Alan Watts, Wu Wei, and McStoicism: What Popular Philosophy Gets Wrong - with Frank Saunders Jr.

https://eggshelltherapy.com/podcast-blog/2026/07/30/frank/

If you have searched for help with anxiety or overthinking, YouTube has probably offered you ten Stoic principles that will change your life, or Taoism explained as going with the flow, sometimes in an approximation of Alan Watts's voice.

My guest is Frank P. Saunders Jr., a philosopher who works on Chinese thought and who has spent the past couple of years making videos about philosophy and public philosophy. 

We began with McStoicism, the version of Stoicism made to go down easily and keep you coming back. Of the distortions he identifies, the one he thinks does the most damage is the promise that this is not difficult. When the ten tips do not work, people conclude that Stoicism does not work for them, or that they are the kind of person for whom nothing works. His formulation is that the results were overstated and the effort was understated.

The second thing that gets removed is God. Surrendering to a world that is indifferent to you is a different act from aligning yourself with a world that is going somewhere.

On emotions, the Stoics did say you should let go of certain feelings, but only because they thought doing so would make you a genuinely better person, someone who could not be shaken by loss or circumstance. The popular version keeps the letting go and loses the point of it. 

Stoicism was about becoming brave, honest, fair, and useful to the people around you. Marcus Aurelius keeps saying you do this for your community, not for your own calm. However, these are rarely mentioned online in the fast food versions of Stoicism, which ask nothing of you, though they may also give little back. 

The second half of our chat turns to the problems with AI-generated Alan Watts video and perennialism. Watts would tell a Taoist story, then a Zen story, then something about a Christian choir, and make them all point the same way. Frank's objection is that the traditions are not saying the same thing.

On wu wei: Frank argues that nothing done at an expert level is effortless. What changes with mastery is where the effort goes, because the expert knows what to attend to.  

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