Ep. 368: I Want Work-Life Balance. Am I Doomed to Mediocrity?

24:39It might be like the Thameses, right, up there in Vermont, otherwise known online as the Frugal Woods. I talked about them. I interviewed Liz in my book, Digital Minimalism, where they were very frugal. They saved a lot of money. They were living right outside Boston in Cambridge, Central Square, and they were very kind of frugal and like sort of saving money, and they bought a property up in Vermont. They moved up there, allowed her to stop working. He kept working but in a remote capacity. They rented out their house in Boston, which more or less covered the small mortgage they had on the house up in Vermont.

25:15More recently, he was able to stop working. They have this like life on this 55 acres where they do maple syruping and they have apple orchards and trails and all this sort of outdoor quiet living with their kids in this local community. That's an example of a remarkable life. You remark on it. Oh, I got to introduce you to these people. They're doing something interesting. All right, if that's your definition of not being mediocre, how do you get there? Well, it's not about eschewing work-life balance. It tends to be much more about build career capital, have the courage to leverage it. What I mean about that is you get good at something that has a sort of lasting, sustainable value to the market.

25:58That can get you sort of a lasting, sustainable source of income and stability. And then you have the courage to say, I'm going to build a really interesting life around that. Like the Frugal Woods, Nate was a computer programmer basically for nonprofits, and they sort of worked out like this is a very useful skill. We can't run our organization without you. And he said, great. I don't want to try to maximize salary with you anymore. I want to be able to work remotely and on my own terms. And then we'll then have the courage to build this whole life up in the woods of Vermont around that career capital.

26:27Laird Hamilton had the capital of, I surf these crazy waves and I can get just enough sponsorship money out of being shown in those surfing magazines surfing these waves to sort of make ends meet and I can keep doing this. Paul Jarvis got really good at web development and he said, okay, instead of growing a big company because there's all this demand now for me, I'll just raise my rates and work less hours. So I will use this skill as the engine to move to Vancouver Island and live by the surf break in Tolfino and have a greenhouse. So it's career capital and courage is what matters here. So we'll put down career capital and courage.

27:08So not only is the answer not just grind, the answers differ depending on what your model is. So we're being more systematic about this because, you know, that's the way I like to do it. The final model of what people have in mind is what most people, just the average person has in mind. if you say, what do you think about having a successful career? Really what they envision is some variation of what we can call the post-war American dream. I don't have a family. I live in a neighborhood I like. Nice house. I'm not worried about money. We're financially stable. I'm not stressed out about money.

27:44We go on two interesting vacations a year. We're close-knit communities that we're a part of. We have good friends and hobbies. I have spent a lot of time in my kid's life, picket fence, et cetera. Starting in the 60s, we began to sort of get bored with this and say it was bougie and this is not that interesting. But talk to a GI in 1945. They would have been like, this is like the best possible life you could offer. Are you kidding me? I'm not stressed about money. I'm not stressed about my town being bombed out by a world war. I have my own yard. I have a car. Like my friends are here. We can walk to the whatever.

28:17I have a stable job that's interesting but not too demanding. That is, for a lot of people, that's not mediocre. to have something like that is the dream. I have a family I love and spend time with, and I'm not stressed about money. My job is interesting, and I don't know. I'm in the bowling league. That's what a lot of people are thinking about. So how do you do that? You get capable. It's a term I'm playing with in my new book on the deep life that I'm writing right now. It's the power, the overlooked power of capability. What does it mean to be capable? In a professional setting, I'm reliable.

28:51I do the thing I say I'm going to do. If I say I'm going to do this, I do it. I do it when I say I'm going to do it. I do it at a high level of quality. I've got my act together. You can trust me. I'm capable, right? I've got my arms on what's going on. I don't take on too much work. I choose to write projects that matter, and I get them done. And I'm professional, and I'm nice, and people like me. We overlook how valuable capability is. But if you are capable, almost any profession, almost any job you have, what are the managers going to worry about? Losing you. Oh, we have a capable person. They get stuff done.

29:19They're good. They choose the right projects. They don't get overloaded. They're nice. They're a leader to the other people. Capability gives you the post-war American dream. It gives you that sort of stable job. It's what allows you then also to be careful about your money and not to overspend and to stay in shape and to care about like, OK, I want to make sure that I do things with my kids. This school is not working for me. I'll make the change so that like things are OK. We deal with all of these things that are necessary for this. Like, hey, we just sort of have a good, rich life is built on a foundation of capability.

29:48What Gen Z sometimes refers to sort of derogatorily as adulting. I call it capability. You build up those abilities. This is boring stuff technically, right? It's time management systems. It's productivity systems. It's strategic plans. It's having an explicit workload management system. It's all the stuff I talk about in books like deep work and slow productivity. But it matters. I don't know why I put a slash there. Oh, geez. Capability. All right. People who are listening, what you're missing is just capability. But Cape a bit. I don't know what I'm writing here, Jesse. Cape a bill. You should hire me if you need like a fancy sign.

30:27I'll just freehand it for you. All right. Boom. There we go. So here's what I mean about this. Like I don't want to get too much in the weeds here of exactly what these models are or exactly what is required. But my point is you got to get more systematic here. What do you mean by success? When you say you want to avoid mediocrity, what does that mean to you? And then you got to get specific. What is really required to get there? Sometimes it's like be ready to grind if you're at a big tin law firm or you just got funding from Andreessen Horowitz. It's like we want our return on your weird Web3 idea.

31:05But for most people in most models, this sort of like I'm just going to stay up real late and burn it and be – pretend like I'm in the West Wing and have all these calls and emails and Slack and I'm going to drink Red Bull all day. Like that's not going to – short term, it doesn't – whatever, but that's not what is going to matter in the long term for your definition of success. So it does really matter. So let's wrap this up. Let me read again that key quote from Barr's piece, the quote that sort of gave us some uneasiness. I'm not suggesting that everyone eliminate work-life balance, but rather arguing that for ambitious young people who want to build wealth, traditional balance is a trap that will keep you comfortably mediocre.

31:43All right, so in the final accounting, was Barr right? I think in this case, Barr was asking the right question, but his answer was to narrow. You need to get specific about what you mean by success, and then you need to learn specific strategies to reach that specific definition. Barr's mistake was to think that all definitions of success require these performative 15-hour days and hustle, but they don't. In fact, the definitions of success that do require that type of hustle are very narrow, and they're open to only a very small number of people, and most people could care less about them. Most definitions of success, by contrast, don't actually require wrecking your health or your social relations.

32:26But here's the thing. As we just saw, these other definitions of success aren't necessarily easy either. They require hard work and focus work, just not all the hours of the day. So why are we talking about this topic on this particular show, right? Well, look, in my roles as a computer scientist and a digital ethicist, I talk a lot about technology's impacts on our lives and how we should react to these changes. And one of the most common vectors that new technologies use to colonize your life, to keep you zonked out in video games or social media, to keep you doing mindless streaming or stewing in nihilism and outrage, is to take advantage of aimlessness.

33:09When you're working actively towards a definition of the deep life, something that's compelling to you, suddenly TikTok and Call of Duty doesn't seem that attractive and rage bait on YouTube starts to look childish. But when you're instead drifting aimlessly through your life, especially when you're young, you become a target for these technologies. If you don't get in the game, the tech companies will play your turn for you. So my real fear about Emil Barr is not that he's going to trick a bunch of 22-year-olds into giving up their sleep and working 100-hour work weeks. Most people see through that bravado.

33:46My real fear. My real fear instead is that people will look to Barr and be so turned off by the idea of work. Oh, is this what it means to be successful in work? That they throw up their hands and give in the nihilism. and then the technologies can creep in and ossify them in that position of aimlessness. So you can go ahead and ignore Emil Barr, but we have to keep his underlying claim in mind. Creating a deep life does require hard work, just not the simplistic performative type of hard work that Barr talked about. So there we go. It may seem like a non-technology related issue, Jesse, but kind of is.

34:23It's like people like that make you anti-work. and when you're anti-work you don't have focus well you don't have focus that's when you know tiktok kind of crawls in it's like hey look at me there's something interesting going on here also bar kind of looks like a 16 year old bond villain in some of the videos i found so it doesn't help yeah there's a video where he had a uh a mock turtleneck in a blazer and was holding a cat like blofeld from a bond movie but like he looks like he's 16 years old so i was like that's not that's not helping your cause not helping your cause um so there we go how do you go about playing with the word capability for the section in the book so i'm working on this notion of a crash course in becoming a more capable human so the idea is you know the book's about the deep life how do you how do you really create a brief life we use lifestyle centric planning we We talk a lot about that on the show.

35:18But a lot of people – I've discovered this on the show. A lot of people, when it comes time to do lifestyle-centric planning, to transform their life into something cool, to follow one of these definitions of success, what they realize is I don't even know how to get started. I don't trust myself to even do the basic work of transformation or I'm in a place where I'm feeling so stuck. I can't even imagine what a more deeper life would even look like. And the issue there I've come to realize is just lack of basic capability. So this – to be capable means you kind of have your act together in the basic ways.

35:51You have some control over your time. You have some control over your mind. You have sort of a basic reserve of discipline. I can do a hard thing even if it's optional knowing that there's a longer-term goal that this is going to give me, right? It's these type of basic level capability that allows you to have confidence. Oh, I can do stuff. Oh, lifestyle-centric planning? Let me give that a try. That's the type of thing I could and maybe make progress on, right? And so I'm toying with a structure to the book where you learn all the ideas of the deep life. And then I have this four-month crash course based loosely off of that really popular video of ours.

36:24Four months, two things per month. Do these things. You'll come on the other side, recharge. And then you can get back to lifestyle-centric planning if you're struggling. So I'm just realizing these things kind of – they all intertwine. It's all complicated. That's why I like simple op-eds. I can't complain though. I wrote op-eds in my 20s for major papers that also had like declarations about I've done this and this and this and I got to be careful about the pot calling the kettle black here a little bit. So there we go. All right. We got some good questions. Also, it's the first episode of a new month.

36:53So we have the books I read in August coming up. But first, we have to get to what you all came here for, which was a word about our sponsors. All right, so Jesse, I got to tell you about the newest thing I'm obsessed with. I'm going to hold it up here to the camera for those who are watching. See this right here? This is my Ridge wallet. It's two slim pieces, I'll tap it here by the mic, of quality metal attached with strong elastic. My credit cards and my IDs are right in here. There's this little notch here, so you push it so they can come out, and you can grab whichever one you want, and then you hit them back in to be here.

37:32It's secure. It's strong. And it's small enough I can put it in my pocket. I don't have my – I had one of those George Costanza wallets. Remember that where he got like back injuries from like having this thing in his back pocket? And I would have to keep it in my backpack or my wife would have to carry it in her bag, which he wasn't very happy about. This just fits in my pocket and I have all my cards and IDs in there. I mean this is a game changer. I'm really happy about it. This is a true story. Tuesday. We're recording this on a Friday. Tuesday. I went out to dinner with some friends, including a friend of mine who works at a major tech company.

38:02We go up to pay at the counter. Both pull out our ridges. Right? I was like, Ridge? He's like, Ridge. And then we did like a Dutch style clog dance. That's what you do when you meet another ridgers. Anyways, I love Ridge. But here's the thing. This is crazy, Jesse. Ridge does these sweepstakes. I didn't know about this. Legendary sweepstakes. Like crazy prizes. Their fifth one. They're doing this for the fifth time right now. Now, here are the prizes for the sweepstakes that Ridge is currently doing. Two lucky winners get to choose between a$280 ,000 Lamborghini Huracan Starato or a$100 ,000 Hennessey Velociraptor, which is where Hennessey Automotive takes a Ford Raptor pickup truck and like soups it up to a crazy amount of horsepower.

38:51Or you could choose$100 ,000 in cash. If two people get to choose between those, Jesse, your truck should be in there. That's what I thought. You can also choose Jesse's 1974 Ford Rustmaster. What's it called? Something like that? Pretty much. Yeah, you get a Lamborghini Starato or Jesse's 1974 Ford Rustmaster, now with occasionally working air conditioning. So I think that's the one that's going to be chosen. Anyways, this sweepstake is going on. There's no reason not to enter. You go to Ridge.com. You can enter for free, so why not take your shot? And if you want to boost your odds, every dollar you spend on Ridge's site gets you one additional entry.

39:30They have a lot of cool products, but I really do love this Ridge wallet. Been using it every day since we got it. So if you're ready to upgrade your wallet and maybe your ride for a limited time only, head to Ridge.com and use the code CAL at checkout for 10 % off your order and a chance to win Ridge's biggest sweepstake ever, a Lamborghini Huracan Starato, a Hennessey Velociraptor, or$100 ,000 in cash. The Velociraptor has 560 horsepower, which I believe is more than my Kia Carnival hybrid minivan, which I believe is powered by a hamster that turns a wheel. I'm not quite sure, but I think that's how my minivan is powered.

40:07So the Velociraptor would be a little bit better. No purchase necessary to enter, but every dollar you spend gets you more entries. That's Ridge.com, and use Cal after you purchase. Use Cal, and after you purchase, they will ask you what you heard about the show. You got to list our show. That's how you know they came from us. I also want to talk to you about Element, spelled L-M-N-T, a zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix and sparkling electrolyte drink born from the growing body of research revealing that optimal health outcomes occur at sodium levels two to three times government recommendations.

40:39Element is a no sugar, no dye, no other dodgy ingredients drink mix or sparkling drink that gives you the electrolytes you need without all that other junk. This is an honest-to-God endorsement. I drink Element essentially every day. Typically after I work out, I'll drink it to replace what I sweat. But also if I wake up in the morning feeling particularly dehydrated, I'll throw Element right into some ice water in my Nalgene. I titrate it depending on how thirsty I feel, like how much of the drink mix I use. I used to mix instead of the prepackaged sparkling drinks, and I love it. I honestly don't trust other athletic drinks because I don't know what goes into them.

41:17With Element, I don't have to worry. Right now, I have a bunch of the watermelon flavor, but there was a new flavor that they introduced over the summer that I want to recommend. It was called Lemonade Salt. So on those really hot days, I think that was a really good one. To be honest, when they announced the Lemonade Salt was their newest flavor, Jesse, I'm kind of glad they chose that over the flavor I had suggested to the executives, which was tobacco diaper. Lemonade salt is better. They probably made the right choice. So I'm not good at coming up at flavors. Element is better at that. So if you want to try some Element, go to drinkelement.com slash deep.

41:54That's drinkelement.com slash deep. If you go to that special URL, you will get a free Element sample pack with any order. Remember, you can try Element risk-free. They're happy to refund your money if you don't like it, but you will unless, of course, you order the tobacco diaper flavor. So go to drinkelement.com slash deep today. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions. First questions from Joel. My work requires me to get a text message through Microsoft Authenticator multiple times per day. This has me on the phone more than I want. How should I deal with the distraction to always look at my text messages?

42:35Interestingly, as part of his employment with me, Jesse has required once every three minutes to call me on a landline to sort of check in his – to give me his 20. He has to say this is a big bird over my 20 years and he has to give me the 20. I got to keep an eye on my people I work with. Okay. Well, it's kind of terrible that you have to answer these text messages throughout the day. I don't buy, however, that this means you must now go into all of your text communication multiple times a day if you don't want to. So you got three things you can do here. One, don't look at the other text messages when you get the Microsoft Authenticator text.

43:11Just you see things come up and you say, I don't care. This is when I do my text messages. This is not one of those times. I will just pretend I didn't see that. That might seem impossible. Practice it for a few days. It won't be so bad. Two, if you're really not sure about your capability to do that, you can set up a custom do not disturb mode that allows messages from that particular number to come through and not others. And you just put it in that mode and only those messages will come through. Or I bet if you talk to IT, there's other factors to use in this two-factor authentication. They say, yeah, that's the default, but we could do other ways.

43:46It can call or like an email. And you could find another way to do it. Just say, I don't want to do text messages. 80 % chance there, they'll hook you up with something else. So do not use this. Kind of looks like you're angling for this answer. do not use this as an excuse to like, I guess I just have to like be involved in text messages all day. You can get around that. All right. Who do we got? Next up is Emily. How did your experiment with summer schedules work out? And what is your, what are you planning for your teaching schedule? So something I'm really trying this semester, Emily, and we'll see, we'll see how it goes.

44:17I have not been in recent years as I guess I'm trying to be accommodating. I have not been as firm as I should be with just these are my deep work hours and I do deep work. And that's just that, right? And a lot of people will be annoyed and that's just what it is. I mean I'm the guy who wrote the book Deep Work. So you can't say you weren't warned. I'm trying to hold the line on that this year. First thing in the morning, I do my deep work hours. There are two exceptions I have to work around. Our faculty meetings are once a month but they're held in the morning on Friday. But I've worked it out that I can get up and start writing right away and make it to the faculty meeting having got in like a reasonable deep work block so I don't have to break that chain.

45:03So now I'm really down to just the end of semester school events for my kids because they often hold those right after school starts. So parents can come in and do that before work. That makes it impossible. Obviously, I want to be at those. But if I'm down to just those, when I have like a presentation of my kid at school is the only time I don't start with deep work, I'm going to be happy. So I'm going to try to hold the line on that. I've been – the problem is by the time I made that decision, I already had a non-trivial number of things scheduled in the morning for the next month or so. So I'm holding the line now, but it might not be for another few weeks until I'm in a territory where that's being preserved.

45:41The other thing is I'm trying to do what I call a studio day. where I dedicate an entire day, the same day every week, just to doing the stuff related to the outreach to the public. So working on podcast scripts, writing my newsletter, any of the sort of stuff that surrounds that. Instead of making that ad hoc, have a day. And I've announced this. I've told like my department chair, like I have a studio day. This is part of my job as a digital ethicist and in the Center for Digital Ethics to do outreach about technology and its impacts. There's a day where the office I'm working out of is my office here in Tacoma Park where my studio is.

46:16And I don't schedule any other meetings on this day. But as Jesse knows, I've been struggling with this because as soon as I declared that, I already had for the next couple of months stuff that fell on every day. So again, it won't be until October until any of this becomes steady. And I might actually have to change what that day is. This is another conversation, Jesse, but I might have to change. It's hard stuff. So anyways, Emily, I'm working on it. But my resolution this fall is I'm just going to be more annoying about it. This is just my thing. And then here's the thing. I get chirped at so much now by so many people from so many different walks of life, from national-level commentators to just random people that we know to random strangers.

46:58I'm kind of used to it now. So this is what I want to do. I want to make sure that I'm writing every single day and that the outreach part of my media company gets a full day of my attention. That's just my standard, and then I'll make everything else fit. and if it doesn't fit, then I'll reduce it. So that's what I'm practicing this year is, and I'll report back how it's going, is just I'm going to hold the line more. And again, it's easy to say and then be really accommodating and the whole thing falls apart. I'm actually going to be less accommodating. But for the summer, you wrote all the time, didn't you?

47:27Yeah, I just wrote all the time. So that worked out well. That worked out fine. Yeah, we travel, we go up north and the writing didn't go well, but the schedule went well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the schedule was fine. So in the summer, I just write every day for the first half of the day and we just built a whole summer around that but realistically now you're on schedule to where you hope to be like going into the summer right with your writing um it's complicated i'm reworking some things this we'll get there we'll get there i mean you wrote a lot of new yorker articles i wrote some new yorker articles oh yeah i was doing a lot of stuff i'm never not writing it's like we talked about in the deep dive i'm never not writing um the newsletter is looking great i want to yeah you know and shout out to so we have weekly newsletter Shout out to Nate for the – he handles all the formatting and it actually looks professional.

48:11So I think all that's good. But I want more of the summer flavor in my regular year. I can't write as much obviously. I have more obligations, but I want to write every day. And then what about deep work for like research? Is that like in the afternoon? Well, it depends what we're talking about for research. So if it's – the things I'm working on in my writing blocks in the morning is it's like books and articles. And so if I'm doing research for a book chapter or an article, that can happen during that time. Like this week I was – I spent one of the writing blocks just finding sources and then the next two blocks like working on writing about it.

48:45All of the other type of stuff I'm working on – yeah, afternoon. By afternoon, I mean sometimes I can get this block in. I'm done by 930. So it might just be like a normal workday is kind of starting, right? If I need to start early, I'll start early. But I'm getting the hours. Yeah. And I'm using the old meta productivity trick, fixed scale of productivity. These are my hours. This is when I deep work. These are the studio days. Everything else fits in. And if I'm not getting this, then I'm not getting to this. Something has to give. So that's something I'm tuning myself into more this semester.

49:21All right. Who we got? Next up is Larry. I went back to episode one where you introduced the idea of the deep life. It's been almost five years since that episode aired. And I'm curious. What did your ideal lifestyle look like back then? How has it evolved since? And what changes do you make to where you are today? Does some of this get answered in your upcoming book? Yeah, it's an interesting question. I haven't gone back and listened to that episode in a while because the mic wasn't great and the audio is a little live. So where I recorded that first episode, this would have been late spring.

49:59it was like may 2020 right in the middle of covid right in the middle of covid and the county we live in in maryland not garmin county was all in on like if you even open your blinds you probably should go to guantanamo like it was very much like just locked down and everyone was trying to out lock down each other to like i don't i guess signal their worthiness or whatever so like this is this is terrible right so we uh we rented a house down in southern maryland where no one no one cares about anything like it's just it's empty whatever uh it's not like we were there all the time it was like we temporarily had a second house we could go down to and it was a weird piece of property because it was like a just a modest house and then not making this up an airstrip it's like a runway but it was all grass but like cut out of the trees runway like so really long and at the end of the runway it was on water and you can there's a fire pit down there and there's like water and they had uh golf carts because it was so far away so you would ride the golf carts down to the end of this runway and there was like water down there it is we just went we just spend more and more time at this crazy property so we gotta have space and be outside.

51:15And they opened up stuff there like way sooner so I could go back to like museums and stuff. We've talked about this before, but I went to five museums in like three weeks when they opened up again. And, you know, that's where I recorded the first episode on a table in that house, a hard table on a hard floor. It was a little live. That's what I was trying to get to. Live meaning echoey. So that's why I haven't listened to it. I will say in the pandemic is when I set like a lot of the pieces that became part of my ideal lifestyle vision that I've made huge progress on but continue to pursue, a lot of those pieces came down in the pandemic.

51:47So that was definitely a phase shift point in whatever my ideal lifestyle vision was. I'm sure pre-pandemic it was much more – I don't remember exactly all the pieces of it. It was much more just functional, just moving forward in my academic career, having a book that was successful. I had a family, still relatively young back then. And we had just moved – like my books were just starting to take off. So I'm sure it was just – I don't know. It was a little bit more prosaic. And then it got a little bit more interesting during the pandemic. Even doing the podcast itself came from driving that golf cart back and forth, listening to mainly the Rewatchables podcast with Bill Simmons and just like hearing what they were doing.

52:33I was like, oh, this is interesting, like what people are up to in this medium and trying to like imagine what it could be. I read a bunch of Disney books during that period. I still – as we'll see at the end of this episode, I'm still reading a lot of Disney books. But I was reading a lot of Disney books back then. During the early pandemic is when my – that weird obsession. And I began thinking about the media side of what I do and a lot of ideas that now we see today and the Deep Work HQ and the podcast, the video and the newsletters and the way things are progressing now and the footprint it has in my life and in my career.

53:05Like a lot of those seeds were planted back early pandemic, thinking about like what I wanted to do with my books and what I wanted the work to shallow ratio, the shape of my career. This is when like my – I began to change beyond just the simple path of just you're a computer science professor who goes to these conferences and publishes these papers and has these students. That's when I first started shifting towards a more ambitious and idiosyncratic vision for my academic impact. So without getting into too much details, a lot changed right around the time I did that podcast early pandemic.

53:39And I made a lot of progress actually on a lot of those ideas that came up then. So still going well. All right. Who do we got? Next up is Kerry. I have enough time in my morning hours to focus on deep work and projects that matter to my work. I also get to inbox zero most days. However, I want to start using my afternoons for other pursuits. My problem is that I obsessively check my inbox for new emails. Well, you do that because you worry about bad things that could happen. And so when you do that type of obsessive checking, you worry about bad things that are happening. But when you're actually doing the checking, what you're looking for is the positive feeling of relief when you see nothing is there.

54:19So your mind is like, what if there's something there? What if someone needs you? What if there's something urgent? You know, like do we need to do something? And you're like, you know what? If I check and there's not, I'm going to feel good. I kind of want that good feeling. You can get addicted to that positive feeling in the same way you can get addicted to the positive feeling of eating a donut or smoking a cigarette. It really can be powerful. So we have to break you out of that cycle. And the way I often suggest in these situations that people do that is commit for one to two weeks saying, I am going to make lots of bad things happen.

54:53even if things go terribly awry I can always apologize my way out of like one week I could be like sorry like it was a hard week I wasn't feeling well or whatever but for one week I'm not going to try to convince myself that nothing bad will happen if I don't check my inbox in the afternoon I'm going to say let the bad things happen I want to see how many bad things happen if I don't do that my new rule is going to be do an emergency check at 4.30 just to make sure there's nothing really urgent And if there is, you can like give your quick apology, like I'm on it. I'll get to it tomorrow. So people aren't stressed out at the end of the day.

55:26And that's it. And be like, I'm sure bad things will happen. People will be upset. Things will get missed. But it's not going to jeopardize my job because it's one week and I can be like, hey, it was a hard week. So make that commitment. Your mind will be on board with that. If you try to convince your mind, it's fine. Nothing bad will happen. It's like, I don't believe you. That is a wrong thing. And because that's a wrong thing, I am not going to base my activities on it. But if you're like, no, no, no, bad things will happen, but we won't get fired for it because it's just one week. Your mind's like, okay, fine.

55:53This is a stupid exercise, but we'll do it. And here's what you'll find. Bad things don't happen because no one really cares. And if you're on the ball and you're responsible and you can touch base at 430 when you need to, when people send you a message, it's off their head. It's off their plate. Like, great. There's one less thing I have to stress about. Now I'm going to pay attention to the next 500 things. It is not as people imagine when they see an email sitting there in their inbox and it's like 430 and it's been there since like 1 p.m. What they imagine is that that sender since 1 p.m. has been sitting there staring at their inbox.

56:30Slowly pouring slugs of bourbon, gripping the glass as it shakes and being like, where the hell is your answer? slug back and they slam it down and then looking at the clock and there's like a wildly ticking second hand behind them and another half hour goes by and they pour another slug it's been 30 minutes so you imagine that's what's happening that everyone is just sitting there like i cannot believe this guy has not answered my message i am probably gonna have to dismember him with an axe because like this is uncomfortable no they have a thousand messages they're just glad they got this one thing off their plate they don't want you to answer right away because then it's back on their plate again.

57:09So it's like, great, we'll let all the terrible things happen. Oh my God, it's gonna be so terrible. And then it won't be. And your mind will be like, oh, okay, fine, you're right, this is okay. And then you'll stop worrying about it as much. Then the relief you get from checking will be less. And if the relief is less, the positive signal is no longer so salient. And then the addictive loop will degrade. So just tell yourself, yeah, mind, let's just see how many bad things do happen and then see what really happens. So much of problems with work communication, Jesse, is what we imagine other people are doing in terms of tracking our behavior.

57:37it's kind of amazing they really think that there's a war room where everyone is sitting there with like real-time graphs it's like the apollo mission control from apollo 13 except for it's like graphs of your inbox you know like they check in on all the people in the control stations at mission control like telemetry go you know whatever life support go that you have everyone that's like response time go number of committees they agreed to go like they're all sitting here with these charts like trying to figure out what's going on no one cares be reliable get your stuff done no one's no one's charting your email response times and if they if they are you know get out that job that's stupid all right who do we got next up is maureen can you summarize how values and strategic planning documents birthday projects and lifestyle centric planning combined together nobody knows just leave it at that it's just the way it is no one knows how they fit together.

58:30We just accept it. Yes. All right. This is like a Cal Newport potpourri. All right. Let's put these, let me go through these all here. Okay. So lifestyle centric planning is an approach to transforming your life in which you work systematically towards a holistic picture of a better lifestyle as opposed to assuming that one radical change or accomplishment will make everything better. So it is an approach to transforming your life. Your values, having a clear description of your values in a values document can help you when creating your ideal lifestyle that you're moving towards. It also just helps you day to day in trying to figure out, like, how do I react to particular situations as they come up?

59:13It's a good reminder. Your strategic plan is a tool you use to move closer to your ideal lifestyle, among other of thing. So that might be useful towards that. How do I make sure I'm making progress on these various things that moves me closer to my ideal lifestyle? Your birthday plan, that just means check in on all this on your birthday to make sure that you don't fall into stasis. Hey, let me look back at my ideal lifestyle. Do I like this vision? Do I need to change anything? How do I want to change my approach, my plan for this year to move closer? So I think that covers it all. Strategic planning, birthday projects, social stream planning, and values.

59:44There you go. So in my new book, which right now feels like it'll come out in 2035, but now I'm making progress on it. It will come out on time. In my new book, I get into some of this. So you'll definitely get into lifestyle-centric planning. Why that's the better way to do it as opposed to hoping for one radical change. How do you build these lifestyle plans? How do you figure out what even matters to you? How do you write a good, ideal lifestyle plan? What's the process? How do you go from like your notes with your intuitions about what resonates to like an actually usefully formatted plan?

1:00:18How do you then build a plan to systematically move closer to that vision? Right? Because I'm all about it's idiosyncratic and it's making very careful. Like if I do this, it could help four things at the same time. Then if I combine it with this, it will prevent this from backsliding. It's more of a puzzle than it is a key. That's a big argument in my book. Changing your life is sometimes fitting together the puzzle pieces of your obstacles and opportunity. not finding the one key that unlocks everything. It's not as dramatic as that. So we'll get into that as well, as well as like the advanced techniques that you throw in to sort of help make that progress.

1:00:52So that's where we might hear about like birthday plans and values documents, et cetera. And then another big part of that book will be like, wait, but what if all of this is just, you're like, I can't even do any of this? Crash course in capability. And maybe you want to do that. And I imagine that being something that you do throughout life. Like I have a hard period. I got knocked on my butt a bunch this quarter, life, work, or whatever. I need to kind of re-get the engine and capability going here, crash course. Or maybe you've never gotten there. You're 27, and it was like straight from college to video games.

1:01:25You're like, I got to just get started, crash course, right? Or you really have your act together, but then you went into a new phase of life. Management position, started a family or something. You're like, oh my god, bought a house. You're like, I don't know how to keep the walls up, crash course. So these are the pieces I'm working with now. All right. Is that our last question? All right, great. So do we have a call this week? Yeah, we have a case study. All right. Which one should we do first, Jesse? You can choose. Let's do the case study first. Do we have our fabled case study music? I think we do.

1:01:58All right. Do I read it? Is it a one-time music or do I read with it in the background? Pretty brave. I see.

1:02:12That'd be funny if the case after that music, the case study started with, well, yesterday I killed a man.

1:02:20Ryan, you're from prison. Must be nice. How do I do deep work when I'm in prison for killing a man? We need different music for that. I like that music. We'll play it again at the end because I kind of talked over it. All right. Today's case study. I like this one's from Nick. It's about household admin, which is something I've been working a lot on recently. Nick said,

1:03:07it came in, so it was easy to slip back into the habit of following up on the stuff every night. But over time, as I built up the routine of checking the mail sorter weekly, I started to trust the system and I got to the place where I could rely on it. After a month or two of using a cardboard box, I decided it was time to over-engineer a more permanent solution. What I came up with was a real mailbox, the style that goes on a wall with a lid on the top, and I mounted it on the kitchen wall with two magnets. This frees up space on the kitchen counter and keeps all the housework paperwork out of sight.

1:03:39It's just the right size to hold a week or two of paperwork. And with the magnets, it's really convenient to pull off the wall when it's time to process. For a long time, I had a weekly reminder in my calendar to process the mail sorter. However, the system was working so well that I recently reduced the frequency to every other week. So using a mail sorter to manage my paperwork has dramatically reduced my household admin burden and keeping that in check is an important piece of my journey towards the deep life. Nick, fantastic case study. Having a place where stuff goes, where you trust that you're going to get to it, this is a David Allen idea, is like the best stress-reducing drug you can find because your mind doesn't worry about it.

1:04:16It's in that box, and I look at that box on Fridays, and I trust I'm going to look at that box on Fridays. And so if I put the thing in the box, it'll be seen on Friday. And what you're gaining here, it's not a time thing. It's what people get wrong about time management or productivity. It's not a time thing. It's not I got the total minutes dedicated. The paperwork is smaller. It's not the game. The game is a psychological relief game. You don't have to worry about it. It's all in one place, and then you can get it done all at once. And it might not be faster, but it is cognitively more pleasant because, as we've also talked about on the show, when you do a big batch of, let's say, household paperwork, you can transform your mind to the cognitive context of household paperwork and then do all of these things in that context.

1:04:58And once you're in the context, these things are much easier to do from just a psychological effort required perspective. Whereas if you take these same household admin things and do them in an ad hoc on-demand pattern just in the middle of something else, oh, let me do this now, you're never in the right cognitive mindset. So it's like pulling cognitive teeth, right? You're like, oh, my God, I got to do this paperwork, but I was just thinking about this thing I was doing over here. And it constantly creates friction and it constantly creates sort of mental strain. So it feels better to do it that way as well.

1:05:26So I think that is a great example. And the key is trust. Yeah, put the weekly calendar thing. You're never going to forget it, but it gives you peace at first because like, oh, my calendar will remind me to check this. You'll remember. But it just gives you peace to know that like it's on my calendar. I won't forget it. So I think that's a fantastic way to do it. When we bought our first house, it was like kind of my job because my wife would go to work early. I'd have the first shift with the kids. And so I just had this mail sorter and a 30-minute block every morning right after the nanny came.

1:05:57I think that's how I did it before I kind of get started with Georgetown work. It was like just do house – because there's so much household stuff to do when you buy a new house. Like I don't have this. The water bill is not working right or we need this type of insurance that we didn't have before. Or like there's snakes in the faucets. It's always something, right? And so I was like just every day for 30 minutes, I work on this stuff. When stuff came in, I just put it in there and man, I was just on top of it. So that works. Trusted systems do work. Can we play the music to play us out here?

1:06:26I enjoyed it.

1:06:39All right. We got a call? We do. Now let's hear it.

1:06:44Hello. My name is Dave Kerlin. and I'm a real estate salesperson. My question is in regard to the capture and review parts of your productivity system. I know you use Trello, and I personally have adopted using it myself, but as the number of Trello cards get bigger and bigger, the list gets longer. I find it difficult to effectively look at them and make decisions about what to do and not to do. You have alluded to David Allen's system in the past, and I'm familiar with his method of capturing things in context categories. Is there a reason you don't create more columns in Trello and use this method?

1:07:18It seems like it would be a more efficient way to review these tasks, etc., when doing daily and weekly planning and dealing with a really big list of possible activities and projects. Love your podcast. It's been so helpful. And the time blocking method has helped me immensely. Thanks. Well, for my professional task when organized in Trello, I do have many columns. I also have many boards. you need to organize information in various scales of context helps you make better use of it right so i tend in the professional context to have a board for each major role so i'm director of undergraduate studies for the computer science department that's a different role than say a role uh working in like the center for digital ethics or my role working as like a an algorithm researcher so give them a separate board i only want to see things related to a given role at one time.

1:08:11And so when I want to service that role, that's what I'm doing this afternoon. Then let me just see those things. And then within those boards, I have a lot of columns. There's like classic columns, like make sense of, I haven't processed it yet. There's like sort of urgent working on this week, but I have a lot of like waiting to hear back from is in there. I sent an email to someone I'm waiting to hear back. Let me remind myself of what that is and what I'm going to do when I hear back to discuss at next meeting for like any regular meetings in my life assigned for that role, I'll have a column, right?

1:08:41So my director of undergraduate studies, there's, I have meetings with my associate director every week and then every other week I meet with my department chair. I keep track of, for both of those things, things I want to talk about at that next meeting. That saves me a ton of email, by the way. So instead of like just sending the people's instinct is as soon as I think of something, let me email my department chair. Hey, it's off my hands. But now you've just added another email to the thousand that she's going to get and she's responds. And now like you have to work this out not at the time you want to, but whenever these emails move back and forth.

1:09:12So instead, you put on a card, talk at next meeting. When you get to the meeting, you go through them all. It gives you relief. You can have columns for like particular projects that are going on. If it's like this is like a time-sensitive, complicated project that we're trying to get this conference together. Great. Here's a separate column over here so I can just keep track of those things. So create as many columns as you need and create different boards for different context. I think all of this helps. So lots of things together that have unrelated context, you all have to look at the same time.

1:09:40That can be really overwhelming. So I'm not sure where you got the idea that I have a very small number of total columns I use. I have a ton in my Trello universe. All right. We got our final segment coming up, the books I read in August. But first, something even more exciting, a word from another one of our sponsors. So look, if you run a small business, you know there's nothing small about it. Every day there is a new decision to make, and even the smallest decisions feel massive. Jesse knows I get upset when people refer to our business as small. Just the other day, for example, Jesse might remember this.

1:10:19The nice woman who runs the gift shop down the street here in Tacoma Park was like, hey, how's life as a small business owner going? So Jesse and I, we rolled our car into a swamp. You don't call my business small. I don't want to hear about that way. So here's what I'm trying to say. It's hard to run a small business. So when you can find decisions that are no brainers, you should take them. And when it comes to selling things, using Shopify is exactly one of those no brainers. Jesse, that was word for word. That whole thing was word for word. The script they sent me, the car and the swamp. And, you know, that's just word for word to Shopify.

1:10:54Shopify's point of sale system is a unified command center for your retail business. It brings together in-store and online operations across up to 1 ,000 locations. It has very impressive features like endless aisle, ship the customer, and buy online but pick up in-store. So these features that make you seem like you're a much bigger company, seamless when you're using Shopify. And with Shopify POS, you can get personalized experiences that help your shoppers come back. We have data about this report from EY said that businesses on Shopify POS see real results like a 22 % better total cost of ownership and benefits equivalent to a 8.9 uplift in sales on average relevant to the market set surveyed.

1:11:35So get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com slash deep. Go to shopify.com slash deep, shopify.com slash deep. I also want to talk about our friends at Caldera Labs. Guys, wouldn't you like to look a little younger, maybe get a few more compliments on your skin? As I've mentioned, as part of his employment contract with me, Jesse has to compliment my skin no fewer than seven times a day. But for the rest of you, your best way to getting compliments on your skin is to actually take care of it. That's exactly what Caldera Lab is here for.

1:12:15Their high-performance skincare is designed specifically for men. These are simple, effective products that are backed by science. In a consumer study, 100 % of men said their skin looks smoother and healthier. 96.9 % noticed improved hydration and texture, and 93.8 % reported a more youthful appearance. Their products include The Good, an award-winning serum packed with 27 active botanicals. the eye serum, which helps reduce the appearance of tired eyes and dark circles and puffiness, and the base layer, a nutrient-rich moisturizer infused with plant stem cells and snow mushroom extract. You just put this on every day.

1:12:55Keep the skin hydrated. These products will make you look better and feel better about yourself, and they're cheaper than hiring Jesse to comment on your skin throughout the day, so that is a bonus. Skin care doesn't have to be complicated, but it should be good. Upgrade your routine with Caldera Lab and see the difference for yourself. Go to calderalab.com slash deep and use deep at checkout for 20 % off your first order. All right, Jesse, let's go to our final segment. So like I like to do, our first episode of each month, talk about the books I read in the previous month. We should get theme music for this, Jesse.

1:13:35Yeah, we should. That's a good idea it's only once a month i think it'd be funny if it was something that like made no sense like it was really incongruous and we just don't mention it it's gonna be funny like girls just want to have fun i won't be the craziest thing la bumba be great um so we're going to do that next time we're going to have incongruous theme music and we're just going to roll with it that's what we do all right so in august it's a weird month i'm looking at my books here i was on vacation in august for a lot of it um so i was reading i was on vacation i was writing a lot i was struggling with my writing i didn't want to read it's an interesting set of books let's just say judges yes what i'm trying to say these are these are the books that someone odd like me reads when on vacation and it's just like i'm not interested in like hard new ideas right now so let's just keep this in mind this is a summer list all right this first book i don't know how to even explain this book.

1:14:35It's called Boundless Realm by Fox Nolte. It is a book. I think it's regularly published. Maybe it's self-published. I read it on Kindle. It is a book about the haunted mansion ride at Disney World, not the Disneyland version of the Disney World. But it's the craziest book, Jesse, because it's not here's a history of the ride. It is here's a history of the haunted house in the American Gothic imagination. Let's start there. All right. Now we're going to have like a history of like – it's like cultural trends that surround the very notion of like haunted spaces. Now let's get a whole history of the dark room attractions starting in these like small amusement park attractions where it would literally just be a dark room that you're on a track and then how things were added.

1:15:23It's like strands of sociology and history all wind together and then it's like a beat by beat examination of this ride. And it goes like on each section, it kind of like goes deep and like what's there and how it's represented the artistic cultural impact, but also like historically speaking, like when something got changed and at this year they came, I mean, it's the craziest thing. It's like the level of detail you would write if you were writing about like a presidential assassination, like that level of research, but about this ride. And it was fascinating. And he has another one out. He has, I think he writes a bunch of these books.

1:16:00So I don't know. The labor of love. How long is the ride? Like five minutes? I was on it like 30 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. It's like five minutes. And I've only been on the one at Disney. I went to Disneyland this summer. And that's the only one anytime I've ever been to any Disney. And this is about the Disney World one, which is a little bit different. And you find out exactly how it's different. Trust me, you get into it. It's a cool, I mean, I think it's a cool ride. I did it a bunch of times. I was just like a, I was reading that one up in Vermont. Interesting book. All right. Then I read Collisions by Alec Navalna Lee.

1:16:32Oh, this is a legitimate book. This is – it's a biography of a physicist who named Alvarez. And he was involved in the Manhattan Project. So he designed the instrument that the chase plane – that chase – like so there's Enola Gay dropping the atomic bomb. But there was – you have like a couple planes with you. And one of the other planes dropped a piece of equipment on a parachute to try to measure the blast and other things and then radio it back. And so he was up in the chase plane because he designed this thing. He went on to win a Nobel Prize for his – he was a sort of experimentalist physicist, big famous physicist.

1:17:14He won a Nobel Prize for his work on something, cloud chambers or particle something, something. So he's kind of an interesting guy. Like what made the book interesting is that his life went – he got involved in like a lot of weird or interesting different projects. So he was heavily involved – not heavily involved, but he got involved in Kennedy assassination debunking. So debunking the conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination from a physics perspective. Like he did a lot of work on using rules of physics to understand things like the timing of the shots and the – like how a head could go backwards if it was shot in this direction.

1:17:51So he got really involved in that. And then most famously later in life working with his son who was a geologist or something like this, he – they were the ones who advanced the asteroid killing the dinosaurs theory. so this was their working together really made this argument based off of uh the iridium and the kt layer they really began to they pushed the argument which you know we grew up with it you and i like yeah the diastrophs were killed by an asteroid what i don't think we realized growing up that was a brand new theory when we were growing up like in the early 90s late 80s that was still being debated.

1:18:33So like we grew up and they're like, yeah, like the asteroid killed the dinosaurs. That wasn't like, yeah, we've known this since the 1950s. In the 90s still, they were like actively making this argument. So anyways, I thought it was cool. So that was interesting. It was interesting to hear about him. Alvarez, interesting guy. Did a lot of deep work. Also, turn this off. I lost my list here. Let me go back. uh then i read it's another disney book jesse i was on vacation this is the mindset i was in i was reducing my stress i i got really into people writing ridiculously detailed books about a very narrow thing involving disney so this is uh similar this is a more legitimate book um no fox nolte is legitimate too i just don't know if it's like traditionally published or not This one was called Before the Birds Sing by Kin Bruce.

1:19:24Kin Bruce is an animator, director, like a Hollywood guy. And it's all about the enchanted tiki room in Disneyland. And because that was like the first animatronics – there was the Lincoln animatronic. But it was really like sort of the first sort of audio animatronics in Disney. And it's the whole history of the technology, the room, like beat by beat, how this came together. This author, Ken Bruce, was like deep in the Disney archives. He got access to them. So he's like looking at annotations on notes about like, oh, they moved like the tables around for this or that. It's like – again, it's a microhistory of this one ride, which by the way, I've never seen.

1:20:06It was closed when I was at Disneyland. So I don't know anything. But I'm interested in audio animatronics. And so you just get this like really, really deep history including like why was it the tiki rooms? You get a whole history about the tiki craze and about the South Pacific really coming to the attention of like the American people. And there was this craze of all these like over-the-top themed tiki restaurants in the first half of the 20th century. Like in Los Angeles, there's this one, the whole outside volcano with like lava coming on. You come into these tiki restaurants and it would – they had like rainstorms inside and volcanoes and giant tanks.

1:20:41It was all really themed. It was this whole mania. Yeah. So you have to understand that to understand like why is there a tiki room at Disneyland? Like it was really big and then it got even bigger after World War II because a lot of American GIs went to the South Pacific. So then they came back and they had seen all this stuff and had these stories and Hawaii was just about to become the 49th U.S. state. And so it was like this moment. So you get like that history in it. But then you get the whole history of audio animatronics, which comes out of technology. They purchased surplus technology that was used in the Polaris nuclear ballistic missile program.

1:21:19Because like the way audio animatronics work, not to get too much into detail here, but it's how do we in an age before we have digital computers, how do we store like all the movements we want like one of a bird to do? And not only store those movements but sync it up exactly with like the sound we're going to be playing. and in audio animatronics they said what we'll do is uh for each movement we'll have like a tone and if we have a multi-track tape we can fit a bunch of tones on here in fact we can overlap some tones on the same tape because there are different frequency bands that are um they don't they constructively we can kind of furrier transform them back out again like we can we can store multiple frequency bands on the same uh channel and then still isolate both of them And so what they then had is – so you're recording these tones on audio tape for all the different motions you want these – it's valves opening and shutting to move things.

1:22:14Then they had these things that Motorola had invented for their push-to-talk radios called tone reads. So you have the sound that's kind of like wired. It's going over an analog cable into these tone reads and it vibrates. Different frequencies vibrate different reads. And when it vibrates, it closes a circuit. And that circuit can then when it closes can open and close a valve to move something. So the program for these birds was on an audio tape. And this tape is playing and they have these huge banks of tone reads that are vibrating different frequencies that are opening and closing valves.

1:22:50And they could fit something like 128 or 200 different kind of sub-tracks of tones on there. And it's exactly synchronized to the sound because one of the tracks is just like the sound. So like it's exactly synchronized to it. So they kind of invented – they were using this to control missiles and they used this for this. But then for Pirates of the Caribbean, there's too many figures for this, right? So Pirates of the Caribbean, now we're talking like 62. There's too many figures and they have audio tape and it's constant. It's not like shows. Like they're constantly moving and they're like we can't just constantly be playing this audio tape and there's too many figures to try to program.

1:23:25So they went to something more simple there. It was each of the – and their motions were much simpler because you only pass them briefly. So they made physical disks that have like bumps up and down. And when the bump happens, like different valves open and close. And they just had like – you have these big racks full of disks with bumps, like big records really. And they would just turn and push a stylus up and down or there would be holes and they would have a photo thing under it. But just physical disks that would turn and each one would have like – it would take two minutes to go around and that's like two minutes of activity.

1:23:59So you would have a whole stack of these disks for all the different motors on one pirate. And it was like a much more durable thing because it was really physical, right? And then by like the 70s, you could just have zeros and ones on a computer, just loading the memory and the computer could just do it. So like this type of stuff is really interesting to me. My wife thought I was crazy. She's like, what are you reading? Actually, this book is a hardcover, beautifully produced. It's hard to get. I had to order it, you know, not through Amazon, through some other means. Beautiful hardcover, embossed hard – cloth hardbound with like the Kiki Bird in or this or that.

1:24:33Self-published as far as I can tell. It's a labor of love. Really? Yeah. There was no publisher. I think this – Brad Bird, the director, wrote – write the introduction. Like this is – the guy who wrote it is like a real Hollywood – he is an animation insider. All right. Then I read a fun novel, which I got in Bethany. There's a good bookstore in Bethany called Beach Reads, which they don't carry my books. But they do have beach reads, a lot of novels or this or that. And I got a book randomly, Off the Shelf Impulse by Desperation Reef by T. Jefferson Parker. It's like a procedural thriller family.

1:25:11They're surfers. There's like, I don't know, intrigue and their criminal syndicate like burns down their restaurant. And it was fun. Interesting. And then finally, I read Shift by Hugh Howey. So I mentioned one of my kids read the Hugh Howey trilogy, which is the – on Apple TV, the series is Silo. But he wrote the Wool trilogy back in the day. That was big like last decade. Anyways, he read them and I promised to read along. So I read the first one the month before. And this month, I read the second one, Shift. And I guess I'll read the third one sometime soon. So there you go. Those are my five books for August 2025.

1:25:48If you know of any obscure Disney books that go way too deep on a very narrow topic, I'm in, man. Now you got to just tell me. I got to read them all. There's a whole world out there. So let me know. Send those recommendations or just send me the book to Jesse. We're going to get a lot of really narrow books. I love the technology side of the Disney park stuff. That's really what I'm kind of interested in. This year, that's my interest. During the pandemic, I was really interested in the media business brand of Disney. Now, this year, because it's like relaxing to me, I'm really interested in the technological side of Disney parks.

1:26:24I've been the one. One day. But what are you going to do? All right. That's all the time we have for today. We'll be back next week with another episode. Until then, as always, stay deep.

1:26:37Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. So if you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70 ,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you got to sign up for my newsletter at CalNewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.

1:27:37Thank you.