Full Length Episode | #174 | February 17, 2022

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC]

00:00:04.740 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, episode 174.

00:00:11.440 | [MUSIC]

00:00:15.580 | I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined by my producer, Jesse.

00:00:22.080 | Jesse, something I am supposed to do and I always forget to do,

00:00:27.080 | so I'm going to do it today, is tell people,

00:00:31.540 | and I'm not saying the right things here,

00:00:33.400 | but tell people if you like the podcast,

00:00:37.000 | consider leaving a review so that people who are interested in the show can see that people like it.

00:00:43.360 | If you listen but don't subscribe, subscribe.

00:00:47.080 | Are these the right things to ask people to do?

00:00:49.440 | Yeah, people should definitely subscribe to your podcast.

00:00:51.880 | All right, there we go. I used to tell my listeners,

00:00:56.880 | I would only do this once a month,

00:00:58.640 | and then I just forgot to do it altogether.

00:01:00.240 | So here we go.

00:01:01.720 | This is how you know I'm not a digital media native.

00:01:05.040 | So yeah, do that. I think it's helpful.

00:01:06.760 | Might as well tell people about your YouTube channel too.

00:01:09.160 | Yeah, okay. As long as we're doing this.

00:01:11.440 | The YouTube channel has the videos of every question asked,

00:01:15.600 | it has videos of the full episodes,

00:01:17.280 | it has videos of every segment we do,

00:01:19.360 | so you can save, refer to, and share all of that.

00:01:22.800 | So go check that out.

00:01:24.320 | YouTube is something you can subscribe to too, right?

00:01:26.720 | Yeah. Okay. But what does that do?

00:01:29.200 | Does that matter?

00:01:30.200 | With the podcast, subscribing makes sense to me

00:01:32.560 | because then it means they'll see all the new episodes.

00:01:34.720 | I don't know what it means to subscribe on YouTube.

00:01:36.520 | What happens? When you subscribe on YouTube

00:01:38.480 | and you get notifications, which you'd be all about,

00:01:40.760 | getting notifications on your phone.

00:01:42.480 | That's exactly what I want people to do.

00:01:44.360 | Is there a feed?

00:01:46.000 | If you subscribe to some channels

00:01:47.600 | and you go to YouTube.com, is it like,

00:01:49.240 | "Oh, here's new videos from people you subscribe to"?

00:01:52.280 | I don't get any notifications on any of my, including YouTube,

00:01:56.360 | so, but you just, if you're at the channel,

00:01:58.400 | you can go in, you can see stuff,

00:01:59.440 | but people do get notifications.

00:02:00.840 | They get notified when a new video comes up.

00:02:02.520 | Now, does it help trick YouTube

00:02:05.000 | into telling more people about your videos

00:02:08.040 | if more people are subscribed?

00:02:09.360 | Is there some sort of stuff like that going on?

00:02:10.320 | Yeah, probably. Yeah.

00:02:11.160 | Okay.

00:02:12.000 | 'Cause comments, subscribers, views, likes, all that stuff.

00:02:17.000 | Yeah. All right.

00:02:18.560 | Well, do those things, don't do those things, I don't know.

00:02:21.840 | I'm terrible at this.

00:02:23.200 | Guys, here's what I do.

00:02:24.040 | I get in front of the mic and I answer your questions

00:02:26.240 | and so, subscribe to things,

00:02:29.960 | leave a review for the podcast if people know you like it,

00:02:32.240 | and I won't bother you about this again for a while.

00:02:35.440 | All right, so new segment.

00:02:36.280 | We wanna try something new.

00:02:37.760 | So back in the early days of this podcast,

00:02:40.040 | back when it was just me all by myself,

00:02:41.680 | I used to do a segment where I would give updates

00:02:44.560 | about what was going on in the life of Cal Newport.

00:02:48.800 | So I'm a very private person,

00:02:50.600 | but I would, on things I was comfortable talking about,

00:02:54.320 | give a little bit of insight

00:02:55.320 | into what was going on into my life.

00:02:57.000 | A little bit weird doing these segments

00:02:59.080 | because it's myself basically just talking about myself.

00:03:02.320 | But now it occurred to me, now that we have Jesse here,

00:03:06.200 | we could rejuvenate this segment,

00:03:09.560 | which I call Behind the Curtain,

00:03:11.240 | since, well, we are in a room surrounded by curtains.

00:03:13.600 | So it's like what happens outside of this room,

00:03:16.040 | a segment called Behind a Curtain,

00:03:17.640 | where Jesse will be the proxy for you, my audience,

00:03:21.720 | and Jesse will ask me some questions

00:03:23.880 | about what's going on in my life.

00:03:26.680 | I have not seen these questions ahead of time,

00:03:29.400 | so these are new to me.

00:03:31.120 | And Jesse, let me make it clear,

00:03:32.840 | if I don't like them, you're fired.

00:03:34.360 | So let's just put that on the table.

00:03:36.160 | - Take that $250,000 a month and go buy a new truck.

00:03:40.360 | - I am gonna spend that on YouTube subscriptions.

00:03:44.320 | Is that how that works?

00:03:45.440 | Can I spend money on YouTube subscriptions?

00:03:47.800 | - One thing you can do on YouTube

00:03:49.920 | is you can subscribe to YouTube Premium,

00:03:51.880 | and you don't get the ads and you get the music.

00:03:53.360 | It's actually only like $9 a month.

00:03:54.800 | I do it, it's unbelievable.

00:03:56.000 | - I should probably do that too.

00:03:58.320 | - You save so much time when you don't have to watch ads

00:04:00.480 | and it just goes right to the video.

00:04:02.000 | - So do YouTube Premium.

00:04:03.040 | All right, do YouTube Premium, subscribe,

00:04:05.040 | leave reviews, I don't know, smoke signals,

00:04:09.720 | send me encouraging telegrams so I know what's going on.

00:04:13.200 | Write to your congressman and say,

00:04:15.320 | I like what Cal Newport is doing.

00:04:17.640 | Send cards to your network executives, I don't know.

00:04:20.920 | I don't know, guys, I'm terrible at that.

00:04:22.240 | All right, Jesse, behind the curtain,

00:04:24.440 | you have some questions for me

00:04:25.680 | about what's going on in my life.

00:04:27.760 | All right, I think I'm ready for it.

00:04:29.120 | - All right, so I got a bunch of questions here.

00:04:32.040 | So I'm just gonna fire a couple off and we'll see how it goes.

00:04:36.000 | Can you give any updates on your Zittelkasten experiment?

00:04:40.560 | - All right, you're fired.

00:04:43.560 | - Next, let's move on.

00:04:44.720 | The reason why I ask is 'cause I remember

00:04:49.000 | you had the interview with the fellow

00:04:53.080 | back over the summertime.

00:04:54.080 | And I was actually, I was in a cool place.

00:04:56.880 | I was on a jog in Scotland on a golf trip.

00:05:00.640 | And I was doing that jog in the morning and I heard this.

00:05:03.480 | And I was like, this sounds cool.

00:05:05.600 | And then I was in a cool place too, near the beach,

00:05:08.360 | in this nature area.

00:05:10.640 | But anyway, so I remember that.

00:05:12.040 | And then you've talked about it a few times,

00:05:13.400 | so I wanted to know what's going on with that.

00:05:16.080 | - It's a timely question

00:05:16.920 | 'cause I was talking to Srini recently.

00:05:18.840 | So one of the ideas, I was talking to Srini,

00:05:21.120 | I was like, man, I should just have you call into the show.

00:05:25.080 | And we could do like a Zittelkasten back and forth,

00:05:27.720 | like just like a 10 minute, 15 minute thing.

00:05:29.720 | So I think we could technically do that, right?

00:05:32.040 | Like we could have him call in on Zoom or something,

00:05:34.360 | 'cause he lives in Colorado,

00:05:36.200 | so he's not be able to get here easily.

00:05:37.640 | But we could have him call in on Zoom

00:05:38.920 | and like we could just do a Zittelkasten

00:05:41.800 | 'cause he has a lot of thoughts.

00:05:43.600 | He has a lot of thoughts on what I've been saying.

00:05:45.280 | And he thinks like I'm missing out on some of the value.

00:05:47.640 | So I think that'd be cool.

00:05:48.680 | We could have a back and forth.

00:05:49.760 | In my own life, I haven't made any big steps forward.

00:05:53.080 | I mean, I'm still in the place where I want Roam,

00:05:57.520 | the tool Roam to be the primary place

00:06:00.080 | in which I'm capturing most notes

00:06:02.480 | that are with the exception of CS research,

00:06:05.000 | which requires math notation, it's a whole separate thing.

00:06:07.360 | Or writing ideas and book ideas

00:06:09.360 | and article ideas and all that.

00:06:10.400 | I want that all to be in Roam,

00:06:12.040 | roughly indexed in a Zittelkasten style

00:06:14.320 | where there's a central index,

00:06:16.040 | but then also bi-directional links.

00:06:18.360 | And I haven't really upgraded that yet

00:06:21.560 | because I've been slammed,

00:06:23.120 | which is its own issue I'm having in my life right now.

00:06:25.960 | It's self-enforced, self-imposed,

00:06:27.840 | but pretty brutal these past months with my workload.

00:06:31.600 | And to me, that's something you do when you have some time.

00:06:33.680 | So I'm thinking as the spring gives way towards summer

00:06:38.120 | and my schedule opens up,

00:06:39.640 | I want Zittelkasten style system

00:06:43.440 | basically capturing the place where I capture

00:06:46.000 | most of my ideas, 'cause I have a lot of ideas.

00:06:48.480 | And so we'll see.

00:06:49.320 | And so we'll have Srinian, he can help me out.

00:06:51.000 | And then you also just read that book

00:06:53.800 | back in January, right?

00:06:55.280 | Yeah, I mean, that book, "How to Take Smart Notes"

00:06:57.200 | is what really introduced me to Zittelkasten.

00:06:59.280 | And it was a cool book and I liked it.

00:07:02.720 | And I recommend it actually.

00:07:03.760 | And a listener sent it to me just out of the blue.

00:07:06.880 | So I'll report back, but maybe what I'll do,

00:07:08.240 | here's what I'll do is when I have time,

00:07:09.760 | I'll have Srinian and have him be my guru.

00:07:12.360 | Like let's just 15 minutes, walk me through.

00:07:14.760 | Let me ask you my highly technical questions

00:07:17.520 | about how to get this right.

00:07:18.840 | And then I'll go try it out.

00:07:20.120 | So I remain intrigued by Zittelkasten.

00:07:22.160 | I have heard from a lot of people, however,

00:07:23.680 | that agree with my central complaint

00:07:25.760 | that Zittelkasten can't do thinking for you.

00:07:28.360 | It can't write articles for you.

00:07:29.840 | It's not, in almost any position,

00:07:33.240 | this idea that you're just going to wander

00:07:36.200 | through your Zittelkasten system

00:07:37.480 | and come out on the other side with an article

00:07:39.880 | or a book or an academic paper is just not how that works.

00:07:43.360 | But it's a really cool way to probably organize a lot

00:07:45.760 | of thoughts that aren't easily put

00:07:47.920 | into some sort of hierarchical categories.

00:07:50.000 | - Okay, moving on, kind of related,

00:07:54.000 | talking about lifestyle centric planning,

00:07:56.840 | which you discuss quite a bit.

00:07:59.800 | For your own life, do you think you're close?

00:08:02.040 | - I think changes are looming.

00:08:06.840 | I think changes are looming that would get me closer.

00:08:10.760 | So I've done extreme lifestyle centric career planning.

00:08:14.480 | I mean, it's why I'm a professor

00:08:17.000 | and not in tech startups or venture capital

00:08:19.720 | or something like this.

00:08:20.680 | It's why I write books.

00:08:22.680 | Very autonomous and interesting income stream

00:08:28.240 | and very interesting to me.

00:08:30.200 | It's why we live in Tacoma Park.

00:08:31.560 | That was very much a lifestyle centric career planning,

00:08:35.600 | very explicit planning process of where do we want to live

00:08:39.360 | and why we want to live there.

00:08:41.120 | Right now, I would say the main obstacle

00:08:46.280 | between where I am right now and the very clear lifestyle,

00:08:49.880 | and I gotta say, I have this written out very clearly

00:08:51.920 | in my strategic plans documents.

00:08:53.120 | I mean, I know the bullet points of what goes

00:08:56.160 | into the lifestyle that I'm working backwards

00:08:59.800 | to try to get in place.

00:09:01.920 | Right now, I still have too much on my plate.

00:09:04.160 | And so the old joke on the podcast is I have 17 jobs,

00:09:07.960 | but I need seven instead of 17.

00:09:10.840 | So that's, I think, the next evolution to come

00:09:15.840 | is it's to be a full-time this and a full-time that

00:09:19.960 | and a full-time that, like three or four multiple things.

00:09:23.000 | It's just the volume of work is too much.

00:09:25.800 | My ideal lifestyle is slower and way more autonomous.

00:09:30.480 | Less things, high stakes, like, hey, deliver a book.

00:09:34.720 | Deliver a really good New Yorker piece.

00:09:37.920 | So high stakes, but you have nothing

00:09:40.120 | on your calendar tomorrow.

00:09:42.080 | It's up to you.

00:09:42.920 | You gotta figure this out.

00:09:43.760 | You need to make this work done.

00:09:44.640 | So I'm working on that.

00:09:46.240 | There's some early stage visions we're working on

00:09:49.840 | right now too about community investment,

00:09:53.560 | getting a little bit more involved in Tacoma Park.

00:09:56.960 | Maybe we need having some more,

00:09:59.520 | I don't wanna get too much into it,

00:10:01.840 | but some sort of commercial presence here.

00:10:03.680 | Do we wanna be, so there's a lot of thoughts we have

00:10:05.360 | about being more integrated into what's going on

00:10:08.680 | in our town, which I think is interesting too.

00:10:11.560 | So it's an ongoing process.

00:10:14.120 | Right now I have too much.

00:10:14.960 | In the moment, I have way too much, but strategic.

00:10:16.920 | So I took on a lot of extra work

00:10:20.040 | 'cause it's gonna help.

00:10:21.520 | I think it's important.

00:10:22.480 | The thing I'm doing is short-lived

00:10:24.040 | and I think it's important.

00:10:25.080 | And I think it's also gonna maybe be important

00:10:26.600 | for the lifestyle I want down the line.

00:10:28.360 | But right now I'm just being crushed by it.

00:10:29.960 | So I'm definitely in a mode right now

00:10:33.040 | where I'm thinking through what I wanna, wanna,

00:10:36.480 | wanna get there.

00:10:37.320 | 'Cause right now I'm just being crushed with overload.

00:10:40.040 | Yeah, you've seen it, you've seen it.

00:10:42.240 | You know, I'm kind of in and out right now.

00:10:43.920 | Like it is, there's too much going on.

00:10:47.360 | Having too much is just not good.

00:10:49.680 | Now I'm doing it on purpose

00:10:52.760 | and for a temporary amount of time.

00:10:54.520 | It's an initiative at Georgetown I think is very important,

00:10:57.320 | but it brings with it a lot of work.

00:11:00.080 | I probably should have aggressively slowed down

00:11:02.960 | other things to compensate, but I didn't.

00:11:04.840 | I added it on top of the stuff that was working just fine

00:11:07.040 | and now it doesn't add up and work just fine.

00:11:08.720 | And it's too much stuff and it's organized

00:11:10.440 | because I'm very organized.

00:11:11.720 | So it's not like I'm disorganized

00:11:13.120 | and I have the, technically I have the time for it.

00:11:15.960 | The issue is, and this is a core idea of slow productivity,

00:11:19.240 | when there's too much on your plate,

00:11:20.400 | no matter, even if you do have the time to get it done

00:11:22.600 | and you're super organized,

00:11:23.440 | it's still short circuits everything.

00:11:24.560 | It stresses you out and it's not healthy.

00:11:26.960 | So it's a good kind of kick in the butt right now

00:11:29.720 | to be like, okay, once I finish this,

00:11:31.480 | I really got to get pretty aggressive again

00:11:33.520 | at pursuing the lifestyle I have in mind.

00:11:37.440 | - Makes sense.

00:11:40.000 | Kind of going with a broader question here.

00:11:43.120 | You've discussed the book, "4,000 Weeks"

00:11:46.080 | that you read recently, you told Tim Ferriss about.

00:11:48.640 | I haven't read it yet, but I will.

00:11:50.720 | And generally, do you find that time goes by very fast?

00:11:55.400 | - Yes.

00:11:58.760 | Yeah, I mean, it depends on what's going on.

00:12:03.680 | These type of seasons like winter,

00:12:06.120 | where it's, there's a lot going on,

00:12:09.120 | it's this, then this, then this, then this,

00:12:10.760 | like this day's basketball and this day I teach.

00:12:13.160 | And so you have this sort of very regular schedule

00:12:15.440 | that each day is different than the one before,

00:12:18.320 | but it's regular each time.

00:12:19.760 | I always feel like time moves very fast during those seasons

00:12:22.080 | and then when you're in like the summer

00:12:24.680 | and there's not a schedule like that

00:12:27.320 | and it's much more autonomous,

00:12:29.480 | I feel like time moves much slower.

00:12:30.720 | So summer feels like a long time to me.

00:12:32.880 | Usually winter feels very fast.

00:12:37.200 | Like, are we in February already?

00:12:38.600 | We're in mid-February already.

00:12:39.440 | I mean, I don't mind it because like winter's

00:12:40.880 | not the best time anyways, but yeah, winter's fast.

00:12:45.880 | - And then, so does that lead to like broader thoughts

00:12:49.960 | about getting older and stuff like that

00:12:52.080 | and not being able to do certain things

00:12:53.440 | or not really for you?

00:12:54.280 | - Like that's the "4,000 Weeks" things.

00:12:57.080 | I'll tell you, I definitely started thinking about that

00:12:59.520 | with 40 looming, right?

00:13:04.440 | 'Cause there's a lot of things,

00:13:08.680 | especially if you're looking at bigger types of achievements

00:13:12.000 | there's a lot of things where you say,

00:13:13.960 | if that's not happened by 40, that's not on your list.

00:13:18.720 | This is like a key Oliver Berkman thing.

00:13:21.160 | Like I think about this with writing.

00:13:22.320 | Like I've been a successful writer.

00:13:24.360 | There's writers that are a lot more successful.

00:13:27.160 | You would think, yeah, you're where you're gonna be.

00:13:30.440 | Like you've taken your swings.

00:13:31.600 | You've been doing this since you were 20 years old.

00:13:35.120 | You've written seven books.

00:13:36.600 | Like you've taken your swings and it's gone well.

00:13:39.400 | But if you were gonna be a absolute top

00:13:43.080 | of the market writer, you'd be an absolute top

00:13:44.520 | of the market writer.

00:13:45.800 | Like same thing with computer science.

00:13:46.920 | Like you've done good computer science,

00:13:48.560 | but if you're gonna be like a breakout brain

00:13:50.200 | in that world, you would have been a breakout brain

00:13:51.480 | in that world.

00:13:52.320 | You've been doing this for a long time, you know?

00:13:53.800 | And I never really, in the 30s,

00:13:55.440 | you still feel like you're working on things.

00:13:57.440 | 40 feels like, yeah, this is where,

00:14:02.000 | these are my levels, so how do we build a life around it?

00:14:04.320 | And that might be overly pessimistic,

00:14:06.480 | but that's kind of an Oliver Berkman point, which I like.

00:14:09.200 | As big as that.

00:14:11.160 | There is one key exception to that, though.

00:14:13.400 | So I've gone down a Taylor Sheridan rabbit hole.

00:14:16.040 | You know this guy?

00:14:17.560 | - No.

00:14:18.400 | - Okay, so he was an actor.

00:14:21.200 | And he, so he was an actor, probably best known

00:14:25.640 | for being on Sons of Anarchy on FX.

00:14:28.840 | - The main character?

00:14:30.240 | - I don't know the show.

00:14:31.520 | - I've seen the show.

00:14:32.440 | I've seen the whole show.

00:14:33.760 | - Yeah, he's like a lantern jod.

00:14:36.320 | - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:14:37.400 | - You know what I'm saying?

00:14:38.240 | - Yeah, he's, yeah, I know.

00:14:39.160 | - Okay, so he's like a big character in that.

00:14:40.720 | Anyways, but he grew up on a ranch, right?

00:14:42.960 | Like he came out of, and he owns a ranch,

00:14:46.440 | come up out of a ranch.

00:14:47.920 | In his, so after the age of 40,

00:14:50.760 | he said, "I'm gonna screenwrite."

00:14:52.640 | And he was gonna do neo-westerns,

00:14:54.840 | which is like the new type of western.

00:14:57.880 | I think the Coen brothers kind of helped usher this in

00:15:01.400 | with No Country for Old Men.

00:15:02.600 | So neo-westerns, they take place in our modern world.

00:15:06.880 | And some of the issues are not,

00:15:09.120 | there's like a bandit coming to town.

00:15:11.960 | It's like the economic hardships of whatever.

00:15:15.360 | And so he's like, "Great, I'm just gonna like

00:15:16.360 | "start writing these type of things."

00:15:17.520 | And he wrote Sicario, Hell and High Water,

00:15:22.520 | and then Wind River, just like rattled off

00:15:24.840 | these like great movies, started writing in his 40s.

00:15:28.200 | His second movie was Oscar nominated for best screenplay.

00:15:32.840 | Wind River, he directed,

00:15:34.640 | like just kind of came out of nowhere.

00:15:36.680 | He just had such a clear vision.

00:15:39.160 | And then he did the show Yellowstone,

00:15:41.400 | which has become a huge phenomenon.

00:15:44.280 | So then he did the show Yellowstone,

00:15:45.680 | and then there's a spinoff,

00:15:46.760 | and they're doing another spinoff.

00:15:48.040 | And he's part of, I don't know if we talked about this

00:15:50.440 | on the show, but in Yellowstone,

00:15:53.400 | there's this huge ranch in Texas,

00:15:54.840 | a real ranch called the 6666, four sixes.

00:15:57.960 | And it's huge.

00:15:59.120 | I think it's over a hundred thousand acres.

00:16:02.960 | It's like six times the size of Chicago.

00:16:05.080 | And he's part of a group that just bought it.

00:16:07.760 | And they have a spinoff of the show

00:16:10.120 | that like takes place on that ranch.

00:16:12.040 | And he's like a horse wrangler.

00:16:14.200 | So like often in this show, Yellowstone,

00:16:16.360 | he's a character in the show,

00:16:17.880 | and he's always just doing crazy things on horses.

00:16:20.200 | And all the horses in the show are his horses.

00:16:22.800 | Anyways, he started all that after 40

00:16:25.160 | and just sort of redefined the genre.

00:16:27.000 | So you never know.

00:16:28.640 | What I'm saying is I think we need a ranch.

00:16:30.800 | (laughing)

00:16:33.040 | We should broadcast from a ranch.

00:16:35.640 | Yeah, it would be episode one,

00:16:38.800 | but guys, I'm reporting from my ranch.

00:16:40.320 | Episode two, you'd be like, it would be you.

00:16:42.520 | He'd be like, I have sad news.

00:16:44.400 | - Cal's 40 miles in the other direction on a horse

00:16:47.120 | in his cabin writing some poetry.

00:16:49.320 | - No, I was gonna say more, Cal has been killed.

00:16:51.880 | He has been trampled by,

00:16:54.280 | trampled by his snake bitten body was trampled by horses

00:16:58.520 | and then dragged by cattle through barbed wire

00:17:00.560 | because he has no idea what he's doing.

00:17:01.800 | And also the ranch is on fire.

00:17:03.240 | That's what would happen.

00:17:05.600 | Yes, I worry about that stuff.

00:17:08.080 | I don't know if I worry about it, I think about it.

00:17:09.880 | And I never thought about that before

00:17:11.320 | until I realized I was gonna turn 40 this year.

00:17:14.040 | - Interesting.

00:17:14.880 | - Yeah, and then I was like, oh my God, I guess this is like

00:17:18.240 | I'm no longer like the hungry upstart thinking like,

00:17:20.400 | what's the thing I'm gonna do?

00:17:22.040 | Where am I gonna break out?

00:17:23.120 | But also I'm pretty happy with where I am.

00:17:25.280 | So it's not bad, but it's definitely an adjustment.

00:17:29.960 | - You want another question?

00:17:32.840 | - Yeah, let's do one more.

00:17:34.240 | - All right, final question.

00:17:35.680 | You talk a lot about training like an athlete.

00:17:38.560 | Are there any athletes that you closely follow

00:17:41.160 | that you like that resonate with you?

00:17:43.960 | Based on like their training resume

00:17:46.840 | and like what they do, what they're all about?

00:17:49.120 | - Well, our man Scherzer.

00:17:50.360 | You know a little bit of something

00:17:53.320 | about his training regime, right?

00:17:54.360 | But he's a beast, right?

00:17:56.640 | - Yeah, absolutely, obsessed.

00:17:58.840 | - Yeah, he was obsessed

00:18:01.920 | and was able to keep his career going.

00:18:04.800 | I mean, the deal he just signed with the Mets,

00:18:07.360 | he's old, man.

00:18:08.360 | - I know.

00:18:09.200 | - He's younger than us, but he's old.

00:18:10.720 | That's a big deal, that's a lot of money.

00:18:13.280 | Yeah, that's all training and competitive.

00:18:15.680 | That's competitive fire right there.

00:18:17.280 | Just that like lasers, yeah.

00:18:20.560 | So I like that, I follow him.

00:18:23.720 | I like the thing, I'm like the Max Scherzer of,

00:18:28.600 | I have to go incredibly narrow here.

00:18:30.200 | I'm like the Max Scherzer of podcasts

00:18:32.680 | that are in a Q&A format

00:18:34.720 | and that deal mainly with questions

00:18:36.720 | about like work and productivity

00:18:38.720 | and are taped in Maryland.

00:18:41.800 | I'm like the Max Scherzer of that.

00:18:43.520 | All right. - Take it.

00:18:47.520 | - All right, so there we go.

00:18:48.360 | So this is a listener calls thing.

00:18:49.640 | I think, thanks for the questions, Jesse.

00:18:50.960 | So there you go, a little insight

00:18:52.000 | into what's going on in my life.

00:18:53.600 | I think it was useful.

00:18:55.960 | If you have questions you want Jesse to ask me,

00:18:57.480 | you can send them to jesse@calnewport.com.

00:18:59.760 | This is a listener calls episode.

00:19:00.880 | We have some listener calls,

00:19:02.120 | but we have to first pay the bills.

00:19:05.320 | Those type of ranches that we are going to buy imminently

00:19:08.080 | don't pay for themselves.

00:19:09.480 | So let's talk about a couple of sponsors.

00:19:12.320 | I want to talk first about MyBodyTutor.

00:19:16.640 | All right, now Jesse,

00:19:18.360 | you've heard me talk about this before,

00:19:20.840 | and maybe this would be a good model for us

00:19:23.520 | for actually like productivity tutoring or something,

00:19:25.360 | because like what they're doing here is pretty smart.

00:19:27.040 | It's fitness and health online coaching.

00:19:32.000 | You get a coach, they come up with a plan for you,

00:19:35.240 | what you're eating, how you're exercising,

00:19:37.160 | and you talk to them every day.

00:19:38.960 | You check in, here's how it's going.

00:19:40.760 | And they get back to you every single day,

00:19:43.000 | like, "Hey, good work," or, "Focus on this,"

00:19:44.680 | or, "Worry about this."

00:19:45.520 | "Oh, you had a question about this.

00:19:46.480 | Let me give you some answers to it."

00:19:47.480 | So you have the consistency of a coach with the convenience

00:19:52.400 | and the economic efficiency of that coach

00:19:54.600 | being entirely online.

00:19:55.840 | I think this is a really good idea.

00:19:57.960 | And it gives you something to do.

00:20:00.080 | If you're like, "I want to get in better shape.

00:20:01.200 | I want to get my health together.

00:20:02.480 | I don't want to just randomly go at it."

00:20:03.880 | Sign up for MyBodyTutor, get one of these tutors.

00:20:06.880 | I mean, we could do this, Jesse.

00:20:08.920 | We should do this with MyWorkTutor

00:20:12.600 | or something like that.

00:20:14.160 | And you would check in online with me, right?

00:20:17.280 | Every day, you fill out a survey

00:20:18.560 | about all the work you would do.

00:20:20.360 | And I would leave a voice message

00:20:22.400 | in which I would just say, "Work deeper."

00:20:25.080 | - And you need another job.

00:20:27.960 | - The issue is I don't have enough to do.

00:20:30.320 | So I'm going to tell Adam Gilbert,

00:20:31.440 | who I've known for a long time,

00:20:32.440 | who runs MyBodyTutor,

00:20:34.160 | I'm going to tell Adam Gilbert,

00:20:35.240 | you need to add a deep work tutoring service

00:20:38.760 | that's just me saying, "Work deeper,"

00:20:40.680 | and add that to your offerings.

00:20:43.040 | So here's the deal with MyBodyTutor.

00:20:44.480 | If you go to mybodytutor.com,

00:20:47.840 | that's T-U-T-O-R,

00:20:50.760 | and you tell them that you came from Deep Questions,

00:20:53.080 | and you could just,

00:20:53.920 | Adam looks at every single person who comes in.

00:20:56.440 | I mean, he gives you his personal phone number,

00:20:59.680 | cell phone number when you sign up.

00:21:01.040 | So this is not some anonymous Peloton type nonsense.

00:21:05.560 | This is personal.

00:21:06.720 | If you tell him, "Hey, I came from Deep Questions,"

00:21:08.680 | he will give you $50 off your first month.

00:21:11.760 | So that's mybodytutor.com,

00:21:14.120 | mention Deep Questions,

00:21:15.080 | and get $50 off.

00:21:17.320 | All right, so Jesse,

00:21:19.240 | as long as we are getting our listeners

00:21:21.440 | in the fantastic shape

00:21:22.720 | so that we can recruit them to come work on our ranch

00:21:25.120 | and save me from being trampled,

00:21:27.080 | let's talk about Athletic Greens.

00:21:29.600 | Athletic Greens is a,

00:21:31.600 | it's a powder that includes 75 high-quality vitamins,

00:21:35.480 | minerals, whole food source, superfoods, probiotics,

00:21:38.760 | and the thing I'm always bothering Jesse about, adaptogens.

00:21:43.240 | I'm always like, "Hey man, how's your adaptogens going?"

00:21:46.560 | You got all the stuff you need in a powder.

00:21:49.720 | You take it once a day,

00:21:50.600 | you put it in 12 ounces of water.

00:21:52.280 | I add two ice cubes 'cause I like it cold.

00:21:54.640 | Shake it up, drink it once a day.

00:21:56.280 | The reason why I take Athletic Greens

00:21:59.280 | is because it is all they do is this one product.

00:22:03.680 | They say we again and again relentlessly

00:22:06.960 | keep upgrading this one product

00:22:08.640 | to have the very best sourced materials in it.

00:22:11.520 | The whole point is that you don't have to worry,

00:22:14.360 | am I getting the right stuff?

00:22:16.760 | Am I getting the best stuff?

00:22:18.880 | I've talked to Athletic Greens directly.

00:22:22.400 | They walk me through how this whole works.

00:22:23.840 | I trust them.

00:22:24.680 | I literally use it every day.

00:22:25.760 | It's a powder.

00:22:27.280 | And the only thing that's not in the powder

00:22:28.520 | is the vitamin D because it's not,

00:22:30.160 | again, they obsess about what's gonna work.

00:22:32.120 | Vitamin D doesn't work well in powder form.

00:22:34.200 | So you add a couple of drops to it for the vitamin D.

00:22:36.040 | And I take it every morning

00:22:37.800 | 'cause I don't wanna have to worry.

00:22:39.400 | Am I having enough of this nutrient?

00:22:41.560 | Do I have enough of this vitamin?

00:22:43.160 | Take the Athletic Greens.

00:22:44.080 | They also have travel packs,

00:22:45.160 | which is great when you travel.

00:22:46.320 | So it's one serving.

00:22:47.400 | Wherever you are, you just throw it into some,

00:22:50.160 | you throw it into some water.

00:22:52.880 | So I am fans of Athletic Greens.

00:22:55.520 | They're not just a sponsor.

00:22:56.560 | I actually use it.

00:22:59.040 | Your adaptogens okay, Jesse?

00:23:01.880 | I was worried about you today.

00:23:02.840 | - They're deep.

00:23:03.680 | - Yeah, are they deep?

00:23:04.520 | 'Cause I was like,

00:23:05.520 | you look like you're adaptogen deprived.

00:23:07.600 | I'm not sure about this.

00:23:09.120 | I'm worried about it.

00:23:10.400 | I'm gonna bring some Athletic Greens in the studio

00:23:12.040 | and force you to take some before every episode

00:23:14.640 | so that you're on top of your game.

00:23:16.400 | So let me give you a call to action here.

00:23:19.040 | Right now it's time to reclaim your health

00:23:21.200 | and arm your immune system with convenient daily nutrition,

00:23:24.320 | especially heading into flu and cold season.

00:23:28.160 | Yes, trust me, we're there.

00:23:30.000 | I have three kids.

00:23:30.960 | I know all about this.

00:23:32.040 | It's just one scoop and a cup of water every day.

00:23:34.760 | That's it.

00:23:35.600 | No need for a million different pills and supplements

00:23:37.680 | to look out for your health.

00:23:39.880 | Jesse, I would say the reason why you need

00:23:41.160 | to take Athletic Greens, by the way,

00:23:42.440 | is that if you ever got near my family,

00:23:44.280 | I have three young kids that are just germ factories.

00:23:46.800 | You're not around kids a lot.

00:23:48.360 | I think you would quite literally just die.

00:23:50.240 | (Jesse laughs)

00:23:51.240 | Like if they came in here right now,

00:23:52.600 | you'd be like, "Oh, it's nice to meet you."

00:23:53.720 | And then you would just die.

00:23:55.400 | Just your immune system would be like,

00:23:57.400 | forget COVID, man.

00:23:58.520 | Like these kids are swarming in germs.

00:24:01.320 | This is why I gotta take Athletic Greens.

00:24:02.200 | I take it every single day because man,

00:24:04.360 | my immune system is at war every day in the winter.

00:24:08.640 | So to make it easy,

00:24:09.520 | Athletic Greens is going to give you free one year supply

00:24:13.760 | of immune supporting vitamin D

00:24:15.280 | and five free travel packs with your first purchase.

00:24:18.600 | All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com/deep.

00:24:23.800 | Again, that is athleticgreens.com/deep

00:24:28.000 | to take ownership over your health

00:24:29.520 | and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance.

00:24:33.720 | All right, Jesse, let's do some calls.

00:24:38.440 | Who do we have on the old call docket today?

00:24:41.900 | - Okay, our first call is from Mark.

00:24:44.320 | He's like you, he's a professor in DC.

00:24:46.640 | And he has a question about finding the opposing views

00:24:51.480 | when you're dealing with certain topics.

00:24:53.840 | - Hi, Kel, my name is Mark

00:24:57.680 | and I'm also a professor at an R1 university in the DC area.

00:25:01.640 | My question for you is the following.

00:25:03.240 | Often on your show, you'll discuss this idea

00:25:05.440 | of building up the Socratic dialectic, as you call it,

00:25:08.160 | or finding the best thinkers or writers or speakers

00:25:12.480 | from opposing viewpoints on a given topic.

00:25:15.440 | My question is the following.

00:25:16.880 | If you want to explore a given topic,

00:25:19.200 | but perhaps you're not as familiar with the topic

00:25:21.880 | enough to kind of know who the key thinkers

00:25:24.240 | are on that topic,

00:25:25.600 | how would you go about the specific mechanics

00:25:28.000 | of identifying who the best speakers were

00:25:31.040 | for that specific topic?

00:25:32.920 | For example, let's say I wanted to understand

00:25:35.360 | the causes of the Baltic War.

00:25:36.920 | It's not a topic I'm typically familiar with.

00:25:40.160 | How would I go about finding the two or three

00:25:43.200 | best thinkers or speakers on that,

00:25:44.880 | given that I have no knowledge of that area?

00:25:48.320 | So this is sort of the curse of knowledge situation,

00:25:50.640 | where if I know who the best thinkers are,

00:25:53.120 | I'm probably already knowledgeable enough

00:25:55.320 | about the field to understand what the key points are.

00:26:00.160 | But if I'm just entering something for the first time,

00:26:02.440 | it's actually quite difficult to do what you're describing.

00:26:06.960 | Thank you for your time.

00:26:08.880 | - Good question, Mark.

00:26:10.080 | Let me start by just underlining the bigger picture method

00:26:13.880 | that Mark was talking about here.

00:26:16.560 | So it's one of the big points I've been making

00:26:18.560 | on this show since the beginning,

00:26:20.600 | is when it comes to having an interesting,

00:26:23.680 | thriving, resilient, but also authentic

00:26:26.040 | and value-producing intellectual life,

00:26:29.400 | you have to be very worried about

00:26:31.560 | or wary of intellectual groupism.

00:26:34.640 | And this is where you say,

00:26:36.040 | I just wanna be told what I'm supposed to think

00:26:40.720 | about something, who the good guys are

00:26:42.920 | and who the bad guys are.

00:26:44.920 | Your mind knows that you are being subservient

00:26:48.880 | when you do that, and it's not happy with yourself.

00:26:51.440 | It's not a approach to intellectual life

00:26:54.360 | that is sustainable.

00:26:55.360 | It makes you feel bad about yourself.

00:26:57.120 | And it brings you into weird tribal places.

00:26:59.480 | It's also, by the way, the dominant mode

00:27:01.520 | of intellectual discourse on social media.

00:27:03.520 | So beware if you are wandering through the waters of Twitter,

00:27:08.480 | you're wandering through the waters of,

00:27:10.840 | I don't know what people use these days, Instagram.

00:27:12.840 | So my alternative, and by my, I mean this goes back

00:27:16.040 | to the very early days of systematic thinking

00:27:19.200 | about thinking, is the Socratic dialectic method.

00:27:21.800 | If you wanna understand something better,

00:27:24.000 | listen to really good thinkers on multiple sides of it.

00:27:26.280 | In that collision, you see what resonates,

00:27:28.920 | you get more insight, you get a more nuanced,

00:27:30.960 | rooted understanding of that topic,

00:27:32.560 | one that you can actually base real action on

00:27:34.600 | and feel good about it.

00:27:36.560 | If by contrast, you just do intellectual groupism,

00:27:39.880 | your mind often is not gonna really trust your stance

00:27:42.640 | because you know you're just following a crowd.

00:27:44.320 | So it's not a good foundation for action.

00:27:46.640 | You don't feel confident taking action,

00:27:49.440 | real action based off it.

00:27:51.400 | So then you end up just doing very little about a cause,

00:27:54.440 | maybe like tweeting about it or yelling at people,

00:27:57.120 | or like getting mad at your cousin or something like this,

00:27:59.720 | and nothing really happened.

00:28:01.000 | So there's this irony of intellectual groupism

00:28:03.480 | is that often people think this is the key

00:28:06.920 | to changing the world.

00:28:07.880 | If we could just get people to just be on our side

00:28:10.400 | and don't question it and attack the other side,

00:28:12.280 | then we'll change this issue.

00:28:13.400 | But actually what you do is you defang people's

00:28:15.800 | actual activist impulses and very little action is taken

00:28:18.560 | because they don't trust the intellectual foundation

00:28:21.200 | of what they believe.

00:28:22.040 | They just vaguely think you're on their team

00:28:24.080 | and don't wanna get yelled at.

00:28:25.400 | So encounter real argument, real argument on both sides.

00:28:30.160 | You will not be tricked.

00:28:31.400 | Your deep moral intuitions will not be tricked

00:28:34.440 | because you read a particularly clever National Review

00:28:38.520 | or Mother Jones article.

00:28:39.760 | It's not gonna trick you.

00:28:40.920 | It's gonna make your belief stronger and more nuanced.

00:28:43.000 | It's actually gonna make you a better advocate

00:28:44.640 | for what you believe in.

00:28:46.560 | So how do you find these things?

00:28:47.840 | Well, for really specific issues like the Baltic War,

00:28:51.360 | you know, something that's kinda niche,

00:28:54.080 | you don't have to find from scratch the best thinker.

00:28:56.480 | You just have to find someone who knows about it

00:28:58.320 | and ask them who the best thinker is.

00:28:59.960 | That's almost always the right way to do it.

00:29:02.200 | Like, oh, here's a professor who wrote an article

00:29:04.680 | about the Baltic War.

00:29:06.000 | That's why I'm thinking about it.

00:29:07.120 | I read this article.

00:29:08.160 | Let me talk to this person.

00:29:09.640 | Like, hey, what are like the definitive books on this?

00:29:12.760 | Who are the definitive thinkers on it?

00:29:14.040 | What are the different sides of this?

00:29:15.200 | You can do that for almost any topic.

00:29:18.640 | Find someone who knows about the topic

00:29:22.000 | and then ask them who they think the best thinkers are.

00:29:25.480 | Now, if there's already a clear tribal divide on the topic,

00:29:28.760 | just find a reasonable person

00:29:30.560 | who seems to be roughly speaking on one side.

00:29:33.280 | Find a reasonable person who, roughly speaking,

00:29:34.920 | seems to be on the other side.

00:29:36.280 | And say, what are the best articles or books

00:29:39.520 | about this topic?

00:29:41.000 | Then you're going to get those two opposing viewpoints.

00:29:43.200 | You read them both, let them collide.

00:29:44.880 | You are going to have the more nuanced understanding.

00:29:48.360 | All right, so Mark, I appreciate the question

00:29:50.080 | because it gives me a chance

00:29:51.640 | to go back to that general thinking.

00:29:54.240 | There's actually a name I heard for that approach

00:29:58.160 | to intellectual life,

00:29:59.120 | especially like culturally relevant intellectual life.

00:30:01.600 | It was a name that was coined by a former doctor

00:30:06.080 | who is now a full-time podcaster YouTuber

00:30:11.000 | who talks about medical issues.

00:30:13.280 | And he goes by,

00:30:14.840 | and this name is not going to make you feel better

00:30:18.200 | about what I'm about to tell you here,

00:30:19.720 | but he goes by the name ZDogg with two Gs, MD.

00:30:23.880 | That's how you can find him on YouTube, ZDoggMD.

00:30:27.400 | I don't know what his actual real name is.

00:30:30.680 | Really funny guy, really smart guy,

00:30:33.000 | really funny broadcaster.

00:30:34.400 | But he coined this term alt-middle.

00:30:37.840 | And I kind of like this terminology, right?

00:30:40.920 | So alt-middle is basically an approach

00:30:43.080 | where instead of partaking in intellectual groupism,

00:30:48.080 | where you say, where's my tribe?

00:30:50.160 | What do we believe?

00:30:51.040 | Send me the memo.

00:30:52.040 | Great, who can I tweet at?

00:30:54.280 | You approach topics one by one and say,

00:30:56.520 | let me get into this,

00:30:57.360 | if it's interesting or relevant to me and I have the time.

00:30:59.600 | Let me look at people on both sides of it

00:31:02.560 | and come up with my own take on it.

00:31:04.840 | And then, and this is critical,

00:31:06.280 | be willing to change that take

00:31:07.520 | if I get better information down the line.

00:31:09.640 | That hold that position with some empathy

00:31:12.600 | and with some contingency.

00:31:14.400 | I might not quite be right here.

00:31:16.240 | This is a complicated topic.

00:31:18.000 | And so I'm going to hold that with some contingency

00:31:20.360 | and I'm going to be relatively empathetic

00:31:22.000 | to people on other sides.

00:31:22.960 | Other people aren't evil.

00:31:24.280 | And that is what he calls the alt-middle approach.

00:31:26.800 | It really emerged because he's a doctor.

00:31:29.640 | He does a lot of sort of COVID centrist type communication.

00:31:33.480 | He's sort of a COVID centrist.

00:31:34.760 | So one of these people that's very plugged in

00:31:37.280 | and mainstream on COVID and understands the science,

00:31:40.560 | but also is alarmed by both sides.

00:31:43.640 | Alarmed, for example,

00:31:45.080 | by really extreme anti-vaccination type of discussion.

00:31:49.840 | Also alarmed by really extreme,

00:31:52.440 | we need to lock down the kids

00:31:53.720 | and put them in underwater cages

00:31:55.040 | because there's a guy who lives six states over

00:31:56.960 | who was once immunocompromised type thinking.

00:31:59.200 | And so through COVID centrism, he has evolved this idea,

00:32:02.880 | but I think it could apply to all of intellectual life.

00:32:05.120 | Alt-middle.

00:32:06.080 | So ZDogg, I appreciate that terminology.

00:32:08.160 | Mark, I appreciate you bringing this up.

00:32:10.360 | Find people who seem reasonable, ask them who the best is,

00:32:13.360 | read on both sides of the topic, think for yourself,

00:32:16.640 | hold ideas with some contingencies,

00:32:19.120 | be empathetic to the other side

00:32:20.920 | and trust your moral intuitions.

00:32:23.200 | You're not going to be tricked into believing something bad.

00:32:26.960 | Your views are going to get more nuanced.

00:32:29.600 | Your beliefs are going to get stronger.

00:32:31.400 | Your ability and motivation to actually make change

00:32:34.040 | in the world, which is what actually matters,

00:32:36.640 | is actually going to be improved

00:32:38.760 | when you encounter the very best thinkers

00:32:40.480 | on all sides of an issue.

00:32:43.080 | All right, so thanks, Mark.

00:32:45.680 | Jesse, I showed you ZDogg's.

00:32:48.840 | - Yeah.

00:32:49.680 | - I showed you one of his videos.

00:32:50.520 | I guess his studio looks very nice.

00:32:52.760 | I'm jealous.

00:32:53.600 | So what is it that makes it look nice?

00:32:55.760 | - It's like a lighting, but I don't know,

00:32:59.560 | it's like a big studio and it's in soft focus or something.

00:33:03.160 | - Yeah, it kind of looks like a really nice yoga studio.

00:33:05.040 | - Yeah, and I don't know if he has like a nice camera.

00:33:07.480 | I mean, pretty nice cameras,

00:33:08.320 | maybe he has an even nicer camera,

00:33:09.400 | but they're good looking videos.

00:33:11.080 | He's also a funny guy.

00:33:12.600 | I like him.

00:33:13.440 | ZDoggMD.

00:33:14.280 | That's such a like, the first name I came up with

00:33:18.680 | when I, I bet if we asked him, he's like,

00:33:20.680 | "I signed up for YouTube on a whim 20 years ago."

00:33:23.000 | And it was like the first name that came to mind

00:33:24.480 | and then you're stuck with it.

00:33:25.920 | It's like when you end up with like your email address

00:33:28.960 | is like nsyncfan24@aol.com.

00:33:33.960 | And you're kind of stuck with it

00:33:36.180 | because like all your family,

00:33:37.480 | that's the one they know to use.

00:33:39.600 | I wonder if that's where ZDogg came from.

00:33:41.640 | All right, what do we got next?

00:33:44.340 | - All right, the next question's from Drew.

00:33:47.160 | He's in a gap year and he has a question

00:33:50.040 | on what activities he should pursue.

00:33:53.080 | - Hey, Kyle, loving the show.

00:33:55.280 | I'm Drew from the Philippines

00:33:56.680 | and I'm currently in a gap year before college.

00:33:59.480 | I've applied to elite universities in the US

00:34:02.000 | and I'm pretty confident I'll get into at least one of them,

00:34:04.880 | hopefully, but in the meantime,

00:34:07.080 | I'm trying to make the most of my time during my gap year.

00:34:10.000 | My country is still in the dying thralls of the pandemic

00:34:12.680 | so going outside is still a bit restricted.

00:34:15.400 | So I've started developing a lifelong habit

00:34:17.400 | of reading books at a more frequent level,

00:34:19.840 | averaging at least one or two nonfiction books per week

00:34:23.120 | by employing your method of making it a default activity.

00:34:26.440 | And it's been working effortlessly so far.

00:34:28.840 | I have approximately 10 months before college

00:34:31.880 | and by the end of my gap year,

00:34:33.440 | I want to come out of it becoming the best possible version

00:34:36.360 | that a 19-year-old like me is capable of actualizing.

00:34:39.640 | What activities should I pursue

00:34:41.760 | and what kind of mindset should I employ going forward?

00:34:44.880 | Thanks, Kyle.

00:34:47.280 | - So given that you're somewhat physically stuck,

00:34:52.280 | that's gonna change the way we think about this gap year

00:34:55.080 | because often gap years is built around experiences.

00:34:59.320 | You go to interesting places, you meet interesting people,

00:35:01.560 | which I think is really important,

00:35:02.680 | but now you're gonna be limited there.

00:35:04.800 | I think what I'm gonna advise

00:35:06.200 | is that you actually develop a curriculum.

00:35:09.560 | So instead of just, which by the way is great,

00:35:12.600 | but instead of just encountering and reading a lot of books,

00:35:15.880 | let's have a curriculum that has maybe three goals

00:35:20.880 | that you're gonna make consistent effort towards.

00:35:24.480 | So you might have a curriculum for reading.

00:35:27.960 | I'm trying to get through these particular books

00:35:30.680 | and I'm gonna read these secondary sources

00:35:32.680 | about each of these books

00:35:33.600 | to try to fill in a particular subject matter

00:35:36.680 | that I wanna know a lot about.

00:35:38.480 | And I don't care about the details so much here

00:35:40.800 | as it is just doing some sort of consistent intellectual work

00:35:45.320 | and intellectual exploration.

00:35:47.720 | I mean, for example, I'll give you an example from my life.

00:35:51.040 | When I first came down to Washington, DC

00:35:54.280 | to take a professorship at Georgetown,

00:35:56.160 | this is before we had kids,

00:35:57.320 | so I had a lot of free time on my hand.

00:35:59.520 | My wife worked a normal person job.

00:36:01.280 | Professorship's not a normal job.

00:36:03.360 | So she had to actually go to work for normal hours

00:36:05.240 | and I didn't, I was a first year professor.

00:36:07.880 | I did a self-imposed curriculum.

00:36:09.520 | I had come across this book,

00:36:11.000 | a book of philosophy called "All Things Shining."

00:36:14.800 | By Dreyfus and Kelly.

00:36:16.360 | And it was an interesting book that was,

00:36:18.440 | went back through the classics

00:36:20.040 | and extracted ideas from the classics

00:36:22.280 | about the sacred and finding meaning in life.

00:36:25.360 | We actually talked about this recently

00:36:26.880 | in my appearance on the Tim Ferriss podcast.

00:36:28.600 | I guess Tim tried to read it

00:36:30.120 | and he didn't actually like it much.

00:36:32.760 | And the reason Tim didn't like it is he said,

00:36:34.160 | "I didn't know all the references.

00:36:35.480 | "I hadn't read Aeschylus.

00:36:36.960 | "I hadn't read Dante."

00:36:38.320 | And so what I did, I said, "Here's what I'm gonna do.

00:36:40.400 | "I'm gonna use 'All Things Shining'

00:36:41.760 | "'cause it's talking about all these books

00:36:43.240 | "and drawing interesting lessons about them.

00:36:44.840 | "And as it gets to each of those books

00:36:46.840 | "that it references, I'm gonna stop and read that."

00:36:50.080 | So I'm gonna go, you know, I started with "The Odyssey"

00:36:52.760 | because they started with the classical heroic Greeks.

00:36:55.200 | And I read "The Odyssey" and then I read Aeschylus

00:36:57.560 | and then I read Dante and I read Augustine.

00:37:02.000 | And so I followed this book and I would read the things

00:37:07.000 | and then read them, talk about it,

00:37:08.160 | then read the next things and read what they talked about.

00:37:09.720 | And it was like an organized curriculum

00:37:11.120 | and it was actually really interesting

00:37:12.520 | to go through these.

00:37:13.360 | And the book ended up with David Foster Wallace.

00:37:15.120 | So we went from Homer to David Foster Wallace.

00:37:17.760 | And there was an organized reflection here

00:37:21.280 | as the book went on.

00:37:23.000 | So do something like that.

00:37:23.960 | Just to get in the habit of,

00:37:25.200 | I can on myself autonomously

00:37:27.440 | dive into an intellectual pool

00:37:30.080 | and make sense of it just because I want to.

00:37:32.400 | And there's a lot of different topics you can do this on.

00:37:34.760 | If you wanna steer this,

00:37:35.920 | you might consider subscribing to the great courses

00:37:39.080 | and let one of the great courses,

00:37:41.120 | you pick a topic from there and let that course

00:37:42.720 | actually watch the lectures and then read the books.

00:37:44.480 | Like actually follow a great course

00:37:45.840 | if you want a little bit more structure.

00:37:47.720 | So that should be part of your curriculum,

00:37:48.900 | some sort of focused intellectual exploration

00:37:51.920 | where you learn to just love doing

00:37:53.080 | focused intellectual explorations.

00:37:54.760 | The second thing in your curriculum

00:37:57.600 | should have you building or creating something.

00:37:59.960 | And I don't know if it's physical,

00:38:03.440 | if it's digital, if it's written, if it's code,

00:38:05.600 | but it's just you're building and honing a skill

00:38:07.680 | and creating things, making intentions manifest concretely

00:38:10.920 | in the world, just to get in the habit

00:38:12.800 | while you have the time of developing a skill

00:38:15.680 | and creating things, being able to actually add new things

00:38:18.120 | into the world, I think that's quite fulfilling.

00:38:20.680 | And then the third part of the curriculum,

00:38:22.120 | I would add is something physical.

00:38:24.400 | Get in really good shape.

00:38:27.200 | Not that you need to be in really good shape

00:38:29.600 | to go to college in America,

00:38:31.360 | but just that it's an outlet for the energy,

00:38:35.440 | it will calm intellectual anxieties

00:38:37.680 | and it's self-mastery and efficacy.

00:38:40.160 | I'm the type of guy that can structure my time

00:38:42.080 | and get after it, I'm getting in really good shape.

00:38:43.680 | It just makes you feel like you have control

00:38:46.120 | over your own life so that when you get there,

00:38:48.800 | when you get to college, you have all this confidence.

00:38:52.560 | I can control my life and create something here

00:38:54.400 | that's really interesting.

00:38:56.440 | And I'm not at just the whims of,

00:38:58.960 | oh my God, my classes and I'm stressed

00:39:00.760 | and I'm just up drinking all night.

00:39:01.880 | Like you feel like you're actually in control.

00:39:03.160 | So I would do those three things.

00:39:04.440 | That's my three-part curriculum I would suggest

00:39:06.640 | for your semi-homebound gap year.

00:39:10.960 | The fourth thing I'm gonna say,

00:39:11.800 | which is not part of the curriculum,

00:39:12.800 | but this is just a substrate.

00:39:14.920 | You need to socialize and connect as much

00:39:17.240 | as the Philippine pandemic restrictions allow.

00:39:20.680 | You need to connect to other people.

00:39:21.840 | You need to sacrifice on behalf of other people.

00:39:23.640 | You need to be a leader in your community

00:39:25.480 | and among people you know.

00:39:26.720 | That's just gonna be the foundation

00:39:27.840 | that stops you from going crazy.

00:39:30.000 | If you're allowed to see people outside,

00:39:31.080 | see people outside.

00:39:32.520 | You're not allowed to do that,

00:39:33.480 | then do it virtually until you can.

00:39:36.960 | But as soon as you can do that,

00:39:38.160 | like be around people, see people,

00:39:39.680 | communicate with people, help people,

00:39:40.960 | bring stuff to people who need help.

00:39:42.960 | Make the social aspect of your life really amplified.

00:39:46.840 | And this is not about your gap year.

00:39:48.760 | This is about you're going through a period

00:39:50.560 | of pandemic restrictions that we all went through before.

00:39:53.160 | And it's the thing that you have to push over the top

00:39:56.080 | to counteract the isolating negative impacts

00:39:58.720 | of pandemic restrictions.

00:40:02.040 | And so I just want you to see that as medicine.

00:40:05.280 | That is your, I don't wanna get anxious

00:40:06.760 | and depressed medicine for this very specific circumstance.

00:40:09.800 | It is, I'm gonna become more socially engaged

00:40:12.880 | and sacrifice more time and attention

00:40:14.360 | on behalf of other people than I ever have before in my life.

00:40:16.560 | And that's just your daily medicine.

00:40:18.000 | All right?

00:40:19.040 | So Drew, hopefully things will calm down there soon.

00:40:24.040 | Hopefully you'll find your way to a nice school soon

00:40:26.600 | and really enjoy that.

00:40:27.440 | But in the meantime, that is my prescription.

00:40:31.920 | - It's kind of weird, Jesse, to imagine there's still,

00:40:33.840 | I mean, I guess it's true,

00:40:34.680 | but there's places where you're dealing

00:40:36.960 | with lockdown type things.

00:40:40.160 | - Yeah.

00:40:41.000 | - Yeah.

00:40:41.840 | I mean, I think we've been done with those here for a while.

00:40:44.440 | I think the populace basically just said,

00:40:47.200 | you gotta find a better way.

00:40:49.360 | You gotta find a better way.

00:40:50.200 | Though, I don't know where we live.

00:40:51.280 | You see it every time you come here,

00:40:53.080 | compared to where you live.

00:40:54.440 | Montgomery County, Maryland is not exactly chill,

00:41:00.200 | chilled out about the virus.

00:41:02.160 | - Yeah.

00:41:03.000 | I mean, I'm in Virginia,

00:41:04.040 | but it's only seven miles away.

00:41:05.920 | It's different.

00:41:07.280 | - Yeah.

00:41:08.120 | Interesting times, but hey, we can go outside.

00:41:10.160 | So feel bad for Drew.

00:41:11.920 | - When you were doing that All Things Shining project,

00:41:14.720 | how long did it take you to do all the,

00:41:16.000 | read all the books and everything?

00:41:17.640 | - I don't remember.

00:41:20.560 | Semester, maybe?

00:41:22.920 | More?

00:41:23.760 | I mean, I don't know if I read every one.

00:41:24.840 | Maybe I skipped a couple.

00:41:26.080 | But I just remember doing it

00:41:28.080 | for a lot of that academic year.

00:41:30.520 | And then I do other things,

00:41:31.360 | and I would come back to it.

00:41:32.760 | Yeah, it's vague memory,

00:41:34.960 | but I have all those books still.

00:41:36.120 | And I remember, by the way,

00:41:36.960 | I remember so much from that,

00:41:39.640 | that it was very useful.

00:41:41.480 | Like I have all these references now,

00:41:43.280 | and these understandings of all these different books.

00:41:44.880 | I know these cultural references

00:41:46.000 | was actually a pretty cool,

00:41:47.400 | it was a pretty cool experience, actually.

00:41:48.760 | That's what I should have told Tim on the podcast.

00:41:50.720 | So Tim was saying he tried to read it,

00:41:52.320 | but found it really academic.

00:41:54.480 | Which it kind of is, if you haven't read the books.

00:41:57.400 | You're like, what the hell are they talking about?

00:41:59.200 | So I probably should have suggested to Tim,

00:42:01.320 | go back and try the book again,

00:42:03.520 | but read the books along with the writers.

00:42:07.640 | And so, longtime fans will recognize the reference,

00:42:11.240 | because I talk about it in "Deep Work."

00:42:13.840 | So that's where that original reference came back.

00:42:17.920 | All right, who do we got?

00:42:19.160 | - Next up, we have Shane McGrath.

00:42:23.520 | I'm pretty sure he's submitted a question before.

00:42:26.120 | And he's basically got a lot of jobs.

00:42:29.160 | He's doing a lot of juggling,

00:42:30.360 | and he's got a specific question about that.

00:42:32.600 | - Hi, Cal.

00:42:37.240 | My name is Shane, and I work as an operations analyst

00:42:40.000 | in the medical device field.

00:42:42.000 | I'm a big fan of your work,

00:42:43.280 | and credit the embrace of "Deep Work" principles

00:42:45.520 | as a catalyst for my last two promotions.

00:42:48.280 | So I first and foremost,

00:42:49.480 | just want to express my utmost gratitude to your work,

00:42:52.200 | and I look forward to your future work as well.

00:42:55.240 | What I want to ask you is your advice and strategies

00:42:57.720 | for shifting gears between multiple domains.

00:43:00.960 | I have several interests, including writing,

00:43:03.240 | learning to code, investing, data analysis,

00:43:06.520 | cooking, and playing guitar, which I all tend to.

00:43:10.840 | They all feel rewarding in different ways,

00:43:12.760 | and I guess I just operate as a right-brained guy

00:43:15.040 | who loves to throw coals in the fire.

00:43:17.640 | Assuming I keep this juggling act going,

00:43:19.960 | do you have any tips or strategies

00:43:21.560 | that help to shift gears

00:43:22.920 | between work in different domains?

00:43:25.760 | When I write, it seems like the optimal state

00:43:28.160 | is quite different than when I'm coding in JavaScript,

00:43:30.800 | for example.

00:43:31.760 | They just seem to hit different.

00:43:34.080 | I just wonder how I could do a better job

00:43:36.000 | with managing this juggling act I'm in the middle of.

00:43:39.080 | Much appreciated, Cal.

00:43:40.360 | Thanks a lot.

00:43:41.200 | - Well, I mean, Shane, my advice here is

00:43:44.680 | if you're struggling juggling lots of balls,

00:43:47.960 | the best solution is to take out a bunch of the balls.

00:43:52.320 | That's much easier than trying to learn

00:43:53.840 | how do I juggle five balls.

00:43:54.840 | That's hard to do.

00:43:56.200 | Two balls is easier.

00:43:57.840 | So instead of trying to figure out how to juggle five balls,

00:43:59.720 | you could get rid of three,

00:44:00.720 | and that's what I think is the issue here.

00:44:03.120 | That's too many things.

00:44:04.240 | That's too many things.

00:44:06.520 | I think the overhead of having that many things

00:44:09.240 | is probably counterbalancing a lot of the value.

00:44:12.800 | So if we wanna see what's a more reasonable load,

00:44:15.520 | and we're talking here,

00:44:16.360 | these are all sort of out-of-work leisure-type pursuits,

00:44:20.520 | there's a few different things.

00:44:21.720 | If we're looking through the different deep life buckets,

00:44:24.600 | there's a few different things

00:44:25.680 | that are pulling at your time,

00:44:27.880 | especially outside of work.

00:44:29.400 | I mean, first of all, there's the community bucket.

00:44:31.000 | I mean, serving your family, serving your friends,

00:44:33.920 | being a leader in your community,

00:44:35.560 | enjoying and savoring times with people you care about.

00:44:38.280 | Like, that actually needs a lot of time.

00:44:40.600 | That's a default.

00:44:41.680 | That's already taking up a lot of time.

00:44:43.880 | We have constitution.

00:44:45.720 | You gotta take care of your body.

00:44:47.000 | It's the best way also of keeping anxiety low,

00:44:49.920 | especially during difficult times,

00:44:51.240 | and it keeps you with more options

00:44:53.240 | for doing things with your life going forward.

00:44:55.520 | And that takes time.

00:44:56.600 | So now we don't have a ton of time left.

00:44:59.520 | Then you wanna throw in there,

00:45:01.840 | if we wanna have the celebration bucket

00:45:03.440 | or under contemplation,

00:45:04.280 | you wanna throw in there just having

00:45:06.120 | high-quality present leisure experiences,

00:45:08.160 | just really enjoying a movie,

00:45:09.520 | really enjoying a dinner,

00:45:10.760 | really enjoying a sunset while you're out for a walk,

00:45:12.800 | and that type of just present gratitude-generating moment.

00:45:15.560 | Now we're really getting down

00:45:16.680 | to a small amount of free time,

00:45:18.800 | which honestly, I think the right load there

00:45:20.880 | is there's a primary hobby that you work on over time,

00:45:24.080 | so you get the satisfaction of mastery

00:45:25.880 | and of developing a really refined taste in one area.

00:45:30.160 | So if you get really good at guitar,

00:45:31.960 | you don't just get the benefit of the mastery

00:45:34.600 | of playing your guitar well,

00:45:35.440 | you get the benefit of really being able to appreciate

00:45:37.440 | and understand other good guitar players.

00:45:39.280 | So it's a gift that keeps on giving.

00:45:40.880 | And then maybe have a secondary hobby

00:45:42.520 | that you're messing around with.

00:45:44.320 | I'm learning how to cook this season,

00:45:46.360 | and then I'm really busy and I'm doing no secondary thing.

00:45:48.960 | And then I'm messing around with code.

00:45:50.080 | I'm gonna make like a video game for my kids.

00:45:52.080 | And then I'm doing nothing because I'm busy.

00:45:53.960 | And you have that secondary slot.

00:45:55.480 | I honestly think that's really what people

00:45:58.280 | more or less have time for.

00:45:59.520 | And my worry is if you try to have

00:46:00.760 | five different leisure activities,

00:46:02.640 | those other core deep life areas,

00:46:04.520 | like community, like constitution,

00:46:06.720 | like just present celebration,

00:46:08.080 | they're gonna get squeezed out,

00:46:09.080 | and that's to your detriment.

00:46:10.320 | And the overhead of just switching back and forth

00:46:12.080 | between these things are gonna make you more anxious

00:46:13.720 | than you get benefit from them.

00:46:15.440 | So I'm not sure if that's the answer you wanna hear,

00:46:17.440 | but that's the answer I am gonna give right now

00:46:20.040 | is if you do less, this might sound paradoxical,

00:46:24.040 | but if you do less, you're actually going to

00:46:26.880 | experience more good things in your life.

00:46:30.600 | All right, thanks Shane.

00:46:33.360 | All right, how are we doing here?

00:46:36.280 | How many total questions we're gonna try to do today?

00:46:38.800 | - We have two more questions,

00:46:41.400 | two or three more questions,

00:46:42.480 | depending on what you're feeling.

00:46:43.760 | - All right, well, let's do one more,

00:46:46.400 | and then we might check in with our sponsors

00:46:47.920 | and do another.

00:46:48.760 | - Okay.

00:46:50.560 | - So the next question is from,

00:46:52.840 | it's about lifestyle planning,

00:46:55.640 | and there's some struggles to stay disciplined.

00:46:58.560 | So we'll hear what it says.

00:47:01.800 | - Hi Cal, this is Ina, and besides being a homemaker,

00:47:06.760 | I learn languages autonomously

00:47:08.680 | and aspire to have my own language school.

00:47:11.400 | My question has to do with rituals and motivation.

00:47:14.440 | I have done life-centric career planning, as you recommend,

00:47:17.680 | and truly believe that at least

00:47:19.280 | for the current season of my life,

00:47:20.800 | I have chosen adequate goals towards the future I desire.

00:47:24.320 | Nevertheless, I find that some days

00:47:26.360 | I really do struggle to stay disciplined

00:47:28.820 | and to show up in the morning and get to work.

00:47:31.600 | Thinking back on advice you've given on this podcast,

00:47:34.480 | there are at least two ways I can approach this.

00:47:37.120 | One is to automate the process with a specific when,

00:47:40.000 | what, where, and how,

00:47:41.600 | so that I can let the power of habit take control,

00:47:44.160 | and the other is to seek a variety of awe-inspiring places

00:47:47.660 | to keep my brain interested and to jog my memory

00:47:50.440 | about why this work is important in the first place.

00:47:53.880 | Which of these options would you suggest

00:47:55.800 | for someone who still has to periodically

00:47:58.280 | drag herself to her desk?

00:48:00.460 | - That's a good question, Ina.

00:48:02.600 | So I think there's a few things that are relevant here,

00:48:05.840 | and you hit on some of them.

00:48:07.520 | So my answer is gonna overlap pretty strongly

00:48:10.480 | with what you were just saying.

00:48:12.120 | Automation is key,

00:48:13.520 | and automation can mean multiple different things

00:48:16.000 | in this context.

00:48:16.840 | So as you hinted, automation could just mean

00:48:20.200 | this is when, where, and how I do this work.

00:48:22.580 | So I don't even have to think about it.

00:48:23.900 | I get back from the gym,

00:48:25.580 | and then we have a desk put aside for bills.

00:48:28.700 | And that is when I do it, right after the gym on Wednesdays,

00:48:33.000 | and that's when I do the bills.

00:48:34.660 | And you know what?

00:48:35.500 | I always collect the bills from the mail

00:48:37.100 | and put them in a two-process sorter on that desk

00:48:40.420 | so I know where they are.

00:48:41.660 | And you know what?

00:48:42.500 | I have stamps there and the envelopes there,

00:48:44.460 | so it's real easy to do.

00:48:46.080 | There is an actual boost you get from organization

00:48:49.260 | where you say, "I built out a system for this."

00:48:51.640 | It's kind of fun to execute a system

00:48:54.580 | and see everything was here and it works really well,

00:48:56.600 | and then you're more likely to actually do the work.

00:48:58.340 | So you have that type of automation.

00:49:00.140 | The other type of automation is literally automating it.

00:49:03.260 | You're not gonna have someone else do this,

00:49:05.540 | especially when it comes to work, household admin work.

00:49:09.260 | I think Laura Vanderkam has a good book about this,

00:49:13.300 | "162 Hours."

00:49:15.040 | And she's a big advocate for this,

00:49:16.940 | of to the extent that you can afford it,

00:49:19.620 | this is where you should be putting a lot of your money

00:49:21.620 | is towards automating stuff in the house,

00:49:24.500 | getting household admin off of your plate.

00:49:27.380 | You have someone who does laundry,

00:49:28.740 | someone who does your yard work,

00:49:29.940 | the handyman who comes once a month,

00:49:31.380 | and you have this list that grows,

00:49:32.580 | and he just takes it and does those things around the house.

00:49:34.660 | And her point, which I think is a good one,

00:49:36.940 | is that is a super high return investment in money.

00:49:39.500 | And what happens instead is people often say,

00:49:41.940 | "Well, I technically could do these things,

00:49:43.620 | so I'd rather spend that money on, you know,

00:49:46.000 | something more fleeting or superficial."

00:49:48.560 | And it's actually what it got a lot more return

00:49:50.200 | in your life just to take those things off your plate.

00:49:53.160 | So literal automation, I think,

00:49:56.040 | is a priority to the extent that you could do it.

00:49:59.180 | The second thing to do here is reduction.

00:50:01.280 | So just taking things off your plate.

00:50:03.120 | Sometimes when you're not able to get started on things,

00:50:06.640 | it's because you're overloaded, there's too much,

00:50:08.200 | your mind is exhausted, it knows it's not sustainable.

00:50:11.400 | So I'm not gonna do this, I'm sorry,

00:50:13.200 | I'm not gonna help on that committee.

00:50:15.760 | This is a bridge too far with like my exercise routine,

00:50:18.560 | whatever it is, reduction.

00:50:20.120 | So when your load is reasonable, it's easier to execute

00:50:24.360 | because you're playing with your wiring here.

00:50:26.560 | Your brain is very good at the things important,

00:50:28.960 | let's set a plan, let's execute that plan,

00:50:30.560 | let's feel really good because we got the plan done.

00:50:32.560 | If you overload that part of your brain,

00:50:34.120 | it short circuits and you lose all of that

00:50:36.160 | evolutionarily optimized inducements

00:50:39.000 | to actually do the daily work that's important.

00:50:41.520 | We are wired to do daily stuff that's important

00:50:44.080 | for the survival of us and our families, right?

00:50:46.020 | So let's take advantage of those mechanisms,

00:50:49.760 | but you can't take advantage of those mechanisms

00:50:51.520 | if there's 75 things on your list.

00:50:53.260 | And then clarity would be my final suggestion,

00:50:56.080 | and that is something you touched on before.

00:50:58.960 | Here's my vision, lifestyle-centric career planning,

00:51:01.160 | where we wanna be in five years,

00:51:02.580 | where we wanna be in 10 years,

00:51:03.720 | where we wanna be later this year.

00:51:05.840 | This is how everything fits in.

00:51:07.920 | These type of more mundane chores,

00:51:09.580 | we've really automated and structured,

00:51:11.160 | and there's these other things I'm doing

00:51:12.440 | that's really fulfilling, and we're saving up to do this.

00:51:15.160 | And you have this vision that this is all a part of that.

00:51:17.280 | You mentioned that as being important.

00:51:18.600 | You are right that that is important.

00:51:20.600 | You are building towards a vision that you believe in

00:51:23.260 | and think is important.

00:51:24.520 | You're working backwards from that positive goal.

00:51:26.880 | It's very important to keep things moving.

00:51:29.100 | So if you have kids, for example,

00:51:32.000 | there's a couple natural milestones to think about.

00:51:36.600 | There's a sort of young kid period,

00:51:39.280 | which is sort of a survival mode.

00:51:40.880 | There's a steady state period

00:51:42.400 | where you have grammar school-aged kids

00:51:44.640 | and what you want life to be like there,

00:51:47.040 | time with them, the role of work, where you live,

00:51:50.080 | really thinking through what that experience is like.

00:51:53.320 | You have a really clear vision for,

00:51:54.600 | okay, when does the last kid leave the house?

00:51:56.840 | These are the changes that are happening then.

00:51:59.480 | I think it's a great time to have

00:52:00.480 | a more substantial change to your lifestyle.

00:52:02.000 | So you have these very clear visions

00:52:04.320 | that you're working backwards from,

00:52:05.800 | that you're working towards with your day-to-day efforts.

00:52:10.520 | And that, again, you're very right to point that out.

00:52:12.360 | So automate, reduce, clarify.

00:52:15.800 | Do those three things.

00:52:17.440 | That's what's needed to keep making progress

00:52:19.640 | in a disciplined fashion on the stuff that's annoying,

00:52:22.520 | but has to get done.

00:52:24.200 | That's how you avoid just being paralyzed

00:52:27.120 | by exhaustion and indecision and lack of motivation.

00:52:31.020 | All right, well, speaking of motivation,

00:52:34.400 | talk about a couple of sponsors

00:52:35.560 | that make this show possible.

00:52:37.520 | One thing I often lack motivation to do

00:52:39.800 | is go to a physical post office.

00:52:44.100 | We have one right down the street from us here

00:52:46.200 | in the Deep Work HQ, and it is crowded.

00:52:50.280 | You have to wait in these long lines.

00:52:52.840 | It's a little bit depressing.

00:52:54.640 | This is where stamps.com comes to the rescue.

00:52:59.260 | So with stamps.com, you can print official postage

00:53:03.720 | right from your computer.

00:53:05.360 | So you can spend less time at the post office

00:53:07.060 | and more time running your business.

00:53:10.680 | It gives you access to all the post office

00:53:12.800 | and UPS shipping services you need.

00:53:15.000 | You can do it right from your computer.

00:53:16.880 | You print the postage, you stick it on,

00:53:20.840 | you schedule a pickup, no going to the post office,

00:53:24.280 | no waiting in line.

00:53:27.740 | They're one of these rare business ideas

00:53:30.260 | that just simply makes sense.

00:53:32.280 | It barely even requires to be pitched

00:53:34.120 | because people get it.

00:53:34.940 | Oh, instead of going to the post office,

00:53:36.080 | I print the postage at home.

00:53:37.400 | Got it.

00:53:38.880 | What do we do?

00:53:39.720 | How do we sign up?

00:53:40.920 | Well, I'll tell you how to do that.

00:53:42.800 | You go to stamps.com and you use the promo code DEEP.

00:53:47.520 | And what you're gonna get with that is a special offer

00:53:49.380 | that includes four-week trial, free postage,

00:53:53.520 | and a digital scale with no long-term commitments

00:53:56.400 | or contracts.

00:53:57.600 | You just go to stamps.com,

00:53:59.320 | click the microphone at the top of the page

00:54:00.880 | and enter that code DEEP.

00:54:03.560 | Remember, whether you're sending invoices

00:54:05.520 | or side hustling with an Etsy shop,

00:54:07.720 | or you're a full-blown warehouse shipping out orders,

00:54:10.160 | stamps.com is gonna make your life easier.

00:54:13.240 | You're gonna join over 1 million businesses

00:54:16.280 | that have been using stamps.com for over 20 years.

00:54:18.160 | So go to stamps.com and use that promo code DEEP.

00:54:22.640 | I also wanna tell you about one of the original sponsors

00:54:27.600 | of the DEEP Questions podcast, and that is Grammarly.

00:54:33.200 | Grammarly is a software product that works

00:54:38.200 | on all of the tools in which you do daily writing

00:54:42.000 | and all of the types of apps or programs

00:54:44.000 | you use to do this daily writing.

00:54:46.240 | And it helps you make your writing better.

00:54:48.720 | This is really important.

00:54:51.960 | We are here in this winter grind where it's emails all day

00:54:55.680 | and instant messages all day, work is work,

00:54:58.360 | the summer's far away, Christmas break

00:55:00.760 | is in the rear view mirror.

00:55:01.960 | All we're doing all day, it seems like seen on our screens

00:55:04.360 | and communicating.

00:55:05.200 | You want that communication to be crystal clear

00:55:06.960 | so people will take you seriously,

00:55:08.640 | that you will be persuasive so that you will have influence

00:55:12.100 | and respect within your company.

00:55:13.680 | Grammarly is how you make sure that you are doing this.

00:55:17.420 | So I don't know, Jesse, do you remember

00:55:19.980 | the old grammar checkers from the old days

00:55:22.280 | where it would just like underline the words

00:55:24.360 | and tell you like you misspelled there

00:55:26.000 | or something like that? - Yeah.

00:55:27.400 | - Well, I gotta show you Grammarly Premium

00:55:29.520 | 'cause I've been working with it

00:55:32.040 | and am really impressed with what it can do.

00:55:36.240 | It's not just telling you you spelled there wrong,

00:55:39.240 | it can help you rewrite an entire sentence.

00:55:41.440 | It can tell you what the tone is on your email, right?

00:55:44.920 | So you can be like, Jesse, I'm looking at this email

00:55:47.040 | that you're about to send here or something.

00:55:49.240 | And the tone here is that you sound like

00:55:52.160 | that you're coming in a van to carry away their corpse.

00:55:56.080 | So you might wanna adjust that tone

00:55:58.920 | to be a little bit more positive.

00:56:02.120 | No, that's not actually one of the tones,

00:56:03.820 | but it can tell you like this is the tone,

00:56:05.200 | like it's super official, it's super friendly, colloquial,

00:56:09.640 | because you don't always know.

00:56:11.320 | You don't always know when you're writing

00:56:12.520 | how it's coming across.

00:56:13.840 | This program can actually tell you.

00:56:16.240 | It even has clarity suggestions.

00:56:17.640 | I like this one, like it'll come in and say,

00:56:19.880 | hey, there's Steinbeck.

00:56:22.120 | This is me voicing the grammar.

00:56:23.720 | It doesn't actually say this,

00:56:24.540 | but this is what I feel like when I use this tool.

00:56:27.280 | Hey, there's Steinbeck.

00:56:28.580 | This giant adjective, great, you're smart, I love it,

00:56:34.200 | but no one's gonna know what the hell you're talking about.

00:56:35.960 | Like it'd be much clearer if you just use this word,

00:56:38.460 | which actually captures what you're trying to say better.

00:56:40.760 | Grammarly actually does that.

00:56:42.360 | So it's really powerful now.

00:56:43.400 | It's like having an editor who sits over your shoulder

00:56:45.920 | and helps you actually write clearly.

00:56:48.340 | So get through those emails and your work quicker

00:56:51.840 | by keeping it concise, confident,

00:56:53.440 | and effective with Grammarly.

00:56:54.880 | Go to grammarly.com/deep to sign up for a free account.

00:56:58.400 | And when you're ready to upgrade to Grammarly Premium,

00:57:01.840 | you will get 20% off for being a listener of my podcast.

00:57:06.200 | That's 20% off at G-R-A-M-M-A-R-L-Y.com/deep.

00:57:11.200 | Tell you, Jesse, we need something like that

00:57:21.600 | for like most academic departments.

00:57:24.760 | It's like professors, we're all weird and live in bubbles

00:57:27.640 | and we have 10 years, so like no one ever,

00:57:30.360 | our jobs aren't in jeopardy,

00:57:31.440 | and we get weird in our email communication.

00:57:33.840 | And there's always that one professor in every department

00:57:36.440 | that has to send out an incredibly like a grieve

00:57:39.800 | and upset email about everything.

00:57:43.080 | Like you can say, whatever,

00:57:46.400 | FYI, we have a new water cooler.

00:57:49.560 | 'Cause the other one broke.

00:57:50.400 | And you will get this long email almost immediately

00:57:52.680 | that is like, in this day and age to have a water cooler,

00:57:57.280 | because my uncle was killed by a water cooler,

00:58:00.880 | and I don't like the way that water cooler looked at me,

00:58:04.200 | and I think it's an antisemitic water cooler,

00:58:07.720 | and also we shouldn't use the word water,

00:58:10.360 | and just mad about everything.

00:58:11.920 | We need like a grammarly.com plugin

00:58:13.640 | that it sits on every academic email server

00:58:16.080 | that just comes back and say,

00:58:17.080 | don't send this, you sound like a crazy person.

00:58:19.800 | Everyone's gonna think you're a crazy person.

00:58:22.040 | And it just flash, just crazy person detection,

00:58:25.320 | because every department has someone

00:58:27.400 | who's just been in their head too long,

00:58:29.200 | and they just are, I just imagine in a dark room

00:58:31.520 | with their, somehow it's a typewriter hooked up

00:58:34.240 | to their email, I don't know how that works.

00:58:35.360 | Just like, I'll show them.

00:58:37.600 | They need a grammarly.com detector that's like,

00:58:40.240 | people are gonna think you are literally insane.

00:58:43.440 | - That's what we need.

00:58:44.560 | - All right, what are we doing here?

00:58:48.040 | 55, let's do one more call.

00:58:49.080 | I think we got time for one more call.

00:58:50.480 | - Okay, sounds good.

00:58:52.000 | This question is from Cameron.

00:58:53.960 | He's in college.

00:58:54.880 | He has a question about your thoughts

00:58:56.440 | on the metaverse, from Meta.

00:58:58.480 | - Hi Cal, college student here.

00:59:01.920 | What are your thoughts on the metaverse

00:59:03.280 | that Meta is currently trying to build?

00:59:05.840 | How do you think that it's going to affect society?

00:59:08.640 | Thank you.

00:59:09.480 | - Well, there's a few things going on here.

00:59:13.320 | One, why is Facebook doing this?

00:59:16.600 | And in part it's because,

00:59:18.880 | as I've been predicting for a few years now,

00:59:21.080 | the age of social media monopoly platforms

00:59:24.760 | has begun its descent.

00:59:27.120 | We just didn't realize it.

00:59:28.120 | Now we're actually starting to see it.

00:59:30.280 | Facebook posted one of their first reductions

00:59:35.360 | in active user minutes,

00:59:37.040 | and their stock lost something like $150 billion.

00:59:39.600 | The biggest in absolute value,

00:59:43.040 | single one-day drop of a company's valuation ever.

00:59:46.280 | So people are leaving Facebook.

00:59:48.880 | People are leaving Instagram.

00:59:51.200 | This era in which there's six platforms you have to use,

00:59:56.200 | or you can't communicate,

00:59:57.160 | and you're completely out of it.

00:59:58.800 | That's all dissolving into a world

01:00:00.480 | of much more niche social media.

01:00:01.920 | And I've talked about before why this has happened.

01:00:03.760 | I talked about this on Lex Fridman's podcast, for example.

01:00:06.560 | I went into detail on this.

01:00:07.920 | The issue is the network effect,

01:00:10.720 | the main network effect that these platforms had

01:00:12.920 | that made them monopolies

01:00:15.240 | was everyone you know is using them.

01:00:18.280 | And so when their main promise was,

01:00:20.160 | you're gonna update people on what you're up to

01:00:22.480 | and see what people you know are up to,

01:00:23.760 | that network effect dominates.

01:00:26.240 | If I need a place to go to see what people I know are up to,

01:00:28.760 | and they're all on this one platform,

01:00:30.200 | no competitor will succeed.

01:00:31.680 | I have to go to Facebook.

01:00:33.000 | That was the foundation

01:00:33.880 | on which they built their massive user base.

01:00:36.720 | They then got spooked

01:00:38.080 | because they saw Twitter come out of nowhere

01:00:40.000 | and have a lot of success

01:00:42.040 | with this algorithmic curated timeline feature.

01:00:44.600 | And so the main social media companies,

01:00:47.320 | namely Facebook and Instagram,

01:00:48.880 | and then Facebook eventually bought Instagram,

01:00:50.480 | said, well, what we're gonna do instead is,

01:00:52.640 | say these platforms are not about

01:00:54.440 | connecting with people you know,

01:00:55.560 | it's about distraction and entertainment.

01:00:57.880 | We will select articles and posts and things

01:01:00.080 | that are generating a lot of engagement

01:01:01.440 | and we'll put them in an infinite scroll newsfeed.

01:01:03.520 | And you could just click on that F on your phone

01:01:05.520 | when you're bored, and there'll be something there

01:01:06.880 | that's gonna press your buttons in as a good distraction.

01:01:09.520 | That was the beginning of the end for these platforms.

01:01:12.360 | Yes, when you already had 1.3 billion people

01:01:14.840 | on these platforms, they were gonna use it more

01:01:18.240 | in the short term, 'cause that's more interesting

01:01:20.840 | than seeing what your cousin's up to.

01:01:23.200 | But in the longterm, now there's no reason

01:01:24.920 | to be on Facebook if I wanna be entertained.

01:01:26.920 | Yeah, that's entertaining, but so are podcasts.

01:01:31.560 | So are shows on the streaming services.

01:01:33.720 | So are books, you know?

01:01:35.640 | So are any other number of other services

01:01:39.320 | where it could care less if my cousin uses it.

01:01:42.960 | And that's exactly what happened to Facebook,

01:01:44.640 | is like, yes, that was more entertaining

01:01:46.240 | for their existing users, but over time,

01:01:48.280 | their users were saying, I don't really wanna see

01:01:50.760 | Facebook newsfeeds, I wanna watch Yellowstone

01:01:54.680 | over on Paramount and listen to a podcast

01:01:57.800 | on some niche topic I'm really interested in.

01:02:00.680 | This is entertaining, but other things

01:02:02.320 | are even more entertaining.

01:02:03.160 | So they're starting to lose users.

01:02:05.500 | And so what we get instead is the rise

01:02:08.120 | of much more fractured social media,

01:02:10.640 | where the experience is, okay,

01:02:12.240 | if we're gonna do distraction, let's just do distraction.

01:02:15.840 | And that was TikTok's play.

01:02:17.760 | TikTok said, okay, if this is just about

01:02:20.360 | scrolling things and being distracted,

01:02:22.640 | let's just plug that matrix cable straight

01:02:24.760 | into the back of your spine.

01:02:26.020 | Let's get rid of the whole, like, my cousin's on here

01:02:28.120 | and I have a wall and I'm connecting to people.

01:02:29.600 | Just get rid of all of that.

01:02:31.160 | And let's just hone in like a laser beam

01:02:33.840 | on just the absolute most in the moment

01:02:37.440 | dopamine hijacking, attention generating style of content.

01:02:41.160 | And don't even worry about where it comes from.

01:02:43.200 | We'll just show you things one after another.

01:02:45.360 | If that's our game here, then let's just purify that.

01:02:49.600 | And that's what TikTok is doing.

01:02:50.680 | And that's why it's sort of eating the lunch

01:02:52.420 | of the other social media platforms,

01:02:53.860 | because it's saying, forget this,

01:02:54.960 | like I wanna connect to people I know stuff.

01:02:57.680 | However, that is a world in which the obligation

01:03:01.880 | to be on these platforms completely dissolves.

01:03:04.220 | And I don't mean to rant too much about this,

01:03:06.740 | but Cameron, I think about this a lot.

01:03:08.760 | Five years ago, when I would say in public,

01:03:11.520 | I don't use social media, I don't use Facebook,

01:03:14.380 | people were aghast.

01:03:17.040 | Like, this is crazy.

01:03:19.080 | How can you survive in our society without it?

01:03:22.240 | That's where everyone is.

01:03:23.140 | That's how you know what's going on.

01:03:24.080 | That's where all the cultural trends are.

01:03:25.340 | That's where all the news is.

01:03:26.420 | That's how you get business.

01:03:27.620 | In an age of TikTok, no one cares anymore

01:03:29.640 | if you're not using it.

01:03:31.140 | 'Cause it's just purified dopamine distraction.

01:03:35.040 | So if you say, hey, I don't have a TikTok account.

01:03:37.960 | No one's like, how do you survive?

01:03:40.080 | Like, yeah, I know it's weird.

01:03:41.960 | You know, it's fun,

01:03:43.260 | but there's no expectation that you would use it.

01:03:46.760 | And that's actually way more healthy relationship

01:03:48.880 | with these tools.

01:03:49.720 | And so what we're gonna get is TikTok 2.0 and 3.0,

01:03:52.520 | all sorts of different services

01:03:54.680 | that directly press buttons in very specific types of ways.

01:03:58.020 | A clubhouse was like this.

01:04:00.400 | It was doing something else very specific,

01:04:01.840 | was very interesting.

01:04:02.820 | None of which have any network effect requirements.

01:04:04.840 | I don't need my cousin and my friends from high school

01:04:08.080 | and my grandfather to be on TikTok

01:04:10.120 | for it to be useful in its promise to me.

01:04:12.400 | It's promised to me is like,

01:04:13.240 | we're gonna show you these videos

01:04:14.680 | and there's gonna be a cat on it

01:04:16.480 | and it's gonna be entertaining.

01:04:18.540 | And so once you got rid of the network effects,

01:04:21.000 | this whole thing is just gonna fragment

01:04:22.440 | into lots of different sources of entertainment.

01:04:24.580 | Some different than others, some much more base,

01:04:27.120 | some much more high end.

01:04:28.280 | It doesn't matter.

01:04:29.680 | And no one will be expected to use any one of these things.

01:04:32.160 | And it's not a weirdness

01:04:33.120 | if you don't use any one of these things.

01:04:34.440 | And that's actually a much better, healthier world.

01:04:36.760 | This more long tail niche social media type world

01:04:39.280 | that's less about connection and more about distraction

01:04:42.120 | is fine and that's where we're going.

01:04:43.880 | And you can't be a $700 billion a year

01:04:46.480 | social media company anymore once we get to that world.

01:04:49.360 | And that's what Facebook sees.

01:04:51.000 | And that's why they're trying to shift away from it.

01:04:53.200 | So that's the whole background for what's going on.

01:04:56.720 | I think the particular meta vision that we see now,

01:04:59.740 | which tends to be focused on social life occurring

01:05:01.880 | in virtual reality, that's a smoke screen.

01:05:04.120 | That's not the big headline.

01:05:07.360 | The big headline with these technologies

01:05:09.140 | is going to be the dissipation

01:05:11.120 | of the personal electronics industry.

01:05:14.220 | I was talking to some people in the industry about this

01:05:17.040 | when I was doing a New Yorker piece last fall

01:05:19.560 | about people who work in virtual reality.

01:05:21.480 | This Cameron is the trend that is much more powerful.

01:05:24.680 | And the trend works as follows.

01:05:27.120 | Once augmented reality glasses get to a certain level

01:05:30.900 | of quality, and once we have sufficient high-speed internet

01:05:35.900 | wherever we need to be, and we're very close to that,

01:05:39.740 | there'll be no need to own any other consumer electronics

01:05:42.280 | beyond those glasses.

01:05:43.340 | If I want to use a computer,

01:05:46.740 | I don't buy a computer from Apple.

01:05:48.920 | There is a instance in some Amazon virtualization cloud

01:05:52.880 | somewhere of my computer running in a giant server farm

01:05:55.860 | and my AR glasses will create a screen

01:05:58.280 | wherever I want in the environment in front of me.

01:06:00.360 | And there is a screen of whatever size I want.

01:06:02.320 | And there I work on my computer.

01:06:03.520 | If I need to use my phone,

01:06:04.600 | I do not need to own an iPhone or an Android phone.

01:06:07.040 | I have my glasses on.

01:06:08.320 | I can just pull my hands down

01:06:10.040 | and there is the list of my contacts

01:06:11.640 | and I can see who's texting me.

01:06:13.460 | I don't need a separate phone.

01:06:14.340 | If I want to watch TV, I do not need a 65 inch TV.

01:06:17.520 | I can make a 65 inch TV show up wherever I want in my house.

01:06:21.160 | And it can be in a position

01:06:22.800 | where I see it through my AR goggles,

01:06:24.320 | but everyone else in my house sees it

01:06:25.800 | in the exact same position.

01:06:26.900 | We can't tell the difference between that screen

01:06:28.540 | being there in real life or not.

01:06:31.560 | There's no need to actually buy or own TVs.

01:06:33.760 | That is the huge game changer that is coming.

01:06:37.160 | The virtualization of computation into the cloud

01:06:40.520 | and the replacement of interfaces

01:06:42.800 | with augmented reality goggles.

01:06:44.660 | Many companies disappear once that happens.

01:06:48.200 | What's the Foxconn plant,

01:06:51.240 | Apple's Foxconn plant gonna do

01:06:53.440 | when there's no iPhones to produce,

01:06:54.780 | there's no iMacs to produce?

01:06:57.060 | What are they gonna do?

01:06:58.000 | You know, that's gonna go out of business.

01:06:59.120 | What's Samsung gonna do

01:07:00.360 | when high-end Android phones

01:07:03.980 | and large screen TVs don't need to exist?

01:07:06.240 | It's gonna disappear.

01:07:09.280 | It's gonna be a huge change

01:07:11.120 | to the digital electronics industry.

01:07:13.140 | And guess what?

01:07:14.440 | All of the major players are investing huge amounts of money

01:07:16.920 | to make sure that they are not going to lose

01:07:19.240 | in that game of musical chairs.

01:07:20.320 | Yes, Facebook talks about Meta.

01:07:22.080 | Facebook is also caring a lot about this future

01:07:25.560 | of virtualized consumer electronics.

01:07:27.620 | They are spending a lot of money on, guess what?

01:07:30.480 | Their own pair of these augmented reality glasses.

01:07:33.600 | Apple is putting a ton of money into this as well

01:07:36.080 | because it is existential for Apple.

01:07:38.880 | Apple is a trillion dollar company

01:07:40.320 | that will disappear and no longer exist

01:07:42.440 | if they don't win the fight to be the people

01:07:44.980 | who produce the best glasses that virtualize all this,

01:07:47.400 | because you don't produce iPhones

01:07:49.040 | in a world of augmented reality.

01:07:51.000 | Amazon and Google are betting big on both.

01:07:53.120 | Google is betting big on the glasses front.

01:07:55.480 | They're doing that with Magic Leap,

01:07:57.080 | which they put well over a billion dollars into.

01:08:00.240 | Amazon is trying to be the back-end computation.

01:08:02.800 | So if we don't actually have a phone,

01:08:04.320 | if we don't actually have a computer,

01:08:05.760 | where does that computation happen?

01:08:07.160 | Amazon is saying, "We'll do it.

01:08:09.200 | "We're not just virtualizing computation.

01:08:10.800 | "We're virtualizing hardware.

01:08:12.260 | "We can make anything you want happen in our servers,

01:08:14.400 | "and we'll just beam the screen to wherever you are."

01:08:16.640 | So Cameron, that is the big trend.

01:08:18.480 | That is going to be the trend

01:08:19.440 | that's going to completely upend our industry.

01:08:21.800 | Not, as Mark Zuckerberg videos would seem to imply,

01:08:25.180 | us playing cards in virtual reality in a space station

01:08:28.560 | with some of our friends.

01:08:30.280 | That's not that interesting to me.

01:08:32.560 | The thing that's going to upend our world

01:08:34.080 | is all interfaces are virtual.

01:08:36.640 | All computation happens on Amazon servers.

01:08:39.360 | And 80% of the major digital electronics companies

01:08:41.920 | that exist today no longer exist in any way,

01:08:44.440 | anywhere like how we see them today.

01:08:46.600 | That's what I would keep my eyes on,

01:08:49.200 | not being in one of these weird virtual reality

01:08:52.480 | space stations and doing Facebook with avatars

01:08:56.740 | or something like this.

01:08:57.920 | Interesting stuff could happen there,

01:08:59.180 | but that's not where my eye is right now.

01:09:01.880 | All right, well, speaking of where my eye is right now,

01:09:04.460 | I think we've run a little long,

01:09:05.580 | so we should probably wrap up this week's episode.

01:09:09.140 | Thank you to everyone who called in.

01:09:10.960 | If you go to calnewport.com/podcast,

01:09:13.720 | you can get instructions on how you too

01:09:15.460 | can submit your own listener calls.

01:09:17.500 | Videos of this episode and every question discussed

01:09:20.240 | are available on our YouTube page.

01:09:22.660 | There's a link in the show notes.

01:09:24.080 | If you like what you heard, you'll like what you read

01:09:25.940 | on my longstanding weekly email newsletter.

01:09:28.760 | You can sign up for that at calnewport.com.

01:09:31.640 | We'll be back on Monday,

01:09:32.740 | and until then, as always, stay deep.

01:09:35.240 | (upbeat music)

01:09:37.820 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:09:41.180 | [MUSIC]

Full Length Episode | #174 | February 17, 2022

Chapters