I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, episode 202. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, before I forget, I have a unsolicited plug I want to do. A friend of mine and a friend of the show, Steve Magnus, has a new book out.

The name might sound familiar. He was on the show in an episode we did a while ago. Him and Brad Stolberg, they do a podcast together called The Growth Equation. They came on my show and we talked about Matt Crawford's book. So if that name sounds familiar, that's probably where you've heard it from.

Anyways, he has a new book out with a title that I think everyone will quickly see why I like this book. It's a very Cal Newport approved title. It is called Do Hard Things. So sort of a cool title. Anyways, good book. Steve is a world class runner and a running coach.

And so he brings an expertise from actually helping people do demonstrably hard things to this question of how do you actually tackle big challenges. And he pushes back on a lot of the sort of conventional wisdom of just be tough and show no weakness, just get after it. And he has a much more sort of nuanced, sophisticated view of how people get through hard things and accomplish hard things.

So check out Steve's newest book. Have you worked out with him before? No. So I'm in a writers-- I have a couple of writers groups I'm in. But I'm in a writers group with Steve. And there's five of us in the group. Three of them are serious runners. And they're always talking about their serious running.

And three of them have run on a semi-regular basis with Gladwell, who's also a very serious runner. And having talked to them about what they do and about their runs with Gladwell, I'm convinced if I was ever invited to go on a run with Gladwell, I would be dead probably.

You could take him down the rower, though. Take him down the rower. Yeah, I have more body mass. I can really get that wheel moving. So anyways, yeah, it's like a bunch of really serious, like, ex-college runners, and then me and Brad Stolberg, the meatheads who hop and pop if we try to run.

Row and clean, CrossFit style. Exactly. I'm going to row clean, lift heavy weights. Oh, well. Here's the other milestone, Jesse. This is the last time I will be recording this podcast in my 30s. Yeah. Tomorrow is the day when I join Jesse as an old man in our 40s.

Jesse crossed a milestone a month or two ago. And so there we are. So I talk about this on the show sometimes. I always have a set of goals for each birthday that I work on throughout the year, usually about halfway through the year, I start working towards. And it's project whatever year it is.

Project 38, Project 39, Project 40. So I'm coming up to that deadline. It's tomorrow, the day after I'm recording this. I think it's gone pretty well. The big issue with my birthday project this year is the advantage of my actual birth date, which is June 23, is that as a professor on the semester system, I'm usually done with my semester by early May.

And there's this nice, long six-week period where my kids are largely still in school and I have more free time. And it's really a period where I finalize the things on my goal list for my birthday. That all got disrupted this year. A, I had some travel in that period.

So that disrupted it to some degree. And then we had COVID go through the family. That disrupted it as well. So I might actually extend-- maybe I'll try to extend the deadline a little bit past my birthday. Because that's my beautiful period, to actually get things done. But I think it's gone pretty well.

I won't go through all of my birthday project goals. But I'm looking at my list here. There are some fitness goals I had, including the rower goal we talked about. And there are some weightlifting goals. I hit them. I had a big list of sort of boring goals. These were just if you're going to be a grown-up in middle age, there are things-- I just wanted to get worked out.

This is boring stuff. But getting our estate and wills figured out, moving over to a financial planner that is going to automate a lot of the finances, hiring someone to just go through and throw out all my old clothes and just buy reasonable adult clothes for me so I don't have to worry about it.

So there's a whole long list of things like that that I got through. There's some-- I can't get into specifics, but some professional disruptions and goals that emerged during this last year that you can't force it. But there are things lurking. There might be some interesting configuration shifts in my professional life that I'm looking forward to.

I couldn't get them done by 40. Wheels are in motion. Things are complicated. I can't force it. But I'm pretty happy, I would say, Jesse. I'm pretty happy with hitting my goals or getting close to the goals I had for turning 40. Some made some big changes. Some big changes are coming.

Look, I don't want to give away my professional goals. I'll just say it has something to do with professional HVAC installation. What's the matter with your current wardrobe? I just had random clothes that didn't fit well. And I can't deal with that. I don't have any skill or interest.

But I'm more and more among camera. And I'm on stages and cameras and TV and video podcast. And I have to do publicity tours and stuff like this. And I realized I should probably wear clothes that fit or this or that. And so I just hired a guy. How's that going?

I think I'm doing fine. Yeah. He flew out and he goes out and sets up the dressing rooms ahead of time the day before. And then you show up and it's just like all of these clothes and you just go through it. It doesn't do this, not this, not this, do this.

The whole day was like an eight hour day. Eight hour day. Oh yeah. I'm talking, we're going from scratch here. Shorts, jeans, t-shirts, formal shirts, a new suit. Flip flops. Basically. Four new pairs of shoes. I was like, whatever you need to do, I don't want to think about it.

Just make it happen. Did you talk to this guy about any of his other clients? I did. He must have some interesting ones. He does. Well, so he specializes in men, which is more rare. Most of the, if you look at "stylists" who work with men, 98% of that is corporate stuff.

98% of it, if you find like, I am a stylist that works with men, it is, OK, you just got promoted to CTO of your large Beltway Bandit whatever company. And you have to wear the right suits and the right shirts. And they're busy. And like, I don't want to think about it.

I got to look. I'm going to these clients who are trying to sign these big deals. And I'm going overseas to sign a deal with a German whatever manufacturer. And that's what most male stylists are, is we will get you the right haircut and suit and tie so you don't have to worry about that.

This guy is one of the few that deals with not just that. I talked to, honestly, like a lot of his clients are tech bros who like emerged from-- I don't know what that says about me. But they emerged from the basement. They've been just coding their whole life.

And they exited their company. And they're a deck of millionaires. And they're like, I should probably dress like a grown up. And I want to talk to girls, basically, or some of that. And then also, he said, some of their clients are just-- again, people, they've worked hard careers.

Maybe they're going through a transition later in life. They're downgrading their careers or whatever. And they're like, you know what? I never really thought about my clothes. I just worn the same business casual. So there's probably a lot of midlife crisis-y stuff in there, too. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I fit right in.

I was honestly like, I don't care much. I just need to-- if I go on camera, I want to look reasonable. If I go on stage or I'm in a documentary or around more well-known people, I do a little more TV now, this type of stuff. I was like, I don't know how to do this.

But I should have a blazer that fits, that's interesting with a shirt, whatever. Whatever, folks. You got it done. I got it done. Check it off. Checklist. Checklist. All right, well, we got a good show. We got a 20-minute fashion segment where I'm just going to come through the HQ and show off different t-shirts I bought.

By the way, hey, the one thing we did not replace-- I did not need anyone to help me with this-- is the podcast shirt. This shirt is only used for the podcast because it's just the color is just right for the backdrop. And you don't notice the shadow of the microphone on it.

This shirt is only used for that purpose. It was my podcast shirt. That I needed no help with. Did you show them that shirt? I showed them the podcast shirt. Are you approved? Yeah, I'm approved. I wore the podcast shirt on-- I did a Netflix show in the podcast shirt as well.

So the podcast shirt has been on Netflix and on here. I may have wore it to do Charlemagne, the God show on Comedy Central. So it's been on Comedy Central, on Netflix. Yeah, I'm getting my money's worth. It's funny, when I do the thumbnails for your YouTube channel, I'm always taking screenshots.

And you always have the same shirt on. I'm telling you, man, you'd think it'd be easy. But when you have a black backdrop and the type of lighting we have, I don't know. We've tried different shirts. It doesn't work. I don't know. Secrets. It's like Lex. Same suit. It's the Lex move.

All right, well, we have a good show. Enough of that nonsense. We got written questions. We got calls. I have a habit tune-up I want to do a little later. But first, I want to do a quick news reaction, because I find this article to be a confirmation of something I've been talking about on this show, something that I have been predicting.

And now we see experts who are confirming what I've been talking about. So here's the article. This came to me in my interesting account, a.com email address. It's from June 16, so a week or two ago. And it's TikTok, an executive from TikTok that is, to some degree, dunking on Facebook.

And I won't get into details what they're saying here. And if you're watching this on YouTube, you'll be able to see the article. If you're listening, I'll tell you what's on the screen. All right, so they are quoting in this article a executive from TikTok, their president of Global Business Solutions.

And he's making a clear distinction between TikTok and Facebook that I have made before. So this executive named Blake Chanley says, "Facebook is a social platform. They built all their algorithms based on the social graph. That is their core competency. Ours is not." All right, he goes on to clarify, what is TikTok?

"We are an entertainment platform. The difference is significant. It's a massive difference." Now, this is something I've talked about multiple times before on this show, this idea that TikTok and its popularity actually represents an important transition in the landscape of these attention economy apps. And I actually think it is a positive transition.

So it's easy instinctually, if you're a social media skeptic, to look at TikTok and everyone looking at this and the 600 million users and be like, oh, man, we're going down the same road. But I actually think it's positive. And this is why, what this executive is saying. TikTok is not playing the same game as Facebook.

It is not a social company. Their revenue stream is not based off of monetizing a social graph. It provides entertainment, straight to the brainstem entertainment. If you are bored, if you are trying to escape a moment of existential despair, whatever the circumstance that wants you to get out of your current moment, you pull up TikTok's app.

It's these short videos, algorithmically optimized and selected. Boom, boom, boom, one after another. They hit these buttons in your brainstem. Slack jaw, drool coming out of the side of your mouth, just locked in, distracted. They are just optimizing, distracting entertainment. No attempt to say, here's what your friend is up to.

Here's an article that was shared by your cousin. Forget all that, just straight to the brainstem entertainment. What the executive is saying is that Facebook, that's not what they were, but they're trying to do this. This is the premise of this article, is that Facebook is trying to, as I previewed they were, increasingly shift over towards this TikTok model.

Let me just put a quote here from the article. Facebook plans to modify its primary feed to look more like TikTok by recommending more content, regardless of whether it's shared by friends. And of course, why are they doing this? Because they are struggling. Here's the numbers from the article.

The parent company of Facebook, Meta's stock price is down 52% this year, underperforming the Nasdaq, which only dropped 32%. In April, they said revenue in the second quarter could drop from a year earlier. That'd be the first time that's ever happened. So Facebook is struggling. They see TikTok being successful.

Like, let's be more like TikTok. I think as I've said before, that is the beginning of the end for the social media platform monopolies. The one thing 2010 Facebook, when it was really starting to get humming, the one thing it had going for it was network effects. The people you know are on here.

If the primary use of this network is to connect with and see what people you know are up to, you have to come to our network and no one can compete with us because no one is gonna be able to get everyone you know onto their network. That is very hard.

Once we've locked in with our first mover advantage, your cousin, your roommate, your brother, your sister, they're all on here. We have this first mover advantage. You have to use our network because that's where the people you know are. As soon as you move out of the game of connecting the people you know, facilitating the sharing of information between people who already know each other.

Once you move out of that game and move to the alternative game of brainstem manipulation, peer distraction, maximizing time on screen, we are the thing you wanna look at when you're trying to escape the current moment, you lose that advantage. It no longer matters that my cousin, my roommates, my brother, my sister are on your platform.

If all I'm doing on that, as it says right here in this article, is seeing content recommended by an algorithm that has nothing to do with what's going on with my friends. So yes, maybe in the short term, it'll help Facebook stave off some of its numbers drops because they'll get more time on screen.

But as I've said before, and I wanna emphasize again, the biggest conclusion of this shift among these players is that you are now in a competitive pool where you don't have the powerful network effects of people I specifically know need to be on there, and you are competing with anyone else who's trying to provide entertainment and distraction.

That is a very competitive pool, and it is a pool in which I think it is gonna be impossible for any one company to dominate in the way that, let's say a Facebook or an Instagram or a Twitter dominated our attention five, six years ago. If you are just an app on my phone that can distract me, that app is next to my podcast player.

That app is next to YouTube videos. That app is next to video streamers investing billions of dollars in high-end entertainment that can come at me and be like any, unlike anything else that we have seen before. $200 million episodic series is competing with that, is competing with video games.

It's competing with books and audio books. It's competing with other activities you might do in the analog world. That is a much more competitive space. And I think once you're in that pool where all we're offering is distraction entertainment, all we're trying to do is to get eyes on screen, necessarily people's digital interactions are going to fragment and go more niche.

There is no reason for there to be a dominant player. TikTok is having a moment, but there's no reason for it to have to be something that everyone uses. Most people don't. It's popular, but there's no big issue if you don't. In a world of just distraction, people are going to fragment or segment towards distractions that they like in particular.

You're really into a certain type of sports. Well, you're listening to that type of sports radio and podcasts by athletes in that sports. Maybe you're a political conservative and you're over in like the Ben Shapiro ecosystem, which has its own videos and its own shows all about stuff that you're interested in.

Maybe you're a board game enthusiast. There's a place for that. Maybe you're a Cal Newport type. You're interested in deep life and getting away from the more distracted living. So we have my videos, my podcast, my books. It necessarily fragments once you no longer have the binding glue of the activity you're doing requires people you know to be here.

So I've been saying this, this article confirms it. Here it is, the head of TikTok saying, not the head, but an executive at TikTok saying, Facebook is trying to become more like us because they want their views to go up. But good luck. And I think he's right. You know, good luck.

If you try to become an entertainment company, you compete with everyone else. So I see that as positive. I like TikTok, not actually using it, but I like what it's doing. TikTok is causing these other platforms that so had us captured and had such a capture on our culture is causing them to accidentally knock the legs out of their own proverbial table.

Get a short-term gain at the, in exchange for their long-term downfall, which I think is good. Social media universalism, when there was three platforms everyone had to use, I think we've seen for now, it was bad for our civic culture. It was bad for our mental health. It was bad for our ability to do anything else.

I don't like that moment where we all had to use three platforms. Too much control, too much power, too much negative externalities. So this is good. Beginning of the end for that era of monopolies. So we shall see. You know what they said in this article, Jesse, I thought it was a good analogy.

They said, "Facebook," TikTok was saying, "Facebook will never succeed at being TikTok because you can't shift core competencies." And the analogy they gave is when Google tried to compete with Facebook. So remember Google Plus? - Vaguely now that you say that. - Yeah, they put, Google spent millions and millions.

This was during Facebook's rise. Like, we want to do that. They spent all this money and they had a huge advantage too. Google had a huge advantage. If we can just make Google Plus native to all of these Google apps that everyone's already using, Gmail, the calendars, and they did, and it still failed.

And the reason why it failed is because Facebook had been built from the ground up to be a social graph company. They just did it really well. Google had not, and they could never get over there. And so in this article, the TikTok executive is saying, "Good luck. You're gonna be the Google Plus of these short videos.

We know how to do it. Our whole company's built around it. You don't, it'll never be as good. You're not gonna peel people off." But I like the fact that they're going to batter up their ship against the shore here trying to do it because, man, we need to get past this moment of two platforms.

- Did you listen to Zuckerberg's interviews with your buddy Lex and Tim? - Yes. I listened to the Lex one. - He's on with Tim too. - Yeah. I think whichever one came out first, I listened to the Lex one. - Lex came out first. - It's the problem with doing a tour like this for someone like that.

And then I was thinking, I don't know if I need to listen to... - It's like a book tour. - Yeah, I don't need to listen to him again on another show, though I'm sure Tim's interview was good as well. Yeah. Yeah, it was interesting. - He'll want to be on your show soon.

- See, I'm not of this school of thought, this like Zuckerberg. I think I'm with Lex on this. Zuckerberg is not the devil, you know? And I don't like the narrative. So I've been a big opponent of some of these services. It's not because I think they're nefarious, right?

I don't think Zuckerberg is the devil. I think it's too simplistic when we have to try to contrive these plot lines of like they're purposefully ignoring all this harm they're doing because they're so evil or this or that. I don't think that's the case. I just think social media universalism, which I can't blame them.

I mean, hey, if everyone's using this, we want to grow as big as possible. I just think it was bad for our culture, this moment of universalism where everyone felt like they had to use the platforms. I think that is a problem. I think if you have a platform everyone is using, there's nothing you can do that's going to prevent that from probably having lots of negative externalities.

I don't think a lot of those are planned. I mean, I think Facebook, they try to solve these problems. They spend a lot of money on it. Like, we'll do anything you say we should do. It's a losing battle because if you have 600 million daily active users from all sorts of walks of life all over the world, it's like an impossible challenge to make that into some sort of interesting.

The only solution in that is segmentation. No problem having small groups of people figuring out how they want to interact, what their standards are, what their norms. That works out fine. 600 million people, it's not natural. Yeah. - Do you think he wants to work for the rest of his life?

- I don't know. I mean, don't bet against him long-term. All I say is he's one of the only CEOs from that boom, that second internet boom period who's still CEO. But he's young. - Yeah. - You gotta be a bit of a killer. - Yeah. - Right? To be running that company at 22, how do you survive that?

With the investor pressure to stay in charge? I mean, he's gotta be a ruthless guy. That is a hard Game of Thrones-style challenge. The Google guys didn't last. The Instagram guys didn't last. The Twitter founders didn't last. Dorsey was out of there. It's very difficult to run a company, start a company in your young 20s, have it become a $500 billion company and still be the CEO.

That means you're cracking skulls and stabbing people in the ribs as they're in the back room of the castle throne room. That's not just you're a nice guy working hard. I think you have a business, there's some sort of business instinct there. That's very difficult to do. Steve Jobs got kicked out.

No one makes it. Gates is the only other person I can think of. Bill Gates is the only person I can think, well, maybe Larry Ellison. There's other examples, but Gates is who comes to mind. Gates started Microsoft as a kid. And almost identical situation to Zuckerberg. Dropping out of Harvard after his sophomore year, it's exactly the same as Zuckerberg.

And he held onto that company until he was ready to leave 30 years later. So Gates and Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg is Gatesian. - Amazon. - Yeah, Bezos was older when he, you know. He was youngish, but he was at D.E. Shaw sort of analyzing the industry and was trying to figure out how do we make a play for e-commerce and the internet?

And he had no connection to books other than he just, so D.E. Shaw is this kind of weird, cool, quantitative investment fund. They give people free reign and they hire only the smartest people. But he was like very systematically, how do we make e-commerce a thing? And he worked all the numbers.

It was like books. Books, the way it works, and the warehouses and the shipping, like we can make books work. But you're right, Bezos was another example of he held on. - It kind of goes along with Mark and him working all the time. It's kind of like what you were talking about when you answered that question in an earlier episode about just people always wanting to work and be doing stuff.

It's kind of like that. - Yeah, yeah, they're driven guys. I mean, Zuckerberg does all these challenges. - Yeah. - You know, the personal challenges, like I'm going to learn a language or master this skill or only not eat meat for a year. It's like on top of his work, he's constantly giving himself other types of personal challenges.

I mean, that's rare. Again, to stay in charge of a company like that, to have the extra energy to do what you do. Though I don't think Facebook is long for this world, but what can you do? I mean, they rode that moment as well as you could. And they did not successfully evolve beyond that.

I think Google was better at that. Amazon was better at that. They evolved very aggressively. I think Facebook kind of doubled down on just being a social media platform monopoly. And we want to do that well. I don't know how long that'll last. - Mm-hmm. All right. Well, speaking of good companies, let me tell you about a couple of sponsors before we get into the meat of our questions.

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So you put this cover on, then you have this mechanism next to your bed, and there's these tubing that goes to the bed and it makes the temperature go up and down. Really cool technology. I'd never slept on a cooled mattress before, and I loved it. I'm not the only one.

Clinical data shows that 8sleep users experience up to 19% increase in recovery, a 32% improvement in sleep quality, and a 34% more deep sleep. Jesse, we need some sort of 8sleep technology for the podcast studio. Like a cooled podcast. You know I run hot. Jesse thinks that I keep this place like an icebox.

- They all do. Like all the studios keep it cold for when people talk. I always have to wear long sleeves. - I was doing a podcast once with a sports announcer, I guess would be the right word. And I was telling her about like, yeah, I overheat. And she's like, you know what they do for college football?

Because you know, a lot of these college football games, they broadcast outside. And the games, if you're in Ohio in September, it can be, you know, really hot. She said some of these guys, because they have to wear the suits to look nice on camera, but it's hot outside.

It's like, how do you do that? Because I overheat, I can imagine it being this real issue. She said they have these air conditioner vents that blast up their suit. And that's what allows them when it's, you know, 96 degrees and they're, you know, trying to cover the Gators game down in Miami or something like that.

They have air conditioners like coming out up their suits so they can be doing the outside broadcast. So all I'm saying is- - You need an eight sleeve for the HQ. - I could just like wrap one around my shoulder. That'd be great. Not to go on a divergence here, but I like collecting other stories of people who overheat so I don't feel alone.

I heard Rob Lowe talking about this. As he got more clout in his career, he's learned a lot of times you're filming shows, they're filming them outdoors in LA in the Valley and it's super hot and like you're dressed for winter because they're doing, you know, La Brea as stand in for some Christmas time in Vermont or something like that.

He now demands, and I appreciate this, it's basically an air conditioned phone booth that's right there. So in between takes, he goes and stands, he can stand in like an air conditioned box and just come out to do his take so that he's not overheating just standing out there in the sun all day.

I love that. I want one of those for my classroom at Georgetown. Some of the rooms don't have good air conditioning and when like September, man, it's brutal in there. I want an air conditioned booth. I can just go and stand in and just sort of shine through onto my slides with a laser pointer.

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That's eightsleep.com/deep. If you are like me or Rob Lowe or the announcers for college football, you need something to help you thermoregulate, Eight Sleep was made for us. All right, Jess, let's do some questions. We're kind of a long one here. This one comes from Steve. Steve says, "In the 90s, I had a plan to get my PhD in exercise physiology to teach and dive deep into human performance testing research.

Unfortunately, I allowed my significant other at the time to convince me otherwise, which led me down a path of ever changing careers, always taking different jobs to maintain some sort of financial security. At the age of 53, and after listening to most of your Deep Questions episodes, I now have the confidence and motivation to go back to school to achieve my previously stated goals.

However, after doing the math, I would be 60 by the time I graduate with a PhD, which would leave me maybe 10 to 15 years to work before retiring. One alternative is to start a small human performance testing lab as a side gig, slowly building up a strong client base while maintaining my day job as an office manager for a major Southern California university." All right, so that's the question.

At the age of 53, do you go get your PhD because you have this idea for some sort of performance testing lab vision that you could run? Well, Steve, regardless of your age, my graduate school advice applies here. My graduate school advice says, "Never start a graduate program unless you have clear evidence that the specific degree you're gonna get at the specific school that you're gonna get it is needed to unlock a specific step in your career that is appealing to you." That you've gotten to a point where you say, "I see this thing I wanna do.

This is why I wanna do that. But if I can get this degree here, I can do it, otherwise I can't." I am not a big believer in get the degree to see what options it opens up. Now, you have a bit of an idea about what you wanna do with this PhD, but I think it is too vague to qualify.

I mean, just based off of your question wording, so I'm extrapolating here, but just based off your question wording, you have this idea that there's some startup with a human performance testing lab that could be interesting. That is super vague. I would not spend six or seven years getting a PhD with the idea that like maybe that will help me do this thing that's kind of vague.

I think your side hustle exploration approach is probably the right one here. So keeping your good job, starting to explore what would this mean? What you even mean by human performance testing lab? What are the real opportunities here? What are the real demands here? And there's two things you'd wanna capture from this experimentation on your side.

One, using money as a neutral indicator of value. Can you actually get clients? Can you actually get people to give you money for something along these lines? That's a great indicator about whether or not the idea has value or not. Everyone will tell you your idea is good, but they will only give you money if it actually is.

Two, it allows you to actually explore the contours of this new territory. That what exactly do you mean by human performance testing lab? You probably aren't quite sure. What is the market opportunity here? Is it consulting? Is it content? Is it working with other companies? You need to figure that all out before you go get a degree for seven years.

I want you to be at the point where you say, we're rocking and rolling and I'm being held back, just being held back by not having this degree. I could just see if I had it. I could do this. I'm so close, but I can't do this because I don't know how to do this.

I want you to be at that point before you pull the trigger on any sort of higher education. So start exploring, Steve, and don't get that PhD until you have to have it. - What would be, outside of your own, what would be a good example of that, getting a PhD, like clearly elevating your career?

- I mean, it's a good question 'cause PhDs are very specific. So obviously, academic, you wanna be a professor. Then you're gonna need a PhD. We have a question about this coming up. And so if you're gonna be a professor, you do need a PhD, but that's where the second part of this is, this degree from this program is what I need becomes important.

'Cause if you say, I would love to be an MIT professor, so I'm just gonna go get a PhD. It's like, well, wait a second, you better be getting a PhD from a top two program or it's not gonna be the right thing. I have this issue also with a lot of military and recent vets that I talked to who are using their GI bill.

And I think there's a lot of predatory online degrees where they come in like, hey, get your online MBA and we'll suck out your GI bill benefits for it. And it's convenient and you kind of do it on the side. And it turns out that the employers down the road say, I don't know what this online MBA is.

And you just wasted your money. So the specific degree matters. There's other fields that have specific PhD requirements. So in biomed, biomed research, working for a drug company, you wanna be on, I have a colleague whose wife works on respiratory virus vaccines at Moderna. So we always tell him, your job for the rest of our culture is to make sure your wife is completely unburdened because we need her working on that.

You can help the culture. But if you want a job like that, that it's not an academic job, but you need a PhD for that, be very careful about PhDs is sort of the way I think about it. Like in computer science, this used to, I mean, this has shifted, but the traditional thinking in computer science, for example, is if you're just looking at going to industry and making salary, getting a master's degree, especially if you do a five-year program where you just, you start your master's classes as an undergrad and just add an extra year.

So you do five years and you get an undergrad and a master's degree. From a pure economic perspective, it's probably worth it because with the master's degree, your starting salary is up here, with the undergrad, it's down here. And in the time it takes you to get that master's degree, you couldn't catch up.

So you do start out ahead. The math often, or at least it didn't back in my day, work out for getting a PhD and going to industry. So if you spend five years to get a PhD and then you go to work at Google, you're gonna get paid more.

Your starting salary will be more than someone coming in with a master's degree. But it took you five more years. And in those five more years, the person who started with the master's degree has been promoted enough that they're making a lot more than you are coming in. So you actually have to account for the time it takes to get the degree.

So that was always the conventional wisdom. There is one exception right now that's AI and machine learning. If you are able to get a PhD from a real star in the field in a relevant artificial intelligence topic where you are doing, moving the avant-garde of the field forward type research, like I'm moving forward what's possible with deep learning.

I'm working with Greg Hinton in Toronto and we're sort of innovating the field. Those, some of those PhD students are getting close to or exceeding seven figure salary offers. So in some fields like AI, where actually being able to produce original research is gonna be a huge competitive advantage, then a PhD might be different.

But if you're gonna go into a development job or an executive job, then in computer science, it's not really worth getting a PhD. So just be wary about it. Just go in with your eyes open. You have to just, you need evidence. This is the type of thing I wanna do.

I know for a fact it requires a PhD to do it. I know for a fact the quality and competitiveness of the program I'm gonna go to will satisfy what's necessary there. You just want clarity. Never use graduate degrees as a delaying function, as a generic option opening function.

No, no, it should be very specific. It should be solving a very specific goal. All right, I got another question here. This one comes from Chad. We've talked about this one a lot, so I can go fast here. Chad says, "Do you have two shutdowns "if you split your day job and your side hustle "with family time in the middle?" No, you have a real shutdown after the first block of work.

You close all the open loops and you set up the work you're gonna do during your second shift, your side hustle work you're gonna do in the evening. You get that all ready. And then you do a full shutdown, schedule shutdown complete, do the checkbox and then time block planner.

Then when you get to your second shift, you know what you're doing, you turn on, you do it, you finish, you turn off. The only nuance I wanna add to this, Chad, the reason why I'm coming back to this question is I was talking about this issue. I was on someone else's podcast yesterday.

I recorded an interview and we were talking about this. And there's a wrinkle that came up that I wanna add here, which is if you're doing this two shift style work, if you create new open loops in the second shift, it's a problem and you're gonna need another full shutdown.

So for example, if you're working on your side hustle in the evening and you're doing emails and looking at an inbox and making plans, you could create a lot more open loops that are gonna require a new shutdown. So what I recommend for people who are mainly working on their day job during the day and doing work on a side hustle in the evening, so like the Steve's performance testing lab, or you're writing a novel or something like that, is any open loop generating activities.

So email, scheduling, et cetera. Do that during the daytime. Purify what you do during the evening second shift just to be the pure putting the mental metal to the grindstone. I'm writing, I'm coding, I'm producing. Make that more focused. So any type of open loop generating interaction do during your day job, so that when you do your shutdown at the end of the day, it also is closing down your second side hustle job.

You're looking at your plan for the rest of the week. What am I doing tonight? That's okay. Do I have any emails I need to answer? So that when you do evening work, if you can keep the evening work just pure work without the interaction open loops, it's going to be a lot better.

So you only need one shutdown, but that's the caveat I'll give you, Chad. Don't create new open loops in the second shift. - And for new listeners, you don't do shutdowns on the weekends, right? - No, no, you shut down hard at the end of the week. Here's where I'm gonna pick up again on Monday, and you don't have to worry about that type of thing during the weekend.

And if you do weekend work, like I often write on Sunday mornings, it's purified. I'm not looking at email. I'm not on my calendar. I'm not generating new open loops. It's, you know, I'm at Bevco. Here's my calendar. I know my calendar. Here's my Scrivener. Here's my writing. And you just purify it.

Speaking of Bevco, by the way, the coffee shop down the road, because we have a workman in our house this whole week because they're working on the study, which is looking awesome, by the way. I'm at Bevco every day. It's too much. I think they're worried about me. I'm eating breakfast and writing at Bevco every single day this week so far.

I don't know. - That's good. - I guess it's good. I worry I'm there too much. - There's a lot of different places to sit in there. You probably sit inside, outside. - I sit inside. - All the time? - Yeah, I sit in, because the inside's not as, I mean, it gets kind of crowded.

I don't know, people are pretty COVID-y around here. So like the outside's all crammed, you know, so it's a little bit quieter in the inside. But every day, it feels like a lot. But you know, it's just, our house is full of people. We have three unrelated teams that we just, it's just so many people in our house.

- Some of these coffee shops have monthly memberships you can buy. - Yeah. - If Bevco had one of those, you could get in on that. - I would say, and I would conservatively estimate my monthly spending at Bevco, and this is just ballpark, is $17,000 a month. Just conservatively, if I had to guess.

I think in the business plan, there's like a pie chart and like 2/3 of the pie chart is just labeled with a picture of me. Like it's at the core, at the core of their business plan. But I need a place to go, and it's nearby, and I know everyone there.

- Yeah, it's fun. - You can refill your coffee and it's good. All right, let's do a call. I think we have a good call here. - All right, sounds good. This is about the good life versus the deep life. - Could you elaborate more on the differences between the good life versus the deep life?

In episode 200, you touched on it, saying that the good life is virtuous, ethical, and meaningful, while the deep life is notable and remarkable. I'm particularly interested in the notion that the latter is a subset of the former. Thanks so much. - Oh yeah, it's a good question. The distinction is not absolute.

So I often get letters about this. But the last thing you said is a useful way, I think, of comparing and contrasting the good life versus the deep life is this idea that the deep life is a subset of the possibilities for a good life. And so just to take another swing at defining these distinctions, when I'm thinking about the good life, I'm thinking Aristotle, I'm thinking eudaimonia, I'm thinking the attempts in antiquity to try to understand human flourishing.

And usually these concepts had something to do, obviously virtue was a big part of it, living life virtuously. Aristotle cared a lot about, I guess you could call it temperance or moderation. So in the Nicomachean Ethics, he often talks about on many of these character traits, there's extremes and where you wanna be is in the middle.

So you don't wanna be incredibly stingy, but you also don't wanna be debt piling, spending freely. You wanna be somewhere in the middle. So there's some notion of temperance or moderation that came up in these notions. And then some notion of flourishing, eudaimonic flourishing, which is taking the talents or abilities you have and pushing them to actually see them, their potential expressed in the world.

You're athletic, you wanna harness that skill and push your athletic abilities to a limit. You have a sharp mind, you wanna actually take in ideas and produce things of value. So those are the elements of the good life in the sort of the ancient Greek definition of it. The deep life is a good life, but it has other components to it.

So there's good lives that don't have these components to it. So it's a good life where you also have this other component of remarkability. So like we can think about the deep life where we wanna use this framework as a good life that is augmented with some notion of remarkability.

It's notable, people look at it and say, "That's really interesting." That is not someone who is gonna go to their deathbed and say, "Man, I wasted this time." It is a remarkable life in the literal sense of that people remark like, "That's very interesting." And the core of doing that, at least provisionally I argue that the core of doing that is radical shifts to align to your value.

So a deep life is a good life where you also make some sort of radical shift to the way your life actually unfolds, where you live, what type of work you do, your commitment to community, your commitment to theology or philosophy. There's some aspects of your life that you have pushed radically towards fulfilling something that you really value.

There's something in that radicality in pursuit of your values that makes a good life, not just good, but also deep. That's why we're attracted to not just presence, but the monks. And we read the seven-story mountain and going to the monastery. It's radical alignment in pursuit of this thing that really matters.

It's why we get attracted to the person who leaves the stressful soul-deadening job and they have the craftsman workshop that they're in. It's a radical move to align their values. That moving to the small town and enmeshing yourself with the community and living a simpler life. Barbara Kingsolver in "Animal Vegetable Miracle" saying we're gonna move to a farm for a year and only eat what we can grow ourselves or buy from nearby.

That type of thing resonates because it's a radical shift in pursuit of what you value. So a deep life is not necessary to have a good life. It's just a particular approach, but it's an approach that right now in our current moment, I think has a lot of momentum behind it.

This was one of the impacts of the pandemic was people being very reflective of their lives, realizing they have a lot more agency than they before realized, realizing that you can make major shifts and life still goes on, that it's possible, and starting to care about what do I really care about?

And so I think the post-pandemic moment is one in which this particular configuration of the good life, one that's built around radical shifts, is one that is catching more and more attention it's having this moment. So that's why I'm thinking about it. And that's why in theory, I'll be writing a book about it at some point in the next couple of years.

So there we go. That's my second attempt to differentiate the good life from the deep life. All right, well, why don't we get technical? We haven't done a good old-fashioned habit tune-up in a while. For those who don't remember, the habit tune-up segment is one where I take a piece of advice that I have given before, and we just get into the weeds a little bit.

So let's get into the weeds, get a little bit technical about some specific productivity advice. I have an email-related habit to talk about in today's segment. It's an idea that I first introduced in my book, "Deep Work," where I gave it the incredibly compelling and sexy name of process-centric email.

So what is process-centric email? Let me step back first. My preamble to getting to the tactic here is pushing for a little bit more clarity on the question of what is it about email that we dislike? This is something I think a lot of people get wrong. I get a lot of messages from people that say, "Yeah, I love this idea of digital minimalism "because I hate how when I go into my email inbox, "there's all of these newsletters.

"And I'm gonna simplify and unsubscribe "from a lot of newsletters." All right, that's fine if you wanna do it. Too many newsletters is not your problem with email. Other people say, "Yeah, I have all of these announcements "and notices and promotional emails from every company "that I've ever bought something for.

"My employer sends out 17 announcements a day, "new parking things, new programs. "There's all these announcement emails "they clutter up my inbox." Yeah, it's annoying. It's not the problem with email. Some people say, "Yeah, everyone is always shooting me "these questions. "Hey, what time is that meeting tomorrow? "What about this?" And that's annoying.

Like, can't we just talk next time we see each other? But short questions that can be answered, two o'clock, the client's name is this, here's the link. That's also not the problem with email. If all of email was a combination of newsletters, announcements and promotions, and short questions that could be answered, we would have no problem with our inboxes.

It really doesn't stress us out that much to see too many newsletters. You can just archive. It doesn't stress us out that much to see too many promotional announcements, just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, right? You just delete and archive them. It's actually kind of fulfilling. It's easy to do.

It feels like you're making progress. We don't get stressed out by questions we can answer immediately with a short response. It's very productive. Let me give you the answer to this, let me give you the answer to this, let me give you the answer to this. If all email was 20 minutes twice a day, would be on top of it, there'd be a little burst of productivity, it would be something that'd be positive.

The real productivity poison that's frothing around in that email inbox is messages that initiate back and forth interaction. That is above all else, the source of almost every piece of cognitive distress that we feel from email. Not a newsletter, not an announcement, not what time is the meeting tomorrow.

It's the email that says, we should probably make a plan for the client coming tomorrow. Or what are we gonna do to get this thing ready for next Monday? The message that is gonna begin back and forth, back and forth, like, well, when should we do that? And what about next week?

Oh, next week doesn't work. Let me CC in Jesse and ask him if he remembers when this has back and forth, back and forth, unscheduled ad hoc, back and forth interactive conversation delivered through emails, working towards trying to figure out something or achieve some goal. That is the main productivity poison in our inboxes.

Why? It brings with it two demands. One, that's more than anything else what keeps you coming back to your inbox again and again and again, because you have to service these back and forth conversations. If five messages have to get back and forth before we can get a resolution, and we need that resolution by the end of the day, I can't wait three hours for message number two, 'cause we have to fit in all five messages.

So back and forth conversations require much more frequent inbox checking. 'Cause I gotta see when the latest message comes in so I can bounce it back. And you gotta see when that comes in so you can bounce it back to me. And I have to see that pretty soon after and bounce it back.

We check our inboxes all the time, not because we know there's new newsletters in there, not because there's promotions from Levi's we wanna see. It's because we have back and forth conversations we have to service. The second reason why these are productivity poison is that these are the conversations that bring with it the dreaded ambiguity.

I don't know how to answer this. It's where you get the, can you figure out how to, you know, fix this issue we have with the budget? And you're like, I don't know how to do that. And now I guess I can afford this as someone else or I'll do obligation hot potato and shoot off a question to someone else just to get it off my plate and wait for it to come back.

I have to like talk to different people and see what they tell me. You've created a, they create these major open loops in terms of our obligation storage systems. And it's a real source of stress and distress. If you feel anxious checking your inbox, going through your inbox, these are the type of messages that create that anxiety.

They're like, oh my God, I don't know. I don't know how to fix the budget. I don't really know how this works. I don't even really know who I should talk to about this. I guess I'm gonna have to start sending messages and like kind of letting this thing unfold and keep checking this throughout the day.

So those are the productivity poison. So if you wanna make your experience with your inbox better, it is these back and forth interactive ambiguous conversations that you have to tame. That is what process centric emailing is all about. The idea is simple. When you see a message arrive that is initiating one of these long back and forths, your first entrance into this conversation, your first message into this conversation should include in it a proposal for the process by which this whole collaboration ending in the goal being achieved of this conversation is going to happen.

You say how it's gonna happen so it doesn't just default to like, let's just keep going back and forth. You declare, this is how I think this should happen. Oh, we have to figure out what to do about this client. Okay, well, here's what I suggest. We have this meeting coming up on Wednesday.

Let's add time to talk to that. I'm gonna, before we get to that meeting, talk to Susan to make sure that we understand the full whatever, the full process for what we need to do to onboard the client. We'll talk about this in the last five minutes of the meeting and make a plan going forward.

Or you say, okay, here's what we need to do. You're right, we do have to figure out when we're gonna meet. Here's what we'll do. I have listed here, whatever, 15 times. Jesse, you then highlight the times that work for you and then you forward it onto the third person and you select one of those that works and put that just into an invite and send it to all of us and we don't even have to discuss anymore.

What I'm talking about here is processes that gets the thing done. The thing that this conversation is gonna lead towards gets you to done without ambiguity and without having to just wait for messages to arrive and respond to them and go back and forth. Process-centric emailing is a little bit stilted.

It's not very casual. So typically the people who use this will have a casual message with emoticons and all the other stuff, but then have the pretty detailed thing below. You can blame it on me. So sorry for the formality, I've been listening too much Cal Newport, but it works.

And it takes a little bit more time up front because you have to figure out, whoa, what's the right way to get to done? What's the right way to get the done here? And you gotta think it through and you gotta explain it to people and you might have some extra work to do to set it up.

Here's the Google Doc, here's the Doodle. Here's how it's gonna unfold. I've set up an office hours. It takes more work, but it is almost always worth spending 10 or 15 more minutes at the beginning of an exchange than it is to have 10 or 15 messages you have to respond to.

10 or 15 minutes right now takes away 10 or 15 minutes from your day, but 10 to 15 messages, each of which is requiring five inbox checks while you wait for it, that's gonna be 50 to 75 inbox checks over the next few days which is way more damaging than you adding 10 minutes right now to what you're doing.

So I'm a big believer in process-centric emailing. And of course, if you find yourself, it's a bonus, proposing the same process again and again because the same type of work happens again and again, then you can just codify that. You know what? We do this client onboarding all the time.

Why don't we all just agree this is how we do it? And so you don't even have to write out the whole process every time. So it's also a good way to unearth or make legible repeated work and get good processes in place. So just remember that. Ongoing interactive conversations, that is the thing that kills us in our inbox.

That's the thing you should care about. That is the thing you should be willing to do almost anything to vanquish. It really is productivity poison. All right, well, let's talk real quickly. I have two sponsors I wanna mention before we get to a couple more questions I enjoy. This first sponsor is My Body Tutor, T-U-T-O-R, founded by Adam Gilbert, Adam Gilbert.

Why is that Gil-Bort? Gilbert, who I've known for many years used to be the fitness advice guy on the early days of the study hack blogs. His company, My Body Tutor, is a 100% online coaching program that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, lack of consistency. And they do this by simplifying the process into practical, sustainable behaviors.

And then, and this is key, giving you daily accountability and support to stick to your plan. So when you use My Body Tutor, you have this app where you check in every day. Here's what I ate, here's what I did. And there is a coach that is assigned to you that sees that and then comes back to you at the end of the day and says, "I read your report, here's my feedback.

"Looking good, don't worry about this, "worry about this, here's some suggestions." So the coach builds the plan for you and then checks in with you every day about whether or not you are achieving it. So in my case, for example, you call up the My Body Tutor coach and you say, "I need the Skarsgård Viking body.

"I have six months to get there, "but it is very important to me "that I look like a Viking with crazy trapezius muscles." - 45 minutes a day. - That's what it is. I went back, I finished watching that movie, by the way, and it's not that they made his, they weren't doing superhero body, but something about him was like really eye-catching.

What it was is, what's this muscle that goes up to your neck, trapezius? - Yeah. - Yeah, they gave him a beast trapezius so that he would walk with his sword or whatever with just like this, looks like he's wearing a backpack on his back. That's the type of thing My Body Tutor can help you with or whatever else your goal is.

You have a coach, you talk to the coach every day, they make a plan, the accountability, it's all online, it's a brilliant idea. I know Adam's crushing it with this company and I'm not surprised. So here's the thing, if you sign up for My Body Tutor, tell them that you came from deep questions, tell them that Cal Newport sent you, they'll know what that means and they will give you $50 off your first month.

Just mention me when you sign up. We were at a dinner last night with someone who didn't realize Chris Pratt had a whole movie career after "Parks and Recreation" and she didn't know that he had gotten to this super good shape to do superhero movies and "Jurassic World" movies.

She just remembered, she's like, "Isn't he the like kind of overweight, "like fun guy on 'Parks and Rec'?" And so I loaded up a photo to show her and it was a kind of a glass drop, a glass drop moment. I went down the rabbit hole, Chris Pratt's my, if I looked over, he was my height and at his peak in "Parks and Rec" he was weighing in 80 pounds more than I weigh in right now.

And I'm not like a super slim guy. And now he is stronger than that, he is lighter than that. If you sign up for a superhero movie, I went down a rabbit hole in Chris Pratt, it turned out-- - At the dinner? - No, this was before. I had gone down this rabbit hole before, so I had this queued up.

I don't know why I went down this rabbit hole, but the first time he had to cut all the weight was to be in "Zero Dark Thirty" where he played a member of SEAL Team Six. - Good movie. - Yeah, but he did it on his own. So he was like, "I'm just gonna do it on my own." He's like, "I'm just gonna stop eating "and do 500 pushups a day and like just do crazy stuff." Destroyed his body, ended up having to get shoulder surgery.

- Really? - Yeah. Because he was just like, "I'll just stop eating "and then just go like wild mode every day," and destroyed his body. So then when it came time, he got the Marvel movie, he's like, "Oh, I should hire somebody." And like, they have ways of doing this, like professional trainers, like, "Here's what you should eat." And they make it so you don't wanna blow out.

It turns out this is one of the really major concerns when they're doing this training for these movies is if you get injured, this could be a $20 million mistake. If you get injured and you have to push filming of a $200 million movie for six weeks because you tore your rotator cuff, it's like a really big deal.

So now it's like, if you have to get in shape for one of these movies, it's like we are gonna handhold you every step of the way 'cause we want you to get strong, yes, but we also can't have you ripping a pack or something and we can't film because they have to pick things up and throw things.

So let that all be, this is why you need something like My Body Tutor. Like whether you're trying to get in shape for a Marvel movie or whatever, or a wedding or whatever you're trying to do, this all comes back to you want a pro helping you. Don't just stop.

- 40th birthday party. - Yeah, just don't, yeah, 40th birthday party where I come bursting out in the Viking outfit from the beginning of the Northmen. - On the rower. - On the rower with a giant trapezius muscle. Don't do that on your own, you need help. So either get Chris Pratt, the "Scars Guard" guy or My Body Tutor.

Those are your three choices, but only one of those choices will give you $50 off your first month if you mention my podcast. I also wanna talk about another sponsor, Wren, W-R-E-N, which is a startup that's making it easy for everyone to make a meaningful difference in the climates crisis.

So right now, Wren is focused on monthly subscriptions where you calculate your carbon footprint, then offset it by supporting awesome climate projects that plant trees, protect forest, and remove CO2 from the sky. So you can be offsetting the carbon you're putting out, investing some of the money you're making as you generate all this carbon and trying to offset it somewhere else.

Their goal is to unlock the collective action of millions of individuals to drive the systemic change needed to end the climate crisis. It says here, Jesse, the inspiration, I don't know if you know this, the inspiration for this company, what motivated the founders to start it was, I'm reading here, watching Jesse drive by in his 1978 Ford pickup truck.

And a tear fell from their eyes as they watched the birds fall from the trees dead, the squirrels paralyzed in the smog coming out of the back of that car, and it catalyzed them. They said, we have to solve the climate crisis. So little known fact, Jesse's pickup truck motivated Wren's fight against climate change.

- Go ahead and count out. - Yeah, they don't have enough digits in their online carbon footprint calculator for you. There's not enough digits, it's the problem. It's like the odometer rolls over. Yeah, when you upload a picture of your truck, it just gives up, the server crashes. Right, so Wren, anyways, that nonsense.

Signing up for Wren is an easy way to do something meaningful about the climate crisis, much of which has been caused by Jesse. So you go to their website, you calculate your personal carbon footprint, and you choose the projects right there. It shows you how much carbon that's offsetting.

You can pay a monthly subscription. It makes it simple for you to actually take some action. So it's gonna take all of us to end the climate crisis. It's gonna take all of us to prevent the damage or push back on the damage caused by Jesse's truck. So do your part today by signing up for Wren, that's W-R-E-N.

Go to wren.co/deep to sign up. And if you do that slash deep, they will plant an extra 10 trees in your name. So that's W-R-E-N.co/deep, start making a difference. I think a Wren's a type of bird, right? - Think so. - W-R, yeah. Also a couple more questions here.

I got one from Lucy, who writes in to say, "Hi Cal, I'm about to finish my PhD "and decided to try to build a career in academia. "Now you've emphasized a couple of times "that choosing a great lab and famous/knowledgeable/ "connected supervisor was an important step. "Unfortunately, it was not the case for me.

"Even though I had high grades and a good profile, "my choice of graduate programs were limited "by my unstable temporary residency situation. "I ended up doing a PhD with a professor "who barely helped me. "He is a nice guy, but not very knowledgeable "and did not improve or increase my publications "or contributed to my growth as a researcher.

"Regardless of the situation, "I managed to publish a few papers of uncertain quality "and learned quite a deal through my own efforts. "My question is, do you think I still can succeed "in an academic world, even if my start was not the best? "Where would you recommend to focus my efforts?" Well, Lucy, academic world can mean a lot of things.

So if what we're talking about is a tenure-track position at a well-known university, sort of the classic image we have of a professor, you have some graduate students, you have the patches on your tweed jacket, you lecture to the big lecture halls at a selective university, the issue is you're starting from a very hard position.

The reason why I push, get the most famous professor at the best school possible is that these are incredibly competitive jobs to get. And the thing that matters more than anything else is your research. Are you producing great work in great places that's generating attention and citations? That's what they're hiring you to do at your school.

The reason why a famous advisor is useful is not because the advisor is famous, but because they're famous because they know how to publish really impactful papers and they will teach you how to do that. Learn from the people who are already doing what it is you wanna do.

This competitiveness is so much that I got a private message recently from a student who said, "Look, I wanna go to grad school in CS, "I wanna be a professor. "I have a grad school offer from Princeton, "I have a grad school offer from MIT." And he's like, "I'm kind of leaning towards Princeton." He was giving his reasons.

And I could empathize. When I applied to grad school, I also got into Princeton and MIT. Those were both on my choices. And he was trying to nudge me towards saying go to Princeton. And honestly, I came back to him, I was like, "Look, man, this is not your coming of age.

"I'm 18 going off to undergrad year experience. "For what you wanna study, MIT is tops. "Go to the best school." And he was going on about, "I like the atmosphere, "the more intellectual literary atmosphere of Princeton." Like live in Harvard Square, that's what I did. Go to MIT, live in Harvard Square, buy books, but just go to the best possible school and get the best possible advisor 'cause it is so competitive out there.

You gotta study at the best place you can. You gotta study with the very best people you can. You gotta produce the best papers you can. It's like training for a professional athletic job. I don't care what town you like better or what campus fits your mood better. You go to the best trainer you possibly can because it's so competitive.

Hundreds of people applying for every one of these positions. So I don't know if this is like a downer or a tough love pipe response, but those types of jobs are very difficult if you're not already coming out of a top place. Something that might help here is a postdoc.

If you could get a postdoc at a good place and kill it on the research in that first year as a postdoc, that could open up opportunities. There's two things here, though, I wanna warn you against. One is the idea of, I will go to a school that I don't wanna go to, right?

So it's a non-tenure track or it's tenure track, but they don't care at all about research, it's super heavy load, and I will earn my way into a better position. That is very, very difficult. It is hard to make that type of jump. If you go to a heavy teaching load school where they don't really care much about research, it's gonna be very hard to distinguish yourself there and jump up into a better school.

Because remember, the better schools have their pick of the very best people coming out of programs. Often when better schools are hiring stars, they're hiring away from other good schools and leveraging things like that person wants to come to your location. It is just real, it happens, but it's really rare.

And the one exception is the very top schools in some fields basically use an all-star methods, like MIT will do this in computer science or mathematics. They won't hire from within, their students have to go off and they'll watch really good schools that are right below them and just wait to see who pops off as a star and they'll say, "All right, come back." So MIT will do that.

You'll be at a really good school and then MIT will call you essentially and be like, "Oh, you got a MacArthur, "you got a whatever, great." Now you can come back to MIT, we'll give you a professorship. But what you don't see is someone going to a non-research focused heavy teaching load school and have a Princeton or an MIT say, "You've been doing great work," because there's no time to do it, it's crushing.

And also be wary about letting your desire for academia pull you into a exploitative adjunct type situation. Again, it's also very rare that you're gonna jump from one of those situations into a classic tenure track type academic position. So I wanna warn you from traps and give you the reality check that for this very narrow definition of academia, and it might not be what you're talking about, but for this very narrow definition of the TV movie portrayal of academia, tenure track at a well-known university doing research, they're hard jobs to get.

And you need to have produced really good research. So if you have a way to do that in a postdoc, if you're right on the precipice of doing something really important, writing the killer book, getting out those killer articles, that's what you should do. That's what they're gonna care about, articles, articles, articles.

So if you can do that, do that. If that doesn't seem like it's in the cards, then I'm just saying be wary because there's a lot of traps out here where someone will tell you a story, will come do this, and then you can jump to what you wanna do a little bit later, and that jump can be pretty hard to make.

I hope that wasn't too much of a downer, Jesse, but. - That was a good answer. With your break now, are you still writing papers? - Yeah. Yeah, thanks. - So you still have a break here? - I'm still writing some papers. Yeah, my doctoral student's presenting a paper next week.

No, no, in, I'm mixing up trips, a little later in July at a conference. And yeah, so I'm still writing some papers. - So that's different writing time than your morning book writing, New Yorker writing time, right? - That's different, yeah. Like I'm not actively writing any research papers right now.

- Got it. - But like my doctoral student's working on his dissertation, so we're doing, you know, I'm looking at drafts. In fact, I'm talking to him right after this, so some of that's going on. Yeah, so like this summer, I'm really kind of locked into non-academic writing. But I still do some of that.

I used to do a lot of it. - Yeah. - Like that's how you get, when I was coming into Georgetown, I had a lot of papers. I don't know what my count is now, but I think I have something, academic peer-reviewed computer science papers, probably 75. - Wow.

- Yeah, and then if you add up citations, four or 5,000 citations, I mean, it's just, it's a hard work. They're like, get the job and get tenure. And I did early tenure is, you know, a four to five paper a year pace in computer science. Like it was just, that's what I was doing.

Yeah, that takes time. All right, let's do, where are we at? We have time, let's do a call. Let's do one more call, and then we can call it quits for today. - Sounds good, we got a call from a monk. - Cal, I'm inspired by your work, thank you.

My name is Etienne, and I'm a Benedictine monk in the United States. The idea of deep work and the deep life is really resonant with me. Part of my work is educating and forming young men to become leaders in the Catholic church. I wish to model and teach them deep work, slow productivity, the deep life, digital minimalism, et cetera.

Do you have thoughts on how I might be a good mentor and teacher for these principles to these young men? Again, thank you very much. - Well, it's a good question. I mean, certainly young men as a demographic are often in this day and age hungry for guidance. So it is a demographic group that is open to being inspired, open to being guided.

And when they're not, when they're left adrift, negative things happen as a consequence. So I'm glad you're involved in being a guiding light to this particular group. I think one thing that's helpful, so I'm thinking about, I mean, I advise, when I get messages from a lot of people, but when I'm thinking about the advice I give to young men in particular, I think having the frame of the deep life is a helpful starting place.

So saying, okay, you're committing to this goal that you want to live a deep life. You don't wanna live a life that is haphazard. You don't wanna live a life that is arbitrary or at the whims of distraction or the noise of our culture, that you instead wanna live a life that is intentional and considered and remarkable in the sense that it makes people turn their head and catch their attention.

Oh, that's something, that's something. That is highly appealing to a lot of young men. And I think laying out that framework, okay, how do we do this? And making it clear that this is gonna require discipline and hard work, that is all fantastic. That is a charge we want.

Give me a challenge. I wanna have to rise to a challenge. So that is all good. The other part of the deep life framework that I think is for good men, good for young men is that it has these multiple elements to it. We often get stuck on just one aspect of good living.

We neglect the others. We get obsessed about career, but we fall behind on our philosophical or theological growth. We fall behind on leadership or community, or we get really obsessed about theology. We're going through the process of becoming a monk and forget the importance of community or the importance of craft.

So this notion that we have various areas of life that all require service, I think that is very useful. And we know the areas I often talk about is craft. So what you actually do and create is community, being a leader and sacrificing non-trivial time and energy on behalf of other people, constitution, that is your health, that is your fitness, contemplation, that's gonna be philosophy, that's gonna be theology, really making that important, making that important part of your life.

And then I often do throw in celebration, the ability to build up taste and kind of stewardship and just gratitude for things that are good in the world and in your life and things you can go and just get pure enjoyment out of. Breaking that down, here are five things.

Each of these requires attention. Each of these requires cultivation, is a message that young people and young men in particular really resonate with. And then you work through, let's do keystone habits in each and let's go through each of these one by one and we can spend six weeks in each and do a preliminary overhaul of that part of your life.

Let's overhaul your eating and get some real serious fitness going here, have some discipline there. How about your theological mind? How about your philosophical mind? You need to start reading books. You need to stop, you can get off that phone, you need to read, you need a half hour a day.

Here's what you're gonna read. We're gonna talk about it. You have to expand your mind. You have to open, okay, there we go. We're working on that as well. Leadership and community. What are you doing to make the life of people around you better? Are you spending time thinking about it every day?

Do you lead anything? Where are you leading other people towards somewhere better where you're sacrificing your own time and energy? These things are important and it's all different areas you're focusing on. When you focus on the craft piece, that's where deep work and concentration and focus and diligence and all of that comes into play, slow productivity.

So as you move through these different buckets, these different areas, all sorts of different learning can happen. But it's that overall pursuit. I want with discipline and intention to make my life into something deep and remarkable. That pursuit is like water to the explorer lost in the desert when we're talking about young men in today's culture.

So I think that's the way I would go about it. And I would really challenge them. In each of these areas, don't just do the easy, do the hard. And I'll tell you, there are so many positive side effects of systematically trying to cultivate this life, especially if you're young and especially if you're adrift.

The excessive video game playing, the excessive phone scrolling, the pornography, the excessive drinking, all of these things that can afflict the 23 and adrift, they naturally just start to dissipate when you have these more important things that you're starting to work on, you're getting that feeling of success on them.

You're getting that feeling of efficacy. You're getting that feeling of autonomy and meaning. And it transforms the whole way you think about the life. It transforms the troll on the Twitter who's just angry and looking for attention into a leader in their town, into a real deep thinker who ends up contributing something really interesting to the world of ideas.

As someone who is in good shape so they can be there for their family, for their community through thick and thin into older age, there's so many things good to come out of it. So I'm glad you're thinking about this. That's how I would do it. Challenge, discipline, intention, all aimed towards the deep life, break into the categories, do my whole framework there.

I think young men are hungry for it and I think they will be quite receptive. All right, Jessie, I think that's a good variety of questions here. We're coming up on the 120 mark. So that's as good a time of any to wrap things up. So thank you everyone who submitted questions.

Go to calnewport.com/podcast for instructions on how to do so. If you like what you heard, you will like what you saw, what you see, I should say, videos of the full episodes and clips are available at youtube.com/calnewportmedia. Go to calnewport.com to sign up for my weekly newsletter. We'll be back next week.

And until then, as always, stay deep. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)