Austin Kleon On Maintaining Healthy Habits, Growing As Parents, And Interrogating The Stoic Virtues

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1:41Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

2:35Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. One of my favorite people in the whole world is today's guest, Austin Kleon. I loved his books Keep Going. I loved Show Your Work. I loved Steal Like an Artist. They're some of the most popular books we sell at the Painted Porch here in Bastrop, Texas. And I was actually just writing about Austin the other day. He gave me this really important advice when I was moving to Austin, thinking about having kids. He said, work, family scene, pick two. And I think about that all the time. I think about it when I think about saying yes to something, when I'm leaning towards saying no to something.

3:15What's important? What do I prioritize? If you try to have it all, you end up losing some of the most important things in the world to you. often for things that are not that important to you. So I brought you a couple of weeks ago, I brought you my conversation at Barnes and Noble with the one and only Casey Neistat. I also did one here in Austin at the Barnes and Noble at the Arboretum, which I'd actually never been to. It's a cool bookstore. It's actually a pretty cool Barnes and Noble. The staff was great, signed a bunch of books while I was there. Certainly not anywhere close to my worst book signing.

3:46My worst was at a Barnes and Noble in Hawaii, I think on Maui, and all of one person came up. Quite a few more people at this one in Austin, which was really cool. Thanks to everyone who came out. Thanks to Austin for having this great conversation with me about work, about creativity, about managing all the impositions on our time, how to raise good people in a crazy messed up world. Austin's been on the podcast a couple of times. I'll link to those episodes. He has just shaped me in many, many ways. Great friend, great person, great writer. you can follow him at austincleon you can go to his website austincleon.com where he has a fantastic newsletter one of the few that i get and love and uh check out steal like an artist show your work keep going his poetry book newspaper blackout is also really cool and uh there's a reason his books are very very popular there's a reason i recommend them all the time and there's a reason that when i was choosing who to do that conversation with the first person i thought of The first person I asked was Austin Kleon, and I was very grateful.

4:49He said yes. So enjoy this conversation, and thanks again, Austin.

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7:48I'm excited to have a break from parenting so we can talk about parenting. So I was actually thinking about you this morning, I was flying back here, and I feel like I'm in a bit of a... Not that I haven't found any good books recently, but I find that my ability to read and concentrate on books is suffering. Have you ever gone through something like that? I mean, yeah, especially after you read something really good. Yeah. Like, that's really dangerous. So when you get something good, then it's like the re-entry problem. like Walker Percy's like Walker Percy and lost in the cosmos has this theory of re-entry where it's like when you have a train the more transcendent the experience like the harder it is to come down from yeah do you find like when you write a book going back to regular life is hard yeah you go on vacation re-entry regular life is hard but this is more like like I would I would I'll read a couple pages and then I pick up my phone but like my ability to read is normally my ability is normally predicated on the power to push through that and do uninterrupted concentrated periods of focusing on something that is not a screen Do you think it's because you're in like marketing book release mode?

9:05I do tend to find that yeah reading dips are correlated with like periods of burnout or exhaustion or tired because you have to be able to focus on what you're doing but also I find reading is like um it's a habit so it's like walking or running or working out when you're doing a lot it's easy to keep doing it and then when you've been doing it intermittently then it's easy to come up with excuses for not doing it. I agree for me I have genres that I go back to so like junk like my favorite genre is like rock and roll like oral history books so I'll like just find like a music oral history that i've never read um and then i'll reread stuff i do that too yeah so it's like if you're struggling instead of going i hope this next book does it for me this next book does it for me go back to something that you know does do it for you yep call your old girlfriend no but like uh charles portis is somebody who like every time i read uh charles or this book like i just fall into it and i end up reading at least one and a half book like i'll like i'll read the one i'm reading and then i'll read at least half of the next one because just because there's only five i don't go back then then you'll take that momentum and channel towards things yeah or need to read or whatever yeah and i'll just be like i just every night just take a chance on something that's like in my like on my kindle or something is that when you read you to read at night?

10:46Well, I read fiction at night. Before bed? Yeah. I can't read nonfiction because my brain starts going, ooh. I read nonfiction like in the afternoon. Like after I pick the kids up and I get them on the screens and their snacks. And Papa's going out. And this is, it's almost pool season. And the great, the great like luxurious, decadent thing about my life now is like i'll just lay in the pool and read for two hours and call it work do you get sunburned yeah like uh no i'll like put up the umbrella and i'll either float on a raft or i'll just stand by the side of the pool with the book just like read and it's kind of a screen-free environment also right so it's you're in the pool so you can't yeah yeah you can't like pick up your phone i can i can i can change music on my watch or i can text meg so like if there's a kid emergency i'm sure she loves that yeah hey honey can you bring out no um like no but like you know if there's any like emergency well but sure shout out the window too it's not like i'm like no like to me it's like i'm very like one of the things i'm really into i used to be a very unfussy kind of like i can read anywhere i can work anywhere i can do whatever yeah but like now that i have now that this is my life like i've been really interested in like what are things i can do because i do this all the time and it's like work for me what can i do like make this lush like what can i do to like make this like real sensorily wonderful so like i spent more money on an apple monitor recently than like i'd probably have for like it was like i i just some ungodly amount the new mac like they're like fifteen hundred dollars or something which to me is just like i'm gonna pay fifteen hundred dollars for it but he's so awesome like every time i said to read now because it's the my my son oren who's 10 he's like you can't see the pixels you know and so it's like oh you know it's like all impressed and it makes it like so i'm like kind of interested right now in like silly rituals and then like I've always been like someone who I don't have silly rituals when I sit down to write but I always thought it'd be fun to have like a dumb robe or something that you put on or like have you found a robe no what I do that's silly sometimes I'll smoke I have these cigarette pencils that are like they're pencils but they look like cigarettes and I'll sit there at my desk like an old grizzled that's like the dumbest thing I do in the studio that's one of my questions actually what's the dumbest thing you do in the studio I love asking people that like what's the silliest thing you do when you're working um when I'm writing well I I listen to the same song on repeat yeah it's not when I say that people go oh what is the song it's not that there's always a song of the moment um do you write down which song you were listening to with different books usually what i'll do is i'll look you know when like the spotify um yep wrap-up comes i'll be like oh it'll give me it was this one it gives me what each of the like for a normal person you know that the list that list of songs they're like oh you probably listened to this song 20 times and this song 15 times for me it's like 700 listens to this song you know yeah um like i i forget which band it was but they sent me a note that I was like in the.001 % listening to that band.

14:21But I tend, so I'll tend to listen to songs on repeat over and over and over again. And I can, if it's somewhat serendipitous, like how I find those songs, but like my productivity can rise and lower depending on how good the songs have been recently. yeah i wrote a book proposal to pet shop boys west end girls with that method and i threw it out so i don't know like if it works for me but um it was fun to listen to it i mean it was a good it was a good soundtrack i uh you mentioned walker percy shelby foot was walker percy's best friend he would famously write in a bathrobe or whatever yeah and i find actually though and i talked a little bit about this in the discipline book i do think like as a writer you can dress how you want your office to look how you want you to set it i do think there's actually something about getting dressed yeah putting on clothes shaving etc like i do feel like there's the fresher you set yourself up to be the fresher you're like there's something to me about just stuffling around the house in your pajamas that might seem fun but it's actually maybe like not conducive like i'm i'm much more interested in the robert carroll like dresses in a three-piece suit that goes to the office yeah uh not quite there but like i do think like that seems like a silly ritual but it also makes sense to me yeah the idea of like uh how you look is a reflection of how the seriousness with which you're taking the thing i also i'm really i guess one of the points i was trying to make when i was talking about making the process like lush is i'm very interested in sensory things right now and and to me clothes are like a sensory thing it's like the feel of the clothing that you're wearing and so i feel like when you're wearing a suit it's really a feel thing it's like a touch thing and i think that like when i'm interested in like sensory cues you can give yourself to like when it's time to work right i have a good one did i tell you this uh you haven't been to my office since but i have joan didion's writing chair you told me And it's like this.

16:33It's not comfortable really at all. But there is something about... I bought Joan Didion's furniture. It's all terrible. It's all basically furniture from a little old lady. A very trendy but little old lady. But she's probably had it for forever. Yes. I mean, she's like the age of my grandmother. So it's like whatever your grandmother's stuff would be. If your grandmother was the coolest person in the world. But there is... I have found there's something about sitting in that. And, like, I have little things like that. Like, I have, like, a little pen knife that is from Rome, like, the second or third century.

17:16Like, it looks like a knife that, like, a senator would carry, right? I just got this new one. It's, like, a hand. It's, like, a rock. And you can see all the chipping on it. but it's like a primitive stone tool from like 10 ,000 years ago. I like to have little mementos or things, and I just know them, I can touch them or move them around. They're obviously like little luxuries or they're antiques or whatever. Searching for them is almost more fun than having them, but there is something about a vibe or an environment. And I think having the chair or whatever, I have little pictures and prints in my mouth, but there's something about like kind of setting the mood of your creative space that I think matters.

18:03And I think that's really like, I mean, I think that really ties into your work. I mean, so much of your work is about going to the past, bringing the past to the present, and finding lessons for the contemporary now. And so it makes sense to me that you have like old artifacts around. The other one that I got recently as a sort of reminder about saying no is I had this little, it's like a little, it's probably no bigger than this note card. Yeah. And it's an inter-office memo from the Truman administration. And which again, the idea you can just buy papers from Truman's White House, like you think, you know, it was like a few hundred dollars.

18:44It wasn't like this priceless antique that, you know, was sold at Sotheby's. like a um but anyways that it's it's a memo from his secretary and it says um you know due to all of the constraints on the uh on the president's time should i tell them that due to so many similar inquiries the president must decline and then um it's that that the president must decline is underlined and it says in this sort of scrawled handwriting it says um uh the proper response is underlined HST. So it was like Truman writing a note to his secretary, like, you have to start, like she passed him like, you know, an interoffice memo.

19:27You have to start saying no. And he's like, yes, you have to start saying no. And I had that on my wall next to two pictures of my kids. And the idea being like, I'm having to say no, not just because there's too many requests, but you're saying no in order to say yes to other things. So again, I think obviously I could just write the word no or i could just remember this but there is something about having that embodied from a person that's much more busy and important but also that i admire uh on the wall and there's something about that that's like i look at that and go i'm just gonna ignore this email or i'm just gonna say no i'm gonna pass this to someone to say no well i'm like i'm i'm obsessed with that word embodied right now because i'm actually really into embodied cognition right now this idea that we think with our bodies that are it's literally our and i think that's something that you're really good about writing about is how much an active life uh whether it's walking or running um or you know being active with your body really have you read the body score i haven't read that i just read a book called um best-selling it was one of the top 20 best-selling books of the year last year and it's like 30 years old it's basically it's a manual yeah not be selling the way that is but it is a reminder of the power of a really good title and then really when you tap into a concept that is true to people and what would you say is the what's the concept is basically that like your body is operating with an understanding or a cognition of the things that it's been through yes whether those are traumas or um bad experiences or pain or memories that you might not be aware of at a conscious level we're operating by um and that your your body is processing that information the idea that like yeah like we're a product of what we've been through so we think we're making you know like i find for instance like whenever i get really upset or triggered about something like that thing is never what's actually going on it's that thing means some other thing to me and either i have a conscious understanding of what that thing is and i go oh this is that thing why I'm acting that way or it's actually a really helpful bit of self feedback because you're like oh why this person gave me it spoke to me in this way and that hit me in some soft or you know strange place and so now I need to figure out what that thing is because whether they should have acted that way or not you your reaction was disproportionate or out of not something fully controlling we're totally aware of what's happening and so anyways it's a very good book i don't i the guy's name is unpronounceable yeah the book the book i read is called the extent the one i read recently is the extended mind and um that's annie murphy paul's book and her thing is that we we think with our body she she kind of like almost i see this concentric circle she's like we think with our there's inside our body and then oh my god I buy my blanket because it's like this is usually when I like zone out and watch TV.

22:42And do you get that like at night? Has anyone else like – I don't know many people that do their best thinking at seven. Yeah, right. But this idea – oh, I know. It was thinking with like – her point is that a lot of our thinking comes from internal stuff with our body and then our body's interactions with our environment and like the other people around us. And so there are all these different, oh, I know what it was. It's the body and it's space and then it's other people. Those are kind of her concentric circles. And so your note cards, for example, that's like a space thing. Yeah. So when you write things down on note cards and have them in a place, that's you're using space and materials to externalize.

23:31It's like a second brain. It's like a second brain, right? and when we text each other that's an interaction where we're thinking together you know that's sure we're thinking with i'm thinking with your brain you're thinking with my brain um and i just really enjoyed but the thing i really liked about what she talks about with the body and what i think is really true as a creative person the body knows what to do before your conscious mind does yeah and that's what i'm really really interested in have you read the inner game of tennis no who wrote that it's a very similar book it's a they probably have it here it's tom brady's favorite book but it's this idea that for instance a tennis player there's sort of the conscious understanding of what you can do yeah and then there's when your sort of training takes over yeah and that like almost all great performance is operating at that second level rather than the con like this is sort of the thinking mind and then yeah you know uh the thinking fast and slow is on a similar level but that's more about cognitive that's more about cognition as opposed to like sort of performance i guess yeah it's like playing the piano you hear something and it grabs you on some sort of weird level and then you have to try to learn the piece and that's like a different part of the brain where you like have to be real meticulous and like learn it and then you let that sink into the back of your mind and then when you sit down and do the recital it's like it just happens yeah and same way if you're trained as an athlete you know you would drill and you drill until it's automatic when it's game time do you find that your best writing is in that phase or is it on that i have to do something for that well i think writing is interesting because it's not in the moment it's not like it doesn't have to be like immediate like you can go back and fix it you know what i mean like with a drawing it's a little bit more like when i'm making like an eight drawing or something that's a little bit more like there's a little bit higher stakes because if I mess this up like yeah I can kind of go back but not as much so um that almost requires a certain love like I think early on when you're starting to do something you you are not good at being bad at the thing yeah and so one of the things as a writer I think you learn is being comfortable just sort of doing the thing just sort of seeing where it goes which I think is the point between sort of consciously trying to hit the ball very hard yes in tennis or golf and then just hitting the ball as one's supposed to and understanding that if you have trained sufficiently if you've gathered the material it'll happen i think one of the things i tend to find like when i'm stuck like if i'm writing and i get stuck like i'm supposed to write today i don't have anything yeah almost invariably like if i just go read stuff like i i take that as a sign that i just need to go do more research and if i do more research when i have when when even though i might not fully think i know what i want to say when i have gathered up enough like raw materials or fuel that i just sort of know it like yeah it should be it should come naturally for the most part i yeah i agree like i i've my new attitudes towards block or like not which really just means you don't have anything to say i mean oh yeah like my approach to that honestly is the same go get something to say like go for a walk or read reading is great the thing i'm this is going to sound it's going to sound really it's the goal but i like to read myself like i'll pull diaries off because i have all these what something i do which is in line with the book is i love to read what i wrote on this day five years ago.

27:16Yes. So I'll grab a diary and I'll read like a page or two. And you organize them by dates? Yeah, they're up on my shelf like ordered by date. And so I just, I can go right to the spot. You know, I've written the dates on the spot. So I can go there and I read. And now I like to skip to the next year and see what I read on that day. And the spook, your brain automatically makes connections between the things. But spookily, it's often the same. problem yeah like there's some weird like it's and that makes sense i got this from reading thoreau because i started reading thoreau's diary this way um which is why i like the introduction of the daily dad so much when he talked about the value of like reading a book every day instead of just like devouring it once because what i decided to do with thoreau's diary because it's so thick this was an annotated version but i decided to read everything he wrote on the day that on the on the calendar date that I was reading.

28:14Sure. And so I had these tabs in the diary, so I just flipped to whatever date, if there was something for... You made your own, like, page a day. Exactly. That would actually be a great book, too. Oh, yeah. Page a day of throw. Yeah. And University of Chicago Press did that. Oh, they did? There was, like, a daily throw, yeah. And it's... But it's not his diary. It's from, like... It's from everything. Sure. So it's from the diary, but it's also from, like, all its essays and letters and everything. it's it's pretty good have you read that calendar of wisdom well i i was gonna ask you i i yeah that's um tolstoys i was going to ask you actually when you got interested in this idea of the daily devotional type thing because i have a memory from childhood when i so the daily show came because my agent suggested it he had published a book called the daily drucker called peter Drucker's like sort of theories of management and leadership which is really good um which I I had read and I thought it was it was interesting because like someone like Peter Drucker you take some of these thinkers you go like well where should I start I think that's often a tough place like where do you start if someone's like where should I start with Thoreau yeah where should I start with Robert Greene or where should I start with Tolstoy like where do you start and there's something sort of spending a year with them as a catalog it's like you know where should I start with this band is it did they perfectly encapsulate everything that's great about them on a singular album or do you pull up like the essential bruce springsteen or whatever and uh is a playlist a better way to sample the things and i think the page a day format is really good for that and then so i hadn't actually read that many books in that genre i grabbed a couple and i there's a bunch of things i didn't like about them yeah a lot of them like for instance there's a 366 zen one that i like but doesn't have dates it's just 366 there's something even though it's totally arbitrary about picking the date i think that's important yeah you know there some are very kind of prompt driven which i didn't i didn't tend to like i found to be like a little artificial um you know some didn't i don't know there's a i i've read most of them uh i think it's hard you know Is Tolstoy's your favorite?

30:29Tolstoy's is probably the one that I read the most and most consistently. Although I've come to learn some things about it, like I'll fall in love with some of the quotes. I'm like, where's that from? And then it's like, oh, he made this quote up, basically. Like, he plays fast and loose with the translations, let's say, which, whatever, worked for him. You know, it's a little more religious than I would like it to be. Like, it's very, very religious. Um, but it, it, it, it's a, it's a collection of thoughts from one of the smartest people that ever lived, which is, and it's rare. Usually those page of day things are assembled afterwards by like a manager, you know, the estate or something.

31:15And so I like that he did that. He actually put it together. But, um, it's great.

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32:53So when I was growing up, I grew up with, you know, very religious parents and they still are. And my dad would sit at the table. My dad, I never saw my dad read that much. But one thing I would see my dad do is our church had these little, they were almost booklets. They were almost like proto, they were like zines or something. They were like little booklets. and I think they might have been called our daily bread or something like that. Maybe someone here knows. But they would be by date and there would be an entry for, you know, read this scripture and then this thought. And I think it's interesting how I was reading a lot of the Daily Dad in the past couple of days and one of the things I was thinking about is how ambient parenting is.

33:44and what i mean by that is like how many of the things that translate and you get into this in a lot of the entries a lot of things that get transmitted are sideway they're like from they're not direct like direct is not the way that i i don't find that like direct transmission works real well with kids i think kids get the parent to the child yeah yeah i think kids really pick up on like the ambient stuff sure so much and like everything you're trying to throw at them directly it kind of like deflects or bounces off but the things you like kind of just have around i'm very interested in like the ambient like that's kind of the house in a page a day thing is that you're just dipping in and out of it and you're getting the oh you're getting if you spend enough time with it you sort of it you absorb it through osmosis or whatever and it becomes part of of your overall understanding, where if you read it, and if you read the whole thing from start to finish, maybe you'd walk away three or four things.

34:46By reading it in smaller pieces over a long period of time, multiple times over a long period of time, you would end up taking in more of it. And that's obviously been the experience with Daily Stoic. You know, it's like eight years now. So some people have been reading it every day for eight years. And it feels weird to me because, I mean, who I was when I wrote it eight years ago, that feels very far away. and yet people are reading those pages for the first time. How do you not repeat yourself or do you just go ahead? Oh, continuing to write? Yeah. Oh, in the email? Yeah. Well, yeah, that's a good question.

35:20I mean, obviously, continuing to write it has been its own thing and being forced to revisit the same themes. It would be interesting. I wonder if at some point maybe I could categorize all of them, but like to look at the use of certain quotes, like how has have i interpreted them different ways in different days has my understanding of it changed over time i i don't know exactly but i usually like i'll come up with a title or some way into a thing and it kind of i don't know it kind of it's weird to say that it writes itself but it kind of just writes itself like you usually have a sentence or a thought or a quote i want to use and then the kind of the rest of it comes together um so random in a big batch when you read from yeah i just have one document it's called unsent okay i have two so i have unsent for daily stoke and it's unsent for daily dad okay that's where i'm working on them always yeah so i'll hear a lyric and a song or i'll you know read an article and i'll paste that in there um or when i go back through it after books i've read i you know put all the stuff there and then i usually try to write one or two a day um sometimes more if if i feel like i'm going to be away for a while but i'm all i try to chip i try to make a contribution to the pile every day yeah um does anyone edit them yeah so i write them and then i tag uh kristin who is the managing editor of day so i tag her in it she takes it does a pass on it um comes back to me to read the audio because you can listen to it as a podcast every day so i see then i read it out loud and I usually edit it again there.

36:55Right. And then once there is edited audio and edited text that gets put into a calendar, which I don't really, at this point, I don't select, like I don't decide what runs on each day. Um, so sometimes people email like, how'd you know? I did. What was today's? Cause I know you. Um, but, but I, um, so it's like, I'm just always making them and then it sort of goes out but i i touch them a hand like i touch them when they're written and then i touch them two other times usually and then it kind of is just this stream of stuff and then that way there's too much to think about like is today is too similar to yesterday similar than this one so that they're they're kind of working out the the cadence of all of it but i'm i'm just always writing them and i to me the value is in writing them like i get something out of writing them instead it's a lot of writing i mean that could be its own it's about a book a year yeah a free book a year yeah uh you know they're about let's say 250 to 300 words and then you're doing five days a week then daily stoke is seven days a week so yeah it's a lot of work yeah but the daily practice of it is really great it's like a sort of a forced journaling like output i cannot recommend like people ask me a lot like about people ask me a lot about like how to get started and everything and i'm always just like have some repeatable thing that you have to put out at a certain frequency like i just feel like when you make a commitment to there's a forcing function there that gets over your preciousness yeah and yeah the heart the hardest part about getting good at anything is reps right and like books especially the problem with books is like you know you might only do a handful of them in your entire life so if that is your reps you know you're not you're not going to get very many of them so you have to have some other way that you're getting the reps like comedians it's going up do you were you an athlete in high school uh my parents did make me do a sport i did uh track and cross country but not not super uh uh voluntarily are you a sports fan yeah okay because i'm always curious about because because sports teams seem to really really like connect with your stuff is that was that a marketing thing on your part or was that something where like one team was i mean i definitely wasn't like that happened i wasn't like you know who these philosophy books would be perfect for no i mean so like that that was not at all expected yeah and certainly the publisher didn't expect it i didn't expect it but if i when the obstacle is the way came out i got a couple emails like in the first few months that had signatures for there's someone from the rockies there's someone from the patriots someone from another team and i was like oh that's weird and maybe i only noticed the pattern because the organizations had email signatures right and the other people i didn't recognize yeah but so i i recognized that pattern pretty quickly and i think from a marketing standpoint that the publisher gave away lots of books to those groups But I spoke at the University of Tennessee today.

40:11I spoke to the athletics department, like all the different coaches and administrators and athletic directors and whatever. And I was taught what's cool about sports than other like CEOs don't tend to call each other and recommend books. Right. But there's something about sports where there's like kind of a fellowship and a community that's very interesting. Maybe because all the people hire each other at one point is revolving door. but there seems to be a lot of recommending of self-development stuff that I think is really interesting and so that's been just like a cool community to fall into the military community has been a similar one, politics has been one kind of, I've seen it now with the entertainment business this industry is like if something works, it tends to make its way through, it just takes time, it takes a lot of time I think there's something in Stoicism in particular, too, that really speaks to that scene, too.

41:14Well, there is this thing. Cicero has a series of fake dialogues about it, but it's called the Scipionic Circle. And these people would meet in the house of this guy named Scipio, and they would talk philosophy. It's kind of one of the first little groups, book club-y philosophy circles that we have. They all go on to be powerful, important people, but they're sharing book recommendations. I think it's good to have a scene like that, where stuff is being surfaced to you and taught to you. And I think the problem is that some domains don't really have... Like, there's one of the reasons I wanted to do Daily Dad is, like, you get surface stuff that makes you better at your work all the time.

42:01But, like, the parenting stuff seems to be this kind of, like, read these books when you're about to have kids and then just, like, wing it for me. Yeah, yeah. That seemed like the wrong way to do it. Yeah. So hopefully this has that same effect. I have a question for you about parenting. Okay. Do you worry about overplaying the agency of parents? What do you mean? Because one of the things when I was reading The Daily Dad was I was like, I love all this stuff. I think it's all super important. But at the end of the day, something as my kids get older, this might be something you feel when your kids get a little bit older.

42:38I feel very much at the mercy of their environment. It becomes less and less about me, and it becomes more and more about the kind of ambient, like, our street. It goes beyond our house to it's our street, it's the school, it's the city, it's the state, it's the country, it's the world. Like, one of the things I hate about being a parent is I felt very, and this was probably delusional, I felt very protected from the environment. I felt very much like... Made early on? Yeah, I felt a real agency, free agent kind of thing where it's like, well, nothing really matters because I can bounce out. I can be flexible.

43:22I can dig a hole in the ground and stay there if I need to. Like the minute I had kids, I felt so vulnerable to the world. And it kind of awakened in me just how connected I was to everything. Well, that's something I was going to ask you. Austin has this amazing book called Keep Going, which I very much recommend. and, you know, how does one keep going when you awaken each day to a fresh set of horror? Yeah. No, I think there is so much that's fundamentally outside of your control, and you are at the mercy of, I mean, do you have some control over what street you live on? Yeah. You know, I think we, stoicism is, to me, the paradox of stoicism is the idea that we don't have agency over the vast majority of what's happening.

44:11We have agency of how we respond to the choices we make in the face of those things. So I think there's a tension there. But I feel like everyone is struggling with that idea of like, well, I don't like all these things that are happening. I'm not sure if you could find an era, though, where like I just read David McCullough's book on John Adams. I don't think John Adams is like, what a wonderful place in time to raise children. right or like i don't i don't know if there's any period where parents or people have ever felt that and that's kind of this myth or this uh illusion that we're chasing but um the idea of just sort of soldiering through and then the paradox of like you look back and you go oh it was so wonderful back then yeah um just mostly nonsense yeah there's a quote i have in the book from caitlin flanagan when she's talking about the dream time of early childhood she like takes them to the like a an ice cream truck and she gets them like a spongebob ice cream and they were just like blown away that such a truck exists you know she like all of them you know and like so there is something also though about having kids where like who knows what i don't know what year that was happening but i'm sure actually if we pulled up like a series of new york times uh front pages from that oh right yes the world was horrible yeah yeah and it's always going to be that way and then what i think so you are very vulnerable but it also does actually give you the thing to retreat into which is this sort of pure bit of chaos and innocence and yeah that was um i just really like having a family because i feel like it's a little gang i belong to like i just really enjoy the just weirdo um my favorite like one of my favorite parenting books if people ask me like a list of my favorite parenting books like one of the books would be um toviansen's moomin comics you know the moomins they're like this little like cartoon character family and i read those books when i think my youngest was like three two or three and i read these books and i was like this is where I want to live like this is what I want this is what I want my house to look like like there's Moomin Papa and there's Moomin Mama and there's so um like I like the gang and I like the we even have gang like lingo like we have a lexicon in our house I like I'm always I love that families do you ever think about like in your family or like where you grew up like did you have weird words that no one else would understand or like weird phrases and stuff like that.

46:55Like we have some in our house that I just love and I'm like, this is it. This is like the best it gets. You know, this is as good as it gets. It is as good as it gets. No one has it as good as we do, right? Yeah. No, the line is out. Who has it better than us? Who has it better than us? Yeah, I love that part of the book.

47:15Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County. I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

48:00We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven it across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you, discover your uncharted territory.

48:42Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in. GiveWell is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact. GiveWell has spent the last 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation, and they direct funding to the highest impact opportunities.

49:27Over 150 ,000 donors have already trusted GiveWell to give more than$2.5 billion over the last several years, and research suggests that these donations will save over 300 ,000 lives. I myself am one of those donors. I donate to GiveWell every year. It means a lot to me. And you can find all their research and recommendations on their site for free. And thanks to the donors that sponsor this research, GiveWell doesn't take a cut from your tax-deductible donation to their recommended funds. And if this is your first gift through GiveWell, you can have your donation matched up to$100 before the end of the year, or as long as matching funds last.

50:02To claim your match, go to givewell.org and pick Daily Stoic from the dropdown menu under podcast. That's how they know that you heard about GiveWell from the Daily Stoic, and you'll get your donation matched. That's givewell.org, code THEDAILYSTOIC to donate or find out more.

50:20All right, we have some questions. Okay, how can parents allow their children to have their own opinions even if they don't agree with it? What choice do you have? Yes, well, this is something I was just talking to someone I know whose son is engaged to be married, is very young, and a lot of people they know have very strong opinions about this and he's i just said and uh thanks and he just said he's happy we're happy oh and i just thought that's such a like it's when you have opinions yeah that you get yourself in trouble and i think there's so much of the conflict between parents and kids are rooted in the parents having opinions about things that not only don't really matter at all, but in the scope of their own lives, as time passes, you will wonder why you argued about these things to begin with.

51:18It's so easy to extrapolate, right? You're like, well, if I let them dye their hair this color, then they'll think that they can do... You know, like so much of what would actually, if looked at, one, in isolation, and two without much thought as to what other people would think or what other people are doing you would be like yeah this doesn't matter at all if that's what floats your boat go for it but we don't look at things that way until we have opinions and yeah one of the favorite things from our experience he says things are not the are not asking to be judged by you and when you realize that like your kids opinions are their kids opinions their lives are their lives with the the fewer opinions you have about things not only is that just better for overall peace but i think then when you when there are some things that you do need to have an opinion about right right and that opinion will carry more weight if you haven't been arguing over the way to sit at the dinner table for right well like so i have this thing with my kids where i do mind games where i'm like what if they're right my like i almost take the my my goal at this point in my life i'm turning 40 and a month we're but we had the same birthday did you guys know that we do yeah i don't you june 16th yes yeah so blue stay yeah um uh and uh so my thing now that i'm trying to like ease into is what I call a curious elder.

52:53And that is someone who kind of assumes the kids are all right, like that that's just an ethos, that you just kind of assume that your children are all right and they know what they're talking about. And even if it's true that they, even if they don't, you, that, that kickstarts a curiosity. And so I'll give you a real concrete example. every parent i know is disgusted by their children watching a youtube video of another person playing a video game yes so they watch it's explicable yeah but it is but but wait um so i had a day where i was like i'm just gonna make myself sit here and watch one of these videos with him and uh i think it was like a minecraft hacks video or something you know where they'd blow up the whole world with TNT or something.

53:45I don't know. I was watching it, and I was like, this is so weird. We're like in front of the screen, and we're watching these other people play a game, and we're not playing it, but they're playing it. And I suddenly was like, oh my god, this is like me and my uncle sitting around watching football on a Sunday. We're watching like other people do something. The difference is that when we get done watching the video my kids know how to do something at their game whereas like you watch football you have to be able to like go and like run the touchdown so but then i had this other so like that was like a light bulb then i had this other moment where i was like wait if people will watch someone play a game i'll bet someone would watch someone make art you know so i got all these ideas for like for like my own business and that was purely just because that one day i was like I'm going to sit down with my kids and this thing that repulses me, I'm going to pay attention to it.

54:47I just wrote an entry about this for the emails. It was too late for the book. But I was thinking about if you're on a date, a person would be telling you about the most dename bullshit and you would pretend to be interested. You think about what you put up with at work. You think about total strangers. You think about your neighbor comes. They tell you about this family vacation. You're like, how did I even get into this conversation? You think about how polite you are to people about shit that is totally what you feel like is a waste of time. And then your kids are like – Because you think you might get kids out of it.

55:20Yeah, right. No, no, but then your kids are like, hey, let me tell you about the thing that I'm most excited about in the entire world. And you're like, oh. You know, like you would never go to a person. But you'll do the equivalent of that to your kids, which is so devastating and terrible. And you don't, like, again, you actually don't, it would be wonderful if you could, you could feign the same, you know, excitement and interest in such a convincing way. But let's just, let's, let's, let's set the bar even lower. What if you just don't express your disdain? Right. You know what I mean? You just say, I don't have to have an opinion about this.

55:58This is what we're watching. This is what we're doing. and what a much more wonderful and amicable life you will have if you could damage to pull that off. I mean, one of the, my friend Erica Hall one time, she said she did like this kind of quick thing about how to survive Thanksgiving with family members who have terrible ideas. And, you know, she was just like, just pretend you're an anthropologist or like a scientist. at the very like if you can't like feign love and attention just be like i'm a scientist and i'm taking notes it's like the nor ephron like everything is copy you know and i i find that like sometimes i'll go into that like okay like i remember so many afternoons on the playground just being like okay i'm an anthropologist looking you know around with these people I have this question, is the study of Stoic philosophy gaining in popularity or declining?

56:57I mean, I would say almost certainly, if we just look at how many people, Rome, let's say Marcus Reelius' time, is the pinnacle of Stoic philosophy. The entire Roman Empire, or sort of Western English, is like 50 million people. So what percentage of those people were super excited? like almost certainly more people get the daily stoic email than were ever interested in ancient philosophy in the ancient world so like it might not feel like these ideas or were in the ancient world yeah so it might not feel like these things have the the penetration or the the the you know the impact that they did then but actually that it's it's so it's spread out more globally but almost certainly the numbers are much, much larger.

57:46You know, philosophy might seem like this sort of obscure academic discipline, but if you just think about how many people are studying, like even if every year philosophy decrees are declining, you're just like, there's still a lot of colleges and a lot of universities, a lot of people, which I think is wonderful. Well, it's interesting. I find that when stoicism is kind of abstracted to me, like I'm very much like, yeah, you know, I fight with a lot. like when you when you do your four cardinal virtues i always am like i'm thinking about like what's the opposite of each virtue and how much me ping-ponging in between them is actually how my work happens you have what do you say the opposite of the four virtues well like so for um courage in some ways i see it more as fight or flight there are times when flight is more advantageous and sometimes that fight.

58:43You know, I think about the, for each virtue, there's like a vice in a sense, but then they create the spectrum of possibilities. So I like kind of locate, like for discipline, there's also lack of discipline and like idleness or whatever. And there are times when my lack of discipline actually like is in contact, is in communication with work. But that's the interview there. I like that. Actually, Aristotle talks about this, and he uses discipline as the example of what he calls the golden mean. Do you know this? Okay, yeah. So he basically says, so the discipline is usually rendered as temperance or moderation.

59:27Right. And he's saying like courage, for instance. Courage is actually in the middle between two vices. it's in the middle between recklessness which would be too much courage okay like has no right yes yes you know um things only of plunging ahead and how the consequences of that on themselves or other people and then on the other end of the vice spectrum is cowardice and that courage is actually in the middle right i like that the key to virtue is the right amount of the right thing at the right time in the right place but this idea of being in between two vices is really good does he do that for each one yeah yeah okay i'll read that part so like justice he's talking about like with generosity right which is a sub virtue of justice is like you give everything away and then your family is starving and then you're also injured yeah yeah so it's like somewhere in the middle on school on all of them that's even even i think discipline right like yeah the person who is so regimented, so driven, always pushing harder, the person who doesn't know how to recover, who doesn't know how to rest, who doesn't, you know, and so like, it's funny, obviously, I wrote a book about discipline, but like, for me, the struggle is not should I get up, it's like this morning, I don't know if it's an example or not, but like, I got into my hotel room at 3.30 last night, and I had to be at this thing at 8.45, but I really like to run before I do my tops.

1:00:56And so I had this balance between obviously sleep is important. Obviously you're not going to be able to perform well, uh, if you are operating on three or some odd hours of sleep. And so this tension between do I sleep in an hour or do I go for a run? And like the, which, which lever of discipline do you pull here? And that actually the, the doing the hard thing is the easier, uh, lever for me to pull. Like if I don't feel well, resting is usually harder than forcing, like cutting through it. Right. And so for someone else, it might be the exact opposite, right? Like they feel amazing. They don't do the thing, but we're both fundamentally struggling with discipline.

1:01:41Yeah. And I love tension. That's like one of my, like, one of my little like pet things I like to think about a lot is like, I always use the example of a guitar string. it's like a guitar string is in between two poles and if it's too slack it just buzzes and makes no music if it's too tight it snaps so in a lot so that there's a tuning that you're trying to get to you're trying to get to the optimal tension yes between these two things so that would be that was really helpful to me the one thing i what i did want to say about the stoics though i think the great thing they have in their corner is the click writers like I'm reading Seneca's letters right now have you read his plays I haven't read his plays I think I've read like a couple of pieces before like essays but the letters are great because sometimes they get bitchy even it's just very human and Aurelius is like that too it's just like this guy's notebook to think about in meditation this is a guy writing not for publication in Greek even though the Romans, he was speaking in the philosophical language.

1:02:50And yet there are turns of phrases in there that you're just like, whoa. And it says something probably about, one, if you're not performing or thinking, you can just, it goes to what we're talking about. You just lock in and something just straight from the mind onto the page, human conscious, beautiful stuff. But then also this sort of practice of like, he was trained in rhetoric, trained in writing, trained in poetry. One of my favorite little tidbits about Marcus is like, there's lines in there and they're like, this sounds more like a quote. And they track it down and it's like, oh, this is a lost line from a play from Euripides or something.

1:03:32It's like, we never, this is the only existing fragment from that thing. And he's almost certainly quoting it from memory, just to himself, or there's little lines from the great poets. It's like this is a person steeped in all the great forms of art in addition to being a politician and a parent and a leader. And you just – nobody's journal is that good. It's pretty incredible. Yeah, and I like Seneca because, like, when you read his letters, you're like, wait a minute. You said this other thing in another letter. You know, he's very human. He'll be like, you know, you shouldn't just quote people.

1:04:06You know, you should have some of your own ideas. And he's like, by the way, here's this quote from Epictetus. Yeah, here's my daily quote from Epicurus or whatever. You know, so it's just like really human, you know. And I, so that is one thing. I mean, I think that like, I think with, when you're writing the type of books that we write, you are hoping that people will swim upstream. You know, you're hoping that people will get back to like what's inspired you because that, because I just think that's the way reading works. I think that's the way music works. I think that's the way art works, is that if you connect with something and then you swim upstream and you see where it came from, I think that's one of the really beautiful, deep things.

1:04:52I'm talking about this in the next book in the Virtua Series. I have this chapter on coaching trees. The way that they judge a great coach is not just how much they won, but what did their assistants go on to do. And in this way, Greg Popovich is probably the greatest coach in the history of sports. this incredible coaching group but I think as a writer as a creative like how how much did you repay your debt to your influences like did you make them more popular or not right um is I think a sign like it's like okay you're successful if you sell a few books or people go to your shows or whatever it is that you do but like did you have enough of a connection and did you impact people enough that they go upstream like you're saying and go well I want to be a fan of the things that made the thing right I'm a fan of and so sometimes people will be like though they'll like in internet sections they'll say like oh he's just a popularizer right like what an incredible compliment thanks that's literally what I am attempting to do so it's not something like I find to be an embarrassment it's actually also quite hard to do but to be able to take Take something that isn't necessarily commercially accessible or immediately attractive to people.

1:06:14Like, look, if through your work people are, like, listen to the Beatles, like, okay. Like, they didn't need your help. But if you, you know, like, you know, but if you can help turn people on to things or bring them to a level where then they can go to these other things, I think that's, like, a wonderful, that's a sign of, like, a real bit of success in your chosen mind. My favorite bands always did that, too. Like, even someone, people forget, like, Nirvana brought the meat puppets on stage with them. You know, they were always, you know, Kurt Cobain wore a Daniel Johnson t-shirt. You know, like, they were always really good at that, even in their brief little spell.

1:06:51And I always, as a fan, loved that. I always loved that. And that's always been a big part of my ethos. And that's why I operate the way that I do. And, um... Well, in Showing Your Work, which he has an awesome book about with that title, it's part of part of not part of being open about those influences the things you're excited about is uh is a big is part of like that that doing that it's it's also it's it's easy because you're not like pretending to be perfect but there's also a selflessness to it because you're exposing people to the things that you like it also turns out to be good marketing because when you talk about the stuff that you love you almost become an art like one of the things that i think a lot of people make their way to my work because of the stuff i i share instead of my actual books and so they show up for like the newsletter or something like that because oh this guy points to cool stuff and then eventually i get up right eventually i get like hopefully i make something that they want you know but no no i i someone told me once like if you introduce two people like you come to their level right so like you introduce two important people to each other you're a peer because you facilitated this relationship yeah yeah that's I thought of that as like they were saying this is kind of like a networking strategy right but I don't know you might like this person and then you're they're like who connected us again right remember that and so if you by recommending music or art or a way of thinking or doing something or Or even you just recommend a contractor to a friend, and then you have a connection there that goes really deep because you gave them something that they used.

1:08:42Yes. Okay, there's something very special about that. I agree. Got anything else? Do you have any more questions? I might have loved all of them. Let's do this last one. This is okay, no. Exactly. Let's do this last one. Okay. Okay, in our reflections on parenting, what do you feel like one could prepare for? And what do you feel like they need to prepare? So, yeah, what parts of parenting can one prepare for in advance? And then what are the things that you learn on the job? You can probably go to therapy. I didn't do that. I still haven't done that, but it might be a good idea. You recommend it, you just won't do it.

1:09:25You can forgive your parents. that's something someone told me it's like you can forgive your parents so you can kind of i don't know if i did that either yeah i didn't really need to um but you know my parents one of the things i was thinking about when i was reading your book is i had this there's this designer named milton blazer and he says in my parents i had the perfect gifted and talented program he I had a mother who told me I could do anything and a father who said, prove it. And they like canceled each other out. And I was thinking about like this kind of like good cop, bad cop of parenting kind of thing.

1:10:05Do you know the Philip Larkin poem, They Fuck Us Up? Do I know the, yes, absolutely. What is it, they fuck us up, our mom and dad? They may not mean to, but they do. They fill us full of faults we had and add some extra just for you. but they were messed up in their turn by weirdos and maniacs so do the world a favor and don't have any kids yourself yeah i only like the first person yeah well you know you gotta pick the whole that's that's context to me you know you only have you read this one about the hedgehog i like that one yeah i can't do that one from memory though it's about really while there's still time yeah i you did the one you quoted in the book that i love is the trees the trees are coming in to leave like something being said well yeah that's right yeah he has this poem about celebrating spring which we're in the middle of those poets do and and how beautiful and wonderful it is to see green leaves and shoots and flowers but he talks about what that means is the passage of a year uh that it's gone forever and i think about that every time i uh clip my kids fingernails i think of the growth i go oh put it in a little baggy well that's a little far for me but no there's there's something sad about it right there you're like i just did this and then you go i didn't just do this yeah two weeks or three weeks have gone by and that that time has gone forever and the person whose nails you clipped last time is gone forever and you you yourself the three weeks old version of you is gone i think there's something there's a morbid sort of stoic turn of that and then also something i think that gives you a kind of urgency and prioritization and clarity but also how beautiful that you get to clip your fingernails and start over you know there is a kind of like renew that goes with the spring too oh i came up with an idea uh for the for the things you can plan for um you can get role models sure right like that's that's you can pick some people who who are like down the road, who you're like, they seem like they did it really well.

1:12:16And you can get to know them. Like I definitely have some, I have some guy friends that are about 10 years older than me. And I find that really, really helpful. Cause they're kind of, and then I, that, the thing that really helped me when I was starting out is I got really lucky and got to know some writers who were good dads and I saw that you could do it. A rare breed. A rare breed. Yeah. Well, I remember going to see George Saunders and and I asked him, like, how do you be a good father and a good writer at the same time? And he said, well, I used to have a Kerouac boner. And he said, I thought you had to be this, like, wild, maniac, womanizing, drinking guy to, like, be a great writer.

1:12:55And he's like, and then I met Tobias Wolfe. And Tobias Wolfe was his mentor at Syracuse and also a wonderful writer. and he said the way Toby wrote these stories with his teeth, they're so good. He was so gentle with his children, and he was so kind and loving, and that just unlocked something for me. And so I think just having a good role model, someone who does what you want to do, right? Good dad, good writer, great. I think it's either in a letter or an essay, but Seneca has this great line. and he says um we can't choose our parents but we can choose whose children we would like to be oh yeah and so when i think about role models like obviously there's things you learn from your parents about what to do and not do but the idea that like that's to go the people like in my family right or like but my parents always did it this way i think that's a very small like uh uninspired way to think about it you should you should go who are the just as you would go you wouldn't go oh there's a series of writers in my family that's why I do it or I come from a long line of musicians or something you would go who are the greatest of all time those are my influences that's the tradition that I'm trying to continue and I think you can do that with parenting I mean you can do with anything but why not do it with parenting why not go uh Mr.

1:14:19Rogers is who I look to right as my model or whatever they don't you don't have to be related to them um yeah so Jay-Z said the same thing it was like we were kids without fathers so we found our fathers on wax that was kind of cool um but the other thing i would say is cross cross gender because uh i think a lot of my like i think finding women writers who are mothers or artists who are mothers that that always for some reason because the michael chabon joke you know he says the the thing historically uh that's handy for men is that the bar for uh fathers is so historically low you know it's a handy thing but um mothers have always been like taken to this you know a much higher and more impossible standard and so i feel like reading stories of mothers who were great artists or mothers who were great writers i found that at a certain point to be a little bit more helpful than just reading like the baby on the fire escape i thought that was good like a good survey yeah yeah yeah um i think and there's terrible cautionary tales too well what i like about that book there's a book called the baby on the fire escape which is more about female writers and artists um is i was joking there's not a lot of good creative men parents yeah uh but then going like oh yeah a lot of the female ones were terrible i mean and that it's it's more it's more of the problem of being very self-involved yeah and dedicated to your thing can other things can fall by the wayside and it's not so much a gender or a societal thing it's a it's a individual thing well and it's interesting in a lot of stories of parents that are good i think this is worth saying um and bringing to the front a lot of people who are good parents and also good writers they have a good partner yes that you know like ursula k le gwen had a she was great but she also had a husband that did his share what did you you like her quote in the book i mean yeah i like yeah definitely she says uh it's impossible for one person to do two jobs and she says art is a job being a parent is a job but she said three people or two people can do three jobs.

1:16:43And yes, I think the partnership and caring and sharing the world is what it's all about. I'll end with another quote by her. My favorite quote by her if anyone's thinking about being an artist and becoming a parent is she says, babies eat books. Babies eat books but they spit them out in pieces again and you can take the pieces back together and put them together later. Awesome, thank you very much. Thank you. It's good to see you. Thanks, y 'all.

1:17:17Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode.

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