Casey Neistat On The Purpose That Parenthood Gives You

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1:54Welcome 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.

2:49So one of the funny things about being an author, but I think about life, is that you have these things that you want, that you think are what success is, that you think make it all worth it. You may be jealous when you see other people have them, then you get them and your attitude towards them totally changes. I'll tell you what I mean. So I got my first book. All I wanted was my publisher to send me on book tour. And they didn't. I remember I did two signings and I paid for them out of my own pocket. So the publisher wouldn't pay to send me. And then, you know, you look, you go, what, they sent this person.

3:25Wouldn't it be great? I could get media. You think it's going to, you think it's this critical thing, right? And then, you know, as my books started to really sell, then they were willing to do it. I remember I went on this long tour for a conspiracy at like 10 stops or something. And it was so exhausting by the time I finished. I was like, never again. And now the conversation with my publisher has exactly flipped. They'll go, okay, these, you know, what about live events for the launch? And I'm like, how can I do as few of them as possible? Not because I don't like meeting people. I love meeting you guys.

4:00Well, it's okay. As you know, I'm a bit of an introvert. But the point is I don't seek out doing the events. I mean, I have my own bookstore. I don't even do events. But mostly I just don't like being gone. And the economics of flying across the country to have a couple hundred people, which is a killer, killer, killer turnout for a book event, you know, does not translate much to the bottom line of an author, right? It's a cool experience, but it doesn't exactly make financial sense, even when the publisher is paying for it. All of which is to say, it's a lesson, right? You think you want this thing and then you get that thing and then you're like, oh, this didn't magically solve anything.

4:42I don't magically feel good because this isn't as cool as I thought. And that's helped me as I've been jealous of things that other people have gotten as I've thought, well, the next thing will be heard. I go, no, that's not how it works. The things you thought you wanted before, once you got them, you were like, meh, right? So when The Daily Dad came out, the publisher wanted me to do a couple events because we did this really cool edition with Barnes & Noble. Barnes & Noble did a large printing of their own version of it. It's a different color. It's got this cool ribbon. It was really cool that they supported me, and I obviously wanted to support them back.

5:13So I agreed to do two events, the first of which was in New York. But I said to my publisher, I'm only willing to do it if we can have it be more of a conversation as opposed to me giving a talk, and then I want to record that. And so I was really trying to do two birds with one stone, and I wanted to be able to bring that to all of you who didn't get to come to the event. The first one was in New York City at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square, where actually I remember getting Robert Greene's 33 Strategies of War when I was like 18 years old. So long history with this store. Very cool to go there.

5:46And even cooler to get to interview and be interviewed by my friend Casey Neistat, one of the great YouTubers of all time. The person who encouraged me to bring out my own YouTube channel. He's given me lots of advice. As I talk about in today's interview. He's the one that helped me pick up my journaling habit. I was an advisor to his company, Beam, which was acquired by CNN. He's got this cool creative space in Manhattan that all different kinds of creators use. His videos have done billions, literally billions of views. He's inspired me as a person, as an artist, as a parent. And it was just a really cool experience for me to get to have this conversation.

6:29and I appreciate that he allowed me to impose on him and ask him to have this experience with me. I know he's a very, very busy guy. And I went for a run with him in the morning before I talked and we did the talk and it was a great experience. Thanks to all of you who came out. Thanks to everyone who supported The Daily Dad. You can check that out anywhere you get your books, including the Barnes & Noble edition, which they still have a few copies of. We have signed copies here at The Painted Porch and at dailydad.com. but in the meantime, I will bring you my conversation with the one and only Casey Neistat.

7:03You can follow him on every platform, at Casey Neistat. On Twitter, he's just at Casey, and I think you're really going to enjoy this interview with one of my favorite people, one of the only people I run with in the world, and someone who's changed my life in many, many ways, and we tell the story about how we met in this interview, along with some other awesome stories. Thanks to Casey. Enjoy.

7:31I got an amazing night's sleep last night. One, because my six-year-old fell asleep in the car at like six o 'clock and he transferred him from the car seat to the bed and it stuck, which is just magic. So he's in bed way earlier than normal. But I sleep really well every night because I have a 8 Sleep Pod 5 Ultra, which is 8 Sleep's best product. I've used Eight Sleep for many years now, and it's just totally transformed how I sleep, made me sleep better, made my wife sleep better. It's amazing. So basically, Eight Sleep is this topper that goes over your mattress. It can heat and cool both sides separately.

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10:32Thanks, everyone, for coming. Is this on? Yeah, we're good? Ryan, I can't see you. Yeah, yeah. Let's move this back. How's that? It's good. That looks nice. I actually haven't seen this in the flesh. So Barnes & Noble has their own edition. And this is very, very cool. It's the only one. It's the only edition with a ribbon. Fancy fact. Fancy fact. So how are you feeling from the run this morning? Casey and I ran 11 miles this morning. It was an off day for both of us. It was double what I normally do. So the opposite of an off day. you're a morning exercise person why is that for reasons that will provide us with an excellent subway segue in today's discussion but um my kids have to be up at like 7 15 to get to school so kind of like the only practical time of day for me to get it in is before the kids have to be woken up so like my deadline like when i have to be done with all my exercise my like casey time the day is pre like pre 7 a.m but it's not like you have a job you could do it any time during the day yeah but like once you once you like fall back on that thing where you're like ah i'll run at 10 and then it's like noon and you're like yeah i'll just go get lunch and then it's like three and then before you know it you've got like one of those mobility carts and you're just kind of like watching tv all the time and you're like you know watching cocomelon on your ipad and you're getting nothing done.

12:01No, I think that's interesting because, yeah, it's like once you start the habit of pushing, then you're probably already admitting to yourself that you're not going to do it. Yeah, don't you have like a great Marcus Aurelius quote about this? Probably. Let me see. I feel like I did this because of one of your quotes. Let's see. Well, he has a great one about getting up in the morning, which I love. He says, well, is this what you were put here to do to stay under the covers and be warm? this is what you're put on this planet to do which i like but seneca's thing is that he says um the one thing fools have in common is that they're always getting ready to start so you're about to do it like i gotta finish this thing first i'll do it after so i think there's something about owning doing it first crossing it off the list that's really really good it's such a healthy practice when you have little kids because when you get up at 4 30 in the morning you are like fucking exhausted by eight o 'clock at night my bedtime is nine o 'clock this will be the latest i've stayed up in months and i do that because i fall asleep when my kids fall asleep like i have the same sleep schedule as a four-year-old yeah and i find it to be a very healthy thing to do and i think that my children appreciate that because i'm with them at night we're on the same cadence i'm not like get to bed kids so i can watch you know the real housewives of beverly hills yeah i'm like kids come on let's all fall asleep and i'm the first one out yeah there i i have this story in discipline is destiny but the tony morrison thing was she had to get up and do her writing before she heard the word mom in the morning before she heard yeah so if you get if you get it done whether it's the workout or the writing or the alone time or the meditation you want to do it before you've started the clock as a parent if you can which i think is really interesting advice um that i don't work that that doesn't work for me but i do think the idea of getting crossing something off the list as early as possible before you're already tired before you're already making compromises before you're already you know into the shit there's something about like the fact that when my children wake up every day when i wake them up i like splashing water on them or whatever i do to get those little rascals out of bed i've been up for three hours and have gotten like a half a day like i think there's some there's a valuable lesson there what are other parts of your routine or is it you just cross that off the list and then it's chaos from there yeah i mean like getting the kids to school every morning i think is one of the most valuable things as a parent, those sorts of routines.

14:40Yeah. My children, like with breakfast, those sorts of routines, like consistency as a parent, I've found to be one of the, kind of the most rewarding things from a child's perspective. It's very hard to get into the mind of a four-year-old, of an eight-year-old, but when there's consistency at hand, like you can really see the response from them. Yeah. What's interesting, right? Like you can see if your kid's routine is disrupted. you see how disrupted they are, right? Like if you normally do things a certain way or if your life is chaos, you see how it manifests in their behavior. And then we're not that different.

15:14Like I realized that if I don't have a routine, my behavior suffers and my willpower suffers and my equanimity suffers. And so I think the idea is like everyone should be on a sleep schedule. Everyone should be on a routine. I mean, it's a human thing as opposed to a kid thing. Yeah. Also, there's like no easier way to look someone in the eye and say, I'm better than you. Than what time you woke up? I wake up at five in the morning every day. That is a powerful. I think I've read all of your books. I haven't read The Daily Dead yet. Well, it just came out. And you shouldn't be more than one page into it.

15:58Just to be clear, it should take you a year. If anyone says they've finished, they already broke the rule and didn't make it through the intro. It's very clearly, it's one page a day. But I've been, you know, Ryan and I have a very interesting history where we met at this outrageous, are we allowed to talk about this? I think so. I don't think it was secret. We met at this outrageous Google event at a castle in England where they had like, Like when I say Ryan and I were the least important people there, I mean like if there's a spectrum of one to a hundred, everyone there was in the 90 to a hundred range and we were in single digits.

16:38Like we were so out of our league at this event, at this castle that they had rent up and we ended up spending a lot of time together. Well, for some reason it was you, me and like two other people. We had to stay in the castle like they didn't put us in a hotel. so then all the adults left and then it was just us in the and it was a castle but it was more like it was an English estate it was called Clevedon I don't know it's this like thing it was the craziest house that I've ever been in and then they just left for very irresponsible people to stay in the castle by ourselves one of whom was Tom Hooper the guy who had just directed and won the Academy Award for the King's Speech and I remember like 3 in the morning we got in trouble because we were all piss drunk playing on some construction site outside.

17:24Wasn't there a slide for some reason? Like a slide from a circus? Yeah, it was either that or it was the shoot that the construction workers threw the garbage out. But when the management yelled at us, I remember Tom fought back. Like, how dare you? And I was like, how brutish. This is fantastic. But we've known each other since then. Oh, actually, to give people a sense of who, how this event was. If you go to conferences, sometimes it's like, and then we're all going to do a joint run in the morning, and it'll be like, we're all going for a one-mile run together, because it's like lowest common denominator.

18:03And then they had like... The guy who just won the Olympics for like... Yeah, Mo... For... Whatever his name is. He just won the fucking Olympic gold. Yes. That was who That was who Google paid to come in just to lead this one run of Google executives. And us assholes. Yeah. But we got to know each other then. And I think it was an interesting sort of inflection point in both of our careers. And it was before I had both of my two daughters. Before you had just been married or were just about to get married. And I think that our friendship, our personal friendship and our professional relationship sort of grew from there.

18:44And it's been really interesting for me to learn about you personally as a friend, but then also learn about you through your writings. And the conspiracy was an all time favorite. So fucking and just like gossipy and page turny and fun. But then I learned about the Stoics and learned about Stoicism through your writing. And I like the impact that it's had on my life has been profound beyond certainly your specific writings, like understanding what Stoicism is. and how that can be applied to your everyday life. And I'm curious about how you dovetailed those themes with a book about parenting. Yeah, so we would have met, I think it was 10 years ago, I was just thinking about this.

19:30Almost exactly. So getting old. Yeah, very. But I think The Obstacle is the Way had just come out. So that would have been my first book about Stoic philosophy. And then The Daily Stoic would have come out a little bit later than that. I got so much out of writing The Daily Stoic, like the idea of doing one page of Stoic philosophy every day. And then obviously I've kept that going with the email. So I've basically written that book, a new version of that book every year since 2016. That when we had kids, I was like, I think that would make me a better parent to do that same process. So obviously the book is for you, but writing it was very much for me.

20:12the idea of like, what do I think? What are my sort of principles? What are the lessons that people should do or should not do from figures from history and philosophy? That was the idea in the book. But I think what's weird, if you went to the parenting section here at Barnes and Noble, you would see a lot of books, some of which are interesting, some of which are not. I would say most of the books for dudes are very patronizing. It's like, let's put a cowboy hat on the cover or something. It's like, or we'll make it camouflage. And actually remember, Adrian, my publisher, is here and he was, when I was proposing the book, he was like, men don't buy parenting books.

20:54That's what he said. That was a fact of the industry, which is true. But I think the reason that's true and the reason why parenting books are, with the exception of, say, what to expect when you're expecting, not great sellers, is that it's insane to read about some problem you might have 22 years from now, right? So you're reading a book about this thing that you never stop doing. You're always a parent once you become one. But how could you read about that in the course of a week and then retain that knowledge? So what I think is special about this format or what I'm trying to do is that it's a book not only that you read in small chunks, but ideally you read over and over again.

21:35I don't know how to put this into a question, right? Something that's interesting is like, So my wife and I have read a number of parenting books. And she highlights a page or folds down a page. It's like, honey, you have to read this. And that has sort of shifted. We're now, she and I are in this sort of perpetual state of sending each other. Don't laugh, because this is serious. You can laugh, it's fucking ridiculous. Sending each other TikToks. Do the same thing. Sure. From pediatricians and then just from like people who think they know something. And they usually do. And they're good at compartmentalizing it into these little videos.

22:11And it's interesting and it's helpful and it makes me feel understood. And I think something that you've done that has been very interesting for me to watch as someone who sort of built my own career on social media is like you're an author. I think they called you a media strategist. But, you know, like I see you as an author. I see someone who's able to take ideas and put them on paper and communicate those ideas in a way that people are able to digest them. But in the last decade, you have leaned into social media, into podcasting. I follow all of your multiple feeds that you or your entities produce on.

22:49If you're doing all that, then I don't know when you sleep. No. But on social media. And, like, I'm curious about that transition, about that. It's not a transition because you're still writing. But I'm curious about how you came to that and what it's like when people come up to you saying, I love your Instagram videos or I love your YouTube videos versus I've read all your books. Yeah, I'm like in the same way that. So when you write a book, obviously it gets translated into different languages. Like I don't also write the Spanish version or it would be unintelligible. You know, I don't even I don't even see like the German or the French or these other versions.

23:28like they just ship them to you after they're done like and you're like oh that's an interesting choice yeah um and uh so it just happens right but the idea is that obviously there's people who read primarily in french and people read in german people read in czech people who read in russian any language and so um that's how you expand the reach of what you're doing and the way i have come to understand is like i'm a book first person that's how i consume information if I wanted to learn, I'm becoming a parent, I go read a parenting book, right? Or if I wanted to learn about this country I was going to, I would read a book about that thing.

24:01Or I want to learn about the Civil War, I'm going to read a bunch of books about the Civil War. But that's not how a lot of people learn. And that's certainly not the easiest entry point into stuff. And so I think about it as like, I write the books, and I think primarily in long form. And then I have a team that helps me translate that into shorter and tighter things that bring people in. And it's weird. The books have been this sort of slow, steady climb. And then somewhere around 2020, we started doing more in the social media stuff. I guess we've had the Instagram account for Daily Stokes since 2016, but we really invested, especially in video stuff.

24:39And it's just been explosive because the same thing you're saying with the parenting ones, it's actually a great medium to encapsulate an entry point into an idea or a concept. And then if someone wants to go further from there. That's what they do. And I think I really learned from your stuff, which is

25:00respecting whatever the medium is and deciding to do it at a high level. So actually figuring out what works, what doesn't, actually investing in quality and all those things. So yeah, it's been it's been a slow journey which i'm not i to this day i'm not sort of naturally comfortable in but it's so it's been a stretch out of my comfort zone but usually when you find you that you've stretched out of your comfort zone you end up learning and experiencing and usually reap you know sort of cool benefits from that i i don't want i don't want this question i don't i say this very gently but like do you see those outlets those social media outlets as legitimate ways for to communicate the ideas and themes that you write about?

25:49Or you do. Yeah, like I used to talk, I used to do a lot of consulting for other authors. That's the media strategist thing. And I would go like, their book's out in six months. I would go, I'm going to describe a scenario to you in which your book sells zero copies. But the title, the phrase you've come up with enters sort of the cultural consciousness. People start, it becomes a buzzword. People start talking about it. People talk about it in business meetings. You hear from people that say, that changed my life. I'm describing a scenario in which the book has a huge impact. It penetrates. It changes things.

26:31It wakes people up. It leads to an investigation or changes who wins an election. A bunch of stuff that could happen. But it doesn't translate into commercial sales in any way. I said, would you accept that as success? And invariably they say, yeah, of course, because nobody chooses to write a book because their main motivation is to make a lot of money. It's like the worst way you could possibly do that. Like people sometimes go, oh, he writes about stoicism to make money. And it's like, yeah, yeah, that's why that's why I write long books about an obscure school of ancient philosophy. Right.

27:04Like books are books are not it. Right. you'd work on Wall Street. You'd do literally anything else. Which is actually, as an aside, because it's something I wrote down I want to talk about. I remember after we met, I came here to your studio and we were hanging out and you gave me a really good piece of advice, which I think is worth repeating. Casey said both of us are not interested in making money. And I said, we're not? And he said, yeah, if all we cared about was making money, we'd work at an ad agency. And I said, oh, that's true. That's why I don't work in an that agency. It doesn't seem like cool work.

27:38And then you said, you don't make art to make money. You make money to make more art, which has changed how I think about it. So the books have been successful and I have done things that have made money. And I think about that as the funding mechanism to make all this other stuff, the videos, social media posts that produces the podcast. At this point, Daily Stoic, the production budget and the staff is well into the very high six figures just to pay for all the stuff that gets made. So I make a lot of stuff that does not make any money, right? You get small checks here or there for the TikTok creator fund or whatever, but that's not paying for what you're making.

28:27I'm making that stuff because I feel like I really care about it. And if that's the medium in which I'm going to reach someone or they're going to get access to the ideas, I actually don't care if they buy the book or not. What I care about is if in that 60 seconds they learn about something that I have talked about in the books and enough people do buy the books that it works out. So I not only think about them as like quality mediums, but I think about it as that you have an obligation once you've succeeded to expand out into the other things if you can. Because what you should really care about is the propagation of the message or the ideas, not trying to like capture it between the two covers or you only want to reach people who purchased it on iTunes or whatever it is.

29:20a funny a funny parenthetical about what you're talking about nobody buys your book but it has social cultural relevance my friends ariel shulman and henry juice brilliant filmmakers and about 15 years ago they made a documentary about this woman who turned out not to be who she said she was online and they showed my brother and me the video uh the movie it was a feature film like before they submitted to festivals like what do you think and we watched it through and I was like, wow, this is like the gnarliest Facebook kind of expose I've ever seen. What are you going to call it? And they're like, we're not sure.

29:58And there was this line at the end of the movie that like this woman who's like this liar, this bullshitter pretended to be someone else, this con woman, where this old guy sitting on a porch is like, you know, what I can say about her is that when they ship fish around the world, they throw a catfish in the aquarium to keep all the other fish moving, keeping them on their toes. And when we're discussing what the movie should be called, my brother Van Gogh's Catfish. That's the name of your movie, Catfish. And I was like, what kind of fucking name is Catfish? That'll never stick. No one will ever remember the name Catfish.

30:38And Catfish now has become such a part of the global lexicon. You can go get the dictionary from the printed dictionary. You know, Catfish is in there. And it's like that word that they invented, the profundity of that word that they invented has gone around the world a hundred times more than the fantastic movie that they made. Yeah, and who would trade that kind of impact for the film being 20 %? Yeah, right, exactly. That's what you're trying to do. And I think there's something stoic in that too, which is like, at a certain point, you have to make something that you're really proud of and you have to understand that sometimes it's explosive and sometimes it's not and you have to be happy with it.

31:22But if your only definition of success is measured in copies sold or dollars earned, that's a very narrow definition. You've so narrowed the target, right? But instead, if your expansion is like, does it have impact? Does it change people's lives? Does it influence other people? I have a chapter in the book that I'm writing now, which will be the third book in the... How many books have you written, Ryan? I actually don't. I think it's 12. How old are you? I actually don't know the answer to that. I think I'm 36. Yes, I'm 36. I turned 42. Zero books. The point is, in sports, there's two ways to measure someone's legacy.

32:10First is, how many games did you win? How many home runs did you hit? That statistic. But the best coaches are measured not in how many wins they have, but they're measured in their coaching tree. Who does their work impact? What coaches come up underneath them? Greg Popovich is undeniably the greatest coach in the history of the NBA. He hasn't won the most titles, but last year it was two of his coaches head-to-head for the title. right? Most matchups are one or both of the head coaches or at least the assistant coaches come from his coaching tree. So again, the idea as you're looking at your work, it's not just the raw numbers, but who are you influencing?

32:58What are you changing? So for me, again, yeah, if the books hadn't sold at all, but stoicism had had the cultural resurgence that it's having, that would of course be something I was extremely proud of and would be equally how I measured whether I succeeded or failed at what I set out to do which that is what you're saying like usually you have an idea you have a concept you have a story you want to tell and you want people to see it and then if you monetize a small fraction of that good for you you deserve it

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35:28How many parents in here? How many people? Whoa, there's so few parents in here. What do you say when someone says to you, like, I've got big news, we're having a baby? Yeah. Like, do you have any advice for me? Oh. Yeah. Where do you start? I mean, actually, I was thinking about this because we were talking about routines. We had some friends that, when they had their first kid, I was like, you guys need to start routines. Because they were like two, this was many years ago, there were two sort of work from home, self-employed people. That's where you start. I was like, these were people who were like, oh yeah, we go to bed whenever, we wake up whenever, we get started working whenever.

36:10I was like, you got to start bringing some order to that chaos just as practice because you can't raise a kid in that. And so I was, it's just interesting. Again, I think it's good for you, the individual, but it's critical in the house. Like you can't, you can't just be winging it. You gotta, I think the first thing is you gotta start getting some stuff in order. Cause it is like a hurricane happening in your house. If you're adding chaos on top of that chaos, I think you're never gonna get, you're never gonna get your arms wrapped around it. And has that advice that you give, would you say that shaped you as a hero in your lifestyle?

36:48I think Tom Segura has this joke that I love where he says, like, you know, people say having a kid changes you. And he's like, no, having a kid should change you. Right. Like, unfortunately, it doesn't. Right. You've got to decide to make those changes. So I think, you know, that there was a lot of growing up. There was a lot of getting serious about things. I think that's actually, you know, and you know, because he knocked up the movie. remember there's a scene where she's like what do you mean you haven't read the baby books right and he's like i what do you there's this huge fight he's like why do the books matter it's funny i think the reason she's saying the books matter isn't because there's actually that much good stuff in the books it's about can you make even the most basic commitment to this being a thing that you are taking seriously right and the beginning of this book i basically make this distinction between having kids and being a parent.

37:45And I know a lot of people that have kids. And I know a fewer amount of people who are parents, right? The decision to make this thing a central part of your life, to make the changes in how your life is structured, what you prioritize, what you get serious about, that I think is the critical, like, big breakthrough. yeah i would say that like when people have one kid yeah they have a kid they're not parents because like one child it's like you can hand that kid off it's a fashion accessory it's something to talk about it's like the coolest arm candy it's a child like it's cool like how cute and fun and all and two kids means like old me is dead six feet under i am all in I am fully committed.

38:35I've completely turned that corner. Sure. And I think that I think there's a lot. I say that crassly. There's a lot of truth to that. Yeah. There's a kind of commitment that happens. You can wing it at first and then having to is like, oh, no, this is this is this is like this is it. Yeah. And when people ask me about especially new parents, when they say we're having like what it what advice i prepare them for the horrors of parenthood because i feel like as a parent you feel obliged to talk about how beautiful and wonderful it is which it is um i've never not been a parent and that is an absolutely wild statement to make i have never not been a parent i was a child and then i was a parent at a kid when i was a teenager i've never not been a parent my entire adult life.

39:27There's never been a moment without it. You're like the story that parents don't want their teenagers to know because you had a kid in high school and it worked out for you. The kid worked out, you worked out. The best age to start thinking about parenthood is 15. You're like the exception that proves the rule. Yeah, don't do that. But I do think that talking about the hardships, talking about the fact that like when you have a newborn in the house, it's mostly horrible. The child gives nothing back. My kids are great. They're four and eight. Like, Brandy and I play Minecraft until two in the morning.

40:03It's super fun. She's really good at it. But a newborn is nothing but, like, scary uncertainty, what's coming next, exhaustion, fighting between you and your partner. The challenge is, and it is not sexy to talk about. It's not. And I find that the more, I mean, I always say it with a sense of sort of sardonicism. I always say it because otherwise you're just a fucking psychopath. But I mean every word that I say about how challenging it is. And I find that people find comfort in that because it's the sort of honesty that a lot of people are scared to confront. Well, there's two ways to think about it.

40:42One, which is, yeah, you go into this thing that's basically impossible to prepare for. but people haven't even attempted to prepare, right? There's that expression that like plans are worthless, but planning is everything. So if you haven't thought about it, if you haven't tried to make the decisions, you're trying to do it all on the fly, like you're going to get overwhelmed. And the Stokes talk about how, you know, the unexpected lands heaviest. So if you're just like, oh, it'll be awesome, you're going to get crushed. At the same time, I do feel like people are done disservice when all they hear is how terrible it is.

41:12It's like, if it was exclusively terrible, people wouldn't be doing it, right? It is also profoundly rewarding and amazing. And I think there's something weird, too, and I do try to talk about it in the book, which is like, okay, so I think we can, I don't think it's controversial to stipulate moms have been doing most of the work for all of human history and society has been sort of rigged to make sure that that is the case when it comes to parenting, right? And so like that also, though, has deprived men of being way more involved and getting way more of the rewards of what is an amazing, rewarding, beautiful experience.

41:52Right. So, you know, men weren't in the hospital when kids were born. And then they were like, oh, I'll check in when they're six, you know, when I start to take over their education or something like like they've skipped all this wonderful stuff. There's a story I tell in the book where Winston Churchill is sitting with his son. His son is like, I think his son's already married. So his son's older. They stay up late into the night talking. And it occurs to him, he goes, you know what? I think I've talked to you tonight more than my father talked to me in his entire life. And that's obviously an extreme case, but not that extreme, right?

42:29like parents of this generation spend more time with their kids than the previous generation and you think about like that's not just that wasn't just unfair it was also really sad and it cost both the kid and the parent one of the most wonderful things in the world which is time together yeah yeah i think about that a lot my you know my father had to work an unrelenting schedule to keep us above water when I was a kid. And the most kind of concrete memory, the one that's most visceral, is him coming home from work. Because he would always come home from work just as we were about to go to bed.

43:09And when you're putting kids to bed, they fight tooth and nail. So any moment of excitement is an excuse to not go to sleep. And it lands particularly hard. and that's what I remember of my childhood when I think of both of my parents when I think of but especially my father is that moment when you would hear like the the bell ring because we had a bell on our front door and that meant he was home and that was such an exciting real thing and I think about that a lot when it's like 5 30 and I'm at the office and it's like I could stay here till seven I know I'm good till we had coverage till seven I'm good till seven and like almost every night like fuck it i'm running home to hang out i don't think i've ever regretted coming home early or making more time and yeah there is this this sense you know they go like you only have 18 summers with your kids or 18 years with your kids but it's way less than that right way less than that because they're in school you're working they also only want to be around you for the first six seven years right so you're like you have a raw deal you know you know that you're going to miss this time that you're in, right?

44:19And then you're like, oh, but I got like emails to respond to or, you know, somebody, I think this is, you and I have connected over this idea of saying no, right, to things because you get a lot of inbounds as I do. And what I try to remind myself is that when I'm saying yes to this thing, like I probably would, as cool as that Google thing was, like if I got invited to it today, I'd be like, sorry, I don't want to get on, I don't want to fly across the ocean. I would measure that in how many bedtimes I would miss. That's how I kind of think about things. I think about it in terms of how many bedtimes am I going to miss.

44:53By the way, I lost the cards. I don't know where they went. Do you have them? Yeah. The questions? I made this movie called My Kid and Me about my son before my daughters were born. And I did this animation in because it's a visual that's always been in my brain when trying to just comprehend what it is to lose your kid's childhood like when they stop being children and i drew it as like two points that start together and then they really grow distant then they sort of come back together if you can if you can visualize that and that is when they're children when they're babies they're 100 dependent on you when they're newborns they're literally 100 dependent on their survival depends on your attention.

45:39My kid's four now, and she could probably figure out how to get the Cinnamon Toast Crunch if we left her alone for like three days, but the minute she's out of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, she's in trouble. So she still needs me, but slightly less. And that trajectory continues. And it continues, in my experience, as a 42-year-old man who's been both a parent and obviously a son. It somewhat ironically starts to come back together when you yourself have children because it's like that that that saying that is like you will never love your children will never love you love might be the wrong word appreciate might be a more fair word but you will your children will never love you the way you love your children and i didn't understand that about my it was incomprehensible that my parents even liked me i fucking burned down the neighbor's house man and this is not a joke i literally burned down my neighbor's house i was the worst kid that you could ever have until i had children and then it was like like i was pretty cute and i was a little there's no way they didn't like me when i was a baby they felt what i'm feeling for my children do i ask you these questions i don't i i can give them to me i'll i'll pick the ones i like i was wondering why you handed them i don't know but but yeah like i met so i measure like what i say yes or no to i measure it in terms of like how many bedtimes am I going to miss?

47:01And it's helpful for me. Before I had kids, I was much less disciplined about saying yes or no to stuff because I was like, I didn't want to hurt people's feelings. I wanted to do cool stuff. Even though I knew that was taking away from my work, it was taking away from my relationship with my wife, it was contributing to burnout, any of that stuff. But then when you have opportunity costs personified in a cute, innocent, dependent thing that you love more than anything in the world, you're able to go, oh, I'm saying yes to you because you want to be on a conference call, which isn't necessary at all.

47:40Or you want to meet in person about a thing that could be a five sentence email. And I'm saying yes to you because I don't want to argue with you. I don't want to hurt your feelings. But I'm saying no to this person who, by the way, I lie to myself and say, I do everything for them. I do it all for them. It's not true at all. No, you are, and my wife's been saying this thing recently that I've been thinking a lot about. She's like, we're being too nice and that's making us not be kind. Meaning we're being nice to random people and then not being kind at home or to people we actually care about because we used it all up.

48:18Yeah, no, that is why I'm just perpetual asshole to everyone. Because all my nice is used up for my kids. I very much appreciate you coming tonight, by the way. I know you, I never ask you for anything. I appreciate you asking this. It was my one ask. I'll talk to you in 10 years for round two.

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49:26And it works. It's got an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews. This December, start a new tradition by taking care of yourself. And our listeners get 10 % off at betterhelp.com slash dailystoicpod. That's betterhelp.com slash dailystoicpod. So we live on a Halloween street. We knew it was a Halloween street when we moved there. And then it has quickly become a Thanksgiving and then a Christmas street. Everyone's vying to outdo each other with their decorations. And I'll admit it sneaks up on us, especially as the competition gets more and more.

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50:59All right, we do have some questions. Let's see what we got here. um casey do you think it's more difficult to be present and by the way i was thinking about the secret to being a good parent i've decided is presence right you have to give them lots and lots of presents not gifts the other kind of presence you have to be with your kids when you're with your kids so is it harder or easier to be present in new york city or california how do you deal with the distraction the busyness the noise we talked about this this morning yes and i say this very gently because i've been very very poor as a parent in new york city when i first moved here um i had no money my kid and me uh we lived in an sro which is effectively a halfway house it was filled up with people who had just gotten out of jail and undocumented immigrants we had a shared bathroom down the hall and no kitchen it was 144 square feet so when my little boy would wake up in the middle of the day i have to go eat we have to put on shoes and grab our bathroom basket and walk down the hall and lock the door behind us it wasn't safe and it was scary with that caveat i now live in a great house and my kids go to a great school and i'm just surrounded by privilege so within that context raising children in new york city i think is one of the greatest places in the world to do it it's absolutely wonderful like my children walk they ride their scooters but they don't get into a vehicle they don't get into a train they don't get into a car they don't strap on a car seat to go from our house to school to gymnastics to swim class to meet their friends they don't leave our building to go hang out with their other friends all their favorite restaurants you can see out of our window so like when i was a child all i ever wanted was to live in a city and now i'm able to see that embodied like i'm I'm going to see that actualized through my children.

52:56And I find it to be tremendously easier. Like that burden, especially in Los Angeles, where we live for just a quick, embarrassing minute, and I'll never do it again. And I apologize to all of you. Anything we wanted to do that was outside of the house required strapping the kids into the minivan, sitting in traffic, like the fighting, the arguing, the stress, the anxiety, all of that. remove all of that bullshit and then put them in a city surrounded by people the sort of culture they're exposed to what they see when we like every weekend my wife and i pick a restaurant that's far away new york city far away outer borough and we have to figure out how to get there if they're going to see there we expose like our favorite place to take the kids is chinatown which is exactly a half a mile from our apartment but to them it's a different world so no i find it like not a little bit easier i find it like on a level i feel like the luckiest parent on the planet because i'm able to raise my kids in what is the disney world so what what does make it hard for you to be present then is it the phone is it work yeah the phone yeah i mean like i really like my kids but there are no competition for like the algorithm that that like makes instagram work are you kidding me my monkey brain versus instagram like ads or whatever the fuck they're pumping into my eyeballs all the time there's no one to tell me no phone and that sounds silly but it is very hard and my wife sent me a tiktok recently where some guy with a beard is like you put your all your kids want is your attention if you put your phone away at 6 p.m like fucking beard again again so we try to do that yeah and one thing that we did and this sounds preposterous go back into the 80s when i was born and explain this to any 80s parent and they would have no this sounds like this is absurd we did never have tvs in our house here in new york city we recently bought televisions on amazon they're like really cheap to buy like big flat tvs these days and we put one in the kid's bedroom for their benefit and it worked.

55:10So now like instead of the kid having an iPad at night they can't touch it. A decision has to be made collectively as a family whether we're going to watch Encanto or Encanto again we only watch Encanto. We watched it last night. It's all we watched. Before that it was Frozen 2. So there's something. But we watched this movie, and it's a shared experience. And because they only like movies they've seen a million times, we talk over it, so we're interacting with one another. It feels like a much more communal, parental, legitimate experience versus handing a kid an iPad, which as a parent, it literally feels like child abuse.

55:52And I think as we get older, we'll learn it is actually child abuse and wildly irresponsible. It's like giving a kid a pack of matches is better for their well-being than giving them an iPad. And these are sorts of like the little tricks we try to do to get them away from that. All right. So this question is, what is a philosopher and is this a standard that anyone can meet? That's definitely for you. So actually, this is interesting. OK, so philosopher, I think, is very accessible and reachable for any person. This would be any person who loves or studies wisdom, right? So philosophy, if we think about it as the pursuit of truth or wisdom, a philosopher is anyone who takes up that pursuit.

56:38And Stoics would say there's a difference between being a philosopher and being a sage, a sage being the sort of penultimate state of studying philosophy, which I think they would say is actually impossible. it's a perfection that you are approaching but you can never reach because it is always getting a little bit further as you get a little bit closer so if we can make this distinction between philosophy being a thing not just that tenured university professors get to pursue or nerds get to pursue or whatever philosophy is accessible and practical and actually quite useful to anyone and everyone but that there is a stage beyond merely the study of philosophy, in the way that one reaches enlightenment or zen, this would be sage for the Stoics.

57:33So that's the highest level. That's a great question. Oh, here's an interesting one for you, and me, I'll answer it too. But they're basically talking about being great at being a parent and then also being ambitious in your profession or in your career. I know it's been interesting that you've sort of worked a lot while you've had kids. You've worked less when you've had kids. You're kind of trying to find like a middle ground, it sounds like. Yeah, it's an impossible balance. And anyone who says that you can be operating as a business, an entrepreneur, a business person, someone who has career ambitions someone who says they can fire on all cylinders doing that and being a parent is full of shit.

58:22They're lying to you. It is impossible. And I think that I've been extremely fortunate in the timing of my own career. I think about this all the time. In the timing of my own career that I was able to sort of thread those needles. And what that means very literally is like, you know, I raised my son as a single parent. His mother and I have always had a wonderful relationship, but he's either with his mom or he's with me, as most kids with their parents split. That's just how it works. And what that meant was I was able to sort of bifurcate my life in a very literal way. The four days a week that I was not with my kid, it was just pedal to the ground, go.

59:02And then I was with my kid, like, you know, everything had to be turned off. We weren't even in the city a lot of the time. And that made it sort of easy. It was very black and white. And then once my career really started to take off, you know, he was a teenager. And there was a lot more malleability in our relationship, a lot more flexibility. He also afforded us opportunities that weren't lost on either of us. And then with my two daughters now, you know, like, really, for me, it was the 2010, 2012, later. 2012 to 2014 was when, like, I was at MIT. I started a technology company. I started a daily show on YouTube and I ran a technology company of a venture backed one.

59:44I had 30 employees while making a video a day, every day for 800 days in a row. All of that chaos was happening while my son Owen was age 16. He's finishing high school. Like he still wanted to hang out, but it was like, no, he'd rather be with his friends. You know, your role as a parent then is much more, it's much more of a title than it is an actual practice. and you know my daughter francine was born right sort of in the beginning of that and as she got older and then my second daughter was born i sold my company and i stopped doing the daily show because i was losing my fucking mind and then like it was wonderful like i had a very lucrative exit from selling my technology company and for the first time in my life i had some sense of financial security and when i took a step back and it was like what do i want to do now that i've achieved this thing that I've been trying to accomplish for two decades, having actual money and not having to stress where my next meal is going to come from.

1:00:43It was like, do I want to buy a Lambo? And it was like, no, fuck that. Let me buy time. And that's what we did. We just spent all of the money on, I still do. It's like, it's the only thing I really value is time. There's a quote I have in the book. I'm forgetting who it's from, but she says something like, kids should be the center of your life, but not the whole of your life. Right. And so the idea that you, uh, invest in them, it's this core part of who you are. It's why you do what you do is I think part of it. And then the tension, but also the connection is there that they should see you striving and growing and doing that.

1:01:25Like it would be sad that there's another quote I have in the book. It was from Susan Strait is this great novel. She was talking about how, um, um she her mother told her when she was a kid she was like when you get married you lose half your life and then she's like when you lose when you have kids you lose the other half right that is a terrible thing to both say it's terrible that it's true for some people but but it's all it's also that's a sad that's a sad statement about your life right that that like your kids when they look back on your life they're like oh that's when it stopped that's when they stopped growing.

1:02:03That's when they stopped changing. That's when the, their work started to like the quality of their work went down. Like, I think that's a bad message to show to your kids that like you were frozen in place when they were born, that you never produced anything good after that. Right. So, so anyways, I think it's a tension. You, you, your kids have to be both central to who you are and what you do, but they can't, you have to show them what is still possible while you have them in your life, which there's a related question someone was saying, how do you encourage contentment and satisfaction while still cultivating ambition?

1:02:37I think this is a similar thing where ideally you, when you have kids, you go, this is everything I've ever wanted. Like you thought what you were achieving in your career was going to give you satisfaction and happiness. And then you realize that it was nothing compared to these people you're bringing in the world. that's part but that doesn't mean you stop doing stuff i think what it means then is that you no longer have anything you have to prove that you're no longer doing the stuff from a place of thirst you're you're making work that you care about because you care about it as opposed to doing work because you have something you need to show you're doing work because you're trying to prove someone wrong do you know what i mean like i feel like i do better more secure work now that I have kids.

1:03:26Also because I have a spouse and I have like a system and a life that keeps me balanced. I think I look at the stack of work I made before I had kids, and it is dwarfed by the stack of work that I made since I had kids. And I think that having kids and getting married, et cetera, like people think like being in a relationship, they go, I don't have time. I'm too dedicated to my career. I would say that all those things have helped me in my career. I don't know if you agree. Yeah, 100%. When I meet really ambitious people, really focused, ambitious people that don't have kids, I just assume, and I think I'm right, they're just total fucking psychopaths.

1:04:07I say that because I... All of my ambition was born from having a kid. It's hard, because like I said, I've only ever been a parent, but before I had a kid, I was selling dime bags in the back parking lot of my high school. That was my life. You really were the worst kid ever. You did everything. I remember when my girlfriend was pregnant and I'm a teenager, a runaway with no money. And it's like I was so excited because I finally had a sense of purpose. I was like, okay, this is why I'm here. This is my role in this world. And when it was like, well, what do I do now? It's like, well, fuck, I can't afford diapers.

1:04:51If the state of Connecticut didn't have a social program that gave me free diapers and coupons to go get milk, this kid would have no diapers and would be starving. It's like, fuck, I have to fix that. How am I going to fix that? And it's like, well, I've got to use all my power. And what it meant then was getting two jobs, working 16 hours a day, washing dishes. It's like, okay, this isn't quite enough. What can I do else? It's not going to work here. I've got to get the hell out of this small town. I've moved to New York City. This isn't working either. I've got to do this. I've got to do that.

1:05:17It was a kind of like psychosis, like this very narrow focus, like being shot out of a cannon. And I attribute all of that to being a parent. Like I would say like he was like, I was never held back because I was a parent. I was enabled because I was a parent. So constraints are focusing the energy. It was just the most empowering thing in the world. Like why do you do it? Where do you get your energy? Like all those stupid fucking questions. I have a kid. I don't have a choice. No, it keeps you honest, right? Like you're saying, if you have a morning routine, because that's when you get them to school, you have an evening routine, because that's when they get home from school, that's when you have to give them a bath, so you have to go to bed.

1:05:55You realize just how wasteful and inefficient you were able to be because you could be so. You had money and time and energy to burn. And when that goes away, ideally it forces you to be really focused and really efficient and to not accept waste or impositions or inconveniences and to do it right, not just because you should, but because the consequences of being inefficient and getting it wrong are so high. Where did those questions come from? Did they write those questions? Yeah, I guess. No, I saw one in here that reminded me of something I want to talk to you about. I remember also when I was in your studio, I saw you had journals that you had written when you're a little white out, you'd put the year of every, you had journals going back for like 20 years.

1:06:48And I remember thinking, I really wish I had journals that way. And I think I said that to you. And then you said, well, you don't. And the second best thing would just be to start right now. Right? Like if you want to have this in the future, you have to start right now. And I love that. And that's one of the reasons I picked up that habit, which has been life-changing for me. Talk to me about journaling. Is it still something you do? No, I'm too late. My phone fucked everything up. You just do it on your phone now? No, I just don't do it. Because I can be looking at Instagram instead. But I have journals that go back for 20 years.

1:07:27But I also have, there was two and a half years, maybe a little bit less of my life. I didn't just keep a journal. I kept minutes. So I can go through the entire day. Not like hour to hour. It's like minute to minute. and I've looked at it recently it is unbelievable you just did that on your phone or did that in the journal? pre-phone, I would take a single sheet of paper and fold it into eight squares on either side, 16 days on one piece of paper and then write it what is the equivalent of a four size font I mean tiny, probably 300 lines per sheet so each square would have 40 lines of text and right there it falls a micro point pen.

1:08:10But I have those. They're in my studio. So I can refer back. This is the day exactly where I was and exactly what I did from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to death. There's a journal. I'm sure they have it here. I sell it in my bookstore, but it's called the One Line a Day Journal. And it has five lines on each page. And each line is for each day of like each one day for five years. So I write one sentence. There's like three or four lines. You could do exactly what you're saying. But I write one little line every day about the thing that I did the day before, something I was feeling, something I was thinking about, some milestone with a kid, first tooth, we went here, first trip to this.

1:08:49And what's really powerful about it is, so you start it, the first year is cool, second year is pretty cool, the third year is really cool, the fifth year is amazing. Because you're like, this is where I was for the last five years. And you can track, you know, here's the evolutions of the books I was writing. Here's the evolution of the kids, of my life, things that were happening. And it's really, really powerful. So if people are thinking about a journaling habit and that's something you want to do, that would be a good place to start. You know, I also have something that no one else on the planet Earth had, and I don't recommend this to anyone if you value your sanity and well-being.

1:09:23I have 800 days of my life. Yeah, right. You can see the kids. in a very highly produced 10 to 15 minute video that is like, you know, it's pretty, pretty acute. Those, they really get into it. And it's, it was like, I know then I knew then what I was capturing my life. I was like, oh, some days it's going to be interesting to look back on. And one thing that I think people have a tough time wrapping their head around, I don't watch, once I click upload, I don't watch my videos ever again. Not like sometimes. I never watch them again. I have like four videos I've seen a thousand times because every time I do a speaking game, I play the same three videos.

1:10:06Like the snowboard one, everybody gets all excited, so I'll play that a million times. But there's a thousand videos, and 800 of them are capturing a day in my life in sequence. And I've never watched any of them. And my daughter discovered them about a year ago. and I would like hear my voice in the house and like one word and I can be like oh I know exactly what day exactly where I was because I edited that like I played it back frame by frame to get it so precise so I don't know what it I don't know how this is going to totally fuck her up but I'm sure I'm paying the therapy bill for the rest of my life for whatever it's going to do to her because she goes back now and is able to revisit her early childhood when she was a baby and understand exactly what her life was.

1:10:51So I think as I get older, as the space between me finishing that thing and where I am in the present, as that chasm grows, the impact of those videos or the role they have in my life will become more and more profound or weird. Two fast ones as... One more question. Who said that? Who's talking here? Two quick ones as we wrap up. what is your thoughts I don't remember exactly I think you maybe you've gone back and forth do you show your kids in videos and social media do you have thoughts on no kids all that why is that I don't because so as my baby Franny like she was in the videos until like she turned 11 months old and it just stopped because she was like right in there babies all look the same and now she's starting to be recognizable moreover when I started I didn't have any following so it's like you know you don't appreciate it my mother-in-law doesn't understand why she can't put pictures of our kids on Facebook.

1:11:48But I just think we, none of us understand what the implications are. And when I see big celebrities, you know, pushing their kids out or posting pictures of their kids, I fucking judge. I judge them because they don't understand. But at least they're getting paid, right? The rest of the people that are doing it are doing it to But see, I would say, I would say like, you know, maybe the kids will inherit that money at some point. It's different than an average person who's just hooked on the algorithm. The kind of person that thinks it's okay to exploit their children is the same kind of person that doesn't put the money away for their college fund, but is spending it on a new handbag.

1:12:25I hate it. And I hate that YouTube doesn't have anything protecting YouTuber social media or the US government or whoever the fuck should be legislating this. There are nothing, there are no rules protecting kids. family vlogging is the grossest thing that has ever existed with like if you're a parent you know it is fucking hard to get your kid to behave to get your kid to do those performances and act happy all the time for every smiling kid like we brought our kids to disney world for every one of those videos there's fucking six hours of the kid crying and screaming and the mother cutting all that footage out and you see these horror stories again and again and again about like the abusive tendencies and the money and the exploitation of kids.

1:13:05Like I take that stuff so personally. So no, I live at the other end of that. Like we try our best and like my daughter doesn't understand when people come up and ask me for selfies, why she's not allowed to be in it because she loves attention. And they're like, Hey, can I get a picture? And she's like, I want to be in it. She's like jumping up and down. Like half the selfies people take with me have my daughter's forehead in it. Um, but no, I don't think it's okay. And I think that anybody who thinks that they understand what the long-term implications of putting your kids like the internet is written in ink it will never be deleted and when they turn 18 they can go to hell they want and when i started making movies with my son he was old enough to sort of consent and understand and he's 25 now he's like we don't make videos anymore and i'm like you're in fucking australia um but for children for babies i take that stuff super personally and um no i don't but if you do that's No, no, I don't.

1:13:57I don't at all. Thanks. I don't for the same reason. So I think of you because people ask me to sign, people give the Daily Stoic as gifts all the time. People ask me to sign it. They'll be like, it's my friend's 40th birthday. And I usually write, I usually write, happy birthday, memento mori, make it count, right? Like your famous video, the idea that you sort of have one life, how are you going to spend it? And I thought we'd just maybe end on this sort of morbid note of everyone in this room is going to die. And you only have so much, you only have so much time with your kids. How do you spend it?

1:14:29And how does that? So maybe just talk to me about, or take us home with some idea of making it count and the fragility and ephemerality of life. I just said this on a friend's podcast, but I've never said it before. I think I realized it on the podcast, but it was like, one thing that making a video every day of my life did is I needed to preserve my relationship with my wife. And by preserve, I don't mean the longevity of our marriage. I mean that if she was mad at me for a day, it would mean I wouldn't get her to be in my video. And she's great. She's pretty. She's like funny. She's irreverent.

1:15:07I need her. I need she's my favorite cast member. So we get in a fight like you do with your significant other. Bullshit fights. I didn't load the dishwasher, that kind of thing. And instead of pouting, I'd be like, I got to resolve this so she'll be in my video. And I think at the end of all that, the reason why I sought resolution, which was a very narcissistic, very self-serving reason, was irrelevant. What matters is that, like, whatever bullshit it was that we were fighting about was meaningless. It had lightning struck, had something horrible happen, had a bus not stopped at a stoplight and something horrible were to happen to someone you love.

1:15:45Whatever little thing that you're upset about in that moment becomes meaningless right then and there. So why not just cut the fat and realize that the details don't matter? And if you're lucky enough to have someone in your life that you love, especially if it's a child or a partner, to push the bullshit aside. And I say that like I'm smart or wise. Or good at it. Or good at it. My wife and I literally have couples therapy tonight that we reschedule because I was like, let's just skip it. I'm doing the thing right. And she's like, no fucking way. We are doing it. We have it. So I try to live that.

1:16:25And it was something that I learned in the most back ass, selfish, self-serving way. But it's something that I try to embody every day. Beautifully said. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

1:16:42Thanks 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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