The Tim Ferriss Show - #568: Cal Newport — The Eternal Pursuit of Craftsmanship, the Deep Life, Slow Productivity, and a 30-Day Digital Minimalism Challenge

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Starting point is 00:04:10 no questions asked. One more time, that's magicspoon.com slash TIM. start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is a very well caffeinated Tim Ferriss. Welcome once again to the Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Cal Newport. Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, who previously earned his PhD from MIT. His scholarship focuses on the theory of distributed systems, while his general audience writing explores intersections of culture and technology. Newport is the author

Starting point is 00:05:05 of seven books, that's a lot of books, man, including most recently Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and A World Without Email. I think some of those allude to how he's able to get so much done. He's also a contributing writer for The New Yorker and the host of the Deep Questions podcast. You can find him online at calnewport.com. And there are a number of things conspicuously absent from this bio. And thank you so much, Cal, for sending me an elegant, streamlined bio. I sometimes get five or six pages that need to get cut down dramatically. So welcome to the show. Nice to see you, Cal. Thanks for having me.

Starting point is 00:05:43 I thought we would start where so many good things start, and that is with Steve Martin. You have written about Steve Martin before on your blog. You are prolific on your blog, which I very much appreciate since that's where I started as well in the blogosphere. What are some of your favorite lessons or any lessons that come to mind for you from Steve Martin? And he's fresh on my mind because I had COVID recently. And while I was recovering, I was watching comedians in cars getting coffee. And one of my favorite episodes was with Steve Martin. So let's start there. I'll pass the mic over. Martin was a big influence on me early on in my career because of that book he wrote, because he wrote his memoir, Born Standing Up, which was a professional memoir.

Starting point is 00:06:30 The whole point of the book, the way he explained it in interviews was, I wanted to actually capture how I got from nothing to being a very well-known and influential comedian. I didn't want to skip the steps. He complained a lot of celebrity biographies would sort of skip the interesting part that one day they would just be playing at the Copa and say, how did they get there? So he wrote this professional biography. It came up, might've been 2007, 2008, somewhere in there. I was a young grad student then. I had started grad school around 2004, 2005. So I was

Starting point is 00:07:01 at MIT. I was blogging. I was writing books. I was doing research. And that book was very influential to me in part and maybe mainly due to something he never actually said in the book. But he said in a Charlie Rose interview about the book, where Charlie was asking him, like, well, let's boil it down. What's your advice? What's your advice for aspiring entertainers? And Martin said, I always tell them the same thing, but it's never what they want to hear. They always want to hear, here's my tips for finding an agent. Here's my way for tips for doing an end run around the typical pipeline. He says, my advice instead is always be so good they can't ignore you. If you do that, lots of other good things will come. That was his advice. That hit me like a lightning bolt. I mean, I remember at this time as a young scholar, second, third year PhD student, published

Starting point is 00:07:48 some books. I was thinking up all sorts of schemes. Well, how do I market my work? How do I have a new angle on research that people haven't seen? How do I, maybe if I write in a cross-discipline way no one else is doing, that hit me like a lightning bolt. It was basically saying, actually, wait, first, just do really good work. And that's hard.

Starting point is 00:08:05 And you're probably not that good yet. And you need to practice and get a lot better. That became the foundation for almost everything else that happened in my professional life and so much of what I wrote about. I owe him quite a bit for that inspiration. So let's use that as a segue into focusing not just on what you do, but also perhaps beginning to touch on what you don't do. Because just as with Steve Martin, a lot of what I find fascinating, or some of what I find fascinating about you is what is absent. Sort of like the case of the dog that didn't bark in

Starting point is 00:08:39 Sherlock Holmes, right? Really paying attention to absence sometimes. And for those people who have heard a lot of bios on this podcast, social media handles are not prevalent in your bio, among other things. We don't have to focus directly on that, but let's perhaps start with your definition of the deep life, this phrase, this term. Could you just unpack that for us and tell us what that means to you and what the constituent parts are? The term, the deep life, is something that emerged in the early pandemic, though the ideas and sentiment had been around for a long time in my writing. The pandemic hits, and I make a lot of changes. Suddenly, I'm not seeing my readers, I'm not seeing my students, much more isolated.

Starting point is 00:09:27 And I began a podcast so I could connect to people. And I went on a heroic one-month period where I wrote an essay every day. And the whole direction what I was writing about shifted pretty dramatically. At that point, I was finishing up a business book, a book about communication in the business world. And I'd been writing much more about the impact of tech on business at that time. I was sort of on a roll with that. And suddenly I found myself in my writing and in major segments of the podcast, like talking about life and building a life of resilience and meaning and depth. And that is

Starting point is 00:10:00 where this term, the deep life came up. My audience just really was interested in this. And we, in a symbiotic fashion, really began to work out what we meant by it. But at a high level, the deep life is a term for one of these things. We all know it when we see it. We just haven't really been approaching it systematically. It's when you see someone living a life in such a way that it resonates. It feels authentic and interesting and resilient that they're not the type of person who's going to look back at the end of their life and say, what did I do? We as humans have a deep craving for that, but we often suppress that craving because it's complicated and we don't know what to do about it. And we don't have a lot of cultural support

Starting point is 00:10:39 for this idea of crafting a deeper life right now. That's not where the cultural pressures are. So we kind of avoid it and look for the short-term burst of good chemicals, the short-term burst of, I feel good about this. I got a like on this. This beer makes me feel good or whatever it is. And we've put it aside. And so I tried to excavate it. I think the disruption of the pandemic cleared aside a lot of the noise. And I've been working on that. It's one of the things I've been talking about quite a bit is systematically speaking, let let's put a Cal Newport overly systematic nerd computer science brain to this. Can we break down what the deep life is, how you get there, what you need to do, what you don't need to do? And it come back to that, but I think a lot of these topics will intersect. So I want to go back in time a bit. So we were just talking about pandemic. Let's go much further back. And part of the reason I want to do that is these days, say if

Starting point is 00:11:39 someone comes up to me on the street, it's nine times out of 10 about the podcast. Let's call it in 2010, 2012. If someone emailed me, it would have been about tech investing in startups. But my career, at least in any credible sense. I didn't start with that. And really, it was the four-hour work week that put me on any map to speak of. One of my employees knows you and got to know you through study hacks. And he moved from overseas to Canada to university. He went from skating through high school because there really wasn't much required to getting his first Fs and was panic-stricken because he needed to correct course. Ended up finding study hacks, your work, and transformed himself into an A student. Is that where you first found your groove, would you say, in terms of public audience and feeling some momentum in your career, or was it before or after that?

Starting point is 00:12:58 Right. It's a good history to get into. My initial books, the first three books I wrote, were aimed at students. There are books, roughly speaking, of student advice, though the third one, I'll touch on in a second, began to veer away from that. And actually that third book intersected with you in a way that you may not remember, but I think I wrote an essay for your blog back then about one of the ideas. But I started with student books and my blog in the early days was called Study Hacks because it was advice for students. And the backstory on that is as a high school student during the late 90s, I had started a dot-com company. This was the first dot-com boom. No one really understood this technology. So there was this brief period where we thought that if you're young, that must

Starting point is 00:13:43 mean that you really know about tech in a way older people didn't. So it's like a brief moment of insanity where they would give 17-year-olds tens of thousands of dollars to do things we didn't know how to do. But as an effect of that, I was a 17-year-old who knew the business and productivity section of Barnes & Noble very well. So I was reading business books and productivity books because I was trying to figure out what the hell I was doing. Then I went to college and I'm taking on student loans. I want to do well. I'm trying to take my college career seriously. And I said, great, let me go to Barnes & Noble and get the books about here's how the top students study so I can figure this out just the way I bought a David Allen book or a Stephen Covey book to figure out how to do business stuff. And those books weren't really there back then. There was a sense in the publishing industry back in the 90s that you had to be quote unquote cool or students would reject the book. And in that effort, they accomplished the opposite. So it's all these books with like kooky people on the covers and it's all about, you know, your crazy roommate and how to deal with the dorm food. And, and I just had this idea. I was like, look, what we need to do is write a book for college students who want to know how to do well, exactly like a business book. This, this doesn't exist. Don't try to talk about naked roommates and dorm food. Just be like, here's how the top students.

Starting point is 00:15:01 Don't talk about the naked roommates. That's more of a show. Don't tell kind of situation. Continue that. I would, I would say so. Yeah. You only need to see that once. And so that's what got me started. So I had this idea and I was a writer in college. I was doing computer science and I was also writing and, you know, I was the editor of

Starting point is 00:15:17 the humor magazine. I was a columnist for the newspaper. I was really into actually humor writing, but I could write. I'd trained myself to write in college. And I was in New York and hanging out with an entrepreneur friend of mine. And he's like, well, stop talking about it. Just write the damn book. So I was like, okay, we'll figure that out. And then I figured out how to, you know, it's not that hard to figure out. In a sort of a Tim Ferrissian style, I found an agent and said, look, I don't want you to be my agent. I want you to just teach me how this whole industry

Starting point is 00:15:42 works. I want you to teach me how can a 20-year-old get a book deal. There's a very narrow path you would have to navigate as a 20-year-old to get a book deal. And she laid it out for me. And it has to be a book about students. And you have to know how to write. And we figured it all out. And I literally- Let me pause you for one second. Did she end up becoming your official agent or not? No, I was true to my word. No, she was a fiction agent, right? Now, my memory was, this was actually, she was an agent who represented, I think maybe Ann Patchett. It's like very well-respected. I might have that wrong, but that was my memory. It was like Bel Canto had come out around this time. So I want you to don't lose track of this timeline,

Starting point is 00:16:18 but how did you get her attention? Why would she take this time to sit with you? So this was a family connection. My memory was my uncle's a journalist and I said, would you be willing to connect me for a, and again, this was very Tim Ferriss style, the way I went around this. This is why I think we're simpatico. Your book had to come out. Yeah, it was very Tim Ferriss style. I said, look, one hour is when I talk to him on the phone. I do not want them to be my age and I'm not going to try to sell myself to them. I just feel that I need to understand the landscape. I'm not going to be able to navigate this because it's too atypical. I'm too young. I'm going to be ignored. I knew there'd be a narrow path. And so that was true to my word. And so she was a fiction agent,

Starting point is 00:16:56 so she wouldn't have been able to represent, she wouldn't have represented me anyways. That was my memory. So I was very clear. And you know what? She gave me the roadmap. She told me like, here is exactly what you would have to do. Among other things, she said, you have to go do commissioned writing. So I went out and started selling articles to these middling college-focused websites and magazines so I could have commissions. Now, is that important just to show that you're credible or that there is a market for your writing. They're going to want writing samples. And they're going to want writing samples on the type of writing I was going to do. And if I was going to be writing a student advice book, I needed advice articles. So I did that. The second thing she said any agent would be worried about when I actually went to find

Starting point is 00:17:39 an agent was, is the content going to be good? And so what I did there is I sold a commission for no money, $200 or something for a nothing online college magazine. I don't even remember what it was. I use that commission to do all of my research for my first book. So I mean, I talked to, because the first book I talked to a bunch of Rhodes scholars and Marshall scholars, like the premise was, I'm going to talk to the best of the best and extract advice from them. And this article required me probably to talk to two people. And I talked to 20. It's just person after person.

Starting point is 00:18:11 Oh, it's for an article. I'm writing this article. Can I get an interview for this article? And I had to figure out how to find them. It turns out it's not hard. You look up press releases from colleges to learn who had just been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship or a Marshall Scholarship or a Marshall Scholarship or a Truman Scholarship. And then you could often at this point, email directories were private,

Starting point is 00:18:29 but all you had to do was find the email address of any student on that campus. And then you said, ah, there's the naming convention. At Harvard, it's like firstname.lastname at fas.harvard.edu. So then you could figure out how to get to them. And so I did all of the interviews for the first book and then wrote out the whole annotated table of content. So I could come when I started to talk to agents to actually be my agent. I could say, I can write, look, I'm an editor of a magazine at college. I write in the paper.

Starting point is 00:18:56 Here's articles I've written for student advice. I have a good idea. Here is the whole thing laid out. And then the third thing I did is i made the format of my first book as easy as possible it was 50 short rules each with a contrarian title each two to three pages long so i made the task as tractable as possible i was not going to try to do some sort of sophisticated take and so all of those pieces came together and then the final piece was how do you find the right agent? And what I did

Starting point is 00:19:25 there is I used the acknowledgement sections of target books to see when the author think their agent. So I could see what agent was working on what book. And I took the business book whose format I was completely copying for my student book, found the agent of that book, wrote that agent and said, I want to do this book, but with student advice instead, here's all the stuff. And she signed me right before my 21st birthday. And I've been with her for 20 years now, actually. So that's how that all started. That's amazing. So let's see what year roughly would that have been when you signed that agent? So this was 2003. So in the spring of 2003, if my memory serves,

Starting point is 00:20:08 I was 20. I turned 21 that June. I was a junior in college. I signed a contract, a book. I had pitched it as Conquer College. And the head of the agency said, you can't have the hard Ks right after each other. So we changed it to How to Win at College. And I wrote it the fall of my senior year of college. I would just wake up early and write for 60 to 90 minutes every morning. I just would wake up and write for 60 to 90 minutes. The format of the book was perfect for it because you could do a draft of one chapter in 60 to 90 minutes. And that was that. And that book, I finished that book while still at college. and it came out right after I graduated. I sold another book while still in college. So while that was still in production, I upgraded. I was like,

Starting point is 00:20:50 okay, I'm now going to do a book with normal chapters. And this was How to Become a Straight A Student. This ended up becoming probably the biggest of my student books. I had no idea how much it had been selling in the background because it was never a big bestseller, but I checked last week, and that little book has sold like 300,000 copies. That's amazing. Which is with never selling more than a very small amount in any one week or month, it just chugs along. So in that book, what I did is I said, okay, let's get past the more vague stuff. And I just talked to 50 straight A students and it was hardcore. Like this is how you take notes

Starting point is 00:21:23 for a math class. This is how you should notes for a math class. This is how you should study for a, an English class. This is how you prepare for a blue book exam. It was just nuts. Here's how you manage your time. This was like one of the first books to seriously tackle time management for students and treat this as something you should do. And so I wrote that almost immediately. And I submitted that right after I started grad school. So by my first year of grad school, I had one book come out and another book in the can. So I just sort of knocked those off real quick. I have many follow-up questions. So a few observations. The first is you were mentioning that as a 17- or 18-year-old, back in the dot-com boom and then subsequent bust, you could get tens of thousands of dollars to try anything. I think we've learned our lesson because now you have to be at least 20 to get

Starting point is 00:22:08 hundreds of millions of dollars. So what could go wrong? And a couple of other things that just hopped to mind as I'm listening to this, because it is kind of like deja vu all over again for me as well. There are a lot of similarities. And one does not tie in perfectly to your story. But when you spoke to this first fiction agent to ask for advice, if you had not promised, actually, even if you had promised not to pitch yourself, I do want to mention that there's a saying, or there was at least when I was here in Silicon Valley, if you want money, ask for advice. And if you want advice, ask for money. And very often the indirect path can actually reap dividends, right? In terms of asking for advice, which this did, it just did it in a

Starting point is 00:22:58 more indirect fashion, right? It kind of laid things out longitudinally. And then the other piece I wanted to mention that I think strikes me as important is that while you were in college, you created a book that was easy to read, but perhaps first and foremost, you created a book that you were capable of writing. And that is why, for instance, in The 4-Hour Body or other books, Tools of Titans certainly, I have written books in a modular way, not just because it allows people to dip in and out in this choose-your-own-adventure type of approach, but doesn't matter how easy it is to read. And so that also occurred to me, right? If you had chosen to try to reverse the order and write the, let's call them normal chapters instead of the two to three page chapters with principles, maybe that first book never would have been written just given the time constraints, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:24:01 And skill. I don't think I could have done it yet. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So this leads me to ask, and we're going to bounce all over the place because that is how my brain functions or malfunctions. You graduate from college. What is your first six to 12 months look like out of college? I mean, the two things I did in college is I wrote and I did computer science. I was a real computer guy. I think we actually overlapped. When I was in high school, I went to high school in a small town near Princeton. And so I think this may be even

Starting point is 00:24:30 overlapped when you were there as an undergrad. I ran out of computer science to take. And so I was taking computer science at Princeton in the university classes when I was still in high school. So I went to Dartmouth College and was really just doing very well into computer science. So I was really like a locked in sort of computer science student. And so I rolled right out of Dartmouth into MIT. What type of focus did you have within computer science? Where were you most interested in and focused on? As an undergrad, it's just you're learning everything. The research I was doing as an undergrad was more network systems-y. And I made a big leap when I went to MIT. You interview, the way it works is potential PhD advisors, you go and you meet with them,

Starting point is 00:25:12 and then they essentially make you offers. I'm going to make you an offer to come join my group. And so you go and meet with them. And it was mainly the systems-oriented professors who were meeting with me. But I had been a real big fan. You know, I wrote of a Richard Feynman. I'd read like the James Gleick biography, Genius. I was a fan of John von Neumann, of Einstein. I had in my mind

Starting point is 00:25:32 just this image of mathematical research, of standing at a whiteboard and proving a proof. It just was incredibly romantic for me, even though math wasn't really considered my strong suit. And so there was one theory professor who said, I need a systems person to come to my group to help build wireless network

Starting point is 00:25:52 systems. And I'd done wireless network research. So I went to her group and then just pulled a fast one and just immediately started trying to write theory papers and became a theoretician. And so I haven't programmed a computer since I arrived. Since 2004, when I left school and went to MIT, I joined a theory group at MIT and have been a theoretician ever since. So I haven't touched a computer since really. All right. So if we look at programming, though, and we look at writing, prose, if we look at poetry, there are some similarities. It depends on who you talk to, of course. But I think of, for instance, an artist named Dmitry Chernyak, who works in generative art predominantly at the moment. And he put up a post recently on Twitter where he showed a screenshot of his code and he said, this is my art. So it occurs to me

Starting point is 00:26:47 that you can strive for and find elegance and beauty in all of those different domains. So there's perhaps more overlap than one might expect, at least from a first principles perspective. You mentioned in passing, I trained myself to write in college. I want to hear more about that. I would imagine it wasn't this sloppy ad hoc approach, just given what I think I know of you. How did you train yourself to write? One of the things I always tell people, because it was my experience, is that in order to get the deliberate practice aspect of skill acquisition applied to writing, if you want to get better at practice aspect of skill acquisition applied to writing, like if you want to get better at writing fast, you have to be writing for editing,

Starting point is 00:27:30 and you have to be writing in the context of acceptance and rejections. Because writing is one of these things where everyone can do it well enough that if you're mainly just writing on your own, so I'm writing in a journal, I'm writing a blog, I'm doing National Novel Writing Month, it's just me working on my novel. You don't necessarily get that stretch that's going to improve your skills. And so the thing that mattered for me is that I was writing for editing and for acceptance and rejection. For editing, meaning writing for an editor. You have a reader. Yes. An editor who's going to edit it and also will reject it if it's not good. And so this is

Starting point is 00:28:03 actually why writing for the humor publication was a big deal. You probably remember from your time in Ivy League schools in particular, there's a real culture around humor writing because it used to be back in the days where everything was the sort of old boys network, the vast majority of comedy writers for shows like SNL or The Tonight Show, they were coming out of these Ivy League humor societies. What is the name of the humor magazine at Dartmouth? At Dartmouth, it's The Jack-O-Lantern. The Jack-O-Lantern. And people may

Starting point is 00:28:32 have heard the term Lampoon. The Lampoon is out of Harvard, and then you have a number of different magazines at Princeton and so on. Yeah, exactly. And then they all have these huge old histories, you know, so like Dr. Seuss did cartoons for the Dartmouth Jack-o'-lantern in the 1920s. And so that's a very competitive

Starting point is 00:28:54 world. You would pitch pieces. And if they were funny, they would go. So back then it would be, you know, print magazines, you would pitch pieces. And if they were funny enough, they would get in. And if they weren't, they won it. It was just starkly competitive. And then I wrote a humor column for the paper. But it's the same thing. To become a columnist, they would say, no, no, no. Yeah, we'll do that one. No, yeah, we'll do that one.

Starting point is 00:29:11 And if you got five in the paper, you had the possibility of doing a column. So I think that really stretched my skill. And that helped. That helped. And I'll say the two things that helped my writing the most, to your original point here, is A, humor writing turns out to your original point here is a humor writing turns out to be incredibly useful for any type of writing because humor writing is all about the timing, the pacing, and the music of the words. You have to replicate the timing of a

Starting point is 00:29:36 standup comedian using grammar and word choice and having to get the right rhythm to set up the punchline way to beat and nail it. You have to do that all with words. That gives you an incredible facility with sentence crafting. And so, I mean, I'll tell you, like today as a writer for The New Yorker, which is very craft focused, you know, they really care. Writing craft is a really big deal over at The New Yorker. The training I did as a humor writer is incredibly applicable because you hear the words as music and the pausing and the rhythm.

Starting point is 00:30:05 You have to actually, the performance of the reading, you think a lot about it. And that actually really helps over there. And then mathematics, just like programming, that has been the other key to my success. Because if you do proofs, for example, you develop this sense where it's not right, this doesn't work, the pieces don't fit. And then when the pieces fit, it's the chorus of angels, right? Like your mind is like, I don't like when things don't quite fit. And when they do, it's dopamine coming out of your ears. It led to my style of writing, which is, my advice is very intricate. It's lay out the generative theory that lays out these pieces, and these pieces all fit together. And you might not notice it consciously when you read it,

Starting point is 00:30:42 but part of the experience of my writing is that all of the pieces I'm laying out there all click together into a hole where everything fits nicely. And this is symmetric with this, and this makes sense here, and nothing is hanging out. And it reduces this cognitive drag that happens sometimes when writing's a little bit less, the ideas are a little bit less formed, and it makes it harder to write. But I think that's been a bit of a secret sauce in my work is that it's cognitively pleasing because your brain appreciates the fact that sort of nerdishly and obsessively, all the pieces actually fit together. So a few things. Number one, I think we might have to call this podcast Cal Newport, A Course of Angels. That may be where we go with this just to get people in the door and the second is

Starting point is 00:31:27 what you're talking about in terms of symmetry and structure if anybody listening is interesting exploring that further there's a book called draft number four by john mcphee who's a staff writer at the New Yorker and just a behemoth of a craftsman and really, really thinks about structure a lot and lays out structure pieces graphically. So draft number four makes for a really fun read if you are willing to go into the weeds and be a super nerd when it comes to that type of topic. I want to ask you about humor writing. So I was the graphics editor, so an illustrator and graphics editor at the Princeton Tiger, which is kind of the equivalent of the Jack Lantern. And just a piece of trivia for people for whom this will make any sense. I took that job or I applied to that job more accurately because Jim Lee had previously held that post when he was a student.

Starting point is 00:32:36 And Jim Lee at the time was one of my favorite comic book pencilers or just beforehand had been one of my favorite comic book. Pencillers had rebooted the X-Men. I think he's now at DC. Still need to get him on the podcast. And I would sit at this desk. And at Princeton, there's this street called Nassau Street with all these gigantic mansions called eating clubs of different names. And they all have their particular personalities. And F. Scott Fitzgerald was at Ivy over here, and JFK was also at Ivy. And then this person was at such and such. So it has this storied and bizarre history. But when he would go out, I don't think this is speaking out of school. It's pretty funny. People go out, I want to say it was Thursdays and Saturdays, and just get hammered. And I didn't get hammered

Starting point is 00:33:25 too much, but I opened up the drawer at one point of this desk and I found drawings that Jim Lee had done clearly when he had come back from being completely hammered. At least that was my impression. And I was like, oh my God, these are treasures. And I don't know if I ever told anyone about them because I didn't want them to disappear. They're like my little secret in this desk. But the reason I brought this up is that the head editor of the magazine at the time ended up shortly thereafter going and becoming the editor-in-chief of Maxim magazine, which at the time was a very, very big deal. So it just kind of goes to show you how quickly you can jump. My question for you is how one can practice humor writing or cultivate an awareness of that timing and so on that you're talking about if they don't, and most people

Starting point is 00:34:19 won't, have access to working at such a magazine. Do you have any thoughts? It has to be for editing. You have to find a place to submit with humor. You need someone who can reject you and help you improve. You need someone who could reject you because it's like the little things matter. So one of the things that the Jack O'Lantern did is we would also do sort of onion style once or twice a year fake newspaper. So there's a daily newspaper at Dartmouth called the Dartmouth. And we would print the paper that was exactly the same format. We just changed the U to a V or something. And we would put it in the machines where the regular newspaper was, but it was all onion style. And I was good at onion style stuff because there's a certain

Starting point is 00:34:59 dryness that has to work. And for whatever reason, I have this memory. I did a piece for it once. And so timing matters. I don't have exactly a title but it was something like team from amish university places last at robotics competition right which you gotta just there's a straight lacedness of it and i and i remember i wrote this thing i wrote it as a maybe a sophomore or something like this and it was just it had to be the exact rightness of drying and i remember the editor came in and added some extra things to it like some quotes like oh and then jebediah said like i had made it really dry where i was trying to do it very repertorial style and like at some point you

Starting point is 00:35:35 you figure out they put like tinfoil on a cat or something like it was something but it was just it would be revealed very dryly and i just remember he added a few quotes from some of the people and I felt like the whole thing fell apart. I was like, that's out of the character. You're breaking the dryness. There's a hole or whatever. But the only way you're going to get that type of fine tuning is submit things, have it be rejected, have things be accepted, and then try to understand why the thing they added is ripping up. You're like, this is making me, it's just not right. I think that really matters. And then the other thing for comedy writing is you have to consume a lot of standup comedy.

Starting point is 00:36:09 I think you got to see the timing, the timing of the top standup comedians is actually the foundation on which all humor writing comes out of. Like at the time when I was doing my column for the paper, my column, I tried to ape Dave Barry style. So I don't know if you remember Dave Barry. Oh, I was just thinking of Dave Barry. Yeah. He won a Pulitzer for his comedy column, which is crazy. That's incredible. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:36:32 Incredible. Yeah. But he was a timing guy. Dave Barry's great. Do you have any favorite books or if people wanted to start with something, do you have any suggestions? Just read his collections. His collections are fantastic. Because his whole thing was to set up and then he would come in with the absurd punch to the gut. He would set you up and it'd be kind of dry. And the timing would be just right beat and then something completely absurd. And then he would just keep rolling. So he'd be writing about, it would be mundane.

Starting point is 00:37:00 Like people bring too much stuff on the plane to put into the overhead compartment. But I still remember at some point in his piece, there's people with full grand pianos and such and such brand John Deere yard tractor that they're trying to get up there. It's like the precision and the absurdity that he just, boom, comes out of nowhere and hits you with it that has a good... Simon Rich is really good at that style. He don't know Simon Rich. Yeah, he's a younger guy. He was at SNL, I believe. I think he's a Lampoon. So he came out of the Lampoon. He's at SNL.

Starting point is 00:37:31 He does some shouts and murmurs for the New Yorker. That's hilarious. I think he's the modern, young version of Dave Barry. It's a little edgier than Dave Barry is. The absurdity, and what he does really well, not to geek out too much on comedy writing, but he does the... Let's do it. No, let's do it. Don't but he does the amplification of absurdity. So he'll set up an absurd situation, he'll take it very places, but without ever losing the dryness. So you had this great piece during COVID about

Starting point is 00:38:08 what should you do if you're like an advice column? Like, what should I do if my kid's afraid of monsters in the closet? At first, it starts off with kind of reasonable advice. And then it becomes pretty clear that this column exists in a world in which there has been a portal that has opened up and like savage monsters are actually out there in the world and are coming in and taking and devouring children and like by the end of the article it's all about you have your shotgun and you're explaining to your kid that

Starting point is 00:38:34 you're going to die for the cause as you leave you know the go fight the monsters that have been whatever but he keeps the dry all of that builds up within the idiom of a Q&A advice column. And it's great. I love it. And in the end, the great thing about Simon, unlike Barry, it's actually a whole metaphor for the stress and anxiety parents were feeling about COVID and how we're trying to use the idioms of normal news while everyone's terrified. And so there's a heart to it that was really sophisticated, but that's the dream. Maybe I should have done that. Well, never say never. I am going to throw one more hat in the ring, and that is Bill Bryson. And for people who want a place to start, A Walk in the Woods, which is rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, is just an outstanding, outstanding book. Also very,

Starting point is 00:39:22 very good with timing. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. If you're traveling, if you're just busy, if you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your bases. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food source ingredients, you'll be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multimineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an immunity formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens. You get the idea.

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Starting point is 00:40:54 I want to perhaps just return to, and I think these are related on some level, a term that I have in front of me. I'm coming back to it visually. I haven't mentioned it yet, but could you speak to slow productivity? And perhaps you could speak to John Gribben's book, The Scientists. You mentioned a bunch of scientists earlier in this conversation. Because you strike me also as kind of a proof case or a test case of slow productivity in a world where it is thought by and large to not be possible or to just be outdated. So could you just expand on that in any way that makes sense to you? Well, I mean, I'll tell you, and this is literally true, what I was doing in the moments before we logged on to do this discussion right now, it was in the other room in my office this year, with a notebook, working on slow productivity,

Starting point is 00:41:43 notes on slow productivity, because I'm thinking about maybe writing a book on it, but I'm still in the earlier stages. And I had gone for a walk earlier and had been developing some new thoughts and I wanted to get them down. So I was actually pretty frantically taking notes in my notebook as I was looking at the clock, like I got to get into the talk to Tim. So when I say it's fresh on my mind, I mean, it's literally fresh on my mind. And so that's a big caveat. That means this is not a fully baked idea. I love half-baked ideas. Yeah. So the ingredients are swirling. So here, I'll pitch you what I wrote down an hour ago.

Starting point is 00:42:15 So as of an hour ago, this is the way... What I do when I'm thinking about ideas is I try to basically re-pitch them out from scratch. And I do that again and again. And each time I do it, there's overlap with the previous times, but also new pieces. And that's how it polishes. It's why it takes me six months to a year to get, for example, a book idea ready to even propose. It's just, this is the, like we talked about the math mind, like I need the pieces to make sense. So my current take on slow productivity is the problem itself. So here's the problem we're facing. The human brain is wired. It's good at making a plan for executing something that you think is important. And it makes you feel good when you complete that plan. This is critical to humans,

Starting point is 00:42:57 why we're different than a lot of animals. We can actually come up with a plan to do something and feel motivation to do it and feel good when we actually, you know, we need to fix the fence, we fix the fence, the cattle can't get out, we feel really good. The issue is, if you don't do anything, let's say I'm not making any plans, I don't want to do anything, we know that makes you feel terrible. So you take away people's autonomy, their sense of efficacy, and they're miserable, we know that. But if you put too much on people's plates, so that now you have more on your plate, more obligations to which you have some sort of ascent to complete, then you can easily conceive actually all getting done. You short circuit that drive.

Starting point is 00:43:33 Just like your drive for hunger is really important. But if you eat like a huge amount of junk food, it short circuits the drive and you end up unhealthy. So when we have way too much on our plate, more than we can easily imagine how it's going to get done, it makes us really unhappy because we're short-circuiting a cognitive drive here and we get sort of anxious and overwhelmed and it doesn't feel good. And so we can't treat humans like we would a computer processor. When a computer processor, you want to pipeline as many instructions as possible that are sitting there so that not a single cycle is wasted

Starting point is 00:44:01 because you just want to make sure that you always have something to do. But for the human brain, that huge pipeline of things that are waiting to be done actually makes the brain unhappy. Our solution to this type of overload, we have too much on our plate in work and in our life admin as well. Our solution has been to use fast productivity. So fast productivity are like tactics and systems for increasing the amount of things you finish on the scale of days and weeks. So how do I get more stuff? This is what all productivity software is about. Lower friction, easier access to information, take out seven steps in the process of getting

Starting point is 00:44:34 this meeting scheduled. We want to maximize the number of things we can execute on the scales of days and weeks. My emerging concept of slow productivity says shift that scale up to years, months and years. I want to maximize the amount of meaningful stuff I get done in the next five years. It completely changes the game in a larger time scale. So maybe I'm working a lot on it this week and then I go a month without doing it at all and I have a hard day today and an off day tomorrow. You have the seasonality up and down rhythms, which is a better fit for the human brain. You get rid of the sense of overload because if you want to produce a good book in the next two years, that's a very different set of initiatives than I want to do as many writerly related promotional things as possible this week.

Starting point is 00:45:26 Like that latter could be a real source of stress and overload. The former can be a real source of fulfillment. And you tend to produce things of higher value because when you're just focusing on maximizing what you can do in the scale of days or weeks, it diverts the sustained application of energy and attention needed to actually do the things that move the needle or that you're proud of. And so I think it's a real issue. I think in the workplace, we have to completely rethink work allocation. Our current mode of doing this is completely

Starting point is 00:45:54 incompatible with slow productivity. We basically just throw an unlimited amount of work at individuals and say, it's up to you to self-regulate. It's like an impossible task to ask. And so I had this New Yorker piece recently called, why do we work too much? And I sort of make this argument in there that if we have to self-regulate, we're just going to end up with 20% too much on our plate. We're going to let stress be the feedback function that slows us down. And in our personal lives, we probably need to be doing significantly less, but the stuff we're doing, do it better and over longer time periods.

Starting point is 00:46:23 So there's just this fundamental mismatch with our brain that's happening right now. This epidemic of busyness, I think, is causing issues because of its mismatch with our brain. And maybe something like slow productivity is the way out of it. Let's look at some beacons of hope, perhaps, but we're going to look at the ghosts of Christmas past first. So very briefly, in The Scientists by John Gribben, you wrote on your blog, this was 2021, I think it was towards the end of July, that you're reading his magisterial tome, I'm not quoting verbatim, The Scientists. You're up to page 190, which is you're only up to Isaac Newton. Now I'm going to read verbatim.

Starting point is 00:47:05 Even early on, I become intrigued by a repeated observation. Though the scientists profiled in Gribben's book are highly productive, in quotation marks, by any intuitive definition of this term, the daily pace of their work was incredibly slow by any modern standards of professional effectiveness. And this comes then to, I'm skipping ahead, what you just said. When viewed at the fast scale of days and weeks, the famed scientists in Gribben's book seem spectacularly unproductive. Years would pass during which little progress was made on epic theories. Even during periods of active work, it might take months for important letters to induce a reply or for news of experiments to

Starting point is 00:47:41 make it across a fractured Europe. Now I'm going to ask you a follow-up question on that piece. I'm only going to read a little bit more. When we shift, however, to the slow scale of years, these same scientists suddenly become immensely productive. And last line I'll read, no one remembers Newton's lazy lockdowns, but his principia achieved immortality. And I'll ask a few questions and then feel free to tackle them or answer a different question however you like so the first is i would imagine some people hear this say that's great but we just live in different times like we are contending with different problems and a volume of stimulation that these people could not even conceive of. And had there been TikTok and Twitter and so on, perhaps Newton never would have achieved anything, which is maybe, maybe not.

Starting point is 00:48:31 And that's why I wanted to just note that I wanted to ask about important letters taking months to induce a reply and so on. They had some inbuilt friction in the system that has been removed in certain ways, and you could perhaps reintroduce it. So the question this leads me to, which is really the real question is, are there any people who come to mind for you who are more contemporary? They could be dead, but let's just say within the last 20 years, who stick out as being particularly good at slow productivity? It could be a category of person, but do we have any contemporary examples? There's a couple of places where we still see a lot of slow productivity. So one is fiction writers, and in particular, literary fiction

Starting point is 00:49:18 writers, but also some genre fiction writers. This is one of the few places where you're allowed to basically say, leave me alone. I'll come back when I have a book. And so if we look, for example, at Dave Eggers, the novelist Dave Eggers, he works in a house on a laptop that doesn't have internet connectivity. So there's no Wi-Fi. And he just basically works nine to five. He's pretty hard to reach. He talks to a couple of times a week. from what I understand. He does have assistants to deal with some of the logistical stuff, but he doesn't do much but work on his books. Another example is Neil Stevenson. He wrote that great essay years ago,

Starting point is 00:49:55 Why I'm a Bad Correspondent. Oh, so good. So good. It's so good. It's inspiring. But basically, his point was, he's mellowed out some, by the way. I remember going to see him do a book publicity tour back in Cambridge. And back then, that was the only time he would leave was to do publicity tours. And he seemed so upset that he had to be there. He just wanted to be writing. And he really didn't want nerd. He hated nerd questions about the canon of his books. bad correspondent was like, if I answer all your messages and go to all your conferences and answer all your emails, what will I have in the end? I'll have like a couple thousand messages I sent to individuals. If I instead don't do that and write a book that I'm really proud of, then maybe a million people are going to read that book. And so my impact will be bigger if I ignore your message so that I can be basically writing something for a lot of people. So John Grisham is another example. I went down this rabbit hole recently. He, not long ago, his longtime assistant retired and he didn't hire

Starting point is 00:50:50 anyone else because he didn't need one. He has created this life. From what I understand, he has created this life where basically his editor knows how to get in touch with him. Outside of his two weeks of book publicity, you can't reach him. He doesn't do things. I know he does do some things. He does do some political fundraising and stuff. But basically, he says, I write my books once a year. He said, I didn't need to rehire my assistant because not enough people knew my phone number for it to make any sense. So basically, he just set that up.

Starting point is 00:51:18 And he put his energy other places. He built a bunch of baseball fields and became the commissioner of the Little League in one of the towns he lived. So he put a lot of time into that. He's really into coaching. So that was inspiring. And then if you look at mathematicians and scientists that are really at the cutting edge, they're just getting after it. They're not on Twitter tweeting all day long for the most part, putting aside, let's say, public health stuff during COVID. But for the most part, the top mathematicians, the top theoretical computer scientists, I know the really leading edge lab scientists,

Starting point is 00:51:48 they're doing their thing. They're going for their Nobel. They're trying to get their fields. They're trying to do the work. And so that's another category, I think, that you see where this is not for me. So I take great inspiration from you. A novelist that really can just disappear. I collect stories, by the way of dual home professional writers it's always just they live in a city in the winter and then they have like a farm they go to in the summer it's just my dream one day so yeah there's people out there doing it and there's people like and like me like you you hinted at it before it's like the weirdest thing about me as far as anyone is concerned is that i've never had a social media

Starting point is 00:52:22 account and it turns out it's allowed like Today, everyone understands it. But until a minute ago, people thought I was literally insane. And it's fine. I had friends who knew what was going on in the world and sold a couple books. So I think we tell ourselves that we're stuck in this way of existence. We're not really stuck. We have a lot of options. Let me just add a few footnotes. Thank you for that. So Neil Stevenson, for people who don't know, first of all, N-E-A-L, Stevenson, S-T-E-P-H. And he'll pop up as soon as you type in N-E-A-L. But if you've heard the term metaverse, probably came from his novel Snow Crash, has written many 70s. My favorite is probably kryptonomicon which i think is a rare choice as a favorite but personally i think krypton well not in my world yeah computer scientists love krypton it's so prescient in so many ways i mean if you look at you know cryptographic cryptography leading into decentralized currencies and so on. He has spotted so many things around corners 10, 15, 20 years in advance. It is really quite mind-boggling.

Starting point is 00:53:32 Neil Stevenson's piece, Why I Am a Bad Correspondent, I'll put it in the show notes as well. I was going to include Why I Am a Bad Correspondent in this book that I was working on a few summers ago that I ended up canceling, which was The No Book. The placeholder title was The No Book. And I kept writing and writing and writing this book on how to say no and coming up with compelling reasons for why I should not write the book myself. So it was kind of this recursive situation where I ended up saying no to The No Book. But the why I'm a bad correspondent is outstanding. So we'll put that in the show notes. You mentioned writers, you mentioned scientists, and then one of the things that is perhaps weird or that people consider weird about you, and that is that you don't have social media accounts. So I'm going to ask you, just to let this bake for a minute, what other things people would consider unusual or strange. And you can take that in any direction you want. But about you, your workflow, how you work, how you live, anything. But before we get to that,

Starting point is 00:54:36 the no social media. So found a GQ piece on you and digital minimalism. And you mentioned that you had a tech company during the dot-com bubble. And you've joked that you originally didn't sign up for Facebook because maybe there was... I'll just read the quote. There was probably a little bit of petty jealousy, Newport says. Like, oh, why is this company so popular? I'm not going to give him the satisfaction of using his product. So did you commit? Is that just purely in jest? Or did you early on commit to that? And then it just worked for you, so you continued it? In other words, was it like a first principles decision or did it start off in a different way? Through the sands of time, I'm trying to remember because I had to go back and do some research. And I did confirm that Facebook arrived at my college in 2004. And I confirmed that was true. And that was the first major. There's things before that.

Starting point is 00:55:36 There's Friendster, et cetera. But those were more niche. There wasn't a real pressure to sign up for those. Right. My memory, and again, this is through the sands of time, is that there was two factors why I didn't sign up for Facebook. One was just what you were talking about. So Mark Zuckerberg was a contemporary of mine. He was a computer science student at Harvard at the time that I was a computer science student at Dartmouth. We had both started companies around the same

Starting point is 00:55:56 time. His has been a little bit more successful. So I think Facebook ended up a little bit more successful than Princeton Web Solutions, which is what I had been running. I mean, comparable if you just add seven zeros. So there was some of that because especially I remember like all the women I knew and they were like, oh, this is so fun. I want to be on there. Like, why are they interested in this guy's service? There's some of that. The other thing, and I think this is true because I have a really

Starting point is 00:56:25 strong memory of this. I have a weird, it's not a phobia, but an inability to do rank list. So if you ask me, hey, what's your favorite book, which I get asked a lot on podcasts, I don't know how to answer it. If you say, what's your two favorite movies? There's probably a name

Starting point is 00:56:41 for it. Our rapid fire questions are going to be great towards the end of this. Continue. Oh, I freeze. You'll see. You'll see. I'll freeze. I freeze on these all the time.

Starting point is 00:56:48 Or if I know they're coming, like I've done Ezra Klein show a few times. Sorry. Sorry. You're cutting out. I'm sorry. What was that? Yeah. Your, your connection's really bad.

Starting point is 00:56:57 They're all great. It's like enumeration, enumeracy, if I'm going to invent the word. And that was what early Facebook was. Your profile was a favorite quote, favorite movies, favorite books. It was a lot of Irving Goffman presentation of self-type sociology. You had to decide like, what am I going to say? My favorite movie is my favorite quote to try to create a presentation of self that was, and I can't do that. I can't. So I really remember as a combination of those two things, I was like, nah, this isn't for me. And I got to tell you, all it took was a few years of separation that suddenly I felt like Margaret Mead among the Polynesian islands,

Starting point is 00:57:31 because I was the only person not using this. And it was so interesting. From a remove, it was really interesting. And I was like, okay, I think I'm just going to run with this for a while because I got to tell you, from the outside, it seemed more and more absurd. Not that the services seemed absurd in isolation. The thing that seemed absurd, my memory, was this presumption of universality, that these are technologies that everyone has to use and it's weird if you don't. I thought they seemed kind of niche, like they're kind of cool. And if you're into technology or Web 2.0, maybe it's interesting. I had nothing against them, but I was really wary about this rising presumption that everyone has to use it.

Starting point is 00:58:08 And I'm an internet nerd from the early days. And I'm like, I don't know that we should consolidate the internet into two or three companies where they built their own private shadow version of the internet that they can control. We already have the internet. Do we have to use these private walled garden versions of the internet? And this idea that it was weird not to use it, that was the thing that really probably made me an advocate in the skeptical calm among social media. It was not that I thought what was happening on Twitter was bad. It was, why is it such a big deal that I don't use it? That's really what pushed me into a place of something weird's going on in our culture. Thank God your personal Everest is putting together lists of favorite books and movies. If you hadn't had that problem, who knows where you'd be?

Starting point is 00:58:51 You'd be, you could be just another troll on Reddit or something. So that's a good thing that you had that friction. We're going to shift gears a little bit because I want to continue to focus on the unusual and unusual, not in any sense of impracticality, but uncommon, uncommon things that you do or don't do. What is your roles and values document? Do you still have a roles and values document? I do. Yeah. It's part of what I pitch. I pitch this multi-scale approach to planning things out. And when I say pitch, I mean, you know, like on my podcast or my articles, roles and values are at the top. And this comes right out of Stephen Covey,

Starting point is 00:59:30 Sharpening the Saw, Seven Habits. Here are the different roles in my life. And here are the values that define how I want to execute each of these roles. There's a professor, family, parent, right? You know, whatever the writer, whatever the role, community member, and here are my values. And there they are. And I look at them and I refine them and you have to think about it. And then in my scheme, you look at those when you then create your plan for the current quarter, because you want to be in align with your values when you make that plan. And then you look at your quarterly plan when you create your plan for the week, because you want what you do this week to be in line with what your bigger vision is for the quarter. And then when you build your plan for each day,

Starting point is 01:00:06 figuring out what to do with your time, that's influenced by your weekly plan. And there you have a thread that connects everything you're doing indirectly, but without any breaks into links all the way back up to your values. So what I'm doing right now is a multi-link connection all the way back up to here's the things I care about. Let's get into some specifics, more specifics here. You've written very well on, and I'm going to get the phrasing imperfect, but you've written very well on how many meetings are created or scheduled because people otherwise don't have good systems for keeping track of things. In other words, they're afraid of forgetting to do something and therefore they just drop a meeting in the calendar

Starting point is 01:00:51 with no clear agenda because at least it functions to prevent the sand from slipping through the fingers. You have this document, the roles and values document. If I were to create a roles and values document, say in Google Drive a roles and values document say in google drive i would be super excited i would focus on it i might look at it the next day but if i did not have some system for forcing me to look at it evaluate it revise it it would become lost very very quickly i would forget i ever put it together So could you just walk us through how you ensure that doesn't happen for you personally with the roles and values documents and then furthermore with the quarterly plan and so on? What does your workflow or your flow look like for those things?

Starting point is 01:01:40 Well, I'm a big believer in what I call rooted productivity. There has to be somewhere, I call it the root document, that says, these are the core big picture systems that I execute in my life. And therefore, the only commitment I really have to make is that I will follow this root document, that this is the commitment. Either I'm someone who follows this root document or my life is chaos. And then that root document is what lays out what I'm talking about here. It lays out that multi-scale planning, that these are the types of planning I do. There's a few other things that lays out. It lays out that I do David Allen style full capture. I'm a big believer about not having open loops. Sorry to interrupt, but I will. So do you read that every morning? Is this like your boot up sequence? It's internalized now, but it's written down. And my listeners do the same thing. Like we put it in a directory, you call it root, and you put all your planning documents

Starting point is 01:02:33 in that directory. And you don't have to look at it every day once you internalize it pretty quickly. But just knowing it's there and you can assess yourself as, am I following that or am I not? And it's a binary. And then everything else comes out of it. So we call it a root because then the tree of all these different systems and stuff grow out of it. And then you might be really nitpicking with all these other small little systems, but they all eventually connect back to the root. And to me, that's a really big deal that the biggest decision you make, if you're going to live a deep life, like

Starting point is 01:03:02 productivity in isolation, I don't even know what that means, who cares. But if you're going to live a deep life, productivity in isolation, I don't even know what that means. Who cares? But if you're going to live a deep life, the ultimate original commitment is, I'm going to commit to discipline in the sense of things I am going to do on a regular basis because they matter even if I don't feel like it. And that is the biggest binary zero-to-one flip that happens in crafting a life. What you commit to, that evolves over time. You might find like, this is a bad idea. I've been trying to whatever, write down notes on a thing once a day, and that's not really working. And it all evolves over time.

Starting point is 01:03:33 But the zero to one commitment is, do I have some sort of structure I'm committing to with the goal of making my life deeper, or am I winging it? That's the zero to one bit that I think matters more than any other. Are there any particular levers, actions, anything that have helped facilitate that for you personally, sort of disproportionately? So I'll share a few things for myself, which are, I think, sometimes embarrassingly primitive for me to even talk about because some of my readers and listeners just imagine I wake up every morning with this mental karate chop and just matrix my way through the day with all these sophisticated systems.

Starting point is 01:04:16 And that is not really how it plays out. And I will say, though, that there are a few things one is looking at my calendar on an annual basis and trying to block out extended periods of time for being offline and by extended that's one two or three weeks and ensuring that I have hopefully something of at least a week, once a quarter. So I'm actually leaving tomorrow for three weeks off the grid and I will have no Wi-Fi and no phone for three weeks. And that's important to me on a multitude of levels. Number one is it allows me to check in and see how comfortable I am with myself when I am not over busied. It provides me with time to reflect without the ability to indulge in the temptation to go on Twitter or check something. So I don't need to rely on self-control. In other words, I'm sort of saved from myself. It allows my

Starting point is 01:05:19 system physiologically time to kind of reboot and recover. And it also forces me to put in place or revisit systems that allow me to be gone for three weeks. So as an example, figuring out right now, and yesterday and today that my usual checks and balances with team members and assistants for wire approvals isn't going to work while I'm gone. So we need to upgrade those systems so that we don't have any issues because my assistant, unless there is an emergency that necessitates a satellite phone, is not going to be able to reach me. And then those systems outlive the time off the grid. That's an example of one thing that I do that seems simple, it is simple, in theory at least, that has this huge spectrum of ripple effects. And there's some other things that come to mind, but I'd love to know for you, if you're trying to focus on this deep life and rooted productivity, which levers or actions have

Starting point is 01:06:21 been particularly impactful for you that come to mind? Well, I mean, I think periodic reflection plays a critical role for me too. As a professor, there's a seasonality that's built into my work, which I wish could be widely replicated. So jealous. Yeah. I mean, I suppose I could do it, but man, it's such a great, such a wonderful thing. Everyone who runs their own business who is entrepreneurial where you have some flexibility. I think you should integrate seasonality into what you do. I have a big believer in seasonality in all scales, by the way, busy and not busy parts

Starting point is 01:06:55 of your day, busier and non-busier days of the week, busier and non-busier months in the season. I mean, I think at all scales, we need it. Being pegged all the time, filling your time all the time is not healthy for us. So for me, there's the December break and the summer break. So December 6th is my last lecture on campus. That's when the semester ends. And for all of the time after that, between then and when the semester begins again, each week I've already blocked off one full day off from no meetings, no phone calls, no podcast recordings, no nothing, plus an additional half day off for what I call adventure work,

Starting point is 01:07:31 where typically I'll go to trails outside somewhere scenic. Sometimes I'll go to the museums in downtown DC to just think about one problem in a awe inspiring or unusual location. I've already blocked those days off because I want to get the most out of December. And then when I get to the summer, with professors, it's a little bit weird. We're not really paid during the summer. What you do, at least at a research university,

Starting point is 01:07:53 is you get summer salary from research grants, and that's how you cover the two months in the summer. And at some point after tenure, when I didn't have to worry about that so much, is I decided I'm not going to take research grants for the summer. I'm just going to take the summers off. I'll fill in the gaps in income with writing or what have you. And so I actually literally am not working for the university for two months out of the

Starting point is 01:08:15 summer. And that's really critical for me. That type of seasonality is probably one of the biggest advertisements for the professor life that I could give. What do you do on your days off? It's not clear what on or off means for me. I read a lot. I think a lot. I take a lot of notes. For me, a day off, what I care about is a day where I don't have to be interacting professionally with other people. To me, that's what off is. I don't have to go on Zoom. I don't have to go in

Starting point is 01:08:43 for a meeting. I'm not in front of an audience. I'm in full control of my time. I don't actually like not doing things when I have control of my time. I love to do things where I have complete autonomy over my time. I'm going to go for a walk and think this through. I'm going to go work on a book proposal. I'm going to read this book. Then when my kids get home from school, we're going to go do something else. And so for me, a day off is a day where I have full autonomy over what I do. The blank calendar day to me is one of the more glorious sites. If you really want to hear the chorus of angels, forget solving a math proof or getting a sentence to work right. Seeing a day on the calendar where there's nothing in Gmail, I think Gmail should have a feature where that just sort of pulsates an angelic glow. If you see the little feedback loop. I'm looking for some inspiration. So these half days of adventure work at inspiring or cool locations, I don't want you to dox yourself, but what are some locations you've used or types of locations and why did you choose them? Because even if you say museum, if you're in a city,

Starting point is 01:09:52 there are multiple museums you could choose. So how did you choose a particular place? And then when you are working on some larger problem or project, what does that actually look like? Is it just pen and paper? Is it laptop where you've knocked out the Wi-Fi? If you could give maybe one or two real world examples, that would be super helpful. I think a lot about location. So if I'm down at the mall in DC, for example, there's a couple of different games I'll play. Sometimes I'll go to the Botanical Gardens. The National Botanical Gardens, it's a giant greenhouse. And so it's just, it resets your whole context because you're in a tropical climate with palm trees and there's these paths that go through it and there's benches and you're going to get really sweaty. It's very

Starting point is 01:10:39 humid, but I'll go there. Sometimes I'll go to the National Gallery because there's a certain type of connection to history, classical antiquity mindset you get if you walk through and here's a Leonardo. You're looking at, especially like the Italian Renaissance floor. And then there's an underground cafeteria at the National Gallery that connects to East and the West Wings in which there's essentially no cell phone reception. So then you go down there and you get coffee from the coffee place and there's this waterfall that you can see through the glass. And then hiking, there's the Patoxic National Wildlife Refuge is not far from me. You can go there and you can hike there. There's the Rachel Carson Greenway that used to be closer to my old house. And I would hike the

Starting point is 01:11:19 same thing every week. And so I got really good at the change of seasons. It was a real thorough move, like noticing week by week, how things were changing and what was happening with the leaves. And I had names for all the places and I would do the same hike again and again. And this is all pen and paper. It's me, notebook, a Uniball micro 0.5 millimeter roller pin. Oh, a 0.5 guy. I like that. I like that. I'm torn between the 0.7 and the 0.5 millimeter roller pin. Oh, a 0.5 guy. I like that. I like that. You know, I'm torn between the 0.7 and the 0.5. Well, the bleeding, I don't know.

Starting point is 01:11:53 I don't know, man. I think if you're using the 0.7, you're going to start to get some bleed when you're... I think I'm a masochist. Also, if I'm doing CS work, I'm doing math. And so there's a lot of little Greek. If you're drawing in epsilon or you're doing exponents or you need a 0.5. My notepads are so full of exponents and epsilons. I don't even know what to do with myself.

Starting point is 01:12:14 So you have your 0.5 millimeter exponent ready pen. You have your pad. You go to the botanical gardens. You're drinking coffee. You're sweating your face off. What type of work are you doing? What does it look like for that half day? If we're looking over your shoulder, what's happening there? Either I'm trying to solve a particular proof. So if I have my computer scientist hat on, I'm trying to solve a proof. It's literally, I do a lot of kind of graph theoretical stuff

Starting point is 01:12:47 and you're drawing graphs, you're doing a quote, you're just trying to make it work or at least make aspects of it work or figure out why it doesn't work. I'm drawing equations, I'm drawing graphs. Or if I have my writer hat on,

Starting point is 01:12:57 I'm trying to crack structure. So writing has to have, for me, writing of course has to happen with a computer and it's a whole other thing but i put a huge amount of time in figuring out the structure of the ideas that i want to write and especially if i'm working on something like a book proposal i mentioned before it takes me six to twelve months again and again you're going to find me somewhere with a notebook

Starting point is 01:13:18 just like i was doing this morning right before i got on the call with you here just writing trying to structure out index index, outline. Ah, it's not quite working. How does this fit together? What about this format for the book? I'll sometimes buy a dedicated notebook for a book idea. It's a trick of mine. I do the same thing.

Starting point is 01:13:34 Yeah. Dedicated notebook. That's what I'm writing. Yeah. So it can be one of those two things. What do you use for writing books? Do you have a preferred software? As you're talking about indexing and playing with table of contents and structure, I have found Scrivener just to be a lifesaver in that department. I'm sure there are a million other options, but I've used Scrivener. I haven't tried it yet for a book.

Starting point is 01:14:07 We'll see about that. But I definitely, for all of my articles, all my New Yorker work, all that Scrivener, I love it. Why was that the catalyst to switch to Scrivener? New Yorker writing is very dense. It's like dense in information. So you're citing a huge number of different, you know, you saw it in the article I wrote about you. There's like a huge number of things you have to cite. And so double pane feature of scrivener is an absolute lifesaver like okay i can just grab the article i'm citing and it's on the right pane and then i can quote from it directly on the left pane or i can take a different section of the article and

Starting point is 01:14:38 put it on the right pane so that the left pane i can properly reference it and then you just jump into composition mode when you're, so you know, you're pulling in information and kind of getting a draft of it. And then you shoot to composition mode, full screen, best composition mode of any tool out there. And then your word polishing, and then you jump back. It's a great tool. I've loved it. I've been a fan for ever since I started using it. Just for people who don't have context to add a little bit more. So Scrivener for me, the reason I began using it is that prior to that, I'd use Word. And if you're using Word and you have, let's just say,

Starting point is 01:15:13 as in my books, which are both long and have many components, if you have 27 chapters and you have 15 open documents, because you also have research documents and reference documents, your computer will cease to function and your brain will cease to function. But with Scrivener, at least the way that I use it, you have these stripped down format minimal documents that can all be looked at within a single application. And you can format it in different ways. A lot of screenwriters or playwrights use Scrivener. I think that's initially how it came onto my radar. I had not seen anyone use it for nonfiction at that point. But if you imagine your screen cut right down the middle on the left-hand side, you have this table of contents. It's the easiest way

Starting point is 01:16:04 to think about it and i will immediately break my book into three or four sections even though i may not even have labels for the sections and then i decide which documents will go into each of those sections and you can just drag them around so you can play with the order You can create another section as an example. And then you have research at the bottom of that left-hand pane. On the right side, if you split that in half horizontally, what I'm working on, this is just how I do it. What I'm working on will be in the top right pane. And then below that, the bottom right pane, I will have whatever research doc I'm referring

Starting point is 01:16:42 to since my stuff is also very, very factually dense and requires citations and references and so on. And by doing that, you don't have to click back and forth between tabs or between programs, between documents. It's a really, really elegant solution. And I hope you're not offended by me focusing on some of the tactical stuff, but I'm curious in the thought process behind some of your decision-making, right? That's much more interesting than just the output of the decision. It's like, okay, how did you arrive at this? So when I was reading about your quarterly plan, sample week plan, et cetera. In the end of this blog post, and that was from January of 2021, and I don't know if this is still the case,

Starting point is 01:17:31 but I'll just read this last paragraph. To be clear, most of my obligations on my plate exist as concrete items in my task lists, which as my podcast listeners know, I maintain using Trello. But most of the projects that move the needle in my career, working on a research paper, writing a major article, never get discretized. I'm not even sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly into bite-sized actions on a list. I instead treat them with the level of intention that their formidable difficulty deserves. So the Trello use, I've used Trello. I like Trello. I tend to use, I've used both Trello and Asana. I'm curious how you've ended up arriving at Trello. Trello has been my tool of choice recently for organizing tasks. And the way I actually use it is I do a different board for different

Starting point is 01:18:19 professional roles. So I have a writer board, I have a board for CS research. So my role is a researcher and then a board for the teaching and administrative pieces of being a professor. So there are three separate roles. They have separate boards. The columns that I then divide those boards into represent different categories. I have a column for, I got to process this. There's a David Allen idea where I need to put this down somewhere, this thing, but I don't really even know what this thing means I need to do.

Starting point is 01:18:49 It's, you know, hey, we need to recruit someone. Like, okay, I don't know what that means, but I don't want to, so let me just write that down under to process. Like another hack I do is anyone I meet with on a regular basis,

Starting point is 01:19:01 they'll have their own column on the particular board. So if anything comes up, I need to ask them. I actually just put it on a card and put it under their meeting column. And then when I meet with them, I just go and boom, boom, boom, go through it. Then typically I'll have a column for like, okay, definitely this week this needs to happen. So I, when I go through my weekly planning, I'll move things to that. And so I like that, that different roles, different columns. And I like that the virtual cards and all these tools

Starting point is 01:19:23 can hold a lot of information. So I'm a big believer that all the relevant files, all the relevant notes, if someone emailed me something about this task that's relevant, you can just copy and paste this all onto the virtual back or attach it to the card. It actually is also an information management system, not just a task management system. That's been what I've been using. And then typically, I really go through those all at the beginning of the week. But when I build out my weekly plan,

Starting point is 01:19:50 I'm often identifying off those boards, this is what I really want to get done this week. And then I'm often executing largely off that weekly plan. Though I should, let me, actually, Tim, I'm going to give a broader context here because I'm kind of a weird guy.

Starting point is 01:20:02 I talk about a lot of things. So I'm going to attempt to try to put all the weird things I do into some sort of context because we've covered a lot of territory. To un-weird the weird. Yeah. Or just to like illustrate the weird. There's these two different main hats I wear. So there's a hat where I'm a computer scientist and I publish papers on mainly like theory of distributed systems. Then there's a sort of journalistic public commentary critique type writing. This is like my articles for the New Yorker, my New York Times op-eds, my books mainly and my books, especially recently have really been about tech and culture and their impact, though they have a real practical aspect too.

Starting point is 01:20:40 But then I often also talk about productivity largely because it's just people are kind of interested in how I do these other things. So it's not necessarily like a tier one topic that I write about, though I kind of do because deep work, I think, talks about this for sure. But then also we talk a lot on my blog and in my newsletter, on my podcast about what we're talking about here because I don't think we talk enough about this in general. So people are out there, well, how do I organize my aspirations? How do I structure a life to be deeper and not get lost in the noise, but not be overscheduled? And so we geek out a lot on productivity as well. So just to give, I don't know if that's useful, but a landscape of, I do these two big things, but then I have to care a lot about productivity

Starting point is 01:21:17 to do these big two things. So then I talk about what do I do to make sure that I can still write an academic paper and a New Yorker piece and a book and whatever? How does that all fit into my life? Because I care a lot about it. So I don't know if that's useful, but that's my lay of the weird landscape for the various things I do. We are going to talk about, say, for instance, a 30-day digital minimalism experiment. So I do want to dig into that. Before we get to it. We've got in 2019, the artist writer Jenny O'Dell, is that right? Helped kind of start the trend, which we're going to talk about when she published a book titled How to Do Nothing, subtitled Resisting the Attention Economy. So that becomes a New York Times bestseller. Barack Obama, one of his favorite

Starting point is 01:22:01 books of 2019. Then it was followed, I guess, a year later, following spring by Celeste Headley. I'm not sure if I'm saying that correctly, but Do Nothing, subtitle, How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving. Then you have Anne Helen Peterson's Can't Even, How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. Maybe a little less inspiring sounding. i'm always curious about titling decisions in the thought process behind it maybe i mean it could be a fantastic book but i haven't read any of these and then devin price's laziness does not exist these are i wouldn't say entirely new in the sense that you can go back to thoreau or Emerson, and certainly you can go thousands of years back

Starting point is 01:22:45 to Hakuin, and you can find discussions of overwork, busyness, laziness versus contemplation. Are there any books, and I know I'm pushing on your weakness here in terms of listing, so I'm not asking you to list, but are there any books in the last five or 10 years from, broadly speaking, this kind of category that really stand out for you? It's an interesting category, first of all. Like I sometimes call it like the anti-productivity category. That's not quite the accurate label, but it's a really interesting category. So, you know, my book came out the same month as How to Do Nothing. So me and Ginny were paired. And so in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review,

Starting point is 01:23:29 The Ringer, there's all these articles that came out where it was always talking about those two books together. So I definitely had a close experience. Price's book is great. I blurbed that book. Celeste Headley's book is great. I interviewed her for The New Yorker in a piece I did. I would say that what I would add more recently, that book just done really well. And I think, and I'll get into a reason why I think it did was Oliver Berkman's new book, which is maybe it's called 4,000 hours. I might have the number wrong.

Starting point is 01:23:56 Oliver Berkman. Yeah. Yeah. He's a British writer and I blurbed that book because it's great. Anyways, and the subtitle is something like time management for mortals or something like this but it killed it the book did great it came out a few months ago or maybe over the summer i have a bad sense of time but the the number of hours i'm getting the number wrong probably something was a thousand four thousand weeks time management

Starting point is 01:24:19 for mortals oliver weeks berkman within that's with an E-B-U-R-K-E-M-A-N. Yeah. 4,000 weeks time management for mortals. And he writes a column for the Guardian. So 4,000 weeks is how many weeks you have to live. I think that really hit and it really hit in particular because it was introducing a values-driven productivity. You could think about it. It's about all that really matters when it comes to organizing your time or being organized is what you're trying to do is you only have so much time and you want to do things with it that's useful, meaningful, and effective. And to just be busy for the sake of being busy isn't good.

Starting point is 01:24:59 I think all of those books make that argument. I think they're all pushing back on the like an empty crushing busyness i am all the stuff i'm doing it's always frenetic but i'm papering over the existential void i don't want to stare down by doing all of this when what i probably need to do is stare into that void for a while wait until the vertigo goes away and then get up and actually start building something real and i think they're all touching on that because there's this whole sort of fractured sense of overload that's happening right now. We have all these different things coming together. You have like the digital distraction piece, which obviously I'm sort of associated with

Starting point is 01:25:36 is really a symptom of the bigger problem. So yes, our phones can be a palliative to this existential despair, but the despair is there. And the despair is not going to be fixed by just getting rid of the palliative and saying, let's not use Instagram anymore. It's still going to be there. We're using these things all the time because it's more palatable to be active and busy all the time than sometimes to face what's hard about what's going on in our lives or the world. And I think all of these books are picking up on that. And we need to slow the hell down, figure out what we really want to do, do these things

Starting point is 01:26:14 at a reasonable pace, slow productivity, not fast, and face the hard stuff and make the good stuff better. All of these books, I think, are getting at that main thing. They all just have different angles. So each of them have a different approach they take to this issue. And that's like its own interesting topic. I mean, everyone comes at this from different ways. Berkman comes at it from like a humanist way. I kind of come at it from a humanist way too in digital minimalism. What does that mean to, let's say in Oliver's case, to come at it from a humanist perspective? What does that mean? Like from a perspective of sort of trying to maximize or improve the flourishing of the sort

Starting point is 01:26:50 of unique and cherished being that is the humans, right? Like as a human, you're an important, unique entity to be cherished and should think about crafting a life in which you flourish. That's the humanist. So it's kind of these lives of indiscriminate busyness where I'm just overwhelmed all the time and distracted in every moment is you're diminishing your humanity. There's a humanist approach where Anne Helen Peterson

Starting point is 01:27:11 might come at this more with a sort of post-liberal, anti-capitalist type approach that this is productivity culture is really just part of the superstructure that supports the base of exploitative capital extraction. It's an economic argument.

Starting point is 01:27:23 Just to take these different arguments, Celeste comes at it from more of a cultural... Odell comes at it with a mix of humanist and economic and artistic. And I think that's why that's a phenomenal book. I think it's very smart, very original. And so there's just these different takes that are all coming at it and all add something, but they're all getting at the same underlying issue of this sort of sense of crushing, overwhelming busyness. You know, I was thinking if this New Yorker gig CS professorial life doesn't work out for you, you could actually work on some sobering children's books along the lines of Dr. Seuss and the first one could be called The Despair Is There. Let's get these kids sobered up quick.

Starting point is 01:28:14 It's only going to get worse, buddy. Get ready. So looking at that through, and this may not be the best segue, but I'm going to give it a shot anyway. We were talking about the deep life, and I'm going to lead into this through that. I'm looking at a post of yours from 2020, and it says, I strive to divide my focused attention among four categories, community, family, friends, et cetera, craft, work and quality leisure. I love that term, quality leisure, constitution, health, in parentheses. And last, contemplation, and then in parentheses, matters of the soul. So I'm going to ask you, not the second, but I'm going to ask you about that fourth one,

Starting point is 01:28:54 contemplation, matters of the soul. And the way that we're going to move into that is through John Newport. So who is John Newport? Well, it's my father's father, my grandfather, a Baptist theologian and scholar and one of the only of his era Baptist apologists, meaning basically someone who, he was Southern Baptist, who was very interested in actually going out there and encountering other worldviews, understanding other approaches to things, and then trying to make a case. Let me make a case for the Baptist Christian worldview. Let me actually go out there and make my case.

Starting point is 01:29:33 As opposed to saying the non-apologist approach of batten down the hatches. We have it right. I don't want to hear about what else is going on there. My grandfather was someone who, he hung out with Carl Jung. He would walk with Heschel in Central Park when Heschel was still at the seminary there. He was at Harvard for a year hanging out with Niebuhr, right? I mean, he was out there exposing himself to every interesting idea and worldview and approach that's out there. He would want to understand them deeply and then try to understand why the advantages of his through comparison and not to get too philosophical but it was a sort of

Starting point is 01:30:09 socratic dialect oh this question is very much a philosophical question so i let's let's not but he would find that you you would get more strength than what you which is a big thing i took from him he was alive till i right around i mean, he died basically on his way to my high see them, go hang out with Heschel, go hang out with Niebuhr, go hang out with Tillich. You wrote a book on Paul Tillich. Go hang out with Jung and really understand. Who was Paul Tillich? Just so I know, I'll admit I don't know that name. He was a Christian apologist. He was like a Christian theologian that did a lot of, sort of of the same rough era as C.S. Lewis, but was a little more

Starting point is 01:31:05 academic than Lewis. So it was like very smart apologia, like really trying to explain the Christian worldview. So let me pause for a second. So apologist, I would imagine for some people, has a sort of a negative connotation to it, but it doesn't seem like that's how you're using this word. Would you mind just explaining the use of that term? There's a technical definition that I'm using. So the technical definition of an apologist is just that you're someone who is out there making a case for the thing that you believe in the effort of explaining it to other people. It doesn't have to be evangelical in the general sense of that term in terms of you're trying to convince people, but at least you're

Starting point is 01:31:47 trying to encounter other people and explain why the thing that you're trying to explain is right. So I mean, a lot of what writing you do or I do is technically would be apologia. If I write a book- I'm a productivity apologist. Yeah. I'm a productivity apologist. Yeah. Like I'm a concentration apologist. That's a confusing term. Do you have any idea how that became like the etymological reasons? Came out of theology. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:32:15 I think it might have. I don't want to talk out of school. I might be wrong about that. You're right though. It's not in common parlance. So I should advocate maybe. But the main point is in the Southern Baptist church at that time, you wouldn't see a lot of apologia because you didn't want to go out there and encounter other worldviews. I just don't even want to know about that.

Starting point is 01:32:34 And I think we see a lot of that today, I mean, outside of the religious context. And so we talk about this a lot on my podcast, but don't be afraid of ideas or worldviews or approaches or philosophies that seem different than what you believe in. You're not going to get tricked out of your convictions or believing something that's false. You actually strengthen your understanding of the world and therefore strengthen your own convictions by encountering other ideas that are well-formed. And that's at the core of the intellectual life for the last however many centuries, we want to say it, that's sort of a core operation and he personified that so if we look at the contemplation bucket and then parentheses matters of the soul so this is one of your four categories of focused attention

Starting point is 01:33:17 what does that mean to you how do you focus on contemplation and matters of the soul? this doesn't seem good. Certain behaviors you see in a movie, the villain, and it hits this thing inside. That's not right. You're watching Secession on HBO and you're like, all of my moral intuitions are telling me that these are bad people. Don't be like these people, right? You know what I mean? And we get on the other side too. You encounter the inspiring, the person who sacrifices or what have you, and it just hits something inside and you feel it, right? And so you can call these intimations. John Haidt would call these moral intuitions. There's different terminologies for it. Critical, I think, and this is obviously by I, I mean like all of philosophy, but critically, I think, and all of theology for that matter too, is figuring out how

Starting point is 01:34:20 to actually structure a life around these intimations, a life that pushes you more towards the things that just instinctually hit you as this is right and good and I just know it and away from the things and the behaviors and the approaches to life that just hit you at a gut level is this is not right, this is not good. This is what philosophy does, this is what religion does. If we think about it from a big picture perspective is it is ideas evolved over time through experience and argument that essentially help you align your life with the things that the moral intuitions that are positive and away from the ones that are negative it's why you shouldn't be quick for example to dismiss a field of philosophy or religion as i can just figure this out from scratch or it's

Starting point is 01:35:01 talking about mythologies that i can't empirically validate in the world. What you really have there is a moral technology, something that's been evolved over time to align your life with these intuitions that you feel. And that's the contemplation bucket, is you better be doing something along those lines, because just winging it is not going to matter. And so, I spend a lot of time trying to think about that bucket. Some details of how I tackle that may be as personal, some are not. I engage a lot in philosophy. There's religious engagements in my life. I'm not formally practicing and associated with a particular religion, but that's also something that might not, I don't think that's necessarily a permanent state. I think there is a lot of intuition and brilliant human moral engineering in religions. Jordan Peterson. And I'm going to, I'm sure, misrepresent both sides. So sorry, guys. I'm

Starting point is 01:36:05 just going to kind of paraphrase. But in general, Jordan refers to mythology and the Bible as moral frameworks that have been time-tested, which is not to say, I don't think he would say that we should base all of our lives on Cain and Abel or something like that. But the fact of the matter is that as humans, we've had a whole lot of trial and error over a very, very long period of time. Certain stories have struck a chord and stuck, and maybe there's value in those stories. And then again, sorry, Sam, I'm sure I'm misrepresenting, but if Sam is perhaps arguing that you should start from first principles, you do not need theology or religion, but can build a moral code and framework for yourself, I think Jordan's response to that would

Starting point is 01:36:58 be you're expecting too much of people. People are just going to have too much trouble doing that. They want something out of the box that is good enough to be helpful. So what I'd love to ask you is, and I spend a good amount of time thinking about these things for myself, just for myself, not for anything else, but my life. And I would love to know what this does for you. Maybe we could start there. What is the need that it satisfies or the unease that it quells to have contemplation slash matters of the soul as one of the four main categories? Maybe we could start there, and I'd just love to hear you expand in any way you feel comfortable. In that particular division, my instinct is that Jordan is probably more on the right path. And I'll tell you a book that really was striking to me that I think gets right at this. There's this great book called All Things Shiny. And it was written by a philosopher from Harvard and a philosopher from Berkeley, Dreyfus, and I forgot the other name.

Starting point is 01:38:05 But they talk about this issue, right? So this was the central issue that this was what Nietzsche was worried about. Like, we are now going to have to create morality from scratch and that's not going to go well, right? And obviously, Jordan is very keyed

Starting point is 01:38:16 into this because his early interest was in the rise of totalitarian regimes that occurred in the 20th century in that context. And spoiler alert, things did not go well. But there's this lament in that book about, it's looking at these prior periods in human history where they used the word the sacred, but they talked about life was just infused with the sacred.

Starting point is 01:38:41 And in ancient Greece, the classical Greece, they really did feel like the gods, the Olympian gods would inhabit you. Ares would inhabit you. And that was to feel like these feelings you would have was literally gods inhabiting you. And in the medieval Christians, everything had a place and a sacredness to it, even objects in the world. And then that all went away. And they opened the book with David Foster Wallace and basically use him as personifying, I can just figure this all out from scratch from first principles. And they use them as it's a really poignant but tragic story because, of course, it's a story that ends up with Foster Wallace's suicide. And they use that to set up the difficulty of trying to build everything up from scratch. And especially when, I guess that's what Jordan likes to point out,

Starting point is 01:39:34 is we have these intuitions that are really deep and incredibly powerful. And Jordan was very inspired by Jung. So he's really drawing from Carl Jung's J-U-N-G, his archetypes, his idea that there's the collective unconscious that has these archetypes that all humans have. They have a deep history pre-culture. And our myths, the reason why certain myths resonate is they're pressing these buttons. And those buttons, what he would call archetypes, Jung, I think of as intuitions. And that we have these technologies for sort of, and I'm using technology, not digital or electronic, but philosophical and theological technologies. Like it really, it aligns your life to these things. We're meant to be aligned to them. Just like our sense of thirst means we really need to drink

Starting point is 01:40:14 water. We shouldn't just ignore that and say, is there another way for me to achieve like the proper isotonic balance in my bloodstream? Like actually the instinct is to drink water. All of those things have been very effective to me, you know, with an A, effective in the sense of like affecting me. And so I think there's something to that is that, I mean, a life that aligns with these intuitions can be very resilient and rich, and then we just have personal experience. And, you know, some people get this through philosophy and some people get this through religion, but they're drawing from the same internal hooks. And so I get very nervous when I think about the challenge, the Nacian, that's a word, challenge of going back to first principle. I mean, we tried, I mean, this was all a philosophy tried to do this

Starting point is 01:40:56 for a couple of hundred years, like what Kant was trying to do. I mean, we all, we tried it. This is very difficult. And I know Sam disagrees and he's smarter than me. So like, you know, let's listen to him maybe more, more than we listened to me, but that's where I fall on that. If that makes sense. Yeah. Well, you know, it's, um, this is a topic of kind of infinite interest to me and I'd love to keep batting things around for a little bit if you're open to it. So I actually have all things shining downstairs, all things shining subtitle, reading the Western classics to find meaning in a secular age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly. I was gifted this book, and you would think based on the title and how much of a stoicism and philosophy nerd I am

Starting point is 01:41:37 that I would have just taken to this like a fished water. I found it very challenging to read. And I think perhaps it was just all of the references to Moby Dick and the Odyssey. It could have been that. I'm not sure, but I found it very dense in a way that made it hard for me to at least process at the time that I was gifted it. And I'm just going to mention a few things kind of in no particular order. The fact of the matter is I don't know Jordan Peterson well. We've spoken before and I've had him on the podcast, but I don't know him well. I would say I know Sam well and have spent a lot of time around Sam. I use his waking up app. I've read many of his books and we've just spent a lot of time in person. Sam by and large seems to me to be a very happy at peace guy, right? So that's interesting. Now, is that Sam out of the box? How much of that is nature versus nurture and

Starting point is 01:42:38 training versus default? I can't say, I have no idea. But he has managed, it seems, to thread the needle and create meaning and frameworks for himself that really seem to work well. And certainly there are counterexamples. And when I see a book like All Things Shining, do you know the backgrounds of the two co-authors? In other words, were they backing into the book from the perspective of people with religious upbringings, or do you not know the background? I mean, I know their background. I think Sean was, Kelly was Dorrance's advisee or some such, but I don't know. I think they're, because they end up in a non-religious place, by the way, right?

Starting point is 01:43:29 So, if you get to the end of that book where they end up basically saying craftsmanship, craft is the solution to re-injecting sacredness in a secular world. So, they do not end up with saying what we need is religion or stoicism or particular philosophy end up saying craft is partially our savior because when you're trying to do something at a high level you have a rigid framework of value that if you're a wheel right some wood is better than others regardless of what other system you've created it's just an external reality this wood is better than that wood and it's a way to actually get some firmament so they end up saying you should focus on basically your work or you know craft and and like a and taste and quality and and which is actually maybe not that far from where sam is so maybe yeah i think it's a really interesting point yeah yeah maybe they ended up converging i mean it's also very not to paint with too broad a brush but having lived in japan and having gone to school there

Starting point is 01:44:25 and speaking and reading and writing japanese i feel like i have some credibility to say that it's all it's also a very japanese or a very prevalent sort of japanese sentiment and predisposition is to focus on the sort of meticulous attention to detail within craft as a means of creating the sacred. Whether you look at the tea ceremony, you look at Kyudo, which is the Japanese archery, there are many, many different sort of instantiations, if that's the right word, of this throughout the culture, which is by and large, not always, but by and large, can be experienced through a secular or religious lens in Japan. Japan's a fascinating example. I can't remember the exact expression. It's in Japanese, so I'm doing a terrible job of mangling a translation here, but it's something along the lines of we are Buddhist when we're born, Christian when we get married, and Shinto when we die.

Starting point is 01:45:36 I might actually have it in the exact opposite, but Shinto when we're born, Christian when we're married, and Buddhist when we die. But what comes to mind for me when looking at all of these different approaches to trying to check the box of contemplation or matters of the soul is that, and I'd love to hear what you think of this because there's no right and wrong, how would I prove this, is that humans really do not like the discomfort of uncertainty and the paradox of choice presented by a life that is largely messy and outside of our control. And therefore, we want frameworks and rules so that we constrain the universe of things that we need to think about. Does that make sense? So as such, something like the 10 commandments, very helpful, right? And having strict rules for what you can say, eat or not eat are very helpful in some ways. It just removes

Starting point is 01:46:42 certain territories of life that you need to think about, or at least you have some reassurance that you don't need to worry about. And at the same time, there's part of me that thinks, well, religion is fantastic for that. And I did not grow up religious. I've been exposed to a lot of religion and honestly, very often I have extreme envy of people with strong religious conviction for precisely that reason. I just feel like I'm trying to David Foster Wallace my way through life and it's really fucking hard and can be very, at least for me, destabilizing just to have this universe of infinite options and potential decision making at the same

Starting point is 01:47:26 time i think well if we are accepting religion because it is this pervasive not to make it bad almost universal instinct of humankind which it seems to be like myth making i'm not saying that's what religion is but meaning making through stories and religion in some fashion really seems to be an evolved instinct of some type but we could also say without certain constraints there are other impulses humans have right that we constrain. And so I don't even, I know I'm going on and on a bit here, but these are some of the questions that remain with me as I continue to explore. In my case, I think I've sort of passed the point of no return with respect to a specific denomination of religion. I don't expect that I

Starting point is 01:48:27 will be able to, for a million reasons, get there. So looking at the alternatives, these are some of the questions that I end up pondering. I mean, if you are talking to someone, let's say you're talking to students who are in a similar position, maybe they had a really terrible experience being brought up in a religious household, or perhaps just for any number of reasons, they're just not going to end up at religion. Are there other ways you would suggest they explore? Because you said philosophy, but philosophy is so broad, right? I mean, you could just go and walk into a philosophy department at any university and man, you do have go and walk into a philosophy department at any university, and man, you do have a paradox of choice situation on your hands. If you're an undergrad and going to

Starting point is 01:49:10 Epistemology 101 and kind of getting walked through it, that's fine. But if you're trying to use philosophy to help figure out your life and starting from scratch, do you have any secular recommendations for folks? Any other recommendations or thoughts? I just want to throw one idea into the mix. It's a common idea in some theological circles, but I think the author Karen Armstrong makes this argument very well in her book, The Case for God. She is actually not religious affiliated. She used to be a nun and had a bad experience and left the Catholic church. But she has this magisterial book called The Case for God. And long story short, she said,

Starting point is 01:49:51 we don't understand religion today. And by today, she means after the Enlightenment, because we think about it as the ascent to empirically validated truths. To be religious means that here's this thing that this happened, this person did this, and I agree that this happened, and this is true. But I don't quote-unquote believe that or what have you. And her whole argument is like through all the history of religion, it's actually a commitment to action and is after you do the action that the insight comes. That you start by doing the things, and then later that gains you revelation. That's where you actually start to gain insight and understanding

Starting point is 01:50:25 you don't start with okay i think this is right like some empirically validated thing like i think gravity is right and so now i i can be all on board with it and that was a really interesting take i thought that was really interesting we're not as used to it now because we're used to a world after descartes where it's all about we're in our head doing rationality so like okay religion like any philosophy we have to work our way up to it and believe it, and then we can go off and do it. And some religions are better about that than others. I think the Jewish tradition doesn't care so much about what's going on in your head. Do these things, and then you'll have revelation, which is like through experience, acting as if. Don't overthink this. This is God and Yahweh, and you got to do this,

Starting point is 01:51:02 and don't eat that and do that, and your to your family's very important blah blah blah and you do this stuff and over time you then you deepen your understanding of the what she calls the ineffable things you can't even put in the words anyways that in her mind all of religion is trying to basically get intimations of the ineffable through action and we think about it too much like here's a alternative to my history book and do i think this is right or not? Which is interesting. And I think it's one of these mind-blowing—I don't know what to do with it. I just think it's a really interesting point, and I've been just trying to get people to read her because I think that's a really cool book and is underappreciated. Philosophy can do. You're right. A lot of philosophy is complicated. I think this is why our mutual friend Ryan Holiday is

Starting point is 01:51:41 really doing well right now is because he's making stoicism accessible. And I know he's very influenced by you in that work. And you've done a lot to make stoicism accessible. And that has done a lot of good for people. I think also committing to communities of character seems to help people. So, okay, people are very committed to their role in the military. It's a community of character, a community in which there are certain aspects of character that are underlined and emphasized, and there's sort of a structure there. People get this through other types of causes or volunteerism, where you're committed to a

Starting point is 01:52:11 community that actually tries to live true to certain characteristics, elements of character they think are important. I think that can get you there too. But I'm really taken by that Armstrong idea of act first, insight second. Get out there and start doing it. It's a quote. I don't have the attribution, but I think about it often, which is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting. And what you say also brings up for me memories from several trips to the Middle East. So I've spent a decent amount of time in the Middle East. And what I've heard more than once from both Jews and Muslims is you would hope for

Starting point is 01:52:53 us to find more common ground because in our religions, and I say this as a non-Jew and a non-Muslim, so forgive me if anyone out there, if I get this wrong, but we believe in action. Like what you do matters. What you believe is really secondary. What you do matters. And that's at least, you know, they would contrast that with some other religions where like what you believe matters first. You can do all the worst things in the world and believe certain things and then you are saved.

Starting point is 01:53:23 Those are fundamentally very, very different, right? And I don't have a particular perspective to add there, but it is a contrast. And these are things that I will obviously continue to think on because I find precisely for maybe some of the reasons that you already mentioned, the persistence of and the endurance and durability of religion to be fascinating. Even if I disagree with any of the tenets of, say, all religions, the fact that it is so persistent is very, very interesting. Are we evolutionarily programmed to create, have, adhere to religion in the same way that birds are programmed to build bird nests. I don't know. Maybe. It seems entirely possible. I'm going to take a super hard left turn on topic shift, if that's okay with you, because I promised it.

Starting point is 01:54:19 So segueing from religion and finding meaning and contemplation, let's talk about digital minimalism for a second. So I would love to hear you expand on your suggestion of people doing a 30-day digital minimalism experiment where one removes optional technologies. I appreciate the congruence we're making here between the Islamic and Jewish understanding of the meaning of the world in life and also my 30-day declutter. These are all basically the same. We're all in kind of the same ontological category here. Tomato, tomato. We're all going the same direction. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but we got the profits and also, you know, 30-day declutter. Now, in fairness,

Starting point is 01:55:07 if you have, let's just say, stocks on your iPhone and Twitter push notifications and everything else just giving you a psycho-emotional death by a thousand paper cuts, how do you expect

Starting point is 01:55:21 to find ultimate meaning in life? It's going to be tough. It's going to make it an uphill battle. So, that's my attempt at tying it together. All right. So let's talk about this suggestion, this experiment potential and what that might look like for people. And feel free to obviously add anything that you would like. But this is something that I think a lot of my listeners would be very, very interested in considering doing. The 30-day declutter is at the core of my philosophy of digital minimalism. So this was my take on what do we do about the fact that

Starting point is 01:56:00 starting around 2016, people became very uneasy about their phones in a way that they weren't in 2014. There was this flip that switched where at some point we realized, I'm looking at this thing too much. This is a problem. We got uneasy. And I could tell very precisely where that happened just based on reactions to my own work when it switched from you're crazy, you're crazy, you're crazy, you're crazy, you're absolutely right, you're absolutely right. It happened in a very quick period where my social media skepticism in particular really switched. And so my approach to it was you can't start with the habits and the tactics, right?

Starting point is 01:56:35 You can't start with like, let me get right to setting filters and turning off notifications and not having my phone in my bedroom and putting my phone into grayscale and moving my icons onto the back screen of my iPhone. That doesn't work. You're going to end up back where you were. And so digital minimalism, by contrast, was this humanist philosophy where it says, no, you got to figure out what you're all about, what you really care about and what you want to do, and then work backwards and say what tech supports that. And that's how you choose what tech you use in your personal life and what rules you put around it. You start with what's important to me, and then you put the tech to

Starting point is 01:57:10 work. That's much more sustainable. But how do you figure out this question? How do you get that insight into what do I really want to do? What's important to me? When you already have all that distraction, that's where the declutter came in. And so I said, take 30 days where you don't use social media. You don't use social media, you don't stream online videos. The only podcast you listen to is Tim and Mines and everyone else you stop listening to. No video games, no online news that's very influenced by you and your low information diet, for example. And you experiment and you reflect and you think about life and go for walks and join things and ride your bike and hang out with friends without sending them

Starting point is 01:57:44 messages on a glowing bitmap screen. And you figure out what you're all about. And then at the end of the 30 days, you say, what do I want to do? And so I had that idea. I mentioned it to my newsletter because I was working on this book, but it was in the early days. And I said, does anyone want to try this? And my thought was, this is a big ask.

Starting point is 01:58:03 So maybe seven people would say yes. And my plan was, this is a big ask. So maybe seven people would say yes. And my plan was, that's great. I will follow these seven people and see how it goes and write pretty long profiles of them. It'll be good for the book. 1,600 people came back and said, yeah, I'm doing it. So I threw that idea that I was going to follow everyone. 1,600 people did it.

Starting point is 01:58:21 One of the people who was doing it was the roommate of a New York Times reporter. So then the New York Times was covering the declutter. It became a whole thing. I got hundreds and hundreds of reports back from people about their experience and what worked and what didn't. But the main takeaway was it is much more effective if you want to tame the technology in your personal life. If you want to tame that, if you're working backwards from first principles of this is what I want to do with my life, how can tech help? It's incredibly sustainable. If you instead say, I'm unhappy with all the tech I'm using now, so let me try to put in rules to use it less, that's incredibly non-sustainable. You're almost certainly going to go back to where you were before.

Starting point is 01:58:56 So if people want to give this a shot, what should they do? Well, I mean, beyond the obvious of buying the book I ended up writing, which of course you should start with, yeah and and a copy for each of your friends because it's easier for them to read it than you to have to explain it um once you've done that it's actually straightforward so literally what i say is just i call them optional personal technologies and i want to draw a really clear line here this This is really about your personal life. I've written other books about email and Slack and technology in the working world. That's a whole other issue. And it seems similar, but there's different issues underlying it. So therefore different solutions, but I'm talking about the stuff you do outside

Starting point is 01:59:37 of work that largely speaking has you looking at your phone. You take a break from them from 30 days. If it's a dual-use technology, like I mainly use this for personal reasons, but there's some reason I need to use it, then you put up fences. So if you're like, I don't want a text message, but my daughter uses text messaging to tell me when she needs to be picked up from practice, you put up a fence and say, well, I'll still do that, but I'm not going to participate in text change with my friends for the 30 days. So you can set the rules how you want to set the rules. And then the only key thing is you go through 30 days, be very active. So in that experiment, the people who treated this like a

Starting point is 02:00:15 detox, and I hate the application of that term, the technology, I think it's a complete misappropriation of that term. People who tried to just white knuckle it and say, yes, I'm just not going to use these technologies for 30 days. And just by not using them, something positive will happen. They never made it 30 days. But the people who are like, I will now be very aggressive about reflection and experimentation, trying new things, going places, going to the library, buying a bike, joining a running club, reading books, going on long walks. They're the ones who really kept with it. And then at the end of the 30 days, you literally write out a code. Here is the tech I use and the rules by

Starting point is 02:00:50 which I use it. I'm going to use Instagram because I'm an artist, but the only way I'm going to use it is on my computer. The only people I'm going to follow are these 10 artists that really inspire me. And I have a glass of wine and look at their latest post on Friday evening. And it's the only interaction I have with that service. You get specific. I'm using this for this reason. Here's how I use it. And then you've reset. You've Marie Kondo'd your digital closet. You took everything out. You only put back in the stuff you cared about and you go for it. Wine on Friday for an Instagram scroll through 10 inspiring artists does sound like it would spark joy. So thank you, Vikonda. She's the tiniest woman I've maybe ever met in my life. She was on a podcast 100 years ago. I actually interviewed her in Japan, and she had the most perfect porcelain skin I've ever seen

Starting point is 02:01:40 on any human. Really may in fact be an alien. Very sweet. A very organized alien though so she's very organized alien they've really you really discouraging if this hyper advanced alien civilization showed up and they're really really fucking disorganized just couldn't figure things out you'd be like oh like, oh no, we thought we had so much clarity to look forward to. And it sounds like from your description that the people who approach this type of digital minimalism experiment as one of subtraction, and that's their focus, they fail. And those who view it as an experiment with new additions or substitutes to kind of crowd out default tech behaviors are the ones who end up benefiting most. Is that a fair description?

Starting point is 02:02:40 We're good at humans to committing to things that are positive. That's very motivating for us. We're bad at trying to avoid things that are negative. It's very bad for us to be like, I think I use Instagram too much. I'm going to try to use it less. That isn't very compatible with our wiring. But on the other hand, I have this vision in my life that it's really positive and it makes me feel good. I'm really into it. Oh, and by the way, that's the vision in which I don't use Instagram. It's way more effective. Do you still use, and this could be a dead end and we can just cut it if so, do you still use a shutdown ritual when you close your computer? You do. All right. Could you please describe for folks what the shutdown ritual is? At the end of your workday, you go through and you close, use the David Allen term,

Starting point is 02:03:27 all the open loops. So, okay, let me make sure there's nothing I missed. There's not like an email I had to answer that was very urgent that I forgot about. You look at your weekly plan and your calendar. What's going on tomorrow? I know what I'm doing tomorrow. Okay, my plan makes sense. You look at your task list. I didn't forget to do something today that was very urgent. All right, I'm good to stop working. And then you have to do some sort of demonstrative ritual at that point to indicate that you did all those checks. So back in the early days of my blog, the thing that me and my readers always talked about doing was actually saying the phrase schedule shutdown complete because it's absurd, right? Like it's a weird, absurd thing.

Starting point is 02:04:06 But the whole idea was then later on when your monkey brain turns on is like work, work, work. I'm sure we're missing things. Ah, right. Like we do instead of having to go back and say, I have to now have a whole conversation with my monkey brain about, well, let me look at my calendar. And I did this. I did that.

Starting point is 02:04:21 You can short circuit all of that and say, I said the absurd phrase. I would not have any other time in my life have said that phrase if I hadn't actually gone through all the steps of making sure there was nothing open. So I don't need to get into it. I said the phrase, I know I'm okay. And when people would do this, it would take about a week or two and it would significantly reduce that evening or morning work anxiety where your mind's like, oh, I'm sure we're forgetting something. Oh, let's go over the email that we sent. Was that the wrong thing to send? And you can just say, I said the stupid thing. And I would never have said that stupid thing. It's like I hadn't shut it down. Look, I created it because I needed it. As a grad student,

Starting point is 02:04:57 I created it and it took on a life of its own. There's a lot of people out there looking left, looking right, making sure they're alone and then under their breath going, schedule shutdown complete. Schedule shutdown complete. That is so fantastic. Just great. Well, Cal, this has been a very fun conversation. Thank you for taking the time. I don't want to end it prematurely.

Starting point is 02:05:23 I want to, of course, ask, is there anything else that you would like to share? I'm in no rush. Is there any type of closing comments, requests for the audience, anything you'd like to point people to, anything at all that you'd like to say or ask before we wind to a close?

Starting point is 02:05:41 No, this has been great. I love the territory we covered. Awesome. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time. It's nice to see you. And for everybody listening, we will have show notes, links to everything, all the resources to all of Cal's books, including Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and his latest, A World Without Email. We'll also link to a number of his New Yorker pieces to the Deep Questions podcast, and you can find him online,

Starting point is 02:06:10 not on any social media platforms, but at calnewport, C-A-L-N-E-W-P-O-R-T dot com. And until next time, be safe, experiment often, and thanks for tuning in. Schedule shutdown complete. from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend. Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun,

Starting point is 02:07:23 again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

Starting point is 02:07:41 This episode is brought to you by Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon is a low carb,b, high-protein, and zero-sugar cereal that I eat all the time. I ate a huge bowl of their cocoa flavor about an hour ago after a short workout. And it's so easy to prepare. It's instantaneous, practically. And you get a lot of goodness. You get a lot of bang for the buck. Time Magazine included Magic Spoon in their list of best inventions of 2019, and Forbes called it the future of cereal. It tastes just like your favorite sugary cereal from childhood. Remember those? It's actually good for you. Each serving has 13 to 14 grams of protein, four grams of net carbs, and zero grams of sugar. It's also gluten-free, grain-free,

Starting point is 02:08:19 soy-free, and keto-friendly. It's delicious. And I don't say that lightly because most healthy versions of unhealthy foods are not delicious, but these guys really nailed it, and I know they did a ton of testing because I know the founders. Magic Spoon comes in your favorite traditional cereal flavors like cocoa, frosted, and blueberry. You can try them all by grabbing a variety pack at magicspoon.com slash Tim. I'm going to order some more cocoa today. In fact, I need more. Cocoa is my personal favorite, but that might change soon because they're launching two limited edition flavors, oatmeal cookie and honey gram, both of which I'm excited to try. And another fun fact, my friends are also obsessed with magic spoon. One of this podcast's most popular guests,

Starting point is 02:08:59 Dr. Peter Atiyah routinely crushes six to seven servings at a time. That's a lot by the way, with practically no glycemic response. That's blood sugar response. And he's checked this with a glucometer. He likes it so much that he invested and two other friends, very fine gentlemen, also past podcast guests, Kevin Rose and Ryan Holiday also invested. So check them out.

Starting point is 02:09:19 Go to magicspoon.com slash Tim and grab a variety pack or my favorite cocoa or anything else. My friends love this stuff. Their kids love this cereal. So whatever strikes your fancy, but you should check it out. My listeners, that's you get $5 off and a 100% happiness guarantee when you use code Tim, T-I-M at checkout. So if you don't love it, they'll give you a full refund. No questions asked. One more time. That's magic spoon.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. My God, am I in love with Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer.

Starting point is 02:09:52 More than 30% of Americans struggle with sleep, and I'm a member of that sad group. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat has always been my nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, putting them back on and repeating ad nauseum. But now I am falling asleep in record time faster than ever. Why? Because I'm using a simple device called the Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep. It's the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced but most user-friendly solution on the market. I polled all of you guys on social media about best tools for sleep, enhancing sleep, and Eight Sleep was by far

Starting point is 02:10:38 and away the crowd favorite. I mean, people were just raving fans of this. So I used it and here we are. Add the Pod Pro Cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit or as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It also splits your bed in half so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. My girlfriend runs hot all the time. She doesn't need cooling. She loves the heat and we can have our own bespoke temperatures on either side, which is exactly what we're doing. Now for me and for many people, the result, eight sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster,

Starting point is 02:11:13 reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40% and get more restful sleep overall. I can personally attest to this because I track it in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery. So you can take on the next day feeling refreshed. And now, my dear listeners, that's you guys. You can get $250 off of the Pod Pro cover. That's a lot. Simply go to 8sleep.com slash Tim or use code Tim. That's 8, all spelled out, E-I-G-H-T, sleep.com slash Tim, or use coupon code Tim, T-I-M, 8sleep.com slash Tim, or use coupon code Tim, T I M eight sleep.com slash Tim for $250 off your pod pro cover.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #568: Cal Newport — The Eternal Pursuit of Craftsmanship, the Deep Life, Slow Productivity, and a 30-Day Digital Minimalism Challenge

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #568: Cal Newport — The Eternal Pursuit of Craftsmanship, the Deep Life, Slow Productivity, and a 30-Day Digital Minimalism Challenge

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