The following is a conversation with Cal Newport.
He's a friend and someone who's writing like his book Deep Work, for example,
has guided how I strive to approach productivity and life in general.
He doesn't use social media and in his book Digital Minimalism,
he encourages people to find the right amount of social media usage
that provides value and joy.
He has a new book out called A World Without Email
where he argues brilliantly, I would say,
that email is destroying productivity in companies and in our lives.
And, very importantly, he offers solutions.
He is a computer scientist at Georgetown University
who practices what he preaches.
To do theoretical computer science at the level that he does it,
you really have to live a focused life that minimizes distractions
and maximizes hours of deep work.
Lastly, he's a host of an amazing podcast called Deep Questions
that I highly recommend for anyone who wants to improve their productive life.
Quick mention of our sponsors.
ExpressVPN, Linode Linux Virtual Machines,
Sunbasket Meal Delivery Service, and SimplySafe Home Security.
Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast.
As a side note, let me say that deep work or long periods of deep focused thinking
have been something I've been chasing more and more over the past few years.
Deep work is hard, but it's ultimately the thing that makes life so damn amazing.
The ability to create things you're passionate about in a flow state
where the distraction of the world just fade away.
Social media, yes, reading the comments, yes, I still read the comments,
is a source of joy for me in strict moderation.
Too much takes away the focused mind, and too little, at least I think,
takes away all of the fun.
We need both, the focus and the fun.
If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on the Apple Podcast,
follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter,
at Lex Freedman, if you can only figure out how to spell that.
And now, here's my conversation with Cal Newport.
What is deep work?
Let's start with a big question.
So, I mean, it's my term for when you're focusing without distraction.
On a cognitively demanding task, which is something we've all done,
but we had never really given it a name necessarily that was separate from other type of work.
And so, I gave it a name and said, let's compare that to other types of efforts
you might do while you're working, and see that the deep work efforts
actually have a huge benefit that we might be underestimating.
What does it mean to work deeply on something?
You know, I had been calling it hard focus in my writing before that.
Well, so the context you would understand, I was in the theory group
in CSAIL at MIT, right?
So, I was surrounded at the time when I was coming up with these ideas
by these professional theoreticians.
And that's like a murderer's row of thinkers there, right?
I mean, it's like Turing Award, Turing Award, MacArthur, Turing Award.
I mean, you know, the crew, right?
Theoretical computer science.
Theoretical computer science, yeah.
Yeah, so, I'm in the theory group, right?
Doing theoretical computer science, and I publish a book.
So, you know, I was in this milieu where I was being exposed to people
where focus was their tier one skill.
Like, that's what you would talk about, right?
Like, how intensely I can focus?
That was the V-key skill.
It's like your 440 time or something if you were an athlete, right?
So, this is something that people, actually, the theory folks are thinking about?
Oh, yeah.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
Like, they're openly discussing, like, how do you focus?
I mean, I don't know if they would, you know, quantify it, but focus was the tier one skill.
So, you would come in, here would be a typical day.
You'd come in and Eric Domain would be sitting in front of a whiteboard, right?
With a whole group of visitors who had come to work with them.
And maybe they projected like a grid on there because they're working on some
graph theory problem.
You go to lunch, you go to the gym, you come back,
they're sitting there staring at the same whiteboard.
Right? Like, that's the tier one skill.
This is the difference between different disciplines.
Like, I often feel, for many reasons, like a fraud, but I definitely feel like a fraud
when I hang out with like either mathematicians or physicists.
It's like, it feels like they're doing the legit work.
Because when you talk closer in computer science, you get to programming
or like machine learning, like the experimental machine learning or like just the engineering
version of it, it feels like you're gone so far away from what's required to solve something
fundamental about this universe.
It feels like you're just like cheating your way into like some kind of trick
to figure out how to solve a problem in this one particular case.
That's how it feels.
I'd be interested to hear what you think about that because programming doesn't always feel
like you need to think deeply, to work deeply, but sometimes it does, so it's a weird dance.
For sure code does, right?
I mean, especially if you're coming up with original algorithmic designs,
I think it's a great example of deep work.
I mean, yeah, the hardcore theoreticians, they push it to an extreme.
I mean, I think it's like knowing that athletic endeavor is good and then hanging out with an
Olympic athlete, like, oh, I see, that's what it is.
Right.
Now, for the grad students like me, we're not anywhere near that level, but the faculty
in that group, these were the cognitive Olympic athletes.
But coding, I think, is a classic example of deep work because I got this problem I want to solve.
I have all of these tools and I have to combine them somehow creatively and on the fly.
But so basically, I had been exposed to that.
So I was used to this notion when I was in grad school and I was writing my blog,
I'd write about hard focus.
That was the term I used. Then I published this book, So Good They Can't Ignore You,
which came out in 2012.
So right as I began as a professor.
And that book had this notion of skill being really important for career satisfaction,
that it's not just following your passion.
You have to actually really get good at something and then you use that skills as
leverage.
And there's this big follow-up question to that book of, okay, well, how do I get really good at
things?
Yeah.
And then I look back to my grad school experience.
I was like, huh, there's this focus thing that we used to do.
I wonder how generally applicable that is into the knowledge sector.
And so as I started thinking about it, it became clear there's this interesting
storyline that emerged that, okay, actually undistracted concentration is not just
important for esoteric theoreticians.
It's important here and support here and support here.
And that involved into the deep work hypothesis, which is across the whole knowledge work sector,
focus is very important.
And we've accidentally created circumstances where we just don't do a lot of it.
But so focus is the sort of prerequisite for basically, you say knowledge work, but
basically any kind of skill acquisition, any kind of major effort in this world.
Can we break that apart a little bit?
Yeah.
So a key aspect of focus is not just that you're concentrating hard on something,
but you do it without distraction.
So a big theme of my work is that context shifting kills the human capacity to think.
So if I change what I'm paying attention to to something different,
really, even if it's brief, and then try to bring it back to the main thing I'm doing,
that causes a huge cognitive pile up that makes it very hard to think clearly.
So even if you think, okay, look, I'm writing this code or I'm writing this
essay, and I'm not multitasking and all my windows are closed and I have no notifications on.
But every five or six minutes, you quickly check, like an inbox or your phone,
that initiates a context shift in your brain, right?
We're going to start to suppress some neural networks.
We're going to try to amplify some others.
It's a pretty complicated process, actually.
There's a sort of neurological cascade that happens.
You rip yourself away from that halfway through and go back to what you're doing.
And now it's trying to switch back to the original thing,
even though it's also in your brains in the process of switching to these emails
and trying to understand those contexts.
And as a result, your ability to think clearly just goes really down.
And it's fatiguing, too.
I mean, you do this long enough that you get midday and you're like, okay, I can't think anymore.
You've exhausted yourself.
Is there some kind of perfect number of minutes, would you say?
So we're talking about focusing on a particular task for one minute, five minutes,
10 minutes, 30 minutes.
Is it possible to kind of context switch while maintaining deep focus every 20 minutes or so?
So if you're thinking of like this, again, maybe it's a selfish kind of perspective,
but if you think about programming,
you're focused on a particular design of a little bit, maybe a small scale on a particular function
or a large scale on a system.
And then the shift of focus happens like this, which is like, wait a minute,
is there a library that can achieve this little task or something like that?
And then you have to look it up.
This is the danger zone.
You go to the internet.
And so now it is a kind of context switch because as opposed to thinking about the
particular problem, you don't have switch thinking about consuming and integrating
knowledge that's out there that can plug into your solutions to a particular problem.
It definitely feels like a context switch, but is that a really bad thing to do?
So should you be setting it aside always and really trying to, as much as possible,
go deep and stay there for a really long period of time?
Well, I mean, I think if you're looking up a library that's relevant to what you're doing,
that's probably okay.
And I don't know that I would count that as a full context shift because
the semantic networks involved are relatively similar.
All right, you're thinking about this type of solution, you're thinking about coding,
you're thinking about this type of functions.
What you're really going to get hit is if you switch your context to something that's
different and if there's unresolved obligations.
So really the worst possible thing you could do would be to look at like an email inbox.
Right, because here's 20 emails, I can't answer most of these right now.
They're completely different.
Like the context of these emails, like, okay, there's a grant funding issue or something
like this is very different than the coding I'm doing.
And I'm leaving it unresolved.
So it's like someone needs something from me,
and I'm going to try to pull my attention back.
The second worst would be something that's emotionally arousing.
So if you're like, let me just glance over at Twitter.
I'm sure it's nice and calm and peaceful over there, right?
That could be devastating because you're going to expose yourself to something that's
emotionally arousing, that's going to completely mess up the cognitive plateau there.
And then when you come back to, okay, let me try to code again, it's really difficult.
So it's both the information and the emotion.
Yeah, both can be killers if what you're trying to do.
So I would recommend at least an hour at a time, because it could take up to 20 minutes
to completely clear out the residue from whatever it was you were thinking about before.
So if you're coding for 30 minutes, you might only be getting 10 or 15 minutes of actual
sort of peak lexicon on there, right?
So an hour at least, you get a good 40, 45 minutes plus.
I'm partial to 90 minutes as a really good chunk.
We can get a lot done.
But just before you get exhausted, you can sort of pull back a little bit.
Yeah. And one of the beautiful, you know, people can read about in your book, Deep Work,
but, and I know this has been out for a long time and people are probably familiar with
many of the concepts, but it's still pretty profound and it has stayed with me for a long time.
There's something about adding the terms to it that actually solidifies the concepts,
like words matter.
It's pretty cool.
And just for me, sort of as a comment, there's, it's a struggle and it's very difficult
to maintain focus for a prolonged period of time, but the days on which I'm able to
accomplish several hours of that kind of work, I'm happy.
So forget being productive and all that.
I'm just satisfied with my life.
I feel fulfilled.
It's like joyful.
And then I can be, I'm less of a dick to other people in my life afterwards.
And so that's a beautiful thing.
And I find the opposite when I don't do that kind of thing, I'm much more irritable.
And like, I feel like I didn't accomplish anything and there's this stress that then
the negative emotion builds up to where you're no longer able to sort of enjoy the
hell out of this amazing life.
So in that sense, deep work has been a source of a lot of happiness.
I'd love to ask you, how do you, again, you cover this in the book, but how do you integrate
deep work into your life?
What are different scheduling strategies that you would recommend just at a high level?
What are different ideas there?
Well, I mean, I'm a big fan of time blocking, right?
So if you're facing your workday, don't allow like your inbox or to-do list to sort of drive you.
Don't just come into your day and think, what do I want to do next?
Yes.
I mean, I'm a big plan is saying, here's the time available.
Let me make a plan for it, right?
So I have a meeting here, I have an appointment here.
Here's what's left.
What do I actually want to do with it?
So in this half hour, I'm going to work on this.
For this 90-minute block, I'm going to work on that.
And during this hour, I'm going to try to fit this in.
And then actually I have this half hour gap between two meetings.
So why don't I take advantage of that to go run five errands?
I can kind of batch those together.
But blocking out in advance, this is what I want to do with the time available.
I mean, I find that's much more effective.
Now, once you're doing this, once you're in a discipline of time blocking,
it's much easier to actually see, this is where I want, for example, the deep work.
And I can get a handle on the other things that need to happen
and find better places to fit them so I can prioritize this.
And you're going to get a lot more of that done
than if it's just going through your day and saying, what's next?
I schedule every single day kind of thing.
So as I could try it in the morning to try to have a plan.
Yeah. So I do quarterly, weekly, daily planning.
So at the semester or quarterly level, I have a big picture vision
for what I'm trying to get done during the fall, let's say, or during the winter.
Like I want, there's a deadline coming up for academic papers at the end of the season.
Here's what I'm working on.
I want to have this many chapters done of a book, something like this.
Like you have the big picture vision of what you want to get done.
And then weekly, you look at that, and then you look at your week
and you put together a plan for like, okay, what am I going to,
what's my week going to look like?
What do I need to do?
How am I going to make progress on these things?
Maybe, maybe I need to do an hour every morning,
or I see that Monday is my only really empty day.
So that's going to be the day that I really need to nail on writing or something like this.
And then every day, you look at your weekly plan and say, let me block off the actual hours.
So you do that, that three scales, the quarterly down to weekly down to daily.
And we're talking about actual times of day versus, so the alternative is
what I end up doing a lot, and I'm not sure it's the best way to do it,
is scheduling the duration of time.
This is called the luxury when you don't have any meetings.
I'm like, religiously don't do meetings.
All other academics are jealous of you, by the way.
Yeah.
I know.
No Zoom meetings.
I find those are, that's one of the worst tragedies of the pandemic,
is both the opportunity to, okay, the positive thing
is to have more time with your family, sort of reconnect in many ways.
And that's really interesting.
Be able to remotely sort of not waste time on travel and all those kinds of things.
The negative is, actually, both those things are also sources of the negative.
But the negative is, it seems like people have multiplied the number of meetings
because they're so easy to schedule, and there's nothing more draining to me.
Intellectually, philosophically, just my spirit is destroyed by even a 10-minute Zoom meeting.
Like, what are we doing here?
What's the meaning of life?
Yeah, every Zoom meeting, I have an existential crisis.
Kierkegaard with the internet connection.
What the hell are we talking about?
Oh, so when you don't have meetings, there's a luxury to really allow for certain things
if they need to, like the important things, like deep work sessions to last way longer than
you maybe planned for.
I mean, that's my goal, is to try to schedule.
The goal is to schedule, to sit and focus for a particular task for an hour,
and hope I can keep going, and hope I can get lost in it.
Do you find that this is at all an okay way to go, and the time blocking is just
something you have to do to actually be an adult and operate in this real world,
or is there some magic to the time blocking?
Well, I mean, there's magic to the intention.
There's magic to it if you have varied responsibilities, right?
So I'm often juggling multiple jobs, essentially.
There's academic stuff.
There's teaching stuff.
There's book stuff.
There's the business surrounding my book stuff.
But I'm of your same mindset.
If a deep work session is going well, just rock and roll and let it go on.
So one of the big keys of time blocking, at least the way I do it,
so I even sell this planner to help people time block, it has many columns.
Because the discipline is, oh, if your initial schedule changes,
you just move over one, next time you get a chance, you move over one column,
and then you just fix it for the time that's remaining.
So in other words, there's no bonus for, I made a schedule and I stuck with it.
Like there's actually, not like you get a prize for it, right?
Like for me, the prize is I have an intentional plan for my time.
And if I have to change that plan, that's fine.
Like the state I want to be is basically at any point in the day,
I've thought about what time remains and gave it some thought for what to do.
Because I'll do the same thing, even though I have a lot more meetings
and other types of things I have to do in my various jobs.
And I basically prioritize the deep work and they get yelled at a lot.
So that's kind of my strategy is like, just be okay.
Just be okay getting yelled at a lot.
Because I feel you, if you're rolling, yeah.
Well, that's what it is for me.
Like with writing, I think it's writing so hard in a certain way that it's,
you don't really get on a roll in some sense.
Like it's just difficult, but working on proofs.
It's very hard to pull yourself away from a proof
if you start to get some traction.
Just you've been at it for a couple hours,
then you feel the pins and tumblers starting to click together
and progress is being made.
It's really hard to pull away from that.
So I'm willing to get yelled at by almost everyone.
Of course, there is also a positive effect to pulling yourself out of it
when things are going great, because then you're kind of excited to resume.
Yeah.
It's supposed to stopping on a dead end.
That's true.
There's an extra force of procrastination that comes with
if you stop on a dead end to return to the task.
Yeah, or a cold start.
Whenever I feel like I'm on a stage now, I submitted a few papers recently.
So now we're sort of starting something up from cold.
And it takes way too long to get going because it's very hard to get the motivation
and schedule a time when it's not, yeah, we're in it.
Here's where we are.
We feel like something's about to give here.
We're in the very early stages where it's just, I don't know.
I'm going to read hard papers and it's going to be hard to understand them.
And I'm going to have no idea how to make progress.
It's not motivating.
What about deadlines?
Okay, so this is like a therapy session.
It seems like I only get stuff done that has deadlines.
And so one of the implied powerful things about time blocking is there's a kind of deadline
or there's artificial or real sense of urgency.
Do you think it's possible to get anything done in this world without deadlines?
Why do deadlines work so well?
Well, I mean, it's a clear motivational signal.
But in the short term, you do get an effect like that in time blocking.
I think the strong effect you get by saying, this is the exact time I'm going to work on this
is that you don't have the debate with yourself every three minutes about,
should I take a break now?
This is the big issue with just saying, I'm going to go right.
I'm going to write for a while and that's it because your mind is saying, well,
obviously we're going to take some breaks.
We're not just going to write forever.
And so why not right now?
You have to be like, well, not right now.
Let's go a little bit longer, five minutes.
Why don't we take a break now? We should probably look at the internet.
Now you have to constantly have this battle.
On the other hand, if you're in a time block schedule,
like I've got these two hours put aside for writing,
that's what I'm supposed to be doing.
I have a break scheduled over here.
I don't have to fight with myself, right?
And maybe at a larger scale, deadlines give you a similar sort of effect.
I know this is what I'm supposed to be working on because it's due.
Perhaps, but we are describing so much healthier,
sort of giving yourself over when you talk about this in the new email book,
the process.
I mean, in general, you talk about it all over, is creating a process
and then giving yourself over to the process.
But then you have to be strict with yourself.
Yeah.
But what are the deadlines you're talking about?
It's like with papers.
Like what's the main type of deadline work?
What's the papers?
Definitely.
But you know, publications like say this podcast,
I have to publish this podcast early next week, one because your book is coming out.
I'd love to support this amazing book.
But the other is I have to fly to Vegas on Thursday to run 40 miles with David Goggins.
And so I want this podcast, this conversation we're doing now to be out of my life.
Like I don't want to be in a hotel in Vegas like editing the freaking out while David
Goggins is yelling.
An hour, an hour 43 of your pterothon thing.
Exactly.
But actually it's possible that I still wouldn't be doing that because that's not a hard,
that's a softer deadline, right?
But those are sort of life imposes these kinds of deadlines.
So yeah, papers are nice because there's an actual deadline.
But I am almost referring to like the pressure that people put on you.
Hey, man, you said you're going to get this done two months ago.
Why haven't you gotten it done?
See, I don't like that pressure.
First of all, I think we can all...
I hate it too.
We can agree by the way having David Goggins yell at you is probably the top productivity
technique.
I think we'd all get a lot more done if he was yelling.
But see, I don't like that.
So I will try to get things done early.
I like having flex.
I also don't like the idea of this has to get done today, right?
Like it's due at midnight and we've got a lot to do as than I before because then I get in
my head about what if I get sick or what if I get a bad night's sleep and I can't think clearly.
So I like to have to flex.
So I'm all processed.
And that's like the philosophical aspect of that book, Deep Work, is that there's something
very human and deep about just wrangling with the world of ideas.
I mean, Aristotle talked about this if you go back and read the ethics.
He's trying to understand the meaning of life.
And he eventually ends up ultimately at the human capacity to contemplate deeply.
It's kind of a teleological argument.
It's the things that only humans can do and therefore it must be somehow connected to our
ends.
And he said ultimately that's where that's where he found his meaning.
But he's touching on some sort of intimation there that's correct.
And so what I try to build my life around is regularly thinking hard about stuff that's
interesting.
Just like if you get a fitness habit going, you feel off when you don't do it.
I try to get that cognitive habit.
So it's like, I got it.
I mean, look, I have my bag here somewhere, I have my notebook in it because I was thinking
on the Uber ride over, I was like, you know, I could get some, I'm working on this new proof.
And it just, so you train yourself.
You train yourself to appreciate certain things.
And then over time, the hope is that it accretes.
Well, let's talk about some demons because I wonder, okay, there's like Deep Work,
which, and the world without email books that to me symbolize the life I want to live.
Okay.
And then there is, I'm like, despite appearances, an adult at this point.
And this is the life I actually live.
And I, it's, I'm in constant chaos.
You said you don't like that anxiety.
I hate it too.
But it seems like I'm always in it.
It's a giant mess.
It's, it's like, it's almost like whenever I establish, whenever I have successful processes
for doing Deep Work, I'll add stuff on top of it just to introduce the chaos.
Yeah.
And, and like, I don't want to, but you know, you have to look in the mirror at a certain point.
And you have to say like, who the hell am I?
Like I keep doing this.
Is this something that's fundamental to who I am or do I really need to fix this?
What's the chaos right now?
Like I've seen your video about like your routine.
It seemed very structured and deep.
In fact, I was really envious of it.
So like, what's the chaos now that's not in that video?
Many of those sessions go way longer.
I don't get enough sleep.
And then I, the main introduction of chaos is, it's taken on too many things on the to-do list.
It's, I mean, I suppose it's a problem that everybody deals with was just saying,
not saying no, but it's not like I have trouble saying no.
It's that there's so much cool shit in my life.
Okay. Listen, I've, there's nothing I love more in this world than the Boston Dynamics robots.
And the other, yeah.
And they're giving me spot.
So there's going to do, what am I going to say?
No.
Yeah.
So they're getting me spot.
And I want to do some computer vision stuff for the hell of it.
Okay. So that's now a to-do item.
And then you go to Texas for a while and there's Texas.
Everything's happening to all the interesting people down there.
And then there's surprises, right?
There are power outages in Texas.
There's constant changes to plans and all those kinds of things.
And you sleep less.
And then there's personal stuff, like just, you know, people in your life, sources of stress,
all those kinds of things.
And, but it does feel like if I'm just being introspective,
that I bring it onto myself.
I suppose a lot of people do this kind of thing is,
is they, they flourish under pressure.
Yeah.
And I wonder if that, if that's just a hack I've developed as a habit early on in life.
That needs, you need to let go of.
You need to fix.
But it's all interesting things.
Yeah.
That's, that's, that's interesting.
Yeah. Because these are all interesting things.
Well, one of the things you talked about in deep work,
which is like really important is like having an end to the day.
Yeah.
Like putting it down.
Yeah.
Like that, I don't think I've ever done that in my life.
Yeah. Well, see, I started doing that early because I got married early.
So, you know, I didn't have a real job.
I was a grad student, but my wife had a real job.
And so I just figured I should do my work when she's at work because, you know,
hey, when, when work's over, she'll be home.
And I don't want, I don't want to be, you know, on campus or whatever.
And so real early on, I just got in that habit of this is when, you know,
this is when you end work.
And then when I was a postdoc, which is kind of an easy job, right?
I put artificial, I was like, I want to train.
I was like, when I'm a professor, it's going to be busier because there's
demands that professors have beyond research.
And so as a postdoc, I added artificial, large time consuming things into the middle of my day.
I'd basically exercise for two hours in the middle of the day and do all this
productive meditation and stuff like this while still maintaining the nine to five.
So I was like, okay, I want to get really good at putting artificial constraints on
so that I stay.
I didn't want to get flabby when my job was easy so that when I became a professor,
and now all of that's paying off because I have a ton of kids.
So, so now I don't really have a choice.
That's what's probably keeping me away from cool things is I just don't have time to do them.
And then after a while, people, you know, stop bothering.
Well, but that, you know, but that's how you have a successful life.
Otherwise you're going to, it's too easy to then go into the full Hunter S. Thompson.
Yeah.
Like to where no, nobody wants, nobody functional wants to be in your vicinity.
Like you're driving, you attract the people that have a similar behavior pattern as you.
Yeah.
So if you, if you live in chaos, you're going to attract chaotic people.
And then it becomes like this self fulfilling prophecy.
Yeah.
And it feels like I'm not bothered by it, but I guess this is all coming around to exactly
what you're saying, which is like, I think one of the big hacks for productive people
that I've met is to get married and have kids.
Honestly, it's, it's, it's very perhaps counterintuitive.
Yeah.
But it gets, it's like the ultimate timetable enforcer.
Yeah.
It enforces a lot of timetables, though it has a huge, kids have a huge productivity hit those.
You got to weigh it.
But here, okay, here's the complicated thing though.
Like you could think about in your own life starting the podcast as one of these just
cool opportunities that you put on yourself, right?
Yeah.
Like, you know, I could have been talking to you at MIT four years ago and be like,
don't do that.
Like your research is going well, right?
But then everyone who watches you is like, okay, this podcast is the direction that's
taking you is like a couple of years from now, it's going to,
there'll be something really monumental that you're probably,
it's going to probably lead to, right?
There'll be some really, it just feels like your life is going somewhere.
It's going somewhere.
It's interesting, unexpected.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So how do you balance those two things?
And so what I try to throw at it is this, this motto of do less, do better, know why, right?
So do less, do better, know why.
It used to be the motto of my website years ago.
So do a few things, but like an interesting array, right?
So I was doing MIT stuff, but I was also writing, you know.
So a couple of things that were, you know, they were interesting.
Like I have a couple bets placed on it, on a couple of different numbers on the roulette table,
but not too many things.
And then really try to do those things really well and see where it goes.
Like with my writing, I just spent years and years and years,
just trained, I was like, I want to be a better writer, I want to be a better writer.
I started writing student books when I was a student.
I really wanted to write hardcover idea books.
I started training.
I would, I would use like New Yorker articles to train myself.
I'd break them down and then I'd get commissions with much smaller magazines and practice the skills.
And, and I took forever until, you know, but now today, like I actually get a right for the New Yorker,
but it took like a decade.
So a small number of things tried to do them really well.
And then the know why is have a connection to some sort of value.
Like in general, I think this is worth doing.
And then seeing where it leads.
And so the choice of the few things is grounded in what like a little,
like a, like a little flame of passion, like a love for the thing,
like a sense that you say you wanted to write and get good at writing.
You had that kind of introspective moment of thinking,
this actually brings me a lot of joy and fulfillment.
Yeah. I mean, it gets complicated because I wrote a whole book about following your passion,
being bad advice, which is like the first thing I kind of got infamous for.
I wrote that back in 2012.
But, but the argument there is like passion cultivates, right?
So what I was pushing back on was to myth that the passion for what you do exists full intensity
before you start.
And then that's what propels you where actually the reality is as you get better at something,
as you gain more autonomy, more skill and more impact, a passion grows along with it.
So that when people look back later and say, oh, follow your passion,
what they really mean is I'm very passionate about what I do and that's a worthy goal.
But how you actually cultivate that is much more complicated than just introspections
going to identify, like for sure you should be a writer or something like this.
So I was actually quoting you.
I was on a social network last night in a clubhouse.
I don't know if you've heard of it.
I was-
Wait, I have to ask you about this because I was invited to do a clubhouse.
I don't know what that means.
A tech reporter has invited me to do a clubhouse about my new book.
That's awesome.
Well, let me know when because I'll show up if you ever do.
But what is it?
Okay.
So first of all, let me just mention that I was in a clubhouse room last night and I kept
plugging exactly what you said about passion.
So we'll talk about it.
It was a room that was focused on burnout.
Okay.
But first, clubhouse is a kind of fascinating place in terms of your mind would be very
interesting to analyze this place because we talk about email,
we talk about social networks, but clubhouse is something very different.
And I've encountered it in other places, discord, and so on.
That's voice only communication.
So it's a bunch of people in a room.
They're just, their eyes closed.
All you hear is their voices.
The real time.
Real time.
Live.
It only happens live.
You're technically not allowed to record, but some people still do.
And, you know, especially when it's big, big conversations.
But the whole point is it's there live.
And there's different structures.
Like on discord, it was so fascinating.
I have this discord server that would have hundreds of people in a room together, right?
We're all just little icons that can mute and unmute our mics.
And so you're sitting there, so it's just voices.
And you're able with hundreds of people to not interrupt each other.
But first of all, like as a dynamic system.
Yeah.
You see icons just like mics muted or not muted basically.
Yeah. Well, so everyone's muted and they unmute and they start, it starts flashing.
Yeah.
And so you're like, okay, let me get precedence.
Yeah.
So it's the digital equivalent of when you're in a conversation at like a faculty meeting
and you sort of like kind of make some noises like all the other persons finishing.
And so people realize like, okay, this person wants to talk next,
but now it's purely digital.
You see a flashing.
But in a faculty meeting, which is very interesting, like even as we're talking now,
there's a visual element that seems to increase the probability of interruption.
Yeah.
When it's just darkness, you actually listen better and you don't interrupt.
So like if you create a culture, there's always going to be assholes.
Yeah.
But they're actually exceptions.
Everybody adjusts, they kind of evolve to the beat of the room.
Okay. That's one fascinating aspect.
It's like, okay, that's weird because it's different than like a zoom call where there's video.
Yeah.
It's just audio.
You think video adds, but it actually seems like it subtracts.
The second aspect of it that's fascinating is when it's no video, just audio, there's an intimacy.
It's weird because with strangers, you connect in a much more real way.
It's very similar to podcasts.
Yeah.
But with a lot of people.
With a lot of people and new people.
And then they bring, okay, first of all, different voices like low voices and like high voices.
And it's more difficult to judge.
In Discord, you couldn't even see the people.
It was a culture where you do funny profile pictures as opposed to your actual face.
In Clubhouse, it's your actual face.
So you can tell like as an older person, younger person, in Discord, you couldn't.
You just have to judge based on the voice.
But there's something about the listening and the intimacy of being surprised by different strangers.
That feels almost like a party with friends and friends of friends you haven't met yet, but you really like.
Now Clubhouse also has an interesting innovation where there's a large crowd that just listens and there's a stage.
And you can bring people up onto stage.
So only people on stage are talking.
And you can have like five, six, seven, eight, sometimes 20, 30 people on stage.
And then you can also have thousands of people just listening.
So there's a, I don't know.
A lot of people are being surprised by this.
Why is it called a social network?
There's not social links.
There's not a feed that's trying to harvest attention.
It feels like a communication.
So the social network aspect is you follow people and the people you follow.
This is like the first social network that's actually correct use of follow, I think.
You're more likely to see the rooms they're in.
So there's a, your feed is a bunch of rooms that are going on right now.
And the people you follow are the ones that will increase the likelihood that you'll see the room they're in.
And so the final result is like, there's a list of really interesting rooms.
Like I have all these, I've been speaking Russian quite a bit there's practicing, but also just like talking politics and philosophy in Russian.
I've never done that before, but it allows me to connect with that community.
And then there's a community of like, it's funny, but like, I'll go in a community of all African American people talking about race and I'll be welcomed.
Yeah, I've never had like, I've literally never been in a difficult conversation about race, like with people from all over the place.
It's like fascinating musicians, jazz musicians.
I don't know.
You could say that a lot of other places could have created that culture.
I suppose Twitter and Facebook allow for that culture.
But there's something about this network as it stands now because no Android users is probably just because it's iPhone people.
It's less conspiratorial or something.
Well, like, listen, I'm an Android person.
So I got an iPhone just for this network.
This is funny.
For now, it's all like, there's very few trolls.
There's very few people that are trying to manipulate the system and so on.
So I don't know, it's interesting.
Now the downside, the reason you're going to hate it is because it's so intimate, because it pulls you in and pulls in very successful people.
Like you, just like really successful, productive, very busy people.
It's a huge time sink.
It's very difficult to pull yourself out.
Interesting.
You mean once you're in a room?
Well, no, leaving the room is actually easy.
The beautiful thing about a stage with multiple people, there's actually a little button that says leave quietly.
So culture, no, etiquette-wise, it's okay to just leave.
So you and I in a room, when it's just you and I, it's a little awkward to leave.
If you're asking questions and I'm just gone.
Yeah.
And actually, if you're being interviewed for the book, that's weird because you're now in the event and you're supposed to.
But usually the person interviewing would be like, okay, it's time for you to go.
It's more normal.
But the normal way to use the room, it's like, you're just opening the app.
And there'll be like, I don't know, Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein, I think Joe Rogan showed up to the app, Bill Gates.
These people on stage just randomly just plugged in and then you step up on stage.
Listen, maybe you won't contribute at all.
Maybe you'll say something funny and then you'll just leave.
And there's the addicting aspect to it.
The reason it's a time sink is you don't want to leave.
What I've noticed about exceptionally busy people, that they love this, I think might have to do with the pandemic.
It might be a little bit, yeah.
There's a loneliness.
They're all snarred.
But also it's really cool people.
Yeah.
When was the last time you talked to Sam Harris or whoever?
Think of anybody, any faculty.
This is like what universities strive to create.
But it's taken cultural evolution and trying to get a lot of interesting, smart people together that run into each other.
We have really strong faculty in a room together with no scheduling.
This is the power of it.
It's like you just show up.
There's none of that baggage of scheduling and so on.
And there's no pressure to stay.
It's very easy for you to leave.
You realize that there's a lot of constraints on meetings and faculty.
Even stopping by before the pandemic, a friend or faculty or colleague and so on, there's a weirdness about leaving.
But here there's not a weirdness about leaving.
So they've discovered something interesting.
But the final result when you observe it is it's very fulfilling.
I think it's very beneficial, but it's very addicting.
So you have to make sure you moderate.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Okay, well, so maybe I'll try it.
I mean, look, there's no, the things that make me suspicious about other platforms aren't here.
So the feed is not full of user-generated content that is going through some sort of algorithmic rating process with all the weird incentives and nudging that does.
And you're not producing content that's being harvested to be monetized by another company.
I mean, it seems like it's more ephemeral, right?
You're here.
You're talking.
The feed is just actually just showing you.
Here's interesting things happening, right?
You're not jockeying in the feed for, look, I'm being clever or something and I'm going to get a light count that goes up and that's going to influence.
And there's more friction.
There's more cognitive friction, I guess, involved in listening to smart people versus scrolling through.
Yeah, there's something there.
So there's no...
Why are people so...
I see all these articles that seem, I haven't really read them, but why are reporters negative about this?
Competition.
The New York Times wrote this article called Unfettered Conversations Happening on Clubhouse.
So I'm right in picking up a tone, even from the headlines, that there's some negative vibes from the press.
No, so I can say, let's say...
Well, I'll tell you what the article was saying, which is they're having cancelable conversations, like the biggest people in the world almost trolling the press.
Right.
Like for Channing the Press.
By saying that you guys are looking for clickbait from our genuine human conversations.
And so I think the...
Honestly, the press is just like, what do we do with this?
We can't...
Yeah.
First of all, it's a lot of work for that.
Okay.
It's what Naval says, which is like, this is skipping the journalist.
Like the interview, if you go on Clubhouse, the interview you might do for the book will be with somebody who's like a journalist and interviewing you.
Yeah.
That's more traditional.
Yeah.
And it'd be a good introduction for you to try it.
But the way to use Clubhouse is you just show up and it's like, again, like me, I'm sorry, I keep mentioning Sam Harris as if it's like the only person I know.
But like a lot of these major faculty, I don't know, Max Tegmark, just major faculty just sitting there and then you show up and then I'll ask like, oh, don't you have a book coming out or something?
And then you'll talk about the book and then you'll leave five minutes later because you have to go get coffee and go to the bathroom.
Interesting.
So like that's the...
Yeah.
It's not the journalist that...
You're not going to actually enjoy the interview as much because it'll be like the normal thing.
Yeah.
There are 40 minutes or an hour and there'll be questions from the audience.
Right.
Like I'm doing an event next week for the book launch where it's like Jason Fried and I are talking about email.
Yeah.
But it's using some more...
There'll be like a thousand people who are there to watch virtually, but it's using some sort of traditional webinar.
Clubhouse would be a situation where that could just happen informally.
Like I jump in like Jason's there and then someone else jumps in and yeah, that's interesting.
But for now, it's still closed.
Yeah.
So even though there's a lot of excitement and there'll be quite famous people just sitting there listening to you.
Yeah.
But the numbers aren't exactly high.
So you're talking about rooms, like even the huge rooms are like just a few thousand.
Right.
And this is probably like Soho in the 50s or something too.
Just because of the exponential growth, give it seven more months.
And if you let one invite be gets two invites, be gets four invites, because pretty soon it'll be everyone.
And the rooms in your feed are going to be whatever, marketing, performance enhancing drugs or something like that.
Exactly.
Yeah.
But then in a bunch of competitors, there's already like 30 plus competitors sprung up Twitter spaces.
So Twitter is creating a competitor that's going to likely destroy Clubhouse because they just have a much larger user base
and they already have a social network.
So I would be very cautious, of course, with the addictive element, but it doesn't just like you said,
this particular implementation in its early stages doesn't have the like.
Yeah.
It doesn't have the context switching problem.
Yeah.
You'll just switch to it.
I think it's fantastic.
And you'll be stuck.
Yeah, to keep a context is great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And but then I think the best way I've found to use it is to acknowledge that these things pull you in.
Yeah.
So I've used it in the past, like almost, you know, I'll go get a coffee and I'll tune into a conversation as if that's how I use podcasts sometimes.
I'll just like play a little bit of a podcast and then, you know, I can just turn it off.
The problem with these is it pulls you in.
It's really interesting.
And then the other problem that you'll experience is like somebody will recognize you and then they'll be like, oh, Lex, come on up.
No, hey, I had a question for you.
And then it takes a lot for you to go like to ignore that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So and then you pulled in and it's fascinating and it's really cool people.
So it's like a source of a lot of joy, but it is you have to be very, very careful.
The reason I brought it up is we, there's a room, there's an entire club actually on burnout.
And I brought you up and I brought David Goggins as the process I go through, which is, you know, my passion goes up and down.
It dips.
And I don't think I trust my own mind to, to tell me whether I'm getting close to burnout or exhaustion or not.
I kind of go with the David Goggins model of, I mean, he's probably more applying it to running.
But when it feels like your mind can't take anymore, that you're just 40% at your capacity.
I mean, it's just like an arbitrary level.
Right.
It's the Navy SEAL thing, right?
The Navy SEAL thing.
I mean, you could put that at any percent, but it is remarkable that if you just take it one step at a time, just keep going.
It's similar to this idea of a process.
If you just trust the process and you just keep following, even if the passion goes up and down and so on,
then ultimately, if you look in aggregate, the passion will increase.
Yeah.
Your self-satisfaction will increase.
Yeah.
I think, and if you have two things, this has been a big strategy of mine so that you can, what you hope for is off phase.
Off phase alignment.
Like that sometimes is in phase and that's a problem, but off phase alignment's good.
So, okay, my research, I'm struggling, but my book stuff is going well, right?
And so when you, when you add those two waves together, like, oh, we're doing pretty well.
And then in other periods, like on my writing, you know, I feel like I'm just not getting anywhere, but I've had some good papers.
I'm feeling good over there.
So having two things that they can counteract each other.
Now, sometimes they fall into sync and then it gets rough.
Then when, you know, when everything, because everything for me is cyclical, you know, good periods, bad periods with all this stuff.
So typically they don't coincide.
So it helps compensate.
When they do coincide, you get really high highs, like where everything's clicking and then you get these really low lows where like your research is not working,
your program's not clicking, you feel like you're nowhere with your writing, and then it's a little rougher.
Is, do you, do you think about the concept of burnout?
Because I, so I personally have never experienced burnout in the way that folks talk about, which is like, it's not just the up and down.
It's like, you don't want to do anything ever again.
Yeah.
It like, it's, for some people, it's like physical, like to the hospital kind of thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I do worry about it.
So when I used to do student writing, like writing about students and student advice, it came up a lot with students at elite schools.
And I used to call it deep procrastination, but it's a real, really vivid, very replicatable syndrome where they stop being able to do schoolwork.
Yeah.
Like this is due, and the professor gives you an extension, and the professor gives you an incomplete, and says you got it, you were going to fail the course, you have to hand this in, they can't do it.
Right.
So you have a complete stop on the ability to actually do work.
So I used to counsel students who had that issue.
And often it was a combination of, this is my best analysis, is you have just the physical and cognitive difficulties of, they're usually under a very hard load.
Right.
They're doing too many majors, too many extracurriculars, just, you know, really pushing themselves.
And the motivation is not sufficiently intrinsic.
Right.
So if you have a motivational center that's not completely on board, so a lot of these kids, like when I'm dealing with MIT kids, they would be, you know, their whole town was,
shooting off fireworks that they got in.
They're everyone's hope that they were going there.
And that they're in three majors.
They don't want to let people down, but they're not really interested in being a doctor or whatever.
So your motivation is not in the right place.
The motivational psychologist would say the locus of control was more towards the extrinsic end of the spectrum, and you have hardship.
And you could just fritz out the whole system.
And so I would always be very worried about that.
So I think about that a lot.
I do a lot of multi-phase or multi-scale seasonality.
So I'll go hard on something for a while, and then for a few weeks go easy.
I'll have semesters that are hard and semesters that are easier.
I'll take the summer really low.
So on multiple scales, and in the day, I'll go really hard on something, but then have a hard cut off at five.
So like every scale, it's all about rest and recovery, because I really want to avoid that.
And I do burn out.
I burnt out.
Pretty recently, I get minor burnt-outs.
I got a couple of papers that I was trying to work through for a deadline a few weeks ago.
And I wasn't sleeping well, and there's some other things going on.
And it just, it knocks out, and I get sick usually, is how I know I've pushed myself too far.
And so I kind of pulled it back, and I'm doing this book launch.
Then after this book launch, I'm pulling it back again.
So I like seasonality for rest and recovery.
I think it's crucial at every scale, daily, monthly, and then at the annual scale.
An easy summer, for example, I think is like a great idea if that's possible.
Okay, you just made me realize that that's exactly what I do.
Because I feel like I'm not even close to burnout or anything, even though I'm in chaos.
I feel the right exact ways of seasonality is the, not even the seasonality, but like you always have multiple seasons operating.
It's like you said, because when you have a lot of cool shit going on, there's always at least one thing that's a source of joy.
That there's always a reason.
I suppose the fundamental thing, and I've known people that suffer from depression too,
the fundamental problem with the experience of depression and burnout is like, life is meaningless.
And I always have an answer of why today could be cool.
And you have to contrive it, right?
If you don't have it, you have to contrive it.
I think it's really important.
Okay, well, this is going bad.
So now is the time to start thinking about, I mean, look, I started a podcast during the pandemic.
It's like, this is going pretty bad, but you know what?
This could be something really interesting.
Deep questions with Kyle Newport.
I do it all in that voice.
I love the podcast, by the way.
But yeah, I think David Foster Wallace said, the key to life is to be unboreable.
I've always kind of taken that to heart, which is like, you should be able to maybe artificially generate anything.
Find something in your environment, in your surroundings, that's the source of joy.
Everything is fun.
Did you read The Pale King?
It goes deep on boredom.
It's like uncomfortable.
It's like an uncomfortable meditation on boredom.
The characters in that are just driven to the extremes of, I just bought three books on boredom the other day.
So now I'm really interested in this topic because I was anxious about my book launch happening this week.
So I was like, okay, I need something else.
So I have this idea for, I might do it as an article first, but as a book.
Like, okay, I need something cool to be thinking about because I was worried about like, I don't have the launch going to work, the pandemic, what's going to happen.
I don't know if it's going to get there.
So this is exactly what we're talking about.
I went out and I bought a bunch of books and I'm beginning like a whole sort of intellectual exploration.
Well, I think that's one of the profound ideas in deep work that you don't expand on too much is boredom.
Yeah.
Well, so deep work had a superficial idea about boredom, which was, I had this chapter called Embrace Boredom.
A very functionalist idea was basically, you have to have some boredom in your regular schedule or your mind is going to form a Pavlovian connection between as soon as I feel boredom, I get stimuli.
And once it forms that connection, it's never going to tolerate deep work.
So there's this very pragmatic treatment of boredom of your mind better be used to the idea that sometimes you don't get stimuli because otherwise you can't write for three hours.
Like it's just not going to tolerate it.
More recently, what I'm really interested in boredom is it as a fundamental human drive, right?
Because it's incredibly uncomfortable.
And think about the other things that are incredibly uncomfortable like hunger or thirst.
They serve a really important purpose for a species, right?
Like if something is really distressing, there's a reason.
Pain is really uncomfortable because we need to worry about getting injured.
Thirst is really uncomfortable because we need water to survive.
So what's boredom?
Why is that uncomfortable?
And I've been interested in this notion that boredom is about driving us towards productive action.
Like as a species, I mean, think about it.
Like what got us to actually take advantage of these brains?
What got us to actually work with fire?
What got us to start shaping stones and the hand axes and figuring out if we could actually sharpen a stick, sharpen after we could throw it as a melee weapon or a distance weapon for a hunting mammoth, right?
Boredom drives us towards action.
So now I'm fascinated by this fundamental action instinct because I have this theory that I'm working on that we're out of sync with it.
Just like we got, we have this drive for hunger, but then we introduced junk food and got out of sync with hunger and it makes us really unhealthy.
We have this drive towards action, but then we overload ourselves and we have all of these distractions.
And then that causes, it's like a cognitive action, obesity type things because it short circuits this system that wants us to do things.
But we put more things in our plate than we can possibly do and then we're really frustrated we can't do them and we're short circling all of our wires.
So it all comes back to this question, well, what would be the ideal sort of amount of stuff to do and type of things to do?
Like if we wanted to look back at our ancestral environment and say, if I could just build from scratch, how much work I do and what I work on to be as in touch with that as like paleo people are trying to get their diets in touch with that.
But see, this is something I made up, but now I'm going deep on it.
And one of my podcast listeners I was talking about on the show and I was trying to learn about animals and boredom.
And she sent me this cool article from an animal behaviorist journal about what we know about human boredom versus animal boredom.
So trying to figure out that puzzle is the wave that's high so I can get through the wave that's low of like, I don't know about this pandemic book launch.
And my research, my research is stumbling a little bit because of the pandemic and so I needed a nice, you know, high.
So there we go. There's a case study.
Well, it's both a case study and a very interesting set of concepts because I didn't even realize that it's so simple.
I'm one of the people that has an interesting push and pull dynamic with hunger, trying to understand the hunger with myself.
Like I probably have a non-healthy relationship with food, I don't know.
But there's probably a perfect, that's a nice way to think about diet as action.
There's probably an optimal diet response to the experience that everybody's telling us, the signal that everybody's sending, which is hunger.
And in that same way, boredom is sending a signal.
And most of our intellectual activities in this world, our creative activities are essentially a response to that signal.
Yeah. And think about this analogy that we have this hunger instinct that junk food short circuits.
Yes.
Right. It's like, oh, we'll satisfy that hyper-palatably and it doesn't end up well.
Now think about modern attention engineered, digitally mediated entertainment.
We have this boredom instinct.
Oh, we can take care of that with a hyper-palatable alternative.
Is that going to lead to a similar problem?
So I've been fasting a lot lately.
I'm eating once a day.
I've been doing that for over a month, just eating one meal a day and primarily meat.
But fasting has been incredible for me for focus, for well-being, for feeling good.
Okay. We'll put on a chart what makes me feel good.
And that fasting and eating primarily meat-based diet makes me feel really good.
But that ultimately, what fasting did, I haven't fasted super long yet, like a seven-day diet, which I really like to do.
But even just fasting for a day for 24 hours gets you in touch with your, with the signal.
It's fascinating. You get to learn to listen to your body that like, you know, it's okay to be hungry.
It's like a little signal that sends you stuff.
And then I get to listen to how it responds when I put food in my body.
And I get to like, okay, cool.
So like food is a thing that pacifies the signal.
Like it sounds ridiculous.
And do different types of food, it feels different. So you learn about what your body wants.
For some reason fasting, it's similar to the deep work, embrace boredom.
Fasting allowed me to go into mode of listening, of trying to understand the signal that I could say,
I have an unhealthy appreciation of fruit.
I love apples and cherries. Like I don't know how to moderate them.
So if you take just same amount of calories, I don't know, calories matter, but so they say calories,
2,000 calories of cherries versus 2,000 calories of steak.
If I eat 2,000 calories of steak, maybe just a little bit of like green beans or cauliflower,
I'm going to feel really good, fulfilled, focused and happy.
If I eat cherries, I'm going to be, I'm going to wake up behind a dumpster crying with like naked.
And like it's just all around with everything face. Yeah.
And it's just like bloated, just not an unhappy and also the mood swings up and down.
I don't know. And I'll be much hungrier the next day.
Sometimes a couple of days.
But when I introduce carbs into the system, too many carbs, it starts, it's just unhealthy.
I go into this roller coaster as opposed to a calm boat ride along the river and the Amazon or something like that.
And so fasting was the mechanism for me to start listening to the body.
I wonder if you can do that same kind of, I guess that's what meditation a little bit is.
A little bit, but yeah, listen to the boredom.
But so two years ago, I had a book out called digital minimalism.
And one of the things I was recommending that people do is basically a 30 day fast,
but from digital personal entertainment, social media, online videos, anything that captures your attention and dispels boredom.
And people were thinking like, oh, this is a detox.
Like I just want to teach your body not to need the distraction or this or that, but it really wasn't what I was interested in.
I wanted there to be space that you could listen to your boredom.
Like, okay, I can't just dispel it. I can't just look at the screen and revel in it a little bit and start to listen to it and say,
what is this really pushing me towards? And you take the new stuff, the new technology off the table
and sort of ask, what is this? What am I craving?
Like what's the activity equivalent of 2000 calories of meat with a little bit of green beans on the side?
And I had 1700 people go through this experiment, like spend 30 days doing this.
And it's hard at first, but then they get used to listening to themselves and sort of seeking out what is this really pushing me towards.
And it was pushing people towards connection.
It was pushing people towards, I just want to go be around other people.
It was pushing people towards high quality leisure activities.
Like I want to go do something that's complicated and it took weeks sometimes for them to get in touch with their boredom.
But then it completely rewired how they thought about, what do I want to do with my time outside of work?
And then the idea is when you're done with that, then it was much easier to go back and completely change your digital life because you have alternatives, right?
You're not just trying to abstain from things you don't like, but that's basically a listening to boredom experiment.
Like just be there with the boredom and see where it drives you when you don't have the digital cheesets.
Okay, so if I can't do that, where is it going to drive me?
Well, I guess I kind of want to go to the library, which came up a lot by the way.
A lot of people rediscovered the library.
With physical books.
Physical books, so like you can just go borrow them.
And like there's like low pressure and you can explore and you bring them home and then you read them.
And you can like sit by the window and read them and it's nice weather outside.
And I used to do that 20 years ago.
They're listening to boredom.
So can you maybe elaborate a little bit on the different experiences that people had when they quit social media for 30 days?
Like is that if you were to recommend that process, what is ultimately the goal?
Yeah, digital minimalism.
That's my philosophy for all this tech.
And it's working backwards from what's important.
So it's you figure out what you're actually all about, like what you want to do, what you want to spend your time doing.
And then you can ask, okay, is there a place that tech could amplify or support some of these things?
And that's how you decide what tech to use.
And so the process is let's actually get away from everything.
Let's be bored for a while.
Let's really spend a month getting really figuring out what do I actually want to do?
What do I want to spend my time doing?
What's important to me?
What makes me feel good?
And then when you're done, you can bring back in tech very strategically to help those things, right?
And that was the goal.
That turns out to be much more successful than when people take an abstention-only approach.
So if you come at your tech life and say, you know, whatever, I look at Instagram too much.
Like, I don't like how much I'm on Instagram.
That's a bad thing.
I want to reduce this bad thing.
So here's my new thing.
I'm going to spend less time looking at Instagram, much less likely to succeed in the long term.
So we're much less likely at trying to reduce this sort of amorphous negative because, you know, in the moment, you know, like, yeah, but it's not that bad.
And it would be kind of interesting to look at it now.
When you're instead controlling behavior because you have a positive that you're aiming towards, it's very powerful for people.
Like, I want my life to be like this.
Here's the role that tech plays in that life.
The connection to wanting your life to be like that is very, very strong.
And then it's much, much easier to say, yeah, like using Instagram is not part of my plan for how I have that life.
And I really want to have that life.
So of course, I'm not going to use Instagram.
So it turns out to be a much more sustainable way to tame what's going on.
So if you quit social media for 30 days, you kind of have to do the work.
Yes, I do the work.
Of thinking like, what am I actually, what makes me happy in terms of these tools that I've previously used?
And when you try to integrate them back, how can I integrate them to maximize the thing that actually makes me happy?
Yeah, or what makes me happy unrelated to technology?
Like, what do I actually, what do I want my life to be like?
Well, maybe what I want to do is be, you know, outside of nature two hours a day and spend a lot more time like helping my community and sacrificing on behalf of my connections and then have some sort of intellectually engaging leisure activities.
Like I'm reading or trying to read the great books and having more calm and seeing the sunset.
Like you create this picture and then you go back and say, well, I still need my Facebook group because that's how I keep up with my cycling group.
But Twitter is just, you know, toxic, it's not helping any of these things.
And well, I'm an artist, so I kind of need Instagram to get inspiration.
But if I know that's why I'm using Instagram, I don't need it on my phone.
It's just on my computer and I just follow 10 artists and check it once a week.
Like you really can start deploying.
It was the number one thing that differentiated in that experiment.
The people who ended up sustainably making changes and getting through the 30 days and those who didn't, was the people who did the experimentation and the reflection.
Like, let me try to figure out what's positive.
They were much more successful than the people that just said, I'm sick of using my phone so much.
So I'm just going to white knuckle it.
Just 30 days will be good for me.
I just got to, I just got to get away from it or something.
That doesn't last.
So you're doing social media currently.
Yeah.
Do you find that a lot of people going through this process will seek to basically arrive at a similar place to not use social media primarily?
About half.
Right.
So about half when they went through this exercise and these aren't quantified numbers.
This is just, they sent me reports and yeah.
That's pretty good though.
So 1700?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So roughly half probably got rid of social media altogether.
Once they did this exercise, they realized these things I care about, social media is not the tools that's really helping.
The other half kept some, there are some things in their life where some social media was useful.
But the key thing is if they knew why they were deploying social media, they could put fences around it.
So for example, of those half that kept some social media, almost none of them kept it on their phone.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
You can't optimize if you don't know what the function you're trying to optimize.
So it's like this huge hack is like, once you know this is why I'm using Twitter, then you can have a lot of rules about how you use Twitter.
And suddenly you take this cost-benefit ratio and it goes like way from the company's advantage and then way over towards your advantage.
It's kind of fascinating because I've been torn with social media, but I did this kind of process.
I haven't actually done it for 30 days, which I probably should.
I'll do it for like a week at a time and regularly and thinking what kind of approach to Twitter works for me.
I'm distinctly aware of the fact that I really enjoy posting once or twice a day.
And at that time, checking from the previous post, it makes me feel, even when there's like negative comments, they go right past me.
And when there's positive comments, it makes you smile.
I feel like love and connection with people, especially people I know.
But even just in general, it makes me feel like the world is full of awesome people.
Okay.
When you increase that from checking from two to like, I don't know what the threshold is for me, but probably like five or six per day.
It starts going to anxiety world, like where negative comments will actually stick to me mentally and positive comments will feel more shallow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's kind of fascinating.
So I've been trying to, there's been long stretches of time, I think December and January, where I did just post and check, post and check.
That was, that makes me really happy.
Most of 2020, I did that, made me really happy.
Recently, I started like, I'll go, you know, you go right back in like a drug addict.
Well, you check it like, I don't know what that number is, but that number is high.
It's not good.
You don't come out happy.
No one comes out of a day full of Twitter celebrating humanity.
And it's not even because I'm very fortunate to have a lot of just like positivity in my, the Twitter, but I, there's just a general anxiety.
I wouldn't even say, I wouldn't even say it's, it's probably the thing that you're talking about with the context switching.
It's almost like an exhaustion.
I wouldn't even say it's like a negative feeling.
It's almost just an exhaustion to where I'm not creating anything beautiful in my life.
Just exhausted.
Like an existential exhaustion.
Existential exhaustion.
But I wonder, do you think it's possible to use from the people you've seen from yourself to, to use social media in the way I'm describing moderation?
Or is it always going to become?
When people do this exercise, you get lots of, lots of configurations.
So for people that have a public presence, for example, like what you're doing is not that, not that unusual.
Okay, I, I post one thing a day and my audience likes it and, and that's kind of it.
Which, but you've thought through like, okay, this supports something I value, which is like having a sort of informal connection with my audience and being exposed to some sort of positive randomness.
Yes.
Okay.
If that's my goal, what's the right way to do it?
Well, I don't need to be on Twitter on my phone all day.
Maybe what I do is every day at five, I do my post and check on the day.
So I have a writer friend, Ryan Holiday, who writes about the Stoics a lot.
And he has this similar strategy.
He posts one quote every day from, usually from a famous Stoic and sometimes from a contemporary figure.
And that's just what he does.
He just posted and it's a very positive thing.
Like his readers really love it because it's just like a dose of inspiration.
He doesn't spend time, he's never interacting with anyone on social media.
Right.
But that's an example of, I figured out what's important to me, what's the best way to use tools to amplify it.
And then you get advantages out of the tools.
So I like what you're doing.
I looked up your Twitter feed before I came over here.
I was curious, you're not on there a lot.
No.
I don't see you yelling at people.
Now, do you think social media as a medium changed the cultural standards?
And I mean it in a, have you read Neil Postman at all?
Have you read, like, Amusing Ourselves to Death?
He was a social critic, technology critic, and wrote a lot about sort of technological determinism.
The ways, which is a really influential idea to a lot of my work, which is actually a little out of fashion right now in academia.
But the ways that the properties and presence of technologies change things about humans in a way that's not really intended or planned by the humans themselves.
And he is, that book is all about how different communication medium, like fundamentally just changed the way the human brain understands and operates.
And so he sort of gets into the, what happened when the printed word was widespread and how television changed it.
And this was all pre-social media.
But this one of these ideas I'm having is like, what's the degree to which, and I get into it sometimes on my show, I get into a little bit, like the degree to which like Twitter in particular just changed the way that people conceptualized what, for example, debate and discussion was.
Like it introduced a rhetorical dunk culture where it's sort of more about tribes not giving ground to other tribes.
And it's like, it's a completely, there's different places and times when that type of discussion was thought of differently, right?
Well, yeah, absolutely.
But I tend to believe, I don't know what you think that there's the technological solutions.
Like there's literally different features in Twitter that could completely reverse that.
There's so much power in the different choices that are made.
And it could still be highly engaging and have very different effects, perhaps more negative or hopefully more positive.
Yeah. So I'm trying to pull these two things apart. So there's these two ways social media, let's say, could change the experience of reading a major newspaper today.
One could be a little bit more economic, right?
So the internet made it cheaper to get news.
The newspapers had to retreat to a paywall model because it was the only way they were going to survive.
But once you're in a paywall model, then what you really want to do is make your tribe, which is within the paywall, very, very happy with you.
You don't want to work to them. But then there's the sort of the determinist point of view, which is the properties of Twitter, which were arbitrary.
Jack and Evan just, whatever, let's just do it this way.
Influenced the very way that people now understand and think about the world.
So the one influenced the other, I think.
Yeah.
They kind of started adjusting together.
I did this thing, I mean, I'm trying to understand this part of the, I've been playing with the entrepreneurial idea.
There's a very particular dream I've had of a startup that this is a longer term thing that has to do with artificial intelligence.
But more and more, it seems like there's some trajectory through creating social media type of technologies.
Very different than what people are thinking I'm doing.
But it's a kind of challenge to the way the Twitter is done.
But it's not obvious what the best mechanisms are to still make an exceptionally engaging platform.
My clubhouse is very engaging and not have any other negative effects.
For example, there's Chrome extensions that allow you to turn off all likes and dislikes and all of that from Twitter.
So all you're seeing is just the content.
On Twitter, that to me creates, that's not a compelling experience at all.
Because I still need, I would argue, I still need the likes to know what's a tweet worth reading.
Because I don't only have the limited amount of time, so I need to know what's valuable.
It's like great Yelp reviews on tweets or something.
But I've turned off, for example, on my account on YouTube, I wrote a Chrome extension that turns off all likes and dislikes and just views.
I don't know how many views the video gets and so on.
Unless it's on my phone.
Did you take off the recommendations?
No.
Some people, distraction for YouTube is a big one for people.
No, I'm not worried about the distraction because I'm able to control myself on YouTube.
You don't rabbit hole?
No, I don't rabbit hole.
So you have to know your demons or your addictions or whatever.
On YouTube, I'm okay. I don't keep clicking.
The negative feelings come from seeing the views on stuff you've created.
So you don't want to see your views?
Yeah.
I'm just speaking to the things that I'm aware of of myself that are helpful and things that are not helpful emotionally.
And I feel like there should be, we need to create actually tooling for ourselves.
That's not me with JavaScript, but anybody is able to create, sort of control the experience that they have.
Well, so my big unified theory on social media is I'm very bearish on the big platforms having a long future.
You are.
I think the moment of three or four major platforms is knock on a last.
Right?
So I don't know, okay, this is just perspective, right?
So you can start shorting these stocks on my...
It's not financial.
Yeah, don't do Robinhood.
So here's, I think the big mistake the major platforms made is when they took out the network effect advantage.
Right?
So the original pitch, especially if something like Facebook or Instagram was the people you know are on here.
Right?
So like what you use this for is you can connect to people that you already know.
This is what makes the network useful.
So therefore the value of our network grows quadratically with the number of users.
And therefore it's such a head start that there's no way that someone else can catch up.
But when they shifted and when Facebook took to lead of say we're going to shift towards a newsfeed model,
they basically said we're going to try to in the moment get more data and get more likes.
Like what we're going to go towards is actually just seeing interesting stuff,
like seeing divergent information.
So people took this social internet impulse to connect to people digitally to other tools,
like group text messages and WhatsApp and stuff like this, right?
Don't think about these tools as oh, this is where I connect with people.
Once it's just a feed that's kind of interesting,
now you're competing with everything else that can produce interesting content that's diverting.
And I think that is a much fiercer competition because now for example you're going up against podcast, right?
I mean like okay, I guess you know the Twitter feed is interesting right now,
but also a podcast is interesting or something else could be interesting too.
I think it's a much fiercer competition when there's no more network effects, right?
And so my sense is we're going to see a fragmentation into what I call long-tail social media,
where if I don't need everyone I know to be on a platform,
then why not have three or four bespoke platforms I use where it's a thousand people
and we're all interested in you know, whatever,
AI or comedy and we've perfected this interface and maybe it's like Clubhouse's audio or something
and we all pay $2 so we don't have to worry about attention harvesting
and that's going to be wildly more entertaining.
I mean I'm thinking about comedians on Twitter.
It's not the best internet possible format for them expressing themselves and being interesting,
that you have all these comedians that are trying to like well I can do like little clips and little whatever,
like I don't know if there was a long-tail social media.
It's really just where the comedians are and this podcast and the comedians are on podcast now.
So this is my thought is that there's really no strong advantage to having one large platform that everyone is on.
If all you're getting from it is I now have different options for diversion and like uplifting and aspirational
or whatever types of entertainment, that whole thing could fragment.
And I think the glue that was holding together was network effects.
I don't think they realized that when network effects have been destabilized,
they don't have the centrifugal force anymore and they're spinning faster and faster,
but is a Twitter feed really that much more interesting than all these streaming services?
Is it really that much more interesting than Clubhouse?
Is it that much more interesting than podcast?
I feel like they don't realize how unstable their ground actually is.
Yeah, that's fascinating.
But the thing that makes Twitter and Facebook work,
I mean the news feed, you're exactly right, like you can just duplicate the news.
Like if it's not the social network and it's the news feed,
then why not have multiple different feeds that are more, that are better at satisfying you.
There's a dopamine gamification that they've figured out.
Yeah.
And so you have to, whatever you create,
you have to at least provide some pleasure in that same gamification kind of way.
It doesn't have to have to do with scale of large social networks,
but I mean, I guess you're implying that you should be able to design that kind of mechanism in other forms.
Or people are turning on that gamification.
I mean, so people are getting wise to it and are getting uncomfortable about it, right?
So if I'm offering something, these exist out here.
People realize sugar is bad for you, they're going to stop eating.
Yeah, sugar is great.
Yeah, drinking a lot is great too, but also after a while you realize there's problems.
So some of the long tail social media networks that are out there that I've looked at,
they offer usually like a deeper sense of connection.
Like it's usually interesting people that you share some affinity and you have these carefully cultivated.
I wrote this New Yorker piece a couple of years ago about the indie social media movement
that really got into some of these different technologies.
But I think the technologies are a distraction, we focus too much on Macedon versus whatever,
like forget or discord.
Like actually, let's forget the protocols right now.
It's the idea of, okay, and there's a lot of these long tail social media groups,
what people are getting out of it, which I think can outweigh the dopamine gamification,
is strong connection and motivation.
Like you're in a group with other guys that are all trying to be better dads or something like this.
And you talk to them on a regular basis and you're sharing your stories and there's interesting talks.
And that's a powerful thing too.
One interesting thing about the scale of Twitter is you have these viral spread of information.
So sort of Twitter has become a newsmaker in itself.
Yeah, I think it's a problem.
Well, yes.
But I don't wonder what replaces that because then you immediately...
Reporting?
No, the problem with reporters and journalism
is that they're intermediary.
They have control.
I mean, this is the problem in Russia currently is that you have...
It creates a shield between the people and the news.
The interesting thing and the powerful thing about Twitter is that the news originates from the individual that's creating the news.
Like you have the president of the United States, the former president of the United States on Twitter creating news.
You have Elon Musk creating news.
You have people announcing stuff on Twitter as opposed to talking to a journalist.
And that feels much more genuine and it feels very powerful, but actually coming to realize it doesn't need the social network.
You can just put that announcement on a YouTube type thing.
This is what I'm thinking.
Right.
So this is my point about that because that's right.
The democratizing power of the internet is fantastic.
I'm an old school internet nerd, a guy that was telemediting in the servers and gophering before the worldwide web was around.
So I'm a huge internet booster and that's one of its big power.
But when you put everything on Twitter, I think the fact that you've homogenized everything, right?
So everything looks the same, moves with the same low friction is very difficult.
You have know what I call distributed curation, right?
The only curation that really happens is a little bit with likes and also the algorithm.
But if you look back to pre-web 2.0 or early web 2.0 when a lot of this was happening, let's say on blogs where people own their own servers and you had your different blogs,
there was this distributed curation that happened where in order for your blog to get on people's radar,
and this had nothing to do with any gatekeepers or legacy media, it was over time you got more links and people respected you and you would hear about this blog over here.
And there's this whole distributed curation and filtering going on.
So if you think like the 2004 presidential election, most of the information people are getting from the internet,
it was one of the first big internet news driven elections was from, you know, you had like the daily costs and drudge.
But there was like blogs that were out there.
And Ezra Klein was just running a blog out of his dorm room at this point, right?
And you would in a distributed fashion gain credibility because, okay, people have paid it.
It's very hard to get people to pay attention to blog or pay attention to get linked to this kid Ezra or whatever.
It seems to be really sharp.
And now people are noticing it.
And now you have a distributed curation that solves a lot of the problems we see when you have a completely homogenized low friction environment like friction where I mean,
Twitter where any random conspiracy theory or whatever that people like can just shoot through and spread.
Whereas if you're starting a blog to try to push QAnon or something like that, it's probably going to be a really weird looking blog.
And you're going to have a hard time.
Like it's just never going to show up on people's radar, right?
So everything you've said up until the very last statement, I would agree with.
This is a topic I don't know a ton about, I guess.
So there's, I think, I'll forget QAnon.
Yeah.
No, but QAnon is QAnon could be that.
I also don't know.
I should know more.
I apologize.
I don't know more.
I mean, that's a power and the downside.
You can have, I mean, Hitler could have a blog today and you would have potentially a very large following if he's charismatic,
if he's as good with words, is able to express the ideas, whatever, maybe he's able to channel the frustration,
the anger that people have about a certain thing.
And so I think that's the power of blogs, but it's also the limitation.
But that doesn't, we're not trying to solve that.
You can't solve that.
The fundamental problem you're saying is not the problem.
Your thesis is that there's nothing special about large scale social networks that guarantees that they will keep existing.
And it's important to remember for a lot of the older generation of internet activists,
the people who are very pro-internet in the early days, they were completely flabbergasted by the rise of these platforms.
Say, why would you take the internet and then build your own version of the internet where you own all the servers?
And we built this whole distributed, the whole thing, we had open protocols.
Everyone anywhere in the world could use the same protocols.
Your machine can talk to any other machine.
It's the most democratic communication system that's ever been built.
And then these companies came along and said, we're going to build our own,
let's own all the servers and put them in buildings that we own.
And the internet will just be the first mile that gets you into our private internet where we own the whole thing.
Completely against the entire motivation of the internet was like, yes,
it's not going to be one person owns all the servers and you pay to access them.
It's anyone server that they own can talk to anyone else's server because we all agree on a standard set of protocols.
And so the old guard of pro-internet people never understood this move towards let's build private versions of the internet.
We'll build three or four private internet and that's what we'll all use.
It was the opposite, basically.
Well, it's funny enough.
But Jack Dorsey is also as a proponent and is helping to fund, create fully distributed versions of Twitter.
Essentially, I think that would potentially destroy Twitter.
But I think there might be financial business cases to be made there.
I'm not sure.
But that seems to be another alternative as opposed to creating a bunch of like the long tail,
creating like the ultimate long tail of like fully distributed.
Yeah, which is what the internet is.
But that's sort of why I'm thinking about long tail social media.
I'm thinking it's like the text not so important.
Like there's groups out there, right?
I know where the tech they use to actually implement their digital only social group, whatever, they might use Slack.
They might use some combination of Zoom or it doesn't matter.
I think in the tech world, we want to build the beautiful protocol that, okay, everyone's going to use as the federated server protocol in which we've worked out X, Y and Z.
And no one understands it because then the engineers need it all to make.
I get it because I'm a nerd like this.
Like, okay, every standard has to fit with everything else and no one understands what's going on.
Meanwhile, you know, you have this group of bike enthusiasts that are like, yeah, we'll just jump on a Zoom and have some Slack and put up a blog.
The tech doesn't really matter.
Like we built a world with our own curation, our own rules, our own sort of social ecosystem that's generating a lot of value.
I don't know if it'll happen.
There's a lot of money at stake with obviously these large.
But I just think they're more...
I mean, look how quickly Americans left Facebook, right?
I mean, Facebook was savvy to buy other properties and to diversify, right?
But how quick did that take for just standard Facebook news feed?
Everyone under the age of something were using it and no one under a certain age is using it now.
It took like four years.
I mean, this stuff is really...
I believe people can leave Facebook overnight.
Like I think Facebook hasn't actually messed up like enough to...
There's two things.
They haven't messed up enough for people to really leave aggressively and there's no good alternative for them to leave.
I think if good alternatives pop up, it would just immediately happen.
The stuff is a lot more culturally fragile, I think.
I mean, Twitter's having a moment because it was feeding a certain type of...
I mean, there's a lot of anxieties that was in the sort of political sphere anyways that Twitter was working with.
But its moment could go to as well.
I mean, it's a really arbitrary thing, short little things.
And I read a Wired article about this earlier in the pandemic.
Like this is crazy that the way that we're trying to communicate information about the pandemic is in all these weird arbitrary rules where people are screen-shotting pictures of articles that are part of a tweet thread where you say one slash in under it.
Like we have the technology guys.
So like really clearly convey long form information to people.
Like why do we have these, and I know it's because it's the gamified dopamine hits, but what a weird medium.
There's no reason for us to have these threads that you have to find and pin with your screenshot.
I mean, we have technology to communicate better using the internet.
I mean, why are epidemiologists having to do tweet threads?
Well, because there's mechanisms of publishing that make it easier on Twitter.
I mean, we're evolving as a species and the internet is a very fresh thing.
And so it's kind of interesting to think that as opposed to Twitter, this is what Jack also complains about is Twitter is not innovating fast enough.
And so it's almost like the people are innovating and thinking about their productive life faster than the platforms in which the operate can catch up.
And so at the point the gap grows sufficiently, they'll jump a few people, a few innovative folks will just create an alternative and perhaps distributed perhaps just many little silos and then people will jump and then we'll just continue this kind of way.
I think like Substack, for example, what they're going to pull out of Twitter, among other things, is the audience that was, let's say, slightly left of center, but the slightly left of center don't like Trump uncomfortable with postmodern critical theories made into political action.
And they're like, yeah, Twitter, there was a people on there talking about this and it made me feel sort of heard because I was feeling a little bit like a nerd about it. But honestly, I'd probably rather subscribe the four subs. You know, I'm going to have like berries and Andrew Sullivan.
I'll have like a Jesse signals like I'll have a few sub stacks I can subscribe to. And honestly, that's I'm a knowledge worker who's 32 anyways, probably that's an email all day.
And so like there's an innovation that's going to that group, you know, it's going to suck them off.
Which is actually a very large group.
Yeah, that's a lot of that's a lot of energy. And then once Trump's gone, I guess that's probably going to drive that drove a lot of more like Trump people off Twitter, like this stuff is fragile.
So I but the fascinating thing to me, because I've hung out on parlor for a short amount enough to know that the interface matters. It's so fascinating like that, that it's not just about ideas.
It's about creating like self stack to creating a pleasant experience, addicting experience.
You're right. You're right about that. And it's hard.
And this is one of the conclusions from that indie social media article is it's just the ugliness matters. And I don't mean even just aesthetically, but just the clunkiness of the interfaces.
And I don't know it's the some degree the social media companies have spent a lot of money on this and the some degree it's a survivorship bias.
Yeah, right. I think Twitter, every time I hear Jack talks about this, it seems like he's as surprised as anyone else, the way Twitter is being used. I mean, it's basically the way, you know, they had it years ago.
And then, you know, it was great. It'll be statuses, right? Yeah, this is what I'm doing, you know, and my friends can follow me and see it.
And without really changing anything, it just happened to hit everything right to support this other type of interaction.
Well, there's also the JavaScript model, which Bernard and I talked about. He just implemented JavaScript, like the crappy version of JavaScript in 10 days throughout there and just changed it really quickly.
Yeah.
Involved it really quickly. And now it's become according to Stack Exchange, the most popular programming language in the world that drives like most of the internet and even the back end and now mobile.
Yeah.
So that's an argument for the kind of thing you're talking about where, like, the bike club people could literally create the thing that would, you know, run most of the internet in 10 years from now.
Yeah.
So there's something to that, like, as opposed to trying to get lucky or trying to think through stuff is just to solve a particular problem.
Do stuff.
Yeah.
And then do stuff.
Keep tinkering until you love it.
Yeah.
And of course, the sad thing is timing and luck matter. And that you can't really control.
That's the problem.
Yeah.
But you can't go back to 2007.
Yeah.
That's like the number one thing you could do to have a lot of success with a new platform is go back in time, 14 years.
So the thing you have to kind of think about is what is like, what's the totally new thing that 10 years from now would seem obvious.
I mean, some people saying clubhouse is that there's been a lot of stuff like clubhouse before.
Yeah.
But it hit the right kind of thing.
It's similar to Tesla, actually. What clubhouse did is it got a lot of relatively famous people on there quickly.
And then the other effect is like, it's invite only. So like, oh, all those like famous people are on there.
I wonder what's, it's the FOMO.
Like, fear that you're missing something really profound.
There's exciting happening there.
So those social effects. And then once you actually show up, I'm a huge fan of this.
The JavaScript model is like, clubhouse is so dumb, like so simple in its interface.
Like you literally can't do anything except mute on mute.
There's a mute button.
Yeah.
And there's a leave quietly button.
Yeah.
That's it.
Yeah.
And it's kind of.
I love single use technology.
Yeah.
That sense.
Yeah.
Like, no, it's just like trivial.
And, you know, Twitter kind of started like that. Facebook started like that.
Yeah.
But they've evolved quickly to add all these features and so on.
And, you know, I do hope clubhouse stays that way.
Yeah.
To be interesting.
Or there's alternatives.
I mean, I mean, even with clubhouse, though, the, so one of the issues with a lot of these platforms, I think is bits are cheap enough now that we don't really need a unicorn investor model.
I mean, the investors need that model.
There's really not really an imperative of we need something that can scale to 100 million plus a year revenue.
So because it was going to require this much seed and angel investment and you're not going to get this much seed angel investment.
Unless you can have a potential exit this, this wide because you have to be part of a portfolio that depends on one out of 10 exiting here.
If you don't actually need that, and you don't need to satisfy that investor model, which I think is basically the case.
I mean, bits are so cheap. Everything is so cheap.
You don't know.
So even like with clubhouse, it's investor backed, right?
This notion of like this needs to be a major platform.
But the bike club doesn't necessarily need a major platform.
That's where I'm interested.
I mean, I don't know.
There's so much money.
That's the only problem that bets against me is that you can concentrate a lot of capital if you do these things, right?
I mean, so Facebook was like a fantastic capital concentration machine.
It's crazy how much, where it even found that capital in the world that it could concentrate and ossify in the stock price that a very small number of people have access to, right?
That's incredibly powerful.
So when there is a possibility to consolidate and gather a huge amount of capital, that's a huge imperative that's very hard for the bike club to go up again.
But there's a lot of money in the bike club.
You should see what the Wall Street bets and that when a bunch of people get together, I mean, it doesn't have to be a bike.
It could be a bunch of different bike clubs just kind of team up to overtake.
That's what we're doing now.
Yeah.
Or we're going to repurpose off the shelf stuff that's not, yeah, we're going to repurpose whatever it was for office productivity or something.
And like the clubs using Slack just to build out these, yeah.
Yeah.
Let's talk about email.
Yeah, that's right.
I wrote a book.
You wrote, you know, another amazing book, World Without Email.
Maybe one way to enter this discussion is to ask what is the hyperactive hive mind, which is the concept you open the book with.
Yeah.
And the devil.
And the devil.
It's the scourge of hundreds of millions.
So I think, so I called this book a world without email.
The real title should be a world without the hyperactive hive mind workflow.
But my publisher didn't like that.
So we had to get a little bit more pithy.
I was trying to answer the question after deep work, why is it so hard to do this?
If this is so valuable, if we can produce much higher, if people are much happier, why do we check email a day?
Why are we on Slack all day?
And so I started working on this book immediately after deep work.
And so my initial interviews were done in 2016.
So it took five years to pull the threads together.
I was trying to understand why is it so hard for most people to actually find any time to do the stuff that actually moves the needle.
And the story was, and I thought this was, I hadn't heard this reported anywhere else.
That's why it took me so long to pull it together, is email arrives on the scene.
Email spreads.
I trace it.
It really picks up steam in the early 1990s.
Between like 1990 and 1995, it makes its move, right?
And it does so for very pragmatic reasons.
We're replacing existing communication technologies that it was better than.
It was mainly the fax machine voicemail and memos, right?
So this was just better, right?
So it was a killer app because it was useful.
In its wake came a new way of collaborating.
And that's the hyperactive hive mind.
So it's the virus that follows the rats that went through Western Europe for the black pig.
As email spread through organizations, in its wake came the hyperactive hive mind workflow, which says, okay, guys, here's the way we're going to collaborate.
We'll just work things out on the fly with unscheduled back and forth messages.
Just boom, boom, boom.
Let's go back and forth.
Hey, what about this?
Did you see this?
What about that client?
What's going on over here?
That followed email.
It completely took over office work.
And the need to keep up with all of these asynchronous back and forth unscheduled messages, as those got more and more and more, and we had more of those to service.
The need to service those required us to check more and more and more and more, right?
And so by the time, and I go through the numbers, but by the time you get to today, now the average knowledge worker has to check one of these channels once every six minutes.
Because every single thing you do in your organization, how you talk to your colleagues, how you talk to your vendors, how you talk to your clients, how you talk to the HR department, it's all this asynchronous unscheduled back and forth messaging.
And you have to service the conversations.
And it spiraled out of control.
And it has sort of devolved a lot of work in the office now to all I do is constantly tend communication channels.
So it's fascinating what you're describing is nobody ever paused in this whole evolution to try to create a system that actually works, that it was kind of like a huge fan of cellular automata.
So it just kind of started a very simple mechanism, just like cellular automata, just kind of grew to overtake all the fundamental communication of how we do business and also personal life.
And that's one of the big ideas is that the unintentionality.
So this goes back to technological determinism.
And this is a weird business book because I go deep on philosophy.
I go deep on, for some reason, we get in the paleoanthropology for a while.
We do a lot of neuroscience.
It's kind of a weird book.
But I got real into this technological determinism, this notion that just the presence of a technology can change how people act.
That's my big argument about what happened with the hive mind.
And I can document specific examples.
So I document this example in IBM 1987, maybe 85, but isn't like the mid to late 80s, IBM, our monk headquarters, we're going to put an internal email, right?
Because it's convenient.
And so they ran a whole study.
And so I talked to the engineer who ran the study, Adrian Stuntley.
We're going to run the study to figure out how much do we communicate because it was still an era where it's expensive, right?
So you have to provision a mainframe so you can't over provision.
We want to know how much communication actually happened.
So they went and figured it out how many memos, how many calls, how many notes.
Great.
We'll provision a mainframe to handle email that can handle all of that.
So if all of our communication moves to email, the mainframe will still be fine.
In three days, they had melted it down.
People were communicating six times more than that estimate.
So just in three days, the presence of a low friction digital communication tool drastically changed how everyone collaborated.
So that's not enough time for, you know, an all hands meeting.
Guys, we figured it out, you know, this is what we need to communicate a lot more is what's going to make us more productive.
We need more emails.
It's emergent.
Isn't that just on a positive end, amazing to you?
Like, isn't an email amazing?
Like in those early days, like just a frictionless communication.
I mean, email is awesome.
Like people say that there's a lot of problems with emails.
Just like people say a lot of problems with Twitter and so on.
It's kind of cool that you can just send a little note.
It was a miracle, right?
So I wrote a, there's originally was a New Yorker piece from a year or two ago called was email a mistake and then it's in the book too.
But I go into the history of email, like why did it come along?
And it solved a huge problem.
So it was the problem of fast asynchronous communication.
And it was a problem that not exists until we got large offices.
We got large offices, synchronous communication, like let's get on the phone at the same time.
There's too much overhead to it.
There's too many people you might have to talk to.
Asynchronous communication, like let me send you a memo when I'm ready and you can read it when you're ready took too long.
And so it was like a huge problem.
So one of the things I talked about is the way that when they built the CIA headquarters, there's such a need for fast asynchronous communication that they built a pneumatic powered email system.
They had these pneumatic tubes all throughout the headquarters with electromagnetic routers.
So you would put your message in a plexiglass tube and you would turn these brass dials about the location.
You would stick it in these things and pneumatic tubes and it would shoot and sort and work its way through these tubes to show up in just a minute or something at the floor and at the general office suite where you wanted to go.
And my point is the fact that they spent so much money to make that work show how important fast asynchronous communication was to large offices.
So when email came along, it was a productivity silver bullet.
It was a miracle.
I talked to the researchers who were working on computer supported collaboration in the late 80s trying to figure out how are we going to use computer networks to be more productive.
And they were building all these systems and tools.
Email showed up.
It just wiped all that research off the map.
There's no need to build these custom intranet applications.
There's no need to build these communication platforms.
Email could just do everything.
So it was a miracle application, which is why it spread everywhere.
That's one of these things where, okay, unintended consequences, right?
You had this miracle productivity silver bullet.
It spread everywhere, but it was so effective.
It just, I don't know, like a drug, I'm sure there's some pandemic metaphor here, analogy here of a drug that is so effective at treating this that it also blows up your whole immune system and that everyone gets sick.
Well, ultimately, it probably significantly increased the productivity of the world, but there's a kind of hump that it now is plateaued.
And then the fundamental question you're asking is like, okay, how do we take the next?
How do we keep increasing the productivity?
Now, I think it brought it down.
So again, there's a little bit in the book, but I have a more recent Wired article that puts some newer numbers to this.
I subscribe to the hypothesis that the hyperactive hive mind was so detrimental.
So yeah, it helped productivity at first, right?
When you could do fast asynchronous communication, but very quickly, there was a sort of exponential rise in communication amounts.
Once we got to the point where the hive mind meant you had to constantly check your email,
I think that made us so unproductive that it actually was pulling down non-industrial productivity.
And I think the only reason why, so it certainly has not been going up, that metric's been stagnating for a long time now while all this was going on.
I think the only reason why it hasn't fallen is that we added these extra shifts off the books.
I'm going to work for three hours in the morning, I'm going to work for three hours at night,
and only that I think has allowed us to basically maintain a stagnated non-industrial growth.
We should have been shooting up the charts. I mean, this is miraculous innovations, computer networks,
and then we built out these $100 billion ubiquitous worldwide high-speed wireless internet infrastructure with supercomputers in our pockets
where we could talk to anyone at any time.
Why did our productivity not shoot off the charts?
Because our brain can't context-switch once every six minutes.
So it's fundamentally back to the context-switching.
Context-switching is poison.
Context-switching is poison.
What is it about an email that forces context-switching?
Is it both our psychology that drags us in?
Or is it the expectation of-
I think we've seen this through a personal will or failure lens recently.
Like, am I addicted to email?
I have bad etiquette about my email.
No, it's the underlying workflow.
So the tool itself, I will exonerate.
I think I would rather use Pop3 than a fax protocol.
I think it's easier.
The issue is the hyperactive high-fine workflow.
I am now collaborating with 20 or 30 different people
with back-and-forth unscheduled messaging.
I have to tend those conversations.
It's like you have 30 metaphorical ping-pong tables.
When the balls come back across, you have to pretty soon hit it back
or stuff actually grinds to a halt.
So it's the workflow that's the problem.
It's not the tool.
It's the fact that we use it to do all of our collaboration.
Let's just send messages back and forth,
which means you can't be far from checking that
because if you take a break, if you batch,
if you try to have better habits,
it's going to slow things down.
So my whole villain is this hyperactive high-fine workflow.
The tool is fine.
I don't want the tool to go away,
but I want to replace the hyperactive high-fine workflow.
I think this is going to be one of the biggest value-generating
productivity revolutions of the 21st century.
I quote an anonymous CEO who's pretty well known
who says this is going to be the moonshot of the 21st century.
It's going to be of that importance.
There's so much latent productivity that's being suppressed
because we just figure things out on the fly and email.
As we figure that out, I think it's going to be hundreds
of billions of dollars.
You're so absolutely right.
The question is, what does the world without email look like?
How do we fix email?
So what happens is, at least in my vision,
you identify, well, actually,
there's these different processes that make up my workday.
These are things that I do repeatedly often in collaboration
with other people that do useful things
for my company or whatever.
Right now, most of these processes are implicitly
implemented with the hyperactive high-fine.
How do we do this thing, like answering client questions
to shoot messages back and forth?
How do we do this thing, posting podcast episodes?
We'll just figure it out on the fly.
My main argument is we actually have to do, like they do
in the industrial sector, take each of these processes
and say, is there a better way to do this?
And by better, I mean a way that's going to minimize
the need to have unscheduled back-and-forth messaging.
So we actually have to do process engineering.
This created a massive growth and productivity
in the industrial sector during the 20th century.
We have to do it in knowledge work.
We can't just rock and roll in inbox as we actually
have to say, how do we deal with client questions?
Well, let's put in place a process that doesn't require
us to send messages back and forth.
How do we post podcast episodes?
Let's automate this to a degree where I don't have
to just send you a message on the fly.
And you do this process by process,
and the pressure on that inbox is released,
and now you don't have to check it every six minutes.
So you still have email.
But we're not coordinating or collaborating
over email or Slack, which is just a faster way
of doing the hive mind.
Slack doesn't solve anything there.
You have better structured bespoke processes.
I think that's what's going to unleash
this massive productivity.
The interesting thing is, for example,
you and I exchange some emails.
So obviously, let's just say,
in my particular case, I schedule podcasts.
There's a bunch of different tasks,
fascinating enough that I do
that can be converted into processes.
Is it up to me
to create that process,
or do you think we also need to build tools
just like email was a protocol
for helping us
create process for the different
tasks?
I think ultimately,
the whole organization, the whole team has to be involved.
I think ultimately, there's certainly a lot of
investor money being spent right now to try to figure out
those tools.
Silicon Valley has figured this out in the past couple of years.
This is the difference between when I was talking
to people after deep work
and now five years later,
is this sentence in the air.
Because there's so much latent productivity.
So yes, there are going to be new tools,
which I think could help. There are already tools that exist.
The different groups I profile
use things like Trello or Basecamp
or Asana or Flow
and our schedule wants
and acuity. There's a lot
of tools out there. The key is not to think
about it in terms of what tool
do I replace email with. Instead, you think about it
with
we're trying to come with a process that reduces back and forth messages.
Oh, what tool might help us
do that?
And I would push it's not about necessarily
efficiency. In fact, some of these things are going to take
more time. So writing a letter
to someone is a high value
activity. It's probably worth doing. The thing that's killer
is the back and forth.
Because now I have to keep checking.
So we scheduled this together because I
knew you from before, but most of the
interviews I was scheduling for this
actually I have a process with my publicist
where we use a shared document
and she put stuff in there and then I check it twice
a week and there's scheduling
options and I say, here's what I want to do this one or this
will work for this one or whatever. And it takes more
time in the moment than just but
it means that we have almost no back and forth
messaging for a podcast
schedule, which without this. So like with my UK
publisher, I didn't put this process
in the place because we're not doing as many
interviews, but it's all the time
and I'm like, oh, I could really feel the
difference, right? It's the back and forth that's killer.
I suppose it is up to
the individual people involved. Like you
said, knowledge
workers, like they have to carry the
responsibility
of creating processes.
Like how always asking the first principle
question, how can this be converted into
a process? Yeah, so you can start by
doing this yourself. Like just with what
you can control. I think ultimately
once the teams are doing that, I think that's
probably the right scale. If you try to do this at the
organizational scale, you're going to get bureaucracy.
So if
Elon Musk is going to
dictate down to everyone
at Tesla or something like this, that's too much
to remove when you get bureaucracy. But if it's, we're
a team of six that's
working together on whatever
powertrain software, then we can
figure out on our own, what are our processes, how do
we want to do this? So it's ultimately also creating
a culture where saying like an email
sending an email just for
the hell of it, it should be taboo.
So like you are being
you're being
destructive to the productivity of the team by
sending the email as opposed to
helping develop
a process and so on
that will
ultimately automate this. That's why I'm
trying to spread this message of the context
which is this poison, I get so much into the science
of it. I think we underestimate how much it kills
us. They have to wrench away our context,
look at a message and come back. And so once
you have the mindset of it's a huge
thing to ask of someone
to have to take their attention off something and look
back at this. And if they have to do that for
three or four times, like we're just going to figure this out on
the fly and every message is going to require
five checks of the inbox while you wait for it.
Now you've created whatever it is at this
point, 25 or 30
context shifts. You've just done
a huge disservice to someone's day. This would be like
if I had a professional athlete, it's like, hey, do me a favor.
I need you to go do this press interview, but to
get there, you're going to have to carry this sandbag
and sprint up this hill, like completely exhaust
your muscles and then you have to go play a game.
Of course, I'm not going to ask an athlete to do
like an incredibly physically demanding thing
right before a game, but something as easy
as thoughts, question mark,
or like, hey, do you want to jump on a call and it's
going to be six back and forth messages to figure it out?
It's kind of the cognitive equivalent, right?
You're taking the wind out of someone.
Yeah. And by the way, for people who are
listening, because I recently posted
a few job openings for us, so I'll have to help
with this thing. One of the things that people
are surprised when they work with me is how many
spreadsheets and processes are involved.
And it's like Claude Shannon, right?
I talked about communication theory, information
theory. It takes time to come up with a clever
code up front. So you spend more time up front
figuring out those spreadsheets and trying to get
people on board with it. But then
your communication going forward is all
much more efficient. So over time,
you're using much less bandwidth, right?
So you do pain up front.
Yes. It's quicker just right now
to send an email. But if I spend a half
day to do this over the next six months,
I've saved myself 600 emails.
Now, here's a tough question
for, you know, from the computer science
perspective, we often
over-optimize.
So you create processes
and you, okay, just like
you're saying, it's
so pleasurable
to increase
in the long-term productivity
that sometimes you just enjoy that
process in itself. Yeah.
By just creating processes
and you actually never
like it has
a negative effect on productivity long-term because
you're too obsessed with the processes.
Is that
a nice problem to have, essentially?
I mean, it's a problem.
Because let's look at the one sector that
does do this, which is
developers, right? So agile
methodologies like Scrum or Kanban are
basically workflow methodologies
that are much better than the hyperactive
hive mind. But, man,
some of those programmers get pretty obsessive.
I don't know if you've ever talked to a whatever
level three Scrum master.
They get really obsessive about
like it has to happen exactly
this way and it's probably seven times more
complex than it needs to be.
I'm hoping that's just because nerds like me
like to do that, but
it's a broadly
probably an issue, right? We have to be careful because
you can just go down that
fiddling path. So it needs to be, here's
how we do it. Let's reduce the messages and let's roll,
you know.
You can't save yourself
through if you can get the process just
right, right? So I
wrote this article kind of recently called The
Rise and Fall and Getting Things Done.
And I profiled
this productivity guru named Merlin Mann
and I talked about this movement called Productivity
Pran as like elite speak
term in the early 2000s where people
just became convinced that if they could
combine their productivity systems with
software and they could find just
the right software, just the right configuration
where they could offload most of the difficulty of work,
what happened with the machine. So we kind of
figured out and then they could just sort of crank
widgets and it would be, and the whole thing fell apart
because it's work is hard and it's hard to do
and making decisions about what to work on is hard
and no system can really do that for you. So you
have to have this
this sort of balance between
context switches are poison. So we got to
get rid of the context switches. Once like
something's working good enough to get rid of the context switches
then get after it.
There's a psychological process there for me
the OCD nature like
I've literally embarrassing enough
have lost my shit before when
so in
in many of the processes that involve python scripts
the rule is
to not use
spaces.
There's like rules for like how you format
stuff okay
and like I should not
lose my shit when somebody had
a space and maybe capital letters
like it's okay to have a space
because there's this feeling like
something's not perfect
and as opposed to
in the python script allowing some flexibility
around that you create this
programmatic way that's flawless and when
everything's working perfectly it's perfect
but actually
if you strive for perfection
it has
the same like has a
lot of the stress that you were seeking to escape
with the context switching because
you're almost
stressing about
errors like when the process is functioning
you're there's always this
anxiety of like I wonder
if it's gonna succeed
I wonder if it's gonna succeed.
I think some of that's just you and I probably
I mean it's just our mindset right and we do computer
science right so chicken and
egg I guess and a lot of the
processes end up working here much
rougher it's like okay instead of letting clients
just email me all the time
we have a weekly call
and then we send them a breakdown
of everything we committed to right
that's a process that works okay I get
asked a lot of questions because I'm the javascript guy in the company
accepting that by email I have office hours
this is what base camp does all right so you come
to my office hours that cuts down a lot of back and forth
we're gonna instead of emailing about this project we'll have
a
Trello board and we'll do a weekly
really structured status meeting real quick what's
going on who needs what let's go
and now everything's on there and on our inboxes
and there's many messages so like that rough level
of granularity that gets you most of the way
there so the
parts that you can't automate and turn
into a process
so how many parts like that
do you think should remain in a perfect world
and
for those parts
where email is still useful
what do you recommend
those emails look like how
how should you write emails when should you send them
yeah I think email
is good for delivering
information
I think of it like a fax machine or something
it's a really good fax machine so if I need to
send you something and you just send you a file
I need to broadcast a new policy or something
like email is a great way to do it
it's bad for collaboration
so you're having a conversation
like we're trying to reach a decision on something
I'm trying to learn about something I'm trying to
clarify what something what this is
that's more than just like a one answer
type question then I think
you shouldn't be doing an email
but see here's the thing
like you and I don't talk often
and so we have a kind of new interaction
it's not
so sure yeah you have a book coming out
there's a process and so on but
say there don't you think
there's a lot of novel interactive experiences
yeah it's fine
so you could just for every novel experience
it's okay to have a little bit of exchange
it's fine like I think it's fine
if stuff comes in over the transom or
you hear from someone you haven't heard from in a while
I think all that's fine
I mean that's that's email at its best
where it starts to kill us is where
all of our collaboration is happening with the back and forth
so when you've moved the bulk of that out of your inbox
now you're back in that
Meg Ryan movie like you got mail where it's like
all right load this up and you wait for the vote
I'm like oh we got a message
Lex sent me a message this is interesting
right back to the AOL days
so you're talking about the bulk of the business world
where like email has replaced
the actual
communication all the communication protocols
required to accomplish anything
everything is just happening with messages so if you
now get most stuff done
repeatable collaborations with
other processes that don't require you to check these inboxes
then the inbox can serve like an inbox
which includes hearing from interesting people
right or sending
something hey I don't know if you saw this I thought you might like it
I think it's great for that
so there's probably a bunch of people listening to this
they're like
yeah but I work on a team
and they're all they use is email
how do you start the revolution from like the ground up
yeah well do it
do asymmetric optimization first
so identify all your processes
and then change what you can change
and be socially very careful about it
so don't necessarily say like okay this is a new process
we all have to do
you're just you know hey we gotta
get this report ready here's what I think we should do
like I'll get a draft into our Dropbox folder by
like noon on Monday grab it
I won't touch it again until Tuesday
morning and then I'll look at your changes
I have this office hours always scheduled Tuesday
afternoon so if there's anything that catches
your attention grab me then but I've told
the designer who CC'd on this that
by COB Tuesday
the final version will be ready for them to
take and polish or whatever like the person
the other end is like great I'm glad you know
Cal has a plan so I just what do I need to do
I need to edit this tomorrow whatever right
but you've actually pulled them into a process that means we're going to get
this report together without having to just go back
and forth so you just asymmetrically
optimize these things
and then you can begin the conversation
and maybe that's where my book comes in place you just sort of
yeah slide it
slide it across the desk
so by the book just leave it
give it to everybody on your team
okay so we solved the bulk of the email problem of this
is there a case to be made that even for like communication
between you and I
we should move away from
from email and for example
there's a guy recently I don't know if you know
he's a comedian but there's a guy named Joey Diaz
that I've had an interaction with recently
and that guy
first of all the sweetest human despite what
his comedy sounds like is the sweetest human being
and he's a big
proponent of just pick up the phone
and call
and it makes me so uncomfortable when people call me
it's like I don't know what to do with this thing
but
it kind of gets everything done quicker I think
if I don't remove the anxiety from that
is there a case to be made for that
because email could still be
the most efficient way to do this
if you have to interact with someone
there's a lot of efficiency and synchrony
right and this is something from the distributed system theory
where you know if you go from
synchronous to asynchronous networks
there's a huge amount of overhead to the asynchronous
so actually the protocols required to solve things
in asynchronous networks are
significantly more complicated and fragile
than synchronous protocols so if we can just do real time
it's usually better
and also from an interaction like social connection
standpoint there's a lot more information
in the human voice in the back and forth
yeah if you just call
so very generational right like
our generation will be comfortable talking on the phone
in a way that like a younger generation isn't
but an older generation is more comfortable with
well you just call people
whereas we so there's a happy medium
but most of my good friends we just talk
we have regular phone calls
yeah it's not I don't just call them
we schedule it we schedule it yeah just on text
like yeah you want to talk sometime soon
do you do you ever have a process
around friends not really
no I feel like I should
I feel like when you have like a lot of
interesting friend possibilities
is you have like an interesting problem right like
really interesting people you can talk to
well that's that's one problem
the other one is the introversion where I'm
just afraid of people and get really stressed
like I freak out and so
you picked a good line of work
yeah now perhaps it's the
Goggins thing it's like facing your fears whatever
but
it's almost like
there's a
it has to do with the timetables thing and the deep work
that the nice thing about the
processes is
it not only automates
sort of
automates away the context switching
it ensures you do the important things too
yeah it's like prioritize
so the thing is with email
because everything
is done over email
you can be
lazy in the same way with like social networks
and do the easy things first
that are not that important
so the process also enforces
that you do the important things
and for me the important things is like
it sounds weird but like
social connection no that's one of the most important things
in all of human existence
yeah and doing it
the paradoxical thing
I got into this for digital minimalism
the more you sacrifice
on behalf of the connection the stronger
the connection feels right so sacrificing
non-trivial time and attention
on behalf of someone is what tells your brain
that this is a serious
relationship which is why social
media had this paradoxical effect making people
feel less social
because it took the friction out of it and so the brain
just doesn't like yeah you've been commenting
on this person's whatever you've been retweeting
them or sending them some text
you haven't it's not hard enough
and then then there's the perceived
strength of that social connection diminishes
where if you talk to them or go spend time with them
or whatever you're going to feel better
about it so the friction is good
I have a thing with some of my friends where
at the end of each call we take a couple minutes
to schedule the next
it's like I do with haircuts or something
like if I don't schedule it then
I'm never going to get my hair cut
and so it's like okay when do you want to talk next
you know yeah that's
a really good idea I just don't call
friends and like
every 10 years I do something dramatic
for them so then we maintain the friendship
like I'd murder somebody that they really don't like
or I just
careful man Joey might ask you
that's why
Lex I need to come down to New Jersey
that's exactly what we're going to do
with that robot dog of yours
we're going to go down to Jersey there's a special
human I love the comedian world
they've been shaking up
I don't know if you listen to Joe Rogan all those folks
they kind of
are doing something
interesting for MIT
and academia they're shaking up
this world a little bit
like podcasting because comedians are paving the way
for podcasting
and so you have like Andrew Huberman
who's a neuroscientist from Stanford
he's like
into podcasting now
and you're into podcasting
of course you're not necessarily podcasting
on computer science currently right
but
it feels like you could have a lot of
the free
spirit of the comedians
implemented by the people
who are academically trained
who actually have a
niche specialty
and then that results
I mean who knows what the experiment looks like
but that results me being able to talk
about robotics with your ideas
when he says
drops F-bombs every other sentence
and I
like I've seen actually a shift
within colleagues and friends within MIT
where they're becoming
much more accepting of that kind of thing
it's very interesting
that's interesting so you're seeing
because they're seeing how popular it is
well you're really popular
I don't know how they think about it at Georgetown for example
I don't know it's interesting but I think
what happens is
the popularity of it combined
with just good conversations
with people they respect
it's like oh
wait this is the thing
and this is more fun to listen to than
a shitty Zoom lecture
about their work
it's like there's something here
and nobody actually knows what that is
just like with Clubhouse or something
nobody's figured out
where is this medium take
is this a legitimate medium of education
or is this just like a fun
well that's your innovation I think
was we can bring on
professors
I know Joe Rogan did some of that too
but
you're professors in your field
bring on all these MIT guys who I remember
well that's been the big challenge
for me is
I feel
I would ask big philosophical questions
of people like yourself
that are
really well
this is for example you have a lot of excellent papers
on
you know that has a lot
of theory in it right
and there is some temptation
to just go through papers
and I think it's possible to actually do that
I haven't done that much but I think it's possible
it just requires a lot of preparation
and I can probably only do that
with things that I'm actually
like in the field I'm aware of
but
there's a dance that I would love to be able to
try to hit right where it's actually getting
to the core of some interesting ideas
as opposed to just talking about philosophy
at the same time there's a large audience
of people that just want to be inspired
by
disciplines where
they don't necessarily know the details
but there's a lot of people that are like
I'm really curious I've been thinking
about pivoting careers
into software engineering
they would love to hear from people like you
about computer science even if it's like theory
yeah but just like the idea
of big ideas you push them through
and it's interesting and you fight for it
there's some
what is it, computer file
and
number file, these YouTube channels
there's channels I watch
I'm like chess, exceptionally popular
where I don't
I understand maybe 80% of the time
what the hell they're talking about
because they're talking about why this move is better
than this move but I love the passion
and the genius of those people just over hearing it
I don't know why it's so exciting
do you look at Scott Aronson's blog
at all, Sheddled Optimized
it's like hardcore complexity theory
but it's just an enthusiasm
or like Terry Tao's blog
a little bit of humor, Terry Tao is a blog
he used to, yeah
and it would just be
I'm going all in on
here's a new affine group with which you can do whatever
I mean it was just equations
well in the case of Scott Aronson he's good
he's able to turn on the
inner troll
and comedian and so on
he keeps the fun, which is the best
he's a philosophical guy
he turns off philosophy
so we're exploring
these different ways of communicating
science and exciting the world
speaking of which, I got to ask you about
computer science
that's right, I do some of that
so a lot of
your work is what inspired
this deep thinking
about productivity from all the different
angles because
some of the most rigorous work is mathematical work
and in computer science that
theoretical computer science
let me ask the Scott Aronson question of like
is there something to you
that stands out in particular that's beautiful
or inspiring
or just really insightful about computer science
or maybe mathematics?
I mean
I like theory
and in particular what I've always liked in theory
is the notion of impossibilities
that's kind of my specialty
so within the context of distributed
algorithms my specialty is impossibility
results the idea that you can argue
nothing exists that solves this
or nothing exists
that can solve this faster
than this and that's
I think that's really interesting and that goes all the way back to Turing
his original
paper on computable numbers
with their connection to the German
Eischlich-Dung problem but basically the German
name that Hilbert called the decision problem
this was pre-computers
but he was you know he's English so it's written in English so it's very
accessible paper
and it lays the foundation for all of
theoretical computer science he just has this insight
he's like well if we think about like an algorithm
he figures out like all effective procedures
or Turing machines are basically algorithms
we could really describe a Turing machine with a number
which we can now imagine with
like computer code you could just take a source
file and just treat the binary version
of the file as like a really long number
but he's like every program is just a
finite number it's a natural number
and then he realized like one way
to think about a problem is you have
and this is like kind of the Mike Sipser
approach but you have a sort of
it's a language so an infinite number of strings
some of them are in the language and some of them aren't but basically
you can imagine a problem is represented
as an infinite binary string
where in every position like a one means that string
is in the language and a zero means it isn't
and then he applied Cantor
from the 19th century and said
okay the natural numbers are countable
so it's countably infinite
and infinite binary
strings you can use a diagonalization argument
and show they're uncountable
so there's just
vastly more problems than there are
algorithms so basically anything you can come up
with for the most part almost certainly is not solvable by a computer
you know and then he was
like let me give a particular example and he figured out
the very first computability proof and he
let's just walk through with a little bit of simple logic
the halting problem can't be solved by an algorithm
and that kicked off the whole
enterprise of
some things can't be solved by
algorithms some things can't be solved by
computers and we've just been doing theory on that
since the
that was the 30s he wrote that
so proving that something is impossible
is sort of a more a stricter version of that
is it like proving bounds on the
performance of different algorithms
so bounds are upper bounds right
so you say
this algorithm does at least as well and no worse
than this but you're looking at a particular algorithm
and possibility proofs say
no algorithm ever
could ever solve this problem so no algorithm could ever solve
the halting problem so it's problem centric
it's making
something different making a conclusive
statement about the problem yes
and that's somehow satisfying because it's
just philosophically interesting
I mean it all goes back to you get back
to Plato it's all reducto
out absurdum so all these arguments have to start
the only way to do it is there's an infinite number
of solutions you can't go through them you say let's assume
for the sake of contradiction
that there existed something
that solves this problem and then you
turn to crank a logic until you blow up the universe
and then you go back and say okay original assumption
that this solution exists can't be true
I just think philosophically
it's like a really exciting kind of beautiful thing
it's what I specialize in with the distributed
algorithms is more like time
bound and possibility results like no
no algorithm can solve this problem
faster than this in this setting
of all the infinite number of ways you might ever do it
so you have
many papers but the one that caught my eye
smooth analysis of dynamic networks
in which
you write a problem
with the worst case perspective is that it often
leads to extremely strong lower bounds
these strong results motivate a key question
is this bound robust
in the sense that it captures the fundamental difficulty
introduced by dynamism
or is the bound fragile
in the sense that the poor performance
it describes depends on an exact
sequence of adversarial changes
fragile lower bounds
leave open the possibility of algorithms
that might still perform well
in practice that's a
in the sense of the impossible
and the bounds discussion
presents the interesting question
I just like the idea of robust and fragile bounds
but
what do you make
about this kind of tension between
what's provably
what the bounds you can prove
that are robust
and something that's a bit more fragile
and also
by way of
answering that for this particular paper
can you say
what the hell are dynamic networks
what are distributed algorithms
and I have no idea
and what is smooth analysis
smooth analysis wasn't
my idea so Spielman and Tang
came up with this in the context of
sequential algorithms just like
the normal world of an algorithm that runs
on a computer and they were looking at
there's a well known algorithm
called the simplex algorithm but basically
you're trying to whatever find
a hole around a group of points
and there's an algorithm that worked really well in practice
but when you analyze it
you would say you know I can't guarantee it's going to work
well in practice because you have just the right
inputs this thing could run
really long right but in practice
it seemed to be really fast so smooth analysis
as they came in and they said let's assume that
a bad guy chooses
the inputs it could be anything like really bad
ones and all we're going to do
and simplex their numbers we're going to just
randomly put a little bit of noise
on each of the numbers and they said if you put
a little bit of noise on the numbers suddenly
simplex algorithm goes really fast
like oh that explains this this lower bound
this this idea that it could sometimes run
really long was a fragile bound
because it could only run a really long time if you had
exactly the worst pathological input
so then my collaborators and I brought this over
to the world to distributed algorithms
we brought them over the general lower bounds
so in the world of dynamic networks
so distributed algorithm is a bunch of
algorithms on different machines talking to each other
trying to solve a problem and sometimes
they're in a network so you imagine them
connected with network links
and a dynamic network those can change
right so I was talking to you but now
I can't talk to you anymore now I'm connected to a person over here
it's a really hard environment
mathematically speaking and there's a lot
of really strong lower bounds which you could
imagine if the network can change all the time
and a bad guy is doing it
it's like hard to do things well
so there's an algorithm running on every single node
in the network and then you're trying to say
something of any kind that makes any kind
of definitive sense about
the performance of that algorithm
so I just submitted a new paper on this
a couple weeks ago and we were looking at a very simple
problem there's some
messages in the network we want everyone to get them
if the network doesn't
change you can do this
pretty well you can pipeline them there's some algorithms
that work basic algorithms that work really well
the network can change every round
there's these lower bounds
that says it takes
a really long time there's a way that like no matter what
algorithm you come up with there's a way that network can change
in such a way that just really slows
down your progress basically right
so smooth analysis there says yeah but
that seems like a really
really bad luck if your network was
changing like exactly
in the right way that you needed to screw
your algorithm so we said what if we
randomly just add or
remove a couple edges in every round so the adversary
is trying to choose the worst possible network we're just
tweaking it a little bit and in that case
this is a new paper I mean it's a blinded submission
so maybe I shouldn't it's not
whatever we basically showed
an anonymous friend of yours submitted
an anonymous friend of mine
whose paper should be accepted
showed that even just adding like one
random edge per round
and here's the cool thing about the simplest
possible solution to this problem
blows away that lower bound it does
really well so that's like a very fragile
lower bound because we're like it's
almost impossible to actually
keep things slow.
I wonder how many lower bounds
you can smash
open with this kind of analysis and show
that they're fragile. This is my interest yeah
because in distributed algorithms
there's a ton of really famous strong
lower bounds but things have to go
wrong really really wrong
for these lower bound arguments
to work and so I like this approach
so this whole notion of fragile
versus robust I was like well let's go in
and just throw a little noise in there
and if it becomes solvable then maybe
that lower bound wasn't really something we should worry about
you know that's kind of embarrassed
that's really uncomfortable that's really embarrassing
to a lot of people
because okay this is the OCD thing
with the spaces
is it feels really good when you can
improve a nice bound
and if you
say that that bound is fragile
that's like
there's going to be a sad kid that walks
like with their lunch box
back home like my lower
bound doesn't matter. I don't think they care
it's all I don't know it feels like to me
a lot of this theory is just math machismo
it's like whatever this was a hard bound to prove
what do you think about
that like so if you show that something is fragile
that's more important that's really important
in practice right
so do you think kind of
theoretical computer science is living its own world
just like mathematics
and their main effort
which I think is very valuable is to develop ideas
it's not necessarily interesting
whether it's applicable in the real world
we don't care about the applicability
we kind of do but not really
we're terrible with computers
we can't do anything useful with computers
we don't know how to code and we're not
productive members of technological society
but I do think
things percolate
from the world of theory into the world of algorithm design
where it will pull on the theory
and now suddenly it's useful
and then the algorithm design gets pulled into the world of practice
where they say well actually we can make this algorithm
a lot better because in practice really these servers
do XYZ and now we can make this super efficient
and so I do think
I teach theory to the PhD students at Georgetown
I show them the sort of funnel
of like okay we're over here
doing theory but eventually some of this stuff
will percolate down in effect
at the very end you know a phone
but it's a long
it's a long tunnel
but the very question you're asking
at the highest philosophical level is fascinating
like if you take a system, a distributed system
or a network
and introduce a little bit of noise into it
like how many
problems of that nature
are fundamentally changed
by that little introduction of noise
yeah because it's all of it
distributed algorithms, the model is everything
like the way we work is we're incredibly precise
about here's exactly
it's mathematical, here's exactly how the network works
and it's a state machine
algorithms are state machines, there's rounds and schedulers
we're super precise so we can prove lower bounds
but yeah often those
impossibility results really
get at the hard edges of exactly
how that model works so we'll see if this
so we published a paper on this
that paper you mentioned
they kind of introduced the idea to distributed algorithms
world and I think
that's got some traction
and there's been some follow-ups and we've just submitted our
our next
honestly the issue with the next is that
the result fell out so easily
and this shows the mathematical machismo problem
in these fields is
there's a good chance the paper won't be accepted
because there wasn't enough mathematical self-flagellation
that's such a nice finding
so even
showing that very few, just very little bit of noise
can have a dramatic
make a dramatic statement about
it was a big surprise to us
but once we figured out how to show it
it's not too hard
and these are
these are venues for theoretical
for theoretical
so the fascinating tension there exists
in other disciplines like one of them is
machine learning
which despite
the power of machine learning and deep learning
and all the impact
of it in the real world
the main conferences on machine learning
are still resistant to application papers
I'm not
sort of
and application papers broadly defined
meaning like
finding almost like you would
like Darwin did by like
going around collecting some information
saying huh isn't this interesting
like those are some of the most popular blogs
and yet as a paper it's not really accepted
I wonder what you think about this whole world of
deep learning
from a perspective of
theory
what would you make of this whole
discipline of the success of Neural Networks
of how to do science on them
are you excited
by the possibilities
of what we might discover about Neural Networks
do you think it's fundamental in engineering discipline
or is there something
theoretical that we might crack open
one of these days in understanding
something deep about how system optimization
when how systems learn
I am convinced by
is it Tegemark and MIT
Tegemark? Yeah, Tegemark, right
so his notion has always been convincing to me
that the fact that some of these models are inscrutable
is not fundamental to them
and that we can
we're going to get better and better because in the end
you know the reason why
practicing computer scientists often who are doing AI
or working at AI on industry
aren't like worried about so much
existential threats is because
they see the reality is they're
multiplying matrices with NumPy or something like that
right yeah and tweaking constants
and hoping that the classifier fitness
for God's sakes before the
submission deadline actually like gets above
something like it feels like it's linear algebra
and
TDM right
but anyways I'm really convinced with his idea
once we understand better and better what's going on from a
theory perspective it's going to make it into an engineering
discipline so in my mind
where we're going to end up is
okay forget these
metaphors of neurons and these things are going to be
put down into these mathematical
kind of elegant equations differentiable equations
that just kind of work well
and then it's going to be when I need a little
bit of AI in this thing
plumbing like let's get a little bit of
a pattern recognizer
with a noise module and let's connect I mean
you know this feel better than me so I don't know if this is like a reasonable
a reasonable prediction but
that we're going to
it's going to become less inscrutable and then it's going to become
more engineerable and then we're going to have
AI and more things because we're going to have a little bit
more control over how we
piece together these different
classification
black boxes so one of the problems
and there might be some interesting parallels that you might
provide intuition on is
neural networks are very large and they have a lot of
it you know we were
talking about
you know dynamic networks and distributed
algorithms
one of the problems of the analysis of
neural networks
is you know you have a lot of nodes
and you love a lot of
edges to be able to
interpret and to control different things is very
difficult there's
there's fields and trying to
figure out like mathematically how you
form
clean representations that are
like one node
contains all the information
about a particular thing and no other nodes
is correlated to it so like
it has unique knowledge
but that ultimately boils down to
trying to simplify this thing
into that goes
against this very nature which is like
deeply connected
and like
dynamic and just
hundreds of millions billions of nodes
and in a distributed
sense like when you zoom out
the thing has a representation
of understanding of something
but the individual nodes are just doing
their little exchange of things
and it's the same thing with Steven Wolfram
when you talk about cellular automata
it's very difficult to do math
when you have a huge collection of distributed
things each acting on their own
and it's almost like
it feels like it's almost impossible
to do any kind of theoretical work
in the traditional sense
it almost becomes completely
like a biologist
as opposed to a theoretician
you just study it experimentally
Yeah, so I think that's a big question
I guess, right?
So is the
large size and interconnectedness
of the deep learning network
fundamental to that task
or we're just not very good at it yet because we're
using the wrong metaphor
I mean the human brain learns
with much fewer examples
and with much less tuning
of the whatever whatever whatever probably
requires to get those deep mind networks
up and running
so I don't really know but the one thing I have
observed is that
the mundane nature
of some of the working with these models
tends to lead people to think
to do it
like it could be
Skynet or it could be a lot of pain
to get the thermostat to do
what we wanted to do
There's a lot of open questions in between there
and then of course
the distributed network
of
humans that use these systems
so like you can have
the system itself then the neural network
but you can also have like little algorithms
controlling the behavior of humans
which is what you have with social networks
It's possible that a very
what is it a toaster or whatever
the opposite of Skynet
when taking a scale used by individual humans
and controlling their behavior
can actually have the Skynet effect
we might have that now
we might have that now, we just don't know
is Twitter creating a little mini Skynet
because what happens
it twirls out
ramifications in the world
is it really that much different
if it's a robot with tentacles
or a bunch of servers
and the destructive effects could be
I mean it could be political
but it could also be like
you could probably make an interesting case
that the coronavirus
spread
on Twitter too
in the minds of people
the fear and the misinformation
in some very interesting ways
mixed up and maybe this pandemic
wasn't sufficiently dangerous to where
that could have created a weird
instability but maybe other things
might create instability
somebody God forbid detonates
nuclear weapons to where
and then maybe the destructive aspect of that
would not as much be the military actions
but
the way those news are spread on Twitter
and the panic that creates
I think that's a great case study
what happened
I'm not suggesting that
you let off a nuclear bomb, I meant the coronavirus
but yeah
I think that's a really interesting case study
I'm interested
in the counterfactual of 1995
do the same virus in 1995
so first of all it would have been
I get to hear
whatever the nightly news
will talk about it and then they'll be my local
health board
will talk about it that mitigation
decisions would probably necessarily be
very sort of localized
like our community is trying to figure out
what are we going to do, what's going to happen
we see this with schools like where I grew up in New Jersey
there's very localized
school districts so even though
they had sort of really bad
viral numbers there my school I grew up in
has been open since the fall because it's very
localized, it's like these teachers
and these parents what do we want to do
what are we comfortable with, I live in a school district
right now in Montgomery County
that's a billion dollar a year budget
150,000 kid school district
it's closed because it's two
so I'm interested in that counterfactual, yes
you have all this information moving around
and then you have the effects on discourse
that we were talking about earlier
that the Neil Postman style effects
of Twitter which shifts people into a sort of
a dump culture mindset
don't give an inch to the other team
and we're used to this and was fired up by politics
and the unique attributes of Twitter
now throw in the coronavirus and suddenly
we see decades of public
health knowledge a lot of which was
honed during the HIV epidemic was thrown
out the window because a lot of this was happening
on Twitter and suddenly we had
public health officials using a don't give an inch
to the other team mindset of like well if we
say this that might validate
something that was wrong over here and we need
that if we say this then maybe like that'll stop
them from doing this that's like very
Twitter-y in a way that in 1995
is probably not the way
public health officials would be thinking
or now it's like well this is
if we said this about masks but the other team said
that about masks we can't give an inch
so we gotta be careful and like we can't tell people
it's okay after they're vaccinated because that might
we're giving them an inch on this and that's
very Twitter-y in my mind right that is
the impact of Twitter
on the way we think about discourse which is a
dunking culture of don't give any inch to the other team
it's all about slam dunks we are completely right
and they're completely wrong it's as a rhetorical
strategy is incredibly simplistic but it's
also the way that we think right now about
how we do debate it combined
terribly with a
election year pandemic yeah
election year pandemic I wonder if we can do some
smooth analysis let's run the simulation over
a few times a little bit noise yeah
see if we can
dramatically change the behavior of the system
okay we talked about your love for
proving that something is impossible
so there's quite a few still
open problems and complexity
of algorithms
so let me ask does p equal
np probably not
probably not
if p equals
np
what kind of
and you'll be really surprised somebody proves it
yeah what would that proof
look like and why would that even be what
would that mean what would that proof look
like and what possible
the universe could p equals np is there
something besides what you can say there
it could it could be true
I mean I'm not a complexity theorist
but every complexity theorist I know
is convinced they're not equal
and are basically not working on anymore
I mean there is a million dollars at stake if you can
solve the proof it's one of the millennium prizes
okay so here's how I think
the p not equals np proof is going to
eventually happen I think it's going
to fall out and it's going to be
not super simple
but not as hard as people think because
my theory about a lot of theoretical
computer science based on just some results
I've done so this is a huge extrapolation
is that a lot of what we're doing is just
obfuscating deeper mathematics
so like this happens to me a lot
not a lot but it's happened to me a few
times in my work where you know we obfuscate
it because we say well there's an algorithm
and has this much you know memory
and they're connected on a network and okay here's
our setup and now we're trying to see how fast it can
solve a problem and people do bounds
about and then the end it turns out that
like we were just obfuscating some underlying
you know mathematical
thing that already existed
right so this has happened to me I had this paper
I was quite fond of a while ago
it was looking at this problem called
contention resolution where you
you put an unknown set of people on a share
channel and they're trying to break symmetry
so it's like an ethernet
whatever only one person can use it at a time you try to break
symmetry there's all these bounds people have proven over
the years about how long it takes
to do this right and
like I discovered at some point
there's this one combinatorial
result from the
early 1990s all of these lower
bound proofs all come from this
and in fact it improved a lot of them and simplified
a lot you could put it all in one paper
you know it's like are we really and then okay so
this new paper that I submitted a couple weeks ago
I found you could take some of these same
lower bound proofs for this contention resolution
problem you could re prove them
using Shannon source code
theorem that actually when you're breaking
contention what you're really doing is
building a code over
you know if you have a distribution on
the network sizes it's a code over that source
and if you plug in a high
entropy information source and plug in from
1948 the source code theorem
that says on a noiseless channel you can't send
things at a faster rate than the entropy
allows the exact same lower bounds fall
back out again right so like this type of thing happens
there's a there's some famous lower bounds
and distributed algorithms that turned out to all
be algebraic topology
underneath the covers and they won the
girdle prize for working on that
so my sense is what's going to happen is
at some point someone really smart
to be very exciting is going to realize
there's some sort of
other representation of what's going on
with these Turing machines trying to
sort of efficiently actually fall out of
and there'll be an existing mathematical
result that
applies someone or something I guess it
could be AI got theorem provers kind
of thing it could be yeah I mean not a
well yeah and there's theorem provers
like what that means now
which is not fun
it's just a bunch of very carefully
formulated postulates that but
I take your point yeah yeah
so okay
you know on a small tangent
and then you're kind of
applying the mathematics it almost feels
like a kind of weird
evolutionary tree that ultimately leads back
to some kind of ancestral few
fundamental ideas that all they're just
like they're all somehow
connected
in that sense do you think
math is
fundamental to our universe and we're just
like slowly trying
to understand these
patterns or is it
discovered
or is it just a little game that we
play amongst
ourselves to try to fit
little patterns to the world
yeah that's the question right that's the
physicist question I mean I'm probably
I'm in the discovered camp
but I don't do theoretical physics so I know
they have a
they feel like they have a stronger claim
to answering that question
but everything comes back to it everything comes
back to it I mean all the physics the fact
that the universe is well
okay
it's a complicated question
so how often do you think
how deeply
does this result describe the
fundamental reality of nature
so
the reason I hesitated
because it's something I
taught the seminar and did a little work
on what are called biological algorithms
so there's this notion of
so physicists use
mathematics to explain
the universe right and it was
unreasonable that mathematics work so well
you know all these differential equations
why does that explain
all we need to know about thermodynamics and gravity
and all these type of things well there's this
movement within the intersection of computer
science and biology
this is kind of wolframmium I guess really
that
algorithms can be very explanatory right
if you're trying to explain
parsimoniously
something about like an ant colony
or something like this you're not going to
ultimately it's not going to be explained as
an equation like a physics equation
by an algorithm so like this algorithm
run
distributedly is going to explain the behavior so
that's mathematical but
not quite mathematical but it is if you think about an
algorithm like a lambda calculus which brings you back
to the world of mathematics so I'm thinking
out loud here but basically
abstract
math is sort of like
unreasonably effective
at explaining a lot of things and that's just what I feel
like I glimpse I'm not a
not like a super well known theoretician I don't have
really famous results
so even as a sort of
middling
career theoretician I keep
encountering this where
we think we're solving some problem about computers
and algorithms
and it's some much deeper underlying math
it's Shannon but Shannon is
entropy but entropy was really
goes all the way back to
whatever it was boiler all the way back
to looking at the early physics and
and it's
me I think it's amazing
but it could be the flip side of that
could be just our brains draw so much pleasure from
the
deriving generalized theories
and simplifying the universe
that would just naturally see that kind of simplicity
and everything
that's the whole Newton to Einstein
so you can say this must be
right because it's so predictive
it's not quite predictive because Mercury wobbles
a little bit but I think we have it set and then you turn out
now Einstein
and then you get more like no not
Einstein is actually statistical and yeah
so that would say it's hard to also know
like where smooth analysis fits into
all that or a little bit of
like you can say something very
clean about a system
and then a little bit of noise
like the average case is actually very different
and so yeah I mean that's
where like the quantum mechanics comes in it's like
why does it have to be randomness in this
yeah I would have to do this complex
statistics yeah
so to be determined
yeah that would be my next book
that would be ambitious
the fundamental
the fundamental core of reality
comma and some advice for being more productive
at work
can I ask you just
if it's possible to do an overview
and just some brief comments
of wisdom on the process
of publishing a book
what's that process until what are the different options
and what's your recommendation
for
somebody that wants to write a book
like yours a nonfiction book
that discovers something
interesting about this world
so what I usually advise
is
follow the
process as is
don't try to reinvent
I think that happens a lot where
you'll try to reinvent
the way the publishing industry should work
this is kind of not like in a
business model ways but just like this is what I want to do
I want to write a thousand words a day
and I want to do this and I'm going to put it on the internet
and the publishing
industry is very specific about how it works
and so like when I got started
writing books which at a very young age so
you know I sold my first book at the age of 21
the way I did that
is I found the family
friend that was an agent
and I said I'm not trying to
make you be my agent just explain to me
how this works not just how the world works but
give me the hard truth about how would a
21 year old under what conditions
could a 21 year old sell a book and what would that look like
and she just explained it to me well you have to do this
and have to be a subject that it made sense for you to write
and you would have to do this type of writing for the
publications the validated and blah blah blah
and you have to get the agent first and I learned a whole
game plan and then I executed
and so the rough game plan
is with nonfiction you get the agent first
and the agent is going to sell it
to the publishers so like you're never sending
something directly to the publishers and nonfiction
you're not writing the book first
right you're going to get an advance from
the publisher once sold
and then you're going to do the
primary writing of the book in fact it will
in most circumstances hurt you if you've already written
if you've already written so you're
trying to sell well I guess the agent
first you sell it to the agent and the agent sells it
to the publishers it's much easier to get an agent
than a book deal so that the thought is
if you can't get an agent then why would you
so you start with and also in the way
this works with a good agent is they know
all the editors and they have lunch with the editors
and they're always just okay what projects you have coming
what are you looking for here's one my authors that's the way
all these deals happen it's not you're not emailing
a manuscript to a slush pile
yeah and so so first of all the agent
takes a percentage and then the publishers
this is where the process comes in they
they take also a cut that's probably ridiculous
so if you try to reinvent
the system you'll probably
be frustrated by the percentage that everyone takes
relative to how much bureaucracy
inefficiency a ridiculous
and the system your recommendation is like
you're just one ant
stop trying to build your own
ant colony well or
if you create your own process for how it should work
it's not going to the books not going to get published
so there's the separate question the economic
question like should I create my own
like self-publish it or do something like that
but putting that aside there's a lot
of people I encounter that want to publish
a book with a main publisher but they
invent their own rules for how it works
right so then the alternative though
is self-publishing in the
the downside there's a lot of
downsides it's like
it's almost like publishing an opinion piece
in the New York Times versus writing our
blog there's no reason why
writing a blog post on medium
can get way more attention
and legitimacy
and long lasting prestige
than in New York Times article but nevertheless
for most people writing
in a prestigious newspaper
quote unquote prestigious
is is just
easier
and well and depends on your goal
so you know like I push you towards
a big publisher because I think your goal
is it's huge ideas you want
impact you're gonna have more impact
you know even though
like actually so there's different ways to
measure impact in the world of ideas
in the world of ideas and also
yeah in the world of ideas it's kind of like
the clubhouse thing now
even if the audience is not large
the people in the audience are very interesting
it's like
the conversation feels like it has long
lasting impact
yeah among among the people
who in different and disparate industries
that are also then starting
their own conversations and all that kind of stuff
because you have other so like
so like self publishing a book
the goals that would solve you have
much better ways of getting to those goals
might be part of it right so if there's the
financial aspect of what you get to keep more of it
I mean the podcast is probably gonna crush
what the book's gonna do anyways right
yeah if it's
wanna get directly to
certain audiences or crowds it might be
harder through a traditional publisher there's better ways to talk to those crowds
it could be on clubhouse
with all these new technologies self published
book's not gonna be the most effective way to
find your way to a new crowd
but if the idea is like I wanna have a leave a dent
in the world of ideas
then they have a vulnerable old
publisher you know
put out your book in a nice hard cover
and do the things they do
that goes a long way and they do do a lot
I mean it's very difficult actually
there's so much involved in playing together a book
they get books into bookstores and all that kind of stuff
all that stuff and from an efficiency standpoint
I mean just a time involved
in trying to do this yourself is
they have a process right like you said
they have a process they've got a process
I mean I know like Jaco did this recently
he started his own imprint and I have a couple other
but it's huge overhead
like if you run a business and you
so like Jaco is a good case study right
so he got you know fed up with Simon and Schuster
dragging their feet
and said I'm gonna start my own imprint then
if you're not gonna publish my kids book
but he what does he do
he runs businesses right so I think
in his world like I already run
I'm a partner in whatever an origin and I have this
and that and so it's like yeah we can run
businesses that's what we know how to do that's what I do
I run businesses I have people but for like you
or I we don't run businesses
it's terrible yeah yeah
especially these kinds of businesses right
so I do want to launch a business but very different
technology business it's very different
very different yeah yeah
I mean this is like okay and you copy editors
and graphic book binders
and I need to contract with the printer
but oh the printer doesn't have slots and so now I have
to try to you I mean it's
I get so
I need to shut this off my brain but I get so frustrated
when the system could clearly be improved
it's the thing that you're mentioning
it's very efficient
every time I go to the DMV or something like that
you think like this could be done so much better
yeah
but you know and the same thing is
the worry with
an editor which I guess would come from
the publisher
who would
how much supervision on your
book did you receive like hey
do you think this is too long or do you think
the title
how much choice do you have in the title
and the presentation and the branding
and all that kind of stuff yeah I mean all of it
depends right so when it comes on
the
relationship with the editor on the writing it depends
on the editor and it depends on you
it's like at this point I'm on my seventh
book and
I write for a lot of major publications and at this
point I have what I feel like is a
voice that I've
and a level of craft that I'm very
comfortable with right so my editor is not going to be
she kind of is going to trust me
and be more big picture like
I'm losing the thread here or
this seems like it could be longer whereas the first
book I wrote when I was 21
I had notes such as you start a lot
of sentences with so
you don't use any contractions because I've been
doing scientific writing we don't use contractions
you should probably use contractions
that was way more you know I had to go
back and realize the whole thing yeah
but ultimately the recommendation
I mean we talked offline
I was thinking loosely
not really sure but I was thinking
writing a book and there's a kind of
desire to go self publishing not for financial
reasons and the money can be good by the way
right I mean it's very
it's very power law type just
distributed right so the money on a hard cover
somewhere between one or two dollars a book
so the thing is I personally
don't but you give up 15% of the agent
so I personally don't care about money
as I've mentioned before but I
for some reason really don't like spending
money
on things that are not worth it
like I don't care
I get money I just don't like spending money
on like feeding a system
that's inefficient it's like I'm
contributing to the problem that's my
biggest problem right so you think that you're
worried about the inefficiencies of the
yeah the fact that
the overhead is a number of people involved
overhead the emails again
the
the fact that they have this
way of speaking which I'm allergic to
many people like that's very marketing
speak like you could tell
they've been having zoom meetings all day
it's like as opposed to
a sort of
creative collaborators that are
like also a little bit crazy
yeah I suppose some of that is finding
the right people finding the right people that's what I would say
I say there's definitely and maybe it's just
good fortune
good fortune terms like my agents and editors
I've worked with there's really good people
who
they see the vision are smart
are incredibly literary they yeah
and psychologically yeah I had
a great editor when I was first moving into hard cover
books for example it was my first
you know big
book advance and my first sort of
big deal and
he was like a senior editor and
it was very useful you know he was like
we had a lot of long talks right I was
so this was my fourth book so good they
can't ignore you was my first big hard
cover idea book
and we had a lot of talks like
even before I started writing it just
let's talk about books and his philosophy
had been in the business for a long time
he was the head of the the head of the imprint it was useful
yeah but
I mean the other frustrating thing is how long
the whole thing takes
I suppose that's
you just have to accept that
I handed in this manuscript for the
book that comes out now like when this I handed
it in I mean over the summer
like during the pandemic so it's not
it's not terrible right and we were editing during the
pandemic and I finished it in the spring
we've talked
most of today except for a little bit computer
science most of today about a productive life
how does love friendship
and family fit into that
is there
do you find that there's a tension
is it possible for relationships
to energize the whole process to benefit
or is it
ultimately a trade-off
but because life is short
and ultimately
we seek happiness not
productivity that
we have to accept that tension
I mean I think
relationships is the
that's the whole deal
like I thought about this the other day
I don't know what the context was I was thinking about
if I was going to give like an advice speech
like a commencement address or like
giving advice to young people
and
like the big question I have for young people
is if they haven't already bad
things are going to happen that you don't control
so what's the plan
right like let's start let's start figuring that out
now because it's not all good
some people get off better than others
but eventually stuff happens
right you get sick something falls
apart the economy craters
the someone you know
dies like all sorts of bad stuff is going to
happen right so how
are we going to do this like how do we
like live life and life is hard
and in ways that is unfair and unpredictable
the relationships is the
that's the buffer for all of that
because we're wired for it
I went down this rabbit hole with
digital minimalism I went down this huge rabbit hole
about the human brain and
sociality it's all
wired it's like all of our brain is for this
everything all of our mechanisms
everything is made to service
social connections because of what kept you alive
you know I mean you had the
your tribal connections is how you didn't
starve during the famine people share food etc
and so you can't
neglect that and it's like everything
and people feel it right like there's no
our social networks are hooked up to the pain center
it's why it feels so terrible when
you miss someone like someone dies or something right
that's like how seriously we take it
there's a pretty accepted theory that
the default mode network like a lot of what the
default mode network is doing so the sort of the default
state our brain goes into when we're not
doing something in particular is practicing
sociality it practicing interactions
think because it's it's so you know crucial
to what we do it's like at the core
of human thriving so I
more recently the way I think about is like
relationships first
okay given that foundation of putting like
and I don't think we put nearly enough time into it I
worried that social media is reducing
relationships strong relationships
strong relationships where you're sacrificing
non-trivial time and attention
resources whatever on behalf of other
people that's the net
that is going to allow you to get through anything
then
all right now what do we want to do with
the surplus that remains may want to build
some build some fire build some tools
so put relationships first
I like the worst case analysis from the
computer science perspective put relationships
first
yeah because everything else is just
assuming average case
assuming things kind of keep going as they
were going and you're neglecting
the fundamental human drive
like we have this we talked about the boredom instinct
we want to build things we want to have impact we want to do
productivity that's not nearly as clear cut of a drive
of we need people
but if we look at the real worst case
analysis here
is one day
you're pretty young now but
that's not going to last very long
you're going to die one day is that something
you think about
a little bit are you afraid of death
well I'm up the mindset of
let's make that a productivity hack
I'm on the mindset of
we need to
confront that soon
so let's do what we can now so that when we
really confront and think about it we're more
likely to feel better about it so in other words
like let's let's focus now on
living and doing things in such a way that
we're proud of so that when it really comes
time to confront that we're
more likely to say like okay
I feel kind of good about the situation
so what when you're laying in your death bed
would you in looking back
what would make you think like
I don't care I'm proud of that
I optimize the hell out of that
that's a good I mean it's a good question
that the go backwards on
I mean this is like
David Brooks' eulogy
virtues versus
resume virtues
his argument is that
that's another interesting DC area person
I keep thinking of interesting DC area people
David Brooks is here too
his argument he thinks
eulogy virtues is so what we eulogize
is different than what we promote on the resume
that's his whole thing
now right his second mountain
wrote the character both these books are
he has this whole premise of there's like this
professional phase and there's a phase of
giving of yourself
and sacrificing on behalf of other people
I don't know maybe it's all mixed together right
you want to I think living by a code
is important right I mean
there's something that's not emphasized enough
I think of advice that my undergrad should be
given that they're not given especially at a place
like Georgetown that has this like deep
history of trying to promote
human flourishing because of the Jesuit connection
there's such
there's such
resiliency and pride
that comes out of living well
even when it's hard like living according to a code
living according to which
I think religion used to structure this for people
but in its absence
you need some sort of replacement but this
even when things where soldiers get this a lot
the experience is a lot even when things were tough
I was able to persist in living this way that I knew
was right even though it wasn't the easiest thing to do in the moment
like fewer things give humans more
resiliency like having done that
your relationships were strong
many people coming to your funerals is standard
like a lot of people are going to come to your funeral
I mean you matter to a lot of people
and then maybe having done to the extent of
whatever
capabilities you are happen to be granted
you know and they're different for different people
and some people can sprint real fast
and some people can do math problems
try to actually do something of impact
I'll just
promise to give gift cards to anybody who shows up to the funeral
you're going to hack it
I'm going to hack even the funeral
there's going to be a lottery wheel you spin when you come in
someone goes away with $10,000
see the problem is like
with all this the living by principles
living a principal life
focusing on relationships and kind of
thinking of this life as a perfect thing
kind of forgets the notion that
none of it
you know makes any sense
right like the
like it kind of
implies that this is like
a video game and you want to get a high score
as opposed to
none of this even makes sense
like why would he
like what the
like
what does it even mean to die it's going to be over
it's like everything I do
all these productivity hacks
all this life all these efforts
all these creative efforts kind of assume it's going to go on forever
there's a kind of
sense of immortality
and I don't even know how to intellectually make sense that it ends
of course
got to ask you in that context
what do you think is the meaning of it all
especially for computer scientists I mean
there's got to be some mathematical
yeah 27 or what's the
what's the uh
22
27 is a better number
I should read more side by
you're onto something with a 27
I don't want to give away too much but just
just make 27
yeah
so I mean I don't know obviously right I mean
I'm a
yeah I don't know but going back to
what you're saying about the sort of the existentialist
or sort of the more nihilist
style approach
the one thing that there is
are intimations right so that there's these
intimations that human
have of somehow this feels
right and this feels wrong this feels good
this feels like I'm doing I mean
aligned with something you know when I'm acting
with courage to save whatever right it's
not these intimations are
grounding against arbitrariness
like one of the ideas I'm really interested in is that
uh
when you look at religion
right so I'm interested in world religions
for my grandfather was
like a theologian that studied and wrote all these books
and I'm very interested in this type of stuff
and there's this great
book that's it's it's not
specific to a particular religion
but it's Karen Armstrong wrote this great book called
The Case for God she's very interesting
she was a Catholic nun who sort of left
that religion and is but one of the
smartest thinkers
in terms of like accessible theological
thinking that's not tied to any
particular religion her whole
argument is that the way to understand religion
you first of all you have to go way back pre-enlightenment
where all this was formed we got messed up thinking
about religion post-enlightenment right
and and
these were operating systems for making sense
of intimations
the one thing we had or these different
intimations of this field like ah
and mystical experience
and this feels some there's something
you feel when you act in a certain way and
don't act in this other way and it was like
the scientists who were trying to study
and understand the model of the atom
by just looking at experiments
and trying to understand what's going on like the great
religions of the world were basically figuring out
how do we make sense of these intimations
and live in alignment with them and build
a life of meaning around that what were the
tools they were using they were using ritual
they were using belief they were using action
but all of it was like an OS it was
like a liturgical model of the
atom that did it
it's hard to put it in so it did
through the evolutionary process
and they wouldn't have called it that back then
or yeah I mean whether they said
they didn't have that as pre-enlightenment
they just said this is here
and the directive is to
try to live in alignment with that
well then I want to ask who wrote the original code
that's the open question
so Armstrong lays out this good argument
and where it gets really interesting is that
she emphasizes that all of this was
considered ineffable right
so the whole notion and this is like rich
and Jewish tradition in particular and also in Islamic tradition
we can't comprehend
and understand what's going on here
and so the best we can do to approximate
understanding and live in alignment is we
act as if this is true
do these rituals have these actions or whatever
post-enlightenment a lot of that got
once we learned about
enlightenment we grew
these suspicions around religion that are very much of
the modern era right so like the
Karen Armstrong like
Sam Harris' critique of religion makes no sense
right the critiques
based on well this is you're making the ascent to propositions
that you think are true for which you do not have evidence that they are true
so like that's an enlightenment thing right
this is not the context and this is not
the religion is
the Rutherford model of the atom like it's not
actually maybe what is underneath
happening but this model explains
why your chemical equations work and so this is like the way religion was
you there's a god
we'll call it this this is how it works we do this ritual
we act in this way it aligns with it
just like the model of the atom predicted why
you know N.A. and C.L. is going to become
salt this predicts that you're going to feel and live
in alignment right it's like this beautiful
sophisticated theory which actually matches how a lot
of great theologians have
you know thought about it
but then when you come forward in time yeah maybe it's
evolution I mean this is like what Peterson
hints at right like he's basically
he's not
he doesn't like to
get super pinned down on this but it kind of seems
where he's
almost like searching for the words he focuses more
like Jung and other people but
I mean I know he's very Jungian but
that same type of analysis I think roughly
speaking like Armstrong is sort of a
it's kind of like a Peter Sony analysis
but she's looking more at the
deep history of religion then
but yeah he throws in an evolutionary
yeah and I wonder what
finds I wonder what the new home is
if religion dissipates
with the new home for these kinds of
natural inclinations are
yeah with
their technology whether and if it's evolution
I mean this is Francis Collins's book also he's like
well
that's a religious that could be a very
religious notion I don't I think this stuff is
interesting I'm not a very religious person but
I'm thinking it's not a bad idea
maybe maybe what replaces honestly
like maybe what replaces religion is a return
to religion
but in this sort of more sophisticated
I mean if you went back
yeah I mean it's the issue with like a lot of
the recent critiques I think is
it's a
it's a strawman critique in a complicated way
right because the whole way these the way
this works I mean the theologians
if you're reading Paul Tillich if you're reading
Heschel if you're reading these people they're
thinking very sophisticatedly about religion
in terms of this it's an effable and we're just
these things and this is deep it connects
us to these things in a way that puts
life in alignment we can't really explain what's going on because
we our brains can't handle it right
for the average person though
this notion of live as if
it's kind of how religions work
is live as if this is true
it's like an OS for getting
alignment with because with
cultural evolution like you behave
in this way do these which live as if this is true
gives you
the what the goal you're looking
for but that's a complicated thing
live as if this is true because if you
especially if you're not a theologian to say
yeah this is not
true in an enlightenment sense but I'm living as if
it kind of takes the heat out of it
but of course it's what people are doing because
you know highly religious people still do bad things
where if you really were
there's absolutely a hell and I'm definitely going to go to it
if I do this bad thing you would never have
you know known whatever murder anyone
if they were evangelical Christian right so
it's like what this is kind of a tangent
that I'm I'm I'm on shaky grounds
here but it's something I've been
interested often on a lot
was this fast I mean I think we're in some
sense searching for because it is it does
make for a good operating system we're searching
for a good live as if
X is true and we're searching for a new
X yeah and maybe
artificial intelligence will be
the very the new gods
that we're so
desperately looking for or it'll just spit out
42 I thought it was
27 yeah this is
as you know I've been a huge fan
so are a huge
number of people that
I've spoken with so they could
tell me I absolutely have to talk to you
this is a huge honor this is really fun thanks
for wasting all this time with me and likewise
I've been a longtime fan so this is a lot of fun
yeah thanks man
thanks for listening to this conversation with Cal
Newport and thank you to our sponsors
ExpressVPN
Linode Linux virtual
machines sunbasket meal delivery
service and simply
safe home security
click the sponsor links to get a
discount and to support this podcast
and now let me leave
you with some words from Cal himself
clarity about what matters
provides clarity about
what does not
thank you for listening and hope to see you
next time.