How To Get Out Of A Rut & Design Your Dream Life In 2024 | Cal Newport & Arthur Brooks

1. 0:00 – 41:02

   Mega-bestselling writer Arthur Brooks

   1. CNCal Newport0:00

      How do you intentionally engineer a life that's deep when you have all of these shallow, often digital distractions that are trying to pull you away from meaning? So your new book, Build the Life You Want, is exactly the type of thing we're talking about. I'm excited to, to get to this sort of blueprint-type approach of how do you get intentional about designing your life. My listeners love this.

   2. ABArthur Brooks0:25

      Oh, thanks.

   3. CNCal Newport0:25

      But if you'll indulge me, what I wanted to do first was actually go back and spend some time on your life story-

   4. ABArthur Brooks0:33

      Uh-huh

   5. CNCal Newport0:33

      ... which I have broken into four acts, each of which is really different than the last. I think it's a case study of really applying not just intention to your life, but revision. Okay, where are things now? Let me adjust my vision. Let me make perhaps a major change. So I thought we would start with the real-life case star- study of designing your life with your life itself. So to start at the beginning, I have your act one-

   6. ABArthur Brooks0:58

      Yeah

   7. CNCal Newport0:59

      ... as serious musician. Would, would you... Do I have that right? You would say this is your first act as an adult, adult life was music.

   8. ABArthur Brooks1:05

      Yeah. That was my first act as a child, too.

   9. CNCal Newport1:08

      Yeah.

   10. ABArthur Brooks1:08

       And, and by the way, this systemic approach to actually building your life, you're the, you're the best guy in the world to talk about this because you have this sys- systematic... Well, you do two things incredibly well. You understand the difference between complex and complicated problems mathematically. Complex problems don't have solutions, but they're easy to understand. Complicated problems are hard to understand, but you can solve them-

   11. CNCal Newport1:27

       Yeah

   12. ABArthur Brooks1:27

       ... with enough horsepower. And you understand that you can't use complicated solutions to solve complex problems, and all of this goes into the way that you're gonna build your life, and I know we're gonna talk about this. You're the, like, you're the guy that actually understands-

   13. CNCal Newport1:40

       Yeah [laughs]

   14. ABArthur Brooks1:40

       ... for people how to do this, so I'm delighted to be able to be a case study for you, for this. And, and, and for your first question, music was the only part of my life that I didn't choose, actually. It was, it was chosen for me, um, perhaps divinely. I don't know. My parents. Um, when I was four, I started violin. When I was five, I started the piano. When I was eight, I started the French horn. Eight. I mean, yeah. And, and s- and, and I was really good at that, and that really stuck, and, and it was fun, and I liked it, and I loved music, et cetera. And so that's what I was... By the time I was 10 or 11 years old, my ambition was to be the world's greatest French horn player. That's m- that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to grow up and do that. My... All of my heroes were great French horn players. The greatest fr- horn player who's ever lived is a British guy from the 1930s and '40s named Dennis Brain. And Dennis Brain, I had a picture of him up on my bedroom wall. You know, I didn't have Michael Jordan. I had... Or, you know, Wilt Chamberlain. I had, I had Dennis Brain up on the wall. And, and that's what I did. And so it was, you know, my unsuccessful run at college when I was 18. Um, really what it was was my heart wasn't in it because I wanted to go pro. So like, I left c- I was... There was a mutual decision of the college and me to pursue my excellence elsewhere, put it that way. And, uh, and I left, uh, m- right after my 19th birthday, and that's when I went pro as a musician. I did that till I was 31.

   15. CNCal Newport3:01

       Well, you know, and I've heard that before from a professional musician friend of mine, is that these colleges that are focused on the arts, if you make it to graduation basically means you failed. So [laughs] you go to one of these colleges. He went to Berklee School of Music in Boston.

   16. ABArthur Brooks3:14

       Yeah, yeah.

   17. CNCal Newport3:15

       Uh, the whole pressure of that system is go, go pro. I, I should mention, by the way, Arthur, when I was eight years old, I started playing the French horn.

   18. ABArthur Brooks3:23

       Did you really?

   19. CNCal Newport3:24

       So we've got that connection.

   20. ABArthur Brooks3:25

       I'll be darned. So third or fourth grade you started playing the French horn as well.

   21. CNCal Newport3:28

       It was very hard.

   22. ABArthur Brooks3:28

       And, uh, and you made good. Look, you, you escaped the vortex, Cal.

   23. CNCal Newport3:32

       It's an impossible inst- it's a preposterous instrument, I would say. [laughs]

   24. ABArthur Brooks3:35

       Yeah.

   25. CNCal Newport3:35

       It's so hard to play.

   26. ABArthur Brooks3:36

       Yeah. No, it doesn't make phys- the s- the physics are no good, which you don't know. It's, uh, the, the problem is that it's as l- almost as long as a tuba, which should make it a, a base instrument.

   27. CNCal Newport3:45

       Yeah.

   28. ABArthur Brooks3:45

       But the mouthpiece that you blow into is the size of a trumpet mouthpiece, and what that does effectively is it sets the harmonics on top of each other. They're so close that it's easy to miss notes. The reason that French horn players notoriously are inaccurate is because the mouthpiece is too small for the length of the instrument. And so, you know, hitting the harmonic and the series right is a r- is perilous, like a tight wire act. Like, like being a flying Wallenda, but for the brass section.

   29. CNCal Newport4:11

       Yeah. The, the trumpet players just sort of blow into that thing, and it's like their notes are clear. And the French horns, you have to, A, you have to blow into that thing like a hurricane force and be precise. Well, anyways, uh, I did not have the poster of the professional French horn player. But so w- w- we see you then. You're in your 20s. You're playing... You dropped out of school to be pro. You're playing professional-

   30. ABArthur Brooks4:30

       Yeah
2. 41:02 – 1:08:38

   Quitting a job to write a book

   1. CNCal Newport41:03

      these universities would say, "Yes, we will actually hire you on a [laughs] five-year contract. We will, we will-

   2. ABArthur Brooks41:08

      Yeah

   3. CNCal Newport41:08

      ... we want you to come and do this." So you have full confidence. Uh, so you go, and then this succeeds really well. So your... I mean, I know Love Your Enemies, your book Love Your Enemies maybe came out right after you left, but I'm assuming you, that was m- something you maybe worked on-

   4. ABArthur Brooks41:21

      That was AEI

   5. CNCal Newport41:22

      ... during the-

   6. ABArthur Brooks41:22

      That was during the eight-

   7. CNCal Newport41:23

      Yeah

   8. ABArthur Brooks41:23

      ... yeah, years.

   9. CNCal Newport41:23

      Yeah.

   10. ABArthur Brooks41:24

       Yeah. But-

   11. CNCal Newport41:24

       So, uh, from strength to strength, this is your first big test of the let's do a big public-facing thing. The book explodes. It's, it's a, a huge, huge bestseller. Everyone's talking about it. Uh, it sells a ton of copies. So what... Bring us behind why that book succeeded. What was the ingredients coming together? We have a lot of aspiring writers [laughs] in my audience. What made that book-

   12. ABArthur Brooks41:48

       Yeah

   13. CNCal Newport41:48

       ... so successful?

   14. ABArthur Brooks41:50

       Well, uh, good luck. I mean, you know perfectly that [clears throat] there's a lot of serendipity that goes into it, that goes into book publishing. And, you know, if you're g- y- you're thinking, "Well, I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna leave academia, and then I'm gonna go and write a... or, or a think tank or whatever. I'm gonna go write a huge bestseller," well, most... there's a lot of books out there, and most-

   15. CNCal Newport42:08

       Yep

   16. ABArthur Brooks42:08

       ... aren't.

   17. CNCal Newport42:08

       Yep.

   18. ABArthur Brooks42:09

       And a lot of really successful authors and a rather, a lot of really great books aren't successful by market measures. Um, you know, you... It, it's great. I mean, probably all of your books have been bestsellers, but you're pretty unusual in this ways. And I've written a, I've written a number of books that let's just say weren't bestsellers, you know, and then I thought that they were really good ideas. Uh, including a book on the science of happiness in 2008 before I left academia the first time that was-

   19. CNCal Newport42:33

       Yeah

   20. ABArthur Brooks42:34

       ... you know, everybody thought it was gonna be a big deal, and it was Not a big deal, right? And so there's a lot of serendipity that goes into it. But I've been looking at the market niche when it came to the happiness world that was just simply not being filled, and that was people in the second half of their lives. How can you design the second half of... How can you work in the first half of your life and design the second half of your life using the principles that I was able to see in big data sets and, you know, all the behavioral science and, and the new neuroscience that was coming out? Because I've had to retrain myself in neuroscience in a huge way. You can't be a good social scientist today and not know some neuroscience, just you can't do it.

   21. CNCal Newport43:11

       Yep.

   22. ABArthur Brooks43:11

       And when I got my PhD in 1998, nobody know- knew any neuroscience. So I, you know, I've had to go back, and I've been studying neuroscience very seriously for the past five years so that I ha- I don't have authority, and I'm not writing research, ac- primary research in it, but I'm a, I'm a, a really good consumer of that research for my column and my books. And I went, and I said, "Look, w- what is it about the second half of life that we need to understand? What are your natural strengths? How can you be a striver, a hardworking person, not burn out, not become frustrated, not go in decline, and not to feel empty and alone when you actually have to stop your nine-to-five? How do you do it? What's the secret on all these things?" And I wrote that book, and the reason it was relatively popular is because people wanted that. People needed that.

   23. CNCal Newport43:57

       Yep.

   24. ABArthur Brooks43:57

       It didn't exist. You go do a thing that isn't out there at this particular point. I, I designed the book the same way that I would of a startup that... You know, in biotech, you don't go by saying, "I'm gonna make a new nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug," you know, a new kind of ibuprofen. You go out, and you say, "I'm gonna start a, a company that makes a large molecule drug that, that tries to take on a disease that currently doesn't have a cure." I'm gonna take a big shot. I'm gonna... But the whole point is that people want it. Once again, there's demand, but there isn't supply on that. That's the way to write a book.

   25. CNCal Newport44:30

       Yep.

   26. ABArthur Brooks44:30

       And, uh, and so that's what I did, and that's probably the reason it was, it was fairly popular.

   27. CNCal Newport44:35

       Yeah, it's always that combination, the... A, a topic that people really wanna hear about plus the right person to write about it.

   28. ABArthur Brooks44:41

       Yeah. Yeah.

   29. CNCal Newport44:41

       Uh, you gotta have... You have those two things, you have it. I mean, I guess David Brooks sort of had indicated with The Second Mountain, you know, a few years earlier like, "Okay, there's people thinking about this." But The Second Mountain was not nearly as, uh, beat-by-beat pragmatic. Like, "Here are the elements that go into this, and here's why they matter, and let's get in, let's get into the science of it." It was, it was a little bit more philosophical, I suppose, for a David Brooks book.

   30. ABArthur Brooks45:04

       Yeah.
3. 1:08:38 – 1:26:59

   Cals favorite and geeky things from 2023

   1. CNCal Newport1:08:38

      twenty-three. So the idea here is instead of talking about common sense or useful things that most normal human beings would say, "This makes sense, and I should have this," I wanna talk about the weird, uh, the weird, almost embarrassingly geeky things that I really, uh, buy, that are unnecessary, and I grow to love. The type of things I talk about on my classic deep or crazy segment where I ask Jesse, "Was this deep that I bought this, or does it make me a madman?" And so I figure there's six of you in the audience that are gonna actually, uh, it, uh, resonate with these suggestions, but it's good. We need to celebrate the idiosyncratic and geeky. We have to celebrate sometimes going all in on getting deep in ways that's entirely superfluous. All right, so I have five things, Jesse. I have them all with me. Yes. So if you are listening, you might wanna go check out the video here. You go to thedeeplife.com/listen. Look for episode two-eighty. At the bottom, there'll be the videos from the episode. You can get the video for the whole thing. You see me talk to Arthur, but come on, this is the main thing you want to see. I will show off my five completely unnecessary, embarrassing geeky things. All right, number one, I'm gonna go grab this. This is my, uh, unnecessary hipster keyboard. This is by Nuphy, N-U-P-H-Y. Gotta look up the title here. Let me hold it up so you can see it. This is a Nuphy Air seventy-eight, Air seventy-five. Uh, what this is is a mechanical keyboard. So the keys actually have a physical switch with a spring. So you press it down, and the spring pushes it back up again. This is what keyboards used to be like until Apple and others in, uh, introduced these membrane-based keyboards where you press down, it's just squeezing rubber and making a connection. These are the old-fashioned clickety-clacks. I'll do some by the microphone here. Clickety-clack keyboard. You can type much faster on these because you get a return on the finger. So you press down, and it pushes your finger back up, so you can move it and get to the next key faster without having to pull it up as quickly. Uh, I got this in part because, you know, the problem, we've talked about this before, but the problem with the current generation of MacBook Airs is they switched to a cheaper plastic on the keyboard, and I wore away, I wore away all of the numbers and all the letters on my keyboard. And I-- really frustrated me, so I wanted a better keyboard. This is really high quality plastic. It's not gonna wear away. I spend so much time writing, and not just casually writing like emails, but hard writing, like New Yorker articles or chapters for my books or my newsletter. And I don't know, it, it completely unnecessary, but I feel much more definitive when I'm typing on this. Like I'm, you know, thinking harder. I don't know. I love it. Completely unnecessary. My hipster keyboard. Did you have color options for that? Uh, it comes with... This is the color options it comes with. Uh, it also has cool lights that come on when you type. You can replace any key on this though. So it comes with a tool. You can pop the key case caps off and put any key caps you want. They snap back onto the switch. So people super customize these, and you can replace these over time. I love it. I don't know. I really like typing on it. All right. Number two from two thousand twenty-three, we've talked about this on the show before, but I will show it off, my Remarkable 2 digital notebook. All right, so this is a, it's a notebook, but it uses the same sort of, uh, E Ink technology that you might see on a Kindle. So I'll show this for those who are watching. Let me do something thicker here. Um, so you write on this, and as you write, it shows up on the screen like you're writing on paper. It has... They've really worked on the feel of it so that it does have the same drag more or less like paper, so it has a very paper-like feel. Um, you can create endless notebooks on here, endless pages, endless notebooks, and the whole thing is constantly syncing with the cloud. So everything in here is available online. You're not gonna lose it. So it's like having a stack of twenty notebooks with you just in this package wherever you go. I have used this as a replacement for basically all of the notebooks I use for keeping track of ideas or scratch paper for working on ideas. I think I have well over a dozen virtual notebooks stored in here right now. So some of these will be idea notebooks. I'm working on an article or a book, and I just wanna have a place to keep ideas. Some of these are my computer science-related notebooks where I'll actually work out math. If I'm working on a theory paper, I'll... There's a place for me to store and always go back and find that math. I can, and I have, just gone into the cloud, grabbed sheets from some of these notebooks as PDFs, and sent them to collaborators. "Oh, look, this is what I was talking about." I also use this for a lot of planning. A lot of the planning for my media company, strategy, ideas. Uh, I've replaced my Moleskine where I used to keep ideas about just living a deep life more generally. That now exists in here virtually. Uh, I've been using this for a while now, and I really like it. I like the experience of writing on here. I like having all my notebooks in one place. I otherwise was using too many notebooks. Now, I say this as under my completely unnecessary and embarrassingly geeky list because it's really kind of expensive. I mean, it doesn't really make sense for most people. By the time you get the tablet, you get the cover, you get the advanced, you have to pay more for the stylus that has an eraser built on. This was $500 easy, all in, which is pretty crazy for a notebook. Uh, for someone like me, yeah, why not? Because my whole life is ideas and technology, and it's cool, and I'm a first mover. I don't know if I can really recommend it unless you just have that money lying around. But I've really enjoyed my reMarkable 2 experience. All right. As we move down this list, by the way, Jesse, things are gonna get increasingly geeky and increasingly less relevant to people. That's the way, that's the way this is gonna work. [laughs] So be prepared. If you already find yourself a little bit alienated, this is gonna get worse. All right. I wanna show, uh, my third favorite unnecessary and geeky thing from last year. I'm holding it up here. This is a Shure MV7 microphone. This is fantastic for anyone who wants to get into the audio game. So let's say you wanna start a podcast, or you just wanna sound better when you are on Zoom meetings, or maybe you're a guest on some podcast. What Shure has done here is taken a lot of the same hardware that you have in the, the classic Shure microphones. I don't know, what are the n- what are these called? S, the, uh, SM7s? What are these? It's on there somewhere, Jesse. Uh- Yeah. SM7B. S- SM7B. So this is, like, the classic microphone. A lot of podcasters use this. It was also, uh... It's used in the m- music industry. I think the, Michael Jackson's Thriller album was recorded on these. It has a lot of those same actual hardwares. Um, but what it also has built into it is all of the digital electronics to convert the analog signal to a digital signal and to do some mixing on it. You can have the, the volume on here. Um, and so what comes out of here on the other end is a USB cable. So it does all the digitization inside the microphone itself, so you can then plug this into any laptop as any other sort of external USB microphone, getting a lot of the sound quality you would have from a high-end Shure mic without needing an, uh, extra mixing board to take that signal and make it something that the computer itself can un- uh, understand. The other thing it has, which I really would've appreciated early in podcasting, is a monitor headphone output so that you can hear yourself, uh, you can hear yourself in your ears. You can hear other sound in your ears. This was a real problem I had early in podcasting, was figuring out how to get monitoring so I could hear myself in my ears. You get that automatically for here. It mixes what you're saying with the audio coming back from the computer. So if you're hooked up to Zoom, you can just select this microphone as your speakers, and so you can hear audio from your computer. You can hear yourself mixed in, so you hear what your levels are. Anyways, it's just a fantastic way to get into higher end audio without needing any other equipment. This straight to your computer. Uh, as people may or may not know, otherwise, things do get complicated. So, like, here in our Deep Work HQ, this is just a classic microphone. It just has an analog signal coming out of here. So this goes... Jesse and I, we both have our mics have to go into a, a large standalone audio processor, which takes that signal and conditions it and does some compression on it and, and works with the, the EQ mix, and we had to have an audio engineer set this up. That signal then goes into a relatively complicated mixing board. So I'm in that mixing board. Jesse's in that mixing board. Our sound effects are in that mixing board. The calls are in the mixing board, and that's all set up. And then that mixing board creates, finally, a digital signal, which is what goes to our computer, uh, that we can then use to record multitrack on the computers. This replaces all of that equipment. Now, it's not gonna be as good quality. I mean, obviously, having professional audio processors with gating and compression and going through a high-end mixing board where we're tweaking the HQs, this is gonna sound a little bit better, but the gap is not big. So if you wanna have really good sounding audio, I think this is just a really great invention. The MV7, for the price of one of these microphones, you have a whole setup. So I think this made podcasting accessible. Yeah. Like, good sounding podcasting accessible to a, a lot more people. It, it makes the cost of that from $700 to get started down to 250. Mm-hmm. So anyways, I love this thing. I use it for all my Zoom calls. Um, I use it when I give virtual talks because it looks weird to have this whole thing when you're giving a talk to a business. So I just use this and, and the audio is... You know, no one notices the difference. All right. Let's get even more esoteric, Jesse. Let me grab my next thing here. [laughs] We're gonna have people running to grab this off the shelves. This here is a mount for an Arduino Nano microcontroller. So, you know, I like to build, uh, microelectronics. I do sometimes with my kids. Next door to the studio, I have a maker studio. I have a maker lab where I have a lot of my microelectronics stuff. Uh, this year I was building a custom light controller for Halloween lights. I wanted to control addressable LEDs using my own custom code, so I had to build a waterproofed controller, and I was running it off of a microprocessor. It's hard to build stable circuits on microprocessors. You have all these, uh... You know, how do you connect all the different cables to them in a way that is going to be stable in the sense it's, you can move around the whole apparatus, and it's not gonna fall apart? You don't wanna just put a breadboard in a waterproof box. Um, so I came across these great mounts for Arduino Nanos. I have a, I have a whole box of Nanos. You can get them sort of cheap knockoffs for, like, eight bucks a pop. And what you can do is stick the, the Nano into these connectors inside, and this breaks out every one of the connections to the Nano with a, uh, screw block, where you can just put a wire end in here and then screw down the bolt and the wire. So you don't have to solder your microcontroller into some sort of protoboard, where now it's permanently in there and permanently soldered to all the different wires you wanna use. You can get j- almost as stable as a connection just screwing them into the screw mount. You can just tape or glue this mount onto whatever your, your, uh, object is you're building. But you can take that processor right out of here and use it for something else. And if you need to switch around the wiring, you can just unscrew it and switch it around. So this has been useful for my projects. Uh, I don't even know what it's called. I just found this probably on Amazon. But it's easier- Were you soldering the stuff before? Or I would just have it in, like, a breadboard or something, and it would all come out. So this is the first time I needed one of my projects to be deployed in the wild, right? I, I'd, like, bring this home and set it up and be able to move it around and reprogram it, and this... It, and it worked. Uh, my light controller stayed functional for the entire Halloween season. All right. Speaking of lights, this is my final completely unnecessary and embarrassingly geeky thing from 2003. I don't actually have the thing 'cause it's in use right now, but this is my BN-Link six-outlet seven-day digital timer stake with six-foot cord. So I really like lighting displays for, uh... We have, like, a winter wonderland display right now for the holiday season. We had a Halloween display. Uh, until this year, I would run my displays, and they're complicated. I did the counts, and I... By the way, all my plans for the displays are on my Remarkable. There's a notebook for it. I did the count, and I think I have, like, 25... In the current display, like, 25 different wiring elements. So wires, splitters, um, adapters. 25 different elements. 'Cause it's, you know, we, uh, we live on a corner, so we have a lot of frontage, and I like to have, uh, light coverage for everything. And I like the lights to come on automatically and come off automatically. So before, I had two separate circuits, and each of the circuits was, uh, led through a light sensor that could see when it got dark and then would have a timer for how long to stay on after it got dark. But this was crude because it was only intervals of two hours, and the sensors would come on at different times depending on exactly where they were in the yard. Because when they would detect it's dark is different. Like, if you're in shade, it might be a little bit earlier than if you're not. And so I finally got a, a more higher-end controller for all of my circuits for my light displays, where you have a, a fully functional digital interface, self-contained, right? So none of this, like, connecting to a phone Bluetooth nonsense. Um, self-contained digital timer that controls all these relays. So now I can e- exactly program when I want the circuits to go on, when I want them to turn off, this time on, this time off, back on at this time, back off on that time. Different days of the week, I can do it differently. Uh, this really made a difference. I now finally have full control over exactly when my lights go on and exactly when my lights go off. Um, nice waterproof box staked up off the ground. So completely unnecessary, Jesse, and embarrassingly geeky, but also one of my favorite things from the last year. Does anybody have better lights than you in the neighborhood? Um, yes. There's some good lights. There's some good lights in the neighborhood. Uh, I, I, I think Halloween... See, the thing about Halloween, without giving too much away, is that we have more... We have a narrative to our lights with actual text that you read. So no one else is doing that. Because we have so much frontage, we bring you on a Halloween journey. There's a sort of a story that unfolds with different vignettes. Uh, for the holiday lights, I, I have more work to do. Yeah. The... People have some good holiday lights. So you're still working on it. I think next year I w- I w- I have some, some key upgrades. I definitely have some key upgrades in mind for next year that I'll, they'll have to write down in my Remarkable. Maybe I should've had my programmable... All right, uh, here's my sixth thing I'll add to here. Uh, the programmable LEDs I started buying, they're so cool. You can control every single bulb on these long Christmas light stands from a microcontroller and make them do whatever you want. So I had, like, really cool alien lights that I was using for our Halloween narrative where, uh, they were sprinkling. You'd see, uh, it was purple, and different green lights would kind of sprinkle in, and there'd be more and more green. And there'd be a chase that goes shoom and chases all the way around and resets it all back to- [laughs] ... set it all back. You can program whatever you want. It's really cool stuff. We have a... Look, I don't wanna go on a soapbox here, but I have really strong thoughts, especially for, uh, Christmas lights, like, what, what I think is good and what I don't think is good. And my sons know this because we watch this ABC show sometimes where they have a competition for Christmas lights. I do not like... I hope I'm not alienating people here. I do not like this new setup where you, you permanently install all of these programmable LEDs all over your house and on all, like, the windows and doors or what have you, and then you use this computer software to, to synchronize them to music. And you have the moving head DMX lights on your roof, and it's like a show And it, it always plays, you know, that whatever that Siberian, Trans-Siberian Railroad, like, "Tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu-tu," and all the lights are f- doing things, and the headlights are moving. I don't like that. I think lights should create a transportative experience. As you're, like, walking nearby the house, it sort of brings you into a different type of frame of mind aesthetically. I don't like the shows. I think the shows are showy. I don't wanna see dancing, uh, gingerbread men projection-mapped on your house while music plays or something. I want, you know, it brings you into, like, "Oh, I'm now in Santa Claus' Village," or something like that.

   2. SPSpeaker1:25:51

      [laughs]

   3. CNCal Newport1:25:51

      I have a lot of, I have a lot of, uh, thoughts about this. You'll hear about them all on my new podcast in 2024, Light Pock with Cal Newport, and we just go deep on decorative lighting. Um, and it's mainly me just being very cranky and, uh, giving long, somewhat inappropriately profane dialogues about what I don't like in light displays. All right, Jesse, that's enough nonsense for now. People have to get back to their in-laws' house and hear some more annoying conversations with their relatives. So thank you everyone, uh, for listening. We'll be back next week with a, a New Year's, our first episode of 2024. I'm excited about that, so definitely be ready to listen to that. We'll get back to basics. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, so if you enjoyed my interview with Arthur Brooks in today's episode, you might also like episode 272, where I did an interview with the writer David Epstein. It was a great conversation. I think you'll enjoy it. Check it out. The goal for today's Deep Dive is to go through four essential tools that you need to build your productivity toolkit

Episode duration: 1:26:59