Author Nancy Sherman on Building Resilience and Living Well | What Are You Making Up About This? That’s The Question.

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to author Nancy Sherman about her new book Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience, using Stoicism to work through emotional trauma rather than repress it, her experience teaching Stoic philosophy to the armed forces, and more. Nancy Sherman is a New York Times Notable Author. She has written several books on Stoicism including Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind. She has also written over 60 articles in the area of ethics, military ethics, the history of moral philosophy, ancient ethics, the emotions, moral psychology, and psychoanalysis. She is the Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. Blinkist is the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. You get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too. Ten Thousand makes the highest quality, best-fitting, and most comfortable training shorts I have ever worn. They are a direct-to-consumer company, no middleman so you get premium fabrics, trims, and techniques that other brands simply cannot afford. Ten Thousand is offering our listeners 15% off your purchase. go to Tenthousand.cc and enter code STOIC to receive 15% off your purchase. Policygenius helps you compare top insurers in one place, and it lets you save 50% or more on life insurance. Policygenius will help you find the insurance coverage you need. You can save 50% or more by comparing quotes. Just go to policygenius.com to get started. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It’s the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. ***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic Follow Nancy Sherman: Twitter: https://twitter.com/drnancysherman Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Nancy-Sherman-190609228735/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  What are you making up about this? That's the question. If you've ever been to therapy, you've probably been nicely brought around to this idea that there is whatever your husband, or wife, or father, or mother, or sister, or brother, or boss is saying to you, and then there is what you're hearing. In fact, in a lot of couples counseling, the therapist will try to get couples to stop fights from spiraling by asking them to say to each other, "Okay, what I am hearing when you say that is, or what I make up about this is..." Because it's true, your mother thought she was just teasing, but what you heard when she did that was, "I don't love you, and you're not good enough." You feel like you're just sighing because you're tired, but what your husband is hearing is,

• 1:21Speaker 01

  "I'm upset with you," and now he's getting ready to defend himself. That expression, "what I make up about this is," is really illustrative, and at its core, an idea that touches on the teachings of Epictetus. See, what other people do or say is objective. Usually, it's pretty straightforward or harmless. In fact, with the people we love, most of the time, it's meant well. That's why we love them in the first place. But for some reason, we make up stories about it. We add interpretations, or project intentions, that are totally about us, and then we wonder why it descends into a fight or hurt feelings. It's not things that upset us, Epictetus said. It's our judgment about things.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  It's what we make up about things that upset us. It's what we hear, not what people say, that is the problem. So whatever you think about today, think... About that, whenever you feel triggered, or misunderstood, or attacked, is that actually what's happening? Or are you just making it up? Is it likely that they were saying anything close to what you heard? Or is your hearing precisely the source of the conflict? Because it usually is.

• 2:35Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. I can't tell exactly when I first heard of today's guest, but let me just say she is very highly recommended and very highly regarded, particularly in military circles. So I'm almost positive it was that someone recommended her first book to me, Stoic Warriors, which is about the sort of culture of Stoicism, the pros as well as the cons, and the sort of ethical ramifications of, you know, the sort of the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius and Seneca and Epictetus inside the military culture. And I think there is no culture that sort of lionizes those four virtues

• 3:20Ryan Holiday?

  of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom more than military culture, and also, you know, some of the ethical quandaries and stressors against those virtues. So her writing is fascinating. What she's really doing is applying the philosophy the way it's supposed to be applied, which is to those vexing, really difficult problems of life. I'm talking about the one and only Nancy Sherman. She is a distinguished university professor and professor of philosophy at Georgetown. And previously, she was the distinguished chair in ethics at the United States Naval Academy. So that, you know, obviously, the connection between Stoicism and the Naval Academy goes back to Stockdale.

• 4:03Ryan Holiday?

  I've been honored myself to speak at the Stockdale Center and the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership. Nancy's work has taken her to visit Guantanamo Bay, to visit the conditions the detainees were under, to provide some ethical advice as their treatment. She was an observer to the vice chief of the Army's Suicide Review Board in 2011.

• 4:28Ryan Holiday?

  And she's written books like After War Healing the Moral Wounds of Our Soldiers, The Untold War, Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers, and then, as I was telling you, Stoic Warriors, The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind, as well as Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue, and The Fabric of Character: Aristotle's Theory of Virtue. But it's her newest book that we're talking about. This is Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience, which I was quite honored to blurb. I'll give you my blurb here. My policy is basically I do not blurb books. I just don't have the time. It's a thing where you do it for one, you gotta do it for a million people. So very rarely do I make exceptions, but Nancy's work had been influential to

• 5:13Ryan Holiday?

  me. We have some mutual friends, so when she reached out, I made an exception, and you can see why. I said, "Professor Sherman applies Stoicism to where it is most needed for our warriors and working people alike, and it helps them become better and more resilient." So this was a great conversation. We go into all sorts of... Look, we nerd out about Stoicism. As you know, sometimes on the podcast, I have sort of famous people or I have athletes, and we talk about their work. But what really gets me excited is when I can go way in-depth into the philosophy, get some of my own questions answered. So that was what today's conversation was an opportunity to do. So I think you're really

• 5:55Ryan Holiday?

  gonna like this interview. I also wanted to say, I hope everyone's doing well. I hope you're getting your vaccines, if they're available in your area. I hope you've continued to be smart and safe. I was thinking about this the other day. Just, it's unbelievable to me that, you know, what has transpired in the last year. I mean, we were just kind of getting this podcast going in March of 2020. We'd done maybe two in-person ones. We'd done the where I read the daily emails. That had been going for a while, and we're just kind of experimenting with maybe we'd have more guests. I wasn't sure if I was gonna do it or not. And then with the pandemic, when suddenly I couldn't travel and doing the remote stuff was easier, I ended up, you know, just starting to interview some

• 6:39Ryan Holiday?

  people. And it's crazy to me to see that a year later, just all the wonderful conversations I've got to have, I feel like... I hope I've gotten better as an interviewer. But I've learned a lot. I've been exposed to some great stuff. I know, you know, it's been downloaded millions and millions of times, which is really cool. When I talk about how the obstacle can be the way, I don't want you to think that this isn't something I I don't apply in my own life. I mean, of course I do. This, this thing happened. It changed and disrupted my life, my career, how I was interacting with people and doing my job. And as frustrating as it was to see sort of that one avenue close, this other one opened up in a big way and, and I've really enjoyed doing it.

• 7:24Ryan Holiday?

  I'm grateful that you're listening. And of course, I was really excited to have this conversation with Professor Sherman and tell you about her new book Stoic Wisdom: Ancient Lessons for Modern Resilience. You can check out Nancy's stuff and of course, you can follow her on Twitter. She is at Dr. Nancy Sherman. And you can also check out her work at nancyscherman.com.

• 7:56Ryan Holiday?

  I wanted to start with a theme that I think a lot of people have some preconceptions about Stoicism with, and, and I think your work is, is important here. And I think it pertains to the military culture, I imagine as well, which is this sort of the myth of the, the sort of the invulnerable Stoic, the, the person who feels no pain, who shrugs it all off. I'm not sure that's ideal and I'm not sure that's what the Stoics were talking about either. So, so talk to me about that kind of stereotype, which I imagine you, you, you have butted up against a lot.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So when I got to the Naval Academy and then, you know, a long time ago now, several decades ago, mid 90s, when I taught ethics, the part of that course that just resonated was being Stoic. And for them, it meant little less Stoicism. Suck it up and truck on, or in a less elegant phrase, embrace the suck.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  And the idea was grit is just invincibility and dominability. And, you know, they pick up some of that from Epictetus. You're in the ring, it's athletic grit. And keep getting up and fighting on. And that's what missions are about often. Carrying the burden with a lot of self-sacrifice. And certainly in the military, deprivation is the name of the game. Especially if you're in a submarine or something like that, or aircraft carrier. So I set about thinking, is that really what the Stoics have to say?

• 9:45Speaker 02

  And in my work over the years, I'm now in the new book, Stoic Wisdom. I really found that that isn't the complete message by any means. The Stoics were aspiring to get, to tough it up a bit and to arm themselves against some of life's misfortunes and accidents and things you can't control. But it's not as if they were accepting that all. And they also knew a lot about grief. They knew a lot about suffering. And they experienced it with emotions that they weren't ready to just get rid of. And Seneca, for me, is the person who speaks to that most loudly.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  He's the patient as well as the doctor. And he's the doctor of therapy because he suffers those sorts of things that can unmoor you. And I think it's critical, not just in the military, but in general. Because the idea of grit that is unflappable and controls everything is just really unhealthy. So looking for that in the Stoics. I, A, I don't think that's the undivided message by any means. And B, it's not good for a modern, healthy Stoicism.

• 11:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think.

• 11:11Ryan Holiday?

  I've got to imagine at the Naval Academy specifically, so much of that sort of indomitable unbreakableness comes from Stockdale, who obviously has to embody those traits in one of the sort of worst environments that human beings have had to experience. But it also strikes me that when you really even dig into that example, what I think is fascinating is the sort of loving tenderness that's expressed between these fellow prisoners, whether it's nursing each other back to health, whether it's comforting one of their comrades after breaking under torture.

• 11:55Ryan Holiday?

  It was sort of superhuman in one sense and then also very human in another sense.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Stockdale is amazing in that regard. We think of him as invincible in some ways, but he wasn't. He is someone who, he was the head of the chain of command and they had a Morse code kind of tap system on walls and swishing essentially poop buckets where you could hear the sound and that was a kind of code. And some of it was, "Are you okay?" Meaning, "I'm looking out for you, you on the other side of the wall." And Stockdale, whom I interviewed a few times in his later years,

• 12:49Speaker 02

  essentially said, "I'm not a converter. I gave up on converting. When I said, 'Are you okay?' and maybe blurted out something in code about Stoicism, I got dead silence and I realized I had my ducks lined up one way and others had their ducks lined up another way." And that's the kind of graciousness that he embodied about care. He was in it not for himself. This wasn't just self-help therapy. This was group survival. And he knew that they were going to break at some point. Each person had their own breaking point. And their job was to support each other.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  And he also was supported by the home community, Sybil Stockdale, with whom he wrote these long letters in code and, you know, in ways of invisible ink. I'm not sure I understood all of it, is explaining it to me. But they kept up a correspondence and love sustained him, you know, and they ended up writing in love and war. And she was fascinating when I went to interview him. She was in the kitchen and he said something to the effect that Stoicism was the silver lining for him of being a POW for seven and a half years. And she came rushing back in, took a seat at the table,

• 14:14Speaker 02

  and she said, "I'd get my silver lining in a different way." And that was important. She, I think she was a religion major at Mount Holyoke. But that said, she was also a very strong force. She helped to get those POWs out of, back home in negotiations in DC with McNamara and others. So I think the care and concern and empathy really played out. And that's a message in Marcus Aurelius. If you're, you know, think of a battlefield with strewn body parts. The body parts alone are not a whole human being.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  If you cut yourself off from the community, you've cut yourself off from being at home in the world. Something to that effect. And I think he really embraced that as a Stoic message.

• 15:09Ryan Holiday?

  Well, Marcus also talks about another sort of war metaphor. He talks about how we're soldiers storming a wall. He says, "So you have to ask for someone to pull you up." That's what this, that's what they're here for, you know? He's sort of seeing this as this sort of community or this, this, you know, regiment of soldiers as opposed to sort of being these individual warriors who are supposed to sort of do everything by yourself and be totally self-sufficient. I think, I think that's a really easy thing to miss in Marcus Aurelius. And in Stockdale, you see him as the solitary warrior, but really it was this sort of band of brothers.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  They were very much a cadre. I mean, he was in a chain of command because that's what you needed. I mean, and that's what he knew, and he was the most senior. So he took the head of the command. But they also were watching out for each other in the most subtle micro-movements. I mean, they would listen for footsteps. As I say, they would listen for how the brush swooshed in the, you know, in the shit bucket. Excuse me. And that, I mean, anything that they could use to communicate, to break the solitude, would be important in order to save each other, save their souls. That's what they were doing.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  They were saving their psyches without compromising the country for which they fought. So, yeah, and Marcus also, he thanks all these people in his meditations.

• 16:49Ryan Holiday?

  At the beginning, though.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  Yes, and it probably wasn't at the beginning, but that's, that's where it appears now. In these meditations to himself, and they're very interesting. Well, you know, there's to your mother and your great uncle and grandfather and whatnot. But to his grammarian, who is very generous and not carping. It gives me, it reminds me of, you know, the idea, be a generous listener. You know, don't correct everything they say and try to understand the intent and not just the, the exact words if they get their grammar wrong. I think of that in teaching a lot. And so, yeah, he was very much indebted to this larger community to be at home in the world. That phrase is so important. And that world was global.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  It wasn't just, you know, a small world. It's the cosmos. We grew out of the polis that was Aristotle's community. And now it's an expansionist world, of course, military expansion. But, but also they had an idea that humanity was cosmopolitan. It was, that's, the word means citizen of the universe, citizen of the cosmos. And that was where you hear, you're, that's what, anyone in that world had good enough reason to be part of the cosmos and complicated story about.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  The enslaved persons.

• 18:12Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  But, yeah, it was, it really was the beginning of the Enlightenment, whether it's the Rational Enlightenment with Kant, or the Enlightenment with the Scottish Enlightenment theorists who believed in sympathy, our version of empathy, to connect us all as the connective tissue. But I think sometimes, Bob Putnam, the political scientist from Harvard.

• 18:34Ryan Holiday?

  Like Bowling Alone?

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, social capital was, it's an old word. It's not in use much anymore, but it's a great word. And it's about the tissues of connection for trust and reciprocation. And I kind of think of the Stoic community as like, not bowling alone.

• 18:56Ryan Holiday?

  Well, speaking of people in that POW camp, I know John McCain is there as well, and not as explicitly a student of Stoicism. What I find so incredible about his story, and again, sort of not as explored, is that, you know, he had the opportunity to leave. Like, if it really was the Stoic warrior, you're on your own, you're not connected to anyone or anything. I mean, one would imagine he would have gone home when he had the choice to go home, but he stayed. I mean, that's what's so incredible about the ordeal that he goes through and the disability that he suffers for the rest of his life is how, if this was solely about self-preservation,

• 19:41Ryan Holiday?

  you know, he may have been able to forego a lot of that, but he stayed.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, he really exhibited the honor of a service member, of a sailor here. His father was an admiral and very much in charge. And as a result, he was known and given a chance to jump the queue, essentially. And they had a clear order, first in, first out. And you wait your turn. Until Sybil Stockdale and other, it was women, the spouses were all women,

• 20:19Speaker 02

  made it clear that everyone has to get out of the Hanoi Hilton, as it was called, the North Vietnamese prison.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  And he waited his turn and he was tortured. I mean, it was, you know, it's a horrible fate that he was, the last president didn't recognize it. But this man was tortured deeply. He knew what torture was about and he was an advocate early on of getting rid of torture in our current military system, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and the like. He spoke out loud and clear about it because he was a victim of it. So, yeah, that, they were a cadre. And when you, you know, I've studied a lot, the, what keeps a cadre together, what keeps a dance company together, and some of it is mimicry of motions.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  And you kind of pick that up almost in, when you're reading Marcus. You know, he talks about coordination of movements and you can kind of

• 21:20Ryan Holiday?

  Although he does, he does say it's better to be a wrestler than a dancer and dug in for life's sudden attacks.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Yes, that's true. But when he's talking about sort of fields and the coordination that goes in it, you kind of picture, I sometimes picture the Somme, World War One and marching. And they're connecting with each other through feet, mimicry of motions. And, you know, the POWs had little to go on, but, but a few sounds here and there and, and picking those up. And, you know, and that sustained them. So, yeah.

• 21:56Ryan Holiday?

  Well, Marcus talks about sort of returning to the rhythm and you almost get the sense that he views the logos as this sort of Jetstream or this current that you can drift from, but you're always kind of trying to get back towards.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  Yes, he, there's definitely, well, you know, he's, he's sort of a street philosopher. He's, he just picks this up because everyone in that period is reading this. This is, this is street philosophy of the day. And you're educated in it. You have tutors that teach you that. Stoicism was much more popular at the time than Epicureanism or the skepticism. And, you know, Aristotle hadn't yet made it. His era was still in the marketplace a bit. It hadn't really made it into the full street in the way that Stoicism became more of a public philosophy. And he is sort of also picking up Heraklitus. You know, the, the flux and the flow and the coming and going, the ebb of the tide.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  And you hear that a lot in his, in his philosophy.

• 22:59Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I want to go back to this idea of the invulnerable Stoic for a second because it, it ties in with, I think, something you've tried to talk about in, in your work, particularly in Stoic Warriors and some of your op-eds. But, but I also think is the, is the sort of the, the thread through like someone like Brené Brown's work, which is the idea that it actually, courage is not just risking oneself on the battlefield. It's not just the endurance of pain. It's not just fortitude in that sense. But it's also, you know, the courage to be vulnerable, to ask for help, to put oneself out there, to let oneself be cared for by someone or something else.

• 23:40Ryan Holiday?

  I think we, we sometimes have a kind of a, a singular definition of courage when I think actually sometimes the bravest thing is, you know, the, the admission of pain or guilt and the, and the desire to, to do something about it.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  I think that's, that's really crucial, Ryan, because I think, well, the military community, but other communities as well, sexual assault survivor, folks who are suffering from addictions or other kinds of issues where they really need management from outside and not self-medication. And

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Asking for help is really, really important. And I'll just give them something that really plagues the military. And that is the idea of go it alone grit, or just being tough enough to endure, because you have a mission to accomplish. And you have to be at operational tempo, or op tempo, as it's called. And that really conflicts with something we long knew, and then a new form of it. So post-traumatic stress, 1980s. The diagnosis comes in as a way of talking about a real debilitating condition that comes from fear. Fear of overwhelming threat,

• 25:07Speaker 02

  that you would suffer, for example, on a battlefield, but also as a victim of sexual assault. Or in other kinds of cases of, you know, many people feel some of that right now in the pandemic, where everything is just too much. And it comes in, and you get over vigilant, and you dissociate a bit, and clamp down. And in addition, there is something we now know as moral injury, which is not so much a fear-conditioned response, but rather a response to moral threat, moral compromise. Whether you think you've done something real or apparent, you suffer something as a victim, or you're an up-close observer,

• 25:50Speaker 02

  wartime reporter, wartime photographer, civilian looking on. All of that can kind of unhinge you morally in mild or severe ways. And you feel guilt, you feel resentment, and you feel horrible shame. And the path is not go it alone. The path is to seek help, whether it's first your family members or those who are more professional counselors. And so the military really has fought hard in trying to figure out how to get people to...

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Seek counseling when they need it. And so some of it comes through primary care. You know, how, when you see a primary care doc, you also can talk about other things. Some of it's through group work. Some of it's through journaling. Some of it's through, I don't know, it could be the National Endowment for the Humanities, having war dialogues and bringing people together that way. Or me talking to my students in class, frankly, many of whom are returning veterans who have seen and done and been and suffered horrible things by being a sniper, surviving when their buddies don't, being caught in collateral incidents where the rules of engagement allowed them to shoot,

• 27:10Speaker 02

  but yet someone was in a car that was going to a hospital or a young kid gets killed. And in some cases, their parents themselves, they see the kid as their own kid. And it's horribly frightening. And just talking is a way to share the civilian, share a burden with civilians. But also getting people to help in ways that allow them to find some self-compassion. And I think the Stoics are really good on this. No, you know, many don't turn to the Stoics for this, but if you read Seneca and you read Seneca's tragedies, one of them is Hercules Rages. And in Hercules Rages, Hercules does something horrific

• 27:54Speaker 02

  because he's, he's been blinded by a vengeful stepmother, Juno, who can't stand the fact that Hercules is the child of another wife of Jupiter. And Hercules comes out of the underworld 12 labors later and he kills his wife and kid, kids. And he's ready to kill himself. The rage and suicidal feelings are so strong. And this is a, this resonates with many military folks. How did I do this? How could I possibly have done this? Bad intelligence, of course, rules of engagement that were too lax,

• 28:39Speaker 02

  fog of war, all of that. And it's a, just as you say, it's a father and a friend that says, "Use your heroic courage to show yourself some self-mercy." And I think that's a really, really important lesson. Use your heroic courage to try to stay your anger and to find some self-mercy. And sometimes it requires, would you hold everyone else as responsible for some of the horrible accidents of war or of life that you yourself hold yourself responsible for? Not clear if you switch perspectives.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  So it's sort of more fairly, you know, the feelings are very apt, but they're also very unfair and so punitive.

• 29:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I had Brian Dorries on the podcast a few months ago. And I think if you see Seneca's plays as sort of a catharsis or an outlet for what must have been a horrendously stressful, and then also you said sort of morally injurious time in a corrupt, broken administration, it makes sense. And yeah, you talked about this earlier, but it's hard not to see Seneca as sort of the most thoughtful and the artistic of the Stoics. You know, he's not Epictetus, who's born into slavery. He's not Marcus Aurelius, kind of this tough guy.

• 30:14Ryan Holiday?

  I see him as more of this, you know, sort of creative, empathetic, artistic guy who probably would have felt a lot of the things that he sort of glosses over in his writings quite deeply.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  Yes, he's a complicated figure. And I think for that reason... Well worth the read, you know, he's Claudius puts him in Corsica then it wasn't the gorgeous island it is now where we've spent some time because my daughter used to teach there. It was a horrible place to spend seven or eight years, desolate wasteland. And he's brought back by Claudius's wife Agrippina, who is Nero's becomes Nero's mother and or is Nero's mother, and she wants the best person of letters and oratory and rhetoric to teach her son because she has ambitions for him. Yeah, he'll become the

• 31:15Speaker 02

  first leader, the emperor. And so Seneca is in the court and his hands are dirty a lot of the time, to be frank. You know, he swims in very muddy streams and muddy rivers. But as a result, he kind of knows power politics. But and he also knows aspiration. And he grew up very sickly. He wants he was very, a very good student, trained in Stoicism. So he's always on the cusp of living opulently, but wanting a simpler life. And he lives

• 31:58Speaker 02

  in his later years, he's forced to exile himself or retire from political life. And he keeps up a correspondence with a young it's, it's, it's an art form, as you say, but it's with a young Lucilius. And it's an epistolary relationship. It's wonderful. He's writing to himself, but he's writing to someone else and he imagines the person getting the letters and coming home and, you know, opening a letter and can't wait to reply. It's a it's an art form. But it's about mentoring and it's about reach out to me. I'm here. And it's, it's also about we struggle. So capturing the struggle, I think, is what the Stoics do best. They're kind of aspirational.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  Group of philosophers, and I think that's why they're so appealing. They you're always struggling with your, you know, with your demons in a certain way.

• 32:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, one of the things I've talked about when I've done done different events for for military groups and things like that is is the sort of the metaphor I use is is a credit card, you know, so you have this pain, you have this vulnerability, you have this thing you're struggling with, and you don't want to deal with it. And you tell yourself, I'm not dealing with it, I'm just stuffing it down. That doesn't like go away. I I sort of liken it to being you're just putting it on this credit card with an extremely high interest rate, and it's just accumulating and compounding. And the bill inevitably comes due, right? And it becomes something that you can afford to pay even less in the future because it's so much higher.

• 33:39Ryan Holiday?

  And I think we sometimes, again, think of the Stoics as saying, don't deal with this, stuff it down. I actually think it's the opposite. When the Stoics are mastering their emotions, it's not that they don't have the emotions. To me, it's it's that they they nip it in the bud in the sense of this is happening, this is real, this is the emotion that I'm having. Let's process this right now. Let's deal with it right now, as opposed to putting it off or pretending that it doesn't exist.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, they are really brilliant, I think, when it comes first to describing the emotions. They're a little off at times with the prescribing, how you manage and deal with it. But the describing is, just as you say, this nip in the bud phenomenon. You get this, sometimes with some emotions, they just come upon you, you know, their first flushes and blushes. And some of them are like blushes. You can't turn it off easily, but you can see that you're getting red.

• 34:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, what's the word for that? It's like fantasia or something?

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, fantasia, which is an impression. Exactly. And it's that's the Greek for impression. And it's or an appearance. And so you get this kind of you get input, you get sensory input. And it comes in, and the Stoics have a great way of talking about it. It's kind of erectic, meaning it's.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  It's grabby. It holds you for a while. It's charged. It's impulsive. Or it's hermetic, like a hormone. It charges. It's got this hormone feature to it. And it does catch you by surprise. But the Stoics' brilliance is they say, for some of them, not all, I mean, if a bear is in front of you, you're very happy to have that trigger response and run, get the hell out of there. But for others, you might want a little more calm. So you can nip it in the bud. You can put some space in between it. And their word

• 35:41Speaker 02

  is not assent to the impression. At some point, you know, to use Kahneman's language, it's really, really useful to think fast. Thinking fast is a very, very good thing. But sometimes you have to monitor your thinking fast with thinking slowly. And so they give you a moment, the Stoics give you a moment to think slowly. They say, do you want to hold on to that anger, for example? And so that's what all this meditation is about, to think about, you know, did you throw your servants into the shark pool yesterday because

• 36:21Speaker 02

  they broke a crystal goblet? Were you sharp at someone when they wouldn't let you into the mansion or something of that sort? And that's the moment of pause. I've talked to young Stoic acolytes who are in classrooms that use this a little bit like, you know, thinking about deferred gratification with students. Look at that stuff out there. You have a big bowl of candy. You want it right now. What would happen if you waited a little more? You might get more. This is sort of the Walter Michel experiment about the marshmallows. But on deferred gratification, but they don't know anything. These people I've talked

• 37:05Speaker 02

  to don't know it. They're just reading straight out of the Stoics, thinking, I can teach my young five, six, seven, eight-year-olds how to put a stop, a pause button, or push a pause button between, I want those sneakers, I have to have those sneakers, and I'm gonna get them right now. And thinking, is that the best way to go? So, yeah, I think that, you know, they're very good about that. And then they have this further notion that after you have that, there's a way of managing, you know, more full-blown emotions, thinking about, a little bit about, how would you react? Okay, so now you're feeling angry. Should you yell? Should you scream?

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Should you count to ten? Should you write a bit in your diary? Um, how do you? What's the behavioral response to the cognition you're experiencing? So they're a little bit, you know, they are cognitive behavioral therapists of an early sort. You, you, you have an emotion that has a certain kind of appearance out there, impression out there. And then a second kind of moment of volition is, how should I respond to that? What should I do? And I, I think that's really a useful way of thinking about emotions. I think they're pretty brilliant on emotions. As I say, on what we now think are emotions that have big cognitive component, components, and a lot more that we can manage.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Um, you know, I think they're a little tougher on, harder to buy full wholesale on grief, but.

• 38:40Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think we should, I think we have to add to the Stoics, our understanding of psychology and biology and, and just sort of what's going on beneath the surface. Like, it, it's, my wife was an addiction counselor early in our relationship, and she would always sort of tell me, you know, someone would come in, you know, they're, they're in this rehab center. You know, I'm just really having a hard time right now. And I seem to always have a hard time, you know, at Christmas, let's say. And you, you'd sort of probe through it and it'd be like, well, that's because your father died at Christmas. Or, you know, you went through this traumatic event at Christmas. And we can become sort of so dissociated, but we have this sort of trauma embedded inside us

• 39:24Ryan Holiday?

  that we don't understand that the reason we're having this impression, it's, it's actually has much less to do with the external stimuli and more to do with how we're seeing it internally because of our experiences. I, I, I deal with, this is why I go to therapy, is I have some issues from my childhood, and I find that those experiences then affect how I react to something that an ordinary person might find not to be, you know. Much of a trigger or much of a painful experience to me hits me in kind of a soft place. And so I feel like maybe where the Stoics, I don't want to say we're insufficient, but we're just, you know, on the, only on the cusp of what we now have a better understanding

• 40:07Ryan Holiday?

  of, is that you really have to sort of deal with these things from your past, from your biology, from your psychology. Because, you know, when Epictetus says, you know, it's not things that upset us, it's our judgment about things. It's not just what our judgment is looking at in front of us, you know, and how we're being misled by this or that. It's, it's almost how we're misleading ourselves because of what we're carrying around.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  Well, right. So the, the, these impressions don't just have to come, if we, we give an update to them, as you say, and be moderns about it. The impressions or the stimulus that's, all the sensory input that's coming in, isn't just coming in from outside, it's coming in from reawoken memories, call them triggers, whatever you like. And, and those memories can, as you say, come on the button on a, on a, on a birth date, a memorial date of some sort. Or they can just sort of seep in through the cracks because some unexplained

• 41:19Speaker 02

  thing in a dream, or what your kid did, or when you pick up a glass and you rub your fingers over the crystal or something like that, all of a sudden it brings back your father and the shot glass he used and had a splash in. And there you are, the five-year-old back in that dining room and some other connected, you know, Proustian-like experience gets triggered and all of a sudden you're in the grip of that. Yeah. So I think the Stoics are definitely giving you space between whatever the

• 41:53Speaker 02

  The prod is or stimulus is of an impression from outside, inside memory, encrusted memory, and the ways in which you can then have a response to it. It's a very, very complicated process. We now know more. I mean, you could throw in fright as well. You're talking about stuff that bubbles up and comes from, you know, your childhood or currently now from traumatic experiences that you experience out on the streets due to a storm, Katrina, a pandemic, loss. We're, you know, in the grip of a lot

• 42:33Speaker 02

  of hurt right now. And I think some of the issues to do with, will I be able to touch someone? What I'm dealing with is even, you know, fully vaccinated, how, how, how safe do I have to be in order to be out there in the classroom, teaching my students? What will this look like? All of that may trigger stuff that is not that pleasant, you know, about close calls, risks we took where it wasn't quite there. I just want to say something about the anniversary memories. I had an uncle that served in Okinawa and a Marine. And to the date, 50 years after an event, he would found himself in a park and he turned

• 43:18Speaker 02

  about on his heels. There were young kids on bikes and he said, get out of my way, I'm going to shoot you. He was reenacting something from a bayonet fight, you know, and they were fighting 48 hours nonstop on the ridge. And it was a very gruesome battle. And some of them were kept awake for long periods of time, probably on speed back then. And he had this on the moment, on the date. I don't know how the biochemistry works of our brains, but it stores down these memories deep. And in his case, he reenacted

• 43:59Speaker 02

  it in a, a very inhospitable way. You know, I think the kids probably were frightened out of their minds. Of course. Seeing this guy in a park, treat them as combat enemies in Japan, you know, in Okinawa.

• 44:16Ryan Holiday?

  Well, let's talk about grief for a second because when I was writing Lives of the Stoics, I think what's interesting is, you know, you can read Marcus Aurelius a bunch of times. You can read Seneca and Epictetus. And if you're just sort of interacting with them as philosophers, there's a lot of value, so much you can get, and probably enough to fill a lifetime. But it was really writing that book, and then again, over the last year, that I sort of had a couple of breakthroughs with Marcus Aurelius. That writing Lives, it was watching death run itself through Marcus's life, right? He loses his father. He loses, I think, like six children. Like, he had a lot of children, but like, six of them die at an early age. It was sort of

• 45:01Ryan Holiday?

  watching just how profound loss was as a, as a theme in his life. And then when I, you know, it really doesn't hit me until March of last year, that Marcus is writing during the Antonine Plague, which is, you know, like COVID-19 times a thousand. It lasts for 15 years, like 10 or 15 million people die. It's heinous. But realizing that, you know, one, when Marcus talks about grief and the Stoics talk about loss, this was something they were intimately familiar with at just like a, almost unfathomable level. But then it also does strike me that it probably was so prevalent

• 45:44Ryan Holiday?

  and profound that, that they're not really fully able to grapple with it. And maybe they do sort of shut down and, and disassociate from it a little. I mean, he never mentions, for instance, in Meditations, where he's trying to, you know, he mentions losing his temper like 50 times. He never mentions, like, the pain of burying a child, which no parent should ever have to do, let alone a half dozen times. Seneca himself buries a child young, from what we gather. I mean, these would have been profoundly painful experiences.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Well, grief is a complicated emotion for the Romans. I think in some ways, the Greek plays are better on this than the Roman plays. I mean, think of Homer, you know.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  Achilles cries. He cries in Priam's breast at the death of all of Priam Priam's sons in Troy. And that is an important lesson. The Romans have a whole series of decorum. They wear roles. You know, Cicero writes a lot about persona. It's the persona, the roles you play. And one of them is how you conduct yourself in grief. So their customs are not ours. So I don't think we should confuse what a Roman would do and how a Roman would grieve at the loss of children. And children's deaths are much more common

• 47:16Speaker 02

  than mortality rates are, you know, not what they are today. So that, and also, they hire keeners, women, to grieve for them and to cry. So it's a, just as any tradition and custom has its own mourning practices, so too the Romans really have their own mourning practices. And Seneca sort of struggles with that. I think he's an interesting person to turn to. You know, he thinks that, and I mention this in the new book, Stoic Wisdom. You know, he thinks that there are certain, we talked about involuntary responses, these proto-emotions or pre-emotions that creep up on you, that you might have to nip in the bud. Well, tears can be like that.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  And if they're involuntary, they just sort of come, then, okay, they're okay. You can shed them involuntarily. But if you indulge them, like, put on a show, we might say crocodile tears, but, you know, a little bit of a performance. Emotions are very expressive, and we control their expression often. And that's why they're so brilliant, the Stoics. They know that you can both have involuntary expressions of emotions and highly staged performances of them.

• 48:37Speaker 02

  You know, to feel an emotion is not to show it necessarily, or express it. They're two different moments of the emotion. And so they're sort of saying, you can feel some of these things, but how you show it, when you express it, and how much you express it, to what degree, that's a part of the voluntary moment. And that's the reaction that you can kind of control. And so in that regard, they know they're in this environment of being staged. If you think of Cicero. Cicero loses his beloved daughter, Tullia, in childbirth. He goes outside Rome to the Tusculan hills,

• 49:22Speaker 02

  and he writes this thing called Tusculan Disputations. The Tusculan Disputations, and his many letters to a friend, Atticus, are about... He's Stoic. Cicero isn't a Stoic, but he turns to them often, and he's how we get along.

• 49:39Ryan Holiday?

  He's a fellow traveler, I say.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  He's a fellow traveler, and he is the person who, to whom we're most indebted in many ways for the early Greek Stoics. He is the translator of many of them, an expositor, an expounder. So he goes there, and he sort of uses them as self-help therapy. You know what? Because he wants to get back to the forum, and Caesar's looking out, "Well, why aren't you here?" And he takes about a seven-month sabbatical or so because he can't contain himself. So he really knows about tears, and he knows about distress. And he can't quite pull himself together, but he turns to the Stoics to get help.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  And he sometimes says to the ancient Greek Stoics, because he predates Seneca... And others, he says, if you think distress isn't real, I think you're wrong. He says, and in some cases, distress is not just about loss of your daughter. It's about shame, you know, the distress of losing your character, losing your integrity, selling yourself. Alcibiades comes up all the time as the sort of the boy who felt shame before Socrates. And he says, that's, that's actually an okay kind of distress and tears because you want to do better in the world.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  So some, so they're, you know, they have a very mixed story about distress, grief, you should kind of get over, maybe we think that too, you know, set how many years, you know, certain periods of time for grief. But the distress that comes with moral turpitude, not so, not so good. And also, I think they're really brilliant on feeling emotion and showing emotion.

• 51:35Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I think two of the most emotional and beautiful things that Seneca writes are his, his consolations, one to his mother and one to the, basically the daughter of a friend.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:48Ryan Holiday?

  Which I, whenever people I know lose someone and they, they go, what did the Stoics say about death or loss? Those are always the two I point them to.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  To Marcia, yeah.

• 51:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. The other one I point them to, which is, you know, again, not quite a Stoic, but sort of a fellow traveler and we're indebted to him for some of his, his, his wisdom from the Stoics. And actually, his grandson goes on to be Marcus Aurelius's philosophy teacher. But Plutarch writes an incredibly moving letter to his wife after they lose a young child. And so it was this beautiful literary genre filled with all sorts of wisdom where someone would lose someone, they'd be in incredible pain, and they would sit down and try to comfort them through words. And there's a reason these essays have survived throughout the centuries because they're, they're really, really good.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, the consolations are fascinating. And it's, it is an art form. You know, they also talked about consolations about.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Destruction, you know, like the death of the city. Fires, think of the fires in California, think of the floods and, you know, what Texas was going through recently. Those consolations about the destruction of whole cities.

• 53:05Ryan Holiday?

  Half a million people have died over the last year.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  Absolutely, so, yeah. It's the grief that we will feel and continue. I don't think we've processed grief adequately. I don't, you know, we've just begun to have public rituals of grief. And I think the grief is not just for half a million more than America's wars. It's hard for me to believe. I used to hold in my head regularly, given my age, 50,000 Vietnam soldiers. That was just in, you know, it was on Mylan's Wall here in DC in the memorial. And it was a figure I couldn't really understand.

• 53:46Speaker 02

  And our current wars have been, we've suffered terribly with traumatic brain and limb loss. But the, but people have survived because of the state of, the art of medicine being so good. But this was, this is a battle we've all been in. You know, I've never been a combatant. I write about war, but I have never been a combatant. I've been privileged to serve with those who have, you know, at high levels. But I've never been a combatant. And this is a war we're all in. But we, we don't really know. And I fear some, you know, there will be grief for a long time. I have friends that work on long COVID here at National Institutes of Health, NIH.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  And long COVID is here for a while. We don't quite know, but by that I mean the long-term effects even of very, very mild COVID. Brain fog doesn't just, doesn't begin. It's failures of your autonomic system to regulate your heart. Breathing just goes off. And some of it has been detected because doctors report they're suffering it, you know. And so the symptoms are taken very seriously by fellow doctors. But we don't even know how to collect that data. So the grieving.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  It just will go on. I feel it in my classroom so powerfully. I see thirty tiles right in front of me from Hawaii to to New Jersey. And there are my students in their bedrooms. Their, you know, their crap is falling out of their closets. They're shutting the doors so everyone doesn't see. Some people have four poster beds. Some people can't connect because we have such a digital divide and I only hear them. And I know there's loss. I don't need, and it's very hard in a public place like a classroom to talk about the loss. And that's what I'm gonna do on Monday.

• 55:41Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no.

• 55:42Speaker 02

  Back on vacation.

• 55:43Ryan Holiday?

  Drew Gilpin Faust, several years ago, wrote a book called A Republic of Suffering.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  Sure, yes, Civil War.

• 55:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. And, and, you know, people know a lot of people died in the Civil War. But then when you really, I think the stat was something like twenty percent of the male population or so, uh, uh, under a certain age. It was like obscenely prevalent. And, and more importantly, like, everyone knew somebody or was connected to somebody who'd lost somebody. And I think that's, that's sort of where we are with the pandemic. And, and that, that's what's gonna make, as you said, the, the sort of the grief and the societal effects go on. I think also, though, this is sort of a tragic statement about sort of the inequality that has become so prevalent in, in, you know, sort of the

• 56:30Ryan Holiday?

  modern, uh, modern American system, which is that some people know lots and lots of people who have been affected. And then there's a whole section of our society that if you ask if they've been affected, they don't, they not only didn't not know anyone, they'd not even heard of anyone in their sort of extended network that's been affected. And so there's this kind of World where some people are living through this immense tragedy and profound loss and other people sort of have continued to exist in their bubble. And so, you know, that grief is not spread equally.

• 57:11Ryan Holiday?

  And I think, to me, this bumps into another key Stoic virtue, to me, is equally as important as courage, which is this sort of idea of justice and that, you know, no man is an island, we're all connected with each other. I think it's been interesting, as I've written about Stoicism and I've written about this sort of justice theme, you can kind of get people on board with courage, you can get people on board with fortitude, you can get people on board with the resiliency side of Stoicism. And then kind of as soon as you express to them like, no, no, no, no, you have obligations to other people, like what was great about the Spartans was they were in this for the person next to them. I think that part of Stoicism has sort of been lost in translation, particularly as

• 57:55Ryan Holiday?

  the philosophies become popular again with younger people. I've been dismayed as I've watched sort of the comments from some people about.

• 58:04Speaker 02

  Well, I think there's a few things here. One is self-help is part of the me culture. So it's me, even if the sources were about virtue, where virtue is not just courage or resilience or strength. And secondly, just on the subject of grief, yes, there's the bubble that those who work remotely and in tech worlds, et cetera, can have suffered less because their livelihood has not depended on being out in the world and exposed.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  But in addition, there's also the idea that the inequity, it's not so much inequity, but I would just call it old fashioned willful ignorance. The vaccines are effective. They are incredibly effective right now. And today, The New York Times came out with even more regarding Moderna and Pfizer, because they've been able to study it, and the effect in the current environment with the new variants. But there's ways in which that message has become polarized, or it's become part of the new culture wars or the like. And that's really dangerous.

• 59:23Speaker 02

  And the Stoics were really good, I think, about updating your information quickly. One of the ways in which you rehearse the bads, in some ways, or prepare, is, you know, they have a sage in mind who is omniscient and infallible, so we don't have to go there necessarily, but they were thinking about that in terms of getting the most up-to-date information so you can adjust your expectations and plans and dwell in the future, their phrase, so that you can be prepared. The idea of being prepared, being one step ahead, pre-rehearsing, anticipating, these

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  are all Stoic notions that have to do with trying to stay ahead of the game. That requires information, not disinformation.

• 1:00:16Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:00:16Speaker 02

  And it requires embracing truth. And I'm, you know, I'm a philosopher. I teach in university. I have little interest in politics about this matter, but I do have interest in the truth and critical discussion. And I think if you're going to turn to Stoicism, you're going to turn to individuals and philosophers who are trying their hardest, I think, to think about what evidence you have for assenting to impressions, for example. And that's really critical now. So there's a divide about loss, but there's also a divide about where you choose to get

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  your information and somehow disputing science. And that's grievous. There is a subject for grief.

• 1:01:09Ryan Holiday?

  No, no.

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  It's very grievous.

• 1:01:13Ryan Holiday?

  I think about, we sort of have two, talk about the Stoics not being emotional. We have two recorded instances of Marcus Aurelius crying in public. The first is which is when, as a young man, he loses his favorite philosophy teacher. And he's crying and Antoninus Pius, you know, sees that someone's trying to sort of say, "Hey, this isn't Stoic." And he says, "No, let the boy be human for once, right? Like, let him grieve." And so I think that's an illustrative moment. But the second that we know about from Marcus Aurelius is that during a court case, someone mentions all of those who had died during the plague. And since we know Marcus, you know, dies of the plague, or suspect he does, this must have been in the middle of it in some ways.

• 1:01:57Ryan Holiday?

  So it's still ongoing. But Marcus supposedly breaks down when he thinks about all the people that have been lost. And so I think, you know, again, if you're taking Stoicism as a formula or a recipe for being a better sociopath, you know, you're missing, you're missing the point. It's actually, it's not supposed to close you up. It's supposed to open you up in some ways, connect you to other people. And I think to sort of circle back where we're talking about Stockdale, you know, Stockdale says, "What's the flip side of what's in it for me?" He says, "It's this: I am my brother's keeper." Like, you, you have to care about other people. That is what the philosophy is about.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, the military and especially Stockdale couldn't embrace Stoicism unless they were really thinking about caring for each other. That just is, you know, if you're, if you're, if you go to the academy, you learn real fast, ship before shipmate. That just is how it goes. And, and even before the ship is, you know, on top of that is obeying an order from a commander in chief. But the top of the commander in chief is always the US Constitution. Am I obeying the US Constitution? And if not... I try to disobey. So I think something that we, you know, we sometimes forget,

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  there's a lesser known Stoic, Greek Stoic, Heracles, H-I-E-R-O-C-L-E-S. And he has this very, very potent image. And that is, you're, you're in the center of concentric circles. And you're always bringing the outer circle inward. And it takes an effort, it takes an effort, he suggests, of imagination. And that's, you know, that's a really important image. It gets picked up later on, if explicitly or at least implicitly by, by Adam Smith, who says you, in order to really feel connected with others, your heart has to beat. You, you bring it back to your own breast.

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  And that is what empathy is. David Hume puts it in terms of feeling the chord, you're connected with the chord. And those guys were reading the Stoics. They were reading the Stoics on social connection. And for them, it was a kind of a motive or emotional feeling. For Emmanuel Kant, who was definitely reading the Stoics, a German Enlightenment philosopher of the 18th century, of 18th century, yeah. He was thinking of it in terms of reason, which is of course, the Stoic theme that we all share logos with, with, in a universe, a connected universe. So the, the connection is critical.

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  And we're at peril if we think Stoicism is a kind of go it alone self-therapy for self-enhancement. It was rooted, you can't be a Stoic and inherit the ancient tradition without it being rooted in virtue, and virtue is other regarding. It's about others and not just about my strength or, you know.

• 1:05:13Ryan Holiday?

  Totally. Well, I had two, two last things I wanted to talk to you about, and then I'll let you go. So the first, it's something I've been trying to talk more about. And it's again, sort of a stereotype I find that Stoicism butts up against. It's interesting, like, when I get interviewed about stuff, people tend to assume that my audience is very male, that it must be all guys. Partly because most of the Stoics historically were guys, but also it just feels perhaps like a masculine philosophy. Actually, it's been interesting when I sort of see who emails me, when I see who's buying the books, it's actually much more evenly distributed than perhaps one might suspect. But I'd just be curious about your experiences,

• 1:05:56Ryan Holiday?

  one, being a woman who writes about and has studied the Stoics for so long, but, two, how have you watched, like, the demographics of your own students change when it comes to Stoicism over the years? So I imagine maybe you have seen a shift?

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  Uh huh. So, interesting. So, I agree with you. You know, when I'm asked to do podcasts, not yours, but others, sometimes it is groups that definitely are male-based or in professions that are particularly male-oriented. So, and for whatever reasons, you know, I actually don't like the existing image of Marcus Aurelius alone on the horse.

• 1:06:45Ryan Holiday?

  How interesting.

• 1:06:46Speaker 02

  Because I think that that suggests the cowboy, you know? On it alone, you know, Marlborough man or something like that. He wasn't a Marlborough man. But, you know, that exists because I think people thought it was the Emperor Constantine. That's how that statue remained and wasn't brought down.

• 1:07:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you've got to imagine that the Christians who ruled Rome, had they known it was Marcus Aurelius, may have not been so happy about it.

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  Taken it down, exactly, exactly. In the way that in the French Revolution, lots of heads rolled on statues and not just in guillotines.

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  So that said, Stoicism has often been used in nefarious ways. But classical philosophy has often been used in nefarious ways. It's been, you know, it's been used by the Nazis. It's been used in other white supremacy communities. So I think that's something that people have to be honest about and try to counter. And in my own book, this book Stoic Wisdom, I work on that. But that's not my main theme. So I do, I will say there is toxic masculinity out there.

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  And white, and the white Western ancient philosophy, classical Roman and Greek philosophy is a place to go if you're looking for that. Not, it's a good, it's been appropriated, and I think it's been misappropriated. That said, Musonius Rufus himself, who is Epictetus's teacher, opened his classrooms to women. When someone asked him whether women too should do philosophy, he began to say, yes, they should. They have the same logos, the rational faculty. I'm quoting now from the fragments we have.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  And they have a desire for ethical excellence and for, you know, natural orientation to that.

• 1:08:53Ryan Holiday?

  When he says, what do you?

• 1:08:54Speaker 02

  That's Musonius Rufus.

• 1:08:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, he says, what do you care what gender your dog is?

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. And Plato was our biggest, I mean Plato's Republic V, which I teach all the time, is women can be, women can be guardians as well. You know, just like cobblers can be bald or not, it doesn't matter. It's not a, gender in this case is not a relevant feature for a warrior. So that, so there's that. And I think also the, you know, the idea, Epictetus's get in the ring and show your grit and get knocked down and stand up again. That misinterprets a whole slew of important Stoic stuff.

• 1:09:43Speaker 02

  So I, in my own, you know, it's hard to tell the demographics.

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  Who's in my classroom, you know, it's lots of undergraduates kind of interested in in the stuff, some who have to take it, some who don't have to take it. Men and women alike are looking at this and I think they're trying, you know, some of them frankly find some of the remarks absolutely crazy. I don't think I've ever had an undergraduate class where eyes haven't rolled almost out of their head when, you know, they read Epictetus citing Anaxagoras who says, you know, kiss your child goodbye in the morning as if it's the last time. These poor freshmen have just arrived on campus and I think they think their mothers and fathers are never gonna take them back again.

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  And I sort of have to backpedal a bit and tell them how to think about pre-rehearsal of bads by telling a story I often tell. So this is a daughter thinking about Stoicism, talking to her mother who's 96 and that daughter is me. My mother hated, and I tell this story in Stoic Wisdom, my mother was a woman of few words. Fine was her favorite word. She read four novels a week and my kids and I and my husband would visit her and say, what's it about? And she says, oh, a little bit of this. And then she said, I said, how mom, how was it? Would you recommend it? It was fine. It was fine.

• 1:11:15Speaker 02

  You know, and so we went over how you would write a book report to her daughter, me. So when it came to talk about death, I could see her not wanting to go there. Are you ready? Do you think, you know, fine? So I would say to her, because I was in charge of all her care and finances, I'd say, you know, mom, I don't think we signed up for the immortality plan.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  Do you think we did? And she's very beautiful and she would smile at me. And, you know, I get this huge smile. I said, because I'm thinking that if we did, I don't think I can afford it. I don't think you can afford it, Mom. And that was our way of pre rehearsing.

• 1:12:06Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  Death, of thinking about.

• 1:12:09Ryan Holiday?

  Addressing the elephant in the room.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  Memento mori, yeah. And we were all gonna die. And it actually was helpful for both of us. And in her last few days, she had a very bad cough. I didn't nearly know that the end was so near. But three days before her death, I was visiting her and in her nursing home. And they were wonderful college students who were putting on some performance of group dancing. And my mom was in a wheelchair. And I wheelchair danced. I'm a dancer. I have done modern dance most of my life. And I wheelchair danced with her and brought smile. And that was our. We had had this conversation many times about the immortality plan and how expensive it would be.

• 1:12:53Speaker 02

  And we sort of, you know, three days later, I got a call that come visit. This will be the last visit. And we were ready. So I think we rehearsed it. So those are two women, a mom and a daughter. The daughter, you know, steeped in Stoic texts, thinking about memento mori, thinking about that we'll all die and pre rehearsing it a little bit. And I kind of, we both got ready for it.

• 1:13:19Ryan Holiday?

  No, that's beautiful. That's beautiful. I was, in Lives of the Stoics, I talk about this great passage in one of Robert Caro's books about Lyndon Johnson, where to go to your point about Marcus as the cowboy, you know, is he sort of studying this Old West mythology that kind of shapes Lyndon Johnson? He talks about how. You know, when he, when he goes out and he meets the women of the hill country, and he sees what they went through, he goes like, I never want to hear a cowboy story again. He's like, I, he's like, the, the tough one was not the, the, the person in the gunfight. He said it was, it was the, the woman bringing water from the well after a perineal tear.

• 1:14:01Ryan Holiday?

  You know, the, the, it was the woman ironing clothes, you know, uh, that, that she, you know, when she's heating the iron on a, on a wood stove and, you know, a Texas summer, when it's a hundred and eight outside, there, there is this element too, where it, it's, it's almost as if the male Stoics are the ones that we hear about. But, but it's actually these sort of nameless female Stoics who, who, the, the, the, the civil stockpiles of, of, of, of, you know, generations that, that were in a way, far more stoic, because they weren't even getting the glory or the attention for the endless endurance and sacrifice that, that life demanded of them.

• 1:14:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, women's voices have long been suppressed and silenced and, um, in many ways diminished. And, um, you know, it's, um, hopefully we're, we're changing that and, you know, getting to parity in, in the workforce and, um, trying to get rid of these crazy myths, you know? And, um, there's gender fluidity out there in many circles, especially if you're in a university. And there's, um, many different ways in which you can flourish and thrive and fulfill your capacities. And if you're a parent, um, and are thinking hard about the flourishing, um, whether you

• 1:15:28Speaker 02

  did a good job raising your kids, you, you, you want them to have the opportunities that are not restricted, um, by, um, um, crazy ways. You know, my mom, Didn't have the same opportunities for education and for professional life and in many ways for flourishing that I've had as a result of my time and place in history. And, you know, that's sad and I think it very much motivated me to compensate a little bit and show her what I could do as a result.

• 1:16:06Ryan Holiday?

  So that was the last thing I wanted to ask you and I think it's why your work is important and why I think it's resonated in the cultures that it has, which is that, you know, although you are literally talking about Stoicism in the classroom a lot of times, you know, I think what's so meaningful to me about Stoicism is that the whole point of it is to get outside of the classroom, it's to apply it to life's actual problems, whether that's PTSD in the military or, you know, losing a loved one to old age or a pandemic. To me Stoicism is designed to be an applied philosophy, not an abstract philosophy.

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  Well, you're right.

• 1:16:51Ryan Holiday?

  And I'd just be curious about that in your.

• 1:16:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. Stoicism definitely, well, it had two phases. So the ancient Greek Stoics, the founders, Xenocritsippus, Clayantes, they definitely were still in the academy. You know, they were in the painted porch, but it was narrow. It was only later under the Romans who were public, you know, Seneca's an orator, a rhetorician, a speechwriter. So he's going to open it up, Epictetus. He really did want to catch young boys, 18 to 22, with some shockers and, you know, shock and awe tactics, and he did a good job.

• 1:17:36Speaker 02

  So my own work and certainly in Stoic wisdom, Stoic warriors, has been to listen and hear stories and understand how best to live. I went into teaching moral philosophy because I do think it's about how do you live well? How do you flourish? How do you thrive? Not solo, but as a community and a shared life, shared voyages and shared journeys and commitments. And the.

• 1:18:11Speaker 02

  I have training also in psychoanalysis. So I have psychotherapeutic training. And I guess in much of my work, also my work with soldiers and after-war and untold war, was to hear their stories, in part because we need to share the burden. I do think it's very, very unfairly distributed, military services. It's not a good system at the moment. And so, being able to listen and hear the stories and think about philosophy, if you want to think of it in terms of case studies, that's an old-school way of thinking about it, but as applying, as applying to our daily life, I think that's important. Certainly, Stoicism is that.

• 1:18:54Speaker 02

  Sometimes I think it's misapplied. I don't think it's just a self-help about me and me alone. It's really about us and us together. And that's the lesson of a kind of, it's being connected at the hip and being at home in the world through our shared humanity. So getting that across in a, you know, the classroom's not always an erudite place. It's sometimes really, really down on earth. Eighteen-year-olds can be very down-to-earth and remind you, they remind you that we're still teaching, you know, young, impressionable folk.

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  And in general, yes, it's, you know, I'm thinking about, I think about philosophy as, how do you make the world a better place? How do you bring, how you, who are privileged to sort of get to read these fun texts, how do you, how do you share them with others? I think that's also the task, really, of science. We're seeing how science has allowed us to get out of this pandemic, maybe.

• 1:20:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. As Marcus says, "The fruit of this life is good character and acts for the common good." And to me, that's a great encapsulation of the obligations of a Stoic.

• 1:20:19Speaker 02

  Yes. The common humanity, the common humanitas that we all embrace is how we should think about the message of Stoicism. And it kind of went on.

• 1:20:30Ryan Holiday?

  Well, Professor, thank you so much. Thank you for your work, and it was an honor to talk.

• 1:20:35Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, Ryan. It's been a privilege being here. Appreciate it.

• 1:20:40Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks for listening to another episode of The Daily Stoic. It's mind blowing to me now that we are well over 30 million downloads of this show. It means so much to me to have all of you listen. If you want to help spread the word about the show, please leave a review on iTunes or whatever your favorite podcasting platform is. It helps a lot. And then, of course, click Subscribe. That's how we know how many people are listening and that makes sure you get the episodes as they come in. So, thanks again for listening to The Daily Stoic Podcast.