Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 260: Make Haste Slowly

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

One of the most popular (and widely forgotten) slogans of the ancient world was Festina Lente, or, “Make Haste Slowly.” In this episode, Cal looks deeper at what this phrase meant, and in doing so uncovers an ancient version of slow productivity.  Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo  Video from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmedia  Today’s Deep Question: What can Octavian Caesar Augustus teach us about productivity? [5:37]  - How can I help my team move fast to slow productivity? [26:12] - How do I figure out how long to spend on a task? [33:08] - What’s up with Cal’s podcast album art? [38:14] - Why is my partner so slow? [40:49] - How does Cal’s Remarkable tablet change his working memory.txt habit? [46:23]  CASE STUDY: Not allowing work to dominate your life [53:28]  The 5 Book Cal Read in July 2023 [1:03:21]  Links:  bigthink.com/the-learning-curve/festina-lente/  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festina_lente  Thanks to our Sponsors:  zocdoc.com/deep hensonshaving.com/cal mybodytutor.com blinkist.com/deep  Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Kyle Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in a distracted world. I'm here up in the Deep Work H.Q. North in Hanover, New Hampshire. I am joined, as always, by my producer, Jesse, who's holding down the Fort down in the Deep Work HQ South in Tacoma Park, Maryland. Jesse, it hit the 40s last night, temperature-wise. I'm assuming something similar has not happened down there in D.C. 40s, that's good sleeping weather. Oh, yeah. Open the windows. Enjoy the cool, dry air. I think we're down to, if I'm doing the math right, two episodes including this one,

filmed up here at the HQ North. And then back to my beloved normal Tacoma Park original HQ studio. I think it's this studio, this episode, next week's episode. And then we are back in action in person back at the Bat Caves. So I am looking forward to that. I do have an exciting, exciting bit of news to share, Jesse. So I received recently in the mail an advance copy of the second version of my time block planner. What I was doing is when I ran out of my pages of my existing planner when I got up here a month or so ago, my plan was I knew this new one was coming.

They're going to send me the advance copy once it got here. And so once my original planner ran out, I was just using my remarkable to try to do my time block planning. Then I got my new time block planner here. And I have to say, I missed it. It's so much better for the daily planning to have the paper with you that you can bring anywhere that's not a screen. I really missed it. Anyways, I'm going to do a whole thing about the planner next week where I'll show it to you and go through the features. But let me just tantalize you with a couple things.

high quality spiral binding, heavy cover, falls open flat. Perfectly flat. I obsessed about the paper. We went through six or seven blanks to get to the one we like. And I'm going to be completely honest. This is entirely selfish. The paper in the new version of the time block planner is optimized for the Uniball Micro, 0.5 millimeter ballpoint pins that I prefer to use.

It is perfected for exactly that pin. The ink flow is great. It doesn't blot, but it grabs the ink really well. I love the paper. And I also completely overhauled the weekend weekly planning to better match what we talk about on the show. And there's an extra month in there. Anyways, I'm in love with this thing. If no one's looking, let's make sure no one's listening.

I really went down this whole rabbit hole of the time block planner so I could just have it for myself. And I think now we have arrived at exactly what I wanted in my life. So anyways, we'll talk more about it next week. There is some concern. If you're thinking about ordering one, maybe pre-order it on Amazon. Make sure you go to the second edition. The original edition is still up there on Amazon. Go to the second edition.

You'll see it has the spiral binding and says new and improved in the picture. When we run out of the first printing, my publisher is telling me they're worried it might be a minute until the next printing gets here because of supply chain issues. I don't know that we're going to, but you never know. You never know. people like this planner. That's amazing that you went through six pages, six different types of paper. I didn't bring them up here to show you.

So I'll bring them into the HQ when I get back to DC. So the blanks are great. So it's all white. They're really cool, right? Because they don't do any graphics on them, but it's testing the cardboard and the paper stock and the size and the spiral size. I'm going to bring my stack of the blanks to the HQ when we get back. It's exactly, I like it even. My prior favorite paper was the black and reds.

I like this paper a little better. It's just on. So we won't get too much into that. Again, because we'll do a whole segment next week so you can actually go to YouTube and see it on camera. So stay tuned for that. I'll tell you what I did want to talk about today, though. This was a cool idea, something I had heard something about, but a listener sent me a longer article about it. It's a idea from antiquity.

that I think actually captures a lot of the ideas we've been talking about on this show about slow productivity. So I'm going to load up an article on the screen here that I'm going to be talking about today. So let me do a little bit of a share here. I'm going to bring this article up. Oh, you know what? It's in the other browser. You would think, Jesse, having done it up here, having done this show up here for six weeks now, two months now, whatever it is, that I would have understood how our remote recording software works.

You would think that, but I clearly I don't. I clearly need to be back to our HQ where you control this because just now, yet again, as always happens with me, I forgot how to share my screen properly. All right, I believe now I do have this correct. All right, here we go. Now I will load this up. I'm not meant to be remote.

When it comes to podcasting, I'm an in-person guy. All right. So I'm going to share this article. I show this article with you today that a reader sent in. I think there's some interesting points here. So for those who are listing, you can see the article on your screen. If you go to YouTube.com slash Cal Newport Media. This is episode 260.

You can also find this episode 260 at the deep life. So I've loaded up this article on the screen from Big Think. Here's the headline, Fastina Lente, a Roman emperor's guide to getting stuff done. So I'll start from the top of this article. Then we're going to get into it. So that Roman emperor in question here is Octavian Caesar Augustus. And this opens by saying like all historical legacies, the one of Octavian Caesar Augustus is open to interpretation. Right?

So he steered Rome through tumultuous times and ushered in a centuries-long period of order and stability known as Pax Romana. On the other hand, he delivered the killing blow to the Roman Republic and established a position so powerful that it gave subsequent emperors such as Caligula and Nero carte blanche to indulge their whim. So, you know, you got the good and you got the bad. But here's the key point here. Whatever your take on Caesar Augustus, you've got to give him this. The man knew how to get things done. And the article mentions a lot of things that Caesar. Augustus did as emperor, a lot of projects to improve Rome after its many wars, his new tax

and census systems. He created police forces and fire brigades. He built roads, instituted a postal service. All right. So this is a guy who was effective. All right. So let's return to the article. That's one heck of a curriculum vitae. He managed all of this not only by being clever, ruthless, and politically savvy, but by following a modest yet powerful Roman principle, Festina Lente, which is often translated, make haste slowly. All right. So this is a idea that I've seen. I looked into this idea when I was researching my book, Slow Productivity, this is coming

out in March. And so I've gone down this rabbit hole before, but it was interesting to see this take on it, this notion of Festina Lintze, make haste slowly, comes up all the time in antiquity. So you see it, it wasn't just Caesar Augustus, but it actually comes up all the time. So let me jump back to this article here for a second. There's some graphics to share with you here. All right, so let's look at this, the history of this phrase. They say here the history of an august oxymoron.

An ad here. All right. Did I say Roman principle? Well, not exactly like most things Roman. Dina Lente is Greek in origin. It's a calk or loan translation of the phrase, which I'm not even going to try to pronounce, but it's a Greek phrase. The Roman simply borrowed it, gave it a Latin polish, and then invoked the time-honored tradition of no backseas.

But while Augustus didn't originate the principle, he did devote himself to it in a history, in a biography of the first Roman emperor, the historian, Soutonius, described how Augustus changed the military following the final civil wars in the Republic. He notes how Augustus thought nothing more derogatory to the character of an accomplished general than precipitancy and rashness. The quash such impulses, Augustus trains his generals to instead make haste slowly and that the cautious captain is better than the gold. How serious was he about this? Augustus minted a Roman coin known as an aureus with his personal branding of Fastina Lente. On the side that didn't include his face, he imprinted the image of a crab hoisting.

a butterfly. The butterfly represented speed, the crab, caution, and deliberateness. Here's another graphic here. This is another Fistina-Lente graphic. You see here a dolphin around an anchor. I have this on the screen now. This was Aldous Manutius, a Renaissance humanist who revolutionized the publishing industry, adopted Fistina Lente as his business ethos. So this was his publishing imprints. print. So in the Renaissance, they rediscovered this idea. Cosmo de Medici also illustrated this with a turtle sporting a sail on top of its shell. So there's, I'm seeing there's one more image in here. Anyways, there's a lot of images. What I'm trying to say is this idea of Fistina Lente showed up a lot. So we see it. The Greeks came up with it. The Romans were really into it. It was minted on coins. The Renaissance humanist rediscovered it. They used it.

Medici had artwork commissioned around it. A famous publisher in the Renaissance period had as the imprint, a dolphin on an anchor. If you look online, you can find all sorts of other artifacts from the ancient world and from the Renaissance period where we see exactly this phrase captured in imagery. So it's a very powerful, popular phrase. The question is, what is meant by this and why is it relevant to us today? Well, I think the literal translation, make haste slowly, is a little bit hard to follow. There's a, as noted in that article, a bit of an oxymoronic element to it. How can you be making haste if you're going slowly?

Haste is fast. Slowly is slow. So I'm going to offer here, let's call it an interpretive translation. So it's not a literal translation of what do these words mean, but an interpretive translation, A way of rephrasing this phrase, which I think gets to the core of what the ancient world and the Renaissance scholars who studied it thought about it, what they thought it meant. So here is my interpretive translation of Fistina Lente. Work slowly but relentlessly on what matters. Work slowly but relentlessly on what matters.

So let's go through the three parts of that, one by one. and I'll elaborate what I mean here. So slowly in this context means, of course, obviously, don't go fast. This is certainly what Caesar Augustus had in mind when he worried about his generals in the field being rash in their decision making. When you're too rash in your decision making, you act in the moment, you act on instinct. This can create problems. And if we bring this forward to the modern context, we can imagine it saying, don't let busyness and frenetic activity distract you from what actually matters. matters to keep you from your best work. It could be reassuring in the moment, like the general

that wants to make a decision and send their archers over there, it can be reassuring in the moment to do things. Let me do this and send this email and hire this consultant and publish this thing and start using this new tool. You feel like the activity is action and action is better than inaction. But Festina Lente is saying, slow down. Don't act hastily. Now the cost in the modern context is not you're going to lose the battle, but it might be you're going to lose time, that you're going to get distracted, that your energy is going to be redirected from the types of activities that might have been most important for what it is you're trying to get done. We can think about this call to slowness also as they call to craft.

Slow down, focus on what matters, work on your craft. That's what's going to matter. Okay, so that's the first part. Work slowly but relentlessly on what matters. What do I mean by relentlessly in this interpretive translation? Well, this is where we get to my take on the haste piece from the original translation. Don't delay or procrastinate. Don't over-analys.

So Augustus didn't want his generals. Caesar Augustus did not want his generals to act hastily, but he also wanted them to act. Make the right moves when they need to be done. Don't react in the moment to your instincts or your fear. But when you see this is the right move. All right, I slowed down. I'm looking at the battlefield. That's a faint.

Here's their weakness. Okay, we need to flank. Once you realize the right thing to do, because you slowed down, do it. Don't overanalyze it. Don't procrastinate on it. So this is where we get that oxymoronic tension. Slow down. Don't just be busy and frenetic, but be relentless on working on what you're working on.

This is the next thing to do? Do it, do it well. Take a beat. What's the best thing to do next? Do that and do that well. it's the constant activity done intentionally with care aggregates to really big results. And I think that's the takeaway of the second piece for the modern context. Working slowly but relentlessly builds up.

And if you do that long enough, you do end up with really interesting results. Even if in the moment it looks slow, if you don't stop, if you keep making progress, you keep putting out one podcast after another, very carefully trying to improve each episode from the last. You keep putting down another page of the book you're working on, and maybe it takes you longer than someone else, but you give enough time. You have a book that you're really proud of. This work relentlessly, don't stop. Keep making progress is the key counterbalance to the slow. And then I added the matters piece.

So go back to my translation, work slowly but relentlessly on what matters. matters. So what I mean by what matters is, okay, making sure you're focused on the right things. So slow down. Don't just be reactive. But when you do keep making progress, relentlessly, don't stop and make sure you're aimed in the right direction. So the generals for Caesar Augustus hearing Fustina-Lente, they know what they're trying to do. We're trying to take this high ground. We're trying to take this city back from the barbarian hordes. They know what matters and they don't lose sight of that. That's what we're trying to do. And then they slow down so they're not being too reactive and they make the relentless project on progress on the right

decisions in the moment that pushed them into long term towards what matters. So work slowly but relentlessly on what matters. That is an ancient piece of wisdom. As we saw, the Greeks talked about it. The Romans stole it from them. The Renaissance humanists that rediscovered the Greeks and the Romans stole it from them. So everyone who has encountered this idea has adopted it with enthusiasm, which from a memetic standpoint tells us there's probably something in this idea that fits well with human nature. And I think this is really exciting because once we see it elaborated in this way, this concept dovetails nicely with the philosophy of slow productivity that we talk about

so often on this show and that I elaborate in the book I have coming out in March. Now, it's not an exact match to slow productivity, but it's in the spirit of the slow productivity mindset. That spirit of slowing down, doing less, being more careful about your decisions, staying focused on the things that matters, but also keep making progress. You keep moving down the path. You keep making progress towards what matters. Trusting in the short term, you're just focused on making a good decision and building something a step you're proud of.

And in the long term, you end up at a cool destination. That's classic slow productivity. So I think this shows that there is no ideas. No ideas are new, right? So the reason why I think slow productivity resonates with me and is resonating with so many of you is because there's actually an ancient idea here that we're hitting upon. So Fistina Lintay, make hay slowly, or to put it my way, work slowly. How do I say? It works slowly, but relentlessly on what matters.

A little bit less pithy, but I think that gets to the core of what all who have rediscovered this advice really liked. We should get a coin made, Jesse. Ryan Holiday has coins, you know. He has the Memento Moray, the Stoic coins. I think we need our own. Yeah, coin or a bookmark. That would be really nice. Because you read a lot of books.

And do you think it would be a step too far in the narcissistic direction if I minted gold coins where it was my face on one side? And then Festina Lente on the other side. People could just look at, and like a general, you know, like I would have a garland. they wear garlands of plants. I don't know which ones. Like in the Sopranos when he got that painting commission of him on the horse? Which I... Did you ever see that?

Exactly. And I think viewers, listeners don't know this, but there is a giant mural of me dressed like a Roman emperor on a horse inside the Deepak HQ. And I'm just pointing forward and it says Fistino-Linte. Maybe that would be a step too far. Anyways, that was cool, though. Here's the only sad thing is I came across, like my Festina Lintze Rabbit Hole was after the manuscript for slow productivity was already done. So it's actually not in the book.

So this is, it's validation of the ideas in the book that came later. But it came too late to actually make into the book itself. So I don't know if that's sad or cool, but there we go. All right. So what I want to move on to is some questions that are going to be roughly, roughly associated. with this slow productivity, slowing down, working with what matters theme of this episode. Before we do, though, I want to talk briefly about one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. And that is our good friends at Hinson Shaving.

So here's the thing about Hinson Shaving. They sell this beautiful precision milled razor that you can then use with standard cheap off-the-shelf safety razor blades. And this beautifully milled aluminum razor, what makes it so good, other than the fact it just looks good and it's heavy and it's well balanced, is that Hinson's business is precision manufacturing before they got into the razor game. They worked on aerospace design and parts manufacturing. So they have these aerospace grade C&C machines that can build really precise metal products. That's what allows them to make a metal razor that extends just 0.0.0.000. 0.03 inches beyond, the blade goes to 0.013 inches beyond the housing of the razor itself. That's what allows a 10 cent standard razor blade when combined with their beautifully milled

razor to give you a clean shave without the diving board effect that causes nicks and that causes clogs. I use the hinson razor and I do because A, it's a beautiful tool. And B, because over time it's cheaper. You pay more up front for this. beautiful milled piece of metal, but then you're using 10-cent blades with it, which means it does not take long before your overall cost to use a Hinson razor is much cheaper than having to use a subscription service or buy the pharmacy plastic packaged razors. So you save money, you get a better shave, and it's a beautiful tool for those of us who really like technology done right. So it's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that will last you a lifetime. Visit Hinsonshaving.com

slash Cal to pick the razor for you and use code Cal and you'll get two years worth of blades free with your razor. Just make sure to add them to your cart. And then when you type in that promo code Cal, the price of the blades will drop the zero. That's 100 free blades when you head to H-E-N-S-O-N-S-H-A-V-I-N-G.com slash Cal. I also want to talk about our good friends at the oh so easy to pronounce Zoc Doc. Zococ is one of these apps that makes so much sense. It's hard to believe that it wasn't around before.

So here's how it works. Let's say you need a new doctor. You know, like in my case, my old doctor left or you're looking for a new type of doctor you didn't have one before. How would you normally do this? I don't know. No one knows. You start asking friends, hey, what doctor do you use?

and then you call the doctor. And if you live in a city like I do, they're like, no, we don't have any availability. If anything, we're mad at you for even asking. Of course we don't. Or you find a doctor with availability, but they don't take your insurance. They turn out the not be so good.

There's a painting of them on a horse like a Roman emperor in the waiting room, and you didn't know about this. This is where Zoc Doc enters the scene. It is an app that allows you to search for the type of doctor you're looking for that's in your area. that takes your insurance, that has available appointments, and you can read reviews right there to see, okay, do they have weird paintings in their hallway?

It's what makes it easy to find a new health care provider. So I think this is just a great idea. I need some sort of doctor. I need a dentist. I need this specialist. Zoc doc. Search. I'm looking for this area.

Availability. This insurance. Boom. Here's some options. What's the reviews. Ooh, this one looks good. maybe I can even book it online using the app itself. So there are thousands of top rated doctors on Zoc Doc,

and it will help you find them. All right. So it's a free app where you find these amazing actors, and in most case, doctors, not actors. And in most cases, can book the opponent, the appointments right there online. Man, actors and opponents, that's a separate type of act,

separate type of app right there. And act. My God, Jesse. I said actors, opponents, and act, all of those, I mean, essentially what I think I really want to do here is fight a screen actor. And somehow that's overtaking me

as I think about Zoc, Doc. Now, forget all that. It's a free app where you can find amazing doctors and book appointments online. We're talking about booking appointments with thousands of top-rated patient-review doctors and specialists. Filter for the ones, take your insurance,

the ones that are located near you. They can treat almost any condition you're searching for. It's just a smart way to find health care providers. All right, so go to Zocdoc.com slash deep and download the Zocdoc app for free. Then you can find a book at Top Redded Doctor Today. That's ZOCDOC.com slash deep. Zockdoch.com slash deep.

You know what I'm thinking about actors, Jesse? It's because our listeners are aggressively shaming me about the fact that there is no large format movie theater near Hanover, New Hampshire. And they are aggressively shaming me. I'm talking a dozen messages, at least, that I am not driving 90 minutes to get to an IMAX screen to see Oppenheimer. Really? And I wish I could. I wish I could.

But the issue is they got me booked pretty seriously up here up in Hanover. Dartmouth has me doing a lot of events in addition to my class, a lot of talks, a lot of classroom visits. I'm all over the place. So I can't just take a day off in the middle of the week. And now we have visitors up here. and I don't know that I'm going to make it to an IMAX while I'm still up here. I am going to go see it in the next couple of days in 35 millimeter. It leaves the local theater here in Hanover on Thursday.

So I have to go find. I am going to go see it in 35 millimeter. And then I'm just going to hope one of the specialty theaters in D.C. is doing an extended run or will bring it back and play it in large format. But man, they're really telling me, let me tell you this. There's one listener who said they flew back from Bavaria to the states. Really? So they could see Oppenheimer.

in the iMX so this is why i haven't seen it yet oh man they're going to be mad at you now jesse if you don't see it in large format mad dog has talked about it yeah um yeah i hear it's really good but i heard it's like probably 25 minutes too long yeah but well i think there yeah there's a like a long uh 70 millimeter sequence of just fire from the the from the uh the main explosion scene where they show the trinity test and he they built a super high speed IMAX camera so they could film real fire. Anyways, I'm excited about it, but that's why I have actors on my mind because, man, I've been so seriously shamed by our listeners. I do miss that about DC. I'm very much looking forward to getting back to movies. Nice movie theaters, big formats,

seeing really interesting movies. That's not what you do up in rural New Hampshire. So it's a, it's a nice break, but I am looking forward to getting back to seeing some serious movies. All right, we should get back to some questions is what we should do, because we have some interesting ones to get into today. Jesse, start us off. Who do we have here? Hi, first questions from Trent. I feel like my team is suffering from a fast productivity bias. We use scrum, but our schedules are overloaded and too many items being prioritized haphazardly leading to me and my team feeling burned out. How can I help my team and client move towards slow productivity and avoid them feeling anxious about not delivering enough work? Well, I think the good news here is that you do actually have in place

a workflow management system that is very compatible with a more sustainable slow productivity. So for the unknowledgeable listener, the listener who doesn't know about scrum, this is a methodology used commonly in software development for keeping track of and organizing work on software projects. And there's a bunch of key ideas to it. But essentially, you work in short, iterative sprints. So instead of trying to plan a very long. large software development project out from scratch. We'll do this and it'll take one week and this will take two weeks and you have a six month plan. The scrum mindset says, okay, what's the next thing we want

to add? Let's just focus on that. This person's doing it. Spend two days, get it done. Let's test it and then see what should come next. So it's a more iterative way of building software. Now, often the work being done in scrum is itself tracked using a metaphor of cards pinned up on a board under columns. So this is a technique that comes from a related system called con bond. Not to confuse everyone, but Scrum often uses con bond boards to keep track of the work. But the way to imagine this is you have a card, be it virtual or physical, for all the different features you might want to add to your software. And they're in a sort of holding tank column. And then there's a column for, okay, this is being worked on. And you move something over there when one person is working

on it. And then that's what they focus on until they're done. And then it gets moved to the testing column typically into the this is done column. Okay. So this is the setup that Trent has. And he's saying the issue is we have this setup, but we're just moving too many things to the working on column. And we're going really fast to keep up with all these different things we want to want us to get done and we're working all the time and on multiple things at a time and we're burning out. So technically all they need to do is just slow down the pace. They have the structure there. They need to say, let's spend more time on each of these things. So when we move a card to the working on column. Let's give that person more time to get it done. And they have to reduce

overlap. Let's not put four things in the working on column for the same person. Let's put one thing at a time or two things at a time and let them finish that before the next thing comes. So there's a knob here you can turn to slow down the workload. Now, the two questions are, is this going to make you worse? Is your team going to be less capable if you do this? And then the second question is, regardless of that, is your client going to accept it? And let's tackle those both separately. Is it going to make your team worse? Are you going to actually be slower? The answer there is almost certainly no. It's one of the key ideas in slow productivity. The first principle is do fewer things. And one of the key explanations for that is doing fewer things does

not necessarily mean that you produce at a slower rate. Everything that is on your plate in the moment to work on brings with it an overhead. Some of this overhead is just purely cognitive. I just, I have to think about this and I'm working on this, both consciously and unconsciously. And some of it is actual logistical or administrative. Once I'm working on something, I might have to talk to other people about it. I might have to have conversations about it. There's email or slack messages going back and forth about it. So there's actual literal overhead that the time takes up time. So when you put more things on your plate in a given period of time, you have more overhead.

When you have more overhead, it means you have less time to work on the work itself and you have less cognitive capacity capable to dedicate it to it when you actually do the work. What does this mean? It takes longer to get those things done. So if you put three things on your plate on your con bond board as part of your scrum protocol,

if you put three things on your plate instead of one, you're not working three times faster. You're not getting three times as much done this week or this month because those three things are going to take longer to get done. and the quality will probably be lower as well. If you put those things one after another, the time required to execute them if they got your full focus would be less because there's less overhead getting in the way.

So going one after another might end up taking less time than putting all three on your plate and trying to finish them. So no, you're not going to be a worse producing team if you start to pull back a little bit on how many things you're moving from this collective coming up column into the individualized working on column. All right, so what about your clients? Well, here's the thing with your clients.

Two things can help. One, let them just see the results. Things are getting done. When they zoom out to the weeks or monthly scale, they say things are getting done. Features get added. We're happy with the work. So have some faith that because you aren't actually producing at a slower rate,

your client will notice this. The second thing you can do is just have a good transparency. right with the client all right thank you here's the feature it's on our list of things to work on in fact we'll give you some visibility into our con bond not the exact con bond board but some sort of lower fidelity collection of it where you can see yes this is exactly where this feature is it's in our holding pin here's the ones we're working on now okay these are done these are the next ones we're working on hey you can see here on priority this is probably four or five features back but it's moving down the list clarity can give you all sorts of

grace when it comes to client work. Being very clear to a client, they see what you're working on, how you're working on it, they see the speed with things are getting done, they see your system. That is going to get you

a lot of grace from the client. The thing that gets clients upset, the things to get clients demanding that you answer their emails at all time, the things that gets clients saying, just do this now, I don't want to wait, is not trusting you.

Not trusting. I don't know when this is going to get done or who's going to work on it. As long as the client feels like it's essentially up to them to badger and individual, with email or Slack until they can get that person to do something, that it's on the client's plate, it's on their head,

they have to keep track of it until it gets done, and they have to keep bothering you until it does. Then you're not going to have any grace. They're going to say, just do it, just, I don't know, work on it. But when they see that transparency, it's in the system. Here it is. I see it moving down the list of priorities. I see things are being executed well and fast.

Then they're going to give you a little bit more breathing room. So I think you're half of the way there, Trent, because you have the system in place. Now you just need to turn the knob down on workload, give a little more transparency to your client, and trust they'll see that the way you're doing this is actually producing results, and I think you will be able to slow things down.

All right, what do we got next, Jesse? All right, next question is from Ben. One challenge I still have with time blocking is knowing how much time to allocate to a specific task or project. For example, as a product manager, I can spend hours or days doing customer market discovery to decide if a new feature is worth pursuing

or I can spend two hours and get a good enough answer. Does it make sense to allocate time to a task or project based on your appetite versus how much you can afford to give it? How much you can afford to give it, I think is the right starting place. So if you have an open-ended task or project that you need to work on, and you say, I don't really know how long I'm supposed to spend on this because maybe there's not a clear done point. Like the example given here, Ben gave was researching,

and you can always keep researching. I think the right thing to do here is to fix a reasonable amount of time, block off that time when you work on it, use the scarcity of that time to push you to really focus. Okay, when I'm working on this, okay, I have two hours. I really want to get a lot done in this two hours. I want to be very careful about it. And then when you're done, you're done.

And then here's the thing. Let negative feedback change you. So if it turns out this is too short of time, It's not enough research, and in the end, the report was not good. We didn't land the client. Wait until you have that negative feedback. Let that negative feedback change what you do. Don't proactively guess.

We do five hours. Let me do six hours. Do what the time you hope from a scheduling perspective it might actually take. Two hours would be great. That's reasonable, given how many of these discovery reports I have to do. And do your best to make that time work. And if you get negative feedback, didn't change something. But even there, so even there, if you get the negative feedback of I didn't spend enough time on this,

before you simply make your response be more time next time this comes up. Focus first on process. Well, what did I do during those two hours? I was just on the internet. I was just gathering stuff. Maybe there's a better way to have done this. Okay, I need to, what would have been better? Oh, I see.

If I knew specifically working backwards from the report I was going to write, I could get the three big points I want to make. And then I could systematically search in this example for five sources for each of those points because I want to quote three things and give a summary. You start thinking through, how could I have better organized my approach during the time I gave this to get the better result? Eight times out of 10, that's what you need. And then the other two times out of 10, it might be some combination of I need a better process and I need more time. But at least it's an evidence-based increase of the footprint of this task on your schedule. Where this used to

come up in my early work was actually helping students with how they studied for test. This was very common where students would just say, I'm going to study open-ended. I have a test. It's a math test. I'm just going to study as much as I can because I don't want to feel guilty. I'll stay up all night. And then let's say they didn't get the result. And sometimes their instinct would be maybe I just have to study more.

And I would say, no, no, no, we need to go back. first of all, we need to restrict your study time. You should not be staying up all night. And they get really worried about this. And maybe they try this and they get an even worse grade. And they say, okay, now let's go back and figure out how do we change this. And almost always the answer was process. I used to call this back in the early days of my newsletter and blog the post-exam post-mortem.

I would say, man, that's the important thing to do. If you worried, you know, I studied for three hours and I got a bad grade, before you just say, let me study all night again. Do a post-exam post-mortem. Look at the exam questions you got. wrong and answer the question for yourself, what should I have done differently to get a better grade specifically? What activities during the hours I spent preparing were a waste of time? And what activities did I not do that would have really helped? And this is how you evolve over time if you're a student, much more time efficient and effective study habits. You realize,

for example, reading over the notes was meaningless. I needed to be doing active recall. And the best way to do active recall is on index cards. I should just build it. those index cards like right after every class, so I have my study index cards growing, and here's exactly what I should be putting on them. You begin to innovate based on what's actually effective. This same thing holds for other types of work as well. So take a guess. Here's a reasonable amount of time. If it doesn't get you the results you want, do a post-mortem. How could I have changed what I did in that time to have gotten more? And I'm telling you, this evidence-based upgrade of process, eight times out of 10 is going to solve your problem.

If anything, you might even be able to reduce, you know, say, hey, if I do this right, two hours was too much. An hour's fine if I really know what I'm supposed to do here. So that's what I would suggest. Start optimistically, start ambitiously, and then aggressively adjust and evolve what you do in that time to get better and better results. I think you'll find this open-ended wandering of, I don't know, I spent all day working on something. That'll go away pretty quick. All right. What do we have next?

All right. Next question is from Nathan. In Cal's image on Apple Podcasts and other podcast players, Cal's right adjustable headband is a little longer than the left. Please help. Oh, yes. Okay, let's be honest. This has nothing to do with slow productivity and Festina Linti.

But it's an interesting question that I think we should. I want to address because it's an interesting answer to it. So I'm actually going to load up. Let's load this up on the screen here. Let's see. All right. I'm going to the Deep Life. com.

That has a big picture of the, the album art. All right. Let's share this. I'm going to share this on the screen. This is a bit of a tangent, everyone. But I think it's interesting. Okay.

So let's get to the bottom of this. I've heard about this before. All right. Here's the album cover art. For those who are watching, for those who are watching YouTube.com or the deeplife.com, episode 260. Okay.

Here's the album cover art. So which, which ear is he saying is longer? Jesse? the right? The left. Yeah. Cal's right adjustable headband

is a little longer than the left. Okay. Now, Jesse, do you remember the explanation for that? Because I remembered this. No. All right. So my memory,

and you can correct me if I'm wrong here, my memory is, here's the issue. The image that they used, the photo they used to make this cover art, had right over, you know, on the right side,

a microphone. Because when I'm doing the podcast, I have a microphone over there, right? in this picture. So my, my memory is that the team, our web team, or design team that worked on this copied the left side and moved it over to the right side. So I think like the headphone and part of my face on the right side, they copied from the left side that was not obstructed by the microphone. So they could have a picture of me without a microphone, because typically I'd have a

microphone right on my right side. So I think that is why the headphone look a little bit weird in cover art is because they copied and pasted and just flipped over the left side to the right side. And in doing that, they didn't exactly line it up. So yes, my headphones are when I do have, I never notice it until now, actually. Yep. I don't know why I remember that, but this little tidbit. I mean, of course, the easier thing to do is just to take a photo without the microphone, which is what we do for our thumbnails now. But I think at the time, they just, they had the photo and they wanted to keep, keep moving. So there you go. This is critical information for the masses, but I thought that'd be to do. All right, let's keep rolling. What do we have next?

All right. Next question is from Natalie. My partner and I have very different understandings of time. Something that could take me 10 minutes, for example, watering house plants might take him an hour, not because he's not capable of doing it faster, just because he moves slowly. He often complains there's not enough time in the day. Are there people in the world that really just operate on a different plane of time because of their mindset about responsibilities and adulting obligations? Well, I think there's a lot of there's two possible things going on here, and it's probably some combination of the two. So first of all, I want to take this point, you know, is it possible that some people on certain

type of work just are fundamentally slower? And this might be controversial, but I think the answer here is yes, and because I'm using myself as an example here, there are certain things in my life I cannot do fast, in particular getting ready, like getting ready in the morning to go to work or getting ready in the morning to, you know, or whatever, to go to an event or prepare for the podcast. I cannot do that fast. And I try. I mean, I have systems I've tried. I've, uh, with timers and different steps and I lay things out. And I don't know why. I just can't get ready for anything in under 15 or 20 minutes. It just takes me forever. I don't know where these inefficiencies are coming on. And I've really tried to squeeze them out of

my life. And I don't know why I can't do those logistical steps fast. And it's not even hard logistical steps. It's not like I have to put on elaborate makeup or do a complicated hairdo. It just takes me a really long time. My wife, by contrast, when it comes time to get ready for something, it's like Superman in the phone booth. She's like, hold on one second. Like the door will kind of swing shut and then swing back open and she's completely ready. I have no idea how she does that. And I've tried for years to be faster. And I don't know where these inefficiencies are coming. from, I just can't do that particular thing fast. Right.

So there may be, in our response here, there may be something to this that some people for some types of things, it's just the inefficiencies aggregate and they are just slower. And that's just who they are. And it's not due to lack of trying. On the other hand, we have this other potential issue, which you hint at here, which is a mindset issue. a mindset issue about this word, which I don't always love, but adulting.

So this mindset issue of, I don't, there's not the type of stuff I should have to do or the type of stuff I want to do. And a almost like the toddler not wanting to put their shoes on. Oh, right. I guess I'll water the plan. This mindset of someone is like putting an obligation on your shoulder that you're like, I shouldn't have to deal with this. and I'm for sure not going to give this any alacrity. That is also a common thing, especially with younger adults. So you're making this transition from a sort of less structured, less urgent student life to a professional life.

Now, we own a house and I have a job and I have to do these various things. Now, for most people, if you end up having kids, that that pushes the adulting woes right out of you because it's, no, no, you got to just do everything fast and it's hard. And there is no, I don't want to change the diaper. or the kid's screaming. You're going to have to do it. But in that key adult period where you're no longer a college student, but you're not a middle-aged father of three, this type of mindset does happen.

So there is a slowness that can come simply from not wanting or being fully on board with having to do the things you have to do. If that's what's going on here, Natalie, with your partner, then here he probably just needs to grow the hell up. This is a place where the answer is, hey, you are an adult. 100 years ago when you're 18, you'd be, you know, running a household. Get over it. You have to do stuff.

Be organized, get things done. Be responsible. It's no one's fault that life has a lot of things you have to do. There's no one for you to complain to or gripe to that life requires you to fill out paperwork and pay bills and do your taxes and you actually have to water plants. And you have to dust things because otherwise they get really dusty. just, okay, get over it. Look, you haven't been drafted the fight into war, and we're not losing 30% of our population to the plague, so things could be worse, grow the hell up. And so I think

that's a perfectly sound reaction if that's what's going on. So I think it's some combination. There might be very specific tasks that he is just slow at. And again, I can attest from personal experience. Some things, some people just can't do fast. I mean, again, it's time to get ready in our house. Ten minutes later, I'm pondering the reality. of the socks I'm holding where, you know, my wife has not only gotten ready, but has gone to the event and come back already. And I'm trying, but I'm like, okay, brown, but what is brown? Is this a brown sock? Where does socks come from? You know, meanwhile, she's building, she's finished building a deck. So there is some things that we just go slower on. But if you sense the mindset is,

I shouldn't have to do this work. And that's why I'm being slow. You can tell him, Cal says, grow the hell up. Yeah, life is complicated. Now what? That needs to be the motto, especially of people who are just entering, just entering adulthood. All right. What we got? Let's do another question. All right. What do we got next? Hi. Next question's from Steve. Hi, Cal. How has using the remarkable two tablet change or influence how you use your working memory. text file, if at all. Has your working memory file habits usage evolved over time. So again, this question is also not directly related to slowness or slow productivity, but we talked about my remarkable tablet in a recent episode, so I figured this would be a good follow-up. All right. So what is Steve referencing when he says

my working memory.txte file? This is a long-time habit I've talked about a bunch of times on the show where on the desktop of my computer, I keep a plain text file, no formatting. This is just straight-up text edit on my Mac. It's called working memory.txt. And I really do, when I'm on my computer, use it like an extension of my memory. I can type notes and ideas I'm trying to organize, keep track of things. It's taking my working memory and extending it. And so the question is, now that I have a remarkable two tablet, do I use that for my working memory instead of the text file on the computer? And Steve, here's what I've found works best for me, at least in the last few weeks of experimenting with this. When I'm doing work on my computer itself, I use the working

memory.txte text file on my computer. And the reason is I can type faster than I can write. So I really can capture so much information in this working memory.txte file. I mean, I'm looking at it right now on my screen. Earlier when I was prepping this podcast, for example, when I'm grabbing questions I want to answer on the show, I just paste them into working memory.txt so that I have a place for them and then I delete some I don't like and I copy them from working memory.txte eventually to my script. I have a list on here now called major admin. So I'm keeping track of a few major things I really want to get done in the week ahead. I'm kind of keeping track of this on here for now. I have some notes on now that my new time block

planner is back, I can do daily metric tracking again. So I've thrown some notes on here about the the codes I'm using for the metrics that I've been tracking up here at Dartmouth this summer. So all of this is just on this file. It grows and expands and contracts as I work on my computer throughout the day. It's just so fast, it can hold so much information. It's so easy to scroll through and see. I love it as a tool. And I still use that when I'm on my computer.

However, one of the advantages of my remarkable is when I'm away from my computer, I can use the remarkable as my working memory file. What I actually use, if you're a remarkable user, there's something called a quicksheet. So it's a notebook that's very easy to get to. So you don't, it's not, it's always there. It's called a quicksheets. I always just have a page in the quicksheets for my daily non-computer working memory.

And this has been really helpful. If I'm out walking or thinking, I can jot things down on there. It's been very helpful during class, in the lecture for the course I'm teaching up here. To be able to take notes on things or like if we're having a discussion, I can keep track of some points. Remember to come back to this or I can quickly sketch out the structure I want for the class that day. So there's been many occasions where I'm not at my computer where having a notebook to use as a substitute working memory. TXD has been useful.

I wasn't really doing that as much before I got my remarkable. But now the remarkable is always with me. So now I have a dual format working memory, we could call it discipline. Computer from when I'm on the computer, the quick sheet on my remarkable when I'm away from the computer. But the key thing here is having a place unstructured, easily accessible where you can work through your thoughts, capture things, move things around is really critical. And it is really useful. And all you have to remember to integrate this into a reasonable organizational system is that when you do your daily shutdown, if you have like a time block planner, you'll have the shutdown complete checkbox to check every day. One of the things you have to review is your working memory sources.

And this means throughout the day, not only can you use this just to temporarily hold things you don't want to keep in your mind or temporarily organize information, you can take notes on things that you don't know what to do within the moment. and it's just one of your David Allen inboxes that you look at at the end of the day. So you have this peace of mind throughout your day. As you capture things on there, it's not going to be forgotten. And you look over it at the end of the day and say, okay, is any of this I need to move into one of my more permanent systems or put something on my calendar? Or in some cases, I'll just leave it on there. So yeah, I use this thing every day. And I need to see this tomorrow.

So I'll just leave it on there. As long as you add a review of your working memory inboxes, be them on your computer, be them on a paper notebook, be them on something like a remarkable. as long as you add that review to your shutdown routine, this becomes a very powerful system for expanding your ability to remember and organize things. I think it's a good question because it gets to this sort of cybernetic complexity about what type of tools to use in what type of situations to extend your actual ability to organize things. What do you do on the weekends in terms of because you don't have a shutdown on the weekends, right? I don't have a shutdown on the weekends. the new, so the new time block planner, I redesigned the weekends into, I call them the weekend pages.

And so now my new time block planner has, and I'll show this next week on the show when I bring one down to the studio. So Saturday and Sunday has a like a column that you can use for both metric tracking if you want to track metrics on the weekend and roughly structuring notes. Right. So, you know, my Sunday box for this weekend is where I had the reminder. that we were recording at 10 a.m. Under that, I have a pretty extensive weekend capture. So there's space for you to capture ideas and thoughts to come up during the weekend. And then the idea is when you get to the next week and you're making your weekly plan and the weekly plan now faces the weekend pages, the captures right there.

And you can see and process all those things when you set up the weekly plan. So I actually I rewrote or updated the introduction to the planner to talk about this new weekend pages discipline. But now it's great. You can have this rough plan for your weekend. You can do metric tracking if you want and you can capture things that happened throughout the weekend in the planner on those pages. And then when you build your weekly plan, so Monday morning or whenever you do it, you see all the stuff you captured and that's when you integrate it. So it got it. Because this is a key thing for me is having a consistent place for capture for the weekend. I felt it was better. What I was doing before with the old planner is I would

often write these notes on the Monday page so that when I got the Monday I would see them. But I prefer them to be on their own weekend page so that you know this is where these thoughts came from. They came from the weekends. The Monday task list can be for Monday. So, yeah, again, all the stuff you tweak, but this works well for me. All right. So I wanted to end today, this segment, at least, with a case study.

So I always appreciate when readers send in their own. experiences with this advice. All right. So this case study, and this is very relevant. I mean, I think this is very relevant to slow productivity because this is a case study. This is from Joni, from Trinidad. And she's offering, she thinks, a perspective about slow productivity and motherhood that is not always emphasized. And I think it's important to get different experiences in on these issues. So I want to read this case study that was sent to me from Joni from Trinidad. She says, I'm a 37-year-old single mother and researcher in Trinidad.

I was performing poorly as an undergraduate student until an unplanned pregnancy at age 21. At this point, the time constraints of motherhood pushed me into what I now understand is self-enforce blocks of deep work. I went on to graduate with a 3.96 GPA was valedictorian and received a full postgraduate scholarship to do my PhD in the States, where I ended up having my second child and completed my PhD at age 30. I'm currently active in research and teaching in my country and applying to do a postdoc. I am disappointed at the lack of female perspectives about deep work. There are gender inequities in academia, not just between men and women, but in particular between mothers and non-mothers.

I've also always been intrigued at the ways in which I am less productive when my children go to visit their father. In my experience, care work does not necessarily detract from deep work, but with the right approach, enforces it. Carework provides a rich and insightful depth of perspective that adds to the quality of deep work and a powerful impetus for an alternative identity outside of motherhood. I would argue that a life entrenched in deep work alone is one that is out of touch with humanity, reality, and meaningful research objectives with the current anti-natalist trends, especially in academia, and the prevailing narrative that motherhood leads to career suicide and an unfulfilled life, I think it is really

important to present and discuss a more balanced perspective on deep work. I love your work, Cal. That kind of makes it seem like I wrote that. I love your work, Cal, not I love your work from Cal. It was, I thought that was really interesting. Because there is, you know, I think this is a trend, right? there is often a trend of seeing various things like care work, be it with kids or be it, you know, sick relatives, maybe parents, aging parents at home, to always see that as antagonistic to the

production of meaningful work or your ability to produce work. And so I think Joni gives an interesting alternative note, which said that's not true for everyone. In fact, for her and for others, you know, care work can actually help focus and enhance and add more depth to your other work and your other work can add more depth and meaning to your identity with care work. And I think that's a really interesting perspective. We discussed that some in my interview with Yale from Brown. This was in the spring sometime. So I don't know how far back that was. We talked about this where she went into, was it Yale Showborn? I don't know if I

get her last name right. I'm trying to remember this right off the cuff. But you go find this interview back from a few months ago. And she got into this, I think, about, because she studies the psychology of work, and in particular, it's intersections with other identities like care work. And I think she had some good points about backing up what Joni said here, that it actually can lead to a more sophisticated approach to your work. It can lead to a more sophisticated and durable self-identity. So I think it's a really cool thread to actually pull on there. Different people have different experiences, but I think that's worth saying. This is not a zero-sum time game. So it's not whoever has more time to dedicate to intellectual work will have a better

result than those who have less. And that's the entire zero-sum game. And so if someone has more time than me, especially for reasons I can't control, then all I should have is upsetness or bitterness towards that person. I think Joni gives us interesting alternative perspectives here. It's complicated. What produces really interesting work is not just time. it's not just complete lack of other commitments in your life. So I thought that was a cool perspective. Also, Trinidad. I really like seeing Jesse the different places where we have listeners write or call in from.

I think we're getting pretty international. Trinidad, I don't know if we've had Trinidad before. We've been hearing more from various African countries that I don't think we had listeners before. Certainly India, there's a big listenership in India, a lot of different European places. Brazil. We have a good listener group I've learned in Brazil. So I do like the international. I think that's really interesting. And I love learning the different ways that different countries think about these concepts because it really can differ. Yeah, the audience is very, very diverse, like all sorts of countries.

Okay, so what I want to do is we have a final segment. I want to get to the books I read in July as we do when we get to the new month. Before we do, though, let me just briefly mention another sponsor that helps make this show possible. And that's our longtime sponsors at Blinkist. The Blinkist app enables you to understand the most important ideas from over 5,500 nonfiction books and podcast in just 15 minutes. So when you use the Blinkist app, you can download to either read or listen to 15 minutes summaries of all of these nonfiction books and podcasts. They're called Blinks. It takes about 15 minutes to.

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They also have this cool other feature right now. What is it called here? Blinkus Connect that allows you to share your premium account so you can get two premium subscriptions for the price of one. That's a limited time feature, but I think it's really cool. It's a way to bring someone else into the Blinkist Fold if you sign up. and like it. So right now Blinkis has a special offer just for our audience. Go to Blinkist.com slash deep to start your seven day free trial and get 25% off of

a Blinkis premium membership. That's Blinkis spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-T, Blinkis.com slash deep to get 25% off on a seven-day free trial. That's Blinkis.com slash deep. And don't forget that right now for a limited time, you can use Blinkus Connect to share your premium account. You will get two premium subscriptions for the price of one. I also want to mention my longtime friend Adam Gilbert and his company, My Body Tudor. My Body Tudor is a 100% online coaching program that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, which is lack of consistency. So the way it works if you work with My Body Tudor is you are matched up with a coach online.

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is because of deep questions. They will give you $50 off your first month. To find out more, go to mybodytutor.com. That's T-U-T-O-R, mybodytutor.com, and mention that you came because of deep questions. All right. Let's move on now to our final segment. Today I wanted to review the books I read up here in New Hampshire in July

of 2023. So the first book I read in July was Shadow Divers by Robert Kirsten. I had read this book before back when it first came out. Whatever the context was, I was just looking for a fun, fast read that would be distracting. It's a fantastic nonfiction book. It's a classic of the narrative nonfiction genre. What it does is it follows a group of deep sea wreck divers from New Jersey. These are people who dive very deep, close to 200 feet deep. It's very, very dangerous to try to look at or explore shipwrecks. They find a U-boat, a Nazi U-boat that no one knew about sunk off the coast of New Jersey. And the book is about their quest to figure out which U-boat is this. So they have to do these very dangerous dives, 200 feet down, going into the twisted corridors of this old submarine.

It's one of these stories as a nonfiction writer's you dream about coming across. I'm not going to spoil too much, but let me just say multiple people die, and there's multiple sort of hair-raising undersea disasters that people have to try to escape from. So it reads like a Clive Custler book, but it's all real. I'd read it before, but it'd been a long time, and it was just as good as I remembered. All right, the next book I read was Power in Progress, the new MIT press book by Darren, Osmoglu, and Simon Johnson. So what I've been trying to do up here is every morning I read a chapter from an academic press book, sort of like kind of an intellectual book.

This is part of my Dartmouth disciplines up here is I'm always working on just a straight-up academics writing about ideas books. This was the first one. I read this the week I was up here alone. I read it mainly the week I was up here alone in June, but I finished it in July, so I put it up there. This was a really interesting book. This is a philosophy of technology book. These are two MIT professors, Power and Progress. Essentially their core point, it's kind of a thick book, but essentially their core point is the impact of technologies, a lot of the impact of new technologies has to do with the choices we make socially and politically about how we are going to allow those tools to the function and spread.

And that there are alternative, we look at a, you know, hey, this tool came along and it had this economic impacts. There's often alternative ways that tool could have, its impacts could have unfolded if we made different choices about how we're going to allow this tool to be used or not used, how we're going to integrate it into our lives. So it's sort of an extension of the social construction of technology direction of thought on philosophy of technology. Well argued, we could probably do a whole show on it. There are some points where I had some disagreement.

Some points I thought were super compelling. I think some of the historical examples maybe were very, very good, whereas some of the applications to very modern technologies, it's just hard when they're new, but it felt like it didn't quite have its finger on the pulse. or didn't quite feel accurate. But overall, it's a very powerful, a very powerful theory. These types of theories are well known in philosophy of technology, but this is very well articulated, very forcefully, forcedfully delivered, and very relevant right now. I mean, I think this is what's happening right now with generative AI.

There are a lot of people who are thinking, wait, we have some choice here about what we want this technology to do or not do. We're not just passive sitting back and this technology is going to do what it is going to do. The Authors Guild, for example, has this big petition out right now, 8,000 authors, including many, many big names signed it. It was an open letter to the artificial intelligence companies saying, essentially, don't use our books to train your models. It is not important for society or culture that we have generative AI models that can, you know, write books in the style of various existing authors. You don't have our permission to use your books to train your models. It's a very interesting application of the ideas from power and progress put into action.

So if you study technology, you've probably heard of this book. It's been splashy, but I really enjoyed it. All right. Next book I read. This I read on the, essentially two of these books are Plain Ride books. This I read largely flying back to D.C. from New Hampshire. It was River of the Gods by Candice Millard. She also wrote, she's known for River of Doubt about Teddy Rose.

Roosevelt's trek, post-presidency trek to South America that almost killed it. River of the Gods is about the quest to find for the Europeans to find the source of the Nile. And basically, very well written, I love Candace's style. She's a very good writer. She adds a narrative thread to these otherwise complicated to research histories. Main takeaway you get from this, not a great job to be a, 19th century explorer.

This is kind of what you come away from is, man, it was rough out there, just condition-wise and what they went through. I mean,

the one character in this book, among other maladies to happen to him is getting a spear stuck through his mouth. I think it got stuck into the palate of his mouth. That's not great.

There's another period where he just got swarmed by beetles, including one that went into his ear. And he couldn't get it out. And he tried anything he could to get it out.

And, you know, it finally, like, it burst his eardrum. And, like, finally over weeks and weeks, like, it kind of died in there, got broken up by the ear wax and pieces came out. And he could never hear out of that ear again. It's not fun. Let's put that way. It's not fun to be a... Did he find the source?

Yeah. And they did. They did finally find it. It was interesting. They knew so little. Europeans knew so little about the interior of Africa until surprisingly late. Like, this is in the 18, mid-1800. that they're doing this exploration.

So the big lake there, which they named Lake Victoria, but now I think the name has gone back to the indigenous name, which I don't have on the tips of my fingers, is huge. It's like the second largest lake in the world or something like this. And they had no idea it existed. So what I learned, this is kind of cool about it. I guess the Nile flows north to south.

No, no, south and north. So you would think, why not just get to the Nile in Egypt, like we're empties into the Mediterranean and just take a boat up until you got to the source, right? Like, why couldn't you just do that? And the issue is there's this region of the Nile, if you follow it south into Africa, where it's this massive, essentially like swampy marshland.

So it's not just a clear river all the way up to its source. There's this huge... Oh, so you get lost. You just get lost. In fact, you can't even, like, get boats through it because it's so choked with vegetation and this and that. And it's huge. You can't just take a boat.

easily. People tried that. You just get lost in this swamp. You can't even navigate with a boat. So you had to come in. They came in from over by the Arabian Peninsula in East Africa, by the horn of Africa. I guess that's maybe Somalia now. And they hiked in from the east. That's how they eventually found it. There's a cool Lincoln Child book. So Lincoln Child's a thriller writer who sometimes writes with Douglas Preston, who's also a New Yorker writer. And And who wrote that, is the head of the Authors Guild, which wrote that letter we just talked about when talking about power and progress. He's the source of the letter to the AI companies. Anyways, his Lincoln Child often writes thrillers with him, and Lincoln Child also writes thrillers on his own. And he has a thriller that takes place in that swamp part of the Nile. And the premise is there's this tomb, this lost tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh that's under the waters of this swamp. And so it's like a classic Lincoln Child techno thriller. I forgot the name of this particular book.

But they bring in all this fancy equipment to the giant swamp land to find this thing. And they build these cassions and caissons and bring the water out. And they're trying to get access to this ancient buried tomb that's under these massive swamps. It's a cool book. But not one I read recently. Why do they want to know the sources of the Nile so much? I don't know. People like to know these things.

It was just a question. It's like this huge open question. like where's what's the source of nile no one knew and like people had asked this question since antiquity but no it's not yeah it's not that it was uh practical like oh we could make money it's not useful outside of just this was the the heyday of the british explorer and the royal geographic society i'm googling it right now there's like a blue sign that says the source of the nile it's like a stop sign here it is this is the source well i mean okay so that's the other question So it's this big lake, but people then pushed it further to say, well, where are the headwaters that feed into this lake?

And so you can keep, you can go beyond the lake and say like, okay, here's the farthest source of water that pours into this giant lake. It's a cool. There's these huge falls there. So that Lake Victoria? There's these huge falls. There's like a riff in the earth. And the lake like pours over it with these like massive waterfalls huge. It's really, really cool.

I would love to see that at some point. That beetle thing sounds horrible. It was horrible. Okay. The next book I read was called The Last Action Heroes by Nick the Selmaye. I really like this book. You know, Jesse knows this. I love books about the movie industry.

This is a book about the heyday of the 1980s action movie stars. Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Segal, Jean-Claude Van Damme. And it tells their story. stories and then the stories of what was happening in the movie industry. And I just thought it was fascinating. If you like movie stuff, it's just really fascinating. These guys were so larger than life. It was a very interesting, very episodic. I listened to this on Audible because these type of books are great for it because each chapter is, okay, now we're going to John Claude Van Damme. Now we're going to spend the chapter on Stephen Seagal. They're self-contained.

Really interesting to hear about, like the thing I came away with this from is what ended this era was basically Jurassic Park. And the reason why Jurassic Park into this era, because the last action hero, this massive Schwarzenegger movie that bombed, came out the same weekend as Jurassic Park. And the reason why that ended it was we're very used to spectacle right now in a post-Jurassic park world that are delivered via special effects. But in a pre-Jurassic Park world, we're talking to 80s, special effects were, I mean, the best things we could do is we could blow things up, but we didn't have computer effects.

So these super muscled guys were in some sense a, the spectacle. Like it was just, it's larger than life. Oh my God. Arnold Schwarzenegger or Salon as Rambo is so muscled and over the top that it was a spectacle, right? Nowadays, we get the spectacle by having really cool special effects done by computers. So we can see the transformers, you know, jumping over buildings and stuff like that. But when you couldn't do that, how do you make a movie larger than life? You put larger than life people into it and blew things up.

So it was like this was the special effects before there was really cool, spectacular special effects. It was these guys that were completely, either they were muscle bound to a degree that was completely attention-catching because it was so novel. You know, it's Arnold Schwarzenegger was just novely strong. Or they were doing crazy martial art stuff.

So like John Claude von Damme, Segal doing the judo, like they were doing crazy throwing people and doing splits and kicks in the air and all these type of crazy stuff. It was spectacle. So we had to rely on larger than life humans doing large and life things

to get spectacle, blowing things up around them. Once Spielberg came along with Jurassic Park, we said, oh, we can make spectacle without having to just

have a person be crazy to look at. We can now make a dinosaur. We can have robots. And that was the end of relying on larger than life people just on their own to make a movie worth watching. It just wasn't as interesting

anymore. Yeah, Schwarzenegger's strong. but the T-Rex, I have to look, it's a T-Rex. That's like more interesting, more interesting than Shorstenegro's Biceps. So, anyways, I thought it was cool. If you like movies and you grew up in that era like Jesse and I did, you'll probably like that book. Were you big in those?

I mean, I was a, I saw all that stuff growing up. I just saw the Arnold documentary on Netflix. Yeah, I watched it. And it went through a lot of that stuff. I recommend the Arnold autobiography. I recommend that to everybody. I read that. Isn't that good?

Yeah, I like the first half, like when I was talking about, I'm like working out and stuff. I thought it was better than the first half. Having read the book, I was somewhat disappointed in the documentary. Like Black Rainy was fine. I was cool to see the things. Yeah, I knew all this. I knew it already and it was a little bit less. It was more cursory.

All right. Final book I read. This was another plain book. So this was maybe my, well, I bought one book with one flight and hit the book with the other. It's the island by Adrian McKinty. It was like a big splashy thriller from last year. think. A lot of fun. This is one of these books, it's all third act, right? So it's just, it's set up in a thriller premise and then it's just 100% go until the book is over.

So in this case, it's a family, a family ends up stuck on this island with sort of in Australia, with deliverance style Australian hillbillies. And they accidentally, they actually kill run someone over with their car. Anyways, long story short, they realize like they're going to, they're going to kill them. And so it's this mom and her stepkids are trying to escape on this island, escape being killed by this whole family on this island. And they're the only people on the island is this family. There's no way off. It's surrounded by shark infested waters. They set this up early on when they bring the boat over. You can see the sharks just surrounding the boat, surrounded by shark infested waters, full of all these crazy Australian hillbillies with all

these weapons and motorcycles and the sun is beating down on them and they're just trying to escape and survive and that's it and it just goes and the stakes are high and they're they're doing terrible things to the people they capture and that's the book it just goes goes goes goes goes goes uh until the end and then that's it it's hard to pull off those those full third only third act type books like it's in the exciting climax the entire time this one did it right and it got a lot of acclaim. Well, well done. I had a lot of fun with it. Don't read if you're squeamish, but it was cool. It was cool. I mean, I wonder if you could probably do a movie about it. It's hard to do these movies that are all third acts. Nolan did it with Dunkirk. Dunkirk is all

third act. If you watch that movie, it's just whole thing is the kind of you're in the climax. Everything's happening for the whole movie. Hard to do. This book does it. So anyways, I liked it. The Island by Adrian McKinty. All right, Jesse, I think that'll do it. I think that's all we have to say today. I'll be back next week. Next week, I think, is the last HQ North episode. So enjoy it.

I will, but I do look forward to being back to the studio. So we'll see you next week up here and then back in D.C. for the weeks beyond that if I did my math right. So thank you, everyone, for listening. If you like what you heard, you'll like what you see at YouTube.com slash Cowell Newport media, video full episodes and clips. See you next time. And until then, as always, stay deep.

Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007. and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world,

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