BONUS | The State of The Daily Stoic Podcast

0:05Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic inspired meditation designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2 ,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, to help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit dailystoic.com.

0:55Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Happy New Year, everyone. I know it's not actually New Year, but it feels like a new year. Just got back from vacation and went straight into a new school year. And you get into a rhythm when you have kids of, you know, is the New Year from January to December? I guess. But my year is August to June. That's a year. I don't know. It feels like a new year just started. The kids are a year older, even though their age hasn't actually changed. Back in the rhythm of things, we had our little brief window with no commute, no homework, no things we had to do or places we had to be, no sports, just hanging out.

1:54We had this amazing trip to Greece. It was lovely. Spent about a month there. Could have been a little shorter. No, we had a lovely trip as a family. Actually learned a lot, as I talked about in one of the Daily Dad episodes we did. And we went there because my son is obsessed with Greek history, and we're trying to encourage his interests. And, of course, I also love Greek history, so I'm not going to try to nip that in the butt. I want to encourage it. But I had this lovely trip. Now school just started, and the Wisdom Takes Work launch is gearing up. So it feels like a chapter ended and a chapter begins, right?

2:27The book is done, except for the audio book, which I am recording now. And then, yeah, I go into the marking mode and then I'm working on my next book. So anyways, a lot of things wrapping up, a lot of things starting. So I thought I would do a state of the show episode in honor of this new year, which is not actually a new year. I know, but you get my point. So we launched the Daily Stoic podcast eight years ago, which is mind blowing to me. I mean, we launched Daily Stoic roughly nine years ago. So we started, it was the daily email. It started going out to about 10 ,000 people. It grew and it grew and grew.

3:05The site launched in August of 2016. The book came out in October of 2016. Also, then maybe a year, year and a half in, started hearing from all these people. They were like, I just don't want an extra email every day. And I was like, okay, I get that. They were like, can I listen to it? And so we started the Daily Stoic podcast, which was basically just me reading the emails. And I write a lot of the Daily Stoic emails pretty far in advance. Like right now, we probably have 60 to 70 Daily Stoic emails in the can because I write a couple of them a day. Not as much when I'm working on a book, but in between books, I usually go on a tear and I write a bunch.

3:45I'll read something and I'll write three or four emails about that thing. Then those have to be spaced out over a long period of time. So we're always just kind of adding to this backlog of them. And then Brendan tightens them down. And then Claire, our podcast editor, edits the audio. And then the team comes up with an editorial schedule and they come out. Since we launched this eight years ago, we've done 2 ,650 episodes of the podcast. Now, the vast majority of those are the daily email, which we do five days a week. but in the fall of 2019 we started expanding we started doing longer form episodes on the weekends as podcasting as a medium started to come together so we would do we started an ask daily stoic which is like now the thursday episode that you listen to when i answer questions we started doing sort of deep dives into topics on youtube and then we'd run those and then i started riffing on ideas in the Daily Stoic book.

4:46So we started building out and went from a couple of days a week to all seven days a week. In fact, I remember when we took over the buildings here before the bookstore was built out one evening with our Zoom recorder, I had it propped up on the basically that where the orders would come out because the building used to be a Mexican restaurant. So sitting there on the sort of with the window where the chefs would put out the order and it's echoing because It's this totally empty building. And I was like, we got to find a smaller place to record. If you've been to the Painted Porch in the last couple of years, you may have seen this because we kept that takeout window.

5:24This was part of the kids part of the bookstore. We actually just tore all that out a couple of weeks ago. And now we've expanded the kids section of the bookstore. And then we ended up buying this old barbershop, which is next door. And the barber, John, who'd been there since 1969 when he came back from Vietnam, He's a lovely guy, cut my hair a bunch of times. We bought that building during the pandemic with the idea that it would be a great place to do a podcast studio at one point. Part of the stipulation when we bought the building was we'd let John stay in it as long as he wanted. He lasted another couple of years and then he died and we decided we did not want to run a barbershop.

6:05So we converted that to the podcast studio. If you've ever seen some of the walkthroughs, you can still see we've got the old linoleum black and white floors on there. And I actually have the barber chair that he used to use. His name and logo is still up on the window. It's what we walk through. We walk out of the studio and then down one building into the bookstore when we do those walkthroughs that we post on YouTube. But we built out a studio, I guess, two years ago now. It's my wife's office, and it's where we record the podcast. And that's where we started doing the interviews. And we've interviewed so many amazing people.

6:38We sit at the Joan Didion table, as you know, that I bought from Joan Didion's estate. And, you know, we've interviewed Super Bowl champions. We've interviewed military leaders. We've interviewed bestselling authors. We've interviewed heroes of mine. Samantha and I, my wife, sit there and talk about parenting every couple weeks as well. It's also where I've recorded my last three or four audiobooks. It's where I'm in the middle of recording Wisdom Takes Work right now. Well, I guess I'm just sort of telling you this because the show has evolved a lot over the years. It was something, again, we just started as this little addition to the email, the email being the sort of the main show, if you will, that we put on every day.

7:23The Daily Stoic email now goes out to over a million people all over the world. Daily Dad goes out to about another hundred thousand or so. So it's a lot, right? We're emailing a million people every day. And then the podcast has become this kind of behemoth, too. Again, I didn't think there was any real business part of it at all when I had the idea. It was just how long could it take and how much could it cost to record a couple minutes of audio every day? And I could talk to all of you as part of it and I could tell you about books that are coming out or talks that I'm doing or things that are going on in the world.

7:56Well, it turns out it can actually cost quite a bit because we've done something like 150 million plus downloads of the podcast in the years since it launched. And those hosting bills are enormous. And we had to hire editors. Obviously, the studio required its own building and space. So it's been a lot, but it's been really, really cool. And it's become this whole big thing. And three years ago, we signed with WME, the talent agency. Ben Davis is our agent, and he took the show out and we signed a deal with Wondery, which is owned by Amazon and Amazon Music. And Wondery was our ad partner. They sold the ads, they sold sponsorships, they had an ad-free component if any of you were Wondery Plus subscribers or maybe listened to it on Amazon Music.

8:50It was a great partnership. They helped us grow the show in a big way. They helped us expand. They helped us grow our audience. That was really cool. We thought we were going to renew with them. And they were going through some changes, as it turns out. And that didn't work out. And so we started working with Backyard Ventures, who actually we've been working with since the very beginning. They're the ones who helped us first kind of conceive of the podcast as more than just like a little extra thing. Backyard Ventures also sells the ads that you sometimes see in the Daily Stoic emails or helps us with sponsorships on social media and stuff.

9:28They've been a great supporter of the show who we've worked with a long time as well. So now all the different platforms are under one banner supported by the same team. It's been great. It's kind of simplified things, taken some things off my plate. Grateful to the folks at Wondery over the last few years for their support. Pumped about the work we're doing with Backyard Ventures. They made the transition super smooth and seamless. And so the other interesting thing about Wondery, one of the reasons we were thinking about switching was there was like a paywall, right? The episodes would come out and then they would be behind the Wondery paywall for about a week.

10:09And that was mostly for people who didn't want to listen to ads and it was sort of an incentive to sign up. Still put out the same amount of content. So the paywall was really just like some people were listening to the episode seven days before the others. But there was always two new episodes each week. But one of the things that happened along the way was that Apple changed its accounting for what was a download and what wasn't. Like when you click subscribe to a podcast, which is, by the way, super important. If you like this show or you like any podcast, you want to support the host. Don't just like pull it up every week and listen to it, but subscribe to it.

10:41Those numbers really matter. And then they download your phone. It's a whole thing. But anyways, Apple changed its thing maybe a year and a half ago, two years ago. And so it started to say, hey, if you don't if you don't listen to the episodes like right away after they download on your phone, they start to stop downloading them on your phone. It sort of treats you as like a zombie subscriber. And so one of the things that was happening with Wondery is because Wondery had like paywall episodes up. It was like triggering that. All of a sudden we went from a certain amount of downloads to a much lower amount of downloads, even though nothing changed.

11:16Just this feature in the paywall was sort of sending the wrong signal to the algorithm. So that is going away. That's great. We're sort of relieved about that. It's also a lot less work. We can just post the episodes. You can listen to them. And we don't have to go, OK, I would be like, OK, so who's this week's episode? And Claire would go like, well, what we're posting for Wondery Plus is this, but this one won't be up until this. And so having to think about what I was going to say, like, is this idea going to keep for 14 days? or whatever. The idea is like, how do we simplify it? How do we make it more straightforward?

11:51I don't know. I think that's going to be good. I'm excited about that. Most of all, thank you for listening. We wouldn't be here if you weren't listening. Look, are ads the most fun thing in the world to listen to? No, I get it. But as I said, it's not free to make a podcast. And in fact, there's a whole team that supports it. And I want to support them. I want to pay people fairly. I I want to continue growing and expanding. You know, we put out a daily show. There's not many independent content producers who can do that. Like, look, if you're the New York Times, you can put out the daily. If you're NPR or some big media organization, you can do that.

12:33This is this tiny little team that, again, started with just me writing books and then writing emails. And it's grown and it's grown and it's grown. and those sponsors who I'm pretty discerning about who we take on. It was actually a little conversation. I think it was with Jordan Harbinger that I talked about this with. The problem is you have to make upstream choices in order to not put yourself in a position to say something bad. Like if I have a sponsor that I think is crap, I'm already in trouble. Yes. Right? Like if I'm shilling something where I'm like, gamblingonline.net, everybody. I'm like, how did I end up in this mess?

13:12So what I do is I write things into contracts. It's like I have to approve all of my sponsors. And if the sponsor does this thing or it turns out to be something else, I will cancel it and I will just lose the money. Sometimes I have to just lose money. Like if it's like, oh, this company is pivoted to do this thing, but we've already approved it. I have to be like, hey, agency, I approved it thinking it was this. I didn't realize they forced people to buy this thing every month and you can't cancel it. I don't want to do that anymore. I'm getting complaints. And they're like, well, we have a six month contract.

13:44You've already done two of the ads. Yeah. And I'm like, well, I don't want to keep doing it. So let me know how to wind this down. And like, all right, can you do the next 30 days of it? But then you have to wind it down. And if it's really egregious, I'll just be like, no, I just I will pay back that I cancel the whole campaign. I'll give the money back for the ads I've already run. My sales team is like, thanks a lot. Jerk face. Right. Because they their commission goes down the toilet. But are there types of advertisers you won't? Yeah, I won't do any sort of gambling thing. And I even tell my my network, you know how those automated ones come in sometimes.

14:18I'm like block the whole gambling category. The problem is these companies that do things like gambling are, in my opinion, already unethical. So what they do is they say this ad is home and garden. And then we catch them and they go, gosh, this this casino ad was under home and garden. And they'll go, oh, that that was an accident. No, it wasn't. You just lied because we blocked the gambling category and you want to advertise to people who have said no already. So they do that and they can say, oh, somebody checked the wrong box. Because you get it. You you you're like, here's the categories that I approve.

14:48Yeah. Or here's the things I won't do. And so they try to find a way around it. Yeah. So, of course, the ads I voice if I see copy that's like gambling online. Sometimes you don't see it until you're like literally sitting down and you're like, wait, this is these are. Yeah. Yeah. There's that. And there's also the ads that are not voiced by me that are just like an announcer and they go across 10 ,000 different podcasts. I might not even know that's in there. I care a little bit less about those in that, like, I feel like, one, I'm not endorsing it. And two, I have no control over what the YouTube ads are.

15:16That doesn't keep me up at night. You know what I mean? That's true. Maybe this is rationalizing, but I think there's obviously different levels of it. But yeah, when I'm sitting down and I'm saying the thing. You're endorsing. I'm saying you should bet on sports and I don't really think you should.

15:36Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Basko 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.

16:21We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven 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.

17:03Learn more at toyota.com slash trucks slash adventure dash detours. We just took our kids to an outdoor performance of the Nutcracker. They had a snow cone and then they went insane in the car ride home. And one of the things I try to remind myself when that's happening is that I don't control my kids' behavior, especially when they're too far gone like that. but I do control how I respond, right? That's stoicism, but it's also what Dr. Becky talks about. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist and a best-selling author, and she founded Good Inside, which is there to give parents practical, actionable tools for handling those everyday challenges with confidence.

17:44My wife introduced me to Dr. Becky's books. I love them. I've recommended them a million times. I've had her on the podcast. And as it happens, Dr. Becky is hosting two live Q &A events for good inside members. I am one of them. She signed me up for it about a year and a half ago. I've loved it ever since. On December 1st, you can join Dr. Becky for her How Not to Raise Assholes event, which is about avoiding entitlement and raising kind, empathetic kids. And on December 15th, she's hosting her How Not to Lose It over the holidays event, which I'm sure we could all use. As I said, I'm a big fan of Dr.

18:21Becky. She's been a great influence for me as a parent and just as a human being. And Daily Stoic listeners can join for 15 % off with code STOIC15. You just got to head over to goodinside.com to catch the events.

18:41so i think a lot about who we're going to accept sponsorships from one of the things i've liked about wondery and one of the things i've liked about backyard is this you know they sell but i still get approval over who we run so i don't accept ads from alcohol or weed companies i don't accept ads from gambling companies. I don't accept things that I think are scams or dishonest. I try not to accept anything I don't personally use or someone on the team hasn't said, oh, no, that's great. I like that. Does this cost us a lot of money? Probably. Does it sometimes frustrate the ad partners? Yeah. But, you know, this is one of the ideas I talk about in Justice, and we just did an episode about this, that you sort of are what you won't do for money.

19:30So I think a lot about, you know, who we accept sponsorships from. And by the way, if you ever have a problem with someone we accept a sponsorship from or you think there's information that we should know, you can email podcast at dailystoic.com. I take that kind of thing seriously. And I've also been talking a little bit lately about podcasting as a medium, which I was really, really excited about when they first came out. Then when I was talking to James Altucher, that was one of the things he and I talked about. Can these be bad for your brain? I was once very bullish on podcasts, and now I'm increasingly beginning to think they're very bad for you.

20:09So like, and I think part of it is the switch from a feed-based universe. Like if you think about podcasts five or 10 years ago, a podcast is something you subscribe to. It's long form. The ads are pre-sold. So whether an episode does a million listens or 500 listens, like you already sold it, right? It's not, it's not sort of sold in this real-time marketplace and it's primarily conversational. And so I thought those are all relatively positive elements of a medium that I think are designed to produce intelligent, good information. Now, what happens is podcast goes from being just audio to also video.

20:53And video, like people, a good chunk, 30 to 40 % of the people who are consuming this episode will be watching it on YouTube. That's why I have this studio, right? I got to just look nice. But YouTube is inherently algorithmic. So it becomes how the thumbnail of the episode and the title of the episode and how many comments it generates and the watch time, all these other forces are now operating on you as a content creator. And then I would say the other thing is they now sell real-time ads in your thing. So for people to understand, you plug in this little chunk of code and they sell ads in that code.

21:30So if the episode blows up, they serve more ads. If it doesn't, whatever, they serve less. And so there's a greater sort of connection between content and profit. And then I think the other thing that I'm realizing is that, like when McLuhan said the medium is the message, what he was saying is that, you know, and Postman talked about this too, whatever the medium goes towards or elicits from the creator is most conducive to, it shapes the kind of content, right? And so like, it's very hard. I think people think that podcasts are good because it has like two people who disagree talking with each other, or it's like maybe, you know, people outside the mainstream or whatever.

22:13Actually, what I think a two hour conversation is really good for is bullshit. Like, I'm not going to have you here and then like hold your feet to the fire for two hours. That's like, that'd be incredibly awkward on a personal level. Do you know what I mean? Also boring. Yeah, sort of that, too. But I guess what I'm saying is that the friendliness of the medium actually allows crazy people and bullshit artists and manipulators and whatever who are good to use the medium to introduce shitty ideas or untrue things. Well, do you think that's true for every medium? Yes, but it's harder to insert outright nonsense and bullshit into a mainstream newspaper than a three-hour conversation where both people are smoking weed.

22:59Do you know what I mean? And also, you have to understand with podcasts, I'm talking about audio podcasts now, you have a captive audience because they're either in their car or they're at their gym. That's where people consume podcasts. And so they're not switching while they're driving. They're not switching while they're on the treadmill. So you have, it's probably more than most media, you have a captive audience. Yes. And so you can kind of do these meandering long form. Like I just when I hear people talk about things that I really know about, I'm like, this is they're not even close, you know?

23:30And so it's interesting to watch people as and I think any medium as it develops, it's there's this kind of innocence and purity in the early days. And then people who need access to an audience get really good at figuring out how to sort of inject themselves into. I think Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a great example of a person who's just utterly full of shit and probably like literally insane, who has figured out that, oh, this medium is conducive to spreading my type of thinking because it's fundamentally unrigorous and there's fundamentally a captive audience. And it doesn't you don't go to a podcast to get political or medical advice for the most part.

24:12But if your favorite comedian is interviewing that person, now you're that's being downloaded directly into your brain. So what I think about or what I am thinking about with The Daily Stoic is how can it be a podcast that's good for your brain? And I do love the idea of being able to take these ancient ideas and have them be listenable to people all over the world. I try to take the responsibility of the platform seriously, which I don't think all my peers necessarily do. I talked about this in Trust Me, I'm Lying, but the way to game the metrics of a medium, it's a relentless, enticing temptation for people.

24:56And I think you are seeing already, you know, people who are getting really good at gaming the podcasting algorithm. And the early days of podcasting, when we started, you know, there was no algorithm to game. It was a feed. And you listened to the episodes as they came out each day. And that chronology just meant you should deliver something of high quality. And that's been going away. But so I don't think, hey, how's this guest going to do? I think about, is this going to be a good conversation? Is this going to add value? Is this someone I want to talk to? I like that. Tyler Cowen on his podcast, he goes, this is the conversation I want to have, not the podcast you want to have.

25:34And I know I've personally gained a lot from the people that we've had on. And I know many of you have, too, because you've written in about it. So I'm not saying you shouldn't listen to podcasts. Obviously, I think you should. I listen to podcasts on my commute and on my walks. I'm just saying that there's something about these like three hour shoot the shit. I'll talk to anyone. I'm open minded. Podcasts that seem to be rotting a lot of people's brains. And I'm trying to be the antidote to that. It's also been interesting watching the podcasting as a medium, which was primarily audio, become also an audiovisual medium.

26:14And the studio we had to build is a testament to that. Always needing to prove the audio quality, but the video quality and the cinematics of it. I know some of you probably wouldn't be listening to this episode again, but even in the last few years, it's been a big shift. YouTube is now like the second biggest, in some cases, the biggest podcasting platform for people. And we do post the episodes over on the Daily Stoic YouTube channel. I personally don't know how people sit and watch an hour, let alone a three-hour podcast, but millions of people do. And the episodes of the Daily Stoic podcast, since we've built out the studio, have developed their own audience, not just on YouTube, but we post the episodes on Twitter and on Facebook in video form.

27:04And then the clips of the show, sometimes just single clips, a minute, two minutes from an episode might go on to do millions and millions of views. When Matthew McConaughey was on the podcast, did a live episode on the back porch of the painted porch, and someone asked him about like his tuna salad recipe, that clip alone got something like 8 million views. How crazy is that? I just couldn't have imagined any of that when we launched this podcast eight years ago. I've learned a lot over the years doing the Daily Stoic podcast. There's been something about doing this podcast that's kept me honest.

27:41like Buzz Williams, who I had on the podcast, he has this thing about being an everyday guy. And actually I asked him about it when he was on the podcast. This is what he said. Are you tough enough to be an everyday guy? I don't think it has anything to do with Paul. I think a lot of it has to do with how I was raised and what I witnessed as I was growing up is whatever it is that you're trying to do, however you deem success, are you tough enough to do that every single day? And I think that time, if you're basing it on talent, Well, talent at some point in time probably will prevail, but not always.

28:18And so if you remove talent, then it becomes consistency. Then it becomes discipline. Then it becomes how are you spending your time and are you tough enough to do those things every day? And like I tell our guys all the time, I would like to win, but I want to win playing my hand. and I'm okay losing if I'm not playing my hand. And my hand is what I believe is right. And I can't sacrifice what I believe those things to be are right. And I'm not saying that I am right. I'm just saying an everyday person is who I respect the most. An everyday person, their talent is going to improve because they're tough enough to do it every day.

29:04It was funny when Buzz came. Buzz was then the head coach at A &M. Now he's the head coach at the University of Maryland, basketball coach. He's one of the people who introduced me to co-traveling, one of my absolute favorite people. But it's funny, when he came on the podcast, we basically reenacted a story that I tell in Discipline is Destiny, which was about dressing for success. like one of the benefits i think of being a writer is that i just dress however i want t-shirt jeans shorts whatever actually when elliot ackerman was on the podcast like i walk in and he goes did you just go for a run i think he was curious but he's also i was like whoa okay sorry i didn't dress up you look like you just went for a run uh no okay this is that's how i dress and nice well you're ready to run i walked the dog earlier and then i was like oh yeah this is why I dress this way.

29:53It's because it's like you're switching between roles. And it's like, if I'm dressed for like, it's like, why am I dressed for the made up thing that I'm not doing? What I'm actually doing is chasing children around or walking dogs. I thought that was really funny. But anyways, I was like, oh, Buzz is coming. You know, he's a pro. I should probably dress up a little bit. So I put on, I put on real clothes. Again, I basically only put on real clothes when I'm doing a talk these days when I'm about to appear on television. And then, of course, Buzz shows up in basketball shorts and a t-shirt. And I just thought that was hilarious.

30:30You can see the video of this. And then when I was talking to Cal Newport about his book, Slow Productivity, he actually hit me because in speaking about just sort of coming back to school and the craziness of all this, one of the hard parts about being an everyday guy with the podcast, like there's this everydayness to it. Like every episode you hear had to be recorded well in advance and then edited and set up to run like that day. There's just a, there's a ceaselessness to it. And it's a lot. And so like, if I go out of town for three weeks or I'm doing a book launch or I'm trying to focus, I have to batch a lot of stuff.

31:10And so we were talking about taking time off, but basically taking that time off, what that means is I have to do double time somewhere else. And so as I've tried to introduce some seasonality into my life and work where I'm lighter in the summers, I have more time with my kids, or I want to spend time really focusing on a book or just for my own peace of mind, I've noticed that what that can mean is just higher stress in other points. And so I've really been trying to work on with the team and in my own life, how to avoid that. So being so far ahead that we can absorb that stuff, but not needing to just cram.

31:50So then you can take a few days off. Again, that one of the beautiful parts about the podcast is just all the things that it helps me think about. And that conversation with Cal was really great. I just thought I'd update you on what's going on. Couple housekeeping notes, I guess. So if you're wondering like, hey, why am I hearing ads when I wasn't hearing ads before? That might be because you were a Wondery Plus subscriber or you were listening on Amazon Music, which was ad-free because Amazon and Wondery were one. Backyard is setting us up with a premium edition if you hate ads. I get that. It's called Daily Stoic Premium.

32:29And with premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free. No interruptions, just the conversation. And you You can get early access to some of the episodes as well. If you want to do that, you just go to dailystoic.com slash premium and you can sign up or click the link. I think that'll be cool. So you can check that out if you want to skip those. And then if you listen to the show, you'll know the last words that I often say in most episodes is, so you want to go check out some books. And we check to make sure everything got recorded. and then we put on these external mics and then we walk next door.

33:08As I said, we walk out the back of the studio, which is actually to the front of the street. We go through this little storefront that we haven't quite figured out what to do with yet, which is sort of previously the waiting room at John's Barbershop. And then we go over back into the bookstore and then we just talk about books. Many people on YouTube have pointed out that I don't hold the door open wide enough for the guests or long enough for the guests as I go in because I go in first because I'm going to show them around. They don't know where we're going. And sometimes it swings back and hits clear who's filming or Jordan who's filming.

33:44There's not really a way around this. I don't know what to tell you. I'm leading them where we're going and then I'm holding the door. The door opens inward. So I have to open the door once I get through it. Or again, it creates a weird traffic jam. And then sometimes there's people in the store. It's a whole thing. But the point is, If you like listening to this podcast and you want to see what happens after the behind the scenes stuff, head on over. We post these on my YouTube channel, which I will link to. They're just me and the guests riffing on books. Sometimes they stay for an extra hour.

34:16Sometimes it's 10 minutes. And I try to pick out a few books that I think they will like. Sometimes that are based on the conversation we just had. Sometimes they're books I'm recently reading. Sometimes they're ones I think really connect with their work. sometimes they're pointing out books that they love. It's just a great conversation. It is funny. Now we have to tell the person or their team, you're not paying for the books because I'll be like, I think you'd like this. I think you'll, and I see the guests going like, I don't know. Like, I'm not bullying you into buying these books. Sometimes they'll leave with 10 books.

34:51I'm like, I'm not just tricking you into spending a couple hundred bucks at the bookstore. So that's my way of saying thank you to the guests. And it also makes great, great content. And the other funny thing is like sometimes people are coming in. Austin, part of the reason I live here is it's an easy city to get in and out of. They flew in that morning and they're flying out that afternoon and they only have a carry-on. And so we have to go, okay, you're not paying for the books. This is not up for debate. These are my treat. And then also we're happy to mail them to you. And Mace, the fighter pilot, was just in here and she posted a great video for unboxing the videos that she got.

35:27I thought that was cool. Anyways, this has gone on longer than it probably needed to. I just wanted to kind of tell you what's going on with the show. I also wanted to express my gratitude to you for listening. Thank you very much. I'm going to keep doing this podcast as long as people keep listening, as long as people want to keep coming down and having conversations, as long as stoicism still lights me up. So I assume that's going to go on for a long time. Thank you for listening. Thank you for the support. Sign up for Daily Stoic Premium if you want an ad-free version of the podcast. Please pre-order Wisdom Takes Work.

36:03That's going to be coming out October 21st. We've got signed numbered first editions. As I said, the audiobook is almost done. I'm really excited for all that. I'll talk soon.

36:19Hey, it's Ryan. Thank you for listening to the Daily Stoic Podcast. I just wanted to say we so appreciate it. We love serving you. It's amazing to us that over 30 million people have downloaded these episodes in the couple of years we've been doing it. It's an honor. Please spread the word. Tell people about it. And this isn't to sell anything. I just wanted to say thank you.

36:49Look, ads are annoying. They are to be avoided, if at all possible. I understand as a content creator why they need to exist. That's why I don't begrudge them when they appear on the shows that I listen to. But again, as a person who has to pay a podcast producer and has to pay for equipment and for the studio and the building that the studio is in. It's a lot to keep something like the Daily Stoic going. So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Supercast to bring you a ad-free version of Daily Stoic. We're calling it Daily Stoic Premium. And with Premium, you can listen to every episode of the Daily Stoic podcast completely ad-free, no interruptions, just the ideas, just the messages, just the conversations you came here for.

37:43And you can also get early access to episodes before they're available to the public. And we're going to have a bunch of exclusive bonus content and extended interviews in there just for Daily Stoic Premium members as well. If you want to remove distractions, go deeper into Stoicism and support the work we do here. Well, it takes less than a minute to sign up for Daily Stoic Premium, and we are offering a limited time discount of 20 % off your first year. Just go to dailystoic.com slash premium to sign up right now or click the link in the show descriptions to make those ads go away.