The Daily Stoic - Cal Newport On the Art of Time Blocking

Episode Date: January 16, 2021

On today’s podcast, Ryan talks to “Deep Work” author and computer scientist Cal Newport about his new Time-Block Planner, the logistics of writing a good book, what life after COVID will look like, and more.Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of 6 books including his most recent, Digital Minimalism,  which was a New York Times bestseller. He is also the host of the Deep Questions podcast which launched in May 2020. This episode is brought to you by Blinkist, the app that gets you fifteen-minute summaries of the best nonfiction books out there. Blinkist lets you get the topline information and the most important points from the most important nonfiction books out there, whether it’s Ryan’s own The Daily Stoic, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, and more. Go to blinkist.com/stoic, try it free for 7 days, and save 25% off your new subscription, too.This episode is also brought to you by Ladder, a painless way to get the life insurance coverage you need for those you care about most. Ladder makes the process of getting life insurance quick and easy. To apply, you only need a phone or laptop and a few minutes of time. Ladder’s algorithms work quickly and you’ll find out almost immediately if you’re approved. Go to ladderlife.com/stoic to see if you’re instantly approved today.This episode is also brought to you by Manly Bands, the best damn wedding rings period. Freedom for your hand to look like you want it to look. Whether you’re looking for men’s wedding rings or engagement rings, Manly Bands has you covered. Manly Bands has an insane selection of materials: gold, wood, antler, steel, dinosaur bones, meteorite, even wood from whiskey barrels. To order your Manly Band and get 20% off, plus a free silicone ring, go to manlybands.com/stoic and enter promo code STOIC.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Cal Newport: Homepage: http://www.calnewport.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school. When we have the time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with our journals and to prepare for what the future will bring.

Hey there listeners, while we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the world's biggest and most innovative companies, to learn how they built them from the ground up. Guy has sat down with hundreds of founders behind well-known companies like Headspace, Manduka Yoga Mats, Soul Cycle, and Kodopaxi, as well as entrepreneurs working to solve some of the biggest problems of our time, like developing technology that pulls energy from

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But come on, someday's parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting. Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown-Oller, we will be your resident not so expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong.

What would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone. So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the day is so podcast.

My guest today needs no introduction because he is one of our most popular guests of all time. One of my favorite authors of all time. I'm talking about Cal Newport author of Deepwork. So good. They can't ignore you. And most recently, digital minimalism and his new planner, the time block planner, a daily method for Deepwork in a distracted world. I love Cal. I love talking to Cal. He's one of my favorite people, one of the people that I have missed not being able to see because I haven't been to DC now in many, many months because of the pandemic. But Cal is one of the best writers. I think of our generation, one of the best thinkers about productivity and focus and creativity

of this generation and just overall a really smart interesting guy. Somebody I love talking to. So here's my episode with Cal Newport. You can check out his new Time Block calendar. We talk all about that. And of course, if you haven't read Deep Work digital minimalism, we're so good they can't ignore you. You are definitely missing out. And Cal has a new podcast which you should check out. And he and I did an interview about my most recent book, The Lives of the Stoics, which I suggest you check out. And of course, listen to my other episode,

I think this is maybe from June, where I talk to Cal about being productive in the midst of this crazy pandemic that we're in. So check it out, here's my conversation with Cal Newport. Well, I'm excited to do this. It was funny, I was gonna say this in the intro, but so when your episode came out on the podcast last time, this was right as all the civil unrest stuff

was happening in the summer. And someone commented, how dare you interview a privileged white male on your podcast with all this going on in the world, even though our thing had been recorded weeks earlier. And then it was the most popular episode of the whole year. So it was an interesting reminder to me that like, the things that people sometimes manage to take offense to,

which were totally unintentional, are not at all representative of what humans actually feel in the aggregate. Yes, it's a terrible sample. Yeah. I made the mistake of asking my audience recently. I'd be like, oh, send me suggestions for the podcast, to this email address. I'm yet to have any two suggestions that are compatible with each other. Everything I've had is like it's oh, and there's zero pattern in the suggestions. All of them are self-contradictory and I realize there's no useful way. So sampling audiences doesn't work, unless you could actually randomly sample your audience.

It just doesn't. Yeah. Well, and then you also have to vet these suggestions against reality. So like the number one suggestion is always like, why do you have ads? And it's like, why do you expect me to spend hours of my life every single week plus the cost of hiring an editor? And I think sometimes people think that everything is free and that doesn't, like because they're getting it over the internet. Therefore, and because there is no marginal cost for them to receive it, therefore there must have been zero costs to create it.

So sometimes we get that with Daily Silk, they'll go like, you know, you have the store, why do you sell stuff, they'll go like, what would Seneca think about this? Or, you know, what would Marcus really think of this? And I sort of go like, well, you know, it, as they sat there on their estate tended by slaves, and their empire supported mostly by plunder and wars of aggression, I think they probably wouldn't have a problem with it. And it would be okay with you selling the coin. Yeah. wouldn't have a problem with it. It would be okay with you selling the coin. Yeah.

I'm sorry. But it's also, it's like, guys, this whole machine costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to run and operate and to reach at scale. And there's opportunity costs as well, which I think is obviously harder for people to understand. And there's opportunity costs as well, which I think is obviously harder for people to understand, but like every episode that you spend on your podcast is time that you didn't spend writing. It's time you didn't spend research.

But most importantly, it's time that you didn't spend at home with your family. Yeah, yeah. And my agent's always about that. When she fights back against appearances and stuff like that. She's like, that's time that Cal could be writing his next book. That's always her thing.

Yeah, I agree. Well, I think you and I have the problem that we've had audiences for a long time too. So like we have audiences that go back to the old days. Which is, that's kind of the issue. It's like, yeah, 2007 or whatever. You know, I had my domain on a little server and there's 50 of us and the same people are around.

So then it feels different. But yeah, like office space is expensive and equipment. Well, it's expensive, I don't know. No, no, that's an interesting point because it actually ties into, I think, a sort of a dilemma or an experience of becoming a successful creator or trying to master any profession, which is like,

okay, when you start, not only, like when you start, you're typically young, you're typically have this hunger to learn and the level that you're doing it at is much more, is much less expensive and easier and whatever. So it's like LeBron James playing basketball in middle school, this is just a guy that gets up, plays basketball, goes to practices,

nothing going on in the world. As he goes through, as he progresses to where he is now, he now spends something like a million and a half dollars of your maintaining his body. Right? He's the same person playing the same game, but to maintain it at the level that he's doing, because it becomes harder, and then because people figure out what you're doing, and it just becomes more competitive,

the cost is greater. So it's weird that you'd think like, hey, as your audience grows, it would be easier to maintain, but it actually becomes harder because you're fighting against entropy and you're fighting against people who are in similar spaces. And just like you've already picked all the low-hanging fruit. So to keep writing good books, it's actually harder and harder to do. Yeah, yeah. And the stakes raise, et cetera, et cetera.

Just like LeBron had to bring home championships eventually. Yeah. That's the different stakes. I wanted to talk about the journal because I'm fascinated. One with journal. So let's talk a little bit about journaling. But let's start with the concept of time blocking, because it's not one eye.

So I want to hear the case for time blocking. Well, so time blocking is how I have for a very long time organized my day. So it was something I talked about on my blog. I went back to try to find the earliest references. I mean, I think it goes all the way back to 2013, but then I wrote about it in deep work, which was 2016. And it was my way of controlling my time and attention. I thought this was a pretty large missing component to a lot of time management systems. Was this notion of, okay, when you actually get to your day, lot of time management systems. Was this notion of, okay,

when you actually get to your day, how do you figure out what I'm gonna do? And a lot of the big systems, if we do like David Allens, or you go back to some of the mentality even of Stephen Covey's, is based around like prioritization, task, you have lists, you have contacts,

you have different priorities for tasks. And it's about going to your list and saying, what's next? And then, okay, now what's next? And what I had discovered is that if you look at the whole day like a chess board, you know, okay, I'm really busy here. I have free time here. I'm going to have a really busy into the day. You can start moving things around in a way that makes a lot more sense. Like, well, right now is going to be the time to work on this because I see what's happening

at three o'clock or at three o'clock. I'm going to have this window here. Maybe I should do a bunch of email there. But probably should, you know, when I go to run this air and get these other things done, you see all the time like chest pieces, it turns out you can get a lot more out of that same day than if you instead just try to go moment by moment.

Okay, what's next, what's next? The other benefit I used to get from time blocking is it keeps you on task. Because if you're just working, if your idea's like, like, I'm gonna work today, I'm gonna try to get from time blocking is it keeps you on task. If you're just working, if your idea is like, like, like, I'm going to work today, I'm going to try to get a reasonable amount of stuff done. I have some list. I have some meetings. You know, okay, I'm going to take some breaks, obviously.

But if it's not scheduled, like every moment you're having this bad, like, oh, this is what I'm going to to take a break. I'm locked into this right now. If you want to take breaks, you schedule. You also get more out of your times. It had just been my secret sauce. At some point, I got frustrated with the notebooks I was using. That's why I had the idea. Why don't I produce my own?

Now, that sort of goes to what we're talking about with LeBron James, where it's like, sort of early on in your career, when you have more energy and less things pulling for your time, you can sort of get away with an amateur system. Like, I wake up and I do whatever I was gonna do today, you sort of go where it leads,

but then as you become more successful, as you have more balls that you're trying to juggle, it becomes increasingly essential that you have some sort of a system or a practice. Yeah, well, for me, I was using these type of systems before I needed to. Interesting. I was like a productivity nerd. And I'd been really into this. I had written these books in college about how to be really productive in college. And so I was into productivity system. So as a grad student, which is a really easy job. I mean, it seems like a hard job when you're a grad student because you haven't had any other job yet, but you're typically speaking. It's an easy job.

I was using all these systems just because I was a productivity nerd. And because of that, I had a ton of extra time. And so I was writing books and I was running my blog because I was a productivity nerd. And because of that, I had a ton of extra time. And so I was writing books and I was running my blog. I wrote a book concurrently with my doctoral dissertation because I was bored, like I had a lot of time. Because I was using these techniques just because I was in the techniques. As my job got harder, so as I went to become a postdoc

and then a professor and then a tenured professor, but then also a dad and with a bunch of kids and my writing career took off. I have... But I'm doing now without the system. So I'm a little bit odd that I started it before I needed it and because of that I just had massive free time. And now that I actually needed it, it absolutely is my lifeblood. Yeah, it is funny. The people I know that we're in grad school or are in grad school, we're doing PhD programs. It seems like it takes a very long time. And then I remember I was asking my friend,

one of my best friends from my school, like how it was going. And he was like, you're not supposed to ask grad students how it's going because it's kind of this open ended it's just like a thing that just happens. And that strikes me as, there must be incredible inefficiencies in that model that if you had systems, you could take advantage of and finish faster or get more done concurrently.

Yes. And I wrote about this a lot, especially back when I was aiming more at students with my advice writing, I called the phenomenon dissertation hell. Because there was a blog when I was coming up called dissertation hell, which encapsulated exactly that mindset. Yeah. The grad students would construct this world. There's nothing more difficult than needing to work on a dissertation. And you're absolutely correct. I mean, I say this on my podcast a lot because I get a lot of questions from students. And I say a lot on my podcast that being a doctoral student in some ways it's much easier than a normal job. And in other ways, it's much harder.

So it's much easier in the sense that you don't have that much to do. You don't have, but it's much harder in the sense that the things you do have to do are hard. They're intellectually demanding. And that short circuits a lot of people's brains. But I came in the grad school with, first of all, my productivity habits. I was a nerd. I also got married very young.

So I got married when I was 24, right after I turned 24, my wife was 23. So she had a normal job all throughout grad school. And I just figured, look, I don't wanna be at the office or at MIT when she's home. So I'll just work during the time when she's working. I was like the only guy in the theory group at MIT who worked bankers hours. Right.

It turns out like it's really effective. You come in at nine, you make a plan for your day. I had way too much to do. I used to write three to four blog posts a week. I wrote three books while I was in grad school. I published a lot. I mean, I published a lot of papers. And I still felt like I had a lot, I mean, I published a lot of papers, and I still felt like I had a lot of time.

So I think there's a lesson in there. There is a lot of... The spouse life hack is an underrated one, or just being in a serious relationship, because I think it's a couple of things. So one, looking back on it, it's like, oh, I didn't have a part-time job going around trying to meet people, right? Like I never was going to bars, I never was

spending time on dating apps. I wasn't sure. Like, it was like, it was a no-new friends policy. Like I was like, I already found my person. So that whole thing is out of the picture. So that was very helpful. But then it's not just the, like, hey, banker's hours, because not every relationship has the specifics there that you're talking about. But I did find it was like, like, like, let's say everyone's working at the office. And the people who don't have anywhere to be,

they're sort of at the mercy of, like, Parkinson's law. It's like, hey, we're just going to go on this until whatever. But for me, it was like, I told my wife, I would meet her for dinner at eight, or, you know, like my weekends are spoken for. So I think it's not just the hours, but it's also having a backstop of another person who's sort of, who's time you have to respect, that prevents things from just expanding to fill an unlimited amount of space in your life. Right. And this is a problem. So the problem you're putting out here is another reason why to bring it back, why time blocking is useful, because part of what you do when you time block again is you

look at your day, your entire day and say, what do I want to do here? As opposed to again, you're if you're just working this Parkinson's loss thing, especially if you don't have a why if you don't have to get home to pick your kids up from school. Yeah, you just fill the time. That's what grad students do. They stay up till midnight for some reason. They they come it makes no sense, but if you're time blocking, you're not going to draw out a schedule that says, well, let me take three hours off here. And then let me kind of half work and watch YouTube from four to seven. And I really think like seven to 11. That's what I'm going to really, when you're actually looking at the schedule

in black and white, like, well, wait a second. I kind of get this all done by noon. You know, like, there's something else, right? So, like this underlying point is a big one that if you don't control your time, and this was actually in my very, I'm thinking back now, my second book I wrote, which was a student book, I wrote it,

well, predominantly still an undergraduate, it was called How to Be a Straight A Student. And it was study habits from actual straight A students, but I had a time management section that was my my secret sauce, like what I had brought over from being an entrepreneur when I was a teenager. And basically, even back then, in that book, I was saying time block. And it was, I was a little bit looser about it then, but even back then, I was saying figure out in advance, like what you want to do with your time, this control notion. It opens up so much.

And by the way, you are right, like the pros and by pros, like the LeBron equivalent, so the people who are super busy and super high productive, it's what they do. I mean, they have, they control their minutes, they control their days, they see, when should I do this, when should I do this? They're like air traffic controllers, except for instead of pushing tin, they're pushing tasks. And that really is how high

performers operate. So if you bring that mentality to a job where you don't have as much on your plate as one of these super high achievers, you get a lot of breathing room, you get a lot of flexibility, you get a lot of space to pursue other things, you can induce implicit seasonality into your job, even though it doesn't exist. It really can open up a lot. I haven't gotten to grad school, but I find that some similarities to what you're talking about with writing books. You and I will talk to someone and be like, oh, I signed a book deal and you're like, congrats. And then like three years later, the book isn't done. And they're not Robert Carro and they're not Robert Green. Like this isn't gonna be some epic biography.

And when I ultimately read the book, I go, there's not three and a half years worth of work here. You know what I mean? This is like, this is, and I've always surprised, I'm always surprised in how that happens because I know that the way you do a book as you show up every day, and in the space we're in the sort of nonfiction,

but not like sort of epic biography space, it's very unlikely that your argument is gonna be so complex and require so much research that you shouldn't be able to turn this around in six months to a year. I mean, to get the manuscript done, editing and all the other stuff can take longer, but I'm always amazed. People are like, how do you, they ask me, how do you get so many books out? I'm actually amazed the other direction. Well, let me run a theory about you. Excuse me. So right before we started recording, I was recording an episode of my podcast,

and I was answering a question from a reader in Australia. And so she was in a PhD program, and she was preparing finally to write her dissertation. And so she was telling me how she was clearing the decks. Yeah. She like, I'm leaving all my extracurriculars. I'm cutting down. And her question was, she was really nervous about like, I've never really, I'm nervous about, you know, how big these time blocks are going to get. Like, I really don't normally do more than two or three, but I'm trying to clear the decks. I really want to get this done. And my answer was like, I think

you're going to make things worse by inflating the difficulty here so much. Yep. You've inflated this thing in your brain into something that's going to require you to have nothing else going on that, you know, you have to quit all your extracurriculars, what she was doing, that is going to take six or seven hours a day or no progress will be made. I was like, I think that's going to make it take longer. And so I wonder if that theory is at play with some of these writers we know where it takes them three years is because if in your head it's like, this is the hardest, biggest

thing I'm ever going to do, then it's really hard on Tuesday to write when you're like, but I have two meetings and I have to take my kid to the dentist and I'm not really feeling inspired, you know, like a treating it as not so big of a deal, maybe. No, no, that's better. No, no, that's that's a good point. I mean, I do I do find I find people who who weren't writers. Like there was somebody who did something and now they're writing a book. Maybe they had a podcast or a YouTube show

or they're an influencer, whatever. What can happen is they love books. And I love books too, but books are this sacred thing. But then because they haven't, like one of the great advantages I got being a researcher to this is that as I saw the books are just an assemblage of pages, right? It's not like some magical thing. It just is. And so, so they, I think they often get intimidated and they make up in their head what it's supposed

to look like. And then so what they struggle with is the reality of writing a book, which for me, like I just, I've worked out basically a two, two and a half projects during the pandemic. It's like, I get to the office at 830 and I'm like, done ready to eat, not think about the book at that level by like 11 at the latest some days. You know what I mean? It's like two, two and a half hours is over six months is a book. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think academics know this because that's what academic writing

is like. So like academics have an easier time and a harder time writing public facing books. They have an easier time because you produce academic papers on a regular basis and they have to be really smart. They have to go through peer review. So you're used to this idea of like, okay, I can produce something hard relatively quickly. So we kind of get used to that. And you write enough academic papers. It's all just, you know, every day you look at the white board. I guess just you make progress every day. The academics have a harder time sometimes, though, because they are used to a level of rigor in their expertise that just makes them really nervous when they're writing public-facing books books because they can't help but think about their peers in academia being like, I don't

know. Yeah, you can't be thinking about the audience. You've got to be thinking about the task in front of you. Yeah, but I think there's something to be gained from that mindset of like, yeah, intellectually hard work. The way really nice products get built is just a little bit each day. I mean, you just think they thought stuff. You know, you have to just thought stuff, thought stuff, stuff. You have to generate, it's like thought reps, you know, and you can only do

so many a day and you do them. And it's a job. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think the worst, even worse than though, not getting the book done is the other thing that makes me cringe is when you hear people talk about like, man, last six weeks, I, you weeks, I barely slept because I had to get my book done. And we're they ran to the cabin somewhere. Yeah, that's not book writing. I mean, if you're doing it in six weeks, that's not book writing. I don't know what that is, but that's a failure too. That's not.

No, it's like just crying it out when like under deadline pressure. No, no, no, there has to, it's a weird balance, right? Because it's the day to dayness of it, like the two crappy pages a day. I love that rule. It's just like, like you show up, you put in some work every day over a long enough time. And then you get, you get an editable manuscript. Like if you don't do the work, you don't have pages, which you can then edit and refine. But then in this something I struggle with more, like you have this impulse to ship, right? Like it's done as good as it can be, let's go.

But then you also need sort of, it's like you need a, it's like, you know, they, they, they like lay concrete and then they have to let it sit and then they need to see how it, how it settles, you know? so like I turned in my last manuscript, I think I turned it in on Wednesday of last week. And so I already have, like these are my no cards today, of stuff in the last five days that had just occurred to me that I wrote down,

that when I get the manuscript back in probably a month, will all be changes that I'm making. So it's like, I'm not working on the book, but it's still kind of cooking in my mind and little marginal changes are sort of reveal themselves. But if it had already gone to the printers, like if I was, you know, these people that are doing these sort of hot political books,

you miss that ability to just get that sort of serendipity like before it's too late kind of changes. Yeah, yeah, like you're right. That's the that's the downside of the way you get the book done, is you have that mindset of like it's not don't overinflate this just right, but you're right. That puts you in the mindset of like, okay, let's roll, let's roll. And going back and doing the edits, I struggled with that too. I mean, one of the ways I deal with, I always worry when I get to like the stage you're entering now with your latest book. I always worry, I start thinking like, what the hell is this? Like, this last half of the book is, you know, this,

this is not right. Or that's okay. That can't be the right way. I'm missing this. This is not like the greatest argument. And the way I get over that is I start thinking about the next book. I think it helps that you and I write a lot of books because what I start, I just say, well, you know, at the next time it'll be better. And that's how I try to get past the, I mean, often it is a trade off. I mean, I could probably sit more with my books.

Yeah. And really, like, come back and let me rewrite it, like, try to master piece them. But instead, I think I've got this idea, and I've been working on it for a year. I think it's a good representation of it. Now, let's move on to the next thing. So it's better. But it's a good point. I mean, I've noticed it, for example, being able to work the last year or two with the New Yorker for it, they have a completely different editing process than you would have with a book. And so like with the New Yorker, they, it's not a book. It'll be like 5,000 words. It's back and forth. It could be back and forth for months of like, this isn't quite doing it. I don't think this is this C section is not really like echoing the A section. You know, like, it's this sort of back and forth collaboration where it's

just picked apart and rebuilt and tightened and what about this and bring this in. It's a whole thing. And you can't do it with a book. Or if you do that with a book, it's like, you can write one book every five years. So it's interesting, I feel that tension. And I get over it by being like, well, the next book will be better as what I always tell myself. And that's how I keep moving. Well, this goes back to the time blocking thing,

but I had a friend who is an NFL reporter and NFL coaches work these insane hours. And I said, like, let's say the coaches union and the players union have come together and there's some sort of, for whatever reason, and they said, just in the way that workouts for the athletes are limited, what if some regulation passed for the coaches where the coaches had to work bankers hours? Like it was nine to five for coaches, you couldn't do all night film sessions, you couldn't go straight from the locker room

after a game to the plane, to the practice facility, you couldn't work these insane hours. And I was like, would the product on the field be noticeably different in any way? And they were like, absolutely not. They were like, all the work that these coaches do, it has almost no, it's mostly a competition they are in with their staffs and with each other that, you know, so I wonder, it's like, and I've worked with some of those

publications we're talking about, is it really, is that the way they get to the quality they get to or is this an anachronism and a system that's become almost a kind of a religious thing that actually, you know, quantity would not, being able to produce more quantity would actually be a better way to get some more quality than the sort of whatever the process you're talking about is. Yeah, I mean, if you have something that works, I get the hesitancy, you know, why not shake it up. And I think you're right about that specific example. Look at Washington DC, our football team, our head coach this year, had to get cancer treatment during the season.

You know, and so the team might win their division. So, they're actually good for a change. They've had the least amount of coaching they've probably ever had and it's working. And it's working. And it's working. So, but I think your broader point, your broader point there is probably, I think, is interesting. Yeah. In general, being worried about like what is proverbial religious, what's like religious, well, in life, like, well, I do this way, then I've always done. I think this is what it needs to be done. And there's some nation to creative destruction. Like, well,

what if we try it this way or what if we try that?, I mean, I do that with my habits all the time. I'm always looking for inefficiencies. In the sense of like, why am I spending time on X? I don't need to do that. Is there a much simpler way to do it? I think I've saved a lot of overhead doing that. I mean, even with like my mini media company that sort of surrounds all the stuff that happens when you write enough books and do these type of things

All of my decisions have been biased towards reducing overhead reducing complexity. Yeah, so I don't have staff So I don't have I'm like I've tried to keep everything Like I and I think that makes a really big difference I mean, I think it probably saves up like a non trivial amount of time in my life So just as a concrete example of questioning this thing that's taken up a lot of time and produces some value, is it producing enough value? Is it producing enough value for the drag or for the overhead? Yeah.

Got a quick message from one of our sponsors and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. Yeah. No, and that goes back to what we're talking about too with the price, right? And so sometimes people can think like, oh, that price seems high or why is this not free or whatever. And it's like, because it has to pay for itself of the other things that the creator or the owner could be spending their time on. and if it doesn't, it becomes really hard to justify. Right, exactly. It's not just a hobby, but just, if you're just starting a podcast on the side,

for example, outside of your... It gets, you know, and has some traction. It's a completely different calculus than, right, like Ryan Holiday spending, you know, if he's going to publish something every day for the Daily Stole podcast, you know, that's a book a year maybe, right? I mean, almost. No, no, Daily Stole podcast. Yeah. It's, it it's it's about 80 to 100,000 words a year that I do in the email. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And which is a non-trivial amount of money these days. So you know, there you go. No, no, it's a world with your world famous author, like Ryan. I mean, a book a year is a start. Well, so I was going to ask you to go back to this idea of planning. So here's what I don't time block and tell me what I'm missing because I'm I am I think earlier I think earlier on in my life,

I also had a lot of arrogance about my systems. So it was like this is the way that I do it. This is obviously the only way to do it. And anyone else who's doing it differently is somehow an indictment of the way that I'm doing it. But as I've gotten older, I've been, I think I've gotten more flexible about trying different things, which is I think the way you want to go. I think a lot of people go the other direction that as you get older, you become more close minded to new things. But when I look at like a person who has time block, a time blocking schedule, I actually get anxiety.

I've talked about this before. I like an empty calendar. Like today, this is the only thing in my entire calendar. That's me is a good day. Whereas later in the week, I've got three things in the calendar and some other thing that I'm sort of administrative obligation and I'm like, I'm like, shit, that's a crappy day. You know what I mean? So for me, like when the calendar is full, that actually means I have less time to do what I want, which is usually writing

and thinking and reading. Yeah, but you can think of time blocking as how you make use of the empty days. Those are actually the days when time blocking is useful. I mean, if you run a day that's full of meetings, full of Zoom, full of calls or this or that, that's actually the scenario in which time blocking is not that useful.

I mean, you have your calendar and if that's all you're doing, it's jumping from call to call. You don't really need auxiliary planning. If you have an empty day, to me, this is when time blocking shines, because you're like, okay, what do I wanna do with this day?

And you kinda wait till you get there to make the decision, right? So it's not looming. Like, okay, what I really wanna do is, I'm gonna write first thing in the morning and get this thing done here, this errand, and I'm gonna work on this in my head when I do that errand.

And then I wanna, this free is up time here to do this thing with my son, and I want to come back here and do this and I can be done and I can be done at three. Right. Look, I got the plan here and then I can do a shutdown. I can do a shutdown when it's done. So it allows you to take the the open water and put some structure onto it and you get a lot more a lot more out of it. Though I will say the thing about you though is one scenario in which time blocking is not as useful as if you have a combination of autonomy and routine. It's like full time writers can fall into it. You have a routine.

So full time writers can fall into this interesting middle zone where a lot of days it's like I have a very common structure to my day. And I have a ton of autonomy. So I've not juggling a lot of, you know, a lot of time blockers are trying to figure out, how do I make sure this gets done and these tasks are accomplished. And I'm making progress on this thing that's due next Wednesday, you know, it's really optimized for that. If you're in a writing routine, you know, I write and then I do this and then I'm done or something like that. People who have a lot of routine and a lot of autonomy don't always get as much benefit.

So you might also fall into that crazy one. But I think the empty days are the days where time blocking actually relieves my stress a little bit. I'm like, okay, I have a plan and I executed it. And now I love the distinction of I'm done. And a good time block plan gives me that and like, oh, I'm done. Or I can end the day early in my time block plan

and actually get that psychological boost of, oh, I'm done. Or I can end the day early in my time block plan and actually get that psychological boost of, oh, I got an early, an early end to the day because somehow the, I followed the schedule. So I feel like my boss granted me an early release as opposed to, oh, I stopped working early. So. Yeah, I guess hearing you say that, maybe I'm more of an implicit time blocker

than an explicit one. Like, like my assistant knows never to schedule, not, I mean, essentially never don't schedule things before 11 a.m. and don't ever schedule anything that goes later than 4 p.m. And so like, really, the only time that things can possibly be schedules is really in that sort of four or five hour window there in the middle that you know often doesn't get filled anyway. So the right,

like the morning is already blocked off for writing and then the afternoon is blocked off for family and the middle part is essentially blocked off for whatever random stuff I have to do for the day whether it's recording a podcast or shooting a video or doing a phone call, that's where those things get slotted in. And ideally, they don't even get slotted in because I'm not doing them. Yeah. And that's not a bad way to do it. So where time blocking is going to really start to shine more is when you're juggling

a lot and you have to figure out, okay, meetings that I don't control at various times. I've tasks that are due at various times. I've larger projects that are due at various times. Progress needs to be made regularly. This needs to get started early. I need to fill in this gap here. So a lot of people who are in, let's say, like a standard knowledge work job are in a consistent state of having this pool of things that are on their plate that is too big to get your arms around on any one day is just big and stressful. And so every day is like, how do we construct a day that is not going to make the best attack in that but also make sure that we are on track for all the different things that we need to be that we need to be on track for. And in those scenarios, time blocking does really well. It also does really well, as I mentioned before, when people have actually a lot of flexibility.

Right. I'm at home, I'm working from home, I don't have a ton of meetings. Maybe it's been very useful for people during the pandemic, because maybe them and their partner are both at home, and there's some childcare that has to happen, and suddenly having a lot of clarity about, I'm going to work here, here on this, and here'm taking care of the kid and you're doing this and this ability to really just move your days together and move those pieces like chest pieces really helps

people. When it otherwise just seems like chaos, I'm at home, I'm kind of watching the kid, I'm kind of not and this is happening and my mind is wandering. I'm in the same room that I also watched TV and there's a nice clarity to it. This is what I'm doing right now. There is something to the close of the day you're talking about, for me, a good day is, so this is a baby you'll like this. So a couple of years ago, one of my books,

I did these signed pages, and they ship you the pages and you sign them, And there was like 2000 extra ones or whatever. That's what I use as my to do list. It's like the perfect consistency of paper. It's like the right length. Anyways, that's what I do my to do list on every day. But what I've really loved, like a good day is I've crossed all the things off on the to do list. And then I'm tearing up the list at the end of the day. I have like a compost bin next to my desk and I tear it up and then I recycle it later. But a day where I got distracted

or got busy or things went wrong, when I'm carrying the to-do list over to the next day, there's something, it feels like I'm running about carrying a balance on my credit card. Do you know what I mean? It feels like I'm not closing the day. Yeah. Well, but see one of the advantages of blocking over just listing is now you can look at your whole day and say, well, what's the best way to get these five things done? And real, the best way is that like these three I can consolidate

their kind of short. And I'm going to do it in this one hour block between these two meetings, which means this one I probably should do right now in the morning because I have 90 minutes and it's gonna take that long. And this other one, you know what, I'm gonna have to move that call because this is really urgent and that's where that's gonna fit in.

And suddenly you get all five done, whereas otherwise you might have wasted the first 60 of those 90 minutes, sort of doing email and then miss that window in between and you end up getting less done. And then the other part of time blocking is when you break your schedule, so it doesn't work out,

because something goes long or something drops on your plate, which is fine and normal, you rebuild it. So in the planner, there's these columns. So as you break a schedule, you cross out the rest, you move over to the next column, and then you fix the schedule and that column. And then if you break it schedule, you cross out the rest, you move over to the next column, and then you fix the schedule and that column. And then if you break it again, you cross out and you move over to the

next column, right? So you rebuild your schedule when it changes. So you're always trying to maintain intentionality about like, okay, what's the best I can do with the time that's left? But that exercise really teaches you how long things take. And you start to realize like, okay, I can't just fool myself into how long it's going to take to whatever, write this type of memo, because I have to rebuild my schedule. So then you start to develop a much more nuanced understanding of this takes much longer than I think. And then once people get that more nuanced understanding, they start making more changes to their schedule. Then they look at their calendar and say, this is untenable. These meetings are spread in such a way

that it's impossible for me to get what's done. All right, let's do like Ryan does. Nothing before 11. Or I need to get out of this, this, this, and this. Right? Like you suddenly, it's like you're getting real good data on you as an execution machine. How long, how long things take what your schedule actually looks like? You're like the football coach looking at the plays,

and then it leads to people making changes, because you're getting the data you need. So you're not just, I'm busy, I'm always trying to do things, I feel like I'm carrying my list over from day to day. Now you can pinpoint, you can diagnose the problem. This is what's going on. And you can, so there's all these ancillary benefits

that float around that approach. One of the things that hit me when you were talking there is, like, people go, oh, with my no cards, like how I researched books, they go, wouldn't a digital system be a more effective, efficient way to do that? And sort of what you were describing, it's like, hey, something bumped, now you've got to redo the thing.

Well, the impulse in today's society's like, hey, something bumped, now you got to redo the thing. The impulse in today's society is like, oh, digital is where that should happen because you know, you adjust one thing and then it can adjust all the other things, but it's strange to me there's actually probably something to the physical form being forced to do it by hand that you like about it, right? Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, it means you don't have to go on your computer to see what's going on into a justice. So if you're in a mode where you're reading or writing, and you don't want to go on to a tool,

you don't have to. Yeah, it's embodied. So you're drawing out these blocks, you're crossing out the blocks. And so I agree with that. And I don't know, digital tools, they have their place, obviously. I think there's certain things that digital tools are good for.

I think digital tools are good for calendars because if you have a really busy schedule, there's a lot of appointments coming and going and moving. And I think digital takes that out. I think digital tools are good for keeping your master task list because a lot of people are collaborating. Yeah, or collaborating. Like we're doing, or if you want to keep track of 500 tasks,

like, I don't want to write all those and move them around or this or that. But I think for scheduling, there's something to it. I mean, there was this movement, you know, in the early 2000s, like 2000 to 2008, there was this productivity movement that thought computer algorithms combined with productivity was going to, like to unlock stress-free work and peace and it was going to make everything much easier that we could kind of, what was

causing us stress was trying to figure out like what to work on and what was going on in our schedule and computers should be able to do that. Right. And then we could make work much less stressful. We could basically outsource all the executive decision making to machines. And that's when you got tools like Omnifocus, in which you could have tasks that existed with these different statuses and contexts and then run these complex queries that would essentially spit out work on this. And none of that worked. None of that worked, right? It turned out like you can't,

that wasn't the key. If we could just outsource into these digital tools, like really complicated tools would tell us like what to do and we could just crank widgets and the whole thing would be just sort of automatic and life would be low stress. It didn't work out. It turns out that like a big part of the art of work is figuring out what to work on and when to work on it

and doing stuff is hard. And actually most of the difficulty was actually doing stuff not in the deciding what to do. And that actually just having a piece of paper and just confronting your day and saying, what do I want to do today was actually ends up being the right thing to do. That having a computer database spit out, make this call next and you would just do it. That's in it work. There's not, there's a few things better than just, I'm confronting the whole picture and this is roughly my plan and I have to just do it now. What's the difference between a planner and a journal in your opinion?

Well, I think of a journal as capturing expository information about your thoughts of your day, whereas a planner is, where that's retroactive, a planner is prospectively looking forward to what do I wanna make out of the day? Sure. So my journal I'm capturing thoughts, like here's what I'm thinking about, here's what happened today, here's what's on my mind and a planner,

I'm saying, I mean, it's much more pragmatic, it's just I have seven hours today. What am I doing with those seven hours? And this is the tool I'm working with. It's my cartographer's map and ink, right? this is the tool I'm working with. It's my cartographer's map and ink, right? This is the tool I'm working with to figure out what I want to do for the next seven hours. Although yet, what's interesting about doing it

contemporaneously is that it then becomes in retrospect a journal of how you spend your light, of how you spent your day, which is in the aggregate how you spend your life, of how you spend your day, which is in the aggregate how you spend your life. Yeah, well, which is one of the big things I sell about the planner is you have a record now. So it's really easy to go back and flip through your time blocker is for a bunch of days.

And you have right there evidence of what's going on. I mean, I recommend that people have patterns for their blocks to differentiate them. So like, I shade in thicker lines, deep work blocks. So those blocks have thicker lines. You can just look at a day and just see where were their deep work blocks. And then I added a metric section to every day for the planner, a big believer in in metrics. So you know, deep work hours, number of steps I took, number of calls, I mean, whatever it is that you want to track. So that gets tracked every single day as well. So now you can go back through a planner is whatever it is, three months or four months,

you can go back through and see what's the story, what's the story of these metrics. Like you have a book that captures one quarter, one season of your life. And I grew with that. I think the learning is a huge thing. Learning about how long things really take, how much am I really getting done. A lot of people who are new to time blocking will be like shocked to see the degree to which, wow, I do very little outside of meetings and email. Right. Yes. I'm trying to, I'm trying to build these days and that's all I have time for. And every time I try to put something in, it gets blown for email. And it's a, I think like something like that is a really important reality check.

And either they have to just say that's my job or make drastic changes to their jobs, but without the feedback. So I think you're right on that. It's like a non-linguistic journal in some sense as well as a prospective planning tool. Yeah, I do this one journal in the morning that and that bunch of people make them now, but it's just you write one line a day. So I write what I did yet, like one sentence about the day that just passed. And what I'm now almost four years into a five year journal. And what what I love is being able to to write, you know, today, what I did yesterday, but then see what I did 366 days ago, and then double that and triple that. And so to be able to see sort of how life is progressing

and what was memorable about this day on the planet one year ago, two years ago, three years ago, in some ways is almost more representative as a journal than me trying to write, you know, what I'm thinking and feeling. Do you know what I mean? There's the literalness of it is almost more revealing than the pros on the other journals. I did that the first, almost first two years of my first son's life.

I had one of those exact journals. They were like, we did this, we had these people over, who's what was going on with sleep. And I got that exact thing benefit out of it. I would go back and say, where were we like a month ago, where were we six months ago, where were we this point last year? And it gave me a really good sense of progress.

I was like, oh, interesting. Like, look, it's different. Back then, we were overwhelmed, and we weren't sleeping, and then someone came by and now look where we are today. And I remember that being really meaningful. So I'm with you on that. I think that ability to look back and say,

what was I doing? So I'm hoping now that I have these planners that I can have a nice shelf full that builds because that'd be really nice. Like, well, what was going on pandemic fall 2020? You know, I can actually see, you know, it would be good for our biographers. I'm not sure either of us have done anything notable enough

to warrant our papers even being reviewed at a university, but that remains to be seen. My last question for you was, I've gone through waves of this during the pandemic, like I remember, I think we talked in June, Ish, and, or maybe it was May, but Texas has gone through this weird cycle where we took the pandemic very seriously and then we all collectively pretended it was over,

and then not we, but then the state collectively, you know, pretended it was over, then it got serious again, then leading up to the fall, we pretend it again, and then obviously now here we are in winter, and it's a disaster. But what's been weird for me is like, my sort of quarantine bubble and productivity bubble has been nice, because I haven't been doing anything, I've been doing meetings, I've been

focused, creative, not going anywhere. But I've noticed that once, when everyone else is going back towards real life, all of a sudden the pull, it becomes harder to say no, I guess what I'm saying. If you've done much thought, let's say the vaccine is here, let's say, certainly, probably certainly. But in the next six to eight months, some semblance of a more integrated, extraverted world may be upon us.

How are you thinking about people maintaining this kind of deep work bubble that some of us have been in? Yeah, I mean, I have been thinking about that even for myself. So, I mean, part of the question is what, what to not let back? Yes, exactly. Or is it even going to be possible? That's what I'm trying to figure out is what not to let back. I mean, I have the sense that I am probably going to be in certain situations untruthfully exaggerating my virus fears, probably. Well, after the point where I actually am worried, I really wish I, but you know, I don't know about the vaccines only like 5% effect, you know, to get out of some trips. I don't know how long, I don't know how long

we'll get away with that. I mean, I, I think the first things I have on the books. I've been using, that I've been using my elderly in-laws as a fantastic excuse. Hey, look, I would love to come to your outdoor, you know, mask wearing garden party, but I just can't. I'm going to be seeing my elderly in laws next week. And I can't even take the most remote risk. And people like, Oh, sure, please, please don't come. And, and yeah, I don't know how long that I can sustain that. Yeah, how long are we going to, how long are we going to get away with that? Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, I see the first things I have in my books that are in theory,

traveling in crowds is like next fall. I think, and I don't even know how I feel about that. Not from a viral perspective, um, because it'll be adjusted if need be, but from a, oh, flying again. Right. Oh, and having to go like, you know, I, you went through a book launch during pandemic. I have one coming up in March. And it's sort of nice. It's great. It's like I invested in the studio and I can do, I can do TV, I can do radio, I can do, I can do podcasts. So, but I am missing, I guess, is like, so one of the ideas I have, for example, is, so I miss more one-on-one interaction, like with other sort of interesting smart people. So like, we've already sort of started laying the groundwork for a writer's group here in DC. There's a bunch of really interesting writers here who I know and I like, and they write for big publications.

And I'm like, okay, that type of thing, that type of thing I am looking forward to getting back to. We built out this big socially distance patio, which is there's certain things I do. Like there's a group of guys we watch movies with and stuff like that that like enabled those type of things that they keep going because we have this big thing and these nice arm chairs that are spaced out or this or that.

So I don't know. It's going to be interesting. Yeah. What do you think about? What are you going to do with speaking? Well, it's weird. Like, to go to your point about the book launch, so I did live to the Stokes in September.

And so I didn't travel anywhere. I actually didn't even do a full launch. In some respects, I didn't travel anywhere. I actually didn't even do kind of a full launch in some respects. I wasn't treating it as like a full, full book launch. And it sold, I mean, debuted at number one, it sold. It had a launch on par with, you know, several of my other books. And it was like, no different. You think it made no difference. Like we could do a counterfactual or is it just like,

you're so, your fame is rising. So like, it's. So it's hard to tell. I mean, let's say, I don't think you won, I guess. You're number one, right? Like it was a and as people don't really realize about these type of books, like big launches are nice, but like a big selling book versus not usually, at least for you and I, is going to be a story written over three years, you know. It's not like the number of books sold in like a successful launch is still, you know, 10% at most of a successful book, whether it had, so anyways. Yeah, yeah. Do ideally the first week should become a forgettable note in a long selling career of a book. So yeah, I definitely

think about that. I mean, maybe if I'd done more events or something, the first week sales could have been 10% higher, which might have been, you know, not that many more books, right? And so I think it was, it was a different experience. It was a better experience. The speaking thing is interesting because this month, I may actually, I think I'm close to, if not surpassing, my best speaking month, since I started speaking ever. And I haven't left my house. I've done, and so,

that, if you're telling me I could I could maintain that, or if that goes away. Yeah. That's because I've been to it seems like you probably the same experience. Everyone didn't move virtual for a while. At least they want to see what was going on and then starting in like September, everyone's like, okay, we'll do it virtual. And it's just fantastic. I mean, it's, it's, you're doing 45-minute zooms for lots of money. But are they, are they going to, let's say they don't keep doing that. That's the thing. Yeah. I know. I think, I think, I think what I found that the big breakthrough for me was, okay, yeah, there was that period. So basically from, let's say, March to May, there was no virtual speaking,

because people I've gotten there, because everything was just getting pushed. What I found out, so if you told me at the beginning of the year, hey, that cost me quite, let's say 20% of my years income, those two months or the three months of stuff that got canceled. If you told me I was going to

absorb that hit at the beginning of the year, I'd been like, well, that's going to be untenable. But what I actually found was that energy just got redirected towards other things that were also, that were not just revenue positive, but were creatively fulfilling and personally more less disruptive, right? Because I wasn't traveling and all that.

And so I think we opened this talking about opportunity costs. I think the opportunity cost of speaking and traveling and doing these other things is now harder for me to deny. So I hope I'm going to be able to say no to more things, but I don't necessarily trust myself either. Well, I mean, so not to get too inside our baseball, but so what do you think about this theory that when it comes like a book launch for someone like you or someone like me,

like the actual model is you have an audience, right? So you have an audience that is a consumer of your, your essentially media channel. And that audience is going to sell a lot of book at first. And but they're going to be the seed that's going to spread the word because you have X thousands of people. And if they really like the book, they'll be spreading the word. And that kind of dwarfs any most particular, just you talking straight to people that aren't part of your audience.

So then from that viewpoint, we have common publicists who are probably watching this right now, so they might get hard attacks. I'm just, hey, portfolio, I'm just hypothesizing here. I'm just hypothesizing. But from that point, there's maybe a new model where it's like, yeah, you're focusing on you have like a media company and you're focusing on that and what you produce and your shows and your writing, this big audience, and one of the things your company produces is books and your audience will take it and embrace it and help spring it out there.

And like you're saying, the notion of you have to start from scratch, like I have to go out there and tell an audience about a book, maybe that's becoming depreciated in this world of like you own your own media companies basically. Well, I think you'll find that on the launch of your next book, which is like for the virtual stuff, they'll go,

okay, hey, obviously, you know, insert indie bookstore, connect to in person event, but they want you to do an Instagram live event or something. They'll go, okay, how many people currently attend, you know, their Instagram live things? And they're like, oh, between like 50 and 60. And then you're like, and how many books are they saying, oh, you know, like five to 10.

And you're like, whoa, okay, that's an hour and a half of my life. Plus, it's got to occupy a block on the calendar to sell seven books. I mean, when you look at the royalty, that's like 15 bucks or something. But more importantly, you go, oh, if I just record an extra episode of my podcast,

that will reach however many tens of thousands of people. Or if I just write one article that will reach this many people. Or if I, you know, so you sort of realize, I think with a pandemic made clear and I think makes extra clear for creators is like, actually investing in your platform day to day is the best use of your time.

And these launch activities or these speaking or the things you're going around doing actually aren't moving the needle for you at all. And they come at the expense of building on this other thing which you then own and have the best chance of sort of getting someone to check out your book or whatever. Yeah, I mean, I think there's something to that. And of course, the caveat being it's very hard to do and like most people aren't going to be, I mean, the create a media channel that has a lot of listeners, but yeah, I'm starting to feel that

way. I mean, I've started this podcast and doing some other things because I would. Would you have started this if there wasn't a pandemic? Probably not. This was a pandemic project. Yeah, because I wasn't. I see, I'm always around people. I'm in front of my students. I'm in front of audiences. I'm in front of like, I'm always interacting with people. And I feel very isolated. And so I said, okay, how can I, I tried, I did a lot of writing at first, the first month, I wrote a blog post every day, just because I was antsy, just to, I wanted to do something. And then I was like, I don't know if this is the right way to reach out to this audience. And yeah, so I started

the podcast as a project. I got, you know, I was inspired by some of the Spotify acquisitions. I was getting, suddenly I started seeing, I was like, oh, podcast are not necessarily just this thing that people do in their spare time because they kind of feel like they have to. I was like, oh, this is actually a media model that's very, very powerful and very disruptive and very distributed and very decentralized, right? It's not through major players. Your stuff is not owned as you and a server company that hosted and, yeah, so the pandemic got me doing it, but it's definitely changed the way, because I'm talking to a web designer and as a small point, but thinking about even, like, calnewport.com. Like, I'm having this realization for the redesign I'm thinking about is, it shouldn't be an author website.

Like author websites are all about, like, let me tell you about this author. And I'm like, no, probably the better analogy is more like a streaming service website. This is a place you come. There's a very different standpoint of view. Yeah, there's a content and you come here because you are on board with that point of view and the ideas and the way they're delivered and you want to consume it. And there's different media on which it's coming. But you think of it the same way as when you go to Netflix or something like this. It's no one's, it's shown it be about what's my bio. It should be about there's new episodes of this, you know, they're available. No, I love it. Well, look, let's do this again when the new book comes out, which I won't even tease for people. Let's talk in March.

And I'll be very curious to see how you handle a pandemic book launch. Yeah, well, I'll take lessons from you. I'm assuming if it goes half as well as yours, I think I'll be pleased though. All right, man. I appreciate it. This is awesome as always. 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.

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