Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 200: Decoding the Deep Life

Episode Date: June 13, 2022

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). For instructions on submitting your own questions, go to calnewport.com/podcast.Video from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaDeep Dive: Feedback Councils [2:58]- How can you not lose faith if there is always more to be done? [23:22]- Do you have two shutdowns when you’re working two shifts? [27:04]- CALL: Decoding the Deep Life [32:13]- What are some good Deep Leisure activities? [47:32]- CALL: Looking to write after early retirement [53:16]Books I read in May 2022 [1:03:13]Thanks to our Sponsors:PolicyGenius.comTrybasis.com/CalMagicSpoon.com/CalExpressVPN.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 200. I'm here in the Deep Work H.Q. joined once again by Jesse. Jesse, we missed a week recording together, so it's been a little while, so it's good to see you again. Good to be back. Thank you, everyone, for putting up with our schedule being a little bit delayed.

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

200. We're just coming up on, I was going to say we're just coming up on the two-year mark of the show, but I think we passed it. I'd have to go back and check, but I think it was probably... You started in May. May, late May 2020. So we've passed the two year milestone. We have about six and a half million downloads. Maybe 10 million would be the nice next download milestone. Though I'm less interested these days in total downloads. I mean, that depends on how many episodes you do and other things. I think I'm more interested in per episode downloads. And that's a number that's been going up. Now, I've heard you mentioned to me briefly that you've got some chatter with the inboxes about people being interested in person. Yeah. Do you question? So is that something that you're starting to hear some interest in? Yeah. Several people have reached out and talked about it. And you've talked about it for over a year. Because even when I was just a fan listening it, you talked about it.

Yeah, that last summer I wanted to do it. And then I got lazy and I didn't do it. But maybe, okay, so maybe soon, maybe soon we'll try it. I'm assuming Nats Park. There'll be plenty of seats available. Yeah. He's going to the games. We could do it concurrently with a game. You can play an inning because I'll need a third basement. Exactly. As long as you guys are here, is there anyone who can give us two innings of relief? We're a, whatever it is.

Aaron Sanchez is no longer available. That's good. All right. So we're back in action. 200 episodes. A lot of downloads will be meeting in person at Nats Park soon. We got a good show ahead of us. us. I got a good show ahead of us. A bunch of questions and calls. Later, I will be doing

the books I read in May. I forgot to do that in the last episode because Jesse wasn't here and I forget things when he's not here. So we'll get to that later. First, though, let's do a deep dive. So I'm going to do a deep dive on an idea I've been thinking about. I'm calling this the feedback council idea. And I'm going to open with an article. I don't want to spend a lot of time in this article, it's just going to motivate this bigger idea of feedback councils. So I saw this article the other day. A listener sent it to me to the interesting at caldneyuport.com address. So there was this article that appeared in the New York Times. It was about CNN's new leadership. So this is from June 5th, as you can see here. So what has happened at CNN is there is a shakeup.

there is a new head of CNN, Chris Lict, L-I-C-H-T, who is trying to do lots of things to shake up the network, among other things. Now that Donald Trump's no longer president, they're shifting away from more of a high-energy adversarial style of reporting that try to be a little bit more down the center. There's a lot of changes that Chris Lict is doing, but there was one in particular that caught my attention. That's what I want to highlight here.

So for those who are watching, you can actually see the article. For those listening at home, you just hear me talking about it. So we have right here, producers have been urged to ignore Twitter backlash from the far right and the far left. All right. That, I think, is a good idea. I want to explain why I think it's a good idea because it will give us some ideas about how the rest of us should be thinking about living our lives in a digital world, whether or not we run a network. So to explain why I think that's a good idea, let's start with the notion of feedback more

generally, and in particular the role of feedback for human beings. Human beings are wired, neurologically speaking, to take feedback from other human beings very seriously. We pay a lot of attention to it. It has a lot of effect on how we feel. So we're very wired for this. And there's two good reasons for this from an evolutionary perspective. One is tribal cohesion. So when you can watch and monitor very carefully the reaction of people around you to what you're saying, it allows you to adjust what you're saying in such a way to try to maintain social comedy,

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

But the high level summary there is we monitor the people around us while we are talking and we take that feedback very seriously. It's very affecting. The other advantage of feedback from the humans is that it extends our ability to cogitate beyond just our own brains. And now if there's a group of people, getting feedback from other people in the group on a plan, on an idea, on an initiative, allows you to essentially tap into the cognitive potential of these other brains, forming a larger collective brain that is more nuanced and smarter than any one brain potentially in isolation. This was a great trick of evolution. It requires complex language to do it. But once we have this trick, it really allowed us to upgrade quickly our ability to actually think and make good decisions.

Now, of course, leaving the evolutionary path to going into the more recent cultural past of human beings, we see this extended cogitation idea maybe reach its apogee with the scientific method, where now we can formally receive feedback on ideas. in a very structured and formalized way that really helps aim our attention towards scientific realities away from somethings that aren't. So getting feedback from other people

is a huge part of the human experience. All right, so we take it seriously. Our brain cares about it. The issue with the social internet and in particular, the more recent last 10-year rise of widely used social media platforms on the social internet,

is that it introduced into our cultural ecosystem, system, new forms of feedback. Feedback that we did not have access to before, feedback that is of a decidedly different character than the type of feedback that our brain has been wired to take very seriously. So there's really two things to differentiate the feedback you get from, let's say, Twitter or Instagram versus what you would get from your tribe 100,000 years ago. One, it's a biased sample. So when you're getting feedback from the internet, it's not as if you are randomly

sampling the population and getting a true representative sense of how people feel about what you just said. It's not as if like it is in our Paleolithic path. It's the same group of people giving you feedback that have given you feedback on everything else. So if their opinion shifts, then that's probably represents there's something going on here. You should pay attention to. Instead, the internet has these weird connectivity and virality dynamics where anyone can get feedback to anyone else. And what selects someone to want to give feedback to you can be quite arbitrary or unusual. There could be something about what you said. They got spread through some viral amplification network and it got to some malcontent over here and then they can directly

message you back with some feedback. It's not a true sample of people whose opinions you care about. It's a biased sample. It's unpredictable. The other issue with feedback from the social internet is that a lot of it is in bad faith. If you're talking to, let's say, your sister, in general, they're probably trying to give you good feedback. It's what they honestly feel about it. Social internet-based feedback, by contrast, has lots of other factors going on that is driving it. It might not be a true representation about how people feel about something.

There's all sorts of other dynamics going on. For example, if we isolate Twitter, the service that was pointed out by Chris Lichten, the article we just looked at about, CNN. We see that a lot of the really aggressive backlash or pushback on Twitter, whether it's coming from the far right or the far left, is often about enforcing tribal boundaries, that there is a war going on where neither side wants their Overton window to shift at all towards the other side, and there'll be intense pressure to try to adjust or control what is said and what is not said.

If you look at backlash from the right or the left, what you often see is that it doesn't correlate to how far have you drifted from orthodoxy? Actually, the most intense pushback will be for people who are right at the border of orthodoxy because that's what matters is you don't want that Overton window border to shift a little bit in the opposite direction. So if you're largely on a team and then drift a little bit towards the other team, that's going to get a lot more attention than let's say that you're wildly against what a particular team feels for.

Whatever value judgment you want to give to those dynamics, what we can say is that it's not an action. representative view of how people actually feel. There's other dynamics going on. There's also retribution that happens in Twitter. There's also amplification of straight up crazy people. The bad faith information you're getting from the internet. This has a real problem.

And the reason why, and Chris Lick is saying, stop looking at backlash from Twitter. The reason why the managing editor at the New York Times, as we covered last month, said the same thing to, his writers stop using Twitter, stop paying attention to Twitter, is because let's say you're a reporter, you take this feedback really seriously because we're wired to take feedback seriously

and it can push how you report into weird directions. It's actually not optimal for the information, but it's the hijacking of our feedback apparatus. The same thing can happen to the rest of us as well. Reporters are not. You get that biased, sampled, bad faith feedback from the internet and it can really affect the way you feel, the way you act, what you talk about, what you produce, how you live your life. It is the hijacking

of the human feedback apparatus by a source of corrupted feedback that our brain never evolved to expect. So I think we need to be very careful about this. We all need to do a similar survey in our own lives, similar to what the New York Times or the CNN seems to be doing now and saying let's be careful about what we pay attention to. Now, a bad solution here would be the stop-seeking feedback for our ideas and actions altogether. Again, we're wired for feedback. It serves a good purpose. There's a common effect that academics know about. I call it retired academic syndrome, where you get a very smart academic that are, that's existing in the high energy, constant feedback, back and forth discussion world of their academic field. And then for whatever reason,

they leave academia. They're very smart people that they leave academia. They leave academia. seven times out of 10, especially if they have some sort of public-facing discussion, they will start to drift into increasingly extreme ideas, different topics, but they'll get to extremely weird ideas, or they'll get very cantankerous, or they'll get very upset. And part of what's happening here is they're very smart,

but they get separated from the feedback mechanism that helps them push back and adjust and modify and improve and keep reasonable their thinking, and they end up going crazy. So again, feedback is important. we don't want to ignore it, but we don't want the internet to drive it. So the solution I want to suggest is to create your own what we can call feedback councils. So this is a group of people that you trust,

that have been in your life for a while, that have a variety of backgrounds and expertises. So if you are a tech bro in Silicon Valley, your feedback counsel should not be six other Stanford grads who are roughly your same age and gender and what have you. You want backgrounds that represent things that you might not be exposed to. And then take the opinion of this council seriously on decisions in your life, ideas you're writing or trying to put out there, just your personal understanding. How do I understand this big news of it that's happening? So take that engineered high quality source of feedback very seriously.

Allow it to adjust the way you think and move. But then here's the key thing. Ignore other arbitrary sources of feedback. Ignore if you're a public facing figure, random comments from Twitter, angry direct messages, those weird emails. If you have engineered a high quality feedback council, you're going to get a variety of good feedback. If they're on board with something and it feels right for you, run with it.

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

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

Be getting the mood of actual people out there. But ignore what angry 27-year-olds with too much time on their hands are repeatedly tweeting at you. That's not real life. That's biased. That's bad faith. You need feedback. You bring craves feedback. But it's got to be good.

So anyways, that is my idea, something we don't talk enough about. Our brains take feedback seriously. The social internet and a particular social media can pervert or corrupt those sources of feedback. So we have to be very careful about replacing those with sources of feedback that we trust. So there's my concept. So for people with not a whole lot of diversity in their social console, what do you suggest? Yeah, so you have to try to seek out as much as you can. So, yeah, let's say your friend group is kind of small.

Yeah, and homogenous. See if there's maybe through at work or through family, you know, or a cousin or you do the best you can. But I think you want to, you want to mix like in a perfect world. There's a lot of things you want to. Most people aren't to be able to have this many different factors. But in a perfect world, the things that I think matter is so professional background, matters, right? So if you had class variety, I think that would be useful. So it's not just let me talk

to a bunch of other dual income upper middle class government worker families. Like, can I talk to someone who has a completely different type of job? Geographic diversity probably matters. I think people feel differently if you live in a suburb in the middle of a city in the country, that might matter. I would say gender and racial identity probably really matters. I mean, gender obviously is a huge one. Women and men think very differently about things and don't always understand each other. And then probably age, you know, like you have a sampling of people from different age. You're not going to hit all of those probably in one group.

But having some sorts of feedback. Now, you know, I kind of cheat that a little bit. I use informally long-time reader slash listeners. You know, like this is the nice thing about my online world. It's been around for a long time. Starting with the blog and then it turned into an email newsletter. are now we have the podcast, but it's not huge. And it doesn't have a big social media presence.

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

where your content moves through amplification networks and gets to some corner of people who are upset at you. But when you're not on social media, it's a much tighter-knit audience. And it's really interestingly diverse, different countries, different backgrounds, different types of jobs, working class, non-working class,

all sorts of different racial identities. And I get all sorts of interesting feedback from people. And so it's my secret weapon, I think, is that I have this cabal of really interesting people that's small enough that it's a pretty good sample. And I would say our crazy to normal ratio is really small. We occasionally get some crazies, but we don't get that much crazy.

Do you know any retired professors who have taken, done this? They'll go crazy. They should. It really is common. The problem about being a professor is you're smart so you can convince yourself. It's completely reasonable to you. That's why they get conspiratorial.

It's completely reasonable to you that you could figure something out that no one else understands. And if you don't have that feedback saying, yeah, that might be true. But you've kind of gone off the deep end on this one. Without that type of feedback, they end up in crazy places.

Like being smart is a problem when it comes to conspiratorial or weird thinking. They either get conspiratorial or they get cantankerous and just kind of mad at everyone, you know. So if I ever retire from academia, if I start going on about contrails and,

and radio transmissions in my fillings. Someone's got to intervene. Oh, well. Okay. So that's what I have to say about that. Let's do a couple ads so that we can jump into a good poll of questions that we put together for today. So let me talk first about one of our sponsors, policy genius.

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

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

Now, Jesse, do you think he's talking about... I want to make sure I'm interpreting it properly. Did you think he's talking about just, there's always more goals or projects or tasks to do, and it's sort of Sisyphian. No matter how many things to get done, there's always more things to get done? That's what I think he's saying.

Right. Okay. Not that you're always, there's always tweaks to do to your system. I think it's the first situation. Well, you know, Colin, it's a good point. So here's the issue. You don't want an oppositional mindset towards the activities or tasks or projects in your life. You do not want to have a mindset of, I have to get through these things until I can get to where I want to get, which is, I don't know, having nothing to do or having free time, that my task list, my projects, my plans are somehow an obstacle to some other better state, that if you could just get through these things as fast as possible, you could get to that

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

biochemically. There's a certain amount of calories you're taking in each day. That's going to be converted into energy, that energy that allows you to do things like think and move. You're taking those calories. You're going to create that energy every day. There's a certain amount of energy you are burning through. So the question is, what do you want to get in return for that energy? And so thinking about interesting or meaningful things or things are useful to the world, being a leader, being effective, being good to others. all of these type of positive targets for your energy is good. You're going to burn it one way or the other,

so you want to direct it towards the thing that's going to make life meaningful, that's going to make life useful. So we're wired for that, Colin. We're wired for action. Your goal is just to direct that action. It's nice to take a break now and again, but I can tell you, if I could take everything off your list, every task, every project,

bring in a whole staff to take care of your every need. You could just sit there. There's the hammock. We'll bring you food, will bring you water, you don't have to do anything. You're not going to be happy. And a reason why you're not going to be happy is that our mind does not expect life to be like that

for any extended period of time. Action is fundamental to the human experience. It's your job to try to make that action as useful as possible. So the bridge needs to be painted because otherwise it rust. So keep painting. All right, we've got a second question here.

This one comes from Chad. Chad says, do you have two shutdowns? if you split your day job and your side hustle with family time in the middle. I work my day job and do a shutdown around 4 p.m. and then family time until 9, at which point I work on either improving my work skills or doing a contract job or writing a novel. At 1030 when I wrap up for the night,

should I be doing another shutdown? Is that a good question, Chad? Do dual shift working arrangements require two shutdowns? I would say no. at least not nearly as extensive as a shutdown as you were doing after your initial work stress that ends around four. What I would recommend is that when you're winding down that initial work stress, you're doing your full shutdown complete routine maybe from 330 to 4, that you prep the work you're going to be doing that evening.

Right. So if you're going to be writing a novel, you get the sources you need. If you're doing some contract work, you gather whatever information you need for that work. it's a skill building, you pull out what you need for the lesson you'll be doing. So you make a plan and prep what you need so that when you get to that next block, that 9 p.m. block that you're doing in the evening, you can get right into work. Now when you finish that work, you want to tie up loose ends. So if you're riding, there's usually some tying up the loose ends you want to do at the end of your session. So you'll be prepared next time. Maybe you have some thoughts you didn't get to.

You know, you want to jot those down or update your outline now that you've done some writing. have you thought about it. If it's contract work, you want to make sure that you shut down exactly where you are and what comes next. There's some tying of loose ends to do with the particular effort you just did there, but that's it. You don't have to do a full shutdown routine. The only thing I would say in addition to be careful about is that you avoid opening lots of loops in the evening session. Don't go on email, don't go on Slack, don't do those type of efforts. That's something that might actually require a shutdown routine to close down all those open loops, but if you're focused on one thing in that evening block

and you prepped it before your afternoon shutdown routine, you should be fine just executing tying up loose ends and you should be able to move on and let your head hit the pillow after that without having too much actual sort of anxious chatter lurking. How long does your shutdown routine take? It depends what I do with my email inbox. So if it's a day where I'm saying

I want to really get my arms around email before I shut down, it could take a while. Otherwise, it doesn't take too long. It doesn't take too long. So you do that with your email a few times a week? Yeah. Yeah, probably a few times a week. I mean, again, it's very confusing for people because most people are ensconced in the hyperactive hive mine. So I get lots of like, when I see an email for the first time, it's one of three. Did you get this? Hey, what's going on? Did you get this answer? I think a lot of people have a hard time just because it's out of their realm of experience with this idea that of course you're going to just answer my email. Like maybe I'll take an hour because you're in a meeting,

but this is the main default activity for so many people is I'm checking and responding and trying to keep up with emails. Where for me, I might not look at email for a day. I'm doing other things. Then I have an admin block where I'm trying to catch up the next day, so it might be a couple of days. And then maybe I don't get your email during that block, you know. And so I think that could be confusing for people.

But I definitely check my calendar, check my weekly plan, and make sure I'm not miss anything, make sure there's nothing urgent I'm missing. get a sense for what I want to do the next day. Look at the whole week. Does everything still make sense? And then I check my checkbox. When you check your email,

do you ever wish that it was last number of emails? Or do you unsubscribe? Yeah. So I'm not worried about subscriptions. So a lot of people talk about this when they talk about email overload is my God. I'm subscribed to so many things. And I get so many messages from retailers and political candidates. And like, that's mildly annoying, but it's easy to deal with.

Just archive, archive, archive, archive, right? So I don't really care about that. What I care about is messages that require a response from me. I don't like, you know, that's time. The worst is message that will initiate or is part of what will be an extended back and forth. Those are the worst. I don't think people realize, and I get into this in my book, A World Without Email, but I don't think people realize that the real productivity poison is asynchronous back and forth messaging

with email. We have to figure something out. It's going to take us five back and forth messages because to get through five back and forth messages is going to require me to check that inbox 50 times because I can't wait two days for each of those messages to go back and forth. We have to make a decision today. That's the thing that really drives inbox overload is, okay, we have to have conversations going back and forth. So there's nothing I hate less than that ambiguous message that is kicking off some sort of extended back and forth conversation. That, that, That is the poison. That's why I like the summer because I get very few Georgetown emails. And so I'm not nearly as exposed. Not nearly as exposed to that. Let's do a call.

Okay, sounds good. We got out here. Hi, Cal. My question today is very simple. Where can we find more real world examples of people living the deep life? I think that case studies are often really good at illustrating very abstract concepts like the deep life. After all, it's much easier to understand radical alignment with your values. when you read the story of the triathlete who left New York and move to Boulder to train and be close to this film. I know you try to share as much cases as you can on the podcast, and I'm assuming your upcoming book we have several cases that illustrate these different moves, but even then, that's only a handful of examples. Some of them are also hard to relate. I mean, not everyone wants

to move to the mountains to be a world-class triathlete or move to a cabin to be a rider. I know from experience that sometimes all it takes to crack in your own deep life is seeing someone else's life. that really resonates. So here's the final provocation. If there isn't such resource, should someone build one? Thanks for your tremendous generosity, your spirit, and sharing your works abroad, Cal. Thank you. Well, John, you're hitting down a couple good points here. Let's start with your last point first. Should there be a better resource for encountering examples of the deep lives so that you have a better chance of hitting one that resonates with you in particular, and I agree with your premise here that somehow or sometimes getting the specifics,

this specific person did something that resonates exactly with me is critical for making a vision for your own life. Yes, I think there should be a resource like that. I actually have this idea. I'll have to figure out when and how I'll have the time to do this. But I've had this idea, and I've talked to Jesse about this before, of a podcast called The Deep Life. And all it is is, each week an interview with someone who lives a deep life. And so you just get this real variety of it. Now, in a perfect world where time and money was not an issue, it would be really cool if you could edit a podcast like this MPR style.

So it's not just straight, let's talk to you for 45 minutes, but there's different segments of conversation with musical interlude and moments of expository narration from me. I think it'll be a really cool show. I'd mention something like that in my proposal for the deep life book that maybe as I start working on that book, I might launch something like that.

So I think that's a good idea. But let's talk about the broader point here, about resonance and deep life case studies. Here is the reality slash issue with the deep life as a concept. We know it when we see it, right? So we all have this instinct. You read a book. You see something on a documentary.

you see an Instagram something, I don't know the terminology, whatever they call it, an Instagram video bundle, whatever the terminology is, of someone doing, you know, triathlon training in Boulder,

and it just hits a chord and it's boom, ah, that's what I, there's something about that life that's right and my life is not there. So we know it when we see it. And starting with the pandemic,

I think a lot more people than ever before, are noticing that reaction and are very interested in this idea about the deep life. The issue is that it's hard to pin down. And then you look to your own life and you say, I just have this deep instinctual feeling

that what I'm doing here is not everything it could be. And there's these other people I see and hear about. And that resonates. They're doing something that I crave. But I can't pin down exactly what it is. Like, I don't know why this guy who moved the boulder the train for triathlons, this really resonates with me, but I don't do triathlons.

lawns. I don't want to move the boulder, but something about that still resonates with me and what is it that resonates with me and what does that tell me for my own life and what type of changes I should make. This is the real issue. The gap between instinct and pragmatism when it comes to this concept of the deep

life. So part of what I've tried to do, I've been trying to do on the show, but I'm doing much more carefully. I'll do much more formally when I eventually write the deep life book is to make the concept concrete. what are the attributes that define a deep life? Generally speaking, I'm not talking about particular activities.

You have to be in bold or you have to be writing triathlon. But what is it specifically that separates what we would instinctually see as a deep life from a normal life? Once we have identified what those properties are, does that mean we can have a more systematic approach to acquiring those in our life if that's what we're interested in? That's what I'm going to be trying to do with my deep life book when I get to it. is a systematic quest for more. Let's pin down the definition. These are the properties that separate what resonates as a deep life from others. Here is how you would actually go and acquire those properties. So it's a deep question, John, and what I'm going to continue to work on.

Let me give you a one only partially formed idea right now. Let's just give an appetizer for the larger banquet, the one day. I'm toying with this notion. This is my proposal for the Deep Life book, that perhaps at the core of what separates a deep life from another life is the radical alignment of your existence to things that you value. So there's two aspects. And this is a preliminary definition, but there's two aspects to this definition. One that you are making changes to align your life closer with certain things that you're

really value. And two, that there's realignment is radical. So it's not just, I think I really value being outdoors and exercise. So I'm going to start training every morning before I go to my standard 45 minute away commute government job from the D.C. suburbs. That's an alignment of your life towards something that you value, but it's not a radical alignment. The radical alignment is like, okay, I'm going to, it's going to be rich role. Yes, I'm going to make. training a big part of my life, I'm going to leave my law firm and be a full-time ultra-athlete. I'm going to move the bolder to be a triathlon. Why does that resonate?

Because they're not just making a change to align their life with something they care about. It is a radical change. They significantly change their job set up, their location where they live, how they actually spend their days. I'm increasingly convinced those are the two things you need. If you miss any one of those two things, you run into trouble. Right. So if you make a radical change, but it's not a lot of it.

with something that's really important or that you really value. You end up, which we saw a lot of during the pandemic, making changes for the sake of change, trying to extract some sense of excitement or interestingness just because you did something radical. But then you get to the small farm that you just bought in the Hudson River Valley and realize I don't like farming. It's weird and quiet out here. I can't get good coffee. This is, this is terrible. This is actually not, nothing here aligns with something I deeply value. That's a problem. Similarly, I think, is if you're really clear on what you care about, but your change is too small, it's not radical, it's nice. It's better than not doing it, but it's not going to give you that deep residence of the deep life. It's the difference between, you know, Bill McKibbin leaving the New Yorker to move to that small house up in the Adirondacks, the rightful time about nature, and Bill McKibbin saying, on the side with my New Yorker job, I want to be working on a book about nature and go to a retreat. treat once a year. So the radicalness matters too. So that's one of the ideas I'm working on,

John. I think maybe you need both those things. The radicalness unlocks some sense of, I really do care about this. It's a real engine of motivation. But figuring out what you care about and making the right choice. Like this is, this actually is important and believing it's important to you. That's important too. So probably those two pieces, those two pieces have to come together. But I think we're going to see a lot more of that. In the near future and for a while going forward people's willing to make radical changes to do radical realignments. I think we've woken up a little bit that we have more options than we think. And there's more things we could be doing with our lives to make it interesting. What about in cases where somebody, like a case study where somebody

already kind of has a deep life? Do you think it needs to be as radical? Or do you think it just needs there's like different tiers? I just think there's usually, there's usually an aspect of radicalness to it. By which I mean there's just a part of their life that is unusually constructed or oriented to promote something that they care about. I think the good life is different than the deep life. I think you could have a good life. I'm plugged into my community. I appreciate my work. I'm in good shape.

I enjoy fine wine and have a good life. Capital G, good life. Virtuous, ethical, meaningful. the deep life is a subset of that and it's not like everyone needs to do that but some people really have this craving of I want something about my life to be notable

or remarkable in the literal sense where people are like wow do you know what Jesse's up to that's really interesting living on a boat or something? Yeah you're living on a boat yeah so is that something you strive for or do you think you have that or do you think you're living a good life I'm like halfway there so do you want to do something radical

maybe I do We're going to podcast from a boat. I'm going to train for triathlons in Boulder. No, I do. I have ideas about specifically your life. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I figure I'm going to be writing a book about the deep life.

It would be cool if that book could be structured around me doing some things. I don't know. I even put that on my proposal. Like, I don't know what these would be. but I would like the book to have a pretty good degree of self-discovery and reporting. For sure, the book is going to be very journalistic. So in maybe a Michael Pollan style, it's me on the road doing things with people. That's a different style than my books up to now, including slow productivity, is less first-person journalistic.

So good they can't ignore you. You had some first-person journalism in it for sure. But since then, I have, my structure is usually not. on first person journalistic. It's more reporting on ideas and laying out frameworks. There's a little bit of first person, I guess, in digital minimalism

too. But the deep life is, no, no, it's, you know, Michael Pollan goes to Polyphase farms and is there with Salatan working on the mobile chicken coops. You know, he goes to the places and does the things. And so deep life

is going to have that personal thread. Now, I would like to have a prolog and epilog, is built around some sort of deep change. So we'll see. You know what I should, here's what it is. I'll give the preview. This is actually,

it's a joke, but I was watching on my iPad the other day, The Northman. Have you heard of this movie? Yeah, I just read about it. It's like, the director is just like,

it's really in detail. And it's a Viking movie. Yeah. But like real Viking. Somewhere. A real New Yorker, I think. Oh, I missed that. Well, anyways, so I finally watched it, or I'm watching it.

It's like a Viking myth. You did the witch movie, too? Yeah. Oh, it's just the same guy? Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was an article in New Yorker, but I just read it last. Oh, maybe I did read that.

Did he do that? Yes, I like that guy. Have you seen The Witch? I was reading it and I was like, I don't know if I saw it. I don't think I did. I need to watch it. Yeah. I love those movies. I love those type of movies.

Because it's like low budget. it just says it's a here's this little village, it's like three houses in 1600s, you know, so it's just one place.

It's not a $50 million budget. That's a cool movie. I mean, it's just like what if, like, you know, the witch, that period with the witch trials and everything,

like what if there's actually witches in colonial New England? Yeah. My wife was watching it. At some point, they're grinding up babies to make so their broom can fly or something. She was done with that.

Anyways, this is all to say. this is a very roundabout way that they get to. So this is a Viking movie that stars Alex or Alexander Scarsgard. You people might know from true blood and some other things. He's 6'4

right. He's a 64 kind of Viking guy. He got stacked for this movie, right? Like, because he plays a Viking berserker. And he's 45. So he's five years older and got just you know, they had to make him

sort of kind of superheroy. They didn't cut him as much because they're trying to be pretty accurate. So it wasn't marvely, right? Because a Viking wouldn't be super cut, but just like what he did with his traps or whatever. So I was joking with my wife. I was like that, this is what I'm going to focus all my time on. If he could do that at 45,

I'm just going to dedicate all of my time to becoming stacked like a Viking, just sort of oper pro of nothing. It took him six months. That would take a lot of time. That would take away from your writing. He did it because I went down this rabbit hole. Hour a day, six days a week. It would take more.

It got real, real jack. It would take at least two hours a day. Yeah, well, here's the curveball. In 2019, he was in Tarzan. Right. So there's probably, which he had to get cut for. So there's probably some, he wasn't, let's just say he wasn't starting. Well, you already work out for at least 25 to 30 minutes a day, right?

Yeah, but I thought it was interesting. It was an hour a day. I think it was an Icelandic, might have been an Icelandic trainer. And they had the philosophy. But SARS-Gar is a beast, like laser-focused method type guy. So it was an intense hour. They do just one muscle group per day until it's just basically destroyed. And then a different muscle group the next day, a different muscle group the next day.

But you know how much he had to eat? 4,000 calories. 7,000 calories a day. It's a lot of muscle, right? He put on 20 pounds of muscle, 7,000 calories a day. And from what I understand, it's not like, yay, let's go get some burgers. No, no, that's 7,000 calories of chicken, broccoli, and rice. But anyways, that's all to say, John, that this is my deep life goal,

is that I'm just going to spend years becoming like an inappropriately stacked looking Viking. Yeah, that would be pretty cool. You'd be able to hit those rowing times very easily. Yeah, and then just row. just be stacked like a Viking and Roe and dressed like a Viking all the time. All right, this is nonsense. All right, let's move on to a better question here.

All right, we got a question from Joanna. Joanna asks, what are some deep leisure activities to engage in when you're cognitively done for the day? I'm a professional turn stay-at-home mom with three kids. I need to prioritize sleep and am unwilling to sacrifice morning sleep time for leisure. So this means realistically I have from eight to nine at night for my leisure. I'm fine with that length of time, but since my brain is kind of done for the day,

I find it challenging to engage in cognitively demanding activities at that time. I would love some crowdsourced examples of leisure that are satisfying but gentler on my brain. Well, Joanna, one hour a night, as we've established, is enough time to get stacked like Alexander Sarasgard in the Northman. I think that's what you need to do is train intensely. with an Icelandic personal trainer to build up unreasonable trapezius muscles. I think we agree about that. All right, so Joanna, I have a couple things to say.

First of all, I didn't list it in the question, but you told me the ages of your kids. They're young. There's like an 11-month-year-old and I think it was like a 3-year-old and maybe a 4-year-old. So let me preface, first of all, with you're in a narrow,

unusually difficult period in those kids' life, and especially because you're coming off of the pandemic last year and I don't know what the situation is with doing preschool or daycare but you probably have those kids around a lot so you're in an unusually hard period so let's preface it with that

the rest of your life starting in a year or two is going to look very different than right now so anything we're talking about right now is just okay during this temporary all hands on deck unusually exhausting period of parenthood, how should you think about leisure? And the first thing I'll say is in this period is like, don't worry too much about it.

What is your job is you're trying to keep these three entirely unreasonable beings alive while keeping your sanity. So you don't want to add another thing on your plate that why am I not getting in my full hour of SARS guard style exercise each night? Why am I not learning the piano or mastering new skills? It's because you're doing something incredibly difficult right now. but it's not permanent and it's going to get easier. Why is it get easier?

Because pretty soon, most and then all of those kids are going to be gone every day. They'll be at school. They'll be in daycare. Now you're going to be dealing with planning. I have this time free from the kids. Then I have different things I want to do with it. It gives you so much more flexibility in terms of thinking about what to do. Okay.

So, but what should you do right now when you have these three kids and they're at home? All right, I have a few things I wanted to mention. One, integrate more restful or leisurely active. activities into the day, even during periods where the kids are around, just figure out how to do this. My wife and I have a lot of creative approaches to doing various things like that with various combination of kids around. It's not uncommon for my three-year-old. I've taught him to want to work out with daddy. And so he will often sit on my concept too and go back and forth while I'm doing weights or if I'm using the screen like with a workout guided on the screen,

I'll bring him down and give him an iPad. And I've learned he's learned to associate like, oh, I get to go on the iPad for 20 minutes while dad is exercising. So there's things like that you can do. There's activities like gardening or outdoor activities you can kind of involve the kids in. And also just have periods where like now you guys do screens and I read or I rest or I push you to the park and I listen to a podcast. So make sure you have plenty of leisure and rest throughout the day.

two, assuming that you're not a single mom, and I don't know that's the case, but assuming that you're not a single mom, I'm going to guess that your husband doesn't work until 8 o'clock every night. So get him doing more things, make that more regular. So you can have an opportunity to do other things, more structured leisure before 8 o'clock. That is, that's too hard of a job to raise three kids all the way until their bedtimes. No, no, no. If you can get help, you should have help. So if he's around, tell him to get off the couch. All right. And then finally, I would say, yeah, don't try to do something super cognitively demanding from eight to nine after a hard day. I think you were right about that. Have a little structure for things you like to do then.

But what are you structuring towards? Rest, relaxation, recharging. You mentioned yoga. That would be great. You mentioned doing a podcast. That'd be great. going for a walk around the block and listening to a podcast, that'd be great. Maybe do a little bit of reading to kick off that period.

And then from 830 to 9, there's a show that you watch. I think it helps to have a little bit of structure to that time. Like, this is what I do during that time. There's a little routine because you get more relaxation out of it. But those activities should absolutely be recharging and relaxing. I mean, honestly, with three kids your age, maybe 8 to 9, the right activity should be drinking heavily. But you'll probably get better use out of that if you start.

around 3 p.m. Because by then it's usually when we're when we're done. I'll tell you that is the, that is the hardest part, at least in our experience of COVID. Forget the disease. Three kids at home, not able to go to school. Makes you feel like, probably just to be safe, need to go to the hospital. Let me just, you know, I'm not, yeah, let me just, I probably need to be hospitalized during this.

You'll, because it's the worst. It is the worst. So I hear you. All right, Joanna, but it gets better. You'll be there soon. All right, Jesse. Let's do one more call. Do we have something?

Yep. All right, excellent. Early retirement call. Oh, there we go. Hi, Cal. This is George here. I have a question for you about testing the waters and getting in the reps as a writer.

Let me explain. I've been a manager at a Fortune 50 company for over 20 years. I've been in various marketing and general management roles in that time and did I have any specific technical abilities. I'm very fortunate to have the option to take early retirement in three years when I turned 55 and focus my efforts in other areas. I enjoy non-fiction writing and, in fact, had a successful personal finance blog for many years. I shut it down about five years ago, though, as it was too distracting for my career where I needed to focus.

But with the potential retirement looming, I'd love to get back to writing. I have a clear vision for how I would like to spend my time when I retire from my time. corporate life. Get up early, work out, spend three to five hours focused on deep work, writing specifically, and then spend the afternoons on other hobbies and activities with my wife, sprinkling and travel and visits with the kids and eventual grandkids into the mix. My question is this, how do you recommend I test the waters on my writing ability and start to get the reps in now so that I will be ready to ramp up when I retire? I still have a full-time corporate job. I'm looking forward to hearing your take on this, and thank you for your podcast.

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

So I don't think I would retire in the sense of, you know, leave union. university or something like this, but we definitely plan 55 as a key turning point where maybe we'll live half time somewhere else or do something interesting. So I appreciate that. Two, I like your proposed schedule. That's my full-time writer schedule. It's what I do right now, for example, in the summer, something more or less like that, where, you know, I wake up, I write and do deep work, I end the writing. This is where anything like podcasting or interviews, admin, email, that happens next. then I shut that down late afternoon and switch over to family, hobbies, exercise, etc.

I think that's a great schedule. I think we're humans thrive with the schedule like that. So I think you have the right idea. I mean, I might suggest that I think this is justified that you might consider, though, replacing the three hours of deep work with three hours of Alexander Sarsgaard-style Northman biking training. So I don't know if you know about this, but I've been a big proponent of that. so just become an unusually stacked biking. No, but here's my main point, though.

Is it super important that you get in these riding reps before you retire, as opposed to would that not be a great thing to be doing with your deep work time once you retire? So I don't know that I would unduly stress myself right now with a full-time Fortune 50 management job to get in a lot of riding somehow on the side with this idea that it will be better to hit the ground running I suppose we retire versus like the first year your retirement is very rapidly getting up the speed. Now when you're working on something every single day,

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

Because what would I do? I mean, if I was in your situation, I think I would reactivate some sort of media presence that gave you the chance to be writing and thinking, maybe a combination of a newsletter and a podcast. I would use that to develop your ideas. Like what are your current theories or ideas? on personal finance to find your voice, to find your niche. And then maybe after a year or two,

if you could build some sort of audience, maybe thinking about writing a book. And I think that would be hard to start on the side as you discovered in your Fortune 50 job. It's hard to maintain a regular podcast or newsletter. Anything like that requires regular investment of time. You can't just do it occasionally. So again, it might be something you want to wait, tell that early retirement, but then really lock into it, lock into it hardcore. The one thing you could do, I mean, you need to find some sort of way to do occasional work as time permits that might help you get back in the writing shape. So if you could figure out some targets for articles, and this might be in trade publications or business publications, etc. So let me take an article

commission and spend some time for the next two weeks working on that. And then there's a busy period for six months where I do nothing. But then I sell another article somewhere else and that gets me thinking of writing again. That might not be the worst thing just to start loosening up those proverbial muscles a little bit. But the main thing I'm going to say to you is maybe that's what year one is about in your retirement is getting back to thinking and writing and finding your voice and finding your message. And I think that'll be fine because again, you're not dependent on this to make your living. You're retired. You've saved that money to live off of. So I want to, I want to kill myself now knowing that a big expanse of autonomous time is lurking not too far in the future.

All right, well, speaking of writing, I do want to talk about the books I read last month. But first, before we get there, let me just briefly mention another sponsor that makes this show possible. You've heard me talk about Magic Spoon. It is that treat-style cereal that we all used to like as kids, but without all of the junk. Here's the stats. Magic Spoon cereal has zero grams of sugar. Unless technically we're talking about the honey nut flavor, which might have one gram, so you know, beware. 13 to 14 grams of protein and only four net grams of carbs that eat serving.

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ExpressVPN.com. All right, Jesse, like we always do, early in each month, I report back on the books I read during the preceding month. So we are in early June while we're recording this. So we will report back on the books I read in May. My goal, as longtime listeners know, is to try to read five books every month. If you want more details on how I do that, we actually have a video online at YouTube.com slash Kalimport Media where I go through the different techniques I use to read five books a month. and how other people can do it too. All right, five books I read in May 2022. Number one, I return to Born Standing Up by Steve Martin.

That's Steve Martin's professional memoir. I have read this before. I read this way back in 2009, soon after it came out. I wrote about it way back then in the early days of my blog. It was actually in an interview that Steve Martin did with Charlie Rose about Born standing up that he used the phrase, be so good they can't ignore you, which I then used or adapted to be the title of my fourth book, so good they can't ignore you. So it was a very influential book of my life, but I have not been back to it since. It's been over a decade since I read it. So I went back and I read it and it was great. There was a lot I had forgotten and I was able to extract a lot more rich detail. And again, what makes this a good book is that it is focused just on his professional

career. Steve Martin's point with this book was he didn't think enough detail is often given in celebrity memoirs about how people actually build their career. So this was just about the craft how he built up his act, what went well, what didn't, his breaks, his steps back, how he move forward again. So I know it's very interesting. The main takeaway that hit me on the second time through was the power of sticking with it. It took Martin years for his act to break with a lot of steps backwards, and he was incredibly focused during those periods on continuing to polish and develop his act. And it was actually in the end the confidence and expertise that was developed by that

relentless focus and drive to improve that tipped him. Like his act was interesting, but once he became world-class at delivering it, that's what actually made it a world-class act. because it was the confidence and precision that's necessary for his type of humor to work. So I was really struck by his focus. All right. Next, I read Blood and Treasure, a newish biography of Daniel Boone by Rod Drury, or is it Bob Jerry,

no, Rod Drury, someone Drury and Tom Clavin. And I read it in part. I don't know if you know this about me, Jesse, but I am descended from the Boones. I did not know that. Maybe I give off that Frontiersman style genre. I'm not descended from Daniel Boone. I'm descended from his brother,

which we figured out at some point. His brother who shows up off and on in the book. So this was my grandmother, my paternal grandmother, let me see if I have this right, I think her mom was a boon. So we're actually not too far off the actual Boone line, but not from Daniel himself.

And I do remember that growing up. We went to a Daniel Boone historical site, and there's a registered to sign if you're a descendant. And they said, you're a descendant of his dad and his brother, but not of him. So we weren't able to sign the book. Very well written. I actually really enjoyed blood and treasure. It must have been very difficult to the research.

I mean, the whole book is about the complicated, shifting, allegiances, alliances, and fail promises between all of the various different Indian tribes at this period of colonial history. Daniel Boone's life was completely intermixed with the fight for land between the American colonists, the British, and the various Indian tribes that were there, or this tribe would take over that tribe and this tribe would come in. So it was really a book about 18th century Indian tribal politics. So a complicated book to write, but very interesting.

These were tougher people back then, these long hunters. They would just go, like, I'll be back in a year. Like, I have a rifle, and I'll be back in a year. I'm just going to hunt for a year. Like, where are you going to go hunt? Oh, I'm going to, I'm going to hike to the other side of the Appalachian Mountains. And then I'll hunt over there. And then I'll come back with all of the skins.

I mean, these were, that was a tougher, tougher period. but I am a boon so I get through proxy a lot of credit. Then I read Why Faith Matters by Rabbi David Volpey. I read this because I heard Lexfordman interview him, and I thought he was interesting. It was a really good interview. I thought it was really interesting. So I said, what's his most famous book?

What's Volpe's most famous book? I think it's Why Faith Matters, and I read it. Pretty good. So this was a, it's a post-9-11 book. Volpe wrote Why Faith Matters as a response to the post-9-11

new atheist so you remember those early 2000s you had Sam Harris and you had Hitchens Dawkins and I guess

Daniel didn't it maybe had a book in there too breaking the spell there is this sort of anti-religious new atheism that arose

and this was a response to that it was a pretty interesting book from a roughly from a Jewish perspective but relatively ecumenical very accessible I thought there's some interesting points in it

then I went back and again this is a reread but a reread from my childhood so I don't think it counts Lost Moon by James Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger this book came out in the 90s when I was a kid

it is the book about Apollo 13 written by the Jim Lovell who Tom Hanks played in the movie and a professional science writer Jeffrey Kluger. So Apollo 13 the Ron Howard movie was based off of

this book was the main source material. Another cool book, they wrote it they wrote it cinematically. So it's like in the room, in the room real time narrative. Like this person said this,

this person grabbed this thing, which is probably the right way. And it goes back and forth between mission control and the capsule, but it's written embedded in the action itself. So, you know, then Love will hit the switch and this happened. Not there's not a, not a third person narrator voice of like, then what was happening on the da-da-da-da.

So it really moves, and it's a crazy story. I mean, what happened on the command module and what they had to do to save it. And Kluger just went back through transcript and transcript, and they really picked apart what happened and the TikTok of how it unfolded and who said what. And so it's really an achievement as a book. As a nonfiction writer, I can say this was,

it's a fantastic story, obviously. I mean, stuck in space and you have to get saved. But to write this book is not an easy feat. I mean, it took a huge amount of research. So it's a real achievement as a book and incredibly interesting to read. So forget the movie. You got to read the book, Lost Moon.

And then finally, I read The Lost City of Z by David Gran. So David Grant is a New Yorker writer. He's sort of, I don't know if he's a target of envy, but he's sort of what you, sometimes what you imagine when you imagine when you're at Columbia Journalism School and you're thinking what you want to do as a writer, what you imagine often is David Grant. So what he does for the New Yorker is he does these long form,

journalistic pieces where he usually goes on some sort of adventure with interesting people with interesting things happening. So there'll be some, you know, I think he did stuff with like white supremacist in jail at some point. There was like a murder in the another thing he did in another article. There was a murder among the Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts. Like there's this whole world.

of Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts that think that Sherlock Holmes was real and there was this murder and David Grant is over there in England and gets in beds with these groups and is really like the Baker Street regulars. And anyways, Loss City of Z is

half of it is the story of Percy Fawcett, one of the last of the great British adventurers and explorers who disappeared trying to find this supposed giant city in the Amazon. So it tells the story

but they interleaves with David Grant going to the Amazon and actually putting together a team and going in himself to try to find some evidence of what they found. And, you know, spoiler alert turns out there were really large civilizations

in the in the Amazon but a lot of it was hard to find because it was built with wood and a lot of that had decayed. But now with modern techniques, we can see there was all these sophisticated cities. So Percy Fawcett was right, but there's no way he was ever going to find it in, you know, the 1920s. Anyways, David Grant is great. He's the goat at these type of things.

These things moved. They're well researched. He inserts himself into it. Sort of classic adventure, narrative, nonfiction New Yorker type stuff. So that book was fun. I should be more David Grand like, Jesse. I need to actually like go, you know, on the trail of murderer. Oh, a famous David Graham piece was hunting the giant squid. So he's out there on this boat with this guy, this eccentric guy. He's convinced that they can catch a giant squid

and he's out there in the storms and they're trying to find a squid. He loves that type of stuff. He just puts himself, puts himself into danger. Do you know? Never met him. How old is he? Older than us. But I don't know, probably not that much older.

We should look it up. I wonder how old he is. I should flex that more. I feel shy and nervous about it. I feel like I, but I should maybe flex more of the potential ability to talk to other New Yorker writers and say just, can I call you? Can I call you? Feels a little bit, I don't know, Eddie Haskelley. Excuse me, Mr. Grant. I also do some writing for your esteem publication there, sir, and... He's 55 years old.

Okay. 55 years old. And I would like to talk to you on the telephone. The problem is if someone wrote me like that, I would be like, oh, this is annoying. So I don't. But I'll tell you, I do want to, before time is too short, and I'm sure there's not much time left to do this just given his age. I really would like to meet John McPhee. And I've built the intro to the slow productivity around John McPhee.

and I grew up near Princeton and I'm around there all the time so I'm going to see He probably just goes walks to campus walks home Yeah he's older I think he's in his upper 80s now So I don't know exactly what the

What his situation is But I would love to meet him once So maybe that's one place I will Do an Eddie Haskell Flex like uh sir I uh I write for your same esteem publication And uh

I would like to stop by and say hello and so I'll try that. But I think it would be cool for the opening of that book when I'm telling a story about his work habits and spending a whole year writing one article to be able to actually be there and see him would be cool. So I might try that. Well, as you said earlier,

when you were talking about your plans for the deep life, you might be doing something related to David Grand, right? Yeah, maybe I could become a David Grand style writer. Yeah. Well, if you're going to do so many deep life, I mean, that's kind of like going on a boat, trying to find a big squid. Yeah, but then he comes back. You know, and then he comes on a stand the ball for your whole entire life. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

How many squids do you want to catch? But see, like in that case, that's more like he does adventures for his articles and then goes back, goes back to his normal life. Where the deep life, you got to, you want, I mean, that is a deep life. Well, he's probably always working on something. So it probably has to be weird that he's going to do after that. Well, his book, he wrote a book, the something summer moon. So it's something Summer Moon About this murder on an Indian reservation

Around trying to get oil rights or whatever Anyways, Scorsesey's making a movie out of it right now So, you know, kudos to him That's a really cool book And I feel bad I'm getting the name It's something something moon The problem is not The not mix it up with

Empire of Summer Moon Well no, but that might be the Killers of the Flower Moon Killer of the Flower Moon Yeah. See, the issue is there's the empire of the summer moon. That's the Gwynne book about the Comanchees, right? Killers of the Flower Moon. Yeah, Killers of the Flower Moon.

I have that. I should read that. But David Grant lives a deep life. Not that the Squid Hunt is a deep life, but probably a life where you do adventure journalism. Like, that's interesting, right? Like, a lot of these full-time writers, their lives are interesting. Like, they're unusual. In his case, like, he travels and goes these adventures and comes back and writes, on him and he kind of does it on his own terms.

Like that's probably, that's pretty cool. Or you have like the Sebastian Youngers of the world where he goes to his, with his family to their little house in the pine scrub in Truro, Cape Cod, and he's sort of like chainsaws trees and writes, you know. He goes about boxing gym too.

Yeah. Yeah, that's another guy who's older than us who looks like he could beat me up. All right, well, anyways, enough of that. How long will we go, Jesse? Ooh, hour 20. is what happens when I get away from the studio too long. So let's wrap this up. Thank you, everyone, for listening.

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