Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Am I Lazy or Overstimulated? | Monday Advice

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

Cal Newport explains about if you're lazy or overstimulated in episode 410 of the Deep Questions podcast. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmedia (0:00) Am I lazy or overstimulated? (28:29) A reaction to Cal’s recent New Yorker article (38:23) Positive lessons from box offices  successes of Gen Z films  (46:24) An old school tool for a woodshed (47:32) A new solution to landlining (49:30) What Cal is reading Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at www.calnewport.com/slow  Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at https://peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/  Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba? https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/instead-of-taking-your-job-ai-might-transform-it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKGhxMi50y8 https://aprilowens.substack.com/p/the-art-we-actually-need Thanks to our Sponsors:  https://www.scribe.how/deep https://www.shopify.com/deep https://www.cozyearth.com/deep (Use code “DEEP”) https://www.calderalab.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production and mastering, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Nate Mechler for research and newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Does this sound familiar to you? You have some sort of significant project that you need to complete. Like maybe your passport is expired and you have to figure out how to renew it, or you volunteered to update the text on your organization's website and you're not quite sure how to get started. And you find yourself day after day unable to make progress. It goes on your list and it stays there untouched. Now, to the outside world, it might look like you're lazy in the sense that you know

that there's something you need to do and you're simply not doing it. But you know inside that things are not so simple. You're not just sitting around playing video games. You're constantly in motion on your devices. You're sending and receiving messages. You're checking in on the news. You're tumbling down potentially productive rabbit holes. And your days are filled with this little P productivity, but not the big P productive accomplishments that actually matter. Well, I struggle with this sometimes and I'm convinced that technology has made the situation much more common and much more worse. But what exactly is happening in our adult brains when we find ourselves procrastinating

on important projects like this? And once we understand what it is, how might we fix it? Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this show, which is the perfect opportunity to tackle these questions. So here's my plan. I recently came across a Reddit post from the Rhabit subreddit that originally got me thinking about this topic. The title of this post was, you're not lazy, you're overstimulated.

And it proposes, this post proposes some answers to the questions that we just asked. So we're going to use that as our jumping off point today. But then I'm going to bring in the help of a psychology professor that I know. We're going to pick apart what this post gets right about our brains and what it does not. And we will use this updated understanding to identify some advice that will help any of us avoid the overstearming. stimulation trap. So if you're always feeling busy but aren't feeling accomplished, then this episode is for you. So let's get into it. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. All right, to get started, I'm going to look

at this Reddit post. I'm going to read some selections from it, and then we'll go from there. All right, so I'm reading from the post here. There's a version of laziness that has nothing to a disciplined motivation or character. It looks like laziness, it feels like laziness. You'll call yourself lazy because there's no other word that seems to fit, but what's actually happening is closer to a system overload than a personality flaw. Your brain has a limited capacity for stimulation per day. Not a metaphorical limit, a real one.

Every notification, every scroll session, every app switch, every group chat, every autoplay video is an input your brain has to process, evaluate, and respond to. Most of these inputs are low value. but they all cost the same processing resources as high-value ones. So what happens when you burn through that capacity before noon? You sit down to work and nothing comes. You know what you need to do. You can see the task in front of you, but the gap between knowing and starting feels enormous.

So you pick up your phone again, not because you want to, but because your brain is reaching for the only kind of input, it still has the energy to process, something short, easy, and immediately rewarding. That's not laziness. That's a depleted system reaching for the lowest friction option possible. All right, so that's the essay I originally saw. And I'll tell you, it feels directionally right. Because we've had this experience.

We're like, we're jumping around with all these devices and technology. We feel very stimulated. And it's like our brain has seized up or run out of energy. And we just really have a hard time then is settling into larger tasks. So it feels directionally right. But before we get into solutions, we should probably take a moment to look a little bit closer at the details about how exactly this article explains what's happening in our brains. Like this article says we have a limited capacity for stimulation per day. Is that true?

Is it true that if we go through a stimulation budget that we'll feel depleted and that's what causes us to stop working? And if it's not that, what's really happened in our brains, let's get to the bottom of that before we move on to some advice. So to help understand the psychological reality of over-stimulation, I turned to one of my colleagues at Georgetown. He's a professor in the psychology department named Kostedin Kuslev, who directs the Happy Tech Lab. I sent him a copy of this Reddit post, and I said, hey, this is your area of expertise. Let me know what this might not quite get right.

All right, so let me read you what he said, his original thing he said. This is Kosted in here. He wrote me and said, the idea that the brain has an action. daily limit of stimulation is patently false. If this was the case, people living in New York City or Bangkok would be comatose by noon. All right, let's pause there for a second. I think that's actually a really good observation. Stimulation, that can't be the right word. It can't be just having a lot of stimuli exhaust us because he's right. If you're walking through Times Square in New York City, you're bombarded with stimuli, and yet we don't end up, you know, out of our stimulation

and budget and comatose by noon when we're in the cities. There must be something else going on here. All right, let's go back to Kostodin's notes. He then says, what is true is people are not good at multitasking. They simply switch from one task to another, which requires more top-down cognitive effort. That ability to direct our attention can get depleted, though it's still not a preset limit. For example, a cup of coffee can sometimes do wonders.

So after a day of trying to redirect your attention back and forth from various notifications, you might be less able to focus your attention on what you want. All right, well, that's interesting, right? So what Costodin is saying is like there are things to get depleted. It's not, however, a capacity for stimulation, bright lights, loud sounds, things you have to process. It's actually something I've talked a lot about on this show and in my books, context switching. Turning your attention from one target to another is something that is exhausting and can be cumulative. So if you're doing more and more context switching between this subject of attention to that,

you can get a growing exhaust in your brain. It's not like a fixed limit if you're more rested, if you're more caffeinated, if the work is more interesting. If there's like a deadline, you can do more of it. But that can build up. It's the context shifting, not the processing of stimuli that can over time make it feel like you're having a harder time working. I wrote about this in a world without email. There's a neuroscience correlate to this, right? So like, why is that depleting? One of the neuroscientific explanations that I have heard is that turning your attention from one focus to another requires a lot of things to happen in your brain. You've got to inhibit certain types of networks and processing centers that were related to the first target and you have to excite

different types of semantic networks and processing centers that might be relevant to the new target. This takes time and energy. And after a while, especially if you switch to one thing and before your brain can entirely reorient to that context or switch to another, you get these overlapping context and it muddles up the brain and eventually you're like, my brain is all over the place. I really am having a hard time focusing. So there's a neuroscientific explanation for what Kostedin is pointing out from a psychology point of view. Now, it turns out that Kostitin actually published a paper on this effect last year.

That's why he was quick to point it out. The core finding of the paper that Kostedin published found that people performed better on a sustained attention task after taking a two-week break from the mobile internet. Now, if this sounds familiar, it's because back in mid-May, we actually did a whole podcast episode on that paper. But now we can understand this in the context of depletion of context switching capability, that if you're spending all your time doing mobile internet, you're constantly exhausting your brain.

When you fall out of the habit of doing all this context switching, then your brain has more energy left to actually sustain focus on one target. All right, so what else that Costa didn't have to say about this Reddit post? Well, he also had an additional explanation for what's going on when we feel overstimulated that also might be playing a role. All right, let me read from his response here. Costodan says, the idea that quick and easy stimulation can change your ability to focus and sustain attention is based on solid ground. The brain self-regulates itself if it's exposed to too much dopamine. In neuroscience, this is called down-regulation, and it is related to why.

why we have things like drug withdrawal or needing ever higher doses of a drug to feel the same high. All right. So if we integrate these two elaborations from Kostedin, we end up with the following refined understanding of this overstimulation theory. So here's like the more expert-backed understanding. Two things are playing a role when you over-stimulate yourself. One, the Reddit article is correct in its general idea that being overstimulated with easy and engaging distractions, can make it harder to sustain focus a more meaningful task. So that's why this article caught my attention.

The thing it is pointing out, the problem it is diagnosing does exist. Oversimulation makes it harder to focus on more important projects. But two, as costed and elaborated, the Reddit article's explanation for why this happens isn't quite right. It's not about depleting a fixed stimulation budget. It is instead about exhausting your brain through excessive context switching and over time, down regulating your dopamine system to require more and more engaging stimuli in order to actually sustain your attention.

So we've got a short-term and a long-term factor at play in our brains. In the short-term, we're exhausting it with the context switching that's induced by all the things that are stimulating us, and long-term exposure to the stimulation down-regulates our dopamine system, so we need more and more stimulation just for a particular task to grab our attention. The boring but important project doesn't, after a while, generally... enough of that response, and so it's very hard to focus our attention on it. If that last point sounds familiar a few weeks ago, we did an interview on the podcast,

talking about this with Analymke, about the dopamine system. So you can go back and learn more about it there. Hey, let's take a quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Now, here's something I've learned running my media company. One of our most valuable assets is our knowledge about the best way to execute all of the different things that we do here internally. So if we lose a key person, we lose their knowledge, which is a big deal. And if we hire someone new, we have to teach them everything from scratch, which can also be a big pain. This is where today's sponsor, Scribe, enters the scene.

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So head to CozyEarth.com and use my code deep for an exclusive 20% off. That's code deep for an exclusive 20% off. and if you see a post-purched survey, mention that you heard about Cozy Earth right here. All right, let's get back to the show. All right, so now we have this more refined version of a problem that this article is right to point out

even if it didn't quite get it right. The next question becomes, okay, so how do we avoid this type of overstimulation in our life? Well, that original Reddit essay actually proposed multiple pieces of advice. And I think this is a good place, to start. So I want to take, what do I got here?

One, two, three, all right, four pieces of advice I pulled out of the Reddit article, and I'm going to go through them one by one. And where relevant, I'm also going to bring in Constitin's take on each of these pieces of advice as well. So we'll read them, and then I'll give my take and Constance take on, is this piece of advice good or bad? And I want to give this a rating, to make this interesting, I want to give this a rating scale. So for each of these four pieces of advice, I'm going to rate it on a scale of yay,

meaning I approve, and so does cost it in, to nay, meaning no, no, no, I don't like this advice, I don't think this is sound, with a third option of me, meaning, eh, I'm indifferent. It's not going to hurt, but might not be as effective as the article says. So we have this yay, nay and me scale. You can kind of rate along as I go here and try to guess where I'm going to actually end up. All right, here we go. Advice from the article. Let's evaluate it. The first piece of advice the article suggests is to spin the first hour of your day away from your phone. Let me read you the exact wording from the article. The first hour of the morning should be completely offline. Phone stays in another room, not airplane mode where it's still

within reach, actually in another room. The first input of the day sets the baseline for the rest of it. Well, the idea of starting your day without a phone, obviously I'm going to be in favor of any sort of time away from your phone. But this idea that it sets a baseline, that if your day starts without a phone, that this is going to give you these extended benefits as the day goes on because you've set some sort of stimuli baseline. That sounded a little suspect to me, right? What's the psychology or neuroscience behind that? I asked Costodin. Here's what he had to say. There is actually no evidence that morning digital detox helps, but it is an appealing idea that deserves more testing. Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. Okay, so here's what we got. It can't be bad to spend time without your phone. We don't really know that doing that in the first hour has a bigger impact than doing that at other time, but it's possible even without data. So I'm going to rate this one. A me. All right. Strategy number two, batch check your phone and email. Let me read you the exact words here from the Reddit essay.

I check messages and email three times a day at set times. Not perfectly. I still slip, but the default shifted from always on to mostly off. And the difference in how my brain feels by early afternoon is significant. So this idea that you must be continuously responsive is clearly that will be over stimulating. I mean, we've talked about this often on the show. Like this idea that I always have to be checking email and slack in my phone, there's just no way that's good. So a notion of like I need to bat somehow, which I just take as I don't need to be constantly checking communication channels like that.

That feels like it has to be good. I asked Kostodin. He liked this idea too. He said the recommendations to reduce notifications and batch them is based on empirical evidence. He pointed to a paper he wrote on this topic that was titled sort of informatively, batching smartphone notifications can improve well-being. So he had actually studied this exact effect. Now, there is a caveat I do want to give to this strategy.

As I discussed in my book, A World Without Email, which you should read if you haven't already, there's research from Gloria Mark's team that found that batching email in an office environment can actually increase stress and anxiety for people with a certain personality type. In particular, there's a Big Five personality trait called neuroticism, and if you're high on that trait, it's actually very stressful if you're just simply batching email because you obsess and get worried and anxious about the messages that you haven't answered. And again, some sense, can make things worse. Ultimately, the best solution is the solution that I talk about in a world without email,

which is actually changing your communication processes so that you don't have channels and inboxes that are building up with urgent messages that arrive haphazardly, that you minimize the messages arriving in the first place of that style, and now you don't have that pressure to have to check these as often. But in general, if we interpret this advice as find a way not to be checking communication, communication constantly. I think we got to give that a yeah or a yay. I'm going to say that, Jesse. I'll say yeah. All right, strategy number three from the article, engage in micro learning sessions. All right, let me read from the essay here. Research on neuroplasticity shows that

consistent daily micro learning, even just 10 minutes, can actually start to rewire your brain's reward pathways over time. Your brain adapts to whatever you feed it repeatedly. If to repeat, heated input is fragmented junk from feeds all day. Your dopamine system calibrates to that. But if you swap even a portion of that scroll time for short focused learning, the brain starts recalibrating towards inputs that require slightly more sustained attention. It's gradual, but the shift is real. This sounds suspicious to me, right? If you feed your brain highly stimulating junk all day, how much can the occasional short doses of learning really matter? Furthermore, the idea of micro-learning seems like a contradiction in terms as far as I'm concerned,

because non-trivial learning is almost always an act of deliberate practice. You have to isolate the relevant neural circuit so that you can have a clean firing of those circuits on the new pattern that can then strengthen those connections and make that future application of thought easier. That type of deliberate practice is not pleasant. You don't just do it real quick. It can take 10 or 50 minutes just to sufficiently clear. clear out your brain that you can even start the hard work of learning something new. So this was a little bit suspicious to me. I asked Costodin.

He also was not impressed. Here's what he had to say. Quote, I'm quoting him here. The claim that just 10 minutes a day of learning can rewire your brain is total marketing hype and makes no sense. If the average person spends hours scrolling on social media, replacing 10 minutes of that with micro learning ain't going to do it. I have heard this claim in commercials.

and if you know what study they may have in mind when they are saying that, please do share, but I am convinced that this is not what the research shows. All right, so I think we have to give that piece of advice a strong nay. All right, our final strategy from the Reddit essay that I want to consider actually involves one of my books. Let me read it here. A stolen focus by Johann Hari is worth reading on the bigger picture, not a self-help book, more of an investigation into why attention is collapsing at a population level and who benefits from that. Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport is the more actionable companion to it.

So I'm going to read that advice as saying you should read my book, Digital Minimalism. I don't even need a check with Costodin on this one because I think we can all agree that that's a triple yay. Of course you have to do that. That's going to make all of the difference. All right. So based on, you know, my experience, based on Costodin's corrections and elaborations here, what advice would I give if I was extending this list of, of,

extend this list of advice. I would basically base all of my advice here for this particular issue of overstimulation leading the procrastination to say that you should permanently reduce your stimulation. You need to rebalance your dopamine system and avoid exhausting your brain unnecessarily from too much context switching. If that's really what's going on here, downregulation, long term, context switching, fatigue in the short term, you have to rewire your life so that you avoid. Avoid that down regulation on stimulation so that you can find sufficient stimulation from things that aren't, you know, casino flashy.

And in the moment, you need to rebuild your day so that you're not forced to constantly contact shift and exhaust your brain temporarily. This would mean, for example, take off of your phone any app that makes money off of your attention. This means, for example, landlining at home. When you're at home, you have your plug phone in the kitchen with the ringer on, and that's where you go. when you need to check for messages, look something up or take or make a phone call, it's not with you as a default. So you get very used to doing other activities in your house without that other type of downregulating dopamine stimulation easily accessible. When it work, you need to separate deep from shallow work.

And if possible, go somewhere different for the deep work, hopefully without your phone. Again, you want to create a different stimulation environment for deep work. You don't want to have to combat other types of stimulation. You want to just make it as easy as possible to sustain focus on one target. and either practice getting positive stimulation from efforts that require sustained focus. Your long-term motivation centers in your brain can override the short-term stimulation centers that want you to go pick up your phone if they get regular exposure to long-term focus leading to more deep reward.

So this could mean, for example, leisure activities, hobbies, projects, practices that maybe are unrelated to work but just help you learn, hey, I got better at this, and then the chair I built was really good. And then I got a deep reward out of that. or I worked on the song until I could perform it and that was fun and I got a deep social reward out of that. You want to give ammo to your long-term motivation system so it can win in the psychological war against a short-term variant. All right, so some conclusions here to this deep dive. You know, I think we learned a lot. Oversimulation is different than laziness, but it can make you feel lazy because you're not able to make progress in the things you want.

Understanding what specifically happens in your brain is the best way to, understand how best to push back on the over-stimulation problem. This Reddit essay captured a common style of advice that's given in these cases, which is short-term fixes. Do a morning detox. MicroLearn for 10 minutes a day. These are fixes that sound like meaningful, like I could do them, but they avoid the hard thing. You've got to change your relationship to your phone.

You have to change relationship to your work, right? It's very much like if you have an alcohol, dependency, looking for the advice that doesn't involve a step of you stop drinking. That's kind of what I see going with a lot of this internet advice. No, you can still use your phone and do all the apps and be on the AI all day or whatever. But don't pick it up first thing in the morning and micro-learn. It's not enough. And the real solutions are harsher, probably.

Like, you need to permanently fix this relationship. You need to greatly reduce the amount of stimulation that you're exposed to. So there we see. I mean, I think this is a nice symbioree. Right? Like this popular essay online pointed out a problem this real and is directly correct in a way that an academic might not otherwise like directly tackle. But talking to an expert psychologist helped us contextualize the problem and therefore get better advice. So this is also like a meta case study in the best way to move forward with the type of problems that we face on a regular basis in our increasingly distracted world. So there we go. Were you surprised Jesse by any of those ratings? I figured you would probably be able to predict them. Yeah. No, I wasn't surprised, the most part. Yeah, there's a mixed bag. But a good article.

I don't even know. Someone sent it to me. I'm trying to think where it came from. I think someone sent it to me. I often have crossed past with Cossadin. I should cross pass with him more because he's doing a lot of research on devices. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a fact on, like, well-being and impact.

So we've crossed paths before, but, you know, I should go see what's going on at that lab. Has he written any books? I don't think so. I mean, I don't want to say no if he has. Yeah. Yeah. If he does, well, I'm on the show, though. Yeah. He's definitely doing some good work. I want to take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Starting a new business is hard. I remember what it was like starting up the media company that produces this podcast. And here's what I learned. Don't reinvent the wheel. Trust industry leaders where you can. This is where Shopify enters the scene. If you need to sell, something, you need Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. from big names like Allbirds and Mattel to new brands just getting started. Do you want to sell online? Well, you can get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style. Do you need help spreading the word? Shopify can help

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Well, that's enough hearing about, hearing from me, we want to hear from you like we like to do on these Monday advice episodes, is open up our inbox and listen to what you have to say. Remember, if you have a question, you have something you want to share or a comment, you can send it to podcast at Cal Newport. dot com. All right, Jesse, what's our first message here? Our first message comes from Emma.

It's a reaction to your email newsletter from last week about your latest New Yorker article on AI. We got layers here. My past newsletter about a past article. I don't know if we talked about my latest New Yorker piece on the show yet. In detail, no, we mentioned it. Right.

Okay. So let me read her message and we'll look at the article. I'll do my best to answer it. All right. So Emma said, thank you so much for, sharing your ideas this week on the ways that AI is actually transforming the knowledge sector. If you have a minute, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on how those entering into the knowledge

sector will be able to learn and scale their skill sets if higher level programmers, consultants are now automating the creation of those quick and dirty tools instead of hiring young people to create them. So the article she's talking about, I'll put it on the screen here, came on the New Yorker on June 5th. It's titled, Instead of taking your job, AI might transform it. Now, what she's mentioning is this article actually opens on me talking about a job I had after a summer. We couldn't figure out what summer it was. I didn't remember, but it was some summer in high school. I had a job in which, here I'll just read you from the article here.

Each morning, I drove through rush hour traffic to an office park near Princeton, New Jersey on the crowded route one corridor. At a desk in some sort of equipment room, I coded quick and dirty database tools for internal use. One of my programs simplified the process of logging hours in the timesheets. another attracted inventory for the IT department. My role is to find small ways to improve the lives of my coworkers. The reason why I told that story in the article is that I essentially conclude the A section by saying when I talk to people who are running businesses and using AI, who are not software development businesses, but other types of businesses, one of their major uses is not automating jobs in

the sense of like I'm going to replace people's jobs, but to build quick and dirty tools that make people's lives easier, like the role I played for that consulting firm back when I was in high school. I then in the article said there was another use I'm seeing, which is something called freestyle work, but that's a little more complicated because it requires you have to use a coding agent for non-coding uses. And so that might be a longer use case, might be a little bit longer time frame before that becomes popular. But there is a lot going on now of companies not replacing employees, but building new tools for them. So instead of saying, let's take some off-the-shelf piece of something, software that kind of does what we need and use that, you could just build your own piece of

software. It can be kind of buggy. It doesn't have to be, you know, super secure, but you can use it internally to make your life easier. And this is what I did for this consulting company because I guess I was a huge nerd, but this is my job, Jesse. I programmed for, you know, I was a computer programmer in high school. So that's what that article was saying. So Emma, my read of Emma, and I got a lot of messages like this, to be honest, where people said, yeah, but AI is automating jobs. It automated your job you had in high school programming. And that's the first step towards these other jobs. So isn't that a problem? And here's what the key point here is. Here's what I was trying to say in that article. The job I had in high school is that's not really a job. That's

not a common job, right? There was a weird confluence of things that came together, right? Which was the fact that, like, I was a big nerd in the sense that, like, I was a really good computer programmer when I was 14 years old. And a family friend, I think was head of IT for this consulting firm and was like, do you want to come build tools for us? These are things we don't have time to build, but they would be useful. If I wasn't available, so if you didn't have access to, you know, a teenage nerd, they just wouldn't have had that role.

So that's not a role that really widely existed of building quick and dirty tools for internal use. Because if you had programming talent that you were paying a full-time programmer salary, you want them building things you can sell or that. are more directly tied to income. So, you know, we're simulating, you know, 14 or 15-year-old me. That's what we're doing with AI. But there wasn't a lot of 14- and 15-year-olds me.

Just most companies didn't have a 14- or 15-year-old me. Now a lot of companies do. That's sort of what's happening here. That's kind of the story, by the way, Jesse, of my life, my teenage years. It's what I did after my first year of college as well. Because, again, I'm awesome and cool. The job I had after my first year of college is a company in my hometown. They had a device that measured properties of optical films.

So they would, it would, using prisms and lasers, you could like shot and precision stepper motors. You could look at the refraction of laser beams coming out of pieces of optical film that measure properties of the films. And this is, and this is, you know, people are at the edge of their seats right now. by the way. They're like, oh my God, I want to hear about this. All right, but this is important to establish how awesome I am, and I'm definitely not a nerd. The machine was run off of the, it was run off of computers where they had like a special circuit board plugged into the

computer and the computer could like control it. But the ability to make these circuit boards got expensive and the slots to put them in the computers were disappearing as computer technology advanced. So what I was hired to do, and I got to say I successfully did this in like a month, is I programmed from scratch in a similar language, a microcontroller that could be on the device itself. And now it could talk to any computer through a serial cable, and now the computer could just send a command, do a measurement, and the microcontroller on board the machine

actually controlled everything and got all the data and did all the precision stuff, and you just sent the data back to the computer to analyze. So the computer didn't run anymore. So I had to understand that program and rewrite it from scratch in a similar language to run on a microcontroller. Kind of similar to your Halloween lights.

It's similar to my Halloween lights. Yeah. This year's Halloween display is not going to be as popular, but it's going to be really focused on optical refraction properties. How was the pay? It was, you know, it was 19. Yeah, I know, I was probably pretty good for the 19 year. Well, it was.

And then I had to keep working on it because now I built the product. So, you know, they bought me a laptop and they kept flying me home from Dartmouth because, like, now the whole product depended on, I built the whole control system for the product. So it was great because I could just work remotely at a custom laptop just for working on that. And I would fly home as needed. So that was like my, that was my job in college. That's how I paid for books.

That's how I paid for, you know, food. That was my income was like working for this company where I rebuilt their product from scratch until my senior year when I signed my first book deal. And then that's when book income. became my next source of my next source of income. So when you left at the company, were they sad? They finally found someone else to take over. Yeah. That was fun.

Programming a similar language, man, it's fun. You actually had to, again, this is riveting. This is the type of thing you're not going to hear on Joe Rogan or call your daddy. The fact that if you're doing a precision, a steper motor moving with assembly language, you know how timing works, how timers work when you're programming that low level? You get out a reference manual for the chip set and you count. It tells you exactly how many microseconds each operation takes because it's how many clock cycles. You know the timing of the clock cycle and we'll say this op code will take seven clock cycles to operate.

So then you go through your loop and you count up every single operation in your loop, how many clock cycles multiply it by the clock cycle time, and you know exactly how many microseconds, one iteration of that loop takes. And then to get to the exact time you want, you put in one clock cycle no ops

until you have enough of those. Like I need 76 of them exactly so that when we loop back, I know exactly how much time it took to execute this code. So there's no timer commands. You're counting the microseconds per op code. So a clock cycle,

What's a clock cycle? A computer processor operates in clock cycles that's driven by a little quartz crystal that like in a watch. And in every clock cycle, there's, I mean, it's just a big circuit, but there's like one advancement. You can think of it as like inputs through the circuitry, right? So like all computer programs are just moving things through circuits in these sort of discrete chunks. You know, you have a command and data. And then you like execute one command might take the data out of.

of this register and run it through an adder circuit and another result comes out, which gets stored back in the register, and then that clock cycle ends, latches, and then you have the next clock cycle, you push through the electricity, and you do another operation through the circuit. So all a computer processor is is running electricity through circuits in these little discrete chunks. Boom, chunk, clock cycle one, boom, chunk, clock cycle two. So that's why, like, in the 90s, what everyone cared about with computer performance was the speed of processors, that was

just how much time passed between each clock cycle. As processors got faster, they were just executing the clock cycles faster and faster. And then they stopped caring about that at some point in the 2000s because you kind of saturated that speed and then they looked at multi-core is another way to get faster. All this stuff

is fascinating, I think. I think what people want, Jesse and you'll agree with this, is like a hardcore engineering segment in each podcast. And then we can alternate between like a hardcore like discrete mathematics commentatorics session and we'll just go back and forth between like circuitry

and thinking about you know commentatorics and single purpose notebooks and notebooks I don't know this will be the new call your daddy all right um what else do we got our next message is from April who sees a positive lesson in the recent box office successes of

the Gen Z films obsession in backrooms uh do you know anything about these I'm going to assume not as a essentially like a boomer. No. No. I didn't know much about these either.

There's two films that came out a couple weeks ago that are not only are they Gen Z directors, but they're based off of like what's called like original internet IP. So just like ideas that were circulating in chat rooms and social media feeds online. So it was like almost like a meme that existed online and they made movies out of them. And in both cases, the movies were, like, very successful. I think backrooms or obsession, one of these two things made more money than Spielberg's new movie in the first weekend. Because it's getting young people into the theater because they know what's going on. Let me see here. Oh, we have an actual message.

All right. Let me read the actual message for a riff on this. So the message says, I've recently written a blog post that I think you'll appreciate. It's inspired by the recent box office successes. of obsession and backrooms among younger audiences and what this says about attention, art, and community in the attention economy. All right, so here's the article.

I'll show it on the screen here. April Owens wrote this. It's called The Art We Need from her Digital Age Humanities. What's this is a substack? Okay, I'm going to read a couple of quotes I've pulled here. One, in the past few weeks, I've frequented my local cinemas nearly every day

to watch a variety of films from Finding Emily to Tuna to Sheep Detective to the Devil Wears product. But two, that my impromptu mini film festival coincided with the release of Obsession and Backrooms, a one-to-punch of Ginzi directed horror films during a lot of attention right now was a happy coincidence. I was independently excited for these movies, but I didn't anticipate just how successful and important they would be. These films are culturally significant in part because they are both directed by Ginzy filmmakers who got their start on the internet, particularly YouTube. Later, she says, obsession and backrooms have dominated in the box office, trouncing the new Star Wars flick.

and leading many to prognosticate about the future of cinema. What interests me, however, is who is turning out to see these movies. Under 35s make up the majority of the audiences for both films. Later, she says, part of the reasons for these movies, younger turnout likely has to do with the fact that the directors are themselves, young internet natives. Younger audiences, for maybe the first time, see something of themselves on the big screen.

And then she says later, sitting in those dark theaters with strangers, fully present, watching something made by people my age, with something real to say, it started to feel like something larger, like a generation quietly insisting on its own humanity. It gives me hope of a coming renaissance where in collective experience, deep attention in human scale art or prize in value over the attention fracking economic model that is fine most of the 21st century.

All right. So I think that's very hopeful. There's a young person saying, we're happy to go see art, we're happy to go to a theater and sit there for two hours and not be on TikTok if it's something that like reflects us. interest us. These are our filmmakers, our versions of Spielberg and Coppola, maybe they're coming up and we care about what they have to say. They're speaking to our experience. There is a renaissance. We don't want to just be on our phones all the time. We don't want to have relationships with chatbots. But we have to evolve. The culture has to keep evolving and be relevant to

us. So the fact that those two movies did really well, I think, is a big deal. I don't know what they are, however. So what I thought we would do today, and Jesse, you'll join me. on this is let's look at which one is this? Backrooms? Yeah. All right. Jesse and I are going to watch here in real time because we're not, you know, we're millennials. We're going to watch the trailer for back rooms.

We'll do it without audio so that we can do commentary over it, but we'll put it on the screen. Let's see what we make of this, Jesse. All right. So we got an empty room. It's an A-24 release. That's fancy. That's good cinematography. Yeah.

The camera goes through the floor and there's another room below it. There's a chair in an empty room. So far as like the opposite of like TikTok hyper engagement. Oh, uh-oh. Now we're going down even lower. That's another. So this is like going down layer after layer.

I clearly don't understand this meme. And now we're down in an empty room. So the room is getting more and more. Jesse, I have no idea what's going on. What the hell is happening? Now there's a door in the room. And now we're in like the severance.

now we're like an empty office building all yellow walls. Is something scary going to happen? It says back rooms. It flickers. That's it. You are so out of touch, Jesse. All right.

So for those who were listening instead of watching, how would you explain this? It was like a real room with a window and yellow walls and a... Oh, is this another trailer plane?

Yeah. Is this back rooms as well? Yeah, it's a longer trailer. You think it'll actually show people? You want to put it on the screen? Yeah, let's put on the screen. Because there's no people in the teaser trailer. It just showed a room,

and then it kept going down lower and lower level, showing that room, like getting more and more empty and abstract, and then it just had back rooms. I kept on thinking that it shows silo on Apple TV Plus. Oh, he's in this? All right, so they got real actors. Okay, now they're showing, this is the official trailer, not the teaser.

He's in this empty room with a bunch of office equipment, piled in the middle. It does look like severance too, doesn't it? It does look like severance. It's like a highly... Uh-oh. There's someone down a long hallway.

He's walking slowly towards a person standing creepily at the end of a long hallway. Then it says, This May. You think Luke Skywalker is going to come out? What if it was all just like a super corporate Disney movie? Oh, no. Now they're showing him in the real world. So he must be having dreams or something like that.

And now there's some found footage. found footage stuff oh that was um the girl from shrinking the daughter from shrinking uh they have a rope going down this hallway so this is like a dream world that people they're going into there's some cool disorienting cinematography there's some found footage in here cane parsons so it keeps going back and forth between the real world and this like sort of fantastical backroom world I guess I would go see this. In the movies?

I would see in the movies. I don't like jump scare. So if it's like pure like jump scare horror, I have a bit of a hard time. I don't know. Whoa, there's guys with like hazmat suits on. All right. I don't know.

I'll tell you what. This seems distinctive. Right? Yeah. Like, I mean, they, I don't know, I stopped it. They have like this director, Kane Parsons, definitely has like a point of view. This is like, there's like an original idea.

Clearly this seems to be. a metaphor for alienation or something, right? Like there's, he has ideas. It was visually interesting looking. They had good actors. I couldn't tell what the hell was happening without the audio, but like that would probably make it.

I think it's supposed to be a disorienting, uh, experience. I mean, you would, because otherwise, like the cliche would be like, oh, well, when Jin Z makes movies,

it's just going to be like a bunch of kids on their phone and just like talking about, you know, brain rod and memes and let's go or whatever. It's going to be dude perfect, basically like in the yeah and no this is like culturally very original all right maybe I'll have to go see it am I allowed to see it if you're under 35 are you over 35 are you allowed to pay double we have to subsidize the kids who don't

who's AI is taking all their jobs all right that gives me hope just a huge movie person I'm happy to see Jin Z saying you know what art is more interesting than TikTok all right do we have anything else yeah we do Michael writes in about an old school tool he bought for wood shop. All right. It's like the opposite of Junzi. All right. Michael says,

Hi, Call and Jesse. Thought you'd enjoy that I bought a $10 calculator for my wood shop. After another woodworker recommended it, I've been using my phone calculator. But as you already know, that invariably leads to time wasted due to unrelated distractions. I still used a phone one for the rare trigonometry needs, but 95% better. Anyway, thanks for your work. Cheers. All right.

And he sent us a picture, right? Yep. All right. We'll see it. Look at that, Jesse. old-fashioned calculator with big buttons you press. I'll tell you,

this is a truism as someone who's had to buy a bunch of like, you know, we buy dumb phones for our kids and stuff like that. The only like old school technology can buy

it always has like giant buttons because it's all made for old people. Yeah. That's the market that's left for like non-digital like fancy tools is old people. So it's all like the phones we,

the flip phones we bought for our kids when they have to take the bus or whatever. It's like big old buttons for 85 year olds to not get confused. We have time for one more, right? Yeah. All right, what we got?

Our final message is from Kat, who has a new solution to landlining. Oh, okay. Let's see what we got here. Kat says, I want to share another version of landlining. I think your podcast listeners may find interesting. I used to charge my phone in the kitchen until a family health issue meant I didn't want to risk missing emergency calls overnight. I considered getting an actual landline for emergencies, but then I learned about landline

phones that connected to your cell phone with Bluetooth. Instead of paying for a landline, I bought the landline phone, connected it to my cell, and I keep that in my bedroom in case I need to answer a call. Since I already have my cell set to silence unknown callers, the phone only rings when a contact calls. This solution keeps the phone out of the bedroom while giving me the peace of mind that I won't miss an important call. Bonus benefit. Instead of the kitchen, I started charging my phone in the basement beside my exercise mat, so now I'm following through more on my morning workout routine.

That's a cool technology. I think that does definitely one-up landlining. I'm thinking this through, Jesse. So here's the problem. So I think if your main concern is keeping you back from landlining, like with Kat, is important phone calls. This works great. You can have an old-fashioned 90-style phone that rings loudly if there's a call from a contact,

and you can go pick it up and talk without having to be distracted by your phone. The issue is, I think, a lot of people's communication that they're doing with their phone is text-based. and so there landlining by just having your phone in the kitchen works well because you can go check the text messages or WhatsApp. You've got to go in the kitchen to do it so it's not with you. But if your phone was in the basement, then the physical landline phone's not going to ring for text messages. You wouldn't be able to hear them, obviously. So that would, I think that's a cool solution if phone calls is what you really care about. If you're deep into text messages, like if you're a parent right now, that's hard to avoid, then like plug in the phone in the kitchen.

so it's nearby but not within reach is probably the best solution. Cool technology, though. All right, we'd like to end our Monday episodes by a guinea up-to-date about what I have been up to. Jesse, I finished three books last week. So the count is up. You know, I didn't read them all from scratch last week, but I finished three books less neat. I finished Derek Thompson's first book, The Hitmakers, which is about like why things are popular or not popular. It's like a classic 2010-style idea book with like stories and science and he's a good writer and I enjoyed it.

Then I finished Molly Haskell's book, Stephen Spielberg, A Life in Films. This is actually an academic press book. She's a well-known film critic. It's like a biography of Spielberg but told through his films, like what was going on in his life as he wrote each film. I wanted to finish that before. I went to see Spielberg's new movie. And so I finished that right before. There's only really two good biographies of Spielberg.

It's this one and Joseph McBride's one. both psychological. So the McBride biography is very Freudian, right? It was written in the 90s, so it's a lot of like trying to understand Spielberg through his relationship to his parents. Haskell is a little bit Freudian too, but she's more like a feminist, feminist psychology lens through seeing Spielberg. So basically both of our big Spielberg biographies are very much delivered through a psychological

lens, like a psychotherapeutic way of understanding Spielberg in his actions. We don't yet have, which is a little non-modern, like you'd be, you know, we don't have like a non-psychological biography, which I would be really, I mean, there needs to be more Spielberg biographies. I think the issue is he never, he won't participate. How old is he? He's just about turned 80. I didn't realize he was that old. Yeah, 1946. And he's still working all the time.

Yeah. I mean, Cloniswood was making movies to his 90s. I was telling you were off air about how Seth Rogen had an interview on New York Times and he was talking about when he was talking about when. he was, because he was in the Spielberg, he was the dad, right? And, um, when Spielberg was a kid. Right. Oh, Fabelman's? Yeah. Oh. He was in the movie. Oh, yeah.

And he would talk to Spielberg all the time. It's a good movie. How do you film X, Y, Z. What are you thinking here? Spielberg is doing podcasts for the first time for his latest movie release. He's never done them before. What are the big movie podcasts? Well, he did rewatchables. And they did 2001. And I'm still listening to it. It's like an hour and a half long. And it's great. And he's so with it. I mean, you might as well be, you know, 60 years old, not 79. But there's a, there's a room here for a good Spielberg biography that is not told through a psychological lens, which feels dated to me a little bit. Like,

but through, I don't know, artistic lens, I think an economic lens would be interesting. I read, like, I often will read lots of biography, like I've read a lot of Disney, Walt Disney biographies. It's just interesting. You get these different lenses. that you can tell these stories. And I think like economic, like what was going on in the film industry, economic artistic,

like that would be an interesting biography on him. So after I finished my Crichton biography, I guess I'll have to write. I was just going to say that. Yeah. Then I'll write a Spielberg biography. And I'll tell it entirely through us

for like economic or like film technology lens. I also finished a book that's actually not coming out until October. I had it in electronic galley form, which is James Marriott's upcoming book, The New Dark Ages, about the important. important role that reading played in modernity and what's going, what we're losing. What's going to

happen to our society and culture is reading becomes less often. I don't want to talk too much about a book that's not actually out yet. But it's, I'm doing a lot of reading right now on the thinking, consciousness, technology, communication as I'm thinking about a new book idea of my own. So I liked it, but I'll talk about it more when it comes out in the fall. All right. So I finished three, I finished three books. I also saw a movie and went to see Disclosure Day on the weekend it came out

which is Spielberg's new movie pretty good. Are there aliens? There's aliens. Spoiler. I mean, the premise of the book is like, of the movie is the, you know, it's a chase film. And it's like the two main characters

want, and this is just, you know this from the trailers, is like they're wanting to get the word out that there are aliens and the government's been covering it up since the 40s. And this, you know, agency is trying to stop them. So it's like ultimately a Chase film. It sits somewhere.

It's interesting. It sits somewhere between, in terms of tone, E.T. and War of the World. Like, there's sort of this, like, dark agency. It's like if E.T. spent, like, a lot more time with the agents who came at the end to kidnap the kids. It's like the third act. It's the way I'd understand it is, like, it's kind of like the third act of E. made into like a full

made into a full movie right so it has a bit of that war of the world's fights but it also has some of the wonder he's still putting it in like it's not it's not dystopian and he still he has like those wonder notes from

close encounters in ET and it's not just like this is scary or this is good and so I thought you know it was good I always look when I watch Spielberg film he always likes to do some like virtuosic camera work because that's his thing. I will tell you film nerds out there, if you go to see this, the scene you got to watch,

and we'll hear more about this scene, like once the movie's been out for a while long. You have the tracking shot at the farmhouse fence outside of Virginia at the safe house. I don't even quite know how he did it. It's a, the setup the scene, there's a split rail fence. The main character is trying to escape, because on the other side of the fence is all these, like, the agency. has arrived in all these cars, black cars and SUVs and SWAT teams to try to come and get them. And he's like trying to sneak away from the fit down the fence as they're on the other side of the fence heading towards the house. And Spielberg does a long unbroken tracking shot where he, the camera keeps going from one side of the fence to the other. So it'll like swoop down and follow him

and then come through the fence and be looking at him from the other side of the fence and then come back through the fence and be on the other side and then follow them as he jumps over. So that's just Spielberg trying to be virtuosic. I assuming he's got to be doing there's probably hidden cuts in motion tracking, I guess, because there's no way to actually physically get the cameras up, down, through a fence, back through a fence, turning 180.

I'm interested in how he does it. I think it's some sort of motion track. I don't know how they do it. Anyways, it's a cool shot. I don't know how many people noticed that, but he puts in those types of, he has to put in those types of shots. The camera's always moving.

All right. You got to see it. Yeah. And we got to see, what's it, back rooms? Yeah. I'm like, oh, I have to see back rooms. It was like a whole internet. It was just like someone posted a picture of like a, it turned out later people discovered.

It was like a retail shop to have been closed down. It's just like this like empty room. It was just like generically, whatever. And it just became a thing online with people like inventing a whole backstory about this whatever. Then they made a movie out of it and it made like $80 million. Damn. Yeah. Yeah.

That's crazy. when we do our Cal Network versus Jesse Skeleton movie, it'll be the voice of our generation. Actually, there's already a lot of filmmakers our age, so that's not going to, that's not going to work. I imagine it like He Man Master the Universe, but it's Cal Network, and he just thwarts the enemies immediately.

And then it kind of morphs into essentially a remake of my dinner with Andre. Do you know this movie from the 90s? 90 minutes of just at one dinner table. and it's just Jesse Skeleton. So it's like all of the CGI and you see in the monsters and Skeletor-type monsters and then Cal Network

immediately dispatches them and then you're at a table and it's just conversation, existential conversation for the next 90 minutes. That's going to be our movie. That movie will show you what our generation can do. All right, that's enough nonsense for now.

It's all the time we have. Back next week with another Monday advice episode, probably an AI reality check on Thursday as well. so stay tuned for that. Subscribe to my newsletter, tell meepard.com. And until next time, as always, stay deep.