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 like his book Deep Work, for example,
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has guided how I strive to approach productivity and life in general.
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He doesn't use social media and in his book Digital Minimalism,
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he encourages people to find the right amount of social media usage
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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 and in our lives.
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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 at the level that he does it,
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you really have to live a focused life 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 called Deep Questions
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that I highly recommend for anyone who wants to improve their productive life.
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Quick mention of our sponsors ExpressVPN,
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Linode Linux Virtual Machines,
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Sunbasket Meal Delivery Service,
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and SimplySafe Home Security.
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Click the sponsor links to get a discount 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 over the past few years.
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Deep Work is hard, but it's ultimately the thing that makes life so damn amazing.
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The ability to create things you're passionate about in a flow state
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where the distraction of the world just fade away.
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Social media, yes, reading the comments, 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 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 the Apple Podcast,
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follow on Spotify, support on Patreon,
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or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman
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if you can only figure out 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 without distraction.
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On a cognitively demanding task, 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 you might do while you're working.
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And see that the Deep Work efforts actually have a huge benefit
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that we might be underestimating.
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What does it mean to work deeply on something?
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You know, I had been calling it hard focus.
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In my writing before that, 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 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, 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.
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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, you know, 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, that was the V key skill.
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It was like your 440 time or something if you were an athlete, right?
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So, this is something that people were actually,
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the theory folks are thinking about?
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Like, they're openly discussing like,
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how do you focus on that?
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I mean, I don't know if they would, you know, 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 Domain would be sitting in front of a whiteboard,
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right, with a whole group of visitors 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 from what's required
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to solve something fundamental 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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And so I'd be interested to hear what you think about that
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because programming doesn't always feel like you need to do something.
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It feels 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 that athletic endeavor is good
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and then hanging out with an Olympic athlete.
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Like, oh, I see that's what it is.
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Grad students like me, 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 want to solve.
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I have all of these tools,
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and I have to combine them somehow creatively and on the fly.
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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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You know, that was the term I used.
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Then I published this book, So Good They Can't Ignore You,
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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 being really important
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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's this big follow up question to that book of,
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okay, well, how do I get really good at this?
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And then I look back to my grad school experience,
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I was like, huh, there's this focus thing that we used to do.
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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 that,
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okay, actually undistracted concentration is not just
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important for esoteric theoreticians.
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It's important here and support here and support 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, but basically any kind of skill
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acquisition, 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 that you're
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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 kills
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the human capacity to think.
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So if I change what I'm paying attention to to something
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different, really, even if it's brief and then try to bring
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it back to the main thing I'm doing,
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that causes a huge cognitive pile up that makes it very
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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 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, that initiates a context shift
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in your brain, right?
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We're going to start to suppress some neural networks
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and we're going to 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 in your brains in the process
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of switching to these emails and trying to understand
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those contexts, and as a result,
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your ability to think clearly just goes really down.
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And it's fatiguing, too.
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I mean, you do this long enough that 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, again,
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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 a 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 internet.
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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 solutions 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 as a full context shift
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because the semantic networks involved are relatively similar.
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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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What you're really going to get hit
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is if you switch your context 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.
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I guess 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, like, okay,
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there's a grant funding issue or something like this
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is very different than the coding I'm doing.
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And I'm leaving it unresolved.
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So it's like someone needs something from me
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and I'm going to try to pull my attention back.
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The second worst would be something 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 because you're going to expose yourself
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to something that's emotionally arousing.
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That's going to completely mess up the cognitive plateau there.
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And then when you come back to, 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 lexicon 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 don't know if I'm going to be able to do that.
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I don't know if I'm going to be able to do that.
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But it's just a really 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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And one of the beautiful people can read about
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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 makes you feel like it's not
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the terms to it that actually
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solidifies the concepts,
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like words matter. It's pretty cool.
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sort of as a comment,
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it's a struggle and it's very difficult
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for a prolonged period of time,
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but the days on which
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I'm able to accomplish several hours
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of that kind of work,
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So forget being productive and all that.
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I'm satisfied with my life.
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And then I can be,
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I'm less of a dick to other people
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in my life afterwards.
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It's a beautiful thing.
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And I find the opposite
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when I don't do that kind of thing,
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I'm much more irritable.
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I feel like I didn't accomplish anything
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and there's this stress that then
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the negative emotion builds up to where
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you're no longer able to sort of
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have a lot 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,
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again, you cover this in the book,
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but how do you integrate deep work
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into your life? 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.
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If you're facing your work day,
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your inbox or to do list
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to sort of drive you. Don't just come into your day
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and think, what do I want to do next?
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I'm a big fan of saying, here's the time
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Let me make a plan for it.
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I have a meeting here. I have an appointment here.
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Here's what's left. What do I actually want to do with it?
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In this half hour, I'm going to work on this.
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For this 90 minute block, I'm going to work on that.
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And during this hour, I'm going to try to fit this in
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and then actually have this half hour gap between two meetings.
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So why don't I take advantage of that 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 want to 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, 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, to deep work.
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And I can get a handle on the other things that need to happen
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and find better places
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to fit them so I can prioritize this.
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And you're going to get a lot more of that done
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than if it's just going through your day and saying,
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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 to try to
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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
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vision for what I'm trying to get done
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during the fall, let's say, or during the winter.
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There's a deadline coming up
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for academic papers at the end of the season.
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Here's what I'm working on.
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I want to have this many chapters done of a book, something like this.
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You have the big picture vision
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of what you want to 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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what's my week going to look like?
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What do I need to do?
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How am I going to 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 going to 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
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versus so the alternative is
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doing a lot and I'm not sure
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it's the best way to do it is
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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
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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
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is both the opportunity to
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have a positive thing
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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
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sort of not waste time on travel
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and all those kinds of things.
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actually both those things are also sources of 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
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more draining to me
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intellectually, philosophically.
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by even a 10 minute Zoom meeting.
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What are we doing here?
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What's the meaning of life?
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Every Zoom meeting
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I have an existential crisis.
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Kierkegaard with the internet connection.
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What the hell are we talking about?
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When you don't have meetings,
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allow for certain things
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if they need to, like the important things
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sessions to last way longer
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planned for. I mean that's my goal
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is to try to schedule, the goal is to schedule
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to sit and focus for a particular
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and hope I can keep going
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and hope I can get lost in it.
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find that this is at all
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and the time blocking
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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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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
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if you have varied
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responsibilities, right? So I'm often
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juggling multiple jobs
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essentially. There's academic
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stuff, there's teaching stuff, there's book stuff,
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there's the business surrounding
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of your same mindset. If a deep work
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session is going well,
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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. So I even sell
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this planner to help people time block.
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It has many columns because
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the discipline is, oh, if your initial schedule
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move over one, next time you get a chance to move over one
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column and then you just fix it for the time
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that's remaining. So in other words, there's
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I made a schedule and I stuck with it.
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There's actually not like you get a prize for it, right?
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Like for me, the prize is
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I have an intentional plan for my time
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and if I have to change that plan, that's fine.
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Like the state I want to be is basically
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at any point in the day, I've thought about what time
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remains and gave it some
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thought for what to do because I'll do the same thing
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even though I have a lot more
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meetings and other types of things I have to do in my
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various jobs and I basically prioritize
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the deep work and they get yelled at a lot.
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So that's kind of my strategy is like just be
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okay, just be okay getting yelled at a
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lot because I feel you, if you're rolling
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yeah, well, that's what it is for me.
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Like with writing, I think it's
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writing so hard in a certain way that it's
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you don't really get on a roll in some
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sense, like it's just difficult.
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But working on proofs,
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to pull yourself away from a proof
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if you start to get some traction.
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You've been at it for a couple hours and you feel
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the pins and tumblers starting to click
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together and progress is being made.
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It's really hard to pull away from
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that. So I'm willing to get yelled at by almost everyone.
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Of course, there is
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yourself out of it when things
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are going great because then you're kind of excited
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supposed to stopping on a dead end.
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force of procrastination that comes with
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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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Like I'm on a stage now,
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I submitted a few papers recently.
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So now we're sort of starting
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something up from cold and it takes way
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too long to get going because it's very hard
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to get the motivation to schedule
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the time when it's not, yeah, we're in it.
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Here's where we are, we feel like something's
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about the gift here. We need the very early stages
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where it's just, I don't know,
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I'm going to read hard papers and it's going to be hard
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and I'm going to have no idea how to make progress.
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motivating. What about deadlines?
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Can we, okay, so this is like
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a therapy session.
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it seems like I don't, I only get stuff
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done that has deadlines.
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And so the one of the
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implied powerful things about time blocking
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is there's a kind of deadline
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or there's artificial
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or real sense of urgency.
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Do you think it's possible to
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get anything done in this world without deadlines?
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Why did deadlines work so well?
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Well, I mean, it's a clear motivational
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signal, but in the
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short term, you do get an effect like that
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in time blocking. I think the strong effect
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you get by saying, this is the
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exact time I'm going to 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
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should I take a break now? This is the big
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issue with just saying, you know, I'm going to go write.
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I'm going to write for a while and that's it
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because your mind is saying, well, obviously we're going to take some breaks.
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We're not just going to write forever.
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And so why not right now?
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They're like, well, not right now. Let's go a little bit longer
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five minutes. Why don't we take a break now? We should probably
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look at the internet. 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.
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And maybe at a larger scale, deadlines give you
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a similar sort of effect.
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I know this is what I'm supposed to be working on because it's
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Perhaps, but we are describing as much healthier
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giving yourself over and you talk about this in
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the new email book as the process.
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I mean, in general, you talk about it all
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over is creating a process and then
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giving yourself over
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But then you have to be
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strict with yourself.
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But what are the deadlines you're talking about?
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Like with papers? What's the main type of
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Well, so papers, definitely.
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publications, like say this podcast,
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publish this podcast
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early next week one because your book
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is coming out. I'd love to
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support this amazing book.
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But the other is I have to
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to run 40 miles with David Goggins.
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this podcast, this conversation
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we're doing now to be out of my life.
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Like, I don't want to be in a hotel
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editing the, like freaking out while David
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Goggins is yelling. On hour, on hour
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your terephthong thing.
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But actually it's possible that I still
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will be doing that, you know, because it's
link |
that's not a heart, that's a softer deadline, right?
link |
But those are sort of, life imposes
link |
these kinds of deadlines.
link |
I'm not, so yeah, papers are nice
link |
because there's an actual deadline.
link |
the pressure that people put on you.
link |
Hey man, you said you're going to get this done
link |
two months ago. Why haven't you gotten it done?
link |
I don't see, I don't like that pressure.
link |
Yeah. So maybe now, first of all, I think we can
link |
I ate it too. We can agree by the way, having
link |
David Goggins yell at you is probably
link |
the top productivity technique.
link |
I think we'd all get a lot more
link |
done if he was yelling.
link |
But see, I don't like that. So I will try
link |
to get things done early. I like having
link |
flex. I also don't like the idea
link |
of this has to get done
link |
today, right? Like, it's due
link |
at midnight and we've got a lot to do
link |
as the night before because then I get in my head
link |
about what if I get sick? Or like
link |
what if, you know, what if I
link |
get a bad night's sleep and I can't think clearly.
link |
So I like to have the flex. So I'm all
link |
process. And that's like the
link |
philosophical aspect of that book, Deep Work, is that
link |
there's something very human and deep
link |
about just wrangling
link |
with the world of ideas. I mean, Aristotle talked
link |
about this if you go back and read the ethics.
link |
He's trying to understand the meaning
link |
of life and he eventually ends up ultimately
link |
at the human capacity
link |
to contemplate deeply.
link |
It's kind of a teleological argument. It's the
link |
things that only humans can do and therefore it
link |
must be somehow connected to our ends. And he said
link |
ultimately that's where that's where he found
link |
his meaning. But, you know, he's touching on some
link |
sort of intimation there. That's correct. And
link |
so what I try to build my life around is
link |
regularly thinking hard
link |
about stuff that's interesting.
link |
Just like if you get a fitness habit going,
link |
off when you don't do it.
link |
I try to get that cognitive habit. So it's like
link |
I got it. I mean, look, I have my bag here
link |
somewhere with my notebook in it because I was
link |
thinking on the Uber ride over, I was like,
link |
you know, I could get some, I'm working on this
link |
new proof and it just, so you train
link |
yourself. You train yourself to appreciate
link |
certain things. And then over time, the hope is
link |
Well, let's talk about some demons because
link |
I wonder, okay, this
link |
is like Deep Work,
link |
email books that to me symbolize
link |
And then there is, I'm like
link |
despite appearances
link |
adult at this point.
link |
And this is the life I actually live.
link |
I'm in constant chaos.
link |
You said you don't like that anxiety. I hate
link |
it too. But it seems like
link |
I'm always in it. It's a giant
link |
it's almost like whenever I
link |
establish, whenever I have successful processes
link |
for doing Deep Work, I'll add stuff
link |
on top of it just to introduce the chaos.
link |
Yeah. And like I don't want to.
link |
Yeah. But you know, you have to
link |
look in the mirror at certain point and you have
link |
to say like, who the hell
link |
am I? Like I keep doing this.
link |
Is this something that's fundamental
link |
to who I am or do I really need to fix this?
link |
What's the chaos right now? Like I've seen
link |
your video about like your routine. It seemed
link |
and deep. In fact, I was really envious of it. So like
link |
what's the chaos now that's not in that
link |
video? Many of those sessions
link |
go way longer. I don't get enough sleep.
link |
Yeah. And then the
link |
main introduction of chaos is
link |
it's taken on too many things on the to do
link |
I mean, I suppose it's a problem that everybody
link |
deals with was just saying
link |
not saying no. But it's not like
link |
I have trouble saying no.
link |
It's that there's so much cool
link |
shit in my life. Okay, listen
link |
there's nothing I love more in
link |
this world than the Boston Dynamics
link |
And they're giving me spot.
link |
So there's nothing to do. What am I going to
link |
say? No. So they're getting me
link |
spot and I want to do some computer vision stuff
link |
for the hell of it. Okay, so that's
link |
now a to do item. And then you go to Texas
link |
for a while and there's Texas and
link |
everything's happening. There's all the interesting people down
link |
there. And then there's surprises, right?
link |
There are power outages in Texas. There's
link |
constant changes to plans and all those kinds
link |
of things. And you sleep less.
link |
And then there's personal stuff like just
link |
people in your life, sources of
link |
stress, all those kinds of things.
link |
But it does feel like
link |
if I'm just being introspective
link |
that I bring it on to
link |
myself. I suppose a lot of people do this kind
link |
flourish under pressure.
link |
And I wonder if that
link |
if that's just a hack
link |
I've developed as a habit
link |
that needs, you need to let go
link |
of. You need to fix.
link |
But it's all interesting things.
link |
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, because
link |
these are all interesting things. Well, one of
link |
the things you talked about in deep work, which is
link |
like really important is like having
link |
an end to the day. Yeah.
link |
Like putting it down. Yeah.
link |
Like that. I don't think I've ever done
link |
that in my life. Yeah. Well, see,
link |
I started doing that early because
link |
I got married early.
link |
So, you know, I didn't have a real job. I was a grad
link |
student, but my wife had a real job. And so
link |
I just figured I should do my
link |
work when she's at work
link |
because, you know, hey, when works over
link |
she'll be home and I don't want to be, you know,
link |
on campus or whatever. And so
link |
really early on I just got in that habit of
link |
this is when, you know, this is when you
link |
work. And then when I was a postdoc,
link |
which is kind of an easy job, right?
link |
I was like, I want to train.
link |
I was like, when I'm a professor, it's going to be busier
link |
because there's demands that professors have
link |
beyond research. And so as a postdoc,
link |
I added artificial, large time consuming
link |
things into the middle of my day. I basically
link |
exercised for two hours in the middle of the day
link |
and do all this productive meditation and stuff
link |
like this while still maintaining the nine
link |
to five. So it's like, okay, I want to get
link |
really good at putting artificial
link |
constraints on so that I stay. I didn't want
link |
when my job was easy so that when I became a
link |
professor and now all of that's paying off
link |
I have a ton of kids. So
link |
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, you know,
link |
Well, but that, you know, but that's how
link |
you have a successful life. Otherwise, you're going to
link |
it's too easy to then go into the full
link |
Hunter as Thompson. Yeah.
link |
nobody functional wants to be in
link |
your vicinity. Like
link |
you're driving, you attract the people
link |
have a similar behavior
link |
pattern as you. Yeah. So if you
link |
if you live in chaos, you're going to attract
link |
chaotic people. And then
link |
it becomes like this self
link |
fulfilling prophecy. Yeah.
link |
I'm not bothered by it
link |
but I guess this is all coming
link |
around to exactly what you're saying, which is like
link |
I think one of the big hacks
link |
for productive people that I've met
link |
and have kids. Honestly.
link |
It's very perhaps counterintuitive.
link |
it's like the ultimate
link |
timetable enforcer.
link |
Yeah. It enforces a lot of timetables
link |
though it has a huge
link |
kids have a huge productivity hit those.
link |
You got to weigh it. But here's the
link |
complicated thing though. Like you could think
link |
about in your own life starting the podcast
link |
as one of these just cool
link |
opportunities that you put on yourself, right?
link |
Like, you know, I could have been talking to you at MIT
link |
four years ago and like, don't do that.
link |
Like your research is going well, right?
link |
But then everyone who watches you is like, okay, this podcast
link |
is the direction that's taking you is like a couple
link |
of years from now.
link |
It's going to be something really
link |
monumental that you're probably just going to 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. It's interesting. Yeah.
link |
Unexpected. Yeah. Yeah. So how do you balance those two
link |
things? And so what I try to throw at it
link |
is this this motto of do less, do better
link |
know why, right? So do
link |
do less, do better
link |
know why it used to be the
link |
motto of my website years ago.
link |
things but like an interesting array, right? So I
link |
stuff, but I was also writing,
link |
you know, so a couple of things are, you know, they were
link |
interesting. Like I have a couple bets placed
link |
on a couple different numbers on the roulette table,
link |
but not too many things.
link |
And then really try to do those things really well and
link |
see where it goes. Like with my writing, I just spent years
link |
and years and years just trained like I want to be a better
link |
writer, want to be a better writer. I started writing student
link |
books when I was a student.
link |
I really wanted to write hardcover idea books. I started
link |
training. I would I would use like New Yorker
link |
articles to train myself.
link |
I'd break them down and then I'd get commissions with
link |
much smaller magazines and practice the skills
link |
and I took forever until, you know,
link |
but now today, like I actually get a right for the New
link |
Yorker, but it took like a decade.
link |
So a small number of things tried to do them really well
link |
and then the know why is have a connection to
link |
some sort of value. Like in general, I think
link |
this is worth doing and then
link |
seen where it leads.
link |
And so the choice of the few things
link |
is grounded in what like a little
link |
like a little flame of
link |
passion, like a love for the thing, like a sense
link |
that you say you wanted to write
link |
get good at writing.
link |
You had that kind of introspective
link |
moment of thinking this actually brings me a lot
link |
of joy and fulfillment.
link |
Yeah, I mean, it gets complicated because I wrote
link |
a whole book about following your passion being
link |
bad advice, which is like the first thing
link |
I kind of got infamous for.
link |
I wrote that back in 2012.
link |
But the argument there is like
link |
passion cultivates, right?
link |
So what I was pushing back on
link |
was to myth that the passion
link |
for what you do exists full
link |
intensity before you start.
link |
And then that's what propels you.
link |
Where actually the reality is as you get better
link |
at something, as you gain more autonomy, more skill
link |
and more impact, a passion grows along with it.
link |
So that when people look back
link |
later and say, oh, follow your passion,
link |
what they really mean is I'm very passionate
link |
about what I do and that's a worthy goal.
link |
But how you actually cultivate that
link |
is much more complicated than just introspection
link |
is going to identify, like for sure
link |
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
link |
I don't know if you've heard of it.
link |
I have to ask you about this because I was
link |
invited to do a clubhouse. I don't know what that means.
link |
has invited me to do a clubhouse about my new book.
link |
Well, let me know when because I'll show up.
link |
But what is it? Okay.
link |
So first of all, let me just mention that I was
link |
in a clubhouse room
link |
last night and I kept plugging
link |
exactly what you said about
link |
passion. So we'll talk about it.
link |
It was a room that was focused on burnout.
link |
But first, clubhouse
link |
is a kind of fascinating place
link |
in terms of your mind
link |
would be very interesting to analyze this place
link |
we talk about email,
link |
we 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.
link |
That's voice only communication.
link |
So it's a bunch of people in a room.
link |
They're just eyes closed.
link |
All you hear is their voices.
link |
Live. It only happens live.
link |
You're technically not allowed to record,
link |
but some people still do,
link |
big conversations,
link |
but the whole point is it's there live.
link |
And there's different structures. Like on Discord,
link |
it was so fascinating.
link |
I have this Discord server
link |
that would have hundreds of people
link |
in a room together.
link |
We're all just little icons that can mute
link |
and unmute our mics.
link |
So you're sitting there,
link |
so it's just voices,
link |
and you're able with hundreds of people
link |
not interrupt each other.
link |
But first of all, as a dynamic system,
link |
just like mics muted or not muted basically.
link |
So everyone's muted and they
link |
unmute and it starts flashing.
link |
So you're like, okay, let me
link |
So it's the digital equivalent of when you're
link |
in a conversation at a faculty meeting
link |
make some noises while the other person's
link |
finishing and so people realize, okay,
link |
this person wants to talk next, but now it's
link |
purely digital. You see a flashing.
link |
Faculty meeting, which is very interesting,
link |
even as we're talking now,
link |
there's a visual element
link |
that seems to increase the probability
link |
When it's just darkness,
link |
you actually listen better
link |
and you don't interrupt.
link |
So if you create a culture, there's always
link |
going to be assholes, but they're
link |
actually exceptions.
link |
Everybody adjusts, they kind of evolve
link |
to the beat of the room.
link |
Okay, that's one fascinating
link |
aspect. It's like, okay, that's weird
link |
because it's different than like a zoom
link |
call where there's video.
link |
You think video adds,
link |
but it actually seems like it subtracts.
link |
The second aspect of it
link |
that's fascinating is when it's no
link |
video, just audio,
link |
there's an intimacy.
link |
in a much more real way.
link |
You go to podcasts.
link |
With a lot of people.
link |
With a lot of people and new people.
link |
okay, first of all, different voices,
link |
like low voices and like
link |
It's more difficult to judge.
link |
In Discord, you couldn't even see
link |
it was a culture where you do funny
link |
profile pictures as opposed
link |
to your actual face.
link |
In Clubhouse, it's your actual face.
link |
You're an older person, younger person.
link |
In Discord, you couldn't. You just have to judge
link |
based on the voice.
link |
something about the listening
link |
and the intimacy of
link |
being surprised by different strangers.
link |
It feels almost like
link |
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
link |
innovation where there's a large crowd
link |
that just listens and there's a stage.
link |
And you can bring people up on the stage.
link |
So only people on stage are talking.
link |
like five, six, seven, eight, sometimes 20,
link |
30 people on stage. And then you can also
link |
have thousands of people just listening.
link |
I don't know, a lot of people are being surprised
link |
by this. 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
link |
to harvest attention. It feels like a
link |
So the social network
link |
aspect is you follow people.
link |
And the people you follow,
link |
now this is like the first social network that's
link |
actually correct use of follow, I think,
link |
you're more likely to see
link |
the rooms they're in. So there's a, your
link |
feed is a bunch of rooms that are going on right
link |
the people you follow
link |
are the ones that will increase
link |
the likelihood that you'll see the room they're in.
link |
And so the final result
link |
is like, there's a list of really interesting
link |
I've always, 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, but it allows me to connect
link |
with that community. And then
link |
there's a community of
link |
like, it's funny, but like
link |
I'll go in a community of all African
link |
American people talking about race
link |
and I'll be welcomed. Yeah.
link |
I've never had, like I've literally never
link |
been in a difficult conversation
link |
like with people from all over the place
link |
it's like fascinating.
link |
Musicians, jazz musicians, I don't
link |
know. You could say that a lot of other
link |
places could have created that culture, I suppose
link |
Twitter and Facebook
link |
a lot for that culture, but there's something about
link |
this network because it stands
link |
It's probably just because it's iPhone people.
link |
Yeah. It's less inspiratory
link |
or something. Well, like less, listen
link |
I'm an Android person, so I got
link |
an iPhone just for this network. This is funny.
link |
For now it's all like
link |
there's very few trolls. Yeah.
link |
There's very few people that are trying to manipulate
link |
the system and so on. So I don't know
link |
it's interesting. Now the downside
link |
the reason you're going to hate it
link |
because it's so intimate, because it pulls you in
link |
and pulls in very successful people
link |
like really successful
link |
productive, very busy people
link |
it's a huge time sink. It's very difficult
link |
to pull yourself out.
link |
You mean once you're in a room? Well no, leaving
link |
the room is actually easy. The beautiful
link |
thing about a stage with multiple people
link |
there's actually a little button that says
link |
leave quietly. Okay.
link |
So culture, no, etiquette
link |
wise, it's okay to just leave.
link |
Yeah. So you and I in a room
link |
when it's just you and I, it's a little awkward to leave.
link |
If you're asking questions and I'm just gone. Yeah.
link |
But and actually if you're being interviewed
link |
that's weird because you're now
link |
in the event and you're supposed to
link |
but usually the person interviewing
link |
would be like okay it's time for you to go
link |
it's more normal but the
link |
normal way to use the room
link |
it's like you're just opening the app
link |
and there'll be like I don't know
link |
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
link |
at all, maybe you'll say something funny
link |
and then you'll just leave and there's
link |
addicting aspect to it, the reason it's a time sink
link |
is you don't want to leave.
link |
What I've noticed about exceptionally busy people
link |
love this, I think
link |
might have to do with the pandemic
link |
there's a loneliness
link |
but also it's really cool people
link |
was the last time you talked to Sam Harris
link |
or whoever, think of
link |
this is like what universities strive
link |
to create but it's taken
link |
cultural evolution and trying to get
link |
a lot of interesting smart people together that run into each other
link |
we have really strong
link |
together with no scheduling
link |
and 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
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 |
before the pandemic
link |
a friend or faculty or colleague and so on
link |
there's a weirdness about leaving
link |
there's not a weirdness about leaving
link |
you discover something interesting
link |
but the final result when you
link |
it's very fulfilling
link |
I think it's very beneficial
link |
but it's very addicting
link |
so you have to make sure you
link |
that's interesting
link |
the things that make me suspicious about other platforms
link |
the feed is not full of
link |
user generated content
link |
it's a rating process with all the weird incentives
link |
and nudging that does
link |
and you're not producing content that's being harvested
link |
by another company
link |
it seems like it's more
link |
the feed is just actually just showing you
link |
here's interesting things happening
link |
you're not jockeying in the feed for
link |
look I'm being clever or something
link |
and I'm going to get a light count that goes up
link |
and that's going to influence
link |
and there's more friction
link |
between listening to smart people
link |
versus scrolling through
link |
there's something there
link |
there's all these articles
link |
that seem, I haven't really read them
link |
but why are reporters negative about this
link |
the New York Times wrote this article called
link |
unfettered conversations happening on clubhouse
link |
I'm right in picking up a tone
link |
even from the headlines that there's some negative
link |
vibes from the press
link |
well I'll tell you what the article was saying
link |
cancelable conversations
link |
the biggest people in the world almost trolling
link |
and the press is desperate
link |
that you guys are looking for clickbait
link |
from our genuine human conversations
link |
honestly the press is just like
link |
what do we do with this
link |
first of all it's a lot of work
link |
it's what Naval says which is like
link |
this is skipping the journalist
link |
like the interview you
link |
if you go on clubhouse the interview you might do
link |
will be with somebody who's like a journalist
link |
that's more traditional
link |
it'll be a good introduction for you to try it
link |
but the way to use clubhouse
link |
is you just show up
link |
mentioning Sam Harris as if it's like the only person I know
link |
but like a lot of these
link |
major faculty I don't know
link |
major faculty just sitting there and then you show
link |
I'll ask like oh don't you have a book coming out
link |
or something and then you'll talk about
link |
the book and then you'll leave five minutes later because you have to go get coffee
link |
so like that's the
link |
it's not the journalist that you're not going to actually
link |
enjoy the interview as much
link |
because it'll be like the normal thing
link |
40 minutes or an hour and there'll be questions from the audience
link |
right like I'm doing an event
link |
next week for the book launch
link |
where it's like Jason Fried and I are
link |
talking about email
link |
but it's using some more like a thousand
link |
people 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 and then someone else jumps in
link |
and yeah that's interesting
link |
but for now it's still closed
link |
so even though there's a lot of excitement
link |
quite famous people just sitting there
link |
but the numbers aren't exactly
link |
high so you're talking about rooms
link |
like even the huge rooms are like
link |
just a few thousand
link |
and this is probably like Soho in the 50s
link |
or something too just because of the
link |
exponential growth
link |
give it seven more months and
link |
one invite begets two invites begets four
link |
invites begetting pretty soon it'll be
link |
everyone and then the rooms in your feed are going to be
link |
marketing performance enhancing drugs or something like that
link |
but then and a bunch of competitors
link |
there's already like 30 plus
link |
competitors sprung up twitter spaces
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 |
I would be very cautious of course
link |
with the addictive element but it doesn't
link |
just like you said this particular
link |
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 the keep a context is great
link |
and but then I think the best way
link |
I've found to use it is
link |
to acknowledge that these things
link |
I've used it in the past
link |
you know I'll go get a coffee and I'll tune into a conversation
link |
as if that's how I use podcast sometimes
link |
I'll just like play a little bit of a podcast
link |
you know I can just turn it off the problem
link |
with these is it pulls you in it's really
link |
interesting and then the other problem that you'll
link |
experience is like
link |
somebody will recognize you
link |
and then they'll be like oh lex
link |
hey I had a question for you
link |
and then it takes a lot for you to go
link |
like to to ignore that
link |
yeah yeah so yeah and then you pulled
link |
in and it's fascinating and it's really cool
link |
people so it's like a source of a lot of joy
link |
you have to be very very careful
link |
the reason I brought it up is we
link |
there's a room just an entire club
link |
actually on burnout
link |
I brought you up and I brought David
link |
Goggins is the process I go through
link |
my passion goes up and down
link |
and I don't think I trust my own mind
link |
whether I'm getting close to burnout or exhaustion
link |
I kind of go with the David Goggins model of
link |
I mean he's probably more applying it
link |
when it feels like your mind can't take
link |
that you're just 40%
link |
I mean it's just like an arbitrary level
link |
it's the Navy SEAL thing
link |
I mean you could put that at any percent
link |
but it is remarkable that
link |
if you just take it one step at a time
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
link |
if you look in aggregate
link |
the passion will increase
link |
and if you have two things
link |
this has been a big strategy of mine
link |
what you hope for is off phase
link |
off phase alignment
link |
sometimes it's in phase and that's a problem
link |
but off phase alignment is good
link |
my research I'm struggling
link |
my book stuff is going well
link |
and so when you add those two waves together
link |
we're doing pretty well and then
link |
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
link |
that can counteract each other
link |
now sometimes they fall into sync
link |
and then it gets rough
link |
because everything for me is cyclical
link |
good periods, bad periods with all this stuff
link |
so typically they don't coincide
link |
so it helps compensate
link |
when they do coincide you get really high highs
link |
like where everything is clicking
link |
and then you get these really low lows
link |
where your research is not working
link |
your program is not clicking
link |
you feel like you're nowhere with your writing
link |
and then it's a little rougher
link |
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 |
it's not just the up and down
link |
it's like you don't want to do anything
link |
for some people it's like physical
link |
to the hospital kind of thing
link |
so I do worry about it
link |
so when I used to do
link |
student writing like writing about students
link |
it came up a lot with students at elite schools
link |
and I used to call it deep procrastination
link |
really vivid, very replicatable
link |
syndrome where they
link |
stop being able to do schoolwork
link |
and the professor gives you an extension
link |
and the professor gives you an incomplete
link |
and says we're going to fail the course
link |
you have to hand this in and they can't do it
link |
it's like a complete stop
link |
on the ability to actually do work
link |
so I used to counsel students who had that issue
link |
and often it was a combination of
link |
you have just the physical and cognitive difficulties
link |
they're usually under a very hard load
link |
they're doing too many majors, too many extracurriculars
link |
just really pushing themselves
link |
and the motivation
link |
is not sufficiently intrinsic
link |
so if you have a motivational center
link |
that's not completely on board so a lot of these kids
link |
like when I'm dealing with MIT kids
link |
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 |
and they're really interested in being a doctor or whatever
link |
so your motivation is not in the right place
link |
the motivational psychologist would say
link |
the locus of control was more towards the extrinsic
link |
end of the spectrum
link |
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
link |
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 |
so on multiple scales and in the day
link |
I'll go really hard on something but then have a hard cut off at five
link |
so like every scale
link |
it's all about rest and recovery
link |
because I really want to avoid that and I do burn out
link |
I burnt out pretty recently
link |
I get minor burnt out
link |
I had a couple of papers
link |
that I was trying to work through for a deadline
link |
and I wasn't sleeping well
link |
and there's some other things going on
link |
and it just knocks out
link |
and I get sick usually is how I know I've pushed myself too far
link |
and so I kind of pull 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 and at every scale
link |
and then at the annual scale
link |
an easy summer for example
link |
I think it's like a great idea if that's possible
link |
you just made me realize
link |
that's exactly what I do
link |
because I feel like I'm not even close to burn out
link |
or anything even though I'm in chaos
link |
the right exact ways of seasonality
link |
not even the seasonality but like
link |
you always have multiple seasons
link |
operating 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
link |
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
link |
from depression too
link |
the fundamental problem with the experience
link |
of depression and burnout
link |
life is meaningless
link |
and I always have an answer
link |
why today could be cool
link |
and you have to contrive it
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 |
look I started a podcast during the pandemic
link |
it's like this is going pretty bad
link |
but you know what this could be something
link |
really interesting
link |
deep questions with Kyle Newport
link |
and 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
link |
I've always kind of taken that to heart
link |
you should be able to maybe artificially
link |
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 |
that goes deep on boredom
link |
it's like uncomfortable
link |
it's like an uncomfortable meditation on boredom
link |
the characters in that are just driven
link |
to the extremes of
link |
I just bought three books on boredom
link |
so now I'm really interested in this topic
link |
because I was anxious about my book launch
link |
happening this week so I was like okay I need something else
link |
so I have this idea for
link |
an article first but as a book
link |
okay I need something cool
link |
to be thinking about because I was worried about
link |
the launch going to work
link |
the pandemic what's going to happen
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
link |
sort of intellectual exploration
link |
well I think that's one of the profound
link |
ideas in deep work
link |
that you don't expand on
link |
too much as boredom
link |
deep work had a superficial idea
link |
about boredom which was
link |
I had this chapter called embrace boredom
link |
a very functionalist idea
link |
you have to have some boredom in your regular schedule
link |
or your mind is going to form a Pavlovian connection
link |
between as soon as
link |
I feel boredom I get stimuli
link |
and once it forms that connection it's never going to tolerate deep work
link |
so there's this very pragmatic
link |
treatment of boredom
link |
of your mind better be used
link |
to the idea that sometimes you don't get stimuli
link |
because otherwise you can't write for three hours
link |
like it's just not going to tolerate it
link |
but more recently what I'm really interested in boredom
link |
is it as a fundamental human drive
link |
right because it's
link |
incredibly uncomfortable
link |
and think about the other things that are incredibly uncomfortable
link |
like hunger or thirst
link |
they serve a really important purpose
link |
for a species right like if something is really
link |
distressing there's a reason pain is really uncomfortable
link |
because we need to worry about getting injured
link |
thirst is really uncomfortable because
link |
we need water to survive
link |
boredom why is that uncomfortable
link |
interested in this notion that
link |
driving us towards
link |
like as a species I mean think about it
link |
what got us to actually take advantage of these
link |
brains what got us to actually
link |
work with fire what got us to start shaping
link |
stones and the hand axes
link |
and figuring out if we could actually sharpen a stick
link |
sharpen after we could throw it as a
link |
melee weapon or a distance weapon
link |
mammoth right boredom
link |
drives us towards action
link |
so now I'm fascinated by this fundamental action
link |
instinct because I have this
link |
theory that I'm working on that
link |
we're out of sync with it
link |
just like we got we have this drive for hunger
link |
but then we introduce junk food and got out of sync with hunger
link |
and it makes us really unhealthy
link |
we have this drive towards action but then we
link |
overload ourselves and we have all
link |
of these distractions and then that causes
link |
it's like a cognitive
link |
action obesity type things because it short
link |
circuits this system that wants us to do things
link |
but we put more things in our plate than we can possibly do
link |
and then we're really frustrated we can't do them
link |
and we're short circling all of our wires so it all comes back
link |
well what would be the ideal
link |
sort of amount of stuff to do and type of things to do
link |
like if we wanted to look back at our ancestral
link |
environment and say
link |
if I could just build from scratch
link |
what type how much work I do and what I work on
link |
to be as in touch with that as like
link |
paleo people are trying to get their diets in touch with that
link |
and so now I'm just
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 |
trying to learn about animals and boredom and she sent
link |
me this cool article from an animal behaviorist
link |
journal about what we know about
link |
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
link |
like I don't know about this pandemic book launch
link |
my research is stumbling a little bit because of the pandemic
link |
nice you know high so there we go
link |
there's a case study
link |
well it's both a case study and
link |
a very interesting set of concepts because I didn't even realize
link |
that it's so simple
link |
I'm one of the people
link |
has an interesting push and pull
link |
dynamic with hunger trying to understand the hunger
link |
with myself like I probably
link |
have a non healthy relationship with food
link |
there's probably a perfect
link |
that's a nice way to think about
link |
there's probably an
link |
optimal diet response
link |
experience that our body is telling us
link |
the signal that our body is sending
link |
which is hunger and in that same way
link |
boredom is sending a signal
link |
and most of our intellectual
link |
activities in this world
link |
our creative activities are
link |
essentially a response
link |
and think about this analogy
link |
that we have this hunger instinct that junk food
link |
we'll satisfy that hyper
link |
palatably and it doesn't end up well
link |
now think about modern
link |
attention engineered
link |
digitally mediated entertainment
link |
we have this boredom instinct
link |
we can take care of that
link |
with a hyper palatable alternative
link |
is that going to lead to a similar problem
link |
so I've been fasting a lot lately
link |
I've been doing that for over a month
link |
just eating one meal a day
link |
and primarily meat
link |
fasting has been incredible
link |
just for feeling good
link |
we'll put on a chart what makes me feel good
link |
that fasting and eating primarily
link |
this diet makes me feel really good
link |
but that ultimately
link |
I haven't fasted super long yet like a seven day
link |
diet which I really would like to do
link |
but even just fasting for a day for 24 hours
link |
in touch with your
link |
it's fascinating like you get to
link |
learn to listen to your body
link |
it's okay to be hungry
link |
it's a little signal that sends you stuff
link |
listen to how it responds
link |
and I get to like okay
link |
cool so like food is a thing
link |
that pacifies the signal
link |
it sounds ridiculous okay
link |
and do different types of food
link |
it feels different so you learn about what your body
link |
for some reason fasting
link |
it's similar to the deep work
link |
of the body's boredom
link |
fasting allowed me to go into
link |
mode of listening of trying to understand the signal
link |
I have an unhealthy
link |
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
link |
say say calories 2,000 calories of cherries
link |
if I eat 2,000 calories of steak
link |
a little bit of like green beans
link |
cauliflower I'm going to feel
link |
fulfilled, focused and happy
link |
if I eat cherries I'm going to be
link |
I'm going to wake up behind a dumpster
link |
naked and like it's just
link |
and it's just like bloated
link |
just not and unhappy
link |
swings up and down I don't know
link |
much hungrier the next day
link |
sometimes it takes a couple days
link |
but when I introduce carbs into the system
link |
it starts it's just
link |
unhealthy I go into this roller coaster
link |
as opposed to a calm boat ride
link |
along the river and the Amazon or something like that
link |
so fasting was the
link |
mechanism for me to start
link |
listening to the body
link |
I wonder if you can do that same kind
link |
I guess that's what meditation a little bit is
link |
a little bit but listen the boredom
link |
but so two years ago I had a book out called
link |
digital minimalism and one of the
link |
things I was recommending that people do
link |
is basically a 30 day fast
link |
but from digital personal
link |
entertainment social media online videos
link |
anything that captures
link |
your attention and dispels boredom
link |
and people were thinking like
link |
oh this is a detox like I just want
link |
to teach your body not to need the
link |
distraction or this or that but it really wasn't what I was interested in
link |
I wanted there to be
link |
space that you could
link |
listen to your boredom
link |
okay I can't just dispel it I can't just look at the screen
link |
and revel in it a little bit
link |
and start to listen to it and say what is this really
link |
pushing me towards
link |
and you take the new stuff the new technology
link |
off the table and sort of ask what is this
link |
what am I craving like what's the
link |
activity equivalent of
link |
2000 calories of meat with a little bit of
link |
green beans on the side and I had
link |
1700 people go through this experiment like spend
link |
30 days doing this and it's hard at first
link |
but then they get used to listening
link |
to themselves and sort of seeking out what is
link |
this really pushing me towards and it was pushing
link |
people towards connection
link |
was pushing people towards I just want to
link |
go be around other people it was pushing
link |
people towards high quality
link |
leisure activities like I want to go
link |
do something that's complicated and it took
link |
weeks sometimes for them to get in touch with their boredom
link |
but then it completely
link |
rewired how they thought
link |
about what do I want to do with my time outside
link |
of work and then the idea is when you're done with that
link |
then it was much easier to go back and completely
link |
change your digital life because
link |
you have alternatives right you're not just trying
link |
to abstain from things you don't like but
link |
that's basically a listening to boredom
link |
experiment like just be there with the boredom
link |
and see where it drives you
link |
when you don't have you know the digital
link |
cheesets okay so if I can't do that
link |
where is it going to drive me well I guess
link |
I kind of want to go to the library which
link |
came up a lot by the way a lot of people rediscovered
link |
the library you know with physical books
link |
physical books like you can just go borrow
link |
them and like it there's like low pressure
link |
and you can explore and you bring them home
link |
and then you read them and you can like sit by the window
link |
and read them and it's nice weather outside and I used
link |
to do that 20 years ago they're listening
link |
to boredom. So can you maybe
link |
elaborate a little bit on the different
link |
experiences that people had when they quit
link |
social media for 30 days like is that
link |
if you were to recommend that process
link |
what is ultimately
link |
the goal? Yeah digital
link |
minimalism that's my philosophy
link |
and it's working backwards from what's important
link |
so it's you figure out
link |
what you're actually all about like what you want to do
link |
what you want to spend your time doing and
link |
then you can ask okay is there a place
link |
that tech can amplify or support some of these things
link |
and that's how you decide what tech to use
link |
and so the the process
link |
is let's actually get away from everything
link |
let's be bored for a while let's let's really
link |
spend a month getting really figuring out what do I
link |
actually want to do what I want to spend my time
link |
doing what's important to me you know what makes
link |
me feel good and then when you're done you can bring back
link |
in tech very strategically to help those things
link |
and that was the goal
link |
that turns out to be much more successful than
link |
when people take a
link |
abstention only approach
link |
so if you come at your tech life
link |
and say you know whatever I look at
link |
Instagram too much like I don't like how much on
link |
Instagram that's a bad thing
link |
I want to reduce this bad thing so here's my new
link |
thing I'm going to spend less time looking at Instagram
link |
much less likely to succeed in the long term
link |
so we're much less likely
link |
at trying to reduce this sort of amorphous
link |
negative because you know in the moment
link |
it's not that bad and would be kind of interesting
link |
to look at it now when you're instead controlling
link |
behavior because you have a positive that you're
link |
aiming towards it's very powerful for people like I want
link |
my life to be like this
link |
here's the role that tech plays in that life
link |
the connection to wanting
link |
your life to be like that is very very strong
link |
and then it's much much easier to say yeah like
link |
using Instagram is not part of my plan for how I
link |
have that life and I really want to have that life so of course
link |
I'm not going to use Instagram so it turns out to be a much
link |
more sustainable way to
link |
tame what's going on so if you quit
link |
social media for 30 days you kind of have to
link |
yes to do the work of thinking like
link |
what am I actually what makes
link |
me happy in terms of these tools that I've
link |
previously used and
link |
when you try to integrate them back
link |
how can they integrate them
link |
to maximize the thing they actually
link |
what makes me happy unrelated to technology
link |
like what do I actually what do I want my life
link |
to be like well maybe what I want to do is be
link |
outside in nature two hours a day and spend a lot more time
link |
like helping my community and sacrificing on behalf
link |
of my connections and then have
link |
some sort of intellectually engaging
link |
leisure activity like I'm reading
link |
or trying to read the great books and having more
link |
calm and seeing the sunset you
link |
you create this picture
link |
and then you go back and say well I still need my
link |
Facebook group because that's how I keep up
link |
with my cycling group but
link |
Twitter is just you know toxics on helping
link |
any of these things and well I'm an artist so
link |
I kind of 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 ten artists and check it once a week
link |
like you really can start to
link |
it was the number one thing that differentiated
link |
in that experiment the people who ended up
link |
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 like let me try to figure out
link |
what's positive they were much
link |
more successful than the people that just said
link |
I'm sick of using my phone so much
link |
so I'm just gonna white knuckle it just 30 days will be good
link |
for me I just gotta just gotta get away from it
link |
or something it doesn't last
link |
so you don't use social media currently
link |
do you find that a lot of people
link |
going through this process
link |
will seek to basically arrive
link |
at a similar place to not use
link |
social media primarily? About half
link |
right so about half when they went
link |
through this exercise and these aren't
link |
quantified numbers you know this is just
link |
they sent me reports and yeah
link |
that's pretty good though so 1700
link |
yeah yeah so so so roughly
link |
half probably got rid
link |
of social media altogether once they did this exercise
link |
they realized these things I care about
link |
I don't social media is not the tools
link |
that's really helping the other half
link |
kept some there are some things
link |
in their life or 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
link |
some social media almost none of them kept it on
link |
their phone oh interesting
link |
yeah I can't optimize if you if you don't know
link |
what it is the function you're trying to optimize so it's like this
link |
huge hack like once you know this is why I'm using
link |
Twitter then you can have a lot of rules
link |
about how you use Twitter and suddenly
link |
you take this cost benefit ratio and it goes
link |
like way from the company's advantage
link |
and way over towards your advantage it's
link |
kind of fascinating because I've been
link |
torn with social media but I did this kind
link |
of process I haven't actually done it for 30
link |
days which I probably should
link |
I'll do it for like a week at a time and regularly
link |
to Twitter works for me
link |
distinctly aware of the fact
link |
that I really enjoy
link |
posting once or twice a day
link |
checking from the previous post
link |
it like it makes me feel
link |
even when there's like
link |
negative comments they go
link |
right past me and when there's positive
link |
comments makes you smile I feel like love
link |
and connection with people
link |
especially people I know but even just in
link |
general it's like makes me feel like the world
link |
is full of awesome people
link |
okay when you increase that from
link |
checking from two to like
link |
I don't know what the threshold is for me but probably
link |
like five or six per day
link |
it starts going to anxiety world
link |
like where negative comments will
link |
actually stick to me
link |
and positive comments
link |
will feel more shallow
link |
yeah yeah it's kind
link |
of fascinating so I
link |
to there's been long stretches of time
link |
December and January where I did just
link |
post and check post and check
link |
that was that makes me
link |
really happy most of
link |
2020 I did that made me really happy
link |
recently I started
link |
like I'll go you know
link |
you go right back in like a drug addict
link |
will you check it like I don't know what
link |
that number is but that number is high
link |
you don't come out happy no one
link |
comes out of a day full of Twitter
link |
celebrating humanity and it's
link |
not even because I'm very
link |
fortunate to have a lot of just the positivity
link |
might the Twitter but I
link |
there's just a general anxiety
link |
I wouldn't even say
link |
I wouldn't even say it's
link |
probably the thing that you're talking about with the context
link |
switching it's almost like
link |
I wouldn't even say it's like a negative feeling
link |
it's almost just an exhaustion to where
link |
I'm not creating anything beautiful in my
link |
yeah life just exhausted
link |
existential exhaustion existential
link |
exhaustion but I wonder do you think
link |
it's possible to use from the people
link |
you've seen from yourself
link |
to use social media in the way
link |
I'm describing moderation or is it always
link |
when people do this exercise you get lots of
link |
lots of configurations
link |
so for people that have
link |
a public presence for example
link |
like what you're doing is not that not that unusual
link |
one thing a day and my audience likes it
link |
and that's kind of it
link |
but you thought through like okay
link |
this supports something I value which is like having a sort of
link |
informal connection with my audience
link |
positive randomness
link |
okay that's my goal
link |
what's the right way to do it well I don't need
link |
to be on Twitter on my phone all day maybe what I do is
link |
every day at five I do my post
link |
and check on the day
link |
so I have a writer friend
link |
Ryan Holiday who writes about the Stoics
link |
a lot and he has this
link |
similar strategy he post one
link |
quote every day from
link |
usually from a famous Stoic and sometimes from a contemporary figure
link |
and that's just what he does he just
link |
post it and it's a very positive thing
link |
like his readers really love it because it's just like a dose
link |
of inspiration he doesn't spend time
link |
he's never interacting with anyone on
link |
social media right but that's an example
link |
of I figured out 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 like I like what you're doing
link |
I looked you up I looked up your Twitter feed
link |
before I came over here I was curious
link |
you're not on there a lot
link |
I don't see you yelling at people
link |
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
link |
at all have you read like a amusing ourselves to death
link |
he was a social critic technology
link |
critic and wrote a lot
link |
about sort of technological determinism
link |
so the ways which is
link |
a really influential idea to a lot of my work
link |
which is actually a little out of fashion right now in academia but
link |
the ways that the properties
link |
and presence of technologies
link |
change things about humans in a way that's
link |
not really intended or planned by the humans themselves
link |
and he is that that book is all about how
link |
different communication medium
link |
like fundamentally just changed the way the human brain
link |
understands and operates
link |
and so he sort of gets into the what happened
link |
when the printed word was widespread
link |
and how television changed it and this was all
link |
but this one of these ideas I'm having is like what
link |
to the degree to which I get into it sometimes
link |
I show again to a little bit like the degree to which
link |
like Twitter in particular
link |
just changed the way that people conceptualized
link |
debate and discussion was
link |
like it introduced a rhetorical dunk culture
link |
or sort of more about
link |
tribes not giving ground to other tribes
link |
and and it's like it's a complete
link |
there's different places and times
link |
when that type of discussion
link |
with thought of differently right
link |
well yeah absolutely but I
link |
I tend to believe I don't know what you think that
link |
there's the technological solutions like
link |
there's literally different
link |
features in Twitter
link |
that could completely reverse that there's so
link |
much power in the different
link |
choices that are made and
link |
it could still be highly engaging
link |
and have very different effects perhaps
link |
more negative but or hopefully more positive
link |
yeah so I'm trying to pull these
link |
two things apart so there's these
link |
two ways social media let's say could
link |
change the experience of reading a
link |
major newspaper today one could be
link |
a little bit more economic right so
link |
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 going to survive
link |
but once you're in a paywall model then
link |
what you really want to do is make your tribe
link |
which is within the paywall very very happy
link |
with you so you want to work to them but then
link |
there's the sort of the determinist point of view
link |
which is the properties of Twitter which were arbitrary
link |
Jack and Evan just
link |
whatever let's just do it this way
link |
influence the very way that people now
link |
understand and think about the world
link |
influence the other I think yeah they
link |
they kind of started adjusting together
link |
I did this thing I mean
link |
I'm trying to understand this part of the
link |
I've been playing with the entrepreneurial
link |
idea there's a very particular
link |
dream I've had of a startup
link |
that this is a longer
link |
term thing with has to do with
link |
artificial intelligence but
link |
more and more it seems like there's a
link |
some trajectory through creating
link |
that type of technology is very different
link |
than what people are thinking I'm doing but
link |
it's a kind of challenge
link |
Twitter is done but
link |
it's not obvious what the best mechanisms
link |
are to still make an exceptionally
link |
my clubhouse is very engaging
link |
and not have any other negative effects
link |
I for example there's
link |
Chrome extensions that allow
link |
all likes and dislikes and all
link |
that from Twitter so all you're seeing
link |
is just the content
link |
on Twitter that to me
link |
creates that's not a compelling
link |
experience at all because I still
link |
I would argue I still need the likes
link |
to know 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
link |
for example on my account on YouTube
link |
I wrote a Chrome extension that
link |
turns off all likes
link |
and dislikes and just views
link |
I don't know how many views the video gets
link |
and so on unless it's on my phone
link |
do you take off the recommendations
link |
YouTube some people the distraction for
link |
YouTube is a big one for people
link |
no I'm not worried about the distraction
link |
because I'm able to control myself
link |
on YouTube you don't rabbit hole
link |
I don't rabbit hole so you have to know your
link |
demons or your addictions whatever
link |
on YouTube I'm okay I don't have I don't keep clicking
link |
feelings come from seeing
link |
stuff you've created
link |
so you don't want to see your views
link |
yeah I'm just like
link |
speaking to the things that I'm aware of of myself
link |
that are helpful and things
link |
that are not helpful emotionally
link |
and I feel like there should be
link |
we need to create actually tooling for
link |
ourselves that's not me
link |
with JavaScript but anybody
link |
sort of control the experience
link |
that they have yeah well
link |
so my my big unified theory
link |
on social media is I'm very I'm very bearish
link |
yes on the big platforms
link |
having a long future you are
link |
I think the moment I think the moment
link |
of three or four major platforms
link |
knock on the last right so
link |
I don't know okay this is just perspective right so you
link |
can start shorting these stocks
link |
on my don't tell me
link |
yeah yeah don't do Robin hood
link |
so here's here's I think the
link |
the big mistake the major platforms made
link |
they took out the network effect
link |
advantage right so the original
link |
pitch especially if something like Facebook
link |
or Instagram was the people
link |
you know are on here
link |
right so like what you use this for you can connect
link |
to people that you already know this is what
link |
makes the network useful we so therefore
link |
the value of our network grows
link |
quadratically with the number of users and therefore
link |
it's such a head start that there's
link |
no way that someone else can catch up
link |
but when they shifted and when Facebook
link |
took to lead of say we're going to shift towards
link |
a newsfeed model they basically
link |
said we're going to try to in the moment
link |
get more data and get more likes
link |
like what we're going to go towards is actually just
link |
seen interesting stuff
link |
like seen diverting information so people took
link |
this social internet impulse
link |
to connect to people digitally to other tools
link |
like group text messages and what's
link |
happened stuff like this right so you don't think
link |
about these tools as oh this is where I connect
link |
with people once it's just a feed that's kind
link |
of interesting now you're competing
link |
with everything else that can produce interesting
link |
content that's diverting I think that is
link |
a much fiercer competition
link |
because now for example you're going up against
link |
podcast right I mean like okay I guess
link |
you know the Twitter feed is interesting right
link |
now but also a podcast is interesting
link |
or something else could be interesting too I
link |
think it's a much fiercer competition when
link |
there's no there's no more network effects
link |
and so my sense is we're going to see a
link |
fragmentation into what I call long tail
link |
social media where if I don't need
link |
everyone I know to be on a
link |
platform then why not have
link |
three or four bespoke platforms I use
link |
where it's a thousand people and it's all
link |
we're all interested in you know whatever
link |
we've perfected this interface
link |
and maybe it's like clubhouse it's audio or
link |
something and we all pay two dollars so we
link |
don't have to worry about attention harvesting
link |
and that's going to be wildly more entertaining
link |
and I'm thinking about comedians on Twitter
link |
internet possible format
link |
for them expressing themselves and being
link |
interesting that you have all these comedians that are trying to
link |
like well I can do like little clips and little whatever
link |
like I don't know if there was a
link |
long tail social media and it's really this is where the comedians
link |
are and this podcast and the comedians are on
link |
podcast now so this is my thought is that there's
link |
there's really no strong advantage to having
link |
platform this everyone is on
link |
and if all you're getting from it is I now have
link |
different options for diversion and
link |
like uplifting aspirational or whatever types
link |
entertainment that whole thing could fragment
link |
and I think the glue that was holding together
link |
was network effects and I don't think they realized
link |
that when network effects have been destabilized
link |
they don't have the centrifugal force anymore
link |
and they're spinning faster and faster but is
link |
a Twitter feed really that much more
link |
interesting than all these streaming services
link |
is it really that much more interesting
link |
than clubhouse is it that much more
link |
interesting than podcast
link |
I feel like they don't realize how unstable
link |
their ground actually is yeah that's fascinating
link |
the thing that makes
link |
Twitter and Facebook work
link |
I mean the news feed
link |
you're exactly right like you can just duplicate
link |
the news like if it's
link |
not the social network and it's the news feed
link |
then why not have multiple different
link |
feeds that are more
link |
that are better at satisfying there's a
link |
dopamine gamification that they've figured out
link |
so you have to whatever you create
link |
you have to at least provide
link |
some pleasure in that same gamification
link |
kind of way it doesn't
link |
have to have to do with scale
link |
of large social networks but I mean
link |
I guess you're implying that
link |
you should be able to design that kind of
link |
mechanism in other forms
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
link |
these exist out here
link |
they realize sugar is bad to you
link |
they're going to stop eating
link |
drinking a lot is great too but also after a while
link |
you realize there's problems
link |
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
link |
of connection like it's usually
link |
interesting people that you share some affinity
link |
and you have these carefully cultivated
link |
I wrote this New Yorker piece a couple years ago
link |
about the indie social media movement that really
link |
got into some of these different
link |
technologies but I think the technologies
link |
on you know, Macedon versus
link |
whatever like forget or discord
link |
actually let's forget the protocols right now it's the idea
link |
and there's a lot of these long tail social media
link |
groups what people are getting out of it which I think
link |
can outweigh the dopamine
link |
gamification is strong
link |
connection and motivation like you're in a group
link |
with other guys that are all trying to
link |
be you know better dads or something like
link |
this and you talk to them on a regular
link |
basis and you're sharing your stories and there's
link |
interesting talks and that's a
link |
powerful thing too. One interesting thing
link |
about scale of Twitter is
link |
you have these viral spread of information
link |
Twitter has become a newsmaker
link |
in itself. Yeah, I think it's a problem.
link |
Well yes but I don't wonder what
link |
replaces that because
link |
because then you immediately
link |
one of the reporters would have to do
link |
some work again I don't know. The problem with reporters
link |
and journalism is that
link |
they're intermediary
link |
I mean this is the problem in Russia currently
link |
it creates a shield
link |
between the people and the news
link |
the interesting thing and the powerful thing
link |
about Twitter is that
link |
the news originates from the individual
link |
that's creating the news like
link |
you have the president of the United States
link |
the former president of the United States on Twitter
link |
creating news you have
link |
Elon Musk creating news you have people
link |
announcing stuff on Twitter
link |
as opposed to talking to a journalist
link |
it feels much more genuine
link |
it feels very powerful
link |
but actually coming to realize
link |
it doesn't need the social
link |
network you can just put that
link |
announcement on a YouTube type thing.
link |
This is what I'm thinking right so this is my point about that
link |
because that's right the democratizing power
link |
of the internet is fantastic
link |
I'm an old school internet nerd
link |
a guy that was you know
link |
telemediting in the servers and gophering before
link |
the World Wide Web was around right 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
link |
right so everything looks the same
link |
moves with the same low friction is very difficult
link |
you have know what I call distributed curation
link |
right the only curation that
link |
really happens there's a little bit with likes
link |
and also the algorithm but if you look back
link |
or early Web 2.0 when a lot
link |
of this was happening let's say on blogs
link |
where people own their own servers and you had your different
link |
blogs there was this distributed
link |
curation that happened where in order
link |
get on people's radar and this had nothing
link |
to do with any gatekeepers or legacy media
link |
you got more links and people respected you
link |
and you would hear about this blog over here and there's this whole
link |
distributed curation and filtering going on
link |
so if you think like the 2004
link |
presidential election
link |
most of the information people are getting from the internet
link |
was one of the first big internet news
link |
driven elections was from
link |
you know you had like the daily costs
link |
and drudge but there was like
link |
blogs that were out there and this was back
link |
Ezra Klein was just running a blog out of his
link |
you know dorm room at this point right
link |
and you would in a distributed
link |
credibility because okay
link |
people have paid it it's very hard to pay attention to a blog
link |
or pay attention I get linked to this
link |
kid Ezra 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
link |
Twitter where any random conspiracy
link |
theory or whatever that people like
link |
can just shoot through and spread
link |
whereas if you're starting a
link |
blog to try to push QAnon
link |
or something like that it's probably
link |
going to be a really weird looking blog and you're going to have a hard time
link |
like it's just never going to show up on people's
link |
everything you've said up until the very
link |
last statement I would agree with
link |
this is a topic I don't know a ton about
link |
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
link |
a blog today and he
link |
would have potentially a very large following
link |
if he's charismatic
link |
words is able to express the ideas
link |
whatever maybe is able to channel
link |
the frustration and anger that people have about
link |
a certain thing and so
link |
I think that's the power of blogs but it's also
link |
the limitation but that doesn't
link |
we're not trying to solve that you can't solve that
link |
the fundamental problem you're saying is not the problem
link |
thesis is that there's nothing special
link |
about large scale social
link |
networks that guarantees
link |
that they will keep existing and it's
link |
important to remember for a lot of the older
link |
generation of internet activists
link |
so the people who are very pro internet in the early days
link |
completely flabbergasted by
link |
the rise of these platforms
link |
take the internet and then build your own version of the internet
link |
where you own all the servers
link |
and we built this whole
link |
distribute the whole thing we had open protocols
link |
everyone anywhere in the world
link |
use the same protocols your machine can talk to any other machine
link |
it's the most democratic
link |
communication system that's ever been built
link |
and then these companies came along and said we're going to build our own
link |
let's own all the servers and put them in
link |
buildings that we own and the internet will just be
link |
the first mile this gets you into our private
link |
internet where we own the whole thing
link |
completely against the entire
link |
of the internet was like yes we it's not going to be
link |
one person owns all the servers and you pay to access them
link |
it's anyone server that they own
link |
can talk to anyone else's server because we all agree on
link |
a standard set of protocols
link |
and so the the old guard of
link |
pro internet people
link |
never understood this move towards
link |
let's build private versions of the internet
link |
three or four private internet 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
link |
and is helping to fund
link |
create fully distributed versions
link |
of Twitter essentially I think
link |
would potentially destroy Twitter
link |
but I think there might be financial
link |
cases to be made there I'm not sure
link |
but that seems to be another alternative
link |
as opposed to creating
link |
like the long tail
link |
creating like the ultimate long tail
link |
of like fully distributed
link |
which is what the internet is
link |
I'm thinking about long tail social media
link |
like the text not so important
link |
like there's groups out there
link |
where the tech they use
link |
to actually implement their digital only social group
link |
whatever they might use Slack
link |
Zoom or it doesn't matter I think in the tech world
link |
we want to build the beautiful protocol
link |
that okay everyone's going to use
link |
as just a federated server
link |
protocol in which we've worked out X Y and Z
link |
and no one understands it because then the engineers needed all
link |
to make I get it because I'm a nerd like this like okay
link |
every standard has to fit with everything else
link |
and no one understands what's going on
link |
meanwhile you know you have this group of
link |
bike enthusiasts that are like yeah we'll just
link |
jump on to Zoom and have some Slack and put up a blog
link |
and the tech doesn't really matter
link |
like we built the world with our own curation
link |
our own sort of social ecosystem
link |
that's generating a lot of value
link |
I don't know if it'll happen there's a lot of money at stake
link |
with obviously these large
link |
but I just think they're more
link |
I mean look how quickly Americans left
link |
I mean Facebook was savvy to buy other properties
link |
and diversify right but how quick did that take
link |
Facebook news feed everyone under the age
link |
of something we're using it and no one under a certain age
link |
is using it now it took like four years
link |
I believe people can leave
link |
Facebook overnight
link |
I think Facebook hasn't actually
link |
there's two things
link |
they haven't messed up enough for people to really leave
link |
aggressively and there's no good alternative
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 because it was
link |
feeding a certain type of
link |
righties that was in the sort of political sphere anyways
link |
but its moment could go to as well
link |
I mean it's a really arbitrary thing
link |
short little things and I read a wired article
link |
about this earlier in the pandemic like this is crazy
link |
we're trying to communicate information about the pandemic
link |
is in all these weird arbitrary rules
link |
where people are screen shotting
link |
pictures of articles that are part of a tweet
link |
thread where you say one slash in
link |
under it like we have the technology guys
link |
clearly convey long form
link |
information to people like why do we have these
link |
and I know it's because it's the gamified dopamine hits
link |
but what a weird medium
link |
there's no reason for us to have to
link |
have these threads that you have to
link |
find and pin with your screen shot
link |
I mean we have technology to communicate better using the internet
link |
I mean why are epidemiologists
link |
having to do tweet
link |
threads because there's mechanisms
link |
of publishing 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 |
it's kind of interesting to think
link |
that as opposed to Twitter
link |
this is what Jack also complains about
link |
is Twitter is not innovating fast enough
link |
it's almost like the people are
link |
innovating and thinking about
link |
their productive life faster
link |
than the platforms in which
link |
they operate can catch up and so
link |
at the point the gap grows
link |
sufficiently they'll jump
link |
a few innovative folks will just create an alternative
link |
distributed perhaps just
link |
and then people will jump and then we'll just continue this kind of way
link |
I think like Substack for example
link |
what they're going to pull out of Twitter among other things
link |
is the audience that was
link |
let's say like slightly left of
link |
slightly left of center
link |
don't like Trump uncomfortable with
link |
like postmodern critical theories made into
link |
political action right
link |
and they're like yeah Twitter there was a people on there talking about this
link |
and it made me feel
link |
heard because I was feeling a little bit like a nerd
link |
about it but honestly I'd probably rather subscribe
link |
the four subs you know I'm going to have like
link |
Barry's and Andrew Sullivan's I'll have like a
link |
Jesse signals like I'll have a few sub stacks
link |
I can subscribe to and honestly that's
link |
I'm a knowledge worker who's
link |
32 anyways probably that's an email all day
link |
and so like there's an innovation that's going to
link |
that group you know it's going to suck
link |
them off which is actually a very large group
link |
yeah that's a lot of that's a lot of energy
link |
and then once Trump's gone I guess that's probably
link |
going to drive that drove a lot of
link |
more like Trump people off Twitter
link |
like this stuff is fragile I think
link |
so I but the fascinating
link |
thing to me because I've hung out on parlor
link |
for a short amount
link |
enough to know that the interface
link |
matters it's so fascinating like that
link |
that it's not just about ideas
link |
creating like Substack too
link |
creating a pleasant
link |
experience a dicting
link |
experience you're right you're right about that and it's hard
link |
and it's why the end this is one of the conclusions
link |
from that indie social media article is
link |
it's just the ugliness matters
link |
and I don't mean even just aesthetically but just the clunkiness
link |
of the interfaces the
link |
and I don't know it's
link |
the some degree the social media companies have spent a
link |
lot of money on this and the some degree it's
link |
a survivorship bias yeah right I think
link |
Twitter every time I hear Jack
link |
talks about this it seems like
link |
he's as surprised as anyone else
link |
the way Twitter is being used I mean it's basically
link |
the way you know they had
link |
ago and then you know it was great
link |
it'll be statuses right yeah this is what I'm
link |
doing you know and my friends can follow me
link |
and see it and without really changing anything it just happened
link |
to hit everything right
link |
to support this other type of interaction well there's
link |
also the JavaScript model which
link |
Bernard and I talked about he just implemented
link |
JavaScript like the crappy
link |
version of JavaScript in 10 days throughout
link |
changed it really quickly yeah
link |
involved it really quickly and now it's
link |
become according to stack exchange
link |
the most popular programming language in the world
link |
yeah it drives like most of the internet
link |
and even the back end and now mobile
link |
yeah and so that that's an argument
link |
thing you're talking about where like
link |
the bike club people yeah
link |
could literally create the thing that would
link |
most of the internet yeah 10 years from now
link |
there's something to that like as opposed
link |
to trying to get lucky or trying to think
link |
through stuff is just to
link |
solve a particular problem do stuff yeah
link |
and do stuff do something like keep tinkering
link |
till you love it yeah yeah and
link |
then of course the sad thing
link |
is timing and luck matter
link |
and that you can't really control that's the
link |
problem yeah but you can't go
link |
back to 2007 yeah that's
link |
like the number one thing you could do to have a lot of
link |
success with the new platform is go back
link |
in time 14 years so the
link |
thing you have to kind of think about is what is
link |
the like what's the totally new
link |
10 years from now would seem
link |
obvious I mean some people saying clubhouse
link |
is that there's been a lot of
link |
stuff like clubhouse before yeah
link |
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
link |
and then the the other
link |
fact is like it's invite only
link |
so like oh all the
link |
famous people are on there I wonder what's
link |
it's the FOMO like
link |
fear that you're missing something really profound
link |
there's exciting happening there
link |
so those social effects
link |
and then once you actually show up
link |
I'm a huge fan of this
link |
it's the javascript model is like
link |
clubhouse is so dumb
link |
like so simple in its interface
link |
like you literally can't do anything except
link |
as a mute button yeah and there's
link |
a leave quietly button yeah that's it
link |
yeah and it's it's kind of
link |
I love single use technology
link |
that sense yeah there's
link |
no like there's no
link |
you know Twitter kind of started like
link |
that Facebook started like that
link |
but they've evolved quickly to add all these features
link |
you know I do hope clubhouse stays that way
link |
yeah be interesting or there's alternatives
link |
I mean I get I mean even with clubhouse
link |
though the so one of the issues
link |
with a lot of these platforms I think is
link |
bits are cheap enough
link |
we don't really need a unicorn
link |
investor model I mean the investors need
link |
that model there's really not
link |
really an imperative
link |
of we need something
link |
100 million plus a year revenue
link |
so because it was going to require this much
link |
seed and angel investment and
link |
you're not going to get this much seed and angel investment
link |
unless you can have a potential exit
link |
this this wide because you have to be part of a portfolio
link |
that depends on one out of ten exiting
link |
here if you don't actually need
link |
that and you don't need
link |
to satisfy that investor model which I
link |
think is basically the case I mean
link |
bits are so cheap everything is so cheap
link |
you don't necessarily even like with clubhouse
link |
it's investor backed right this notion of like
link |
this needs to be a major platform
link |
doesn't necessarily need a major platform
link |
that's where I'm interested I mean I don't know
link |
there's so much money that's the only problem that bets against
link |
me is that you can concentrate
link |
a lot of capital if you do these
link |
things right I mean so Facebook was like
link |
a fantastic capital concentration
link |
machine 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
link |
you know access to right that's
link |
incredibly powerful so when there's
link |
consolidate and gather a huge amount of capital
link |
that's a huge imperative that's very hard
link |
for the bike club to go up again so
link |
but there's a lot of money in the bike club
link |
you should see with the wall street bets
link |
and that when a bunch of people
link |
get together I mean it doesn't
link |
have to be a bike it could be a bunch of different bike clubs
link |
just kind of team up
link |
to overtake is what we're doing now
link |
or we're going to repurpose off the shelf
link |
we're going to repurpose whatever
link |
it was for office productivity or something
link |
like the clubs using Slack just to build
link |
out these you know yeah
link |
let's talk about email
link |
yeah that's right I
link |
wrote a book you're
link |
yet another amazing
link |
book a world without
link |
email maybe one way to enter
link |
this discussion is to ask what is
link |
the hyperactive hive mind
link |
which is the concept you open the book with yeah
link |
it's the scourge of hundreds
link |
I called this book a world without email
link |
the real title should be a world without the hyperactive
link |
hive mind workflow
link |
but my publisher didn't like that
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 if people are much
link |
why do we check email a day why are we on Slack all day
link |
you know and so I started working on this
link |
book immediately after deep work
link |
and so my initial interviews were done in
link |
2016 so it took five years
link |
to pull the threads together I was trying to understand
link |
why is it so hard for
link |
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 |
and 1995 it makes its move right
link |
and it does so for very pragmatic reasons
link |
it was replacing existing communication
link |
technologies that it was better than it was mainly
link |
the fax machine voicemail and memos right so
link |
this was just better right so it was
link |
a killer app because it was useful
link |
came a new way of collaborating
link |
and that's the hyperactive hive mind so it's
link |
the like the virus that follows
link |
went through western Europe for the black pig as
link |
email spread through organizations in
link |
its wake came the hyperactive hive mind
link |
workflow which says okay guys here's the way
link |
we're going to collaborate we'll just work
link |
things out on the fly with unscheduled
link |
back and forth messages just boom boom boom
link |
let's go back and forth hey what about this
link |
you see this what about that client let's see
link |
what's going on over here that followed
link |
email it completely took over
link |
to keep up with all these asynchronous
link |
back and forth unscheduled messages
link |
as those got more and more and more we had more
link |
there's a service the need to service those
link |
requires to check more and more and more
link |
right and so by the time and I go through
link |
the numbers by the time you get to today
link |
now the average knowledge worker has to check one
link |
of these channels once every six minutes
link |
every single thing you do in your organization
link |
how you talk to your colleagues how you talk
link |
to your vendors how you talk to your clients how
link |
you talk to the HR department it's all this
link |
asynchronous unscheduled back and forth messaging
link |
and you have to service the conversations
link |
and it spiraled out of control and it has
link |
sort of devolved a lot of work in the office
link |
now to all I do is constantly tend
link |
communication channels
link |
so it's fascinating what you're describing
link |
nobody ever paused in this whole
link |
to try to create a system that actually works
link |
kind of like a huge fan of cellular
link |
automata so it's just kind of started
link |
a very simple mechanism just like cellular
link |
automata just kind of grew to overtake
link |
all the fundamental
link |
communication of how we do business
link |
and also personal life yeah that's one of
link |
the big ideas is that
link |
the unintentionality yeah right so this goes
link |
back to technological determinism and this
link |
is a weird business book because I go deep
link |
on philosophy I go deep
link |
on for some reason we get in the paleoanthropology
link |
for a while we do a lot of neuroscience
link |
it's kind of a weird book
link |
but I got real into this technological determinism
link |
right this notion that just the presence
link |
of a technology can change how people act
link |
that's my big argument about what happened
link |
with the hive mind and I can document
link |
right so I document this example in IBM
link |
but isn't like the mid to late 80s IBM
link |
our monk headquarters we're going to put
link |
an internal email right because
link |
it's convenient and so
link |
they ran a whole study and so I talked to
link |
the engineer who ran this study Adrian
link |
Stuntley we're going to run this study to figure out how much
link |
do we communicate because it was still an era where
link |
it's expensive right so you
link |
have to provision a mainframe so you can't
link |
over provision like we want to know how much communication
link |
actually happened so they went and figured it out
link |
how many memos how many calls how many notes
link |
great we'll provision a mainframe
link |
to handle email 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
link |
than that estimate so just in
link |
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
link |
you know in all hands meeting guys we figured
link |
it out you know this is what we need to communicate
link |
a lot more is what's going to make us
link |
more productive we need more emails it's emergent
link |
just on a positive end amazing to you
link |
email amazing like in those early days
link |
like just a frictionless communication
link |
email is awesome like
link |
people say that there's a lot of
link |
problems with emails just like people say a
link |
lot of problems with Twitter and so on it's kind
link |
of cool that you can just send a little note
link |
it was a miracle right so
link |
there's originally was a New Yorker piece from
link |
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
link |
of email like why did it come along
link |
and it solved a huge
link |
problem so it was the problem of fast
link |
asynchronous communication and
link |
it was a problem that did not exist until we got large offices
link |
we got large offices
link |
synchronous communication like let's get on the phone
link |
at the same time there's too much overhead to it
link |
too many people you might have to talk to
link |
asynchronous communication like let me send you a memo
link |
when I'm ready and you can read it when you're ready
link |
took too long and so it was like
link |
a huge problem so one of the things I talked about
link |
is the way that when they built the CIA
link |
headquarters there's such a need for
link |
fast asynchronous communication
link |
that they built a pneumatic powered
link |
email system they had these pneumatic tubes
link |
all throughout the headquarters with
link |
electromagnetic routers so you would put
link |
your message in a plexiglass
link |
tube and you would turn these brass dials
link |
about the location you would stick it in these
link |
things and pneumatic tubes and it would shoot
link |
and sort and work its way through these tubes
link |
to show up in just a minute
link |
or something at the floor and at the general
link |
office suite where you wanted to go
link |
and my point is the fact that they spent so much
link |
money to make that work show how important
link |
fast asynchronous communication
link |
was to large offices so when email came along
link |
productivity silver bullet it was a miracle
link |
I talked to the researchers who were working on
link |
computer supported collaboration in the late 80s
link |
to figure out how are we going to use computer
link |
networks to be more productive and they were
link |
building all these systems and tools email
link |
showed up it just wiped all that research off
link |
the map there's no need to build these
link |
custom intranet applications there's no need
link |
to build these these communication platforms
link |
email could just do everything
link |
miracle application which is why it spread
link |
everywhere that's one of these things where
link |
okay unintended consequences right you had
link |
this miracle productivity silver bullet it
link |
spread everywhere but it was so
link |
effective it just you know I don't know like
link |
a drug I'm sure there's some pandemic
link |
metaphor here analogy here
link |
of a drug that like it's so effective at treating
link |
this that it also blows up your whole immune system
link |
and then everyone gets sick but well ultimately
link |
it probably significantly increased the productivity
link |
of the world but there's a kind of hump
link |
that it now is plateaued
link |
and then forward the
link |
fundamental question you're asking is like
link |
okay how do we take the next how do we
link |
keep increasing the productivity
link |
I think it brought it down so my
link |
so again there's a little bit in the book
link |
I have a more recent wired article
link |
that put some newer numbers to this
link |
I subscribe to the hypothesis that
link |
the hyperactive hive mind was so detrimental
link |
productivity at first right when you could
link |
do fascinicos communication but very
link |
quickly there was a sort of exponential
link |
rise in communication amounts
link |
once we got to the point where the hive mind
link |
meant 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 and I think the only
link |
reason why so it certainly has not been
link |
going up that metrics been stagnating
link |
for a long time now while all this was going
link |
on I think the only reason why it hasn't
link |
fallen is that we added these
link |
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 and only
link |
that I think has allowed us to basically
link |
maintain a stagnated
link |
non industrial growth it we should have been
link |
shooting up the charts I mean this is
link |
miraculous innovations the computer
link |
networks and then we built out these hundred billion
link |
dollar ubiquitous worldwide high
link |
speed wireless internet infrastructure
link |
with supercomputers in our pockets where we could talk to
link |
anyone at any time like why did our
link |
productivity not shoot off the charts because our brain
link |
can't context which once every six minutes so it's
link |
fundamentally back to the context switching
link |
in context switching
link |
is poison it's the what
link |
is it about email that forces context
link |
switching is it both our psychology that
link |
drags us in yeah no expectation
link |
yeah right right because it's not
link |
I think we've seen this through a personal
link |
a personal will or failure
link |
lens recently like oh my addicted
link |
to email yes I have
link |
bad etiquette about my email
link |
no it's the underlying workflow
link |
so the tool itself I will
link |
exonerate right I think
link |
I would rather use pop three than
link |
a fax protocol right I think it's easier
link |
the issue is the hyperactive
link |
hive mind workflow so if I am now collaborating
link |
with 20 or 30 different people
link |
with back and forth unscheduled
link |
messaging I have to tend those conversations
link |
right it's like you have 30
link |
metaphorical ping pong tables and when the
link |
balls come back across you have to pretty soon
link |
hit it back or stuff actually
link |
grinds to a halt so it's the
link |
workflow that's the problem it's not the tool
link |
it's the fact that we use it to do all of our
link |
collaboration let's just send messages back and forth
link |
which means you can't be far from checking
link |
that because if you take a break
link |
if you batch if you try to have better habits
link |
it's going to slow things down so
link |
my whole villain is this
link |
hyperactive hive mind workflow
link |
the tool is fine I don't want the tool
link |
to go away but I want to replace
link |
the hyperactive hive mind workflow I think this is going to be
link |
one of the biggest
link |
value generating productivity
link |
revolutions of the 21st century
link |
I quote an anonymous CEO
link |
is pretty well known who says this is going to be the
link |
moonshop of the 21st century is going to be
link |
of that importance there's so much latent
link |
productivity that's being suppressed
link |
because we just figure things out on the fly
link |
and email that as we figure that out I think
link |
hundreds of billions of dollars
link |
absolutely right the
link |
question is what is the world
link |
without email look like how do we fix email
link |
so what happens is
link |
at least in my vision
link |
actually there's these different processes
link |
that make up my work day like these are things
link |
that I do repeatedly
link |
often in collaboration with other people that do
link |
useful things for my company or whatever
link |
right now most of these processes
link |
are implicitly implemented with the hyperactive hive mind
link |
how do we do this thing like answering
link |
client questions to shoot messages back and forth
link |
how do we do this thing posting podcast
link |
episodes we'll just figure it out on the fly
link |
my main argument is we actually have to do like they do
link |
in the industrial sector take each of these
link |
processes and say is there a better way to do
link |
this and by better I mean
link |
a way that's going to minimize the need to have unscheduled
link |
back and forth messaging so we actually
link |
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 we can't just rock and roll
link |
an inbox as we actually have to say
link |
how do we deal with client questions well let's put in place
link |
a process that doesn't require us to
link |
send messages back and forth how do we post podcast
link |
episodes let's automate this to a degree where
link |
I don't have to just send you a message on the fly
link |
process by process and the pressure on that
link |
inbox is released and now you don't have to check it
link |
every six minutes you still have email I mean
link |
like I need to send you a file sure I'll use email
link |
but we're not coordinating or collaborating over
link |
email or Slack which is just a faster
link |
way of doing the hive mind I mean Slack doesn't
link |
solve anything there you
link |
have better structured bespoke processes
link |
I think that's what's going to unleash this
link |
massive productivity the spoke so
link |
the interesting thing is like for example
link |
you and I exchanged some emails so obviously
link |
I for let's just say
link |
my particular case I schedule podcasts there's
link |
a bunch of different tasks fascinating
link |
do that could be converted into processes
link |
yeah is it up to me
link |
to create that process or do you
link |
think we also need to build tools just like
link |
email was a protocol
link |
create process for the different
link |
tasks I mean I think ultimately
link |
the whole organization
link |
whole team has to be involved I think ultimately
link |
there's certainly a lot of investor money being
link |
spent right now to try to figure out those tools
link |
right so I think Silicon Valley has figured this out
link |
in the past couple of years this is the difference between
link |
when I was talking to people after
link |
deep work and now five years later
link |
scent is in the air right because there's so much
link |
latent productivity so yes there are going to be
link |
new tools which I think could help there are already
link |
tools that exist I mean in
link |
the different groups I profile use things like
link |
Trello or Basecamp or Asana
link |
or Flow and you know
link |
our schedule wants and acuity like there's
link |
there's a lot of tools out there
link |
the key is not to think about it in terms
link |
of what tool do I replace email with instead
link |
you think about it with
link |
I have a pro we're trying to come with a process
link |
that reduces back and forth messages oh what
link |
tool might help us
link |
might help us do that yeah and I would
link |
push it's not about necessarily efficiency in
link |
fact some of these things are going to take more time
link |
so writing a letter to someone
link |
is like a high value activity it's probably
link |
worth doing the thing that's killer is
link |
the back and forth because now I have
link |
the key to checking right so we scheduled
link |
this together because I knew you from
link |
before but like most of the interviews
link |
I was scheduling for this actually
link |
I have a process with my publicist where we
link |
use a shared document and she put stuff
link |
in there and then I check it twice a week
link |
and there's scheduling options
link |
I say here's what I want to do this one or this will work for this one
link |
or whatever and it takes more time in the moment
link |
than just but it means that we
link |
have almost no back and forth messaging
link |
for podcast scheduling which without
link |
this so like with my UK publisher
link |
I didn't put this process in the place because
link |
we're not doing as many interviews
link |
but it's all the time and I'm like oh
link |
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
link |
people involved like you said
link |
like they have to carry the responsibility
link |
creating processes like how
link |
always asking the first principles question
link |
how couldn't 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
link |
are doing that I think that's probably the right scale
link |
if you try to do this at the organizational scale
link |
you're going to get bureaucracy right
link |
so if it's you know right if
link |
Elon Musk is going to dictate
link |
down to everyone at Tesla
link |
or something like this that's too much remove
link |
you get bureaucracy but if it's we're a team of six
link |
that's working together
link |
on you know whatever power
link |
train software then we can figure out on our own
link |
what are our processes how do we want to do this
link |
so it's ultimately also creating a culture
link |
where saying like an email
link |
sending an email just for the hell of it it should
link |
be taboo like yeah so like
link |
you're being destructive
link |
to the productivity of the team by sending the email
link |
process and so on that
link |
that will ultimately
link |
automate this that's why I'm trying to spread
link |
this message of the context which is as poison
link |
I get so much into the science of it I think we underestimate
link |
how much it kills us
link |
to have to wrench away our context look at a message
link |
and come back and so once you have the mindset
link |
of it's a huge thing to ask
link |
of someone to have to
link |
take their attention off something and look back at this
link |
and if they have to do that for three or four
link |
times like we're just going to figure this out on the fly
link |
and every message is going to require five checks
link |
of the inbox while you wait for it well you've now you've created
link |
whatever it is at this point 25
link |
or 30 context shifts
link |
like you've just done a huge
link |
disservice to someone say this would be like if I had a professional
link |
athlete like hey do me a favor
link |
I need you to go do this press interview but to get there you're going to have to
link |
carry this sandbag and sprint
link |
up this hill like completely exhaust your muscles
link |
and then you have to go play a game like of course I'm not going to
link |
ask an athlete to do like an incredibly
link |
physically demanding thing right before a game
link |
but something as easy as
link |
thoughts question mark or like hey
link |
do you want to jump on a call and it's going to be six
link |
back and forth messages to figure it out it's
link |
kind of the cognitive equivalent right you're taking
link |
the wind out of someone yeah and by the way
link |
for people who are listening
link |
because I recently posted a few job openings
link |
for us so I had to help with this thing
link |
and one of the things that
link |
people are surprised when they work with me is how many
link |
spreadsheets and processes are involved
link |
and it's like Claude Shannon right I talked about
link |
communication theory information theory
link |
it takes time to come up with a clever code
link |
up front so you spend more time up front figuring out
link |
those spreadsheets and trying to get people on board
link |
your communication going forward is all much more efficient
link |
so over time you're using
link |
much less bandwidth right so
link |
you do pain up front
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
link |
now here's a tough question
link |
for you know from the computer science perspective
link |
we often over optimize
link |
so you create processes
link |
okay just like you're saying
link |
it's so pleasurable
link |
term productivity that sometimes
link |
you just enjoy that process in itself
link |
by just creating processes
link |
like it has a negative effect
link |
on productivity long term because you're too obsessed
link |
with the processes
link |
a nice problem to have essentially
link |
I mean it's a problem
link |
let's look at the one sector that does do this
link |
which is developers
link |
right so agile methodologies
link |
like Scrum or Kanban are
link |
basically workflow methodologies that are
link |
much better than the hyperactive hive mind
link |
some of those programmers get pretty obsessive
link |
I don't know if you've ever talked to a whatever level 3
link |
they get really obsessive about
link |
like 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 |
like to do that but it's
link |
a broadly probably an issue
link |
right 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
link |
you can't save yourself
link |
if you can get the process just right
link |
so I wrote this article
link |
kind of recently called the rise and fall and getting things done
link |
this productivity guru
link |
named Merlin Mann and I talked about this movement
link |
called productivity prawn
link |
as like elite speak term
link |
in the early 2000s where people just became convinced
link |
that if they could combine
link |
their productivity systems with software
link |
and they could find just the right software
link |
just the right configuration where they could offload
link |
most of the difficulty of work what happened
link |
with the machine so we kind of figured out
link |
and then they could just sort of crank widgets
link |
and the whole thing fell apart because
link |
it's 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
link |
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 to get rid of the context switches
link |
there's a logical process there for me
link |
I've literally embarrassing enough
link |
have lost my shit before
link |
in many of the processes that involve python scripts
link |
there's like rules for how you format stuff
link |
and I should not lose my shit
link |
when somebody had a space
link |
and maybe capital letters
link |
it's okay to have a space
link |
because there's this feeling like
link |
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
link |
that's flawless and when everything's working
link |
perfectly it's perfect
link |
if you strive for perfection
link |
like it has a lot of the stress
link |
that you were seeking to escape with the context switching
link |
stressing about errors
link |
like when the process is functioning
link |
there's always this anxiety of
link |
like I wonder if it's gonna
link |
I wonder if it's gonna succeed
link |
I think some of that's just you and I probably
link |
it's just our mindset
link |
we do computer science
link |
so chicken and egg
link |
and a lot of the processes
link |
of working here are much rougher
link |
instead of letting clients just
link |
we have a weekly call
link |
and then we send them a breakdown of everything we
link |
committed to right
link |
that's a process that works okay I get asked a lot of questions
link |
because I'm the javascript guy in the company
link |
instead of doing that by email I have office hours
link |
this is what base camp does
link |
you come to my office hours that cuts down a lot of back and forth
link |
instead of emailing about this project we'll have
link |
and we'll do a weekly really structure
link |
status meeting real quick what's going on
link |
who needs what let's go
link |
and now everything's on there and on our inboxes
link |
so like that rough level of granularity
link |
that gets you most of the way there
link |
so the parts that you
link |
can't automate and turn into a process
link |
how many parts like that do you think should
link |
remain in a perfect world
link |
for those parts where email is
link |
what do you recommend those emails
link |
look like how should you write
link |
emails when should you send them
link |
yeah I think email is good
link |
for delivering information
link |
right so I think of it like a fax machine
link |
or something you know it's a really good fax machine
link |
so if I need to send you something
link |
and you just send you a file I need to broadcast a new
link |
policy or something like email is a great
link |
way to do it it's bad for
link |
collaboration so you're having
link |
a conversation like we're trying to
link |
reach a decision on something I'm trying to learn
link |
about something I'm trying to clarify what something
link |
what what this is that it's more than
link |
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 |
don't talk often and so we have a kind
link |
of new interaction it's not
link |
yeah you have a book coming out so there's a process
link |
say there don't you think there's a lot of
link |
novel interactive experiences
link |
yeah it's fine so you could just
link |
for every novel experience it's okay to
link |
have a little bit of exchange it's fine
link |
like I think it's fine if stuff comes
link |
in over the transom or it's you hear from
link |
someone you haven't heard from in a while
link |
I think all that's fine I mean
link |
that's that's email at its best where it
link |
starts to kill us is where all of our
link |
collaboration is happening with the back and forth so when you've
link |
moved the bulk of that out of your inbox
link |
now you're back in that Meg Ryan movie
link |
like you got mail where it's like all right
link |
load this up and you wait for the vote I'm like oh
link |
we got a message yeah
link |
Lex sent me a message this is interesting right back to
link |
the AOL days so you're talking about the bulk
link |
of the the business world
link |
where like email has replaced the actual
link |
all the communication protocols required to
link |
accomplish anything everything is just happening with messages
link |
so if you now get most stuff
link |
done repeatable collaborations
link |
with with other processes
link |
that don't require you to check these inboxes then the inbox
link |
can serve like an inbox which
link |
includes hearing from interesting people
link |
right or sending something hey I don't
link |
know if you saw this I thought you might like it like it's great for that
link |
so there's there's probably
link |
a bunch of people listening to this they're like
link |
I work on a team and they're all they use
link |
is email how do you start the revolution
link |
from like the ground up yeah
link |
well do it a do asymmetric optimization
link |
first so identify all your
link |
processes 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 you know hey we
link |
gotta get this report ready here's
link |
what I think we should do like I'll get a draft into our Dropbox
link |
folder by like noon on Monday
link |
touch it again until Tuesday morning
link |
and then I'll look at your changes I have this office
link |
hours always scheduled Tuesday afternoon so
link |
if there's anything that catches your attention grab me
link |
then but I've told the designer
link |
who cc'd on this that
link |
by C.O.B. Tuesday the
link |
final version will be ready for them to take and
link |
polish or whatever like the person the other is like great
link |
I'm glad you know Cal has a plan
link |
so I just what I need to do I need to edit this
link |
tomorrow whatever right but you've actually pulled them into
link |
a process that means we're going to get this report together
link |
without having to just go back and forth you just
link |
asymmetrically optimize these
link |
things and then you can
link |
begin the conversation and maybe that's where my
link |
book comes in place you just sort of
link |
yeah slide it slide it across
link |
to buy the book just leave it
link |
leave it to everybody on your team
link |
okay so we solved the bulk of the email problem
link |
of this is there a case to be made that
link |
even for like communication between you and
link |
I we should move away
link |
email and for example there's a guy
link |
recently I don't know if you know comedians but there's
link |
a guy named Joey Diaz yeah that
link |
I've had an interaction with recently
link |
and that guy first of all the sweetest
link |
human despite what his comedy
link |
sounds like is the sweetest human being
link |
and he's a big proponent of just pick up
link |
the phone yeah and call
link |
yeah and it makes me so uncomfortable
link |
people call me yeah it's like I don't know what to
link |
do with this thing
link |
but it kind of gets everything done
link |
if I don't move the anxiety from that is
link |
there a case to be made for that or his email
link |
could still be the most efficient way
link |
to do this no I mean look if you have
link |
to interact with someone
link |
there's a lot of efficiency and synchrony
link |
right and this something from the distributed system theory
link |
where you know if you go from synchronous to asynchronous
link |
networks there's a huge amount of overhead
link |
to the asynchronous so actually the protocols required
link |
to solve things in asynchronous networks
link |
are significantly more complicated
link |
and fragile than synchronous protocols
link |
so if we can just do real time
link |
it's usually better than also from
link |
interaction like social connection standpoint
link |
there's a lot more information in the human voice
link |
in the back and forth
link |
yeah if you just call so very generational
link |
right like our generation will be comfortable
link |
talking on the phone in a way
link |
that like a younger generation isn't but an older
link |
generation is more comfortable with well
link |
you just call people whereas we
link |
so there's a happy medium but most of my good friends
link |
we just talk we have regular
link |
phone calls okay yeah it's not
link |
I don't just call them we schedule it we schedule
link |
it yeah just on text like yeah you want to talk
link |
do you ever have a process around friends
link |
I feel like I should I feel like
link |
when you have like a lot of interesting
link |
friend possibilities is you have like
link |
an interesting problem right like really interesting
link |
people you can talk to
link |
well that's that's one problem the other one is the
link |
introversion where I'm just afraid
link |
of people and get really stressed like
link |
I freak out and so you picked a good
link |
now perhaps it's the Goggins thing it's
link |
like facing your fears whatever
link |
but it's almost like
link |
it has to do with the timetables thing and the
link |
the nice thing about the processes is
link |
a way the context switching it ensures
link |
you do the important things too yeah
link |
it's like prioritized so
link |
the thing is with email
link |
because everything is done over email
link |
be lazy in the same way with like social
link |
networks and and do the
link |
easy things first yeah they're not that
link |
important so the process
link |
also enforces that you do the important
link |
things and for me the important
link |
it sounds weird but like social connection
link |
no that's one of the most important
link |
things in all of human existence
link |
the paradoxical thing I got into this
link |
for digital minimalism
link |
the more you sacrifice on behalf of the
link |
connection the stronger the connection feels
link |
right so sacrificing non trivial time
link |
and attention on behalf of someone
link |
is what tells your brain that this is a
link |
serious relationship
link |
which is why social media had this
link |
paradoxical effect of making people feel less
link |
social because it took the friction out of
link |
it and so the brain just doesn't like yeah
link |
you've been commenting on this person's
link |
whatever you've been retweeting them or
link |
sending them some text you haven't
link |
it's not hard enough and then
link |
the perceived strength of that social
link |
connection diminishes where if you talk to
link |
them or go spend time with them or whatever
link |
you're going to feel better about it
link |
so the friction is good I have
link |
a thing with some of my friends where at the end of
link |
each call we take a couple minutes to schedule the next
link |
then you never it's like I do with
link |
haircuts or something right like if I don't
link |
schedule it then yeah I'm never going to get
link |
my haircut right and so we it's like okay
link |
when you want to talk next you know
link |
yeah that's really that's a really good idea
link |
I just don't call friends
link |
and like every 10 years
link |
I do something dramatic for them so then
link |
we maintain the friendship like I'd murder
link |
somebody that they really don't like
link |
careful man Joey might ask
link |
oh this is one of my favorite things
link |
Lex I need to come down to New Jersey
link |
that's exactly what we're going to do
link |
with that robot dog of yours
link |
we're going to go down to Jersey there's a special
link |
human I love the comedian world
link |
they've been shaking up I don't know if you
link |
listen to Joe Rogan all those folks
link |
are doing something interesting for
link |
they're shaking up this world
link |
a little bit like podcasting
link |
because comedians are paving the way for podcasting
link |
yeah and so you have like
link |
Andrew Huberman who's a neuroscientist
link |
in front of my now
link |
into podcasting now and
link |
you're into podcasting of course you're not
link |
necessarily podcasting on computer science
link |
currently right yeah but
link |
it feels like you could have a lot of
link |
implemented by the people
link |
who are academically trained
link |
who actually have a niche
link |
specialty yeah and then
link |
that results I mean who knows what the
link |
experiment looks like but that results
link |
me being able to talk about robotics with
link |
he says you know drops F bombs
link |
every other sentence and
link |
I've seen actually a shift within
link |
colleagues and friends within MIT
link |
where they're becoming much more
link |
accepting of that kind of thing it's very
link |
interesting that's interesting so you're seeing
link |
okay because they're seeing how popular
link |
it is they're like well you're really popular
link |
I don't know how they think about it at
link |
Georgetown for example I don't know it's
link |
interesting but I think what what happens
link |
of it combined with
link |
just good conversations with
link |
people they respect
link |
yeah okay wait this is the
link |
thing yeah and this is more fun
link |
to listen to than a shitty zoom
link |
about their work yeah it's like there's
link |
something here there's something interesting and we don't
link |
nobody actually knows what that is
link |
just like with like clubhouse or something
link |
nobody's figured out like
link |
where is this medium take is this a legitimate medium
link |
of education yeah or
link |
is this just like a fun
link |
well that's your innovation I think was
link |
we can bring on professors
link |
yeah and I know Joe Rogan to some of
link |
that too but but you know
link |
but your professors
link |
in your field yeah bring on all these
link |
MIT guys who I remember you know
link |
well that's been the big challenge for me is
link |
I would I would ask big
link |
like philosophical questions of
link |
maybe people like yourself
link |
they're like really
link |
so for example you have a lot of excellent papers
link |
you know that a lot has a lot of
link |
theory in it right
link |
and there is some temptation to just
link |
go through papers and I think
link |
it's possible to actually do that I haven't done that much
link |
but I think it's possible it just requires
link |
a lot of preparation
link |
and I can probably only do that with things
link |
like in the field I'm aware of
link |
but there's a dance
link |
that I would love to be able to try to hit
link |
right where it's actually getting to the core
link |
interesting ideas as opposed to just talking
link |
about philosophy at the same time
link |
there's a large audience of people that
link |
just want to be inspired by
link |
like by disciplines
link |
where they don't necessarily know
link |
the details but there's a lot of people
link |
that are like hmm I'm really curious
link |
I've been thinking about pivoting
link |
careers into software engineering
link |
they would love to hear from
link |
people like you about computer science
link |
even if it's like theory yeah but just
link |
like the idea that you can have big ideas
link |
you push them through and it's interesting
link |
you fight for it yeah well there's some
link |
there's what is it computer
link |
number file these YouTube channels
link |
I watch I'm like chess exceptionally popular
link |
I don't understand
link |
maybe 80% of the time what the hell they're talking about
link |
because they're talking about like
link |
why this move is better than this move but I love
link |
the passion and the genius
link |
of those people just overhearing it
link |
I don't know why it's so exciting
link |
do you look at like Scott Aronson's blog at all
link |
the settled optimized yeah it's like
link |
hardcore complexity theory
link |
but it's just an enthusiasm
link |
or like Terry Tao's blog a little bit of humor
link |
Terry Tao is a blog
link |
he used to yeah he would
link |
and it would just be I'm going all in
link |
on you know here's the new affine
link |
group with which you can do whatever
link |
I mean it was just equations well in the case of Scott
link |
Aronson he's good he's able
link |
to turn on like the
link |
inner troll and comedian
link |
and so on yeah he's he keeps the fun
link |
which is the best and he's a philosophical guy
link |
he wrote that he turns off philosophy
link |
you know we're exploring these different
link |
ways of communicating in science and
link |
in exciting the world speaking of which
link |
I gotta ask you about computer science
link |
yeah that's right I do some of that
link |
of your work is what inspired this
link |
deep thinking about
link |
that activity from all the different
link |
angles because some of the most
link |
rigorous work is mathematical work
link |
and in computer science that theoretical computer
link |
science let me ask the Scott
link |
Aronson question of like is there
link |
something to you that stands out in particular
link |
that's beautiful or inspiring
link |
insightful about computer science
link |
or the or maybe mathematics
link |
theory and in particular
link |
what I've always liked in theory is the notion of
link |
possibilities that's kind of my specialty
link |
within the context of distributed algorithms
link |
my specialty is impossibility results the idea
link |
that you can argue
link |
nothing exists that solves this
link |
or nothing exists that can solve this
link |
and that's I think that's really interesting
link |
and that goes all the way back to Turing
link |
there's his original paper
link |
on computable numbers
link |
with their connection to the German
link |
problem but basically the German name
link |
that Hilbert called the decision problem
link |
this was precomputers but he was
link |
you know he's English so it's written in English so it's very accessible paper
link |
it lays the foundation for all of theoretical computer science
link |
he just has this insight he's like well if we think
link |
about like an algorithm he figures out like
link |
all effective procedures or Turing
link |
machines are basically algorithms we could
link |
really describe a Turing machine with a number
link |
which we can now imagine with like computer
link |
code you could just take a source file and
link |
just treat the binary version of the file as like
link |
a really long number right but it's like
link |
every program is just a finite
link |
number it's a natural number
link |
and then he realized like one way to think about
link |
a problem is you have
link |
this is like kind of the Mike Sipser approach
link |
but you have a sort of it's a language
link |
so of an infinite number of strings some of them
link |
are in the language and some of them aren't but basically
link |
you can imagine a problem is represented as an
link |
infinite binary string where in every
link |
position like a one means that string is in the
link |
language and a zero means it isn't
link |
and then he applied Cantor
link |
from the 19th century and said okay
link |
natural numbers are countable
link |
so it's countably infinite
link |
and infinite binary strings
link |
you can use a diagonalization argument and show
link |
they're uncountable
link |
so there's just vastly more
link |
problems than there are algorithms
link |
so basically anything you can come up with for the
link |
most part almost certainly is not solvable by a computer
link |
you know and then and then he was like let me
link |
give a particular example and he figured out the
link |
very first computability proof and let's just
link |
walk through with a little bit of simple logic
link |
the halting problem can't be solved by an algorithm
link |
and that kicked off the whole
link |
some things can't be solved by
link |
algorithm some things can't be solved by computers
link |
and we've just been doing theory on that
link |
since the, that was the 30s
link |
he wrote that. So proving that something is impossible
link |
sort of a more stricter version of that is it like
link |
proving bounds on the performance
link |
of different algorithms? Yeah so bounds are
link |
upper bounds right so you say
link |
this algorithm does
link |
at least as well and no worse than this but you're looking
link |
at a particular algorithm and possibility proof
link |
ever 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
link |
making a conclusive statement about the
link |
problem and that's somehow
link |
satisfying because it's
link |
philosophically interesting. Yeah I mean it all goes
link |
back to you get back to Plato it's
link |
all reducto ad absurdum
link |
so all these arguments have to start the only way to
link |
do it is there's an infinite number of solutions
link |
that you can't go through them as you say let's assume
link |
for the sake of contradiction
link |
that there existed something that solves this problem
link |
and then you turn to crank logic
link |
until you blow up the universe and then you go
link |
back and say okay our original assumption
link |
that this solution exists can't be true
link |
I just think philosophically it's like a
link |
really exciting kind of beautiful thing it's what
link |
I specialize in within distributed algorithms
link |
is more like time bound
link |
and possibility results like no
link |
no algorithm can solve this problem faster than this
link |
in this setting of all
link |
the infinite number of ways you might ever do it.
link |
So you have of many papers
link |
but the one that caught my eye smooth analysis
link |
of dynamic networks
link |
in which you write
link |
a problem with the worst
link |
case perspective is that it often leads to extremely
link |
strong lower bounds these strong
link |
results motivate a key question
link |
is this bound robust in the sense that it
link |
captures the fundamental difficulty
link |
introduced by dynamism
link |
or is the bound fragile
link |
in the sense that the poor performance it describes
link |
depends on an exact sequence
link |
of adversarial changes
link |
fragile lower bounds
link |
leave open the possibility of algorithms that
link |
might still perform well in practice
link |
in the sense of the impossible and the bounds
link |
discussion presents the
link |
interesting question I just like the
link |
idea of robust and fragile bounds
link |
what do you make about this kind
link |
of tension between
link |
what's provably like
link |
what bounds you can prove
link |
that are like robust
link |
and something that's a bit more fragile
link |
by way of answering that
link |
for this particular paper
link |
can you say what the hell are dynamic networks
link |
what are distributed outcomes
link |
you don't know this come on now
link |
and I have no idea and what is smooth analysis
link |
smooth analysis it's so wasn't my idea
link |
so Spielman and Tang came up
link |
with this in the context of sequential
link |
algorithms just like
link |
the normal world of an algorithm that runs on a computer
link |
and they were looking at
link |
there's a well known algorithm called the simplex
link |
algorithm but basically you're trying to
link |
whole around a group of points and there's an algorithm
link |
that worked really well in practice
link |
but when you analyze it you would say
link |
you know I can't guarantee it's going to work well in practice
link |
because you have just the right
link |
inputs this thing could run really long
link |
right but in practice it seemed to be really fast
link |
so smooth analysis as they came
link |
in and they said let's assume that
link |
a bad guy chooses the inputs
link |
it could be anything like really bad ones
link |
and all we're going to do because in simplex
link |
their numbers we're going to just randomly
link |
put a little bit of noise on each of the
link |
numbers and they said if you put a little bit of noise
link |
on the numbers suddenly simplex algorithm
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
link |
run a really long time if you had exactly
link |
the worst pathological input
link |
and then my collaborators and I brought this over to the world
link |
the distributed algorithms
link |
we brought them over the general lower bounds
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 and sometimes they're in a network
link |
so you imagine them connected with
link |
network links and a dynamic
link |
network those can change
link |
so I was talking to you but now I can't talk to you
link |
anymore now I'm connected to a person over here
link |
it's a really hard environment mathematically
link |
speaking and there's a lot of really
link |
strong lower bounds which you could imagine
link |
if the network can change all the time
link |
and a bad guy is doing it it's like hard
link |
to do things well so there's an algorithm
link |
running on every single node in the network
link |
and then you're trying to say something
link |
of any kind that makes any kind of definitive
link |
sense about the performance of that algorithm
link |
yeah so like we're
link |
I just submitted a new paper on this a couple 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 there's some algorithms that work
link |
basic algorithms that work really well
link |
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 like no matter what algorithm you come up with
link |
there's a way that network can change in such a way
link |
that just really slows down your progress
link |
basically right so smooth analysis
link |
there says yeah but that seems like a
link |
really you know really bad luck
link |
if your network was changing like
link |
exactly in the right
link |
way that you needed to screw your algorithm
link |
so we said what if we
link |
randomly just add or remove a couple edges
link |
in every round so the adversaries trying to choose the worst
link |
possible network 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 so maybe I shouldn't
link |
we basically showed
link |
an anonymous friend of yours submitted a paper
link |
anonymous friend of mine yeah
link |
whose paper should be accepted
link |
so that even just adding like one random edge
link |
and here's a cool thing about the simplest
link |
possible solution to this problem
link |
blows away that lower bound it does really well
link |
so that's like a very fragile lower bound
link |
because we're like it's almost impossible
link |
I wonder how many lower bounds you can
link |
with this kind of analysis and show that they're fragile
link |
this is 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
link |
really really wrong
link |
for these lower bound arguments to work
link |
and so I like this approach so this
link |
whole notion of fragile versus robust
link |
I was like well let's go in and just
link |
throw a little noise in there and if it becomes solvable
link |
then maybe that lower bound wasn't
link |
really something we should worry about
link |
that's kind of embarrassed that's really uncomfortable
link |
that's really embarrassing
link |
to a lot of people
link |
okay this is the OCD thing with the
link |
it feels really good when you can provenize bound
link |
if you say that that bound is fragile
link |
that's like there's going to be a sad kid
link |
like with their lunchbox back home
link |
my lower bound doesn't matter
link |
I don't think they care it's all
link |
I don't know it feels like to me a lot of this
link |
theory is just math machismo
link |
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 more important that's really important
link |
so do you think kind of theoretical
link |
computer science is living its own world
link |
just like mathematics and their main
link |
effort which I think is very valuable
link |
is to develop ideas it's not necessarily
link |
interesting whether it's applicable
link |
in the real world we don't care about the applicability
link |
we kind of do but not really
link |
we're terrible with computers
link |
we can't do anything useful with computers
link |
we don't know how to code and
link |
we're not productive members
link |
of technological society but
link |
I do think things percolate
link |
you percolate from the
link |
world of theory into the world of algorithm design
link |
which we'll pull on the theory and now suddenly
link |
it's useful and then the algorithm design
link |
gets pulled into the world of practice where they say
link |
well actually we can make this algorithm a lot better
link |
because in practice really these servers do XYZ
link |
and now we can make this super efficient
link |
and so I do think, I mean I teach
link |
theory to the PhD students at Georgetown
link |
I show them the sort of funnel
link |
of like okay we're over here doing theory
link |
but eventually some of this stuff will percolate
link |
down in effect at the very end
link |
you know a phone but it's a long
link |
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
link |
a distributed system or a network
link |
and introduce a little bit of noise
link |
into it like how many
link |
problems of that nature
link |
changed by that little introduction
link |
because it's all especially distributed algorithms
link |
the model is everything
link |
the way we work is we're incredibly precise
link |
about here's exactly, it's mathematical
link |
here's exactly how the network works
link |
and it's a state machine, algorithms are state
link |
machines, there's rounds and schedulers
link |
we're super precise so we can prove lower bounds
link |
but yeah often there's lower, those impossibility results
link |
really get at the hard
link |
edges of exactly how that model
link |
works so we'll see if this
link |
we publish the paper on this, that paper you
link |
they kind of introduced the idea to the distributed algorithms
link |
and I think that's got
link |
some traction and there's been some follow up
link |
so we've just submitted our
link |
our next, honestly
link |
the issue with the next is that like the result fell out
link |
so easily and this shows the mathematical
link |
machismo problem in these fields
link |
is there's a good chance
link |
the paper won't be accepted because there wasn't
link |
enough mathematical self
link |
modulation. That's such a nice finding
link |
so even just showing that very
link |
few, just very little bit of noise
link |
can have a dramatic
link |
make a dramatic statement about
link |
it was a big surprise to us but
link |
once we figured out how to show it
link |
and these are venues
link |
the fascinating tension there exists in other disciplines
link |
like one of them is machine learning
link |
of machine learning and deep learning and all
link |
like the impact of it
link |
the main conferences on machine learning
link |
are still resistant to application papers
link |
and application papers broadly defined
link |
finding almost like you would
link |
like Darwin did by like
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
link |
it's not really accepted. I wonder
link |
what you think about this whole world of deep
link |
from a perspective of theory
link |
make of this whole discipline
link |
of the success of neural networks of how to do
link |
science on them. Are you excited
link |
by the possibilities
link |
of what we might discover about neural networks
link |
do you think is fundamental in engineering discipline
link |
or is there something
link |
theoretical that we might crack open
link |
one of these days and understanding
link |
something deep about how system optimization
link |
when how systems learn
link |
is it Tegemark and MIT who's
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 going to get better
link |
and better because in the end you know
link |
the reason why practicing computer scientists
link |
often who are doing AI
link |
or working at AI on industry aren't like
link |
worried about so much existential
link |
threats is because they see the reality is
link |
they're multiplying matrices
link |
with NumPy or something like this, right?
link |
And tweaking constants and hoping that the
link |
classifier fitness for
link |
God's sakes before the submission
link |
deadline actually gets above some like it feels
link |
like it's linear algebra
link |
I'm really convinced with his idea that once we understand
link |
better and better what's going on from a theory perspective
link |
it's going to make it into an engineering discipline
link |
so in my mind where we're going to end up
link |
is okay you forget
link |
these metaphors of neurons
link |
and these things are going to be put down
link |
into these mathematical kind of elegant equations
link |
differentiable equations that just
link |
kind of work well and then it's going to be
link |
when I need a little bit of AI in this thing
link |
like let's get a little bit of a
link |
pattern recognizer with a noise module
link |
and let's connect I mean you know this feel better than me
link |
so I don't know if this is like a reasonable
link |
a reasonable prediction but that we're going to
link |
it's going to become less inscrutable
link |
and then it's going to become more engineerable
link |
and then we're going to have AI and more
link |
things because we're going to have a little bit more
link |
control over how we
link |
piece together these different classification
link |
So one of the problems and there might be
link |
some interesting parallels that you might provide
link |
intuition on is you know neural networks are very
link |
large and they have a lot of
link |
it you know we were talking about
link |
dynamic networks and distributed
link |
and one of the problems with the analysis of
link |
is you know you have a lot of nodes
link |
and you have a lot of edges
link |
to be able to interpret
link |
and to control different things is very difficult
link |
fields and trying to figure out
link |
like mathematically how you form
link |
representations that are like
link |
like one node contains
link |
all the information about
link |
a particular thing and no other nodes
link |
are correlated to it so like
link |
it has unique knowledge
link |
but that ultimately boils down to trying
link |
to simplify this thing
link |
into that goes against this very
link |
nature which is like
link |
hundreds of millions billions of nodes
link |
and in a distributed sense
link |
like when you zoom out
link |
the thing has a representation
link |
of understanding of something but the individual
link |
is just doing that little exchange
link |
thing and it's the same thing
link |
with Stephen Wolfram when you talk about
link |
cellular automata it's very difficult to do math
link |
when you have a huge collection
link |
of distributed things each acting on their own
link |
and it's almost like
link |
it feels like it's
link |
almost impossible to do any kind of
link |
theoretical work in the traditional sense
link |
it almost becomes completely
link |
you become a biologist as
link |
opposed to a theoretician
link |
you just study it experimentally
link |
I think that's the big question I guess
link |
and interconnectedness of the
link |
deep learning network
link |
fundamental to that task or we just not very good
link |
at it yet because we're using the wrong
link |
I mean the human brain learns with much
link |
fewer examples and
link |
with much less tuning of the
link |
whatever whatever whatever probably that requires
link |
to get those 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
link |
the mundane nature of some of the working with
link |
tends to lead people to think that
link |
it could be Skynet or it could be
link |
like a lot of pain to get
link |
the thermostat to do what we wanted to do
link |
and there's a lot of open questions in between there
link |
and then of course
link |
distributed network
link |
that use these systems so like you can have
link |
the neural network but you can also have
link |
little algorithms controlling the behavior of humans
link |
which is what you have with social networks
link |
it's possible that a very
link |
what is it a toaster or whatever
link |
the opposite of Skynet
link |
when taking a scale well used by individual humans
link |
and controlling their behavior can actually have
link |
so the scale there
link |
we might have that now
link |
but we just don't know
link |
is Twitter creating a little mini Skynet
link |
because what happens it twirls out
link |
ramifications in the world
link |
and is it really that much different
link |
if it's a robot with tentacles
link |
or a bunch of servers
link |
and the destructive effects
link |
it could be political but
link |
it could also be like
link |
you could probably make an interesting case that
link |
spread on Twitter too
link |
in the minds of people
link |
and the misinformation in some very interesting ways
link |
and maybe this pandemic wasn't sufficiently
link |
dangerous to where that could have created a weird
link |
instability but maybe other things might
link |
create instability like somebody
link |
God forbid detonates nuclear weapons
link |
so where and then maybe the
link |
destructive aspect of that would not
link |
as much be the military actions
link |
but the way those news
link |
are spread on Twitter
link |
and the panic that creates
link |
I think that's a great case study
link |
I'm not suggesting that you
link |
let off a nuclear bomb I meant the coronavirus
link |
I think that's a really interesting case study
link |
I'm interested in the counterfactual
link |
do the same virus in 1995
link |
so first of all it would have been
link |
I get to hear whatever
link |
about it and then they'll be my local
link |
health board will talk about it
link |
that mitigation decisions would
link |
probably necessarily be
link |
very sort of localized
link |
like our community is trying to figure out what are we going to do
link |
what's going to happen 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
link |
had sort of really bad viral numbers
link |
there 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 what do we want
link |
to do 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
link |
so I'm interested in that counterfactual
link |
yes you have all this information moving around
link |
and then you have the
link |
the effects on discourse that we were talking about earlier
link |
that the Neil Postman
link |
style effects of Twitter which shifts
link |
people into a sort of a dunk culture mindset
link |
an inch to the other team
link |
we're used to this and was fired up by politics
link |
and the unique attributes of Twitter
link |
now throw in the coronavirus and suddenly we see
link |
decades of public health
link |
knowledge a lot of which was honed during the HIV
link |
epidemic 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
link |
mindset of like well if we say this
link |
that might validate something that was wrong
link |
over here and we need to if we say this
link |
and maybe like that'll stop them from doing this
link |
that's like very Twittery
link |
in a way that in 1995 is probably
link |
public health officials would be thinking
link |
or now it's like well this is if we said this
link |
about masks but the other team said that about
link |
masks we can't give an inch so we got to be
link |
careful 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 and that's very
link |
Twittery in my mind right that is the impact
link |
of Twitter on the way
link |
we think about discourse which is a dunking culture
link |
of don't give any inch to the other team and it's all about
link |
slam dunks we are completely right and they're completely wrong
link |
it's as a rhetorical strategy is incredibly
link |
simplistic but it's also the way that we
link |
think right now about how we do debate
link |
it combined terribly
link |
with an election year pandemic
link |
yeah an 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 noise yeah see if
link |
it can dramatically change the behavior of the system
link |
yeah okay we talked about
link |
your love for proving that
link |
something is impossible so there's
link |
quite a few still open problems
link |
of algorithms so let me ask
link |
you know and you'll be really surprised
link |
somebody proves it yeah
link |
what would that proof look like
link |
and why would that even be what would that mean
link |
what would that proof look like
link |
in what possible universe could P equals NP
link |
is there something insightful you can say there
link |
I mean I'm not a complexity theorist but every
link |
complexity theorist I know
link |
is convinced they're not equal
link |
and are basically not working on anymore
link |
I mean there is a million dollars at stake if you can
link |
solve the proof it's one of the millennium prizes
link |
okay so here's how I think
link |
the P not equals NP proof is going to eventually
link |
happen I think it's going to fall out
link |
and it's going to be
link |
but not as hard as people think because
link |
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 is that
link |
a lot of what we're doing is just obfuscating
link |
deeper mathematics
link |
so like this happens to me a lot
link |
not a lot but it's happened to me a few times in my work
link |
where we obfuscate it because
link |
we say well there's an algorithm and it has this much
link |
you know memory and they're connected on a network
link |
and okay here's our setup and now we're
link |
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 that like we were just obfuscating
link |
you know mathematical thing that already
link |
existed right so this has happened
link |
to me I had this paper I was quite fond
link |
of a while ago it was looking at this
link |
problem called contention resolution
link |
where you you you put
link |
an unknown set of people on a shared channel
link |
and they're trying to break symmetry so
link |
it's like an ethernet whatever only one person
link |
can use it at a time you try to break symmetry there's all these
link |
bounds people have proven over the years
link |
about how long it takes to do this right
link |
and like I discovered
link |
at some point there's this one
link |
combinatorial result
link |
from the early 1990s
link |
all of these lower bound proofs all
link |
come from this and in fact it improved
link |
a lot of them and simplified a lot you could put it all
link |
in one paper you know it's like are we
link |
really and then okay so this new paper that
link |
I submitted a couple weeks ago
link |
I found you could take some of these same lower bound
link |
proofs for this contention resolution problem
link |
you could re prove them using
link |
Shannon source code theorem
link |
that actually when you're breaking contention
link |
what you're really doing is building
link |
if you have a distribution on the network
link |
sizes is a code over that source
link |
and if you plug in a high entropy
link |
information source and plug in from 1948
link |
the source code theorem that says on
link |
a noiseless channel you can't send things
link |
at a faster rate than the entropy allows
link |
the exact same lower bounds fall back out again
link |
right so like this type of thing happens
link |
there's some famous lower bounds and distributed
link |
algorithms that turned out to all be
link |
algebraic topology underneath the covers
link |
and they won the girdle prize for
link |
working on that so my sense
link |
is what's going to happen is at some point
link |
someone really smart to be
link |
very exciting is going to realize there's
link |
some sort of other representation
link |
of what's going on with these
link |
Turing machines trying to sort of efficiently
link |
actually fall out of that and there'll be
link |
an existing mathematical result
link |
that applies someone
link |
or something I guess it could be
link |
AI theorem provers kind of thing it
link |
could be yeah I mean not a well
link |
I mean there's theorem provers like what
link |
that means now which is
link |
not fun it's just a bunch
link |
of very carefully formulated
link |
postulates that but
link |
I take your point yeah yeah so
link |
you know on a small tangent and then
link |
then you're kind of implying the
link |
mathematics it almost feels like a
link |
kind of weird evolutionary
link |
tree that ultimately leads back to some kind
link |
of ancestral few fundamental
link |
ideas that all they're just like
link |
they're all somehow connected
link |
math is fundamental
link |
to our universe and we're just like slowly
link |
trying to understand
link |
little game that we play
link |
amongst ourselves to try to
link |
fit little patterns to the world
link |
yeah that's the question
link |
right that's the physicist question
link |
I mean I'm probably I'm in the discovered
link |
camp but I don't do theoretical
link |
physics so I know they have
link |
like they have a stronger claim to answering that question
link |
but everything comes back
link |
to it everything comes back to it I mean all the physics
link |
the fact that the universe
link |
it's a complicated
link |
question so how often
link |
deeply does this result
link |
describe the fundamental
link |
the reason I hesitated because it's
link |
something I taught this seminar and did a little
link |
work on what are called biological
link |
algorithms so there's this
link |
physicists use mathematics
link |
to explain the universe
link |
right and it was unreasonable that
link |
mathematics work so well
link |
you know all these differential equations
link |
why does that explain all we need to know about
link |
dynamics and gravity and all these type of things
link |
well there's this movement within
link |
the intersection of computer science and biology
link |
it's kind of wolframmium I guess
link |
algorithms can be very
link |
explanatory right that like if you're trying to
link |
parsimoniously something about
link |
like an ant colony or something like this you're not
link |
going to ultimately it's not going to be
link |
explained as a equation like a
link |
physics equation it's going to be explained by an algorithm
link |
so like this algorithm
link |
is going to explain the behavior so
link |
that's mathematical but not quite mathematical
link |
but it is if you think about an algorithm like a
link |
lambda calculus which brings you back to the
link |
world of mathematics I'm thinking out loud here but
link |
is sort of like unreasonably effective
link |
at explaining a lot
link |
of things and that's just what I feel like I glimpse I'm not
link |
not like a super well known theoretician I don't have really famous
link |
results so even as a
link |
you know career theoretician I
link |
keep encountering this
link |
where we think we're solving some
link |
problem about computers and algorithms
link |
and it's some much deeper
link |
underlying math it's Shannon
link |
but Shannon is entropy but entropy was
link |
goes all the way back to
link |
whatever it was boiler all the way back to looking at the early
link |
it's anyways to me I think it's
link |
but it could be the flip side of that could be just
link |
our brains draw so much pleasure from
link |
the deriving generalized
link |
theories and simplifying
link |
the universe that would just naturally
link |
see that kind of simplicity and everything
link |
yeah so that's the whole
link |
you know Newton to Einstein right so
link |
you can you can say this must be right because it's
link |
so predictive well it's not quite
link |
predictive because Mercury wobbles a little bit but I think
link |
we have it set and then you turn out
link |
no Einstein and then and then you get
link |
more like no not Einstein
link |
actually statistical and yeah so
link |
it's hard to also know like where
link |
smooth analysis fits into all that
link |
or a little bit of no like you can
link |
say something very clean
link |
about a system and then
link |
a little bit of noise like the average
link |
case is actually very different and so
link |
yeah I mean that's where like the quantum
link |
mechanics comes in it's like
link |
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'd be my next book that'd be ambitious
link |
the fundamental core
link |
of reality comma and some advice
link |
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
link |
comments of wisdom
link |
on the process of publishing a book
link |
what's that process until what are the
link |
different options and what's your
link |
for somebody that wants
link |
to write a book like yours
link |
a nonfiction book that discovers
link |
something interesting
link |
so what I usually advise
link |
don't try to reinvent
link |
I think that happens
link |
you'll try to reinvent the way the publishing
link |
industry should work like this is kind of
link |
not like in a business model
link |
ways 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 going to put it on the internet
link |
and the publishing industry is very
link |
specific about how it works
link |
and so like when I got started writing books
link |
which was at a very young age so you know
link |
I sold my first book at the age of 21
link |
the way I did that
link |
is I found the family friend
link |
and I said I'm not trying to make you be my
link |
agent just explain to me how this works
link |
not just how the world works but give me
link |
the hard truth about how would a
link |
21 year old under what conditions could a
link |
21 year old sell a book and what would that look like
link |
and she just explained it to me well you have to do this
link |
and have to be a subject that it made sense for you to write
link |
and you would have to do this type of writing for the publications
link |
the validated and blah blah blah
link |
and you have to get the agent first and I learned a whole game plan
link |
and then I executed
link |
and so the rough game plan is with
link |
nonfiction you get the agent first
link |
and the agent is going to sell it to the publishers
link |
so like you're never sending something directly
link |
to the publishers and nonfiction you're not
link |
writing the book first
link |
you're going to get an advance from the publisher once sold
link |
and then you're going to
link |
do the primary writing of the book
link |
in fact it will in most circumstances
link |
hurt you if you've already written
link |
so you're trying to sell
link |
well I guess the agent first you sell it to the agent
link |
and 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
link |
agent then why would you so you start with
link |
and also in the way this works with a good
link |
agent is they know all the editors
link |
and they have lunch with the editors and they're always just
link |
okay what projects you have coming what are you looking for
link |
here's one of my authors that's the way all these deals happen
link |
it's not you're not emailing a manuscript to
link |
yeah and so first of all the agent takes a percentage
link |
and then the publishers this is where the process
link |
comes in they take also a cut
link |
that's probably ridiculous
link |
so if you try to reinvent
link |
the system you'll probably be frustrated
link |
by the percentage that everyone takes relative
link |
to how much bureaucracy and efficiency
link |
ridiculousness there is in the system
link |
your recommendation is like
link |
you're just one ant
link |
stop trying to build your own ant colony
link |
create your own process for how it should work
link |
the book's not going to get published
link |
so there's the separate question the economic question
link |
like should I create my own
link |
self publish it or do something like that
link |
but putting that aside there's a lot of people
link |
I encounter that want to publish a book
link |
with a main publisher but they invent
link |
their own rules for how that works
link |
so then the alternative though is
link |
self publishing and the downside
link |
there's a lot of downsides
link |
it's like it's almost like
link |
publishing an opinion piece in the New York Times
link |
versus writing our blog
link |
there's no reason why
link |
writing a blog post on Medium
link |
can't get way more attention
link |
and long lasting prestige
link |
than in New York Times article
link |
but nevertheless for most people
link |
writing in a prestigious newspaper
link |
quote unquote prestigious
link |
and well and depends
link |
on your goal so you know like
link |
I push you towards a big publisher
link |
because I think your goal
link |
it's huge ideas you want impact
link |
you're going to have more impact
link |
even though like actually
link |
so there's different ways to measure impact
link |
in the world of ideas
link |
and also yeah in the world of ideas
link |
it's kind of like the clubhouse thing
link |
now even if the audience is not large
link |
the people in the audience
link |
are very interesting
link |
it's like the conversation
link |
feels like it has long lasting
link |
among the people who
link |
in different and disparate industries
link |
that are also then starting
link |
normal conversations and all that kind of stuff
link |
yeah because you have other
link |
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 so if there's the financial aspect
link |
of well you get to keep more of it
link |
I mean the podcast is probably going to crush
link |
what the book is going to do anyways right yeah
link |
get directly to certain audiences
link |
or crowds 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 going to be the most effective way
link |
to find your way to a new crowd
link |
but if the idea is like I want to have a
link |
in the world of ideas
link |
then they have a vulnerable old publisher
link |
you know put out your book
link |
in a nice hardcover and do the things
link |
that goes a long way and they do do a lot
link |
it's very difficult actually
link |
they're so much involved in playing together a book
link |
they get books into bookstores and all that kind of stuff
link |
all that stuff and from an efficiency standpoint
link |
I mean just a time involved in trying to do this
link |
they have a process right like you said
link |
they have a process I mean I know
link |
like Jaco did this recently he started his own imprint
link |
and I have a couple other but it's a huge
link |
overhead I mean if you like
link |
if you run a business and you
link |
Jaco is a good case study right so he got
link |
you know fed up with Simon and Schuster
link |
dragging their feet and said I'm going to start
link |
my own imprint then if you're not going to publish
link |
but he what does he do he runs businesses
link |
right yeah so I think in his world
link |
I already run I'm a partner
link |
in whatever an origin and I have this and that and so it's like
link |
yeah we can run businesses that's what we know
link |
how to do that's what I do I run businesses
link |
I have people but for like you or I
link |
we don't run businesses it'd be terrible
link |
yeah yeah well especially
link |
kinds of businesses right so I do
link |
want to launch a business but very different technology
link |
business very different very different
link |
very different yeah yeah I mean this is
link |
like okay and you copy editors and
link |
graphic book binders and I need
link |
to contract with the printer but the printer doesn't
link |
have slots and so now I have to try to you I mean it's
link |
I need to shut this off my brain but I get so
link |
frustrated when the system could clearly be improved
link |
it's the thing that you're mentioning
link |
yeah it's like this is so inefficient
link |
every time I go to the DMV or something like
link |
that you think like
link |
this could be done so much better
link |
and the same thing is
link |
the worry with an editor
link |
which I guess would come from the publisher
link |
supervision on your book did you receive like
link |
hey do you think this is too long
link |
or do you think the title
link |
how much choice do you have in the title
link |
in the cover in the presentation
link |
in the branding and all that kind of stuff
link |
yeah I mean all of it depends right so
link |
the relationship with the editor
link |
on the writing it depends on the editor and it depends
link |
it's like at this point I'm on my seventh book
link |
and I write for a lot of major
link |
publications and at this point I have
link |
what I feel like is a
link |
voice and a level of craft
link |
that I'm very comfortable with
link |
so my editor is not going to be
link |
she kind of is going to trust me and it's going to be more big picture
link |
I've never read here or this seems like it could be
link |
longer whereas the first book I wrote
link |
I had notes such as you start a lot of sentences
link |
you don't use any contractions because I've been doing
link |
scientific writing we don't use contractions
link |
you should probably use contractions
link |
that was way more you know I had to go back
link |
and rewrite the whole thing yeah
link |
but ultimately the recommendation
link |
I mean we talked offline
link |
I was thinking loosely
link |
not really sure but I was thinking of writing a book
link |
and there's a kind of desire to go
link |
self publishing not for financial reasons
link |
and the money can be good by the way right I mean
link |
power law type just distributed
link |
so the money on a hardcover is somewhere between
link |
one and two dollars a book
link |
so the thing is I personally don't
link |
but you give up 15% of the agent so
link |
I personally don't care about money as I've
link |
mentioned before but I for some reason
link |
really don't like spending money
link |
that are not worth it
link |
I don't care if I get money
link |
I just don't like spending money on
link |
like feeding a system that's
link |
inefficient it's like I'm contributing to the
link |
problem that's my biggest problem
link |
right so you think that you're worried about the
link |
inefficiencies of the
link |
yeah the fact that
link |
the number of people involved or the overhead
link |
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
link |
a sort of creative
link |
collaborators that are like
link |
also a little bit crazy
link |
and I suppose some of that is finding the right people
link |
finding the right people that's what I would say I say
link |
there's definitely and maybe it's just good fortune
link |
in terms of like my agents and editors I've worked with
link |
there's really good people
link |
see the vision or smart or incredibly
link |
literary they yeah
link |
psychologically yeah I had a great editor
link |
when I was first moving into hard cover books for example
link |
is my first you know
link |
and my first sort of big
link |
deal and it was like a senior
link |
very useful you know it was like we had
link |
a lot of long talks right I was
link |
this was my fourth book so good they can't ignore you was
link |
my first big hard cover idea
link |
and we had a lot of talks like even before I started
link |
writing it just let's
link |
talk about books and his philosophy
link |
had been in the business for a long time he was the head
link |
of the the head of the imprint it was useful
link |
I mean the other frustrating thing is how long the whole thing takes
link |
yeah I suppose that's you just have to
link |
well I yeah I handed in this manuscript
link |
for the the the book that comes out
link |
now like when this I handed it in
link |
I mean over the summer like during the
link |
pandemic so it's not it's not terrible
link |
right and we were editing during the pandemic and I finished
link |
we've talked most of today
link |
except for a little bit computer science most of today
link |
about a productive life
link |
love friendship and family
link |
do you find that there's a tension
link |
possible for relationships to energize
link |
the whole process to benefit
link |
or is it ultimately
link |
a trade off but because life
link |
we seek happiness not productivity
link |
accept that tension
link |
I mean I think relationships
link |
that's the whole deal
link |
like I thought about this the other day
link |
I don't know what the context was I was thinking about
link |
if I was going to give like an advice speech
link |
like a commencement address or like to give
link |
an advice to young people
link |
and like the big question
link |
I have for young people is
link |
if they haven't already bad things are going to happen
link |
that you don't control
link |
so what's the plan
link |
let's start figuring that out now
link |
because it's not all good
link |
some people get off better than others but eventually
link |
you get sick, something falls apart
link |
the economy craters
link |
someone you know dies
link |
all sorts of bad stuff is going to happen
link |
so how are we going to do this
link |
live life and 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 |
because we're wired for it
link |
I went down this rabbit hole with digital minimalism
link |
I went down this huge rabbit hole about
link |
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 |
everything, all of our mechanisms
link |
everything is made to service
link |
social connections because of what kept you alive
link |
I mean you had your tribal connections
link |
you didn't starve during the famine
link |
people would share food etc
link |
and so you can't neglect that
link |
and it's like everything
link |
and people feel it right, like there's no
link |
our social networks are hooked up to the pain center
link |
it's why it feels so terrible when you miss someone
link |
like someone dies or something right
link |
that's like how seriously we take it
link |
there's a pretty accepted theory that the default
link |
mode network, like a lot of what the default mode network
link |
is doing so the sort of the default state
link |
our brain goes into when we're not doing something in particular
link |
is practicing sociality
link |
practicing interactions
link |
because it's so crucial to what we do
link |
it's like at the core
link |
of human thriving so I've
link |
more recently 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 non trivial
link |
time and attention
link |
resources whatever on behalf of other people
link |
that's the net that is
link |
going to allow you to get through anything
link |
now what do we want to do with
link |
the surplus that remains may want to build
link |
some build some fire build some tools
link |
so put relationships first I like
link |
the worst case analysis from the computer science
link |
perspective put relationships
link |
first yeah because everything else is just
link |
assuming average case
link |
assuming things kind of keep going as they were
link |
going and you're neglecting the fundamental
link |
human drive like we have
link |
this we talked about the boredom instinct we want to build things
link |
we want to have impact we want to do productivity that's
link |
not nearly as clear cut of a drive of we need
link |
but if we look at the real worst case
link |
you're pretty young now but
link |
that's not going to last very long
link |
you're going to die one day is that something you think about
link |
are you afraid of death well I'm
link |
up the mindset of let's make that a
link |
one of the mindset of
link |
we need to confront that
link |
soon yeah so let's do
link |
what we can now so that when we really confront
link |
and think about it we're more likely to
link |
feel better about it so in other words like let's
link |
focus now on living
link |
and doing things in such a way that we're proud
link |
of so that when it really comes time to confront
link |
that we're more likely
link |
to say like okay I feel kind of good
link |
about the situation so what
link |
when you're laying in your death bed
link |
would you in looking back
link |
would make you think like oh I did
link |
I'm okay I'm proud of that
link |
I optimized the hell out of that
link |
that's a good question that
link |
I mean this is like David Brooks's
link |
virtues versus resume virtues
link |
right so his argument is that
link |
that's another interesting DC area
link |
person I keep thinking of interesting DC
link |
area people all right David Brooks is here too
link |
his argument he thinks eulogy virtues
link |
so what we eulogize is different than what
link |
we promote on the resume
link |
that's his whole thing now right
link |
his second 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
link |
giving of yourself and sacrificing on behalf
link |
of other people I don't know
link |
maybe it's all mixed together right you want to
link |
I think living by a code is important
link |
right I mean there's something that's not
link |
emphasized enough I always think of advice
link |
that my undergrad should be given that
link |
they're not given especially at a place like Georgetown
link |
that has this like deep history of
link |
you know trying to promote human flourishing
link |
because of the Jesuit connection
link |
resiliency and pride that comes out of
link |
living well even when it's hard
link |
like living according to a code living according to
link |
which which you know I think religion
link |
used to structure this for people
link |
and but in its absence you need some sort of
link |
replacement but this even when things where
link |
soldiers get this a lot right the experience
link |
is a lot even when things were tough I was able
link |
to persist in living this way that I knew was right
link |
even though it wasn't the easiest thing to do in the moment
link |
like fewer things give humans more
link |
resiliency like having done that
link |
your relationships were strong right many
link |
people coming to your funeral is the standard
link |
like a lot of people are going to come to your funeral
link |
like I mean you matter to a lot of people
link |
and then maybe having done to to the extent
link |
of whatever capabilities
link |
you are happen to be granted you know
link |
and they're different for different people
link |
and some people can sprint real fast and some people
link |
try to actually do something
link |
I'll just promise to give
link |
gift cards to anybody who shows up to the funeral
link |
you're going to hack it
link |
even the funeral there's going to be a lottery
link |
wheel you spin when you come in and someone goes away
link |
with ten thousand dollars
link |
see the problem is like with all this
link |
the living by principles
link |
living a principal life focusing on relationships
link |
and kind of thinking
link |
of this life as this perfect thing kind of
link |
forgets the notion that none of it
link |
it kind of implies
link |
that this is like a video game
link |
and you want to get a high score
link |
as opposed to none of this
link |
like what does it even mean
link |
to die it's going to be over
link |
it's like everything I do
link |
all these productivity hacks
link |
all this life all these efforts all these creative efforts
link |
kind of assume it's going to go on forever
link |
there's a kind of sense of immortality
link |
and I don't even know
link |
how to intellectually make sense that it ends
link |
of course got to ask you in that
link |
context what do you think is the meaning
link |
of it all especially for a computer
link |
scientist I mean there's got to be some
link |
yeah 27 or what's the
link |
27 is a better number
link |
maybe you're on to something with a 27
link |
I don't want to give away too much
link |
but just trust me 27
link |
I don't know obviously right I mean
link |
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
link |
style approach the one thing
link |
that there is are intimations
link |
right so that there's these
link |
intimations that human have
link |
somehow this feels right and this feels
link |
wrong this feels good this feels like
link |
I'm doing I mean aligned
link |
with something you know when I'm acting with courage
link |
to save whatever right it's not
link |
these intimations are agrounding against arbitrariness
link |
like one of the ideas I'm really
link |
interested in is that
link |
uh... when you look at religion
link |
interested in world religions for
link |
my grandfather was like a theologian
link |
that studied and wrote all these books and I'm very interested
link |
in this type of stuff and there's
link |
this great book that's
link |
specific to a particular religion but it's Karen
link |
Armstrong wrote this great book called the case for God
link |
she's very interesting she was
link |
a Catholic nun who sort of left that religion
link |
and is but one of the smartest
link |
of like accessible theological thinking
link |
that's not tied to any particular religion
link |
her whole argument
link |
is that the way to understand religion you
link |
first of all you have to go way back pre enlightenment where all this was formed
link |
we got messed up thinking about religion
link |
post enlightenment right and
link |
these are operating systems for making sense of intimations
link |
one thing we had were these different intimations
link |
of this field like ah
link |
and mystical experience
link |
and this feels something there's something you feel
link |
when you act in a certain way and don't act in this other way
link |
and it was like the scientists
link |
who were trying to study
link |
and understand the model of the atom by just looking at
link |
experiments and trying to understand
link |
what's going on like the great religions of the world were basically
link |
figuring out how do we make
link |
sense of these intimations and live in alignment
link |
with them and build a life of meaning around that
link |
what were the tools they were using
link |
they were using ritual they were using belief
link |
they were using action but all of it was like
link |
an OS it was like a
link |
liturgical model of the atom that
link |
it's hard coded in so it did
link |
evolutionary process
link |
they wouldn't have called it that back then or yeah
link |
I mean whether they said who
link |
they didn't have that as pre enlightenment they just say this is here
link |
the directive is to try to live in alignment
link |
well then I want to ask who wrote the original code
link |
that's the open question
link |
yeah so Armstrong lays out this good argument and where it gets really interesting
link |
is that she emphasizes
link |
that all of this was considered
link |
unethical right so the whole notion
link |
and this is like rich and Jewish tradition in particular
link |
and also an Islamic tradition
link |
we can't comprehend and understand
link |
what's going on here right and so
link |
the best we can do to approximate understanding
link |
and live in alignment is we act as if this is true
link |
have these actions or whatever
link |
post enlightenment a lot of that got
link |
once we learned about enlightenment
link |
we grew these suspicions
link |
around religion that are very much of the modern
link |
era right so like the
link |
Karen Armstrong like Sam Harris's critique of religion
link |
right the critiques based on
link |
you're making the ascent to propositions that you think are true
link |
for which you do not have evidence that they are true
link |
that's an enlightenment thing right this is not
link |
the context and this is not the religion
link |
is the Rutherford model
link |
of the atom like it's not actually maybe what
link |
is underneath happening
link |
but this model explains why your chemical equations
link |
work and so this is like the way religion was
link |
you there's a god we'll call it
link |
this this is how it works we do this ritual we act
link |
in this way it aligns with it just like the model
link |
the atom predicted why you know
link |
N.A. and C.L. is going to become salt this predicts
link |
that you're going to feel and live in alignment right
link |
it's like this beautiful sophisticated
link |
theory which actually matches how a lot of
link |
great theologians have you know thought
link |
about it but then when you come forward
link |
in time yeah maybe it's evolution I mean
link |
this is like what Peterson hints at right
link |
like he's basically
link |
he doesn't like to get super pinned down
link |
on this but it kind of seems where
link |
he's almost like searching for the words
link |
he focuses more like Jung and other people
link |
but I mean I know he's very Jungian
link |
but that same type of analysis
link |
I think roughly speaking like Armstrong
link |
is sort of a it's kind of like a Peter
link |
Sony analysis but she's looking
link |
more at the deep history of religion
link |
he throws in an evolutionary
link |
and I wonder what home it finds
link |
I wonder what the new home is if religion
link |
with the new home for these kinds of
link |
natural inclinations are
link |
yeah with their technology
link |
whether and if it's evolution I mean this is
link |
Francis Collins's book also he's like well
link |
that's a religious
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that could be a very religious notion
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I don't I think this stuff is interesting I'm not a very
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religious person but I'm
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I'm thinking it's not a bad idea
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maybe what replaces honestly like maybe
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what replaces religion is a return to
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religion but in this
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sort of more sophisticated
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I mean if you went back
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it's the issue with like a lot of the
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recent critiques I think is it's
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it's a strawman critique
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in a complicated way right because
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the whole way these the way this
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works I mean the theologians if you're reading
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if you're reading these people they're thinking
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very sophisticated about religion in terms of this
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it's ineffable and we're just these things
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and this is deep it connects us to these
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things in a way that puts life in alignment
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we can't really explain what's going on because
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our brains can't handle it right
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for the average person though
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this notion of live as if
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it's kind of how religions work
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is live as if this is true
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it's like an OS for getting in alignment
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with because we through
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evolution like you behave in this way
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do these which live as if this is true
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what the goal you're looking for
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but that's a complicated thing live as if this
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is true because if you
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especially if you're not a theologian to say
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yeah this is not true
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in an alignment sense but I'm living as if it kind of
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takes the heat out of it but of course
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it's what people are doing because
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highly religious people still do bad things
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where if you really were there's absolutely
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a hell and I'm definitely going to go to it if I do this bad thing
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you would never have
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known whatever murder anyone if they were an evangelical Christian
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right so it's like what
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this is kind of a tangent that I'm
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I'm on shaky ground here but
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it's something I've been interested
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I think we're in some sense searching for
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because it does make for a good operating system
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we're searching for a good
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live as if X is true
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and we're searching for a new X
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and maybe artificial intelligence
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that we're so desperately looking
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for or it'll just spit out 42
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I thought it was 27
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as you know I've been a huge fan
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so are a huge number
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of people that I've
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spoken with so they could be telling me
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I absolutely have to talk to you this is a huge
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honor this is really fun thanks for wasting all
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this time with me and likewise I've been a long
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time fan so this is a lot of fun yeah thanks
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man thanks for listening
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this conversation with Cal Newport
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and thank you to our sponsors
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and SimplySafe Home Security
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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
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clarity about what matters
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provides clarity about what does not
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thank you for listening
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and hope to see you next time