Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Cal Newport.
00:00:02 He’s a friend and someone who’s writing,
00:00:04 like his book, Deep Work, for example,
00:00:06 has guided how I strive to approach productivity
00:00:09 and life in general.
00:00:11 He doesn’t use social media,
00:00:13 and in his book, Digital Minimalism,
00:00:15 he encourages people to find the right amount
00:00:17 of social media usage that provides value and joy.
00:00:21 He has a new book out called A World Without Email,
00:00:24 where he argues brilliantly, I would say,
00:00:27 that email is destroying productivity in companies
00:00:30 and in our lives.
00:00:31 And very importantly, he offers solutions.
00:00:35 He is a computer scientist at Georgetown University
00:00:38 who practices what he preaches.
00:00:41 To do theoretical computer science
00:00:42 at the level that he does it,
00:00:44 you really have to live a focused life
00:00:46 that minimizes distractions
00:00:48 and maximizes hours of deep work.
00:00:51 Lastly, he’s a host of an amazing podcast
00:00:54 called Deep Questions that I highly recommend
00:00:57 for anyone who wants to improve their productive life.
00:01:00 Quick mention of our sponsors,
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00:01:11 Click the sponsor links to get a discount
00:01:13 and to support this podcast.
00:01:15 As a side note, let me say that deep work
00:01:17 or long periods of deep, focused thinking
00:01:20 have been something I’ve been chasing more and more
00:01:22 over the past few years.
00:01:24 Deep work is hard, but is ultimately the thing
00:01:28 that makes life so damn amazing.
00:01:30 The ability to create things you’re passionate about
00:01:33 in a flow state where the distractions of the world
00:01:36 just fade away.
00:01:37 Social media, yes, reading the comments,
00:01:41 yes, I still read the comments,
00:01:43 is a source of joy for me in strict moderation.
00:01:46 Too much takes away the focused mind
00:01:49 and too little, at least I think,
00:01:51 takes away all of the fun.
00:01:53 We need both, the focus and the fun.
00:01:56 If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube,
00:01:59 review it on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify,
00:02:02 support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter
00:02:06 at Lex Friedman if you can only figure out
00:02:08 how to spell that.
00:02:10 And now, here’s my conversation with Cal Newport.
00:02:15 What is deep work?
00:02:16 Let’s start with a big question.
00:02:18 So I mean, it’s my term for when you’re focusing
00:02:21 without distraction on a cognitively demanding task,
00:02:25 which is something we’ve all done,
00:02:28 but we had never really given it a name necessarily
00:02:31 that was separate from other type of work.
00:02:33 And so I gave it a name and said,
00:02:36 let’s compare that to other types of efforts
00:02:38 you might do while you’re working
00:02:40 and see that the deep work efforts actually have
00:02:43 a huge benefit that we might be underestimating.
00:02:45 What does it mean to work deeply on something?
00:02:49 I had been calling it hard focus in my writing before that.
00:02:54 Well, so the context you would understand,
00:02:55 I was in the theory group in CSAIL at MIT, right?
00:02:58 So I was surrounded at the time
00:02:59 when I was coming up with these ideas
00:03:01 by these professional theoreticians.
00:03:03 And that’s like a murderer’s row of thinkers there, right?
00:03:06 I mean, it’s like Turing Award, Turing Award,
00:03:08 MacArthur, Turing Award.
00:03:10 I mean, you know the crew, right?
00:03:12 Theoretical computer science.
00:03:13 Theoretical computer science, yeah, yeah.
00:03:15 So I’m in the theory group, right?
00:03:18 Doing theoretical computer science and I publish a book.
00:03:21 So I was in this milieu where I was being exposed to people
00:03:25 where focus was their tier one skill.
00:03:27 Like that’s what you would talk about, right?
00:03:29 Like how intensely I can focus.
00:03:31 That was the key skill.
00:03:33 It’s like your 440 time or something
00:03:34 if you were an athlete, right?
00:03:37 So this is something that people actually,
00:03:39 the theory folks are thinking about?
00:03:41 Oh yeah. Really?
00:03:43 Like they’re openly discussing like, how do you focus?
00:03:45 I mean, I don’t know if they would quantify it,
00:03:48 but focus was the tier one skill.
00:03:51 So you would come in, here would be a typical day.
00:03:53 You’d come in and Eric DeMain would be sitting
00:03:56 in front of a whiteboard, right?
00:03:58 With a whole group of visitors
00:04:00 who had come to work with them.
00:04:01 And maybe they projected like a grid on there
00:04:03 because they’re working on some graph theory problem.
00:04:06 You go to lunch, you go to the gym, you come back,
00:04:10 they’re sitting there staring at the same whiteboard, right?
00:04:12 Like that’s the tier one skill.
00:04:14 This is the difference between different disciplines.
00:04:16 Like I often feel for many reasons, like a fraud,
00:04:20 but I definitely feel like a fraud when I hang out
00:04:22 with like either mathematicians or physicists.
00:04:25 It’s like, it feels like they’re doing the legit work
00:04:29 because when you talk closer in computer science,
00:04:31 you get to programming or like machine learning,
00:04:33 like the experimental machine learning
00:04:38 or like just the engineering version of it.
00:04:41 It feels like you’re gone so far away
00:04:44 from what’s required to solve something fundamental
00:04:47 about this universe.
00:04:49 It feels like you’re just like cheating your way
00:04:51 into like some kind of trick to figure out
00:04:53 how to solve a problem in this one particular case.
00:04:56 That’s how it feels.
00:04:59 I’d be interested to hear what you think about that
00:05:02 because programming doesn’t always feel
00:05:07 like you need to think deeply to work deeply,
00:05:11 but sometimes it does.
00:05:12 So it’s a weird dance.
00:05:14 For sure code does, right?
00:05:15 I mean, especially if you’re coming up
00:05:17 with original algorithmic designs,
00:05:20 I think it’s a great example of deep work.
00:05:22 I mean, yeah, the hardcore theoreticians,
00:05:25 they push it to an extreme.
00:05:26 I mean, I think it’s like knowing
00:05:29 that athletic endeavor is good
00:05:31 and then hanging out with a Olympic athlete,
00:05:33 you’re like, oh, I see that’s what it is.
00:05:35 Now for the grad students like me,
00:05:37 we’re not anywhere near that level,
00:05:38 but the faculty in that group,
00:05:41 these were the cognitive Olympic athletes.
00:05:44 But coding I think is a classic example of deep work
00:05:48 because I got this problem I wanna solve,
00:05:50 I have all of these tools
00:05:52 and I have to combine them somehow creatively
00:05:55 and on the fly.
00:05:56 But so basically I had been exposed to that.
00:05:59 So I was used to this notion when I was in grad school
00:06:00 and I was writing my blog, I’d write about hard focus.
00:06:03 That was the term I used.
00:06:05 Then I published this book,
00:06:06 So Good They Can’t Ignore You, which came out in 2012.
00:06:09 So like right as I began as a professor.
00:06:12 And that book had this notion of skill
00:06:14 being really important for career satisfaction,
00:06:16 that it’s not just following your passion.
00:06:19 You have to actually really get good at something
00:06:21 and then you use that skills as leverage.
00:06:22 And there was this big followup question to that book
00:06:24 of, okay, well, how do I get really good at things?
00:06:27 And then I look back to my grad school experience,
00:06:29 I was like, huh, there was this focus thing
00:06:31 that we used to do.
00:06:32 And I wonder how generally applicable that is
00:06:35 into the knowledge sector.
00:06:36 And so as I started thinking about it, it became clear,
00:06:39 there’s this interesting storyline that emerged
00:06:41 that, okay, actually undistracted concentration
00:06:43 is not just important for esoteric theoreticians,
00:06:46 it’s important here, it’s important here,
00:06:47 it’s important here.
00:06:48 And that involved into the deep work hypothesis,
00:06:51 which is across the whole knowledge work sector.
00:06:55 Focus is very important
00:06:56 and we’ve accidentally created circumstances
00:06:58 where we just don’t do a lot of it.
00:07:00 So focus is the sort of prerequisite for basically,
00:07:03 you say knowledge work,
00:07:04 but basically any kind of skill acquisition,
00:07:07 any kind of major effort in this world.
00:07:09 Can we break that apart a little bit?
00:07:11 Yeah, so a key aspect of focus is not just
00:07:15 that you’re concentrating hard on something,
00:07:17 but you do it without distraction.
00:07:20 So a big theme of my work is that context shifting
00:07:24 kills the human capacity to think.
00:07:27 So if I change what I’m paying attention to
00:07:29 to something different, really, even if it’s brief
00:07:32 and then try to bring it back to the main thing I’m doing,
00:07:34 that causes a huge cognitive pile up
00:07:36 that makes it very hard to think clearly.
00:07:38 So even if you think, okay, look, I’m writing this code
00:07:40 or I’m writing this essay and I’m not multitasking
00:07:43 and all my windows are closed
00:07:45 and I have no notifications on,
00:07:47 but every five or six minutes you quickly check
00:07:50 like an inbox or your phone,
00:07:51 that initiates a context shift in your brain, right?
00:07:54 We’re gonna start to suppress some neural networks,
00:07:55 we’re gonna try to amplify some others.
00:07:57 It’s a pretty complicated process actually.
00:07:59 There’s a sort of neurological cascade that happens.
00:08:02 You rip yourself away from that halfway through
00:08:04 and go back to what you’re doing
00:08:05 and now it’s trying to switch back to the original thing
00:08:07 even though it’s also your brain’s in the process
00:08:08 of switching to these emails
00:08:09 and trying to understand those contexts.
00:08:11 And as a result, your ability to think clearly
00:08:14 just goes really down.
00:08:16 And it’s fatiguing too.
00:08:17 I mean, you do this long enough and you get midday
00:08:19 and you’re like, okay, I can’t think anymore.
00:08:22 You’ve exhausted yourself.
00:08:23 Is there some kind of perfect number of minutes,
00:08:27 would you say?
00:08:28 So we’re talking about focusing on a particular task
00:08:32 for one minute, five minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes.
00:08:37 Is it possible to kind of context switch
00:08:40 while maintaining deep focus every 20 minutes or so?
00:08:44 So if you’re thinking of like this,
00:08:46 again, maybe it’s a selfish kind of perspective,
00:08:48 but if you think about programming,
00:08:51 you’re focused on a particular design of a little bit,
00:08:53 maybe a small scale on a particular function
00:08:55 or large scale on a system.
00:08:59 And then the shift of focus happens like this,
00:09:02 which is like, wait a minute,
00:09:04 is there a library that can achieve this little task
00:09:07 or something like that?
00:09:08 And then you have to look it up.
00:09:10 This is the danger zone.
00:09:11 You go to the internets.
00:09:13 And so you have to, now it is a kind of context switch
00:09:17 because as opposed to thinking about the particular problem,
00:09:20 you now have switch thinking about like consuming
00:09:25 and integrating knowledge that’s out there
00:09:27 that can plug into your solution to a particular problem.
00:09:31 It definitely feels like a context switch,
00:09:33 but is that a really bad thing to do?
00:09:35 So should you be setting it aside always
00:09:38 and really trying to as much as possible go deep
00:09:42 and stay there for like a really long period of time?
00:09:45 Well, I mean, I think if you’re looking up a library
00:09:48 that’s relevant to what you’re doing, that’s probably okay.
00:09:51 And I don’t know that I would count that
00:09:52 as a full context shift because the semantic networks
00:09:56 involved are relatively similar, right?
00:09:58 You’re thinking about this type of solution.
00:10:00 You’re thinking about coding.
00:10:01 You’re thinking about this type of functions.
00:10:03 Where you’re really gonna get hit
00:10:04 is if you switch your context
00:10:06 to something that’s different.
00:10:08 And if there’s unresolved obligations.
00:10:09 So really the worst possible thing you could do
00:10:11 would be to look at like an email inbox, right?
00:10:14 Cause here’s 20 emails.
00:10:16 I can’t answer most of these right now.
00:10:18 They’re completely different.
00:10:19 Like the context of these emails,
00:10:21 like, okay, there’s a grant funding issue
00:10:22 or something like this.
00:10:23 It’s very different than the coding I’m doing.
00:10:25 And I’m leaving it unresolved.
00:10:27 So like someone needs something from me
00:10:29 and I’m gonna try to pull my attention back.
00:10:30 The second worst would be something
00:10:31 that’s emotionally arousing.
00:10:33 So if you’re like, let me just glance over at Twitter.
00:10:35 I’m sure it’s nice and calm and peaceful over there, right?
00:10:37 That could be devastating
00:10:38 because you’re gonna expose yourself
00:10:39 to something that’s emotionally arousing.
00:10:41 That’s gonna completely mess up the cognitive plateau there.
00:10:43 And then when you come back to,
00:10:45 okay, let me try to code again.
00:10:46 It’s really difficult.
00:10:47 So it’s both the information and the emotion.
00:10:50 Yeah, both can be killers if what you’re trying to do.
00:10:53 So I would recommend at least an hour at a time
00:10:55 because it could take up to 20 minutes
00:10:57 to completely clear out the residue
00:10:59 from whatever it was you were thinking about before.
00:11:02 So if you’re coding for 30 minutes,
00:11:04 you might only be getting 10 or 15 minutes
00:11:05 of actual sort of peak lacks going on there, right?
00:11:08 So an hour at least you get a good 40, 45 minutes plus.
00:11:11 I’m partial to 90 minutes as a really good chunk.
00:11:15 We can get a lot done.
00:11:16 But just before you get exhausted,
00:11:18 you can sort of pull back a little bit.
00:11:21 Yeah, and one of the beautiful,
00:11:23 people can read about it in your book, Deep Work.
00:11:27 And I know this has been out for a long time
00:11:29 and people are probably familiar with many of the concepts,
00:11:31 but it’s still pretty profound
00:11:33 and it has stayed with me for a long time.
00:11:36 There’s something about adding the terms to it
00:11:39 that actually solidifies the concepts.
00:11:42 Like words matter, it’s pretty cool.
00:11:44 And just for me, sort of as a comment,
00:11:47 there’s, it’s a struggle and it’s very difficult
00:11:52 to maintain focus for a prolonged period of time.
00:11:56 But the days on which I’m able to accomplish
00:11:59 several hours of that kind of work, I’m happy.
00:12:03 So forget being productive and all that.
00:12:05 I’m just satisfied with my life.
00:12:07 I feel fulfilled, it’s like joyful.
00:12:11 And then I can be, I’m less of a dick
00:12:14 to other people in my life afterwards.
00:12:16 It’s a beautiful thing.
00:12:19 And I find the opposite when I don’t do that kind of thing,
00:12:23 I’m much more irritable.
00:12:25 Like I feel like I didn’t accomplish anything
00:12:27 and there’s this stress that then the negative emotion
00:12:30 builds up to where you’re no longer able
00:12:32 to sort of enjoy the hell out of this amazing life.
00:12:35 So in that sense, Deep Work has been a source
00:12:37 of a lot of happiness.
00:12:39 I’d love to ask you, how do you,
00:12:42 again, you cover this in the book,
00:12:43 but how do you integrate Deep Work into your life?
00:12:46 What are different scheduling strategies
00:12:48 that you would recommend just at a high level?
00:12:51 What are different ideas there?
00:12:52 Well, I mean, I’m a big fan of time blocking, right?
00:12:55 So if you’re facing your workday,
00:12:58 don’t allow like your inbox or a to do list
00:13:02 to sort of drive you.
00:13:02 Don’t just come into your day and think,
00:13:04 what do I wanna do next?
00:13:05 I mean, I’m a big planner saying,
00:13:06 here’s the time available, let me make a plan for it.
00:13:11 So I have a meeting here, I have an appointment here,
00:13:13 here’s what’s left, what do I actually wanna do with it?
00:13:15 So in this half hour, I’m gonna work on this.
00:13:17 For this 90 minute block, I’m gonna work on that.
00:13:19 And during this hour, I’m gonna try to fit this in.
00:13:21 And then actually I have this half hour gap
00:13:22 between two meetings.
00:13:23 So why don’t I take advantage of that
00:13:24 to go run five errands,
00:13:25 I can kind of batch those together.
00:13:27 But blocking out in advance,
00:13:30 this is what I wanna do with the time available.
00:13:32 I mean, I find that’s much more effective.
00:13:33 Now, once you’re doing this,
00:13:34 once you’re in a discipline of time blocking,
00:13:36 it’s much easier to actually see,
00:13:37 this is where I want, for example, the Deep Work.
00:13:40 And I can get a handle on the other things
00:13:41 that need to happen and find better places to fit them
00:13:44 so I can prioritize this.
00:13:46 And you’re gonna get a lot more of that done
00:13:48 than if it’s just going through your day
00:13:49 and saying, what’s next?
00:13:51 I schedule every single day kind of thing.
00:13:53 So as I could try to do in the morning
00:13:54 to try to have a plan.
00:13:57 Yeah, so I do a quarterly, weekly, daily planning.
00:14:00 So at the semester or quarterly level,
00:14:02 I have a big picture vision
00:14:04 for what I’m trying to get done during the fall,
00:14:06 let’s say, or during the winter.
00:14:08 Like there’s a deadline coming up for academic papers
00:14:11 at the end of the season, here’s what I’m working on.
00:14:13 I wanna have this many chapters done of a book,
00:14:15 something like this.
00:14:16 Like you have the big picture vision
00:14:18 of what you wanna get done.
00:14:20 Then weekly, you look at that,
00:14:22 and then you look at your week
00:14:23 and you put together a plan for like,
00:14:25 okay, what’s my week gonna look like?
00:14:27 What do I need to do?
00:14:28 How am I gonna make progress on these things?
00:14:29 Maybe I need to do an hour every morning
00:14:32 or I see that Monday is my only really empty day.
00:14:34 So that’s gonna be the day that I really need to nail
00:14:36 on writing or something like this.
00:14:38 And then every day, you look at your weekly plan
00:14:41 and say, let me block off the actual hours.
00:14:42 So you do that three scales,
00:14:44 the quarterly, down to weekly, down to daily.
00:14:47 And we’re talking about actual times of day versus,
00:14:50 so the alternative is what I end up doing a lot,
00:14:55 and I’m not sure it’s the best way to do it,
00:14:56 is scheduling the duration of time.
00:15:01 This is called the luxury when you don’t have any meetings.
00:15:04 I’m like, religiously don’t do meetings.
00:15:07 All other academics are jealous of you, by the way.
00:15:09 Yeah. I know.
00:15:11 No Zoom meetings.
00:15:13 I find those are,
00:15:15 that’s one of the worst tragedies of the pandemic,
00:15:19 is both the opportunity to,
00:15:21 the positive thing is to have more time with your family,
00:15:25 sort of reconnect in many ways.
00:15:27 And that’s really interesting.
00:15:29 Be able to remotely sort of not waste time on travel
00:15:34 and all those kinds of things.
00:15:35 The negative is, actually both those things
00:15:38 are also sourced from the negative.
00:15:40 But the negative is like,
00:15:41 it seems like people have multiplied the number of meetings
00:15:44 because they’re so easy to schedule.
00:15:46 And there’s nothing more draining to me intellectually,
00:15:50 philosophically, just my spirit is destroyed
00:15:55 by even a 10 minute Zoom meeting.
00:15:57 Like, what are we doing here?
00:15:59 What’s the meaning of life?
00:16:01 Yeah, I have, every Zoom meeting is,
00:16:04 I have an existential crisis, so.
00:16:05 Kierkegaard with the internet connection.
00:16:08 So, what the hell are we talking about?
00:16:13 Oh, so when you don’t have meetings,
00:16:16 there’s a luxury to really allow for certain things
00:16:21 if they need to, like the important things,
00:16:25 like deep work sessions to last way longer
00:16:27 than you maybe planned for.
00:16:30 I mean, that’s my goal is to try to schedule,
00:16:33 the goal is to schedule,
00:16:34 to sit and focus for a particular task for an hour
00:16:37 and hope I can keep going and hope I can get lost in it.
00:16:41 And do you find that this is at all an okay way to go
00:16:48 and the time blocking is just something you have to do
00:16:51 to actually be an adult and operate in this real world?
00:16:54 Or is there some magic to the time blocking?
00:16:57 Well, I mean, there’s magic to the intention.
00:17:01 There’s magic to it if you have varied responsibilities.
00:17:05 So I’m often juggling multiple jobs, essentially.
00:17:08 There’s academic stuff, there’s teaching stuff,
00:17:11 there’s book stuff, there’s the business
00:17:13 surrounding my book stuff.
00:17:16 But I’m of your same mindset.
00:17:18 If a deep work session is going well,
00:17:22 you just rock and roll and let it go on.
00:17:24 So like one of the big keys of time block,
00:17:26 at least the way I do it,
00:17:27 so I even sell this planner to help people time block,
00:17:30 it has many columns because the discipline is,
00:17:32 oh, if your initial schedule changes,
00:17:35 you just move over one.
00:17:36 Next time you get a chance, you move over one column
00:17:38 and then you just fix it for the time that’s remaining.
00:17:41 So in other words, there’s no bonus
00:17:43 for I made a schedule and I stuck with it.
00:17:46 Like there’s actually,
00:17:47 it’s not like you get a prize for it, right?
00:17:48 Like for me, the prize is I have an intentional plan
00:17:51 for my time and if I have to change that plan, that’s fine.
00:17:54 Like the state I wanna be is basically
00:17:56 at any point in the day, I’ve thought about
00:17:57 what time remains and gave it some thought
00:18:00 for what to do because I’ll do the same thing,
00:18:02 even though I have a lot more meetings
00:18:04 and other types of things I have to do in my various jobs
00:18:06 and I basically prioritize the deep work
00:18:09 and they get yelled at a lot.
00:18:11 So that’s kind of my strategy is like,
00:18:12 just be okay, just be okay getting yelled at a lot
00:18:15 because I feel you, if you’re rolling, yeah.
00:18:18 Well, that’s what it is for me, like with writing,
00:18:20 I think it’s writing so hard in a certain way
00:18:22 that it’s, you don’t really get on a roll in some sense,
00:18:24 like it’s just difficult, but working on proofs,
00:18:28 it’s very hard to pull yourself away from a proof
00:18:32 if you start to get some traction,
00:18:33 just you’ve been at it for a couple of hours
00:18:35 and you feel the pins and tumblers
00:18:37 starting to click together and progress is being made,
00:18:40 it’s really hard to pull away from that.
00:18:42 So I’m willing to get yelled at by almost everyone.
00:18:45 Of course, there is also a positive effect
00:18:48 to pulling yourself out of it when things are going great
00:18:53 because then you’re kind of excited to resume.
00:18:55 Yeah.
00:18:56 Like stopping on a dead end.
00:18:58 That’s true.
00:19:03 There’s an extra force of procrastination
00:19:05 that comes with if you stop on a dead end
00:19:07 to return to the task.
00:19:08 Yeah, or a cold start.
00:19:10 Yeah.
00:19:11 Whenever I feel like I’m in a stage now,
00:19:13 I submitted a few papers recently.
00:19:15 So now we’re sort of starting something up from cold
00:19:18 and it takes way too long to get going
00:19:20 because it’s very hard to get the motivation
00:19:23 to schedule a time when it’s not, yeah, we’re in it.
00:19:25 Like here’s where we are.
00:19:26 We feel like something’s about to give here.
00:19:28 We need the very early stages where it’s just,
00:19:30 I don’t know, I’m gonna read hard papers
00:19:32 and it’s gonna be hard to understand them
00:19:34 and I’m gonna have no idea how to make progress.
00:19:35 It’s not motivating.
00:19:38 What about deadlines?
00:19:39 Can we, okay, so this is like a therapy session.
00:19:46 It seems like I only get stuff done that has deadlines.
00:19:50 And so one of the implied powerful things
00:19:53 about time blocking is there’s a kind of deadline
00:19:56 or there’s a artificial or real sense of urgency.
00:19:59 Do you think it’s possible to get anything done
00:20:02 in this world without deadlines?
00:20:04 Why do deadlines work so well?
00:20:06 Well, I mean, it’s a clear motivational signal,
00:20:08 but in the short term, you do get an effect like that
00:20:12 in time blocking.
00:20:12 I think the strong effect you get by saying,
00:20:15 this is the exact time I’m gonna work on this,
00:20:18 is that you don’t have the debate with yourself
00:20:20 every three minutes about, should I take a break now?
00:20:23 This is the big issue with just saying,
00:20:25 I’m gonna go write.
00:20:26 I’m gonna write for a while and that’s it
00:20:27 because your mind is saying,
00:20:28 well, obviously we’re gonna take some breaks.
00:20:30 We’re not just gonna write forever.
00:20:32 And so why not right now?
00:20:34 You have to be like, well, not right now.
00:20:35 Let’s go a little bit longer, five minutes.
00:20:36 So why don’t we just take a break now?
00:20:37 We should probably look at the internet.
00:20:38 Now you have to constantly have this battle.
00:20:40 On the other hand, if you’re in a time block schedule,
00:20:42 I’ve got these two hours put aside for writing.
00:20:44 That’s what I’m supposed to be doing.
00:20:46 I have a break scheduled over here.
00:20:48 I don’t have to fight with myself, right?
00:20:50 And maybe at a larger scale,
00:20:51 deadlines give you a similar sort of effect.
00:20:53 I know this is what I’m supposed to be working on
00:20:55 because it’s due.
00:20:57 Perhaps, but will you describe it as much healthier
00:21:01 sort of giving yourself over,
00:21:02 and you talk about this in the new email book,
00:21:05 the process, I mean, in general,
00:21:07 you talk about it all over, is creating a process
00:21:09 and then giving yourself over to the process.
00:21:15 But then you have to be strict with yourself.
00:21:17 Yeah, but what are the deadlines you’re talking about?
00:21:19 It’s like with papers,
00:21:20 like what’s the main type of deadline work?
00:21:24 Well, so papers, definitely,
00:21:26 but publications, like say this podcast,
00:21:31 I have to publish this podcast early next week,
00:21:35 one, because your book is coming out.
00:21:36 I’d love to sort of support this amazing book,
00:21:40 but the other is I have to fly to Vegas on Thursday
00:21:45 to run 40 miles with David Goggins.
00:21:47 And so I want this podcast,
00:21:50 this conversation we’re doing now to be out of my life.
00:21:54 Like I don’t wanna be in a hotel in Vegas,
00:21:56 like freaking out while David Goggins is yelling.
00:22:00 On hour 43 of your Tarathon thing.
00:22:05 But actually it’s possible that I still will be doing that
00:22:08 because that’s not a hard, that’s a softer deadline, right?
00:22:11 But those are sort of,
00:22:12 life imposes these kinds of deadlines.
00:22:15 Yeah.
00:22:16 I’m not, so yeah,
00:22:17 papers are nice because there’s an actual deadline.
00:22:19 Yeah.
00:22:20 But I am almost referring to like the pressure
00:22:24 that people put on you.
00:22:25 Hey man, you said you’re gonna get this done two months ago.
00:22:28 Why haven’t you gotten it done?
00:22:30 I don’t see, I don’t like that pressure.
00:22:31 Yeah.
00:22:32 First of all, I think we can all.
00:22:33 I hate it too.
00:22:34 We can agree, by the way, having David Goggins yell at you
00:22:37 is probably the top productivity technique.
00:22:39 I think we’d all get a lot more done
00:22:42 if he was yelling, but see, I don’t like that.
00:22:45 So I will try to get things done early.
00:22:47 I like having flex.
00:22:49 I also don’t like the idea of this has to get done today.
00:22:52 Right?
00:22:53 Like it’s due at midnight and we’ve got a lot to do
00:22:56 as the night before,
00:22:57 because then I get in my head about what if I get sick?
00:22:59 Or like, what if, you know,
00:23:01 what if I don’t get a bad night’s sleep
00:23:03 and I can’t think clearly?
00:23:04 So I like to have the flex.
00:23:05 So I’m all process.
00:23:07 And that’s like the philosophical aspect
00:23:08 of that book, Deep Work,
00:23:09 is that there’s something very human and deep
00:23:13 about just wrangling with the world of ideas.
00:23:15 I mean, Aristotle talked about this.
00:23:16 If you go back and read the ethics,
00:23:18 he’s trying to understand the meaning of life
00:23:20 and he eventually ends up ultimately
00:23:22 at the human capacity to contemplate deeply.
00:23:26 It’s kind of like a teleological argument.
00:23:27 It’s the things that only humans can do
00:23:29 and therefore it must be somehow connected to our ends.
00:23:31 And he said, ultimately that’s where he found his meaning,
00:23:34 but, you know, he’s touching on some sort of intimation
00:23:36 there that’s correct.
00:23:37 And so what I try to build my life around
00:23:39 is regularly thinking hard about stuff that’s interesting.
00:23:44 Just like if you get a fitness habit going,
00:23:46 you feel off when you don’t do it.
00:23:50 I try to get that cognitive habit.
00:23:51 So it’s like, I got it.
00:23:52 I mean, look, I have my bag here somewhere,
00:23:54 I have my notebook in it because I was thinking
00:23:56 on the Uber ride over, I was like, you know,
00:23:58 I could get some, I’m working on this new proof
00:24:00 and it just, so you train yourself.
00:24:02 You train yourself to appreciate certain things.
00:24:04 And then over time, the hope is that it accretes.
00:24:08 Well, let’s talk about some demons
00:24:09 because I wonder there’s like deep work,
00:24:13 which and the world without email books
00:24:19 that to me symbolize the life I want to live.
00:24:23 Okay.
00:24:24 And then there is, I’m like,
00:24:26 despite appearances and adult at this point,
00:24:29 and this is the life I actually live.
00:24:33 And I’m in constant chaos.
00:24:36 You said you don’t like that anxiety.
00:24:37 I hate it too.
00:24:38 But it seems like I’m always in it.
00:24:41 It’s a giant mess.
00:24:42 It’s like, it’s almost like whenever I establish,
00:24:46 whenever I have successful processes for doing deep work,
00:24:49 I’ll add stuff on top of it just to introduce the chaos.
00:24:52 Yeah.
00:24:52 And like, I don’t want to.
00:24:54 Yeah.
00:24:54 But you have to look in the mirror at a certain point
00:24:57 and you have to say like, who the hell am I?
00:25:00 Like, I keep doing this.
00:25:02 Is this something that’s fundamental to who I am
00:25:04 or do I really need to fix this?
00:25:06 What’s the chaos right now?
00:25:07 Like, I’ve seen your video about like your routine.
00:25:09 It seemed very structured and deep.
00:25:12 In fact, I was really envious of it.
00:25:13 So like, what’s the chaos now that’s not in that video?
00:25:17 Many of those sessions go way longer.
00:25:19 I don’t get enough sleep.
00:25:20 Yeah.
00:25:21 And then I, the main introduction of chaos is,
00:25:24 it’s taking on too many things on the to do list.
00:25:26 I see.
00:25:27 It’s, I mean, I suppose it’s a problem
00:25:29 that everybody deals with,
00:25:30 which is saying, not saying no.
00:25:33 But it’s not like I have trouble saying no.
00:25:36 It’s that there’s so much cool shit in my life.
00:25:39 Yeah.
00:25:39 Okay, listen, there’s nothing I love more in this world
00:25:42 than the Boston Dynamics robots.
00:25:45 Spot and the other, yeah.
00:25:46 And they’re giving me spot.
00:25:48 So there’s a to do, what am I gonna say?
00:25:50 No.
00:25:51 Yeah.
00:25:52 So they’re getting me spot
00:25:52 and I wanna do some computer vision stuff
00:25:54 for the hell of it.
00:25:55 Okay, so that’s now a to do item.
00:25:57 And then you go to Texas for a while.
00:25:59 There’s Texas.
00:26:00 Everything’s happening.
00:26:00 There’s all the interesting people down there.
00:26:02 And then there’s surprises, right?
00:26:03 There are power outages in Texas.
00:26:05 There’s constant changes to plans
00:26:07 and all those kinds of things.
00:26:08 And you sleep less.
00:26:09 And then there’s personal stuff,
00:26:11 like just people in your life, sources of stress,
00:26:14 all those kinds of things.
00:26:16 But it does feel like if I’m just being introspective,
00:26:19 that I bring it onto myself.
00:26:22 I suppose a lot of people do this kind of thing.
00:26:24 Yeah.
00:26:25 Is they flourish under pressure.
00:26:29 Yeah.
00:26:30 And I wonder if that’s just a hack I’ve developed
00:26:34 as a habit early on in life
00:26:38 that you need to let go of, you need to fix.
00:26:42 But it’s all interesting things.
00:26:44 Yeah.
00:26:44 That’s interesting.
00:26:45 Yeah, because these are all interesting things.
00:26:47 Well, one of the things you talked about in Deep Work,
00:26:49 which is really important, is having an end to the day.
00:26:53 Yeah.
00:26:54 Like putting it down.
00:26:55 Yeah.
00:26:56 Like that, I don’t think I’ve ever done that in my life.
00:26:59 Yeah.
00:26:59 Well, see, I started doing that early
00:27:01 because I got married early.
00:27:04 So I didn’t have a real job.
00:27:05 I was a grad student, but my wife had a real job.
00:27:07 And so I just figured I should do my work
00:27:10 when she’s at work.
00:27:12 Because hey, when work’s over, she’ll be home,
00:27:14 and I don’t wanna be on campus or whatever.
00:27:17 And so real early on, I just got in that habit
00:27:19 of this is when you end work.
00:27:22 And then when I was a postdoc,
00:27:24 which is kind of an easy job, right?
00:27:26 I put artificial, I was like, I wanna train.
00:27:29 I was like, when I’m a professor, it’s gonna be busier
00:27:31 because there’s demands that professors have beyond research.
00:27:34 And so as a postdoc,
00:27:35 I added artificial large time consuming things
00:27:37 into the middle of my day.
00:27:38 I basically exercise for two hours in the middle of the day
00:27:41 and do all this productive meditation and stuff like this,
00:27:44 while still maintaining the nine to five.
00:27:46 So it’s like, okay, I wanna get really good
00:27:48 at putting artificial constraints on so that I stay,
00:27:51 I didn’t wanna get flabby when my job was easy.
00:27:54 So that when I became a professor,
00:27:56 and now all of that’s paying off
00:27:57 because I have a ton of kids.
00:27:59 So now I don’t really have a choice.
00:28:01 That’s what’s probably keeping me away from cool things
00:28:04 is I just don’t have time to do them.
00:28:06 And then after a while people stop bothering.
00:28:09 Well, but that’s how you have a successful life.
00:28:13 Otherwise you’re going to,
00:28:14 it’s too easy to then go into the full Hunter S. Thompson.
00:28:17 Like to where nobody wants,
00:28:22 nobody functional wants to be in your vicinity.
00:28:25 Like you’re driving, you attract the people
00:28:29 that have a similar behavior pattern as you.
00:28:33 So if you live in chaos,
00:28:35 you’re going to attract chaotic people.
00:28:37 And then it becomes like this self fulfilling prophecy.
00:28:42 And it feels like I’m not bothered by it,
00:28:45 but I guess this is all coming around
00:28:48 to exactly what you’re saying, which is like,
00:28:50 I think one of the big hacks for productive people
00:28:53 that I’ve met is to get married and have kids, honestly.
00:28:57 It’s very perhaps counterintuitive,
00:29:00 but it gets, it’s like the ultimate timetable enforcer.
00:29:05 Yeah, it enforces a lot of timetables,
00:29:08 though it has a huge,
00:29:10 kids have a huge productivity hit those, you gotta weigh it.
00:29:13 But okay, here’s the complicated thing though.
00:29:15 Like you could think about in your own life,
00:29:17 starting the podcast as one of these
00:29:18 just cool opportunities that you put on yourself, right?
00:29:22 Like I could have been talking to you at MIT four years ago
00:29:25 and be like, don’t do that.
00:29:25 Like your research is going well, right?
00:29:28 But then everyone who watches you is like,
00:29:29 okay, this podcast is,
00:29:30 the direction that’s taking you
00:29:31 is like a couple of years from now,
00:29:33 it’s gonna, it’ll be something really monumental
00:29:36 that you’re probably, that’s gonna probably lead to, right?
00:29:38 There’ll be some really,
00:29:39 it just feels like your life is going somewhere.
00:29:41 It’s going somewhere.
00:29:42 It’s interesting.
00:29:43 Unexpected, yeah.
00:29:44 Yeah, so how do you balance those two things?
00:29:46 And so what I try to throw at it
00:29:47 is this motto of do less, do better, know why, right?
00:29:50 So do less, do better, know why.
00:29:55 It used to be the motto of my website years ago.
00:29:58 So do a few things, but like an interesting array, right?
00:30:01 So I was doing MIT stuff, but I was also writing, you know?
00:30:06 So a couple of things are, you know, they were interesting.
00:30:08 Like I have a couple bets placed
00:30:10 on a couple of different numbers on the roulette table,
00:30:12 but not too many things.
00:30:14 And then really try to do those things really well
00:30:15 and see where it goes.
00:30:16 Like with my writing,
00:30:17 I just spent years and years and years just training.
00:30:19 I was like, I wanna be a better writer,
00:30:20 I wanna be a better writer.
00:30:21 I started writing student books when I was a student.
00:30:24 I really wanted to write hardcover idea books.
00:30:25 I started training.
00:30:26 I would use like New Yorker articles to train myself.
00:30:30 I’d break them down and then I’d get commissions
00:30:31 with much smaller magazines and practice the skills.
00:30:34 And it took forever until, you know, but now today,
00:30:37 like I actually get to write for the New Yorker,
00:30:38 but it took like a decade.
00:30:40 So a small number of things, try to do them really well.
00:30:42 And then the know why is have a connection
00:30:44 to some sort of value.
00:30:45 Like in general, I think this is worth doing
00:30:48 and then seeing where it leads.
00:30:50 And so the choice of the few things is grounded in what?
00:30:55 Like a little flame of passion, like a love for the thing,
00:31:00 like a sense that you say you wanted to write,
00:31:02 get good at writing.
00:31:04 You had that kind of introspective moment of thinking,
00:31:07 this actually brings me a lot of joy and fulfillment.
00:31:10 Yeah, I mean, it gets complicated
00:31:11 because I wrote a whole book
00:31:12 about following your passion being bad advice,
00:31:14 which is like the first thing I kind of got infamous for.
00:31:18 I wrote that back in 2012.
00:31:20 But the argument there is like passion cultivates, right?
00:31:23 So what I was pushing back on was the myth
00:31:26 that the passion for what you do exists full intensity
00:31:29 before you start, and then that’s what propels you.
00:31:32 Or actually the reality is as you get better at something,
00:31:35 as you gain more autonomy, more skill and more impact,
00:31:37 the passion grows along with it.
00:31:38 So that when people look back later and say,
00:31:42 oh, follow your passion, what they really mean is
00:31:43 I’m very passionate about what I do,
00:31:45 and that’s a worthy goal.
00:31:47 But how you actually cultivate that is much more complicated
00:31:49 than just introspection is gonna identify,
00:31:51 like for sure you should be a writer or something like this.
00:31:54 So I was actually quoting you.
00:31:55 I was on a social network last night in a clubhouse.
00:32:00 I don’t know if you’ve heard of it.
00:32:01 Wait, I have to ask you about this
00:32:03 because I’m invited to do a clubhouse.
00:32:05 I don’t know what that means.
00:32:07 A tech reporter has invited me to do a clubhouse
00:32:09 about my new book.
00:32:11 That’s awesome.
00:32:12 Well, let me know when, because I’ll show up.
00:32:14 But what is it?
00:32:15 Okay, so first of all, let me just mention
00:32:16 that I was in a clubhouse room last night,
00:32:21 and I kept plugging exactly what you said about passion.
00:32:24 So we’ll talk about it.
00:32:25 It was a room that was focused on burnout.
00:32:28 Okay.
00:32:29 But first, clubhouse is a kind of fascinating place
00:32:34 in terms of your mind would be very interesting
00:32:37 to analyze this place because we talk about email,
00:32:41 talk about social networks,
00:32:43 but clubhouse is something very different.
00:32:45 And I’ve encountered it in other places,
00:32:47 Discord and so on, that’s voice only communication.
00:32:52 So it’s a bunch of people in a room.
00:32:53 They’re just, their eyes closed.
00:32:56 All you hear is their voices.
00:32:57 In real time.
00:32:58 Real time, live.
00:32:59 It only happens live.
00:33:01 You’re technically not allowed to record,
00:33:03 but some people still do,
00:33:04 and especially when it’s big conversations.
00:33:07 But the whole point is it’s there live.
00:33:09 And there’s different structures.
00:33:10 Like on Discord, it was so fascinating.
00:33:13 I have this Discord server
00:33:15 that would have hundreds of people in a room together, right?
00:33:19 We’re all just little icons that can mute and unmute our mics.
00:33:22 Okay.
00:33:23 And so you’re sitting there, so it’s just voices,
00:33:28 and you’re able with hundreds of people
00:33:31 to not interrupt each other.
00:33:33 Well, first of all, like as a dynamic system, like.
00:33:37 You see icons just like mics muted or not muted basically.
00:33:40 Yeah, well, so everyone’s muted and they unmute
00:33:42 and it starts flashing.
00:33:44 Yeah.
00:33:44 Oh, so you’re like, okay, let me get precedence.
00:33:47 Yeah.
00:33:48 So it’s the digital equivalent
00:33:49 of when you’re in a conversation, like at a faculty meeting,
00:33:52 and you sort of like kind of make some noises,
00:33:54 like while the other person’s finishing.
00:33:56 And so people realize like, okay,
00:33:57 this person wants to talk next,
00:33:58 but now it’s purely digital.
00:34:00 You see a flashing.
00:34:01 But in a faculty meeting, which is very interesting,
00:34:04 like even as we’re talking now,
00:34:06 there’s a visual element that seems to increase
00:34:09 the probability of interruption.
00:34:11 Yeah.
00:34:12 It’s just darkness.
00:34:13 You actually listen better and you don’t interrupt.
00:34:17 So like if you create a culture,
00:34:18 there’s always gonna be assholes,
00:34:20 but they’re actually exceptions.
00:34:23 Everybody adjusts.
00:34:24 They kind of evolve to the beat of the room.
00:34:28 Okay, that’s one fascinating aspect.
00:34:30 It’s like, okay, that’s weird.
00:34:32 Cause it’s different than like a Zoom call
00:34:34 where there’s video.
00:34:35 Yeah.
00:34:36 It’s just audio.
00:34:38 You think video adds, but actually seems like it subtracts.
00:34:42 The second aspect of it that’s fascinating
00:34:45 is when it’s no video, just audio, there’s an intimacy.
00:34:49 It’s weird.
00:34:51 Because with strangers, you connect in a much more real way.
00:34:57 It’s similar to podcasts.
00:34:58 Yeah.
00:34:59 But with a lot of people.
00:35:01 With a lot of people and new people.
00:35:03 And they bring, okay, first of all,
00:35:07 different voices, like low voices and like high voices.
00:35:10 And it’s more difficult to judge.
00:35:14 In Discord, you couldn’t even see the people.
00:35:18 It was a culture where you do funny profile pictures
00:35:21 as opposed to your actual face.
00:35:23 In clubhouse, it’s your actual face.
00:35:24 So you can tell like as an older person, younger person.
00:35:27 In Discord, you couldn’t.
00:35:28 You just have to judge based on the voice.
00:35:31 But there’s something about the listening
00:35:34 and the intimacy of being surprised
00:35:37 by different strangers that feels almost
00:35:40 like a party with friends.
00:35:43 And friends of friends you haven’t met yet,
00:35:45 but you really like.
00:35:47 Now clubhouse also has an interesting innovation
00:35:49 where there’s a large crowd that just listens
00:35:52 and there’s a stage.
00:35:54 And you can bring people up onto stage.
00:35:56 So only people on stage are talking.
00:35:59 And you can have like five, six, seven, eight,
00:36:01 sometimes 20, 30 people on stage.
00:36:03 And then you can also have thousands of people
00:36:05 just listening.
00:36:06 I see.
00:36:06 So there’s a, I don’t know,
00:36:08 a lot of people are being surprised by this.
00:36:10 Why is it called a social network?
00:36:12 It seems like it doesn’t have, there’s not social links.
00:36:14 There’s not a feed that’s trying to harvest attention.
00:36:17 It feels like a communication.
00:36:20 So the social network aspect is you follow people.
00:36:24 And the people you follow,
00:36:26 now this is like the first social network
00:36:27 that is actually correct use of follow, I think.
00:36:30 You’re more likely to see the rooms they’re in.
00:36:35 So there’s a, your feed is a bunch of rooms
00:36:37 that are going on right now.
00:36:39 And the people you follow are the ones
00:36:43 that will increase the likelihood
00:36:44 that you’ll see the room they’re in.
00:36:46 And so the final result is like,
00:36:48 there’s a list of really interesting rooms.
00:36:50 Like I have all these, I’ve been speaking Russian
00:36:53 quite a bit, there’s practicing,
00:36:55 but also just like talking politics
00:36:58 and philosophy in Russian.
00:37:00 I’ve never done that before,
00:37:01 but it allows me to connect with that community.
00:37:03 And then there’s a community of people,
00:37:05 like it’s funny, but like I’ll go in a community
00:37:09 of all African American people talking about race
00:37:12 and I’ll be welcomed.
00:37:13 I’ve never had, like I’ve literally never been
00:37:17 in a difficult conversation about race,
00:37:20 like with people from all over the place.
00:37:22 It’s like fascinating.
00:37:23 And then musicians, jazz musicians, I don’t know.
00:37:26 You could say that a lot of other places
00:37:28 could have created that culture, I suppose.
00:37:31 Twitter and Facebook a lot for that culture,
00:37:32 but there’s something about this network
00:37:35 as it stands now, cause no Android users.
00:37:40 It’s probably just because it’s iPhone people.
00:37:43 It’s like.
00:37:44 Less conspiratorial or something.
00:37:45 Well, like less, listen, I’m an Android person.
00:37:47 So I got an iPhone just for this network, which is funny.
00:37:52 For now it’s all like, there’s very few trolls.
00:37:55 There’s very few people that are trying
00:37:57 to manipulate the system and so on.
00:37:59 So I don’t know, it’s interesting.
00:38:00 Now the downside, the reason you’re going to hate it
00:38:04 is because it’s so intimate, because it pulls you in
00:38:08 and pulls in very successful people like you,
00:38:11 just like really successful, productive, very busy people.
00:38:20 It’s a huge time sink.
00:38:21 It’s very difficult to pull yourself out.
00:38:23 Interesting, you mean once you’re in a room?
00:38:25 Well, no, leaving the room is actually easy.
00:38:27 The beautiful thing about a stage with multiple people,
00:38:30 there’s a little button that says leave quietly.
00:38:33 So culture, no etiquette wise, it’s okay to just leave.
00:38:38 So you and I in a room, when it’s just you and I,
00:38:41 it’s a little awkward to leave.
00:38:42 If you’re asking questions, I’m just gone.
00:38:44 But, and actually if you’re being interviewed for the book,
00:38:47 that’s weird because you’re now in the event
00:38:51 and you’re supposed to, but usually the person interviewing
00:38:54 would be like, okay, it’s time for you to go.
00:38:55 It’s more normal, but the normal way to use the room
00:38:59 was like, you’re just opening the app
00:39:02 and there’ll be like, I don’t know, Sam Harris,
00:39:06 Eric Weinstein, I think Joe Rogan showed up to the app,
00:39:12 Bill Gates, these people on stage
00:39:13 just like randomly just plugged in
00:39:15 and then you’ll step up on stage,
00:39:18 listen, maybe you won’t contribute at all,
00:39:20 maybe you’ll say something funny
00:39:22 and then you’ll just leave.
00:39:23 And there’s the addicting aspect to it.
00:39:26 The reason it’s a time sink is you don’t wanna leave.
00:39:30 What I’ve noticed about exceptionally busy people
00:39:33 that they love this.
00:39:35 I think it might have to do with the pandemic.
00:39:37 It might be a little bit, yeah.
00:39:38 There’s a loneliness.
00:39:39 They’re all starved, yeah.
00:39:40 But also it’s really cool people.
00:39:42 Yeah.
00:39:43 Like when was the last time you talked to Sam Harris
00:39:46 or whoever, like think of anybody,
00:39:48 Tyler Copeland, like any faculty.
00:39:52 This is like what universities strive to create,
00:39:54 but it’s taken hundreds of years of cultural evolution
00:39:57 to try to get a lot of interesting, smart people together
00:39:59 that run into each other.
00:40:00 We have really strong faculty in a room together
00:40:04 with no scheduling.
00:40:05 This is the power of it.
00:40:07 It’s like you just show up,
00:40:08 there’s none of that baggage of scheduling and so on
00:40:11 and there’s no pressure to leave, sorry,
00:40:13 no pressure to stay.
00:40:15 It’s very easy for you to leave.
00:40:16 You realize that there’s a lot of constraints on meetings
00:40:19 and like faculty, like even stopping by before the pandemic,
00:40:25 a friend or faculty or colleague and so on,
00:40:28 there’s a weirdness about leaving.
00:40:30 Yeah.
00:40:31 But here there’s not a weirdness about leaving.
00:40:33 So they’ve discovered something interesting.
00:40:36 But the final result when you observe it
00:40:38 is it’s very fulfilling.
00:40:41 I think it’s very beneficial, but it’s very addicting.
00:40:44 So you have to make sure you moderate.
00:40:48 Yeah, that’s interesting.
00:40:50 Okay, well, so maybe I’ll try it.
00:40:52 I mean, look, there’s no,
00:40:53 the things that make me suspicious
00:40:54 about other platforms aren’t here.
00:40:56 So the feed is not full of user generated content
00:41:00 that is going through some sort of algorithmic rating process
00:41:02 with all the weird incentives and nudging that does.
00:41:05 And you’re not producing content that’s being harvested
00:41:08 to be monetized by another company.
00:41:11 I mean, it seems like it’s more ephemeral, right?
00:41:14 You’re here, you’re talking.
00:41:15 The feed is just actually just showing you
00:41:17 here’s interesting things happening, right?
00:41:19 You’re not jockeying in the feed for,
00:41:21 look, I’m being clever or something
00:41:22 and I’m gonna get a light count that goes up
00:41:24 and that’s gonna influence.
00:41:26 And there’s more friction.
00:41:27 There’s more cognitive friction, I guess,
00:41:28 involved in listening to smart people
00:41:31 versus scrolling through.
00:41:33 Yeah, there’s something there.
00:41:34 So there’s no.
00:41:35 Why are people so, I see all,
00:41:37 there’s all these articles that seem,
00:41:39 I haven’t really read them.
00:41:40 Why are reporters negative about this?
00:41:42 Competition.
00:41:43 The New York Times wrote this article called
00:41:44 Unfettered Conversations Happening on Clubhouse is.
00:41:49 So I’m right in picking up a tone
00:41:51 even from the headlines
00:41:51 that there’s some like negative vibes from the press.
00:41:55 No, so I can say, let’s say,
00:41:58 well, I’ll tell you what the article was saying,
00:42:00 which is they’re having cancellable conversations,
00:42:05 like the biggest people in the world
00:42:07 almost trolling the press.
00:42:08 Right.
00:42:09 And the press is desperately.
00:42:10 Like foreshanning the press.
00:42:11 Yeah, foreshanning the press.
00:42:13 By saying that you guys are looking for click bait
00:42:16 from our genuine human conversations.
00:42:19 And so I think the, honestly,
00:42:23 the press is just like, what do we do with this?
00:42:25 We can’t, first of all, it’s a lot of work for them.
00:42:28 Okay.
00:42:29 It’s what Naval says, which is like,
00:42:32 this is skipping the journalist.
00:42:34 Like the interview you, if you go on Clubhouse,
00:42:37 the interview you might do for the book
00:42:39 will be with somebody who’s like a journalist
00:42:41 and interviewing you.
00:42:42 Yeah.
00:42:43 That’s more traditional.
00:42:44 Yeah.
00:42:45 It’d be a good introduction for you to try it.
00:42:47 But like the way to use Clubhouse is you just show up
00:42:52 and it’s like, again, like me, I’m sorry,
00:42:55 I’m like, boy, I keep mentioning Sam Harris
00:42:58 as if it’s like the only person I know,
00:43:00 but like a lot of these major faculty,
00:43:03 I don’t know, Max Tegmark.
00:43:04 Like just major faculty just sitting there
00:43:07 and then you show up and then I’ll ask like,
00:43:10 oh, don’t you have a book coming out or something?
00:43:12 And then you’ll talk about the book
00:43:14 and then you’ll leave five minutes later
00:43:15 because you have to go get coffee included.
00:43:17 Interesting.
00:43:18 So like that’s the, it’s not the journalistic,
00:43:20 you’re not gonna actually enjoy the interview as much
00:43:23 because it’ll be like the normal thing.
00:43:26 Yeah.
00:43:26 Like you’re there 40 minutes or an hour
00:43:28 and there’ll be questions from the audience.
00:43:30 Right.
00:43:31 Like I’m doing an event next week for the book launch
00:43:33 where it’s like Jason Fried and I are talking about email,
00:43:37 but it’s using some more like a thousand people
00:43:40 who are there to watch virtually,
00:43:41 but it’s using some sort of traditional webinar.
00:43:44 Clubhouse would be a situation
00:43:46 where that could just happen informally.
00:43:47 Like I jump in like Jason’s there
00:43:49 and then someone else jumps in and yeah, that’s interesting.
00:43:51 But for now it’s still closed.
00:43:53 So even though there’s a lot of excitement
00:43:56 and there’ll be quite famous people
00:43:58 just sitting there listening to you.
00:44:00 Yeah.
00:44:01 But the numbers aren’t exactly high.
00:44:04 So you’re talking about rooms,
00:44:05 like even the huge rooms are like just a few thousand.
00:44:09 Right.
00:44:10 And this is probably like Soho in the 50s or something too.
00:44:12 Just because of the exponential growth,
00:44:15 give it seven more months.
00:44:17 And if you let one invite be, it gets two invites,
00:44:19 it gets four invites,
00:44:20 because pretty soon it’ll be everyone.
00:44:22 And then the rooms in your feed are gonna be whatever,
00:44:25 marketing, performance enhancing drugs or something like that.
00:44:27 Exactly.
00:44:28 Yeah.
00:44:29 But then in a bunch of competitors,
00:44:30 there’s already like 30 plus competitors sprung up,
00:44:33 Twitter spaces.
00:44:34 So Twitter is creating a competitor
00:44:36 that’s going to likely destroy Clubhouse
00:44:38 because they just have a much larger user base
00:44:40 and they already have a social network.
00:44:42 So I would be very cautious, of course,
00:44:46 with the addictive element,
00:44:47 but it doesn’t just like you said,
00:44:49 this particular implementation in its early stages
00:44:52 doesn’t have the like,
00:44:56 it doesn’t have the context switching problem.
00:44:58 Yeah.
00:44:58 You’ll just switch to it and you’ll be stuck.
00:45:01 Yeah, to keep a context is great.
00:45:02 Yeah. Yeah.
00:45:04 But then I think the best way I’ve found to use it
00:45:07 is to acknowledge that these things pull you in.
00:45:12 Yeah.
00:45:13 So I’ve used it in the past,
00:45:17 like almost, I’ll go get a coffee
00:45:19 and I’ll tune into a conversation
00:45:22 as if that’s how I use podcasts sometimes.
00:45:24 I’ll just like play a little bit of a podcast
00:45:26 and then I can just turn it off.
00:45:29 The problem with these is it pulls you in,
00:45:31 it’s really interesting.
00:45:32 And then the other problem that you’ll experience
00:45:35 is like somebody will recognize you.
00:45:38 Yeah.
00:45:38 And then they’ll be like, oh, Lex.
00:45:40 Come on up.
00:45:41 Come on.
00:45:42 Oh, hey, I had a question for you.
00:45:43 And then it takes a lot for you to go like,
00:45:46 to ignore that.
00:45:47 Yeah. Yeah.
00:45:48 So. Yeah.
00:45:49 And then you pulled in and it’s fascinating
00:45:51 and it’s really cool people.
00:45:52 So it’s like a source of a lot of joy,
00:45:53 but you have to be very, very careful.
00:45:58 The reason I brought it up is we,
00:46:00 there’s a room, there’s an entire club actually on burnout.
00:46:04 And I brought you up and I brought David Goggins
00:46:08 as the process I go through, which is,
00:46:10 my passion goes up and down, it dips.
00:46:14 And I don’t think I trust my own mind
00:46:17 to tell me whether I’m getting close to burnout
00:46:22 or exhaustion or not.
00:46:24 I kind of go with the David Goggins model of,
00:46:28 I mean, he’s probably more applying it to running,
00:46:30 but when it feels like your mind can’t take any more,
00:46:35 that you’re just 40% at your capacity.
00:46:38 I mean, it’s just like an arbitrary level.
00:46:41 It’s the Navy SEAL thing, right?
00:46:41 The Navy SEAL thing.
00:46:43 I mean, you could put that at any percent,
00:46:44 but it is remarkable that if you just take it
00:46:48 one step at a time, just keep going,
00:46:49 it’s similar to this idea of a process.
00:46:53 If you just trust the process and you just keep following,
00:46:55 even if the passion goes up and down and so on,
00:46:58 then ultimately, if you look in aggregate,
00:47:02 the passion will increase.
00:47:04 Your self satisfaction will increase.
00:47:06 And if you have two things,
00:47:08 this has been a big strategy of mine,
00:47:09 so that what you hope for is off phase, off phase alignment.
00:47:14 Sometimes it’s in phase and that’s a problem,
00:47:16 but off phase alignment’s good.
00:47:18 So, okay, my research, I’m struggling,
00:47:20 but my book stuff is going well, right?
00:47:22 And so when you add those two waves together,
00:47:24 like, oh, we’re doing pretty well.
00:47:25 And then in other periods, like on my writing,
00:47:28 I feel like I’m just not getting anywhere,
00:47:29 but I’ve had some good papers, I’m feeling good over there.
00:47:32 So having two things that can counteract each other.
00:47:35 Now, sometimes they fall into sync and then it gets rough.
00:47:38 Then when, you know, when everything,
00:47:40 because everything for me is cyclical,
00:47:41 good periods, bad periods with all this stuff.
00:47:43 So typically they don’t coincide, so it helps compensate.
00:47:47 When they do coincide, you get really high highs,
00:47:50 like where everything’s clicking,
00:47:51 and then you get these really low lows
00:47:52 where like your research is not working,
00:47:54 your program’s not clicking,
00:47:56 you feel like you’re nowhere with your writing,
00:47:59 and then it’s a little rougher.
00:48:00 Is, do you think about the concept of burnout?
00:48:04 Because I personally have never experienced burnout
00:48:06 in the way that folks talk about,
00:48:08 which is like, it’s not just the up and down.
00:48:11 It’s like, you don’t want to do anything ever again.
00:48:14 Yeah.
00:48:15 It’s like, for some people it’s like physical,
00:48:17 like to the hospital kind of thing.
00:48:19 Yeah, so I do worry about it.
00:48:22 So when I used to do student writing,
00:48:24 like writing about students and student advice,
00:48:27 it came up a lot with students at elite schools,
00:48:30 and I used to call it deep procrastination,
00:48:32 but it was a real, really vivid, very replicatable syndrome
00:48:37 where they stop being able to do schoolwork.
00:48:39 Yeah.
00:48:40 Like this is due, and the professor gives you an extension,
00:48:42 and the professor gives you an incomplete,
00:48:44 and says, you got it, you were gonna fail the course,
00:48:46 you have to hand this in, and they can’t do it, right?
00:48:48 It’s like a complete stop
00:48:50 on the ability to actually do work.
00:48:52 And so I used to counsel students who had that issue,
00:48:54 and often it was a combination of,
00:48:56 this is my best analysis,
00:48:58 is you have just the physical and cognitive difficulties
00:49:01 of they’re usually under a very hard load, right?
00:49:03 They’re doing too many majors, too many extracurriculars,
00:49:05 just really pushing themselves,
00:49:07 and the motivation is not sufficiently intrinsic.
00:49:11 Right.
00:49:12 So if you have a motivational center
00:49:13 that’s not completely on board,
00:49:14 so a lot of these kids, like when I’m dealing with MIT kids,
00:49:16 they would be, their whole town was shooting off fireworks
00:49:20 that they got in.
00:49:21 Everyone’s hoped that they were going there,
00:49:23 and that they’re in three majors,
00:49:24 they don’t wanna let people down,
00:49:25 but they’re not really interested
00:49:26 in being a doctor or whatever.
00:49:28 So your motivation’s not in the right place.
00:49:30 The motivational psychologist would say
00:49:31 the locus of control was more towards
00:49:33 the extrinsic end of the spectrum, and you have hardship.
00:49:36 And you could just fritz out the whole system.
00:49:38 And so I would always be very worried about that.
00:49:40 So I think about that a lot.
00:49:41 I do a lot of multi phase or multi scale seasonality.
00:49:45 So I’ll go hard on something for a while,
00:49:48 and then for a few weeks, go easy.
00:49:50 I’ll have semesters that are hard,
00:49:51 and semesters that are easy.
00:49:53 Or I’ll take the summer really low.
00:49:54 So on multiple scales,
00:49:55 and in the day I’ll go really hard on something,
00:49:56 but then have a hard cut off at five.
00:49:57 So like every scale, it’s all about rest and recovery.
00:50:01 Because I really wanna avoid that.
00:50:02 And I do burn out.
00:50:03 I burnt out, pretty recently I get minor burnt outs.
00:50:06 I got a couple papers that I was trying to work through
00:50:10 for a deadline a few weeks ago,
00:50:12 and I wasn’t sleeping well,
00:50:14 and there’s some other things going on.
00:50:17 And it just knocks out and I get sick usually,
00:50:20 is how I know I’ve pushed myself too far.
00:50:22 And so I kind of pulled it back.
00:50:23 Now I’m doing this book launch.
00:50:24 Then after this book launch, I’m pulling it back again.
00:50:26 So I like seasonality for rest and recovery,
00:50:29 I think it’s crucial.
00:50:30 And at every scale, daily, monthly,
00:50:33 and then at the annual scale.
00:50:34 An easy summer, for example,
00:50:36 I think is like a great idea if that’s possible.
00:50:38 Okay, you just made me realize
00:50:41 that that’s exactly what I do.
00:50:43 Because I feel like I’m not even close
00:50:45 to burnout or anything.
00:50:46 Even though I’m in chaos,
00:50:49 I feel the right exact way is the seasonality,
00:50:52 is the, not even the seasonality,
00:50:55 but like you always have multiple seasons operating.
00:50:59 It’s like you said,
00:51:00 because when you have a lot of cool shit going on,
00:51:02 there’s always at least one thing that’s a source of joy,
00:51:06 that there’s always a reason.
00:51:08 I suppose the fundamental thing,
00:51:10 and I’ve known people that suffer from depression too,
00:51:13 the fundamental problem with the experience of depression
00:51:16 and burnout is why do, life is meaningless.
00:51:21 And I always have an answer of why today could be cool.
00:51:28 And you have to contrive it, right?
00:51:29 If you don’t have it, you have to contrive it.
00:51:31 I think it’s really important.
00:51:33 Like, okay, well, this is going bad,
00:51:34 so now is the time to start thinking about,
00:51:37 I mean, look, I started a podcast during the pandemic.
00:51:39 It’s like, this is going pretty bad, but you know what?
00:51:43 This could be something really interesting.
00:51:46 Deep questions with Kyle Newport.
00:51:49 I do it all in that voice.
00:51:50 I love the podcast, by the way.
00:51:53 But yeah, I think David Foster Wallace said,
00:51:56 the key to life is to be unboreable.
00:51:59 I’ve always kind of taken that to heart,
00:52:01 which is like, you should be able to maybe artificially
00:52:05 generate anything.
00:52:08 Like, find something in your environment,
00:52:13 in your surroundings, that’s a source of joy.
00:52:16 Like, everything is fun.
00:52:17 Yeah.
00:52:18 Did you read The Pale King?
00:52:20 It goes deep on boredom.
00:52:21 It’s like uncomfortable.
00:52:22 It’s like an uncomfortable meditation on boredom.
00:52:25 Like, the characters in that are just driven
00:52:27 to the extremes of, I just bought three books on boredom
00:52:31 the other day, so now I’m really interested in this topic.
00:52:35 Because I was anxious about my book launch
00:52:37 happening this week.
00:52:38 So I was like, okay, I need something else.
00:52:39 So I have this idea for, I might do it as an article first,
00:52:42 but as a book.
00:52:43 Like, okay, I need something cool to be thinking about.
00:52:46 Because I was worried about, like,
00:52:48 I don’t know if the launch’s gonna work, the pandemic,
00:52:50 what’s gonna happen, I don’t know if it’s gonna get there.
00:52:52 So this is exactly what we’re talking about.
00:52:54 So I went out and I bought a bunch of books,
00:52:56 and I’m beginning like a whole intellectual exploration.
00:53:00 Well, I think that’s one of the profound ideas
00:53:03 in deep work that you don’t expand on too much
00:53:06 is boredom.
00:53:08 Yeah, well, so deep work had a superficial idea
00:53:12 about boredom, which was,
00:53:13 I had this chapter called Embrace Boredom,
00:53:16 and a very functionalist idea was basically,
00:53:19 you have to have some boredom in your regular schedule,
00:53:21 or your mind is gonna form a Pavlovian connection
00:53:25 between as soon as I feel boredom, I get stimuli.
00:53:28 And once it forms that connection,
00:53:29 it’s never gonna tolerate deep work.
00:53:30 So there’s this very pragmatic treatment of boredom
00:53:34 of your mind better be used to the idea
00:53:36 that sometimes you don’t get stimuli
00:53:37 because otherwise you can’t write for three hours,
00:53:39 like it’s just not gonna tolerate it.
00:53:41 But more recently, what I’m really interested in boredom
00:53:44 is it as a fundamental human drive, right?
00:53:47 Because it’s incredibly uncomfortable.
00:53:49 And think about the other things
00:53:51 that are incredibly uncomfortable, like hunger or thirst,
00:53:53 they serve a really important purpose for a species, right?
00:53:56 Like if something is really distressing, there’s a reason.
00:53:58 Pain is really uncomfortable
00:54:00 because we need to worry about getting injured.
00:54:02 Thirst is really uncomfortable
00:54:03 because we need water to survive.
00:54:05 So what’s boredom?
00:54:07 Why is that uncomfortable?
00:54:08 And I’ve been interested in this notion
00:54:11 that boredom is about driving us towards productive action.
00:54:17 Like as a species, I mean, think about it,
00:54:19 like what got us to actually take advantage of these brains?
00:54:22 What got us to actually work with fire?
00:54:24 What got us to start shaping stones and the hand axes
00:54:27 and figuring out if we could actually sharpen a stick
00:54:29 sharp enough that we could throw it as a melee weapon
00:54:32 or a distance weapon for hunting mammoth, right?
00:54:35 Boredom drives us towards action.
00:54:37 So now I’m fascinated by this fundamental action instinct
00:54:41 because I have this theory that I’m working on
00:54:43 that we’re out of sync with it.
00:54:45 Just like we have this drive for hunger,
00:54:47 but then we introduced junk food
00:54:49 and got out of sync with hunger
00:54:50 and it makes us really unhealthy.
00:54:52 We have this drive towards action,
00:54:53 but then we overload ourselves
00:54:55 and we have all of these distractions.
00:54:56 And then that causes,
00:54:58 it’s like a cognitive action obesity type things
00:55:01 because it short circuits this system
00:55:02 that wants us to do things,
00:55:03 but we put more things on our plate than we can possibly do
00:55:05 and then we’re really frustrated we can’t do them
00:55:07 and we’re short circuiting all of our wires.
00:55:09 So it all comes back to this question,
00:55:11 well, what would be the ideal sort of amount of stuff
00:55:16 to do and type of things to do?
00:55:18 Like if we wanted to look back at our ancestral environment
00:55:20 and say, if I could just build from scratch,
00:55:23 how much work I do and what I work on
00:55:26 to be as in touch with that as like paleo people
00:55:28 are trying to get their diets in touch with that.
00:55:30 And so now I’m just, well, see, this is,
00:55:32 it’s something I made up,
00:55:34 but now I’m going deep on it.
00:55:36 And one of my podcast listeners I was talking about
00:55:38 on the show and I was like,
00:55:39 well, I get trying to learn about animals and boredom.
00:55:41 And she sent me this cool article
00:55:42 from an animal behaviorist journal
00:55:44 about what we know about human boredom versus animal boredom.
00:55:48 So trying to figure out that puzzle
00:55:49 is the wave that’s high.
00:55:52 So I can get through the wave that’s low of like,
00:55:54 I don’t know about this pandemic book launch.
00:55:55 And my research is stumbling a little bit
00:55:59 because of the pandemic.
00:56:00 And so I needed a nice, you know, high.
00:56:03 So there we go, there’s a case study.
00:56:05 Well, it’s both a case study
00:56:07 and a very interesting set of concepts
00:56:09 because I didn’t even realize that it’s so simple.
00:56:12 I’m one of the people
00:56:14 that has a interesting push and pull dynamic with hunger,
00:56:18 trying to understand the hunger with myself.
00:56:21 Like I probably have an unhealthy relationship with food.
00:56:24 I don’t know, but there’s probably a perfect,
00:56:28 that’s a nice way to think about diet as action.
00:56:32 There’s probably an optimal diet response
00:56:36 to the experience that our body’s telling us,
00:56:40 the signal that our body’s sending, which is hunger.
00:56:43 And in that same way, boredom is sending a signal.
00:56:46 And most of our intellectual activities in this world,
00:56:49 our creative activities,
00:56:51 are essentially a response to that signal.
00:56:56 Yeah, and think about this analogy
00:56:59 that we have this hunger instinct
00:57:01 that junk food short circuits, right?
00:57:03 It’s like, oh, we’ll satisfy that hyper palatably
00:57:06 and it doesn’t end up well.
00:57:08 Now think about modern attention engineered,
00:57:11 digitally mediated entertainment.
00:57:14 We have this boredom instinct.
00:57:16 Oh, we can take care of that
00:57:17 with a hyper palatable alternative.
00:57:20 Is that gonna lead to a similar problem?
00:57:22 So I’ve been fasting a lot lately,
00:57:23 like I’m doing eating once a day.
00:57:27 I’ve been doing that for over a month,
00:57:29 just eating one meal a day and primarily meat.
00:57:33 But it’s very, fasting has been incredible for me,
00:57:38 for focus, for wellbeing, for, I don’t know,
00:57:41 just for feeling good, okay?
00:57:43 We’ll put on a chart what makes me feel good.
00:57:45 And that fasting and eating primarily a meat based diet
00:57:50 makes me feel really good.
00:57:52 And so, but that ultimately what fasting did,
00:57:57 I haven’t fasted super long yet,
00:57:59 like a seven day diet, which I really like to do.
00:58:02 But even just fasting for a day for 24 hours
00:58:05 gets you in touch with your, with the signal.
00:58:09 It’s fascinating.
00:58:10 Like you get to listen to your,
00:58:12 learn to listen to your body that like,
00:58:16 it’s okay to be hungry.
00:58:17 It’s like a little signal that sends you stuff.
00:58:19 And then I get to listen to how it responds
00:58:24 when I put food in my body.
00:58:27 Like, and I get to like, okay, cool.
00:58:30 So like food is a thing that pacifies the signal.
00:58:33 Like it sounds ridiculous, okay?
00:58:35 And you could do that with.
00:58:36 And do different types of food.
00:58:38 It feels different.
00:58:39 So you learn about what your body wants.
00:58:41 For some reason fasting,
00:58:44 it’s similar to the deep work, embrace boredom.
00:58:47 Fasting allowed me to go into mode of listening,
00:58:50 of trying to understand the signal that I could say,
00:58:53 I have an unhealthy appreciation of fruit, okay?
00:58:57 I love apples and cherries.
00:58:59 Like, I don’t know how to moderate them.
00:59:01 So if you take just same amount of calories,
00:59:03 I don’t know calories matter, but they say calories.
00:59:05 2000 calories of cherries versus 2000 calories of steak.
00:59:11 If I eat 2000 calories of steak,
00:59:13 maybe just a little bit of like green beans or cauliflower,
00:59:17 I’m going to feel really good, fulfilled, focused and happy.
00:59:22 If I eat cherries, I’m going to be,
00:59:24 I’m going to wake up behind a dumpster crying with like naked
00:59:28 and like, it’s just.
00:59:29 Pits all around.
00:59:30 Yeah, with everything.
00:59:31 Over your face, yeah.
00:59:32 And it’s just like bloated, just not and unhappy.
00:59:36 And also the mood swings up and down.
00:59:39 I don’t know.
00:59:41 And I’ll be much hungrier the next day.
00:59:44 Sometimes it takes a couple of days.
00:59:46 But when I introduce carbs into the system, too many carbs,
00:59:50 it starts, it’s just unhealthy.
00:59:53 I go into this roller coaster as opposed to a calm boat ride
00:59:56 along the river in the Amazon or something like that.
00:59:58 And so fasting was the mechanism for me
01:00:01 to start listening to the body.
01:00:03 I wonder if you can do that same kind of,
01:00:05 I guess that’s what meditation a little bit is.
01:00:07 A little bit, but yeah, listen to boredom.
01:00:10 But so two years ago,
01:00:11 I had a book out called Digital Minimalism.
01:00:13 And one of the things I was recommending that people do
01:00:16 is basically a 30 day fast.
01:00:18 But from digital personal entertainment,
01:00:20 social media, online videos,
01:00:21 anything that captures your attention and dispels boredom.
01:00:26 And people were thinking like, oh, this is a detox.
01:00:29 Like, I just wanna teach your body
01:00:30 not to need the distraction, this or that.
01:00:32 But it really wasn’t what I was interested in.
01:00:34 I wanted there to be space
01:00:37 that you could listen to your boredom.
01:00:39 Like, okay, I can’t just dispel it.
01:00:41 I can’t just look at the screen
01:00:42 and revel in it a little bit and start to listen to it
01:00:45 and say, what is this really pushing me towards?
01:00:48 And you take the new stuff, the new technology off the table
01:00:50 and sort of ask, what is this?
01:00:52 What am I craving?
01:00:53 Like, what’s the activity equivalent of 2000 calories
01:00:56 of meat with a little bit of green beans on the side?
01:00:59 And I had 1700 people go through this experiment,
01:01:01 like spend 30 days doing this.
01:01:03 And it’s hard at first,
01:01:04 but then they get used to listening to themselves
01:01:06 and sort of seeking out,
01:01:07 what is this really pushing me towards?
01:01:09 And it was pushing people towards connection.
01:01:12 It was pushing people towards,
01:01:13 I just wanna go be around other people.
01:01:15 It was pushing people towards high quality
01:01:18 leisure activities.
01:01:19 Like I wanna go do something that’s complicated.
01:01:21 And it took weeks sometimes for them
01:01:23 to get in touch with their boredom,
01:01:25 but then it completely rewired how they thought about,
01:01:28 what do I wanna do with my time outside of work?
01:01:30 And then the idea is when you’re done with that,
01:01:32 then it was much easier to go back
01:01:33 and completely change your digital life
01:01:34 because you have alternatives, right?
01:01:37 You’re not just trying to abstain from things you don’t like,
01:01:39 but that’s basically a listening to boredom experiment.
01:01:42 Like just be there with the boredom
01:01:45 and see where it drives you
01:01:46 when you don’t have the digital Cheez Its.
01:01:48 Okay, so if I can’t do that,
01:01:50 where is it gonna drive me?
01:01:51 Well, I guess I kinda wanna go to the library,
01:01:53 which came up a lot, by the way,
01:01:54 a lot of people rediscovered the library.
01:01:57 With physical books.
01:01:58 Physical books, so like you can just go borrow them.
01:02:00 And there’s like low pressure and you can explore
01:02:03 and you bring them home and then you read them
01:02:04 and you can like sit by the window and read them
01:02:06 and it’s nice weather outside.
01:02:07 And I used to do that 20 years ago,
01:02:09 they’re listening to boredom.
01:02:10 So can you maybe elaborate a little bit
01:02:12 on the different experiences that people had
01:02:15 when they quit social media for 30 days?
01:02:17 Like if you were to recommend that process,
01:02:20 what is ultimately the goal?
01:02:22 Yeah, digital minimalism,
01:02:24 that’s my philosophy for all this tech.
01:02:27 And it’s working backwards from what’s important.
01:02:30 So it’s you figure out what you’re actually all about,
01:02:33 like what you wanna do,
01:02:33 what you wanna spend your time doing.
01:02:35 And then you can ask, okay,
01:02:37 is there a place that tech could amplify
01:02:38 or support some of these things?
01:02:40 And that’s how you decide what tech to use.
01:02:42 And so the process is,
01:02:44 let’s actually get away from everything,
01:02:46 let’s be bored for a while,
01:02:47 let’s really spend a month getting really figuring out
01:02:49 what do I actually wanna do?
01:02:50 What do I wanna spend my time doing?
01:02:52 What’s important to me?
01:02:53 What makes me feel good?
01:02:54 And then when you’re done,
01:02:55 you can bring back in tech very strategically
01:02:56 to help those things, right?
01:02:58 And that was the goal.
01:02:59 That turns out to be much more successful
01:03:01 than when people take a abstention only approach.
01:03:05 So if you come out your tech life and say,
01:03:08 you know, whatever, I look at Instagram too much.
01:03:10 Like I don’t like how much I’m on Instagram,
01:03:12 that’s a bad thing.
01:03:13 I wanna reduce this bad thing.
01:03:15 So here’s my new thing,
01:03:16 I’m gonna spend less time looking at Instagram,
01:03:18 much less likely to succeed in the longterm.
01:03:20 So we’re much less likely at trying to reduce
01:03:23 this sort of amorphous negative
01:03:24 because in the moment you’re like,
01:03:25 yeah, but it’s not that bad
01:03:27 and it would be kind of interesting to look at it now.
01:03:29 When you’re instead controlling behavior
01:03:30 because you have a positive that you’re aiming towards,
01:03:32 it’s very powerful for people.
01:03:33 Like I want my life to be like this,
01:03:35 here’s the role that tech plays in that life.
01:03:39 The connection to wanting your life to be like that
01:03:41 is very, very strong.
01:03:42 And then it’s much, much easier to say,
01:03:43 yeah, like using Instagram is not part of my plan
01:03:45 for how I have that life.
01:03:46 And I really wanna have that life,
01:03:47 so of course I’m not gonna use Instagram.
01:03:49 So it turns out to be a much more sustainable way
01:03:51 to tame what’s going on.
01:03:53 So if you quit social media for 30 days,
01:03:55 you kinda have to do the work.
01:03:58 You have to do the work.
01:03:59 Of thinking like, what am I actually,
01:04:01 what makes me happy in terms of these tools
01:04:04 that I’ve previously used
01:04:05 and when you try to integrate them back,
01:04:08 how can I integrate them to maximize
01:04:10 the thing that actually makes me happy?
01:04:11 Yeah, or what makes me happy unrelated to technology?
01:04:14 Like what do I actually, what do I want my life to be like?
01:04:16 Well, maybe what I wanna do is be like outside of nature
01:04:18 two hours a day and spend a lot more time
01:04:20 like helping my community and sacrificing
01:04:21 on behalf of my connections
01:04:23 and then have some sort of intellectually engaging
01:04:26 leisure activity like I’m reading
01:04:28 or trying to read the great books
01:04:29 and having more calm and seeing the sunset.
01:04:31 Like you create this picture and then you go back
01:04:34 and say, well, I still need my Facebook group
01:04:36 because that’s how I keep up with my cycling group.
01:04:39 But Twitter is just, you know,
01:04:41 toxic, it’s not helping any of these things.
01:04:42 And well, I’m an artist,
01:04:43 so I kinda need Instagram to get inspiration.
01:04:46 But if I know that’s why I’m using Instagram,
01:04:48 I don’t need it on my phone, it’s just on my computer
01:04:49 and I just follow 10 artists and check it once a week.
01:04:51 Like you really can start deploying.
01:04:54 It was the number one thing
01:04:55 that differentiated in that experiment,
01:04:56 the people who ended up sustainably making changes
01:04:59 and getting through the 30 days and those who didn’t,
01:05:02 was the people who did the experimentation
01:05:03 and the reflection.
01:05:04 Like let me try to figure out what’s positive.
01:05:07 They were much more successful than the people
01:05:09 that just said, I’m sick of using my phone so much.
01:05:11 So I’m just gonna white knuckle it.
01:05:12 Just 30 days will be good for me.
01:05:14 I just gotta get away from it or something.
01:05:16 It doesn’t last.
01:05:17 So you don’t use social media currently.
01:05:19 Yeah.
01:05:21 Do you find that a lot of people going through this process
01:05:24 will seek to basically arrive at a similar place
01:05:29 to not use social media primarily?
01:05:30 About half.
01:05:32 Right, so about half when they went through this exercise,
01:05:34 and these aren’t quantified numbers.
01:05:36 This is just, they sent me reports and yeah.
01:05:40 That’s pretty good though, 1700?
01:05:42 Yeah, yeah.
01:05:42 So roughly half probably got rid of social media altogether.
01:05:47 Once they did this exercise,
01:05:48 they realized these things I care about,
01:05:50 I don’t, social media’s not the tools that’s really helping.
01:05:53 The other half kept some,
01:05:55 there were some things in their life
01:05:56 where some social media was useful.
01:05:59 But the key thing is if they knew
01:06:00 why they were deploying social media,
01:06:02 they could put fences around it.
01:06:04 So for example, of those half that kept some social media,
01:06:07 almost none of them kept it on their phone.
01:06:09 Oh, interesting.
01:06:10 Yeah, you can’t optimize if you don’t know
01:06:12 what the function you’re trying to optimize.
01:06:13 So it’s like this huge hack.
01:06:14 Like once you know this is why I’m using Twitter,
01:06:16 then you can have a lot of rules about how you use Twitter.
01:06:19 And suddenly you take this cost benefit ratio
01:06:21 and it goes like way from the company’s advantage
01:06:24 and then way over towards your advantage.
01:06:25 It’s kind of fascinating
01:06:26 because I’ve been torn with social media,
01:06:29 but I did this kind of process.
01:06:30 I haven’t actually done it for 30 days,
01:06:32 which I probably should.
01:06:33 I’ll do it for like a week at a time and regularly
01:06:36 and thinking what kind of approach to Twitter works for me.
01:06:43 I’m distinctly aware of the fact
01:06:46 that I really enjoy posting once or twice a day.
01:06:51 And at that time checking from the previous post,
01:06:54 it makes me feel even when there’s like negative comments,
01:06:59 they go right past me.
01:07:01 And when there’s positive comments, it makes you smile.
01:07:03 I feel like love and connection with people,
01:07:06 especially with people I know,
01:07:07 but even just in general, it’s like,
01:07:09 it makes me feel like the world is full of awesome people.
01:07:12 Okay, when you increase that from checking from two to like,
01:07:15 I don’t know what the threshold is for me,
01:07:17 but probably like five or six per day,
01:07:19 it starts going to anxiety world.
01:07:21 Like where negative comments will actually stick
01:07:25 to me mentally and positive comments will feel more shallow.
01:07:33 It’s kind of fascinating.
01:07:34 So I’ve been trying to, there’s been long stretches of time,
01:07:41 I think December and January where I did just post
01:07:44 and check, post and check.
01:07:46 That makes me really happy.
01:07:49 Most of 2020 I did that, it made me really happy.
01:07:52 Recently I started like, I’ll go,
01:07:56 you go right back in like a drug addict,
01:07:57 where you check it like, I don’t know what that number is,
01:08:00 but that number is high.
01:08:01 Not good, you don’t come out happy.
01:08:03 No one comes out of a day full of Twitter
01:08:06 celebrating humanity.
01:08:07 And it’s not even,
01:08:08 cause I’m very fortunate to have a lot of just
01:08:11 positivity in the Twitter,
01:08:12 but there’s just a general anxiety.
01:08:16 I wouldn’t even say it’s,
01:08:19 it’s probably the thing that you’re talking about
01:08:21 with the contact switching.
01:08:22 It’s almost like an exhaustion.
01:08:25 I wouldn’t even say it’s like a negative feeling.
01:08:27 It’s almost just an exhaustion
01:08:29 to where I’m not creating anything beautiful in my life,
01:08:32 just exhausted.
01:08:33 Like an existential exhaustion.
01:08:35 Existential exhaustion.
01:08:36 But I wonder, do you think it’s possible to use
01:08:39 from the people you’ve seen from yourself
01:08:42 to use social media in the way I’m describing moderation?
01:08:45 Or is it always going to become?
01:08:48 When people do this exercise,
01:08:49 you get lots of configurations.
01:08:52 So for people that have a public presence, for example,
01:08:56 like what you’re doing is not that unusual.
01:08:58 Okay, I post one thing a day and my audience likes it
01:09:02 and that’s kind of it.
01:09:04 But you’ve thought through like, okay,
01:09:05 this supports something I value,
01:09:06 which is like having a sort of informal connection
01:09:09 with my audience and being exposed to some sort of
01:09:13 positive randomness.
01:09:15 Okay, then you could say if that’s my goal,
01:09:18 what’s the right way to do it?
01:09:19 Well, I don’t need to be on Twitter on my phone all day.
01:09:20 Maybe what I do is every day at five,
01:09:22 I do my post and check on the day.
01:09:25 So I have a writer friend, Ryan Holiday,
01:09:28 who writes about the Stoics a lot.
01:09:30 And he has this similar strategy.
01:09:32 He posts one quote every day usually from a famous Stoic
01:09:36 and sometimes from a contemporary figure.
01:09:37 And that’s just what he does.
01:09:38 He just posts it and it’s a very positive thing.
01:09:41 Like his readers really love it
01:09:42 because it’s just like a dose of inspiration.
01:09:44 He doesn’t spend time.
01:09:46 He’s never interacting with anyone on social media, right?
01:09:48 But that’s an example of I figured out
01:09:51 what’s important to me,
01:09:51 what’s the best way to use tools to amplify it.
01:09:54 And then you get advantages out of the tools.
01:09:56 So I like what you’re doing.
01:09:57 I looked you up, I looked up your Twitter feed
01:09:59 before I came over here.
01:10:00 I was curious, you’re not on there a lot.
01:10:02 I don’t see you yelling at people.
01:10:04 Now, do you think social media as a medium
01:10:07 changed the cultural standards?
01:10:09 And I mean it in a, have you read Neil Postman at all?
01:10:11 Have you read like a Amusing Ourselves to Death?
01:10:14 He was a social critic, technology critic
01:10:17 and wrote a lot about sort of technological determinism.
01:10:19 So the ways, which is a really influential idea
01:10:22 to a lot of my work,
01:10:23 which is actually a little out of fashion
01:10:24 right now in academia.
01:10:25 But the ways that the properties
01:10:28 and presence of technologies change things about humans
01:10:31 in a way that’s not really intended
01:10:32 or planned by the humans themselves.
01:10:33 And that book is all about
01:10:35 how different communication medium,
01:10:38 like fundamentally just changed the way
01:10:39 the human brain understands and operates.
01:10:42 And so he sort of gets into the,
01:10:43 what happened when the printed word was widespread
01:10:45 and how television changed it.
01:10:47 And this was all pre social media.
01:10:49 But this is one of these ideas I’m having
01:10:51 is like what’s the degree to which,
01:10:52 and I get into it sometimes on my show,
01:10:54 I get into a little bit,
01:10:54 like the degree to which like Twitter in particular
01:10:58 just changed the way that people conceptualized
01:11:00 what for example, debate and discussion was.
01:11:03 Like it introduced a rhetorical dunk culture
01:11:06 where it’s sort of more about tribes
01:11:08 not giving ground to other tribes.
01:11:10 And it’s like, it’s a complete,
01:11:12 there’s different places and times
01:11:14 when that type of discussion was thought of differently.
01:11:17 Well, yeah, absolutely.
01:11:19 But I tend to believe, I don’t know what you think,
01:11:21 that there’s the technological solutions.
01:11:23 Like there’s literally different features in Twitter
01:11:27 that could completely reverse that.
01:11:29 There’s so much power in the different choices that are made.
01:11:33 And it could still be highly engaging
01:11:36 and have very different effects.
01:11:37 Perhaps more negative or hopefully more positive.
01:11:40 Yeah, so I’m trying to pull these two things apart.
01:11:42 So there’s these two ways social media,
01:11:45 let’s say could change the experience
01:11:46 of reading a major newspaper today.
01:11:49 One could be a little bit more economic, right?
01:11:50 So the internet made it cheaper to get news.
01:11:53 The newspapers had to retreat to a paywall model
01:11:55 because it was the only way they were gonna survive.
01:11:56 But once you’re in a paywall model,
01:11:58 then what you really wanna do is make your tribe,
01:12:01 which is within the paywall, very, very happy with you.
01:12:03 So you wanna work to them.
01:12:04 But then there’s the sort of determinist point of view,
01:12:07 which is the properties of Twitter, which were arbitrary.
01:12:10 Jack and Evan just, whatever, let’s just do it this way.
01:12:13 Influenced the very way that people now understand
01:12:15 and think about the world.
01:12:16 So the one influenced the other, I think.
01:12:19 They kind of started adjusting together.
01:12:21 I did this thing, I mean, I’m trying to understand this.
01:12:25 Part of the, I’ve been playing with the entrepreneurial idea.
01:12:30 That’s a very particular dream I’ve had of a startup.
01:12:34 That this is a longer term thing,
01:12:37 it has to do with artificial intelligence.
01:12:39 But more and more, it seems like there’s some trajectory
01:12:43 through creating social media type of technologies.
01:12:47 Very different than what people are thinking I’m doing.
01:12:49 But it’s a kind of challenge to the way the Twitter is done.
01:12:55 But it’s not obvious what the best mechanisms are
01:12:58 to still make an exceptionally engaging platform.
01:13:01 My clubhouse is very engaging.
01:13:03 And not have any other negative effects.
01:13:06 For example, there’s Chrome extensions
01:13:08 that allow you to turn off all likes and dislikes
01:13:13 and all of that from Twitter.
01:13:14 So all you’re seeing is just the content.
01:13:18 On Twitter, that to me creates,
01:13:21 that’s not a compelling experience at all.
01:13:23 Because I still need, I would argue,
01:13:26 I still need the likes to know
01:13:28 what’s a tweet worth reading.
01:13:30 Because I don’t only have a limited amount of time,
01:13:32 so I need to know what’s valuable.
01:13:34 It’s like great Yelp reviews on tweets or something.
01:13:36 But I’ve turned off on, for example,
01:13:40 on my account on YouTube, I wrote a Chrome extension
01:13:45 that turns off all likes and dislikes and just views.
01:13:50 I don’t know how many views the video gets and so on.
01:13:53 Unless it’s on my phone.
01:13:53 Did you take off the recommendations?
01:13:57 No, no.
01:13:58 On YouTube, some people,
01:13:59 distraction for YouTube is a big one for people.
01:14:02 No, I’m not worried about the distraction
01:14:04 because I’m able to control myself on YouTube.
01:14:06 You don’t rabbit hole.
01:14:07 No, I don’t rabbit hole.
01:14:09 So you have to know your demons or your addictions
01:14:11 or whatever.
01:14:12 On YouTube, I’m okay.
01:14:13 I don’t keep clicking.
01:14:14 The negative feelings come from seeing the views
01:14:19 on stuff you’ve created.
01:14:22 Oh, so you don’t want to see your views.
01:14:24 Yeah.
01:14:24 So I’m just speaking to the things
01:14:26 that I’m aware of of myself that are helpful
01:14:29 and things that are not helpful emotionally.
01:14:31 And I feel like there should be,
01:14:34 we need to create actually tooling for ourselves.
01:14:37 That’s not me with JavaScript,
01:14:38 but anybody is able to create,
01:14:42 sort of control the experience that they have.
01:14:45 Yeah.
01:14:45 Well, so my big unified theory on social media
01:14:48 is I’m very bearish on the big platforms
01:14:52 having a long future.
01:14:53 You are.
01:14:54 I think the moment of three or four major platforms
01:14:57 is not gonna last, right?
01:15:01 So I don’t know.
01:15:02 Okay.
01:15:03 This is just perspective, right?
01:15:03 So you can start shorting these stocks on my,
01:15:07 don’t tell.
01:15:07 It’s not financial advice.
01:15:08 Yeah.
01:15:09 Yeah.
01:15:10 Don’t do it Robinhood.
01:15:11 So here’s, I think the big mistake
01:15:12 the major platforms made as when they took out
01:15:17 the network effect advantage, right?
01:15:19 So the original pitch,
01:15:20 especially if something like Facebook or Instagram
01:15:23 was the people you know are on here, right?
01:15:26 So like what you use this for is you can connect to people
01:15:28 that you already know.
01:15:29 This is what makes the network useful.
01:15:31 So therefore the value of our network grows quadratically
01:15:34 with the number of users.
01:15:35 And therefore it’s such a headstart
01:15:37 that there’s no way that someone else can catch up.
01:15:40 But when they shifted and when Facebook took the lead
01:15:42 of say we’re gonna shift towards a newsfeed model,
01:15:45 they basically said we’re going to try to in the moment
01:15:48 get more data and get more likes.
01:15:50 Like what we’re gonna go towards
01:15:51 is actually just seeing interesting stuff.
01:15:54 Like seeing different information.
01:15:55 So people took this social internet impulse
01:15:58 to connect to people digitally,
01:15:59 to other tools like group text messages
01:16:01 and WhatsApp and stuff like this, right?
01:16:03 So you don’t think about these tools
01:16:04 as oh, this is where I connect with people.
01:16:06 Once it’s just a feed that’s kind of interesting,
01:16:09 now you’re competing with everything else
01:16:10 that can produce interesting content that’s diverting.
01:16:13 And I think that is a much fiercer competition
01:16:16 because now for example, you’re going up against podcasts,
01:16:18 right?
01:16:19 I mean like, okay, I guess the Twitter feed
01:16:20 is interesting right now,
01:16:22 but also a podcast is interesting
01:16:24 or something else could be interesting too.
01:16:25 I think it’s a much fiercer competition
01:16:27 when there’s no more network effects, right?
01:16:29 And so my sense is we’re gonna see a fragmentation
01:16:32 into what I call long tail social media,
01:16:34 where if I don’t need everyone I know to be on a platform,
01:16:38 then why not have three or four bespoke platforms I use
01:16:41 where it’s a thousand people and we’re all interested
01:16:44 in whatever, AI or comedy.
01:16:47 And we’ve perfected this interface
01:16:50 and maybe it’s like Clubhouse, it’s audio or something.
01:16:52 And we all pay $2 so that we don’t have to worry
01:16:54 about attention harvesting.
01:16:55 And that’s gonna be wildly more entertaining.
01:16:57 Like, I mean, I’m thinking about comedians on Twitter.
01:17:00 It’s not the best internet possible format
01:17:04 for them expressing themselves and being interesting.
01:17:06 That you have all these comedians that are trying to like,
01:17:08 well, I can do like little clips and little whatever.
01:17:10 Like, I don’t know if there was a long tail social media.
01:17:13 I mean, it’s really, this is where the comedians are
01:17:14 and there’s podcasts and the comedians are on podcasts now.
01:17:16 So this is my thought is that there’s really no,
01:17:19 there’s really no strong advantage
01:17:21 to having one large platform that everyone is on.
01:17:25 If all you’re getting from it is,
01:17:27 I now have different options for diversion
01:17:29 and like uplifting aspirational
01:17:31 or whatever types of entertainment,
01:17:33 that whole thing could fragment.
01:17:34 And I think the glue that was holding together
01:17:36 was network effects.
01:17:36 I don’t think they realized that when network effects
01:17:38 have been destabilized,
01:17:40 they don’t have the centrifugal force anymore
01:17:41 and they’re spinning faster and faster.
01:17:43 But is a Twitter feed really that much more interesting
01:17:46 than all of these streaming services?
01:17:48 Is it really that much more interesting
01:17:49 than Clubhouse, is it that much more interesting
01:17:52 than podcast?
01:17:54 I feel like they don’t realize
01:17:55 how unstable their ground actually is.
01:17:57 Yeah, that’s fascinating.
01:17:58 But the thing that makes Twitter and Facebook work,
01:18:03 I mean, the newsfeed, you’re exactly right.
01:18:07 Like you can just duplicate the news.
01:18:08 Like if it’s not the social network and it’s the newsfeed,
01:18:12 then why not have multiple different feeds
01:18:15 that are more, that are better at satisfying.
01:18:17 There’s a dopamine gamification that they’ve figured out.
01:18:20 Yeah.
01:18:21 And so you have to, whatever you create,
01:18:24 you have to at least provide some pleasure
01:18:27 in that same gamification kind of way.
01:18:29 It doesn’t have to have to do with scale
01:18:32 of large social networks.
01:18:33 But I mean, I guess you’re implying that
01:18:36 you should be able to design that kind of mechanism
01:18:39 in other forms.
01:18:40 Or people are turning on that gamification.
01:18:42 I mean, so people are getting wise to it
01:18:44 and are getting uncomfortable about it, right?
01:18:46 So if I’m offering something, these exist out here.
01:18:49 Like sugar.
01:18:49 People realize sugar’s bad for you.
01:18:50 Yeah, sugar’s great.
01:18:51 They’re gonna stop eating it.
01:18:52 Yeah, drinking a lot’s great too,
01:18:53 but also after a while you realize there’s problems.
01:18:56 So some of the long tail social media networks
01:18:58 that are out there that I’ve looked at,
01:18:59 they offer usually like a deeper sense of connection.
01:19:02 Like it’s usually interesting people
01:19:04 that you share some affinity
01:19:06 and you have these carefully cultivated.
01:19:08 I wrote this New Yorker piece a couple of years ago
01:19:09 about the indie social media movement
01:19:11 that really got into some of these different technologies.
01:19:14 But I think the technologies are a distraction.
01:19:17 We focus too much on Macedon versus whatever.
01:19:20 Like forget, or Discord.
01:19:21 Like actually let’s forget the protocols right now.
01:19:23 It’s the idea of, okay.
01:19:26 And there’s a lot of these long tail social media groups,
01:19:28 what people are getting out of it,
01:19:29 which I think can outweigh the dopamine gamification
01:19:32 is strong connection and motivation.
01:19:35 Like you’re in a group with other guys
01:19:36 that are all trying to be better dads
01:19:39 or something like this.
01:19:40 And you talk to them on a regular basis
01:19:42 and you’re sharing your stories
01:19:43 and there’s interesting talks.
01:19:45 And that’s a powerful thing too.
01:19:47 One interesting thing about scale of Twitter
01:19:49 is you have these viral spread of information.
01:19:53 So sort of Twitter has become a newsmaker in itself.
01:19:57 Yeah, I think it’s a problem.
01:19:58 Well, yes, but I wonder what replaces that
01:20:01 because then you immediately.
01:20:03 Reporting?
01:20:04 Well, no.
01:20:05 Reporters have to do some work again, I don’t know.
01:20:07 The problem with reporters and journalism
01:20:09 is that they’re intermediary.
01:20:12 They have control.
01:20:14 I mean, this is the problem in Russia currently
01:20:15 is that it creates a shield between the people and the news.
01:20:22 The interesting thing and the powerful thing about Twitter
01:20:25 is that the news originates from the individual
01:20:28 that’s creating the news.
01:20:29 Like you have the former president of the United States
01:20:33 on Twitter creating news.
01:20:34 You have Elon Musk creating news.
01:20:36 You have people announcing stuff on Twitter
01:20:39 as opposed to talking to a journalist.
01:20:41 And that feels much more genuine
01:20:44 and it feels very powerful,
01:20:48 but actually coming to realize
01:20:49 it doesn’t need the social network.
01:20:53 You can just put that announcement
01:20:54 on a YouTube type thing.
01:20:56 This is what I’m thinking.
01:20:56 Right, so this is my point about that
01:20:58 because that’s right.
01:20:59 The democratizing power of the internet is fantastic.
01:21:01 I mean, I’m an old school internet nerd,
01:21:03 a guy that was telemeting in the servers
01:21:06 and gophering before the World Wide Web was around, right?
01:21:08 So I’m a huge internet booster.
01:21:10 And that’s one of its big power.
01:21:12 But when you put everything on Twitter,
01:21:14 I think the fact that you’ve taken,
01:21:16 you homogenized everything, right?
01:21:18 So everything looks the same,
01:21:20 moves with the same low friction is very difficult.
01:21:22 You have no what I call distributed curation, right?
01:21:25 The only curation that really happens,
01:21:27 there’s a little bit with likes and also the algorithm.
01:21:29 But if you look back to pre web 2.0 or early web 2.0,
01:21:33 when a lot of this was happening,
01:21:34 let’s say on blogs where people own their own servers
01:21:37 and you had your different blogs,
01:21:39 there was this distributed curation that happened
01:21:41 where in order for your blog to get on people’s radar
01:21:45 and this had nothing to do with any gatekeepers
01:21:47 or legacy media, it was over time you got more links
01:21:51 and people respected you
01:21:52 and you would hear about this blog over here
01:21:53 and there’s this whole distributed curation
01:21:55 and filtering going on.
01:21:56 So if you think like the 2004 presidential election,
01:22:00 most of the information people are getting from the internet
01:22:02 was one of the first big internet news driven elections
01:22:05 was from, you had like the daily costs and drudge,
01:22:09 but there was like blogs that were out there
01:22:11 and this was back, Ezra Klein was just running a blog
01:22:13 out of his dorm room at this point, right?
01:22:16 And you would in a distributed fashion gain credibility
01:22:20 because okay, people have paid,
01:22:22 it’s very hard to get people to pay attention to your blog,
01:22:24 they’re paying attention, they get linked to this kid Ezra
01:22:26 or whatever, it seems to be really sharp
01:22:28 and now people are noticing it
01:22:29 and now you have a distributed curation
01:22:32 that solves a lot of the problems we see
01:22:34 when you have a completely homogenized low friction
01:22:36 environment like friction where, I mean Twitter,
01:22:38 where any random conspiracy theory or whatever
01:22:41 that people like can just shoot through and spread,
01:22:44 whereas if you’re starting a blog
01:22:46 to try to push QAnon or something like that,
01:22:49 it’s probably gonna be a really weird looking blog
01:22:51 and you’re gonna have a hard time,
01:22:52 like it’s just never gonna show up on people’s radar, right?
01:22:55 So everything you’ve said up until the very last statement,
01:22:58 I would agree with.
01:23:01 This is a topic I don’t know a ton about, I guess, QAnon.
01:23:03 There’s, I think, I’ll forget QAnon.
01:23:07 Yeah, no, we can.
01:23:08 But QAnon is, QAnon could be that,
01:23:10 I also don’t know, I should know more,
01:23:12 I apologize, I don’t know more.
01:23:13 I mean, that’s a power and the downside,
01:23:17 you can have, I mean, Hitler could have a blog today
01:23:21 and you would have potentially a very large following
01:23:24 if he’s charismatic, if he’s as good with words,
01:23:28 is able to express the ideas,
01:23:29 whatever maybe he’s able to channel,
01:23:32 the frustration, the anger that people have
01:23:33 about a certain thing.
01:23:34 And so I think that’s the power of blogs,
01:23:37 but it’s also the limitation, but that doesn’t,
01:23:39 we’re not trying to solve that.
01:23:40 You can’t solve that, yeah.
01:23:41 The fundamental problem you’re saying is not the problem.
01:23:45 Your thesis is that there’s nothing special
01:23:48 about large scale social networks
01:23:51 that guarantees that they will keep existing.
01:23:53 And it’s important to remember
01:23:55 for a lot of the older generation of internet activists
01:23:58 or the people who are very pro internet in the early days,
01:24:01 they were completely flabbergasted
01:24:03 by the rise of these platforms.
01:24:05 Say, why would you take the internet
01:24:08 and then build your own version of the internet
01:24:11 where you own all the servers?
01:24:12 And we built this whole distributed,
01:24:14 the whole thing, we had open protocols.
01:24:16 Everyone anywhere in the world could use the same protocols.
01:24:18 Your machine can talk to any other machine.
01:24:20 It’s the most democratic communication system
01:24:23 that’s ever been built.
01:24:24 And then these companies came along and said,
01:24:25 we’re gonna build our own,
01:24:26 we’ll just own all the servers
01:24:27 and put them in buildings that we own.
01:24:29 And the internet will just be the first mile
01:24:31 that gets you into our private internet
01:24:32 where we owned the whole thing.
01:24:33 It went completely against the entire motivation
01:24:37 of the internet was like, yes,
01:24:39 it’s not gonna be one person owns all the servers
01:24:41 and you pay to access them.
01:24:42 It’s any one server that they own
01:24:43 could talk to anyone else’s server
01:24:45 because we all agree on a standard set of protocols.
01:24:48 And so the old guard of pro internet people
01:24:51 never understood this move towards
01:24:54 let’s build private versions of the internet.
01:24:57 We’ll build three or four private internets
01:24:59 and that’s what we’ll all use.
01:25:00 It was the opposite basically.
01:25:01 Well, it’s funny enough, I don’t know if you follow,
01:25:03 but Jack Dorsey is also as a proponent
01:25:07 and is helping to fund, create fully distributed
01:25:11 versions of Twitter, essentially,
01:25:13 I think that would potentially destroy Twitter.
01:25:15 But I think there might be financial,
01:25:19 like business cases to be made there, I’m not sure.
01:25:21 But that seems to be another alternative
01:25:23 as opposed to creating a bunch of like the long tail,
01:25:28 creating like the ultimate long tail
01:25:31 of like fully distributed.
01:25:33 Yeah, which is what the internet is.
01:25:35 But that’s sort of my long,
01:25:36 when I’m thinking about long tail social media,
01:25:37 I’m thinking it’s like the tech’s not so important.
01:25:40 Like there’s groups out there, right?
01:25:42 I know where the tech they use to actually implement
01:25:45 their digital only social group, whatever,
01:25:47 they might use Slack, they might use some combination
01:25:50 of Zoom or it doesn’t matter.
01:25:51 I think in the tech world,
01:25:52 we wanna build the beautiful protocol
01:25:54 that okay, everyone’s gonna use
01:25:56 as just a federated server protocol
01:25:58 in which we’ve worked out X, Y, and Z,
01:25:59 and no one understands it
01:26:00 because then the engineers need it all to make,
01:26:02 I get it because I’m a nerd like this,
01:26:03 like, okay, every standard has to fit with everything else
01:26:05 and no one understands what’s going on.
01:26:07 Meanwhile, you have this group of bike enthusiasts
01:26:10 that are like, yeah, we’ll just jump on to Zoom
01:26:12 and have some Slack and put up a blog.
01:26:14 The tech doesn’t really matter.
01:26:15 Like we built a world with our own curation,
01:26:17 our own rules, our own sort of social ecosystem
01:26:21 that’s generating a lot of value.
01:26:23 I mean, I don’t know if it’ll happen.
01:26:24 There’s a lot of money at stake with obviously these large,
01:26:27 but I just think they’re more,
01:26:29 they’re so, I mean, look how quickly
01:26:30 Americans left Facebook, right?
01:26:33 I mean, Facebook was savvy to buy other properties
01:26:35 and to diversify, right?
01:26:36 But how quick did that take
01:26:37 for just standard Facebook news feed?
01:26:40 Everyone under the age of something were using it
01:26:42 and no one under a certain age is using it now.
01:26:44 It took like four years.
01:26:45 I mean, this stuff is really.
01:26:47 I believe people can leave Facebook overnight.
01:26:50 Yeah.
01:26:51 Like I think Facebook hasn’t actually messed up
01:26:54 like enough to, there’s two things.
01:26:57 They haven’t messed up enough
01:26:58 for people to really leave aggressively
01:27:00 and there’s no good alternative for them to leave.
01:27:03 I think if good alternatives pop up,
01:27:06 it would just immediately happen.
01:27:07 The stuff is a lot more culturally fragile, I think.
01:27:10 I mean, Twitter’s having a moment
01:27:11 because it was feeding a certain type of,
01:27:13 I mean, there’s a lot of anxieties
01:27:14 that was in the sort of political sphere anyways
01:27:16 that Twitter was working with,
01:27:20 but its moment could go to as well.
01:27:21 I mean, it’s a really arbitrary thing.
01:27:23 Short little things.
01:27:24 I read a Wired article about this earlier in the pandemic.
01:27:27 This is crazy that the way
01:27:29 that we’re trying to communicate information
01:27:31 about the pandemic is all these weird arbitrary rules
01:27:34 where people are screenshotting pictures of articles
01:27:37 that are part of a tweet thread
01:27:38 where you say one slash in under it.
01:27:40 We have the technology guys
01:27:43 to really clearly convey long form information to people.
01:27:47 Why do we have these?
01:27:48 And I know this because it’s the gamified dopamine hits,
01:27:50 but what a weird medium.
01:27:52 There’s no reason for us to have to have these threads
01:27:55 that you have to find and pin with your screenshot.
01:27:57 I mean, we have technology
01:27:58 to communicate better using the internet.
01:28:00 I mean, why are epidemiologists having to do tweet threads?
01:28:05 Because there’s mechanisms of publishing
01:28:06 that make it easier on Twitter.
01:28:08 I mean, we’re evolving as a species
01:28:10 and the internet is a very fresh thing.
01:28:12 And so it’s kind of interesting to think
01:28:16 that as opposed to Twitter,
01:28:18 this is what Jack also complains about
01:28:20 is Twitter’s not innovating fast enough.
01:28:23 And so it’s almost like the people are innovating
01:28:26 and thinking about their productive life faster
01:28:30 than the platforms on which they operate can catch up.
01:28:33 And so at the point the gap grows sufficiently,
01:28:37 they’ll jump.
01:28:38 A few people, a few innovative folks
01:28:40 will just create an alternative
01:28:42 and perhaps distributed perhaps just many little silos
01:28:48 and then people will jump
01:28:49 and then we’ll just continue this kind of way.
01:28:50 Yeah, but see, I think like Substack, for example,
01:28:52 what they’re gonna pull out of Twitter,
01:28:53 among other things, is the audience that was,
01:28:56 let’s say, like slightly left of center,
01:28:58 but slightly left of center, don’t like Trump,
01:29:03 uncomfortable with like postmodern critical theories
01:29:05 made into political action, right?
01:29:07 And they’re like, yeah, Twitter,
01:29:08 there was people on there talking about this
01:29:10 and it made me feel sort of hurt
01:29:12 because I was feeling a little bit like a nerd about it.
01:29:14 But honestly, I’d probably rather subscribe
01:29:16 to the four subs, you know, I’m gonna have like Barry’s
01:29:19 and Andrew Sullivan’s, I’ll have like a Jesse Signals,
01:29:20 like I’ll have a few substacks I can subscribe to
01:29:22 and honestly, I’m a knowledge worker who’s 32 anyways,
01:29:26 probably that’s an email all day.
01:29:28 And so like, there’s an innovation that’s gonna,
01:29:30 that group, you know, it’s gonna suck them off.
01:29:32 Which is actually a very large group.
01:29:34 Yeah, that’s a lot of energy.
01:29:36 And then once Trump’s gone,
01:29:37 I guess that’s probably gonna drive,
01:29:38 that drove a lot of more like Trump people off Twitter.
01:29:42 Like this stuff is fragile, I think.
01:29:44 I, but the fascinating thing to me,
01:29:47 because I’ve hung out on Parler for a short amount enough
01:29:50 to know that the interface matters.
01:29:52 It’s so fascinating like that,
01:29:54 that it’s not just about ideas.
01:29:57 It’s about creating like Substack 2,
01:30:01 creating a pleasant experience, a dicting experience.
01:30:04 No, you’re right, you’re right about that.
01:30:05 And it’s hard.
01:30:06 And it’s why the, this is one of the conclusions
01:30:08 from that indie social media article
01:30:09 is it’s just the ugliness matters.
01:30:12 And I don’t mean even just aesthetically,
01:30:13 it’s just the clunkiness of the interfaces.
01:30:17 And I don’t know, it’s,
01:30:18 to some degree, the social media companies
01:30:19 have spent a lot of money on this.
01:30:21 And to some degree, it’s a survivorship bias, right?
01:30:24 I think Twitter, every time I hear Jack talks about this,
01:30:26 it seems like he’s as surprised as anyone else,
01:30:30 the way Twitter is being used.
01:30:31 I mean, it’s basically the way, you know,
01:30:33 they had it years ago.
01:30:36 And then, you know, it was like, great,
01:30:38 there’ll be statuses, right?
01:30:39 This is what I’m doing, you know?
01:30:41 And my friends can follow me and see it.
01:30:42 Without really changing anything,
01:30:43 it just happened to hit everything right
01:30:46 to support this other type of interaction.
01:30:47 Well, there’s also the JavaScript model,
01:30:49 which Brendan Eich talked about.
01:30:51 He just implemented JavaScript,
01:30:53 like the crappy version of JavaScript in 10 days,
01:30:55 threw it out there and just changed it really quickly,
01:31:00 evolved it really quickly.
01:31:01 And now it’s become, according to Stack Exchange,
01:31:04 the most popular programming language in the world
01:31:06 that drives like most of the internet
01:31:08 and even the backend and now mobile.
01:31:10 And so that’s an argument for the kind of thing
01:31:14 you’re talking about where like the bike club people
01:31:18 could literally create the thing that would, you know,
01:31:21 run most of the internet in 10 years from now.
01:31:24 Yeah.
01:31:25 So there’s something to that,
01:31:27 like as opposed to trying to get lucky
01:31:29 or trying to think through stuff
01:31:30 is just to solve a particular problem.
01:31:33 Do stuff, yeah.
01:31:34 And then do stuff.
01:31:35 Do stuff, keep tinkering until you love it.
01:31:36 Yeah. Yeah.
01:31:37 And then, and of course the sad thing is timing and luck
01:31:41 matter and that you can’t really control.
01:31:43 That’s the problem.
01:31:44 Yeah.
01:31:45 But you can’t go back to 2007.
01:31:47 Yeah.
01:31:48 That’s like the number one thing you could do
01:31:49 to have a lot of success with a new platform
01:31:51 is go back in time 14 years.
01:31:53 So the thing you have to kind of think about
01:31:55 is what is the like, what’s the totally new thing
01:31:59 that 10 years from now would seem obvious.
01:32:03 I mean, some people saying clubhouses that,
01:32:05 there’s been a lot of stuff like clubhouse before,
01:32:08 but it hit the right kind of thing.
01:32:12 Similar to Tesla actually,
01:32:14 what clubhouse did is it got a lot of
01:32:16 relatively famous people on there quickly.
01:32:19 And then the other effect is like, it’s invite only.
01:32:24 So like, oh, all the smart, like famous people are on there.
01:32:27 I wonder what’s, it’s the FOMO,
01:32:29 like fear that you’re missing something really profound
01:32:32 as exciting happening there.
01:32:34 So those social effects.
01:32:36 And then once they actually show up,
01:32:38 I’m a huge fan of this.
01:32:40 It’s the JavaScript model is like,
01:32:42 clubhouse is so dumb, like so simple in its interface.
01:32:46 Like you literally can’t do anything except mute, unmute.
01:32:50 There’s a mute button.
01:32:51 Yeah.
01:32:52 And there’s a leave quietly button.
01:32:53 Yeah.
01:32:54 And that’s it.
01:32:55 Yeah.
01:32:55 And it’s kinda.
01:32:56 I love single use technology that sense, yeah.
01:32:59 There’s no like, there’s no,
01:33:02 it’s just like trivial.
01:33:04 And Twitter kinda started like that.
01:33:08 Facebook started like that.
01:33:10 Yeah.
01:33:10 But they’ve evolved quickly to add all these features
01:33:12 and so on.
01:33:13 And I do hope clubhouse stays that way.
01:33:16 Yeah.
01:33:17 It’d be interesting.
01:33:17 Or there’s alternatives.
01:33:18 I mean, even with clubhouse though,
01:33:21 so one of the issues with a lot of these platforms
01:33:23 I think is bits are cheap enough now
01:33:27 that we don’t really need a unicorn investor model.
01:33:30 I mean, the investors need that model.
01:33:32 There’s really not really an imperative
01:33:36 of we need something that can scale
01:33:39 to a hundred million plus a year revenue.
01:33:42 So, because it was gonna require this much seed
01:33:44 and angel investment,
01:33:45 and you’re not gonna get this much seed angel investment
01:33:48 unless you can have a potential exit this wide
01:33:50 because you have to be part of a portfolio
01:33:52 that depends on one out of 10 exiting here.
01:33:55 If you don’t actually need that
01:33:57 and you don’t need to satisfy that investor model,
01:33:59 which I think is basically the case.
01:34:01 I mean, bits are so cheap.
01:34:02 Everything is so cheap.
01:34:04 So even like with clubhouse, it’s investor backed, right?
01:34:07 This notion of like, this needs to be a major platform,
01:34:11 but the bike club doesn’t necessarily need a major platform.
01:34:14 That’s where I’m interested.
01:34:15 I mean, I don’t know.
01:34:15 There’s so much money.
01:34:16 That’s the only problem that bets against me
01:34:18 is that you can concentrate a lot of capital
01:34:21 if you do these things, right?
01:34:22 I mean, so Facebook was like
01:34:23 a fantastic capital concentration machine.
01:34:26 It’s crazy how much,
01:34:28 where it even found that capital in the world
01:34:30 that it could concentrate and ossify in the stock price
01:34:32 that a very small number of people have access to, right?
01:34:35 That’s incredibly powerful.
01:34:37 So when there is a possibility to consolidate
01:34:40 and gather a huge amount of capital,
01:34:42 that’s a huge imperative
01:34:43 that’s very hard for the bike club to go up against, so.
01:34:45 But there’s a lot of money in the bike club.
01:34:47 If you see what the Wall Street bets
01:34:50 on that when a bunch of people get together,
01:34:53 I mean, it doesn’t have to be a bike.
01:34:54 It could be a bunch of different bike clubs
01:34:56 just kind of team up to overtake.
01:34:59 That’s what we’re doing now, yeah.
01:35:00 Or we’re gonna repurpose off the shelf stuff.
01:35:03 That’s not, yeah, we’re gonna repurpose
01:35:05 whatever it was for office productivity or something,
01:35:07 and like the clubs using Slack
01:35:09 just to build out these, you know.
01:35:11 Yeah.
01:35:12 Let’s talk about email.
01:35:14 Yeah, that’s right.
01:35:15 I wrote a book.
01:35:16 You wrote yet another amazing book,
01:35:20 A World Without Email.
01:35:22 Maybe one way to enter this discussion
01:35:24 is to ask what is the hyperactive hive mind,
01:35:28 which is the concept you opened the book with?
01:35:29 Yeah, and the devil.
01:35:31 And the devil.
01:35:32 It’s the scourge of hundreds of millions.
01:35:35 So I think, so I called this book A World Without Email.
01:35:40 The real title should be A World
01:35:41 Without the Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow,
01:35:43 but my publisher didn’t like that, right?
01:35:45 So we had to get a little bit more pithy.
01:35:47 I was trying to answer the question after deep work,
01:35:50 why is it so hard to do this?
01:35:52 Like, if this is so valuable,
01:35:54 if we can produce much higher,
01:35:55 if people are much happier,
01:35:57 why do we check email a day?
01:35:58 Why are we on Slack all day?
01:36:00 And so I started working on this book
01:36:02 immediately after deep work.
01:36:04 And so my initial interviews were done in 2016.
01:36:06 So it took five years to pull the threads together.
01:36:08 I was trying to understand why is it so hard
01:36:11 for most people to actually find any time
01:36:14 to do the stuff that actually moves the needle?
01:36:16 And the story was, and I thought this was,
01:36:18 I hadn’t heard this reported anywhere else.
01:36:20 That’s why it took me so long to pull it together,
01:36:22 is email arrives on the scene,
01:36:24 email spreads, I trace it,
01:36:26 it really picks up steam in the early 1990s,
01:36:28 between like 1990 and 1995, it makes its move, right?
01:36:32 And it does so for very pragmatic reasons.
01:36:34 It was replacing existing communication technologies
01:36:36 that it was better than.
01:36:37 It was mainly the fax machine, voicemail, and memos, right?
01:36:39 So this was just better, right?
01:36:41 So it was a killer app because it was useful.
01:36:44 In its wake came a new way of collaborating,
01:36:47 and that’s the Hyperactive Hive Mind.
01:36:49 So it’s like the virus that follows the rats
01:36:53 that went through Western Europe for the Black Pig.
01:36:55 As email spread through organizations,
01:36:57 in its wake came the Hyperactive Hive Mind workflow,
01:37:00 which says, okay, guys,
01:37:01 here’s the way we’re gonna collaborate.
01:37:03 We’ll just work things out on the fly
01:37:05 with unscheduled back and forth messages.
01:37:07 Just boom, boom, boom, let’s go back and forth.
01:37:09 Hey, what about this?
01:37:09 Did you see this?
01:37:10 What about that client?
01:37:11 What’s going on over here?
01:37:13 That followed email.
01:37:14 It completely took over office work.
01:37:18 And the need to keep up with all of these asynchronous
01:37:22 back and forth unscheduled messages,
01:37:24 as those got more and more and more,
01:37:25 and we had more of those to service,
01:37:26 the need to service those required us to check
01:37:29 more and more and more and more, right?
01:37:30 And so by the time, and I go through the numbers,
01:37:32 but by the time you get to today,
01:37:34 now the average knowledge worker
01:37:34 has to check one of these channels once every six minutes.
01:37:37 Because every single thing you do in your organization,
01:37:39 how you talk to your colleagues,
01:37:40 how you talk to your vendors,
01:37:41 how you talk to your clients,
01:37:42 how you talk to the HR department,
01:37:43 it’s all this asynchronous unscheduled
01:37:45 back and forth messaging.
01:37:47 And you have to service the conversations.
01:37:49 And it spiraled out of control,
01:37:51 and it has sort of devolved a lot of work in the office now
01:37:54 to all I do is constantly tend communication channels.
01:37:58 So it’s fascinating what you’re describing
01:38:00 is nobody ever paused in this whole evolution
01:38:05 to try to create a system that actually works.
01:38:08 That it was kind of like a huge fan of cellular automata.
01:38:13 So it’s just kind of started a very simple mechanism,
01:38:17 just like cellular automata.
01:38:18 It just kind of grew to overtake
01:38:20 all the fundamental communication
01:38:23 of how we do business and also personal life.
01:38:25 Yeah, and that’s one of the big ideas
01:38:27 is that the unintentionality, right?
01:38:29 So this goes back to technological determinism.
01:38:31 I mean, this is a weird business book
01:38:33 because I go deep on philosophy.
01:38:35 I go deep on, for some reason,
01:38:37 we get into paleoanthropology for a while.
01:38:39 We do a lot of neuroscience.
01:38:40 It’s kind of a weird book.
01:38:42 But I got real into this technological determinism, right?
01:38:44 This notion that just the presence of a technology
01:38:46 can change how people act.
01:38:48 That’s my big argument
01:38:49 about what happened with the hive mind.
01:38:51 And I can document specific examples, right?
01:38:54 So I document this example in IBM, 1987, maybe 85,
01:38:59 but it’s in like the mid to late eighties,
01:39:01 IBM, R. Monk headquarters.
01:39:03 We’re gonna put an internal email, right?
01:39:05 Because it’s convenient.
01:39:07 And so they ran a whole study.
01:39:09 And so I talked to the engineer who ran the study,
01:39:11 Adrian Stone, like we’re gonna run this study
01:39:13 to figure out how much do we communicate
01:39:14 because it was still an era where it’s expensive, right?
01:39:17 So you have to provision a mainframe.
01:39:19 So you can’t over provision.
01:39:20 Like we wanna know how much communication actually happened.
01:39:22 So they went and figured it out.
01:39:24 How many memos, how many calls, how many notes, great.
01:39:26 We’ll provision a mainframe to handle email
01:39:28 that can handle all of that.
01:39:29 So if all of our communication moves to email,
01:39:32 the mainframe will still be fine.
01:39:34 In three days, they had melted it down.
01:39:36 People were communicating six times more than that estimate.
01:39:39 So just in three days, the presence
01:39:42 of a low friction digital communication tool
01:39:44 drastically changed how everyone collaborated.
01:39:46 So that’s not enough time for an all hands meeting.
01:39:49 Guys, we figured it out.
01:39:51 This is what we need to communicate a lot more
01:39:52 is what’s gonna make us more productive.
01:39:54 We need more emails.
01:39:55 It’s emergent.
01:39:57 Isn’t that just on the positive end, amazing to you?
01:40:00 Like, isn’t email amazing?
01:40:03 Like in those early days,
01:40:04 like just the frictionless communication.
01:40:07 I mean, email is awesome.
01:40:09 Like people say that there’s a lot of problems with emails,
01:40:13 just like people say a lot of problems with Twitter
01:40:15 and so on.
01:40:15 It’s kind of cool that you can just send a little note.
01:40:18 It was a miracle, right?
01:40:20 So I wrote a, there’s originally was a New Yorker piece
01:40:23 from a year or two ago called, was email a mistake?
01:40:26 And then it’s in the book too.
01:40:28 But I go into the history of email,
01:40:31 like why did it come along?
01:40:32 And it solved a huge problem.
01:40:34 It was the problem of fast asynchronous communication.
01:40:37 And it was a problem that did not exist
01:40:39 until we got large offices.
01:40:41 We got large offices, synchronous communication,
01:40:43 like let’s get on the phone at the same time.
01:40:44 There’s too much overhead to it.
01:40:45 There’s too many people you might have to talk to.
01:40:48 Asynchronous communication,
01:40:49 like let me send you a memo when I’m ready
01:40:51 and you can read it when you’re ready, took too long.
01:40:53 And so it was like a huge problem.
01:40:55 So one of the things I talked about is the way that
01:40:56 when they built the CIA headquarters,
01:40:58 there was such a need for fast asynchronous communication
01:41:02 that they built a pneumatic powered email system.
01:41:05 They had these pneumatic tubes
01:41:06 all throughout the headquarters
01:41:07 with electromagnetic routers.
01:41:09 So you would put your message in a plexiglass tube
01:41:12 and you would turn these brass dials about the location.
01:41:15 You would stick it in these things and pneumatic tubes
01:41:17 and it would shoot and sort
01:41:18 and work its way through these tubes
01:41:20 to show up in just a minute or something at the floor
01:41:23 and at the general office suite where you wanted to go.
01:41:26 And my point is the fact that they spent so much money
01:41:28 to make that work,
01:41:29 to show how important fast asynchronous communication
01:41:32 was to large offices.
01:41:33 So when email came along,
01:41:35 it was a productivity silver bullet.
01:41:37 It was a miracle.
01:41:37 I talked to the researchers who were working
01:41:39 on computer supported collaboration in the late 80s,
01:41:41 trying to figure out how are we gonna use
01:41:43 computer networks to be more productive?
01:41:45 And they were building all these systems and tools.
01:41:47 Email showed up,
01:41:48 it just wiped all that research off the map.
01:41:50 There was no need to build
01:41:51 these custom intranet applications.
01:41:53 There was no need to build these communication platforms.
01:41:56 Email could just do everything.
01:41:58 So it was a miracle application,
01:42:00 which is why it spread everywhere.
01:42:02 That’s one of these things where,
01:42:04 okay, on into the consequences, right?
01:42:05 You had this miracle productivity silver bullet.
01:42:07 It spread everywhere,
01:42:09 but it was so effective.
01:42:10 It just, I don’t know, like a drug.
01:42:12 I’m sure there’s some pandemic metaphor here,
01:42:15 analogy here of a drug that like it’s so effective
01:42:17 at treating this that it also blows up
01:42:19 your whole immune system and then everyone gets sick.
01:42:21 Well, ultimately it probably significantly increased
01:42:23 the productivity of the world,
01:42:24 but there’s a kind of hump that it now has plateaued.
01:42:28 And then the fundamental question you’re asking is like,
01:42:32 okay, how do we take the next,
01:42:33 how do we keep increasing the productivity?
01:42:35 Now, I think it brought it down.
01:42:36 So my contention,
01:42:39 and so again, there’s a little bit in the book,
01:42:42 but I have a more recent Wired article
01:42:44 that puts some newer numbers to this.
01:42:47 I subscribed to the hypothesis
01:42:48 that the hyperactive hive mind was so detrimental.
01:42:51 So yeah, it helped productivity at first, right?
01:42:53 When you could do fast asynchronous communication,
01:42:56 but very quickly there was a sort of exponential rise
01:42:59 in communication amounts.
01:43:01 Once we got to the point where the hive mind meant
01:43:02 you had to constantly check your email,
01:43:04 I think that made us so unproductive
01:43:06 that it actually was pulling down
01:43:08 non industrial productivity.
01:43:09 And I think the only reason why,
01:43:11 so it certainly has not been going up.
01:43:12 That metric has been stagnating for a long time now
01:43:15 while all of this was going on.
01:43:16 I think the only reason why it hasn’t fallen
01:43:19 is that we added these extra shifts off the books.
01:43:22 I’m gonna work for three hours in the morning,
01:43:23 I’m gonna work for three hours at night.
01:43:25 And only that I think has allowed us
01:43:27 to basically maintain a stagnated non industrial growth.
01:43:31 We should have been shooting up the charts.
01:43:33 I mean, this is miraculous innovations,
01:43:35 the computer networks.
01:43:36 And then we built out these hundred billion dollar
01:43:38 ubiquitous worldwide high speed wireless internet
01:43:41 infrastructure with supercomputers in our pockets
01:43:43 where we could talk to anyone at any time.
01:43:44 Like why did our productivity not shoot off the charts?
01:43:47 Because our brain can’t context switch
01:43:48 once every six minutes.
01:43:49 So it’s fundamentally back to the context switching.
01:43:51 Context switching is poison.
01:43:53 Context switching is poison.
01:43:54 What is it about email that forces context switching?
01:43:58 Is it both our psychology that drags us in?
01:44:00 Or is it the expectation?
01:44:02 Yeah, right, right.
01:44:03 Because it’s not, I think we’ve seen this
01:44:04 through a personal will or failure lens recently.
01:44:08 Like, oh, am I addicted to email?
01:44:11 I have bad etiquette about my email.
01:44:14 No, it’s the underlying workflow.
01:44:16 So the tool itself I will exonerate.
01:44:19 I think I would rather use POP3 than a fax protocol.
01:44:23 I think it’s easier.
01:44:24 The issue is the hyperactive hive mind workflow.
01:44:27 So if I am now collaborating with 20 or 30 different people
01:44:30 with back and forth unscheduled messaging,
01:44:33 I have to tend those conversations, right?
01:44:35 It’s like you have 30 metaphorical ping pong tables.
01:44:38 And when the balls come back across,
01:44:39 you have to pretty soon hit it back
01:44:41 or stuff actually grinds to a halt.
01:44:43 So it’s the workflow that’s the problem.
01:44:45 It’s not the tools, the fact that we use it
01:44:47 to do all of our collaboration.
01:44:48 Let’s just send messages back and forth,
01:44:49 which means you can’t be far from checking that.
01:44:52 Cause if you take a break, if you batch,
01:44:54 if you try to have better habits,
01:44:56 it’s gonna slow things down.
01:44:58 So my whole villain is this hyperactive hive mind workflow.
01:45:02 The tool is fine.
01:45:03 I don’t want the tool to go away,
01:45:05 but I wanna replace the hyperactive hive mind workflow.
01:45:07 I think this is gonna be one of the biggest
01:45:10 value generating productivity revolutions
01:45:12 of the 21st century.
01:45:14 I quote an anonymous CEO who’s pretty well known
01:45:16 who says this is gonna be the moonshot of the 21st century.
01:45:19 It’s gonna be of that importance.
01:45:20 There’s so much latent productivity that’s being suppressed
01:45:24 because we just figure things out on the fly in email
01:45:26 that as we figure that out,
01:45:27 I think it’s gonna be hundreds of billions of dollars.
01:45:32 You’re so absolutely right.
01:45:35 The question is, what is a world without email look like?
01:45:39 How do we fix email?
01:45:40 So what happens is, at least in my vision,
01:45:44 you identify, well, actually there’s these different
01:45:47 processes that make up my workday.
01:45:49 Like these are things that I do repeatedly,
01:45:52 often in collaboration with other people
01:45:53 that do useful things for my company or whatever.
01:45:56 Right now, most of these processes are implicitly implemented
01:45:59 with the hyperactive hive mind.
01:46:00 How do we do this thing?
01:46:01 Like answering client questions
01:46:02 to shoot messages back and forth.
01:46:03 How do we do this thing?
01:46:05 Posting podcast episodes,
01:46:06 we’ll just figure it out on the fly.
01:46:07 My main argument is we actually have to do
01:46:09 like they did in the industrial sector,
01:46:11 take each of these processes and say,
01:46:12 is there a better way to do this?
01:46:14 And by better, I mean a way that’s gonna minimize the need
01:46:17 to have unscheduled back and forth messaging.
01:46:19 So we actually have to do process engineering.
01:46:22 This created a massive growth and productivity
01:46:24 in the industrial sector during the 20th century.
01:46:25 We have to do it in knowledge work.
01:46:26 We can’t just rock and roll an inbox
01:46:28 as we actually have to say,
01:46:30 how do we deal with client questions?
01:46:31 Well, let’s put in place a process
01:46:32 that doesn’t require us to send messages back and forth.
01:46:35 How do we post podcast episodes?
01:46:36 Let’s automate this to a degree where
01:46:38 I don’t have to just send you a message on the fly.
01:46:40 And you do this process by process
01:46:43 and the pressure on that inbox is released.
01:46:45 And now you don’t have to check it every six minutes.
01:46:46 So you still have email.
01:46:47 I mean, like I need to send you a file.
01:46:49 Sure, I’ll use email,
01:46:50 but we’re not coordinating or collaborating over email
01:46:52 or Slack, which is just a faster way of doing the hive mind.
01:46:55 I mean, Slack doesn’t solve anything there.
01:46:57 You have better structured bespoke processes.
01:47:00 I think that’s what’s gonna unleash
01:47:01 this massive productivity.
01:47:03 Bespoke, so the interesting thing is like,
01:47:05 for example, you and I exchange some emails.
01:47:07 So obviously I, let’s just say in my particular case,
01:47:10 I schedule podcasts.
01:47:11 There’s a bunch of different tasks,
01:47:13 fascinatingly enough, that I do
01:47:16 that can be converted into processes.
01:47:18 Yeah.
01:47:19 Is it up to me to create that process?
01:47:21 Or do you think we also need to build tools
01:47:23 just like email was a protocol
01:47:26 for helping us create processes for the different tasks?
01:47:31 I mean, I think ultimately the whole organization,
01:47:34 the whole team has to be involved.
01:47:35 I think ultimately there’s certainly
01:47:36 a lot of investor money being spent right now
01:47:38 to try to figure out those tools, right?
01:47:40 So I think Silicon Valley has figured this out
01:47:42 in the past couple of years.
01:47:43 This is the difference between
01:47:45 when I was talking to people after Deep Work
01:47:47 and now five years later is this scent is in the air, right?
01:47:51 Because there’s so much latent productivity.
01:47:53 So yes, there are gonna be new tools,
01:47:54 which I think could help.
01:47:55 There are already tools that exist.
01:47:57 I mean, in the different groups I profiled use things
01:48:00 like Trello or Basecamp or Asana or Flow
01:48:03 and our schedule wants and acuity,
01:48:06 like there’s a lot of tools out there.
01:48:08 The key is not to think about it in terms of
01:48:10 what tool do I replace email with?
01:48:12 Instead, you think about it with,
01:48:14 we’re trying to come up with a process
01:48:16 that reduces back and forth messages.
01:48:17 Oh, what tool might help us do that?
01:48:21 Yeah, and I would push,
01:48:22 it’s not about necessarily efficiency.
01:48:24 In fact, some of these things are gonna take more time.
01:48:26 So writing a letter to someone is like a high value activity
01:48:29 it’s probably worth doing.
01:48:31 The thing that’s killer is the back and forth
01:48:33 because now I have to keep checking, right?
01:48:35 So we scheduled this together
01:48:36 because I knew you from before,
01:48:38 but like most of the interviews I was scheduling for this
01:48:41 actually I have a process with my publicist
01:48:43 where we use a shared document and she puts stuffs in there
01:48:46 and then I check it twice a week
01:48:48 and there’s scheduling options.
01:48:50 I say, here’s when I wanna do this one
01:48:51 or this will work for this one or whatever.
01:48:52 And it takes more time in the moment than just,
01:48:55 but it means that we have almost no back and forth messaging
01:48:58 for podcast scheduling, which without this,
01:49:00 so like with my UK publisher,
01:49:02 I didn’t put this process in the place
01:49:03 because we’re not doing as many interviews,
01:49:06 but it’s all the time.
01:49:07 And I’m like, oh, I could really feel the difference, right?
01:49:10 It’s the back and forth that’s killer.
01:49:11 I suppose it is up to the individual people involved,
01:49:15 like you said, knowledge workers,
01:49:18 like they have to carry the responsibility
01:49:21 of creating processes.
01:49:23 Like how always asking the first principles question,
01:49:25 how can this be converted into a process?
01:49:28 Yeah, so you can start by doing this yourself,
01:49:30 like just with what you can control.
01:49:32 I think ultimately once the teams are doing that,
01:49:34 I think that’s probably the right scale.
01:49:36 If you try to do this at the organizational scale,
01:49:38 you’re gonna get bureaucracy, right?
01:49:39 So if it’s, if Elon Musk is gonna dictate down
01:49:44 to everyone at Tesla or something like this,
01:49:46 that’s too much remove and you get bureaucracy.
01:49:48 But if it’s, we’re a team of six that’s working together
01:49:52 on whatever powertrain software,
01:49:55 then we can figure out on our own, what are our processes?
01:49:57 How do we wanna do this?
01:49:58 So it’s ultimately also creating a culture
01:50:00 where saying like an email, sending an email
01:50:03 just for the hell of it, it should be taboo.
01:50:05 So you are being, you’re being destructive
01:50:09 to the productivity of the team by sending this email.
01:50:12 As opposed to helping develop a process and so on
01:50:17 that will ultimately automate this.
01:50:20 That’s why I’m trying to spread this message
01:50:22 of the context switches as poison.
01:50:24 I get so much into the science of it.
01:50:25 I think we underestimate how much it kills us
01:50:28 to have to wrench away our context,
01:50:29 look at a message and come back.
01:50:30 And so once you have the mindset of,
01:50:32 it’s a huge thing to ask of someone
01:50:35 to have to take their attention off something
01:50:37 and look back at this.
01:50:38 And if they have to do that for three or four times,
01:50:40 like we’re just gonna figure this out on the fly
01:50:42 and every message is gonna require five checks
01:50:44 of the inbox while you wait for it.
01:50:45 Now you’ve created whatever it is at this point,
01:50:47 25 or 30 context shifts.
01:50:50 Like you’ve just done a huge disservice to someone’s day.
01:50:52 This would be like, if I had a professional athlete,
01:50:54 like, hey, do me a favor.
01:50:55 I need you to go do this press interview,
01:50:57 but to get there, you’re gonna have to carry this sandbag
01:50:59 and sprint up this hill, like completely exhaust
01:51:01 your muscles and then you have to go play a game.
01:51:03 Like, of course I’m not gonna ask an athlete
01:51:04 to do like an incredibly physically demanding thing
01:51:07 right before a game,
01:51:08 but something as easy as thoughts, question mark,
01:51:11 or like, hey, do you wanna jump on a call
01:51:13 and it’s gonna be six back and forth messages
01:51:14 to figure it out.
01:51:15 It’s kind of the cognitive equivalent, right?
01:51:17 You’re taking the wind out of someone.
01:51:19 Yeah, and by the way, for people who are listening,
01:51:22 because I recently posted a few job openings
01:51:24 for us so I wanted to help with this thing.
01:51:26 And one of the things that people are surprised
01:51:28 when they work with me is how many spreadsheets
01:51:30 and processes are involved.
01:51:32 Yeah, it’s like Claude Shannon, right?
01:51:33 I talked about communication theory or information theory.
01:51:36 It takes time to come up with a clever code upfront.
01:51:38 So you spend more time upfront figuring out those
01:51:40 spreadsheets and trying to get people on board with it.
01:51:42 But then your communication going forward
01:51:45 is all much more efficient.
01:51:46 So over time, you’re using much less bandwidth, right?
01:51:49 So you do pain upfront.
01:51:52 It’s quicker just right now to send an email.
01:51:54 But if I spend a half day to do this
01:51:56 over the next six months, I’ve saved myself 600 emails.
01:52:00 Now, here’s a tough question for, you know,
01:52:02 from the computer science perspective,
01:52:04 we often over optimize.
01:52:07 So you’ve create processes and you, okay,
01:52:10 just like you’re saying, it’s so pleasurable
01:52:14 to increase in the longterm productivity
01:52:19 that sometimes you just enjoy that process in itself
01:52:22 by just creating processes and you actually never,
01:52:28 like it has a negative effect on productivity longterm
01:52:31 because you’re too obsessed with the processes.
01:52:33 Is that a nice problem to have essentially?
01:52:37 I mean, it’s a problem.
01:52:38 I mean, because let’s look at the one sector
01:52:41 that does do this, which is developers, right?
01:52:44 So agile methodologies like Scrum or Kanban
01:52:47 are basically workflow methodologies
01:52:49 that are much better than the hyperactive hive mind.
01:52:52 But man, some of those programmers get pretty obsessive.
01:52:55 I don’t know if you’ve ever talked to a whatever
01:52:57 level three Scrum master.
01:52:59 They get really obsessive about like,
01:53:02 it has to happen exactly this way
01:53:04 and it’s probably seven times more complex
01:53:06 than it needs to be.
01:53:07 I’m hoping that’s just because nerds like me,
01:53:09 you know, like to do that,
01:53:11 but it’s a broadly probably an issue, right?
01:53:14 We have to be careful because you can just go down
01:53:16 that fiddling path.
01:53:18 Like, so it needs to be, here’s how we do it.
01:53:19 Let’s reduce the messages and let’s roll, you know?
01:53:22 You can’t save yourself through,
01:53:26 if you can get the process just right, right?
01:53:28 So I wrote this article kind of recently
01:53:30 called The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done.
01:53:32 And I profiled this productivity guru named Merlin Mann.
01:53:37 And I talked about this movement called Productivity Prawn
01:53:39 as like elite speak term in the early 2000s
01:53:42 where people just became convinced
01:53:44 that if they could combine their productivity systems
01:53:47 with software and they could find just the right software,
01:53:50 just the right configuration where they could offload
01:53:51 most of the difficulty of work,
01:53:53 what happened with the machines,
01:53:54 when it kind of figured out for,
01:53:55 and then they could just sort of crank widgets and it’d be,
01:53:57 and the whole thing fell apart
01:53:58 because work is hard and it’s hard to do
01:54:00 and making decisions about what to work on is hard
01:54:03 and no system can really do that for you.
01:54:04 So you have to have this sort of balance between,
01:54:09 context switches are poison.
01:54:10 So we got to get rid of the context switches.
01:54:12 Once like something’s working good enough
01:54:13 to get rid of the context switches, then get after it.
01:54:17 Yeah, there’s a psychological process there for me.
01:54:19 The OCD nature, like I’ve literally,
01:54:22 embarrassing enough, have lost my shit before when,
01:54:26 so in many of the processes that involve Python scripts,
01:54:30 the rule is to not use spaces.
01:54:34 Underscores, there’s like rules
01:54:36 for like how you format stuff, okay?
01:54:39 And like, I should not lose my shit
01:54:42 when somebody had a space and maybe capital letters,
01:54:45 like it’s okay to have a space
01:54:48 because there’s this feeling like something’s not perfect.
01:54:51 And as opposed to in the Python script,
01:54:54 allowing some flexibility around that,
01:54:56 you create this programmatic way that’s flawless
01:54:59 and when everything’s working perfectly, it’s perfect.
01:55:01 But actually, if you strive for perfection,
01:55:06 it has the same stress, like has a lot of the stress
01:55:10 that you were seeking to escape with the context switching
01:55:12 because you’re almost stressing about errors.
01:55:18 Like when the process is functioning,
01:55:20 there’s always this anxiety of like,
01:55:23 I wonder if it’s gonna succeed.
01:55:25 I wonder if it’s gonna succeed.
01:55:26 Yeah, no, no, I think some of that’s just you and I probably.
01:55:29 I mean, it’s just our mindset, right?
01:55:30 We’re in, we do computer science, right?
01:55:32 So chicken and egg, I guess.
01:55:34 And a lot of the processes end up working here much rougher.
01:55:37 It’s like, okay, instead of letting clients
01:55:39 just email me all the time, we have a weekly call
01:55:43 and then we send them a breakdown
01:55:45 of everything we committed to, right?
01:55:47 That’s a process that works.
01:55:48 Okay, I get asked a lot of questions
01:55:50 because I’m the JavaScript guy in the company.
01:55:51 Instead of doing it by email, I have office hours.
01:55:53 This is what Basecamp does.
01:55:54 All right, so you come to my office hours,
01:55:55 that cuts down a lot of back and forth.
01:55:57 All right, we’re gonna, instead of emailing
01:55:58 about this project, we’ll have a Trello board
01:56:02 and we’ll do a weekly really structured status meeting
01:56:04 real quick, what’s going on, who needs what, let’s go.
01:56:07 And now everything’s on there and on our inboxes,
01:56:09 we don’t have to send as many messages.
01:56:10 So like that rough level of granularity,
01:56:12 that gets you most of the way there.
01:56:14 So the parts that you can’t automate
01:56:17 and turn into a process.
01:56:18 So how many parts like that do you think
01:56:21 should remain in a perfect world?
01:56:24 And for those parts where email is still useful,
01:56:29 what do you recommend those emails look like?
01:56:32 How should you write emails?
01:56:34 When should you send them?
01:56:35 Yeah, I think email is good for delivering information.
01:56:40 Right, so I think of it like a fax machine or something.
01:56:43 It’s a really good fax machine.
01:56:44 So if I need to send you something
01:56:46 and you just send you a file,
01:56:47 I need to broadcast a new policy or something,
01:56:49 like email is a great way to do it.
01:56:51 It’s bad for collaboration.
01:56:53 So if you’re having a conversation,
01:56:55 like we’re trying to reach a decision on something,
01:56:57 I’m trying to learn about something,
01:56:58 I’m trying to clarify what this is,
01:57:01 that’s more than just like a one answer type question,
01:57:04 then I think that you shouldn’t be doing an email.
01:57:07 But see, here’s the thing.
01:57:08 Like you and I don’t talk often
01:57:11 and so we have a kind of new interaction.
01:57:13 It’s not, so sure, yeah, you have a book coming out,
01:57:17 so there’s a process and so on,
01:57:19 but say there, don’t you think there’s a lot
01:57:22 of novel interactive experiences?
01:57:24 Yeah, I think it’s fine.
01:57:25 So you could, just for every novel experience,
01:57:27 it’s okay to have a little bit of exchange.
01:57:29 Yeah, I think it’s fine.
01:57:30 Like I think it’s fine if stuff comes in over the transom
01:57:33 or you hear from someone you haven’t heard from in a while.
01:57:36 I think all that’s fine.
01:57:37 I mean, that’s email at its best.
01:57:39 Where it starts to kill us is where all
01:57:41 of our collaboration is happening with the back and forth.
01:57:43 So when you’ve moved the bulk of that out of your inbox,
01:57:45 now you’re back in that Meg Ryan movie, like You Got Mail,
01:57:48 where it’s like, all right, load this up
01:57:50 and you wait for the boat and be like,
01:57:51 oh, we got a message.
01:57:53 Yeah, Lex sent me a message.
01:57:54 This is interesting, right?
01:57:55 You’re back to the AOL days.
01:57:56 So you’re talking about the bulk of the business world
01:58:00 where email has replaced the actual communication,
01:58:04 all of the communication protocols required
01:58:05 to accomplish anything.
01:58:06 Everything is just happening with messages.
01:58:08 So if you now get most stuff done,
01:58:11 repeatable collaborations with other processes
01:58:14 that don’t require you to check these inboxes,
01:58:15 then the inbox can serve like an inbox,
01:58:17 which includes hearing from interesting people, right?
01:58:20 Or sending something, hey, I don’t know if you saw this,
01:58:22 I thought you might like it.
01:58:23 I think it’s great for that.
01:58:24 So there’s probably a bunch of people listening to this.
01:58:27 They’re like, yeah, but I work on a team
01:58:31 and all they use is email.
01:58:33 How do you start the revolution from the ground up?
01:58:35 Yeah, well, do asymmetric optimization first.
01:58:39 So identify all your processes
01:58:40 and then change what you can change
01:58:42 and be socially very careful about it.
01:58:44 So don’t necessarily say like, okay,
01:58:46 this is a new process we all have to do.
01:58:48 You’re just, hey, we gotta get this report ready.
01:58:51 Here’s what I think we should do.
01:58:52 I’ll get a draft into our Dropbox folder
01:58:54 by noon on Monday, grab it.
01:58:57 I won’t touch it again until Tuesday morning
01:59:00 and then I’ll look at your changes.
01:59:01 I have this office hours always scheduled Tuesday afternoon.
01:59:03 So if there’s anything that catches your attention,
01:59:05 grab me then.
01:59:07 But I’ve told the designer who CC’d on this
01:59:09 that by COB Tuesday, the final version will be ready
01:59:13 for them to take and polish or whatever.
01:59:14 Like the person on the other end is like, great,
01:59:16 I’m glad Cal has a plan.
01:59:18 So what do I need to do?
01:59:19 I need to edit this tomorrow, whatever, right?
01:59:21 But you’ve actually pulled them into a process.
01:59:22 That means we’re gonna get this report together
01:59:24 without having to just go back and forth.
01:59:25 So you just asymmetrically optimize these things
01:59:29 and then you can begin the conversation.
01:59:31 And maybe that’s where my book comes in place.
01:59:32 You just sort of slide it across the desk.
01:59:36 Buy the book and just leave it, give it to everybody
01:59:39 on your team.
01:59:40 Okay, so we solved the bulk of the email problem with this.
01:59:42 Is there a case to be made that even for communication
01:59:45 between you and I, we should move away from email?
01:59:50 And for example, there’s a guy, I recently,
01:59:52 I don’t know if you know comedians,
01:59:53 but there’s a guy named Joey Diaz
01:59:55 that I’ve had an interaction with recently.
01:59:57 And that guy, first of all, the sweetest human,
02:00:00 despite what his comedy sounds like,
02:00:02 is the sweetest human being.
02:00:04 And he’s a big proponent of just pick up the phone and call.
02:00:08 And it makes me so uncomfortable when people call me.
02:00:11 It’s like, I don’t know what to do with this thing.
02:00:14 But it kind of gets everything done quicker, I think,
02:00:17 if I remove the anxiety from that.
02:00:19 Is there a case to be made for that?
02:00:21 Or is email could still be the most efficient way
02:00:24 to do this?
02:00:25 No, look, if you have to interact with someone,
02:00:27 there’s a lot of efficiency and synchrony, right?
02:00:30 And this is something from distributed system theory
02:00:31 where you know if you go from synchronous
02:00:33 to asynchronous networks,
02:00:34 there’s a huge amount of overhead to the asynchrony.
02:00:36 So actually the protocols required to solve things
02:00:39 in asynchronous networks are significantly more complicated
02:00:42 and fragile than synchronous protocols.
02:00:44 So if we can just do real time, it’s usually better.
02:00:46 And also from an interaction,
02:00:48 like social connection standpoint,
02:00:49 there’s a lot more information in the human voice
02:00:51 and the back and forth.
02:00:53 Yeah, if you just call, so very generational, right?
02:00:56 Our generation will be comfortable talking on the phone
02:00:59 in a way that a younger generation isn’t,
02:01:01 but an older generation is more comfortable
02:01:03 with, well, you just call people.
02:01:05 Whereas we, so there’s a happy medium,
02:01:07 but most of my good friends, we just talk,
02:01:09 we have regular phone calls.
02:01:11 Okay.
02:01:11 Yeah, it’s not, I don’t just call them,
02:01:13 we schedule it, we schedule it, yeah.
02:01:14 Just on text, like, yeah, you wanna talk sometime soon.
02:01:17 Do you ever have a process around friends?
02:01:20 Not really, no.
02:01:22 I feel like I should, I feel like.
02:01:24 Well, you have like a lot
02:01:25 of interesting friend possibilities.
02:01:27 You have like an interesting problem, right?
02:01:29 Like really interesting people you can talk to.
02:01:32 Well, that’s one problem.
02:01:33 The other one is the introversion
02:01:34 where I’m just afraid of people and get really stressed.
02:01:37 Like I freak out.
02:01:38 And so.
02:01:39 You picked a good line of work.
02:01:41 Yeah, now perhaps it’s the Goggins thing.
02:01:43 It’s like facing your fears or whatever,
02:01:46 but it’s almost like there’s,
02:01:50 it has to do with the timetables thing and the deep work
02:01:52 that the nice thing about the processes
02:01:55 is it not only automates sort of,
02:02:00 automates away the context switching,
02:02:03 it ensures you do the important things too.
02:02:06 It’s like prioritize.
02:02:07 So the thing is with email,
02:02:09 because everything is done over email,
02:02:13 you can be lazy in the same way with like social networks
02:02:17 and do the easy things first that are not that important.
02:02:20 So the process also enforces
02:02:23 that you do the important things.
02:02:24 And for me, the important things is like,
02:02:27 okay, that sounds weird, but like social connection.
02:02:30 No, that’s one of the most important things
02:02:32 in all of human existence.
02:02:34 And doing it, the paradoxical thing,
02:02:37 I got into this for digital minimalism,
02:02:40 the more you sacrifice on behalf of the connection,
02:02:42 the stronger the connection feels, right?
02:02:44 So sacrificing non trivial time and attention
02:02:47 on behalf of someone is what tells your brain
02:02:48 that this is a serious relationship,
02:02:52 which is why social media had this paradoxical effect
02:02:54 making people feel less social
02:02:56 because it took the friction out of it.
02:02:58 And so the brain just doesn’t like,
02:02:59 like, yeah, you’ve been commenting on this person’s,
02:03:01 whatever, you’ve been retweeting them
02:03:03 or sending them some text.
02:03:05 You haven’t, it’s not hard enough.
02:03:07 And then the perceived strength
02:03:09 of that social connection diminishes
02:03:11 where if you talk to them or go spend time with them
02:03:13 or whatever, you’re gonna feel better about it.
02:03:16 So the friction is good.
02:03:17 I have a thing with some of my friends
02:03:18 where at the end of each call,
02:03:20 we take a couple minutes to schedule the next.
02:03:23 Then you never have to,
02:03:23 it’s like I do with haircuts or something, right?
02:03:25 Like if I don’t schedule it then,
02:03:27 I’m never gonna get my haircut, right?
02:03:29 And so it’s like, okay, when do you wanna talk next?
02:03:32 Yeah, that’s a really good idea.
02:03:34 I just don’t call friends.
02:03:36 And like every 10 years I do something dramatic for them
02:03:39 so that we maintain the friendship.
02:03:40 We’re like, I’d murder somebody that they really don’t like.
02:03:43 Yeah, exactly.
02:03:44 Careful, man, Joey might ask you to do that.
02:03:46 Yeah, that’s why, that’s one of my favorite things.
02:03:49 Lex, I need you to come down to New Jersey.
02:03:51 That’s exactly what we’re gonna do.
02:03:52 With that robot dog of yours.
02:03:55 We’re gonna go down to New Jersey.
02:03:56 There’s a special human.
02:03:57 I love the comedian world.
02:04:00 They’ve been shaking up.
02:04:01 I don’t know if you listen to Joe Rogan, all those folks.
02:04:04 They kind of are doing something interesting
02:04:08 for MIT and academia.
02:04:10 They’re shaking up this world a little bit.
02:04:13 Like podcasting, because comedians are paving the way
02:04:15 for podcasting.
02:04:17 And so you have like Andrew Huberman,
02:04:18 who’s a neuroscientist at Stanford, friend of mine now.
02:04:23 He’s like into podcasting now and you’re into podcasting.
02:04:27 Of course, you’re not necessarily podcasting
02:04:29 about computer science currently, right?
02:04:30 But that, it feels like you could have a lot
02:04:35 of the free spirit of the comedians implemented
02:04:40 by the people who are academically trained.
02:04:43 Who actually have a niche specialty.
02:04:46 Yeah, and then that results, I mean,
02:04:49 who knows what the experiment looks like,
02:04:51 but that results me being able to talk about robotics
02:04:54 with Joey Diaz when he says, you know,
02:04:56 drops F bombs every other sentence.
02:04:58 And I, the world is like, I’ve seen actually a shift
02:05:02 within colleagues and friends within MIT
02:05:06 where they’re becoming much more accepting
02:05:08 of that kind of thing.
02:05:09 It’s very interesting.
02:05:10 That’s interesting.
02:05:11 So you’re seeing, okay.
02:05:12 Because they’re seeing how popular it is.
02:05:14 They’re like, wait a minute.
02:05:15 Well, you’re really popular.
02:05:16 I don’t know how they think about it
02:05:17 at Georgetown, for example.
02:05:18 I don’t know.
02:05:19 It’s interesting, but I think what happens
02:05:22 is the popularity of it combined
02:05:25 with just good conversations with people they respect.
02:05:29 It’s like, oh, wait, this is the thing.
02:05:32 Yeah.
02:05:33 And this is more fun to listen to
02:05:34 than a shitty Zoom lecture about their work.
02:05:39 Yeah.
02:05:40 It’s like, there’s something here.
02:05:40 There’s something interesting.
02:05:41 And we don’t, nobody actually knows what that is.
02:05:44 Just like with like Clubhouse or something,
02:05:46 nobody’s figured out like, where does this medium take?
02:05:49 Is this a legitimate medium of education?
02:05:51 Yeah.
02:05:52 Or is this just like a fun?
02:05:54 Well, that’s your innovation, I think,
02:05:55 was we can bring on professors.
02:05:58 Yeah.
02:05:58 And I know Joe Rogan did some of that too,
02:06:00 but your professors in your field.
02:06:04 Yeah, exactly.
02:06:05 You bring on all these MIT guys who I remember.
02:06:08 Well, that’s been the big challenge for me is,
02:06:10 I don’t, is I feel,
02:06:15 I would ask big like philosophical questions
02:06:17 of people like yourself.
02:06:20 They’re like really well public.
02:06:23 Like, so for example, you have a lot of excellent papers
02:06:25 on, you know, that has a lot of theory in it, right?
02:06:31 And there’s some temptation to just go through papers.
02:06:35 And I think it’s possible to actually do that.
02:06:37 I haven’t done that much, but I think it’s possible.
02:06:39 It just requires a lot of preparation.
02:06:41 And I can probably only do that with things
02:06:43 that I’m actually like in the field I’m aware of.
02:06:48 But there’s a dance that I would love to be able
02:06:51 to try to hit right where it’s actually getting
02:06:53 to the core of some interesting ideas
02:06:54 as opposed to just talking about philosophy.
02:06:56 At the same time, there’s a large audience of people
02:06:59 that just want to be inspired by disciplines
02:07:04 where they don’t necessarily know the details.
02:07:07 But there’s a lot of people that are like,
02:07:08 hmm, I’m really curious.
02:07:10 I’ve been thinking about pivoting careers
02:07:13 into software engineering.
02:07:14 They would love to hear from people like you
02:07:16 about computer science.
02:07:17 Even if it’s like theory.
02:07:19 Yeah, but just like the idea that you can have big ideas,
02:07:22 you push them through and it’s interesting,
02:07:24 you fight for it, yeah.
02:07:25 Well, there’s some, there’s what is it?
02:07:27 Computerphile and Numberphile, these YouTube channels.
02:07:33 There’s channels I watch on like chess, exceptionally popular
02:07:37 where I don’t understand maybe 80% of the time
02:07:41 what the hell they’re talking about
02:07:42 because they’re talking about like why this move
02:07:44 is better than this move.
02:07:45 But I love the passion and the genius of those people
02:07:48 and just overhearing it.
02:07:49 Yeah.
02:07:50 I don’t know why that’s so exciting.
02:07:52 Do you look at like Scott Aaronson’s blog at all?
02:07:53 The Settled, Optimized?
02:07:55 Yeah, it’s like hardcore complexity theory.
02:07:57 But it’s just an enthusiasm or like Terry Tao’s blog.
02:08:01 A little bit of humor about it.
02:08:02 Terry Tao has a blog?
02:08:03 He used to, yeah.
02:08:05 And it would just be, I’m going all in on,
02:08:09 here’s a new affine group with which you can do whatever.
02:08:11 Whatever, it was just equations.
02:08:12 Well, in the case of Scott Aaronson,
02:08:14 he’s good, he’s able to turn on like the inner troll
02:08:19 and comedian and so on.
02:08:20 Yeah.
02:08:21 He keeps the fun, which is the best
02:08:22 of kinds of books. And he’s a philosophical guy.
02:08:24 He wrote that.
02:08:24 He turns on the philosophy. Yeah.
02:08:27 Yeah, so we’re exploring these different ways
02:08:30 of communicating science and exciting the world.
02:08:33 Speaking of which, I gotta ask you about computer science.
02:08:36 Yeah, that’s right, I do some of that.
02:08:39 So, I mean, a lot of your work is what inspired
02:08:43 this deep thinking about productivity
02:08:46 from all the different angles,
02:08:48 because some of the most rigorous work
02:08:50 is mathematical work.
02:08:52 And in computer science, the theoretical computer science,
02:08:55 let me ask the Scott Aaronson question of like,
02:08:57 is there something to you that stands out in particular
02:09:00 that’s beautiful or inspiring,
02:09:03 or just really insightful about computer science
02:09:05 or maybe mathematics?
02:09:08 I mean, I like theory.
02:09:11 And in particular, what I’ve always liked in theory
02:09:13 is the notion of impossibilities.
02:09:14 That’s kind of my specialty.
02:09:16 So within the context of distributed algorithms,
02:09:19 my specialty is impossibility results.
02:09:21 So the idea that you can argue
02:09:23 nothing exists that solves this,
02:09:26 or nothing exists that can solve this faster than this.
02:09:30 And I think that’s really interesting.
02:09:32 And that goes all the way back to Turing.
02:09:34 His original paper on computable numbers
02:09:37 with their connection to the German Eichsturzungen problem,
02:09:40 but basically the German name
02:09:41 that Hilbert called the decision problem.
02:09:43 This was precomputers, but he’s English,
02:09:46 so it’s written in English.
02:09:47 So it’s a very accessible paper.
02:09:48 And it lays the foundation
02:09:50 for all of theoretical computer science.
02:09:51 He just has this insight.
02:09:53 He’s like, well, if we think about like an algorithm,
02:09:55 I mean, he figures out like all effective procedures
02:09:57 or Turing machines are basically algorithms.
02:09:59 We could really describe a Turing machine with a number,
02:10:02 which we can now imagine with like computer code,
02:10:04 you could just take a source file
02:10:05 and just treat the binary version of the file
02:10:07 as like a really long number, right?
02:10:09 But he’s like, every program is just a finite number.
02:10:12 It’s a natural number.
02:10:14 And then he realized like one way to think about a problem
02:10:16 is you have, and this is like kind of the Mike Sipser
02:10:19 approach, but you have a sort of, it’s a language.
02:10:21 So of an infinite number of strings,
02:10:23 some of them are in the language and some of them aren’t,
02:10:25 but basically you can imagine a problem is represented
02:10:27 as an infinite binary string,
02:10:29 where in every position, like a one means that string
02:10:31 is in the language and a zero means it isn’t.
02:10:33 And then he applied Cantor from the 19th century and said,
02:10:37 okay, the natural numbers are countable.
02:10:39 So it’s countably infinite and infinite binary strings,
02:10:43 you can use a diagonalization argument
02:10:45 and show they’re uncountable.
02:10:47 So there’s just vastly more problems
02:10:50 than there are algorithms.
02:10:51 So basically anything you can come up with for the most part
02:10:54 almost certainly is not solvable by a computer.
02:10:56 And then he was like, let me give a particular example.
02:10:58 And he figured out the very first computability proof.
02:11:01 Let’s just walk through with a little bit of simple logic
02:11:03 to halting problem can’t be solved by an algorithm.
02:11:05 And that kicked off the whole enterprise
02:11:08 of some things can’t be solved by algorithms,
02:11:12 some things can’t be solved by computers.
02:11:14 And we’ve just been doing theory on that
02:11:16 since that was the 30s he wrote that.
02:11:18 So proving that something is impossible
02:11:21 is sort of a stricter version of that.
02:11:23 Is it like proving bounds on the performance
02:11:26 of different algorithms?
02:11:27 Yeah, so bounds are upper bounds, right?
02:11:29 So you say, this algorithm does at least this well
02:11:32 and no worse than this,
02:11:33 but you’re looking at a particular algorithm
02:11:35 and possibility proof say no algorithm ever
02:11:39 could ever solve this problem.
02:11:40 So no algorithm could ever solve the halting problem.
02:11:42 So it’s problem centric.
02:11:43 It’s making something different,
02:11:46 making a conclusive statement about the problem.
02:11:48 Yes.
02:11:49 And that’s somehow satisfying because it’s…
02:11:51 It’s just philosophically interesting.
02:11:53 Yeah.
02:11:54 I mean, it all goes back to, you get back to Plato,
02:11:55 it’s all reductio ad absurdum.
02:11:58 So all these arguments have to start.
02:11:59 The only way to do it
02:12:00 is because there’s an infinite number of solutions
02:12:01 you can’t go through them.
02:12:02 You say, let’s assume for the sake of contradiction
02:12:06 that there existed something that solves this problem.
02:12:09 And then you turn to crank a logic
02:12:10 until you blow up the universe.
02:12:11 And then you go back and say,
02:12:12 okay, our original assumption
02:12:13 that this solution exists can’t be true.
02:12:16 I just think philosophically,
02:12:17 it’s like a really exciting kind of beautiful thing.
02:12:19 It’s what I specialize in within distributed algorithms
02:12:22 is more like time bound and possibility results.
02:12:24 Like no algorithm can solve this problem faster than this
02:12:28 in this setting.
02:12:29 Of all the infinite number of ways you might ever do it.
02:12:32 So you have many papers,
02:12:34 but the one that caught my eye
02:12:35 is Smooth Analysis of Dynamic Networks,
02:12:38 in which you write,
02:12:40 a problem with the worst case perspective
02:12:42 is that it often leads to extremely strong lower bounds.
02:12:45 These strong results motivate a key question.
02:12:48 Is this bond robust in the sense
02:12:49 that it captures the fundamental difficulty
02:12:52 introduced by dynamism?
02:12:53 Or is the bond fragile in the sense
02:12:56 that the poor performance it describes
02:12:58 depends on an exact sequence of adversarial changes.
02:13:02 Fragile lower bounds leave open the possibility
02:13:05 of algorithms that might still perform well in practice.
02:13:08 That’s in the sense of the impossible
02:13:11 and the bounds discussion presents the interesting question.
02:13:15 I just like the idea of robust and fragile bounds,
02:13:18 but what do you make about this kind of tension
02:13:23 between what’s provably,
02:13:25 like what bounds you can prove that are like robust
02:13:30 and something that’s a bit more fragile.
02:13:32 And also by way of answering that
02:13:36 for this particular paper,
02:13:38 can you say what the hell are dynamic networks?
02:13:41 What are distributed algorithms?
02:13:42 You don’t know this?
02:13:43 Come on now.
02:13:43 And I have no idea.
02:13:44 And what is Smooth Analysis?
02:13:46 Yeah, well, okay.
02:13:47 So Smooth Analysis, so it wasn’t my idea.
02:13:49 So Spielman and Tang came up with this
02:13:52 in the context of sequential algorithms.
02:13:54 So just like the normal world of an algorithm
02:13:57 that runs on a computer.
02:13:58 And they were looking at, there’s a well known algorithm
02:14:01 called the simplex algorithm,
02:14:02 but basically you’re trying to find a hole
02:14:06 around a group of points.
02:14:07 And there was an algorithm
02:14:08 that worked really well in practice.
02:14:10 But when you analyze it, you would say,
02:14:12 I can’t guarantee it’s gonna work well in practice
02:14:13 because if you have just the right inputs,
02:14:16 this thing could run really long.
02:14:18 But in practice, it seemed to be really fast.
02:14:20 So Smooth Analysis is they came in and they said,
02:14:22 let’s assume that a bad guy chooses the inputs.
02:14:25 It could be anything like really bad ones.
02:14:27 And all we’re gonna do, because in simplex they’re numbers,
02:14:30 we’re gonna just randomly put a little bit of noise
02:14:33 on each of the numbers.
02:14:34 And they said, if you put a little bit of noise
02:14:36 on the numbers, suddenly simplex algorithm goes really fast.
02:14:39 Like, oh, that explains this lower bound,
02:14:41 this idea that it could sometimes run really long
02:14:44 was a fragile bound because it could only run
02:14:46 a really long time if you had exactly
02:14:47 the worst pathological input.
02:14:49 So then my collaborators and I brought this over
02:14:51 to the world of distributed algorithms.
02:14:53 We brought them over the general lower bounds, right?
02:14:55 So in the world of dynamic networks,
02:14:58 so distributed algorithm is a bunch of algorithms
02:15:00 on different machines talking to each other,
02:15:02 trying to solve a problem.
02:15:03 And sometimes they’re in a network.
02:15:05 So you imagine them connected with network links
02:15:07 and a dynamic network, those can change, right?
02:15:10 So I was talking to you, but now I can’t talk to you anymore.
02:15:12 Now I’m connected to a person over here.
02:15:14 It’s a really hard environment mathematically speaking.
02:15:16 And there’s a lot of really strong lower bounds,
02:15:19 which you could imagine if the network can change
02:15:20 all the time and a bad guy is doing it,
02:15:23 it’s like hard to do things well.
02:15:24 So there’s an algorithm running on every single node
02:15:27 in the network.
02:15:28 Yeah.
02:15:28 And then you’re trying to say something of any kind
02:15:30 that makes any kind of definitive sense
02:15:32 about the performance of that algorithm.
02:15:34 Yeah, so I just submitted a new paper on this
02:15:37 a couple of weeks ago.
02:15:38 And we were looking at a very simple problem.
02:15:39 There’s some messages in the network.
02:15:42 We want everyone to get them.
02:15:44 If the network doesn’t change,
02:15:46 you can do this pretty well.
02:15:47 You can pipeline them.
02:15:48 There’s some basic algorithms that work really well.
02:15:52 If the network can change every round,
02:15:54 there’s these lower bounds that says,
02:15:57 it takes a really long time.
02:15:58 There’s a way that no matter what algorithm you come up with,
02:16:00 there’s a way the network can change in such a way
02:16:02 that just really slows down your progress basically, right?
02:16:05 So smooth analysis there says, yeah,
02:16:07 but that seems like you’d have really bad luck
02:16:10 if your network was changing exactly in the right way
02:16:14 that you needed to screw your algorithm.
02:16:15 So we said, what if we randomly just add
02:16:19 or remove a couple of edges in every round?
02:16:20 So the adversary is trying to choose
02:16:21 the worst possible network.
02:16:22 And we’re just tweaking it a little bit.
02:16:24 And in that case, this is a new paper.
02:16:25 I mean, it’s a blinded submission,
02:16:27 so maybe I shouldn’t, it’s not, whatever.
02:16:30 We basically showed.
02:16:31 An anonymous friend of yours submitted a paper.
02:16:33 An anonymous friend of mine, yeah,
02:16:35 whose paper should be accepted.
02:16:37 Showed that even just adding like one random edge per round,
02:16:42 and here’s the cool thing about it,
02:16:43 the simplest possible solution to this problem
02:16:46 blows away that lower bound and does really well.
02:16:47 So that’s like a very fragile lower bound
02:16:50 because we’re like, it’s almost impossible
02:16:53 to actually keep things slow.
02:16:55 I wonder how many lower bounds you can smash open
02:16:59 with this kind of analysis and show that they’re fragile.
02:17:02 It’s my interest, yeah.
02:17:03 Because in distributed algorithms,
02:17:05 there’s a ton of really famous strong lower bounds,
02:17:08 but things have to go wrong, really, really wrong
02:17:12 for these lower bound arguments to work.
02:17:14 And so I like this approach.
02:17:15 So this whole notion of fragile versus robust,
02:17:17 I was like, well, let’s go in and just throw
02:17:20 a little noise in there.
02:17:21 And if it becomes solvable, then maybe that lower bound
02:17:23 wasn’t really something we should worry about.
02:17:25 You know, that’s gonna embarrass,
02:17:27 that’s really uncomfortable.
02:17:28 That’s really embarrassing to a lot of people.
02:17:31 Because, okay, this is the OCD thing with the spaces,
02:17:35 is it feels really good when you can prove a nice bound.
02:17:39 And if you say that that bound is fragile,
02:17:43 that’s like, there’s gonna be a sad kid
02:17:46 that walks with their lunchbox back home,
02:17:49 like, my lower bound doesn’t matter.
02:17:52 No, I don’t think they care.
02:17:53 It’s all, I don’t know, it feels like to me,
02:17:55 a lot of this theory is just math machismo.
02:17:57 It’s like, whatever, this was a hard bound to prove.
02:18:00 What do you think about that?
02:18:02 So if you show that something is fragile,
02:18:03 that’s really important in practice, right?
02:18:08 So do you think kind of theoretical computer science
02:18:10 is living its own world, just like mathematics,
02:18:13 and their main effort, which I think is very valuable,
02:18:16 is to develop ideas that’s not necessarily interesting,
02:18:19 whether it’s applicable in the real world.
02:18:21 Yeah, we don’t care about the applicability.
02:18:22 Yeah, we kind of do, but not really.
02:18:24 And we’re terrible with computers,
02:18:26 and can’t do anything useful with computers,
02:18:27 and we don’t know how to code.
02:18:28 And, you know, we’re not productive members
02:18:31 of like technological society,
02:18:33 but I do think things percolate.
02:18:36 Exactly.
02:18:37 You percolate from the world of theory
02:18:38 into the world of algorithm design,
02:18:40 where it will pull on the theory,
02:18:41 and now suddenly it’s useful,
02:18:43 and then the algorithm design
02:18:44 gets pulled into the world of practice,
02:18:45 where they say, well, actually,
02:18:46 we can make this algorithm a lot better,
02:18:47 because in practice, really, these servers do X, Y, Z,
02:18:50 and now we can make this super efficient.
02:18:51 And so I do think, I mean, I teach theory
02:18:54 to the PhD students at Georgetown.
02:18:56 I show them the sort of funnel of like,
02:18:58 okay, we’re over here doing theory,
02:19:00 but it eventually, some of this stuff
02:19:01 will percolate down in effect at the very end, you know,
02:19:04 a phone, but it’s a long tunnel.
02:19:08 But the very question you’re asking,
02:19:10 at the highest philosophical level, is fascinating.
02:19:12 Like, if you take a system, a distributed system,
02:19:15 or a network, and introduce a little bit of noise into it,
02:19:19 like, how many problems of that nature
02:19:23 are fundamentally changed
02:19:25 by that little introduction of noise?
02:19:27 Yeah, because it’s all,
02:19:29 especially in distributed algorithms,
02:19:30 the model is everything.
02:19:31 Like, the way we work is we’re incredibly precise about,
02:19:34 here’s exactly, it’s mathematical,
02:19:36 here’s exactly how the network works,
02:19:37 and it’s a state machine, algorithms are state machines,
02:19:40 there’s rounds and schedulers,
02:19:41 we’re super precise so we can prove lower bounds.
02:19:44 But yeah, often those lower,
02:19:45 those impossibility results really get at the hard edges
02:19:48 of exactly how that model works.
02:19:50 So we’ll see if this, so we published a paper on this,
02:19:53 that paper you mentioned,
02:19:55 that kind of introduced the idea
02:19:56 to the distributed algorithms world.
02:19:58 And I think that’s got some traction
02:20:01 and there’s been some followup.
02:20:02 So we’ve just submitted our next.
02:20:05 I mean, honestly, the issue with the next
02:20:07 that like the result fell out so easily,
02:20:09 and this shows the mathematical machismo problem
02:20:11 in these fields is there’s a good chance
02:20:13 the paper won’t be accepted
02:20:15 because there wasn’t enough mathematical self flagellation.
02:20:18 That’s such a nice finding.
02:20:20 So even showing that very few,
02:20:22 just very little bit of noise,
02:20:24 can have a dramatic, make a dramatic statement about the.
02:20:28 It was a big surprise to us,
02:20:29 but once we figured out how to show it,
02:20:32 it’s not too hard.
02:20:34 And these are venues for theoretical work.
02:20:38 Okay, so the fascinating tension
02:20:41 that exists in other disciplines,
02:20:42 like one of them is machine learning,
02:20:45 which despite the power of machine learning
02:20:48 and deep learning and all like the impact of it,
02:20:52 in the real world,
02:20:53 the main conferences on machine learning
02:20:55 are still resistant to application papers.
02:21:01 And application papers broadly defined,
02:21:03 meaning like finding almost like you would,
02:21:08 like Darwin did by like going around,
02:21:12 collecting some information,
02:21:14 saying, huh, isn’t this interesting?
02:21:16 Like those are some of the most popular blogs,
02:21:19 and yet as a paper, it’s not really accepted.
02:21:21 I wonder what you think about this whole world
02:21:23 of deep learning from a perspective of theory.
02:21:29 What do you make of this whole discipline
02:21:31 of the success of Neon Networks,
02:21:33 of how to do science on them?
02:21:34 Are you excited by the possibilities
02:21:37 of what we might discover about Neon Networks?
02:21:40 Do you think it’s fundamental in engineering discipline,
02:21:42 or is there something theoretical
02:21:44 that we might crack open one of these days
02:21:47 in understanding something deep
02:21:48 about how system optimization and how systems learn?
02:21:52 I am convinced by, is it Tegmark at MIT?
02:21:56 Tegmark? Yeah, Tegmark, right.
02:21:58 So his notion has always been convincing to me
02:22:00 that the fact that some of these models are inscrutable
02:22:04 is not fundamental to them,
02:22:06 and that we can, we’re gonna get better and better,
02:22:08 because in the end, you know,
02:22:09 the reason why practicing computer scientists often
02:22:12 who are doing AI or working at AI and industry
02:22:15 aren’t like worried about so much existential threats
02:22:18 is because they see the reality
02:22:20 as they’re multiplying matrices with NumPy
02:22:22 or something like this, right?
02:22:23 Yeah, and tweaking constants
02:22:25 and hoping that the classifier fitness,
02:22:27 for God’s sakes, before the submission deadline
02:22:30 actually gets above some,
02:22:31 it feels like it’s linear algebra and tedium, right?
02:22:37 But anyways, I’m really convinced with his idea
02:22:39 that once we understand better and better
02:22:40 what’s going on from a theory perspective,
02:22:42 it’s gonna make it into an engineering discipline.
02:22:44 So in my mind, where we’re gonna end up is,
02:22:47 okay, forget these metaphors of neurons,
02:22:50 and these things are gonna be put down
02:22:52 into these mathematical kind of elegant equations,
02:22:54 differentiable equations that just kind of work well,
02:22:57 and then it’s gonna be
02:22:58 when I need a little bit of AI in this thing, plumbing.
02:23:02 Like, let’s get a little bit of a pattern recognizer
02:23:05 with a noise module and let’s connect.
02:23:06 I mean, you know this feel better than me,
02:23:08 so I don’t know if this is like a reasonable prediction,
02:23:11 but it’s gonna become less inscrutable,
02:23:14 and then it’s gonna become more engineerable,
02:23:16 and then we’re gonna have AI in more things
02:23:18 because we’re gonna have a little bit more control
02:23:20 over how we piece together
02:23:22 these different classification black boxes.
02:23:25 So one of the problems, and there might be
02:23:28 some interesting parallels that you might provide intuition
02:23:30 on is, you know, neural networks are very large,
02:23:32 and they have a lot of, you know,
02:23:35 we were talking about, you know, dynamic networks
02:23:39 and distributed algorithms.
02:23:41 One of the problems with the analysis of neural networks
02:23:45 is, you know, you have a lot of nodes,
02:23:48 and you have a lot of edges.
02:23:50 To be able to interpret and to control different things
02:23:53 is very difficult.
02:23:53 There’s fields in trying to figure out like mathematically
02:23:59 how you form clean representations that are like,
02:24:04 like one node contains all the information
02:24:07 about a particular thing,
02:24:08 and no other nodes is correlated to it.
02:24:10 So like it has unique knowledge and like,
02:24:13 but that ultimately boils down to trying
02:24:15 to simplify this thing into,
02:24:19 that goes against this very nature,
02:24:20 which is like deeply connected,
02:24:23 and like dynamic and just, you know,
02:24:27 hundreds of millions, billions of nodes.
02:24:30 And in a distributed sense, like when you zoom out,
02:24:33 the thing has a representation
02:24:35 and understanding of something,
02:24:36 but the individual nodes are just doing
02:24:38 their little exchanging thing.
02:24:40 And it’s the same thing with Stephen Wolfram
02:24:42 when you talk about cellular automata,
02:24:44 it’s very difficult to do math
02:24:46 when you have a huge collection of distributed things,
02:24:48 each acting on their own.
02:24:50 And it’s almost like, it feels like it’s almost impossible
02:24:54 to do any kind of theoretical work in the traditional sense.
02:24:58 It almost becomes completely like a biology,
02:25:02 you become a biologist as opposed to a theoretician.
02:25:06 You just study it experimentally.
02:25:07 Yeah, I think that’s the big question, I guess, right?
02:25:10 Yeah, so is the large size and interconnectedness
02:25:15 of the like a deep learning network fundamental
02:25:18 to that task, or are we just not very good at it yet
02:25:20 because we’re using the wrong metaphor?
02:25:23 I mean, the human brain learns with much fewer examples
02:25:26 and with much less tuning of the whatever, whatever,
02:25:30 whatever probably that requires to get
02:25:32 those like deep mind networks up and running.
02:25:34 But yeah, so I don’t really know,
02:25:36 but the one thing I have observed is that the, yeah,
02:25:38 there’s the mundane nature of some of the working
02:25:42 with these models tends to lead people to think that,
02:25:46 to do it like, it could be Skynet
02:25:49 or it could be like a lot of pain to get the thermostat
02:25:53 to do what we want it to do.
02:25:54 And there’s a lot of open questions in between there.
02:25:56 And then of course, the distributed network
02:26:02 of humans that use these systems.
02:26:04 So like you can have the system itself,
02:26:07 then your network, but you can also have like little
02:26:10 algorithms controlling the behavior of humans,
02:26:11 which is what you have with social networks.
02:26:14 It’s possible that a very, what is it, a toaster or whatever,
02:26:17 the opposite of Skynet when taken at scale
02:26:20 while used by individual humans and controlling
02:26:22 their behavior can actually have the Skynet effect.
02:26:25 So the scale there.
02:26:27 We might have that now.
02:26:29 We might have that now, we just don’t know.
02:26:31 As it’s happening.
02:26:32 Is Twitter creating a little mini Skynet?
02:26:33 I mean, because of what happens,
02:26:35 it twirls out ramifications in the world.
02:26:38 And is it really that much different if it’s a robot
02:26:41 with tentacles or a bunch of servers that.
02:26:44 Yeah, and the destructive effects could be,
02:26:47 I mean, it could be political, but it could also be like,
02:26:51 you could probably make an interesting case that the virus,
02:26:54 the coronavirus spread on Twitter too,
02:26:59 in the minds of people.
02:27:00 Like the fear and the misinformation
02:27:03 in some very interesting ways mixed up.
02:27:06 And maybe this pandemic wasn’t sufficiently dangerous
02:27:08 to where that could have created a weird like an instability,
02:27:12 but maybe other things might create instability.
02:27:15 Like somebody, God forbid,
02:27:17 detonates a nuclear weapon somewhere.
02:27:19 And then maybe the destructive aspect of that
02:27:21 would not as much be the military actions,
02:27:24 but the way those news are spread on Twitter
02:27:28 and the panic that creates.
02:27:29 Yeah, yeah.
02:27:30 I mean, I think that’s a great case study, right?
02:27:32 Like what happened, not,
02:27:34 but I’m not suggesting that Lexi go let off a nuclear bomb.
02:27:36 I meant the coronavirus, but yeah,
02:27:39 I think that’s a really interesting case study.
02:27:43 I’m interested in the counterfactual of 1995,
02:27:46 like do the same virus in 1995.
02:27:48 So first of all, it would have been,
02:27:50 I get to hear whatever the nightly news,
02:27:53 we’ll talk about it.
02:27:54 And then there’ll be my local health board,
02:27:57 we’ll talk about it.
02:27:58 That mitigation decisions would probably necessarily be
02:28:01 very sort of localized.
02:28:04 Okay, our community is trying to figure out
02:28:05 what are we gonna do?
02:28:06 What’s gonna happen?
02:28:07 Like we see this with schools,
02:28:08 like where I grew up in New Jersey,
02:28:10 there’s very localized school districts.
02:28:12 So even though they had sort of
02:28:15 really bad viral numbers there,
02:28:16 my school I grew up in has been open since the fall
02:28:18 because it’s very localized.
02:28:20 It’s like these teachers and these parents,
02:28:21 what do we wanna do?
02:28:22 What are we comfortable with?
02:28:23 I live in a school district right now in Montgomery County
02:28:26 that’s a billion dollar a year budget,
02:28:27 150,000 kid school district.
02:28:29 It just can’t, it’s closed because it’s too.
02:28:32 So I’m interested in that counterfactual.
02:28:33 Yeah, so you have all this information moving around
02:28:36 and then you have the effects on discourse
02:28:39 that we were talking about earlier,
02:28:40 that the Neil Postman style effects of Twitter,
02:28:43 which shifts people into a sort of a dunk culture mindset
02:28:46 of don’t give an inch to the other team.
02:28:49 And we’re used to this and was fired up by politics
02:28:51 and the unique attributes of Twitter.
02:28:53 Now throw in the coronavirus
02:28:54 and suddenly we see decades of public health knowledge,
02:28:58 a lot of which was honed during the HIV epidemic,
02:29:00 was thrown out the window
02:29:02 because a lot of this was happening on Twitter
02:29:04 and suddenly we had public health officials
02:29:06 using a don’t give an inch to the other team mindset
02:29:08 of like, well, if we say this,
02:29:10 that might validate something that was wrong over here
02:29:12 and we need to, if we say this,
02:29:14 then maybe like that’ll stop them from doing this.
02:29:16 That’s like very Twittery in a way that in 1995
02:29:19 is probably not the way public health officials
02:29:22 would be thinking.
02:29:23 Where now it’s like, well, this is,
02:29:25 if we said this about masks,
02:29:26 but the other team said that about masks,
02:29:28 we can’t give an inch to this.
02:29:29 So we gotta be careful.
02:29:30 And like, we can’t tell people it’s okay
02:29:31 after they’re vaccinated because that might,
02:29:33 we’re giving them an inch on this
02:29:34 and that’s very Twittery in my mind, right?
02:29:36 That is the impact of Twitter
02:29:39 on the way we think about discourse,
02:29:40 which is a dunking culture
02:29:41 of don’t give any inch to the other team
02:29:43 and it’s all about slam dunks
02:29:44 where you’re completely right and they’re completely wrong.
02:29:46 It’s as a rhetorical strategy, it’s incredibly simplistic,
02:29:49 but it’s also the way that we think right now
02:29:50 about how we do debate.
02:29:52 It combined terribly with election year pandemic.
02:29:56 Yeah, election year pandemic.
02:29:58 I wonder if we could do some smooth analysis.
02:30:00 Let’s run the simulation over a few times.
02:30:01 A little bit of noise, yeah.
02:30:03 See if it can dramatically change
02:30:05 the behavior of the system.
02:30:07 Okay, we talked about your love
02:30:09 for proving that something is impossible.
02:30:11 So there’s quite a few still open problems
02:30:14 and complexity of algorithms.
02:30:17 So let me ask, does P equal NP?
02:30:20 Probably not.
02:30:22 Probably not.
02:30:23 If P equals NP, what kind of,
02:30:29 and you’d be really surprised somebody proves it.
02:30:32 What would that proof look like
02:30:33 and why would that even be?
02:30:35 What would that mean?
02:30:36 What would that proof look like?
02:30:38 And what possible universe could P equals NP?
02:30:40 Is there something in size that you could say there?
02:30:43 It could be true.
02:30:45 I mean, I’m not a complexity theorist,
02:30:47 but every complexity theorist I know
02:30:49 is convinced they’re not equal
02:30:51 and are basically not working on it anymore.
02:30:53 I mean, there is a million dollars at stake
02:30:54 if you can solve the proof.
02:30:55 It’s one of the millennium prizes.
02:30:57 Okay, so here’s how I think the P not equals NP proof
02:31:00 is gonna eventually happen.
02:31:02 I think it’s gonna fall out
02:31:04 and it’s gonna be not super simple,
02:31:07 but not as hard as people think,
02:31:08 because my theory about a lot of theoretical computer science
02:31:12 based on just some results I’ve done,
02:31:13 so this is a huge extrapolation,
02:31:15 is that a lot of what we’re doing
02:31:17 is just obfuscating deeper mathematics.
02:31:20 So this happens to me a lot, not a lot,
02:31:22 but it’s happened to me a few times in my work
02:31:24 where we obfuscate it because we say,
02:31:26 well, there’s an algorithm and it has this much memory
02:31:29 and they’re connected on a network
02:31:30 and okay, here’s our setup
02:31:31 and now we’re trying to see how fast it can solve a problem
02:31:34 and people do bounds about it
02:31:35 and then the end it turns out
02:31:37 that we were just obfuscating some underlying
02:31:40 mathematical thing that already existed, right?
02:31:43 So this has happened to me.
02:31:44 I had this paper I was quite fond of a while ago.
02:31:47 It was looking at this problem called contention resolution
02:31:50 where you put an unknown set of people on a shared channel
02:31:54 and they’re trying to break symmetry.
02:31:55 So it’s like an ethernet, whatever.
02:31:57 Only one person can use it at a time.
02:31:58 You try to break symmetry.
02:31:59 There’s all these bounds people have proven over the years
02:32:02 about how long it takes to do this, right?
02:32:05 And like I discovered at some point,
02:32:07 there’s this one combinatorial result from the early 1990s.
02:32:12 All of these lower bound proofs all come from this
02:32:15 and in fact, it improved a lot of them
02:32:16 and simplified a lot.
02:32:17 You could put it all in one paper.
02:32:19 It’s like, are we really?
02:32:20 And then, okay, so this new paper
02:32:21 that I submitted a couple of weeks ago,
02:32:24 I found you could take some of these same lower bound proofs
02:32:26 for this contention resolution problem.
02:32:28 You could reprove them.
02:32:29 Using Shannon’s source code theorem
02:32:32 that actually when you’re breaking contention,
02:32:34 what you’re really doing is building a code over,
02:32:38 if you have a distribution on the network sizes,
02:32:40 it’s a code over that source.
02:32:41 And if you plug in a high entropy information source
02:32:44 and plug in from 1948, the source code theorem
02:32:47 that says on a noiseless channel,
02:32:48 you can’t send things at a faster rate
02:32:51 than the entropy allows,
02:32:52 the exact same lower bounds fall back out again, right?
02:32:54 So like this type of thing happens.
02:32:55 There’s some famous lower bounds and distributed algorithms
02:32:58 that turned out to all be algebraic topology
02:33:01 underneath the covers.
02:33:02 And they won the Girdle Prize for working on that.
02:33:05 So my sense is what’s gonna happen is at some point,
02:33:08 someone really smart to be very exciting
02:33:11 is gonna realize there’s some sort of other representation
02:33:14 of what’s going on with these Turing machines
02:33:16 trying to sort of efficiently compute.
02:33:18 And there’ll be an existing mathematical result
02:33:22 that apply.
02:33:23 Someone or something, I guess.
02:33:25 It could be AI theorem provers kind of thing.
02:33:28 It could be, yeah.
02:33:28 I mean, not a, well, yeah.
02:33:30 I mean, there’s theorem provers,
02:33:31 like what that means now, which is not fun.
02:33:35 It’s just a bunch of…
02:33:37 Very carefully formulated postulates that,
02:33:39 but I take your point, yeah.
02:33:41 Yeah, so, okay.
02:33:44 On a small tangent on that,
02:33:45 then you’re kind of implying that mathematics,
02:33:49 it almost feels like a kind of weird evolutionary tree
02:33:52 that ultimately leads back to some kind of ancestral,
02:33:55 few fundamental ideas that all are just like,
02:33:58 they’re all somehow connected.
02:34:01 In that sense, do you think
02:34:04 math is fundamental to our universe
02:34:07 and we’re just like slowly trying to understand
02:34:10 these patterns or is it discovered?
02:34:15 Or is it just a little game that we play amongst ourselves
02:34:19 to try to fit little patterns to the world?
02:34:23 Yeah, that’s the question, right?
02:34:24 That’s the physicist question.
02:34:26 I mean, I’m probably, I’m in the discovered camp,
02:34:29 but I don’t do theoretical physics.
02:34:30 So I know they have a,
02:34:33 they feel like they have a stronger claim
02:34:35 to answering that question.
02:34:37 But everything comes back to it.
02:34:38 Everything comes back to it.
02:34:39 I mean, all the physics,
02:34:40 the fact that the universe is, well, okay.
02:34:45 It’s a complicated question.
02:34:47 So how often do you think,
02:34:49 how deeply does this result describe
02:34:53 the fundamental reality of nature?
02:34:57 So the reason I hesitated,
02:34:59 because it’s something I’m,
02:35:01 I taught this seminar and did a little work
02:35:03 on what are called biological algorithms.
02:35:05 So there’s this notion of,
02:35:09 so physicists use mathematics to explain the universe, right?
02:35:14 And it was unreasonable that mathematics works so well.
02:35:18 All these differential equations,
02:35:19 why does that explain all we need to know
02:35:21 about thermodynamics and gravity
02:35:23 and all these types of things?
02:35:24 Well, there’s this movement
02:35:25 within the intersection of computer science and biology,
02:35:28 just kind of Wolframium, I guess, really,
02:35:31 that algorithms can be very explanatory, right?
02:35:35 Like if you’re trying to explain parsimoniously
02:35:39 something about like an ant colony or something like this,
02:35:41 you’re not going to,
02:35:43 ultimately it’s not gonna be explained as a equation,
02:35:45 like a physics equation.
02:35:46 It’s gonna be explained by an algorithm.
02:35:48 So like this algorithm run distributedly
02:35:51 is going to explain the behavior.
02:35:53 So that’s mathematical, but not quite mathematical,
02:35:56 but it is if you think about an algorithm
02:35:57 like a Lambda calculus,
02:35:58 which brings you back to the world of mathematics.
02:36:01 So I’m thinking out loud here,
02:36:01 but basically abstract math is sort of like
02:36:07 unreasonably effective at explaining a lot of things.
02:36:10 And that’s just what I feel like I glimpse.
02:36:11 I’m not like a super well known theoretician.
02:36:14 I don’t have really famous results.
02:36:16 So even as a sort of middling career theoretician,
02:36:21 I keep encountering this where we think we’re solving
02:36:25 some problem about computers and algorithms,
02:36:28 and it’s some much deeper underlying math.
02:36:31 It’s Shannon, but Shannon is entropy,
02:36:33 but entropy was really goes all the way back
02:36:36 to whatever it was,
02:36:38 Boyle or all the way back to looking at the early physics.
02:36:40 And it’s, anyways, to me, I think it’s amazing.
02:36:44 Yeah, but it could be the flip side of that could be
02:36:47 just our brains draw so much pleasure
02:36:49 from the deriving generalized theories
02:36:53 and simplifying the universe that we just naturally see
02:36:56 that kind of simplicity in everything.
02:36:58 Yeah, so that’s the whole Newton to Einstein, right?
02:37:01 So you can say this must be right
02:37:03 because it’s so predictive.
02:37:04 Well, it’s not quite predictive
02:37:06 because Mercury wobbles a little bit,
02:37:07 but I think we have it set
02:37:08 and then you turn out, no, Einstein.
02:37:10 And then you get Bohr like, no, not Einstein.
02:37:13 It’s actually statistical.
02:37:15 And yeah, so that would be interesting.
02:37:16 It’s hard to also know
02:37:17 where a smooth analysis fits into all that
02:37:20 or a little bit of noise.
02:37:21 Like you can say something very clean about a system
02:37:25 and then a little bit of noise,
02:37:27 like the average case is actually very different.
02:37:29 And so, I mean, that’s where
02:37:31 the quantum mechanics comes in.
02:37:32 It’s like, ugh, why does it have to be randomness in this?
02:37:36 Yeah, I would have to do this complex statistics.
02:37:38 Yeah. Yeah.
02:37:41 So to be determined.
02:37:42 Yeah, that’ll be my next book.
02:37:44 That’d be ambitious.
02:37:45 The fundamental core of reality, comma,
02:37:50 and some advice for being more productive at work.
02:37:53 Can I ask you just,
02:37:55 if it’s possible to do an overview
02:37:57 and just some brief comments of wisdom
02:38:00 on the process of publishing a book,
02:38:02 what’s that process entail?
02:38:04 What are the different options
02:38:05 and what’s your recommendation
02:38:08 for somebody that wants to write a book like yours,
02:38:12 a nonfiction book that discovers
02:38:14 something interesting about this world?
02:38:17 So what I usually advise is follow the process as is.
02:38:25 Don’t try to reinvent.
02:38:27 I think that happens a lot where you’ll try to reinvent
02:38:31 the way the publishing industry should work.
02:38:33 Like this is kind of not like in a business model ways,
02:38:36 but just like, this is what I want to do.
02:38:38 I want to write a thousand words a day
02:38:39 and I want to do this and I’m gonna put it on the internet
02:38:41 and the publishing industry is very specific
02:38:44 about how it works.
02:38:46 And so like when I got started writing books,
02:38:47 which at a very young age,
02:38:48 so I sold my first book at the age of 21.
02:38:52 The way I did that is I found a family friend
02:38:56 that was an agent and I said,
02:38:58 I’m not trying to make you be my agent.
02:39:00 Just explain to me how this works.
02:39:02 Not just how the world works,
02:39:03 but give me the hard truth about how would a 21 year old,
02:39:06 under what conditions could a 21 year old sell a book
02:39:08 and what would that look like?
02:39:09 And she just explained it to me.
02:39:10 You know, you have to do this and have to be a subject
02:39:12 that it made sense for you to write.
02:39:14 And you would have to do this type of writing
02:39:15 for the publications to validate it and blah, blah, blah.
02:39:17 And you have to get the agent first.
02:39:18 And I learned the whole game plan and then I executed.
02:39:22 And so the rough game plan is with nonfiction,
02:39:24 you get the agent first
02:39:26 and the agent’s gonna sell it to the publishers.
02:39:28 So like you’re never sending something directly
02:39:30 to the publishers.
02:39:31 In nonfiction, you’re not writing the book first, right?
02:39:34 You’re gonna get an advance from the publisher once sold
02:39:37 and then you’re gonna do the primary writing of the book.
02:39:40 In fact, it will, in most circumstances, hurt you
02:39:42 if you’ve already written it.
02:39:43 If you’ve already written it.
02:39:44 Yeah.
02:39:45 So you’re trying to sell, well, I guess the agent,
02:39:47 first you sell it to the agent
02:39:48 and then the agent sells it to the publishers.
02:39:50 It’s much easier to get an agent than a book deal.
02:39:52 So the thought is, if you can’t get an agent,
02:39:54 then why would you?
02:39:55 So you start with, and also the way this works
02:39:57 with a good agent is they know all the editors
02:40:00 and they have lunch with the editors
02:40:01 and they’re always just like,
02:40:02 okay, what projects do you have coming?
02:40:03 What are you looking for?
02:40:04 Here’s one of my authors.
02:40:04 That’s the way all these deals happen.
02:40:06 It’s not, you’re not emailing a manuscript to a slush pile.
02:40:09 Yeah, and so first of all, the agent takes a percentage
02:40:12 and then the publishers, this is where the process comes in.
02:40:14 They take also a cut that’s probably ridiculous.
02:40:17 So if you try to reinvent the system,
02:40:21 you’ll probably be frustrated by the percentage
02:40:22 that everyone takes relative to how much bureaucracy
02:40:25 and efficiency ridiculousness there is in the system.
02:40:28 Your recommendation is like, you’re just one ant.
02:40:31 Stop trying to build your own ant colony.
02:40:34 Well, or if you create your own process
02:40:36 for how it should work,
02:40:38 the book’s not gonna get published.
02:40:39 So there’s the separate question,
02:40:40 the economic question of like,
02:40:41 should I create my own, like self publish it
02:40:44 or do something like that?
02:40:45 But putting that aside,
02:40:47 there’s a lot of people I encounter
02:40:48 that wanna publish a book with a main publisher,
02:40:51 but they invent their own rules for how it works, right?
02:40:54 So then the alternative though is self publishing
02:40:56 and the downside, there’s a lot of downsides.
02:41:00 It’s almost like publishing an opinion piece
02:41:03 in the New York Times versus writing on a blog.
02:41:05 There’s no reason why writing a blog post on Medium
02:41:09 can’t get way more attention and legitimacy
02:41:13 and long lasting prestige than a New York Times article.
02:41:16 But nevertheless, for most people,
02:41:18 writing in a prestigious newspaper,
02:41:21 quote unquote prestigious, is just easier.
02:41:26 And well, and depends on your goal.
02:41:29 So, you know, like I push you towards a big publisher
02:41:32 because I think your goal, it’s huge ideas, you want impact.
02:41:36 You’re gonna have more impact.
02:41:37 Even though, like actually,
02:41:39 so there’s different ways to measure impact, right?
02:41:41 In the world of ideas.
02:41:42 In the world of ideas.
02:41:44 And also, yeah, in the world of ideas,
02:41:46 it’s kind of like the clubhouse thing now,
02:41:48 even if the audience is not large,
02:41:51 the people in the audience are very interesting.
02:41:54 It’s like the conversation feels like
02:41:56 that has long lasting impact among the people
02:42:01 in different and disparate industries
02:42:03 that are also then starting their own conversations
02:42:06 and all that kind of stuff.
02:42:07 Yeah, because you have other,
02:42:09 so like self publishing a book,
02:42:12 the goals that would solve,
02:42:13 you have much better ways of getting to those goals,
02:42:15 might be part of it, right?
02:42:16 So if there’s the financial aspect
02:42:17 of well, you get to keep more of it,
02:42:19 I mean, the podcast is probably gonna crush
02:42:22 what the book’s gonna do anyways, right?
02:42:23 Yeah, if it’s, I wanna get directly
02:42:27 to certain audiences or crowds,
02:42:28 it might be harder through a traditional publisher.
02:42:30 There’s better ways to talk to those crowds.
02:42:32 It could be on clubhouse with all these new technologies,
02:42:34 self published books not gonna be the most effective way
02:42:36 to find your way to a new crowd.
02:42:39 But if the idea is like, I wanna have a,
02:42:40 leave a dent in the world of ideas,
02:42:43 then to have a vulnerable old publisher,
02:42:47 put out your book in a nice hardcover
02:42:49 and do the things they do, that goes a long way.
02:42:52 And they do do a lot.
02:42:53 I mean, it’s very difficult actually.
02:42:55 There’s so much involved in putting together a book.
02:42:57 They get books into bookstores
02:42:59 and all that kind of stuff.
02:42:59 And from an efficiency standpoint,
02:43:02 I mean, just the time involved
02:43:03 in trying to do this yourself is.
02:43:05 They have a process, right?
02:43:06 Like you said, they have a process.
02:43:08 They’ve got a process.
02:43:09 I mean, I know like Jocko did this recently,
02:43:11 he started his own imprint and I have a couple other.
02:43:13 But it’s a huge overhead.
02:43:15 I mean, if you run a business and you,
02:43:17 so like Jocko is a good case study, right?
02:43:19 So he got fed up with Simon and Schuster
02:43:22 dragging their feet and said,
02:43:23 I’m gonna start my own imprint then,
02:43:25 if you’re not gonna publish my kid’s book.
02:43:28 But he, what does he do, he runs businesses, right?
02:43:30 So I think in his world, like I already run,
02:43:32 I’m a partner in whatever, in Origin,
02:43:34 and I have this and that.
02:43:35 And so it’s like, yeah, we can run businesses.
02:43:37 That’s what we know how to do.
02:43:38 That’s what I do.
02:43:39 I run businesses, I have people.
02:43:40 But for like you or I, we don’t run businesses.
02:43:43 It’d be terrible.
02:43:44 Yeah, well, especially these kinds of businesses, right?
02:43:47 So I do wanna launch a business with very different
02:43:49 technology business.
02:43:50 It’s very different.
02:43:51 Yeah, it’s very, very different, yeah.
02:43:53 I mean, this is like, okay, I need copy editors
02:43:55 and graphic book binders, and I need to contract
02:43:58 with the printer, but oh, the printer doesn’t have slots.
02:44:00 And so now I have to try to, I mean, it’s.
02:44:02 I get so, I need to shut this off in my room,
02:44:05 but I get so frustrated when the system
02:44:07 could clearly be improved.
02:44:08 It’s the thing that you’re mentioning.
02:44:10 It’s like, this is so inefficient.
02:44:12 Every time I go to the DMV or something like that,
02:44:15 you think like, ah, this could be done so much better.
02:44:18 But, and the same thing as the worry with an editor,
02:44:23 which I guess would come from the publisher,
02:44:26 like who would, how much supervision on your book
02:44:31 did you receive like, hey, do you think this is too long?
02:44:34 Or do you think the title, like title,
02:44:36 how much choice do you have in the title, in the cover,
02:44:39 in the presentation and the branding
02:44:41 and all that kind of stuff?
02:44:42 Yeah, I mean, all of it depends, right?
02:44:43 So when it comes on the relationship with the editor
02:44:48 on the writing, it depends on the editor
02:44:49 and it depends on you.
02:44:51 So like at this point, I’m on my seventh book
02:44:54 and I write for a lot of major publications.
02:44:56 And at this point I have what I feel like is a voice
02:45:00 and a level of craft that I’m very comfortable with, right?
02:45:03 So my editor is not gonna be,
02:45:06 she kind of is gonna trust me
02:45:07 and it’s gonna be more big picture.
02:45:08 Like I’m losing the thread here
02:45:10 or this seems like it could be longer.
02:45:12 Whereas the first book I wrote when I was 21,
02:45:15 I had notes such as you start a lot of sentences with so,
02:45:19 you don’t use any contractions
02:45:20 because I’ve been doing scientific writing,
02:45:22 we don’t use contractions.
02:45:23 Like you should probably use contractions.
02:45:25 It was way more, I had to go back
02:45:27 and rewrite the whole thing, yeah.
02:45:29 But ultimately the recommendation,
02:45:31 I mean, we talked offline and sort of,
02:45:33 I was thinking loosely, not really sure,
02:45:36 but I was thinking of writing a book
02:45:37 and there’s a kind of desire to go self publishing,
02:45:40 not for financial reasons.
02:45:42 And the money can be good by the way, right?
02:45:43 I mean, it’s very power law type distributed, right?
02:45:48 So the money on a hardcover is somewhere
02:45:49 between one or $2 a book.
02:45:52 So the thing is, I personally don’t.
02:45:53 But then you give up 15% to the agent, so.
02:45:56 I personally don’t care about money
02:45:57 as I’ve mentioned before,
02:45:58 but I for some reason really don’t like spending money
02:46:03 on things that are not worth it.
02:46:05 Like I don’t care if I get money,
02:46:08 I just don’t like spending money on like feeding a system
02:46:11 that’s inefficient.
02:46:12 It’s like I’m contributing to the problem.
02:46:14 That’s my biggest problem.
02:46:16 Right, so you’re worried about the inefficiencies
02:46:18 of the opportunity.
02:46:19 Yeah, the fact that.
02:46:21 Like the overheads, the number of people involved.
02:46:23 Or the overheads.
02:46:24 The emails again.
02:46:26 The fact that they have this way of speaking,
02:46:30 which I’m allergic to many people,
02:46:32 like that’s very marketing speak.
02:46:34 Like you could tell they’ve been having
02:46:36 Zoom meetings all day.
02:46:37 It’s like as opposed to a sort of creative collaborators
02:46:43 that are like also a little bit crazy.
02:46:45 Yeah.
02:46:46 I suppose some of that is finding the right people.
02:46:48 Finding the right people.
02:46:48 That’s what I would say.
02:46:49 I’d say there’s definitely,
02:46:51 and maybe it’s just good fortune.
02:46:53 Good fortune in terms of like my agents and editors
02:46:55 I’ve worked with.
02:46:56 There’s really good people who see the vision
02:47:01 are smart or incredibly literary.
02:47:02 And they actually help you.
02:47:03 Yeah.
02:47:04 Like psychologically.
02:47:05 Yeah, I had a great editor when I was first moving
02:47:06 into hardcover books, for example.
02:47:08 It was my first big book advance
02:47:12 and my first sort of big deal
02:47:14 and he was like a senior editor
02:47:16 and it was very useful, you know?
02:47:19 He was like, we had a lot of long talks, right?
02:47:21 I was, so this was my fourth book,
02:47:23 So Good They Can’t Ignore You was my first,
02:47:25 my big hardcover idea book.
02:47:28 And we had a lot of talks,
02:47:29 like even before I started writing it,
02:47:31 just let’s talk about books and his philosophy.
02:47:34 He’d been in the business for a long time.
02:47:35 He was the head of the imprint.
02:47:37 It was useful.
02:47:38 Yeah, but I mean, the other frustrating thing
02:47:41 is how long the whole thing takes.
02:47:42 Makes a long time.
02:47:44 Yeah.
02:47:45 But I suppose that’s, you just have to accept that.
02:47:46 Well, yeah, I handed in this manuscript
02:47:48 for the book that comes out now,
02:47:50 like when this, I handed it in,
02:47:52 I mean, over the summer, like during the pandemic.
02:47:54 So it’s not, it’s not terrible, right?
02:47:56 And we were editing during the pandemic
02:47:57 and I finished it in the spring.
02:48:00 We’ve talked most of the day,
02:48:02 except for a little bit computer science,
02:48:03 most of the day about a productive life.
02:48:07 How does love, friendship and family fit into that?
02:48:11 Is there, do you find that there’s a tension?
02:48:17 Is it possible for relationships
02:48:19 to energize the whole process, to benefit?
02:48:22 Or is it ultimately a trade off?
02:48:25 But because life is short and ultimately
02:48:30 we seek happiness, not productivity,
02:48:32 that we have to accept that tension.
02:48:35 Yeah.
02:48:36 I mean, I think relationships is the,
02:48:39 that’s the whole deal.
02:48:41 Like I thought about this the other day,
02:48:43 I don’t know what the context was.
02:48:44 I was thinking about if I was gonna give
02:48:46 like an advice speech, like a commencement address
02:48:49 or like giving advice to young people.
02:48:51 And like the big question I have for young people is
02:48:56 if they haven’t already, bad things are gonna happen
02:48:58 that you don’t control, so what’s the plan, right?
02:49:01 Like, let’s start figuring that out now
02:49:03 because it’s not all, you know,
02:49:05 some people get off better than others,
02:49:07 but eventually stuff happens, right?
02:49:09 You get sick, something falls apart,
02:49:11 the economy craters, someone you know dies,
02:49:16 like all sorts of bad stuff is gonna happen, right?
02:49:19 So how are we gonna do this?
02:49:20 Like, how do we like live life when life is hard?
02:49:23 And in ways that is unfair and unpredictable,
02:49:25 then relationships is the,
02:49:27 that’s the buffer for all of that.
02:49:30 Cause we’re wired for it, right?
02:49:31 I went down this rabbit hole with digital minimalism.
02:49:34 I went down this huge rabbit hole
02:49:35 about the human brain and sociality.
02:49:38 It’s all we’re wired to do.
02:49:39 It’s like all of our brain is for this.
02:49:41 Like everything, all of our mechanisms,
02:49:43 everything is made to service the social connections
02:49:46 because it’s what kept you alive, you know?
02:49:47 I mean, you had the, your tribal connections
02:49:49 is how you didn’t starve during a famine,
02:49:52 people would share food, et cetera.
02:49:54 And so you can’t neglect that.
02:49:56 And it’s like everything and people feel it, right?
02:49:58 Like there’s no, our social networks
02:50:00 are hooked up to the pain center.
02:50:01 That’s why it feels so terrible when you miss someone
02:50:03 or like someone dies or something, right?
02:50:05 That’s like how seriously we take it.
02:50:07 There’s a pretty accepted theory
02:50:09 that the default mode network,
02:50:10 like a lot of what the default mode network is doing.
02:50:12 So that’s sort of the default state our brain goes into
02:50:14 when we’re not doing something in particular
02:50:16 is practicing sociality, practicing interactions thing,
02:50:19 because it’s so crucial to what we do.
02:50:22 It’s like at the core of human thriving.
02:50:25 So I’ve more recently,
02:50:26 the way I think about it is like relationships first.
02:50:29 Okay.
02:50:30 Given that foundation of putting like,
02:50:31 and I don’t think we put nearly enough time into it.
02:50:33 I worry that social media is reducing relationships,
02:50:36 strong relationships.
02:50:37 Strong relationships where you’re sacrificing
02:50:39 non trivial time and attention and resources,
02:50:42 whatever on behalf of other people.
02:50:44 That’s the net that is gonna allow you
02:50:46 to get through anything.
02:50:48 Then, all right.
02:50:50 Now what do we wanna do with the surplus that remains?
02:50:53 Maybe I wanna build some fire, build some tools.
02:50:55 So put relationships first.
02:50:57 I like the worst case analysis
02:50:59 from the computer science perspective.
02:51:01 Put relationships first.
02:51:03 Yeah, because everything else is just assuming average case,
02:51:08 assuming things kind of keep going as they were going.
02:51:10 And you’re neglecting the fundamental human drive.
02:51:13 Like we have this, we talked about the boredom instinct.
02:51:15 We wanna build things, we wanna have impact,
02:51:16 we wanna do productivity.
02:51:17 That’s not nearly as clear cut of a drive of we need people.
02:51:21 But if we look at the real worst case analysis here
02:51:25 is one day you’re pretty young now,
02:51:28 but that’s not gonna last very long.
02:51:31 You’re gonna die one day.
02:51:33 Is that something you think about?
02:51:35 Little bit.
02:51:36 Are you afraid of death?
02:51:37 Well, I’m of the mindset of,
02:51:39 let’s make that a productivity hack.
02:51:41 I’m of the mindset of we need to confront that soon.
02:51:47 So let’s do what we can now
02:51:48 so that when we really confront and think about it,
02:51:50 we’re more likely to feel better about it.
02:51:52 So in other words, let’s focus now on living
02:51:55 and doing things in such a way that we’re proud of
02:51:58 so that when it really comes time to confront that,
02:52:00 we’re more likely to say,
02:52:02 like, okay, I feel kind of good about the situation.
02:52:05 So what, when you’re laying on your deathbed,
02:52:07 would you, in looking back,
02:52:09 what would make you think like,
02:52:11 oh, I did okay, I’m proud of that.
02:52:13 I optimized the hell out of that.
02:52:15 That’s a good, I mean, it’s a good question
02:52:17 to go backwards on.
02:52:19 I mean, this is like David Brooks’s eulogy virtues
02:52:24 versus resume virtues.
02:52:26 Right, so his argument is that,
02:52:28 and that’s another interesting DC area person.
02:52:30 I keep thinking of interesting DC area people.
02:52:32 All right, David Brooks is here too.
02:52:34 Yeah.
02:52:36 His argument, he thinks eulogy virtues is,
02:52:38 so what we eulogize is different
02:52:39 than what we promote on the resume.
02:52:43 That’s his whole thing now, right?
02:52:44 His Suckin Mountain wrote the character.
02:52:46 Both these books are, he has this whole premise
02:52:48 of there’s like this professional phase
02:52:50 and there’s a phase of giving of yourself
02:52:53 and sacrificing on behalf of other people.
02:52:55 I don’t know, maybe it’s all mixed together, right?
02:52:57 You wanna, I think living by a code is important, right?
02:53:00 I mean, this is something that’s not emphasized enough.
02:53:03 I always think of advice that my undergrad
02:53:05 should be given that they’re not given,
02:53:06 especially at a place like Georgetown
02:53:07 that has this like deep history
02:53:09 of trying to promote human flourishing
02:53:11 because of the Jesuit connection.
02:53:14 There’s such resiliency and pride
02:53:19 that comes out of living well, even when it’s hard,
02:53:22 like living according to a code, living accord to,
02:53:24 which I think religion used to structure this for people.
02:53:28 But in its absence, you need some sort of replacement.
02:53:30 But even when things were,
02:53:31 soldiers get this a lot, right?
02:53:33 They experienced this a lot.
02:53:34 Even when things were tough,
02:53:35 I was able to persist in living this way
02:53:36 that I knew was right,
02:53:37 even though it wasn’t the easiest thing
02:53:38 to do in the moment.
02:53:39 Fewer things give humans more resiliency.
02:53:42 It’s like having done that,
02:53:43 your relationships were strong, right?
02:53:45 Many people coming to your funeral is a standard.
02:53:47 A lot of people are gonna come to your funeral.
02:53:49 I mean, you matter to a lot of people.
02:53:51 And then maybe having done,
02:53:52 to the extent of whatever capabilities
02:53:55 you happen to be granted,
02:53:57 and they’re different for different people,
02:53:59 and some people can sprint real fast,
02:54:00 and some people can do math problems,
02:54:02 try to actually do something of impact.
02:54:06 I’ll just promise to give gift cards
02:54:08 to anybody who shows up to the funeral.
02:54:10 You’re gonna hack it.
02:54:11 I’m gonna hack even the funeral.
02:54:12 There’s gonna be a lottery wheel you spin
02:54:14 when you come in and someone goes away with $10,000.
02:54:17 See, the problem is, with all this living by principles,
02:54:22 living a principled life,
02:54:23 focusing on relationships,
02:54:24 and kind of thinking of this life as this perfect thing
02:54:27 kind of forgets the notion that none of it
02:54:32 makes any sense, right?
02:54:36 It kind of implies that this is like a video game
02:54:40 and you wanna get a high score,
02:54:42 as opposed to none of this even makes sense.
02:54:45 Like, why would he, like, what that?
02:54:47 Like, what does it even mean to die?
02:54:52 It’s gonna be over.
02:54:53 It’s like everything I do, all these productivity hacks,
02:54:57 all this life, all these efforts, all this creative efforts,
02:55:00 kind of assume it’s gonna go on forever.
02:55:02 There’s a kind of a sense of immortality,
02:55:05 and I don’t even know how to intellectually
02:55:06 make sense that it ends.
02:55:08 Of course, gotta ask you in that context,
02:55:10 what do you think is the meaning of it all,
02:55:13 especially for a computer scientist?
02:55:14 I mean, there’s gotta be some mathematical.
02:55:17 Yeah, 27, or what’s the, what’s the Douglas Adams?
02:55:21 Yeah, or 42, okay.
02:55:23 27 is a better number.
02:55:24 I should read more sci fi.
02:55:26 Maybe you’re onto something with a 27.
02:55:28 I don’t wanna give away too much, but just trust me, 27.
02:55:31 It’s visible, yeah.
02:55:34 So, I mean, I don’t know, obviously, right?
02:55:37 I mean, I’m a…
02:55:38 I was hoping you would.
02:55:38 Yeah, I don’t know, but going back to what you were saying
02:55:41 about the sort of the existentialist,
02:55:43 or sort of the more nihilist style approach,
02:55:47 the one thing that there is are intimations, right?
02:55:50 So that there’s these intimations that human halves
02:55:53 of somehow this feels right, and this feels wrong,
02:55:56 this feels good, this feels like I’m doing,
02:55:59 I’m aligned with something, you know,
02:56:01 when I’m acting with courage to save, whatever, right?
02:56:03 It’s not, these intimations
02:56:04 are a grounding against arbitrariness.
02:56:07 Like, one of the ideas I’m really interested in is that
02:56:11 when you look at religion, right?
02:56:13 So I’m interested in world religions.
02:56:15 My grandfather was like a theologian
02:56:18 that studied and wrote all these books,
02:56:19 and I’m very interested in this type of stuff.
02:56:21 And there’s this great book that’s,
02:56:24 it’s not specific to a particular religion,
02:56:27 but it’s Karen Armstrong wrote this great book
02:56:29 called The Case for God.
02:56:30 She’s very interesting.
02:56:31 She was a Catholic nun who sort of left that religion,
02:56:34 but one of the smartest thinkers
02:56:37 in terms of like accessible theological thinking
02:56:40 that’s not tied to any particular religion.
02:56:42 Her whole argument is that the way to understand religion,
02:56:45 first of all, you have to go way back pre enlightenment
02:56:47 where all this was formed.
02:56:48 We got messed up thinking about religion
02:56:50 post enlightenment, right?
02:56:51 And these were operating systems
02:56:54 for making sense of intimations.
02:56:57 The one thing we had were these different intimations
02:57:00 of this field, like awe and mystical experience.
02:57:03 And this feels, there’s something you feel
02:57:05 when you act in a certain way
02:57:07 and don’t act in this other way.
02:57:08 And it was like the scientists who were trying to study
02:57:11 and understand the model of the atom
02:57:13 by just looking at experiments and trying to understand
02:57:15 what’s going on.
02:57:16 Like the great religions of the world
02:57:18 were basically figuring out
02:57:19 how do we make sense of these intimations
02:57:21 and live in alignment with them
02:57:22 and build a life of meaning around that.
02:57:24 What were the tools they were using?
02:57:26 They were using ritual.
02:57:27 They were using belief.
02:57:28 They were using action, but all of it was like an OS.
02:57:31 It was like a liturgical model of the atom that did.
02:57:34 It’s hard coded in.
02:57:35 So it did through the evolutionary process.
02:57:39 I mean, they wouldn’t have called it that back then
02:57:41 or yeah, I mean, they didn’t have that as pre enlightenment.
02:57:45 They just said, this is here.
02:57:46 And the directive is to try to live in alignment with that.
02:57:50 Well, then I want to ask who wrote the original code.
02:57:53 Yeah, so Armstrong lays out this good argument
02:57:56 and where it gets really interesting
02:57:58 is that she emphasizes that all of this
02:58:01 was considered ineffable, right?
02:58:03 So the whole notion, and this is like rich
02:58:05 in Jewish tradition in particular
02:58:06 and also in Islamic tradition,
02:58:08 we can’t comprehend and understand what’s going on here.
02:58:11 Right?
02:58:11 And so the best we can do to approximate understanding
02:58:13 and live in alignment is we act as if this is true,
02:58:16 do these rituals, have these actions or whatever.
02:58:19 Post enlightenment, a lot of that got,
02:58:22 once we learned about enlightenment,
02:58:24 we grew these suspicions around religion
02:58:26 that are very much of the modern era, right?
02:58:28 So like the Karen Armstrong,
02:58:30 like Sam Harris’s critique of religion makes no sense.
02:58:33 Right?
02:58:34 The critique’s based on, well, this is,
02:58:35 you’re making the ascent to propositions
02:58:37 that you think are true for which you do not have evidence
02:58:39 that they are true.
02:58:40 That’s an enlightenment thing, right?
02:58:41 This is not the context and this is not,
02:58:43 the religion is the Rutherford model of the atom.
02:58:46 Like it’s not actually maybe what is underneath happening,
02:58:50 but this model explains why your chemical equations work.
02:58:52 And so this is like the way religion was.
02:58:55 There’s a God, we’ll call it this, this is how it works,
02:58:57 we do this ritual, we act in this way,
02:58:58 it aligns with it, just like the model of the atom
02:59:00 predicted why NA and CL is gonna become salt,
02:59:03 this predicts that you’re gonna feel
02:59:05 and live in alignment, right?
02:59:06 It’s like this beautiful sophisticated theory,
02:59:08 which actually matches how a lot of great theologians
02:59:11 have thought about it.
02:59:13 But then when you come forward in time,
02:59:14 yeah, maybe it’s evolution.
02:59:15 I mean, this is like what Peterson hints at, right?
02:59:18 Like he’s basically, he doesn’t like to get super pinned down
02:59:24 on this, but it kind of seems where he sees it that way.
02:59:27 He’s almost like searching for the words.
02:59:29 He focuses more on like Jung and other people,
02:59:31 but I mean, I know he’s very Jungian,
02:59:32 but that same type of analysis, I think, roughly speaking,
02:59:35 like Armstrong is sort of a, it’s kind of like a Peter
02:59:38 Sony analysis, but she’s looking more at the deep history
02:59:41 of religion than, but yeah, he throws in an evolutionary.
02:59:45 Yeah, and I wonder what home it finds,
02:59:48 I wonder what the new home is if religion dissipates
02:59:51 and what the new home for these kinds of
02:59:54 natural inclinations are, whether it’s technology,
02:59:58 whether…
02:59:59 And if it’s evolution, I mean, this is Francis Collins’s
03:00:00 book also, he’s like, well, that’s a religious,
03:00:04 that could be a very religious notion.
03:00:06 I don’t, I think this stuff is interesting.
03:00:07 I’m not a very religious person,
03:00:08 but I’m thinking it’s not a bad idea.
03:00:11 Maybe what replaces, honestly, like maybe what replaces
03:00:14 religion is a return to religion,
03:00:17 but in this sort of more sophisticated…
03:00:20 I mean, if you went back, yeah, I mean, it’s the issue
03:00:22 with like a lot of the recent critiques,
03:00:24 I think it’s a strong critique in a complicated way, right?
03:00:29 Because the whole way these, the way this works,
03:00:32 I mean, the theologians, if you’re reading Paul Tillich,
03:00:34 if you’re reading Heschel, if you’re reading these people,
03:00:36 they’re thinking very sophisticatedly about religion
03:00:39 in terms of this, it’s ineffable,
03:00:40 and we’re just these things, and it connects us
03:00:43 to these things in a way that puts life in alignment.
03:00:46 We can’t really explain what’s going on
03:00:47 because our brains can’t handle it, right?
03:00:50 For the average person though, this notion of live as if
03:00:53 is kind of how religions work, is live as if this is true.
03:00:57 It’s like an OS for getting in alignment with,
03:01:00 because through cultural evolution,
03:01:02 like you behave in this way, do these words,
03:01:04 live as if this is true gives you
03:01:07 the goal you’re looking for.
03:01:10 But that’s a complicated thing, live as if this is true,
03:01:12 because if you, especially if you’re not a theologian,
03:01:15 to say, yeah, this is not true in an enlightenment sense,
03:01:18 but I’m living as if, it kind of takes the heat out of it,
03:01:21 but of course it’s what people are doing
03:01:22 because highly religious people still do bad things,
03:01:25 where if you really were, there’s absolutely a hell
03:01:28 and I’m definitely gonna go to it if I do this bad thing,
03:01:30 you would never have, you know,
03:01:31 no one would ever murder anyone
03:01:33 if they were an evangelical Christian, right?
03:01:34 So it’s like what, this is kind of a tangent
03:01:37 that I’m on shaky ground here,
03:01:39 but it’s something I’ve been interested off and on a lot.
03:01:43 Well, it’s fascinating, I mean,
03:01:44 I think we’re in some sense searching for,
03:01:46 because it does make for a good operating system,
03:01:48 we’re searching for a good live as if X is true
03:01:52 and we’re searching for a new X.
03:01:54 And maybe artificial intelligence will be the very,
03:01:58 the new gods that we’re so desperately looking for.
03:02:02 Or it’ll just spit out 42.
03:02:04 I thought it was 27.
03:02:06 Cal, this is, as you know, I’ve been a huge fan,
03:02:10 so are a huge number of people that I’ve spoken with,
03:02:14 so they’ve been telling me,
03:02:15 I absolutely have to talk to you, this is a huge honor,
03:02:18 this is really fun, thanks for wasting all this time with me.
03:02:20 Yeah, no, likewise, man, I’ve been a long time fan,
03:02:22 so this was a lot of fun.
03:02:23 Yeah, thanks, man.
03:02:25 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Cal Newport
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03:02:44 And now let me leave you with some words from Cal himself,
03:02:47 “‘Clarity about what matters provides clarity
03:02:51 “‘about what does not.’”
03:02:52 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.