Jonathan Church On Terminal Cancer and Making Peace with Fate

On today’s episode, Ryan speaks to author and economist Jonathan Church about his brain cancer diagnosis, coming to terms with mortality through philosophy, the origin and nature of microaggressions, his new book, Reinventing Racism, and more. Jonathan Church is an economist and writer with degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University, who became a CFA charter holder in 2014. He has also published poems, a short story, and several papers in economics, which can be found at www.jonathandavidchurch.com. This episode is brought to you by Stamps.com, a secure Internet mailing solution to print postage using your computer. Stamps.com allows you to mail and ship anytime, anywhere right from your computer. Send letters, ship packages, and pay a lot less with discounted rates from USPS, UPS, and more. There’s NO risk. Use the promo code, STOIC, to get a special offer that includes a 4-week trial PLUS free postage and a digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts. Just go to Stamps.com, click on the Microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in STOIC. This episode is also brought to you by Public Goods, the one stop shop for sustainable, high quality everyday essentials made from clean ingredients at an affordable price. Everything from coffee to toilet paper & shampoo to pet food. Public Goods is your new everything store, thoughtfully designed for the conscious consumer. Receive $15 off your first Public Goods order with no minimum purchase. Just go to publicgoods.com/STOIC or use code STOIC at checkout. This episode is also brought to you by Trends. Trends is the ultimate online community for entrepreneurs and business aficionados who want to know the latest news about business trends and analysis. It features articles from the most knowledgeable people, interviews with movers and shakers, and a private community of like-minded people with whom you can discuss the latest insights from Trends. Just visit trends.co/stoic to start your $1 seven day trial.***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/dailystoicFollow Jonathan Church:Homepage: www.jonathandavidchurch.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/jondavidchurchSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:02Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring.

• 0:53Ryan Holiday?

  So walk me through the day when you got your diagnosis, your brain cancer diagnosis. What, just tell me that story.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Okay, I can certainly, I mean, the day itself is,

• 1:11Speaker 01

  I don't know, pretty ordinary.

• 1:12Ryan Holiday?

  It hinges, right?

• 1:13Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, it was pretty ordinary, although actually, I actually hadn't thought about it, but now it's kind of coming back to me quite quickly. I had to go in for an MRI.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  You know, 8:30, 9:00 AM or whatever. And I just now remember getting involved in traffic. And, you know, nobody likes to get in traffic. In fact, it's probably the one, one of the few things that really disrupt my, you know, what you might call my Stoic calm. But I went in for an MRI and it was just neither here nor there. It was pretty routine. For the last few months, they had had some tests or a bunch of tests to try to figure out what this lesion in my brain that had been detected three months before was all about. They hadn't been able to figure it out.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  And so finally, the neurologist said, you know, we're going to monitor it. So I went in for the first one. And it was neither here nor there. I just went in for it and then I went to work. And I think as soon as I sat down, I had a call or a message, and it was from the neurologist who told me to call her immediately. So, you know, I called her immediately.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  And I think the the phrase that sort of stands out for you is you might want to stand out, uh, sit down for this, um, and then told me I had a, a low grade brain tumor.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  And, uh, you know, then just walk me through what to do next. Um, but, uh, I think, um, you know, in terms of, um, uh, what's relevant here is just, I, I think the first word I said was congratulations. In other words, she had figured it out. Uh, we hadn't been able to figure out what, what was, what caused the lesion. And I remember not really feeling anything. It was, you know, it may very well be that she emphasized the word low, low grade. And so I thought, you know, this was not too serious. It was treatable. And it was, I mean, I had surgery and so on. Um, but, uh, I suppose you would expect normally that, you know, when you're told you have a brain tumor, that, you know, you might sort of, you know, have all

• 3:27Speaker 01

  these emotions run up, rush up and, you know, rush up within you. Um, and I didn't feel a thing really. It was, uh, almost kind of relief to know that there was something, you know, somebody had figured it out. Um, but then it was just a matter of doing what, you know, what the doctor ordered and following up on the next steps and figure out what I had to do, which I think I pretty much knew surgery was, surgery was coming. Um, and, uh, so yeah, that was it. Uh, went in for MRI and then I went to work, got a message. I was told the diagnosis and I said, congratulations. And, um, really just kind of went, went, went on with my day and worked.

• 4:06Ryan Holiday?

  So, so it wasn't one of those things where, you know, you went in for a physical thinking everything was great and your life irrevocably changed. You, you had some sense that something was wrong, but it was really a matter of what was wrong.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. So a year, a year before, well, maybe not even a year before, in the summer of, uh, 2017, I was, uh, having some weird sensations. It was, uh, sort of spinning over to tie my shoe and it would be like this sort of spasmic act thing. It turned out to be sort of pre-seizure type, uh, uh, experience. But, you know, it's sort of for about two or three seconds, I would lose control of my, my jaw. Um, and I, I would sort of almost feel like I was about to lose consciousness, but I never did. But that happened a few times. I didn't really know what to make of it. And so I never really did anything about it. But I mentioned it during my physical and the doctor thought it might,

• 5:03Speaker 01

  maybe it was an aneurysm or whatever. And that turned out to not be the case. Late December 2017, one day I had flu-like symptoms and it was just really bad. So I went home early. And then I ended up on the way back on the train, commuter train, it just got really bad. And I got to the platform and sorry to be graphic, but I ultimately just heaved. In other words, you know, it just came out vomited. And I went to the ER because I was having really serious spasmic activity. I still didn't have a seizure, but you know, and then we sort of had a CT scan and that's when the lesion was discovered and that led to a whole bunch of

• 5:47Speaker 01

  doctor appointments and tests and so on.

• 5:50Ryan Holiday?

  I feel like that limbo period must have been stressful. I was, I did a video about this, but I'd, I'd, I had a COVID test recently and because of where we are in Texas, there was a delay. That's sort of like, nothing will change, but you're waiting for the news is a, is the thing where the mind can sort of be your worst enemy.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you're saying the interval between the initial, well, it was initially diagnosed as an old stroke and then the three months later when it was found to be a brain tumor. So if that's the limbo period, I would just say that, again, I was just kind of going on, carrying on with my life and I wasn't thinking about it too much. I just, I knew what I had to do, what I had to do. You know, I had to figure out, figure out what was going on just so that, you know, you can treat it. Cause you know, so we would say in stoicism, right? That focus on what you can control and not what you can't control. And, you know, there was something there. There's nothing I could do. The only thing I could do is just follow

• 6:56Speaker 01

  the doctor's orders and figure out what was, what it is. So we could figure out what we can do. And other than just the irritate or the annoyance of having to go through a battery of tests, I can't say I thought about it too heavily.

• 7:11Ryan Holiday?

  Really? Do you think you're someone who's naturally stoic? Or is your reading, was your reading on Stoicism sort of explicitly guiding you here?

• 7:21Speaker 01

  So, uh, yeah, I had a feeling we might address that question. And, uh, you know, I think, um, I mean, in short, I would say I'm pretty much naturally stoic. And what I mean by that is, uh, you know, I've always sort of been more reserved in nature and, you know, very introverted. And so, you know, I don't know, therapists would have their own view on what that means in terms of, you know, I don't know.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Whatever underlies the nature of your personality or whatever, but, um, but, uh, you know, I came to philosophy pretty early, actually. Around, I guess I was 14 and I think the first book I ever read was The Republic. But the ancient Greeks were particularly fascinating to me. So I eventually arrived at, you know, the Hellenistic, you know, the Stoics and Epictetus and so on.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  And, uh, you know, I mean, I haven't, I just lack of time and other things, but I haven't done, I wouldn't say I've done a systematic, rigorous reading of every word that the Stoics have, have written. But when I read the Stoics, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, just like this is me. And I mean, it's just like they are articulating what I've always sort of, you know, how I've approached life.

• 8:49Ryan Holiday?

  And, and was there, was there anything specifically from the Stoics that was jumping out at you as this was happening?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Mortality, uh, that's something I've thought a great deal about in life in terms of coming to terms with it.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  And I mean, I mean, I could talk for hours about it. Hamlet is another great work that I've identified, identified with because of sort of the contemplation about mortality. But no, you, um, read in, uh, you know, there's this, um,

• 9:21Speaker 01

  I mean Marcus Aurelius has, you know, numerous quotes, if I recall correctly, from about, you know, coming to terms with the inevitability of, of death and that, you know, it's just nothing, nobody can over, overcome it and that, uh, you know, death does not discriminate. It's just, we're, you know, when I die, everybody else who's still alive is going to follow me. And in, uh, so I have a Aurelius quote here, you know, he who fears death either fears the loss of sensation or a different kind of sensation. But if you shall have no sensation, neither will you feel any harm.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  And if you shall acquire another, another kind of sensation, you will be a different kind of living being and you will not cease to live. And I mean, that's one way of looking at it. In other words, when you're dead, you're not going to know you're dead. So why worry about it? And the other thing is if you end up having some other kind of sensation, you're not dead. Um, but you know, these are sort of perspectives that you can have on it. And Epictetus has, you know, I remember one quote, which I probably is a little more controversial, um, because it's sort of somewhat attacks our sort of moral sensibilities.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  But, you know, he talks about seeing your child die or, and, you know, obviously that's a very grievous, um, experience to have. Uh, but if you just remind yourself that, you know, it's not unique in the sense that there are many, many other people who see their child, children die. There are many other people who also die and that it's sort of just in the nature of the universe or in the nature of life and death that, um, Obviously, you wanna, you're gonna feel strong emotions and that's not, that's not what we're objecting to, but it's just a matter of perspective that perhaps allows you to observe, absorb the shock a little bit more softly or gently, if you will. So anyway,

• 11:29Speaker 01

  just mortality, I would think stoicism and sort of coming to terms with the fact that you just can't avoid death, that was very, very appealing to me. I think the other thing is, you know, the notion of logos, you know, however it is you want to interpret it, you know, whether it's God or nature or whatever, but the idea that there's this, I guess you might call natural order of things, but you know, things happen and you can impact, you know, you can impact, try to impact how they happen, but once they happen, they've happened. And if you get all out of sorts about, you know, whether it didn't happen the way that you want it to happen, whatever, I mean, it's just wasted energy. And so it's

• 12:14Speaker 01

  the, there's this sort of perseverance in stoicism that I think I've always sort of had latent within me, which is that, you know, life is a battle, it's a war, and you're always going to have these adversities. And the issue is to just march on and just deal with it as best you can, to the extent that you can control it. So you get up every morning and you work out, you get up every morning and you work, you just keep, you know, go with the grind. And, you know, not to go on and on, so one last thing, I can recall in high school, you know, I was a state champion in the pole vault and I remember morning after I had won this, you know, event and somebody, a classmate had asked, you know,

• 12:59Speaker 01

  what did you do to celebrate? And I simply, you know, I don't know, maybe this was almost kind of presumptuous, I don't know, but I just remember saying, and quite honestly, really, is that the celebration was in the journey or the, in the, in the training and in the performance. And there was really nothing else to do after that, you know?

• 13:18Ryan Holiday?

  Do you have children?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  I do, I have one daughter.

• 13:21Ryan Holiday?

  Do you actually do that exercise from, from Epictetus or Marcus? I, I try to actually do it as I do bedtime with my, with my kids at night. It's, it's, it's easy to think about in theory, but it's, it's tricky.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Well, what do you do? What exercise in particular?

• 13:41Ryan Holiday?

  You know, he talks about actually sort of, as he says, as you tuck your children in tonight, remind yourself they may not make it to the morning, actively doing that momentum more with people you love. Is that, is that something you actually practice? I find it to be both haunting and, and very centering. Like I never, whenever I do it, I, it immediately ceases any impulse to rush through bedtime.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  I do not, actually. I mean, she's only just turned four. And so I haven't exactly started trying to teach philosophy to her, but.

• 14:22Ryan Holiday?

  No, I mean yourself. I think, to me, the exercise is, is you're tucking your kid in at night. Because my, my son is four, you know, you're, we're laying there, I'm reading a book. You know, you, you can feel this pull to like, you know, I gotta go answer some emails. I gotta get back to work. I, you know, I wanted to work out tonight before it gets dark, whatever it is.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  I see.

• 14:42Ryan Holiday?

  What I find when I do that exercise, I go, what am I rushing towards? What am I rushing, I'm rushing towards death, you know? I'm rushing away from five more, you know, I feel like whenever I do that exercise and then my son goes, can we read one more book? Can we watch one more video? I'm like, are you kidding me? Of course, you know, like, why, why am I trying to rush through this? I'm rushing towards death.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  I see what you're saying. Yeah. And, you know, honestly, that is a struggle for me because I, I guess you could say I like, think, or not like, but I just am, you know, sort of what I say, productivity fanatic. And, and as a, as an introvert, I can, you know, you spend, you know, several hours with, you know, your kid and you get, you know, kind of emotionally drained, just as I would with anybody. And so, you know, it does, there is that impulse to want to.

• 15:37Ryan Holiday?

  Wrap this up.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and but I mean, maybe it's stoicism, maybe it's sort of paternal instinct or whatever. But yeah, I mean, if she wants to do one more story or one more, you know, I am pretty, I do tend to be lenient in that regard. But, you know, then again, you do have to be firm as well, in the sense that, you know, you do have to keep to a regiment. And so, I mean, to me, that's a little bit of stoicism, too, is you sort of teaching that, you know, regimentation has its own virtues as well. So, but yeah, sure. But yeah, I can't say that I've actually consciously thought of stoicism when I reach a moment like that, although now I may very well do that.

• 16:22Ryan Holiday?

  What I what I thought was fascinating about your essay about your diagnosis is that, and in the headline, it's terminal, you know, brain cancer. And I mean, obviously, that was, you know, a few years ago, and here you and I are talking. And so I was, I remember I was thinking, like, how terminal is it, right? That was my, like, that's, there's even that that that curbed, that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, where it's like, is it the good, the good Hodgkin's? You know, like, he's asking, like, like, how serious it is. And and your point was, like, sort of, all brain cancer is terminal. There's no cure for it. But you were saying that the differences, like, the doctor was saying, like, you have this growth, this tumor, this thing, and it is going to continue to progress

• 17:06Ryan Holiday?

  until it kills you, which, which I found to be so sort of haunting and interesting, because it's like, that is also the status, the Stoics would say, that is the status quo for all of us. There's a line, I think it's from Seneca, he talks about some, some guy who's, who's grabbed by the emperor, and, and, you know, drug off to, to, you know, to be killed. And he says, you're dragging me where I was already going.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. So yeah, my, my understanding from doctors and some reading is that, you know, we just haven't found a cure for brain cancer. At this point, it's pretty well managed. It's still very small and it is not as far as I know. I just got an MRI yesterday, but progressed to any kind of high, high grade status and, and you know, the doctors are pretty optimistic that I've still got several years. And, you know, that certainly is a relief. You know, because, you know, there's things I want to do like anybody else, but, but yeah,

• 18:14Speaker 01

  that is where we're all, where we're all going. But, you know, you, if you can obtain several more years, then, you know, by doing radiation and going through some chemo, which is what I'm doing now, just actually the radiation's over, but just got through the second round of chemo. They, so they just detected a, in a, an enhancement, enhancement in March. Not that it had been, it was, became really large, but there was some kind of enhanced contrast. And so they wanted to get ahead of it before it, you know, becomes, you know, just gets out of control. So there,

• 18:57Speaker 01

  it was a proactive decision to go ahead with radiation and chemo. And so now I'm kind of going through it. That was one of the reasons for the MRI is just, you know, after the second cycle. So yeah, I mean, I'm going to do all that and, and, you know, just keep living my life as well. Even when the chemo kind of gets you a little fatigued. But yeah, we are, we're all going to death. And I mean, it's not, I don't, I just don't, I don't take it personally.

• 19:27Ryan Holiday?

  How, how does the reality of it, it's like, like, so I know, as a, at birth, I was also given a terminal diagnosis, but we find ways to, to, to not have to face that. We tell ourselves, oh, this is in the very distant future. But, you know, the difference between me going, hey, I have several more decades and you being forced to wrestle with, you know, several more years. How does that, how does that shape your day to day consciousness? How, how, how do you think?

• 19:58Ryan Holiday?

  As a result of that sort of, you know, change in perspective?

• 20:05Speaker 01

  There is a very good, see if I can bring it up, but there's a very good quote from Marcus Aurelius on that, but basically it just makes me say that, you know, I'm trying to say this without sounding cliche, but you know, just, you know, maximize the time that you have. You know, you just, I mean, I haven't really changed my life in any particular way. I just kind of, you know, I've largely come to terms with who I am, but that's not to say that there isn't a day to day flux and you're kind of always rediscovering yourself in a sense.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  You develop new interests and whatever, but I'd say I'm pretty well anchored. And so I just kind of carry on with that same sort of moral compass. But it certainly made me more conscious of, you know, being productivity fanatic and so on, of wanting to do what, you know, my inner nature, soul, whatever the word is, wants to do. So I guess you could say it makes it more, makes myself more proactive. I'm not sure if that's the word, but urgent, there's a sense of urgency. But at the same time, it's, you also, you know,

• 21:31Speaker 01

  I don't want to imply a sense of anxiety about that. Because again, to me, it's like, you're, I guess you're trying to make use of that consciousness in a way that is able to make an impact on things that you can control. And again, I'm trying to resort again to the Stoic language. So like, there's nothing you do about it. So if you get really anxious about it, and you try to do too much, you end up undermining your, your efforts because you just, you know, you just get worked up, anxious, distracted, distracted and so on. But if you're able to rein that in a little bit, it can make you more productive and more

• 22:13Speaker 01

  proactive without losing sight of the overall perspective of, you know, death is coming to us all. And, you know, just, you know, continue to Be reconciled to the, what the world has presented to you and you know, that, that sort of thing. So it, I guess it's just a more of a heightened awareness of what I had already been aware of.

• 22:35Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 22:43Ryan Holiday?

  How do you deal with like, Kate Bower, who's a fan of the Stoics, wrote this great book called Everything Happens for a Reason and Other Lies. I've loved since she got a diagnosis of basically stage four, I think pancreatic cancer. And she was talking about, yeah, people will sort of say these things to you, like, everything happens to a reason, or everything happens for a reason. And she's like, you know, what reason? I'd love to know. But how do you deal with what's, what seems like would be very natural feelings of anger, unfairness, fear? How do you deal with those emotions, which I got to imagine bubble up at least time to time?

• 23:25Speaker 01

  If you mean anger, fear, and whatever with respect to the, the tumor itself, the cancer, I actually don't, I've never really felt angry, anger, or fear. I mean, I mean, I guess it depends on what you mean by fear. I mean, the, you know, I think for everybody in the moments for before death, I mean, when it really sort of is imminent, I think everybody is gonna feel anxious, to say the least. But I'm not a fan of the phrase, everything happens for a reason.

• 23:59Ryan Holiday?

  She's saying that it's a cool thing to say to people.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  And I'm saying that I agree. And I, you know, if you think about, I think, trying to think about, like, say, playing chess. One of the things that I kind of like to do, and I sometimes have to exert some Stoic discipline to rein in the addictive, you know, it can be addictive. But the thing is, you're trying to win the game. And

• 24:38Speaker 01

  So you're, uh, you're doing, you know, you're, you're, you're carrying, you're doing what you have to do to win the game. So there's a reason that you're playing the game. It's to win. But if you, and then it's either, you know, you're either gonna win or you lose. And when you lose, you know, you lost because, you know, you made a miscalculation or you were just playing a better player or whatever. And, you know, you can get upset because you made a stupid move and whatever. But the fact is, I mean, it's done. The game is over. You lost or you won. And there's a reason everything happened in the sense that, you know, you can explain it in hindsight. But now it's done. It is what it is. The world carries on.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  And similarly for any athlete, you know, whether you're trying to shoot a bow and arrow or throw a football, whatever. Like, it's not entirely random and it, you could say it happens for a reason.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  But not in the sense of design or that there's some, some active power behind it that's against you or whatever. It just happened. Like you lost the game for whatever reason. And now you have to reconcile to reality and move on and maybe move, you know, win the next game. And with respect to the cancer, um, you know, I don't know how it happened. It just happened, you know, some mutation or whatever. And now like, I can't go back in time and, you know, change the DNA to get it back to where it was. You just carry on with the treatments that are available and hope that it will extend your life as much as possible. But then also understand that this is the reality that you're dealing with.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  It's like within economics, which is my sort of field, you talk about constrained optimization. You have a set of constraints that you're operating with and you optimize within those constraints. And that's what you do. Um, the constraints are there. There's no evil banal power behind it. They're just there. And then you try to optimize as best you can. You can focus on what you can control and not on what you can't control.

• 26:46Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's, I think, I think the Stoics would say sort of it's wasted energy to feel regret or anger.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:55Ryan Holiday?

  Or any of these things at the, at the reality of the experience you have. But there's also this moment in Marcus's life, he's, he loses, you know, his favorite tutor, who dies of something, and he starts to cry and, you know, one of, one of his philosophy instructors, you know, begins to talk to him about exactly what we're saying, you know, this is pointless, you don't need to cry. And Antoninus, his stepfather, goes, you know, let the boy be human for once, you know, he says, like, you, you can't, it's, people die, it's sad. Do you let yourself have some of those experiences? Or had there been some cathartic moments like that?

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Um.

• 27:36Ryan Holiday?

  I, I just feel like there's this idea that Stoicism is the absence of emotion.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:42Ryan Holiday?

  And I'm not sure that's right.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  No, it's not. I actually have written some, some few articles aside from the Quillette essay. And one of them was, was entitled, you know, Why I'm a Man Who Chooses, Chooses Not to Cry. The, um, the point of the essay was basically that emotional restraint is not the same thing as emotional repression. So emotions are in the, they're in the order of the universe, so to speak. I mean, we feel emotions. And it's not so much, I guess this may be Spinoza-like language, but it's not so, well, it's very Stoic, too, but, you know, they're kind of related, but it's not so much that

• 28:28Speaker 01

  you, you want to get your emotions, you know, you want to eschew emotions as much as you want to develop the right perspective on emotions, as Spinoza, I think, would say, have adequate ideas about emotions. And so, yeah, I mean, for cer, for certain, I wrestle with emotions like anybody else. You know, it's not about being a robot. But it's also not allowing emotions to distract you from developing a healthy perspective about the adversities that you. You face. And so like, I think one of the things I said in that is that crying is sort

• 29:09Speaker 01

  of like a stormy interlude, but doesn't really resolve anything. And it's not as if I'm incapable of stirring up tears. It's just that I don't feel this compelling need to burst out. And, you know, and not saying that nobody else should. It's just, you know, something that I've sort of grown into. And I think a lot of it is just about being reconciled to adversity and focusing more on what I can do about it, rather than just sort of, you know, a chaotic release. So, yeah, that's sort of my perspective on that.

• 29:47Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's like Nassim Taleb says, it's about Stoicism is the domestication of emotions, not the absence of the

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like that.

• 29:58Ryan Holiday?

  So, this idea, and I think you, you, you did everyone a great service when, you know, the APA came out and sort of defined this idea of toxic masculinity and tried to sort of shoehorn in Stoicism as an example of that. You wrote a great piece or talking about the distinction, I think, essentially the distinction between lowercase Stoicism and uppercase Stoicism, right? The sort of Stoicism of no emotions and the strategies that helped you deal with the most severe difficulty of your life. So walk me through your, like, what this idea of toxic masculinity and so, and Stoicism gets wrong?

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is part of the larger concern I have about, I guess, I would say excesses in social justice activism. And I would say the, the, the central concern I have in general, and I've written, you know, a fair amount about this, is the idea of, you know, as you mentioned, shoehorning experiences, individual experiences into preconceived frameworks. And so with social justice activism,

• 31:26Speaker 01

  I guess I should preface this by saying I'm not against quote unquote "social justice." The issue is what constitutes social justice. In fact, I've had quite a history myself of writing about social justice and I kind of came to this from a background of having written in support of various initiatives. So I feel like I need to preface that. But the reigning paradigms of social justice activism these days sort of come from a framework that sees everything as stemming from systems of power and privilege, sort of structural issues, societal structures.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  And there are merits to this paradigm, if you will, and I don't want to sort of tangentially go down that road. But one of these so-called "systems of power and privilege and so on" is masculinity, patriarchy, and so on. And it's not so much, so the argument goes, that it hurts whether it's women or boys, but men themselves. And one example is taken to be

• 32:38Speaker 01

  this notion that men are taught in society to repress their emotions, be a man, and then that carries forward into adult behaviors of being overly aggressive and competitive and so on. And I think if you really want to walk through all the nuances, you can see pros and cons and you can see... And so I'm not going to disagree with all of that. But with respect to Stoicism, it just struck me as another, an example of trying to take Stoicism as it's understood and stood in layman's terms.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  You know, emotional repressiveness and that sort of thing and shoehorned into this notion of toxic masculinity. And what I thought was unfortunate about that is it obscures this distinction between lowercase stoicism and uppercase stoicism. I would argue that stoicism, and I think cognitive behavioral therapists and maybe other therapists would agree with me, Donald Robertson, I think, for example, stoicism is very much a healthy approach to dealing with adversity in life. And it's not just this stopgap, get through type of, you know, just get through war type of thing and deal with the emotions later. It's very

• 34:05Speaker 01

  much about actually dealing with emotions, but in a healthy way. And so to the extent that you have this reigning paradigm that is just dead set on shoehorning all of this into its paradigm, you end up conflating, you know, a very hard distinction between unhealthy manifestations of emotional repression and healthy manifestations of emotional restraint.

• 34:31Ryan Holiday?

  I think that's right. And I would say the other thing, and this pertains to your new book, which I want to get into next, but there's almost this tendency, I think, in academia and in our culture to like attack the flaws in everything, right? Like to go like, here's an imperfection in this system. Here's a problem with this. Let's put a label on this. And what we end up doing is we sort of knock the, we knock away the legs of all these different things that sort of society and culture and just normal people trying to get through adversity depend on. And we don't replace it with anything better. So if you told me there's a system that stoicism is flawed for the following reasons, lowercase

• 35:11Ryan Holiday?

  or uppercase, I'd be willing to hear that. But what tools are you equipping a man in your case, or a woman in, you know, Kate Bell's case? What tools are you giving them to deal with the?

• 35:27Ryan Holiday?

  A diagnosis like brain cancer, pancreatic cancer, it's not like these things are being replaced with a better system. It's sort of like Churchill's line about democracy being the, the least bad of all the systems. Like, sometimes life just fucking sucks.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  They don't like Churchill either.

• 35:44Ryan Holiday?

  Of course not.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, um, I would say that, uh, you know, I say this carefully because there's a, there's a fairly large literature now, you know, and people have different takes on it and it's controversial. And, you know, there's the cynical theories book, which sort of it says it's all rooted in post-modern philosophy and, and it's successive generations. And I think that there is something to that, although, you know, you can argue here, there on various details. And so anyway, where this comes from, that is, you know, social justice, whatever you want to, activism, so ideology, whatever, that, that's one thing.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  And a large part of my effort is sort of, is critiquing that explanatory paradigm. But there's also a large literature on how to go about overcoming this. So things like implicit bias training and so on, which themselves are very flawed. And so to the extent that they are relying on these kinds of alternatives, I mean, I just find them also flawed. And I kind of come back to things like stoicism and so, I mean, um, microaggressions, that's another very popular notion. And it's based on a 2007 paper by Daryl Wynn Sue and, and co-authors. And it sort of originates in a plane trip he took, in which he and

• 37:10Speaker 01

  a colleague were asked to sit at the back of the plane to balance out the weight. And, you know, not to go into all the details, but basically you can see arguments coming from both sides and whatever about, you know, whether, you know, he should have, they should have asked the three guys, white guys in front of him to do that. And whether there was any intent to do harm or whatever. But anyway, he wrote a paper about how this was a microaggression. And then that became, that sort of entered into the lexicon. And,

• 37:39Speaker 01

  In 2017, I guess, Scott Lilienfeld, a psychologist, wrote a very comprehensive literature view, you know, saying that, you know, this is a new term. We haven't really understood exactly what this, uh, this term is in terms of constructuality and, and parsing out various biases of the research and so on. But anyway, where I'm going with this is that, um, one of the things he identifies is what I guess what psychologists call negative emotionality, which is that some personalities are more predisposed to take offense, or they're a little more, you know, just, uh, sensitive or what have you. And that that's a factor

• 38:24Speaker 01

  that you need to take into account. Now, um, Stoicism for me is a way of trying to deal with, um, you know, having a sort of, uh, again, I always want to say this carefully, not to be misunderstood, but, um, when you are overly sensitive or negative emotionality, whatever it is you want to say, sometimes to me that might be an indication of just needing to grow a little bit more, uh, maturing or whatever. Like there are things that I would have taken offense to or got all worked up about 10, 20 years ago that I never, I don't get worked up about anymore. Um, and so saying something like America is a melting

• 39:05Speaker 01

  pot, or, um, you know, some other examples that are taken to be quote unquote, microaggressions, um, just strike me almost as kind of silly. Um, and if we're really getting worked up about, you know, calling America a melting pot, so to speak, and that that's taken to be somehow offensive, a microaggression, or whatever, it just, like, I can't see a, someone who is partaking in a sort of stoic approach to life can really see that as, you know, crucial to understanding how we address racial inequality, justice, one of the four virtues, you know, one of the things that we're supposed to be, uh, concerned with. So, yeah, I mean, I can go on and on about this, but that's just one example.

• 39:46Ryan Holiday?

  No, no, I do, I do want to get into it. I think microaggressions are interesting because it's like, it, it strikes me as being pretty straightforward. It's like,

• 39:55Ryan Holiday?

  Are there such things as microaggressions? Ways that society is set up or practices or things that disproportionately affect different minorities or different people? Of course. Look, I'm left-handed. Scissors are mostly made for right-handed people, and that's an unpleasant thing I have to deal with. Certainly, there are such things at a much more serious level affecting different people. So it's like, microaggressions probably exist. Should you, as a person, try to limit the negative externalities or consequences of the behaviors and decisions and beliefs that you have on other people? Of course, this is your stoic duty of justice.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:34Ryan Holiday?

  And then the third part, though, is that are people going to direct these microaggressions or even regular aggressions at you? Absolutely. And that's where the stoicism comes in of like, are you going to let this ruin your life? Or are you going to focus on what you control and either try to live your life despite it? Or spend some of your time and energy trying to fix this injustice in the world? But being hurt about it and feeling and letting it ruin your life is not the solution either.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's, in Lilian Feld's paper, he does say, you know, nobody should deny that racial insensitivities and so on are an everyday occurrence. And so there really isn't any dispute about that. I think we can all acknowledge that racism or prejudice or insensitivity and so on, there's all sorts of things that we need to fix. So the issue with microaggressions is that when you look into the literature, the conceptual framework that it given rise to really does tend to have a sort of incoherence to it. For instance, two instances of microaggressions, they call micro insults and micro assaults,

• 41:54Speaker 01

  which to me don't strike me as very micro. But then there's also, there's just a whole other set of issues with the research and so on. And so really, the point is that it's just a concept that's sort of gotten way ahead of the research. But that aside, that is, you articulated what it is that essentially...

• 42:16Speaker 01

  You know, with respect to Stoicism, how I would agree with that. I mean, I would say that in some sense, slights or insensitivities or what have you that I've encountered in life have often been a motivating factor for me and not something that I just sort of gripped about and let it sort of get the best of me and sort of paralyzed me.

• 42:38Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 42:47Ryan Holiday?

  And I wanted to get into the new book. You basically are talking about sort of, it's sort of a sober, patient look at this idea of white fragility, which I think is another interesting concept because is there such a thing as white fragility? I mean, of course there is. I think the irony as someone who's sort of not, I would sort of identify as center right or sort of a radical centrist, but as a result, not a fan of Trump, you know, I've noticed no one is more of a snowflake than a Trump supporter in 2020. There is such a thing as fragility and white fragility. At the same time, if

• 43:27Ryan Holiday?

  you take a good, if you take a good person who honestly strives to be colorblind, who tries to seek out and address injustice in the world, and you suddenly redefine what racism is to them as in a much more sort of aggressive context, in an academic context that introduces a whole bunch of concepts that frankly, they're not familiar with. And you suddenly move the lines as to what racist is and you take behavior that previously wasn't racist and you make it racist and they have a reaction to that. It's sort of unfair to call that fragile.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, so I, uh, I mean, I, I don't really have anything to object to that. Uh, I would, I would say, however, I, I, I take issue with the idea that there is something called white fragility in the sense as, as D'Angelo herself tries to articulate it. Um, I, you know, I say in the book, I say in an essay, um, that I think it should not be surprising or unexpected that, you know, you, as you sort of very reasonably said, that if you come into a seminar with, to, uh, talk to people about these sort of new

• 44:52Speaker 01

  paradigms and new, new ideas and redefining racism, so on, that, uh, and this is true for any field, uh, to those who are uninitiated, uh, that you should encounter, um, resistance and objections and, and so on. Um, the, uh, the issue is, um, that you also have to be open to the possibility that your sort of reigning paradigm or your, um, redef, your redefinition of racism and, and so on itself, uh, is worthy of critique, um, and that there are critiques that can maybe be made of them and that, um, when essentially, as I argue,

• 45:36Speaker 01

  and I think other people see, when you dismiss essentially any critique as an instance of white fragility, you have, you know, this sort of Kafka trap issue where you're, any objection is just taken as evidence of your guilt. And so in that sense, I argue there really isn't such a thing as white fragility, um, in the sense that in the way that it's defined within the overall, uh, sort of academic discipline of critical race theory and whiteness and so on. Um, frankly, I think it's something that she identified, it really as early as 2004 in her dissertation, um, because she was in encountering a lot of hostility and

• 46:17Speaker 01

  resistance. Um, and I, I would argue that maybe that's just largely in part because she was ineffective and that she was trying to figure out a way to explain, uh, or maybe to shed her own responsibility. I mean, I mean, I guess that that's something I would want to think about a little bit more, but it's not, I'm not the first person to make that critique. But I have a lot of sort of reservations about the overall paradigm of whiteness studies and critical race theory, and not that I dismiss it all out of hand. And to the extent that I have those reservations, I also call into question the notion of quote unquote, white fragility that is derived from that. But that said, I mean, you're right, and I write this in the book, that it's not as

• 47:00Speaker 01

  if we need to dismiss her out of hand as well. I mean, if we're not open minded and willing to consider the ideas like Eduardo Bonilla Silva's notion of colorblind racism that she very heavily relies upon, if we aren't willing to engage with the idea, and even if we're going to critique it, but engage with it, then, and in some sense, we're dismissing, when I say we're, I mean, me and critics, dismissing things out of hand, and it sort of becomes its own sort of Kafka trap. So in sort of in keeping with Stoic pursuit of wisdom, if you will, temperate analysis, the pursuit of justice and

• 47:40Ryan Holiday?

  And truth.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  And truth and so on, right. You want to sort of cultivate the courage to, you know, reasonably critique what is widely considered to be kind of a reified truth, if you will, which is that see, critical race theory is the way to go and so on. So really, I see this critique as very much in keeping with the Stoic pursuit of wisdom, you know, temperate analysis, not keep becoming an online troll, mudslinging and whatever, but really just conduct a very sober analysis and, and, and evaluate on the source of the merits.

• 48:20Ryan Holiday?

  Well, there's a line from Chrysippus, someone is, you know, sort of asking him, why is he not doing this thing everyone else is doing? And he says, you know, if I wanted to follow the mob, I wouldn't be a philosopher and, or I wouldn't have studied philosophy. And I think that's, that's a thing I try to remind myself, you know, there's that, that, that Twain line, you know, whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, pause and reflect. That's what been an interesting thing over the last couple of years where The point of that is not to be a contrarian, right? The point of that quote is not always do the opposite of what other people believe. The point of that is to go to first principles and think for yourself, to go, why do I believe this? Do I believe this because everyone believes it?

• 49:04Ryan Holiday?

  Or do I believe that it's true? And I think that's the tricky thing about your critique of white fragility and then also the people who just sort of reflexively go racism is over, everything's solved. No, the truth is almost always complicated and there's a little bit here and a little bit here. And you've got to figure out for yourself from your own research and your own thinking, where you come down on all of that.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's very well said. Actually, I was listening to your podcast with, I think, Joe Lonsdale. And I think the notion of being a contrarian came up. And yeah, the issue is not simply to be a contrarian per se. That's really not the issue. And I think one of the frustrating things about writing about this, I mean, D'Angelo does tend to be a little belligerent in her approach and that then that can be a little irksome. But so, you know, you can sort of understand maybe to some extent, the acrimonious reactions. But the most difficult thing about this is that I really think that there are very reasonable

• 50:13Speaker 01

  critiques to be made, but I don't think that we dismiss critical theory and other, you know, these sort of ideas out of hand. There are pros and cons throughout. And just, you know, not to promote myself, but I recently had very brief exchange on Twitter and comments with somebody who, you know, I had sort of, I guess, maybe the mood I was in, but I sort of dismissed Bonilla Silva as someone I didn't really hold in high regard. And so this other person was sort of attacking me as saying, lying, I was lying about my, about his book and whatever.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  And so, you know, it became a little acrimonious and I was, I was ready to just sort of disengage because I don't really, you know, when, when things get heated, I don't really see a point. But

• 51:10Speaker 01

  At some point, the question arose as to, you know, pursuing this at a little bit more length, and so I proposed a exchange on letters, the letter medium, so that you have more space to work this out. And, you know, this was, it turned out to be a temperate, sober, sort of back and forth between me and what I learned was a sociology professor, somewhat unsurprisingly, because this is very popular in that field, as I understand it. And, you know, we had a very extensive set of exchanges, and we were able to come to agreement on

• 51:50Speaker 01

  various issues. We didn't agree on everything, but I think we ended up arriving at a position of really respect, you know, a respective, respectable disagreement, as well as agreement on various things. And I think we all came out well as a result. In other words, that initial, real acrimonious exchange really kind of blossomed into this very fruitful and productive discussion about the pros and cons of things like critical race theory, colorblind racism, or ideology, the white racial frame, and so on. And I think that's

• 52:30Speaker 01

  really what you're aiming for, the stoic pursuit of wisdom and justice and so on, is you're not trying to get into these mudslinging things on Twitter. You're really trying to, you know, engage in honest, good faith discussion. And I was sort of happy that that was able to blossom in that way. And the point is to show that, yes, you could acknowledge the pros and cons, and then arrive at either agreement or respectable disagreement in the pursuit ultimately of racial justice.

• 53:01Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I'd argue too that Twitter as a medium is almost inherently anti-wisdom. Like, if you were to go back and talk to Marcus Aurelius or Seneca and be like, "Okay, flashing forward to the future, we're gonna conduct the majority of our cultural discourse on a medium that originally you could communicate in no more than 140 characters, but was recently expanded to 280 characters." And this is where the intellectuals of our time, professors, journalists, leaders, philosophers, etc., they're gonna be battling it out in 140 to 280-character quips with each

• 53:45Ryan Holiday?

  other. No one would think like, "Oh, that's a medium. You're gonna get to truth." So I feel like Twitter has unfortunately radicalized a whole generation of people on the right and the left, that instead of thinking in long form, as you mentioned with letters, instead of defaulting towards finding common ground, instead of thinking about complicated, complex truths, we think in terms of virality, we think in terms of dunking on each other, and we think in terms of being clever more than concrete.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't have any objections to that. One thing that always does come to mind is Alexis de Tocqueville, talking about newspapers and the tyranny of the majority and so on. And I think those principles are as operative then as they are now. And I think that the thing about Twitter is that it just heightens or just makes it more extreme and just further polarizes that tendency or further advances that tendency towards polarization. And particularly because of what you're saying, is that you're battling out in 280 characters or less, and it doesn't allow you to engage in the complexities and the

• 55:04Speaker 01

  nuances that really could serve to mitigate the tensions that arise when you're just sort of throwing these, you know, our attempts to be clever.

• 55:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, then you add in, you add on top of that, the algorithm, right? So it's like even what you're pulling on and seeing, you're not, you're not seeing things that challenge you, that make you think, you're not seeing what you, like, I feel like if I'm sort of zooming out and evaluating my own thinking, I almost always leave Twitter more certain of whatever it is that I think, and very rarely do I leave Twitter with anything that I'm gonna go chew on.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  One of the things that really puzzles me is that is the frequency with which people mute and block each other. I don't mute and I don't block. And maybe, I mean, I can understand people who have like hundreds of thousands of followers. I mean, maybe at some point you just gotta, but I wanna know when people criticize me. This to me, again, is very stoic. Like, first of all, there's a quote, I don't know, I think it's Marcus Aurelius or somebody who says, you know, when somebody criticizes them, you know, you, you, you essentially say yes, and then tell them more about what they could critique you about. In other words, it's sort of a

• 56:26Ryan Holiday?

  If they really mute you, they'd be even harsher, he says.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so there's that, but there's also just being open-minded and, you know, for instance, this letter exchange I had, you know, I could have just immediately muted or blocked this person, but instead chose to try to engage, and it turned out to be a very productive conversation. So I don't mute or block because I want to be open to critique. And I think that's very much in the, in the spirit of so, soicism as well. And maybe unfortunately, that's not what people are in time to do on Twitter, and so you do get these echo chambers that you're referring to.

• 57:02Ryan Holiday?

  So my, my last question for you, because, because I, I agree with you that a lot of this stuff, and, and again, I'm someone who, who's written about this, talked about it quite a bit, I'm a big believer in social justice, I think it is the key stoic virtue. You know, I believe what Marcus Aurelius says when he's like, and you can commit injustice by doing nothing. You know, I, I believe deeply in this idea of the common good. But I believe a lot of the stuff, a lot of the sort of extreme stuff on the left, and I say this again as a centrist person, is not even wrong. Like, it's just nonsense, right? It's the, I've been very critical of a lot of academic philosophy. I think a lot of academic sociology and some of these critical theories are not even wrong.

• 57:47Ryan Holiday?

  They're just nonsense, even if the person's heart is sort of generally in the right place. But I'm curious, like, how do you decide? You're someone who has, you know, less amount of time to live than you might have otherwise expected. You have so many things to write. What, I'm just, I'd love to hear, like, why did you decide to write about this? How do you even decide what to work on and not work on with this kind of ticking clock being more vivid for you than it is for other people?

• 58:21Speaker 01

  Well, boy, what a question to end it with, because that's something I think about often, and I don't have an easy answer to that. I just started off the new year, all of a sudden, like, seven different essays came to mind that I wanted to write. And at the same time, there's, there's basically three more books I want to write, if I can get the time. One is the one I want to start, that I've been, that started the new year working on, which is, you know, it's in reasonable shape, but I still have more to write, which is basically about Stoicism and a Stoic's guide to, you know, love masculinity and, and, and death, I think, I forget what the, but there's that.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  And then there's two novels that have been in progress for years. And I got distracted from all that because I ended up getting immersed in this white virility stuff, which really just started off as a curiosity when I was writing articles about social justice, some of them, only some of them, being critical, and those being dismissed out of hand as instances of white virility, which really just struck my curiosity. And before I knew it, I had a book. But basically, I know the three books I want to write if I'm given enough time. And after that, it's just a matter of, you know, just doing it day after day after day and trying not, trying to rein in the, the...

• 59:45Speaker 01

  The desire to write every essay that come, every idea that comes to mind into an essay. So, I mean, really, I know the books I want to write, so I'm, I think that's a line I've been able to cross. As far as the essays, it's just, I try to keep it within fields that I know something about, topics that I know something about. And not get, get sort of cast tonight and, you know, start, start a whole new, uh, uh, start a new and a whole new other field. But in a sense, you're just trying to gauge your interests day by day. And wherever your passions tend to zoom in on a particular day, you sort of,

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  I've tried, the verb is escaping me, but you try to steer them in a very productive, reasonable way. But it's, it's hard. I mean, I just, um, like I, I now have about seven essays I want to write. And I've just said to myself, no more until these are done. But that's hard. The three books I have, but the essays, they just keep coming in. And you just have to at some point say, okay, write the essays before you can think of other ones.

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  And I don't have an easy answer to that. It's just, uh, you struggle with it every day.

• 1:01:04Ryan Holiday?

  No, and there's also this sense, I think as a writer, you just sort of, you go where your heart leads you and you, you gotta, I, I always tell people, you have to write what you can't not write.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:14Ryan Holiday?

  That's not always, that's not always what you think it's going to be. Sometimes you just, this is what, you know, this is something I feel I have to say because if I don't say it, somebody else won't.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  That's, that's right. I don't have any, yeah, I don't have any, that's, you captured in, in few words what I took too much, too long to say, but yes, exactly.

• 1:01:35Ryan Holiday?

  Well, let's close there. Jonathan, this was so great to talk. I, I, I hope you are with us for many, many more years. I hope I'm here for many more years, but as, as the Stoics say, none of that is, is up to us and we're all mortal. But in the meantime, I think you've done, you've done great work in the time you're here and I, I look forward to your, your contribution to Stoicism with your next book.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me and thanks for everything and I appreciate the good sentiment and I, I send the same to you. So thank you very much.

• 1:02:07Ryan Holiday?

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