Offline with Jon Favreau - Two Writers Wonder If They’ll Be Replaced By AI

Episode Date: January 15, 2023

Evan Puschak, also known as The Nerdwriter, joins Offline to discuss ChatGPT, the revolutionary artificial intelligence chatbot from OpenAI. In his most recent video essay, “The Real Danger of ChatGPT,” Puschak explores how AI could erode our fundamental ability to understand ourselves and the world around us. He sits down with Jon to discuss that essay, evaluate the strengths and limitations of ChatGPT, and talk about the ways the internet is trying to replace our minds. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

There was a Princeton student last week who created an app that can detect chat GPT. I love that. To ruin all these high schoolers. Man, what a narc. Yeah, I know. That's exactly what I thought. He's a college kid. All of his friends are having fun with chat GPT. I know. But good for him.

I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest today is essayist and YouTuber Evan Puschak, also known as the Nerdwriter. Evan's known for his in-depth analysis and commentary on a wide range of topics, including film, literature, art, and philosophy. He's gained a large following for his ability to explain complex ideas in an accessible and engaging way. He began his YouTube channel in 2011 and has since amassed over 3 million subscribers. In addition to his YouTube content, Pushek has also worked as a writer, director, and producer on various film and television projects. On today's episode, the two of us will be talking about ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot from OpenAI

that happens to be responsible for writing that intro of Evan I just read. Were you fooled? Personally, I think it could have done a better job. But there have been a lot of takes, endless takes, that ChatGPT may eventually bring about the demise of high school English, Google, and the entire writing profession itself. Who knows? To prepare for this episode, I spent a fair amount of time playing around with ChatGPT. For those of you who haven't yet had a chance, here's how it works.

You log on, and ChatGPT welcomes you with a small text box. Type in anything you want, a question, a request, something to edit, and ChatGPT will respond to you conversationally or with a complete, coherent argument. It's pretty impressive, and it does seem like a more useful version of Google. If you ask it for 10 cheap and easy recipes, it'll give you a solid answer. If you want a thousand-word essay on To Kill a Mockingbird, you'll get a halfway decent rough draft. But there's still something missing. Even though ChatGPT could write an intro of Evan that included plenty of facts about his background, it couldn't tell you why I invited him on the show or make you excited to listen. That still needs a human hand.

Evan recently published a video essay on the real dangers of chat GPT, which is actually an essay about the real value of writing. Evan argues that if we fully outsource writing to chat GPT, we'll be living according to the language of others, and we'll lose something essential about being human. Namely, our ability to uniquely express and understand ourselves and the world around us. As someone who spent a lot of time writing and a lot of time thinking about the ways the internet is rewiring our brains, this argument really sat with me. So I invited Evan on to unpack it. What followed was a great conversation between two writers who love their craft and are afraid of the future that AI conversation bots may deliver.

As always, if you have questions, comments, or ideas for future episodes, please email us at offline at cricket.com. And please take a moment to rate, review, and share an episode with a friend. Here's the nerd writer, Evan Puschak. Evan Puschak, welcome to Offline. Thanks for having me. So I've been wanting to have a conversation about ChatGPT for a while now. For those of you who don't know, ChatGPT is the new artificial intelligence conversation bot from OpenAI that's so good, people think it might replace Google, high school English, even the entire writing profession

itself. Evan, you recently made a video essay about this debate. Why did you want to take this issue on? Well, I mean, I, like everyone else, was totally fascinated with ChatGPT when it came out. You know, the crazy thing is it only came out like a month and a half ago. And it feels like it's been with us for so long at this point because so much- It's really dominated social media. Exactly.

And it's understandable because, you know, I, like everyone, started playing with it, you know, asking it different kinds of prompts, write an essay on this, give me a sonnet in the style of Shakespeare about corgis or whatever, you know, and it is amazing what it can churn out. And I think, you know, it's rhetorical flexibility, it's rhetorical muscle, its ability to produce not just sentences, but paragraphs of coherent text is really, really fascinating. What kind of impact it's going to have is, I think, still unclear, but, you know, people can't really resist, I think, in the first few days after something like this comes out, saying that all writing is dead or the essay is going away or, you know, we love to think that

we're reaching the end of an era. That's just sort of, I think, what we're hardwired to think. It could be that. It could be as extreme, you know, but it also could be something less, you know, less impactful. It's hard to say now it's just it's just really really interesting and I sort of wanted to to dive into the implications of that as related to things that I've been thinking about around writing can you talk about how chat GPT works just for people who might not be familiar and and what's what's the magic here like why does it seem passably human what is the what is the bot doing well let me start by saying I'm not an expert in AI or large language models, which is what this is.

It's a large language model. And essentially what it does is it scrapes the whole internet, essentially, all the language on the internet. And there was actually a really interesting paper about this by Murray Shanahan. I just wanted to shout that out called Talking About Large Language Models, where he essentially says that it's based around this technology of next token prediction, which essentially means that you give it a piece of text, and then it looks through all the language that has ever existed and tries to predict with the highest amount of accuracy, what would go next in that sentence? He gives the example, he could say twinkle, twinkle, you know, the most likely next two words after twinkle, twinkle are going to be little star, you know?

And so it is a high probability that that's going to be right. You could say after Frodo defeated Sauron, he returned to, and the most likely answer is going to be the Shire just because it knows all of the times that that's been used in the history of text. And just the amount of text that it's using gives it its extreme power that lord of the rings example was another one that he used and into this it adds you know some extra stuff that allows it to be more accurate uh humans were were essentially training it on certain answers and you know there. And there's a lot that goes into producing an accurate response to that, because it has to understand what the intention of the asker is, which is why it still has problems, which

is why it still often says things that are completely incorrect, if not nonsensical. It's good at being not nonsensical, which is impressive, but it's not great at being correct. And then it says the correct thing with just the most confidence that you've ever heard in your life. You know, so it's sort of similar to when, I don't know if you had this experience

when I was in school and college, like all my teachers really, really tried to get us to not use Wikipedia as a source because it was not reliable in terms of as a primary source for things. That was drilled into us. It's sort of similar to that in that, you know, it's going to be accurate, an impressive amount of times, but you would not be wise to use it as a primary source on something that you really want it to be right. You have to check what it's saying. I am feeling old because in college, we didn't have Wikipedia yet to be warned about by professors. Wow. Yeah, I know.

It's rough. This is oversimplifying it, but it is basically a really, really smart autocomplete that we have on our phones right now for texting, which I think is important as we start talking about the possibility of it replacing writing as a profession. Because I used it a bunch just in preparation for this interview and i hadn't really used it all that much before and it is interesting like using it as a sort of alternative to google does seem sort of useful because you know you can ask it like what's a good place to eat in in los angeles that's new or that i want see you know like you can do

that and it will it's it's the search results or what it spits out is much clearer and i think more helpful than sometimes even what you get with google when you try to do like you know i i i asked for a couple obama speeches i knew it i knew you would i had to to. I knew you would. I had to. Of course. And it's, you know, you can tell that it is using language that Obama uses over and over again or has used over and over again. Yeah. But it's not fooling anyone. No. I mean. I don't think.

Well, listen. You said in the essay it's like a, it's basically like a B minus high school student. Yes. And that's where it starts to get more interesting or dangerous, depending on how you look at it. Because, yeah, it's not going to be able to reproduce a Jon Favreau, Obama speech with any kind of persuasive power that you might be able to give it. But what's so interesting about this is that it came out, I think, November 30th, and I just happened to be visiting my parents' house for Thanksgiving the week before. And my parents are trying to sell their house. And part of that process is that they're making me go through all of my old stuff, of which they have kept all of it. And so I was going through

these boxes of essays that I had written in elementary school and junior high and high school, and they are so bad. Like they are just so, the writing is torturous, you know, and what you get most from it really is how much I really did not want to be writing those essays, which I think is important to this whole discussion. But the ChatGPT versions of those prompts are definitely better than what I was writing. It's not going to be able to reproduce sophisticated writing. It just can't do that. Maybe in the future it will, but we're not there yet. But the writing of students, particularly high school students and younger, it can reproduce and it can reproduce it pretty well. And so that does pose, I think, some kind of issue for teachers and for the education

system. You say in the essay that maybe we'll outsource writing to GPT like we outsourced math to calculator, spelling to spellcheck, memory to the internet. I want to spend most of our time talking about writing. But do you think that we have lost anything by outsourcing math, spelling, and especially memory? I thought that one was particularly interesting to these technologies. It's a good question.

I mean, if you're asking me, somebody who is a writer in the arts, no, I have not lost anything from outsourcing math to calculators. You know, and that's, that's another point I bring up, which is that the questions that I was personally posing to my calculus teachers was, when am I ever going to use this? You know, and they, they came up with some kind of bullshit that it would be valuable to me a future in my life and the truth is that it really isn't and i think high schoolers are very savvy about that they they can sort of understand when you're you're reaching so for me those things are not as important now memory to the internet is an interesting one. I'm sort of resigned about it now. I think that is the general feeling in the public. I mean, there are people who, like you can find essays online who argue for rote memorization as a method of schooling to come back in a big way. We still do that,

but we don't do it as much as they used to do in the early parts of the 20th century, in which that was a huge part of education. Now, we actually lean more towards essays because I think in part, we realize that our access to information is always with us. It's never not going to be with us moving forward and so i i don't know for sure if if we've lost something from not being able to recall on the spot things but maybe we have i don't know what do you think dude i the the memory wand stuck out at me because we're just watching over spellcheck, by the way. We don't need spell...

No, yeah, no. Thank God for spellcheck. I know that was a waste of time. Yeah, yeah. Though, yeah, I did spelling bees and all that. So, you know, whatever. Well, you had to when you were like third, fourth grade. But memory, I've noticed, and again, I can't tell if this is age or technology, but that because I'm so dependent on, oh, I'll just Google it if I need to remember something, that personal memory stories, not even from childhood, even from a couple weeks ago when I'm trying to piece together a story to tell friends, I have a harder time and i wonder if it's because like i'm not using the muscle of memory as nearly

as much as i used to before google which was you know probably the first 20 25 years of my life well i mean this is i think all going to wrap into the conversation about writing but you know it might be the case that like in-person dialogue, conversation, dinner party chatter has suffered. I think so. For the loss of memory. Yeah. Because, you know, if you're alone and you're trying to compose something on your own,

you know, then it doesn't really matter at what speed you get to the information. But if what we're all operating on is like a surface level of things, and in order to say something intelligent about what happened in the world, or like you say, three weeks ago in your own life, you know, then conversation could suffer from that. But you know, it's too late. It's too too late we're never getting it back i want to get to the writing part i mean your main argument in the essay is that even though we will probably end up outsourcing many categories of basic writing to ai we should be careful about

how much we outsource because there's something special and important and fundamentally human about writing. What is it? So this sort of goes back to the me of high school, which is that I really was an uninspired student in high school. Like I said, those essays, just steaming off of them was this kid who really would rather have done anything else but sit down and write this essay on pride and prejudice. And that's just because the educational system as a whole, at least for me in the sort of middle class suburban Philadelphia world, I could read the incentives of the education system. And the incentive said to me that what mattered wasn't learning, it was grades. And that learning was just a means to achieve the grades, which was a means to achieve the GPA, which was a means to achieve the degree, the college, the job, and so on. And that was just me reading the world around me. Now, great teachers can puncture through that, but the system as a whole can corrupt the good intentions of individual people.

It wasn't until I got to college, and I write about this in my book, which is really sort of the theme of the book, which is that when I got to college as this uninspired kid and had completed these checkpoints, I discovered Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was such a huge figure for me in my development. And what was so mind-blowing about Emerson was that reading him, it was like I was reading my own thoughts. And that just blew my mind and emerson has this quote that i'll never forget which is that the young man reveres men of genius because to speak truly they are more himself than he is you know and that is just to say that language and this is what i learned i really learned from emerson language is what makes up the human mind

you know and the more sophisticated you can be with language the better you can understand yourself others in the world Emerson taught me that and it launched in me it's a sort of hunger to get to the bottom of myself to answer the questions I talk about in the video, which are, who am I and what are those things that I believe? And so that is what writing is. We talk about thinking, we talk about speaking, we talk about writing, but they're just different words for the same thing. Thinking is writing, speaking is writing, and writing is writing. It's just different levels of sophistication. For the most part, the me until I started writing for myself, the me was made up of

the language in my head, the language of thought, which is just chaos. The language in your mind is pure chaos. And the language of speech is a little better. But please, no one transcribe this. Because the level of sophistication between what I am able to extemporaneously say versus what I'm able to compose in writing, the gulf there is huge. And so I think what I learned was that just this respect for the ability to compose language and how really important it is for self-knowledge and knowledge of the world. Self-knowledge is especially interesting there. It made me think, have you heard that psychologists and therapists often suggest

keeping a journal to patients? And the reason they do that is because the act of writing apparently integrates our emotional right brain with our logical left brain so that instead of lying awake and spinning out with our thoughts and emotions, as you just alluded to, like, don't transcribe what's going on in my head. We can understand and process them by using the more logical left brain to figure out how to channel and organize those emotions into actual words on a page. And that in itself is sort of an act of self-realization and understanding that sort of helps your own mental health. Had you heard about that? I mean, I haven't heard that precisely, but it makes complete sense. It makes complete,

I mean, think about what talk therapy is, you know, what psychotherapy is, you know, you're being asked to essentially articulate in language the way you feel about certain things to a particularly sensitive listener who can identify the patterns, the sort of the deleterious patterns in your own thinking. I think that's at the key of this whole conversation about ChachiT and writing is that the language in our heads or the language that we, we receive from the world, like it doesn't just form into spontaneous patterns. It takes the patterns of the language that already exists, you know? And so we are all living along the grooves of language created by other people. On the most basic level, we are living in the pattern of the syntax and grammar of language. So, you know, the way language sentences are put together, that's really the only way we can think, you know?

And so that's the most fundamental thing but then on top of that you have the conventional wisdom of the culture and the received knowledge that you get the way that you analyze yourself without even realizing it is a long sentence structures and you know persuasive structures forms and genres of writing that you have been exposed to throughout your life. And the only way to disrupt that is to create language of your own, I think. Yeah. Well, so I love the line in the video where you say, not to write is to live according to the language of others. This is what you were just talking about. But just to play devil's advocate on this i i happen to agree but so

chat gpt is is living according to the language of others because it's basically just a composite of the entire internet right but isn't what we write and think a composite of all the information we've processed you know like what's the difference between there is no difference it's just a matter of degree it's just a matter of degree. It's just a matter of, you know, that's the thing. It's like the human mind and culture are the same thing. It's just a symbolic whatever ways that we read the world. But by far the most dominant one is language. And so we can never escape. Like I say in the video, like writing is a form of editing as well. We're just receiving words that Shakespeare made, you know, or we're receiving ways of thinking that Virginia Woolf wrote, you know, whomever it is. And that will always be the case. exact same power to change the reality that we all live in. And a creative, a generative relationship to language is, I think, much more beneficial to people and to the world than a purely received one. And then there's degrees in that too. There's reading tweets and then there's degrees in that too. There's reading tweets, and then there's reading Virginia Woolf. Right. A little bit different.

Yeah, exactly. So there's writing a letter to your friend, and then there's attempting to write an essay about something that means a lot to you. Just the process of doing that, just bolting words into a structure of your own is, I think, going to be therapeutic on the personal level. On the cultural level, desperately need it. Desperately need it. Well, it's interesting because I wonder what you think are sort of the top hallmarks of really good writing, because I do think that gets to what humans and individuals can do that artificial intelligence could probably never do. Well, I mean, I don't want to say never. Who the hell knows? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's my optimistic take. Well, there's the thing of like, you know, there was a Princeton student like last week

who created a app that can detect chat GPT, you know? I love that. To like, you know, ruin all these high schoolers. Man, what a narc. Yeah, I know. That's exactly what I thought know that's exactly what i thought that's exactly a college kid all of his friends are having fun with chat gpt i know um but good for him um and yeah it might be able to catch like this version of it but you know it's

going to be an arms race you know yeah the ai is going to get better and eventually maybe it will be able to write something like as sophisticated as our favorite writers. I don't know. I don't want to say never, but I don't know. For me, the hallmarks of great writing are, I don't know, I think it's about drilling into parts of experience that have not been articulated. You know, the beauty of Shakespeare is that when he wrote Romeo and Juliet, what he essentially did was define a kind of experience, romantic love, that did not really exist in that way prior and which we are all living still. The shortest definition of love as we know it in 2022,

like identity affirming and potentially identity destroying love is Romeo and Juliet. That's the most succinct definition of love. He brought that into the culture and that's what genius is. You don't have to be a genius to be a great writer, but it would be silly to think that there are no more kinds of experience that have yet to be articulated in those interesting ways. So when I'm reading, I'm always looking for those people who just essentially turn a light on something that we were all sort of orbiting, but couldn't put like, that's the, that's why it's so joyful when you find a writer who just, it just like clicks for you and they've explained something and all of a sudden your life comes into focus. That is the drug that I'm constantly looking for. So I was originally trained as just a standard political speech writer. And by the time I started working for Obama, I knew how to write a standard

democratic political speech. And then when I started working with him, I basically had to unlearn all of that to figure out how to write in his voice because he was intent on making it personal, making it about himself. The reason the 2004 convention speech did well is because he told the story that no other politician could have told. The reason Dreams for My Father was a great first book is because it didn't sound like a politician was writing it who your point of view, writing a speech that no one else could give but you, telling a story that no one else could tell but you, that no one else has heard, making a point that no one else has made before. And, you know, what people say about good writing often is like you might not remember what you heard, but if it's good, you'll remember how you felt and so there's certain emotion that good writing generates whether that's you know moving you emotionally whether it's making you laugh chat gpt doesn't do well with humor um right and so like there's emotion that comes from writing that i don't know you can necessarily capture at least if you are just scraping the internet of language and, and, and, you know, generating a really smart autocomplete.

Yeah. That's interesting though, because how do you write something that only you could write for someone else? Yeah, you, that's, it's interesting. Well, because the key there also was like, if I had to just study him, just read his books, read his transcripts of his interview, basically be a chat GPT and then churn things out, I don't think it would have been all that successful. And the other big thing I tell people is like, if you are the kind of politician whose speechwriter is like five staffers removed from you and you're just getting drafts and editing

and sending it back, then like, that's not really gonna work. Like you, I got to know him and collaborate with him. And he did a lot of the writing himself. And I really think that's the only way you can be successful because I could be a really good mimic, but I can't get all the way there because I'm not you. Yeah.

And I haven't had your experiences, right? And each one of this, back to your point, like each one of us, what makes us potentially powerful writers is that we have had a unique set of experiences and relationships that no one else in the world has had. Yeah. And, you know, just hearing you talk about that, too, I think it's salient for the conversation about, like, where does the high school essay go from here? Because I don't know what could have convinced me to really get into it, you know, at that age. But what definitely didn't get me into it was the very sort of dry five paragraph argumentative essay that we're all familiar with from school, which is say what you're going to say

prove it in three different ways and then say what you just said you know like and actually that's the kind of essay that chat gpt is really good at reproducing um but if i was the 15 year old me and i was listening to what you just said and you're saying, only you've lived these experiences. write is you know unique to you maybe we will be able to you know create a love of writing at a younger age which is really the point of all this is trying you know it didn't succeed with me really but what i say in the video is that it didn't succeed but the heroic work of teachers on an insipid teenager like me was just giving me the basic competence of structure and grammar and syntax. hit me when i when my life felt very shallow and confused i had those fundamentals to to work with and i have no like answer for the educational system but great teachers and inspiring you know people who can inspire you i think it's really the only way to get through yeah that's why teachers, I don't think,

could be replaced by artificial intelligence either, or at least the kind of teaching we're talking about. But a big obstacle in the way here, and this gets to a couple of the essays in your book, is I think the internet. The obstacle in the way of creative writing, right? It's an obstacle in the way of a lot of things. Yeah, right, of course. One thing I struggled with since I left the White House, especially over the last five years, is that I'm finding it much more difficult to write, which used to be my entire job.

And as I've been doing on this show, I've wondered how much the internet has to do with it. In your book of fantastic essays, in one of them about the internet, you write, When I'm consuming the internet, it feels like the agency dial has been turned to zero. Culture isn't just in my mind, it's steering my thinking. And as I spend more time online, I'm getting better at ascertaining the internet's opinions instead of developing my own i i like read that and i was like man that is me yeah do you think that's why it might be harder to write i write like right before that in the essay i try to recreate this hour-long period after i saw the cats trailer a couple of years ago and how I was so funny. It's just like this weird, like detective trying to figure out what I should be thinking about this cats trailer and people who are online people, you know, well, I think relate to that

experience of, you know, trying to figure out what the internet's thoughts for us are. And it goes to, I think, the same thing we've been talking about, which is that language is at the core of the human mind and culture. And the internet is just an expression of culture. And so I had this professor at Boston University who essentially taught that to us. And one interesting corollary of that is that because the mind is really just language, it means that there is no spatial quality to the mind. The mind is temporal. It's a function of time and it happens in sequence. And if you think about thinking, you know, we sometimes talk about having two thoughts at the same time, but that's not really how it works. They all come in sequence.

And so what that essentially means is that you just have a calendar of time every day and a number of appointments that can be filled on that calendar. If you're online all the time, what essentially is happening is the internet is filling up all those appointments on your mind's timeline. And because the internet, especially like Twitter and a lot of social media, is language itself, what's essentially happening is that your mind is being swapped out for internet mind. If you give away time, you are giving away your mind. I mean, there's nothing else to the mind, you know? And so you have to be sort of care. And so, and let me tell you, internet mind, easy to spot. Yeah. Yeah. The internet mind is the mind that's trying to figure out what the cat's trailer is all about. That is internet mind or, or, or in any number of realms. And so

it makes it harder to write purely because you are not spending any generative time with language. You're just, you know, for a lot of it, receiving the worst kind of language. You know, horrible, not good for you. You know, you could be spending, I hope spending some time reading good articles and things like that, which, you know, will have a good effect for you.

But what we all need to do, the only thing we can do is to step away from it and allow some language composition of our own, some time for that. And just like forming our own opinions, I think is huge too. Because the way that echo chambers are talked about now, it's from like a sort of partisan political perspective, right? But I think there's something else going on there, which is sort of having in your mind

your opinions being shaped by sort of the general cultural opinion. So like I've had embarrassingly have had these experiences where I finish a TV show or I finish a movie and I almost want to tweet about how great it is. But before I do that, I will check Twitter to be like, well, I don't want to step into something horrible and say that something I loved and everyone's going to be like, what the fuck? That's horrible. You're speaking to me so much right now. I can't even tell you. But then I've also done like I've watched speeches like political speeches. And I did this.

I tried to do Twitter wasn't as crazy during the Obama years as it is now. But I've done this a few times where I'm like, OK, President Biden's giving a speech or back with President Trump was giving a speech or anyone's giving a speech. And I'm like, you know what? Instead of watching the speech while I am scrolling through Twitter, I want to just, because I'm going to talk about this on the pod, I want to just watch it and react to it what I think. What is that? What do you think?

Right. But that's the problem. And then I'm like, at least I can compare it to what's happening online but i want to have my own opinion first and i think that the reason i've had so much trouble writing is because every time i'm trying to like figure out a take on something it is just a a composite of the various takes that i have seen on the internet and i'm sitting there i'm like well i don't want to write it unless it's something new or something that i have to say that no one else has said yet. Otherwise, what's my point? Yeah. You're just really speaking to my heart right now. I mean,

I don't envy you because you have needs for takes on a much broader variety of things and much more, a much bigger number of takes. For me, for me, like I have come to terms with the fact that on a lot of things, I'd say probably the vast majority of things, I don't have an opinion and that's okay. You know, because, because the question is what's the quality of the opinion? I have these 10 essays that i wrote in the book i release a nerd writer video once a month or something you know that is essentially that is the that comprises all my that's a prolific number of takes yeah i mean like the the 10 essays in the book for say the 11 essays in the book like those are original ideas and opinions that I each on

each of them spent at least a month trying to think through what I actually think about this because they meant a lot to me. And because I, like you're saying, like you want to say something that people haven't said before that you feel has value, that's unique to you. Those are the things that I feel have value for me. And you those are the things that i feel have value for me and i and one of the reasons i really don't post like on twitter or other social media is because i just don't really feel comfortable i don't feel comfortable with pining on everything you know essentially or or just that like i don't really know what my opinion is um and we do live in a culture in which you are asked to give opinions on everything um and i if well on twitter you can like you can watch it in real time you're like

all the covet experts just became ukraine experts yeah there we go a lot of overlap in that but i totally struggle with you at One realm is music. I have an issue where, and I don't know what to do about it, but when I listen to an album, I go on Pitchfork to see what they said about it. And I really wish that that didn't affect me. But if the rating is below a seven, that is going to be a real difficult, you know, it's like,

I try to divorce myself from those things, but, and I think it partly comes from the fact that like we are bombarded now with so much more information on such a wider variety of things than we ever have before that as a shorthand, we have to rely on the opinions of others for a lot of things. You know, we have to not only, you know, trust in experts who are smarter than us or have spent time with, because we can't possibly do that kind of work ourselves. But, you know, when you're at a dinner party and someone's asking about the house of representatives this latest bill or that like it's not the worst thing in the world if if you parrot a talking point that you heard if it you know if it actually has some resonance with you um yeah

you're not going to be able to get away with a like unique incisive like totally unique opinion on everything you come across um and so we're in this weird position and the internet is is certainly making it more difficult if not just worse i interviewed johan harry last week who wrote the book stolen focus which is a book about paying attention to things he writes at length about sort of letting your mind wander, the benefits of letting your mind wander. You write about this too. You call it free time, time for ideation. How did you come around to realizing that you weren't doing enough of that? And what's your process now? Wow. Definitely don't have a process. It is a mess over here. No, because that essay, the internet essay too, it ends on a very pessimistic note with this backsliding that happens, which I think we're all familiar with of setting up these boundaries for yourself where you're being really good and then slowly those things coming back into

your life until you're it's worse than it was at the start i think the way i sort of came to that was like i am a constant input for things whether it's the internet or other forms of media and it was really just one day in the shower realizing like this is the only time of the day like my mind is wandering i'm in the shower there's nothing else yeah i'm not an input for anything and you come up with some good ideas you you like go places you didn't think you would go um and so i tried to build that time into my life, you know, tried to build some time just to sit down and do nothing. But, you know, what I say in the book is that like, it's not easy primarily because

the distractions of the internet, the time that you're being an input is like the perfect kind of thing to distract from the self-criticisms of your own mind you know and so the very first things that are going to come to you when you build some free time are those things um and then you remember oh yeah that's the reason why i was on tiktok for 30 hours because i just yes i am trying to distract myself from existential angst there was a purpose yeah exactly um let's let's reopen um but if you can get through that and it's sort of like quitting sugar or quitting something you know the first week is just going to be hell but eventually you will you know you will be able to get to a place where you are more comfortable with that feeling and letting your

mind sort of do its thing with language like we've been talking about will yield i think interesting creative therapeutic results but again it's a roller coaster. You know, I just, a couple of days ago, I put the stupid freaking time, the things on the apps, you know, the time limits. Yeah, yeah. I have overrode them every single day. I know, I do the same thing.

I do this. It's like, sometimes it pauses me when your Twitter time is up and it's like 8 a.m. Yeah. Like, okay, I've been up since 5, and yeah, that's a problem. But it's really hard, and I think the reason it's hard is because it's not, I mean, the reason we don't call these devices addictive lightly here. Yeah. Like, it's not always up to us.

I mean, like, when we are exposed to them, when they're around, and when it is sort of permeating the entire society that we're in, it's hard. It's hard to put them down. One thing that helps is reading books. I mean, that to me is, and my wife actually turned me on to reading and listening at the same time. So audio book at the same time. And that puts me into like a kind of hyper focus. It just keeps me on like the train tracks, you know. That's interesting.

And goes right back to language. Like being exposed to long form text from a good writer is, you know, is a really therapeutic, creative thing to experience uh i talk about i talk about it like it's some like it's something from the distant past or something you know it kind of is that's how i feel no like i i finished a novel in july on vacation and i was like this vacation was so restful and and and restorative and i feel great and i read this novel everyone's like yeah who the fuck do you think i read 10 novel you know i'm like but I read this novel. Everyone's like, yeah, who the fuck do you think? I read 10 novels. But I read this and it made me feel so good.

It's like, that's what a lot of us are missing. Try the headphones in the books at the same time. I'm going to try this. I like this. Evan Pushek, thank you so much for joining. Go to Evan's YouTube channel, which has millions of subscribers. It's called Nerdwriter.

And your book is Escape Into Meaning. It is a fantastic series of subscribers. It's called Nerdwriter. And your book is Escape into Meaning. It is a fantastic series of essays. So go check it out. Thanks for joining Offline. Thank you. This was so much fun. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show.

Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Michael Martinez, Ari Schwartz, Amelia Montooth, and Sandy Gerard for production support. A special thanks to Gabby from our team at Crooked who gave us the idea of having ChatGPT write that intro of Evan. Thank you.