Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 215: RYAN HOLIDAY: Discipline Is Destiny

Episode Date: September 26, 2022

Link to submit questions: bit.ly/3U3sTvo- INTERVIEW with Ryan Holiday [10:00] - Cal and Jesse talk about Holiday interview [1:13:57]Thanks to our Sponsors:mybodytutor.comwren.co/deepnotion.comhensonshaving.com/cal  (enter Cal at checkout for 100 free blades)Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 2.15. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, one of the things I'm excited about today is we have a guest, which has been a little while, but it's definitely been one of our ambitions to have more interviews on the show. so to help kick off a season which we may have more of those coming, I sat down with our friend of the show,

good friend of the show, Ryan Holiday. Exciting stuff. Yeah, yeah, there's a new book coming out. Discipline is destiny. It comes out this week, the week that this podcast comes out. He is on track to sell, and this is the official number

I just got from Book Scan, all the copies. That's what that says there. He has quite the following. I think this book's going to do quite well, but it was a good, good chance to catch up. I'll say the long-term plan for guests in case you're wondering is in the future what we would like, it might take us again a couple months to we're really there. Two episodes a week. Always the standard Q&A episode like you know and love, deep questions.

It's us answering questions from you, taking calls from you, other episode each week, doing a deep dive with a guest on a particular type of topic that we would cover normally on. on the show. So guest, Q&A, guest Q&A. That's ultimately where we want to end up. The other exciting thing about today's guest episode is the first time in the history of the show that we have, knock on wood, video of guests. So that should be nice.

I'm excited about that format. I can't wait to hear you talk to other people. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I love the, you know, I love video. And so I like that we can also watch it. So at the YouTube.com slash Countyport Media will be able to release the video of Ryan and I talking as well as clips from our interview. There's a lot of cool people I want to talk to. For me, my goal here is not so much of I just want to have a bunch of famous people on. I'm happy having people return again and again. What I want to do is bring in other interesting thinkers to tackle

the type of issues that we do on the show, that we tackle on the show. I want to bring in the most interesting brains to people with the biggest experiences, to people who come out things from completely different angles. We could have certainly repeat guests. We tackle different topics each time they're here. We can have guests. They're just here one time. I think there's a whole universe of interesting conversations to add into the mix. So the Q&A is not going anywhere.

And it might just be Q&A for a little while, more or less. But we're going to be adding more guests in the not too distant future. So, I mean, this conversation we had today was a great one. We start by talking about, you'll hear, the book, Discipline is Destiny. So we talk about discipline and why Ryan is writing about that, his main ideas. we do a little bit of advice by proxy. I say, okay, assume I'm a reader and this is my, my issue and I need more discipline. I'm in this circumstance.

What would you do? Okay, assume I'm in this circumstance. How should I think about this? And then as often happens when I get together with Ryan, we end up veering off to get in the weeds and play a little insider baseball on the publishing industry. His and I similar rise through, you know, becoming writers and having media companies and how to balance that all. So we end up covering, I think, a fair amount of topics. And we kept it tight, right, Jesse?

Because he had a hard out. Yeah. We got a good, you know, I think one hour, get in, get out, keep it tight. Yeah, that was a good conversation. No Joe Rogan style three hours here. But I think it's fine. I think it's good. So anyways, that's the plan.

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Ryan Holiday, welcome back to the Deep Questions podcast. As often seems to be the case, you have a book out. Yes, that's pretty much the norm these days, is that I have a book out or about to come out. It's true. It would be hard in the recent history to talk to you and for you to say, no, I don't really have anything in the works. Yes. Just, I'm board. So the new book, Discipline is Destiny. It's coming out the same week that this podcast releases. So if you're hearing this, it's out or about to come out. Let's start there. I want to get into the book. So this is one of four books based around the four Stoic virtues. It's the second one. The first book was Courage as calling. So the Stoic Virtue, it's often translated,

the relevant virtue is temperance. So what's going on here? What's the thinking behind discipline as the term you used for the title. Well, the problem is in America because of the temperance movement around the turn of the 20th century, which sought to forbid the sale and consumption of alcohol, people think that temperance means not having any of something, right? Temperance is really rooted in the idea of balance or moderation, like finding the right amount. A better word for this, a Greek word is sophracine, which means sort of self-mastery. So when you see the Stoics talk about this one of the four virtues, courage, temperance, justice,

wisdom, you often see it rendered as self-discipline, which I think is a much more accessible and practical and I would say urgent of the topics. And so I decided not to spend a whole book talking about, you know, how do you find the right amount of something and instead talk about what you do once you know the right amount of something, which is be disciplined about it. So the book pivoted around that, which I tend to find is the critical question on all book projects, which is you have this general vague idea of something you want to write about, but what is the handle that the book is built around or what's the shelf that it's on? Like when you wanted to talk about sort of devices and our relationship with screens,

et cetera, I got to imagine it wasn't until you sort of come up with the idea. It's like this is about minimalism applied to technology that you sort of figure out what it is you're going to say and how you're going to say it. I mean, that is interesting that that's a shift. With this specific topic and you talk about it in the book and in various interviews you've done, when you go back to, let's say, Aristotle. Yeah. Right. We get a lot of the mean that we go to the Nicaramachian ethics.

It's all about trying to find the what you should be pursuing that middle ground between excess and posity. And there's a lot of focus on that. And you're right. That seems less relevant to people today. It's not the I know this is what the amount of exercise I should do. This is where I should be with drinking is the actual self-mastery. So where the Stoics, because I don't know them as well as you obviously, So were the Stoics locked into that self-control, self-disciplined piece of this more than you would see in, let's say, the non-stoic ancient Greeks?

Like you would see in Aristotle, for example. I think so, yeah, it's a good question. I mean, and for me, what's interesting is so much of like the knowing what the right amount of something. Also, to me, that fits pretty neatly under the discipline or the virtue of wisdom or prudence, right? And so I have taken some liberties in moving stuff around. I'll give you another example. So the Stoics typically rendered endurance as one of the elements of courage, right? So like when they were talking about all the sub virtues of courage, they would talk about

endurance. But to me, endurance quite clearly falls under the virtue of self-control or self-discipline, right? It's how do you hang on? how do you how do you last through something? How do you push through something? So I haven't really felt any compunction about moving stuff around. I feel more than entitled to do that, especially when you're thinking about temperance as a topic that probably isn't on its own big enough or interesting enough to go the distance for someone, for a prospective reader.

So I really wanted to talk about self-discipline, which I think. most people believe they don't have enough of. Do you differentiate between the different flavors of this? Because people, when they think discipline, there's these broad categories that come up. There's physical, obviously. There's self-control in terms of addictions and consumptions. There's self-control in terms of productive, focused application effort. What's the ontology that you find useful with this idea?

So I ended up splitting the book in three parts. That's how I'm kind of doing each structure. of thinking even in the terms of like beginning intermediate advance. But the way I did it here was the first is sort of physical discipline. So that's like what you eat. That's what you do. That's what your environment looks like. Then it goes into sort of temperament or the sort of emotional mental discipline. So focus, you know, controlling your temper, you know, pushing oneself. And then the third part is kind of a fusing of those together where sort of in the real world someone is has that sort of almost monk like or or transcendent level of self-discipline like kind of under

fire. So that's that's kind of the structure I was thinking about. And you're right. It's self-discipline isn't just not doing things. It's also doing some things. So the epigraph of the book, I have a quote from Epictetus, and he basically is trying to sum up, like, two words that function as your advice for life. These are two words that you should always follow and observe, and he says it's persist and resist. And so some things you're resisting, and then some things you're pushing through and doing. And I like that sort of tension. And to me, it actually kind of does go back to the origins of the idea of temperance or self-disciplines or self-disblis. There's kind of a contradiction there.

It's this sort of paradox of like do some things, don't do some things, and you've got to know which is what and when. Right. And so do you think there's the reason why you started with physical for approaching that, whatever, that tension, that dichotomy? Is physical the right entry way? I mean, because it's so clear. I'm exercising, I'm whatever. Whatever it is, it's clear. And so is that meant to be foundational?

Is that where people should start? I think so. I mean, unless you're asking me a sort of an editorial question, which it's too late for me to change, if I should have moved the part two of the book to part one, which I certainly thought about. But no, I do like, I start. So I start with the physical and then I start with like just what time do you wake up in the morning or the idea of like starting the day sort of intentionally and deliberately. I make a case for

waking up early. But I do think you want to start with with something very simple, very straightforward, something very clear. You know, if I say like master your emotions, well, what does that actually look like and what does that mean? That's a vaguer. That's a vaguer command than like wake up early. go to sleep, you know, try to get eight hours of sleep every night or, you know, don't eat fatty foods or exercise regularly, right? Like I wanted to talk about something very concrete, very clear, very tangible, not just because I think it's simple, but I also think momentum or sorry, I think discipline is, it's a muscle. So the more disciplined you are able to be in the, I don't even want to call them trivial, but in these sort of straightforward parts of your life, I do think it is transferable

or the muscle once built allows you to be more disciplined in other facets of your life. Right. I was thinking about this because we did a question on the show, I don't know, maybe two weeks ago, where someone was asking about being more disciplined. Then, of course, the short answer was get Ryan's book. But it wasn't out yet. So the longer answer was, was I ended up stumbling on this construction that discipline is not, it's not an adjective. It's more an identity. So instead of saying, I'm going to, I need to go apply discipline to this thing I'm doing, it's an identity you build as I'm a disciplined person.

Discipline people are then able to actually go forward and do other things with discipline. And if that is true, then the obvious, the physical, the clear is probably a really good way into identity building. And the reason why I was thinking about this, and I wanted to get your take on this, is there seems to be in the last, let's say, five years, a pretty powerful online community, I guess we could call it, built around discipline. And I'm talking about Cam Haynes, whose book I just read, or David Goggins, or Rich Roll. You know, that's really how Rich Roll got started before he shifted more guru, etc. these type of characters who who demonstrate extreme physical typically discipline and it's very popular it's very popular and so what's going I mean is it what's this tapping into why is this so popular well I let's say a monk is equally impressive in terms of their discipline let's say to be a

a monk you know you take your vow of poverty you detach from society you wear your robes you shave your head etc you meditate multiple hours a day let let let's let's let's let's let's let's Let's stipulate an environment in which that demands as much discipline as running an ultramarathon, perhaps more. Well, one is much more cinematic than the other, right? One is much more followable than the other. So I do think that's why you see sort of the feats of strength or the sort of physical fitness influencers, the sort of discipline manifesting itself, whether it's hunting or running or lifting weights or what time you wake. up, this is easier to track and watch. So I think there's some just sort of filter bias there,

but I do think it goes back to the idea that it is a transferable skill and you want to build, you want to build it up. And, you know, this is why the stoics would talk about taking cold baths or, you know, wearing coarse clothing. They were trying to build up a kind of a toughness, right? Seneca talks about treating the body rigorously so that it's not. disobedient to the mind. If you're the kind of person that can say when your body is tired, you're in the middle of a run and your body's saying, you should stop doing this. It is hard. And you have the ability to override that. I think that is a skill that then when your phone says, hey, you should pick me up and tune out the world for the next 45 minutes. Ideally, you have

cultivated, again, the ability to be like, no, I decide what I'm going to do. not the impulse, not the urge, etc. And to go to your point about discipline being an identity, I think it's an identity, but I would also argue that it is a habit. And this goes back to Aristotle. He says like, if you want to be a, if you want the virtue of, say, generosity, he says you get that by being generous, right?

This isn't like a state that you arrive at. It is a thing that you do. And so again, if you want to be more disciplined, it starts by being disciplined and insisting on discipline and making discipline a habit. So, you know, what are you going to quit? What are you going to push yourself to do? Persist and resist. This is how one develops the identity of discipline.

I don't think it's something you assert. Just like calling yourself a writer is not as important as regularly writing. Yeah, and we've talked about that before. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I have the pin. I mean, I think that all makes sense, right? Like, it's tractable to get 10% more disciplined than you were before, for example, as a tractable goal.

So if you start by being as disciplined as you can, you can then be six months later, 20% more disciplined than six months later, 20% more disciplined than that. I mean, that's tractable, increasing by a modest amount, whereas jumping from, you know, I'm out of shape, I'm on my phone all the time, I'm going to be elk hunting, you know, marathon elk hunting or whatever for six days next week. It's not going to happen. Which, by the way, I think this is, I don't know what your take is on this, but, you know, I know various people who have been involved in, we could think of as like manhood or manliness style online communities where, you know, they're into, it was. was weightlifting, I think, after Rogan's influenced definitely into bow hunting, like everyone's bow hunting, right? So they're working out, they're bow hunting.

And I think it's easy for people around here, like suburban D.C., they kind of roll their eyes and like, oh, come on, what is this? What do you think you are cavemen or something like this? But what I'm observing, and what I hear from the people who run these communities is, yeah, you get in the door hunting

because you saw Cam Haynes do it on like the Rogan podcast and lifting out because Jocko, does it. But what you then get six months down the line is also now they're drinking less. Also now they're showing up more for their kids. Also now they're a better father. It's like the pornography has gone.

It was this entry way. It's like entry, entry drug to greater discipline. You got to start somewhere. And as you say, it's cinematic. I can have a drone shot of me trail running. Well,

you know what's funny about it too is like there is a certain amount of fattishness to it. It's like you can, as you just said, you can trace it like exactly to what influence. or popularized what activity. But it's not like they're, it's some fad that came out of nowhere.

Like they invented, it's not like pickleball, which wasn't a game, you know, even just a few years ago, right? Like it is, these are timeless activities. You could say they're timeless disciplines, right? Like bow hunting, it taps into something immensely primal

about the human experience, hunting, being outdoors, you know, sort of getting, the endorphins from exerting oneself. Like the Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which a lot of people do, these are, these are traits, activities that would not only have not been unfamiliar, but were in fact practiced by Marcus Uralius and Epictetus and Seneca. And like they talk about these things, not in the metaphorical sense, but in the real sense.

When Marcus Rueh says, you know, you know, you should face life like a, you should face life like like a wrestler dug in for sudden attacks. Like, he's saying that as a person who trains in the discipline of wrestling and had his whole life. So I think there is something, you know, when you look at our very modern, sheltered, sort of unchallenging lives, there's something refreshing and invigorating about these activities. Like, I just, again, kind of a fad. I just got like a cold plunge at my house. And, you know, there's there's some part of me that feels a little ridiculous because it's like everyone's doing it and who actually knows what the health benefits are.

Like, they're, I think they're there, but they're not like, I would not be shocked to find they were overstated. But like in a world where you have hot water on demand at all times, a certain softness comes from that. And the ability to do uncomfortable challenging things on purpose and subject yourself to it, it toughens you up. And then when, you know, the hot water isn't there because you're staying in a hostel in Europe while you're traveling or something, you have a layer of resiliency or discipline there that a person who gets everything they want all the time doesn't have. Right. I mean, this is what I always used to think about my.

parents, like my dad, for example, way less affected by hardship than I think we were or I would be at my current age. Like, oh, you got to wake up early to pick someone up at the airport at 5 a.m. Or this is inconvenience. Like, whatever, like, just do the thing you need to do. And my long theory had always been, well, he had to, you know, right after college, Vietnam was going on. And he had to leave college and be in Louisiana at an army base, you know, sleeping on

tarps and crawling through the jungle. And like when that type of stuff happened. later in life, you say, whatever, I'll wake up at four to pick you up. Like, being tired for a day is not the, not the worst thing. So let me put on a, I put on the lens of I'm one of my listeners because they write about discipline a lot. So maybe we'll try to extract some, they write me about discipline a lot. So try to extract some, some reasonable advice.

So where do you tell someone to start? If I'm calling in St. Ryan, I watch those videos, they resonate. I watch, you know, discipline videos. I know I want this in my life. I know I'm missing it. I'm all over the place. What do I do tomorrow? Yeah, I guess it would depend on where that person is.

I don't mean like geographically, but I would mean like where are you in your life, right? Are you 150 pounds overweight? I might say, let's start with a walk, right? If you're in pretty decent shape, I might say let's start with a run, right? So I do think it depends. Like if I walked into your office and it was a disaster, I might say, let's start by cleaning up your desk, right? If you were someone who was overcommitted and overbooked, I might say, well, let's start

by eliminating one thing from your to-do list each day, not doing it, right? But like what is a task that we're going to delegate or outsource or eliminate from your purview? So, you know, do you know what I'm saying? Like, I think some people, the discipline is you've got to get off your butt and start moving. And then someone else, I was just reading about Tom Brady, like Tom Brady had to have the discipline to start taking one day off a week. Right. So those are very opposite ends of the spectrum, right? Here's a person whose discipline has taken them incredibly far, but perhaps endangered or jeopardized other things that they really care about. And then you have another

person who doesn't have the life they want, hasn't realized the potential they have. And so they need to start small and build. And so I guess maybe the first thing we want to look at is like, are you a person who you don't have enough discipline or are you a person who is perhaps too driven, too active, too busy? I would, I probably personally lean more towards that end of the spectrum. And so when I have thought about discipline. It's been more, like I'll give you an example. I'm working on this book now and trying to say, hey, how can I do this book at the level that I want to do it, but do it more sustainably, do it not not hate the process so much, but do it more enjoyably at the same time. And so I think it really depends on where you are on that spectrum. Oh, interesting. Okay. So

let me give you a specific scenario. I'll give you a specific scenario. I'll give you. two. All right. So scenario number one, because I hear this one a lot, 23 out of school, has a job. Is, you know, like, I don't know. Maybe it's what I want to do. Maybe I don't. It doesn't have any real serious hobbies, but sort of just out there in the world on their phone playing a little bit too much video games. And they're early. Early in life. Like, okay, foundation laying time. I'm feeling type A. I don't know what to do with my energy. I have ambition. I have no target. Well, start with that scenario. Maybe that's an easy one. Yeah, so I think this goes to the question that you talk about in your books, which is like, I want to do something great, but I don't know what that is. And you just said to have a number of vague sort of passions or interests. Well, I think what I would do in that position is sort of, first off, where do I have time that I'm wasting? Right. And you've mentioned video games. So it's like, okay, I'm going to make this decision. Instead of video games, I'm going to read. Or instead of video games, I'm going to read. Or instead of video games, I'm going to. going to volunteer or attend this class. I think what that person to me is really needing, it's not more discipline per se, but exposure to or an avenue to go down

that begins to direct that energy and effort towards something constructive or positive, right? Like for me, the pivotal moment in my life, my development of as a writer, and I was in that position where I was sort of like talented, interested, wanted to do something that wasn't, you know, a sort of normal nine to five job. And I end up starting to write for my college newspaper. And this college newspaper introduces me

to a number of people, allows me to develop my skills and, and thus puts in motion that thing. So let's say I was out of school. Well, you know, maybe this is an email to someone that you admire, that you want to, you know, do so, you want to intern for. Maybe this is, you know, committing to some sort of charity project or some sort of group activity or I think you you've got to find something that you're directing this towards. And it might turn out that you don't like that thing as much as you think you do and you end up going in another direction. But you've got to stop this sort of idea of like, I'm just sitting around and that task or that thing is going to reveal itself to me. That's not how it's going to go. Interesting. I mean, so you're saying you need a target for disciplined

energy. Discipline can't apply in a vacuum. I can just like, hey, I'm disciplined today. You need to have things that you're directing your attention towards that seem valuable. But then that's something now that you can, you can, okay, pursue. All right. So then here's the harder scenario, I guess, is like you and I, right? And you mentioned this before, but like, think about you and I are in a similar situation. We're rioters that has sort of spun out into sort of media companies. We have, you have the painted porch bookstore. I have my academic career. We, we have a lot going on. Our issue is not laziness, but our issue might be. be lack of

hitting potential in one particular area because of of crowdedness. So how do you and I think about discipline as people who do a lot, or not short on accomplishment, but maybe you're doing too much. I think you met Les Sneed, the GM of the Rams, right?

I don't think I connected you guys. Anyways, he's the GM of the Rams. And I went and I spoke to them maybe two, three years ago. And he was sort of going over with me, like the rules of the organization. And one of the rules of the organization is the main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing, which I love. I love that phrase. And so I think for people like you and me, as you have multiple things you're good at, multiple things that produce revenue, multiple things that produce rewards of all kinds, you know, it's, it can be difficult to recall or remember or prioritize what the main thing is. And so for me, I like to do lots of things.

I have lots of interests. But I have to, the discipline for me is the reminder of like, what is the thing that drives all the other things? What is the thing that only I can do, right? And so that's the actual writing of the books and the ideas, right? And so I have to go. Do you focus that, your answer to that question is just books? I would say, like the podcast.

other things, like someone else can't host your show, but is it just books? How do you answer it? Well, someone else can't host the show. But if I want to do the podcast, then it's going to mean organizationally or system-wise. I have to set up systems so the podcast takes as little time as possible, right? So it's like I have to hire a producer. I have to hire a scheduler. I have to hire, this is one of the reasons that we were talking about this earlier, why I did a deal with a network. Like, I want to limit the imposition of that thing as much as possible so that it does not impede on the main thing, which is me sitting down and writing. But then also even that, like, okay, what is a research assistant cost, right? What are the, what's an office that I need to set up?

I just, I just think about, like, how do the decisions I make, the schedule I have, the priorities I have, how are at the end of the day, they facilitating the main driving thing. And I can't really compromise on that. Do you have a rule in terms of timing for writing? This is what gets the time first. It's this many hours. It's the first mornings. Yeah, I'll give you a good example of me not falling,

being able to fulfill it completely. So last week, because of publicity for the book and because I had three different talks, I had one full morning to write. And I missed like five out of seven bed times or something like that, right? So like for my two main things, which would be writing and family, I agreed to things that took me away from those main things. And that's not how I want my life to be.

I also as an adult understand sometimes you're temporarily out of balance. And, you know, it was it, but I could, I remember what I was thinking about as it was happening was how easily this could become the norm and how I'm going to have to be even more disciplined as fees go up, as opportunities increase, as asks increase that I don't allow that week to be the norm. The week, the norm has to be this week, which is that I have written every morning and done every bedtime. So it's, it's really about, I think it begins. Ironically, you talked about the, the sort of two different ends, like someone just starting and someone who's at the core, it's like, what are you trying to do? What is the, what is the important thing? What's the target you're aiming at? Because if you don't know that, it's really hard to be disciplined. Right. Well, I mean, how do you figure out, this is insider baseball? Yeah. But there's this, this weird tension in both of our worlds between the writing is the main thing, right? That's the core of our success and the thing that can't be replicated.

The online media, the podcast, etc., really supports the writing in the sense of it, it's what, you know, it's what allows stillness or courage to hit number one. It's what allows the publishers will keep giving us money to write books or what have you. And so then it's this weird tension. And I haven't quite been able to figure that out. So on the one hand, I'm like, the online media company piece of it needs to be contained, but it's very important because that's what will allow you to keep doing the books. but there's this other counterfactual of what if you said, no, I'm just going straight Robert Carroll mode, or McCullough mode. I'm just going to think and write and put out the best books and some will sell better than others. And I don't know what would happen to that counterfactual.

I think the key to being Robert Caro is to be born 90 years ago, right? Like, that's the key part of that strategy, right? Like, he comes from another, like, he has been putting out books since 1970, right? He has a 50 year or I guess a 40 year head start on us. So that is it, it came out in a different environment. It came out of a certain kind of scarcity. It's like, like, if you want to be Steve McQueen, like, you're going to have to find a different way to be Steve McQueen because the way Steve McQueen was Steve McQueen was from a different media environment, right? So I think understanding that some of the, just like people want to go back to living in the 19, you know, America in the 1950s. Like, that's not going to happen, right? Like, uh,

fundamentally things have changed for the better. But one of the things I am sort of heartened by, and it highlights the tension you're talking about, which is like the number of people that I hear now that tell me they heard about me from YouTube is like, it's probably the dominant way that I hear from people now, or that people discover the work now. Because they're not just-

What's your subscribers now? It's high now, right? It's like 750,000, something like that. And it wasn't long ago that it was 100. I remember it. 50,000. Yeah, it was very low. Yes. It grew very, very fast.

And that is the power of the algorithms and, you know, the immense size of those platforms. So I understand that people are not walking through bookstores and randomly discovering authors for the most part. That's a reality. So, yes, if you want the work to resonate and reach people, you have to have these online tools. or you have to access these different platforms, it's just thinking about it in a way that, you know, the mask doesn't eat the face,

so to speak, right? Like that you don't, here's the weird thing. YouTube is easier than writing, right? Like the, because I've worked on a couple of books for people where we tried to take a YouTube channel

and turn it into a book or a podcast and turn it into a book. Now, you might think this would be really easy. It's actually quite hard. because the visual side of the medium does most of the work. If you think about like what a dramatic drone shot, to go to the rituals in the Cameron Haynes of the world, a dramatic drone shot in an exotic location,

you know, inspirational music and a, you know, a voiceover, right? That paints a scene that is extraordinarily difficult to do in just words. And so I see people more often than not start with writing, which is a tough medium, and then get seduced by or stolen away from these other mediums. And what gets relegated or abandoned is the hard day-to-dayness of sitting down in front of a blank page. So I have tried to set up systems where I take advantage of the platforms and I benefit from them. and I'm agnostic as to what medium the message is getting out. But as an artist or a creator, what I love is the craft of the writing.

And that's the thing that I feel like I am world class at. So I want to be uncompromising on my protection of that space and that skill. I mean, I think that all's right. I was thinking, you know, the other day that why don't fiction writers have this issue? If you think about well-known fiction writers, for the most part, do not have large online platforms. John Grisham does two weeks of publicity once a year when his book comes out. He semi-famously, when his assistant retired, didn't bother to hire a new one because he says, no one has my number. Only my editor has my number.

But on the other hand, when I'm thinking about fiction, it looks like, yeah, but it's incredibly more narrow the path to actually being successful there. So either you're a Grisham or a king or you're selected for a book club. And so that's probably the price we pay to be nonfiction writers is we don't have the option that fiction writers have of I disappear and write. I really don't do anything else except for the two weeks of publicity when my book comes out. We don't have that option. But many more of us, I guess, can make a living at this than fiction writers. I mean, you know the publishing industry better, but yeah. I think that's right.

I wouldn't say that nonfiction is more a meritocracy than fiction. but I would say that the individual has more agency in nonfiction. So like, and I don't want to dismiss the fiction authors who have been successful and say that it's luck, but I would say that it is a industry in which breaking through is a side of publishing in which breaking through requires more gatekeepers, more breaks going your way, and more sort of institutional support or, I feel like, An interesting self-help author with a somewhat new or, you know, a unique message has a reasonable chance of breaking through getting a toehold and like developing an audience, whereas like the fiction world is littered with talented, potentially brilliant authors or creators who their books sell

66 copies and they'll never get in front of an audience. And there's really no, and it's, it's not because they're not working hard enough. It's because there isn't the pathways that you're talking about to do that. Like, for you and I, like, if we write a book and then we can go make videos about the same ideas in that book, and those videos can reach people and thus sell the book. If I wrote a sci-fi book about some planet and another solar system and it's this complex universe, interesting characters, it's a whole world. It could be brilliantly done. But I can't make videos about a world that nobody knows about and nobody cares about to draw attention to a book that nobody knows about and nobody cares about.

Whereas me making videos about self-discipline, you know, there are people who are looking for help with self-discipline who then, in watching the video might read the book. And that, I do think you want to, as you seek out career paths, obviously there's callings and you can't ignore a calling, but I think you want to go towards places where you have agency. It's like, do you want to be the 50th Mexican restaurant in your town? That's going to be a hard way to break through. And so when I think about what I'm doing, I try to think like, you know, is success here in my power or not? Right. So nonfiction, right, not meritocracy, but many more paths, many more paths to non-trivial sales than fiction. And you would almost say, look, if you want to be a fiction writer too, face the reality of this is how the gatekeepers work. This is their credentialing that works. If you want to be a literary novelist and be like, well, I have to have these proximate goals first of getting into the Iowa workshop or having an editorial position at N-plus one or at Harper's. I mean, That's where you would need to be to get through the gatekeepers.

And it's a world where you can't just say, I want the world to be the way I want it to be. So I want to just write my brilliant novel during National Novel Writing Month and it break through. You have to say, oh, here's the hurdles I have to get through. And if I'm not making those hurdles, then it's probably not going to work out. We're nonfiction writing. Right. We do have more paths. I mean, I don't know what this is.

I hear from novelists who say, like, their agents or their editors are really pushing them to be on social media. they don't want to be distracted. They don't know what to do. And I don't really know how to answer because of my mind is like, I don't think it's going to matter either way. Yeah, right. Right. They're just giving you general advice because they don't really, no publisher is going to be like, hey, it's inherently a crapshoot. Let's hope that the gatekeepers, you know, annoy you. It's funny because, you know, you talk about, you know, be so good they can't ignore you. I don't think anyone means that in the sense of like, just make something amazing. And then the world will beat a path to your door. As Emerson said, it's,

It's also figuring out in like who is the they. So, you know, so good, they can't ignore you. Who is it? And then what is it that they want to see? And how do you get in front of them? You have to have the ability to break down that world. Like it's like if you wanted to run for office, okay, what are the qualifications? I don't mean like, can you do the job?

Because we all know that's not really a qualification these days. But like, what are the filtering mechanisms? what are the gatekeepers and what do you need to bring to them to stand out or to distinguish yourself from other people so they can't ignore you. It's not simply just being what you think you want to be and knowing that that has something to offer the world. You have to figure out the peculiar logic or, you know, roadmap of the thing you're trying to break through. That is what's so key about. it. Right. You have to find your entryway, which is hard, and it might take experimentation. And you see this pattern a lot. When something clicks, and it might not be the first three things you try,

then being willing to do the battering ram model. Hey, this is working. Now we have to smash through that opening. We have to put all of our energy. We have to run with it. So know when something is working, you have to run with it. This is the advice I was given to a young writer the other day is I was saying it's two things. It's the search and exploration and exploitation. It's hard to tell. Like, what's the package of what you're talking about, who you are, how you're presenting it, that's going to catch. And so the thing you try might not work.

But when you do find something that catches, then as the exploitation part, you have to then really with discipline, pursue that. And so let me ask you about that, as long as we're getting sort of insider baseball down in the weeds and all the other metaphors here. you're very good at that. And, you know, I've known your work forever. I mean, I remember, I don't know if I knew you specifically, but we had friends in common back then, probably through Ferris. I remember when Word got around that Ryan Holiday, the marketer, the author of Hello Online is going to write a book about stoicism. And I remember having that conversations with someone thinking you were going to write a text book. I don't know what you were doing, but it's like, this is never going to work.

And I don't know how, that's an interesting story to get into, but at some point, I don't know. don't think it was right away. It's what I want to ask you about. At some point when you realized bringing this particular philosophy alive was clicking, you really got focused. So the daily stoic became a brand. It became a focus. It became a structure. You had a format that people could anticipate for the book. So maybe walk us through how your exploration exploitation story when it came to kind of coming across this and then how you disciplined and diligently built up. this really powerful empire around it. Well, I knew I wanted to write about stoicism. That's what I was interested in. That's what I was excited about. That's the style of writing I liked. But I also understood that, you know, people were not lining up to give book deals to, you know, at that time, like 23, 24 year old college dropouts who had not even studied philosophy, right? And so I knew that to break into publishing, I probably had to do something else first to then have a little bit of leverage or power to transition towards what I wanted to write about. And so I said, you know, what are my

strengths? And my strengths were I was a marketer. And I had seen a lot of stuff. I had interesting opinions about how marketing work. And I had a lot of connections and a track record as a marketer. So my first book was about media and marketing. I did like an ebook in between there. But then the next book was this book about Stoic philosophy. And even then I was thinking, look, I want to really nerd out about philosophy, but that is not what the audience wants. What the audience wants is something to help them be better at what they do to solve their problem. So the obstacle is the way, you know, the word Stoicism appears like maybe once or twice in the entire book. That is a book about overcoming obstacles. I happen to be using and basing it on Stoic philosophy, but that is not

what the book is explicitly about. And that's for a good reason. And so I, what I was really doing was getting more and more power, more and more leverage, more and more control over an audience as I went and then got closer and closer to what I wanted. The Daily Stoic happened to be a breakthrough both platform-wise, but also like process-wise. because it was a page a day in the book, but then I started the email list, which was also a page a day. And the ability to just have somewhere to direct that energy, something to be very disciplined about, that was like huge for me. Well, that's a good case study, too, for people, or think about exploration versus exploitation,

is that for years and years, and you still have it today as one of my favorite newsletters, you had this very high-quality newsletter, the reading list. and I recommend that everyone sign up for that I guess at Ryanholiday.net And it's where you would share what you read each month which is a great concept that's on brand for you

as someone who reads a lot and who sort of lives this intellectual life but I watched it sort of slowly grow towards 100,000 people or whatever it was over years, over years and when the daily stoic idea came out after a year that thing was

it was 100,000, then 300,000 then 600,000 and to me that really encapsulated there's there's two things at play. I mean, just having a really good idea isn't necessarily going to explode. It's the right idea of push. There's some concept of sort of feeling out what's working, what's working with my audience. And same thing with your YouTube page.

It's built around the Daily Stoic, not around like it was before, Ryan Holiday. And there's something, there's a clarity in that that works for people. And it's hard to predict in advance what structure is going to work with people. But when they do, I mean, you pushed on those with a lot of effort once they were working. So to me, that's a really valuable case study that I'm studying when thinking about my own career. It comes down to your network, really. And if you think about it, like, let's say you really love investing. You trade stocks on the side.

You're building up this small portfolio. You know, you're learning. And then, you know, one day you want to strike out on your own, right? It can't be the moment that you strike out on your own that you're like, oh, I should meet people who might be. interested in investing in my fund that you have to be doing these two things simultaneously which is you have to be developing your competence and your skill and your confidence but you also have to be developing a network of colleagues of patrons of you know resources of potential investors etc and then it's there's a moment where you transition you you call all those chips in and so for me

like the Daily Stoic was, as you said, like I had written about Stoic philosophy, I had an online audience, et cetera, and then I wanted to launch this daily newsletter. But that newsletter didn't start at zero, right? That newsletter, I emailed the hundred or so thousand subscribers to daily, to the reading list email. Maybe it was 50, I don't know where it was at that time. But let's say it's in the high five figures, low six figures. I told them about the Daily Stoic the day that it launched. And I believe we started the Daily Stoic in, let's call it September of 2016, with roughly 10,000 people, right? So that 10,000 is now about 500,000. And, you know, it's like almost two million on Instagram. It's almost a million on YouTube. It's different on

different platforms. But I wasn't starting at zero. I was starting with a large number of which a percentage were interested in betting on me on this thing. And that was enough to jumpstart that process. So you can't just be developing the so good they can't ignore you thing that we're talking about. You can't just be developing the discipline of how to do it. You also have to be cultivating the resources and the relationship and the audience and the platform that you're going to need to support you when you go do that thing. Right. But there's a discipline to the idea. So daily stoic, I want to be more, I want more stoicism in my life. I like Ryan Holidays writing about stoicism.

If I got an email about this every day, it would help me accomplish the goal of remembering to be more stoic in my everyday life. So there's the properly disciplined idea. So what I'm doing now is basically taking the concept of your book and stretching it to places that is inappropriate. It's not all what you have in mind. But a disciplined idea. Yeah. I would just say, but the actual discipline of the Daily Stoic, the real beneficiary of it is me. Like the having to make a thing every day and I have for four years, wait, no, six years.

So that's basically a free book every year that I write. That process. And then doing the videos about it and doing the daily podcast version of it. like my game has exponentially improved as a result of the forcing function of the output or the thing that I signed up for. So like, you know, the discipline, one of the great stoic lines is well-being is realized by small steps, but it's no small thing. I have gotten so much better. I think one of the problems with writing compared to a lot of professions, it's probably, maybe it's similar to like being a movie director is that you only get. get so many reps. Like, I've written more books than most people, and even I only have, like, a dozen at bats, right? Like, it's hard to be great at something when you only get to do it so many

times. Yeah, you're doing the little pieces of it, but you're not, like, actually getting the stage time the way a comedian would or an investor would or, you know, a leader would. You're not getting, like the day-to-dayness of it. And so I have very much benefited from the function or the process of like having to be disciplined about making this thing all the time. Well, those reps was the exact word, a friend of mine who's a magazine editor, a former magazine editor when I was first deciding whether I was going to sign my first contract with the New Yorker.

And I was like, well, it's going to be a lot of writing to do. That was exactly his terminology is, no, no, you need to do. that and actually put a pretty big word count in the contract because it's reps. And that was the way he conceptualized the advantage of that writing setup is you're going to get reps to editing. It has to be at a high level or, you know, they're not even going to sniff it. And you can do it again and again and again. And then when I was deciding, should I do a column for four or five months, where it was every twice a month. Again, it was all about reps.

So, yeah, I hear you on that. And then you're doing, you're doing the work again and again. Yeah, so that's interesting. It's sort of an audience too, right? Like the, the tightrope of like, if it doesn't work, like, you know very quickly whether it's not working or not. And that makes you better because you have to be alive and alert to it. Yeah. So it's interesting.

So we're getting some nuances here around different applications of discipline. So like an idea being disciplined, meaning that it's very clear. But then discipline as a means of actual career development, as it means of reps, as it means, of reps as a means of actually, you know, building out skills. There's a lot that comes out of this. So I know we're getting short on time because I know you have another interview coming out, but I would be remiss if I didn't on a podcast where we talk a lot about the deep life and making radical decisions to affirm things that are really valuable to you.

You have to tell us about you're in what year, one year in or one and a half years into owning your own bookstore, which to me as a writer is very romantic. So are you going to fan the flames of my romance here or crash, crash things down to reality? I don't know which way you're going to go with this, but tell us about being a writer who now owns their own small town bookstore. I love every part of it. So I will perpetuate the romanticism of it. I have no regrets so far. But that may well be because it's gone well so far.

I mean, it was certainly difficult. The pandemic made it more expensive, take longer, the elements. have not been particularly cooperative. We had to spend a bunch of money putting on a new roof and new ACs and all sorts of stuff. But I would say the bookstore as a home base HQ sort of multi-use space has been one of the best, not even decisions, but investments I've ever made in myself. And I think it's helped me up my game across the board.

So I guess I'm not saying everyone should open a bookstore. but like in a world where everyone tends to default to doing digital things at scale, I've actually really liked having something physical, tangible, rooted in a place that is my base of operations for all the stuff that I do. I would say if I am trying to, in effort of full disclosure, the hardest thing has been actually the success of it. that people come from like all over and they want to see me. And so I kind of have to like hide out a little bit.

Like it's not the first year and a half from the pandemic was wonderful because it was like I had this huge space and then I had a reason why it was empty. And now, you know, like even my wife, because it's in this small town, you know, my wife will come to work and she'll be like, I didn't get anything done because like everyone kept coming to say hi to me, not like fans, just like people who live here. And so having to be disciplined and set boundaries has been, you know, one of the lessons that I've been learning, you know, in the last couple months for sure. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Sorry. What was the last thing I said? You were right at saying having to set boundaries.

Oh, yeah. So having to set boundaries and be disciplined about, you know, protecting personal space, protecting workspace, like protecting like the bubble, so to speak. for both of us has been a challenge that I think we're getting better as a result of having to do. And that's part of being public in your work. But it's also just like somebody working at an office right now has to be like, look, I can't say hi to you every time I walk to go fill up my water bottle. Like I'm never going to get anything done. So what are you say home base? So what are the different activities?

Is it writing, podcasting, videoing? Like when you says it's your home base for everything you're doing, what happens there? Yeah, I mean, it's my office where I write. It's where all the employees that work at my company have offices, have offices in. It's right down the street from my house. So like it's, you know, it's where I get packages delivered or, you know, it's like it's the HQ, which was helpful also, you know, I think we may have talked about this last time, but like getting this stuff out of my house has also helped me be more, have better boundaries at home. Right. So like I'm not coming home from work and then getting lost in work because work is here and home is here. And so I just, I think that there's something, there's a reason that, you know, you don't want your desk to be in your bedroom. You don't, you want to separate these things. Yeah. Well, I mean, we talked about this last time, but I definitely blame you for the HQ where I work because, again, it was you early pandemic texting me.

photos. I was like, man, you have a place to go. Yeah. And even pandemic aside, like, you have a place to go that's not your, not your house. And, yeah, you corrupt. But it's been great. Yeah, I love this notion. It has worked for me. You know, my producer Jesse who's here will tell you, we're only now, because it's post-pandemic, more people are coming through, only now really doing the serious renovation we should have done a year ago. But everything is painted. We're re-hanging things, you know, professionally. This afternoon, Jesse and I are building tables. That should be fun. And it feels, so on the one hand, it feels like a huge indulgence.

Yes. On the other hand, it feels like what a necessary investment for this particular type of life. I mean, you invest. And I think the podcast helped me segment things financially because I just think, oh, I'm just taking ad money from the podcast and reinvesting it into the space where I do the podcast. So it can be sort of conceptualized. It doesn't feel like I'm taking money out of the, you know, kids college. funds or something like this. And so that that is helpful. But that was, yeah, that was your influence. And I think that's been that's been great. So place matters is basically the lesson there.

Yeah. It matters. The experience of place matters for your work. Yeah. It's like a vibe or a head space that you get into. And I think it just, it creates some separation that's required also to be balanced and to have to have boundaries too. So like, like, like, For instance, like, if I was walking down the street and someone recognized me and said, hello, I'd be like, hello. But when someone comes to the office and tries, you know, they're like, hey, is Ryan here? Can I see them? I actually don't feel bad saying like, you know, passing a message. No, I can't. Because like, I'm at work, right? Like, I'm working. This is where I go to work. It's not a, it's, I've hung out here before, but it's not a hangout space, right? And so the ability to sort of know what, you know,

each thing is for, I also think is sort of a function of discipline. Yeah, exactly. I mean, having the formal location, having the formal address, having the formal office, and people's expectations, yeah, expectations are different. Well, Ryan, I think we're at the top of the hour, so as promise, we'll wrap it up. But this has been a pleasure as always. So the book is discipline, is destiny. I'm going to list the places I tell people to go for you, and then you tell me what I'm missing.

Okay. So, okay, so you have the Daily Stoic newsletter, which is very popular. You get the email every day with this touch of Stoicism to keep things going, and that's dailystoic.net. Dot com. Dot com. There we go. Dot com. There's a daily Stoic podcast where it's a daily, most days, a short podcast, and then you have interviews once or twice a week that are longer.

fantastic podcast. YouTube is daily stoic, and there you have videos. It's Ryan. Again, it's like the email, but visual. You get the videos pushing on different parts of stoicism, a lot of aspirational views of your ranch and of your bookstore. And then there's a whole mess of social media that, you know, you can all ignore. Do I have that about right? Is that even though you're social, though I do point to you, by the way, is my example of social media done right.

I mean, you post things on there. it's a good way to reach people, but you're not on there battling with people. You're not on your phone trying to see what you're mentions. I always point to your Twitter page when authors ask me what they should do on Twitter. I was like, do what Ryan is doing. It's very clear. It's a stoic quote. It's once a day.

It works well with how people use Twitter. And he doesn't have to be in battles with, you know, Q&R or something. Of all the networks, the one to personally spend the least amount of time on, it's definitely Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. It's the one that's the one that will break your brain. Yeah, Twitter will break your brain.

Instagram will just melt your brain into like not very useful. I'm just watching these videos. But Twitter is going to make your make you feel like the apocalypse is here. You need to fight someone or you're about to die. I mean, Twitter has a dynamic. I love your Twitter approach, which is I don't even know if you even touch it. I mean, it's just these quotes. I imagine you have a document somewhere with these quotes and there's someone who's putting them out there.

And I love to imagine all the people who are angrily, I don't know the terminology for Twitter, but, you know, replying like, well, Ryan, blah, blah, blah, and then like self-satisfy. Like, yeah, when he sees that, that's really going to get them. And then when they realize you never see it, I get a little bit of joy out of that. No, even like, I've been doing Twitter threads recently where I'll take an article in our idea and I'll try to break it down into like a 20 tweet thread. Like, I write that in Google Docs. I never see Twitter, you know, I don't even upload it into the thing that then posted

on Twitter because it's a talk success pool that you should spend as little time as possible. But if people are there, I'm happy to deliver up some ideas. Yeah, just follow Ryan. Get Ryan's, yeah, once inspiring quotes and never ever just disable the send button, you know, or whatever. I don't know the buttons. I don't know how it works. People have learned.

Don't look at me for advice about social media. All right. Well, Ryan, thank you very much. This is great. I know the book's going to be The Monster. My audience loves this topic. So appreciate it as always. and we'll talk again soon.

Thanks, man. All right. And that was my conversation with Ryan Holiday. I'm back here now with Jesse. We're going to talk about some of our main takeaways from that interview. Before we do, let me first mention another sponsor that I am excited about, and that is Notion. This ad almost seems superfluous because I know there's so many hardcore, productivity practitioners of my audience that know notion and love Notion, so they already

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you will get $50 off your first month. All right, so that's mybodytutor.com, t-U-T-O-R dot com. Mention deep questions when you sign up, and you will get $50 off your first month. All right, Jesse, that was our first videotaped interview we just did. It was a great conversation. We've had Ryan on the show before.

It's been a minute since we've had them. So it's good to catch up. I'm curious about your main takeaways. I would say one of the things I really picked up out of this interview was this. I have two ideas. But first, this notion of discipline needs a target. So, like, if you want to be more disciplined, what you actually first need is activities that you care about, which can't.

and then be the target or receptacle for the discipline that you're going to build up. So you need the right things to become disciplined about it first. That made a lot of sense to me. Also, what made a lot of sense was this idea that discipline is cumulative, that it is a reasonable goal to say I want to be 20% more disciplined than I am right now, but it's not a reasonable goal to say, I want to be David Goggins next month. And so getting started somewhere, reaching a certain level, then moving to the next level, then moving to the next level,

that's how you work your way up to being a very disciplined person, not just going from from zero to 60. Yeah. I don't think it really ever ends either. I think it just keeps on going, you know? Yeah. And I think it was also interesting that we ended up discussing for a while a notion of disciplined that was actually about doing less.

And I don't know if that's just unique to me and Ryan. I think it's probably not. I think there's a lot of people in a similar situation. You, Ryan and Tom Brady, baby. Me, Ryan and Tom Brady, who was mentioned all. also in the interview, we all share many things, the three of us,

including needing to be disciplined about not doing too much and focusing on the things that matter. I mean, between the three of us, it's not that we haven't been successful, between the three of us, we have like, what, six Super Bowl rings?

Seven. Seven? Yeah. So between me, Ryan Holiday and Tom Brady, seven Super Bowl rings. I don't know how many league MVP. So, you know,

we know what we're talking about. Two, I think. Two league MVP. Do you know that he's got a $30 million year for announcer after he stops playing? Did you know that? Is it really? Yeah. He's making bank.

What's he, what was his Tampa Bay? He always takes a little bit less. So he's probably making 40 this year, I would think. Right. So he's going to have to cut back his life. Aaron Rogers signed one for 50. He's, and so he's making bank too. I think he's the highest right now.

So Brady, okay. So Brady's going to have to cut back his lifestyle is what you're saying when he becomes an announcer. Exactly. You go from 40 to 30 millions. Here's what I'll just say. I mean, between me, Ryan Holiday and Tom Brady, we're averaging more than $40 million a year salary right now.

So like we know something. Something's going on. Between the three of us, we have over $30 million worth of media contracts next year. So again, let's just use that as social proof. But I thought that was interesting because, Ryan and I have very similar trajectories.

He's a little younger than me, but I got started writing a little younger. So we line up pretty well. So we've gone through a lot of this together. Coming up in writing, building out these other things around writing, really desperately trying to make sure that the writing itself is protected because without it, nothing else matters. But also recognizing that without the other stuff,

you're going to disappear as a writer. It's a really hard tightrope. And you guys have the same publisher, right? Yeah. Yeah, we both are portfolio, which is an imprint at Penguins. So we're both portfolio writers. Yeah, I had four things I wanted to kind of,

ask you about from the interview. All right. One is cold bass. Do you take cold showers? Do you hear people talk about it all the time? Yeah, you know it's big now? Or like cold plunge and then like sauna cold punch, sonicol punch, or just even cold

shower. Some people do that if they don't have the access to the other facilities and stuff. Well, you're more up on these type of things to me. Is any of this in your routine yet? Yeah, I started taking cold showers, but then I didn't really like it. Gonzaga just got a brand new weight room with new cold tubes plunges. So I'm going to start going on that.

Well, so from what I understand, and from what I understand, let me cite my sources here. I have one source. So I just coincidentally, like the other day was reading my friend Steve Magnus, who's been on the show before, he's a Brad Stolberg's the co-host, a growth EQ podcast together. And he's an athletic, he's a running coach and was a high-level runner. He did a Twitter thread about cold plunges because they're so popular. And basically the takeaway from his thread, seem to be, okay, and Huberman chimed in on this thread. It was interesting. Data is accumulating, but we still don't completely understand it. Steve's best guess is, yes, there are some, these various benefits exist.

They're probably no different than what you get from like any sort of exercise. So there's like some. So if you do both. Yeah, like it, but it's probably not doing something special. I know if you hear like Laird Hamilton talk about it. And I think Laird has really influenced

like how Joe Rogan talks about it. They have a lot of claims. I think where it's like a very specific reaction that's causing all this. And Steve was saying maybe, but like the best evidence they have now is it's probably like it does, you know, it releases some chemicals to feel good.

There is a stress response that, you know, all these things are kind of positive. But you get the same thing running for 20 minutes. You get the same thing from doing your workout. So probably a lot of it is psychological. Cole. But I think Ryan was saying there's a discipline aspect to it. Yeah, I like this line treating the body rigorously so that you're not disobeying your mind. And that's where I think

there's probably the big advantage. Yeah. Like you're like, I do the sauna, I do the cold plunge. It's part of it's part of the identity of being a disciplined person. Like I am the type of person who takes care of, takes care of my body, is willing to do things that are that are uncomfortable or non-obvious to get some sort of benefit out of it. There's probably a huge psychological boom to it. We have no space. My wife's interested in the idea of a son, et cetera, but we just don't have space at our house. Right.

The second thing that I thought was really interesting is when he was talking about the network. And I would actually ask this follow-up question to you because you asked them a question about discipline for like the 23-year-old, you know, that scenario. Yeah. So how would you talk to the 23-year-old about, you know, creating that discipline but also establishing a network? Yeah, that was interesting, right? Because he was saying, it's really important. When you make the,

when he made his leap to daily stoic. com for like what he was doing before. It helped that he had an audience, but he knew all these people. He had all these contacts to the poll on. I think that's an interesting point that, you know, part of what you want to do is you're coming up

is accumulate people who are on your side or on your team. And I think a lot of that, honestly, be an interesting person, have integrity, deliver to stuff you say you're going to deliver, be organized, like be a man, a character, a woman of character, basically. People remember that. And it's actually pretty rare. Like most people, they can't help themselves. There's, you know, I'm just hung up on this or I have to mention this or get upset at someone about this and there's all that type of stuff that comes out. If you're in the 10% of people

who is just very reasonable and is able to be upset about something without making a big deal about something who's able to approach a social situation from the context of like what's appropriate here to be most effective not like I feel upset about this and I can't not mention it or I have to brag they need to know I did this thing because

you know and it just comes across terribly so there's probably something about in your 20s being a person that people like to be around like authentic with integrity deliver you don't drop the ball you just do good work people want to work with people like that and it's one of the things I've learned

about publishing, by the way, is, like, that makes a difference. Mm-hmm. And editors can write it and see if this is actually true or not, but I've heard this time and again, if you're a writer or a musician, definitely for athletes, I've heard this. Being someone that people like to work with or be around actually does make a difference. Mm-hmm. You know, I mean, again, if you're great at something, Stephen King is a, if he was a jerk, people are still going to publish his books.

But I do think it makes an epsilon difference. Then eventually over time, your network gets bigger and bigger. It's bigger. Yeah, I'd be willing to pull from it. My next takeaway is I loved how you mentioned the Rams, GM, and the NFL. I'm just a huge NFL fan, so I always love hearing about the NFL. Did they win the Super Bowl last year, right? Last year, yeah.

Yeah. They've been in it twice with McVeigh. So Ryan spoke to them like three years ago. All right, two years later, they win the Super Bowl. I don't want to say. They traded for Stafford. That was a big deal. So he helped. Training for Stafford and Ryan, Ryan's talk.

Yeah. I think I do those two things. I was telling Jesse off air, Deep work is more popular, I guess, in the NBA than the NFL, but I did have an opportunity that I was not able to take advantage of just because I wasn't around where one of the assistant coaches of an NBA team that was here to play the Wizards in D.C. Who liked my book was like, hey, can you just come over to the team hotel

and talk to them about Deep Work? And I couldn't do it. I wasn't there. Well, I think it goes hand in hand. I mean, you have a lot of golfers who were fans of your show. And I think that, you know, even when we've talked to, you've answered some of the questions about time blocking as an athlete. I think it goes, it's really important because, I mean, they have certain things mapped out for them in terms of practice and lifts and whatnot.

But then when they're outside of that realm, some of them can have a tendency to be lost. And then I think it helps hearing your message for those types of scenarios. That's what Mickleson was saying. Or no, who was it, McElroy, actually. Yeah. Mickleroy is the McElroy. McElroy.

Sorry, Roy. But he's the digital minimalism fan. Yeah. Yeah. And he was saying it made a big difference. Yeah, the outside, not just during the game,

but the outside of the game. Yeah. Yeah. Ryan was great about that. Ryan definitely did more with professional sports teams and kind of got the word out more that he was doing things

with professional sports team. And I think that helped yeah, definitely expand, expand his message. Because a lot of those athletes, they want to like, learn. You know, they're very like motivated people and they want to learn.

Talk about discipline too. These are disciplined guys. Yeah. So, um, yeah. And then the fourth takeaway I found was I really liked his line about knowing what each thing is for. You know, he was talking about the office and like distinguishing work from home and that sort of thing. Yeah. Well, that, that's why we have the HQ was him, that theory of his. Have a space. If you can afford it, spend the money on it. I have a space that's for the work. It's different than home. And now I have three spaces because I have a space for writing at the home.

And then here is all for business. So that gives me actually a separation between writing and all the business around our media business. To me, that's really important. I know Ryan writes at his HQ. I write in our study at home that we kind of custom built to be centered on writing. And then I come here for the business side of things. And the writing where I ride at home is a room that's kind of, so it's all,

each place has its own place. I think it goes hand in hand with your concept of time blocking too, because you say a lot of times go to different areas for different spaces. So, and that's important. You know, like I think I gave you this example how I just went to like a different area for like one of my online Spanish classes like a couple weeks ago.

And it was like, cool, because then you get motivated, you're in there, then you leave. And then you're done. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. keeps this place is separate. So I think that's cool. That's definitely something he's said before about his bookstore, too, is it's not a super profitable endeavor to run a bookstore. So like if you want to become rich or this or that. But I really think the way he thinks about that whole thing is he has a building in which lots of things that is useful to his life happens. They sell books. He records podcast.

He writes. He has his staff is there. And the bookstore offsets some of the cost of things. that. But it's, but also he just loves the, the main benefit I think he gets from the actual selling of the books. It's just that he loves bookstores. Yeah. And like, I have a bunch of books in here and I can bring books to people and, and curated. And I love that. And I think the space of a bookstore is highly motivating. And it was a really interesting way to think about it. So if you just were doing a dollar and cents analysis on, uh, painted porch as a source of income, I'm sure in

the Ryan Holiday Empire that's like, way down, way down towards this down there with the Minto Mori coins or something like that. But if you see it as the bookstore as the center of his professional existence and a home for all the existence, then suddenly it makes a lot of sense. You can make the Republic a bookstore and it already has a bar built into it. This is a thing. If we had a bigger podcast, we talked about it before, a big enough podcast to be able to take over that space, that's what we'd have to do.

It's a big bar for a bookstore. We'd have to cut that in half. It's a big bar for a bookstore. Maybe a book bar. This would be so non-profitable. If you had like multiple people behind a bar to like to help curate book selections for you. It's like the opposite. We do need a bookstore in Tacoma Park.

So look, if someone is looking to start a bookstore and needs a partner, let me know. I think we need one. I just can't do that work on my own. All right. Well, we should probably wrap this up. But there you have it. Ryan Holiday, buy his book or check out his book. Discipline is Destiny.

If you're near Boss Drop, Texas, you've got to stop in on the Painted Porch bookstore. We will be back next week with what should just be a standard Q&A episode. So keep those questions coming. You can find a link to submit questions in the show notes of this episode. If you want to see video of today's episode, go to YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media. until next time, as always, stay deep.