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Foreign. Newport. And this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. So this is the last episode I'm recording up north in my undisclosed location. I am joined by my producer Jesse at the Deep Work hq. Jesse, there's a lot I'm going to miss about being up here. The one thing I am looking forward to is getting back to the hq. I need to record podcasts. Yeah, I've spent too much time recording podcasts on dresser drawers and on in front of windows with too much light and without my good mic and without my camera. Ah, I do look forward to the hq. We do have to put in like a giant stuffed black bear though, so I don't, I don't miss Vermont too much. Oh, I revealed where I was. Oh, Okay. Somehow the paparazzi have not found me. Anyways, up north or not, we've got a good show. We got a deep dive. We could unexpected connection between something I was reading and something we talk a lot about on this show. We got good questions, we got a cool case study. And our final segment, instead of what I'm reading like we normally do, I'm going to do what I'm writing. I actually want to talk about a recent newsletter article that I thought was worth sharing because it elaborated on some ideas that we had mentioned earlier this month. All right, so that's the game plan, Jesse. I think we should get right into it and get started with the deep dive. All right, I want to try something unexpected here. I'm going to start with a little known story from the life of Walt Disney that I came across recently while reading Richard Snow's book, Disney's Land. I am then going to connect this tale from the 1940s to our current moment in the 2000s. And I am going to extract from it a useful strategy for trying to combat that all too common sense that we are sleepwalking through life subservient to our screens. Okay, so let me set the scene for this story. It's the late 1940s. Walt Disney is going through a hard time in his life. So here's a timeline you got to understand. Sort of the apex of the first half of Disney's career was 1937. That is when Snow White and the Seven Doors comes out. It's the first full length animated movie. It was the highest grossing movie of all time when it came out. So this was a phenomenon. But after that high point, his animation studio had begun to suffer financial difficulties, in particular because of World War II. So his follow up films, which we now see as classics like Fantasia and Pinocchio. They struggled in part because there was no European or otherwise international market for these because of the ongoing war. Then we get, in the early 1940s, this big animator strike at Disney Studios. This was really traumatic for Disney. Several of his biographers, including my favorite biographer of his, Neil Gablers, talks about how this really was a period of emotional and creative malaise for Disney. He felt betrayed. He felt drained. So here we are. As the 40s wear on, the high point of the animation studios down. They're struggling. They were having to do. I don't know if you've ever seen these before, Jesse, but they were doing propaganda videos on contract for the government, animated propaganda videos, because they needed the money. So there's nothing really exciting going on. They were always short on money. He felt betrayed. He's not having a great time. Then came the trains. So Disney was fascinated with steam trains. This is not unusual for someone who is born near the turn of the 20th century. You have to imagine what it was like if you're Disney's age when you were growing up in the. The 1920s, right? Steam engines were magic, right? Think about it. You had horse transportation. It's all anyone had ever known for centuries. And suddenly you have these massive machines. You've never seen something like this that were blowing and hissing steam like a dragon of a size that. You've rarely seen anything man made that large that could actually move and they could rush across the landscape 60, 70, 80 miles per hour, pulling these massive lines of freight over giant trestle bridges. I mean, it was the thing. There was nothing else to be as amazed by in the period when Disney grew up than it was train. So like many people from his era, he always had had a fascination with trains. He worked selling papers on a train for a while as a kid. And so he bought. He was 46 years old. It's 1940s, not feeling good. He buys a Lionel train set, you know, the, what do you call, model trains you set up. He's like, oh, this is kind of fun. Then he discovers that one of his animators, Ward Kimball, was essentially building a full size steam engine in his backyard. And this started to get Disney going, like, well, wait a second, what are you doing here? And so he travels with Kimball. They go to a train show where. I think I forgot exactly where this was. It might have been Chicago, it might have been somewhere in the Midwest, but it was a train show where they were bringing together all these great steam Engines from times past. And it was really amazing. And he saw that Ward Kimball was built building like a fake set in his backyard to put the steam engine and Disney felt something that he hadn't felt in a little while, which was a spark of inspiration. And so he hatched a plan. He said, I'm going to build not a model train, but a 1:8 scale train. So to put that into perspective, a 1:8 scale train, the engine is just big enough that like a full grown man, you could sit on it and you know, your legs would kind of be over the side, but so it's like the size of, I don't know, you think of it as like a wagon, right? So he was like, I'm going to build a train at that scale and I'm going to build a track to run this thing on. Now he didn't have enough room where they lived, so he bought a new house. Right? This is 1949. Disney purchases a five acre plot in Los Angeles specifically because the land would be well suited for building this 1:8 scale train that he suddenly had come up with. It's like, this will be fun. He laid out nearly 800 MET of track for his steam engine which he called the Carrollwood Pacific Railroad because it was on Carrollwood Avenue. He ended up with a 46 foot long trestle. So that's a old school railroad bridge that was large enough that it fell under LA County's jurisdiction as a real bridge. They had to actually check that it was properly built. Had loops and overpasses, a gradient, an elevated dirt berm and a 90 foot tunnel underneath his wife's flower bed. They engineered the tunnel at great expense to have an S turn so that when you went in one end you couldn't see out the. You had no idea how long. It felt like the tunnel was going on and on for a long time. We have some photos, I think, right Jesse, of this track. So if you're watching this on YouTube instead of just listening, we're going to see if we can pull up on the screen. Jesse will pull up while we're talking here, some, some photos from an article I found that were pretty good. So yeah, so we see here, there he is on the train. That's what 1:8 scale is. You see he's writing on it, but close to the ground. All right, scroll some more, Jesse. That's the layout. Look at that. Oh, I'm so jealous. And then you see here, there's his barn. If you're watching, keep that barn in mind. I'LL mention that in a second. I think there's like maybe one more photo on there. Yeah, there they are, going by the flower beds. All right. So amid this circuit, Disney also built a barn where he could store and maintain his rolling stock. It was also the control room for the Pacific Line as well. And as long as he was building it, he designed it to look like his family barn he had growing up in Marceline, Missouri. This also became a place for him to relax and to brainstorm about future projects. So he went all in on this. His biographers talk about him really coming alive once he was able to start working on this railroad, this project that he was spending more and more time on. He bought a house just to build, had nothing to do with his work, but he really began to come alive. Which made it all the more surprising when in 1953, a accident happened. It wasn't a major accident, but he let someone drive the train, a young guy drive the train, and he went too fast and it derailed and some of the steam came out of the engine. And a five year old girl got some minor burns. She was fine. But right after that accident, he's like, okay, I'm done. And he shut it down and they stored away the cars. The locomotive went back to, I think they had under a desk somewhere at Walt Disney. His friends and family were surprised, like, wait, you're just going to shut this whole thing down? But it was not a surprise to Disney because the Carola Pacific project had accomplished its purpose. It had reignited his ability to feel wonder and motivation to build things and do things that mattered, right? And in that barn he had built, where he would sit after a day of working with his train, where he'd been working in there and brainstorming. He had been, it turned out, mulling an idea for the next chapter of his career, the chapter that would occupy him happily for the rest of his life. He had decided, reinvigorated by that railway project, that he was going to build a theme park. And that's where he then turned his energy. Now, Disney used this experiment to overcome the professional malaise. But I couldn't help think, when I was reading Richard Snow's book recently, I couldn't help coming across this story that there might be a lesson in here that is relevant to people today who are suffering from what I think is a related condition. That's at the same time vary of our current moment. Here is the issue I'm observing today that Disney's scheme might help. We spend all of our Time on screens right at work, it's email, it's zoom, it's web interfaces, it's on laptop screens and it's on our phone when we're not in work, it's on our phone and it's text messages and it's social media and maybe at some points it's on a TV screen and it's streaming media and we're sitting here just swiping these things with our small motions of our hands. There's nothing wrong with a screen, but weird things happen when most of your life becomes mediated through these screens. And when we live in what is basically an artificial or abstract world, my conjecture is this dulls our nervous system. We begin to lose what it feels like to be a being that exists in the physical world, that is shaping that physical world, that is enjoying that physical world. So much of our nervous system, our senses, is built around experiencing the world. So much of our brain is built around projecting things into the world, imagining what's going to happen and finding satisfactions when they do happen, as we expect. And we lose touch with all of that when our life is increasingly through this abstraction that we're seeing through screens. It's a digital grayness where we exist, where these real world sensations have been dulled, and where we get our sensations from instead are these highly optimized and artificial pings that are delivered by memes and comments and highly produced videos that are squeezed on the glass. A sort of a fake or artificial version of the feelings we would have used to have being out there in the real world. It creates a condition I call the digital doldrums. And it makes life seem sort of listless, sort of like you're sleepwalking. Not miserable, but not really fully all there. Now let's bring this back to what Disney discovered, which was the power of engineering wonder. So if you take something that really interests you, like for him it was trains, and that has no instrumental purpose. It's not like this is going to be good for my career, it's going to make me healthier, or it's something I can brag about, because God knows Disney was not bragging about it. Wasn't that cool that he was building this weird train in his backyard? You find something that has no instrumental purpose other than you find it remarkably interesting. And then if you take that and you inflate your ambition for it to 10 times larger than what is reasonable, I think interesting things happen. Right. Instead of buying the Lionel train, you buy five acres of land and build a 1:8 scale train you can ride. I saw a guide to give some more examples of this. I saw a guy on YouTube once who had built a reproduction of the Haunted Mansion ride from Disneyland in his suburban backyard. I mean, the whole thing. He had built a dark room, he was using tarps to make the passages, and there was a track system and actual homemade doom buggies and prop controllers. And he really did the best he can and was like thousands of hours of work. My old hairstylist in Georgetown that I used to go see, he took me once to his house and showed me that he had built this commercial grade glassblowing studio, that he was building this wonderful art out of glass. The whole salon he used to work before he left had his custom glass creations hanging from the ceiling. God knows how much effort went into it, but it was really kind of incredible to see. I call this engineered wonder. And I think it is a effective way to free you from the digital doldrums. I think it works because it reactivates your actual analog world nervous system. You get used to what it feels like to be really engaged with something that exists in the real world, not just feeling these sort of artificial, simulated emotions. You get used to having an intention in your mind that your nervous system then sees being made manifest in the real world. That's an incredibly powerful thing. We lose what that feels like when more and more our accomplishments have to do with numbers next to a thumbs up on a social media post. But it feels fantastic when you get back to it. We get used to how much better the analog settings to work. And we feel that it feels like they have actual authentic wonder for something and not just an artificially manipulated emotion delivered through a screen. And I think once all that's reinvigorated, that screens no longer seem so great and you begin seeking other things. You can do your version of Disney saying, I'm now going to start Disneyland, opening up new chapters of your life that really can be profound or meaningful in a bigger way. Now look, I know there's an irony that we're using Walt Disney, creator of Disneyland, of all people, to give us a solution for escaping artificial worlds. But I still think there's something here in this notion of engineered wonderful that can be an important part of building a bridge from a shallow life to one that's deeper. So there's my monologue. This was the thought I had when I encountered that story. And this is what it made me think about. So I need to go do something crazy. Jesse, My Halloween decorations are not nearly Enough.