Pod Insights The Daily Stoic | Wondery+ How To Love Your Country Without Lying About It | Ty Seidule About this episode Today in the US, we celebrate Juneteenth, the commemoration of the emancipation of slaves in America. It’s wonderful to note the moments of historical progress like Juneteenth. But we have to remember that beautiful language pales in comparison to beautiful acts.
In today’s episode, Ryan talks with General Ty Seidule about memory, monuments, and what it means to tell the truth about the past. They discuss the difference between memory and nostalgia, why commemoration should reflect our values, and how American history is full of heroes worth honoring.
Ty Seidule served in the U. S. Army for more than three decades, retiring in 2020 as a brigadier general. He is a professor emeritus of history at West Point and received its distinguished faculty award. In 2021, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin appointed Seidule to the Congressional Naming Commission tasked with redesignating Department of Defense assets which honor Confederates, where he was elected vice chair.
Follow Ty on Instagram | @tyseidule https://www.instagram.com/tyseidule/
📚 Books Mentioned:
How The Word Is Passed https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/how-the-word-is-passed-a-reckoning-with-the-history-of-slavery-across-america?_pos=1&_sid=f40760497&_ss=r
Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/robert-e-lee-and-me-a-southerners-reckoning-with-the-myth-of-the-lost-cause?_pos=1&_sid=ed72a8571&_ss=r
A Promise Delivered: Ten American Heroes and the Battle to Rename Our Nation’s Military Bases https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/a-promise-delivered-ten-american-heroes-and-the-battle-to-rename-our-nations-military-bases?_pos=2&_sid=ed72a8571&_ss=r
🎟️ DAILY STOIC LIVE https://www.dailystoiclive.com/| Ryan Holiday is coming to a city near you https://www.dailystoiclive.com/! Grab tickets here https://www.dailystoiclive.com/ | https://www.dailystoiclive.com/
🎙️ AD-FREE https://dailystoic.supercast.com/| Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.com/ https://dailystoic.supercast.com/
🎥 VIDEO EPISODES https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos| Watch the video episodes on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos: https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic/videos
✉️ FREE STOIC WISDOM https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail | Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues: courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.
0:15 Ryan Holiday? Today, the United States celebrates Juneteenth, the commemoration of the emancipation of slaves in America. Two years after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and nearly 90 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, US Army troops deployed to Texas, the only state of the Confederacy still with institutional slavery. "The people of Texas are informed," ordered a Union general, "in accordance with a proclamation from the executive of the United States, all slaves are free." There's no question that that military order deserves celebration. It asserted absolute equality and began the liberation of hundreds of thousands of human beings.
1:00 Ryan Holiday? And Marcus Aurelius would write in Meditations that his Stoic role models taught him "to conceive of a society of equal laws governed by equality of statute and speech, and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else." It's as beautiful a sentence as any written by Thomas Jefferson, but of course, a long way from Epictetus's personal experience. This kind of freedom that Marcus was talking about would have been something inconceivable to the early Stoics, who themselves lived in a slave society and tragically did very little to stop it. Like Jefferson's writings, Marcus Aurelius's passage was just that: an idea, not a reality. In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt would remind his fellow citizens
1:45 Ryan Holiday? of the critical distinction between words and deeds. "In name, we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776," he said, "but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence until 1865." And he said, "Words count for nothing except insofar as they represent acts." This is true everywhere. Or, as the Latin expression goes, "acta non verba," deeds not words. It's wonderful to celebrate these principles from the Stoics and the founders. It's wonderful to note the moments of historical progress like Juneteenth. But we have to remember that beautiful language pales in comparison to beautiful acts.
2:30 Ryan Holiday? We have to turn these words, these ideas into deeds. Can't just talk about them. We have to be about them. And not living up to them or doing something about them, as was the case with slavery in Rome and America, is ugly. Marcus knew this, but fell short, damning himself with his own words in meditations that you can commit an injustice by doing nothing also. We must make sure today that we are not guilty the same.
3:09 Ryan Holiday? Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to the second half of this episode. That was our Juneteenth-inspired Daily Stoic email. I didn't really know about Juneteenth until I moved to Texas. I mean, I'd heard of it, but I moved to East Austin about 15 years ago, and my house was right near this park that a bunch of Black citizens of Austin had purchased. Originally, Juneteenth was celebrated in another part of Austin. And then, when the city was segregated in the late 1800s, after Reconstruction, they weren't allowed to celebrate there anymore. And so, this group of people decided they wanted to buy land. They wanted to be able to celebrate Juneteenth on Black-owned property.
3:54 Ryan Holiday? And that became what was known as Emancipation Park. And I remember I came out of town. I came back one day, and it was just like bedlam in East Austin. I was like, what is happening? What is this? It was the Juneteenth celebration. And that was right around the time I started studying the Civil War, and I was reading all these books. I was just blown away by it. And it's a beautiful, inspiring thing. But in honor of this incredible holiday and this incredible day, I wanted to do a little deep dive into it and how it ties into Stoicism. And it's funny, actually, we talked about Juneteenth when Chet Garner from The Day Tripper, who's a great Texas historian and travel guide. He was on the podcast. He and I talked about it.
4:33 Speaker 01 We would have tons of Civil War sites. In Texas that we don't have because of this. And it could have ended the war a lot faster because then the whole thing would have gone. It's like, there's so many little turning points in history like this. This would have rewritten the whole thing.
4:45 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
4:46 Speaker 01 Got to travel to see them.
4:47 Ryan Holiday? Well, yeah, and then, and then you go, oh, hey, everyone's talking about Juneteenth. Well, Texas is why we have.
4:52 Speaker 01 Yeah, right, right, right. I went to that spot in Galveston.
4:54 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
4:55 Speaker 01 Recently.
4:55 Ryan Holiday? Well, I mean, I was just driving, when we drove to Lockhart, I passed, there was like a Juneteenth grounds. And you're like, oh, because all these little cities had these little parades and moments celebrating this thing. Because it was basically a foreign country. They just didn't get the news. It took a while to come over.
5:11 Speaker 01 That's right.
5:12 Ryan Holiday? I was on Morning Joe this morning recommending some, some Juneteenth inspired books. One of the books I recommended is Clint Smith's incredible book, How the Word Is Passed. Which is, is just an interesting thing about Juneteenth, because like, it's literally a holiday about the word not being passed. Like, because of the isolated nature of Texas and how far away it was, like, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, word doesn't get out. And then it's not till two months after the war ends that, on Juneteenth, it was announced, like, you are free. But in that book, he not only goes to Galveston and stands there and explores what that announcement means and what this holiday means. But he has this great line in the book about the difference between memory and nostalgia.
5:53 Ryan Holiday? And that's also the theme of one of my favorite modern historians writing. General Ty Sedgely's books, which I've been raving about over the years. His book, Robert E. Lee and Me, is beautiful and moving. And his latest one, A Promise Delivered: Ten American Heroes and the Battle to Rename Our Nation's Military Bases. Every time he comes on, I like to nerd out about history and, and America. He came out and we talked about a bunch of things. But I thought today would be a good day to bring you that episode. He's been helpful to me in this campaign I've been on to try to remove this Confederate statue from the courthouse that we live in. We, we walked over, I showed it to him. He said, I gotta take a picture.
6:37 Ryan Holiday? I thought he was gonna like, just take a picture of him. He wanted to take a picture of him flipping it off, which I thought was, was hilarious. But, but here on Juneteenth, I thought it would be. A good idea to explore what some of these ideas mean, right? The difference between history, celebration and commemoration, monuments and celebration, how we can study the past, Civil War, honestly, without memorializing or celebrating things that shouldn't be celebrated, how we how we learn from the worst parts of the past to bring about a better future. And I think on Juneteenth, that distinction is really important, right? Like, freedom was delayed, fought for, announced, resisted, and it had to be made real, and
7:21 Ryan Holiday? it still has to be made real. But it's also a reminder, and I think this is this is the theme of of his book, A Promise Delivered, American history is full of people worth looking up to, people who expanded the promise of the country rather than trying to destroy it. So that's what the general and I are talking about, talking about memory and monuments and heroes and what it means to love a country enough to tell the truth about it. Thanks for listening, and I hope you have a great Juneteenth. Don't you think that's something about history, like, you know, history can be depressing, history can be uncomfortable, but one of the things I find, and this is why I hate this argument that like, if we we tell all this stuff, our kids are gonna hate themselves.
8:03 Ryan Holiday? When I study history and these complicated periods, I go, oh, there were good guys, right? There were good guys. And and the idea that that's instinctively who I identify with, right? I don't I don't I don't go, oh, that that shitty person looks like me, so I suck. I I don't think about what they look like or where they're from as far as my identification. I identify with the the people that I aspire to be like, and there's an unlimited amount of those.
8:32 Speaker 02 Unlimited, two examples. The first is, that's why I don't say the Union Army in the Civil War. I say the US Army.
8:38 Ryan Holiday? Yes, I noticed you said that earlier.
8:39 Speaker 02 Blue uniform that I do. I love that idea. The other one is, one of the things that changed was the USS Chancellorsville, and that was a guided missile cruiser that was named after Chancellorsville, and it had pictures of Lee and and Jackson, who were the the heroes of that for the Confederate Army. Army in the wardroom and they had gray in their thing. So we said you should change it. The Secretary of the Navy at the time, Carlos Totoro, changed it to Robert Smalls. Okay. I don't know if you know, Robert Smalls is a guy, is an enslaved. See the guy that steals the boat? Yes. Okay, yes. Yes. I love this story. He steals his boat, this Confederate boat, gets all these enslaved people on it, takes it to friendly US Navy lines and then eventually commands the boat himself as a Navy captain. Yeah.
9:23 Speaker 02 Later serves five terms as a South Carolina congressman. And so now it is USS Robert Smalls. Yes. There's your hero. Yes. That's, that's America right there. That's America right there. And every time you think that, that's why, don't look for Confederate heroes. Yeah. You look for people like another one that we named after, Mary Walker, who was the only surgeon employed by the US Army during the Civil War. Yeah. Only, she's a woman. The second woman to graduate from medical school at Syracuse. And she just keeps going down and says, you need to use me, you need to use me. Eventually goes into the Tennessee campaign, is a contract surgeon. Eventually is captured behind enemy lines where she was, not only was she doing surgery stuff, which she totally was doing, little light spying on the side too.
10:09 Speaker 02 Sent to a prison in Richmond. Eventually she's paroled from there and is famous the rest of her life for, for putting on pants. Like, I'm telling you, I'm gonna wear pants. Yeah. And she is arrested multiple times for wearing pants. But she then receives from Sherman and Grant and Thomas, the Medal of Honor. She's the only woman to have ever received the Medal of Honor and it was taken away from her right at the end of her life and then given back to it posthumously. So we named a post after Mary Walker. Yeah. Because here's someone, again, a hero. There's so many in American history. We have, we, I love this country. I love my country. I was serving in uniform for 36 years and we have plenty of people that we could and should honor. It doesn't mean we can't do both of these. I'm comfortable.
10:54 Speaker 02 Yeah. Saying slavery bad. You know, and yes, we should know what that caused and the Jim Crow that came with it and the lynching and other things, redlining. But we also have these great heroes.
11:05 Ryan Holiday? So people have trouble with the idea of removing names and they have trouble with statues coming down. And I don't totally understand it, but it does seem to be a block for people, right? And I think there's something about it that it feels modern to them. Like this is like something, they didn't do this in the past, which isn't true. I wanted to read this passage to you. I thought, okay, this is where our work overlaps. All right. This is from the Historia Augusta about the life of Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius. "The murderer Commodus was dug up and buried and then his body dragged in the dust." This is how bad of an emperor it was. And then it says, "I give it as my opinion that his statue should be overthrown because this man who lived but for the destruction of his fellow
11:50 Ryan Holiday? citizens and for his own shame, forced us to decree them in his honor, and wherever they are, they should be cast down." That's 2,000 years ago.
11:58 Speaker 02 2,000 years ago. Remember, George III had a statue of Manhattan that was taken down in 1776.
12:03 Ryan Holiday? They turned it into bullets.
12:04 Speaker 02 Turned it into bullets. We also, at West Point, we had Fort Arnold, named after Benedict Arnold.
12:08 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
12:09 Speaker 02 And when he chose treason to give away the plans, we changed to Fort Clinton.
12:13 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
12:13 Speaker 02 So, and by the way, the other one is, sometimes we just want to change things. So have you ever flown through Idlewild Airport?
12:19 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, right.
12:20 Speaker 02 That's now JFK Airport in, on Long Island.
12:23 Ryan Holiday? Or Midway Airport.
12:24 Speaker 02 Midway Airport. National Airport.
12:26 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
12:26 Speaker 02 In DC. So we change things, and why shouldn't we?
12:30 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
12:30 Speaker 02 If it no longer reflects the values. Remember, commemoration is about inspiration. It's about your values. And if commemoration doesn't do that, it's not history.
12:37 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
12:38 Speaker 02 We're going to teach the Battle of Gettysburg every year at West Point, and every year, Pickett's going to charge and Lee's going to lose.
12:43 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
12:43 Speaker 02 That's not changing.
12:44 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, a museum is not commemoration, right? A museum is about investigation and study and recording what happened. The statues outside a museum or outside a public building, it's a very different context. And so, yeah, maybe the difference between what they did in the ancient world is they would tear down your statue and grind it into dust or use it as something else. Ironically, not what anyone is saying we should do here. We should, they're saying, put it in a museum or reinterpret it in some other form.
13:14 Speaker 02 Or put it in a cemetery.
13:15 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
13:15 Speaker 02 That's another possibility. What, you know, what Hungary did after the fall, the wall fell down, they took all of those statues of Lenin, Marx, Engels, Stalin, and they moved them all to one park.
13:26 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
13:26 Speaker 02 So outside Budapest, there's a park that has all of them there. But the idea that they were put there for a nefarious purpose, our Confederate monuments.
13:33 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
13:34 Speaker 02 So if they're outside a courthouse, it's because when they were put up, it's to recognize that the white people are back in the saddle after Reconstruction.
13:41 Ryan Holiday? Yes.
13:41 Speaker 02 And for a black man to go into the courthouse, there were two ways you could do that, custodian or defendant.
13:47 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
13:47 Speaker 02 And so the idea that these ones outside courthouses, they are, they're pernicious. They have a pernicious purpose to enforce power for one group at the expense of another.
13:57 Ryan Holiday? Yeah, I forget what country did it, but one country took all their communist statues and put them like in a lake and you can dive and turn it into a diving park. Also love that idea.
14:07 Speaker 02 Love that idea.
14:07 Ryan Holiday? Yes. The reinterpretation becomes something, makes its own statement.
14:13 Speaker 02 Absolutely. And there's a, there's a show in, at Mocha Geffen in LA where they took the Stonewall Jackson statue that was in Charlottesville and sort of did a Sid and Toy Story.
14:24 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
14:24 Speaker 02 Version of it, which has recreated it. I love it.
14:27 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
14:27 Speaker 02 And so now that's another recreation of that.
14:29 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
14:30 Speaker 02 But these, this, this issue is not, as long as there's a politics of race in America, there's going to be a politics of Civil War memory in America. And so we're still, I was just an expert witness on a case for Stonewall Jackson High School in Shenandoah, Virginia.
14:42 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
14:43 Speaker 02 It was Shenandoah, it was Stonewall Jackson, 1959, a reaction to integration.
14:49 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
14:49 Speaker 02 2020, it goes to Mountain View. 2024, back to Stonewall Jackson.
14:52 Ryan Holiday? Yeah.
14:53 Speaker 02 So these things are still coming, but we should always remember that Confederates tried to destroy this country we love to create a slave republic. And, and, and they're, it's a bad, bad thing.
15:05 Ryan Holiday? You know, this county is one of the only counties in Texas that didn't vote for succession.
15:08 Speaker 02 Really?
15:09 Ryan Holiday? Mm-hmm. Yeah.
15:09 Speaker 02 I could, I could feel the vibe. I could feel the vibe.
Previous We Are Poor Compared To Them Next What Our Fathers Teach Us, For Better Or Worse | Tom Junod Page updated September 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
