Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 332: Jesse Takeover!

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

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/calnewportmedia- Who are Cal’s “must read” writers? [6:03]- Does Cal think he can get better at writing? [13:37]- When does Cal find time for academic papers? [24:09]- How do you get unstuck? [26:44]- How should students pick a college? [34:04]- What is Cal’s shutdown ritual? [43:00]- Does Cal think about retirement? [48:00]- CAL REACTS: Elon and Twitter [54:30]- Is cal still using his ReMarkable? [1:03:17]- What’s Cal’s post-mortem on his latest book? [1:08:10]FINAL SEGMENT: Checking in on Cal’s New Year Plan [1:26:10]Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2024/see-how-elon-musks-online-audience-dwarfs-donald-trumps/?itid=hp_world-biz-tech_p006_f008Thanks to our Sponsors:notion.com/caldrinklmnt.com/deepblinkist.com/deepzbiotics.com/deepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the 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 on my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. This is our episode that airs on the same week as Christmas vacation. Traditionally, our numbers are down that week because people are traveling. So, Jesse and I decided to have some fun with today's episode. If you're listening and you jump over to the YouTube feed, you'll see we are dressed for the occasion. We are wearing literally the finest Christmas costumes that $22 at CBS can buy.

So I'm very impressed by how we look. I'll say, Jesse, seeing ourselves on the monitor now really makes me happy I spent all that time earning a doctorate and theoretical computer science from MIT and a full professorship from Georgetown. Really getting my full money's worth from that as I sit here with flashing Christmas lights and a Santa hat on. It makes it juicy. I like it.

Yeah. Well, I guess I'm really. leaning into the sort of respect and maturity of my of my social standing here but here's what we decided to do jesse takeover so the bulk of the episode is going to be jesse asking the questions that he has always wished that someone would ask me on the show i don't know how many hundreds of these episodes you've you've been here for not all 332 but probably at least 250 a decent amount yeah decent amount so you've heard questions from all around the world you've read questions from our listeners and our readers from everywhere. So today, Jesse gets a chance to ask the questions.

He's always wanted to hear me answer. And then in the final segment, also by Jesse's request, I'm going to dive into my quarterly plan. So what is my plan for the new year ahead? How am I structuring it? What have I changed about this? In particular, I've made some changes to the structure of this document based on the work I'm doing on my new book, The Deep Life. So we'll kind of get in the weeds about the semester quarterly plan that I have in place for the new year. So stick around for the end for that. Quick update, Jesse, after lots of feedback from the last episode,

I can tell you the answer we were looking for was insidious. So that is how you pronounce the word insidious. I don't know why I've had this problem with this specific word. I mix it with deciduous and I call it insiduous and I know that's wrong. Insidious. So thank you for the roughly and I'm checking my notes here. Did somebody call you to tell you that or did somebody spell it out in an email? I got like 7,000 emails.

Insidious. Like the way a dictionary spells words? Yeah. There's a lot of like hyphenating it and it's not deciduous. So there we go. We've been, I've been enjoying this. I don't think anyone else is, but I have been enjoying spending 10 seconds at the beginning of our episode bragging about my new books, little productivity.

There's, you know, end of the year, so there's various lists or whatever. My brag for this week, Jesse, it's a little random, but I liked it. The Seattle Public Library System. announced their most popular books of 2024. Slow Predictivity was their number four most popular nonfiction book in their system for the 2024. It's all I said, Seattle, they know what they're doing. They're fine critics of books over there. As Seattle goes, there goes to nation when it comes to book habits.

So there you go. There's my slow productivity brag. Also, I mentioned last time and I'll mention again, get a signed copy of that. that book for a new year's gift forget christmas gifts new year's gifts that are focused on improvement in the new year get a copy of slow productivity for yourself for a friend that is signed you can get those through people's book tacoma dot com so people's book in tacoma i was just over there the other day signing more copies these will you know they can't obviously get into you by christmas by the time you hear this is the day before but we can get them out pretty quick so order a signed

copy for a new year uh a new year's gift okay um so vacations coming up we're recording this right before the the week, you're disappearing somewhere warm. Yeah, I'm going to Mexico. That's the way to do it. I'm going to New Jersey. It's almost as exciting as Mexico. Check out some drones. I'm going up there to hunt drones.

Yeah, I'm going to get to the bottom of this. Clearly, it's aliens, because the one thing we know is if aliens saw faster than light travel and made all the way to Earth, the thing to be very careful about is having the correct FAA approved lights on their spacecraft as to go around. because I've been hearing this. Like the, you know, there's a couple, I've been following this story a little bit. It's a mixture of things probably.

New regulations that allow drones to fly at night, which wasn't allowed before. There's potentially specific drone testing happening in New Jersey. There was sort of an announcement about this months ago. Like, hey, we have this partnership for these bases, have set up a corridor. These aren't military bases to test drones. The initial drones they were seeing had running. lights, FAA approved running lights. So this is probably testing of it.

And there's just more drones out that we realize and now they can fly at night. You see them more. And once the story became a story, I think you just have more people flying drones because they're like, yeah, this is awesome. Like, let's get in on this. And you're getting a lot of photos of people zooming in on light sources. If you zoom in on light sources like a star too much with a telegraph, telephoto lens, you get this like weird, hazy effect.

It looks like a ball of energy. That's all just people focusing with their telephoto lenses on a light source. Anyways, I'm going down there. I have a net. I have my shotgun. I'm going to catch some drones. I guess it's up there from D.C. This should be good. All right. So anyways, we got Jesse takeover episode, all the questions. Jesse had wanted to ask. Let's get into it. All right, Jesse, you're in control of the show for this holiday episode. You ask the questions you want to hear. What do you want to hear about first? All right. First question, who are you must read writers, both authors, journalists and reporters that are still alive.

How do you get notified when they produce content and how quickly do you get around to reading it? On a similar note, who are your favorite writers of all time? I mean, at this point, what I mainly do is read and reread Jane Patterson's eruption, his continuation of the Michael Crichton concept of a Battle of volcano book. No, serious question. I can't do must-reads. I can't do favorites. I have a hard time rank ordering things I like.

I think there might even be a word for this. I mean, I don't know what it is. I'm making up a word orophobia from ordinal for ranking or ordering and phobia for fear of or dislike of. I just have a real block with things I like trying to order them. And I've talked about this on the show before. It was one of the reasons why I did not sign up for Facebook when Facebook became the first social media platform to have wide-scale adoption because early Facebook was built on list. your profile was favorite books, favorite movies, favorite quotes, and I have orophobia. Like, I can't do that.

And so I don't want to bother with this. There is, however, I think something deeper in this question, which is deeply applicable, which is this idea of how do you figure out when an author you like has something to read? Are you on list? Did you get notifications? How do you know when there's something out that you might want to read? And here I want to maybe offer a mindset. shift for the listener. There's two ways to think about the reading life, the life where you read

lots of books and articles, et cetera. One way is more of the negative avoidance approach, which is I'm afraid of missing something good. There's something out there that's good that I would like or I should read, but I missed it. So there's a fear of missing out approach to it. The flip side of that mindset is the joy and serendipity of, I found something good to read. isn't that exciting. And I think a long time ago, I realized in the world of nonfiction, which is primarily the world in which I do most of my reading, there's more good authors and more books than I'm ever going to read. And instead of seeing that as a downside, uh-oh, I'm going to miss all this great stuff. I see it as this positive side.

It's never going to be hard to find something that's going to delight me. There's so much stuff out there that's good. The joy or the benefit is in like constantly finding stuff you like that's interesting that challenges you. And so with that in mind, I'm not super specific. and how I find what I'm going to read. I hear about things. I see things. I'll walk through bookstores, right?

I was just at people's book yesterday here in Tacoma Park, just looking at the new book tables. Hey, who has something new out that I might want to hear about? People mention things online. I read book reviews, right? I'll read like the New York Times book review. I'll see what books, the Wall Street Journal is reviewing, especially in like the business space. They're pretty good on that.

I'll see authors come up in podcast. Like I've said this before when it comes to interview podcast. I follow guest, not host. So there might be a huge number of interview podcasts that might sort of scroll through and see what's on, not because I will listen to whatever they do, but to see if they have someone on that I'm interested in. And so I might hear an interesting author come up on, you know, a friend of mine show or something like this and then listen to it and say, oh, that sounds fascinating. Okay, maybe I want to read that book. So I'm discovering all often, I have a pretty big library. I'll just wander through my library and say, oh, here's a book in here.

I picked up at some point meaning to read. I didn't get around to it. Now it's really appealing to me. Let's rock and roll with it. So I don't sweat missing stuff that's good. There's so much good stuff out there that I'm not worried about not having something to read. So that being said, there's authors I really like. I'm often looking for a combination of an author I like and a topic I like.

And if it's not both, I might skip it, right? So I don't know to be specific. I've long liked Sebastian Younger. His adventure nonfiction, realistic nonfiction book was, of course, world class, beginning with the perfect storm. Then he switched over in the last decade or so to more of these like smaller cultural critique type books, which tend to be about mismatches in like human wiring and modern society. I really like tribe. I really like freedom. And so if I see Junger has a book out and he has some sort of interesting cultural critique about these mismatches, like I'm going to be on board.

But he had a recent book out that was his reflections on mortality and dying. And I didn't pick that one up. I was like, I like this author, but I'm not really into that topic right now. So that combination is not catching my attention. It was like this with David McCullough, who was one of my favorite historical nonfiction writers, if not my favorite historical nonfiction writer. His style is fantastic. He's the master of taking the archive, the written word, typically in correspondence, and using this to recreate in vivid detail, realistic characters from history. So he brings people alive by using their own written words.

So if I see him plus a historical timer topic I'm interested in, I was all on board. But if it was him and not a topic or area I was interested in, I might skip it. Like I didn't read his book about Americans in Paris. It just wasn't as interesting to me as his sort of presidential books or colonial era books. So that's the way I do this. And sometimes I won't know anything about the author, but the idea seems so interesting. I'll say, let's give this a try. I'm reading right now this fantastic, crazy book.

it might be the only book this guy ever wrote. And he's basically recreating mathematics. I've mentioned this before, Jesse, but he builds from scratch mathematics, from first principles, in a way that's more conversational, but motivated. So he doesn't just say, here's how you take a derivative of a polynomial.

He works from first principles. How would you take a derivative of polynomial? He derives all the stuff you learn in math class all the way through multidimensional calculus, including trigonometry, all the major rules of algebra. It's a crazy book. It's fantastic and is weird and brilliant.

I don't think anyone even knew about it and it sort of disappeared. And that was just topic first. And I didn't know anything about this author. So I don't know. I love books. I love nonfiction books. There's no shortage of good books to read. You'll miss most of the good books.

And the way I see it is that's okay. What's the name of that math book? Burn math class. Oh, okay. Yeah. Bad title, right? Burn math class. It was on a smaller press.

I'll talk about it. I'm not done. with it yet. So I guess it'll be, it'll end up on the January book list. So you have two copies of that, right? I lost the first one. I have it. Oh, you have it. I bought another one. Yeah, I've been reading it. I forgot to return it. I looked for it. I was like, ah, whatever. I'll just buy another one. That's a cool book. It's a cool book. I'm in a multi, multi variable calculus, which I took. I used to be good at, but I don't remember, but he derives it all from scratch. It's a, it's all done in late tech. I mean, only like math and science people know this,

but he clearly wrote the whole book using the layout software we use for scientific papers. So it's not even formatted, it wasn't reformatted for book format. He just wrote it with the same software you use to write a math paper. A cool book, though. I mean, crazy, but I wish more people to write crazy books like that. Needs a better title, needs a better cover. Maybe we should buy the rights for it and like re-release it. Remember like Ferris was doing that for, I don't know if you remember this.

Years ago, Tim Ferriss was doing this. He was like, I'm going to buy the rights for, books I really like. He would buy like the audio rights and re-record them and publish them and use his platform to help push them. And then he realized, okay, that's like a really low margin business. But it was cool. He was buying rights for a while. All right. What's our second question? All right. Next question. Writing is a big part of your life. When you compare your writing to your favorite writers, do you think their level is achievable? Or is it similar to your MIT experience with certain folks having extreme brain horsepower?

It's a good question and a tough question. to give context for the listener, I've talked about this with theoretical computer science, my primary academic field or my original academic field, that there was differences. Like, it was very hard work to get better, but there is some point where I realized I'm not at my 100%, because to get the year 100% is very difficult just in terms of the sheer intensity of work required. But I realized my 100% was going to fall short of the greats in the field. And there was the

Epsilon between You know So if you can't be a great The difference between being like very good and good Was somewhat diminishing returns I mean I had a professorship at a good university It's respect in my field Easily got my promotions

And so I at some point was thinking The go all in on getting the my 100% Which basically in theoretical computer science means you got to read a lot more papers That sounds casual but it's actually very hard to read and understand a theory paper because it's complex math that's summarized and you have to reconstruct complicated math from scratch. It just really is like an all-out intellectual effort. It can take days and days just to understand one paper. And you've got to do that all the time.

If you do that all the time, you can get yourself to 100%. And I still think it would have been short of the very top people. And so I pulled back from trying to go 100%. Writing? That's a good question. I'm probably better at nonfiction writing nationally speaking, I guess, than theoretical computer science, I guess. So maybe I'll start there. I mean, I'm a good theoretician, right?

I mean, I trained at the top theory group. It was the MIT's theory group was a good group. I have a good professorship. I have a good H index. I have a lot of citations. But it's a smaller group of people to compare yourself against. There's more nonfiction writers. I just guess the reason why I say that is my national reputation as a nonfiction writer is probably better.

And some of the accolades of nonfiction, right? Like writing for the New Yorker, maybe that's in academia, maybe that's the equivalent of having a position at like a top 10 CS program, right? The New York Times bestsellers, the award list, maybe that's the academic equivalent of, though I've won some awards for my academic work, but winning some more like higher level awards. being in like the you know your work showed up in science and not just in like the journal that's specific to your field so so i think i'm a little better nationally speaking in nonfiction that i am in a theory but i'm not one of the best nonfiction writers right i'm not writing features for the new yorker in the magazine i'm not up for national book awards or pollitzers right i mean i'm not at that that echelon of from a craft perspective the just the very best writers

I make best of the year list, but typically places that are considering business books or considering pre-back nonfiction, whereas like the New York Times is top 100. Like, that's not a place I'm going to show up. I'm not going to show up in the New Yorker's best books of the year. So in theory, there's higher craft I could get to. I don't know how high I would get if I pushed for 100% in writing. I think just like in CS, I'm at that 75%, which took a decade to get here. Like, it took really hard work. Don't get me wrong.

but to write the very best writing I could do, I would really need to do it full time all out and to get to that 100%. And I don't know where that would land. One of the reasons why I'm not doing that, as long as we're psychoanalyzing my career decisions here, which is interesting to me. One of the reasons I'm not doing that is that

it might not be the most productive thing for me to do from a career success or impacts perspective, right? Like really my skill, the thing I think that I have that's more unique or my unique advantage is actually actually idea generation. I'm an idea generator. I can make sense of information and come up with interesting ways to think about things. I'm very good at consolidating things into interesting ideas and frameworks.

I've always been good at this. I just sort of see the world this way. That's well served by my current writing ability. Like I'm a pretty good writer, which means when I write about idea stuff, it has a little bit of a gloss of it being maybe a little bit smarter than. like a standard advice or self-help, but not off-the-charts, like literary nonfiction. And that's probably like the right place, right? This sort of smart self-help balance I've found where I'm have ideas that can give you specific action, but I'm writing about it more New Yorkery style, like smarter than you

would get in just a standard advice book that you would pick up. That seems to be like a combination. That's a lane I've created, which I think is a good lane. So actually becoming better at nonfiction writing when I help that lane. Personally, though, I'm interested in continuing to grow my craft. So, man, this is an interesting question, Jesse. This is like an interesting discussion that you could have in general when talking about achievement. Is that gap between 75% of your capacity and 100%?

Because there is a huge effort differential between 75% and 100%. And it's a calculus that in any sort of high achieving field you have to do, is my 100% going to justify that effort differential or not. And it's a complicated question because your 100% is where you land on that hierarchy of skills and like most people's 100%

doesn't land at the top. And so often like your 75%, which again is very hard. You have to focus and it takes decades. But your 75% is often the right strategy with high achievement.

You're getting the most bang for your buck. It's a complicated topic that I don't think we discuss with enough complexity in our culture in general. So I don't know. Maybe I, let me summarize it.

I could probably be a little bit better at writing, but I don't know, I don't know how much better. Yeah. So in the time being, like in the next 10 years, you'll hopefully be a better writer than you are now, right? Yeah. But I will get better. Yeah. The question is like. Is it like baseball?

Like, I keep on asking you this. Is there eventually you kind of go through your prime? I, it's a, yeah, it's a hard question. I don't know. probably. See, the thing about baseball and my former late editor who edited so good they can't ignore you and actually tragically died a couple years ago, he used to tell me this because he was a professional baseball player, didn't make it to the majors, opposed to the professional minor league systems. And the thing is he said in baseball, everyone is, everyone is gunning for their 100% to use my analogy. So everyone is doing. all the training you can possibly do to maximize your potential. So everything just eventually sorts out. And I'm a single A player.

I'm an Instructural League player. I'm a AA player. Maybe I'm like a AAA or a quadruple A style utility player. Or I'm a major league or I'm an all-star. And you're going to fall somewhere on that scale and you're going to know it by like 27. Because everyone is going all out. And so you're probably not going to happen. Changes happen.

Like obviously you'll get into weeds. you'll get a sort of mid-career, Daniel Murphy changes his swing to be more launch angle and suddenly becomes one of the best hitters in baseball. But for the most part, it kind of shakes out. Most other non-athletic fields, people don't push it that far. And so what I'm trying to figure out is, is your 75% sort of indicate, hey, if my 75% is this good, then I just add this much to get what my 100% would be, or is it a completely different game? Like maybe in writing, like nonfiction writing, if you're a pretty good writer,

and you go all out, you can get great. Maybe anyone can do it. I just don't know. You know, like a lot of what makes great nonfiction writing great is tends to be on the research side. And that's something just pretty replicatable. It's just time. It's, you know, okay, what makes like a David Grand long form piece for the New York are good? David Grant, who wrote Killers of the Flower Moon and what makes his long form piece is good.

he spends a huge amount of time just immersing himself in the topic and the people and he just follows them and he gets all these notes and he goes into the archives and he spends all these times and reads all these things and just immerses himself in that world typically puts himself in some sort of adventure as well

he brings those two things. That's just like a lot of time. Right? Like often what differentiates like a great nonfiction writer from a good nonfiction writer is like they're willing to do the time. They're willing to use the Robert Caro term turn every page in the archive.

Like I'm going to read everything. I'm going to just sit and craft. Ronan Farrow was great at this. Like I'm just going to like a bulldog cultivate these sources and just get and go and get and go. And some of that is a time game. Some of that is an instinct game. But I don't know. That's what I think is different about athletics and writing is that like if you're willing to put in the time, yeah, it's like a pain tolerance thing.

I am willing to spend five years on this. It's going to be a better book than if you spend two. But, you know, at some point, you're right. It's got to level out. Like, just your instinct for the written word and rhythm. It's just, it's going to, your quality will land where it will land. But, I mean, you can have huge successes. Like, Walter Isaacson, he puts in the time.

It's not that his writing style is, there's something magnificent about it. He just, it's just super clear. He does the work. He goes to the archives. He gets the important information. He sees the through lines are important. And he writes with the real clarity, which is like a little bit different than David McCola, who had like a real skill for capturing the essence of a historical figure using the

written word, quoting the right things. Like he had this super empathetic brain that could inhabit the brain of the subject by just reading everything that person had written. And he kind of understands what gets to the core of that person and what they're thinking and then can pick out those examples. And like, there's just like a real skill in there. So I don't know. It's a great question.

It's one I struggle with. All right. What we got? Next question. when do you fit in your writing blocks for academic papers? Do these replace your morning blocks for book and article writing? I mean, nowadays writing is writing. That's my main intellectual activity is producing words on paper

that other people are going to find interesting and important or impactful. And so whether it's a book or a New York article or an academic article, I just want to write. And I try to write every morning. And then I schedule more writing blocks if I need it, depending on what's going on. and what happens in those blocks just depends on what I'm working on. So if I'm heavy in book mode, those will be book blocks.

If I'm crunching a deadline for an academic paper, then those will be academic blocks. Sometimes I'll mix them by try not to. I'm a big believer in milestones. So if I have a huge project like writing a book, then I have like a New Yorker piece I would to write. I just milestone things. Like great. Let me get to this milestone on the book, finishing a draft of this chapter.

Then I can put that aside and move to like this New Yorker piece. So what's my milestone there? Full rough draft, I get to my editor. So I'm all in on that until I get to that milestone. Now I'm going to hear back for my editor. I go back and say my milestone for the book is going to be like a full editing pass to this chapter. And like that's what I'll work on for four or five days. Okay, now I'm going back.

So I milestone my work in the things that can happen within like roughly a week. And so I'm not switching. I try not to switch back and forth within the same day. But I also just don't differentiate that much anymore like I used to. I mean, it used to be when I was struggling for computer science promotions. Like that's what I was focused on. It was, I have to make sure I'm publishing this many academic papers. All right.

Now I have like my book writing. And I got to figure out like when I'm going to take on book contracts and like when I'm going to do that book writing. And these are two very separate things. Now it's all mixed together to me. I just think writing is writing as writing. I try to do as much as possible. Sometimes a year I'm doing more than others.

I'm milestone so I can be monofocused on one thing in any given day. It probably feels slower in the moment. But it's one of my ideas for my book slow productivity. Over time, it produces just. as much. I didn't write today, actually, so. Well, you had a doctor's appointment. Yeah.

So, um. So are you right this afternoon? I had to take, today is a non-riding day because I have a meeting after this and a board meeting tonight. And so I had to mentally, I had to mentally prepare myself yesterday that just this is a non-writing day because otherwise I get so frustrated that I'm not writing. A Christmas break can be rough for me. I got to get writing in or I get really ante.

It's the, someone took away my cigarettes type of thing. All right. Next question. What steps do you take when completely stuck on a project? For example, if you optimize the project for many months and have seen only minimal improvement in minor metrics, but the overall goal isn't getting any closer. You know, I was just talking about this on an interview I was recording last night for someone else's podcast.

They were asking about this. You know, sticking with a project for a long amount of time has all these advantages. I write about in slow productivity. like stuff that's cool takes time and you got to stay focused on it for a long amount of time and they were wondering about but what if it's not going well

you know if you're thinking it's going to take five years for me to get good at something what happens if after four years it turns out that's not your thing if you wasted four years

so I was thinking about this problem and a book came to mind I remember reading this book this probably would have been if I had the guess 2007 maybe it was 2009 but I think this was 2007

I have a I don't have a photographic memory but I have a memory for books, just for whatever reason, I can remember where I am when I've read most books. And I read this book in the airport. We were flying to a trip to Argentina. And I was reading this book in, I think George Bush International Airport in Texas, where we were connecting for the flight. Seth Godin's book, The Dip, gets at this exact issue. He says, okay, here's a cool thing, or not cool thing. The critical question when you're working on a long-term important project. When things start to go,

poorly, like you stop making progress or opportunities are not emerging or you feel stuck. How do you tell the difference between being in what he calls a dip, which means you want to make it through this dip and on the other side you're going to keep going up? How do you tell the difference between a dip and a cul-de-sac? Colossack means, no, you're just done. You're just stuck. And, like, what you need to do is quit. And this is not working.

You need to do something else. And I think he correctly points out differentiating between dips and cul-de-sacs is the key to tackling a type of long-term projects that ultimately you can build really cool lives on top of. The problem is, I don't remember that book giving really solid technical advice for how you make that differentiation. It was more like he was saying, this matters, there's a difference. It was giving you vocabulary. Figuring out how to tell the difference is one of the key under-discussed elements of long-term performance.

So what I said on this podcast interview I was doing last night is you want to look for indications of progress. Sometimes this is a skill. I'm trying to get better at something so I can just get the indication I'm getting better at this skill. Sometimes the indications have to come from the opportunities that are being afforded you on the other side. I'm getting more offers or opportunities or more clients or more incoming.

So it could be your internal skill that you can measure is getting better or your external value is being validated as getting better. But you're looking for these indicators of progress. If they're stuck for a non-trivial amount of time, you need to rethink process. All right, let me go back and rethink process. How am I trying to get better? So I'm a writer trying to get better. I'm kind of stuck. I'm just now, I'm writing this newsletter. The numbers are low. The numbers are stuck. Nothing else is happening. I need to go back to the drawing board and rethink the process I'm using to try to get better. That's the first thing to do.

Rethink your process has to happen from an evidence-based perspective. It is very tempting when working on long-term projects to write a story about what you want to be true about what's important for getting better here. This is what I want to be true, that if I just keep writing this substack and I do it every week and I'm very careful about putting screenshots of the essay on Twitter in the optimized form after they come out and I do all the social media stuff right, that like eventually something will click and this will take off and I'll make a full-time living off it. Like we tell ourselves stories about what we want to be true.

but the reality could be very different, right? And you might get a completely different story from reality. It says, well, wait a second. Writing a substack where you don't already have a reputation in a subject is not going to do anything. What you need to do is try to build up a footprint in, like, the journalistic world on way to getting a book. And this is difficult because you've got to make pitches and they're going to get rejected and it's going to be hard work. And you don't want it to be true, but it is. So you have to go back and get evidence.

What really works in this pursuit I'm doing? Talk to people who know. and then upgrade your process or update your process to reflect this reality. If this still doesn't return results, like, okay, I'm doing the things that you're supposed to do.

I was reality checked. Here's how people make progress in this world. And you're still not getting indicators of progress. That's your sign you might be in a cul-de-sac and you need to change the map of where you're going. And maybe it's a small change or maybe it's a drastic change. Like, I'm just not going to go this way in general.

Right. So I have seen this. a lot. I've become more attuned to this. In the things that I do that have been relatively successful, I have become attuned to the degree to which there's a survivorship bias and which it's easy to say, okay, here's what I did. So if you just do that, you'll be fine. And I've realized over time, no, no, some of these things are really hard and you don't want to get stuck in a cul-de-sac because most people will. So, like, let's consider book writing. And you used to always tell people, yeah, like, write books. It's not so hard. Like, here's, it's not too hard to sell a

book and then you'll build up your audience and it's like really cool and like it wasn't that hard everyone should write books and that over time I realized none of there's some survivorship bias there it's hard to sell a book it's really hard to get a book to actually sell the people there's luck there's timing there's topic there's skill like for most people who go down the writing path like you're going to get stuck pretty quickly same thing with podcasting right it's easy to say this is not technically that hard what we do here I could tell you what we do here. And here's what it requires and technically here's what we do week to week. But I've realized like, oh, it's really hard to have a podcast be successful and it depends on

lots of things, including like I've discovered having a national reputation or brand outside of what you're doing with the podcast. You have a built-in audience. You have a sort of built-in trust or social validation that you're someone that people should listen to. Like all this is really hard. So actually, like most people, you know, I know who have tried podcasts, it's just kind of dead ended. They technically did all the right things. There's just no audience coming. There's no obvious thing to do to make that audience bigger. It's like, oh, this is like a difficult path to the thread. And actually, it's not going to work for most people and you don't want to waste too many years trying to follow it. So I've become more attuned to this recently, that you want to look for

indicators of progress. You need evidence-based plans for this. You can update your plan with new evidence if it's not working. If it's still not working after that, then it might be a cul-de-sac, not a dip and you want to consider putting your efforts towards something that's more likely to succeed for you, right? Where you're building off of, I have this preexisting ability or platform. I already have this credential that makes it much more likely I'll succeed going this path. Like you might need the reality check the path. So I've become more crumudgeonly about this, Jesse, about general stuff.

I expect everyone should just do everything I'm doing. It's fine. And I've recognized I've been very selective and I've really leveraged preexisting cultural assets to try to make other things successful. And it's a lot more like fragile and contingent than maybe I would have realized before. Okay. Next question. What criteria do many high school students fail to consider when selecting a college? On a related note, do you think tuition costs for private schools will exceed 150K per year in say 15 years? I mean, I think students in the American context, and this is different than very different than other countries where higher education is like,

largely free. In the American context, I think students probably over-emphasize fit. So it's like a uniquely American thing that I want this to feel of the college to be right, which often means physically what it feels like, like where it is in the country, what the buildings feel like, et cetera. It probably makes sense. Like the strategy that probably makes sense for most people is go to your state school. That's going to be the best bang for your buck unless you can get into like a really

elite school that can open up substantially more opportunities because of its eliteness, but avoid that big middle ground of non-elite schools that are very expensive that you're shopping on fit. It's probably not a great investment in money, you know. That's probably the best strategy. You know, go to state school unless you can get into, you know, a Georgetown or better or something like this. There are, of course, schools where fit really matters.

If you're a super math whiz, try to go to MIT. It's great for that. If you're a music whiz, you really want to try to go to Julia. yard, right? If you're film savant, you can get into the USC, you should go to USC. But for the most part, we probably think too much about is this like a fit for me? Because honestly, like, what does a 17 year old know? What are they basing this decision off? If they had a good visit to a school, they met someone nice, like, great, that's where I want to go. The cost thing, I hope it doesn't get to 150. I hope tuition doesn't get there.

I think there's going to be some emergent reverse pressure on tuition prices in schools as like more alternatives. There's some alternatives that are emerging independent, independent schools like the University of Austin. Barry Weiss is set up down there in Texas. There's some of these other options that are emerging, which might start to put some pressure on runaway costs because there's going to be these alternatives that emerge that have more constrained cost. So there's a kind of a tragedy of the comments that goes on now where just all schools increase their cost. All these private schools, like, well, as long as we all do it, it's fine because you have no other option. It's all very expensive. And so hopefully there's some sort of capped pressure that comes in to prevent it from getting bigger.

I say this as a father of three kids are going to have to go to college. The only advantage I have of private school getting more expensive is, you know, as a professor, I have a tuition benefit. Yeah. which is key to the cost of Georgetown's current tuition. So there's like a certain, they will pay a certain percentage of Georgetown's tuition towards any school that my kids go to. And as it stands now,

because private schools are so expensive, a third or whatever the percentage is of Georgetown's tuition, is all of the University of Maryland's tuition. So actually, the best case scenario is Maryland keeps its prices low and then Georgetown gets really expensive. In fact, if Georgetown can get like five times more expensive than any other college, I'm set. I do it benefit because I'm able to cover anything else.

But yeah, it's big. And the gap between state and private is getting big as well. States have done pretty well, most places, at keeping the cost kind of reasonable. But now you have this big gap that's opening, which we're noticing as we're doing college savings. Because if you save for a state university, but your kid, like in a 529,

but your kid wants to go to a private university, you don't have nearly enough money. But if you're saving in a tax-advanced account like a $529 for a private university and your kid goes to a state university, you've way over-saved, you know, and you have too much money in that account and you're going to have to pay penalties to get out. So that that gap is kind of complicated when it comes to the tuition saving. I guess it would somewhat vary too in terms of selection process if you're being like recruited to play a sport.

Yep. Sports its own thing, obviously, right? you're deciding what team you want to play for. Yeah, same thing. This is mentioning specific things. I'm a violin whiz. You want to go to Juilliard, you know, etc. So we'll see.

I still got some time before I have to worry about it. I wrote a book about college admissions. My least known book, but it is out there. So I used to know a lot about this. Jesse, I figured we should do a quick ad break before we keep going with Jesse Takeover. I want to talk first about our now becoming a little. long-time sponsor. It's a product I really like, and that is our friends at Notion.

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Also want to talk about our longtime friends at Blinkist. Blinkist is an app that gives you over 6,500 book summaries and expert-led audio guides to read and listen to in just 15 minutes per title. You can access best in class Actimal Knowledge from 27 categories such as productivity, psychology, and more on the go, and get entertained at the same time.

The way Jesse and I like to use Blinkist is to triage potential books to read. If we hear about a book we might be interested in, we'll add it to our queue, and we get around to it. We'll either read the 15-minute summary, you know, right there on our phone or listen to the 15-minute summary

like you would, a podcast. It does a great job of letting you understand understand what a book is about, and I find it really helps me decide whether I want to read the whole book, or if I've got enough, I get the gist. Like, I get where you're going here. I don't need to read a whole book about this. So it's a fantastic tool for triaging what books you read. Other people use it as just straight entertainment. It's like an interesting podcast to learn about different topics. A lot of ways to use Blinkus, but it is a must-have companion to the reading life. Cool new feature to offer. They have this program called Blinkus Connect that allows

you to give another person unlimited access for free, so it's basically two for one. That's a cool thing that's going on now. So right now, Blinkis has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkets.com slash deep to start your seven-day free trial and you will get 40% off a Blinkis premium membership. That's Blinkis spelled B-L-N-K-I-S-T, Blinkist.com slash deep to get 40% off in a seven-day free trial. Blinkist.com slash deep. And now for a limited time, you can use Blinkist.

Connect to share your premium account, you will get two premium subscriptions for the price of one. Jesse, maybe we should wear these blinking lights every time we do a blinkest ad. Yeah, that's a good idea. It could start a bad precedent, though. Like every advertiser would now want us to have a physical prop. But, hey, we're up for it. We're up for it. All right.

Let's get back to the questions. All right. Next question. Can you walk us through your shutdown ritual? How long does it take? Has there ever been a work day where you missed it? Are there significant consequences if that happens? So, okay, when I'm done with work for the day, I open my first of what will be several handles of whiskey.

And I just start pounding. I start pounding until the pain goes away. No, that's not my shutdown ritual. So what I do for my shutdown ritual is I, first of all, clean up open loops. So for me, these are going to be in two places. one will be my working memory.txt file on my computer. This is my expansion of my working memory. I use this non-formatted text edit text file.

All throughout the day, I capture notes and ideas, just to remember things temporarily or more long-term. Like, let's say I'm trying to schedule a meeting and someone emails me some options. I'll just copy that and paste it into that file, and then I'll open up my calendar and I have the file open up next to me and I can see what time works. I keep impromptu to-do list for admin blocks in here.

Okay, here's what I'm working on. I take notes on things that occur to me. So I make sure at the end of the day, there's nothing loose in that file that needs to be captured, that needs to be moved into my task storage system that needs to be moved as a reminder onto my calendar that needs to generate an email that I send out. So I make sure those open loops are closed. I usually then do a survey of my inbox as well, just to make sure there's not something time sensitive I missed.

It's critical. doing a final check of your inbox before you shut down will destabilize one of the biggest post shutdown sources of distraction, which is this urge to just sort of check in just to be sure that you're not missing something in your inbox. So that final check is really important. Then I'm going to look at my weekly plan, see if I need to update it at all. What am I doing tomorrow? I look at my calendar, my weekly plan.

What changes do I need to make about what I did or didn't get to today so that I feel like my weekly plan is now at the end of this day in a good place. All right. It's up to speed where where it needs to be. At that point, I'm ready to do my shutdown ritual, which now is typically going to just be in my time block planner where I have a shutdown complete checkbox. I just check that. And now I know I've done my shutdown ritual.

If I've done that, I can get into my evening without work stress. I can get into my evening without feeling like there's something in the back. of my mind, like, what about this? What about that? So it really does make a difference. Sometimes as part of the shutdown ritual, I'll sketch out a plan for the evening. If it's kind of a complicated evening, I need to pick up this kid, we're going to this thing, I want to get this done.

I'll sketch out a little plan. And I will look at the planner. I'll have it just so I can remember when I'm trying to get done that night after my shutdown. But once I do that checkmark in the checkbox, I'm not thinking about work until the next day. I do miss this sometimes. The times when I miss this, it's not due to a day being so busy that I just don't get time to do it. The times when I miss this is where the day is sort of hybrid.

When the day is sort of kind of a workday, not really a work day. And I know a lot of people who go to an office don't have this experience. But for someone like me, I'm a professor, I'm a writer, it can get kind of hazy. Like this time of year, it can get kind of hazy. semester's over Christmas breaks about the start maybe I have to go to a doctor's appointment that morning and I'm kind of working but like we're also going to like pick up gifts

and it's sort of a workday and it's sort of not a work day those are the days where the shutdowns don't happen and I suffer for it and it's just this background hum of a little bit of destabilization and anxiety so it's the days I can get my shutdown routine which is I really don't like to miss it

and I'm not going to miss it on a normal full workday that really makes a big difference. So you pretty much work on the same computer all day where your working memory is. Yeah, so I have two working memory. txt files, my laptop. That's the main computer I'll use. I have an external monitor at home

that I'll plug it into. And then I have one here in the computers in the studio, the MakerLab here at the studio. That one I use only in the moment. I will empty that when I'm done using that computer. So I don't keep stuff on there. So if I'm writing on that computer, I'm using the big monitors, I'll usually have my laptop. I will copy stuff over to the working memory.

txty on my laptop. So I will use the working memory TXT on the studio computers really temporarily. Like, let me remember this while I go over to my calendar. Let me type the five points. I want to put in this thing. I'm writing quotes. Let me copy a quote. I'm going to move over here.

And then I clean that out when I walk away from the computer. So it's really the file on my laptop that I treat as the sort of stable file. And that's the one I want to be checking at the end of the day. Okay. All right. Next question. Do you think about retirement? If so, is it dependent on financial or other factors?

Would you still work some of your jobs past technical retirement? I mean, what does retirement mean for me? I have been thinking about this. And my financial advisor asked me about this. But it's complicated. because I have a lot of jobs, right? So what is retirement, like, what would it actually mean from a job perspective? Does it mean stop being a professor?

Does it mean stop being a magazine journalist? Does it mean stop being a podcaster? Does it mean stop writing books? Is it some subset of those, some combination of those? It's unlikely to ever mean for me do none of those things. Like, why would I ever stop, for example, writing books if I could or, you know, magazine articles? So it's a very complicated thing for me. And even like saying stop being a professor, it's not always so cut and dry.

Like there's professors have different setups, you know. It's there. Some are just straightforward. I'm in a standard department with a full teaching load doing the normal thing. But there's also professors out there. You might not know it if you're not in academia, but like well-known professors where they have a title and they're associated with the center and they don't really draw much of a salary and maybe they have an office or not on campus.

but they're barely there. It's like very, the word professor can mean many different things. So it's all very complicated. So what I've been focusing in on stead is the financial aspect. And really, like, keeping things simple, looking at straightforward financial independence. So we have a very clear number. This is how much we would need this sort of comfortably live per year. Like we know that number pretty well because we're pretty careful in tracking our expenses.

And this is what that number is going to reduce to sort of post having kids at home, because that's a smaller number. But kids at home, you spend more money and you have to think about college, etc. So you have like, what would the number be tomorrow? And what would the number be once the kids are gone, which is like a lower number? Both of those we can translate into how much assets would you have to have that basically feel comfortable with drawing that much money annually? That's a big number. Not a crazy number, but a big number. That's a number I have in mind.

right if you know my next book does really well there's a some big influx of money that's what I'm putting that money towards because the way I see it is the closer you get to that sort of financial independence the more breathing room you have to pursue whatever definition of retirement seems interesting because now you're not dependent on any of the things I'm doing as like an income source now you can just start thinking what do I think the ideal combination of work would be. And you could, you could explore that without having to worry about, yeah, but my health insurance, or are we going to be able to, like, pay for this or that or the, these expenses or whatever. So that's the way I've been thinking about it is not I want to stop working, but the more

financial independence I gain, the more comfortable I can be reconfiguring what work means, because the fear is not there. And this is why I'd be a bad entrepreneur, I think, Jesse, is like I really have that mindset of I don't trust I think of the worst case scenarios financially. I don't take risks. I like overlapping sources of income. I want stress reduction. You know, I think other people we know are much more aggressive about, hey, this thing's going well and it's cool. Like, let's go all in on that.

And we'll probably figure it out. Well, I don't like to just hope it works out. So I'm probably way more conservative than other people would be. And because of that, I have too many jobs, and that's kind of a problem. What does overlapping source of income mean? So, okay, like someone else's our situation might say, hey, this podcast is doing well. Just be a podcaster. Or you're a successful writer.

Just be a full-time book writer. It's fine. You're doing well, right? Or, you know, whatever it would be. Whereas I think of it as like, well, yeah, the podcast's doing well, but, like, what if it stops doing well? Then you're screwed. Or, like, books is fickle. It's like being a successful actor.

You're a successful actor until you're not. until you make two bad movies and then you're no longer a successful act. It's like I'm always sort of catastrophizing. Whereas my full-time writer friends, for example, are like, you're crazy. Like, you're very, very successful as a writer, you know, way over the threshold that someone just like, great, I can just now write books. Or other things where I'll be conservative would be a lot of people in my situation, like, yeah, whatever, I bought a farm up in, you know, Vermont or I have a cabin up in West Virginia. Yeah, they don't overthink it. that'd be cool. It's a cool place to go and we spend the summers there and we write or whatever.

I'm in my head, I'm doing the math. There's not because this much. What about this? And the stress of this and this and this. And so I'm, I've always had this mindset of like, no one's going to save me.

I got to, I'm supporting a family. I want security. I want, you know, I want to be able to weather multiple points of failure. It's a very sort of non-entrepreneurial. Mm-hmm.

Also, the problem is I like all these things. Right? Like, Georgetown could be a pain in terms of work. you know, especially when I feel like I'm at the height of my abilities with certain things and I'm doing forms. But I really love academia and professors and being on campuses and that life and my whole life. I've lived my entire adult life in academic institutions and it's really cool and rare and most people don't get to do it. And I would hate to give that up.

Yeah, because I bet once you left it, you would be like, oh, I miss it. I want to go back. It's the problem. And I like, I like writing books. Like, why would I want to start? Like, that's really fun. I've been doing that since I'm, you know, 20 years old. Like, why would I want to stop doing that?

And this podcasting thing, we're having a, this is cool as well. It's the modern, this is like the, the equivalent of having a radio show that was pretty successful 25 years ago. And like, this is really interesting. I just liked many of these things. I love all the people at the New Yorker. It's like really cool to write for them, right? So the problem is, I can do, I like all these things.

And, and like, often it works. And then sometimes it doesn't. I mean, Jesse knows every September, I say, that's it. I'm quitting. I'm just going to live in the woods and be a writer. But then every June, I'm like, these jobs are awesome. I love all this stuff. Why would I ever want to not do any of these things?

So yeah, back to retirement. I don't even know what that means. So I'm just squirreling away money. I see like money is options, optionality. I don't know if that's a word. Optionality. Do you get some emails about it? It's a real insiduous process.

Real insiduous process we have here. All right. Next question we have a little bit of an interactive here. But the overall question is, do you think Elon's person, Elon Musk's purchase of X had this intended, and this intended effect, and are that many people really on X? And I have an article here from the Washington Post.

It's like an interactive that you can scroll through. All right. So we can put this up on the screen for people who are watching, up on the screen, full screen. Our YouTube guy is yelling right now. He's convinced that like any moment I'm not on the screen, people are going to immediately turn away. All right.

I'll read this out loud for those who are listening instead of just writing. I guess Elon on November 6th he tweeted they have to tweet up here it's morning in America again all right then here's the text at 1039 a.m. on the day Donald Trump declared victory for a second term Elon Musk wrote six words on X. This post instantly caught fire. About an hour and a half it had been seen more than 10 million times and was still reaching 120,000 new viewers every minute. Oh, there's a cool graph. Oh, interesting. This is the graph of views over time. it's trending down. With over 200 million followers, can you see this? The arrow on the graph is like sparking. Cool graphics. With over 200 million followers,

Musk has the biggest account on X and increasingly uses it the wield political power. Look at this thing. In 26 days around the election, Musk fired off 3,000, 70 posts. They received more than 33 billion views.

My God, if I was a shareholder in one of these companies, I'd be like, what are you doing? Come on. Like, this is a give those 3,000 worse, almost 4,000 posts could have been like you're thinking about our company. Musk reach transcends Trump's, with each of his ex post typically seen by twice as many users as opposed from the president-elect. Yeah, the post-returned to Twitter Trump's influence is smaller on there. As Musk prepares for a central role in the U.S. government, the billionaire has a political megaphone unmatched in modern society. All right.

So what do you wondering about it, Jesse? You're wondering, like, is this true? How many people are really on? I didn't think that many people were really on X. Yeah, I think your suspicion is largely correct, right? X slash Twitter, whatever you, you know, Twitter now X, really is a playpin of elites in a very broad sense. But it was a place that this is where, like, intellectual action. academic, technocratic, and political elites gathered.

And this is why there was a lot of energy in this place. It's where they gathered. They hashed out ideas. They sought status. And they sort of collaboratively ward with each other to try to establish cultural overtone windows. So it was an important place for various elites. Most people in the country could care less.

It's not a heavily used platform. It doesn't have a large number of active users. It doesn't play a large role in most people's day-to-day life. It's the smallest of the platforms in terms of, you know, it's dwarfed by something like Facebook. That's why it was like valued so little, right? Yeah. That's why it was like a $40 billion company where meta is, you know, honing in on a trillion billion dollar valuation. It's whatever it is, $800 million, $800 billion valuation.

It's a pretty small company. but the people who write about it are part of that category of cultural elites to which it made a really big deal. So if you're covering technology, it's a really big deal. It's like, this was the clubhouse where we all were. And there was a change in fortune. As the ownership of that clubhouse changed, the clubhouse became different. It was like a bigger kid took over the tree house and put up a no-girls-allowed sign like you would have had, you know, back when you were in fourth grade, but it was like the cultural political equivalent of that,

the composition changed. So there was a period in the lead-up. So in the last Donald Trump presidency and through the Biden presidency, there was up through, you know, Elon taking over Twitter. There was a period where certain groups sort of had control within these elites, certain subset of the elite sort of had control of this platform. And then it switched to like the other team got control of it. And this is very traumatic if you're someone who was hanging out in this clubhouse.

But for the rest of the country, I don't think it mattered much. But it did, like, it set the agenda for what elites wrote about, what other elites talked about. Elite politicians would look at what was happening on here and this would set their agenda about how they thought about things or how they were reacting to things. And so it mattered to this small group of people. But I don't think it matters to most normal people. I actually, and I've said this from the beginning, I think it was good for our culture writ large that Elon Musk. bought and semi broke this platform because it reduces its influence on those cultural leaves. Great.

Fracture it, make it more partisan, so it's less influential. If it's more nakedly like this team has it, this team doesn't like it, it's impact on how a politician thinks about what matters, doesn't matter, goes down. It's impact on how a journalist thinks about, what am I going to write about or not write about, goes down. It's impact on an academic trying to think about what they want to say or not say or pursue goes down and that's for the good because it's entirely non-representative. It doesn't represent any sort of coherent understanding of the world.

It's status-seeking elites from different sides all fighting with each other. So I think the more Twitter X broke, the better for our culture writ large. I think Twitter capture of cultural elite conversations was a real problem. It's not a major platform, but it was punching way above its weight class. So yes, I think for the people who used to be really powerful on that platform, who are no longer are really worried that someone they doesn't like is powerful in that platform. But I think the bigger picture is most people don't care who has a lot of users on that platform or not. Most people have real jobs and kids to take care of and aren't going to look at memes that Elon Musk is posting,

that he had his GROC AI produce. I'm working on an article right now, Jesse, that's requiring me to go deep on a few social platforms I'd never use and actually use them for a little bit, that's brain-wrought stuff. It's brain-wrought stuff. So I think this article is historic. I think, yes, to that reporter, it seems, if this is your whole world,

it's like, yeah, it's a big deal the other guy took over. But I'm like, great, break it. Make the, rip the rope ladder off the metaphorical clubhouse so people stop paying so much attention to it. Because I don't think it's good. I don't think it's good for our culture. I don't think it's good for our politics.

It's not good for our media. It's not good for anything. The elite stop hanging out among each other and creating these sort of interior super bubbled meme-filled worlds and giving it so much significance. Because I guess if you do a little bit of math, $33 billion with $3,8,8,870 posts would be about 8.5 million views per post, which I guess if you compare to 335 million people in the U.S., it's only like, it's less than 3%.

And it's the same people. And that's the whole, yeah, it's the same people. Yeah, that's the problem with these. It's the same. And yes, his influence graph looks big because he sort of set it up so that everyone who has a Twitter timeline just sees his latest thing. But, yeah, I've never been a – I've written about this for New Yorker a bunch of times. And I've written this article several times. Like, look at my article, we don't need a new Twitter, for example.

I've written a couple more about this. It's an idea that doesn't make sense. Our culture doesn't need it. It's not as important as the people who think it's important think it is. Right. The problem is it didn't fall apart. So there is early on, there was this accusation of like, look, when Musk took this over and started firing all these people, the platform itself technically was going to fall apart. I'd be like, that would be great from my perspective of a cultural critic because this is not a useful contribution to our culture. The problem is Elon Musk is good at running tech companies.

And he knows he fired a ton of people, brought in some 10xers, drastically cut down the expenses of running it. And you know what? It's like perfectly stable again. And he's building. So that's the problem. He's too good at running companies to accidentally break it. But now it's just become like a smaller playhouse. It's just there's these two sides we're fighting on there.

Now it's like mainly just this side. And, you know, I don't think it's culturally important. Okay. Next question. Many fans have reached out asking me for an update on, you're remarkable. Are you still regularly using it? If so, has anything changed since you? your last update. I am, I am still regularly using it. It is my primary notebook. I use that and

single purpose notebooks, small field notes that I use for like very specific single purpose uses, which I've talked about before on the show, single use notebooks. I either have my single purpose notebooks so I can fit in my pocket and then am I remarkable. I don't have any other full size notebooks I use. So I've been using it regularly. I still enjoy it. I cracked a screen a little bit, but it's in the corner, so I think it's okay. I was actually, the doctor's appointment today,

I was seen a, you know, I had a surgery and I was seen the surgeon for the post-stop, whatever. And, you know, when you see a surgeon,

you get, what, six minutes, yeah, max. Three of those six minutes was him just wanting to know about my remarkable. Because you had it out of your hand.

Yeah. That's the magic of it. I can just grab it. And like, yeah, in fact, so remarkable users know you can create as many

notebooks as you want within it. And I was even seen, actually, I didn't bring it with me here. You can have as many notebooks as you want within it, but there's also something called Quicksheets, which is just like a generic notebook where you can just jot down notes. So like for something like a surgeon's appointment, I just opened up a quick sheet and Dr. blah, blah, blah, this date took notes on what he said because it's like, I need to

capture this information just temporarily so I don't forget it, but I don't need like a whole notebook for this surgery. Like this is, I got some information before the surgery. I got some information here and let me just jot it down so I don't forget it. But for other things, I, you know, I have full. I have full notebooks. It's probably now 30 notebooks on there. And so, yeah, I use it for everything.

I use it for certainly all of my sort of work I've been doing on my new quarterly plan. I've been talking about in the final segment. I've been working a lot of that out within the remarkable. I teach, I run a robotics club at my kid's school, and that's where I keep track. I have a notebook for that. This is just like in the weeds. Who was using what computer? What were the teams?

who like here's the bracket for the competition, the robot competition. So just, you know, I'm just using it straight up for that. When I'm working on a particular article, I might have an article notebook or I'm, you know, taking notes on that. So I love my remarkable. I continue to think it's a great application. They've made a couple updates to the software I like. I think notably now, you know, you have to select what type of pin or pencil you're using.

Like you have a stylist, but you select like how thick you want the line. be and whether you want it to be a pencil line or a pin line or a highlighter. They added a second pencil or like selector next to it. So you could have two different things selected that you use commonly and just sort of tap on which one you want to use. So I think that's cool. Yeah. So I continue to be a big remarkable fan.

Let me tell you the thing I paid for that I've never used or have barely used. I got the fancy case that has a built-in keyboard. So I can open it up, turn it around, and I have a keyboard. mounted up, I don't use it. I don't use the keyboard. The typing is not well supported. It's not, it's like weird where you can type and it's hard to edit. And I just don't use that. So if you're thinking like it in remarkable, it's very expensive, but don't make it even more expensive by getting the keyboard case for now. I've just been doing the writing. Do you ever check the notebooks on another computer? Can you do that? So it automatically sinks. Yeah. So can you do that if you're on your

laptop. Yeah. So I have the app on my laptop. And whenever I'm on Wi-Fi that the remarkable knows about, it'll just in the background sync things up. And then if I go over to that app, it just has all the notebooks replicated in there. Right. So I can, if I need it to, I don't use this very often, but I just like knowing it's there. And I actually had, where I've used it before is I've printed stuff before. Or I'd be like, you know what? I want to print this, these notes I took. It's easy to do. You go to the app, you go to the notebook. You navigate over the page and you can just print them.

So I like it. I think it's a cool product. All right, what we got? All right. Next question is our corner. Slow productivity corner. Oh, let's get some theme music. All right.

So this is your slow productivity corner question. For people who don't know, we have one question every week. That's relevant to my new book, Slow Productivity, the Lost Art of Burnout. The Lost Art of Abund Out. That'll be a different book. The Lost Art of Burnout. how to burn out. Let me tell you how to do it.

Be a professor and a podcaster and a magazine journalist and a writer and on a couple boards at the same time. And have three kids. And have three kids. That's how you burn out and get surgery in the middle of all that. All right. What's your slow productivity question? What's your post-mortem analysis of slow productivity? Please consider the actual writing, marketing, and sales.

Are there clear things you'll do differently for your deep life book? Look, I think the whole project was worth it just for that theme music. It has given us an excuse to play the Slow Productivity Corner Music. It's been an interesting ride with slow productivity. I'm very positive about it, but it's been an up and down ride. It opened up really well because, you know, I'm pretty, I'm relatively well known right now. If I have a book coming out, I can do major appearances surrounding it, you know, like I did Andrew Huberman show on the day the book came out. That type of stuff matters.

I have a great audience on this podcast. I have a great audience for my newsletter. So the book came out stronger than any book I've ever written before, which makes sense giving my growing audience size and reputation. They debuted as number two on the New York Times of a seller list, which was sort of good news, bad news. like number three would almost be better because you weren't so close to number one. I was thwarted by James Clear, having a big bulk order for Atomic Habits that week. It made the UK bestseller list for the first time. It made the indie bestseller list for the first time.

The book is actually doing very well in the UK, which has been, you know, interesting to see. So I think that's all great. It's been selling well. It's been at probably a faster selling trajectory than any past books. I keep convincing myself like, well, that's about. the stop and now it's going to fall off and fall well below like other books. But I think it's doing well. It got into six figure sales like as quick as any book that I have done before, which is

great, which means now of my eight books, there's only two of my eight books that have not made it comfortably into six figure book sales, so that I'm proud of. The downside was like the initial reaction to the book. when it first came out, there was like some negative reaction from like traditional elite media. As I've talked about on the show, it makes sense because I had become in this like weird

in between position. I do what I call smart self-help. I like the right stuff that has practical advice. But I also think about things in a way that you might have in a more traditional like cultural commentary, more sophisticated type nonfiction. I kind of put those two things together. And I think there's a,

there's a, group of just sort of the standard media that my name came to their attention doing much more like traditional more traditional non-fiction journalism stuff like during the during the pandemic. You know, I spent a lot of time on NPR, for example, as a sort of resident expert on remote work and knowledge work, the technology of knowledge work and knowledge work in this sort of like remote work era. People came to know my New Yorker work, my New Yorker journalism on technology. And so, you know, I got some book reviews early on from reviewers who would never review a book like, slow productivity, never have before in their life. I've never read a book that has advice in it.

You know, like the New York Times, it was their main literary nonfiction book reviewers. Like, I'll review this. And they were like, what the hell is this? You know, this guy is giving advice. You know, pearls being clutched, people swooning on fainting chairs. They had just never seen a book like this before. They don't review these types of books. And if a book like this typically was going to get reviewed at something like the Times, typically you would shop it out to someone from that field, you would say, great, we'll have a freelancer, like, someone who writes about business review it. It's like when Adam Grant gets a book reviewed in the New York Times book review, they'll have a psychologist review it. But no, it was like the literary book reviewer who was like, what the hell is this? There's advice in here. So that threw me off

my game early on. I was like, what if I wrote a bad book? I mean, I was getting good reviews too, like big publications that were more used to the world of business and business advice, like the Financial Times, for example, in the UK, the Wall Street Journal here in the U.S., like, yeah, this is a good book. This is like, da, da, da, da, there's the points. But I was thrown by the New York Times and Times of London, putting their literary book reviewers on it and being like, this is crazy that someone's giving advice. Like, I couldn't imagine doing that in the book. And it was, it was thrown.

Like, is this, what if the book was, what if the writing is just, what if it's bad? Like, what if it's off? So I sort of stopped following coverage of it, stopped following sales. then the end of the year came and it was all everything switched because at the end of the year it's when book awards are given out it's when best books of the year list are given out and the book had did better on those than anything I've ever written before right and people are talking about passing along and this best book of the year you know best book of year here and there and business book awards multiple different selections and awards and I was like oh okay

yeah maybe it was a good book okay but I had to sort of wait till the end of the year to get that So it's this interesting up and down. But it's doing well. I think it is having a cultural impact, which is what I wanted it to have. And I'm continuing to draw from it on this podcast because there's so many good ideas in it. The new book I'm working on The Deep Life, it's similar. I mean, I see the Deep Life is sort of a one, it's not a one-off book, but it's a step out of the main trajectory of my books, which is all technology. and its impact in one way or the other, right?

Like, slow productivity is about knowledge, work broke because of computers and networks and email. How do we fix it? Right. It's within that trajectory. The deep life is about how do you, it's a pandemic idea. How do you engineer your life? And the whole premise of that book is we spend so much time talking about what should be in a life well lived.

We don't talk nearly enough about the mechanics of how one actually changes their life. We don't give that nearly enough attention. the mechanics of figuring out what to do, making the changes, making the changes stick. Like, that's what we ignore. And instead we focus on what your life should have. It should have passion. It should have friendship.

You have whatever, but not how do you actually change your life? That's pretty hard. And how does that happen to our current world of, like, high-tech knowledge work with the opportunities that gives us? And so this book is a little bit of a step out of the main trajectory. And I'm just leaning into that. I'm writing like a practical guide.

The chapters have numbered sections. And it's really, I'm writing this book for my gut. You know, it's just unapologetic. Here's the ideas. Do this. It's why I think it's important. That important.

Here's a story. Here's a finding. Like, it's not, it really is really unfiltered, purified. Like the way I talk on this podcast, I guess. I don't know. I feel good about it, but it's its own thing. It's not, it's not carefully crafted. Like we have to this very special, you know, a lot of these books are really well crafted with

everything has to start with a story. The story has to have ideas extracted from it. It's more free-flowing. It's sections and some sections are smaller than others. It's as dense as anything I've ever written. I only want super solid ideas that I think are interesting. I'm cutting out everything else. It covers a huge wider range.

I don't know. I'm really enjoying writing it. And I'm sort of just saying, I don't know what you're going to categorize this book as. You know, I don't know what I would compare it to. I'm just, I think it's, I find it awesome. I'm just really enjoying it. And it'll do what it's going to do, but I'm going to be happy that it exists out there in the world. So, you know, I'm having fun with it.

That's a lot of things to say, Jesse, but I've been thinking about with slow productivity. But generally, I'm happy. I think this book is out there. It's selling. It's helping. I think it was good. I wasn't sure. I have some feedback that is good.

So all of that, I think all that's positive. Are there principles for the deep life? So the deep life right now is broken into two parts. each part around a big idea connected to our general theme here, which is the mechanics of how you actually transform your life to be more intentional. So part one right now is tentatively called preparation. The big idea there is that we think too much about we want to jump right into making big changes in our life. But if you don't have your act together, we talk about this on the show. But if you don't have your act together first, you're unlikely to succeed in trying to make big changes.

So like the whole first part of the book, preparation, is how do you get your act together to the point where making really cool intentional changes to your life is going to be likely to succeed? And this is where I talk about discipline. It's where I talk about being organized. That's where I talk about reclaiming your mind. So it's like in the weeds. Part two, transformation is about the mechanics of how you actually reliably figure out the changes you want to make and successfully execute them. And they're the big idea is lifestyle-centric planning. most people when they think about trying to overhaul their life, they fixate on a singular goal that they hope will change everything.

If I can just succeed with this big, bold singular goal I like to talk about and tell friends about, everything in my life will be better. That rarely works for a lot of reasons. It's much better to establish a rich vision of an ideal lifestyle and then work backwards from that to figure out with your current opportunities and obstacles, how do I move towards it? It becomes much more like strategic and tactical and into weeds and you're much more likely to succeed. And so it really gets into those ideas and kind of step by step how you actually, how you actually do those things. So preparation, transformation. So even if you just read part one, it's sort of just my guide to being an imminently capable human. You know, you're going to build up your capacity for discipline.

You are going to get yourself organized. Like my latest thinking on what matters and doesn't matter in personal productivity, personal productivity, like this is the only book you're going to find that all in. reclaiming your brain, like how to teach yourself to think again, not just not being a slave to devices, so I talk about it, but how to actually actively build up contemplative abilities, you know,

the ability to sit there with a book to self-reflected. So you come out of part one, just like you're in control your life. Anything's possible. And part two is like, let's take that out for a spin. And now start figuring out how to, how to transform your life into something really cool.

So I'm enjoying writing this. I'm taking my time, you know. And so it's going to be, when you take your time as a writer in nonfiction, what you get is density. You know, I really thought about this chapter, and I really thought about this section in this chapter, and I thought about for a while,

and I wrote and I rewrote it, and what's there is exactly what I want to say in nothing else. And you get this real density of arguments and justifications and stories and evidence, because if you just take the book one section at a time, and I just want to make this section like a New Yorker piece as goes possible. In the end, the book is very dense,

and you don't have that. You want to avoid that sensation you get when books are written quicker of they're kind of stretching. I just want to try to finish this chapter to get my word count up for the month. This book is very, it's very dense. The people I'm talking to, the things I'm reading. And I have no consistency to stories. It's not slow productivity. I had a particular thing I wanted to do, which was stories of traditional knowledge workers as the anchors.

Here there's like stories, but there's some things are not stories. It's intellectual stories. It's an event that happened. in the world of ideas. It's something to happen. There's no set story format. It's just like what is the, what gets me to what I want to say here? What makes this interesting and clear?

And so some of it is like I'm talking to really interesting people, but I'm also coming up with like, here's like a really interesting history of how this thing changed. The reception of this book teaches us like an important, you know, lesson about this. Here's this thing from, I'm all over the place with this. And I think it's, I don't know, I'm liking it. It's the key question is what I'm going to do next, Jesse. That's the question that's up in the air. I'm wondering what the book cover is going to be for a deep life too.

I like the full bleed image concept that came up with slow productivity. So this was by, I'm proud of this innovation. I told my publisher, I said, I just think we need to break out of the visual vocabulary that these idea books and business books are all in, which was vocabulary invented by Gladwell, white cover, a single image, big text, you know. Like, we got to break out of that. I think that limits your audience. I want my cover to induce in the reader a physiological state that is congruent with the goal of the book.

And so full bleed, aspirational, relaxing imagery. I, you know, I was like that I think was useful for the book and opened it up to audiences that would not pick up that book if it was, you know, a turtle at the computer screen in the middle or a single match stick with a weird color flame or big, cool, new port or whatever. So I'm sure I'm going to probably pitch something like that for this book too. The Deep Life. All right. Let's, there's our corner. Oh, let's get our final segment where I am going to talk about where I am with my quarterly planning for the upcoming new year. But first, hear from another one of our sponsors.

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All right, Jesse, we've on to our final segment. All right, so if I have this right, Jesse, and tell me if I have this right, Jesse. You want me to talk about how I've updated my quarterly plan format and what is on my quarterly plan for the quarter that's going to begin here in the new year. Yeah, you mentioned in last week's episode about how you were making some changes to it and I had some inquiries about the specifics. Okay, so, well, I have, and a lot of this reflection has come out of writing my book. the deep life because I'm thinking about generalizing advice around this type of thing. And when I was thinking about it, I was realizing some changes that might be beneficial. So as you know, I like to keep the big picture plan, the anchor plan on my multi-scale planning.

I update it roughly once a semester. So business people call these quarterly plans because they think about quarters. I'm a professor. I think about them as semester plan. So my sort of winter spring plan is what I'm working on now. and this will kind of kick in in the new year. I used to have two of these for each semester, one for my personal life, one for my professional life.

The change I mentioned in the last episode is I've consolidated them. It makes more sense to have just one plan because, I don't know, these are all mixed together to me, my life and my work and these things mixed together in such a way that I wanted to deal with the whole thing holistically. What had helped me back from doing that before is that in my professional quarterly plan, I would sometimes get pretty detailed notes, like especially if it's working through with writing or the podcast. It might be like pretty detailed notes about, you know, we're going to work on this sequence of articles and interleave with these articles, research for this book chapter

here. And actually these bigger picture notes for the next months could get pretty complicated. And so that's why I had my professional plan in a separate document. I realized I could just put those specific notes in a separate document and link to it from the main one. So when I talk about craft in my singular semester plan, I can just link to a separate document that says, okay, for this thing I'm working on really heavily this semester, over here I'm getting to the weeds about how I want to sequence that. So once I figured that, I was like, great, I can have like one document that I actually review. I've been experimenting with the structure of this document as well. And what I've been working with for the plan that's about to go live is, and this comes from my thinking from the new book, is a foundation pillar approach. So you have a foundation on which you have a few pillars. These are what we would have used to call buckets that are the pillars are capturing important parts of your life and what you're trying to achieve there in the long term and in the current planning semester or quarter.

and the foundation supports them all. So right now in the plan I'm working on, I've simplified this thumb because this has gotten out of control from before. I've simplified this thumb. The foundation typically is something that's going to be some mix of spiritual, philosophical, and ethical. It's the foundation, it's working on your base, your code and base operating system if you want to use sort of nerdy terminology that helps you figure out how you just go about your life day to day, like your code, how you actually operate, helps you.

It's what you use to navigate hard things that are going to happen, your plan for doing that. And it influences the pillars you build on top of it, like what those pillars focus on and what you're trying to do. So I've increasingly come to believe you need this sort of philosophical, spiritual, ethical foundation that's like your OS for life, for navigating life. And you need to keep working on that and evolving that. And that has to be clearly specified. On top of that, then, come to pillars. Right now, there's four pillars in particular that I'm focusing on. One that is what it called Constitution in our classic bucket language.

But this is your health, health and fitness. I mentioned off and on the show. I've had to have a surgery recently. This has sort of really knocked me off my physical game. Recovery's been, it's been what it's been. But as part of this, you get lots of tests and blood test. And it's sort of kicking off for me, like a much more, my, my, my, my middle age renewed focus in health and fitness is a common thing you go through.

You get to a certain age. And now it's health and fitness become less about when it be great to be good at this sport and more about I don't want to bypass. So this is a major focus going forward. There's then a leadership pillar, being a leader of my family, being a leader among sort of like friends circles and being a leader in the community in which I'm a part of. This has become a bigger focus for me as I get older as well, how to be a good father, how to be a good friend, how to be a leader within, you know, I'm on, I'm more leadership positions

in my life now in various communities I'm involved in. So that is a pillar I'm focusing on what I guess I'll call celebration. The use deal bucket terminology, but basically a pillar focused on loving life. So like stuff that you do just because life is cool and it helps you acknowledge that. It's like the maker projects I do, the adventures I go on, my movie hobby of like really getting into movies. And like making that a priority, that's like an important pillar for me is, you know, this is it. You can't, I strive a lot, but I need to be enjoying where I am now.

So that's a pillar. And then the probably the thickest pillar in terms of complexity is craft, my work, the things I build with my hands and my mind. the things I'm known for and where I'm trying to go with that craft and what's my goal long term and what am I trying to do in the semester ahead and that's probably the most complicated of the pillars. So that foundation and I have those four pillars. The method I'm applying for navigating these in the semester ahead is one of rotating focus.

So choose one of these pillars and make it like a big focus and try to transform that part of your life. The other pillars, like, know what you're working on, right? Make sure you're not neglecting them, but you're not trying to make major changes in them. When you finish overhauling one of those pillars, then you can say, okay, now here's the next pillar. I'm going to overhaul this part of my life. This is not something you're necessarily doing all the time, but for me, it's a sort of midlife course correction that's been building up over the last couple of years.

So, like, I'm starting with that Constitution, physical health pillar. That's getting a huge amount of my attention, and it will probably for the next six months or so, I will come out of that transformation with a completely different relationship to physical health and routine. So there's all sorts of stuff happening here in terms of doctors and fitness and trainers and the amount of time and the role like exercise and diet and a lot of changes and things are having to happen in my life. And I'm giving it focus.

I'm going to come out of this semester having really put a lot of focus on that and my new steady state being really different than it was before. The other pillars, again, it's like, know what you're working on, but don't try to get crazy on multiple things at once. Then I'll choose another one of these pillars. Like now I really want to overhaul this part of my life and really think about it and put effort and energy into it and really make those changes. So I'm going pillar by pillar.

This might be a year or multi-year process to really get through all of them. But this is one way you can tame the complexity of having all these different things that matter to you. And it's overwhelming to think about optimizing all. all of those at the same time. You're just going to collapse under too many changes at once. So I've really become more of a fan of, you know it's important, you have your plan that's reasonable for each of those.

And if you're going to do a major change, only work on one pillar at a time. So that is what I'm really kicking off now during my surgery recovery. I'm using that, all the stuff you have to do for that anyways, the physical therapy, the doctor's test, like use that as to just run with that momentum and let's overhaul, let's overhaul the whole thing, which is my way of saying by the time we get to the summer, I'm going to be looking like Scars Guard in the Northman. And it's a lot of shirtless podcasting guys. I'm just going to put it out there right now.

There'll be a lot of like shirtless podcasting as I look like scars. With the holiday lights. Holiday lights and killer delts. Which one's delts? The back. Oh. Or isn't these? What's shoulders?

What shoulders? Um, Jesse and I are in shoulders. Shelders. Traps. Traps. Traps is kind of these. Yeah.

All right. That's what Scars Guard did for the movie the Northman. That's a movie more people should see, by the way. I have two movie recommendations. Northman came out during COVID, so it wasn't widely seen. A fantastic director, though, director I really like. It's a Viking saga, and Alexander Scarsgard's the star of it. And it's, it's mythological.

right so it's not done in a completely realistic frame but it's a realistic treatment of Viking sagas and Viking mythology but the key thing is Alexander Scarsgaard is my age the character they built up his body so he has massive traps because he's like huge traps like they didn't want him to look you can't get a 42 year old to look too crazy they didn't want to be like super inflated with muscles because a Viking wouldn't be so they chose this one muscle he's just like err anyways I'm gonna be doing trap style the other movie I finally got around the scene, by the way, and I'll recommend Fritz Lings classic M, 1931. One of the, early in the sound movie era, he innovated the use of sound completely.

It's also just brilliantly shot in other ways. It's a great movie. I really enjoyed it. It's on HBO, Max, whatever it's called. It's on Max right now. So you can find it. Fritz Lings, 1931, German semi-expressionistic classic M. It's hard to, here's why it's hard to find.

If you search for M, it doesn't know what to do with that. So how do you search for it? I actually ended up typing in Fritz Lang into the search bar in HBO Max. And then it started bringing up Fritz Lang movies. And then that's how I found it. Same thing when I used the Apple TV search over all of the different streaming services. If you just give it the letter M, it's like, no, you're clearly trying to write out a word that starts with M. So like, what are the most popular movies that start with M?

It'll never actually show it to you. So there you go. So, anyways, that's what I'm up to. I've simplified to these four pillars, a reasonable plan for each, but one that I'm going all in on trying to overhaul, and it's getting a lot of my attention. So just sort of going. And the other pillars, I'm still doing stuff.

It's just like taking the foot off the accelerator, like have a reasonable steady state. This thing is important to me, and I'm working on it and being intentional about it. But the big changes are happening in this one pillar, then I'll move to the next pillar. and having that foundation all the way that you can keep falling back on even if the pillar is faltered

that is what guides you day to day that's a key thing to have there you go that's what's going on to my semester plan and that's my plan for my traps which I think is what's most important here all right Jesse I think that's it good episode

all right Jesse takeover you learned everything you're wondering about yeah I sure did there we go can we do like 30 minutes on the Washington Nationals offseason to date is that because I'm getting worried

I'm getting worried about the lack of significant action I am hoping that Bellinger going to the Yankees clears Christian Walker to make his way to the Nats but I'm worried there's not going to be a major acquisition and for this season I don't know what that would mean for my fandom so this is very important that'll be our next episode just 95 minutes on the Washington Nationals

all right but until then enjoy your heart holidays, vacation for most people. Hopefully you're hearing this episode. A lot of people miss it. But if you're listening, you should check out our outfits online because I think they're pretty sharp. And otherwise, we'll be back New Year's Week with a new episode of the podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at Calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply.

I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you've got to sign out for my newsletter at caldeport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.