The Daily Stoic - Paper Trails: How Notebooks Changed The World | Roland Allen

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

So often we forget that the things we rely on every day had to be invented at one point or another, such as the notebook. Roland Allen, author of The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, joins Ryan for a fascinating conversation today about how the notebook was invented and the different ways it revolutionized the world. Great news - Roland's book will be out in the US this fall! You can pre-order a copy of The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen at The Painted Porch 🎥 Watch the YouTube video of Ryan’s tips for commonplace bookkeeping ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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supply PPE. And the company, PPE Medpro, made millions of pounds of profit from the contract and a lot of the equipment was unusable. Oh a minor detail. And having said that she had nothing to do with that profit repeatedly, she then goes on national television and says that Hona Children are actually in line to receive nearly 30 million pounds as a result of it. To find out the full incredible story, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad free on Wondery Plus. Welcome 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. Hey, 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 more time on this weekend than I ordinarily do. So I, I had someone who works for Daily Stoke run by the office and grabbed me the big stack of books that were sitting near the window in my office that I had been meaning to go through and do my notecard system on, right? I'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 notecards. 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 cause 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. I 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 gonna 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, but like the notebook as we know it, like the Moschini 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 portrait, 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. Roland 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 was 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 the 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. Check 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, uh, 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, uh, enjoy this episode. I 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. 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 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, right? 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 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. But 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 think, 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 gonna have these sort of loose leaf pages that you write stuff on and 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 gonna 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. Yeah, 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 Luce. They were constantly publishing books in dialogue, with 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. Yes, 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 as 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. This is 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 they can think about it, but they haven't really thought about it philosophically as turning something else into a thinking resource. Another 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 became a 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, 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. You're like, well, 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 Tiago Forte or Ryder Carroll thinking about all yourself thinking about notebooks in a whole new way, because people didn't said, hundreds of years, no one actually stopped and actually thought, what are these things that potentially quite interesting, quite useful? Yeah, and it's, it's weird, like, I don't, 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 accent, it seems like there 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. And 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. If a commonplace book is ordered, it's very structured, you have to go and dig out 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 word. And then that continues through to the present day, I guess, you know, they would be 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 what you like, and then that zips over to Evernote or some 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 I mean, obviously this is what I use when I write but like there's a big part of it

That's like it's the accidental byproduct 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 then 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 impact in your sign-ups as 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, 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 a pen and paper. And 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've had a laptop or a pen and paper, but I was lucky enough to be doing it all by hand. That's concerned

for me quite seriously. I mean, I think for me, my commonplace book, other than, other than my to do list, 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. I notice it because as the years have gone by, my handwriting has gotten so much worse because it is like 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 at a restaurant, but I don't do much long form writing anymore by hand. And the process of feeling 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. Which is interesting, because 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. Yeah, 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 this then I think. Yeah, for it forces you to also, because you're going to have to expend labor to do it, you there's probably I think there's an economy there to language, it forces you to be a bit more

diligent in your choices, because don't wanna have to cross it out and you don't wanna 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, or it's 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. Well let's get the elephant out of the room here because I kept, 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 gonna appear. Marcus Aurelius' meditation is gonna 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, Or 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. Was 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 will be 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. So 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. But 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 it's big mystery, as far as I'm concerned, don't have an answer to that. Yeah, it's 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 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 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? Here you have a Roman writing his, what's ostensibly his journal or his diary is 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, you know, more of a glimpse into how sort how 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 plan to refer to regularly as intended, there are so many references to thinking through your emotions to turning an emotion into a thought and an effect, which is, I find anyway, the process of diary writing, if 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 not just marks the realist, but Seneca and epic status, sort of touching on that similar process, and none of them actually say, go home and write a diary, but Seneca and Epictetus, are sort of touching on that similar process. 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, get 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. I 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, 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, you can verbalize those, those thoughts and then question them or discuss them or critique them. Yeah, completely. And then 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. Yeah. And then when you look back and see how things

turn out, Oh, did I did I accomplish that? Did I not? How did I How do I feel about it now, etc. So you make that permanent record. And of course, how did you feel in your head about something 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 that 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. But 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 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, but the symmetry of it would be lost on me

because I don't remember what I was doing 370 days ago. And so getting 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. What was I doing this day? And it's funny how just a few words because these days I write quite a full diary,

it 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. How much do you really know about black history? Like really, really know.

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He was the director of the FBI for half a century. An immensely powerful political figure, he was said to know everything about everyone. He held the ear of eight presidents and terrified them all. When asked why he didn't fire Hoover, JFK replied, you don't fire God. From chasing gangsters to pursuing communists

to relentlessly persecuting Dr. Martin Luther King and civil rights activists, Hoover's dirty tricks tactics have been endlessly echoed in the years since his death. And his political playbook still shapes American politics today. Follow Legacy Now wherever you listen to podcasts. I was really struck. I think it was Darwin towards the end of the book. You note something that he captures in 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 and 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.

Yeah, 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, you know, that does the small there may be the size of a phone these days, or a little address book, something like that. But that was all he needed. You know, he just took notes at the time was able to, you know, write them up more fully when he was still fresh, which is important in much bigger notebooks, obviously. But yeah, his entire career came out of that tiny, tiny part of notebooks, which you could just pick up and walk away with today. It's fantastic. When 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, like, it's almost like he's deferring the insights. He's like, this is interesting, this is interesting, this is interesting, this is interesting. And 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 he could have only intuitively guessed at before.

Yeah and also when he got back to Britain and was 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. He'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.

Writes it down, takes it away, and it all goes into the suit. So there is this slight myth that because it took him a long time to publish 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 weight of it to hit you because you didn't want it you didn't want it to be true before you didn't

have the basis to understand what you had only sort of vaguely intuitive 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, 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. I 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 that said there's a really good Joan Didion essay on keeping a notebook, particularly, and a 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, 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 in a book that I hadn't even conceived of writing.

And then I had the extra surreal experience. I owned Joe Dinian's chair. So I was sitting in her chair. Oh, wonderful. As I wrote this. And it may well have been the chair that she, you know, wrote that thing in. 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. I don't know if it's gonna be useful, but at some point, you know, it'll be a little window back into the past. Well, and 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 80s, but she had notebooks purchased and ready to use, you know, as if she was going to live another 20 years. It's almost like being a hoarder. You're hoarding this information,

and you tell yourself that someday you're going to use it. When 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. 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, as 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 Moleskine's were going through that sort of first boom about 20 years ago, 1520 years ago, I spoke to the guy at Barnes and Noble, he was then responsible for stocking them.

Yeah. And, and filling the shelves by the that sort of shelf they have by the checkout, which always has the moleskins on it. And 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, 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 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. And I'm always like, well, I might use this. 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 then, yeah, I'm just walking around years later using a thing from some tech conference from nine years ago because I was trying to save you know the 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. Yeah. Yes. The other problem I have is 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.

And 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 not wanting to lose it. Yeah, absolutely. This happens a couple of times in and it must have happened to a lot of people. In fact, I can think of several, but the one I like the most is Senator Bob Graham. He was absolutely, you would probably call it a neurosis 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 three 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 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 she had been at Columbia, I want to say

University in New York, and would for her writing journal would only use Columbia branded stationery, notebooks ring down once. Therefore, got her friends to mail them to her every time she ran out because she didn't live anywhere near Columbia for most of her life. But 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 retailers.

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. And 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, you know, a couple of years worth of to-do lists on. And then I ran out. And so the publisher, like I was like, look, how can I just buy like 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 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.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I love them. Japanese stationary. The quality of it is fantastic. The paper, how smooth it is, how light it is, the bindings always really strong. But 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. Even though you know, 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. You'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 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. This is interesting, because the first, she can't have been the first first, but the first gratitude journal on record is Oprah Winfrey. Really? She invented that? 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, right? Yes, yes. There's a line in Meditations where Marcus really 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, and you know at first I would sort of fill out that go, oh I'm grateful for this, I'm grateful for that. And I don't wanna say it felt facile, but it just wasn't doing it for me. 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 would try 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 really is trying to See how there's an opportunity and in everything that he's experiencing or that, or that there's some positive in it, or there's some philosophical challenge or meaning in it. And so to me, how many times are you gonna say

you're grateful for your spouse or your kids or that you're alive? I think at some point it becomes perfunctory and relatively meaningless. But if you try, 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, that to me is a philosophically beneficial exercise that is worth memorializing. Because again, you don't ever have to read it again, official exercise that that is that is worth memorializing because again you don't ever have to read it again but it's the forest function of always looking for something to be grateful for that isn't easy to be grateful for that's what I love and I I 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. And it became true after you typed it for the 10,000th time. That's how I try to think about it. That'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, 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? You know, what is this for? What's happening? Why am I even here? You know, 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 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,

in my colonial outposting, why? What do I feel seeing the bodies of these people? 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, where 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 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. 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. To 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 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 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. They're keeping the journal for their ghostwriter 15 years in the future to craft a memoir, or or now even less. So, so I can I'm going to accept this job 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 guy I completely agree. I think and the the guy at the moment, I'm just tell him,

I try to resist the urge to tell everyone just to write a diary because it becomes compulsive and meaningless. But I have a friend who's working for a charity delivering aid supplies to Ukraine, 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. And he goes, he went and helped after the earthquake in Turkey as well that were 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 gonna be doing your head so much good because you're gonna get it out of your head, all the worry about missile strikes and shells and roads being blown up around you, et cetera. Just 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 that's what makes her convert this autograph book into a diary. But 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 anyway. Yeah. Yeah. 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 like you put it on the page, so you're not putting it on yourself. And you're not putting it on other people. Yeah, beautifully expressed. Definitely. For a for a teenager to get that is just absolutely incredible. Yeah, one of the people I spoke to about about the benefits of journaling and working with people with PTSD and all this stuff was 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. Have you ever heard of the term nuclear family? The term was coined by an anthropologist in the 1920s to describe the family structure of a straight married couple and their kids. Well now, over a century later, that definition of family describes only 18% of American households.

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Mother, a mother to many. Follow, let me say this on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to episodes everywhere on May 22nd, or you can listen ad free by joining Wondery Plus and the Wondery app on Apple Podcasts. You 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

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 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. I don't see that happening with

people's Instagram accounts or their Snapchats or whatever. Yes. I mean, the only benefit of the digital stuff, as I was reading about Emerson's diary recently, and he had to have a diary that was just a key to understanding his other commonplace books. Like there isn't a worse structure for organizing things you want to keep track of than a blank notebook that is 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 so I can file it in a 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 and 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 asked, you know, unsorted note cards, which were abandoned several years ago. So I'd want 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 hard, is harder, heartbreaking. That happened to was it Wittgenstein's last book? It was his the post posthumous publication, the story I heard how much truth there isn't, I don't know. He wrote this book paragraph by paragraph on loose leafs of paper, and it was all arranged 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. Well, that's the big what if with Marcus Riles' 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. So do we have it in the order that he wrote it in? Mm-hmm, or is this some later? You know attempts 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 why and that our brains are random But uh, but yeah, does it break off at random or does it come to an end? why and that our brains are random but like the last passage in meditations is, you know, you've lived a citizen in a great city, five 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 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? And some later translator went and said, well, let's just end it with what he must have been thinking about at the end. The beginning of meditations is a collection called debts and lessons. It's really the only chapter that has a name. And Debt and Lessons is just Marcus really is 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, you know, when he was sitting down to start this notebook, I could see it easily happening either way. Yeah, fascinating. It seems like they do these things to torture us 2000 years later. Well, I mean, to speak of Marcus Riles' last thing, I mean, I think it's, it's not exactly glamorous. But you

know, 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 notebook. And I do wonder because he he was quite organized in a way. I mean, the notebooks are hugely wide ranging and they're very various. And 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. Because 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 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. You 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, it's both compulsive, but it also must have been so clarifying. Yeah, to have had the to 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 we're doing than anyone else. And to think like the final product is the 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. 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, 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 Sophie, the other thing is so few sort of finished objects, if you like, so he doesn't paint a huge number of paintings, 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. And apart from that, all of these amazing discoveries just go into libraries, no one ever really reads them and they never get published.

Yeah, that 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 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 happen in a vacuum.

Yeah, 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, he 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 there 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. Maybe that's slowing down. Yeah, there's, I think, you know, Marcus really, let's say he did write meditations for himself, then maybe he wouldn't wanted it. He didn't want it to be published. And so the 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 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, they're this is this isn't the good stuff. And that tendency in artists probably deprives the world. It 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 1000 that's world changing or amazing and and we're better for for getting access to it. Yeah. And and 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? Well, 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 an actual book by Epicurus, right? Here's some lost, there's a stoic named Chrysippus, who supposedly published 700 books and essays, and not a single one survives, right? 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, it strikes me as absolutely, incredibly unimaginably exciting. Yeah. 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. And 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 yeah, and you're just like, the idea of a of an ancient

philosophical text from the year 300 BC is being re translated and brought to us because of radio imagery and, and, 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. Like, the reason the Odyssey resonates more than Gilgamesh is because we've only got 150 years with Gilgamesh. And

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 again gains a bit of power. Yeah, that's That's really interesting. When I was looking at the Daily Stoic, or am really enjoying it, I suddenly realized, 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. The more modern example, or the other example of this is have you read a Tolstoy is a calendar of wisdom? No. Okay, you got to get that. It's incredible. So Tolstoy towards the end of his life, just

become sort of this spiritual seeker, not 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. And 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 100 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 Well, I loved your book I hope you get a US 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

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. It is the incredibly indeed very, very cool Bibli Oasis of Windsor, Ontario. They recently published Duck's Newbury report, 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. Amazing. 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. Oh, 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 and I'll see you next episode. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. And before you go, would you tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey on Wondery.com slash survey.