I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, episode 200. I'm here in the Deep Work HQ joined once again by Jesse. Jesse, we missed a week recording together, so it's been a little while, so it's good to see you again. Good to be back. Thank you everyone for putting up with our schedule being a little bit delayed.

So you got last week's episode towards the end of the week, but the silver lining of that is you get this week's episode soon after. So through patience, you get the reward of two episodes being released within a few days of each other. Now 200 Jesse, that feels like a milestone.

A lot of episodes. A lot of episodes. So I think that's good. 200, we're just coming up on, I was going to say we're just coming up on the two year mark of the show, but I think we passed it. I'd have to go back and check, but I think it was probably you started in May, May, late May 2020.

So we've, we've passed the, the two, the two year milestone. We have about six and a half million downloads. Maybe 10 million would be the nice next download milestone though. I'm less interested these days in total downloads. I mean, that depends on how many episodes you do and other things.

I think I'm more interested in per episode downloads and that's a number that's been going up. So I've heard, you mentioned to me briefly that you've, you've got some chatter with the inboxes about people being interested in, in person. Yeah. Do you have a question? So is that something that you're starting to hear some interest in?

Yeah. Several people have reached out and talked about it and you've talked about it for over a year. Cause even when I was just a fan listening to it, you talked about it. Yeah. That last summer I was, I wanted to do it and then I got lazy and I didn't do it, but maybe, okay.

Maybe soon, maybe soon we'll try it. I'm assuming Nats Park. There'll be plenty of seats available. Yeah. He's going to the games. We could do it concurrently with a game and you can play an inning cause I'll need a third baseman. Exactly. Like as long as you guys are here, is there anyone who can give us two innings of relief?

We're a, whatever it is. Aaron Sanchez is no longer available. That's good. All right. So we're back in action. 200 episodes. We're going to be doing downloads. We'll be meeting in person at Nats Park soon. We got a good show ahead of us. We've got a good show ahead of us.

A bunch of questions and calls later. I will be doing the books I read in May. I forgot to do that in the last episode because Jesse wasn't here and I forget things when he's not here. So we'll get to that later. First though, let's do a deep dive.

So I'm going to do a deep dive on an idea I've been thinking about. I'm calling this the feedback council idea, and I'm going to open with a, an article. I don't want to spend a lot of time in this article. It's just going to motivate this bigger idea of feedback councils.

So I saw this article the other day, a listener sent it to me to the interesting account, Newport.com address. So there was this article that appeared in the New York times. It was about CNN's new leadership. So this is from June 5th, as you can see here. So what has happened at CNN is there is a shakeup.

There is a new head of CNN, Chris Licht, L I C H T, who is trying to do lots of things to shake up the network. Among other things, now that Donald Trump's no longer president, they're shifting away from more of a high energy adversarial style of reporting. They try to be a little bit more down the center.

There's a lot of changes that Chris Licht is doing, but there was one in particular that caught my attention. That's what I want to highlight here. So for those who are watching, you can actually see the article for those listening at home. You just hear me talking about it.

So we have right here, producers have been urged to ignore Twitter backlash from the far right and the far left. All right. That I think is a good idea. I want to explain why I think it's a good idea, because it will give us some ideas about how the rest of us should be thinking about living our lives in a digital world, whether or not we run a network.

So to explain why I think that's a good idea, let's start with the notion of feedback more generally, and in particular, the role of feedback for human beings. Human beings are wired, neurologically speaking, to take feedback from other human beings very seriously. We pay a lot of attention to it.

It has a lot of effect on how we feel. So we're very wired for this. And there's two good reasons for this from an evolutionary perspective. One is tribal cohesion. So when you can watch and monitor very carefully the reaction of people around you to what you're saying, it allows you to adjust what you're saying in such a way to try to maintain social comedy, to maintain positive affect between people.

You see the body language show, "Uh-oh, I'm going into dangerous territory here." You pull back a little bit. This helps keep tribal groups happy amongst themselves. Now, I talk about the neuroscientific backing for how this happens a little bit in my book, Digital Minimalism. I talk about how much of our brain is actually dedicated to processing all these complex input channels that come from person-to-person interaction.

But the high-level summary there is we monitor the people around us while we are talking, and we take that feedback very seriously. It's very affecting. The other advantage of feedback from other humans is that it extends our ability to cogitate beyond just our own brains. And now if there's a group of people getting feedback from other people in the group on a plan, on an idea, on an initiative, allows you to essentially tap into the cognitive potential of these other brains, forming a larger collective brain that is more nuanced and smarter than any one brain potentially in isolation.

This was a great trick of evolution. It requires complex language to do it, but once we have this trick, it really allowed us to upgrade quickly our ability to actually think and make good decisions. Now, of course, leaving the evolutionary past and going into the more recent cultural past of human beings, we see this extended cogitation idea maybe reach its apogee with the scientific method where now we can formally receive feedback on ideas in a very structured and formalized way that really helps aim our attention towards scientific realities away from some things that aren't.

So, again, getting feedback from other people is a huge part of the human experience. All right, so we take it seriously, our brain cares about it. The issue with the social internet, and in particular, the more recent last 10 year rise of widely used social media platforms on the social internet, is that it introduced into our cultural ecosystem new forms of feedback.

Feedback that we did not have access to before, feedback that is of a decidedly different character than the type of feedback that our brain has been wired to take very seriously. So there's really two things that differentiate the feedback you get from, let's say, Twitter or Instagram versus what you would get from your tribe 100,000 years ago.

One, it's a biased sample. So when you're getting feedback from the internet, it's not as if you are randomly sampling the population and getting a true representative sense of how people feel about what you just said. It's not just like it is in our Paleolithic path, it's the same group of people giving you feedback that have given you feedback on everything else.

So if their opinion shifts, then that's probably represents there's something going on here you should pay attention to. Instead, the internet has these weird connectivity and virality dynamics where anyone can give feedback to anyone else. And what selects someone to want to give feedback to you can be quite arbitrary or unusual.

There could be something about what you said that got spread through some sort of viral amplification network, and it got to some malcontent over here. And then they can directly message you back with some feedback. It's not a true sample of people whose opinions you care about. It's a biased sample.

It's unpredictable. The other issue with feedback from the social internet is that a lot of it is in bad faith. You're talking to, let's say, your sister. In general, they're probably trying to give you good feedback. It's what they honestly feel about it. Social internet based feedback, by contrast, has lots of other factors going on that is driving it.

It might not be a true representation about how people feel about something. There's all sorts of other dynamics going on. For example, if we isolate Twitter, the service that was pointed out by Chris Licht in the article we just looked at about CNN, we see that a lot of the really aggressive backlash or pushback on Twitter, whether it's coming from the far right or the far left, is often about enforcing tribal boundaries, that there is a war going on where neither side wants their Overton window to shift at all towards the other side.

And there'll be intense pressure to try to adjust or control what is said and what is not said. If you look at backlash from the right or the left, what you often see is that it doesn't correlate to how far have you drifted from orthodoxy. Actually, the most intense pushback will be for people who are right at the border of orthodoxy because that's what matters is you don't want that Overton window border to shift a little bit in the opposite direction.

So if you're largely on a team and then drift a little bit towards the other team, that's going to get a lot more attention than let's say that you're wildly against what a particular team feels for. Whatever value judgment you want to give to those dynamics, what we can say is that it's not an accurate representative representative view of how people actually feel.

There's other dynamics going on. There's also retribution that happens in Twitter. There's also amplification of straight up crazy people. So bad faith information you're getting from the Internet. Now, this has a real problem. And the reason why and Chris Licht is saying, stop looking at backlash from Twitter. The reason why the managing editor at the New York Times, as we covered last month, said the same thing to his writers, stop using Twitter, stop paying attention to Twitter is because let's say you're a reporter.

You take this feedback really seriously because we're wired to take feedback seriously and it can push how you report into weird directions. It's actually not optimal for the information, but it's the hijacking of our feedback apparatus. The same thing can happen to the rest of us as well. Reporters are not.

You get that bias sample, bad faith feedback from the Internet, and it can really affect the way you feel, the way you act, what you talk about, what you produce, how you live your life. It is the hijacking of the human feedback apparatus by a source of corrupted feedback that our brain never evolved to expect.

So I think we need to be very careful about this. We all need to do a similar survey in our own lives, similar to what the New York Times or the CNN seems to be doing now and saying, let's be careful about what we pay attention to. Now, a bad solution here would be to stop seeking feedback for our ideas and actions altogether because again, we're wired for feedback.

It serves a good purpose. There's a common effect that academics know about. I call it retired academic syndrome, where you get a very smart academic that's existing in the high energy, constant feedback, back and forth discussion world of their academic field. And then for whatever reason, they leave academia.

They're very smart people, but they leave academia. Seven times out of 10, especially if they have some sort of public facing discussion, they will start to drift into increasingly extreme ideas, different topics, but they'll get to extremely weird ideas or they'll get very cantankerous or they'll get very upset.

And part of what's happening here is they're very smart, but they get separated from the feedback mechanism that helps them push back and adjust and modify and improve and keep reasonable their thinking and they end up going crazy. So again, feedback is important. We don't want to ignore it, but we don't want the internet to drive it.

So the solution I want to suggest is to create your own, what we can call feedback councils. So this is a group of people that you trust, that have been in your life for a while, that have a variety of backgrounds and expertises. So if you are a tech bro in Silicon Valley, your feedback council should not be six other Stanford grads who are roughly your same age and gender and what have you.

You want a backgrounds that represent things that you might not be exposed to. And then take the opinion of this council seriously on decisions in your life, ideas you're writing or trying to put out there, just your personal understanding. How do I understand this big news event that's happening?

So take that high engineered, high quality source of feedback, very seriously, allow it to adjust the way you think and move. But then here's the key thing, ignore other arbitrary sources of feedback, ignore if you're a public facing figure, random comments from Twitter, angry, direct messages, those weird emails.

If you have engineered a high quality feedback council, you're going to get a variety of good feedback. If they're on board with something, then it feels right for you run with it. If they're nervous about an idea, they say, I don't think that's good for you. Take that seriously.

If they say, Hey, this thing you're writing about, I don't think you realize that it's going to come across to people like me as being kind of dismissive or offensive. Take that seriously. Now I think companies should do the same thing at a much larger scale. They should have large representative panels of people that are relevant to what their company does, their stakeholder, their customers, their shareholders, et cetera.

They should take the feedback from this very seriously. And the flip side is they should ignore Twitter and they should ignore random emails or direct messages. Politicians should do the same thing. You should be very in touch with a representative sample of your constituents. You should be talking to your constituents.

You should be doing town halls, be getting the mood of actual people out there, but ignore what angry 27 year olds with too much time on their hands are repeatedly tweeting at you. That's not real life. That's biased. That's bad faith. You need feedback. Your brain craves feedback, but it's gotta be good.

So anyways, that is my idea. Something we don't talk enough about. Our brains take feedback seriously. The social internet and a particular social media can pervert or corrupt those sources of feedback. So we have to be very careful about replacing those with sources of feedback that we trust. So there's my concept.

There's my concept. For people with not a whole lot of diversity in their social console, what do you suggest? Yeah. So you have to try to seek out as much as you can. So yeah, let's say your friend group is kind of small. Yeah. And homogenous. See if there's maybe through at work or through family, you know, or a cousin or you do the best you can, but I think you want to, you want to mix like in a perfect world.

There's a lot of things you want. Because most people aren't going to have this many different factors, but in a perfect world, the things that I think matter is so professional background matters, right? So if you had class variety, I think that would be useful. So it's not just, let me talk to a bunch of other dual income, upper middle class government worker families.

Like, can I talk to someone who has a completely different type of job? Geographic diversity probably matters. I think people feel differently. If you live in a suburb in the middle of a city in the country, that might matter. I would say gender and racial identity probably really matters.

I mean, gender obviously is a huge one. Women and men think very differently about things that don't always understand each other. And then probably age, you know, like you have a sampling of people from different age, you're not going to hit all of those probably in, in one group, but having some sorts of feedback now, you know, I kind of cheat that a little bit.

I use informally long time reader slash listeners, you know, like this is the nice thing about my, my online world. It's been around for a long time, starting with the blog and then it turned to an email newsletter. Now we have the podcast, but it's not huge. And it's not, it doesn't have a big social media presence.

I don't interact with people on social media. And so the group of people who send me emails or comment on blog posts and you see, you see their messages, it feels close knit, you know, it, it, it, it somehow has escaped the dynamics and I think I shouldn't say somehow I know exactly why it's because all this interaction is happening in the absence of social media with all of those weird incentives it has.

If you're, if, if all your contents in social media, then you can find these weird bias samples of feedback where your content moves through amplification networks and gets to some corner of people who are upset at you. But when you're not on social media, it's a much tighter knit audience and it's really interestingly diverse, um, different countries, different backgrounds, different types of jobs, working class, non-working class, all sorts of different racial identities.

Like, and then I get all sorts of interesting feedback from people. And so it's, it's my secret weapon I think is that I have this cabal of really interesting people that's small enough that it's a pretty good sample. And I would say our crazy to normal ratio is really small.

We occasionally get some crazies, but we don't get that much. Do you know any retired professors who have taken done this? Did not go crazy. They should. It really is common. The problem with being a professor is you're smart, so you can convince yourself it's completely reasonable to you.

That's why they get conspiratorial. It's completely reasonable to you that you could figure something out that no one else understands. And if you don't have that feedback saying, yeah, that might be true, but you've kind of gone off the deep end on this one without that type of feedback, they end up in crazy places like being smart is a problem when it comes to conspiratorial or weird thinking.

They either get conspiratorial or they get cantankerous and just kind of mad at everyone, you know? So if I ever retire from academia, once I start, if I start going on about contrails and radio transmissions in my fillings, someone's got to intervene. Oh, well, okay. So that's what I have to say about that.

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That's trybasis.com/cal and use that code CAL at checkout to save 10%. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions. Our first one is a written question. This comes from Colin. Colin says there always seems to be more to be done. How do you stop yourself from losing faith in your system?

It's like painting the fourth bridge. Once you finish, you just go back to the beginning and start all over again. So I don't know the fourth bridge reference, but I've heard that saying with the Golden Gate Bridge. By the time they're finished painting the Golden Gate Bridge, they have to go back and repaint it again.

I like this question a lot. Now, Jesse, do you think he's talking about, I want to make sure I'm interpreting it properly. Do you think he's talking about just there's always more goals or projects or tasks to do and it's sort of Sisyphean, no matter how many things you get done, there's always more things to get done?

That's what I think he's saying. Right. Okay. Not that there's always tweaks to do to your system. I think it's the first situation. Well, you know, Colin, it's a good point. So here's the issue. You don't want an oppositional mindset towards the activities or tasks or projects in your life.

You do not want to have a mindset of, I have to get through these things until I can get to where I want to get, which is, I don't know, having nothing to do or having free time that my, my task list, my projects, my plans are somehow an obstacle to some other better state that if you could just get through these things as fast as possible, you could get to that better state.

I'm going to suggest a alternative mindset, which is that man is always in action. Activity is fundamental to life. Our bodies take in food and water and convert it into energy so that we can actually create movement. We can actually create action in the world. So the goal of a time management system or productivity system and a life structuring system, the various types of things I talk about is making sure that the action that you're doing, because you're going to be doing action one way or the other is as meaningful and directed as possible.

We could think about this if we wanted to biochemically, there's a certain amount of calories you're taking in each day. That's going to be converted into energy. That energy then allows you to do things like think and move. You're going to take in those calories. You're going to create that energy every day.

There's a certain amount of energy you are burning through. So the question is, what do you want to get in return for that energy? And so thinking about interesting or meaningful things or things that are useful to the world, being a leader, being effective, being good to others, all of these type of positive targets for your energy is good.

You're going to burn it one way or the other. So you want to direct it towards the thing that's going to make life meaningful, that's going to make life useful. So we're wired for that, Colin. We're wired for action. Your goal is just to direct that action. It's nice to take a break now and again, but I can tell you if I could take everything off your list, every task, every project, bring in a whole staff to take care of your every need, you could just sit there.

There's the hammock will bring you food, will bring you water. You don't have to do anything. You're not going to be happy. And the reason why you're not going to be happy is that our mind does not expect life to be like that for any extended period of time.

Action is fundamental to the human experience. It's your job to try to make that action as useful as possible. So the bridge needs to be painted because otherwise it rust. So keep painting. All right, we've got a second question here. This one comes from Chad. Chad says, do you have two shutdowns?

If you split your day job and your side hustle with family time in the middle, I work my day job and do a shutdown around 4 p.m. and then family time until nine, at which point I work on either improving my work skills or doing a contract job or writing a novel at 1030 when I wrap up for the night.

Should I be doing another shutdown? That's a good question, Chad. Do dual shift working arrangements require two shutdowns? I would say no, at least not nearly as extensive as a shutdown as you were doing after your initial work stress that ends around four. What I would recommend is that when you're winding down that initial work stretch, so you're doing your full shutdown, complete routine, maybe from three thirty to four, that you prep the work you're going to be doing that evening.

Right. So if you're going to be writing a novel, you get the sources you need. If you're doing some contract work, you gather whatever information you need for that work. If it's a skill building, you pull out what you need for the lesson you'll be doing. So you make a plan and prep what you need so that when you get to that next block, that nine p.m.

block that you're doing in the evening, you can get right into work. Now when you finish that work, you want to tie up loose ends. So if you're writing, there's usually some tying up the loose ends you want to do at the end of your session. So you'll be prepared next time.

Maybe you have some thoughts you didn't get to, you know, you want to jot those down or update your outline now that you've done some writing, if you've thought about it. If it's contract work, you want to make sure that you shut down exactly where you are and what comes next.

So you have a tie of loose ends to do with the particular effort you just did there, but that's it. You don't have to do a full shutdown routine. The only thing I would say in addition to be careful about is that you avoid opening lots of loops in the evening session.

Don't go on email, don't go on Slack, don't do those types of efforts. That's something that might actually require a shutdown routine to close down all those open loops. But if you're focused on one thing in that evening block and you prepped it before your afternoon shutdown routine, you should be fine just executing, tying up loose ends, and you should be able to move on and let your head hit the pillow after that without having too much actual sort of anxious chatter lurking.

How long does your shutdown routine take? It depends what I do with my email inbox. So if it's a day where I'm saying I want to really get my arms around email before I shut down, it could take a while. Otherwise, it doesn't take too long. It doesn't take too long.

So you do that with your email a few times a week? Yeah, yeah, probably a few times a week. I mean, again, it's very confusing for people because most people are ensconced in the hyperactive hive mind. So I get lots of like, when I see an email for the first time, it's one of three.

Did you get this? Hey, what's going on? Did you get this answer? I think a lot of people have a hard time just because it's out of their realm of experience with this idea that of course, you're going to just answer my email. Like maybe I'll take an hour because you're in a meeting.

But this is the main default activity for so many people is I'm checking and responding and trying to keep up with emails. Where for me, I might not look at email for a day. I'm doing other things. And then I have an admin block where I'm trying to catch up the next day.

So it might be a couple of days. And then maybe I don't get your email during that block. You know, and so I think that could be confusing for people. But I definitely check my calendar, check my weekly plan, and make sure I'm not missing anything. Make sure there's nothing urgent I'm missing.

Get a sense for what I want to do the next day. Look at the whole week. Does everything still make sense? And then I check my checkbox. When you check your email, do you ever wish that it was last number of emails or do you like unsubscribe from email?

Yeah, well, like, so I'm not worried about subscriptions. So a lot of people talk about this when they talk about email overload is my God, I'm subscribed to so many things. And I get so many messages from retailers and political candidates. And like, that's mildly annoying, but it's easy to deal with.

Archive, archive, archive, archive, right? So I don't really care about that. What I care about is messages that require a response from me. I don't like, you know, that's time. The worst is message that will initiate or is part of what will be an extended back and forth. Those are the worst.

I don't think people realize I get into this in my book, A World Without Email, but I don't think people realize that the real productivity poison is asynchronous back and forth messaging with email. We have to figure something out. It's going to take us five back and forth messages, because they get through five back and forth messages is going to require me to check that inbox 50 times because I can't wait two days for each of those messages to go back and forth.

We have to make a decision today. That's the thing that really drives inbox overload is, okay, we have to have conversations going back and forth. So there's nothing I hate less than that ambiguous message that is kicking off some sort of extended back and forth conversation. That is the poison.

That's why I like the summer because I get very few Georgetown emails. And so I'm not nearly as exposed, not nearly as exposed to that. Let's do a call. Okay, sounds good. We got here. Hi, Cal. My question today is very simple. Where can we find more real world examples of people living the deep life?

I think that case studies are often really good at illustrating very abstract concepts like the deep life. After all, it's much easier to understand radical alignment with your values when you read the story of the triathlete who left New York and moved to Boulder to train and be close to his family.

I know you try to share as much cases as you can on the podcast, and I'm assuming your upcoming book will have several cases that illustrate these different moves. But even then, that's only a handful of examples. Some of them are also hard to relate. I mean, not everyone wants to move to the mountains to be a world class triathlete or move to a cabin to be a writer.

I know from experience that sometimes all it takes to crack in your own deep life is seeing someone else's life that really resonates. So here's the final provocation. If there isn't such resource, should someone build one? Thanks for your tremendous generosity of spirit and sharing your work so broadly, Cal.

Thank you. Well, John, you're hitting on a couple of good points here. Let's start with your last point first. Should there be a better resource for encountering examples of the deep life so that you have a better chance of hitting one that resonates with you in particular? And I agree with your premise here that somehow or sometimes getting the specifics, this specific person did something that resonates exactly with me, is critical for making a vision for your own life.

Yes, I think there should be a resource like that. I actually have this idea. I want to figure out when and how I'll have the time to do this. But I've had this idea, and I've talked to Jesse about this before, of a podcast called The Deep Life. And all it is, is each week an interview with someone who lives a deep life.

And so you just get this real variety of it. Now, in a perfect world where time and money was not an issue, it would be really cool if you could edit a podcast like this in PR style. So it's not just straight, let's talk to you for 45 minutes, but there's different segments of conversation with musical interlude and moments of expository narration from me.

I think it'd be a really cool show. I mentioned something like that in my proposal for the Deep Life book, that maybe as I start working on that book, I might launch something like that. So I think that's a good idea. But let's talk about the broader point here about resonance and deep life case studies.

Here is the reality/issue with the deep life as a concept. We know it when we see it, right? So we all have this instinct. You read a book, you see something on a documentary, you see an Instagram something. I don't know the terminology, whatever they call it, an Instagram video bundle, whatever the terminology is of someone doing triathlon training in Boulder, and it just hits a chord and it's boom.

That's what I, there's something about that life that's right and my life is not there. So we know it when we see it. And starting with the pandemic, I think a lot more people than ever before are noticing that reaction and are very interested in this idea about the deep life.

The issue is that it's hard to pin down. And then you look to your own life and you say, I just have this deep instinctual feeling that what I'm doing here is not everything it could be. And there's these other people I see and hear about, and that resonates.

They're doing something that I crave, but I can't pin down exactly what it is. Like I don't know why this guy who moved the Boulder to train for triathlons, this is really resonates with me, but I don't do triathlons. I don't want to move the Boulder, but something about that still resonates.

What is it that resonates with me and what does that tell me for my own life and what type of changes I should make? This is the real issue, the gap between instinct and pragmatism when it comes to this concept of the deep life. So part of what I've tried to do, I've been trying to do on the show, but I'm doing much more carefully.

I'll do much more formally when I eventually write the deep life book is to make the concept concrete. What are the attributes that define a deep life? Generally speaking, I'm not talking about particular activities. You have to be in Boulder. You have to be right in triathlon, but what is it specifically that separates what we would instinctually see as a deep life from a normal life?

Once we have identified what those properties are, does that mean we can have a more systematic approach to acquiring those in our life? If that's what we're interested in, that's what I'm gonna be trying to do with my deep life book. Let's get into it. There's a systematic quest for more.

Let's pin down the definition. These are the properties that separate what resonates as a deep life from others. Here is how you would actually go and acquire those properties. So it's a deep question, John, and one I'm going to continue to work on. Let me give you a one only partially formed idea right now.

Let's just give an appetizer for the larger banquet to one day come. I'm toying with this notion. This is my proposal for the deep life book that perhaps at the core of what separates a deep life from another life is the radical alignment of your existence to things that you value.

So there's two aspects, and this is a preliminary definition, but there's two aspects to this definition. One that you are making changes to align your life closer with certain things that you really value and to that those realignment is radical. So it's not just I think I really value being outdoors and exercise.

So I'm going to start training every morning before I go to my standard 45 minute away commute government job from the D.C. suburbs. That's an alignment of your life towards something that you value, but it's not a radical alignment. The radical alignment is like, OK, I'm going to is going to be rich role.

Yes, I'm going to make training a big part of my life. I'm going to leave my law firm and be a full time ultra athlete. I'm going to move the boulder to be a triathlon. Why does that resonate? Because they're not just making a change to align their life with something they care about.

It is a radical change. They significantly change their job set up, their location where they live, how they actually spend their days. So increasingly advanced. Those are the two things you need. If you miss any one of those two things, you run into trouble. Right. So if you make a radical change, but it's not aligned with something that's really important or that you really value, you end up, which we saw a lot of during the pandemic, making changes for the sake of change, trying to extract some sense of excitement or interesting this just because you did something radical.

But then you get to the small farm that you just bought in the Hudson River Valley and realize I don't like farming. It's weird and quiet out here. I can't get good coffee. This is this is terrible. This is actually not nothing here aligns with something I deeply value.

That's a problem. Similarly, I think is if you're really clear what you care about, but your change is too small, it's not radical. It's nice. It's better than not doing it, but it's not going to give you that deep resonance of the deep life. It's the difference between, you know, Bill McKibben leaving the New Yorker to move to that small house up in the Adirondacks, the rightful time about nature and Bill McKibben saying on the side with my New Yorker job, I want to be working on a book about nature and go to a retreat once a year.

So the radicalness matters, too. So that's one of the ideas I'm working on, John. I think maybe you need both those things. The radicalness unlock some sense of I really do care about this. It's a real engine of motivation. But figuring out what you care about and making the right choice like this is this actually is important and believing it's important to you.

So probably those two pieces, those two pieces have to come together. But I think we're going to see a lot more of that in the near future. And for a while going forward, people's willing to make radical changes to do radical realignments. I think we've woken up a little bit that we have more options than we think.

And there's more things we could be doing with our lives to make it interesting. What about in cases where somebody like a case study where somebody already kind of has a deep life, do you think it needs to be as radical or do you think it just needs there's like different tiers?

I just think there's usually there's usually an aspect of radicalness to it, by which I mean there's just a part of their life that is unusually constructed or oriented to promote something that they care about. I think the good life is different than the deep life. I think you could have a good life like I'm I'm plugged into my community.

I appreciate my work. I'm in good shape. I enjoy, you know, fine wine and like and have a good life. Capital G good life, virtuous, ethical, meaningful. The deep life is a subset of that. And it's not like everyone needs to do that. But some people really have this craving of I want something about my life to be notable, remarkable in the literal sense where people like, wow, do you know what Jesse's up to?

Yeah, that's really interesting. Living on a boat or something. Yeah, you're living on a boat. Yeah. So do you is that something you strive for? Or do you think you have that or do you think you're living a good life? I'm like halfway there. So do you want to do something radical?

Maybe I do. We're going to podcast from a boat. I got trained for triathlons in Boulder. No, I do. I have ideas. About specifically your life. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I figure I'm going to be writing a book about the deep life. Uh, it would be cool if that book could be structured around me doing some things.

I don't know. I even put down my proposal. Like, I don't know what these would be, but I would like the book to have a pretty good degree of self discovery and reporting for sure. The book is going to be very journalistic. So in maybe a Michael Pollan style, it's me on the road doing things with people.

That's a different style than my norm. My books, uh, up to now, including slow productivity is less first-person journalistic. So good. They can't ignore. You had some first-person journalism in it for sure. But since then I've, I've, uh, my, my, my structure is usually non-first-person journalistic. It's more reporting on ideas and laying out frameworks.

There's a little bit of first-person. I guess in, in digital minimalism too, but the deep life is no, no, it's Michael Pollan goes to polyphase farms and is there with salad tan working on the mobile chicken coops. You know, he goes to the places and does the things. And so deep life is going to have that personal thread.

I would like to have a prologue and epilogue is built around, um, some sort of deep change. So we'll see, you know what I should, here's, here's what it is. I'll, I'll, I'll give the preview. No, this is actually, it's a joke, but, um, I was watching on my, uh, iPad the other day, the North men.

Have you heard of this movie? Yeah. I just read about it. It's like, uh, the directors it's like, it's really in detail and it's a, it's a Viking movie, but like real Viking, New Yorker, I think about it. Oh, I missed that. Well, anyways. Um, so I finally watched it or I'm watching it.

It's Viking. It's like a Viking myth. So it, it, it did the witch movie too. Yeah. Oh, it's just the same guy. Yeah. Oh yeah. There was an article in the New Yorker, but I just read it last. Oh, maybe I did read that. Did he do the, uh, yes.

I like that guy. Have you seen the witch? I was reading it. I was like, I don't know if I saw, I don't think I did. I need to watch it. Yeah. I love those movies. I love those type of movies, the wit because it's like low budget. It just says it's a, here's this little village.

It's like three houses in 1600s, you know? So it's just one place. It's not a $50 million budget. Um, that's a cool movie. I mean, it's just like, what if like, you know, the witch that period with the witch trials and everything, like what if there's actually witches in colonial New England?

Yeah. Uh, my wife was watching it at some point. They're grinding up babies to make. So their broom can fly or something. And she was done with that. Anyways, this is all, all to say, this is a very roundabout way that they get to. So this is a Viking movie that stars Alex or Alexander Skarsgard.

You people might know from true blood and some other things. He's six, four, right. He's six, four kind of Viking guy. He got stacked for this movie, right? Like, because he's plays a Viking berserker and he's 45. So he's five years older and got, uh, just, you know, they, they had to make them sort of kind of superhero.

They didn't cut them as much because they're trying to be pretty accurate. So it wasn't marvel-y right. Because a Viking wouldn't be super cut, but just like, you know, they had to make them just like what he did with his traps or whatever. So I was joking with my wife.

I was like that, this is what I'm going to focus all my time on. If he could do that at 45, I'm just going to dedicate all of my time to becoming stacked like a Viking, just sort of opera pro of nothing. It took him six, uh, six months.

That would take a lot of time. That would take away from your writing. He did it. So I went down this rabbit hole hour a day, six days a week. It would take more than that. It got real, real jacked. It would take at least two hours a day.

Yeah. Well, here's the, here's the curve ball in 2019. He was in Tarzan. Right. So I just probably, which he had to get cut for. So there's probably some, he wasn't, let's just say he wasn't starting. Well, you already work out for at least 25 to 30 minutes a day, right?

Yeah. I thought it was interesting. It was an hour a day. I think it was an Icelandic, might've been an Icelandic trainer. Uh, and they had the philosophy, but. Sarsgar is a beast, like laser focus method type guy. So it was an intense hour. They do just one muscle group per day until it's just basically destroyed.

And then, uh, a different muscle group, the next day, different muscle group the next day. Um, but you know how much he had to eat? 4,000 calories, 7,000 calories a day. It's a lot of muscle, right? He put on 20 pounds of muscle 7,000 calories a day. And from what I understand, it's not like, yay, let's go get some burgers.

No, no, that's 7,000 calories. Yeah. No, you can't eat that. Chicken, broccoli and rice. Anyways. Uh, that's all to say, John, that this is my deep life goal is that I'm just going to spend years becoming like a, uh, like a inappropriately stacked looking Viking. Yeah. That would be, it's pretty cool.

You'd be able to hit those rowing times very easily. Yeah. And then, and then just row. Yeah, just be stacked like a Viking and row, uh, and dress like a Viking all the time. All right. This is nonsense. All right. Let's get, let's, let's move on to a better question here.

All right. We've got a question from, uh, Joanna. Joanna asks, what are some deep leisure activities to engage in when you're cognitively done for the day? I'm a professional turn, stay at home mom with three kids. I need to prioritize sleep and I'm unwilling to sacrifice morning sleep time for leisure.

So this means realistically I have from eight to nine at night for my leisure. I'm fine with that length of time, but since my brain is kind of done for the day, I find it challenging to engage in cognitively demanding activities at that time. I would love some crowdsourced examples of leisure that are satisfying, but gentler on my brain.

Well, Joanna, one hour a night, as we've established is enough time to get stacked like Alexander Sarsgaard in the Northmen. I think that's what you need to do is train intensely with an Icelandic personal trainer to build up unreasonable trapezius muscles. All right. I think we agree about that.

Um, all right. So Joanna, I have a couple of things to say. First of all, I didn't list it in the question, but you told me the ages of your kids. They're young. There's like an 11 month old. And I think it was like a three-year-old and maybe a four-year-old.

So, so let me preface first of all, with you're in a narrow, unusually difficult period in those kids' life. And especially because you're coming off of the, uh, the pandemic last year. And I don't know what the situation is with doing preschool or daycare, but you probably have those kids around a lot.

So you're in an unusually hard period. So let's preface it with that. The rest of your life starting in a year or two is going to look very different than right now. So anything we're talking about right now is just, okay, during this temporary, all hands on deck, unusually exhausting period of parenthood, how should you think about leisure?

And the first thing I'll say is in this period is like, don't worry too much about it. You know, what is your, your job is you're trying to keep these three entirely unreasonable beings alive while keeping your sanity. So you don't want to add another thing on your plate that why am I not getting in my full hour of SARS guard style exercise each night?

Why am I not learning the piano or mastering new skills? It's because you're doing something incredibly difficult right now, but it's not permanent and it's going to get easier. Why does it get easier? Because pretty soon most, and then all of those kids are going to be gone every day.

They'll be at school. They'll be in daycare. Now you're going to be dealing with planning. I have this time free from the kids that I have different things I want to do with it. It gets you so much more flexibility in terms of thinking about what to do. Okay.

So, but what should you do right now when you have these three kids and they're at home? All right. I have a few things I wanted to mention. One, integrate more restful or leisurely activities into the day, even during periods where the kids are around, just figure out how to do this.

My wife and I have a lot of creative approaches to doing various things like that with various combination of kids around. It's not uncommon for my three-year-old. I've taught him to want to work out with daddy. And so he will often sit on my concept too, and go back and forth while I'm doing weights or if I'm using the screen, like with a workout guided on the screen, I'll bring him down, give him an iPad.

And I've learned, he's learned to associate like, oh, I get to go on the iPad for 20 minutes while dad is exercising. So there's things like that you can do. There's activities like gardening or outdoor activities. You can kind of involve the kids in and also just have periods where like, now you guys do screens and I read or I rest, or I push you to the park and I listened to a podcast.

So make sure you have plenty of leisure and rest throughout the day. Two, assuming that you're not a single mom, and I don't know that's the case, but assuming that you're not a single mom, I'm going to guess that your husband doesn't work until eight o'clock every night. So get him doing more things, make that more regular so that you can have an opportunity to do other things, more structured leisure before eight o'clock.

That is, that's too hard of a job to raise three kids all the way until their bedtimes. No, no, no. If you can get help, you should have help. So if he's around, tell him to get off the couch. All right. And then finally, I would say, yeah, don't try to do something super cognitively demanding from eight to nine after a hard day.

I think you were right about that. Have a little structure for things you like to do then. But what are you structuring towards? Rest, relaxation, recharging. You mentioned yoga. That'd be great. You mentioned doing a podcast. That'd be great. Going for a walk around the block and listening to a podcast.

That'd be great. Maybe do a little bit of reading to kick off that period. And then from eight, 30 to nine, there's a show that you watch. I think it helps to have a little bit of structure to that time. Like this is what I do during that time.

There's a little routine because you get more relaxation out of it. But those activities should absolutely be recharging and relaxing. I mean, honestly, with three kids your age, maybe eight to nine, the right activity should be drinking heavily, but you'll probably get better use out of that if you start around 3 PM, because by then it's usually when we're, when we're done, I'll tell you, that is the, that is the hardest part, at least in our experience of COVID forget the disease, three kids at home, not able to go to school.

Makes you feel like, ah, probably just to be safe, need to go to the hospital. Let me just, because, you know, I'm not, yeah, let me just, I probably need to be hospitalized during this year because, because it's the worst. It is the worst. So I hear you. All right, Joanna, but it gets better.

You'll be there soon. All right, Jesse, let's do one more call. Do we have something? - Yep. - All right, excellent. - Early retirement call. - Oh, there we go. - Hi, Cal, this is George here. I have a question for you about testing the waters and getting in the reps as a writer.

Let me explain. I've been a manager at a Fortune 50 company for over 20 years. I've been in various marketing and general management roles in that time and did not have any specific technical abilities. I'm very fortunate to have the option to take early retirement in three years when I turned 55 and focus my efforts in other areas.

I enjoy nonfiction writing and in fact, had a successful personal finance blog for many years. I shut it down about five years ago though, as it was too distracting for my career where I needed to focus. But with a potential retirement looming, I'd love to get back to writing.

I have a clear vision for how I would like to spend my time when I retire from corporate life. Get up early, work out, spend three to five hours focused on deep work, writing specifically, and then spend the afternoons on other hobbies and activities with my wife, sprinkling and travel and visits with the kids and eventual grandkids into the mix.

My question is this, how do you recommend I test the waters on my writing ability and start to get the reps in now so that I will be ready to ramp up when I retire? I still have a full-time corporate job. I'm looking forward to hearing your take on this.

Thank you for your podcast, which is now my favorite. You provide tremendously good advice and I recommend you to my college aged kids. Cheers. Well, George, a couple of things to say here. So one, early retirement sounds great. 55 is actually our target as well. Because it's when all of our kids will be out of the house.

So I don't think I would retire in the sense of, you know, leave university or something like this, but we definitely plan 55 as a key turning point where maybe we'll live halftime somewhere else or do something interesting. So I appreciate that. Two, I like your proposed schedule. That's my full-time writer schedule.

It's what I do right now, for example, in the summer, something more or less like that where, you know, I wake up, I write and do deep work. I end the writing. This is where anything like podcasting or interviews, admin, email, that happens next. And then I shut that down late afternoon and switch over to family, hobbies, exercise, et cetera.

I think that's a great schedule. I think we're humans thrive with a schedule like that. So I think you have the right idea. I mean, I might suggest that I think this is justified that you might consider though, replacing the three hours of deep work with three hours of Alexander Sarsgaard style Northman Viking training.

So I don't know if you know about this, but I've been a big proponent of that. So just become an unusually stacked Viking. No, but here's, here's my, my main point though, is it super important that you get in these writing reps before you retire, as opposed to, would that not be a great thing to be doing with your deep work time once you retire?

So I don't know that I would unduly stress myself right now with a full-time fortune 50 management job to get in a lot of writing somehow on the side with this idea that it will be better to hit the ground running, I suppose, we retire versus like the first year of retirement is, is very rapidly getting up to speed.

Now, when you're working on something every single day, it's like trying to develop your writing habit. When you can work on that every day during retirement, what you can do in six months might take you three years working on the side in your corporate job. So, so I don't think you're giving up much time if you're deferring some of this training until you actually get to retirement.

So, so I want to plant that seed first because what would I do? I mean, if I was in your situation, I think I would reactivate some sort of media presence that gave you the chance to be writing and thinking, maybe a combination of a newsletter and a podcast.

I would use that to develop your ideas. Like how, what, what are your current theories or ideas on personal finance to find your voice, to find your niche. And then maybe after a year or two, if you could build some sort of audience, maybe thinking about writing a book.

And I think that would be hard to start on the side as you discovered in your fortune 50 job, it's hard to maintain a regular podcast or newsletter. Anything like that requires regular investment of time. You can't just do it occasionally. So again, it might be something you want to wait, tell that early retirement, but then really lock into it, lock into it, hardcore.

The one thing you could do, I mean, you need to find some sort of way to do occasional work as time permits that might help you get back into writing shape. So if you could figure out some targets for articles, and this might be in trade publications or business publications, et cetera.

So we take an article commission and spend some time for the next two weeks working on that. And then there's a busy period for six months where I do nothing, but then I sell another article somewhere else. And that gets me thinking of writing again, that might not be the worst thing just to start loosening up those proverbial muscles a little bit.

But the main thing I'm going to say to you is maybe that's what year one is about in your retirement is getting back to thinking and writing and finding your voice and finding your message. And I think that'll be fine because again, you're not dependent on this to make your living.

You're retired. You've saved up money to live off of. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't kill myself now knowing that a big expanse of autonomous time is lurking not too far in the future. All right. Well, speaking of writing, I do want to talk about the books I read last month, but first, before we get there, let me just briefly mention another sponsor that makes this show possible.

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That's ExpressVPN.com/deep ExpressVPN.com/deep. All right, Jesse, like we always do early in each month, I report back on the books I read during the preceding month. So we are in early June while recording this. So we will report back on the books I read in May. My goal as longtime listeners know is to try to read five books every month.

If you want more details on how I do that, we actually have a video online at youtube.com/calendarportmedia where I go through the different techniques I use to read five books a month and how other people can do it too. All right, five books I read in May 2022. Number one, I returned to Born Standing Up by Steve Martin.

That's Steve Martin's professional memoir. I have read this before. I read this way back in 2009, soon after it came out. I wrote about it way back then in the early days of my blog. It was actually in an interview that Steve Martin did with Charlie Rose about Born Standing Up that he used the phrase be so good they can't ignore you, which I then used or adapted to be the title of my fourth book, So Good They Can't Ignore You.

So it was a very influential book of my life, but I have not been back to it since. It's been over a decade since I read it. So I went back and I read it and it was great. There is a lot I had forgotten and I was able to extract a lot more rich detail.

And again, what makes this a good book is that it is focused just on his professional career. Steve Martin's point with this book was he didn't think enough detail is often given in celebrity memoirs about how people actually build their careers. This was just about the craft, how he built up his act, what went well, what didn't, his breaks, his steps back, how he moved forward again.

So I thought it was very interesting. The main takeaway that hit me on the second time through was the power of sticking with it. It took Martin years for his act to break with a lot of steps backwards, and he was incredibly focused during those periods on continuing to polish and develop his act.

And it was actually in the end, the confidence and expertise that was developed by that relentless focus and drive to improve that tipped him. His act was interesting, but once he became world class at delivering it, that's what actually made it a world class act because it was the confidence and precision that's necessary for his type of humor to work.

So I was really struck by his focus. All right. Next, I read Blood and Treasure, a newish biography of Daniel Boone by Rod Drury. Or is it Bob Drury? No, Rod Drury, someone Drury and Tom Clavin. And I read it in part. I don't know if you know this about me, Jesse, but I am descended from the Boones.

I did not know that. Maybe I give off that frontiersman style genre. I'm not descended from Daniel Boone. I'm descended from his brother, which we figured out at some point, his brother who shows up off and on in the book. So this was my my grandmother, my paternal grandmother.

Let me see if I have this right. I think her mom was a Boone. So we're actually not too far off the actual Boone line, but not from Daniel himself. And I do remember that growing up, we went to a Daniel Boone historical site and there's a register to sign if you're a descendant.

And they said, you're a descendant of his dad and his brother, but not of him. So we weren't we weren't able to sign the book. Very well written. I actually really enjoyed Blood and Treasure. Must have been very difficult to research. I mean, the whole book is about the complicated, shifting.

Allegiances, alliances and failed promises between all of the various different Indian tribes at this period of colonial history, Daniel Boone's life was completely intermixed with the the fight for land between the American colonists, the British and the various Indian tribes that were there, or this tribe would take over that tribe and this tribe would come in.

So it was really a book about 18th century Indian tribal politics. So a complicated book to write, but very interesting. These were tougher people back then. These long hunters, they would just go like, I'll be back in a year. Like I have a rifle and I'll be back in a year.

I'm just going to hunt for a year. Like, where are you going to go hunt? Oh, I'm going to I'm going to hike to the other side of the Appalachian mountains. And then I'll hunt over there and then I'll come back with, with all of all of the skins.

I mean, these were, that was a tougher, tougher period, but I am a Boone. So I get through proxy, a lot of credit. Then I read why faith matters by rabbi David Volpe. I read this because I heard Lex Fridman interview him. And I thought it was, he was interesting.

It was a really good interview. I thought it was really interesting. So I said, what's his most famous book was Volpe's most famous book. I think it's why faith matters. And I read it pretty good. So this was a, it's a post nine 11 book. Volpe wrote why faith matters as a response to the post nine 11 new atheist.

So, you know, remember those two early two thousands, you had Sam Harris, you had Hitchens, Dawkins, and I guess Daniel did it maybe had a book in there too, breaking the spell, there is this sort of anti-religious new atheism that arose, and this was a response to that. It was a pretty interesting book from a roughly from a Jewish perspective, but, but relatively ecumenical, very accessible.

I thought there's some interesting points in it. Then I went back and again, this is a reread, but a reread from my childhood. So I don't think it counts lost moon by James Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger. This book came out in the nineties when I was a kid. It is the book about Apollo 13 written by the Jim Lovell who Tom Hanks played in the movie and a professional science writer, Jeffrey Kluger.

So, so Apollo 13, the Ron Howard movie was based off of this book was the main source material. Another cool book, they wrote it, they wrote it, narrate, uh, cinematically. So it's like in the room, in the room, real time narrative, like this person said this, this person grabbed this thing, which is probably the right way.

And it goes back and forth between mission control and the capsule, but it's written embedded in the action itself. So, you know, then Lovell hit the switch and this happened, not, there's not a, as not a third person narrator voice of like, then what was happening on the, so it really moves.

And it's a crazy story. I mean, what happened on the, on the command module and what they had to do to save it. And Kluger just went back through transcript and transcript, and they really picked apart what happened and the tick talk of how it unfolded and who said what.

And so it's really an achievement as a book. I just, as a nonfiction writer, I can say this was, it's, it's a fantastic story, obviously, I mean, stuck in space and you have to get saved. But to write this book is not an easy feat. I mean, it took a huge amount of research.

So it's a real achievement as a book and incredibly interesting to read. So forget the movie, you gotta, you gotta read the book Lost Moon. And then finally, I read the Lost City of Z by David Gran. So David Gran is a New Yorker writer. He's sort of, I don't know if he's a target of envy, but he's sort of what you, sometimes what you imagine when you imagined when you're at Columbia journalism school and you're thinking what you want to do as a writer, what you imagine often is David Gran.

So what he does for the New Yorker is he does these long form journalistic pieces where he usually goes on some sort of adventure with interesting people with interesting things happening. So there'll be some, you know, I think he did stuff with like white supremacist in jail. At some point, there was like a murder in the, another book thing he did, another article, there was a murder among the Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts.

Like there's this whole world of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts that think that Sherlock Holmes was real. And there was this murder and David Gran is over there in England and gets in beds with these groups and is really like the Baker Street regulars. And anyways, Lost City of Z is half of it is the story of Percy Fawcett, one of the last of the great British adventurers and explorers who disappeared trying to find this supposed giant city in the Amazon.

So it tells the story, but the interleaves with David Gran going to the Amazon and actually putting together a team and going in himself to try to find some evidence of what they found. And, you know, spoiler alert, turns out there were really large civilizations in the, in the Amazon, but a lot of it was hard to find because it was built with wood and a lot of that had decayed.

But now with modern techniques, we can see there was all these sophisticated cities. So Percy Fawcett was right, but there's no way he was ever going to find it in the 1920s. Anyways, David Gran is great. He's the goat at these type of things. These things move, they're well researched.

He inserts himself into it, sort of classic adventure narrative, nonfiction, New Yorker type stuff. So that book was fun. I should be more David Gran like Jesse. I need to actually like go, you know, on the trail of a murderer. Oh, a famous David Gran piece was hunting the giant squid.

So he's out there on this boat with this guy, this eccentric guy, he's like convinced that they can catch a giant squid and he's out there in the storms and they're trying to find a squid. He loves that type of stuff. He just puts himself puts himself in the danger.

Do you know him? I never met him. How old is he? Older than us, but I don't know, probably not that much older. We should look it up. I wonder how old he is. I should flex that more. I feel shy and nervous about it. I feel like I should maybe flex more of the potential ability to talk to other New Yorker writers and say, just can I call you?

Can I call you? It feels a little bit. I don't know. Eddie Haskelly. Excuse me, Mr. Gran. I also do some writing for your esteemed publication there, sir. And. 55 years old. Okay. 55 years old. And I would like to talk to you on the telephone. The problem is if someone wrote me like that, I would be like, oh, this is annoying.

So, so I don't, but I'll tell you, I do want to before time is too short and I'm sure there's not much time left to do this. Just given his age, I really would like to meet John McPhee. And I built the intro to the slow productivity around John McPhee.

And I grew up near Princeton and I'm around there all the time. So I'm going to see. He's probably just goes, walks the campus, walks home. Yeah, he's older. You know, I think he's in his upper eighties now, so I don't know exactly what the, what his situation is, but I would love to meet him once.

Maybe that's one place I will do an Eddie Haskell flex. It's like, ah, sir, I, I write for your same esteemed publication and I would like to stop by and say hello. And so I'll try that, but I think it'd be cool for the opening of that book when I'm telling this story about his work habits and spending a whole year writing one article to be able to actually be there and see him would be cool.

So, so I might try that. Well, as you said earlier, when you were talking about your plans for the deep life, you might be doing something related to David Gran, right? Yeah, maybe I could become a David Gran style writer. Yeah. Well, if you're going to do something deep life, I mean, that's kind of like going on a boat, trying to find a big squid.

Yeah. But then he comes back, you know, and then he comes. You don't want to stay on the boat for your whole entire life. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But how many squids you want to catch? But see, like in that case, that's more like he does adventures for his articles.

Then goes back, goes back to his normal life where the deep life you got to, you want, I mean, that is a deep life. Oh, he's probably always working on something. So probably I think he is going to do after that. Well, his book, he wrote a book, um, the something, summer moon.

So something, summer moon about this murder on an Indian reservation around trying to get oil rights or whatever. Anyway, Scorsese is making a movie out of it right now. So, you know, kudos to him. That's a really cool book. And I feel bad. I'm getting the name. It's something, something, something moon.

The problem is not the, the, not mix it up with a fire of summer moon. Well, no, but that might be the killers of the flower moon killer of the flower moon. Yeah. Yeah. So the issue is there's the empire of the summer moon. That's the, the Gwyn book about the Comanches, right?

Killers of the flower moon. Yeah. Killers of the flower moon. I have that. I should read that. But, but no, but David Graham lives a deep life. Not that the squid hunt is a deep life, but I probably a life where you do adventure journalism. Like that's interesting, right?

Like it's a lot of these full-time writers, their lives are interesting. Like they're, they're unusual. They, in his case, like he travels and goes, he's adventures and comes back and writes on them and he kind of does it on his own terms. Like that's probably, that's pretty cool. Or you have like the Sebastian Youngers of the world where he goes to his, with his family, to their little house in the pine scrub in Truro, Cape Cod.

And he's sort of like chainsaws trees and writes, you know, it goes to a boxing gym too. Yeah. Yeah. That's another guy who's older than us who. Yeah. Looks like he could beat me up. All right. Well, anyway, enough of that. How long did we go? Just, Ooh, hour 20.

That's what happens when I get away from the studio too long. So let's wrap this up. Thank you everyone for listening. If you like what you heard, you will like what you see videos of full episodes and select segments available at youtube.com/calnewportmedia. If you like what you heard, you'll also like what you read.

Sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com. Be back next week at the normal time with a normal episode. And until then, as always stay deep. (upbeat music)