Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 121: Is Writing Everyday Overrated? (with Srini Rao)

Episode Date: August 16, 2021

In today's episode, I am joined in studio by my longtime podcasting friend Srini Rao, host of the incredible Unmistakable Creative podcast (https://unmistakablecreative.com/), on which I've been a guest many times.Srini helps me answer your questions on both deep work and the deep life. We also talk about his podcasting company recently raising a series A round of venture capital funding, and what it was like appearing on the Netflix reality show Indian Matchmaker.I apologize that I don't have timestamps for the individual questions for this episode. In the moment, I forgot to take notes. In future collaborative Q&A episodes I'll make sure to get the questions written down so I can deliver the timestamps to you here.Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Episode 121. So I'm trying something kind of new in this episode. So this is a, it's a normal Q&A episode. I am answering the questions that you submitted, except for during this episode, I have someone helping me. So my longtime podcasting friend, Shreeny Rao, was in town, and I said, well, come on, come on down to the DeepWork HQ. We get you on the other mic here. As I go through the questions, you can give some of your thoughts on those questions, too. This was the original conceit I had for guest, was instead of interviewing the guest, we will just have the guest to help me answer your questions.

And of course, along the way, we'll find out some more about the guest. And I kind of got away from that, and I'm trying it again today. So I will be interested in what you think about this format. A little bit about Shreeny. His name might sound familiar. That's because he's the longtime host of the unmistakable creative. podcast. The podcast has been around for a long time. He's done over a thousand interviews. If you've listened to it, and I've been on it, I think, four or five times. It's very

narrative and story-based. So it's a very cool podcast. They just received funding from Podfund, the series A round to build out a larger media company around all of this content and IP. They've been generated. We get a little bit into that in the episode. But it was good to see Shreeny again. It was good to get his take on these questions. Two things to, I want to highlight about the questions to follow to look out for. One, at some point we do a question about note taking.

I give my standard response which is pretty boring about how I mark up books with a pencil. Shreeny is actually a master of a Zittalcastin-based system that he implements in MIM. Listen to what he says about how he takes notes on books. This may be

it turns me around. I may actually start doing this. So this is one of the cases where someone's tactics has turned me around. I was very interested. In particular, I love this idea that as a writer, he no longer tries to write a set amount of words each day. He instead aims to process a certain number of notes in his note-taking system each day. The processing, the filling out the connecting of notes is a physical manifestation of thinking.

And that's what he wants to do, is think through ideas and clarify ideas every day, not necessarily write. I like that. It kind of dovetails with my essay I wrote. wrote a few months ago called In Defense of Thinking, or I downplayed the importance of just writing as the main way of thinking. Anyways, keep an eye out for that answer because he's kind of turning me around with his note-taking strategy.

The other thing to keep an eye on is if the name sounds familiar, Shreeny was on this Netflix reality show called Indian Matchmaker. I don't know when that came out like last year maybe or something like this. I asked him about it at the end. I'm not so much interested in what his experience was like his appearance on the show, just about the mechanics of how reality TV is formed, what's it like to be on the other side of the camera and a Netflix show,

and what it tells us more broadly about the evolution of media as the production values become more accessible to amateurs like me, is more and more people can produce content that gets closer to the levels of these reality shows. What's that going to do with the media

landscape? So that's an interesting thing I talk about at the end, so you might want to keep your attention open for that. Okay, before we get going, I also want to mention something about guest more generally. I have not yet started systematically going out and recruiting guest. I am going to do that. You know, I set up this deep work HQ now with multiple, multiple mics. I'm going to, the lights are being installed next week.

So I'm doing another national TV thing from the HQ. So I want to get the lights installed first and the cameras can be installed. And so basically I've been waiting to systematically start inviting. guest until I can get good video and have a good studio setup. So I'm almost there. And then once that's the case, and it's not going to be every week, but then I can say, okay, what type of guest do I want? What content do I want them to talk about? And some virtual, some in person, and figure that out. And that means every guest I've had on so far is incidental in the sense that in every case, it's just a friend of mine who's like in town or we're talking. And I said,

yeah, let's jump on the mic and we'll talk. All right. So I do get some notes about like, There's an interesting, there's not really a smart pattern to the guests you have. It's sort of the same guys. It's all guys. It's all authors. And yes, this is only because I'm not actually recruiting guest yet. It's just my friends I occasionally have on. And as a guy, my friends are mainly guys as an author.

My friends are mainly authors. So just to put that note out there, once I start officially bringing guest on as part of this podcast strategy, we will have a broader array of the backgrounds that guests are from, a broader array of genders for sure, and a broader array of topics that we talk about. I don't want you to think that the goal for guests on the show is to have a bunch of 30 to 40-year-old male authors on, and that's it.

That's just who my friends are because I'm a 30-to-40-year-old male author. So look out for that. We're almost there to that point where the studio can support nice video of guests, and then I'm going to start concentrating on, okay, what's the most interesting variety of people to have on? I just wanted to give that disclaimer. Just to give you a little bit of insight into the way I've been thinking about that. All right, that is enough intro.

Let's get rolling. This is me and Shreeny Rao answering your questions. Shrini. Thank you for venturing into the Deep Work H.Q here. Yeah, it's funny. Like, I was thinking, I've talked to you so many times. It doesn't even feel like I'm meeting you in person for the first time. It is weird how much we identify people with voice.

because I've been talking with you since probably 2014 or something like this, since the early days back when your show had a different name. And yeah, I meet you. I'm like, oh, yeah, of course, that's Shreeny again. Yeah, welcome back. I think more people know my voice than know my face. It's kind of bizarre, like how well people know my voice. But that's, I think, the nature of audio.

This is one of the reasons why I read my own audiobooks, because I remember sometimes people like, oh, do you want to read the book? I don't know if you read your own books, but I hate it when authors don't read their audiobooks, especially if I know them, it really annoys me because I'm like, wait a minute. So you're saying, I have to do this, is what you're saying. People like the sound of your voice, so you should absolutely do it. I know. I should.

I like having the professionals do it. But then someone told me the other day, they're like, look, I was listening to the audio book of one of my recent books. And they're like, ah, the narrator does this weird high-pitched voice for all of the females that are quoted in the book. And it's really annoying. I'm like, okay, maybe I do need to insert some control. That's the one thing I remember when somebody asked me.

I said, well, look, I'm a podcast host. The primary thing that people identify it. You have to read your voice. Me not reading all your audio books would be insane. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So you've seen the podcast has just cost me three days in the studio next time I have to record.

Yeah. Okay. All right. So, you know, the premise here is we do questions. And the audience should know and Shereenie will back this up. He has not seen any of the questions in advance. And so this should be a surprise. But let me start with asking you a question just so we have a little.

have a little bit of a background here. You host this podcast, as I talked about in the intro, the unmistakable creative. You've been doing it forever. I mean, in podcasting terms, right? When did you start this? 10 years ago. So maybe even, well, so we're in 2021 now, right?

Yeah. So we started in 2009, but not fully as a podcast. It was literally just an MP3 file, uploaded to a WordPress site. Mainly, so I'd started a blog as part of an online marketing, or online blogging course called blog mastermind, and one of the lessons was to interview somebody. and about 13 interviews in, the guy who was my 13th guest,

I had asked him if he wanted to collaborate on a multi-author blog, and he said, no, you're not a very good writer. So you should start a podcast and spend it out into a separate site. And about an hour later, with my limited design skills, mocked up a version of a WordPress site called Blogcast FM and said, is this what you had in mind? When do you want to start? I don't think that's what he meant.

But I dragged him along for a couple years. And then it became, I think, in 2014. So we relaunched it as unmistakable creative in 2014. So yeah, we've been at this now for, I guess if we go back to 2009, now we're looking at close to more than 10 years. And the premise has been basically the same the whole time. Well, no, not really. So initially when we started, because I was in that blogging course,

it started out as interviews with up-and-coming bloggers. I think even in our initial conversations, it was usually we're talking about to bloggers who just happened to have expertise. So when I did blog, which I did. I think my original interview was blogcast. Where were we talking

about study hacks or something like this? We might have been talking about the blog itself. But I'm sure your work came up. And then in 2013, the conversation started to evolve quite a bit. One, because I was bored of talking to bloggers

about how they increased traffic to their blogs. I'm like, this is mind-numbing. Guest post. Yeah, exactly. We're going to do an hour on blog roles today. Exactly. It was just like, nobody wants to hear this. And so when we started looking at that

and my mentor, Greg Hartle, asked me, And he said, none of them have anything to do with growing a blog. He said, all those are great stories. And we did probably the most counterintuitive thing that you should do for market research. We said, okay, let's not ask our audience. Let's go find somebody who we knew listen to the podcast who was completely separate from this whole world. Like a friend of mine who's an engineer at Stanford.

And I asked him, what are your favorite interviews? Because I thought he was much more representative of the population at large than our little sort of incestuous ecosystem. Bloggers, yeah. Yeah, you know, circle of bloggers. And so he told me the same thing. he said, I don't care about the ones that are about growing blogs or whatever. He said, I like the ones where you have really good stories. And we figured out that, wait a minute, you could get that out of anybody just by changing the way that you ask questions.

So you've noticed, even as our interviews have gone on, they change every time. And we rarely start with talking about your work. We almost always have topics that have nothing to do with your book. Yes. Mainly because I think that to me, you know, there's no point in having an interview if all I'm going to learn is what you wrote about in the book. that defeats the purpose of the interview. I want to find out the things I couldn't from looking at your LinkedIn profile,

from looking at your resume. And this is where I think a lot of podcasters go wrong. I always say, you know, keep those bios short, you know, don't read them on air, or do what you do. Like, we don't read anybody's bios on air. I'm like the bio's in the description. If you really want to know this person,

go look them up. Yeah. Just get to the interview. And so a lot of it just started to evolve because one, it wasn't just that, but if you look closely at the sort of top 100 shows in iTunes, every one of them is a storytelling show.

You notice it right now or when you're, generally. I mean, it's always been the case. A lot of serialized podcast. You notice it's none of the people from our ecosystem who are ever in the, with the exception of maybe Tim Ferriss and it's only because his audience was so massive.

But it's rarely that, hey, I'm interviewing some online marketer about, you know, how they market their thing or grew their business. And so my focus was always on storytelling because I knew that that could be done at a much bigger scale. Yeah.

And also, the content would stay timely. So that's the thing. Even though you talk about things like deep work, digital minimalism, and even World Without Email, conceptually, all those things will still be relevant five years from now. Like, I can air episodes of yours, and I know this. We have, and sometimes they'll be more popular than our newer episodes.

Yeah. So, I mean, it's shifted a lot over 10 years. How many have you done? So rumor has it. Somebody calculated it for an article they wrote about me. I think it was a podcast movement. It was about a thousand. Thousand.

Yeah. So who of all those people were you the most? nervous? So it's interesting because I stopped getting nervous about interviews quite a while back. Because the answer might be like your second guest just because it was so new. It wasn't the second guest. The guest that made me nervous the first time and he still does is Seth Godin. Because Seth is one of those people where you have to be able to ask really smart questions

to get good answers out of him. And if you don't really think about your questions in advance, you can definitely get thrown because Seth is one of those people. He's like so quick and so smart. Literally I think he's the most intimidating podcast. You want to find things like how do you get something out of a guy who's written a blog post every day for you know, God knows how long? And it seems to be a wealth of knowledge and that knowledge is all publicly accessible everywhere. And the challenge is to find something that he hasn't said a thousand times. And I think that's what makes him one of the more challenging interviews. But everybody else, I'd never really been intimidated by because

one, I was a musician in high school, so I learned how to get over stage fright because my high school band director told me, he said, look, nobody knows when you screw up. The only person that knows that you scrub, and I was a soloist, so he said, nobody will know the difference, just keep playing. So that always stayed with me.

And then I got to the point where I think my guests are more nervous about me as a host than anything because they know that I have ruthless standards. Like, everybody knows that I will cut interviews in the middle if I don't like how it's going. I will ask guests to do multiple takes. And so I don't send questions in advance. And even if I do, I always say, hey, I'm happy to send you questions in advance.

Just no, I'm not going to ask you any of these questions. So it would be not worth your time to come up with something. Yeah. Yeah, that's the way to do it. And then you raise money. So what's the vision here? So we raised a seed round in... Podfund, right?

Yeah, Podfund. So funny enough, there's a woman who was writing ad copy for us. And she said, Trini, have you heard about this thing? And Podfund basically was looking for emerging creators. And I remember just looking at the criteria thinking this describes us in a nutshell. I mean, we have revenue. you. We have a proven business model. We have a proven audience. And we should at least get an interview. And so I, you know, while everybody else,

you know, to credit to you, since, you know, you've been such a vocal critic of social media, while everybody else was in the podcast movement Facebook group talking about what they would do with $50,000, I went and filled out an application because I knew exactly what I would do with $50,000. So I basically filled out the application. We got an interview a week later. They said, you know, we want to talk to you. And then coincidentally, the investors happened to be visiting L.A. And I called one of my listeners who also happens to be a mentor. I said, hey, we got an interview. And he said, of course you did. I said, what do I do now? And he said, go to Ycombinator's website. They have a pitch deck template and fill it out. It's seven slides. And he said, just make sure you have a few graphs that are going up into the right.

Because at that point. Not stable and then slowly turning down. At that point, you're basically looking at just, you know, projection. You're kind of saying, okay, this is what we think we can do. But I had always had that vision from the get-go for what. we pitched pod fund, which was, like, we want to do more than just build a podcast. We want to turn this thing into a full-blown media company where we take this one show and we create offshoots, you know, animated shorts, you know, e-books. I mean, we can do so much with this content. So we've done it.

We did an animated series with Soul Pancake. So the great thing about going into funding rounds like that is instead of just saying, hey, this is what I'm going to do with your money, we literally had evidence of all the things we would do with their money because it's like, we've already done these things. You're just going to help us do it at a much bigger scale. So we were really lucky in that we happened to be one of the first, you know, pod fund portfolies. And it's definitely nerve-wracking because you first see more money than you've seen ever in your bank account.

And you also at that same time have to realize, like, okay, this isn't mine. And, you know, that's like this constant sort of tension of, okay, I have a job here. One is to, there's a paradox almost because the very things that have gotten you this far are also the things that you start to have to keep in check, like the ability to take risks. So it's this balancing act of being smart enough. to realize you now have metrics, because remember you and I've talked about, he said metrics are a double-edged sword. And they can influence the way that you create, the way that you behave.

And they matter, particularly when you've raised money. But you don't want them to matter so much that you compromise the integrity of what you're doing. And I have always had a sort of line of I will actually choose a guest in service of our listeners, even if it comes at the cost of my metrics. Because I think that's still the most important thing. Over the long run, that's what's going to matter. Yeah, metrics are killer. My greatest secret as a writer is I never figured out how the author portal works.

So just like occasionally my editor or my agent will be like, here's how it's going. I'm like, all right. I didn't tell you how many books I've sold. I don't know where my books are ranked on Amazon. I mean, I checked, I think, like for about a month after the books came out. And I started getting really depressed because it wasn't due as well. I was like, all right, you know what, I'm done. I'm not going to look at this anymore.

Let me just get back to work. It always suppresses me. Launch week. Yeah. Looking at Amazon. I had a friend who literally sat and refreshed his. his Amazon rankings the day his book came out. You just sat in from the computer. You were like, what did you do today? I was like, well, I wrote a thousand words and I went to the beach to

surf. Yeah. And I didn't look until the evening again. If the book's going to be a runaway, you'll find out, basically. It's not going to be like, well, it was here. And then there was just like suddenly it started going down. It's like, if you're going to James Clear it, it's just going to be. It's going to be on the chart. He'll know. You sent one email to his list. I know this because he and I have the same leader agent. And she told me on the first email, he got 6,000 pre-orders. That was a guaranteed New York Times bestseller. Yeah, he also did 80 interviews to launch on the week of launch. James Hustles, he knows what he's doing. That was a great book.

Well, not only that. But my point is to line up 80 interviews all, because it's really hard to get everybody to air your interview the week, especially the bigger podcast. Yeah, the guy works. I remember I had, you know, you and I have both probably been on Jordan Harbinger show, and I was like, okay. And he didn't air my interview until about a month and a half after my book came out. I was like, okay.

Because that's the unfortunate thing about bestseller list and things like that is that it's all about, you know, what can you do in launch? week, not over the long haul. Yeah, and it's all nowadays. It's all about first interview, first rights. Yeah. Right. For a lot of the bigger shows, we've got to be number. We'll do it if we can be number one. Yeah. And nobody else can air during that time. And no one else can, no one else can air between that time. Yeah. All right. Well, let's, let's solve other people's problems. I don't know if you're ready for this. I got a couple questions here. I'm sure. So I split them up. We do some questions about deep work. We do some questions about just the

deep life more generally, but it all overlaps. All right. Here we got someone, Chris. Chris, is asking about self-publishing. He says, self-publishing on Amazon as my side hustle, making 3K a month. What do you think about that? Well, I think I'm uniquely qualified to speak on that subject. I chose this for a reason, Chris. Yeah, you're talking about someone who knows about this. First of all, 3K a month is...

It's doable. That's, I think he's saying he's... If he's earning... He's doing that already. So that's very different than talking to someone who's just thinking one day I might self-publish a book. Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, 3K a month if you're self-publishing, that's solid.

it. I mean, because one, with the sheer volume of books that are published, that's hard to do. And a lot of self-published books are really awful because there's no editors involved. There's no cover designers. I mean, it's just somebody who randomly throws up a bunch of thoughts. And I can tell you somebody who did that more than once. Yeah. That the, you know, my initial self-publishing efforts were kind of laughable. But then I had one that was kind of just this crazy, freakish runaway success because Glenn Beck, of all people, found it and loved it. Was this? Was this before the original unmistakable create a book you did with portfolio.

Yeah, yeah. So that book was what led to the book deal. Personally, I think for any aspiring author in nonfiction, I completely disagree with people who say that self-publishing damages your credibility and all that. You don't have any credibility anyways if you haven't published anything.

And it's funny because Art of Being Unrestakable, which to this day is still my most popular book, has probably tons of typos in it. It's not particularly well organized. I mean, even my editor is a when they looked at it, they've acquired the rights. And my editor, Stephanie, sent a note saying, I wanted to talk to you about the structure. She was like, there isn't one. I said, I'm aware, because it was just a bunch of Facebook status updates compiled into a book, which I think goes to

the point of, it doesn't really matter what the format is. It doesn't matter if it looks all pretty. If the content resonates with people, then it's going to resonate. And when something has resonance, then it has the potential to spread. So what are the economics here, though? So I don't know that world. And when they say self-publishing nowadays, is this mainly can. Kindle ebook? Kindle ebooks. So you can do Kindle ebooks. You can do CreateSpace.

So typically the way it works is... Which is on demand printing. You get a physical book, but there's no inventory. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So typically the way it works is if you price anything above $2.99, Amazon gives you 70% of the revenue. Because I remember the day before I went on Glenn Beck, I went and updated the price.

And what were you charging for the art? Originally it was $1.99 and I put it up to $2.99 right after. Because we only had a Kindle version. And my friends always tease me like, don't you wish you just press it. at a dollar higher considering you sold 15,000 copies of it. So you get two bucks basically. Yeah, two bucks a book at $2.99. Yeah.

So now you're getting a hardcover royalty at a $2.99 at a $2.99. That's why you see so many of $2.99 books. Yeah. Interesting. That's actually one of the reasons because of that 70% royalty. We were also really lucky. Like Glenn Beck, between the fact that he had a massive presence, it was a really inexpensive book. Like $2.99 is kind of like, oh, this is a no-brainer.

I'll just do it. You know, I have to think about it. So I think that book hit number seven on all of Amazon for about a day or two. but the economics of it, I think the thing that works really well. One, if you're going to do it and do it well, you need to have professional editors. And that's the thing now, having gone through the publishing process, if I were to go back and do self-publishing, there are certain things that are really good about the traditional publishing process. One is that it teaches you process, above all things.

You understand how to carry an argument over like a coherent arc and narrative, you know, because that's the big difference between a blog. So, you know, this as a blogger. You can write about one thing this week, and you can write about one thing this week, and you can write about something else next week. But when you're writing the book, everything has to do with that theme of the book. And the editor makes sure of that.

Yeah. The number one question my writing coach Robin asked me the entire time we were writing unmistakable is what does this have to do with the theme of unmistakable? To the point where I started to hate the word unmistakable. Now, let's say the titles, we'll get them correctly. So the original self-published version of the book was called the art of being unmistakable. And then my memory's the actual book was called the unmistakable. No, so the second one was called unmistakable, why only is better than best.

Yeah. And then the last traditionally published one was an audience of one. Which I really liked. Yeah. Audience of one, it's funny, that sold much better. Yeah, you did. That one actually sold way better than the other two. And partially it could be just because people know in me.

The other thing is it could be that it just resonated more. Yeah. Well, I mean, and the topic is this is the right way to think about creative output. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Which the message obviously resonates today. Because when people are thinking about creative output, they're thinking about, I mean, everyone's covered in metrics. Yeah.

Like, well, what about likes? What about retweets? What's going on with this? Is this number moving up and down? Yeah. And those numbers, ultimately, I realized, are effectively meaningless. You know, we were just talking about, you know, sort of book deals and people with large social presences and how their social presence actually has almost negligible impact

on their ability to sell books. So we had another friend who had a book come out, I think, right before Atomic Habits, maybe six, seven months before. And she had this wildly popular blog that, you know, when she would put stuff on, Facebook, her posts would get hundreds of shares, which you'd think, oh, hundreds of shares, like this woman should be able to move books. She never, I think she hit, she maxed out of about 2,000 copies. And James Clearer sent one email and sold 6,000 copies.

I'll tell you something funny. When I first got in the publishing, this was I was, just turned 21 years old. I was selling my first book to, this is a random house at the time before Penguin merged with it. And I remember talking to the editors would have been 2003, right? 2003. And they're talking about, okay, here's other books in this space of college student-aimed books. And this one they really liked. Like, man, this guy has a big email mailing list.

Like, this is what it's all about. And since then, we went through this whole period of, like, well, now there's social media, and there's Twitter followers, the Instagram followers. And where the publishing industries ended up again is where they were in 2003. Oh, email list. Like, that converts, you know, because I guess people have bought in. Like, I have bought into, like, I really like what you have to say. Yeah.

And I want to read what you have to say. I think clicking subscribe to that email list is a very different thing than what it means, the contract I'm making with you when I say follow. When I say follow, it's, I don't know, I saw something funny. Yeah. Throw it into my news feed. Maybe something else funny will show up or something like that. But this has been the monstrable case that the conversion rate on followers and social media is garbage, basically. Yeah, I mean, for any medium, right?

So even podcasts, if you look at sort of people who start podcasts, people think that certain people like Pat Flynn or Lewis has all these people like just came out of nowhere. And this is one of the things that really pisses me off about how these guys go out and like Pat Flynn in particular says, oh, everybody should start a podcast. One of the things that's left out of that story is an important piece of context, which is Pat Flynn had a massive email list that he could tell about his podcast. And like, that's hugely important. You cannot neglect that when you're giving people this advice. Yeah. You know, so if, for example, Tim Ferriss, it's like, why is Tim Ferriss's podcast so popular? It's like, Tim Ferriss already had an audience of a million people he could tell about the podcast.

That helps. Yeah. And he was early to the idea that you can have on TV quality guests onto a podcast. He was just, he was early on that. Like, oh, have on famous people. And yeah, he has access to famous people because, you know, his audience is big enough that most people will say yes to Tim Ferriss. And rumor has it. Then Tim Ferriss podcast, if you appear on that show, that's one of the biggest drivers of book sales. It'll do more for you probably than appearing on Oprah Wood. I want to take a moment to talk about one of the sponsors. of the Deep Questions podcast, and that is our longtime friends at Blinkist. You've heard me say before, ideas are power in our current culture, and the best place to master new ideas is in books. How do you figure out which books to read? Blinkist. When you subscribe to the Blinkist app, you get access to short explainers in text or audio that

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Blinkist.com slash deep. Yeah, I heard that, yeah. Of how influential he is. Yeah. So, Tim, come on, Tim. I'm talking to you here. Come on. We did you here, Tim.

Yeah, I've heard that. I've heard that about Rogan's podcast, too, except for it, if they're talking about your book, which makes a lot of sense. He has a huge audience. So when he has on, you know, an author he really likes. He's like, I have you on because I love your book. Everyone has to read your book. Yeah.

Surprisingly, that does, that does give a lot of copies. And the funny thing is we started before Tim Ferriss did. But, you know, that actually just, you know, echoes the, you know, point of the email being such a big deal. Because Tim already had this huge audience built from all his books. The day he launched, he tells a million people. And Tim Ferriss skyrocket's the top of iTunes. Yeah, because he was early. Tim.comlog was very early in blogging.

had a huge audience because he was, I mean, he had a lot of trends, and then he moved the podcast early. Yeah. I'll tell you, here's my insider story on Lewis Howe. I've done his show. He's got the studio out in West Hollywood.

He's a sneaky good interviewer. Is he? That is why he is, yeah, he is a pro at his craft, but he does it in a way that seems very, just sort of informal. But he's a sneaky good interviewer. So I definitely have a lot of Lewis Howe stock when it comes to podcast.

You never know, like, who's going to have the skill for it. All right. So, if we go back to Chris, though, so $3,000 a month, I mean, this is basically, he's replicating, this was probably your experience. If you did 15,000 copies at $2.99 of the original ebook over about a one-year period or an eight-month period, that probably, if it's spread out, working out to something like that, low thousands a month. Yeah. Okay. So Chris, Trini was in your exact position. I think he's in a better position than I am, because if he's been able to maintain that consistently, that's huge.

I mean, because the thing is, once the work is done, you actually don't have to keep doing much else because you're basically just building. a catalog. So, I mean, if I were to do what Chris is doing, I would approach it as if I am building a publishing company. Yeah. So he needs a bigger vision. This is a proof of concept that he has some sort of voice or topic or content that's connecting, but you're not going to build a livelihood or a long-term company out of just the self-publishing books. Let that been, because you self-publish your book early. Yeah. Now you have a venture-backed media company. So now the question is, what's next for Chris? He has to figure out. Well, yeah. I mean, I think that if I were in It's a side hustle should he quit?

I would think about potentially looking at it as, okay, do I have to be the only author in this imprint? Like, why can't I take on, you know, if I'm self-publishing books, why not bring on other authors? Why not build something? Yeah. The question there becomes how you basically compensate other authors, right? So like if I wanted to start a publishing imprint, there are two major limitations for me. I'm not going to come to somebody like you and say, hey, Cal, we're starting unmistakable publishing. Would you like to publish your next book with us? By the way, portfolio will give you a six-figure advance.

I can't give you anything. you sign with me. The answer is going to be no. But I do think that the entire industry. The memoirist did this. Asymmetrical press. Yeah. So the thing is, I think that a lot of people have tried this model.

Belladonna is trying to, I mean, they're a little more established, but it's like 50% deal with the authors or something. Yeah. So the thing is, I don't like the idea of the author having to pay the publisher. I think that's lunacy. That's ridiculous. What I want to do is basically start up, do a startup publishing company, basically where it's like, hey, go out and raise a round of venture funding and let's go head to head with the big five.

Because once you've done a book deal with the big five, you have an insider knowledge of what the whole thing looks like that most people who are starting these self-publishing imprints don't necessarily know. You know, like, you and I both know all the flaws in the system, which there are dozens. I mean, the entire way they even acquire books is kind of questionable because they don't look at the right metrics. Like when, you know, I hear an editor say, oh, you know, what's your social media following? I was like, it just makes me want to like cringe because I know that that's not going to make a difference. Yeah. They want number. What can you ask?

Well, I will say what they do now is they build these business models. I remember you talking about that. Yeah. But it's mainly based on past sales. Yeah. It's just fine. And even that's hard to predict because, you know, like I had 15,000 copies of order to be almost unmistakable. I didn't even come close to that again.

And by the way, I think they can make the model say whatever they want. Yeah. Because there's so many assumptions that go into it. They're like, okay, I really want this author. They want to still justify and protect themselves by saying I built this model and we justify it, but they just, you know, you tweak this number. Well, I think publishing is a lot like venture capital in that. You know, my joke is always basically what happens is they give people like you and me book

deals and then Tim Ferriss and Michelle Obama make up for the losses they take on everybody else. I read, you know, I read a book about that, the blockbuster effect right around the time deep work was coming out. And I was like, oh, and it was talking about the publisher of deep work was the hashette was the case study, right? And maybe even the Grand Central imprint where I was. Yeah.

And I remember having a conversation with my agent. after that because a little known thing about deep work when that came out i was really just i was disillusioned i mean there was no publicity uh they had paid less for that book than they paid for so good they can't ignore you wow it wasn't really showing up even in a lot of barns and nobles right i remember that at the time too i was really getting to i was like so people i know can't even go find this how long was it before it actually took off i don't know it's a good question um it's a good question maybe a year or so yeah that's common apparently so ryan halliday is another example his obstacle is the way kind of just putter along for three years

and then somebody in the NFL found it and after that it was kind of off to the races. Yeah, though he'll sometimes claim he would have been on the New York Times bestseller list if not for the fact that you know, the marketing gimmick he did for trust me, I'm lying. He got himself as a fake source

in the New York Times and then came out and said, see, this is exactly what I'm talking about in my book about media manipulation. I manipulated the New York Times and quoting me as an expert even though I'm not. That's how easy the media is to manipulate. That was part of his marketing campaign, and he claims that put him on a six-year blacklist, basically, because he was selling a lot of copies. I wouldn't be surprised. I mean, rumor has it. So that's the other thing with self-publishing. I sold 15,000 copies. I made the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. I couldn't make the New York Times because I'm self-published. Yeah, because it has a bunch of other criteria, including, like, moving into indie stores and stuff like that. Totally.

By the way, my business plan, tell me, is this a good business plan? Here would be my business plan for starting up. Chris, you can steal this, okay? But Shreeny's going to evaluate this and let us know if this is good for starting up my own imprint. All right, you're going to bring in authors where you really, or you understand the space, you have a feel in them. But what you're doing is, it's the deal is not just we're going to do your book. It's we're going to get your podcast going. And your podcast is then going to be a part of the network of the other podcast of the other authors that are in this imprint.

If there's like an online course angle aspect to it, we have all the tech there. It's going to be a basically full-featured presence that's all synergistic together. So basically the book is one of three or four things. We got nice studios. There's going to be, you know, we can get you a good sounding show, a good whatever. We can get you a good show. We can get a good web presence or something like that, right? Like somehow it's...

So I think the way I would look at it just slightly differently. I think you're right about having this sort of holistic idea that the book is just a component of what each person does because if you think about, you know, if we go back to sort of the venture capital model, right? Like a venture capitalist, unlike a editor at a company, at a publisher, once they give you their money, they're going to try to hold you accountable to get that money back many times over. That's where I think publishing is wrong. They don't do everything they can to ensure that that book becomes a success. Now, that's not all VCs. There's plenty of VCs who will write you a check and, you know, you won't hear from them. They're useless. But, you know, as far as podcast

go, the one thing I would think about in terms of modifying it is to say, okay, what's the medium that is most aligned with your natural talent. Because I feel like there was... What are the other mediums? I mean, video could be one. That might make more sense. Like YouTube. Yeah.

Like YouTube might make more sense. It just depends on whatever... That's smart. So, you know, for example, if you're this incredibly talented visual artist or photographer, and this is something I've said before, what ends up happening is you dilute your efforts. So it's like, oh, I'm starting a podcast because everybody else is starting a podcast. And so you go from being this extraordinary visual artist to now, instead of being

extraordinary one thing, you're average at two. Yeah. And, you know, it's basically the opposite of so good they can't ignore you. Find the medium that takes the thing that's generating heat in the first place and amplify. Find the medium that makes you so good they can't ignore you. Yeah, I like that. All right. So, Chris, it sounds like do that.

Yeah. And hey, maybe it's the books. Or who knows. It could be. 3K a month. It could be he's doing some, you know, 3K a month is solid. That's actually better than like 90% of people.

Because I think people, one, people have a very skewed idea of how well people earn in our industry. because, one, anybody can make it seem like they're bigger than they really are. You know, with some good design, some fancy work, you know, a few media appearances. You know, people always think that I make more money than I do. Yeah, it's always a skew in that direction. People think, yeah, I had Jordan Harbinger on the show the other couple weeks ago, and we were going through the economics of various shows. And he was giving us a reality check.

And this was just in podcasting. Yeah. But he was reality checking podcasting. Like, okay, that show's probably making this much money. We weren't doing names, but like these calibers of shows are only doing this much money. And this is how many shows are doing this much money. money. And it was interesting to hear. There's this woman who, she's

the founder of a venture firm called Atelier Ventures, and I don't remember her name, but she wrote a article in the Harvard Business Review titled that, you know, the creator economy needs a middle class. And for this. Yeah, and it's so true because And I thought, by the way, I started Jordan's

podcast interview thinking podcasting might be offering this. I came away from that interview thinking, no. No, there is not. There is no middle class because the reality is. It's a one or take all market again. It really is. It has a little broader top, obviously, than TV had or something like this, but it's kind of comparable to books is what I came away with. I think that basically what you have, and if I were to do another book with a publisher, and I've been hashing this idea out as I've been

taking notes, was when I started looking at this creator economy idea, I thought, wait, we're living in a world of digital inequality. It's basically just a microcosm of the actual economy, where, like you said, it's winner takes all, a handful of people get the bulk of the attention. It's just a smaller version of what happens in big tech, where it's like four companies rule. what a hundred podcasts and iTunes probably take the majority of the revenue on Patreon, which is one of the worst examples of this income distribution. The bulk of people probably make, you know, enough to buy coffee every month. And the rest goes to Jordan Peterson.

Is that how the economics work? That's a good way of looking at it. Jordan Peterson and a few people who have a similar size audience. But anyway, but this is the issue of democratizing entertainment channels is that democratizing access to the tool doesn't, change the dynamics of winner take-all economics, which is, if I have full access to everybody, I would much rather have the best person in this space. Having three people who are okay interviewers and listening to their podcast does not bring me the same value as listening to just the best interviewer in that space. And so democratizing access to entertainment type channel

technologies, what it's really good at is casting a wider net for filtering for talent. Totally. But the number of spaces for talent is really not. that much more than when the technology was, well, it's TV cameras and you don't even get access to it. So you can get a more, you can open some more initiatives and get more diverse array of people at the top. But it doesn't democratize revenue. And I think that's the thing that just because everyone can blog now doesn't mean everyone's going to make money on blogs. Just because everyone can podcast now, doesn't mean everyone's going to make money on podcasts. Now you're going to have people, you know, rise to the top because blogs came along, you had, for example, like Ezra Klein percolate up.

And like, oh, because blogs exist, we found this kid in California has real talent. And now he's an, you know, op-ed columnist for the Times and box and all of that. Or you'll get like Joe Rogan running this empire, whatever. There's no way he would have, obviously, no TV network was going to say, great, you're a new Sunday morning show. So it's like democratizes the search. You get a very wide net. That also probably makes it more competitive for everyone because you have a very wide net. Yeah.

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, it basically goes back to the whole idea of So Good They Can't Ignore You, which basically is, like, this is not optional. It's a necessity because what you're up against is the entire world. You're up against people who have plenty of talent. And so, and then the other issue with this whole creator economy thing is we don't have an ecosystem the way startups do. So, for example, tech startups have incubators like tech stars and Y Combinator. And the problem is, if I'm Paul Graham and I have the choice to, you know,

to say, you know what, I'm going to make an investment in Cal Newport's Deep Questions podcast. Maybe I'll make some money, or I can invest in Drew Houston's Dropbox that'll make me a billion dollars. No brain wrong. I'm going to invest in Dropbox. And I'm saying that as somebody who is in the creator economy. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So, so Chris, don't try to become the next Tim Ferriss, but find the technology the best amplifies what's going on here. And it could be books. I mean, I don't know. He could be publishing very technical, very technical books, like how to take, you know, whatever, better photos with your galaxy, whatever, whatever. And then maybe, so maybe that's even the best. But so amplify Chris, but don't, don't dilute. All right. How about, here's a work question that's a little bit more psychological.

How to deal with job rejection? I'm a recent graduate. This is Bell, by the way. Sorry, Bell. I'm a recent graduate in humanities and finishing a master's degree. I'm looking for jobs. And so far, all the jobs I apply to have been unsuccessful. What is the best way to deal with rejection?

How should the rejection fuel my motivation look for jobs instead of pitting my myself. Bell, let me just do my quick master's PSA. This is the bane of all master's programs in the country, but this is always my PSA about master's degrees. Before you sign up for that master's degree that you're going to be paying for, you need to identify this is the type of job that I really want and I have evidence that this master's degree from this program is what is needed to open that door. Do not just do the degree thinking, generally speaking, I think this will open up options. You're making a lot of universities rich, but that's not the way to approach it. I don't know if that's what you did, Bell, but I'm using this as an excuse to do my, my master's,

my master's PSA. Okay, so she's on the market, Shereenie, she's looking for jobs. Yeah. Unsuccessful. She has a graduate in the humanities finishing a master's. Well, let me, you know, echo your master's sentiment. I got an MBA and I always said business school teaches you nothing about running a business. It teaches you how to be an employee and somebody else's. But so job search, no matter how you slice it, I know because I've been through exactly what she's going through. I graduated April 2009 in the midst of arguably the worst recession ever where we just knew we were like basically flushing our resumes down on the toilet. So did I. Yeah. I signed up to be a postdoc. That was probably a better move than trying to find a job.

Yeah. So you would go into interviews where, you know, a thousand completely overqualified people would answer and, you know, here I am 30 years old and we'll pay you 10 bucks an hour. It's like I made that at McDonald's. I'm not going to do that. Yeah. And so, you. You know, I wouldn't say I'm necessarily qualified to address the psychological components of it, which she's not wrong. It is incredibly taxing to go through that. But what I can tell you is the best piece of advice I ever got during that period was from a guy named Peter Bergman. And to this day, that was priceless advice.

And he told me the worst thing that you can do when you're unemployed is to spend all of your time looking for a job. Yep. Which sounds completely counterintuitive. But it made sense because during that time that I was unemployed, I started my blog, which eventually led to all the other things that ended up happening. But it also gives you something that keeps your mind off of the fact that you're getting rejected from jobs you're struggling. Because if all you do is spend all your time looking for a job, then your entire focus is on the one thing that you think is wrong with your life. So basically you wake up every day, it's like this is what's wrong with my life.

It just constantly becomes this reinforcing negative feedback loop. Whereas if you have something else that adds meaning to your life, even if it's not something that might open the doors to a career, you end up discovering, you know, a lot of things about yourself that can be valuable. So, for example, that was a period in which I became an avid surfer. And it made that period so much better because I was actually surprisingly happy despite how much I was struggling to find a job. Yeah. Because that's one thing.

The other place that I would look is to all of Vermeat-Sat these stuff on, you know, finding jobs, getting interviews, he's probably got some of the most well-thought-out, constructive advice on all this. He has a course called Dream Job, and even his email sequence that he writes dream job. Yeah, it's probably, yeah, it's probably as good as the course. Like, you can take his free material and probably find just as good a job as you could from taking the course.

And rumor has it, people who take the course end up with really high salaries and do quite well. And I can tell you from having taken one of his courses, I took his copywriting course. And even though it was $2,000, we made that money back in one launch. And I thought, okay, you know what? I'll never question buying anything from this guy now. Yeah, Ramit's the best. I've never remit forever.

Yeah. Used the guy who introduced me to Tim Ferriss. Because he's an old Tim Ferriss friend. Yeah, I agree. I remember when he did a dream job. It's like a thousand bucks. Yeah. And I remember at the time.

And that's pricey if you're not, if you're trying to find a job to spend $1,000 on a course. And his whole pitch is you're going to make so much more. And he does offer payment plans. And the truth is, you know, Rameen's stuff works. He's not,

he's, you know, he's had thousands of people go through all of his courses. Yeah, he gets my stamp of approval. Yeah. Absolutely. I've known him forever.

Yeah. That sounds good, Bill. And also, yeah. I mean, I think when you're at that level of education, looking for jobs.

There's sometimes a mismatch between the channels of, I'm going to send resumes to these positions that I've seen on websites where a lot of the hiring happens through connections. A lot of it happens. There's a lot of firms, a lot of organizations. Maybe things that wouldn't have been on your radar, maybe smaller companies that need some people.

They're not necessarily advertising a place that you're going to see it, but they're like, we need good people. And if you're the value of being dependable, you've got your act together, you're organized, you're sharp, you have the training. I mean, there's always a need for it. It's just sometimes you have. to network your way into that.

Yeah, and I always found that going through the front door is the wrong way to do. Another person who has a really great book about sort of back doors and ways to get in. There's a guy Alex Benayan, who was a college student at USC, who wrote a book called The Third Door. And he got somehow interviews with everybody from Jessica All But to Bill Gates. Like, he got into Bill Gates office as a kid who just graduated from college. So he knows a thing or two about how to navigate these. But I remember when I would look at LinkedIn or anything like that for a job back when somebody would actually hire me to work at a company. I would never actually, you know, apply through the front, you know, the website.

I would try to figure out who the hiring manager was, try to basically use Google Reuter to figure out that person's email address and then just email them directly. Because then you're going to bypass all. One, if you can bypass a recruiter, that's huge. Because that first filter alone can get you eliminated, not necessarily on, you know, like value, like based on your qualifications, the recruiter might just check a box and say no. Whereas you might actually get the attention. You might actually get in, yeah.

And I would add to do things. So obviously the high quality leisure, but things you can get involved with, even if it's consulting work, even if it's volunteer work, just be doing things around other people where you can be competent. Volunteer work is really great. Tim Ferriss has talked to me about this. You know, he said that if you are willing to go and volunteer in an event and not just be sort of a lame volunteer like a lot of them are, but really go above and beyond, you'll be able to connect with people who are significant yet significantly higher pay grades. like highly influential people. Instead of being on the committee, volunteer to run the committee,

stuff like that. I mean, it was really one of those things. I worked the door at networking events when I couldn't afford to buy the tickets. Yeah, but this is how it works. You do something like that. And then someone's like,

well, let's bring you on and do a little consulting engaging. You can help us with this project. We'll pay you hourly. And they're kicking to tires. Often a lot of small firms, it's risky for them to hire someone. They really want to know if someone's going to work out

and they bring you into door. So, Belle, keep doing things, doing things where you can, for yourself, but also professional things. You can show your competence. Keep meeting people. Keep talking to people.

Yeah. And you also don't lose your momentum. You know, like that keeps you, one of the most dangerous things is stagnating. Even if it doesn't feel like it's going anywhere. Just the fact that you're staying in motion, it can make a huge difference.

Yeah. Yeah. Or connect with Chris and start a podcasting company. That's the fallback. Here's a kind of technical deep work question. Tom says I'm an academic like yourself. And I have a ton of reading that I should be keeping on top of. How do you keep track of what you read?

and how do you take notes in a way that's accessible when you need them? So, Tom, I'll give you my answer. And then Shreenia is more complicated answer. He actually knows about Zytokeston, which you guys all love Zytokastin? Zettlcastin. Zettlcastin. Yeah. Deep questions listeners are always telling me about Zettlcastin.

So Tom, I'll tell you if it's academic papers, when I'm working on a topic, so I'm reading an academic paper, usually on behalf of a particular topic I'm working on. So a paper I'm working on. I try to get that citation right into the right format and the notes right into the skeleton I'm writing for the paper. So I use a markup language called latex, which is how you mark. It's how you mark up and write mathematical notation. And I will just start summarizing the papers right in the latex markup document. I'll get the citation into my bib file right away so I can just cite it from anything else I want to do. And then for the books I read, and, you know, I average about five books a month,

which sort of a professional necessity. I marked the books directly. And I've talked about this before on the podcast, but pencil mark in the corner, if I'm going to mark something on the page, then check boxes, brackets, and underlines. If you do that, you can go back, and I've mentioned this before, and flip through a book, just going just to the mark corners, just reading the mark sections in a book, you can pull out the main ideas from a book in about six or seven minutes. So I just do that.

And this is different than, let's say, like Ryan Holiday, who spends a lot more time up front and it's going to get all that information into note cards and get these note cards in the trays, and I've seen them, and it's crazy. And then it's easier for them on the back end. But for me, it's all about friction reduction. And then I just grab books off my shelf. I was just doing this today. I was fact-checking a New Yorker piece.

And I've been citing some stuff from Walden, which I had read years ago for digital minimalism. I could pull my copy of Walden off and very quickly get to the parts I have marked. So I am ad hoc low friction, the opposite of probably what Shereen is going to tell us. Believe it or not, there are a lot of similarities. The problem is, so you as an academic have been taught how to do research because you've had to write peer-reviewed journals. That's not how we're taught to do research typically when we're writing the five-paragraph essay in school. And there's a reason there's no such thing as the Great American Five-Paragraph essay because because we didn't write those things to be read.

We wrote those things to pass tests. And so Zettelcastin was something that I just discovered, you know, about probably about two months ago, I came across the book, How to Take Smart Notes, and a lecture about Swart Notes. I didn't even remember how I came across it. How to take smart notes. Sorry, that's the book title.

Yeah, it's by Sonka Erins, who's a German guy. And he learned about this from the work of Nicholas Lumen, who was a social scientist, who was a son of a brewer, and basically where I think worked for, like, the patent office somewhere. And somebody met him once and they said, you know, how would you, you know, be interested in becoming a professor? And he finished a PhD dissertation within a year, wrote 30 books, published 500 papers, all using this Zetelkastin method. So naturally as a writer, I was incredibly intrigued.

I wanted to know more about it. And so I started working with it. And the premises is actually, there's a lot of similarities between the way you're talking about research and, you know, but I think the way that this works is it makes it way easier to find things and also make connections between your ideas, which is, really where it starts to shine. But there are basically three types of notes. So while you're reading, similar to what you do, I highlight and I underline things. And you might have some sort of marker. And this is similar. And you have, you can either put these at the beginning of the book, like with an index. I remember seeing a post that you wrote once about creating an index at the beginning of the book. But I keep a notebook with me while I'm doing that. So I underline and highlight

things at the end of every chapter or at the end of every 50 or so pages. I go into the notebook and I write down a page number and just a very brief phrase to say, okay, what is this about? That's what they call a fleeting note. Those notes eventually will be thrown away. There's just a way to remind you of what is important. Those are not going to go into your database, and you can use different tools to do this.

You could use Rome to do this. You could use Mem. Right. You could do this in Notion. But the original guy was all paper. Yeah, the original guy did it all on paper, and it looked very much like Ryan Holidays. Because he had note cards.

Yeah. And there's a notation system. There's like card catalogs. Yeah, which. I wouldn't have figured how to do that. But now with bidirectional linking and tagging, it's actually very easy to do all of this. So then you take those fleeting notes

and you create what are called literature notes. And this is really, really important. It's probably the most important part of this. And this probably echoes a lot of what you wrote in how to be a straight-A student. So I realized this, as I was going through Zetelcast and understanding this concept of smart notes, I kind of had like a flashback to college.

One of my roommate said, you must have been smart in high school if you were a straight-a student. I said, no, being a straight, a student in high school doesn't indicate intelligence. It indicates discipline. Most people, if they just show up and do what the teacher says and memorize information well, they can get good grades in high school. That doesn't work in college, and you learn that really, unfortunately, the hard way,

because nobody actually teaches you how to study. And I think you and I've talked about this before, but I learned this in economics at Berkeley. You basically, you know, you go to lectures, you do problem sets. you read the textbook and most college students are notorious for doing things like underlining or highlighting the entire textbook as if that's going to be of any use. And then what ends up happening is you think that you understand something and you go to the midterm and they present the same idea, but now you have to apply it to a context you're completely unfamiliar with, which is where it becomes very apparent that you didn't actually understand this. You just tried to memorize it. So literature notes become really important because they're a way of rewriting whatever that insight is in your own words. So that way you really demonstrate that you've actually understood it because elaboration is like a critical part of this.

And then after you write the literature note, you actually basically indicate inside the literature note what the source of that note was. And you can actually put the original quote that you basically paraphrased. Okay. And then you have what are called reference notes. Now, reference notes are basically, so for example, let's see you highlight and underline 40 passages from a book. The verbatim passages are your reference notes. The way I do this is, and I only read physical books, which people find that annoying because you think you have to type all of this. Well, now, thanks to an app called Readwise, I just go in and I take, thanks to Optical Character Recognition.

Sure, right, right, and you get them right in there. You get them right into Readwise, and then you just export them to your note-taking tool of choice. So Readwise has a Rome integration, so you can export to Rome, you can export to Notion. And so then what you do is you create a link from the literature note to the original source, which is your reference note. And in the process of creating literature notes, you're going to end up having insights and thoughts. And those become what are called permanent notes. And permanent notes are notes that you make or insights that you have.

And somebody who reads those notes could understand them without having to have access to the original context. Right. You're drawing out standalone insights. That's a smart idea. standalone insights inspired by what you're reading and references back to the book. So standalone insight, but here's where the real magic starts to happen with the Zellcasten is when you're making these literature notes and you're having these standalone insights, what you can do is you can create links to related notes. You can just write the name of the note down without actually taking action on the insight.

So basically you can have insight without immediate action because you can't plan for insight. It's spontaneous. And that's where this starts to become really valuable. And the other thing that becomes apparent is that you start to realize that your brain isn't a hierarchy. So if you think about how we typically organize information, we organize it in hierarchies, like folders upon folders upon folders. Typically, you go into Dropbox, and that's why people can never find anything. Yes. And not only that, there's no way to find connections between different ideas.

And so when you start putting all these links together using bidirectional linking or using tags, not only do you overcome this idea of having insight without friction because you just create a link. So, for example, let's just say I'm writing, you know, I could be writing something about deep work. I could take a note from deep work about, you know, let's just say that example of, you know, these are the two most important skills for thriving, you know, in the 21st centuries, like the ability to manage your attention and, you know, developing rare and valuable skills. And I could say, okay, and these are five of the most rare and valuable skills, you know, on the market today. That would be an insight. But the thing is, I could write nothing about that and just create a link.

And let's say, tomorrow morning, I wake up and say, okay, now I actually know what I want to worry about. So no idea goes to waste ever. And then using tags, you can tag things with topics, you can tag things. Although it's recommended that you don't tag by topic because this was one huge insight. The guy said you don't want to think like an archivist, you want to think like a writer. And so then you start to see that all these things have different connections between them. You realize your brain is actually a network. It's not a hierarchy.

And you start to be able to make connections between your ideas. And the more notes that you add into it, whether it's something like Rome, whether it's something like Mem or any of these other sort of network note-taking apps, the more notes that you put into it, the easier it becomes, the more valuable it becomes. And not only that, let's say, for example, I'll give you an example. So I have like 60 notes on decision-making. If I wanted to write an article on decision-making, now, instead of having to start the article from scratch with an outline and think about what I want to do, it's a bottom-up approach where I can say, okay, I have all these different notes. Let me compile them into one note. So the real work starts to become editing

and really thinking through how you organize all of this stuff, which is way harder than just sitting down and writing. Right. So what should I do here? So I'm working on a couple book proposals. I'm working on a book proposal. I'm using Rome. Okay.

So Rome is one of the softwares that allows you to create these notes and link them to each other with these links. It kind of feels like wiki editing a little bit. Yeah, it definitely is. I mean, you could do this with a wiki. But I'm doing it very hierarchical. So I kind of have a page for the book idea I'm looking on. and I do a lot of indented whatever.

I should be, so what should I be doing? I should be breaking things in the separate standalone pages I'm linking to. So if my idea is like, okay, here's like something I want to tackle in this chapter, make a standalone page for that, and then link to it from an outline page or something. I don't know that I would make a, you can have topic pages. That's one way to do it. So yeah, one way to do it is to have different topics on. It's like list of ideas. Yeah.

But I just like that it's like very low friction interface. It's just indented bullet points, like rock. And then the other thing is when you create these topic pages, because of the fact that you have these abilities to embed reference blocks, you can just go back and embed them all together into one page. But if I were to say, let's use decision making as an example, just because that's the one that I was talking about. So let's say that you're going to write a chapter on decision making, and then you have a book that you've read, let's say you just read Thinking and Betts by Annie Duke, right? And you've read, you know, underlined or highlighted 10 different passages. So what I would do is I would take each of those passages. I would create a literature note based on all of those passages.

For a different note for each passage. But rewritten in your own words. Because then when you go back and what you're doing is, the funny thing about this is I think the hardest thing about this is it changes the workflow that you and I are probably used to. Like even I was struggling with this because I write a thousand words every day. And this negates the need for that, which is incredibly frustrating when I've spent 10 years writing a thousand words a day.

I've seen an hour spent working on your notes. Yeah, is, which by the way, I am infamous for, I keep giving this advice that like stop using the word writing in all these different fields as the primary and only activity. I just put that on the record. I was sort of infamous for I used to do a lot of these dissertation boot camps at colleges in the area just to help grad students, you know. And everyone just talk about writing. Are you getting your writing hours? Make sure you write every day. It's all about writing.

And my infinite contribution is like, well, writing is part of that. But there's like so much other efforts to producing a piece of intellectual output that's not literally writing. Why are we using the verb writing? Because a lot of it is thinking. You're trying to solve the thing. You're trying to organize your thoughts. And when you get into the cult of just, did you get your pages? Yeah.

Like, that's not writing. Okay. Interesting. For me, that was a struggle is somebody who primarily depended on volume. And so when I saw this idea of, wait a minute, in six notes a day. which is actually not that hard to do, you read in the morning, you have some fleeting notes, and then you create,

so if we go back to your Rome database, right? So some of this could be you going back the notes where you drop placeholders and working it through, and some of it is just dropping it. Could some of this be, okay, I read Andy Duke's book, it's time I need to go back

and start going through my highlighted passages and converting them. Well, the other thing was, if you go back and you rewrite these things in your own words, you're going to have material that you can use in your book already.

So when you sit down to write the book, you're literally not starting from scratch or with a blank page. You have so much already written. And so let's say, for example, you have your own insights or placeholders. You now don't have to think about, oh, an idea that you had while you were going through this research process doesn't get lost. Technical question, you create a page for the book in this instance. And you create a page for every idea. Those pages link, the idea page is linked to the book page.

Now, in Rome, it shows you automatically everything that links to you. So then if anything brings you to that book, book page, you then can very easily see everything that links to it, which would be, yeah, that's interesting. So that's, so Tom, that's interesting. So that's basically the next step off of what I'm suggesting is instead of just going back to that book later when you need it and pulling out the passages, is at some point after you finished the book, process all those passages in the literature notes into a tool like Rome. You use MIM? I use MAM. Okay. And just notion. Notion, I think, if I understand it right. It doesn't have the bi-directional linking capabilities.

That has been there. That's why a lot of people have been ditching Notion. But it has all these other fancy. You can create, I just turned on a light in here. Actually, it's trying to plug in my laptop. But I guess that was plugged into it.

Yeah, for the viewer doesn't know. There's all sorts of technical chicanery. Happening while we speak here. Okay, so that makes a lot of sense. So you use a tool like MIM like notion. I can start doing this, Tom, I think. Yeah.

Create a page for the book. Create a page for every idea. I have a YouTube channel for MAM. I think if you just do Unmistigable Creative, the creative life. for whatever, where I actually go into detail about this. And I did a free webinar for Mem.

So you search for unmistakable creative on YouTube. Yeah. And if you do, if you go to Mem's YouTube channel, I did a webinar for them titled how to build an idea factory using Mem.

Because that's effectively what this starts to become is a factory for ideas. I'm going to watch that. I learned Rome from Thomas Frank. Yeah. Okay. So for Rome, you can look at Thomas Frank

and for Mem, unmistakable creative. I like this. I'm going to have to do that. I'll say, here's my other controversial article a little while ago. called in defensive thinking.

And one of the arguments I made in that was the focus on the first draft a little bit. This focus on writing is the primary activity of intellectual construction. And what a lot of people are doing with people, they will just write that crappy first draft. That's all that matters. A lot of what you're doing is just a highly inefficient way of trying to work out ideas and connect them. But you're wasting a lot of overhead because you're also trying to make connective flowing pros. But what you're really doing is probably you're cutting out the middleman tree. I'm going to do six notes.

And a lot of time when someone is writing their crappy first draft, what they're really doing is just working out their notes on things. And then down the line, like, well, I'll use that one and that one and went in my final. So, yeah, I'm not big on pages. I'm not big. So good. There's your new metric. Yeah, this is actually a really good way of, you know, going.

So somebody once says, the best indicator of how prolific you are is the number of permanent notes you create per day. Yeah. Which I thought is really interesting because now it definitely changes the way you're read and write. and you, but then when you sit down to actually write an article, so recently I did this really extensive guide on conducting podcast interviews, which I wrote in different pieces. It was about 9,000 words. Yeah. And then there's another article I wrote about a book called Little Betts. And I remember thinking when I started mapping it out inside the Zetelcastin, that it would take me a week to write the article. Yeah, Peter Sims. Yeah. So good they can ignore you. I talk a lot about

well, that book is instrumental to every, like any creative person should read that book. That's on my must read book list. But when you do that, what ends up happening is now that you've have all these five or six different pieces, you go from needing a week to write an article to 45 minutes and everything's right there. You weren't looking at a blank word document and saying word counts is zero. Yep.

I need to get that to 9,000. Sentence one, let's go. You are polling in. Exactly. Do you know the people who do MIM? Yeah, the founders? Yeah.

Okay. Because here's my pitch. Here's my pitch. Put in latex markup capability into it. So now when taking these notes, you can have mathematics in the notes. I will get you a giant audience in the world of mathematics because... Well, put it in the feature request to them. I'm sure if you tell them that.

I'll say, Shreeny said you have to listen to me. And while you're at that, you know, be like, by the way, Shreeny wants an equity stake in exchange for this. Yeah. Well, I think this is a 5% idea. Let's be honest. I want to take a moment to talk about another one of our sponsors for Sigmatic, a wellness company that is known for its delicious mushroom coffee.

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All right. Let's do some deep life questions. Okay, we got here Ooh, this one's deep. Speaking of deep, okay. Carl says, after obtaining the life I wanted, I find it to satisfying, and I blame Shreeny.

Oh, no, this is, sorry about that, this person said they blame you. Yeah, it was interview 400. Yeah, no. I added that part. Okay, so Carl says, I find it to satisfy. How do I trust a vision for the future?

I work 35 hours per week as a surgeon, but I'm beginning to find it boring after five years of work. Endurance sports do give my life some zest, but overall is kind of boring. I also have six kids between four and 13 years of age and have been married for 15 years. There's a lot to unpack there, Carl.

Yeah, that's... Yeah. I mean, I'm doing the math on the kids. Are you sure you're not just exhausted when you say? You're bored. A surgeon with six kids? That sounds like an exhausting life. for anybody.

With some endurance sport thrown in there. The Carl, okay, here's where I'm going to start is, again, long time listeners

hearing me talk a lot about the deep life buckets, right, which is, again, my scheme, my scheme for cultivating the deep life. So Shreeny hasn't heard

this before. So here we go. You're hearing for the first time, where you, you identify the different buckets that are important

to you in your life, and it depends on who we're talking about, but we're always needlessly alliterative on the shows we like you see. So you have craft,

maybe you have Constitution. We're talking about health. You have community, that type of connection. You might have contemplations, what we use for, like, philosophy or theology. And sometimes we use celebration in there, which is about gratitude and awe and enjoying if things are quality. One thing I'll say, Carl, is that when the buckets are out of sync, when they're out of balance, when maybe there's one bucket that got a lot of attention, and then you're sort of putting a little attention in another.

And that's kind of it. when things get out of balance like that, the structures tip over. And so I know to become a surgeon, that's a lot of time when you are focusing exclusively probably on that craft bucket. There's a lot of energy going into that. And the other buckets aren't getting their time, aren't in their attention. So now you're very precarious. And, okay, you start to get a little exhausted. You know, you have the 16 kids pulling out your attention.

Like, you're exhausted. The work is hard. And it's no longer the challenge of trying to, I want to get up to this position here. and have this clinical associate professor's position, like that challenge is kind of out there. One of the things we often talk about is we'll get the other buckets in line now. Before you start saying, well, let me just change what I'm doing in the one bucket that I put all in my energy, then maybe that'll fix the problem.

You know, what are you doing with the contemplation bucket? What are you doing with the community bucket? How are each of these buckets are you finding this is something that really matters to me that I'm committing non-trivial time and attention to? And you put the keystone habit in place to show that you take the bucket seriously and then you give it a couple months bucket by bucket to overhaul that part of your life. It seems to me that's step one. Yeah.

Before we start doing dramatic. You can't dramatically change a bucket when the other ones have been completely neglected. Yeah, I think that somebody once told me like no one thing, like whether it's a relationship, whether it's a career accomplishment can be your sole source of meaning and happiness because it's kind of like, who was, it was a woman who wrote a book called How to Be Single Unhappy. And she said it's a bit like a portfolio. She said it's like you're basically taking all your money and betting it on this one risky stock. And she said, you need to diversify your sources of meaning.

And so that to me, that always stayed with me as something that, okay, wait a minute, there's got to be other places where you get a sense of meaning. I mean, obviously six kids, a job as a surgeon, that's, you know, a pretty demanding life as it is. But to your point, I think the only way out of that, I mean, I don't know what kinds of hours. He's only doing 35 hours a week, he says. So he must already be doing sort of more like shift-based. Yeah, so we've done with residency and all that craziness. that comes with being a surgeon.

And it's not trying to build up a, you know, seven figures, surgical partnership where you're doing 60 hours a week of surgery. Another, a good example of somebody I think who's been a surgeon who really has had this very diverse career is Atoll Gawande. Sure. You know, if you look, he's done New York Times op-eds. He's written multiple bestsellers. He's a New Yorker guy.

We share an editor at the New York. Yeah, and he's great. I think he's a model for somebody like Chris to look at is, okay, like, what can I model from this? And then, you know, what are other sort of tangential things that you can explore based on your background, maybe it's teaching somewhere, maybe it's researching. Because I feel like when you have a specific, you know, very specialized knowledge like Chris probably does, there are probably numerous areas where you could go and apply that knowledge.

I mean, so it sounds like when he says endurance sports do give my life some zest. It sounds like to me, and I'm completely guessing here, Carl, that this was just a sort of, let's take a random stab at the rest of our life. Like, I don't know, I'll do triathlons. Whereas, you know, I talked about on the show, Carl, much more systematic about it. Keystone habit first. Every bucket has a keystone habit you come back to just as a signal to yourself,

I take this seriously. And I'm willing to come back to this again and again. And then giving a one to two month period per area where it is your focus for those two months overhauling that part of your life and then being willing to repeat that again and again as you're trying to do it. The other thing I will add, because I've been thinking about this for this book idea I'm working on,

you need self-knowledge as the foundation of making changes. So maybe surgery is not for you. I mean, maybe you want to do something different. me there's something about the hours or there's a there's a stress to it okay i could get that but the self-knowledge on which you can make those type of big decisions the more you are out there actually pushing areas of your life that seem to matter and trying to cultivate those areas of your life what you are doing is getting in touch with those intimations that come from within from which you actually gained a real knowledge about what's important and not in the meaning

and the resilience with which you build your life and the better in tune you are to those intimations the better decisions you can make because otherwise you're just going to it's going to be time, man. It's going to be like, oh, I don't want to be a surgeon anymore. I've seen this so many times. I don't want to be a surgeon anymore. I'm going to be, whatever, a triathlete podcaster. And you just like, you know, you make that change or something like that. Like, this is what I'm going to do or, or I'm going to quit and go and teach, you know, high school science or this or that. But you're just swinging into the wind, man. You know, you want to be coming from a place of like, I understand what matters and what doesn't. And then when you, you know, like, move to the farm in Vermont and do whatever, it's not random. It's like, you're doing it from the perspective of like, okay, I have this. really philosophies I feel seriously about, about how my kids should be raised and what's important in time and I want to fix tractors or whatever it is, you're probably firing from the hip a little bit. So spend the time.

That's a whole little bets concept, right? Even though we're talking about it in terms of creative work, like little bits are things you can apply to, you know, self-knowledge as well. Blogcast.comfm, a little bit? That's a little bit, right? The entire thing, my entire career has been a series of little bets. Yeah, no, it was literally just paid.

In 2009, when you're having a hard time in the job market. Yeah. You didn't sit down and map out. Okay, so then, 10 years later is when we'll get the series A round investment. Not even close. The irony was I started it all to try to find a job. And that was kind of ridiculous, considering I've been fired from every job I had.

Yeah, now you're providing jobs. But yeah. I like that. That's a good question, Carl. Quick one. Ivan, e-books or paper-based books. You do no e-books, right? I don't do e-books because I find anything on a device incredibly distracting.

I mean, I'm super ADD, so it's one of those things that, like... But even on a Kindle? There's nothing going on there. Well, I'll tell you what it is for the Kindle is I find it very difficult to retain things that I read on screens. Yes. And there's been research that proves this. I don't remember the woman's name. I think her name, Marianne Wolfe wrote a book about this called The Reading Mind or something like that.

That's a squid. Wasn't there? I know the book. Well, she had a great book. Proust, Proust, a squid or something. Yeah, exactly. Oh, what a great book. Yeah.

So she talked about it. this. And so what happens when you're reading on a screen, whether it's, you know, Kendall, so think about an article you've read versus a book you've read. Like, I know way more about the books I've read and I can talk to you about those for hours. You asked me about articles I read. I couldn't tell you what I read yesterday on the internet. And that's because we don't actually read when we're reading on screens because we tend to scan and we scan in the sort of F pattern, right? Where you kind of just do like literally you read the top line, you read the middle, you read down and then that's it. So you think you kind of get the gist of it, but you

don't. And I found that almost all of the best writers I knew, Ryan Holliday, Danny Shapiro, people who had really poetic voices, they all swore by physical books. And after that, that was all, and it's a pain to carry around physical books. And I know this because my, my wife gets mad to me about this. My roommate's like, we're going to need a storage facility just for these damn books. And they're still coming. Like they're, you know, Ryan had to hire a special moving company for the books. Yeah, Ryan's libraries. Yeah, Ryan's libraries to do this. They're a library moving companies. like specialize in moving books.

Yeah. And Ryan recently opened up a bookstore. So that should tell you how many books he has. I had to hire movers when I came into this office to get my books into the office. It's also crazy. Okay. I'm with you though, too. I will do e-books though, Ivan, but I only do them when it's I need this today.

Yeah. So I will do that. I'm like, I'm working on a book and I'm writing a chapter. And I'm like, oh, I need to read Marianne Wolfe's Prussian Squid. Like, I think I need that. And I need it today. I'm going to write. I'm going to go through it.

today because there's some stuff in there I need. And typically it's when I know there's like three chapters I need. But I will always do paper books if I can otherwise because of my pencil and pen. Because I've my library out there, every book in there you can pull off and see yeah, exactly what I marked. That's interesting.

Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows, Ivan, if you want to see a good summary of Wolf's research on the F pattern, that's where I first encountered it, is the, he talks about it. And I wonder if I have an easier time with e-books because I do a lot less, like, phone and tablet time than, like, if I'm compared to, like, a 23-year-old today or something. Probably, yeah.

I might not have the same F pattern because I read my news in a paper newspaper, for example. Like, I don't do a ton. I don't read a ton on my screen except for, like, stuff I'm actually writing. So maybe, maybe I'm a little better there. All right, Christiana, let's do, ooh, all right, I'll do two more questions here. So Christianana says, I'm intrigued with your working backwards career advice. You suggest to think of the life you want and work backwards to a career from, that larger vision. Can you share tips on how

to do this? I find that having a singular grand vision is very difficult for me to conceptualize. Okay, this is good because I want to get Shreeny's opinion on this. That's funny because I was like, this sounds like your domain, not mine. Well, yeah, yeah, but you have an interesting backstory. Okay, so first of all, Christina,

or Christina, I'm sorry, not Christiana, Christina, um, the thing you're summarizing here is not exactly what I suggest, and this might help clarify things. So, she's saying, I have a hard time finding a singular grand vision for my career, which I think is almost impossible to do. I mean, there's some cases you can.

You're like, okay, I have an incredible athletic ability at a young age. I know I have a shot at the NBA. Okay, you can kind of have a grand vision of I want to get to this type of contract after whatever. But what I was talking about, and what you're talking about, Christina, is the working backwards is working backwards from lifestyle. That's the advice that I think you're picking up on. And it's something I wrote about years ago before so good they can't ignore you came out. And I think I called that essay something like the most important piece of career advice. No one ever told me or something like this.

And the idea was think about what you want your life to be like. Or get the content of the work for now, right? I mean, what is it that resonates with you when you hear stories of people and you read biographies? Is it you think about a simple life? When you read Wendell Berry, when you read like Bill McKibben up in his cabin in the Adirondacks writing the end of this? Is that what gets to you? Like, I'm in nature and I have space and it's quiet. It's in the field and I'm with my kid.

Or is it like this sort of hum of lost generation style? I'm in a bar and it's like with other creative types. There's the energy of the city. Like really thinking about lifestyle. Are you master of the universe type? Like we're making moves. My startup's going. It's really growing.

Or is it, you know, you're imagining something completely different. Like I'm working with, you envision the lifestyle that causes residence because your body will respond to these sort of general images of lifestyle in a way that doesn't respond so much to a job description. It's a little harder. You're like, I'm a senior social media brand manager. Your body doesn't know physiologically what to think about that.

And then that advice, Christina, was you work backwards and say, okay, what are the different paths to a lifestyle like that? And then you start trying to match actual, okay, what work is available to me? Oh, I see if I took this job and at first it would be kind of hard, but then if I can develop these skills, I could go over the consulting and cut the hours in half, and then I could move to Western Massachusetts, and then I could do the whatever. working backwards from the lifestyle. It's not the only way, obviously, to do career advice,

but it is the opposite of what your worry is. You don't need a singular grand vision of what's all going to happen. You're trying to identify lifestyle traits. So I think there are two things that I found, you know, in this process. So I think it was Tina Selegg, who told me, and she's a professor at Stanford,

she's a passion follows engagement. And the problem is, and you yourself said, you know, we put the cart before the horse when it comes to passion because people actually start with a passion. They don't start with what they find engaging. If I had done that earlier in my career, I probably wouldn't have fired from every damn job I ever had

because I had this idea that I was passionate about all these things I actually hated doing. And you mentioned job descriptions. I think that job titles are actually probably the worst thing because a job title. People say, I want the title of senior director. Give us a turn. Yeah. They're like, I want the title of senior director of something, but they don't think about what are you actually going to be doing in that job? Are you actually going to find your duties in that role engaging?

Or I want to work for a sports marketing company. I get that a lot. Do you know what it means to work for a sports marketing company? What are you actually going to be doing there? It's not like you're going to be hanging out. You're not hanging out with LeBron James or sitting courtside with Jack Nicholson at the Lakers game. You do an Excel squad. You do that when you own an NBA team, which is my next goal, by the way, which is the only reason I'm doing any of this.

So you're doing lifestyle centric career planning. You're like, okay, the lifestyle I envision involves being court side at the Lakers. You're working backwards. Exactly. Not even court side. We're joking. I remember the Milwaukee Bucks. won the championship this year.

And I was my roommate. He was like, well, we sit in Courtside. I was like, court side is where the poor people sit. We're going to sit in the owner's box. Exactly. It's like, that's where the poor people like artists and musicians sit.

Yeah, those are the $5,000 seats. Come on. With the $50,000 box. Come on. So, no, but the thing is that we never think about that whole idea of what we find engaging. So I discovered that in the process of building unmistakable. I didn't, this wasn't my job. I actually literally worked as a social media manager at an online travel company.

But what I started to notice. was that I would just do this thing with these interviews. I was like, wow, I'm like, I get up at 6 in the morning and I do this. Nobody pays me to do this. I'm not making any money doing this. Why am I doing this? And it's because I find the process engaging. And so what ends up happening is if you find something engaging, you're going to stick with it.

If you stick with it, you start to develop where and valuable skills. Then you go from that to mastery. So it's basically passion follows engagement and meaning follows mastery. And so what I would say is when you're looking for opportunities or when you're different things is to, above all things, pay attention to what you find engaging, and then start to figure out, you know, where are the different places where I can incorporate all of those things? Because this pattern of, you know, expressing my creativity using technology, because people, at the core of what I do, when they ask me, what do you do, I say, I use the internet

to make things. And I've been doing that ever since college. My default question, anytime I see a new piece of technology or a new app, is what can I make using this? And I'd realize, what I find truly engaging is using technology to make things. Yeah. It wasn't. podcasting per se. Podcasting is a byproduct of that idea. You built that original blog and 53 files up there. Yeah. So that to me is really where I would go. I mean, that's the one thing I think I was not told. The other thing I would say is that, you know, if you mismatch talented environment, you're inevitably going to get lousy performance. And this is where corporate America falls apart in my mind. Because they put people on performance and proven plans. They never question

whether the person is in the job in the right first place. I know this because I've been put my fair share of performance improvement plans. Yeah. And so they're mismatching talent and environment where sometimes that same person, if you put them in a different role, would absolutely thrive. Yeah. Yeah. Find a role that matches.

All right. So gut in this sense then. And it's not gut. Again, all of this comes back from, it's not necessarily the specific content of the work. But the gut about this type of thing engages me or not, but this type of job engages me. That's the part I will add is the sort of very non-job-specific gut. And my example for my life was leaving undergrad.

And I wrote an op-ed about this. This was way back when so good that came out, I wrote like a New York Times op-ed about this, New York Times piece, about deciding between grad school or Microsoft. So it's a computer science guy, and I had the job offer from Microsoft, and I had the sort of the MIT grad school. And Microsoft would offer you money,

and, you know, MIT would not offer you that much money. But the thing that really, and so I'm talking about that up, But the thing that kind of took over there was my gut was the lifestyle of a more busy corporate job. Like, let's hustle, let's roll. Like, we got a product going out there. Let's like kill it in the marketplace. It just didn't feel right.

You know? I don't know. I feel stressful. I don't want someone telling me what to do. And so I went with the grad school job entirely from a lifestyle perspective, for the most part, of I think I would have a lot more freedom. And I remember having to thought, I could probably keep writing a lot easier if I had a lot more freedom. So it was just the feel for, like, what I was looking for. I wanted a more autonomous life or I had more free time and I could kind of pursue projects and not have to get up early and necessarily work long hours or put on a tie or something like that.

And it was just a feel about the lifestyle. So I guess, Christina, both of these things would come back to, you don't need a singular grand vision for how everything's going to unfold. And so you can think about what is it that's actually engaging you. Passion will follow engagement. Great notion. Definitely so good that Kagnore talks about it. And I'm saying focus on lifestyle too. If you want this type of, I want the family and I want to be in a suburb and I have these memories of my childhood I want to recreate, that's going to put you on a very different path than another way.

In other words, it's the lifestyle insight can help give you an intelligent way to shape the professional choices you make and then how to go forward and how not to get in the trap. And we'll don't take this promotion, go over here because what you really need is the autonomy from the skill, not the more income because the autonomy is going to help you hit this lifestyle better. or no, I want the box seats at the box game, so I have to go for the promotion because that's what's going to get me there. I hear that. All right, so one last question. Kind of a deep life question.

So, Shreeny, you did, you were on a reality show. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Real CEOs of whatever. No, but you were on the show Indian matchmaking. It was a Netflix series. Tell us what we don't know about how reality TV works. I mean, because it had the typical beats of like talking, like a mix between Veritas,

like showing things happening and then talking heads or something like that. I'm just curious into nuts and bolts. Yeah, well, it's funny. So, you know, you and I're here in D.C. And I'm here because I met a girl, not because of the show, kind of indirectly. And she's sitting here in the office. So she and I watched. Yeah, we should say, Rini is.

Yeah, we do have another person in the room. She's like basically in the peanut gallery here. Yeah. This is just the moment. We've broken the record for the most people in the studio at once, by the way, with three. She had me rewatch the show a year later because I didn't want to see it again. I was done with it. I'm like, all right, you know what?

I lived through this experience and now I've seen it on TV once. And I had to deal with, you know, being inundated with all sorts of strange questions for about, you know, three, four weeks afterwards. But there are a lot of things that you don't see. The first is that everything in reality TV is made by editing. The job of a reality TV producer is not to showcase reality. Reality is pretty mind-numbing. You know, if people just sat here and recorded, you know, you and I hanging out for the, the afternoon.

Yeah. You know, like if me coming to your house, people are like, well, that's pretty boring. But if somebody took it and basically clipped different, you know, sections together in segments, they could tell a story that isn't entirely true. So how much were you filmed? I think they're in this show. There's probably just like two events involving you. Yeah.

So there's like a date or two events or something. There's a date and there's a meeting with the girls' parents. Yeah. And so they filmed those. They filmed those. Right. And the thing that I was really cognizant of is that I already had a public presence. And so I thought to myself, like, okay, this could be a nightmare if I'm not careful.

Because I knew that they can do anything they want with the editing. But the thing is, all they can use is what you give them. So we weren't getting authentic Shreeny necessarily. You were getting Shrini being mindful of the fact that, wait a minute, a lot of people are going to see this potentially. I don't want to act like an idiot. So, you know, I called my dad and he's like, when I found out I was meeting this girl's parents, he said, be polite. I was like, that's the advice you can give me as somebody with a PhD. I was like, that's useless.

So then I called my cousin in India and she lives here but she said, okay, tell you what. She said, don't give too many specifics. Be vague if the matchmaker asked your questions. And then she gave me the most priceless piece of advice when it came to dealing with the matchmaker. She said, do what you do best. Interview her. So when they put me in the ride along with a matchmaker, I went in thinking, lady, I'm a conversational wizard. You're not going to get anything out of me.

I don't want to tell you. And I just peppered her with questions for 45 minutes to the point where she could only ask one question and I gave her a very vague answer. So that was one big thing because I had a cousin who's a media attorney and I asked him. I said, you know, here's the media release. Can you look at it? He said, look, this is a standard release. It doesn't matter what the release says. Anybody can make you look like an idiot in editing.

Your job is to give them zero ammo they can do that with. Yeah. So, okay. But then, that's in both ways. So they film, there's certain events where they're filming. And do you have to do talking head stuff? You do a little bit of talking head stuff. So for you, it wasn't a huge amount of time.

No, it wasn't. Because this was pretty condensed. Like we want you, it was near where you already lived or. No, actually, I had to fly to Houston. You had to fly Houston, but they said in like a couple days. You go on this date and there's just cameras just sit standing there, I guess. Okay. And then you're going to do this right along with the matchmaker.

Yeah, I mean, it was all in one day. And then come to a studio, come to a studio and do some talking heads or? No studio. Everything was all on various on-site locations. So I think I did. Yeah, I mean, everything was on. So I flew it on a Friday night. This was another one of those weird things.

They didn't even tell me who I was going to meet until I got there on Friday night. Yeah. And then the next morning, they started filming, I think, at 11 o'clock. We were done by about six or seven. And the thing that's interesting is if you go back and watch it and we noticed this. I didn't notice this. Rini did yesterday. She pointed it out to me.

There's a lot of scenes in there where if you look, the way it was cut, you're like, this is the same. It was like they filmed certain people talking for an hour. And then they put those segments on and clip them onto other parts where they actually didn't happen the way that they filmed. So that's the other thing. Nothing happens in the order that you actually see it in. So like if they were showing the date, they're going to mix max the order just to get a whatever.

And they'll add things in that weren't actually. So for example, somebody could say something. Reality shows have writers. They have editors and writers. You figure out what's the art. The job of a reality TV producer is not to basically showcase reality is to entertain their audience, just like the job of a podcast. So once you understand that, you realize their job is to create a narrative.

And so they could film something that has absolutely, nothing to do with what has just been shown on screen and they could say, you know what, let's add that little sound bite where this girl says this onto that, even though it had nothing to do with that and wasn't even related to that. But you were probably, it seems to me must be different today versus 20 years ago.

Yeah. Because everyone is so used to being filmed and documented and self-documented and self-documented and all of this, that it must be harder. I don't know if it's hard to reality shows as a producer these days, but everyone is so aware. Yeah. Like, oh, I get this camera. I'm used to being on cameras and like I don't know what context is. will be put in.

I don't necessarily think that's entirely true. I think it's because you and I are public figures. You and I are hyper aware of how we come across. Well, you came across, right? What's your opinion? I mean, he came across well, right? I mean, he basically was edited into a, like, a non, like they, I mean, they were able to look.

They made you into a backdrop against which this other character could, you know, pretty much. That's what I think they were interested in was making this other character a good TV. Yeah. So you were like just a like, oh, he's like a very reasonable person. They weren't trying to execute a storyline about you of like, look at this person has X and Y. Yeah, no, no, no, at all. You were the straight man. Really do any, you know, in a lot of ways I kind of was neglected.

I mean, I think now it's not a bad outcome. Yeah, no, I trust me. And, you know, I met her because of it. So that all worked out kind of well. No, the thing that I realize now, looking back, you know, when I was watching it was how often the matchmaker completely ignored everybody's actual preferences. It was just like, let me give you all my preferences and then, and then she's like, let me match you with a person who's the exact opposite. Yeah, it doesn't give you a lot of confidence in that profession. No, not at all.

And there's a lot of other sort of mystical nonsense, you know, just new age nonsense where you have like face readers and palm readers and all these people who just seem to be making things up that I'm like, wait a minute, a face reader? Like, what qualifies this guy to be a face reader? Like, you can't go to college and get a PhD in. That's right. There was. They bring people in. And I was like, okay, this guy's not a social scientist who studied facial expressions in labs. You know, this is completely, like, so those kinds of things were literally put there primarily to make it entertaining is what I think now. That's interesting. Yeah.

Now, they, in this instance, they let the matchmaker do her work and then they would ask the persons that she found, would you be willing to also be filmed? Or was there a separate cast? So she's not really matchmaking, I guess. No, so the cast, they picked all in advance. And, you know, because it was really strange. So what's the matchmaker do? Am I revealing the trade secrets here? I'm revealing trade secrets.

I'm going to get you serious by Netflix. We're beginning to have a lot of questions about her credibility. Because one, you know, nobody from the show actually was successfully matched. Not one. Every person was matched with people they were incompatible with. What's the background rate, though? This is what I want to know. What percentage of people going to Indian matchmakers actually end up successfully matched?

Because the background rate might be really low. That's a good question. We don't know. I mean, so here's the funny thing, right? So they show this scene at the beginning where she's like going through all these things, like, you know, preferences and, you know, all these different things. And it's like, oh, I've done a thousand matches. I mean, if you had done a thousand matches, the way that you approached this would have been

much more systematic. I mean, you and our systems thinkers. Like, I literally was thinking, I was like, wait a minute, you would, even if you weren't using an algorithm, you would have a way of making sure the people in the database that you match with each other, have a high chance of compatibility. Maybe she just counts as match like I literally just got them to do it. Or maybe she did six million attempts, right? So you don't know the DOMA.

We're missing a lot of context. We're missing a data. Out of those, I've done a six million attempts, I've done a thousand matches that were successful. 800 people today. It's like having a really bad shooting percentage or like batting average at baseball. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, that's interesting.

That's interesting. Okay, one last thing about that unrelated specifically to the show is I'm sure you saw working on this, you know, being involved in a show. that the overhead of that just costwise must have been huge, right? Like all these, or do they have it down more to, because I went down a rabbit hole of reality TV production. Yeah. Like, I know discovery, part of their profitability is they got the number down to about $400,000, $400,000 per hour to their production costs. As they really got those type of cameras, journey,

I think they got down to a very small crew, and probably maybe that's what you're seeing with the Netflix. Well, it depends on kind of the nature of the content, right? So if you think about Indian matchmaking, overall, you're working with a cast that's completely free. So that costs you nothing. Yeah, it's just crew. Crew. Your crew is basically what cost you money. And they're all basically contractors.

The sets are all paid for, so you're not paying for locations ever. Maybe people got paid for the locations got paid somehow. But come to think of it, you know, my date was an axe throwing date. I don't remember even seeing the name of the axe throwing place in the show. But it's full time. But it's full time. You know, you have these editors. is these cameramen, these whatever

for probably a 12-month production run or something that it's like salary and benefits. Yeah, I kind of wonder how much. For Indian Matchming, I don't know. But I know the hired local crews and the whole game. You can definitely do a lot of things on a budget in a way you couldn't before.

Because right after, I think pre-Indian matchmaking, just for fun, I took Ken Burns' documentary filmmaking class on Masterclass and I decided to make a documentary about the women in my family. Because they're all amazing cooks who make the most delicious food with no recipes. So I just made the documentary short called Zero Recipes.

And I shot the whole thing with an iPhone. I used a couple of microphones. And the production quality was surprisingly good. So I thought to myself, wow, basically a lot of the documentaries I see are just talking heads, but they're edited really well. So a lot of the magic and almost all of this comes down to editing. Yeah. Well, and so this is my theory, my sort of media, future media theory,

is the interesting bifurcation we're going to see going forward. this age of streamers is that we're going to see things push to both extremes. So there's obviously a huge market for the $4 million an hour production cost shows. So these are the prestige shows that the big streamers can put their money into, right? The Game of Thrones or Ozarks or things where it's really high quality prestige series done with really good people. And there's obviously a market for it, and it scales right. And if you're Disney Plus or something, you can you can make a living with these Star Wars shows and stuff like that and these Marvel shows. Yeah.

What was below that before was the Discovery sort of $400,000 an hour production cost reality show. And I think that is what that middle is going to go away because now you have the $1,000 an hour bottom-up entertainment, right? So now I can get a pretty good camera, I can get good editing, I can get production values that roughly approach what you see in the matchmaking

or in a Discovery Channel show. It's not that too hard. You have one staff and you can get a pretty good camera with a good lens and get the right lighting and it's not so bad. And now you have this incredible competitive field of exploring every niche, pulling up talents that never would have been discovered before. And I just think those shows that were being produced to fill that niche for discovery or whatever. You know, they're okay.

Like every once in a while you get a real spark of talent. Like you get the, what's that show, the fixer up or, right? Like where there's like a good spark of talent with that, you know, and then it really takes off or whatever. But I just think when you can basically approach to production values of a thousand an hour production cost or something. And you can have 20,000 people taking a swing. Then you're going to get out of that more of these fixer-upper type talent pairs.

And it's the death. And this is the problem with, I think, the Discovery Plus streaming channel is, yeah, you have all this reality content to push through the channel. But I think Longtail Streaming is going to eat that up because it's going to be, you know, someone like you or someone like me that has a show that doesn't cost nearly that much, but it looks pretty good. And we have an audience that likes what we're doing. And then there's 50 of us that it doesn't work.

And so that's what I think. Well, I think that what you're speaking to is the complete fragmentation of the media landscape. This is why anytime somebody who I hear about who's an interviewer is like, I want to be the next Oprah, I was like, okay, one, that's a terrible goal because it's literally impossible for anybody to be the next Oprah. because what ended up happening is technology completely fragmented the media landscape. I remember I gave a talk to a big media company. I think it was Meredith Corp or whatever it is. Like they own a bunch.

I think better homes and gardens, like all those types of magazines. And I told them, I said, you know, the thing that you guys have to deal with, the biggest threat to big media companies who have unlimited resources are individual creators with limited resources, but unlimited resourcefulness and imagination.

And tools that are damn near free. this point. I mean, Stephen Sutterberg did a film using nothing but an iPhone. He shot an entire film. Yeah, just to do. Yeah. Yeah. So the fact that, like, a Hollywood director is shooting a film with an iPhone, that tells

you, and then, you know, layer onto that as artificial intelligence becomes better and better. And we're starting to see it finally getting to a point where some of the things that's doing are kind of amazing. You know, with GPT3, I think, we're spitting out landing pages. And the copy is surprisingly good. Like, even if you don't use the landing page itself, we've done that, where we literally did the entire course landing page using nothing but.

AI. I wrote all the module descriptions using AI. I didn't write any of them. And other than making some tweaks to the landing page so the copy flowed, almost all of it was done by an AI. Now, we're doing that with copy. Imagine what happens when you get to a point where we don't need actors anymore. We can model an AI to create the voice of the actor, to mimic the movements. And at that point, like in Roadrunner, like in the Bordane documentary, they used to model for his voice. Well, the idea, really, if you think about it, there's going to be a certain point at which it's not going to be technical proficiency. it comes to tools, it's going to be your ability to conceive what's impossible.

Yes, exactly. And then, and again, going back to our original discussion early in the show, that does not mean that the riches are going to be democratized. It means that the talent filtering is going to be democratized, which in the end for consumers, I think, is good, because now we're taking a swing on 100,000 different people trying to do interviews. You're going to end up with five interviewers that are a lot better than it's 30 years ago. You're like, okay, one of the six late night shows has an opening. like, okay, is Craig Ferguson available? There's like six comedians. You're like, I don't know, let's just try one of these.

And now it's going to, yeah, we're going to get a shot. And you're going to get the niche, which I think will be a little bit more democratizing, that you can have a niche that the example I point to, there's a couple examples I point to Adam Savage and Tested.com. Right? So he was one of the Mythbusters. It's like a channel and it's DIY making stuff. And there's like an audience for that.

And the production values are great. I think they have five people. the staff. They've got a nice headquarters in San Francisco. They got one good camera guy and a good editor. And it's great, right? I mean, people subscribe to it. I want to see people building things. And then you have Steve Ronella's meat eater. So he had like this hunting show and he's compelling. And now he has his own, basically, media channel. And they got a bunch of investment and they filmed their own TV shows. Like, here's our show. This is a show about fishing. And we have drone cameras and whatever. And they're not paying that much to produce it. And they have another show where

they bought 40 acres up in upstate Michigan. Like, we're going to convert this into a wildlife preserve or something. And they made a reality show on it. And I bet they're doing a tenth of the cost of a Discovery Channel show. So, yeah, I think we're going to get niches. We're getting niches and talent filtering. And so you're going to have, you know, the Mandalorian. And you're going to have, you know, productivity hour with Cal Newport or whatever, or whatever.

But what you're not going to have in between anymore is, you know, like an animal planet show where it follows some vets who, like, try really hard to be animated in their camera talk or whatever. all right well we've got we've gone a sundar this is neither of our expertise but shirini i really appreciate you to actually coming by the actual hq yeah as i i told you before he came on we're about one week away from having the cameras turned on so so unfortunately we're not going to have you know uh we're not going to have the beautiful film well And other people know the sound of my voice anyways. That's right. People know what you look like now anyways, yeah. So before, once the Cal Newport Productivity Hour and Variety Show gets going, then you'll be having back as guests so people can see my face.

See your face, yeah, but you're going to have to bring a talent. Okay. But, you know, it's just about ratings. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I just think it's a good angle, you know. Totally.

And the face reader. So we'll be good. Yeah. All right. All right. That was fun. It's nice to have another voice in here. Help me answer your questions.

I'll be back on Thursday. Just little old me answering your questions alone. But thanks to Shereenie for helping out today. Go to Calnewport.com slash podcast to find out how to submit your own questions. And until next time, stay deep.