Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 178: CALLS: On Doing Hard Things

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcastVideo from today’s episode:  tinyurl.com/b2rkctfjDEEP DIVE: On Doing Hard Things [4:42] LISTENER CALLS:- People who are bad at planning [31:56]- What did Cal learn from his mom the computer programmer [40:42]- Students working on weekends [45:49]- Living a deep life with anxiety (warning: lecture alert) [56:52]Thanks to our Sponsors:Blinkist:  Blinkist.com/DeepAthletic Greens:  Athleticgreens.com/deepJUST EGGNew Relic:  Newrelic.com/deepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, 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 178. I'm here, my Deep Work H.Q. I'm joined, as usual, by my producer, Jesse. Now, Jesse, do I look more tanned and relaxed? You look very tan. Like Mark Sisson. Like Mark Sisson.

I look like a 65-year-old man. Like Mark Sisson. I just got back from Mark Sisson's home stomping grounds of Florida just a few days ago. And let me tell you what the important thing was about that trip. I didn't work. All right. And that's rare for me because when I go on any type of vacation. Now, this was a short one, but when I go on any type of vacation, I pretty soon get antsy.

If I don't have things to think about, if I don't have progress to be making. So I'm usually working on a writing problem, a writing project, or a math problem I'm trying to solve. and I'll walk the beach and I'll try to make progress. And I didn't bring anything like that. I didn't write and I didn't try to solve anything. I mean, I did a little writing in my head. But I wasn't like actually typing and making progress. I wasn't trying to solve anything.

It was nice. How many books did you read? 12. No. One and a half. One and a half. So, oh yeah, by the way, what are we now? The 25th or six.

So yeah, we got another book episode. time we record we'll have books. I will admit, so we're recording this on February 25th, and I finished my five books in February early in that trip. So now I'm working on two books concurrently that I'll finish in March. So I'm sort of on my way. And I'm working on a really big book in the background too. And I don't know how to report that because it's going to take me. It's an 800-page beast. And so I just work on it a little bit at a time in the background. And so it doesn't get captured in my monthly reports, but that thing's rolling along as well.

So a lot of good reading got done. Saw some sun. Saw some dolphins. Did not see Mark Sisson, but it was all in all a good trip. But not working is a big deal for me. It's actually wrangling family and looking at the ocean and doing what one does. So it's a good trip.

Good to hear. So I figure we'd do a little deep dive and then get into some listener. calls. I was thinking this might be a good time to remind people, Jesse, that if they go to Kelmnewport.com slash podcast, there's a link on there about how to submit listener calls. You can do it straight from your browser. It's easy to do. And we use those and appreciate those. We use those right in the show. Also, I guess I should remind people. I always forget to do this, but YouTube page is up. So if you want to see videos of full episodes, or videos of each individual question and segment we do.

All of that is on the YouTube page. We finally have our own URL. So you don't have to just look in the show notes. You can just remember YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media, one word, right? Yep. What was the one? We couldn't get Cal Newport, right? Somebody has it, I guess.

Makes me nervous. But then when you try to go to it, it doesn't go to anything. Yeah, it makes me nervous. There's a Twitter account. So there's been a lot of fake Cal Newport. Twitter accounts off and on. And usually they're fine. We had to get one taken down because it was getting a pretty inappropriate.

It was my picture and my name, my bio. But there's one now that's actually doing pretty well. I think they're up to 800 followers that they're clear in the description, at least, that this is not, this is not Cal Newport. He's not on social media. But as far as I can tell, the Twitter account is just my quotes. And I don't know, I think the guy's been pretty well with it. So there we go.

So hopefully YouTube.com slash Cal Newport is not that weird. Remember we found that like Professor Cal erotic ASMR guy? Hopefully it's not going to be that with a picture of me like a big prominent picture of me and just a bucket load of erotic ASMR. It's possible. So I'll pre-worn people. So it's Cal Newport media. That media might end up being critical. It could get rough.

It could get dicey. All right, but let's do a deep dive. So I wanted to talk about this topic of tips for doing hard things. And what's going to be different about this deep dive versus past deep dives is I'm not giving my advice for doing hard things. I actually want to relay some advice that I saw in an interesting video that a reader sent to me from 2020. of an author giving a talk about this topic. And I recently wrote an essay about this talk, and I published it in my email newsletter,

which if you don't get, you probably should. You can sign up for that at calnewport.com, but I figured I just wrote that this morning before we started recording. I said, I want to talk about this on the show. So I brought in some of my notes from it. So here's the setup. The video is from 2020.

It's from the fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson, who wrote a bunch of best-selling series, I've read some of his books. I read Name of the Wind and whatever the second book was in that particular trilogy. And it's really good. And I'm actually now one of the books I'm reading right now is I decided I wanted to read some Ursula K. Gwynn. And I was going back and reading some of her Earth Sea Chronicles, which has, that's from the 60s, but it has some ideas about the true names of elements being critical to the magical system that Sanderson plays with. Anyways, think big successful fantasy novelist.

And he gives a talk in 2020 that was titled, let me have it here, the common lies writers tell you, but this was not really what the talk was about. The talk was about doing hard things. And Sanderson comes right out and you know I'm going to appreciate this. He comes right out up front and says he dislikes the fact that the media keeps telling young people that you you can do anything you want to and you should follow your dreams. And he said, look, that is way too simplistic. That's not the way it works.

That's not going to help anyone to say that. It's definitely a perspective you would hear, for example, in my book, so good they can't ignore you. And he says, okay, here is the more realistic claim. I'm quoting them here. I can do hard things. Doing hard things has intrinsic value. And they will make me a better person even if I end up failing. He said, that's the right way to talk about ambitious goals.

Is there's value in doing hard things. You're able to do hard things and you're going to get value out of it no matter what actually happens, whether it makes you a famous novelist or not or whatever that dream happens to be. And that this is better than telling people, no, of course you'll succeed and you can do whatever you want. And then for the remainder of his talk, he said, so let's talk about doing hard things. And he gave three tips, three tips for the reality, reality-based. tips for dealing with hard things. So I thought what I would do here is I want to go through these three tips.

I'll tell you what he said and then give a little bit of my own commentary on each. So the first tip he gave was make better goals. So when it comes to doing hard things, he thinks we are not good at setting the right goals. We don't help people set better goals. So he mentioned, for example, that in an AP literature class, in high school. He won a minor contest for a story. He wrote and decided,

oh, my goal is to be a successful novelist. And he said, that was not a good goal. It was way too long-term, vague, and grandiose. How do you make progress on that particular goal? In particular, what are you supposed to do tomorrow to make progress towards that goal become a successful writer? he said what you should do instead is make goals that you have control over.

And what Sanderson ended up doing was writing 13 manuscripts before he actually had a book he could sold and he said his goal should have been focused on producing a certain number of manuscripts as an act of practice and having a commitment with each manuscript to be more ambitious than the last to push and develop his skills because that's a goal he could make progress on. I can write another manuscript. I can for sure make this next manuscript be even more ambitious in this way, this way, that way. Those are achievable goals saying be a successful author. That was too vague.

Now my take on this is I write about something similar in my book Deep Work. In that book Deep Work, I talk about this methodology, this business methodology called 4DX, the four disciplines of execution. And I talk about how this methodology, which was designed to help teams. and companies do better, gives us some insight into accomplishment when we apply it to individuals. And one of the core ideas from that methodology is lead versus lag indicators. A lag indicator is the big goal you eventually want to accomplish. I want my next academic paper to get into a top-tier journal. And the problem with lag indicators according to 4DX is that it doesn't give you a clear action.

So they said instead you should focus on what they call lead indicators, which are things you can track and do and control. And they should be chosen such that if you do well with those lead indicators, you're likely to have success with the lag indicators, but it gives you something concrete to focus on. And so for that example, the right lead indicator might be, I'm going to do 15 hours of deep work per week on the paper I'm writing. Well, that I can track.

That creates friction I can push back against. now I can actually make real changes in the intentional application of my energy cancel things, move things, wake up early, progress can happen. So I like Sanderson's idea there and I've talked about variations of that. All right, his second tip,

learn how you work. So Sanderson, when it comes to writing, thinks it's a real disservice when he hears people say things like real writers have an overwhelming compulsion to write and that if you don't have that compulsion you should do anything else and only people who just can't help but write and that's all they can do should be people who should be writers. He thinks that's nonsense.

He says writing is hard and it's hard work to figure out how to get yourself to do it. He is a professional writer and I'm quoting him here. I love writing but I have a hard time sitting down in writing. So even for this very successful professional writer, he says writing is hard. So his advice is when it comes to doing hard things, you have to put in a lot of effort to figure out what works for you that basically get yourself to do that type of effort. And it could differ from person to person.

Sanderson uses daily word count tracking in a spreadsheet. It's like a game for him. He likes that. But he says other people thrive under the social pressure of a writer's group. Other people need a deadline. Now, I talk about this a lot of my own work. I talk a lot about how deep, cognitive efforts are unnatural. It uses a lot of energy.

More ancient parts of our brain cannot immediately see what benefit they're going to get from this energy. What's the threat we're escaping? Where's the food or mate source that this thinking is going to give us right away? And it doesn't have an answer for that. You try to convince your brain, for example, that your 460,000 word epic fantasy novel is going to help you in mate selection, your brain's not going to buy it. It's going to see that you're talking a lot

about wizards with names like Gargamel, who are passing wind spells on elves, and it's going to say, this is not going to get us children. This is not going to get us food. Why are we doing this? And this is generally true when it comes to doing coglily demanding work.

It's unnatural. So a lot of effort is required to trick yourself into doing it. So I like what Sanderson talked about. I would also add scheduling philosophy and ritual. That's why this plays such a big role. Get rid of any decision your mind has about when you're going to do this work. Instead you have a philosophy.

It's always these days at these times. Or at the beginning of the week, I put it on my calendar and it's right there in the same color as meetings I know I can't skip. That time is protected. I don't always feel like I want to go to a meeting, but if it's on my calendar, I'd go. I don't always feel like I want to write, but it's there on my calendar. That's what I'm doing next. And this is also why ritual matters.

Writers will build out these spaces that seem over the top or go to weird places like I wrote about in my New Yorker piece last summer about working from near home, where riders will leave perfectly nice and good homes to go to weird eccentric locations to write just because they associate that transit. They associate that new environment just with writing. That's why Peter Benchley left his bucolic carriage home on Eastwellyn Avenue there. No, he's on Curliss Avenue. Curliss Avenue there in Pennington, New Jersey to work in the backroom of a furnace factory. Why Steinbeck would balance a legal pad on a boat in Sag Harbor.

It's why Maya Angelou would go to hotel rooms and take everything off the walls. So there is zero distraction. And right, laying down on the bed, propped up on an arm, doing this so often that she built up deep calluses on that arm that she was supporting yourself because it's hard to do this work you've got to figure out how to get your mind into there so scheduling philosophies and rituals especially over the top rituals play a big role and i'll say when it comes to writing there's a quote i i've said a few times has bounced around a few times which is basically

what some people call writers block by some people i mean amateurs is actually just the physiological feeling of what it writing, the writing experience is. That feeling of, I don't know what to say, I don't want to, I don't feel inspired, I don't know what to say, I'm stuck, like great, now you've started writing.

That's what it feels like. All right, Sanderson's third tip, break it down. Maybe his most prosaic tip out of the three, but basically, if you have a big goal, break it in the manageable pieces

so you have something to go after, he noted that the book he was writing at that time was longer than the entire Hunger Game series, put together. So he's saying that's such a big, hairy, epic goal because

he'll write 400,000 word plus books, which is crazy. By comparison, my books are usually 70 to 90,000. So it's like five deep works. He's like, you've got to break that down. That can't be your

goal. I'm writing this book. It's no, no, I'm trying to finish the chapter cycle that establishes the backstory. or the wizard gargamel that passes to win spells on the elves, or whatever it is. I obviously know a lot about fantasy books. So I think that's good work.

I think the key part about this final tip is that he says in figuring out what those goals are, that's where all the magic happens, is that we don't give people enough training, especially in creative fields, to figure out what those smaller goals are. He said this is a particular problem in writing, where if you talk to a professional writer and say, look, I really want to do what you do, what's your advice?

They'll just look at you and say, well, you've got to write. Because that's too vague. No, no, what you need to tell me is it's going to take about six manuscripts before you get your chops down. And those manuscripts have to be successively harder in this way.

And here is the level type and source of feedback you need on each to make sure that you're gaining particular skills. You do one on your own. You do one with, two with a writing group. For the fourth, maybe you want to hire an editor a day of their time to like come back and give you harsher. The fifth you want to submit and get notes from the publisher that you submit to.

We need that type of detailed roadmap. It's non-trivial and it's not obvious. You don't just tell people if you want to write, write. If you want to be a musician, play music. You want to be an artist paint. No, these are big, hairy goals that you need to break down. And it's not obvious how they break down. And the thing I talk about a lot on this show in particular is that if you're going to get this information,

you have to go get it. What I mean by that is you have to go to people who know what they're doing. And don't just say what's your advice because they'll just say write. They'll just say paint. Say, I want to hear your story. How did you get there? What was the first thing? Then what was the next thing?

Oh, oh, Sanderson, you wrote 13 manuscripts? Oh, I didn't realize that. So you mean, I can't just do national novel writing month and have the name of the wind be the book that comes out of it. Oh, okay, now I get that. I don't like that's reality, but that's reality. Okay, I have to write 13 manuscripts. How long is that going to take? you know, maybe I'm going to need much more time on this and I think you get the reality, not what you want to be true.

You get the reality of what actually matters for the endeavor you want to do. You get that reality from people who came before, not by asking for advice, but asking for their story. You look at that and you find out what really matters. I talked about this. If you want to see a more extensive conversation about this, when I was on the Tim Ferriss podcast earlier in whatever this was January, I guess I was on his podcast. we get into how I got started in writing. And they go into detail the story about how through connections with my family, I got in touch with an agent, a literary agent, who I promised I'm not going to try to sell you a book.

And I had that agent walk me through step by step. What exactly what a 20-year-old need to do to get a book deal with a major publisher? And she walked me through, here's what matters, here's what doesn't, here's the process, here's the steps. It was not at all what I would have guessed, and it's not at all what most young people I've met who say, I want to write a book due, but it was the reality. And it took me two years, but I followed that plan and sold that book and wrote that book as a senior and everything else unfolded from there. So that's my advice there is, yes, you need to break down your goals, the more manageable goals. It's not always obvious how to do that.

Ask the experts, but not for their advice, but for their story. And you can extract from their story the reality of what matters. All right. So Sanderson, thank you for giving that talk. excuse me for my wizard elf jokes obviously you're very good at what you do and I am of great awe

but that's good advice don't just follow your dreams focus on doing hard things for the meaning of doing hard things and treat doing hard things like a complicated endeavor that requires a lot of nuanced nuanced feedback there we go

you have fantasy guy Jesse um yeah yeah I am do you read fantasy books I read a lot of like science fiction right now. Oh, I see. So. I feel like I should be more in the fantasy.

And I've read some like the classics, but like I get, I think I should be a huge fantasy fan just given my demographics. It's like a semi, semi-nerdy computer science, whatever guy who reads a lot. And I don't know. I lose steam. But I've read the classics. I've done the Lord of the Rings. I'm doing Ursula Gwyn's Earthsea cycle. Oh, I'm reading at least the first one.

Just why not? I like Name of the Wind. So I like Brandon Sarrison's book. I mean, man, it's long. But I like that. But I've tried a lot of other things that I've just, I don't know, I can't get in. I tried Robert Jordan. I was Lord of the Rings.

I read that again at some point. And it's cool. It's written in a mythological meter, if that makes sense, right? So he writes it, he writes it almost like you're reading, because he's an expert in old English, like it's mythological, where like now things are more boldly expository. Like I'm the third person observer,

just explaining everything that's happening. But this had like a more, especially the first Lord of the Rings book. I know, there's like more of like a mythological than I remembered meat or two. The language is a little chewy, you know, like it's,

it kind of sets the scene and it's not all just pure action. And sometimes the description feels more mythological than modern. just objective description of what's happening. So it's a very impressive, very impressive book. Did you like the movies? I kind of get bored in the movies. I don't know.

Do you like them? I did, yeah. Yeah. I just, that's my memory. I rewatch some of them recently. It's my memory in the theater. It was getting a little, a little antsy.

Here's my, okay, here's a Lord of the Rings question about the movies. Because I don't know, no one else seems to agree with this. But to me, and this is, probably unavoidable because of budgets. The world seems so uninhabited.

It's all just empty fields and mountains, and then they'll eventually come to like a city with a king, but it'll be 70 people in the middle, like a giant empty field or this or that. It just feels like there's no people in that world. And so is that supposed to be because after ancient warfare, it's like largely depopulated or it's just a very sparsely populated country, but nowhere in the Lord of the Rings universe,

in the visual movie universe you ever have this feel of like medieval England or something where there's big cities and villages and stuff it's just everything is so empty

was it that way in the books you know I'm trying to remember yeah I don't know I don't remember it's a good question I mean I think the

I read a book about Lord of the Rings uh as part a couple years ago I read a book about the making of the movies that was actually kind of

an interesting book. Like what, everything that went through, like the movie writes and how Peter Jackson got them and how they, like how they filmed it and where they found that like to me, that was actually more interesting. And I think the reality is like they can't afford to, you can't make medieval England.

It's just too many people. So it's easier for it to be sparsely populated. Yeah. Well, let's add this to our list of directions for us not to go with this podcast. Next to we had from last week becoming like a hardcore sports. talk radio show with the premise is I know nothing about sports but I'm very enthusiastic about it and like Pat McAfee where a tank top and stand up and yell but know nothing about sports. And then two, let's not become a like hardcore fantasy discussion podcast.

This is a lot of like, I don't know. I didn't like it. I didn't read it. I don't know. Those are on the list. Our list is growing, Jesse. Our list of things we should not try to discuss on this show is growing. growing with each week.

Fantasy book reviews with Cal and Jesse. Like, oh, though. Seems kind of nerdy. What's next? We out of here in like a crisp five minutes. Oh, man. All right. Well, we have calls,

call an episode looking forward to it. But as always, let's talk about this week's sponsors. I will start with Blinkist, longtime friend of the show. You heard me talking about them in Monday's episode. the subscription service in which you can get these 10 to 15 minutes summaries

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It's what popular right now. So we get a sense of what it would be like, what value you could get out of Blinkist. If like me, you're curious about books and curious about the world of ideas. And so we're doing this unprompted. All right. So if we go to Blinkist.com, what do we, what books are they showing there that are popular? Now, this is where Jesse should lie and say, deep work, digital minimalism, a world without email, are in a category at the top called Can't Miss Modern Classics. Deep work, digital minimalism, a world without email, the Bible. They're in their own box, but be under that box, Jesse.

What do we got? Well, I actually just signed up for my Blinkets account last week, so on a different computer. So when I'm going to this one, it's making me sign in. Oh, so then I need to get it. I need to get my password. Well, what's the first blink? What's the first blink you considered once you signed up for Blinkist?

I read, what I read? I read two of them earlier this week. There were a couple like philosophy things. What was it? Philosophy is a good topic for Blinkist, right? Because it's, let me see what this is before I get into the book. Well, let me ask you this, though, for either of those two philosophy books you read Blinks on, that either of them then passed a bar of like I should buy this or were they both like I know what I need to know from this book and I'm kind of glad I did it.

The cool thing with that is I have a Scribitt account. Do you know what Scribit? You might have. Yeah. Yeah. I think Ryan Holiday talked about it. So it's like $10 a month for book. So I just I went to the blink and then added to the script. That's a good one to punch right there. Yeah. So then you can dive in. All right. So Jesse is invented, I think, a really good one two punch there. So now you can really, you can move quickly through a lot of blinks and then scribid the things that catch. your attention. And then the things that really last after that, you can put it into your library if you really want to get into it. The other thing, cool thing with the Blinkist, is you can listen to the audio.

Yeah, so you can listen or read now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I like to listen. I like the listen option. Yeah, the listen option is great because in my commute, it's about 35 minutes, two, no problem. Yeah. No, I like, I'd like to listen. So there you go. So Blinkist, use it to get that information

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And they figured out the vitamin D can't be in powder form. It needs to be mixed with vitamin K and an olive oil suspension if it's going to work, so you have to add that. And I add it every morning because it's cold and flu season. And I have three young kids in three different congregate settings every day, which means I get roughly 17 colds a week. I believe my kids are probably the source of the evolution of COVID because there are so many coronaviruses going back and forth.

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So I have the limp. All right, let's do some calls. All right, so what are we starting off with today? All right, so we got a call. The first call is basically about the different types of people and how they go about planning. Sounds good. Hi, Cal. My name is Johann van der Pitter.

I'm a Belgian psychologist. And I've been thinking that there's probably a continuum at one end of it. You have people who are skilled at planning or they have become skilled at it. And then you have people who a bit like me aren't so skilled at it. I guess planning involves dividing up life into tasks and then allocating these tasks to pockets of time. I guess it requires some spatial skill. I think I'm not very good at it. It is hard for me to do and it makes me sometimes stressed and a bit.

anxious when I try to do it. You have any suggestions of how people who maybe aren't so talented at it, how they could like move in this direction without attempting to become very good planners in the short time? Thank you. Well, I think it's an important question. And I am going to give you what I think of as planning baby steps, like a way to ease yourself into something that looks more like my time management philosophy. And for those who are interested about that, we did a core idea video about my time management philosophy that you can find at the Cal Newport. Or what's at, YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media YouTube page.

You can find that core idea video on time management. So I do have some baby steps to help you get into that. But let me just first emphasize that, yes, planning is anxiety producing. And that that shouldn't come across if this happens to you. Should not come across as if there's something wrong. It's just the reality of planning is that it's anxiety producing. And the reason is because you are confronting, you are confronting this typically two large stack of things that you have been committed to doing.

You can't easily imagine. imagine how they're going to get done. The planning centers of your brain short circuit when they're faced with this type of overload scenario that short circuiting causes anxiety. I'm simplifying this. There's a lot of other things going on, but that's a simplified way of understanding what's happening. So in particular, when you do weekly planning, this is my experience. When I'm looking over all of my to-do list, when I'm looking over my calendar, when I'm

looking over my strategic plans, and I'm trying to figure out what am I going to do this week, I get very anxious. It is a natural reaction. it's similar to having your heart rate increase when you're running on treadmill. So don't fear that. Don't think that's a problem. That anxiety then fades once you're done planning. When you go day to day and do your daily time block planning, if you follow my system, that's much less stressful.

Because now your weekly plan has already confronted the productivity dragon. It's already confronted the short circuit-inducing overload of tasks and come up with an idea for your week that makes sense. And now you can just look at that idea for your week when you do it. your daily planning, it should be less stressful. So let's start with that. It is supposed to cause anxiety. Now, what I'm going to suggest is for your baby steps is essentially have low granularity plans. Plans that don't get into a lot of detail, but are more structured than just what's next to my inbox.

What do I feel like doing next? So if we're talking about daily planning, I want you to do some time blocking. This is when I'm working. When I'm working, I want to have some say in advance about what I want to do with my time. Get you out of the mindset of the list reactive method where you just react to things that come in and occasionally glance at to-do lists. But to get started with time blocking, make your time blocks very large and quite generic. Here are my meetings. Well, I might as well copy those down into my time plan.

Let me take this big chunk of time here, not get too specific about it, but just say, catch up on email and small tasks. and let me just find one block in that day. I'm going to say work on something specific. All right, this is where I'm going to work on that report. And any other time, you might just say, whatever, email and small tasks. So, like, when you're starting off, you're really trying to have maybe one block each day where you specifically say, even though it's not on my calendar, even though no one's forcing me going to do it, even though I might want to do something else, I'm going to work on a long-term cognitive demanding task during that time.

And the rest is, like, by default, like, let's do, you know, shallows, let's do email, let's do task. Then you might get a little bit better. The way you get a little bit better is add in a focused admin blocks. You do this for a couple of weeks. Now you say, this block right here, I'm going to go run those errands. You know, I have an hour between this meeting and this meeting, so I'm going to eat lunch, and then I'm going to swing by the drugstore and the bank.

Now you're getting used to like, let me be a little bit more conscientious about admin, certain times being better for certain times. task. And then just do that for a while. I have a simple time block plan. There's that like one big block in there somewhere for focusing on something deeply. There's one block in there for like a specific type of admin task and everything else is like, whatever, list reactive, email, looking at to do list.

You'll just get used to that after a while. And then you can begin to add more granularity. And I get into a lot of details about this in the front of my time block planner in particular. I actually have a chapter all about, there's like a book chapter at the front of my planner that's just all about the mechanics of doing time blocking at a much higher level of detail and getting really good at it.

So you can find out about that planner at timeblock planner.com and I really get into it, but that's how I would start. And the same thing with your weekly plan. Do a weekly plan and feel the anxiety and trust it's going to go away, but you can make that weekly plan kind of bad at first. You know, it's like,

I'm looking at my calendar let me just write down a few notes about this week. Like, I need to get started this week on this report that's doing two weeks because next week is busy or something like this. Or Friday is going to be a good day for catching up on something. Like, just make a couple decisions and maybe have a reminder for some habits. Like, don't do anything that complicated, but get in the habit of doing it. And that's the main advice I'm going to give here is the binary from doing none of this planning

to doing some of this planning bad is the key. key binary. That's the hard shift. I do a weekly plan. I don't care if it's terrible. I do it. I do a daily time block plan. I don't care if it's pretty terrible. There's only a few meaningful blocks. I do it. That's the shift that matters. Going from that to doing those things well, that'll come later. It's not too hard. You'll get used to it. You'll feel at impulse. Like if you've done this for a while, I might as well make this better. That's not a big deal. It's going from zero to one. That's the flip that's going to matter. And don't mind, again, don't mind that anxiety around weekly plans. That's just your brain doing what your

brain is supposed to do. So let's say, I don't know how much I can talk about it, Jesse, but we are deep in discussions about version 2.0 of my time block planner and what it's going to be like. I have a lot of upgrades in mind because as I told people, like if you, the time block planner, you're not buying a single thing. You're buying into a system because, you know, you have to get new ones when it fills up. But over time, it's going to keep improving. And probably the longest cycle of improvement is this one we just went through because we printed a bunch up front.

So it's like, okay, until we sell, we have to sell the ones we have before we do new ones. And we've done that. So now we're working on the next one. And as we print them in smaller batches, making tweaks going forward, it'll be cool. So I can't talk about any specifics yet because I got to tell you, in a global supply chain crisis moment, it's surprisingly hard to design new. paper product type things. Stuff you wouldn't even think about being potentially scarce, like glue can be.

So it's been a bit of a journey, but I should have announcements to make soon about new and improved time block planners. Exciting stuff. Yeah. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, definitely. So let's move on. What do we got?

Okay. Moving on here. We got a question. Basically, he has a question about, he thinks your mom might be a computer scientist. And she was a computer programmer. Okay.

So he's got a question about that and types of values she instilled in you. All right. Hey, Cal, this is Michael from Falls Church, Virginia. I recently read in one of the magazine articles of yours, I think it was a New Yorker. You said your mother was a computer scientist. So I can imagine she must have instills some values and habits into you that would differ for most mothers your generation growing up. Could you possibly share some of these values and habits that she instilled?

you that helped shape who you are today. Thanks, and I hope to see you at an in-person event or talk or a bookstore around DC one of these days. Well, yeah, first of all, to your second point, yes, we should hope to see you in person at some point. Once Jesse and I get our act together to organize something, false church is not too far from here. So that would be great. Yeah, so my mom, the article you're talking about was an article I wrote early in the pandemic about remote work. she wasn't a computer scientist. She was a computer programmer,

cobal programmer on series 7 IBM mainframes for the Houston Chronicle back when we was born and raised in Texas. And so, yes, so I talked about in that article, the fact that she was one of the first remote workers and they had set up a terminal. But that's important for your question because what it meant was is we had computers, personal computers in our house in the 80s,

at a relatively early period because, again, as a very early remote worker, she had a personal computer that she could connect into the mainframe and program from home there in Houston. So we had computers in our house in a very early age. So that had an impact on my interest in computers and eventually in computer science because I could ask her what she's doing and she'd tell me what computer programming was. I knew what computer programming was. We had computers in the house. So at a pretty early age, I started computer programming.

and I got pretty deeply into that, and that set up my whole computer science career. Of course, ironically, as soon as I got to MIT in grad school, I said, I'm done with computer programming. I want to be a theoretician, and I haven't programmed a computer since, more or less.

But that was very useful. And the other influence here, and I'm going to say right now, I'm just focusing on influences relevant to my public professional life. Obviously, there's very important influences on my values and me as a person and character, but I don't want to get into all of that right now.

But in terms of things that are publicly visible in my professional life, the other important thing that I got out of my mom is that when we moved, we moved to New Jersey, and I have three siblings, so there's four of us. And we moved to New Jersey, she stopped working for the Houston Chronicle and was just helping to raise the kids because we were at an age where it's four kids. It's a really hard, hard job.

and we generated a lot of chaos. There's a lot of paperwork and things that happen when you move. And my memory was it was quite overwhelming until one of her friends sold her on a Franklin planner. It was like the Franklin planner is a productivity organizational system that was in particular quite popular in the 80s and 90s. And she got very organized and it made all the difference in the world. And it went from chaos like a completely organized, household, a completely organized childhood in a way that was very impressive and very comforting. So I had been exposed all throughout my childhood to the power of being structured and organized

in terms of your calendar, your to-do list, your days, your plan for what should happen. There's a lot of ideas from that original Franklin Covey system that permeate the time management systems I talk about today, looking to the week ahead, figuring out in advance when things were going to happen. Full capture of things. You had all the information in place. Avoiding the chaos of what do I want to do next. And instead having the structure of what's my plan for the day. A lot of that I saw happening as we were growing up. And it meant a very stable structured household. Oh, it's this holiday happening. Those decorations come out. There's these events we do. Everyone gets there. We got to get clothes for the kids. That was a big thing.

Because you grow out of your clothes so fast. And my mom would bring down the catalogs. Like, okay, you have to go through and circle what you want. And there would be the day she called and ordered it. And that I think I took the heart for sure. And that will lead me to be someone that had productivity and productivity systems instilled in my DNA. So those are my two things I will say in terms of my mom's influence on my public, my public professional, visible lifestyle. Me as a computer scientist and me as someone that does some productivity guruing, that goes back to her. That's good question.

All right. What do we have next? Okay, our next question is about weekend planning. Weekend planning, okay. Hi, Carl. My name is Lucia. I'm a low student from Spain. Thank you for your writing on your student advice.

It has helped me a lot. My question is this. You recommend that people don't time block their weekends because it may lead to burn out. However, with students often need to work on weekends in order to live up to the study load. How do you recommend that we approach weekend planning? Thank you so much.

For a student, what I would rely on is my autopilot schedule philosophy, which is where you figure out all the work that regularly needs to be done and you get the days and times in which that work is actually accomplished. So I always use whatever Thursday mornings is when I do the problem set that's due on Friday and I do my lab right up right after my lab on Monday. I have a two-hour window where I just stay in the science library right there and I do the lab write-up that's due every week. And so you just have fixed on your schedule. Here's the times when this work gets done. This work I know that always has to happen.

So that gives you a realistic vision of how much do I really have to do and where does it fit. Now, if you're already filling that up, autopilot the weekends. You might have autopilot things scheduled on the weekends, right? So I don't have to think about it. I'm working on the weekends, but I don't have to think about when or how I do it. This is just what I do on Sunday afternoon.

This is what I do on Saturday morning. So when you're building your autopilot schedule as a student, feel free to just use the weekends as well. And this is different than time blocking. Autopilot scheduling is different than time blocking because you just get used to. I always do this work on this point. And that's very different than I'm wrangling a whole day, beat by beat, what I'm doing.

I have to keep turning my attention from one thing to another, a complicated, intricate schedule where you're locked in until you're done. Now, on the weekend, it's like, look, I do Sunday mornings and Saturday afternoons. I just always do that. I go to the library. I don't have to think about it. It's not going to burn you out the same way. So you write the note that students often do make use of the weekends. But let your autopilot schedule do a lot of that work.

Now, what about the one-time things, papers and exams, studying for exams, writing papers? For that, what I used to recommend in my books on this and also my writing on the study hacks blog is that you were going to create a plan for prep and execution for these one-time big things at least a month in advance. And you figure out what really needs to be done to study for an exam. What is going to be involved in writing this paper? And you get that work onto your calendar far in advance. And I would even suggest, when I used to talk about this to students, I would say at the beginning of every semester, go through your syllabus for each class, find a major one-time things, find the exams, find the papers. Go back one month from each and put a note on your calendar that says, make a plan for this. So you do that at the beginning of the semester.

Now as you're going through your semester, executing your autopilot schedule, everything's fine. You're not time blocking every minute of your day. You're just executing the schedule that's the same every day, every week. And when you get to this note that says, hey, time to start thinking about the mid-time. term. Then you make a plan and you put that work on your calendar like doctor's appointments or other other classes. And now you're back to just say I'm executing. Autopilot schedule. Oh, my autopilot schedule plus today, I have a block of time on my calendar. So let me do that. Today I only have it Saturday at my Saturday afternoon where I always work on my CS problem set.

But you know what? This Saturday I have a study session in the morning on my calendar because I have a midterm coming up. So let me just do that too. And when you're starting, a month out and really spreading this stuff out. What you avoid is this thing is due on Monday. It's Saturday morning. I now have to work all day and all night and all day the next day and all day of the next night to try to get something done because you're spreading work out. So you have plenty of breathing time, plenty of time to recharge.

And it does not feel the same. An autopilot schedule augmented with these pre-planned sessions for papers and exams does not feel the same as, let's say, my situation where I will say, okay, I have eight hours I'm working today and I need to get everything out of those minutes. Let's go. Because as a student, you do not have that chronic overload issue of people are just piling work on you. You have more on your plate than you could ever imagine actually doing. No, you can actually wrap your arms around your work as a student.

You autopilot schedule the regular stuff. You pre-plan the one-time stuff. If that's too crowded, get an easier schedule. Make sure you don't have to be extra curriculars. You can control this. And it's not going to be nearly as stressful as time block planning, even if this work is happening on weekdays and weekends. You know, the good news about that question. that caller, we should say, is that she's thinking about this.

Yeah. That's the biggest issue with college kids and these issues and with student stress in college is that most students that are doing the traditional, I'm 19, doing a four-year residential college, those type of students, is they don't want to hear it. You know, like, I don't want to hear study advice, you know, it's going to make me uncool or something like that. I'm fine. I can just do it. And it's so needlessly stressful and overwhelming.

college, if you do it right, if you keep your schedule reasonable, and don't do the 70 extracurricular nonsense, and don't do the triple major nonsense, and you autopilot schedule and pre-plan your exams and papers, like, you don't have to work at night. And like, you rarely have a busy day. It's not that much work. It all changes when you get out there in the real world if you follow and have like an ambitious difficult job. So it doesn't have the hard.

But the main thing is thinking, I'm actually going to be systematic about how I approach my job as a student. Like that's the zero to one binary for college life that makes all the difference. It did for me. All right. Well, let's do a, before we do a final call, I'll talk about a couple other sponsors here real quick. This next ad comes to you from a company that's cooking the best omelets you'll have all year, all while changing the world one egg at a time. It's called Just Egg.

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and get a nice, cholesterol-free, plant-based product that I can enjoy. The one thing I'll say, Jesse, that I'm not sure about just egg, and it worries me because I haven't tested it yet, is what if I want to throw this at someone that I am trying to jeer or indicate my displeasure? Because this is one of the key uses of eggs is throwing them at people, right? You egg people when they're saying something you don't like, you suspect they might be a witch or a sorcerer or if they are trying to push some, sort of unpopular cause. And, you know, I got to say, this is something I think we need to test out. We need to pelt people with just egg. It's not actually a liquid form.

So I don't know how it's going to work. So we're going to have to figure out how to actually take that product and turn it into something that we can actually pelt at someone. But once we have solved that problem and combine it with the fact that this is a cholesterol free plant-based egg that tastes great and helps the plant because it's good for you, think we'll really be on to something. I think like a disposable sling or something like that. I'm trying to think, like, because it's, you know, it's liquid,

but we could get it into some sort of thing so that you could, you could throw it at someone that you're jeering. All I can think about it is, like, you in the field and Lord of the Rings doing that. It would be counterproductive because there's no one else there. It would just be me alone. And, like, eventually a Brandon Sarranson type character would come by and cast a wind spell on an elizabeth. and I would help them with Just Egg.

There we go. So that's what's going to happen. But no, keep your eyes open for Just Egg. This has been an important part of my routine. I love throwing it in there because I'm an egg guy. All right. Let's also talk briefly about, oh, new relic. Yeah, so I'll tell you, if there's a topic that Jesse won't stop bothering me about in just casual conversation,

it has to do with getting transparency into debugging for your entire software stack. It just bothers me about this. He's like, Cal, I, no, this is not in Jesse's wheelhouse, but it's in my world. There's a computer scientist, and I'm around a lot of computer engineers, people who run computer companies. And I can tell you, New Relic is one of these critical products in that world. right? So if you're running one of these complex software stacks and something breaks, you need to figure out where the issue is. And what a lot of people do is they just start calling people and using ad hoc tools and going on to their cloud interface and seeing what's going on with their processes. That is a chaotic way to deal with problems.

The better solution is New Relic, which combines 16 different monitoring products that you normally buy separately. that allows engineering teams to see across the entire software stack in this one place. You can pinpoint issues down to the single line of codes. You know exactly why a problem happens. You can resolve it quickly. It's why dev and ops teams at DoorDash, GitHub Epic Games, and more than 14,000 other companies use this tool. If you're in the dev or ops business, you know New Relic.

If you're in that business and you're not using New Relic, you should be. I don't know why you want it. So whether you run a cloud native startup or are a Fortune 500 company, it takes just five minutes to set up your relic in your environment. So the next time, the next issue is what I mean to say. See, I'm thinking about pelting wizards. This is my problem. Now I have that in my head, pelting wizards with liquid egg. The next issue is just waiting to happen, so you should get new relic before it does.

You can get access to the whole New Relic platform and 100 gigabytes of data free and forever. No credit card required. Sign up at Newrelic.com slash deep. That's N-E-R-E-L-I-C. Dot com slash deep. New Relic.com slash deep. All right, Jesse, I think we have time for one more call because I'm running late today. But let's get one more call in.

Who do we have here? All right. Sounds good. We got a question, a call about living a deep life. There we go. Hi, Cal, this is Karan. And I took a break from my 33 jobs to retreat to a cabin in the woods and think about, who am I?

What is identity and how is it crafted? And I came up with this heuristic that I would love your thoughts on. And I have a question that I put a lot of thought and research into. First, part of this heuristic that I came up, what is identity? Who am I? And how do I live a deep life? And it go very descriptive into that area. Next is philosophy, digital millimism.

helps back up that identity. Then we have framework. We use digital minimalism as that framework for living a deep life, but we also have the atomic habits by James Clear, and I use that as part of the framework category. After that, we have behavioral and techniques, and this is where, like, the nitty degree, I leave my phone at home and I go for a walk,

I enjoy solitude. And then we have outcomes, which is really important, because we've got to know how do these behaviors, what outcomes do they have? background, how many anxiety goes down. Now, I'm reading Brad Stolberg's book on this idea of how I wanted to keep improving and this idea of always trying to optimize everything. And this is where my question comes in.

Because the last part of my heuristic is feedback. I want to make sure I do better at living the deep life. But this compound 1% interest that you and James talk about and this idea that Brad talks about, it can be like, how do I, if I keep trying to optimize living a deep life, how do I get rid of this background of anxiety? Well, Corona, I appreciate the thought you put into this. And let me just preface my response by saying, just the fact that you were putting this much intentional thought

into how you want to structure your life is 80% of the battle. Most people don't do that. Most people go from one distraction or moment of chemical pleasure to another and hope to string along enough of those to get later on in life. it's not the way to do it. You need a plan. You need to be intentional. The second thing I'm going to preface it is these type of plans evolve over time, and that's great.

The goal is not to figure out the one true plan that's absolutely optimal and then you have it all figured out. Then you execute it. You don't want paralysis by analysis here. You come up with something. You live with it. Check in twice a year. Checking at your birthday to make changes. So you want to make sure that you're spending a lot of time living life and not just thinking about how you're going to live life.

So those are some prefaces. All right. Now, let me start with your last point about beating back the background anxiety so that you can live a deep life. These are unrelated. Anxiety will do what anxiety does. You will feel anxiety sometimes. Other times you won't, there will be periods where it's heavier. There'll be periods where it is not heavier. Your goal is not to make that go away. Your goal is to live a deep life even though you live in a world in which you sometimes feel the physical symptoms of anxiety. constriction of the test, chest, a little bit difficulty of breathing. There's very specific physical symptoms. That comes and goes. Great. What's next?

How do I still build a deep life? So I don't want you to think about banishing that which you cannot fully control from your life as a precondition for it being good, for it being enjoyable. And I'm going to recommend the book here. So there are, I don't know how much you know about modern psychotherapy, but there's roughly speaking people, think about there being three waves of modern psychotherapy. You have the first wave where you have talk therapy, which sort of came originally out of Freudian modalities. Let's talk things through and try to understand the source of issues.

Largely this was non-evidence-based therapy modalities. Then the second wave really is like cognitive behavioral therapy. And this was one of the first major approaches to issues like anxiety in which they were using studies and evidence and saying this type of thing worked. And the core book, the canonical public-facing book in second wave psychotherapy is feeling good. And I believe this came out, so the 70s or 80s. And it introduced cognitive behavioral therapy to a larger group. Third wave psychotherapies is built more around what is sometimes called acceptance commitment therapy or act ACT. There's some other things in there.

But it pulls more from some Eastern philosophies as well. This is where I want to turn your attention. And I want to turn your attention to a book that popularizes ACT, and that is the book, I believe it is called The Happiness Trap. Actually, Jesse, can you look that up and tell me what the author's name is? I want to make sure I got that name right. But it's a book that introduces acceptance commitment therapy to a broader audience. And this is a evidence-based methodology. It's something that studied pretty well.

And I like it a lot. I think it's what I want to preach to you right now. Because at the core, I can tell you what's at the core of acceptance, if you'll excuse this digression into psychotherapy. But at the core of this is this notion that, oh, we have a name here? Yeah, Russ Harris, that's right. And it is the happiness trap, Jesse. Did I get that right? Yeah.

That's right. So at the core of acceptance commitment therapy is they look back at cognitive behavioral therapy. And cognitive behavioral therapy directly addresses ruminous. ruminations, these insistent, hard-to-control conversations you have with yourself in your head are at the core of both major anxiety and depressive disorders because if you're obsessively worried about, so you have these talks, these conversation in your head about bad things that could happen, it's anxiety, and if you have these hard-to-control, consistent voices, conversations to your head about what you've done that's bad

and why you suck, that's the foundation for depression. So that's the same thing as the voices. And cognitive behavioral therapy, again, if you'll excuse the lecture here, focused on directly confronting ruminations. And so you would say, wait a second. This is the thing I keep talking about. Let me actually point out the ways in which that thinking is distorted, because often in anxiety and in depression, is very distorted thinking. There's names for the distortion. This is black and white thinking.

This is predicting the future. And you call it out and you push back at it and say, this is the problem with this rumination. and over time that can actually diminish the power of that rumination to keep cycling faster and faster. And this can be quite effective for a lot of things. In fact, I use this quite successfully. If you want a personal story, when I was first having bad insomnia problems early in grad school. And there's a whole backstory to them. But basically, there's very little I get anxious about in my life, even as I do pretty ambitious, big things that should be scary.

And my theory has always been all these things I'm doing that should. should be really anxious anxiety producing. All that anxiety just got funneled into this random weird thing, which was I got very anxious about sleep and I felt physical anxiety every single day. I was sleeping, but the anxiety about not sleeping was every single day. And I read feeling good. I read the book about cognitive behavioral therapy. And this was a case where that worked really well because the ruminations that were creating

this anxiety about not sleeping were disordered. They were clearly exaggerating. And I could call out the distortions. And I had a system where I said twice a day in the morning and in the evening, I'm going to address these thoughts and point out the distortions, but not in between. And in between, my mind's like, let's think about sleep and why we're worried. I would say, I thought about this, and went through it in the morning and wasn't that impressed, and I'll do it again in the evening.

So just wait until then, and then we'll get back to it in the evening. And that actually worked. And the day-to-day anxiety, and for this particular anxiety, it took a long time, but it went away. It was very effective. of ACT came along and said there's certain things for which that doesn't work, right? Because what if the thing that you're anxious about, what if the story there is accurate? What if it's not distorted? And the key thing that really the key thing that led to the divergence of ACT, my understanding of act from cognitive behavioral therapy were panic attacks.

So even with panic attacks, you get a rising sense of panic leads to a place where you kind of tip over an edge and have your, your heart goes. It feels like a heart attack. You can become faint. And it could be like a really just disturbing public thing. And what the act people pointed out was that's not a, if you're anxious about that happening, you're going to go on stage, you're anxious about that happening. It's not a distorted thought.

Like, it really could happen. And maybe this has been happening to you quite a bit. So you can't look at yourself and convince yourself, oh, it's just distorted. Of course, you're not going to have a panic attack. I just had three. I very well could. So cognitive behavioral therapy didn't work as well for panic attacks. And so acceptance commitment therapy was about, okay, you're not trying to challenge the thought.

You make space for the thought. But instead of getting into it, like let's really get into it, you say, despite that, I'm going to go commit to doing something that's value-driven. Because what matters is living true to your values. And like, that's ultimately what matters. I'm going to commit to do that, even though something bad could happen. And act is all about, and you'll read this in the happiness. trap, you're able to separate from the feeling of anxiety.

It's there. It's the eastern part of it. But it's just a sensation. It's just physical. Great. I'm feeling that. It's like my knee hurts. Great.

What's next? And you learn to separate from the part of your mind it wants to tell the stories. We've got to think about this. But what if there's a panic attack? And what if this happens? And what if you, you know, this or that happens, right? And you say, I see that story there. And I'm not mad at that part of my mind.

And it's like a character. And I give it a name. And maybe this is the, this is the, this is the patron. of panic attacks. And I'm not mad at that person, that character in my mind, but I'm not going to get into it with them. What I'm going to do is this thing right here because it's important to me and I want to live true to my values, regardless

of what happens. And so you go do it anyways. And so when they would deal with people with like severe anxiety, they say you go to the party anyways and you give the talk anyways and you do whatever. And I like that. And so this is a very long way around the saying the deep life is about living in a value

driven way, despite everything else that happens. Not about creating a life that these specific good things happen and there is no bad. That's called the fantasy life, right? That's not a life that you're going to achieve. No one achieves that life. We all have our issues. I have the deal with the anxiety with the sleep thing. I have not classic panic attacks, but I've gone through.

I've had, I have weird stuff happens to me. I have whatever, automatic, autonomic, um, um, um, nervous system panic attack style reactions. I've had this all the time. Faint. I'll have like a severe sort of I'll get lightheaded and like my whole body will break out and sweat. Like look man,

I've been through all this stuff and you want to talk about high stakes. How about like, okay, you're about to go on air on this network or you're on stage in front of like a huge number of people. You're here sitting next to the dean. And so I've gone. So we all have this stuff we go through. And because the point is our goal is not to avoid bad things from happening,

avoid bad sensations and have only good things happen to us. The goal is to live deeply, to live true to your values despite it. It's the act mindset. It's the mindset that Russ Harris talks about in the happiness trap. So that's the piece I really Quran wanted to focus on here. It's focus on what you can control and building this good life. The stuff you can't control will come and go. It'll do what it does.

whatever, and you can't, a lot of that you can't control. Be happy when it's, hey, I'm not feeling this thing I don't like. Great, I'm happy. But when it's there, don't be devastated. Be like, crap, but I'm still doing this thing I really find important. So I think that's good.

Now, onto your framework, I mean, look, I nerd out on this stuff all the time. So yes, I, I like what you're doing here. You know, you're building out a system of different layers. You're thinking things through. I think of what you're doing is called a personal operating system that has these different stack layers

that meet together. My only word of warning would be make sure that the fiddling of the knobs doesn't take over the actual living. In the end, you actually, life is hard and complicated, and some days you're anxious, and some days you get sick,

and you're out of commission for two weeks, and you can't follow your system. And you want to make sure that in the end, you're present and have gratitude and are doing interesting things and enjoying good moments and that you're not spending all your time thinking about your system.

But I'm glad you're thinking about it. I like your heuristics. Try them. If they don't work, change them. feel free to simplify them if you feel stressed by just the complexity of your system. I think that's all fine. But let's go back to this original point is the goal of the deep life here is not to avoid the bad.

It is to live good even when the inevitable bad comes and goes. All right, Cron, well, talking about going, I am running late, so we should probably wrap up this episode. Thank you, everyone who sent in their listener calls. If you like what you heard, you will like what you'll like what you you read in my email newsletter, sign up at calnewport.com. You'll also like what you see on the YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media. We have videos of these full episodes, as well as individual videos for each individual question and segment we cover. I'll be back

next week. And until then, as always, stay deep.