Ep. 335: On Morning Routines  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 335: On Morning Routines - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/f967cef9-6e16-4bf6-bce9-596b714f36ef ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Embrace the Suck** - Consider incorporating challenging activities into your morning routine to boost discipline. - This signals to yourself that you're capable of handling difficult tasks. Transcript: Cal Newport All right. So we got a crowded show and I think we should get started with our deep dive. I want to talk today about morning routines. This is a tricky topic for critics of online productivity culture. Overly complicated morning rituals that often seem to rely on confident citations of shaky science have come to represent a lot of what people dislike about online productivity spaces. But as I'll explain as this deep dive unfolds, you know, I feel like my mornings recently have been getting off to a sort of a shaky start and I want to revamp what I'm doing. So with some trepidation, I recently waded into the online productivity world to read articles, social media feeds, and YouTube channels about morning rituals. What is this thing that's happening online? What I've done is I've broken them down into three categories. I'm going to go through these categories, tell you what I found, what's good about each of these categories, what's bad, what my takeaway lessons are, and then I'll end by saying what Changes did I make in my own life based on all that I discovered. All right, so let's get into it. First of all, why do I need this? What I have been finding in my own morning, so my morning starts very predictably because I have three young kids. They all take the same school bus. We have to be out the door about 7.30 to make the walk to the bus stop bus stops about half to three quarters of a mile away so our morning is very much like get up wrangle wrangle wrangle out The door get the kids to the bus walk back now by the time we're back it's 8 10 maybe 8 15 this is where i'm shaky i just eat up too much time between finishing the morning family ritual, getting The kids out the door and getting a sort of like tightly time block planned day unfolding. Just to get ready often takes me way too much time. I don't know why I've talked about this before on the show. It's just some weird block I have, but just to like go get showering dressed, like if I have to go to campus or come to the podcast studio, it just takes way too much time. I often find myself before my schedule really gets going, I might actually get sucked into some sort of administrative chore or task that is enlist. And what ends up happening is by the time my day gets going, I'm cursing how much time has already passed. And when I look at face to productivity dragon and time block my day to follow, it's like, well, there's not enough time in here to do the things I really want to do. I'm almost to my first appointment of the day. So I want to tighten that up. And this is where I was hoping by looking at popular morning routines online, I would find some ideas. Okay. So as I mentioned, I've roughly categorized this content that's out there right now and popular into three categories. So the first category, type one of the morning routine rituals, I'm going to call this the embrace the suck videos. Embrace the suck being a term out of the special forces that basically says when going gets hard, the idea with that term is lean into the hardness. That's great. Hardness is good. So there's a certain type of person talking online that really pushes this for their morning routine that the whole point should be do something really hard. Here's a sort of classic example of that. This is probably the originator of the embrace the suck morning routine. Jocko Willink. So if you're watching, instead of just listening, I've loaded up Jocko's Twitter feed here on the screen, his Twitter feed. He's been doing this for God. I think he started doing this in 2015, but famously like most of what he does on here and I have it on the screen is every morning he takes a picture of his watch when he wakes up so here's a Picture from four hours ago and it says it's 4 28 in the morning and what's his caption you know what you have to do in caps do it here's the day before 4 33 caption stay in the fight and then He will accompany it with a video uh a picture slightly later of like where he exercised he does like brutal exercising he's a sort of a monster of a man So 428 picture of the watch right Now and then a picture of a Bulgarian bag which is like a, was that just like a weighted bag you carry or something like that? Probably. Yeah, something terrible. And it says aftermath move. Right. So that's like the originator of the embrace of the get up really early and do something really hard. This has evolved. So if we look at, you know, online circles and we look at examples of the embrace the suck morning routine, a new aspect that's emerged in sort of like the post-Jocko world is a cold plunge. So here I have a that jesse will play from tiktok of joe rogan felt popularized this talking about his morning routine see if we can play this year i don't dress warm i wear my underwear And i go outside it's 40 degrees this morning and i walk out and i lift the lid on that morosco cold plunge and i see the ice floating up in there every day. I climb in. Jesse That's brutal. Cal Newport And I just get in there for three minutes in the morning and then I work out. So I have that's how I start my day now. Whereas before. All right. So that has also become popular. So I often feel like Rogan, because he's in comedy, so he's out late, is not going to wake up at 430 in the morning. So he his equivalent of something that is over-the hard to get the day started is let's go into an ice-encrusted outside cold plunge for three minutes. There's a lot of people who talk about doing this in the morning as well. So this is all the same type of morning routine. Do something super hard first thing in the morning. All right, so let's do the bad and the good. The bad, one of the places we see a bit of a problem is when people try to justify some of this behavior through ill-sighted science. So for example, I'm not a exercise medicine person, but my friends who are, I'm thinking in particular, like my friend Brad Stolberg will tell me that there's a lot of people citing science About cold plunges that try to justify that there's this really large therapeutic benefit. And he's read all of these studies and he says these effect sizes are teeny. It's like the same effect size you get from like having a cup of coffee in terms of improvement to well-being in the moment or like seeing something fun. Like there are these minor like therapeutically irrelevant impacts. It's easy to oversell, you know, like, hey, there are – your body is – you're going to live for 20 more years. It's easy to do that. I don't think the big players do, but a lot of the secondary people do. The other bad I'd say with this is that, you know, look, not all of these activities are sustainable for all people. In particular, we know there's a small percent of the population, I don't know what the percent is, I think it's 10% or less, who just don't need ([Time 0:03:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5f2d79f7-fadc-4341-8396-fce485235f4e)) - **Morning Recentering** - Morning routines that center around self-discovery can help ground your thoughts. - These routines offer an alternative to starting your day with an ungrounded, reactive mind, especially by avoiding phone use. Transcript: Cal Newport All right. The second category, broad category of these morning rituals I found online, I don't really know what to call this category, self-discovery or recentering your soul. I'm not quite sure what the right way to describe this category, but the canonical example of this category is Hal Elrod's 2012 bestselling book, The Miracle Morning. This was very influential in how people were thinking about morning routines, especially in this sort of early social media period, 2012 to 2016 or so. And we see a lot of variations of what Hal suggests in that book online, especially in social media spaces. I'm going to pull up an article here from 2019 where a reporter, I think this is from NBC News, tried the Miracle Morning and kind of talks it for a month and talks about how it went, but it Gives us a good summary of what actually this ritual means. So the article I'm pulling here is titled, I tried the miracle morning productivity routine for a month. Here is what happened. This is by Locke Hughes from 2019. So what I'm going to do here is just scroll down. What I like about this article is the reporter summarizes the six practices of Hal Elrod's Miracle Morning. So Elrod abbreviates the six practices as SAVERS acronym SAVERS. So the S stands for silence. When you wake up, the first thing you do is you sit silently. This could be, for example, doing a mindfulness meditation. The reporter used Calm meditation app to sort of run through a morning meditation. All right, the second piece of the Miracle Morning is A for affirmations. An affirmation is a sentence or two in alignment with what you want to accomplish and who you need to be to accomplishing it. The Elrod suggests your affirmation should make an impression on your subconscious mind. Transform how you think and feel so you can overcome your limiting beliefs. The reporter in this article's affirmation was, I'm an accomplished successful writer, author, and speaker. My work helps others feel less alone and empowers them to make the choices and decisions that lead them to their best life. You say that to yourself a bunch of times. Then in your miracle morning, you go to V for visualization. You train your brain to see things as you would like them to be instead of as they are. Elrod suggesting this for five minutes. Visualize living your ideal day, performing all tasks with ease, confidence, and enjoyment. Then comes E for exercise. Again, you're still in your morning ritual here. You don't need to run eight miles or even go to the gym unless you want to, but exercise can be something as simple as a 10-minute yoga routine or set of bodyweight exercise you do in the Living room floor. You just need to get moving, and the blood and oxygen flowing to the brain. Then comes R for reading. This practice fast tax transformation at any part of your life. Elrod explained, don't reinvent the wheel. He reminds us the fastest way to achieve everything you want is to model successful people who have already achieved it. Read 10 pages per day. Finally, the final S is for scribing. Scribing just means writing, but a W would have ruined the acronym. This means journaling, jotting down ideas, making a gratitude list, putting whatever's on your mind on paper. All right. So that was the miracle morning. I see a lot of variations of this when I'm looking at morning routine content where people have a relatively, I would characterize it as like a relatively long list of morning checklist Activities. There's usually journaling involved. There's usually some sort of meditation involved, some sort of light exercise. All these things you do that are sort of self-centered on yourself, yourself, your understanding of yourself, like preparing for your day, rediscovering yourself. Any variation like that, I put that into that same category. All right. So let's go for the bad and the good of the sort of recentering, morning recentering approach. The bad is, well, first of all, it could be a lot of time each morning. You're sort of navel gazing. You're thinking about yourself, but you're not, none of this is actually making traction. It's not making traction on something that I don't want to use the word productive here, but you know, something that has like a, uh, an output that like you, you need. So even like a, an exercise routine, like I need to, that exercise is part of like what I need to do for my body or work or whatever it is. There's kind of that sense of frustration of like, I'm doing semi-arbitrary semen activities and it takes a while. You're going through this checklist. So what happens is I think a lot of people get impatient and you're like, kind of fake meditating visual. It becomes a rote, right? I'm scribing thoughts. I'm just going to jot something down. I'm visualizing my day. Like, come on, let's just roll past this. I also think it's very personality driven, right? If you told Jocko Willink, all right, here's your six step thing you have to do in the morning and you're going to have to sit there quietly and then visualize your day being successful And then say like positive affirmations about yourself, you know, he's going to throw a kettlebell through the wall, right? That it's just not his personality. He's like, I would rather, you know, do squats with a Bulgarian bag, whatever, whatever that is. So it's also very personality driven. The good about this approach, because again, I think in each of these approaches, there's a hidden value. It might not be explicitly what they talk about, but it helps explain their popularity. Here, I think the good is our brain can be ungrounded in the morning. And by our brain, I mean, in particular, our conscious thoughts. They can go everywhere. Stressful, distracting, diverting. They can bring us into weird rabbit holes. If you pull out a phone early in the morning, like your brain and your thoughts can really get captured in weird places that takes a long time to escape from. It gets harder and harder to ground it in something useful. Having this like immediate series of cognitive internal things you do grounds your brain in the morning. It prevents you from the alternative of an ungrounded brain just rattling off into like whatever thought, stressful or otherwise. I really think probably 80% of the value this approach generates for people right now is it prevents them from looking at their phone first thing. Having any alternative to looking at your phone first thing is probably positive regardless of the details. Like again, it could be just reorganizing your Jocko approved Bulgarian bags in order. If you just have something to do that's not your phone, I think that is positive. So that's the lesson I'm pulling from second category is that having some sort of cognitive plan in the morning matters. Something where it directs what you're thinking about early in your day. ([Time 0:13:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/914f57ad-d536-4689-90f1-987cf4b0d984)) - **MIT (Most Important Thing) Method** - Prioritize getting outside and tackling your most important work right away in the morning. - This capitalizes on your clearest focus and minimizes cognitive conflicts. Transcript: Cal Newport So you don't start your day with your thoughts being ungrounded. There's probably real benefit in that. All right. The third category of morning routines, I call the MIT abbreviation for most important thing style morning rituals. I think Andrew Huberman's rituals is a good example. He has some other stuff in it. But let's start there. My example here is I have a clip from the goal guys where one of the goal guys says, I'm going to try Andrew Huberman's routine and see what happens. But I think it's a good way of summarizing Huberman's routine. So here, I'm going to play this on the screen for those who are watching. What is Andrew Huberman's morning routine? For me, I tend to wake up sometime around 6am, 630, and I write down the time in which I woke up. The second thing I do after I wake up is I make a beeline for sunlight. So getting outside for a 10-minute walk or a 15-minute walk is absolutely vital to mental and physical health. We get back, I start craving caffeine, but I purposely delay my caffeine intake to 90 minutes to 120 minutes after I wake up. So for me, I just drink water. I also put a little bit of sea salt in the water. And I also drink my athletic greens, which is compatible with fasting. So I don't eat anything until about 11 a.m. Or 12 noon. Next, I would do a 90-minute bout of work, and that's typically phone off and out of the room. You'd be amazed how much you can get done in 90 minutes if you are focused. After I finish that cognitive work bout, I do some form of physical exercise for about an hour. Very last, but certainly... So now we're kind of in mid-morning now, so it's no longer talking about his morning routine. I was actually surprised looking up Huberman's routine because the sense I had gotten about the way people talk about Huberman's protocols is that they are always like overly complicated And super scientific, right? I actually was surprised. Like to me, you could simplify this routine. Like basically there's two pieces to it. Piece one, wake up, get outside right away, and then do work, something important right away. That's where the MIT or most important thing of the day acronym comes from. And then step two, there's like a nutritional piece on it, but the nutritional piece is really, uh, he fast until lunch, which is not a crazy nutritional strategy. Uh, Peter Atiyah talks about this in his book. He's like, look, if you need to, there's different ways to control the calories you consume to prevent over nutrition. And one of the easy ways to do it is like restrict the time which you you eat so from just like a practical manner getting going and waiting till lunch to have like your first food of the day Is like a reasonable strategy for keeping the total calories in the day more reasonable so like that's not like that crazy of a thing the part that is crazy and i think this this completely Exposes uh andrew huberman as the most dangerous, worst type of charlatan. Not drinking caffeine right away, I'm not on board with that. Jesse, that's got to be wrong. He's got to be wrong on that. You got to get your coffee going right away. Okay, so I've seen variations of this sort of Huberman plan, some variations all over the place. The elements being you get going on something important right away without doing anything else professionally and with some combination of like getting some sunlight or getting Outside. That's what we'll call that the MIT strategy. I mean, I've seen it different ways. Some people use like sun lamps and some people do work and then go outside and then do work. But just like getting going with something hard before you engage with the world and getting outside. And I guess from a nutrition standpoint, waiting till that first block of work is done before you even think about like food or breakfast or something like this. Okay. So what's the good and the bad with this morning routine strategy? On the bad side, mornings can be tricky schedule-wise if you have other people in your life. So this adds some complexity to MIT strategies because, you know, hey, you have to get the kids up. You got to get the kids to school. And now if you really want to try to like get up, go outside, it's going to be and get something done before that. You're getting up so early that unless you have Jocko circadian rhythms, you're going to be super tired. So it can get kind of complicated. There's also a danger to the most important thing methodology in general. It's a danger that I've talked often about like throughout sort of my history of dealing with these issues. And that is it's easy to fall into the trap that like once you've worked on your quote unquote most important thing of the day, that you then just fall into like reactive sludge for the Rest of the day. Hey, that's my scheduling for the day. I worked for 90 minutes on X and now it's like, whatever. Inbox is open. I'm kind of slacking. I had this debate with Oliver Berkman when he was on the show last fall. And where we landed is if you have a very autonomous, relatively non-crowded job, so like a writer like Oliver, that's probably fine. Like you get your pages in and in the morning and then you kind of do your best with some like reactive stuff, answer some emails, have some calls. Like you don't really have to be on point. You'll be fine. But for a lot of knowledge work jobs because of pseudo productivity, because of the issues I talk about in my book, Slow Productivity, where we have too much on our plates and we have inefficient Communication protocols. That's not going to work for most people. If you just do one thing with focus and then just anything goes, list reactive method for the rest of the day, you're going to fall behind, you're going to be stressed, you're going to Exhaust your brain, you'll probably end up worse. So you don't want the most important thing of the day to be the only scheduling of the day. You probably still, if you have a sort of standard overloaded knowledge work style job, you still want to probably time block the rest of your day so that you're getting the most out of That without the work unduly taxing you or your brain or becoming unsustainable. All right. So that would be the potential bad there. The good, I think Huberman and everyone else is right on track based on my own experience. Get outside right away matters. I mean, I do this because I walk my kids to the bus stop. I've been doing this forever. Even when my kids were young, I would take our, we had a dog at the time. I would take the dog out very early because my wife would go. She would go to work early. We had a shifted thing. She would go to work on the early side so that I could get the kids up and fed and wait until the nanny was there. And then she would come home on the earlier side to leave the nanny. And then I was going to work later and I'd come back later. But I had to walk the dog before she left for work early. So I got very used to like, oh, you're out there. And actually it's great. Just seasons. It's cold, it's hot, it's somewhere in between. The sun is starting to come up now. I don't know. It really does ground you. I do think that's really great. And ([Time 0:20:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/83390540-0d04-4258-97bd-917e1290007e)) - **Podcast Consumption Habits** - Cal Newport prefers interview-style podcasts and categorizes listening modes based on energy levels. - He prioritizes podcasts aligned with his energy and interest, rather than stressing about optimal consumption. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, who do we have for our first question of the day? Jesse First question is from Joseph. I'm a big consumer of online content, podcasts, YouTube videos, and Twitter feeds. I'm trying to reduce my content consumption. I struggle with selecting which podcast episodes are worth my time. Most podcasters I follow are very interesting and upload once week. Do you have advice on how to determine which episodes are worth watching and which I should skip? Well, I mean, I think the preferred thing to do here is what you want to do is get at least four or five complete listens of deep questions with Cal Newport per day, but you want to use a different Cal Newport Device for each of those listens so that it counts as a different listener. So all I'm suggesting here is you buy like 20 to 30 iPhones and spend most of your day just generating fresh downloads. Joseph, here's my bigger advice here. The theme to my advice to you, first of all, is we can kind of chill out. The stakes here are low, right? So we want to release this idea that there's some optimal way to listen to the podcast that you can miss out on. You're not going to get anything wrong here. The stakes here are very low. So then when we think about how we should think about podcast content, here's the way I like to think about it. There's two modes I'm normally in when I'm playing audio content. Either it's a high energy mode, you know, like it's early in the day, I'm out walking, I'm driving to work, my energy is high. In that type of mode, I want to hear something interesting or engaging. For me, I'm often looking for like an interview that is going to like spark ideas for me. Like, hey, there's something in here or maybe I could write about or it's a world I'm into or I want to learn about an interesting world or I'm looking for motivation and then there is the Second state which is low energy I'm doing the dishes it's nine o'clock at night I'm tired I'm stressed out by work I do not have the the energy or interest right now in getting like excited About ideas and I want something just entertaining. And so then you're looking at like, I want something funny. I want to just kind of get lost in something. You know, I'm just doing something boring and I don't, I'm out of mental energy. So those are the two modes. So your, your only goal is to have more than enough stuff to pull from for both of those modes so that you're just avoiding the null situation of having nothing to listen to in those circumstances. And when you think about it that way, you're like, oh, it's fine. There's an abundance of things I could pull from when I'm looking for like an idea generating podcast. And there's an abundance of like fun or funny podcasts I can pull from when I'm low energy. And so I don't have to stress about it. So you subscribe to – you discover podcasts the way you discover podcasts., you got 20 or 30 you subscribe to, and then you just see like, which one's catching my attention. Once you stop worrying about, oh, am I missing something? Am I doing this suboptimally? It just becomes a lot easier. This is how I often engage with podcasts. It's very random. I kind of subscribe to things as I hear about them, or I follow an author or a thinker to a podcast just to hear that author be interviewed. I'm like, oh, I like this interviewer. Maybe I'll just subscribe to it. And then I'm just I'm in this mode. Let me look at podcasts that match that mode. First thing that catches my attention, I go no regrets. You know, so I hear what I hear. Like, like, Jesse, you're always asking me, like, hey, did you hear so and so interview or that interview? It's just random. Like, sometimes I did. Sometimes, you know, I didn't. So I don't, especially like interview podcasts. I don't serially consume a lot of podcasts. All right. I then have the exception to all of this is what I think of as the like scheduled podcast. Like our podcast, I know this sounds self-serving, but our podcast, our schedule is invented for this to come out at a certain time where it solves a certain problem, where a Monday morning Podcast, we're meant to be a part of your ritual, like Monday morning on your way to work. You listen to it to sort of get back into the mindset of, you know, deep work and the deep life. To come out of the weekend, start thinking again about being careful about how you navigate the modern digital environment, careful about how you're going to approach the morass that Is your knowledge work job, careful in how you think about like what's working and not working or changes you want to make. It's like a wake up for the week type podcast. There's a bunch of them out there that are tied to like a certain time to have a certain purpose. And so, of course, those I think of as like I know when I consume those, that's like ritualistic podcast consumption. So we put these all together. You got your ritualistic podcast. Always listen to this day, this time, every week because they like it's just a nice part of my routine and they serve some purpose. Then you're just pulling from these two other poles depending on your energy. ([Time 0:41:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/166299ca-ac6b-4e39-aa8a-65798a92e90e)) - **Step Tracking** - Track daily steps with a simple pedometer for a focused approach. - Cal Newport prefers single-purpose technologies and finds standalone pedometers effective for tracking steps. Transcript: Jesse Track daily steps? I imagine he doesn't use a smartwatch. I have a love-hate relationship with my Apple watch. I've tried to turn off notifications, but I'm curious about alternative approaches. Yeah. Cal Newport I mean, everyone uses Apple Watches. I'm not a big Apple Watch fan. I remember writing about the Apple Watch when it first came out. So it's worth going back and finding this article at calnewport.com from when the Apple Watch first came out because it captures a reality about that product's launch, which is when The Apple Watch was released, they had no idea what it was for. This was like one of Tim Cook's first move. It was a post-Jobs after Steve Jobs died. One of the first big product deployments that Tim Cook oversaw, if I'm remembering this time, like history was the Apple Watch. And they had no use case for it. They're like, we have a watch. Like a lot of people bought it. And I remember writing an article saying, it's not our job to figure out what the Apple watch should be used for. That's Apple's job. Like they have to tell us, like make a pitch. Here's how you're going to use it. After like a year or so, it kind of shook out like their plan worked. People just used it. And they said, what did people like about it? It shook out that people wanted it for like fitness stuff. And so then it became more of like a fitness aid. But no, I don't use an Apple Watch. I have my day-to watch is actually a Zen 105, which is a full automatic. So there's no electricity or batteries in this beast. It's just a sort of German workhorse of a watch that harnesses my arms motion. And it stays pretty accurate. I can stick within a few minutes. The movement, it's a solito movement customized by zen i can get i don't stay with some like three minutes per week without any winding so cool watch steps all right so uh what i did for A long time and i might go back to is i just bought a watch battery powered pedometer that's you've seen it jesse it's like i don't know for those who are watching like that big so like kind Of the size of like a lighter you know um and and all it did i love single purpose technologies all it does is you you have to press these buttons it's very hard to set the time but you set the Time and then all it does is keep track of your steps just based on its motion and it resets at midnight just like pull out your pocket how many steps have i done today the problem is i kept Losing them because you forget to take it out of your pocket and then like they're in the hamper so then i ended up with like two or three of them and i would i lost this one i'd find another One but i love the single the single use technology it wasn't super accurate be honest, but none of these technologies are. Michael Easter wrote about this last year, some research. It was actually pretty cool. They tested, like, all these pedometers, and none of them are accurate. But it doesn't really matter. It's all, like, kind of relative to itself. So I haven't used those recently. The batteries all died, and I haven't been step counting as much recently. I started step counting more as part of recovery, this injury recovery I'm doing. And I just was using my phone as often in my pocket. And it just automatically tracks stuff in the fitness app. I don't know how accurate that is. But that's what I've been doing. I think I'm going to go back to a standalone pedometer again. I'm wondering if there's – I think there's better ones. I think there's really good – I think the best ones, you like clip on your belt and i think it's going to make me look awesome unless you're wearing sweatpants well i am which i am well i think What i'm going to do and this is more reasonable and accurate is you know the wheel things it's like a wheel on a stick it's how you like accurately yeah yeah let's walk around with one of Those they're constantly like pushing my my wheel on a stick anyways i love standalone pedometers if someone knows of a really good one small it's very accurate you don't have to use An iphone uh tell jesse jesse at calnewport.com because i'm i'm in the market it's ([Time 0:53:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4b739c71-80aa-4b0f-a10a-940ed5633b2f)) - **Protecting Office Hours** - Treat office hours like any other meeting, putting them on your calendar and protecting them. - Only reschedule office hours if you would reschedule another important meeting. Transcript: Jesse Right. Who do we got next? All right. Next question is from Lindsay. Is it okay to have different office hours throughout the week, depending on my schedule Also, sometimes higher up scheduled meetings that I have to accept. How should I manage office hours in those cases? Cal Newport Well, first of all, congrats for doing the office hour strategy. For people who don't know, very briefly, this is the strategy where you have set times on set days in which you are available for incoming communication. Office door open. Your phone is on. If there's a chat service your company uses like Slack, you're in a channel ready to chat. And you use this to defer as much as possible any sort of back and forth communication that requires more than you just responding to a message with a single message. You say, well, just grab me at my office hours. And this actually breaks up or eliminates a bunch of ad hoc back and forth exchanges. And those are the real killers. We always talk about the real killers of your energy and concentration is having to monitor inboxes for these back and forth conversations. So you want to try to eliminate those with office hours. Okay. It's okay if your office hours shift a little bit, right? Because like typically what's happening is no one knows what your office hours are. So you're typically telling people when you are diffusing one of these back and forths. Like it's often, hey, Jesse, what do you think about, like, what should we do for the timing for the upcoming client conference? Like, oh, this is a back and forth. It's usually you're replying to that like, that's a good question. We should get into this. If you can, just like swing by, you know, call me during one of my office hours this week and we can figure it out. Paste what those are. Like just have a text file on your desktop with here's where they are this week and you just like paste that in. Right. And then they just like, okay, great. I'll call them one of those times. So if you see something gets scheduled and you're kind of shifting them around, it doesn't really matter because people are hearing about your office hours sort of on demand. So that's one thing to keep in mind. A second thing to keep in mind is protect the office hours like other meetings. So like, especially if there's a shared calendar system, more and more companies do this because we overmeet. Why do we overmeet? Because we have workloads that are too high. But more and more companies like Georgetown will do this. For example, you'll have a shared calendar that's communal so that when a higher up, like a fancy person in your company wants to set up a meeting with people, more and more what will happen At these companies is they'll have one of their assistants look at everyone's calendar, find a time that works, and then send out an invitation. This has become like the new way that higher ups deal with calendars, right? Because a higher up is not going to waste his or her time with like, and well, when are you available? What about this? Or what about that? And so there's like more and more of this is going on. So all you have to do is your office hours just go on your calendar, like any other meeting. So when these meetings are being set up automatically, those times just aren't considered. So you have to like show respect to your office hours, treat it like if you already had a meeting with like your team lead, and then your boss is like, hey, can we meet at blah, blah, blah Time? You're like, well, no, I'm already have a meeting then, but I'm free after before and you like give all the other times you're like, we're kind of used to that convention. So it's okay if your office hours have to shift because most people are finding out about them as they need them. And two, treat the office hours like a meeting that's already on your calendar. And then you can kind of protect that time like you would protect any other meeting that was on your calendar. Then just follow the same conventions. Like let's say like the CEO of your major company, you know, chief of staff is like she needs to meet you at three on Monday. You know, I get these summons sometimes. Not summons, but like at the university level, this will be typically like the provost or the president. If the provost or the president wants to talk to me, typically they're just telling you, hey, can you come by at like blah, blah, blah, because their schedule is so full. It's like, this is the slot. Okay. So if it's something where you would, you would overwrite or reschedule an existing meeting with someone else, then you would overwrite and cancel your office hours. If it's something where you want it, you would say, no, no, I'm already busy then, then, and then, but here's where I'm available, then don't reschedule your office hours. So just treat it like you would any other meeting on your schedule. I get burned with this shared calendar thing all the time, Jesse, because I have multiple calendars, right? You know, I have my Georgetown calendar, but like so much of my life is run. My writing life has all this other obligations and I don't keep that on my Georgetown calendar. So what'll happen is with higher ups, they'll often just get this media invite. We'll just show up and they'll be like, yeah, we looked at your calendar. And so as far as they're concerned, these assistants must think I'm so lazy because I don't – there's nothing on my Georgetown calendar. Jesse Otherwise, you'd have to go through your Georgetown calendar and put fake things in that codes like for your other calendar. Cal Newport Yeah, which would be like – yeah. So instead what happens, I'm just constantly having to be like, I'm sorry. Like I don't actually use this Georgetown calendar, but I'm not available any of these times. Maybe I should consolidate my calendar. But the issue is it's complicated because I share my calendar with my wife and she doesn't need to see all the Georgetown things and and I I have things I don't want I you know I use three Calendars it's the moral of the story you probably could spend like two to three minutes and put in those like blocks of meetings you know as just like fake code there's probably a way Too I can import my other calendar to my georgetown calendar and have a show up automatically but yeah i don't it's annoying people all ([Time 0:57:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3d26b4d0-bd12-4459-9448-f6667c3ce054)) - **Career Capital for Filmmaking** - For creative aspirations like filmmaking, focus on actively creating, not climbing a corporate ladder. - Combine lifestyle-centric planning with evidence-based research to make informed career decisions. Transcript: Jesse Right who do we got next next question is from luke i'm 25 and a post-production producer at a large marketing agency my long-term goal is to make feature films but i took this job to build Career capital and expand my experience beyond my video production skills my role involves no creative work, just managing emails, coordinating teams, and ensuring client deliverables. How do you know if I'm staying in this role? I don't, how do I know if I'm staying in this role is worth it for career capital or if it's time to quit and pivot towards something more aligned with my aspirations? Well, I think there's a couple of things going on here, Luke. Cal Newport The one is your specific aspiration for feature films and two is just a more general question of how do you decide like is this job right for me and whether well despite the specifics of The job when it comes to feature films i was actually just you know i i like movies i read a lot of books about movies i was just reading or listening to a book maybe this was in the book we talked About from December books on the 1989 the sci-fi movies from 1989 it may and maybe it was Ridley Scott I don't quite remember which director was talking about this but basically they Had this advice which stuck out to me that I think is relevant here as well they said when it comes to like feature film directing there's not a ladder. Like so this idea of like, well, let me just get my foot in the door in like that industry. And then I'll slowly kind of like move my way up and work my way up these like that's not how it works. You have to just start directing. This might have been Chris Nolan who was talking about this. Like you got to just as quickly as possible find a way to make a movie and make it good. Like I got the money from here and there it's small it's a short but like makes you got to be making movies like the directors just come in directing like i'm a director i'm directing you Know here's a movie i did here's a short sometimes this could be commercial directing like ridley scott came out of commercial directing like that's where he could get work you know Okay but i'm directing stuff and now i want to do movies don't they're saying there's not don't become an ad and then work your way up to be an assistant director and we're like that doesn't Work they there's a talent mindset in hollywood that says like if you're meant to be a good director you should just come on to the scene guns blazing like directing cool stuff oh look At all this talent let's like give them a bigger movie to try it's not a like you worked your way up type of thing so no uh post-production producing at large market agency when it comes To your aspiration to be a feature film director i mean you might as well um be at like a computer software firm or a truck driver or something it's just not related it's not going to make A difference the bigger question here though is like how do you know in general if staying in a place is worth your career cap is it worth it are you acquiring enough career capital? Should you be switching to another job? Is this not going to support a vision you have? How do you actually do that? There's two things that matter. Lifestyle-centric planning and evidence-based planning. Right? So lifestyle-centric planning means you know what it is you're aiming towards, and it's not a specific job so much as like, here's all the aspects of the life I want to have in five years And 15 years. That type of specificity now allows you to say, am I acquiring the right type of career capital at this particular job that I see how, like I have the path in mind, that if I get better at This, I'll be able to change my position to be this and this position will be compatible with this. And that's going to match like a lot of the stuff I want in my lifestyle. So you're working towards a particular goal. Now you can get very clear about specifically what you're doing. Is specifically what I'm doing going to help me get there? Evidence-based planning says when it comes to like particular stuff you're doing as part of these lifestyle plans, do you have evidence from real people who know what they're talking About that the thing you're doing will work? Like lifestyle-centric planning is how you figure out like this is what I'm aiming towards and I'm working backwards from that and building plans of like how do I get closer to that, Giving my unique opportunities and obstacles. The evidence-based component is making sure you're not telling yourself stories as part of that effort. Make sure you haven't written your own story about what you think matters as opposed to learning from people what really matters. Like the advice I gave you earlier in my answer about how people become feature film directors, that's like an example of evidence-based planning. You might want the story to be doing production at a marketing company, which will lead to this, which will lead to this. And then finally, I'll get my shot as being a director. You might want that to be the right story. But then you talk to real people who know what's going on. And you get, you Sandy check your plan. They say, that's not going to get you anywhere near where you want to go. Now, evidence-based planning, you say, why would people avoid this step? Well, they avoid this step because you sometimes get an answer that is not what you want to hear. Sometimes you get the answer of like, oh, that's how people do this. I'm not going to be able to do that. Or I tried that and it didn't go well. Right. So there can be some reality checks that happen with evidence-based planning. I may want to get to this place. I may want this plan, this piece of my plan to work. But what I'm doing is not going to work. And what I would have to do, I'm not capable of doing or I tried and I failed. I don't have that talent. I don't have that access. It's too late. So evidence-based planning can be pretty scary because it reality checks you, but those reality checks are often liberating because you say, okay, well, what's next? And the thing you want to fall back to is your lifestyle-centric vision. And you say, okay, there's other ways to get to that. That's what I love about lifestyle-centric planning. You might have a whole lifestyle, creative lifestyle vision that your plan to get there is built around being a director. And maybe you find, like, that's not reasonable. Well, you still have that lifestyle image. Oh, I just moved your camera, Jesse. All good. Speaking of directors, that was like a, you know what they call that, what I just did there, Jesse? So for people who are watching, I had to laterally move the camera back on Jesse's head. That's called a swish pan. Is it? Yeah. There you go. I just swish pan Jesse. What I'm trying to say is I should be a director. But when you have lifestyle-centric planning, we're like, okay, I had this way of getting to this lifestyle that's built on directing. For whatever reason, I got some evidence-based reality check that's not going to work. Well, what were the aspects of this lifestyle I really liked? I could still capture those with this other way. Okay, maybe I'm not going to be a feature film director, but I could be X, Y, and Z because actually this is what was important to me and you find other ways to get there. It's the most flexible planning methodology I know because you have all of these possible routes forward in your life. Your life forward is all of these branching trees that exponentially grow and covers all this land. You see each of those as paths. There's so many paths to navigate there. You always have so many more options. It's so much more freeing than grand goal-based planning in which you're just fixated on a particular path. And if that path doesn't work, you're out of luck. And if that path does work and you discover it doesn't fix everything, you're even more ... ([Time 1:02:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/01fc0070-8d83-4ba4-a761-5f7e520525fd)) - **Enforcing Meeting-Free Days** - If people disregard your meeting-free days, treat office hours like regular meetings on your calendar. - Communicate and reject conflicting meeting requests as you would with any other scheduled meeting. Transcript: Cal Newport All right. What do we got next, Jesse? We have our corner. Ooh, this is where each week we take a question related to my new book. I can't say new book anymore, Jesse. It's been out for 10 months now. Jesse Yeah, we came up with some good rules last episode. Yeah, what did we decide? One year mark. One year mark. Cal Newport Okay, so I'm going to call it my new book until we stop doing the corner. So my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomptain Without Burnout. Every week we do a question relating to it, and we do it so that we have an excuse to play the official theme music for the segment, which we'll hear now. All right. What's our Slow Productivity Corner question of the week? Jesse It's from Christy, and it's about office hours again. So he says, I'm a software engineer and recently read Slow Productivity. I set up office hours twice a week. I've also blocked off Wednesdays as meeting-free days. However, people disregard these and still schedule meetings on Wednesdays. I'm fed up. How can I politely and effectively communicate, reject meetings on these days? Cal Newport Again, I think this goes back to an office hours, I should say, is discussed in more length and slow productivity because principle one, doing fewer things. Part of that principle talks about how you reduce just the load of what you're juggling any one moment. And office hours is a fantastic strategy in there, along with many including like polling versus pushing etc etc all right this goes back to do not treat office hours differently than Other meetings it lives on your calendar in the same way that you know meet with bob from marketing lives on your calendar and deal with meeting requests the same way you deal with media It's all homogeneous now hey let's meet on Wednesday. How about two? You're like, no, I'm busy from one to three, but I'm free from three to five. I'm free from two to whatever. You just deal with it like the way you would deal with any other meeting. And again, the rules I talked about before apply here. You would only preempt that meeting, your office hours for another meeting, if you would have preempted a meeting with Bob for marketing for that new meeting. So if it's, again, if it's super urgent and higher up, and you would normally cancel another meeting that was already in place to do this new meeting, then do the same for office hours. But if you would not cancel an existing meeting, right, for this new meeting being proposed, don't do that for office hours either. Treat it with parity, with parity to how you would treat existing meetings. If you're struggling, it might be the case that your office hours are too long. That's like a common issue is that people will say, I'm going to have three hours on Wednesday afternoons and that's office hours and then people can come in. That might be too much time to consistently have blocked off right because if someone if bob from marketing said we should have a three-hour meeting every wednesday you'd be like that's Too many meetings right so that that could be the other problem here is that your office hours are too long make them shorter make it an hour people can come in and out you can get a lot done In an hour and then it won't be so hard it won't it won't step on on people's toes too much time right so just whatever you would do with a normal meeting, do that with your office hours. I like office hours. I'm back. I have some teaching again this semester. So I have like legitimate office hours again. Jesse It's ([Time 1:09:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/43f278c8-deb8-451c-aa0b-be0f07fe13bf)) - **Doctoral Research Skills** - Doctoral students should focus on understanding existing research and defer to senior researchers for problem selection. - Mastering existing literature makes you invaluable and helps identify potential follow-up research. Transcript: Cal Newport Really nice. Call me in my office hours. All right. What do we got? We got a call. Jesse So you want normally the last episode you said you wanted the theme music twice. Do you want to hear it again? Oh, I forgot the rules. Yeah, let's hear it one more time. Cal Newport I'm going to miss it when we get to the one year, two more months. Play it four times. Jesse Because your book came out early March, right? Early March. Yeah. You basically have two months from today. Yeah. Yeah, we're getting there. I can put it on MP3. You can listen to it on your walks with your new pedometer. Cal Newport I'm going to look so, yeah, wheeling my pedometer wheel and listening to slow productivity music on a Walkman. It'd be fantastic. Do we got a call this week? We do. All right. Hi, Cal. My name is Emil Foligno, and I've been a lecturer within computer science at the Swedish Higher Education Institute for the past eight plus years. I've used some of your approaches to deep work and time management to become great at teaching and was promoted to expert lecturer a couple of years ago. I've now invested some of my career capital and will start doctoral studies in general, but with my lecturer salary. To be able to obsess over quality, I will need to develop a new set of skills related to research. As an experienced researcher, what general and specific skills would you recommend that I hone in on? That's a good question. All right. So this is someone who knows the field well. They've been doing lecturing. It's going back to doctoral work while maintaining their lecturer position or salary, which is well played by the way. Right? That's a good move. What do you need to know to do computer science research at a doctoral level or above really well? Here, I usually come back to a couple of things. One, it is it's really hard to find good problems. There's like a real skill to that. Like this is this is right problem to look at next. Like people have been looking at this and this is like a natural follow-up that applies some special skill our group has. Like there's like a pattern to this. It's usually in the adjacent possible. So when you're a doctoral student, defer to more senior people for problem selection. So if you're in a group that research is often done with your advisor, your advisor is going to have that sixth sense you don't have yet, right? If you're working with other research groups, you kind of defer to like more senior people, like let them find or suggest like what the problem, like what the really interesting problem Is. You can be kind of selective here. Like maybe people are, hey, do you want to work on this? You want to work on that? Be wary of people just sort of like spitballing, like this could be interesting, that could be interesting. I would tie my ship closer to ideas that are coming out of existing research that's catching attention. Good place to be in your doctoral program. There's some heat going on over here with this issue. There's been a couple big papers on it. Like what are the natural follow-up papers on this topic? What's the natural next step? Like get in where there's already some heat while you're still a doctoral student. The second thing I would say is more important than anything else is understanding existing research. You got to read the relevant papers and take the time to really understand them. The most valuable doctoral students in most computer science groups are those who are reading and understanding the literature relevant to the problems that they're supposed to Be working on. If you want to make yourself really useful to your advisor, you come back and are like, I spent the week reading these three award-winning papers from the conference that's relevant To our field. And here's what's going on. And here's what they did. And here's what they found. And here's what their their questions. Like, you want to be an expert. I mean, I remember this when I was post-docing. So I'm a theoretician, but I post-doc at MIT in a systems group, network and mobile systems group, Hari Balakrishna's group. And I remember, like, one of the students, so they were doing a lot of work on wireless, because I was doing theory about wireless distributed algorithm theory and sort of wireless environments. And so I was going back to a systems group to bring some theory know-how but also to bring back some more systems know-how back to theory, et cetera, et cetera. I remember one of the students in this group when the new 802.11n standard came out, which was new at the time. This would have been 2009, 2010. They just disappeared and came back like a week later. Okay. I have mastered, I've read all this, the, the impossibly obtuse, uh, opaque, I should say technical documentation and read the early papers on it. I now know exactly how this works and what the options are and what's happening here. And I can, I I'm an expert on this now. And then we were able to, or my advisor was able to harness that and say, great, now let's find an interesting problem to look at. This new standard came out. Let's really understand it. What is like an experiment we can run or an interesting thing we can follow? So like that student had made himself very useful by mastering that knowledge. In theory, this is even more clear. The best papers come out of understanding the already good papers. And it's really hard to understand papers in theory because, again, they're complicated proofs and only some of the steps are shown. I mean, it's really, it's one of the hardest things I ever do intellectually is really understanding existing proofs in existing papers because you have to fill in a lot of gaps on your Own. But when you teach yourself the mathematics and the logic and understand a really complicated proof and you really internalize it, it opens up all of these options. You take that same mechanics and you apply them over here. You see a natural way to follow up. Well, the results were here. I really understand this. I'm also good at this, like, I can bring in, like, whatever, like, Martingale analysis, which they probably didn't know much about. But if we can get away from being dependent on Chernoffs and throw in some like Martingale bounds, we can actually deal with these troublesome dependencies over here and lose that log Factor. Great. I'm going to take that hammer. I'm going to apply it over to this nail. And now you have a follow up paper and it's technical and it moves the state of the art forward. All of this comes back to understanding papers. So defer to the experts on like, what are the good problems when you're still new and make yourself useful by reading what's already good and spending the time to understand what's already Good. ([Time 1:12:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b1dc531c-dee8-4ad1-a4e7-5c2b1979cf87)) - **Lifestyle-Centric Planning for Pastoring** - Justin transitioned to pastoring by using lifestyle-centric planning, prioritizing time with his family and faith. - He used Newport's productivity strategies to manage the demands of pastoring and maintain a fulfilling life. Transcript: Cal Newport It's all about the reading. All right, let's see. We got a case study here. We could just see instead discuss Martin Gale balance instead of the case study. I don't know what people would prefer. My misspent youth doing probabilistic analysis. I've got a case study here. This one comes from Justin. This is where people write in the jesse at calnewport.com and talk about how they use the advice we discuss on the show in their own lives. So Justin says, most of my career has been in people work, adults with disabilities, trauma-informed work with teens, and now as a pastor in a church. The transition to pastoring was a significant adjustment and was hugely helped by your books, Deep Work, and So Good They Can't Ignore You. I was in my late 20s with a second kid on the way when I decided I did some to do some lifestyle-centric planning that included no more shift work and the chance to be more open about my faith In my work with my people. My intention was to be a pastor with time and energy for my wife and kids, living close to my family and the mountains here in Alberta, Canada. So I quit my highly demanding youth and family counselor role to do a MA in seminary while working halftime as a church youth ministry director. My undergrad five years earlier was really challenging, with a little more prefrontal cortex and a lot more awareness of autopilot scheduling and deep work blocking. I was able to do well in seminary, become licensed as a minister, grow my position at the church into a full-time role, get back into CrossFit and backcountry camping and be a present Father and husband. Pastoring has a ton of variety and flexibility and infinite opportunities. So your MSP teaching has been huge and taming what could have been overwhelming. MSP, he means multi-scale planning, by the way, and weekly templates are helping me grow in specific areas of study, keep up with administrative demands, grow our church and plan family And personal rhythms that are life-giving and make me glad I made the switch five and a half years ago. Justin, I appreciate that case study. Two things I want to point out. One, for all the students out there, notice how Justin said he found his undergraduate education to be challenging, but when he returned half a decade later with a little bit more prefrontal Cortex and a little bit more systematic approach to his time and efforts, it wasn't so hard. Yeah. Being a student is not that hard as long as you don't approach your work like a student. When people come back to school later in life, they often have a much easier time doing well because it's not that hard of a job if you're good at managing your time and being sort of reasonable About when you get things done. So just keep that in mind if you're stressed out as a student. I also love the example of lifestyle-centric planning. He figured out the attributes he was looking for in his life, and some of this had to do with who he was around, what he was around in terms of physical features, the mountains, etc., but Also some characteristics of his work, in particular that he was open about his faith and that the hours weren't crazy, that he had lots of time with his family. Then he worked backwards with opportunities and obstacles and said, okay, I could go back and get this MA, this timing works out. If I keep this job over here, that'll pay for that. Youth ministry director will help keep the lights on while I'm getting this MA, but it'll also be the foot in the door to move to a pastor role and set the right type of church. And I throw the right sort of Cal Newport style organizational strategies at my work. I can keep it tamed enough to have the time with my family. There's an opportunity to do this near where I want to be. You see how all these pieces fit together. The final point I want to make here is notice how he was deploying the sort of quote-unquote productivity strategies we talk about, like multi-scale planning, weekly templates, and Autopilot scheduling. He was deploying them to help execute his vision of having a job that had a spiritual meaning to it, but had a reasonable time footprint so he could do other stuff, so he could be present For his family and spend time in nature. It's why I get frustrated when people take what we do here, for example, and somehow lump it into some sort of undifferentiated hustle culture. When people say talk about organization and productivity as somehow the embodiment of some sort of bourgeois embrace of, you know, capitalist dynamics, as if there's some better Alternative world in which, like, we all sit around and do nothing and just send out pithy sub stacks and are lauded or something like this. And work is all sort of contrived. How are people in the real world using these type of ideas? Often they're using them so that they can like keep their work contained the same way I use them. I get super stressed with, with, with crowded calendars. I get super stressed if I have to work outside of a nine to five on any sort of consistent basis. I get super stressed if I don't get seasonality, times that are low key to offset times that are higher key. And the only way I know how to sort of keep my work reasonable is to deploy these type of ideas. I'm multi-scale planning, weekly templates, autopilot scheduling. So I love the shift in thinking. You deploy these tools to make your life more sustainable, not as a means to make it more stressful. Because what is the reality? Like I talk about in my book, Slow Productivity. Most of like the knowledge work sector right now is dominated by this broken notion of pseudo productivity where visible activity is used as a proxy for useful effort. So if what you want to do is hustle, what you want to do is like keep getting more and keep getting more recognition, you could just work really hard, just work all hours, answer emails All the time, just be visibly busy all the time. You don't need, why would you need careful planning of your time? Why would you need weekly templates or autopilot schedules or multi-scale planning? If you're in the pseudo productivity regime trying to get attention, just like be on your email all the time. That's what's rewarded right now. If anything, the stuff we talk about is sort of counterproductive to the things that get people in a superficial sense noticed and moved ahead, you know, especially early in their career. So anyways, I use that, Justin, as an excuse for a bit of a rant. I think of the type, what we call productivity. I think about that, you know, you, if you increase what you can produce per unit time, you can now reduce the unit time and keep the production the same and work less. That is the flip side to, I can increase how much I produce. You can also decrease how much you work in a way that is sustainable. So we've got two sides of the coin there. ([Time 1:18:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ef58cb03-e7d2-4d5c-a05a-a1cf02a71341)) - **The Creative Middle Class** - The internet supports a "creative middle class" of content creators who earn a good living independently. - This contrasts with the consolidated social media model and offers a positive trend for the creative arts. Transcript: Cal Newport All right, we've got a quick tech corner coming up, but first I want to talk about another sponsor. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Every January brings you 365 blank pages waiting to be filled. 2025 is going to have its shares of plot twist coming up above that you're going to have to make your way through. Grand goals that are perhaps dissipate new challenges you weren't expecting. But there is one thing you know will make this journey this year better, which is having a good relationship with your own brain. And if you are struggling with that, for whatever reason, it's anxiety, it's the depressive thinking, it's excessive rumination, therapy can help. And if you're thinking about introducing therapy in your life, but you don't know where to get started, you're worried about expense, you're worrying about how can I find someone nearby Who has a room in their schedule, and how can I fit into my life, the easiest on-ramp into the world of therapy is BetterHelp. It is fully online, which makes therapy affordable and convenient. It currently serves over 5 million people worldwide. They do this with a diverse network of more than 30,000 credential therapists with a wide range of specialties. And when you use BetterHelp, if you don't have a, if you're not have a great connection with their therapist, you can switch to a different one at any time at no extra cost. So write your 2025 story and make sure it has a through line of good mental health by using BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/deep questions. They get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com/deep questions. I also want to talk about my friends at My Body Tutor. You heard me at the beginning of the show talk about this cool new product done daily where you have a coach that helps you stick to your multi-scale plan. Well, where this all came from is this famous online product, My Body Tutor, T-U They've been at this for 20 years using online coaching to help you become healthier. You have an online coach that you work with to help you figure out like what you're doing with your diet, what you're doing with your exercise, as this is customized to you. And then you check in with the coach every single day. That is the magic of the My Body Tutor service is accountability. The second bit of magic is because you have this coach you're working with, I know you accountable. If you need to adjust, they help you. Oh, I'm traveling, you know, for the holidays. I'm worried about my diet. Like, great, let's come up with a plan. I'm going on this corporate retreat. I'm not going to have my normal exercise. What should I do so I don't sort of lose momentum? They'll help you come up with a plan so you can adjust the things. And then you have the accountability. It really is the most effective way I know of to get healthy, short of actually having a nutritionist and physical trainer come to your house like the Hollywood stars do. But that costs all the dollars in the world. MyBodyTutor, because it's delivered online, you get that same sort of concierge daily service, but you get it at a much more affordable price. So go to MyBodyTutor, T-U to learn more. If you mention you came from the Deep Questions podcast, they will give you $50 off your first month. So MyBodyTutor.com and mention deep questions. All right, Jesse, let's do our last segment. So we'll do a tech corners where we talk about some sort of interesting element or idea from the world of technology. Today, I want to talk about what I'm going to conservatively assess to be the most important article of the last decade. You say that's fair, Jesse? Yeah. Most important article. I haven't read it yet, though. Well, you know. I think we know. It's the most important. What I'm talking about is my latest article for The New Yorker. I've loaded this up on the screen here for those who are watching. The article is called A Lesson in Creativity and Capitalism from Two Zany YouTubers. So here's the point of this article is I spent time with two DIY maker YouTube YouTubers. So the people who build, they build sort of crazy contraptions on YouTube. One of them was James Hopson who runs a channel called The Hacksmith. And they do a lot of like taking things from Marvel movies and then building real life versions of them. Wolverine's claws or Captain American shield, or they built the bulletproof suit from the John Wick movies. And then I also looked at Colin Furse, who also builds crazy things right now. His current project is he's digging out a secret underground garage in front of his otherwise nondescript suburban England house. And it's going to have a DeLorean. There'll be a button he presses that summons this DeLorean from underground and the front yard opens and it's going to come out. He's working on that right now. So I spent time with both of them. I recommend you read the article if you have a New Yorker subscription. But here's like the point from the article that I want to emphasize here. They started the same way, both James and Colin. Early YouTube, they got started. They started doing these type of videos. They built up an audience, found sponsors. Suddenly they could do this full-time. Then their paths diverged, creating an interesting natural experiment. James decided, I want to get big. Now it turns out what he was really motivated by here is he just loved the idea of having a giant space with all these people. He just had this, I want to get big. So he began aggressively investing money in the channel. He went from his garage to a 13,000 square foot warehouse that they were leasing. And then he took out a multimillion dollar mortgage to go to like an 18,000 warehouse on this large corporate campus, and they remodeled the whole thing. And it's called the Hacksmith something like Research Center, Herc, and he modeled it after Stark Industries from Iron Man, 30 employees, a burn rate of a quarter million dollars a Month. He really blew this thing out big colin first did none of that he just films some edits to videos on his own sometimes his wife like holds the camera for him just like does it on his own he Has a barn that's it's not air conditioned which horrifies james he's like why aren't you air conditioning your bond your barn and then and colin's like yeah whatever it's too hot i'll Just work in my garage. It's fine. I went through, so I tell you two stories. You go through, Colin's video, they're making the same type of videos. Colin's channel is doing just as well. Actually, it did more views than James's channel did in 2024. And so I get into why in this article. And the short summary is, is that I point out that there is like a specific type of media that's happening in some online spaces, parts of YouTube and podcasting and substack newsletters, Where the typical dictum that you should just keep growing doesn't necessarily apply. And that there's a sweet spot where trying to grow bigger, you're not going to. There's an authentic sweet spot where you can make a very good living for yourself. I'm talking probably like doctor or lawyer money. You're not Elon Musk, but you're making more money than like a computer programmer. There's like this sweet spot you can get into in podcasting ([Time 1:25:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/43b117f3-fff0-463d-b132-a5d91ff307a7))