All right. So new segment, we want to try something new. So back in the early days of this podcast, back when it was just me all by myself, I used to do a segment where I would give updates about what was going on in the life of Cal Newport.

So I'm a very private person, but I would, on things I was comfortable talking about, give a little bit of insight into what was going on into my life. A little bit weird doing these segments because it's myself basically just talking about myself. But now it occurred to me, now that we have Jesse here, we could rejuvenate this segment, which I call behind the curtain since, well, we are in a room surrounded by curtains.

So it's like what happens outside of this room? A segment called behind a curtain where Jesse will be the proxy for you, my audience, and Jesse will ask me some questions about what's going on in my life. I have not seen these questions ahead of time, so these are new to me.

And Jesse, let me make it clear, if I don't like them, you're fired. So let's just put that on the table. Take that $250,000 a month and go buy a new truck. I am going to spend that on YouTube subscriptions. Is that how that works? Can I spend money on YouTube subscriptions?

One thing you can do on YouTube is you can subscribe to YouTube premium and you don't get the ads and you get the music. It's actually only like $9 a month. I do it. It's unbelievable. I should probably do that too. You save so much time when you have to watch ads and yeah, just goes right to the video.

So do YouTube premium. All right. Do YouTube premium, subscribe, leave reviews. I don't know. Smoke signals. Send me encouraging telegrams so I know what's going on. Write to your congressman and say, I like what Cal Newport is doing. Send cards to your network executives. I don't know. I don't know, guys.

I'm terrible at that. All right, Jesse, behind the curtain, you have some questions for me about what's going on in my life. All right. I think I'm ready for it. All right. So I got a bunch of questions here, so I'm just going to fire a couple off and we'll see how it goes.

All right. Can you give any updates on your Ziddle casting experiment? All right. You're fired. Next, let's move on. Um, the reason why I ask is because I remember you had the interview with the, um, the fellow like back over the summertime. And I was actually, I was in a cool place.

I was on a jog in Scotland on like a golf trip and I was doing that jog like in the morning and I heard this and I was like, this is, this sounds cool. And then I was in a cool place too, like near the beach, like in this, like, you know, nature area.

But anyway, so I remember that. And then you've talked about a few times, so like wanting to know. Well, it's a good, it's a timely question because I was talking to Shreeny recently. So one of the ideas I was talking to Shreeny, I was like, man, I should just have you, uh, call into the show and we could do like a Ziddle cast in back and forth, like just like a 10 minute, 15 minute thing.

So I think we could technically do that, right? Like we could have him call in on zoom or something. Cause he, he, he lives in Colorado, so he's not, not be able to get here easily, but we could have him call in on zoom and like, we could just do a Ziddle casting.

Cause he has a lot of thoughts. Yeah. He has a lot of thoughts on what I've been saying. And he thinks like I'm missing out on some of the value. So I think that'd be cool. We got it back and forth. In my own life, I haven't made any big steps forward.

I mean, I'm still in the place where, uh, I want Roam, the tool Roam to be the primary place in which I'm capturing most notes that are, with the exception of CS research, which requires math notation, it's a whole separate thing. Or writing ideas and book ideas and article ideas and all that.

I want that all to be in Roam, roughly indexed in a Ziddle cast in style where there's a, there's a central index, but then also bidirectional links. And I haven't really upgraded that yet because I've been slammed, which is his own issue I'm having in my life right now.

It's self enforced, uh, self-imposed, but pretty brutal these, these past months with my workload and that, to me, that's something you do when you have some time, so I'm thinking as the spring gives way towards summer, my schedule opens up, I want Ziddle cast in style system, basically capturing the place where I capture most of my ideas, because I have a lot of ideas and so we'll see.

And so we'll have Srinian, he could help me out and fill in. You also just read that book, you know, back in January, right? Yeah. I mean, that book, how to take smart notes is what really introduced me to Ziddle cast. And, and, and it was a cool book and I, I, I liked it and I recommend it actually.

And, and, and the listener sent it to me just out of the blue. Uh, so I'll report back, but maybe what I'll do, here's what I'll do is like, when I have time, I'll have Srinian and have him be my guru, like let's just 15 minutes, walk me through, let me ask you my, my highly technical questions about how to get this right, and then I'll, then I'll go try it out.

So I remain intrigued by Ziddle cast. And I have heard from a lot of people, however, that agree with my central complaint that Ziddle cast and can't do thinking for you, it can't write articles for you, it's not in almost any position, this idea that you're just going to wander through your Ziddle cast and system and come out on the other side with an article or a book or an academic paper is just not how that, not how that works, but it's a really cool way to probably organize a lot of thoughts that aren't easily put into some sort of hierarchical categories.

Okay. Moving on, kind of related and talking about lifestyle centric planning, which you discuss quite a bit for your own life. Do you think you're close? I think changes are looming. I think changes are looming that would get me closer. So I've done extreme lifestyle centric career planning. I mean, it's why I'm a professor and not in tech startups or venture capital or something like this.

It's, it's why I write books. Very autonomous and interesting income stream and very interesting to me. It's why we live in Tacoma park. That was very much a lifestyle centric career planning, very explicit planning process of where do we want to live and why, why we want to live there.

Right now, I would say the, the main obstacle between where I am right now and the very clear lifestyle, and I got to say, I have this written out very clearly in my strategic plans documents. I mean, I know the bullet points of what goes into the lifestyle that I'm working backwards to try to get in place.

Right now I still have too much on my plate. And so the old joke on the podcast is I have 17 jobs, but like I need seven instead of 17. So that that's, I think the, the, the, the next evolution to come is it's to be a full-time this and a full-time that, and a full-time that like three or four multiple things, it's just the volume of work is too much.

My ideal lifestyle is slower and way more autonomous, less things, high stakes, like, Hey, deliver a book, deliver like a really good New Yorker piece. So high stakes, but you have nothing on your calendar tomorrow. You know, it's up to you. You got to figure this out. You need to make this work done.

So, so I'm working on that. There's some early stage visions we're working on right now too, about community investment, getting a little bit more involved in Tacoma park. Maybe we need having some more. You know, I don't want to get too much into it, but some sort of commercial presence here.

Do we want to be, so there's a lot of thoughts we have about being more integrated into what's going on in our town, which I think is interesting too. So it's a, it's ongoing process. Right now I have too much in the moment. I have way too much, but strategic.

So I took on a lot of extra work because it's going to help. I think it's important when I'm, the thing I'm doing a short live and I think it's important, and I think it's also going to maybe be important for my, the lifestyle I want down the line, but right now I'm just being crushed by it.

So I'm definitely in a mode right now where I'm thinking through what I want to want to want to get there. Cause right now I'm just being crushed with overload. Yeah. You've seen it. You've seen it. You know, I'm kind of in and out right now. Like I, it is there's too much going on.

Having too much. It's just not good. Now I'm doing it on purpose and for a temporary amount of time. It's an initiative at Georgetown. I think it's very important, but it brings with it a lot of work. And I probably should have aggressively slowed down other things to compensate, but I didn't, I added it on top of the stuff that was working just fine.

And now it doesn't add up and work just fine. And it's too much stuff and it's organized because I'm very organized. So it's not like I'm disorganized and I have the, technically I have the time for it. The issue is, and this is a core idea of slow productivity.

When there's too much on your plate, no matter, even if you do have the time to get it done, you're super organized, it's still short circuits, everything is stresses you out and it's not healthy. So it's, it's a good kind of kick in the butt right now to be like, okay, once I finished this, I really got to get pretty aggressive again at, um, pursuing the, the lifestyle I have in mind.

Makes sense. Um, kind of going with a broader question here. You've discussed the book 4,000 weeks that you read recently. You told Tim Ferriss about, I haven't read it yet, but I will. In generally, do you find that time goes by very fast? Um, yes. Yeah. I mean, it, it depends on, it depends on what's going on.

These types of seasons, like winter, where it's, there's a lot going on. It's this, then this, then this, then this, like this day's basketball and this day I teach, and so you have this sort of very regular schedule. That's, uh, each day is different than the one before, but it's regular each time.

I always feel like time moves very fast during those seasons. And then when you're in like the summer and there's not a schedule like that, and it's much more autonomous, I feel like time moves much slower. So summer feels like a long time to me. Usually winter feels very fast.

Like, are we in February already? We're in mid-February already. I mean, I don't mind it because like winter's not the best time anyways, but, um, yeah, winter's fast. And then, so does that lead to like broader thoughts about, you know, getting older and stuff like that and not being able to do certain things or not really for you?

Like that's the 4,000, 4,000 weeks things. I'll tell you, I definitely started thinking about that with, uh, 40 looming. Right. Um, because there, there's a lot of things, especially if you're looking at bigger types of achievements, there's a lot of things where you say, uh, if that's not happened by 40, that's not on your list, this is like a key Oliver Berkman thing, like, I think about this with writing, like I've been a successful writer, there's writers that are a lot more successful, you would think, yeah, you're where you're going to be.

Like you've taken your swings. You've been doing this since you were 20 years old. You've written seven books, like you've taken your swings and it's gone well. But if you were going to be a absolute top of the market writer, you'd be an absolute top of the market writer.

Like same thing with computer science, like you've done good computer science. But if you're going to be like a breakout brain in that world, you would have been a breakout brain in that world. You've been doing this for a long time. You know, and I never really, in the thirties, you still feel like you're working on things.

40 feels like, yeah, this is, this is like the, this is where these are my levels. So how do we build a life around it? And that might be overly pessimistic, but that's kind of an Oliver Berkman point, which I like. Uh, as big as there is one key exception to that though.

So I've gone down a Taylor Sheridan rabbit hole. You know this guy? No. Okay. So, um, he was an actor and he, so he was an actor probably best known for being on sons of anarchy on FX. The main character? I don't know the show. I've seen the show.

I've seen the whole show. Yeah. He's like a lantern Jod. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's yeah. I know. Okay. So he's like a big character in that anyways. Um, but he grew up on a ranch, right? Like he, he came out of, uh, and he owns, owns a ranch coming up, come up out of a ranch in his, so after the age of 40, he said, I'm going to screenwrite.

And he was going to do a neo Westerns, which is like the, the new type of Western. I think the Coen brothers kind of helped usher this in with no country for old men. So it, it, neo Westerns, they take place in. Ma in our modern world. And some of the, the issues are not, uh, there's like a abandoned coming to town.

It's like the economic hardships of whatever. And so he's like, great. I'm just going to like, start writing these types of things. And he wrote, uh, Sicario, hell and high water, and then wind river, just like rattled off these like great movies started writing in his forties. His second movie was Oscar nominated for best screenplay.

Um, wind river, he directed like, just kind of came out of nowhere. He just had such a clear vision. Uh, and then he did the show Yellowstone, which has become a huge, a huge phenomenon. So then he did the show Yellowstone and then there's a spinoff and they're doing another spinoff.

And, and he, he's part of, uh, I don't know if we talked about this on the show, but in Yellowstone, there's this huge ranch in Texas, a real ranch called the 66, 66, four sixes, and it's huge. I think it's a over a hundred thousand acres. It's like six times the size of Chicago.

And he's part of a group that just bought it. And they're going to, then they have a spinoff of the show that like takes place on that ranch. And he's like a horse Wrangler. So like often in this show, Yellowstone, he's a character in the show and he's always just doing crazy things on horses and all the horses in the show are his horses.

Anyways, he started all that after 40 and just sort of redefined, redefined the genre. So you never know. What I'm saying is I think, I think we need a ranch. We should, we should broadcast. We should broadcast from a ranch. Yeah. It would be episode one, but guys are reporting from my ranch.

Episode two, you'd be like, it would be you. He'd be like, I have sad news. Cal's 40 miles in the other direction on a horse and his cabin writing some poetry. No, I was going to say more. Cal has been killed. Uh, he has been trampled by, trampled by his snake bitten body was trampled by horses and then dragged by cattle through barbed wire because he has no idea what he's doing.

And also the ranch is on fire. That's what would happen. Um, yes, I worry about that. I don't know if I worry about it. I think about it. And I never thought about that before until I realized I was going to turn 40 this year. Interesting. Yeah. And then I was like, Oh my God, I guess this is like, I'm no longer like the hungry upstart thinking like, what am I going to, what's the thing I'm going to do?

Where am I going to break out? But also I'm pretty happy with where I am. Uh, so it's not bad, but it's definitely, definitely an adjustment. You want another question? I'll just do one more. All right. Final question. You talk a lot about training, like an athlete. Are there any athletes that you closely follow that you like that, you know, resonate with you based on like their training resume and like what they do, what they're all about?

Well, our man Scherzer. Yeah. Yeah. You know, a little bit of something about his training regime, right? But he's, yeah, yeah. He's a beast, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, obsessed. Yeah. He was able to, he was obsessed and, uh, was able to keep his career going. I mean, the deal he just signed with the Mets.

He's old, man. I know. Younger than us, but he's old. That's a big deal. That's a lot of money. Um, yeah, that's all training and competitive. That's competitive fire right there. Just that like lasers. Yeah. Um, so I like that. I follow him. I like to think I'm like the, the Max Scherzer of, I have to go incredibly narrow here.

I'm like the Max Scherzer of podcasts that are in a Q and a format and that deal mainly with questions about like work and productivity and our, uh,