back to indexCal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media | Lex Fridman Podcast #166
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The following is a conversation with Cal Newport.
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He's a friend and someone who's writing,
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like his book, Deep Work, for example,
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has guided how I strive to approach productivity
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and life in general.
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He doesn't use social media,
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and in his book, Digital Minimalism,
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he encourages people to find the right amount
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of social media usage that provides value and joy.
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He has a new book out called A World Without Email,
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where he argues brilliantly, I would say,
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that email is destroying productivity in companies
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And very importantly, he offers solutions.
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He is a computer scientist at Georgetown University
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who practices what he preaches.
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To do theoretical computer science
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at the level that he does it,
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you really have to live a focused life
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that minimizes distractions
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and maximizes hours of deep work.
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Lastly, he's a host of an amazing podcast
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called Deep Questions that I highly recommend
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for anyone who wants to improve their productive life.
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Quick mention of our sponsors,
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ExpressVPN, Linode Linux Virtual Machines,
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Sun Basket Meal Delivery Service,
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and SimpliSafe Home Security.
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Click the sponsor links to get a discount
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and to support this podcast.
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As a side note, let me say that deep work
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or long periods of deep, focused thinking
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have been something I've been chasing more and more
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over the past few years.
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Deep work is hard, but is ultimately the thing
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that makes life so damn amazing.
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The ability to create things you're passionate about
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in a flow state where the distractions of the world
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Social media, yes, reading the comments,
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yes, I still read the comments,
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is a source of joy for me in strict moderation.
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Too much takes away the focused mind
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and too little, at least I think,
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takes away all of the fun.
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We need both, the focus and the fun.
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If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
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review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify,
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support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter
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at Lex Friedman if you can only figure out
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how to spell that.
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And now, here's my conversation with Cal Newport.
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What is deep work?
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Let's start with a big question.
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So I mean, it's my term for when you're focusing
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without distraction on a cognitively demanding task,
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which is something we've all done,
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but we had never really given it a name necessarily
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that was separate from other type of work.
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And so I gave it a name and said,
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let's compare that to other types of efforts
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you might do while you're working
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and see that the deep work efforts actually have
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a huge benefit that we might be underestimating.
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What does it mean to work deeply on something?
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I had been calling it hard focus in my writing before that.
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Well, so the context you would understand,
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I was in the theory group in CSAIL at MIT, right?
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So I was surrounded at the time
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when I was coming up with these ideas
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by these professional theoreticians.
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And that's like a murderer's row of thinkers there, right?
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I mean, it's like Turing Award, Turing Award,
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MacArthur, Turing Award.
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I mean, you know the crew, right?
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Theoretical computer science.
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Theoretical computer science, yeah, yeah.
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So I'm in the theory group, right?
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Doing theoretical computer science and I publish a book.
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So I was in this milieu where I was being exposed to people
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where focus was their tier one skill.
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Like that's what you would talk about, right?
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Like how intensely I can focus.
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That was the key skill.
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It's like your 440 time or something
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if you were an athlete, right?
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So this is something that people actually,
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the theory folks are thinking about?
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Like they're openly discussing like, how do you focus?
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I mean, I don't know if they would quantify it,
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but focus was the tier one skill.
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So you would come in, here would be a typical day.
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You'd come in and Eric DeMain would be sitting
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in front of a whiteboard, right?
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With a whole group of visitors
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who had come to work with them.
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And maybe they projected like a grid on there
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because they're working on some graph theory problem.
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You go to lunch, you go to the gym, you come back,
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they're sitting there staring at the same whiteboard, right?
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Like that's the tier one skill.
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This is the difference between different disciplines.
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Like I often feel for many reasons, like a fraud,
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but I definitely feel like a fraud when I hang out
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with like either mathematicians or physicists.
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It's like, it feels like they're doing the legit work
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because when you talk closer in computer science,
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you get to programming or like machine learning,
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like the experimental machine learning
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or like just the engineering version of it.
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It feels like you're gone so far away
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from what's required to solve something fundamental
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about this universe.
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It feels like you're just like cheating your way
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into like some kind of trick to figure out
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how to solve a problem in this one particular case.
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That's how it feels.
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I'd be interested to hear what you think about that
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because programming doesn't always feel
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like you need to think deeply to work deeply,
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but sometimes it does.
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So it's a weird dance.
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For sure code does, right?
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I mean, especially if you're coming up
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with original algorithmic designs,
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I think it's a great example of deep work.
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I mean, yeah, the hardcore theoreticians,
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they push it to an extreme.
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I mean, I think it's like knowing
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that athletic endeavor is good
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and then hanging out with a Olympic athlete,
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you're like, oh, I see that's what it is.
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Now for the grad students like me,
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we're not anywhere near that level,
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but the faculty in that group,
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these were the cognitive Olympic athletes.
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But coding I think is a classic example of deep work
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because I got this problem I wanna solve,
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I have all of these tools
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and I have to combine them somehow creatively
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But so basically I had been exposed to that.
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So I was used to this notion when I was in grad school
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and I was writing my blog, I'd write about hard focus.
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That was the term I used.
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Then I published this book,
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So Good They Can't Ignore You, which came out in 2012.
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So like right as I began as a professor.
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And that book had this notion of skill
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being really important for career satisfaction,
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that it's not just following your passion.
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You have to actually really get good at something
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and then you use that skills as leverage.
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And there was this big followup question to that book
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of, okay, well, how do I get really good at things?
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And then I look back to my grad school experience,
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I was like, huh, there was this focus thing
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that we used to do.
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And I wonder how generally applicable that is
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into the knowledge sector.
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And so as I started thinking about it, it became clear,
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there's this interesting storyline that emerged
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that, okay, actually undistracted concentration
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is not just important for esoteric theoreticians,
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it's important here, it's important here,
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it's important here.
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And that involved into the deep work hypothesis,
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which is across the whole knowledge work sector.
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Focus is very important
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and we've accidentally created circumstances
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where we just don't do a lot of it.
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So focus is the sort of prerequisite for basically,
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you say knowledge work,
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but basically any kind of skill acquisition,
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any kind of major effort in this world.
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Can we break that apart a little bit?
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Yeah, so a key aspect of focus is not just
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that you're concentrating hard on something,
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but you do it without distraction.
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So a big theme of my work is that context shifting
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kills the human capacity to think.
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So if I change what I'm paying attention to
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to something different, really, even if it's brief
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and then try to bring it back to the main thing I'm doing,
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that causes a huge cognitive pile up
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that makes it very hard to think clearly.
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So even if you think, okay, look, I'm writing this code
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or I'm writing this essay and I'm not multitasking
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and all my windows are closed
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and I have no notifications on,
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but every five or six minutes you quickly check
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like an inbox or your phone,
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that initiates a context shift in your brain, right?
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We're gonna start to suppress some neural networks,
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we're gonna try to amplify some others.
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It's a pretty complicated process actually.
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There's a sort of neurological cascade that happens.
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You rip yourself away from that halfway through
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and go back to what you're doing
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and now it's trying to switch back to the original thing
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even though it's also your brain's in the process
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of switching to these emails
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and trying to understand those contexts.
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And as a result, your ability to think clearly
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just goes really down.
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And it's fatiguing too.
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I mean, you do this long enough and you get midday
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and you're like, okay, I can't think anymore.
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You've exhausted yourself.
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Is there some kind of perfect number of minutes,
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So we're talking about focusing on a particular task
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for one minute, five minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes.
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Is it possible to kind of context switch
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while maintaining deep focus every 20 minutes or so?
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So if you're thinking of like this,
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again, maybe it's a selfish kind of perspective,
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but if you think about programming,
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you're focused on a particular design of a little bit,
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maybe a small scale on a particular function
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or large scale on a system.
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And then the shift of focus happens like this,
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which is like, wait a minute,
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is there a library that can achieve this little task
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or something like that?
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And then you have to look it up.
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This is the danger zone.
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You go to the internets.
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And so you have to, now it is a kind of context switch
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because as opposed to thinking about the particular problem,
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you now have switch thinking about like consuming
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and integrating knowledge that's out there
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that can plug into your solution to a particular problem.
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It definitely feels like a context switch,
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but is that a really bad thing to do?
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So should you be setting it aside always
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and really trying to as much as possible go deep
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and stay there for like a really long period of time?
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Well, I mean, I think if you're looking up a library
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that's relevant to what you're doing, that's probably okay.
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And I don't know that I would count that
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as a full context shift because the semantic networks
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involved are relatively similar, right?
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You're thinking about this type of solution.
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You're thinking about coding.
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You're thinking about this type of functions.
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Where you're really gonna get hit
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is if you switch your context
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to something that's different.
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And if there's unresolved obligations.
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So really the worst possible thing you could do
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would be to look at like an email inbox, right?
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Cause here's 20 emails.
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I can't answer most of these right now.
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They're completely different.
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Like the context of these emails,
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like, okay, there's a grant funding issue
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or something like this.
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It's very different than the coding I'm doing.
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And I'm leaving it unresolved.
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So like someone needs something from me
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and I'm gonna try to pull my attention back.
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The second worst would be something
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that's emotionally arousing.
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So if you're like, let me just glance over at Twitter.
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I'm sure it's nice and calm and peaceful over there, right?
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That could be devastating
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because you're gonna expose yourself
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to something that's emotionally arousing.
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That's gonna completely mess up the cognitive plateau there.
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And then when you come back to,
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okay, let me try to code again.
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It's really difficult.
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So it's both the information and the emotion.
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Yeah, both can be killers if what you're trying to do.
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So I would recommend at least an hour at a time
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because it could take up to 20 minutes
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to completely clear out the residue
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from whatever it was you were thinking about before.
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So if you're coding for 30 minutes,
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you might only be getting 10 or 15 minutes
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of actual sort of peak lacks going on there, right?
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So an hour at least you get a good 40, 45 minutes plus.
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I'm partial to 90 minutes as a really good chunk.
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We can get a lot done.
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But just before you get exhausted,
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you can sort of pull back a little bit.
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Yeah, and one of the beautiful,
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people can read about it in your book, Deep Work.
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And I know this has been out for a long time
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and people are probably familiar with many of the concepts,
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but it's still pretty profound
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and it has stayed with me for a long time.
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There's something about adding the terms to it
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that actually solidifies the concepts.
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Like words matter, it's pretty cool.
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And just for me, sort of as a comment,
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there's, it's a struggle and it's very difficult
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to maintain focus for a prolonged period of time.
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But the days on which I'm able to accomplish
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several hours of that kind of work, I'm happy.
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So forget being productive and all that.
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I'm just satisfied with my life.
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I feel fulfilled, it's like joyful.
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And then I can be, I'm less of a dick
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to other people in my life afterwards.
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It's a beautiful thing.
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And I find the opposite when I don't do that kind of thing,
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I'm much more irritable.
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Like I feel like I didn't accomplish anything
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and there's this stress that then the negative emotion
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builds up to where you're no longer able
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to sort of enjoy the hell out of this amazing life.
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So in that sense, Deep Work has been a source
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of a lot of happiness.
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I'd love to ask you, how do you,
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again, you cover this in the book,
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but how do you integrate Deep Work into your life?
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What are different scheduling strategies
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that you would recommend just at a high level?
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What are different ideas there?
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Well, I mean, I'm a big fan of time blocking, right?
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So if you're facing your workday,
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don't allow like your inbox or a to do list
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to sort of drive you.
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Don't just come into your day and think,
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what do I wanna do next?
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I mean, I'm a big planner saying,
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here's the time available, let me make a plan for it.
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So I have a meeting here, I have an appointment here,
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here's what's left, what do I actually wanna do with it?
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So in this half hour, I'm gonna work on this.
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For this 90 minute block, I'm gonna work on that.
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And during this hour, I'm gonna try to fit this in.
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And then actually I have this half hour gap
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between two meetings.
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So why don't I take advantage of that
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to go run five errands,
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I can kind of batch those together.
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But blocking out in advance,
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this is what I wanna do with the time available.
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I mean, I find that's much more effective.
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Now, once you're doing this,
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once you're in a discipline of time blocking,
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it's much easier to actually see,
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this is where I want, for example, the Deep Work.
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And I can get a handle on the other things
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that need to happen and find better places to fit them
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so I can prioritize this.
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And you're gonna get a lot more of that done
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than if it's just going through your day
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and saying, what's next?
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I schedule every single day kind of thing.
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So as I could try to do in the morning
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to try to have a plan.
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Yeah, so I do a quarterly, weekly, daily planning.
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So at the semester or quarterly level,
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I have a big picture vision
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for what I'm trying to get done during the fall,
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let's say, or during the winter.
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Like there's a deadline coming up for academic papers
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at the end of the season, here's what I'm working on.
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I wanna have this many chapters done of a book,
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something like this.
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Like you have the big picture vision
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of what you wanna get done.
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Then weekly, you look at that,
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and then you look at your week
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and you put together a plan for like,
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okay, what's my week gonna look like?
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What do I need to do?
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How am I gonna make progress on these things?
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Maybe I need to do an hour every morning
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or I see that Monday is my only really empty day.
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So that's gonna be the day that I really need to nail
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on writing or something like this.
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And then every day, you look at your weekly plan
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and say, let me block off the actual hours.
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So you do that three scales,
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the quarterly, down to weekly, down to daily.
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And we're talking about actual times of day versus,
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so the alternative is what I end up doing a lot,
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and I'm not sure it's the best way to do it,
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is scheduling the duration of time.
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This is called the luxury when you don't have any meetings.
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I'm like, religiously don't do meetings.
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All other academics are jealous of you, by the way.
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that's one of the worst tragedies of the pandemic,
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is both the opportunity to,
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the positive thing is to have more time with your family,
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sort of reconnect in many ways.
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And that's really interesting.
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Be able to remotely sort of not waste time on travel
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and all those kinds of things.
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The negative is, actually both those things
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are also sourced from the negative.
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But the negative is like,
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it seems like people have multiplied the number of meetings
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because they're so easy to schedule.
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And there's nothing more draining to me intellectually,
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philosophically, just my spirit is destroyed
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by even a 10 minute Zoom meeting.
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Like, what are we doing here?
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What's the meaning of life?
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Yeah, I have, every Zoom meeting is,
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I have an existential crisis, so.
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Kierkegaard with the internet connection.
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So, what the hell are we talking about?
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Oh, so when you don't have meetings,
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there's a luxury to really allow for certain things
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if they need to, like the important things,
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like deep work sessions to last way longer
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than you maybe planned for.
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I mean, that's my goal is to try to schedule,
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the goal is to schedule,
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to sit and focus for a particular task for an hour
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and hope I can keep going and hope I can get lost in it.
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And do you find that this is at all an okay way to go
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and the time blocking is just something you have to do
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to actually be an adult and operate in this real world?
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Or is there some magic to the time blocking?
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Well, I mean, there's magic to the intention.
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There's magic to it if you have varied responsibilities.
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So I'm often juggling multiple jobs, essentially.
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There's academic stuff, there's teaching stuff,
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there's book stuff, there's the business
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surrounding my book stuff.
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But I'm of your same mindset.
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If a deep work session is going well,
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you just rock and roll and let it go on.
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So like one of the big keys of time block,
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at least the way I do it,
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so I even sell this planner to help people time block,
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it has many columns because the discipline is,
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oh, if your initial schedule changes,
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you just move over one.
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Next time you get a chance, you move over one column
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and then you just fix it for the time that's remaining.
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So in other words, there's no bonus
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for I made a schedule and I stuck with it.
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Like there's actually,
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it's not like you get a prize for it, right?
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Like for me, the prize is I have an intentional plan
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for my time and if I have to change that plan, that's fine.
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Like the state I wanna be is basically
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at any point in the day, I've thought about
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what time remains and gave it some thought
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for what to do because I'll do the same thing,
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even though I have a lot more meetings
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and other types of things I have to do in my various jobs
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and I basically prioritize the deep work
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and they get yelled at a lot.
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So that's kind of my strategy is like,
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just be okay, just be okay getting yelled at a lot
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because I feel you, if you're rolling, yeah.
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Well, that's what it is for me, like with writing,
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I think it's writing so hard in a certain way
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that it's, you don't really get on a roll in some sense,
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like it's just difficult, but working on proofs,
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it's very hard to pull yourself away from a proof
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if you start to get some traction,
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just you've been at it for a couple of hours
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and you feel the pins and tumblers
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starting to click together and progress is being made,
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it's really hard to pull away from that.
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So I'm willing to get yelled at by almost everyone.
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Of course, there is also a positive effect
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to pulling yourself out of it when things are going great
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because then you're kind of excited to resume.
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Like stopping on a dead end.
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There's an extra force of procrastination
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that comes with if you stop on a dead end
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to return to the task.
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Yeah, or a cold start.
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Whenever I feel like I'm in a stage now,
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I submitted a few papers recently.
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So now we're sort of starting something up from cold
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and it takes way too long to get going
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because it's very hard to get the motivation
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to schedule a time when it's not, yeah, we're in it.
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Like here's where we are.
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We feel like something's about to give here.
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We need the very early stages where it's just,
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I don't know, I'm gonna read hard papers
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and it's gonna be hard to understand them
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and I'm gonna have no idea how to make progress.
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It's not motivating.
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What about deadlines?
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Can we, okay, so this is like a therapy session.
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It seems like I only get stuff done that has deadlines.
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And so one of the implied powerful things
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about time blocking is there's a kind of deadline
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or there's a artificial or real sense of urgency.
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Do you think it's possible to get anything done
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in this world without deadlines?
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Why do deadlines work so well?
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Well, I mean, it's a clear motivational signal,
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but in the short term, you do get an effect like that
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I think the strong effect you get by saying,
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this is the exact time I'm gonna work on this,
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is that you don't have the debate with yourself
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every three minutes about, should I take a break now?
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This is the big issue with just saying,
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I'm gonna go write.
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I'm gonna write for a while and that's it
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because your mind is saying,
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well, obviously we're gonna take some breaks.
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We're not just gonna write forever.
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And so why not right now?
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You have to be like, well, not right now.
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Let's go a little bit longer, five minutes.
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So why don't we just take a break now?
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We should probably look at the internet.
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Now you have to constantly have this battle.
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On the other hand, if you're in a time block schedule,
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I've got these two hours put aside for writing.
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That's what I'm supposed to be doing.
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I have a break scheduled over here.
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I don't have to fight with myself, right?
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And maybe at a larger scale,
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deadlines give you a similar sort of effect.
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I know this is what I'm supposed to be working on
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Perhaps, but will you describe it as much healthier
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sort of giving yourself over,
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and you talk about this in the new email book,
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the process, I mean, in general,
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you talk about it all over, is creating a process
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and then giving yourself over to the process.
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But then you have to be strict with yourself.
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Yeah, but what are the deadlines you're talking about?
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It's like with papers,
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like what's the main type of deadline work?
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Well, so papers, definitely,
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but publications, like say this podcast,
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I have to publish this podcast early next week,
link |
one, because your book is coming out.
link |
I'd love to sort of support this amazing book,
link |
but the other is I have to fly to Vegas on Thursday
link |
to run 40 miles with David Goggins.
link |
And so I want this podcast,
link |
this conversation we're doing now to be out of my life.
link |
Like I don't wanna be in a hotel in Vegas,
link |
like freaking out while David Goggins is yelling.
link |
On hour 43 of your Tarathon thing.
link |
But actually it's possible that I still will be doing that
link |
because that's not a hard, that's a softer deadline, right?
link |
But those are sort of,
link |
life imposes these kinds of deadlines.
link |
papers are nice because there's an actual deadline.
link |
But I am almost referring to like the pressure
link |
that people put on you.
link |
Hey man, you said you're gonna get this done two months ago.
link |
Why haven't you gotten it done?
link |
I don't see, I don't like that pressure.
link |
First of all, I think we can all.
link |
We can agree, by the way, having David Goggins yell at you
link |
is probably the top productivity technique.
link |
I think we'd all get a lot more done
link |
if he was yelling, but see, I don't like that.
link |
So I will try to get things done early.
link |
I like having flex.
link |
I also don't like the idea of this has to get done today.
link |
Like it's due at midnight and we've got a lot to do
link |
as the night before,
link |
because then I get in my head about what if I get sick?
link |
Or like, what if, you know,
link |
what if I don't get a bad night's sleep
link |
and I can't think clearly?
link |
So I like to have the flex.
link |
So I'm all process.
link |
And that's like the philosophical aspect
link |
of that book, Deep Work,
link |
is that there's something very human and deep
link |
about just wrangling with the world of ideas.
link |
I mean, Aristotle talked about this.
link |
If you go back and read the ethics,
link |
he's trying to understand the meaning of life
link |
and he eventually ends up ultimately
link |
at the human capacity to contemplate deeply.
link |
It's kind of like a teleological argument.
link |
It's the things that only humans can do
link |
and therefore it must be somehow connected to our ends.
link |
And he said, ultimately that's where he found his meaning,
link |
but, you know, he's touching on some sort of intimation
link |
there that's correct.
link |
And so what I try to build my life around
link |
is regularly thinking hard about stuff that's interesting.
link |
Just like if you get a fitness habit going,
link |
you feel off when you don't do it.
link |
I try to get that cognitive habit.
link |
So it's like, I got it.
link |
I mean, look, I have my bag here somewhere,
link |
I have my notebook in it because I was thinking
link |
on the Uber ride over, I was like, you know,
link |
I could get some, I'm working on this new proof
link |
and it just, so you train yourself.
link |
You train yourself to appreciate certain things.
link |
And then over time, the hope is that it accretes.
link |
Well, let's talk about some demons
link |
because I wonder there's like deep work,
link |
which and the world without email books
link |
that to me symbolize the life I want to live.
link |
And then there is, I'm like,
link |
despite appearances and adult at this point,
link |
and this is the life I actually live.
link |
And I'm in constant chaos.
link |
You said you don't like that anxiety.
link |
But it seems like I'm always in it.
link |
It's a giant mess.
link |
It's like, it's almost like whenever I establish,
link |
whenever I have successful processes for doing deep work,
link |
I'll add stuff on top of it just to introduce the chaos.
link |
And like, I don't want to.
link |
But you have to look in the mirror at a certain point
link |
and you have to say like, who the hell am I?
link |
Like, I keep doing this.
link |
Is this something that's fundamental to who I am
link |
or do I really need to fix this?
link |
What's the chaos right now?
link |
Like, I've seen your video about like your routine.
link |
It seemed very structured and deep.
link |
In fact, I was really envious of it.
link |
So like, what's the chaos now that's not in that video?
link |
Many of those sessions go way longer.
link |
I don't get enough sleep.
link |
And then I, the main introduction of chaos is,
link |
it's taking on too many things on the to do list.
link |
It's, I mean, I suppose it's a problem
link |
that everybody deals with,
link |
which is saying, not saying no.
link |
But it's not like I have trouble saying no.
link |
It's that there's so much cool shit in my life.
link |
Okay, listen, there's nothing I love more in this world
link |
than the Boston Dynamics robots.
link |
Spot and the other, yeah.
link |
And they're giving me spot.
link |
So there's a to do, what am I gonna say?
link |
So they're getting me spot
link |
and I wanna do some computer vision stuff
link |
for the hell of it.
link |
Okay, so that's now a to do item.
link |
And then you go to Texas for a while.
link |
Everything's happening.
link |
There's all the interesting people down there.
link |
And then there's surprises, right?
link |
There are power outages in Texas.
link |
There's constant changes to plans
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
And you sleep less.
link |
And then there's personal stuff,
link |
like just people in your life, sources of stress,
link |
all those kinds of things.
link |
But it does feel like if I'm just being introspective,
link |
that I bring it onto myself.
link |
I suppose a lot of people do this kind of thing.
link |
Is they flourish under pressure.
link |
And I wonder if that's just a hack I've developed
link |
as a habit early on in life
link |
that you need to let go of, you need to fix.
link |
But it's all interesting things.
link |
That's interesting.
link |
Yeah, because these are all interesting things.
link |
Well, one of the things you talked about in Deep Work,
link |
which is really important, is having an end to the day.
link |
Like putting it down.
link |
Like that, I don't think I've ever done that in my life.
link |
Well, see, I started doing that early
link |
because I got married early.
link |
So I didn't have a real job.
link |
I was a grad student, but my wife had a real job.
link |
And so I just figured I should do my work
link |
when she's at work.
link |
Because hey, when work's over, she'll be home,
link |
and I don't wanna be on campus or whatever.
link |
And so real early on, I just got in that habit
link |
of this is when you end work.
link |
And then when I was a postdoc,
link |
which is kind of an easy job, right?
link |
I put artificial, I was like, I wanna train.
link |
I was like, when I'm a professor, it's gonna be busier
link |
because there's demands that professors have beyond research.
link |
And so as a postdoc,
link |
I added artificial large time consuming things
link |
into the middle of my day.
link |
I basically exercise for two hours in the middle of the day
link |
and do all this productive meditation and stuff like this,
link |
while still maintaining the nine to five.
link |
So it's like, okay, I wanna get really good
link |
at putting artificial constraints on so that I stay,
link |
I didn't wanna get flabby when my job was easy.
link |
So that when I became a professor,
link |
and now all of that's paying off
link |
because I have a ton of kids.
link |
So now I don't really have a choice.
link |
That's what's probably keeping me away from cool things
link |
is I just don't have time to do them.
link |
And then after a while people stop bothering.
link |
Well, but that's how you have a successful life.
link |
Otherwise you're going to,
link |
it's too easy to then go into the full Hunter S. Thompson.
link |
Like to where nobody wants,
link |
nobody functional wants to be in your vicinity.
link |
Like you're driving, you attract the people
link |
that have a similar behavior pattern as you.
link |
So if you live in chaos,
link |
you're going to attract chaotic people.
link |
And then it becomes like this self fulfilling prophecy.
link |
And it feels like I'm not bothered by it,
link |
but I guess this is all coming around
link |
to exactly what you're saying, which is like,
link |
I think one of the big hacks for productive people
link |
that I've met is to get married and have kids, honestly.
link |
It's very perhaps counterintuitive,
link |
but it gets, it's like the ultimate timetable enforcer.
link |
Yeah, it enforces a lot of timetables,
link |
though it has a huge,
link |
kids have a huge productivity hit those, you gotta weigh it.
link |
But okay, here's the complicated thing though.
link |
Like you could think about in your own life,
link |
starting the podcast as one of these
link |
just cool opportunities that you put on yourself, right?
link |
Like I could have been talking to you at MIT four years ago
link |
and be like, don't do that.
link |
Like your research is going well, right?
link |
But then everyone who watches you is like,
link |
okay, this podcast is,
link |
the direction that's taking you
link |
is like a couple of years from now,
link |
it's gonna, it'll be something really monumental
link |
that you're probably, that's gonna probably lead to, right?
link |
There'll be some really,
link |
it just feels like your life is going somewhere.
link |
It's going somewhere.
link |
Yeah, so how do you balance those two things?
link |
And so what I try to throw at it
link |
is this motto of do less, do better, know why, right?
link |
So do less, do better, know why.
link |
It used to be the motto of my website years ago.
link |
So do a few things, but like an interesting array, right?
link |
So I was doing MIT stuff, but I was also writing, you know?
link |
So a couple of things are, you know, they were interesting.
link |
Like I have a couple bets placed
link |
on a couple of different numbers on the roulette table,
link |
but not too many things.
link |
And then really try to do those things really well
link |
and see where it goes.
link |
Like with my writing,
link |
I just spent years and years and years just training.
link |
I was like, I wanna be a better writer,
link |
I wanna be a better writer.
link |
I started writing student books when I was a student.
link |
I really wanted to write hardcover idea books.
link |
I started training.
link |
I would use like New Yorker articles to train myself.
link |
I'd break them down and then I'd get commissions
link |
with much smaller magazines and practice the skills.
link |
And it took forever until, you know, but now today,
link |
like I actually get to write for the New Yorker,
link |
but it took like a decade.
link |
So a small number of things, try to do them really well.
link |
And then the know why is have a connection
link |
to some sort of value.
link |
Like in general, I think this is worth doing
link |
and then seeing where it leads.
link |
And so the choice of the few things is grounded in what?
link |
Like a little flame of passion, like a love for the thing,
link |
like a sense that you say you wanted to write,
link |
get good at writing.
link |
You had that kind of introspective moment of thinking,
link |
this actually brings me a lot of joy and fulfillment.
link |
Yeah, I mean, it gets complicated
link |
because I wrote a whole book
link |
about following your passion being bad advice,
link |
which is like the first thing I kind of got infamous for.
link |
I wrote that back in 2012.
link |
But the argument there is like passion cultivates, right?
link |
So what I was pushing back on was the myth
link |
that the passion for what you do exists full intensity
link |
before you start, and then that's what propels you.
link |
Or actually the reality is as you get better at something,
link |
as you gain more autonomy, more skill and more impact,
link |
the passion grows along with it.
link |
So that when people look back later and say,
link |
oh, follow your passion, what they really mean is
link |
I'm very passionate about what I do,
link |
and that's a worthy goal.
link |
But how you actually cultivate that is much more complicated
link |
than just introspection is gonna identify,
link |
like for sure you should be a writer or something like this.
link |
So I was actually quoting you.
link |
I was on a social network last night in a clubhouse.
link |
I don't know if you've heard of it.
link |
Wait, I have to ask you about this
link |
because I'm invited to do a clubhouse.
link |
I don't know what that means.
link |
A tech reporter has invited me to do a clubhouse
link |
about my new book.
link |
Well, let me know when, because I'll show up.
link |
Okay, so first of all, let me just mention
link |
that I was in a clubhouse room last night,
link |
and I kept plugging exactly what you said about passion.
link |
So we'll talk about it.
link |
It was a room that was focused on burnout.
link |
But first, clubhouse is a kind of fascinating place
link |
in terms of your mind would be very interesting
link |
to analyze this place because we talk about email,
link |
talk about social networks,
link |
but clubhouse is something very different.
link |
And I've encountered it in other places,
link |
Discord and so on, that's voice only communication.
link |
So it's a bunch of people in a room.
link |
They're just, their eyes closed.
link |
All you hear is their voices.
link |
It only happens live.
link |
You're technically not allowed to record,
link |
but some people still do,
link |
and especially when it's big conversations.
link |
But the whole point is it's there live.
link |
And there's different structures.
link |
Like on Discord, it was so fascinating.
link |
I have this Discord server
link |
that would have hundreds of people in a room together, right?
link |
We're all just little icons that can mute and unmute our mics.
link |
And so you're sitting there, so it's just voices,
link |
and you're able with hundreds of people
link |
to not interrupt each other.
link |
Well, first of all, like as a dynamic system, like.
link |
You see icons just like mics muted or not muted basically.
link |
Yeah, well, so everyone's muted and they unmute
link |
and it starts flashing.
link |
Oh, so you're like, okay, let me get precedence.
link |
So it's the digital equivalent
link |
of when you're in a conversation, like at a faculty meeting,
link |
and you sort of like kind of make some noises,
link |
like while the other person's finishing.
link |
And so people realize like, okay,
link |
this person wants to talk next,
link |
but now it's purely digital.
link |
You see a flashing.
link |
But in a faculty meeting, which is very interesting,
link |
like even as we're talking now,
link |
there's a visual element that seems to increase
link |
the probability of interruption.
link |
It's just darkness.
link |
You actually listen better and you don't interrupt.
link |
So like if you create a culture,
link |
there's always gonna be assholes,
link |
but they're actually exceptions.
link |
Everybody adjusts.
link |
They kind of evolve to the beat of the room.
link |
Okay, that's one fascinating aspect.
link |
It's like, okay, that's weird.
link |
Cause it's different than like a Zoom call
link |
where there's video.
link |
You think video adds, but actually seems like it subtracts.
link |
The second aspect of it that's fascinating
link |
is when it's no video, just audio, there's an intimacy.
link |
Because with strangers, you connect in a much more real way.
link |
It's similar to podcasts.
link |
But with a lot of people.
link |
With a lot of people and new people.
link |
And they bring, okay, first of all,
link |
different voices, like low voices and like high voices.
link |
And it's more difficult to judge.
link |
In Discord, you couldn't even see the people.
link |
It was a culture where you do funny profile pictures
link |
as opposed to your actual face.
link |
In clubhouse, it's your actual face.
link |
So you can tell like as an older person, younger person.
link |
In Discord, you couldn't.
link |
You just have to judge based on the voice.
link |
But there's something about the listening
link |
and the intimacy of being surprised
link |
by different strangers that feels almost
link |
like a party with friends.
link |
And friends of friends you haven't met yet,
link |
but you really like.
link |
Now clubhouse also has an interesting innovation
link |
where there's a large crowd that just listens
link |
and there's a stage.
link |
And you can bring people up onto stage.
link |
So only people on stage are talking.
link |
And you can have like five, six, seven, eight,
link |
sometimes 20, 30 people on stage.
link |
And then you can also have thousands of people
link |
So there's a, I don't know,
link |
a lot of people are being surprised by this.
link |
Why is it called a social network?
link |
It seems like it doesn't have, there's not social links.
link |
There's not a feed that's trying to harvest attention.
link |
It feels like a communication.
link |
So the social network aspect is you follow people.
link |
And the people you follow,
link |
now this is like the first social network
link |
that is actually correct use of follow, I think.
link |
You're more likely to see the rooms they're in.
link |
So there's a, your feed is a bunch of rooms
link |
that are going on right now.
link |
And the people you follow are the ones
link |
that will increase the likelihood
link |
that you'll see the room they're in.
link |
And so the final result is like,
link |
there's a list of really interesting rooms.
link |
Like I have all these, I've been speaking Russian
link |
quite a bit, there's practicing,
link |
but also just like talking politics
link |
and philosophy in Russian.
link |
I've never done that before,
link |
but it allows me to connect with that community.
link |
And then there's a community of people,
link |
like it's funny, but like I'll go in a community
link |
of all African American people talking about race
link |
and I'll be welcomed.
link |
I've never had, like I've literally never been
link |
in a difficult conversation about race,
link |
like with people from all over the place.
link |
It's like fascinating.
link |
And then musicians, jazz musicians, I don't know.
link |
You could say that a lot of other places
link |
could have created that culture, I suppose.
link |
Twitter and Facebook a lot for that culture,
link |
but there's something about this network
link |
as it stands now, cause no Android users.
link |
It's probably just because it's iPhone people.
link |
Less conspiratorial or something.
link |
Well, like less, listen, I'm an Android person.
link |
So I got an iPhone just for this network, which is funny.
link |
For now it's all like, there's very few trolls.
link |
There's very few people that are trying
link |
to manipulate the system and so on.
link |
So I don't know, it's interesting.
link |
Now the downside, the reason you're going to hate it
link |
is because it's so intimate, because it pulls you in
link |
and pulls in very successful people like you,
link |
just like really successful, productive, very busy people.
link |
It's a huge time sink.
link |
It's very difficult to pull yourself out.
link |
Interesting, you mean once you're in a room?
link |
Well, no, leaving the room is actually easy.
link |
The beautiful thing about a stage with multiple people,
link |
there's a little button that says leave quietly.
link |
So culture, no etiquette wise, it's okay to just leave.
link |
So you and I in a room, when it's just you and I,
link |
it's a little awkward to leave.
link |
If you're asking questions, I'm just gone.
link |
But, and actually if you're being interviewed for the book,
link |
that's weird because you're now in the event
link |
and you're supposed to, but usually the person interviewing
link |
would be like, okay, it's time for you to go.
link |
It's more normal, but the normal way to use the room
link |
was like, you're just opening the app
link |
and there'll be like, I don't know, Sam Harris,
link |
Eric Weinstein, I think Joe Rogan showed up to the app,
link |
Bill Gates, these people on stage
link |
just like randomly just plugged in
link |
and then you'll step up on stage,
link |
listen, maybe you won't contribute at all,
link |
maybe you'll say something funny
link |
and then you'll just leave.
link |
And there's the addicting aspect to it.
link |
The reason it's a time sink is you don't wanna leave.
link |
What I've noticed about exceptionally busy people
link |
that they love this.
link |
I think it might have to do with the pandemic.
link |
It might be a little bit, yeah.
link |
There's a loneliness.
link |
They're all starved, yeah.
link |
But also it's really cool people.
link |
Like when was the last time you talked to Sam Harris
link |
or whoever, like think of anybody,
link |
Tyler Copeland, like any faculty.
link |
This is like what universities strive to create,
link |
but it's taken hundreds of years of cultural evolution
link |
to try to get a lot of interesting, smart people together
link |
that run into each other.
link |
We have really strong faculty in a room together
link |
with no scheduling.
link |
This is the power of it.
link |
It's like you just show up,
link |
there's none of that baggage of scheduling and so on
link |
and there's no pressure to leave, sorry,
link |
no pressure to stay.
link |
It's very easy for you to leave.
link |
You realize that there's a lot of constraints on meetings
link |
and like faculty, like even stopping by before the pandemic,
link |
a friend or faculty or colleague and so on,
link |
there's a weirdness about leaving.
link |
But here there's not a weirdness about leaving.
link |
So they've discovered something interesting.
link |
But the final result when you observe it
link |
is it's very fulfilling.
link |
I think it's very beneficial, but it's very addicting.
link |
So you have to make sure you moderate.
link |
Yeah, that's interesting.
link |
Okay, well, so maybe I'll try it.
link |
I mean, look, there's no,
link |
the things that make me suspicious
link |
about other platforms aren't here.
link |
So the feed is not full of user generated content
link |
that is going through some sort of algorithmic rating process
link |
with all the weird incentives and nudging that does.
link |
And you're not producing content that's being harvested
link |
to be monetized by another company.
link |
I mean, it seems like it's more ephemeral, right?
link |
You're here, you're talking.
link |
The feed is just actually just showing you
link |
here's interesting things happening, right?
link |
You're not jockeying in the feed for,
link |
look, I'm being clever or something
link |
and I'm gonna get a light count that goes up
link |
and that's gonna influence.
link |
And there's more friction.
link |
There's more cognitive friction, I guess,
link |
involved in listening to smart people
link |
versus scrolling through.
link |
Yeah, there's something there.
link |
Why are people so, I see all,
link |
there's all these articles that seem,
link |
I haven't really read them.
link |
Why are reporters negative about this?
link |
The New York Times wrote this article called
link |
Unfettered Conversations Happening on Clubhouse is.
link |
So I'm right in picking up a tone
link |
even from the headlines
link |
that there's some like negative vibes from the press.
link |
No, so I can say, let's say,
link |
well, I'll tell you what the article was saying,
link |
which is they're having cancellable conversations,
link |
like the biggest people in the world
link |
almost trolling the press.
link |
And the press is desperately.
link |
Like foreshanning the press.
link |
Yeah, foreshanning the press.
link |
By saying that you guys are looking for click bait
link |
from our genuine human conversations.
link |
And so I think the, honestly,
link |
the press is just like, what do we do with this?
link |
We can't, first of all, it's a lot of work for them.
link |
It's what Naval says, which is like,
link |
this is skipping the journalist.
link |
Like the interview you, if you go on Clubhouse,
link |
the interview you might do for the book
link |
will be with somebody who's like a journalist
link |
and interviewing you.
link |
That's more traditional.
link |
It'd be a good introduction for you to try it.
link |
But like the way to use Clubhouse is you just show up
link |
and it's like, again, like me, I'm sorry,
link |
I'm like, boy, I keep mentioning Sam Harris
link |
as if it's like the only person I know,
link |
but like a lot of these major faculty,
link |
I don't know, Max Tegmark.
link |
Like just major faculty just sitting there
link |
and then you show up and then I'll ask like,
link |
oh, don't you have a book coming out or something?
link |
And then you'll talk about the book
link |
and then you'll leave five minutes later
link |
because you have to go get coffee included.
link |
So like that's the, it's not the journalistic,
link |
you're not gonna actually enjoy the interview as much
link |
because it'll be like the normal thing.
link |
Like you're there 40 minutes or an hour
link |
and there'll be questions from the audience.
link |
Like I'm doing an event next week for the book launch
link |
where it's like Jason Fried and I are talking about email,
link |
but it's using some more like a thousand people
link |
who are there to watch virtually,
link |
but it's using some sort of traditional webinar.
link |
Clubhouse would be a situation
link |
where that could just happen informally.
link |
Like I jump in like Jason's there
link |
and then someone else jumps in and yeah, that's interesting.
link |
But for now it's still closed.
link |
So even though there's a lot of excitement
link |
and there'll be quite famous people
link |
just sitting there listening to you.
link |
But the numbers aren't exactly high.
link |
So you're talking about rooms,
link |
like even the huge rooms are like just a few thousand.
link |
And this is probably like Soho in the 50s or something too.
link |
Just because of the exponential growth,
link |
give it seven more months.
link |
And if you let one invite be, it gets two invites,
link |
it gets four invites,
link |
because pretty soon it'll be everyone.
link |
And then the rooms in your feed are gonna be whatever,
link |
marketing, performance enhancing drugs or something like that.
link |
But then in a bunch of competitors,
link |
there's already like 30 plus competitors sprung up,
link |
So Twitter is creating a competitor
link |
that's going to likely destroy Clubhouse
link |
because they just have a much larger user base
link |
and they already have a social network.
link |
So I would be very cautious, of course,
link |
with the addictive element,
link |
but it doesn't just like you said,
link |
this particular implementation in its early stages
link |
doesn't have the like,
link |
it doesn't have the context switching problem.
link |
You'll just switch to it and you'll be stuck.
link |
Yeah, to keep a context is great.
link |
But then I think the best way I've found to use it
link |
is to acknowledge that these things pull you in.
link |
So I've used it in the past,
link |
like almost, I'll go get a coffee
link |
and I'll tune into a conversation
link |
as if that's how I use podcasts sometimes.
link |
I'll just like play a little bit of a podcast
link |
and then I can just turn it off.
link |
The problem with these is it pulls you in,
link |
it's really interesting.
link |
And then the other problem that you'll experience
link |
is like somebody will recognize you.
link |
And then they'll be like, oh, Lex.
link |
Oh, hey, I had a question for you.
link |
And then it takes a lot for you to go like,
link |
And then you pulled in and it's fascinating
link |
and it's really cool people.
link |
So it's like a source of a lot of joy,
link |
but you have to be very, very careful.
link |
The reason I brought it up is we,
link |
there's a room, there's an entire club actually on burnout.
link |
And I brought you up and I brought David Goggins
link |
as the process I go through, which is,
link |
my passion goes up and down, it dips.
link |
And I don't think I trust my own mind
link |
to tell me whether I'm getting close to burnout
link |
or exhaustion or not.
link |
I kind of go with the David Goggins model of,
link |
I mean, he's probably more applying it to running,
link |
but when it feels like your mind can't take any more,
link |
that you're just 40% at your capacity.
link |
I mean, it's just like an arbitrary level.
link |
It's the Navy SEAL thing, right?
link |
The Navy SEAL thing.
link |
I mean, you could put that at any percent,
link |
but it is remarkable that if you just take it
link |
one step at a time, just keep going,
link |
it's similar to this idea of a process.
link |
If you just trust the process and you just keep following,
link |
even if the passion goes up and down and so on,
link |
then ultimately, if you look in aggregate,
link |
the passion will increase.
link |
Your self satisfaction will increase.
link |
And if you have two things,
link |
this has been a big strategy of mine,
link |
so that what you hope for is off phase, off phase alignment.
link |
Sometimes it's in phase and that's a problem,
link |
but off phase alignment's good.
link |
So, okay, my research, I'm struggling,
link |
but my book stuff is going well, right?
link |
And so when you add those two waves together,
link |
like, oh, we're doing pretty well.
link |
And then in other periods, like on my writing,
link |
I feel like I'm just not getting anywhere,
link |
but I've had some good papers, I'm feeling good over there.
link |
So having two things that can counteract each other.
link |
Now, sometimes they fall into sync and then it gets rough.
link |
Then when, you know, when everything,
link |
because everything for me is cyclical,
link |
good periods, bad periods with all this stuff.
link |
So typically they don't coincide, so it helps compensate.
link |
When they do coincide, you get really high highs,
link |
like where everything's clicking,
link |
and then you get these really low lows
link |
where like your research is not working,
link |
your program's not clicking,
link |
you feel like you're nowhere with your writing,
link |
and then it's a little rougher.
link |
Is, do you think about the concept of burnout?
link |
Because I personally have never experienced burnout
link |
in the way that folks talk about,
link |
which is like, it's not just the up and down.
link |
It's like, you don't want to do anything ever again.
link |
It's like, for some people it's like physical,
link |
like to the hospital kind of thing.
link |
Yeah, so I do worry about it.
link |
So when I used to do student writing,
link |
like writing about students and student advice,
link |
it came up a lot with students at elite schools,
link |
and I used to call it deep procrastination,
link |
but it was a real, really vivid, very replicatable syndrome
link |
where they stop being able to do schoolwork.
link |
Like this is due, and the professor gives you an extension,
link |
and the professor gives you an incomplete,
link |
and says, you got it, you were gonna fail the course,
link |
you have to hand this in, and they can't do it, right?
link |
It's like a complete stop
link |
on the ability to actually do work.
link |
And so I used to counsel students who had that issue,
link |
and often it was a combination of,
link |
this is my best analysis,
link |
is you have just the physical and cognitive difficulties
link |
of they're usually under a very hard load, right?
link |
They're doing too many majors, too many extracurriculars,
link |
just really pushing themselves,
link |
and the motivation is not sufficiently intrinsic.
link |
So if you have a motivational center
link |
that's not completely on board,
link |
so a lot of these kids, like when I'm dealing with MIT kids,
link |
they would be, their whole town was shooting off fireworks
link |
Everyone's hoped that they were going there,
link |
and that they're in three majors,
link |
they don't wanna let people down,
link |
but they're not really interested
link |
in being a doctor or whatever.
link |
So your motivation's not in the right place.
link |
The motivational psychologist would say
link |
the locus of control was more towards
link |
the extrinsic end of the spectrum, and you have hardship.
link |
And you could just fritz out the whole system.
link |
And so I would always be very worried about that.
link |
So I think about that a lot.
link |
I do a lot of multi phase or multi scale seasonality.
link |
So I'll go hard on something for a while,
link |
and then for a few weeks, go easy.
link |
I'll have semesters that are hard,
link |
and semesters that are easy.
link |
Or I'll take the summer really low.
link |
So on multiple scales,
link |
and in the day I'll go really hard on something,
link |
but then have a hard cut off at five.
link |
So like every scale, it's all about rest and recovery.
link |
Because I really wanna avoid that.
link |
And I do burn out.
link |
I burnt out, pretty recently I get minor burnt outs.
link |
I got a couple papers that I was trying to work through
link |
for a deadline a few weeks ago,
link |
and I wasn't sleeping well,
link |
and there's some other things going on.
link |
And it just knocks out and I get sick usually,
link |
is how I know I've pushed myself too far.
link |
And so I kind of pulled it back.
link |
Now I'm doing this book launch.
link |
Then after this book launch, I'm pulling it back again.
link |
So I like seasonality for rest and recovery,
link |
I think it's crucial.
link |
And at every scale, daily, monthly,
link |
and then at the annual scale.
link |
An easy summer, for example,
link |
I think is like a great idea if that's possible.
link |
Okay, you just made me realize
link |
that that's exactly what I do.
link |
Because I feel like I'm not even close
link |
to burnout or anything.
link |
Even though I'm in chaos,
link |
I feel the right exact way is the seasonality,
link |
is the, not even the seasonality,
link |
but like you always have multiple seasons operating.
link |
It's like you said,
link |
because when you have a lot of cool shit going on,
link |
there's always at least one thing that's a source of joy,
link |
that there's always a reason.
link |
I suppose the fundamental thing,
link |
and I've known people that suffer from depression too,
link |
the fundamental problem with the experience of depression
link |
and burnout is why do, life is meaningless.
link |
And I always have an answer of why today could be cool.
link |
And you have to contrive it, right?
link |
If you don't have it, you have to contrive it.
link |
I think it's really important.
link |
Like, okay, well, this is going bad,
link |
so now is the time to start thinking about,
link |
I mean, look, I started a podcast during the pandemic.
link |
It's like, this is going pretty bad, but you know what?
link |
This could be something really interesting.
link |
Deep questions with Kyle Newport.
link |
I do it all in that voice.
link |
I love the podcast, by the way.
link |
But yeah, I think David Foster Wallace said,
link |
the key to life is to be unboreable.
link |
I've always kind of taken that to heart,
link |
which is like, you should be able to maybe artificially
link |
generate anything.
link |
Like, find something in your environment,
link |
in your surroundings, that's a source of joy.
link |
Like, everything is fun.
link |
Did you read The Pale King?
link |
It goes deep on boredom.
link |
It's like uncomfortable.
link |
It's like an uncomfortable meditation on boredom.
link |
Like, the characters in that are just driven
link |
to the extremes of, I just bought three books on boredom
link |
the other day, so now I'm really interested in this topic.
link |
Because I was anxious about my book launch
link |
happening this week.
link |
So I was like, okay, I need something else.
link |
So I have this idea for, I might do it as an article first,
link |
Like, okay, I need something cool to be thinking about.
link |
Because I was worried about, like,
link |
I don't know if the launch's gonna work, the pandemic,
link |
what's gonna happen, I don't know if it's gonna get there.
link |
So this is exactly what we're talking about.
link |
So I went out and I bought a bunch of books,
link |
and I'm beginning like a whole intellectual exploration.
link |
Well, I think that's one of the profound ideas
link |
in deep work that you don't expand on too much
link |
Yeah, well, so deep work had a superficial idea
link |
about boredom, which was,
link |
I had this chapter called Embrace Boredom,
link |
and a very functionalist idea was basically,
link |
you have to have some boredom in your regular schedule,
link |
or your mind is gonna form a Pavlovian connection
link |
between as soon as I feel boredom, I get stimuli.
link |
And once it forms that connection,
link |
it's never gonna tolerate deep work.
link |
So there's this very pragmatic treatment of boredom
link |
of your mind better be used to the idea
link |
that sometimes you don't get stimuli
link |
because otherwise you can't write for three hours,
link |
like it's just not gonna tolerate it.
link |
But more recently, what I'm really interested in boredom
link |
is it as a fundamental human drive, right?
link |
Because it's incredibly uncomfortable.
link |
And think about the other things
link |
that are incredibly uncomfortable, like hunger or thirst,
link |
they serve a really important purpose for a species, right?
link |
Like if something is really distressing, there's a reason.
link |
Pain is really uncomfortable
link |
because we need to worry about getting injured.
link |
Thirst is really uncomfortable
link |
because we need water to survive.
link |
So what's boredom?
link |
Why is that uncomfortable?
link |
And I've been interested in this notion
link |
that boredom is about driving us towards productive action.
link |
Like as a species, I mean, think about it,
link |
like what got us to actually take advantage of these brains?
link |
What got us to actually work with fire?
link |
What got us to start shaping stones and the hand axes
link |
and figuring out if we could actually sharpen a stick
link |
sharp enough that we could throw it as a melee weapon
link |
or a distance weapon for hunting mammoth, right?
link |
Boredom drives us towards action.
link |
So now I'm fascinated by this fundamental action instinct
link |
because I have this theory that I'm working on
link |
that we're out of sync with it.
link |
Just like we have this drive for hunger,
link |
but then we introduced junk food
link |
and got out of sync with hunger
link |
and it makes us really unhealthy.
link |
We have this drive towards action,
link |
but then we overload ourselves
link |
and we have all of these distractions.
link |
And then that causes,
link |
it's like a cognitive action obesity type things
link |
because it short circuits this system
link |
that wants us to do things,
link |
but we put more things on our plate than we can possibly do
link |
and then we're really frustrated we can't do them
link |
and we're short circuiting all of our wires.
link |
So it all comes back to this question,
link |
well, what would be the ideal sort of amount of stuff
link |
to do and type of things to do?
link |
Like if we wanted to look back at our ancestral environment
link |
and say, if I could just build from scratch,
link |
how much work I do and what I work on
link |
to be as in touch with that as like paleo people
link |
are trying to get their diets in touch with that.
link |
And so now I'm just, well, see, this is,
link |
it's something I made up,
link |
but now I'm going deep on it.
link |
And one of my podcast listeners I was talking about
link |
on the show and I was like,
link |
well, I get trying to learn about animals and boredom.
link |
And she sent me this cool article
link |
from an animal behaviorist journal
link |
about what we know about human boredom versus animal boredom.
link |
So trying to figure out that puzzle
link |
is the wave that's high.
link |
So I can get through the wave that's low of like,
link |
I don't know about this pandemic book launch.
link |
And my research is stumbling a little bit
link |
because of the pandemic.
link |
And so I needed a nice, you know, high.
link |
So there we go, there's a case study.
link |
Well, it's both a case study
link |
and a very interesting set of concepts
link |
because I didn't even realize that it's so simple.
link |
I'm one of the people
link |
that has a interesting push and pull dynamic with hunger,
link |
trying to understand the hunger with myself.
link |
Like I probably have an unhealthy relationship with food.
link |
I don't know, but there's probably a perfect,
link |
that's a nice way to think about diet as action.
link |
There's probably an optimal diet response
link |
to the experience that our body's telling us,
link |
the signal that our body's sending, which is hunger.
link |
And in that same way, boredom is sending a signal.
link |
And most of our intellectual activities in this world,
link |
our creative activities,
link |
are essentially a response to that signal.
link |
Yeah, and think about this analogy
link |
that we have this hunger instinct
link |
that junk food short circuits, right?
link |
It's like, oh, we'll satisfy that hyper palatably
link |
and it doesn't end up well.
link |
Now think about modern attention engineered,
link |
digitally mediated entertainment.
link |
We have this boredom instinct.
link |
Oh, we can take care of that
link |
with a hyper palatable alternative.
link |
Is that gonna lead to a similar problem?
link |
So I've been fasting a lot lately,
link |
like I'm doing eating once a day.
link |
I've been doing that for over a month,
link |
just eating one meal a day and primarily meat.
link |
But it's very, fasting has been incredible for me,
link |
for focus, for wellbeing, for, I don't know,
link |
just for feeling good, okay?
link |
We'll put on a chart what makes me feel good.
link |
And that fasting and eating primarily a meat based diet
link |
makes me feel really good.
link |
And so, but that ultimately what fasting did,
link |
I haven't fasted super long yet,
link |
like a seven day diet, which I really like to do.
link |
But even just fasting for a day for 24 hours
link |
gets you in touch with your, with the signal.
link |
Like you get to listen to your,
link |
learn to listen to your body that like,
link |
it's okay to be hungry.
link |
It's like a little signal that sends you stuff.
link |
And then I get to listen to how it responds
link |
when I put food in my body.
link |
Like, and I get to like, okay, cool.
link |
So like food is a thing that pacifies the signal.
link |
Like it sounds ridiculous, okay?
link |
And you could do that with.
link |
And do different types of food.
link |
It feels different.
link |
So you learn about what your body wants.
link |
For some reason fasting,
link |
it's similar to the deep work, embrace boredom.
link |
Fasting allowed me to go into mode of listening,
link |
of trying to understand the signal that I could say,
link |
I have an unhealthy appreciation of fruit, okay?
link |
I love apples and cherries.
link |
Like, I don't know how to moderate them.
link |
So if you take just same amount of calories,
link |
I don't know calories matter, but they say calories.
link |
2000 calories of cherries versus 2000 calories of steak.
link |
If I eat 2000 calories of steak,
link |
maybe just a little bit of like green beans or cauliflower,
link |
I'm going to feel really good, fulfilled, focused and happy.
link |
If I eat cherries, I'm going to be,
link |
I'm going to wake up behind a dumpster crying with like naked
link |
and like, it's just.
link |
Yeah, with everything.
link |
Over your face, yeah.
link |
And it's just like bloated, just not and unhappy.
link |
And also the mood swings up and down.
link |
And I'll be much hungrier the next day.
link |
Sometimes it takes a couple of days.
link |
But when I introduce carbs into the system, too many carbs,
link |
it starts, it's just unhealthy.
link |
I go into this roller coaster as opposed to a calm boat ride
link |
along the river in the Amazon or something like that.
link |
And so fasting was the mechanism for me
link |
to start listening to the body.
link |
I wonder if you can do that same kind of,
link |
I guess that's what meditation a little bit is.
link |
A little bit, but yeah, listen to boredom.
link |
But so two years ago,
link |
I had a book out called Digital Minimalism.
link |
And one of the things I was recommending that people do
link |
is basically a 30 day fast.
link |
But from digital personal entertainment,
link |
social media, online videos,
link |
anything that captures your attention and dispels boredom.
link |
And people were thinking like, oh, this is a detox.
link |
Like, I just wanna teach your body
link |
not to need the distraction, this or that.
link |
But it really wasn't what I was interested in.
link |
I wanted there to be space
link |
that you could listen to your boredom.
link |
Like, okay, I can't just dispel it.
link |
I can't just look at the screen
link |
and revel in it a little bit and start to listen to it
link |
and say, what is this really pushing me towards?
link |
And you take the new stuff, the new technology off the table
link |
and sort of ask, what is this?
link |
What am I craving?
link |
Like, what's the activity equivalent of 2000 calories
link |
of meat with a little bit of green beans on the side?
link |
And I had 1700 people go through this experiment,
link |
like spend 30 days doing this.
link |
And it's hard at first,
link |
but then they get used to listening to themselves
link |
and sort of seeking out,
link |
what is this really pushing me towards?
link |
And it was pushing people towards connection.
link |
It was pushing people towards,
link |
I just wanna go be around other people.
link |
It was pushing people towards high quality
link |
leisure activities.
link |
Like I wanna go do something that's complicated.
link |
And it took weeks sometimes for them
link |
to get in touch with their boredom,
link |
but then it completely rewired how they thought about,
link |
what do I wanna do with my time outside of work?
link |
And then the idea is when you're done with that,
link |
then it was much easier to go back
link |
and completely change your digital life
link |
because you have alternatives, right?
link |
You're not just trying to abstain from things you don't like,
link |
but that's basically a listening to boredom experiment.
link |
Like just be there with the boredom
link |
and see where it drives you
link |
when you don't have the digital Cheez Its.
link |
Okay, so if I can't do that,
link |
where is it gonna drive me?
link |
Well, I guess I kinda wanna go to the library,
link |
which came up a lot, by the way,
link |
a lot of people rediscovered the library.
link |
With physical books.
link |
Physical books, so like you can just go borrow them.
link |
And there's like low pressure and you can explore
link |
and you bring them home and then you read them
link |
and you can like sit by the window and read them
link |
and it's nice weather outside.
link |
And I used to do that 20 years ago,
link |
they're listening to boredom.
link |
So can you maybe elaborate a little bit
link |
on the different experiences that people had
link |
when they quit social media for 30 days?
link |
Like if you were to recommend that process,
link |
what is ultimately the goal?
link |
Yeah, digital minimalism,
link |
that's my philosophy for all this tech.
link |
And it's working backwards from what's important.
link |
So it's you figure out what you're actually all about,
link |
like what you wanna do,
link |
what you wanna spend your time doing.
link |
And then you can ask, okay,
link |
is there a place that tech could amplify
link |
or support some of these things?
link |
And that's how you decide what tech to use.
link |
And so the process is,
link |
let's actually get away from everything,
link |
let's be bored for a while,
link |
let's really spend a month getting really figuring out
link |
what do I actually wanna do?
link |
What do I wanna spend my time doing?
link |
What's important to me?
link |
What makes me feel good?
link |
And then when you're done,
link |
you can bring back in tech very strategically
link |
to help those things, right?
link |
And that was the goal.
link |
That turns out to be much more successful
link |
than when people take a abstention only approach.
link |
So if you come out your tech life and say,
link |
you know, whatever, I look at Instagram too much.
link |
Like I don't like how much I'm on Instagram,
link |
that's a bad thing.
link |
I wanna reduce this bad thing.
link |
So here's my new thing,
link |
I'm gonna spend less time looking at Instagram,
link |
much less likely to succeed in the longterm.
link |
So we're much less likely at trying to reduce
link |
this sort of amorphous negative
link |
because in the moment you're like,
link |
yeah, but it's not that bad
link |
and it would be kind of interesting to look at it now.
link |
When you're instead controlling behavior
link |
because you have a positive that you're aiming towards,
link |
it's very powerful for people.
link |
Like I want my life to be like this,
link |
here's the role that tech plays in that life.
link |
The connection to wanting your life to be like that
link |
is very, very strong.
link |
And then it's much, much easier to say,
link |
yeah, like using Instagram is not part of my plan
link |
for how I have that life.
link |
And I really wanna have that life,
link |
so of course I'm not gonna use Instagram.
link |
So it turns out to be a much more sustainable way
link |
to tame what's going on.
link |
So if you quit social media for 30 days,
link |
you kinda have to do the work.
link |
You have to do the work.
link |
Of thinking like, what am I actually,
link |
what makes me happy in terms of these tools
link |
that I've previously used
link |
and when you try to integrate them back,
link |
how can I integrate them to maximize
link |
the thing that actually makes me happy?
link |
Yeah, or what makes me happy unrelated to technology?
link |
Like what do I actually, what do I want my life to be like?
link |
Well, maybe what I wanna do is be like outside of nature
link |
two hours a day and spend a lot more time
link |
like helping my community and sacrificing
link |
on behalf of my connections
link |
and then have some sort of intellectually engaging
link |
leisure activity like I'm reading
link |
or trying to read the great books
link |
and having more calm and seeing the sunset.
link |
Like you create this picture and then you go back
link |
and say, well, I still need my Facebook group
link |
because that's how I keep up with my cycling group.
link |
But Twitter is just, you know,
link |
toxic, it's not helping any of these things.
link |
And well, I'm an artist,
link |
so I kinda need Instagram to get inspiration.
link |
But if I know that's why I'm using Instagram,
link |
I don't need it on my phone, it's just on my computer
link |
and I just follow 10 artists and check it once a week.
link |
Like you really can start deploying.
link |
It was the number one thing
link |
that differentiated in that experiment,
link |
the people who ended up sustainably making changes
link |
and getting through the 30 days and those who didn't,
link |
was the people who did the experimentation
link |
and the reflection.
link |
Like let me try to figure out what's positive.
link |
They were much more successful than the people
link |
that just said, I'm sick of using my phone so much.
link |
So I'm just gonna white knuckle it.
link |
Just 30 days will be good for me.
link |
I just gotta get away from it or something.
link |
So you don't use social media currently.
link |
Do you find that a lot of people going through this process
link |
will seek to basically arrive at a similar place
link |
to not use social media primarily?
link |
Right, so about half when they went through this exercise,
link |
and these aren't quantified numbers.
link |
This is just, they sent me reports and yeah.
link |
That's pretty good though, 1700?
link |
So roughly half probably got rid of social media altogether.
link |
Once they did this exercise,
link |
they realized these things I care about,
link |
I don't, social media's not the tools that's really helping.
link |
The other half kept some,
link |
there were some things in their life
link |
where some social media was useful.
link |
But the key thing is if they knew
link |
why they were deploying social media,
link |
they could put fences around it.
link |
So for example, of those half that kept some social media,
link |
almost none of them kept it on their phone.
link |
Yeah, you can't optimize if you don't know
link |
what the function you're trying to optimize.
link |
So it's like this huge hack.
link |
Like once you know this is why I'm using Twitter,
link |
then you can have a lot of rules about how you use Twitter.
link |
And suddenly you take this cost benefit ratio
link |
and it goes like way from the company's advantage
link |
and then way over towards your advantage.
link |
It's kind of fascinating
link |
because I've been torn with social media,
link |
but I did this kind of process.
link |
I haven't actually done it for 30 days,
link |
which I probably should.
link |
I'll do it for like a week at a time and regularly
link |
and thinking what kind of approach to Twitter works for me.
link |
I'm distinctly aware of the fact
link |
that I really enjoy posting once or twice a day.
link |
And at that time checking from the previous post,
link |
it makes me feel even when there's like negative comments,
link |
they go right past me.
link |
And when there's positive comments, it makes you smile.
link |
I feel like love and connection with people,
link |
especially with people I know,
link |
but even just in general, it's like,
link |
it makes me feel like the world is full of awesome people.
link |
Okay, when you increase that from checking from two to like,
link |
I don't know what the threshold is for me,
link |
but probably like five or six per day,
link |
it starts going to anxiety world.
link |
Like where negative comments will actually stick
link |
to me mentally and positive comments will feel more shallow.
link |
It's kind of fascinating.
link |
So I've been trying to, there's been long stretches of time,
link |
I think December and January where I did just post
link |
and check, post and check.
link |
That makes me really happy.
link |
Most of 2020 I did that, it made me really happy.
link |
Recently I started like, I'll go,
link |
you go right back in like a drug addict,
link |
where you check it like, I don't know what that number is,
link |
but that number is high.
link |
Not good, you don't come out happy.
link |
No one comes out of a day full of Twitter
link |
celebrating humanity.
link |
And it's not even,
link |
cause I'm very fortunate to have a lot of just
link |
positivity in the Twitter,
link |
but there's just a general anxiety.
link |
I wouldn't even say it's,
link |
it's probably the thing that you're talking about
link |
with the contact switching.
link |
It's almost like an exhaustion.
link |
I wouldn't even say it's like a negative feeling.
link |
It's almost just an exhaustion
link |
to where I'm not creating anything beautiful in my life,
link |
Like an existential exhaustion.
link |
Existential exhaustion.
link |
But I wonder, do you think it's possible to use
link |
from the people you've seen from yourself
link |
to use social media in the way I'm describing moderation?
link |
Or is it always going to become?
link |
When people do this exercise,
link |
you get lots of configurations.
link |
So for people that have a public presence, for example,
link |
like what you're doing is not that unusual.
link |
Okay, I post one thing a day and my audience likes it
link |
and that's kind of it.
link |
But you've thought through like, okay,
link |
this supports something I value,
link |
which is like having a sort of informal connection
link |
with my audience and being exposed to some sort of
link |
positive randomness.
link |
Okay, then you could say if that's my goal,
link |
what's the right way to do it?
link |
Well, I don't need to be on Twitter on my phone all day.
link |
Maybe what I do is every day at five,
link |
I do my post and check on the day.
link |
So I have a writer friend, Ryan Holiday,
link |
who writes about the Stoics a lot.
link |
And he has this similar strategy.
link |
He posts one quote every day usually from a famous Stoic
link |
and sometimes from a contemporary figure.
link |
And that's just what he does.
link |
He just posts it and it's a very positive thing.
link |
Like his readers really love it
link |
because it's just like a dose of inspiration.
link |
He doesn't spend time.
link |
He's never interacting with anyone on social media, right?
link |
But that's an example of I figured out
link |
what's important to me,
link |
what's the best way to use tools to amplify it.
link |
And then you get advantages out of the tools.
link |
So I like what you're doing.
link |
I looked you up, I looked up your Twitter feed
link |
before I came over here.
link |
I was curious, you're not on there a lot.
link |
I don't see you yelling at people.
link |
Now, do you think social media as a medium
link |
changed the cultural standards?
link |
And I mean it in a, have you read Neil Postman at all?
link |
Have you read like a Amusing Ourselves to Death?
link |
He was a social critic, technology critic
link |
and wrote a lot about sort of technological determinism.
link |
So the ways, which is a really influential idea
link |
to a lot of my work,
link |
which is actually a little out of fashion
link |
right now in academia.
link |
But the ways that the properties
link |
and presence of technologies change things about humans
link |
in a way that's not really intended
link |
or planned by the humans themselves.
link |
And that book is all about
link |
how different communication medium,
link |
like fundamentally just changed the way
link |
the human brain understands and operates.
link |
And so he sort of gets into the,
link |
what happened when the printed word was widespread
link |
and how television changed it.
link |
And this was all pre social media.
link |
But this is one of these ideas I'm having
link |
is like what's the degree to which,
link |
and I get into it sometimes on my show,
link |
I get into a little bit,
link |
like the degree to which like Twitter in particular
link |
just changed the way that people conceptualized
link |
what for example, debate and discussion was.
link |
Like it introduced a rhetorical dunk culture
link |
where it's sort of more about tribes
link |
not giving ground to other tribes.
link |
And it's like, it's a complete,
link |
there's different places and times
link |
when that type of discussion was thought of differently.
link |
Well, yeah, absolutely.
link |
But I tend to believe, I don't know what you think,
link |
that there's the technological solutions.
link |
Like there's literally different features in Twitter
link |
that could completely reverse that.
link |
There's so much power in the different choices that are made.
link |
And it could still be highly engaging
link |
and have very different effects.
link |
Perhaps more negative or hopefully more positive.
link |
Yeah, so I'm trying to pull these two things apart.
link |
So there's these two ways social media,
link |
let's say could change the experience
link |
of reading a major newspaper today.
link |
One could be a little bit more economic, right?
link |
So the internet made it cheaper to get news.
link |
The newspapers had to retreat to a paywall model
link |
because it was the only way they were gonna survive.
link |
But once you're in a paywall model,
link |
then what you really wanna do is make your tribe,
link |
which is within the paywall, very, very happy with you.
link |
So you wanna work to them.
link |
But then there's the sort of determinist point of view,
link |
which is the properties of Twitter, which were arbitrary.
link |
Jack and Evan just, whatever, let's just do it this way.
link |
Influenced the very way that people now understand
link |
and think about the world.
link |
So the one influenced the other, I think.
link |
They kind of started adjusting together.
link |
I did this thing, I mean, I'm trying to understand this.
link |
Part of the, I've been playing with the entrepreneurial idea.
link |
That's a very particular dream I've had of a startup.
link |
That this is a longer term thing,
link |
it has to do with artificial intelligence.
link |
But more and more, it seems like there's some trajectory
link |
through creating social media type of technologies.
link |
Very different than what people are thinking I'm doing.
link |
But it's a kind of challenge to the way the Twitter is done.
link |
But it's not obvious what the best mechanisms are
link |
to still make an exceptionally engaging platform.
link |
My clubhouse is very engaging.
link |
And not have any other negative effects.
link |
For example, there's Chrome extensions
link |
that allow you to turn off all likes and dislikes
link |
and all of that from Twitter.
link |
So all you're seeing is just the content.
link |
On Twitter, that to me creates,
link |
that's not a compelling experience at all.
link |
Because I still need, I would argue,
link |
I still need the likes to know
link |
what's a tweet worth reading.
link |
Because I don't only have a limited amount of time,
link |
so I need to know what's valuable.
link |
It's like great Yelp reviews on tweets or something.
link |
But I've turned off on, for example,
link |
on my account on YouTube, I wrote a Chrome extension
link |
that turns off all likes and dislikes and just views.
link |
I don't know how many views the video gets and so on.
link |
Unless it's on my phone.
link |
Did you take off the recommendations?
link |
On YouTube, some people,
link |
distraction for YouTube is a big one for people.
link |
No, I'm not worried about the distraction
link |
because I'm able to control myself on YouTube.
link |
You don't rabbit hole.
link |
No, I don't rabbit hole.
link |
So you have to know your demons or your addictions
link |
On YouTube, I'm okay.
link |
I don't keep clicking.
link |
The negative feelings come from seeing the views
link |
on stuff you've created.
link |
Oh, so you don't want to see your views.
link |
So I'm just speaking to the things
link |
that I'm aware of of myself that are helpful
link |
and things that are not helpful emotionally.
link |
And I feel like there should be,
link |
we need to create actually tooling for ourselves.
link |
That's not me with JavaScript,
link |
but anybody is able to create,
link |
sort of control the experience that they have.
link |
Well, so my big unified theory on social media
link |
is I'm very bearish on the big platforms
link |
having a long future.
link |
I think the moment of three or four major platforms
link |
is not gonna last, right?
link |
This is just perspective, right?
link |
So you can start shorting these stocks on my,
link |
It's not financial advice.
link |
Don't do it Robinhood.
link |
So here's, I think the big mistake
link |
the major platforms made as when they took out
link |
the network effect advantage, right?
link |
So the original pitch,
link |
especially if something like Facebook or Instagram
link |
was the people you know are on here, right?
link |
So like what you use this for is you can connect to people
link |
that you already know.
link |
This is what makes the network useful.
link |
So therefore the value of our network grows quadratically
link |
with the number of users.
link |
And therefore it's such a headstart
link |
that there's no way that someone else can catch up.
link |
But when they shifted and when Facebook took the lead
link |
of say we're gonna shift towards a newsfeed model,
link |
they basically said we're going to try to in the moment
link |
get more data and get more likes.
link |
Like what we're gonna go towards
link |
is actually just seeing interesting stuff.
link |
Like seeing different information.
link |
So people took this social internet impulse
link |
to connect to people digitally,
link |
to other tools like group text messages
link |
and WhatsApp and stuff like this, right?
link |
So you don't think about these tools
link |
as oh, this is where I connect with people.
link |
Once it's just a feed that's kind of interesting,
link |
now you're competing with everything else
link |
that can produce interesting content that's diverting.
link |
And I think that is a much fiercer competition
link |
because now for example, you're going up against podcasts,
link |
I mean like, okay, I guess the Twitter feed
link |
is interesting right now,
link |
but also a podcast is interesting
link |
or something else could be interesting too.
link |
I think it's a much fiercer competition
link |
when there's no more network effects, right?
link |
And so my sense is we're gonna see a fragmentation
link |
into what I call long tail social media,
link |
where if I don't need everyone I know to be on a platform,
link |
then why not have three or four bespoke platforms I use
link |
where it's a thousand people and we're all interested
link |
in whatever, AI or comedy.
link |
And we've perfected this interface
link |
and maybe it's like Clubhouse, it's audio or something.
link |
And we all pay $2 so that we don't have to worry
link |
about attention harvesting.
link |
And that's gonna be wildly more entertaining.
link |
Like, I mean, I'm thinking about comedians on Twitter.
link |
It's not the best internet possible format
link |
for them expressing themselves and being interesting.
link |
That you have all these comedians that are trying to like,
link |
well, I can do like little clips and little whatever.
link |
Like, I don't know if there was a long tail social media.
link |
I mean, it's really, this is where the comedians are
link |
and there's podcasts and the comedians are on podcasts now.
link |
So this is my thought is that there's really no,
link |
there's really no strong advantage
link |
to having one large platform that everyone is on.
link |
If all you're getting from it is,
link |
I now have different options for diversion
link |
and like uplifting aspirational
link |
or whatever types of entertainment,
link |
that whole thing could fragment.
link |
And I think the glue that was holding together
link |
was network effects.
link |
I don't think they realized that when network effects
link |
have been destabilized,
link |
they don't have the centrifugal force anymore
link |
and they're spinning faster and faster.
link |
But is a Twitter feed really that much more interesting
link |
than all of these streaming services?
link |
Is it really that much more interesting
link |
than Clubhouse, is it that much more interesting
link |
I feel like they don't realize
link |
how unstable their ground actually is.
link |
Yeah, that's fascinating.
link |
But the thing that makes Twitter and Facebook work,
link |
I mean, the newsfeed, you're exactly right.
link |
Like you can just duplicate the news.
link |
Like if it's not the social network and it's the newsfeed,
link |
then why not have multiple different feeds
link |
that are more, that are better at satisfying.
link |
There's a dopamine gamification that they've figured out.
link |
And so you have to, whatever you create,
link |
you have to at least provide some pleasure
link |
in that same gamification kind of way.
link |
It doesn't have to have to do with scale
link |
of large social networks.
link |
But I mean, I guess you're implying that
link |
you should be able to design that kind of mechanism
link |
Or people are turning on that gamification.
link |
I mean, so people are getting wise to it
link |
and are getting uncomfortable about it, right?
link |
So if I'm offering something, these exist out here.
link |
People realize sugar's bad for you.
link |
Yeah, sugar's great.
link |
They're gonna stop eating it.
link |
Yeah, drinking a lot's great too,
link |
but also after a while you realize there's problems.
link |
So some of the long tail social media networks
link |
that are out there that I've looked at,
link |
they offer usually like a deeper sense of connection.
link |
Like it's usually interesting people
link |
that you share some affinity
link |
and you have these carefully cultivated.
link |
I wrote this New Yorker piece a couple of years ago
link |
about the indie social media movement
link |
that really got into some of these different technologies.
link |
But I think the technologies are a distraction.
link |
We focus too much on Macedon versus whatever.
link |
Like forget, or Discord.
link |
Like actually let's forget the protocols right now.
link |
It's the idea of, okay.
link |
And there's a lot of these long tail social media groups,
link |
what people are getting out of it,
link |
which I think can outweigh the dopamine gamification
link |
is strong connection and motivation.
link |
Like you're in a group with other guys
link |
that are all trying to be better dads
link |
or something like this.
link |
And you talk to them on a regular basis
link |
and you're sharing your stories
link |
and there's interesting talks.
link |
And that's a powerful thing too.
link |
One interesting thing about scale of Twitter
link |
is you have these viral spread of information.
link |
So sort of Twitter has become a newsmaker in itself.
link |
Yeah, I think it's a problem.
link |
Well, yes, but I wonder what replaces that
link |
because then you immediately.
link |
Reporters have to do some work again, I don't know.
link |
The problem with reporters and journalism
link |
is that they're intermediary.
link |
They have control.
link |
I mean, this is the problem in Russia currently
link |
is that it creates a shield between the people and the news.
link |
The interesting thing and the powerful thing about Twitter
link |
is that the news originates from the individual
link |
that's creating the news.
link |
Like you have the former president of the United States
link |
on Twitter creating news.
link |
You have Elon Musk creating news.
link |
You have people announcing stuff on Twitter
link |
as opposed to talking to a journalist.
link |
And that feels much more genuine
link |
and it feels very powerful,
link |
but actually coming to realize
link |
it doesn't need the social network.
link |
You can just put that announcement
link |
on a YouTube type thing.
link |
This is what I'm thinking.
link |
Right, so this is my point about that
link |
because that's right.
link |
The democratizing power of the internet is fantastic.
link |
I mean, I'm an old school internet nerd,
link |
a guy that was telemeting in the servers
link |
and gophering before the World Wide Web was around, right?
link |
So I'm a huge internet booster.
link |
And that's one of its big power.
link |
But when you put everything on Twitter,
link |
I think the fact that you've taken,
link |
you homogenized everything, right?
link |
So everything looks the same,
link |
moves with the same low friction is very difficult.
link |
You have no what I call distributed curation, right?
link |
The only curation that really happens,
link |
there's a little bit with likes and also the algorithm.
link |
But if you look back to pre web 2.0 or early web 2.0,
link |
when a lot of this was happening,
link |
let's say on blogs where people own their own servers
link |
and you had your different blogs,
link |
there was this distributed curation that happened
link |
where in order for your blog to get on people's radar
link |
and this had nothing to do with any gatekeepers
link |
or legacy media, it was over time you got more links
link |
and people respected you
link |
and you would hear about this blog over here
link |
and there's this whole distributed curation
link |
and filtering going on.
link |
So if you think like the 2004 presidential election,
link |
most of the information people are getting from the internet
link |
was one of the first big internet news driven elections
link |
was from, you had like the daily costs and drudge,
link |
but there was like blogs that were out there
link |
and this was back, Ezra Klein was just running a blog
link |
out of his dorm room at this point, right?
link |
And you would in a distributed fashion gain credibility
link |
because okay, people have paid,
link |
it's very hard to get people to pay attention to your blog,
link |
they're paying attention, they get linked to this kid Ezra
link |
or whatever, it seems to be really sharp
link |
and now people are noticing it
link |
and now you have a distributed curation
link |
that solves a lot of the problems we see
link |
when you have a completely homogenized low friction
link |
environment like friction where, I mean Twitter,
link |
where any random conspiracy theory or whatever
link |
that people like can just shoot through and spread,
link |
whereas if you're starting a blog
link |
to try to push QAnon or something like that,
link |
it's probably gonna be a really weird looking blog
link |
and you're gonna have a hard time,
link |
like it's just never gonna show up on people's radar, right?
link |
So everything you've said up until the very last statement,
link |
I would agree with.
link |
This is a topic I don't know a ton about, I guess, QAnon.
link |
There's, I think, I'll forget QAnon.
link |
But QAnon is, QAnon could be that,
link |
I also don't know, I should know more,
link |
I apologize, I don't know more.
link |
I mean, that's a power and the downside,
link |
you can have, I mean, Hitler could have a blog today
link |
and you would have potentially a very large following
link |
if he's charismatic, if he's as good with words,
link |
is able to express the ideas,
link |
whatever maybe he's able to channel,
link |
the frustration, the anger that people have
link |
about a certain thing.
link |
And so I think that's the power of blogs,
link |
but it's also the limitation, but that doesn't,
link |
we're not trying to solve that.
link |
You can't solve that, yeah.
link |
The fundamental problem you're saying is not the problem.
link |
Your thesis is that there's nothing special
link |
about large scale social networks
link |
that guarantees that they will keep existing.
link |
And it's important to remember
link |
for a lot of the older generation of internet activists
link |
or the people who are very pro internet in the early days,
link |
they were completely flabbergasted
link |
by the rise of these platforms.
link |
Say, why would you take the internet
link |
and then build your own version of the internet
link |
where you own all the servers?
link |
And we built this whole distributed,
link |
the whole thing, we had open protocols.
link |
Everyone anywhere in the world could use the same protocols.
link |
Your machine can talk to any other machine.
link |
It's the most democratic communication system
link |
that's ever been built.
link |
And then these companies came along and said,
link |
we're gonna build our own,
link |
we'll just own all the servers
link |
and put them in buildings that we own.
link |
And the internet will just be the first mile
link |
that gets you into our private internet
link |
where we owned the whole thing.
link |
It went completely against the entire motivation
link |
of the internet was like, yes,
link |
it's not gonna be one person owns all the servers
link |
and you pay to access them.
link |
It's any one server that they own
link |
could talk to anyone else's server
link |
because we all agree on a standard set of protocols.
link |
And so the old guard of pro internet people
link |
never understood this move towards
link |
let's build private versions of the internet.
link |
We'll build three or four private internets
link |
and that's what we'll all use.
link |
It was the opposite basically.
link |
Well, it's funny enough, I don't know if you follow,
link |
but Jack Dorsey is also as a proponent
link |
and is helping to fund, create fully distributed
link |
versions of Twitter, essentially,
link |
I think that would potentially destroy Twitter.
link |
But I think there might be financial,
link |
like business cases to be made there, I'm not sure.
link |
But that seems to be another alternative
link |
as opposed to creating a bunch of like the long tail,
link |
creating like the ultimate long tail
link |
of like fully distributed.
link |
Yeah, which is what the internet is.
link |
But that's sort of my long,
link |
when I'm thinking about long tail social media,
link |
I'm thinking it's like the tech's not so important.
link |
Like there's groups out there, right?
link |
I know where the tech they use to actually implement
link |
their digital only social group, whatever,
link |
they might use Slack, they might use some combination
link |
of Zoom or it doesn't matter.
link |
I think in the tech world,
link |
we wanna build the beautiful protocol
link |
that okay, everyone's gonna use
link |
as just a federated server protocol
link |
in which we've worked out X, Y, and Z,
link |
and no one understands it
link |
because then the engineers need it all to make,
link |
I get it because I'm a nerd like this,
link |
like, okay, every standard has to fit with everything else
link |
and no one understands what's going on.
link |
Meanwhile, you have this group of bike enthusiasts
link |
that are like, yeah, we'll just jump on to Zoom
link |
and have some Slack and put up a blog.
link |
The tech doesn't really matter.
link |
Like we built a world with our own curation,
link |
our own rules, our own sort of social ecosystem
link |
that's generating a lot of value.
link |
I mean, I don't know if it'll happen.
link |
There's a lot of money at stake with obviously these large,
link |
but I just think they're more,
link |
they're so, I mean, look how quickly
link |
Americans left Facebook, right?
link |
I mean, Facebook was savvy to buy other properties
link |
and to diversify, right?
link |
But how quick did that take
link |
for just standard Facebook news feed?
link |
Everyone under the age of something were using it
link |
and no one under a certain age is using it now.
link |
It took like four years.
link |
I mean, this stuff is really.
link |
I believe people can leave Facebook overnight.
link |
Like I think Facebook hasn't actually messed up
link |
like enough to, there's two things.
link |
They haven't messed up enough
link |
for people to really leave aggressively
link |
and there's no good alternative for them to leave.
link |
I think if good alternatives pop up,
link |
it would just immediately happen.
link |
The stuff is a lot more culturally fragile, I think.
link |
I mean, Twitter's having a moment
link |
because it was feeding a certain type of,
link |
I mean, there's a lot of anxieties
link |
that was in the sort of political sphere anyways
link |
that Twitter was working with,
link |
but its moment could go to as well.
link |
I mean, it's a really arbitrary thing.
link |
Short little things.
link |
I read a Wired article about this earlier in the pandemic.
link |
This is crazy that the way
link |
that we're trying to communicate information
link |
about the pandemic is all these weird arbitrary rules
link |
where people are screenshotting pictures of articles
link |
that are part of a tweet thread
link |
where you say one slash in under it.
link |
We have the technology guys
link |
to really clearly convey long form information to people.
link |
Why do we have these?
link |
And I know this because it's the gamified dopamine hits,
link |
but what a weird medium.
link |
There's no reason for us to have to have these threads
link |
that you have to find and pin with your screenshot.
link |
I mean, we have technology
link |
to communicate better using the internet.
link |
I mean, why are epidemiologists having to do tweet threads?
link |
Because there's mechanisms of publishing
link |
that make it easier on Twitter.
link |
I mean, we're evolving as a species
link |
and the internet is a very fresh thing.
link |
And so it's kind of interesting to think
link |
that as opposed to Twitter,
link |
this is what Jack also complains about
link |
is Twitter's not innovating fast enough.
link |
And so it's almost like the people are innovating
link |
and thinking about their productive life faster
link |
than the platforms on which they operate can catch up.
link |
And so at the point the gap grows sufficiently,
link |
A few people, a few innovative folks
link |
will just create an alternative
link |
and perhaps distributed perhaps just many little silos
link |
and then people will jump
link |
and then we'll just continue this kind of way.
link |
Yeah, but see, I think like Substack, for example,
link |
what they're gonna pull out of Twitter,
link |
among other things, is the audience that was,
link |
let's say, like slightly left of center,
link |
but slightly left of center, don't like Trump,
link |
uncomfortable with like postmodern critical theories
link |
made into political action, right?
link |
And they're like, yeah, Twitter,
link |
there was people on there talking about this
link |
and it made me feel sort of hurt
link |
because I was feeling a little bit like a nerd about it.
link |
But honestly, I'd probably rather subscribe
link |
to the four subs, you know, I'm gonna have like Barry's
link |
and Andrew Sullivan's, I'll have like a Jesse Signals,
link |
like I'll have a few substacks I can subscribe to
link |
and honestly, I'm a knowledge worker who's 32 anyways,
link |
probably that's an email all day.
link |
And so like, there's an innovation that's gonna,
link |
that group, you know, it's gonna suck them off.
link |
Which is actually a very large group.
link |
Yeah, that's a lot of energy.
link |
And then once Trump's gone,
link |
I guess that's probably gonna drive,
link |
that drove a lot of more like Trump people off Twitter.
link |
Like this stuff is fragile, I think.
link |
I, but the fascinating thing to me,
link |
because I've hung out on Parler for a short amount enough
link |
to know that the interface matters.
link |
It's so fascinating like that,
link |
that it's not just about ideas.
link |
It's about creating like Substack 2,
link |
creating a pleasant experience, a dicting experience.
link |
No, you're right, you're right about that.
link |
And it's why the, this is one of the conclusions
link |
from that indie social media article
link |
is it's just the ugliness matters.
link |
And I don't mean even just aesthetically,
link |
it's just the clunkiness of the interfaces.
link |
And I don't know, it's,
link |
to some degree, the social media companies
link |
have spent a lot of money on this.
link |
And to some degree, it's a survivorship bias, right?
link |
I think Twitter, every time I hear Jack talks about this,
link |
it seems like he's as surprised as anyone else,
link |
the way Twitter is being used.
link |
I mean, it's basically the way, you know,
link |
they had it years ago.
link |
And then, you know, it was like, great,
link |
there'll be statuses, right?
link |
This is what I'm doing, you know?
link |
And my friends can follow me and see it.
link |
Without really changing anything,
link |
it just happened to hit everything right
link |
to support this other type of interaction.
link |
Well, there's also the JavaScript model,
link |
which Brendan Eich talked about.
link |
He just implemented JavaScript,
link |
like the crappy version of JavaScript in 10 days,
link |
threw it out there and just changed it really quickly,
link |
evolved it really quickly.
link |
And now it's become, according to Stack Exchange,
link |
the most popular programming language in the world
link |
that drives like most of the internet
link |
and even the backend and now mobile.
link |
And so that's an argument for the kind of thing
link |
you're talking about where like the bike club people
link |
could literally create the thing that would, you know,
link |
run most of the internet in 10 years from now.
link |
So there's something to that,
link |
like as opposed to trying to get lucky
link |
or trying to think through stuff
link |
is just to solve a particular problem.
link |
And then do stuff.
link |
Do stuff, keep tinkering until you love it.
link |
And then, and of course the sad thing is timing and luck
link |
matter and that you can't really control.
link |
That's the problem.
link |
But you can't go back to 2007.
link |
That's like the number one thing you could do
link |
to have a lot of success with a new platform
link |
is go back in time 14 years.
link |
So the thing you have to kind of think about
link |
is what is the like, what's the totally new thing
link |
that 10 years from now would seem obvious.
link |
I mean, some people saying clubhouses that,
link |
there's been a lot of stuff like clubhouse before,
link |
but it hit the right kind of thing.
link |
Similar to Tesla actually,
link |
what clubhouse did is it got a lot of
link |
relatively famous people on there quickly.
link |
And then the other effect is like, it's invite only.
link |
So like, oh, all the smart, like famous people are on there.
link |
I wonder what's, it's the FOMO,
link |
like fear that you're missing something really profound
link |
as exciting happening there.
link |
So those social effects.
link |
And then once they actually show up,
link |
I'm a huge fan of this.
link |
It's the JavaScript model is like,
link |
clubhouse is so dumb, like so simple in its interface.
link |
Like you literally can't do anything except mute, unmute.
link |
There's a mute button.
link |
And there's a leave quietly button.
link |
I love single use technology that sense, yeah.
link |
There's no like, there's no,
link |
it's just like trivial.
link |
And Twitter kinda started like that.
link |
Facebook started like that.
link |
But they've evolved quickly to add all these features
link |
And I do hope clubhouse stays that way.
link |
It'd be interesting.
link |
Or there's alternatives.
link |
I mean, even with clubhouse though,
link |
so one of the issues with a lot of these platforms
link |
I think is bits are cheap enough now
link |
that we don't really need a unicorn investor model.
link |
I mean, the investors need that model.
link |
There's really not really an imperative
link |
of we need something that can scale
link |
to a hundred million plus a year revenue.
link |
So, because it was gonna require this much seed
link |
and angel investment,
link |
and you're not gonna get this much seed angel investment
link |
unless you can have a potential exit this wide
link |
because you have to be part of a portfolio
link |
that depends on one out of 10 exiting here.
link |
If you don't actually need that
link |
and you don't need to satisfy that investor model,
link |
which I think is basically the case.
link |
I mean, bits are so cheap.
link |
Everything is so cheap.
link |
So even like with clubhouse, it's investor backed, right?
link |
This notion of like, this needs to be a major platform,
link |
but the bike club doesn't necessarily need a major platform.
link |
That's where I'm interested.
link |
I mean, I don't know.
link |
There's so much money.
link |
That's the only problem that bets against me
link |
is that you can concentrate a lot of capital
link |
if you do these things, right?
link |
I mean, so Facebook was like
link |
a fantastic capital concentration machine.
link |
It's crazy how much,
link |
where it even found that capital in the world
link |
that it could concentrate and ossify in the stock price
link |
that a very small number of people have access to, right?
link |
That's incredibly powerful.
link |
So when there is a possibility to consolidate
link |
and gather a huge amount of capital,
link |
that's a huge imperative
link |
that's very hard for the bike club to go up against, so.
link |
But there's a lot of money in the bike club.
link |
If you see what the Wall Street bets
link |
on that when a bunch of people get together,
link |
I mean, it doesn't have to be a bike.
link |
It could be a bunch of different bike clubs
link |
just kind of team up to overtake.
link |
That's what we're doing now, yeah.
link |
Or we're gonna repurpose off the shelf stuff.
link |
That's not, yeah, we're gonna repurpose
link |
whatever it was for office productivity or something,
link |
and like the clubs using Slack
link |
just to build out these, you know.
link |
Let's talk about email.
link |
Yeah, that's right.
link |
You wrote yet another amazing book,
link |
A World Without Email.
link |
Maybe one way to enter this discussion
link |
is to ask what is the hyperactive hive mind,
link |
which is the concept you opened the book with?
link |
Yeah, and the devil.
link |
It's the scourge of hundreds of millions.
link |
So I think, so I called this book A World Without Email.
link |
The real title should be A World
link |
Without the Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow,
link |
but my publisher didn't like that, right?
link |
So we had to get a little bit more pithy.
link |
I was trying to answer the question after deep work,
link |
why is it so hard to do this?
link |
Like, if this is so valuable,
link |
if we can produce much higher,
link |
if people are much happier,
link |
why do we check email a day?
link |
Why are we on Slack all day?
link |
And so I started working on this book
link |
immediately after deep work.
link |
And so my initial interviews were done in 2016.
link |
So it took five years to pull the threads together.
link |
I was trying to understand why is it so hard
link |
for most people to actually find any time
link |
to do the stuff that actually moves the needle?
link |
And the story was, and I thought this was,
link |
I hadn't heard this reported anywhere else.
link |
That's why it took me so long to pull it together,
link |
is email arrives on the scene,
link |
email spreads, I trace it,
link |
it really picks up steam in the early 1990s,
link |
between like 1990 and 1995, it makes its move, right?
link |
And it does so for very pragmatic reasons.
link |
It was replacing existing communication technologies
link |
that it was better than.
link |
It was mainly the fax machine, voicemail, and memos, right?
link |
So this was just better, right?
link |
So it was a killer app because it was useful.
link |
In its wake came a new way of collaborating,
link |
and that's the Hyperactive Hive Mind.
link |
So it's like the virus that follows the rats
link |
that went through Western Europe for the Black Pig.
link |
As email spread through organizations,
link |
in its wake came the Hyperactive Hive Mind workflow,
link |
which says, okay, guys,
link |
here's the way we're gonna collaborate.
link |
We'll just work things out on the fly
link |
with unscheduled back and forth messages.
link |
Just boom, boom, boom, let's go back and forth.
link |
Hey, what about this?
link |
What about that client?
link |
What's going on over here?
link |
That followed email.
link |
It completely took over office work.
link |
And the need to keep up with all of these asynchronous
link |
back and forth unscheduled messages,
link |
as those got more and more and more,
link |
and we had more of those to service,
link |
the need to service those required us to check
link |
more and more and more and more, right?
link |
And so by the time, and I go through the numbers,
link |
but by the time you get to today,
link |
now the average knowledge worker
link |
has to check one of these channels once every six minutes.
link |
Because every single thing you do in your organization,
link |
how you talk to your colleagues,
link |
how you talk to your vendors,
link |
how you talk to your clients,
link |
how you talk to the HR department,
link |
it's all this asynchronous unscheduled
link |
back and forth messaging.
link |
And you have to service the conversations.
link |
And it spiraled out of control,
link |
and it has sort of devolved a lot of work in the office now
link |
to all I do is constantly tend communication channels.
link |
So it's fascinating what you're describing
link |
is nobody ever paused in this whole evolution
link |
to try to create a system that actually works.
link |
That it was kind of like a huge fan of cellular automata.
link |
So it's just kind of started a very simple mechanism,
link |
just like cellular automata.
link |
It just kind of grew to overtake
link |
all the fundamental communication
link |
of how we do business and also personal life.
link |
Yeah, and that's one of the big ideas
link |
is that the unintentionality, right?
link |
So this goes back to technological determinism.
link |
I mean, this is a weird business book
link |
because I go deep on philosophy.
link |
I go deep on, for some reason,
link |
we get into paleoanthropology for a while.
link |
We do a lot of neuroscience.
link |
It's kind of a weird book.
link |
But I got real into this technological determinism, right?
link |
This notion that just the presence of a technology
link |
can change how people act.
link |
That's my big argument
link |
about what happened with the hive mind.
link |
And I can document specific examples, right?
link |
So I document this example in IBM, 1987, maybe 85,
link |
but it's in like the mid to late eighties,
link |
IBM, R. Monk headquarters.
link |
We're gonna put an internal email, right?
link |
Because it's convenient.
link |
And so they ran a whole study.
link |
And so I talked to the engineer who ran the study,
link |
Adrian Stone, like we're gonna run this study
link |
to figure out how much do we communicate
link |
because it was still an era where it's expensive, right?
link |
So you have to provision a mainframe.
link |
So you can't over provision.
link |
Like we wanna know how much communication actually happened.
link |
So they went and figured it out.
link |
How many memos, how many calls, how many notes, great.
link |
We'll provision a mainframe to handle email
link |
that can handle all of that.
link |
So if all of our communication moves to email,
link |
the mainframe will still be fine.
link |
In three days, they had melted it down.
link |
People were communicating six times more than that estimate.
link |
So just in three days, the presence
link |
of a low friction digital communication tool
link |
drastically changed how everyone collaborated.
link |
So that's not enough time for an all hands meeting.
link |
Guys, we figured it out.
link |
This is what we need to communicate a lot more
link |
is what's gonna make us more productive.
link |
We need more emails.
link |
Isn't that just on the positive end, amazing to you?
link |
Like, isn't email amazing?
link |
Like in those early days,
link |
like just the frictionless communication.
link |
I mean, email is awesome.
link |
Like people say that there's a lot of problems with emails,
link |
just like people say a lot of problems with Twitter
link |
It's kind of cool that you can just send a little note.
link |
It was a miracle, right?
link |
So I wrote a, there's originally was a New Yorker piece
link |
from a year or two ago called, was email a mistake?
link |
And then it's in the book too.
link |
But I go into the history of email,
link |
like why did it come along?
link |
And it solved a huge problem.
link |
It was the problem of fast asynchronous communication.
link |
And it was a problem that did not exist
link |
until we got large offices.
link |
We got large offices, synchronous communication,
link |
like let's get on the phone at the same time.
link |
There's too much overhead to it.
link |
There's too many people you might have to talk to.
link |
Asynchronous communication,
link |
like let me send you a memo when I'm ready
link |
and you can read it when you're ready, took too long.
link |
And so it was like a huge problem.
link |
So one of the things I talked about is the way that
link |
when they built the CIA headquarters,
link |
there was such a need for fast asynchronous communication
link |
that they built a pneumatic powered email system.
link |
They had these pneumatic tubes
link |
all throughout the headquarters
link |
with electromagnetic routers.
link |
So you would put your message in a plexiglass tube
link |
and you would turn these brass dials about the location.
link |
You would stick it in these things and pneumatic tubes
link |
and it would shoot and sort
link |
and work its way through these tubes
link |
to show up in just a minute or something at the floor
link |
and at the general office suite where you wanted to go.
link |
And my point is the fact that they spent so much money
link |
to make that work,
link |
to show how important fast asynchronous communication
link |
was to large offices.
link |
So when email came along,
link |
it was a productivity silver bullet.
link |
I talked to the researchers who were working
link |
on computer supported collaboration in the late 80s,
link |
trying to figure out how are we gonna use
link |
computer networks to be more productive?
link |
And they were building all these systems and tools.
link |
it just wiped all that research off the map.
link |
There was no need to build
link |
these custom intranet applications.
link |
There was no need to build these communication platforms.
link |
Email could just do everything.
link |
So it was a miracle application,
link |
which is why it spread everywhere.
link |
That's one of these things where,
link |
okay, on into the consequences, right?
link |
You had this miracle productivity silver bullet.
link |
It spread everywhere,
link |
but it was so effective.
link |
It just, I don't know, like a drug.
link |
I'm sure there's some pandemic metaphor here,
link |
analogy here of a drug that like it's so effective
link |
at treating this that it also blows up
link |
your whole immune system and then everyone gets sick.
link |
Well, ultimately it probably significantly increased
link |
the productivity of the world,
link |
but there's a kind of hump that it now has plateaued.
link |
And then the fundamental question you're asking is like,
link |
okay, how do we take the next,
link |
how do we keep increasing the productivity?
link |
Now, I think it brought it down.
link |
and so again, there's a little bit in the book,
link |
but I have a more recent Wired article
link |
that puts some newer numbers to this.
link |
I subscribed to the hypothesis
link |
that the hyperactive hive mind was so detrimental.
link |
So yeah, it helped productivity at first, right?
link |
When you could do fast asynchronous communication,
link |
but very quickly there was a sort of exponential rise
link |
in communication amounts.
link |
Once we got to the point where the hive mind meant
link |
you had to constantly check your email,
link |
I think that made us so unproductive
link |
that it actually was pulling down
link |
non industrial productivity.
link |
And I think the only reason why,
link |
so it certainly has not been going up.
link |
That metric has been stagnating for a long time now
link |
while all of this was going on.
link |
I think the only reason why it hasn't fallen
link |
is that we added these extra shifts off the books.
link |
I'm gonna work for three hours in the morning,
link |
I'm gonna work for three hours at night.
link |
And only that I think has allowed us
link |
to basically maintain a stagnated non industrial growth.
link |
We should have been shooting up the charts.
link |
I mean, this is miraculous innovations,
link |
the computer networks.
link |
And then we built out these hundred billion dollar
link |
ubiquitous worldwide high speed wireless internet
link |
infrastructure with supercomputers in our pockets
link |
where we could talk to anyone at any time.
link |
Like why did our productivity not shoot off the charts?
link |
Because our brain can't context switch
link |
once every six minutes.
link |
So it's fundamentally back to the context switching.
link |
Context switching is poison.
link |
Context switching is poison.
link |
What is it about email that forces context switching?
link |
Is it both our psychology that drags us in?
link |
Or is it the expectation?
link |
Yeah, right, right.
link |
Because it's not, I think we've seen this
link |
through a personal will or failure lens recently.
link |
Like, oh, am I addicted to email?
link |
I have bad etiquette about my email.
link |
No, it's the underlying workflow.
link |
So the tool itself I will exonerate.
link |
I think I would rather use POP3 than a fax protocol.
link |
I think it's easier.
link |
The issue is the hyperactive hive mind workflow.
link |
So if I am now collaborating with 20 or 30 different people
link |
with back and forth unscheduled messaging,
link |
I have to tend those conversations, right?
link |
It's like you have 30 metaphorical ping pong tables.
link |
And when the balls come back across,
link |
you have to pretty soon hit it back
link |
or stuff actually grinds to a halt.
link |
So it's the workflow that's the problem.
link |
It's not the tools, the fact that we use it
link |
to do all of our collaboration.
link |
Let's just send messages back and forth,
link |
which means you can't be far from checking that.
link |
Cause if you take a break, if you batch,
link |
if you try to have better habits,
link |
it's gonna slow things down.
link |
So my whole villain is this hyperactive hive mind workflow.
link |
I don't want the tool to go away,
link |
but I wanna replace the hyperactive hive mind workflow.
link |
I think this is gonna be one of the biggest
link |
value generating productivity revolutions
link |
of the 21st century.
link |
I quote an anonymous CEO who's pretty well known
link |
who says this is gonna be the moonshot of the 21st century.
link |
It's gonna be of that importance.
link |
There's so much latent productivity that's being suppressed
link |
because we just figure things out on the fly in email
link |
that as we figure that out,
link |
I think it's gonna be hundreds of billions of dollars.
link |
You're so absolutely right.
link |
The question is, what is a world without email look like?
link |
How do we fix email?
link |
So what happens is, at least in my vision,
link |
you identify, well, actually there's these different
link |
processes that make up my workday.
link |
Like these are things that I do repeatedly,
link |
often in collaboration with other people
link |
that do useful things for my company or whatever.
link |
Right now, most of these processes are implicitly implemented
link |
with the hyperactive hive mind.
link |
How do we do this thing?
link |
Like answering client questions
link |
to shoot messages back and forth.
link |
How do we do this thing?
link |
Posting podcast episodes,
link |
we'll just figure it out on the fly.
link |
My main argument is we actually have to do
link |
like they did in the industrial sector,
link |
take each of these processes and say,
link |
is there a better way to do this?
link |
And by better, I mean a way that's gonna minimize the need
link |
to have unscheduled back and forth messaging.
link |
So we actually have to do process engineering.
link |
This created a massive growth and productivity
link |
in the industrial sector during the 20th century.
link |
We have to do it in knowledge work.
link |
We can't just rock and roll an inbox
link |
as we actually have to say,
link |
how do we deal with client questions?
link |
Well, let's put in place a process
link |
that doesn't require us to send messages back and forth.
link |
How do we post podcast episodes?
link |
Let's automate this to a degree where
link |
I don't have to just send you a message on the fly.
link |
And you do this process by process
link |
and the pressure on that inbox is released.
link |
And now you don't have to check it every six minutes.
link |
So you still have email.
link |
I mean, like I need to send you a file.
link |
Sure, I'll use email,
link |
but we're not coordinating or collaborating over email
link |
or Slack, which is just a faster way of doing the hive mind.
link |
I mean, Slack doesn't solve anything there.
link |
You have better structured bespoke processes.
link |
I think that's what's gonna unleash
link |
this massive productivity.
link |
Bespoke, so the interesting thing is like,
link |
for example, you and I exchange some emails.
link |
So obviously I, let's just say in my particular case,
link |
I schedule podcasts.
link |
There's a bunch of different tasks,
link |
fascinatingly enough, that I do
link |
that can be converted into processes.
link |
Is it up to me to create that process?
link |
Or do you think we also need to build tools
link |
just like email was a protocol
link |
for helping us create processes for the different tasks?
link |
I mean, I think ultimately the whole organization,
link |
the whole team has to be involved.
link |
I think ultimately there's certainly
link |
a lot of investor money being spent right now
link |
to try to figure out those tools, right?
link |
So I think Silicon Valley has figured this out
link |
in the past couple of years.
link |
This is the difference between
link |
when I was talking to people after Deep Work
link |
and now five years later is this scent is in the air, right?
link |
Because there's so much latent productivity.
link |
So yes, there are gonna be new tools,
link |
which I think could help.
link |
There are already tools that exist.
link |
I mean, in the different groups I profiled use things
link |
like Trello or Basecamp or Asana or Flow
link |
and our schedule wants and acuity,
link |
like there's a lot of tools out there.
link |
The key is not to think about it in terms of
link |
what tool do I replace email with?
link |
Instead, you think about it with,
link |
we're trying to come up with a process
link |
that reduces back and forth messages.
link |
Oh, what tool might help us do that?
link |
Yeah, and I would push,
link |
it's not about necessarily efficiency.
link |
In fact, some of these things are gonna take more time.
link |
So writing a letter to someone is like a high value activity
link |
it's probably worth doing.
link |
The thing that's killer is the back and forth
link |
because now I have to keep checking, right?
link |
So we scheduled this together
link |
because I knew you from before,
link |
but like most of the interviews I was scheduling for this
link |
actually I have a process with my publicist
link |
where we use a shared document and she puts stuffs in there
link |
and then I check it twice a week
link |
and there's scheduling options.
link |
I say, here's when I wanna do this one
link |
or this will work for this one or whatever.
link |
And it takes more time in the moment than just,
link |
but it means that we have almost no back and forth messaging
link |
for podcast scheduling, which without this,
link |
so like with my UK publisher,
link |
I didn't put this process in the place
link |
because we're not doing as many interviews,
link |
but it's all the time.
link |
And I'm like, oh, I could really feel the difference, right?
link |
It's the back and forth that's killer.
link |
I suppose it is up to the individual people involved,
link |
like you said, knowledge workers,
link |
like they have to carry the responsibility
link |
of creating processes.
link |
Like how always asking the first principles question,
link |
how can this be converted into a process?
link |
Yeah, so you can start by doing this yourself,
link |
like just with what you can control.
link |
I think ultimately once the teams are doing that,
link |
I think that's probably the right scale.
link |
If you try to do this at the organizational scale,
link |
you're gonna get bureaucracy, right?
link |
So if it's, if Elon Musk is gonna dictate down
link |
to everyone at Tesla or something like this,
link |
that's too much remove and you get bureaucracy.
link |
But if it's, we're a team of six that's working together
link |
on whatever powertrain software,
link |
then we can figure out on our own, what are our processes?
link |
How do we wanna do this?
link |
So it's ultimately also creating a culture
link |
where saying like an email, sending an email
link |
just for the hell of it, it should be taboo.
link |
So you are being, you're being destructive
link |
to the productivity of the team by sending this email.
link |
As opposed to helping develop a process and so on
link |
that will ultimately automate this.
link |
That's why I'm trying to spread this message
link |
of the context switches as poison.
link |
I get so much into the science of it.
link |
I think we underestimate how much it kills us
link |
to have to wrench away our context,
link |
look at a message and come back.
link |
And so once you have the mindset of,
link |
it's a huge thing to ask of someone
link |
to have to take their attention off something
link |
and look back at this.
link |
And if they have to do that for three or four times,
link |
like we're just gonna figure this out on the fly
link |
and every message is gonna require five checks
link |
of the inbox while you wait for it.
link |
Now you've created whatever it is at this point,
link |
25 or 30 context shifts.
link |
Like you've just done a huge disservice to someone's day.
link |
This would be like, if I had a professional athlete,
link |
like, hey, do me a favor.
link |
I need you to go do this press interview,
link |
but to get there, you're gonna have to carry this sandbag
link |
and sprint up this hill, like completely exhaust
link |
your muscles and then you have to go play a game.
link |
Like, of course I'm not gonna ask an athlete
link |
to do like an incredibly physically demanding thing
link |
right before a game,
link |
but something as easy as thoughts, question mark,
link |
or like, hey, do you wanna jump on a call
link |
and it's gonna be six back and forth messages
link |
It's kind of the cognitive equivalent, right?
link |
You're taking the wind out of someone.
link |
Yeah, and by the way, for people who are listening,
link |
because I recently posted a few job openings
link |
for us so I wanted to help with this thing.
link |
And one of the things that people are surprised
link |
when they work with me is how many spreadsheets
link |
and processes are involved.
link |
Yeah, it's like Claude Shannon, right?
link |
I talked about communication theory or information theory.
link |
It takes time to come up with a clever code upfront.
link |
So you spend more time upfront figuring out those
link |
spreadsheets and trying to get people on board with it.
link |
But then your communication going forward
link |
is all much more efficient.
link |
So over time, you're using much less bandwidth, right?
link |
So you do pain upfront.
link |
It's quicker just right now to send an email.
link |
But if I spend a half day to do this
link |
over the next six months, I've saved myself 600 emails.
link |
Now, here's a tough question for, you know,
link |
from the computer science perspective,
link |
we often over optimize.
link |
So you've create processes and you, okay,
link |
just like you're saying, it's so pleasurable
link |
to increase in the longterm productivity
link |
that sometimes you just enjoy that process in itself
link |
by just creating processes and you actually never,
link |
like it has a negative effect on productivity longterm
link |
because you're too obsessed with the processes.
link |
Is that a nice problem to have essentially?
link |
I mean, it's a problem.
link |
I mean, because let's look at the one sector
link |
that does do this, which is developers, right?
link |
So agile methodologies like Scrum or Kanban
link |
are basically workflow methodologies
link |
that are much better than the hyperactive hive mind.
link |
But man, some of those programmers get pretty obsessive.
link |
I don't know if you've ever talked to a whatever
link |
level three Scrum master.
link |
They get really obsessive about like,
link |
it has to happen exactly this way
link |
and it's probably seven times more complex
link |
than it needs to be.
link |
I'm hoping that's just because nerds like me,
link |
you know, like to do that,
link |
but it's a broadly probably an issue, right?
link |
We have to be careful because you can just go down
link |
that fiddling path.
link |
Like, so it needs to be, here's how we do it.
link |
Let's reduce the messages and let's roll, you know?
link |
You can't save yourself through,
link |
if you can get the process just right, right?
link |
So I wrote this article kind of recently
link |
called The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done.
link |
And I profiled this productivity guru named Merlin Mann.
link |
And I talked about this movement called Productivity Prawn
link |
as like elite speak term in the early 2000s
link |
where people just became convinced
link |
that if they could combine their productivity systems
link |
with software and they could find just the right software,
link |
just the right configuration where they could offload
link |
most of the difficulty of work,
link |
what happened with the machines,
link |
when it kind of figured out for,
link |
and then they could just sort of crank widgets and it'd be,
link |
and the whole thing fell apart
link |
because work is hard and it's hard to do
link |
and making decisions about what to work on is hard
link |
and no system can really do that for you.
link |
So you have to have this sort of balance between,
link |
context switches are poison.
link |
So we got to get rid of the context switches.
link |
Once like something's working good enough
link |
to get rid of the context switches, then get after it.
link |
Yeah, there's a psychological process there for me.
link |
The OCD nature, like I've literally,
link |
embarrassing enough, have lost my shit before when,
link |
so in many of the processes that involve Python scripts,
link |
the rule is to not use spaces.
link |
Underscores, there's like rules
link |
for like how you format stuff, okay?
link |
And like, I should not lose my shit
link |
when somebody had a space and maybe capital letters,
link |
like it's okay to have a space
link |
because there's this feeling like something's not perfect.
link |
And as opposed to in the Python script,
link |
allowing some flexibility around that,
link |
you create this programmatic way that's flawless
link |
and when everything's working perfectly, it's perfect.
link |
But actually, if you strive for perfection,
link |
it has the same stress, like has a lot of the stress
link |
that you were seeking to escape with the context switching
link |
because you're almost stressing about errors.
link |
Like when the process is functioning,
link |
there's always this anxiety of like,
link |
I wonder if it's gonna succeed.
link |
I wonder if it's gonna succeed.
link |
Yeah, no, no, I think some of that's just you and I probably.
link |
I mean, it's just our mindset, right?
link |
We're in, we do computer science, right?
link |
So chicken and egg, I guess.
link |
And a lot of the processes end up working here much rougher.
link |
It's like, okay, instead of letting clients
link |
just email me all the time, we have a weekly call
link |
and then we send them a breakdown
link |
of everything we committed to, right?
link |
That's a process that works.
link |
Okay, I get asked a lot of questions
link |
because I'm the JavaScript guy in the company.
link |
Instead of doing it by email, I have office hours.
link |
This is what Basecamp does.
link |
All right, so you come to my office hours,
link |
that cuts down a lot of back and forth.
link |
All right, we're gonna, instead of emailing
link |
about this project, we'll have a Trello board
link |
and we'll do a weekly really structured status meeting
link |
real quick, what's going on, who needs what, let's go.
link |
And now everything's on there and on our inboxes,
link |
we don't have to send as many messages.
link |
So like that rough level of granularity,
link |
that gets you most of the way there.
link |
So the parts that you can't automate
link |
and turn into a process.
link |
So how many parts like that do you think
link |
should remain in a perfect world?
link |
And for those parts where email is still useful,
link |
what do you recommend those emails look like?
link |
How should you write emails?
link |
When should you send them?
link |
Yeah, I think email is good for delivering information.
link |
Right, so I think of it like a fax machine or something.
link |
It's a really good fax machine.
link |
So if I need to send you something
link |
and you just send you a file,
link |
I need to broadcast a new policy or something,
link |
like email is a great way to do it.
link |
It's bad for collaboration.
link |
So if you're having a conversation,
link |
like we're trying to reach a decision on something,
link |
I'm trying to learn about something,
link |
I'm trying to clarify what this is,
link |
that's more than just like a one answer type question,
link |
then I think that you shouldn't be doing an email.
link |
But see, here's the thing.
link |
Like you and I don't talk often
link |
and so we have a kind of new interaction.
link |
It's not, so sure, yeah, you have a book coming out,
link |
so there's a process and so on,
link |
but say there, don't you think there's a lot
link |
of novel interactive experiences?
link |
Yeah, I think it's fine.
link |
So you could, just for every novel experience,
link |
it's okay to have a little bit of exchange.
link |
Yeah, I think it's fine.
link |
Like I think it's fine if stuff comes in over the transom
link |
or you hear from someone you haven't heard from in a while.
link |
I think all that's fine.
link |
I mean, that's email at its best.
link |
Where it starts to kill us is where all
link |
of our collaboration is happening with the back and forth.
link |
So when you've moved the bulk of that out of your inbox,
link |
now you're back in that Meg Ryan movie, like You Got Mail,
link |
where it's like, all right, load this up
link |
and you wait for the boat and be like,
link |
oh, we got a message.
link |
Yeah, Lex sent me a message.
link |
This is interesting, right?
link |
You're back to the AOL days.
link |
So you're talking about the bulk of the business world
link |
where email has replaced the actual communication,
link |
all of the communication protocols required
link |
to accomplish anything.
link |
Everything is just happening with messages.
link |
So if you now get most stuff done,
link |
repeatable collaborations with other processes
link |
that don't require you to check these inboxes,
link |
then the inbox can serve like an inbox,
link |
which includes hearing from interesting people, right?
link |
Or sending something, hey, I don't know if you saw this,
link |
I thought you might like it.
link |
I think it's great for that.
link |
So there's probably a bunch of people listening to this.
link |
They're like, yeah, but I work on a team
link |
and all they use is email.
link |
How do you start the revolution from the ground up?
link |
Yeah, well, do asymmetric optimization first.
link |
So identify all your processes
link |
and then change what you can change
link |
and be socially very careful about it.
link |
So don't necessarily say like, okay,
link |
this is a new process we all have to do.
link |
You're just, hey, we gotta get this report ready.
link |
Here's what I think we should do.
link |
I'll get a draft into our Dropbox folder
link |
by noon on Monday, grab it.
link |
I won't touch it again until Tuesday morning
link |
and then I'll look at your changes.
link |
I have this office hours always scheduled Tuesday afternoon.
link |
So if there's anything that catches your attention,
link |
But I've told the designer who CC'd on this
link |
that by COB Tuesday, the final version will be ready
link |
for them to take and polish or whatever.
link |
Like the person on the other end is like, great,
link |
I'm glad Cal has a plan.
link |
So what do I need to do?
link |
I need to edit this tomorrow, whatever, right?
link |
But you've actually pulled them into a process.
link |
That means we're gonna get this report together
link |
without having to just go back and forth.
link |
So you just asymmetrically optimize these things
link |
and then you can begin the conversation.
link |
And maybe that's where my book comes in place.
link |
You just sort of slide it across the desk.
link |
Buy the book and just leave it, give it to everybody
link |
Okay, so we solved the bulk of the email problem with this.
link |
Is there a case to be made that even for communication
link |
between you and I, we should move away from email?
link |
And for example, there's a guy, I recently,
link |
I don't know if you know comedians,
link |
but there's a guy named Joey Diaz
link |
that I've had an interaction with recently.
link |
And that guy, first of all, the sweetest human,
link |
despite what his comedy sounds like,
link |
is the sweetest human being.
link |
And he's a big proponent of just pick up the phone and call.
link |
And it makes me so uncomfortable when people call me.
link |
It's like, I don't know what to do with this thing.
link |
But it kind of gets everything done quicker, I think,
link |
if I remove the anxiety from that.
link |
Is there a case to be made for that?
link |
Or is email could still be the most efficient way
link |
No, look, if you have to interact with someone,
link |
there's a lot of efficiency and synchrony, right?
link |
And this is something from distributed system theory
link |
where you know if you go from synchronous
link |
to asynchronous networks,
link |
there's a huge amount of overhead to the asynchrony.
link |
So actually the protocols required to solve things
link |
in asynchronous networks are significantly more complicated
link |
and fragile than synchronous protocols.
link |
So if we can just do real time, it's usually better.
link |
And also from an interaction,
link |
like social connection standpoint,
link |
there's a lot more information in the human voice
link |
and the back and forth.
link |
Yeah, if you just call, so very generational, right?
link |
Our generation will be comfortable talking on the phone
link |
in a way that a younger generation isn't,
link |
but an older generation is more comfortable
link |
with, well, you just call people.
link |
Whereas we, so there's a happy medium,
link |
but most of my good friends, we just talk,
link |
we have regular phone calls.
link |
Yeah, it's not, I don't just call them,
link |
we schedule it, we schedule it, yeah.
link |
Just on text, like, yeah, you wanna talk sometime soon.
link |
Do you ever have a process around friends?
link |
I feel like I should, I feel like.
link |
Well, you have like a lot
link |
of interesting friend possibilities.
link |
You have like an interesting problem, right?
link |
Like really interesting people you can talk to.
link |
Well, that's one problem.
link |
The other one is the introversion
link |
where I'm just afraid of people and get really stressed.
link |
You picked a good line of work.
link |
Yeah, now perhaps it's the Goggins thing.
link |
It's like facing your fears or whatever,
link |
but it's almost like there's,
link |
it has to do with the timetables thing and the deep work
link |
that the nice thing about the processes
link |
is it not only automates sort of,
link |
automates away the context switching,
link |
it ensures you do the important things too.
link |
It's like prioritize.
link |
So the thing is with email,
link |
because everything is done over email,
link |
you can be lazy in the same way with like social networks
link |
and do the easy things first that are not that important.
link |
So the process also enforces
link |
that you do the important things.
link |
And for me, the important things is like,
link |
okay, that sounds weird, but like social connection.
link |
No, that's one of the most important things
link |
in all of human existence.
link |
And doing it, the paradoxical thing,
link |
I got into this for digital minimalism,
link |
the more you sacrifice on behalf of the connection,
link |
the stronger the connection feels, right?
link |
So sacrificing non trivial time and attention
link |
on behalf of someone is what tells your brain
link |
that this is a serious relationship,
link |
which is why social media had this paradoxical effect
link |
making people feel less social
link |
because it took the friction out of it.
link |
And so the brain just doesn't like,
link |
like, yeah, you've been commenting on this person's,
link |
whatever, you've been retweeting them
link |
or sending them some text.
link |
You haven't, it's not hard enough.
link |
And then the perceived strength
link |
of that social connection diminishes
link |
where if you talk to them or go spend time with them
link |
or whatever, you're gonna feel better about it.
link |
So the friction is good.
link |
I have a thing with some of my friends
link |
where at the end of each call,
link |
we take a couple minutes to schedule the next.
link |
Then you never have to,
link |
it's like I do with haircuts or something, right?
link |
Like if I don't schedule it then,
link |
I'm never gonna get my haircut, right?
link |
And so it's like, okay, when do you wanna talk next?
link |
Yeah, that's a really good idea.
link |
I just don't call friends.
link |
And like every 10 years I do something dramatic for them
link |
so that we maintain the friendship.
link |
We're like, I'd murder somebody that they really don't like.
link |
Careful, man, Joey might ask you to do that.
link |
Yeah, that's why, that's one of my favorite things.
link |
Lex, I need you to come down to New Jersey.
link |
That's exactly what we're gonna do.
link |
With that robot dog of yours.
link |
We're gonna go down to New Jersey.
link |
There's a special human.
link |
I love the comedian world.
link |
They've been shaking up.
link |
I don't know if you listen to Joe Rogan, all those folks.
link |
They kind of are doing something interesting
link |
for MIT and academia.
link |
They're shaking up this world a little bit.
link |
Like podcasting, because comedians are paving the way
link |
And so you have like Andrew Huberman,
link |
who's a neuroscientist at Stanford, friend of mine now.
link |
He's like into podcasting now and you're into podcasting.
link |
Of course, you're not necessarily podcasting
link |
about computer science currently, right?
link |
But that, it feels like you could have a lot
link |
of the free spirit of the comedians implemented
link |
by the people who are academically trained.
link |
Who actually have a niche specialty.
link |
Yeah, and then that results, I mean,
link |
who knows what the experiment looks like,
link |
but that results me being able to talk about robotics
link |
with Joey Diaz when he says, you know,
link |
drops F bombs every other sentence.
link |
And I, the world is like, I've seen actually a shift
link |
within colleagues and friends within MIT
link |
where they're becoming much more accepting
link |
of that kind of thing.
link |
It's very interesting.
link |
That's interesting.
link |
So you're seeing, okay.
link |
Because they're seeing how popular it is.
link |
They're like, wait a minute.
link |
Well, you're really popular.
link |
I don't know how they think about it
link |
at Georgetown, for example.
link |
It's interesting, but I think what happens
link |
is the popularity of it combined
link |
with just good conversations with people they respect.
link |
It's like, oh, wait, this is the thing.
link |
And this is more fun to listen to
link |
than a shitty Zoom lecture about their work.
link |
It's like, there's something here.
link |
There's something interesting.
link |
And we don't, nobody actually knows what that is.
link |
Just like with like Clubhouse or something,
link |
nobody's figured out like, where does this medium take?
link |
Is this a legitimate medium of education?
link |
Or is this just like a fun?
link |
Well, that's your innovation, I think,
link |
was we can bring on professors.
link |
And I know Joe Rogan did some of that too,
link |
but your professors in your field.
link |
You bring on all these MIT guys who I remember.
link |
Well, that's been the big challenge for me is,
link |
I don't, is I feel,
link |
I would ask big like philosophical questions
link |
of people like yourself.
link |
They're like really well public.
link |
Like, so for example, you have a lot of excellent papers
link |
on, you know, that has a lot of theory in it, right?
link |
And there's some temptation to just go through papers.
link |
And I think it's possible to actually do that.
link |
I haven't done that much, but I think it's possible.
link |
It just requires a lot of preparation.
link |
And I can probably only do that with things
link |
that I'm actually like in the field I'm aware of.
link |
But there's a dance that I would love to be able
link |
to try to hit right where it's actually getting
link |
to the core of some interesting ideas
link |
as opposed to just talking about philosophy.
link |
At the same time, there's a large audience of people
link |
that just want to be inspired by disciplines
link |
where they don't necessarily know the details.
link |
But there's a lot of people that are like,
link |
hmm, I'm really curious.
link |
I've been thinking about pivoting careers
link |
into software engineering.
link |
They would love to hear from people like you
link |
about computer science.
link |
Even if it's like theory.
link |
Yeah, but just like the idea that you can have big ideas,
link |
you push them through and it's interesting,
link |
you fight for it, yeah.
link |
Well, there's some, there's what is it?
link |
Computerphile and Numberphile, these YouTube channels.
link |
There's channels I watch on like chess, exceptionally popular
link |
where I don't understand maybe 80% of the time
link |
what the hell they're talking about
link |
because they're talking about like why this move
link |
is better than this move.
link |
But I love the passion and the genius of those people
link |
and just overhearing it.
link |
I don't know why that's so exciting.
link |
Do you look at like Scott Aaronson's blog at all?
link |
The Settled, Optimized?
link |
Yeah, it's like hardcore complexity theory.
link |
But it's just an enthusiasm or like Terry Tao's blog.
link |
A little bit of humor about it.
link |
Terry Tao has a blog?
link |
And it would just be, I'm going all in on,
link |
here's a new affine group with which you can do whatever.
link |
Whatever, it was just equations.
link |
Well, in the case of Scott Aaronson,
link |
he's good, he's able to turn on like the inner troll
link |
and comedian and so on.
link |
He keeps the fun, which is the best
link |
of kinds of books. And he's a philosophical guy.
link |
He turns on the philosophy. Yeah.
link |
Yeah, so we're exploring these different ways
link |
of communicating science and exciting the world.
link |
Speaking of which, I gotta ask you about computer science.
link |
Yeah, that's right, I do some of that.
link |
So, I mean, a lot of your work is what inspired
link |
this deep thinking about productivity
link |
from all the different angles,
link |
because some of the most rigorous work
link |
is mathematical work.
link |
And in computer science, the theoretical computer science,
link |
let me ask the Scott Aaronson question of like,
link |
is there something to you that stands out in particular
link |
that's beautiful or inspiring,
link |
or just really insightful about computer science
link |
or maybe mathematics?
link |
I mean, I like theory.
link |
And in particular, what I've always liked in theory
link |
is the notion of impossibilities.
link |
That's kind of my specialty.
link |
So within the context of distributed algorithms,
link |
my specialty is impossibility results.
link |
So the idea that you can argue
link |
nothing exists that solves this,
link |
or nothing exists that can solve this faster than this.
link |
And I think that's really interesting.
link |
And that goes all the way back to Turing.
link |
His original paper on computable numbers
link |
with their connection to the German Eichsturzungen problem,
link |
but basically the German name
link |
that Hilbert called the decision problem.
link |
This was precomputers, but he's English,
link |
so it's written in English.
link |
So it's a very accessible paper.
link |
And it lays the foundation
link |
for all of theoretical computer science.
link |
He just has this insight.
link |
He's like, well, if we think about like an algorithm,
link |
I mean, he figures out like all effective procedures
link |
or Turing machines are basically algorithms.
link |
We could really describe a Turing machine with a number,
link |
which we can now imagine with like computer code,
link |
you could just take a source file
link |
and just treat the binary version of the file
link |
as like a really long number, right?
link |
But he's like, every program is just a finite number.
link |
It's a natural number.
link |
And then he realized like one way to think about a problem
link |
is you have, and this is like kind of the Mike Sipser
link |
approach, but you have a sort of, it's a language.
link |
So of an infinite number of strings,
link |
some of them are in the language and some of them aren't,
link |
but basically you can imagine a problem is represented
link |
as an infinite binary string,
link |
where in every position, like a one means that string
link |
is in the language and a zero means it isn't.
link |
And then he applied Cantor from the 19th century and said,
link |
okay, the natural numbers are countable.
link |
So it's countably infinite and infinite binary strings,
link |
you can use a diagonalization argument
link |
and show they're uncountable.
link |
So there's just vastly more problems
link |
than there are algorithms.
link |
So basically anything you can come up with for the most part
link |
almost certainly is not solvable by a computer.
link |
And then he was like, let me give a particular example.
link |
And he figured out the very first computability proof.
link |
Let's just walk through with a little bit of simple logic
link |
to halting problem can't be solved by an algorithm.
link |
And that kicked off the whole enterprise
link |
of some things can't be solved by algorithms,
link |
some things can't be solved by computers.
link |
And we've just been doing theory on that
link |
since that was the 30s he wrote that.
link |
So proving that something is impossible
link |
is sort of a stricter version of that.
link |
Is it like proving bounds on the performance
link |
of different algorithms?
link |
Yeah, so bounds are upper bounds, right?
link |
So you say, this algorithm does at least this well
link |
and no worse than this,
link |
but you're looking at a particular algorithm
link |
and possibility proof say no algorithm ever
link |
could ever solve this problem.
link |
So no algorithm could ever solve the halting problem.
link |
So it's problem centric.
link |
It's making something different,
link |
making a conclusive statement about the problem.
link |
And that's somehow satisfying because it's...
link |
It's just philosophically interesting.
link |
I mean, it all goes back to, you get back to Plato,
link |
it's all reductio ad absurdum.
link |
So all these arguments have to start.
link |
The only way to do it
link |
is because there's an infinite number of solutions
link |
you can't go through them.
link |
You say, let's assume for the sake of contradiction
link |
that there existed something that solves this problem.
link |
And then you turn to crank a logic
link |
until you blow up the universe.
link |
And then you go back and say,
link |
okay, our original assumption
link |
that this solution exists can't be true.
link |
I just think philosophically,
link |
it's like a really exciting kind of beautiful thing.
link |
It's what I specialize in within distributed algorithms
link |
is more like time bound and possibility results.
link |
Like no algorithm can solve this problem faster than this
link |
Of all the infinite number of ways you might ever do it.
link |
So you have many papers,
link |
but the one that caught my eye
link |
is Smooth Analysis of Dynamic Networks,
link |
in which you write,
link |
a problem with the worst case perspective
link |
is that it often leads to extremely strong lower bounds.
link |
These strong results motivate a key question.
link |
Is this bond robust in the sense
link |
that it captures the fundamental difficulty
link |
introduced by dynamism?
link |
Or is the bond fragile in the sense
link |
that the poor performance it describes
link |
depends on an exact sequence of adversarial changes.
link |
Fragile lower bounds leave open the possibility
link |
of algorithms that might still perform well in practice.
link |
That's in the sense of the impossible
link |
and the bounds discussion presents the interesting question.
link |
I just like the idea of robust and fragile bounds,
link |
but what do you make about this kind of tension
link |
between what's provably,
link |
like what bounds you can prove that are like robust
link |
and something that's a bit more fragile.
link |
And also by way of answering that
link |
for this particular paper,
link |
can you say what the hell are dynamic networks?
link |
What are distributed algorithms?
link |
You don't know this?
link |
And I have no idea.
link |
And what is Smooth Analysis?
link |
So Smooth Analysis, so it wasn't my idea.
link |
So Spielman and Tang came up with this
link |
in the context of sequential algorithms.
link |
So just like the normal world of an algorithm
link |
that runs on a computer.
link |
And they were looking at, there's a well known algorithm
link |
called the simplex algorithm,
link |
but basically you're trying to find a hole
link |
around a group of points.
link |
And there was an algorithm
link |
that worked really well in practice.
link |
But when you analyze it, you would say,
link |
I can't guarantee it's gonna work well in practice
link |
because if you have just the right inputs,
link |
this thing could run really long.
link |
But in practice, it seemed to be really fast.
link |
So Smooth Analysis is they came in and they said,
link |
let's assume that a bad guy chooses the inputs.
link |
It could be anything like really bad ones.
link |
And all we're gonna do, because in simplex they're numbers,
link |
we're gonna just randomly put a little bit of noise
link |
on each of the numbers.
link |
And they said, if you put a little bit of noise
link |
on the numbers, suddenly simplex algorithm goes really fast.
link |
Like, oh, that explains this lower bound,
link |
this idea that it could sometimes run really long
link |
was a fragile bound because it could only run
link |
a really long time if you had exactly
link |
the worst pathological input.
link |
So then my collaborators and I brought this over
link |
to the world of distributed algorithms.
link |
We brought them over the general lower bounds, right?
link |
So in the world of dynamic networks,
link |
so distributed algorithm is a bunch of algorithms
link |
on different machines talking to each other,
link |
trying to solve a problem.
link |
And sometimes they're in a network.
link |
So you imagine them connected with network links
link |
and a dynamic network, those can change, right?
link |
So I was talking to you, but now I can't talk to you anymore.
link |
Now I'm connected to a person over here.
link |
It's a really hard environment mathematically speaking.
link |
And there's a lot of really strong lower bounds,
link |
which you could imagine if the network can change
link |
all the time and a bad guy is doing it,
link |
it's like hard to do things well.
link |
So there's an algorithm running on every single node
link |
And then you're trying to say something of any kind
link |
that makes any kind of definitive sense
link |
about the performance of that algorithm.
link |
Yeah, so I just submitted a new paper on this
link |
a couple of weeks ago.
link |
And we were looking at a very simple problem.
link |
There's some messages in the network.
link |
We want everyone to get them.
link |
If the network doesn't change,
link |
you can do this pretty well.
link |
You can pipeline them.
link |
There's some basic algorithms that work really well.
link |
If the network can change every round,
link |
there's these lower bounds that says,
link |
it takes a really long time.
link |
There's a way that no matter what algorithm you come up with,
link |
there's a way the network can change in such a way
link |
that just really slows down your progress basically, right?
link |
So smooth analysis there says, yeah,
link |
but that seems like you'd have really bad luck
link |
if your network was changing exactly in the right way
link |
that you needed to screw your algorithm.
link |
So we said, what if we randomly just add
link |
or remove a couple of edges in every round?
link |
So the adversary is trying to choose
link |
the worst possible network.
link |
And we're just tweaking it a little bit.
link |
And in that case, this is a new paper.
link |
I mean, it's a blinded submission,
link |
so maybe I shouldn't, it's not, whatever.
link |
We basically showed.
link |
An anonymous friend of yours submitted a paper.
link |
An anonymous friend of mine, yeah,
link |
whose paper should be accepted.
link |
Showed that even just adding like one random edge per round,
link |
and here's the cool thing about it,
link |
the simplest possible solution to this problem
link |
blows away that lower bound and does really well.
link |
So that's like a very fragile lower bound
link |
because we're like, it's almost impossible
link |
to actually keep things slow.
link |
I wonder how many lower bounds you can smash open
link |
with this kind of analysis and show that they're fragile.
link |
It's my interest, yeah.
link |
Because in distributed algorithms,
link |
there's a ton of really famous strong lower bounds,
link |
but things have to go wrong, really, really wrong
link |
for these lower bound arguments to work.
link |
And so I like this approach.
link |
So this whole notion of fragile versus robust,
link |
I was like, well, let's go in and just throw
link |
a little noise in there.
link |
And if it becomes solvable, then maybe that lower bound
link |
wasn't really something we should worry about.
link |
You know, that's gonna embarrass,
link |
that's really uncomfortable.
link |
That's really embarrassing to a lot of people.
link |
Because, okay, this is the OCD thing with the spaces,
link |
is it feels really good when you can prove a nice bound.
link |
And if you say that that bound is fragile,
link |
that's like, there's gonna be a sad kid
link |
that walks with their lunchbox back home,
link |
like, my lower bound doesn't matter.
link |
No, I don't think they care.
link |
It's all, I don't know, it feels like to me,
link |
a lot of this theory is just math machismo.
link |
It's like, whatever, this was a hard bound to prove.
link |
What do you think about that?
link |
So if you show that something is fragile,
link |
that's really important in practice, right?
link |
So do you think kind of theoretical computer science
link |
is living its own world, just like mathematics,
link |
and their main effort, which I think is very valuable,
link |
is to develop ideas that's not necessarily interesting,
link |
whether it's applicable in the real world.
link |
Yeah, we don't care about the applicability.
link |
Yeah, we kind of do, but not really.
link |
And we're terrible with computers,
link |
and can't do anything useful with computers,
link |
and we don't know how to code.
link |
And, you know, we're not productive members
link |
of like technological society,
link |
but I do think things percolate.
link |
You percolate from the world of theory
link |
into the world of algorithm design,
link |
where it will pull on the theory,
link |
and now suddenly it's useful,
link |
and then the algorithm design
link |
gets pulled into the world of practice,
link |
where they say, well, actually,
link |
we can make this algorithm a lot better,
link |
because in practice, really, these servers do X, Y, Z,
link |
and now we can make this super efficient.
link |
And so I do think, I mean, I teach theory
link |
to the PhD students at Georgetown.
link |
I show them the sort of funnel of like,
link |
okay, we're over here doing theory,
link |
but it eventually, some of this stuff
link |
will percolate down in effect at the very end, you know,
link |
a phone, but it's a long tunnel.
link |
But the very question you're asking,
link |
at the highest philosophical level, is fascinating.
link |
Like, if you take a system, a distributed system,
link |
or a network, and introduce a little bit of noise into it,
link |
like, how many problems of that nature
link |
are fundamentally changed
link |
by that little introduction of noise?
link |
Yeah, because it's all,
link |
especially in distributed algorithms,
link |
the model is everything.
link |
Like, the way we work is we're incredibly precise about,
link |
here's exactly, it's mathematical,
link |
here's exactly how the network works,
link |
and it's a state machine, algorithms are state machines,
link |
there's rounds and schedulers,
link |
we're super precise so we can prove lower bounds.
link |
But yeah, often those lower,
link |
those impossibility results really get at the hard edges
link |
of exactly how that model works.
link |
So we'll see if this, so we published a paper on this,
link |
that paper you mentioned,
link |
that kind of introduced the idea
link |
to the distributed algorithms world.
link |
And I think that's got some traction
link |
and there's been some followup.
link |
So we've just submitted our next.
link |
I mean, honestly, the issue with the next
link |
that like the result fell out so easily,
link |
and this shows the mathematical machismo problem
link |
in these fields is there's a good chance
link |
the paper won't be accepted
link |
because there wasn't enough mathematical self flagellation.
link |
That's such a nice finding.
link |
So even showing that very few,
link |
just very little bit of noise,
link |
can have a dramatic, make a dramatic statement about the.
link |
It was a big surprise to us,
link |
but once we figured out how to show it,
link |
it's not too hard.
link |
And these are venues for theoretical work.
link |
Okay, so the fascinating tension
link |
that exists in other disciplines,
link |
like one of them is machine learning,
link |
which despite the power of machine learning
link |
and deep learning and all like the impact of it,
link |
in the real world,
link |
the main conferences on machine learning
link |
are still resistant to application papers.
link |
And application papers broadly defined,
link |
meaning like finding almost like you would,
link |
like Darwin did by like going around,
link |
collecting some information,
link |
saying, huh, isn't this interesting?
link |
Like those are some of the most popular blogs,
link |
and yet as a paper, it's not really accepted.
link |
I wonder what you think about this whole world
link |
of deep learning from a perspective of theory.
link |
What do you make of this whole discipline
link |
of the success of Neon Networks,
link |
of how to do science on them?
link |
Are you excited by the possibilities
link |
of what we might discover about Neon Networks?
link |
Do you think it's fundamental in engineering discipline,
link |
or is there something theoretical
link |
that we might crack open one of these days
link |
in understanding something deep
link |
about how system optimization and how systems learn?
link |
I am convinced by, is it Tegmark at MIT?
link |
Tegmark? Yeah, Tegmark, right.
link |
So his notion has always been convincing to me
link |
that the fact that some of these models are inscrutable
link |
is not fundamental to them,
link |
and that we can, we're gonna get better and better,
link |
because in the end, you know,
link |
the reason why practicing computer scientists often
link |
who are doing AI or working at AI and industry
link |
aren't like worried about so much existential threats
link |
is because they see the reality
link |
as they're multiplying matrices with NumPy
link |
or something like this, right?
link |
Yeah, and tweaking constants
link |
and hoping that the classifier fitness,
link |
for God's sakes, before the submission deadline
link |
actually gets above some,
link |
it feels like it's linear algebra and tedium, right?
link |
But anyways, I'm really convinced with his idea
link |
that once we understand better and better
link |
what's going on from a theory perspective,
link |
it's gonna make it into an engineering discipline.
link |
So in my mind, where we're gonna end up is,
link |
okay, forget these metaphors of neurons,
link |
and these things are gonna be put down
link |
into these mathematical kind of elegant equations,
link |
differentiable equations that just kind of work well,
link |
and then it's gonna be
link |
when I need a little bit of AI in this thing, plumbing.
link |
Like, let's get a little bit of a pattern recognizer
link |
with a noise module and let's connect.
link |
I mean, you know this feel better than me,
link |
so I don't know if this is like a reasonable prediction,
link |
but it's gonna become less inscrutable,
link |
and then it's gonna become more engineerable,
link |
and then we're gonna have AI in more things
link |
because we're gonna have a little bit more control
link |
over how we piece together
link |
these different classification black boxes.
link |
So one of the problems, and there might be
link |
some interesting parallels that you might provide intuition
link |
on is, you know, neural networks are very large,
link |
and they have a lot of, you know,
link |
we were talking about, you know, dynamic networks
link |
and distributed algorithms.
link |
One of the problems with the analysis of neural networks
link |
is, you know, you have a lot of nodes,
link |
and you have a lot of edges.
link |
To be able to interpret and to control different things
link |
is very difficult.
link |
There's fields in trying to figure out like mathematically
link |
how you form clean representations that are like,
link |
like one node contains all the information
link |
about a particular thing,
link |
and no other nodes is correlated to it.
link |
So like it has unique knowledge and like,
link |
but that ultimately boils down to trying
link |
to simplify this thing into,
link |
that goes against this very nature,
link |
which is like deeply connected,
link |
and like dynamic and just, you know,
link |
hundreds of millions, billions of nodes.
link |
And in a distributed sense, like when you zoom out,
link |
the thing has a representation
link |
and understanding of something,
link |
but the individual nodes are just doing
link |
their little exchanging thing.
link |
And it's the same thing with Stephen Wolfram
link |
when you talk about cellular automata,
link |
it's very difficult to do math
link |
when you have a huge collection of distributed things,
link |
each acting on their own.
link |
And it's almost like, it feels like it's almost impossible
link |
to do any kind of theoretical work in the traditional sense.
link |
It almost becomes completely like a biology,
link |
you become a biologist as opposed to a theoretician.
link |
You just study it experimentally.
link |
Yeah, I think that's the big question, I guess, right?
link |
Yeah, so is the large size and interconnectedness
link |
of the like a deep learning network fundamental
link |
to that task, or are we just not very good at it yet
link |
because we're using the wrong metaphor?
link |
I mean, the human brain learns with much fewer examples
link |
and with much less tuning of the whatever, whatever,
link |
whatever probably that requires to get
link |
those like deep mind networks up and running.
link |
But yeah, so I don't really know,
link |
but the one thing I have observed is that the, yeah,
link |
there's the mundane nature of some of the working
link |
with these models tends to lead people to think that,
link |
to do it like, it could be Skynet
link |
or it could be like a lot of pain to get the thermostat
link |
to do what we want it to do.
link |
And there's a lot of open questions in between there.
link |
And then of course, the distributed network
link |
of humans that use these systems.
link |
So like you can have the system itself,
link |
then your network, but you can also have like little
link |
algorithms controlling the behavior of humans,
link |
which is what you have with social networks.
link |
It's possible that a very, what is it, a toaster or whatever,
link |
the opposite of Skynet when taken at scale
link |
while used by individual humans and controlling
link |
their behavior can actually have the Skynet effect.
link |
So the scale there.
link |
We might have that now.
link |
We might have that now, we just don't know.
link |
As it's happening.
link |
Is Twitter creating a little mini Skynet?
link |
I mean, because of what happens,
link |
it twirls out ramifications in the world.
link |
And is it really that much different if it's a robot
link |
with tentacles or a bunch of servers that.
link |
Yeah, and the destructive effects could be,
link |
I mean, it could be political, but it could also be like,
link |
you could probably make an interesting case that the virus,
link |
the coronavirus spread on Twitter too,
link |
in the minds of people.
link |
Like the fear and the misinformation
link |
in some very interesting ways mixed up.
link |
And maybe this pandemic wasn't sufficiently dangerous
link |
to where that could have created a weird like an instability,
link |
but maybe other things might create instability.
link |
Like somebody, God forbid,
link |
detonates a nuclear weapon somewhere.
link |
And then maybe the destructive aspect of that
link |
would not as much be the military actions,
link |
but the way those news are spread on Twitter
link |
and the panic that creates.
link |
I mean, I think that's a great case study, right?
link |
Like what happened, not,
link |
but I'm not suggesting that Lexi go let off a nuclear bomb.
link |
I meant the coronavirus, but yeah,
link |
I think that's a really interesting case study.
link |
I'm interested in the counterfactual of 1995,
link |
like do the same virus in 1995.
link |
So first of all, it would have been,
link |
I get to hear whatever the nightly news,
link |
we'll talk about it.
link |
And then there'll be my local health board,
link |
we'll talk about it.
link |
That mitigation decisions would probably necessarily be
link |
very sort of localized.
link |
Okay, our community is trying to figure out
link |
what are we gonna do?
link |
What's gonna happen?
link |
Like we see this with schools,
link |
like where I grew up in New Jersey,
link |
there's very localized school districts.
link |
So even though they had sort of
link |
really bad viral numbers there,
link |
my school I grew up in has been open since the fall
link |
because it's very localized.
link |
It's like these teachers and these parents,
link |
what do we wanna do?
link |
What are we comfortable with?
link |
I live in a school district right now in Montgomery County
link |
that's a billion dollar a year budget,
link |
150,000 kid school district.
link |
It just can't, it's closed because it's too.
link |
So I'm interested in that counterfactual.
link |
Yeah, so you have all this information moving around
link |
and then you have the effects on discourse
link |
that we were talking about earlier,
link |
that the Neil Postman style effects of Twitter,
link |
which shifts people into a sort of a dunk culture mindset
link |
of don't give an inch to the other team.
link |
And we're used to this and was fired up by politics
link |
and the unique attributes of Twitter.
link |
Now throw in the coronavirus
link |
and suddenly we see decades of public health knowledge,
link |
a lot of which was honed during the HIV epidemic,
link |
was thrown out the window
link |
because a lot of this was happening on Twitter
link |
and suddenly we had public health officials
link |
using a don't give an inch to the other team mindset
link |
of like, well, if we say this,
link |
that might validate something that was wrong over here
link |
and we need to, if we say this,
link |
then maybe like that'll stop them from doing this.
link |
That's like very Twittery in a way that in 1995
link |
is probably not the way public health officials
link |
would be thinking.
link |
Where now it's like, well, this is,
link |
if we said this about masks,
link |
but the other team said that about masks,
link |
we can't give an inch to this.
link |
So we gotta be careful.
link |
And like, we can't tell people it's okay
link |
after they're vaccinated because that might,
link |
we're giving them an inch on this
link |
and that's very Twittery in my mind, right?
link |
That is the impact of Twitter
link |
on the way we think about discourse,
link |
which is a dunking culture
link |
of don't give any inch to the other team
link |
and it's all about slam dunks
link |
where you're completely right and they're completely wrong.
link |
It's as a rhetorical strategy, it's incredibly simplistic,
link |
but it's also the way that we think right now
link |
about how we do debate.
link |
It combined terribly with election year pandemic.
link |
Yeah, election year pandemic.
link |
I wonder if we could do some smooth analysis.
link |
Let's run the simulation over a few times.
link |
A little bit of noise, yeah.
link |
See if it can dramatically change
link |
the behavior of the system.
link |
Okay, we talked about your love
link |
for proving that something is impossible.
link |
So there's quite a few still open problems
link |
and complexity of algorithms.
link |
So let me ask, does P equal NP?
link |
If P equals NP, what kind of,
link |
and you'd be really surprised somebody proves it.
link |
What would that proof look like
link |
and why would that even be?
link |
What would that mean?
link |
What would that proof look like?
link |
And what possible universe could P equals NP?
link |
Is there something in size that you could say there?
link |
I mean, I'm not a complexity theorist,
link |
but every complexity theorist I know
link |
is convinced they're not equal
link |
and are basically not working on it anymore.
link |
I mean, there is a million dollars at stake
link |
if you can solve the proof.
link |
It's one of the millennium prizes.
link |
Okay, so here's how I think the P not equals NP proof
link |
is gonna eventually happen.
link |
I think it's gonna fall out
link |
and it's gonna be not super simple,
link |
but not as hard as people think,
link |
because my theory about a lot of theoretical computer science
link |
based on just some results I've done,
link |
so this is a huge extrapolation,
link |
is that a lot of what we're doing
link |
is just obfuscating deeper mathematics.
link |
So this happens to me a lot, not a lot,
link |
but it's happened to me a few times in my work
link |
where we obfuscate it because we say,
link |
well, there's an algorithm and it has this much memory
link |
and they're connected on a network
link |
and okay, here's our setup
link |
and now we're trying to see how fast it can solve a problem
link |
and people do bounds about it
link |
and then the end it turns out
link |
that we were just obfuscating some underlying
link |
mathematical thing that already existed, right?
link |
So this has happened to me.
link |
I had this paper I was quite fond of a while ago.
link |
It was looking at this problem called contention resolution
link |
where you put an unknown set of people on a shared channel
link |
and they're trying to break symmetry.
link |
So it's like an ethernet, whatever.
link |
Only one person can use it at a time.
link |
You try to break symmetry.
link |
There's all these bounds people have proven over the years
link |
about how long it takes to do this, right?
link |
And like I discovered at some point,
link |
there's this one combinatorial result from the early 1990s.
link |
All of these lower bound proofs all come from this
link |
and in fact, it improved a lot of them
link |
and simplified a lot.
link |
You could put it all in one paper.
link |
It's like, are we really?
link |
And then, okay, so this new paper
link |
that I submitted a couple of weeks ago,
link |
I found you could take some of these same lower bound proofs
link |
for this contention resolution problem.
link |
You could reprove them.
link |
Using Shannon's source code theorem
link |
that actually when you're breaking contention,
link |
what you're really doing is building a code over,
link |
if you have a distribution on the network sizes,
link |
it's a code over that source.
link |
And if you plug in a high entropy information source
link |
and plug in from 1948, the source code theorem
link |
that says on a noiseless channel,
link |
you can't send things at a faster rate
link |
than the entropy allows,
link |
the exact same lower bounds fall back out again, right?
link |
So like this type of thing happens.
link |
There's some famous lower bounds and distributed algorithms
link |
that turned out to all be algebraic topology
link |
underneath the covers.
link |
And they won the Girdle Prize for working on that.
link |
So my sense is what's gonna happen is at some point,
link |
someone really smart to be very exciting
link |
is gonna realize there's some sort of other representation
link |
of what's going on with these Turing machines
link |
trying to sort of efficiently compute.
link |
And there'll be an existing mathematical result
link |
Someone or something, I guess.
link |
It could be AI theorem provers kind of thing.
link |
It could be, yeah.
link |
I mean, not a, well, yeah.
link |
I mean, there's theorem provers,
link |
like what that means now, which is not fun.
link |
It's just a bunch of...
link |
Very carefully formulated postulates that,
link |
but I take your point, yeah.
link |
On a small tangent on that,
link |
then you're kind of implying that mathematics,
link |
it almost feels like a kind of weird evolutionary tree
link |
that ultimately leads back to some kind of ancestral,
link |
few fundamental ideas that all are just like,
link |
they're all somehow connected.
link |
In that sense, do you think
link |
math is fundamental to our universe
link |
and we're just like slowly trying to understand
link |
these patterns or is it discovered?
link |
Or is it just a little game that we play amongst ourselves
link |
to try to fit little patterns to the world?
link |
Yeah, that's the question, right?
link |
That's the physicist question.
link |
I mean, I'm probably, I'm in the discovered camp,
link |
but I don't do theoretical physics.
link |
So I know they have a,
link |
they feel like they have a stronger claim
link |
to answering that question.
link |
But everything comes back to it.
link |
Everything comes back to it.
link |
I mean, all the physics,
link |
the fact that the universe is, well, okay.
link |
It's a complicated question.
link |
So how often do you think,
link |
how deeply does this result describe
link |
the fundamental reality of nature?
link |
So the reason I hesitated,
link |
because it's something I'm,
link |
I taught this seminar and did a little work
link |
on what are called biological algorithms.
link |
So there's this notion of,
link |
so physicists use mathematics to explain the universe, right?
link |
And it was unreasonable that mathematics works so well.
link |
All these differential equations,
link |
why does that explain all we need to know
link |
about thermodynamics and gravity
link |
and all these types of things?
link |
Well, there's this movement
link |
within the intersection of computer science and biology,
link |
just kind of Wolframium, I guess, really,
link |
that algorithms can be very explanatory, right?
link |
Like if you're trying to explain parsimoniously
link |
something about like an ant colony or something like this,
link |
you're not going to,
link |
ultimately it's not gonna be explained as a equation,
link |
like a physics equation.
link |
It's gonna be explained by an algorithm.
link |
So like this algorithm run distributedly
link |
is going to explain the behavior.
link |
So that's mathematical, but not quite mathematical,
link |
but it is if you think about an algorithm
link |
like a Lambda calculus,
link |
which brings you back to the world of mathematics.
link |
So I'm thinking out loud here,
link |
but basically abstract math is sort of like
link |
unreasonably effective at explaining a lot of things.
link |
And that's just what I feel like I glimpse.
link |
I'm not like a super well known theoretician.
link |
I don't have really famous results.
link |
So even as a sort of middling career theoretician,
link |
I keep encountering this where we think we're solving
link |
some problem about computers and algorithms,
link |
and it's some much deeper underlying math.
link |
It's Shannon, but Shannon is entropy,
link |
but entropy was really goes all the way back
link |
to whatever it was,
link |
Boyle or all the way back to looking at the early physics.
link |
And it's, anyways, to me, I think it's amazing.
link |
Yeah, but it could be the flip side of that could be
link |
just our brains draw so much pleasure
link |
from the deriving generalized theories
link |
and simplifying the universe that we just naturally see
link |
that kind of simplicity in everything.
link |
Yeah, so that's the whole Newton to Einstein, right?
link |
So you can say this must be right
link |
because it's so predictive.
link |
Well, it's not quite predictive
link |
because Mercury wobbles a little bit,
link |
but I think we have it set
link |
and then you turn out, no, Einstein.
link |
And then you get Bohr like, no, not Einstein.
link |
It's actually statistical.
link |
And yeah, so that would be interesting.
link |
It's hard to also know
link |
where a smooth analysis fits into all that
link |
or a little bit of noise.
link |
Like you can say something very clean about a system
link |
and then a little bit of noise,
link |
like the average case is actually very different.
link |
And so, I mean, that's where
link |
the quantum mechanics comes in.
link |
It's like, ugh, why does it have to be randomness in this?
link |
Yeah, I would have to do this complex statistics.
link |
So to be determined.
link |
Yeah, that'll be my next book.
link |
That'd be ambitious.
link |
The fundamental core of reality, comma,
link |
and some advice for being more productive at work.
link |
Can I ask you just,
link |
if it's possible to do an overview
link |
and just some brief comments of wisdom
link |
on the process of publishing a book,
link |
what's that process entail?
link |
What are the different options
link |
and what's your recommendation
link |
for somebody that wants to write a book like yours,
link |
a nonfiction book that discovers
link |
something interesting about this world?
link |
So what I usually advise is follow the process as is.
link |
Don't try to reinvent.
link |
I think that happens a lot where you'll try to reinvent
link |
the way the publishing industry should work.
link |
Like this is kind of not like in a business model ways,
link |
but just like, this is what I want to do.
link |
I want to write a thousand words a day
link |
and I want to do this and I'm gonna put it on the internet
link |
and the publishing industry is very specific
link |
about how it works.
link |
And so like when I got started writing books,
link |
which at a very young age,
link |
so I sold my first book at the age of 21.
link |
The way I did that is I found a family friend
link |
that was an agent and I said,
link |
I'm not trying to make you be my agent.
link |
Just explain to me how this works.
link |
Not just how the world works,
link |
but give me the hard truth about how would a 21 year old,
link |
under what conditions could a 21 year old sell a book
link |
and what would that look like?
link |
And she just explained it to me.
link |
You know, you have to do this and have to be a subject
link |
that it made sense for you to write.
link |
And you would have to do this type of writing
link |
for the publications to validate it and blah, blah, blah.
link |
And you have to get the agent first.
link |
And I learned the whole game plan and then I executed.
link |
And so the rough game plan is with nonfiction,
link |
you get the agent first
link |
and the agent's gonna sell it to the publishers.
link |
So like you're never sending something directly
link |
to the publishers.
link |
In nonfiction, you're not writing the book first, right?
link |
You're gonna get an advance from the publisher once sold
link |
and then you're gonna do the primary writing of the book.
link |
In fact, it will, in most circumstances, hurt you
link |
if you've already written it.
link |
If you've already written it.
link |
So you're trying to sell, well, I guess the agent,
link |
first you sell it to the agent
link |
and then the agent sells it to the publishers.
link |
It's much easier to get an agent than a book deal.
link |
So the thought is, if you can't get an agent,
link |
then why would you?
link |
So you start with, and also the way this works
link |
with a good agent is they know all the editors
link |
and they have lunch with the editors
link |
and they're always just like,
link |
okay, what projects do you have coming?
link |
What are you looking for?
link |
Here's one of my authors.
link |
That's the way all these deals happen.
link |
It's not, you're not emailing a manuscript to a slush pile.
link |
Yeah, and so first of all, the agent takes a percentage
link |
and then the publishers, this is where the process comes in.
link |
They take also a cut that's probably ridiculous.
link |
So if you try to reinvent the system,
link |
you'll probably be frustrated by the percentage
link |
that everyone takes relative to how much bureaucracy
link |
and efficiency ridiculousness there is in the system.
link |
Your recommendation is like, you're just one ant.
link |
Stop trying to build your own ant colony.
link |
Well, or if you create your own process
link |
for how it should work,
link |
the book's not gonna get published.
link |
So there's the separate question,
link |
the economic question of like,
link |
should I create my own, like self publish it
link |
or do something like that?
link |
But putting that aside,
link |
there's a lot of people I encounter
link |
that wanna publish a book with a main publisher,
link |
but they invent their own rules for how it works, right?
link |
So then the alternative though is self publishing
link |
and the downside, there's a lot of downsides.
link |
It's almost like publishing an opinion piece
link |
in the New York Times versus writing on a blog.
link |
There's no reason why writing a blog post on Medium
link |
can't get way more attention and legitimacy
link |
and long lasting prestige than a New York Times article.
link |
But nevertheless, for most people,
link |
writing in a prestigious newspaper,
link |
quote unquote prestigious, is just easier.
link |
And well, and depends on your goal.
link |
So, you know, like I push you towards a big publisher
link |
because I think your goal, it's huge ideas, you want impact.
link |
You're gonna have more impact.
link |
Even though, like actually,
link |
so there's different ways to measure impact, right?
link |
In the world of ideas.
link |
In the world of ideas.
link |
And also, yeah, in the world of ideas,
link |
it's kind of like the clubhouse thing now,
link |
even if the audience is not large,
link |
the people in the audience are very interesting.
link |
It's like the conversation feels like
link |
that has long lasting impact among the people
link |
in different and disparate industries
link |
that are also then starting their own conversations
link |
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
Yeah, because you have other,
link |
so like self publishing a book,
link |
the goals that would solve,
link |
you have much better ways of getting to those goals,
link |
might be part of it, right?
link |
So if there's the financial aspect
link |
of well, you get to keep more of it,
link |
I mean, the podcast is probably gonna crush
link |
what the book's gonna do anyways, right?
link |
Yeah, if it's, I wanna get directly
link |
to certain audiences or crowds,
link |
it might be harder through a traditional publisher.
link |
There's better ways to talk to those crowds.
link |
It could be on clubhouse with all these new technologies,
link |
self published books not gonna be the most effective way
link |
to find your way to a new crowd.
link |
But if the idea is like, I wanna have a,
link |
leave a dent in the world of ideas,
link |
then to have a vulnerable old publisher,
link |
put out your book in a nice hardcover
link |
and do the things they do, that goes a long way.
link |
And they do do a lot.
link |
I mean, it's very difficult actually.
link |
There's so much involved in putting together a book.
link |
They get books into bookstores
link |
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
And from an efficiency standpoint,
link |
I mean, just the time involved
link |
in trying to do this yourself is.
link |
They have a process, right?
link |
Like you said, they have a process.
link |
They've got a process.
link |
I mean, I know like Jocko did this recently,
link |
he started his own imprint and I have a couple other.
link |
But it's a huge overhead.
link |
I mean, if you run a business and you,
link |
so like Jocko is a good case study, right?
link |
So he got fed up with Simon and Schuster
link |
dragging their feet and said,
link |
I'm gonna start my own imprint then,
link |
if you're not gonna publish my kid's book.
link |
But he, what does he do, he runs businesses, right?
link |
So I think in his world, like I already run,
link |
I'm a partner in whatever, in Origin,
link |
and I have this and that.
link |
And so it's like, yeah, we can run businesses.
link |
That's what we know how to do.
link |
I run businesses, I have people.
link |
But for like you or I, we don't run businesses.
link |
Yeah, well, especially these kinds of businesses, right?
link |
So I do wanna launch a business with very different
link |
technology business.
link |
It's very different.
link |
Yeah, it's very, very different, yeah.
link |
I mean, this is like, okay, I need copy editors
link |
and graphic book binders, and I need to contract
link |
with the printer, but oh, the printer doesn't have slots.
link |
And so now I have to try to, I mean, it's.
link |
I get so, I need to shut this off in my room,
link |
but I get so frustrated when the system
link |
could clearly be improved.
link |
It's the thing that you're mentioning.
link |
It's like, this is so inefficient.
link |
Every time I go to the DMV or something like that,
link |
you think like, ah, this could be done so much better.
link |
But, and the same thing as the worry with an editor,
link |
which I guess would come from the publisher,
link |
like who would, how much supervision on your book
link |
did you receive like, hey, do you think this is too long?
link |
Or do you think the title, like title,
link |
how much choice do you have in the title, in the cover,
link |
in the presentation and the branding
link |
and all that kind of stuff?
link |
Yeah, I mean, all of it depends, right?
link |
So when it comes on the relationship with the editor
link |
on the writing, it depends on the editor
link |
and it depends on you.
link |
So like at this point, I'm on my seventh book
link |
and I write for a lot of major publications.
link |
And at this point I have what I feel like is a voice
link |
and a level of craft that I'm very comfortable with, right?
link |
So my editor is not gonna be,
link |
she kind of is gonna trust me
link |
and it's gonna be more big picture.
link |
Like I'm losing the thread here
link |
or this seems like it could be longer.
link |
Whereas the first book I wrote when I was 21,
link |
I had notes such as you start a lot of sentences with so,
link |
you don't use any contractions
link |
because I've been doing scientific writing,
link |
we don't use contractions.
link |
Like you should probably use contractions.
link |
It was way more, I had to go back
link |
and rewrite the whole thing, yeah.
link |
But ultimately the recommendation,
link |
I mean, we talked offline and sort of,
link |
I was thinking loosely, not really sure,
link |
but I was thinking of writing a book
link |
and there's a kind of desire to go self publishing,
link |
not for financial reasons.
link |
And the money can be good by the way, right?
link |
I mean, it's very power law type distributed, right?
link |
So the money on a hardcover is somewhere
link |
between one or $2 a book.
link |
So the thing is, I personally don't.
link |
But then you give up 15% to the agent, so.
link |
I personally don't care about money
link |
as I've mentioned before,
link |
but I for some reason really don't like spending money
link |
on things that are not worth it.
link |
Like I don't care if I get money,
link |
I just don't like spending money on like feeding a system
link |
that's inefficient.
link |
It's like I'm contributing to the problem.
link |
That's my biggest problem.
link |
Right, so you're worried about the inefficiencies
link |
of the opportunity.
link |
Yeah, the fact that.
link |
Like the overheads, the number of people involved.
link |
The fact that they have this way of speaking,
link |
which I'm allergic to many people,
link |
like that's very marketing speak.
link |
Like you could tell they've been having
link |
Zoom meetings all day.
link |
It's like as opposed to a sort of creative collaborators
link |
that are like also a little bit crazy.
link |
I suppose some of that is finding the right people.
link |
Finding the right people.
link |
That's what I would say.
link |
I'd say there's definitely,
link |
and maybe it's just good fortune.
link |
Good fortune in terms of like my agents and editors
link |
There's really good people who see the vision
link |
are smart or incredibly literary.
link |
And they actually help you.
link |
Like psychologically.
link |
Yeah, I had a great editor when I was first moving
link |
into hardcover books, for example.
link |
It was my first big book advance
link |
and my first sort of big deal
link |
and he was like a senior editor
link |
and it was very useful, you know?
link |
He was like, we had a lot of long talks, right?
link |
I was, so this was my fourth book,
link |
So Good They Can't Ignore You was my first,
link |
my big hardcover idea book.
link |
And we had a lot of talks,
link |
like even before I started writing it,
link |
just let's talk about books and his philosophy.
link |
He'd been in the business for a long time.
link |
He was the head of the imprint.
link |
Yeah, but I mean, the other frustrating thing
link |
is how long the whole thing takes.
link |
Makes a long time.
link |
But I suppose that's, you just have to accept that.
link |
Well, yeah, I handed in this manuscript
link |
for the book that comes out now,
link |
like when this, I handed it in,
link |
I mean, over the summer, like during the pandemic.
link |
So it's not, it's not terrible, right?
link |
And we were editing during the pandemic
link |
and I finished it in the spring.
link |
We've talked most of the day,
link |
except for a little bit computer science,
link |
most of the day about a productive life.
link |
How does love, friendship and family fit into that?
link |
Is there, do you find that there's a tension?
link |
Is it possible for relationships
link |
to energize the whole process, to benefit?
link |
Or is it ultimately a trade off?
link |
But because life is short and ultimately
link |
we seek happiness, not productivity,
link |
that we have to accept that tension.
link |
I mean, I think relationships is the,
link |
that's the whole deal.
link |
Like I thought about this the other day,
link |
I don't know what the context was.
link |
I was thinking about if I was gonna give
link |
like an advice speech, like a commencement address
link |
or like giving advice to young people.
link |
And like the big question I have for young people is
link |
if they haven't already, bad things are gonna happen
link |
that you don't control, so what's the plan, right?
link |
Like, let's start figuring that out now
link |
because it's not all, you know,
link |
some people get off better than others,
link |
but eventually stuff happens, right?
link |
You get sick, something falls apart,
link |
the economy craters, someone you know dies,
link |
like all sorts of bad stuff is gonna happen, right?
link |
So how are we gonna do this?
link |
Like, how do we like live life when life is hard?
link |
And in ways that is unfair and unpredictable,
link |
then relationships is the,
link |
that's the buffer for all of that.
link |
Cause we're wired for it, right?
link |
I went down this rabbit hole with digital minimalism.
link |
I went down this huge rabbit hole
link |
about the human brain and sociality.
link |
It's all we're wired to do.
link |
It's like all of our brain is for this.
link |
Like everything, all of our mechanisms,
link |
everything is made to service the social connections
link |
because it's what kept you alive, you know?
link |
I mean, you had the, your tribal connections
link |
is how you didn't starve during a famine,
link |
people would share food, et cetera.
link |
And so you can't neglect that.
link |
And it's like everything and people feel it, right?
link |
Like there's no, our social networks
link |
are hooked up to the pain center.
link |
That's why it feels so terrible when you miss someone
link |
or like someone dies or something, right?
link |
That's like how seriously we take it.
link |
There's a pretty accepted theory
link |
that the default mode network,
link |
like a lot of what the default mode network is doing.
link |
So that's sort of the default state our brain goes into
link |
when we're not doing something in particular
link |
is practicing sociality, practicing interactions thing,
link |
because it's so crucial to what we do.
link |
It's like at the core of human thriving.
link |
So I've more recently,
link |
the way I think about it is like relationships first.
link |
Given that foundation of putting like,
link |
and I don't think we put nearly enough time into it.
link |
I worry that social media is reducing relationships,
link |
strong relationships.
link |
Strong relationships where you're sacrificing
link |
non trivial time and attention and resources,
link |
whatever on behalf of other people.
link |
That's the net that is gonna allow you
link |
to get through anything.
link |
Now what do we wanna do with the surplus that remains?
link |
Maybe I wanna build some fire, build some tools.
link |
So put relationships first.
link |
I like the worst case analysis
link |
from the computer science perspective.
link |
Put relationships first.
link |
Yeah, because everything else is just assuming average case,
link |
assuming things kind of keep going as they were going.
link |
And you're neglecting the fundamental human drive.
link |
Like we have this, we talked about the boredom instinct.
link |
We wanna build things, we wanna have impact,
link |
we wanna do productivity.
link |
That's not nearly as clear cut of a drive of we need people.
link |
But if we look at the real worst case analysis here
link |
is one day you're pretty young now,
link |
but that's not gonna last very long.
link |
You're gonna die one day.
link |
Is that something you think about?
link |
Are you afraid of death?
link |
Well, I'm of the mindset of,
link |
let's make that a productivity hack.
link |
I'm of the mindset of we need to confront that soon.
link |
So let's do what we can now
link |
so that when we really confront and think about it,
link |
we're more likely to feel better about it.
link |
So in other words, let's focus now on living
link |
and doing things in such a way that we're proud of
link |
so that when it really comes time to confront that,
link |
we're more likely to say,
link |
like, okay, I feel kind of good about the situation.
link |
So what, when you're laying on your deathbed,
link |
would you, in looking back,
link |
what would make you think like,
link |
oh, I did okay, I'm proud of that.
link |
I optimized the hell out of that.
link |
That's a good, I mean, it's a good question
link |
to go backwards on.
link |
I mean, this is like David Brooks's eulogy virtues
link |
versus resume virtues.
link |
Right, so his argument is that,
link |
and that's another interesting DC area person.
link |
I keep thinking of interesting DC area people.
link |
All right, David Brooks is here too.
link |
His argument, he thinks eulogy virtues is,
link |
so what we eulogize is different
link |
than what we promote on the resume.
link |
That's his whole thing now, right?
link |
His Suckin Mountain wrote the character.
link |
Both these books are, he has this whole premise
link |
of there's like this professional phase
link |
and there's a phase of giving of yourself
link |
and sacrificing on behalf of other people.
link |
I don't know, maybe it's all mixed together, right?
link |
You wanna, I think living by a code is important, right?
link |
I mean, this is something that's not emphasized enough.
link |
I always think of advice that my undergrad
link |
should be given that they're not given,
link |
especially at a place like Georgetown
link |
that has this like deep history
link |
of trying to promote human flourishing
link |
because of the Jesuit connection.
link |
There's such resiliency and pride
link |
that comes out of living well, even when it's hard,
link |
like living according to a code, living accord to,
link |
which I think religion used to structure this for people.
link |
But in its absence, you need some sort of replacement.
link |
But even when things were,
link |
soldiers get this a lot, right?
link |
They experienced this a lot.
link |
Even when things were tough,
link |
I was able to persist in living this way
link |
that I knew was right,
link |
even though it wasn't the easiest thing
link |
to do in the moment.
link |
Fewer things give humans more resiliency.
link |
It's like having done that,
link |
your relationships were strong, right?
link |
Many people coming to your funeral is a standard.
link |
A lot of people are gonna come to your funeral.
link |
I mean, you matter to a lot of people.
link |
And then maybe having done,
link |
to the extent of whatever capabilities
link |
you happen to be granted,
link |
and they're different for different people,
link |
and some people can sprint real fast,
link |
and some people can do math problems,
link |
try to actually do something of impact.
link |
I'll just promise to give gift cards
link |
to anybody who shows up to the funeral.
link |
You're gonna hack it.
link |
I'm gonna hack even the funeral.
link |
There's gonna be a lottery wheel you spin
link |
when you come in and someone goes away with $10,000.
link |
See, the problem is, with all this living by principles,
link |
living a principled life,
link |
focusing on relationships,
link |
and kind of thinking of this life as this perfect thing
link |
kind of forgets the notion that none of it
link |
makes any sense, right?
link |
It kind of implies that this is like a video game
link |
and you wanna get a high score,
link |
as opposed to none of this even makes sense.
link |
Like, why would he, like, what that?
link |
Like, what does it even mean to die?
link |
It's gonna be over.
link |
It's like everything I do, all these productivity hacks,
link |
all this life, all these efforts, all this creative efforts,
link |
kind of assume it's gonna go on forever.
link |
There's a kind of a sense of immortality,
link |
and I don't even know how to intellectually
link |
make sense that it ends.
link |
Of course, gotta ask you in that context,
link |
what do you think is the meaning of it all,
link |
especially for a computer scientist?
link |
I mean, there's gotta be some mathematical.
link |
Yeah, 27, or what's the, what's the Douglas Adams?
link |
Yeah, or 42, okay.
link |
27 is a better number.
link |
I should read more sci fi.
link |
Maybe you're onto something with a 27.
link |
I don't wanna give away too much, but just trust me, 27.
link |
It's visible, yeah.
link |
So, I mean, I don't know, obviously, right?
link |
I was hoping you would.
link |
Yeah, I don't know, but going back to what you were saying
link |
about the sort of the existentialist,
link |
or sort of the more nihilist style approach,
link |
the one thing that there is are intimations, right?
link |
So that there's these intimations that human halves
link |
of somehow this feels right, and this feels wrong,
link |
this feels good, this feels like I'm doing,
link |
I'm aligned with something, you know,
link |
when I'm acting with courage to save, whatever, right?
link |
It's not, these intimations
link |
are a grounding against arbitrariness.
link |
Like, one of the ideas I'm really interested in is that
link |
when you look at religion, right?
link |
So I'm interested in world religions.
link |
My grandfather was like a theologian
link |
that studied and wrote all these books,
link |
and I'm very interested in this type of stuff.
link |
And there's this great book that's,
link |
it's not specific to a particular religion,
link |
but it's Karen Armstrong wrote this great book
link |
called The Case for God.
link |
She's very interesting.
link |
She was a Catholic nun who sort of left that religion,
link |
but one of the smartest thinkers
link |
in terms of like accessible theological thinking
link |
that's not tied to any particular religion.
link |
Her whole argument is that the way to understand religion,
link |
first of all, you have to go way back pre enlightenment
link |
where all this was formed.
link |
We got messed up thinking about religion
link |
post enlightenment, right?
link |
And these were operating systems
link |
for making sense of intimations.
link |
The one thing we had were these different intimations
link |
of this field, like awe and mystical experience.
link |
And this feels, there's something you feel
link |
when you act in a certain way
link |
and don't act in this other way.
link |
And it was like the scientists who were trying to study
link |
and understand the model of the atom
link |
by just looking at experiments and trying to understand
link |
Like the great religions of the world
link |
were basically figuring out
link |
how do we make sense of these intimations
link |
and live in alignment with them
link |
and build a life of meaning around that.
link |
What were the tools they were using?
link |
They were using ritual.
link |
They were using belief.
link |
They were using action, but all of it was like an OS.
link |
It was like a liturgical model of the atom that did.
link |
It's hard coded in.
link |
So it did through the evolutionary process.
link |
I mean, they wouldn't have called it that back then
link |
or yeah, I mean, they didn't have that as pre enlightenment.
link |
They just said, this is here.
link |
And the directive is to try to live in alignment with that.
link |
Well, then I want to ask who wrote the original code.
link |
Yeah, so Armstrong lays out this good argument
link |
and where it gets really interesting
link |
is that she emphasizes that all of this
link |
was considered ineffable, right?
link |
So the whole notion, and this is like rich
link |
in Jewish tradition in particular
link |
and also in Islamic tradition,
link |
we can't comprehend and understand what's going on here.
link |
And so the best we can do to approximate understanding
link |
and live in alignment is we act as if this is true,
link |
do these rituals, have these actions or whatever.
link |
Post enlightenment, a lot of that got,
link |
once we learned about enlightenment,
link |
we grew these suspicions around religion
link |
that are very much of the modern era, right?
link |
So like the Karen Armstrong,
link |
like Sam Harris's critique of religion makes no sense.
link |
The critique's based on, well, this is,
link |
you're making the ascent to propositions
link |
that you think are true for which you do not have evidence
link |
that they are true.
link |
That's an enlightenment thing, right?
link |
This is not the context and this is not,
link |
the religion is the Rutherford model of the atom.
link |
Like it's not actually maybe what is underneath happening,
link |
but this model explains why your chemical equations work.
link |
And so this is like the way religion was.
link |
There's a God, we'll call it this, this is how it works,
link |
we do this ritual, we act in this way,
link |
it aligns with it, just like the model of the atom
link |
predicted why NA and CL is gonna become salt,
link |
this predicts that you're gonna feel
link |
and live in alignment, right?
link |
It's like this beautiful sophisticated theory,
link |
which actually matches how a lot of great theologians
link |
have thought about it.
link |
But then when you come forward in time,
link |
yeah, maybe it's evolution.
link |
I mean, this is like what Peterson hints at, right?
link |
Like he's basically, he doesn't like to get super pinned down
link |
on this, but it kind of seems where he sees it that way.
link |
He's almost like searching for the words.
link |
He focuses more on like Jung and other people,
link |
but I mean, I know he's very Jungian,
link |
but that same type of analysis, I think, roughly speaking,
link |
like Armstrong is sort of a, it's kind of like a Peter
link |
Sony analysis, but she's looking more at the deep history
link |
of religion than, but yeah, he throws in an evolutionary.
link |
Yeah, and I wonder what home it finds,
link |
I wonder what the new home is if religion dissipates
link |
and what the new home for these kinds of
link |
natural inclinations are, whether it's technology,
link |
And if it's evolution, I mean, this is Francis Collins's
link |
book also, he's like, well, that's a religious,
link |
that could be a very religious notion.
link |
I don't, I think this stuff is interesting.
link |
I'm not a very religious person,
link |
but I'm thinking it's not a bad idea.
link |
Maybe what replaces, honestly, like maybe what replaces
link |
religion is a return to religion,
link |
but in this sort of more sophisticated...
link |
I mean, if you went back, yeah, I mean, it's the issue
link |
with like a lot of the recent critiques,
link |
I think it's a strong critique in a complicated way, right?
link |
Because the whole way these, the way this works,
link |
I mean, the theologians, if you're reading Paul Tillich,
link |
if you're reading Heschel, if you're reading these people,
link |
they're thinking very sophisticatedly about religion
link |
in terms of this, it's ineffable,
link |
and we're just these things, and it connects us
link |
to these things in a way that puts life in alignment.
link |
We can't really explain what's going on
link |
because our brains can't handle it, right?
link |
For the average person though, this notion of live as if
link |
is kind of how religions work, is live as if this is true.
link |
It's like an OS for getting in alignment with,
link |
because through cultural evolution,
link |
like you behave in this way, do these words,
link |
live as if this is true gives you
link |
the goal you're looking for.
link |
But that's a complicated thing, live as if this is true,
link |
because if you, especially if you're not a theologian,
link |
to say, yeah, this is not true in an enlightenment sense,
link |
but I'm living as if, it kind of takes the heat out of it,
link |
but of course it's what people are doing
link |
because highly religious people still do bad things,
link |
where if you really were, there's absolutely a hell
link |
and I'm definitely gonna go to it if I do this bad thing,
link |
you would never have, you know,
link |
no one would ever murder anyone
link |
if they were an evangelical Christian, right?
link |
So it's like what, this is kind of a tangent
link |
that I'm on shaky ground here,
link |
but it's something I've been interested off and on a lot.
link |
Well, it's fascinating, I mean,
link |
I think we're in some sense searching for,
link |
because it does make for a good operating system,
link |
we're searching for a good live as if X is true
link |
and we're searching for a new X.
link |
And maybe artificial intelligence will be the very,
link |
the new gods that we're so desperately looking for.
link |
Or it'll just spit out 42.
link |
I thought it was 27.
link |
Cal, this is, as you know, I've been a huge fan,
link |
so are a huge number of people that I've spoken with,
link |
so they've been telling me,
link |
I absolutely have to talk to you, this is a huge honor,
link |
this is really fun, thanks for wasting all this time with me.
link |
Yeah, no, likewise, man, I've been a long time fan,
link |
so this was a lot of fun.
link |
Yeah, thanks, man.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Cal Newport
link |
and thank you to our sponsors, ExpressVPN,
link |
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and SimpliSafe Home Security.
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Click the sponsor links to get a discount
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and to support this podcast.
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And now let me leave you with some words from Cal himself,
link |
"'Clarity about what matters provides clarity
link |
"'about what does not.'"
link |
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.