Full Length Episode | #180

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:03.320 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, episode 180.

00:00:08.320 | I'm here at my Deep Work HQ,

00:00:15.420 | joined with my producer, Jesse.

00:00:21.100 | The Jesse ominous sign, ominous sign

00:00:23.920 | happened just the other day.

00:00:26.480 | My oldest son asked us if we would set up

00:00:31.480 | a Zoom conference for him and some of his school buddies,

00:00:36.600 | because they're setting up a business

00:00:39.100 | to sell Pokemon cards.

00:00:40.980 | And so they needed to do a Zoom meeting.

00:00:44.160 | And so I thought the tentacles,

00:00:47.820 | the heart numbing, deadening tentacles,

00:00:50.900 | that is doing meetings on Zoom,

00:00:54.040 | work meetings on Zoom,

00:00:54.960 | and not extend past us to our kids, but they have.

00:00:57.680 | Now my own son is setting up on his own accord,

00:01:01.300 | the things that have tortured us for the last two years,

00:01:03.680 | which is Zoom based business meetings.

00:01:07.360 | So I think that's an ominous sign.

00:01:09.160 | If he starts sending me calendar invites,

00:01:11.800 | we're moving to a farm.

00:01:13.480 | That's it.

00:01:14.320 | He doesn't have to be exposed.

00:01:17.080 | He's too pure to be exposed to the inanities

00:01:19.820 | of the world of digital remote work.

00:01:23.100 | (laughing)

00:01:25.140 | Speaking of farm, so I read,

00:01:27.060 | last week you were telling me about

00:01:28.240 | this big New Yorker profile of Wendell Berry.

00:01:31.820 | So I went on your recommendation and I read it.

00:01:35.940 | I had to read in the physical magazine,

00:01:37.300 | because Wendell Berry,

00:01:38.700 | you gotta read a Wendell Berry thing in physical form.

00:01:42.500 | And that's really interesting, really interesting.

00:01:45.680 | I mean, I knew about Berry,

00:01:47.700 | but it was interesting to hear more of a long form,

00:01:51.420 | long form description of what his life was like.

00:01:55.140 | The thing that caught my attention is that

00:01:57.980 | he is a purified instantiation of this deep life philosophy

00:02:02.100 | that we talk about on the show.

00:02:03.220 | I don't know if you had the same reaction,

00:02:04.540 | but think about it.

00:02:05.380 | This is someone who said,

00:02:06.980 | I'm gonna do exactly what's at the core

00:02:09.080 | of our notion of the deep life,

00:02:10.380 | which we talk about in our core idea video

00:02:12.420 | on the deep life, if people aren't familiar.

00:02:14.500 | So YouTube page, core idea video on the deep life,

00:02:18.060 | we talk about this, but at the core of the deep life

00:02:20.060 | is making radical change to your life

00:02:23.020 | to put it into alignment with the things that you value.

00:02:26.220 | And that's what Berry did.

00:02:27.980 | I mean, he moved, he left New York

00:02:30.300 | to move to a farm in Kentucky near where he grew up

00:02:34.700 | to cultivate land with horses

00:02:37.980 | while teaching at a local college there,

00:02:40.020 | built his entire life around incredibly intentionally,

00:02:43.060 | here are the things I value, community, connection to land,

00:02:46.040 | these older ways of living, the idea of writers

00:02:49.760 | having a, being cited in a particular place and context

00:02:54.560 | from which they write about,

00:02:55.680 | as opposed to, as he talks about,

00:02:57.120 | just being in this cosmopolitan abstraction

00:03:00.000 | where you live in a city and are of no place.

00:03:02.000 | And he did all those things

00:03:02.960 | and built a really unusual life around it,

00:03:05.560 | but it sounds cool.

00:03:06.640 | I don't know what your, was your thought,

00:03:07.980 | my thought was, this sounds like kind of a cool life

00:03:09.960 | he built out there.

00:03:10.880 | - Well, a couple of things.

00:03:11.760 | I mean, you read one of his books in the past month,

00:03:15.200 | I think it was January or December or something like that.

00:03:17.160 | So I hadn't heard of him until you were explaining

00:03:21.320 | in the book that you read about him

00:03:22.600 | and then he came up here.

00:03:24.480 | And he's a prolific writer.

00:03:26.480 | He's written a ton of stuff.

00:03:27.480 | I mean, he's probably like 80 something years old

00:03:29.760 | and he's written nonstop for 50 years.

00:03:32.680 | - Poems, novels, essays, and nonfiction books.

00:03:36.320 | And he's a professor, was a professor and a farmer,

00:03:40.200 | but they have like no technology.

00:03:42.480 | Didn't have a computer, they weren't on the internet,

00:03:45.120 | he wasn't on phone.

00:03:46.000 | So maybe it tells you something about,

00:03:47.920 | you're up at dawn to tend your horses,

00:03:51.980 | even if you have a teaching job,

00:03:53.240 | you have a lot of time to write.

00:03:54.400 | - He lives in a town of 60 people, something like that.

00:03:57.240 | - Yeah, and he's related to half of them.

00:03:59.200 | - Yeah.

00:04:00.040 | - Yeah.

00:04:00.920 | I'll tell you the big revelation of the article for me

00:04:02.800 | was his writing shed.

00:04:03.920 | I hadn't heard about that before,

00:04:06.600 | that he has this house, it's overlooking a river,

00:04:10.840 | not a house, it's like a little cabin up on pillars.

00:04:15.360 | Because I guess the river overflows,

00:04:17.880 | no electricity, no running water.

00:04:20.780 | And he goes out there and he writes.

00:04:24.060 | And he's out there and he writes.

00:04:25.840 | But I love in this piece,

00:04:27.880 | but also in the book of essays I read,

00:04:29.780 | how he knows the land and he has a connection to it

00:04:32.800 | and he wanders the land and canoes on his river

00:04:35.880 | and is completely connected to his town

00:04:39.580 | in that particular place.

00:04:40.840 | And now his family, multiple generations now,

00:04:43.680 | a lot of them all live around there.

00:04:45.360 | And in the article, his daughter and his granddaughter

00:04:48.040 | would just wander into their house.

00:04:50.080 | I mean, it really looks like a great case study

00:04:52.880 | of the deep life in action.

00:04:54.200 | Figure out what matters to you,

00:04:55.760 | reorient your life around that,

00:04:59.080 | as opposed to arbitrary metrics that are nice in the moment

00:05:02.480 | or seem just culturally palatable,

00:05:04.000 | like just going up the ladder in a career

00:05:07.180 | or just seeking distraction.

00:05:10.500 | And then be willing to make radical changes.

00:05:11.960 | And what's more radical than leaving a teaching,

00:05:14.480 | writing job in New York, move to Kentucky.

00:05:17.640 | - Speaking of which, you do a good job

00:05:19.000 | of explaining the radical part,

00:05:20.700 | because it's important to do, you explain it,

00:05:23.620 | like there being some sort of a test before you do that,

00:05:25.640 | 'cause then you gave the example of the one fellow

00:05:27.280 | who in your book who went to become a monk

00:05:29.600 | and it didn't really work out.

00:05:31.400 | So I think for new listeners,

00:05:32.860 | it's good to explain that briefly,

00:05:34.180 | just so they don't think that you just jump

00:05:36.000 | into the radical part.

00:05:37.040 | - Yeah, radical is important,

00:05:38.440 | but it has to be aligned with your values.

00:05:41.280 | So you have to make, if you really wanna live deeply,

00:05:43.880 | ultimately you wanna make some sort of radical shift

00:05:45.880 | because that signals to yourself

00:05:46.960 | that you take this really seriously.

00:05:48.440 | It makes it an adventure.

00:05:50.160 | And it allows you to really immerse yourself in that value.

00:05:54.360 | So if Wendell had just said,

00:05:56.900 | I work in New York, I live in Northern New Jersey,

00:06:01.440 | but like a little bit South,

00:06:03.760 | so I have a little bit of a plot of land

00:06:05.620 | and I really have a nice garden that I take care of

00:06:08.800 | because I find land really important.

00:06:10.500 | And I take the commuter train into New York

00:06:12.400 | and work in New York.

00:06:13.400 | That's not the same thing as I'm using horses

00:06:16.920 | to plow land in Kentucky.

00:06:19.440 | And there's something about the radicalness

00:06:20.640 | of what's important, right?

00:06:21.480 | That's the immersion in the value.

00:06:22.920 | You can make the value that you're orienting

00:06:24.800 | towards a guiding direction for your life.

00:06:27.600 | But radical without prep becomes just change

00:06:31.520 | for the sake of enjoying the disruption

00:06:33.200 | and that can fade out.

00:06:34.120 | So you're right, it's so good they can't ignore you.

00:06:35.440 | I talk about the guy who says,

00:06:37.520 | I'm gonna go become a monk

00:06:39.280 | and he's in Mountain Monastery and he gets there

00:06:41.980 | and is like, oh, all right,

00:06:44.980 | this is not immediately making my life better

00:06:47.660 | and why exactly am I doing this

00:06:48.860 | other than the fact it's disruptive?

00:06:50.260 | And he gave up on that.

00:06:51.860 | I talked about in the video where we explain the deep life

00:06:56.060 | from that Core Ideas playlist,

00:06:57.940 | the Mark Fredenfaller,

00:07:00.580 | where they moved to that island in the South Pacific.

00:07:03.100 | And it's because of disruption.

00:07:04.580 | You're like, hey, it's radical, change is radical,

00:07:06.500 | it's something to do.

00:07:07.340 | And they're like, oh, this is terrible

00:07:08.180 | and we feel weird about it.

00:07:09.100 | And our kids have lice and they got ringworm.

00:07:11.340 | And it was like, this is not great.

00:07:13.200 | And they couldn't open the coconuts.

00:07:15.840 | This is another thing I didn't leave out.

00:07:17.120 | They imagined themselves just cracking open the coconuts

00:07:19.520 | and it turned out it's really hard to open coconuts

00:07:21.360 | and they're like, this is terrible, why did we do this?

00:07:24.360 | And then he went back and did make a radical change,

00:07:27.440 | rebuilt his whole life around DIY and started a new magazine

00:07:30.920 | and getting back in touch with building things

00:07:32.680 | with his hands.

00:07:33.520 | And that's actually the real story.

00:07:34.680 | So I think it's a really important point

00:07:36.180 | is that you have to do something radical, really,

00:07:38.760 | if you're gonna embrace the deep life,

00:07:39.840 | but it has to be very much oriented towards things

00:07:42.840 | that are valuable to you.

00:07:43.680 | You have to know why you're making

00:07:44.640 | that particular radical change.

00:07:46.120 | And there's a lot of self-insight involved there.

00:07:48.040 | And that would be fascinating,

00:07:50.520 | to really be a fly on the wall with Wendell Berry

00:07:54.240 | in his 20s, when he's trying to figure this out

00:07:57.200 | and trying to convince his wife, this is what we need to do.

00:08:00.000 | - A couple of things that come to mind.

00:08:02.200 | One, I mean, the article was written by the daughter

00:08:04.400 | of his first editor who was sentenced to pass,

00:08:06.880 | but that was kind of cool to see the interchange

00:08:08.680 | of that throughout the story.

00:08:10.080 | I mean, it was a long article.

00:08:11.400 | And then talking about what he was like when he was younger,

00:08:15.880 | there was a quote in there where someone was like,

00:08:18.440 | did you tell him to lighten up?

00:08:19.640 | I think he was pretty intense.

00:08:22.040 | - Yeah, his book's gonna be pretty polemical.

00:08:24.680 | His nonfiction work can be pretty polemical.

00:08:26.560 | And his new book, he's writing a book

00:08:29.000 | as like an 80-something year old on racism.

00:08:32.440 | So that's gonna be interesting, I think.

00:08:34.440 | - Two other, yeah, I think it will be for sure.

00:08:36.120 | - I don't think he cares.

00:08:37.200 | He's like, whatever.

00:08:38.320 | What did he say?

00:08:39.160 | He said like, I'm 80, I have friends, I have family.

00:08:42.960 | Like, I don't care if people are mad at me.

00:08:44.560 | And so I'll read it.

00:08:46.800 | I think it'll be interesting.

00:08:48.120 | It's an awful guy.

00:08:48.960 | - He's written about that in the past.

00:08:50.360 | And I think that he's thought a lot about it.

00:08:53.880 | - Yeah, he did a lot of writing

00:08:54.880 | about the civil rights movement

00:08:56.680 | and trying to understand it as a movement

00:08:59.280 | and compare and contrast it to other movements.

00:09:01.280 | I don't remember the punchline,

00:09:02.400 | but I know he had some pretty provocative essays

00:09:06.080 | in the book I read that was comparing

00:09:09.680 | and contrasting the civil rights movement

00:09:11.200 | to the environmental movement.

00:09:12.880 | So he thinks a lot about movements and how they expand.

00:09:17.880 | I mean, one of his main critiques, if I remember,

00:09:20.800 | is the problem with movements is there's a certain place

00:09:23.920 | where his real worry, which I think seems

00:09:27.120 | really relevant today, but his real worry is

00:09:30.200 | when movements get separated from personal action.

00:09:36.040 | So he talks about the environmental movement

00:09:38.560 | and he's like, what matters is you're in a place,

00:09:42.840 | actually stewarding the land in that place

00:09:46.480 | and building up from personal experience

00:09:48.680 | a respect for land and its interaction with humans.

00:09:51.080 | What he worries about is that you say,

00:09:52.280 | no, no, I just live in suburban America

00:09:55.600 | and I give money to these groups

00:10:00.120 | that are trying to influence legislation.

00:10:02.560 | Or today it would be, and he's talked about this

00:10:04.600 | probably more recently, I tweet about things

00:10:06.880 | or change my Twitter profile or whatever.

00:10:08.760 | And he says these movements become professionalized

00:10:11.080 | and abstracted and their identity badges,

00:10:13.760 | I'm a part of this movement, I wear the right thing,

00:10:15.920 | I say the right things, no action actually happens.

00:10:18.880 | And in my memory is when he was talking

00:10:20.440 | about the civil rights movement,

00:10:23.000 | the degree to which I guess this was,

00:10:25.840 | it was cited in personal action.

00:10:29.000 | You were out there sitting at the lunch counters

00:10:32.640 | or this or that.

00:10:33.480 | So I think he was lamenting about the environmental movement

00:10:36.160 | but I think it's a big thing today

00:10:37.680 | that social media gives you the ability

00:10:41.720 | to superficially be connected with movements

00:10:43.760 | but it also accelerates the abstraction of these movements

00:10:46.720 | into just components of an identity presentation.

00:10:50.320 | And there feels like there's a lot of crackling energy

00:10:53.280 | but that energy is not being conduited

00:10:56.320 | into actually any sort of motive force.

00:10:59.400 | And so actually, yeah, I think this book will be interesting.

00:11:02.720 | Interesting guy.

00:11:04.680 | - There was a cool part in the book

00:11:05.960 | where he was talking about the difficulty of writing.

00:11:07.880 | He's like, yeah, writing's hard.

00:11:08.880 | And then he gave the analogy or gave the story

00:11:10.840 | about when he goes out to change the wires at night

00:11:13.600 | and it's cold and he started doing the work

00:11:15.080 | and then it was getting better.

00:11:15.960 | And then he related that to writing

00:11:18.120 | and getting into the groove.

00:11:20.160 | - Yeah, if you're a farmer, you're used to hard work.

00:11:22.480 | Yeah, writing's hard work.

00:11:23.800 | Yeah, that's always my thing is what writer's block

00:11:27.840 | is another way of describing what it feels like to write.

00:11:30.800 | Because it's a weird, unnatural thing

00:11:32.080 | you're asking your brain to do.

00:11:33.320 | So why are you rewarded for doing it well

00:11:34.920 | is because you're able to overcome that.

00:11:36.720 | So the difficulty should be the first thing

00:11:39.600 | that you expect.

00:11:40.960 | But anyways, I think we'll see more

00:11:45.200 | of Barry style lifestyles potentially

00:11:49.480 | in this current sort of post pandemic period

00:11:51.920 | where people are reinventing their lives

00:11:54.120 | and becoming disillusioned with what life was like

00:11:58.360 | pre pandemic and having the disruption

00:12:00.320 | give them the space to think about it.

00:12:02.160 | That's a direction I think a lot of people should consider

00:12:04.280 | which is this hardcore deep life direction.

00:12:07.560 | Radical changes to align your life with your values.

00:12:09.520 | You have to know what you value,

00:12:10.960 | be very careful about that,

00:12:11.920 | but then make the changes radical.

00:12:13.760 | So don't do radical for the sake of radical.

00:12:16.520 | Should be very aligned clearly with your values,

00:12:18.920 | and why not?

00:12:22.480 | I mean, Barry did it.

00:12:23.920 | He has an interesting life out there.

00:12:26.080 | So I think we need to move this podcast to a farm.

00:12:30.200 | I want video.

00:12:33.000 | We should be on horses.

00:12:34.720 | I think we should be on horses as we do the podcast.

00:12:37.920 | Here's an AV challenge for our contractors.

00:12:41.760 | Like we wanna record this podcast from horses.

00:12:44.200 | Like we're just sort of walking over our land

00:12:46.000 | and sort of chatting about life.

00:12:48.880 | - We can do that the 201st episode

00:12:50.760 | 'cause the 200th episode will-

00:12:52.160 | - We're going to South Africa.

00:12:53.120 | - Yeah. - Yeah.

00:12:54.640 | And then after our treatment for black mamba venom,

00:12:58.880 | we'll go to a farm.

00:12:59.880 | And we'll get, we do this from a farm

00:13:01.040 | and then we'll get the next headline.

00:13:02.800 | Minor podcaster hilariously bit by mamba in South Africa,

00:13:07.520 | immediately trampled by horses on farm,

00:13:11.560 | ruining the land and the financial future

00:13:14.880 | of the land's owner, Wendell Barry,

00:13:17.360 | who has now been forced to move to New York

00:13:20.320 | to become a TikTok influencer

00:13:22.560 | in hopes of salvaging his waning fortune.

00:13:24.960 | It's a long headline.

00:13:25.800 | - And he couldn't pack his typewriter.

00:13:27.560 | - Yeah, couldn't pack his typewriter.

00:13:29.840 | So now is using virtual reality goggles

00:13:34.040 | and living mainly in the metaverse.

00:13:35.760 | And it's all gonna have, it's a long headline.

00:13:39.920 | You know, the headlines are long these days.

00:13:41.600 | You have to, because you got to pack

00:13:42.840 | a lot of information into them.

00:13:44.400 | Oh, well, all right.

00:13:46.320 | Well, enough of that nonsense.

00:13:47.160 | We got calls today, right?

00:13:48.080 | So we got a-

00:13:48.920 | - Yeah, we got some good calls.

00:13:50.040 | - Listener call episode.

00:13:51.120 | We got to pay the bills a little bit

00:13:52.760 | because I think these medical expenses

00:13:54.600 | are gonna pile up fast after our 200th

00:13:57.800 | and 200th first episode.

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00:16:50.740 | - All right.

00:16:51.780 | Well, speaking about easy,

00:16:53.780 | let's see how easy our questions are this week.

00:16:56.240 | Jesse, what is our first call we have on the docket?

00:16:59.660 | - All right, the first call is from Simon

00:17:01.460 | and he references an article that you were a focus of

00:17:04.820 | and it basically challenges some

00:17:06.700 | of your metrics of productivity.

00:17:08.740 | - Hi Cal, Simon here.

00:17:17.020 | I'm calling from New Zealand.

00:17:19.740 | Recently, Alan Jacobs, a philosopher,

00:17:22.380 | Alan Jacobs published a small bit of writing

00:17:25.020 | in the Hedgehog Review.

00:17:26.060 | The writing's called "The Problem with Productivity

00:17:27.940 | and the Good Work of Love."

00:17:29.700 | And in it, he takes you to task a little bit

00:17:33.860 | in one of your New Yorker articles

00:17:38.380 | and just has some questions about

00:17:41.140 | the way you describe productivity

00:17:42.860 | and the metrics of productivity.

00:17:46.100 | And his questions are kind of about

00:17:48.460 | the way in which those people involved

00:17:52.620 | and things that are less able to be quantified,

00:17:55.980 | how they fit in your, let's say, picture of the world.

00:18:00.020 | Would love to hear your response.

00:18:02.460 | Cheers.

00:18:03.300 | - Well, Simon, I went back and I read that article.

00:18:07.180 | I like the Hedgehog Review.

00:18:08.820 | This was an interesting piece,

00:18:09.940 | as you mentioned, by Alan Jacobs.

00:18:14.060 | He was talking about a piece I wrote for the New Yorker

00:18:16.820 | on productivity culture, people's frustration

00:18:21.460 | with the notion of productivity,

00:18:23.580 | and what we should do about it.

00:18:27.340 | So there's a couple points in his piece,

00:18:28.780 | if I'm remembering properly.

00:18:30.420 | So part of this was just saying

00:18:33.100 | productivity is hard in a lot of contexts

00:18:37.340 | to even measure, like what do we even mean by productivity?

00:18:41.140 | And he felt, sort of the typical anti-neoliberal critique

00:18:46.420 | of this seems to, your language seems to quantify

00:18:49.580 | too systemic, too economically blinkered, I would say.

00:18:54.580 | Now, I think this is a common fault line right now

00:18:59.700 | in the discussion of productivity and anti-productivity.

00:19:02.260 | So I would say the popular lane right now

00:19:05.580 | in elite discourses when talking about productivity,

00:19:08.500 | roughly speaking, falls into the club

00:19:10.740 | of the post-capitalist, post-liberal types,

00:19:14.340 | where the big things to talk about

00:19:17.300 | is how just work itself, we need to rethink work itself,

00:19:22.180 | and this drive to produce and to define your life

00:19:25.460 | too much by work is a problem,

00:19:27.180 | and it's a sort of a necessary outcome

00:19:29.740 | of our capitalist systems.

00:19:31.140 | And can't we, we need to rethink what work means

00:19:35.420 | and the role it plays in a life,

00:19:37.180 | and productivity discourses, typically it's influenced

00:19:40.500 | by like Bayes superstructure theory.

00:19:42.100 | Productivity discourses are really just an opiate

00:19:45.380 | of a Zoom-equipped bourgeois that is trying to coerce you

00:19:49.060 | into giving up more of your labor

00:19:51.740 | towards extracting value for the capitalist,

00:19:54.060 | et cetera, et cetera.

00:19:54.900 | So there's a sort of post-capitalist thread

00:19:56.620 | that's really popular right now

00:19:58.340 | in, I would say, left-leaning elite discourses.

00:20:02.500 | They don't like me.

00:20:03.580 | So they think I'm a neoliberal shill

00:20:06.300 | because I think while those are interesting

00:20:07.980 | philosophical ideas, I'm much more

00:20:09.820 | boots-on-the-ground pragmatic.

00:20:11.420 | These people at this company right now

00:20:13.060 | in this job are stressed out, and why?

00:20:15.100 | And how can we change this company

00:20:16.260 | so they're not so stressed out?

00:20:17.260 | Like, I like to get into the nuts and bolts

00:20:18.860 | about how knowledge work actually unfolds

00:20:21.820 | and work in a much more narrow way

00:20:24.860 | of what can we do in here, pragmatically what's going on.

00:20:27.380 | So again, I'm often disparaged by that crowd

00:20:31.300 | as some sort of neoliberal shill

00:20:33.020 | because I'm not appropriately having these

00:20:37.380 | navel-gazing, more philosophical, grandiose theories

00:20:40.940 | about work and life and capitalism, et cetera.

00:20:45.220 | I'm much more narrow.

00:20:47.740 | So what I'm arguing about and what I argue about

00:20:49.540 | in that article is actually something very specific.

00:20:52.740 | What I'm saying here is let's get boots-on-the-ground,

00:20:54.820 | ethnographically in the cubicles,

00:20:57.180 | seeing what is frustrating people.

00:20:58.940 | And this is, again, one of the things

00:20:59.940 | that I think distinguishes my work.

00:21:01.700 | I have such a deeply embedded surveillance network

00:21:05.420 | into the world of work because I have this

00:21:07.700 | decade-plus career writing about this stuff

00:21:10.700 | where I hear from people constantly.

00:21:12.340 | So I really have my finger on the pulse,

00:21:13.900 | like what's happening in these type of knowledge work jobs?

00:21:16.700 | And what I was pointing out is here

00:21:17.940 | is a specific pragmatic issue.

00:21:20.020 | We said productivity should be personal.

00:21:23.580 | It's up to the individual to figure out

00:21:25.460 | how to manage their work and their workload.

00:21:28.740 | A necessary consequence of this is that in this informal,

00:21:33.180 | you-have-to-figure-it-on-your-own type context,

00:21:35.180 | people became way overloaded.

00:21:38.300 | They have more work than they know how to handle,

00:21:40.740 | and it is a almost dehumanizing, cruel act to say,

00:21:45.740 | we're gonna give you more work than you can handle

00:21:48.020 | and figure it out, forcing you into a position.

00:21:51.180 | So there's no sort of professional,

00:21:52.980 | personal Fifth Amendment here,

00:21:54.140 | forcing you into a position of having to make

00:21:56.780 | these judgment calls between your personal life

00:21:58.860 | and your work life because the more of your personal life

00:22:00.860 | you give up, the more work you can get done.

00:22:02.620 | And they're just like, hey, be productive,

00:22:04.020 | and it's up to you to figure out how to do it.

00:22:05.420 | And I'm like, this is an untenable situation.

00:22:07.460 | We're overloaded, we were in this untenable situation

00:22:09.660 | where we have to figure out how to balance

00:22:11.980 | our professional lives and our personal lives.

00:22:15.260 | And the whole thing is a recipe for frustration

00:22:17.060 | and exhaustion, and people are getting fed up with it.

00:22:20.100 | And so my argument is, we gotta get this off

00:22:23.580 | of the individuals, the structure and systems

00:22:27.620 | by which we actually figure out things like,

00:22:29.300 | how much work should you have on your plate?

00:22:31.500 | How many projects should someone be working on?

00:22:35.660 | How do we communicate and talk about this work?

00:22:38.140 | These type of things need to be surfaced and made explicit.

00:22:42.260 | So A, it can prevent us from being

00:22:45.540 | in these terrible situations where we're overloaded

00:22:48.260 | and are being implicitly pushed to just sacrifice

00:22:50.700 | more and more of other things that are important to us.

00:22:52.900 | And it makes it something that we can argue

00:22:54.580 | and fight back against.

00:22:55.500 | When you say, this is how we assign work,

00:22:57.460 | and this is how we communicate about work.

00:22:58.980 | And if that system is onerous, we can all point to that

00:23:02.700 | and say, this is an onerous system.

00:23:04.220 | We don't like this, do something better.

00:23:06.380 | It gives you something to push back on.

00:23:08.980 | You don't have any targets to push back on,

00:23:10.780 | which is up to everyone, and work is informal,

00:23:12.620 | and we're all sitting back and forth,

00:23:13.700 | calendar invites and emailing.

00:23:15.260 | Surface and make explicit the systems

00:23:17.740 | by which work is assigned, how you collaborate on that work,

00:23:22.140 | how much should be on your plate.

00:23:23.860 | And now we have something to push back on,

00:23:25.060 | now we have something to optimize,

00:23:26.740 | and now we can actually move past, I think,

00:23:28.820 | the excesses in terms of workload,

00:23:32.500 | the excesses in terms of sacrifice

00:23:34.420 | that our current knowledge work context creates.

00:23:36.300 | Now, this is like an intensely pragmatic thing.

00:23:38.220 | I'm talking about processes for communication

00:23:41.700 | and task boards and push versus pull work allocation systems

00:23:45.460 | and what we can learn from just-in-time manufacturing

00:23:47.580 | and Kanban.

00:23:48.420 | None of this is sexy.

00:23:49.540 | It's much better to have a sub stack and a Twitter account

00:23:51.900 | and talk about the excesses of capitalism

00:23:54.820 | and how we have to, in the sort of the post-capitalist order,

00:23:57.940 | we'll all just have, I guess, universal basic incomes

00:24:00.860 | and write poetry or whatever.

00:24:02.420 | And I'm not being fair to Jacobs.

00:24:03.940 | I'm obviously exaggerating here, and that's all fine.

00:24:06.780 | And I think it's good to have avant-garde

00:24:08.180 | philosophical critique because the avant-garde

00:24:10.220 | pulls forward the mainstream, and that's all good,

00:24:12.500 | but I'm not on the avant-garde.

00:24:14.540 | I like to think of myself as more in the cubicle trenches.

00:24:18.140 | And so I think this is what I was talking about in that article.

00:24:19.900 | This is a core issue right now.

00:24:21.500 | It's very pragmatic.

00:24:22.540 | Implicit informal systems for work assignment,

00:24:26.260 | organization, and collaboration cause issues,

00:24:28.380 | and it frustrates and burns people out.

00:24:29.860 | So let's make them explicit.

00:24:31.220 | And I think that's what Jacobs was taking me to task.

00:24:33.980 | He was like, "Well, but let's not talk about systems.

00:24:38.060 | "That seems weird and corporate and capitalist.

00:24:39.980 | "Let's not talk about systems.

00:24:41.100 | "Let's not talk about trying to figure out

00:24:42.980 | "what's more productive.

00:24:44.460 | "Let's be very careful about the language we use."

00:24:46.900 | And I'm like, "That's fine."

00:24:47.740 | I think when I write for the Hedgehog Review,

00:24:50.980 | I'll be more careful about the appropriate language,

00:24:53.820 | but I think this is a concrete issue

00:24:55.660 | that I think real people have.

00:24:58.620 | And this is a concrete approach

00:25:00.300 | to actually solving those issues.

00:25:03.500 | I mean, let's get in the trenches and figure out

00:25:05.740 | why do you have 200 emails and are working on the weekend?

00:25:10.060 | And yes, we could stand back and say because of capitalism,

00:25:14.540 | but that's not gonna fix this person's problem next week.

00:25:17.580 | And so again, I think both of these levels

00:25:23.660 | of analysis are important.

00:25:27.260 | I talk at my level.

00:25:29.580 | I think a lot of the elite discourses talk at another level.

00:25:34.020 | Both are important.

00:25:35.300 | The avant-garde pulls forward, the mainstream.

00:25:38.380 | And I also think debate is good.

00:25:40.460 | I think this is a useful article

00:25:41.860 | and it's a well-written article.

00:25:43.740 | And I think Jacobs is very thoughtful,

00:25:46.460 | but there's a lot of other commentators out there

00:25:48.860 | where I think the anti-productivity discourse

00:25:53.380 | so easily just falls more into, I want applause.

00:25:58.300 | I want applause for how radically critical I am

00:26:02.820 | and aren't I smart and I hate capitalism,

00:26:04.740 | subscribe to my sub stack because I want more money.

00:26:06.620 | Yeah, it's like this whole, it's fine and I'm boring.

00:26:10.500 | And I think we get too many emails and I wanna fix it.

00:26:12.460 | So I don't know if that's convincing, Simon,

00:26:16.060 | but I guess that's my off the cuff review.

00:26:21.060 | I mean, Jesse, if you look at me,

00:26:22.060 | you see no one's ever gonna associate with me.

00:26:23.860 | You just look at me and say, you can't be a radical.

00:26:27.580 | You can't be avant-garde.

00:26:29.380 | You have a part in your hair.

00:26:31.420 | You know what I mean?

00:26:33.020 | So like, why even try?

00:26:34.220 | Why even try?

00:26:35.060 | So I was like, let's talk about how

00:26:37.700 | we need more systematic work assignment policies.

00:26:40.420 | No one ever associates me with the word

00:26:42.900 | intellectually cool.

00:26:44.180 | I mean, if I do like a beret

00:26:47.940 | and had a cigarette in a cigarette holder,

00:26:50.540 | see, then we might be playing with fire.

00:26:52.500 | And if I was like, here's the thing, here's the thing.

00:26:57.500 | I need an accent too.

00:26:58.780 | Here's the thing.

00:27:00.300 | You got to have another column on your Trello board

00:27:05.060 | for waiting to hear back.

00:27:07.940 | Waiting to hear back should be its own column.

00:27:12.940 | And then I just throw in some of the post-liberal stuff too.

00:27:18.220 | And do better, the Zoom.

00:27:23.220 | Zoom is the shackles of the bourgeois.

00:27:26.900 | Because French intellectuals are very cool.

00:27:30.460 | And we need to get rid of the capitalism.

00:27:35.460 | You do better.

00:27:36.300 | But also, you should use Calendly

00:27:41.300 | when setting up your meetings.

00:27:44.420 | Because it's less email.

00:27:45.260 | See, what I'm going to do, I could mix them together.

00:27:47.500 | Like the really avant-garde philosophical stuff.

00:27:49.900 | As Edward Said taught us well,

00:27:55.900 | you should only use email for short questions.

00:28:01.580 | And also do not other.

00:28:03.500 | So I'll mix in post-colonial theory

00:28:06.220 | plus my advice for scheduling deep work sessions.

00:28:11.220 | But see, no one would buy it from me.

00:28:14.540 | I'm not French.

00:28:15.380 | I don't have the right accent.

00:28:16.580 | I'm not like suitably angry.

00:28:19.180 | I have read all this stuff, by the way.

00:28:20.820 | I mean, I get it.

00:28:21.660 | I'm on a university campus.

00:28:22.620 | It's good stuff.

00:28:23.460 | I like the avant-garde.

00:28:24.540 | - The accent was solid.

00:28:25.740 | - It's solid?

00:28:26.580 | All right, do the rest of the episode that way.

00:28:28.780 | - Do the ad reads that way.

00:28:32.460 | - Yeah, as long as they're not mad at us enough.

00:28:34.980 | Yeah.

00:28:35.820 | Why does this company even exist?

00:28:38.020 | It's just a stooge of the capitalist.

00:28:41.700 | The only company that I think should exist

00:28:45.540 | is, I don't know what company,

00:28:50.100 | the Hedgehog Review,

00:28:51.660 | the only sponsor we have for the show.

00:28:55.180 | And we paid them money.

00:28:57.460 | If they're paying us,

00:28:59.860 | this is a capitalist exchange.

00:29:02.540 | It is dirty.

00:29:03.620 | No, so we paid them money to be on the show

00:29:08.020 | as Foucault taught us.

00:29:10.420 | As Foucault taught us.

00:29:12.260 | The power hierarchy that defines

00:29:15.460 | the modern podcast ad agency

00:29:17.420 | is itself a vestige of capitalist supremacy.

00:29:22.420 | And so we could do it.

00:29:25.580 | We could do it.

00:29:26.420 | I don't think, again,

00:29:28.260 | I've got a part in my haircut.

00:29:29.460 | I can't pull it off.

00:29:30.500 | I need a Shay t-shirt and shave my head maybe.

00:29:34.540 | I don't know.

00:29:35.980 | Or I'll just continue to be kind of a dork.

00:29:39.460 | It's worked okay so far.

00:29:40.900 | All right.

00:29:41.740 | - Having hair is a good thing.

00:29:42.580 | - Having hair is a good thing.

00:29:43.420 | That's right.

00:29:44.780 | All right, so Simon, there you go.

00:29:46.540 | Let's do another call here.

00:29:48.340 | I'm back to dork mode.

00:29:49.380 | Another call.

00:29:50.220 | - All right.

00:29:51.940 | That was a great bit there.

00:29:53.180 | Our next call is about basically

00:29:56.620 | talking about those Conor arguments,

00:29:58.580 | but in this case,

00:29:59.500 | it's authors that run Conor

00:30:01.220 | to your career capital theory.

00:30:03.780 | - Yeah.

00:30:04.620 | People are really out to get me today.

00:30:06.220 | - Hey Cal, my name's Donald

00:30:09.900 | and I'm thinking about transitioning my career

00:30:12.100 | as we move cities, my fiance and I.

00:30:15.140 | And so my question today is actually

00:30:16.740 | about how to have two conflicting ideas about something.

00:30:21.020 | How do we hold those?

00:30:21.940 | I know you talk a lot about

00:30:23.460 | making sure we're reading different authors

00:30:26.980 | and different perspectives on a theory

00:30:29.740 | or whatever that might be

00:30:30.660 | to make sure that you're getting both sides

00:30:32.260 | and letting those sit with you

00:30:34.620 | and kind of battle it out, so to speak.

00:30:37.660 | And I read "So Good They Can't Ignore You"

00:30:40.380 | pretty early on in my career

00:30:41.460 | and I am a big believer in it.

00:30:43.460 | And I'm 10 or 12 years into my career now

00:30:45.780 | and I've gained this capital,

00:30:47.660 | but I have this other passion that's kind of nagging at me.

00:30:51.780 | And from the career capital side,

00:30:54.100 | I know I shouldn't necessarily

00:30:56.100 | follow that passion right now,

00:30:57.460 | but I'm curious if you know of any authors,

00:31:00.140 | books or other people on this topic

00:31:03.980 | that might run counter to your career capital theory.

00:31:06.940 | I firmly believe in it,

00:31:07.980 | but I'm also trying to practice what we preach around here

00:31:10.580 | about making sure to have different opinions

00:31:13.820 | to allow to help me kind of make this decision.

00:31:17.540 | Would love any thoughts you have.

00:31:18.700 | And again, just really appreciate what you do.

00:31:20.580 | Thanks, Cal.

00:31:21.980 | - All right, well now I'm wishing he had told us

00:31:24.740 | what the passion was.

00:31:26.320 | Because that could be actually be pretty relevant

00:31:29.260 | for thinking about this.

00:31:31.020 | But I like your approach here,

00:31:32.660 | because what I preach,

00:31:33.500 | which is having differing smart opinions about things

00:31:37.900 | in your head at the same time

00:31:39.300 | gives you a more nuanced understanding of the world.

00:31:41.980 | I mean, we were just joking in the last caller,

00:31:44.180 | but we were talking about Alan Jacobs' essay

00:31:46.300 | and he had a different take on productivity than mine.

00:31:48.340 | We're kind of joking about it,

00:31:49.340 | but actually that collision.

00:31:51.580 | So my sort of dorkish New York article

00:31:53.640 | versus like Alan Jacobs' Hedgehog Review article

00:31:57.100 | crash those together.

00:31:59.300 | And what you come away with is not,

00:32:00.580 | oh, one exploded and this one is right.

00:32:02.740 | You have a more nuanced understanding of the topic,

00:32:04.940 | which I think is excellent.

00:32:05.780 | So if we're thinking about career capital theory,

00:32:07.740 | what are good things to push up against that?

00:32:11.780 | Well, again, let's clarify exactly

00:32:13.340 | what career capital theory is saying.

00:32:15.020 | What it's saying is that typically the things

00:32:17.420 | that make a good job good are rare and valuable.

00:32:20.920 | So you have to have something rare and valuable

00:32:22.220 | to offer in return.

00:32:24.260 | And in the professional context,

00:32:26.100 | it'll be rare and valuable skills.

00:32:27.260 | So get better at things that are valuable,

00:32:28.780 | then use those things as leverage to shape your career

00:32:31.020 | in ways that resonate.

00:32:31.860 | That's a pretty repeatable path

00:32:34.980 | towards feeling really good about your career.

00:32:37.860 | And there's other takes on this, obviously.

00:32:39.980 | Like the straw man take, which is popular in culture,

00:32:43.540 | but is rarely, I think,

00:32:46.380 | articulated in good books so simplicitly.

00:32:48.260 | The straw man alternative is just, no, no,

00:32:50.460 | follow your passion.

00:32:51.300 | You're inborn to do one thing.

00:32:52.300 | If you do that thing, you'll love it.

00:32:53.300 | If you don't, you won't.

00:32:54.140 | But that's a bit of a straw man,

00:32:55.200 | because I would say that the more important counterpoints

00:32:59.180 | to career capital theory would be a little bit more subtle.

00:33:01.420 | So one of the counterpoints you should try to encounter,

00:33:03.500 | and I think Wendell Berry, who we talked about

00:33:05.420 | at the beginning of the show, is a good example of this,

00:33:07.860 | is, and the Jacobs essay we just read,

00:33:10.980 | is the whole strain of thought that says,

00:33:13.420 | shaping your career shouldn't be

00:33:14.900 | the most important thing anyways.

00:33:16.700 | What matters is building a good life

00:33:19.340 | based on values that is important,

00:33:21.260 | and you might need some money in there so you have a job,

00:33:23.980 | but stop thinking so much about your job anyways,

00:33:25.700 | except for to the degree to that which it steps on

00:33:29.020 | other things that are important to you.

00:33:30.260 | This is like Berry leaving his teaching job in New York

00:33:33.540 | to go live in Kentucky, but there's any numbers of examples

00:33:38.060 | of books where you see people building a life of meaning

00:33:43.060 | off of focusing on values that maybe have

00:33:47.380 | very little to do with their work.

00:33:49.580 | So I mean, I can give you some specific suggestions here.

00:33:52.660 | Go back and read a classic, like Thomas Merton,

00:33:56.440 | with the seven-story mountain, I believe it's called,

00:33:59.260 | which is about him.

00:34:00.580 | It's a memoir, I'm actually reading it right now,

00:34:02.420 | it's one of my March books,

00:34:04.300 | but a memoir about how he also, like Berry,

00:34:06.340 | left life in New York as a writer,

00:34:09.380 | and eventually becoming a monk,

00:34:11.900 | and writing about the experience,

00:34:13.220 | and it was very inspirational to a lot of people,

00:34:16.660 | but he just downgraded the professional aspect of his life.

00:34:21.020 | Richard Rohr's book, R-O-H-R, I wanna get this right,

00:34:25.620 | falling, can you look this up, Jesse?

00:34:27.220 | Richard Rohr, Falling Up, Falling,

00:34:32.220 | it's falling something, Jesse's gonna look this up,

00:34:36.220 | but it's a book-- - Falling Upward.

00:34:37.340 | - Falling Upward, that's a book I read, Richard Rohr,

00:34:40.460 | R-O-H-R, he's also a Catholic, in a Catholic order,

00:34:45.460 | I think he might be a Franciscan.

00:34:48.460 | That's about how in the second half of life,

00:34:52.700 | building your life around service to others

00:34:54.780 | is the source of the deepest meaning.

00:34:56.880 | David Brooks read Richard Rohr,

00:34:59.420 | and then wrote basically his own version

00:35:01.340 | of Falling Upward, it's called The Second Mountain,

00:35:03.140 | which is, again, I would read The Second Mountain,

00:35:05.100 | I would throw that right against So Good They Can't Ignore You,

00:35:07.620 | they'll hit together, and sparks will fly,

00:35:10.100 | and something even better will emerge,

00:35:11.820 | so The Second Mountain is about how

00:35:14.180 | maybe the first half of your adult life

00:35:16.940 | is aimed towards what he calls resume values,

00:35:19.860 | building up your career, making it the way you like,

00:35:22.140 | but then the second half of your adult life

00:35:23.660 | is where you really focus on eulogy values,

00:35:26.320 | and it's, again, service to others,

00:35:27.740 | connection to other people, you see David Brooks

00:35:29.760 | struggling with building meaning beyond

00:35:32.900 | just his otherwise very successful career,

00:35:34.820 | so you read those type of books,

00:35:36.100 | and you get this counterpoint that says,

00:35:37.340 | yeah, whatever, right, like your work is what it is,

00:35:41.540 | but it's not gonna be at the core of a life well lived,

00:35:43.500 | so I think that's what you might wanna read,

00:35:47.780 | because my concern here, and again,

00:35:49.020 | I don't know what the passion is you're talking about,

00:35:50.940 | but if it's a professional passion,

00:35:54.100 | my concern here is that it's possible

00:35:55.840 | that you're heading towards this second mountain in life,

00:35:59.500 | this Richard Rohr falling upwards,

00:36:02.180 | and you're feeling that dissatisfaction,

00:36:05.100 | that hunger, a soul ache, so it's something quite deep,

00:36:08.300 | and you're saying, you're looking

00:36:10.000 | just within the professional lane,

00:36:11.700 | so maybe I need to change my job,

00:36:14.160 | and if my job was something that was more passionate about,

00:36:17.220 | I would get that back, but it's possible

00:36:18.580 | that things need to change as everything else in your life,

00:36:21.140 | so I think those books you're gonna find useful.

00:36:23.060 | I think also just my deep life philosophy in general,

00:36:26.380 | it's not contrary to So Good They Can't Ignore You,

00:36:29.600 | but it generalizes it and contains it,

00:36:31.880 | is my deep life philosophy, which again,

00:36:34.560 | there's a recorded a core idea video on this,

00:36:37.100 | so go to youtube.com/calendlyportmedia,

00:36:40.840 | go to the core ideas playlist, go to the deep life,

00:36:43.880 | the deep life core idea video,

00:36:45.860 | is it constrains that professional part

00:36:47.980 | to just one of four or five different areas

00:36:50.280 | that we call buckets that you focus on,

00:36:52.660 | and when you see the four or five different buckets

00:36:54.760 | of your life, you're then caring about how they interact

00:36:57.360 | and connect with each other,

00:36:58.440 | you're not just prioritizing one over the other,

00:37:00.900 | so you might find those exercises useful too,

00:37:03.160 | and again, they don't repudiate So Good They Can't Ignore You

00:37:07.080 | but they constrain it and put into a larger context,

00:37:10.240 | that's a good question, and that is what I'd recommend,

00:37:14.640 | I think you're gonna get some good feedback there,

00:37:18.520 | get some good pushback, and I'm glad you're seeking that.

00:37:22.520 | All right, do we have a caller now, Jesse,

00:37:23.600 | where they're like, I just wanted to tell you,

00:37:26.320 | you're brilliant and your work is 100% right,

00:37:29.920 | and-- - They like your part.

00:37:31.920 | - And I like the part in your hair,

00:37:33.160 | and you don't look dorky,

00:37:34.160 | and I think you're cool like Che Guevara,

00:37:35.800 | can we just get one caller that says that?

00:37:37.800 | Jesse's shaking his head no.

00:37:40.840 | All right, what do we got instead?

00:37:45.880 | - All right, next call is about your thoughts

00:37:49.040 | on the future of a 40 hour work week

00:37:51.680 | in the eight hour work day.

00:37:54.080 | - Hey Cal, for knowledge work,

00:37:59.640 | what do you think of the standard eight hour work day,

00:38:02.600 | 40 hour work week, and what's ideal,

00:38:05.440 | and do you think that this is likely to change at all

00:38:08.320 | in the next 10 years?

00:38:10.300 | - It's a good question,

00:38:13.960 | so I've thought and written some about this,

00:38:17.200 | I had a New Yorker piece in January,

00:38:21.200 | that was about slow productivity,

00:38:22.520 | and it actually opened talking about

00:38:24.920 | some of these ongoing discussions

00:38:26.680 | to shorten the official work week,

00:38:28.640 | and basically my take is,

00:38:31.320 | focusing on the number of hours we work,

00:38:33.120 | or the number of days we work,

00:38:35.460 | in this broader context of burnout and dissatisfaction,

00:38:39.360 | and a general reconfiguration of the working world,

00:38:43.680 | especially in knowledge work, I think it's a red herring.

00:38:46.760 | I don't think that is the problem that people have,

00:38:49.440 | I don't think the problem that people really have

00:38:51.200 | with knowledge work right now,

00:38:52.840 | is that they have to work Friday,

00:38:57.040 | in addition to Monday through Thursday,

00:38:58.520 | I don't think it's that the day ends at five,

00:39:00.720 | versus four, versus three,

00:39:02.680 | these are knobs you can tune on the margins,

00:39:06.080 | and though I am a believer in results oriented style of work,

00:39:11.080 | and I think having a lot of variety

00:39:13.120 | in how people configure their work days and work weeks,

00:39:15.680 | is in general a nice thing to explore,

00:39:17.360 | it's not the solution on its own,

00:39:20.520 | to the issues of dissatisfaction and burnout

00:39:22.680 | that so many are facing.

00:39:24.440 | And my argument in that piece,

00:39:25.760 | and also an argument I lay out in a video,

00:39:27.880 | and again I'm really pitching these core idea videos today,

00:39:30.640 | because this is why I recorded them for exactly this purpose

00:39:33.040 | so I can reference my ideas easily,

00:39:35.000 | but if you read, watch my core idea video

00:39:37.120 | on slow productivity, I make this point,

00:39:39.320 | the real issue is overload.

00:39:40.780 | The thing that is burning people out,

00:39:43.920 | the thing that's causing a lot of dissatisfaction,

00:39:45.760 | or at least one of the many factors in knowledge work,

00:39:47.760 | is having more on your plate

00:39:50.000 | than you can easily imagine accomplishing,

00:39:52.640 | and having an incoming stream

00:39:54.520 | of ever more piling on top of that.

00:39:56.700 | So you enter the state

00:40:00.600 | where you have this overwhelming amount of obligations,

00:40:03.640 | and three different things happen.

00:40:06.480 | One, there is a mental short-circuiting that happens,

00:40:10.720 | there's a part of the human brain

00:40:12.080 | that is charged with making long-term plans for our goals,

00:40:15.480 | that thing short-circuits

00:40:16.920 | when you give it 75 different obligations

00:40:19.160 | and 700 unread emails.

00:40:20.880 | It can't figure out a plan for all of those things,

00:40:23.960 | and then it feels like it's failing

00:40:25.160 | to make plans that are things that are important,

00:40:26.520 | and you feel anxious and you feel overwhelmed.

00:40:28.920 | We have a short-circuiting effect

00:40:30.040 | that directly makes us feel bad.

00:40:32.720 | Then we have a pragmatic negative impact,

00:40:36.280 | which is overhead spirals.

00:40:37.940 | Everything on your plate that you agree to do,

00:40:40.080 | be it a small thing or a major project,

00:40:42.080 | brings with it a fixed amount

00:40:43.540 | of collaborative overhead that is required.

00:40:46.600 | Okay, to get this done, I have to talk to some people

00:40:48.920 | and keep people posted and go find some information

00:40:51.080 | I need to accomplish it.

00:40:52.280 | Now, that's all fine if you give me one thing to do.

00:40:55.680 | Yeah, I gotta find information and talk to some people

00:40:58.040 | and have some meetings where we can discuss

00:40:59.520 | how it's gonna happen.

00:41:01.160 | The problem is when you have more on your plate

00:41:03.280 | than you can handle,

00:41:04.120 | when you're in a state of chronic overload,

00:41:06.000 | each of those things brings with it

00:41:08.000 | its fixed amount of overhead.

00:41:10.080 | And if you have a huge amount of things on your plate

00:41:13.360 | that overhead alone takes up most of your schedule.

00:41:17.560 | Everyone experienced this who had a certain type

00:41:21.840 | of knowledge work job during the pandemic,

00:41:23.360 | experienced this when they found their calendars

00:41:25.780 | get completely full with Zoom meetings,

00:41:27.420 | back to back to back to back,

00:41:28.760 | and their inbox is completely overflowing.

00:41:30.860 | That is overhead spirals and overhead spiral.

00:41:35.200 | You have too much stuff on your plate,

00:41:37.140 | so the overhead takes all your time.

00:41:38.440 | And why it's a spiral is because now if all your time

00:41:40.600 | is spent servicing the overhead,

00:41:42.700 | you're making very little progress

00:41:43.920 | on the things that remain.

00:41:45.800 | So more things pile up and then you get more overhead

00:41:48.480 | that you have to service, more meetings, more emails,

00:41:50.640 | you get farther and farther behind.

00:41:53.040 | This is maddening, it's misery making.

00:41:58.040 | It's almost satirical sometimes how it feels,

00:42:02.440 | how much you're just in these meetings and doing emails.

00:42:04.760 | So it's completely crushes the soul.

00:42:07.880 | And it ends up requiring you to try to fit work

00:42:12.200 | into early in the morning or in the evening

00:42:13.860 | or on the weekends 'cause it has to get done sometime.

00:42:16.140 | So now you're losing the time that you would ordinary spend

00:42:18.700 | to do other things that are important to you,

00:42:19.900 | and that is going to accelerate burnout as well.

00:42:21.860 | So that is happening as well.

00:42:23.060 | And then you just have the alienation from output

00:42:25.220 | because you have so little time to actually do the stuff

00:42:27.460 | that you're good at doing,

00:42:28.340 | the stuff that actually makes an impact.

00:42:29.660 | You're doing it in small bursts

00:42:31.100 | and you're doing it at night while all day you're on Zoom,

00:42:33.420 | and there's a real alienation from your productive potential.

00:42:36.300 | So chronic overload, having more on your plate

00:42:38.540 | than you can easily handle,

00:42:40.020 | creates these three horsemen

00:42:42.380 | of the knowledge worker burnout apocalypse.

00:42:45.020 | This is why we are predominantly feeling so bad

00:42:49.220 | is this overload that we're all feeling.

00:42:51.260 | And if you tell me you don't have to work on Friday,

00:42:55.660 | I was like, that doesn't help much

00:42:56.980 | because I still have all of these things.

00:42:58.900 | I'm short circuiting my brain.

00:43:00.060 | I've overhead spirals taking up all my time.

00:43:02.040 | I'm just gonna put work in that Friday anyways

00:43:03.860 | 'cause when am I gonna get things done?

00:43:05.220 | It's not by itself gonna solve the problem.

00:43:07.620 | How are we gonna solve the problem

00:43:08.840 | is stop having so much stuff on people's plates.

00:43:11.660 | The work should get stopped at a central system

00:43:15.380 | from which you can pull when you have free cycles.

00:43:19.580 | When I'm done with what I'm working on now,

00:43:21.020 | I'll pull something else.

00:43:22.620 | You can't just let that damn burst

00:43:24.460 | and just throw it on everyone's plate

00:43:25.700 | with no constriction, with no restraint.

00:43:28.260 | I think that is really the much more important

00:43:30.760 | than reducing the work week or reducing the work day.

00:43:33.140 | Now, again, I think flexibility is critical.

00:43:35.580 | Reconfiguring your hours is critical,

00:43:37.420 | but we don't have a crisis of having too many work hours.

00:43:40.600 | And this is a very different way of thinking about this

00:43:43.180 | because in a industrial context,

00:43:45.780 | work hours was the main knob you had to turn

00:43:50.240 | when trying to deal with the employee's

00:43:52.520 | subjective experience of work.

00:43:54.160 | If you worked on an assembly line,

00:43:55.860 | the main metric that seemed to matter

00:43:58.840 | was how much time do you have to spend

00:44:00.400 | working on that assembly line?

00:44:01.460 | So a union was gonna fight for less hours,

00:44:04.340 | which they successfully did in the early 20th century,

00:44:06.600 | and that's where the 40-hour work week came from.

00:44:08.880 | The context of knowledge work, the issue is different.

00:44:11.640 | It's not the number of hours so much

00:44:13.320 | as it is the number of things on our plate

00:44:14.940 | that's causing a lot of the troubles.

00:44:17.320 | So that's where I wanna make sure we have a lot of focus

00:44:19.220 | because if we don't solve that problem,

00:44:20.440 | it doesn't matter what you say

00:44:21.600 | about how many days you're supposed to work

00:44:23.720 | or how many hours you're supposed to work.

00:44:25.880 | We will be miserable till we solve that problem.

00:44:28.280 | Now, this brings us back to the first caller

00:44:32.100 | who was talking about the disagreement

00:44:34.160 | between me and Alan Jacobs in the Hedgehog Review.

00:44:36.700 | It is exactly this problem where my style solution shows up

00:44:41.840 | and I think has some merit

00:44:43.160 | because when I'm looking at this very pragmatic problem,

00:44:45.360 | I said, "We have to figure out how to re-engineer

00:44:47.920 | work systems so that you do not have too much stuff

00:44:51.440 | on your plate because it causes a lot of misery."

00:44:53.040 | This is a boring thing.

00:44:54.000 | This is like in the industrial age,

00:44:56.820 | if in the late 19th century, earliest 20th century,

00:44:59.360 | if you're there saying, "We have to actually change

00:45:01.600 | the way we've configured these assembly lines

00:45:04.280 | because the wheels are moving by too fast

00:45:06.340 | and people are getting repetitive strain injuries."

00:45:08.520 | That's kind of a boring but pragmatic solution.

00:45:11.020 | Now, in that early 20th century context

00:45:14.080 | or the late 19th century, the sexy stuff would be,

00:45:17.160 | we have to rethink capitalism.

00:45:21.080 | What we need is to, we need to socialize the plants

00:45:24.680 | or we have to have a Marxist style revolution.

00:45:27.040 | That's the sexy stuff.

00:45:27.880 | That's big think theory.

00:45:29.560 | We got to rethink how we even allocate

00:45:31.780 | and make profit off of capital and alienation of labor.

00:45:34.440 | And that's the exciting stuff.

00:45:36.220 | The boring stuff was, we need to give more breaks

00:45:39.940 | to the workers and slow down the steering wheels.

00:45:42.320 | I'm like that boring guy today with knowledge work.

00:45:44.980 | The sexy stuff is these post-capitalist visions

00:45:47.840 | of re-imagining the role of work

00:45:50.400 | and rethinking what work means in our life

00:45:52.860 | and how much we have to do to support ourselves and et cetera.

00:45:55.880 | That's the sexy, interesting stuff.

00:45:57.200 | And I'm in here saying, "Yeah, but also we have to make sure

00:45:59.240 | that you can't have 50 tasks on your plate at the same time.

00:46:01.960 | And this is a workflow system problem.

00:46:04.680 | It's a productivity system problem.

00:46:06.720 | It's not exciting.

00:46:07.560 | It's not sexy, but it's the stuff

00:46:08.600 | that can actually make a difference right now

00:46:11.040 | while we're waiting for the overthrow of capitalism."

00:46:13.640 | I think that's a good question.

00:46:15.720 | That's where I'm putting my focus though,

00:46:18.700 | is in the short term,

00:46:20.880 | overload is one of the biggest problems

00:46:23.280 | that I think we could solve.

00:46:24.240 | And the reason why I think we can solve it by the way

00:46:26.840 | is it's not a...

00:46:29.560 | The relationship here is one of more win-win

00:46:33.880 | than other type of labor issues.

00:46:35.280 | So the chronic overload makes workers less productive

00:46:39.480 | in a lot of ways.

00:46:40.300 | Clearly, if you're in an overhead spiral,

00:46:42.480 | it limits the amount of good work you can produce.

00:46:45.460 | Clearly, if you're burnt out and leaving your job,

00:46:47.900 | that's bad for the employer.

00:46:49.320 | So pull-based systems,

00:46:52.760 | where you have a small number of things

00:46:53.740 | on your plate at a time,

00:46:54.580 | but you work on them really intensely

00:46:55.800 | and then pull in a new thing when you finish,

00:46:57.440 | well, probably actually from a company's perspective

00:46:59.960 | or an organization's perspective,

00:47:01.720 | more things will get done at higher quality.

00:47:03.480 | Their employers will be more happy, not burn out as much.

00:47:05.400 | I mean, it's a bit of a win-win situation.

00:47:07.200 | It's just complicated.

00:47:08.160 | So this is the nice thing about this

00:47:09.800 | versus other labor movements we've had in the past.

00:47:12.840 | This is not so much labor versus management.

00:47:15.440 | It's more like labor and management versus complexity.

00:47:18.380 | The way we work now is easy.

00:47:22.040 | The way I'm talking about is a pain.

00:47:23.840 | And things that are a pain take a long time to get right.

00:47:25.600 | Who wants to be the one that first wants

00:47:26.880 | to completely rethink their work?

00:47:28.160 | And what if it doesn't work?

00:47:29.200 | And I've talked about this before.

00:47:31.040 | It took Henry Ford years to figure out

00:47:32.840 | how to make the assembly line profitable

00:47:34.400 | until then he looked stupid.

00:47:35.480 | So it's a whole complicated mess,

00:47:37.580 | but that's where I'm putting my focus.

00:47:38.880 | I like flexibility in work.

00:47:40.620 | I like to be able to control when my hours are

00:47:42.560 | to some degree great, but let's fix the overload problem.

00:47:45.160 | We're gonna get a huge immediate benefit.

00:47:48.100 | All right, so speaking about overload,

00:47:51.180 | let me talk about a couple sponsors here.

00:47:55.760 | Let's see our first sponsor is,

00:47:58.200 | oh no, it's Alan Jacobs.

00:48:00.080 | Shoot, sorry.

00:48:01.560 | Man, we keep doing that.

00:48:03.040 | Keep doing that.

00:48:03.880 | No, I'm joking.

00:48:04.700 | I like Alan, very, very smart, smarter than me.

00:48:06.120 | So read his stuff.

00:48:07.920 | No, we got ExpressVPN is our sponsor here.

00:48:10.300 | We've talked about this before,

00:48:12.840 | how a VPN works, why you need a VPN.

00:48:15.640 | VPNs are gonna get you privacy and security online.

00:48:18.880 | And if you're gonna use a VPN,

00:48:20.000 | use the one I use, which is ExpressVPN.

00:48:22.800 | 'Cause they have a lot of servers all around the world

00:48:25.560 | and very fast speeds.

00:48:27.600 | You won't even know it's turned on.

00:48:28.880 | It's a great VPN.

00:48:29.920 | But they sent me some notes about a particular usage

00:48:33.760 | of their VPN, which I've been messing around with

00:48:35.920 | and think is quite cool,

00:48:36.980 | which is if you connect to a VPN server in another country,

00:48:41.080 | you can access content that is only available

00:48:45.440 | in that country.

00:48:46.600 | I've been doing this recently to get access

00:48:49.380 | to the BBC player in the UK,

00:48:51.240 | connect to an ExpressVPN server in the UK.

00:48:53.920 | I can now stream that regionalized BBC coverage,

00:48:57.840 | which right now is my favorite coverage

00:49:00.120 | on the war in Ukraine.

00:49:01.560 | So it's been quite useful.

00:49:02.960 | So I think that's just a nice bonus feature you get

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00:49:19.840 | And that's a cool thing you can do with it.

00:49:22.160 | So if you visit my special link right now

00:49:24.820 | at expressvpn.com/deep,

00:49:26.880 | you can get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free.

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00:49:43.800 | Also wanna talk about Athletic Greens,

00:49:48.120 | the preferred daily nutritional supplement of Jessie's mom.

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00:49:58.120 | We're gonna have to have her now come back

00:49:59.320 | and do a review after she's tried it for a while.

00:50:01.400 | - A hundred percent.

00:50:02.240 | - Yeah, we're gonna get real endorsements,

00:50:04.600 | real endorsements.

00:50:05.440 | But I can give you my endorsement

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00:50:38.520 | the things your body craves.

00:50:40.460 | And I do my best to eat well,

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00:50:43.160 | but I know I'm not hitting all the things

00:50:44.660 | at all times of the year.

00:50:45.500 | So Athletic Greens is my insurance,

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00:51:37.580 | All right.

00:51:39.880 | So where are we at here?

00:51:42.960 | I think we have time.

00:51:43.800 | Let's fit in one more call, Jesse,

00:51:44.920 | and then we'll call it a day

00:51:46.600 | so that we'll keep this episode svelte.

00:51:50.200 | - Sounds good.

00:51:51.400 | All right, the next question is about your reading habits.

00:51:53.880 | And a lot of people are interested in that sort of thing.

00:51:56.560 | And this has a twist, so we'll hear what it says.

00:51:59.360 | - Hi, Cal, this is Emily,

00:52:00.620 | and I'm a grad student in molecular biology.

00:52:03.340 | I have a problem with reading

00:52:04.460 | that I've never heard you discuss.

00:52:06.120 | I read obsessively, and I have since I was a child.

00:52:08.760 | I enjoy this, but if I'm not careful,

00:52:10.520 | it harms the rest of my life.

00:52:12.160 | I don't sleep enough.

00:52:13.000 | I neglect responsibilities.

00:52:14.320 | I even miss work.

00:52:15.700 | Even if I manage to put a book down halfway through,

00:52:17.720 | thoughts of it can distract me for hours.

00:52:20.600 | In order to focus on finishing my PhD,

00:52:22.660 | I've seriously restricted my reading for pleasure.

00:52:25.200 | This year, the majority of my reading

00:52:26.600 | has been either books I've read before

00:52:28.160 | or books that I find a bit dull,

00:52:30.200 | which allows me to stop reading when appropriate.

00:52:32.520 | On rare occasions, I'll take a Saturday

00:52:34.080 | to devour something new,

00:52:35.620 | but mostly I see this restriction

00:52:37.080 | as temporary but necessary.

00:52:38.700 | Your usual advice of carving out time

00:52:41.560 | for reading every day sounds dangerous for me,

00:52:43.600 | so I'm curious if you have any tips

00:52:45.200 | or alternate approaches to manage my experience.

00:52:47.600 | Thanks.

00:52:48.420 | - Well, Emily, it's a good question.

00:52:51.120 | Just as a brief aside before I get to your question,

00:52:54.160 | when we were having a little bit of a delay just there

00:52:56.480 | getting the call to work,

00:52:57.360 | it was reminding me, Jesse, of last week,

00:53:00.240 | the avalanche of technical errors

00:53:03.360 | that the listener did not realize was occurring.

00:53:06.920 | - That was funny.

00:53:07.760 | I made a list, and I told several people about it

00:53:09.600 | over the weekend.

00:53:10.440 | It was funny.

00:53:11.260 | I made a list because thing after thing,

00:53:12.840 | we record these live,

00:53:14.200 | thing after thing was going wrong,

00:53:16.240 | and it was so many things going wrong

00:53:17.800 | that Jesse started writing them down.

00:53:20.280 | But let's see if I had this straight.

00:53:22.000 | I was asking you, so at some point,

00:53:24.080 | I was asking you about Blinkist, one of our sponsors,

00:53:26.480 | and you were trying to log in to Blinkist.

00:53:28.560 | - That was so funny.

00:53:30.960 | So you were asking me what Blinks I read,

00:53:33.120 | and you're like, "Log in to Blinkist

00:53:34.360 | "and tell me what you see on the homepage."

00:53:37.160 | So I go to Blinkist.com,

00:53:38.840 | but it's like, "Enter your login information."

00:53:41.500 | 'Cause I logged in on another computer.

00:53:44.820 | So I had to go to my password document, look that up.

00:53:47.160 | But then as soon as that's happening,

00:53:48.780 | this laptop isn't great.

00:53:50.420 | Sometimes the browser's crashed.

00:53:52.060 | It crashed.

00:53:52.960 | You're still asking me.

00:53:53.800 | I'm trying to play it off by seeing--

00:53:55.660 | - And by the way, the browser is needed

00:53:57.740 | for playing the calls.

00:53:59.060 | So the browser crashing now has a big implication

00:54:01.820 | because now he can't play more calls.

00:54:04.180 | And I'm talking to him at this time.

00:54:05.460 | - Yeah, so I'm trying to play it off,

00:54:06.860 | tell you what Blinkist I was reading.

00:54:08.300 | I was trying to think about the one that I was reading,

00:54:10.260 | but I'm entering this so I could get it in.

00:54:13.580 | - Yeah, and then at some point,

00:54:15.140 | you're stuck in a captcha, right?

00:54:16.900 | - Yeah, oh yeah, forgot about that.

00:54:18.380 | - Vertical rivers.

00:54:19.700 | - So I get in there, like, yeah,

00:54:20.860 | "Identify 10 vertical rivers."

00:54:23.460 | I was telling my buddy who does online stuff,

00:54:25.460 | and he's like, "I had the same thing that day."

00:54:27.780 | - So all this is going on.

00:54:29.460 | He has to get the next question queued up.

00:54:30.780 | He's trying to talk to me on camera,

00:54:32.380 | and he has to identify vertical rivers

00:54:34.220 | from a large picture of,

00:54:36.180 | a large array of images of vertical rivers.

00:54:40.300 | So anyways, that's why we pay you $250,000 a month,

00:54:43.540 | because this is,

00:54:44.560 | that's why you get all that sweet, sweet

00:54:47.940 | athletic greens money,

00:54:49.220 | because it's a hard job.

00:54:51.620 | - And then when we came in,

00:54:52.500 | you were kind of in a rush,

00:54:53.860 | but I couldn't do anything 'cause the mouse had died.

00:54:55.700 | - Yeah, the mouse died,

00:54:57.340 | and the soundboard broke.

00:54:59.700 | Remember, the soundboard was giving static,

00:55:01.540 | like just a loud, large, loud static,

00:55:03.820 | and yeah, man, that was not our day.

00:55:06.540 | So we're doing pretty well.

00:55:07.380 | All we had was like one delayed call so far.

00:55:09.580 | So we're doing pretty well.

00:55:11.140 | All right, Emily, let's get to your question though.

00:55:14.480 | It's completely fine.

00:55:15.660 | What you're describing is completely fine.

00:55:18.220 | You're finding the types of books you're reading

00:55:20.780 | lead to compulsive reading,

00:55:22.220 | so you're doing less so that you can focus on other things.

00:55:24.500 | That's fine.

00:55:25.340 | Don't read every day,

00:55:27.380 | if it's creating that compulsion.

00:55:29.900 | And I think you've already landed on three solutions.

00:55:33.580 | One, titrating your reading to the situation.

00:55:35.660 | So you're up to your ears and working on a dissertation.

00:55:37.940 | So maybe you're reading less stuff

00:55:39.500 | that's unrelated to the dissertation.

00:55:41.220 | That's fine.

00:55:42.340 | Two, have a reading day.

00:55:44.640 | So if you like to do compulsive reading

00:55:46.260 | where you dive into something,

00:55:47.300 | you're like, yeah, I look forward to Saturdays,

00:55:49.540 | and I go somewhere cool, like a coffee shop to start,

00:55:51.900 | and then I go hiking and read,

00:55:53.380 | and I can devour a whole book,

00:55:54.900 | and it's part of a really enriching, meaningful ritual.

00:55:58.380 | I think that's great.

00:56:00.040 | And then three, be careful about your book selection.

00:56:04.100 | Right?

00:56:05.980 | Because reading is reading, reading is good.

00:56:07.120 | It's your mind having to engage

00:56:08.640 | with complex thought structures.

00:56:09.840 | So yeah, read the boringer books.

00:56:11.600 | If it's novels that really catch your attention,

00:56:15.240 | then like, okay, I'm going to read a long history

00:56:17.940 | of World War I or something like that,

00:56:19.440 | so that you can still maybe have some of this exercise.

00:56:21.600 | But to be very careful about what you choose,

00:56:24.220 | I think is fine.

00:56:26.580 | This is much more minor than what you're talking about,

00:56:29.680 | but I do not like, for example, apocalyptic fiction.

00:56:34.640 | My brain gets too into it and gets concerned.

00:56:37.040 | It presses anxiety buttons or this or that.

00:56:38.920 | I don't like that.

00:56:40.400 | So I just don't read those type of books.

00:56:42.480 | I'm not going to read World War Z.

00:56:44.800 | I don't want to read apocalyptic tales

00:56:47.660 | of the earth becoming uninhabitable and everyone died.

00:56:52.360 | Maybe it's just hitting a little bit

00:56:53.400 | too close to home these days.

00:56:54.440 | So I avoid those type of books.

00:56:56.000 | Julie was really pushing on me, like,

00:56:58.280 | oh, you should read Station Eleven.

00:56:59.400 | I was like, I can't read Station Eleven right now.

00:57:01.600 | I can't read a book about a viral pandemic

00:57:05.000 | that kills most of the people on earth.

00:57:06.920 | Like, I don't want to read that right now.

00:57:08.360 | Just like with the stuff going on in Europe right now,

00:57:11.880 | I'm not going to read, you know, On the Beach,

00:57:14.440 | Neville shoots On the Beach, for example.

00:57:16.500 | Though it's kind of a cool book.

00:57:18.520 | Have you heard of that book, Jesse?

00:57:19.880 | - No.

00:57:20.720 | - There's a nuclear war and it follows,

00:57:25.320 | there's a crew on a submarine.

00:57:28.220 | So like, they're alive, obviously,

00:57:29.640 | because they were underwater in a submarine

00:57:31.040 | and they're like going around trying to find,

00:57:33.040 | they end up in Australia,

00:57:34.640 | 'cause like the whole world's been destroyed

00:57:36.000 | and they kind of end up in Australia

00:57:37.760 | because the nuclear winter cloud hasn't come there,

00:57:41.080 | but they know the nuclear winter cloud is on its way.

00:57:43.920 | And it's like, they're trying to just find civilization.

00:57:47.400 | I found the beginning of Seveneves too apocalyptic.

00:57:49.520 | I was like, oh, I had to get through that pretty quickly.

00:57:51.280 | I don't like that whole, the hard rain is coming.

00:57:54.760 | And I'll tell you the flaw in that,

00:57:57.680 | plot flaw is it was symbolic,

00:58:01.460 | but they had this orchestra playing

00:58:05.060 | in like Canterbury Cathedral

00:58:06.940 | as the hard rain was about to come.

00:58:08.860 | Like, we're going to play this concert

00:58:10.500 | and we're just going to die as we play it.

00:58:12.140 | So like, we go out like celebrating humanity's greatest art

00:58:15.900 | as the hard rain comes.

00:58:17.660 | I don't buy it.

00:58:18.500 | They're all going to be with their families, right?

00:58:20.260 | I don't think they're gonna be like, sorry, family.

00:58:21.740 | Like I'm going to spend my last time like rehearsing

00:58:24.580 | and playing in an orchestra with people.

00:58:26.440 | So I thought that was a flaw.

00:58:27.340 | But anyways, the point is Emily,

00:58:28.580 | I can't read apocalyptic fiction and it's small,

00:58:32.520 | but I don't read it.

00:58:33.660 | So read the stuff that's working for you right now.

00:58:35.940 | Titrate, absolutely.

00:58:37.900 | Have a reading day.

00:58:39.620 | All of that's good.

00:58:40.460 | You're working on dissertation.

00:58:41.640 | You don't have to worry about your brain

00:58:42.940 | not getting worked out right now, right?

00:58:45.260 | It's like when you're training for a marathon,

00:58:47.520 | it's okay to let your Peloton habit go wax for a while.

00:58:51.580 | You're getting enough of that.

00:58:52.860 | So do not think of my daily reading

00:58:55.660 | or this many books a month as gospel you have to follow.

00:58:59.260 | Build the thing that makes sense for you.

00:59:01.680 | All right, Jesse, well, we're hitting up on an hour.

00:59:05.060 | So I think this is a good place to call it.

00:59:07.980 | Thank you everyone who sent in their listener calls.

00:59:11.940 | As I always say, if you like what you heard,

00:59:13.660 | you will like what you read.

00:59:14.820 | You can subscribe to my weekly email newsletter

00:59:17.540 | at calnewbork.com.

00:59:19.340 | If you like what you heard,

00:59:20.160 | also like what you see.

00:59:22.060 | Videos of these full episodes

00:59:23.500 | and each individual question I answer

00:59:25.340 | can be found at youtube.com/calnewportmedia.

00:59:30.340 | We'll be back on Monday.

00:59:31.500 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

00:59:33.940 | (upbeat music)

00:59:37.440 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:59:40.800 | [MUSIC]

Full Length Episode | #180 | March 10, 2022

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