Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 297: The Deep Life Hardware

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

Why do you struggle with your grand attempts to escape distraction and aimlessness to make your life deeper? In this episode, Cal draws on an unexpected metaphor – Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and the Analytical Engine – to help identify the subtle obstacle on your path to increase depth. With this new understanding in hand, he then details a specific gameplan to get around it. Later, he takes questions from the audience and reacts to the new AI Pin, a tool intended to render smartphones obsolete.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: The Deep Life Hardware [4:09]- Does personal productivity make us anxious? [34:04]- How can I build skills without getting in the way of my existing work? [42:11]- How can I build a deeper life after years of neglect? [46:00]- How is Sam Sulek’s stripped down YouTube channel doing so well? [52:12]- How can I convince my husband that I’m not a time management snob? [1:02:38]- CALL: Obsessing over quality [1:06:04]CASE STUDY: Shifting a mindset to do more deep work [1:11:04] CAL REACTS: Is the Al Pin the End of Smartphones? [1:17:46]Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at www.calnewport.com/slow computerhistory.org/babbage/engines/theverge.com/24126502/humane-ai-pin-reviewpodcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/conversation-with-cal-newport-the-key-to/id1498802610?i=1000652834277 samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/363-knowledge-work Use this link to preorder a signed copy of “Slow Productivity”: https://peoplesbooktakoma.com/preorder-slow-productivity/Thanks to our Sponsors: rhone.com/calshopify.com/deeppolicygenius.com/deepquestionsgrammarly.com/podcasttim.blogThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for slow productivity 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 cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. So I'm here back in my deep work, HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, do you miss the madcap primal excitement that is podcasting live in front of an independent bookstore crowd? Or are you happy to be back to the quiet and calm of our HQ studio? I thought was a good experience. Yeah. I enjoyed it. I think it was fun.

We got to be in front of a bunch of people, a bunch of fans, do a bunch of questions live. It was fun. But, you know, it is nice to be back in our controlled environment, I suppose.

Yeah. We had Adam helping us out with the audio, which helped. Yeah, that was nice. Yeah, shout out to Adam. And we got some nice video on it. So you should watch the video. If you haven't seen it,

we have good video of that live event. In general, for the video, I guess I should say, videos of the episodes, the deeplife.com, slash listen. You just go to the

episode you're interested in link to the video below this is episode 297 we do have some visuals coming up so you might want to find it on there if you want to see what we're talking about so what are we going to talk about well you know there's three main categories of topics we tend to cover in the show all about being deeper in a world of distraction one is digital knowledge work two is promise and parallels of new technology and three is the sort of systematic engineering of depth trying to engineer more depth into your life when there's all these distractions pulling from it. We're going to have a deep dive in that third category today.

We haven't done this in a while. Getting back to our bread and butter of engineering more depth in your life as a bulwark against digital distraction. Got some great questions. I think we have a call. Isn't there some music in the call we have? Is that what I heard earlier? All right.

There'll be some live music in our call. We have a cool case study. And then a final segment about a new tool you probably will not see me walking around with on anytime soon. So we've got a good show. before we get into it, people have been asking me to try to keep them up to speed on interviews I'm doing about my new book, Slow Productivity, so they can check out conversations. And so I wanted to point out two podcast interviews I did in the last week that I think were

particularly interesting. The first was on Scott Galloway's podcast, the Proff G podcast. That's just released. Scott Galloway is a good broadcaster, Jesse. It's interesting. I started listening to a lot of him. He's on Bill Maher a lot. He's on Bill Maher a lot.

He has another podcast with Kara Swisher, Georgetown alum Kara Swisher, called The Pivot Podcasts, which is really popular. But he's very, he reminds me of Bill Simmons in the sense of that he is well suited for the podcasting medium,

clear, provocative, anyways. He has a book coming out right now too, right? I have two copies of this book for some reason. I think his PR agency sent me a copy and we share a publisher, so his editor sent me a copy.

It's a cool book. look, yeah, it comes out the day this episode airs. The algebra, the algebra of something. I'll look it up. Scott Galloway. It's a good book. Anyways, so that was a cool interview. Fellow professor podcasting.

I also did Sam Harris's show. Always fun doing Sam Harris's podcast. You kind of have to bring your A game to that podcast because Sam will like think for a second and then ask like an incredibly profound question that you have to answer. And then a minute later, ask another like very profound question you have to answer. So it's always a cool, deep conversation. It's my second time on Sam's show. So if you like Harris, check that out on his Making Sense podcast.

That also came out last week. All right. Jesse, maybe we'll put those notes, links in the show notes. Yeah, and the book's called The Algebra of Wealth. The Algebra of Wealth, yeah.

It's not just a financial book, though. It's actually about, you know, I talk about it. One of the questions, actually, we're going to get into a little more. So stay tuned. All right. Enough of that.

I think we should get started with our deep dive. So here's a common problem. problem. You're tired of being listless or distracted just by screens in your life, and you come up with some plan for regaining some intention and some depth, some idea to make your life much more focused. And you go flying out of the gate with the new plan, your guns blazing. But then things just sort of peter out. And before you know it, you're back to TikTok binging while watching Netflix in the background. So today I want to diagnose one of the major causes of this type of fit. failure to get your ambitious plans off and running, will then use this new understanding to try to come up with some systematic advice for overcoming it and having more success, introducing more intention into your life. All right, so we're going to get started in a perhaps unexpected place, a example that will soon make sense once I explain how it connects to this topic.

I'm going to bring this up on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening. I want to go back to the 1800s. I want to go back to Charles Babbage, the mathematician, and these crazy machines he thought up. What's on the screen here is a picture of one of his so-called difference engines. So if you're listing, what you see here is a pile of brass gears arranged in interlocking columns. The difference engine was a mechanical machine, right? We're talking 19th century, that you could use to,

solve certain mathematical problems, in particular problems that had to do with repeated arithmetic and subtraction, addition and subtraction. It took the type of algorithms that a mathematician might execute and it mechanically implemented them.

Here's another close-up view. So then what happened, why this is relevant, so stick with me here. He came up with a design for a more advanced machine called the analytical engine. And unlike the difference engine, The analytical engine could be programmed to solve different problems. Here's a scene.

He didn't build one in his life, but a full one. But here is a scene from a part of a prototype he built in 1871. Here I'm loading up on the screen. This is a schematic he had of the analytical engine. You could actually specify to the machine what mathematical operations you wanted to do using punch cards. an idea that he borrowed from Jock Lecards and his powered programmable looms. Interestingly,

Ada Lovelace Ada Lovelace heard about, you've probably heard this story, but Ada Lovelace, who was related, of course, to the poet John Byron, heard about Babbage's analytical engine in an article

and designed a program for it, like, oh, here's how you can use it to solve a particular math problem involving the Bernoulli numbers. This was probably the first example of what we would think of as like a computer program in history. She was designing, okay, this series of instructions on the punch cards can take this machine that Babbage designed and solve this particular problem that might be interesting, the Bernoulli number problem. Okay. So why is this interesting?

Well, like up until this point, when we think about machines, we think about machines being constructed to do very specific things. I designed this machine to solve this problem. There could be some variability in the machine. I mentioned the Jacquard loom, where you could use punch cards to specify the pattern that this machine loom would actually weave, but that's still just a machine meant to do one thing, and you're just changing the parameters of how it does this thing. What made this idea with the Babbage Analytical Engine and Adelaide Lace's program so interesting is that it introduced a new split into the world of machine operation. the split between hardware and software. So we have hardware, which is going to be the machine itself,

and you have software, which is what you give the machine to actually run. So now when we think about a hardware software split, you have two different initiatives that have to go on simultaneously. And I think actually just, we can bring this down off the screen now. I think I'm showing what I need. You have two initiatives that go on simultaneously. Obviously, people trying to make the hardware better, people trying to write software. Yeah, Babbage trying to build this analytical engine.

How do we get the gears to actually mesh? And we have Ada Lovelace thinking about what's something we can do with this engine. How about the Bernoulli number? So we have these two separate worlds. This, of course, became the foundation of digital computation. Fast forward to the 1940s. We get this famous memo that Jean von Neumann writes saying like, hey, we should do something like this architecture with digital computers. we should have the program be its own thing that you input that runs on the hardware.

You build the machine once, and then the program you want the computer to run, we can put into the memory. We program it in. This was a big deal. Like one of the first large electronic digital computers that INEAC didn't have this capability. You had to actually adjust the way the thing was wired to get it to do different things. John von Neumann was saying, okay, with this new computer, Peter the Edvac, why don't we just have the program be something we put into the memory, just like the data.

It's completely separate from the machine. A couple other people suggested this. Turin had a similar suggestion for a machine for the ACE, the automatic computation engine around the same time. There's a debate about who came up with this idea first and how much they were influenced by Babbage. The details don't matter. What matters is our current digital age is dominated by this idea of hardware software.

Hardware better, make the software better. Now here's something that quickly made sense for people in the computational world. The hardware determines what you can do with the software. The butter your hardware, the more capability it had, the cooler software you could run. Like a great example of this, let's go to the world of video games, was the Atari 2,600, one of the first widely sold at-home video game players. The games on the Atari 2600, they look kind of weird. Why do they look weird?

Well, it turns out that the hardware that the Atari 2600 was based on was essentially a Pong playing machine. Pong being the original Atari game where you're trying to knock the ball back and forth between the paddles. So what had happened is they had commissioned a chip, sort of like microprocessor type chip, to bring a Pong to TVs at home, like an at-home Pong playing machine. So it was a chip that was meant to play Pong. And then Atari realized, wait, we should probably have, if we had lots of different games, this would be a big market. But we don't have the time or money to go build a different chip. So hey, game designers, you're dealing with a Pong playing chip. So all of these other games that we think of with the Atari 2600 are dealing with a Pong architecture,

where you have paddles and a ball and a field and you mirror one half of the game field onto the other half, because it's two sides of Pong and one avatar. Like everything in the constraints in how you program that Atari game is you were taking a machine that was meant to play Pong and you are tricking it and subverting it and stretching it to try to make these other games that don't look like Pong at all. But underneath the covers, they are. There's a fantastic book about this called Racing the Beam, which computer scientists know about, SDS style people know about, about how the constraints of the Atari Harkers. hardware really determined what you could produce. Then the Nintendo Entertainment System came along and said, oh, you know what? We have a graphics chip.

And it's meant just to make games, not just to play Pong. And you could just put whatever graphics you want in here. And suddenly, oh, my God, we could make any type of game. And it was like a revelation, right? So the hardware matters. The Atari 2,600, the hardware really limited what video games you could produce. All right. Let's connect this back to our original question.

We want to succeed with our plans. I think of like the cool goals you have in your life. Here's the way I want to get deeper and get away from just being distracted. I think of that like software. The cool flashy stuff. It's the video game. It's the like I am going to get really good at this or start a podcast or move to the woods or whatever it is. That's like your software.

This has to run on hardware. So what is the hardware in your life? It's your background habits and routines. It's the control you have over your time and schedule. It's the internal sense of discipline you have, your efficacy, your belief that you are able to actually execute things that are non-urgent but might be important in the long term. This is the hardware in which all of the software of your big plans and visions run. What I think happens to a lot of people is that they neglect the hardware and go straight to the really cool software. They want to run Super Mario World 3 in their life, and yet they're still living in Atari 2,600,

existence. So what you have to do, once we apply this metaphor and use this, what we have to do is focus first on upgrading our metaphorical hardware before we get too caught up in the possibilities for the much more visible software. We have to get the boring stuff, the foundations of our life humming before we worry too much about the really cool idea that we want to run, the really cool place we want to actually move our life. So we've talked about this before on the show, but let's just get into it again. Let's get into what might be involved in upgrading your personal hardware. Okay, first of all, we've talked about before the importance of discipline.

Let's apply discipline to this metaphor here. I like to think about discipline as something like the instruction set on your computer hardware. If you have convinced yourself, you've written the story that I am capable in different parts of my life of making progress on things that are important, even if it's not urgent or no one's forced me to do it and it's hard. If you've convinced yourself you're able to do this, it's like you've added more possible instructions to your metaphorical processor. You're increasing the scope of what you can use when you then write your programs. So this identity of discipline is a great place to start. And again, this is not the way most people think about this. Most people, again, want to jump to the big change.

The change will redeem me. I'm going to quit my job and move and buy my podcasting microphone. And the change is going to redeem me. They don't like to think about just the building up this ability to do things that are hard and being convinced I can. But you need that discipline first. It's a good place to start. How do you do that? Well, as we've said this before on the show,

So the best way to do this is to identify the different areas of your life that are important. We've called these various things like buckets, areas. If we want to use our computational metaphor, these could be like processing units. But you've got to identify the areas that are important for your hardware. We often use the alliterative Cs when thinking about this. Craft, of course, should be on here. That is like what you do professionally. Contemplation should be on here.

This is going to be sort of theology, philosophy. You should probably have community. Well, you should definitely have community. Your connection to others. Constitution, that's your health. Celebration. That is like your interest, the things you find great pleasure in that are outside of just your professional demands. That's a good place to start.

But you find the areas that are important in your life and you have a – identify a daily discipline in each. These should be things that are tractable, right? So not impossibly hard to do consistently, but also not trivial. Just hard enough that you have to do a little bit of effort. and you should track this and mark it down on a piece of paper. I'm doing my daily disciplines daily. That is all about improving and increasing the instruction set available to your hardware. Because your mind begins to tell itself the story. All of these parts of my life are important, and in each of them I am willing to do something that's not required and non-urgent, but is pushing me towards something that I find important.

So you want to start building up your instruction set with daily discipline. Next, you need some sort of control over the obligations in your life. If it's all haphazard, all this stuff professionally, non-professionally I need to do. I'm trying to keep track of it. I forget people are bothering me. Hey, what happened to this thing? You're late and now I'm scrambling to get it done. This is like having in our computational metaphor like a poorly designed data bus

and the instructions move slowly and get bottled-necked and stuck. And it's hard to move data instructions around. around, you need control over the stuff going on in your life. So you need a place where this stuff is storage. You need some sort of capture system to use the Dave Allen methodology where all the things you need to do and the information related to the things you need to do are in a system that you trust and look at frequently. It's not just being stored in your head.

I've talked about using trello boards. You could do this in notebooks. You could do this in a Google Doc. It doesn't really matter. but having some sort of collection for tasks in the different areas of your life. I have one Trello board for each of the different roles in my life. And then within there, you have cards for the different obligations. The columns have to do with the status, backburner waiting on, waiting to hear back,

actively working on, etc. Information relevant to each of these obligations is on the cards, and you're looking at these things on a regular basis. We'll get into that more here in a second. But you have a place where everything is stored and organized that you need. to do or you've committed to do. You've got to get that outside of your head. Again, this is the boring stuff, but the important stuff, getting the hardware upgraded so we can do the cool stuff later. Now you need a good scheduler. Any piece of good computational hardware is going to be based off of,

there's going to be at the core of it, some sort of scheduler. The schedules, what are we doing next? Let me get the data I need. Here's the instruction. Let's get this to the right processing unit. Let's execute. You need a good scheduler in your own metaphorical hardware, which means some planning discipline that allows you to actually be intentional about what you're doing. I'm, of course, a big proponent of multi-scale planning. You should have a big picture plan for the current season or year. You can look at that big picture plan each week when you make a weekly plan. When you make your weekly plan, this is when you can move around and tweak things on your calendar,

check in on things, cancel things, consolidate things to make your weekly, make more sense for what you want to work on, and then daily have some sort of plan for what you want to do that day. This is a scheduling discipline. Now I control my obligations. I have some control of my time. What do I want to be working on? When am I going to get this done? Now your hardware is beginning to get some more functionality.

Finally, we want to sort of clean out to the degree necessary the junk that's junking up the system. We want to streamline our data. We want to streamline our instruction set. And what does this mean in practice? Now that you have control over your obligations and you're actually planning at multiple scales, you can find out pretty soon what's clogging up the system. You know, this obligation over here keeps really getting the way of other things. It's not that important to me.

Why am I spending time doing this so inefficiently? You can start removing things from your plate. You can also start using autopilot scheduling for the things that remain. Okay, this is something I do regularly. Why don't I just say I always do this Monday. I always do it right after lunch. Let me consolidate this here. So this is all about getting efficiency in the system.

I want to get out the stuff that's clogging the system I don't need to be doing. I want to take the regular routines and give them a sort of like dedicated time they run. So I don't have to waste cycles thinking about them or have them show up in inopportune times. So this is all about getting the system to run smoothly. This is boring, but critical. So I'm going to summarize them all right here. You increase your metaphorical instruction set by, developing an identity of discipline, daily discipline in the different areas of your life is a

great way to do it. You gain control over your obligations. This is like having smart data management by having places where everything is stored by role and by status. You don't have to keep track of this in your head. You have easy access to all the possible things that need to be done. Use multi-scale planning to get your metaphorical scheduler working well. So you know what's on your plate, you know what's coming up with your time, you're making some intentional decisions about what to do with your time, and you're cleaning up your code and your instruction set by getting rid of stuff that you don't really need to be doing, simplifying your life, and making automatic the regular things that can be made automatic so that they're not taking up

core processor cycles. Let's get some special circuitry going for those things. All right. You do all of that. You upgrade your hardware in this way. Now you can run some pretty cool software. Now when you say, okay, I want to make a major professional change, you can act on that now. You've got your act together, you're planning, you can figure out what you're going to do, you can make regular time for it, you can pick up this new skill, you can use that skill to make the leverage a new position, you can then go through what's necessary to, like, move to a different location and just start to pick up this other hobby. Whatever it is you're trying to do, your hardware can handle this much better than if your life is just haphazard. If you're just, I don't know,

I just roll through things, I'm distracted all the time. I get inspired by something and I hope this inspiration carries me through to executing this. Good luck. Your hardware is old. Your hardware is simple. Inspiration doesn't matter. I could be the most inspired Atari programmer possible. I'm not going to be able to have a side-scroller video game like Mario Brothers, just like the hardware can't handle it.

So anyways, we've talked about this in different ways before, but I think the hardware software split, which is a fundamental idea and computation, really gives us a useful handle here. work on your hardware before you work on your software. If you're not working your hardware, there's a reason why your software might be failing. It also gives us a new motivation for these type of hardware-type activities because, you know, sometimes these get scrutiny. We have a good question coming up about this. But sometimes these get scrutiny. Like, well, why are we bothering to try to, like, control our obligations? And what are we doing here with this time management and discipline?

And, like, why do we care about this? Are we sort of just trying to, like, optimize ourselves? or we distract ourselves. Like, no, we're upgrading our hardware so we can do the cool stuff. If we want the schedule where we like watch birds all the time and have all this flexibility,

that's a really cool program we need better hardware to get there. So we get a much more functional approach to these type of things. It's not doing them for the sake of doing them. It's upgrading our potential so that we can then take advantage of that potential

and run some pretty cool games. So I think that's a useful metaphor. And I think it gives us a new way to think think about engineering depth in a distracted world. You know what they call that that book, Racing the Beam, Jesse is, man, Atari's were so hard to program. But there was an incredibly limited amount of video memory, not the geek out here.

But with a modern graphics chip like you would have on an ES, you could just say there's a, like a bite for every pixel on the screen. And I can say, like, this is what I want each pixel to be. and you put that in graphic memory and the graphic chip draws that on the screen. Not so with the Atari. With the Atari,

you can, first of all, the pixels are grouped in the groups of four. So you can only say what color you want each group of four to be. And there's only memory for like a little bit of like one row, like part of one row,

is all you could specify. So what you have to do is in your code because it's all one chip, you have to keep track of exactly where the electron beam is that's going across scanning the TV screen. Right?

And because that's how TV's worked. An electron beam would scan across the screen and turn off and on pixels. And you would say, here's the electron beam is about to go across this part of the screen. And you quickly write in the memory, like exactly what they draw there. And it would draw all those things. And you had to then quickly change it. So you were telling the electron beam right before it got to each part of the screen, okay, this next chunk do this. This next chunk do this.

And it was the same chip that does everything else. So then if you have other calculations you need to do, like what should we draw? Like is the ball moving? What's the enemy doing? You would wait until the electron beam was moving back up to the top again. And you could get some instructions in there. And you had the count, like, exactly how many microseconds each of these instructions took because you only had so much time before you had to start telling the beam what to do again.

So it was like impossible to program. How long ago do you read that book? Oh, I don't know. I read that not super recently, but, it was a, I'll give a professor I know, I was a professor. A professor I know at Yale, we were at a conference. I remember this. God, where was that conference?

I don't know, but this must have been 10 years ago or more. And he was telling me about this book. And then I went and read it. Yeah, I sort of geeked out on it. It's really cool. And then the NES, like, made it much better. I had to do not graphic programming, but I did some microcontroller programming when I was in college.

It was like my summer job to make money. And we also, I remember, I was controlling the, the, I built a system that I coded up a system for a, it's a complex piece of optical machinery. So you had like lasers and films and things have to move very precisely. But I remember having to count, like look up in the reference manual the number of microseconds per op code because you have the time things exactly, like exactly how many microseconds would it take to execute this code.

I think Jesse the people are figuring out I'm a nerd. I don't know. I think the secrets out. All right. Anyways, enough of that. Hardware software. I think it's a great way to think about engineering the deep life. And so we got a lot of cool questions, but first, let's talk about some sponsors.

Our first sponsor is actually not just a friend of the show, but a friend of mine, Tim Ferriss. The Tim Ferriss Show podcast crossed the one billion download mark in 2023 and is celebrating its 10-year anniversary this month. Tim has a bunch of cool things in store for 2024. Here's the thing. I've been on Tim's show, I think, three times now. Tim was my first interview I did for slow productivity. I arranged for him to be the very first interview I was going to do on the book because Tim really is the best in the business when it comes to this sort of advice-oriented interview

format. He invented it. He's been called the Oprah of podcasting, and I think for good reason. A couple things that are impressive about this show is that he has this long track record of getting first-time podcast appearances on his show. So Schwarzenegger, Jamie Fox, Jocko Willink, Rick Rubin, all of them did their first podcast appearances ever on Tim Ferriss show. Little known fact, in the Jamie Fox interview,

they talk about my book, Deep Work, so I appreciated that. He also just gets other fantastic guests, including Seinfeld, LeBron James, Jane Goodall, Bernay Brown, Terry Cruz, Neil Gaiman, He gets everyone. You've probably heard of the show. I just want to tell you directly, if you like this show, I'm sure you would like the Tim Ferriss show as well. If for some reason you're not listening to that show yet, you have to check out the Tim Ferriss show. He has only cooler guest planned and all sorts of interesting stuff coming up for the year ahead.

You can find the Tim Ferriss show wherever you get your podcast. You can learn more about the podcast as well as Five Bullet Friday, Tim's newsletter that has nearly two million weekly subscribers at Tim. That's tim. dot blog. I also want to talk about our friends at Rohn, R-H-O-N-E, and talk in particular about their commuter collection, which is a clothing collection that I very much appreciate. Why? Because, look, men's closets are due for a radical reinvention.

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so you'll remain selling fresh. And it's 100% machine washable. You don't have to bother with dry cleaners. Throw the stuff in the washing machine, boom, you're good. Right? So if you're a guy in my audience, It's like I need good clothes that looks good that can handle like a really hard day and I'm going to be comfortable. I can travel with it.

Rhone commuter collection is what you need. So the commuter collection can get you through any workday and straight into whatever comes next. So head to Rhone.com slash Cal and use promo code Cal to save 20% off your entire order. That's 20% off your entire order when you head to R-H-O-N-E. I said that weird. R-H-O-N-E dot com slash Cal. and use to code Cal, it's time to find your corner office comfort. Finally, we want to mention our friends at Shopify, whether you're selling a little or a lot,

Shopify helps you do your thing, however, you, cha-ching. There's a reason why you've heard the name Shopify. It's because it is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business, from your small online shop to your massive in-person store, to your million dollars in orders, e-commerce, BMF, whatever it is you're doing, Shopify has a best in business tool for you. They also help you turn your browsers into buyers

using the internet's best converting checkout, 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. 10% of all e-commerce in U.S. is already powered by Shopify. It's the force behind brands like all birds, Rothes and Brooke Lennon's. This is what Jesse and are going to use when we open our long-awaited Deep Questions podcast store.

We still haven't figured out exactly what's going to be in this store. Most of our ideas have been shot down so far. But when we open this store, we will be sure using Shopify, it will make selling whatever we sell that much easier. So you can sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash deep. But you have to type that all in lowercase to get the deal. So go to Shopify.com slash deep now to grow your business, no matter what stage you're in, that's Shopify.com slash deep. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

Now that you're using Roan clothing, you're going to pick up golf? I should because I want to, and I'm just, this is just a phrase that's coming to my head out of nowhere. I want to find my corner office comfort. And I think that will help me. I'll tell you what I like about golf. It would be nice to be outside. I'll tell you what I would dislike about golf. The part where you have to hit that ball and try to get to go near a hole.

I feel like that would be frustrating because I would want the ball to go towards the hole. But because I'm trying to hit it with a small metal stick, it would not go towards the hole. So I don't know if you've heard this analysis before, but I watched Tiger Woods over the week and shoot a plus 10 in one round. I was like golf is a hard sport. And then the other thing is, too, you'd probably be contemplating, like, while you're walking up the fairway, then you're getting in trouble for a slow play because you'd be writing in your journal. Everyone would be mad at me.

Yeah. If I was, like, if I was, like, okay, you know, Cal Newport is going to play around at the master. It's like, oh, it's kind of exciting. We know Cal. Like, here's what would happen. It would be, like, the first hole. All right, like, here we go.

I would swing. Yeah, like, okay, I'm going to knock this ball. I'm swinging at the ball. What's going to happen is, like, as I swing down, immediately the ball is going to go exactly 90 degrees to the left, like smashing an old lady in the face while my club goes out of my hand and like breaks the arm of Roy McElroy. Like that's first, that's the first swing. McElroy.

McElroy. Just like swing, frame, break, you know, something catches on fire. Yeah. The giant CBS broadcasting tower eventually just totters and falls and then explodes. That would be one swing of me at the Masters. All right. Our first question is from Gourley. How can I balance robust routines and plans with enjoying the present moment?

Is it possible to be an ambitious high achiever without a baseline level of anxiety? It's an interesting question because coincidentally, I listened to two different podcasts in the last few days that I think of as giving two different perspectives on this question. Both podcasts by people I know and respect. So let's start with these two perspectives I heard. coincidentally just in the last few days. So the first was from Oliver Berkman, who wrote 4,000 weeks, friend of the show.

He blurbs slow productivity. I blurbed 4,000 weeks. And he really has made a name for himself with this much more like British, sort of relaxed re-appraisal of time management of productivity. I was listening to Oliver recently on Chris Williamson's podcast, Modern Wisdom. And Berkman was,

sort of giving this kind of ideal. He's like, here's his approach to personal productivity, how he thinks about these things right now. And I'm paraphrasing, but his system was like, have a few things you want to get done, but also be willing to let your interest guide you. If you don't really have energy for this thing you want to do, but there's something else you're kind of excited about me, work on that instead. Like, you'll be okay. That's a paraphrase, but that's sort of a classic like 4,000 weeks approach. Let's call that the humanistic. We call this humanistic personal productivity.

It's sort of what are we, you know, as humans, like what really kind of like fits the way we operate best? All right. Then soon after this, sort of coincidentally, I was listening to Scott Galloway, who, you know, we talked about earlier in a show. I was just on his Prof G podcast. And then I was listening to a bunch of Galloway. And I was listening to him on Dan Cienor's podcast, Call Me Back. And they were talking about at the end, Galloway's new. book, the algebra of financial...

Of wealth. Right. And he was sort of given his take on life and advice. And he sort of, Galloway had this take, which is like, look, in your 20s in particular, your biggest resource is your time. Like, what you want to be doing with this is really getting after getting good at something valuable. Because he's like, here's the end game.

He's like, look, this is a reality. That's not good, but it's a reality, especially in America. we are not kind to poor people. And if you can build up a skill, whether it's like knowledge, work or in trades, you can use this as a foundation of financial security, and that's what you want. You want to be able to when your upper middle age, to be able to take care of your kids, to be able to help your parents when they get older and sick, they're not have to worry about to go pursue things you're interested in and not be worried about money. He's like, that's the game. And it's hard. And you need to take all this free time you have in your 20s and you need to like focus on.

am going to get good. So we'll call that sort of pragmatic personal productivity. And there's some tension between these two, right? Oliver's like, you know, just have a few things to do. And also it's okay if you don't do those, like if your interest take you somewhere else. And Galloway is basically like, look, if you don't sort of get after it and like work really hard to master some good stuff, like your life's going to be miserable. So we kind of have these two different approaches, idealistic and pragmatic.

So I think what's going on here is that Berkman's approach, I think, matches the human brain. Like, this is ideally how humans are wired. Like, this is really what productivity is to humans. Is this much looser sort of, what am I going to do right now? Well, I need to go hunt this thing or we're going to go forage. You're sort of doing one or two things. You don't have complicated plans.

And those plans are also contingent. Well, I don't know. It's kind of raining, so I'm not going to do this. I'm going to do this. or there's a new urgent thing that came up. Let me work on that before. Like, I do think you would be happier with the Berkman personal productivity. On the other hand, I think Galloway is right that it is really hard to be financially secure.

And, like, you do have to build up skills. And it's hard. And especially when you have a lot of free times to your 20s, like, you probably have to do some grinding. Right. I mean, because it's hard. It's hard to, in a modern economy, it's hard to convince other people to give you money. But you really want people to. give you money because without money, things are hard. And so we have to construct a sort of artificial

relationship with time just for a sort of financial survival, for a sort of basic economic security. So I don't know, maybe our goal is you want to get to a place in life where you can have a Birkman-style personal productivity, and that's going to require a Galloway-style pragmatic personal productivity along the way. Maybe Berkman's given us the goal, and Galloway is giving us the path you have to take to be able to get to something like that goal. But I think back to the original question, the Galloway style pragmatic personal productivity can be, it doesn't have to be super anxiety provoking, but you know, it's hard. And you have to care about what am I doing. Am I making progress on what matters?

You have to sort of fight back distractions. You have to make time for what's important. There's a sort of defensive time management in here. I can't let all these distractions encroach so much that nothing gets done. There's a sort of urgency of I have to keep working deeply on the things that matter. this is my time to start to get good. And some of that's stressful and some of that sort of anxiety producing. One thing I want to suggest, not to bring this back to me, but that my new book,

Slow Productivity, maybe gives us like a reasonable roadmap for walking this tightrope, right? For like, okay, we need to do something like Galloway-style personal productivity just to survive, but we're attracted to the Birkman-style personal productivity. Slow productivity sort of helps you split the difference. It says, you got to do, oh, we've got to do the work, we've got to get better. Well, let's make sure along the way that we're not doing too many things at the same time. That gets counterproductive and it's particularly stressful. Let's make sure along the way that we're giving ourselves a reasonable amount of time.

We can't procrastinate forever, but let's not try to squeeze everything into the smallest time frames. Let's work consistently on getting better, but we can have variations in intensity and we don't have to have super unrealistic timeframes. Slow productivity says, okay, if we really care about quality in a very specific way, what's the craft that matters? And let me actually work specifically on training that craft like I would train to get better at an instrument. We're going to get to that Galloway goal of security much easier. We're getting much faster. We're going to gain much more control over our schedule, much more autonomy quicker. If we're not just working really hard, but working hard at the specific goal of getting better at something that matters.

Slow productivity we can think of, in other words, as a way to navigate Galloway's style, his pragmatic personal productivity in a way that minimizes. the exhaustion and burnout. There's still probably going to be some anxiety there. It's hard to do hard things, and the pressure is on. But slow productivity gives us a way to navigate that where not only will be more likely to be successful with getting to the Berkman promised land, but we are going to get there without it having to be an impossible or unsustainable slog. I don't believe that we have to grind it out in a miserable sort of way to get to a

sort of security later on a professional career. I do think we have to be careful about our time. I do think we are going to have to prioritize, like, the deep efforts to get better. I do think we have to have defensive time management to make sure that other things don't come in and take over and prevent us for making progress. And I do think all that's kind of hard, but it doesn't have to be miserable. So I'm going to throw slow productivity in here as the way to follow the Galloway path as nicely and sustainably as possible en route to getting to the Berkman promised land.

both good interviews, actually. Yeah, I'll check them out. I did Modern Wisdom as well. If you're looking for another podcast interview with me, I did Chris's show. I recorded it down in Austin, but that came out kind of recently. So check that out as well,

my interview on Modern Wisdom. All right, who do we have next? Next question is from Adita. I currently work in a startup with long hours. I struggle to find time to sharpen my problem solving and programming skills. How do I plan weekly and daily sessions such that I can follow my interests pragmatically? without hampering my performance at the company.

So my best advice here is combine the two objectives. So you're going to start up a big hour startup. You're going to exhaust yourself if you're trying to have a sort of non-trivial deep work requiring skill building sessions outside of all the hard work you're already doing for your startup. Again, going back to the Galloway vision, maybe if you're in your 20s, you kind of have the energy to do this. But I don't know, I'd rather spend the time you do have doing other things that are rewarding. servicing the other buckets of the deep life. So I think the right thing to do here is start to find ways that you can take on professional challenges that are useful for the startup in your career that require in order for you to succeed

with them for your skills in strategic ways to get better. This is almost always the optimal way to do this. When you're trying to develop a professional skill, if you can integrate that into your existing professional life, that's almost always going to be better, as opposed to I'm studying to do this on my own, and then over here I have my job. And there's two reasons why it's better typically to integrate them. One is it's just more manageable. You're not requiring extra time. It's what you're already doing for your job. Your work to get better at this is directly helping something you're supposed to be doing. Getting better at the skill will give you

immediate rewards. There's a course, an online course I do with Scott Young called Top Performer about getting better in your career. And this is a course. is one of the key ideas in the course is we have you design a professional activity that is straight up useful for you and your boss and your job, but also is going to make you get better at something that's useful to your job. So you combine it as much more manageable. You're not, you're not having to find extra time. And two, it's much more effective, right? There's a general rule of learning new skills that is like the more close you can get your practice to the actual application of the skill you're learning, the better.

You know, I had this conversation on a podcast the other day where they were saying, hey, should I meditate to improve my ability to focus on hard work problems? And I said, well, if you want to improve your ability to focus on hard work problems, practice focusing on hard work problems. We don't do something similar and hope that some of these skills transfer over because this transference can often be low fidelity and not that useful. Practice the thing you want to get better at. So, like, if you want to learn how to, like, program or whatever, program specific things that are useful for your company don't take abstract programming classes, right?

So you want to try to connect what you're doing, the training to the actual application. So that's my advice there is make what you're doing an implicit training session. And I think that'll solve a lot of your problems and give you the goal of as you build these new skills, giving you more leverage and control. You know, it's what we always talk about. You get more control and leverage over your working. and you can really take that out for a spin. For those interested in the course, it's through your newsletter and it opens twice a year, right? Yeah, I announced it in my newsletters twice a year.

Scott actually has a new book coming out in May all about how to learn things, like how to learn hard things. And I'm setting up for him to come on the show. One of the ideas I have is to have Scott be sort of like a guest question answerer with me. We could do a bunch of questions about learning skills and him and I can try to answer them together. So I'm having Scott. I've known Scott forever. I do two courses with them. This new book is awesome.

So anyways, we'll get more on that with Scott soon on the podcast. All right, who we got next? Next question is from Lily. I have lived under a controlling family environment for most of my life where I wasn't allowed to have any hobbies or many friends. I'm now living on my own and I'm struggling to create my own routine. I want to live a deeper life, but I feel that it's empty. How can I begin to build a deeper life after years of neglect?

Well, it's a great question, and I love your thinking about this. You know, I love the self-awareness of this might be hard for me, but it's important. And I think it's, before we get to the details, the reason why that self-awareness is important is because when and if it's hard, and it will be hard, because, again, you were not used to the sort of more expansive vision of the deep life growing up. When you struggle at first with it, you'll know the struggle is expected and you persist. Like you'll know this is going to be hard. You're more likely to persist in pursuing depth as opposed to when the first obstacle is coming up just saying maybe I'm not worthy of this or maybe this is just not

something that's going to work for me. So I love the self-awareness. I'm going to give a preamble to my advice here. My general preamble to this advice is probably the biggest danger throughout this process of finding more depth. The biggest danger I want to be wary of is your phone. Because what you're trying to do here, and building a more expansive depth into your life

is you're going to try to be servicing more of these areas that make life meaningful and important, the contemplation, craft, community, celebration, constitution. There's going to be these broad areas, these elements that make the human life interesting and important. The phone can offer you a sort of low, high sugar, low-quality, simulacrum of satisfaction for a lot of these areas, right like oh you really like desire community you don't have a lot of experience having friends

we can just kind of simulate having friends on the phone like just people in social media and they're commenting and they're clicking on things and like that's close enough and it's easy you know you want to seek out you know beauty and interesting things you want to like get engaged in like the world of like what humanity can create the phones like we got interesting stuff on here just like scroll this thing and like it'll just it'll look interesting and and binge on these shows, you know, like what you're looking for,

the phone can give you a cheap version of. You want to be, you have a call to a moral intuition. I want to be involved. I have a moral intuition. The phone's like, we can just like punch outrage buttons. Just like,

look at these tweets. So the phone is going to subvert every human instinct you have is you try to build a more expansive depth. So now is the time you need to be super wary of the phone. Right. Be very careful what's on there.

Be very careful what services you're doing. You might consider temporarily taking social media off your phone. You should consider using something like the phone foyer method when you're at home. You have it plugged in in a set place in your house and that's where it stays or in your apartment. And you can go there to reference it, but it doesn't stick with you as a constant companion. Do things on a regular basis without your phone just so you become comfortable being alone with your own thoughts. You have a lot of actual introspection you're going to have to do here, Lily. A lot of sort of building out your schema and your understanding of the world and how you fit into it.

this is going to be a lot of just you with your own thoughts. So I'm talking about once or twice a week, long walks without your phones, errands without your phone. You have to be very wary of this thing in this very important but vulnerable moment you find yourself in. All right. With that in mind, how do we make progress here? Let's go back to the deep dive from earlier in the episode. Work on your hardware first before you get too caught up in the software. Right.

you've had a very limited, powerful, but very limited type of hardware you've been running on because of what it was like growing up. You now want to build out this more expansive hardware. Let's focus on the boring hardware before we get into the sexy software. So this means you want to get some control over your obligations and time like we talked about. Here's what I'm working on. Here's my planning. I know what I'm doing. And I have control over what I do and when I do it.

Work on your discipline instruction set. I have daily disciplines in these areas. of my life, including areas that I've never given any attention to before, but now I am because I want to tell myself I can do things that are non-urgent, but are important in the long-term, simplify stuff that's clogging things up, get automation on the stuff. I don't think that's your big problem, that piece, because you're just getting started out. But get that hardware going. Trust yourself. I have discipline. I can do things in different areas in my life. I have control over my obligations. I have a pretty reasonable control over my schedule.

Now you can start working on your software. And here what I'm going to suggest is take one processing unit at a time, by which I mean one area of your life at a time and give it a few months to do an overhaul on it. Right. All right. Let's start with maybe not community. Maybe we'll start with something like contemplation. Okay. I want to overhaul that part of my life, like a regular reading habit, meditation habit, rediscovering a sort of religious connection and integrating that into my life.

Let me spend a few months just working on that. okay now I'm sort of feeling like there's meaning in life and I have I can direct myself towards things that are important all right now I'm going to focus on community for a few months how do I start getting a service to my community the friends I do have how do I actually how do I improve those relationships or meet new people and you slowly go area by area and kind of build up beta versions of very basic software in each of these areas and then after a year go back and let's do version one you know now you're going to iterate on this and make it better and you can start building up really cool software so be

aware of your phone, upgrade your hardware so it's ready to handle this full expanse of the human experience, and then start working on your software in one area of your life at a time. The stakes are low here at first. That's why I said beta software. It's what some sort of cool program after about a year of work running each of the areas of my life. And now I'm ready to try to come up with the new version. And this is going to take time. But I'm absolutely convinced that you will get there because you care about it. You know about it. You know it'll be hard. And you're committed to actually making change. All right, who do we have next? Next question, slow productivity corner. Let's get our theme music. So as you know, we try to find one question per episode that's related

to my book, Slow Productivity, the Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnouts. Find out more about that book anywhere books are sold or at Calduport.com slash slow. If you like to show, you need to have that book because we reference it all the time. All right, Jesse, what's our slow productivity corner question of the day? All right, it's from Matt. Sam Sulek has a massive YouTube following, with over 3.27 million subscribers. His channel lacks clipback thumbnails, YouTube shorts, and fancy editing. Can you articulate why Sam's slow approach

is garnishing such praise in a content media forum that usually amplifies anything but deep? Sam Sulek. All right, let's load this up. For those who are watching, I have his YouTube channel. Let's load up one of these videos here. Let's see what we got here.

All right, so here's the name of this video. This is from two days. ago. The video title is not click by it. It's spring cut day 16 dash cardio and has been viewed 100,000 times. It came out a couple days ago. All right. Here's Sam Sulek. He's just

talking in his car. No fancy editing. Let me zoom forward. Now he's shirtless. I guess he's showing spring cut day. So he's showing what, like, how his cut looks. Because he's a bodybuilder. He's a bodybuilder is what we're seeing here. Yeah. Shouldn't wait. Yeah. He's a muscular man.

picture on there um okay it's a good question i mean one of the reasons why i'm glad matt's asking this question is because as you would imagine jesse i'm often mistaken for sam suleck right like hey sam i love your oh oh sorry because we have like i would say like kind of a comparable you're laughing too much about this jesse we have a comparable physique that's what i was trying to say okay he's a strong gentleman make that full screen come on that's sort of Is that much different? He's a very big guy. A lot of people have actually been writing me about Sam and asking is he an example of like a slow, a slow YouTube movement, right?

Like it's forget all of the whatever, just going to have me on there. Here's what I think is happening with Sam is he has rediscovered a format that used to be in early YouTube days incredibly popular, which is the vlog, the video log. This was like a big part of independent video early in YouTube days. I remember a lot of writers had these. John Green, for example, had like a really big one. And it really was just people, it was Web 2 indie talking to camera. And you would build up these parisocial relationships with the vlogger, the video blogger, because they would just talk about their life and what's going on.

and you, over time, had this connection with them. Again, a parasycial connection, you felt like you really knew them. And you're like, I just want to check in and see what these people are doing. And it's a powerful format. Typically for it to work, there had to be something sort of unusual or interesting about the person. That's kind of like the hook. So, like, this is why I was saying, John Green, if I'm remembering this, correctly, had like a big vlog because he was like a well-known writer.

And he wrote for young audiences and young audiences were watching these things. So there is a connection they had. And I think there's something similar here because Sam Sulek is clearly like a very successful bodybuilder. Like what this is this bodybuilding, Jesse, or is this something different? I think it's bodybuilding. Yeah, I don't know if he's like a competitive. There's a difference, I guess, between like I compete and just like, I want to look as big as possible. But, you know, he's very successful at that.

So there's kind of like a hook into it. And then you build up this parisocial relationship. And then you don't care what the thumbnails are. You don't care what the titles are. You're like, I just, I want to be connected to this person. So, yeah, I think Sam has rediscovered vlogs. And vlogs, I think, is a really cool format because it's like an ongoing novel. You really get in the mind of another person.

The hard thing here, I think, is the chicken and the egg. This is why my vision of the future of independent video. I think video is critical for independent media. because we just know this from TV, eating radio's lunch. Video ultimately is way more powerful than audio by itself. So, like, I do think video is the future. The problem with video right now is YouTube is sort of the platform that works. They have the best tech, but it's an algorithmic recommendation environment.

And that's even really matter if you have a lot of subscribers. It's like it decides what people are being recommended and how it decides this is sort of arbitrage. These algorithms you kind of have to chase if you want anyone, including your own subscribers to see your video. So somehow, you know, Sam has gotten around this, I think, a couple other YouTubers who have gotten around this, like Andrew Huberman, you know, so he does not have fancy thumbnails and does not have clickbait titles.

Doesn't matter. They still crush it. Lex Friedman, just very simple thumbnails. His titles are just on the person's name and like what we're talking about or whatever. So there is some critical mass. If you have a big enough audience, they will somehow, and I don't know how this works, I don't know if they're getting notifications or they just check to see when the Sam have a newest video.

You can get around the algorithmic world and still have people see your videos on YouTube. If you get past a certain critical mass, the question is how you do that. And maybe Sam did it by being so successful at bodybuilding and Huberman had audio podcast. those audiences were huge so that could kind of carry people over. So I don't know. I don't know exactly how that works, but I do like the trend. I do like the trend where we think about the video platforms as hosting technologies and how people curate and find that this becomes more person to person, this becomes

less algorithmic, this becomes more trust-based. I really like that movement forward. We're messing around on that with our channel. we just have someone, we record our podcast and then we have someone who puts on YouTube and puts on thumbnails and titles that are supposed to make sure that the people who actually subscribe, like YouTube will actually show it to them so they'll remember Ocala's new video and then they'll watch it. But they're like, it's a little clickbaity.

It's like we're experimenting now with how can we, you know, still have the people who want to see my videos be shown the fact my new video exists without having to have the titles be like over some sort of cringe barrier or maybe without having to have like a surprise face thumbnail. And so like we're experimenting that with that ourselves. How does this work? How can we have a video presence for independent media that does not require us to either play ball with an algorithm or be either metaphorically or in Sam's case physically,

literally big enough that it doesn't matter? That's the cool question. The question right now, I think, an independent video, is getting around the curation problem. Because the vlog format's great. People have a real relationship with this guy. I remember this from, you know, Hank Green maybe. John Green, Hank Green, I might get these names wrong. This was all like big YA writers in the early 2000s, but whatever.

I like this. I like slow YouTube, if that's what we're going to call it. The key is how to crack this code so that, like, more people can have YouTube just be the tech that hosts their videos. We need better ways of curation and finding videos, better ways for people to get videos. I mean, some equivalent of like RSS that we have for audio where it's just, I actually subscribe to people and there's like a custom channel that's created for me and there's no algorithm involved. And I find those people through other people's videos. I don't know. There's a, there's a solution to this that hopefully doesn't involve,

you know, everyone has to be like 50% Mr. Beast in order for just people who, already subscribed to their videos to even see them. So I'm keeping an eye on this, and I think Sam is a good example. I think it's a good example of the alternative things going on. My version of a Sam Sue, like, V-Log, because he's mainly in the gym, because that's what he does.

Yeah. So would my version just be like, it would just be me sitting quietly at a keyboard, piping for an hour? It would probably be you walking down the 18th Fairway at Augusta, you know. The crowd's following me. While you're journaling.

Yeah. Yeah, just like everyone's like, get out of the way. My deep work is not as visually gripping as Sam Sulek's work, I guess I would say. Oh, by the way, with your human interview, he wanted to do deep work with you. Was there ever any coordination on that? They have not coordinated with Andrew Heubman on that, but we did talk about it. He wanted to. Yeah, he was like, I want to do deep work in like a Zoom room with you, so I would be motivated to keep doing it.

Yeah. That would be a good. That would be a good vlog. That would be. Just like me, that's a good idea though. What if it was like me with like various well-known people doing deep work together? It's like mainly it's just sort of like them typing. And you typing.

And then like but occasionally like we kind of talk about what they're working on. And then you could show them pictures of your keyboard and how all the keys are done. Yeah, just kind of hear some clicking. And like everyone could just sort of do it along. Like we're all just kind of deep working and that's actually not a bad idea for a show. Work deeply with Kyle Newport. And it's live. So the whole idea is like you can work along with, you know, Cal and Scott Young.

Yeah. Like just as different people rotate through like, what do you work it on? How's it going? I like that idea. And I would be sure it looks like Sam Sulek just like flexing all the time. His channel's popular, Jesse, so there must be something to it. All right. What do we got next?

All right. We got a question from Joy. I'm a time management snob about my husband. prides himself on living without any structure. How can I begin to build deeper lives for both of us if we both have such conflicting views? I like this inversion, by the way, because we usually get like the husband is annoying the wife with all of his, like, Cal Newport dumb. Yeah.

So I like the inversion. That's good. Your husband prides himself on living without any structure. I definitely imagine, like, the dude from the big Lebowski. That's what I imagine for the husband. He's just sort of like, has a bathrobe on, just sort of. Big beers are going through the room, like grabbing. Hey, do we have any cream left for my white Russians?

Well, and for some reason, like, I imagine his wife has, like, on a green accountant's visor. It's like, works on her planners. All right. It's a good question, though, right? I would say, yeah, this is why it's complicated. Because you need the hardware. Let's bring us all back to the deep dive. Like, you kind of need the hardware in place before you do the cool software stuff.

So you want to do cool stuff with your life as a married couple. It's helpful to have the hardware in place. Like, yeah, we have a sort of disciplines, the different areas. We can control our obligations to have some control over time. Now we can take this out for a spin and do kind of cool things. So it does limit the software you can run if the underlying hardware is not working that well. And it certainly can be a problem if one part of a partnership is trying to do all the time management. And the other partner doesn't want to have anything to do with this.

That creates a lot of tension. It's like having a dual processor machine where one of the processors, is not working well. That's going to make it frustrating to try to run software as well. I'm torturing this metaphor, but I have to keep going. What I would say is probably

you need to ease him into having slightly better hardware. And by ease him, I mean, if you're a time management stop, you're probably way too advanced on stuff, and that's intimidating and it's scary and annoying. So you can't jump him in

at here's my rooted productivity system with like my notion powered multi-scale planning system. It's got to be the basics. You know, we talk twice a week about like what's coming up and we look at the calendar together. We have like just a list on the refrigerator of like stuff we need to do. So we could be like, oh, let's do this this weekend or that this weekend.

Like really, really kind of simple stuff. Like we have a shared calendar where the ongoing stuff is on there and people can add stuff to it. So I think just getting simple stuff going matters. they will upgrade your hardware. So at least like we look ahead, we kind of know what's going on. We have a list of where things are. Not trying to force him too much beyond there.

That might be enough for you to start planning interesting stuff for you to do in your life. And then at that point, just be okay with it. Like as long as you have like a basic competency here and like at least I kind of know what's going on and I can see when things are coming up. If he has that basic competency, like that's enough. You don't have to make him as good at time management as you are. you can put my podcast on in the car sort of subtly when you guys are going places. See how that goes. But you do need, I mean, I'm with you in the fact that, like, he needs some basic hardware,

but I'm also going to say basic might be as far as you can get and don't preach about it. You know, simple is fine. Simple is better than nothing. Not everyone's going to like really complicated time management. Do we got a call? We do. All right. Here we go.

Hey, Kyle and Jesse. My name is Corey and I live in Chicago. I'm writing because I have a problem. I have a rare and unvaluble skill. You see, I'm a professional guitar player and I typically play guitar in musical theater orchestras. I've actually played in some pretty big level productions including the musical Hamilton.

I've applied a lot of the deep work and digital minimalism ideas into my own life and into my musical practice. And I have to say that it's worked really well and I'm very grateful for many of the ideas you've helped to put out there. So I wonder if you have any advice about how to circle the square here between scratching the itch of wanting to put something out that's my own, but also recognizing that money probably won't be a useful indicator of the value.

And maybe another way of asking this is, you know, would you still write books yourself, Cal, if the financial incentive completely changed for the worst? pretty cool question cool caller plays guitar and like productions of Hamilton

yeah I always like the questions because I never know what the answers are going to be that's true yeah like I'm going to surprise everyone now by saying you need to become a private equity investor

that's the this is the key greed makes the world go around I'm embarrassed by your lack of money that makes you lesser no I'm joking with that It's a good question. Right.

So, like, I think the core of this question is he's really good at guitar. He has a career with the guitar, but he also wants to, there's things he wants to do with that he wants to produce new stuff in the world. It sounds like he wants to record his own music. And the question is, like, how much should that take up and how much should he, like, focus on that? How much income can that put in? All right, I'm going to give a couple of sort of thoughts here.

One, you do have to get your financial house in order. Like, this goes back to the sort of sky. Galloway, tough love from earlier, you know, you need to support yourself. You need some financial security. You need to make sure that you don't have to deal with the stresses of like it's hard to make ends meet. You do not want to chase an interest to financial difficulty, right? So that's got to be a baseline here. So this might mean, and we didn't get into the details of this, maybe if you have a good unionized pit job, like that's fine, like playing in the orchestras and stuff. And if you do that work well, that that's like fine financially.

If that's the case, great. You need to keep doing that as your foundation. If that's not a good enough foundation, you have to find a way to expand that foundation. Like, it's not sexy, but it's like you've got to get the financial house in order. And so this could be music related. It could be whatever it is, lessons, instruction. I don't know the world well. I don't know the world well.

Sound engineering, sound design. but make sure that financial house is in order. If that's in order, and then there are sort of related pursuits that are not greatly renumerative but are interesting and really scratch and itch, have those in there as well. I think that's fine. Even if it's difficult and you have to fight to make time, I think that's fine. Let me give an example in my own life. You ask about books, like what would I write books if it wasn't super financial rewarding?

Now, here's the actual case study that's relevant for my life, for example. writing for the New Yorker. That's not like a super financially lucrative thing. And it certainly takes a lot of time and takes a lot of focus, right? It's like really hard to write those articles. But I really, really like doing it. I've been a writer my whole life. And it's a fantastic venue for creating new writing at a level that my books tend to be more broad audience.

You know, I like to do the smart self-help style where I have prescriptive advice with ideas. That's like its own thing. And my academic writing is very narrow audience. And the New Yorker is just, it's a creation that hits an audience in a way. And it makes me a better writer. And it's creatively very fulfilling. So that could be the equivalent of in your own life to having like a musical pursuit that is, you know, it's impressive and important and pushes your skills and has impact. But it's not, you know, going to make you wealthy.

It's not going to be how you pay your mortgage. I think that's absolutely fine. So that is fine. The trap to avoid. And I always tell people is don't follow an interest into poverty. Don't follow an interest into a difficult situation. You have to solve the – solving the difficult financial situation has to be the foundation. And then you can kind of go out of your way to make this other part of music in your life a major part of your life, and that's fine.

But just make sure the foundation is very stable first. I like that you play. We should get more people like playing music on their calls. Yeah. That's pretty cool. All right. We got a case study. actually Jesse at the event we did last week

one of the people who came to get their book signs says I love the case studies make sure like you keep getting Jesse to put those in okay so this is for whoever that was here's our case study this where people send in some notes about their personal experience putting this type of advice we talk about in the practice this one comes from Don Don said I just wanted to share details about the end result of the deep work and time block planning practices I learned from you. I first heard your ideas on an episode of NPR's Hidden Brain. At the time, I was

beginning the research for a book about the chimpanzees used during the first space race, and your approach helped me reframe my expectations for writing and research sessions. My goal shifted from producing X number of words or finding X new sources to investing concentrated time in the work. Your time block planner and podcasts were regular reinforcers of best practices. As a side note, the book just received a star-dust, review from Kirkus, and the review noted the book's, quote, meticulous research. That meticulous research happened during deep work sessions, and I can't think you enough. And this book which just came out is called Astrochimp's America's first astronauts.

That's a cool case study, right? I mean, we get flack for the sort of hardware portion of the pursuit of the deep life, this idea of like you kind of have to get your crap together and be organized and be control, have control over your time and control of your obligations and be a little defensive in your time management so you can make sure that you're making progress on the stuff that really matters. Yeah, it's a little constraining, but it also is like what produces like a cool new book. It's what like allowed Don to take this potential to produce something new in the world that's really interesting that wasn't there before and actually act on it. Like that's not going to be something that just, you know, you're going to stumble into or I'll work on it when I'm interested. Like at some point, you got to control your time to some degree.

You got to put in the deep hours, even the days you don't want to do it. You know, so I think that's a cool example of like what we're going for here. We're not trying to optimize something. We're not trying to science bro out and be like the superhumans and live for 150 years. We're not trying to do this type of thing. We want to finish the book and get a starred review, you know. We want to be able to move to this cool place and have the freedom to mount a bike half the day. The things that make like the standard deep life deep, it's hard to do without some good hardware in which you're running.

That does require that, like, I control my time. I control my obligations. Like, I have to have some say on this chaos if in it I'm going to form something that's really cool. So I thought there was a cool case study. I'll check out that book, Astrochimp's. And Don, thanks for sending that in. All right, we got a final segment. But first, Jesse, let's do a couple more sponsors.

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Easier said, done. All right, so our final segment. Our final segment, one of the things I like to do is react to interesting things in the news that are relevant to our quest here to find more depth in a world full of digital distractions. I want to bring up on the screen here for those who are watching. Here's a review from the verge of this new product that people have been talking about. The AI pin, the humane AI pin. Let me read the first paragraph here of this review. The idea behind the humane.

AI pin is a simple one. It's a phone without a screen. Instead of asking you to open apps and tap on a keyboard, this little wearable abstracts everything away behind an AI assistant and an operating system humane calls COSOS, like Cosmos. Want to make a phone call? Send the text message, calculate the tip, write something down, or learn to population at Copenhagen. Just ask the AI pin. It uses a cellular connection to be online all the time and a network of AI models that try to answer your questions and execute your commands. It's not just an app. It's all the apps, right?

So what they're pitching here at Humane, that for the Humane AI pin is that this is like a, a bridge to a post-smart phone world. I just talked to this thing that looks like the Star Trek communicator pin. You actually touch this thing to turn it on and you just ask it things, and it can give you back information. One of the weirder features of this is, I'm going to show this to you, Jesse.

There's a picture of it later. it has a laser I don't even know what you call this yeah here we go laser projector it's like how do you get numbers and information from this pen instead of it talking

and you can see this if you're looking on the screen it will you can hold your hand in front of this thing and it uses like a laser to like draw monochromatic numbers and letters like it can like print on your hand

so like here's a picture of it like actually printing some information on someone's hand those the AI pen. All right. Does this work well? Here's another picture of that. Does this work well?

No, not yet. That's the review here in the Verge is like it does everything terribly. It just doesn't work very well. It's $700. No, the technology is not quite there. That's the review that the Verge, I haven't tried it. That's the review the Verge gets it. What do I think is interesting about this, though?

If you read this review and you read the marketing materials for the pen, like this question comes up. Like here is my first question. Like isn't this a problem that it's already solved with like our smartphones in Siri? Like can't you just have like an AirPods in and just like, hey, Siri, what's the population in Copenhagen? Hey, Siri, can you add to my to do list to do whatever? I mean, look, this technology with these tools is becoming better, especially as they

can use large language models. What's the problem here? Why do we want to be talking into a Star Trek communicator and having it use a laser projector to put low fidelity monochrome on our hand. I mean, look, if we thought Google Glass was going to get you beaten up. I mean, this is going to get you thrown in a river. Here's what's interesting. It becomes clear when you read this that the problem they're solving is not,

oh, there's no way to actually just have like a voice interface with a computer to get things done because our phones do this. The problem is people don't want to look at their phones. It's such an attention landmine for so many people that they might consider talking into this sort of dork pin and looking at laser projections on their hand just so they don't have to turn on their phone and be grabbed by all the stuff on there that's like grabbing their attention and manipulating them and making them unhappy and miserable. It's like we're going through great lengths with this product to avoid using a product that

already does all this thing really well. So to me, the real story here is not the Humane Pins technology, but the technology that it is helping us flee, which is our existing phones. So what's the solution here if you want something like the humane pin technology is take that junk off your phone. Remove from your phone any app where a multi-billion dollar company makes money the more you look at the app. You don't want to have to fight that battle every time you need to know the population of

Copenhagen. Take all that off your phone. Make your phone boringer. It has your calendar and your email and text messages and you can look at it. look up stuff, have Siri look stuff up for you, or you can look it up on like the Safari browser, and like that's it. You use it to listen to audio and like to send text messages to your friends and like to maps.

Make your phone like the Steve Job version of the iPhone from 2007, and now the problems that the Humane AI pin are solving are already solved. You could just look at your phone when you need something, or if you don't want to take your phone out, talk to Siri. That's the takeaway. I'm coming from this. is that people are drowning in their phones. And instead of trying to build alternatives to the phones,

I think we just need to make the phone experience better that doesn't require new technology that requires the elimination of technology that's on there right now. Like just to have the boldness to say, just because TikTok exists doesn't mean it needs to be on here. Just because people are talking about things on Twitter doesn't mean I need to be on Twitter seeing what they're saying. Just because, like, YouTube has, like, these interesting Sam Sue-like videos,

I don't need, like, the YouTube app on my phone to watch it. I can watch things on TV when it comes time to watch things on TV. We can fix this problem by fixing our relationship to the technology instead of trying to come with these weird technologies, they're doing an in run around it. It's the same way I feel about these sort of dumb phone technologies, which I think are great for things like my kid needs a phone, I don't have access to the Internet.

That's a fantastic use of a dumb phone. If it's I don't trust myself as a grown-up to use my phone, then it becomes more of a like, you need to grow the hell up moment. Get the junk off your phone. Focus on the stuff that matters. Don't use this stuff that is making you not even trust yourself with your phone. That's a problem.

Solve the problem. You shouldn't have that problem. You know, don't go through the elaborate routines that try to, like, not be exposed to alcohol if you're an alcoholic, you know, get your addiction under control. Right. So, guys, that's where I am on this. We don't need to in run around our phone. We need to just actually transform our phones to be much more boring.

And then Siri or whatever can answer our questions about Copenhagen and book, put something on our to-do list and tell us what's on our calendar. If we need to see something, we can just look at this beautiful high-risk screen as opposed to a weird monochromatic laser trying to draw it on our hands, it all works fine. We just have to repair the relationship with this thing. We can't avoid it forever. It's like that weird ant you have. you're eventually going to see our Thanksgiving anyway,

so you might as well fix the relationship. That's the way that I think more people need to think about their phone. So I'm not rushing out to buy an AI pin. I'm not bullish on this technology because I think we already invented this technology. We just have to make it less something that we're afraid of. $700, too. Yeah. Not cheap.

You buy a fridge for that. You could buy a fridge for that. I just had to buy a fridge for that. I was going to say, I was like, that's true. but also a little non-sequitorious. Okay, yes, you could buy a fridge with that. So that's our review. Save your money and buy a refrigerator instead of buying the AI humane.

All right. Well, speaking of which, I think that's all the time we have. Thank you everyone who sent in their questions and calls and case studies. We'll be back next week with another episode of the show. 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've got to sign out for my newsletter at caldnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.