So I want to talk today about the desire to build a good life. One that's focused on what you care about. One that feels meaningful. One where the appeal of zoning out on your phone or losing hours to mindless video game playing is diminished. Now I have a specific strategy for achieving this goal that I want to talk about in today's episode.

It's one that's going to pull from both my background as a computer scientist as well as from the habits of a reclusive writer. So this should be fun. I call it the good life algorithm. Let's get into it. All right. I am going to start and my apologies for people who are watching instead of just listening.

I'm going to draw something. So this is always a risk. I haven't done this in a little while, Jesse. New viewers of the podcast are not used to my artistic skills, but here we go. I want to draw a picture that's going to help coordinate us here. I have a big box on the screen.

Okay. So I want to think about this box as capturing possible lives. Let's say it that way. Now within this space of possible lives that you could live, only some of them are actually achievable. So we'll draw like a region within this, this bigger space here. So if you're just listening, I'm drawing this region is green.

So within this space of possible lives, we kind of have a region of things that are actually reasonably achievable. So for example, here's a life outside of that region that might be becoming a Cy Young award winning pitcher. If this was my diagram of achievable lives, I mean, I'm not quite there, Jesse.

I still have some hope, but I'm rapidly getting to the point where like I'm probably not going to be able to make it to that. I'll probably not be a Cy Young award winning pitcher. So there's lives in here that are achievable. All right. And what we want to do is get to the achievable lives that are deep or good.

It's like, I don't know, I'm, I'm drawing a couple possible lives in here. I'm going to highlight one of them. Like maybe this life right here, I have drawn up here, this achievable life that I've circled. Maybe that is like a really good one. That's one that would satisfy our definition of deep, meaning that if you could live that life, it would feel meaningful, it would feel interesting, the appeal of being just distracted on your phone would be reduced.

Like that, that's a goal. And then maybe like right now you're, you're down, we're like down here. So I'll circle life, you know, down here on the side. The whole challenge, we want to think about this visually, the whole challenge of trying to cultivate a deep life is to try to get from wherever you are to one of these possible deep lives that's going to be much better.

That is the challenge of trying to do some sort of lifestyle design. So the question is, how do we actually achieve that? Well, what most people do is what I often call on the show, the grand goal strategy. This is where you pick an appealing sounding grand goal and just go for it and hope that it will, if achieved, make your life better all at once.

Well, when we have this diagram, this landscape of possible lives, it allows us to visualize the problem with this strategy, because here's what actually happens if you apply the grand goal strategy. You can think about each of these possible lives that I've drawn here, it's a two-dimensional picture. So they exist on, they're going to exist on two axes, right?

So we can think about each of these points as being described by two values in this particular simple example. So like how far it is on this vertical line and how far it is on this horizontal line. So I don't know, we can just make up properties, but maybe like this horizontal line describes like number of hours per day spent reading Brandon Sanderson books.

So higher is more, lower is less. And maybe this one over here, the horizontal line represents like hours spent working per day. And so like as we move over here, you're working more hours and as your points over here, working less hours. Like every point in this simplified example has some combination.

In reality, of course, your lives will be defined by hundreds of relevant points. I can't draw in a hundred dimensional space, so let's just use two for this example. What happens when you apply the grand goal strategy is, to simplify it a little bit, you're basically choosing one of these axes.

So like one of these points you care about, and then just leaping in that direction. Hey, this is something I care about. My grand goal is going to take one of these properties and just take that singular property and try to greatly amplify that in my life. So for example, maybe you say, "I know I like reading Brandon Sanderson books, so I'm going to find an opportunity, a big grand goal that's going to increase that." And maybe you decide, "I am going to start a full-time business making novelty t-shirts with esoteric quotes from Brandon Sanderson books." You're going to read them all day, like looking for quotes.

And so you make a big leap up that axis, but that's the only thing you care about. So where might you end up? All you do know is that you're going to be increasing that one thing, and maybe you end up like up here. So for those who are just listening, I've drawn something that is higher on the reading Brandon Sanderson scale, but it's also way far over on the hours of work scale because you weren't thinking about that.

You were just trying to leap up. So maybe for example, you start that novelty shirt company and you're working 15 hour a day trying to pay your bills because you got to sell a lot of shirts and there's not a big market and you're really having to hustle. And so yes, you did improve, you did move, improve on this one factor, but you disregarded this other factor.

So yeah, you're reading a lot of Brandon Sanderson in this example, but you're also exhausted from how much you're working. That's what happens with the grand goal strategy is it is a, think of it as a blunt way of moving through the landscape of possible lives. You're just picking one of many dimensions that matters and just making a leap that increases that one dimension.

But where it puts you on the other dimensions might be a problem. It's disregarding these other areas. So what should you do instead? Well, this is where I want to turn and take some advice I mentioned from a reclusive author. I'm going to bring up here an article on the screen and those who are listening, I mean watching instead of just listening can see this.

Let's see here. Okay. So this article, it's a podcast interview. This is from Tim Ferriss' podcast. Episode 361 of his podcast. This is from six years ago, February of 2019. I actually remember listening to this interview. I was shoveling snow. I don't know if I remember that, Jesse, but I was shoveling snow.

There was a big snowstorm in February of 2019 here in DC. The interview was with Jim Collins. So Jim Collins is a former Stanford Business School professor who is a very well-known business book writer. Good to Great and Build to Last are probably his two most famous books. He sold something like 10 million total copies of his books, which puts him in like the elite of elite when it comes to nonfiction advice writing.

He left Stanford right around the time he was 38 years old. So kind of similar to my age, just to write full time. And he doesn't do a lot of public interviews. So this was a big get for Tim, and we got some interesting insights into how Jim approached his life.

And so there's a part in here that I want to capture, because we're going to bring back this idea that Jim Collins talks about in his interview. We're going to bring it back to that landscape of possible lives, and it's going to help us solve this problem of how do we more systematically make our way to better lives.

All right. So I'm going to quote here from the interview. Let me just set this up. Tim has mentioned to Jim, like, hey, I've heard you mention that you use like a stopwatch to track things and that you track in particular each day how many hours you spend doing deep work.

You put it in a spreadsheet, and you have this goal of like 1,000 hours a year of doing deep work. Like, what's going on with this, Jim? Explain what's going on here. And so he said, okay, here's what he explained. Let me find the right quote. Okay. So he explained why he was doing that.

"I was worried what would happen if I went from being invisible to visible, and that if I was fortunate enough to have a success, that I might wake up in five or six or seven years and have not gone back to the wellspring of the deep, quiet solitude of work.

And then your second book is half as good, right? So I started, as I was heading out on the Thelma and Louise leap," he's referring here to leaping, being a professor, "counting my hours every day." All right. So that's how he got started. He was counting his, how many hours did I spend doing creative work every day?

Because he thought if that went down, like if you had a successful book and that went down, then he was never going to produce anything good again. So he was going to track it to make sure. Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos. You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow. I know you're going to like it. Check it out. Now let's get back to the video. So Tim starts pushing them because Tim likes details.

Okay. But Jim, like what is in the spreadsheet? Is it all your tracking, like every day, how many hours of deep work? And Jim revealed, I think for the first time, well, actually every line of my spreadsheets one day, I have three cells on each line. So the first cell is actually a quick summary of what I did that day.

The second cell, as I talked about, was the number of hours I spent doing deep work. What was interesting is the third cell, this is what's going to start getting us closer. All right. I'm going to read this. There's kind of an exchange here that's worth hearing in full.

So here's what Jim says. Now there's a third cell that I put in there that most people don't know as much about because people know about the hours thing somewhat. But what I started to do is I started creating a code, which is +2, +1, 0, -1, -2. And the other thing I put in, and the key on all of this, by the way, is you have to do it every day in real time.

You can't five days later, look back and say, how did I feel that day? So what this is is a totally subjective how quality was the day, or like a +2 is a super positive day. So Ferris interrupts and says, you're talking about emotionally speaking? And Jim Collins says, exactly.

Just like, was it a great day? A +2 is just a great day. It doesn't mean it wasn't. There might not have been a really difficult day. It might've been a day of total really hard rock climbing. It might've been one of really hard riding, but if it felt really good, right, I'd put that down.

+1 is another positive day. 0 is meh, -1 is kind of a net tone negative, and -2 is bad days. And so you can say over the last five years, what's going on in all of the +2 days? So Tim comes in and says, oh, so this is why you're writing the description of those days as well.

And here we get to the punchline. Jim says, yeah, exactly. And over the last five years, what's going on in the -2 days? And now as I navigate, it's kind of like the simplex method in operations research, where you find optimal by never knowing what optimal is ahead of time.

You do it by a series of iterative steps of the next best step. This is where we get to the magic of Jim's advice. I'm going to load back up my diagram here. All right, this is where we get to the magic of his life. He is saying, if I track every day, here's what I did, just a sentence or two, and here's if it was a +2 day, a +1 day, a 0 day, a -1 day, or a -2 day.

He can start to gather data, right? He can start to gather data about what am I doing on the +2 days? Also what am I doing on the -2 days? Like, what are the days I come away from saying that was really good, and what are the days that I come away from and saying that was really bad?

And I can learn over time the type of stuff that makes me happy, and over time the type of stuff that doesn't make me happy, and he says, I can use that to make iterative changes in my life. Now, this is where my computer science hat comes on. He references the simplex algorithm.

The simplex algorithm, if you do any sort of like mathematical theory, is like an algorithm you use for finding feasible solutions for linear programs. So linear programs is just basically where you say, maximize this value or this vector of values given a bunch of constraints on them. You're trying to figure out like a really good answer to a question.

Think about it that way. There's a lot of possible values you can assign, so how do you find like a set of values to assign that's really good? The simplex algorithm is a solution to that. The details don't matter. I mean, as you probably all know, and Jesse's shaking his head like a chorus, you're moving through a multidimensional polytope, which we understand through the vertexes of the multidimensional polytope.

We all know about this. That's fine. But the key is, if you actually look at the simplex algorithm operating, it's iterative. So you're sort of moving ever closer towards an optimal solution. So you don't know in advance where you're going, you're moving there. So if we come back to our diagram here, looking at the landscape of possible lives, and we have the circle down here where we started, the Jim Collins simplex algorithmic approach is as you learn about, well, what days am I happy, what days am I not, you make a little change.

Well, I'm going to do a little bit more of this because I associate this with plus two days. A little bit less of that because I associate that with minus two days. Let me look at what's possible, and let me make this change here. All these changes are small, and they're within the realm of what's possible, given just your current obstacles and opportunities, right?

So there's no big grand scheme here. You're not going off to start your Brandon Sanderson shirt business. Small changes to get more plus twos and less minus twos. And maybe some of these, eh, that didn't work out, but that's okay if it didn't work out because it's not a big change in your life.

Maybe we go over here, and you work your way iteratively towards that optimal solution. You make your way towards a much better life. This I think is a, it's not the only way to get to a deep life, but I think when we look at this diagram of the landscape of possible lives, and we imagine it as existing on these multiple dimensions, we really begin to see the difference between evidence-based iterative changes versus gut-based grand leaps.

It's just really hard to make a grand leap because you make one thing much better. You might make another thing much worse. Also, you don't have a great understanding of the full landscape between here and there. What's actually around here? Maybe there's a lot of challenges around here. This thing here is in some sort of fitness lull.

It's not as good as you think. There's traps around it. The iterative approach is not exciting this week, but over five years it leads you somewhere really cool. Collins has built this really cool life. He left academia and formed this really cool life that's built on doing this deep work and these other activities, and he's built these books that matter, but it's not fallen to the typical traps, the time traps that authors fall into.

I think it's really interesting, the iterative approach. I have a friend who has been doing this for the last, it might have been five or six years. He has the spreadsheet. He has the plus and minuses. He has the short description, and he has been changing his life bit by bit based on this data.

I talk to him all the time. I've heard him do this. Right now, he's ended up in a really interesting, I'm going to say idiosyncratic, because it is never something that he or anyone else would have come up with from scratch if he was just thinking 10 years ago, "What do I want to do with my life?" But he has a fantastically deep and interesting, admirable life.

I'm actually going to go interview him for my "Deep Life" book. I'm going to have him come on the podcast soon. We'll do an in-depth episode to really get into it, but he was the one who really helped me come back to this concept of actually the data-based, evidence-based, iterative improvement of your life is much more likely to move you towards the good life than taking these big gut-driven swings.

Those could work, but often they don't. They make one thing better while making other things worse, and then it can be just sort of a wash in the end. For now, let's just sit with this idea. The path to depth is sometimes iterative and not the result of major leaps.

I call that the good life algorithm. I like it. I actually met Jim. I don't remember how I got in touch with him, but it was probably after listening to that interview. We had a good talk. Good advice. When I talked to him, I was like the exact age he was when he left Stanford.

He was like, "It works out pretty well if you go and just become a full-time writer." I didn't, but he did make an interesting pitch. Well, you like teaching, right? I do like teaching. Yeah. He was in the business school. It's kind of different, I think, too. Yeah. It's its own sort of business.

I mean, you're around some pretty smart kids. It keeps you pretty young. People leave business schools, I think, more than other type of academic schools because there's a lot of going out to start businesses or coming back to business schools after you've done something in business. I think there's more of a revolving door than – though I would say at MIT, in the theory group in a computer science lab where I worked, people came and went.

They would go, and then they would come back like $250 million richer. There is a lot of that. There is a lot of like Robert Morris would go, invent the first shopping cart for the web, and then come back with a lot of money. Ron Rivest would go, sell RSA for $1.7 billion, and come back and start teaching.

So there was more of a revolving door just because – And then they'd buy you coffee in the break room? They did. Ron Rivest, his personal secretary, B, was in charge of the coffee. We had a lot of coffee on that floor. It was none of this like little pot nonsense.

We had the professional brewers and the big, giant carafts, and we just had thing after thing of Pete's coffee. Like the big where you could brew like 20 or 30 cups at a time and fill up one of those things like you would have at like a conference. Yeah.

Yeah, we had a lot of coffee. The good coffee machine was actually the floor below where the WC3 consortium is, so Tim Berners-Lee's web consortium. So Tim Berners-Lee is the guy who's invented the HTML and HTTP and the World Wide Web. So he worked on the fifth floor, and he's – I guess he's English.

He's a Sir, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and they had a fancy espresso machine, a really nice one. Were you able to get any of that? We would go down there sometimes. We'd go down there sometimes. Anyway, so there we go. We'll call that the good life algorithm. All right. We've got a bunch of questions.

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All right, here's the deal. My listeners will get $1,000 off Vanta if they go to vanta.com/deepquestions. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/deepquestions for $1,000 off. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions. Hi, first question is from Chris. How should I navigate the barrage of negative news as a federal worker? I feel like I should stay informed to understand how my livelihood might be impacted, but it's very stressful.

Well, here's what's going on here. If you're a federal worker, and half the people I know are, I live in Washington, D.C., at the moment when we're recording this, Elon Musk's doge is trying to do, among other things, psychological warfare. He wants to terrorize the federal workforce because he is essentially, A, kind of a broken person inside, but B, he's mad about having to deal with federal regulators with some of his companies, right?

So he wants to, beyond just finding inefficiencies or trying to save money, he wants to add a note of terror about it. If you want to hear more about this, by the way, I wrote an article for The New Yorker last week. Last week it came out, I think on Tuesday or Wednesday, that looked at Elon Musk's two weeks ago email that said, "Send me five things you did yesterday," which any manager will tell you is like what insecure managers do who are just trying to be a-holes.

I went through the whole history of, not just Musk, but productivity in Silicon Valley and seemed like they don't exactly have this figured out yet, but that's an aside. He's trying to terrorize you. So I'm saying don't give him the pleasure. If you're not a congressional appointee or a probationary worker, you're most likely not in an imminent threat of your computer's going to be shut off at any moment.

So what I would suggest is you have a couple set check-in times. What do I need to know about what has happened? It could be every day for 10 minutes, what's happening on the times, or maybe even like every other day you just check in to see what's going on.

But anything that directly you need to do something, also you're going to hear from your supervisor, you're going to hear from your agency heads, right? So extremely limit the time you check and when you check, and do not give it other time. Do not be online following it. Do not be on social media.

Don't be like sort of obsessively talking about it. Why? Because that is allowing Musk to live rent-free in your head, right? So if you actually want to do something here that is going to frustrate the person terrorizing you as hard as it might be, it's just don't look. I'll check in briefly to see if what's going on, if I need to know something.

And otherwise, I'm going to do my job, I'm going to live my life. You don't get a live rent-free in my head. So that's what I would suggest. It's chaos and it's a bit of psychological warfare going on. Let's not give him too much of the pleasure. All right, what do we got next?

This is from Anthony, "Can you give a preview of your thoughts on relationships for your upcoming deep life book? What about if your partner does not like to geek out on systems, values, and stacks?" What you're talking about, your partner might not enjoy references to the simplex algorithm as a way of trying to navigate iterative improvement of your lifestyle configuration parameters?

I don't believe it. I will give you some reassuring words. I do like to geek out. The deep life book, which I'm working on now, and just for a timeline purpose, I'll probably finish the first draft at some point by the end of the summer. So it's kind of a slow process.

I am not writing it in a super geeky tone. So I am trying to write this book to be accessible even to people who aren't hopeless nerds like myself. So I'm hoping that's not going to be a problem. There's no stack in it. I'm not using stack terminology. I'm not going to talk about the simplex algorithm.

I might talk about the landscape of possible lives, but I might use more of an actual navigation metaphor. You're trying to get to a destination on an actual physical map, not in terms of a multidimensional vector or a linear program. So I'm trying to be good, Anthony, about toning down the geekiness for the book, which I'm usually pretty good at, I think.

If you read Slow Productivity, my most recent book, it's not super geeky. I'm trying to be more accessible, so like the larger audiences, so audiences who do not obsessively quote random scenes from season five of The Simpsons as if that's a reasonable conversational gambit. People who think that's weird, I want to also be able to enjoy my book.

So I'm trying to de-geekify myself somewhat. I've been pretty good about it, I think, Jesse. I geek out a little bit more in here sometimes because I can't help myself, but my editors would not let me get away with it. Yeah. It's like publishing, it's all English majors. Yeah.

Yeah. Like, come on. Stop talking about simplex algorithms. I, by the way, held myself back. I've done some research. I won an award a few years ago, Best Paper Award, for a paper I did on a new application of an algorithmic analysis technique called smooth analysis, which was Spielman and Tang originally created this method for understanding why, in practice, the simplex algorithm converges faster than you might expect in the worst case.

And I took that same technique and applied it to some distributed system analysis. So I could have gone a level deeper in my nerding, but I did not. So you're all welcome. All right. Who do we got next? Next question is from Rebecca. I'm recovering from a health setback and struggle with creating a schedule for my projects.

Since I may need to adjust for rest in recovery, what approaches do you recommend for developing a schedule that balances productivity with flexibility? Rebecca, I was just there. And I'm like just coming out of a relatively still happening, but better rehab about a bunch of stuff that got messed up after I went through this sort of injury and surgery recovery.

And here's what I basically learned, was start with like, OK, here's the schedule I think that like gives me some more rest, you know, so it's a little bit like I'm taking my foot off the gas a little bit, right? So here's what I'm thinking. I'm going to, you know, tell my boss or my supervisor, like, here's how I want to do it to try to prioritize rest a little bit more.

And take the amount of rest in that schedule and then multiply that by two. Like your initial reaction about what to do here is not going to be enough rest. It's going to be the sort of minimum possible change because you're very worried. It seems like in the moment, your brain interprets these changes that you're making to accommodate rest or rehab.

It interprets these as a permanent change. And it begins to predict a future and say, my God, if I only work this much, you know, for the next 20 years, I'm going to really fall behind. I'm going to get fired. I'm not going to be able to keep up with my job.

But the reality is you're probably talking three months or six months or one month or whatever it is. It's not actually that much time. And all the time, people have to take their foot off the gas for three months or four months and then come back to it again.

So if you're going to take your foot off the gas, take your foot off the gas enough to really rehab and recover. So that's my main advice is you probably need the rest more than your brain thinks is reasonable. One of the things I actually like to do is collect just internally, I like to collect stories that I encounter of real historical figures who are super accomplished and they all have these like long periods where they were barely working.

You know, they were sick, they were dealing with this. If you go back far enough, like in American history, I'm sort of a fan of colonial history and early post-colonial history. You read these biographies of like founding fathers. It would be, oh, for that month, they were just traveling from here to there, like just to get from here to there.

That was like a month of time that was just like, they weren't doing anything. Like you read about, you know, Ben Franklin, there would just be these like six to two months, six weeks to two month gaps where it's like, well, he was traveling to London and he just can't do anything.

You're just like on a ship and you're sick or you read about Darwin. And for like a year, he's basically just throwing up on the Beagle, just like really seasick, right? And so I find this, and I talk about this in Slow Productivity. So if you want to get into these examples, get my book Slow Productivity, principle two is work at a natural pace.

And I really go through a lot of case studies here of people that we look back at the end of their lives. We look back at these historical figures and say, wow, they produced all this stuff and it was awesome. And I was like, yeah. And they had all sorts of ups and downs and big, long extended periods where they were doing nothing.

And then periods where they're really productive. That is just the natural pace with which people produce things. Like here's another story. I have so many of these. Galileo, I believe this was Galileo. He went at some point to stay with friends who had basically like a vacation home. And it was up in the Italian mountains.

And they had had this clever system, if I understand this correctly, that in their villa they built a series of chutes that take air from deep in a cave in the mountainside and bring it up into the villa because that air was cool. So it was like air conditioner, right?

So it's pretty cool. Like they built an air conditioning system. It was pretty cool, literally cool, and also cool pragmatically, except for there was some sort of poisonous gas that was being vented into this cave. And so Galileo is sleeping in this room with his villa with his friends on like vacation and it poisons everybody.

And it kills like two of the people in the room and he barely survives and is basically like debilitated for a really long time and never fully recovers from it. We don't know any of that. Like, yeah, Galileo, we know the work he did, it was fantastic. So like people have this, John F.

Kennedy, you know, battling Addison's disease, huge issues. Like he'd be like, look, I got to just go down to the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach and just be there for like three weeks. Like they called that place the Southern White House or the White House South or whatever, because he'd be like, I just can't, I'm in pain, I can't move, like just weeks would be lost.

And then, you know, he'd do his best to work and come back. Anyways, this is all to say, we are used to the modern pace of knowledge work that is set by the concept of pseudoproductivity, which is this heuristic I talk about in my most recent book, where we use visible activity as our proxy for useful effort.

In that type of mindset, anytime you're not doing something is like a disaster. And that's what leads to these thoughts of like, I can maybe like rest a little bit, like take a little bit off my plate, but like anything more than that for more than a couple days is a disaster.

But when you do not have pseudoproductivity, when you're instead focused on like, I want to produce good stuff this year and this decade or the next three years, I have some big initiatives I want to go well, the fact that these three months you're not doing a lot of email or Zoom meetings because you're recovering from a surgery or something is not that big of a deal.

So if you need to get bucked up about resting more than you think you should, read while you're resting, read slow productivity, because that's sort of at the core, especially that second principle of working at a natural pace. It really is, Jesse, like people don't know how artificial it is, this idea of even if I'm just finishing work at four for a few days, for a lot of people, they're in their mind, they'd be like, this is a disaster, which is crazy.

There's nothing they're doing where like not being there is like working to four instead of five is going to make some sort of major difference. That's just a straight up pseudoproductivity. All right, who we got next? Next question's from Shark Loffin. I have the opportunity to lead the reboot of a once successful aerospace company of about 100 people.

I've got full autonomy to set everything from building to culture. I'm going to attempt to use many of the ideas and deep work, including office layout, workflow management. The site is performing poorly and is best described as the most shallow workplace ever. So much busy, so little production. Any suggestions on how I can implement this transformation?

Well, don't take a book out of Elon Musk's strategy. I actually went through, this is a bit of a side, but for that New Yorker piece I was talking about, I went through and cataloged what happened in the first few months after he took over Twitter in 2022. It just reminded me of this question.

It was, I would call it, haphazard random chaos that led nowhere good. So don't do that. That was just like, I'm going to start sporadically making declarations, losing interest in that declaration, then make another declaration, and then kind of lose interest in that, and then do this and lose interest in that, and then just fire half the people for no reason.

So don't do that. What should you do? I took a couple notes, but here's the big picture organizational principle for these notes I'm about to give you. You need a small number of clearly identified, we'll call them North Stars, for the journey you're about to take with this company that you've taken over that you want to be really clear and transparent about.

Everything we're going to do, is what you should be telling your company. Everything we're going to do is aiming us at these North Stars, so you know why we're doing it and what our goals are. I'll give you a few sample North Stars, but I think this general approach is really important, because otherwise you could end up in that sort of must-taking-over-Twitter-in-2022 territory, which was more like, I am going to haphazardly do things and you don't know why.

Haphazardness can really be a problem, right? That really can be a problem, where it's like, I don't know why you're doing this or what's going on. What then, what might these North Stars be? Well based on my books, I would mention three ideas you could start with. One, North Star number one, context switching is productivity poison.

This is the thing we're really worried about. We are willing to go to a pretty extreme extent to try to minimize the times during a typical day where you have to switch your cognitive context from one target to another, because we know every time we do that, there's this huge cognitive cost.

We're basically siphoning cognitive fuel out of your brain, and there's only so many times we can siphon it before you're just burnt out and can't do anything else for the day. That's what we want to try to minimize, is cognitive context switches. I would emphasize here, this is very different than what other people implicitly try to optimize or minimize, which tends to be things like friction or response time, or they try to maximize the velocity of information.

You say, no, this is a business run on brains. We want our brains to run well. We're spending a lot of money on these brains. Contact shifts is putting sand in the gears. Priority one, how do we rethink about how we do work and communicate, etc., to minimize contact shifts.

North star number two, I would suggest, make it very clear, deep work on things that move the needle, that is bring in new revenue. That's the priority. We're going to make changes, bend, transform how we do things, whatever is needed to protect that priority. This is what we're going to measure.

This is what we are going to reward. This is what we are going to defer to, even if deferring to this makes other parts of our lives less convenient. Even if deferring to this means the HR department has a much harder time getting the information they need for payroll because they can't just blast email everyone and say answer in six hours with this information so we can fill out these charts and it's going to make our job in the HR department much easier.

Our goal is not to make the lives of the HR department as easy as possible. It's to produce aerospace products that make money. So if someone is doing that, we're going to let them cook, to reference our episode from a couple weeks back about let Brandon cook, our reference to Brandon Sanderson.

This is what matters. We protect it. So if you're able to prove to me, I am producing something with my brain that is directly valuable, but in order to do this, you have to stop. I can't go to these meetings people keep sending me or I need to take these things off my plate.

If you can make a case, this is going to produce more cognitive output that is directly valuable. I will listen to that case. I will always listen to that case. You got to come back to what ultimately actually makes the difference. As soon as we lose sight of that, we are going to end up in a productivity thunderdome where everyone is just trying to optimize their own lives, make their own lives easier, and that's not our business.

We're in the business of making aerospace and the stuff that matters matters, meritocracy in that way. North Star number three, no more pseudo productivity. Visible activity is meaningless to me. Results matter. What are you working on? Did it go well? Good. What are you going to work on next?

To this end, teams should be tracking work in a more transparent fashion so that no one gets overloaded. Teams should have, like I talk about a lot in my book, Slow Productivity, here's the things we are working on. Here's the things we need to work on. We have a whole list, and it doesn't exist distributed haphazardly through different team members' email inboxes.

It is on this digital board or this physical bulletin board, a card for everything that we need to do. Over here, we're tracking who's working on what right now, and you can only have so many cards under your name, like one or two, maybe that's it. We don't take all these things we need to do and just sort of spread them around everyone's plate and just start talking to each other all the time about all of these things.

"Hey, what about this? What about that?" That puts us back to our first north star that violates minimized context shifting. It also violates our second north star, prioritize deep work on the stuff that really matters. So why don't we track work carefully so that no one gets overloaded? You're not allowed to work on 10 things.

Work on two things. Do those things well. I don't want to overload you. If I give you 10 things, you're going to have to have meetings and emails about all 10 of those things, which means most of your day will be having meetings and emails, which means when are you doing the deep work on the stuff that really moves the needle?

That's no good. So let's track at the team scale workloads in a transparent fashion so no one has to take on too much and we can allow people to be more efficient. This in turn will allow you to structure communication because now you can check in on this. You can have daily standups at the team scale.

Okay, who's working on what? I know that actually. It's on the board. What do you need to get this done? All right. You've been working on this since Monday. What is the roadblock? "Oh, you need this information. You need this information from, you know, Bob. You're right here in the daily standup." When can you get that information over to Cal?

You can get it, okay, by 11. Get it to him by 11. We all agree on this? Great. And then you're going to work on this for the four hours after that you're going to get that done? Great. Now just go work. Don't look at your inbox. Go work.

So those would be my three north stars if I was taking over a 100-person company. Make it clear that context shifting is productivity poison. Make it clear that the number one thing we care about is cognitive efforts to produce things that directly move the needle. Everything else is going to revolve around making that better and doing more of that.

That is our north star. It's what we care about. And three, no more pseudoproductivity. We're going to track work carefully so that no one gets overloaded and so that we can make sure people have what they need with a minimum of unnecessary activity. And if you're moving things from your column to the done column, I don't care about anything else.

I don't care about how fast you answer emails. I don't care about how many Zoom meetings you're in. Productivity versus pseudoproductivity. So that's what I would do. All right. What do we got next? We have our corner. Ooh, slow productivity corner. This last one could have been a part of the corner a little bit, too.

So slow productivity corner, we specifically highlight a question that's related to my book, Slow Productivity. We want to highlight at least one question each week that is related to that. Wow, we're running out of time on that, though, Jesse. We said one year, right? Yeah. When did my book come out?

Pretty early in March last year. I think it was like March 5th. Uh-oh. This could be the last one. Technically, this would be the last episode with a slow productivity corner. So go buy the book, Slow Productivity. We'll find a reason to play this theme music. We'll find a reason.

All right. What's our slow productivity corner question of the week? All right. It's from Daniel. Are there perceived benefits of pseudoproductivity in the workplace? At my company, being responsive at all times on email and instant messaging leads someone to being seen as dedicated to work and visible to leaders, which leads to advancement.

How do I advance if I don't do this? Well, yeah, I mean, this is the dangerous nature of pseudoproductivity, is that as long as this becomes the implicit heuristic by which your company measures value, it's hard to escape. So again, we talked about in the last question, but just to reemphasize, pseudoproductivity is using visible activity as a proxy for useful effort.

So the more visibly active you are, the more useful you will be assumed to be. In a digital world, this is a problem because mobile computing means you can be demonstrating effort at any location at any time, and mobile communications like email and Slack means you can be demonstrating effort at this incredibly fine granularity, at the granularity of like answering individual emails, being involved in back and forth conversations.

So it leads to a sort of overload of work. You work too many hours, and it leads to a style of work that is very draining and doesn't produce much that's actually valuable. I hate pseudoproductivity. I think it is a cancer on employee well-being in the knowledge sector. It's why I wrote the book Slow Productivity to say, do this instead.

Part one, here's why this is bad. Part two, do this instead. First of all, just recognize the problem. All right, so what can you do if you are in an organization that still worships at the altar of pseudoproductivity? Well, most of the advice in my book is geared at least in part towards this situation.

You're behind enemy lines, and you're trying to make your way towards safety. So there are still things you can do. One is trade clarity for responsiveness. Be really clear what you're working on, its status, when it's going to get done, and deliver it when you say you're going to deliver it.

If you're trusted, if you have this clarity, the need for you to be responsive goes down. Because why do people want answers typically right away to messages? It's because they don't know what's going on. They have an open loop in their head, "Oh, yeah, this project, I forgot about that.

What is Jesse up to with that?" It's just an open loop in their head, and until you respond, they have to keep track of it, and it's a source of stress. But if you have some other system, they could be like, "Oh, no, Jesse's on the ball." You're like, "Yep, I'm working on it.

It's in position five in my queue. Here's what it is. I think I should have it done by Tuesday, and I'll tell you if that's going to shift." And they trust if they don't hear from you it's going to come on Tuesday, they don't have to worry about it.

So a lot of responsiveness is driven from uncertainty. So if you're very clear, you can reduce the demands of responsiveness. Two, it's a big thing in the book, you have to have some way of limiting concurrent workload. The kiss of death in pseudoproductivity is working on too many things at the same time because everything you're working on brings with it its own administrative overhead.

So if you're working on too many things, that administrative overhead aggregates until most of your schedule is servicing tasks instead of actually completing them, and that's this terrible state where almost nothing gets done, and it's incredibly stressful. So how do you do that? Well, one thing you can do is distinguish between, "Here's what I'm actively working on, and here's what I'm waiting to work on," of the things I've accepted.

Active waiting. I do email meetings about the stuff I'm actively worked on, not on the stuff I'm waiting to work on, and I make this transparent and clear, it's in a shared document, I'll send a link right to you. "Oh, you want to have a meeting to talk about it?

Here's my queue. It's still in the waiting part. It's in position three. You know, it should get there in about a week or so. I'll email it as soon as it gets to active, and then we'll talk about it all day if you want. But I can only be actually working on a few number of things at a time." That sort of clarity works.

Also if you have some flexibility on what you can say yes and no to, so the problem is just not yourself wanting to say no to too much, use quotas, "Yeah, I do this type of thing, but only this many per quarter." And when your quota is filled, say, "Yeah, of course, typically I would like to have a mentoring lunch, or jump on this call, or come to this committee meeting, but I've already passed my quota for this quarter, or for this month, or for this week, so I can't do it this time." It's a very reasonable way to moderate activities that are important, so that you're still doing things that are important, but not doing too many.

There's a bunch of other ideas like that that are in the book, but those are the two big picture things to think about, trading clarity for responsiveness and finding ways to manage your concurrent workload. You do those two things, you'll be better. Above all else, just get really good at things that matter.

That's principle three of my books, obsess over quality. If you're doing something that's valuable, they do not want to lose you. I'll just make this final point, because I think a lot of people have an overly character charred, antagonistic mental image of their employer or boss, and they really do see their employer or boss like a Bond villain, who is somehow converting rapid email responses into fuel for a laser that they're going to use to destroy the world.

That's what they care about. This thing that really makes you miserable, they're twisting their mustache and they have a cat that they're petting, and it's like, "We need you to be answering emails is what's important because we use those quick responses in my volcano layer to fuel my laser." The reality is, it's really hard to hire good people.

They worry about people leaving. They don't have enough people. If you're doing something valuable, you're really good at something that the company needs. You know what they're staying up late at night thinking about? Not, "Hey, how quickly is he responding to my emails?" They're thinking, "Oh my God, what if he leaves?" You got to recognize, make yourself valuable.

Don't be a jerk about it, but recognize you have value. You don't have to make a big manifesto or a big autoresponder, but I work differently. You know why? Because I deliver. I produce this code that's awesome. I organize these events that kill. I put together these marketing campaigns that have the highest ROI of my entire team.

Yeah, I do this Cal Newport stuff that's a little bit weird. My project queue, you hear from me within 24 hours, but not within 24 minutes when you email me. And I'm responsible, but I'm a little bit off kilter and I say no to a lot more things. But if I go, you're going to lose that ROI.

You do not want that person to go, so you kind of put up with it. So remember that. If you're doing something valuable, you are really needed. You are really wanted, right? I mean, unless, again, you're under the supervision of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency, if you're at an actual company with an actual boss who doesn't walk around holding chainsaws, they are desperately afraid of losing good people.

So be good. And you get a lot more flexibility as well. All right. Do we have a call this week? We do. All right. Let's hear it. Hi, Cal. My name is Joe and the majority of my work centers around optimizing websites for clients. My job is remote, flexible, and I have a lot of autonomy.

However, my responsibilities aren't clearly defined since I'm on a very small team. This has sort of led me to a cycle of reacting to urgent tasks, putting in a lot of work, and then taking work easier for a while until something urgent comes up again. This has left me either overwhelmed and tired some days or feeling bad that I haven't done enough for most others.

I'd love to strike a balance between client work and working on company goals while also leveraging the sort of flexibility and autonomy at work so I can work on my personal projects like content creation while not quite going full quiet quit mode. While struggling with motivation is definitely one of my problems here, one of the other thorns in my side has been struggling to define what enough means for a work day or a work week.

For people with more autonomous or flexible roles or even just business owners in general, how do you recommend going about defining what it means to have worked enough? Thanks. All right, we've got a couple things going on here. Let's get to your job situation in particular. I think you need to think about your job as really being two different jobs.

The first job is client responsiveness, right? Your first job is working with clients with their issues or requests and satisfying them. Then you have the second part of your job, which is self-initiated, less monitored, and less deadline. Let's just call that part B because what that is could depend, but you sort of have to think of it as like the self-initiated part of your job and you have the client responsiveness part of your job.

Let's look at both of these. Let's do some work on both of these and then I want to talk about overall this question of how much work is enough, how do I know if I'm working enough. I would look at the client piece first and even though it's reasonable, right?

You're saying it's only sometimes there's issues that I have to deal with. I would say, how do I make this piece as sustainable as possible, right? Let's do some optimization over there and maybe this is about how do I stop crisises from occurring as much as they do or how do I have, more importantly, maybe a way of dealing with crisises that is reassuring to the client and moves us away from just constant immediate responsive communication, right?

In the lack of structure, if you run like a website dev company and there's a problem that a client has had, with a lack of structure for like, here's how we stay in touch and here's how we deal with crises, what it's going to be is like, answer my call, answer my call, answer my call, like this is now a big source of stress for me and I don't know what's happening until you finally like tell me what's going on.

So you might want to work on that a little bit like, here's our crisis response, you know, we have crisis@webdevelopmentcompany.com, you send in that email, like we will be on it within two hours, we have a daily setup call, I don't know. I don't want to give you the details, but find a way to make sure that's not too stressful or draining.

All right, all the other days you're working on part B of your job and here you have a choice. You can either do a phantom part-time job, this is our word for I have like a consistent amount of sort of unstructured time that I'm going to structure for another goal, something that's really important to me that I'm working on and it could be building up a technical skill or something that might eventually become a side business or it could be a self-education project or something completely unrelated, community related, unrelated to your professional job.

So you could do that. Or as you suggest, build in a more sort of self-initiated sort of value-growing project within your company. Like I also do this, which is going to have value within the company. So you have to make that decision. There's something to be said for if you like the general company and the client stuff's a little bit stressful, you have this flexibility where you could start building a secondary pursuit within your company that you're initiating that you want to become so good you can't be ignored on eventually, but there's no actual pressure or deadlines or close monitoring in the short term with the idea of if I keep getting better at this, I can spend less time doing the client stuff and more time doing what I want to do.

So you can have a vision of like, what do I want my job at this company in an ideal world to be like and start working your way towards there with this extra time. That might not be a bad way of thinking about it. Oh, I have a vision for what I could be doing here.

You know, I don't know. Maybe it's building back-end tools that not only helps the company, but then the company can license and sell to other people and you're just on your own doing dev and no one really knows what you're doing in a particular day, but you're kind of pulling out cool tools or something like that.

That's an example of something you could do within your company that makes you really valuable. You could point to the money you're bringing in the door, like we're much better because of this and you made 500K selling licenses for this last year. So like, obviously my salary is justified, but it's entirely autonomous and there are no crisis days.

Right. So something like that might not be a bad idea. I don't want to discourage you from spending this time on a content creation related phantom part-time job, but I will say the content creation world is really hard. I think you'd say that's probably true, right, Jesse? Like we work pretty hard at this and I have 20 years of writing books that helps.

I mean it's a tough, that's a tough world and there are traps there. There's a lot of, a lot of this world right now is this thin stream of people making a good living and then a lot of people that they're, they're saying they can use similar tools and kind of feel like you're in this world.

You have like a sub stack or you're used to be like you're posting your medium post or you're doing your threads on X that are in the exact same format and at the end of this last one you say, if you want to find out more, sign up here, but a lot of that's just like getting people to churn and be online and be monetized.

Like you're not making money, you're being monetized. So be careful about it. Content creation is a rough world, but you know, whatever, you do you with that. The final question then, regardless of how you choose to do through A and B, is how should you feel about, you know, guilt or non-guilt?

Look, here's the thing, if you're not defrauding your company, if you are doing what they're asking you to do and you're doing a good job at it and they're happy with you and they're actually giving you a check that has money in it and that money is enough, the market is saying you are working enough as far as that employer is concerned.

Right? Again, this pseudo-productive culture, pseudo-productivity culture, the thing I invade against in my book Slow Productivity. Pseudo-productivity culture says activity is what is valuable and this arbitrary amount of activity, which should be like 40 hours, but really like 40 plus, like you should have a couple of late days, somehow that amount of activity means you're worthwhile and anything less than that means you're not.

Which is crazy because if you look at any sort of kind of classical value creation figure from history, there's all sorts of different amounts of times they're working and it's not 40 hours. 40 hours a week is just what the labor unions compromised with, with the factory owners for like how long can we get someone to stay on an assembly line and put steering wheels on Model T's before they begin to bleed out of the eyes.

Right? And they're like, well, the factory owners are like, can't you just do this for 80 hours? And the unions were like, I think people will die on their feet and like, all right, I guess 40. Right? It has nothing to do with like web development. It's no magic when it comes to what's the right amount of time to be a writer, to be doing marketing campaigns or to be working on software dev.

So what matters is, is your employer happy? Are you making money? Are people paying you? I mean, money is a neutral indicator of value. Are they paying you a good living for what you're doing? And there's no deceit, right? You're not tricking them. You're not tricking them. Like I making them think you did something, you didn't.

They know what you're doing. Yeah. We have these clients, these clients are being handled. The clients are happy. Here's your paycheck. That is a free exchange in a capitalist market. Your labor is being valued there. And it's, you know, one of the cool things about these sort of more entrepreneurial knowledge, sort of remote work, knowledge, work markets is that like the market, it will try to value you properly.

And it's possible that like, yeah, this job is taking 15 hours a week and I'm making a good living off it. That's not a problem. That just means you're doing something high value for this particular company. You're bringing skills to the table and it's worth that much money to them.

So I wouldn't worry about that. If they're unhappy with you, you're not working enough, right? That's what you should, but they're happy with you. You're working enough. Now you're saying, how do I, now what do I want to do with my job? What do I want to do with my surplus time?

So that's the way I would think about that. All right. We have a case study here. This is where people send in their accounts of applying the type of advice we talked about on the show to their own lives so we can see what it looks like in practice.

Today's case study comes from Ariel who says, I worked my butt off in grad school and landed what I thought was a dream job in biotech. As these things go, the dream job, I'm putting this in scare quotes, is turning into a career with many flaws and limited growth potential, but I've really been able to improve my productivity per unit time.

To achieve what I used to accomplish in about 60 hours of, again, scare quotes, work, showing up at an office for six days a week has turned into about 10 hours of focused work that is very flexible plus 12 hours of meetings. I use many of the tools you talk about as a means to be very productive, but work far less than I used to.

But the workaholic thoughts are a daily struggle. Anytime I have some free time, I think things like, hey, maybe I should start a science sub stack in my specialty. Maybe I should write some fiction. Shouldn't I be busier? I would love to be at peace with consuming great books and movies, but the drive to create is pretty relentless.

I am torn between creating things in my free time that may benefit my career or turn into a new one or maintaining this fairly stress-free lifestyle while it lasts. My question is simply why can't knowledge workers be happy just doing less? If we have the means and the drive, should we all just start creating content in hopes that people will consume it?

All right. Well, interesting case study. I want to really, before we get to the meat of Ariel's embedded question, let's get to the meat of what happened here that I think is really telling. He was working 60 hours a week. And when he stepped back and said, what actually creates value?

And let me focus on that and be careful about my time. He reduced that to 10 hours of deep work and then 12 hours of performative meetings. This is true of a lot of jobs. Pseudoproductivity is different than actual productivity. Actual activity is a low risk, highly replicatable way of trying to trick people into thinking that you're valuable.

But again, it is just rarely the case that actual value production requires roughly 40 to 60 hours a week. That's like an arbitrary number. So I think this is really telling that in 10 hours of actual work, he did all the stuff he used to do in 60. That's what happens when you move from pseudoproductivity to actual value production.

The workaholic question is an interesting one. I'm actually going to point towards the future. If all things go well, I believe I have an in-depth episode coming out on Thursday of this week, which is a conversation on exactly this question, this question of the pursuit of greatness. Is this a problem?

Why does it make us uncomfortable? Why does it also motivate us? How do we navigate the conflicting constraints and the conflicting demands of trying to be really good? We get into that in the upcoming in-depth episode. So listen to that. My short take on this, though, is it usually helps—so in this situation, if you're doing something good, you like your work, you think it's important what you're doing, it usually helps if you are doing some lifestyle-centric planning.

So what you're working towards with your time in your life is making your lifestyle closer to things that resonate and away from things that don't. That might be professional. It might be like, "Okay, once I've done lifestyle-centric planning, I really need to get to this point in my job.

So I'm building up a new skill specifically because that'll allow me to move from the headquarters and work remotely out of Maine because I want to live by blah, blah, blah." Or it could be completely unrelated to your job. It gives you a real effort for a real purpose for energy that you're investing outside of your job, whatever it is, like with your kids or your health or something else that's going on.

Lifestyle-centric planning is going to give you a direction for these efforts, so it's not just, "Maybe I'm just reading a lot of big books or maybe I'm just trying to do more work at my job." It gives you a reason for why you're doing that. You have a particular target you're trying to go to.

So I think that might be helpful. But also, it is okay to just have some seasonality and like, "My job's not that hard right now. It's kind of nice. I don't know. I'm exercising a lot. I spend a lot more time with my kids. I'm like involved with a—yeah, I'm writing a fiction writing group just for fun, no stakes.

Something to do." That's not the worst thing either. I really think slow productivity, the book Slow Productivity, is perfectly timed for what you're going through now because it'll continue to have strategies to help you tighten the strategies you're already doing to keep this job load small. But the seasonality, you could really take advantage of the ideas of seasonality, the work at a natural pace principle, and the obsess over quality, like do something really well for more leverage, like that also is right where you are right now.

So I think that book is really going to resonate. But I appreciate the case study, 60 hours down the 10 hours of focused work and 12 hours of meetings. And I bet in those 12 hours of meetings, 25 minutes of actual useful information, if I had to guess. All right, well, we got our final segment coming up where we'll talk about the books I read.

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I thought it was really cool. I am assuming they bought that Defender because they heard me say they should. But it's a really cool, these cars are everywhere. Last time we did a read for the Defender, we saw one right outside the HQ. We're doing a read for the Defender today, and Brad sends me a photo of his neighbor's just got one.

I don't know. It's a really cool car, but you can check it out. If you haven't seen one, go to LandRoverUSA.com, and you can see what these cars look like. It's an iconic car that's been updated with all of the modern conveniences, drives great on road and off. It's kind of like the official car of the Deep Questions podcast right now.

Check that out, LandRoverUSA.com. You can explore the full Defender lineup when you go to LandRoverUSA.com. I also want to talk about our friends at Shopify. Look, if you are going to be selling things online or in a store, you have goods you're going to exchange for money, you got to be thinking about Shopify.

But the thing that anyone who is in the online space like we are knows is this is what people use when they want to start selling something. They go to Shopify. It makes it very easy to set up. You get this sort of best-in-class tech. The conversion rate on sales is high.

The experience is fantastic. It makes everything simple. People who set up physical stores, they use Shopify point-of-service systems. It all just works really well. It's basically almost like a shorthand in our world, our online world. It's like, "Yeah, I'm going to start selling these shirts or coins or whatever.

Yeah, I'm going to Shopify it." It is the technology that people that we know who sell things, it is the technology that they use. Statistically, they're the number one checkout on the planet. Their shop pay feature, so this is what happens when you're checking out. Sales conversions up to 50%, meaning that way less sharp carts go abandoned and way more sales get going.

If you're growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web in your store and their feed and everywhere in between. You need Shopify businesses that sell more sell on Shopify. Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that basically everyone I know who sells things uses.

You can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/deep, but you have to type that in all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/deep to upgrade your selling today at shopify.com/deep. All right, let's get on, Jesse, to our final segment. All right, this is our first episode of March, so I'm going to talk about the books I read in the short month of February 2025.

The first book I read was Moral Ambition by Rutger Bregman. A couple of people have been talking to me about Rutger. He's, I believe, Danish, maybe? Danish philosopher? He's had a couple of books that have really raised some eyebrows, young guy. I like the idea of this book, Moral Ambition.

It was basically a call to use your skills to go do things that are useful for the world. I don't know if it's out yet or not. I actually read this in galley form. I was given a blurb for it, but I enjoyed it. I actually read it very closely, and so I'm including it then on this list.

I admire the ambition of the book, Moral Ambition. It's sort of nice to have someone say, "Hey, smart person. Maybe your whole life shouldn't be centered on how do I make the most money in private equity or something. Go do things that are good." I like when people challenge people to stand up, do more.

It's an interesting book. I like the program that Bregman has going on over there. Then I read a thriller. You've got to have some thrillers. The thriller I read was Brotherhood of the Rose by David Morrell. David Morrell is a big thriller writer from the '70s and '80s in particular, maybe best known for Rambo First Blood.

It was First Blood that became the first Rambo movie, which was actually one of the very first modern form action movies. I rewatched it a couple of years ago. It's worth watching. Actually, that's a very cool movie. It's Sly Stallone, the first one. The later Rambo movies is where he has the giant biceps and the headband and is firing exploding arrows.

The first movie was not like that. It's at the tail end of the new Hollywood '70s, and it is a smaller movie. The premise of the first Rambo movie is that he's a Vietnam vet who's suffering post-traumatic stress and walking through this small town where he's being hassled by the sheriff, like, "Hey, hippie.

Get out of here." He's really struggling, so he's unresponsive, and he cracks. All of this training that he had as a special forces guy in Vietnam all comes out. He goes back in autopilot and breaks someone's nose and stabs the other and flees into the woods. They're going after there to catch him.

It was a book about war and its effects and its after effects, and the book has this real tragic ending. The movie is cool, though, because of the famous scene where the colonel who trained Rambo comes to where they're trying to find him in the forest. I think it's Brian Dennehy who plays the police chief.

The police chief is like, "Colonel, we don't need you here. We get it. You're worried about your man. You don't want him to get hurt, but he killed one of us. We're going to go get him." The colonel says, "I don't think you understand. I'm not here to save Rambo from you.

I'm here to save you from Rambo." It's this kind of classic line, and he does kill a lot of them. Different book by David Murrell. Another classic one, Brotherhood of the Rose, is about these two orphans that have been trained by the CIA to be assassins, and then they're kind of turning on them and trying to kill them off to make them scapegoats, and they're being chased.

Classic thriller. I thought it was really good. I was hearing about Murrell from Jack Carr, the ex-Navy SEAL novelist who wrote Terminalist series of books. He always talked about David Murrell, was a real inspiration for him, and so I had fun with it. Then I read How Dante Can Save Your Life by Rod Dreher.

It's an account of Rod Dreher going through a tough period in his life, and Dante's, reading Dante, the Inferno, Paradiso, and I forgot the one in the middle, but the whole belcanto, the Grand Comedia. What do they call it? The Comedia? Comedia? The Grand? I don't know what the right name is for the three books of Dante.

Look that up. Oh, well, yeah, I'm getting that wrong, and I read a whole book about it, but basically he reads Dante, and it brings him out of this funk that he's in, and so there's some cool history of Dante, and then the lessons he drew out of it.

There's also some memoir going on. He moves back to a small town in Louisiana where he grew up, and things don't go well, and he has a psychological crisis that leads to a physical... Divine comedy? The divine comedy, yeah. There's an Italian name for it, right? That's what I was trying to say, the Comedia, which is not how you say it, right?

But I'm clearly a Dante scholar. I haven't read the full Divine Comedy, but I have a pretty good translation. The Penguin... La Divina Comedia. Yeah, that's what I was thinking about, La Divina Comedia. So it's pretty good. I don't, I mean, honestly, this is probably not fair. I'm not the right person to read memoirs.

I just, you know, Dreher came across as somewhat self, as the reader, he feels sort of self-absorbed, which I guess is just what happens in a memoir, but like his whole life was just centered in this period on like, I can't get past that, like, my family is slighting me or disapproving of me or whatever.

And at some point you're reading the book and you're like, man, get over it. There's a little bit of that going on, which is not fair. But anyways, he ends up okay. All right. I also read Buzzsaw by Jesse Daugherty. This is the, Jesse Daugherty was the beat reporter for the Nationals in 2019, and this was the book he wrote about the Nationals winning the World Series.

And I went to see him speak at the, there's a new bookstore in Bethesda. So I went to see him speak and Andrew Golden and Spencer Nussbaum were there, they're the current beat reporters for the Nationals. And it was kind of cool to have like a lot of baseball fans get together and just sort of talk about it.

And I felt bad for him because his book, Buzzsaw, came out March, 2020. This was the only book event he has done for that book is in February, 2025. So I was like, this is the only event you got, but he had a full house. So I felt, I felt really good about it.

So I read the book. It was great. I was like, oh man, memory lane, like remembering that season and his style of writing the book as he explained it is like, there's a, this is his editor at Simon & Schuster told him this, your book's on a highway that's getting towards them winning, right?

You're going through the season, but you're going to have off ramps along the way where we get backstories of like, oh, like how did this player come into this system or where, what's the backstory on this like head of scouting. So you got all these like side stories about the Nationals as well as you had the through line of the season.

And it was a lot of fun. It was, it was a better than I thought it would be. Jesse's a really good writer. Finally I read Chris Hayes' new book, The Siren's Call. This is his big new split. Chris Hayes from MSNBC is big new splashy book about attention, the attention economy.

This book didn't necessarily have like a big new thesis. It's doing well. It debuted at number one. Like Chris is pretty famous and he was on all the shows. It doesn't have like a big new splashy thesis, but it's very smartly written. It's just like a smart idea book.

There's no advice in it, but it's just let me try to understand. And he's, he, his research assistants are busy. There are a lot of things and examples they're citing. And I thought it was like a really well written book. Chris is a smart writer. We talk about these issues a lot on this show.

If you want kind of like a smart cultural critic take on attention, the attention economy, this was a good one. He's a good writer. All right. So that's what I read. What's this picture you've given me here, Jesse? It's a Sega Genesis game. Oh, I didn't know we were going to talk about that.

I'm going to hold it up, hold it up to the camera. It is a Sega, did a listener send this to us? Yeah. It's a Sega Genesis game that has the title Sigma Insidious. Yeah. Did we? Okay. So this is about us talking about both these terms. Oh, I have, I have your text here.

All right. Here's what the listener said. I was just listening to episode 331 of the Deep Questions podcast where the two words Sigma and Insidious have taken a prominent role, which made me think about how they perfectly align with the two central philosophies of the deep life. Putting these two words together, Sigma Insidious makes me think of an old RPG game where the hero has to fight the heroes of shallowness and distraction by accumulating career capital in order to live out and maintain his ever evolving ideal lifestyle.

I like that. I love the Sega Genesis reference because that's like our childhood. Yeah. That's like 1994 to 1997 so that's definitely a deep cut. I'm going to be honest though, I don't remember what Sigma means. We talked about it, I guess. I don't remember what it means. He describes it in the second paragraph if you want to read it.

Describes an individual who puts his energy into pursuit of real value rather than relying on empty flashiness. Oh, I like that. All right, man. Sigma. It's like the big term with young kids. So it's good. Yeah. Did you know? Cool. Did you know Ohio is like a negative term?

Yes. I learned it from my kids recently. So Sigma is not Ohio. Right. I still can't figure out if based is good or bad. I hadn't heard of that. Based? It's a thing. That's based. That's the first I heard. You're clearly not Sigma. I know. Guys, just so you know, Ohio.

A Sigma is no about based except for I don't know what it means. All right. Every 10 second interval that I'm talking about youth lingo is like a thousand listeners taking their AirPods off and throwing them. So we should probably wrap it up there, but I appreciate that Sega Genesis reference.

This was from Alex. Thank you for that. All right, everyone. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep. If you like today's episode, you might also like episode 339 titled Let Brandon Cook, which is about building a company around letting people do what they do best.

The brand there, of course, is a reference to the very same Brandon Sanderson I talked about in today's deep dive. Check it out. I think you'll like it. Everything in our company is built around let Brandon cook and take away from Brandon anything that he doesn't have to think about.