Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 252: The Deep Life Stack

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

How do you leave a life of superficial distraction and cultivate something deeper? In today’s episode, Cal describes “The Deep Life Stack,” an approach to cultivating a deep life that starts with overhauling the person before making the big decisions.  Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo  Video from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmedia  Today’s Deep Question: How do I rebuild my life into something deeper? [6:29]  - Is the deep life only available to those with high salaries? [31:55] - How do I co-create a deep life with my partner? [41:48] - Is there a genetic component to depth? [45:24] - What are Cal’s thoughts on the book “Designing Your Life”? [58:31]  Something Interesting: Forget AI. Apple’s all in on AR. (And this is smart.) [1:06:34]  Links:  apple.com/apple-vision-pro/  Thanks to our Sponsors:  hensonshaving.com/cal drinklmnt.com/deep 80000hours.org/deep zocdoc.com/deep  Thanks 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, the show about living and working deeply in a distracted world. So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I got some news. There is now officially available on Amazon for pre-order is the new edition of the Time Block Planner. Oh, nice. It took a long time coming because of supply chain issues, etc. Also, we really spent a lot of time trying to get it right. I'll have to bring it in.

We have a stack of what are called blanks. So just to get the new material right, the new binding right, they built these blank versions, right? There's no color. It's all white. And we went through a lot of those that try to get it just right. But we're very happy with how it ended up. Spiral binding, right?

It's spiral bound. So I'll get into these details as it gets a little bit closer. The official cell date when it's available to ship is August 15th. but I can tell you briefly now, the big difference is really high-quality spiral binding, double-wire big loop spiral binding, so you can open this thing, lie it completely flat.

I also re-engineered the interior pages. There are no longer individual time-block double-page spreads for the weekend days because I don't recommend that you time-block your weekends to that level of detail. So instead, we have these new things I call weekend pages, where you have a space on one page. These are two-facing pages. You'll have space on one page for building a rougher granularity plan

and still doing metric tracking on the weekend and another page for your weekly planning. This saves space. So now we can get an extra month worth of planning pages into a single time block planner. It'll now carry you through an entire four-month semester, which to me, because that's the unit in which I break up my year, was very important.

So anyways, I'm telling you about it now early. Because you might consider wanting to pre-order a copy of the planner. The only reason why I'm bringing this up is that supply chain issues. So depending on how things go, we may be in a circumstance where we sell out the initial printing of the new planners, and then it might take a little bit before that supply chain catches up and we have the steady flow going. So if you're looking for this on Amazon, the original time block planner are still up there. you can differentiate that page from the page for the new planner because it says second edition in parentheses in the title. We don't even have the graphic yet.

You'll see the graphic is the same for both. So look for that second version or second edition at the top. So if you're interested in making sure you get your copy on August 15th, you might want to pre-order it. My editor wanted me to note that if there are time block planner 1.0 fans out there, You also might want to consider stocking up now while they're still available. That page will be up there on Amazon until we sell out of the printing of the old version, and then it'll disappear. So once that stock is gone, that's gone.

So if you're a diehard original version aficionado, you might want to stock up now. And if you want to make sure you get your second version, as soon as it's available in August, you might want to consider pre-ordering now. As we get closer, we'll talk about it in more detail. Well, maybe I'll do another primer in time block planning and we'll show you the new planner. I think I'm going to see it in July is when I get my first hands on a fully formed one. So stay tuned, but I just wanted to drop that note. Yeah, that would be good for new listeners, too, that aren't familiar with it.

Yeah, exactly. It would be a good chance to go through time blocking, the nuances, show off the new planner and such. All right, so what do we want to talk about today? Well, Jesse, let me give you the thought process that leads us to today's topic. So I'm just finishing up the manuscript, the final changes, the very final changes on the manuscript for my new book on slow productivity, which will come out next year. And so we're about to, it's called manuscript submission, but it's where you actually officially, the publisher hands it off to the team that works on things like copy editing, right? So you're done writing and now you're into polishing. So I have begun to think a little bit about the topic of the next book, which is going to be about the deep life.

I sold both of those together. And almost immediately, once I started thinking, just in recent weeks, about the idea of the deep life, it became apparent to me that the process we talk about here on this show, the taking of the deep life buckets, and focusing on those buckets one by one, is incomprehend, that when I think about the deep life from giving one-on-one advice to someone, there's other aspects to the cultivation of depth that goes beyond there. In some sense, by the time you get to the point where you're looking at individual aspects of your life and trying to do a potentially radical overhaul, that's pretty far along

in the process of trying to cultivate a life more of depth. There's a whole psychological self-identification piece that goes to this. We call it a pre-process where you set yourself up, you set up your life on a foundation in which you can make those types of changes. So I've been trying to brainstorm a systematic way of describing the broader goal of cultivating the deep life, a more complete system where you can go from, I'm overwhelmed, I'm stressed out, I'm anxious, I feel as if my life is just mired in a sort of superficial shallowness, the fuller process of how you get from there to a deeper life, one that seems remarkable, one that seems impactful. I want to stretch that out a little bit more. So what I have here is the first version of an elaborated deep life process. I want to go through it today in the show and then solicit your feedback as my listener.

Send me some notes. You can send them straight to author at caldnewport.com or interesting at caldnewport.com. I'm interested in your thoughts on this. This is still early stages, but I thought this would be a great time to beta test my more complete understanding of the deep life. So we'll call today's deep question. How do I rebuild my life into something deeper? All right. So I'm going to load up on the screen here.

My notes, I'm going to draw. So caveat mature. Cal Newport is going to try drawing. This never ends up being that beautiful. So be ready for it. If you're listing and you want to watch what I'm drawing on the screen, this is episode 252. So go to YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media and look for episode 252. or go to the deeplife.com and look for episode 252.

I'll also do my best to narrate what I'm drawing for those who are just listening. All right. So what you'll see on the screen here is what I call the deep life stack. Right now I have it empty. We're going to fill in the details as we go along. The stack has four different levels to it. I'll highlight those. I've got level one, two, three, four.

The way I'm conceptualizing in deep life stack is sequential. you start with developing the bottom layer of the stack, then you move up to the second layer, then the third, then the fourth, and then we're going to iterate, and we'll get into that soon. All right, so what happens on the first layer of the deep life stack?

This is the first big change or breakthrough, I would say, I've had when thinking about the deep life more recently. What I'm going to put out this bottom layer, it's going to be discipline. That's going to mean two things. But let me say what my, goal is here. I'm realizing when it comes to cultivating a different type of life, any type of transformation, you have to first change your self-identification to be the type of person who is

able to persist with things that are difficult in the moment in pursuit of a greater good down the line. And I think it's very easy for people like me who give advice for a living and who have been doing this for a long time to take for granted that that's what we do already. But But this is actually for most people, maybe the most critical step is transitioning from someone who says, look, this is not me. I don't have discipline. I'm not really able to pursue goals unless I feel really excited about it in the moment. How do we shift that self-identity? And as longtime listeners of the show, no, I really do see discipline as an identity.

It is not something you do. It is an identity. You see yourself as someone who is disciplined or you don't. that requires some cultivation. So at the very bottom of the Deep Life stack, and this is why I've highlighted this, you would get started by putting some elements into your life that required discipline to accomplish.

And it doesn't really matter when we're first beginning here what these are. You just want to push them to be past what's trivial, but still south of intractable. So where you're starting from might depend. pinned where, how ambitious these initial bits of discipline are. So this is where you might say, look, I'm going to train for a 5K. I am going to read five books a month. You're trying to find something that's going to require some discipline. I'm going to overhaul my nutrition. I'm going to do

something new. I'm going to do this workout routine, try to hit a streak on Peloton, whatever it is. You're calibrating it to where you are. And I don't really care at first. The content of these things you're pursuing with discipline is identity formation. And that's where we get started. You take a couple things in your life. You say, how can I make progress on this every day? And if it's too hard, you find something easier until you can move up to something harder, but you're establishing discipline.

The second piece here is you're going to establish your route for everything we're about to do, a directory, a folder, a drawer in a desk, where it's going to be the one place where you keep track of everything that you've committed to do in your life, your rules, your systems, you goals. so you're going to initialize this route to your ultimate life planning processes with these initial discipline projects. So at the beginning, you could just have a folder on your desktop. You could have a drawer where you're just writing down. Here's my disciplines. I'm working on these two things.

Here's what I do every day towards them. This is going to grow as we move through the deep life stack. But you're establishing here in the discipline step. Here's where I keep track of what I commit to. And you're starting to practice having commitments that are about long-term value, not what you want to do in the short term. So already we're a little bit different than standard thinking about lifestyle designs because we're not starting with the decisions. We're not starting with the let's quit my job. I want to move to the country.

We're recognizing that there is some effacement that has to happen first. There's some preparation that has to happen first. We don't want to jump into the decisions to develop the self first. That's the first layer of the stack. All right. So once that's going, I have a couple things. I've impressed myself. I'm doing these.

I didn't think I could. I am capable of discipline, and I have a centralized place now to keep track of what I'm doing. We move on to the next layer. I'll write this in here. We'll call this values. All right. So, yeah, we're not yet to choose to quit your job.

We're not yet to moving. Values is where you are going to establish what it is that is important to you. What are the truths that exist rooted outside of just your own preferences around, around which you were going to structure your life. This is committing to what is important to you. There's three pieces to figuring out what your values are going to be. I'll write them all three down, and then we'll talk about it. Code, rituals, routines.

So code is actually figuring out this is my code that I live by. I strive to do this. I will never do this. I have integrity. I am honest. I will prioritize the protection of others, whatever it is. This is where you make that clear. I have a code by which I live, and all of my decisions are going to come back and make sure that they satisfy this code.

All my big decisions, all my short-term actions will live by this code. The code should be something that forces you on occasion to do things that are hard or scary in the moment, to move away what might be in your best interest. But you have a code written down. Then you have rituals recorded. or some sort of rituals that you commit to that help just reinforce in your life what it is that you value and take seriously.

Finally, you're going to have routines, things you do on a regular basis that ensure that you are supporting these values that are encoded in your code that make sure that you are pursuing them, reflecting the things you value in your everyday life. Now, of course, the most obvious pre-packaged answer to these three things would be a traditional religion. So if you are already religious, that's going to make it very easy for you to figure out code or rituals and routines. For if you're religious, the ritual is going to involve, for example, let's say your Muslim, it might involve daily prayer ritual as a way of reinforcing and reminding yourself of your relationship to God. Routines might involve things that your religion asks you to do, such as some sort of charitable giving on a regular basis, to go out and serve other.

others in the community, but you don't have to have a religion to fill in code rituals and routines. You can do so on your own. The thing I want to emphasize here is don't worry so much about getting this exactly right, because when we're done with this stack, we're going to add one final piece, which is iterate. So you come to the stack where you are in your life right now, and you can expect that might change and evolve as time goes on. Now, everything you're going to figure out here for values gets recorded in that system. you set up during the first level of the stack, during discipline. That's why I'm drawing an arrow back down there.

That's where you record. Here's my code. The things I value, things I don't, how I plan to live my life. That's where you record your rituals. You know, I meditate every morning. I read a book of philosophy. One book per month. I observe Shabbat as a time to reflect.

Whatever it is, it's where the routines go in. I volunteer every month. I whatever it is actually going to be. And I go to services, whatever it is, this is all written down. And you have a central place for it because you set that up in discipline. These two things, these first two layers of the stack, discipline and values. This now becomes our safety net foundation. Before we go up, the things that are going to follow are going to be a little bit more complicated and ambitious.

But if everything else falls apart in your life, your professional system goes apart, there's health or sickness issues, your life takes a turn or some sort of disaster, the two levels that will always be there for you to fall down on will be discipline plus values. So this is very important. The idea that I can do things that are hard when it's in my long-term interest or the interest of my values, even if I don't want to, I'm capable of doing this,

and I know what I'm all about, what is my code and I'm able to build my life around it. That is your insurance for disaster. That is your insurance against everything else going wrong. If everything else we're about to talk about unravels, you will be able to fall back on that. And that's going to give you a soft landing. And it's going to give you a foundation

on which you will eventually be able to rebuild. All right. So now we're going to head towards a layer where we're getting a little bit more into the traditional design, life design type waters. And that's going to be what I call calm. So the goal with calm is to gain control

over your life and to leverage that control to give yourself breathing room. So it's the calm level of the stack where you are actually going to start thinking about organizational and productivity systems. How do I keep track of the different obligations in my professional life and my personal life?

How do I plan? How do I manage my time? This is all about I have control. I'm not just stumbling reactively through life. I have some control of what's going on. Now, once you have control, I'm organizing things. I can build out smart plans.

I can now see much more clearly the relationship between my implicit workload, my tacit obligations, and my schedule. Now you have a really good sense of, is this reasonable or not, or how much can I actually have on my plate before I begin to get stressed out? And you can leverage this control to start doing some minimalism, to start taking some things off of your plate to simplify aspects of your commitments in your personal life, in your family life, and your professional life. The goal here is I have control of my time. I've pruned my schedule to a degree that I have some flexibility in breathing room. And I am now ready to start thinking about some bigger picture changes. Because if we get to the final stack, which is where you do the fun stuff, where you move to the farm, if you get to that final stack and your life is chaotic and you're overwhelmed and you're busy and exhausted and fatigue,

there's not going to be room for you to do what you need to do. There's not going to be room for you to reflect. There's not going to be room for you to pursue the disciplines and values that lay under it. And there's not going to be room to actually make the big changes. If you don't control your life, you also are not going to be able to build up the career capital. You'll probably need to execute some of these ideas. The more you're killing it at work because you control your time and your obligations and you can give things the time they need, the more options you're going to have to transform that work. This is true in a lot of different elements as well.

And so this is, again, something you use. You don't always see you in the discussion of lifestyle design, but I think it's foundational. I'm throwing it in there. Calm. I'm under control. These three things, if you're starting from scratch, it might take a while, by the way. This might be the work of six months to a year to build the first three layers. But once you have, you get to the final stack here, the final layer of the stack, which I call plan.

And this finally is where we get back to more familiar territory. This is where we get back towards the deep life buckets territory. This is where you divide your life into the major areas that are important to you and start to think through what does my life look like in each of these areas, what changes do I want to make? And you don't have to overhaul everything at the same time, but maybe you look at community, so your relationship with your family and friends,

those who are important to you and say, okay, let's start overhauling this. What do I want this aspect of my life to look like? Where does it fall short? What type of change is what I need to make to better fulfill my values here? And this is where you might make the bigger change. You move to be closer to family. You commit the community organizations. Maybe craft, of course, would be a big one here.

Your job. Okay, let me really think about my job. What's going on here? Is it overwhelming me? Is it compatible with the other things I care about? Maybe I want to hatch a plan to transform this job into something that's going to better support my vision for my life. All of this happens here.

The buckets, lifestyle center career plan. all of this is squeezed into the top layer out of four in the deep life stack. And this really is the big innovation between the way we used to talk about it and the way we had talked about it, the way we're talking about it now. Discipline values and calm is foundational. And if we ignore that, whatever we do up and plan is going to be haphazard and be very likely to fizzle. We try to make some big change, but if we don't have anything else nailed down, we're

building this big change, this new conceptual structure for our life on top of sand, that foundation is not strong enough. I'm going to add a couple more arrows here because again, throughout each of these stacks, where do your decisions go back into that central repository you set up during the discipline level? These are my organizational systems for calm. This is what I'm working on right now. I'm working on my craft bucket and here's my vision. So in that discipline step, that all got set up. Now, the number of disciplines, the things that you are pursuing regularly that you're committed to, that also increases as you move up this stack. Values adds rituals and routines to your list of disciplines. Calm adds organizational systems to your list of disciplines.

Plan might add bucket-specific keystone habits to your list of disciplines. So everything down there grows, the description of your systems, the descriptions of your discipline commitments. That all grows as you move up the stack. So I have these arrows pointing back down. And then finally, once you're, once you've made it through the whole stack, I'm going to draw one last arrow here, you are going to iterate, which means you return back towards the bottom and refactor, focusing on what needs the most work.

So you've made it through the whole stack, enjoy that for a while, then you're going to iterate back down again. Okay, let's go back down the discipline. How is this going? If I cleaned up, my description on my systems and my disciplines or there's stuff hanging around here I don't do anymore. Let me clean that up. Make sure the way I'm tracking this goes well. Am I committing discipline to the things I said I am? If I'm not, do I have too many things in here? Do I need to clean that up? Okay, we're good. Let's move up the values. Am I liking

my current code? The rituals I have in place to help reinforce the code, the routines I have to put that code into action in the world. Am I ready to tweak that? Do I want to make a major change? Am I maybe at first earlier in my life? These were self-imposed and in middle age with a family. They're going to be more tied to a formal theology. So you're going back. and checking that out. You're going up to calm. How are my systems going for organization? Oh, maybe they're going well.

What about my load? You know, I feel overloaded. Great. So as I revisit that stack, I'm going to make some more cuts on the things that I'm committed to or pursuing. And you come back up the plan, you might say, I'm going to look at another bucket more carefully. I looked at Kraft last time, but I really want to now think about celebration, sort of

quality in my life. That's iteration. You go back through the whole stack, check in at each layer, spending time on the layers that need time before moving on to the next. You probably want to do this once a year. I recommend using your birthday as the anchor for this. Different years, you're going to stop and spend more time on different layers than others. Sometimes everything might be rock and rolling, so you're just tweaking on your way up and it takes you a couple of weeks, no problem. Sometimes you're going to lose the next six months of your years of really reflectively

rethinking your life, but this structures the way you think about that. It structures the way you go through trying to refactor or tighten up what's actually going on in your day. day-to-day existence. So this is what I'm thinking about now. This is my generalization of what used to just be the deep life buckets, the deep life stack. It's equal part psychology as it is practical habit, as it is visionary planning. All of those things are now mixed together in a more structured way. This also reflects more carefully or closely, I should say, what I actually do in my own life,

the way I think these things through, the way I order these things. So I'm interested in your thoughts. Are we improving or have we overcomplicated? I still have time to think about this, so feel free to send it through. I don't know, Jesse, am I adding too much complication, or are we getting to some levels we actually needed for thinking about this topic? I think it goes in hand with you've talked about before in terms of stacks and discipline and metric tracking.

So like the metric tracking on the TimeBock Planner would be in that level. becomes a discipline. Right, the time block planner is something you might introduce as calm. The metric planning is installed in the discipline stack. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the things I was underestimating, so in addition to just the psychological preparation,

was I take for granted structure and organization in my life. And it's something we hear from listeners a lot is if you are not organized and structured and how you manage just even the minutia of your life, it's actually really difficult to do anything big. Yeah. It feels impossible, or if you try it, it's not going to go well because you're just throwing a big change

at an already chaotic situation. Yeah, you've had that in place for a really long time. Yeah, and that's why I take it for granted. Yeah. But I think for a lot of people, I was thinking, I'm going to write a book about the deep life, I can't jump into, let's overhaul your job when there's someone who has never actually had

any sort of coherent organizational system to any part of their life. It's impossible until you feel that you control your life and have breathing room. It's very difficult to imagine making a big change. And we're going to see that the questions I chose for today's episode are all deep life related. Issues and questions about people pursuing the deep life. And we're going to see some of that in the questions. There's at least one I have in mind where someone is they're coming to what you would think about as the plan level of the stack with the other levels not in place.

and it just feels impossible to them. Yeah. I mean, a lot of it has to come down to your time management system. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How do you keep track of your time? Then how do you manage your obligations?

And how do you then prune those obligations, right? It's very difficult to keep breathing room in your life if you can't control the stuff that's taken away the air. If you don't control it, you're just grabbing. It's very hard to get at things or organize things or move things out of the way. It's very paradoxical. It's people say, I don't want to. want to be so, I don't have time to do all these systems and be so rigid and then my whole life will be planning. But it's exactly the people that make a structure for the stuff in their

life that have the flexibility. Yeah. That have the breathing room that are, you know, have their feet up by the lake and their reading. It's this misnomer that somehow have an organization will mean your time is more filled. It's actually the key to actually gain back time, the fine time affluence, that takes some flexibility. It's your boy, Jocko. Disappellation. and equals freedom. Yeah. Well, that term is, yeah, definitely motivating or inspiration here, discipline at the base. Provides the freedom to do other things.

It does. Read five books a month. And that was the other breakthrough I'm thinking, because I found this working with people, just finding that one or two things, that's the place to start. I'm doing this thing. I'm working on every day. It's hard. It's optional.

I don't want to do it in the moment. Long term, I did it. I succeeded. That psychological switch is so important to everything else. So I'm working on it, but it's one idea for how I might structure my deep life book. So we do have some questions exactly about the deep life. Before we get there, I want to briefly mention one of the sponsors that makes the show possible. That is our friends at Element, LMNT, one of the original sponsors of the show,

and they are back as a sponsor in part because I never stopped using this product. And so I lamented what happened to Element. I really like Element, so I'm glad they're back and we can have them as a sponsor once again for the show. So Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix that has everything you need and nothing you don't. So that means it has that the levels of salt you really do need if you are sweating hard. You're working out, you're exercising as part of your discipline layer of the Deep Life Stack. And so you want to replenish this, but you don't want to grab a sugary sports drink. is where you use element.

You get the salt, you don't get all of the sugar. So you get 100 milligrams of sodium and 200 milligrams of potassium, 60 milligrams of magnesium with no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients, no gluten, no fillers, no BS. I love the flavor. I'm a big watermelon fan, but all the flavors are really good. This allows you to get your electrolyte needs, even if you're keto or low carb or paleo, or just in general, don't want a bunch of sugar. So look, I live in D.C.

It's humid here. I work out in my garage. That is not a comfortable space, especially in the summers. And I also go for long walks. And when I get going and I get sweating, my body craves salt, it's always element I put in my water bottle. So I am happy to endorse them. I think it is the right replacement drink. So right now, Element is offering a free sample pack with any purchase.

That's eight single serving packets free with any element order. This is a great way to try all the flavors or shell element with a salty friend. Get yours at drinkelement.com slash deep. This deal is only available through that link. You have to use the slash deep. So go to D-R-I-N-K-L-M-N-T.com slash deep. And keep in mind, you can try it totally risk-free if you don't like it. Share it with a salty friend, and they will give you your money back.

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so they can design and mill these razors with incredible tolerances. This is the key to getting a good shave. You put a standard 10-cent safety blade in a Hinson's razor, and only 0.0013 inch of the blade protrudes past the edge. This gives you a close, clean shave without the diving board effect, where the blade moves up and down, the diving board effect that creates the nix, that creates the burn. When it's such a little amount of the blade sticking past,

you get a very good shave, no clogs, no nicks. And what I like about this is you're using a better made product to save money over time. So you pay up front to get this beautifully milled razor, but you can use it with a standard 10-cent blade. So what does that mean? It doesn't take long to amortize the cost of this razor. It does not take long where now you're just spending a couple quarters per month on the cheap blades to put into this beautiful razor. It does not take long before this is much cheaper to maintain than one of the disposable razor. you get from the drugstore than one of the subscriptions that you get.

So you get a beautiful, manufactured, really good tool that in the end is going to also be cheaper to use. So it's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that will last you a lifetime. Visit hinsonshaving.com slash cow to pick the razor. And if you use the code cal at checkout, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just add those blades to your cart and then use Cal at checkout and the cost of the blades will be free. that's 100 free blades when you head to H-E-N-S-O-N-S-H-A-V-I-N-G.com slash Cal and use that code Cal at checkout. All right, Jesse, let's do some deep life-related questions.

Who do we have first today? All right. First questions from Mark, a 38-year-old sales director. I spend many hours a week taking care of my kids, cooking, cleaning, gardening, doing chores, fixing up my house, and so on. Between this and my work, I have little to know. free time. The same applies to my wife. When we do have free time, we are generally tired. The idea that we could each find energy in time to consistently take long walks, work out, or read for hours seems fantastical. Do we need to be able to afford to outsource mundane tasks to cultivate a deep life? Well, Mark, we could reword this question to say, you know, is it possible for a family with,

and he gave a little more details about his work, but, you know, a family with lower upper middle class jobs to take walks or exercise or read. I don't think that's a fantastical goal. I think there's a lot of families in similar professional situations where people still take walks, still exercise, and still read. I think that is definitely possible, but what I also recognize that right now in your life, it doesn't. I think that's important.

And this is where I think the first. fuller deep life stack we introduced earlier is much more helpful than the way we used to talk about the deep life where we would just focus on the final changes because what's happening here and I'm very empathetic to this. I've been in the situation before. Many of our listeners are in the same situation where your time just feels completely out of your control. And it puts you in a defensive mood. It puts you in a mood where you're just sort of down on the prospects for doing anything with any control. We're exhausted all the time. We're working all the time. when are things going to happen?

How could I possibly think about carefully overhauling other parts of my life? So let's go back to the deep life stack. What I'm going to suggest here is actually work in the deep life stack, even though this might seem like I'm giving you more work, it's going to help. So I'm going to think about the stack. I have it here in front of me. Jesse May I let's load this back up on the screen. Okay.

All right. So what would this mean for you? Well, one, discipline. Well, the key thing here is really going to be, here's my place, my drawer, my folder. We're going to keep track of everything we're about to do. that doesn't take time. Here's a folder. Here's a desk drawer.

That's fine. And we're going to throw something into our life here. Not super time consuming, but kind of hard. And maybe you're going to have to stretch a little bit. Okay, I'm going to do this during my lunch hour every day or before I go to work. It's going to be maybe a fitness thing or something else. But just something, something that is optional but meaningful to you that you're just going to commit to whatever it takes. I'm going to find time to do this.

I think that's worth doing because we're going to start. changing that mindset. And once that succeeds, you're going to say, okay, at least it's possible. I am the type of person that's possible that I can find time to make something happen that's important to me, even though my life is busy. Then we get up the values, and you're clarifying what's important to you and your wife and you should do this together, and we'll talk more about that in a later question. What's our code?

What are the rituals? What are the routines? Keep the rituals and routines very simple right now because you're feeling overwhelmed. But they can still be in there. There can still be that moment of prayer every day if you're religious. There can still be that meditative moment, the gratitude journaling routines. There can still be something you do, even if it's just look at Saturday morning, there's a one-hour volunteer thing or a charitable thing. You just have set up.

I give money to this cause, not a lot of money, but I do it. And every month we do it. And it's not very time-consuming, but it's concrete and it's driven by your code. And you get that in place. We're not adding a lot of things in your schedule yet. Now you're ready for the thing I think is going to help you most, which is the calm. layer of the stack. So now, buoyed by your discipline, so the idea that you can make changes and have control over

things even when it's difficult, buoyed by your values that are really pushing you towards what matters and what's not. So you have a compass that gives you a very strong north reading. You can start to put in place some organizational system. What's on our plate? How do we manage our time? What is this load? And then more crucially, where should we start pruning or simplifying?

Driven by your values, driven by your discipline. You piece by piece try to take what sounds like a whirlwind in your life right now and make it into a much more orderly flow. We do this on these days, not this. We finish here. We do this in advance. We get all the paperwork for the kids done over lunch on Thursday. You would be surprised, Mark, when you're driven by a sense of self-efficacy, when you're driven by values you trust by how much control and breathing room, even a standard busy middle class or upper-middle class life can seem how much room you can find, how much breathing room you can find.

And I don't want you to go right to this. I mean, I want you to follow the stack. I think the discipline stack is key because you have to have the sense of I'm able to do things that are hard and I have a place I keep track of them and I follow what I write down. You need the value stack because it's hard to prune. It's hard to take things back when you don't have the the bigger values driving you. But once this calm is in place, then and only then do I think you're ready to think about the planning step. And I think by the time you get to the planning step. You're now going to have the control and breathing room necessary to make the changes that right now seem impossible. And it might not be major, but it might be some sort of routine.

You're walking, your exercise, and you're reading more. I think that's going to be completely on the table. More importantly, you're also now well set up if you discover what's really holding us back here is maybe the nature of our jobs. Maybe the demands of this jobs. Maybe that's making things impossible to really overhaul the other areas of my life the way I want. Or maybe it's to have these jobs, we have to live here. The schools here aren't good, so our kids have to go over to this private school. The private school means we have to work more, and the private school is really difficult to get to, and we're driving back and forth. And that's what's stopping us from overhauling these other parts of our life.

Oh, this is all really clear now, and we're driven by our values and our sense of self-efficacy and our control over what's going on. So we really can understand what's causing our time famine, what's causing our issues with our schedule. With all of this in place, you might get clarity that you wouldn't have right now. We should move and take a different job. Oh, we need to leave this city. Let's go here. They could go to this public school. They could walk to the middle school, and the cost of living here is cheaper.

And actually, I could go down to halftime and do my old job remote while my wife still did full time, but now we have a lot more. Now there's someone here after school. Oh, my God, all the pieces fit in the place. And I can overhaul these other parts of my life, and everything is deeper. But you can't get to that type of clarity without the other pieces first. So I feel your pain mark. I also think that you can.

find more depth and by just control and intention and satisfaction with your life. You can find it and you should. And I think you worked a full stack. My apologies for presenting this earlier in past episodes as just start overhauling, you know, your fitness routine. Worked a whole stack and have confidence. More intentional, satisfying, meaningful life is absolutely available to you and in your situation. This is not something that's unovercumable. You're not a refugee in a war-torn nation.

you're not scrambling for jobs just to try to keep the heat on. You actually have a foundation more leverist than you think, but it's also much harder than we often let on to take advantage of that leverage. So hopefully the stack there is going to help. By the way, send me a note if you start making some changes. I want to hear what's going on. You can send the note right over to interesting at calenuport.com. Keep me posted.

In terms of the mundane tasks, like outsourcing those. I mean, that's all going to happen in calm. Yeah. But I think his point is he's frustrated that I have no time. So I can't imagine anyone reading or exercising or doing anything else unless I suppose there's just someone I hired to do all these things. And my point is most people don't outsource all that stuff. And yet many, many people who don't have, I don't even know who you outsource most of this stuff to, they still exercise and walk. We have more, it could feel as if your obligations are leaving, you know,

time right now. And it could be the case that without having to majorly change your material situation, you could feel three times better by just how you control and track the situation and keep track of things with some strategic pruning, et cetera. So I don't think, I mean, maybe in the calm step, they'll realize, because again, having this precision understanding of where your time goes and how different things interact with each other allows you so precisely to see where the pain points are. So if there is going to be a little bit of outsourcing that happens, the calm layers what's going to give you that precision to say, you know, the thing that's screwing this all up is driving back and forth to this school across town.

Or the thing that's making the schedule impossible is this terrible giant yard we have with all these beds and we're always out there. And, you know, if we stop doing this and use that money for a yard crew, everything else becomes possible. Or that's where you say we need to move. We have to get a different job. It's, again, an interesting point that doesn't come up as much in lifestyle design is organizing yourself, tracking your time, being intentional about the deployment of time,

getting that sophisticated awareness of your time is often critical for actually making decisions about what you want to change in your life. People really don't realize when you're chaotic, they don't really realize what actually is causing the trouble and they might flail in different directions or think I have to have a nanny in a full-time whatever to ever get anything done. And they don't realize, no, the problem is actually the commute. The problem is actually you live in the wrong house. Why do you have two acres?

And, you know, whatever it is. You don't live near your parents. You're always having to drive over there. We don't always know the problem until we actually get a good awareness of how our time is actually being spent. I mean, that's one of my insights is a book on the deep life actually has to talk a lot about time management, which for me was a bit of a breakthrough to think about. All right. Let's keep rolling. What do we have next, Jesse?

All right. Next question is from Mike, a 67-year-old retiree. One thing I regret has been my focus on my personal development. without involving my spouse. In retirement, we have enough to live extremely well, but lack any ability to create a shared vision for our future. Any thoughts on how to co-create a deep life with your partner? Mike, I think it's really important.

I'm glad you brought this up. If you're married or in a committed relationship, you need to work the deep life stack with your partner. It really makes, not only makes a difference, it's what enables, in my opinion, a sustainable deep life. because what is the alternative here, which is very common, especially in these sort of dual income close in city suburb type places where Jesse and I live, it's very common to see an approach that says we're essentially business partners with kids. And we each need to work our own individual visions about career, but also other things like physical health. And because we shouldn't have to compromise.

So I have my own vision of what I want to have with. life, you have your own vision. We have to get together to make sure that, you know, we're doing the kid thing right. That doesn't work. And the reason why that doesn't work is that your individual visions for a deep life are going to clash with each other. They're almost certainly going to be incompatible with each other. And now you're an antagonistic relationship with your partner. Actually, you are getting in the way of mine. And then you get into these weird sort of one for you, one for me type interleaving swap relationships. Well, you can do this with your job for a year. And then you have to pull back and I'll do this for my job for a year or you got to spend three hours in

the gym so I need to get three hours this week in the gym too. It's business partners that are trying to negotiate some sort of equitable access to resources and that clashing visions of a deep life do not add up. Do not add up to a coherent whole. If you marry someone, for example, you are in some sense giving up the option of I'm just going to focus on me and make my life as good as possible. What you're focused to is trying to build a dual life, a family life that's as good as possible. So you have to work to stack together. The discipline together, we all keep, we've done our things. We keep track of our things here. The values together. What are our shared values? What's the code we live by and are going to manage our life by? What rituals and routines do we have to put in there? The calm together. How do we organize our lives as a couple?

How do we make decisions together about what's working and not working? And then you go through the planning stages together. It's not to say that there's not going to be individualized things that come out of it. When you're looking at Constitution, I might end up doing something different with fitness than my wife, but we thought about this together. And it feels scary in the moment, especially if you'll see you got married a little bit later in life. Like, I don't want to give things up. I don't want to sacrifice. But if you're together with someone, I really do think a deep life that is designed together is so much more fulfilling than trying to do it yourself, trying to stay separate. It turns out just trying to optimize whatever career respect on my own and see my partner as an obstacle is not going to make you happier in the end than trying to figure out a lifestyle that can keep into it values if I want to do high impact work or put my training into practice but also keeps other values in play and everyone's on the same page.

It's really going to be more satisfying in the end. I'm a big believer in that, you know, especially if you're married, business partner with kids doesn't work. It doesn't work out very well. All right, Jesse. What do we got next? Hi, next question is from Sadie, a 37-year-old writer. Do you think there is a genetic component to being able to consistently follow your methods? My partner organizes life similar to you. His parents are successful academics who, like him, are very organized and productive.

My parents are the least organized people in existence. I'm currently struggling to complete a book revision. I get bored easily, and my pension for procrastination still borders on self-destructive. Why does it feel like this is so much harder for me than it is for other people? When it comes to organized organization, deeper living, these type of life-related disciplines, I've come to believe it's most useful to think about this as a practiced ability. So what I mean about this, let's say, for example, you are used to the cognitive difficulty of certain types of organizational activities. the subsuming of the appeal in the moment towards the longer-term accomplishment of a system or a plan.

And let's say you've done this throughout much of your life, so you have a lot of reward. I've seen this work. I know long-term, this makes me feel better. So I'm much, much easier, much more easily in the moment able to say, put that phone back down. I block this to work on this. I'm going to work on this. That is a practiced capability. That's something you get better with as you train your mind.

to get used to a particular sensation. And as you add more reward stimuli, so your brain gets used to, no, there's something good coming from sticking to the schedule. I'm going to feel better at the end of the day. I've been doing this for a while. That's a practice ability. So if you weren't raised with this, you're missing a lot of practice right out of the bat. Right out of the gate, you're missing a lot of practice.

If you weren't raised with this, if you were raised with parents that were more haphazard and were more disorganized, you got no practice. And then let's say you go on the college where, you know, like, yeah, I'm going to, I'll cram at night and kind of make it work, and that can often work. You're still getting no practice. And then you find yourself out there in the real world. You're the entry-level job. You've moved up to a medium-level job. And now you look over to your partner who is from a completely different situation. You say, my God, I must not be an organized person because why are they so organized? But what if they had the exact opposite situation? Their parents were very organized. From a young age, they were

exposed to structuring and organizing your time, subsuming instinctual distraction in the moment towards the longer term goal of figuring the schedule. They were seeing models of that be successful. They were doing it from a young age. They've been building up a rich bank of experience where this leads to long-term reward. When they're now 28, this comes very easily, much in the way that if you grew up with athletic parents

and were on long walks and running involved in sports your whole life, running a 5K comes very easily. Not because you were wired to be a runner, but because you spent your whole life working on that. So I think that's both good news and bad news, Sadie. It's good news because it means, no, you're not wired to be disorganized, and that's just your fate. The bad news is, if we're going to return to our analogy here with running, if you're out of shape, it takes a while to get a good 5K time. You're going to have to exercise and train, you might have to overhaul your fitness.

It could take a little while. It's not going to come overnight. This is why you've probably had this experience of I read a Cal Newport book, and it made sense. and you saw, you know, your partner used those ideas. But then you tried them and it didn't work and you're like, oh, this is frustrating. I mean, again, that's similar to, I've never run a day of my life and I watched chariots of fire. I say, man, I want to do that. Let's go run a mile.

Let's go run a four minute mile. It's not going to go well the next day, right? You probably got a year or two at training before you're happy about what you're doing with your mile time. So that's sort of the bad news. But my recommendation, I guess, Eddie, would be let's start training. And let's do so in a way where you're easy on yourself, organizational activities will not feel natural if you haven't trained. It will, and you won't do very well at first,

and you have to start simple and build up from there. A couple simple disciplines, like we talked about the Deep Life Stack, a couple basic disciplines that you get used to, and then you make a slightly more complicated addition to your system, then another more slightly complicated addition to your system. So let me get specific here. Back in the day where I did a lot more writing, especially at Calnewport.com, about specifically organization. I was often somewhat dismissive of an organizational strategy called MIT,

most important task. And this was a very simple organizational strategy where the first thing you did every day was write down the one and in some variations the three most important things you wanted to get done that day. And you would do them first. I did that thing first. And I was derisive about this. because I was a time management snob. I am the time management, what Mozart was the piano. He was raised from a young age, practicing all the time. I was raised from a young age. I was reading time management books when I was young.

I knew this genre inside and out. I was still a college student. Sold my first book talking about these ideas. I mean, I'm a time management nerd. So to me, I look at that. I'm like, this is so simple. What do you mean most important? You do one thing?

No, no, no, no. Look, you got a time block. You got to have good capture. But what I didn't realize at the time is it was as if, you know, I had been a track runner all throughout high school and I get the college and I'm scoffing at people that say, okay, you want to get in shape. Let's start by going on a good long walk every day. What do you mean a good long walk? I don't know. You've got to be doing 800 meter intervals, right? So you can get your leg, whatever, the fast twitch muscles going.

And then you have to marry that with the 7K days. But that's because I've been training for a long time. And this is what the most important task method. This was the gap it filled. You're just getting started. So here's one thing you can do. I write down the most important thing every day in the morning and I do it. Then I open my inbox.

This is not the system five years from now you'll still be using. But for the first week, what's this going to do? I have a little bit of structure. I do it. I get a little bit of reward. Now you're starting to build some circuitry that says, okay, doing just a little bit of structuring. And it's not, you know, it's more easy to look at my email.

I did this an hour every morning. It feels good. I'm actually making more progress on things. I feel a sense of the cognitive burden of doing this type of things a little bit less. I have reward and a sense of self-efficacy. You know, okay, if I do this, these type of things, I get more done. Then you can start layering up the system to be a little bit more complicated. You say, okay, you know, I'm feeling really disorganized.

The next thing I'm going to do is just a full capture system. Why don't I just start putting everything in the Trello columns and Trello boards and just have them in there. And all I want to commit to is at the end of every day making sure nothing's in my head. I don't even have to do anything with these things yet.

Let's just get them into a Google Doc or a Trello board or workflow or whatever you're using. That's your second step. So now in this thought experiment, you've been doing most important things, the most important thing every morning first for a few months,

and now you're just getting everything written down. You're not even doing anything with the things you're written down. You're still being haphazard about it, but nothing's being kept in your head. You have that discipline going. You do that, And now we're six months in.

Again, you've built the stronger circuit. You have more reward. You're feeling better. You're feeling more self-efficacy going on now. Now you might start some rudimentary time blocking. Time block my day, but very loosely, and I know that my estimates are going to be bad. And so I'm not going to hold myself too much to it. But let me get used to seeing where the free time is and maybe assigning some work to some of that free time.

And maybe now I'm going to start taking things from these task lists and assigning them to some tax blocks. within my time block schedule. And you work with this and you get better with it. Now you have that in your life. Then once you have that in your life, you can start adding in some weekly planning. Let me start thinking about my week now. And now let me add some strategic planning. And a year in, you're like, oh, the seven-minute mile my partner ran is not so impressive

anymore. I can do this sort of thing now. Now that exact sequence, who cares? That doesn't have to be the exact sequence of things you do. But that's the right progression of magnitudes of complexity. of trying to add some organization into your life. So, Sadie, you're not wired to be organized or not, but you might, you can't, you can't assume by default you're an organizational shape.

It does take some work. Now, are there genetics in here somewhere? I don't know. I mean, I think epigenetics is probably more interesting than genetics. And the idea that there's like a particular gene that just directly expresses itself and pinch it towards organization. That's probably too simple. It probably has some sort of genetic component combined with.

your early exposures could have some impact into how your brain develops, maybe. But for most of these complex psychological traits that aren't talking about just fundamental skills, that type of early development, epigenetic development tends to express itself more in extremes, that like that could become malformed and you could be sort of obsessively hyperorganized or it could be malformed in a maybe like an attention disorder way that requires a more careful structuring of how you deal with, how you deal with obligation. So you could have these some, again, the genetics, the epigenetics tend to show up in extreme cases, and most people are not extreme cases.

And when you're in the middle, you're not trying to be the most organized person in the world or not fighting a sort of a really notable deficit in certain types of skills, then it doesn't really matter. What matters is training. What matters is practice. And that's where most people actually fall. Training to be organized. I really was dismissive of MIT

because not like school, but most important task. I was like, this is so simplistic. Yeah. As a snob. It's got to be the nerdiest type of snob is a time management snob. Well, when you're in book writing mode,

that's pretty much what you fall, right? Yeah. But, you know, also a full capture, a multi-scale planning. You know, that day was informed by that time block plan, informed by a weekly plan, informed by a strategic plan, and I have full capture and shut down routines built around it.

So the most important thing always seems so simple to me. I had rudimentary time block planning in my second book in How to Become a Straight A Student. I was recommending the college students do. That was the original me talking about it. You need to do something like time block planning. Don't just say what's due and what do I want to do next. How much more writing do you do outside of book writing, like when you're just writing articles and stuff?

Articles take a lot of time. Yeah. So if I'm not working on a book, like a New Yorker piece is a lot of, it's a lot of work. I write academic papers, a lot of work. I don't know. I spend a lot of time writing. So it's pretty much always has a place in your calendar. Yeah. I mean, there's periods where I'm taking a break, but yeah, these days, if I'm not book writing, I'm New Yorker writing or academic writing. So like last year around this time when you were writing your book. Yeah. And every day you're writing, or I guess six days a week. Yeah. this year is like the same allocation of time on your calendar? Yeah. Yeah, I've been riding most days. Yeah, I've been writing most days.

I'll be interesting to see what my summer plan is going to be like since I'm teaching this summer. You're probably more inspired up there. I might be. I think New Hampshire is going to be... You'd be in the woods. It's surrounded by mountains. So Dartmouth, you can see mountains all around, which is kind of cool, which I appreciate up there. I think it'll be good.

I think there's some good spaces because we're living on campus. There's some good spaces on campus. I'm thinking in particular the tower room in Baker Library. I'll send you a picture, Jesse, but it's like what you would imagine. You should send it out to the audience, too. It's what you would imagine a collegiate studying environment should be. It's this wood panel old library room where you sit in this multi-hundred-year-old building and look out these old windows over the green and armchairs.

They're like musty. They have these armchairs with these wooden boards, basically. So you put the board across the arms, and then it's a desk. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So I want to write there. That's my plan. Are you going to eat in the cafeteria?

I want to. Do you get a meal pass? I'll get, I'll, so I want my kids to have one. Oh, that would be awesome. They could just bike down to the cafeteria and like, they're going to love it. I think so. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that's going to be fun. I'm looking forward to that. Well, and by the way, if you're wondering what I'm talking about, we'll get more into this next week because, yeah, the show is going to relocate to New Hampshire for a couple months this summer. It won't affect your experience as the listener. I can record from anywhere. Jesse, we might not be in the same room, but we'll still make it work. But you'll be hearing a lot about sort of, I guess we'll call it Deep Work H.Q.

North is what we'll call it where I'm working this summer. And if you, by the way, if you're at Dartmouth College this summer, if you're a sophomore, sign up for my class about writing for technology. We do have space. All right. Let's go, let's do one more question. All right. question from Matt, a 35-year-old professor. Your discussion of the Deep Life reminds me of a book I came across about designing

your life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. I wonder if you might comment a bit on this book and its approaches how complements your emerging deep life approach. Well, that book, which I do believe it's called Designing Your Life. I think that's right by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. That came out similar, the same year as Deep Work, it was very successful. So it and deep work have both been very successful books from that year. Burnett's the executive director of the Stanford Design School, and Evans, I think, is a professor there. So they wrote this book based off of a course they taught at the design school about using design principles of the type they would teach at the design school, but applying them to your life.

I had to more systematically design your life. And look, the timing for this book was good. a few years earlier I had published So Good They Can't Ignore You, where I was laying some of the first cracks in the foundation of the dominant career philosophy of the first part of the 2000s, which was the passion philosophy. So most of our career vision was built around through self-reflection, discovering your true passion and then having the courage to match your job to that passion. So it was all about building the courage to match your job to a passion,

was the dominant career advice. That was failing as the millennials who were raised. with this, we're first leaving college, and the financial crisis hit, and we realized it's more complicated than just I'm meant to be a sports marketer. I can tell from self-reflection, and if I do that, I'm going to be happy there on out. So this was part of this revolution in thinking about careers more systematically. This is a design problem to solve, not a soul alignment type problem. So that idea, of course, aligns well with the way I often talk about careers, and I'm sure that book has been influential to me, even in implicit ways.

So it shares a similar notion of intentionality and design. In terms of differences, well, first of all, I would say that book is more traditional in that it's starting with decisions, not the person, right? So the deep life stack is you're overhauling yourself before you overhaul your life. And this book, I think Design Your Life gets more towards, let's just start. How do we systematically make decisions? Which to me, I think, comes a little bit later in the process. I also think it's more career focus probably.

And the deep life philosophy, career is a big part of it. It's one of the tools you have to reach your ideal vision of a life. But there's other tools that matter just as much. And so I would say the deep life philosophy is much broader. where this philosophy, a lot of this really is about figuring out the right job, experimenting with different jobs, gathering data. So it's, I guess, a little bit more bloodless in that sense.

There's more of a sense of, you know, in the deep life philosophy, there's more of a, I don't know, philosophical core of trying to build a life of meaning, satisfaction, of value, and discipline and connection, where a career is just one of the knobs that's in there that you turn. Now, for a lot of people, it's a major knob. It's one of the determining, most important determining factors

with the quality of your life, so it's not wrong to underscore that like they do. But if I'm going to point out differences, I would say that. All that being said, I would say read the book. If you like my conversation in the deep life, if you like so good, they can't ignore you, if you like deep work. I think designing your life is a good augment to that type of thinking. You'll probably like that as well if you like the type of things that we do here. Speaking about what we do here, I want to get soon to do. to our final segment, something interesting, where I talk about something interesting that

you have sent me to my interesting at Kelnewport.com address. First, however, I want to mention another one of our sponsors. That is our friends at 80,000 hours. This is a nonprofit that aims to help people find careers that help solve the world's most pressing problems, right? So we just talked about Bill Burnett and Dave Evans' book. 80,000 hours actually is a great compliment to that because they help people get past just saying, what is my passion?

And instead have them asked a question, what is something useful I can do with the time I spend working? Most career advice is pretty cookie cutter. It doesn't take into account up-to-date evidence, a more quantitative or systematic way of thinking about what exact impact is the job choices you have going to make. That is where 80,000 hours enters the pictures. It'll help you find that career that's fulfilling, but also helps. you make a big difference.

So where does that name come from? Well, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, 40 years. Multiply those together, you get 80,000 hours. That's the amount of time you have to try to make a difference in the world. The team at 80,000 hours have done over 10 years of research, alongside academics at Oxford University, all focused on the question of how do you build a career that is both fulfilling and does the maximum amount of good.

Turns out what they've discovered might not be exactly what you think. So if you care about what the evidence actually says about having a fulfilling and impactful career, if you want real advice that goes beyond aphorisms and empty cliches like follow your passion, then 80,000 hours can help. Oh, and because they're a nonprofit, everything you provide is free forever. Their only aim is to help solve global problems by helping people find impactful careers. So I'm going to recommend that you go to 80,000 hours.org slash. Deep, that's 80,000, the numbers, the digits, followed by the word hours.org slash deep to find out more.

They have their articles there. They have their newsletter there. They have their job board there. They have their podcast there. Imminent thinkers thinking about these same problems. I've known these guys for a long time. When I was writing so good, they can't ignore you. We had a lot of conversations because we really were on the same page.

So if you want to figure out how to be useful with your work and not just wander or seek. ambition or follow cliches, check out 80,000 hours.org slash deep. I also want to talk about our good friends at Zoc Doc. Zoc Doc is the only free application that lets you find and book doctors who are patient reviewed, take your insurance, and are available when you need them to treat almost every condition under the sun. I have multiple doctors who have either discovered through Zoc Doc or they use the Zoc Doc software to keep track my patient records in a way that allows me to check in in advance

and get reminders. I am a big Zoc Doc fan. It's one of these apps that just makes sense. Let's just say you need a particular type of doctor, you need a dentist, you need to do primary care physician because your other one left, you never had one in the first place. How do you go about finding them? This is actually a big question, especially for newly minted adults. Most people just ask people or Google it, and you're sort of just rolling the dice here

or you're saying yourself up for the frustration of calling five doctors in a row to find out they don't have any openings for new patients. Zoc Doc solves all this problem. You say, I need a doctor in this area that takes this insurance to take new patients. Go. Oh, here's three. Well, what do people think about them? Here's the reviews. Great.

Here's the one I want. Click it. Oh, I can book it right here. Zock.com to get the app that you need to help organize the medical care in your life. So go to Zocdoc.com slash deep and download the Zocdoc app for free. Then find a book a top-rated doctor today, many within only 24 hours. That's ZOC, doc.com slash deep. The Zocdoc.com slash deep.

All right, Jesse, let's do something interesting. This is the segment where I go into my interesting at Calnewport.com email address. I look for interesting things that you have sent in, and I pick one to talk about on the show. I'm going to load up up a website now to bring up on the screen. Let's see here. Okay,

so here's the thing I wanted to talk about today. I wanted to return to something we mentioned, we previewed in an early something interesting segment. So there was an earlier segment where I talked about Apple was going to release

this new augmented reality, virtual reality set called the Vision Pro, and I had some thoughts about why that's more important than you might think. Well, they've done it now.

They had the official announcement. The product is available. We have our first looks at it. A bunch of you sent this to me. So I want to just revisit this question because I have a big claim here I want to make. What Apple is doing here is just as important as a lot of the big investments companies are making right now in AI. Apple is lagging in that battle. And I don't think that's actually a bad decision.

Their emphasis on AR over AI is not necessarily. a mistake. And so let's just look at this together, and I'll try to justify why I think that's the case. Again, if you're listening, you can watch at YouTube.com slash Caliport Media episode 252. All right, Jesse, I have on the screen here a picture of the Vision Pro. We see someone wearing these, what do you say? Like ski goggles? Yeah, more or less. Okay, so this is the Vision Pro.

There's a cable out the back that goes down to a battery pack that you have to keep in your pocket. right off the bat, let me say this. What you're seeing here is not going to become ubiquitous. You're not going to see a lot of people wearing the Vision Pro. Critically, what you see in this picture is eyes, right? So you're imagining these are like goggles. They're opaque. What you are seeing there is actually a screen on the front of opaque goggles that is showing you an image of the person's eyes.

So these are actually virtual reality goggles. They actually have no pass-through. And yet if we look at this demo, and I have it up here on the screen, we see a gentleman putting on the goggles. He's looking at his room, right? And then we see elements like a menu pop up right in front of him. So what's actually happening here is called Pass Through Augmented Reality. There's a high-definition camera pointing out from the front of these goggles.

So what he is seen when he looks through here is actually a video of what's in front of his eyes. So you're seeing a video of the world. around you. Why is this, why would they do this? Because it allows them, from a technical standpoint, to do much cooler things in terms of adding digital elements to their world. So if we look at the video I have up on the screen now, you see someone scrolling a website and they have it as a giant screen just floating in front of them in the space. When you're adding that into a video of the world around you, just from a computer science perspective, it is much, much, much easier.

The standard AR technology has you looking through glass and actually seeing the world in front of you. And inside does glass in standard AR, there's something called a wave guide. It's essentially a transparent piece of plastic that you're looking through. And these wave guides allow

them to, in classic AR, to actually put an image, make an image appear in this wave guide. So you're seeing that image in the real world that you're actually seeing. So it's mixing the photons from the screen in with the real photons from the world around you. This is how Magic Leap works, for example.

It's how the Microsoft HoloLens works, for example. That's ultimately the way AR needs to work, but it's very hard because those waveguides are hard to make work. And one of the big issues you have is they're small. And so you have a limited field of vision. So if you're looking through a magic leap, you might be able to see your whole world, but there's actually only a smaller box inside of the world where they can add digital elements.

And so as you turn your head, for example, the screen clips off. The screen can't be that big. If I'm instead just taking a video of the world around me, I can fill the entire video with something. So technologically, that makes it much easier. So what Apple is doing here is saying, why don't we master the experience and then we'll figure out later how to make the technology more mass usable. And so they're perfecting this fantastic experience where I don't need screens. I don't need a laptop. I don't need a TV.

I don't need a phone. I can just make a screen wherever I am and use it. They're perfecting that experience now with this more adaptable but clunkier technology. Then once they have the experience mastered, hopefully the technology will catch up to get them where they need to get. The end game here that is going to make this ubiquitous is this pair of ski goggles you see in this video on the screen right now gets replaced with a pair of glasses, standard looking glasses with a really good waveguide technology.

And you're getting the same experience, but these elements are being added to the real world they're not in a virtual reality screen and that's going to be the tipping point I believe in which we're going to see the dramatic reduction in the need to manufacture individual consumer facing screens because I have a nice pair of glasses on and I can make a screen anywhere I want

why would I mount a screen on my wall when I could make a screen appear on any wall that I want so this is what Apple is doing and I think it's smart because essentially what Magic Leap discovered after wasting, not wait, but spending tens of billions of dollars is that the waveguide is hard. And so they couldn't deliver the experience they wanted because the technology was harder. So Apple's coming the other way.

Let's get the experience right. And then we'll figure out how to make the delivery of that experience more and more palatable. I think that's the right way to do it. I think Apple is smart to invest in that as opposed to going all in on AI. And I think they're smart for two reasons. One, it's going to be a massive economic space. If your one device can deliver basically every screen someone owns, that is going to be a massively ubiquitous device, probably one with a very high profit margin. And two, investing very heavily in AI right now is risky, right?

Because Open AI with the support of Microsoft, Google on the other hand, they're spending huge money to try to build these new models. It's a very expensive game. They're scrambling to try to figure out how to make enough revenue just to even pay for the server cost. meanwhile you have these second-tier large language models that are free. They're academic models. It's the Lama model that meta release for free back in February. They're not as big as GPT4. We might be talking about 20 billion parameters instead of a trillion parameters,

but they're free, and they do really well, and they're only going to get better. So it's going to be this incredibly competitive space for AI because software doesn't cost money once you have it. These things are expensive to train but not expensive to run. it would be very hard to dominate that space. Having an AR device that's beautifully designed and perfected over 10 years of R&D, where you've worked with the experience starting with the Vision Pro, and now you have these nice ray bands where I have all my screens on it. That's a market you can dominate.

That's a market where you can do $500 billion of sale every year and put Samsung out of business. So I think Apple is smart to say, let's not put all of our resources in doing a GPT clone, because large language model AI support is going to be cheap and ubiquitous and cut rate competitive and everyone's going to be cutting it, slicing on each other's throats. This is the other big thing that's coming is the end of screen. So anyways, now that I've seen the announcement, Jesse, I think Apple, I think what they're doing is smart.

I would say ignore the snark right now. There's a lot of snark out there. Like, I don't want to wear these things. Well, you're not supposed to wear these things. Apple's seen where the puck is going and decided we have to start experience engineering now, even before the technology catches up. So I'm still bullish on what they're doing. I'm still bullish on us getting to a future with minimum screens.

I'm not saying moralistically whether that's good or bad. I'm just saying this is where I think we're going. I wonder if we get a free pair of those from them. Probably not. Just call up Tim. Hey, Tim, it's Cal. It's C. C dog.

Hey, Tim, you see. I call him T.C. I don't know. This is kind of, it's a colloquial thing. But I haven't actually ever spoken to him. but I think if I did, it would be understood that I could just be like, hey, TC, C dog. Hey, why don't you sling me a pair of those VizPros?

All right, man. You keep that real. He probably makes like $75 million a year, don't you think? Yeah. So you can afford to send you one. I think they're $4,000. Oh, really? Yeah, because they're for developers right now.

Okay. Yeah, they're just trying to master the experience. They're not meant for everyone to use them. I would like to try him, though. A lot of people say he's like one of the best CEOs. Yeah. I don't know. That's why I read.

I heard he's really good with like supply chain stuff, which is critical for what they do. I mean, just keeping the lights on is hard, a company that produces things that are so precise. He must like to work. Yeah, those guys like for a long time. Those guys like to work. It's also power. You know, it's nice to be in charge of everything. Yeah.

And I don't begrudge them. All right. So look, if you work for Apple, write us note and let us know how. we can get a free pair of the Vision Pro. I will wear them on this show. Then you'll give them a time block planner, second edition. This is the trade. A second edition time block planner, USRP $30 for a pair of Vision Pro goggles.

But I will wear those goggles on the show, okay? And this is expensive advertising, right? I mean, honestly, the cost of an ad slot on the show is probably not that different than the cost of a pair of goggles. So I think this is really good organic advertising. So Apple, ball is in your court. I think the people want to see Cal Newport wearing Vision Pro goggles just repeatedly knocking into the microphone and talking to the wrong camera angle for an episode.

You can make that happen if you send me a pair of goggles. All right, Jesse, we should probably wrap this up. Thank you, everyone for listening. We'll be back next week for another episode. Actually, it'll probably be our last episode, standard studio episode before we go to the Deep Work HQ North and we're going to have a different backdrop for a couple months. So there's our last, before the summer change.

That's our last episode in the studio before we return again in September. So definitely tune in for that. And until next time, 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've got to sign up for my newsletter at calduport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.