Ep. 200: Feedback Councils, Decoding the Deep Life, and Becoming a Writer

00:00:00.000 | I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, episode 200.

00:00:07.000 | I'm here in the Deep Work HQ joined once again by Jesse.

00:00:17.000 | Jesse, we missed a week recording together, so it's been a little while, so it's good

00:00:21.860 | to see you again.

00:00:22.860 | Good to be back.

00:00:23.860 | Thank you everyone for putting up with our schedule being a little bit delayed.

00:00:27.320 | So you got last week's episode towards the end of the week, but the silver lining of

00:00:32.740 | that is you get this week's episode soon after.

00:00:36.140 | So through patience, you get the reward of two episodes being released within a few days

00:00:41.300 | of each other.

00:00:42.300 | Now 200 Jesse, that feels like a milestone.

00:00:44.740 | A lot of episodes.

00:00:45.740 | A lot of episodes.

00:00:48.340 | So I think that's good.

00:00:49.340 | 200, we're just coming up on, I was going to say we're just coming up on the two year

00:00:55.460 | mark of the show, but I think we passed it.

00:00:57.420 | I'd have to go back and check, but I think it was probably you started in May, May, late

00:01:02.860 | May 2020.

00:01:03.940 | So we've, we've passed the, the two, the two year milestone.

00:01:07.140 | We have about six and a half million downloads.

00:01:11.180 | Maybe 10 million would be the nice next download milestone though.

00:01:14.620 | I'm less interested these days in total downloads.

00:01:16.660 | I mean, that depends on how many episodes you do and other things.

00:01:19.500 | I think I'm more interested in per episode downloads and that's a number that's been

00:01:24.000 | going up.

00:01:25.000 | So I've heard, you mentioned to me briefly that you've, you've got some chatter with

00:01:28.660 | the inboxes about people being interested in, in person.

00:01:31.820 | Yeah.

00:01:32.820 | Do you have a question?

00:01:33.820 | So is that something that you're starting to hear some interest in?

00:01:35.900 | Yeah.

00:01:36.900 | Several people have reached out and talked about it and you've talked about it for over

00:01:41.500 | a year.

00:01:42.500 | Cause even when I was just a fan listening to it, you talked about it.

00:01:45.020 | Yeah.

00:01:46.020 | That last summer I was, I wanted to do it and then I got lazy and I didn't do it, but

00:01:52.540 | maybe, okay.

00:01:53.540 | Maybe soon, maybe soon we'll try it.

00:01:55.640 | I'm assuming Nats Park.

00:01:57.000 | There'll be plenty of seats available.

00:01:58.680 | Yeah.

00:01:59.680 | He's going to the games.

00:02:00.680 | We could do it concurrently with a game and you can play an inning cause I'll need a third

00:02:03.680 | baseman.

00:02:04.680 | Exactly.

00:02:05.680 | Like as long as you guys are here, is there anyone who can give us two innings of relief?

00:02:11.720 | We're a, whatever it is.

00:02:14.760 | Aaron Sanchez is no longer available.

00:02:18.480 | That's good.

00:02:19.480 | All right.

00:02:20.480 | So we're back in action.

00:02:21.480 | 200 episodes.

00:02:22.480 | We're going to be doing downloads.

00:02:23.480 | We'll be meeting in person at Nats Park soon.

00:02:28.160 | We got a good show ahead of us.

00:02:30.040 | We've got a good show ahead of us.

00:02:31.280 | A bunch of questions and calls later.

00:02:33.880 | I will be doing the books I read in May.

00:02:38.240 | I forgot to do that in the last episode because Jesse wasn't here and I forget things when

00:02:42.200 | he's not here.

00:02:43.200 | So we'll get to that later.

00:02:44.200 | First though, let's do a deep dive.

00:02:47.400 | So I'm going to do a deep dive on an idea I've been thinking about.

00:02:51.240 | I'm calling this the feedback council idea, and I'm going to open with a, an article.

00:02:57.480 | I don't want to spend a lot of time in this article.

00:03:00.360 | It's just going to motivate this bigger idea of feedback councils.

00:03:06.480 | So I saw this article the other day, a listener sent it to me to the interesting account,

00:03:11.360 | Newport.com address.

00:03:12.800 | So there was this article that appeared in the New York times.

00:03:15.420 | It was about CNN's new leadership.

00:03:20.940 | So this is from June 5th, as you can see here.

00:03:25.560 | So what has happened at CNN is there is a shakeup.

00:03:28.360 | There is a new head of CNN, Chris Licht, L I C H T, who is trying to do lots of things

00:03:37.360 | to shake up the network.

00:03:38.360 | Among other things, now that Donald Trump's no longer president, they're shifting away

00:03:41.680 | from more of a high energy adversarial style of reporting.

00:03:45.760 | They try to be a little bit more down the center.

00:03:48.360 | There's a lot of changes that Chris Licht is doing, but there was one in particular

00:03:52.680 | that caught my attention.

00:03:55.100 | That's what I want to highlight here.

00:03:56.200 | So for those who are watching, you can actually see the article for those listening at home.

00:03:59.900 | You just hear me talking about it.

00:04:02.380 | So we have right here, producers have been urged to ignore Twitter backlash from the

00:04:09.140 | far right and the far left.

00:04:12.360 | All right.

00:04:14.380 | That I think is a good idea.

00:04:18.760 | I want to explain why I think it's a good idea, because it will give us some ideas about

00:04:24.240 | how the rest of us should be thinking about living our lives in a digital world, whether

00:04:28.720 | or not we run a network.

00:04:30.360 | So to explain why I think that's a good idea, let's start with the notion of feedback more

00:04:36.600 | generally, and in particular, the role of feedback for human beings.

00:04:42.920 | Human beings are wired, neurologically speaking, to take feedback from other human beings very

00:04:50.280 | seriously.

00:04:51.280 | We pay a lot of attention to it.

00:04:52.820 | It has a lot of effect on how we feel.

00:04:56.580 | So we're very wired for this.

00:04:57.760 | And there's two good reasons for this from an evolutionary perspective.

00:05:01.800 | One is tribal cohesion.

00:05:03.020 | So when you can watch and monitor very carefully the reaction of people around you to what

00:05:07.880 | you're saying, it allows you to adjust what you're saying in such a way to try to maintain

00:05:13.080 | social comedy, to maintain positive affect between people.

00:05:17.540 | You see the body language show, "Uh-oh, I'm going into dangerous territory here."

00:05:21.320 | You pull back a little bit.

00:05:22.320 | This helps keep tribal groups happy amongst themselves.

00:05:28.240 | Now, I talk about the neuroscientific backing for how this happens a little bit in my book,

00:05:35.280 | Digital Minimalism.

00:05:36.280 | I talk about how much of our brain is actually dedicated to processing all these complex

00:05:39.360 | input channels that come from person-to-person interaction.

00:05:43.120 | But the high-level summary there is we monitor the people around us while we are talking,

00:05:48.120 | and we take that feedback very seriously.

00:05:50.240 | It's very affecting.

00:05:51.360 | The other advantage of feedback from other humans is that it extends our ability to cogitate

00:05:57.360 | beyond just our own brains.

00:05:59.160 | And now if there's a group of people getting feedback from other people in the group on

00:06:05.880 | a plan, on an idea, on an initiative, allows you to essentially tap into the cognitive

00:06:12.000 | potential of these other brains, forming a larger collective brain that is more nuanced

00:06:17.680 | and smarter than any one brain potentially in isolation.

00:06:21.320 | This was a great trick of evolution.

00:06:25.240 | It requires complex language to do it, but once we have this trick, it really allowed

00:06:29.400 | us to upgrade quickly our ability to actually think and make good decisions.

00:06:35.480 | Now, of course, leaving the evolutionary past and going into the more recent cultural past

00:06:40.800 | of human beings, we see this extended cogitation idea maybe reach its apogee with the scientific

00:06:46.000 | method where now we can formally receive feedback on ideas in a very structured and formalized

00:06:52.640 | way that really helps aim our attention towards scientific realities away from some things

00:06:58.200 | that aren't.

00:06:59.200 | So, again, getting feedback from other people is a huge part of the human experience.

00:07:03.160 | All right, so we take it seriously, our brain cares about it.

00:07:07.640 | The issue with the social internet, and in particular, the more recent last 10 year rise

00:07:12.840 | of widely used social media platforms on the social internet, is that it introduced into

00:07:19.840 | our cultural ecosystem new forms of feedback.

00:07:24.720 | Feedback that we did not have access to before, feedback that is of a decidedly different

00:07:30.000 | character than the type of feedback that our brain has been wired to take very seriously.

00:07:34.040 | So there's really two things that differentiate the feedback you get from, let's say, Twitter

00:07:38.960 | or Instagram versus what you would get from your tribe 100,000 years ago.

00:07:43.600 | One, it's a biased sample.

00:07:47.200 | So when you're getting feedback from the internet, it's not as if you are randomly sampling the

00:07:51.600 | population and getting a true representative sense of how people feel about what you just

00:07:56.400 | said.

00:07:57.400 | It's not just like it is in our Paleolithic path, it's the same group of people giving

00:08:00.720 | you feedback that have given you feedback on everything else.

00:08:02.920 | So if their opinion shifts, then that's probably represents there's something going on here

00:08:07.320 | you should pay attention to.

00:08:08.880 | Instead, the internet has these weird connectivity and virality dynamics where anyone can give

00:08:14.400 | feedback to anyone else.

00:08:16.080 | And what selects someone to want to give feedback to you can be quite arbitrary or unusual.

00:08:20.480 | There could be something about what you said that got spread through some sort of viral

00:08:23.640 | amplification network, and it got to some malcontent over here.

00:08:26.880 | And then they can directly message you back with some feedback.

00:08:29.400 | It's not a true sample of people whose opinions you care about.

00:08:32.880 | It's a biased sample.

00:08:33.880 | It's unpredictable.

00:08:35.380 | The other issue with feedback from the social internet is that a lot of it is in bad faith.

00:08:41.880 | You're talking to, let's say, your sister.

00:08:46.560 | In general, they're probably trying to give you good feedback.

00:08:49.520 | It's what they honestly feel about it.

00:08:52.220 | Social internet based feedback, by contrast, has lots of other factors going on that is

00:08:58.340 | driving it.

00:08:59.340 | It might not be a true representation about how people feel about something.

00:09:04.660 | There's all sorts of other dynamics going on.

00:09:07.540 | For example, if we isolate Twitter, the service that was pointed out by Chris Licht in the

00:09:13.680 | article we just looked at about CNN, we see that a lot of the really aggressive backlash

00:09:20.660 | or pushback on Twitter, whether it's coming from the far right or the far left, is often

00:09:25.060 | about enforcing tribal boundaries, that there is a war going on where neither side wants

00:09:29.940 | their Overton window to shift at all towards the other side.

00:09:33.180 | And there'll be intense pressure to try to adjust or control what is said and what is

00:09:38.460 | not said.

00:09:39.460 | If you look at backlash from the right or the left, what you often see is that it doesn't

00:09:42.580 | correlate to how far have you drifted from orthodoxy.

00:09:46.340 | Actually, the most intense pushback will be for people who are right at the border of

00:09:51.980 | orthodoxy because that's what matters is you don't want that Overton window border to shift

00:09:55.860 | a little bit in the opposite direction.

00:09:57.400 | So if you're largely on a team and then drift a little bit towards the other team, that's

00:10:02.580 | going to get a lot more attention than let's say that you're wildly against what a particular

00:10:07.840 | team feels for.

00:10:09.900 | Whatever value judgment you want to give to those dynamics, what we can say is that it's

00:10:12.780 | not an accurate representative representative view of how people actually feel.

00:10:18.460 | There's other dynamics going on.

00:10:22.160 | There's also retribution that happens in Twitter.

00:10:25.100 | There's also amplification of straight up crazy people.

00:10:29.180 | So bad faith information you're getting from the Internet.

00:10:33.300 | Now, this has a real problem.

00:10:35.260 | And the reason why and Chris Licht is saying, stop looking at backlash from Twitter.

00:10:38.880 | The reason why the managing editor at the New York Times, as we covered last month,

00:10:42.220 | said the same thing to his writers, stop using Twitter, stop paying attention to Twitter

00:10:47.140 | is because let's say you're a reporter.

00:10:50.380 | You take this feedback really seriously because we're wired to take feedback seriously and

00:10:53.660 | it can push how you report into weird directions.

00:10:56.740 | It's actually not optimal for the information, but it's the hijacking of our feedback apparatus.

00:11:02.320 | The same thing can happen to the rest of us as well.

00:11:06.020 | Reporters are not.

00:11:07.180 | You get that bias sample, bad faith feedback from the Internet, and it can really affect

00:11:11.500 | the way you feel, the way you act, what you talk about, what you produce, how you live

00:11:15.540 | your life.

00:11:16.540 | It is the hijacking of the human feedback apparatus by a source of corrupted feedback

00:11:24.580 | that our brain never evolved to expect.

00:11:27.460 | So I think we need to be very careful about this.

00:11:29.660 | We all need to do a similar survey in our own lives, similar to what the New York Times

00:11:34.180 | or the CNN seems to be doing now and saying, let's be careful about what we pay attention

00:11:37.540 | to.

00:11:38.540 | Now, a bad solution here would be to stop seeking feedback for our ideas and actions

00:11:43.820 | altogether because again, we're wired for feedback.

00:11:46.660 | It serves a good purpose.

00:11:50.660 | There's a common effect that academics know about.

00:11:54.180 | I call it retired academic syndrome, where you get a very smart academic that's existing

00:12:01.380 | in the high energy, constant feedback, back and forth discussion world of their academic

00:12:08.380 | field.

00:12:09.380 | And then for whatever reason, they leave academia.

00:12:10.380 | They're very smart people, but they leave academia.

00:12:13.500 | Seven times out of 10, especially if they have some sort of public facing discussion,

00:12:17.900 | they will start to drift into increasingly extreme ideas, different topics, but they'll

00:12:24.020 | get to extremely weird ideas or they'll get very cantankerous or they'll get very upset.

00:12:28.500 | And part of what's happening here is they're very smart, but they get separated from the

00:12:32.900 | feedback mechanism that helps them push back and adjust and modify and improve and keep

00:12:37.260 | reasonable their thinking and they end up going crazy.

00:12:40.380 | So again, feedback is important.

00:12:41.700 | We don't want to ignore it, but we don't want the internet to drive it.

00:12:45.140 | So the solution I want to suggest is to create your own, what we can call feedback councils.

00:12:53.380 | So this is a group of people that you trust, that have been in your life for a while, that

00:13:00.100 | have a variety of backgrounds and expertises.

00:13:05.500 | So if you are a tech bro in Silicon Valley, your feedback council should not be six other

00:13:12.660 | Stanford grads who are roughly your same age and gender and what have you.

00:13:18.920 | You want a backgrounds that represent things that you might not be exposed to.

00:13:24.160 | And then take the opinion of this council seriously on decisions in your life, ideas

00:13:29.580 | you're writing or trying to put out there, just your personal understanding.

00:13:35.020 | How do I understand this big news event that's happening?

00:13:37.980 | So take that high engineered, high quality source of feedback, very seriously, allow

00:13:41.560 | it to adjust the way you think and move.

00:13:44.140 | But then here's the key thing, ignore other arbitrary sources of feedback, ignore if you're

00:13:49.180 | a public facing figure, random comments from Twitter, angry, direct messages, those weird

00:13:54.500 | emails.

00:13:55.500 | If you have engineered a high quality feedback council, you're going to get a variety of

00:13:58.900 | good feedback.

00:13:59.900 | If they're on board with something, then it feels right for you run with it.

00:14:04.640 | If they're nervous about an idea, they say, I don't think that's good for you.

00:14:07.620 | Take that seriously.

00:14:09.460 | If they say, Hey, this thing you're writing about, I don't think you realize that it's

00:14:12.420 | going to come across to people like me as being kind of dismissive or offensive.

00:14:17.660 | Take that seriously.

00:14:20.260 | Now I think companies should do the same thing at a much larger scale.

00:14:24.060 | They should have large representative panels of people that are relevant to what their

00:14:28.340 | company does, their stakeholder, their customers, their shareholders, et cetera.

00:14:31.980 | They should take the feedback from this very seriously.

00:14:34.640 | And the flip side is they should ignore Twitter and they should ignore random emails or direct

00:14:40.480 | messages.

00:14:41.480 | Politicians should do the same thing.

00:14:43.000 | You should be very in touch with a representative sample of your constituents.

00:14:46.200 | You should be talking to your constituents.

00:14:48.000 | You should be doing town halls, be getting the mood of actual people out there, but ignore

00:14:53.880 | what angry 27 year olds with too much time on their hands are repeatedly tweeting at

00:14:59.000 | you.

00:15:00.080 | That's not real life.

00:15:01.200 | That's biased.

00:15:02.200 | That's bad faith.

00:15:03.200 | You need feedback.

00:15:04.200 | Your brain craves feedback, but it's gotta be good.

00:15:06.900 | So anyways, that is my idea.

00:15:09.940 | Something we don't talk enough about.

00:15:11.560 | Our brains take feedback seriously.

00:15:14.360 | The social internet and a particular social media can pervert or corrupt those sources

00:15:19.960 | of feedback.

00:15:20.960 | So we have to be very careful about replacing those with sources of feedback that we trust.

00:15:28.800 | So there's my concept.

00:15:29.800 | There's my concept.

00:15:30.800 | For people with not a whole lot of diversity in their social console, what do you suggest?

00:15:36.080 | Yeah.

00:15:37.080 | So you have to try to seek out as much as you can.

00:15:40.360 | So yeah, let's say your friend group is kind of small.

00:15:43.400 | Yeah.

00:15:44.400 | And homogenous.

00:15:45.400 | See if there's maybe through at work or through family, you know, or a cousin or you do the

00:15:52.000 | best you can, but I think you want to, you want to mix like in a perfect world.

00:15:58.360 | There's a lot of things you want.

00:15:59.360 | Because most people aren't going to have this many different factors, but in a perfect world,

00:16:02.080 | the things that I think matter is so professional background matters, right?

00:16:06.740 | So if you had class variety, I think that would be useful.

00:16:10.040 | So it's not just, let me talk to a bunch of other dual income, upper middle class government

00:16:13.720 | worker families.

00:16:14.720 | Like, can I talk to someone who has a completely different type of job?

00:16:18.560 | Geographic diversity probably matters.

00:16:20.760 | I think people feel differently.

00:16:21.920 | If you live in a suburb in the middle of a city in the country, that might matter.

00:16:26.760 | I would say gender and racial identity probably really matters.

00:16:32.000 | I mean, gender obviously is a huge one.

00:16:33.600 | Women and men think very differently about things that don't always understand each other.

00:16:37.920 | And then probably age, you know, like you have a sampling of people from different age,

00:16:43.800 | you're not going to hit all of those probably in, in one group, but having some sorts of

00:16:48.800 | feedback now, you know, I kind of cheat that a little bit.

00:16:51.560 | I use informally long time reader slash listeners, you know, like this is the nice thing about

00:16:58.760 | my, my online world.

00:17:01.280 | It's been around for a long time, starting with the blog and then it turned to an email

00:17:04.280 | newsletter.

00:17:05.280 | Now we have the podcast, but it's not huge.

00:17:08.520 | And it's not, it doesn't have a big social media presence.

00:17:10.720 | I don't interact with people on social media.

00:17:12.880 | And so the group of people who send me emails or comment on blog posts and you see, you

00:17:18.600 | see their messages, it feels close knit, you know, it, it, it, it somehow has escaped the

00:17:25.040 | dynamics and I think I shouldn't say somehow I know exactly why it's because all this interaction

00:17:28.860 | is happening in the absence of social media with all of those weird incentives it has.

00:17:33.280 | If you're, if, if all your contents in social media, then you can find these weird bias

00:17:37.220 | samples of feedback where your content moves through amplification networks and gets to

00:17:40.800 | some corner of people who are upset at you.

00:17:42.920 | But when you're not on social media, it's a much tighter knit audience and it's really

00:17:48.980 | interestingly diverse, um, different countries, different backgrounds, different types of

00:17:53.520 | jobs, working class, non-working class, all sorts of different racial identities.

00:17:57.600 | Like, and then I get all sorts of interesting feedback from people.

00:18:00.080 | And so it's, it's my secret weapon I think is that I have this cabal of really interesting

00:18:04.640 | people that's small enough that it's a pretty good sample.

00:18:08.560 | And I would say our crazy to normal ratio is really small.

00:18:13.280 | We occasionally get some crazies, but we don't get that much.

00:18:15.280 | Do you know any retired professors who have taken done this?

00:18:19.160 | Did not go crazy.

00:18:20.760 | They should.

00:18:21.760 | It really is common.

00:18:22.760 | The problem with being a professor is you're smart, so you can convince yourself it's completely

00:18:27.320 | reasonable to you.

00:18:28.320 | That's why they get conspiratorial.

00:18:30.480 | It's completely reasonable to you that you could figure something out that no one else

00:18:33.440 | understands.

00:18:34.800 | And if you don't have that feedback saying, yeah, that might be true, but you've kind

00:18:39.340 | of gone off the deep end on this one without that type of feedback, they end up in crazy

00:18:43.640 | places like being smart is a problem when it comes to conspiratorial or weird thinking.

00:18:48.800 | They either get conspiratorial or they get cantankerous and just kind of mad at everyone,

00:18:53.880 | you know?

00:18:55.320 | So if I ever retire from academia, once I start, if I start going on about contrails

00:19:00.560 | and radio transmissions in my fillings, someone's got to intervene.

00:19:07.280 | Oh, well, okay.

00:19:09.400 | So that's what I have to say about that.

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00:21:17.680 | I also want to talk about perhaps a slightly more technical topic that is NAD+.

00:21:28.280 | So let's put on our biology hats here for a second.

00:21:31.400 | NAD+ is found in every single cell of your body and is responsible for creating energy

00:21:36.200 | and regulating hundreds of cell functions.

00:21:39.440 | NAD+ levels decline as you age.

00:21:43.800 | This is relevant to Jesse and I as we are now in our forties or about to be in our forties.

00:21:48.000 | We're old, old men.

00:21:49.840 | So we have to worry about this type of thing.

00:21:52.000 | Lack of sleep, intense exercise, unbalanced diet, too much sun, all of this can deplete

00:21:56.520 | NAD+ levels.

00:21:59.120 | They're also low levels of the NAD+ are also linked to faster biological aging.

00:22:04.320 | All right.

00:22:06.400 | So NAD+ supplementation should be an important part of your health routine as you age.

00:22:12.920 | This is why you should consider Basis by Elysium Health.

00:22:17.320 | It is the most trusted source for NAD+ supplementation.

00:22:23.120 | Basis is clinically proven to increase levels of NAD+ by 40% safely and sustainably.

00:22:32.920 | It was founded by the renowned researcher, Dr. Leonard Garante, who has worked on these

00:22:38.440 | issues for more than 30 years.

00:22:39.720 | They have tons of scientists on their board.

00:22:41.920 | So that is Basis by Elysium to get your NAD+ levels back where you want them.

00:22:47.920 | So go to trybasis.com/cal and enter code CAL at checkout to save 10% off Basis prepaid

00:22:56.800 | plans as well as other Elysium health supplements.

00:22:59.760 | That's trybasis.com/cal and use that code CAL at checkout to save 10%.

00:23:06.200 | All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

00:23:09.920 | Our first one is a written question.

00:23:13.800 | This comes from Colin.

00:23:16.920 | Colin says there always seems to be more to be done.

00:23:22.000 | How do you stop yourself from losing faith in your system?

00:23:24.480 | It's like painting the fourth bridge.

00:23:27.320 | Once you finish, you just go back to the beginning and start all over again.

00:23:33.200 | So I don't know the fourth bridge reference, but I've heard that saying with the Golden

00:23:36.320 | Gate Bridge.

00:23:37.320 | By the time they're finished painting the Golden Gate Bridge, they have to go back and

00:23:42.080 | repaint it again.

00:23:43.080 | I like this question a lot.

00:23:44.080 | Now, Jesse, do you think he's talking about, I want to make sure I'm interpreting it properly.

00:23:47.520 | Do you think he's talking about just there's always more goals or projects or tasks to

00:23:52.000 | do and it's sort of Sisyphean, no matter how many things you get done, there's always more

00:23:56.920 | things to get done?

00:23:57.920 | That's what I think he's saying.

00:23:58.920 | Right.

00:23:59.920 | Okay.

00:24:00.920 | Not that there's always tweaks to do to your system.

00:24:03.880 | I think it's the first situation.

00:24:05.480 | Well, you know, Colin, it's a good point.

00:24:08.600 | So here's the issue.

00:24:12.080 | You don't want an oppositional mindset towards the activities or tasks or projects in your

00:24:20.400 | life.

00:24:21.520 | You do not want to have a mindset of, I have to get through these things until I can get

00:24:29.040 | to where I want to get, which is, I don't know, having nothing to do or having free

00:24:32.120 | time that my, my task list, my projects, my plans are somehow an obstacle to some other

00:24:38.160 | better state that if you could just get through these things as fast as possible, you could

00:24:42.760 | get to that better state.

00:24:44.080 | I'm going to suggest a alternative mindset, which is that man is always in action.

00:24:53.640 | Activity is fundamental to life.

00:24:56.640 | Our bodies take in food and water and convert it into energy so that we can actually create

00:25:01.640 | movement.

00:25:03.080 | We can actually create action in the world.

00:25:06.880 | So the goal of a time management system or productivity system and a life structuring

00:25:11.040 | system, the various types of things I talk about is making sure that the action that

00:25:15.600 | you're doing, because you're going to be doing action one way or the other is as meaningful

00:25:18.700 | and directed as possible.

00:25:21.600 | We could think about this if we wanted to biochemically, there's a certain amount of

00:25:25.520 | calories you're taking in each day.

00:25:28.280 | That's going to be converted into energy.

00:25:31.120 | That energy then allows you to do things like think and move.

00:25:34.000 | You're going to take in those calories.

00:25:35.520 | You're going to create that energy every day.

00:25:37.520 | There's a certain amount of energy you are burning through.

00:25:39.720 | So the question is, what do you want to get in return for that energy?

00:25:43.360 | And so thinking about interesting or meaningful things or things that are useful to the world,

00:25:47.600 | being a leader, being effective, being good to others, all of these type of positive targets

00:25:56.320 | for your energy is good.

00:25:58.120 | You're going to burn it one way or the other.

00:25:59.280 | So you want to direct it towards the thing that's going to make life meaningful, that's

00:26:02.640 | going to make life useful.

00:26:05.800 | So we're wired for that, Colin.

00:26:06.880 | We're wired for action.

00:26:09.280 | Your goal is just to direct that action.

00:26:12.000 | It's nice to take a break now and again, but I can tell you if I could take everything

00:26:15.940 | off your list, every task, every project, bring in a whole staff to take care of your

00:26:19.480 | every need, you could just sit there.

00:26:21.040 | There's the hammock will bring you food, will bring you water.

00:26:23.080 | You don't have to do anything.

00:26:24.080 | You're not going to be happy.

00:26:25.560 | And the reason why you're not going to be happy is that our mind does not expect life

00:26:28.280 | to be like that for any extended period of time.

00:26:32.680 | Action is fundamental to the human experience.

00:26:34.920 | It's your job to try to make that action as useful as possible.

00:26:39.800 | So the bridge needs to be painted because otherwise it rust.

00:26:43.420 | So keep painting.

00:26:44.420 | All right, we've got a second question here.

00:26:50.500 | This one comes from Chad.

00:26:54.020 | Chad says, do you have two shutdowns?

00:26:57.360 | If you split your day job and your side hustle with family time in the middle, I work my

00:27:02.840 | day job and do a shutdown around 4 p.m. and then family time until nine, at which point

00:27:09.120 | I work on either improving my work skills or doing a contract job or writing a novel

00:27:13.720 | at 1030 when I wrap up for the night.

00:27:15.840 | Should I be doing another shutdown?

00:27:17.760 | That's a good question, Chad.

00:27:20.200 | Do dual shift working arrangements require two shutdowns?

00:27:24.080 | I would say no, at least not nearly as extensive as a shutdown as you were doing after your

00:27:29.600 | initial work stress that ends around four.

00:27:32.700 | What I would recommend is that when you're winding down that initial work stretch, so

00:27:37.520 | you're doing your full shutdown, complete routine, maybe from three thirty to four,

00:27:43.200 | that you prep the work you're going to be doing that evening.

00:27:45.760 | Right.

00:27:46.760 | So if you're going to be writing a novel, you get the sources you need.

00:27:49.880 | If you're doing some contract work, you gather whatever information you need for that work.

00:27:55.040 | If it's a skill building, you pull out what you need for the lesson you'll be doing.

00:27:59.080 | So you make a plan and prep what you need so that when you get to that next block, that

00:28:04.440 | nine p.m. block that you're doing in the evening, you can get right into work.

00:28:10.080 | Now when you finish that work, you want to tie up loose ends.

00:28:13.760 | So if you're writing, there's usually some tying up the loose ends you want to do at

00:28:16.640 | the end of your session.

00:28:17.640 | So you'll be prepared next time.

00:28:20.000 | Maybe you have some thoughts you didn't get to, you know, you want to jot those down

00:28:22.760 | or update your outline now that you've done some writing, if you've thought about it.

00:28:26.620 | If it's contract work, you want to make sure that you shut down exactly where you are and

00:28:31.120 | what comes next.

00:28:32.120 | So you have a tie of loose ends to do with the particular effort you just did there,

00:28:35.000 | but that's it.

00:28:36.000 | You don't have to do a full shutdown routine.

00:28:38.380 | The only thing I would say in addition to be careful about is that you avoid opening

00:28:42.600 | lots of loops in the evening session.

00:28:44.960 | Don't go on email, don't go on Slack, don't do those types of efforts.

00:28:48.320 | That's something that might actually require a shutdown routine to close down all those

00:28:51.700 | open loops.

00:28:52.700 | But if you're focused on one thing in that evening block and you prepped it before your

00:28:56.040 | afternoon shutdown routine, you should be fine just executing, tying up loose ends,

00:29:00.840 | and you should be able to move on and let your head hit the pillow after that without

00:29:04.880 | having too much actual sort of anxious chatter lurking.

00:29:08.800 | How long does your shutdown routine take?

00:29:14.600 | It depends what I do with my email inbox.

00:29:17.600 | So if it's a day where I'm saying I want to really get my arms around email before I shut

00:29:22.160 | down, it could take a while.

00:29:23.160 | Otherwise, it doesn't take too long.

00:29:24.160 | It doesn't take too long.

00:29:25.160 | So you do that with your email a few times a week?

00:29:29.880 | Yeah, yeah, probably a few times a week.

00:29:32.160 | I mean, again, it's very confusing for people because most people are ensconced in the hyperactive

00:29:38.360 | hive mind.

00:29:39.760 | So I get lots of like, when I see an email for the first time, it's one of three.

00:29:43.480 | Did you get this?

00:29:44.480 | Hey, what's going on?

00:29:45.680 | Did you get this answer?

00:29:46.880 | I think a lot of people have a hard time just because it's out of their realm of experience

00:29:50.840 | with this idea that of course, you're going to just answer my email.

00:29:56.400 | Like maybe I'll take an hour because you're in a meeting.

00:29:58.280 | But this is the main default activity for so many people is I'm checking and responding

00:30:02.520 | and trying to keep up with emails.

00:30:03.520 | Where for me, I might not look at email for a day.

00:30:06.840 | I'm doing other things.

00:30:07.840 | And then I have an admin block where I'm trying to catch up the next day.

00:30:10.360 | So it might be a couple of days.

00:30:11.360 | And then maybe I don't get your email during that block.

00:30:13.080 | You know, and so I think that could be confusing for people.

00:30:16.240 | But I definitely check my calendar, check my weekly plan, and make sure I'm not missing

00:30:20.600 | anything.

00:30:21.600 | Make sure there's nothing urgent I'm missing.

00:30:23.080 | Get a sense for what I want to do the next day.

00:30:25.160 | Look at the whole week.

00:30:26.160 | Does everything still make sense?

00:30:27.440 | And then I check my checkbox.

00:30:30.400 | When you check your email, do you ever wish that it was last number of emails or do you

00:30:34.760 | like unsubscribe from email?

00:30:36.200 | Yeah, well, like, so I'm not worried about subscriptions.

00:30:40.840 | So a lot of people talk about this when they talk about email overload is my God, I'm subscribed

00:30:45.880 | to so many things.

00:30:46.880 | And I get so many messages from retailers and political candidates.

00:30:52.240 | And like, that's mildly annoying, but it's easy to deal with.

00:30:56.240 | Archive, archive, archive, archive, right?

00:30:58.760 | So I don't really care about that.

00:30:59.840 | What I care about is messages that require a response from me.

00:31:03.280 | I don't like, you know, that's time.

00:31:05.760 | The worst is message that will initiate or is part of what will be an extended back and

00:31:10.880 | forth.

00:31:12.320 | Those are the worst.

00:31:13.320 | I don't think people realize I get into this in my book, A World Without Email, but I don't

00:31:16.600 | think people realize that the real productivity poison is asynchronous back and forth messaging

00:31:22.120 | with email.

00:31:23.200 | We have to figure something out.

00:31:24.600 | It's going to take us five back and forth messages, because they get through five back

00:31:28.100 | and forth messages is going to require me to check that inbox 50 times because I can't

00:31:32.880 | wait two days for each of those messages to go back and forth.

00:31:35.480 | We have to make a decision today.

00:31:37.160 | That's the thing that really drives inbox overload is, okay, we have to have conversations

00:31:43.820 | going back and forth.

00:31:44.820 | So there's nothing I hate less than that ambiguous message that is kicking off some sort of extended

00:31:50.420 | back and forth conversation.

00:31:51.940 | That is the poison.

00:31:52.940 | That's why I like the summer because I get very few Georgetown emails.

00:31:57.540 | And so I'm not nearly as exposed, not nearly as exposed to that.

00:32:01.780 | Let's do a call.

00:32:04.820 | Okay, sounds good.

00:32:06.820 | We got here.

00:32:09.820 | Hi, Cal.

00:32:12.820 | My question today is very simple.

00:32:15.980 | Where can we find more real world examples of people living the deep life?

00:32:19.580 | I think that case studies are often really good at illustrating very abstract concepts

00:32:23.260 | like the deep life.

00:32:24.260 | After all, it's much easier to understand radical alignment with your values when you

00:32:28.260 | read the story of the triathlete who left New York and moved to Boulder to train and

00:32:32.340 | be close to his family.

00:32:33.340 | I know you try to share as much cases as you can on the podcast, and I'm assuming your

00:32:38.220 | upcoming book will have several cases that illustrate these different moves.

00:32:41.500 | But even then, that's only a handful of examples.

00:32:44.740 | Some of them are also hard to relate.

00:32:46.100 | I mean, not everyone wants to move to the mountains to be a world class triathlete or

00:32:50.340 | move to a cabin to be a writer.

00:32:51.780 | I know from experience that sometimes all it takes to crack in your own deep life is

00:32:56.580 | seeing someone else's life that really resonates.

00:32:59.580 | So here's the final provocation.

00:33:01.260 | If there isn't such resource, should someone build one?

00:33:05.140 | Thanks for your tremendous generosity of spirit and sharing your work so broadly, Cal.

00:33:09.580 | Thank you.

00:33:10.580 | Well, John, you're hitting on a couple of good points here.

00:33:13.860 | Let's start with your last point first.

00:33:17.700 | Should there be a better resource for encountering examples of the deep life so that you have

00:33:21.900 | a better chance of hitting one that resonates with you in particular?

00:33:25.620 | And I agree with your premise here that somehow or sometimes getting the specifics, this specific

00:33:31.980 | person did something that resonates exactly with me, is critical for making a vision for

00:33:36.460 | your own life.

00:33:37.460 | Yes, I think there should be a resource like that.

00:33:38.980 | I actually have this idea.

00:33:40.780 | I want to figure out when and how I'll have the time to do this.

00:33:46.220 | But I've had this idea, and I've talked to Jesse about this before, of a podcast called

00:33:51.820 | The Deep Life.

00:33:53.620 | And all it is, is each week an interview with someone who lives a deep life.

00:33:59.060 | And so you just get this real variety of it.

00:34:02.540 | Now, in a perfect world where time and money was not an issue, it would be really cool

00:34:06.500 | if you could edit a podcast like this in PR style.

00:34:10.940 | So it's not just straight, let's talk to you for 45 minutes, but there's different segments

00:34:15.500 | of conversation with musical interlude and moments of expository narration from me.

00:34:22.980 | I think it'd be a really cool show.

00:34:25.060 | I mentioned something like that in my proposal for the Deep Life book, that maybe as I start

00:34:30.100 | working on that book, I might launch something like that.

00:34:32.780 | So I think that's a good idea.

00:34:33.860 | But let's talk about the broader point here about resonance and deep life case studies.

00:34:38.220 | Here is the reality/issue with the deep life as a concept.

00:34:45.460 | We know it when we see it, right?

00:34:48.580 | So we all have this instinct.

00:34:50.380 | You read a book, you see something on a documentary, you see an Instagram something.

00:34:54.780 | I don't know the terminology, whatever they call it, an Instagram video bundle, whatever

00:35:00.860 | the terminology is of someone doing triathlon training in Boulder, and it just hits a chord

00:35:06.620 | and it's boom.

00:35:08.660 | That's what I, there's something about that life that's right and my life is not there.

00:35:12.260 | So we know it when we see it.

00:35:14.900 | And starting with the pandemic, I think a lot more people than ever before are noticing

00:35:20.180 | that reaction and are very interested in this idea about the deep life.

00:35:25.300 | The issue is that it's hard to pin down.

00:35:27.580 | And then you look to your own life and you say, I just have this deep instinctual feeling

00:35:31.860 | that what I'm doing here is not everything it could be.

00:35:37.980 | And there's these other people I see and hear about, and that resonates.

00:35:41.260 | They're doing something that I crave, but I can't pin down exactly what it is.

00:35:45.500 | Like I don't know why this guy who moved the Boulder to train for triathlons, this is really

00:35:50.060 | resonates with me, but I don't do triathlons.

00:35:52.700 | I don't want to move the Boulder, but something about that still resonates.

00:35:55.020 | What is it that resonates with me and what does that tell me for my own life and what

00:35:58.060 | type of changes I should make?

00:35:59.700 | This is the real issue, the gap between instinct and pragmatism when it comes to this concept

00:36:07.380 | of the deep life.

00:36:10.260 | So part of what I've tried to do, I've been trying to do on the show, but I'm doing much

00:36:13.860 | more carefully.

00:36:14.860 | I'll do much more formally when I eventually write the deep life book is to make the concept

00:36:20.260 | concrete.

00:36:22.620 | What are the attributes that define a deep life?

00:36:26.620 | Generally speaking, I'm not talking about particular activities.

00:36:29.060 | You have to be in Boulder.

00:36:30.060 | You have to be right in triathlon, but what is it specifically that separates what we

00:36:33.780 | would instinctually see as a deep life from a normal life?

00:36:36.500 | Once we have identified what those properties are, does that mean we can have a more systematic

00:36:42.340 | approach to acquiring those in our life?

00:36:44.380 | If that's what we're interested in, that's what I'm gonna be trying to do with my deep

00:36:47.220 | life book.

00:36:48.220 | Let's get into it.

00:36:49.220 | There's a systematic quest for more.

00:36:53.140 | Let's pin down the definition.

00:36:54.780 | These are the properties that separate what resonates as a deep life from others.

00:36:59.540 | Here is how you would actually go and acquire those properties.

00:37:03.380 | So it's a deep question, John, and one I'm going to continue to work on.

00:37:06.700 | Let me give you a one only partially formed idea right now.

00:37:13.660 | Let's just give an appetizer for the larger banquet to one day come.

00:37:19.700 | I'm toying with this notion.

00:37:22.820 | This is my proposal for the deep life book that perhaps at the core of what separates

00:37:27.300 | a deep life from another life is the radical alignment of your existence to things that

00:37:35.700 | you value.

00:37:37.740 | So there's two aspects, and this is a preliminary definition, but there's two aspects to this

00:37:42.100 | definition.

00:37:44.180 | One that you are making changes to align your life closer with certain things that you really

00:37:48.620 | value and to that those realignment is radical.

00:37:54.740 | So it's not just I think I really value being outdoors and exercise.

00:38:00.060 | So I'm going to start training every morning before I go to my standard 45 minute away

00:38:06.500 | commute government job from the D.C. suburbs.

00:38:09.260 | That's an alignment of your life towards something that you value, but it's not a radical alignment.

00:38:13.900 | The radical alignment is like, OK, I'm going to is going to be rich role.

00:38:17.020 | Yes, I'm going to make training a big part of my life.

00:38:20.340 | I'm going to leave my law firm and be a full time ultra athlete.

00:38:25.260 | I'm going to move the boulder to be a triathlon.

00:38:27.380 | Why does that resonate?

00:38:28.380 | Because they're not just making a change to align their life with something they care

00:38:31.900 | about.

00:38:32.900 | It is a radical change.

00:38:33.900 | They significantly change their job set up, their location where they live, how they actually

00:38:38.180 | spend their days.

00:38:39.180 | So increasingly advanced.

00:38:40.180 | Those are the two things you need.

00:38:41.420 | If you miss any one of those two things, you run into trouble.

00:38:45.260 | Right.

00:38:46.460 | So if you make a radical change, but it's not aligned with something that's really important

00:38:49.780 | or that you really value, you end up, which we saw a lot of during the pandemic, making

00:38:54.340 | changes for the sake of change, trying to extract some sense of excitement or interesting

00:38:59.100 | this just because you did something radical.

00:39:01.340 | But then you get to the small farm that you just bought in the Hudson River Valley and

00:39:04.820 | realize I don't like farming.

00:39:08.640 | It's weird and quiet out here.

00:39:10.180 | I can't get good coffee.

00:39:11.820 | This is this is terrible.

00:39:13.220 | This is actually not nothing here aligns with something I deeply value.

00:39:16.900 | That's a problem.

00:39:17.900 | Similarly, I think is if you're really clear what you care about, but your change is too

00:39:22.900 | small, it's not radical.

00:39:24.060 | It's nice.

00:39:25.060 | It's better than not doing it, but it's not going to give you that deep resonance of the

00:39:27.700 | deep life.

00:39:28.700 | It's the difference between, you know, Bill McKibben leaving the New Yorker to move to

00:39:37.020 | that small house up in the Adirondacks, the rightful time about nature and Bill McKibben

00:39:42.820 | saying on the side with my New Yorker job, I want to be working on a book about nature

00:39:47.380 | and go to a retreat once a year.

00:39:49.100 | So the radicalness matters, too.

00:39:50.580 | So that's one of the ideas I'm working on, John.

00:39:52.540 | I think maybe you need both those things.

00:39:54.380 | The radicalness unlock some sense of I really do care about this.

00:39:57.940 | It's a real engine of motivation.

00:40:00.980 | But figuring out what you care about and making the right choice like this is this actually

00:40:04.820 | is important and believing it's important to you.

00:40:06.660 | So probably those two pieces, those two pieces have to come together.

00:40:10.660 | But I think we're going to see a lot more of that in the near future.

00:40:14.020 | And for a while going forward, people's willing to make radical changes to do radical realignments.

00:40:20.740 | I think we've woken up a little bit that we have more options than we think.

00:40:25.700 | And there's more things we could be doing with our lives to make it interesting.

00:40:29.940 | What about in cases where somebody like a case study where somebody already kind of

00:40:34.340 | has a deep life, do you think it needs to be as radical or do you think it just needs

00:40:38.420 | there's like different tiers?

00:40:39.460 | I just think there's usually there's usually an aspect of radicalness to it, by which I

00:40:44.100 | mean there's just a part of their life that is unusually constructed or oriented to promote

00:40:51.060 | something that they care about.

00:40:53.060 | I think the good life is different than the deep life.

00:40:55.220 | I think you could have a good life like I'm I'm plugged into my community.

00:40:59.300 | I appreciate my work.

00:41:00.820 | I'm in good shape.

00:41:01.940 | I enjoy, you know, fine wine and like and have a good life.

00:41:06.980 | Capital G good life, virtuous, ethical, meaningful.

00:41:12.820 | The deep life is a subset of that.

00:41:14.500 | And it's not like everyone needs to do that.

00:41:16.180 | But some people really have this craving of I want something about my life to be notable,

00:41:22.260 | remarkable in the literal sense where people like, wow, do you know what Jesse's up to?

00:41:26.740 | Yeah, that's really interesting.

00:41:28.020 | Living on a boat or something.

00:41:29.060 | Yeah, you're living on a boat.

00:41:30.180 | Yeah.

00:41:30.580 | So do you is that something you strive for?

00:41:32.420 | Or do you think you have that or do you think you're living a good life?

00:41:34.500 | I'm like halfway there.

00:41:38.100 | So do you want to do something radical?

00:41:39.620 | Maybe I do.

00:41:40.180 | We're going to podcast from a boat.

00:41:44.100 | I got trained for triathlons in Boulder.

00:41:47.380 | No, I do.

00:41:49.380 | I have ideas.

00:41:51.060 | About specifically your life.

00:41:53.460 | Yeah.

00:41:54.020 | Yeah.

00:41:54.500 | Well, I figure I'm going to be writing a book about the deep life.

00:41:58.740 | Uh, it would be cool if that book could be structured around me doing some things.

00:42:03.940 | I don't know.

00:42:06.340 | I even put down my proposal.

00:42:07.300 | Like, I don't know what these would be, but I would like the book to have a pretty good

00:42:12.900 | degree of self discovery and reporting for sure.

00:42:17.460 | The book is going to be very journalistic.

00:42:19.060 | So in maybe a Michael Pollan style, it's me on the road doing things with people.

00:42:24.340 | That's a different style than my norm.

00:42:25.700 | My books, uh, up to now, including slow productivity is less first-person journalistic.

00:42:30.100 | So good.

00:42:31.300 | They can't ignore.

00:42:31.780 | You had some first-person journalism in it for sure.

00:42:33.700 | But since then I've, I've, uh, my, my, my structure is usually non-first-person journalistic.

00:42:40.100 | It's more reporting on ideas and laying out frameworks.

00:42:44.420 | There's a little bit of first-person.

00:42:46.020 | I guess in, in digital minimalism too, but the deep life is no, no, it's Michael Pollan

00:42:53.140 | goes to polyphase farms and is there with salad tan working on the mobile chicken coops.

00:43:01.300 | You know, he goes to the places and does the things.

00:43:04.100 | And so deep life is going to have that personal thread.

00:43:06.740 | I would like to have a prologue and epilogue is built around, um, some sort of deep change.

00:43:12.100 | So we'll see, you know what I should, here's, here's what it is.

00:43:16.820 | I'll, I'll, I'll give the preview.

00:43:18.260 | No, this is actually, it's a joke, but, um, I was watching on my, uh, iPad the other day,

00:43:26.420 | the North men.

00:43:27.540 | Have you heard of this movie?

00:43:28.660 | Yeah.

00:43:29.220 | I just read about it.

00:43:30.180 | It's like, uh, the directors it's like, it's really in detail and it's a, it's a Viking

00:43:36.420 | movie, but like real Viking, New Yorker, I think about it.

00:43:40.260 | Oh, I missed that.

00:43:41.700 | Well, anyways.

00:43:43.540 | Um, so I finally watched it or I'm watching it.

00:43:45.140 | It's Viking.

00:43:45.700 | It's like a Viking myth.

00:43:47.060 | So it, it, it did the witch movie too.

00:43:48.580 | Yeah.

00:43:49.940 | Oh, it's just the same guy.

00:43:50.900 | Yeah.

00:43:51.220 | Oh yeah.

00:43:52.180 | There was an article in the New Yorker, but I just read it last.

00:43:53.780 | Oh, maybe I did read that.

00:43:54.660 | Did he do the, uh, yes.

00:43:56.340 | I like that guy.

00:43:57.460 | Have you seen the witch?

00:43:58.260 | I was reading it.

00:44:00.340 | I was like, I don't know if I saw, I don't think I did.

00:44:02.260 | I need to watch it.

00:44:02.980 | Yeah.

00:44:03.940 | I love those movies.

00:44:05.140 | I love those type of movies, the wit because it's like low budget.

00:44:08.180 | It just says it's a, here's this little village.

00:44:11.860 | It's like three houses in 1600s, you know?

00:44:14.980 | So it's just one place.

00:44:16.100 | It's not a $50 million budget.

00:44:17.540 | Um, that's a cool movie.

00:44:19.300 | I mean, it's just like, what if like, you know, the witch that period with the witch trials

00:44:23.380 | and everything, like what if there's actually witches in colonial New England?

00:44:25.780 | Yeah.

00:44:26.500 | Uh, my wife was watching it at some point.

00:44:30.180 | They're grinding up babies to make.

00:44:31.460 | So their broom can fly or something.

00:44:34.660 | And she was done with that.

00:44:35.700 | Anyways, this is all, all to say, this is a very roundabout way that they get to.

00:44:40.020 | So this is a Viking movie that stars Alex or Alexander Skarsgard.

00:44:44.420 | You people might know from true blood and some other things.

00:44:48.180 | He's six, four, right.

00:44:49.380 | He's six, four kind of Viking guy.

00:44:50.980 | He got stacked for this movie, right?

00:44:55.300 | Like, because he's plays a Viking berserker and he's 45.

00:44:59.940 | So he's five years older and got, uh, just, you know, they, they had to make them sort

00:45:05.220 | of kind of superhero.

00:45:06.260 | They didn't cut them as much because they're trying to be pretty accurate.

00:45:09.140 | So it wasn't marvel-y right.

00:45:10.820 | Because a Viking wouldn't be super cut, but just like, you know, they had to make them

00:45:14.180 | just like what he did with his traps or whatever.

00:45:16.180 | So I was joking with my wife.

00:45:18.100 | I was like that, this is what I'm going to focus all my time on.

00:45:20.580 | If he could do that at 45, I'm just going to dedicate all of my time to becoming stacked

00:45:25.140 | like a Viking, just sort of opera pro of nothing.

00:45:27.380 | It took him six, uh, six months.

00:45:28.980 | That would take a lot of time.

00:45:30.740 | That would take away from your writing.

00:45:32.260 | He did it.

00:45:33.140 | So I went down this rabbit hole hour a day, six days a week.

00:45:36.820 | It would take more than that.

00:45:38.500 | It got real, real jacked.

00:45:39.620 | It would take at least two hours a day.

00:45:41.140 | Yeah. Well, here's the, here's the curve ball in 2019.

00:45:44.900 | He was in Tarzan.

00:45:46.020 | Right.

00:45:47.060 | So I just probably, which he had to get cut for.

00:45:50.260 | So there's probably some, he wasn't, let's just say he wasn't starting.

00:45:53.700 | Well, you already work out for at least 25 to 30 minutes a day, right?

00:45:58.340 | Yeah.

00:45:58.580 | I thought it was interesting.

00:45:59.300 | It was an hour a day.

00:46:00.500 | I think it was an Icelandic, might've been an Icelandic trainer.

00:46:04.660 | Uh, and they had the philosophy, but.

00:46:08.020 | Sarsgar is a beast, like laser focus method type guy.

00:46:12.100 | So it was an intense hour.

00:46:14.420 | They do just one muscle group per day until it's just basically destroyed.

00:46:19.460 | And then, uh, a different muscle group, the next day, different muscle group the next day.

00:46:24.260 | Um, but you know how much he had to eat?

00:46:26.260 | 4,000 calories, 7,000 calories a day.

00:46:30.020 | It's a lot of muscle, right?

00:46:32.660 | He put on 20 pounds of muscle 7,000 calories a day.

00:46:36.740 | And from what I understand, it's not like, yay, let's go get some burgers.

00:46:39.940 | No, no, that's 7,000 calories.

00:46:41.380 | Yeah.

00:46:41.620 | No, you can't eat that.

00:46:41.780 | Chicken, broccoli and rice.

00:46:43.940 | Anyways.

00:46:44.340 | Uh, that's all to say, John, that this is my deep life goal is that I'm just going to spend

00:46:49.940 | years becoming like a, uh, like a inappropriately stacked looking Viking.

00:46:56.180 | Yeah.

00:46:57.300 | That would be, it's pretty cool.

00:46:59.380 | You'd be able to hit those rowing times very easily.

00:47:03.300 | Yeah.

00:47:04.180 | And then, and then just row.

00:47:05.700 | Yeah, just be stacked like a Viking and row, uh, and dress like a Viking all the time.

00:47:11.140 | All right.

00:47:12.180 | This is nonsense.

00:47:12.900 | All right.

00:47:13.140 | Let's get, let's, let's move on to a better question here.

00:47:16.820 | All right.

00:47:17.540 | We've got a question from, uh, Joanna.

00:47:20.740 | Joanna asks, what are some deep leisure activities to engage in when you're

00:47:25.780 | cognitively done for the day?

00:47:27.540 | I'm a professional turn, stay at home mom with three kids.

00:47:31.300 | I need to prioritize sleep and I'm unwilling to sacrifice morning sleep time for leisure.

00:47:35.300 | So this means realistically I have from eight to nine at night for my leisure.

00:47:38.820 | I'm fine with that length of time, but since my brain is kind of done for the day, I find

00:47:42.180 | it challenging to engage in cognitively demanding activities at that time.

00:47:45.300 | I would love some crowdsourced examples of leisure that are satisfying, but gentler on my brain.

00:47:50.500 | Well, Joanna, one hour a night, as we've established is enough time to get stacked

00:47:58.900 | like Alexander Sarsgaard in the Northmen.

00:48:01.940 | I think that's what you need to do is train intensely with an Icelandic personal trainer

00:48:08.260 | to build up unreasonable trapezius muscles.

00:48:11.140 | All right.

00:48:11.460 | I think we agree about that.

00:48:12.420 | Um, all right.

00:48:14.500 | So Joanna, I have a couple of things to say.

00:48:15.940 | First of all, I didn't list it in the question, but you told me the ages of your kids.

00:48:20.660 | They're young.

00:48:21.620 | There's like an 11 month old.

00:48:23.140 | And I think it was like a three-year-old and maybe a four-year-old.

00:48:26.340 | So, so let me preface first of all, with you're in a narrow, unusually difficult period in

00:48:33.060 | those kids' life.

00:48:33.860 | And especially because you're coming off of the, uh, the pandemic last year.

00:48:39.620 | And I don't know what the situation is with doing preschool or daycare, but you probably

00:48:44.660 | have those kids around a lot.

00:48:46.740 | So you're in an unusually hard period.

00:48:48.900 | So let's preface it with that.

00:48:51.780 | The rest of your life starting in a year or two is going to look very different than right

00:48:57.300 | now.

00:48:57.780 | So anything we're talking about right now is just, okay, during this temporary, all

00:49:01.860 | hands on deck, unusually exhausting period of parenthood, how should you think about

00:49:07.860 | leisure?

00:49:08.360 | And the first thing I'll say is in this period is like, don't worry too much about it.

00:49:12.420 | You know, what is your, your job is you're trying to keep these three entirely unreasonable

00:49:18.900 | beings alive while keeping your sanity.

00:49:20.900 | So you don't want to add another thing on your plate that why am I not getting in my

00:49:24.500 | full hour of SARS guard style exercise each night?

00:49:27.700 | Why am I not learning the piano or mastering new skills?

00:49:30.260 | It's because you're doing something incredibly difficult right now, but it's not permanent

00:49:33.940 | and it's going to get easier.

00:49:35.220 | Why does it get easier?

00:49:35.940 | Because pretty soon most, and then all of those kids are going to be gone every day.

00:49:39.620 | They'll be at school.

00:49:40.420 | They'll be in daycare.

00:49:41.780 | Now you're going to be dealing with planning.

00:49:44.100 | I have this time free from the kids that I have different things I want to do with it.

00:49:47.300 | It gets you so much more flexibility in terms of thinking about what to do.

00:49:52.500 | Okay.

00:49:54.020 | So, but what should you do right now when you have these three kids and they're at home?

00:49:57.540 | All right.

00:49:57.780 | I have a few things I wanted to mention.

00:49:59.060 | One, integrate more restful or leisurely activities into the day, even during periods where the

00:50:05.940 | kids are around, just figure out how to do this.

00:50:08.900 | My wife and I have a lot of creative approaches to doing various things like that with various

00:50:15.460 | combination of kids around.

00:50:17.300 | It's not uncommon for my three-year-old.

00:50:20.020 | I've taught him to want to work out with daddy.

00:50:22.100 | And so he will often sit on my concept too, and go back and forth while I'm doing weights

00:50:29.460 | or if I'm using the screen, like with a workout guided on the screen, I'll bring him down,

00:50:34.740 | give him an iPad.

00:50:35.940 | And I've learned, he's learned to associate like, oh, I get to go on the iPad for 20 minutes

00:50:40.420 | while dad is exercising.

00:50:41.540 | So there's things like that you can do.

00:50:43.380 | There's activities like gardening or outdoor activities.

00:50:45.940 | You can kind of involve the kids in and also just have periods where like, now you guys

00:50:50.260 | do screens and I read or I rest, or I push you to the park and I listened to a podcast.

00:50:55.060 | So make sure you have plenty of leisure and rest throughout the day.

00:50:57.700 | Two, assuming that you're not a single mom, and I don't know that's the case, but assuming

00:51:03.380 | that you're not a single mom, I'm going to guess that your husband doesn't work until

00:51:08.180 | eight o'clock every night.

00:51:09.300 | So get him doing more things, make that more regular so that you can have an opportunity

00:51:15.940 | to do other things, more structured leisure before eight o'clock.

00:51:19.060 | That is, that's too hard of a job to raise three kids all the way until their bedtimes.

00:51:26.820 | No, no, no.

00:51:27.540 | If you can get help, you should have help.

00:51:29.540 | So if he's around, tell him to get off the couch.

00:51:32.980 | All right.

00:51:35.220 | And then finally, I would say, yeah, don't try to do something super cognitively demanding

00:51:40.580 | from eight to nine after a hard day.

00:51:42.180 | I think you were right about that.

00:51:43.540 | Have a little structure for things you like to do then.

00:51:46.580 | But what are you structuring towards?

00:51:47.940 | Rest, relaxation, recharging.

00:51:50.980 | You mentioned yoga.

00:51:52.580 | That'd be great.

00:51:53.940 | You mentioned doing a podcast.

00:51:56.260 | That'd be great.

00:51:57.380 | Going for a walk around the block and listening to a podcast.

00:52:00.340 | That'd be great.

00:52:00.900 | Maybe do a little bit of reading to kick off that period.

00:52:03.300 | And then from eight, 30 to nine, there's a show that you watch.

00:52:06.740 | I think it helps to have a little bit of structure to that time.

00:52:09.300 | Like this is what I do during that time.

00:52:10.660 | There's a little routine because you get more relaxation out of it.

00:52:12.980 | But those activities should absolutely be recharging and relaxing.

00:52:17.780 | I mean, honestly, with three kids your age, maybe eight to nine, the right activity should

00:52:22.980 | be drinking heavily, but you'll probably get better use out of that if you start around

00:52:27.300 | 3 PM, because by then it's usually when we're, when we're done, I'll tell you, that is the,

00:52:33.300 | that is the hardest part, at least in our experience of COVID forget the disease, three

00:52:40.660 | kids at home, not able to go to school.

00:52:43.060 | Makes you feel like, ah, probably just to be safe, need to go to the hospital.

00:52:49.860 | Let me just, because, you know, I'm not, yeah, let me just, I probably need to be

00:52:52.820 | hospitalized during this year because, because it's the worst.

00:52:56.340 | It is the worst.

00:52:57.300 | So I hear you.

00:52:58.420 | All right, Joanna, but it gets better.

00:53:00.660 | You'll be there soon.

00:53:02.900 | All right, Jesse, let's do one more call.

00:53:08.980 | Do we have something?

00:53:09.700 | - Yep.

00:53:10.260 | - All right, excellent.

00:53:11.220 | - Early retirement call.

00:53:13.060 | - Oh, there we go.

00:53:14.180 | - Hi, Cal, this is George here.

00:53:20.660 | I have a question for you about testing the waters and getting in the reps as a writer.

00:53:24.980 | Let me explain.

00:53:25.780 | I've been a manager at a Fortune 50 company for over 20 years.

00:53:29.860 | I've been in various marketing and general management roles in that time and did not

00:53:33.380 | have any specific technical abilities.

00:53:35.380 | I'm very fortunate to have the option to take early retirement in three years when I turned

00:53:39.140 | 55 and focus my efforts in other areas.

00:53:42.020 | I enjoy nonfiction writing and in fact, had a successful personal finance blog for many

00:53:47.460 | years.

00:53:48.340 | I shut it down about five years ago though, as it was too distracting for my career where

00:53:52.500 | I needed to focus.

00:53:54.100 | But with a potential retirement looming, I'd love to get back to writing.

00:53:57.380 | I have a clear vision for how I would like to spend my time when I retire from corporate

00:54:02.500 | life.

00:54:02.740 | Get up early, work out, spend three to five hours focused on deep work, writing specifically,

00:54:08.900 | and then spend the afternoons on other hobbies and activities with my wife, sprinkling and

00:54:12.660 | travel and visits with the kids and eventual grandkids into the mix.

00:54:15.940 | My question is this, how do you recommend I test the waters on my writing ability and

00:54:22.020 | start to get the reps in now so that I will be ready to ramp up when I retire?

00:54:26.420 | I still have a full-time corporate job.

00:54:28.340 | I'm looking forward to hearing your take on this.

00:54:30.820 | Thank you for your podcast, which is now my favorite.

00:54:32.980 | You provide tremendously good advice and I recommend you to my college aged kids.

00:54:38.500 | Cheers.

00:54:38.820 | Well, George, a couple of things to say here.

00:54:43.300 | So one, early retirement sounds great.

00:54:48.500 | 55 is actually our target as well.

00:54:52.020 | Because it's when all of our kids will be out of the house.

00:54:55.140 | So I don't think I would retire in the sense of, you know, leave university or something

00:55:02.660 | like this, but we definitely plan 55 as a key turning point where maybe we'll live

00:55:06.020 | halftime somewhere else or do something interesting.

00:55:07.860 | So I appreciate that.

00:55:08.820 | Two, I like your proposed schedule.

00:55:12.020 | That's my full-time writer schedule.

00:55:13.460 | It's what I do right now, for example, in the summer, something more or less like that

00:55:17.780 | where, you know, I wake up, I write and do deep work.

00:55:21.380 | I end the writing.

00:55:22.660 | This is where anything like podcasting or interviews, admin, email, that happens next.

00:55:30.180 | And then I shut that down late afternoon and switch over to family, hobbies, exercise,

00:55:35.460 | et cetera.

00:55:35.860 | I think that's a great schedule.

00:55:36.980 | I think we're humans thrive with a schedule like that.

00:55:39.940 | So I think you have the right idea.

00:55:44.420 | I mean, I might suggest that I think this is justified that you might consider though,

00:55:48.340 | replacing the three hours of deep work with three hours of Alexander Sarsgaard style

00:55:54.660 | Northman Viking training.

00:55:55.940 | So I don't know if you know about this, but I've been a big proponent of that.

00:55:59.460 | So just become an unusually stacked Viking.

00:56:01.460 | No, but here's, here's my, my main point though, is it super important that you get

00:56:09.300 | in these writing reps before you retire, as opposed to, would that not be a great thing

00:56:16.740 | to be doing with your deep work time once you retire?

00:56:19.940 | So I don't know that I would unduly stress myself right now with a full-time fortune

00:56:28.660 | 50 management job to get in a lot of writing somehow on the side with this idea that it

00:56:34.740 | will be better to hit the ground running, I suppose, we retire versus like the first

00:56:39.460 | year of retirement is, is very rapidly getting up to speed.

00:56:42.020 | Now, when you're working on something every single day, it's like trying to develop your

00:56:46.980 | writing habit.

00:56:47.300 | When you can work on that every day during retirement, what you can do in six months

00:56:51.380 | might take you three years working on the side in your corporate job.

00:56:55.860 | So, so I don't think you're giving up much time if you're deferring some of this training

00:57:03.300 | until you actually get to retirement.

00:57:05.300 | So, so I want to plant that seed first because what would I do?

00:57:09.780 | I mean, if I was in your situation, I think I would reactivate some sort of media presence

00:57:15.380 | that gave you the chance to be writing and thinking, maybe a combination of a newsletter

00:57:21.460 | and a podcast.

00:57:22.340 | I would use that to develop your ideas.

00:57:26.820 | Like how, what, what are your current theories or ideas on personal finance to find your

00:57:30.900 | voice, to find your niche.

00:57:32.660 | And then maybe after a year or two, if you could build some sort of audience, maybe thinking

00:57:36.660 | about writing a book.

00:57:37.540 | And I think that would be hard to start on the side as you discovered in your fortune

00:57:41.940 | 50 job, it's hard to maintain a regular podcast or newsletter.

00:57:44.820 | Anything like that requires regular investment of time.

00:57:47.540 | You can't just do it occasionally.

00:57:49.220 | So again, it might be something you want to wait, tell that early retirement, but then

00:57:53.060 | really lock into it, lock into it, hardcore.

00:57:56.020 | The one thing you could do, I mean, you need to find some sort of way to do occasional

00:58:00.420 | work as time permits that might help you get back into writing shape.

00:58:03.860 | So if you could figure out some targets for articles, and this might be in trade publications

00:58:09.940 | or business publications, et cetera.

00:58:11.700 | So we take an article commission and spend some time for the next two weeks working on

00:58:15.860 | that.

00:58:16.100 | And then there's a busy period for six months where I do nothing, but then I sell another

00:58:19.700 | article somewhere else.

00:58:20.580 | And that gets me thinking of writing again, that might not be the worst thing just to

00:58:24.660 | start loosening up those proverbial muscles a little bit.

00:58:27.540 | But the main thing I'm going to say to you is maybe that's what year one is about in

00:58:31.620 | your retirement is getting back to thinking and writing and finding your voice and finding

00:58:37.460 | your message.

00:58:38.420 | And I think that'll be fine because again, you're not dependent on this to make your

00:58:41.220 | living.

00:58:41.540 | You're retired.

00:58:42.180 | You've saved up money to live off of.

00:58:43.940 | So I wouldn't, I wouldn't kill myself now knowing that a big expanse of autonomous time

00:58:52.580 | is lurking not too far in the future.

00:58:56.180 | All right.

00:58:56.340 | Well, speaking of writing, I do want to talk about the books I read last month, but first,

00:59:04.580 | before we get there, let me just briefly mention another sponsor that makes this show possible.

00:59:08.580 | And that is Blinkist.

00:59:11.700 | So, you know, Blinkist has been a long time supporter of this show.

00:59:16.820 | What they offer is 15 minute text and audio explainers of over 100 books.

00:59:25.700 | 5,000 nonfiction books divided over 27 categories.

00:59:30.900 | If you want to know the big ideas of a bestselling nonfiction book, you can either read or listen

00:59:35.860 | to a blink, which is what they call them and quickly get up to speed on the big ideas.

00:59:41.860 | They also now have summaries from podcast as well.

00:59:46.420 | So they call those short cast.

00:59:49.220 | So I'm a believer in Blinkist.

00:59:51.060 | I think it's a great way to take a topic, learn the lay of the land.

00:59:54.820 | Look at a few books on the topic, read the blinks, learn the terminology, learn the major ideas,

00:59:59.380 | and then decide which of those books, if any, do you want to buy and read in more detail?

01:00:03.300 | It is like a cheat code to developing and exposing yourself to some of the best

01:00:09.140 | ideas being spread out there in books.

01:00:11.940 | Interested in blockchains, get the blockchain revolution.

01:00:16.820 | Interested is Yuval Harari's follow up to Sapiens, Homo Deus.

01:00:21.460 | What the heck is that about?

01:00:22.420 | Is it worth it?

01:00:23.300 | Read the blink first.

01:00:24.660 | Then you know what you're dealing with.

01:00:26.340 | So right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience.

01:00:29.300 | If you go to blinkist.com/deep to start your free seven day trial,

01:00:33.940 | you will get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership.

01:00:38.100 | That's Blinkist spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T.

01:00:43.140 | Blinkist.com/deep to get 25% off a seven day free trial.

01:00:47.460 | Blinkist.com/deep.

01:00:51.940 | I also want to talk about ExpressVPN.

01:00:55.220 | Now going online without ExpressVPN is like leaving your kids

01:01:00.100 | with the nearest stranger while using the restroom.

01:01:03.140 | Most of the time, it would probably be fine, but you never truly know who you're trusting.

01:01:07.220 | Why would you ever risk it?

01:01:09.060 | I'll tell you who does not worry about leaving their kids with strangers in the restroom.

01:01:14.100 | Alexander Sarsgaard from the Northman.

01:01:17.540 | You see that guy's traps.

01:01:18.900 | You say, I'm not messing with your kids.

01:01:20.420 | But if you're not Alexander Sarsgaard, you would not leave your kids with a stranger.

01:01:24.580 | Now, this is why you need to be using ExpressVPN.

01:01:26.420 | This is just a metaphor for obviously internet use.

01:01:28.980 | Using the internet with a VPN is like,

01:01:32.500 | I'm just going to trust that nothing bad is going to happen.

01:01:36.100 | And guess what?

01:01:36.580 | Sometimes bad things will.

01:01:37.780 | So how do VPNs work?

01:01:40.340 | Well, instead of just directly connecting to whatever service or website you want to talk

01:01:46.340 | with, allowing your packets to be sniffed and everyone to know who it is that you are

01:01:51.060 | interacting with, what site you're pulling from, what service you're interacting with.

01:01:54.340 | You instead with a VPN get an encrypted tunnel to that site or service, which means the provider

01:02:00.260 | you're connected to that hotspot at the airport or in the coffee shop, the people sniffing

01:02:04.740 | your packets nearby have no idea who you're communicating with or what you're actually

01:02:09.940 | saying.

01:02:10.340 | You do not just have to trust that the provider you're using or the people nearby are

01:02:16.260 | good.

01:02:16.660 | You can make it so it doesn't matter whether they are or not.

01:02:19.940 | If you're going to use a VPN, then ExpressVPN is the one to use.

01:02:24.900 | It is easy to set up.

01:02:27.860 | It's seamless once it's on there.

01:02:29.540 | You use your devices or computer just like normal, but your traffic is now going through

01:02:34.260 | VPN.

01:02:35.220 | They have good speeds, lots of bandwidth servers all around the world to connect to so you

01:02:39.780 | can always get a blazingly fast tunnel set up.

01:02:44.180 | So you need to use a VPN.

01:02:45.620 | If you do ExpressVPN is the one I recommend.

01:02:47.780 | So secure your online data today at ExpressVPN.com/deep and you will get three extra months free.

01:02:55.380 | That's ExpressVPN.com/deep ExpressVPN.com/deep.

01:03:02.580 | All right, Jesse, like we always do early in each month, I report back on the books I

01:03:10.500 | read during the preceding month.

01:03:13.940 | So we are in early June while recording this.

01:03:16.340 | So we will report back on the books I read in May.

01:03:18.580 | My goal as longtime listeners know is to try to read five books every month.

01:03:24.260 | If you want more details on how I do that, we actually have a video online at youtube.com/calendarportmedia

01:03:31.220 | where I go through the different techniques I use to read five books a month and how other

01:03:35.220 | people can do it too.

01:03:36.180 | All right, five books I read in May 2022.

01:03:40.580 | Number one, I returned to Born Standing Up by Steve Martin.

01:03:45.860 | That's Steve Martin's professional memoir.

01:03:49.460 | I have read this before.

01:03:50.820 | I read this way back in 2009, soon after it came out.

01:03:56.100 | I wrote about it way back then in the early days of my blog.

01:03:59.140 | It was actually in an interview that Steve Martin did with Charlie Rose about Born Standing

01:04:04.660 | Up that he used the phrase be so good they can't ignore you, which I then used or adapted

01:04:09.460 | to be the title of my fourth book, So Good They Can't Ignore You.

01:04:12.820 | So it was a very influential book of my life, but I have not been back to it since.

01:04:16.180 | It's been over a decade since I read it.

01:04:20.020 | So I went back and I read it and it was great.

01:04:24.180 | There is a lot I had forgotten and I was able to extract a lot more rich detail.

01:04:29.780 | And again, what makes this a good book is that it is focused just on his professional

01:04:34.100 | career.

01:04:34.420 | Steve Martin's point with this book was he didn't think enough detail is often given

01:04:40.020 | in celebrity memoirs about how people actually build their careers.

01:04:43.700 | This was just about the craft, how he built up his act, what went well, what didn't, his

01:04:49.700 | breaks, his steps back, how he moved forward again.

01:04:52.580 | So I thought it was very interesting.

01:04:53.940 | The main takeaway that hit me on the second time through was the power of sticking with

01:05:00.420 | it.

01:05:01.540 | It took Martin years for his act to break with a lot of steps backwards, and he was

01:05:07.460 | incredibly focused during those periods on continuing to polish and develop his act.

01:05:12.420 | And it was actually in the end, the confidence and expertise that was developed by that

01:05:17.220 | relentless focus and drive to improve that tipped him.

01:05:20.020 | His act was interesting, but once he became world class at delivering it, that's what

01:05:25.620 | actually made it a world class act because it was the confidence and precision that's

01:05:29.380 | necessary for his type of humor to work.

01:05:31.620 | So I was really struck by his focus.

01:05:33.620 | All right.

01:05:35.460 | Next, I read Blood and Treasure, a newish biography of Daniel Boone by Rod Drury.

01:05:47.700 | Or is it Bob Drury?

01:05:49.220 | No, Rod Drury, someone Drury and Tom Clavin.

01:05:54.900 | And I read it in part.

01:05:56.980 | I don't know if you know this about me, Jesse, but I am descended from the Boones.

01:06:02.100 | I did not know that.

01:06:03.780 | Maybe I give off that frontiersman style genre.

01:06:08.900 | I'm not descended from Daniel Boone.

01:06:10.500 | I'm descended from his brother, which we figured out at some point, his brother who

01:06:15.460 | shows up off and on in the book.

01:06:19.860 | So this was my my grandmother, my paternal grandmother.

01:06:25.380 | Let me see if I have this right.

01:06:26.500 | I think her mom was a Boone.

01:06:28.980 | So we're actually not too far off the actual Boone line, but not from Daniel himself.

01:06:35.460 | And I do remember that growing up, we went to a Daniel Boone historical site and there's

01:06:38.500 | a register to sign if you're a descendant.

01:06:40.260 | And they said, you're a descendant of his dad and his brother, but not of him.

01:06:45.220 | So we weren't we weren't able to sign the book.

01:06:46.740 | Very well written.

01:06:48.580 | I actually really enjoyed Blood and Treasure.

01:06:50.260 | Must have been very difficult to research.

01:06:52.660 | I mean, the whole book is about the complicated, shifting.

01:06:56.340 | Allegiances, alliances and failed promises between all of the various different Indian

01:07:04.660 | tribes at this period of colonial history, Daniel Boone's life was completely intermixed

01:07:10.420 | with the the fight for land between the American colonists, the British and the various Indian

01:07:18.500 | tribes that were there, or this tribe would take over that tribe and this tribe would

01:07:21.860 | come in.

01:07:22.260 | So it was really a book about 18th century Indian tribal politics.

01:07:26.820 | So a complicated book to write, but very interesting.

01:07:32.740 | These were tougher people back then.

01:07:34.260 | These long hunters, they would just go like, I'll be back in a year.

01:07:37.700 | Like I have a rifle and I'll be back in a year.

01:07:40.740 | I'm just going to hunt for a year.

01:07:42.020 | Like, where are you going to go hunt?

01:07:43.700 | Oh, I'm going to I'm going to hike to the other side of the Appalachian mountains.

01:07:48.660 | And then I'll hunt over there and then I'll come back with, with all of all of the skins.

01:07:52.420 | I mean, these were, that was a tougher, tougher period, but I am a Boone.

01:07:58.100 | So I get through proxy, a lot of credit.

01:08:01.700 | Then I read why faith matters by rabbi David Volpe.

01:08:07.940 | I read this because I heard Lex Fridman interview him.

01:08:12.660 | And I thought it was, he was interesting.

01:08:15.540 | It was a really good interview.

01:08:16.260 | I thought it was really interesting.

01:08:17.700 | So I said, what's his most famous book was Volpe's most famous book.

01:08:20.500 | I think it's why faith matters.

01:08:21.700 | And I read it pretty good.

01:08:22.980 | So this was a, it's a post nine 11 book.

01:08:24.980 | Volpe wrote why faith matters as a response to the post nine 11 new atheist.

01:08:30.980 | So, you know, remember those two early two thousands, you had Sam Harris,

01:08:35.300 | you had Hitchens, Dawkins, and I guess Daniel did it maybe had a book in there too, breaking

01:08:43.060 | the spell, there is this sort of anti-religious new atheism that arose, and this was a response

01:08:50.820 | to that.

01:08:51.220 | It was a pretty interesting book from a roughly from a Jewish perspective, but, but relatively

01:08:58.180 | ecumenical, very accessible.

01:09:01.300 | I thought there's some interesting points in it.

01:09:02.580 | Then I went back and again, this is a reread, but a reread from my childhood.

01:09:08.740 | So I don't think it counts lost moon by James Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger.

01:09:14.980 | This book came out in the nineties when I was a kid.

01:09:16.820 | It is the book about Apollo 13 written by the Jim Lovell who Tom Hanks played in the movie

01:09:24.580 | and a professional science writer, Jeffrey Kluger.

01:09:28.180 | So, so Apollo 13, the Ron Howard movie was based off of this book was the main source

01:09:36.020 | material.

01:09:37.380 | Another cool book, they wrote it, they wrote it, narrate, uh, cinematically.

01:09:43.380 | So it's like in the room, in the room, real time narrative, like this person said this,

01:09:49.380 | this person grabbed this thing, which is probably the right way.

01:09:51.860 | And it goes back and forth between mission control and the capsule, but it's written

01:09:56.740 | embedded in the action itself.

01:09:59.620 | So, you know, then Lovell hit the switch and this happened, not, there's not a, as not

01:10:04.580 | a third person narrator voice of like, then what was happening on the, so it really moves.

01:10:09.780 | And it's a crazy story.

01:10:11.620 | I mean, what happened on the, on the command module and what they had to do to save it.

01:10:18.180 | And Kluger just went back through transcript and transcript, and they really picked apart

01:10:23.140 | what happened and the tick talk of how it unfolded and who said what.

01:10:26.900 | And so it's really an achievement as a book.

01:10:28.500 | I just, as a nonfiction writer, I can say this was, it's, it's a fantastic story, obviously,

01:10:32.820 | I mean, stuck in space and you have to get saved.

01:10:35.060 | But to write this book is not an easy feat.

01:10:40.660 | I mean, it took a huge amount of research.

01:10:42.740 | So it's a real achievement as a book and incredibly interesting to read.

01:10:46.340 | So forget the movie, you gotta, you gotta read the book Lost Moon.

01:10:48.980 | And then finally, I read the Lost City of Z by David Gran.

01:10:57.620 | So David Gran is a New Yorker writer.

01:11:00.340 | He's sort of, I don't know if he's a target of envy, but he's sort of what you, sometimes what

01:11:07.540 | you imagine when you imagined when you're at Columbia journalism school and you're thinking

01:11:11.540 | what you want to do as a writer, what you imagine often is David Gran.

01:11:16.660 | So what he does for the New Yorker is he does these long form journalistic pieces where he

01:11:23.540 | usually goes on some sort of adventure with interesting people with interesting things

01:11:30.100 | happening.

01:11:30.600 | So there'll be some, you know, I think he did stuff with like white supremacist in jail.

01:11:40.180 | At some point, there was like a murder in the, another book thing he did, another article,

01:11:45.540 | there was a murder among the Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts.

01:11:50.180 | Like there's this whole world of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts that think that Sherlock

01:11:56.180 | Holmes was real.

01:11:56.900 | And there was this murder and David Gran is over there in England and gets in beds with

01:12:02.500 | these groups and is really like the Baker Street regulars.

01:12:05.460 | And anyways, Lost City of Z is half of it is the story of Percy Fawcett, one of the last

01:12:13.460 | of the great British adventurers and explorers who disappeared trying to find this supposed

01:12:22.020 | giant city in the Amazon.

01:12:23.940 | So it tells the story, but the interleaves with David Gran going to the Amazon and actually

01:12:29.700 | putting together a team and going in himself to try to find some evidence of what they

01:12:34.820 | found.

01:12:36.500 | And, you know, spoiler alert, turns out there were really large civilizations in the, in

01:12:44.100 | the Amazon, but a lot of it was hard to find because it was built with wood and a lot of

01:12:50.420 | that had decayed.

01:12:51.060 | But now with modern techniques, we can see there was all these sophisticated cities.

01:12:53.860 | So Percy Fawcett was right, but there's no way he was ever going to find it in the 1920s.

01:12:59.060 | Anyways, David Gran is great.

01:13:01.220 | He's the goat at these type of things.

01:13:03.140 | These things move, they're well researched.

01:13:04.660 | He inserts himself into it, sort of classic adventure narrative, nonfiction, New Yorker

01:13:08.740 | type stuff.

01:13:09.620 | So that book was fun.

01:13:12.180 | I should be more David Gran like Jesse.

01:13:14.980 | I need to actually like go, you know, on the trail of a murderer.

01:13:19.940 | Oh, a famous David Gran piece was hunting the giant squid.

01:13:22.900 | So he's out there on this boat with this guy, this eccentric guy, he's like convinced that

01:13:28.420 | they can catch a giant squid and he's out there in the storms and they're trying to

01:13:31.540 | find a squid.

01:13:32.180 | He loves that type of stuff.

01:13:33.140 | He just puts himself puts himself in the danger.

01:13:36.180 | Do you know him?

01:13:36.820 | I never met him.

01:13:38.020 | How old is he?

01:13:40.100 | Older than us, but I don't know, probably not that much older.

01:13:45.700 | We should look it up.

01:13:46.500 | I wonder how old he is.

01:13:49.140 | I should flex that more.

01:13:50.500 | I feel shy and nervous about it.

01:13:53.220 | I feel like I should maybe flex more of the potential ability to talk to other New Yorker

01:13:58.820 | writers and say, just can I call you?

01:14:04.260 | Can I call you?

01:14:05.300 | It feels a little bit.

01:14:06.100 | I don't know.

01:14:07.700 | Eddie Haskelly.

01:14:09.300 | Excuse me, Mr. Gran.

01:14:12.340 | I also do some writing for your esteemed publication there, sir.

01:14:18.180 | And.

01:14:18.740 | 55 years old.

01:14:19.780 | Okay.

01:14:20.280 | 55 years old.

01:14:21.700 | And I would like to talk to you on the telephone.

01:14:25.620 | The problem is if someone wrote me like that, I would be like, oh, this is annoying.

01:14:28.900 | 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

01:14:34.900 | not much time left to do this.

01:14:36.260 | Just given his age, I really would like to meet John McPhee.

01:14:40.500 | And I built the intro to the slow productivity around John McPhee.

01:14:46.100 | And I grew up near Princeton and I'm around there all the time.

01:14:51.140 | So I'm going to see.

01:14:51.860 | He's probably just goes, walks the campus, walks home.

01:14:56.820 | Yeah, he's older.

01:14:57.540 | You know, I think he's in his upper eighties now, so I don't know exactly what the, what

01:15:00.580 | his situation is, but I would love to meet him once.

01:15:03.220 | Maybe that's one place I will do an Eddie Haskell flex.

01:15:07.540 | It's like, ah, sir, I, I write for your same esteemed publication and I would like to stop

01:15:13.700 | by and say hello.

01:15:14.820 | And so I'll try that, but I think it'd be cool for the opening of that book when I'm

01:15:19.460 | telling this story about his work habits and spending a whole year writing one article

01:15:24.020 | to be able to actually be there and see him would be cool.

01:15:28.980 | So, so I might try that.

01:15:30.100 | Well, as you said earlier, when you were talking about your plans for the deep life, you might

01:15:36.580 | be doing something related to David Gran, right?

01:15:40.500 | Yeah, maybe I could become a David Gran style writer.

01:15:43.700 | Yeah.

01:15:44.980 | Well, if you're going to do something deep life, I mean, that's kind of like going on

01:15:48.580 | a boat, trying to find a big squid.

01:15:50.180 | Yeah.

01:15:50.340 | But then he comes back, you know, and then he comes.

01:15:53.060 | You don't want to stay on the boat for your whole entire life.

01:15:54.660 | Oh yeah.

01:15:55.140 | Yeah.

01:15:55.300 | Yeah.

01:15:55.460 | But how many squids you want to catch?

01:15:56.980 | But see, like in that case, that's more like he does adventures for his articles.

01:16:00.820 | Then goes back, goes back to his normal life where the deep life you got to, you want,

01:16:04.980 | I mean, that is a deep life.

01:16:06.740 | Oh, he's probably always working on something.

01:16:08.100 | So probably I think he is going to do after that.

01:16:10.260 | Well, his book, he wrote a book, um, the something, summer moon.

01:16:14.420 | So something, summer moon about this murder on an Indian reservation around trying to

01:16:19.860 | get oil rights or whatever.

01:16:21.060 | Anyway, Scorsese is making a movie out of it right now.

01:16:23.300 | So, you know, kudos to him.

01:16:26.180 | That's a really cool book.

01:16:27.220 | And I feel bad.

01:16:28.100 | I'm getting the name.

01:16:28.900 | It's something, something, something moon.

01:16:36.100 | The problem is not the, the, not mix it up with a fire of summer moon.

01:16:41.860 | Well, no, but that might be the killers of the flower moon killer of the flower moon.

01:16:45.860 | Yeah.

01:16:46.260 | Yeah.

01:16:46.420 | So the issue is there's the empire of the summer moon.

01:16:48.740 | That's the, the Gwyn book about the Comanches, right?

01:16:52.420 | Killers of the flower moon.

01:16:53.620 | Yeah.

01:16:53.860 | Killers of the flower moon.

01:16:54.820 | I have that.

01:16:56.100 | I should read that.

01:16:56.660 | But, but no, but David Graham lives a deep life.

01:16:59.460 | Not that the squid hunt is a deep life, but I probably a life where you do adventure journalism.

01:17:05.300 | Like that's interesting, right?

01:17:06.340 | Like it's a lot of these full-time writers, their lives are interesting.

01:17:10.020 | Like they're, they're unusual.

01:17:11.460 | They, in his case, like he travels and goes, he's adventures and comes back and writes on

01:17:16.100 | them and he kind of does it on his own terms.

01:17:17.780 | Like that's probably, that's pretty cool.

01:17:19.780 | Or you have like the Sebastian Youngers of the world where he goes to his, with his family,

01:17:23.940 | to their little house in the pine scrub in Truro, Cape Cod.

01:17:27.060 | And he's sort of like chainsaws trees and writes, you know, it goes to a boxing gym too.

01:17:32.820 | Yeah.

01:17:33.780 | Yeah.

01:17:34.980 | That's another guy who's older than us who.

01:17:37.140 | Yeah.

01:17:38.580 | Looks like he could beat me up.

01:17:40.660 | All right.

01:17:42.580 | Well, anyway, enough of that.

01:17:43.300 | How long did we go?

01:17:43.860 | Just, Ooh, hour 20.

01:17:45.700 | That's what happens when I get away from the studio too long.

01:17:47.940 | So let's wrap this up.

01:17:49.300 | Thank you everyone for listening.

01:17:51.700 | If you like what you heard, you will like what you see videos of full episodes and select

01:17:57.380 | segments available at youtube.com/calnewportmedia.

01:17:59.060 | If you like what you heard, you'll also like what you read.

01:18:02.900 | Sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com.

01:18:05.460 | Be back next week at the normal time with a normal episode.

01:18:08.980 | And until then, as always stay deep.

01:18:11.620 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

01:18:14.980 | (upbeat music)

Ep. 200: Feedback Councils, Decoding the Deep Life, and Becoming a Writer | Deep Questions Podcast

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