Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 336: On Screens and Solitude

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

In a recent article for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson writes about the troubling trends toward increased solitude. In this episode, Cal looks at the role technology plays in these trends, pointing out some surprising factors and then using these insights to come up with a practical plan for reconnecting with the world. He then answers listener questions and concludes with a tech corner segment inspired by yet another New Yorker column. 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: On Screens and Solitude [3:09] - How can I study at night after my doctor work? [26:49]- Can you comment on Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness essay? [36:45]- How do I successfully pursue my non-work values? [51:33]- How can I become a better writer? [1:00:56]- Can someone break into the top 0.1% of their respective field without periods of unsustainable and obsessive work? [1:02:44]- CALL: Managing active projects [1:08:42] CASE STUDY: A follow-up from Episode 323 [1:13:02] CAL REACTS: An Offline Person Tries TikTok for the First Time [1:19:34] 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?axios.com/2024/06/23/leopold-aschenbrenner-ai-future-silicon-valleytheatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/american-loneliness-personality-politics/681091/newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/what-happened-when-an-extremely-offline-person-tried-tiktok Thanks to our Sponsors: upliftdesk.com/deeplandrover.com/usaexpressvpn.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. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ. I'm joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, some irony. You know, last week we did this episode, we were talking about morning routines, and we were kind of lamenting the over-the-top nature of morning routine videos online. And we looked at some of those like Jocko and Joe Rogan talking. him out as ice bath.

But anyways, we put out the video of that episode and our YouTube guy named an optimal morning routine and the video is doing really well. So we have become, YouTube is treating us like one of those over the top morning routine videos, even though the video was itself actually critiquing a lot of those morning routine videos. So I thought it was funny. Yeah, I mean, he did say that those types of videos generate a lot of attraction. Yeah.

God knows how that algorithm works. Morning routines have been a big thing for years now. I saw it mentioned even like in the article we're going to talk about today in the deep dive of the Derek Thompson Atlantic article. He talks about it at some point in there how he has become or he became sort of addicted to watching morning routine videos and TikToks. So I guess it's like a genre that's just interesting in itself, just watching people with their really organized, really organized mornings. My morning routine video like an actual day in the life will be a lot more stressful. there'd be a lot of you said you were just going upstairs

to get your hat you were up there for 10 minutes we've got to go just a lot of me yelling at my kids why is your shoe not tied every morning every morning you tie your shoe I should not have to tell you this

you'd be like something you would show before you interrogated enemy combatant just to kind of get them all stressed and anxious so that you could get your answers out of them anyways I thought that was pretty funny I haven't had yet a chance to try out. We're talking about this done daily, like the online coaching thing I was interested in.

I haven't tried it out yet, but I know several of you told me you did sign up. So remember to send in your reports. Again, I'm fascinated by this model. Done daily. Have like an executive coach, but it's online and accountability, multi-scale productivity with the coach. I'm just curious. I think that's it.

I don't know if we have any other. We're like out of the season when I'm bragging about slow productivity. anymore because we're done with the best of the year list. So I feel like we're lean and mean now. Just a quick heads up for the deep dive that we're going to do. That article came from Amy, who's actually the follow-up case study. Oh, there we go. So the thing we're going to talk about today came from Amy, who is also our source of our case study.

Yeah. It's a follow-up case study. She was also in episode 323, I think. All right. It's all things Amy today. I love it. All right. Well, speaking of that, let's get started with our deep dive.

So the writer Derek Thompson, who I know and I like, It has a big new feature article in the Atlantic right now. Many of you sent it to me, so you probably have heard of it. It's titled, The Anti-Social Century. Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It's changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality. For this article, Derek talked to a lot of different experts and explored a lot of different related ideas. But today, there's one point in particular from the article I want to focus on, because I think it represents,

one of the biggest issues created by our modern digital environment. The good news is once we make that issue clear, the solution will also be quite obvious. All right, so start here. Let's talk a little bit more about what Derek is saying in this article. Then we'll point out the part I care about. For those who are watching, instead of just listing, I have it up on the screen here. There's the headline, the opening graphic. All right.

So I want to read, I'm going to read a quote from this, but just to set it up, The key idea in this article is Derek notes a lot has been said about the so-called loneliness epidemic. So loneliness is an actual negative subjective state connected to the sense that you are not connected to other people. Derek says this is a bit of a misnomer in the sense that if you look at the data around loneliness in particular, it's not like that is getting a lot worse or that's getting worse in some sort of pronounced way. He says the real issue is solitude, which he defines his time spent alone. Solitude does not depend on you feeling bad about it. It's just an actual physical state.

Let me read you a key quote about this from his article. The privatization of American leisure is one part of a much bigger story. Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other people. period for which we have trustworthy data going back all the way to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2003, it plunged by more than 20 percent, according to the American Time Use survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So the issue is not necessarily that we're lonely, but that we're spending more time alone,

and a lot of cases, we don't mind it. Derek goes on to say self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America. All right. So there's a lot of problems that Derek surveys in this article that come from this rise in solitude. But there's one point in particular that I want to highlight because I think it's particularly relevant to the modern digital environment. So again, I'm going to quote from the article here. this is Derek talking about one of multiple problems with solitude. Richard V. Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me that for men as for women, something hard to define is loss when we pursue a life of isolationist comforts.

He calls it needness, the way we make ourselves essential to our families and community. I think at some level, we all need to feel like we're a jigsaw piece that's going to fit into a jigsaw summer, he said. This neediness can come in several forms, social, economic, or communitarian. Our children's and partners can depend on us for care or income. Our colleagues can rely on us to finish a project or to commiserate about an annoying boss, our religious congregations, and weakened poker parties can count us to

fill a pew or to bring the dip. All right. So let's talk about this notion of neediness. I think we can kill this here, Jesse. In my book, Digital Minimalism, which actually made a lot of points that I think are being underscored by the experts in this article, I made this related argument where I said, look, when it comes time, when it comes to sociality, what our brain really looks for is us sacrificing non-trivial time and attention on behalf of someone else. So we have evolved to think about if I am sacrificing non-trivial time and attention, so reproductively relevant, survival relevant resources, on behalf of another person, that person is someone with whom I have an important connection.

We're connected. We are in a community, right? This is an important person to me. So it's sort of measuring how much you sacrifice for someone to measure how important that person actually is in your life. So you can imagine if we're drawing a social graph. So we put points for all the different people around you, like in a tribe back in the Paleolithic period. You draw a line between people if they're sacrificing non-trivial attention on behalf of each other. And what you would want is your point in the middle of that graph to be densely connected into this web.

You have lots of people to whom you're connected to, and a lot of those people are connected to each other as well. So now imagine you're drawing your social life, one of these social graphs today. the problem is if you're not sacrificing non-trivial time and attention on behalf of someone, you don't get to draw a line. And so we're seeing a lot of people's social graphs are sparse. And if your social graph is sparse, you're not feeling that neededness that Reeves talk about. So I just think this is two sides of the same coin. He talks about neediness. That's a subjective description of what it means to have a connection to an individual community that they need you.

play an important role. I use sacrifice of non-tribular resources as a sort of quantitative or functional description of what this type of connection means. It's about what are you actually giving up on behalf of another person? So the more of these actual neededness or sacrifice connections you have to other people around you, the more resilient you become, the more fulfilled you become, the more satisfied you become about your life. So why then is this dissolving, as Reeves points out in Derek Thompson's article?

Well, I think technology plays a major role in that story of dissolution. And it does so in two major ways that sort of work together into a negative symphony. So the first type of way where the modern digital technology plays a role in this is it leads us away from that type of behavior, that sacrifice a non-trivial time and attention that's really required to feel connected to someone. Let's think about the ways in which it does this. digital communication, low friction digital communication, simulates enough of the idea of connecting to another person that it can help stave off loneliness. But it doesn't require sacrifice,

so it doesn't give us that neededness that we also crave. I think is a subtle point that's really important here. It's easy to text message someone that's very low friction. It's easy to jump on someone's social feed, see what they're doing, and leave a comment. it's low risk, low friction, doesn't take much energy. If you're doing enough of this, you're probably not going to feel lonely because you're interacting with people.

Like, I am not alone in this world. There are other people that I am interacting with. But this is so low friction, it's not requiring you to sacrifice any non-trivial time and attention. You're not taking out your afternoon, putting everything aside to go, like, for a walk with a friend to help them figure something out. You're not cooking soup and driving it over to your friend's house because they're sick and giving it to them. You're taking that, you're making that sacrifice to make their life better.

You're not doing anything, any significant investment or resources. So the social circuits in your mind don't see these people as being a part of your social graph. So we get this mismatch. I don't have loneliness because I'm simulating these social connections. And without loneliness, what's driving you to sacrifice this time and attention? There's nothing left to drive you. It's comfortable to be at home. You don't feel particularly bad in the moment. Why get off the couch and go for that walk or deliver that soup. This is a point that's emphasized actually in Derek's article that loneliness serves the purpose of feeling really bad.

So to make that bad feeling go away, we get off our butts and go do things for other people and the neediness follows. Social media and digital or in particular digital communication, more generally, short circuits the loneliness loop. And so we feel completely content to keep sitting there, not really noticing that that actual substantial social graph is quietly beginning to dissipate behind. behind us. Social media itself, if we focus in here more, also plays a role in being led astray from these type of non-trivial sacrifice behaviors, because it gives us a sense, if you're a

user, that you're a part of a community. Yeah, I'm a community. I have leadership. I'm out there. I'm needed, right? There's my followers need me. Because look, I post the things and they give me reactions and it passes around. So again, it short circuits the sort of of natural human drive we have to be in community, to be there for our community, to be someone that people look up to and depend on. It kind of simulates that enough that we don't feel bad about ourselves, but those deeper parts of our social circuitry say we're not sacrificed on behalf of a community. We're not really out there doing something that is hard and requiring energy. These aren't real connections. These are Potemkin podiums at

which we're making our imagined grand speeches. But it's just an algorithm ginning up some fake response so that we feel important. So again, this is a theme that we see. Video games are doing the same thing, especially for young men. It scratches that itch to be a leader to stand up and be someone people can count on because your call-a-duty squad is killing a bunch of Nazis. But you're not really. You're deeper down.

Your mind knows this isn't real. Where's the actual physical pain or hardship? Where's the time we're actually investing, you know, helping the guy down the street dig his car out after the storm. We're not actually doing the stuff our brain counts. So again, this theme comes back again and again. With the technology scratches the itch that would otherwise drive us to do the stuff that matters, just enough we don't do the stuff that matters.

And we have a disconnect between one part of our brain is happy with the simulated sociality, but the other part of our brain is not. And we don't have that neededness because we know deep down our call of duty squad, and our social media followers don't really need us. And is it really a friend if all we're doing is trading text? The final way, the technology, I think, is leading to this, actually comes from the world of work. So it seems maybe like it's coming from out of nowhere, but I think it connects. So like I write about in my book, Slow Productivity, we have pseudo-productivity,

the management heuristic that visible activities are proxy for useful effort, combined with mobile computing. so now I can do work at a very visible fine-grained level and eddy location on earth. Those two things have made us very, very busy, especially or notably outside of our normal work hours. Of course, I wrote a whole book about this. But from the point of view of what we're talking about here, neediness in the social graph, being more and more busy outside of normal work hours means there's less and less time the sacrifice non-trivial time and attention on behalf of other people.

So that, too, is getting in the way of building these strong social graphs, which give us that sense of neediness. All right. So modern technology is playing a big role in this solitude problem. But I said there was a second way that there's two major ways that technology is playing this role. Well, the first way we just talked about, it's making our graph sparser. The second way, and this is where it becomes an insidious, insidious. I almost said it, Chessie.

I almost said insidious. insidious cycle, it helps numb us from the pain of not having that neededness. It drives us away from neededness and then gives us the sucre so that we can survive not having it or just barely. And that's where we really get that self-reinforcing cycle. I don't feel needed anymore. My social graph is sparse. I'm not really connected into a thick network of people who depend on me and I depend on them. This makes me uncomfortable.

Let's distract myself. Let's TikTok. Let's video game. Let's endlessly scroll. Let's get caught up. I don't know. It could be a conspiracy theory or whatever we want to do that's going to give us some sort of like distraction away from this big lack. This actually happened in our lives.

Then we use devices more or we work more to try to fill in that void. And then we get even more distance from our actual sacrifice-driven social graph and our needness goes down. even more severely. It's a terrible cycle. There's a cycle that got amplified, of course, by COVID and other types of trends with computing. And it brings us to where we are now and the where Derek's article is. All right, so here's the good news.

Once we know what's going on here, the solutions are obvious. We've got to add back more links to that sacrifice social graph. That's it. We've got to add back more links. Now that we know that's the problem that those are being taken out because of technology, we need to add those back in. And we could be indirect about this. And I think this is the problem.

It's too often what happens in these discussions is we say, well, maybe we need to think about how to get rid of the forces that are causing this problem in the first place. And we have to completely reform both our relationship and our cultural's relationship with technology and work so that we can finally have the time and drive to get back to the building social lives in a way that we're more used to doing it. Or we could just say, I'm just going to go add links directly. We'll figure that out on the way. I just want to go sacrifice non-trivial time and attention on behalf of people I care about. let me just go do that. Just do that first. Let's just directly add the lines back.

And then we can figure out how to fix a bigger problem and fix our culture and get Utopia. So it's not a hard thing to understand that we need to do. Spend more time actually doing things for other people. That's what we need to do. How many people, like, in the last month, have you, like, gone out of your way to really be there for them or to sacrifice on behalf of them? Like, if you have a family, you've probably done it for your kids, maybe for one. friend or another, but this should actually be something I'm doing multiple times a week. You start adding those lines back in your graph.

You could even draw one of these things. Here's a dot for like all the people I really know well. And each month I'm going to draw a line if I do at least one non-trivial sacrifice on their behalf. And each month, like how thick can I get this graph to look? How many points on this star can I actually create if I'm at the center and they're around the periphery? Not a bad exercise to actually do.

Now here's the good news. If you go right to that solution, what are you going to find? Well, you're going to find something getting reactivated within you, and suddenly that drive to be on the devices so much goes down, because this is better. We're on our devices a lot because we were missing this. We're our devices a lot because we're convincing ourselves this counts of sociality. But when we get re-exposed to the real thing,

suddenly this other stuff, this digital simulation comes across as sort of, trivial or a low-resolution simulation, it's no longer as appealing. As we get used to sacrifice and other people, we see, that's important. Now, I'm not going to do email all evening. We'll have to just figure that out. I'll have to figure out another approach to my work, either grow some confidence or change some systems or this is just what it's going to have to be. It pushes back on the digital.

So the digital pushed us into this problem, sure. But instead of trying to fix our digital life first, just go right back and fix this social problem and actually the digital itself will suddenly seem less urgent. So I think that's the good news in this because really, you know, what we do on the show is like we're often navigating the perils of the modern digital environment, figuring out what are causing the disorders and mismatches of this and then trying to figure out how to actually solve it. This is one of the biggest perils right now, this lack of neededness caused by the sparsification of the sacrifice social graph. And no, Jesse, I don't like to create a literative, unnecessarily technical terms.

That's just how normal people talk. Let's just be clear about that. Sparcification of the sacrifice-driven sociality graph. That's how normal people talk, almost beyond. This is, I think, one of the big problems of culture right now. Technology got us there. Technology is keeping us there. But going back to our roots as a social being,

suddenly makes technology's role in this seem more glaring and hard to miss. And therefore, the role that technology plays in our lives begins to reduce a little bit. So, I want to throw it out there. I can't help but connect these type of issues too. technology. And here's a place where we have a big negative impact, but we also have a very clear lever to pull

to make things more positive. I like that phrase. Sparsification of sacrifice driven social graph. It's like a computer science paper title right there. I like it too. Yeah.

All right. So there we go. We got a bunch of good questions. We have a deep dive, a reaction piece coming up later, a tech corner, which once again is an article I just wrote for the New Yorker.

So we're getting a bunch of cow New Yorker this week or this month. So I'm excited to get to that. But first, I thought quickly about a sponsor. We actually have a new sponsor this week. This is a company that came into my life at a very opportune time. We're talking about uplift. The uplift desk is at the forefront of ergonomic solutions, promoting better posture and health to adjustable standing desk design

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You don't even know it's a standing desk. I feel like the old standing desks, correct me if I'm wrong here, Jesse. My memory of like back in the day when this technology came around is it looked basically, the technology looked roughly in size footprint to like Mike Mulligan's steam engine. a huge contraption, you know, there's, there's like a foreman blowing a whistle and these giant gears start turning. These uplift desks now, like, oh, that's just a normal desk in just like the normal leg on the side. It's like in there. I don't know how, anyway. So I was like, oh, it's beautiful desk.

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Or you can have this mat. And it's just so you don't have that pressure as much. Like, this stuff really matters in a way I didn't think about before. I also got, I'm going to bring it to the HQ, a wobble stool. I can put it in front of the 3D printer. So it's like you can sit on it, but instead of just sitting completely still, you can wobble on it and kind of like move your core around. It doesn't, you can't fall, you're not going to fall over, but you can like kind of move and work out your core. I originally was like, oh, my kids will like it, but like, oh, God, I need this thing now.

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First question is from K. I'm a medical doctor switching specialties. This requires I study for entrance exams. I time block my nights for studying after my 8 to 5 doctor work, but I struggle with this as I'm too tired. This leaves only the weekends to study. How can I improve on scheduling and falling through on weekdays? Well, as I learned doing research for last week's episode on morning routines, I think the key is, and Jesse will agree with me, is to do your studying from within a cold place. Because what that's going to do is the cytokines are going to sharpen your focus muscles, and then it's going to be very difficult.

Actually, what you need to do is in the cold plunge. You need a cold plunge that's deep enough that you can do pull-ups while in the cold plunge. You're maybe doing pull-ups in and out of the cold plunge, and then that will help you get after it. No, okay, let's get to the heart of this here. Okay, I'm going to tell you first of all to use a phrase from the older episodes of the show to face the productivity dragon here, which means confronting and accepting the reality of a particular workload that you're struggling with. You have a very hard job, and so you're finding it hard to also do a lot of hard studying after your job is over. That is just the reality. That's not a broken thing.

It's not unusual. It's not inexplicable. It's not a problem. In fact, it's not at all surprising. It's hard to be a doctor. Those are long shifts. And so the study, something intense after a hard shift, might just be really hard. So we have to just accept that at first.

But we can't see it. To ignore the productivity dragon is just to really want something to be doable, to be frustrated that it's not. And just hope if you get upset enough or focus on it enough, you can just sort of make it possible. But that dragon is there, and sometimes it's going to block you from getting where you want to go. All right, once we accept that, now we can review what are our options and tools here. Without yet trying to assess whether any of these is going to solve the problem. Let's just put on the table. There's a dragon up here.

All right, townspeople, what weapons do we have? Let's see what we have, and then we can build a plan. So in your case, there's a few things that could be relevant. Better energy could help, right? There's things you could do so that you're coming off of your shift. you just you have higher energy, maybe you're able to persist in more studying than you are now. These are things like sleep, exercise, and nutrition. Those are probably the big ones, maybe with like a good shutdown routine from the doctor job.

In theory, if you're in really good shape and have really good health, in theory, you probably would have more energy you could probably spare. I don't know if that's going to be a lot because the physical and intellectual are related, but they're not completely congruent. But that's a tool we have on our table. That might take a while, though, to get healthy, to get in the good shape, well, that takes time. And kind of ironically, you don't have a lot of time each day to work on this. We can get around that. Doctors get around that. They work out at the hospital, et cetera.

But it takes a lot of time to get in, you know, to get healthier. And you might have to be done with this in a couple months. All right, another tool, though, better study habits. So if you're using the right study habits, maybe a shorter amount of time per day. You can get more out of it. Also, studying is less exhausting when it's more. more focused and you trust it, right? When you're a really good study or I was a really good study or I wrote books about how to study.

When you're really good studier, it's a lot less exhausting. Why? Because the sense of exhaustion from studying in particular is sometimes generated from your mind having resistance to the activity that you're about to do. It doesn't want to do it. So it's like, I don't want to do this. And now you're competing with your mind trying to drag it into this activity. That's exhausting and not super sustainable.

Why does your mind reject studying? Well, one of the reasons why it rejects it is because studying is not a precise verb. Your mind doesn't think you have a particularly good plan for how you're going to get prepared. Your mind knows that you're just going to sit down and open up your books and then look at your phone and then look at your instant messenger and then kind of read some things and kind of look over at something else. It has no confidence that this is going to lead to anything good at all. And so it holds back motivation. So now you're dragging your mind through it. By contrast, if you're a really good study, your mind's like, oh, yeah, we got a good plan.

We know how to prepare for these type of questions. We're giving this 50 hard minutes, and we are going to really make progress in these 50 minutes. You're going to have a lot more motivation to do it, even if it's intellectually harder. So improving your study habits is something else that could help here. Let's step back now and look at more drastic or reconfiguration-based plans. You could just take longer. You know, maybe you want to sit for these master's exams in three months. Maybe like what I really need to do here is do this six months from now or a year from now

because my studying is going to be, I can't study every night. And maybe I'm doing my study on the weekends or just one night a week. It's going to take me a lot longer to prepare. So if I push this off by a year, then I can get there in a reasonable time frame. That's like a real slow productivity type of idea. No one knows how long it took you to do something. They just know in the end what things you did. And often, like, the key to sustainability is simply just taking longer.

10 years from now, all people are going to know is like, oh, you made this shift in your clinical practice. They don't remember exactly how long did it take from you having this idea to you taking the interest exams. The final tool we can put on the table here is change your work situation temporarily. Maybe you take a leave for two weeks. You can just do nothing but seriously study and just, like, get this thing done. Right. So we have different tools on the table. and your question is just, okay, what combination of these is going to get me where I need to get?

Facing the productivity dragon, rarely as people fear, leads them to the conclusion of this thing that's important to me I can't do. That's not what happens. What happens is you come up with a more reasonable plan for how to get there. And it might not be as easy as you hope or as quick as you hope or as painless as you hope. But typically you find a way to take care of that dragon once you actually see it and you're looking at it and having an honest conversation about what options you actually have. So probably some combination of those things I mentioned will get you there. And almost certainly it's not going to end up being as quick or as easy as you hoped when you first went down this path.

But that's okay. Sometimes paths have dragons on them. We still have to figure out how to get up to the castle. So hopefully, not hopefully, you will. You'll find a way to get there. When did you come up with a term productivity dragon? I feel like it was early in the show. Oh, it wasn't before?

It was definitely early on the show Because when I was listening to it, I loved it when I was just a fan. Should we look it up? Well, I'm looking at it. Was it? I was thinking maybe you discovered it when you're in your 20s. No, no, no. But it's possible.

So here's what I'm looking this up now. So here's what's possible is that like I wrote about it on my newsletter. Around the time the show was coming up. Okay. I thought you had it for 15 years before. But God, now you're making me doubt myself, Jesse. All right. man so it's definitely here's it's definitely early study hacks because i'm seeing a clip from

august of 2020 okay so that'd be pretty early but here's a like five years old here's an article from july of 2020 on confronting the productivity drag in take two okay so you know why this is take two that wasn't great so i wrote this art now i remember this july of 2020 I wrote this article about confronting the productivity dragon And so I just grabbed some image online of St. George fighting a dragon Because like that's the classic and like here's a picture of it now of like him, you know, artwork. I didn't realize the picture I had drawn. I guess St. George has white supremacist connections as well.

I kid you not. This picture I posted was St. George stabbing a dragon. and it was like his cloak or his sword, swastikas. Swastikas. People are like, all right, that checks. That's why I feared. I think I put a note about this.

No, I didn't. But, oh, yeah, I did down here. It was from Wiki Commons. That's why, you know, I was like, oh, it's a Wicked Commons. Like, no, because no copyright image. So I didn't expect it. Okay, so here's what I said. In my first attempt to post this article,

I grabbed an image of St. George from Wiki Commons that seemed to be of the right resolution and dimensions, but I missed one crucial detail. His heralding was full of swastikas. Whoops. Oh, my God. Anyways, if I read this article from July of 2020, it opens by saying on a recent episode of my podcast,

someone asked me, and I mentioned this term. So I think it was the podcast. A very early episode. Yeah, a very early episode of the podcast I came up with it. Okay. I kind of want to return to it. Let's revisit the productivity dragon. I love the term. I just thought maybe you had it like a poster of your of the dragon like in your college dorm or something.

I don't know. Maybe I did. So I had to look it up. But no, it mainly is just a vehicle for me to put swastika imagery on my. I thought like my site was going to get put on a hate watch list or something. I was like just probably bots that are just, you know, following sites and be like, oh, they posted a lot of swastika. Like we got to take them, you know. It's good thing you weren't on Facebook at the time. Yeah, that would not have gone well. Yeah. Maybe that's the real reason why I'm not on social media. They just, I got kicked off all of them for.

And it got reposted a few places too, I think, because people just repost my articles. Anyways, we should do a productivity drag and like revisit. Okay. I'll note that. All right. What have got next? Next question is from David. As a non-tech person interested in tech, I enjoy your comments on AI.

Can you comment on Leopold Aschenbrenner's situational awareness assessment? It's getting a lot of hype and criticism. Yes, I think I have something. I loaded up something here. Okay. I'm not going to load up. So for people who don't know, Leopold, Ash and Brenner, I think now he's an investor. He runs a fund, but used to be in tech, wrote this essay called situational awareness, AI from now to 2034, which is basically he's synthesizing.

He like all these conversations with people in tech and he's laying out this like vision of axioms and predictions for the future of AI and it's pretty extreme and it's it's because of that gathering a lot of attention. I'm not going to read that or even go through the essay because I think it's like a hundred and sixty something pages long. I mean, it's a book basically. It's like this huge really long thing. But I did find a good, Mike Allen has a good summary of the main points on Axios. So I'll read a few of these. I have it on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listing. Like here are some of the points that are made, some of the stickier points that were made in this big long essay.

One, trust the trend lines. The trend lines are intense and they were right. The magic of deep learning is that it just works and the trends lines have been astonishingly consistent despite naysayers to every turn. Another big point over and over again year after year, skeptics have claimed deep learning won't be able to do X. They've been quickly proven wrong. Point three. It's strikingly plausible. that by 2027

models will be able to do the work of an AI research engineer. By 2027, rather than a chatbot, you're going to have something that looks more like an agent, like a coworker. Number five, the data wall, there's potentially important source of variance for all this. We're running out of internet data. Number six, AI progress won't stop at a human level.

We would rapidly go from human level to vastly superhuman systems. He points the idea of superintelligence, possibly by AD 20, 30, and so on. Okay. So these are the type of ideas that are in this essay. And it's, you know, it's an interesting essay and it's getting a lot of attention. I would say, you know, be wary to just naively dismiss this essay because Ashnebrenner knows a lot about this technology.

And he really did talk to a lot of people. Like, he really has a sense for it. On the other hand, you do have to take his essay with a grain of salt because his fund is basically focused on, we are investing in the technologies that are going to lead directly to AGI. Like that's his pitch to investor. So it is, of course, very much in his benefit. It's very much to his benefit for people to believe that AI technologies trends are very extreme and noteworthy because that's the pitch of his fund as well.

So you have to keep those things in mind. A couple, I'll add a couple observations. These aren't like limits to what he's saying. But I'll put a couple, I'll put a couple potential breaking observations. observations to keep in the mix here. So one thing that interests me that Ashton Brenner doesn't talk about in the summary at least, you know, he says over and over again year after year, skeptics have claimed deep learning won't be able to do X and have been quickly proven wrong.

If there's one lesson we've learned from the past decade of AI, is that you should never bet against deep learning. Well, it is true. Like, its capabilities keep growing. And as we say, well, it's still bad at this. Then engineers work on this. And then for a lot of those this is it gets better at. But there have been year after year of predictions that have not been coming true, which is the predictions about the practical impact in our lives.

As soon as chat GPD came out there, it was like we're six months away from this disruption. Whole industries are going away. Homework apocalypse, education as we know it is done. These whole sectors are gone. Look, this guy over here fired half of his call center. That's going to be everyone. These jobs are gone. So far there's been almost no major disruption.

So the one place where there is a gap is the impact gap. So the connection that we've been getting wrong is we thought there would be this type coupling between functional breakthrough and disruption. That as the magnitude of a functional breakthrough on AI models jumped, the immediate disruptions would jump as well. Well, it turns out that there's at the very least a large lag between these two things. I think this is a significant thing to keep in mind. It is turning out that to make this technology high impact on people's day and day lives, there is no escaping the actual sort of hard, hard to predict product development cycle. That it's not just the fact that these models can do amazing things.

It doesn't mean that it's doing amazing things in people's lives. People still have to now do the painstaking work of integrating this AI in the specific products. Nine out of ten ways you do this is not going to work or be that useful. so it's hard, there's competition, companies are going to fail, initiatives are going to lose money for these big companies, and then in there you're going to find, oh, here's the right product that actually works. The internet was the consumer internet was the same way. We knew it was a big deal, and a lot of companies were like, this is a big deal, this changes everything, which it did. But we thought at first, like, great. So if I just put money into anything internet, it's going to be successful.

And it was, and then most of the early things we did didn't really work. And we had the first dot com crashed in the early 2000s. And then what ended up being required was like years of different companies and startups and people trying like, well, what's the right way to get the internet to people or how do people actually want to use it? And then we got out of it some of these like web two based models that have then become incredibly profitable, right? So but you had in 1999 people being like, yeah, well, Time Warner should be on just buy AOL and we'll have this sort of online version of the articles and Webvan will warehouses full of food you can buy on the internet. and we're all going to make a lot of money, none of that worked. But you fast forward another 25 years, and meta has a trillion plus dollar market cap. So, like, they were right, but it just took a long time to try to figure out what works and what did it.

So that's going to slow down AI's progress some. Because we're three years out of highly capable language models and don't yet have large disruption use cases. So just that lag is longer than we think. on the flip side, that means when the disruptions come, it might seem like it's coming out of nowhere because it's not going to be tightly coupled to an innovation. I actually think the power, I was just giving a talk at Microsoft recently

we were talking about this. I actually think we have sufficient capability and AI tools today to support major disruption to the way knowledge work happens. We don't actually need, if we have no future innovation, like we have to freeze everything like where it is now, we have sufficient capability and power in these models for sufficient disruption knowledge.

We just haven't figured out the right tools or way to integrate it yet in the products. And that's what everyone's working on right now. So it might be slower until the everyday person is feeling the disruption. But the disruption might also seem to be somewhat out of nowhere because, again, it won't be tied to a recent innovation. It will be a product innovation that finally just works just right. All right. So that's one idea I want to point out that I think is relevant. The second is I think there's a there's a pause or wall or sort of AI mini winter that is coming up because there's there's two limits we're coming up against.

And Asad Brinner mentions one of these limits. One we're running out of data. So this idea of we're going to train these sort of transformer-based language models, these feed forward language models. We're going to train them with with text data. There's not much text left. We've kind of used all the text on the internet. I mean, meta has this advantage. I heard Scott Galloway talking about this.

I think it's probably a smart analysis. He was saying, don't bet too hard against meta right now because there's a couple wins in their favor, like TikTok perhaps going away, which will be good for them because Reels has become an effective TikTok clone. But the other thing is they have a lot of extra text because of all the platforms. All their platforms have these giant archives of text. And text is what you need to train these. And so maybe they can they can eke out some more training. They're like Open AI who maybe is just limited to like the full open internet and every book every written. So to also have everything ever said on Facebook, that's more text.

So more text helps. But we're kind of running out of text that train these things on. So we're sort of getting to the limit of data. These are because of the inefficiency of how the training happens and knowledge is represented, you need a ton of data to train these things. So we could be kind of running out of what we get to capabilities. Now, there's different training methods that matter, right? like the 01 model, and I don't want to go down too deep down this rabbit hole, but you know, the newest chat CPT is better at reasoning. And this is in part due to the way they train it now.

Like it turns out you can make these things a little bit better at feed forward networks better at reasoning. If you do a particular type of training where what you really do is you say when you give an answer, it's a simple idea, but it has a huge impact. It's actually a Dartmouth kid to figure this out. Jason Wynn, I think. But it's a simple idea. when you give an answer chat GPT, we want you to explain your steps

that lead to your answer. And if you give an answer that doesn't have a lot of steps, we're going to zap you during trading with a bad signal. And if you give an answer where you kind of spell out your steps, we're going to zap you with a good signal. That's called reinforcement learning. And we're going to add that onto your normal training. This is how they train these models

not to like say bad things to avoid certain topics. Well, they're just saying, oh, we'll just zap them while we're training. Like, hey, show your work. So if I ask you like a math problem, don't just say the answer to that math problem is 27. I'm going to give you a happy zap. If instead of just saying that, you say, well, let's walk this through. We started with this many apples and we took away this apples, we left this many apples. So now the answer is 27.

So by zapping it, like, hey, we really like when you show your work. Now when you're training these networks, they're more likely to train in a way that actually captures more of the logic because they have to actually say the steps along the way and then they're more likely to do reasoning better. So there's stuff you can do. But we are going to hit a limit where we're going to run out of data. I also am this big believer that the feed forward network model, there's only so far we can get with that. There is no state. There is no recurrence.

There is no looping. There is no, let's try out a bunch of things. There's no, here's a novel state of a problem in the world and we want to now explore what to do with this and compare this to other stuff we know. Feed forward, everything has to be stuck in these forward connections of the deep learning model. So I think the limitations of that structure plus data limitations means we might hit an AI mini winter.

the way we're going to break out of that, I think, is going to be with more complicated model structure. We're going to have multiple models. Individual models might go through deep learning to actually learn what they're doing, but they're going to interact with each other. And some of these models are modules are going to be human coded and not learned. And it's going to be in the ensemble of different models. This is keeping a state. Here's a simulator model. Here's like an understand the world model. Over here is a like prediction model. Over here is like a meta model. All of these working together is what's going to, I think, get us out of the AI mini winter and actually move AI to that next level, which is going to be a much bigger step towards something like AGI. So I'm getting kind of technical here, but there we go.

AI mini winter is going to come, but then we'll eventually get through it. And the impact gap on AI we should not look down on. It takes years actually to go from this tech is great to this tech is having a great impact on people's lives. We've got to factor that in. So that wasn't quite a 165 pages worth of material, Jesse, but I think it was close. On Rogan Zuckerberg talked about how AI can basically do the work of an average programmer now? Did you hear that? I mean, it just depends what you mean by that. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it's good at generating code. But it's unclear. So when you look at professional programmers, so it can produce code like okay code. But it's not really where it's impacting productivity and programming. Where it's impacting productivity and programming based on the programmers I've talked to is it's preventing you from having to do what for the last 10 or 15 years

programmers have been doing, which is, I know there is some sort of library call I need to make here to erase the screen or whatever. I don't remember what it was. So I'm going to Google it, that Google is going to load up a page on the Stack Overflow Forum. And the Stack Overflow Forum is going to have the answer. Like, oh, that's the name of that library. And wait, what are the parameters? Okay, great. And then they go back over and you type it in. So this is a lot of programming nowadays. You don't master, you don't memorize everything. You're constantly Googling things and then you're getting answers and going back to what

you're doing. AI is very good at like, I don't even have to do that. I can just like start typing and it kind of figures out like, oh, you're looking for this. Here's it. Here's the name of the library. Here's the parameters. You don't have to leave your development environment.

Or you can kind of even ask it. Like, what's the thing I need to draw circles? Or just write it like what would I call it? Circle drawing thing. And it says, is this what you mean? And like, yeah, that's what I mean, right? So for programmers, it's literally shaving time off of what they're doing, but they would never put in a bunch of code.

On the other hand, I know a lot of people who aren't programmers at all, who are now building simple programs, who wouldn't have been able to without AI. This is one of the ideas. I kind of introduce us in this talk I was given the other day. But I think one of the first big productivity impacts is going to have in knowledge work is really going to be this, in general, unlocking, complex software capabilities

in individuals without complex software training. And it's not just with programming, but just with software has powerful capabilities. Often only power users know how to do it. AI is going to make it easier for non-power users to get power capability. So I'm going to be able to do crazy stuff in Excel without having to really understand Excel macros

and how these sort of complicated things work because I can just kind of describe what I want. And the AI can understand that and turn it into a macro language at Excel, understands and I can get it done. So like that's where I think the first productivity gains are going to happen is unlock these more powerful features. So like now I don't program, but I can write a simple program.

That's useful. I kind of know about Excel, but I don't know how to do like an advanced sort or the swap the rows with these numbers with these other. Like I don't know how to do those operations. Now AI will help me do it. Right. So I think unlocking power features without power user training will be one of the low hanging fruits we're going to see some impact.

All right. What do we got next? Next question is from Colin. I'm fortunate to have a remote job that supports flexibility, but I often struggle to translate the values I care about learning, curiosity, self-improvement, connection, and adventure into concrete goals and actions. I want to be able to sustain these practices. Too often I find myself stuck in a cycle of pseudo-productivity going through the motions

without feeling truly fulfilled. I think this is a common problem, especially if you have the blessing of time. is you get kind of systematic and say, okay, well, here's the things that matter to me. And then you kind of start, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. And I can do this. And it feels sort of soulless.

Like I have these like checklist of things I do every day that's connecting to the things that I value. And I don't know, it just feels like going through the motions. It doesn't actually feel like it's infusing my life with value. That's a really common problem. Actually, like, acting on your values in a way that's really meaningful. I have four things I want to mention that can be helpful here. one you know once you've identified what's important to you you have your buckets have some sort of

keystone habit in each sure as a starting point something you do for each of these values or things you care about on a regular basis this it's not trivial but's tractable so you're just signaling to yourself i care about these things sure but then choose one and say this is the thing i'm going to really work on for the next six months this is the thing for the next season i'm going to try to figure out through experimentation and focus how to integrate this into my life in the coolest possible way. Because it actually can be hard. You could say, I like adventure.

Great. Building an actual rhythm of adventure that's meaningful to you in your life, that might take a lot of experimentation. It's not an obvious thing to do. So maybe you spend a full summer, like really focusing on that. Like, well, what if I go like on weekend trips and that's not enough? Maybe what I want to do is like once a quarter, go on a, let me try one of these quarterly trips.

What does that feel like? maybe I want to have a challenge myself every week, like to go to a place that, you know, I haven't been before. Maybe I want to get a group of friends. We do this together. Like, you figure out what's really pressing my buttons on this value and how do I best integrate that into a part of my life. And that takes time and experimentation.

So just focus on one until you feel good about it. And then you can move on to another. It can take years to kind of button down a full lifestyle set up. And then at the end of that, you kind of say, okay, now I wanted, I had kids. Whoops. We got to change all these again. Like what adventure. your means is very different now than it did before, and that's okay.

So spend more time and go one by one in figuring these things out. There's a patience thing. The second solution, go back to lifestyle-centric planning the better understand what it means for these values to be a part of your life, in particular the part of lifestyle-centric planning that's key when you're thinking about these type of values like curiosity or adventure, for example, is to find examples at resonating. Like, you know what? what I'm looking for is someone who is doing something in their life that really that specific

thing they're doing really resonates with me. So get more concrete. Move from the abstract to the more concrete. Like, oh, I really love the way this guy, this guy works. Like maybe you're really, when it comes to adventure, you try to get concrete. The thing that resonates with you is this movie, which I watched a bunch as a kid. I don't know this one, Jesse. K2.

Oh, yeah. Right? Is it Spacey? Yeah, right? Oh, it might be. Yeah. Where they go to climb K2. It doesn't go well.

Oh, no. That was it everyone. It's a mountain climbing movie. Wait, I'm looking this up because... It's the... He was in like K something else. Yeah. Oh, oh.

This K packs. Exactly. Exactly what we were talking about. No, I can think of, I'm looking this up here. 1991 film. Man, I used to like this film. Oh, it's Michael Bean. Yeah, Michael Bean and Matt Craven.

Spoiler alert. Don't think it goes well for Matt Craven. Anyway, so it was this mountain climbing movie. K2, you know, is the second highest mountain in the world behind Everest and it's like the most dangerous mountain. People die. I mean, people die all the time. I mean, okay. Not the rabbit hole.

But the reputation of K2 at the time was like, this is the real killer. Like Everest, you can have these companies that, like, take you up to the top. If you pay them $60,000, you don't have to be a world-class athlete. K2 is really, really hard. It's the second highest mouth. It was really, really hard. And it had the highest death toll. It was like one out of five people die or whatever.

But then after this movie came out, you know, you get the disaster on Everest where Crackhour into thin air was there where, like, all these people died. And then, like, a lot of people died on Everest after that. So, like, no one thinks about Everest as being easy. I mean, in theory, you can do it without being an elite athlete. you can pay to do it, but now it's death rates also pretty high. Anyways, the reason why I think about this movie, because I saw it all the time, is that Michael Bean was a corporate executive in this movie.

And they were always showing he was in his skyscraper office, and he had like a Nortatrack machine in there because he was training for this, like, so he was like a world-class mountaineer and had this job, right? So maybe that really resonates with you. Like, yeah, that's what I want to be like adventure is like I have my job. just fulfills other things for me and it's specific and corporate or whatever. But I want to be the guy who's also has like the Nordotrack machine in my office because I'm training to go do like these extreme things. And like there's these like two sides of me.

You're like so maybe that's what resonates with you. Then that gives you like a concrete way of thinking about integrating adventure into your life. So you look for what resonates because sometimes the abstract principle, you don't know what about that appeals to me or what way of integrating down to a life really is interesting to me. me. And the concrete examples I get there. So you want to use a single purpose notebook for this or have like a Fields Note or Molskin notebook where you're taking notes on these things as you watch things, as you read things as you meet people. Take notes on what's resonating. And that's going to give you some better ideas of how to implement this. Solution three, you might want to simplify. Right. Maybe maybe you want to simplify down the things you're focusing on so that you're not, you don't have too many specific things that you're trying to make progress on. So, you know, connection might be like heart, heart body mind. You know, heart is like community and connection. Body is I want like the be in good shape and healthy and it fuels all these other things

and go do things that like uses my body and mind is like I want to like enjoy the world of ideas and interestingness and just do cool stuff with my mind or like simplify it. And then under those things, there's lots of different things you could do and maybe you do different things at different times. Like, I'm going to start by this season, like this winter. I want to read these like five great books and have like a discussion group about them. And, you know, maybe in the summer I'm doing something else with my curiosity. And with my body right now, maybe it's just like in my case, getting my back to work again.

But then like the next season I might be working on, you know, returning to my like Alex Scars Guard workout and getting giant traps or whatever. And it might get more extreme, right? So if you simplify it, smaller categories that have many more possibilities under them, Now you have less going on at any one time. All right. My final thing I would mention here, make sure you're not missing a foundation

of what David Brooks would call second mountain virtues. Like in your list, outside of connection, we have learning curiosity, self-improvement, and adventure. None of these are second mountain virtues are service virtues, you serving other people in the world. This is like a foundation of meaning, especially as you get past a certain age. So often this will happen as people leave their 20s

and move through their 30s is that they'll find that just the sort of self-focused things, the things we see in the beginning of those morning ritual videos, I'm up and I'm 17 steps I do just to like perfect my, you know, every aspect of my being. They don't fulfill. It's not exciting anymore. You feel this bit of a lack.

You're like, I'm trying to kill it at my job and be in really good shape and go on all these adventures and catalog them or whatever. And it's, it's feeling a little bit empty after a while. The second mountain virtues, which are character and service-based, that's when these kick in and really give you a strong foundation.

And really probably a life where a lot of your discretionary time is on second mountain virtues. And then on top of that, you're able to do these sort of, you know, I'm training the mountain climb as like my other thing I do. Or I'm really in the movies and me and my friends are like really in the movies. That becomes that balance of second mountain virtues versus like other types of self-focused virtues. That ratio needs to shift as you get a little bit older. So it might just be that. like it's more about like your heart and soul you have to get cleaned up and then the other things maybe it'll be less important or you'll enjoy them more or you don't have to do as many of them

to get the same fulfillment so I long answer because you know I'm thinking about a lot of this from my deep life book it's actually I'm on like a six week pause writing that because I'm doing this New Yorker thing yeah you mentioned that so I am excited to get back to it you know I took over Kyle Shaka's column for one month and I'm writing the third of fourth of the fourth four articles right now. I'm kind of looking forward on the other end of that, just easing my way back into the deep life book, kind of building up the speed.

It has been fun writing columns, but man, that's a fast pace. All right, who do we got next? Next question is from Holden, speaking of writing. How would you recommend somebody go about

deliberate and consistent improvement in writing? You know, my thing for writing, it's like any other sort of skilled activity, you have to train. Right. is doing it a lot will get you part of the way. So if I'm writing a bunch, I want to do my pages every day, that will help.

You will become a better writer than if you don't do that at all. You get more used to it. It's less hard. You build some circuits in your brain. Words come more easily. Then you're going to hit a wall. And if you want to get better, you have to have activities designed to stretch you in specific ways past where your current capabilities are.

Writing for editing is really the best way to do that. I'm trying to make this good enough that this person likes it. So someone's going to evaluate it and you're going to get that feedback. Like it stretches you and the feedback helps you get better in particular ways. Taking on specific writing challenges also helps. I want to work on this technique here. I'm going to read people who are good at that technique, try to understand it and then use that knowledge in this thing I'm writing now. So it's writing where you are specifically stretching a particular piece of the writing talent.

It's the stretch and the specificity that's going to make you better. You've got to think about it as something that you're going to train. I mean, it's why, for example, at the very upper levels of fiction writing, like elite literary fiction writers, so many of them go to MFA programs. They just often need that final really learning and being pushed with other writers and reading their stuff and they're reading your stuff. You just need that final push of like where you're still a little rusty. Seeing someone who's better at something than you are and like reading their thing and then trying to be better in yours the next time. They need that final training push if you want to be like an elite level fiction writer. but that persisted every level on the writing ladder.

You got to train to get to the next level. So that's the way I usually think about that. All right. What's next? We have our corner. Slow productivity corner. This is each week we have a question about my latest book, Slow Productivity, the Lost Art of Accompliance Without Burnout.

The main reason we do this segment is so that we can play this segment theme song, which we're going to hear right now. All right, Jesse, what's our Slow Productivity Corner question of the week? It's from JJ. Many individuals who've reached the absolute pinnacle of their fields from athletes like Michael Jordan to entrepreneurs like Elon Musk seem to follow a different pattern of obsessive, all-consuming work without clear boundaries. While your approach clearly leads to meaningful achievements in a fulfilling life, I wonder if someone can truly reach the uppermost echelons of their field while maintaining the balanced approach you discuss in slow productivity. Well, it's a good question. I don't know necessarily that you would use balance as one of the key adjectives for slow productivity.

I would say it's focused. I would say it's sustainable. I would say it's kind of the opposite of pseudo productivity, which is performative. Activity for the sake of activity. That's what it rejects. But I was thinking about people in the top 1% of their field. And in a lot of fields, elite level performers, if you look at how they approach their work, it echoes a lot of the ideas from slow productivity. So let's consider, for example, elite writers.

I used elite writers as examples frequently in the book's slow productivity because to be an elite writer, you almost always have to take a slow productivity approach. You're not working on many things. You're basically just all in on the book you're writing. You kind of simplify your life in that way. Your course are obsessing over quality if you're an elite writer. Like I want this thing to win the whatever literary prizes that I'm hoping to become a New York Times notable books. You really care about quality more than anything else.

And yeah, it's seasonal. I'm really working on a book hard. Now I'm completely doing nothing. Now I'm brainstorming the next book. Now I'm editing a book. There's real variations. And because they have such autonomy, there can be seasonality in their day. Often these writers have specific hours they write in and then they're done.

They're not writing all day long. And there could be seasonality in their month or week. Like I was thinking if I was just a full-time writer, like just a book writer, I bet this back thing I'm dealing with would be so much easier to deal with because like, oh, all I'm doing is writing. I could just take the foot off the gas pedal while I work on this rehab and it's bothering me and then just put it back on again. Because writers are full-time writers and sometimes have to be pretty much elite to do it full-time

to have that type of ability to be more seasonal. Elite athletes I actually think about as practitioners of slow productivity as well. I mean, they do one thing. They're sport. They're not working on 30 things, right? They're not answering emails and jumping off and on calls. they're training for their sport. Of course they obsess over quality.

That's what makes them elite athletes. And their work is literally seasonal. Here's the sport season. Here's the off season. We treat these things very differently. So they have different rhythms of their week. Elite academics, often they become elite because, again, they are slow productivity practitioners as well.

Hey, I'm focusing on this result. Academia is very seasonal, teaching, non-teaching, but also working on a result, that being done with a result, it might take you a couple of years before you get going again on another big project

and they obsess over quality. Now, of course, a lot of academic positions have the slow productivity subverted by the injection of the administrative, but in this context, we note that's a problem.

Like they say, I'm worse at being a professor now because I have to do all this administrative work. Like what made them elite was not the busyness you see of a later stage career professor holding all these administrative positions.

What made them elite is when they were, more true to the slow productivity principles. So I see it. I mean, what's missing here, you mentioned balance. I think what you mean by balance is like the total number of hours you're working in a day is not too bad. Athletes, I guess, violate that because it takes a lot of hours if you're just in a season. Yeah.

Writers don't work huge number of hours. I think that's still okay. Elite academics, they can work a lot of hours. Yeah, I think, especially if it's a lab-based academia. So, like, fair enough on that point. There are a course, you mentioned Elon Musk that points. towards the idea that there are careers in which elite level is not really compatible with slow productivity principles.

Entrepreneurship is probably the classic example of that, like starting up a company. You just, you aren't doing one thing. You're doing lots of things. It's not seasonal. It's all out all the time. And it's not really obsessing over quality because you don't have time or energy to do that. It's just like putting out fires and trying to keep things rolling forward. So, yeah, starting big companies is usually not compatible with slow productivity.

Elite leaders of complicated teams. Those type of positions often aren't compatible. I'm thinking about like Navy commanders. You're the CEO on a big ship, like a destroyer or something. Like that's not compatible slow productivity. It's doing many, many different things. It's all out all day. It's getting things done right, but not trying to like push to quality.

You don't have the time, energy, or luxury of like, I'm just going to obsess over quality in one thing. It's like trying to prevent bad things from happening. So, yeah, no, not every job has the elite levels be compatible with slow productivity, but a lot do. And you'll see that if you read the book because I draw from stories of knowledge workers who done elite work in times past to draw out these principles. So it should be no surprise.

All right. I think we decided, right, Jesse, we're now doing the music on the way out as well. We sure did. All right, let's hear that. This is my competitor product for donedaily.com. All it is is every five minutes, it just plays that music. Like an app, just plays that music every five minutes. just relax people to get good work.

All right, do we have a call this week? We do. All right, let's hear it. Hi, Cal. This is Chris. I'm a data architect in Minnesota, and I have a question about how do you manage different projects in the columns, specifically active and waiting on someone else. I created a personal project in Asana that I have one task for each of my projects.

and I have the active column, and I'm trying to keep that to no more than three open projects at a time. But I also have projects that I'm waiting on other people to get back to me for. And so I'm curious if you have any advice or rules of thumb around what to do if that list of projects that I'm waiting on people starts to stack up and then say four people. get back to me at the same time. I'm wondering if you have any advice on that. Yeah. Really appreciate the show. Thanks.

It's a good question about these task storage boards. Two things I want to say. First of all, I don't have everything I need to do on my task storage board. These tend to be sort of like tasks that need to get done. But what's not typically included on those boards for me is like ongoing work. You know, if I'm working on a book chapter, for example, that's amazing. thing I'm working on. There's not a task on my task board that says like work on book chapter. That's something that's going to come up in my weekly planning. I'm like, what am I doing right now?

Oh, I'm working on my book is one of my big goals for this quarter. So what do I want to get done this week? Well, let's see. If I could finish a draft of chapter three this week, that would actually be good. Greatly put that on my weekly plan. Like today's big, you know, this week's focus is working on chapter three. And in fact, maybe I want to actually block out a few big writing blocks to make sure I have time on my calendar for working on chapter three. right nothing here ever touched a task on a trollboard but the trailer board stuff might be they often are they're like one off task or individual tasks like stuff i need to do or get back to people that i don't want to forget about all right so i'll keep that in mind first um second okay so what happens if you have a lot of stuff waiting to hear back from well you put these items on the waiting to get back column so

you don't forget about them you're telling your mind yeah i sent out this request i don't want to forget that that's out there like that person may never get back to me again. That's going to be an open loop that's going to generate stress in my brain. So I want to make sure I remember, like, yeah, I asked Jesse about this that I'm waiting to hear back. And a good waiting to get back card on a trailer board will say what you're going to do when that comes back.

When that gets back, make a decision and tell Jeremy. So here's what I'm waiting to hear back on it. Here's what I'm going to do when I get it. Okay. You don't have to execute that right away. So, you know, if someone gets back to you, you can take. that off the waiting to get back to you list now. Hey, that's back in my world. But then what you do with that's up to you. It's kind of like a new task has entered your life. You could put it on,

you could just do it right then. You can put on your active list as something like I want to try to get to this as soon as possible or could go on a back burner list. All right, ball's back in my court. I'm not going to act on this right now. But like, okay, it's changed. The status has changed. I've heard back. I have this information. Now I have a new thing to do. I'm going to put that back, you know, under whatever column is appropriate. So you don't have to do those things right away. The goal of that list is, you know, not to forget things that are outstanding, but you don't have to execute those things right away.

All right. So hopefully that helps. And also, you know, I'm pretty loose about these things. Like, often the things I have on my active list, it's non-major things. Like I, but from my list of things, I kind of want to make progress on. And as I go through my daily plan, I, and I have like to put aside admin blocks, I'll go look at those and see how many of those I can churn through. But, you know, hey, sometimes things take longer or you lose some admin blocks.

You don't get them done. And like, that's fine. I find that kind of loose. Like, the critical stuff is going to end up being a part of my weekly plan and probably make its way onto my calendar. So hopefully that makes sense about waiting for, just because you've been waiting for something for a while doesn't mean you have to act on it right away when it comes back to you.

Or we got a case study this week's where people send in description of using that type of advice we talk about here in the show in their lives. You have a case study. you can send them to jesse at calnewport.com. This case said he comes from Amy, who we talked to in episode 323. She was also one of the listeners who pointed us towards the Derek Thompson article that we talked about earlier in the deep dive. So thank you, Amy. All right.

So I don't remember episode 233, Jesse, in detail. But I guess it was about she was going back to grad school. It had been a few years since she'd been in school. She's in our early 30s. And we were giving some advice about how to tackle school. school. And I think one of the points we made is, hey, don't be too stressed about this. You probably are going to find coming back to school in your 30s, it's not going to seem as hard of a job as it was when you were 20, whatever. All right. So here's her follow-up case study.

I got all A's in my first semester of graduate school. Going to school and doing well is much easier at 34 than it was at 18. And it wasn't like I wasn't interested in my college education. I went to Berkeley College of Music because I was in. still am obsessed with music. But after having some more life experience, my grad school program, though challenging and demanding, feels much easier than undergrad. My unsolicited advice for anyone considering college or grad school, take a gap year. If you're 18 and planning to go to college, seriously consider deferring your acceptance for a year. This is a common practice in other countries for various reasons, but Americans would be well, do well to adapt it to. I appreciate that,

Amy. It is a true point. Older people find school easier, because school is not that hard once you're used to doing hard things. An 18-year-old's not really used to doing hard things. But a 34-year-old is. And if it's their full-time job, they say it's not too hard to study. Like, studying is not fun. But honestly, this is going to take me like five hours this week to be prepared for this exam. Five hours is not that much time.

I used to spend five hours just on my inbox on Monday morning alone. This is no big deal. I noticed this again and again when I would advise non-traditional college students. So at Georgetown, I would help advise or give talks to the advising program that would work with non-traditional college students. So people coming back later in life, but also we did some work with veteran programs, so people coming back on the GI Bill, and they would just crush it. All right, because they'd seen real hardship. If you are new to school, the gap year is a good idea. Another idea, just read my book how to become a straight-A student.

Read it and do it. Your friends are idiots when it comes to studying. do not look at how they study, take no advice from them, they are really bad at it. Do the stuff in that book, you'll get very good grades. That's just it. That book is like, here's how the people who get after it. This is how they actually study. This is the stuff that works.

This is what you really need to do. Do that stuff. It tells you how to be organized, how to take notes, the right way to study for math, right way to write papers. Just do it that way. And you're going to get really good grades. And it's going to be a lot easier than what your friends are doing. So, yeah, if you treat being a student like a job,

it's like an easy job. If on the flip side you do what many students do is you treat being a student like a vacation, then you're like, this is a really crappy vacation because I keep having to go to the library. And you see like everything you have to do is somehow being negative because it's getting the way of you having fun. But if you see it as a job, you're like this the easiest job we ever had. It's like a half-time job and I'm doing great and getting a lot of praise for it.

So there's Amy, thanks for helping to emphasize that point. So we have a cool final segment coming up and react to one of my own articles. But first, let's briefly hear from. another sponsor. I want to talk about the defender, the class of vehicles that we have been promoting here on the show, because it seems to kind of fit with our theme, right? I mean, it is a vehicle that is well suited for those who are seeking something deeper in life, but it's also pretty cool.

It's rugged and comfortable, which is, by the way, how people like to describe me. Rugged, rugged and comfortable. I've always liked these cars. There's actually the current defender line of cars. They have the 90, the 110, and the 130 model. The 130 model can now hold up to eight seats. This is a car that has a very durable, rugged design that you can take adventurous places, but it's very comfortable inside.

It's got all of the latest technologies to make driving not just comfortable but easy. I particularly like they have the under-the-car camera system. So if you're driving in some sort of situation off road, you can see what's under the car. Like, where is that big rock? Because I want to make sure that I'm going around it with my tire. And you see it like you're seeing through your car on the screen, which is really cool.

Or, of course, the way I would use that feature, which is, okay, what kid toy am I currently running over right now in our driveway? And how valuable is it? Do I have to bother going to get it? Or can I just continue to drive over it? It would help me there. It was cool car, rugged, but also comfortable, adventurous, but also relaxing.

So you can design your defender at land rover USA.com. Build your defender at land rover USA.com. I also want to talk about our friends at Shopify. Everyone we know. And okay, I'm not fact checking that statement. So let's say so many people Jesse and I know who are in this business who sell things, they use Shopify. That's just what you do.

Like if you're going to sell something online or in a store, you use Shopify because they have. selling things nailed down. It just is going to make it professional and easy and effective. Nobody does selling better than Shopify. They have the number one checkout on the planet, and they're not so secret secret shop pay, which boost conversions up to 50%.

People who are thinking about buying your thing are going to buy it. The shop pay pushes them forward. That means less carts go abandon. So if you're into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web in your store, in their feed, and everywhere in between businesses that sell more, sell on Shopify. So upgrade your business and get the same.

Check out that basically everyone we know who's selling things online uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash deep. Just be sure to type that in all lowercase to get the discount. Go to Shopify.com slash deep to upgrade your selling today. that's Shopify.com slash deep. Right, Jesse, let's move on their final segment. We like to do one of two segments in the end, either a tech corner where I talk about technology

or a Cal reacts where I react to something on the internet. Today we're doing both again, because I am reacting to my own latest article for the New Yorker and it is an article about technology. I'm going to pull this up on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening to show you what I think is probably the most disturbing graphic that has ever accompanied something I have written, Jesse.

I would describe it as a phone melting somebody's face. So, okay, it's pretty intense. Cool graphic, though, actually. It's like a... Do you ever know the graphics they're going to use? No, they do it kind of last minute. Yeah. Yeah.

It's been occasions where I wish I had a version of it. So it's not like the book cover input that you have? Yeah, I don't know how it works. Sometimes they're drawing it from scratch and sometimes they're like, they have it already. I don't quite know how it works. But I guess this is probably not an artwork I went blowing up large in my house because it would give me nightmares. It's a cool picture, though.

All right, here's the article I wrote. It's a column. This is me again. I took over Kyle Shakra's Infinite Scroll column for a month. This column is titled, what happened when an extremely offline person tried TikTok? So the premise was, hey, I'm recovering from this injury. I've got kind of laid up a little bit. Maybe it would be fun to try TikTok.

The formal journalistic experiment I was doing here was. to see how is the experience of social media and a relationship with social media changed since when I was last like really actively writing about like how people use social media, whether they should use social media, which was really about a decade ago. I'm just going to point out a couple points. So the perhaps one of the most striking things I found is that when I was writing about quitting social media, this was like 2013 and 2016. That's when I became known for that.

I went back and read those articles. again for this. There were really big debates happening. Supporters of social media had very strong reasons why it was important. I was debating against those reasons. So my articles were like very carefully walking through these arguments and saying these arguments are not as strong as you think and people would get upset about those stances. It was really a pretty robust debate.

I've talked about this before on the show, but like I would write a Times op-ed and then the Times would publish a response op-ed or I would go on the radio to talk about that article and that they would bring on someone to push back on me on the radio show to say, you know, Cal is wrong. Like it was a pretty contentious debate that was unfolding at that time. Most of those articles that I, arguments I used to debate against, none of them apply anymore to social media. We used the same phrase, but when I was on TikTok or trying YouTube shorts or Instagram Reels, the arguments that people used to make and favor of social media just don't apply anymore. They said, this is how you keep up with your friends and your social media.

life, no one keeps up with their friends or social life on TikTok. They said, this is going to open up career opportunities. This was a big one. People are like, you're crazy. You're going to disappear and have no job if you're not using these platforms. No one's saying that about TikTok. No one's saying like, yeah, I got my job because my boss at the insurance company thought my TikToks were fire, right?

That just doesn't happen. The other major argument from 10 years ago was this is the online town square. This is where, like, culture is being formed. This is like the Twitter argument back then. the most important articles are moving around Facebook. TikTok, Instagram, Reels, YouTube shorts, you're getting these incredibly individualized atomized feeds. Your feed looks nothing like the person next to you.

It's not creating collective culture. It's creating isolated, customized distraction. So I was really struck. I was like, man, all this fighting I used to do, none of it's relevant anymore. Right? So these big arguments for why social media is important don't apply to the latest, most popular generation of social media. So I went and I talked to some young people who do use.

these services. I had them show me TikTok. I was like, well, why do you use it? And here's the thing. They don't have a great answer. None of these young people were giving full-throated defenses of TikTok in the way that I used to get full-throated defenses of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram back in the day. They're like, yeah, it's pretty stupid. But it's diverting. The one guy I talked to Zach would talk about it's like, there's these memes, these video memes, and it's funny. And he showed them to me, and they're funny and interesting. And they remind me of some of the absurdist type of humor that was popular on the early web when I was in college

in the early 2000s and I get it but that's not like a profound argument it was like yeah this is funny I like him I he would actually use the funny TikToks he found as just a social lubricate like you could send these to friends and via text message and it gave you something an excuse

like being your friend or to talk to someone so the young woman I talked to was like I don't know it like it feels kind of authentic it creates emotions she sent me some TikToks it was like a a recipe thing that was visually appealing and a video of vets returning home early to surprise their kids. And I was like touching.

Like none of them have a grandiose theory like you used to get from communication professors back in 2013 about why this was at like the key of culture or this was at the key of your success or it's at the key. It's the evolving civic life. People are just like, I don't know, it's diverting. And I could use a little diversion in my life. There's a lot of fears around this because it's very diverting, and we see young people, they have a hard time turning their eyes away from this because once we get rid of all those other justifications, you can hone in on just being as engaging as possible, and that could be pretty addictive. But I found an almost hopeful note in this.

If we're no longer fighting for social media, then I think its footprint on our lives is going to get smaller. I think, yes, it's addictive nature maybe as higher, but the addiction is no longer protected. It's no longer protected in the clothing of virtue. It's just addicting. It's cigarettes in the 80s versus cigarettes in the 50s. No one wants to be smoking anymore. We all get it. It's still hard to stop, but everyone kind of agrees like, yeah, I probably should do this less.

So we use the term social media today. We used the term social media 10 years ago. But it's describing something different. And in some ways it's something more insidious. But in other ways, it's something that feels like it's much more solvable, because it feels much less important. Its grasp is hard, but its grounding is shallow. So I actually came away from this like,

not as scary because no one's fighting me on this. We're all on the same side. And the fact that we have the TikTok ban, at least in some form seems like it's going through, that would be positive as well. You see one of these services be banned that also just like helps change our mindset of like, yeah, these things are kind of optional.

It was okay. We took that one away. We all survived. It just kind of emphasizes that. the optionality, the triviality, the tangentiality of these services. So it was an interesting experiment, Jesse. I had no, by the way, I have no interest in, they're on my phone now because I was doing an experiment.

I have no interest in clicking those apps. I don't know if you've used TikTok before. It's just, I've never used it. But I get you would get used to it if like it was, these young people are more used to it. Do you think Elon's going to buy it? Maybe. Yeah, maybe.

I don't know what's going to happen. I always get, I'm bad at predicting the legislative. It's like we're recording this on Friday before the ban could go into effect very quickly. But like probably like Congress wants to expand it. I don't know what's going to happen. I think he's going to buy it. You know, I just wish. They'll be expensive.

He don't think he has the money. They all raise it. Yeah, maybe a syndicate. Yeah. I just hope it goes away. Just so we get used to this idea of like, yeah, these things come and go, which I think is the reality of social media today. Like, these things come and go.

The guy I talked to for the article, Zach, shout out to Zach. He also uses Instagram Reels, which is very similar to TikTok, and he mixes them up. He doesn't care. He's like, oh, here, check out this TikTok and really it's an Instagram reel. Like, there's no, it doesn't matter. Like, they're all just, there's no social graph. TikTok, you know, most people, like the typical TikTok user, according to peer research, doesn't ever even touch their biofield.

It doesn't know anything about you other than the videos you like. It's not like your friends are in there, your followers are in there. if you leave the platform, it's a problem. You know, I can jump over to reels and see videos on there, and I'm getting the same experience. Like, I don't, it doesn't matter. These things have become portable. They're just, uh, becoming increasingly generic sources of short form distraction. And that feels very different than like, man, I would get yelled at.

People thought I was like an eccentric Luddite, uh, anti-democratic weirdo for not using like one of these three platforms. That is just not the case anymore. He bought Twitter for $44 billion, right? How much would TikTok be like $200 billion? I don't know. That's a good question. So, I mean, Twitter's user base is in the hundreds of millions. And TikTok's much bigger than that.

You would think it would be at least four times. TikTok's generating a lot more revenue as well. Yeah. I mean, that's not easy money to raise. He's in trouble right now for some of the details of how he used his own stock to raise. The SEC's madden for how he raised the money for Twitter. He's like taking loans against his own stock. I just read that SBF book from Lewis about FTX.

Yeah. He could have bought it. Not anymore. Not anymore. It's a lot of abbreviations. A similar thing of all Coleman England funds. Yeah. Maybe we should buy it.

Just be all like slow productivity corner theme music and Jesse Skeleton. That would be a good, just like Jesse Skeleton doing like funny things and slow productivity corner theme music. That would be a successful platform. I look forward to that. All right, anyways, let's wrap it up for now. 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 deep. 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

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