All right. Now that you're back in action, Jesse, the microphone's back and running. What do we got for our second question here? All right. Next question. That's funny. Thanks for rescuing me there. We have a question from Richard about your business model. Hi, Cal. This is Richard from California.

I love the podcast and have read many of your books. Thanks for all you do. I have a question about your business model. I'm wondering, I know you have a full-time job as a professor, but you are doing all these activities, writing books, podcasts, speaking, articles for The New Yorker.

Do you have an overall business model behind this? Is there something that you are mainly focusing on? Or are these simply activities that you are doing because you're interested in them and, of course, you don't want to lose money on them? So I'm wondering, is everything a support to your book publishing, or is there some bigger empire-building plan behind it?

Love to hear more, and whatever you can tell us would be appreciated. So Richard, there is a plan, and I do think a lot about this, and I tweak and adjust this over time. Sometimes I think about what's going on in my writing career. I'll use a Jim Collins flywheel metaphor.

So if you know his flywheel metaphor that was originally introduced in Good to Great, you're trying to make your business into a flywheel that it picks up momentum. As you go around this flywheel, it turns faster and faster, so it builds upon itself. Positive stuff builds upon itself, and that's the key to having something go somewhere interesting.

And I often think about my writing business that way. So at the top of the flywheel, the core thing, the foundation of my writing business is my writing, books and New Yorker. And New Yorker was a great simplification of lots of different places I used to write. For now, as long as they'll have me, I like the idea of just this is where I focus for the most part my non-book writing.

So books and New Yorker, blockbuster book releases, attention-catching, beautifully crafted articles. That's the core grist for my writing business. Mill, I think without that, nothing else really matters. Then you're just like an online marketer or influencer or something. That's the foundation. Okay. Then next, if you go around the flywheel, I have this, think of it as like the online platform, the online business, the other online activities that happen.

So people find their way to these other online activities, which is at this point, primarily my email newsletter, my podcast and the associated videos. They find their way there because they've read my books, they've read my articles, but then they go there and we can interact with that audience and build relationships with the audience.

So we pull more people into that audience who maybe haven't seen my books or haven't read my articles. So then we have this online, it's the podcast newsletter video. And then that all fuels what I call just my deep life. So making my life interesting and as deep as possible, you get flexibility with like the income that these things bring in, the opportunities they bring in, you can make your life more interesting.

And that actually fuels back into the flywheel. And I may have these out of order. Let me think. I think the way I normally think about it is the books doing really well allows more flexibility and interesting things to happen in my life, makes my life deeper. I think it's the way I normally think about it.

And my life being more interesting and deeper feeds into my online platforms and makes that more interesting because it makes it more interesting to hear from me or to see me. And that online platform, as that grows, it allows my books to be bigger, which then fly wheels back around to my life, getting more interesting, I have more options, which makes the platform bigger.

That's the actual way. So I had that ordering wrong, Richard. So that's the actual flywheel I see. So the book fuels a more interesting, deeper life. And the more interesting, deeper life fuels the online platform. The online platform means the books can be bigger. That makes an even bigger, more deeper, interesting life, which makes the platform even bigger, which makes the books even bigger.

That's a classic Jim Collins flywheel. And that's the way I think about these things feeding into each other. Now, in terms of time, I'm very careful about this. So as I've talked about here on the show, I separate writing from non-writing. The writing is a core thing and it's seasonal.

When I'm working on a book or an article, it's getting time. There's times where I'm not writing something, but that's a core time that I protect on my calendar and that's at the core of my business. The other stuff, the other recording the podcast, writing the newsletter, working on the logistics, right now I try to keep that to roughly like a long half day.

And Jesse can confirm, it's like roughly a half day. I got here today at 1030 and I don't know what time it is now, but I think we're aiming for like 2.30 or we're done here today. And so podcast recording, working with Jesse on anything we need to do for the podcast, video, talking to our video people, talking to our sound engineer, like all of that stuff.

I want to be in basically a half day once a week. And that's my fixed schedule productivity setup. I want to do the best I can with that half day. So I'm very aggressively and ambitiously trying to push things forward, but it has to fit within that, with that confines.

So maybe it's a little bit of a slower pace than if my whole time was spent on the podcast, on the video and the newsletter and all these types of things, but it's still making forward progress and its footprint is contained. So I keep that footprint really contained. Then there's a few other ancillary income producing things.

There's talks on my online courses. I'm very careful about spending time on those and I don't spend, aggregated over the year, I spend not that much time on those. Like right now I'm not doing a much talking. So new is a busy semester and I had my half days for the podcast, video, newsletter, and I had some writing to do and I knew I had a lot of busy semester, so I'm not doing much talking.

I just told, I tell my speaking agents, turn off the spigot for now. So I've significantly reduced the writing and the online courses, Scott Young and I have two and we release them twice a year and I'll add it when we add new courses, it'll usually be over a summer and we only do that every, God knows not very long.

One of our courses we built in 2014 and the other we built during the pandemic, but I'm very careful about when I invest time in that and then we do the launches twice a year and that's it. So those things are very careful about, I don't want to spend too much time on those things.

The reason why I spend any time on those things is again, the income feeds into the making your life deeper and making your life deeper makes the platform more interesting, which makes the books more interesting. So that's part of the flywheel that those things are like someone running up and giving an extra push to it.

So that's the way I see it and so just to summarize the key points here is I do have a flywheel, two, writing's at the core of it, three, I'm incredibly careful about the time footprints I allow for the non-writing stuff and that's all very constrained and I don't know what number I'm on now, four or D, I'll just switch the letters.

Really income in this picture is all about flexibility, remarkability, interestingness and not just scorecarding income. To me that's it's entirely utility. The fact that I make enough money on my books means for example, I don't have to take summer salary from research grants. So my summers are mine. I pay my own salary so I can do whatever I want.

I'm not working for Georgetown in the summer and that's really important for me. That's money opening up autonomy that allows me to do cooler things. The income from this podcast right now, a lot of the income from this podcast goes to making the Deep Work HQ possible, which I think is an interesting part of my deep life, having this HQ and being able to come here and we have different plans for what we want to do with this space.

That's interesting and deep and remarkable. That's what I care about, not can I, I don't know, buy a car with podcast money or something like that. So that's the other thing I see because I think as my life gets more deeper and interesting, it makes what I do on a show like this or in our videos or my newsletter more interesting.

And that means more people are engaging with me, which means when I write a book, more people want to write the book and the books generate a lot of money. So then we can make the life even more remarkable, more interesting. There's things on the table where if I want to take a half sabbatical, for example, or take a, this is insider baseball, but basically when you have a sabbatical, it pays for one semester, but you can spread it over two semesters and take half salary for those two semesters.

And when people do that, it's usually because they're going to like go to Google for the work on research and the company will fill in the rest of their salary. But like now I could have the option of doing that and just filling in the half salary with book money and just spending a whole year writing.

Like those types of things to me are very important. Being able to have the summers to myself, those types of things are very important, et cetera. So that's the business model, turning that flywheel and everything in that flywheel keeps coming back to making my life deeper, more interesting and more focused.

Everything keeps coming back to that and everything's aimed at that. And as that gets, as that's accomplished more, the rest of the flywheel turns, rest of the flywheel turns more and more. And that's the, that's the goal. All right, Richard. So that's, that's the, the business model. And and it's earned me literally dozens of dollars, dozens of dollars a month that like I just drink a second cup of coffee, three cups of coffee.

I don't even have to worry about that cost, man. This is with all of our, with all of our podcast money. Jesse knows Jesse, you will confirm. I have, I have, I have drawn the flywheel on a whiteboard for you before you've, you know, I talk about the flywheel quite a bit.

The scary thing is what's going to happen if the flywheel keeps picking up speed. If it all comes back to like making my life more deeper and focused and more remarkable, potentially that might lead to some pretty radical things. You might have to buy a remarkable tablet. That's where it's all.

The flywheel is all aimed at buying a remarkable tablet. Then you can have a life like that. That's that. That's the story right there. Yes, exactly. I want to have a remarkable tablet that I, I want to be very well dressed on a balcony, looking pensively out over the ocean and then writing poetry on a remarkable tablet.

That's where this all leads, Richard. That's where this all leads. So anyways, oh, and let me caveat this all that I'm very bad at business. And so don't use my, don't use anything I'm saying as like an example of how you should, how you should run things because I have negative business instinct.