All right, Jesse, you're in control of the show for this holiday episode. You ask the questions you want to hear. What do you want to hear about first? All right. First question. Who are your must read writers, both authors, journalists, and reporters that are still alive? How do you get notified when they produce content and how quickly do you get around to reading it?

On a similar note, who are your favorite writers of all time? I mean, at this point, what I mainly do is read and reread Jane Patterson's "Eruption." It's a continuation of the Michael Crichton concept about a volcano book. Now, serious question. I can't do must reads. I can't do favorites.

I have a hard time rank ordering things I like. I think there might even be a word for this. I mean, I don't know what it is. I'm making up a word, ordophobia, from ordinal for ranking or ordering and phobia for fear of or dislike of. I just have a real block with things I like trying to order them.

I've talked about this on the show before. It was one of the reasons why I did not sign up for Facebook when Facebook became the first social media platform to have wide scale adoption because early Facebook was built on lists. Your profile was favorite books, favorite movies, favorite quotes, and I have ordophobia.

I can't do that, and so I don't want to bother with this. There is, however, I think something deeper in this question, which is deeply applicable, which is this idea of how do you figure out when and not you like have something to read? Are you on list? Did you get notifications?

How do you know when there's something out that you might want to read? And here, I want to maybe offer a mindset shift for the listener. There's two ways to think about the reading life, the life where you read lots of books and articles, etc. One way is more of the negative avoidance approach, which is, I'm afraid of missing something good.

There's something out there that's good that I would like or I should read, but I missed it. There's a fear of missing out approach to it. The flip side of that mindset is the joy and serendipity of, I found something good to read. Isn't that exciting? I think a long time ago, I realized in the world of nonfiction, which is primarily the world in which I do most of my reading, there's more good authors and more books I'm ever going to read.

Instead of seeing that as a downside, I'm going to miss all this great stuff. I see it as this positive side. It's never going to be hard to find something that's going to delight me. There's so much stuff out there that's good. The joy or the benefit is in constantly finding stuff you like that's interesting, that challenges you.

With that in mind, I'm not super specific in how I find what I'm going to read. I hear about things. I see things. I'll walk through bookstores. I was just at People's Book yesterday here in Tacoma Park, just looking at the new book tables. "Hey, who has something new out that I might want to hear about?" People mention things online.

I read book reviews. I'll read the New York Times book review. I'll see what books the Wall Street Journal is reviewing, especially in the business space. They're pretty good on that. I'll see authors come up in podcasts. I've said this before. When it comes to interview podcasts, I follow guest, not host.

There might be a huge number of interview podcasts that I might scroll through and see what's on, not because I will listen to whatever they do, but to see if they have someone on that I'm interested in. I might hear an interesting author come up on a friend of mine's show or something like this and then listen to it and say, "Oh, that sounds fascinating.

Okay. Maybe I want to read that book." I have a pretty big library. I'll just wander through my library and say, "Oh, here's a book in here. I picked up at some point meaning to read. I didn't get around to it. Now it's really appealing to me. Let's rock and roll with it." I don't sweat missing stuff that's good.

There's so much good stuff out there that I'm not worried about not having something to read. That being said, there's authors I really like. I'm often looking for a combination of an author I like and a topic I like. If it's not both, I might skip it. I don't know.

To be specific, I've long liked Sebastian Junger. His adventure nonfiction, realistic nonfiction book was, of course, world class beginning with The Perfect Storm. Then he switched over in the last decade or so to more of these smaller cultural critique type books, which tend to be about mismatches in human wiring in modern society.

I really like Tribe. I really like Freedom. If I see Junger has a book out and he has some sort of interesting cultural critique about these mismatches, I'm going to be on board. But he had a recent book out that was his Reflections on Mortality and Dying and I didn't pick that one up.

I was like, "I like this author, but I'm not really into that topic right now, so that combination is not catching my attention." It was like this with David McCullough, who was one of my favorite historical nonfiction writers, if not my favorite historical nonfiction writer. His style is fantastic.

He's the master of taking the archived written word, typically in correspondence, and using this to recreate in vivid detail realistic characters from history. So he brings people alive by using their own written words. So if I see him, plus a historical time or topic I'm interested in, I was all on board.

But if it was him and not a topic or area I was interested in, I might skip it. Like I didn't read his book about Americans in Paris. It just wasn't as interesting to me as his sort of presidential books or colonial era books. So that's the way I do this.

And sometimes I won't know anything about the author, but the idea seems so interesting, I'll say, "Let's give this a try." I'm reading right now this fantastic, crazy book. It might be the only book this guy ever wrote. And he's basically recreating mathematics—I've mentioned this before, Jesse—but he builds from scratch mathematics from first principles in a way that's more conversational but motivated.

So he doesn't just say, "Here's how you take a derivative of a polynomial." He works from first principles. How would you take a derivative of a polynomial? He derives all the stuff you learn in math class all the way through multidimensional calculus, including trigonometry, all the major rules of algebra.

It's a crazy book. It's fantastic. And it's weird and brilliant. I don't think anyone even knew about it. And it sort of disappeared. And that was just topic first, and I didn't know anything about this author. So I don't know. I love books. I love nonfiction books. There's no shortage of good books to read.

You'll miss most of the good books. And the way I see it is that's OK. What's the name of that math book? Burn Math Class. Oh, OK. Yeah. Bad title, right? Burn Math Class, a weird—you know, it was on a smaller press. I'll talk about it. I'm not done with it yet, so I guess it'll end up on the January book list.

So you have two copies of that, right? I lost the first one. I have it. Oh, you have it. I bought another one. Yeah, I've been reading it, and I forgot to return it. I looked for it. I was like, "Ah, whatever. I'll just buy another one." That's a cool book.

Yeah. It's a cool book. I'm in Multivariable Calculus, which, you know, I took. I used to be good at, but I don't remember. But he derives it all from scratch. And it's all done in LaTeX. I mean, only, like, math and science people know this, but he clearly wrote the whole book using the layout software we use for scientific papers.

So it's not even formatted—it wasn't reformatted for book format. He just wrote it with the same software you use to write a math paper. It's a cool book, though. I mean, crazy, but I wish more people would write crazy books like that. Needs a better title, needs a better cover.

Maybe we should buy the rights for it and, like, re-release it. Remember, like, Ferris was doing that for—I don't know if you remember this. Years ago, Tim Ferris was doing this. He was like, "I'm going to buy the rights for books I really like." He would buy, like, the audio rights and re-record them and publish them and use his platform to help push them.

And then he realized, "Okay, that's, like, a really low-margin business." But it was cool. He was buying rights for a while. 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. All right. What's your second question? All right. Next question.

"Writing is a big part of your life. When you compare your writing to your favorite writers, do you think their level is achievable? Or is it similar to your MIT experience with certain folks having extreme brain horsepower?" It's a good question and a tough question. To give context for the listener, I've talked about this with theoretical computer science, my primary academic field or my original academic field, that there were differences.

It was very hard work to get better, but there was some point where I realized I'm not at my 100%, because to get to your 100% is very difficult just in terms of the sheer intensity of work required. But I realized my 100% was going to fall short of the greats in the field.

And there's an epsilon between, you know—so if you can't be a great, the difference between being, like, very good and good was somewhat diminishing returns. I mean, I had a professorship at a good university, it's respected my field, easily got my promotions. And so I at some point was thinking to go all in on getting to my 100%, which basically in theoretical computer science means you've got to read a lot more papers.

That sounds casual, but it's actually very hard to read and understand a theory paper, because it's complex math that's summarized, and you have to reconstruct complicated math from scratch. It just really is like an all-out intellectual effort. It can take days and days just to understand one paper, and you've got to do that all the time.

And if you do that all the time, you can get yourself to 100%. I still think it would have been short of the very top people, and so I pulled back from trying to go 100%. Writing? That's a good question. I'm probably better at nonfiction writing, nationally speaking, I guess, than theoretical computer science.

I guess. So maybe I'll start there. I mean, I'm a good theoretician, right? I mean, I trained at the top theory group. It was the MIT's theory group was a good group. I have a good professorship. I have a good H-index. I have a lot of citations. But it's a smaller group of people to compare yourself against.

There's more nonfiction writers. I just guess the reason why I say that is my national reputation as a nonfiction writer is probably better. And some of the accolades of nonfiction writing, like writing for The New Yorker, maybe that's in academia. Maybe that's the equivalent of having a position at a top 10 CS program, right?

The New York Times bestsellers, the award list, maybe that's the academic equivalent of—though I've won some awards for my academic work, but winning some more higher-level awards, being in the—your work showed up in science and not just in the journal that's specific to your field. So I think I'm a little better, nationally speaking, in nonfiction than I am in theory.

But I'm not one of the best nonfiction writers, right? I'm not writing features for The New Yorker in the magazine. I'm not up for national book awards or Pulitzers, right? I mean, I'm not at that echelon of, from a craft perspective, just the very best writers. I make best-of-the-year lists, but typically places that are considering business books or considering pragmatic nonfiction, whereas The New York Times is top 100, that's not a place I'm going to show up.

I'm not going to show up in The New Yorker's best books of the year. So in theory, there's higher craft I could get to. I don't know how high I would get if I pushed for 100% in writing. I think, just like in CS, I'm at that 75%, which took a decade to get here.

It took really hard work, don't get me wrong. But to write the very best writing I could do, I would really need to do it full-time all out to get to that 100%, and I don't know where that would land. One of the reasons why I'm not doing that, as long as we're psychoanalyzing my career decisions here, which is interesting to me.

One of the reasons I'm not doing that is that it might not be the most productive thing for me to do from a career success or impacts perspective, right? Like, really, my skill, the thing I think that I have that's more unique or my unique advantage is actually idea generation.

I'm an idea generator. I can make sense of information and come up with interesting ways to think about things. I'm very good at consolidating things into interesting ideas and frameworks. I've always been good at this. I just sort of see the world this way. That's well-served by my current writing ability.

Like, I'm a pretty good writer, which means when I write about idea stuff, it has a little bit of a gloss of it being maybe a little bit smarter than, like, a standard advice or self-help, but not off-the-charts, like, literary nonfiction. And that's probably, like, the right place, right, this sort of smart self-help balance I've found, where I have ideas that can give you specific action, but I'm writing about it more New Yorker-y style, like, smarter than you would get in just a standard advice book that you would pick up.

That seems to be, like, a combination, that's a lane I've created, which I think is a good lane. So actually becoming better at nonfiction writing wouldn't help that lane. Personally, though, I'm interested in continuing to grow my craft. So man, this is an interesting question, Jesse. This is, like, an interesting discussion that you could have in general when talking about achievement, is that gap between 75% of your capacity and 100%, because there is a huge effort differential between 75% and 100%.

And it's a calculus that in any sort of high-achieving field you have to do. Is my 100% going to justify that effort differential or not? And it's a complicated question, because your 100% is where you land on that hierarchy of skills, and, like, most people's 100% doesn't land at the top.

And so often, like, your 75%, which again is very hard, you have to focus and it takes decades, but your 75% is often the right strategy with high achievement. You're getting the most bang for your buck. It's a complicated topic that I don't think we discuss with enough complexity in our culture in general.

So I don't know. Maybe I-- let me summarize it. I could probably be a little bit better at writing, but I don't know how much better. Yeah. So in the time being, like, in the next 10 years, you'll hopefully be a better writer than you are now, right? Yeah.

But I will get better. Yeah. The question is, like-- Is it like baseball? Like, I keep on asking you this, is there-- eventually, you kind of go through your prime? I-- it's a-- yeah, it's a hard question. I don't know. Probably. See, the thing about baseball-- and my former late editor, who edited So Good They Can't Ignore You, and actually, tragically, died a couple of years ago, he used to tell me this because he was a professional baseball player.

Didn't make it to the majors, but was in the professional minor league systems. And the thing is, he said, in baseball, everyone is gunning for their 100%, to use my analogy. So everyone is doing all the training you can possibly do to maximize your potential. So everything just eventually sorts out.

And I'm a single A player, I'm an instructional league player, I'm a double A player, maybe I'm like a triple A or quadruple A style utility player, or I'm a major leaguer, or I'm an all-star. And you're going to fall somewhere on that scale, and you're going to know it by, like, 27.

Because everyone is going all out. And so you're probably not going to have-- changes happen. Like, obviously, you'll get in the weeds, you'll get a sort of mid-career Daniel Murphy changes his swing to be more launch angle, and suddenly becomes one of the best hitters in baseball. But for the most part, it kind of shakes out.

Most other non-athletic fields, people don't push it that far. And so what I'm trying to figure out is, is your 75% sort of indicate, hey, if my 75% is this good, then I just add this much to get what my 100% would be, or is it a completely different game?

Like, maybe in writing, like nonfiction writing, if you're a pretty good writer and you go all out, you can get great. Maybe anyone can do it. I just don't know. You know? A lot of what makes great nonfiction writing great tends to be on the research side. And that's something that's pretty replicatable.

It's just time, it's, you know, OK, what makes a David Graham long-form piece for The New Yorker good? So you have David Graham, who wrote Killers of the Flower Moon, and what makes his long-form pieces good? He spends a huge amount of time just immersing himself in the topic and the people, and he just follows them, and he gets all these notes, and he goes into the archives, and he spends all these times and reads all these things and just immerses himself in that world.

Typically puts himself into some sort of adventure as well. He brings those two things together. That's just like a lot of time, right? Like often what differentiates like a great nonfiction writer from a good nonfiction writer is like they're willing to do the time. They're willing to use the Robert Caro term, turn every page in the archive.

Like I'm going to read everything. I'm going to just sit and craft. Ronan Farrow was great at this. Like I'm just going to, like a bulldog, cultivate these sources and just get and go and get and go. And some of that is a time game. Some of that is an instinct game, but I don't know.

That's what I think is different about athletics and writing is that like if you're willing to put in the time, yeah, it's like a pain tolerance thing. I am willing to spend five years on this. It's going to be a better book than if you spend two. But at some point, you're right, it's got to level out.

Like just your instinct for the written word and rhythm, it's just, it's going to, your quality will land where it will land. But I mean, you can have huge successes like Walter Isaacson. He puts in the time. It's not that his writing style is, there's something magnificent about it.

He just, it's, he's just super clear. He does the work, he goes to the archives, he gets the important information, he sees the through lines are important and he writes with a real clarity, which is like a little bit different than David McCullough, who had like a real skill for capturing the essence of a historical figure using the written word, quoting the right things.

Like he had this super empathetic brain that could inhabit the brain of the subject by just reading everything that person had written and he kind of understands what gets to the core of that person and what they're thinking and then can pick out those examples. And like there's just like a real skill in there.

So I don't know. It's a great question. I struggle with. All right, what do we got? Next question. When do you fit in your writing blocks for academic papers? Do these replace your morning blocks for book and article writing? I mean, nowadays, writing is writing, like that's my main intellectual activity is producing words on paper that other people are going to find interesting, important or impactful.

And so whether it's a book or a New Yorker article or an academic article, I just want to write. I write every morning and then I schedule more writing blocks if I need it, depending on what's going on. And what happens in those blocks just depends on what I'm working on.

So if I'm heavy in book mode, those will be book blocks. If I'm crunching a deadline for an academic paper, then those will be academic blocks. Sometimes I'll mix them. I try not to. I'm a big believer in milestones. So if I have a huge project like writing a book that I have like a New Yorker piece, I want to write.

I just milestone things like, great, let me get to this milestone on the book, finishing a draft of this chapter, then I can put that aside and move to like this New Yorker piece. So what's my milestone there? Full rough draft. I get to my editor. So I'm all in on that till I get to that milestone.

Now I'm going to hear back from my editor. I go back and say, my milestone for the book is going to be like a full editing pass to this chapter. And like, that's what I'll work on for four or five days. OK, now I'm going back. So I milestone my work and the things that can happen within like roughly a week.

And so I'm not switching. I try not to switch back and forth within the same day. But I also just don't differentiate that much anymore like I used to. I mean, it used to be when I was struggling for computer science promotions, like that's what I was focused on.

It was, I have to make sure I'm publishing this many academic papers. All right. Now I have like my book writing and I got to figure out like when I'm going to take on book contracts and like when I'm going to do that book writing. And these are two very separate things.

Now it's all mixed together for me. I just think writing is writing is writing. I try to do as much as possible. Sometimes a year I'm doing more than others. I milestone so I can be monofocused on one thing at any given day. It probably, it feels slower in the moment.

That's one of my ideas for my book, Slow Productivity. Over time it produces just as much. I didn't write today actually. So. Well, you had a doctor's appointment. I had a doctor's appointment. Yeah. So. So will you write this afternoon? I had to take, today is a nonwriting day because I have a meeting after this and a board meeting tonight.

And so I had to mentally, I had to mentally prepare myself yesterday that just this is a nonwriting day because otherwise I get so frustrated that I'm not writing. A break, a Christmas break can be rough for me. I got to get writing in or I get really antsy.

It's the, this might, someone took away my cigarettes type of thing. All right. Next question. What steps do you take when completely stuck on a project? For example, if you optimize a project for many months and have seen only minimal improvement in minor metrics, but the overall goal isn't getting any closer.

You know, I was just talking about this on an interview I was recording last night for someone else's podcast. They were asking about this, you know, sticking with a project for a long amount of time has all these advantages I write about in slow productivity, like stuff that's cool takes time and you got to stay focused on it for a long amount of time.

And they were wondering about, but what if it's not going well? You know, if you're thinking it's going to take five years for me to get good at something, what happens if after four years, it turns out that's not your thing, right? If you wasted four years. So I was thinking about this problem and a book came to mind.

I remember reading this book. This probably would have been, if I had to guess, 2007, maybe it was 2009, but I think this was 2007. I don't have a photographic memory, but I have a memory for books. Just for whatever reason, I can remember where I am when I've read most books.

And I read this book in the airport. We were flying to a trip to Argentina and I was reading this book in, I think, George Bush International Airport in Texas where we were connecting for the flight. Seth Godin's book, The Dip, gets at this exact issue. He says, okay, here's the cool thing, or not cool thing, the critical question when you're working on a long-term important project.

When things start to go poorly, like you stop making progress or opportunities are not emerging or you feel stuck, how do you tell the difference between being in what he calls a dip, which means you want to make it through this dip and on the other side, you're going to keep going up.

How do you tell the difference between a dip and a cul-de-sac? Cul-de-sac means that you're just done, you're just stuck and what you need to do is quit and this is not working, you need to do something else. And I think he correctly points out differentiating between dips and cul-de-sacs is the key to tackling a type of long-term projects that ultimately you can build really cool lives on top of.

The problem is, I don't remember that book giving really solid technical advice for how you make that differentiation. It was more like he was saying this matters, there's a difference, it was giving you vocabulary. Figuring out how to tell the difference is one of the key under-discussed elements of long-term performance.

So what I said on this podcast interview I was doing last night is you want to look for indications of progress. Sometimes this is a skill, I'm trying to get better at something so I can just get the indication I'm getting better at this skill. Sometimes the indications have to come from the opportunities that are being afforded you on the other side.

You're getting more offers or opportunities or more clients or more incoming. So it could be your internal skill that you can measure as getting better or your external value is being validated as getting better. But you're looking for these indicators of progress. If they're stuck for a non-trivial amount of time, you need to rethink process.

All right, let me go back and rethink process. How am I trying to get better? So I'm a writer trying to get better, I'm kind of stuck, I'm just now, I'm writing this newsletter, the numbers are low, the numbers are stuck, nothing else is happening. I need to go back to the drawing board and rethink the process I'm using to try to get better.

That's the first thing to do. Rethink your process has to happen from an evidence-based perspective. It is very tempting when working on long-term projects to write a story about what you want to be true, about what's important for getting better here. This is what I want to be true, that if I just keep writing this substack and I do it every week and I'm very careful about putting screenshots of the essay on Twitter in the optimized form after they come out and I do all the social media stuff right, that eventually something will click and this will take off and I'll make a full-time living off it.

We tell ourselves stories about what we want to be true. But the reality could be very different, and you might get a completely different story from reality where it says, "Well, wait a second. Writing a substack where you don't already have a reputation in a subject is not going to do anything.

All you need to do is try to build up a footprint in the journalistic world on way to getting a book, and this is difficult because you've got to make pitches and they're going to get rejected and it's going to be hard work, and you don't want it to be true, but it is." So you have to go back and get evidence.

What really works in this pursuit I'm doing? Talk to people who know, and then upgrade your process or update your process to reflect this reality. If this still doesn't return results, like, "Okay, I'm doing the things that you're supposed to do, I was reality checked, here's how people make progress in this world," and you're still not getting indicators of progress, that's your sign you might be in a cul-de-sac and you need to change the map of where you're going.

Maybe it's a small change or maybe it's a drastic change, like, "I'm just not going to go this way in general." So I have seen this a lot. I become more attuned to this in the things that I do that have been relatively successful. I have become attuned to the degree to which there's a survivorship bias, in which it's easy to say, "Okay, here's what I did, so if you just do that, you'll be fine." I've realized over time, no, no, some of these things are really hard, and you don't want to get stuck in a cul-de-sac because most people will.

So let's consider book writing. I used to always tell people, "Yeah, write books. It's not so hard. It's not too hard to sell a book, and then you'll build up your audience, and it's really cool, and it wasn't that hard. Everyone should write books." Then over time, I realized, no, no, there's some survivorship bias there.

It's hard to sell a book. It's really hard to get a book to actually sell to people. There's luck. There's timing. There's topic. There's skill. For most people who go down the writing path, you're going to get stuck pretty quickly. Same thing with podcasting. It's easy to say, "This is not technically that hard, what we do here.

I could tell you what we do here, and here's what it requires, and technically here's what we do week to week." But I've realized, "Oh, it's really hard to have a podcast be successful," and it depends on lots of things, including, I've discovered, having a national reputation or brand outside of what you're doing with the podcast.

You have a built-in audience. You have a built-in trust or social validation that you're someone that people should listen to. All this is really hard. Actually, like most people I know who have tried podcasts, it's just kind of dead-ended. They technically did all the right things. There's just no audience coming.

There's no obvious thing to do to make that audience bigger. It's like, "Oh, this is a difficult path to thread," and actually, it's not going to work for most people, and you don't want to waste too many years trying to follow it. I've become more attuned to this recently, that you want to look for indicators of progress.

You need evidence-based plans for this. You can update your plan with new evidence if it's not working. If it's still not working after that, then it might be a cul-de-sac, not a dip. You want to consider putting your efforts towards something that's more likely to succeed for you, where you're building off of, "I have this pre-existing ability or platform.

I already have this credential that makes it much more likely I'll succeed going this path. You might need to reality check the path." I've become more curmudgeonly about this, Jesse, about general stuff. I used to be like, "Everyone should just do everything I'm doing. It's fine." But now I've been recognized, I've been very selective, and I've really leveraged pre-existing cultural assets to try to make other things successful.

It's a lot more fragile and contingent than maybe I would have realized before. Okay, next question. What criteria do many high school students fail to consider when selecting a college? On a related note, do you think tuition costs for private schools will exceed $150,000 per year in, say, 15 years?

I think students, in the American context, and this is very different than other countries where higher education is largely free. In the American context, I think students probably overemphasize fit. It's a uniquely American thing that, "I want this to feel of the college to be right," which often means physically what it feels like, where it is in the country, what the buildings feel like, etc.

It probably makes sense. The strategy that probably makes sense for most people is, go to your state school. That's going to be the best bang for your buck, unless you can get into a really elite school that can open up substantially more opportunities because of its eliteness. But avoid that big middle ground of non-elite schools that are very expensive that you're shopping on fit.

It's probably not a great investment in money. That's probably the best strategy. Go to state school, unless you can get into a Georgetown or better or something like this. There are, of course, schools where fit really matters. If you're a super math whiz, try to go to MIT. It's great for that.

If you're a music whiz, you really want to try to go to Juilliard. If you're film savant, you can get into USC, you should go to USC. But for the most part, we probably think too much about, "Is this a fit for me?" Because honestly, what does a 17-year-old know?

What are they basing this decision off of? They had a good visit to a school, they met someone nice, like, "Great. That's where I want to go." The cost thing, I hope it doesn't get to $150,000. I hope tuition doesn't get there. I think there's going to be some emergent reverse pressure on tuition prices in schools as more alternatives.

There's some alternatives that are emerging, independent schools like the University of Austin. Barry Weiss is set up down there in Texas. There's some of these other options that are emerging, which might start to put some pressure on runaway costs, because there's going to be these alternatives that emerge that have more constrained costs.

There's a kind of a tragedy of the commons that goes on now, where just all schools increase their cost. All these private schools, like, "Well, as long as we all do it, it's fine because you have no other option. It's all very expensive." Hopefully, there's some sort of capped pressure that comes in to prevent it from getting bigger.

I say this as a father of three kids who are going to have to go to college. The only advantage I have of private school getting more expensive is, as a professor, I have a tuition benefit, which is key to the cost of Georgetown's current tuition. They will pay a certain percentage of Georgetown's tuition towards any school that my kids go to.

As it stands now, because private schools are so expensive, a third or whatever the percentages of Georgetown's tuition is all of the University of Maryland's tuition. The best case scenario is Maryland keeps its prices low, and then Georgetown gets really expensive. In fact, if Georgetown can get like five times more expensive than any other college, I'm set.

It's my tuition benefit, because I'll be able to cover anything else. But yeah, it's big. The gap between state and private is getting big as well. States have done pretty well. Most places are keeping the cost kind of reasonable. But now you have this big gap that's opening, which we're noticing as we're doing college savings.

Because if you save for a state university, but your kid, like in a 529, but your kid wants to go to a private university, you don't have nearly enough money. But if you're saving in a tax-advantaged account, like a 529 for a private university, and your kid goes to a state university, you've way over-saved, and you have too much money in that account, and you're going to have to pay penalties to get out.

So that gap is kind of complicated when it comes to tuition saving. I guess it would somewhat vary, too, in terms of selection process if you're being recruited to play a sport. Yep. Sport's its own thing, obviously, right? You're deciding what team you want to play for. Yeah, same thing.

This is mentioning specific things. I'm a violin whiz. You want to go to Juilliard, et cetera. So we'll see. I still got some time before I have to worry about it. I wrote a book about college admissions. My least known book. But it is out there. So I used to know a lot about this.

Jesse, I figure we should do a quick ad break before we keep going with Jesse Takeover. I want to talk first about our now becoming a longtime sponsor, because it's a product I really like, and that is our friends at Notion. You've heard me talk about Notion before. It's a tool that helps you combine your notes, docs, and projects into one space that's simple and beautifully designed.

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When you use our link, you'll be supporting our show. That's notion.com/cal. Also want to talk about our longtime friends at Blinkist. Blinkist is an app that gives you over 6,500 book summaries and expert led audio guides to read and listen to in just 15 minutes per title. You can access best in class, actionable knowledge from 27 categories such as productivity, psychology and more on the go and get entertained at the same time.

The way Jesse and I like to use Blinkist is to triage potential books to read. If we hear about a book we might be interested in, we'll add it to our queue and we get around to it. We'll either read the 15 minute summary, you know, right there on our phone or listen to the 15 minute summary like you would a podcast.

It does a great job of letting you understand what a book is about and I find it really helps me decide whether I want to read the whole book or if I've got enough, I get it. I get the gist. Like I get where you're going here. I don't need to read a whole book about this.

So it's a fantastic tool for triaging what books you read. Other people use it as just straight entertainment. It's like an interesting podcast to learn about different topics. A lot of ways to use Blinkist, but it is a must have companion to the reading life. One new feature to offer, they have this program called Blinkist Connect that allows you to give another person unlimited access for free.

So it's basically two for one. That's a cool thing that's going on now. So right now Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com/deep to start your seven day free trial and you will get 40% off a Blinkist premium membership. That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com/deep to get 40% off any seven day free trial, Blinkist.com/deep.

And now for a limited time, you can use Blinkist Connect to share your premium account. You will get two premium subscriptions for the price of one. Jesse, maybe we should wear these blinking lights every time we do a Blinkist ad. I think that's a good idea. It could start a bad precedent though, that like every advertiser would now want us to have a physical prop, but hey, we're up for it.

We're up for it. All right, let's get back to the questions. All right, next question. Can you walk us through your shutdown ritual? How long does it take? Has there ever been a workday where you missed it? Are there significant consequences if that happens? So okay, when I'm done with work for the day, I open my first of what will be several handles of whiskey and I just start pounding.

I start pounding until the pain goes away. No, that's not my shutdown ritual. So what I do for my shutdown ritual is I, first of all, clean up open loops. So for me, these are going to be in two places. One will be my workingmemory.txt file on my computer.

This is my expansion of my working memory. I use this non-formatted text edit text file. All throughout the day, I capture notes and ideas just to remember things temporarily or more long-term. Like, let's say I'm trying to schedule a meeting and someone emails me some options. I'll just copy that and paste it into that file and then I'll open up my calendar and I have the file open up next to me and I can see what time works.

I keep impromptu to-do lists for admin blocks in here. Okay, here's what I'm working on. I take notes on things that occur to me. So I make sure at the end of the day, there's nothing loose in that file that needs to be captured, that needs to be moved into my task storage system, that needs to be moved as a reminder onto my calendar, that needs to generate an email that I send out.

So I make sure those open loops are closed. I usually then do a survey of my inbox as well, just to make sure there's not something time-sensitive I missed. It's critical. Doing a final check of your inbox before you shut down will destabilize one of the biggest post-shutdown sources of distraction, which is this urge to just sort of check in just to be sure that you're not missing something in your inbox.

So that final check is really important. Then I'm going to look at my weekly plan, see if I need to update it at all. What am I doing tomorrow? I look at my calendar, my weekly plan, what changes do I need to make about what I did or didn't get to today, so that I feel like my weekly plan is now at the end of this day in a good place.

All right, it's up to speed where where it needs to be. At that point, I'm ready to do my shutdown ritual, which now is typically going to just be in my time block planner where I have a shutdown complete checkbox, and I just check that. Now I know I've done my shutdown ritual.

If I've done that, I can get into my evening without work stress. I can get into my evening without feeling like there's something in the back of my mind, like what about this? What about that? So it really does make a difference. Sometimes as part of the shutdown ritual, I'll sketch out a plan for the evening.

If it's kind of a complicated evening, I need to pick up this kid, we're going to this thing, I want to get this done. I'll sketch out a little plan, and I will look at the planner, I'll have it just so I can remember when I'm trying to get done that night after my shutdown.

But once I do that checkmark in the checkbox, I'm not thinking about work until the next day. I do miss this sometimes. The times when I miss this, it's not due to a day being so busy that I just don't get time to do it. The times when I miss this is where the day is sort of hybrid, when the day is sort of kind of a workday, not really a workday.

I know a lot of people who go to an office don't have this experience, but for someone like me, I'm a professor, I'm a writer, it can get kind of hazy. This time of year, it can get kind of hazy. Semester's over, Christmas break's about to start, maybe I have to go to a doctor's appointment that morning, and I'm kind of working, but we're also going to pick up gifts, and it's sort of a workday, and it's sort of not a workday.

Those are the days where the shutdowns don't happen, and I suffer for it, and it's just this background hum of a little bit of destabilization and anxiety. So it's the days I can get my shutdown routine, which is, I really don't like to miss it, and I'm not going to miss it on a normal full workday, that really makes a big difference.

So you pretty much work on the same computer all day, where your working memory is. Yeah, so I have two working memory.txt files. I have my laptop, that's the main computer I'll use, I have an external monitor at home that I'll plug it into, and then I have one here in the computers in the studio, in the maker lab here at the studio.

That one I use only in the moment, I will empty that when I'm done using that computer, so I don't keep stuff on there. So if I'm writing on that computer, I'm using the big monitors, I'll usually have my laptop. I will copy stuff over to the working memory.txt on my laptop.

So I will use the working memory.txt on the studio computers, really temporarily. Like I let me remember this while I go over to my calendar, let me type the five points I want to put in this thing I'm writing quotes, let me copy a quote, I'm going to move over here.

And then I clean that out when I walk away from the computer. So it's really the file on my laptop that I treat as the sort of stable file. And that's the one I want to be checking at the end of the day. Okay. All right. Next question. Do you think about retirement?

If so, is it dependent on financial or other factors? Would you still work some of your jobs past technical retirement? I mean, what does retirement mean for me? I have been thinking about this and my financial advisor asked me about this. But it's complicated because I have a lot of jobs, right?

So what does retirement, like, what would it actually mean from a job perspective? Does it mean stop being a professor? Does it mean stop being a magazine journalist? Does it mean stop being a podcaster? Does it mean stop writing books? Is it some subset of those, some combination of those?

It's unlikely to ever mean for me to do none of those things. Like why would I ever stop, for example, writing books if I could or, you know, magazine articles? So it's a very complicated thing for me. And even like saying stop being a professor, it's not always so cut and dry.

Like there's professors have different setups, you know, it's, it's there. Some are just straightforward. I'm in a standard department with a full teaching load doing the normal thing, but there's also professors out there. You might not know it if you're not in academia, but like well-known professors where they have a title and they're associated with a center and they don't really draw much of a salary and maybe they have an office or not on campus, but they're, they're barely there.

So the word professor can mean many different things. So it's all very complicated. So what I've been focusing in on instead is the financial aspect and really like keeping things simple, looking at straightforward financial independence so that we have a very clear number. This is how much we would need to sort of comfortably live per year.

Like we know that number pretty well because we're pretty careful in tracking our expenses. And this is what that number is going to reduce to sort of post having kids at home, because that's a smaller number, but kids at home, you spend more money and you have to think about college, et cetera.

So you have like, what would the number be tomorrow and what would the number be once the kids are gone, which is like a lower number. Both of those we can translate into how many, how much assets would you have to have to basically feel comfortable withdrawing that much money annually?

That's a big number, not a crazy number, but a big number. That's a number I have in mind, right? If my next book does really well, there's some big influx of money. That's what I'm putting that money towards, because the way I see it is the closer you get to that sort of financial independence, the more breathing room you have to pursue whatever definition of retirement seems interesting.

Because now you're not dependent on any of the things I'm doing as like an income source. Now you can just start thinking, what do I think the ideal combination of work would be? And you could explore that without having to worry about, yeah, but my health insurance, or are we going to be able to pay for this or that or these expenses or whatever?

So that's the way I've been thinking about it, is not I want to stop working, but the more financial independence I gain, the more comfortable I can be reconfiguring what work means, because the fear is not there. And this is why I'd be a bad entrepreneur, I think, Jesse, is like I really have that mindset of I don't trust, I think of the worst case scenarios financially, I don't take risks.

I like overlapping sources of income. I want stress reduction. I think other people we know are much more aggressive about, hey, this thing's going well and it's cool. Let's go all in on that. And we'll probably figure it out. Well, I don't like to just hope it works out.

So I'm probably way more conservative than other people would be. And because of that, I have too many jobs and that's kind of a problem. What does overlapping sources of income mean? So OK, like someone else's situation might say, hey, this podcast is doing well, just be a podcaster or you're a successful writer.

Just be a full time book writer. It's fine. You're doing well. Right. Or, you know, whatever, wherever it would be. Whereas I think of it as like, well, yeah, the podcast's doing well, but like, what if it stops doing well? Then you're screwed or like books is fickle. It's like being a successful actor.

You're a successful actor until you're not, until you make two bad movies and then you're no longer a successful actor. It's like I'm always sort of catastrophizing. Yeah. Whereas my full time writer friends, for example, are like, you're crazy. Like you're very, very successful as a writer, you know, way over the threshold that someone just like, great, I can just now write books.

Or other things where I'll be conservative would be a lot of people in my situation like, yeah, whatever. I bought a farm up in, you know, Vermont or I have a cabin up in West Virginia. Yeah. They don't overthink it. That'd be cool. It's a cool place to go.

And we spend the summers there and we write or whatever. I'm in my head, the math doesn't cost this much. What about this? And the stress of this and this and this. And so I'm, I, I, I've always had this mindset of like, no one's going to save me.

I got it. I'm supporting a family. I want security. I want, you know, I want to be able to weather multiple points of failure. It's very sort of non-entrepreneurial. Also the problem is I like all these things, right? Like Georgetown can be a pain in terms of work, you know, especially when I feel like I'm at the height of my abilities with certain things and I'm doing forms, but I really love academia and professors and being on campuses and that life and my whole life.

I've lived my entire adult life in academic institutions and it's really cool and rare and most people don't get to do it. And I would hate to give that up. Yeah. Cause I bet once you left it, you would be like, oh, I miss it. I want to go back.

It's the problem. And I like, I like writing books. Like why would I want to start that? Like, that's really fun. I've been doing that since I'm, you know, 20 years old. Like why would I want to stop doing that? And this podcasting thing we're having, this is cool as well.

It's the modern, this is like the, what the equivalent of having a radio show that was pretty successful 25 years ago. And like, this is really interesting. I just like too many of these things. I love all the people at the New Yorker. It's like really cool to write for them.

Right. So the problem is I can do, I like all these things and like often it works and then sometimes it doesn't. I mean, Jesse knows every September I say, that's it, I'm quitting. I'm just going to live in the woods and be a writer. But then every June I'm like, ah, these jobs are awesome.

I love all this stuff. Why would I ever want to not do any of these things? So yeah, back to retirement. I don't even know what that means. So I'm just squirreling away money. I see like money is options, optionality, I don't know if that's a word, optionality. You'll get some emails about it.

It's a real insidious process, real insidious process we have here. All right, next question, we have a little bit of an interactive here, but the overall question is, do you think Elon Musk's purchase of X had this intended effect and are that many people really on X? And I have a article here from the Washington Post that's like an interactive that you can scroll through.

All right. So we can put, this is up on the screen for people who are watching, up on the screen, full screen. Our YouTube guy is yelling right now. He's convinced that like any moment I'm not on the screen, people are going to immediately turn away. All right. All right.

I'll read this out loud for those who are listening instead of just writing. I guess Elon on November 6th, he tweeted, they have the tweet up here, it's morning in America again. All right. Then here's the text. At 1039 AM on the day Donald Trump declared victory for a second term, Elon Musk wrote six words on X.

This post instantly caught fire. About an hour and a half, it had been seen more than 10 million times and was still reaching 120,000 new viewers every minute. Oh, there's a cool graph. Oh, interesting. This is the graph we've used over time. It's trending down. With over 200 million followers, can you see this?

The arrow on the graph is like sparking. Yeah. Cool graphics. With over 200 million followers, Musk has the biggest account on X and increasingly uses it to wield political power. Look at this thing. Within 26 days around the election, Musk fired off 3,870 posts that received more than 33 billion views.

My God, if I was a shareholder in one of these companies, I'd be like, what are you doing? Come on. Like this is a give those 3,000 worst, almost 4,000 posts could have been like you thinking about our company. Musk reach transcends Trump's with each of his X posts typically seen by twice as many users as opposed to the president elect the other post returned to Twitter.

Trump's influence is smaller on there. As most prepares for a central role in the U.S. government, the billionaire has a political megaphone unmatched in modern society. All right. So what do you wonder about it, Jesse? You're wondering like, is this true? How many people are really on? I don't think that many people are really on X.

Yeah. I think the assumption is largely correct, right? X slash Twitter, whatever you, you know, Twitter now X really is a playpen of elites in a very broad sense. But it was a place that this is where like intellectual, academic, technocratic and political elites gathered. And this is why there was a lot of energy in this place is where they gathered.

They hashed out ideas, they sought status and they sort of collaboratively warred with each other to try to establish cultural Overton windows. So it was a, a, an important place for various elites. Most people in the country could care less. It's not a heavily used platform. It doesn't have a large number of active users.

It doesn't play a large role in most people's day to day life. It's the smallest of the platforms in terms of, you know, it's dwarfed by something like Facebook. That's why it was like valued so little, right? Yeah. That's why, that's why it was like a $40 billion company where Meta is, you know, honing in on a trillion billion dollar valuation.

It's whatever it is, $800 million, $800 billion valuation. It's pretty small company. But the people who write about it are part of that category of cultural elites to which it made a really big deal. So if you're covering technology, it's a really big deal. It's like, this was the clubhouse where we all were.

And there was a, there was a change in fortune as the ownership of that clubhouse changed. The clubhouse became different. It was like a bigger kid took over the tree house and put up a, like a no girls allowed sign like you would have had, you know, back when you were in fourth grade.

But it was like the, the cultural political equivalent of that, that the composition changed. So there was, there was a period in the lead up, so in the last Donald Trump presidency and through the Biden presidency, there was up through, you know, Elon taking over Twitter. There was a period where certain groups sort of had control within these elites, certain subset of the elite sort of had control of this platform.

And then it switched to like the other team got control of it. And this is very traumatic if you're someone who was hanging out in this clubhouse. But for the rest of the country, I don't think it mattered much. But it did like, it set the agenda for what elites wrote about, what other elites talked about.

Elite politicians would look at what was happening on here and this would set their agenda about how they thought about things or how they were reacting to things. And so it mattered to this small group of people, but I don't think it matters to most normal people. I actually, and I've said this from the beginning, I think it was good for our culture writ large that Elon Musk bought and semi broke this platform because it reduces its influence on those cultural elites.

Great, fracture it, make it more partisan. So it's less influential. If it's more nakedly like this team has it, this team doesn't like it. Its impact on how a politician thinks about what matters, doesn't matter, goes down. Its impact on how a journalist thinks about what am I going to write about or not write about goes down.

Its impact on an academic trying to think about what they want to say or not say or pursue goes down. And that's for the good because it's entirely non-representative. It doesn't represent any sort of coherent understanding of the world. It's status seeking elites from different sides all fighting with each other.

So I think the more Twitter X broke, the better for our culture writ large. I think Twitter capture of cultural elite conversations was a real problem. It's not a major platform, but it was punching way above its weight class. So yes, I think for the people who used to be really powerful on that platform who are no longer are really worried that someone they doesn't like is powerful on that platform.

But I think the bigger picture is most people don't care who has a lot of users on that platform or not. Most people have real jobs and kids to take care of and aren't going to look at memes that Elon Musk is posting that he had his grok AI produce.

I'm working on an article right now, Jesse, that's requiring me to go deep on a few social platforms I'd never use and actually use them for a little bit. That's brain rot stuff. It's brain rot stuff. So I think this article is histrionic. I think, yes, to that reporter, it seemed if this is your whole world, it's like, yeah, it's a big deal.

The other guy took over. But I'm like, great, break it, rip the rope ladder off the metaphorical clubhouse so people stop paying so much attention to it because I don't think it's good. I don't think it's good for our culture. I don't think it's good for our politics, not good for media, it's not good for anything.

The elites stop hanging out among each other and creating these sort of interior super bubble meme filled worlds and giving it so much significance. Because I guess if you do a little bit of math, 33 billion with 3,870 posts would be about 8.5 million views per post, which I guess if you compare it to 335 million people in the U.S., it's only like it's less than 3%.

And it's the same people. Yeah, it's the same people. Yeah. That's the problem with these. It's the same. Yes, his influence graph looks big because he sort of set it up so that everyone who has a Twitter timeline just sees his latest thing. Yeah, I've written about this for New Yorker a bunch of times, and I've written this article several times.

Like, look at my article, "We Don't Need a New Twitter," for example. I've written a couple more about this. It's an idea that doesn't make sense. Our culture doesn't need it. It's not as important as the people who think it's important think it is. The problem is it didn't fall apart.

So early on, there was this accusation of like, look, when Musk took this over and started firing all these people, the platform itself technically was going to fall apart. And I'd be like, that would be great, from my perspective as a cultural critic, because this is not a useful contribution to our culture.

The problem is Elon Musk is good at running tech companies. He fired a ton of people, brought in some 10xers, drastically cut down the expenses of running it. And you know what? It's like perfectly stable again. And he's building. So that's the problem. He's too good at running companies to accidentally break it.

But now it's just become like a smaller playhouse. It's just there's these two sides we're fighting on there. Now it's like mainly just this side, and you know, I don't think it's culturally important. OK, next question. Many fans have reached out asking me for an update on your Remarkable.

Are you still regularly using it? If so, has anything changed since your last update? I am. I am still regularly using it. It is my primary notebook. I use that and single purpose notebooks, small field notes that I use for very specific single purpose uses, which I've talked about before on the show.

Single use notebooks. I either have my single purpose notebooks I can fit in my pocket, and then I have my Remarkable. I don't have any other full size notebooks I use. So I've been using it regularly. I still enjoy it. I cracked the screen a little bit, but it's in the corner.

So I think it's OK. I was actually, the doctor's appointment today, I had a surgery and I was seeing the surgeon for the post-op, whatever. And you know, when you see a surgeon, you get six minutes max. Three of those six minutes was him just wanting to know about my Remarkable.

Because you had it in your hand? I had it out. Yeah. That's the magic of it. I can just grab it and like, yeah. In fact, so Remarkable users know you can create as many notebooks as you want within it. And I was even seeing, actually I didn't bring it with me here.

You can have as many notebooks as you want within it, but there's also something called Quick Sheets, which is just like a generic notebook where you can just jot down notes. So like for something like a surgeon's appointment, I just opened up a Quick Sheet and Dr. Blah Blah Blah, this date, took notes on what he said, because like I need to capture this information just temporarily so I don't forget it, but I don't need like a whole notebook for this surgery.

Like this is, I got some information before the surgery, I got some information here and let me just jot it down so I don't forget it. But for other things, I, you know, I have full, I have full notebooks. And there's probably now 30 notebooks on there. And so yeah, I use it for everything.

I use it for, certainly all of my, all of my sort of work I've been doing on my new quarterly plan, which we're going to talk about in the final segment. I've been working a lot of that out within the Remarkable. I teach, I run a robotics club at my kid's school and that's where I keep track of.

I have a notebook for that, where this is just like in the weeds. Who was using what computer? What were the teams? Who like, here's the bracket for the competition, the robot competition. So just, you know, I'm just using it straight up for that. When I'm working on a particular article, I might have a article notebook where I'm, you know, taking notes on that.

So I love my Remarkable. I continue to think it's a great application. They've made a couple updates to the software I like. I think notably now, you know, you have to select what type of pen or pencil you're using. Like, you have a stylus, but you select like how thick you want the line to be and whether you want it to be a pencil line or a pen line or a highlighter.

They added a second pencil or like selector next to it, so you could have two different things selected that you use commonly and just sort of tap on which one you want to use. So I think that's cool. Yeah. So I continue to be a big Remarkable fan. Let me tell you the thing I paid for that I've never used or have barely used.

I got the fancy case that has a built-in keyboard, so I can open it up, turn it around, and I have a keyboard and it's mounted up. I don't use it. I don't use the keyboard. The typing is not well supported. It's not. It's like weird where you can type and it's hard to edit, and I just don't use that.

So if you're thinking about getting a Remarkable, it's very expensive, but don't make it even more expensive by getting the keyboard case for now. I've just been doing the writing. Do you ever check the notebooks on another computer? Can you do that? So it automatically syncs. Yeah. So can you do that if you're on your laptop?

Yeah. So I have the app on my laptop, and whenever I'm on Wi-Fi that the Remarkable knows about, it'll just in the background sync things up. And then if I go over to that app, it just has all the notebooks replicated in there. So I can, if I needed to, I don't use this very often, but I just like knowing it's there.

And I actually have, where I've used it before is I've printed stuff before, or I'd be like, you know what, I want to print this, these notes I took. It's easy to do. You go to the app, you go to the notebook, you navigate over to the page and you can just print them.

So I like it. I think it's a cool product. All right. What do we got? All right. So this one's our corner, Slow Productivity Corner. Oh, let's get some theme music. All right, so this is your Slow Productivity Corner question. For people who don't know, we have one question every week.

That's relevant to my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Burnout, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. That'd be a different book, The Lost Art of Burnout. Let me tell you how to do it. Be a professor and a podcaster and a magazine journalist and a writer and on a couple boards at the same time.

And have three kids. And have three kids. That's how you burn out and get surgery in the middle of all that. All right. What's your Slow Productivity Corner question? All right. What's your postmortem analysis of slow productivity? Please consider the actual writing, marketing, and sales. Are there clear things you'll do differently for your deep life book?

Look, I think the whole project was worth it just for that theme music. It's given us an excuse to play the Slow Productivity Corner music. It's been an interesting ride with slow productivity. I'm very positive about it. But it's been an up and down ride. It opened up really well because I'm relatively well known right now.

If I have a book coming out, I can do major appearances surrounding it. I did Andrew Huberman's show on the day the book came out. That type of stuff matters. I have a great audience on this podcast. I have a great audience for my newsletter. So the book came out stronger than any book I've ever written before, which makes sense given my growing audience size and reputation.

Debuted as number two on the New York Times bestseller list, which was sort of good news, bad news. It could almost be better because you weren't so close to number one. I was thwarted by James Clear having a big bulk order for Atomic Habits that week. It made the UK bestseller list for the first time.

It made the indie bestseller list for the first time. The book is actually doing very well in the UK, which has been interesting to see. So I think that's all great. It's been selling well. It's been at probably a faster selling trajectory than any past books. I keep convincing myself like, "Well, that's about to stop, and now it's going to fall off and fall well below other books," but I think it's doing well.

It got into six-figure sales as quick as any book that I have done before, which is great, which means now of my eight books, there's only two of my eight books that have not made it comfortably into six-figure book sales, so that I'm proud of. The downside was the initial reaction to the book.

When it first came out, there was some negative reaction from traditional elite media. As I've talked about on the show, it makes sense because I had become in this weird in-between position. I do what I call smart self-help. I like to write stuff that has practical advice, but I also think about things in a way that you might have in a more traditional cultural commentary, more sophisticated type nonfiction.

I kind of put those two things together. I think there's a group of just sort of the standard media that my name came to their attention doing much more traditional nonfiction journalism stuff like during the pandemic. I spent a lot of time on NPR, for example, as a sort of resident expert on remote work and knowledge work, the technology of knowledge work and knowledge work in this sort of remote work era.

People came to know my New Yorker work, my New Yorker journalism on technology. I got some book reviews early on from reviewers who would never review a book like Slow Productivity. Never have before in their life. I've never read a book that has advice in it. The New York Times, it was their main literary nonfiction book reviewers.

I'll review this, and they were like, "What the hell is this? This guy is giving advice?" Pearls being clutched, people swooning on fainting chairs. They had just never seen a book like this before. They don't review these types of books. If a book like this typically was going to get reviewed at something like the Times, typically you would shop it out to someone from that field.

You would say, "Great. We'll have a freelancer, like someone who writes about business, review it." It's like when Adam Grant gets a book reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, they'll have a psychologist review it. But no, it was like the literary book reviewer who was like, "What the hell is this?

There's advice in here." That threw me off my game early on. I was like, "What if I wrote a bad book?" I was getting good reviews too. Big publications that were more used to the world of business and business advice, like the Financial Times, for example, in the UK, the Wall Street Journal here in the US, were like, "Yeah.

This is a good book. Da-da-da. Here's the points." But I was thrown by the New York Times and the Times of London putting their literary book reviewers on it and being like, "This is crazy that someone's giving advice. I couldn't imagine doing that in a book." It was thrown.

It's this, "What if the book was—what if the writing is just—what if it's bad? What if it's off?" So I sort of stopped following coverage of it, stopped following sales. Then the end of the year came, and it was all—everything switched, because at the end of the year, it's when book awards are given out.

It's when best books of the year lists are given out. The book did better on those than anything I've ever written before. People are talking about it and passing it along, and this best book of the year, best book of the year here and there, and business book awards, multiple different selections and awards.

I was like, "Oh, okay. Yeah. Maybe it was a good book. Okay." So I waited until the end of the year to get that. So it's this interesting up and down. It's doing well. I think it is having a cultural impact, which is what I wanted it to have, and I'm continuing to draw from it on this podcast because there are so many good ideas in it.

The new book I'm working on, The Deep Life, it's similar. I see The Deep Life as sort of a one—it's not a one-off book, but it's a step out of the main trajectory of my books, which is all technology and its impact in one way or the other. Slow productivity is about knowledge work broke because of computers and networks and email.

How do we fix it? It's within that trajectory. The Deep Life is about how do you—it's a pandemic idea. How do you engineer your life? The whole premise of that book is we spend so much time talking about what should be in a life well-lived. We don't talk nearly enough about the mechanics of how one actually changes their life.

We don't give that nearly enough attention, the mechanics of figuring out what to do, making the changes, making the changes stick. That's what we ignore, and instead we focus on what your life should have. It should have passion. It should have friendship. It should have whatever, but not how do you actually change your life.

That's pretty hard. How does that happen in our current world of high-technology work with the opportunities that gives us? This book is a little bit of a step out of the main trajectory, and I'm just leaning into that. I'm writing a practical guide. The chapters have numbered sections, and it's really—I'm writing this book for my gut.

It's just unapologetic. Here's the ideas. Do this. This is why I think it's important. That's important. Here's a story. Here's a finding. It really is really unfiltered, purified, like the way I talk on this podcast, I guess. I don't know. I feel good about it, but it's its own thing.

It's not carefully crafted, like we have to have this very special—a lot of these books are really well-crafted. Everything has to start with a story, and then the story has to have ideas extracted from it. It's more free-flowing. It's sections, and some sections are smaller than others. It's as dense as anything I've ever written.

I only want super-solid ideas that I think are interesting. I'm cutting out everything else. It covers a huge wider range. I don't know. I'm really enjoying writing it, and I'm sort of just saying, "I don't know what you're going to categorize this book as." I don't know what I would compare it to.

I find it awesome. I'm just really enjoying it, and it'll do what it's going to do, but I'm going to be happy that it exists out there in the world, so I'm having fun with it. That's a lot of things to say, Jesse, but I have a lot I've been thinking about with slow productivity, but generally, I'm happy.

I think this book is out there. It's selling. It's helping. I think it was good. I wasn't sure. Some feedback that it's good, so I think all that's positive. Are there principles for the deep life? The deep life right now is broken into two parts, each part around a big idea connected to our general theme here, which is the mechanics of how you actually transform your life to be more intentional.

Part one right now is tentatively called preparation. The big idea there is that we think too much about—we want to jump right into making big changes in our life, but if you don't have your act together—we talked about this on the show, but if you don't have your act together first, you're unlikely to succeed in trying to make big changes.

The whole first part of the book, preparation, is how do you get your act together to the point where making really cool, intentional changes to your life is going to be likely to succeed. This is where I talk about discipline. It's where I talk about being organized. It's where I talk about reclaiming your mind, so it's like in the weeds.

Part two, transformation, is about the mechanics of how you actually reliably figure out the changes you want to make and successfully execute them. They're the big ideas, lifestyle-centric planning. Most people, when they think about trying to overhaul their life, they fixate on a singular goal that they hope will change everything.

If I can just succeed with this big, bold, singular goal I like to talk about and tell friends about, everything in my life will be better. That rarely works for a lot of reasons. It's much better to establish a rich vision of an ideal lifestyle and then work backwards from that to figure out, with your current opportunities and obstacles, how do I move towards it.

It becomes much more strategic and tactical and in the weeds, and you're much more likely to succeed. It really gets into those ideas and step-by-step, how you actually do those things. Preparation and transformation. Even if you just read part one, it's just my guide to being an eminently capable human.

You're going to build up your capacity for discipline. You are going to get yourself organized. My latest thinking on what matters and doesn't matter in personal productivity, this is the only book you're going to find that all in. Reclaiming your brain. How to teach yourself to think again. Not just not being a slave to devices, like I talk about it, but how to actually actively build up contemplative abilities.

The ability to sit there with a book, to self-reflect. You come out of part one just like you're in control of your life. Anything's possible. Part two is like, let's take that out for a spin and now start figuring out how to transform your life into something really cool.

I'm enjoying writing this. I'm taking my time. When you take your time as a writer in nonfiction, what you get is density. I really thought about this chapter, and I really thought about this section in this chapter, and I thought about it for a while, and I wrote it, and I rewrote it, and what's there is exactly what I want to say and nothing else.

You get this real density of arguments, and justifications, and stories, and evidence, because if you just take the book one section at a time, and I just want to make this section like a New Yorker piece as good as possible. In the end, the book is very dense, and you don't have that.

You want to avoid that sensation you get when books are written quicker of they're kind of stretching. I just want to try to finish this chapter to get my word count up for the month. This book is very dense. The people I'm talking to, the things I'm reading, and I have no consistency to stories.

It's not slow productivity. I had a particular thing I wanted to do, which was stories of traditional knowledge workers as the anchors. Here there's like stories, but some things are not stories. It's intellectual stories. It's an event that happened in the world of ideas. It's something that happened in the – there's no set story format.

It's just like what gets me to what I want to say here? What makes this interesting and clear? So some of it is like I'm talking to really interesting people, but I'm also coming up with like here's like a really interesting history of how this thing changed. The reception of this book teaches us like an important lesson about this.

Here's this thing from – I'm all over the place with this, and I think it's – I don't know. I'm liking it. The key question is what I'm going to do next, Jesse. That's the question that's up in the air. I'm wondering what the book cover is going to be for Deep Life too.

I like the full bleed image concept that came up with Slow Productivity. This was by – I'm proud of this innovation. I told my publisher, I said, "I just think we need to break out of the visual vocabulary that these idea books and business books are all in," which was vocabulary invented by Gladwell.

White cover, a single image, big text. We got to break out of that. I think that limits your audience. I want my cover to induce in the reader a physiological state that is congruent with the goal of the book. Full bleed, aspirational, relaxing imagery, that I think was useful for the book and opened it up to audiences that would not pick up that book if it was a turtle at the computer screen in the middle or a single matte stick with a weird color flame and big teleport or whatever.

So I'm sure I'm going to probably pitch something like that for this book too, The Deep Life. All right. That was our corner. Oh, let's get our final segment where I am going to talk about where I am with my quarterly planning for the upcoming new year. But first, hear from another one of our sponsors.

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I know that some holiday companies have given those to their holiday parties. Oh, that's a smart idea. Before the parties. Maybe that's what we should have done for our holiday episode, is just both had like a really strong Christmas beer. And as the episode went on, it gets more fun.

We're just ranting about Brandon Sanderson by the end of it. All right. I also want to talk to you, speaking of fun liquids, I want to talk to you about our longtime friends at Element. L-M-N-T. Element is a zero sugar electrolyte drink and sparkling electrolyte water born from the growing body of research revealing that optimal health outcomes occur at sodium levels that are two to three times government recommendation.

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All right, so if I have this right, and tell me if I have this right, Jesse, you want me to talk about how I've updated my quarterly plan format and what is on my quarterly plan for the quarter that's going to begin here in the new year. Yeah, you mentioned in last week's episode about how you were making some changes to it.

I had some inquiries about the specifics. Okay, so, well, I have, and a lot of this reflection has come out of writing my book, The Deep Life, because I'm thinking about generalizing advice around this type of thing and when I was thinking about it, I was realizing some changes that might be beneficial.

So as you know, I like to keep the big picture plan, the anchor plan of my multiscale planning, I update it roughly once a semester. So business people call these quarterly plans because they think about quarters. I'm a professor. I think about them as semester plans. So my sort of winter/spring plan is what I'm working on now, and this will kind of kick in in the new year.

I used to have two of these for each semester, one for my personal life, one for my professional life. The change I mentioned in the last episode is I've consolidated them. It makes more sense to have just one plan because, I don't know, these are all mixed together to me, my life and my work, and these things mixed together in such a way that I wanted to deal with the whole thing holistically.

What had held me back from doing that before is that in my professional quarterly plan, I would sometimes get pretty detailed notes, especially if it's working through with writing or the podcast. It might be pretty detailed notes about, we're going to work on this sequence of articles and interleave with these articles, research for this book chapter here.

And actually, these bigger picture notes for the next months could get pretty complicated, and so that's why I had my professional plan in a separate document. I realized I could just put those specific notes in a separate document and link to it from the main one. So when I talk about craft in my singular semester plan, I can just link to a separate document that says, OK, for this thing I'm working on really heavily this semester, over here I'm getting to the weeds about how I want to sequence that.

So once I figured that out, I was like, great, I can have one document that I actually review. I've been experimenting with the structure of this document as well, and what I've been working with for the plan that's about to go live is, and this comes from my thinking from the new book, is a foundation pillar approach.

So you have a foundation on which you have a few pillars. These are what we would have used to call buckets. The pillars are capturing important parts of your life, what you're trying to achieve there in the long term and in the current planning semester or quarter, and the foundation supports them all.

So right now in the plan I'm working on, I've simplified this thumb, because this has gotten out of control for me before. I've simplified this thumb. The foundation typically is something that's going to be some mix of spiritual, philosophical, and ethical. It's the foundation. It's working on your base, your code, and base operating system, if you want to use sort of nerdy terminology, that helps you figure out how you just go about your life day to day, like your code, how you actually operate.

That's what you use to navigate hard things that are going to happen in your plan for doing that, and it influences the pillars you build on top of it, like what those pillars focus on and what you're trying to do. So I've increasingly come to believe you need this sort of philosophical, spiritual, ethical foundation that's like your OS for life, for navigating life, and you need to keep working on that and evolving that, and that has to be clearly specified.

On top of that then come the pillars. Right now, there's four pillars in particular that I'm focusing on. One that is what are called constitution in our classic bucket language, but this is your health, health and fitness. I've mentioned often on the show I've had to have a surgery recently.

This has sort of really knocked me off my physical game. Recovery has been what it's been, but as part of this, you get lots of tests and blood tests, and it's sort of kicking off for me like my middle age renewed focus in health and fitness is a common thing you go through.

You get to a certain age, and now health and fitness become less about wouldn't it be great to be good at this sport and more about I don't want to bypass. So this is a major focus going forward. There's then a leadership pillar, being a leader in my family, being a leader among sort of like friend circles, and being a leader in the community in which I'm a part of.

This has become a bigger focus for me as I get older as well. How to be a good father, how to be a good friend, how to be a leader within, I'm more leadership positions in my life now in various communities I'm involved in. So that is a pillar I'm focusing on.

I guess I'll call celebration, they used the old bucket terminology, but basically a pillar focused on loving life, so like stuff that you do just because life is cool and it helps you acknowledge that. It's like the maker projects I do, the adventures I go on, my movie hobby of like really getting into movies and like making that a priority.

That's like an important pillar for me is, you know, this is it. I strive a lot, but I need to be enjoying where I am now. So that's a pillar. And then probably the thickest pillar in terms of complexity is craft, my work, the things I build with my hands and my mind and the things I'm known for and where I'm trying to go with that craft and what's my goal long term and what am I trying to do in the semester ahead.

That's what's complicated of the pillars. So I have foundation and I have those four pillars. The method I'm applying for navigating these in the semester ahead is one of rotating focus. So choose one of these pillars and make it like a big focus and try to transform that part of your life.

The other pillars, like know what you're working on, right? Make sure you're not neglecting them, but you're not trying to make major changes in them. And then when you finish overhauling one of those pillars, then you can say, OK, now here's the next pillar. I'm going to overhaul this part of my life.

This is not something you're necessarily doing all the time. But for me, it's a sort of midlife course correction that's been building up over the last couple of years. So like I'm starting with that constitution, physical health pillar, that's getting a huge amount of my attention and it will probably for the next six months or so.

I will come out of that transformation with a completely different relationship to physical health and routine. So there's all sorts of stuff happening here in terms of doctors and fitness and trainers and the amount of time and the role like exercise and diet and a lot of changes and things are having to happen in my life.

And I'm giving it focus. I want to come out of this semester having really put a lot of focus on that and my new steady state being really different than it was before. The other pillars, again, it's like know what you're working on, but don't try to get crazy on multiple things at once.

Then I'll choose another one of these pillars. Like now I really want to overhaul this part of my life and really think about it and put effort and energy into it and really make those changes. So I'm going pillar by pillar. This might be a year or multi-year process to really get through all of them.

But this is one way you can tame the complexity of having all these different things that matter to you. And it's overwhelming to think about optimizing all of those at the same time. You're just going to collapse under too many changes at once. So I've really become more of a fan of, you know, it's important you have your plan that's reasonable for each of those.

And if you're going to do a major change, only work on one pillar at a time. So that is what I'm really kicking off now during my surgery recovery. I'm using that, all the stuff you have to do for that anyways, the physical therapy, the doctor's test, like use that as the just run with that momentum.

And let's overhaul the whole thing, which is my way of saying by the time we get to the summer, I'm going to be looking like scars guard in the Northman. And it's a lot of shirtless podcasting guys. I just want to just, I'm just going to put it out there right now.

There'll be a lot of like shirtless podcasting as I look like scars with the holiday lights, holiday lights, and killer delts. Which one's delts? The back. Oh, well, isn't these what's the like, what's shoulders? Shoulders, shoulders, shoulder traps, traps, traps is kind of these. Yeah. All right. You know, that's what scars guard did for the movie.

The Northman. That's a movie. More people should see, by the way, uh, of two movie recommendations, Northman came out during COVID. So it wasn't widely seen a fantastic director, the director I really like, um, it's a Viking saga and Alex, Alexander scars guards, the star of it. And it's, uh, it's mythological, right?

So it's not done in a completely realistic frame, but it's a realistic treatment of Viking sagas and Viking mythology. But the key thing is Alexander scars guard is my age, the character, they built up his body. So he has massive traps. He has, he's like huge traps. Like they didn't want them to look, you can't get a 42 year old to look too crazy.

They don't want them to be like super inflated with muscles because a Viking wouldn't be. So they chose this one muscle. He's just like, so anyways, I'm going to be doing trap style. The other movie I finally got around the scene, by the way, and I'll recommend Fritz Leng's classic M it's 1931.

One of the, uh, early in the sound movie era, he like innovated the use of sound completely. It's also just brilliantly shot in other ways. It's a great movie. I really enjoyed it. It's on HBO max, whatever it's called. It's on max right now. So you can find it Fritz Leng's 1931 German semi-expressionistic classic M it's hard to, here's why it's hard to find.

If you search for M it doesn't know what to do with that. So how do you search for it? I actually ended up typing in Fritz Leng into the search bar and HBO max, and then it started bringing up Fritz Leng movies. And then that's how I found it.

Same thing when I use the Apple TV search over all of the different streaming services. If you just give it the letter M it's like, no, you're clearly trying to write out a word that starts with M it's like, what are the most popular movies that start with M it'll never actually show it to you.

So, so there you go. Um, serious. That's what I'm, that's what I'm up to. I've simplified these four pillars, a reasonable plan for each, but one that I'm going all in on trying to overhaul and it's getting a lot of my attention. So just started going, um, and the other pillars, I'm still doing stuff.

It's just like taking the foot off the accelerator, like have a reasonable steady state. This thing is important to me and I'm working on it and being intentional about it. But the big changes are happening in this one pillar. Then I'll move to the next pillar and having that foundation all the way, um, that you can keep falling back on, even if the pillar is faltered, that is what guides you day to day.

That's a, that's a key, a key thing to have. There you go. That's what's going on in my semester plan. And uh, that's my plan for my traps, which I think is what's most important here. All right, Jesse, I think that's it. Good episode. All right. Jesse, take over.

You learned everything you were wondering about. Yep. I sure did. There we go. Uh, can we do like 30 minutes on the Washington nationals off season to date? Is that because I'm getting worried, I'm getting worried about the lack of significant action. I am hoping that Bellinger going to the Yankees clears Christian Walker to make his way to the Nats, but I'm worried there's not going to be a major acquisition.

And for this season, I don't know what that would mean for my fandom. So this is very important. That'll be our next episode. Just 95 minutes on the Washington nationals. All right. But until then, enjoy your holidays as vacation for most people, hopefully you're hearing this episode. A lot of people miss it, but you know, if you're listening, you should check out our outfits online because I think they're pretty sharp and otherwise we'll be back New Year's week with a new episode of the podcast.

And until then, as always stay deep. Hey, if you enjoyed watching today's holiday episode and are in the mindset of relaxing, check out episode 326, which is called Time to Unplug. I think you'll like that one as well. Check it out. The title of this piece is After You Vote, Unplug.