The Daily Stoic - John Hendrickson on Embracing Disability with Stoicism

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

Ryan speaks with John Hendrickson about his new book Life on Delay: Making Peace with a Stutter, how Stoicism and Ryan’s work influenced him to open up about his stuttering, how stuttering being diagnosed as a neurological disorder changed his perception of himself, how his daily struggles can be found in the lives of many other people who don’t have disabilities, and more.John Hendrickson is an author and Senior Editor at The Atlantic where he writes stories on a wide array of political issues, including his popular piece on Joe Biden and his stutter. He previously wrote and edited for Rolling Stone, Esquire and the Denver Post. With his first book, Life on Delay, John strives to educate readers about the commonly misunderstood speech disorder known as stuttering or stammering, as well as his experiences as a lifelong stutterer. His work can be found on his website johnhendrickson.org.✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. 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. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday.

Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoke Podcast. It actually wasn't until the middle of this week's interview. It struck me how much I talked about in the obstacles the way overcoming impediments, but specifically what you would call speech impediments. I talk about Thomas Jefferson about how Thomas Jefferson's discomfort speaking allowed into audiences channeled, he channeled that energy into being a great writer, talk about Dimastinese and his famous stutter, which led him to sort of, he literally goes underground, he shaves his head,

he doesn't show his face in public for years, as he not only gets over the stutter, but makes himself one of the great speakers and orders of not just his time, but all time. And that made for a very fruitful conversation with today's guest, John Hendrickson, whose work at the Atlantic I've read for many, many years. He wrote this fascinating piece about Joe Biden

and Joe Biden's lifelong battle with and sort of eventually over his stutter, which was, it was an epic long read back in 2019. Absolutely should read it. John is also the author of a fantastic new book, Life on Delay, Making Peace with a Stutter. My dear friend Austin Cleon recommended that I talk with John. He said, he's having a new book.

I think you would like it. Check it out. And's having a new book. I think you would like it. Check it out. And I cracked open this book. And as you'll see in today's episode, the epigraph was quite familiar to me. And I think we'll be familiar to many of you. John lives in New York City before he wrote for the Atlantic. He wrote and edited for Rolling Stone, for Esquire, and the Denver Posts. And so John has a stutter. It's a fact of his life. It's also an impediment to things that a lot of us like just take totally for granted, right?

There's a fascinating video we talk about, and the thing, there's a video him trying to make like a customer service call, you know? And they go like, please say your name at the tone and he goes to say it and it's a sorry I can't hear you or please you know like every it's this fascinating thing He's like trying to use this automated call service thing and like This thing that would ordinarily be so easy for most of us is super hard for him You can see his frustration

You can see him having to practice a kind of stoicism of not getting upset, not feeling insecure, not throwing up his hands and quitting this thing that should take two seconds instead is extraordinarily difficult. And you could also imagine it made communicating over a virtual podcasting host like harder, right? There's already sometimes a lag from technology. Sometimes it can be harder. Here's someone that the equipment doesn't always work. And so like it was interesting to even think about how it was interesting to catch myself

thinking about something that I wouldn't have thought about if I was having any other guests on. And I was actually something as we wrapped up the interview. I talked to him about also, I said, hey, like obviously you want people to listen to this and we want the experience to be as good as possible for the interview. How do you want this to be edited, right? When we do these podcasts, I have an editor come back in and get rid of unnecessary ums and us or breaks or, you know, we are digression sometimes or if somebody says, no, no, wait, what I mean is sometimes we get rid of that. I had to ask John, you

know, what he thought about that? Does he want me to get rid of some of the pauses before he starts talking or is it important that it's there? And he said, to leave it to me. So what you hear here is a slightly cleaned up version, but I think the experience of hearing what I heard is important. So you'll listen to that in this interview. But I was just so excited to do this interview. And in the book, John writes about bullying and substance abuse, depression, isolation, things that people with stutters are prone to, they deal with. I talk about the family dynamics that go into, you know, how one's parents know how to

deal with a thing like this. And do they do a good job or, you know, we get a sense of his childhood in the book, his career as a journalist, and even his search for love, it's, as I said, just a beautiful book. And then there's a lot of discussions of the science and the evolving understanding of speech impediments in the book, which I was fascinated to learn about. So I'll just get into the interview, check out John's new book, Life on Delay, Making Peace with a Stetter. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter at JohnGHendy. So it's John, the letter G, H-E-N-D-Y, and I think you're really going to like this conversation. I felt very inspired and edified after having it, and I think you're going to like listening to it.

Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, thank you for doing this. I'm excited. And I was excited to talk before I'd actually read the book. And then I opened it up and I read the epigraph, which is a quote I like so much I wrote an entire book about it. The impediment to action advances action with stands in the way that becomes the way that's Marx to realize. Tell me what that means to you in relation to your life and why you open the book with that. Well, first off, thank you so much for having me on, a big fan, and

your work has meant a lot to me because in social media in particular, it's just the most the most anxiety inducing confidence breaking thing out there. And when I follow your page or pages like Ram Das, I get the opposite and I get messages like that in the epigraph. And so I knew I wanted to put a message of that nature right at the top of the book. What I love about that quote is it's paradoxical. It does it seem like it makes sense and yet it makes perfect sense. Yeah, I think as I've come to understand that quote,

it's not just that, I think like a very simple reading is that like the thing you think is bad is actually, there's a silver lining to it, right? Or that like you can turn everything around. And I think that's partly true, but I have been thinking about it more and more as the idea of like whatever you happen to experience in life,

it's an opportunity to be excellent in whatever capacity one is able to be excellent. So even, you know, that it's always an opportunity to practice a virtue or virtue, even if that virtue is like the exact opposite of what one would like to be practicing, be it patience or forgiveness or, you know, returning love when one is hated, you know, on down the line.

It's not this like, hey, everything is good, but it's that there is an opportunity to be good inside really, really bad things. Exactly, and I think it also gives you purpose, you know. So many people are just looking for a purpose. And the wisdom of that quote is this thing that's literally holding your back may give you purpose in life. And it took me a really long time to come to that perspective. And I, you know, there's a part of my brain that is telling me the opposite of that message. And I'm kind of a war trying to let the positive self-talk, be the negative self-talk. And I think that's a fairly active practice.

Well, yeah, because I imagine it's relatively simple to say the impediment to action advances action, which stands in the way becomes the way. But in your case, it's relatively simple to say the impediment to action advances action, which stands in the way it becomes the way. But in your case, it's not only not literally simple to say it, but like it's where the rubber meets the road on these ideas, where one has to take the worst or the hardest or the most frustrating or the most unfair thing in their life, or the most frustrating or the most unfair thing in their life, and find a way to demonstrate excellence inside of it. Like, that's where it stops being philosophy and it starts being like a real huge problem. Yeah, and it's easy to be high-minded and theoretical with this, but it's like, no, I actually have an impediment to me procuring a cup of coffee in the morning, or to me ordering a pizza. These like little

tiny moments that make up the fabric of life. When you're a person who stutters or a person with any number of others' disabilities, those tiny moments really are challenging. And if you make enough compromises and if you find yourself withdrawing and avoiding those moments, trying to avoid momentary embarrassment, you just start doing that over and over and over again, and then you realize, well, I'm missing out on a lot of life. I'm living a really small life. And part of this book is me trying to figure out

just like how to get my life back. Yeah, I watched that New York Times video that you did and it was showing you trying to like talk to an automated message like on a customer service line or something. And it was really illustrative to me because I think everyone could go, yeah, it would be difficult to have a stutter, but you don't quite think about the ways in which the entire world is designed around the implicit assumption that you should easily be able to do this thing. And I imagine that's true for all sorts of different disabilities or whatever the term people want to use.

But like when, you know, the other term of microaggression, right, like the idea of an implicit or a systemic slight against someone, you're sort of waking up and dealing with that all the time. That could be a recipe, not just for a withdrawn life, I imagine, but also a shameful life or also a very angry life. And those are choices that you have had to make.

Absolutely. And what I try to get across in this book is that actual stuttering, like my mouth just there, stuttering, stuttering. That is the very, very, very, very tip of the iceberg, as far as the problem. The rest of the problem is the internal daily battle, the mental health battle, and the people who stutter are much more likely to deal with issues like

depression, anxiety, who's CD substance abuse. And the way that we cope is not always not always great. I mean, there were years of my life where I avoided picking up the telephone and answering. There were years where I was too afraid to just order off a restaurant someone out on a date or try to apply for a job. And that's really what this book is about and what the layers of disability come down to. And that's a thing that I think people with disabilities know. But a lot of the population does it. Think about that part. Yeah, no, it's an interesting idea.

I mean, I talked about demosthenes and the obstacles the way. Obviously one of the sort of more famous examples of a person with a speech impediment, but as you were saying that, I was just thinking about it. It's like, okay, so he has this speech impediment, which is one sort of problem.

And if everything else in his life was perfect and easy, then perhaps that would have been a pretty surmountable thing. But then you go, no, then your parents die. So you withdraw a little bit, then the people who are supposed to take care of you, don't take care of you, then they steal from you, then the court system is rigged against you. So I was just thinking, it's like, yeah, this guy has to go on this journey to get what was taken from him. And then every step of the way, the impediment that he has or the the ham that life is dealt him makes that already difficult and unfair thing that he's been sort of robbed blind by his legal guardians. It's like a thousand times harder to deal with because

he has to get up and give speeches about them in court to get them back and just the way that these things kind of all overlap with each other. I never really thought about that until you said it. Well, just to be clear for your listeners, you're describing Demosthenes there. You're not describing me. My carrots are alive. Of course. Yeah.

Of course. Yeah. People take care of me. I'm not going to court. I just want to make sure everyone does. Yes. Yes. Yes. But that's exactly it. And that's a huge part of this book too, that like, it's not about the mechanics of talking.

It's not about one physical challenge. It's about how the shedruggle to communicate affects every fiber of your being. And that truth is something I totally suppressed and ignored for the first three decades of my life. And it's only a truth I've begun to grapple with in recent years as I set out to write this book. Yeah, you talk about that in the book. And I guess I wasn't as familiar with how it works as well. That fundamentally we've come to understand it as a neurological disorder, not just some bad habit that someone has picked up

that you can sort of bully them into not having or train them into not having with a few simple techniques, that this is a wiring issue that has a very prominent or public symptom, and for basically thousands of years, we've been treating the symptom and kind of blaming the victim also. kind of blaming the victim also. Only since around the turn of the moolinium have researchers and scientists understood this as a neurological

disorder with a complex genetic component. It's not merely a manifestation of anxiety and nervousness. It's a brain chemistry, and we're learning more and more with each passing year, but that basic fact is something I only learned in 2019 when I was with this article for the Atlantic about drill Biden's life-on-gerdumestuddering and learning a lot of this new information about new information about the disorders he and I both have, it rocked my world. But what is the realization that it is a neurological condition or a sort of a fact? How does that change your own perception? Because the majority of your life, you had a sort of a different paradigm for understanding what you were doing and what you were going through. And then suddenly, it's presented to you in a different way.

I mean, the underlying issue is still the same, right? But how it's the story, the lens through which you're seeing it changes, what does that mean for you? I was always on an island with it. It was always my problem, my thing. And I certainly knew there were other people out there who studied, but I never really met them. And it never dawned on me to ever Google conferences for people who

stood out support groups for people who stood out. And those things certainly exist and I've found them. them, but it was just this private, really personal, failing. That's how I viewed it for a while. And it's taken a lot of work to break out of that mindset. Does it allow you to accept it in a way that maybe you couldn't when there was some notion that it was your fault or that was more solvable than, you know, perhaps it was? Yes. Even learning that this is considered a disability, that reoriented my sense of self. Because I never really ever saw disability accommodations.

And I read about this in a chapter, but I nearly didn't graduate college because I was constantly avoiding taking 100 level public speaking class. And when I went back to interviews and some more teachers and professors in this book, one of them asked me, did you ever register with the disability's office for undergraduate students? And I said, no, that thought never crossed my mind. Right.

Yeah, no, it's interesting. I think people sometimes think in stoicism, this idea of resignation is to be avoided or acceptance. It feels like weirdly acceptance feels like a form of passivity or cowardice or like a lack of agency. But I've come around to the idea that actually it's kind of the first step in asserting the agency. Are you familiar with the idea of the Stockdale Paradox? No, I'm not. What is it? So the Stockdale Paradox, he's the prisoner of war in Vietnam. He's been introduced actually in graduate school at Stanford to to Epictetus and and so so

Storicism is a sort of guiding forces. He's in this horrible camp Solitary confinement he's tortured multiple times, but basically what emerges from this is this thing that becomes known as the Stockdale paradox where he says On the one hand you have to unflinchingly accept the reality of your condition, right, where you are, what's happened, how bad the odds are. And then he said, but I simultaneously held that I would survive and that I would turn this into something that in retrospect, I would not trade away. And so this kind of paradox, again, to go to the Marcus quote where it's like, it is what it is.

It can't be denied. It's a neurological condition. It's this or this. And then simultaneously going, well, now that I've accepted that, I'm free to sort of do what it is possible to do with that thing. I love that, and that underscores the origin of my sub-title, which is making peace with the stutter.

Right. And as you know as an author, subtitles are very hard. And there, I think most people hate their subtitles. The reason it was important to me to make that this subtitle was because I viewed that phrase as my North Star. Making peace with something is much different than curing something. It's much different than then even overcoming something. To me, making peace, I kind of do, think about battle or think about war. And at the end of a war when both sides lay down arms,

a lot has been lost, a lot of hard things have happened. But eventually both sides lay down arms and you kind of just go forward. And that's something I have been trying to do. And the two sides in this case are me and my negative self-talk. And the only other thing I'll say about this concept is there's a person who's daughter is in the book whose ER nurse named Rochene McManus. Over the summer, Rushi gave an amazing keynote address at a conference for people who stood there. And I'm paraphrasing her here, but what she said was,

you don't have to be happy about it. It's okay to be pissed off about it. It's okay to not like it. But you can learn to just ride with it in the passenger seat or in the motorcycle side car. And you're still moving forward. You're still going places. And it's just kind of alongside with you.

And that's enough sometimes. That's actually a very beautiful metaphor. The Stoics have one, they say we're like a dog tied to a cart, right? This is their understanding of fate or what they call the logos, sort of the rhythm of the universe. They're like, we're a dog tied to a cart. They're like, you can lay down and it'll drag you or you know, you can trot happily alongside. It's sort of your call. And I think about that in relation to the things that

we do not wish to be true, but unfortunately are true and are largely outside of our control are height, you know, what time we're, what time in the world we're born, you know, what is happening in the world, you know, the individual, the things that DNA gives us, whether it's, you know, cancer or a stutter or, you know, a proclivity to do this or that, or to be addicted to this or that, these are sentences that have been handed down, and then we have to figure out how are we going to do that time? Absolutely. And it's interesting, you say cancer there, there's a character in my book named Hunter Martinez, who was a lawyer who stood. And he reshowed to me after I wrote that Atlantic article and he told me a bit of his life story. And it was a amazing email he sent me. And I thought, wow, what must it be like to be a lawyer who's a stutter. So when I start to talk, someone who has to persuade people.

Right. So I interviewed him and I made him a main character. You know, we did many interviews over many months and then we eventually got time together in person. We really got to know him and his family. And during the course of us getting to know each other, he was diagnosed with colon cancer and he was only 32. And our conversations quickly migrated from talking purely about stuttering to talking about his cancer journey. And he told me one of the most amazing things I've ever heard, which he said, being a person whose stutters prepared me for cancer. Why is that?

Hmm. Why is that? Because he had to just keep waking up every day and battling and keep moving forward. And you have that fork in the road of you can either wallow, you know, you can, you can get down on yourself or you can just face it and square up and keep going. And you can make the most of what time you have left and be grateful for every day. And it's been hard because he did ultimately pass before this book was published. But I've kept in close touch with his widow and we've had a lot of meaningful conversations in the years since he passed. And as I've dealt with such just peak anxiety, peak insecurity, peak self-doubt,

in the lead-up to this book's publication, I have, you know,, lack of a better word, communed with him, and I've asked him to help me out and I can hear him, I can feel him sending me messages back. Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up.

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or Wondery. Yeah, you know, you brought up the sort of the war metaphor earlier and, you know, speaking of cancer in that regard and then about it with a stutter, it's like the thing about war is that nobody wins, right? Like, even the person that wins still loses, right? It's a thing that takes a lot out of you. So there's an element of sort of tragicness to it. But again, I think the essence of stoicism is like, how are you sort of great or good inside

that kind of tragic, painful, unfair situation? that kind of tragic, painful, unfair situation. That's the part that you control. Yes, exactly. And that sentence being a person who's still is preparing for cancer, I would never dream of comparing the two things. I would, you know, just as a person who does not have cancer at the moment, and I'm grateful for that, I would think that would be offensive if I short-root that sentence.

If that sentence came from my brain, my mouth, I think it would be offensive. But to hear it come from a person battling going cancer and hear that like elaborate on it and how they reach this perspective of just moving forward with positivity in the face of such adversity, it changed my life. So, I have two things that I want to get into. The first one is the idea of life on delay. That's the title of the book. And I was, you know, you sort of talk about, you know, this sort of, this pause. And you're saying one of the annoying things you end up hearing is people go, take your time, right, as you're struggling with it.

But it did strike me that there is something about the delay or the pause or the forced consideration that must go into everything that you say. That I don't wanna say it has an advantage, but I would say it does feel like the majority of us take for granted the ease with which we can say things, and the simplicity and the effortlessness

with which words pop out of our mouth, and that probably is to our detriment, not having the delay or the forced consciousness of what we're about to say and what it's going to, what we're going to have to pay to say it. That's exactly right. So in a way, it can be kind of a blessing because it does give you that extra half second to put your words together. And when your person who stutters, you're so conscious of the amount of time you take up in conversation, and you're so aware that the person you're talking to is like getting bored or uncomfortable and may leave the conversation any moment,

and you're doing whatever you can to just be as efficient as possible with your word choices. And I think that made me a better writer, because I'm just pathologically averse to long sentences, long paragraphs, long chapters. I'm just always, always trying to keep the reader engaged. Cause God forbid someone makes you say one of them out loud. Yeah. And like,

it's sort of, the way I view this is we have three voices. We have the voice in our head. We have the voice that we talk with, and we have the voice that we write with. And when you're a person who stutters, two of those voices are at war with each other. And for me, writing was the secret linchpin, in which I could get things out the way they actually sound in my head. get things out the way they actually sound in my head. I suspect that's more common than maybe we might think it is.

I've always felt that not at all to compare situations, but I've always felt like if I was really good at saying what I was thinking, I almost certainly wouldn't have developed well as a writer, right? Like, if me at 11 years old could perfectly articulate to my parents the emotions of being a teenager or of being their kid or any of the feelings that I had, I mean, I just would have done that and then gone back to watching TV or hanging out with my friends. It was that life seemed difficult to explain

or there was ineffable, and ineffableness to it and that one really had to sit down and think and take their time and translate it through the medium of the written word to get to the essence of what I was trying to say, I'm not sure I would have developed as a writer and I imagine that process is something similar to you. Your inability to communicate verbally as effortlessly as you would like probably channels that energy in a different direction. channels that energy in a different direction.

That's exactly right. Writing was always my ball, my oasis, my escape. English was always my best subject, my favorite subject, reading obviously. And you can't be a good writer if you're not a good reader. And I just can't even describe to you what reading and writing have given me. Whatever being a person who's stutter is taking away from me, reading and writing have given me back tenfold.

Yeah, I actually, now that I'm thinking about it, there's not that many examples of really great speakers or orators, or orators who are great writers. I mean, Churchill is probably the exception that proves the rule. Although even he tended to write via dictation, as opposed to by hand. But I do wonder if like what it, conversely I tend to see with athletes, it's almost like the more brilliant you are as an athlete, the less articulate you are.

I wonder if it's because all the energy went towards physical expression, and you just never developed over here the way that you could. Well, just to politely disagree with you on part of that. Go for it. Um, cream at dual jibbar is an incredible writer. And he, I use obviously one of the best basketball players of all time. But I, but I know what you mean.

And I think, you know, it kind of mystifies me if I ever come across a really great writer who is also a really great public speaker. I'm just like, how is that possible? Not fair. Well, it's like, you know, the great, you know, they say you've got a face for radio. It's like the people who have the brilliant voice

are rarely as photogenic as one might hope. But we're never, I think that is one thing we learn in life is that nobody's the complete package. Nobody is the complete package. And that often though, our deficiencies in one area force us to compensate in other areas and that if we were perhaps more evenly balanced, we wouldn't be able to do the things that we end up being able to do. And that's one of these weird upsides of being a person who stutters, or I think being a person with any number of

disabilities, is you are kind of always walking around naked. And you get in barris And you get in barest and you get in uncomfortable situations literally every day of your life to the point where it does eventually get easier. And you're just you know I'm 34 and there's nothing anyone could say to me now as an adult man that's any worse or more painful than taunt size hurt on the playground as a kid.

Yeah, imagine you have a sort of a thick skin from it, but you also have just sort of a plotting sense of like, I have to get through what I'm going to have to get through. Perhaps this is going to be pleasant. Perhaps this is going to be mortifying. Perhaps this is going to be, you know, deeply uncomfortable and awkward, you know, all the things that you end up dreading that in some ways are true, you probably have a sense of your own ability to endure things that other people would probably just be like, I'm out. One of the things I explore in this book is that concept of building up rhino skin, you

know, we call it. Yeah. Just like so, so, so tough that whatever happens rolls off your back. And I think part of that idea is real and true. But what I eventually learned about myself was that not everything was growing off my back. And actually a lot of it, I was just pushing deep, deep, deep, deep down inside of me and putting it in a locked box, I put it in my st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st-st that box kept getting bigger and heavier. And I reached a point where I was around the age of 30 and which I was feeling as though I was about to have a nervous breakdown.

And I finally buckled down and went to psychotherapy and that changed the course of my life. Is that how you started processing this sort of baggage or pain that you've been carrying around or pretending wasn't there? Exactly. And that I think in some cases I didn't even know was there. Sure. But once you open it, I mean it's the Tyron metaphor, but Pandora's Box. And like you can't go back, you know, and all you can do is begin to make peace with and it's it's very empowering just talking to a person and getting these things out there and the more you talk about it the less power it has over

you and it does ultimately become cathartic and liberating. Yeah I mean I think there is this sense of stoicism as being sort of, not just emotionlessness, but sort of being able to be unaffected by the things that have happened to a person, which is probably possible for minor things. But I'm not sure a person can spend 30 years of their life with a stutter, let's say, and that not take a toll on them, that do not accumulate pain and frustration and resentments and, you know, sort of debts, right, between you and other people, between you and society, between you and yourself, that if you, like eventually that bill comes due,

I would guess, right? And there's interest of queuing on it, the longer you pretend it's not there. That's why I love the markets who really is quote, so much that I put in the epigraph, the impediment to action, advances advances action what stands the way becomes the way Because he's not saying

The impediment is no big deal Yes, he's saying the impediment is interwoven to Your existence interwoven to your existence? When you think about, you know, he's not saying, although actually the irony is, in that quote, he's referring to people who get in our way,

right, the specificity of that quote, is he's like, when people get in our way. But I think generally when you look at his life, it's a life filled with overwhelming tragedy. I mean, he loses his father early on, his sort of plan to be a contemplative philosopher is disrupted, he becomes emperor, it's 20 years of pandemics and wars and coups and stuff.

He loses six children before they come into adulthood. It's devastating tragedy after tragedy for him to be a guy who could get out of bed in the morning and say, the impediment to action, advances action with stands in the way, becomes the way. Yeah, he wasn't talking about traffic, you know, he was talking about, he was talking about the heartbreaking devastation that life can inflict on a person. Absolutely. And to be sure,

And to be sure, I am a very, very, very lucky, fortunate person. You know, I'm married. I have a great family, great friends, gainfully employed, I have so much to be thankful for and so many things that just put me in a luckier, more full of it, privileged position than the overwhelming majority of the world's population. And that is never lost on me at any moment. And the only thing I'm trying to get across in this book is my personal with a daily problem can be applied to many other people's daily problems. And I'm hoping that this book and the other people in it and the wisdom I've received from other people gives you a roadmap for not curing your problem, but for just making peace with your problem. What I mean, certainly, you know,

with what we were just talking about, right? One could have a stutter and cancer, one could have a stutter and cancer. One could have a stutter and lose their parents and have all their money stolen from them, right? I mean, like it can always be worse. It's not, that's not always super comforting, but like it is easy because our problems are our problems and they're all we know.

And that's not to dismiss the reality or the severity of our problems either they're all we know. And that's not to dismiss the reality or the severity of our problems either, right? But like, it's so easy to go to this is the worst thing that could have possibly happened when the reality is not even close. Oh, no, yeah, absolutely not. I mean, in the course of writing this book, my wife and I live above a bagel shop in New York City, and there are these two big industrial exhaustive fans out behind our bedroom window. And they click on every morning at 5am, which means that the people downstairs making the bagels have probably already been there for an hour and they've probably woke up an hour and a half before

that and Shelby took two trains and buses to get here. And all I have to do is wake up and write some sentences. And that daily reminder was just the best thing in the world. Yeah, yeah. It's when you can step back and realize how many people would gladly trade places with you. It can sort of cut off the spiral or the pity party before it gets too out of control. Again, it doesn't mean it's awesome to be you, right? Like, it's, this is not, I mean, this generally, I'm not saying you specifically,

like just because someone would trade places with you, doesn't mean you're a king on earth. It just means, you know, before you, before you think that, you know, you're at the absolute bottom of the pile or that the world has Particularly singled you out for misfortune. It's always good to remember like how many people Would die for like 10 seconds of your life Exactly or that even you yourself. I imagine when you were 11 years old imagining one doing this

interview to writing the articles you've done having the job you've had, you tell the story and the book about going on, you know, your first live television hit. I imagine a lot of the things that you've ended up doing in your life were almost inconceivable to you at one point or another, right? Ryan, I can't even imagine doing this interview when I was 29 years old. It's turn my whole life around facing this problem and facing it publicly. And it's made every relationship in my life better. And it's made me a more comfortable person. Well, circling back to writing, you're both a writer and an editor.

I can see how it would make one a better writer, because you're sort of really having to think about what I think about this. I was curious though, do you think it's made you a better editor also? And how so? Yes. And this gets back to what I mentioned earlier about being

acutely conscious of not taking up too much of the reader's time and trying to keep them engaged. I like to think of my writing and editing which go hand in hand. I think of it like a bonsai tree, and you're just always, always, always trying to make that cut. When I was writing this, every night my wife who is total seen, were come in and read that these pages to me out loud. And the reason by what I did this is because even when I'm alone, if I'm the only person in this small room reading out loud, I will still stutter. And that gets

down to the neurological element. It's not because I'm nervous. I'm here alone. I'm not anxious, but it's a neurological disorder. I will still stutter. And the key to good writing is rhythm of momentum. And it upsets me that I can't read my work aloud and maintain that momentum and rhythm. So my wife would read it out loud to me and I would go to my eyes and I would say, okay, like we got to cut that adjective, we got to cut that adverb, that two syllable words to get to make a piece of writing better. Yeah, I can imagine it probably forces you to be both very understanding, but then also very strict with the people who's writing you edit, because

you're not going to put up with indulgent or flowery or poorly written stuff, because you sort of have an economy and a sense of importance on language. And then also, though, you're probably quite empathetic to the idea which I was thinking about because you talk about in the book it's like you were like the struggle of like not being able to articulate to say what you think that's also inherently the struggle of writing like I can speak fine but it's never on the page what I want it to be if it was I would be the greatest writer in the world, right? Nobody, we know what we want to do, right?

We have the sort of sense of what we want the writing to be. It's the fucking doing it that's so hard and it's never as good as you want it to be. So I imagine you have a unique sort of empathy for that and an ability to get someone from A to B. Yes, absolutely. And that reality that you just articulated is the case for literally every writer,

even people like Michael Lewis, there's this great quote, I wish I had in front of me, but he told an interviewer once, he said, my rating process is sweaty and elegant. And I think he said, you know, paraphrasing here. So I mean, I get exactly right. But I think he said that he rewrites every chapter or something like 20 times, just trying to get it down to that pure essence. And when you think of Michael Lewis, big short money ball, all these blockbuster nonfiction books, big short money ball, all these blockbuster nonfiction books, the overarching quality of his work is clarity, the condition, kind of above anybody else. And it's reassuring to learn that it can take him 20 times to get there. Yeah, the Hemingway line, the first draft of anything is shit.

And then we're all struggling with the gap between what we're trying to say and what we're able to say. Yes, and that gap is pronounced when you're a person who stutter is. Well, go ahead. Oh, no, it's okay. Good. No, I was just going to say as we're wrapping up, because this conversation has been awesome. I was thinking about your piece on Biden,

which I found to be beautiful and moving, just as I found when they did the virtual convention and they had that little boy with also with a stutter, do a talk. I was curious, after I've read that and I thought, like it's interesting that someone who is so well-known who's been in the public eye for so long, and maybe this goes to why having a stutter is so hard,

and your point about never having realized there were resources to help you get along in a world not designed for that. It seems like it's just totally taken for granted that this guy had a stutter and is past it and that's fundamentally not how it works. If you're a kid who stutters, and brain to, you know, for lack of a better word, cure your stutter.

This can happen with therapy or it can happen naturally. have 75% of all kids who who's a dutter won't have the problem as adults. But for about 25% they will continue to stutter for the rest of their lives. And the best you can do if you fall into that category is learn to manage it.

Biden continued to stutter through high school and college, well past the point of a little kid, but became very adept at managing it, and for the bulk of his political career, he managed it. But if you go back and you watch old addresses and old things, you can see the manifestations of it's still the coping mechanisms. And what I found and what other people who stood or found adults, what researchers, academics, therapists, was as Biden reached this later point in his life, he just turned 80, as he was getting older and older, he simply became less adept at managing the stuff, which, you know, look at anyone, you look at Bill Clinton now compared to the way Bill Clinton sounded in the 90s.

They don't sound exactly the same. It doesn't mean that either of them have dementia. It's just the reality of aging. That's what I was thinking about. It's like we're so quick to reduce or be worried about or criticize what seems like, yeah, the mark of a slower, a slowing down 80 year old. And it struck me, you know,

sort of thinking about it through the lens of your work is like, this dude must be tired. Like just tired, his brain and his body must be tired. And in the way that I'm sure John McCain's arm was tired, his brain and his body must be taught. In the way that I'm sure John McCain's arm was tired, you know, like you find a way to compensate or mitigate the injury done to you that was not your fault. But as you get older, like the idea that you're gonna be able to continue to keep that up the same way, it is unlikely.

And it feels like we're doing a bad job having empathy for that and trying to ascribe to it some sort of unfitness instead of saying, oh, I can very easily meet you halfway on that. And to be sure, having a stutter is not a, get out of jail free card. It doesn't explain everything. This is not a one-size-fits-all answer. There are plenty of moments in which Joe Biden mixes up a name or a fact, and those moments have nothing to do with being a person who's stutter. But there are other moments in which he clearly exhibits the secondary behaviors that are associated with stuttering,

like loss of eye contact, rapid blinks, down to very visible things, like moving his mouth, like sometimes you'll seem like, you know, and that is nothing to do with getting an old. Those are manifestations of a stutter. And he actively managed it, manages it, manages it still, but just not in the same way. I think you managed it around the age of 40. But what you said is really important because it all comes down to our society's lack of understanding, lack of interest, lack of nuance when it comes to disability. Yeah, and realizing that, I just, again, just thinking about it through the lens of your work.

And I think these are pretty good presidents. There's things I very much disagree with them on and things I do agree with them on. But I was thinking about it in terms of like, you're saying like, hey, I don't want to sign up for this speech class. And I may, may well drop out of college, you know, because it's in some ways easier than the ordeal that I'm, you know, dreading. And you're like, this guy has the most public job in the entire world. The job that demands the most verbal acuity, the most sort of quickness on your feet,

the most preciseness in your language. And the fact that he's doing even a half decent job communicating, that he could get up on a debate stage and go toe-to-toe with a person who's, I won't say bright, but certainly good on television, right? It's a... In all of human history, our, you know, sort of, tales of people who have had stutters, I mean, it kind of ranks up there with the de-mostenies or whomever, right?

Like that he could do it at any level given what he's been through. I'm not sure we we appropriately credit or acknowledge just what what a feat of strength and skill that must be in fortitude. And Biden as a kid adopted the, the Demosthenes method where he pebbles in his mouth. Yeah. It's pretty wild the way all of these things are interwoven. And it's a beautiful story.

And I thought your piece was amazing and I thought this book was amazing and I was so glad to see Marcus at the beginning and I hope that the story inspires people and it was absolutely awesome talking with you and I can only imagine how stressful and difficult the press and book tour has been, but I hope you give yourself credit. But as you said, if you couldn't even have comprehended doing this interview a few years ago, I hope it's really striking you just what you're pulling off here because you did awesome and the book is great too. Well, thank you so so much for having me. It's an honor to talk with you,

big fan of your work. And I appreciate all the positivity that you put out there on the internet. Because like I said, I'll be looking at Instagram and she won't bad about myself. And then I'll see your poster and daily stow a post and I'll be like all right here we go it kind of resets me but thank you very much I really appreciate everything awesome I hope everyone

checks out the book it's really good life on delay making peace with the stutter by John Hendrix and John. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks, Brian. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode. Hey Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery

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