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

24:20So there's no filler there. Like, okay, now I need step three and chapter three will give me step three. So I don't want there to be any filler. I wanted everything to be giving you new information that's part of actually implementing this vision. and the way it goes now as I open 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 in 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.

25:11Here'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 do we mean by buckets? What do you actually have in it? How do you build an actual useful, comprehensive, ideal lifestyle vision? Then we get into 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.

25:50What changes should I do or not? How do I assess some different types of changes to think about? And so 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. That'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.

26:21Then 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 very concrete. Like here's how to crash course. I want you in a few months to be a capable human being. And 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 would be very important.

26:51let'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 idea, here's my approach versus other approaches. One, two, 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.

27:26But 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. 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 and 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.

27:55It's one chapter that's broken into three different things. It's controlling your time, discipline, and controlling your mind. And then Values is its own chapter. So yeah, this deep life map has three major territories. Because 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've got to start thinking about touring again, Jesse.

28:24I was just like amazed how – 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. I know. Coming up on book number nine. I've been doing these things for a while. When you 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. Yeah. If I read like Ginsburg, if I read like Hal or something like that, my head explodes. What's the stream of conscious nonsense? Structure your arguments. Zinn and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

29:00I want numbered subsections. Come on. What are you doing here? I know. I do think about it. This is probably what I'll do here, right? When I think about it, it's like, all right, core idea is lifestyle-centric planning versus this phase shift model. 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, right?

29:35Idea 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 human. You need some sort of foundation of values. And visioning is 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.

30:03And studies show that if you have like six good friends versus three, that you'll get 1.7 extra years on your average longevity. And, you know, social psych research on motivational centers show that if your work has these aspects, then 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's like a good description of what you want? I wrote a whole book that said, don't just follow your passion's bad idea. So what should you be aiming for? What is a lifestyle?

30:33What goes into that? Why is that better than just making like one-off changes? Why are you going to end up, you know, happier that way? How do you actually describe it? How do you make a plan? Like in my planning section of this book, it's a very mechanical book. Like I'm being very advice-y 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 putting aside and making progress on these things that can move you closer to your vision?

31:02That part's often left out. It's just a sort of – 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 it'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 it'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.

31:50There'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 pretty grounded, but still keeping it very structured. Anyways, so there we go. Let'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.

32:29So 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. Actually, 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 up. 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.

32:58I'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. And 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.

33:34And 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 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 and 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.

34:06And so that's my model. 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, I'm 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. I'm still like reading a bunch of books. which is always the fun stage.

34:37I'm reading a lot of books about thinking, like how the brain works. Yeah, 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.

35:10It's like hey figure out what your ideal life that's very exciting you'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. 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. No, it's the deep life, a structured approach.

35:46So 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. 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 Oyster Bay which we talked about recently like oh I want to go visit Teddy Roosevelt Summer House up there and I guess it's in Long Island maybe or upstate New York 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.

36:36I think it'd 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. I 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 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 live on a ranch and hunt or whatever.

37:13But he just left his daughter. So he was just like, all right, my wife is dead, my mom is dead, I'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 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. All right. That's enough of this deep dive nonsense. It's enough of talking about what I was interested in.

37:49I want to hear what you're 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 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. Too 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.

38:26If 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. 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. I 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 that difference is minor and maybe it's even worse to be really good at five things because they're they're crowding each other out in a way that's frustrating there is however a giant difference between being good at zero things versus one.

39:23So 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 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. 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. And I know a lot about jazz music and I've become a pretty adept guitar player and I'm really into like vintage cars.

40:01And 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 the sort of renaissance men, right? Like, wow, you have all these things you do and know. 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. But 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. You can't necessarily rearrange time that way. when you work on too many things concurrently, you get log jams, 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?

41:24So 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 log jamming effects. So Vincent, I admire your attitude, but be patient. Do less. Do those things really well. Let things take time. Add things slowly over time. I mean professionally. I just did a podcast interview this weekend. Well, don't figure who I really admire.

41:56I guess I don't like to announce podcast things until they actually come out, but it will be out soon. And we were talking. It was not Rogan. It was someone who is a little bit more intellectually distinguished in some senses. I'll just leave it at that. And civically distinguished. But we were talking about this in this interview. We were talking a little bit about me. And I was like, yeah, 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. It's 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.

42:32And like, that's been basically it. I've been doing that for over two decades now. And that's, it's great. 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. These are the ideas I'm reflecting to. But also to be a writer for 20 years, one of the things you get really good at over time is talking about your books because I've been doing radio and podcasts at a very regular clip since roughly 2014 when this really started taking off.

43:02I'm like 12 years into that now. And so something like this podcast sort of emerges as a natural, slowly evolving side thread of this 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 very impressive but weren't something that you set out from scratch to do. They 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 compared to an athlete where it's only like...

43:37There are no prime years, basically. I mean, the first 10 years are not because it takes a decade to become reasonable at writing. Maybe for some people, I guess if you live long enough, there'll be some years at the end where you're sort of losing your sharpness. But otherwise, it's like wine. I think writers get better. Their thinking gets clearer. they are more confident it's a really it's an aggregate skill like through accretion you pick up your skill in writing just sort of gets better as you go on writing becomes easier to do and so that's why I like writing so 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 like stuff that's it doesn't lag as long as you can keep the energy high all right we're gonna 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.

44:37So that should be fun. But first, let's talk about Masterclass. As you know, Jesse, we're always trying to level up our game here, both in terms of our video and audio quality. And let me tell you, 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. But 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 do 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 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 chatbot 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. You can even use audio mode to listen during workouts or on commutes.

46:03And 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. This 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.

46:44Teams 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. You 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.

47:22And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. Speaking of our show, let's get back to it. All 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 and 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 rabid cal fan yeah i figure this out i hope i hope you get that treated before it's too late or does it mean uh i like cal so much that i want to bite people i guess rabid means like in this context a uh enthusiastic supporter of.

48:09Okay, so Devin sent along an article. Let's see, we have this one, 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, okay, 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.

49:00Attention was directed either internally towards sensations at the test site or externally towards distracting video clips. All 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.

49:37And another group was told to attune specifically towards what they were feeling in their arm, like 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.

50:16If 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. Attention is this incredibly powerful thing. Our brains are what defines us as a species. It's also our brains are at the core of a huge part of our economy right now because of intensive knowledge labor that requires brains to add value to information.

50:51and 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. Just 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.

51:28So 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 equivalent 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.

52:02Um, 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 And 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. And 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. 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.

52:43Now, 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 about 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 is 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, let's take the thing that doesn't require attention to kind of the busyness stuff and let's hypercharge it.

53:14So 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 summarized by someone else's bot and added to the calendar. it's focusing on things where the values produce is 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, I didn't care at all about nutrition or exercise and all the others.

53:48I 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, care about our marketing materials. And I was like, oh, but 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.

54:16Like 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. to be honest it's kind of a cool mind over body type of situation attention 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 what I come away from 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 dr friend of the show brad stolberg for example who does amateur power lifting you can't it's incredible he'll explain 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.

55:27The sort of LinkedIn AI manager culture is so ridiculous. Everyone trying to feel like they're smart. Alright, 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. Alright, 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 and feel like I need socials for work. Ticket sales PR is almost exclusively on socials these days 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. Ergo hot post propter hot, right? The big social media following is why they're more successful.

56:39The 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 socials are like what they're looking for.

57:07Meanwhile, if you talk to book editors, they're desperate for stuff they can publish. They're desperate for good stuff. 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, 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. So it's probably, this is also kind of true in music as well.

57:40Be 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 you putting things out without having to be someone who takes things in or lives on social media right there's a couple different things you can do here um 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 well you can figure it out um all right so here's my ideas i put down here juliet um number one fixed posting schedule and uh algorithms, what you post about, when you post about, when you post it and what it looks like.

58:39Figure 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. They 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. I'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.

59:12Hey, if you want to know about like my upcoming releases, this or that just, you know, juliet.com slash mailing, like you just have like a simple name to say to them, um, 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, right so 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 right 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 that leverages my skills as musicians, interesting to people, but not interactive.

1:00:08Favorite lyric or something. It's like one sentence of a lyric and you talk about why that's a perfect lyric. Or it's album reviews. Or there's some authors that do what I'm reading. And I just read this passage. And it kind of lets people into the life of this writer and this thinking life or whatever. or pictures from the road. But anyway, something that you do regularly that's repeatable, that fits into what you can offer and is interesting to a crowd and 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.

1:00:41I often point to Ryan Holiday as a great example of this repeatable, non-transactional format where if you look at his feed, he has a backbone of stoic quotes, which I think he just writes out in advance or in a Google Doc. someone 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 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 YouTube videos reposted there once a week or whatever.

1:01:22and it gives you a dose of what you like about Ryan without social media having any impact on his life. So that's probably the way, Juliet, that you should think about that. 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? Like him in arguments about Trump? 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.

1:02:04Then 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? Which 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 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 a variety of content that all fits this theme of I want Stoic motivation, and none of it is him actually probably having to touch this platform at all.

1:02:37So that might be a way to think about it. When you started your response to this question about the constant need to put out material, it started to make me think of the Acquired episode with Disney and they were talking about Disney Plus and how they started Disney Plus and they did all this content and they were trying to compete with Netflix and it didn't necessarily become 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.

1:03:17last week yeah on the rower but um 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 actually brings up another question i have for you about because i was thinking what's my disney question for cal and it's this so when disney when eisner took over not eiser when eiger took over for right When Iger took over, he called up Steve Jobs and wanted essentially to buy Pixar. And if Pixar, if Steve Jobs wasn't going to die, do you think, A, he would have sold it, and B, if Disney didn't acquire it, they would have maybe perished themselves?

1:04:06I 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. Because you got to remember at that time, he was the CEO of Apple. That's kind of where his attention was, right? Pixar was what Jobs did when he was in the wilderness after Next. 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. I guess bought it away from George Lucas and it was like$5 million or something.

1:04:50Exactly, that's what it was. Yeah, it was like, I've read a few books about this. And then it kind of blew up into this 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 have a successful company again. 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.

1:05:19They 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. They needed Disney. Disney needed them. The jobs like renegotiate. It was kind of acrimonious. The jobs like we want to better deal with this. But you have to be huge to really take advantage of that type of IP, to distribute your own movies, to fund your own movies, to 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 with their whole flywheel of parks and all this different types of media, this or that.

1:05:58So like the bulk of the value is also being left on the table. so 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 the like heyday of the Marvel movies in the 2000 teens was just huge amounts of money was coming from that.

1:06:39They're also making a lot from the Disney animation as well. But then they sort of, I mean it's a little bit confusing because they bought, I mean they were nowhere with their animation. Like it was just, it was post after they lost Katzenberg during the Eisner period. He started DreamWorks, right? He started DreamWorks, yeah. SKG is Spielberg Katzenberg and Geffen. So DreamWorks SKG. 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 DreamWorks and do have to finish that so I can count. Well, Katzenberg wanted to stay, but he didn't get the top job, right?

1:07:11Yeah. He didn't get the top job. They gave it to Ovitz, which was a bad idea.

1:07:17My 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. 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 put Lasseter in charge of Disney animation and Pixar.

1:07:51And 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 so it's unclear how much of that was just them taking Pixar and expanding it or how much of that they might have been able to do. But I know at the time, because I reread Iger's book earlier this year, his memoir, they 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.

1:08:22Like 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 at Disney. Yeah. Yeah. And they let him go. And then they put him in charge of everything. But then during Me Too, they're like, your hugs are a little creepy. So 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.

1:08:52The one thing they did mention I thought was interesting was when before Lucas got divorced or whatever, he gave cash, he raised cash for the divorce settlement, didn't want to give her a part of the thing, and then it became like a... It became a massive, yeah. Okay, well, anyways, speaking of Disney, this should bring us to our third segment of the show, What Cal's Up To, because I have a Disney-related edition of Deeper Crazy, which we haven't played recently, but for those who don't know, Oh, 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.

1:09:31Most 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 weeks ago that as part of the renovation that one day will happen. I think it will happen soon now that the summer is over. I was just traveling too much for the studio here or the producing 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.

1:10:03I'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 not a consumer of Disney content. I'm a consumer of Disney as a person and company and how it runs and the people involved. That's what's interesting to me. So I was like, here's what I really want. I want artifacts from the original Disneyland Imagineering. I want something where one of the names, Imagineer 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 employee's collection.

1:10:50I think he died. His family was auctioning off his collection of all this Disney stuff. And included in this auction was various sketches. And the ones I cared about were attributed to Mark Davis, the Imagineer, planning sketches for the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. Oh, deep for sure. Yeah. That looked awesome in there. so 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 gonna say it's there's it's it's in four digits not five i would have thought it was four digits okay yeah i would have crazy i thought everybody nobody's gonna thought it was gonna be five hundred dollars can i tell you why it was nerve-wracking so i have it it's great a collection of seven pictures attributed to Mark Davis, who's the...

1:11:40Not all of them are, but most of them are. Davis is the... He does more of the comic style Imagineering drawing that defines the sort of non-scary elements of the Haunted Mansion and the Pirates of the Caribbean. So, you know, it's just like kind of famous drawing. It was nerve-wracking because... So the way this works is this is... It's a live auction. It was in, you know... 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 jump to 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 and 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.

1:12:35And it was always, here's where I got nervous. It was always the same thing is 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 stop. 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. And 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.

1:13:04And 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. And I was like, oh man, they're doing this every single time. But then I tuned it into mine and it got about two thirds of the way to my max bid. And it was like a going once, going twice. But you could have always adjusted your max bid too, right? Yeah, but I just, everything I was seeing was they were, the people in the room would just wait until, which probably means I paid too much for it. You got it. Yeah. But actually it was okay because there was a better batch of drawings and a worse batch of drawings.

1:13:41And what I paid came right in the middle of 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 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 were original attraction posters so like a haunted mansion silkscreen poster that they had put up in the park in 1960 whatever a Matterhorn bobsled poster because I guess they have posters in the parks if you can get one from the original those were going for $20 ,000 plus really?

1:14:21yeah that was interesting 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 it doesn't matter? Well, I was thinking about that because all right, moving on. The 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 up at a remainder table in Bethany, Delaware when I was at the beach a couple weeks ago. I like Daniel Silva thrillers.

1:14:52His main character is Gabriel Alon. who is a Mossad-trained assassin who becomes a world-famous art restorer. And 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 one was about a lost Leonardo is discovered in the Vatican's archives, and the mob gets involved, and kills off some people and they're going to steal it back and it's like whatever, whatever, right? But they auctioned it off at some point. They're auctioning off this Leonardo and it ends up going for like$500 million and I thought about that because they were referencing the Salvatore Mundi, Salvatore Mundi, the Leonardo they discovered 10 years ago and it went for$450 million at Christie's and I think it went to someone in like a Sheik somewhere or something like that.

1:15:49I was like, 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 % of how much money you have or something. Right. Like that, that feels like, uh, I think they do get nervous, I guess. They got to. 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, well, a billionaire can't afford a lavish private jet.

1:16:25But what they can do is you lease them. So I'm going over to Europe. We'll just hire a private jet. I don't have to own it. And they were talking about the price. It was something expensive, like quarter million dollars or something like that to fly to something and back again or something like that. And that seems like a lot of money. But if you make that cost relative to how much money this person has, it's the equivalent of someone with the median net worth in America paying$350 for a roundtrip flight. So relatively speaking, if you had the median net worth in America, you're like, oh, I'm spending$350 on a plane flight for a vacation.

1:17:00You want to think of this as like, oh my God. And they're like, that's what it feels like if you have a billion dollars, just spend a quarter million dollars on a private jet flight. So there's this relativity thing. And then they talk about 100 billionaires like there's just no way to spend the money at that point. It's just absurd. some guy in India 100 billionaire didn't just buy a nice apartment basically built a small skyscraper to all be his apartment like 25 stories tall he just built a building it has 9 stories of cars like garages on elevators or whatever you just can't spend that money at a certain point the other book I finished was speaking of Disney 3 Years in Wonderland by Tom James Pierce the story of Disneyland it's another one of these academic press books.

1:17:45Like what I'm finding is these academic press books about Disney are way better researched than the popular ones. Because I read Richard Land's book, or Richard Snow's book rather, Disney's Land, which I thought was very good. But this, it's so much better researched. Because I guess these academic press books, they're in no hurry. And they'll spend five years just reading. There's no hurry. Because it was so detailed. Like it's like so in the weeds about, you know, they must have just been in the archives. and reading every piece of paper or whatever. And so actually I really enjoyed it. One issue with the book is it tries to set it up that this is really about this one character, C.V.

1:18:22Wood, that played a big role in creating Disneyland and his relationship with Disney. And it opens with his backstory. But then it just becomes, it seemed like to me, just like a traditional 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? all of them. I feel like, you know how they have that ACQ2 series? They don't do it anymore, do they? They haven't had it in a while, but they've got to have you on about Disney. I know. Well, there's a new Disney book coming out.

1:18:58Maybe we should have the guy on. It's an Imagineer has a book coming out September 8th called Floating Mountains about being creative or whatever. We should have them on. We're going to have a revolt. One last thing I want to mentioned before we run out of time here for our listeners in the UK uh there are new UK editions 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 uh 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 kids that are in school, you can now get direct access to the study guides.

1:19:42I think they look really cool. Pretty consistent schemes. That's a cool scheme. I didn't realize we hadn't sold those rights over there yet. 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. 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.

1:20:14And until then, as always, stay deep.