Paper Trails: How Notebooks Changed The World | Roland Allen

0:01You hear that? That's not just a Toyota truck Look, that's the sound of no crowds, no alerts, no distractions, and no telling what you'll find next. You know, like a detour. So why would you ever take a tour when you could take a detour? Toyota trucks. Look, 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.

0:58So if you want to support a show but not listen to ads, well, we have partnered with Super overcast 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. And 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.

1:35If 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.

2:01Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

2:50Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. My voice might sound a little different to you because I'm a little congested. I am stuck at my house with COVID and a result of the right thing right now, book tour, media tour being in New York City, where I saw slightly more people than I do when I am out in rural Texas living the writer life, where I don't see anyone, but I am quarantining, isolating, or whatever. And so I got a little time on this weekend than I ordinarily do. So I had someone who works for Daily Stoic run by the office and grab me the big stack of books that were sitting near the window in my office that I'd been meaning to go through and do my note card system on, right?

3:47I've talked about this a bunch of times, but I read books, physical, I fold the pages, and then I go back through them and I transfer that to note cards. So like I have, let's see, how many books have I gone through? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. So eight books. I've got probably 50, 60 note cards. That's not because these books weren't good. I was sort of doing the easy ones first. But the last one that I did is one that I absolutely loved. And it's pretty perfect. This is The Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. This book's actually not out in the US yet.

4:21I read the UK edition, which was published by my publisher Profile in the UK. And I cannot tell you how much I love this book. Like I loved this book and it's awesome. And I wanted to reach out. I had Roland on the podcast because I loved it so much. And it's going to appear a bunch in the Wisdom book, which will be the fourth book in the Virtue series, which I'm writing now, because it's absolutely awesome. And I think what I loved about this book is like, you don't think of the notebook as something that was invented, but of course it was. Obviously, different scraps of paper writing little things here or there, you know, has existed for a long time.

5:02But like the notebook as we know it, like the Moleskine or whatever, this is an invention. He dates like the more common notebook to about the 1400s in Florence, which puts us smack in the middle of da Vinci's time. And he has amazing stuff. in this book about da Vinci. I absolutely loved it. This book is incredible. The first thing I said when I finished, I went to the manager of The Painted Portion, I said, we've got to carry this book in the bookstore. Apparently, it won't be out in the US until the fall. I'll be talking about it a bunch in the Reading List newsletter and other places. But in the meantime, I loved this conversation.

5:37Roland has written an amazing book. And this idea of thinking on paper, writing to think, or as I'm going to say in the wisdom book, you write to think right, is absolutely essential. And it's a key stoic practice. This is what Marcus Aurelius is doing in meditations. And so I'm very excited to bring you this interview. I'll probably excerpt it again when the book is coming out. But in the meantime, here's Roland and I talking. He's also written a fascinating book on the bicycle and bread. He keeps his own journal. And I think you're really going to like his stuff. So definitely check out Roland's book.

6:12Check out The Notebook, especially if you are in the UK. I'm very grateful. To the folks over at Profile who sent me this book, they didn't know that I would need it, but I did. And if you want more from me and Commonplace Booking, I'll link to one of the videos that I have on that as well. And enjoy this episode.

6:41I have no idea how I found your book. It just showed up at my bookstore one day and I loved it. That's remarkable. Where is your bookstore then? Somewhere in Texas. Yeah, right outside Austin, Texas. It took a long journey there because there's no American edition. So that's incredible that they found it. Oh, maybe that's why. Because I read it. You know, wait, who publishes it? Was it published by Profile? It's published by Profile, yeah. Okay, Profile is my UK publisher. So they must have sent it. I guess so, yeah. I thought the book was fantastic. I was talking to someone the other day about this and what I'm fascinated by things that we take for granted, but were obviously invented at some point.

7:22Right. And the notebook being a kind of thing that you assume has always been with us, has obviously always been part of what humans do. And it certainly wasn't. And you kind of bounce back and forth, you know, between different eras. So it's hard to say exactly when one might say that the notebook was invented, but more recent than you might guess also. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that was very much the starting point. The whole thing was was the first moment when I did think of it as a gadget or a device which had been invented at some point, which hadn't always been there. And of course, because it's so materially so simple, you do just assume that it's always existed as long as there was paper and so on.

8:04But then, in fact, the story of it then becomes sort of two-way in as much as you have the hardware, you have the notebook itself, and then you have the software, I like to think of it, which is the different ways people use it. Yeah. And that's very much the story of the book is how this very simple device arrives, and people immediately start using it in quite complicated ways. But then over time, many more interesting ways get developed and are still being developed right up to now. Yeah, that's an interesting distinction. The hardware of like, okay, we're going to bind these pages together, or you're going to have these sort of loose leaf pages that you write stuff on.

8:41And then the systems or the methodology, like what we could say, right, is people are not going to be keeping commonplace books, right, where they're noting down the passages in books they read that often before the invention of sort of mass literacy and books to begin with. So like, I guess it's not a coincidence that the sort of commonplace book is really coming into being after Gutenberg, right? Like if I only have the family Bible and I'm just reading that one book over and over again, I'm not going to need to keep a commonplace book. But once my personal library gets bigger and bigger and bigger and I want to remember all these things that I'm reading, now I need both the hardware and the software to use this stuff.

9:23Yeah, absolutely. And you're quite right about the timing there because the formal commonplace book arrives with, it's kind of devised by Erasmus in the 1510s or so. And of course, Erasmus is one of Europe's first bestselling authors in print, largely because of his beef with Luther. They were constantly publishing books in dialogue, very politely put, with each other, where one of them would publish a tract and then the next year the other would respond and they sold colossal numbers. And you're quite right. Yeah, it was a way of managing all of this information because that was the first era, I guess, when there was too much for one person to read.

10:03Yes, you can't just keep it all in your head. And that's where the notebook starts to be like. And it's funny because this is a phrase that I only heard somewhat recently, but it seems like it should have been with us always. The notebook has kind of a second brain. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And this is an example, I think, of how people are always thinking about it in new ways. Tiago Forte sort of coined that expression, which I think is a really interesting way of looking at it. And of course, people have been doing this for ages. They have been consciously putting stuff down on the page so that they can think about it, but they haven't really thought about it philosophically as turning something else into a thinking resource.

10:45Another example, I guess, is the most recent thing, I guess, is the patient diaries, which is an entirely new use of the notebook, which was invented in the 70s and 80s, so comparatively recent, and which people are only starting to do really now. It became common only really with COVID when you had huge numbers of people in ICUs. So The Patient Diary, I think, is a new use of the notebook, and I'm sure that there are other ones around the corner. Yeah, a second brain seems like something you would have heard Erasmus say his commonplace book was in one of his letters. and then you're like no just some guy on the internet came up with that like recently and you're like what okay yeah no exactly and it's sorry and from my point of view it's great it's really fun that you have people like um tiago forte or rider carroll thinking about all yourself thinking about notebooks in a whole new way because people didn't for hundreds of years no one actually stopped and actually thought what are these things that are potentially quite interesting, quite useful.

11:44Yeah. And it's weird. I don't know how I first heard of the idea of a commonplace book. It's not like I learned about it in elementary school and it just became part of this practice. I would have axed it. It seems like there's something about notebooks and this process and all this stuff that is like being continually rediscovered, like the cure for scurvy. Like we don't want to actually remember this and systematize it so everyone can benefit from it. Let's just by trial and error, have multiple people solve the same vexing problem. But that if you did teach it to people young and you taught it as a skill, because everyone who does do it talks about it as what a fundamental part of their life it is.

12:30And yet we're sort of just like, well, I hope you find it. You know, it's strange how we think about this thing that's been part of the human tradition now for so many hundreds of years, specifically with really, really smart people. I mean, the thing about commonplace books is it's insanely hard work. You can keep a notebook of things that you like to read. And like when I was a teenager, for instance, I used to write down song lyrics. I used to paste in newspaper stories, write down interesting things from all over the place. But that's not quite the same as a commonplace book. The commonplace book is ordered.

13:00It's very structured. You have to go and dig out the quotations. And the benefit of it is that it is hard work and I think that's very much why it sort of died out over the Victorian period I think over the 19th century probably at the same time as education went a bit wider and became less of an elite phenomenon although that's hypothetical I guess but see the commonplace book you then start to see books being published which are sort of attempted shortcuts where that you have people saying well we've done it for you so you don't have to do it yourself which of course takes away the point completely because the point is the work.

13:35And then that continues through to the present day, I guess, you know, they would do the average school textbook or the average school workbook as being a shortcut and not doing the work in the way that you should. And today people are like, well, here's a technical solution for the commonplace book, right? So you read digitally, then you copy and paste what you like, and then that zips over to Evernote or some computer software, which then allows you to easily access it. And to me, it's funny. It's like the physical commonplace book. Although I do sometimes go back to it. I mean, obviously this is what I use when I write, but like, there's a big part of it.

14:12That's like, it's the accidental by-product of the process, which is the valuable part. So it's the reading and then the transferring of the information that's creating the majority of the recall and the value. And then the physical documentation of it, which you may or may not go through at a later date, is this byproduct of what was actually valuable, which was going over the text, selecting out the text, and having to do this all laboriously by hand. And you put your finger on it with the laboriously by hand, because when, and this now becomes psychology or neuroscience, they now know, of course, that the more physical effort you put into something, using your hands, using your eyes, creating something on paper, creating an object, the better you're going to recall it later on and they know this and you know swiping and swiping and tapping and saving control c control d whatever isn't going to have the same uh impact in your synapses literally um so they've done a lot of work on this which is one of the things i really worry about with some trends in education at the moment um the digital classroom and the digital lecture hall where you have a bunch of students listening to the same lecture as was given 20 years ago, but they're now doing it with a laptop rather than with the pen and paper.

15:31And they're taking verbatim notes. You can type much faster than you can write. So it's much easier to write down exactly what the lecturer says, but that way you're not processing it. You don't paraphrase it. You don't summarize it. You don't organize it yourself. And therefore, you're not digesting it as well as we used to do. I don't know if you had a laptop or a pen and paper, but I was lucky enough to be doing it all by hand. That's a concern for me quite seriously. I mean, I think for me, my commonplace book, other than my to-do list, my commonplace book is maybe one of the last things that I do with pen and paper.

16:06I notice it because as the years have gone by, my handwriting has gotten so much worse because it is the only place that I do write longhand. I mean, I guess I made my wife a Mother's Day card yesterday or something, and I signed the occasional check, you know, at a restaurant. But I don't do much long form writing anymore by hand. And the process of feeling, you know, a 2000 year old passage from a book go from the page to my eyes through my body out my hand is a magical experience. But one that I don't have a lot of other opportunities to use. Like I just don't I don't write more than a couple sentences by hand pretty much ever in my life.

16:51Which is interesting because I'd have I'd have pegged you as a natural for keeping a diary. I keep a journal. I don't make a huge distinction between my journal and my commonplace books. I do do a lot of journaling. But but I guess what I'm saying is I don't sit down and write long letters to people. I don't do my books longhand. You know, I don't write memos to my employees longhand. I don't do much handwriting other than like the things that I'm putting in a notebook. One big difference I find is I do a lot of writing by hand as much as I can. And when you write by hand, you have to know where the sentence is going to end when you start it.

17:28Yeah. When you type, of course, you can always just backspace, backspace and get it right the second time. But when you're writing, you need to sort of know where the subject, verb and the object are all going to end up. And that's a really useful disk then, I think. Yeah, it forces you to also, because you're going to have to expend labor to do it, I think there's an economy there to language. It forces you to be a bit more diligent in your choices because you don't want to have to cross it out and you don't want to write anything that you didn't need to say. Exactly. Yeah. And which is all to do with, I think, the idea of externalizing, which is related to the idea of externalizing, which is the idea of getting out what's on your head and turning a sort of vague amorphous feeling into a thought which has words and concrete ideas.

18:19Well, let's get the elephant out of the room here because I read this book. You can see all the – I haven't processed mine for my commonplace book yet, but you can see all the pages that I folded that I need to go back through. I did a lot of writing. There's some food. This is very flattering. Thank you. There's some food spilled here because I tend to read while I'm eating. But I kept expecting the next page. I'm like, this is where Marcus Aurelius is going to appear. Marcus Aurelius' meditation is going to appear here. And he never does. I even checked the index. Do you think of Marcus Aurelius' meditations as a sort of notebook style of work?

18:58Or did you see it as something different? To me, it's a classic example of what we're talking about. But I'd be curious what your take is. What's he writing for himself? The conventional wisdom is yes. Are you disputing? You think it was more of a... That is a question because one of the really fascinating questions I found about the notebook over time is that people were writing all kinds of stuff down about their own lives, but very, very rarely addressing their own emotional state or their own feelings until quite late in the day, until sort of 300 years after notebooks arrive. So you have people who are very used to keeping like a household diary, which will have all the accounts, everything they've bought, everything they've done around the house, what they cook, eat, the stuff they lay in, the guests they have.

19:45So they'll keep a very detailed diary of events and affairs, but they won't ever talk about what's going on inside their heads. And I found this very strange or surprising, especially when you consider that these same people were often writing letters when they were talking about their emotions and what was inside their head. They were very often sharing it with their brother or their friend or sister, whoever, wife. And I'm talking largely about Italians here because this is where the paperwork was all happening. But they were quite happily pouring it all down on paper in a letter and sending it off to someone else.

20:15But the idea of talking to yourself on paper in that kind of introspective, reflective way didn't seem to occur to them. And it's a big mystery as far as I'm concerned. I don't have an answer to that. Yeah, it's remarkable that, you know, sometime around the year 160 AD, you have this guy writing a work of philosophy that if it was for publication, it's very weird. He made a lot of weird choices that don't make sense if he was writing to an audience. And yet, you're right, it was unusual, right? I mean, that's what meditations translates to the title in Greek is to himself. And yet, there's also just this weird sense that it's in Greek, right?

20:54Here you have a Roman writing what's ostensibly his journal or his diary, his philosophical riffings, in his not native tongue, but in the native tongue of philosophy. So is that a performative element that's a little bit of a tell? Or is it actually more of a glimpse into how sort of private and personal this thing was? I've seen it argued both ways, but I make up that, yes, he was writing to himself. And it's so interesting because it relates a lot to when I was looking through the daily stoic, which I found fascinating and sort of plan to refer to regularly as intended. There are so many references to thinking through your emotions, to turning an emotion into a thought, which is, I find anyway, the process of diary writing.

21:45If you write about your emotions, that's exactly what you're doing. You're turning emotions into thoughts. And I don't think it can be an accident, as you say, that all of not just Marcus Aurelius, but Seneca and Epictetus are sort of touching on that similar process. And none of them actually say, go home and write a diary. But they all say at the end of the day, think about things, you know, conquer your feelings and don't go to sleep enraged and think things through and think about things from the other point of view, which I find invaluable with a diary. Yes. Seneca talks about the evening review, sort of putting yourself and your thoughts up for review.

22:19I think that's extraordinarily difficult to do, if not pointless, just do inside your head. You know what I mean? The writing is where you're able to do that because you're having to talk, unless you're going to walk around like a crazy person and talk to yourself. The page is pretty much the only way you can verbalize those thoughts. and then question them or discuss them or critique them. Yeah, completely. And then another stage of it is that you, Ryder Carroll writes brilliantly about this, the bullet journal guy who dealt with ADHD by keeping a journal. You can then look back on what you wrote six months ago or a year ago and see how things actually worked out because he's always talking about putting plans on paper.

23:07And then when you look back and see how things turned out, oh, did I accomplish that? Did I not? How do I feel about it now, et cetera? So you make that permanent record. And of course, how did you feel in your head about something a year ago? Who knows, really? Memory is so subjective and unreliable. I don't know how you can do it without writing it down. Yeah, one of the journals I like to keep, it's called the one line a day journal. And you just write one line, it's got five slots. And so to me, the first year I did it, it was okay. The second year I did it, it was mildly interesting to see where I was exactly one year ago.

23:40But by the time you get to year three and four and five, it's a really magical experience, because you're like, on this day in history, in my life, this is what I was doing. And the the symmetry of it is often remarkable. It's like, oh, I was missing the rhythms of my life or the way that I was doing things corresponding to seasons or dates or whatever. Like, oh, what are the chances that I would have dinner with this person like one year and six days apart? And it's like, it's probably because, I don't know, our schedules lined up for some reason that was actually much more expected than you would expect.

24:19But the symmetry of it would be lost on me because I don't remember what I was doing, you know, 370 days ago. Right. And so, so getting to, to sort of document something is one thing. And it was probably mildly therapeutic to take a few minutes that evening to jot that down. But it's really the dividend of that is a year later or two years later or three years later, when you're able to stack those insights on top of each other. Absolutely. I love that going back occasionally and looking at a diary, which is 10 years old or 15 years old, just what was I doing this day? And it's funny how just a few words, because these days I write quite a full diary.

25:00It goes on and on and on. But when I started it, the entries were very punchy, very short, very brief. But even then there's normally enough to evoke a scene again, a conversation, how things actually were on the day. They're so evocative and economical.

25:23The world is full of tours. But you don't choose a Toyota truck to follow the beaten path. You choose it to find the places in between. The detours, where each adventure pulls you toward the next. And wrong turns turn out right. So why would you ever take a tour when you could take a detour? Toyota Trucks. Human, your body has a performance superhighway. 60 ,000 miles of blood vessels that deliver oxygen and nutrients to every cell. This, of course, is your cardiovascular system. It's the foundational system that powers everything we do. Both elite athletes and longevity experts invest directly in the cardiovascular system because supporting healthy blood flow is critical for energy, recovery, mental clarity, and overall performance.

26:22That's where human comes in. That's human with two N's. They started out of research at the University of Texas, near where I live, and have 15 years of experience making award-winning supplements for nitric oxide production and healthy blood flow, now used by over 160 pro and college sports teams. human cardiovascular health daily is a plant-based and made from clinically studied ingredients like grapeseed and seed kelp extract it supports nitric oxide production for healthy blood flow and energy while also supporting blood pressure and helping support the delicate interlining of your blood vessels just two capsules each morning will power energy and recovery while also playing the long game by supporting long-term vascular health and healthy aging human has an exclusive offer for our listeners, you can visit human.com slash stoic for an extra 15 % off your first purchase.

27:12That's enter code S-T-O-I-C stoic at checkout. That's human with two N's.com slash stoic for an extra 15 % off with code stoic at checkout.

27:25I was really struck. I think it was Darwin towards the end of the book. You note like something that he captures in, you know, his ship log or his quick diary, and then how that gets rendered 20 years later in On the Origin of the Species. And you can see how just a few sentences or even a few words, it seemed almost more like a shorthand. He's able to evoke, you know, thousands of miles across the ocean and decades in time and all this stuff. He's able to put himself there because he took the time contemporaneously to document what was happening just enough that the vibe of it, you know, would would stand out to him when he went to flesh it out later.

28:12Yeah, again, the economy of it is just fantastic. So he spent, I think it was about five years on the Beagle voyage. Don't quote me on that. But it was years long, much longer than they were expecting. And over the course of it, the notes he took on land amounted to 14 full notebooks, which sounds quite a lot. But I was talking to John Van Wye, who's the academic who studied them more than anyone, and I asked him just how big they were. And he laughed and he said, they're tiny. And I said, would they fit in a shoebox? He said, yeah, they'd be rattling around. They're small, they're maybe the size of a phone these days or a little address book, something like that.

28:52But that was all he needed. You know, he just took notes at the time, was able to write them up more fully when he was still fresh, which is important and much bigger notebooks, obviously. But, yeah, his entire career came out of that tiny, tiny part of notebooks, which he could just pick up and walk away with today. It's fantastic. Well, I think the process of jotting it down, coming back to it, thinking on it, it's kind of pinging back and forth and growing in intensity. It's almost like he's deferring the insights. He's like, this is interesting. This is interesting. This is interesting. This is interesting.

29:27And then 20 years later, 15 years later, whenever the epiphany finally happens, and it's actually not an epiphany. It's more like a new paradigm forming slowly and surely. But the idea is it's in the process of going through the notebooks and extending and expanding and trying to make sense of them that he realizes what he could have only intuitively guessed at before. Yeah. And also when he got back to Britain, he was quite a celebrity when he landed because of his discoveries. The news had got back to Britain before him. And he's carrying a notebook around with him all the time. He talks to everyone he possibly can.

30:06He's very gregarious. He's very sociable. And he wants to share these sort of ideas which are forming with anyone. And whenever they say anything interesting, he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, that's a good point. He writes it down, takes it away and it all goes into the soup. so there is this slight myth that because it took him a long time to publish the um on the origin of species that he didn't want it to be published because he knew it was going to be controversial it's not true at all he just took ages about everything his process was to think and write and think and write and reflect and talk and more and then go back to the beginning and do it all again when some of these things have to age like wine you know you have to put some distance between you and the thing for the the weight of it to hit you because you didn't want it, you didn't want it to be true before.

30:49You didn't have the basis to understand what you had only sort of vaguely intuited or experienced before. I have this strange experience that happens to me all the time where I'll note something in my commonplace book and then I will go back to it. At this point, I don't always transfer the whole passage down by hand. I'll give sort of a summary and then I'll say, you know, page 52 of this book, this is where the stuff is. So then I'll be going back through the note cards and I'll go to that thing and it'll be exactly what I wanted. I'll give you an example. I'm sort of a meta example in the book I'm doing now.

31:24I have a chapter on keeping a notebook. And so I do my commonplace book on four by six note cards. And so I pulled out the note card on the stuff I'd collected about keeping a notebook. And there was a little thing, you know, that said there's a really good Joan Didion essay on keeping a notebook, particularly, and I jot down the page that it is in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. So I go, I get up, I walk over, I grab that copy of the book, I pull it down. And there it is, like everything I, you know, everything I needed. And I probably read it 10 years ago, you know? And so how did I know in this moment that 10 years, how did I know 10 years ago that 10 years in the future, I could need this passage and that it would be exactly what I needed for a chapter on in a book that I hadn't even conceived of writing.

32:13And then I had the extra surreal experience. I own Jodinian's chair. So I was sitting in her chair as I wrote this. And it may well have been the chair that she, you know, wrote that thing in. And but the real experience of noting something in a book that decades in the future is exactly what you need is this strange conversation you end up having with a past version of yourself. It's quite magical. So I'm just flicking through one of my notebooks here somewhere. I've got that exact Joan Didion paragraph written out in full because it's so good. This, why am I doing this? Why am I doing this? I'm storing up something for the future.

32:57I don't know if it's going to be useful, but at some point, you know, it'll be a little window back into the past. Well, that's what was so funny about the auction where they sold a bunch of her stuff was the giant stack of unused notebooks. And you have a footnote about it in your book, but like she was clearly, I mean, she died in her mid eighties, but she was, she had notebooks purchased and ready to use, you know, as if she was going to live another 20 years. And it's almost like being a hoarder. You're like hoarding this information and you tell yourself that someday you're going to use it.

33:32When you actually do, it's magic. I have a different theory about that. Having in a similar position to Joan, having published something about notebooks that immediately gives everyone permission just to give you notebooks for Christmas and birthdays. Yes. So I have a little I've got a shelf down here with everything which I'm writing in at the moment, which is a bunch of notebooks because I'm researching quite a complicated book. and then over here I've got a stack of all the ones I've been given which are not yet cracked open which is nearly as large. So I'll forgive her that. I don't think she was necessarily a compulsive buyer but that said, this is going back a long way but I spoke when moleskins were going through that sort of first boom about 20 years ago, 15, 20 years ago I spoke to the guy at Barnes & Noble he was then responsible for stocking them and filling the shelves by that sort of shelf they have by the checkout, which always has the moleskins on it.

34:28And he said that they had a Barnes and Noble customer who would come in once a week, go through all the books, not buy a book, but would buy a moleskin every time, you know, and walk out. And this was a significant sort of part of their demographic. And they sold, I mean, they sold them in staggering, staggering numbers. But people who weren't buying books, because they were in the bookshop, and they sort of got that creative itch every time would have to buy one. I speak at a lot of conferences. And so that's like the, always the branded item, you know, is like, they want to give everyone something to remember the conference by.

35:01And I'm always like, well, I might use this, you know, like, I already have the journal that I'm doing now. I've already got three or four stacked up unused for next time, but I never know. And so, so then, yeah, I'm just walking around years later using a, using a thing from some tech conference from nine years ago, because I was trying to save, you know, the$15 of having to buy one when I actually needed one. Which is another lovely window into the past, isn't it? Yes. It's a memory in itself. I'm exactly the same. I've got various branded notebooks kicking around as well. Exactly the same scenario from conference sales conferences I have attended.

35:41Yeah. Yes. The other problem I have is I do them on these note cards. And because I learned I was a research assistant for this writer named Robert Green. And he showed me, he does all his books on note cards. So that's how I learned about, you know, 15 or so years ago. And when I started doing it myself, I was like, I got to find something to store them in. Like, how am I going to organize them? So I bought, they used to make these plastic boxes that you would store photos in. It's a photo box. It was this thing called a cropper hopper, I remember. And so, you know, I bought one, I filled it up on my first book, and then I bought another one for my second book.

36:16And then at some point they started getting harder to find. And so I just bought as many as I could. I think I bought 10 and I maybe got like five or six left. But it's this thing where you find the process or the physical one that works for you. And then you're in this race against time that you hope the retailer or the manufacturer doesn't abandon this like all things with planned obsolescence. And because there's this kind of magical juju to like you doing it in a very specific way with a specific pen or specific paper and just not wanting to lose it. Yeah, absolutely. This happens a couple of times and it must have happened to a lot of people.

37:00In fact, I can think of several, but the one I like the most is Senator Bob Graham, who was absolutely, you would probably call it a neurosis, a record keeper, because he was writing down what he did every five minutes for his entire life, or certainly for about 40 years or so. and so he got through colossal quantities of these little spiral bound very unremarkable notebooks which were all made at a particular paper mill in south in north carolina and i was desperate to speak to them because they they did stop making them and bob graham's people tried to hoover up as many of them as they could because they knew he got through hundreds every year and then they had to substitute them for something else and it was tragic because this paper company still goes on it's a family-owned company it's very successful but unfortunately now it just makes toilet paper so there's a real loss there patricia highsmith was very interesting as well she uh she had been at um oh columbia i want to say university in new york and would for her writing journal would only use columbia branded stationary notebooks ring bound ones um and therefore got her friends to to mail them to her every time she ran out because she didn't live anywhere near columbia for most of I like.

38:13But yeah, there had to be that particular model. A couple of years ago, I did a thing on one of my books where the publisher wanted me to do some signed editions for like retailers. So they sent me like a thousand pages from the book and I just signed the blank pages and then they bind the book. They tipped them in. Yeah. Yeah. And it was really cool. And so, you know, they sent me like, let's say I was supposed to sign a thousand. They sent me like 1200, assuming I would mess up quite a few. So I just kept the 200 and they made, they were the perfect size for to-do lists because they're a little bit bigger than a note card.

38:47And then because they weren't bound, I didn't have to tear anything. I just had a stack of pages. So this became what I did a couple of years worth of to-do lists on. And then I ran out. And so the publisher, I was like, look, how can I just buy pages? I was like, I like the feel of it. I like the size of it. I just have to have it. And so they sent me a bunch more. And so like, like this, this is a tip in for my next book, which I'm using here to do notes for, for our interview. So I do think there's something about you find the one that works for you, and then kind of don't fix what isn't broken.

39:27Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I love Japanese stationery. The quality of it is fantastic. The paper, how smooth it is, how light it is, the bindings always really strong but i i recently experimented with a very expensive japanese brand for my for my annual diary and within about a day i was just disgusted and angry at it it was all wrong um even though you know at first glance is exactly the same as what i've been using for years so i immediately switched over to the one i was comfortable with which is 95 the same i'm going to say so it's funny the pickiness you develop yeah it's like the artistic taste that you have you almost become a prisoner of it.

40:06You're like, I like how it feels. I like how it looks. I like what it does. And then you can't unfeel that thing, even though it probably makes next to no difference for you. Can I throw a couple of stoic questions or thoughts at you? Of course. One of the things which does pop up in the book, and I see what you mean about, you know, you're constantly waiting for the Marcus Aurelius reference, because I think that's a valid point. One of the things which does pop up is gratitude journaling. Mm hmm. This is interesting because the first she can't have been the first first, but the first gratitude journaler on record is Oprah Winfrey.

40:42Really? She invented that? She I think she got it from her church. I couldn't find any printed reference to anyone doing gratitude journaling before she said that she did it in the early 90s. Again, these are things people invent. Yeah, exactly. So it's a new piece of software there. But then, of course, feeling gratitude for what you have is a very stoic kind of idea. Yes. Yes. There's a line in Meditations where Marcus Aurelius says, convince yourself that everything is wonderful and it's all a gift from the gods. And what I have taken from that, because someone gave me a gratitude journal a few years ago.

41:19And, you know, at first I would sort of fill out that and go, oh, I'm grateful for this. I'm grateful for that. And I don't want to say it felt facile, but it just wasn't doing it for me. I was I I kind of ran out of things and it didn't feel super special. And so to kind of challenge myself, what I decided I would do every day is I would write why I was grateful for something that I wasn't really grateful for, if that makes sense. So I was trying to find what I liked about something that I didn't like. I do think this is a vibe you sort of pick up in meditations. Marcus Aurelius is trying to see how there's an opportunity in everything that he's experiencing, or that there's some positive in it, or there's some philosophical challenge or meaning in it.

42:08And so to me, you know, how many times are you going to say you're grateful for your spouse or your kids or great that you're alive? You know, I think at some point it becomes perfunctory and relatively meaningless. But if you try, you know, you get back to your house at two in the morning because your flight was horribly delayed and you're coming down with something and you have to try to spend five minutes about why you're actually grateful for it. But that to me is a philosophically beneficial exercise that that is that is worth memorializing, because, again, you don't ever have to read it again.

42:46But it's the forced function of always looking for something to be grateful for that isn't easy to be grateful for. That's what I love. And it was sort of codified for me because I read this article about this guy who had changed his internet password to something about forgiveness or gratitude for like someone that had really hurt him. And the reason he did it was so that he had to write it out every single time he opened his computer. I was like, oh, that probably became almost like a mantra. A mantra, yeah. And it became true after you typed it for the 10 ,000th time. That's how I try to think about it.

43:29That's a really interesting idea. And a lot of these things, I think, and again, there seems to be a kind of overlap between a philosophical idea with these stoical habits and a psychological benefit where you do something for a philosophical reason because it makes you a better person or it helps you live a better life. but then there is a psychological benefit to it too which was the angle i was going at quite a lot of the diary writing things particularly emotional disclosure and things like that um where the benefits are psychological but there's also this interesting sort of philosophical idea behind it yeah it is interesting these the people who wrote these diaries how often they were involved in these massively consequential moments of history and how little introspection they had about them and how humanity might have benefited from them going, why are we doing this again?

44:27You know, what is this for? What's happening? Why am I even here? You know, like, Like the least valuable journaling you can do is writing stuff down for posterity's sake. You know, it's really what insights does it bring up in you? I mean, obviously, history is in a debt to these people who recorded the weather and, you know, these things. That is nice. But humanity would have been better had more people just questioned the implicit assumptions or wrestled with the, hey, I just slaughtered 30 natives today, you know, in my colonial outposting. Why? You know, what do I feel seeing the bodies of these people?

45:14You know, if they had had more of an open dialogue with them, I can't help but think they would have come to their senses sooner. Yeah, that's a really interesting thought. It makes me think of the Civil War, the American Civil War, People wrote colossal journals on both sides. And as you say, always, they were, I think, writing to posterity, attempting just to justify what it was that they were doing that day. And, you know, and after the Civil War, you get these, as I understand it, colossal amounts of self-justifying memoirs published by everyone. And presumably they only sell to each other, but there are enough of them to get a print run together.

45:52that. Speaking of that, I was struck, I read this biography of George Marshall, the chief of staff of the US Army during World War Two. And early on in the war, one of his friends came to him and said, you know, you really need to be keeping a diary for history's sake. And he actually chose not to. He said, I don't want to, because I don't want to be performing for history. He was like, I want to be making the right decisions and sort of operating more in the present moment and not thinking about how these things are going to play. And I mean, I do think I would disagree that that's the function of a journal.

46:34To me, you're weighing these life and death decisions. It would be good to sort of show your work, but for yourself, that showing the work helps you get the answer better, not shows the teacher that you didn't cheat. But it was interesting that after the war, he was basically the only major figure that didn't write a memoir, that he turned down millions of dollars because he didn't have the basis of doing it. And I think he probably objected to the practice. And I do think that's kind of become the scourge of modern day public life is like the person, the people are keeping a journal not to think through their thoughts as they're thinking them.

47:16They're keeping the journal for their ghostwriter 15 years in the future to craft a memoir or, or now even less time. So, so I can, I'm going to accept this job in the Trump administration so I can write a tell all expose when I invariably leave. You know, there's something, there's something pretty hollow and frankly gross about that process yeah the the guy i completely agree i think and the um the guy at the moment i'm just tell him i i try to resist the urge to tell everyone just to write a diary because it becomes compulsive and meaningless but yeah um i have a friend who's uh working for a charity delivering aid supplies to ukraine and which involves not putting himself in the front line or anything but you know it's not a safe particularly safe environment to be doing what he does um and he goes he went and helped after the earthquake in turkey as well that sort of quite hairy situations and i keep on saying just write a diary because otherwise all of firstly these are amazing things you're seeing they're amazing things that you're doing and they don't deserve just to vanish slowly into the past secondly you're going to be doing your head so much good because you're going to get it out of your head, all the worry about missile strikes and shells and roads being blown up around you, et cetera.

48:35Just get it out of your head and onto paper and it'll do you so much good. Right. Instead of processing this in therapy, when you get back, try to have some therapy as it's happening. And I was struck by that. I didn't really understand the history of Anne Frank's diary, who you talk a little bit about in the book that first off, she kept the journal because she listened to a radio report where one of the Dutch, maybe the Dutch princess or Dutch queen in exile said, hey, the radio stations was like, hey, keep a diary of what's happening. So we know. And so that's what makes her convert this autograph book into a diary.

49:14But she has this beautiful line in her thing, which is remarkable when you think about what a 13-year-old is going through. I mean, it's hard to be a 13-year-old girl. And then to be doing it in an attic with your family and a strange family, you know, hiding from the Nazis must have been insane. But she has this line where she says paper is more patient than people. And I think that just about perfectly captures the power of a commonplace book and a diary and a journal or any, any form of notebook. It's that you put it on the page, so you're not putting it on yourself. And you're not putting it on other people.

49:50yeah no that beautifully expressed definitely for a for and for a teenager to get that it's just absolutely incredible yeah one of the people i spoke to about um about the benefits of journaling and uh working with people with ptsd and all this stuff was um professor jamie pennebacher and he talking about teenage diaries he refers to hormonal poisoning that it's a period of particular stress and therefore as a lot of people do responding to it by writing a diary is a really good thing but obviously you know as you say what she was experiencing was appalling and extraordinary but a lot of people i mean again something i found when researching the book was during times of war and upheaval a lot of people just start writing diaries anyway it seems to be an instinct

50:46You could think about a teenager today, you know, the instinct is, well, I'm just thinking, I'm expressing my thoughts on social media, right? I'm putting it on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or whatever. And there's, that might get some of the benefits. You can go back to it later. But part of the benefit of a journal is that you are not publishing it. So how fully stupid or ignorant or irresponsible or naive you were is safely ensconced on that paper and that patient paper as opposed to being captured on the algorithm forever yeah absolutely i completely agree it's completely antithetical and there's so much about it you know the uh click click sweet sort of quick movement and the way it sort of is there always as you say it's completely permanent but it's also completely ephemeral and you don't end up with this thing like i i do really like a completed notebook as a thing i think clearly you get sentimentally attached to these objects that five-year diary for instance you're going to hold on to forever and i don't see that happening with people's instagram accounts you know or their snapchats or whatever yes i mean the the only benefit of the digital stuff like as i was reading about emerson's diary recently and like he had to have a diary that was just a key to understanding his other commonplace books.

52:10Like there isn't a worse structure for organizing things you want to keep track of than a blank notebook that is organized chronologically. You know what I mean? There's something inherently inefficient of like, well, I wrote this thing and then 50 pages later, I'm writing a similar thing, but I don't remember that I did this, like the connections between the things is the one benefit that technology unleashes in us. Or in my case with the note cards, I often, if I'm writing something down that really matters to me, a thought or a passage or something, and I think, oh, this pertains to a lot, I'll do it more than once.

52:54So I can file it, you know, in a sort of catalog system. So I'm getting the benefit of writing it down more than one time, but also I can physically move it and put like with like. The commonplace book as a blank notebook is very ill-suited to that. Yeah. And I was going to say, I really admire you for being able to work on index cards because I've tried it because I know it's going to be better. It's going to be more efficient dealing with these very diffuse subjects, which I tend to write about these very wide ranging books. and I've never been able to make it work. There's something about, you know, I like making notes in cafes and on the beach and on trains, wherever I happen to be.

53:40And there's something about note cards which doesn't seem to work. I just end up with a pile of, I've got one right there. It's really sad and half-assed, you know, unsorted note cards which were abandoned several years ago. So I'd love people who can do it. The system is great when you've got it all organized in the box And then as has happened to me, and I shudder to even speak about it, I have knocked them over a few times. And and then it all comes falling apart. And the process of reorganizing them is is heart is heart heartbreaking. That happened to was it Wittgenstein's last book? It was the post postumous publication.

54:22The story I heard, how much truth there is, I don't know. he wrote this book paragraph by paragraph on loose leaves of paper and it was all arranged in in the order he wanted it to be and then his cleaning lady dropped the box when she was carrying it down the stairs oh god cue decades of academic argument about the order he wanted it in how true that is i don't know but it's well that's that's the the big what if with marcus really's meditations because it is this disjointed collection of thoughts and we don't have the original, right? We don't have the one that, and we don't know how many times it was translated or copied.

55:00So do we have it in the order that he wrote it in? Or is this some later attempt to add coherency to something? We don't know. I suspect that the randomness is kind of the point, right? Is you're sort of one day you need X and the next day you're thinking about Y and And our brains are random. But yeah. Does it break off at random or does it come to an end? Does he feel like he's winding it up at any point? Well, it's interesting, right? Because so we know he dies, right? Spoiler alert. He dies at the end. But like the last passage in meditations is, you know, you've lived a citizen in a great city.

55:48Five years or 100. What's the difference? the laws make no distinction. He says, this will be a drama in three acts, a length fixed by the power that directed your creation and now directs your dissolution. So make your exit with grace, the same grace that was shown to you. And so it seems kind of magical and beautiful that the last line would be something about him dying. Is this Marcus Aurelius, his last act is jotting down a little observation because we think he died of the plague. So, you know, does he know dying, he's got five or six days and these are the last things he's doing? Or is that just a little too poetic and perfect?

56:29And some later translator went and said, well, let's just end it with what he must have been thinking about at the end. Yeah. The beginning of meditations is a collection called debts and lessons. It's really the only chapter that has a name and debts and lessons is just Marcus Aurelius ruminating on all the things that he learned from people in his life. Is that how he did it? Or did he just wake up one day and was riffing on one person and a couple months later, he was riffing on another person? Or was that a kind of a way to prime the pump when he was sitting down to start this notebook? I could see it easily happening either wet.

57:13Yeah, fascinating. It seems like they do these things to torture us 2000 years later. Well, I mean, to speak of Marcus Aurelius' last thing, I mean, I think it's not exactly glamorous, but the idea that the last thing that da Vinci wrote in his sketches is like, the soup is getting cold. There is something about just the purity and honesty of him capturing a moment not knowing it would be his last moment. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, Da Vinci obviously was another fantastic notebooker. And I do wonder because he was quite organized in a way. I mean, the notebooks are hugely wide ranging and they're very various.

57:55And he constantly returns to the same subjects again and again. But for instance, on a given page or for a run of pages, he normally only writes about one thing. He very rarely, if ever, writes about two things on the same page. So he always organizes his thoughts in that way. So we know that. We also know that we've lost maybe three quarters of his notebooks. So even the huge stack, which exists now, like 13 ,000 pages, I think it is, is probably only a quarter of what he wrote. And I love to think that he did write a diary, which was quite organized and therefore not mixed up with the rest of his notes, but which unfortunately got lost.

58:31because he was such a natural diary writer in other ways that it seems odd to me that he never would have written anything about himself or his own emotions down. But nothing survives about literally lines, two or three lines about him getting angry once with his, I guess, live-in boyfriend. But apart from that, there's nothing ever about the state of his emotions. And I find that very surprising. I did find that to be the most fascinating part of the book. the it's not just that he he was fascinated by things but he had to work them out on the page you know he's he's not just doing the dissections and remembering them he's doing the dissections and then writing in words what he saw and then also sketching what he saw he can't just see a wave he has to draw hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of waves the need to just do it over and over and over again.

59:26It's both compulsive, but it also must have been so clarifying. Yeah. To have been in that habit and to have had the leisure to have done it all the time would have been just fantastic. But he came from a culture which was full of notebooks. It's just that he took it farther and deeper, I think, and weirder than anyone else. And to think like the final product is the compounding returns of the years of notebooking. So you see Mona Lisa and you, you know, you wonder about the smile. You're not thinking not just the sketches that went into it when he was working as an artist, but the hundreds and hundreds of hours of the notebooking that would have led up to that before he even started.

1:00:11it. Yeah. And the fact that, you know, he wasn't just drawing or then painting a woman, he also would have looked at the muscles underneath a human face, you know, that smile comes from muscles, which he anatomized in great detail. So he knew exactly what was going on underneath the skin. That sort of level of detail is, you know, it's so unusual. Yeah, he doesn't just set out to do a statue of a horse he has to study horses he has to talk about horses he has to interview people about horse he has to live and breathe and like become one with it yeah absolutely but then so few the other thing is so few sort of finished objects if you like so he doesn't paint a huge number of paintings uh which is what he's famous for for most you know for the period when he's alive and then after immediately after his death he's just famous as a painter not as a thinker at all or a scientist he never publishes anything about science he never publishes anything about anatomy he makes all these amazing discoveries has these amazing thoughts on the pages of his notebook and they just get lost for nearly 400 years 370 years because no one really reads them there's only one little extract of the notebooks is published in the years after he dies which is his How to Paint manual, Treatise on Painting.

1:01:34And apart from that, all of these amazing discoveries just go into libraries. No one ever really reads them and they never get published. Yeah, you make that point in the book. I think it's the one argument against notebooks is that they're sort of stuck in this ghetto. And had he been a little bit more polished or maybe if he'd saved some of that energy for the finished product. Yes, humanity might have benefited from the insights, but they're locked away in between the covers of these journals or these notebooks or whatever. And as a result, people aren't able to build upon his discoveries. It's like they happened in a vacuum.

1:02:12Yeah. I wonder what it would have been like if he'd wanted to publish a book in his lifetime, like a printed book, because he worked with people sort of tangentially who published odd drawings of his in books. But I just think it was slightly too early. They were very, at that point when he was alive, they were printing huge numbers of books, but nearly all of them were by dead people. There were very few living authors or they only started to be living authors in the last decade or so of his life. And possibly there was this cultural phenomenon of just living people not being in print yet. I don't know.

1:02:46Maybe that slowed him down. Yeah, there's, I think, you know, Marcus Aurelius, let's say he did write meditations for himself, then maybe he wouldn't want it. He didn't want it to be published. And so the act of publishing it may have been a betrayal by someone close to him. And yet, humanity is the greater for someone disregarding those wishes. And and da Vinci's sort of I bet if you'd asked da Vinci, he would have said there's nothing in these notebooks. These notebooks are nonsense. They're scribblings. You know, there this is this isn't the good stuff. And that tendency in artists probably deprives the world.

1:03:24It saves us from a lot of crap because a lot of times what is in the notebooks isn't good. But we also miss the one out of a thousand that's world changing or amazing. And we're better for getting access to it. Yeah. And the process, you know, the next Anne Frank Diary, where's that going to come from? That's going to have to survive miraculously in some terrible situation. Yes. Yes. I get excited thinking about some of these scrolls that they're starting to to work their way through in Pompeii. What's your dream discovery there? What's the thing you'd like to see the most? Well, the dream discovery would be some of these lost texts, you know, okay, here's, here's an actual book by Epicurus, right?

1:04:09Here's, you know, here's some lost, right? There's one, there's a stoic named Chrysippus, who supposedly published 700 books and essays, and not a single one survives, right? Yeah. So So we can tell from, you know, the Cicero's and such where they're referencing these whole this whole body of work from these philosophers that we don't have. The idea that some of that might be in there strikes me as absolutely incredibly unimaginably exciting. Yeah. And I love it because it's processes. It's this combination of classicists, but also radiographers and people who are incredibly sophisticated particle physicists.

1:04:50and this kind of collaboration across really divergent disciplines, which is just fantastic. I find it really exciting. And it sort of gives you a bit of hope for humanity almost. Yeah, that AI is being put to work on these things too. And you're just like, the idea of an ancient philosophical text from the year 300 BC is being retranslated and brought to us because of radio imagery and AI, you know, all these years later. It is incredible. Although I do wonder, you know, how much of our relationship with these ancient texts is the fact that we have been writing and rewriting about them for 2000 years.

1:05:34Like the reason the Odyssey resonates more than Gilgamesh is because we've only got 150 years with Gilgamesh. And the Odyssey, we've got 2000 plus years of riffing and re-riffing and commonplace booking about it. So it has this sort of cultural resonance, even if it's not good. The fact that people have been talking about it for 2000 years is why it's better. It gains a bit of power. Yeah, that's really interesting. and when I was looking at the Daily Stoic or I'm really enjoying it I suddenly realised oh this is like one of those humanist books which is a commentary on so and so and when you see commentary on Plato or whatever and when you see these books in the old catalogues you think oh that must be fairly dry but of course at the time no this was their way of making it interesting and bringing it to life and making it relevant and having it in a relatable language Yeah, that each generation is rediscovering these ideas and making them accessible.

1:06:39The more modern example or the other example of this is, have you read Tolstoy's A Calendar of Wisdom? No. OK, you got to get that. It's incredible. So Tolstoy, towards the end of his life, just becomes sort of this spiritual seeker, doesn't see himself as a novelist anymore. And he writes this collection called The Calendar of Wisdom, which is also a page a day book of like his favorite quotes and some riffing and commentary on those quotes. And he puts it together shortly before he dies. It's the thing he's most proud of. Then he does die. And then only a few it's only a few years later that the Russian Revolution happens.

1:07:18And this being a largely spiritual text, there's a lot of Christianity in it. It's suppressed. And so it basically isn't rediscovered until the 1980s. And it's come back now. And I sell it in my bookstore. It's one of the most popular books we sell. You have this sort of hundred year old spiritual text without 100 years of history to it. It's only got like 30 or 40 years of history to it. And there's something it was like in a time capsule for all of the USSR. It's just really remarkable, magical, historical document. You would you would really like it. Yeah, I've made a note. The calendar, it's there, it's on the page.

1:08:01Well, I loved your book. I hope you get a U.S. publisher soon, because literally as I walked out, I said to the manager of the bookstore, I said, I thought I'd asked you to carry this. And she said, well, we're having trouble. I couldn't I couldn't order it from the distributor. and now I understand why, but I've got to fix this. I can confirm. I'm very happy to confirm. There is a North American publisher. Amazing. Which is the incredibly indie, very, very cool Biblioasis of Windsor, Ontario. They recently published Duck's Newburyport, so they're not afraid of a big baggy book. And it will be available in all normal American and Canadian bookstores from early September.

1:08:42Amazing. Well, I will be hopefully the absolute first to carry it because I love this book and I think it's an incredible act of service that you did. So thank you very much. Thank you. I really appreciated it. Thanks 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.

1:09:15Thank you.