You’ve Gotta Make Them Work For It | The Presidential Biographies You Can’t Afford to Skip

It’s discouraging. It’s distracting. All the stuff that’s happening in the world. But you know what you can’t do? You can’t give up your work, your freedom of thought, your freedom of choice pre-emptively.🎥 Watch the video of this episode on Ryan Holiday's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEgYzLYPmO4 📚 You can find all the books mentioned in this episode at Ryan's bookstore, The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  You gotta make them work for it. It's depressing. It's discouraging. It's distracting. All this stuff that's happening in the world, all that's wrong in the world. Maybe you're worried about authoritarians destroying institutions we once trusted. Maybe you're worried about groupthink and cancel culture and chilling effects. Maybe this is making it harder for you to focus. Maybe this is making you afraid. But you know what you can't do? You can't give up your work, your freedom of thought, your freedom of choice preemptively. It may well be that the social media mob or the goons with guns come for you at some point, and you'll be forced to reckon with that use of force. But this is not that point. So why are you giving up your power voluntarily in advance?

• 0:59Speaker 00

  In the Hanoi Hilton, James Stockdale counseled his fellow prisoners of war that they would inevitably be tortured and almost certainly break under the torture. But, he told them, and this was the key, "They needed to resist up until that point. They should make their captors work for it," he said. "They should go as far as they could. They should not surrender until they had to. They had to make the guards work for it." The Stoics knew about tyranny. They knew about exile and torture and duress. But they also understood that for the time being, that is to say, right now, they possessed a freedom of choice, and they had to use it. They had to hold out. They should not give up out of fear or anticipation prematurely. They should not hand over their focus

• 1:43Speaker 00

  or their freedom until the tyrant actually made them. And this advice applies as much today as it did then.

• 1:56Ryan Holiday?

  Favorite presidential biographies. I haven't read a biography of every president, but I've read most, and I'm going to give you some of my favorites. Okay, Truman, underrated president. You wouldn't think you would want to read thousand-plus pages, but this David McCullough biography is incredible. It's not my favorite. My favorite Truman biography is Plain Speaking by Merle Miller, which I have upstairs in my office. It's out of print, but it's sort of an oral history of Truman's presidential administration, and absolutely incredible. As Truman said, "There's nothing new in the world but the history you don't know." McCullough's biography of Theodore Roosevelt is really good, Mornings on Horseback, but again,

• 2:36Ryan Holiday?

  not my favorite. My favorite Roosevelt biography, this is Teddy Roosevelt, is The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris, which I actually bought on the same Amazon order as Meditations for the first time 20 years ago. Love this book. Very good. They say about Washington, the more you read about Washington, the more you like him. And we should have Chernow's biography of Washington here somewhere, which I'm not seeing it, but Chernow's biography of Washington is very good. The more you read about Washington, the more you like him. John Adams, the more you read about John Adams, it's not that less you like him, you just find him kind of annoying, and you understand why some of his colleagues thought the same, but still very good biography. As far as Lincoln goes,

• 3:18Ryan Holiday?

  this is Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, which is a classic for a very good reason. I just interviewed her onstage a couple of weeks ago. But I have a couple other Lincoln biographies that I like. Here's Lincoln biography of as a writer, which is a look at Lincoln as a writer. This is Gary Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg, which is all about the Gettysburg Address. And then these two books by William Lee Miller, Lincoln's Virtues and President Lincoln, which are biographies of him as a politician and then as a man of moral character. Very, very good. Love those. As I said, Chernow's Washington, quite good. Chernow's Grant is quite good, although I would say that Grant's Memoirs, which is over there, is almost better than

• 4:01Ryan Holiday?

  any biography you could read. It's so good that they thought that Mark Twain ghostwrote it. That's how good it is. So I would definitely read that. Not a presidential biography, but that's by choice. Sherman, the Shermanesque statement where he refuses that the presidency is...

• 4:18Ryan Holiday?

  Sherman's one of my favorites. His memoir is equally good as Grant's. Not exactly a presidential biography, but this book about Paul Jennings. He's a slave in the Madison White House. He's the one that saves the famous painting. Very, very good. I have that next to Barack Obama's memoir. Okay, and then of course, the gold standard of presidential biographies. He is probably the GOAT. He is the GOAT. And he's rushing to finish the fifth and hopefully final installment in the Lyndon Johnson series. I'm of course talking about Robert Caro. Path to Power, Means of Ascent, Master of the Senate, Path to Power. The four amazing epic Lyndon Johnson books. Again, you don't think you want to read, what is it?

• 5:03Ryan Holiday?

  It's probably 4,000 pages, close to 4,000 pages about Lyndon Johnson, but you do. They are as readable as any novel. And what they are sweeping histories, not just of the man and how he uses power, but also the time and place that he is from. So The Path to Power is fascinating because it gives you like a whole, like it starts like before people have even come to Texas. He does this big sweeping history of each moment in time. So these are all Pulitzer Prize winners, number one bestsellers classics for a reason. If you say, hey, I'm going to read this whole series from start to finish, and it's going to take me three years, that would be a good three years of reading and be well worth it. These are just incredible, amazing books worth every page.

• 5:46Ryan Holiday?

  And I would say Robert Caro earns every page. Why should you care about Lyndon Johnson? First off, because you could argue that that was the last time the Senate worked. When he was master of the Senate, as the third book is all about, when they actually passed real legislation. And then when he was president, he's the one that gets the civil rights legislation passed. You know, his whole life had been about power, his whole life had been about his own ambition. And then he'd been your standard southern racist politicians. And yet, the second he gets the presidency, he goes and he says, I want to pass Kennedy's civil rights bill. And his advisors are like, I think you should wait till later in the term or the next term. And he says, oh man, what the hell is the presidency for? As in to say, Good is sitting in the seat if you're not going to use that power to do good.

• 6:31Ryan Holiday?

  And that's what Johnson did. But the tragedy, of course, of Johnson is that the same guy that creates the great society, the idea of the social safety net, also gets us into Vietnam. And so it's not hero worshiping by any means. He's looking at what makes this person tick, what happened to him as a kid, what's broken in him, what's good in him. So it's just a masterful diagnosis and character study. And then also, I think, some real lessons on cautionary tale. One of the famous lines in this book is he says, you know, "Power doesn't corrupt. That's too simple." Here it says, "What power does is reveal." And what it reveals in Lyndon Johnson's is both much better than people think and in other ways, much worse than people think. And so this is what biography is meant to do.

• 7:13Ryan Holiday?

  It's history and psychology and character study, psychology and all this other stuff. These are worth every page. Okay, River of Doubt, another good Roosevelt biography, really good. But then she has another book, Destiny of the Republic, which is about the assassination of President Garfield. You wouldn't think Garfield, President James Garfield would be an interesting president you would want to read about, but you would be wrong. Very good.

• 7:47Ryan Holiday?

  Also, there's a little bit of a Wilson biography here in Dead Wake about the Sangha of Lusitania. And Wilson, another president, the more you read about, the less you like. Do you have your favorite presidential biography?

• 8:00Speaker 00

  Right, the Beadle Roosevelt.

• 8:02Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 8:07Ryan Holiday?

  Okay, you want some quick presidential trivia? Okay, this is a letter from like a week after Roosevelt became president. "Dear George, I'm very much obliged to you, old fellow, for your letter on the 16th. I shall do my best to bear myself well." Executive mansion. That's credible. And then that over there is a ticket from Grant's funeral. Here's the first edition of his memoirs, as I said, very, very good. Okay, other presidential biographies that I like. I think my favorite grant biography is Brooks D. Simpson's Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity. That's about his early years, very, very good. Eisenhower in War and Peace by Gene Edward Smith, very, very good.

• 8:49Ryan Holiday?

  A Thousand Days, this is a Schlesinger bio of Kennedy, very good. I prefer, as a shorter Kennedy biography, The Thirteen Days, which is written by his brother. As I said, here's River of Doubt, love that one. Here's my original copy of Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, now 20-plus years old. Okay, great Washington biography. This is Cincinnatus, The Myth of Cincinnatus, the great Roman general who becomes his name dictator and then resigns his powers after he saves Rome. This is a great Gary Wills biography about what that myth and that idea means to Washington.

• 9:32Ryan Holiday?

  As far as Lincoln goes, Team of Rivals, as I said. David Reynolds and David Donald, two big epic bios of Lincoln, very, very good.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  Oh, this one was good. This is about the women in Theodore Roosevelt's life.

• 9:50Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, Jimmy Carter, underrated, great president, loved these two books. This is Kai Bird's biography, and then this is Jonathan Alter's biography. However, it's hard to beat Carter in his own words. This is An Hour Before Daylight, which is about his boyhood, loved this. Oh, here's Plain Speaking, my favorite Truman bio. Okay, biography of the other Roosevelt. This is FDR. This is called The Lion and the Fox. It's a political biography. It's, again, a biography. Kennedy famously said that people want their kids to grow up to be president. They don't want them to be a politician. But to be a good president, you have to be an effective politician.

• 10:33Ryan Holiday?

  How did Roosevelt manage to change the country for the better? How did he actually operate effectively as a politician? That's not a thing people know enough about. That's what this biography is. Robert Greene recommended this to me. It's a great book. Here is Washington from Chernow.

• 10:56Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please, spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.