Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 230: How Well Are You Living?

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaDEEP DIVE: How well are you living? [11:14]- How do you track deep life habits? [28:07]- How do I become more social? (Bonus: How does Cal avoid being killed by Jocko?) [34:15]- How do I distill essential ideas from complex topics? [46:13]- How does Cal research his articles? [53:49]- Should I get a Deep Life tattoo? [59:41]THREE INTERESTING THINGS: - Guillermo Del Toro Bought a Second House to Boost his Creativity [1:13:33]kpcc.org/show/the-frame/2016-07-22/bleak-house-a-tour-inside-guillermo-del-toros-creative-man-cave- Kary Mullis’s Nobel-Winning Moment of Insight [1:19:56]nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1993/mullis/lecture/ - Charles Dickens Wrote “A Christmas Carol” on Foot [1:22:38]Thanks to our Sponsors:stamps.com/deepgrammarly.com/deephensonshaving.com/calmybodytutor.comThanks 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 230. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ. Joined once again by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, welcome back from vacation. Thanks. Good to be back.

I was actually pretty impressed that I remembered how to do most of the stuff that happens on the computer screen. It was muscle memory. I was actually thinking about that. I mean, it's not overly complicated, but there are steps that I would. It's just a lot of little things. things, yeah, but it's like riding a bike.

So recording on garage band podcasting is like riding a bike. All right, news, Jesse, news to share. I think I can say officially that as of this morning, I am done with a complete first draft of my new book, Slow Productivity. That's pretty awesome. It's a little bit hazy to really put a line in the sand and say the draft is done. because, for example, I have a couple examples I've come across recently that I want to go back and integrate into prior chapters. I also want to do a pass-through and see if any of the major stories I want to change before I submit it.

But my definition of being done is, like, as of right before I came here this morning, every chapter of the book has been written and polished. So in theory, I have a complete version of the manuscript. Maybe not the version I'm going to submit, but there's a complete version of it. There's nothing that's either not yet written or written still in a rough draft. So I finalized the conclusion. So as you were walking us through, you know, the quarterly plans and stuff since last when you started, did it all fall into place? It did.

I laid my game plan for this manuscript. Well, let me think about that. Let me be a little bit more careful about this. I started writing it in earnest late spring, early summer. And so I had a plan through the summer that I think I would. was a little bit light on. So when I got to the end of the summer, I was a little behind schedule. Beginning of the fall, I laid out a plan from the beginning of the fall to completing

the manuscript. And my target was to be done basically now. Wow. Now, it might sound like, wow, how did I predict that so well? But that's not how this works with quarterly planning. It's not that I made a prediction and I happened to hit it. It's having that plan in place gave me back pressure to, okay, I got to work harder now. I got to fill in extra time.

Now it gave me milestone. So when I could see I was going behind, I could put an extra effort to catch up. And when I got ahead, then I could pull back and put that effort elsewhere. So that's the way I like to think about these sort of quarterly scale plans is it's not, let's just see if I hit it. It's not a prognostication. It's actually a set of milestones you can use to govern your activity throughout the way. So it was the structure I used to govern my energy all fall long.

And it works. And so I ended up coming in for a landing right. around, I mean, within a week of when I was. That's so good. So you probably, how many hours a day did you average writing? Like, six days a week. So the way I normally do is I'll have a mile. So I'll go from, this is multi-scale planning.

So I'll go from my quarterly plan will influence my weekly plan. And then my weekly plan will influence what I do each day. And so typically when I'm writing, I have a particular milestone I'm trying to hit. So it just depends how close I'm getting to it. So if I'm getting close to it or I'm falling behind, I might put in a five or six hour writing day. My average writing day is going to be two hours, two and a half hours. And I would just write in the morning, most mornings, not Saturday, was my typical schedule.

Sometimes I'd miss a morning with a meeting. And I would just try to write for about two hours, two and a half hours. I mean, this was really a, to quote McPhee, John McPhee, and I know this quote because it's actually at the very final section of the conclusion of my book. It's from a 2010 interview McPhee did for the Paris Review, who's interviewed by his colleague at the New Yorker, Peter Hessler. And he has this book where he has, this quote where he essentially marvels at this idea that people think he's very hardworking or prolific because it says from his point of view,

he's just putting a little drop in the bucket every day. But he said the thing is, it's not hard, you know, it doesn't look that impressive to add a drop in the bucket on a given day. But if you do that 365 days, when you get to the end of the year, that bucket's pretty full. That's the approach I took with slow productivity. I wanted the writing to be good. So I really just kept my focus each day on what section am I working on. I want this to be really good.

And then it's not overwhelming, right? Because then you're focusing on I'm writing a section where I'm telling the story of X to make this point. And over two days, I just want to do that really well. And I did that really well. Good. What's next? And then you just add that up over about six or seven months. And you hope what you end up with is a manuscript that's pretty well crafted, that there's not a lot of

a flab in it. I mean, the thing I dislike in pragmatic nonfiction is where you clearly see evidence of writing for the sake of writing. I have 10,000 words I got to finish. I have a week left to do it. Type, type, type as fast as I can. Lots of rhetorical questions throwing in random examples. Like, just you can tell the author is like, my God, I got to get these words done. I never want that to come through in my writing. So it's always just today I'm writing a thousand words or whatever. And I want those thousand words to be great. And I think that's how you get density. So it really worked, I mean, we'll see how the book turns out. But I really feel good about this drop everyday method of by a time I got to what I'm working on today, all I'm caring about is that. And keeping the

whole pressure, there's this whole book that needs to be finished and I'm not that far into it, keeping that at a higher scale of planning. I only have to confront that every once in a while, maybe once a month. And really what I want to be doing each day is just, this one I'm working on this week, this is the part I'm doing today and just focus. So anyways, I'm excited about that. It's kind of exhausting, Jesse. I mean, I find this with every book, it's mentally exhausting. So I'm sort of happy to have a little bit of a break coming up because, you know, I'm doing New Yorker stuff at the same time. Yeah.

I'm doing academic stuff at the same time. It's a lot of thinking. And I think about my brain the same way athletes think about their muscles, right? I mean, you have a hard season. You got to recharge a little bit. Yeah, I guess, I mean, we've heard a lot of examples, too, of people like authors who, write five, six hours a day every single day. It just seems like you also write pretty fast, you know, because this thing got done pretty quickly too. Yeah, yeah, I got done. I mean,

this is about my pace. If I can give it daily attention. See, I don't need five hours a day, but I need most days to be able to give it to. And so for me, it's if I can connect a summer term with a teaching release, I can make it happen, right? So I really got going in May. Not surprising, right? Because May is when my courses end. I had a very busy spring semester because I was teaching two courses and was co-chairing a university-level search committee in which we were trying to hire three people. So it was very time-consuming, lots of being on campus, meeting with candidates, going to talks, and a lot of overhead. And so I didn't write basically at all.

I knew I wasn't going to be able to write. But once I got the May, it was like, let's turn it on because it's summer, right, right, right, right, right. And off term, right, right, right, right, right. And so that's why I was able to get it done in about six months. If I was teaching this fall, I would have to, this would be a one-year process. So probably May to back around again to May again. Because if you think about it, it probably reduces the number of mornings you can write by about 40%. Yeah.

And then you got to factor in loss of momentum because of that. And yeah, yeah, that makes about sense. I have some big swings ideas for the New Yorker. I'm excited to get to. I have some cool academic paper I'm working on. So I'm really looking forward to in the next few months going back to a non-book schedule where I'm teaching and I have some articles I'm working on. But there's not this.

I mean, I wake up every day for six months, waking up every day. First thought is, what am I writing today? Yeah. Let's get after. What am I writing? What am I? Like, don't waste time. Don't waste time.

We've got to get into it. Got to get into it. You know, that's been six months of that. So I'm looking forward to a slow start. Your, um, your recent New Yorker article was in the New Yorker weekly summary email. I just got that. Yeah. Well, yeah, so they do the New Yorker.

Oh, it was in the weekly summary. Yeah. I don't get, you can get, you can sign up for a bunch of different ones. I get the weekly one and like one other one. I don't want the daily one. Can you control which ones you get? Oh, yeah. I get too many.

You can, you know, I mean, I write for the magazine, but I was talking, my wife and I were talking about it because I get like the daily huge. humor. Yeah, no, you can definitely control. Which I don't need, right? And I get this week in the magazine, which I don't need because I have the magazine. I really just want the daily, but I don't get the weekly. Well, I guess this week in the magazine, what I was talking about.

You came up. Oh, okay. But yeah, you can get all sorts of ones. I think that quiet quitting one did well. Interesting podcast shout out for that article. The quiet quitting article came out of our podcast. Some editor heard us talking about it. It was like you should write something about it.

Yeah. So the podcast is providing a, uh, a platform. Actually, it's one of the questions I'm going to tackle later in the show. Someone wrote in about coming up with these ideas, my process for researching. So actually, we're going to get into that later in the show. But before we do, I also have a request. I realize it's been, I don't know, six months since I've asked this, and I realize I should. Leave a review of the podcast if you get around to it. I want to go, I think it's a good way to get some new listeners. It's confusing if you just come across this show. You just see it on like the

podcast technology charts. Like what the hell is this? And reviews kind of help people figure it out. So if you like the show, consider leaving a review. If you dislike the show, I just heard that the review feature will give you a computer virus. You don't want to do that. Right. So if you like it, leave a review. If you don't, do not. All right, Jesse, here's the plan for the show today. Three segments are standard setup. Number one, we have a deep dive. Number two, two, we have a collection of questions from you, our listeners, and the number three, we will do our three interesting things segment. It's three interesting things that people have emailed to my interesting account at calnewbar.com address. You know, I forgot Jesse to do the

little tagline for the show. I'm trying to be better at identifying the show for people. So I'll do that now. This show is one in which I answer questions from my audience and give advice about the struggle to live deeply in a new world be set by distractions. So I like to remind everyone that's what we're doing here. Our deep dive will be about that. Our questions will be about that. All three of our interesting things will cover later. We'll all come back to that theme. How do we live deeper in a world that's trying to destroy us with distraction? All right, so let's get going with our deep dive. The title is, how well are you living? This is a deep dive that is supposed to be well suited to this current season of New Year resolutions.

Now, the inspiration for this deep dive is an email I read actually this morning. It comes from a writer's group that I'm a part of. And it was an email that someone was sending to the writers group. It was a well-known writer talking about a conversation he had with another well-known writer. I want to read an excerpt from this email. I'm going to get rid of any identifying information, of course. We'll obfuscate that. But I'm going to read the core of this message, what caught my attention.

So the well-known writer who's sending this email. email says, by far the most interesting topic to emerge, and he's referring to a lunch he had recently with another author, was the question, how well are you living? It's not the type of question that comes up often in overachiever circles, and we took a long pause to consider it. I mean, if you were to grade yourself on how well you're living, what would the grade be? That's how we framed the question. Well, that gave us something to really think about and led to an incredible set of text exchange in the days, weeks, and months to come, some of the most meaningful exchanges I've had in years. So food for thought as this new year begins, how well are you living?

Now, I thought that was a provocative prompt because it gets at a core issue that I think people have when they think about improving their life, as so many are doing right now in the new year season. In particular, the tension I think this highlights is the tension between holistic and focused approaches to self-improvement. So the question, how well are you living? This is a holistic question. Looking at your life as it exists in its entirety. If someone was to write a short story about your life or film a documentary about your life, would it resonate with others as a life well lived? would it resonate with you?

I like hearing about this life. There's a question about the holistic properties of your day-to-day existence. Now, it sounds obvious, yeah, I want to live well. But when people tackle this goal, they tend instead to fall into focused approaches to self-improvement where you isolate specific elements of your life where you want to remove something bad or do something better. So, for example, you might say, I want to be in better shape. So I want to exercise more. I want to eat better.

I want to go to the gym more. It's a classic New Year's resolution. You might say, I want to be a better parent. I feel like I'm too disorganized. I'm not able to show up at enough of my kids' events or give them enough time. I want to be a better parent. Or you might say, for example, I want to be better at this aspect of my job. I want my newsletter to double the amount of readers.

I want to get promoted to be team lead at my programming job, et cetera. Now, the issue with this focused approach to self-improvement is that it ignores the complex ways in which different aspects of your life interact with each other. So actually, the problem a lot of overachievers in particular have. So this is the crowd that this email I read was really talking about. It's a bunch of overachieving writers. The problem that overachievers have with the self-improvement is not their failure to make progress on things. It's not their failure to follow through on their resolutions. it's actually what happens when they succeed.

Because when you're doing focused self-improvement, you're messing with a complex mechanism by taking one aspect and maybe amplifying it. That might then interact with or interfere with how the other aspects of your life unfold and things can get even worse. Because often the way to solve or improve parts of your life is to improve your life as a whole.

The isolating of looking at one thing might throw everything else out of whack. So for example, maybe you say, I want to be in better shape and you come up with these, I'm going to train and I'm going to train for a triathlon or I'm going to run a marathon. I see this all the time. Like, I'm an overachiever. I'm going to take on like a really serious training regimen and I'm going to get really careful about my eating. I have to run this much and lift these weights and do all of these things. And yeah, you maybe are succeeding in making that part of your life better, but now it's completely swapping, taking out time that you didn't really realize you need before to recharge between work or home or taking away time from your family.

have to wake up real early to do this. And now suddenly other aspects of your life just got worse. So the holistic system of your life is now actually worse off because you succeeded at the focus goal if I want to be in better shape. Now, sometimes the other issue that happens with focus versus holistic approach is that the solution requires other things to be involved. So maybe we're looking at this hypothetical issue of I want to be a better parent. I want to be my kid's life more.

I want to go to more whatever events at their school. I feel too harried. it might be that the solution to that has nothing to do with your commitments to parenting but actually changing your work situation. Oh, it's actually when we see the whole picture, it's the demands of your specific job that's making it impossible to do this other thing that matters to you. So we have these two issues of being focused. One, you might succeed and in doing so actually make other things worse.

Two, you can't actually get to the real solutions because the problems you need to fix to improve this aspect of your life involve other unrelated, seemingly unrelated aspects. This is why I like the question, how well are you living? Because it demands that you look at the big picture. Not are you in shape? How's your parenting? How's your work? How's your whole life? Is this a life well lived or not? And what it asks you to do, if you're going to resolve to improve yourself this new year, it asks that you resolve to improve the entire picture of your life. Shift from this holistic picture to that holistic picture. This one's better than this. You think about all the aspects of your life, how they interact, how they push back and forth on each other, and you make changes that make sense for the whole picture.

That's what I think, and I'm going to recommend that those who are thinking about doing New Year's resolutions, this is how I think you should go about doing it. Do not write down a disparate collection of discrete and unrelated resolutions of things you want to improve. Instead, record an image of an improved lifestyle. When you get to the New Year 2024, what do you want your life as a whole to look like? When you get the New Year 2030, what do you want your life as a whole to look like? And think about then, how do all of these pieces need to change? What's holding back this? Is it my job?

Is the problem here? Is it I've taken on too many. I have seven hobbies, and they're eating each other's time, and this isn't working. I need to simplify here. what I really need to do is shift this leisure attention to something I can do with my kids because now I'm able to use the same time to connect with my family and find an outlet with something that's completely unrelated to my work. You see the whole picture and you think about what does your whole lifestyle look like?

Do we need to move? Is this really the issue? Do we have to get out of the D.C. suburbs and move to a farm in southern Appalachia? I don't know. But you're not going to get to an answer unless you're seeing the whole picture. Because if you're not seeing the whole picture, you're going to be picking at specific things. I guess I'll get up at 5 a.m. to run now. I guess I'm going to work later so I can try to get this promotion. You need to see the whole picture. So that's what I'm going to recommend is a holistic

approach to New Year's resolutions this year. The question is, how well are you living? And if you're not happy with the answer, you need to focus on how you upgrade your life as a whole, not little individual aspects of it. So anyways, that was a good question, Jesse. How well are you living? It's the right way to think about it. More and more I'm realizing that in my life as I get new years after new years is the whole game is crafting lifestyle and how things interact with each other. I mean, everything is so related. The thing that comes up most often, I think, is how much your job, the details of your job interacts with like everything else. Yeah. You know? And so it's the issue in overachievers, like, I'm just going to like crush it even more at my job. I'm this successful.

How would I be more successful is they don't realize how much that is often crush everything else, or they'll try in isolation to say I'm going to be, you know, the coach of the little league team and train for the triathlon and realize because of the reality of their job, there's no way to actually do that. And then it becomes a huge source of stress or anxiety or the commute is the issue. And, you know, if we moved here, but we'd have to change the job. I mean, it's all about seeing this whole picture and it's a puzzle. How do I figure out? If I move this piece, I can adjust that piece. This then allows this piece to move over here. Oh, the whole thing clicks together into a new whole thing.

whole that's much better. It's a dynamic system. And then as you always talk about, it gets distorted when people look at social media and stuff like that. Yeah, and that just makes it worse because again, social media, especially Instagram, it's going to isolate these individual features of people's lives and

exaggerated and making it seem. That's what people want. Yeah. You're like, oh, that's what I need. Like, why why don't I look like? This came up last night. The family was watching a movie, on Netflix. It's a kid's movie called

Finding Oana. I mean, obviously, that word right, but it takes place in Hawaii and it's like a family from Brooklyn, comes back to Hawaii because their grandfather had a heart attack. And as happens, they find a lost pirate treasure map or sort of goony styles like the kids are trying to whatever. But anyways, it's kind of built around their dad had died, and he comes back, a spoiler alert, but he sort of comes back as a ghost.

And it turns out this guy, is an Instagram fitness model because my son was like, where have I seen him before? And so you look at these pictures. Gentleman is in very good shape. He is, he's like the, it's like, you know, if you're a producer and you're like, get me the rock. And like the rock is not available. You're like, then get me his like much cheaper non-union equivalent. Like you get this guy, right?

He's like a really buff guy who, you. The problem is he's 10 inches shorter than the rock. But where I'm going with this is you see his Instagram photos. He's a Hawaiian cowboy. So he's shirtless with like 36 inch biceps with a cowboy hat on horses or whatever. You see that in isolation. And you're like, oh, man, you know, I guess I should be spending two hours a day in the gym. Yeah.

Like just like ripping at it to become like a buff Hawaiian cowboy. But, you know, how does that fit with all the other aspects of your life? Like if you're going to play ghosts and movies or whatever of like Hawaiian Warriors like yeah that's what you should do that's all you're doing like your job is to get in really good shape

where I'm trying to go with this Jesse is I'm going to move to Hawaii and just work out all the time all the time I'm not sure why I thought about the example All right anyways we got a whole good chunk of questions

to get to I want to briefly mention before we get there one of the sponsors that makes this show possible and that is our friends at Hinson shaving. I shaved with my Hinson razor

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slash Cal and use that code Cal. Let's also talk about our longtime sponsors at Grammarly. you what Grammarly is and then why I'm proud to have them as a sponsored. So Grammarly gives you an AI-powered writing assistant that will help you jump boldly into the professional fray with clear, mistake-free writing. This runs on all of your devices and all the applications where you do writing. It sits there and helps you make your writing better. There's some features in Gramerly that is going to blow your mom.

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First questions from Chris. How do you keep track of all the other habits you develop besides your keystone habit? All right. This is a good New Year's question. So as long-time listeners know, I have this procedure I pitch on this podcast for how to transform your life towards the goal of depth.

So how to go towards what we call the deep life. And the procedure I talk about is to divide your life into different buckets that cover different aspects of your life. So you have craft for your work, community, for your friends, family. You have constitution for your health and so on. And I have this procedure I always come back to where I say, if you're going to overhaul your life towards depth, start by putting it in place a keystone habit in each of these what we call buckets, something distractible, but non-trivial. And that's just about setting your mindset, right? You know, when it comes to my health, when it comes to my work, when it comes to my relationships,

when it comes to my sort of ethical or spiritual development, there's something I do every day that it's not trivial, and I do it. And that signals to myself, I care about these areas, and I'm willing to do work that's optional but important. Once you've laid that psychological foundation, then I talk about going bucket by bucket and spending a month or two to really overhaul each. So what Chris is asking is where do the results of that bucket-by-bucket overhauls get written down? How do you remember, let's say, when you overhaul constitution, what you've decided about your health and fitness?

When you overhaul craft and you've made changes in how you approach your work, you have new visions, where does that go? That's a very good question. So Chris, and I brought my computer here, Chris, because I'm going to actually look at my own documents and answering this question. But the basic answer is two-part. So the first place, if I'm overhauling a bucket, the first place those proposed changes are going to go is in my strategic plan, what we also call a quarterly plan or semester plan. That's where it lives at first so that every week I see these changes. And I'll give it a name often. I'll be like, okay, this is the project whatever.

I like to do that. You know, project work 2.0 or something. And I'll often even put, and I'm looking at it on my screen right now, like a, a, a, a, you know, a project, whatever. table inside the Google Doc I use. There's a border and put the name it bold and I'll have that right at the top of it. And it's a reminder of like this is the, this is what we're trying right now. We're doing this every day. We're using this new system and we have, you know, we're trying to hit this milestone every

month for the next three months. So it's right there, right in your face. I will leave it there for a while because not everything is going to stick. And I'll change it maybe over time. Like, let me get rid of this. Let me update this. So it's sort of a living dock. After a while, if this overhaul has created changes that are going to stick, this is just going forward what I always do with fitness.

This is going forward something I always do with craft. I have another document where those changes will then get encoded. And in my system here, and I'm looking in my core folder in my personal Google Docs. And I have my work strategic semester planning here. I have my personal family life career strategic plan here. I have my values document in here. And the fourth document is called core systems that run my life. This is where new habits or systems or rules to become a permanent part of my life eventually migrate and find their permanent home.

So I'm loading that up now. I'm not going to – I've talked about this before. I won't read the details, but let me give you the category. So right up top, at the top of this document, I've written below are summaries of the three main categories that contain the elements of my core systems. Those categories are core documents, productivity, and discipline. So under core documents, this is where I discuss how my value document works, how my strategic plans works, and maintenance.

Like, when do I check on these? How do I update these? Under productivity, this is where I capture daily, weekly planning, how that works, multi-scale planning, shutdowns, capture, like the different elements that are at the core of sort of how I organize that. And then under discipline is where I have, okay, these are just things I do on a regular basis and all these different buckets, you know, aspects of my life. So this is where permanent changes to different buckets of my life end up. They'll largely be in this core systems document. Exceptions abound. Okay.

So some things become so core. I don't even bother writing them down. I just sort of get used to this is what I do. Other things like live pretty permanently in my strategic plans, right? So, for example, there might be some vision I have. And let me be specific. There is a vision I have for where I'm trying to get with my work. like the lifestyle vision of my working life I want.

That's at the top of my strategic plan for work. It lives there. So like every time I'm up, you know, overhauling that strategic plan or just looking at it to make my weekly plan, I just see again and again this vision I have on my life. And so I don't forget that where I want to get. And on this list, it's five attributes that I have. So some things just live in my strategic plans. He's sort of like lifestyle visions and stuff living there. Some things I just do, I get used to it.

I don't bother writing it down. And other things make their way into my core systems. All right. So, Chris, that's a good question. That's how I run it. I will say psychologically speaking, the point of that core system's document is so like I don't worry about forgetting it. Practically speaking, I never read it.

Because if you do these things again and again, after a year or two, you don't really need to be reminded. But it makes me feel good to know at least it's written down somewhere. All right. What do we guys are next question here? All right. next question terry a software developer from england i'm currently 36 i spent a while neglecting all my deep life buckets i had a minimum wage job irregular exercise no social life then i discovered deep work and so good

they can't ignore you around 2017 thanks to those in jaco willings podcast i learned to code landed a programming job i enjoy at triple my previous salary and now exercise four or five times a week so thank you for the assistance there your podcast also poach me away from Jocco's. The one bucket I still struggle with is community and simply just being social at the basic level. I really know what to say in a one-on-one conversation, even with people I've known for years, and I often fail to take advantage of social networking events because of it. All right. So first of all, Terry, you've got to be quieter about talking about me poaching you away from Jock's podcast. I do not want Jock Willick to

snap me into three different pieces. He is one of the scariest human beings alive, and I don't want him to know or think of me as a competitor because he could destroy me in a very literal, very literal sense. If you don't know who Jocko Willink, by his way, just look at seven seconds of a Jocko YouTube video, and you know exactly what I talk about. In fact, Jesse, I think we should try doing some Jocko style. YouTube videos. Do you on the rower?

Have you seen, do you watch any Jocko videos? Yeah, I've seen him over the ears. Black and white. And then he puts a mic, he eats the mic, and they put up the base. And he's just like,

you know, I was, you know, whatever he's saying, right? Get after it. Yeah. Get after it. It's like terrifying,

you know. So he's a terrifying man. I think it would be funny if we did our videos that way. So first things, first Terry. don't tell Jocko that you stop listening to his podcast because of me. Second thing, second, congratulations on the turnaround.

We'll get to the one remaining issue you have about community bucket in a second. But this one to make a quick aside because I hear from a lot of different people from a lot of different situations in life. And I think there's sort of an important internet culture point being made here. there is a lot of men for whom aspirational think of it as like manhood podcast like joccos is a very important and positive force in their life. I mean, look at Terry went from minimum wage job, a regular exercise, no social life to a really good programming job and he's in very good shape and is actively working on trying to improve his social life. Like this is a real turnaround. And I think the reason is, as someone who gives advice, who's given advice my whole life,

what I've learned is that different people have different, there's different things that resonate with them. And you want to reach someone, you have to figure out what it is exactly that resonates with that particular person. And it's different for different people. For a lot of men, but not all, but for a lot of men, there's something about a sort of traditional, you know, jaco has giant arms and wakes up at 430 and growls in his microphone and is like, you can do more than you think, you know, get after it, have disabilities,

discipline, was it, discipline is freedom? Is that jocco? Right? For a lot of guys, that really resonates, right? Just because of the way they're wired and biochemically and hormonally or whatever, that resonates and it can really lead to a lot of changes. Now, for other people, it doesn't. But I think this is this pluralistic advice is pluralistic modes of advice is something that

we need to embrace. And so I think there is a pushback against the jocos of the world where, other people that makes them uncomfortable. So having like a 250 pound silver star winning sort of war hero Navy seal type growling at them makes them really uncomfortable, which completely makes sense. Because again, different people get advice different ways, right? So like I don't get that uncomfortable around Brune, around Jocco, but I was talking about this story recently. I remember years ago I was on the same circuit as Bray Brown. And I remember back in like 2011, her and I spoke at the.

same event and she did her presentation and the crowd was on their feet and they were dancing. And I remember turning to the person next to me being like, I don't understand the word she just said because she was speaking a language that really resonates with some people, but for me made no sense. So I think recognizing different tones of advice work for different people and we need a pluralistic approach to advice. I think this is really important, sort of device, advice diversity. So just like I shouldn't say

Bray Brown should go away because I don't understand why she has people danced like what's going on here. I feel the same thing when people are saying, I don't like Jocko. Like I don't know, this makes me uncomfortable. He turned Terry's life around and there's a lot of other people like that.

So I think there's two things and again, I'm just going on a tangent here because I've been thinking about internet culture recently and I'm going to get back to your question, Terry. But I think there's two different things going on when we see something like discomfort with Jocko. And the first is what I just talked about here.

It's just like that particular tone doesn't resonate with me. So I think, you know, this person can go away. Second, and I'm going to add a bonus here. So second, I think, is the mixing of the universal with the existential. So I'm about to teach propositional logic to my undergraduate mathematics class starting next week, and that's the first topic we cover. so this is on my mind. I think this happens a lot where we go from a proper dislike of the universal leading to an improper rejection of the existential.

What do I mean by that? Well, we might look at the trope of manhood promoted by someone like Jocko and correctly say, this should not be the only vision of manhood that we push. If this is the only thing that's available, if it's the only thing we promote or support, that's a problem because not all men this is going to resonate with. That's a completely appropriate rejection of the universal. It is easy for that to slip, however, into the fear of the existential. Where you go from, this shouldn't be the only vision of manhood we push to we should never push this version of manhood.

The existence of anyone still pushing that is a problem. So it's very easy, I think, when you're thinking about in a broad sense, like progressive, and I don't mean this in a political sense, but in the actual definition of the term evolution of culture, it's very easy to go from the rejection of the universal to the demonization of the existential. There shouldn't only be jaco as our model for manhood, but we shouldn't say there should be no joccos, because for some people, that really resonates. The third thing I think this is happening here is also there's some real, I don't know, I don't want to, I don't, this is a non-explicit podcast, so I don't want to curse. But there's some, like, terrible, toxic guys out there as well.

And it's easy to start mixing it up. so it's easy to say and I don't know much about this guy but there's this guy have you heard this Andrew Tate guy Jesse no I mean I don't know I only know about him because I don't I'm not on social media because this is now crossed over into it was on the front page of the Washington Post but I guess he's like one of these um it's like a toxic like uh he got arrested for sex trafficking in Romania but like um his whole thing is alpha male like but in like a caricature sort of I'm going to be outrageous sort of to get eyeballs type of thing.

And smoke cigars and stand in front of my jet and, you know, that, like that type of thing, like really sort of over the top and annoying and he just got arrested or whatever. That exists. And so maybe what's happening is also people are somehow mixing, mixing that up because, like,

well, Jocko has muscles and, like, talks in a deep voice. But man, those are so different things. Jocko has, like, two silver stars,

you know, for, like, heroic valor on the battlefield, like, saving people's lives. He ran the brutal task force bruiser During the battle for Ramadi

Has had to watch You know And he's cried about this on air Having to watch the death of people Who were close to him That were just doing the mission The suicides that came after And getting through this

He's like a leader to this community So we have on one hand an American hero And on the other hand A sex trafficker who you know Smokes cigars and we're like well They're both kind of musly or whatever It's completely different But again if you're not really familiar

With the world Maybe you mix it up So those are my three reasons why, you know, these are my three, please. Different type of advice resonates with different type of people and be worried about proper rejection of the universal, leading to fear of the existential, and also don't mix up people that seem superficially similar. The real reason why I'm giving these three explanations, Jesse, this is all about trying to prevent Jocko from killing me. I spent five minutes defending Jocko because I'm terrified of him. Actually, I hear he's a nice guy. I have friends in common.

I hear he's a really nice guy. You guys will get along. I think so. I think those guys who are like, know what they're about. Navy SEAL, Blackbell, and Jiu-Jitsu or whatever are like the nice guys because they have nothing to prove. They're like, they just go through life kind of, you know. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, nice. He lives in San Diego because it's sunny. He surfs. He probably reads your books. He might. I should meet him. And this podcast is mainly military. So he has on a lot of other military people.

All right, Terry, as for your question about community, my concern here is you're thinking about it too systematically. Like, how do I talk to people? How do I, like, optimize interaction? And I'm going to suggest change the name of this bucket in your mind from community to service. And say, what I want to do with this bucket is forget, like, am I having enough conversations with people? and my good socializer is how do I serve other people?

And let's just get that bucket going. Start with a keystone habit and build up to an overhaul. Ways that you can give non-trivial amounts of your time, attention, and energy towards improving other people's lives. And this could be straight up community service. Like I'm volunteering for my church and we're helping run this initiative. Or it could be I'm a part of this group of other people who share an interest and we try to help each other out and encourage people.

And I see what I'm trying to do here is like they're giving me help, but I want to help other people. You know, I want to just, how can you serve other people? And this is an idea that I argue in digital minimalism. My book, Digital Minimalism, this is really where the factor that causes our mind to think about a social connection with someone else being strong. It's not how well do we talk. It's, am I sacrificing non-trivial time and attention on behalf of this person. If you do that, your mind says, this is a member of my tribe. We're in the group together.

They're an important person in my life. It's what makes you feel social. It's what makes you feel connected. Not how much you talk to people, but how much you give for other people. So don't worry about the talking right now and think more about how to serve other people. You will feel more connected. The conversation will come after that. The other stuff will follow.

But I would say turn away from you and turn towards other people. That's probably the best way for you to tackle this community bucket. all right just looking at the door to see i don't want to hear like the footsteps of jaco um all right what we got let's do another question all right next question scott a scientist from boston i read on the platform medium my problem is whenever i get an idea for an article i get stuck into a trap of being unable to stop going too deep

and have trouble distilling the essential idea down to a 10 to 12 minute read how do you distill complex idea into short form for the New Yorker articles without getting into the trap of trying to capture everything there is to say about a complex topic? Well, Scott, the first thing to recognize is that distilling complex ideas to something that's essential, that hangs together, that captures people's attention and improves or augments the way they understand the world, that is really hard to do. And so I want to lay that as a foundation so you're not overly hard on yourself. or disappointed that you're not just naturally able to accomplish that pretty easily. I think that type of idea writing is in a way like screenwriting in the sense that the finished product is so familiar and natural that we make the mistake of assuming, well, I should be able to do that easily as well.

So when you see a lot of movies in your life, screenwriters talk about this all the time, people in their lives see a lot of movies. And when you see a movie, it's like it comes, it's just natural. like their people are talking and things are blowing up and you think like well yeah i mean i could do that like i have ideas and i have a plot ideas and what if like the robot was actually you know um secretly this guy's brother and and his sister was dead the whole time like we come with plots and kind of imagine it and we say yeah we could do that too but what you don't recognize is to actually make a screenplay work to make a screenplay just seem natural like yeah there's just plot and it happened

it's incredibly hard because there's a million things that makes a screenplay break all of the mcuffins, all the red herrings, like you've got to be very careful to get rid of all those things. All the pieces have to fit together. Everything that sets up has to be resolved. Motivations have to be here. There can't be any wasted beats. To make a screenplay feel so natural is incredibly hard to do.

Similar with, I think, idea writing. In the end, if you do it well, it's like, oh, yeah, that's a good way of thinking about that. Yeah, cool, good idea. And you're like, I have good ideas all the time. Why can't I do that? But it's actually really hard to deliver that because the idea has to, everything has to work. no red herrings, no mcuffins.

The things you set up are resolved at the end. The idea makes complete sense of exactly what you introduce. There's no loose threads. The whole thing moves. There's some sleight of hand. You kind of navigate around the complexities as if they don't exist. That's really hard to do. But when you read it, you're like, oh, yeah, it's just natural.

So I want to start with that so you don't feel too bad about yourself. I do a lot of idea writing, but you have to remember, I'm kind of an exceptional character in this. in some sense, I was like bred in a lab, like Drago in Rocky Four, to be an idea writer. I was exposed to all this writing in my teenage years because I was a teenage entrepreneur. So I read a lot. I read a lot of pragmatic nonfiction. I read a lot of idea nonfiction. I was sort of like obsessed with this as a kid.

I was also a precocious writer. I was pulled into this gifted and talented writing program when I was eight years old where instead of having to do normal English class, we'd read really hard books and write write, right, right, right, right, constantly writing these really long, short stories and essays. And so, like, I was a precocious writer who happened through happenstance to be exposed to the style of writing really early. In college, I became a serious writer, editor of the humor magazine, a columnist for the newspaper, and began writing idea books, signed my first book deal right after I turned 21 years old. So I've been doing this my entire life. This is why I say I've been bred into the lab to do idea writing. So now by the time I'm 40, it's a little bit more natural for me.

You know, I can pretty quickly assess, like, here's an idea. I can deliver pretty quickly. But that's all really hard. All right. So all of that's just to say, don't be down on yourself. Now, I have some advice to give to you. So if you're doing idea writing, A, remember, your goal is not to cover all of the details, all the possible caveats, all the alternative paths forward.

You're trying to tell a coherent, cohesive story with narrative momentum that in the end will give the reader another tool to use in trying to build an understanding of the world. You're not writing a textbook. You're delivering one new take that people can add to their collective understanding of the world. The thing I think that often slows down new writers in the space and leads to the excessive research issue that you talk about you having where you spend so much time researching, you never get to the article, it's often fear. of imagined critique, you get paralyzed by this idea that, you know, someone's going to come along and say, wait a second, Scott, you didn't talk about this. Like, you told us that this is the way the world works, but you didn't talk about, you know, this effect or that study. I don't think you really understand what's going on here. That imagined critique, it can be really paralyzing, especially

for new writers. And I have a theory that the current moment, because of the rise of social media, and in particular, the hair-trigger critique culture on Twitter, where a lot of writers engage, makes this problem even worse. You know, when I was writing as a 21-year-old, maybe a letter would make its way to me, or there would be a review in a newspaper that was mean, but that was about it. Like today, everything is going to get picked over,

and so you're so worried about triggering critique because it's so accessible, I think it paralyzes writers more. It's not your goal to write a textbook on the topic. tell a story that hangs together that's going to help me understand the world. If I'm the reader, I'm smart. I recognize that Cal's story about quiet quitting and generational relationships with work is not the full story. And there's three other things going on here.

And it doesn't apply to this group. And he didn't talk about Generation X. I know all of that as a reader. But I'm just going to pull out here. Here's a new tool to add to my toolbox. So that's your goal. So that should help. B, work backwards from the insight and then find.

support. So if your approach, and in your elaboration, Scott, you talked about this more. If your approaches, I'm going to learn everything I can about this topic and then hopefully I'll be able to emerge a cohesive story about how this part of the world works. There's no end to how much you can learn. And so typically in advice writing, you sort of have the insight first and then you're working backwards from that. Like, how do I make this argument? How do I fill it in? We're going to get into those details in the next question, so stay tuned. And then three, or C, A, B, C, the pieces you present all have to fit. So the story has to, it's like a screenplay. The story has to be cohesive. If you introduce something early, there has to be a reason for it. It has to be made sense of later

or be responded to later. If you bring in an example, that example has to be just what you need to fill in a point. No red herrings, no mcuffins, right? So you can't have things that, you put in there that end up not being so important or you end up just leaving hanging. So you have to think of yourself as I'm going to open up these ports and I have to close them again before the article ends. So that type of consistency is actually more important to comprehensiveness. A consistent cohesive story is more important than I've covered every possible angle. All right, Scott, those are my advice.

I think we got, I purposely scheduled this next question, Jesse, because it follows up directly on what Scott was asking about. Okay. Next question's from Enzo. In a previous episode, you discussed quiet quitting and described how you researched the origins of the phrase in a TikTok video. Can Cal talk through his article research methods in more detail? Right. So this is an elaboration of what I was talking to about.

Scott, let me get into how I typically work on idea articles. And I sort of wrote down my process here. So I'll go through it. I have a bunch of steps on here. So I start with having a foundation of just broadly consuming potentially relevant information. That's key. You've got to have grist to the mill of creative insight. So this includes the five books I read, you know, my five book a month reading pace.

I read a lot of articles. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I do research to answer questions on this podcast. That sometimes is a source of ideas. And I read a bunch of the stuff you guys send me. interesting at calnewport.com. You guys send me really interesting. So I'm reading a lot and I'm creating this sort of broad base of just generally potentially

useful information. All right, too, I constantly riff off these things, especially when I'm walking, trying to come up with different ideas or theories. Now, sometimes I'm responding to something I just heard. Like, oh, I just listened to Mark Manson's interview on Tim Ferriss's show. they were talking about the death of blogs and the rise of YouTube. Let me see, you know, as I'm walking to pick up my kids from school, is there like an interesting, coherent story to talk about evolution of internet content? And maybe there's not.

But let me just try it out. And I'm doing this all the time. Now, again, I talked about it my answer to Scott. I was bred in a lab to be an idea writer. So this is just how my mind works. But I'm constantly riffing off ideas. Eventually an idea will click. This is pure instinct, just through experience.

Boom. Oh, there's something there. I have this storyline about the, there's a parallel between the transition from blogs to YouTube videos. There's a parallel between the transitions from the penny daily newspaper, the penny press newspaper to radio. Because maybe I've read something about that. I read Tim Wu's book, The Master Switch or something. And I kind of learned about that. I read his attention merchant's book.

and I bet there's a parallel there. Oh, that's interesting. And it clicks. I'm like, okay, now I have something that could actually be a complete beginning, middle, event story where everything pulls together. At least it has that potential.

At that point, if I want to work with that, I'll do a little bit more basic research. Let me see if this rough story I just outlined actually holds up. Let me go back and reread my marked notes in that Tim Wu book about the attention merchants. Let me go back and actually relisten to that piece of the interview

with Mark and Tim. Do I really remember that right? Like, what exactly did he say? So I'm doing some sanity checking, some basic research. Like, does the storyline I wrote in my head actually match? Am I remembering properly these sources? And I'll tell you 40% of the time, that's not going to be the case. I'll go back and read the thing or re-listen to the thing.

They're actually kind of saying the opposite. Like, my mind is so desperate for, find such pleasure in cohesive stories. It will sometimes change things. And when I go back, I'm like, oh, my God. It was actually the opposite. But if my basic research kind of confirms, yeah, we have the pieces here for a story. At this point, I'm ready to pitch it. So it's a pitchable story, and at some point I might pitch it.

If I'm going to write it for a magazine, I'll pitch it to my editor. If it's going to be a book chapter or a podcast segment, it's just, you know, there's no one to actually pitch it to. I just, it's in my list of like, let's go for this. Once greenlit, then I will go back and more thoroughly fill in the detail. So get the depth of research needed to actually write it. about it in a confident way. For something like a 2000 word, New Yorker piece, this might only take a couple days. It's like, okay, let me go.

I have like, let me get the transcript of this interview. Let me get this chapter. Let me write down my notes from this chapter of this relevant book. Let me find three articles and pull out the relevant notes. Okay, now I have enough to actually support this story. If it's a longer piece, you know, like the New Yorker piece I wrote on natural productivity, that was five or six thousand words or if it's a long book chapter, this could take longer, maybe even a couple of months.

I'm working on an article right now, and I won't give any details because I don't give details on things in progress if it's being done for other publications. But just speaking in generalities, I'm working on in the early stages of a potential bigger article now where I've read five books on it already, and I have probably two or three interviews I need to set up before this rough stuff. storyline I have in my mind, I'll really be able to flesh it out. So, you know, it could take a long time or it could take a couple of days. It depends on how big of a thing you're writing.

Then I will rework my storyline with this more detailed research. And sometimes it's just tweaking it. Like, okay, actually, here's the best beat. Forget, it's not about the penny far. It's not pinning far. It's a bicycle. The penny press. So it's not about like the penny press going to the radio.

Actually, the really good story here is, you know, about television's rise versus paperback mass market paperback nonfiction or fiction books or something right like you you might realize like the story more or less true but there's better examples to make this make this true or there's another angle to it I want to add so I evolve the story now I have the fully evolved story and I'm ready to write so that's my process uh Anzo that's how I get from uh nothing just a general foundation of having lots of interesting thoughts to a finished piece all right let's Let's move on, Jesse. I think we have time for one more.

Another question here. Nicholas from Tucson. I haven't heard you talk about much of the symbolism for value of expression in the pursuit of the deep life. If you've held a core value for 10 plus years, then would it be appropriate to celebrate that with a tattoo? A good question. You got to be wary about tattoos?

Nicholas, I regret. Jesse's seen it. I have a full back tattoo. of it's a Brandon Sanderson's face and like right under it you know like you would have mom with a cherub angel holding it up

it says never forget the name of the wind. I regret that tattoo. You know? Like I probably should have done like a little bit more research. And it was expensive. It was expensive.

Yeah. Yeah. Expensive. And Brandon has really sent a lot of cease and desist letters about, you know, because I go there a lot and try to show them the tattoo.

Yeah. show up shirtless outside of his underground layer. Brandon. The wind. Brandon, the wind. No, Nicholas, okay. Broad answer, specific answer. Broad answer, you're absolutely right that we underestimate.

We often underestimate the value of symbolism. Capturing things that are important to us symbolically in objects and the way we set up an office, the things we buy, the things we collect. it's really easy to see that through the sort of miserly pragmatic economic lens of why are you wasting money on that? Isn't that an extravagance? But it's actually really important, I think, to have totems of things that you really care. In the three interesting segments, three interesting things segment that follows, I have a really cool example of this where I'm going to show you something involving the director, Guillermo del Toro. So stay tuned for that. But let me just say more broadly, I think it makes complete sense to invest in things that do nothing else but remind you or solidify values that you hold important. So if you're a writer and you invest in expensive first editions of influential books to you, I don't think that's a waste of money. I think that's your capturing the written word is important to me, you know, and I really value it. I'm thinking about for the HQ, for example, I want to get a pre-microcessor arcade cabinet.

And I actually don't care if the cabinet itself is rebuilt, but I want it to be original circuitry. For a game from before there was actually microprocessors, I just love this idea of analog circuitry being wired up in such a way that you can then have it come together and create something like a video game, right? And so like that's nonsense to almost anyone else. Like, are you really going to spend that money on asteroids or whatever? But to me, there's something symbolic about things I care about with. technology and culture and the way technology can alchemize into sort of cultural influence or something bigger than the sum of its parts. And as a computer scientist, I really love the history of digital electronics before we get to the sort of bloodless reality of today of these

sort of just processors where one piece of silicon does everything. And the idea of Steve Jobs and Wozniak sitting there in Atari in the mid-1970s trying to just get together a breakout clone before there was something like a microprocessor to use as just timing circuits and the puzzle of it. Like it's symbolic to me. And so it's something that I would invest, you know, invest money in. So I'm a big believer in exactly what you suggest here.

Capturing values in symbolic objects. Tattoos, like, sure. I mean, my real thing about tattoos is my rule of thumb. Wait until you're in your 30s. Because when you're getting the tattoo in your 20s, you haven't really developed that full value system. yet. So then the tattoo might play more of the role of like, I'm just so desperate to sort of individualiate. That's not the right word. Individuate. Is that a word? To sort of define

myself as a unique individual and I like what it signals to other 20 year olds of like, I look, like I don't care. I have this. Like I'm really unique and interesting or whatever. But in your 20s are an idiot and you know, you're going to look back and say, I thought at the time it was really cool to get deep work forever in a face tattoo, but like actually, you know, Cal's kind of a dork. Can I regret that right? And when the time you get to your 30s, then it's like, okay, now I kind of have a handle on. I'm not so interested in, you know, looking cool to the, the 24-year-old at the bar.

I have a bigger sense of my values. I know a lot of writers who do this. Ryan, Ryan Holiday has multiple forearm tattoos from his books. I think he has ego as the enemy, the obstacle. is the way. He said a four book deal, so I guess he's going to have to, I don't know, he's going to run out to body parts, you know, at some point. My friend Brian Johnson, I think, did he, he's done.

So I think I've seen a lot of like forearm tattoos like writers have done. So I'm for it, man. I'm for taking big swings. I mean, I'm not a tattoo guy myself, but whatever your equivalent is of a tattoo, I think taking big swings to signal to yourself that you take, you care about something or think something is important. I think it's cool. there's a real psychology behind it.

And it makes life boring if we see that all through the lens of like, is that really strictly necessary? Is that an indulgence? Is that a contrivance? I mean, life is short. If you're involved in it, something that matters to you,

you know, lean into it. I would say by far the most consistent group in my life who has tattoos is actually moms. Really? Mm-hmm. The kids names. Very common.

Which makes sense, right? I mean, they're, unlike my Brandon Sanderson name of the wind tattoo, there's one thing you could probably be pretty sure that you're not going to like 10 years later be like, I'm not really that into this anymore. We're kids, right? And it's such like a huge life altering. Your whole life is like reorienting around this thing. A lot of moms have their, it'll be like the initial. It's just subtle, the initial somewhere, the name somewhere. Anyways.

The best tattoo humor. So I just got to recommend a clip. the TV show Superstore of if you saw it or if you've seen the show or not it's from a few years ago

but there's a whole scene there where he wants to get his mom's, one of the characters wants to get his mom's face tattooed on his back and she's been learning how to do it

but she's been practicing on Melon so it's not going well you know what she does on his actual back so it's a really funny sequence she gives him like a top hat and keeps growing the top hat like cover over the mistake

he says really funny So in the end, there's like this giant top hat. It's humor, guys. It's great. I recommend that clip. All right. That's enough questions. I want to get the three interesting things.

I have a couple of cool things I want to show everyone. First, let me mention another sponsor that makes this show possible. It's a tattoo parlor. See, that would be synergy. That's how you get the real CPMs, Jesse, is you rebuild your whole show around the thing you're about, to talk to you. So our tattoo parlor that we're opening downstairs in the old

Republic restaurant, it's going to be really successful. It's all Brandon Sanderson team. Okay. No, no. What I really want to talk about is something that's way more pragmatic and way more clearly useful. Stamps.com. For over 20 years,

Stamps.com has been indispensable for more than one million businesses. It gives you access to USPS and UPS services that that you need to run your business right from your computer anytime day or night. No lines, no traffic, no waiting. You just print your own postage with your normal printer.

You put it on what you want to ship. You schedule a pickup. No going to the post office. No going to the UPS store. They also have negotiated these large discounts on shipping rates. So you end up not only getting more convenience, but saving money as well. if you run a business that does any sort of shipping, you have to be using stamps.com.

Don't go to the post office. Just print, pay, schedule, boom, discount, convenience. Most importantly, I think time, not to waste that time. I can just get this part, this quintessential shallow work task, shipping something. You want to squeeze that into the smallest possible amount of time as you can.

So stamps.com is just something you need to have, if you do any amount of shipping, this is just a straightforward productivity hack. It just makes sense. It's one of the easiest pitches I do. Don't go to the post office. You can just do it from home. Bam, sign me up. Stamps.com is a way to do it.

So you can start the new year right by saving serious money on your mailing and shipping. Get started with Stamps.com today. Sign up with the promo code deep for a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus free postage and a free digital scale, no long-term commitments or contracts. You go to Stamps.com, you click on the microphone at the top of the page. That will then let you enter the promo code deep, and you get all that cool free stuff. All right. Another sponsor I want to talk about, very appropriate for the new year.

My Body Tudor. My Body Tudor is a 100% online coaching program that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, which is lack of consistency. eat. It's not hard to figure out what you should be eating. It's not hard to figure out a workout plan that's going to make a difference. What's hard is actually doing it on a regular basis and making the tweaks you need to make it work for your life. What my body tutor does, that's why it's so smart, is that it connects you with a coach dedicated to you. And they're going to figure out your eating plan. They're going to figure out your exercise plan. And then

you check in with them every day. It's a simple app on your phone. boom, boom, boom, and they read it and respond every day. That gives you accountability. The accountability leads to consistency. The consistency leads to results. It also gives you expert advice. So, you know, like, I'm trying this plan, but, like, this isn't working for me. I'm having a hard time with this part of what we're talking about eating.

You have this coach. It's like, let me specifically address that issue. Why don't we change this or move the Wednesday things to Thursday, or let's not care so much about this in your diet. Really, what we should do is maybe instead prepackage your lunches. You have expert advice to help deal with the specific issues you have in your life as you're trying to succeed with these health and fitness goals. So if you're here in the new year wanting to get in better shape and you're just going to do it on your own,

don't. Go to my body tutor. Get the online coach, work with them every day. It's going to work. It's what actually works. Now, here's the good news. If you mention deep questions when you sign up, they will give you $50 off your first month. So just mention the podcast deep questions when you sign up.

And if you talk to Adam Gilbert, my old friend, Adam Gilbert, who found him my biotutor, tell him, Cal says hi, that guy is awesome and a really good shape. So if you're going to, if you have any resolution getting better shape, let me just make this clear. MyBodytutor.com mentioned deep questions. I think it's the best way to do it. Me and the boys just have been watching Limitless on Disney Plus, which is a Darren Arfneski directed documentary series that follows Chris Hemsworth, Thor, as he like does all. And he's beautifully shot.

Darren Arniewski is a great film director. He did Black Swan. But he's been doing these beautifully shot sort of documentary series for National Geographic, which Disney owns because it's through Fox. He did one with Will Smith a couple years ago. But anyway, so it's a lot of Chris, a lot of Chris Hemsworth. It made us think about our discussions before about how do these guys,

like how did he get in the shape to be Thor? And let's just say he wasn't doing on his own. He had a coach. He had a coach. I heard a whole discussion about Hemsworth.

On the show? But on this show. But on another podcast about there's some needles that are probably involved. I don't want to cast dispersions. But supposedly it's a whole dark underside. Not dark,

but it's just like an underside of these superhero movies. It's really really, no way for these guys to get as strong as they do as quick as they do without some AIDS, which are probably not that healthy, but you got to inject this, inject that. And the whole agreement in the media

is just like, don't ask about it. It's not like the rock is saying, I don't use this, or Chris Hemsworth saying, I don't use this. They just, just, no one talks about it. It's just kind of like the price you pay to do these movies. So if I show up looking like Chris Hemsworth, be suspicious.

Within the next three months. Yeah, be suspicious. All right. Final segment of the show. Three interesting things. This is where we take three things that I found interesting that you have sent to me and my interesting at calnewport.com email address that all relate to the general theme here of trying to live a deep life.

And I take three I like and we look at them. So if you are listening to this show, you might want to jump over to the YouTube version of the episode because the three things are visual. that's YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media. We launch a video of the full episode of each podcast, usually the same day

that it comes out. I'll explain in words what's on the screen here, but it's better than what. So it's a good chance to jump over to YouTube. All right. The first interesting thing

I want to talk about is the director, Guillermo del Toro, or as I've discovered, his fans call him GDT, his so-called bleak house. All right. So I've loaded on the screen now.

An article, there's a lot of articles about this. This happens to come from a Southern California radio station. And the headline here is Bleak House, a tour inside Guillermo del Toro's creative man cave. There is a picture of him in a Victorian decorated room with a terrifying monster statue. So here's the subhead. I'll read this on the screen right now. The director behind Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy owns a house filled with artifacts. he has collected throughout his life.

Now, the reason why we're hearing about this is there's an exhibit they're now doing where you can come in a museum exhibit. We can see a lot of these things. But the key thing is before this exhibit, he has a two-story house filled with more than 10,000 items. Artworks, sculptures, artifacts, books, movies collected over a lifetime. But he insists he's not collecting for collecting sake. So let's dive a little deeper. here's a Gailmar quote. This is a religious place for me.

See, to me, everything that surrounds us is not a collection. It's relics. It's relics or its talismans. Whatever you want to call them, they have a spiritual hold of who I am essentially. This goes right back to the question we talked about before the break, about the value of having symbolic objects to capture your values. GDT is getting right to the core of this. He sees these things he collects as relics. It's a power is being captured in there.

where is the bleak house it's a in the suburbs he just bought a house in the suburbs near his existing house and he gets into it later in this article he gets into how this came about he was collecting this stuff because if you know GDT

he does these these beautiful fantastical movies that often have the macabre or terrifying in them so he was collecting these somewhat disturbing objects and at some point his wife very reasonably said this cannot be in our house like we have young

kids. If you want to know what I'm talking about and you're watching on YouTube, I have an example on the page of something that's in his bleak house. It's a man's face that has been ripped open and there's like jaws coming out of it. It's not the type of stuff you want in your house. So he said, fine, I'll buy another house and that's where we're going to store my collection. So he has the second house. Here's another big picture I put on the screen. It's cool, Jesse. Look at this. There's a monster, a giant Frankenstein head. The whole thing has done up Victorian red walls. All the pictures are covered in framed art,

but it's like weird macabra, uh, sort of, uh, Hieronymish Bosch style artwork. Like it's, it's, uh,

old lamps and bookcases. So, um, oh, here's the quote, by the way, uh, his wife said,

that's too close to the kitchen. The kids are going to get freaked out. And he, GDT said, inside of me something cracked. And I said, I'm going to get my own place. He has a haunted mansion room based off the

Disney thing. He has a room that simulates a rain storm outside. He has 13 libraries. So each room has a different library. He used that as a research area. So this one opens and you're in a room that's a haunted mansion. But the haunted mansion room has a library that's all about mythology, folklore, fairy tales, and myths, etc.

So he uses this house, not just to capture things that are valuable to him, but also as a source of creative inspiration. So he's not just reading about fairies when he's working on Pan's Labyrinth. He's in a haunted mansion room taking these old volumes off of the shelf. I think this stuff really matters. And I talk about this a lot on the show. If you do any sort of creative endeavor where you're trying to alchemize value out of the stuff in your mind, environment matter, rituals matter, objects matter. If you're an accountant, you might say this is crazy.

You bought a second house just to store stuff, how indulge it or whatever. But this is at the core of what GDT does for a living, these fantastical, incredibly creative, inspired visual masterpiece-style movies. This is just a completely pragmatic investment. And I think people might say something similar about the Deep Work H.Q. But for what I do for a living, it's an investment that makes a huge amount of sense to have a place to come to that I'm specifically decorating to celebrate what I care about in terms of cognitive work,

that have the ritual of coming here versus somewhere else. The lab we're building in here. Jesse Saul today, when he came back from vacation, I bought in a lot more electronics equipment because me and my oldest son are building things. And that's really important to me and having that connection. So it seems completely crazy to, you know, I don't know, like my brother. But to me, because of what I do, it's like, of course I'm going to invest in this. You know, it matters.

Symbolic value matters. Ritual matters. Location matters. So anyways, I just think this is cool. Here's a, I like this picture. So for those who are watching, there's a picture of an incredibly scary looking doll on an old Victorian chaise lounge. And I just, I want to pull this up because of the photo caption, which just reads,

a couch piled with books and a demonic doll. It's an awesome photo caption. Here's the freaks room. That guy's terror. I'm just showing, if you're listening, I'm just showing like terrifying pictures on the screen. There's a simulated rainstorm room. Anyways, I put the link to this article in the show notes. So there's Frankenstein drinking tea.

No, Frankenstein's monster, I should be precise here, drinking tea film room. Anyways, I love that stuff. Jesse, who wins? GDT's Bleak House, Brandon Sarranson's Underground Layer. Seems like GDT had more stuff to look at. I think he has to, I think it's right. I think he has to cooler house. It's bigger.

I love the idea of having themed rooms for different libraries. Sanderson just wins on the coolness factor of being underground. Yeah. But it's, yeah, I'm going to give, I'll give this one that you do. You also might just be upset because he hasn't answered to your, you know, door knocking when you're outside his house. That's just me shirtless. Sanderson!

So now you're just knocking his layer. Screw his layer. Screw his layer. All right. Second interesting thing. Let me load up. I'm switching over to a different aspect. A reader sent this in.

This is the Nobel lecture. So the lecture given when you're awarded the Nobel Prize is the transcript of the Nobel lecture given by Kerry Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in 1993 for his work on developing the polymerase chain reaction PCR technology that's at the core of a lot of the genetics explosion. So it's a cool lecture because he's like going through in detail his whole story of How did he get his training, his ups and downs, how he left the academic track to try to become an author, that didn't work. He worked in restaurants for a while, came back to academia.

He really gives more detail than I'm used to seeing about building up to something like a Nobel caliber academic career. There's just one quote in particular one to point out, and I've marked it in this document. So I'm just scrolling down to this now on the screen. I thought this was cool. so he talks about halfway through his lecture. One Friday night I was driving, as was my custom,

from Berkeley up the Mindachino, where I had a cabin far away from everything off in the woods. My girlfriend, Jennifer Barnett was asleep. I was thinking since oglinode nucleotides

were not that hard to make anymore wouldn't be simple enough to put two of them into a reaction instead of only one such that one of them would bind to the upper strand and the other to the lower strand with the three prime ins adjacent to the opposing base pair in question.

This is the type of things we think, right? We all think when we're driving up to our cabins. We think about ugly nucleotides. Anyways, he had some more thoughts. And when he finished this thought, he realized he had everything he needed to do PCR, which he'd win the Nobel Prize for. So I just love this idea that he just had the habit

of going to a cabin in the woods to think. And it was going to this cabin in the woods to think, that ritual of doing so that eventually led to the thought. one thought on which his whole Nobel Prize winning work was eventually based. So again, this goes back to like the bleak house that GDT has. The accountant, our hypothetical accountant, says, wait a second, you're like a young academic. Why do you have a cabin in the woods?

What an indulgence, what a waste. This is what one of them is Nobel Prize. Thinking is hard. Creativity is hard. Coming up with things in your brain that has great value to the world outside is very hard. It needs, this process needs all the help it can get. So doing these things that seem kind of radical or unnecessary sometimes are exactly what you need to get radically impressive results. I have a third thing. This is a short. Someone sent this to me. This was just an honor of the Christmas season that just ended. I didn't get this in time in time last week, but here we go. I've written about this a long time ago. I wrote an essay about this, but it's a, what I've loaded on the screen here was just a note from Reddit. T.I.L. While writing a Christmas carol, Charles Dickens was

taking nighttime walks of 15 to 20 miles around London to build out the story in his head. What's TIL, Jesse? I kept on looking at it as TDL. Your's. TDL. Yours the deep life, but I don't know what. TIL.

Okay, Jesse, I don't know anything about the internet. But anyways, I've heard this story before, and I think it's cool. Dickens did a lot, he did a lot of work on foot, which I always advocate. he's upping this to the next level. 15 to 20 miles is pretty impressive. But this idea that he worked through this masterpiece in his head as he was moving

through the night streets of London, I think is really cool. It might not quite be true. This might be mixing up an essay that Dickens wrote about his nighttime walks in London, where he was talking about how he used these long walks as a cure for an about of insomnia. Some of these stories might get mixed up. But let's just keep the pristine folklore in our minds for now. Him walking through the gaslit streets of London, conjuring up ghost of the Christmas past, present and future,

building out this classic story in his head. A great Victorian personification of depth and a good holiday story to kind of end the whole holiday season. So there we go. Jesse, that's all we got. I got to go send some more photos to Brandon, so we should probably wrap this up. Thank you, everyone.

who sent in your questions. We always want more. There's a link right in the show notes for how you can go online and send us as many questions as you want for us to potentially answer on the show. Remember, if you like what you heard, you will like what you see. Full episodes and clips are available at YouTube.com slash Kalnuport Media. We'll be back next week with another episode of the podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email, newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over

70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you got to sign up for my newsletter at Caldnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.