It's how do you intentionally engineer a life that's deep when you have all of these shallow, often digital distractions that are trying to pull you away from meaning. So your new book, "Build the Life You Want" is exactly the type of thing we're talking about. I'm excited to get to this blueprint type approach of how do you get intentional about designing your life.

My listeners love this, but if you'll indulge me, what I wanted to do first was actually go back and spend some time on your life story, which I have broken into four acts, each of which is really different than the last. I think it's a case study of really applying, not just intention to your life, but revision.

Okay, where are things now? Let me adjust my vision. Let me make perhaps a major change. So I thought we would start with the real life case study of designing your life with your life itself. So to start at the beginning, I have your act one as serious musician.

Would you, do I have that right? You would say this is your first act as an adult, in adult life was music. - Yeah, that was my first act as a child too. And by the way, this systemic approach to actually building your life, you're the best guy in the world to talk about this because you have this systematic, well, you do two things incredibly well.

You understand the difference between complex and complicated problems mathematically. Complex problems don't have solutions, but they're easy to understand. Complicated problems are hard to understand, but you can solve them with enough horsepower. And you understand that you can't use complicated solutions to solve complex problems. And all of this goes into the way that you're gonna build your life.

And I know we're gonna talk about this. You're the, like, you're the guy that actually understands for people how to do this. So I'm delighted to be able to be a case study for you, for this. And for your first question, music was the only part of my life that I didn't choose, actually.

It was chosen for me, perhaps divinely, I don't know. My parents, when I was four, I started violin. When I was five, I started the piano. When I was eight, I started the French horn. Eight? I mean, yeah. And I was really good at that, and that really stuck.

And it was fun, and I liked it, and I loved music, et cetera. And so that's what I was, by the time I was 10 or 11 years old, my ambition was to be the world's greatest French horn player. That was what I wanted to do. I wanted to grow up and do that.

All of my heroes were great French horn players. The greatest horn player who's ever lived is a British guy from the 1930s and '40s named Dennis Brayne. And Dennis Brayne, I had a picture of him up on my bedroom wall. I didn't have Michael Jordan, or Wilt Chamberlain. I had Dennis Brayne up on the wall.

And that's what I did. And so it was my unsuccessful run at college when I was 18. Really what it was was my heart wasn't in it because I wanted to go pro. So I left. There was a mutual decision of the college and me to pursue my excellence elsewhere, put it that way.

And I left right after my 19th birthday, and that's when I went pro in musician. I did that 'til I was 31. - Well, and I've heard that before from a professional musician friend of mine, is that these colleges that are focused on the arts, if you make it to graduation, basically means you failed.

So you go to one of these colleges. He went to Berklee School of Music in Boston. The whole pressure of that system is go pro. I should mention, by the way, Arthur, when I was eight years old, I started playing the French horn. - Did you really? - So we've got that connection.

- I'll be darned. So third or fourth grade, you started playing the French horn as well. - It was very hard. - And you made good. Look, you escaped the vortex, Cal. - It's an impossible, it's a preposterous instrument, I would say. It's so hard to play. - The physics are no good, which you don't know.

The problem is that it's almost as long as a tuba, which should make it a bass instrument. But the mouthpiece that you blow into is the size of a trumpet mouthpiece. And what that does effectively is it sets the harmonics on top of each other. They're so close that it's easy to miss notes.

The reason that French horn players notoriously are inaccurate is because the mouthpiece is too small for the length of the instrument. And so hitting the harmonic in the series right is perilous, like a tight wire rock, like being a flying Wallenda, but for the brass section. - Yeah, the trumpet players just sort of blow into that thing.

And it's like, their notes are clear. And the French horns, you have to, A, you have to blow into that thing like a hurricane force and be precise. Well, anyways, I did not have the poster of the professional French horn player. But so we see you then, you're in your twenties, you're playing, you had dropped out of school to be pro, you're playing professional French horn.

By your thirties, you are a full professor. I mean, you're an academic. You're a standard academic at Syracuse. So walk us through that transition. How do we get from, I'm playing in, was it Barcelona, to I'm on an academic track, not a typical path. So what went down there?

- Yeah, it's not a typical path. But when I was a kid, I had this theory, believe it or not. I mean, it was a kind of a precocious theory to have, I realized, but nonetheless, I had this idea that you could build your life, you've got to make your own decisions, that it was almost incumbent upon you to make a decision about different areas of your life.

And so I always figured at some point, it was my responsibility to choose my religion, not every year, like some sort of sentimentalist, but to choose my faith and practice it seriously, to choose my own political views, to make a choice on the basis of the information that's out there.

So not take things, important things in your life as given. And that meant my vocation as well. The problem is I hadn't chosen my vocation. I hadn't chosen my vocational path. And by the time I was in my mid-twenties, my life was great. I have to say, I mean, I moved to Barcelona and joined the symphony, not because of the symphony, but because I was in love with a Spanish girl.

And I chased her to Barcelona in a bid to learn the language so I could ask her to marry me, which took two years to close that deal. But we just celebrated our 32nd wedding anniversary and we have kids and grandkids at this point. So it turned out that venture was really successful.

But in that time, I realized that I was good at it, but I didn't love it. I didn't love it. I mean, I wasn't the world's greatest French horn player, but I was making a living, which isn't nothing. And so my wife, my new wife said, "Why don't you figure out what you love?

"I mean, don't you have this theory "that you get to choose everything once?" And I said, "Huh." So I actually went back to school. She was studying for her high school diploma in her late twenties. She had dropped out of high school when she was 16 to sing with a very famous rock band in Barcelona.

And so she was doing that, taking a few math classes. She said, "You gotta try math." I said, "Math?" You know, my dad was a math professor, but you know, no, it's not for me. I took calculus and it was like doing crossword puzzles, man, it was easy and fun and just great.

'Cause I was 27 or something at that point. And so I wound up enrolling in correspondence school, distance learning in Barcelona. Took a job in South Florida teaching French horn because it gave me enough time to finish my bachelor's degree by correspondence, which wound up being in economics 'cause it was so interesting, social science.

This is something I chose. And I went, I got my master's degree in economics. And by that time I was 31 and I was actually ready to try something new. So I quit and started my PhD. So I did my PhD in three years in public policy analysis. My fields were applied microeconomics and math modeling.

I was doing operations, military operations research for the US Air Force while I was in graduate school to make a living. And then I came out and took an academic job. You know, used my PhD to get an academic job as a social scientist. First at Georgia State for a little while and then at Syracuse.

And all told, that first pass through academia was 10 years where I took promotions and tenure and endowed chairs and all the stuff that you do in academia. - But when you were making that intentional vocational choice there in Spain, was the vision all the way through to academia or was it, I don't wanna do French horn anymore, let me go back to school and then we will see what that opens up?

How far in the future were you thinking? - I was, I had notions of it and the truth is that academia is the family business for me. My father was a professor, was a math professor. His father was a theology professor and an administrator at a college, at these, you know, religious colleges actually.

But it is a family profession. So I always kind of thought, you know, it's a pretty good life, et cetera, but I don't know. You know, maybe I'll try to run a company, maybe I'll, you know, go to one of these crazy think tanks, et cetera. What I really wanted to was to learn social science, which is incredibly interesting.

I mean, human behavior is the most interesting thing ever because you can use mathematical and statistical tools, complicated tools to at least apprehend some of these complex problems of human behavior. Not perfectly, this is not computer science we're talking about here, but it is amazing how much power you have.

And so I just couldn't get enough of that. I was much happier as a social scientist than I ever had been as a classical musician because it was the thing that I chose. I was passionate about it. And then when I got out of graduate school, I realized I could continue to learn and I needed to learn a lot more only if I went into academia.

So my assistant professor life, you know, before I got any, you know, I was on the tenure track, but before I got any of that tenure, it really was an extension of my PhD. I learned probably more as an assistant professor than I did in graduate school. You too, probably, right?

- Oh yeah, well, especially like teaching a course, you know, then you learn, oh, I understand this. I understand this topic now. - But also writing code. You know, I was running very sophisticated packages, you know, software packages for my statistical programming and I had to learn how to write code, which taught me the statistics.

And then I was writing a lot of theory. I was doing, you know, early AI stuff. I was doing a lot of stuff with genetic algorithms and using genetic algorithms as learning models across economies. And I had to learn how that worked. And you know, I didn't get any of that in my PhD.

- Hey, quick interruption. If you want my free guide with my seven best ideas on how to cultivate the deep life, go to calnewport.com/ideas or click the link right below in the description. This is a great way to take action on the type of things we talk about here on this show.

All right, let's get back to it. - I'll talk about a topic that has fallen out of favor. I remember genetic algorithms. You would actually evolve the algorithms with natural selection. But I think you're selling, so just to set the stage for the ions, you're being modest here because I think a misnomer a lot of people in the general public have about academia is this idea of like, well, if you get a PhD, like one of the things you can just choose to do is teach.

It's just like this teaches how it's described. It's like, yeah, you could go be a professor if you decide to or not. The reality of course is that, especially when you get to an R1 institution or an institution like Syracuse, it's incredibly competitive. It's very hard to get hired at Syracuse and then advance through the promotion chain.

So it must be what you were doing at Georgia State had a spark to it, right? So it must have been you were seen early on or maybe you were doing this on purpose. You were finding a niche that was gathering some heat or some attention because that's actually a really impressive jump.

I mean, typically, again, a professor at Syracuse would have been good school, straight out of college, in the grad school, like their whole life focused on getting hired in one of those slots. You came into it sideways. So I'm assuming what you were doing was seen as was innovative or you found a vein there that was really rich.

- Yeah, it's basically what it was. I had my eye on Syracuse 'cause Syracuse was the number one school in policy in the country at the time. And there were great professors there, people I really venerated. It was a community I wanted to be part of. And so when I came out of graduate school and went into academia at Georgia State, also a very fine university, and I enjoyed it a lot, the first thing that I did was I figured out how the system works.

The biggest mistake that professors make when they come out of graduate school is that they'll say something like, you know, I'm gonna get my courses under control, then I'm gonna start paying attention to my research. I can tell that that person's probably not gonna get tenure. The truth is that in an R1 research university, research is everything.

It really matters what you're doing in research. So I got a notion of how the traffic patterns work, and that meant basically that there was a certain number of articles in certain set of journals. I looked at those journals and the articles that I admired the most and I found most interesting.

I actually made a template of those articles. I didn't make a macro to write the articles. That's completely impossible, obviously. It's still a creative task. But I made a structure that I needed to follow, and I started to follow that particular structure, and I did that about, you know, six times in each of my first three years in academia, which gave me a real leg up and it made it possible to show that I had a big research record.

I was doing economic statistical research in public policy, which was a little bit unusual. - You were doing six papers a year, you were hitting in your journal papers in your assistant professorship years? - Yeah, that's right. Mostly sole author, which actually was a weakness. I needed to co-author a little bit more.

I could have been doing higher quality research if I'd been co-authoring with more senior people, but I was trying to keep up a speed. I mean, I was working pretty hard, I have to say, and by that time I had little kids and there was a cost to it.

I mean, I was working 60, 80 hour weeks. - That's superstar. Before our audience, six journal papers a year in that field, that's superstar level performance. I think what would be more typical is two, maybe three. So, I mean, you really, you work backwards. By the way, what you're saying reminds, this is exactly the same story that I think our mutual acquaintance, Adam Grant, has told me about when he started at Penn, was figuring out the same thing.

What do you need to write a paper? How many papers are my typical colleagues writing? All right, let me do twice that. And then he ends up the youngest tenured, youngest full professor in Penn history. So I'm sensing something very similar. You deconstructed the system and said, then let me level up.

Like, let me level up to be doing probably much more than your colleagues were at the institution at the time. - Yeah, well, I was doing more. And part of the reason is because I had a little bit of a pathological need to catch up with my cohort. So Adam Grant, who's a genius, he's unbelievable, he was the youngest guy ever tenured at Penn.

I was not the youngest guy tenured any place because I'd already had a 12 year career as a French horn player before I even went to graduate school. So by the time I graduated with my PhD, I was 34 years old. And to catch up, I kind of figured that I needed to get promotion and tenure by seven to eight years in.

And to do that, I kind of backed out the amount of productivity I thought I was gonna need to have to get there in the meantime. And that actually worked. When you understand systems, you're a lot more successful. I mean, when you understand traffic, you're less likely to have an accident or get a ticket.

And when you understand the rules of the academic road, you know what the expectations are and you can design your work patterns to that. Now, what impedes that is if you don't like doing the work. You know, the biggest problem that I see academics have is they come out of their PhD and they don't like writing articles.

They just don't enjoy it. And so they put it off and they can't get to it and they think it's boring and they go do something else or they write kind of popular stuff or whatever. And then by the time their third year review or their tenure time comes around, they don't have enough of a record.

But for me, it was a thrill. I was learning stuff like crazy. And so it was not an onerous task for me to publish, you know, five, six, seven articles a year. And my goal was to hit 60 by my 10th year. That was the whole idea. - Well, I mean, and I'll say it's just an add on to that because I went through something similar.

Soon after I started my assistant professorship, I did something similar. So I did a study. I said, I wanna go back and study past the tenure coming in my field of computer science. So what I went back and did was found natural experiments where you had two students leaving the same advisor.

So they have the same training and then looking at their time to tenure or even if they made tenure at all, right? So I had two cohorts, fast to tenure, not faster, not tenured, coming out of the same training environment. And I wrote an essay about this early on in my blog days.

And so I said, what's different? Let me quantify everything I can and say what's different. And I figured out, oh, the people who get tenure faster, it wasn't publication quantity. It wasn't so much topic. It was the number of citations of their five most cited papers. And I realized, oh, this is what's important is you have to write these, in my field, you have to write these papers that get cited a lot.

And what makes papers get cited a lot? Typically, you're making progress on a hard problem that people are working on because you've made progress on it and then people are gonna build on you. And so it was both good news and bad news. Good news because there's clarity. Bad news because it's really, really hard.

And so I further deconstructed, how do the real stars make the huge progress? And you could deconstruct it. And it was, they spent a lot of time in mathematics. Your dad would probably tell you something similar. A lot of it is deconstructing what other people have done, really understanding in your bones how the proofs work.

And this is very hard because people skip details in their papers. And if you do, then you can make progress. And that is just really, really, really hard. And so at some point, I had to make a decision. I can do pretty well here. I get tenure early and do this and that.

To be a superstar, I know exactly what that would take. And I don't think I had the stomach for it. I was like, that's just, it's so mentally demanding the deconstruction of these proofs. You have to just do it hour after hour, day after day. So it's interesting when you deconstruct.

It not only gives you the path towards where you wanna go, sometimes it changes your path because you realize, I don't exactly wanna do what's required. - Yeah, or if you allow me to analyze you a little bit, Cal, because I know some things about your career as well.

And what it really takes for that highest echelon is not just more intellectual horsepower or the willingness and ability to do that one thing for 80 hours a week for a little while. You gotta pay your dues for a long time. Anytime a band comes from no place, it's like an overnight hit, everybody's talking about it.

They've been out at a holiday inn by the airport playing, doing as a cover band for 15 years. That's what's been going on. And you gotta do that work and do that work and do that work. And if you're interested in a lot of different things, beavering away at the margins like that is not something that's necessarily going to appeal to you.

And you're, I mean, you're natural public intellectual, Cal. You wanna be in the public talking about these things that can raise consciousness among non-scientists as opposed to simply raising consciousness among in the ether of the scientists, in the rarefied atmosphere of the scientists themselves. And that's gonna make it hard, maybe impossible for you to play Beatles tunes at the holiday inn for 15 or 20 years, which is deconstructing somebody else's proofs to see what's actually going on.

It's a question of longevity in the trenches, which is hard for natural public intellectuals, I dare say. Is that fair? - I think that is probably fair. Yeah, it is. It's a grind and it's a really long grind. I mean, writing's the same way. You've experienced this as well.

It takes a lot of writing before you can write things that large audiences actually like. I got started early. I sold my first book when I was 20. I had this very long training period to actually get to a point where it's like, okay, I can sort of write something now that is good.

So everything has trenches. The trenches are long, yeah. So then why did you, if we go to the next act, is now your think tank world here in DC. So leaving academia, that's a scary thing for people with full professorships at R1 institutions. So I'm particularly interested in this.

- Yeah. - What was that decision process? - It wasn't scary, actually. And part of the reason was because I hit my number. I hit 60 articles, peer-reviewed articles. And I thought to myself, what is the, and that was around getting toward tenure. So I entered academia at 34.

Around 44, I was looking around at other opportunities to create value as a social scientist. I joined up as a part-time kind of visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute there in DC. And I was spending a day a month, something like that, doing different policy ideas. And I was starting to write sort of trade books on the side.

And so I wrote a book called "Who Really Cares" about charitable giving. It was very, it was actually quite academic, had a mathematical appendix and the whole thing. But it got noticed. You know, President Bush read it and called me to the White House. And you know, I started to get, it's not like it was some huge, big hit.

But it did change my perspective on how I could have a conversation. And I realized when I was looking at the next 10 years, I mean, 10 years is a good cadence. Now, it follows the career trajectory of the so-called spiral. I didn't know it at the time. And I've gone back and, you know, participated in the research on it at this point.

What you find is that most people think that they're linear, which is to say that they'll only change institutions or jobs when they're in the same field and have a better opportunity. For more money, more prestige, more admiration, more, more, more, whatever. But a lot of people don't have that career trajectory.

They have the spiral career trajectory, which is that they want a series of mini careers that make sense in their heads. And sometimes you take more money and sometimes you take less money and sometimes you leave the industry. And when you're in academia, it means you gotta kick away your tenure from time to time.

And after 10 years in academia, I was looking at the next 10 years and said, that's another 60 articles, you know? And that's another 60. That's another, more or less, doing the same thing. It's doing my homework and turning it in. And I got nothing against that. Some of the people I respect the most in life have done that.

But I thought, I bet there's a thing that I could do to take these ideas now and to start making them more public in public policy. My background is in policy. My PhD is in policy. I'd worked at the Rand Corporation in policy, Syracuse University, big policy school. And the next thing, obviously, was a think tank or so it seemed to me.

And so I decided I was gonna probably leave and be a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. And what surprised me is that they had a big crisis over the fact that they couldn't find a president. And so, you know, it's an old think tank. It was started in 1938.

And it's one of the better known think tanks in the world. And their longtime president was leaving. They were out of time. They had offered it to a couple of people who'd turned it down. Because it's very hard to find a think tank president. It's not a fun job, especially in Washington, D.C., for a lot of people.

And, you know, they were out of options. And I think that the last words uttered before offering me the job, a guy who had never supervised any employees and never raised a dollar, and this is a think tank based entirely on philanthropy, I think they basically were like, ah, what the hell?

You know, give it a shot. If it doesn't work out, we'll fire him and we'll be fine. Which was a little bit scary, but it also was incredibly exciting because it was the next phase, it was the next turn of the spiral is what it came out to be.

I had been teaching non-profit management, among other things, at Syracuse. I had a big, I had a round table of non-profit executives that I would be, that I was running. I was giving them, I wrote a textbook. Cal had written a textbook in non-profit management. I'd never run a non-profit.

And I thought to myself, you know, I wonder if I could do this. I mean, I was just fascinated to know whether I could do public policy and be an administrator and kind of square these circles at the same time. And so when they offered me the job over the objections of my wife, who didn't want to move to Washington, D.C., I said, "Yeah." I said, "Yeah." So she said, "Okay, okay, give it a shot." And so I ran the American Enterprise Institute for 10 years and six months, 10.5 years.

That was the second phase. And that was very interesting, I have to say. I wrote some books while I was there. And I, you know, I had a regular gig with the Wall Street Journal later, the New York Times. You know, once a month I would write a column in those places about, you know, different public policies.

And then more and more and more, back to my social science roots, I was writing about human happiness in those venues, as a matter of fact. And I was also learning how to raise money. I had to raise $50 million a year. You know, I had a major building project.

I was hiring scholars. I had 310 employees. And it was, that was a lot, that was hard work. I have to say, that was very, very hard work. And so that was the next 10.5 years, the next challenge. That was part three of the career. - I guess, if you're breaking it into four parts, that's part three, right?

- That's part three, right? Yeah, okay, it is part three. Yep, that's act three. That's, I mean, it's still fascinating to me, though. It's walking away from tenure. But it makes sense. You said, "I did this 10-year chunk. "What's the next 10 years?" So I'm assuming, is the way you were thinking is, okay, here's a particular place to take my spiral.

Let's go to nonprofit management. Let's just try this. Let's actually have a policy impact. I'm assuming the other option you were trying to consider is how do I reconfigure my academic career for the next, a lot of that happens around that point. All right, I wanna build a new theoretical framework.

I want to publish the definitive book. I wanna change the way, I mean, it seems like this is what's needed for energy in academia, is that 10 years in, post-promotions, you need to either do something differently, or within academia itself, you have to come up with some new grand project.

So you weren't that scared walking away from tenure? You were figuring-- - I mean, I was pretty nervous. I wasn't nervous walking away from tenure because I knew, you know, I had a good research record and I was walking away from the number one school in my field, meaning that if I got fired from AEI, which was, by the way, pretty likely, that getting back into academia wouldn't be that hard.

And the jobs that people were offering me at that point were either full professorships or administrative jobs. You know, when this was going on, a lot of places were coming and saying, how about thinking about being a dean? You know, policy schools. Some local people in the Syracuse came and asked if I thought I might want to run for Congress, which was kind of an interesting challenge.

There were a lot of weird things going on. I went home with that one to my wife. She said, well, as you know as Catholics, we don't believe in divorce. So, you know, that was-- - So you can't run for Congress, yeah. - Yeah, no, no, yeah, yeah. And by the way, I would have lost anyway.

Like, who wants this, you know, this mug for Congress? It's like, we're not ready for bald politicians. But the whole point is that it was, there was a lot of stuff in the air because I knew that the spiral was turning, and the universe conspires when the spiral is turning to give you options, and if you don't take 'em, shame on you, right?

I mean, it's really what it comes down to. So I knew that it was gonna be fine giving up my tenure. What I didn't know is if I was gonna be ignominiously humiliated by not being able to raise money or having some sort of revolt by the scholars or getting, you know, stomped in Washington, D.C.

And I gotta tell you, that was pretty stressful, and at times, it was pretty scary. - Right, it's the end of a, within six months, the building's on fire. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, I remember, you know, I got some bad press pretty early on. I had to make a lot of personnel moves just for the good of the institution and for our budget.

I mean, it was, I went in on January 1st, 2009 in the teeth of the Great Recession. You know, we had blown a 10% hole in our budget in the last quarter before I came in, and I had to cut our cost structure by 16% in our first 64 days on the job, and I hadn't run anything ever in my life.

I hadn't run anything. - Yep. - And so the result was, I was getting a lot of advice, you know, and people were, when you run an organization like that, a lot of people come out of the shadows and give you a list of the people that they think you should fire.

Every, 'cause I had like 20 lists, and they were all, they were all orthogonal. I mean, it's like, everybody's list had everybody else on it. And so this was completely unhelpful, and it was scary, it was tough. I got lit up in the press a little bit from time to time, but I gotta tell you, it got tougher.

- Yeah. - Which probably makes the publishing world seem easy now, which-- - Oh my gosh, yeah. Academia, academic politics, are you kidding me? No problem. - No problem, because no one actually cares. Yeah, it's the, the academic politics, the old joke is sort of like, the intensity of the responses grows with the decreasing actual, like, impact of what's being discussed.

- Yeah, that's an old Kissinger, that's an old Kissinger maxim, isn't it? - It's about true. I'd say the more trivial it is, the more people are standing on the desk at the faculty meeting. All right, let's take a brief break from my conversation with Arthur to talk about one of the sponsors that makes this show possible.

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Also wanna talk about our friends at Shopify, whether you're selling a little or a lot, Shopify helps you do your thing, however you cha-ching. Now you've heard me talk about it before. Shopify is a global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the, I'm just launching my first online stop shape, stage to your first real life store stage, all the way to the, how do we just hit a million order stage?

Shopify is there to help you grow, whether you're selling scented soap or outdoor outfits, or in the case of Jesse and I, we have a new line of t-shirts where instead of having the common workplace phrase, "Could this meeting have been an email?" We are now gonna have a shirt that says, "Could this meeting have been a telegram?" Let's see, we're trying to push a simpler, more nostalgic type of technological future.

I think the telegraph is gonna come back, so we really wanna push that. They have all-in-one e-commerce platforms. They also have in-person point-of-sale systems that all work seamlessly together. Their e-commerce checkouts are the best in the business. They help you turn browsers into buyers. They get a 36% better on average conversion rate for people who make it to your checkout as compared to the industry standard.

They also now have an AI-powered assistant called Shopify Magic, so you really are taking advantage of all the technology you can to get those sales. So you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period. That's great, $1 per month, Jesse, it's a great deal. - Yeah. - $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/deep.

Make sure that's all lowercase letters. That's Shopify, S-H-O-P-I-F-Y, Shopify.com/deep. Go there now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in. That's Shopify.com/deep. (bell dings) So then we get your final act. Actually, this transition's maybe the one I'm even most interested in, which is where you leave the think tank world to essentially positive psychology, writing, some teaching.

It's a significant change towards much more autonomous, sort of direct to consumer impact, meaning readers and students. Would you say the seed, because I'm just trying to read between the tea leaves, was the initial seed for this transition of leaving the think tank world, I got to write books basically full-time and also teaching the course at Harvard, was the seeds of this, where you had started doing some regular writing for the Journal and the Times, and it began to shift from the policy-type stuff you would expect from the head of, from the public policy professor, the head of Enterprise Institute, to the positive psychology type, more direct to people.

Was that the seed planted right there? You could have another spiral turn coming up that was gonna be much more just you directly interacting with people. - Yeah, it was a couple of different things. One of them was that I had been working on the supply side of good ideas for a long time, and I realized along the way that it's much more powerful to work on the demand side.

It's one thing to say I've got 75 whiz-bang ideas about the carried interest provision of the Internal Revenue Code and the new bomber force at the Pentagon or whatever, and have people go, "Huh, what?" including members of Congress, and sometimes it sticks, but you get tons of attention if you foment a real hunger for a better life.

And the way to do that is by talking about love and happiness. And I was a social scientist with a background in studies on love and happiness. So I thought to myself, I wanna go back, number one, I wanna go to the demand side, because what I wanna do with the rest of my life is lift people up and bring them together.

That's what I wanna do with the rest of my life. I wanna use science and ideas to lift people up and bring them together. It's a purely personal and very ethical and moral mission that I have for what my life means, quite frankly. It's my, that's my mission statement, literally, is that's how I wrote my mission statement.

And the best way to do that, I thought, is go back to my roots as a social scientist to dedicate myself to creative work and to work on the demand side. And I thought, well, what does that mean? How do I do that? And it seemed to me that that meant kind of a combination, once again, as a system of three parts to it.

Number one is I wanna teach leaders. I wanna teach, I wanna foment this demand on the side of leaders, I wanna make them hungry to have a better life and to become teachers of a better life as leaders themselves at the best place I can and to find the best possible future leaders.

The second part is I want my work to be public-facing. In other words, I want my research to be public-facing because I knew perfectly, based on my own research, that at that point, I was 55 years old, that I wasn't gonna be doing the best bench science. I was not gonna be pouring stuff into test tubes or for my field that's doing natural experiments and analyzing huge datasets, large dataset econometrics.

I'm not gonna be able to do that as creatively as younger people. I'm gonna be able to do public-facing work where I recognize patterns, tell stories, write lucidly. That's what older people are better at. And I wanted a public audience, so I wanted to be kind of a professor of practice where practice didn't mean telling war stories in the classroom.

It meant taking academia to the masses. That's what I wanted to do for the writing. And the last part is I wanted to be out on the road doing public-facing work. I wanted to be doing workshops and speeches. And I figured I could do that. The teaching part, per se, is about 20 hours a week.

The research part is 20, 25 hours a week. And the last part I could do on 15 or 20 hours a week and make it part of a public intellectual profile that maybe a university would value. So that's when I went out and I talked to a bunch of universities.

I talked to 10 universities. I said I'm retiring as president of AEI. - Okay. - How does this sound? And a bunch of really, really good universities said, "That sounds pretty interesting." And I decided it was a good idea to get out of Dodge, leave Washington, because it's not great for me to be walking up and down the halls of my old institution saying, "Don't fire my friends," that kind of thing, because the new guy needs space to do it.

And he's doing an outstanding job, by the way. He'll be the best president that place has ever had. A guy named Robert Doerr, you probably know him. But I needed to get out of town, and so I went to a place that's kind of interesting, and a city that's kind of interesting, and literally one of the very greatest universities in the world, which is Harvard.

And they split my time between the Kennedy School, which is the policy school, and the business school, which trains, obviously, executives. And in the business school, I created my happiness science class called Leadership and Happiness. And in the Kennedy School, I created my lab, which was the Leadership and Happiness Lab.

And between those two things, and the writing, speaking, teaching, it's kind of worked out more or less the way that I saw the architecture. And it's been incredibly exciting. I have to say, I'm by far the happiest in my career at this point. - Interesting. So this was more systematic than I would have guessed.

So you knew at some point, 10 years we're gonna sunset the presidency. - Yeah, I told them. I told them at five years in. They said, "So what are we talking about, 20?" And I said, "No, we're talking about 10." So they deferred all of my comp to 10 years and six months, all of my pension, all of my retirement at AEI to 10 years and six months.

So that last year was a big check, I have to say, but it was the last check, and it was that by design. - Interesting, interesting. So then you were surveying the landscape and saying, "How do I leverage "what we would call a career capital?" And you're saying, "Well, I have the academic background." Because of that, you knew about things like professors of practices, that these positions actually existed, these full-time non-tenure line positions.

It was all just intricacies of how... I don't know if that's the situation you have, but I'm assuming that's what you were looking for. - Yeah, yeah, totally. I was looking for something that has kind of an industrial tenure, which is to say five-year rolling contract, so you can count on something, you know exactly what you're looking at, but that would value the public intellectual portfolio and see it as something that's really useful to the university.

So I'm not doing any work on the side. Everything is on the whole. The work that I do out giving talks to different groups at universities and et cetera, community groups, it actually feeds into the work that I do at my academic lab and gives me ideas that I'm using in the classroom, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm also creating pathways for my students to be able to go into businesses in different places with their happiness expertise. - Yeah, so you came in and said, "This is exactly what I'm going to do. "I'm not just teaching and I'm not doing research "in the traditional lab sense.

"I am going to be writing and speaking "and it's going to be a book every so often. "It's going to be my regular columns. "This is going to be my contribution." And so there's a term for that, a book I wrote a long time ago, actually a decade ago, "So Good They Can't Ignore You." I had this term I borrowed from Derek Sivers where he said, "Use money as a neutral indicator "of value of your plans." Basically, see if someone will actually give you money for this thing you have, this idea, and that's actually the best feedback on whether or not it's good or not as opposed to just people saying, "No, that sounds great.

"You should do that. "You should quit and write a book. "That sounds romantic." You essentially did that. If this was a good idea, these universities would say, "Yes, we will actually hire you on a five-year contract. "We want you to come and do this "so you have full confidence." So you go and then this succeeds really well.

So your, I mean, I know "Love Your Enemies," your book "Love Your Enemies" maybe came out right after you left, but I'm assuming that was something you made a book on. - That was AEI. That was during the AEI years, yeah. - So from strength to strength, this is your first big test of the, let's do a big public-facing thing.

The book explodes. It's a huge, huge bestseller. Everyone's talking about it. It sells a ton of copies. So what, bring us behind why that book succeeded. What was the ingredients coming together? We have a lot of aspiring writers in my audience. What made that book so successful? - Well, good luck.

I mean, you know perfectly that there's a lot of serendipity that goes into it, that goes into book publishing. And, you know, if you're thinking, well, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna leave academia and then I'm gonna go and write a, or a think tank or whatever, I'm gonna go write a huge bestseller.

Well, most, there's a lot of books out there and most aren't. And a lot of really successful authors and a lot of really great books aren't successful by market measures. You know, you, it's great. I mean, probably all of your books have been bestsellers, but you're pretty unusual in this way.

And I've written, I've written a number of books that let's just say weren't bestsellers, you know, and then I thought that they were really good ideas, including a book on the science of happiness in 2008, before I left academia the first time that was, you know, everybody thought it was gonna be a big deal and it was not a big deal, right?

And so there's a lot of serendipity that goes into it. But I've been looking at the market niche when it came to the happiness world that was just simply not being filled. And that was people in the second half of their lives. How can you design the second half of, how can you work in the first half of your life and design the second half of your life using the principles that I was able to see in big data sets and, you know, all the behavioral science and the new neuroscience that was coming out because I've had to retrain myself in neuroscience in a huge way.

You can't be a good social scientist today and not know some neuroscience, just you can't do it. And when I got my PhD in 1998, nobody knew any neuroscience. So I, you know, I've had to go back and I've been studying neuroscience very seriously for the past five years so that I don't have authority in it.

I'm not writing research, primary research in it, but I'm a really good consumer of that research for my column in my books. And I went and I said, "Look, what is it about the second half of life "that we need to understand? "What are your natural strengths? "How can you be a striver, a hardworking person, "not burn out, not become frustrated, "not go in decline and not to feel empty and alone "when you actually have to stop your nine to five?

"How do you do it? "What's the secret on all these things?" And I wrote that book. And the reason it was relatively popular is because people wanted that, people needed that, and it didn't exist. You go do a thing that isn't out there at this particular point. I designed the book the same way that I would have a startup that, you know, in biotech, you don't go saying, "I'm gonna make a new nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug, "you know, a new kind of ibuprofen." You go out and you say, "I'm gonna start a company that makes a large molecule drug "that tries to take on a disease "that currently doesn't have a cure.

"I'm gonna take a big shot." But the whole point is that people want it. Once again, there's demand, but there isn't supply. On that, that's the way to write a book. And so that's what I did. And that's probably the reason it was fairly popular. - Yeah, it's always that combination.

A topic that people really wanna hear about plus the right person to write about it. You gotta have, you have those two things, you have it. I mean, I guess David Brooks sort of had indicated with the second mountain, you know, a few years earlier, like, okay, there's people thinking about this.

But the second mountain was not nearly as beat-by-beat pragmatic. Like, here are the elements that go into this and here's why they matter and let's get into the science of it. It was a little bit more philosophical, I suppose, for David Brooks. - Yeah, I mean, there's two different ways to look at a startup or a book or anything that's a new creative endeavor.

There's sort of the conventional entrepreneurship, which is to say there's a ton of demand, but there's no supply, so I'm gonna go create the supply. And the other is that there could be demand, but people just don't know it yet. That's even scarier. I mean, that's the iPhone challenge.

So, I mean, Steve Jobs said, "Hey, see this thing in my hand? "You don't know what it is. "It's a computer in your hand that does everything." People are like, "I don't want it." And like, "Yeah, you do, trust me." And that's a really scary thing to do. That's when somebody writes a book that nobody knew they needed in the first place.

And that's the, those are the, you know, that's the seven habits of highly effective people or how to win friends and influence people or the Bible or, you know, these things that go so stratospheric that you can't believe it. From Strength to Strength was a book that people were asking for that had never been written by a social scientist, by a scientist, basically.

And so, yeah. - And how important was the being the right person to write it piece? So beyond just your story included a big shift in middle age, the shift away from the nonprofit, but also the fact that you're at Harvard and the fact that you had these regular columns.

I think this sometimes gets underappreciated when people think about how you have a cultural impact, really working to get the right cultural foundation from which to then do the things. I'd say, did you have that sense that, how important was that foundation of brand names that was there to sort of get you over the hurdle of like, who is this and why are we listening to it?

- Or the platform for sure. It's actually more that the platform is really important, but for I think a slightly different reason. And this is a super important question that you're asking, I think. There are a lot of people that want the public intellectual life, but they're kind of autodidacts.

And one of the things that I'm doing all day long is recommending that people go get a PhD. I'm doing it all day long. And again, you know, I'm not using everything I did in my PhD every single day, but here's the thing. One of the things that's most important about the intellectual life is that you need a long period of time to think.

Why? Because you get much better at thinking and life doesn't give this to you. Look, I mean, your whole career is about, you know, serious deep work, you know, and part of the reason is because we're so unbelievably distracted, but even if you have periods of, you know, deep work over the course of your day, you need months and years to just knock your head against the wall, solve problems, reason things out, be befuddled, because you become a much better, clearer, linear thinker.

I mean, whether you're doing English literary criticism or, you know, linear programming, that's, you know, the PhD has really no substitute in our culture for becoming incredibly expert at something and thinking for a long time. And that's one of the reasons that, you know, if you can do that and then leverage that into a serious body of work that a university will take seriously, and on top of that, a really great university, then that creates a platform and a brand, but behind it is this non-autodidactic truth that you need training.

We just need training. - Yeah, you got to get used to it. You have to, I mean, from strength to strength, right? You have years of thinking about that. Then you have this article, what was it? Maybe 2019, where you have an Atlantic piece that's trying out the ideas.

- Right. - That goes really well. That's another piece of this, writing for major publications. I've definitely found this. Gives you a chance to stress test ideas against reaction as well. So you have years of thinking, and then you're testing, and most of the ideas, yeah, I write it, I put it out there in a long-form article.

It's not really doing something. And then you occasionally get something that really seems to create a frision of energy, and after all of that, you're like, now I think I have something I'm willing to write a book about. That's a long process. - That is a long process, and it's a really critical point that you're making for anybody who's trying to do this, that you and I have the same process, obviously.

The way, when I write a book, it starts off by me talking about an idea. And so I talk about an idea, and what I usually have, is I do about 175 speeches a year outside the university, so I do a lot of public speaking. And I always have three or four real stump speeches, but there's always a bunch that I'm trying out.

And they're based on a bunch of different ideas, and a lot of things that I'm reading, and I put 'em together. I murder board a talk before I take it out on the road, so that I have reps on it, and so I know which jokes work. I know whether the beginnings and the endings work.

A lot of that I learn from being a French horn player. Slow everything down. Watch your tapes. Get people to adjudicate the performance of the thing before you're doing it in public. Memorize the beginning and memorize the ending, so it's not extemporaneous, 'cause there's not so much throat clearing when you're nervous, et cetera, et cetera.

Then I'll talk about something for usually six months, and then I'll write something that's not a 1,200 word piece. It's usually a 7,000 word piece based on all the things that I've been thinking about by talking about it. I learn by having conversations, typically. That's the kind of learner that I am.

And I write, I beta test it in the long piece where the stakes are low. I mean, who cares if not that many people read it? It'll just drop off the leaderboard of the Atlantic or something quickly. But if it lights up, if it's a big deal, then I know it's something big, and then I start digging into the book version is the way that that works.

But that's a long process of internally cogitating, of exposing ideas to external scrutiny, of fermenting the ideas in a productive way so that they actually get better in the age a little bit. And you can't, you know it's like, hey, I had an idea for a book and I wrote it.

No way, that's the recipe for a terrible book. - This used to be my, the thing I was known for early in my career as a professor, they would often invite me to come to dissertation boot camps where doctoral students work on dissertations. You'd get together, kind of motivate each other, and you'd have some speakers come in, and they would have me come speak.

And the thing I'd always get mad about was, and this was maybe a futile battle, is that all the other speakers, all the terminology was all focused on writing. You got to make sure you write, put in time to write, get your pages every day. You got to keep writing.

We got to help each other writing. And I was always coming in and saying, well, what about thinking? I mean, you need to be thinking about thinking. Do you have enough time for think? How do you think? Where do you go to think? We don't talk enough about thinking as a standalone term.

This is something curmudgeonly, I guess, academics like us like to think about. But we don't think enough about thinking, and it's different than writing. The whole culture of writing online, sort of instruction is all about pages. - Yeah, you know, I think first, talk second, then write third. And then I write short form first, medium form second, and long form third.

And so when you get a book that I write, it's been in there, it's been rolling. The problem with it is that by the time the book comes out, I don't want to talk about it anymore. I don't want to talk about the next thing. But then, of course, you're on tour, and then you're on tour for the next year.

So, you know, "From Strength to Strength" came out in February of 2022, and I'm still talking about it. You know, 'cause people are saying, "Can you come talk about that book?" But yeah, I mean, these are pretty nice problems to have. - Yeah, well, okay, then that brings us where we wanted to get to from the beginning, which is the newer book, "Build the Life You Want." This is co-authored with Oprah Winfrey.

So what's this step? I think for most people, this is completely mind-boggling. They assume, you know, Stedman showed up at your house with, you know, Oprah's favorite, like some sort of trumpets blaring, but I'm sure it was probably much more prosaic than that. How did this come to be?

And this is also for you pretty quick. This is breaking your two-year rule, and I'm assuming when Oprah comes, you break your two-year rule. So how did we get from strength to strength is out, it's doing well, within a year and a few months after that, your new book is out?

- So yeah, that was, so I have a column in "The Atlantic" at this point. You know, during the coronavirus epidemic, I wasn't able to go out on the road. I had more time for creative work at home, you know, in the silence of my head, where I have, you know, the sounds of screaming children, et cetera.

Ever since my kids moved out, I have it inside my head as opposed to outside. And I thought, well, let's try some new things. And I'm, you know, I've been friends for a while with Jeff Goldberg, who's the editor of "The Atlantic." And he said, "Why don't we do a happiness column "on the science of happiness?" You know, you write these longer form pieces.

I said, "Okay." So we started this column and it was really popular. You know, it's 1,200 or 1,300 words weekly on a different topic. And so it's kind of like writing a lay version of the literature review part of an academic article on a different topic every week, which is an incredible challenge, but it's super interesting.

I mean, it's like, I can't believe, I mean, today I just turned in a column about why you might not want to be the boss. Every, you have a, the evolutionary psychology says, get, rise in the hierarchy, rise in the hierarchy, get promoted, get promoted. And that's an imperative from mother nature for you to get more mates and survive, but it's not an imperative to get happier 'cause mother nature doesn't care if you're happier.

Here are the costs based on natural experiments where people are promoted or not and what actually happened to their emotional life in the two years after their promotion. And I said, if you tend toward anger or loneliness, don't become the boss, fight mother nature. That's what I wrote. I turned that one in today.

It's for nine weeks from now. I'm about eight or nine weeks out of my column. And I, you know, I give suggestions and I live out the suggestions, et cetera. Super interesting. So I'm putting that column out there and we get about 500,000 readers a week on that column.

And I don't know who they are. I don't know who they are. You know, I found, I find out from the editor that, you know, some, you know, former president reads the column. Cool, that's great. But it turns out that one of my regular readers during coronavirus when we're all locked down was Oprah Winfrey, who's super interested in ideas.

I mean, she's a high caliber intellect and she's very interested in all kinds of ideas and interested in the science of happiness. So she's reading it. When the new book comes out, "From Strength to Strength" back in February, 2022, she read it when it, on the first day it hit the market and called me up.

This is Oprah Winfrey. And I'm like, yeah, and I'm Batman, right? I mean, turns out it's Oprah Winfrey. - She just called. - Yeah, I mean, her team called my team, et cetera. But we, so we wound up talking, right? And she said, we think about things in much the same way.

Why don't you come on my podcast to talk about your book, which we did. And we were like a house on fire. Her mission is the same as mine. It's just different means of getting at it. Lift people up and bring them together with ideas. Lift them up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love.

That's what we want, right? I mean, a better society, happier people. It's beautiful. And so we decided, why don't we team up on something? We kicked around a bunch of different ideas, texting back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And finally she says, you know, if I had my show, she had a show for 25 years, an iconic show that was on from the time that I was in my early 20s on national television.

And I mean, it really, really brought people together. I mean, millions of five, 10 million people a day watched that show. And what she would do is she would find somebody who had a bunch of ideas she thought was interesting and have them on the show 30 times and launch those ideas into the zeitgeist.

She said, if I had my show, I'd have you on 30 times, but I don't have a show. So why don't I host a book? You know, we do it that way where, you know, we write together this book on the science of happiness. That's kind of a conversation between us and I'm putting in the connective tissue and then we'll read it for the audio version.

And I said, cool, that's awesome. And so basically I went back, we wove together a bunch of stuff that had been in columns, but it was fundamentally about the neuroscience and social science of emotional self-management. How you treat what's going on inside your head with the same seriousness as you treat your job.

Because most people think, you know, there's nothing I can do about my feelings. My feelings happen to me. That's actually completely wrong. It's a missed opportunity to have a much happier life. It's the single biggest mistake that people make is thinking that. So we tested a bunch of these ideas.

We murder boarded the concepts. I wrote the book chapters and we passed them back and forth and she edited and added stuff, et cetera, et cetera. And we published that book in September of this year, September of 2023, Build the Life You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier.

And it was, Cal, it was a total blast. I gotta tell you, working with Oprah Winfrey is as fun as it sounds. - Now, I already gave a rave review of this book on the show because it's so connected to the way that we talk about the deep life here, which is identify the different areas of life that are important and give each of those attention.

I think that approach, which was the exact structure of the book, well, let's talk about work, but let's talk about faith, let's talk about family. Did you start in this murder boarding process, was it a situation where you started with 10 or a dozen candidates for these are areas that really matter for paying attention to and then it narrowed down as you begin to develop it?

Or after three years or two and a half years of doing the column, was it a 30 minute conversation where you're saying, it is clear that these are the five things? Like, I mean, I can see, I've been doing this. What was that process like finding the buckets you told people to focus on?

- Yeah, the first, yeah, so I had a concept of what I thought it might be and then we got to, Oprah Winfrey and I got together at her place. She has a, she lives in Southern California and we got together for a period of time together where we just stayed, you know, I stayed in her guest house and we took our meals together and we would just work on the work on work on the structure of the manuscript and we would test ideas and we had people from her team, people from my team saying, no, it's not gonna work, that doesn't make sense, et cetera.

And so that was the basis of the original idea. Then as I started getting into the writing, as you know, when you write it, it's not the same. When you write it, it's not so easy because it turns out the things that made sense in your head don't make sense on the page anymore.

And so that's when I started passing out ideas and doing kind of internal murder boarding with my students. You know, I would try out ideas in my lectures. I would ask students for feedback 'cause my graduate students, my MBA students at the Harvard Business School, they're phenomenal. They're smart, they're interesting, they're interested, they're curious, it's really great.

Asking people that I was pretty familiar with, you know, the people I had worked with, especially junior people at the American Enterprise Institute to help me out with these ideas as well. She was doing the same thing. Then we got back together and put together a kind of a mega manuscript and started down selecting ideas so it would be the right length.

The right length for a book like this, it's about the same length as most of your books, around 60,000 words. And the reason is you wanna keep people's attention enough that they can read the whole book in a weekend and they can absorb the idea. There's a lot of research on this.

If it takes them three weeks, by the end of the book, they're not gonna remember the beginning. And that's a problem and most people will drop off. I mean, there's all that literature out there about nobody finishes books. You know, you want people to actually finish the book. And so more than 60,000 words is gonna be a problem.

The original version of the manuscript was closer to 100,000 words. And we just started murdering parts of it. Just kill it, kill it, kill it, kill it, kill it, and cutting it down until we had the essential part where the fat was stripped out. And that was the book.

- Well, and then my final question here, 'cause I know we're short on time. My audience has a real hunger for exactly what you're doing in that book, which is let's get systematic in thinking through our life. Are you picking up this exact same strong signal from your students, from the audience that are reading this book?

What is your take on what it is right now, sort of post-pandemic, late 2023? What is your take on what people are hungry for in terms of their life at this moment? - People are hungry to feel like they have control over their own lives and their own feelings, their own emotions.

And they feel like they don't. They feel like they don't. They feel like they're being managed by their own emotional processes and managed by the outside world, managed by the distraction industrial industry that you talk about really compellingly all the time. They're feeling like they're being managed and they're feeling out of control.

That's one of the reasons that you see such an uptick in generalized anxiety and clinical depression. I mean, the symptoms of clinical depression, if you believe this, are up by about 4X since the beginning of COVID and are not dropping at this point. And it has everything to do with the fact that we're being exogenously managed.

And the whole point is it doesn't have to be the case. And so that's the big idea from my class is if there's one word that characterizes my class, it's metacognition, which is thinking about thinking, which is awareness of your own emotional processes. When you are aware, consciously aware of your subconscious processes, when your prefrontal cortex is paying attention to your limbic system, you have power.

You have practically unbridled power, but it doesn't come naturally. You know, we're very reactive creatures. We want our limbic system, it flies out of control. It does all kinds of crazy things all the time. It delivers us emotions constantly and people are manipulating our limbic system. When you understand the basic neuroscience and social science of how emotions work, then you can actually develop a repertoire of techniques from meditation to prayers of petition, to journaling, to therapy, to walking in nature and grounding yourself, et cetera, et cetera.

And always using the techniques of deep work, by the way, no joke, your stuff is completely, as you know, complimentary to this. You can, in this metacognitive state, you can manage your emotions so they don't manage you and then you have power of your life, power you never thought you had.

So this is intended to be a compliment for many of the techniques that people think of in the self-improvement literature of how to structure their day, how to structure their work, how to structure their life. This is how to structure your feelings in your mind alongside of all that.

- Which is, and I'll say for my listeners, one of the really cool and distinctive parts of Build A Life You Want is that right up front, you're talking about metacognition. Like right up front, you're talking about emotions and feelings, which is a big change because this field tends to be very action-focused.

Like, well, you need to make this plan and then execute this plan and it's all about mechanistic and that's something I loved about the book is that it's very aware that your emotions, your thought patterns is everything when it comes to your perception of life, the actions you take.

It's a very aware book. So I know we're short on time, so I wanna point people towards the right places to bathe in more of this wisdom from Arthur Brooks. The two books we talked about mainly was From Strength to Strength and Build The Life You Want. Your column, that's still running in The Atlantic, right?

What does that call for people who are looking for it? - How to Build A Life. - How to Build A Life. - How to Build A Life. By the way, The Life You Want is Oprah's show, internet show, so How to Build A Life plus The Life You Want is like those two products that a baby called Build The Life You Want.

So How to Build A Life is my column every Thursday morning in The Atlantic. - Excellent, and then do you do, what about online platform, social, et cetera? - I do, I'm on social. I'm on Instagram and I'm on Twitter, X, whatever it's called. What I do is I use it as a way to put out content around this subject.

I'm not on it for my edification or to find news or to have conversations or God knows not to get into fights with other people. I'm using it to broadcast what I think are really good ideas to edify other people as well. And then I have a lot of stuff on YouTube.

I have a lot of, you know, Oprah and I just dropped three video casts on YouTube that are on YouTube and actually on the Starbucks app of all things, which is kind of an interesting thing. So you can, you know, sip your venti dark roast while watching me and Oprah talk about the limbic system if that floats your boat.

- It's 100% what I want to do. - Well, this is great. So Arthur Brooks, thank you very much. And thanks for coming on the show. This was a fantastic and thank you. It may seem like we didn't talk a ton about the details of the last book, but it's all we talked about.

Because your life, I think, and the way you're thinking is just this fantastic case study into how a really thoughtful, intentional person shapes and reshapes their lives. I think it's gonna be very useful to my audience. So thank you again for coming on. - Thanks, Cal. And thank you for the work that you're doing.

It's really enriched me an awful lot. I mean, the systems thinking for my own life. When I see somebody who thinks the same way and has thought more deeply, even about those details, it's been really helpful. So that's the reason you've got a big audience that includes me. - There we go.

We feel seen. All right, thanks, Arthur. - Thanks. - All right, so that was my conversation with Arthur Brooks. I thought that was fantastic. Learned a lot. Interesting guy. Really interesting, thoughtful guy, the way that he has crafted his life. And I particularly appreciated that little detail, Jesse, about him spending time, the way he wrote that book with Oprah was to just go live in her guest house in Montecito.

You got to find a way to coauthor a book with Oprah. That just sounds awesome. - Yeah. - Just a lot of like cozier sheets and good smelling candles. That'd just be fantastic. - Lots of places to read and do deep work. - Exactly. I love it. Just be like me and Stedman just reading books.

That's all I know about Oprah. Dr. Phil comes by every once in a while and we just like chat. - Yeah. - All my Oprah knowledge is from circa 2004, basically. Anyways, thank you, Arthur, for coming on the show. Definitely check out his new book, "Build the Life You Want." So we have a third segment here in honor of the holidays and in honor of Oprah.

My list of my favorite completely unnecessary and embarrassingly geeky things of 2023. First, let me just mention one other sponsor that helped make this show possible. That's our friends at Roan. Here's the thing. When closets were due for a radical reinvention and Roan stepped up to the challenge, Roan's commuter collection is the most comfortable, breathable, and flexible set of products known to man.

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All right, Jesse, here we go. My favorite completely unnecessarily and embarrassingly geeky things from 2023. So the idea here is instead of talking about common sense or useful things that most normal human beings would say, this makes sense and I should have this, I wanna talk about the weird, the weird, almost embarrassingly geeky things that I really buy that are unnecessary and I grow to love.

The type of things I talk about on my classic deep or crazy segment where I asked Jesse, was this deep that I bought this or does it make me a madman? And so I figured there's six of you in the audience that are gonna actually resonate with these suggestions, but that's good.

We need to celebrate the idiosyncratic and geeky. We have to celebrate sometimes going all in on getting deep in ways that's entirely superfluous. All right, so I have five things, Jesse, and I have them all with me. - Yes. - So if you are listening, you might wanna go check out the video here.

You go to thedeeplife.com/listen, look for episode 280. At the bottom, there'll be the videos from the episode. You can get the video for the whole thing. You see me talk to Arthur, but come on, this is the main thing you wanna see. I will show off my five completely unnecessary, embarrassingly geeky things.

All right, number one, I'm gonna go grab this. This is my Unnecessary Hipster Keyboard. This is by Nufi, N-U-P-H-Y. Gotta look up the title here. Let me hold it up so you can see it. This is a Nufi Air 78, Air 75. What this is is a mechanical keyboard.

So the keys actually have a physical switch with a spring. So you press it down and the spring pushes it back up again. This is what keyboards used to be like until Apple and others introduced these membrane-based keyboards where you press down, it's just squeezing rubber and making a connection.

These are the old-fashioned clickety clacks. I'll do some by the microphone here. Clickety clack keyboard. You can type much faster on these because you get a return on the finger. So you press down and it pushes your finger back up so you can move it and get to the next key faster without having to pull it up as quickly.

I got this in part because the problem, we've talked about this before, but the problem with the current generation of MacBook Airs is they switch to a cheaper plastic on the keyboard and I wore away, I wore away all of the numbers and all the letters on my keyboard.

And it really frustrated me. So I wanted a better keyboard. This is really high quality plastic. It's not gonna wear away. I spend so much time writing and not just casually writing like emails, but hard writing like New Yorker articles or chapters for my books or my newsletter. And I don't know, it completely unnecessary, but I feel much more definitive when I'm typing on this.

Like I'm thinking harder. I don't know, I love it. Completely unnecessary, my hipster keyboard. - Did you have color options for that? - It comes with, this is the color options it comes with. It also has cool lights that come on when you type. You can replace any key on this though.

So it comes with a tool. You can pop the key case caps off and put any key caps you want. They snap back onto the switch. So people super customize these and you can replace these over time. I love it, I don't know. I really like typing on it.

All right. Number two from 2023. We've talked about this on the show before, but I will show it off. My Remarkable 2 digital notebook. All right, so this is a, it's a notebook, but it uses the same sort of e-ink technology that you might see on a Kindle. So I'll show this for those who are watching.

Let me do something thicker here. So you write on this and as you write, it shows up on the screen like you're writing on paper. It has, they've really worked on the feel of it so that it does have the same drag more or less like paper. So it has a very paper-like feel.

You can create endless notebooks on here, endless pages, endless notebooks, and the whole thing is constantly syncing with the cloud. So everything in here is available online. You're not gonna lose it. So it's like having a stack of 20 notebooks with you just in this package, wherever you go.

I have used this as a replacement for basically all of the notebooks I use for keeping track of ideas or scratch paper for working on ideas. I think I have well over a dozen virtual notebooks stored in here right now. So some of these will be idea notebooks. I'm working on an article or a book and I just wanna have a place to keep ideas.

Some of these are my computer science-related notebooks where I'll actually work out math if I'm working on a theory paper. There's a place for me to store and always go back and find that math. I can and I have just gone into the cloud, grabbed sheets from some of these notebooks as PDFs and sent them to collaborators.

Oh, look, this is what I was talking about. I also use this for a lot of planning, a lot of the planning for my media company, strategy, ideas. I've replaced my Moleskine where I used to keep ideas about just living a deep life more generally that now exist in here virtually.

I've been using this for a while now and I really like it. I like the experience of writing on here. I like having all my notebooks in one place. I otherwise was using too many notebooks. Now I say this is under my completely unnecessary and embarrassingly geeky list because it's really kind of expensive.

I mean, it doesn't really make sense for most people. By the time you get the tablet, you get the cover, you get the advanced, you have to pay more for the stylus that has an eraser built on. This was $500 easy, all in, which is pretty crazy for a notebook.

For someone like me, yeah, why not? Because my whole life is ideas and technology and it's cool and I'm a first mover. I don't know if I can really recommend it unless you just have that money lying around, but I've really enjoyed my Remarkable 2 experience. All right, as we move down this list, by the way, Jesse, things are gonna get increasingly geeky and increasingly less relevant to people.

That's the way this is gonna work. So be prepared. If you already find yourself a little bit alienated, this is gonna get worse. All right, I wanna show my third favorite unnecessary and geeky thing from last year. I'm holding it up here. This is a Shure MV7 microphone. This is fantastic for anyone who wants to get into the audio game.

So let's say you wanna start a podcast or you just wanna sound better when you are on Zoom meetings or maybe you're a guest on some podcast. What Shure has done here is taken a lot of the same hardware that you have in the classic Shure microphones. I don't know, what are these called?

The SM7s, what are they? It's on there somewhere, Jesse. - Yeah, SM7B. - SM7B, so this is like the classic microphone. A lot of podcasters use this. It was also, it's used in the music industry. I think the Michael Jackson's "Thriller" album was recorded on these. It has a lot of those same actual hardwares, but what it also has built into it is all of the digital electronics to convert the analog signal to a digital signal and to do some mixing on it.

You can have the volume on here. And so what comes out of here on the other end is a USB cable. So it does all the digitization inside the microphone itself. So you can then plug this into any laptop as any other sort of external USB microphone, getting a lot of the sound quality you would have from a high-end Shure mic without needing an extra mixing board to take that signal and make it something that the computer itself can understand.

The other thing it has, which I really would have appreciated early in podcasting is a monitor headphone output so that you can hear yourself in your ears. You can hear other sound in your ears. This was a real problem I had early in podcasting was figuring out how to get monitoring so I could hear myself in my ears.

You get that automatically for here. It mixes what you're saying with the audio coming back from the computer. So if you're hooked up to Zoom, you can just select this microphone as your speakers. And so you can hear audio from your computer. You can hear yourself mixed in. So you hear what your levels are.

Anyways, this is a fantastic way to get into higher-end audio without needing any other equipment, this straight to your computer. As people may or may not know, otherwise things do get complicated. So like here in our DeepWork HQ, this is just a classic microphone. It just has an analog signal coming out of here.

So this goes, Jesse and I, we both have our mics have to go into a large standalone audio processor, which takes that signal and conditions it and does some compression on it and works with the EQ mix. And we had to have an audio engineer set this up. That signal then goes into a relatively complicated mixing board.

So I'm in that mixing board, Jesse's in that mixing board, our sound effects are in that mixing board, the calls are in the mixing board, and that's all set up. And then that mixing board creates finally a digital signal, which is what goes to our computer that we can then use to record multi-tracked on the computers.

This replaces all of that equipment. That's not gonna be as good quality. I mean, obviously having professional audio processors with gating and compression and going through a high-end mixing board where we're tweaking the HQs, this is gonna sound a little bit better, but the gap is not big. So if you wanna have really good sounding audio, I think this is just a really great invention.

The MV7, for the price of one of these microphones, you have a whole setup. So I think this made podcasting accessible. - Yeah. - Like good sounding podcasting accessible to a lot more people. It makes the cost of that from $700 to get started down to 250. So anyways, I love this thing.

I use it for all my Zoom calls. I use it when I give virtual talks because it looks weird to have this whole thing when you're giving a talk to a business. So I just use this and the audio is, you know, no one notices the difference. All right, let's get even more esoteric, Jesse.

Let me grab my next thing here. We're gonna have people running to grab this off the shelves. This here is a mount for an Arduino Nano microcontroller. So, you know, I like to build microelectronics. I do sometimes with my kids. Next door to the studio, I have a maker studio, I have a maker lab where I have a lot of my microelectronics stuff.

This year I was building a custom light controller for Halloween lights. I wanted to control addressable LEDs using my own custom code. So I had to build a waterproofed controller and I was running it off of a microprocessor. It's hard to build stable circuits on microprocessors. You have all these, you know, how do you connect all the different cables to them in a way that is going to be stable in the sense that you can move around the whole apparatus and it's not gonna fall apart.

You don't wanna just put a breadboard in a waterproof box. So I came across these great mounts for Arduino Nanos. I have a whole box of Nanos. You can get them sort of cheap knockoffs for like eight bucks a pop. And what you can do is stick the Nano into these connectors inside and this breaks out every one of the connections to the Nano with a screw block where you can just put a wire end in here and then screw down the bolt in the wire.

So you don't have to solder your microcontroller into some sort of proto board where now it's permanently in there and permanently soldered to all the different wires you wanna use. You can get almost as stable as a connection just screwing them into the screw mount. You can just tape or glue this mount onto whatever your object is you're building, but you can take that processor right out of here and use it for something else.

And if you need to switch around the wiring, you can just unscrew it and switch it around. So this has been useful for my projects. I don't even know what it's called. I just found this probably on Amazon, but it's easy to- - Were you soldering this stuff before?

- Or I would just have it in like a breadboard or something and it would all come out. This was the first time I needed one of my projects to be deployed in the wild, right? I'd like bring this home and set it up and be able to move it around and reprogram it in this.

And it worked. My light controller stayed functional for the entire Halloween season. All right, speaking of lights, this is my final completely unnecessary and embarrassingly geeky thing from 2003. I don't actually have the thing 'cause it's in use right now, but this is my BNLink six outlet, seven day digital timer stake with six foot cord.

So I really like lighting displays for, we have like a winter wonderland display right now for the holiday season. We had a Halloween display. Until this year, I would run my displays and they're complicated. I did the counts and by the way, all my plans for the displays are on my remarkable.

There's a notebook for it. I did the count and I think I have like 25, in the current display, like 25 different wiring elements. So wires, splitters, adapters, 25 different elements. We live on a corner, so we have a lot of frontage and I'd like to have a light coverage for everything.

And I like the lights to come on automatically, come off automatically. So before I had two separate circuits and each of the circuits was led through a light sensor that could see when it got dark and then would have a timer for how long to stay on after it got dark.

But this was crude because it was only intervals of two hours and the sensors would come on at different times depending on exactly where they were in the yard because when they would detect it's dark is different. Like if you're in shade, it might be a little bit earlier than if you're not.

And so I finally got a more higher end controller for all of my circuits for my light displays where you have a fully functional digital interface, self-contained, right? So none of this like connecting to a phone, Bluetooth nonsense. Self-contained digital timer that controls all these relays. So now I can exactly program when I want the circuits to go on, when I want them to turn off, this time on, this time off, back on at this time, back off on that time, different days of the week, I can do it differently.

This really made a difference. I now finally have full control over exactly when my lights go on and exactly where my lights go off. Nice waterproof box staked up off the ground. So completely unnecessary, Jesse, and embarrassingly geeky, but also one of my favorite things from the last year.

- Does anybody have better lights than you in the neighborhood? - Yes, there's some good lights. There's some good lights in the neighborhood. I think Halloween, see the thing about Halloween without giving too much away is that we have more, we have a narrative to our lights with actual text that you read.

So no one else is doing that. Because we have so much frontage, we bring you on a Halloween journey. There's a sort of a story that unfolds with different vignettes. For the holiday lights, I have more work to do. Yeah, so people have some good holidays. - So you're still working on it.

- I think next year I have some key upgrades. I definitely have some key upgrades in mind for next year that I'll have to write down in my remarkable. Maybe I should have had my programmable, or here's my sixth thing I'll add to here. The programmable LEDs I started buying, they're so cool.

You can control every single bulb on these long Christmas light stands from a microcontroller and make them do whatever you want. So I had like really cool alien lights that I was using for our Halloween narrative, where they were sprinkling. You see, it was purple and different green lights would kind of sprinkle in and there'd be more and more green.

Then there'd be a chase that goes and chases all the way around and resets it all back to set it all back. You can program whatever you want. It's really cool stuff. We have a, look, I don't wanna go on a soapbox here, but I have really strong thoughts, especially for Christmas lights.

Like what I think is good and what I don't think is good. My sons know this because we watch this ABC show sometimes where they have a competition for Christmas lights. I do not like, I hope I'm not alienating people here. I do not like this new setup where you permanently install all of these programmable LEDs all over your house and on all like the windows and doors or what have you.

And then you use this computer software to synchronize them to music. And you have the moving head DMX lights on your roof and it's like a show. And it always plays that, whatever that Siberian, Trans-Siberian railroad, like do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. And all the lights are doing things and the headlights are moving.

I don't like that. I think light should create a transportative experience as you're like walking nearby the house. It sort of brings you into a different type of frame of mind aesthetically. I don't like the shows. I think the shows are showy. I don't wanna see dancing gingerbread men projection mapped on your house while music plays or something.

I want, you know, it brings you into like, oh, I'm now in Santa Claus's village or something like that. I have a lot of thoughts about this. You'll hear about them all in my new podcast in 2024. Light Talk with Cal Newport. And we just go deep on decorative lighting.

And it's mainly me just being very cranky and giving long, somewhat inappropriately profane dialogues about what I don't like in light displays. All right, Jesse, that's enough nonsense for now. People have to get back to their in-laws house and hear some more annoying conversations with their relatives. So thank you everyone for listening.

We'll be back next week with a New Year's or first episode of 2024. I'm excited about that. So definitely be ready to listen to that. We'll get back to basics. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, so if you enjoyed my interview with Arthur Brooks in today's episode, you might also like episode 272 where I did an interview with the writer, David Epstein.

It was a great conversation. I think you'll enjoy it. Check it out. My goal for today's deep dive is to go through four essential tools that you need to build your productivity toolkit.