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

Episode Date: February 20, 2026

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/👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content: https://dailystoic.supercast.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 FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the Daily Stoic podcast, designed to help bring those four key stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. You've got to 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 authoritarian's destroying institutions we once trusted. Maybe you're worried about group think 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? 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 Stilocks 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 or their freedom until the tyrant actually made them. And this advice applies as much today as it did then. Favorite presidential biographies. I haven't read a biography of every president, but I've read most and I'm gonna 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. of Deidre Roosevelt is really good. Mornings on horseback, but again, not my favorite, my favorite Roosevelt biography. This is Teddy Roosevelt, is The Rise of Theater 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 Chernell'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 the less you like if 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, this is Doris Kerns Goodwin's team of rivals, which is a classic for a very good reason. I just interviewed her on stage a couple weeks ago, but I have a couple other Lincoln biographies that I like. Here's Lincoln biography of as a writer, which is a lot of, at Lincoln as a writer. This is Gary Wills' 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. Churnow's Grant is quite good, although I would say that Grant's memoirs, which is over there, is almost better than any by biography you could read. It's so good that they thought that Mark Twain, a ghost wrote it. That's how good it is. So I've definitely read that. Not a presidential biography, but that's by choice. Sherman, the Sherman-esque statement where he refuses that the presidency is, Sherman's one of my favorites. His memoir is equally good as grants. 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 is 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 assent, master of the Senate, passage of power. The four amazing epic Lyndon Johnson books. Again, you don't think you want to read, what is it, 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 history is not just of the man and how he uses power and, but also the time and place that he is from. So the path of 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 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. And I would say Robert Carroll 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. His whole life had been about power, his whole life had 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 what good is sitting in the seat if you're not going to use that power to do good. 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-worshipping 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. Kara 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 is this is what biography is meant to do. It's history and psychology and character study, psychology and all this other stuff. These are these are worth every page. Okay, River of Doubt, another good Roosevelt biography, really good. But then she has another book, Destiny of the Repar.

public, 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. We are just getting back from a trip, so the fridge is empty, and we're like, oh man, we've got to go to the store. We're going to have for dinner tonight. And then I realized, no, no, no, wait, Hello Fresh just came. So we took the Hello Fresh meals out, and we got to work. We love Hello Fresh in our household because the meals are simple. You can make them on a business. you work night. You can do it on the weekend. You can do it when you get to the end of your groceries. They have more than 100 recipes every week, which is especially great if people at your home

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$144 value on your third box. Offer valued while supplies last, free meals applied as discount on first box. New subscribers only varies by plan. Look, this is the time of year. we try to get our health in order, try to get back on track, try to have better habits, put better things into our bodies. So maybe you're thinking about supplements. If you are, you know it's a confusing space. There's a lot of brands out there. It's a low trust category. Not a lot of regulation, a lot of scammers, a lot of big, unpronounceable ingredients. It's hard.

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the creatine lately lately. And right now, Momentus is offering our listeners up to 35% off your first order with promo code Daily Stoic. Head over to LiveMomenus.com and use promo code Daily Stoic for up to 35% off your first order. LiveMomenus.com promo code Daily Stoic. Also, there's a little bit of a Wilson biography here in Dead Wake about the singing of the Lusitania. And Wilson, another president, the more you read about, the less you like. Do you have your favorite presidential biography?

Right, the people are it up. Okay. Okay, you want some quick presidential trivia? Okay. a letter from like a weak actor 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 incredible. 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 earlier. Very, very good. Eisenhower and War and Peace by Gene Edward Smith. Very, very good. A thousand days, this is a Schlesinger bio of Kennedy. Very good. I prefer, as a shorter Kennedy biography, the 13 Days, which is written by his brother.

As I said, here's Rivered Out. Love that one. Here's my original copy of Rise of Theatre Roosevelt, now 20 plus years old. Okay, great Washington biography. This is Cincinnati. The myth of Cincinnati, the great Roman general who becomes his name dictator and then resigns his powers after he saves Rome, is this is a great Gary Will's biography about what that myth and that idea means to Washington.

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. Oh, this one was good. This is about the women in Theta Roosevelt's life. Oh, Jimmy Carter, underrated, great president, loved these two books. This is Kai Byrd'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. Love 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. How did Roosevelt managed 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 Green recommended this to me. It's a great book. Here is Washington from Chernow. Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoag podcast.

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