Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 325: Simple Focus Protocols

Episode Date: November 4, 2024

A common theme on this show is the importance of focus and the need to train the ability. This can be a long term project, but are there things you can do right away to improve your ability to concentrate? In this episode, Cal explores five easy ideas that will immediately improve your focus ability. He then answers listener questions and reviews the books he read in October 2024.  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 Deep Dive: Simple Focus Protocols [2:09]  - Can I time-block my personal time if it’s more busy than work? [25:57] - How do I prioritize when I have so much I want to do? [29:46] - How can I do deep work to increase my job skills if my days are filled with meetings? [34:50] - What are your all-time favorite books? [39:25] - How can I apply the principles of Slow Productivity as a business owner with multiple projects? [44:41] - CALL: Eyeglasses as a proxy for meaningful effort [49:39]  FINAL SEGMENT: The 5 Books Cal Read in October 2024 [59:01]  Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba? Thanks to our Sponsors:  This show is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/deepquestions grammarly.com/podcast zocdoc.com/deepshopify.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the slow productivity 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 Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. All right. Well, for podcast listeners out there, this is one where you're going to want to make your way over to the video because we are recording this real close to Halloween. So Jess and I thought we would dress up this year for Halloween. I am dressed up this year as producer Jesse wearing a Gonzaga hooded sweatshirt and just Jesse is dressed up as me wearing the famous blue shirt. So you'll have to jump over the video. Here's what I'm realizing, though, Jesse.

We don't put the intro in the video. So for people just watching the video, you think they're going to wonder, like, why I'm in the switch? Should I say something at the start of the deep dive as well? Probably during the video. All right. So I'm going to mention this again. So don't be confused. I'm going to mention this briefly again when we start to deep dive.

And that is for our friends that join us just on the video. video so they know what's going on. The other thing I want to mention is thank you, everyone who sent in a note volunteering for the challenge I announced a few weeks ago where I wanted to work with a small number of people and help them organize their professional and personal lives, the type of ideas I talk about on the show. And as I promise, there's going to be audio from this that we'll be able to play on the show. We got a great batch of applicants.

I think over 100, right, Jesse? Yeah. Yeah. So we're going through them now. We're going to narrow it down and, you know, we work slow here. But we'll be in touch with people soon and hopefully get this project going soon, which means, you know, at some point this fall, you'll be able to hear some audio on the program itself. All right, I think that's what we got.

So happy Halloween for those who celebrate. And Jesse, let's get diving in to the deep dive. All right, today I want to talk about focus. First, however, a quick logistical note. you may notice I am not dressed as normal. I am in a sweatshirt and producer Jesse is not dressed as normal either. And that is because we are recording this right before Halloween. And I decided to dress up as producer Jesse for Halloween and producer Jesse dressed up as me.

If you are new to this channel and just stumbled across this clip and I have no idea what we're talking about. Good for you. It's all nonsense. You don't need to know. All right. Let's get back to what we're going to talk about today, which is focus. Clearly, I talk about this a lot. I care about this a lot.

I even wrote a whole book about this called Deep Work. Put simply, distraction-free concentration is just a powerful, powerful tool. It produces quality results quick. It's a source of real creativity. It's deeply human. Focusing, however, is hard, especially in our current moment of digital distraction. Now, when I talk about becoming better at focus in my books and on this show, I have a standard, what I would call long-term protocols, a standard set of long-term protocols

for over time becoming better at focus and making it a part of your life. Over the years, these protocols have coalesced around four in particular, brain trading, workload limits, communication reform, and distraction, moderation. You've heard me talk about all these before. But someone asked me the other day what they could do to get better at focus quickly, like get some improvements right away tomorrow the day after. And I think this is a great question. Like you can't become an expert focuser and have your whole life built around focus overnight,

but you can get better at it overnight. And I think having improvements quickly could be an important source of motivation for people looking to make longer term changes. So I love this idea of what can we do to get better at this key skill right away. So I came up with five protocols for short-term improvements to your focus, meaning these protocols work right away. We get immediate benefits from. Right. So let's get into this.

Protocol number one, clearly differentiate your focus blocks. So when you are working, you have to imagine there's a bit, zero one. When it's turned on, you're doing something that requires focus. When it's turned off, you're not. And you just have a simple set of rules for how you treat. focus work. The key rules being no distraction, no email, no slack, no phone, no web browser. Having a clear differentiation will right away make a big difference. When you try to integrate focused activities with other things you're doing, you're going to be more distracted.

If you are saying, for example, yeah, I'll just check my email a certain amount of times today to keep up with it and you're working on something kind of hard and you haven't clearly segregated that focused work from other things, you're going to have this constant fight with your own mind. Well, should we check email now? What about now? What about now? Well, shouldn't we check in to see, like, what they're saying on John Boy about the Yankees

lost last night? Well, this would be a good time to do that. Why not, right? When you have clearly differentiated focus blocks, you don't have to have these arguments. The only argument you have is, do I respect the focus block rule or not? So it's a simple thing, but just differentiating for this specific amount of time, which I have clearly specified, 9 to 10.30, 11 to 1145. For the specific, clearly specified duration of time, I'm using my focus rules.

That simple change really helps you get more out of those focus blocks. All right. Protocol number two, focus less. Here's the thing. Focus is great. But if you get too ambitious, like, yeah, I want my life to be like, like the writer Robert Caro, and I'm just going to spend eight hours a day slowly turning pages at an archive and writing on a typewriter.

If you get overly ambitious, you're saying yourself up to fail. When you fail, your mind can give up on the whole project. Hey, we try this focus thing that's not for us. When you have an overly ambitious plan, you might also suffer from your mind realizing your plan is overly ambitious. This is not sustainable. We're not going to be able to focus for six hours to take. today. And if we have six hours free today, we're not going to have that free tomorrow.

So why begin, right? Your brain is a plan evaluation machine. And when it doesn't trust your plan, withholds motivation. So it sounds counterintuitive, but for a lot of people who are new to focusing, being less ambitious is going to help you in the long term. Hey, I just want to do an hour. I want to get an hour done every day, right? That seems very tractable. Your mind says, I believe this can work, you're likely to succeed at it. Momentum builds. I was looking at a book the other day, reading this book called Lost in Thought. And it had some quotes, the author, I think your name is Zena Hertz, had some quotes early

on from two books I know well, but I forgot these calculations in the books. So she talked about, oh, God, what's the book called? I think it's called the intellectual life, written by a Dominican Friar Sir and Tilngies. I'm saying his name wrong. Anyways, I quote this in deep work. It's a book from a while back

about how to have an intellectual life. And maybe look that up, just to see if it's the intellectual life. Supposedly, according to Zina Hertz, in this book, I missed this part, the author says, yeah, your goal should be like an hour a day. If you can dedicate an hour a day to like really focusing on books and thinking, you'll have an intellectual

life. The other book she mentions is How to Live on 24 Hours a Day by Arnold Bennett, a book of which I have a first edition from the early 20th century, a listener sent it to me. Supposedly in there, Bennett's argument for what you need to have an intellectual life is he said you should aim for 90 minutes a day. That should be enough, but three days a week, maybe a little more. Anyways, they had formulas for this. Formulas for how much time you need to focus to build up like an intellectual life. The key point being these times weren't big. is it the intellectual life?

Yeah, by Sir Chalangies. Yeah, so I always pronounce that name wrong. It's a fantastic book. What does it say? It's hard to find when the original copy is from. I'll check it out. Yeah, it's new editions. It's a fantastic book.

It was not to go out of an aside here, I'll do this briefly. 1992. That's a newer edition probably, I think. I had a cool version of it. I had stumbled across it early in my career at Georgetown in the library stacks just like wandering through the stacks and I found it and I read it for those who know Georgetown on there's like a patio outside of the Levy Center that overlooks you have like the business school to your right and overlooks down to the football field.

I remember reading this outside and taking notes on it and then it helped shape my thinking around Deep Fork School book, the intellectual life. 1921. So I read like a 1921 edition of this book from the library. It was very inspirational to me at the time. I mean, I was like a first year professor. It was such a good book to find. It was all about the mechanics of how to be an intellectual.

And sometimes deep work is inspired by that. So deep work is not about how to become an intellectual, but how to become a deep worker. But it's very similar. Like how do you craft a life built around your mind? Yeah. Yeah. So that was a very influential find for me. All right.

Enough digression. Protocol number three, use a focus space. Have a different place to go to do focus work. I don't care what it is. make it different. Kitchen table, if you're working from home, a conference room, reserve a conference room at your office.

You know, the ones you can reserve when you have to do Zoom meetings or whatever, reserve those just like an hour at a time for a focus block every day. Going to a different space makes it much easier to focus. Now, if you really want this to work, don't bring your phone.

Right now people are sort of getting the DTs a little bit. Don't bring your phone. And if you're working on your laptop, deactivate Wi-Fi when you go in there. Now we're really cooking. You're in like a conference room or you're outside on your patio or a kitchen table. You have no internet connection. It's just an hour.

Right away, you're going to get a big hit to your ability to focus. Protocol number four, produce artifacts. And what I mean by this is, especially if you're new to focus, you do not want to just say, for this block, I'm going to think. There's going to be me alone with my thoughts. Like, I'm used to doing that now, but I've been doing this professionally for a couple decades. For most people, it's difficult to maintain focus. Your mind wanders.

It can be frustrating. So I recommend you should be producing some sort of tangible artifact as you go of your focus section. Typically, this is something you're writing. You're writing and shaping notes about your thoughts and then refining those notes. When I would work on math proofs, for example, during deep work. work sessions. I had a notebook and I'd be working through my thoughts. What about this proof? This equation doesn't work. Let me label where this equation breaks. What about this? Let me analyze this. Okay, let me now. This proof strategy failed. Let me say where. When you're leaving an artifact

like this, it focuses your thinking. It gives you a scaffolding for your thinking, which makes it much easier to proceed. And it helps you sidestep a pernicious effect that we don't even know that's happening when we're trying to do intellectual work, which is our mind likes to save energy. So often, it'll be sort of near an intuition or insight. And you begin to get that biochemical feeling of aha, like, ooh, I'm kind of on to something. But your mind doesn't actually fully articulate that insight. It just gets close enough to it. I think we're near to something good that you get that good feeling and you sort of move on,

feeling like I did good thinking. But you didn't actually finish that. insight and pull it through to a completed thought, which can actually take a lot more work after the fact that you already feel like you're on to something. When you're taking notes, you have these physical artifacts, it forces you to write it all out. This would happen a lot with me when I was working on a proof for like an algorithm analysis. I'd be like, oh, I think that works. But then I'd have to force myself to write out why it works and do the math.

And a lot of times I discover like, oh, I didn't really have that right. Or this insight, it seems good, but I actually don't know how to apply it yet. and here's where I'm stuck. And there's always resistance to do that, but that's what actually helps you. I think of it as like the head of your thought is poked above the ground. You have to pull the whole thing out of the ground.

You have to harvest the thought before you can, in this metaphor, I guess, cook it and eat it, if this is like a vegetable or something. And created an artifact as you go along really helps you do that. So it gives you structure to your thinking and it helps you finish out your thoughts.

All right, protocol number five, walk. we are good by we, I mean humans, at thinking while we walk. Now, this might be because we have a long evolutionary history of covering great distances walking. We're bipedal. We're not meant to sprint for short distances and then rest like an antelope would. We're not meant to stay relatively stationary in one place and occasionally moving. We are made very efficiently to be able to walk.

We can walk all day long. We can walk in the heat of the African savannas where our evolutionary past comes back from. We're not heavily furred. We can sweat to change our temperature. Our hips are set up in a way that has a very efficient bipedal locomotion. We're a walking animal. So I think it makes sense that we're very good at thinking while we're walking. I also think there's an argument to be made for walking suppresses.

certain circuits just because it gets your mind automatic portions of your mind working on the taking the steps which sort of suppresses some circuits in your brain and actually frees you from sort of random brain distraction I can always think through a thought much more clearly walking than sitting still there's also probably something about the sensory experience when your brain is seeing novel sensory scenes you're in the woods it's a tree look at this bush it's really bright

and it contrasts nicely with the stream over here. That novelty opens up brain circuits, which allows for more creative insight. Whereas if you're just at your same desk, you always work. There is nothing novel, and you might entrench in sort of the same circuits and have a harder time being creative. So it's an easy thing to do.

Say, okay, I'm going to work for an hour and a half on something focused. Spend the first half hour thinking about it walking. Right away, you're going to feel smarter. You're going to have better thoughts. You're going to enjoy the experience more. All right, so those are my five protocols. Let me go through them again.

Clearly differentiate your focus blocks from non-focus blocks. Focus less. Use focus space. Produce artifacts along the way and spend more time walking. There we go, Jesse. I don't know why I call them protocols this time. I often use that term because I'm a computer scientist, but also Andrew Huberman uses that term.

So maybe that means we'll get a two million. views on this video. When you were at MIT, you talked about how there were the All-Star brains who just were like above and beyond everything. Did they do this type of stuff or do they just not need to? Is it kind of like professional athletes who are just so elite and eat whatever they want and still be fine? No, it's a good question.

They would do a lot of this stuff. I mean, they were sitting still thinking. There was a lot of that. But there was a lot of motion in thinking. So there's a mentor of mine, a professor from EPFL. in Switzerland. Shout out to Rashid. He was a visiting professor at MIT

kind of early on in my career. He was really big on runs. So he did his best thinking running because the motion sort of just helped him think. The problem was he was in much better shape than I was. So he'd be like, yeah, let's go for a run and we can like work on this proof.

But they'd be too far away. Seven miles. Like a fast pace. He'd be like, yeah, The key is you should be running fast enough to talk, but not sing. And I was like, I can't breathe. What about not being able to breathe? Is that, that's where I am right now.

So that's the problem with running. So I think for him, for someone who's in really good shape, you know, to them, a slow jog is like a walk to other people. Like, it's not really taxing you, but, man, I don't know how many insights I got out of those runs. But yeah, no, I saw a lot of that. Definitely people had very specific ways they took notes on, like how they built out notes on what they were working on. I think that was a big thing as well. Do your current students ask you about this a lot? No, but I am talking about it soon.

So we have this new class at Georgetown for the graduate students called research methodologies. And it's a class where it's like just learning how to be like a researcher. And I'm giving a talk to this class and I'm going to talk about these things. Yeah. So we should talk about these things more. At MIT it was just assumed. It was so sink or swim. It was like, yeah, you better figure this stuff out because otherwise you're out.

And so people were like highly. And I would learn from mentors like the one I just talked about who these weren't students. These were professors. They taught me all these rules about, okay, here's how you work on a problem. Like I learned from Rashid, for example, in theory problems. You start with the simplest possible formulation of the problem. we would call it a toy version. So, like, you've simplified a lot of the complexities.

You've made the model very simple. And something that just gets to, like, the core of the thing that you're interested in. It's, like, solve the toy problem, understand the toy problem. And then you can add back complexities. Okay, now that I have this insight, what happens when we make the model more standard, or we add other things to it? And you end up with something that's kind of complicated and contingent. but it's like starting with the the core problem.

So like, for example, I worked on this paper with him way back when, I think the title, if you want to look this up, the theoretical computer scientists out there, I think the title of the paper was on malicious moats and suspicious sensors. And it was a paper about trying to communicate wirelessly in like an abstract model. when you had maybe like a malicious source nearby that could be trying to it could like jam your signal or try to trick the receiver and the thinking something else was going like how do you communicate securely on a shared channel right and he simplified it i remember this we simplified it down to like let's just start with time is in rounds my entire goal is there's uh there's two there's a sender and receiver alice and bob and Alice has a single bit. It's either zero or one. And Alice just wants Bob to figure out is her pit zero or one. And we'll make time in like exact rounds. And in every round, like Alice can send something or not.

And in every round, there's one adversary, we'll call it Charlie, can also send something or not. And if they both send something, it's they kind of like collide, like you just detect noise. Like we simplified it as much as possible. and this really like deep insight about the amount of communication required to jam communication, this jamming game, this whole like really deep insight came out of looking at the simplest possible problem. And then like a lot of papers have been written on this or whatever. But yeah, I guess the point being how you think matters, not just like how you focus, but how you approach problems, how you approach articles, how you approach books.

A lot of this information is often implicit. and not made explicit and you kind of just have to figure it out and other people's don't. So I really love efforts to try to surface thinking. Like I have this idea for a short book I want to write at some point called In Defense of Thinking, like a manifesto. And really get into thinking as a skill and there's all of these like skills and different types of thinking. There's different ways to do it as this whole like lively rich actual activity and not like we think about it now. It's just this like vague thing. Like I don't know.

I'm just in my head thinking about things. So I've spent my life thinking for a living, so I think a lot about thinking. All right, well, we got some good questions coming up. I should say before we get there, Jesse, I don't know how you wear these sweatshirts all the time. They're warm. Well, you get really hot. I get really cold in the studio. Yeah, it's crazy.

Like right now I'm cold, but you run hot when you, well, you're talking a lot. I do. I do run hot. Like, to me, this is what I would wear outside. I would say like down to 25 degrees Fahrenheit. I hope you don't faint during this recording. I'm going to make it. Nonsense.

According to the Arctic. I have the air conditioning blasting too. That's why Jesse's cold. That's his punishment for making me wear a sweatshirt. All right, let's, we got some questions coming up, but first, it's here from one of our sponsors. I want to talk about our friends at Zoc Doc, an app that I just used the other day. Let me explain why.

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All right, Jesse. Let's do some questions. I think we got first. First questions from Confused. You stated no time blocking outside of work, but my life outside of work is more complex than work itself. It's where I'd like to be more productive. How should I manage family time, friends, volunteering in varied commitments, and a side hustle? Well, first, I'll make a clarification in case this is helpful.

The main thing I want people to avoid is time blocking all their time. if you time block all of your waking hours, it's too exhausting, right? It's too much to remain in the time block mindset and you're going to give up. You're also going to stress yourself out. Some people are in situations, however, where it's not like a traditional, here's my job from 9 to 5 and then I have time off after my job. People have unusual situations.

Maybe they have work that happens in the evening or split shift work or they're not working a traditional job. And actually, like, the main thing they're doing is like organizing what's going on in their house. and a lot of these efforts happen, not during the day. That's the easy time. It's like in the afternoons or evenings. This is where I think this more generalized rule helps. Your goal is not to time block all of your time.

So for some people, this might mean actually earlier in the day is on time blocked. But this complicated part of my day, like three to seven, I really time blocked that because that's what gets complicated. The other thing you can do, so let's say you have a nine to five job and your time blocking it because you need to do that to keep your job. Some other things you can do to help control. your life outside of work, is one, make use your calendar. So a lot of the things you mentioned, like doing things with friends, you're volunteering, some side hustle activities, these probably are happening at set time. So that's on your calendar.

That's fine, right? You look at your calendar. What am I doing this evening? Okay, here's my events. I know when they happen. That's fine. That's just your calendar. That's not time blocking every minute of your day.

you can autopilot schedule regular work like on a side hustle or hobbies. I always do it in this place on these days of this time. That makes sure this work gets done, but it's not the same as building an ad hoc time block plan on spec for every evening, knowing that like Tuesday and Thursdays, you leave work early and you work on your side hustle at the local coffee shop. And that's just your routine. It's not the same as time block.

knowing you always work out, like right after work before dinner starts. That's an autopilot routine. It's not the same as time blocking because it's just something you do. It's not you saying, okay, I've built this on-spec schedule for the next few hours that I have to follow. That takes more work. Finally, it's okay to sketch a plan for your evening. Just don't be super minute-by-minute-per-per-sise. Like, okay, before I pick up the kids from baseball, I want to try to get this done.

and tonight after dinner remember to take out the garbage recycling. You can just kind of sketch out these plans to help guide you without having to have like every minute spoken for. So really our principle here is do not time block your whole day every waking hour, but there's still a lot of structure you can have. You don't have to just have a big to-do list after your work days over and just rock and roll. You can still have a lot more structure than that. when they do work on the side hustle and they go to the coffee shop say on Tuesdays, they should probably still time block that,

right? Yeah. So if it's an autopilot schedule, you just know that's when you do it. So I see that as different than time blocking. But you're saying like within that block. Yeah, I think that's fine.

Okay. Because your side hustle is work. Okay. So I think that's fine. Yeah. If you're like, okay, I have 90 minutes at the coffee shop,

what am I doing? If it helps the time block that out some, I think that's that's fine. All right. What do we got next? Next question is from Anonymous. I'm 25 and live at home. I discovered you on YouTube.

From your guidance, I now schedule with times for gaming, no more YouTube browsing. And reading is my main form of entertainment. I just started taking some more classes online from my batchers and computer information systems. I got your time block planner, but I have trouble prioritizing what to do.

There are so many things I want to get done. I like this idea that for more people, where the last YouTube channel, they ever discovered. Because like once they listen to us, they don't browse on YouTube anymore. And, you know, my advice for YouTube is treat it like a library or a cable TV station, right? So look things up that you want to learn more about. Have a stable of shows like mine that are bookmarked that you watch the same way that you

might have used to watch the Mythbusters on Discovery Channel. These are programs I like. It's funny not to do an aside, Jesse, but like last night we were watching a YouTube video, two different YouTube videos, maker YouTube video. So a Mark Rober video and a hacksmith video. And my wife was watching with me in The Boys. And what she remarked, which is absolutely right, is they are converging on exactly the production style of like circa 2000s cable reality TV.

So when you watch some of these videos now, it's just like watching one of these reality shows, you know, at 3 o'clock in the Discovery Channel. You know, the cuts. the talking heads, the like kind of force zaniness, like we're all having fun. So it's interesting. It's like YouTube, the higher funded YouTube is now basically rediscovering classic cable TV, like reality competition program styles. Anyways, back to your question. All right. So here's why I usually recommend the people who are going from unstructured to structured for the first time.

First of all, congratulations. The structured life is much better than the unstructured life. it's one of my preparation steps for the deep life more generally. Right? We've talked about this before. If you want to cultivate a deep life, you have to get your act together first. And this requires practicing and cultivating discipline. Organizing all the stuff you have to do in your time.

And then I have a third one in there about taking back control your brain. So you're sort of on track to what you need to do to cultivate a deep life. Here's what I recommend that people who are new to this, three things. Number one, autopilot the things that are most important. It sounds like you have a lot of flexibility in your schedule. That's great. You don't want to just come to each day and say, what are the things I want to do today?

What's important to me? You want to autopilot the important for you. That should mean autopiloting your time for your online classes. If you autopilot that time, you can attack these classes much more systematically and get through them much faster, actually. You'd be surprised by how many classes you can complete when it's like every day for 90 minutes.

Typically, I tell people who are new to structure to also autopilot fitness or exercise in there. and something community oriented. Every week I have this like volunteer thing I do. So you get the big rocks to use a Stephen Covey term automatically happening on your schedule. Next, you want to use multi-scale planning for everything else. This prevents you from having to grapple moment to moment

with the full scope of your ambition. So once you realize like I can control my time, and as you say here, there are so many things I want to get done. It could be paralyzing when it's, you know, o'clock on Tuesday. Oh my God. Which of these things should I do? I'll never get through them all.

Multi-scale planning cures you of this paralyization because you don't have to think about everything all the time. At the scale of the season or the quarter, you're figuring out your big goals. Like, what do I want to do this fall? Then when you make your weekly plan, you're saying, okay, which of these things are I want to make sure to reflect on my weekly plan? You're moving around appointments, scheduling some stuff on your calendar. And then when you get to your day, you have your autopilot schedule, you have the stuff you already add on there in a weekly plan.

You're really just time blocking your day. You're looking at your task list. It's much less fraught. So use multi-scale planning to, I would say, confine your ambitions so that it's not constantly rattling your brain. The third thing, avoid overload. It is tempting as you gain more structure in your life to try to fit in a lot of things, to try to catch up all at once. you'll burn yourself out this way, keep your schedule reasonable.

Keep seeking out time for gratitude and awe and just straight up enjoyment of things. You're going to see the sunset, the long walks, the going to the concerts. That sense of appreciation of life is going to be the fuel to help you keep pushing on making your life more interesting because it's exactly this type of appreciation

and gratitude for cool things you're doing that you want more of. So don't fill all your time with productive activity. Balance a productive activity with the enjoyment of the fruits of these efforts. All right. Who got next? Next question's from Seb. I work in consulting where there are lots of shall meetings.

How can I do deep work to increase my job skills if my days are filled with meetings? Seb reached out to me. He was actually in Asia before and that's where there was a lot of meetings. Then he moved to Germany and the same problem occurred. there. Oh, this was the guy who was saying, but in Asia, there was overtime. Yes. Yeah. And in Germany, there's not. Right. So it's more structured in Asia. It was more structured. Like, well, the meetings you're being compensated for, if this gets in the way of other work. And Germany's more Western where it's like, nah. Yeah. Hi, back to high mind. So said, my short term advice is schedule meetings with yourself. So if you're in a meeting driven job, then just have some meetings on your calendar for deep work. Because you have to keep in mind, you're being bombarded with meetings. You say yes to a lot of them.

You say no to others. Some days are more full than others, and you have to move meetings forward to try to find time for them. So it's not like you're going to notice a difference if you introduce some new meetings into this mix. It's all still going to be you trying to fit meetings into your days and some days are more full than others. No one else is going to notice the difference either. But if your mindset is in one of meetings, if that is the fundamental structure of work at your company, You have meetings we talk about things. Your calendar is your destiny.

Then just put other cool stuff on your calendar. So I have this three days a week, 90-minute meeting. It's with myself and it's when I work deeply on this project. But I treat it like any other – it's on my calendar. I treat it like any other appointment. If we use a shared calendar in our company so that we can see when people are available, that just shows up at a time when I'm busy. Don't make a big deal about it.

Don't preach about it. But, you know, we have this tendency and modern knowledge work. to somehow value meetings with other people above the time we spend doing stuff with ourselves. And this is an inversion of reality. Meetings are typically supporting the efforts that eventually have to be done on our own through focus. So the focus has to be very, very important.

You can't just talk about the work. You have to do it as well. So it's this weird value we have about what matters is meeting with other people. So schedule meetings with yourself. Two, try to reduce meetings. I know that's scary in a meeting culture, but there's a few ways to do that. One, just say no to more meetings. You don't have to say yes just because it comes your way.

You know, people throw out media invites all the time about all sorts of things, especially if they're just like, hey, you might be interested in this. You thought you might be interested in this. Why don't you listen in? Just like, no, my counter's full. It's a busy week. I've hit my workload limit. I'm trying to cut back on it.

People don't care. to use office hours. So if there's a one-off meeting, like, hey, let's discuss this thing. It's too complicated to do via email, for example. If you just have a set time twice a week, you can defer more of those that set time. So there's a much smaller footprint. And then use protocol and processes more. Don't let people, to the extent that this is possible.

Don't let people use standing meetings as a replacement for real process thinking and time management. don't let people say, okay, we're going to work on this project. I worry we're not going to make progress. So here's what we're going to do. I'll put a standing meeting on our calendar. So I know at least every week we'll talk about it. Now I don't feel stressed of progress won't make progress. Right.

That is a weak way to organize work. So no, no, no. If we're going to work on this project, let's take a moment to figure out how we're going to do it. What are the steps? Who's going to do what? How do we find out who needs what from when? Where are we going to keep the information? What are our deadlines for different things to happen?

like how do we actually want this work to unfold? Not just, let's just have a meeting and small talk for 20 minutes and they do five minutes of talking. Or if you need, say, look, if we just want to check in, come to my office hours once a week. Like, hey, how's it going? Or say, I'll stop by your office once a week just to poke my head in and be like, hey, how are we doing? Going okay? Okay, any questions you have? Anything that prevents a meeting that takes 30 minutes to an hour, squatting there on your schedule,

it's probably going to be in advance. You can cut down on meetings, but then ultimately, just make what you do with yourself, your deep work and meeting as well. I've got a lot of meetings in my life these days, Jesse. Do you like that? No. I want to write and be left alone.

I use a lot of office hours, though. All right. What do we got next? Next question is from Carson. What are your all-time favorite books? Oh, well, long-time listeners, no, I can't do favorites. like in any category, movies, books, foods.

I am incapable. It's not like an intentional choice. I'm incapable of rank ordering things they like. I don't know why. There's probably, we could come up with a term about it, like ordinal phobia. Something like that. Anti-ordination, thereinism. Now, maybe ordinalism, ordinulophobia.

I just can't do it. All right. I did, however, in preparation for answering this question, I took a bunch of categories. I just looked at my shelf. I took a bunch of categories and, like, what's a book that was influential to me in that category, all right? Now, this is not exhaustive because I was literally just looking at my bookshelf, but I'll give you some ideas. All right. In religion, a book that was very influential to me was Karen Armstrong's the case for God.

This sort of came out during the period of the new atheist, Richard, Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, et cetera. And it gives a much more interesting, I guess, presentation of religion and the time in which religion emerged and how it was pre-enlightment time and the issues had happened when you begin to combine post-enlightment understandings of epistemology with the way religion operates. Really powerful book, those ideas have affected me. They show up again and again in all sorts of theological and religious writing and Apology, but I thought this book was just deep ideas, well written, very interesting. It starts with like the cave paintings.

The book opens with like the earliest impulses towards religion. It's pretty cool. All right. When it comes to the arts, cinema speculation by Tarantino, fantastic book, just like in the mind of a movie enthusiast and just how they think about movies and their pieces and their values. very well-written collection of essays. And Sidney Lumet's making movies, a fantastic book about filmmaking,

where he uses his own movies. He looks at the different aspects of filmmaking and uses his own movies for each to talk about his experience. History, I remember John Adams by David McCullough being very influential when I first read that just because it was the way

the narrative momentum and the psychological realism, I don't know, it was a fantastic book. It won the Pulitzer, so look, I'm not the first to say it. Lincoln's Virtues by William Lee Miller. I've never read something like that before. It's like an ethical biography of Lincoln and has written in this like sort of interesting style, very influential.

Ideas. Idea books. You are not a gadget by Jaron Lanier. That was very influential. I mean, just like the idea of even like the polemic and the single person and the exploring of ideas from different angles and trying to wrap your intellectual arms around the sort of complex submerging phenomenon. I was an influential book. I talk a lot, obviously, about Walden by Thoreau.

I think one of the original big idea books. It should be read as an idea book. Amusing ourselves to death by Neil Postman. It's like you were not a gadget, but without the insane parts. Postman's a more of a careful thinker than Jaron is. The Jaron's a very fun thinker. And Shop Class of Soulcraft, I'm Matt Crawford. I think it was 2008, maybe 2009.

That was very influential when I read it. It was like a really big idea. and it was new and it changed the way you understood things and it was humanists and it was a cool book. Finally, in philosophy, I was very influenced by All Things Shining by Herbert Triphist and Sean Dorrance Kelly. That's a cool book.

I pull from it some in deep work, but it's worth a read on its own to sort of understand our current moment and how we see the world differently, for example, than someone living during the age of the heroic age of the ancient Greeks. And it's, I thought it was a very fascinating,

thought-provoking book. So I don't know if those are my favorites, but those are all influential books to me in category. So you could do worse than the read any one of those books. All right, what do we got next? We have our corner. Ah, slow productivity corner. Let's hear some theme music.

Jesse, I think we should sell sponsor space on my big white tea mug. I think you should. Kind of like the patches and MLB. just have like an element logo right here. And the logo on the helmets? Yes. The Yankees had this Strauss.

Everyone had it. I don't know what Strauss is. I didn't either, but every team had it in the MLB playoffs. So in some sense, that's been effective advertising because we all know it. In some sense, it's not because I have no idea what it is. All right. Slow productivity corner, for those who don't know, we like to have one question each week. That draws for my most recent book, Slow productivity, the lost art of accomplishment

without burnout. If you like this show, you need to buy that book. About half of what we deal with is relevant to that book. So check that out wherever books are sold. All right, Jesse, what is today's slow productivity corner question? It's from Tisha. I run a small, high-end consulting firm that experienced a lot of hires this past year. They went from four to 14 people. I read slow productivity and decided to incorporate its principles with the new hires. It all worked great. However, as a business owner, I'm still stressed and have tons of work. How can I apply the principles to myself to ease my burden. Yeah, sometimes it's harder for the, the owner of the business and the people that works for them, because as the owner, you can kind of control what's being given to the people

below you. You can kind of give them processes and structures that helps, but you're the backstop. So everything that needs to get done that's not being handled by the other people of the company, like eventually you have to do it. You're also the intake. So much new things, business development issues that need to be solved, vendors that have solutions like come through years. So it's like the hardest position. The hardest position. The good news is you have plenty of autonomy. And the bad news is you have a lot of work.

A couple of things that I think help business owners. Separate active projects from waiting projects, right? So workload management. You can't say no to most of these things because the things you're working on are just things the business has to do. But just be really clear about I'm only actively working on these three things. And once I hit a milestone with one of these, I'll pull something else in. So it reduces the number of things around which you're doing active administrative overhead. That will help.

You've got to make sure that the people collaborating with you on the work that you're waiting on know that. Right. So it could be a vendor. So you're the owner of a company. One of the things you have to do is upgrade your email service and whatever. Like I got to talk to the rep from Google Workplace and see if they have a solution for us. It could be a pain. And they kind of reached out and you're like, yeah, I want to do this.

but it's not active. It's on your list. It's like two things away from your active projects. Tell that vendor. We're going to work on this. It's in waiting status. I have two things ahead of it.

I will email you as soon as this moves to active and then we'll set up a time to chat. Right. So when people are trying to set up meetings, for example, or sending you emails about stuff you're waiting on, don't set up the meeting. Don't reply with the answers.

Instead say, look, I'm on this. This is in my waiting queue. when it gets to my active queue, which I estimate will happen within this time frame, I will reach back out to you and we'll set this up and email and I'll be giving this

a lot of my attention will make progress. So only working actively on a few number of things of time is going to make your work seem much less overloaded because you're putting the overhead of everything in the waiting list on pause. To separate your job in the different roles

and treat it like you have multiple part-time jobs, there's like an administrator role of like trying to run the company. There's a strategy role. I'm overseeing the teams and making the decisions about the products and like what we're going to go with.

And maybe there's like a, I don't know, whatever role there'd be. There's a technical role, you know, making sure that we have the best technology or whatever. Treat those as separate jobs with their own task list on their own board. You have different times,

different days for working on these different roles. This will prevent the context switching that's going to make you feel more harried. When you're working on strategy, you're just working on strategy for that morning. You don't think about anything else. When you're working on administrative stuff, that's all you're doing.

You can really pick up speed and start getting a lot done. This also will make delegation easier later because you've divided things in the roles, and now it's much easier when you hire that COO to say, like, great, this role, I can just move over to you. It makes it easier to delegate what you're doing. Finally, create processes.

stuff that happens regularly should have a regular way it happens. This type of report we always produce. Here is how it works. It's like clockwork. The draft goes here in this folder. I sign off of it digitally by this close of business on this day. You send it to the designer who has all the instructions she needs to post it to the client

webpage or whatever it is. Make processes for things that happen regularly so that their footprint on your life and time is very predictable and they're not just another thing floating. You're trying to minimize the process. the active floating things you're trying to juggle and have to trade emails and slack about. You're the owner, so you can push for as many processes as you want. The only caveat there is make sure that the people involved in the process are involved in the details of the process and feel like they have the ability to suggest changes.

Without buy-in, people will resist the process with buy-in. They can make your life a lot easier. All right. So, yes, I want to validate. It could be much harder to be slowly productive as the owner of a business than as an employee of a business or it's like a solo entrepreneur, but it's still possible. You've got plenty of autonomy. You've got to just deploy that to implement the right sort of things.

All right, so I think we have a call this week, right, Jesse? We do. All right, let's hear what we got. Hey, Cal and Jesse, just listen to the Tech Minute segment from this week's show. And I have to say, as someone working in Ed Tech and in analytics, my first inclination when I heard the direction that that was going was my first thought. was, oh my goodness, in a future with visual headsets as the three window desktop of the future, my first thought was the eye tracking that's required to make that tech possible,

will really open up the floodgates for work from remote surveillance. And some of the mouse jigglers that we're seeing to give the proxy for useful effort will just essentially skyrocket. So anyway, I was just curious what your thoughts were on that. immediately where my brain went when you started in on the discussion. And I just wanted to see what your thoughts are. If we're living in a future with glasses on everywhere we go, especially at work when we put on our headsets, what kind of feature does that present for us as far as proxy for meaningful effort?

Will eye tracking really be useful in that future of work? And kind of what are your thoughts as it relates to that? Thanks for the pod. And thanks for all your work. Bye. All right. Well, great question. The first of all, tech minute.

No, no, no. Tech Corner. There's a huge different tech minute. That's a whole other thing. We call that segment the Tech Corner. All right. It's a good question. It is a concern, not a deep concern.

And let me explain why. When we look at the current trajectory of the virtual screen apparatus, so the visors to put the virtual screens into your life, they're taking that screen from your laptop. Okay? So, like, as it stands now, if I'm using, like, the immersed Pfizer, which is still in testing, or I'm using Applevision Pro, to put screens in my real world, or Quest 3 to put screens in my real world, the actual things I'm seen on the screens are just my normal applications running on my laptop. So the applications don't know they're being viewed on a visor, right? So it doesn't, in the first iteration of this vision, you're not writing as a company that's writing the software that, that's being used. people are seeing in their virtual world.

You're not writing this software for the virtual world. It's taking your laptop screen, right? So when these are virtual screens, it's the exact same as just plugging your laptop into an external monitor. Microsoft Word doesn't know if you're looking at it on an external monitor or not and doesn't care. More broadly, however, going forward, I think this is a critical point. This is a privacy feature that has to be made crystal clear as physical privacy.

if I am a manufacturer of a visor that can put screens in the world, I need to be very clear as what is my API? Like, am I exposing to applications, things they can access? And I think the easiest things to say no, just be a display. There's no API. There's nothing that Microsoft Word can access from the glasses themselves. There's no interaction between the software in your computer and the glasses except for display. This is not going to be the case for most software because what's going to happen eventually is that people are going to want to actually modify their software to take advantage of the fact that they exist in a virtual space.

I mean, we see this in, for example, the Magic Leap demos. They seem to think that it's important that like your Google messages are things you can swipe with your hand and sort around as opposed to there's just a screen floating in space and has a web browser on it. So in the future, I guess, more apps might want to actually take advantage of the fact that we're in virtual space. The privacy here has to be very clear. What information about my physical state does the applications accessing the device API have? Do they have any information about my eyes, eye tracking, location? That's going to have to be very clear. Maybe that even has to be regulatory.

But we have time until that's a problem because I think, and I've argued this before, the magic leap vision of we need special AR apps and it needs to look like minority report. We're throwing things around and it's all like visually beautiful and I grab the email and I throw it over there and I swipe things around. That is not where we're going to go immediately because no one cares. They just want more screens. I want a bigger screen. I got an email on my phone. I want a type of response.

I want a 16-inch screen to do that. I don't want to just look at my phone. That's going to be the first iteration of this type of lifestyle where we're looking at the virtual screens. So, yeah, down the road, that API privacy has to be clear, but it's not going to be the initial problem. Does that make sense, Jesse? They're like, yeah. If you think about the glasses, it's just a monitor. You know, we're not worried about the, our monitor doesn't talk to the application.

You know, the application doesn't care how it's being displayed. I think that's the way that this technology is going to be, at least for a while. All right. Let's see here. We have a case study, but actually I'm going to jump past the case study because I'm looking at the final segment where we're going to read about the books I read and I have a sort of long digression on one of the books there. So I will save some time for that. And so let's jump to the books I read October. But first, before we do, you're about another sponsor.

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All right. Jesse, let's do our final segment. Man, every time I drink, I think. Every time I drink, I think. Yeah. I think logo. I'm seeing it on the camera here. For people who are watching, We use, we use teleprompter, so I can sort of, I can see in front of me every time I raise my glass.

You don't speak as a telecomptor, though. I don't have any notes on a teleprompter. That's clear. You talk off the cuff all the time. We talk off the cuff and we do live the tape. The teleprompter lets me just see what is currently being recorded, right? So like now I see myself, but if Jesse cuts the camera to himself, I see, so I can see what the current shot is. And if we're doing iPad drawing, I can see, like, the iPad, what's up on the screen.

screen. So it's basically, this is showing me the master shot that's actually being recorded. All right. So I want to talk about the five books I read in October. I got a little riff on the first one. Beware, I haven't done a sort of like, an intellectual academic riff in a while. So the first book I read, buckle in on settler colonialism by Adam Kirsch. All right. So why this book? I got interested, the thing that got me interested in this book was October 8th of last year. So the day after October 7th, 2023, well before there was, for example, the subsequent war.

In academic circles, there was, in some circles, excitement and celebration of what had happened the day before. Now, this is worrisome. Just as like a general heuristic, whenever you are seeing a sort of dehumanization of the Jewish people in particular, whenever you hear people start saying about Jews, well, they had it coming, you've got to twitch your antennas a little bit, right? Historically, this has not gone well. So what is going on? What is this reaction coming out of academia? it was intertwined pretty quickly, it's pretty clear with rhetoric with specific terms

like settlers and settler colonialism sort of a lot of Franz Fanon sort of also being channeled as well which as an aside is actually kind of ironic Franz Fanon was actually a supporter of the Zionist project a supporter of Israel. It's interesting.

He's sort of he liked the socialist nature of what was going on over there. Sort of like an interesting sort of contradiction. Anyways, a lot of this turned out to be coming from a lot of this rhetoric in that sort of immediate celebration of what happened October 7th was coming from an academic theory known as settler colonialism theory. So following my own dictates, which is read about the things you're hearing about, you know, try to understand things by books where people have taken time to sit down and think about it. I said, I will write, I want to read a book on this and a book came out this summer by Adam Kers. And it was called On Settler Colonialism. Adam is a poet and literary critic. I believe he was the poetry editor. I think for Harper's, I might have that wrong. And he wrote this book.

Let me say as an aside, I love the idea of this style or form of publishing where you write a short book that's dealing with something that's like very new. You know, as opposed to I'm going to spend four years and work on this book or whatever. We should have more of this. Like smart people that are like, I'm going to turn around a book on this quick. I've been thinking a lot about it. I know about it. let me so you can get books into the conversation faster so bravo to the publisher and adam just in the general sense for doing it um so i read his book let me set this up uh curse is not a fan of settler colonialism

theory so you got to take that into account when you read this book i do think he does a good job however of for most of the book just trying to give a straightforward here is what this is here are the ideas here's where it came from here's the key readings and writings and then at the end of the book he gives more of his own critiques. I think he was pretty fair, but you have to come from the point of view that the book is not positive about settler colonialism theory.

Okay. So what did I learn? Settler colonialism theory rose out of the 90s and was developed in the 2000s. It emerged in Australia and then later in American circles. It was getting this bigger influence in academic

and academic activist circles, but it was not as well known to the general public as other theoretical frameworks that picked up more prominence, especially in the 2010s. Racial and gender theories, I think,

were getting more attention. People were more familiar with those as theories than they were settler colonialism theory. But it was growing in influence, even if it was quieter. So, for example, land acknowledgments,

right? You're probably used to this if you work in sort of any sort of large organizations or arts organizations where at the beginning of an event, you acknowledge the indigenous peoples on whose, which land you're currently doing, you know, the event or the play or the meeting or whatever. That actually, as far as I can tell, came out of settler colonialism theory, so it came out of these academic circles. So it was having influence. It's just its name as a theory was not as well known. And then it really took off, began taking off when A, they turned.

turned their attention from U.S. and Australia. So the original writing was really focused on the settler project of the U.S., you know, in the 17th and 16th century and of Australia in the 19th century and 18th century. When they turned our attention more to Israel, it began to pick up more speed. And then, of course, after October 7th, it came to more public prominence because you had people using terminology from the theory that people hadn't heard before. Okay. I came away not feeling very positive towards this theory. I have two reasons. Number one is very general. It's not specific to this theory, but I think it's an important point just worth emphasizing as you go through your own intellectual journeys and think about the world of knowledge. There are two different types of academic theory. I put them into these categories. Predictive and radical. Predictive theory, this is like the traditional notion of a theory, there's some phenomenon you're trying to explain. You come up with a theory that has a mechanism that explains what has been observed, right?

This is a plausible explanation for what we have observed. You're trying to increase understanding of like how something works. What makes theory effective is it's predictive. Once you have this mechanism, there's other predictions you can draw from it. well, if this was true, we would also see this, or we wouldn't see that. And so you can then kind of test these predictions as a way to either strengthen your conviction in the theory's effectiveness or to discard the theory. Oh, this doesn't work or to modify the theory.

Oh, let's modify the mechanism because these observations over here didn't match with what would be predicted. Now, we're used to thinking about this for science, but the same predictive framework holds for theories in other fields as well. For example, sociologist Max Weber had this sort of well-known famous theory for the capitalist energy in the U.S., he said, well, this is because it's the Protestant work ethic. The early U.S., the pilgrims, the early settlers, a lot of these were Protestants, and there's like a very specific component to Protestant religion, especially with predetermination that would push like really hard work. And that explains the sort of economic dynamism of colonial America and onward, right? It's a good sounding theory. It kind of makes sense.

It explains what's going on. But over time, it made other predictions that didn't prove true. I'm not an expert on this, but then people started looking at other countries around that time that were primarily Protestant that did not have anything near the same type of economic dynamics as the U.S. And then we saw similar dynamics. So once we had a more religiously mixed population, we didn't see much difference in the dynamics. You know, we had Catholic immigration wasn't causing these groups in the population. We're not acting notably different economically speaking. And so the theory is like largely been abandoned or at least heavily modified by sociologists, right?

So that's predictive theory at work. Radical theory by context has some other elements. One, they try to explain large swaths of human behavior with a single explanation. nation, sort of the wider, the swath, the sort of more exciting to theory. Two, they tend to modify information they

encounter to fit the desired conclusion as opposed to modifying their conclusions to fit the observed information. That's a radical theory does that. Three, they tend to propose radical solutions as cure-alls.

They're often solutions that are kind of impossible, but hey, if we could just do this, everything would be solved. That's where the radicalism comes from, the name radical theory. Four, they tend to enforce purity. They tend to have structures to enforce purity among their adherence. There's a lot of careful self-observation and ostracization or punishment of insufficient purity, which is kind of needed because especially when you have these other factors,

like you're having to bend information to fit the conclusion and sort of put some history away. way. That makes you sort of fragile as a theory. So you have to enforce purity. Typically, radical theories include a theory for why people would critique them. I could dismiss a theory for why. So if someone critiques this theory, our theory explains they're doing so out of bad motivation, so we don't have to take it seriously. The classic radical theory of the 20th century, of course, was Marxism, which as it evolved, was explaining more and more, especially as you got into sort of the early critical theories of the modern period as well.

So much was explained by these underlying mechanisms, these economic mechanisms that Mark put out. Everything had to be sort of explained and driven by these underlying mechanisms. All of sort of human behavior could be explained by these mechanisms.

All sorts of information was ignored or modified the, or just outright suppressed, especially once you actually took this theory and made it the foundation of running countries. There's a lot of that going on, the solutions were radical, obviously, like running a Marxist communist government was a big radical solution. We had these big revolutions, right?

And finally, of course, there was strict purity enforcement. So, of course, in the political context, this was actually violent enforcement. But in the academic context for a while, it was seen as unsophisticated, did not follow these type of mechanisms, right? So classic radical theory versus predictive theory. as presented by Adam Kirsch, settler colonialism theory is a radical theory. It tries to explain basically everything bad

through the ongoing impact of the original dispossession of the indigenous and a settler event. So like everything bad in America stems from the fact that America would dispossess the indigenous people of America with the settlers coming from England. It's not seen as a one-time thing. It's seen as the classic phrase from settler colonialism theory is that setling is not a single event. It's an ongoing thing, right? So then they explain everything, everything, climate change, income inequality, all racial strife. Anything that is bad, all has to come back to some sort of like, um, sustainability.

an ongoing impact of this sort of single particular bad thing that happened. So there's that sort of grandiose large swathness to it. As Adam points out, there's huge amounts of just bad history, ignoring information that's inconvenient. There's no rigorous scholarship. It's a radical theory. Just everything gets reshaped to fit this conclusion. So that's not a predictive theory.

That's radical theory. The radical solutions, I mean, this is kind of the problem with it. basically the radical solution is decolonization, which actually literally means, like in the case of the U.S. or Australia, the 350 million people who live in the U.S. basically leaving, I suppose, and the remaining Native American population takes back over the country. Like, there's no other real solutions just to propose other than decolonization, which that's literally where it's not, there's no other sort of solution predicted. and there's a lot of purity restrictions within it, right? So if you're within these circles, everyone has to one up each other with their purity to the decolonization mindset. Okay.

So again, I'm separating right now, actually, even the particular, like the subject of the theory is very important. Like, the colonial history of the world is a devastating history. You know, settler colonialism came out of the broader post-colonialism academic. study project, which was like a really important ongoing project to understand when the age of empire was finally dismantled in the mid-20th century to understand like what that had done and what was needed to enforce empire, right? After World War II, we realized, oh, empire is not a good thing.

Before World War II, we're like, of course, you kind of take over countries or whatever, and they make cotton for you. After World War II, we're like, whoops, maybe empire's not so great, right? This doesn't lead to good places. And so, like, post-colonial studies was, like, necessary. And there's a lot of really interesting thinking in there. This came out of that, but it's just gone into, like, a radical direction. And now it's just, at least in my opinion, reading what I've read about it.

It's shoddy scholarship and people trying to one-up each other with who can be more purely adherent and more radical. And I think that's dangerous. In general, radical theory, I think, is a dangerous direction for academia to go. So I don't like radical theory in general, right? Studying colonialism is important. Colonialism is bad. Confronting it is important. Radical theory is bad.

We can have both of those things be true at the same time. All right. So I came away just thinking negatively about settler colonialism theory divorced from the specific content of the theory, but because of its attributes as a radical theory. And I don't think radical theory is helpful for better understanding the world. and I don't think it's helpful for progressivism, meaning progressivism in not the political sense,

but in the philosophical sense of striving to improve the world, which I think people in academic institutions should be doing. You know, all this support implicitly or explicitly from the state to be a professor. Like, yes, you should be using your brain, at least in part, to improve the world. And radical theory gets in the way of that. The other reason, like, I'm specifically suspicious of this theory,

and this goes back to what I said before, I just am suspicious of any theory for which one of the immediate consequences is violence towards Jews. Historically, this has never ended up well for that theory, right? I'm not talking about the war in the Middle East. I'm talking about the 3 to 500% increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes. I'm talking about Jewish state schools being shot at. Jews being randomly shot at. This happened in Chicago just a few days ago,

just for being visibly Jewish. This is not in Israel. This is not the war. This is just North American Jews. I'm talking about all of the students I hear about on college campuses who are saying, I feel like I have to hide visible signs of my religion. Every time in the last 120 years,

where a theoretical framework led to that, random violence against Jews, Jews trying to hide their identity, every single time the adherence to that theory said yeah yeah but you know what kind of you know look you got to break some eggs and make omelets and they kind of have it coming and there's this really bad thing that we're attributing

to them or at least some juice somewhere and so that's kind of just like an unfortunate consequence every single time we've gone down that road it's ended up bad so I just see that as like the alarm system with any theory the alarm system with any theory that if that is happening your theory is probably

a problem So that is a general alarm system I have. Okay. Final key point, because if there's anything you come to listen to my podcast for us to hear about the Middle East, is I do want to make very clear when it comes to specifically what's happening in the Middle East, most people engaged in debate and protest and discussion about the wars in the Middle East could care less about settler colonialism theory. They don't know what it is. It's not at the source of what they're thinking. So it would be intellectually dishonest to try to use the problematic nature of this theory,

which I think is very clear, to try to, for example, dismiss everyone who is protesting, debating, or arguing against what's happening with Israel or Gaza. This is sort of unrelated from that, in that sense. You cannot paint everyone on one side with this broad brush any more than, for example, you can look at every Israeli and say they all would be comfortable in Netanyahu's right-wing cabinet, right? So we're talking about this particular theory,

not talking about this much larger conflict that's happening. But I do think if you are engaged, this is a serious issue that requires serious people making serious arguments and throwing radical theory into the mix doesn't help. If you are serious

about this issue, do not use this particular theoretical framework as your guy. If you're a college student and you want to think hard about these issues, that's fantastic. Be wary of this theoretical framework. This particular theoretical framework is not helping any side of this conflict. This particular theoretical framework, I think, is only going to gum up the works, only going to get in the way of serious people trying to do serious work on the serious issue. I do not like radical theory in general.

And so that is kind of my, this is my PSA against radical theory. And again, the book I read and the things I've read about it are somewhat biased, but it's pretty easy to identify the tenets of radical theories when you see them. So as a scientist academic and not someone who's in the social science, it's easier for me to say this. I'm just going to say, I don't like radical theory. I don't like that radical theory. It's a specific thing I'm saying, but there we go. There is my lecture, Jesse. Detailed.

Detailed. It was a good book. You should do like a detailed description like that. that on Crichton's eruption that you read a couple months ago.

I now want to spend 30 minutes and I actually am equally passionate about this on how James Patterson messed up

Michael Crichton's eruption. I don't know who the characters were. 200 pages in this book and so and so

Susan walks in the door. I don't know who Susan is. 200 pages in I don't know who this character is. I can't tell

you right now the name of a single person from that book. You tell me, Jurassic Park. It's like, oh, you got Dr. Grant, you got Settler, you got Malcolm, right? Like, we know these things. I could, as soon as I finished that book, I couldn't tell you, it's bad writing. Bad writing.

All right, one of the books that I read. It breaks the record for the longest I've ever talked about a book. I also read The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMohan. So Sharon McMohan is like a huge social media presence. She's like a government history scholar. So it's surprising and it's fantastic. She has this like huge Instagram. It's like about interesting people from history.

She wrote this book called The Small and the Mighty. My publisher sent it to me. I really enjoyed it. It's it's vignettes of historical figures that you don't know, but who lived consequential lives and inspiring lives. And it's divided in the sections divided by kind of categories. And then it follows these figures. And this is what I think Sharon does.

if I understand it properly on her social channels as well. This is like a drawn-out version of it. So I like that book. I saw Ryan Holiday mentioned his reading list as well. You guys have the same publisher. I think it's what it is. It must be a portfolio book. Then I read Chasing Dreams by Bob Weiss, former head of the Imagineers at Disney.

It wasn't what I was hoping. You know, I have this weird Disney book obsession. And so this book came out. out by the former head of just the imaginary. I think what I was hoping, it's not a knock on the book, but I think what I was hoping

was a lot more about the technical details of how they built these theme parks. Like what goes into the technical innovations and the building like the next generation

arise or whatever, but it was more of a traditional business memoir. So it was much more like Bob and where he was going and the people he met and the stresses of the job. It's just fine.

But I kind of wanted to get into like how the Pirates of the Caribbean works. Mainly because I was doing my Halloween decorations. I was like, yeah, I want to get some like techniques. I want to build some animatronics. So it's fine. If you're into Disney, it was fine. Good business memoir. I had an interesting wife. Bobwise.

Then I read The Wave by Susan Casey. Huge Susan Casey fan. I'd read the Wave a long time ago. I went back and reread it. Great book. It's about big waves. So half of the book is her hanging out with Laird Hamilton and other big wave surfers. That's kind of that is that's fantastic sort of like outside magazine adventure writing.

And the other half is like hanging out with wave scientists. And they're kind of interleaved together. But anyways, I love that book. And then I read Tribal by Michael Morris. This was an interesting book. So he studies tribalism, but not in the sort of, not like a sociological perspective of like the way we talk about tribalism now. But like how our brain is evolved, right? like how does like the homo sapien brain deal with tribes and how is that different than other species of humans and how has that affect us today?

And his big argument, which I thought was nicely contrarian, is that tribalism gets a bad rap. He says, no, no, no, the thing that allowed homo sapiens to succeed over all of these other human style, humanit, whatever they call them, humidid species like Neanderthals, homo erectus, like homo florenzis, he's like, what lot of homo sapiens to succeed is that actually we have this capacity to connect with and work with other people at a much broader scale. Like we can, Yuval Harari talks about this in sapiens to some degree. We can come up with a way to feel like our state, like a million people are all our brothers. Like we can connect to and work with people at a much larger scale than other species. Neanderthal is like, I have my band.

And if someone else comes in, like, we're just going to eat them. Like, we're going to kill them. I have no ability. Chimpanzees are the same way. You're not in my band? Yeah, what do we care? Like, we'll just kill you, right? But Homo sapiens could cooperate with people from far away, huge groups of people.

It's allowed us to do things like trading and that allowed knowledge to move. And we could build up giant cities. So he's actually saying the homo sapient tribal instinct is one of compassionate cooperation. And so what we should do is leverage that to try to build, get over divides. So actually like our built-in mechanisms, tribal mechanisms, are things to leverage the overcome divides. That this idea that our instinct is to quickly draw a line between us and others and to be very suspicious of people who are not in our immediate group, he's like, that's not actually homo sapiens instinct. We have a huge capacity for greatly,

expanding who counts as our group and that it actually documents to build what we call tribalism now like in-group out-group it takes a lot of work that try to put up those divides and you have to do a lot of work to try to demonize another side to to carefully set them up as being very different like it's more the it takes effort to keep people apart and our default is like we're much better at connecting so I thought it was a cool contrarian thesis and he's like so we should leverage in like business and life and politics leverage this fundamental mechanisms of homo sapiens to like cooperate better to have teams operate better to overcome like political divides and hatred so contrarian um this is one of these cases where it's like the topic the professor has been

studying forever so these are always good books when a professor writes their like big book on the thing that they've been studying forever so it has that type of energy of like I've done all of these studies and I'm putting into a book for the first time. So that's a pretty good book. Tribal by Michael Morris. All right. I think that's it.

Five books. Maybe this will be our new standard, Jesse. I'll give a 30 minute speech on one book every I like it. Every week. I have to put on my professor hat occasionally. As I always say, please send all hate mail on this to Jesse at Calnewport.com.

It'll definitely get the new. I'll definitely read it. All right, everyone. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode. 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, you've got to sign out for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.