I'm Calne Newport and this is deep questions.

The show where I answer queries from my readers about work, technology, and the deep life.

So we're doing something special in and the Deep Life.

So we're doing something special in today's episode of the Deep Questions podcast. I will be joined soon by our very first guest host, my friend and fabulously best-selling author Ryan Holiday.

And you might know Ryan for his books on Stoicism.

The obstacle is the way, ego is the enemy, stillness is the key, and his most recent

book Lives of the Stoics, which comes out on the 29th of September which is just a day or two after this

podcast is first released.

So I've known Ryan for a long time.

He lives a really interesting deep style life where he has a ranch with 40 acres and he goes for walks with his family to see the sun rise on his own land.

He has this office in this small town outside of Austin in an old building that he goes to to do his thinking or do his writing or to do his podcasting he has more books than most small town

libraries he's also entirely autodidactic and self-taught he didn't go to

college and yet has built up this expert level understanding of Stoicism that he makes tractable for those of people out there that are looking for a deeper philosophical foundation for constructing how they lived their life.

Really interesting guy, known him for a long time,

and given that his book was just coming out this week,

I thought he would make an excellent guest host.

So what we try to do is, I ask him some questions, but I also as in a normal episode of this show,

we do reader questions, except for instead of it's just me answering, we get Ryan to give his thoughts as well.

So we get into that, we get into your questions, we get into his life on the ranch, we get into the state of the publishing industry.

Interestingly, you'll notice sort of towards the end of the why there's no young people writing nonfiction anymore, critical theory, how that's spreading,

what its impact is going to be on culture, academics, academics role in the public conversation, a lot of back and forth. I want to highlight this because I think it gives an interesting insight that's not always well understood into how nonfiction authors talk to each other.

So we know it's pretty common in popular culture

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