It’s Mostly Froth And Bubble | Ask Daily Stoic

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.

1:09more than they could ever need. This is what we do, isn't it? What we've always done? In one of the more cynical passages of meditations, Mark Sreelius describes life in Rome as a pointless bustling of processions, operas, herds of sheep and cattle, military exercises, a bone flung to pet poodles, a little food in the fish tank, the miserable servitude of ants, the scampering of frightened mice, puppets jerked on strings. We fight over things. We entertain ourselves with trivialities. We miss the point. We waste this thing called existence, led by our perceptions, our insecurities, our fears. Stoicism is supposed to be a dash of clarity.

1:56It's a hard dose of perspective. It's what Marcus was doing in that passage, contemptuously dismissing so much of what people take for granted, trying, as he said later in meditations, to strip things of the legend that encrusts them. Too much of life is froth and bubble. Too much of it is servitude and stupidity being jerked around like a puppet. You are better than that. Time is too short for that. Wake up. Stop it. Show up. Be the person philosophy tried to make you. see what it tried to show you.

2:40Thanks to Toyota Trucks for sponsoring this episode. When I bought my ranch in 2015 out here in Bastro County, I drove my car about halfway down the dirt road that we live on, thought this isn't going to work, stopped, parked it, walked the rest of the way home, borrowed my wife's car, drove into Austin and bought a truck. What I bought was a Toyota Tacoma. And this truck wasn't just transportation getting me to and from my house. It unlocked a whole different style of living for us, not just on the ranch, but in our little Texas towns. There were places I could go now that I couldn't go before, especially out here in the piney forests, through the fields, and on the unpaved roads like the one that I lived in.

3:25We got to go deep into the hill country's wild beauty. We've driven all the way out to East Texas. We've driven it across the country. And by we, I mean not just my wife, but both my kids who I drove home from the hospital in that truck. Toyota trucks are built for those who understand that the best adventures happen when you're willing to veer off course. Because you never know when you'll end up on a Toyota adventure detour. And of course, this is stoicism, too, because every detour, every obstacle is an opportunity. But it's helpful if you can handle the difficulty inherent in that. If you've got the resilience and the right companion to make it wherever the road takes you.

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5:42Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Weirdly, I'd never been to Vermont before until September. I landed, I think, in Boston and I drove up to Burlington. It was lovely. Had a great run there. I went and I saw the world's tallest filing cabinet, which I will say, something was disappointing. I just sang, if you had to guess how tall the world's tallest filing cabinet was, just a bunch of filing cabinets stacked together, I'd hope it'd be more than like 10. I think it was like eight. But I would have guessed it'd be like 30. And now my kids are bursting in. What are you doing, boy?

6:19Are you guys playing hide and seek? Okay, he's not in here. I will tell you if he hides in here. Shut the door. I'm recording something, okay? Love you. Buddy, you didn't shut the door. Shut the door. So that's what I'm dealing with. I just picked the kids up from school and they are running around before we go to jujitsu. In any case, had a lovely time in Vermont. Much colder there then in September than it is now in Texas. I think it was like 85 today. What does this have to do with today's episode? I was doing a talk in Vermont to this group called Exit 5, which is a membership community place for B2B marketers to get together.

6:56It's a lovely chat. I didn't talk about stoicism so much as I talked about how I was able to take an obscure school of ancient philosophy and build it into something, which was always lovely to talk about. I was talking about more or less the ideas in Perennial Cellar. In any case, afterwards, I got to answer some questions, a lot of which were about stoicism. So I'm going to bring you that for today's Q &A. In related news, I'm going to be in Seattle on December 3rd, giving a talk much more about stoicism. But you can ask me questions about anything you want there in the Q &A or at the VIP. I think there's a few tickets left to that.

7:30And then I will be in San Diego and Phoenix in February. you can grab tickets to all of those before they sell out at dailystoiclive.com thanks to dave the founder and ceo of exit five he was a big day stoke fan he said he gifted it to many people including friends and family which is very cool to hear and i appreciate him inviting me got another child interruption what's up buddy you're locking the door that's smart i will tell him i haven't seen you so i'm gonna get to this game of hide and seek in the meantime i hope to see you in seattle phoenix and san diego dailystoke live.com enjoy this episode of the daily stoke podcast

8:12i used to be a high school teacher and i had a really big responsibility to school in the south side of chicago to get kids to believe in themselves when they get emotional talking about this uh i decided to crowdsource on donors choose a classroom set of obstacles away from them yeah I cold emailed you, you funded like 200 bucks a day, and then tweeted it and it was funded in like three minutes. Oh, that's a lot. I was just reading down the street.

8:41Well, here's something I've been thinking about. I want to keep it related to marketing, because otherwise I'm going to ask about Conspiracy, which is one of my favorite books. Okay. But Trust Me Online was the first book I read of yours. I still think it holds true quite a bit. Unfortunately, yeah. What do you see, the intersection between conspiracy and conspiracy you pose, like what if we use this for good? Yes. What about trusting and lying? Is there parts of that that you still see we can use for good today in marketing? Yeah, so I wrote a book, my first book, as I was saying, which came out in 2011.

9:11It's basically about sort of how the media system and marketing can be manipulated and how sort of the things that we find out about, like what's going on behind the curtain. Why do we hear about some things and not other things? Basically, my argument is sort of a knife fight for attention, attention being the scarce resource in this world, and that there are a lot of forces and a lot of bad actors involved in that system. And my argument was, like, you've got to figure out how this system works because the fact that you have a cool cause or even a great product is not sufficient to break through when you're up against these better funded or better organized groups and interests.

9:57so I think how do you actually break through what are you willing to do to break through to me that's kind of the lesson of that book and I think we're watching too many people just presume that because their heart's in the right place or presume because most reasonable people would agree with what they're saying that that message is going to get out and that's not how it works it's much more complicated than that And I do think you've got to take the time to figure out how the system works, particularly if you have something that's actually worth seeing and hearing about. And I think, you know, in a world of AI, it's only going to be more difficult just because there's, you know, endless amounts of slop that you're competing with.

10:47Hey, Ryan. Hi. Thanks for coming out. Yeah. After you're done writing your first draft, I imagine you go through, like, an editing process. Sure. how do you know when the editing is done how do you know when it stops he's a writer by the way yeah in perennial seller I sort of split it I feel like there's four phases there's sort of writing and there's editing and refining and crafting and then there's the marketing and then there's other stuff we're talking about as far as platform all the stuff that sort of comes about towards the end I think the editing phase is probably the most important in many ways.

11:26You know, the book that I have coming out in October, you know, I had to cut 20 ,000 words out of it. And that was the hardest and most visible of the edits, but I just finished the audio book, and I was, you know, much to the chagrin of my publisher, even editing as I was doing, because now I'm having to read it out loud in a studio by myself, and there's just stuff that on the page seemed fine. But, you know, I just, oh, I said this word three times on the same page. And when I was editing it in Microsoft Word, you know, nine months ago, those words weren't on the same page just because the layouts compressed and moved stuff around.

12:11So I think editing is this ongoing thing. And as I said, I just had this weird experience doing the 10-year anniversary. year, I'm going to do a 15 year anniversary of Trust Me, I'm Lying. There's still stuff I'm adding and changing as it goes. So it's not that it never stops, but I do think in a world where, you know, I could edit the e-book tomorrow, if there's something I want to change, I'm going to keep changing it. But to me, you do your draft, as they say, like the first draft is just for you. And then once you finish, now you have to start to take a bunch of other considerations into consideration.

12:48Everything from, like, what am I legally allowed to say here to, you know, who am I really trying to get this to land with? And all of that is a painful but necessary part of the process. Look at your list of books right now. Like, the one question comes to mind for me is, what is your ideation process? Like, how do you write such great stories that keep your audience engaged without being the one broken record? Yeah, look, I started as a research assistant. I was a research assistant for this writer named Robert Green, and his books are primarily story-based. And I do think stories, parables, anecdotes, this is how we learn.

13:27This is what stays with us. So I tend to always be looking for stories, and I have a whole method that I sort of read, synthesize, record, process stories, and then as I'm writing a book, I'm sort of moving and plugging around. I showed you my note cards. I do all that. But I usually have the idea for what I want to say, the argument, and then what I'm looking for are stories that illustrate that idea. So the writing rule is you always show, don't tell. And so I'm not saying, here's a logical proof for why this is true. I'm saying, let me show you what this looks like in practice. Let me show you someone violating the idea or observing the idea or proving it in some way.

14:14That's kind of how I think about it. Not just a direct-linked story is made for compelling reading, but then what I like about the insert story base is then it's very translatable to all these other mediums. So I might write a 5 ,000-word story in a book, and then that story can be condensed down into a 30-second TikTok. It can be a 30-minute YouTube video. It could be a five-minute section in an hour talk. And so the things are modular, and I kind of move them around. I'm curious about your distribution. You talk about how much content you distribute and how that works in the team, but also the dad.

14:52Curious about the motivation behind Daily Dad. Yeah, I'm a big believer in the sort of page-a-day format, which I didn't really know that much about before I wrote The Data Stoic. But I've gotten so much out of sort of having the surface, like one idea or one thing to think about each day. So Daystoke came out in 2016. Daily Dad came out, I think, two years ago. It's just stories that sort of illustrate the lessons that I think we all want to embody as parents. And so what I think about is, like, am I going to get better for doing the project? That's one of my sort of things. So the Daily Dad book is also a Daily Dad email that goes out every day.

15:29It's dailydad.com. and the process of like, hey, what's something to meditate on, what's something to think about, that's kind of how that is. And yeah, there's a team. I write all the stuff, but then people are just like, I don't do the Spanish translation of my books. Someone helps me translate that into, okay, as I said, here's the TikTok version of this, and here's the YouTube version of this, and the Instagram version of this, the tweet version of this. So how do we take the sort of core idea of what I'm saying, and then find ways to reach people in all the different mediums that they're consuming content.

16:03And like me, when I want to learn about something, I read a book. That's my medium. But that's not the dominant cultural medium these days. And so I think I spend a lot of time trying to take what I do and make it work for wherever there's people. And then the idea is that sort of funnels back ultimately to the books, which is where I spend most of my effort. You kind of have fun a little bit on the distribution side, but to zoom in a little bit more on your process for sourcing ideas like all over the place for books and conversations you're doing whatever and then your daily practice for maintaining that ability to do it for 15 plus years yeah daily by cadence being unbelievably prolific what does that look like when you actually sit down to write or do a do the thing yeah so i'm reading widely and I tend to find the best stuff when I'm not looking for it.

16:55So, you know, I find stuff in novels, I find stuff in weird history books. I'm just reading where my interests take me, but I'm, it's like I'm kind of using the confirmation bias to my advantage. Like, oh, that connects here. Oh, that's related to this. Oh, that, I was just thinking about something in this story that I'm reading, this three-sentence anecdote in a history book happens to maybe to illustrate that idea. Now I need to go dive deeper into that and find out, you know, is it actually an illustration of what I'm talking about or just a coincidence? And so, yeah, I kind of read widely and then I, yeah, I'm just always doing it.

17:30I honestly have the advantage that it's my job to read and find stories, but I really love doing it. It's what I would be doing. It's what I was doing when I had my marketing career is that I love to read. I love history. I love learning out about stuff and I try to find just stuff that I haven't heard of. So that sort of curiosity is driving you and you never know what you're going to end up finding. You need to have a process. I think the reason I tend to read physical books instead of e-books and audio books, although I don't regret anyone that consumes any medium they like, is that I don't want it to just go into some black hole somewhere.

18:07For me it's the process of taking the notes and recording it and transferring it that allows me to develop the recall that I need to actually be able to use it at some time. I don't think Evernote exists anymore. People are like, I've had an Evernote somewhere. It's like, okay, but you don't actually have it. So for me, it's that process of finding, recording, and then applying is really where it's about.

18:34Hey, 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.

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