How To Get Out Of A Rut & Design Your Dream Life In 2024

00:00:00.000 | It's how do you intentionally engineer a life that's deep

00:00:03.520 | when you have all of these shallow,

00:00:05.160 | often digital distractions that are trying

00:00:06.920 | to pull you away from meaning.

00:00:09.920 | So your new book, "Build the Life You Want"

00:00:13.920 | is exactly the type of thing we're talking about.

00:00:16.600 | I'm excited to get to this blueprint type approach

00:00:20.080 | of how do you get intentional about designing your life.

00:00:23.040 | My listeners love this, but if you'll indulge me,

00:00:27.280 | what I wanted to do first was actually go back

00:00:30.640 | and spend some time on your life story,

00:00:34.320 | which I have broken into four acts,

00:00:37.680 | each of which is really different than the last.

00:00:39.480 | I think it's a case study of really applying,

00:00:42.340 | not just intention to your life, but revision.

00:00:44.820 | Okay, where are things now?

00:00:46.140 | Let me adjust my vision.

00:00:47.340 | Let me make perhaps a major change.

00:00:48.960 | So I thought we would start with the real life case study

00:00:52.240 | of designing your life with your life itself.

00:00:55.360 | So to start at the beginning,

00:00:57.080 | I have your act one as serious musician.

00:01:00.600 | Would you, do I have that right?

00:01:02.520 | You would say this is your first act as an adult,

00:01:04.520 | in adult life was music.

00:01:05.680 | - Yeah, that was my first act as a child too.

00:01:07.920 | And by the way, this systemic approach

00:01:10.320 | to actually building your life,

00:01:11.520 | you're the best guy in the world to talk about this

00:01:14.300 | because you have this systematic,

00:01:16.440 | well, you do two things incredibly well.

00:01:18.260 | You understand the difference between complex

00:01:20.000 | and complicated problems mathematically.

00:01:22.400 | Complex problems don't have solutions,

00:01:24.080 | but they're easy to understand.

00:01:25.100 | Complicated problems are hard to understand,

00:01:26.680 | but you can solve them with enough horsepower.

00:01:29.120 | And you understand that you can't use complicated solutions

00:01:31.700 | to solve complex problems.

00:01:33.520 | And all of this goes into the way

00:01:35.280 | that you're gonna build your life.

00:01:36.200 | And I know we're gonna talk about this.

00:01:37.280 | You're the, like, you're the guy

00:01:39.960 | that actually understands for people how to do this.

00:01:41.900 | So I'm delighted to be able to be a case study for you,

00:01:44.320 | for this.

00:01:45.160 | And for your first question,

00:01:47.780 | music was the only part of my life

00:01:49.560 | that I didn't choose, actually.

00:01:51.400 | It was chosen for me, perhaps divinely, I don't know.

00:01:55.520 | My parents, when I was four, I started violin.

00:01:58.280 | When I was five, I started the piano.

00:01:59.880 | When I was eight, I started the French horn.

00:02:02.000 | Eight?

00:02:02.960 | I mean, yeah.

00:02:03.780 | And I was really good at that, and that really stuck.

00:02:06.840 | And it was fun, and I liked it, and I loved music, et cetera.

00:02:09.440 | And so that's what I was,

00:02:10.560 | by the time I was 10 or 11 years old,

00:02:12.600 | my ambition was to be

00:02:13.720 | the world's greatest French horn player.

00:02:15.280 | That was what I wanted to do.

00:02:17.160 | I wanted to grow up and do that.

00:02:18.680 | All of my heroes were great French horn players.

00:02:21.440 | The greatest horn player who's ever lived

00:02:23.260 | is a British guy from the 1930s and '40s

00:02:26.020 | named Dennis Brayne.

00:02:27.780 | And Dennis Brayne, I had a picture of him

00:02:30.120 | up on my bedroom wall.

00:02:31.820 | I didn't have Michael Jordan, or Wilt Chamberlain.

00:02:34.860 | I had Dennis Brayne up on the wall.

00:02:37.580 | And that's what I did.

00:02:38.860 | And so it was my unsuccessful run at college when I was 18.

00:02:43.860 | Really what it was was my heart wasn't in it

00:02:46.860 | because I wanted to go pro.

00:02:47.900 | So I left.

00:02:49.880 | There was a mutual decision of the college and me

00:02:52.300 | to pursue my excellence elsewhere, put it that way.

00:02:54.900 | And I left right after my 19th birthday,

00:02:58.220 | and that's when I went pro in musician.

00:02:59.740 | I did that 'til I was 31.

00:03:01.660 | - Well, and I've heard that before

00:03:03.060 | from a professional musician friend of mine,

00:03:05.020 | is that these colleges that are focused on the arts,

00:03:07.820 | if you make it to graduation, basically means you failed.

00:03:10.780 | So you go to one of these colleges.

00:03:12.660 | He went to Berklee School of Music in Boston.

00:03:15.380 | The whole pressure of that system is go pro.

00:03:18.940 | I should mention, by the way, Arthur,

00:03:20.360 | when I was eight years old,

00:03:22.240 | I started playing the French horn.

00:03:23.900 | - Did you really?

00:03:24.740 | - So we've got that connection.

00:03:25.580 | - I'll be darned.

00:03:26.400 | So third or fourth grade,

00:03:27.240 | you started playing the French horn as well.

00:03:28.060 | - It was very hard.

00:03:28.900 | - And you made good.

00:03:29.780 | Look, you escaped the vortex, Cal.

00:03:32.180 | - It's an impossible, it's a preposterous instrument,

00:03:35.060 | I would say.

00:03:35.900 | It's so hard to play.

00:03:37.660 | - The physics are no good, which you don't know.

00:03:39.940 | The problem is that it's almost as long as a tuba,

00:03:42.940 | which should make it a bass instrument.

00:03:45.740 | But the mouthpiece that you blow into

00:03:47.500 | is the size of a trumpet mouthpiece.

00:03:49.260 | And what that does effectively is it sets the harmonics

00:03:51.820 | on top of each other.

00:03:52.700 | They're so close that it's easy to miss notes.

00:03:55.580 | The reason that French horn players

00:03:56.760 | notoriously are inaccurate

00:03:58.940 | is because the mouthpiece is too small

00:04:01.200 | for the length of the instrument.

00:04:02.540 | And so hitting the harmonic in the series right

00:04:04.980 | is perilous, like a tight wire rock,

00:04:07.900 | like being a flying Wallenda, but for the brass section.

00:04:10.940 | - Yeah, the trumpet players just sort of blow

00:04:12.860 | into that thing.

00:04:13.900 | And it's like, their notes are clear.

00:04:15.360 | And the French horns, you have to,

00:04:16.300 | A, you have to blow into that thing

00:04:17.660 | like a hurricane force and be precise.

00:04:19.460 | Well, anyways, I did not have the poster

00:04:22.140 | of the professional French horn player.

00:04:23.820 | But so we see you then, you're in your twenties,

00:04:26.480 | you're playing, you had dropped out of school to be pro,

00:04:28.700 | you're playing professional French horn.

00:04:32.640 | By your thirties, you are a full professor.

00:04:36.460 | I mean, you're an academic.

00:04:37.700 | You're a standard academic at Syracuse.

00:04:40.380 | So walk us through that transition.

00:04:43.660 | How do we get from, I'm playing in, was it Barcelona,

00:04:47.080 | to I'm on an academic track, not a typical path.

00:04:50.720 | So what went down there?

00:04:52.000 | - Yeah, it's not a typical path.

00:04:53.160 | But when I was a kid, I had this theory, believe it or not.

00:04:58.160 | I mean, it was a kind of a precocious theory

00:05:00.880 | to have, I realized, but nonetheless,

00:05:02.640 | I had this idea that you could build your life,

00:05:06.700 | you've got to make your own decisions,

00:05:08.240 | that it was almost incumbent upon you to make a decision

00:05:11.000 | about different areas of your life.

00:05:12.320 | And so I always figured at some point,

00:05:14.480 | it was my responsibility to choose my religion,

00:05:17.080 | not every year, like some sort of sentimentalist,

00:05:19.360 | but to choose my faith and practice it seriously,

00:05:21.800 | to choose my own political views,

00:05:24.600 | to make a choice on the basis

00:05:26.280 | of the information that's out there.

00:05:28.360 | So not take things, important things in your life as given.

00:05:32.360 | And that meant my vocation as well.

00:05:34.520 | The problem is I hadn't chosen my vocation.

00:05:36.880 | I hadn't chosen my vocational path.

00:05:38.760 | And by the time I was in my mid-twenties,

00:05:41.480 | my life was great.

00:05:44.320 | I have to say, I mean, I moved to Barcelona

00:05:46.320 | and joined the symphony, not because of the symphony,

00:05:48.440 | but because I was in love with a Spanish girl.

00:05:50.840 | And I chased her to Barcelona in a bid to learn the language

00:05:54.000 | so I could ask her to marry me,

00:05:55.320 | which took two years to close that deal.

00:05:57.760 | But we just celebrated our 32nd wedding anniversary

00:06:01.040 | and we have kids and grandkids at this point.

00:06:02.600 | So it turned out that venture was really successful.

00:06:07.120 | But in that time, I realized that I was good at it,

00:06:10.840 | but I didn't love it.

00:06:11.880 | I didn't love it.

00:06:13.640 | I mean, I wasn't the world's greatest French horn player,

00:06:15.000 | but I was making a living, which isn't nothing.

00:06:16.840 | And so my wife, my new wife said,

00:06:20.040 | "Why don't you figure out what you love?

00:06:22.200 | "I mean, don't you have this theory

00:06:23.440 | "that you get to choose everything once?"

00:06:25.680 | And I said, "Huh."

00:06:27.240 | So I actually went back to school.

00:06:28.920 | She was studying for her high school diploma

00:06:31.720 | in her late twenties.

00:06:33.120 | She had dropped out of high school when she was 16

00:06:36.720 | to sing with a very famous rock band in Barcelona.

00:06:40.320 | And so she was doing that, taking a few math classes.

00:06:42.880 | She said, "You gotta try math."

00:06:43.920 | I said, "Math?"

00:06:44.760 | You know, my dad was a math professor,

00:06:46.000 | but you know, no, it's not for me.

00:06:47.640 | I took calculus and it was like doing crossword puzzles,

00:06:50.200 | man, it was easy and fun and just great.

00:06:54.160 | 'Cause I was 27 or something at that point.

00:06:56.320 | And so I wound up enrolling in correspondence school,

00:07:00.080 | distance learning in Barcelona.

00:07:02.080 | Took a job in South Florida teaching French horn

00:07:05.120 | because it gave me enough time

00:07:06.160 | to finish my bachelor's degree by correspondence,

00:07:09.340 | which wound up being in economics

00:07:10.920 | 'cause it was so interesting, social science.

00:07:13.360 | This is something I chose.

00:07:14.520 | And I went, I got my master's degree in economics.

00:07:16.440 | And by that time I was 31

00:07:17.800 | and I was actually ready to try something new.

00:07:20.000 | So I quit and started my PhD.

00:07:21.600 | So I did my PhD in three years in public policy analysis.

00:07:26.020 | My fields were applied microeconomics and math modeling.

00:07:28.880 | I was doing operations, military operations research

00:07:32.540 | for the US Air Force while I was in graduate school

00:07:34.680 | to make a living.

00:07:35.840 | And then I came out and took an academic job.

00:07:38.440 | You know, used my PhD to get an academic job

00:07:40.600 | as a social scientist.

00:07:41.680 | First at Georgia State for a little while

00:07:43.360 | and then at Syracuse.

00:07:45.360 | And all told, that first pass through academia

00:07:48.000 | was 10 years where I took promotions and tenure

00:07:50.440 | and endowed chairs and all the stuff

00:07:52.560 | that you do in academia.

00:07:53.720 | - But when you were making that intentional vocational

00:07:56.440 | choice there in Spain,

00:07:59.000 | was the vision all the way through to academia

00:08:01.100 | or was it, I don't wanna do French horn anymore,

00:08:04.080 | let me go back to school

00:08:05.560 | and then we will see what that opens up?

00:08:07.400 | How far in the future were you thinking?

00:08:09.480 | - I was, I had notions of it and the truth is

00:08:12.000 | that academia is the family business for me.

00:08:14.680 | My father was a professor, was a math professor.

00:08:17.480 | His father was a theology professor

00:08:20.660 | and an administrator at a college,

00:08:22.360 | at these, you know, religious colleges actually.

00:08:24.800 | But it is a family profession.

00:08:26.920 | So I always kind of thought, you know,

00:08:28.280 | it's a pretty good life, et cetera, but I don't know.

00:08:30.600 | You know, maybe I'll try to run a company,

00:08:32.520 | maybe I'll, you know, go to one of these crazy think tanks,

00:08:36.640 | et cetera.

00:08:37.480 | What I really wanted to was to learn social science,

00:08:41.520 | which is incredibly interesting.

00:08:43.000 | I mean, human behavior is the most interesting thing ever

00:08:45.320 | because you can use mathematical and statistical tools,

00:08:48.120 | complicated tools to at least apprehend

00:08:50.760 | some of these complex problems of human behavior.

00:08:54.240 | Not perfectly, this is not computer science

00:08:56.440 | we're talking about here,

00:08:57.840 | but it is amazing how much power you have.

00:09:00.320 | And so I just couldn't get enough of that.

00:09:01.960 | I was much happier as a social scientist

00:09:05.080 | than I ever had been as a classical musician

00:09:07.040 | because it was the thing that I chose.

00:09:08.640 | I was passionate about it.

00:09:09.880 | And then when I got out of graduate school,

00:09:11.640 | I realized I could continue to learn

00:09:13.320 | and I needed to learn a lot more

00:09:15.040 | only if I went into academia.

00:09:17.040 | So my assistant professor life, you know,

00:09:19.200 | before I got any, you know, I was on the tenure track,

00:09:21.800 | but before I got any of that tenure,

00:09:23.560 | it really was an extension of my PhD.

00:09:25.800 | I learned probably more as an assistant professor

00:09:28.120 | than I did in graduate school.

00:09:29.320 | You too, probably, right?

00:09:30.440 | - Oh yeah, well, especially like teaching a course,

00:09:32.480 | you know, then you learn, oh, I understand this.

00:09:34.920 | I understand this topic now.

00:09:36.480 | - But also writing code.

00:09:38.120 | You know, I was running very sophisticated packages,

00:09:41.360 | you know, software packages for my statistical programming

00:09:44.240 | and I had to learn how to write code,

00:09:46.000 | which taught me the statistics.

00:09:47.840 | And then I was writing a lot of theory.

00:09:49.320 | I was doing, you know, early AI stuff.

00:09:51.240 | I was doing a lot of stuff with genetic algorithms

00:09:53.360 | and using genetic algorithms

00:09:55.040 | as learning models across economies.

00:09:57.960 | And I had to learn how that worked.

00:09:59.400 | And you know, I didn't get any of that in my PhD.

00:10:01.960 | - Hey, quick interruption.

00:10:03.320 | If you want my free guide with my seven best ideas

00:10:07.440 | on how to cultivate the deep life,

00:10:10.520 | go to calnewport.com/ideas

00:10:13.880 | or click the link right below in the description.

00:10:16.720 | This is a great way to take action

00:10:19.160 | on the type of things we talk about here on this show.

00:10:22.120 | All right, let's get back to it.

00:10:23.360 | - I'll talk about a topic that has fallen out of favor.

00:10:25.840 | I remember genetic algorithms.

00:10:27.960 | You would actually evolve the algorithms

00:10:29.800 | with natural selection.

00:10:31.120 | But I think you're selling,

00:10:32.600 | so just to set the stage for the ions,

00:10:34.320 | you're being modest here because I think a misnomer

00:10:39.200 | a lot of people in the general public have about academia

00:10:41.800 | is this idea of like, well, if you get a PhD,

00:10:43.960 | like one of the things you can just choose to do is teach.

00:10:46.120 | It's just like this teaches how it's described.

00:10:49.400 | It's like, yeah, you could go be a professor

00:10:50.720 | if you decide to or not.

00:10:51.920 | The reality of course is that,

00:10:53.200 | especially when you get to an R1 institution

00:10:55.720 | or an institution like Syracuse,

00:10:57.000 | it's incredibly competitive.

00:10:58.440 | It's very hard to get hired at Syracuse

00:11:01.280 | and then advance through the promotion chain.

00:11:04.280 | So it must be what you were doing at Georgia State

00:11:08.600 | had a spark to it, right?

00:11:09.920 | So it must have been you were seen early on

00:11:11.560 | or maybe you were doing this on purpose.

00:11:12.840 | You were finding a niche that was gathering

00:11:15.360 | some heat or some attention

00:11:18.000 | because that's actually a really impressive jump.

00:11:20.720 | I mean, typically, again, a professor at Syracuse

00:11:22.560 | would have been good school, straight out of college,

00:11:24.920 | in the grad school, like their whole life

00:11:26.720 | focused on getting hired in one of those slots.

00:11:28.920 | You came into it sideways.

00:11:30.880 | So I'm assuming what you were doing

00:11:32.360 | was seen as was innovative

00:11:33.720 | or you found a vein there that was really rich.

00:11:36.360 | - Yeah, it's basically what it was.

00:11:39.560 | I had my eye on Syracuse

00:11:40.920 | 'cause Syracuse was the number one school in policy

00:11:44.120 | in the country at the time.

00:11:45.200 | And there were great professors there,

00:11:46.800 | people I really venerated.

00:11:47.880 | It was a community I wanted to be part of.

00:11:49.920 | And so when I came out of graduate school

00:11:51.440 | and went into academia at Georgia State,

00:11:53.760 | also a very fine university, and I enjoyed it a lot,

00:11:56.600 | the first thing that I did

00:11:58.440 | was I figured out how the system works.

00:12:00.280 | The biggest mistake that professors make

00:12:02.640 | when they come out of graduate school

00:12:03.840 | is that they'll say something like,

00:12:05.560 | you know, I'm gonna get my courses under control,

00:12:08.560 | then I'm gonna start paying attention to my research.

00:12:10.800 | I can tell that that person's

00:12:13.680 | probably not gonna get tenure.

00:12:15.920 | The truth is that in an R1 research university,

00:12:19.120 | research is everything.

00:12:20.680 | It really matters what you're doing in research.

00:12:22.680 | So I got a notion of how the traffic patterns work,

00:12:27.360 | and that meant basically

00:12:29.080 | that there was a certain number of articles

00:12:30.760 | in certain set of journals.

00:12:32.640 | I looked at those journals

00:12:34.680 | and the articles that I admired the most

00:12:37.000 | and I found most interesting.

00:12:38.760 | I actually made a template of those articles.

00:12:42.360 | I didn't make a macro to write the articles.

00:12:44.880 | That's completely impossible, obviously.

00:12:46.360 | It's still a creative task.

00:12:47.440 | But I made a structure that I needed to follow,

00:12:50.760 | and I started to follow that particular structure,

00:12:53.640 | and I did that about, you know,

00:12:55.840 | six times in each of my first three years in academia,

00:12:59.360 | which gave me a real leg up

00:13:01.000 | and it made it possible to show

00:13:02.160 | that I had a big research record.

00:13:04.160 | I was doing economic statistical research in public policy,

00:13:08.160 | which was a little bit unusual.

00:13:09.800 | - You were doing six papers a year,

00:13:12.440 | you were hitting in your journal papers

00:13:14.480 | in your assistant professorship years?

00:13:15.880 | - Yeah, that's right.

00:13:16.800 | Mostly sole author, which actually was a weakness.

00:13:19.200 | I needed to co-author a little bit more.

00:13:20.760 | I could have been doing higher quality research

00:13:23.600 | if I'd been co-authoring with more senior people,

00:13:26.520 | but I was trying to keep up a speed.

00:13:27.880 | I mean, I was working pretty hard, I have to say,

00:13:29.680 | and by that time I had little kids

00:13:31.360 | and there was a cost to it.

00:13:33.200 | I mean, I was working 60, 80 hour weeks.

00:13:35.960 | - That's superstar.

00:13:36.800 | Before our audience, six journal papers a year in that field,

00:13:40.480 | that's superstar level performance.

00:13:42.120 | I think what would be more typical is two, maybe three.

00:13:46.280 | So, I mean, you really, you work backwards.

00:13:48.100 | By the way, what you're saying reminds,

00:13:49.440 | this is exactly the same story

00:13:50.960 | that I think our mutual acquaintance, Adam Grant,

00:13:53.600 | has told me about when he started at Penn,

00:13:56.000 | was figuring out the same thing.

00:13:58.680 | What do you need to write a paper?

00:14:00.480 | How many papers are my typical colleagues writing?

00:14:03.500 | All right, let me do twice that.

00:14:05.120 | And then he ends up the youngest tenured,

00:14:06.720 | youngest full professor in Penn history.

00:14:07.960 | So I'm sensing something very similar.

00:14:09.640 | You deconstructed the system and said,

00:14:11.960 | then let me level up.

00:14:14.040 | Like, let me level up to be doing

00:14:16.280 | probably much more than your colleagues were

00:14:18.020 | at the institution at the time.

00:14:19.640 | - Yeah, well, I was doing more.

00:14:21.740 | And part of the reason is because

00:14:23.440 | I had a little bit of a pathological need

00:14:25.780 | to catch up with my cohort.

00:14:27.940 | So Adam Grant, who's a genius, he's unbelievable,

00:14:31.300 | he was the youngest guy ever tenured at Penn.

00:14:33.900 | I was not the youngest guy tenured any place

00:14:36.140 | because I'd already had a 12 year career

00:14:37.820 | as a French horn player

00:14:39.300 | before I even went to graduate school.

00:14:41.260 | So by the time I graduated with my PhD,

00:14:43.620 | I was 34 years old.

00:14:44.860 | And to catch up, I kind of figured that

00:14:46.640 | I needed to get promotion and tenure

00:14:48.480 | by seven to eight years in.

00:14:50.360 | And to do that, I kind of backed out

00:14:53.600 | the amount of productivity I thought

00:14:54.840 | I was gonna need to have to get there in the meantime.

00:14:57.080 | And that actually worked.

00:14:59.320 | When you understand systems,

00:15:01.600 | you're a lot more successful.

00:15:03.160 | I mean, when you understand traffic,

00:15:04.900 | you're less likely to have an accident or get a ticket.

00:15:07.480 | And when you understand the rules of the academic road,

00:15:10.600 | you know what the expectations are

00:15:12.480 | and you can design your work patterns

00:15:14.740 | to that.

00:15:15.580 | Now, what impedes that is if you don't like doing the work.

00:15:18.960 | You know, the biggest problem that I see academics have

00:15:21.000 | is they come out of their PhD

00:15:22.280 | and they don't like writing articles.

00:15:24.160 | They just don't enjoy it.

00:15:25.200 | And so they put it off and they can't get to it

00:15:27.480 | and they think it's boring

00:15:29.040 | and they go do something else

00:15:30.240 | or they write kind of popular stuff or whatever.

00:15:32.600 | And then by the time their third year review

00:15:34.320 | or their tenure time comes around,

00:15:35.840 | they don't have enough of a record.

00:15:37.400 | But for me, it was a thrill.

00:15:38.660 | I was learning stuff like crazy.

00:15:40.840 | And so it was not an onerous task for me

00:15:43.680 | to publish, you know, five, six, seven articles a year.

00:15:47.520 | And my goal was to hit 60 by my 10th year.

00:15:50.400 | That was the whole idea.

00:15:52.360 | - Well, I mean, and I'll say it's just an add on to that

00:15:54.720 | because I went through something similar.

00:15:56.480 | Soon after I started my assistant professorship,

00:15:59.880 | I did something similar.

00:16:01.400 | So I did a study.

00:16:02.380 | I said, I wanna go back and study past the tenure

00:16:05.840 | coming in my field of computer science.

00:16:07.320 | So what I went back and did was found natural experiments

00:16:10.760 | where you had two students leaving the same advisor.

00:16:13.580 | So they have the same training

00:16:15.160 | and then looking at their time to tenure

00:16:16.960 | or even if they made tenure at all, right?

00:16:18.900 | So I had two cohorts, fast to tenure,

00:16:22.040 | not faster, not tenured,

00:16:23.760 | coming out of the same training environment.

00:16:25.640 | And I wrote an essay about this early on in my blog days.

00:16:29.340 | And so I said, what's different?

00:16:31.560 | Let me quantify everything I can and say what's different.

00:16:35.360 | And I figured out, oh, the people who get tenure faster,

00:16:37.520 | it wasn't publication quantity.

00:16:40.200 | It wasn't so much topic.

00:16:41.340 | It was the number of citations

00:16:42.920 | of their five most cited papers.

00:16:44.920 | And I realized, oh, this is what's important

00:16:46.880 | is you have to write these, in my field,

00:16:49.560 | you have to write these papers that get cited a lot.

00:16:53.000 | And what makes papers get cited a lot?

00:16:54.560 | Typically, you're making progress

00:16:56.740 | on a hard problem that people are working on

00:16:58.440 | because you've made progress on it

00:17:00.200 | and then people are gonna build on you.

00:17:02.440 | And so it was both good news and bad news.

00:17:04.840 | Good news because there's clarity.

00:17:06.680 | Bad news because it's really, really hard.

00:17:09.120 | And so I further deconstructed,

00:17:10.940 | how do the real stars make the huge progress?

00:17:13.880 | And you could deconstruct it.

00:17:15.120 | And it was, they spent a lot of time in mathematics.

00:17:18.040 | Your dad would probably tell you something similar.

00:17:19.440 | A lot of it is deconstructing what other people have done,

00:17:23.160 | really understanding in your bones how the proofs work.

00:17:25.920 | And this is very hard

00:17:26.760 | because people skip details in their papers.

00:17:28.480 | And if you do, then you can make progress.

00:17:31.560 | And that is just really, really, really hard.

00:17:33.280 | And so at some point, I had to make a decision.

00:17:36.160 | I can do pretty well here.

00:17:37.200 | I get tenure early and do this and that.

00:17:39.360 | To be a superstar,

00:17:40.840 | I know exactly what that would take.

00:17:42.840 | And I don't think I had the stomach for it.

00:17:44.380 | I was like, that's just,

00:17:45.220 | it's so mentally demanding the deconstruction

00:17:47.700 | of these proofs.

00:17:48.540 | You have to just do it hour after hour, day after day.

00:17:51.080 | So it's interesting when you deconstruct.

00:17:52.640 | It not only gives you the path towards where you wanna go,

00:17:55.880 | sometimes it changes your path

00:17:57.360 | because you realize,

00:17:58.760 | I don't exactly wanna do what's required.

00:18:01.340 | - Yeah, or if you allow me to analyze you a little bit, Cal,

00:18:06.340 | because I know some things about your career as well.

00:18:09.080 | And what it really takes for that highest echelon

00:18:13.200 | is not just more intellectual horsepower

00:18:16.640 | or the willingness and ability to do that one thing

00:18:19.640 | for 80 hours a week for a little while.

00:18:21.600 | You gotta pay your dues for a long time.

00:18:25.840 | Anytime a band comes from no place,

00:18:28.440 | it's like an overnight hit, everybody's talking about it.

00:18:31.600 | They've been out at a holiday inn by the airport

00:18:34.240 | playing, doing as a cover band for 15 years.

00:18:37.660 | That's what's been going on.

00:18:38.800 | And you gotta do that work and do that work

00:18:40.720 | and do that work.

00:18:41.560 | And if you're interested in a lot of different things,

00:18:44.320 | beavering away at the margins like that

00:18:47.320 | is not something that's necessarily going to appeal to you.

00:18:50.200 | And you're, I mean, you're natural public intellectual, Cal.

00:18:53.260 | You wanna be in the public talking about these things

00:18:55.940 | that can raise consciousness among non-scientists

00:18:59.240 | as opposed to simply raising consciousness

00:19:01.760 | among in the ether of the scientists,

00:19:04.640 | in the rarefied atmosphere of the scientists themselves.

00:19:08.480 | And that's gonna make it hard, maybe impossible

00:19:12.280 | for you to play Beatles tunes at the holiday inn

00:19:16.320 | for 15 or 20 years,

00:19:17.720 | which is deconstructing somebody else's proofs

00:19:20.680 | to see what's actually going on.

00:19:21.800 | It's a question of longevity in the trenches,

00:19:24.240 | which is hard for natural public intellectuals, I dare say.

00:19:27.080 | Is that fair?

00:19:27.920 | - I think that is probably fair.

00:19:28.840 | Yeah, it is.

00:19:29.720 | It's a grind and it's a really long grind.

00:19:32.920 | I mean, writing's the same way.

00:19:34.640 | You've experienced this as well.

00:19:36.560 | It takes a lot of writing before you can write things

00:19:40.040 | that large audiences actually like.

00:19:43.440 | I got started early.

00:19:44.520 | I sold my first book when I was 20.

00:19:46.960 | I had this very long training period

00:19:50.200 | to actually get to a point where it's like,

00:19:52.680 | okay, I can sort of write something now that is good.

00:19:56.200 | So everything has trenches.

00:19:58.240 | The trenches are long, yeah.

00:20:00.200 | So then why did you, if we go to the next act,

00:20:02.800 | is now your think tank world here in DC.

00:20:05.480 | So leaving academia, that's a scary thing

00:20:10.240 | for people with full professorships at R1 institutions.

00:20:13.520 | So I'm particularly interested in this.

00:20:15.800 | - Yeah.

00:20:16.640 | - What was that decision process?

00:20:18.640 | - It wasn't scary, actually.

00:20:20.240 | And part of the reason was because I hit my number.

00:20:23.400 | I hit 60 articles, peer-reviewed articles.

00:20:26.520 | And I thought to myself, what is the,

00:20:28.160 | and that was around getting toward tenure.

00:20:30.560 | So I entered academia at 34.

00:20:33.000 | Around 44, I was looking around at other opportunities

00:20:36.600 | to create value as a social scientist.

00:20:38.880 | I joined up as a part-time kind of visiting scholar

00:20:42.800 | at the American Enterprise Institute there in DC.

00:20:45.240 | And I was spending a day a month, something like that,

00:20:49.240 | doing different policy ideas.

00:20:51.040 | And I was starting to write sort of trade books on the side.

00:20:54.720 | And so I wrote a book called

00:20:56.040 | "Who Really Cares" about charitable giving.

00:20:57.720 | It was very, it was actually quite academic,

00:20:59.360 | had a mathematical appendix and the whole thing.

00:21:02.080 | But it got noticed.

00:21:02.920 | You know, President Bush read it

00:21:04.360 | and called me to the White House.

00:21:05.600 | And you know, I started to get,

00:21:06.920 | it's not like it was some huge, big hit.

00:21:09.260 | But it did change my perspective

00:21:10.980 | on how I could have a conversation.

00:21:12.720 | And I realized when I was looking at the next 10 years,

00:21:15.500 | I mean, 10 years is a good cadence.

00:21:17.560 | Now, it follows the career trajectory

00:21:21.360 | of the so-called spiral.

00:21:23.680 | I didn't know it at the time.

00:21:24.880 | And I've gone back and, you know,

00:21:25.920 | participated in the research on it at this point.

00:21:28.220 | What you find is that most people think that they're linear,

00:21:30.640 | which is to say that they'll only change institutions

00:21:32.840 | or jobs when they're in the same field

00:21:35.120 | and have a better opportunity.

00:21:36.560 | For more money, more prestige,

00:21:38.160 | more admiration, more, more, more, whatever.

00:21:41.400 | But a lot of people don't have that career trajectory.

00:21:44.240 | They have the spiral career trajectory,

00:21:46.160 | which is that they want a series of mini careers

00:21:49.040 | that make sense in their heads.

00:21:51.120 | And sometimes you take more money

00:21:52.440 | and sometimes you take less money

00:21:53.700 | and sometimes you leave the industry.

00:21:55.160 | And when you're in academia,

00:21:56.000 | it means you gotta kick away your tenure from time to time.

00:21:59.260 | And after 10 years in academia,

00:22:01.280 | I was looking at the next 10 years and said,

00:22:02.960 | that's another 60 articles, you know?

00:22:05.040 | And that's another 60.

00:22:06.760 | That's another, more or less, doing the same thing.

00:22:09.040 | It's doing my homework and turning it in.

00:22:10.480 | And I got nothing against that.

00:22:11.640 | Some of the people I respect the most in life have done that.

00:22:14.080 | But I thought, I bet there's a thing that I could do

00:22:16.000 | to take these ideas now

00:22:17.880 | and to start making them more public in public policy.

00:22:20.380 | My background is in policy.

00:22:21.720 | My PhD is in policy.

00:22:23.480 | I'd worked at the Rand Corporation in policy,

00:22:25.600 | Syracuse University, big policy school.

00:22:27.880 | And the next thing, obviously, was a think tank

00:22:29.900 | or so it seemed to me.

00:22:31.240 | And so I decided I was gonna probably leave

00:22:33.940 | and be a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

00:22:36.040 | And what surprised me is that they had a big crisis

00:22:38.480 | over the fact that they couldn't find a president.

00:22:41.440 | And so, you know, it's an old think tank.

00:22:42.640 | It was started in 1938.

00:22:43.920 | And it's one of the better known think tanks in the world.

00:22:46.800 | And their longtime president was leaving.

00:22:48.620 | They were out of time.

00:22:50.100 | They had offered it to a couple of people

00:22:51.940 | who'd turned it down.

00:22:52.920 | Because it's very hard to find a think tank president.

00:22:55.680 | It's not a fun job, especially in Washington, D.C.,

00:22:58.040 | for a lot of people.

00:22:59.240 | And, you know, they were out of options.

00:23:00.960 | And I think that the last words uttered

00:23:02.600 | before offering me the job,

00:23:04.120 | a guy who had never supervised any employees

00:23:06.500 | and never raised a dollar,

00:23:07.920 | and this is a think tank based entirely on philanthropy,

00:23:09.800 | I think they basically were like, ah, what the hell?

00:23:11.920 | You know, give it a shot.

00:23:13.080 | If it doesn't work out, we'll fire him and we'll be fine.

00:23:16.360 | Which was a little bit scary,

00:23:17.600 | but it also was incredibly exciting

00:23:20.080 | because it was the next phase,

00:23:22.040 | it was the next turn of the spiral

00:23:23.840 | is what it came out to be.

00:23:25.340 | I had been teaching non-profit management,

00:23:27.440 | among other things, at Syracuse.

00:23:29.080 | I had a big, I had a round table of non-profit executives

00:23:33.480 | that I would be, that I was running.

00:23:35.200 | I was giving them, I wrote a textbook.

00:23:37.520 | Cal had written a textbook in non-profit management.

00:23:39.280 | I'd never run a non-profit.

00:23:41.340 | And I thought to myself, you know,

00:23:43.500 | I wonder if I could do this.

00:23:45.120 | I mean, I was just fascinated to know

00:23:47.060 | whether I could do public policy and be an administrator

00:23:49.800 | and kind of square these circles at the same time.

00:23:52.360 | And so when they offered me the job

00:23:54.860 | over the objections of my wife,

00:23:57.080 | who didn't want to move to Washington, D.C.,

00:23:58.540 | I said, "Yeah."

00:24:00.160 | I said, "Yeah."

00:24:01.000 | So she said, "Okay, okay, give it a shot."

00:24:03.060 | And so I ran the American Enterprise Institute

00:24:06.100 | for 10 years and six months, 10.5 years.

00:24:09.120 | That was the second phase.

00:24:10.900 | And that was very interesting, I have to say.

00:24:12.440 | I wrote some books while I was there.

00:24:13.980 | And I, you know, I had a regular gig

00:24:15.740 | with the Wall Street Journal later, the New York Times.

00:24:18.500 | You know, once a month I would write a column

00:24:20.820 | in those places about, you know, different public policies.

00:24:23.060 | And then more and more and more,

00:24:24.440 | back to my social science roots,

00:24:25.760 | I was writing about human happiness

00:24:28.160 | in those venues, as a matter of fact.

00:24:30.480 | And I was also learning how to raise money.

00:24:32.000 | I had to raise $50 million a year.

00:24:33.960 | You know, I had a major building project.

00:24:35.840 | I was hiring scholars.

00:24:37.640 | I had 310 employees.

00:24:39.240 | And it was, that was a lot, that was hard work.

00:24:43.000 | I have to say, that was very, very hard work.

00:24:45.040 | And so that was the next 10.5 years, the next challenge.

00:24:48.120 | That was part three of the career.

00:24:50.600 | - I guess, if you're breaking it into four parts,

00:24:52.380 | that's part three, right?

00:24:53.220 | - That's part three, right?

00:24:54.040 | Yeah, okay, it is part three.

00:24:54.880 | Yep, that's act three.

00:24:55.980 | That's, I mean, it's still fascinating to me, though.

00:24:57.700 | It's walking away from tenure.

00:24:59.900 | But it makes sense.

00:25:00.740 | You said, "I did this 10-year chunk.

00:25:02.900 | "What's the next 10 years?"

00:25:04.740 | So I'm assuming, is the way you were thinking is,

00:25:07.140 | okay, here's a particular place to take my spiral.

00:25:09.860 | Let's go to nonprofit management.

00:25:10.940 | Let's just try this.

00:25:11.780 | Let's actually have a policy impact.

00:25:13.860 | I'm assuming the other option you were trying to consider

00:25:16.220 | is how do I reconfigure my academic career for the next,

00:25:19.060 | a lot of that happens around that point.

00:25:21.080 | All right, I wanna build a new theoretical framework.

00:25:23.700 | I want to publish the definitive book.

00:25:25.760 | I wanna change the way, I mean, it seems like

00:25:27.660 | this is what's needed for energy in academia,

00:25:30.100 | is that 10 years in, post-promotions,

00:25:33.660 | you need to either do something differently,

00:25:35.580 | or within academia itself, you have to come up

00:25:37.580 | with some new grand project.

00:25:39.920 | So you weren't that scared walking away from tenure?

00:25:42.760 | You were figuring--

00:25:43.600 | - I mean, I was pretty nervous.

00:25:44.480 | I wasn't nervous walking away from tenure

00:25:45.960 | because I knew, you know, I had a good research record

00:25:48.960 | and I was walking away from the number one school

00:25:50.900 | in my field, meaning that if I got fired from AEI,

00:25:54.180 | which was, by the way, pretty likely,

00:25:57.080 | that getting back into academia wouldn't be that hard.

00:25:59.580 | And the jobs that people were offering me at that point

00:26:01.700 | were either full professorships or administrative jobs.

00:26:05.660 | You know, when this was going on,

00:26:06.940 | a lot of places were coming and saying,

00:26:08.460 | how about thinking about being a dean?

00:26:10.860 | You know, policy schools.

00:26:12.740 | Some local people in the Syracuse came and asked

00:26:16.420 | if I thought I might want to run for Congress,

00:26:18.960 | which was kind of an interesting challenge.

00:26:20.240 | There were a lot of weird things going on.

00:26:21.480 | I went home with that one to my wife.

00:26:22.680 | She said, well, as you know as Catholics,

00:26:24.600 | we don't believe in divorce.

00:26:26.440 | So, you know, that was--

00:26:27.280 | - So you can't run for Congress, yeah.

00:26:28.400 | - Yeah, no, no, yeah, yeah.

00:26:30.240 | And by the way, I would have lost anyway.

00:26:32.200 | Like, who wants this, you know, this mug for Congress?

00:26:34.600 | It's like, we're not ready for bald politicians.

00:26:38.100 | But the whole point is that it was,

00:26:39.720 | there was a lot of stuff in the air

00:26:40.960 | because I knew that the spiral was turning,

00:26:44.040 | and the universe conspires when the spiral is turning

00:26:46.900 | to give you options, and if you don't take 'em,

00:26:49.740 | shame on you, right?

00:26:51.260 | I mean, it's really what it comes down to.

00:26:52.480 | So I knew that it was gonna be fine giving up my tenure.

00:26:55.140 | What I didn't know is if I was gonna be

00:26:57.460 | ignominiously humiliated by not being able to raise money

00:27:01.220 | or having some sort of revolt by the scholars

00:27:03.420 | or getting, you know, stomped in Washington, D.C.

00:27:06.460 | And I gotta tell you, that was pretty stressful,

00:27:08.420 | and at times, it was pretty scary.

00:27:10.340 | - Right, it's the end of a,

00:27:12.660 | within six months, the building's on fire.

00:27:15.140 | - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:27:15.980 | But I mean, I remember, you know,

00:27:17.320 | I got some bad press pretty early on.

00:27:19.280 | I had to make a lot of personnel moves

00:27:21.400 | just for the good of the institution and for our budget.

00:27:23.640 | I mean, it was, I went in on January 1st, 2009

00:27:27.000 | in the teeth of the Great Recession.

00:27:29.400 | You know, we had blown a 10% hole in our budget

00:27:32.160 | in the last quarter before I came in,

00:27:34.280 | and I had to cut our cost structure by 16%

00:27:36.640 | in our first 64 days on the job,

00:27:38.800 | and I hadn't run anything ever in my life.

00:27:42.600 | I hadn't run anything.

00:27:43.660 | - Yep.

00:27:44.500 | - And so the result was, I was getting a lot of advice,

00:27:46.620 | you know, and people were,

00:27:47.460 | when you run an organization like that,

00:27:49.140 | a lot of people come out of the shadows

00:27:50.460 | and give you a list of the people

00:27:52.100 | that they think you should fire.

00:27:53.620 | Every, 'cause I had like 20 lists,

00:27:55.540 | and they were all, they were all orthogonal.

00:27:58.420 | I mean, it's like, everybody's list

00:27:59.980 | had everybody else on it.

00:28:01.340 | And so this was completely unhelpful,

00:28:03.780 | and it was scary, it was tough.

00:28:05.400 | I got lit up in the press a little bit from time to time,

00:28:07.860 | but I gotta tell you, it got tougher.

00:28:09.920 | - Yeah.

00:28:10.760 | - Which probably makes the publishing world seem easy now,

00:28:12.780 | which--

00:28:13.620 | - Oh my gosh, yeah.

00:28:14.440 | Academia, academic politics, are you kidding me?

00:28:17.020 | No problem.

00:28:17.860 | - No problem, because no one actually cares.

00:28:19.620 | Yeah, it's the, the academic politics,

00:28:22.100 | the old joke is sort of like,

00:28:23.740 | the intensity of the responses

00:28:26.340 | grows with the decreasing actual,

00:28:28.980 | like, impact of what's being discussed.

00:28:31.060 | - Yeah, that's an old Kissinger,

00:28:32.300 | that's an old Kissinger maxim, isn't it?

00:28:34.220 | - It's about true.

00:28:35.060 | I'd say the more trivial it is,

00:28:36.500 | the more people are standing on the desk

00:28:38.100 | at the faculty meeting.

00:28:39.820 | All right, let's take a brief break

00:28:41.420 | from my conversation with Arthur

00:28:43.200 | to talk about one of the sponsors

00:28:44.900 | that makes this show possible.

00:28:47.460 | This is our friends at Notion.

00:28:50.820 | Now, you've heard me talk about Notion before.

00:28:53.540 | It is a software tool that allows you

00:28:55.960 | to combine your notes, documents, and projects

00:28:58.380 | all together in one beautiful space.

00:29:00.900 | The reason why it comes up so often on this show

00:29:03.700 | is that if you run any sort of operation

00:29:07.540 | that has non-trivial information to keep track of,

00:29:10.460 | you should be using Notion to build a custom system

00:29:14.860 | for storing, organizing, and displaying your information.

00:29:17.660 | This gets to the heart of the custom workflow philosophy

00:29:20.460 | that I talk about in my book, "A World Without Email."

00:29:23.580 | Jesse and I, for example, use Notion,

00:29:26.020 | a Notion-based system to work with our ad agency.

00:29:29.580 | It's fantastic.

00:29:31.260 | All of the information about the upcoming ad reads,

00:29:34.140 | all of the ad copy.

00:29:35.980 | Here is the timestamps of the different times

00:29:38.900 | we read the ads.

00:29:39.900 | Here are the download numbers from the episodes.

00:29:41.860 | They all go into a custom Notion system

00:29:44.740 | that makes it easy for the agency

00:29:46.620 | to get the information they need,

00:29:48.060 | for us to get what we need.

00:29:49.860 | You gotta be using Notion.

00:29:51.620 | Now, the reason why I wanna talk about 'em today

00:29:53.140 | is that they have a new feature,

00:29:55.700 | which I think is pushing these type of systems

00:29:58.700 | to a new level.

00:29:59.900 | This is their new Q&A feature, an AI assistant

00:30:04.900 | that can answer questions about your information

00:30:08.380 | that you already have stored in Notion.

00:30:10.380 | So you have a question about next quarter's roadmap

00:30:13.100 | or finding that marketing campaign proposal

00:30:15.340 | or digging up a long lost link,

00:30:17.300 | or in our case, trying to figure out,

00:30:18.700 | hey, when did we last do an ad read

00:30:21.580 | for a particular advertiser?

00:30:25.100 | The AI assistant can help go and find that information

00:30:28.980 | in your pre-existing Notion system.

00:30:33.500 | So as your projects get more complex,

00:30:35.260 | finding what you're looking for

00:30:36.500 | across your entire workspace can get harder.

00:30:38.620 | Notion's Q&A comes in here and makes things easier.

00:30:42.780 | So maybe you would, for example,

00:30:44.740 | normally just ask someone to go dig around in Notion.

00:30:47.580 | Now you can ask Q&A instead.

00:30:49.500 | It can go through thousands of documents in seconds.

00:30:51.980 | It can answer your question in clear language.

00:30:54.580 | So actually answer you back in natural language.

00:30:57.220 | You can ask these questions from anywhere in Notion.

00:31:01.060 | So you can find exactly what you need

00:31:02.340 | without leaving whatever doc or system

00:31:04.380 | or a workflow page that you are already in.

00:31:07.460 | So we excited about this.

00:31:10.140 | I think this is an interesting step forward.

00:31:12.460 | Notion AI is giving you instant answers to your questions

00:31:15.300 | using information you already have

00:31:16.900 | from across your Wiki project documents and meeting notes.

00:31:19.700 | So you build your custom systems,

00:31:21.620 | but now you have this easy way

00:31:22.920 | to extract information out of them.

00:31:25.280 | So here's the good news.

00:31:26.160 | You can try Notion AI for free

00:31:29.340 | when you go to notion.com/cow.

00:31:33.220 | Now that's all lowercase letters,

00:31:35.020 | notion.com/cow to try the powerful,

00:31:39.480 | easy to use Notion AI today.

00:31:42.100 | But you have to use our link

00:31:43.660 | 'cause that will help you support our show.

00:31:45.740 | So go to notion.com/cow.

00:31:49.920 | Also wanna talk about our friends at Shopify,

00:31:54.180 | whether you're selling a little or a lot,

00:31:57.580 | Shopify helps you do your thing,

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00:32:03.860 | Shopify is a global commerce platform

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00:32:08.780 | from the, I'm just launching my first online stop shape,

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00:32:17.980 | Shopify is there to help you grow,

00:32:20.900 | whether you're selling scented soap or outdoor outfits,

00:32:24.280 | or in the case of Jesse and I,

00:32:26.580 | we have a new line of t-shirts

00:32:28.860 | where instead of having the common workplace phrase,

00:32:31.940 | "Could this meeting have been an email?"

00:32:34.140 | We are now gonna have a shirt that says,

00:32:36.080 | "Could this meeting have been a telegram?"

00:32:39.340 | Let's see, we're trying to push a simpler,

00:32:41.380 | more nostalgic type of technological future.

00:32:43.980 | I think the telegraph is gonna come back,

00:32:45.460 | so we really wanna push that.

00:32:46.880 | They have all-in-one e-commerce platforms.

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00:33:12.500 | so you really are taking advantage

00:33:13.900 | of all the technology you can to get those sales.

00:33:18.480 | So you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period.

00:33:22.820 | That's great, $1 per month, Jesse, it's a great deal.

00:33:24.880 | - Yeah.

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00:33:43.880 | (bell dings)

00:33:44.960 | So then we get your final act.

00:33:46.760 | Actually, this transition's maybe the one

00:33:48.040 | I'm even most interested in,

00:33:49.560 | which is where you leave the think tank world

00:33:52.980 | to essentially positive psychology, writing, some teaching.

00:33:57.520 | It's a significant change towards much more autonomous,

00:34:01.260 | sort of direct to consumer impact,

00:34:05.080 | meaning readers and students.

00:34:08.020 | Would you say the seed,

00:34:09.320 | because I'm just trying to read between the tea leaves,

00:34:11.120 | was the initial seed for this transition

00:34:12.780 | of leaving the think tank world,

00:34:14.000 | I got to write books basically full-time

00:34:16.240 | and also teaching the course at Harvard,

00:34:18.880 | was the seeds of this,

00:34:20.960 | where you had started doing some regular writing

00:34:23.100 | for the Journal and the Times,

00:34:24.560 | and it began to shift from the policy-type stuff

00:34:27.660 | you would expect from the head of,

00:34:29.840 | from the public policy professor,

00:34:31.920 | the head of Enterprise Institute,

00:34:33.300 | to the positive psychology type, more direct to people.

00:34:36.300 | Was that the seed planted right there?

00:34:38.880 | You could have another spiral turn coming up

00:34:42.060 | that was gonna be much more just you

00:34:43.680 | directly interacting with people.

00:34:45.720 | - Yeah, it was a couple of different things.

00:34:47.080 | One of them was that I had been working

00:34:48.820 | on the supply side of good ideas for a long time,

00:34:51.880 | and I realized along the way

00:34:54.040 | that it's much more powerful to work on the demand side.

00:34:57.200 | It's one thing to say I've got 75 whiz-bang ideas

00:35:00.320 | about the carried interest provision

00:35:02.240 | of the Internal Revenue Code

00:35:04.200 | and the new bomber force at the Pentagon or whatever,

00:35:07.240 | and have people go, "Huh, what?"

00:35:09.080 | including members of Congress, and sometimes it sticks,

00:35:12.580 | but you get tons of attention

00:35:14.220 | if you foment a real hunger for a better life.

00:35:17.520 | And the way to do that

00:35:18.440 | is by talking about love and happiness.

00:35:19.840 | And I was a social scientist with a background

00:35:22.200 | in studies on love and happiness.

00:35:23.960 | So I thought to myself, I wanna go back,

00:35:26.320 | number one, I wanna go to the demand side,

00:35:28.400 | because what I wanna do with the rest of my life

00:35:29.880 | is lift people up and bring them together.

00:35:31.880 | That's what I wanna do with the rest of my life.

00:35:34.240 | I wanna use science and ideas

00:35:35.700 | to lift people up and bring them together.

00:35:37.080 | It's a purely personal and very ethical

00:35:40.080 | and moral mission that I have

00:35:41.640 | for what my life means, quite frankly.

00:35:43.760 | It's my, that's my mission statement, literally,

00:35:46.960 | is that's how I wrote my mission statement.

00:35:48.600 | And the best way to do that, I thought,

00:35:49.920 | is go back to my roots as a social scientist

00:35:53.440 | to dedicate myself to creative work

00:35:56.000 | and to work on the demand side.

00:35:57.680 | And I thought, well, what does that mean?

00:35:59.020 | How do I do that?

00:36:00.560 | And it seemed to me that that meant kind of a combination,

00:36:02.960 | once again, as a system of three parts to it.

00:36:05.820 | Number one is I wanna teach leaders.

00:36:08.600 | I wanna teach, I wanna foment this demand

00:36:11.200 | on the side of leaders, I wanna make them hungry

00:36:14.080 | to have a better life and to become teachers

00:36:15.800 | of a better life as leaders themselves

00:36:18.000 | at the best place I can

00:36:19.920 | and to find the best possible future leaders.

00:36:22.160 | The second part is I want my work to be public-facing.

00:36:24.840 | In other words, I want my research to be public-facing

00:36:27.800 | because I knew perfectly, based on my own research,

00:36:31.040 | that at that point, I was 55 years old,

00:36:33.200 | that I wasn't gonna be doing the best bench science.

00:36:35.840 | I was not gonna be pouring stuff into test tubes

00:36:38.340 | or for my field that's doing natural experiments

00:36:41.080 | and analyzing huge datasets, large dataset econometrics.

00:36:46.080 | I'm not gonna be able to do that

00:36:48.720 | as creatively as younger people.

00:36:50.040 | I'm gonna be able to do public-facing work

00:36:51.720 | where I recognize patterns, tell stories, write lucidly.

00:36:55.120 | That's what older people are better at.

00:36:56.880 | And I wanted a public audience,

00:36:58.840 | so I wanted to be kind of a professor of practice

00:37:01.280 | where practice didn't mean telling war stories

00:37:03.180 | in the classroom.

00:37:04.020 | It meant taking academia to the masses.

00:37:06.800 | That's what I wanted to do for the writing.

00:37:08.360 | And the last part is I wanted to be out on the road

00:37:11.200 | doing public-facing work.

00:37:13.320 | I wanted to be doing workshops and speeches.

00:37:16.240 | And I figured I could do that.

00:37:17.860 | The teaching part, per se, is about 20 hours a week.

00:37:20.400 | The research part is 20, 25 hours a week.

00:37:23.920 | And the last part I could do on 15 or 20 hours a week

00:37:26.520 | and make it part of a public intellectual profile

00:37:29.280 | that maybe a university would value.

00:37:31.520 | So that's when I went out

00:37:32.520 | and I talked to a bunch of universities.

00:37:33.960 | I talked to 10 universities.

00:37:35.560 | I said I'm retiring as president of AEI.

00:37:37.620 | - Okay.

00:37:38.620 | - How does this sound?

00:37:40.180 | And a bunch of really, really good universities said,

00:37:43.020 | "That sounds pretty interesting."

00:37:44.240 | And I decided it was a good idea to get out of Dodge,

00:37:47.680 | leave Washington, because it's not great for me

00:37:50.780 | to be walking up and down the halls of my old institution

00:37:53.900 | saying, "Don't fire my friends," that kind of thing,

00:37:58.080 | because the new guy needs space to do it.

00:38:00.000 | And he's doing an outstanding job, by the way.

00:38:02.000 | He'll be the best president that place has ever had.

00:38:04.480 | A guy named Robert Doerr, you probably know him.

00:38:06.840 | But I needed to get out of town,

00:38:08.440 | and so I went to a place that's kind of interesting,

00:38:10.640 | and a city that's kind of interesting,

00:38:12.960 | and literally one of the very greatest universities

00:38:16.320 | in the world, which is Harvard.

00:38:17.640 | And they split my time between the Kennedy School,

00:38:19.980 | which is the policy school, and the business school,

00:38:22.580 | which trains, obviously, executives.

00:38:25.040 | And in the business school,

00:38:26.640 | I created my happiness science class

00:38:29.120 | called Leadership and Happiness.

00:38:30.240 | And in the Kennedy School, I created my lab,

00:38:32.560 | which was the Leadership and Happiness Lab.

00:38:34.340 | And between those two things,

00:38:35.560 | and the writing, speaking, teaching,

00:38:36.640 | it's kind of worked out more or less

00:38:38.200 | the way that I saw the architecture.

00:38:40.800 | And it's been incredibly exciting.

00:38:42.820 | I have to say, I'm by far the happiest

00:38:45.940 | in my career at this point.

00:38:47.400 | - Interesting.

00:38:48.240 | So this was more systematic than I would have guessed.

00:38:49.880 | So you knew at some point,

00:38:51.160 | 10 years we're gonna sunset the presidency.

00:38:54.600 | - Yeah, I told them.

00:38:55.800 | I told them at five years in.

00:38:57.200 | They said, "So what are we talking about, 20?"

00:38:59.640 | And I said, "No, we're talking about 10."

00:39:02.440 | So they deferred all of my comp to 10 years and six months,

00:39:06.460 | all of my pension, all of my retirement at AEI

00:39:11.260 | to 10 years and six months.

00:39:12.380 | So that last year was a big check, I have to say,

00:39:14.740 | but it was the last check, and it was that by design.

00:39:17.180 | - Interesting, interesting.

00:39:18.020 | So then you were surveying the landscape

00:39:19.820 | and saying, "How do I leverage

00:39:21.140 | "what we would call a career capital?"

00:39:22.980 | And you're saying, "Well, I have the academic background."

00:39:25.940 | Because of that, you knew about things

00:39:27.540 | like professors of practices,

00:39:28.900 | that these positions actually existed,

00:39:30.940 | these full-time non-tenure line positions.

00:39:32.840 | It was all just intricacies of how...

00:39:35.800 | I don't know if that's the situation you have,

00:39:37.240 | but I'm assuming that's what you were looking for.

00:39:38.960 | - Yeah, yeah, totally.

00:39:39.800 | I was looking for something

00:39:40.620 | that has kind of an industrial tenure,

00:39:42.040 | which is to say five-year rolling contract,

00:39:44.480 | so you can count on something,

00:39:45.620 | you know exactly what you're looking at,

00:39:47.440 | but that would value the public intellectual portfolio

00:39:50.640 | and see it as something that's really useful

00:39:52.880 | to the university.

00:39:53.720 | So I'm not doing any work on the side.

00:39:56.360 | Everything is on the whole.

00:39:58.000 | The work that I do out giving talks to different groups

00:40:01.180 | at universities and et cetera, community groups,

00:40:04.140 | it actually feeds into the work that I do

00:40:05.820 | at my academic lab and gives me ideas

00:40:08.420 | that I'm using in the classroom, et cetera, et cetera.

00:40:10.540 | I'm also creating pathways for my students

00:40:13.060 | to be able to go into businesses in different places

00:40:15.860 | with their happiness expertise.

00:40:17.620 | - Yeah, so you came in and said,

00:40:18.700 | "This is exactly what I'm going to do.

00:40:19.800 | "I'm not just teaching and I'm not doing research

00:40:22.720 | "in the traditional lab sense.

00:40:24.080 | "I am going to be writing and speaking

00:40:26.480 | "and it's going to be a book every so often.

00:40:28.140 | "It's going to be my regular columns.

00:40:30.000 | "This is going to be my contribution."

00:40:33.020 | And so there's a term for that,

00:40:35.260 | a book I wrote a long time ago, actually a decade ago,

00:40:37.660 | "So Good They Can't Ignore You."

00:40:38.820 | I had this term I borrowed from Derek Sivers

00:40:41.300 | where he said, "Use money as a neutral indicator

00:40:44.140 | "of value of your plans."

00:40:45.820 | Basically, see if someone will actually give you money

00:40:49.500 | for this thing you have, this idea,

00:40:51.180 | and that's actually the best feedback

00:40:52.460 | on whether or not it's good or not

00:40:54.100 | as opposed to just people saying,

00:40:55.280 | "No, that sounds great.

00:40:56.120 | "You should do that.

00:40:56.960 | "You should quit and write a book.

00:40:57.840 | "That sounds romantic."

00:40:59.420 | You essentially did that.

00:41:00.740 | If this was a good idea, these universities would say,

00:41:04.120 | "Yes, we will actually hire you on a five-year contract.

00:41:07.180 | "We want you to come and do this

00:41:09.740 | "so you have full confidence."

00:41:12.500 | So you go and then this succeeds really well.

00:41:14.820 | So your, I mean, I know "Love Your Enemies,"

00:41:16.980 | your book "Love Your Enemies"

00:41:17.980 | maybe came out right after you left,

00:41:19.920 | but I'm assuming that was something you made a book on.

00:41:21.880 | - That was AEI.

00:41:22.720 | That was during the AEI years, yeah.

00:41:24.340 | - So from strength to strength,

00:41:26.740 | this is your first big test of the,

00:41:29.700 | let's do a big public-facing thing.

00:41:32.220 | The book explodes.

00:41:33.320 | It's a huge, huge bestseller.

00:41:35.980 | Everyone's talking about it.

00:41:37.940 | It sells a ton of copies.

00:41:39.340 | So what, bring us behind why that book succeeded.

00:41:44.300 | What was the ingredients coming together?

00:41:45.940 | We have a lot of aspiring writers in my audience.

00:41:47.540 | What made that book so successful?

00:41:49.920 | - Well, good luck.

00:41:51.860 | I mean, you know perfectly

00:41:53.060 | that there's a lot of serendipity that goes into it,

00:41:55.660 | that goes into book publishing.

00:41:57.060 | And, you know, if you're thinking,

00:41:59.020 | well, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna leave academia

00:42:00.900 | and then I'm gonna go and write a,

00:42:02.540 | or a think tank or whatever,

00:42:03.500 | I'm gonna go write a huge bestseller.

00:42:05.660 | Well, most, there's a lot of books out there and most aren't.

00:42:09.020 | And a lot of really successful authors

00:42:11.040 | and a lot of really great books

00:42:13.660 | aren't successful by market measures.

00:42:16.240 | You know, you, it's great.

00:42:18.060 | I mean, probably all of your books have been bestsellers,

00:42:20.420 | but you're pretty unusual in this way.

00:42:22.700 | And I've written, I've written a number of books

00:42:24.420 | that let's just say weren't bestsellers, you know,

00:42:27.300 | and then I thought that they were really good ideas,

00:42:29.260 | including a book on the science of happiness in 2008,

00:42:31.760 | before I left academia the first time that was, you know,

00:42:34.180 | everybody thought it was gonna be a big deal

00:42:35.560 | and it was not a big deal, right?

00:42:38.260 | And so there's a lot of serendipity that goes into it.

00:42:41.100 | But I've been looking at the market niche

00:42:43.300 | when it came to the happiness world

00:42:44.740 | that was just simply not being filled.

00:42:46.500 | And that was people in the second half of their lives.

00:42:49.260 | How can you design the second half of,

00:42:50.900 | how can you work in the first half of your life

00:42:52.540 | and design the second half of your life

00:42:55.020 | using the principles that I was able to see in big data sets

00:42:58.800 | and, you know, all the behavioral science

00:43:01.060 | and the new neuroscience that was coming out

00:43:03.260 | because I've had to retrain myself

00:43:04.860 | in neuroscience in a huge way.

00:43:06.560 | You can't be a good social scientist today

00:43:08.620 | and not know some neuroscience, just you can't do it.

00:43:11.100 | And when I got my PhD in 1998,

00:43:13.440 | nobody knew any neuroscience.

00:43:15.380 | So I, you know, I've had to go back

00:43:16.580 | and I've been studying neuroscience very seriously

00:43:19.980 | for the past five years

00:43:21.340 | so that I don't have authority in it.

00:43:22.780 | I'm not writing research, primary research in it,

00:43:25.300 | but I'm a really good consumer of that research

00:43:28.140 | for my column in my books.

00:43:29.420 | And I went and I said,

00:43:30.460 | "Look, what is it about the second half of life

00:43:32.500 | "that we need to understand?

00:43:33.340 | "What are your natural strengths?

00:43:34.980 | "How can you be a striver, a hardworking person,

00:43:38.360 | "not burn out, not become frustrated,

00:43:41.640 | "not go in decline and not to feel empty and alone

00:43:45.040 | "when you actually have to stop your nine to five?

00:43:48.100 | "How do you do it?

00:43:48.940 | "What's the secret on all these things?"

00:43:50.460 | And I wrote that book.

00:43:51.460 | And the reason it was relatively popular

00:43:54.580 | is because people wanted that, people needed that,

00:43:57.820 | and it didn't exist.

00:43:58.760 | You go do a thing that isn't out there

00:44:01.060 | at this particular point.

00:44:01.980 | I designed the book the same way that I would have a startup

00:44:05.620 | that, you know, in biotech, you don't go saying,

00:44:08.100 | "I'm gonna make a new nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug,

00:44:12.420 | "you know, a new kind of ibuprofen."

00:44:14.340 | You go out and you say,

00:44:15.180 | "I'm gonna start a company that makes a large molecule drug

00:44:17.780 | "that tries to take on a disease

00:44:19.660 | "that currently doesn't have a cure.

00:44:21.200 | "I'm gonna take a big shot."

00:44:23.140 | But the whole point is that people want it.

00:44:25.500 | Once again, there's demand, but there isn't supply.

00:44:28.300 | On that, that's the way to write a book.

00:44:30.020 | And so that's what I did.

00:44:31.600 | And that's probably the reason it was fairly popular.

00:44:35.060 | - Yeah, it's always that combination.

00:44:37.100 | A topic that people really wanna hear about

00:44:39.300 | plus the right person to write about it.

00:44:41.540 | You gotta have, you have those two things, you have it.

00:44:43.300 | I mean, I guess David Brooks sort of had indicated

00:44:46.600 | with the second mountain, you know, a few years earlier,

00:44:48.900 | like, okay, there's people thinking about this.

00:44:51.460 | But the second mountain was not nearly

00:44:53.340 | as beat-by-beat pragmatic.

00:44:56.540 | Like, here are the elements that go into this

00:44:58.180 | and here's why they matter

00:44:59.220 | and let's get into the science of it.

00:45:01.180 | It was a little bit more philosophical, I suppose,

00:45:04.000 | for David Brooks.

00:45:04.840 | - Yeah, I mean, there's two different ways

00:45:06.340 | to look at a startup or a book

00:45:09.060 | or anything that's a new creative endeavor.

00:45:11.620 | There's sort of the conventional entrepreneurship,

00:45:13.860 | which is to say there's a ton of demand,

00:45:15.900 | but there's no supply, so I'm gonna go create the supply.

00:45:18.420 | And the other is that there could be demand,

00:45:20.500 | but people just don't know it yet.

00:45:22.260 | That's even scarier.

00:45:23.520 | I mean, that's the iPhone challenge.

00:45:25.860 | So, I mean, Steve Jobs said,

00:45:27.220 | "Hey, see this thing in my hand?

00:45:29.020 | "You don't know what it is.

00:45:29.940 | "It's a computer in your hand that does everything."

00:45:32.980 | People are like, "I don't want it."

00:45:34.900 | And like, "Yeah, you do, trust me."

00:45:36.620 | And that's a really scary thing to do.

00:45:38.340 | That's when somebody writes a book

00:45:39.700 | that nobody knew they needed in the first place.

00:45:42.820 | And that's the, those are the, you know,

00:45:44.660 | that's the seven habits of highly effective people

00:45:48.940 | or how to win friends and influence people or the Bible

00:45:52.180 | or, you know, these things that go so stratospheric

00:45:56.100 | that you can't believe it.

00:45:56.980 | From Strength to Strength was a book

00:45:58.840 | that people were asking for that had never been written

00:46:01.220 | by a social scientist, by a scientist, basically.

00:46:04.140 | And so, yeah.

00:46:05.740 | - And how important was the being the right person

00:46:08.460 | to write it piece?

00:46:09.500 | So beyond just your story included a big shift

00:46:13.900 | in middle age, the shift away from the nonprofit,

00:46:18.580 | but also the fact that you're at Harvard

00:46:21.140 | and the fact that you had these regular columns.

00:46:23.980 | I think this sometimes gets underappreciated

00:46:25.820 | when people think about how you have a cultural impact,

00:46:29.580 | really working to get the right cultural foundation

00:46:32.700 | from which to then do the things.

00:46:34.540 | I'd say, did you have that sense that,

00:46:36.500 | how important was that foundation of brand names

00:46:40.380 | that was there to sort of get you over the hurdle

00:46:42.580 | of like, who is this and why are we listening to it?

00:46:44.980 | - Or the platform for sure.

00:46:46.300 | It's actually more that the platform is really important,

00:46:48.660 | but for I think a slightly different reason.

00:46:50.340 | And this is a super important question

00:46:52.020 | that you're asking, I think.

00:46:53.460 | There are a lot of people

00:46:54.420 | that want the public intellectual life,

00:46:56.660 | but they're kind of autodidacts.

00:46:59.060 | And one of the things that I'm doing all day long

00:47:01.540 | is recommending that people go get a PhD.

00:47:04.260 | I'm doing it all day long.

00:47:05.220 | And again, you know, I'm not using everything I did

00:47:07.260 | in my PhD every single day, but here's the thing.

00:47:10.260 | One of the things that's most important

00:47:12.180 | about the intellectual life is that you need

00:47:14.860 | a long period of time to think.

00:47:17.580 | Why?

00:47:18.420 | Because you get much better at thinking

00:47:19.740 | and life doesn't give this to you.

00:47:21.380 | Look, I mean, your whole career is about, you know,

00:47:23.820 | serious deep work, you know, and part of the reason

00:47:26.660 | is because we're so unbelievably distracted,

00:47:28.500 | but even if you have periods of, you know,

00:47:30.500 | deep work over the course of your day,

00:47:32.300 | you need months and years to just knock your head

00:47:35.660 | against the wall, solve problems, reason things out,

00:47:38.820 | be befuddled, because you become a much better,

00:47:41.740 | clearer, linear thinker.

00:47:43.020 | I mean, whether you're doing English literary criticism

00:47:47.220 | or, you know, linear programming, that's, you know,

00:47:51.540 | the PhD has really no substitute in our culture

00:47:55.020 | for becoming incredibly expert at something

00:47:57.780 | and thinking for a long time.

00:48:00.060 | And that's one of the reasons that, you know,

00:48:02.020 | if you can do that and then leverage that

00:48:03.900 | into a serious body of work that a university

00:48:05.980 | will take seriously, and on top of that,

00:48:08.340 | a really great university, then that creates a platform

00:48:10.860 | and a brand, but behind it is this non-autodidactic truth

00:48:15.860 | that you need training.

00:48:18.500 | We just need training.

00:48:20.300 | - Yeah, you got to get used to it.

00:48:21.980 | You have to, I mean, from strength to strength, right?

00:48:24.900 | You have years of thinking about that.

00:48:26.880 | Then you have this article, what was it?

00:48:28.220 | Maybe 2019, where you have an Atlantic piece

00:48:31.180 | that's trying out the ideas.

00:48:32.940 | - Right. - That goes really well.

00:48:34.340 | That's another piece of this,

00:48:35.380 | writing for major publications.

00:48:37.080 | I've definitely found this.

00:48:38.660 | Gives you a chance to stress test ideas

00:48:41.580 | against reaction as well.

00:48:43.140 | So you have years of thinking, and then you're testing,

00:48:46.140 | and most of the ideas, yeah, I write it,

00:48:48.780 | I put it out there in a long-form article.

00:48:50.300 | It's not really doing something.

00:48:51.340 | And then you occasionally get something

00:48:52.620 | that really seems to create a frision of energy,

00:48:54.900 | and after all of that, you're like,

00:48:56.860 | now I think I have something I'm willing

00:48:58.800 | to write a book about.

00:48:59.640 | That's a long process.

00:49:00.940 | - That is a long process, and it's a really critical point

00:49:04.060 | that you're making for anybody who's trying to do this,

00:49:06.640 | that you and I have the same process, obviously.

00:49:09.580 | The way, when I write a book,

00:49:10.820 | it starts off by me talking about an idea.

00:49:13.940 | And so I talk about an idea, and what I usually have,

00:49:16.040 | is I do about 175 speeches a year outside the university,

00:49:19.140 | so I do a lot of public speaking.

00:49:20.860 | And I always have three or four real stump speeches,

00:49:24.380 | but there's always a bunch that I'm trying out.

00:49:26.620 | And they're based on a bunch of different ideas,

00:49:29.120 | and a lot of things that I'm reading,

00:49:30.420 | and I put 'em together.

00:49:31.260 | I murder board a talk before I take it out on the road,

00:49:34.820 | so that I have reps on it,

00:49:36.460 | and so I know which jokes work.

00:49:38.340 | I know whether the beginnings and the endings work.

00:49:40.800 | A lot of that I learn from being a French horn player.

00:49:43.040 | Slow everything down.

00:49:44.860 | Watch your tapes.

00:49:46.140 | Get people to adjudicate the performance of the thing

00:49:49.460 | before you're doing it in public.

00:49:51.180 | Memorize the beginning and memorize the ending,

00:49:53.740 | so it's not extemporaneous,

00:49:55.180 | 'cause there's not so much throat clearing

00:49:56.480 | when you're nervous, et cetera, et cetera.

00:49:58.100 | Then I'll talk about something for usually six months,

00:50:00.620 | and then I'll write something

00:50:02.140 | that's not a 1,200 word piece.

00:50:04.340 | It's usually a 7,000 word piece

00:50:07.060 | based on all the things that I've been thinking about

00:50:09.180 | by talking about it.

00:50:10.320 | I learn by having conversations, typically.

00:50:12.540 | That's the kind of learner that I am.

00:50:13.940 | And I write, I beta test it in the long piece

00:50:16.620 | where the stakes are low.

00:50:17.860 | I mean, who cares if not that many people read it?

00:50:19.980 | It'll just drop off the leaderboard

00:50:21.460 | of the Atlantic or something quickly.

00:50:23.500 | But if it lights up, if it's a big deal,

00:50:26.060 | then I know it's something big,

00:50:27.480 | and then I start digging into the book version

00:50:29.780 | is the way that that works.

00:50:30.780 | But that's a long process of internally cogitating,

00:50:34.700 | of exposing ideas to external scrutiny,

00:50:38.300 | of fermenting the ideas in a productive way

00:50:42.740 | so that they actually get better in the age a little bit.

00:50:45.020 | And you can't, you know it's like,

00:50:46.300 | hey, I had an idea for a book and I wrote it.

00:50:47.860 | No way, that's the recipe for a terrible book.

00:50:50.860 | - This used to be my,

00:50:52.980 | the thing I was known for early in my career as a professor,

00:50:55.680 | they would often invite me to come to dissertation boot camps

00:50:59.140 | where doctoral students work on dissertations.

00:51:01.420 | You'd get together, kind of motivate each other,

00:51:03.300 | and you'd have some speakers come in,

00:51:04.900 | and they would have me come speak.

00:51:06.300 | And the thing I'd always get mad about was,

00:51:09.100 | and this was maybe a futile battle,

00:51:10.660 | is that all the other speakers,

00:51:11.980 | all the terminology was all focused on writing.

00:51:14.780 | You got to make sure you write, put in time to write,

00:51:16.940 | get your pages every day.

00:51:18.980 | You got to keep writing.

00:51:20.020 | We got to help each other writing.

00:51:21.220 | And I was always coming in and saying,

00:51:22.380 | well, what about thinking?

00:51:24.020 | I mean, you need to be thinking about thinking.

00:51:26.900 | Do you have enough time for think?

00:51:28.180 | How do you think?

00:51:29.020 | Where do you go to think?

00:51:30.140 | We don't talk enough about thinking as a standalone term.

00:51:34.380 | This is something curmudgeonly, I guess,

00:51:35.700 | academics like us like to think about.

00:51:37.340 | But we don't think enough about thinking,

00:51:38.860 | and it's different than writing.

00:51:40.500 | The whole culture of writing online,

00:51:43.540 | sort of instruction is all about pages.

00:51:45.660 | - Yeah, you know, I think first, talk second,

00:51:48.620 | then write third.

00:51:50.260 | And then I write short form first,

00:51:52.460 | medium form second, and long form third.

00:51:55.500 | And so when you get a book that I write,

00:51:57.340 | it's been in there, it's been rolling.

00:52:00.380 | The problem with it is that by the time the book comes out,

00:52:03.620 | I don't want to talk about it anymore.

00:52:05.740 | I don't want to talk about the next thing.

00:52:07.260 | But then, of course, you're on tour,

00:52:08.780 | and then you're on tour for the next year.

00:52:10.460 | So, you know, "From Strength to Strength"

00:52:11.940 | came out in February of 2022,

00:52:14.220 | and I'm still talking about it.

00:52:15.860 | You know, 'cause people are saying,

00:52:16.700 | "Can you come talk about that book?"

00:52:18.380 | But yeah, I mean, these are pretty nice problems to have.

00:52:21.420 | - Yeah, well, okay, then that brings us

00:52:22.900 | where we wanted to get to from the beginning,

00:52:26.180 | which is the newer book, "Build the Life You Want."

00:52:30.020 | This is co-authored with Oprah Winfrey.

00:52:33.060 | So what's this step?

00:52:35.140 | I think for most people, this is completely mind-boggling.

00:52:38.820 | They assume, you know,

00:52:40.700 | Stedman showed up at your house with, you know,

00:52:43.580 | Oprah's favorite, like some sort of trumpets blaring,

00:52:45.900 | but I'm sure it was probably much more prosaic than that.

00:52:48.140 | How did this come to be?

00:52:49.220 | And this is also for you pretty quick.

00:52:51.420 | This is breaking your two-year rule,

00:52:52.700 | and I'm assuming when Oprah comes,

00:52:53.900 | you break your two-year rule.

00:52:54.980 | So how did we get from strength to strength is out,

00:52:57.180 | it's doing well,

00:52:58.780 | within a year and a few months after that,

00:53:01.100 | your new book is out?

00:53:02.700 | - So yeah, that was,

00:53:03.780 | so I have a column in "The Atlantic" at this point.

00:53:06.940 | You know, during the coronavirus epidemic,

00:53:08.500 | I wasn't able to go out on the road.

00:53:10.780 | I had more time for creative work at home,

00:53:13.220 | you know, in the silence of my head,

00:53:15.860 | where I have, you know,

00:53:16.700 | the sounds of screaming children, et cetera.

00:53:18.860 | Ever since my kids moved out,

00:53:21.420 | I have it inside my head as opposed to outside.

00:53:23.980 | And I thought, well, let's try some new things.

00:53:26.020 | And I'm, you know, I've been friends for a while

00:53:27.180 | with Jeff Goldberg, who's the editor of "The Atlantic."

00:53:29.460 | And he said, "Why don't we do a happiness column

00:53:32.500 | "on the science of happiness?"

00:53:33.780 | You know, you write these longer form pieces.

00:53:35.700 | I said, "Okay."

00:53:36.540 | So we started this column and it was really popular.

00:53:38.700 | You know, it's 1,200 or 1,300 words weekly

00:53:41.180 | on a different topic.

00:53:42.340 | And so it's kind of like writing a lay version

00:53:44.500 | of the literature review part of an academic article

00:53:48.180 | on a different topic every week,

00:53:49.980 | which is an incredible challenge,

00:53:51.620 | but it's super interesting.

00:53:52.940 | I mean, it's like, I can't believe,

00:53:55.420 | I mean, today I just turned in a column

00:53:58.020 | about why you might not want to be the boss.

00:54:01.300 | Every, you have a, the evolutionary psychology says,

00:54:05.060 | get, rise in the hierarchy, rise in the hierarchy,

00:54:07.700 | get promoted, get promoted.

00:54:09.300 | And that's an imperative from mother nature

00:54:11.900 | for you to get more mates and survive,

00:54:13.860 | but it's not an imperative to get happier

00:54:15.580 | 'cause mother nature doesn't care if you're happier.

00:54:17.580 | Here are the costs based on natural experiments

00:54:20.060 | where people are promoted or not

00:54:21.420 | and what actually happened to their emotional life

00:54:23.100 | in the two years after their promotion.

00:54:24.980 | And I said, if you tend toward anger or loneliness,

00:54:28.420 | don't become the boss, fight mother nature.

00:54:31.420 | That's what I wrote.

00:54:32.260 | I turned that one in today.

00:54:33.220 | It's for nine weeks from now.

00:54:34.660 | I'm about eight or nine weeks out of my column.

00:54:36.860 | And I, you know, I give suggestions

00:54:38.060 | and I live out the suggestions, et cetera.

00:54:39.780 | Super interesting.

00:54:40.700 | So I'm putting that column out there

00:54:41.980 | and we get about 500,000 readers a week on that column.

00:54:45.820 | And I don't know who they are.

00:54:47.060 | I don't know who they are.

00:54:48.240 | You know, I found, I find out from the editor that,

00:54:50.000 | you know, some, you know,

00:54:51.700 | former president reads the column.

00:54:53.340 | Cool, that's great.

00:54:54.280 | But it turns out that one of my regular readers

00:54:55.880 | during coronavirus when we're all locked down

00:54:57.780 | was Oprah Winfrey, who's super interested in ideas.

00:55:00.860 | I mean, she's a high caliber intellect

00:55:04.060 | and she's very interested in all kinds of ideas

00:55:06.060 | and interested in the science of happiness.

00:55:07.860 | So she's reading it.

00:55:08.700 | When the new book comes out, "From Strength to Strength"

00:55:10.460 | back in February, 2022,

00:55:11.620 | she read it when it, on the first day it hit the market

00:55:14.420 | and called me up.

00:55:15.380 | This is Oprah Winfrey.

00:55:16.460 | And I'm like, yeah, and I'm Batman, right?

00:55:19.040 | I mean, turns out it's Oprah Winfrey.

00:55:22.020 | - She just called.

00:55:23.100 | - Yeah, I mean, her team called my team, et cetera.

00:55:26.820 | But we, so we wound up talking, right?

00:55:28.980 | And she said, we think about things in much the same way.

00:55:31.740 | Why don't you come on my podcast

00:55:33.140 | to talk about your book, which we did.

00:55:34.300 | And we were like a house on fire.

00:55:35.940 | Her mission is the same as mine.

00:55:37.300 | It's just different means of getting at it.

00:55:39.060 | Lift people up and bring them together with ideas.

00:55:41.780 | Lift them up and bring them together

00:55:42.980 | in bonds of happiness and love.

00:55:45.100 | That's what we want, right?

00:55:46.380 | I mean, a better society, happier people.

00:55:48.920 | It's beautiful.

00:55:49.980 | And so we decided, why don't we team up on something?

00:55:51.900 | We kicked around a bunch of different ideas,

00:55:54.340 | texting back and forth and back and forth

00:55:56.060 | and back and forth.

00:55:56.900 | And finally she says, you know, if I had my show,

00:55:58.740 | she had a show for 25 years, an iconic show

00:56:01.460 | that was on from the time that I was in my early 20s

00:56:04.260 | on national television.

00:56:06.460 | And I mean, it really, really brought people together.

00:56:09.620 | I mean, millions of five, 10 million people a day

00:56:12.340 | watched that show.

00:56:13.500 | And what she would do is she would find somebody

00:56:15.940 | who had a bunch of ideas she thought was interesting

00:56:17.520 | and have them on the show 30 times

00:56:18.820 | and launch those ideas into the zeitgeist.

00:56:21.760 | She said, if I had my show, I'd have you on 30 times,

00:56:24.220 | but I don't have a show.

00:56:25.060 | So why don't I host a book?

00:56:27.380 | You know, we do it that way where, you know,

00:56:28.820 | we write together this book on the science of happiness.

00:56:31.040 | That's kind of a conversation between us

00:56:32.900 | and I'm putting in the connective tissue

00:56:34.500 | and then we'll read it for the audio version.

00:56:37.300 | And I said, cool, that's awesome.

00:56:38.820 | And so basically I went back, we wove together

00:56:40.860 | a bunch of stuff that had been in columns,

00:56:43.120 | but it was fundamentally about the neuroscience

00:56:45.620 | and social science of emotional self-management.

00:56:48.840 | How you treat what's going on inside your head

00:56:50.740 | with the same seriousness as you treat your job.

00:56:53.780 | Because most people think, you know,

00:56:55.620 | there's nothing I can do about my feelings.

00:56:57.000 | My feelings happen to me.

00:56:58.440 | That's actually completely wrong.

00:57:00.780 | It's a missed opportunity to have a much happier life.

00:57:03.900 | It's the single biggest mistake that people make

00:57:06.620 | is thinking that.

00:57:07.660 | So we tested a bunch of these ideas.

00:57:09.500 | We murder boarded the concepts.

00:57:12.140 | I wrote the book chapters and we passed them back and forth

00:57:14.580 | and she edited and added stuff, et cetera, et cetera.

00:57:16.940 | And we published that book in September of this year,

00:57:20.220 | September of 2023, Build the Life You Want,

00:57:23.260 | The Art and Science of Getting Happier.

00:57:25.260 | And it was, Cal, it was a total blast.

00:57:27.860 | I gotta tell you, working with Oprah Winfrey

00:57:29.620 | is as fun as it sounds.

00:57:31.540 | - Now, I already gave a rave review of this book

00:57:33.840 | on the show because it's so connected to the way

00:57:37.180 | that we talk about the deep life here,

00:57:38.420 | which is identify the different areas of life

00:57:41.280 | that are important and give each of those attention.

00:57:43.460 | I think that approach,

00:57:45.460 | which was the exact structure of the book,

00:57:47.500 | well, let's talk about work, but let's talk about faith,

00:57:49.860 | let's talk about family.

00:57:51.700 | Did you start in this murder boarding process,

00:57:54.180 | was it a situation where you started with 10

00:57:56.860 | or a dozen candidates for these are areas

00:57:59.420 | that really matter for paying attention to

00:58:01.980 | and then it narrowed down as you begin to develop it?

00:58:04.740 | Or after three years or two and a half years

00:58:07.340 | of doing the column, was it a 30 minute conversation

00:58:10.620 | where you're saying, it is clear

00:58:11.740 | that these are the five things?

00:58:12.900 | Like, I mean, I can see, I've been doing this.

00:58:15.380 | What was that process like finding the buckets

00:58:17.860 | you told people to focus on?

00:58:19.500 | - Yeah, the first, yeah, so I had a concept

00:58:21.580 | of what I thought it might be and then we got to,

00:58:23.540 | Oprah Winfrey and I got together at her place.

00:58:25.580 | She has a, she lives in Southern California

00:58:27.900 | and we got together for a period of time together

00:58:31.320 | where we just stayed, you know, I stayed in her guest house

00:58:34.040 | and we took our meals together and we would just work

00:58:37.500 | on the work on work on the structure of the manuscript

00:58:39.500 | and we would test ideas and we had people from her team,

00:58:42.860 | people from my team saying, no, it's not gonna work,

00:58:44.980 | that doesn't make sense, et cetera.

00:58:46.220 | And so that was the basis of the original idea.

00:58:49.820 | Then as I started getting into the writing,

00:58:51.580 | as you know, when you write it, it's not the same.

00:58:55.060 | When you write it, it's not so easy

00:58:58.020 | because it turns out the things that made sense

00:58:59.740 | in your head don't make sense on the page anymore.

00:59:02.080 | And so that's when I started passing out ideas

00:59:04.660 | and doing kind of internal murder boarding with my students.

00:59:08.620 | You know, I would try out ideas in my lectures.

00:59:11.180 | I would ask students for feedback

00:59:12.980 | 'cause my graduate students, my MBA students

00:59:14.820 | at the Harvard Business School, they're phenomenal.

00:59:17.420 | They're smart, they're interesting, they're interested,

00:59:19.940 | they're curious, it's really great.

00:59:22.240 | Asking people that I was pretty familiar with,

00:59:25.480 | you know, the people I had worked with,

00:59:26.780 | especially junior people at the American Enterprise Institute

00:59:29.380 | to help me out with these ideas as well.

00:59:31.180 | She was doing the same thing.

00:59:33.100 | Then we got back together and put together

00:59:34.820 | a kind of a mega manuscript and started down selecting ideas

00:59:37.820 | so it would be the right length.

00:59:39.020 | The right length for a book like this,

00:59:40.860 | it's about the same length as most of your books,

00:59:42.620 | around 60,000 words.

00:59:44.500 | And the reason is you wanna keep people's attention enough

00:59:46.940 | that they can read the whole book in a weekend

00:59:49.140 | and they can absorb the idea.

00:59:50.860 | There's a lot of research on this.

00:59:52.100 | If it takes them three weeks, by the end of the book,

00:59:54.580 | they're not gonna remember the beginning.

00:59:56.160 | And that's a problem and most people will drop off.

00:59:59.420 | I mean, there's all that literature out there

01:00:00.900 | about nobody finishes books.

01:00:02.900 | You know, you want people to actually finish the book.

01:00:05.140 | And so more than 60,000 words is gonna be a problem.

01:00:08.100 | The original version of the manuscript

01:00:09.580 | was closer to 100,000 words.

01:00:11.460 | And we just started murdering parts of it.

01:00:14.020 | Just kill it, kill it, kill it, kill it, kill it,

01:00:16.100 | and cutting it down until we had the essential part

01:00:19.020 | where the fat was stripped out.

01:00:20.200 | And that was the book.

01:00:21.340 | - Well, and then my final question here,

01:00:22.740 | 'cause I know we're short on time.

01:00:25.220 | My audience has a real hunger for exactly

01:00:27.900 | what you're doing in that book,

01:00:28.860 | which is let's get systematic in thinking through our life.

01:00:33.220 | Are you picking up this exact same strong signal

01:00:36.740 | from your students, from the audience

01:00:39.140 | that are reading this book?

01:00:39.980 | What is your take on what it is right now,

01:00:42.280 | sort of post-pandemic, late 2023?

01:00:44.740 | What is your take on what people are hungry for

01:00:48.460 | in terms of their life at this moment?

01:00:51.620 | - People are hungry to feel like they have control

01:00:56.540 | over their own lives and their own feelings,

01:00:58.620 | their own emotions.

01:01:00.180 | And they feel like they don't.

01:01:01.700 | They feel like they don't.

01:01:02.540 | They feel like they're being managed

01:01:03.900 | by their own emotional processes

01:01:06.100 | and managed by the outside world,

01:01:08.260 | managed by the distraction industrial industry

01:01:11.580 | that you talk about really compellingly all the time.

01:01:15.060 | They're feeling like they're being managed

01:01:16.860 | and they're feeling out of control.

01:01:18.060 | That's one of the reasons that you see such an uptick

01:01:20.000 | in generalized anxiety and clinical depression.

01:01:22.660 | I mean, the symptoms of clinical depression,

01:01:25.500 | if you believe this, are up by about 4X

01:01:28.220 | since the beginning of COVID

01:01:29.180 | and are not dropping at this point.

01:01:30.860 | And it has everything to do with the fact

01:01:32.340 | that we're being exogenously managed.

01:01:34.980 | And the whole point is it doesn't have to be the case.

01:01:37.360 | And so that's the big idea from my class

01:01:40.420 | is if there's one word that characterizes my class,

01:01:44.980 | it's metacognition, which is thinking about thinking,

01:01:48.580 | which is awareness of your own emotional processes.

01:01:51.540 | When you are aware,

01:01:53.540 | consciously aware of your subconscious processes,

01:01:57.180 | when your prefrontal cortex is paying attention

01:02:00.180 | to your limbic system, you have power.

01:02:02.900 | You have practically unbridled power,

01:02:06.020 | but it doesn't come naturally.

01:02:07.780 | You know, we're very reactive creatures.

01:02:09.820 | We want our limbic system, it flies out of control.

01:02:12.580 | It does all kinds of crazy things all the time.

01:02:14.460 | It delivers us emotions constantly

01:02:17.260 | and people are manipulating our limbic system.

01:02:19.580 | When you understand the basic neuroscience

01:02:21.980 | and social science of how emotions work,

01:02:24.380 | then you can actually develop a repertoire of techniques

01:02:27.620 | from meditation to prayers of petition,

01:02:30.260 | to journaling, to therapy, to walking in nature

01:02:33.900 | and grounding yourself, et cetera, et cetera.

01:02:35.820 | And always using the techniques of deep work, by the way,

01:02:39.040 | no joke, your stuff is completely, as you know,

01:02:41.380 | complimentary to this.

01:02:42.660 | You can, in this metacognitive state,

01:02:45.380 | you can manage your emotions so they don't manage you

01:02:47.720 | and then you have power of your life,

01:02:49.420 | power you never thought you had.

01:02:51.180 | So this is intended to be a compliment

01:02:53.240 | for many of the techniques that people think of

01:02:56.020 | in the self-improvement literature

01:02:57.620 | of how to structure their day, how to structure their work,

01:02:59.540 | how to structure their life.

01:03:00.880 | This is how to structure your feelings in your mind

01:03:03.420 | alongside of all that.

01:03:04.760 | - Which is, and I'll say for my listeners,

01:03:06.060 | one of the really cool and distinctive parts

01:03:07.820 | of Build A Life You Want is that right up front,

01:03:10.060 | you're talking about metacognition.

01:03:11.540 | Like right up front, you're talking about emotions

01:03:13.420 | and feelings, which is a big change

01:03:14.860 | because this field tends to be very action-focused.

01:03:17.900 | Like, well, you need to make this plan

01:03:20.460 | and then execute this plan and it's all about mechanistic

01:03:24.620 | and that's something I loved about the book

01:03:27.000 | is that it's very aware that your emotions,

01:03:29.700 | your thought patterns is everything

01:03:32.460 | when it comes to your perception of life,

01:03:33.900 | the actions you take.

01:03:34.740 | It's a very aware book.

01:03:36.460 | So I know we're short on time,

01:03:37.740 | so I wanna point people towards the right places

01:03:39.620 | to bathe in more of this wisdom from Arthur Brooks.

01:03:43.220 | The two books we talked about mainly

01:03:44.980 | was From Strength to Strength and Build The Life You Want.

01:03:48.980 | Your column, that's still running in The Atlantic, right?

01:03:51.060 | What does that call for people who are looking for it?

01:03:53.220 | - How to Build A Life.

01:03:54.300 | - How to Build A Life. - How to Build A Life.

01:03:56.340 | By the way, The Life You Want is Oprah's show,

01:04:01.180 | internet show, so How to Build A Life

01:04:02.860 | plus The Life You Want is like those two products

01:04:05.420 | that a baby called Build The Life You Want.

01:04:09.660 | So How to Build A Life is my column

01:04:11.380 | every Thursday morning in The Atlantic.

01:04:13.780 | - Excellent, and then do you do,

01:04:15.020 | what about online platform, social, et cetera?

01:04:17.740 | - I do, I'm on social.

01:04:19.220 | I'm on Instagram and I'm on Twitter, X,

01:04:23.060 | whatever it's called.

01:04:24.540 | What I do is I use it as a way to put out content

01:04:28.260 | around this subject.

01:04:29.500 | I'm not on it for my edification or to find news

01:04:32.780 | or to have conversations or God knows not

01:04:35.300 | to get into fights with other people.

01:04:36.460 | I'm using it to broadcast what I think

01:04:38.140 | are really good ideas to edify other people as well.

01:04:40.460 | And then I have a lot of stuff on YouTube.

01:04:42.300 | I have a lot of, you know, Oprah and I

01:04:44.100 | just dropped three video casts on YouTube

01:04:46.420 | that are on YouTube and actually on the Starbucks app

01:04:49.460 | of all things, which is kind of an interesting thing.

01:04:51.340 | So you can, you know, sip your venti dark roast

01:04:54.140 | while watching me and Oprah talk about the limbic system

01:04:57.260 | if that floats your boat.

01:04:58.820 | - It's 100% what I want to do.

01:05:01.260 | - Well, this is great.

01:05:02.100 | So Arthur Brooks, thank you very much.

01:05:03.140 | And thanks for coming on the show.

01:05:04.220 | This was a fantastic and thank you.

01:05:06.380 | It may seem like we didn't talk a ton

01:05:08.180 | about the details of the last book,

01:05:10.660 | but it's all we talked about.

01:05:12.620 | Because your life, I think, and the way you're thinking

01:05:15.100 | is just this fantastic case study

01:05:16.900 | into how a really thoughtful, intentional person

01:05:19.980 | shapes and reshapes their lives.

01:05:21.380 | I think it's gonna be very useful to my audience.

01:05:23.340 | So thank you again for coming on.

01:05:24.780 | - Thanks, Cal.

01:05:25.620 | And thank you for the work that you're doing.

01:05:26.620 | It's really enriched me an awful lot.

01:05:28.300 | I mean, the systems thinking for my own life.

01:05:30.740 | When I see somebody who thinks the same way

01:05:32.300 | and has thought more deeply, even about those details,

01:05:34.620 | it's been really helpful.

01:05:35.560 | So that's the reason you've got a big audience

01:05:36.980 | that includes me.

01:05:37.900 | - There we go.

01:05:38.740 | We feel seen.

01:05:39.740 | All right, thanks, Arthur.

01:05:40.860 | - Thanks.

01:05:42.380 | - All right, so that was my conversation with Arthur Brooks.

01:05:44.460 | I thought that was fantastic.

01:05:46.580 | Learned a lot.

01:05:47.420 | Interesting guy.

01:05:48.980 | Really interesting, thoughtful guy,

01:05:50.660 | the way that he has crafted his life.

01:05:52.260 | And I particularly appreciated that little detail, Jesse,

01:05:56.560 | about him spending time,

01:05:58.900 | the way he wrote that book with Oprah

01:06:00.820 | was to just go live in her guest house in Montecito.

01:06:03.860 | You got to find a way to coauthor a book with Oprah.

01:06:06.580 | That just sounds awesome.

01:06:07.700 | - Yeah.

01:06:08.540 | - Just a lot of like cozier sheets

01:06:10.580 | and good smelling candles.

01:06:12.820 | That'd just be fantastic.

01:06:14.220 | - Lots of places to read and do deep work.

01:06:16.020 | - Exactly.

01:06:17.260 | I love it.

01:06:18.100 | Just be like me and Stedman just reading books.

01:06:20.980 | That's all I know about Oprah.

01:06:23.420 | Dr. Phil comes by every once in a while

01:06:25.020 | and we just like chat.

01:06:25.940 | - Yeah.

01:06:27.060 | - All my Oprah knowledge is from circa 2004, basically.

01:06:31.220 | Anyways, thank you, Arthur, for coming on the show.

01:06:33.940 | Definitely check out his new book, "Build the Life You Want."

01:06:37.700 | So we have a third segment here in honor of the holidays

01:06:40.400 | and in honor of Oprah.

01:06:42.140 | My list of my favorite completely unnecessary

01:06:45.380 | and embarrassingly geeky things of 2023.

01:06:49.060 | First, let me just mention one other sponsor

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01:08:30.640 | All right, Jesse, here we go.

01:08:33.820 | My favorite completely unnecessarily

01:08:35.660 | and embarrassingly geeky things from 2023.

01:08:39.420 | So the idea here is instead of talking about common sense

01:08:41.700 | or useful things that most normal human beings would say,

01:08:44.340 | this makes sense and I should have this,

01:08:46.180 | I wanna talk about the weird,

01:08:48.740 | the weird, almost embarrassingly geeky things

01:08:50.980 | that I really buy that are unnecessary and I grow to love.

01:08:55.260 | The type of things I talk about

01:08:56.740 | on my classic deep or crazy segment where I asked Jesse,

01:09:00.300 | was this deep that I bought this

01:09:02.300 | or does it make me a madman?

01:09:04.300 | And so I figured there's six of you in the audience

01:09:06.700 | that are gonna actually resonate with these suggestions,

01:09:11.360 | but that's good.

01:09:12.200 | We need to celebrate the idiosyncratic and geeky.

01:09:14.540 | We have to celebrate sometimes going all in

01:09:17.460 | on getting deep in ways that's entirely superfluous.

01:09:20.020 | All right, so I have five things, Jesse,

01:09:21.780 | and I have them all with me.

01:09:22.900 | - Yes.

01:09:23.740 | - So if you are listening,

01:09:24.580 | you might wanna go check out the video here.

01:09:27.260 | You go to thedeeplife.com/listen,

01:09:29.860 | look for episode 280.

01:09:31.700 | At the bottom, there'll be the videos from the episode.

01:09:34.460 | You can get the video for the whole thing.

01:09:35.460 | You see me talk to Arthur, but come on,

01:09:36.740 | this is the main thing you wanna see.

01:09:38.580 | I will show off my five completely unnecessary,

01:09:41.620 | embarrassingly geeky things.

01:09:42.460 | All right, number one, I'm gonna go grab this.

01:09:46.780 | This is my Unnecessary Hipster Keyboard.

01:09:51.100 | This is by Nufi, N-U-P-H-Y.

01:09:55.540 | Gotta look up the title here.

01:09:56.740 | Let me hold it up so you can see it.

01:09:58.540 | This is a Nufi Air 78, Air 75.

01:10:05.420 | What this is is a mechanical keyboard.

01:10:09.240 | So the keys actually have a physical switch with a spring.

01:10:13.120 | So you press it down and the spring pushes it back up again.

01:10:16.920 | This is what keyboards used to be like

01:10:19.320 | until Apple and others introduced

01:10:22.300 | these membrane-based keyboards where you press down,

01:10:24.720 | it's just squeezing rubber and making a connection.

01:10:26.880 | These are the old-fashioned clickety clacks.

01:10:29.120 | I'll do some by the microphone here.

01:10:30.920 | Clickety clack keyboard.

01:10:34.680 | You can type much faster on these

01:10:36.480 | because you get a return on the finger.

01:10:38.680 | So you press down and it pushes your finger back up

01:10:41.140 | so you can move it and get to the next key faster

01:10:43.460 | without having to pull it up as quickly.

01:10:45.460 | I got this in part because the problem,

01:10:49.120 | we've talked about this before,

01:10:50.140 | but the problem with the current generation

01:10:52.400 | of MacBook Airs is they switch to a cheaper plastic

01:10:54.820 | on the keyboard and I wore away,

01:10:56.740 | I wore away all of the numbers

01:10:59.420 | and all the letters on my keyboard.

01:11:01.820 | And it really frustrated me.

01:11:03.060 | So I wanted a better keyboard.

01:11:04.300 | This is really high quality plastic.

01:11:06.020 | It's not gonna wear away.

01:11:07.300 | I spend so much time writing

01:11:09.580 | and not just casually writing like emails,

01:11:11.540 | but hard writing like New Yorker articles

01:11:14.020 | or chapters for my books or my newsletter.

01:11:16.180 | And I don't know, it completely unnecessary,

01:11:19.380 | but I feel much more definitive when I'm typing on this.

01:11:22.920 | Like I'm thinking harder.

01:11:25.140 | I don't know, I love it.

01:11:26.260 | Completely unnecessary, my hipster keyboard.

01:11:29.380 | - Did you have color options for that?

01:11:31.980 | - It comes with, this is the color options it comes with.

01:11:35.220 | It also has cool lights that come on when you type.

01:11:37.480 | You can replace any key on this though.

01:11:39.500 | So it comes with a tool.

01:11:41.100 | You can pop the key case caps off

01:11:43.420 | and put any key caps you want.

01:11:44.780 | They snap back onto the switch.

01:11:46.560 | So people super customize these

01:11:48.860 | and you can replace these over time.

01:11:50.380 | I love it, I don't know.

01:11:51.220 | I really like typing on it.

01:11:52.800 | All right.

01:11:53.640 | Number two from 2023.

01:11:57.740 | We've talked about this on the show before,

01:11:59.100 | but I will show it off.

01:12:00.380 | My Remarkable 2 digital notebook.

01:12:04.880 | All right, so this is a, it's a notebook,

01:12:09.300 | but it uses the same sort of e-ink technology

01:12:13.420 | that you might see on a Kindle.

01:12:16.940 | So I'll show this for those who are watching.

01:12:18.700 | Let me do something thicker here.

01:12:20.940 | So you write on this and as you write,

01:12:24.520 | it shows up on the screen like you're writing on paper.

01:12:30.260 | It has, they've really worked on the feel of it

01:12:32.480 | so that it does have the same drag more or less like paper.

01:12:36.420 | So it has a very paper-like feel.

01:12:38.740 | You can create endless notebooks on here,

01:12:40.980 | endless pages, endless notebooks,

01:12:42.780 | and the whole thing is constantly syncing with the cloud.

01:12:45.260 | So everything in here is available online.

01:12:47.660 | You're not gonna lose it.

01:12:49.060 | So it's like having a stack of 20 notebooks with you

01:12:53.240 | just in this package, wherever you go.

01:12:55.900 | I have used this as a replacement

01:12:57.340 | for basically all of the notebooks I use

01:12:59.960 | for keeping track of ideas

01:13:01.620 | or scratch paper for working on ideas.

01:13:03.540 | I think I have well over a dozen virtual notebooks

01:13:06.460 | stored in here right now.

01:13:09.340 | So some of these will be idea notebooks.

01:13:11.540 | I'm working on an article or a book

01:13:13.380 | and I just wanna have a place to keep ideas.

01:13:15.500 | Some of these are my computer science-related notebooks

01:13:18.420 | where I'll actually work out math

01:13:19.900 | if I'm working on a theory paper.

01:13:21.500 | There's a place for me to store

01:13:22.620 | and always go back and find that math.

01:13:24.660 | I can and I have just gone into the cloud,

01:13:27.540 | grabbed sheets from some of these notebooks

01:13:29.940 | as PDFs and sent them to collaborators.

01:13:32.980 | Oh, look, this is what I was talking about.

01:13:35.180 | I also use this for a lot of planning,

01:13:36.620 | a lot of the planning for my media company,

01:13:39.140 | strategy, ideas.

01:13:41.380 | I've replaced my Moleskine where I used to keep ideas

01:13:44.780 | about just living a deep life more generally

01:13:46.460 | that now exist in here virtually.

01:13:48.440 | I've been using this for a while now and I really like it.

01:13:51.180 | I like the experience of writing on here.

01:13:52.980 | I like having all my notebooks in one place.

01:13:55.280 | I otherwise was using too many notebooks.

01:13:57.860 | Now I say this is under my completely unnecessary

01:14:00.940 | and embarrassingly geeky list

01:14:02.780 | because it's really kind of expensive.

01:14:04.260 | I mean, it doesn't really make sense for most people.

01:14:07.740 | By the time you get the tablet,

01:14:09.820 | you get the cover, you get the advanced,

01:14:12.740 | you have to pay more for the stylus

01:14:14.220 | that has an eraser built on.

01:14:16.020 | This was $500 easy, all in,

01:14:19.660 | which is pretty crazy for a notebook.

01:14:21.860 | For someone like me, yeah, why not?

01:14:23.860 | Because my whole life is ideas and technology

01:14:26.860 | and it's cool and I'm a first mover.

01:14:28.820 | I don't know if I can really recommend it

01:14:30.220 | unless you just have that money lying around,

01:14:31.780 | but I've really enjoyed my Remarkable 2 experience.

01:14:35.140 | All right, as we move down this list, by the way, Jesse,

01:14:38.260 | things are gonna get increasingly geeky

01:14:40.860 | and increasingly less relevant to people.

01:14:43.100 | That's the way this is gonna work.

01:14:45.020 | So be prepared.

01:14:46.260 | If you already find yourself a little bit alienated,

01:14:48.260 | this is gonna get worse.

01:14:49.460 | All right, I wanna show my third

01:14:56.620 | favorite unnecessary and geeky thing from last year.

01:14:59.860 | I'm holding it up here.

01:15:00.680 | This is a Shure MV7 microphone.

01:15:03.580 | This is fantastic for anyone

01:15:08.100 | who wants to get into the audio game.

01:15:10.540 | So let's say you wanna start a podcast

01:15:13.100 | or you just wanna sound better

01:15:15.300 | when you are on Zoom meetings

01:15:17.300 | or maybe you're a guest on some podcast.

01:15:19.860 | What Shure has done here

01:15:21.300 | is taken a lot of the same hardware

01:15:23.700 | that you have in the classic Shure microphones.

01:15:27.340 | I don't know, what are these called?

01:15:29.060 | The SM7s, what are they?

01:15:30.840 | It's on there somewhere, Jesse.

01:15:32.400 | - Yeah, SM7B.

01:15:35.400 | - SM7B, so this is like the classic microphone.

01:15:37.520 | A lot of podcasters use this.

01:15:39.120 | It was also, it's used in the music industry.

01:15:42.160 | I think the Michael Jackson's "Thriller" album

01:15:44.040 | was recorded on these.

01:15:45.360 | It has a lot of those same actual hardwares,

01:15:48.440 | but what it also has built into it

01:15:50.480 | is all of the digital electronics

01:15:55.160 | to convert the analog signal to a digital signal

01:15:59.620 | and to do some mixing on it.

01:16:01.300 | You can have the volume on here.

01:16:03.540 | And so what comes out of here on the other end

01:16:06.540 | is a USB cable.

01:16:07.640 | So it does all the digitization

01:16:10.260 | inside the microphone itself.

01:16:11.740 | So you can then plug this into any laptop

01:16:13.940 | as any other sort of external USB microphone,

01:16:17.260 | getting a lot of the sound quality you would have

01:16:20.920 | from a high-end Shure mic

01:16:22.460 | without needing an extra mixing board to take that signal

01:16:26.080 | and make it something

01:16:26.920 | that the computer itself can understand.

01:16:29.200 | The other thing it has,

01:16:30.120 | which I really would have appreciated early in podcasting

01:16:32.720 | is a monitor headphone output

01:16:35.360 | so that you can hear yourself in your ears.

01:16:40.000 | You can hear other sound in your ears.

01:16:42.320 | This was a real problem I had early in podcasting

01:16:44.720 | was figuring out how to get monitoring

01:16:46.680 | so I could hear myself in my ears.

01:16:48.280 | You get that automatically for here.

01:16:49.960 | It mixes what you're saying

01:16:51.540 | with the audio coming back from the computer.

01:16:53.660 | So if you're hooked up to Zoom,

01:16:55.480 | you can just select this microphone as your speakers.

01:16:58.540 | And so you can hear audio from your computer.

01:17:00.820 | You can hear yourself mixed in.

01:17:02.780 | So you hear what your levels are.

01:17:04.140 | Anyways, this is a fantastic way

01:17:05.380 | to get into higher-end audio

01:17:06.660 | without needing any other equipment,

01:17:08.420 | this straight to your computer.

01:17:10.660 | As people may or may not know,

01:17:12.940 | otherwise things do get complicated.

01:17:14.460 | So like here in our DeepWork HQ,

01:17:15.980 | this is just a classic microphone.

01:17:17.460 | It just has an analog signal coming out of here.

01:17:20.800 | So this goes, Jesse and I,

01:17:22.280 | we both have our mics have to go

01:17:23.860 | into a large standalone audio processor,

01:17:27.280 | which takes that signal and conditions it

01:17:29.940 | and does some compression on it

01:17:31.480 | and works with the EQ mix.

01:17:33.660 | And we had to have an audio engineer set this up.

01:17:35.880 | That signal then goes

01:17:37.120 | into a relatively complicated mixing board.

01:17:40.600 | So I'm in that mixing board,

01:17:41.960 | Jesse's in that mixing board,

01:17:43.120 | our sound effects are in that mixing board,

01:17:44.720 | the calls are in the mixing board,

01:17:45.960 | and that's all set up.

01:17:46.920 | And then that mixing board creates finally a digital signal,

01:17:50.600 | which is what goes to our computer

01:17:53.200 | that we can then use to record multi-tracked

01:17:55.240 | on the computers.

01:17:56.220 | This replaces all of that equipment.

01:17:57.760 | That's not gonna be as good quality.

01:17:59.320 | I mean, obviously having professional audio processors

01:18:02.500 | with gating and compression

01:18:04.160 | and going through a high-end mixing board

01:18:05.640 | where we're tweaking the HQs,

01:18:07.140 | this is gonna sound a little bit better,

01:18:08.720 | but the gap is not big.

01:18:09.760 | So if you wanna have really good sounding audio,

01:18:11.600 | I think this is just a really great invention.

01:18:14.200 | The MV7, for the price of one of these microphones,

01:18:16.920 | you have a whole setup.

01:18:19.360 | So I think this made podcasting accessible.

01:18:22.240 | - Yeah.

01:18:23.080 | - Like good sounding podcasting accessible

01:18:25.020 | to a lot more people.

01:18:27.120 | It makes the cost of that from $700

01:18:30.920 | to get started down to 250.

01:18:33.760 | So anyways, I love this thing.

01:18:34.760 | I use it for all my Zoom calls.

01:18:36.480 | I use it when I give virtual talks

01:18:39.360 | because it looks weird to have this whole thing

01:18:41.200 | when you're giving a talk to a business.

01:18:42.960 | So I just use this and the audio is,

01:18:45.860 | you know, no one notices the difference.

01:18:47.660 | All right, let's get even more esoteric, Jesse.

01:18:51.480 | Let me grab my next thing here.

01:18:53.020 | We're gonna have people running to grab this off the shelves.

01:19:00.900 | This here is a mount

01:19:05.720 | for an Arduino Nano microcontroller.

01:19:09.340 | So, you know, I like to build microelectronics.

01:19:11.800 | I do sometimes with my kids.

01:19:13.340 | Next door to the studio, I have a maker studio,

01:19:16.040 | I have a maker lab

01:19:16.880 | where I have a lot of my microelectronics stuff.

01:19:19.860 | This year I was building a custom light controller

01:19:22.240 | for Halloween lights.

01:19:23.240 | I wanted to control addressable LEDs

01:19:25.480 | using my own custom code.

01:19:26.800 | So I had to build a waterproofed controller

01:19:29.200 | and I was running it off of a microprocessor.

01:19:31.440 | It's hard to build stable circuits on microprocessors.

01:19:34.880 | You have all these, you know,

01:19:36.640 | how do you connect all the different cables to them

01:19:38.620 | in a way that is going to be stable

01:19:40.560 | in the sense that you can move around the whole apparatus

01:19:42.960 | and it's not gonna fall apart.

01:19:44.520 | You don't wanna just put a breadboard in a waterproof box.

01:19:47.320 | So I came across these great mounts for Arduino Nanos.

01:19:51.480 | I have a whole box of Nanos.

01:19:52.760 | You can get them sort of cheap knockoffs

01:19:54.700 | for like eight bucks a pop.

01:19:56.920 | And what you can do is stick the Nano

01:19:59.680 | into these connectors inside

01:20:01.840 | and this breaks out every one of the connections

01:20:05.080 | to the Nano with a screw block

01:20:09.040 | where you can just put a wire end in here

01:20:10.960 | and then screw down the bolt in the wire.

01:20:14.020 | So you don't have to solder your microcontroller

01:20:18.040 | into some sort of proto board

01:20:19.820 | where now it's permanently in there

01:20:21.240 | and permanently soldered

01:20:22.200 | to all the different wires you wanna use.

01:20:23.960 | You can get almost as stable as a connection

01:20:25.860 | just screwing them into the screw mount.

01:20:27.360 | You can just tape or glue this mount

01:20:28.920 | onto whatever your object is you're building,

01:20:32.360 | but you can take that processor right out of here

01:20:34.320 | and use it for something else.

01:20:35.760 | And if you need to switch around the wiring,

01:20:37.080 | you can just unscrew it and switch it around.

01:20:38.400 | So this has been useful for my projects.

01:20:40.520 | I don't even know what it's called.

01:20:41.780 | I just found this probably on Amazon,

01:20:44.120 | but it's easy to-

01:20:44.960 | - Were you soldering this stuff before?

01:20:47.200 | - Or I would just have it in like a breadboard or something

01:20:48.920 | and it would all come out.

01:20:50.280 | This was the first time I needed one of my projects

01:20:52.040 | to be deployed in the wild, right?

01:20:53.440 | I'd like bring this home and set it up

01:20:55.160 | and be able to move it around and reprogram it in this.

01:20:57.880 | And it worked.

01:20:58.740 | My light controller stayed functional

01:21:01.460 | for the entire Halloween season.

01:21:04.080 | All right, speaking of lights,

01:21:05.200 | this is my final completely unnecessary

01:21:07.080 | and embarrassingly geeky thing from 2003.

01:21:09.440 | I don't actually have the thing

01:21:13.320 | 'cause it's in use right now,

01:21:15.080 | but this is my BNLink six outlet,

01:21:18.120 | seven day digital timer stake with six foot cord.

01:21:21.120 | So I really like lighting displays for,

01:21:26.520 | we have like a winter wonderland display right now

01:21:28.280 | for the holiday season.

01:21:29.480 | We had a Halloween display.

01:21:30.980 | Until this year, I would run my displays

01:21:36.140 | and they're complicated.

01:21:36.980 | I did the counts and by the way,

01:21:38.640 | all my plans for the displays are on my remarkable.

01:21:41.180 | There's a notebook for it.

01:21:42.520 | I did the count and I think I have like 25,

01:21:46.120 | in the current display, like 25 different wiring elements.

01:21:48.520 | So wires, splitters, adapters, 25 different elements.

01:21:53.520 | We live on a corner, so we have a lot of frontage

01:21:57.360 | and I'd like to have a light coverage for everything.

01:22:01.120 | And I like the lights to come on automatically,

01:22:02.680 | come off automatically.

01:22:03.600 | So before I had two separate circuits

01:22:05.880 | and each of the circuits was led through a light sensor

01:22:10.300 | that could see when it got dark

01:22:11.700 | and then would have a timer for how long to stay on

01:22:14.100 | after it got dark.

01:22:15.580 | But this was crude because it was only intervals

01:22:18.780 | of two hours and the sensors would come on

01:22:21.680 | at different times depending on exactly

01:22:23.320 | where they were in the yard

01:22:24.460 | because when they would detect it's dark is different.

01:22:26.300 | Like if you're in shade,

01:22:27.180 | it might be a little bit earlier than if you're not.

01:22:29.900 | And so I finally got a more higher end controller

01:22:33.820 | for all of my circuits for my light displays

01:22:36.960 | where you have a fully functional digital interface,

01:22:41.800 | self-contained, right?

01:22:43.040 | So none of this like connecting to a phone,

01:22:44.480 | Bluetooth nonsense.

01:22:46.160 | Self-contained digital timer that controls all these relays.

01:22:49.920 | So now I can exactly program

01:22:53.360 | when I want the circuits to go on,

01:22:55.640 | when I want them to turn off,

01:22:57.240 | this time on, this time off, back on at this time,

01:22:59.500 | back off on that time, different days of the week,

01:23:01.160 | I can do it differently.

01:23:02.560 | This really made a difference.

01:23:03.400 | I now finally have full control

01:23:04.960 | over exactly when my lights go on

01:23:06.520 | and exactly where my lights go off.

01:23:08.280 | Nice waterproof box staked up off the ground.

01:23:11.960 | So completely unnecessary, Jesse,

01:23:14.140 | and embarrassingly geeky,

01:23:16.160 | but also one of my favorite things from the last year.

01:23:18.400 | - Does anybody have better lights

01:23:19.580 | than you in the neighborhood?

01:23:20.980 | - Yes, there's some good lights.

01:23:24.440 | There's some good lights in the neighborhood.

01:23:27.000 | I think Halloween, see the thing about Halloween

01:23:29.040 | without giving too much away is that we have more,

01:23:31.320 | we have a narrative to our lights

01:23:33.320 | with actual text that you read.

01:23:35.320 | So no one else is doing that.

01:23:37.360 | Because we have so much frontage,

01:23:38.680 | we bring you on a Halloween journey.

01:23:40.600 | There's a sort of a story that unfolds

01:23:42.520 | with different vignettes.

01:23:44.520 | For the holiday lights, I have more work to do.

01:23:48.000 | Yeah, so people have some good holidays.

01:23:49.200 | - So you're still working on it.

01:23:50.600 | - I think next year I have some key upgrades.

01:23:53.920 | I definitely have some key upgrades in mind for next year

01:23:55.840 | that I'll have to write down in my remarkable.

01:23:58.400 | Maybe I should have had my programmable,

01:24:00.320 | or here's my sixth thing I'll add to here.

01:24:02.840 | The programmable LEDs I started buying, they're so cool.

01:24:05.920 | You can control every single bulb

01:24:07.680 | on these long Christmas light stands

01:24:09.240 | from a microcontroller and make them do whatever you want.

01:24:12.040 | So I had like really cool alien lights

01:24:13.600 | that I was using for our Halloween narrative,

01:24:15.760 | where they were sprinkling.

01:24:17.440 | You see, it was purple and different green lights

01:24:20.800 | would kind of sprinkle in

01:24:22.280 | and there'd be more and more green.

01:24:23.880 | Then there'd be a chase that goes and chases

01:24:26.240 | all the way around and resets it all back

01:24:27.720 | to set it all back.

01:24:29.320 | You can program whatever you want.

01:24:31.640 | It's really cool stuff.

01:24:32.880 | We have a, look, I don't wanna go on a soapbox here,

01:24:36.120 | but I have really strong thoughts,

01:24:37.880 | especially for Christmas lights.

01:24:41.080 | Like what I think is good and what I don't think is good.

01:24:44.800 | My sons know this because we watch this ABC show sometimes

01:24:47.880 | where they have a competition for Christmas lights.

01:24:49.960 | I do not like, I hope I'm not alienating people here.

01:24:53.680 | I do not like this new setup

01:24:57.000 | where you permanently install

01:24:58.960 | all of these programmable LEDs all over your house

01:25:01.880 | and on all like the windows and doors or what have you.

01:25:04.320 | And then you use this computer software

01:25:05.960 | to synchronize them to music.

01:25:07.840 | And you have the moving head DMX lights on your roof

01:25:10.720 | and it's like a show.

01:25:12.600 | And it always plays that,

01:25:14.760 | whatever that Siberian, Trans-Siberian railroad,

01:25:17.800 | like do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

01:25:19.320 | And all the lights are doing things

01:25:21.120 | and the headlights are moving.

01:25:22.120 | I don't like that.

01:25:23.720 | I think light should create a transportative experience

01:25:28.720 | as you're like walking nearby the house.

01:25:31.160 | It sort of brings you into a different type

01:25:33.600 | of frame of mind aesthetically.

01:25:35.720 | I don't like the shows.

01:25:37.240 | I think the shows are showy.

01:25:38.720 | I don't wanna see dancing gingerbread men

01:25:42.240 | projection mapped on your house

01:25:43.880 | while music plays or something.

01:25:45.720 | I want, you know, it brings you into like,

01:25:47.600 | oh, I'm now in Santa Claus's village

01:25:50.240 | or something like that.

01:25:51.520 | I have a lot of thoughts about this.

01:25:53.680 | You'll hear about them all in my new podcast in 2024.

01:25:56.480 | Light Talk with Cal Newport.

01:26:00.240 | And we just go deep on decorative lighting.

01:26:04.040 | And it's mainly me just being very cranky

01:26:07.080 | and giving long, somewhat inappropriately profane dialogues

01:26:12.080 | about what I don't like in light displays.

01:26:15.160 | All right, Jesse, that's enough nonsense for now.

01:26:17.640 | People have to get back to their in-laws house

01:26:19.440 | and hear some more annoying conversations

01:26:22.000 | with their relatives.

01:26:23.280 | So thank you everyone for listening.

01:26:25.840 | We'll be back next week with a New Year's

01:26:28.520 | or first episode of 2024.

01:26:29.920 | I'm excited about that.

01:26:30.920 | So definitely be ready to listen to that.

01:26:32.640 | We'll get back to basics.

01:26:34.480 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

01:26:36.600 | Hey, so if you enjoyed my interview with Arthur Brooks

01:26:40.520 | in today's episode, you might also like episode 272

01:26:44.840 | where I did an interview with the writer, David Epstein.

01:26:48.440 | It was a great conversation.

01:26:49.600 | I think you'll enjoy it.

01:26:50.720 | Check it out.

01:26:51.560 | My goal for today's deep dive is to go through

01:26:53.840 | four essential tools that you need to build

01:26:58.800 | your productivity toolkit.

How To Get Out Of A Rut & Design Your Dream Life In 2024 | Cal Newport & Arthur Brooks

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