Kate Bowler on Memento Mori and Falling in Love with Fate | This Decision—This Process—Will Change Your Life

Ryan reads today’s meditation and talks to author and professor Kate Bowler about her recent book Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved, her battle after being unexpectedly diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, the similarities between hope and fear, the importance of stillness, how the prospect of death concentrates the mind, and more. Kate Bowler, PhD is a New York Times bestselling author, podcast host, and a professor at Duke University. She studies the cultural stories we tell ourselves about success, suffering, and whether (or not) we’re capable of change. Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, which received widespread media attention and a lot of puns about being #blessed. 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. KiwiCo believes in the power of kids and that small lessons today can mean big, world-changing ideas tomorrow. KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 30% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com. 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. Novo is the #1 Business Banking App - because it’s built from the ground up to be powerfully simple and free business banking that Money Magazine called the Best Business Checking Account of 2021. Novo makes banking easy and secure - you can manage your account in Novo’s customizable web, android, and iOS apps with built in profit first accounting and invoicing. Get your FREE business banking account in just 10 minutes at https://banknovo.com/STOICSign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Kate Bowler: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, HomepageSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:03Ryan 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. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  This decision, this process, will change your life. There was a man who changed Marcus Aurelius's life. His name was Quintus Junius Rusticus, a teacher who tirelessly urged his student to read attentively, not to be satisfied with just getting the gist of it. And what did he urge this student to read? Whose work did he recommend to this promising young man? Epictetus. Knowing all the power and responsibility that would soon come Marcus's way, Rusticus designed a course of study and reading that would prepare him as much as possible for the kind of thing you can never truly prepare for. Together, they would read and reread these lessons, absorbing and discussing, challenging and encouraging

• 1:26Speaker 01

  each other, which made them both better. Marcus could have blown this instruction off. He could have chased pleasure instead, but he didn't. He was a diligent and dedicated student. Interestingly enough, Dwight Eisenhower, who in turn would come to hold immense and in some cases, absolute power, had a nearly identical influence in his own life. In 1922, as a lowly staff officer, Eisenhower was ordered to Panama to join the 20th Infantry Brigade, serving two years under General Fox Connor, a man Eisenhower later said "had a place in my affections that no other, not a relative, could obtain." In the book General Fox Connor: Pershing's Chief of Operations and Eisenhower's Mentors,

• 2:10Speaker 01

  There's a passage about the relationship. "Connor gradually led Eisenhower to a more advanced level of military study," the author writes. "The general introduced his assistant to the writings of the 19th century Prussian military theorist Karl von Clausewitz, whose On War remains an influential treatise on warfare. Eisenhower struggled to grasp the military maxims set forth by Clausewitz. So Connor had Eisenhower read the book three times to drive home the lessons. Connor would quiz Eisenhower as to what each Clausewitzian principle meant. In a 1966 letter, Eisenhower identified On War as the book that had most profoundly influenced his military career." Again, Eisenhower didn't have to do any of this. He chose to.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  One can imagine on the days and nights leading up to June 6, 1944, when Eisenhower successfully led the single largest and most important invasion in military history on the coast of Normandy. We can imagine him finding confidence in the lessons he had learned in Connor's library. One can imagine Marcus Aurelius doing the same with Epictetus and Risticus in his tent late at night on the front lines of the war in Germania. We should be sobered and inspired by these examples. Reading, particularly when you're young, is not just some fun diversion. It may well be preparing you for a future you cannot even imagine. The mentorships you cultivate today, the people you seek out and listen to are not

• 3:37Speaker 01

  just helping you advance in your career, they are part of your hero's journey. They are making you into the person you can be that the world may someday need. So that's your challenge today and every day, to find those books, to find your Risticus and your Fox Connor, and most importantly, to do what they say. For me, this, my sort of Fox Connor and my Risticus has been Robert Greene. Robert Greene is the person who introduced me to many, many of the books that you've heard me recommend over the years. He taught me how to be a reader. And so actually, our Read to Lead challenge, which we made with Daily Stoic, is largely influenced by some of the ideas from Robert Greene. So I strongly suggest you check that out. If you want to be a better reader, if you want to develop this kind of course of study

• 4:20Speaker 01

  for yourself, you can check that out at dailystoic.com/reading.

• 4:27Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Today's guest is actually someone I've wanted to have on the podcast for a very long time. I've reached out a million times to their publisher. I thought it was gonna happen and COVID happened and then kept going back and forth. Then it just went nowhere. And then randomly, I got a Twitter DM from the person herself saying, "Hey, I would love to come on your podcast sometime. Would you ever want to have me on?" And I said, "Are you kidding? I've been trying to have you on forever. I've loved both of your books." And that is today's guest. I don't know what this says about publicists at publishers, or just the importance of timing, but I'm so glad I got to make this happen because my guest

• 5:11Ryan Holiday?

  today, Kate Bowler, is one of my favorite authors. Actually, as I talked about in the interview, my sister is the one who turned me on to this because Kate wrote an amazing piece in The New York Times where she talks about Seneca and grief and dying and her cancer diagnosis. And that's also the topic of her two wonderful books. Her first book, a New York Times bestseller, Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies, I've Loved. It's an awesome book. I read it when it first came out. I sell it at my bookstore, The Painted Porch. It's very popular. People love it. Here is my copy. And then her new book, which I just finished, No Cure for Being Human and Other Truths I Need to Hear. If these two memoirs weren't enough, Kate is an Associate Professor of the History of Christianity

• 5:55Ryan Holiday?

  at Duke Divinity School. She has a master's degree in religion from Yale Divinity and a PhD from Duke. She's an expert on the history of Christianity in America, and she's written two, really, from what I hear, fascinating academic texts about the prosperity gospel and the role of pastors' wives. So she is both an expert and, I think, a philosopher in the truest Stoic sense in that she has deeply experienced in life itself. She has a surprise diagnosis of bowel cancer, stage four bowel cancer, as a young woman in her 30s. It turns her life upside down, but in the process forces her to explore all the powerful, life-changing, beautiful ideas that she talks about in these two books,

• 6:39Ryan Holiday?

  and brings her, of course, to Stoicism and thus to today's podcast. She and I hit it off. I'm so excited and proud of this interview. I think you're gonna really like it. And Amy, my sister, if you're listening, I hope this is the first episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast that you actually like, and I'll talk to you soon.

• 7:00Ryan Holiday?

  I was gonna tell you, you're the first guest in however many hundreds there have been that my sister actually gives a shit about, so.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  I am deeply honored. It's honestly Ryan. It's usually someone's mom. So I feel pretty good to be getting this sister racket.

• 7:17Ryan Holiday?

  I do find that's like the highest praise you can get. Like with, someone will say that with one of my books, they'll be like, I'll be like, how'd you hear about the book? They'll be like, oh, my wife made me read it, or my husband made me read it. Because like, I only recommend like, a small percentage of the stuff that I read to my wife. I'll recommend stuff to my friends all the time.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  Who you don't care about. Which this is what this podcast should be about. It's like, what's going on with you and your friends, Ryan?

• 7:41Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's like, if you recommend something to your spouse and they hate it, you'll never hear the end of it.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  That's true. That's true. I do, oh my gosh. My poor husband, though, like, he

• 7:53Speaker 02

  he's like a very impatient reader and he does, he gets, he gets really frustrated by the most bizarre criteria. Like, he'll hand a book back and be like, it had too many characters. I'm like, how is that? Why? It can't all just be Life of Pi, buddy. It can't just be two people on a boat forever.

• 8:11Ryan Holiday?

  Speaking of important questions, one thing that I was thrown for a loop about in your book that I needed to know more about immediately, what is marshmallow salad? Is that a Canadian thing?

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Oh, but the things people can do with marshmallows is really upsetting. Yeah. If you're a Mennonite, you just look at any food thing and you're like, that's not just a food, it's a food group. And it's not a food group, it's just something you're gonna have to scale by about 200 or 300. So they take those mini marshmallows and they tend to be like. I bet this could use some mandarin orange wedges, but like the canned kind. And then, and then it's just like, and then some green grapes, throw those in there. And then like a lot of just, just a lot of fluff, a lot of fluff gesture. And then sometimes Jell-O and it is rough.

• 8:58Ryan Holiday?

  Is it like at barbecues, when do you serve marshmallow salad?

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Hmm, we don't have like, because we don't really have any good reason to celebrate Thanksgiving in the way that you guys do, because we have no civil religion is what I'm reaching for. And so we do have a lot of Thanksgiving for, at a different time, we have it in October for entirely inexplicable.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  But when you visit our gentle and kind people, I, I would very much like to explain to you how bad food can be.

• 9:29Ryan Holiday?

  Okay. No, I guess we, we shove marshmallows into mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving for some reason. Like they'll put it on top of yams or sweet potatoes. I'm not sure why, but maybe it's a Thanksgiving thing. That makes sense.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  This was, yeah, this was like an full on, like that, that's your healthy side. Like you can have the carrots or you can have the marshmallow salad.

• 9:52Ryan Holiday?

  Right. Because it has salad in the name.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  It's got salad. Yeah.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  I think the one time that I, I think the first time I broke ranks with my culture was I was at an outdoor like barbecue thing and I saw that someone had put like slices of, of deli meat into the Jell-O salad.

• 10:13Ryan Holiday?

  What?

• 10:14Speaker 02

  And I, because I, I poked at it, like I shook it, I poked at it. And I stepped back from the line and I yelled, who did this? Take responsibility.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  And that felt, that felt right.

• 10:28Ryan Holiday?

  I, I have a memory like I was, uh, working on my first book and we went to this like potluck thing or something. We were living in New Orleans and our friends had a, had a friend who was like a Chinese exchange student who, who'd come over. And she had, she made cookies and she'd seen chocolate chip cookies, but she'd not had them before. And so she just thought it was like a cookie with things in it and she didn't have chocolate chips. So she put beans in instead and I, I took, I took a bite of it and apparently I made quite a scene that I then later had to apologize for.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  That is so funny. Beans, that like, that is the consistency of that.

• 11:14Ryan Holiday?

  Well, no, I feel like the, the exact phrase that you said would, would have come out of my mouth, which is who did this? This is, this is a crime against humanity.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Especially that, like, the texture. At first, you thought your mouth, thought it was a raisin and then it dug in a little more. And then the mealiness.

• 11:31Ryan Holiday?

  It looked like a chocolate chip cookie. That was the worst part. It's, you know, you, I was, it was so unsuspected.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's like in, um, I'm sorry, you're getting like full on, it's like a sleepover high, right? Where, but, um, like in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where it just gets Turkish delight. It looks like something, but it tastes like nothing forever, forever, forever.

• 11:57Ryan Holiday?

  Um, well, we should talk about serious stuff.

• 12:01Speaker 03

  Sure, sure, sure, sure. Right, you're gonna get a lot of uns- unfiltered personality.

• 12:07Ryan Holiday?

  Well, as an easy transition though, I, I, I, let's start with the absolute darkest question I have, which is, I was fascinated by this idea because it's something I think a lot about. You were sort of talking about as you're working, I suspect it was your first book, but you're talking about it in this one, where you're sort of like, why work on this thing if I'm going to die? Like, why spend time and energy on something that's as hard and to a certain degree unrewarding while you're doing it?

• 12:38Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely.

• 12:39Ryan Holiday?

  As a book. So what is the answer? Because I, I would love to know.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, and I, I knew how hard it would be writing a book like that. It was going to be a massive history book, like over a hundred thousand heavily footnoted words. And I knew how hard I was because I'd done it before. I'd written a massive history of the prosperity gospel and that took me a decade. And then I realized, oh, this is my, probably my last fall. And this book will have to go in, in the early summer for what will probably be my last summer for a job I'll never get to keep for reasons that I now yet, I now have to dig deep for. And I had, um, at first, the whole thing seemed absurd, really, truly absurd. Cause I'd, I'd always been so externally driven.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  I wanted to get tenure at an elite university. I wanted the- Feeling of the ladder that I was climbing. And, um, and then I, I got talked into it at a, uh, at a conference with two beautiful friends who do the same kind of work. And they said, you know, Kate, you've been kind of talking about this all wrong. You're always framing the historical work you do as like a result of your ambition or your, um, some kind of like quirky hobby at best, but, you know, even if the worst happens, like you're in there. Like they, like the people who love you can find you there.

• 14:09Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 14:09Speaker 03

  And I, I guess the way that kind of resonated for me was that, um, that there's like a deep purity to doing something you know you were made to do.

• 14:21Ryan Holiday?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  And I, uh, I happen to believe that ideas bear up the weight of civilization and they don't have to be mine, but I do think that idea work, which is like, especially I love the work of deep history, is inherently valuable and that I happen to be good at it, but that only about 500 people read those books. So that was the math equation I ran, but it, it, uh, it came out to a feeling of deep calling.

• 14:49Ryan Holiday?

  Did it change your relationship with the work? The, the, the sort of transition from external motivation to intrinsic, I might not even be around to experience the rewards motivation?

• 15:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. I think I had to figure out too, if it could even fit in the course of a day, because what I was imagining was a mountain of work. And I was gonna, in a way, have to be like in full beast mode.

• 15:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  To do it so that I would have to get up two hours earlier. I'd have to know exactly how many words a day. I would have to slog and then toggle fast where I could put it down, turn toward moming a little smushy baby.

• 15:29Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  And then not being a dick to my family and friends. You know, like having enough left to then also be doing almost full time, like.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  Chemo immunotherapy sad cancer things. And so, but the beautiful feeling was the second I'd done it in the day, I used to send it to my dad, who's also a historian. And then he would read it over and we would sort of chew over little bits of things. But the feeling then of having that shared work where someone's kind of keeping pace beside you, that felt like we were digging out like a deeper part even of being together. So it wasn't then just intellectually satisfying. It felt like I was not alone and being able to simultaneously make it like a gift, like a like a fam- like a like a family project.

• 16:17Ryan Holiday?

  Sure. And when the sort of looming specter of death diminishes slightly, does that go away? Or were you able to carry it forward on these two books?

• 16:28Speaker 03

  I find death is very weird. Not that I've really fully been there, but I've almost been there a couple of times. And it's almost like the volley, it's almost like volume dials. Like the volume of some things gets turned way up and then other it just feels very through me and far away. So that, um, that, and for me, work has always helped me kind of adjust the dials of my life. So I would, I spent, I had to spend so much time in the hospital and I just didn't want to, I knew I had to be there. Like you have to get blood work done. You have to be nice to your nurse. Not everyone has to force their nurse to pretend to be a vampire, but that's what I did and pretended he wanted to be left alone with my blood. And that's what I

• 17:13Speaker 03

  needed to get through those days. But I, I also wanted to be somewhere else and still myself. So I used to conduct interviews all the time in the cancer center.

• 17:23Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  And have people stop by for my new, I had hundreds of people to interview for that dumb book. So I was like, hey, I'm really busy. You should come on by. But it was so lovely to see the way people are truly themselves while in the midst of you being truly yourself. So anyway, so that was, that was very intense and felt really meaningful. But, but then what? Like, what do you do if you kind of have more time to spend and? I realized that I, I think I realized I needed to toggle between a couple of different ways of being, that I needed to write to tell the truth, which was the beauty of being able to write like memoir and cultural essays.

• 18:08Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  But then the other bit was I needed to write to learn. And so that I would keep flipping back and forth between those kinds of writings, just so I could, um, learn how to keep living, I guess.

• 18:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Yeah, I've been trying to think about that because I wrote one book during the pandemic. I did a one book and a children's book, but it did feel like, especially in the summer of 2020, when things were really crazy, it was this sort of unique period of sort of stillness and quiet where the, it felt like the volume was turned down, but then the stakes were turned up. And then, uh, you weren't expected to do anything. So it sort of like, was like waking up like on a Sunday every day, just, and, and if you made progress, you were ahead because most people were not doing anything. And as I've been working on the next book since then, uh, you know, everyone's sort of talking about things going back to normal. I'm not sure if I really want them to go back to

• 19:04Ryan Holiday?

  normal. The, whatever that was, felt better to me than normal.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. Did you like the, um, I'm just wondering if it felt like that, that deep end feeling, like you can, like in the arc of a day, you can kind of dive deep under the water?

• 19:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. And, and like, there was so much less to say no to, because most of the stuff you have to say no to was like illegal, you know, like temporarily, like coffee or travel or, or whatever. Like, you know, I've flown a couple of times in the last month, the sort of first travel I've done since the pandemic for work stuff. And it's like, oh, I can't, I, I'm used to working where I'm not doing anything and nothing's going on. And now I'm having to adjust to a sort of a busier world. I imagine that as traumatic and terrible as cancer was, it was a bubble, like literally and figuratively, where you were just, that was your life and everything else in the external world, you just didn't have time for.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  I think the thing I was most scared of those is that the beauty of the world you're describing, where the bubble lets you go deep, like deep into work or deep into love. And like, there was and is. Living with chronic cancer is like the feeling of of just being so like desperately in love with the world.

• 20:24Ryan Holiday?

  Hmm.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  And not wanting to miss it.

• 20:26Ryan Holiday?

  Um. Cause it could go away. You have a sense of its.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:29Ryan Holiday?

  The femorality.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  The precarity of it does feel very um bright.

• 20:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  But um but a lot of cancer is and a lot of pain or suffering is not just deep. It's um horrifyingly mind numbingly mundane. It's um feeling foggy and being mad at yourself or feeling sleepy. It's uh being worried about being medically bankrupt because this is a country that bankrupts sick people.

• 21:03Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  It was fighting with insurance companies over bills that were so that was the like that wasn't just like the dross. Sometimes the suffering, I think most of suffering turns out it's just paperwork.

• 21:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  Not.

• 21:17Ryan Holiday?

  Kafkaesque.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. That feels like just such a punishment. Like, wait, this is my existential finish line. I want to be doing the stuff that matters. And instead, I'm talking to Linda, Linda from HR to see why this bill came to me.

• 21:34Ryan Holiday?

  No, that was something that my sister sort of told me about that I didn't think about. It's just like how long you have to spend in the hospital that, you know, chemotherapy doesn't take 20 minutes. It takes like an hour of setup and then it takes two hours and then it's an hour of this and then you can't drive and then the next two days you're like I the idea that it involves so much waiting. I don't think is something people would anticipate.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. What does your sister do?

• 22:01Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, she's a she works in education, um but uh but she had breast cancer about three years ago.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm sorry.

• 22:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, thank you. She's doing good now, but but the idea of just like. Yeah. And then also, I guess, the hell of the logistics

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 22:17Ryan Holiday?

  of like, who's going to drive me? And you talk about this in the book, just the flights. And I could, the anger you felt when, when you were like, oh, I could have been doing it at Duke this whole time.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah. I, when, when my life became a clock, I didn't really take too kindly to people wasting it.

• 22:37Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  And especially when, you know, I'm a, I'm a professor at Duke University.

• 22:44Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  So when I found out that Duke University Hospital was offering the treatment I would need to live, I was, I was so confused. I guess, um, because turns out we're not just suffering, we're participating in this bigger thing called bio-capitalism. And we're like caught in structures. And I think that's part of what makes you have to give up heroic individualism as a patient pretty fast, is you're like, oh, there's me and my, the dignity of my many choices. And then, and then you realize, oh, no, I'm in a trial and the trial has rules and the rules have sponsors.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  And there's a whole lot of, there's a whole lot of things deciding what the next few months and years of my life will be, and it's not me.

• 23:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. You're like the private in a mass army and they're sending you around and they don't really, this isn't about individuals at all. And so you, but, but to you, you are an individual. And in the, in the primacy of your life and death struggle, you're the most important individual.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  I like trying so hard to live this hero's journey, but instead I'm just like this sad, sad peon. Who's like, does anyone, the cup bearer for all of these?

• 24:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, I think that's what's so hard when so much of what I was trying to do is give up on this hyper-agency that I'd gotten so hooked on. And I didn't, I did not like being subject all the time to the things I couldn't pick. It does not suit my personality and I did not enjoy it.

• 24:23Ryan Holiday?

  But that, that, there's some irony, I guess, in that because obviously as a Christian and then, but you talk about everything happens to a reason. Part of Christianity is about surrender. So, but then, and we can talk about that in the abstract, but then when surrender means Linda from HR is in charge, that's a different

• 24:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:42Ryan Holiday?

  pill to swallow.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  Well, especially lovingly, respectfully about Americans, but like, American culture, especially American Christianity, is obsessed with individualism, telling and shaping their own faith story. I mean, not even, our Calvinists aren't even Calvinists anymore. Everybody believes that they're, I mean, since everyone drunk from the deep wells of the revolution, everybody is positive that they are, uh, they are rugged, individualist, bootstrapping their way to a different story. And in faith, that has had some really strange consequences for Christianity is faith became a set of certainties that people take on.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  Eventually it became a belief that, I mean, try telling anybody in church that if you become a Christian, your life might actually get worse.

• 25:34Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  It's, it's absolutely countercultural.

• 25:38Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I didn't think about that. Yeah, like the, uh, the, the paradox of faith is that it's, uh, about belief, but then that becomes, uh, certainty, or that has sort of metastasized into a kind of certainty.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:53Ryan Holiday?

  It doesn't leave a lot of room for other people to have different beliefs or situations.

• 25:59Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I think that there, I think that the math that starts to get run is, uh, is a kind of obsessive futurism. So because in this story, that Jesus's death and resurrection saves the world, God is drawing us toward a story of love in which all things will be made right. And then therefore, and so it goes like, and then therefore, you know, heaven makes today, um, not just bearable, but it makes it impossible then for you to complain. Or if you say, you know, I'm really scared, like, I'm really, I'm just like, I'm really scared right now, then like, oh, God didn't give us a spirit of fear. So

• 26:43Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  it, the futurism becomes, um,

• 26:48Speaker 03

  A huge burden for people who are just trying to say that that life takes more courage than we expected. And I think, I think like in the balance, here's my guess about me and you, Ryan. My guess is you and I agree a lot about courage. My guess is we disagree about hope. But I think that in this version, that the people who are especially hopeful are obsessed with the future that I'm asking them to give up a little bit of certainty about.

• 27:18Ryan Holiday?

  Interesting. Well, our mutual friend Seneca says that hope and fear are the same, which I think is an interesting way of thinking about it.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  Tell me more.

• 27:28Ryan Holiday?

  Well, that they're both sort of about what the future will be. There's some sense either of dread of the future or certainty about the future or expectation for the future. Instead of dealing with that kind of painful ambiguity of the present moment or a or an uncertain future.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that. I love the framing of the existential cliff that that stoicism is so good at. I think it, I think it rubs against our cultures.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  I'm trying to pick a nicer word than delusional. Excited, excited, anticipatory habits about always saying that life is supposed to get better.

• 28:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  And just to be able to say,

• 28:27Speaker 03

  we don't know what the future will hold and we and we have to learn how to accept the live what's under the burden of that with a little bit more. Humility, I think.

• 28:40Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you talk about that in the book, specifically about the Stoics. You're talking about how they lived in a time of cholera and smallpox and executions and exile and all of that. So it is interesting that then they spent a whole bunch of time going memento mori or remember, you know, Seneca talks about never forgetting, fortune's habit of behaving exactly as she pleases. So it's weird that people who lived in an uncertain world where tragic, terrible things were happening all the time, certainly at a level greater than it is today, right? Like, you're not getting exiled, you know, even if you're canceled, it just means you don't have a Twitter account or something anymore, right?

• 29:19Ryan Holiday?

  So like, the stakes are so much lower and yet we don't do any of that remind, like, it's weird that they had to do the reminding when the stakes were there and visceral and real. And then today, when it's actually much more likely that you would be caught by surprise by one of those things because it's not happening to your neighbor, we're like, oh, I'm fine, I'm prepared. And you're not, I don't think anyone's prepared.

• 29:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I totally agree. Also, I loved how excited you were when you said that. I don't, this is all the stuff that nobody likes when I say at parties. So I like how excited that you are to say it at this party.

• 29:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, yes. No, it's like, you know, people used to, like, you would, the average person would lose one to two children in childbirth. And yet, you know, the Stoics are talking about, you know, even thinking about your children's mortality. And then today, that's not happening and we're not taking the time. Like, life isn't reminding you of it, except in these sort of freak instances or, you know, you're a surprise case for cancer. You get basically old man's cancer. And, and so like, of all, of all the people who should be actively preparing, it's us, but we don't do it.

• 30:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I, and I should have been, I mean.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  You would think with an expertise like I studied the history of people's ideas about suffering and whether their lives are gonna get better. You'd think that someone who'd written for 10 years on that would be slightly less surprised. But I was horrified. I was horrified that it was me. I was horrified that it was my life that came apart. I, it was awful to be the one that felt like I was just a bomb that went off and, but I, um, and I, I think had I lived, I mean, a hundred years before. I mean, I, I, I kept thinking about my, um, you know, especially in this plague that we've just been going through.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  I, I just keep thinking how short our historical memory is. Like my grandparents knew. My grandma had been, um, sent away to a, to a sanitarium with tuberculosis. And she was, I mean, the smartest person in their family was, was just about to do it. No one else had done in my family and get a college degree. And she suddenly catches this wildly infectious arrant disease. And she's, uh, put behind glass. And, and even, even when she miraculously is allowed to leave, they had to cut out most of the tissue of her lung. And she spent the rest of her life in and out of, um, quarantine, basically having to put kids, her own children in the foster care system

• 32:11Speaker 03

  when she couldn't care for them. And I think, man, my grandma, my grandma knew. It was just my parents forgot and then I forgot.

• 32:21Ryan Holiday?

  You know, Seneca has tuberculosis too. He has to spend 10 years basically in Egypt, uh, uh, convalescing. And it, it, it's right as he, he, he basically becomes a lawyer, gets tuberculosis, has to spend 10 years. He comes back, reinvents himself as a politician. Then he gets exiled, uh, spends another 10 years. So, yeah, it is interesting. We talk about like things going back to normal. And it's like, actually this stuff is very normal. This is like, show me some decade or some human life, uh, long enough where this stuff doesn't happen. I mean, exactly a hundred years ago, we had, we had this.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly, exactly. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And even, I mean, I'm a, I'm an American historian and I. I mean, when I, when I was giving my sort of like the big lecture series, uh, I didn't even include the history of plagues because I, I don't think I imagined. I was mostly trying to tell the story about democracy and choice, the idea of Americans' concept of self-making. I really wish I would have told the history as, as it's, as it's equal and opposite is the story of our, of our fragile selves.

• 33:34Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  The story of our, um, of our desperate attempts to control what can't be controlled. And how, um, how very quickly we forget, especially when we get all, you know, whipped up on our certainties.

• 33:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. I mean, for me, you know, reading the Stoics, like, I just, I mean, I'd read Marcus Ruse probably a hundred times and, it never actually resonated with me that he was not only living in a plague, but he writes about the plague several times.

• 34:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:06Ryan Holiday?

  Like, like, I guess I just assumed. So there's, there's one passage that I have talked about a lot. Some people are probably tired of hearing about it. But he says, you know, there's two types of plagues. He's like, there's the plague that takes your life. And he says, but the much more dangerous pestilence is the one that destroys your character. And I was like, oh, okay. He's being whatever. I, I didn't get that he was talking about exactly what we've seen play out on the news for, for 18 months. Like, I, I, it just never occurred to me that he could be specifically talking about people and the plague that he was living in. And, and then, yeah, you just sort of get caught by surprise by it. It's kind of, it's kind of strange, the tunnel vision that we get.

• 34:48Speaker 03

  I think I had maybe thought about, um, cancer in a similar way because I really didn't know anybody. Nobody in my family had cancer. I, there was no sense that it was, I was genetically predisposed to anything. And so I assumed it was a thing that unlucky people get. Don't know why.

• 35:05Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  But it felt, um, but the more that I. Have spent time with people who study cancer. And I did this one, uh, one of those lovely conversation with the pioneer of bad luck theory in cancer, which was this, and I will, as a historian and not a scientist, struggle to summarize this appropriately. But um, his Christian Thomas said, and he's a professor at Johns Hopkins, and he had this thought on an airplane, an epiphany, that um, that people had not been able to appropriately uh, predict the incidence rate of cancer. So why does some, why, you know, how many people get kidney

• 35:47Speaker 03

  cancer versus how many people who get bone cancer? And he wondered if as a statistician, it might have something to do with the rate of cell replication per organ. What an interesting and elegant thought. And so then he decided to map the number, the incidence of cancer with, with a, with the, with the rate of growth of cells. Mapped it amazingly. It maps beautifully. And he then, so when I, I'm sitting there with stage four stupid colon cancer, and I had been so desperate for a reason for it. I'd been like, hungry for a reason, because frankly, everywhere I went, I, people blamed me for it. Like, it's, it's different than brain cancer.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  Because if you have colon cancer, you assume you get all the people who, you know, all the goop people, right? All the essential oil smoothie people. And

• 36:39Ryan Holiday?

  It was what you were eating. It's something in the air. It's the environmental or it's somebody's fault.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  It's, and it's probably mine. And didn't I, you know, it was just like a deep curiosity as if I'm like sleeping next to a mattress factory every day, drinking directly from the environmental.

• 36:57Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I am, and when I, I, because I, I guess I had been struggling honestly with um, just this like hyper causality that happens when you suffer. Why, why, why, why, why, why?

• 37:13Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  And also, I had recently had a nurse blame me for what I eaten, what I'd eaten on the, on the way into like a recent procedure or something. She looked at my chart and she was like, well, must be something you ate. And I was like, I was like, hi, well, I'm in a hospital gown. I'm feeling a little tender right now. Maybe you could stop tacitly calling me fat, but um, but the, when the researcher, Christian Thomas, he looked at me and he goes, oh, well, Kate, I mean, cells duplicate and cells in the colon duplicate at a higher rate. So, my dear, there's not necessarily like a a reason, you're just, um, you're just deeply unlucky.

• 37:54Speaker 03

  And I, when I started thinking about cancer cells being, you know, cells that try to fix themselves, cells that try to duplicate of just living inside of the, of chance itself. I felt, um, I felt like I was able to accept the chaos of it in a way that I, I don't think I would have been able if he hadn't joyfully pronounced me deeply unlucky.

• 38:18Ryan Holiday?

  So what's the difference between being deeply unlucky and everything happens for a reason? It's the same nonsense, right?

• 38:26Speaker 03

  Well, it depends. I mean, I've only read a little bit about the history of luck, but uh, it really all depends if you've applied like a, it's almost like I think of it as if you've, um, if you're living in a closed universe or not, everything, every, like if you're living, if you're living under like a, not an open sky, a close guy, a closed ecosystem, where every single thing like karma has to either come back to you in some way or another, every action gets a reaction, then everything has to be overly hyperinterpreted. And I think depending on your theory of luck, one of the lovely explanations is that uh, it's not an explanation at all, is

• 39:08Speaker 03

  that something surprising happens and it has a happy outcome, you're lucky. But neither of those things are a story about your character or a story about, and, and, and sometimes they are, but allowing there to be a little bit more ambiguity there is like something I'm. I've, I really do a lot of work around because I, it's like a deep hope I have that it'll make us more charitable, I think.

• 39:34Ryan Holiday?

  When even, so even unlucky is a bit of a story then, right? It's just, that's, that was just your luck, right? Like probabilistically, it can happen, so it did happen. And that's why you're in the mess you're in.

• 39:49Speaker 03

  It does get a little, um, perverse with theories of luck because it really kind of depends on whether or not you've decided what the rules of the game are. Like for instance, one theory of luck is that when a system operates the way it should, you're not lucky. You're just, you know, it's the natural outworking. So for instance, you could just be, if you, um, you know, if I'm an affluent white person entering a healthcare in a certain position and it works to my advantage, I'm not lucky. It's just the outworking of the system and the way it's designed. But in this, because I study religious causality, I guess, um,

• 40:28Speaker 03

  part of the burden has been in being like a, an overinterpreted person. Like I can't just, I'm always like a spiritual problem to be solved or a, and I-

• 40:42Ryan Holiday?

  This is what, this is how people are seeing you.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, because I can't, otherwise I'm, otherwise if what happened to me was just random.

• 40:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  Then it might happen to them.

• 40:54Ryan Holiday?

  Or they might have to, like, let's say it's a, I, I think, I think this is a, this is a problem we have politically in the United States with, you know, some, some of the, the issues that we obviously have to solve, whether it's like, let's say, let's say mass shootings. If you can respond to this with, uh, everything happens to a reason or thoughts and prayers, then you don't have to address it, right? And so I think you were talking about some of the inequities in the healthcare system or the, the, the fact that you can be bankrupted for the bad luck of having cancer. If this is just something that can happen to someone and then it happens with an alarming amount of regularity, then we have to do something about it.

• 41:34Ryan Holiday?

  If it's God's will, then we can just feel bad for that person and not have to change. And that's, that's the thing I think people struggle with, even with Stoicism, this idea of like, what's in our control, what's not in our control. That doesn't mean that you just look at all the horrible things happening in the world and you go glad it's not me.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah, the courage to act. I hear that.

• 41:59Ryan Holiday?

  Or, or, or yeah, the courage to actually sit and wrestle with the discomfort of good, bad things happen to good people and that that could happen to me.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  Ryan, we don't want to live in reality, though, wouldn't we?

• 42:14Speaker 03

  What a terrible idea. These are awful. You must be terrible at kids' birthday parties.

• 42:18Ryan Holiday?

  Uh, yes, I, I would say one of the, one of the upsides of the pandemic has been fewer kids' birthday parties.

• 42:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, what do you mean? Standing near strangers, watching children blow on food?

• 42:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, not having to do seven one day, the back to back to back. I'm enjoying.

• 42:36Ryan Holiday?

  So, so talk me through your introduction to the stoic, because that's actually how I found you. My sister had sent me an article that you'd written in the New York Times about your cancer diagnosis, where you talked about Seneca, I believe. So how, how does that introduction happen?

• 42:52Speaker 03

  Uh, well, I was being talked out of it by my lovely colleague, Warren. So I teach at a, I'm at Duke University's.

• 43:06Speaker 03

  Full do-gooders who lead local congregations. And I was really struggling with the idea that the future just felt, I mean, I could hear it in the way that I couldn't talk, I couldn't speak casually anymore with people. They'd always say, oh, we should do that in the summer or like, let's go to, or even just like complaining about, oh, it'll be years until I'd ever get to retire. Like, we're all 12 years old.

• 43:33Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 43:33Speaker 03

  And I, I just, I could feel it like catching my throat and I, I knew that I didn't, I didn't sort of belong to the future anymore.

• 43:42Ryan Holiday?

  You were dealing with different time horizons than everyone else.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it felt.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, it felt like I was locked out of a, like a world that I had once very casually visited. And, um, and I think, I'm trying to remember the exact phrase, but, um, I was talking to my adorable friend, Warren, who like is forever in a clerical collar, just like, it's like, like, I've seen him come out of the gym. I don't even understand where he keeps it. And, uh, and I was like, Warren, do you think that, um, that he could tell I was really, I said, I, I think I'd like to give up on the future. And he said, well, would you agree that, uh, like to live is to live without the, like, an anxious dependent on, on like what is to come, something like that.

• 44:35Speaker 03

  And I was like, yes, wait, is this a trap? Please tell me that Jesus said this. And he was like, oh no, that was, that was Seneca. And he was like, but we Christians are, are meant to be people of hope. And I said, uh, I don't know what you're talking about, the future. The future is like an abyss. And, uh, I guess I was trying to, you know, I'm not an expert in, um, I only have, I'm gonna like have to, I'd have to rummage through my philosophy minor in my undergrad to like be any good at this, though I did learn Latin and was not bad at it for a bit. But, um, I was trying to figure out the nature, like, what is the nature of Christian hope if hope isn't optimism?

• 45:18Speaker 03

  I spent so long studying the history of positive thinking and I really couldn't figure out what the, frankly, Rand, I couldn't figure out what the difference was.

• 45:25Ryan Holiday?

  Fair.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  So that's what I was struggling through.

• 45:28Ryan Holiday?

  Interesting. Yeah, you know what? What, one of the things that really struck me a, a couple of years ago was realizing that Seneca and Jesus are both born in roughly the same year, uh, both in provinces of the Roman Emperor, Empire, both ultimately die, one dies a little later than the other, but, but both die sort of at the hands of the, the state, uh, and then both probably are more impactful after their death than during their death or during their life. But it is weird to think like, these two guys were walking around the earth at the same time, saying relatively similar things.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  You know, there's like, it's such a, and there's such a meld, like for centuries, there's like, the impact of Stoicism on Christianity was significant. I think the, I mean, obviously, one believes that a guy died and then was the only person to get resurrected, really, and then stay resurrected.

• 46:31Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 46:31Speaker 03

  Sorry Lazarus.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  And that resurrection tells us something about the salvation of the world. I guess the difference there is, I think, I think one of the similarities that I feel, and is about the way that both Stoicism and Christianity have a lovely cyclical view of time. Like, it, it has a...

• 47:00Ryan Holiday?

  It's a circle, you say in the book.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, it's a, it doesn't just, well, I'd love to hear your, I'd love to hear your thoughts and feelings of our culture's current obsession with the present mindset.

• 47:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 47:19Ryan Holiday?

  Well, you know, the other, the other two Stoicism Bible things, Seneca's brothers in the Bible, which I've always found to be really interesting.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 47:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, his brother is Gaiio, or Gallo, I don't know how you pronounce it. But, and then, if you told me that Marcus Aurelius was actually the author of Ecclesiastes, I would buy that.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:40Ryan Holiday?

  They're basically the same.

• 47:41Speaker 03

  It's a got real vibe.

• 47:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. No, I think the present thing is interesting because there's a certain, there's almost like a certain emptiness to it, you know, like the Zen idea of presence, like, you have no self, think nothing, just be present. I don't, I don't know if that's that meaningful, or I don't know, there's almost something nihilistic I found in that, in this sort of Zen approach. To me, I like the idea of just very much breathing the present moment in, like seeing the world like the way that an artist or a child would see the world, which is that it's perfectly sufficient, it's wonderful as it is, even when it's ugly,

• 48:24Ryan Holiday?

  even when it's mundane, and to not need it to be anything different than it is. To me, that's where you want to get, which is when you just say be present, isn't quite capturing what we're talking about.

• 48:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it sounds like you're arguing for a deeper acceptance and a more, and the granularity of reality.

• 48:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah. I talk, in my Still in This Book, I talk about Maria Abramovic, and she does this, that art installation where she sits in a chair every day for like 50 consecutive days.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 49:00Ryan Holiday?

  And like, as she's sitting there, people will, you know, they would rotate, people would come, and like, you watch some people like sit across from her, and she has said and done nothing, and they just burst into tears. Just the, being in the presence of someone who is present was almost more than they could bear. And I found that to be very poignant.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, you always know, don't you?

• 49:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  And I, I

• 49:26Ryan Holiday?

  Old people have that vibe very often. It's the grandparent vibe.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  Yes, totally. I, it is like, it is a deep, has a deep magic, is being willing to be surprised and then changed by the people you actually encounter. That's a kind of, that's a kind of hype, like just

• 49:51Speaker 03

  That that that that's that started for me, I think, with my diagnosis, mostly because I couldn't, maybe because the future was taken away in such an intense way. And then I I needed to be surprised in my day because the day wasn't sufficient.

• 50:05Ryan Holiday?

  I found during the pandemic, um, just a sort of an overwhelm of emotions of just like, this is like, this is sort of it. This is enough. It's not going to be anything different. It could be like this forever. It could end tomorrow, like, like life itself could end tomorrow. Um, just, just, uh, it was a sort of a weird feeling that I haven't been quite able to shake of just like,

• 50:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. So really fully being engaged in life in a way that you're not when you're doing 50 things at the same time.

• 50:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. That's such a, um, when life can't be wide and then just to make it deep, like just to keep letting the the new details of it. I did look up, I was in quarantine nine times though, because of the government. I was in Canada. Every time I, oh, I was in quarantine nine times though, Ryan. And I will tell you on the ninth, I felt less in love with the details of my small student rental in Winnipeg, Manitoba, I'll tell you.

• 51:08Ryan Holiday?

  That's interesting. So, so we live out in the country and then decided to sort of take it very seriously and just never, because I don't have to see anyone for work and this is my wife. We just sort of have been on one long quarantine, like sort of ever since. Um, and so it was really sort of surreal and beautiful, but that was something I was going to ask you. So when you have this sort of, you, you talked about the, the volume being turned down and the volume being turned up on some stuff. But then as you come out of the diagnosis, uh, or into the remission or whatever, the, the sort of weird thing they call it.

• 51:42Speaker 03

  I know. I'm not even cancer. I'm not even remission. I'm just sort of like, I've been able to pronounce you cancer-y.

• 51:48Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you're, you're good for now.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'm just, I'm cancer adjacent.

• 51:54Ryan Holiday?

  How do you, how do you like, cause I've been struggling with this, like on the couple, like there was stuff I agreed to when it was like hot vac summer and we thought life was going back to normal. And then now it's like a little weird, especially here in Texas, but like I've been, I've been having trouble doing mundane things that are like, like it's like, I'm supposed to miss bedtime for this fucking conference call, or like, I have to go to the DMV. Like, how could someone steal one hour of my time for such a, how, how do you go back to just regular life?

• 52:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 52:29Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  I love.

• 52:30Ryan Holiday?

  How have you adjusted?

• 52:31Speaker 03

  I love this. You're right. Cause there is kind of a brittleness to it.

• 52:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 52:34Speaker 03

  Where you're like, fuck you. I'm being existential right now.

• 52:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. She said, as a Christian. Um, yeah, I, I guess it did sort of help me when my, my friend Luke was, um, in his work, he, he like talks about different kinds of experiences of time and that basically just describing to me that the one in which I've been living was tragic time that like, there's a, you know, which was, we've all been in, in the pandemic that the stakes had been elevated, the both gratitude and intensity of the todays and the yesterdays become kind of overwhelming. Um, and, uh, and also like an overlap, but not always related is like apocalyptic time. I mean, I, I hope we've all read accounts of people who, who,

• 53:23Speaker 03

  who believed that the very end of the world was, was on them and that they had stark binaries that they imagined the, and that they, um, and that, that gave them a kind of crisp clarity about what they, uh, what was intolerable and what they would give everything to be, to have in their lives, you know? And then there's just ordinary time.

• 53:47Ryan Holiday?

  And that's the pastoral time?

• 53:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's just the garbage getting up and then figuring out whether your bread has gone moldy, if you're nice toast. And, and then, you know, caring about other people, returning phone calls and then.

• 53:59Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 53:59Speaker 03

  Giving up on self mastery for the moment. And I, uh, I, I find I have such a deep, I mean, I think, Ryan, this is why we have like a secret and immediate, um, uh, friend assumption, at least on my part is, uh, is like a deep, deep, a deep intolerance of ordinary time.

• 54:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 54:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. Don't tell me, don't tell me what to do.

• 54:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, and I think I got very used to having no ordinary time over the last 18 months. And now you're like, what do you mean the flight is 30 minutes delayed? Like, you're stealing this from me and my children and we'll never get this back.

• 54:40Speaker 02

  I love that so much. You are robbing me of my lifeblood, which, just to say my minutes. And, uh, yeah, I, the tick, tick, tick feeling, I really, uh, I, I feel that so deeply. Cause I, I have, I have wanted so desperately to turn all my minutes into moments. And then when people want to change them back, like Cinderella pumpkin style, back into these garbage minutes. I feel you. I mean, cause at first, I, when I knew that my minutes, like when you said, did you say robbed, stolen? You said stolen from me? Yeah. I was like, you can't, you can't take this from me.

• 55:24Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  I, uh, I stood up in the middle and it was a couple of months after my diagnosis. Everyone had sort of thought I was ready for polite company. Turns out I wasn't. I would like stand up in the middle of work lunches and announce, I don't have time for this. I like rented heavy machinery just to bulldoze things out of sheer joy. I, I was recently, I promise this is just not related to anything, but poisoned by a copperhead snake. And I, um, I was in the hospital being.

• 55:54Ryan Holiday?

  Wait, you got bit by a copperhead?

• 55:56Speaker 02

  I sure did.

• 55:57Ryan Holiday?

  I saw, I saw a, um, a coral snake this morning. I was, uh, it was very exciting on our, on our morning walk. But so how, how did it get close enough to bite you?

• 56:06Speaker 02

  Well, please don't get bitten because it'll cost you $120,000.

• 56:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, right.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  Which is the antivenom. Uh, I was just, I was a block from my house, like a saint, moving a half step off a bath for an old man onto a fully mowed, uh, A bit of grass and then I, I guess stepped on where it was probably living and having a nice day. And then it bit me and I, it really hurt is like a not surprising subplot of that scenario, but it also meant that I got to walk into a hospital yell, I've been poisoned, which was one of the funniest things I've ever gotten to say. But I, while I was stuck in this stupid hospital, I was so, I was, I was like, you are robbing me of my Tuesday. And I immediately,

• 56:53Speaker 02

  I was high, but I did apparently send a very thoughtful email to somebody asking if they worked with, I was like, I think I remember that you worked with sharks. And then like, cut to two weeks later, like fishing dinosaurs out of the ocean, because I don't like having things be taken from me. And I, I just, I hear you.

• 57:12Ryan Holiday?

  Wow. What happened?

• 57:13Speaker 02

  I like

• 57:14Ryan Holiday?

  You have a motion sensor?

• 57:15Speaker 02

  I do.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  I also just thought we might wanna, we just might want a little drama.

• 57:24Ryan Holiday?

  One of the, what, you know, you write, you write these sort of books about, you know, that, that appeal to people in times of, of difficulty. And you sort of never know who they're going to reach. One of the weird experiences for me with the Daily Stoic is, somebody gave Billy Bush a copy of the book, like as his life was imploded and destroyed for a tape that, you know, he basically forgot existed. And, you know, he was not the bad guy on the tape. But

• 57:49Speaker 02

  He was kind of the bad guy.

• 57:51Ryan Holiday?

  No, I mean, he's, Billy Bush took the weight for our anger at a different person. Right. But anyway, so he loses his job and his livelihood and his reputation. And then he was telling me like, three weeks later, he's like playing golf with his friends and his friend like drills him in the head with a, with a golf ball like off of a drive. Like he nearly dies from that. And it is weird how we think that life is as bad as it could possibly be.

• 58:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:20Ryan Holiday?

  And then it manages to get worse. Yeah. Then you get bit by a, by a copperhead.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  Ryan, I'm gonna just say this as an aside so that you can fully cut this because you will want to include it. But Billy Bush absolutely immediately tweeted that everything had happened for a reason and that he had been and that he had been taught a lesson by his complicity. Complicity was the word he should have used. And so I was like, oh, okay, well, maybe that maybe that's not the right, maybe that's not the right lesson. But I bet he hadn't read your book yet. And so I would have liked to meet him after he read your book. Okay.

• 58:54Ryan Holiday?

  Well, well, let's actually leave it in because my favorite part of the book is the appendix where you translate what we should say instead of that. So I'll let him know that it's not everything that happens for a reason. It says, we must learn to face uncertainty with courage, which I love that, right? It's it's not that it happened for a reason. It's that shit happens and you got to figure out how to to navigate through it. Sometimes that shit is your fault. Sometimes it's partly your fault. Sometimes you're not to blame at all.

• 59:24Speaker 02

  Yes, that's right. Yes, absolutely.

• 59:27Ryan Holiday?

  Why do you think we we talked about this a little bit earlier, but I think people gravitate towards those cliches because they do kind of explain things.

• 59:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:38Ryan Holiday?

  But they're also woefully insufficient at the same time. And I do wonder if like, if you ever actually heard one of the Stoics say one of these things to you at the time, you'd be like, shut the fuck up. Like, that is woefully insufficient to the tragedy of my current situation.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  I I do think that this it's part of the beauty and the weight of of you can say time worn truths, or you can say cliches. But it's that there's always a little gem in there. Like, like, the beauty of being present is you and I agree that that people are magic. And that if you slow down, that that that time unspools. And that's a weird that's a weird trick to learn. I think YOLO is a great idea. Except, of course, if you need to, you know, pay taxes, or like

• 1:00:28Ryan Holiday?

  And a career.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  bury the like, bear the weight of of other people's loves and dreams, too.

• 1:00:33Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  Like, there's, you know, a whole, whole hundred, several hundred thousand people right now who are not living their dreams. There's they're living the dreams of other people by by being a caregiver. So we're not all just self realizing.

• 1:00:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  Existential hunger monsters.

• 1:00:51Ryan Holiday?

  My, my, uh, my favorite one from Seneca that I think about that sort of changed my thinking. And I wonder what your thoughts would be. He says, don't think of death as something in the future. He says, think of death as something that's happening always, like it's happening right now. So like the time that passes belongs to death is basically what he says.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  That is nice and dark. I like a good crispy darkness.

• 1:01:15Ryan Holiday?

  And, and so this idea, like instead of like, oh, um, like I have 40 years left. It's like, how many years have you lived?

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  I'm 40 years spent. Yeah.

• 1:01:26Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Uh, and that seems to me an interesting way to think about it because it's also in our control. Right? Like you, if we go back to the idea of being present, the time you have now, you can choose to live it or not live it, or just let it elapse. Um, whereas you don't really have control over when the end comes.

• 1:01:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. Control really is a drug and I have loved it.

• 1:01:53Ryan Holiday?

  With your lists and things?

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  I love my lists. I love my, I love my light feeling of wind in my sails. I love the feeling of being on stilts, you know, like your steps just, but having most of that taken away and still having like, like what things remain, you know? And unfortunately it is like the, the deep and beautiful

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

  love of others and being a group project. And we all know we hated group projects in high school. So someone's always like, someone who did B minus work is always getting an A plus.

• 1:02:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, your, your family members are not contributing to the group project as much as you are.

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  I want to name them right now. Let's get into it. Let's get specific. Who failed me during cancer?

• 1:02:47Ryan Holiday?

  Last thing, because I do think it's interesting to actually hear you because when you read the books, it's very clear that you have a sense of humor and that you're fun, and that's partly what gets you through this. But I think there is this idea, at least particularly of the Stoics, but I suspect of Christians too, that the study of philosophy, these big ideas, sucks the joy out of everything or sucks the humor out of it. But all the priests that I remember liking growing up were hilarious. And I think the Stoics are really funny, too. Why is there this idea that this is all very deadly serious and there's no fun in it?

• 1:03:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, partly the ponderous tone we probably use while quoting. But yeah, I think it's... I mean, the reason why they're funny is because tragedy, I mean, because it's tragedy. There's humor and drama and comedy. And I mean, it is the deep comedy of our lives.

• 1:03:43Ryan Holiday?

  Better to laugh than cry.

• 1:03:46Speaker 03

  And laughing, I mean, really, it helps us tell the truth. It really does. I mean, we all know the person who will say it in the group, and that person... And that is a... It's because we need to practice getting up as close to the edge of the cliff as possible and imagining we have wings for a moment, which is what comedy does, like helps us feel the upward draft of the air and not just hold our breath.

• 1:04:19Ryan Holiday?

  That's beautifully said. Well, I loved the new book. I loved the other one, which I also read. And I hope there are many more to come.

• 1:04:28Speaker 03

  Ryan, you are such a philosophy nerd, and I love it so much. I would absolutely have been your best friend in college.

• 1:04:35Ryan Holiday?

  Remember, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave is now available everywhere. You can go to your local bookstore and pick it up. You can come to the Painted Porch and pick it up. We are still offering the preorder bonuses. We've extended it to the end of this week. So you can get that at dailystoic.com/preorder. But you can also get Audible. You can get eBooks. You can get whatever you want from wherever you want it. But I would very much like you to support the new book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave.