Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stowak. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time.
Here on the weekend when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stowak podcast. Social media has largely not been great for humanity.
Certainly not been great for us as individuals as far as our habits and practices. It's just an enormous time socket. You know, ripped apart our political system. It polarized us.
It distracted us. Probably made us more materialistic. Evaporated our tensions. You know, it didn't do a lot of great stuff for us.
But it's not all bad. I mean, look, maybe you found out about Stoicism through social media. These algorithms are, of course, very powerful. I try to take advantage of them where I can.
And I'm also always interested in other people who have used the algorithm for good, right, who have used it to spread positive messages or used it to popularize things that are difficult to popularize, an obscure school of ancient philosophy, not the easiest thing to get the algorithm to pick up. And I'd say Poetry, not the easiest. We had Ruby Carr on not long ago. Her counterpart, another very popular Instagram poet who I've known now, I guess, for three or so years is young Pueblo.
Young Pueblo came on the podcast back in 2022. We had a delightful conversation then and we had a delightful conversation. This time he came out to the pain of porch. His books have sold over a million and a half copies worldwide and translated in over 25 languages One of the things we talked about that I didn't know about him.
I didn't know how steep he was in meditation and Buddhist thinking. He kept talking about people who spent tens of thousands of hours meditating. I never really thought about the cumulative amount of time spent studying or practicing a philosophical practice, right? I've wondered, maybe you wonder how long I've actually put into Stoicism over the years.
Certainly, I would tend to measure my output in words rather than hours, but it was a really interesting conversation I was glad to have. He has a new book out called How to Love Better, the Path to Deeper Connection Through Growth, Kindness and Compassion. He's got a bunch of very popular poetry books which always immediately sell out at the book store where you have trouble keeping them and stalking. He signed a bunch of them.
He signed a lighter inward clarity in connection and the way forward. You can follow him on Instagram at Young Pueblo. That's why UNG underscored Pueblo. Follow him on Twitter at Young Pueblo.
No underscore. Look, there's a guy with an online audience in the millions when poetry is seemingly an achronistic or antiquated or just a domain of tenured university professors. He found a way to bring that to millions of people. I'm really fascinated by that.
So here is us talking about how not to let your emotions rule, how to have empathy for people you disagree with, where the Stoics and the Buddhists overlap and quite a bit about Emerson. Also, here is my conversation with Diego Perez, AKA Young Pueblo. What do you live in? I live in the woods in western Mass.
The woods. I'm like literally in the middle of nothing. Like throw kind of woods? Yeah, like literally pretty close.
Yeah. Two hours west of Boston, three hours north of New York City. Why there? I was just tired of the concrete.
I was tired. I grew up in Boston and then I lived in New York City for seven years and I don't know. I just needed some nature. Yeah.
I was wringing about throw one time that it's more wooded now than when he lived there. Yeah. He lived there. They just cut everything down.
So we had this sense of the landscape being one thing and actually what we think of as the good old days or when things were more rural, it was actually worse and more industrialized. Yeah. We were. I think it was just the same as the UK where they cut everything down.
They came to New England, cut everything down. And there is one tiny little place where there's an old growth forest that I went to that was it looks like Lord of the Rings. It just looks very different than these skinny little, you know? Obviously, I know they needed this stuff.
But what did they think as they were chopping down these 800 year old trees or whatever? You know, there's something about being explicable to me about the human mind that some people were like, this seems like a good idea. Like, you know, they're not filled with guilt and disgust and shame. Yeah.
It's just production. Yeah. I think it's just like, you know, going from survival to maybe thriving on a very material manner. But also probably just if you think there's an infinite amount of it and there was a good chunk of human history where we just didn't know where the limits were.
Like we just assumed there was, it went on like this forever. Right. There was just more land. Yeah.
Yeah. But then we got to the end of it. Yeah. And maybe they didn't fully know how old this stuff was, like how long it took, but they're just like, hey, I'm chopping down a thing.
That's like the human condition right there. Like you were, or the silliness of humans. It's like, I know this thing took 300 years to grow. Yeah.
And I'm going to chop it down. Yeah. But they grow back, right? It's like, yeah, every 300 years.
Yeah. Yeah. When I was in, I spent a little bit of time outside of Portland, Oregon, and there were some sick old growth forests and it just looked otherworldly. Like I almost felt like you were just stepping into a different world because it wasn't organized the way woods are now.
Like when you walk through woods in Western Mass now, they do feel a bit organized. Because they read. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And I think it's really special because it reminds you that you're like an animal. Yeah. We're like, we have some property in Southern California that's like up in these mountains and they have these trees that are like several thousand years old.
Like there's some of the oldest trees in the world, these like little punch. And it's like some guys walking over and chopping it down for firewood. Just like that, you know, I mean for hundreds of years, people doing that. This thing is 3000 years old.
It's older than basically every civilization. And somebody's using it for an hour of warmth. Yeah. Just the ephemerality of it is kind of.
Yeah. Yeah. And we're just down now. Yeah.
And there's probably more people that don't care than care. And so there's this battle between those two sort of four. But also like how the relation between, you know, you have the awareness, you have the information and then as necessity grows. Sure.
And then like the importance of it just decreases. And you're like, eventually, you know, if the world like that seems from, what was it movie? Like 2012 and like, or everything falls apart and the whole and then they're in the library just burning all the books. Yeah.
And it's like, we're dying. That's true. Yeah. It's hard to tell someone who's shivering to death that they've talked on this tree.
Sure. But just just the, that is like what's crazy to me too about Walden is is is Thoreau talks about this that they would chop ice from Walden Pond and ship it to India. Like, like even at that global commerce at that period of time was already so complex and multinational and whatever that like, yeah, if you're a, I don't know, you're, you're part of the British Raj. Yeah.
Some army ops and you're drinking, you know, a cocktail with ice in it. They made of chopped that ice from Walden Pond loaded onto a ship in Boston, Harvard, they covered in sawdust, ship it across the ocean and then they're taking back, you know, whatever they're looting from India. Yeah. Yeah.
I know what the fluctuations in whatever. But like what he's sort of commenting on there. It's not just, hey, I'm retreating from the busyness of Boston. Yeah, but that Boston has his global commerce hub.
Yeah. Means that everything is so interconnected and global. And he's just kind of making everything small. Yeah.
Yeah. That's. That's wild man. I've never thought about that.
And I imagined like what did it take a month to get there? Probably. Yeah. But even just like that.
They could chop ice and keep it. Yeah. For the journey and all of that. That's been, I mean, that's been one of my experiences from just like, you know, traveling around for this book launch and just for the past few years, like doing speaking events and the world's not that big.
No. It's not that big. It's like it takes a long time to get to Japan from here. Yeah.
But other than that, like you can really get to a place in like 14 hours. You can basically get anywhere in the world in a day. Yeah. But to me, it's like there's so many of us, so much culture, but then even amidst all that culture, like we're pretty similar.
Like there are a lot of things about the human mind that are like, you know, we react, we have anger, we have going through the same series of emotions. And I've been talking to my wife about this. I'm like, we're like Jitter Christian Merti was so correct. Like, you think you're different, but we're the same.
We suffer in the same ways and we like are moving through the same field of emotions. I think that's why probably almost all our all religious insight, all philosophical insight, is saying like the five or six same things. Oh, yeah, totally. Totally.
You go through like that's so interesting about history is like, you have these different people who either move through philosophy or move through, you know, some type of special experience that, you know, illuminates them in some manner and they keep, keep revealing the same truths about how important and conditional love is. How valuable it is, you know, to have good will and move through good will and how that supports your own piece and the piece of the community. Yes. And like these like fundamental things just get rediscovered over and over again through like different people's perspectives.
Yeah. Like, you know, making meaning from suffering and how we're the cause of most of our own suffering and that it's our opinions and expectations that are the problem. They're like just the same sort of core insights, whether it's Buddhist thought or Hindu thought or stoic thought. Totally.
Yeah. And they're very like, I think there's a connection between like awakening the individual and stabilizing the community where like a lot of times it feels like the two things are moving and synced where like during the Buddhist time, you know, all these people start practicing, some of them become enlightened, but a lot of it is then like turned towards like, how are we going to treat each other? And I think it's pretty special. Yeah.
Yeah. And it's happening all the time. And whenever we forget, someone's going to remember. Yes.
Someone will rediscover the old idea or repopularize the old idea. That's sort of the largely because we something will happen that reminds us of the consequences of not doing that. Yeah. Chaos.
Yeah. Chaos cruelty, you know, things that make you feel ashamed of your country or your community. When you're like, Oh, yeah, we've we built this in response to that. Like I heard someone say that tradition is not always true, but the expression is tradition is a solution to a problem we forgot about.
Like we invented this to address that. Yeah. And also see someone go like monogamy, it doesn't make any sense. It's not biological.
And it's like, yeah, society is invented monogamy. So people would stop killing each other. Or so things were fair, you know, or or because it was making people so profoundly unhappy and they're choosing one form of unhappiness for another. You know, it's not always perfect.
And no one is saying they're good solutions, but it is it's addressing a root cause. And you you rip out the tradition or the assumption at your peril. If you haven't explored why we slowly evolved to them. Can we go on that tangent though, which is really interesting because it's a conversation I've been having with myself and like with friends where I think a lot of my so I'm releasing my fifth book and I think a lot of that that even being possible is directly tied to me being in a long term relationship.
Oh, sure. Having the stability of being with one person and having enough satisfaction, where I'm not looking at other places and like having that part of my mind, just like be chilled out so that I can just focus. Well, I hate the idea that to be successful at what you do. You have to be like a monster or you have to be this sort of juvenile, arrested development, you know, emotionally immature person.
There are obviously a number of artists and entrepreneurs and athletes who sort of personify that, but I tend to find either that they're the exception that proved the rule or it was immensely expensive for them and everyone else involved. So it seems like one fueled the other, but actually it was more suppressing than it was empowering and it I wouldn't say they were paragons of happiness either. No, totally. And I've been thinking this in the same ones to where like the idea of the tortured artist and like that's where the epitome of our comes from.
And it sounds like nonsense to me. It's like I rather, you know, I'm curious to see when we're living in this world now, where there's so many people actively trying to cultivate self awareness. Yeah. And it's like what art transforms into and reaching these sort of almost like new heights because it's a special time.
Like people are reflecting in so many different ways. Millions of people are using therapy to their benefit. Millions of people are meditating. Millions of people are reading your books.
They're like trying to self do some self analysis. And I think that's pretty like pretty different in terms of like how connected the global community is and how like, you know, whether you're here or you're in Singapore, you could probably type in like, how can I deal with my anxiety? Like is there someone I can talk to and you can find somebody within like 10, 15 miles, you know, it's pretty special. Yeah, that's true.
I mean, athletes used to just get by on raw talent, even not that long. You see pictures of them and they're they're smoking in a lot of room or they were partying all night before or I mean, look, baseball players used to play in wool uniform. So like they were obviously good and the product on the field was pretty impressive. But what we slowly steadily, we realized, oh, hey, if you play in this fabric, first that fabric, you perform better.
Hey, like the NBA has limited the amount of back to back road games because the players play worse when they're on when their sleep is disrupted. Like we just realized these things. And so the idea that like the artist doesn't become professionalized and have to take care of their habits, you know, and like when you look at older musicians, they're shoe choice they have is because they're worried about their back. Yeah, they're doing it for like when everyone died at 27 because they OD, yeah, what it meant to be a rock star was different than if you can theoretically do it to your 85 and if your goal is to do it to your 85, you have to rethink some of your assumptions and your practices.
And yeah, the idea that you should just be treating your body like a garbage can and that that's going to be conducive to creative expression strikes me as anachronistic. Maybe you've been hearing the buzz about live shopping lately. I know I have and it makes sense. Like people are already on their phones or hanging out.
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I mean, just because I have you here for this moment and it's, I'm curious. Can we talk about the relationship between creating something that you hopefully, you know, hopefully brings value to people, like putting a book together and what your relationship is to marketing that book? Cause I think there's like, you're in it now. Yeah.
I mean it right now. And I know like we're always in it together. You know, like I released a book and you released some book two months after whenever I write, put together a book, I tell my editor, Matthew Benjamin, I'm like, can you find out when Ryan's releasing his next book to make sure it's not on the same week? You know, and I'm like, carefully, there's something like this.
I'm like, there's a few people I'm like, we have to kind of be mindful of when things are, you know, but you must have learned so much about marketing. I know I've learned a bunch about it too. It's not the thing I wanted to learn. It's not, it's not the reason why I've learned how to like, honestly, just the different platforms, how to use them in concert to be able to get the most eyes to even realize that I have a new book out.
Because you know, it'll be like three, four, five months of people will still be people who are really committed to your work and be like, Oh, I know you have a new book out. Sure. So there's a lot to it. They just read the obstacles away.
It's been out for 12 years or whatever. It's new to someone if they haven't heard of it. I do think it's for both of us, what we do is crazy in the sense that like you do poetry and people are like, poetry, nobody reads poetry anymore. I do angel philosophy and it's like angel philosophy.
And so you already have this uphill battle and that there's a perception that what you do is irrelevant or, you know, quaint or silly or, you know, just not what people want. And so you have to figure out like marketing to me is not like degrading. It's the process of it's like another puzzle you have to figure out. Like you have to figure out how do I get the words to go in this order and rhyme and say what I want.
That's like the constraints. And I feel like I have what I want to say and what I'm excited about. Yeah. And then you have the world that's totally indifferent to that.
And you have to figure out how to get your vision to align and be interesting to someone else. And some of that's just raw, like, you know, boot leather going on shows and talking about a lot of it's like how do you make the thing that's relevant now? And then also hopefully so it's both how do you make a thing that's both timely and timeless? That's right.
That's both a creative puzzle, but also a marketing puzzle. Yeah, I had one of these original sort of moments of inspiration before I released my first book. I used to, I was living in New York City and I would go to the Strandbook store a lot and the Strandbook store, they have these like two tables right at the front. There's like the best of the best.
And then there's also like timeless classics. And I'm like, I need to figure out how to write something that helps people so much that it ends up on these two tables as like a personal goal. And in what's been interesting is so I'm releasing my second nonfiction book. So I've been stepping a little bit away from poetry.
But in doing the second nonfiction book, I had the clear idea of what I wanted to write about, but then I had learned enough about sort of human psychology and how to like structure chapters in a way where it's like the person who's reading it is feeling one victory after another. Sure. You know, so it's not like this giant slog. So you're not only getting good information, but you're working with the mind as opposed to against it.
Do you think about that too? Yeah. No, my books are deliberately short. Yeah.
And like I just did this four book series on the Cardinal version. I could have just written one epic book on the Cardinal virtues, but four books allows someone to breeze through each one of them. Yeah. And then it feels like you're creating the sensation of, wow, that went by really fast, it's very compelling.
And that's also it's true, but it's also because it's half the length of an arm or whatever, right? And so thinking, I think like, look, there's lots of forms of poetry you could do, but I think you probably gravitate towards like when I read your poems on Instagram, I'm not scrolling like 10 slides. It's one, I'm getting it most of it there, like some of them are longer, but when I read poetry and like I hear about some poem, I look it up and it comes up on poetry or whatever, if I'm like scrolling, I'm like, I'm probably not going to do this. You know, like, but like, that's just like a fact on the ground.
You have to figure out how to like navigate. And do you, do you feel like there's like when you sort of like rev yourself up for like another launch, you know, it feels in some ways I'm reaching this point where I am obviously like this book that I just wrote, I love better. It's, I personally think it's better than all the other books that I've written. Just because it's taken a long time to go on the wrong direction.
Right. But it's taken time to like, honestly, just learn how to be clear, like, how to like just be more clear, how to like use sentence structure in a better way. And in the material, like it's taken a long time, you know, so many thousands of hours of meditating and all that stuff to be able to even fix my personal relationship with my wife and also take that understanding and put it into the book. But then it's like another launch and a launch is like a little bit of a battle.
You know, it's like you're battling the algorithm. You have to maintain your own stamina. You have to then go on tour and it's like, I'm like, Hey, how many more of these am I going to do? Like I'm like willfully entering a battle here.
Well, the fantasy is you just make something that's so good that it just does. And I think that that misleads a lot of people. It's another myth, like the tortured artist. Yeah.
It's a myth, like the, you know, Kerouac sat down and wrote on the road in 24 hours on a bender. And it's like, no, almost everything that is impressive was methodically and gradually built. Yeah. And painstakingly so.
And like a launch is it would be amazing that you put out the book and then you get to your publisher and then they call you and they go, the New York Times doing a front page excerpt and a trend, you know, like everybody like you're on these five morning shows and then all and I've never, never done a book where I felt like I got all the things that I thought were possible to get. Yeah. You know, and so you're always kind of in this street fight for attention. And you also, I think early in your career, you're like, I want to go on a book tour.
Yeah. I want to publish or do send me on a tour and then you do it. And then you're like, I hope I never have to do that. I know to be able to like stay at home and like be able to put a book out.
I mean, it's nice to be able to connect with people, honestly, like in person and share the stories, but it's also taxing. I think though that like when I went into writing, I also felt that same thing, like, you know, not too far from each other. Ruby, Cowrer releases, Milk and Honey, James Clear releases, Atomic Habits. Yeah.
And they're these books just sell 10 million copies on their own, you know, like and they just keep growing. I know James very well. Yeah. And we had this mastermind group.
We met every year for three years. And he paid for it all out of his own pocket, invited all these different authors, a bunch of people you've heard. And he just literally downloaded everything that everyone had learned into that launch, which then, you know, he did like 200, like he built an email list for years, he did like 200 pockets, he did media. It was, it was as good as I've ever seen anyone do it.
And then people are like, that book came out of nowhere and it didn't come out of nowhere at all. He's the only guy who anytime I'm ever ahead of him on any list, he reaches out. He's like, congratulations. And what did you do?
Yeah. You know, like, he's always trying to learn. And it's really cool seeing that. But I brought that up because not having that experience has honestly been really liberating where it's like having one book that's just like a major bestseller, you know, seems like an ideal, but honestly, it's been fun, like fine-tuning the craft, like learning how to like do it better, like continuing to grow as an individual and understand like, what am I learning?
That's really affecting my life in a better way. And like putting it together in a, you know, a set of books that can like hold much more weight than just one individual book that hopefully takes off to the stars. Well, you think you, you think you want it, like you think you want it all upfront in a lump sum and you want to get every break that you can. And maybe, I don't know, I haven't experienced it, but it's probably not as good for you.
Do you know what I mean? Like, it's probably better to like fame and success are a poison. Highly decidifying. No, I mean, like, it kills people.
Yeah. Obviously at some level, it is potent. And so the question is how big of a dose do you want to take all at once? It's probably something that you want to take slowly and steadily over time and build up a tolerance and earn immunity for it.
Like, you guys, the enemy came out basically the same month as the set alert of not giving up. And yeah, that book probably cumulatively has sold more than all of my books combined. I've done all right. But like, if you would ask me what I wanted, I probably would have said that.
But Mark's been really honest about this. Like, it's a lot. It's destabilizing and disorienting. And I mean, it's lucrative, but it's a lot.
And I think everyone wants kind of transformative, you know, generational success. Yeah. And actually you probably want about 50%. You know, like, and you want it, you want it doled out steadily.
Yeah. Because it's just the chances of it killing you or less or breaking you or less. Totally destabilizing. I think that's one of the things that I really like about sort of the newer translations coming out of the Buddhist teaching where, you know, they, he would refer to life as Duka, this word that means suffering as a rate, right?
But another way to translate it is life is satisfying. Life is stressful. Yeah. And that's much more relatable.
And in my experience, I've both been extremely poor, like aerobic, extremely poor, growing up in Boston, where my mom, she cleaned houses, my dad worked at a supermarket. And then now since, you know, writing my fifth book, I've had success. I'm not like crazy wealthy, but I'm not poor anymore. And after having experienced both things, they're both quite dissatisfied.
You know, both like it's like, yeah, the mind is just like when the mind, especially is untrained, it just is constantly reaching out for more. And especially if so many people are turning the light on you and giving you all that attention. And then the mind is like, OK, more and more and more like a crab that's endlessly trying to grab. Well, no one feels like they've done it.
Like that's what's interesting that James is messaging you and going, Hey, what have you done? He's not like, there's obviously humility in that. Like, it's only happened twice, by the way, like, two times I've gone in. I think every time I because the number one plaque up there, James was the week before and then we got there.
Yeah. Which is also there's something helpful about that too. You realize like, OK, this thing that I worked all these years for, sit directed to all this accomplishment. I did it.
That's a normal week for someone else. Yeah. Right. Like my best week ever was a slight deviation above his normal.
Yeah, these 30,000, 40,000 copies that took so much work for us. So a regular week and you have that experience in life. You'll you'll meet someone who's usually within like finance or business or whatever. And they go, you realize, Oh, this person, this person has spent on a house remodel every dollar that I've ever earned in my life.
What is my giant enormous, I'm piling all my accomplishments up in one thing. They're like, I did that. There's actually a famous exchange between Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut. They're at this party of his billionaire.
Do you know the story? No, tell me that. They're the party of his billionaire and Vonnegut is teasing Joseph Heller. And he says, you know, this guy, there is this house in Long Island.
This guy probably made more money this week than Catch 22 has made in its entire run. And and Heller says, yeah, that's true. But I have something that this person will never have. And Vonnegut, that's what could that possibly be?
And he says, I have enough. And so what is interesting when you meet very rich and powerful and important people is how many of them or rather how few of them feel that, like they don't feel rich and powerful or sufficient or that they've done it. They feel exactly like you feel, which is like they're measuring themselves against someone else. And so to get to get to a point of enoughness or to feel good or to just feel proud of yourself is actually an extraordinary accomplishment and a like probably the rarer form of wealth.
I mean, you can't pay for it. No, you can't pay for it. And I've seen that happen a lot where, you know, I'm friends with Jack Cornfield and he has, you would not believe who called him. Yeah.
You know, it's like any time I think probably in the past like 20, 30 years when some, you know, billionaire gets a divorce, they call him because he like has peace in his mind. Yes. And I've, you know, I've gone to dinners and like been around like people who are really wealthy and like, you can feel their agitation. You can just feel like how they're looking at you trying to listen to your words, but they want what's deeper than the words.
They want the piece that's inside that you can't really transmit. And the answer is usually like, you know, I feel the way I feel. I have a long way to go. But I feel the way I feel because like I'm at a table like 12, 13,000 hours, you know, like I put a lot of time into it.
Sure. It's also funny to meet those people and, you know, the luncheon, the dinner goes on. And then at a certain point, they tell you their book idea. So it's like, they have all the money in the world and whether they do, they would like to do what you do.
Yeah. And like that was something that I realized really early on that this is more an analogy than anything specific about writing. But like you tend to be jealous of what other people have and you don't think about the people that would kill to do what you do and how lucky you are. If you found something that is worth doing, that people think is worth doing and you get to do that.
That is, that's the lottery. That's the jackpot. And so you go, Oh, these people, their dream is to do what I get to do. Yeah.
And did I wake up this morning and feel like I have an incredible, rare, you know, sought after thing? No, I just was like, Oh, I gotta do this. You know, and when you can remember that it helps you. I mean, what you don't have often looks very shiny.
And I've heard the same thing from a friend. She was like at the time when she told me that she was like, you know, the number two at this like billion dollar crypto firm, she was like getting her book together. And she was like, I can't wait to be like you. And I was like, what are you talking about?
I'm like, are you serious? Like, it's you're also saying like, I'm my context is like, one of my jobs feels like I'm, it's my job to pull my family out of poverty. Yeah. Like we immigrated from Ecuador.
Like, so when I'm listening to this really wealthy person, be like, Oh, I want to like do what you're doing. I'm like, that's a wild because I'm trying to like lift my family up and, you know, have that sense of economic stability so that we don't have to struggle anymore. You it's striving to her. It's tranquility and peace.
Yeah. Yeah. It's really funny. It's funny too.
Like, because you live in the woods, I live on this ranch. Like whenever people, if you have like sort of a weird life, like, you don't just live in a condo tower somewhere and people hear about it, they always do something like, Oh, I've always wanted to do that. Or that's my dream someday. Yeah.
And you go, yeah, it's not like I, you know, I didn't have to like get through Navy Seal Hill Week to live on this farm. Like, it's anyone can do it. It was a choice. Yeah.
It was a choice. Yeah. No, and it was, it was so interesting too that moment. Like my wife and I were holding it as this like dream that we were going to walk into at some point and then the first wave of the pandemic hits and we're both like, let's get out of this tiny as apartment.
Like let's just go. Let's go to the woods. Like we've always wanted to. And it's been the best because we ended up moving near the meditation center that we always go to.
And over there, there's just like so many people who have meditated for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, like, you know, literally like people who were walking around have put, have put like 30, 40,000 hours of meditation into their minds. Like their minds are like weapons like so highly cultivated, but they're the most peaceful people in the world. So it was nice not only, you know, getting some sense of external tranquility to support internal tranquility, but the people that we were around were just very different than, you know, the half has of New York City. Yeah, it's not like getting accepted to Harvard.
Like you can move anywhere. Yeah. You can do it. And often it's, it's cheaper and easier than whatever you're currently doing.
Oh my God. requires making it that choice. Especially when you move out of the city. Like when we, when we got our house, we were like, it felt like we were living in a castle.
Like we went from this tiny one bedroom apartment and then we're paying the same for a mortgage and we're like, you know, five acres of land and all that. And it's just, no, I might ranch. I mean, obviously it's different now because Austin's went up. But my ranch, my first mortgage payment on my ranch was less than a studio apartment.
We had renting in New York City. And so, you know, when people have always wanted to do that, it's like, I think it's easier than I think it is. Did you ever live in New York? I did for how long?
Like less than a year. Yeah, you're out of there. I had the idea that to be an artist, you have to go live in a noisy, dirty, cement place. New York was special.
I think the one thing that I was happy about was, you know, I did my seven year as a part time there. And when we got there, we had nothing. And then when we left, we had a little bit of something. But what I did have was the inspiration and the support from sort of key people that I had my first self-published book release, my friend Elena Brouwer, she co-hosted that event.
And because she co-hosted that event with me, it opened up the rest of the country to make sure people were like, come, like come to DC, come to LA, do all these things. And like sort of these sort of key little moments. I got my first literary agent there. And then when I felt like I had enough sort of connections where, because I don't like networking, networking to me is pretty lame.
I rather make strong friendships and it feels reciprocal that we can support each other. But once I had those friendships and I was like, I'll have these friendships with her, I live here or not. Let's just bounce. Let's go.
Well, one thing I wanted to talk to you about is because I think people, they think this is what the Buddhism is. But when people think stoicism, they think it's like the absence of emotion. Right. They think like if you meditate enough, you have transcended the feeling.
Yeah. But this one, this one, my favorite poems, you have this one. Emotional maturity is not about being above your emotions. It is about being able to sit with the rawness of every feeling without letting it take over your mind in actions.
It's about facing storms without getting blown away. I think the distinction between having the emotion and then acting on the emotion or having the emotion and being overwhelmed by the emotion, that's the best you can hope for. There's no point where they cease to exist. No, they don't see a success at all.
And I think what's hard for people is that we often live in a very sort of like, we're trapped in our own black and white thinking where it's either yes or no. And it's the solid either or's. And what stoicism introduces you, what the Buddhist teaching introduces you to is basically like the gray area, the subtlety. And that's something that if I had not experienced it myself, I wouldn't know it exists.
But you can feel the difficulty of a tense emotion on or that it's there. You're not suppressing it. You're feeling it, but you're not acting out on it. You're simply just observing it, giving yourself time.
And then you start seeing all the different options that you can take. I can either act on this dense emotion and do an action that I might later regret or I could just slow down and choose something a little more skillful. But that openness of mind, like I just was oblivious to it until I, you know, cultivated it. Well, I think the reason people struggle with it, obviously on the personal level is difficult.
But the example that I get all the time ago, well, what about an injustice? I agree about the injustices in the world. And it's only if you can understand this distinction between having the feeling and then being sort of driven by the passion, that it makes sense because, yes, the injustice, the cruelty that you saw, the unfairness, the persecution, the corruption, whatever, that should make you angry. But if you are going to defeat evil or resolve an injustice or bring change in the world, if you are blinded by your anger, it's precisely because it is such a profound injustice or a big problem that you have to have all your wits about you.
Absolutely. I mean, I couldn't agree more because if you see someone doing something wrong and you need to stop them, are you going to stop them with a mind that's riddled with stress and that's riddled with fear or hate, anger, whatever it could be? But then your perception is immediately so unclear, your strategic thinking goes out the window and then you're just, you know, probably end up acting with brutality with the same brutality that you saw. Sure.
So I think it's much more skillful to, you know, this is wrong, this needs to be stopped. And you can also, and this is like sort of like the really asking a person to step up to the higher level, which is like, you can have compassion for the person that's committing harm to, you know, compassion for the person who's being hurt, compassion for the person who's doing the harm because they're like, they're rolling in their ignorance. Like, can you imagine living in their mind in a mind that's so full of tension that they're willingly causing harm to another person? That's horrific.
Or just like, I try to remind myself, like, they're not getting away with anything because that's one of the things like when someone speaks to us poorly or that you see someone cheating and getting ahead, one of the things that triggers in us, it's not just the injustice, but the sense that the universe is unfair and that they're getting away with this thing, that they're not being punished. And if you can step back and you understand history, you understand psychology, you have your own experiences, you realize, oh, they're not getting away with anything. They might be winning the contest or getting the money or, you know, getting the thing that they said they want. But you also understand that this person is incapable of getting what they actually want, which is some semblance of peace or happiness or worth trying to treat some wound that they have, which is feeling good.
You realize like, they're not getting away with anything because it sucks to be them. No, they're living in the torture of their own mind. And I would never want that for myself for other people. So I think when you really take a step back, it's like, you know, someone who's like just decimating a population who's just, you know, doing some type of harm and either on the individual level on a group level, like it takes a lot of internal intensity to even produce that action into the world.
And you don't want to live like that. That's just like, I don't know. Yeah, it's a lot of it isn't this like math equation where you do this and then the variables cancel each other out and you don't have to do anything. Like you can have empathy and understand, okay, it's actually tortured to be this person.
It sucks to be them. I'm still as a prosecutor, have to bring them up on charges as a, you know, a friend, I still have to speak up. You still have to do something about the problem, but you just understand that it helps mitigate that distress you feel when you're like, hey, this is breaking the order of the universe that this person isn't doing their fair share and being rewarded for. This person is actually shitty and they have a good reputation.
You know, that kind of bothers us because it doesn't line up. Yeah. And it's like, no, no, there's just another part of it that you're not seeing, which is that it sucks to be them. And there's so much that you're not seeing too.
Like, I think there are times where, and I'm not trying to name any names, but there are times where like people have public personas, but then like us who write books and do things, you know, we all like know about each other. People will tell you like, you know, you don't want to be around that person. Yeah. And like, so even though outwardly they look, you know, so nice and kind in the background, you know, I'm sure people are saying, you know, the same things about Diddy.
Like, they're like, just be careful. Like, don't stay at the party too late. Sure. But the actions reverberate.
People see them, people feel them, and then they talk about them. So I think whether you win or lose, you know, one battle, I think if you're causing a lot of harm, like, not that the harm's necessarily going to come back to in the same way, but people are going to know about it and they're going to change their actions around you. You're doing a violence to yourself also. It doesn't mean you're necessarily suffering for the same degree that other people you're making suffer, but like it sucks to be you.
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And I'm sure you get this a lot too. But I think one of the things that I find challenging about putting myself out there and doing events is like, I don't want anybody putting you on a pedestal. Like, there's literally nothing special about, like, I'm not perfect. I'm not enlightened.
You know, I like to meditate, but I'm still very much on the road. I make mistakes fully in perfect person, have so much to learn. But I think sometimes just because people are accustomed to seeing your face, they give almost like a. Not just the trust to read your book, but like a higher level of trust where like Ryan definitely has all the answers, you know, yes.
I mean, that's just in some ways just misunderstanding what art and philosophy is, which is you're crediting the person with the thing that they're a conduit for. Yeah, exactly. We're learning. Yeah, like, we're actively learning.
And I think that's like, it's tough because part of us, we have this, you know, it's funny because it like reminds me of like Freud. It's like, we want to create these like images in our minds that are the perfect mom, the perfect dad. And like, it's people who can we can truly depend on, but like, we're all these highly imperfect human beings. We're figuring it out.
Yeah. No, there's a difference also between articulating something and fully integrating it into your own life. And so we're all sort of on this spectrum and sometimes we can articulate it very beautifully and then struggle to apply it. Sometimes we can apply it, but I have trouble articulating it and yeah, you don't want to.
You don't want to assume a person is like what they produce. Yeah, and they could be similar to it. But I think that's why like, I really enjoy. I have these two people who I think of as my teachers who I meditate with and they neither of them have written books.
Yeah, neither of them have, you know, they don't go on podcasts. They don't have Instagrams. Like their lives are strictly devoted to service. Like, you know, one's 50 and has probably meditated around 30,000 hours.
The other one's in his mid seventies. And to me, like what I find inspiring about these individuals is not only are they devoted to service and helping others, but they live very simple lives and they're like, they're not afraid of death. They're not like, so like these key things where I'm like, I'm still cultivating that strength that they have. And like they may still be cultivating this within them.
But when we're talking, when I'm receiving inspiration from them, when I'm receiving direction from them, I'm just like, you have all the things that I really need to develop. Yeah, at some level, they've conquered whatever part of it in you or in most artists that's like, I hope this does well. Like I need people to know this. Yeah.
You know what I mean? They're there. There is a sort of a monkish level you can get to where you are, totally self-contained. And like the world would be in not a great shape if everyone got there because, you know, actually a whole part of sort of Buddha's breakthrough is the realization that you can't pursue your enlightenment on your own.
This is also the inquiry of Plato's Cave, which is the idea that you discover something, do not then have an obligation to teach it and share it. But the line between the obligation to teach and share and the ego is always hard to discern. It is hard. It is hard.
But I'm grateful to the people who are at the sort of like the far ends of the bell curve, you know, like James Claire, like I'm so happy that we even have this model of like, I'm grateful that we have a Jordan to know where we're going, you know, to know like what, what is it even like, I can put more energy and like sort of a new market. You thought the market was this, you thought the ceiling on the market was here and actually there's a whole, no, whole not normally reachable. Yeah, you can reach. Yeah.
I mean, even when all that stuff came out about, you know, between the trial between the different publishing agencies and like all the information came out and it's literally like 200 authors that sell enough books to pay off the advances of all the other authors. Like it's wild. Just like knowing that information, I was talking to a friend about how the publishing industry, it's just an investment firm. They're just basically VC firms.
They make tiny little bets and maybe 5% of those bets are going to work out to pay everything back. And I'm like, well, I'm fortunate that I'm on that end. Like I can sell books and like the books are good enough that, you know, you'll share them with a friend. But it's also like a very haphazard relationship where like I talked to my wife the other day and I'm like, I almost feel like a young basketball star.
You know, you get invited up to these like rooms with the CEO of like, you know, the publishing house and I know I'm only being invited because I can sell like, you know, we have this relationship where we're both benefiting from these books being out. But you're like a mind that they've struggled and just trying to extract everything. The can of it. And then though as soon as it goes dry, they'll cover you up.
The relationship is over. Yeah. But I'm grateful for it. Like I'm also happy like we work together because I love, you know, for the publishing house.
I'm part of and all that stuff. But I know that the relationship wouldn't work if I wasn't selling. Yeah. Well, and the metaphor of like, hey, I have this thought, I'm not going to attach my identity to it.
I'm not going to identify with it. Is also true for success, which is like, hey, I'm having the success. Yeah, the success can't have me. Like at this moment, I am your time's best selling author.
At this moment, I am delivering certain amounts of revenue or sales or reach, but it's not me. Yeah, because it can go away at any time and it 100% will go away. I will die. I know.
Yeah. Or the well will be tapped out. And so this is what I say to people all the time and sometimes it makes them uncomfortable. I'm like, it's going well right now.
Yeah. Like the things are going well right now. I don't know how it's going to be. We know when I drop books, seven book eight, it may be better.
It may be worse. I have no idea. But what I do understand is that everything is fundamentally impermanent at the atomic level, the sort of the biological level, the cosmological level, everything is just flowing impermanence. It feels like this universe is just one giant river that flows forward.
And you want to work with that as opposed to against it. And what that really means is you have to embrace impermanence. And I mean, the Buddhist teaching is just revolves around this idea of embracing impermanence that helps you understand why life is the satisfying and then helps you understand why the sense of self is fundamentally real. But does your boy Marcus really talk about embracing impermanence?
Yeah. Yeah. He talks about how everything in your life came from change, including existence, right? So at one point, you did exist.
Yeah. And now you exist. And then what happens is then you fear death, which is just the same change happening again. Or everything in your life that you like was a result of change, right?
Like something wasn't permanent. Yeah. And so you got this. The problem is that rational thing that we do is even though to get where we are to get things the way we liked them, we had to embrace and in fact seek out all sorts of change, it's like we think that we can choose how much change we get.
Like we're like, Hey, I'm stopping now. Like this is when I take my cards off the table and I get to keep my winnings and stay. And that's not how it works. It's always in this state of flux and what I try to remind myself of because that impermanence can be scary.
You're just like, Oh, you can take away the success. And that's true. Right. They can take away your success.
They can take away your children. They can take away your happiness. They can take away your health. All that stuff can go away.
What I try to remind myself, this note is explicit on this, but I think it's fundamentally a stoic idea. I go, they can take away everything that I have, except the fact that I'm not. I had it. So like you can't take away that I did it that I and that you can't take away this moment where I'm looking around and my kids are playing and my wife and I are sitting or I just finished this meal or, you know, I just had this great day of writing.
You can take away the product, the thing, but you can't take away that I had it that I did it, the feeling that I had in that moment. That's the one thing that I possess. And that's so powerful. Like, because it hit me once when I was like, you know, in the middle of a, like I go away to meditate for like 30, 45 days and when you're away there, meditating, you're there, you know, in the darkness of the meditation cell because you meditate with a group and you also have these little rooms inside of a pagoda, which is basically a closet.
So it's like fully dark and you're there meditating, maybe for like 10, 11 hours a day, but it hit me so hard that like our universe is not just want to change, but that change directly describes motion. Like our universe is one of motion. Everything is moving. And what does that mean?
Is that nothing is ever static? Like it's constantly dynamic. And because of that dynamism, we have life, you know, and I think that it made me think so similar to what you were talking about. It hit me that we have this combative relationship of change where we fear it because we're afraid of what it will take away, but we never have a relationship of gratitude towards change because it gave us the people that we love like the fact that the earth even exists is because of change.
Or you know, the fact that we even have these opportunities to be around our parents, even our parents may die someday. We got to know them. We got to learn from them. We got to embody these characteristics that we can hopefully give to our friends and children someday.
So to me, it's like, um, it feels really important to balance out our relationship with change. Like, yeah, change can be scary sometimes, but man, we have everything because of change. Yeah, the stokes talk about how like everything is coming in and out of being time is zipping by us. You know, everything is in a state of motion and marks versus so it would take an idiot to feel angry at any of this as if any of it lasts.
Right. There's like a Southern expression. You don't like the weather. We'll just wait a minute.
You know, because it's always changing. And so I think in the moment, you know, you don't like where we are politically. You don't like, you know, some state in a relationship, you don't like what your neighbor is. You don't like any of this stuff.
Don't worry. It'll it'll change, you know, none of the things actually last in both in a sort of a cosmic sense. Like we definitely know that. And then also think about times you've had that feeling before when you were like, I'm sick of it.