Rethinking the Deep Life Stack (Again!) | Monday Advice

Revisiting the Deep Life Stack

0:00Back in June, 2023, I published an episode of this show that described a lifestyle design tool that I called the Deep Life Stack. Now, this was my best attempt at describing a general process for taking a life that might feel aimless or disappointing or shallow and transforming it into something more remarkable, what I would refer to as a life lived on purpose. Now, why do I care about this topic? Well, in part, it was because I write a lot about the dangers of digital distractions,

0:34and I came to realize that really the most effective strategy for putting down your screens is to make your analog life more interesting than your digital. So, you know, as I put out that episode, people seem to really like it. Soon after I put out that episode in 2023, I started working on a book completely dedicated to this idea of the deep life. A few months into that project, when I was just doing my background thinking and research, I realized that my Deep Life Stack concept needed some work.

1:05So in November of 2023, I put out a new episode in which I explained this predicament. Earlier this year, I introduced a step-by-step plan for cultivating a deep life. I called it the deep life stack. Since then, I have been gathering extensive feedback from you, my listeners and viewers. I have also been extensively experimenting with this new construction in my own life, and I have a major revision. It's what we can call the deep life stack 2.0, my new and improved evidence-based approach

1:39for how to cultivate a deep life, what you can use as your driving force to get away from a world lost in digital distractions and shallow. So here's the plan. Let me just quickly re-motivate. I'll start by quickly re-motivating why this approach of life-changing is important. Second, I'll review what didn't work about the original deep life stack. So what the feedback told me wasn't quite working. And then we'll get into the new deep life stack 2.0. I'll give you your step-by-step instructions for how in a short period of time to make drastic

2:13changes to the depth experienced in your own day-to-day existence. Now, this episode was even more popular, and this brings us to today. So what has happened since that November, 2023 episode? Well, I finally finished that book. It took me two and a half years, but just a few months ago, we locked in the manuscript for my deep life book, which is coming out in March, which means I have two and a half years since I last talked about the deep life stack, doing nothing but thinking about how best to cultivate a deep life.

2:46And so I think we know what this means. It's time to revisit that tool once again and announce the version 3 of my deep life stack. That's exactly what we're going to do. I'll start by briefly previewing version 1, the issues with that, version 2, the issues with that, and version 3. Spoiler alert, the name of the tool is going to change today. So stay tuned for that. So if you've been thinking recently about making major changes to your life, it's the fall. This is the time I think is good to think about doing that.

3:17Then you're going to like what I have in this episode. All right, so let's get into it. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions.

The Original Deep Life Stack

3:33All right, so I want to start with the original deep life stack version 1.0. I'll walk you through it and explain what I had in mind, and then I'll explain what the issue was. We'll get the two, and then we'll get to my new idea. All right, so I'm going to actually, God help us all, Jesse, but I'm going to draw this on the screen so for those who are watching, you can see this. All right, so the deep life stack was, the first one was a collection of five layers that stacked on top of each other. All right, so the first layer, and I'll write this on here with my beautiful handwriting.

4:04So we have this first layer of discipline. Above it was values. Let me write that on here.

4:17Above that was calm. I actually had forgotten exactly what was on this stack from so long ago, Jesse, so it was interesting to go back. And above that was plan. I'm going to make each of these within a nice box because we saw this as a stack. All right, so at the bottom of the stack, we had discipline. On top of that was values. On top of that was calm. And on top of that was plan. And so the basic idea was up here where it says plan, that's the way we had been talking

4:49about the deep life up to that point. This is where you had a description of your ideal lifestyle broken into buckets to make sure that you're capturing a totality, a vision of your whole lifestyle. This is my concept of lifestyle-centric planning, which had been in the show since its first episodes in 2020. This idea that one radical change is not going to fix everything. If you want a better life, you have to fix your lifestyle, all the aspects of your life to on a regular basis yield you better results as opposed to hoping one change fixes. That's all we had been talking about before the deep life stack came along.

5:21And that was all in this new, in the deep life stack was all captured at the top and plan. The big insight of the stack is, oh, there's a lot of other work that's necessary before you're going to succeed in figuring out what should go into your plan or actually succeed in executing it. And so the way I talked about it in June of 2023 is let's start by actually just getting your discipline higher, make you into someone who feels like you're capable of doing hard things that are optional. Then I said, let's get your value straight because how are you going to really figure out what you want in your life if you don't know what you care about? Calm was my term I used to capture everything you might think about as like time management

5:55or organization, right? How do you actually get control of your schedule and obligations? Because if you can't keep your arms around all you have to do, then you're not going to get things done you want to. And then the plan was on top of it. All right. So that was the idea of the original deep life stack is that, hey, we forgot all of this part, but that is a key part when you actually want to change your life. So that's deep life stack version 1.0.

Version 2.0 and Its Flaws

6:19All right.

Version 2.0 and Its Flaws

6:20So what was the problem? What was the problem with that way of thinking about constructing your life? Well, as the summer went on, I realized, oh, there's two separate things here. There's this becoming more capable piece. And that's actually really more complicated than I was giving it credit. And then the planning is more complicated than just like, okay, now figure out your life. And so as I began to think more about it, I split the stack into two, right?

6:52So I was saying, all right, let's have a separate stack for capability versus a separate stack for how you actually then like make the transformations once you're ready. All right. This one's complicated, but let's go back to the screen here and I'll show you what I had in mind. All right. So for this next one, for version 2.0, this is where things got complicated. Over here, we had the first stack, which I called phase one stack, the one you would navigate first.

7:22Discipline at the bottom. Then I had control. I'll explain each of these in a second. On top of that, I had craft. And on top of that, I had simplification.

7:35Simplification. All right. So this was a stack one and let me put boxes around all this. All right. I said, you start here, stage one, you navigate this stack to get capable, get ready for actually making major changes in your life. All right. So I said, you want to start there. Discipline. You would start with discipline. Like we said before, this is where just you get used to the idea of doing hard things that are optional. And then control took the place, what I used to call calm. I was like, now you want to get control of your obligations and time. And then I was like, maybe I really want to integrate in here my thoughts about career

8:08capital, deep work. Like how do you actually work in a way that's going to be effective? How do you build useful things with your mind, right? That this would be useful just to have that tool in your toolbox before you try to make big transformations. And then I had the simplification piece on here, simplifying your life so you don't have too much going on. So you have breathing room in your schedule. You have reserves in your energy to actually pursue changes. And so I called that whole thing stage one. And you would work your way through that stack. And when you were done with that, you would move over to a second stack.

8:39And this is a stack that was dedicated to actually transforming your life. And this got more complicated. I'm going to write the things here and then we'll go through them each. I had values at the bottom, then service. And again, this is from November, 2023. Then I had a word that's not going to fit.

9:01Look at that. I got transformation. Jeez. So we can already see the problem I had with this is these words were too big. You're really good at navigating the notability though. Well, I teach with it. All right. Transformation. And then legacy.

9:17All right. So let's go through those, right? So we had, and this is, man, things got complicated. All right. Values was at the bottom of the second stack. Man, it's getting complicated, Jesse. Now you can see the problem why I'm simplifying. I'm going to have 3.0. On the second stack, the first layer was values, right? So figure out first and foremost, when you're trying to transform your life, what actually matters to you. Then introduce service. I was on a kick then like that. You have to be servicing other people in any notion of a deep life.

9:47Transformation is where you would actually start making changes to your life to move it closer to an ideal lifestyle. And then legacy was, okay, after you're able to do that, you choose one area or one or two places to really make a move to do something remarkable, something that people are going to remember you by. Because I felt like that would be, that's a common piece when you hear stories about lives that are deep. It's like, and they did this thing that was like really remarkable. Can you believe this person did it? All right. So this was the deep life stack 2.0. You had to first navigate this capability stack that had a lot of pieces.

10:18And then you could navigate this transformation stack, which itself had a lot of pieces. And somehow this would all come together. And that's really what you needed to create a deep life. All right. So the problem with that, clearly this is someone who's in the early stages of working on a book or all, I have all of these ideas on brainstorming that seem relevant to the task at hand of cultivating a deep life. And I put them all into this vision. The problem is, it's too complicated.

10:48That's problem number one, right? It's too complicated. Two different stacks you have to execute sequentially, each of which has four different items in it. This is getting too cute, right? This is getting too like in the weeds, not acknowledging the variety that we might have of different people, you know, their experience and what they're trying to do. It felt like I was getting too in the weeds. And if we bring this back up again, Jesse, I'll show you a couple other problems. I was mixing in specificity with technique. And in general, my approach to the deep life and the whole idea of the book I have coming

11:19out is I'm not going to tell you what should be in your life to make it deep. I don't know that. I'm going to give you a method for how do people successfully transform their lives. Well, the deep life stack 2.0, I mix those up. Like, look at this service. That's not a general component, a general strategy to successfully transform your life. It's a specific thing I'm saying you should have in your life to be deep. So I was violating that process versus content barrier that I actually thought was important for talking about it. Legacy. I was on a kickback then that said, hey, deep life should have some remarkable piece to it.

11:51Something you do that like really reflected your values in a way that people would literally remark about. But that's not necessarily necessary. Came across many examples of deep lives. You don't need that, right? So that was getting, again, I think it was getting too specific, less process, more content, which I thought was an issue. And same thing over on the capability, career capital, deep work, maybe that's relevant. Maybe it's not. So it just felt like it was too complicated and I was mixing too much content with process.

Sponsor: Surfshark and Quo

12:25All right, we're going to take a quick break from our discussion of the deep life stack to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. But stay tuned because after this break, I will be revealing my new thinking on how to cultivate a deep life. But first, let's talk about our friends at Surfshark. If you've been listening to this show for a while, you know I talk a lot about intentionality, not just in how you work, but in how you interact with your technology. Every time you log online, browse a site, click a link, or make a quick search, you're leaving behind a massive digital footprint.

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14:33Again, that's surfshark.com slash deepquestions or use code deepquestions. I also want to talk about our friends at Quo. So, Jesse, you know I'm into Halloween decorations, but I got to say a lot of the people and companies you get involved with or try to contact when finding out about things like animatronics or actuators, which I'm trying to buy right now, these are often smaller companies, right? These are sort of specialized startups, and it can be difficult sometimes to actually get

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Introducing the Deep Life Map

16:04All right. So now, two and a half years later, can we do better? So how do I think about the deep life stack today after I've finished a whole book about it? All right. So here's how my thinking has evolved. I have moved away from a stack.

16:24Disappointment to all my computer science friends who deal with stack data structures. And I imagine if we're going to have a core diagram of a tool for transforming your life, I imagine it now more like a map that you navigate. So we're going from the deep life stack to a deep life map. All right. And this metaphor is going to make sense in a second. So what is on this map? There's three different territories, right?

16:55This is the way I think about it. So over here, we'll have the territory related to capability. Over here, we'll have a territory related to values. And over here up top, I'm going to have a territory related to vision. I'll kind of draw these. These are like, these are territories. Okay.

17:23These are three different territories that are relevant to transforming your life into something deep. The capability territory is where you get things like discipline. It's where you get things like time management. It's where you get things like contemplation. How do you actually control your mind, focus on things, put your mind's eye on targets that you have chosen, whether they're internal or external. The becoming a more capable human being that is sort of a theme through a lot of my thinking about the deep life. I see that now as like its own territory. There's a separate territory for values where you figure out what's important to you and have

17:57rituals in your life to reinforce that, right? So this is where you're making sure that you understand what matters to you and why. And vision is what captures all the specific description of what your ideal lifestyle is, plus your plan for how to move closer to it. Now, if we go back to this diagram here for a second, Jesse, the way I see it is capability helps you with your vision. The more capable you are, the more successful you'll be implementing your vision. Values also feeds in to your vision.

18:28The better you understand your values, the more they'll be reflecting what you decide to put into your vision as well. And the reason why I call this a map is what I came to understand is that you're going to wander through these territories. And depending on where you are, that journey might look a little bit different. Some people really don't have their act together. So any sort of attempt to make major changes to their life is going to fizzle. So really, they're going to start in this capability territory and they're going to spend maybe a lot of time in there. I mean, I think for some people, this could be a year plus of just sort of getting your

18:58act together before maybe then they'll wander over in the vision. Other people, they're like, I don't know what I'm all about. I got my act together. I'm doing really well. I'm organized. You know, I get after it, but I don't know why I'm, you know, whatever. I'm in private equity, making a lot of money and don't know what to do with it. Right? So you're like, I got to really get my values together. And maybe that's going to mean some sort of philosophical system or reintegrating religion into your life. And that could be a territory you're going to journey in for a while. For other people, that's all in place. They're like, great, let me just get to this vision territories where I need to spend some

19:30time and figure out, so what do I want my life to look at? And what are my concrete practices and projects for getting closer to that? Right? The key thing is there's a lot of moving back and forth. It's the other thing I came to understand is maybe you spend some time here. You go up here. You're in this land for a while. You're making some changes. It feels a little bit disconnected, so you wander down here, spend some more time with my values, update this vision. It's kind of going fine. Then as your vision gets more ambitious, you're hitting up against some walls. Now you go and spend some more time back in capability. Then you come back to it. It's a circuitous journey, right? That you might move back and forth between these things.

20:02And the amount of time you spend in each of these things will depend on your particular circumstances. And I don't have necessarily this sort of like very clear stack in each of these either. I have like a collection of related topics for some of these. And then you can decide which of those are important or not. So this is probably how I would think about the deep life today. Now I'll tell you the book I wrote that's coming out in March actually has an incredibly detailed kind of vision, game plan for how to navigate these territories in like a very systematic way. But at this point, I think the main idea is these are the components that go into a deep

20:36life. And almost always where you have problems, where someone wants something more, they're on the screen all day because their life outside their screen is lacking and they want that life outside of their stream to be better. Almost always when you find someone who wants something more, they're lacking some of these territories on their conceptual map, right? And we see this all the time. I often see people who are not doing the vision thing right. That's probably the biggest issue people have. Instead of having a tested vision of an ideal lifestyle they're systematically moving towards, they subscribe to the idea of if I just make one big enough, impressive, attention-catching

21:12enough change, everything will be better. So that's often a trap people have. If I could just get this job, if I could just win this award, if I could just be famous, if I could just do this one thing that's really big, if I could move to the woods, everything will fall in place. So they're lacking the vision area. Like, no, no, no. You need to understand your whole lifestyle because your day-to-day subjective state is determined by all the aspects of your lifestyle, not the consequence of one major change. Some people are really good at the vision thing, but the capability thing is lacking.

21:43And it's like, I don't know. I'm running around. I procrastinate. I don't manage my obligations in time well. I never have time to get anything done. I'm too busy. I'm not busy at all, but I can't get off the couch. I'm just playing video games, right? And so when you miss out this, nothing really happens. And then this, you know, we don't talk about values as much, but we should. But having some sort of tested core, either transcended or intellectually rigorous that you use to understand what's important to you and how you want to direct your life makes everything else much easier. It gives you the motivation for it and helps you aim towards things and around traps.

22:15So usually where there's an issue, it's they're missing one of these areas, not that they don't have the exact detailed list for what to do in each of these areas. So I think the deep life map is a better way of thinking about shifting towards a deep life than these increasingly complicated deep life stacks. And a key thing about this, and this is a key thing in the way I think about this in my book, is that none of this is prescriptive of content. None of this is telling you this is what should be in your life. You need to make sure that you have a mix of this, this, and this.

22:45Your work should be like this. Your relationships should be like this. This should be like your spiritual life. That's for you to discover. The key is, okay, how do you discover it and how do you actually make actions? And I think something like this map gives us a better way of thinking about how you actually move towards a deeper life. So we went from deep life stack, Jesse, to deep life map.

23:08I like it. Is that what your book says? Is that what it's called in the book or you can't say? I don't use the map metaphor in the book. If we're going to have like the stack metaphor, if we're going to have these visual metaphors, I thought the map was better here.

Structure of the New Book

23:22The way the book, I mean, I can talk about the outline of the book. I'm whatever. It's my book. I don't know who's going to stop me. Chapter one through four is mainly about animatronic design at Disney, but that's just sort of like an amuse-bouche to sort of get you ready for the discussion that follows. And then I have two chapters on the pitching preparation of the Washington Nationals. So we kind of get into that. But there's in chapter eight is about how to have a deep life. So I have it all in the book. No, no. Okay.

23:52So the actual outline of the book, and I'll tell you, the key to me for this book is I really don't like when you, the accusation or the reality of picking up a book where you're like, okay, there's like a blog post here. And then, then you're just padding it with like case studies and this and that, you know, like I could have gotten this in something short. I was like, no, no. I want to write a book where it's sequential. Here's the first thing to work on. Here's the next thing you do. Here's the third thing. Each chapter is essentially explaining like the next thing you need to do. So there's no filler there. Like, okay, now I need step three and chapter three will give me step three, right?

24:25So I don't want there to be any filler. I wanted everything to be giving you like new information that's part of actually implementing this vision. And the way it goes now, as I opened the book, I believe the first chapter is explaining this idea of lifestyle-centric planning, which is at the core of how I think about transforming your life. And we've been talking this way since, you know, 2020 and about how this sort of phase shift model of like one major change will fix everything, why that doesn't work and why fixing the lifestyle and working backwards from that is what's going to work. So we sort of set the stage. Then I get really detailed about how do you figure out what you're actually looking for

25:00in your life, right? That would go into the vision part of the map here, but I get into a, I call it action-based insight. And I actually get into like specifically, here's the notebook you have. Here's what you're writing down. Here's what you're going to go do. Like you're going to build out insight systematically about what actually matters to you in your life. Then in the next chapter, we transform that into a lifestyle vision, ideal lifestyle vision. What goes into it? What format? What are the, what, what's, what do we mean by buckets? What do you actually have in it? Like what, how do you build a, an actual useful, comprehensive, ideal lifestyle vision?

25:36Then we get into the, the next chapter is okay. Now that you have that vision, how do you construct your plan for how you're going to move your life closer to it? That's like where we really get into the weeds of the fun stuff where you figure out like actual decisions to make and strategies to follow. Um, what changes should I do or not? How do I assess some different types of changes to think about? And so it's then how do you make that plan? So like those first four chapters are just bringing you through step-by-step to where you're finally going to end up with a insight driven vision of your ideal lifestyle with a concrete plan for starting to make progress towards it.

26:09That's when I then step back and explore the other two territories of this map. So with that all established, because I want to just get right into it. Like here's the core idea, let's build this thing out. And like, that's kind of the core of the book. Then comes capability. I was like, okay, now that we know all that, I'm going to go over a crash course for becoming a more capable human being. If you're already super capable, maybe you only need parts of this. If you're a mess, spend time because I break it into three different things to look at and get it very concrete. Like here's, here's how to crash course. I want you in a few months to be a capable human being.

26:42And then after that is the, what about God chapter, the values chapter, the values region. Like, okay, but what about values? Let's add that. Okay. This is why this is be very important. Let's now update the way that we're keeping track of this to explicitly integrate values. And here's how to think about then why it's important. So it's like the, the idea here's, here's my approach versus other approaches.

27:04One, two, three, three, three chapters of just implementing it. Like, let's get right into it. And you end up with a plan and a vision and then stepping back and saying, okay, if you need the brush up on just being organized and disciplined and being able to control your mind, Cal Newport in the weeds, just advice, advice, advice, advice. What about values? Let's put that at the very end because I don't want to distract you with that, but you're going to, this is at the end, you're going to want to integrate this in to really make this full. So that's the current, that's the structure.

27:32When you, when you went on your last book tour with slow productivity, it always came back to the three, you know, core fundamentals of slow productivity. Is it going to be something similar for this? I guess I just get there naturally. It's a good observation. Yeah. That it's like vision. How do you figure out what you want to build a plan to get there? And that's like three chapters of the book capability. That's one chapter, but it's really kind of like three chapters. It's one chapter that's broken into three different things. It's, you know, controlling your time, discipline and controlling your mind. And then values is its own chapter.

28:03So yeah, that, this deep life map has three major territories. Cause when you were going through the tour, a lot of questions you would get, I was like, I wonder how I was going to answer it. But that always came back to the three things. And I was like, oh, wow. Okay. Well, yeah. It always like, okay, that falls into this territory. Let's talk about that territory. Yeah. So that's probably the way I'm going to, God, I got to start thinking about touring again, Jesse, I was just like amazed how it was like, I mean, obviously you're a professor, but everything came back. So it was like structured. Yeah, I know. But I've been doing these things for a while.

28:34I know. Coming up on book number nine and doing these things for a while. I assume that read an unstructured book. You must be like, get this out of my hands. I'm like, what is going on here? A stream of conscious nonsense. It's yeah. No, if I, if I read like Ginsburg, if I read, you know, like how or something like that, my head explodes. Like what's a stream of conscious nonsense. Structure your arguments. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. I want numbered subsections. Come on. What are you doing here? I know. I do think about it.

29:05This is probably what I'll do here. Right. It's like when I think about it, it's like, all right, core idea is lifestyle centric planning versus this phase shift model. So core idea number one, core idea number two, you need a deep life. If you make all the other stuff I talk about, make sense. Like those will probably be like two core ideas, right? Like why am I writing about the deep life? Because all the other stuff, technology criticism, I do, none of it's going to work or it all works much better. If you can also make an analog life that's so interesting that you don't want to look at TikTok all day.

29:35Right. Idea number two, lifestyle centric planning versus the phase shift is the way to do it. All right. So then how do we execute that? I think, yeah, I'll come back to these three things. You have to be capable of human. You need some sort of foundation of values and visioning is a comp. It's an art. Like the book is like, it's not obvious how to build a vision of your lifestyle and a plan to get there. Like we always just sort of skip that part. Like, Hey, here's the things. I don't know. I think so many of these books are like, here are the five things you need in your life. And I'm going to talk about scientific studies for each and studies show that if you have like six good friends versus three, that you'll get 1.7 extra years on your average longevity.

30:09And, uh, you know, social psych research on motivational centers show that if your work has these aspects and you're going to enjoy it more than that. So make sure that your work has this or that. And no one ever gets into the mechanics of like, but how do you figure out what you want? What does that mean? What, what's like a good description of what you want? I wrote a whole book that said, don't just follow your passions, bad idea. So what, what should you be aiming for? What is a lifestyle? What goes into that? Why is that better than just making like one-off changes? Why, why are you going to end up, you know, happier that way? How do you actually describe, how do you make a plan?

30:41Like in my planning section of this book, it's a very mechanical book. Like I'm very, I'm being very advicey in this, like on purpose. And like my planning section in this book that's going to be coming out, I mean, I'm really getting into, all right, you have these practices and projects. Like how does this integrate into your like daily planning, your weekly planning? Like how do you actually track and make sure that you're, you're putting aside and making progress on these things that can move you closer to your vision? That part's often left out. It's just a sort of, you know, a lot of these books are just, let's get you hyped up about the idea of a better life. But I also just squeeze so many examples in here. There's so many stories, so many examples, like you're never going to, it's a very structured book.

31:15It's numbered sections, but you're never far from, because when I think about the deep life, I see everything through the lens of examples. And sometimes it's famous people, most of it's people you've never heard of. That's how I understand these things. It's like, so what is it about this person who did this? Oh, this is the principle at play. Well, what about this? This example always makes me think about that.

31:37It's a great collection of examples too, because they're, I don't know, I have a weird collection of things. I've pulled from over the last half decade thinking about this, like characters you haven't heard about or sides of people that you have heard about that you've never heard that aspect of their stories. There's original interviews in there with people that you might have known of, but details that no one's ever heard before about their life or their trajectory. So the whole thing is trying to keep it, keep it pretty, you know, grounded, but still keeping it very structured. Anyways, so there we go.

32:08Let's put up one more time, Jesse, deep life map for those who are watching. That's it. Here, I'll make it a little smaller. Boom. All right, deep life map, vision, capability, values, how long you spend in each, how much you come back and forth to each depends on you. Your mileage might vary, but this is the way we'll be thinking about this going forward. So your next book, like the thinking book, is it going to be structured or is it more open-ended? In defense of thinking? Yeah. What do you think? I mean, I'm still in the stage now.

32:38Actually, there's so many times that people ask you questions and I ask you questions, I don't know. What do I think? I would assume it's going to be structured. Yeah. But I don't know how. It seems to be like, well, I guess a life is a pretty good thing. I think it's going to be practical and philosophical. So I haven't quite figured that out yet. It'll probably be closer. So for those who don't know about my, it's not a book I've sold yet. I'm just saying my idea for the book I want to write next is on cognitive fitness. I want to call it in defense of thinking. I basically expand in detail the general argument I made in that splashy New York Times piece from last winter.

33:13And I want to make the case for cognitive fitness. I want to make the case for thinking. I mean, I have all these notes on this. But like what I mean by thinking and how it's at the core of like everything we value as modern humans. And that it's not something that we want to lose. And it's something that we should practice and get better at like we do with our health, both institutionally and individually. And then I guess get very practical about what that means. I mean, I really have Michael Pollan. I went back and reread in defense of food, you know, a few months ago because that's my model in defense of food was like he's making his philosophical argument about how food culture has gone awry and why we should care about it.

33:50And then also got practical about how do we do that? How as an individual can we care more about food? And that was his like eat less, mostly plants. I forgot exactly what it was. Eat real food, mostly plants, not too much or something like that. Yeah, not processed or something. Yeah, and it got really kind of practical as well. And so that's my model.

34:09You know, I just want people – I mean I know my goal is I want people to think about thinking like they do about cognitive fitness like they do about physical fitness today. And as individuals and societies and governments, like putting as much energy into preserving and improving cognitive fitness as we do physical fitness. I want people just to be really excited about their cognitive fitness and have a lot of things in their life where they're trying to get more cognitively fit. But I haven't quite figured that out. I'm still like reading a bunch of books, which is always the fun stage. I'm reading a lot of books about thinking, like how the brain works.

34:41Yeah, you've been telling the audience. Yeah, I've been keeping people up to date. I have some outlines too, but I'm not quite at the point yet where I'm still staying open. I haven't locked anything in yet. Yeah, so I was worried the deep life will seem like a one-off, but I think it's okay. I mean largely what? I'm a computer scientist who writes about human flourishing in a technological world. So most of my stuff is often having a foot in the technological world and then seeing how that impacts human flourishing. But really this book is just on the human flourishing side. It's like, hey, figure out what your ideal life that's very exciting.

35:13You're moving towards it. You're going to have so much more autonomy over all this sort of techno stuff that's trying to pull you away from that. But it will seem a little bit like a one-off. The cover is awesome. I think I'll be able to debut it in the next week or two. Oh, exciting. Yeah, it's really cool. I do like it a lot. And the subtitle we fixed on was A Structured Approach, The Deep Life. I thought you were going to say something like baseball or something. The Deep Life. Baseball, Disney, Quest for the Perfect Animatronic.

35:44No, it's The Deep Life, A Structured Approach. So it's really emphasizing this is like a systematic computer scientist approach to the mechanics of transforming your life. Not, hey, what should be in a life well lived? One last thing. Did you – unrelated, did you read the recent article about the 250th and The New Yorker and had a lot of that Teddy Roosevelt examples? I haven't read it yet but my – one of my former editors, The New Yorker, was telling me the other day that he lives near the Oyster Bay, which we talked about recently.

36:15Like, oh, I want to go visit the Teddy Roosevelt summer house up there and I guess it's in Long Island maybe or upstate New York. Yeah, and there was a big thing in like North Dakota too in the article. Yeah, when he's out in the Badlands. But it turns out this town – there's a town near where the summer house is that has like a cool bookstore. And then I was like, oh, that would be cool to do a bookstore event. I think it would be fun. They do one like up by Teddy Roosevelt's house. I think it fits in well. No, but I haven't read that article yet. Yeah, he spent a lot of time out in the Badlands. Yeah, I felt like I was getting a lot of Teddy Roosevelt this week and last week.

36:47I mean, not the most responsible – I mean, yeah, that's a different time. His wife and his mom died – On the same day. Like on the same day. His wife giving birth to his daughter. And because I was watching the Netflix thing on Teddy Roosevelt with my wife. So he's like, I'm really sad about that, really so. So he's like, I'm going to go out to the Badlands and just like live on a ranch and hunt or whatever. But he just left his daughter. So he was just like, all right, my wife is dead, my mom is dead.

37:19I'm just going to go spend a year living and hunting. He just left his daughter with his relatives to raise. That's the only kind of asterisk on that. He was like – that's one thing you could do is like raise your daughter. But he was like, no, I got to go hunt buffalo, which is what I will do if my book does not sell the level I want. I'm going to move to South Dakota and hunt buffalo and wear bear skins or whatever he was doing out there.

Managing Many Interests

37:41All right.

Managing Many Interests

37:42That's enough of this deep dive nonsense. It's enough of talking about what I was interested in. I want to hear what you were interested in. As we always do on our Monday episodes, we like to open up our inbox and see what you have sent us. If you have a question for the show or something, a comment or something you want to share I think might be interesting, send it to the podcast at calnewport.com. And maybe we will talk about it on the air during this segment. All right. What's our first message we have today, Jesse? Our first message is from Vincent who has too many interests and not enough time.

38:15Too many interests and not enough time. All right. So let's see what Vincent said here. Vincent said, I have been thinking seriously about your ideas on deep work and the deliberate construction of a working life. If you had to give one principle to a technically trained person with many legitimate interests who wants to become exceptionally capable over the next decade, what would it be? All right. And I think Vincent like elaborated like a long list of things he was interested in. And so, I mean, I'd like to go getting attitude here. You know, I'm willing to do the work. I want to get better at things. I want to have career capital. There's so much stuff I can be good at.

38:45I want to be good as much as possible. Typically, my advice here is to do less, do better. You can only really be focused on a very small number of things at a time that you really want to get good at. And that's okay. Just take a small number of things you get really good at, can open up all sorts of really interesting opportunities and give you a lot of meaning in your life. It's not necessarily better to be good at five things versus two. That difference is minor and maybe it's even worse to be really good at five things because they're crowding each other out in a way that's frustrating.

39:19There is, however, a giant difference between being good at zero things versus one. So having mastery in your life versus not makes your life much better. Having more things that you have mastery on than less doesn't necessarily make your life that much better. So I'd say that number one. Number two, you've got to leverage the power of sequentiality. You're focusing on this for a while. You get good at it. Then you pick up another skill. That takes another few years. Because in the short term, that seems interminable. But over the period of like a decade, you might look back and say, actually, yeah, there's this thing I do professionally I'm really good at.

39:51And I know a lot about jazz music. And I've become a pretty adept guitar player. And I'm really into like vintage cars. And these things can add up different seasons of your life where you're having the joy of learning about something new. Over time, you look like one of these sort of renaissance men, right? Like, wow, you have all these things you do. And no, you didn't sit down with a list of five. Like, I'm going to work on all these concurrently to try to get to it one at a time. So sequentiality can also add up over time to a lot of impressive things.

40:25But I really don't. I guess what I'm trying to get away from here is you should not be seriously pursuing lots of things, be them personal or professional or both concurrently.

40:37Because it is stressful. It slows down your progress. And you can logjam. And logjam is this effect like I talk about in slow productivity where you cannot just – time doesn't scale or parallelize neatly when it comes to task, right? So it's not just a case of I have five skills. Each of them is going to take me a year if I worked on it by itself to master. So I could either do one after another in five years or work on all five for five years and end up being good at all five of them.

41:08You can't necessarily rearrange time that way. When you work on too many things concurrently, you get logjams, which is where the overhead of these things adds up to the point where it's hard to actually make legitimate progress on any of them. And you slow down your overall pace, right? So like often the best way to learn something is to have it be one of the few things that you're really focusing on. And then moving on later to the next thing, then moving on to the next thing. It's actually the total time to learn all those things will be less than if you try to do them all together because you want to avoid sort of logjamming effects. So Vincent, I admire your attitude, but be patient.

41:43Do less. Do those things really well. Let things take time. Add things slowly over time. I mean, professionally, I was, I just did a, um, a podcast interview this weekend. Um, well, don't figure who I really admire. I guess I don't like to announce podcast things until they actually come out, but it'll be out soon. Um, and we were talking, uh, it was not Rogan. It was someone who was, um, let's say a little bit more intellectually distinguished in some senses. And I'll just leave it at that. Uh, and civically distinguished. Um, but we were talking about this, uh, in this interview, we're talking a little bit about me and I was like,

42:14yeah, I decided now 20, almost 25 years ago. I mean, I was like a sophomore in college. I was like, here's the things I'm going to get good at is like computer science and writing. I'm still working on that. Like, those are the things I've continued to like, continue to try to get better at. And, and, and like, that's been basically it. I've been doing that for over two decades now. And that's, it's great. Like I've gotten pretty good at it. It's caused a lot of interesting things. And you have these little offshoots when you get better at things like this podcast. The podcast is coming directly out of my writing and academic work, right?

42:48These are the ideas I'm reflecting to, but also to be a writer for 20 years. Uh, one of the things you get really good out over time is talking about your books because I've been doing podcast professional, you know, radio and podcasts at a very regular clip since roughly like 2014. When this really started taking off, I'm like 12 years into that now. And so something like this podcast sort of emerges as a like natural, slowly evolving, uh, side thread of this, this, you know, main thrust. So sometimes just doing a small number of things really well, it takes a really long time. It's very rewarding. And it has its own little offshoots along the way that themselves can be like very impressive, but weren't something that you set out from scratch to do.

43:24They were sort of natural outgrowths of your sort of core trunks, little branches off the core trunk of what you're trying to do better. I keep asking you this, but what do you think the prime years are for a writer? Like compared to like an athlete where it's only like, uh, you know, it's there, there are no prime years basically. I mean, the first 10 years or not, because it takes a decade to become reasonable at writing. Um, maybe for some people, I guess if you live long enough, there'll be some years at the end where you're sort of like losing your sharpness. But otherwise it's like wine.

43:54I think writers get better. Their thinking gets clearer. They, um, are more confident that it's a really, it's an aggregate skill. Like through accretion, you pick up your skill and writing just sort of gets better as you, as you go on, writing becomes easier to do. And so that's why I like writing is you can have a very long prime, like from 30 to 80. You can have like a 50 year prime where you're just, you can just churn out, um, like stuff that's, it doesn't lag as long as you can keep the energy high.

Sponsor: Masterclass and Notion

44:25All right.

Sponsor: Masterclass and Notion

44:26We're going to take another quick break to hear from some of our sponsors, but stay tuned because not only do we have more questions left to answer, but we'll be playing the game deep or crazy in the final segment, which we haven't done in a while. So that should be fun. But first let's talk about masterclass as you know, Jesse, uh, we're always trying to level up our game here, both in terms of our video and audio quality. And let me tell you, um, I get obsessed sometimes about the details of like, okay, how exactly do I set up like our camera zoom or white balance or something like this?

44:56But in reality, here's what I realized. Most of that was a distraction. What really mattered, what we had to focus on here was the story. How would you actually tell compelling stories that people want to hear? I learned about this from masterclass diving into their courses on directing and storytelling from legends like Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog taught me really important information about how do you actually capture someone's attention and tell a real story.

45:27This is the type of thing that sets masterclass apart. You're not just watching kind of random surface level internet tutorials or just sort of asking a chat bot what they think you're learning directly from some of the world's best, whether we're talking about the worlds of film or business or writing or creativity, they have over 200 classes across 13 categories, including one from yours. Truly me talking about how to manage your time and beat distraction. And with plans starting at just $10 a month billed annually, it's incredibly accessible.

45:59You can even use audio mode to listen during workouts or on commutes. And this is all backed up by a 30-day money-back guarantee. So give it a try. And if it's not for you, nothing is lost. So check it out and start learning today from the best at masterclass.com slash deep. I also want to talk about our friends at Notion. I don't know about you, but I don't know if I want to live in a future where every company is just some random dude orchestrating a fleet of 100 agents producing slop, right? AI can make businesses much better, but only if it's used correctly.

46:32This is why I like the vision that Notion is pursuing. Notion is the AI workspace where your team's knowledge, projects, and agents all come together in one place. Teams using Notion move faster, cut frictions and costs by consolidating tools, and stay aligned. And because everything lives together, Notion has the context it needs to answer questions instantly, automate busy work, and keep moving. It's AI designed to strengthen teamwork, not replace it. Now, with over 100 million users, Notion is already trusted by 98% of the Forbes Cloud 100 and 95% of the top 50 AI companies, including OpenAI, Cursor, Lovable, and more.

47:12You can learn more about how Notion can support your business at Notion.com slash Cal. That's all lowercase letters, Notion.com slash Cal to try Notion today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. Speaking of our show, let's get back to it.

Attention and Immune Responses

47:29All right, what do we got next? Our next question is from Devin, who wanted to share an article. Devin said, I'm a rabid Cal fan, but wondered if he has seen this fascinating article. Best in Keep It Up, look forward to the new book. That's sort of an ambiguous, Jesse. Does he mean I'm a Cal fan who has rabies? Or does he mean I just am a... Oh, rabid Cal fan. Yeah. Try to figure this out. I hope we get that treated before it's too late. Or does it mean I like Cal so much that I want to bite people?

48:03I guess rabid means like in this context, a enthusiastic supporter of. Okay. So Devin sent along an article. Let's see. We have this one, right? All right. Let's load it up here. It's from Nature Human Behavior. I have it here on the screen. The title is Voluntary Attention Regulates Acute Immune Responses in Humans. I hadn't seen it, but I did read it ahead of time. So I'm going to try to skip forward here. There's a key paragraph that...

48:35Okay. So I guess this paragraph is sort of the key to this. So it says, we first tested whether voluntarily directing attention towards bodily sensations influences the immediate inflammatory response. In experiment one, participants underwent histamine-induced skin inflammation while maintaining gaze on the screen for the following 20 minutes. Attention was directed either internally towards sensations at the test site or externally towards distracting video clips.

49:07All right. Let's stop there for a second, Jesse. Just so we understand the setup of this experiment, they were saying, we are going to cause literal inflammation. They prick their skin with stuff that causes it inflamed. Like they get big bumps, like a bruise. And then we're going to manipulate your attention for 20 minutes after you literally have an inflammation sort of immune response that we've induced somewhere on your arm. And if I understand this correctly, one group was being distracted. Watch like interesting video clips or this or that. And another group was told to attune specifically towards what they were feeling in their arm.

49:43Like the inflammation, they're thinking about what is happening, paying attention to the actual inflammation in their arm. All right. So let's see what actually happened here. In line with our pre-registered hypotheses, internal attention, so paying attention to what's happening on your arm, produced a substantially smaller and more regulated inflammatory response than distraction. All right. That's interesting. So what they're saying here, Jesse, is that you could actually control physical inflammation in your body by just paying attention.

50:15If I'm paying attention there, I can actually make it die down with no other physical intervention versus if I'm distracted elsewhere. That's a cool finding. What's the broader idea there that might be important to what we talk about? I mean, I think this dovetails with cognitive fitness in the sense that it is underlying the criticalness of attention, right? Attention is this incredibly powerful thing. Our brains are what defines us as a species is also our brains are at the core of a huge

50:46part of our economy right now because of intensive knowledge labor that requires brains to add value to information. And being able to attend, so to take the mind's eye in your brain and turn it towards one topic towards another, be it your body, reflections about yourself, a problem you're trying to solve or a situation that you're trying to get through, is like one of the most powerful things that we as a species can do. And I think this just sort of underscores that, that our mind and attention is so powerful that by paying attention to parts of our body, we can change like our immune responses.

51:16Just like our ability to reflect on ourselves and our lives and make sense of things that are happening to us can really change our sense of self and moderate things like anxiety responses or stress about the future or what's happening or what's going on. So our attention is an incredibly powerful tool. Just like you might say your cardiovascular fitness is really important because it has all these other impacts on parts of your life in the physical domain. And yet we don't think about it at all. We take it for granted. We don't train it. And we poison it with all sorts of things that makes us bad at paying attention. This is clearly the case in the personal sphere where, you know, we have the cognitive

51:51equivalent of ultra processed food with algorithmically curated distraction apps. Sure, that makes a lot of money for a small number of investors, but it's the equivalent in our mind if we were just eating Doritos several bags a day and drinking Slurpees, right? Like it's terrible for our ability to actually pay attention. And then in work, it's even worse because there's a dollar and cents result. Like the better I can control my mind, the more literal value I can create for my organization if I'm in a knowledge work company.

52:22And yet almost everything we build out about knowledge work completely makes us difficult to pay attention, makes it much harder to pay attention, makes our mind weaker. Right? For decades, I've written books about this. It's email. It's Slack. It's this sort of constant overflow of meetings where the last thing we're prioritizing is the human brain and giving it the time and space to actually focus on something and create value. Now, AI is coming along. You have all these managers that don't know an LLM from a reinforcement learning policy network from a robot. Like, I don't know. They just sort of see this all as vaguely AI and they're reading all these LinkedIn posts

52:56about people orchestrating their agents to orchestrate agents and getting in 19 seconds getting done what used to take them roughly six centuries. Right? Like, just they're reading all this stuff and it's like, we're an AI first company. And like, what are they doing is they're making this attention issue even worse because they're like, let's take the thing that doesn't require attention, the kind of the busyness stuff, and let's hypercharge it so you can spend all of your time this orchestrating AI things, doing busy work. No one ever comes in and says, but your ability to pay attention without contact shifts is what ultimately creates the value. Not your ability to automatically turn a phone transcript into a PowerPoint that could be

53:29summarized by someone else's bot and added to the calendar. It's focusing on things with the values produced as knowledge work. So we don't think about attention at all. So again, if we go to a physical analogy, it'd be like if I was trying to run the, you know, an Olympic team for my country and I didn't care at all about nutrition or exercise and all the others. I was like, no, I really care about like our uniforms. I want to make sure that like we have like a really cool, like coordinated way that we come in when, when we show up on the opening ceremonies, March and, and I, I, you know,

54:01care about our marketing materials. And I was like, oh, but I, I'm not even thinking at all about not only am I not thinking at all about exercise and nutrition, but I have you doing things that are making you out of shape. I have you smoking cigarettes because I want the Pall Mall ad, you know, Hey, we should get more ad money. You should do cigarette ads. You all should be smokers now. Like I'm doing things that are actively making you worth it to support. That's what we're doing in business now by not caring at all about the power of attention. And in fact, creating things that makes attention harder to actually apply. So I think that's what I take out of that beyond it's kind of a cool mind over body type of situation.

54:32Attention is powerful. It's one of the most powerful forces we have. It's the smartest species to ever live and we completely take it for granted. So that's why I come, come away from it. They talk about on bodybuilding too. What? Like really focusing on like. Yeah. Focusing on muscles. Like really like doing the curl. Mind, body, whatever, right? If you're actually like really thinking about the muscle fibers contracting, you get. Like the whole time. Yeah. You get a bigger response. Which is hard to do, but. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you talk to like. That's what the study reminded me of.

55:03I talked to a friend of the show, Brad Stolberg, for example, who does amateur power lifting. You can't. It's incredible. He'll explain it. It's incredibly cognitively demanding. You can't make. Because you're at the limit of what you can lift. You can't hit your PRs without full focus. Because you have to recruit every muscle fiber and you need that kind of mind over muscle control. Yeah. So attention is powerful and I don't know why we don't care about it. The sort of LinkedIn AI manager culture is so ridiculous. Like everyone trying to feel like they're smart.

Social Media for Musicians

55:32All right. Who else do we have here? Our final question is about one of our favorite topics here, social media. I feel like we haven't talked about social media in a little while. All right. So this comes from Juliet. And let's see here. Juliet says, I despise social media. Always have done. But I'm a freelance musician. I feel like I need socials for work. Ticket sales PR is almost exclusively on socials these days. Ticket sales and funding promoters, agents, labels really take into account your social following.

56:05Yeah. It's a tricky one. We've talked about this before, but let's revisit it. Because there's a few different things going on here. One is, let's just start with this. When it comes to things like performers, there is a bit of a chicken and an egg type of issue where a lot of performers or writers or this or that will say, I need a lot of social followers in order to sell tickets and people know when my shows are. So how do I do that? And when I look at more successful acts, they had big social followings.

56:34ErgoHop, Post, PropterHop, right? The big social media followings is why they're more successful. The reality is often, well, they have big social followings because they are really good and people really like them and they like to come to their shows. And so they're more likely now to follow them. And then, yes, then it helps them find out about future shows. But the being so good they couldn't be ignored was like the critical piece to that, right? So you don't want to miss that piece. You want to do what you do really well. You know, I don't know the music world as well as I know the book world. But in the book world, you hear this all the time from authors. Like, you know, the reason why I can't get a book deal is like, I just don't think my

57:05socials are like what they're looking for. Meanwhile, if you talk to book editors, they're desperate for stuff they can publish. They're desperate for good stuff, right? They have a deal flow pipeline they need to keep full. And they actually cannot find enough books where it's like, this is a really good book by a talented writer. I can assure you in the world of writing, they're not like, wow, this is a killer idea. This is a great book. This is really smartly done. Nah, nah, the Instagram followers aren't what we would like. We're not going to take this deal. They're like, oh my God, we found a good one, right?

57:37So it's probably, this is also kind of true in music as well. Be really good. Be really good. People need good musicians. They want to sign people that have talent, that are doing something original, that could break out. They could be real. So that's got to be core. All right. Putting that aside, how do you then integrate with the world of social if you despise it? Well, if we're going to be more clear here, like Juliette, it's not that you despise social media. You probably despise consuming social media. It makes you feel bad and it's distracting. So don't do it. You can be a one direction social media user.

58:08You putting things out without having to be someone who takes things in or lives on social media, right? There's a couple of different things you can do here. I have a couple ideas I'm going to give out. All right. And I actually have an example we can show in a second. I actually don't know how to get there, Jesse.

58:26Well, you can figure it out. All right. So here's my ideas I put down here, Juliette. Number one, fix posting schedule and algorithms. What you post about, when you post about, when you post it, and what it looks like. Figure out that algorithm. Have a posting schedule. Do it from your computer or have someone do it for you. So it's like twice a week, I put out one of these type of posts that go out. They look like this. I put them out on these days. I write them in Google Docs. Someone else puts them out or I just go onto the web interface and do them. I'm not on there consuming other social media.

58:58I'm not interacting with other people on social media. Two, as a musician, your mailing list is probably more important than your social. So you just need to be relentless about that on your performances. You already know this, but make it dead easy for people to sign up for your mailing list and give them a reason to do so. Hey, if you want to know about my upcoming releases, this or that, just juliet.com slash mailing. You just have a simple name to say to them and be relentless about slowly building that up because that'll be more important than socials. And then three, have a non-transactional repeatable social format.

59:32So the idea here is don't just use your social accounts to post about your upcoming shows because unless you're already famous, no one cares. Why are they following that? So what's nice is to have a non-transactional repeatable social format, something you post on a regular basis that's not transactional where you're going to be interacting with other people about it. It's one way. It fits you and your brand and it's interesting.

59:53Right? So like if you're a musician, you find a thing like I have this weekly post or every other day I post about this, uh, that leverages my skills, musicians, interesting to people, but not interactive. Right? Like favorite lyric or something. It's like a, a, a one sentence of a lyric and you like talk about why that's like a perfect lyric or, you know, it's album reviews or, you know, there's some authors that do like what I'm reading. And like, I just read this passage and it kind of lets people into like the life of

1:00:24this writer and there's thinking life or whatever, um, or pictures from the road. But anyway, something that you do regularly that's repeatable that fits into like what you can offer and it's interesting to a crowd and like gives your social channel a reason to exist. None of this requires you to be on social media a lot, consuming it and being overwhelmed by it. I often point to Ryan holiday as like a great example of this repeatable non-transactional format where, you know, if you look at his feed, it's a, he has a backbone of like stoic quotes, which I, I think he just writes out in advance or to Google docs.

1:00:54Someone just takes them out and puts them on there, but that's like a heartbeat of like little doses of stoicism. And then it will be, and he doesn't do this is as he releases essays or articles, uh, on his various channels, there'll be like a version of it tweeted on there as well. Or if he's doing events, that'll be on there as well. He's never on Twitter. He's never on X, but you have a reason to maybe follow it because you like the stoic quotes or you like the, the, the YouTube videos reposted there once a week or whatever. And it gives you a dose of what you like about Ryan without social media having any impact

1:01:26on his life. So that's probably the way, uh, Juliet that you should think about that.

1:01:32Oh, do we have Ryan up here? Okay. Let's look at Ryan real quick. Let's see if I'm actually right about this. Is it all going to be him just like arguing?

1:01:40Like him been arguments about Trump. Um, yeah. Okay. So like, what do we have here? We have a stoic quote. Then we have a clip from his podcast. Then we have an essay. Then we have a stoic quote. Then we have a clip from his podcast. Then we have a stoic quote. Then we have a clip from his podcast. You know, then we have a stoic quote. Then we have a clip from his podcast. I think we're starting this and then we have an essay, right? So I think we're starting to see there's a pattern here, right?

1:02:12Which makes a lot of sense. Stoic quote backdrop, a clip from every podcast episode that comes out. And then when his weekly essay comes out on, this is, I don't, this might be from the daily stoic, takes one of his weekly essays from his mailing list and puts one of those on there as well. And so you have like a kind of variety of content that all fits this theme of like, I want stoic motivation and none of it is him actually probably having to touch this platform at all. So that might be a way to think about it. When you started your response to this question about the constant need to like put out material,

1:02:46it started to make me think of the acquired episode with Disney and they were talking about Disney plus and how they had like, they started Disney plus and they need all this content and they were trying to compete with Netflix and it didn't necessarily become like the high quality content that Disney always had. So they were talking about that. But then at the same time, this is part two. This is part two of the acquired Disney episode, which by the way, I don't know if I've ever been more excited to listen to a podcast than I am to listen to part two of the Disney podcast.

1:03:17I listened to it last week on the rower, but it's like really like entertaining, like meter 20,000 to 30,000 between the 20,000, 30,000 meter mark. You started listening to it, but it actually brings up another question I have for you about because I was thinking, what's my Disney question for Cal? Well, and it's this, so when Disney, when Eisner took over, not Eisner, when Iger took over for, when Iger took over, he called up Steve jobs and wanted essentially to buy

1:03:51Pixar. And if Pixar, if Steve jobs wasn't going to die, do you think a, he would have sold it and be, if Disney didn't acquire it, they would have maybe perished themselves? I think it's a good question. Having read too much about this, I think it's a good question. I think my understanding is they would have still probably sold, they probably would have still sold it even if jobs was perfectly healthy. Cause you got to remember at that time he was the CEO of Apple.

1:04:25That's kind of where his attention was, right? Pixar, Pixar was what jobs did when he was in the wilderness after next, you know, he got fired by Apple. He started another company next that was like not working out. It wasn't going to be the next Apple. And he made this sort of almost impulsive investment in Pixar, uh, I guess bought it away from George Lucas and it was like $5 million or something. Exactly. That's what it was. Yeah. It was like, I've read a few books about this and then it kind of blew into this up into

1:04:56this thing, which he really liked, but more and more of his attention while that was starting to blow up at first it was great because it was like, Oh, I'm, I have a successful company again. Um, but then Apple became like way more important and successful. I think they probably would have sold it anyways because it's very difficult to be a standalone film studio. It's just a capital issue. It takes a huge amount of capital expense to produce a movie and you're always on razor's edge. Distribution was a problem. They needed Disney to be their distribution partner. They couldn't really figure out distribution on their own. And they were in this sort of back and forth war where they needed Disney.

1:05:28Disney needed them. The jobs like renegotiate. It was like, it was kind of acrimonious. The jobs like we want to better, uh, deal with this, but they, you have to be huge to really take advantage of that type of IP to distribute your own movies, to fund your own movies that then there's so much latent value on the table with all that IP too, that Pixar couldn't do anything with. I mean, think about how much value Disney extracts out of it, um, with their whole flywheel of parks and all this different types of media, this or that. So like the, the bulk of the value was also, also being left on the table.

1:06:01So it just, it didn't make sense as a business probably just to be Pixar trying to operate that level. So I think they probably would have. But then Disney really needed Pixar, right? At that time, Disney, I don't know what would have happened. Yeah. Yeah. Disney animation was struggling. Struggling. Um, that's a good question. Yeah. I think, I think they would have gone through with their IP strategy. They did anyways, Marvel, um, Lucas, Lucas, right. Which had, which actually was like a core of their movie profits, right? Especially that like heyday of the Marvel movies in the 2000 teens was just huge amounts

1:06:37of money was coming from that. Uh, they're also making a lot from the, the Disney animation as well. But then they sort of, I mean, it's a little bit confusing because they bought pick. I mean, they were, they were nowhere with their animation. Like it was just, it was post, um, after they lost Katzenberg and I, during the Eisner period. He went to dream where he started dream work. He started dreams work. Yeah. Um, that's SK, SKG is Spielberg, Katzenberg and Geffen. So dream works, SKG. Uh, I just read a book about, I didn't finish it. That's why I haven't talked about it yet, but I've listened to most of the book about dream works and do have to finish that so I can count.

1:07:09Well, Katzenberg wanted to stay, but he didn't get the top job, right? Yeah. He didn't get the top job. They gave it to Ovitz, which was a bad idea. Um, and my, my Ovitz story was remember way back, like I read his, I was reading his autobiography and as I finished it, I got an email from Michael Ovitz. And it was like this, it's not a name I would have ever thought about. And then like someone recommended you should read his biography. Like, Oh, this is great. As I was finishing up the biography, got an email from Michael Ovitz. Like one of those weird timing type of things.

Deconstruct or Crazy Game

1:07:39Um, all right. So, I mean, I'm getting too much in the weeds here, but basically they were really struggling. They bought Pixar, but then after they bought Pixar, they, they put Lasseter, um, in charge of Disney animation and Pixar, and then they kind of built out Disney animation. And now it doesn't like some of their animated movies are coming out of Pixar and some are coming out of Disney animation. And they've, they've, they've, so it's unclear how much of that was just them taking Pixar and, and expanding it or how much of that they might've been able to do. But I know at the time, because I re, I reread Iger's book earlier this year, his, his memoir,

1:08:12they really didn't know. They did not have the talent to do what Pixar was doing. Talent. That's why talent is so people talk about like salaries get out of control in the entertainment industry. Talent's incredibly scarce. Like Disney had all the money in the world and like, there's literally no one we can hire to make us start doing what Pixar is doing. Even though they had the guy and they let him go. Yeah. Lasseter, all he wanted to do, John Lasseter was be, uh, at Disney. Yeah. Yeah. And they, and yeah, they let him go and then they put him in charge of everything. But then during like me too, they're like, your hugs are a little creepy.

1:08:43So they kicked him out. Dude, you're going to know all the details in the episode too, but you'll still like it. I know, but I liked episode one. I knew all the details and I was like, oh, they're doing this well. The one thing they did mention, I thought was interesting was when before Lucas got divorced or whatever, he didn't, he gave cash, he raised cash for like the divorce settlement and didn't want to give her a part of the thing. And then it became like a, became a massive, yeah. Um, okay. Well, anyways, that speaking of Disney, this should bring us to our third segment of the show. What Cal's up to, um, because I have a Disney related edition of deeper crazy.

1:09:20Which we haven't played recently, but for those who don't know, it's a game Jesse and I play on the show sometimes where I talk about something I did when we try to discover if it's deep or if it's crazy. Most of the time I say deep. You do usually say deep. I don't know if our audience always agrees with you or not, but okay. I've got one for you. I got one for you. I got it in my mind a couple of weeks ago that as part of the renovation that one day will happen, I think it'll happen soon. Now that the summer's over, I was just traveling too much for the studio here or the, uh, the

1:09:50producing whatever maker lab part of our studios here as part of the renovation. I was like, what I really want, I do want something Disney related, but as you know, I'm a fan of the business of Disney. I'm a fan of the engineering of Disney. I'm a fan of the vision of Disney. I'm not really a super fan of the content itself. Right. So I'm not a, like, I need a Moana poster. You know what I mean? Like I'm, I'm not a consumer of Disney content. I'm a consumer of Disney as a person and company, uh, and how it runs and the people

1:10:21involved. That's, what's interesting to me. So I was like, here's what I really want. I want, uh, artifacts from the original Disneyland Imagineering. I want something where one of the names, imagine your names, I know something they produced as part of trying to figure out how to build Disneyland. As it turned out, there was a big auction last week of someone, some longtime employees collection. I think he died. His family was auctioning off his like collection of all this Disney stuff and included in this

1:10:54auction was, um, various sketches. And the ones I cared about were attributed to Mark Davis, the Imagineer, um, planning sketches for the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. Oh, deep for sure. Yeah. That looked awesome in there. So I, I, I, I participated in an auction and won a set of those drawings. It's kind of an absurd amount of money. That's what, that's the thing you have to factor in when you say deep or crazy. How much? I'm just going to say it's, there's, it's, it's in four digits, not five.

1:11:26I would have thought it was four digits. Okay. Yeah. I would have crazy. I thought everybody, nobody's got thought it was going to be $500. Can I tell you why it was nerve wracking? So I have it. It's great. A collection of seven pictures, um, attributed to Mark Davis, who's the, so not all of them are, but most of them are. Davis is the, um, he does more of the comic style, Imagineering drawing that defines the sort of non-scary elements of the Haunted Mansion and the, the Pirates of the Caribbean. So, you know, it's just like kind of famous, uh, draw. It was nerve wracking because so, so the way this works is this is, it's a live auction.

1:11:58It was in, you know, um, but you can participate from the internet and there's different ways to do it. But one way you can, the main way to participate from the internet is in advance. You say, here's my maximum bid and it will then they will like someone on the phones will then, um, automatically not just jumped your maximum bid, but like it will bid on your behalf until it gets to your maximum and then it'll stop. So if you watch the auction live, it was people in the room and they were bidding with paddles

1:12:28and then they were kind of like, okay, on the internet, we have a bit of whatever, like coming from the phones or whatever. And I was watching these auctions as the day went on and it was always, here's where I got nervous. It was always the same thing is the people in the room are so savvy. They basically just assume that the internet bid set the market. And so they would just like one person in the room would just sort of keep bidding the, uh, to see if there's an internet bid response. And they'd go until the internet bid stopped. And then the people in the room were like, okay, that's the market. There's no more internet bids. And then they would go 10% more.

1:12:58And then the people who really wanted it, they'd be like, okay, I'm okay at that price point. And then there'd be a little bit more bidding in the room. And it was always someone in the room got it. They would always just exhaust the internet bids. And then there would be a little battle. Um, I was like, oh man, they're doing this every single time. Um, but then I tuned it into, into mine and it got about two thirds of the way to my max bid. And it was like a going once going twice. And so you could have always adjusted your max bid too, right? Like, yeah, but I just, everything I was seeing was, they were, uh, the people in the room

1:13:31would just wait until, which probably means I paid too much for it. Yeah. But actually it was okay because there was, there was a better batch of drawings and a worse batch of drawings. And what I paid came right in the middle of the, what was paid for those two. So I think it was okay. The thing I saw that went the highest. So, I mean, I just tuned in and out, but there's something that went, it was like up over $25,000 when I was looking at one of these bids, you know what it was, the things that were really going for a lot where attraction posts, the original attraction posters.

1:14:01So like a haunted mansion, silkscreen poster that they, they had put up in the park in 1960, whatever, um, a, uh, Matterhorn bobsled poster, because I guess they have posters in the parks. Um, if you can get one from the, like the original, those were going for 20 plus thousand dollars. Really? Yeah. That was interesting. So it got me thinking about that article about, in the New Yorker about Ken Griffin and how he's like, you know, that hedge fund dude. He's big in archive. Do you think he gets nervous when he's bidding on stuff or he just has so much money?

1:14:32It doesn't matter. Well, I was thinking about that because, all right, moving on to books I read since last week. One of the books I finished this last week was an inside job by Daniel Silva, which Daniel Silva, the thriller writer. I picked this, picked this up at a remainder table in Bethany, Delaware, when I was at the beach a couple of weeks ago. Um, I liked Daniel Silva thrillers. His main character is Gabriel Alon, who is a, um, Mossad trained assassin who becomes a world famous art restorer.

1:15:02And the plot lines are always like, he just wants to be working on some piece of art. And then he always ends up in some sort of crime or whatever that he has to be involved in. And this is about, this one was about, um, a lost Leonardo is discovered in the Vatican's archives and the mob gets involved and like kills off some people and they're going to steal it back. And it's like, whatever, whatever. Right. Um, but they auctioned it off at some point, they're auctioning off this Leonardo and ends

1:15:33up going for like $500 million. And I thought about that, uh, because they were referencing the, the self tour Monday, self tour Monday, the, the, the Leonardo they discovered 10 years ago. And it went for $450 million at Christie's. And that, and I think it went to someone in like a chic somewhere or something like that. I was like, they, they probably have to get nervous. Like they were saying this guy was worth single digit billions of dollars, 500 million. Like that's 20%, 20% of how much money you have or something. Right. Like that, that feels like, uh, I think they do get nervous, I guess.

1:16:06They gotta. Yeah. But I don't know. It's all relative. I saw, I was watching a Johnny Harris video about what it's like to be a billionaire or a hundred billionaire, like what's like these different levels of wealth. I think when they were talking about like the billionaires, they're like, well, a billionaire can't afford a, um, lavish private jet, but what they can do is they, you lease them. Like, uh, so I'm going over to Europe. I'm going to just, we'll just hire a private jet. Like I don't, I don't have to own it. And they were talking about the price. It was something, you know, expensive, like quarter million dollars or something like

1:16:36that, the, the fly to something and back again or something like that. And like, that seems like a lot of money, but like, if you make that cost relative to how much money this person has, they're like, it's the equivalent of someone with the median net worth in America paying $350 for a roundtrip flight. So relatively speaking, if you may, if you had the median net worth in America, you're like, Oh, I'm spending $350 on a plane flight for a vacation. You want to think of this as like, Oh my God. And they're like, that's what it feels like to, if you have a billion dollars to spend a quarter million dollars on a private jet flight.

1:17:08So they're like, there's this like relativity thing. And then they talk about a hundred billionaires. Like there's just no way to spend the money at that point. It's just like absurd. Yeah. Some guy in India, a hundred billionaire, didn't just buy a nice apartment, built a, basically built a small skyscraper to all be his apartment, like 25 stories tall. He just built the building. It has nine stories of cars, like garages on elevators or whatever. Like you just can't spend that money at a certain point. The other book I finished was speaking of Disney, three years in Wonderland by Tom James

1:17:40Pierce. The story of Disneyland is another one of these academic press books. Like what I'm finding is these academic press books about Disney are way better researched than the popular ones. Cause I read Richard Land's book or Richard Snow's book, rather Disney's Land, which I thought was very good. But this is so much better research. Cause I guess these academic press books, they're in no hurry. And he's, you know, they'll spend five years just reading. There's no hurry because it was so detailed. Like it was, it's like, so in the weeds about, you know, they must've just been in

1:18:12the archives and reading every piece of paper or whatever. And so actually I really, um, I enjoyed it there. One issue with the book is it tries to set it up that this is really about this one character, C.V. Wood that played a big role in, you know, creating Disneyland and his relationship with Disney. Um, and it opens with like his backstory, but then it just becomes, it seemed like to me, just like a traditional, like methodical history of how this part came together. And he wasn't necessarily any more important than the other characters. So that was kind of a weird marketing decision. How many Disney books do you think you've read?

1:18:43All of them. I feel like, you know how they have that ACQ, ACQ two series. They don't do it anymore. Do they? They haven't had it in a while, but they got to have you on about Disney. I know. Well, there's a new Disney book coming out. Maybe we should have the guy on. It's an Imagineer has a book coming out September 8th called floating mountains about like being creative or whatever. They should, we should, we should have them on. We're going to, we're going to have a revolt.

UK Study Guide Editions

1:19:10Um, one last thing I want to mention before we run out of time here for our listeners in the UK, uh, there are new UK additions of my study guides. So my first three books, how to win a college, how to become a straight A student, how to become a high school superstar, had not been published in the UK up to now. Um, and they look great. They just sent them to me. They have a brand new covers and they're, they're all like a coherent color scheme. I think they look really good. So if you're in the UK and you're in school or have a kids that are in school, you can now get direct access to the study guides.

1:19:43I think they look really cool, pretty consistent scheme. So that's the school scheme. I didn't realize we hadn't sold those rights over there yet. So, and it's my same publisher that publishes a lot of my other books. So it's nice. All right. I think that's all the time we have for today. A lot of chatter today, Jesse, but I think that's just where we are. Hopefully people appreciate it. I'll be back next week with another one of these Monday episodes. Uh, stay tuned for tech decoded episodes on many, but not all Thursdays as well. Sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com. If you want dispatches on these topics in your inbox once a week and until then, as always,

1:20:15stay deep.