Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 328: Analog Mode

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

There’s a video trending on the internet at the moment arguing that its audience (presumably, young men) should disappear from the world to focus on going “beast mode” on their goals. Cal takes a closer look at this video and argues that it points toward a much larger issue – a mismatch between the modern digital environment and our human brains – that affects all of us. He then answers listener questions and calls and concludes with a tech corner segment.  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: Analog Mode [2:39]  - How do I go about restructuring my life after a shake-up? [29:50] - Should I take breaks from my AirPods? [36:03] - How can I adopt the discipline ladder to “multi-scale” planning? [38:54] - How do I regain a sense of time in a period of isolation and challenge? [43:41] - Should I quit some of my side projects? [48:50] - CALL: How should I time block on sabbatical? [55:27]  CASE STUDY:  Building Studio Z [1:03:18]  TECH CORNER: Section 230 and Poison Pills [1:15:10]  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?youtube.com/watch?v=p5a7whN1k64promarket.org/2020/12/13/liberals-conservatives-wrong-section-230-reform-repeal/ Thanks to our Sponsors:  eightsleep.com/deepzbiotics.com/deepblinkist.com/deepdrinklmnt.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. So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer Jesse. Jesse Quick Show update. You know, we are experimenting with those occasional Thursday deep dive episodes. Is what we call them? No, we call them in-depth. In-depth. Where I have on people to talk about ideas relating to cultivating a deep life.

Anyways, I've scheduled two more for December. Bad dog? I can't announce in advance who it's going to be or how many all-time points, titles they have won, or whether or not their son also plays in the NBA. But we have a pretty big guest coming on. A royal guest. No, it's not LeBron James. But anyways, I like them. So we have a couple more coming up.

I want them to come out in December. So stay tuned for those. I'll tell you, here's my rule for those. It's why I like about this being just like an occasional episode. I literally just think who do I want to talk to, right? And sometimes it'll be someone who's like really well known. Sometimes it might not be, but I'm using it as an excuse to have cool conversations with cool people. That's good.

Yeah. And including people where I've been like, oh, we should catch up. Like, why don't we do it on air? So that's good. A couple announcements real briefly. First of all, I wanted to shout out Matt Coleman of the company Cap 3, which just bought a big bulk order, a slow productivity for their office book club. I, of course, really appreciate when people do that.

It's a great book club book because not only is an interesting conversation, but you may get a much more happy workforce and effective company after you buy the book. So, thanks for doing that. I'm happy to shout it out. I'll say right now on the air, Jesse, you know, hey, you do a book order for a book club, let Jesse know, and I'm happy to give you a shout out on the air. Yeah. So just send out the Jesse account.

I bet you know him out. He's a good dude. Cool. Also, administrative note, we need more calls. We're running low on calls, which means this is probably your best shot right now to get on the show is leaving a call. You can do it right from your browser. Go to the deeplife.com slash listen. There's a link there. It's called something like leaving a call or call or voice or something. Yeah, it's easy to do. You can do it from your browser on your phone or right from your laptop. We need more calls, so bring those in. All right. I think that's it, Jesse. Let's go on with our deep dive. All right, so several people recently have sent me the same video, which seems to be everywhere at the moment on YouTube.

The video is called How to Disappear and Transform. Last time I checked, it had 2.5 million views and counting. Here's what I want to do today. I want to play a clip from this video. I want to get into it. Because when I first watched this video, to be honest, I was a little taken aback. It seemed sort of

Nietzschean in a vaguely unsuttling way. But as I look beyond its aesthetics, it became clear that there is a deeper issue at play that goes beyond the immediate audience and topic of the video, one that's probably relevant to you. So we're going to extract some deep truths from this very trendy video. All right.

So to get started, I want to play at the beginning of this video. If you're watching, instead of just listening, we're going to put the video up in the corner here as well. But we'll have the audio for those who are who are just listening. All right, Jesse, let's load this up. The more you open your life up for display, the more people find a way to drag you down. It's a natural sociological phenomenon. There's something powerful about disappearing and working in the shadows.

Becoming unavailable and committing to become the next version of you in secret can be exhilarating, exciting. Because you know that when you reappear, your transformation will shock the world. All right, Jesse, we can... Funny thing is when you do... Got them off there. First of all, I always love the music and popular videos. This, I say, I'm thinking stranger things. Yeah, it was really compelling.

Yeah, that music is compelling. Again, I think we put that, we put that music behind anything we say here. It's going to seem a lot more, a lot more compelling. Okay, so let's get into it a little bit. So the video, we see the main concept. Disappear. Beware, people don't know what you're doing. you're not talking about what you're doing.

No one really knows what you're up to. Transform yourself and then reappear. I want to walk through just the – these are the chapters of the video. So these are kind of like the steps of the process. So disappear with step one. And that's what we just heard about. Step two was shut it. Step three was only care.

Step four was hide your plans. So there's a big thing in this about don't talk to anybody about anything you're up to. They make one exception for if you have a life partner. Then we get step one, two, three, four, five, hide progress, hide pain, pick targets, crush it, reprogram, and then reappear the question mark. Which is actually consequential. We'll see there in a second. Look, there's a certain feel to this video that is in the vein of like a young man, really has that kind of like young man feel. young man stepping away from society to grind through pain en route to some dream of becoming an Uber mention a way that's going to awe all of their foes.

That's why I had that Nietzsche reference from before. It really kind of has that feel to it. The examples of the goals that you might crush it in this video are also sort of very kind of young man online examples. One is getting shredded. They talk about in the video that you should consider, for example, moving your apartment to be next to the gym so that you can more easily spend more time in the gym. And then the other example is creating a business that, quote, prints money, in quotes. All right. For those of us who are in other stages of life, we're not sort of like an online young man,

this idea of like retreating to an apartment next to the gym and completely cutting ourselves off from other people, like it sounds unappealing. And it's easy to dismiss. It's like this is like a broculture thing. This is like a very online thing. But as I was trying to digest this video with an open mind, I'm realizing there's a deeper issue in here that is relevant to many more. of us. Okay. So for the generation who is the target audience of this video, here's the thing we have to keep in mind. Their online selves, that is the version of themselves that they present

publicly online over various platforms, social platforms, bulletin boards, even like gaming platforms, discord, etc. Their online selves is a major part of just their overall general identity. And the problem that they are noticing is that their online selves attracts a lot of crap. Like this is endemic and unavoidable in almost any major online space that if your online self, so your discussion of yourself, your ideas, which are up to your life, in any of these online spaces is going to attract trolling, is going to attract people who are telling you to check yourself. It's going to attract people who are going to put you down make fun of what you're working on.

I was just noticing this the other day. I was on a Reddit thread for Peter Attia fans because I met Peter and I read his book and I was looking up some information. Like you can't post anything on there without like 10% of the people responding. Why? However, whatever you're doing, whatever fitness thing you're doing, whatever metric that you're measuring, whatever biomarker is just not quite right. You don't know what's going on.

All right. So for the generation where this. online selves is actually like a major part of their selves, it really gives them this feel as if their social standing is always under threat and that they're constantly being judged and they're often being judged poorly. So this is where you get this very strong push we see in this video disappear, right? Because to remove yourself from those spaces for someone whose online self is such an integral part of their identity is a major act. It is what requires the stranger things music and those big animations because it's a it really is a major act in a way that for me

to like not go on to the peter a t a reddit thread is not like a transformative decision in my life so rebuilding uh what they're trying to do here these people who are essentially born online is separate themselves from their online selves and this is actually a pretty traumatic to do but they are picking up in a very refined sense this is like a refined to amplified version of a problem that I think is relevant to the rest of us. So to explain what the general problem is here, I want to clarify like a general framework I like to use when thinking about the topics we talk about on this show. Primarily, I see myself when it comes to a lot of my public-facing writing is you would

call it like a digital theorist or a technology theorist. I think a lot about how technology impacts our lives and then what we should do about it. Sometimes this gets obscured because the solutions to digital problems. are often analog. We talk a lot about solutions. So we talk a lot about analog on here, but so much what I talk about has its roots in the digital. So the framework I use, and we're going to apply it to this particular problem.

The framework I like to use is I imagine that right now in the 21st century, Homo sapiens exist in what I call the modern digital environment, the MDE. Right? We're in this sort of new kind of novel environment as defined by networked digital technologies. The modern digital environment often conflicts with our paleolithic brains and bodies and our neolithic culture. In these mismatches, we get what I think of as disorders, which I mean in sort of the literal sense of disorders as ways of living that are notably negative. So it's in these mismatches between our brains and culture, which are evolved in times long past with the modern digital environment. We get various disorders. and then we have to figure out how to address them at different levels as individuals,

as communities, and larger up as like cultures and governments even, right? That's kind of my program. So let's apply that framework here. The relevant aspect of the modern digital environment that's causing a disorder in this case, I think is the introduction of large-scale conversation platforms. So any sort of digital platform in which a notably large number of people are brought together to have a conversation, That's what I call a large-scale conversation platform.

The most famous examples, of course, would be like Twitter slash X or, you know, Instagram, potentially TikTok, etc. You have a huge number of people coming together for a conversation. What makes it large scale is the fact that any individual user is seeing, of course, just a teeny, teeny minuscule fraction of the actual amount of communication that's happening. So that's very different, for example, than a conversation on like a WhatsApp group with 10 people where you see every. every message that everyone is sending. So what is the mismatch between this corner of the modern digital environment and ourselves, our species? I think it tricks the brain.

So here's the problem is, in a large-scale conversation platform, you have a huge number of people saying things, responding back and forth, talking to each other. The platforms have to curate that down to a very tractable conversation for each individual user. Twitter slash X has 600 million users. The number of tweets per day is astronomical. Of course, you're not seeing these all. You see kind of like a curated feed. TikTok has hundreds of millions of videos that are being posted. You can only see a couple hundred, you know, in a given day or whatever. So there's this huge curation that goes on. The curation brings down what you're seeing to seem very similar to a normal social conversation that you would have in a normal

analog social context. So you're kind of looking for some threads on like Reddit that look interesting. You're jumping on or you're jumping on some conversations on, you know, Twitter, for example. The scale of those conversations as recognizable as your brain is like, yeah, we're chatting with people around the fire. We're chatting with people at the town square because it's it's not that many people. They're talking back and forth. I said this. Some people talk back.

It feels like you're at a town hall meeting. But in reality, of course, this is all being super curated. The real reality is like you say something. The next store, you have Madison Square Garden full of people, all like yelling things and responses. And someone comes through and like, hey, over there in Section K in the 50th row, that person seems kind of like saying something fun or is catching our attention. Let's bring them over and put them in front of you to respond to you. It feels like you're just responding to one person. But really, there's Madison Square Garden full of people and just the most engaging or interesting or attention catching responses are captured.

So what we get is the simulacrum of like a normal conversation we've been evolved to have, but the conversation is not really real. It's not with people you know. There's no social stakes. There's no tit for tat expectation as this is someone that you have to live with going forward. So injure interactions, you have to keep that in mind. You need a sustainable relationship. It's instead sort of like algorithmically matched rhetorical bomb throwing. So the disorder this creates is that these curated pseudo-conversations, as I like to call them,

when we see them as real, we get very distressed. You constantly feel like you're in a situation that in the analog world, would be very rare and very alarming. We constantly feel when we're interacting with these curated pseudoconversations on large global conversation platforms, we constantly feel as if we just offended someone at the town hall meeting. We said the wrong thing around the Paleolithic campfire and now we're getting cold stairs from the tribal chief who's like a real beast and is holding spear in both hands.

That is like a very alarming circumstance through most of our history. And our brain doesn't realize that the curated pseudo-conversation is different. So we are distressed at a level and a consistency that would have otherwise been a spelling disaster. This is like you're about to get kicked out of Salem or burned at the stake type of disaster. So we get really upset. That is the trend that for these digital natives, these young men who are watching his YouTube video, is unavoidable. because so much of their life is on there, they have to do something about it,

it seems so drastic. But the rest of us that maybe use these platforms less frequently, but on a semi-consistent basis, we still suffer from this. The dosage of the disorder is lower, but it is still a steady drip

of this type of social distress, which just makes us less happy. All right, so we've seen this mismatch between the modern digital environment and our species. We've identified the disorder it creates. Now that we know the disorder, we can think about the treatment.

The treatment here is simple. We can take, like, what the visual is, video is saying, and we can simplify that to not be so hyperbolic, you don't have to disappear and move next to the gym. But here is my treatment for this disorder of curated pseudo-conversation-induced distress. Don't digitally interact with people that you've never previously been in the same room with before. So what this is saying, this simple heuristic, actually does a lot of work for us, right?

It saves us from being too aggressive. The too aggressive thing to do here would be like, don't. ever have interactions digitally. Well, that's going too far. Actually, like, digital communication tools, these are pretty useful. It's pretty useful if I can, like, text message a question to a friend of mine, or kind of keep up with, like, what's going on with my family, with, like, we could have, like, a text thread going back and forth or, like, the email, uh, some information about an upcoming,

like, we're going to the game. Let me email you the tickets over email. Like, there's all sorts of digital conversation. That's great. Zoom calls. Remember this? like during the pandemic, the ability to see people and your family or friends face to face and how now we can still do that with distance relatives.

Like all this stuff is great. I mean, I write about in my book digital minimalism, it's not as good as in-person interaction. So you want to be careful not to replace all analog interaction with people you care about with digital. But there's nothing wrong with doing the digital. It's only a problem with people you know if you let that replace other types of communication. So there's no negative thing that happens being on a. text thread with your friends.

The only negative thing that could come from that is if because of that thread, you never actually go and do things with your friends ever again. But there's no negative harm from the direct activity. But what this simple heuristic does tell you to take a break from is the strangers online. The post on whatever it is now, Twitter, Blue Sky, or threads where you're angrily replying to someone, the performative posting on Instagram of something that, you know, whatever it is, but you have the hashtag blessed after it. You're going to get some crap for that because that's kind of annoying,

like waiting for that crap to come back in. Where you're posting for people you don't know. That's what the he says, hey, step away from that. At least see what that feels like. So again, my treatment here, and I'll say it one more time, don't digitally interact with people that you previously have not been in the same room with before.

Now, of course, look, there's obvious caveats here. We're talking recreational communication. this doesn't mean like, hey, I can't respond. I'm applying for a job and I can't respond to the new boss because I've never been in the same room with them before. But just in terms of like casual leisure-based interaction, give that a try. That solves this disorder we have. You're not posting in public places means you're not exposing your brain to curated pseudo-conversations, which means the digital world is not giving you the steady dose of distress.

Now, this is what I would even tell, like the young men who are watching this video is like, I feel the pain that's driving you to this. But you don't have to think about this necessarily through the lens of I'm going to temporarily disappear. And then I'm going to come back. Really, it's this Uberminch idea in this video. It's like, I'm going to come back so shredded. It was so much money that you can't say anything wrong about. You can't say anything bad about me, right?

I'm going to be the king alpha. I'm saying there's a more consistent solution here. Just don't make this online self so important anymore. You know, hang out with real people. go to the gym, but make friends at the gym. And then go get wheatgrass shots or whatever people who are in shape to you, like after the gym or whatever. You want to start a business.

Great. You could get together with some people and start a business and go to a co-working space, be around people, build out your analog life, digitally communicate with people you've met in the real world. Do not have this sort of shadow self who has to exist online. And you'll realize your problem was not other people. Your problem was not that you told people about your goals. or that people had heard stuff that makes you vulnerable. The problem is you were telling people who don't know you and don't care.

That's the problem. It's the audience, not what you're saying. So I think there's an interesting lesson in it. So I'm going to give a name to it. I like to give names to things. Stopping digital interaction with people you have not met before in person. We'll call this analog mode. You don't have to disappear, but try analog mode out for a while.

This is a particularly good time to do it. I've been listening to these fights recently, Jesse, about these online platforms Twitter versus Blue Sky versus Threads. Because someone wrote me and said, by the way, oh, there's a Cal Newport on Blue Sky.

I didn't know what Blue Sky is. It's my understanding is a Twitter style platform, but it maintains the style of content moderation that Twitter had in like 2019, 2020, like the very sort of strong. And then Threads is also a Twitter-style interface, but it really downplays politics. So it's trying to be more of like an Instagram-y-type place or whatever. So there's a Cal Newport on Blue Sky.

That's not me. It's really trying to be me. It's my picture. It's my books. Fortunately, whoever this is has him posted incendiary things, but, you know, who knows. Anyways, the point is, I'm looking at this. It's all these people who, the assumption. behind this conversation is like, well, clearly we have to be on a global conversation platform having

curated pseudo conversations. And I'm like, no, the answer is you don't have to be on any of these things. I wrote a New Yorker article about this two summers ago called, We Don't Need a New Twitter, that really gets into this argument about why global communication platforms, conversation platforms are not intrinsic to the internet. They're not somehow, they're not somehow synonymous with digital expression and free speech. It's like a weird business move, right? It's the free speech equivalent, I guess, of like Amazon or Walmart saying it's important that everything you buy comes from one giant company. That's not that important, actually.

Like, we liked when there was a Main Street and there's many other smaller shops. So you don't have to have these digital cells. I mean, it's ironic because I'm very exposed online. But the places I guess I'm exposed are not places people comment. It's a podcast and newsletters. It's like in the people's ears and they read it. It's not in these conversation platforms. where people talk about.

So there we go. Analog mode. I think this is a great time to give that a try. Yeah. And I also follow Rogan's advice. I never read the comments on YouTube. So I've heard him say posting ghost is this advice. Meaning like if you post something, don't go back and read like the comments.

I think if I ever went on his show, my pitch to him would be like, don't post because it would be so influential. right? Because I don't really know. I guess we could check it out. Can you load up? I guess he'd be on Twitter probably, right? He's buddies with Elon. I'm sure he's on Twitter. I wonder if he even posts on there that much. But I think it would be really influential if Joe Rogan said, I don't post on social media. There's just like more important things in lives. Be a leader in your community, do cool things, build things. Don't waste time posting

at all. I think that would be so powerful, don't you think? And, yeah, so he could do that. Yeah. I convinced Sam Harris to leave Twitter. Maybe that had some influence with some people, but man, if Joe Rogan did it. I never heard, I don't listen to him all the time, but I never heard him complain about, I think he barely, he barely uses it. So I here's the, okay, not to get into what Joe Rogan should do in conversation.

He barely uses it, right? And I think he is super discipline. So to him, he's saying, what's the problem? Right. I think he barely uses it. He doesn't check comments. He's been in the public eye since, you know, a young age. He's very used to it.

So he's like, what's the problem? Like, I post and ghost. Like, I put some stuff on there. I think it's funny. It's fine. But the problem is most people can't do what he does. Like, most people can't kind of be on it. So even though he doesn't have to quit, like it's not going to make his life much better to quit.

he probably barely looks at it. Him quitting would probably be a model to other people. I mean, when he started, it seems like the most arbitrary thing. When, like, Cam Haynes convinced him that hunting deer with a bow and arrow was, like, a cool thing to do, half the men on the internet started hunting gear with bows and arrows, right? Not that that's a bad thing, but it's like super, super specific.

When he decided that, like, Brazilian jihitsu, like this very specific martial art was, like a cool thing to do, half the men on the internet started doing Brazilian jihis. which is like a very, very specific thing. So imagine if he's like, yeah, just stop using social media. But I don't think there's any way to do it because these boys with Elon and he likes going on X.

That's the problem. He's really good friends with him. That's the problem. So he's never going to do it. All right, so I got to convince Elon first to shut down X. My list is getting harder. Jesse. My two-de-lis are getting harder.

All right, we got some good questions. We've got a call. We got a tech corner coming up. But first, briefly hear from a sponsor. I talk about one of my favorite products of the last couple of years. You've heard me talk about it a lot.

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All right, Jesse, let's do some questions. First question from Tyler. I'm from the Asheville area that was recently hit by Helene. This shakeup made me reflect on how I want to structure my life. How would you recommend someone spend a week or a long weekend this way? What documents, systems, and protocols would you recommend somebody put in place as a good foundation towards a deep life? Well, first of all, I hope things are going better for you in Asheville. A good friend and friend of the show, Brad Stolberg, lives in Asheville.

So I really have been able to hear through him kind of like the details of the challenges there. And in fact, that would be my first bit of advice is check out Brad's work at the growth equation. He's got, it's a website he runs with Steve Magnus, another friend of the show, great newsletter. They've got a great podcast as well called Farewell that I've been on a couple times. He's thinking about these issues because he's going through it as well. So I'm just going to give a plug to that team over there, Brad and Steve and Clay, et cetera. All right, but let's get more general here. the general question here that's relevant to everyone is there's some sort of disruption has happened in your life.

And it could be, you know, a climate disaster like this, but it could be medical is another big one. You get a health scare. Someone gets really sick. Someone dies. It could be professional. Like you lose a job. You know, you have to move suddenly or whatever. How do you reset, not just reset, but come out of a disruption.

aim towards reconstructing your life to be not just deep as it was before, but perhaps even deeper. I got some specific advice here. First of all, I would spend at least a week or two using a single-purpose journal dedicated to trying to capture and make sense of your reactions to the disruption. So a single-purpose journal, we've talked about this in a prior episode. It's a small journal that you use for one specific purpose. So you're like, I'm trying to figure out this one thing. like an idea for a book or a life transformation. I like to use the field notes notebooks for these because they're very small in your pocket.

They're about the right size for dealing with just like a single issue. You have to make sense of your intimations about your life that have been inspired, changed, or evolved because of the disruption. What is it about your life that now, in light of the disruption, is feeling out of whack? Or is feeling like it's dragging? What is it that's feeling like newly valuable in a way you didn't think about before? What are the insights that are coming up? What type of media is suddenly appealing to you in a way that it didn't before?

It's like, why am I suddenly listening to Surf Podcast? Or why is it that like I'm being really attracted to hearing about like Netflix documentaries on sports stars? It's a time to become attuned to how you're feeling because, and this is a concept I talk about in the book I'm writing now about the deep life, these types of disruptions often shake the sand loose and reveal insights there were previously obscured. So we want to capture those. You're just taking notes, right? Have it with you whenever you're walking to dog or you're just commuting the work. You feel that like a particular rush of insight because you had your first cup of coffee of the morning.

Jot down those notes. All right. Once you've done that for a while and you're sort of refining these intimations into actual insights. It's time to try to update your lifestyle vision. I would do this in nature. I would try to take one big swing at this. The Asheville area has beautiful hiking up there in those mountains.

Go for a hike. It's a couple hours long. And at the summit, sit there and try to work through an updated vision of your ideal lifestyle integrating these insights you found through your single purpose journaling. This will be a different vision likely than whatever vision you had before the disruption. And maybe you weren't doing lifestyle-centric planning before. so this might just be your first vision you've ever done. Now once you return from that mountain, which for you, Tyler, is probably literal because

you live in Asheville and for other people might be metaphorical, now you do the whole lifestyle planning thing where you work backwards from the vision to figure out how you can move forward closer to it. And now you're talking to your partner, if you're married, now you're thinking through your options, now you're getting tactical, now you're having those sort of strategic and tactical decisions. Do we want to really change something about our work situation? Do we want to change something about where we live or a school situation?

Is there a big change we want to make in our lives? That's kind of the fun part, also the scary part. But what I'm sort of arguing for here is don't start there. That's the TLDR of this whole advice. Don't start with sitting down tonight and saying, should we move? You want to get there after you've clarified your intermissions and the insights and then use those to try to form a lifestyle vision that really resonates and then work backwards from that vision. that's how you'll avoid just falling into the trap of just trying to do something big for the sake of doing something big. Right.

That's how you'll avoid the trap of, you know, slamming your hand in the door just to feel something. That's what I sometimes call it where people make major changes in their life just because they feel stuck. And at least there's some emotion in making a major change. But if that change is aimless or random, when the excitement wears off, you're not necessarily going to be in a better place. All right. So I think there's opportunity lurking in here. Here is a quote. I'll see if anyone recognizes where this is from. Here's my question. Here's my quote, Jesse. The one character from this anonymous quote says, you know, Dad, the Germans have the same word for crisis and opportunity. And the father in this quote says, yes, crisisotunity. You know where that quotes from? No. The Simpsons. that's Lisa talking to her at Homer but it's true right in crisis there is opportunity

actually speaking of Brad read his book as well Masters of Change is like all about how to be resilient to change to come out stronger so this ends up being a big pitch for Brad all right Tyler hope that helps hope you have water back I know that's the last thing to come and Estrell's beautiful

it'll it'll rise up again but thanks for giving us a chance to discuss this topic all right who do we have next next question is from Jack I constantly use my AirPods during gap times throughout the day. I listen while driving to work, doing chores, around the house, cooking dinner, eating lunch. I'm torn as I'm always listening to interesting stuff, but am I properly embracing boredom? Yeah, I listen to my AirPods a lot as well.

Here's what I recommend. I think the easiest thing to do is to actually schedule the times that you want to not use the AirPods. Like schedule the gap times, as you call them, where you want to be embracing boredom. and then you don't have to worry about it the other times. So in other words, you can make listening to podcast or audiobooks a perfectly reasonable default activity. I'm doing the dishes. I'm, you know, shaving in the morning.

I'm waiting at the car wash. Just make listing the interesting stuff at default and just schedule on a regular basis times to be without it. That's easier than trying to just debate with yourself moment to moment. Like, ooh, I should feel guilty. I've been listening to stuff a lot. I should have time where I'm not listening to things. Should it be now?

Well, maybe not now. Don't have this debate with yourself all the time. Schedule the boredom because that can be less often. And the AirPods could be the default. The key is to have a good mix of stuff you listen to. It doesn't all have to be incredibly intellectually demanding, but some of it should be. Right. Expose yourself to interesting ideas, listening to interesting books.

My one piece of advice is that if you have a regular time you listen that is kind of like time bounded, and I'm thinking in particular like a morning commute is what I used to do, where you're like, I'm listening, I have pretty good energy, and it's a bounded amount of time every day. Think about using that for listening to like something really advanced or complicated. Like a learning company, great courses style course, where you can listen to like one lecture, poor morning on your way to work. So you have some sort of regular listing session where you're really trying to push yourself into something smarter.

But yeah, no, I don't mind listening, especially if you're listening to our show, schedule the time off instead of scheduling the time when you are listening. I always lose these. I have, Jesse knows this. This happens to be all the time. We have many AirPods boxes because we lose them and then we find them again. I have an AirPods with me.

This case is probably at home. I guess I just had one in. And so I have a single AirPods with me without a case. That's kind of like story of my main relationship to AirPods. My wife bought me a true story. Air tags. They lose these things all the time. Lost the air tags.

Ironically. I'm surprised I don't have air tags for golf balls. Are they too big? People are always spending time looking for their golf balls. I agree. A million dollar company right there. Yeah. Yeah, find your golf balls.

Not relevant for me. I know where to find my golf ball. Middle of the green, baby. But for you duffers out there. You know, I'm a real golfer because I used the term duffer. All right. Who we got next? Next question is from Stuck Kinnock.

As a recovering perfectionist to use Oliver Berkman's term, I'm trying to take a just-start approach to my work instead of thinking endlessly about the perfect way to get it done. I used to get hung up on the right way to do it to the point where I struggle with implementation. Is there a way to adopt your discipline ladder idea to incrementally getting better at frameworks like multi-scale planning? I love the details. This is a Newportian nerd question, which I love. Perfectionism.

Berkman's perfectionist framework, discipline ladder, multi-scale planning. You're speaking my language, Stuck, Kinnock. Okay, here's the first key point I want to make. It's an important point to emphasize. Frameworks and systems for organizing your work and effort can't make hard work not hard. This was like the major trap of the productivity prawn movement from the early 2000s. This was, we've talked about on the show before. This is where you got this marriage of sort of sophisticated time management productivity techniques, mainly David Allen's getting things done,

which was this like very complicated productivity. technique and software. So we're starting to get powerful personal computer software. And you had these two worlds of people who were, in particular, like Mac officinados and David Allen officinados who said, wait a second, if we build custom software tools to implement complicated time management organization productivity systems, maybe we could make work less hard. Like work itself could become like relatively automated.

We're kind of just task will pop up. automatically out of our kinkless GTT setup, but we just kind of execute small tasks, and then over time, stuff gets done. That was the productivity prong promise. A technology plus sufficiently complicated systems will make hard work less hard.

The reality and why that movement failed is that hard work is hard to do and a productivity system can't make it unhard. It's hard to write that book chapter. And nothing you can do makes you like more likely to want to do it or make it fun. It's still going to be hard. Writing code is hard.

Figuring out that business, strategy is hard. Having the interview, it's just hard things are hard. All right. So what do frameworks and systems and the right technologies do? I think the better analogy is thinking about like fitness routines at the gym, right? You have a good training program does not make the specific day you're in the gym any easier. You still have to go to the gym.

Every one of those weights is heavy to lift. And you still have to convince yourself to like lift every one of those weights. But over time, having a structure to how you do your exercise is going to make you stronger and you're going to get more results. So over time, it's better. But it doesn't make work not hard in the moment. So first of all, we have to change our expectation. No system is going to make hard work not hard. That being said, okay, so we've lowered the stakes.

Then, yeah, I think it's perfectly fine. The discipline ladder in the systems you use to organize your task in time. So start with something simple. I do some sort of basic organization and that's consistent. Then I'm going to ladder that up to like a slightly more complicated system. That's fine. And then when you're comfortable with that. So if that's going to help you kind of ease into like full multi-scale planning,

that's going to be more consistent than just trying to jump into a full system, I think that's absolutely fine. But do not have the expectation that the system, if done right, is going to make hard work easy. And don't go too far. Like a good organizational system should require very little effort from you. It should be automatic. It should be boring. You barely even think about it.

If you're having a hard time keeping up with a system, maybe you laddered up too fast, but also maybe it's just too complicated. Right. Again, it's like a gym routine. If in the gym, you have to spend five minutes before every set, like plugging all this information to an app that's going to tell you what, like, you're now ideal, like, AI generated, best next set to do. And it wants to track with like diodes on your muscles exactly what the contraction is or whatever.

you're going to stop working out. That's too complicated. What you really want is a piece of paper, and it says like, bench press times three. You're like, great, I know what to do. It's helping me be structured,

but the system takes very little of my energy. So yeah, if you want to ladder up a little bit to a more complicated system, yeah, but if you're having a hard time sticking with the system, keep in mind that system

might be too complicated and keep your expectations reasonable. We want to structure our effort over time to keep work sustainable and keep us working on the things that matter, but systems can't transform the actual experience of doing our work. All right. Who do we got next?

Next question is from Rebecca. I struggle with feeling like time has lost its usual structure, particularly due to forced isolation and health challenges. This has been going on before COVID so many years now. How can I build a system that helps re-anchor me to a more traditional sense of time while also allowing for the flexibility I need to do my current life control? trains. Well, Rebecca, first of all, I'm empathetic with what you're talking about here. A lot of people have experienced this in the short term. So you have some sort of disruption to your normal

rhythm of life, like a health-related disruption. And you have this sense of, like your term here, like you're disoriented or unanchored. Like my days are just kind of passing by. People in the hospital report this or if you're recovering from like a really bad flu or from a surgery or something. it really can be disorienting. The good news is when it comes to anchoring ourselves to a sense of structure and meaning, there's incredible flexibility. There's no rule that says you have to be doing this many things. There's no rule that says like structure and meaning won't work unless you have a certain

type of temporal consistency. Like it always has to be these things at these days. It can be much more flexible than that. So you can have some anchor. that these are the things that are important to me to do. And I have some flexibility about how I do them, like, depending on what's going on, that they or this or that. But I don't let them, I don't take my focus off of them.

Like, I'm going to connect to people that matter to me. No, and I'm going to do every single day something along these lines. I'm going to maybe even check it off in, like, a metric tracking place. Now, what that means can vary on the day. I can make the call on the day. If I'm, like, feeling really bad that day, there's, like, a health issue going on. it really could be texting someone. On the other hand, if I'm having a good day, I want to go and see someone spend some time with

them. But the key is I'm anchored to this value and I do something towards this value every day. Maybe there's like a professional creative project you're working on that's important to you. Like I work on this, you know, every week or every day. I'm making progress on this serious progress. It can vary day to day what that means. And maybe for like the next two weeks, it's like the most minimal thing. I'm reading a few pages or writing down one idea.

and other days I'm doing more. But what you're anchoring to is, like, I work on this thing that's important to me every day. Same thing with physical. I get this a lot. I hear about this a lot from people with health issues that makes their physical capacities highly variable day to day. They will talk about the importance of still prioritizing that. And again, just having flexibility and what that means, right? I mean, you can imagine someone in their life who exercises a lot.

It's really important to them. And then they get, like, hip surgery. or something like this. Right now they're kind of laid up. They can't go do like a hard workout at the gym. But what they could re-ancher on is like in my state of recovery, what can I do physically that's going to be good for my recovery and kind of like the best I can do with my current circumstance.

And that's like that's what they're getting, they're anchoring out of. So that's what I would say. And I think it's going to hold more generally for people in a lot of situations. Have the things that matter, these anchors in your life, take action towards them like classic logotherapy have action towards things that matter

and make these things that really matter these relationships really matters a project I'm working on that really matters I think this is important not arbitrary make progress on them anchor to them and then just be very flexible in what that progress is

depending on the state you're in the general rule you want to apply probably is I made progress on this thing to the best of my capabilities given my specific capabilities today. And that's the thing that you get pride out of.

And that's how you find, that's how you find structure, even when it's highly variable in terms of what specific activities you can actually do. I mean, I do this even when I get sick. I'm like, okay, I don't feel well, but I'm going to walk around the block or I'm going to try to read a chapter, you know, like symbolically almost, I'll do, I'm going to text. I'm going to come down and like see how my kids day went at school. Like it might be very, very minor what I'm doing with respect to the things I really anchor to, but I just like completely adjust what that means. But I don't disanchor from them.

Yep. All right. What do we got next? We have our slow productivity corner. All right. Let's hear that theme music. All right. So slow productivity corner is where we answer a question that is related to my most recent book, Slow Productivity, the Lost Art of Accomplishment without burnout.

I now call it Jesse my award winning book after winning the S-A-E-B-W-S-B-B-A-B-A-R. S-A-B-E-W-A-B-E-S. It won a major award. I always get the acronym wrong. Also one of Amazon's best business books of 2024. A lot of what we talk about on the show comes from that book. So if you haven't read it yet, please do. All right, Jesse, what is our slow productivity corner question of the week?

It's from Dilbert. I'm a full-time journalist with young kids. I'm also slated to write a book and I got a startup. I've tried to eliminate one of the projects but can't. Is there a way for me to pursue these activities in parallel? Or is there a neurotic element here and take a let's see how things line up approach in terms of possible book deal, startup traction, job progress? Well, it is a lot of things. Now, of course, I'm speaking as like the king of doing too many jobs seemingly simultaneously.

So I will tell you from my experience, raising kids, writing a book, doing journalism job, and starting something new like a startup. up it feels like too much. You're going to have a hard time doing all of those at like a reasonable level. So if it's possible to sort of pause one of those, I would. The word pause sometimes helps people so they don't have to think about quitting something or stopping something. If you can't, I'm going to say lean into the slow productivity principle of work at a natural pace. Just slow down the pace at which you expect to make progress at each of these things.

double the amount of time you're going to spend on your book. We kind of key in on these things sometimes of like in theory, I could have this book done in eight months. In fact, my publisher would be happy if I got this book done in eighth month. My friend over there got their book done in eighth months.

So I have to get this done in eight months. But if you say, look, I have these other things going on, it's going to be 16 months. Grumble, grumble, grumble, people move on with their lives. And now you've given yourself the ability to go slower, take steady progress but slower progress. You're guiding a startup, sure, but maybe you end up having to like more limit or the

startup is going to start much slower. We're going to just really try to get just this one product and just do a few clients and we're going to take two years instead of one to get this thing up and running. The number of articles I'm running as, am I journalists? It's like going to be fewer than I was doing before. I, during this period, I can't volunteer for all the things for my kids. I'll have to say I'm in this busy period. So I'm saying no to some of these volunteer things.

And later, when I'm less busy, I'll volunteer for more, right? So you can just slow things down. You don't have to do everything at what would be the theoretical maximum pace. That is a strategy that a lot of people use. It's a strategy I use. I take time for things. Also, I'm often interleaving things. So you could think about, I told you like maybe the pause a couple things.

So you finish something, then bring something else back. there's something called the illusion of concurrency that you see often when you look at the records of what seem to be highly accomplished people and that's where you do temporal collapse you see this long list of things that people did and you collapse your understanding of their execution how you imagine they were done

you collapse the time so you imagine them all being done at the same time I am often subjected to the illusion see of concurrency there's like various things I've done. I've written eight books. I have a bunch of like papers I've written in a bunch of citations, right? I've written all these articles for the New Yorker. I have the podcast. People see that just written next to each other.

And they do temporal collapse and imagine someone doing all that stuff at the same time. They're like, wow, that would be impossible. You must like super be hustling or something like that. But the point is I don't do it all at the same time. Like when I'm writing a book, maybe I'm not working on other things. I take years off in between books. where I'm focusing on this. And when I'm publishing,

when I was publishing five papers a year to get tenure, that was kind of like the main professional thing I was doing. I wasn't podcasting. I wasn't writing for the New Yorker. I had like one book in that whole period that I wrote, and I took my time on that book. It's like slowing down on things, interleaving between things.

In the moment, it feels like hopelessly, like hopeless levels of impedance. Like, oh my God, I'm going so slow. But you zoom out the 10 years and you're like, well,

there's that startup you did and that book you wrote and you have your journalism, we're going well and and we're like the room parent for your kid's school. And it adds up to a lot in the end. So if you have to do these things concurrently slow down and whether you slow down or not, also pause things, be more sequential, do this and then do that. Days are short but life is long. So there's a lot that can add up.

What you want to avoid is like I want to do each of these things at the theoretical maximum level I could be doing it if I was doing it by itself. And I want to reach that level for all the things I'm doing. I'm going to do them all at the same time. Because this other person had done all these things, they must have done and I could do it too. But you're forgetting they did that over five years. And they did this thing before they did that thing. And this took much longer than you thought.

So slow down and if possible be a little bit more sequential and a little bit less concurrent. So Jesse, that illusion of concurrency is something I studied way back when when I was writing student books, I was studying road scholars. And the phrase I had for it back then was the paradox of the relaxed road. scholar. I interviewed all these Rhodes Scholars for my first book. They're not stressed out grinds. Some of them are. But a lot of them were. There's a paradox. So if they're so accomplished, why aren't they like jittery? I haven't slept in three years type of locked in. It's because it's like, oh, they tend to aggregate accomplishments. I did this, and I did that, and then I kind of took my time on this. And over time, the list looks long. And then we have the illusion

of concurrency. And we imagine someone doing all those things at the same time. But people are less concurrent than you, than you, uh, than you really imagine. How many books do you think you'll have written by the time you're like 75? I don't know. Um, let me think here. I started writing when I,

see, my first book came out when I was, what, 22. I'm 42. So that's like four a year, a decade. I'm going to write four books a year.

Forget slowing down. I'm going to write four concurrently because I'm going to disappear and transform myself. And I'm going to live in the gym and I'm going to crush preacher curls while dictating. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to dictate multiple books at the same time and I'm going to have voice recognition software and then AI is going to fill it out. And I'm going to crush preacher curls and write four books a year. Awesome. So I guess at that pace, though, okay, 30 years from now, three decades, I don't know, maybe written another 12 to 15 books.

If I keep writing books, we'll see. I like writing books, though. It's my favorite. All right, do we got a call this week? We do. All right, let's hear it. Hi, Kel. I'm Sarah, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa.

I've been the director of graduate studies for my department for the past three years, and I teach many of your deep work and slow productivity techniques to my MA and Ph.D. students, which they have found incredibly helpful. So thank you. But now I have a productivity question of my own. How should I time block on sabbatical? I'm about to start a full year sabbatical and want to make significant progress on my research and writing. I'm starting a new book project and also preparing my application for full professor.

While I know how to time block when I'm maxed out on service and teaching, I'm just not sure how to organize what feels like vast expanses of time. to dedicate to my writing. I also have busy school-age kids, and so I'll need a clear, shut down complete ritual every day at 4 p.m. when the after-school activities start. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks. Well, Sarah, first of all, I can completely understand your situation. I've been a director of graduate studies before. I'm currently the director of undergraduate studies for our department,

and just gave a talk about deep work to our grad students. So we got some concurrency here. All right, here's the key for sabbatical. I've done one or two sabbaticals at this point. I've done one sabbatical. I'm up for a second sabbatical, but I'm holding off on it for now. But my summers are kind of like sabbaticals every year because I don't teach or do research on the summer. I don't take summer salary.

Here's what I've learned. You have kind of two goals for this time. One, you want to make really good creative progress on your. your writing. So you have a writing project, it's probably like a book or something, and your full application, which I did last year. So again, like Sarah, we're really linked here in our timelines. That's just like another writing project as well. You want to make good creative progress on those, much more progress than you would normally make during a normal school year, but you also want to reap relaxation and flexibility and recharging, right? Like that's a key part of the sabbatical.

So how do you do this? Here's what I do in my summers, and I'm going to suggest you consider this for your sabbatical. Instead of time blocking, use an aggressive scheduling template. So I've talked about on the show before the idea of like a weekly scheduling template where it's like a general set of rules for what you do on different days of the week. And I'm going to give you my exact weekly scheduling template I use during the summer because it could be perfect for you or you could use this as the foundation for evolving your own. So my scheduling template was, all right, Monday through Friday,

first thing I do is write. Right? So I start my day with writing on Monday and Fridays. I'll take that writing until after lunch, do a very quick admin block. Hey, what's going on with emails or anything I need to do? And then shut down my work. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I write till lunch.

I leave like 90 minutes after that for meetings and phone calls and the type of interaction. with other people that you still even have to do during sabbatical. I might have more of this my life than you because of my writing career as well, followed by an admin block and shut down before school's out. Like that can be your scheduling template, right? You don't really need the time block because you know what to do. You get the kids to school, you write. Monday and Fridays, you write longer.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays, you don't write quite as long and you have time there for, like, meetings and stuff you have to do. You know when your day is done, do a clear shutdown. And then it's all just like family household stuff. right so you don't even really need the time block that's more or less what i do in the summer the one edition being on one of those days we have in the afternoon uh the podcast recording all right just do something like that and that's going to make sure that you're making daily progress on writing at the best time it also gives you like i like that template because it gives you freedom from meetings Friday all the way through Monday if you add the weekends and

that's really nice that when you get to Thursday you're like i don't even have to look at my calendar for professional stuff until I get to Tuesday. That's like really nice. I really recommend that. It still keeps you doing just enough admin that you don't fall off the radar and stuff that's important. And you can still have meetings and stuff like that. I learned this lesson. You have to have time put aside for meetings or what's going to happen is you're going to convince yourself.

All I'm going to do is right. And then when the inevitable meetings come up, you see each of them as like a failure or a problem and that's psychologically not good. So just put aside time for them. My other piece of advice is after you shut down, this is a cool time to have a lot of like house household of personal projects you're working on, like leaning into stuff around the house or with your kids and we're going to, we're going to like completely renovate this room or we're going to like transform this or we're going to learn this new thing or we're going to go see all these shows or whatever.

Like, it's easy to tell yourself what you want because work is so exhausting until you get to your sabbatical. It's just to be able to kick your feet up and not have to do anything in the evenings and afternoons, but actually humans like to do things, especially if it's stuff that is self-directed with no deadlines and you're in charge of and you like it. So be really busy with your non-work stuff because it's kind of fun. I've learned out of my sabbaticals and my summers. It helps to have projects.

But use a weekly scheduling template. Maybe start with mine and if that doesn't work, you can adjust it as fit. But you don't even need the time block during your sabbatical. You have this automatic schedule you do. You love it. You don't have to think about it. And you'll get a lot of writing done. I can't wait till my next sabbatical.

When was your last one? It was when Josh was born. So that would have been six years ago. Oh, so last year you just had a semester off. Was that it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So sabbaticals typically is six years, six years of normal semesters earns you a sabbatical. Which is a year?

Which is a, well, so it depends, right? Depends on the program. I'm like Georgetown does what a lot of places do, which is it could be half a year. It could be one semester full pay or it can be a full academic year, two semesters at half pay. The idea there being like if you want to take a full year sabbatical, it's typically because you're working on a project that you might have funding for. Like I have a grant from the National Institute of Health to work on this thing and that's going to cover my salary. A lot of computer scientists will take a full year sabbatical and kind of work as a research and residence. at like Google or something and like Google will pay the other half of their salary.

I can just, if I'm working on a book, I will use like the book advance to fill in the other half of the salary. So, you know, it kind of depends on places. But this is, it would make sense because I, when my youngest was born, I was on sabbatical. He's six. And I'm due for a sabbatical next year. That makes sense. So I'm in my sixth year.

But I'm not taking it next year because I have all this stuff I'm doing for the university. that I'm kind of seen through. So I'm taking a little bit more time before I take it. But man, when I get the sabbatical, I'm going to be coming in here. I'm going to be in like a tank top. I'm going to be like crushing a beer. I'm going to have sunglasses on. I've got my legs up.

Those are going to be some relaxed podcast. We're going to move this studio next to a gym. Be right next to a gym. I'm going to crush it. Preacher curls while I podcast while I dictate. So my podcast will also be me dictating, just me dictating chapters of one of my four books. We'll just multitask baby. It's going to be awesome.

Crush it. All right. Let's see here. Oh, we got a case study this week. A case study with visuals. Yep. So case studies where people write in to Jesse at Jesse at Calton, uport.com to give their case studies of using that type of advice we talk about here on this show in their own life.

And today's case studies from Zach who sent some visuals. So those who are watching instead of just listening, I'll pull some of this up on the screen. All right. Here's what Zach says. I am 29 and have a full-time job as a church media specialist. The job is mostly graphic design work and people asking me to blast out announcements on social media. It's a good job. For the past decade, my creative pursuit has been music, primarily in the pop rock genre.

After spending most of that time writing, recording, and performing in a couple of bands, I recently made the decision to start a new chapter as a solo artist. starting in late 2023, I began the process of self-recording my first album, and it was only possible because of deep work. My wife and I would determine which evenings would be good for recording, and I would head out after dinner on those days to record as much as I could of whichever instrument I was tracking at the time. I didn't always feel excited and energized to start, but the work always got done. Some of those sessions got canceled and interrupted, but the minutes added up. I recorded a total of 16 songs over nearly a year, 10 of which officially made the album, which is currently in the mixing phase.

The majority of recording for the album was completed in a 10-foot-by-20-foot indoor storage unit that was a short drive through town. Other than always being too hot or too cold, it served me well as a studio space. During that time, my wife and I were blessed to be able to build a home as well as a 16-by-16 standalone shed that my father-in-law named Studio Z. Inspired by my productive times in the storage unit and by hearing about the concept of the writing shed on the podcast, I decided to go all in on setting up the studio shed in a way that I am hoping will spark creativity and productivity.

The studio is just for creative work. It contains every instrument and piece of equipment I own, as well as some key books from my library, my grandfather's Corona typewriter, cozy brown leather furniture, and other key items to make an interesting environment. The desk was made from a massive hickory tree that was in the middle of our property before the build. I even ordered some Studio Z coasters. All of this makes the studio feel very official, and it still holds a unique charm of a writing shed or a small cabin. In addition, because building materials aren't cheap, the whole thing feels as weighty as a high-end lab notebook.

If you don't know that reference, it's from slow productivity. All right, let's see some pictures before we get into this. Up on the screen now, for those who are watching, is the storage shed, or storage use. unit in which he recorded the first album. So what we see here is it's narrow. You can see on the side that this is like corrugated metal. So this is like a storage unit. There's a, I guess, is there not even carpet on the ground.

Man, that must be echoing there. There's a couch and some guitars. I see some stratacaster. So I appreciate that. There's a piano and there's some drums, right? So this is a non-conditioned space in which he would go to record. Now I'm going to shoot over to the shed. Ooh, that looks nice.

So here's an exterior shot of the shed. It's like a nice looking, like, mini house with gray siding. Look inside the shed. Ooh, very nice space. Good hardwood floors. We see mini split unit. So he's got heating, he's got conditioning. And here it is all laid out.

Oh, that looks great, Jesse. Brown leather chairs, hardwood floors. Cool stuff up on the walls. A nice desk. some specific Studio Z paraphernalia, including this logo. Let's see. Oh, yeah, there's my books.

All right, this place is awesome. There's his Studio Z. There's a Corona typewriter in the corner. That looks like something like maybe a remarkable. He has down there. Zach is speaking my language. This is awesome, Zach. All right.

So a couple things to say about this. One, we see in this case study, the slow productivity principle of working at a natural pace. We just talked about this earlier as well. in one of our questions, doing work consistently, good work consistently. Sometimes you feel like it,

sometimes it don't, adds up. And in the end, do you really care how quickly it adds up? Right? Zach wanted to record an album. Now, you might say,

if I want to record an album, I have to be able to spend a month and go to an expensive recording studio and just do it. And because I don't have access to a month to do this and I don't have access to an expensive recording studio,

I can't. But Zach used a, a slow productivity approach. It's like, well, why don't I just record some nights each week? I have a space. It's not perfect, but it's a space I only dedicate to that. And I'll record what I can record. And it might just be laying down a bass track that I throw out the next time.

And some of these will be canceled. Yes, we're busy. Something comes up. I'm not feeling well. But I'll just keep coming back relentlessly. A couple nights a week, I'll make time. And it took a year, but a whole album came out of it. So that's number one I'm going to take out of this story.

Number two is the power of spaces. Having a space to go, even if it wasn't a great space, there's a storage unit, helped him make that progress. This is a space I've dedicated to work and you take that seriously. I love then that once he had the resources, one of the things he invested in was a really nice space for creativity. We undervalue space. Like, I have the Deep Work HQ.

Probably don't need it. Right? I could record this podcast at home. I could record it in just like a small office. But it's like a fantastic investment. I come here to write. I come here to work. I've got my library here.

We have the studio, like the nice studio here. It's a place that just changes my mindset to get away from it. The shed that Zach built is fantastic. He's got Studio Z custom artwork in there and big leather chairs. The total amount of sort of like creativity and peace and just energy that's going to inject into his life is a fantastic investment. So we under value space. We feel like it's a superfluous investment. But it's often not.

Cool spaces really have cool effects. So I was happy to see those pictures, Zach, and happy to hear your story. So our two lessons are working at a natural pace. And space matters, build cool spaces. More people should build cool spaces. All right. So we have a final segment coming up. I think we have another tech corner coming up.

But first, you mention another sponsor. I want to talk about our friends at Element, L-M-N-T. Element is a zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix and sparkling electrolyte water, born from the growing body of research revealing that optimal health outcomes occur at sodium levels, two to three times government recommendations. Each stick, pack, or sparkling can delivers a meaningful dose of electrolytes free of sugar, artificial colors, or other dodgy ingredients. That's what I like about Element.

No sugar, no weird colors. You can get those electrolytes you need when you've been sweating or speaking a lot, you're a little dehydrated without having to worry about junk, without having to feel like you're drinking like a super sugary sports drink. The stick pack is powder. She has put that in any water bottle. And then the can is that you can also get it already pre-mixed into a sparkling water that you can take out of your fridge. You kind of have those two options for getting to your element.

I use the stick packs. We got a whole box. I'm at home. I've already gone through a whole pack this morning. Especially sometimes I feel dehydrated in the morning. I'll drink it. I'll drink it after workouts. after a long day of lecturing or podcasting.

I'm going to take it as well. I'm a big Element fan. There is a kind of a cool list of the various people who use Element. U.S. Olympians, professional athletes, including Bradley Beale, many different special forces teams, health experts all use them. It always makes me wonder. I wonder if like the Navy SEALs of professional athletes when they're doing their ads for elements, say like computer scientist, technology theorist use it. it somehow feels like less compelling. I have to like Cal Newport,

who has written many articles for the New Yorker about the impact of technology on society uses element. That somehow is probably not compelling to their audiences in the way that me saying that Bradley Beale uses element is compelling to our audience. You have been doing those preacher curls, though. I'm hammering out. This is my new ad read.

Hey, let's say you're crushing hammer curls at the preacher curls at the gym. Work up a thirst. Got to pound some element. Me and Bradley Biel agree. Pounding element at the gym while doing preacher curls will help you get through not just two, but three or four books at the same time. Now, I do use element every day. They also have element hot. People like the element chocolate chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, chai and chocolate raspberry.

Now we're in winter. You can enjoy those with hot water. Also helps when I should do that with my throat. You know, I feel it during allergy season, my throat. Some hot elements, what I need for the studio. Let's get some hot element. Yep. All right.

Let's talk to, let's talk to the team about getting us. some of the medley there. So, right, I'm a big fan of element. It is the way to do your hydration. We got a good deal here. Members of our community can receive a free element sample pack with any order if they purchase through drink element.com slash deep.

That's drink element, LMNT.com slash deep. And you will get that free sample pack in your order. I also want to talk about our friends at Zibiotics because we are getting to that holiday season. We're talking Thanksgiving. We're talking like Christmas. We're talking all the parties that surround that. And if you were like me and Jesse, which is to say not super young, that's how I say our age now, not super young. Yeah, I've arthritis in my left knee, so I'm old. I know, and I'm going to see T's scan tomorrow. But we're still going to hammer preacher curls when we can.

We're not super young anymore. So it's not like we can just go to a party, you know, have some celebratory drinks and not feel it the next day. That's where the product like Z biotics is really appealing. They call it pre-alcohol. So you actually drink this before you have a couple drinks in order to help you metabolize those drinks better, have a better day the next day. So it is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking.

So here's how it works. So when you drink alcohol, there's a byproduct that's created in your gut. And it's this byproduct that causes a lot of that rough feeling the next day, not like people traditionally claim just dehydration. So pre-alcohol produces an enzyme that just helps break that byproduct down, so less of it builds up. So you drink the Zbiotic, the little, it's like this little glass thing. You drink it before your first drink of the night,

then you drink responsibly and you'll feel your best the next day. So it's a cool idea. Something that might not have been relevant when we're 21, but now that we're not super young, I'm glad that this exists. So with the holiday season upon us, when you know you might be consuming a bit more alcohol than usual, pre-alcohol can help you stay on track

and not let this season throw any of us off course. Go to Zbiotics.com slash deep to learn more and to get 15% off your first order if you also use Deep that promo code at checkout. Zbiotics is backed with a 100% money back guarantee. So if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they will refund your money. No questions asked.

So remember to head to Zbiotics.com slash deep and use that code deep at checkout for 15% off. All right, Jesse, let's do our final segment. I don't know if I should call this final segment Tech Corner or Cal reacts. These are like the two things I normally do in this segment. either I react to something in the news or I explain something about technology with my nerd computer science hat on. This is kind of a mix of both. I do have an article to bring up, but it's from four years ago, so it's not like it is timely in that sense.

But there is a technology issue that I want to just briefly dive into because it's important to know about. And I have a sort of a rogue point to add to the discussion. So the particular technology issue I want to talk about is so, called Section 230. And I have an article up here that I'm going to use to help explain it. This is an article from Pro Market, the journal Pro Market. Actually, an article in Pro Market not long ago about age restrictions on social media. This is an article written by Tim Wu about Section 230.

It's up here as like an explainer because Tim is great and he does a good job of explaining it. It's not that this is a contemporary article. All right. So if you're unfamiliar with it, Section 230 refers to Section 230 of the 19th 96 Communications Decency Act. It grants an immunity the platforms that host the content of others. Critically, what it says is even if you are moderating on your digital site, even if you're moderating content, so you are making decisions about what's on there or not, you're still not liable for what this content says.

right so so what this was trying to address back in the day was uh it was sort of agreed on or it seemed kind of like obvious that if you were just like purely a hosting platform like i'm an internet service provider like i'm not responsible for what people are doing on the internet through me but then we began to get services that hosted information so you had like prodigy and compi and then aOL and they were worried like okay but we're actually making decisions here here. Like if you come on here and post a bunch of credit card numbers, we're going to take that down. Are we going to be treated like newspapers or can we still kind of treat like we're just like an internet service provider and we're not responsible for anything that was on there? This clarified that and it is now widely and strongly embraced in particular by something that did not exist back then, which is a social media platform. So it's sort of like the core of the legal immunity that social media platforms have for you suing them about stuff that. that's on there. Now, this doesn't actually stop all of those lawsuits. There has been, especially more recently, lawsuits aimed at social media companies. There's been some, for example,

aimed at meta about one of them I, from a couple years ago, I've written some about was about you helped exacerbate, your content exacerbated eating disorder for like our child. And you should be responsible. There's another lawsuit about our child committed suicide. And we think, in part because of what they're exposed to on your platform, and this is sort of your fault. So there are some lawsuits, but there would be a lot more, say, for Section 230. All right, today, there's a lot of discussions today about technology regulation, a lot of fights, a lot of agreement as well. Section 230 reform is one of these things that's on the table. Now, it turns out both the political left and the political right here in America have some interest

in reforming 230 or getting rid of Section 230 altogether. Donald Trump has talked about this as well. Recently, I think the Biden administration has talked some about it. But here's the thing, and this is what's pointed out in this article, they have different reasons for

wanting to do this same action. All right, so Tim Wu in this article summarizes how the left and the right think about the issue of Section 230. All right, so here's what the left says according to Tim Wu.

We have a huge problem with fascist disinformation and propaganda, and the platforms are a big part of it because they bear no responsibility for what appears on their platforms. According to Tim, the left wants to remove Section 230 reforms so that you can hold platforms responsible for this quote-unquote bad information they're allowing to be on their platform. The right has a different reason. So here is Tim Wu summarizing the rights argument. The platforms are grossly biased against conservative speech, and they should only have immunity if they don't censor anyone. So what the right is upset about is especially like in the 2019-2020, the 2015-2020, there was this period in which there was heavy control of the information, the moderation, and conservatives felt like things that are mainstream conservative points would be censored. but not even like relatively extreme points from the left. They said,

this is because these companies are based in very blue states. And the employees are disproportionately blue. And this is not just moderating on safe information, but it's like bias against conservatives. So they kind of have this sense that maybe somehow you could modify 230. They kind of want to modify it, not remove it in such a way that it's like, if you are censoring us, like if it feels like you're censoring conservatives,

it's like this time bomb. 2.30 disappears for you and you're going to be sued about everything. But if you don't censor us, then like you're still going to be protected. Whereas the left just says like if we could just sue, then we could stop you from publishing bad stuff. So they both want to reform 230 but for different reasons. All right. So Tim's argument here is that both of them are misguided, both the left and the right, because reforming or removing 230 is not going to accomplish either of these goals.

which I think is interesting. So he says, for example, yes, no one can deny that Facebook and Twitter, not to mention 4chan, had been the breeding ground for lots of crazy disinformation and propaganda. But as Tim points out, so has NewsMack, Brett Bart, O&I, the Gateway Pundit,

and dozens of other sites and broadcasters that are not subject to 230 protection because they're not digital information platforms. So in other words, he's saying, getting rid of that protection is not going to in some sense make it possible for you to stop the information you don't like because there's plenty of new sources that don't have that protection and you don't like the things they are saying. So he says the liberals have a fantasy that potential civil liability would finally force platforms to do more about information on their sites to take responsibility.

But Tim Wu is skeptical that that would actually work. All right. Then shifting to the right wing, he says the right wing fantasy is about 230 repeal. are even more off base. For one thing, without Section 230 immunity, well, this is going to date this, a figure like Donald Trump would almost certainly be kicked off Twitter because he constantly defames people.

All right, he was kicked off soon after that, but his argument was you would have the opposite effect that if they didn't like things that conservative figures were saying, they would actually be more likely to just kick the figures completely off because they don't want to be sued

about the bad things they say. They'll be more worried about that than, you know, being sued for kicking him off. He says you could get the opposite. You could get the opposite result. Basically, it would be too expensive to keep anyone controversial around because of all the lawsuits anyone controversial will generate. So he's like, no, no, what you're going to get is massive censorship.

And then these platforms are just going to be people sharing like pie recipes. As for erasing anti-consertive bias, repeal a section 230 would have no obvious effect on that at all. the decisions to remove things like false claims of election fraud are actually decisions of the platforms, decisions for which they already bear liability, if any, uh, zero effect, right? So basically it's like, I'm looking at this from a lawyer's perspective. Neither of these fantasies is going to be successful for removing 230. All right. I want to introduce a third reason. Not a lot of people are pushing this reason, but it's interesting to me. I call this the poison pill strategy.

What's intriguing about something like Section 230 reform is not the idea that it's going to make these global conversation platforms better, but that it might make them financially unviable. That's interesting to me. I am interested. I'm not saying I want to do this if I was in charge of the FTC tomorrow. But I am interested in this idea of poison pill regulation, that regulation that is invented that basically say, certain forms of communication which have been net negative just sort of become

kind of financially unviable, better ones will happen before. I know tinkering in innovation like this is dangerous, tinkering in the markets is like this is dangerous, but in this particular case, the argument I made in the deep dive today and I'm made in my writing before is that global conversation platforms

trying to build a platform like Twitter slash X and which 600 million people are trying to talk on the same platform is not intrinsic to the internet, is not intrinsic to expression, is not intrinsic to free speech. It is a corporate play to try to maximize profits that doesn't work well. It plays poorly with humans. It is an aspect of the digital environment in which we are surrounded, the modern digital

environment that creates tons of disorders. The internet does not need 600 million people on the same particular internet site or app to give you all the benefits that the internet promises. much smaller niche organizations, people publishing their own information accessible to anyone, that they stand by, small groups that are self-c curated by communities that actually has stakes in what each other has to say, plus easy accessibility of information that's published in ways where people stand by it, like newspapers, for example. All of this is fantastic stuff the Internet does.

The problem is the mobile revolution and the shift of our experience with the Internet through our phone, and the domination of mobile social media apps on our phones warped a lot of people's brains into thinking that these small number of apps that exist on our phone and have these massive global conversation platforms are somehow synonymous with the internet. But they're not. And so if something ends up being a poison pill to these type of global conversation platforms would probably be the medicine that the internet needs. We do not need these for the internet to be successful.

So I'm always secretly hoping with some of these regulations that they're actually, accidentally going to be a poison pill that suddenly makes the business model for something like Instagram or TikTok no longer make a lot of sense. I think a smaller, weirder, more esoteric, heterogeneous, distributed, more individual than large corporate internet is a good one. And so there's the poison pill interpretation of Section 230 reform. I don't think many people share that, but I'm going to throw that into the conversation as long as we're going to geek out. Because I think it's another interesting way to think about what might be happening with these particular technological reforms. All right, Jesse, there we go.

That's our policy, tech policy corner. And the poison pills from the Matrix? No, it actually comes from corporate takeovers. So in the 80s where corporate raiders would borrow a ton of money and then use that to buy enough stock and a company to take control of it, right? So yeah, like corporate raiders in the 80s where you had these brands whose market capitalization was less than like how much money, even just the stuff they owned is worth. right? Like we have $100 million for the assets and our stock, their full market capitalization

of our stock is $90 million. So what you could do is like, I'm going to borrow a $90 million buy all the stock and then sell all the stuff from the company and make a $2 million profit. So what board started doing, and business people out here are going to say you got this wrong. But my understanding is what board started doing is they changed the bylaws of their companies that have these rules in it that basically said things like if a single person, owns more than this much of the stock, you know, like all of our employees have to be pantsless or we're going to take the engines off our planes. They call them poison pills.

Things would go into effect. It makes the company, like, not valuable. Okay. Yeah. If, like, someone owns 51% of our stock, then, like, we're going to burn all the printing presses type of it. So they put these poison pill provisions into their, I think that's where it's from. All right.

Anyways, that's all the time we have for today. Thank you for listening. We'll 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 the, their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you got to sign up for my newsletter at caldneyport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.