The Daily Stoic - Nils Parker, Bestselling Writer and Editor Behind Lives of the Stoics, The Obstacle Is the Way and The Daily Stoic

Episode Date: September 23, 2020

On today’s Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan talks to his longtime writing partner and friend Nils Parker. They discuss Stoicism, their ongoing collaboration with Daily Stoic and Ryan’s other written works, and more. Nils Parker is one of the most sought after writers and editors in the business, having worked on books that have grossed more than $100M in earnings in the last fifteen years. He and Ryan have been collaborators, friends and business partners.Preorder Lives of the Stoics now: http://dailystoic.com/livesThis episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. Four Sigmatic is a maker of mushroom coffee, lattes, elixirs, and more. Their drinks all taste amazing and they've full of all sorts of all-natural compounds and immunity boosters to help you think clearly and live well. Four Sigmatic has a new exclusive deal for Daily Stoic listeners: get up to 39% off their bestselling Lion’s Mane bundle by visiting foursigmatic.com/stoic.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Nils Parker:  Twitter: https://twitter.com/nilsaparkerFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/nilsparkerSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. of necessary for living good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest

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Hey Prime members, you can listen early and app free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. I don't remember when, when this was, it's probably 14 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, probably 14 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, through Tucker Max, who was one of the first sort of writers I worked for, I met Neales Parker. Neales Parker had a website, was an interleague blog,

and he was one of Tucker's editors. And as when I interned for Tucker, I met Neales, and Neales kind of watched me grow up as a human and as a writer, and Neales was instrumental then in editing my first book, Trust Me in Blind, and he's collaborated with me on every single one of my books since then. Then when I started Braschek, he was one of my business partners. Then when we started Daily Stoic, which Braschek owns, he was a part of that.

Niels and I have had an ongoing collaboration now of at least 10 years. And so, almost every word you would have read of mine, Niels has touched or edited, or shaped, or refined, or pushed back on and helped make it into what it was. And Niels is a great writer in his own right. He and I have collaborated on many other books which you have read, I'm sure, that you don't know we were responsible for. It's one of the things Breastcheck does, is a lot of ghost-trying, we sold proposals for big podcast hosts and celebrities and athletes, and we've written their books, we've marketed their books. So he and I have this sort of long-standing books, we've marketed their books. So, he and I have this sort of longstanding kind of collaborative relationship that has been incredibly fruitful and rewarding for me. We've been through failed

companies together and conflict together and all sorts of ridiculous stuff together. And so, I wanted to have him on the podcast to talk about that because I think his skill as an editor and as a as a story advisor and as a as just a creative mind is really valuable to anyone doing any kind of of work out there. He and I have collaborated with businesses and we've consulted with tech companies and all sorts of stuff. So so we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about stosism. We're going to talk about the evolution of trust Me, I'm Lying and obstacles the way and some behind the scenes on how that book came.

And then we talk a little bit about my new book, Lies of the Stoics, The Art of Living from Xeno to Marcus Realis, which I collaborated on with Niels from the very beginning, from just my idea of how to structure it, how to organize it, what it should look like, how it should feel, what we had to avoid, what the problems were. Because it was a difficult book, but I'm so proud of it, I'm so happy with it,

and it wouldn't be here without my next guest. We're gonna talk about that. And the good news is, of course, you can pre-order lives of the Stokes, it comes out September 29th, you can pre-order it, and we've got a whole bunch of bonus chapters and cool stuff and rewards and incentives if you pre-order it. So you can go to dailystoic.com slash pre-order.

I think this is, as Neil's was saying, sort of a definitive book on Stoicism. It's going to be a sign in university classes. It's going to introduce a lot of the lesser known stoic characters, hopefully on a level that puts them up on par with the Marx Relius and Asenica and Epicetus. And I go in depth and really get into what made Epicetus, Epicetus, what made Marcus, Marcus, Asenica's flaws and his virtues. It's just a book I'm super proud of. It's sort of a sequel to the Daily Stoic. It's 26 chapters of in-depth biographies of each sort of the important pivotal Stoics from the early Greek Stoics to the later Roman Stoics.

And then finally, if you pre-order you get the bonuses where we talk about two lie heroes, some modern Stoics as well. So, lives of the Stoics is out coming up here really soon, but you can preorder at dailystoic.com slash preorder. And listen to this conversation with Niels, great thinker, writer, funny as hell, check out some of his pieces on Medium as well. But if you want to see Niels' work, just check out some of my work because it's hard to separate where one ends and the other begins. So here's my conversation with Neal's Parker.

Hey, man, how are you? I'm good. How are you? I'm really good. It must be nuts for you. I know you have a, what is it? Three month old now? Five months. Five months. Man, I've lost, I don't know about you, but I've lost all conception of space and time, not just from the pandemic. I you, but I've lost all conception of space and time, not just from the pandemic. I feel like I haven't had any conception of space or time since I had a kid, three, which I, even this is proof, my son is three, but he's almost four, and that, even that year,

like, that's a margin of error of 12 months, and I still sometimes get it wrong. Oh, totally. Like, I remember when we first had him, everybody said, you know, enjoy these first few weeks because they go by lightning fast. And, you know, before you know what he's gonna be walking and he's gonna be going to school. And I'm like, it's been five months, it could be five years.

Like, it's been so long. No, it's like that joke about how like March was 12 years ago or whatever. Or when they're worried that on December 31st, it's going to change to December 32nd. It's just going to keep going. No, and then this is obviously what we're going to talk about a little bit. I also feel like, and I know you're in the middle of a couple books right now. There's something about like being in a book that screws and warps your sense of time. Like, I remember when I was writing Trust Me I'm Lying, I moved to New Orleans and it was amazing, and I love New Orleans, and I was writing and blah, blah, blah, and then when I finished,

I like, we were, I was driving with Samantha, and we, we hit this giant pothole, and I was like, we were, I was driving with Samantha and we, we like hit this giant pothole and I was like, oh man, that's new, like I hate this or whatever. And she's like, we have driven over that pothole, like 700 times over the last eight months. You have just existed in your own universe and not noticed it until right now. Oh, oh yeah, I've, I've come through the other side of books with new restaurants having opened that were like three months old by the time I saw the store front open. It's like, oh, where'd that come from? It's like, oh, they've been open for a while. It's like, that's, and it's two blocks from my house.

Right. No, and in some respects, like, the other thing, I've always found, it's like, to me, it's a sign, either that things are going horribly in the world or that you truly love what you do, like when you forget what day it is, you know? And actually, to me, that's like a sign that I'm fully engaged present, like in that flow state or whatever, when I'm like,

oh, did we do that like a month ago? And it's like, no, that was yesterday. Oh, absolutely. And for me, it's what's interesting is that I have it in a couple different ways, depending on whether I'm writing or editing. When I'm editing, it's very much problem solving and puzzle piece moving. And so if I'm in it, like I've got all these pieces floating around in my brain, moving around, clicking together,

and as they start to make sense, like almost like a Sudoku puzzle where, it's like, okay, if the four fits there, then the seven should fit here, and it does. And as the puzzle pieces come together, and the picture starts to make sense, it just pulls you deeper and deeper into the problem solving process and you lose conception of time and space and like where I live in Milwaukee, my office is an interior office. So I don't have any direct sunlight. And in the winter time, if I'm not careful, I'll start when it's dark and I'll

end when it's dark. And I'll have no idea what time it is. Like when you leave a movie and it was light when you went inside and then you come out and you're like, did the world end? What's going on? I know. I know. It's, that's the hardest part about going to a movie

at like five o'clock. You come out the other side and it's, did they finally drop the bomb? Or did a volcano erupt? Is this nuclear winter? Well, unfortunately, we don't have that problem anymore. But so speaking of like a lot of time elapsing, I thought we'd go back to the beginning.

So I had a conversation with Nikki. People would be listening to this differently, but I had a conversation with my other editor, Nikki, yesterday, and we were sort of talking about the early days of my writing career. But you and I have been working together I don't know if they served beer and hell. And we were talking to Falcone and Falcone, like I was sort of, I was like, I don't know if they served beer and hell. And we were talking to Falcone and Falcone,

like I was sort of, I was like, I don't know if they served beer and hell. I was like, I don't know if they served beer and hell. And I was like, I don't know if they served beer and hell. And I was like, I don't know if they serve beer and hell and we were talking to I don't know if we want to believe that is the name but we were talking to Falcone and Falcone like I was sort of probably thinking about something else I was standing there and you were talking to Mike about he you were talking you guys were talking I was sort of in the conversation you know in the circle and he had said something like he had identified as a writer or something. And I don't know if you remember this,

but you just caught my attention because you just began laying into this person. And you were like, you are not a writer. How could you say that? And then you pointed at me and you were like, Ryan has been writing on this blog sort of quietly every day, putting it, you made this sort of speech that about me as a writer, which at that point, I did not at all identify with.

I don't think I was obviously working with writers and I'd been a research assistant for Robert Green, but the idea that I had earned that label was something that hadn't occurred to me. And I just remember that being a very formative exchange in my sort of inching my way towards this profession. Do you remember that at all? I do, because Falcone, he is a nice guy.

He is the brother-in-law of Drew Curtis, who owns Farc.com. He is, and I feel like I can say this because half of my family is from New Jersey. They are he is quintessential. Jersey. wannabe where he wants to be he wants to have had a book he wants to have have written a screenplay he doesn't actually want to write. He's and that's totally fine like you don't have to be a, want to be a writer or an author.

But he was in the middle of all this hanging out and he had an idea for a script and he was, you know, noodling around on it and kicking ideas back and forth with me and with Tucker and I'm like, dude, you're not, you want to have written a screenplay. You want to have produced a movie. You don't actually want to write because writers write. And he looked at me like I was speaking Italian and it was a very basic truth that I don't think most people who aspire

to have books or write books really think about. If you want to be a writer, you have to write. Until that point, you can't call yourself a writer. You can call yourself someone who has an idea. Well, it's a tricky thing, though, right? Because I was always, and I don't know if this was self-consciousness. I don't know if this was some bad self-esteem deficiency that I picked up as a child,

but I've always sort of wrestled with, can you call yourself a writer or not? Is that like, I don't like the idea that other people get to decide whether you're a writer or not, and then at the same time, I don't like the idea that you can just call yourself one. So to me, there's this weird limbo period. I was probably in that limbo period.

And when I think about the elapsing of time, I guess I started my first blog in 2005. That conversation was in 2009, maybe 2010. And then as I was talking to Nikki about, I don't really feel like even after I'd sold that first book, I remember feeling like something had changed, like I just sold a book. But even when it wasn't until maybe it came out, which would have been June of 2012, that

I felt comfortable identifying as a writer. And even, even probably until obstacle came out, I would still tell people I worked in marketing because it would inevitably bring up the question, oh, if I read anything you've written, there was a self-consciousness for me about assuming that label. Absolutely. I mean, I haven't, I didn't start calling myself a writer

or accepting that label until maybe three or four years ago, I always called myself an editor. And for that same reason, it's the same way you can't, anybody who tells you that they're funny or confident is usually not. It requires somebody else to identify it for it to have any legitimacy, and or to have any objectivity, really. And it's not until I think you see points up on the scoreboard that you can comfortably say, yeah, I'm a writer. Because the tough part is there's lots of people out there

who have one book, they're authors, they were authors, they are not writers. Like that. I think there's that weird, maybe it's semantic, but what do you really call somebody who only has one book because they had one idea? Are they really writers? And doesn't matter, but I think the label comes from the outside and you have to decide whether or not you're willing to embrace it and do what it takes to keep hold of that honorific. In my episode with Donald Robertson, we talked about this because Gregory Hayes points out this interesting thing about Marcus Aurelius.

No where does Marcus Aurelius ever explicitly say I'm a stoic. And so Gregory Hayes goes like, hey, maybe Marcus Aurelius wasn't a stoic, maybe he wouldn't have identified that way. And I thought that was an interesting point and then the more I thought about it, I actually wondered if it's similar to this sort of like writer label.

And that it's like, it'd be really fucking weird to call yourself a stoic in your own diary, you know, and that maybe being a stoic, like you do call yourself a stoic, it's great. I don't go around calling myself a philosopher. I say that I write books about philosophy and that might seem like a semantic distinction and it is, but I think it's actually a critical, might seem like a semantic distinction and it is, but I think it's actually a critical, like, you don't, what benefit is there assigning yourself this honorific? It's weird. No, it not only is it weird, but it puts, it puts a target on your back that you don't need.

Because anytime you call yourself something with a capital letter at the front of it, you're just asking to be taken down for reasons that are wholly unrelated to your to your personality or to your work. It's more hassle than it's worth. Like just I'm a person who writes about philosophy, I'm a person who writes comedy, I'm a person who does this. It's much easier. Like you said in your other books, sort of keeping your identity small. There's only benefit to that. Yeah, I think so. It's for people who don't know. I mean, you edited, not only did you do a very helpful job editing Trust Family Online.

You've edited, I think everything I've written. I don't know if you worked on GrowthHacker, but you edited all my books, and I was thinking about obstacle. And I don't know if I've ever, like, sort of fully told the story of hinted at it. But I remember, I remember when you were very helpful on obstacle, you gave me a bunch of notes, but I remember two things showing Tucker in an early copy of the book. And I remember he gave me one very helpful note, which two very helpful notes And I remember he gave me one very helpful note,

which two very helpful notes. I remember he pointed out that the asterisks, which appears in the beginning of obstacles the way that basically says, hey, this is not a book of Stoic philosophy. This is a book that features some Stoic philosophy, which I think was actually critical as sort of a trojan horse for getting it out there.

That was very helpful. And I remember he gave me the Tommy John story. And then I remember you. I remember I was sitting at a Starbucks in Riverside, California, and I'd sent you some early pages of the book. And you, like, I had some sort of sections that were kind of like sort of meditations on stuff. And I had some sections that were like stories illustrating, and the ideas. And I remember your note was sort of like,

go with this part, you're like, show, don't tell. Like you don't, like, anyways, I remember that note for people who sort of wonder how books come about. Like it's in the discussion with the writer and the editor as you kick around things in the early days, that not only influencing the structure of that book, but then also obviously you go to the enemy and still this is the key. Yeah, and I was sort of in the middle of some screenwriting stuff, and that show don't tell, note is sort of the central maxim to all screenwriting.

And, but it applies to books, it applies to any real form of expression. And I remember looking at those pages and realizing like if we, if we order this properly, if we structure this properly, all of this wisdom is just sort of going to drop out of the bottom of it, just based on the natural order of the order of the information and the thinking and the analysis and the observations. And it was just having the confidence to commit to that and to recognize that you had the ability to show. A lot of people don't, that's really the big problem is

that a lot of writers don't feel like they have the chops to show or they have, don't have the right to show, so they have to tell, they have to, you know, they have to use exposition. And it's to their detriment. And once I think you wrapped your arms around the fact that you could show these, these ideas you could show these stories, that thing really started to, it really started to pick up steam and it just blossomed into, started to blossom into what it is now.

Well, yeah, it's, and I think it opened up a couple things, right? So it's like, if you're doing meditations, there's a lot of eye. Like, I think this, what about this? You're telling the reader stuff. To, to be able to illustrate via stories was actually really sort of generating a lot of confidence for me because it was like, oh, I don't have to be front and center. And it allowed me to sort of, I think tackle the subject matter from a greater level. Like, you know, when people, one of the nice notes about people like who read the book, they think I'm much older than I am. Or they sort of marvel at some of the, the, the weightiness of it.

And it's like, well, that's because you're not seeing me in the book. I'm putting all these other wiser, more successful people center stage. And so they're giving you the wisdom. And I'm just sort of, you help me play to my strengths there, which is like researching and organizing and illustrating, as opposed to having to authoritatively give a philosophy of, you know, overcoming adversity, which was preposterous as a 26-year-old white guy who had had, although gone through my share of

difficulties, you know, I didn't lose my arm in Vietnam or something, you know, like I, I think that was actually a critical breakthrough on the book. And what was interesting about that is that I don't remember us having that specific conversation for obstacle, but it definitely reared its head and ego is the enemy. Like, when there is that long, protracted argument about where does your story go, does it go as part of the epilogue or afterward or does it stay in the intro? And Nikki was desperate to put that thing up front, which we ultimately did. But the conversation around that was, you know, I'm this young guy, who am I to talk about, you know, ego or things that I've done or, or, you know, and I guess it connects back to who am I to talk about obstacles

as a young white guy in America? And it was of all the discussions we had with EGO. That was definitely the longest. And it felt like it took you, I don't know if you were ever fully happy with it, but it was the one that sort of stuck in your car for the longest time. Yeah, I think if I was redoing EGO, I would probably take the prologue out

and move it to the back, but that's easy to do now that the book has worked. You know what I mean? But I very much like that instillness and obstacle. It's primarily about the other people. Yeah, because it's it's it's it's part because it's it's it's almost a version of what we're talking about earlier about calling yourself a writer. If you capitalize that letter, if you be right over the capital W, or you put I in front of all of this showing all of this advice, it sets you up for the skeptical reader or

the critics say, who the hell is this guy? Who is he to talk to me about? Obstacles, who is he to talk to me about ego? And you start this pissing contest between the author and the reader when the author is putting something uncomfortable Even if it's the truest of all true statements in front of that person because the easiest way to invalidate an uncomfortable truth is by shooting the messenger And if you take the mess if the messenger removes himself from the message, it's much harder to deny the truth of what's being put in front of you.

I was, this idea of taking notes is something I wanted to dive into because as helpful as Tucker was with the Tommy John story and that sort of footnote thing I was talking about, the other two things I remember from his early time with the book, one more direct one I found out indirectly, but I remember I showed him the process chapter of the book

and his reaction was sort of like, everyone fucking knows this, this is the most basic thing in sports. Like what is that like a very negative reaction to the Nick Sabin process chapter, which, you know, sort of, as it happens, turns out to be one of the most popular chapters in the book, the one I get the most feedback on, that I, I now having spoken all over the world telling stories from the books, always the one that I make sure is in there. Even when I spoke to Nick Saven at Alabama was in there. And you can see that the audience

doesn't always know this stuff and that hearing it works. But then I also remember hearing third hand that his predictions for the book he'd been predicting that obstacle would sell like 5,000 copies. That it was going to be this colossal failure and I'd have egg all over my face. And we don't need to get into why, or what motivated these predictions. But the interesting thing is, as you go out and do anything

whether it's starting a company or writing a book or whatever, you get feedback. And some of the feedback is spot on. And you have to, you your idiot not to listen. And then other feedback is potentially fatal if you don't manage to ignore it or have thick enough skin. And so it's like tricky thing where it's like you have to proceed and yet you're crazy if you ignore advice and feedback. And so I'm curious as a person who is an editor

who's also privy to some of these conversations, how do you think about like sort of integrating feedback? How do you know what to listen to, what not to listen to? I think the thing that I usually, it's hard because they, you know, it comes from so many different angles for so many different reasons. But the one type of feedback that I always tend to listen to is the type that if I were to engage it, would produce a lot of extra work. Because that usually means there's something going on.

Oh, so you listen to it when it's a lot of work. Uh-huh. Okay. I may not take it all the way. I may not ultimately, you know, take it in chapter and verse. But if they have a note that implies that I've got to rework an entire section, or I've got to re-conceptualize an entire character or an entire section, or I've got to re-conceptualize an entire character, or an entire idea, or I've got a chapter

completely upside down, like, something's going on there, because I've, they're telling me the opposite of what my intention was, like, something's going on. The ones, so I really dig into that stuff. The stuff that I immediately, I shouldn't say immediately dismissed, but I'm immediately skeptical of the stuff that just hurts my feelings. If you tell me or bruises my sense of self.

Like, okay, I'm having an emotional response to that. That can't be good. So I have to, and it reminds me of that advice. Who is it? Is it Neil Gaiman? Who's that? I think so, yeah. It's like, if somebody tells you something is wrong,

they're usually right, and if they tell you how to fix it, they're usually wrong. It's, it's that I have to get over the part where they're telling me what to do and deal with my emotional response to that, knowing that there's probably, I can probably dismiss most of it, but I have to keep the core of the criticism probably dismiss most of it, but I have to keep the core of the criticism at heart. Though, I guess the stuff that I really let go of is anybody telling me exactly what to how to fix something. If that's, if they're telling me, here's what you should do.

I had said, okay, like, you, I've been in the middle of this inside this thing for, you know, four months, and you all of a sudden have dissected this thing like your house MD. Like that's not how this is going to work. So I have to do, and sometimes that stuff can come from reputable people or people who's opinion you respect, and that's the hard one to really go. Well, it's interesting, too, because I obviously, for people who don't you respect, and that's the hard one to really go. Well, it's interesting too, because I obviously, for people who don't know

that you're a partner in daily stoke and you recalibrate on videos and the coins and the statues and that you edit the daily emails, that's an interesting sort of insight into how your mind works and probably an insight into how mind works, is that often your notes, sometimes I'm frustrated because I feel like you, especially when we're dealing with something physical or logistically complicated, your notes

are, hey, if this was like a, if this was like a chapter in a book, I dig into this whole hog because it's like just moving words around on a page. But sometimes your notes are like, hey, I know you guys have been working on this thing for like four months, but my note is to blow it all up and start from scratch. But it's in your right. That's often the one that you, a person intuitively has the most resistance to because the cognitive dissonance is like, you know, if you just dismiss this, you won't have to change, you know. And so we often ignore probably the feedback that we most need to hear and then listen to the feedback that is the most trivial,

but tell ourselves we're being open to feedback, but that's only because the cost of it is low. It's much lower. Yeah. And it's tough. It's really tough, especially if your vision for the end goal or your perception of the end goals for whatever the product or project is, are not identical, or if you want something to be one way and the person who's giving you feedback wants to be another way, that feedback will never reconcile with your vision of the product or the project. So it's even harder to take that into consideration. And with stuff like that we work on, the struggle that I have is like, want There there's things that I I want to change or there's ideas I have or things to make it better The problem is to make it better and the way that I'm talking about it requires Built rebuilding from the foundation. It's the same materials like it'd be building the same house with the same stuff

You'd just be rearranging the foundation and maybe the layout a little bit, but you'd end up using the same amount of pieces and the same kind of pieces. That's even more frustrating. Right, right, right. No, and it's weird too, because I think less discussed is how a stray someone can be led by bad feedback. We won't say who, but you and I were go striding a book for a brass check for a client. And remember, we finished the book, the client loved it, the editor loved it, the marketing people loved it. And then at some point way too late in the process, the, what do we, in goes right and we call the person who didn't God knows who, and they got some weird, flippant, strange feedback that essentially completely unraveled the thing. Who knows if this book will ever see the light of day. They're ended up doing like a sort of a page one ground up rewrite, but like, you know, they may have missed their window. I mean,

I haven't heard about this book in months. I'm more confident that it won't get published than I am that it will get published. And that's the cost of showing something to the wrong person or being open to the wrong feedback. Yeah, it's not only that for them it was a double for that book it's a double edged sword or double lami because they also had that problem they had the Falcome problem where they called them they wanted to call themselves writers they wanted to be writers but really what they wanted to have was a book and when all you want to have is a book and you don't really know what you want to say, you leave the evaluation of the content up to other people. And that's exactly

what happened. This author had no real sense for what the book should say. And I would argue probably didn't care that much as long as everybody else liked it. And enough people didn't like enough of it for or whatever reasons, or wanted it to be different in some way, that they amassed that feedback and in that accumulation said, well, okay, if I've got no positive feedback over here from my trusted counsel, and I got all of this negative feedback over here, that must mean that it's bad.

And this is the other piece about feedback as a writer that you have to be really, really careful about with your network is when you ask somebody for feedback on a book, they think that they have to give you feedback. So you're going to get criticism because they think that's their job. Nobody who has been who has given a manuscript by a friend will read that and say, I think it's great. I don't think you should touch anything. That has never happened in 10 years of doing this. And so you have to keep in mind that you're going to get feedback

from people because they think they have to give it mind that you're going to get feedback from people because they think they have to give it, not because they actually have something constructive to say. And one of the ways you can tell that, this is what's going on, is that 80% of their notes come from the first 20 pages. Right. No, and I think it's, to me, it's a habit. I've tried to cultivate in my life. You know, if we're looking for applications beyond being a writer, my sister's looking

at buying a house and I was like, you know, she would send me this stuff and like, my instinct was to like, give my opinion. And then I realized, that's what my parents would do. And that's why we don't get along. Like, I don't need to have an opinion on somebody else's house. I can just be happy for this person and encourage them, which is by the way, what they wanted anyway. Do you know what I mean?

Like, they didn't want me to tell them all the reasons they shouldn't, they shouldn't buy it. They were already thinking about buying it, and they just want you to be happy for them, and maybe, okay, maybe they want you to go like, hey, here's something good about it, or hey, like, you know, make sure to look into this, or like, hey, in my experience, like, here's something I learned. but nobody is, nobody is asking for you to tell them all the things that's wrong with what they're doing. And that's the Marcus Rurelius idea. He's like, you, it's okay to not, like, you don't have to have an opinion about this. And conversely, you know, he says, and I think this ties into the feedback thing,

why do you care about other people's opinion more than your own opinion? How are you allowing, like, if I had listened to what Tucker was saying, more than my own sense of what I was trying to accomplish and what I thought the audience would do, I mean, he predicted 5,000 copies. This book just sold a million copies and it's in 30 languages. You know what I mean? And my sense of why it was working was correct. And I'm glad I listened to myself and I didn't listen to what was at that point totally unsolicited feedback.

Yeah. And I've seen that issue crop up not just in areas around giving opinions on houses and things like that, but in relationships especially. Like, I deal with that. I struggle with this with my wife. Like she, she has, she was a, you know, an executive in a big family business that they were selling the company. And, you know, there was all, it took, you know,

18 months to get the deal done. And, you know, there's a 12 month transition period. And it was all very fraught. And she would come home from the office or get off a phone call and she would just start to vent. And my instinct would be to have an opinion about what was going on and to try and solve it. And I had to sort of go back to that you know, that sort of the therapeutic language or just

the relationship advice language. And it's like, sometimes they just want to vent and want you to listen and to say, you know, I'm on your side. Like, you don't want to hear you say that sucks. Yes, exactly. That sucks. And conversely, like you're saying with your sister, that's great. I hope you love your house.

You know, you know, not whereas, whereas sometimes it might be, this house will be great if you add if you add on to it. Like once you change all the things that you have decided are make it worth buying this house, then it will be good. Like that's the other thing to avoid. So I was thinking you mentioned this idea of getting into a pissing contest with the reader or with critics or whatever. I thought we should talk briefly about the new book, Lives of the Stoics, which you were

an editor on and you actually saw it before Nikki did. Nikki was commenting about how this book just sort of dropped on her desk fully formed and that was a result largely of the work you and I did together. But I mean for people who will see the intro of the new book, the intro makes this just sort of very clearly goes, philosophy is not what people say, it's what people do. And the concept of lives of the Stokes is that, you know, let's look at the lives of these stoic philosophers, how they live, what was Santa Cah actually like, how did Marcus really succeed as a leader, Zeno's life that leads up to the foundation,

the founding of Stoicism, how does that transpire, where do they fall short, where do they exceed, et cetera. But one of the early notes with the intro of the book was I was sort of making this argument against the idea that I like Nikki's note was that the intro was very defensive and that I was sort of having this argument about what philosophy was. And she gave me some notes and we ended up doing with another intro and I thought I liked it and it wasn't until we were almost seeing the book in the final, final stages that I read it.

And I was like, something I listened to bad advice, but I listened to advice that took me further from where I wanted to go. And I had to pump the brakes. It was a big thing. And now people read the intro. I think the argument is much clearer. It's just like, boom, here's my take.

Not here's me arguing against these phantom people. And then, you know, you're the middle one, it started with a quote and I hate starting books with quotes and blah, blah, blah, blah. But the point is, I don't think people always understand the wrestling that goes into fine tuning these things and how narrow one it can be. You listen to the wrong person at the wrong time, you make this mistake or that mistake

or you got your head too far up your own ass about something, you can end up ruining a whole project. Yes. And it's like, if you're going down, if you're going down a path and you take one step off the path, but you continue in a straight line, over the course of time, you're going to be so far away from the path just by that one little diversion that you don't, you think you'll have been doing everything the same, and you're nowhere near where you wanted it end up. And if you listen to the wrong kind of advice and the wrong kind of feedback, it can send you down to rabbit hole that aligns you to other things in the immediate vicinity of that

problem that are actually bigger issues to solve, that then if you end up actually seeing them by the time you're on the other side of the rabbit hole, you've run out of energy to deal with them. And like, with the intro to lives, if I had to boil it down, it was really just that the first version, Nikki was right, it was defensive. But what she was wrong is that was that it didn't need to be an argument. What makes the intro great now is that you go on the offense. Like you speak with authority. You take responsibility for that position

and you make a point and you say, bam, here it is, this is the deal. And I think that is part of the evolution of your evolution as a writer. Like we talked about in the beginning where it's like I'm being hesitant to call yourself a writer to speak with authority and obstacle allowing you to drop all of this knowledge and wisdom onto people without having to put yourself out in front of it. Lives as this sort of it's this it's weird it's this deep dive but it's also

sort of like a survey course like you could actually give this to sort of intro to stoa season course and this would be the first book they read and it would be probably the smartest book they would read it you have accepted your your position as a writer and you've accepted your authority and it is present in the positive, assertive, offensive nature of the intro. Yeah, I think I talk about this in ego, but S this, he talks about the word euphemia, and he has this analogy, he says, he's like sort of pieces, is the sense that you're on the right path

and not being distracted by all the paths that Chris cross yours. I think that one of the tricky things with this book was not just the argument about how should the intro be, and then obviously not just, steves vision and my vision, my understanding of the market what previous books have done,

but also just like, it required a certain amount of confidence because like, it's a really tricky proposition. I mean, like the first several chapters of the book, not to deter people, the first several chapters of the book are, I'm biogurizing people who even people interested in stosism don't know about. But I had to have the sense that one I could pull it off and I did pull it off. But two, that the payoff would be there.

By the time you got to Cato, Encissaro, Ensenica, and Helvides and Marcus and Epictetus and Musone's Rufus, that you'd have a groundwork. And so yeah, I think the sort of confidence and courage but both being interrelated virtues in this sense of like you gotta know what you're doing, why you're doing it and you have to believe that you can pull it off and then you have to like just go do it and it's it's hard and scary. Yeah, it is, it is sort of it's walking without a net. It especially when you are

when you have an argument to make that is maybe counter to the to the conventional narrative. I mean, and I think that's been something that you've dealt with for years now, just based on the conventional understanding of what a stoic is and what's the whicism is. You've been demystifying that for five books now, really, if you count daily stoic. And it has never not required that sort of amalgamation of confidence and courage because the academic establishment is still sort of trotting out the old yarns. Even if you sell 2 million books, that's still going to be there and you still have to fight

against it and you still have to remember you know that you that you were right that you you have the right approach to this and it would be very easy to get knocked off that path to follow one of those crisscrossing pads that might be less steep or wider or smoother and to stay the course is really sometimes the hardest part. And to stay the course is really sometimes the hardest part. Yeah, and it's, I think weirdly conspiracy was a big factor in all that because not only do you have to, if the, if the, no, you're trying to do, you have to stay the course. But then you have to get yourself to a place where you're indifferent to the results because the results don't always confirm that you did it right. You know what I mean? So it's like with obstacle, okay, someone's predicting that it's going to sell 5,000 and it sells a million, that's actually not confirmation that I did what I wanted to do. Like, that doesn't validate it at all, just as if, just as with conspiracy, which has been a much slower burn, in a weird way I'm prouder of because not only do I know that

I think it's some of my best writing, but it's like, no, no, I did what I wanted to do. It doesn't matter to me if it sells 50,000 copies or 500,000 copies, you have to cultivate it like, hey, this is the path that I'm on. It's a long, it's a, I'm in it for the long haul. The fact that it's celebrated or criticized today can't be what's motivating you. It marks really says, like, you just got to do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter. That's like a really difficult attitude to cultivate because we're social beings who crave feedback and confirmation and validation and all these things.

who crave feedback and confirmation and validation and all these things. Yeah, and it's also you you want to be able to look back at that work at any point in the future and feel the same about it or at least about your work that you put into it and what you were trying to accomplish. Like the worst thing that could happen regardless of sales is you look back in 10 years and you ask yourself, you know, what was I thinking? Right. No, you want to be able to say, I did what I set out to do. And that's enough. And then everything else is extra. It's like a shock as Mara was telling me, he's like, look, like if if it was a good shot, if it was a shot they were supposed to take, I'm not gonna be mad at them if it misses. You know what I mean?

And that, that takes a lot of restraint and a lot of self-awareness, but to me, it's the only path to sanity. Yeah, and it's funny that there's a lot of coaches who struggle with that, like Mike Leach up at Washington State, that he's been running pro- style offenses in that sort of, not even pro style. He's been running the wide open, four wide receivers, run and gun for decades.

And people think he's a crazy person. I mean, he's a little weird. But his offensive scheme and his perception of where the game was going was 20 years ahead of everybody. So he never got the big jobs and he put a bunch of people in the league. He never got the big jobs, but he's persisted. When you hear people interview him and when you hear college coaches being interviewed, he always seems to be the one most at peace because hear college coaches being interviewed, he always

seems to be the one most at peace because he's doing the things that he always knew were right for his style of game. And it's served him over the years and I don't think he's moved around jobs, but I don't think he's ever, you never hear him like he's not getting his back window smashed in with a golf club, like he's not getting his back windows mashed in with a golf club like he's not getting caught it Caught out in corruption scandals. It's just Mike Leach, you know, doing Mike Leach things Yeah, no you you got to be able to sort of cultivate the ability to just be you Regardless of what's what's happening around you, which you wouldn't think would be the hardest thing to do in the world, because that's like naturally how everyone is, but to go against the current in that sense is like

extraordinarily difficult. And Nicky and I were talking about this too. It's funny. Like, they were not excited about a book about stoicism. And of course, now that stoicism is trendy or popular, you know, deciding to write a book about stoicism is very easy to do. And they're going to eat, you know, some sloppy seconds from my books. And there's, you know, sort of wind at the back. And so you can feel like it's a good decision. But actually, the bad decision was they're not being them. They're being sort of mercenary them.

And that's like to me, just a crappy place to be. Yeah. I was, I was gonna ask you, like, I wonder if you could say to Nikki or say to the people at Portfolio, it's like, you didn't make the right decision for you, you made a decision and you happened to be right. But like, if stoicism didn't take the day and it was Zen Buddhism, how would you feel about the book that we wrote?

Because the book would be the same. Well, that's actually, she was saying that actually, they felt like they bought the book because they hoped I would get the Stoicism thing out of my system and then go back to marketing books. So, you know, you can make the right decision for the wrong reasons and it's really important that you don't learn the wrong lessons from that.

The interesting thing with publishers and movie studios and VC companies is almost invariably, like I was just, I was reading this interview with, with, uh, uh, Alana Smorecett, and I sent it to you. She's like, nobody wanted me to do Jagged Little Pill. I put it on their desk, it sold 10 million copies, and then I come out with my next album,

and they're making me defend myself and justify my artistic instincts. When they should be saying, thank you. We want the next thing from you. It is funny, even with portfolio, there's still arguments about this idea or that idea or should it go in this direction in that direction. I'm not saying that because you're successful, you should automatically get your way from that point forward. That's a needy-tistical thing to think

and probably a recipe for disaster. But it is interesting how quickly people forget that the decisions that worked out were almost always gut decisions. There wasn't a ton of evidence behind them. They were lonely decisions. And then when that person or that organization wants to do it again,

instead of going, okay, we're gonna defer to you, you do this for a living. They're immediately like, well, what about this, this, this, and this? And you're like, how did that logic work out for you last time? Yeah, it's, my buddy Sean, he's the producer, and he bought the pitch for Get Out Jordan Peele's first movie.

And when he bought it at a coffee meeting, like Jordan pitched in the idea, he's like, this is great, I've never seen this on screen before. We have to get this made. And it got made, made $506 million. Over the next 18 months, he got, I don't know, 350 pitches for a screenplays that all were like, this is, this is wedding crashers, means get out.

Like, it's, everybody's trying to replicate the get out model and And it took him an immense amount of discipline not to try and just redo that, not to follow the path that he went on, get out and just sort of do a derivative version and hit the cycle over and over again. That is very rare in Hollywood because that's been the business model. Like he was telling me the other day, he has had 150 pictures for small budget COVID movies

that are socially relevant since March. And somebody's gonna make it. Somebody's, each studio is gonna make a COVID movie. And the one that gets is most successful is going to get replicated multiple times until they're so bad that they don't even get any kind of release. No, it said, you got to go your own way. And yeah, there is.

It's always about the 0 to 1, not about piling on. But it's the hardest thing for people to do. No, it was so weird. This is actually another point is where we should wrap up. But like, daily dad, to me, was a no-brainer of a project. It's been super popular with people. It's going to make a great book. It follows the exact model of daily dad. And yet, when we went to publishers with it, it was, oh, parenting books don't sell. it, it was, oh, parenting

books don't sell or, you know, what about this? What about that? Even though, of course, parenting books are some of the best selling books of all time. There's, it's a huge audience. I have a proven track record. And so on the one hand, that's frustrating. On the other hand, you know, if people were more on top of it, you'd have to give up more control of it. And so you and I are doing daily dad now and it's been cool to watch. Like, when we started the project, you were not a dad and now you are. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's like parenting books, parenting books work great. Shitty opportunistic parenting books by people looking to cash in do not work. This is not, that was not what we were trying to do, but they couldn't divorce the intention of the authors with the track record of the people who came before us. And I think ultimately they will see that that was a mistake. But also you see, I think this goes to the other point is like, people will always want to put things in a box. And the best things don't exist in a box. So they're like, you know, when I was a marketing book, so like, but this is a stoicism book.

And then when it's like, I want to do a parenting book, they're like, a stoicism parenting book, you know, like, everything wants to go in a box. And really the best things exist in their own categories, and are their own things for their own reasons. And to me, that's the best part about daily data. It's like, I think what we're making there. And for people, there's a podcast version you can listen to, you could also just go to daily.

Dad.com for the email. But what I love about the email is like, and this probably sounds weird to me, but I read the email every day, because I've written them in batches, they get shuffled around. It's a surprise to me in some way which one arrives in the inbox each day.

And since they're not my wisdom, it's like stories and examples from history, it's like I'm benefiting because this doesn't exist anywhere. And if it did exist, I would have just subscribed to that instead of making my own. And that's, I think, something that the, especially editors of publishing houses don't, don't understand is that when something is, you know, when, if something is good, it will, it will find, it will find its audience. But I also think that this is one of the benefits. I think that you've, you've, you've had being a marketer on top of being a writer is one

of the reasons people want to put things in boxes that is it just makes it easier for them to explain it to other people or to themselves. They don't want to take the time or do the work to understand what you're trying to say or sell or do. And if you can develop the language and the marketing terminology around the concept and around the idea and hand it to them at the same time as you were handing them the book. It probably increases your rate of success of acquisition and then distribution because

without it, you're just going to get stuck with people, green lighting stuff that they can describe to their boss in 30 seconds. No, I think that's totally right. Well, look, as I told you, when I held the box set of obstacle ego and stillness in my hand a couple months ago, none of these books would have been possible without you. I appreciate all the help, not just with Daily Still It, but that conversation we were talking about earlier and saw some talk. I can hear your kid crying in the background. So you go take care of that and we'll talk to you. It's been a great pleasure, thank you.

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