BONUS | The State of The Daily Stoic Podcast

It’s been eight years since The Daily Stoic Podcast launched. In today’s bonus episode, Ryan looks back on the journey to 2,600+ episodes and shares what’s next. 👉 Support the podcast and go deeper into Stoicism by subscribing to The Daily Stoic Premium - unlock ad-free listening, early access, and bonus content coming soon: dailystoic.com/premium http://dailystoic.com/premium 📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work":https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast 🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:05Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.

• 0:56Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Happy New Year, everyone. I know it's not actually New Year, but it feels like a New Year. Just got back from vacation and went straight into a new school year. And you get into a rhythm when you have kids of, you know, is the New Year from January to December? I guess, but my year is August to June. That's a year. I don't know. It just feel, it feels like a new year just started. The kids are a year older, even though their age hasn't actually changed,

• 1:38Ryan Holiday?

  back in the rhythm of things. We had our little brief window with no commute, no homework, no things we had to do or places we had to be, no sports, just hanging out. We had this amazing trip to Greece. It was lovely. Spent about a month there. Could have been a little shorter. No, we had a lovely trip as a family. Actually, learned a lot, as I talked about in one of the Daily Dad episodes we did. And we went there because my son is obsessed with Greek history and we're trying to encourage his interests. And of course, I also love Greek history, so I'm not going to try to nip that in the bud. I want to encourage it. But I had this lovely trip. Now, school just started and the Wisdom Takes Work launch is gearing up. So that it just,

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  it feels like a chapter ended and a chapter begins, right? The book is done, except for the audiobook, which I am recording now. And then, yeah, I go into the marketing mode and then I'm working on my next book. So anyways, a lot of things wrapping up, a lot of things starting. So I thought I would do a state of the show episode in honor of this new year, which is not actually a new year, I know, but you get my point. So we launched the Daily Stoic Podcast eight years ago, which is mind blowing to me. I mean, we launched Daily Stoic roughly nine years ago. So we started, it was the daily email. It started going out to about 10,000 people.

• 3:04Ryan Holiday?

  It grew and it grew and grew. The site launched in August of 2016. The book came out in October of 2016 also. Then maybe a year, year and a half in, started hearing from all these people. They were like, I just don't want an extra email every day. And I was like, okay, I get that. They were like, can I listen to it? And so we started the Daily Stoic Podcast, which was basically just me reading the emails. And I write a lot of the Daily Stoic emails pretty far in advance. Like, right now, we probably have 60 to 70 Daily Stoic emails in the can. Because I write a couple of them a day. Not as much when I'm working on a book, but in between books, I usually go on a tear and I write a bunch. I'll read something and I'll write three or four emails about that thing.

• 3:48Ryan Holiday?

  Then those have to be spaced out over a long period of time. So we're always just kind of adding to this.

• 3:55Ryan Holiday?

  Backlog of them. And then Brendan tightens them down and then Claire, our podcast editor edits the audio and then the team comes up with an editorial schedule and they come out. Since we launched this eight years ago, we've done 2,650 episodes of the podcast. Now, the vast majority of those are the daily email, which we do five days a week. But in the fall of 2019, we started expanding. We started doing longer form episodes on the weekends as podcasting as a medium started to come together. So we would do, we started Ask Daily Stoic, which is like now the Thursday episode that you listen to when I answer questions. We started doing sort

• 4:39Ryan Holiday?

  of deep dives into topics on YouTube and then we'd run those. And then I started riffing on ideas in the Daily Stoic book. So we started building out and went from a couple of days a week to all seven days a week. In fact, I remember when we took over the buildings here before the bookstore was built out one evening with our Zoom recorder. I had it propped up on the, basically that where the orders would come out because the, the, the building used to be a Mexican restaurant. So we're sitting there and sort of with the window where the chefs would put out the order and it's echoing because it's this totally empty building. And it was like, we gotta find a smaller place to record. If you've been to the Painted Porch in the last couple of years, you may

• 5:22Ryan Holiday?

  have seen this because we kept that takeout window. This was part of the, the kids' part of the bookstore. We actually just tore all that out a couple of weeks ago and now we've expanded the kids' section of the bookstore. And then we ended up buying this old barber shop, which is next door. And the barber, John, who'd been there since 1969, when he came back from Vietnam, is a lovely guy, cut my hair a bunch of times. We bought that building during the pandemic with the idea that it would be a great place to do a podcast studio at one point. And we, part of the stipulation when we bought the building was, We'd let John stay in it as long as he wanted. And he lasted another couple of years and then he died. And we decided we did not want to run a barber shop.

• 6:05Ryan Holiday?

  So we converted that to the podcast studio. If you've ever seen some of the walkthroughs, you can still see we've got the old linoleum, black and white floors on there. And I actually have the barber chair that he used to, used to use. His name and logo is still up on the window. It's what we walk through. We walk out of the studio and then down one building into the bookstore. And we do those walkthroughs that we post on YouTube. But we built out a studio, I guess, two years ago now. It's my wife's office and it's where we record the podcast. And that's where we started doing the interviews. And we've interviewed so many amazing people. We sit at the Joan Didion table, as you know, that I bought from Joan Didion's estate. And, you know, we've interviewed Super Bowl champions. We've interviewed military leaders.

• 6:49Ryan Holiday?

  We've interviewed bestselling authors. We've interviewed heroes of mine. Samantha and I, my wife, sit there and talk about parenting every couple of weeks as well. It's also where I've recorded my last three, four audiobooks. It's where I'm in the middle of recording Wisdom Takes Work right now. I guess I'm just sort of telling you this because the show has evolved a lot over the years. It was something, again, we just started as this little addition to the email. The email being the sort of the main show, if you will, that we put on every day. The Daily Stoic email now goes out to over a million people all over the world. Daily Dad goes out to about another 100,000 or so. So it's a lot, right?

• 7:34Ryan Holiday?

  We're emailing a million people every day. And then the podcast has become this kind of behemoth too. Again, I didn't think there was any real business part of it at all when I had the idea. It was just, how long could it take? And how much could it cost to record a couple of minutes of audio every day? And I could talk to all of you as part of it. And I could tell you about books that are coming out or talks that I'm doing or things that are going on in the world. Well, it turns out it can actually cost quite a bit because we've done something like 150 million plus downloads of the.

• 8:06Ryan Holiday?

  Podcast in the years since it launched and those hosting bills are enormous. And we had to hire editors. Obviously, the studio required its own building and space. So it's been a lot, but it's been really, really cool. And it's become this whole big thing. And three years ago, we signed with WME, the talent agency. Ben Davis is our agent and he took the show out and we signed a deal with Wondery, which is owned by Amazon and Amazon Music. And Wondery was our ad partner. They sold the ads, they sold sponsorships. They had an ad free component, if any of you were Wondery Plus subscribers or maybe listen to it on Amazon Music.

• 8:51Ryan Holiday?

  It was a great partnership. They helped us grow the show in a big way. They helped us expand. They helped us grow our audience. That was really cool. We thought we were gonna renew with them and they were going through some changes, as it turns out, and that didn't work out. And so we started working with Backyard Ventures, who actually we've been working with since the very beginning. They're the ones who helped us first conceive of the podcast as more than just like a little extra thing. Backyard Ventures also sells the ads that you sometimes see in the Daily Stoic emails or helps us with sponsorships on social media and stuff. They've been a great supporter of the show, who we've worked with a long time as well.

• 9:34Ryan Holiday?

  So now all the different platforms are under one banner, supported by the same team. It's been great. It's kind of simplified things, taken some things off my plate. Grateful to the folks at Wondery over the last few years for their support. Pumped about the work we're doing with Backyard Ventures. They made the transition super smooth and seamless. And so the other interesting thing about Wondery, one of the reasons we were thinking about switching was there was like a paywall, right? The episodes would come out and then they would be behind the Wondery paywall for about a week. And that was mostly for people who didn't want to listen to ads and it was sort of an incentive to sign up. Still put out the same Amount of content. So the paywall was really just like, some people were listening to the

• 10:18Ryan Holiday?

  episode seven days before the others, but there was always two new episodes each week. But one of the things that happened along the way was that Apple changed its accounting for what was a download and what wasn't. Like when you click subscribe to a podcast, which is by the way, super important. If you like this show or you like any podcast, you want to support the host, don't just like pull it up every week and listen to it, but subscribe to it as those numbers really matter. And then they download to your phone. It's a whole thing. But anyways, Apple changed its thing, maybe a year and a half ago, two years ago. And so it started to say, hey, if you don't, if you don't listen to the episodes, like right away after they download on your phone, they start to stop downloading them on

• 11:00Ryan Holiday?

  your phone. It sort of treats you as like a zombie subscriber. And so one of the things that was happening with Wondery is because Wondery had like paywall episodes up. It was like triggering that. All of a sudden, we went from a certain amount of downloads to a much lower amount of downloads, even though nothing changed. Just this feature in the paywall was sort of sending the wrong signal to the algorithm. So that is going away. That's great. We're sort of relieved about that. It's also a lot less work. We can just post the episodes. You can listen to them. And we don't have to go, okay, I would be like, okay, so who's this week's episode? And Claire would go like, well, what we're posting for Wondery Plus is this, but this one won't be up until this. And so having to think about what I was going to say, like,

• 11:43Ryan Holiday?

  is this idea going to keep for 14 days? Or whatever, you know, the idea is like, how do we simplify it? How do we make it more straightforward? I don't know. I think that's going to be good. I'm excited about that. Most of all, thank you for listening. We wouldn't be here if you weren't listening. But are ads the most fun thing in the world to listen to? No, I get it. But as I said, it's not free to make a podcast. And in fact, there's a whole team that supports it. And I want to support them. I want to pay people fairly. I want to get great talent. I want to continue growing and expanding. You know, we, we put out a daily show. There's not many independent content producers who can do that.

• 12:26Ryan Holiday?

  Like, look, if you're the New York Times, you can put out the daily. If you're NPR or some big media organization, you can do that. This is this tiny little team that again, started with just me writing books and then writing emails. And it's grown and it's grown and it's grown. And those, those sponsors who I'm pretty discerning about who we take on. There's actually a, a little conversation, I think it was with Jordan Herbinger that I talked about this with.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  The problem is you have to make upstream choices in order to not put yourself in a position to, to say something bad. Like, if I have a sponsor that I think is crap, I'm already in trouble.

• 13:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Right? Like, if I'm shilling something where I'm like,

• 13:08Ryan Holiday?

  Now I can't talk bad about.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Gamblingonline.net, everybody, like, I'm like, how did I end up in this mess? So what I do is I write things into contracts. It's like, I have to approve all of my sponsors. And if the sponsor does this thing, or it turns out to be something else, I will cancel it. And I will just lose the money. Sometimes I have to just lose money. Like, if, if it's like, oh, this company has pivoted to do this thing, but we've already approved it. I have to be like, hey, agency, I approved it thinking it was this.

• 13:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  I didn't realize they forced people to buy the, this thing every month and you can't cancel it. I don't want to do that anymore. I'm getting complaints. And they're like, well, we have a six-month contract.

• 13:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you've already done two of the ads.

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I'm like, well, I don't want to keep doing it, so let me know how to wind this down. And like, all right, can you do the next 30 days of it? But then you have to, and to wind it down. And if it's really egregious, I'll just be like, no, I just, I will pay back the, I cancel the whole campaign. I'll give the money back for the ads I've already run. My sales team is like, thanks a lot, jerk face, right? Because they, their commission goes down the toilet.

• 14:10Ryan Holiday?

  Are there types of advertisers you won't?

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I won't do any sort of gambling thing. And I even tell my, my network, you know how those automated ones come in sometimes? I'm like, block the whole gambling category. The problem is these companies that do things like gambling are, in my opinion, already unethical. So what they do is they say, this ad is home and garden. And, and then we catch them and they go, gosh, this, this casino ad was under home and garden. And they'll go, oh, that, that was an accident. No, it wasn't. You just lied because we blocked the gambling category and you want to advertise to people who have said no already. So they do that and they can say, oh, if somebody checked the wrong box.

• 14:44Ryan Holiday?

  Because you get, you, you, you're like, here's the, the categories that I approve.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:48Ryan Holiday?

  Or here's the things I won't do. And then so they try to find a way around it.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So of course the ads I voice, if I see copy that's like gambling online.

• 14:57Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Sometimes you don't see it until you're like literally sitting down and you're like, wait, this is, these are.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. There's that. And there's also the ads that are not voiced by me that are just like an announcer and they go across 10,000 different podcasts. I might not even know that's in there.

• 15:09Ryan Holiday?

  I care a little bit less about those in that like, I feel like, one, I'm not endorsing it and two, I have no control over what the YouTube ads are. That doesn't keep me up at night. You know what I like?

• 15:18Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 15:18Ryan Holiday?

  Maybe this is rationalizing, but I think there's, there's obviously different levels of it. But yeah, when I'm sitting down and I'm saying the thing.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  You're endorsing.

• 15:26Ryan Holiday?

  I'm saying you should bet on sports and I don't really think you should.

• 15:41Ryan Holiday?

  So I think a lot about who we're going to accept sponsorships from. One of the things I've liked about Wondery and one of the things I've liked about Backyard is this, you know, they sell, but I still get approval over who we run. So I don't accept ads from alcohol or weed companies. I don't accept ads from gambling companies. I don't accept things that I think are scams or dishonest. I try not to accept anything I don't personally use or someone on the team hasn't said, oh no, that's great. I like that. Does this cost us a lot of money? Probably. Does it sometimes frustrate the ad partners?

• 16:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. But you know, this is one of the ideas I talk about in Justice and we just did an episode about this, that you sort of are what you won't do for money. So I think a lot about, you know, who we accept sponsorships from. And by the way, if you ever have a problem with someone we accept a sponsorship from, or you think there's information that we should know, you can email [email protected]. I take that kind of thing seriously. And I've also been talking a little bit lately about podcasting as a medium, which I was really, really excited about when they first came out. Then when I was talking to James Altucher. That was one of the things he and I talked about. Can these be bad for your brain?

• 17:02Ryan Holiday?

  I was once very bullish on podcasts and now I'm increasingly beginning to think they're very bad for you. So like, and I think part of it is the switch from a feed-based universe. Like, if you think about podcasts five or 10 years ago, a podcast is something you subscribe to. It's long form. The ads are pre-sold. So whether an episode does a million listens or 500 listens, like you already sold it, right? It's not, it's not sort of sold in this real-time marketplace. And it's primarily conversational. And so I thought that was all, those are all relatively positive elements of a medium that I think are designed to produce intelligent, good information.

• 17:46Ryan Holiday?

  Now, what happens is a podcast goes from being just video or just audio to also video. And video, like people, a good chunk, 30 to 40% of the people who are consuming this episode will be watching it on YouTube. That's why I have this studio, right? It gotta just look nice. But, but YouTube is inherently algorithmic. So it becomes how the thumbnail of the episode and the title of the episode and how many comments it generates and right? The watch time, all these other forces are now operating on you as a content creator. And then I would say the other thing is they now sell real-time ads in your thing. So like you, for people to understand, you plug in this like little chunk of code and they sell ads in that code.

• 18:30Ryan Holiday?

  So if the episode blows up, they serve more ads. If it doesn't, whatever, they serve less. And so it, there's a greater sort of connection between content and profit. And then I think the other thing that I'm realizing is that, like when McLuhan said, the medium is the message. What he was saying is that, you know, the, and you know, Postman talked about this too. Whatever the medium goes towards or elicits from the creator is most conducive to, it shapes the kind of content, right? And so like, it's very hard. I think people think that podcasts are good because it has like two people who disagree, talking with each other. Or it's like, maybe, you know, people outside the mainstream or whatever.

• 19:12Ryan Holiday?

  Actually, what I think a two hour conversation is really good for is bullshit. Like, I'm not gonna have you here and then like, hold your feet to the fire for two hours. That's like, that'd be incredibly awkward on a personal level. Do you know what I mean?

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Also boring.

• 19:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, sort of that too. But I guess what I'm saying is that the friendliness of the medium actually allows crazy people and bullshit artists and manipulators and whatever, who are good, to use the medium to introduce shitty ideas or untrue things.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  But do you think that's true for every medium?

• 19:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, but it's harder to, uh, it's harder to insert outright nonsense and bullshit into a mainstream newspaper than a three hour conversation where both people are smoking weed. Do you know what I mean?

• 19:59Speaker 02

  And also, you have to understand with podcasts, the, I'm talking about audio podcasts now. There, you have a captive audience because they're either in their car or they're at their gym. That's where people consume podcasts. And so they're not switching while they're driving. They're not switching while they're on the treadmill.

• 20:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  So you have, it's probably more than most media, you have a captive audience.

• 20:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. And so you can kind of do these meandering, long form, like, I just, the, when I hear people talk about things that I really know about, I'm like, this is, they're not even close.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:29Ryan Holiday?

  You know? And so it's, it's interesting to watch people, as, and I think any medium, as it develops, it's, there's this kind of innocence and purity in the early days. And then people who need access to an audience get really good at figuring out how to sort of inject themselves into, like, I think Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a great example of a person who's just utterly full of shit and probably, like, literally insane, who has figured out that, oh, this medium is conducive to spreading my type of thinking because it's fundamentally unrigorous and it's, but there's fundamentally a captive audience. And it doesn't, you don't go to a podcast to get political or medical advice for the most part.

• 21:11Ryan Holiday?

  But if your favorite comedian is interviewing that person, now you're, that's being downloaded directly into your brain. So what I think about, or what I am thinking about with The Daily Stoic, is how can it be a podcast that's good for your brain? And I do love the idea of being able to take these ancient ideas and have them be listenable to people all over the world. I try to take the responsibility of the platform seriously, which I don't think all my peers necessarily do. Talked about this in Trust Me, I'm Lying, but that the way to game the metrics of a medium, it's a relentless enticing temptation for people.

• 21:55Ryan Holiday?

  And I think you are seeing already, you know, people who are getting really good at gaming the podcasting algorithm. And the early days of podcasting, when we started, you know, there was no algorithm to game. It was a feed and you listened to the episodes as they came out each day. And that chronology just meant you should deliver something of high quality. And that's been going away. But so I don't think, hey, how's this guest gonna do? I think about, is this gonna be a good conversation? Is this gonna add value? Is this someone I want to talk to? I like that Tyler Cowen on his podcast, he goes, "This is a conversation I want to have, not the podcast you want to have." And I know I've personally gained a lot from the people that we've had on.

• 22:37Ryan Holiday?

  And I, I know many of you have too, because you've written in about it. So I'm not saying you shouldn't listen to podcasts. Obviously, I think you should. I, I listen to podcasts on my commute and on my walks. I'm just saying that there's something about these like three hour, shoot the shit, I'll talk to anyone, I'm open minded podcasts that seem to be rotting a lot of people's brains. And I'm trying to be the antidote to that. It's also been interesting watching the podcasting as a medium, which was primarily audio. Become also an audio visual medium. And the studio we had to build is a testament to that. Always needing to prove the audio quality, but the video quality and the cinematics of it.

• 23:21Ryan Holiday?

  I know some of you probably wouldn't be listening to this episode again, but even in the last few years, it's been a big shift. YouTube is now like the second biggest, in some cases, the biggest podcasting platform for people. And we do post the episodes over on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel. I personally don't know how people sit and watch an hour, let alone a three hour podcast, but millions of people do. And the episodes of the Daily Stoic podcast, since we've built out the studio, have developed their own audience, not just on YouTube, but we've posted the episodes on Twitter and on Facebook in video form.

• 24:03Ryan Holiday?

  And then the clips of the show, sometimes just single clips, a minute, two minutes from an episode, might go on to do millions and millions of views. When Matthew McConaughey was on the podcast, did a live episode on the back porch of the painted porch, and someone asked him about like his tuna salad recipe, that clip alone got something like eight million views. How crazy is that? I just couldn't have imagined any of that when we've launched this podcast eight years ago. I've learned a lot over the years doing the Daily Stoic podcast. There's been something about doing this podcast that's kept me honest. Like Buzz Williams, who I had on the podcast, he has this thing about being an everyday guy. And actually, I asked him about it when he was on the podcast.

• 24:48Ryan Holiday?

  This is what he said.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  Are you tough enough to be an everyday guy? I think, I don't think it has anything to do with Paul. I think a lot of it has to do with how I was raised and what I witnessed as I was growing up is whatever it is that you're trying to do, however you deem success, are you tough enough to do that every single day? And I think that time, if you're basing it on talent, well, talent at some point in time probably will prevail, but not always. And so if you remove talent. Then it becomes consistency, then it becomes discipline, then it becomes, how are you spending your time and are you tough enough to do those things every day?

• 25:29Speaker 03

  And like I tell our guys all the time, I would like to win, but I want to win playing my hand. And I'm okay losing if I'm not playing my hand.

• 25:40Ryan Holiday?

  Huh.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  And my hand is what I believe is right. And I can't sacrifice what I believe those things to be all right. And I'm not saying that I am right. I'm just saying an everyday person is who I respect the most. An everyday person, their talent is going to improve because they're tough enough to do it every day.

• 26:04Ryan Holiday?

  It was funny when Buzz came, Buzz was then the head coach at A and M. Now he's the head coach at University of Maryland, basketball coach. He's one of the people who introduced me to coach traveling, one of my absolute favorite people. But it's funny, when he came on the podcast, we basically reenacted a story that I tell in Discipline is Destiny, which was about dressing for success. Like one of the benefits, I think of being a writer is that I just dress however I want. T-shirt, jeans, shorts, whatever. Actually, when Elliot Ackerman was on the podcast, like I walk in and he goes, did you just go for a run? I think he was curious, but he's also, I was like, whoa, okay, sorry. I didn't dress up. You guys went for a run? Uh, no. Okay. This is, that's how I dress. Nice. Well, you're ready to run.

• 26:49Ryan Holiday?

  I walked the dog earlier and then I was like, oh yeah, this is why I dress this way. It's because it's like you're switching between roles. And it's like, if I'm dressed for like, it's like, why am, why am I dressed for the made up thing that I'm not doing? And what I'm actually doing is chasing children around or walking dogs. Yeah, I thought that was really funny, but anyways, I, I was like, oh, Buzz is coming, you know, he's a pro. I should probably dress up a little bit. So I put on, I put on real clothes. Again, I basically only put on real clothes when I'm doing a, a talk these days or I'm about to appear on television. And then of course Buzz shows up in basketball shorts and a T-shirt. And I, I just thought that was hilarious. You can see the video of this.

• 27:32Ryan Holiday?

  And then when I was talking to Cal Newport about his book Slow Productivity, he actually hit me because in speaking about just sort of coming back to school and the craziness of all this, one of the hard parts about being an everyday guy with the podcast, like there's this everydayness to it. Like every episode you hear had to be recorded well in advance and then edited and set up to run like that day. There's just a, there's a ceaselessness to it and it's a lot. And so like if I go out of town for three weeks or I'm doing a book launch or I'm trying to film, I, I have to batch a lot of stuff. And so we were talking about taking time off, but basically taking that time off,

• 28:15Ryan Holiday?

  what that means is I have to do double time somewhere else. And so as I've tried to introduce some seasonality into my life and work where I'm lighter in the summers, I have more time with my kids or, you know, I want to spend time really focusing on a book or just for my own peace of mind, I've noticed that what that can mean is just higher stress in other points. And so I've really been trying to work on with the team and in my own life, how to avoid that. So being so far ahead that we can absorb that stuff, but not needing to just cram. So then you can take a few days off. Again, that one of the beautiful parts about the podcast is just all the things that it helps me think about. And that conversation with Cal was really great.

• 29:01Ryan Holiday?

  I just thought I'd update you on what's going on. Couple of housekeeping notes, I guess. So if you're wondering like, hey, why am I hearing ads when I wasn't hearing ads before? That might be because you were a Wondery Plus subscriber or you were listening on Amazon Music, which was ad free because Amazon and Wondery were one. Backyard is setting this up with a premium edition. If you hate ads, I get that. It's called Daily Stoic Premium. And with premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast completely ad free. No interruptions, just the conversation. And you can get early access to some of the episodes as well. If you want to do that, you just go to daily stoic.com/premium and you can sign up

• 29:45Ryan Holiday?

  or click the link. I think that'll be cool. So you can check that out if you want to skip those. And then if you listen to the show, you'll know the last words that I often say in most episodes is so you want to go check out some books. And we checked to make sure everything got recorded. And then we put on these external mics. And then we walk next door. As I said, we walk out the back of the studio, which is actually to the front of the street. We go through this little storefront that we haven't quite figured out what to do with yet. Was sort of the previously the waiting room at John's Barbershop. And then we go over back into the bookstore. And then we just talk about books. Many people

• 30:27Ryan Holiday?

  on YouTube have pointed out that I don't hold the door open wide enough for the guests or long enough for the guests as I go in because I go in first because I'm going to show them around. They don't know where we're going. And sometimes it swings back and hits Claire, who's filming or Jordan who's filming. There's not really a way around this. I don't know what to tell you. I'm leading them where we're going. And then I'm holding the door. The door opens inward. So I have to open the door. Once I get through it, or again, it creates a weird traffic jam. And then sometimes there's people in the store. It's a whole thing. But the point is, if you like listening to this podcast, and you want to see what happens after the behind the scenes stuff, head on over. We post these on my YouTube

• 31:09Ryan Holiday?

  channel, which I will link to. They're just me and the guests riffing on books. Sometimes they stay for an extra hour. Sometimes it's 10 minutes. And I try to pick out a few books that I think they will like. Sometimes that are based on the conversation we just had. Sometimes they're books I'm recently reading. Sometimes they're ones I think really connect with their work. Sometimes they're pointing out books that they love. It's just a great conversation. It is funny. Now we have to tell the person or their team, you're not paying for the books. Because I'll be like, I think you'd like this. I think you'll and I see the guest going like. I don't know. Like, I'm not bullying you into buying these books. Sometimes they'll leave with 10 books. Like, I'm not just tricking you into spending a couple hundred bucks at the bookstore.

• 31:54Ryan Holiday?

  So that's my way of saying thank you to the guests. And it also makes great, great content. The other funny thing is like, sometimes people are coming in, Austin, part of the reason I live here is it's an easy city to get in and out of. They flew in that morning and they're flying out that afternoon and they're, they only have a carry on. And so we have to go, you're not paying for the books. This is not up for debate. These are my treat. And then also, we're happy to mail them to you. And Mace, the fighter pilot, was just in here and she posted a great video for unboxing the videos that she got. I thought that was cool. Anyways, this has gone on longer than it probably needed to. I just wanted to kind of tell you what's going on with the show. I also wanted to express my gratitude to you for listening. Thank you very much.

• 32:38Ryan Holiday?

  I'm going to keep doing this podcast as long as people keep listening, as long as people want to keep coming down and having conversations, as long as Stoicism still lights me up. So I assume that's going to go on for a long time. Thank you for listening. Thank you for the support. Sign up for Daily Stoic Premium if you want an ad-free version of the podcast. Please preorder Wisdom Takes Work. That's going to be coming out October 21st. We've got signed, numbered first editions. As I said, the audiobook is almost done. I'm really excited for all that. We'll talk soon.

• 33:18Ryan 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.