The Minimal Productivity System That Could Reinvent Your Life | Cal Newport

So one of the conflicts we've confronted here is the one between having too little productivity and too much we know the problem with too little productivity in your life this could be disorganization and stress scrambling job insecurity people stop counting on you when it comes to things at work or in your personal life and you feel like you're not making progress on any of these things that are non-urgent but Important as Emerson said the crime which bankrupts men in Nations is that of turning aside from one's main purpose to serve a job here and there

but we also know the problem with having too much productivity in your life your life can become reentered on optimization itself as you fill more and more of your time with execution for execution sake you can lose a sense of wonder and appreciation for anything other than just mechanistic accomplishment here's An Helen Peterson summarizing some of these fears this is the dystopian reality of productivity culture its mandate is never you figured out how to do my task more efficiently so you got to spend less time working it is always instead you figured out how to

do your task more efficiently so now you must do more tasks so this conflict got me thinking recently that there's a key question lurking underneath all this conflict that we really haven't talked About enough and it's the following what is the minimally minimally viable productivity system that is what is the minimal set of rules and tools that will allow you to escape the problem s of having too little productivity but not jump all the way into becoming a task juggling superhero just enough to find some breathing room but not enough for your life to become

all about execution I think this would be useful to figure out Because it would provide us with a common starting place where everyone should begin from a sort of Baseline minimally viable productivity that you start from to get away from the hardship of being too disorganized the hardship of being someone that no one can count on the hardship of not being able to make progress on the things that you care about but just enough that you have flexibility in there for you to figure out what fits you and your goals and Your personality when it

comes to how much more organized you want to be that's what I want to try to do today I've been thinking about this topic there's I'm writing a chapter in my new book on this so I'm I'm beginning to bounce ideas around about this topic and what I want to do today is start by first figuring out what are the actual problems that we would want a minimum minimally viable productivity system to solve then two Identify what are the key components A system that solved those problems would need to feature and then three give some

ideas about then how might you concretely implement those components here I think the key is there is no one right answer once we know the minimal components of a minimally viable productivity system I just want to talk about what might you look for in implementing these and how you actually do it can be a Choose Your Own Adventure All right so that's our goal let's get into to it I want to start by saying what should the goals be for a minimally viable productivity system I don't have this locked in yet but I've been thinking

about this for a couple weeks now and there's three goals that come up most common when I think about what I really want out of this the first is going to be stress reduction I need a productivity system to make my life less stressful this is Sort of table Stakes for trying to bring more organization to your life in the first place second I need this system to uh increase people's perceived uh understanding of my responsibility or increase my responsibility what I mean by this is professionally I don't want to be dropping the ball however

this system runs I don't want to be seen as someone who may or may not get something done if You give it to me I want to be someone you can trust I want the same thing to happen in my life outside of work if a friend or someone in my community needs me to handle something for them or ask for my help they trust I'm not going to forget about it I'm not going to flake so whatever the system does it should give me that sense of responsibility I'm someone you can count on finally

I think whatever else the system does it has to be able to help me Make at least some progress on things that are important but non- urgent I think that word some there does a lot of work because depending on what circumstance or stage of life you're in how much progress you might be able to make on an important non-urgent matter could really vary I mean if you're like 24 years old and your job is not that demanding and you have some sort of big big idea you want to make progress on uh you could

be spending a lot of time Working on this the other extreme we can go all the way to like Victor Frankle and man search for meeting right his Memoir of his time during the Holocaust and then the the the Psychotherapy field called logotherapy that he created in its wake and there he was pointing out just having something matter how minor it could seem in a different context having something that you are working on that you control because you chose to do it is critical Not just a human flourishing but human survival so we got this

whole spectrum of what doing some work could mean but the key is a system should make sure that there's always some room for you to make progress on stuff that's important that's no one's asking you to do it that you have some autonomy and control in your life so I want those three things out of any system but I want the minimal system that gets me those that's my goal right now all right So then I started thinking what components would a system have to have to satisfy those three things this two is contentious but

after thinking about this for a few weeks three things came to mind here's my best swing the first is there's got to be some notion of task management right so there has to be some way of keeping track of the things that you have agreed to do that is not just in your brain this is going to be vital For basically all three of the goals we have for this system you're not going to drop the ball on things it's going to reduce the stress of just trying to remember things in your brain or forgetting

about things until the last minute and having deadline overload which is like a huge source of acute stress in people's lives also as a way to to keep track and remember of the things you need to do to make progress on non- urgent tasks that's kind of at The core of a lot of things there has to be some basic way to keep track of what you've agreed to do that doesn't exist just in your brain the second component any such system must have is some notion of workload management so if task management is about

keeping track of what you've agreed to do workload management is about controlling the volume of things that you agree to it's like the gate through which obligations Come this is a piece of my thinking that I think has developed especially in the last few years it became a big part of my most recent book slow productivity it's probably a part that had been neglected in some of my earlier thinking about organization of productivity but the amount of stuff that you're actively working on plays a vital role in almost all aspects of your of your mental

health as well as your Effectiveness in both your professional and personal life So you have to have something a minimally viable system that satisfies those goals have to have some intentional thought about what my workload is and what I am trying to do to keep it within a range that is reasonable you don't have that there you do everything else in productivity you could end up executing a heck of a lot of stuff and being stressed out of your mind and not actually being able to work On the stuff you want to work on all

right final component I think any viable productiv productivity system is going to have to have is some notion of time control some notion of like I want to have a say in how my time is allocated on a day-to-day basis might be saying well how would you not have a say I mean you're always making decisions but not really actually the default that people do is much more Of a reactive mode I am reacting to things that come towards me maybe email maybe a slack someone calling me and saying Hey where's this thing I'm reacting

to things that people are asking for me and in between reacting I sort of just drift off into a days of digital distraction and pacification until I get stressed about something else and then I react to that stress by doing something else most people's days unfold Haphazardly if you pinned them down that morning and said what do you think's going to happen today and then you see what actually happens there's going to be very little convergence between it they are being bounced around the sort of time schedule pinball machine and they're not the ones hitting

the flipper buttons and so we want to have at least a resistance to that doesn't mean you're going to be able to control your day like oh I have exact control of what I'm Going to go on but you're going to have some intention that's going to be applied or at least attempted to apply I just think you have to have that in any viable productivity system at least if you want to hit those three goals I talked about before there's a lot of other stuff you might do with productivity but for first talking about

a minimally viable system those are the components I think you have to have task management Workload management time control some systems for each so I want to go through those let's go through those three components and I'm going to do two things for each I'm going to give an idea of a bare bones thing you could do that would like put that some sort of system there in your life and then I'll talk about more like what I do in that component like more of like a moderately Advanced you can get a sense of the

the options but the key thing I want to Emphasize here is these are just samples of possibilities so by giving you a barebones way of implementing each these ideas and a sort of moderately Advanced way of implementing each of these ideas what I'm trying to do is just give you a sense of there's a large landscape of possibilities here you can choose your own adventure you can choose your own adventure based on what the the details are of your particular situation and also of your particular personality what Resonates or not I mean some people are

going to want to go way more analog than this because they get a sort of uh aesthetic rush out of having something that looks beautiful other people really love high-tech systems and they're like I really want an AI powered zle cast in bot playing a big role in what I'm doing and some people really enjoy that there's nothing wrong with that either so you can customize this but I want to give a couple examples so that You the point I'm making is there's no one way to do these things hey it's Cal I wanted to

interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video then you need to check out my new book slow productivity the Lost start of accomplishment without burnout this is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos you can get a free excerpt at Cal newport.com slow I know you're going to like it check it out now let's get back to the Video all right so let's get specific so let's go back to task management what we need here right what are we trying to accomplish is some notion of

what David Allen called a trusted system a place where the things you need to do ends up and you trust yourself to review it regularly those two things is what helps prevent you from forgetting things and also reduces the stress of trying to keep track of things in your mind as soon as your mind Trust where I wrote this down is a place I won't lose it and a place I won't forget it then your mind releases all right that is uh classic David Allen and David Allen himself was actually adapting that idea from Dean

ainon so we can kind of follow this this chain back if you want to go through productivity culture all right what's like a barebone ways of implementing this the barebone way here is a text file and a calendar right you need a calendar so stuff that Is due on particular days or happens at particular times just go straight on a calendar it's a tool that we all use it's a remarkably effective technology it's probably one of the oldest productivity Technologies the oldest probably is actually what counting tablets uniform tablets going back to the Samaran days

but tracking things with time was another one of the early applications of technology so have a calendar and then have a text file where You just like I'm writing down things that I have to do that's the simplest implementation when I was in graduate school there was a period in which I was implementing this system where I used a calendar on my computer and I had a tablet like a legal pad I remember it very vividly because it was a Cale legal pad Cale was the computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory so that's the at

the time this was like the Cs department at MIT um there's now a School of computing it's a whole s separate sort of thing and it was swag I don't know where I got this it was just swag it was like a white legal pad and it had the Cale logo the status Center up in the corner and I just kept a list of there of things I needed to do and I would cross things off as I would do them and eventually the page would have so many things crossed off I would copy the

uncrossed off things to a new page that was Clean if you want a more modern or work through example of that very simple way look at writer Carol's bullet Journal method that does something similar you you write things you have to do and just copy to a clean page when it gets too messy but that's the Bare Bones here I have a calendar for things that are time-sensitive and a file or a notepad that I have everything else that works the minimal viable system that's enough if you want to get Somewhat more advanced you can

combine a calendar with a status board this is of course I've talked on the show what I do I use Trello one board for each of the roles in my life a different column on each board for different statuses of things I need to do each card on each column is a thing I have to do so I might have a board for my role as director of undergraduate studies for the computer science department at Georgetown And I might have a column in there that is something like major declaration requests that still need to be

processed and then I have a card for each per student who has written me saying Hey I want to declare a major and I have kind of the information I have in there I have another uh Row in that that says to discuss with the chair at the next meeting I have with the chair I have another thing there it says to discuss with the associate director and there we Meet once a week and I store cards there with tasks that we're going to discuss at the next meeting I have a waiting to hear back

from column there that's very important oh I had a question of this student and now I'm waiting to hear back from them I put a card there so I won't forget that explains here's the student here's what I asked them I'm waiting to hear back this here's the next step so that's what I do status Boards but as long as you have some way of putting stuff down where you're not going to forget it and you'll review regularly you have a minimally viable task management system all what about workload management well here look you need

some way of estimating your current workload so what is on my plate we sometimes use the phrase on this show facing the productivity Dragon just facing directly This is the full magnitude of what is on my plate of things I've agreed to do you need some way of understanding what your personal maximum effective workload is like this is roughly how much I can do it once that estimate may be broken down into different types of work and so you should be able to compare those two things and have some since where your actual workload is

going beyond your estimated like this is what I'm comfortably can handle and the Workload management needs some collection of rules and tools that you use to try to keep those two things balanced like that's what a workload management system needs now how you do that there's a million different ways if we're going to go with just like minimum simple things you could do for workload management to satisfy those properties a couple simple ideas and these come from my book slow productivity pres schedule big Commitments on your calendar is a simple thing to do all right

I'm going to agree to do this big thing I'm going to go and actually find the time on my calendar at the point of agreement I will go at that point and go find time on my calendar to schedule to work on this if it takes 10 hours I'll find three hours here four hours here I will find and protect that time so now I'm actually allocating my actual hours to the agreement as opposed to just agreeing it and it's just Abstractly added to my workload and sometime and as it gets nearer to do this

like where am I going to find the time to do it you get a nice little reality check from having to pre-schedule time for major commitments which is if you don't have that time available in the near future you can't avoid that reality because you're trying to find hey I got to schedule the 10 hours for this hypothetical chore and if I can't find those 10 hours the next two Weeks I can't do it in the next two weeks it gives you feedback on how crowded your schedule actually is or at first you're you're easily

finding time for things but then as your schedule fills you have to start looking out farther into the future to schedule things and eventually you have to tell people like yeah look I'm scheduling a month out now I've filled the next four weeks if you're not prescheduling time and you're just saying yes to all those Things it's still going to take up that much time you just don't know it yet you're going to have to pay that bill as those deadlines get due and the work is going to get done in a frenzy of stress

and it's not going to get done that well another very simple thing you can do is have quotas for particular type of work yes I do these type of committees but only one per quarter yes I'm willing to do do review but I do four per semester once I hit my Quota I'm done yeah I do calls I think it's important in my role as an entrepreneur that I do calls hop on calls with young entrepreneurs who want advice but I can only do one per week quotas allow you to keep things that are important

but potentially schedule strangling to keep those things in your life but in a way that is reasonable another simple thing if you're just doing Bare Bones here would be project counts you just figure out through Experience maybe through doing that pre-scheduling for a while how many projects of the major types of projects you do in your job how many can you usually handle before Things become a little bit too stressful and then you just have this very simple system I only do three at a time I'm at three I got to wait till I finish

something right so there's barebone things you can do for workload management if you want to get more Advanced you can do like I talked about slow productivity some sort of individual scale or team scale implementation of a agile on Bond style work tracking system where you separate what you have agreed to work on or your team has agreed to work on from what is actually being worked on and you have clear wips or work in progress limits for what is actually being worked on at any one time if you have a team you could actually

have something like a Conon board where there is digital cards these used to be done with physical note cards on bulletin boards but now there's any number of digital products for this of all the things your team needs to work on and those things exist in a sort of to be worked on section of your virtual board no one is responsible for those things until they get moved to the column for someone uh labeled with someone's particular name and then I can see like okay here's the Cal column the things under the column is what

I am working on now these are the only things you can talk to me about the things over here no one's working on yet you can email me about these things hey what's going on with such and such we talked about I say it's not been assigned yet I'll talk I'll talk to you when it is here's the things I'm working on and you have a clear limit like here's what's reasonable work on two things at a time three things on a time You can give those things a lot of time the fraction of your

schedule dedicated to administrative overhead is reduced to a point where you can be very effective with applying your brain to accomplishment the throughput with which you finish things goes up so you could do this as a team it really works if you have a sort of like daily standup style status check-in where it's like who's working on what what do you need from each other now Let's go work I talk about slow productivity how you can even Implement something like this for yourself even if your team has no interest in this where you personally differentiate

on the things you've agreed to do between the things you're actively working on and the things you're waiting to work on and you don't take meetings or do emails or really dedicate any administrative overhead to the things you're waiting to work on and You make this whole list transparent and when someone who gave you something to do that you're waiting to work on bothers you you can push them to that list you can see where your thing is and as soon as it moves to my active status you'll hear from me I'll tell you right

away but until I'll say this nicely you know bug off of course you won't say it that way you'll use all sorts of fancy language but I'm a professor so I don't really know how To interact like a normal human in a business environment but I'm sure you all figure that out some fancy way you do that so yeah you can get as complicated here as you want but just having some sort of at least you need some sort of minimal way of saying how much am I working on how much is too much and

what am I doing to try to keep those two things in Balance get to have something there all right the final thing is time control as I Talked about before our goal here is to have some sort of proactive control or intention in how your day unfolds even if you can't control it beat by beat have some intention embedded in your day as opposed to just reacting so here's an example just like a bare minimum thing you could do here some sort of morning review first thing in the morning maybe I'm keeping my tasks in

a legal pad like we talked about have a calendar look at the Calendar look at your legal pad what what's on my plate maybe uh grab a couple things off that legal pad and say okay these are the things I want to try to get done today maybe kind of figure out here's the most important things I want to do why don't I do it in I see I have an open time in my calendar let me just s that's when I'll do them make a few decisions it's putting minimal intention into your Day a

more advanced thing would be like I do multiscale planning where I plan on multiple time scales so like the semester time scale I'm thinking about my big picture goals for that semester I look at that plan every week when I make a weekly plan critically my weekly plan I'm looking at everything scheduled on my calendar I'm going to move things around if it's going to really unlock my week if I move this or cancel this or move this to this day it opens up big Time here so you play uh chess with your calendar during

a weekly plan I also schedule progress on the big rocks for my semester plan I'll schedule them right on my calendar during the weekly plan you know I really am trying to make progress on finishing Chapter 3 of my book by the end of March I saw that in my semester plan so now when I'm doing my weekly plan I want to get like 5 hours blocked off on my calendar for writing just to make sure That time gets done and then the final scale is every day in the morning I like to do a

Time block plan give every hour of my day a job not reacting I want to see the time I have and make the best possible plan for it yes I'm going to get knocked off this time block plan within a couple hours and I'll have to adjust it a few times and sometimes it'll be okay and sometimes I'll never recover but I'm going to try to have some say on how my day unfolds So that's a more advanced way to do it multiscale planning but again you can start with something as minimal as just like

5 minutes every morning where's the list where's the calendar what am I want to do today or what's something I want to remember to do today just like give it a little bit of thought before you open that email inbox before you jump into the slack all right so to summarize we can go on and on about the optimal productivity systems or the best Productivity systems or the most modern productivity systems but if you want just the minimally viable productivity system that sort of barebones that I think everyone in the modern knowledge economy needs to

avoid stress or disillusionment or burnout you got to have some sort of task management component you need some sort of workload component you need some sort of time control component and even if they are super Simple you are going to save yourself from the worst deprivations of of being not productive enough and yet focusing on these three things if you're reasonable about it that also saves you from that sort of optimization mindset thing right it leaves that to the people who like think about productivity as a hobby I think it puts you in a really

good place so there we go the MVPs minimally viol productivity system That's my current take on this issue I'm sure it'll evolve but I think it's an important one to throw into the discussion I can't call it MVP because minimally viable product is a real Silicon Valley piece of lingo okay have you heard that lingo just Most Valuable Player well then there's that as well yeah but uh in Silicon Valley it's like rapidly developing the the simplest possible like software product that like does something useful as opposed to Trying to build a fully featured piece

of software before you release it so minimally viable product and they didn't think about MVP because Silicon Valley people not playing a lot of sports so that I don't think that crossed their mind I don't think they I don't think they were thinking about that so MVPs is what we'll call it Minal viable productivity system all right so we got some good questions coming up but first let's hear From some sponsors want to talk about our friends at cozy Earth cozy Earth Products are designed to transform year 5 to9 the time that matters most into

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trap or does purpose operate under a different set of Rules rules well okay we have a couple different things going on here uh so first of all is it a trap to have your volunteer position your research volunteer position get in the way of developing a meaningful paid career um there yes the answer is yes that's a trap right if you're volunteering you need to see that as a volunteer position like helping out at your kids's school or like your local church um it's could be a very important part of your life But you see

it separately than what you see is your your paid profession so certainly shouldn't get in the way of you developing a meaningful and sustainable uh paid employment but there's a secondary question here that's worth getting at more generally which is the difference between passion and purpose so there's a passion trap but there is also a purpose trap and I think it's worth trying to figure out what the difference is between these two so the Passion trap as I wrote about in my book so good they can't ignore you um is the assumption that the key

really liking your job is to match the content of your job that's something you're really interested in so you say I have a passion for X so if my job involves X I will feel passionate about my work this was the fundamental model for career satisfaction that was taught to like Jus ni generation Follow Your Passion you'll be passionate about your work doesn't Work out that way the factors that make a job meaningful and sustainable the factors that can help you develop a source of passion for your job are complicated and multivariate and it's much

more involved in simply saying I like this so if my job is connected to that I'll be happy right I really like baseball it doesn't mean that if I take you know a back office job at the Nationals that I'm going to love my job what makes you love your job is more Complicated than just the content of it the purpose trap is interesting it's different so the purpose trap is the fact that your job provides some sort of sense of purpose so like the work you're doing feels important or is important that that allows

you to put up with lots of other factors about your job and his impact being negative so the purpose trap is yeah this is kind of terrible like for whatever reason like where the hours the the the lack of Money the the stress but it's important like the field I'm in so I'm going to put up with those other things so it's letting purpose blind you to other elements that make a good job good now again the reality is purpose can be a very important component in engineering your ideal lifestyle and in particular engineering what

you want out of your job but it shouldn't be the sole component there's other things you want As well it could be com uh autonomy connection to other people sense of Mastery those matter and then there's a financial reward so it's able to fund other things that are important in your life and also when you're doing lifestyle Centric planning you care about how the job fits in and supports other things are important to you in your life all of those factors matter so you can't let one factor in there like does this job have a

sense of purpose Stomp over everything else you have to be more intentional about it so what should you do build career Capital first and foremost be so good they can't ignore you at whatever it is you're doing and then leverage that Capital to take control of your career shape it towards things that resonate and away from things that don't make it supportive of your overall Vision your lifestyle and move away from things that destabilize your overall ideal of your Ideal lifestyle This is complicated it's iterative we talked about this last week in the Deep dive

The Good Life algorithm the idea that you have to sort of experiment and discover what works and what doesn't and make Corrections and adjustments in your life you're sort of navigating this multi-dimensional landscape of our possible lives towards something that resonates more and more but it's what ultimately works so don't look for the one fix if I'm passionate About this my life will be passionate if I purpose in my job my whole life will feel good it's always going to be more complicated you always have to be sort of solving for the complex equation here

so I don't know there's a lot hidden in this question but I appreciate that because we actually got to get to a lot of uh a lot of interesting points I didn't talk a lot about the purpose trap and so good they can't ignore you but it's come up a lot since that book came Out where people are like no I mean I'm not passionate about this but this is an important cause so because of that I'm putting up with a lot of other negative things in my life that's a real common trap that people

get in all right who do we got next next is from charity I'm always on the go when listening to podcast so it's hard for me to stop and write Stu down how can I capture these discovered tactics and tips well I think it depends on the Podcast I think for most podcasts it doesn't matter um for this podcast I think what Jesse and I recommend is probably you have a dedicated space for listening to it in um I would have this built custom if possible your your inspiration and clearly doesn't have to be this

large but your inspiration when thinking about like a space that's appropriate for listening to our podcast I'm thinking like the Cath in charge maybe notra Dum smaller but something in a similar level of contemplation and you really should be uh sitting in there dedicating I would say easy four or five hours to kind of go slowly and to relisten and to take your notes no U okay ideas from podcast I don't know here's the two things I do I will jot down timestamps in the notes on my phone if there's something like ooh I want

to remember that it only comes up so often right I mean some interviews are rich with these If you're watching Interview show some have none but I put time stamps down temporarily in Apple notes and then you can go later and write those down somewhere else the other thing I sometimes do this will happen a lot if I'm working out and I'm listening to a podcast and then I get an idea like oh that like gives me an idea what they're just talking about I voice dictate into Gmail email to myself so I'll just like

and they're they're weird because I have No punctuation and you know there's a lot of typos it's but I'll just voice always translate a bunch of ideas send and then after my workout I have a couple of those emails in there I might want to deal with as well so you can kind of develop your tricks the third thing you could do is if you're have a single purpose notebook you could dedicate this like a field notes notebook and a pin just have that with you in a pocket you could just jot in There time

stamps as things come up and then you could deal with that as well um so whatever works but I typically am doing the notes and the the emails to myself all right who do we got next question questions from Andrew in a world without email and in the podcast you talk about communication protocols and office hours is there anything else as a professor I'd love to know how you work on projects with your PhD students you know in a world without email I talk About a cool study that was done I think it was University

of Maryland and they're looking at models for managing for professors managing doctoral students and the model they tried that worked really well was borrowing ideas from agile software development so particular they they worked on okay we keep track of clearly what each of the students is working on right so there's no question about that and we have like they have in the agile methodology these Daily standups that are like 10 minutes long and this was actually hard to dial this in just right this is not let's all talk for a half hour about what's going

on it is 10 minutes of like okay I see you were working on this whatever it is writing up the data from this experiment trying to understand this proof from this paper working on it correcting this mistake and this proof how's it going what do you need what progress have you made what do you need to make progress Going forward and it's quick and you go through and in this way students always know what they're working on and they can't get stuck that long this actually worked really well and it worked well in contrast to

what standard this is the way I was trained was you have a weekly check-in with each of your students and you have this meeting and it's an hour long and it feels sometimes it's packed because you have things you really have to work on but sometimes it feels Performative and students can be stuck for a whole week until they actually get to this meeting and you might not have the right energy or time to help them make progress or not they found this daily standup work much better so students really know what they were working

on and then you set up additional one-on-one meetings as there's very focused work to be done oh now you're really stuck on a proof let's put aside time now for you and I to work On this proof and I'll help you get unstuck so like the longer meetings are being dedicated for actual we've identif an actual problem where we can make real progress uh but the daily check-in really quick and the keeping track of who's working on what keeps people from getting stuck so that feels like a good idea I I don't I'm a theoretician

I also work on digital ethics I don't have large research teams but I've heard this works pretty well all right what we got Next from Chris I'm a federal worker with recent concerns over incompatible values pitched by leadership do I just focus on Surviving the dayto day despite a values Gap well it's a it's a timely question but it's a complicated one um so in your lifestyle Centric planning I took some notes on this um your job is probably supporting many aspects of your ideal lifestyle I mean even just having a job the income where

you live like what it's supporting the hours Etc so the what you were working on and your Val how you value what you're working on is one aspect of the ideal lifestyle that uh your job is supporting but it's not everything so we want to be careful here about making an immediate drastic change because what could happen is you could be saying there's something I don't like about currently how my job is set up and so I'm going to leave that job because it's Important to me that I'm I like the people I'm working for

the mission but then there's like six or seven other things that are important to you in your life to take a hit and you're thinking like maybe that wasn't a fair trade right so we want to go with some care so let's talk about how to be how to be more Discerning here uh in my book so good they can't ignore you I talk about working towards working on things that are directly against your values I say That that's a disqualifier for a job being something that you can get long-term value out of so what

we want to be if we're going to get more fine grained about that here so does this apply or not you want to be careful here especially in this government context about there's a difference between what my job is directly is pushing something that's against my values versus there are things in my job the Place I work for that I value that are being like blocked or stopped like this is really relevant in the government right now where it might be like maybe um you know you're you're working on uh clean water or something like

this and it's not that someone is coming in and saying you have to like actively work on something that's going to make water less clean but that like funding's being taken away from clean water and so there's a bit of a Difference there or the the boss of my boss of my boss is someone who doesn't care about I'm in you know regulatory oversight and like has a different way of thinking about it but it's not actually changing what I'm doing day-to-day yet so there is a difference between I'm selling cigarettes and I really don't

want to be selling cigarettes versus I am helping people quit smoking and the amount of programs we're working on this has been cut in Half there's a difference between those two things it's frustrating to have resources or projects towards what you care about be reduced but it's so deadening to be actively working on the opposite of what you care about so that I think is a that is an important distinction a lot of what happens or what's happening now in the government or when new administrations take overs is it often Tends to be more of

the resources or focus is being reduced on the things I care about versus I am actively being forced um to work on something that I directly dislike that happens as well but make that distinction that's going to be a key distinction in figuring out how to act here you also want to be careful not to personalize this is very common in jobs in general this is not just for this government scenario where you you Personalize like you can because our mind is good at this we're used to dealing with individuals so you personalize this individual

this person who's coming in and messing with maybe my organization is you know 20,000 people but this person who's coming in and messing with it I hate that person I just I could just imagine that person I dislike them and um I this is about a battle between me and them and I'm not going to let them win you how they're Not going to win I am going to you know I going to quit and in your mind you imagine it like in the Paleolithic tribe where there's 12 of you and you're making the big

display in the group of 12 and the the the new person who's trying to take over the tribe can ignore what you did in it's big showy thing but what really happens in a large organization is no one notices or that's what they're hoping like yeah we want people to quit anyways they don't care They don't notice you can't personalize you have to see it abstractly what am I getting from the job how's it fit to my ideal lifestyle um and then you can take if just gives you some breathing room then you can take

your time to figure out what to do and the answer might very well be no no no we've changed our mission like in my government position uh I'm now doing something actively just like I need to get out of there and we've seen This actually happen recently in the government where people are saying I'm being asked I'm literally being asked to do something that I don't want to do and um they're leaving or they're being asked to leave but if it's not that now you can take your time hey am I still able to make

progress amidst the hardship make progress on things I care about to the best that I can oh it's super frustrating but it's important that the work goes on maybe that's the Answer or maybe it's this whole thing has been gutted and there's no reason to be here anymore but my job and its benefits and its flexibility is you know it's supporting my family it allows the hours are reasonable I can go coach to my kids's Little League team and or heavily there's these other things this is making possible that's very important in my life so

I don't want to throw that away um so yeah I'm going to explore I probably need to make a change but I'm Going to take my time finding this and maybe I'm going to be very checked out mentally and you know Phantom part-time Jobing in all the sort of situations but I'm going to be take my time finding this because no one's going to notice if I make a big showy thing unless I'm you know already famous or something like this as well so I guess what I'm really pushing here is some is is caution

in this scenario understand the way your job fits into your larger lifestyle Centric Vision separate actually working against your values versus working in a place where someone against your values is monking around with it frustrating you can't do more is different than frustrating at what you are doing and then if you do make a change take your time to make that change like right in a way that's going to support your full lifestyle don't get caught in the Trap that you know Elon Musk or Big Balls is going to notice and Be like oh my

God I'm going to change my ways they quit and they sent this email to their boss and like this is you know so you're kind of winning if you're staying in control of your own life I guess that's the way I would think about it all right what do we have next Jesse we might have our final Corner oh slow productivity Corner today is we're recording this on the 4th yeah and the 5th of March is the one-year anniversary of my book slow Productivity so for the last year in every episode we've had one question

dedicated to uh ideas for a book slow productivity which was just our excuse to play theme music we should have people write in why don't we have people write in the Jesse atal newport.com is this the end of the corner should we find another way to use the theme music or should we just like clean break and move on from the segment right now our default is to move on but send your vote If you have one the Jess atal newport.com but either way we know for sure right now we can hear that theme music

at least one more [Music] time no it's just hitting me what that theme music sounds like what's that the more you know remember the NBC the more you know that's why it's hitting our like Millennial memory banks right there all right what's our question of the week It's from Daniel in your episode let Brandon Cook you argu that letting the brandons of your organization cook will help move the rest of the work coach away from pseudo productivity what if your organization has a fairly entrenched pseudo prod productive managerial work culture that trickles down to knowledge

workers Are there specific recommendations you'd make for moving manager managerial work culture in a deeper Direction well the the let Brandon Cook idea who I have in mind this beginning to effect is the managerial class right so the idea from that episode titled let Brandon Cook was if organization starts deciding okay at least we have some people who have a highly specialized skill and we're going to prioritize them applying that skill right we're we're not going to even if it's like less convenient for us or other people it's not going to be about Responsiveness or

uh having the most low friction back and forth conversations or what's going to make our lives easier it's like let that person do what they do best because it moves the bottom line and I said if you have a few people doing that that'll put cracks into the pseudo productivity firmament so this idea that busyness is what matters that idea itself is destabilized when you have some people who are mattering not for being busy and who do I think that's Going to really affect psychologically I think managers if you're a manager and you realize well

some of these people they're helping our bottom line more not by answering my emails really quickly but because like we're letting them actually spend time doing what they do really well makes it hard for you to remain fully committed to the pseudo productivity ideal that activity is all that matters So actually it's the managerial class itself where I want to start affecting some changes and I think that is where letting Brandon Cook can begin to help make progress because once you start thinking another way of measuring productivity is how much actual valuable stuff did you

produce that sounds so obvious because every other measure of productivity in every other sector does that but we don't do that in knowledge work so as soon as you bring that into Knowledge work this many lines of good code this articles that got this many you know readers or won these many awards when you're thinking about results suddenly email response time doesn't matter suddenly being on slack doesn't matter suddenly like what's really important that we need to know exactly what days you're in the office doesn't matter because like results can results are what moves the

deal so I Don't know I I think the let Brandon Cook idea starts with Superstar performers but begins to change the mindset of managers and now you're going to get over time more flexibility for a lot of other people as well all right do we have a call this week we do all right let's hear it hi Cal my name's Danny longtime reader big fan I am a programmer full-time I also have a part-time gig teaching math the programming relates to Math education as well and although I don't want to to quote become a writer

I have a book in me about math education and I kind of wanted to ask you how one goes about sort of doing writing a book on the side you know I've read little things about like a king who wrote a book while he waited for his wife to come to dinner in just those little bits of time so I was just curious if you had any thoughts or tips or had heard things about how people manage the process proc Of just sort of kind of putting a book together uh not to make a living

at it and not on any really strict schedule but just wanting to you know get a book together thanks Cal appreciate everything well it's a good question uh and when it comes to non-fiction Danny people want the the picture you're painting there they want that to be true like what's interesting to people is this idea of like I have this habit where I'm kind of riding a little bit Every day or in these certain types of little Windows of time and over time this book comes together and then like hey this book's pretty cool and

then it gets published and kind of finds an audience it's actually not how non-fiction is written right there's a there's a there's a reality to how non-fiction is written and there's that story that that people like to tell because it's fun low stakes writing when you get time is like Fun but it's not how non-fiction gets written in non-fiction you sell the book first you sell the book based off a proposal first that there's a little bit of exceptions if you're talking about an academic press it's a little bit different right you might have the

book together for like it gets a little bit more complicated but for the most part of non-fiction you're selling the book first and then you're writing it so actually in Non-fiction unlike fiction the motivation to write is not a problem the motivation is I have a contract they've already given me the first half of the advance I'm going to have to give it back if I don't deliver him a book by this date it's due in eight months it's not fun like I'm just of like writing when I get a chance in the shed this

is a job now I've been paid to do a job I got to execute it it actually feels much more commercial and workmanlike than you Than you would imagine so writing non-fiction is not something where motivation really matters because you sell the book first so how do you sell the book well first you get an agent and and here the the process of getting an agent is not there's not a lot of Hoops you're jumping through right I mean there's something called a quering process where you're sending letters of a certain format you're emailing them

these days two agents who Are saying I want to find authors query me here here's the type of authors I support and you're sending them and it's a page long there's a format to it and they if they're interested like let's talk then if you get an agent they'll help you write a proposal they'll be the ones to sell it to a publisher then you'll go write the book so that's how that actually works people don't like that story because it front-loads the evaluation you're like Shoot I like the idea of writing this book but

the reality of the story is that like I could start querying agents this week and by next week know that none of them are interested and that could be the end of that dream right it because your mind kind of knows like I don't if we really have this fully worked out like are we the right people to write this book is the topic something that people really need to see I'm not quite ready yet for someone to Like evaluate this but that's really how non-fiction actually starts so it's uh it's like good news bad

news good news is you don't have to worry about tricking yourself to right or motivation or willpower procrastination the bad news is getting to step two of not fiction book writing is like really hard step one is actually selling the book first but don't run away from the reality right confront the reality if You can't get an agent for your book idea then use that as a forcing function to figure out well why not and that could help you find a better idea I wrote a like a kind of a well-known blog post about this

years ago back when I was still writing my student books and if you go to Cal search for like Cal newport.com and you know how to get a non-fiction book deal I wrote about everything I learned my first three books which are just like Straight up student focused non-fiction advice books I lay out all these ideas here is how it works here's what I learned to do it's funny Jesse I talked about in that article I reread it recently I'm like well look I'm not like a New York Times best-selling author who has sold millions

of books but I've still had a pretty good run and now you fast forward you know 10 years after that I have done all those things but back when I wrote that post I was that Was like this impossible future that I I I had not achieved and I was never going to achieve so I didn't really believe in myself back but that post gets I mean I was right in the thick of like just starting out as a writer was right after I sold my third book so go find that article and don't ignore

the reality and that the thing that trips up most people with this reality is I identify early on in that article to sell a book is what I learned From my agent 20 years ago you got to have an idea that people are going to feel like they have to read there's got to be a sizable audience that's going to feel that way and you have to be the right person to write it it's actually really hard to find something that satisfies all three like you can come up with a killer idea but like if

you're not a writer with any sort of connection to that idea then like you're not the right person to Write it or you could have an idea that you were the right person to write but it's so niched that no one cares it's not a big enough audience or you have an idea that like in theory a lot of people would be interested in this like it's relevant to a lot of people and you're the right person to write it but no one is going to feel like oh I have to read that book it's

not motivating Me Like O I got to see that it's hard to get all three but if you get all three it's hard Not to sell it because again agents are desperate for clients Publishers are desperate for books they just have to be viable ideas being written by viable people but it is not a world of people trying to reject stuff that you're trying to slip past it's a world where people want to accept stuff so your job is to get rid of the rough edges that makes it impossible for them to accept what you're

doing so read that article confront the reality of how the industry Works instead of the story you want to be true or you could write for fun but if you you really want to publish a book you got to confront the reality of how that industry actually works and if he takes the approach by writing for fun he can just self-publish and essentially nobody's ever going to read the book though right yeah no no probably no one will read it but you could write for fun you could write on like medium no one will read

it you could have uh a Substack but again if you don't already have an established reputation no one's going to read that either but you could do that or you could write for family or friends like that would be fun as well um fiction is better for this because in fiction you're supposed to write the book first so like you can just write fiction because in theory you're doing the same thing as Brandon Sanderson right you're Like yeah we all just write the thing first and see if it works so it's a little bit more

fulfilling non-fiction though you shouldn't delude yourself if you're you know 300 pages into your your your selfhelp Manifesto that you think is going to be brilliant you're not really following the path or in the world of professional writers that's just not the way that typically works all right so we got a case study here where people write the share their Personal experiences implementing the type of advice we talk about on this show this week's case study comes from Kelly KY says I am 26 years old and an athletic trainer by trade I recently transitioned away

from working in Collegiate Athletics and into a new pursuit of K to2 substitute teaching at my old job I became burned out after dealing with high administrative overhead expectations for having an online presence outside of working hours And limited free time to explore deep Pursuits I had trouble finding meeting outside of work despite your prudent advice I resigned from my old position with absolutely no plan for my next move I did some lifestyle Centric career planning however and found that substitute teaching could help me build career capital in the educational realm provide enough consistent structure

around which I could time block give me enough time off to explore new hobbies And pursue deep meaningful things so I took your advice to make my phone less appealing bring a book everywhere I go and limit my consumption of algorithmically curated articles post and content um I was doing great with my more analog lifestyle until a medical crisis happened in my family last week and then Kelly goes on about how like a lot of this stuff got difficult over this last week but I want to pause there to focus on the things that Kelly

did do That I really want to emphasize here and then I'll talk about briefly how to make sense of what's going on with her like right now with this this medical issue so what I like about this lifestyle Centric planning for the win now I would have done as she pointed out I would have done the life Center Career planning before I left the old job but okay it still worked out uh substitute teaching it's not the thing that like Pops to your mind necessarily As like oh God that's the dream job that's what I

want to do but it's the type of thing that can come up when you're doing Lifestyle Center Career planning what do I want my life to be like day today what are the things that matter doing that analysis and then looking at your specific opportunities and obstacles LED Cy to like if I did substitute teaching I'm working on this Capital here but I and I feel the Structure I need I don't have this extra stuff I have to do outside of my work and I can pursue these other things that are important to me and

I like how then Kelly also did a rebuilding of her Digital Life I'm going to bring books I'm going to make my phone less interesting and how that freed up a lot more time and focus and contemplation for pursuing things are interesting and probably reconnecting with herself more that's a fantastic example of the way I Talk about transforming your life which is not as exciting as like I just got this giant goal and I pursued it and everything was better but it made a real difference then Kelly talks about i w mention this briefly hey

things got tough recently there's like a big medical emergency in my family and if I won't read all the details but basically she's saying that put her on her phone all the time first to be in contact for obvious reasons with family members but Then once she was on her phone all the time she began using it more again understandably as digital pacification because it was very stressful what was happening in her family and as I talked about this I've learned this like during my own medical things recently there's like a numbing effect distracting effect

of just algorithmically curated content so the question she's asking finally is like well how do I deal with that I say well you're going through an Emergency like now's not the time to uh nitpick about like your digital habits now is also not the time to hold yourself to the same standards that you were holding yourself to the day before the emergency happened you will get back to that but like what you're doing now basically is think about this as crisis lifestyle C career planning what do I want during this crisis period what is my

idea of how I want to look back and say I got through this and it's going to Be less about I spend four hours a day on self-improvement right because no this is not your head space is not there and your time is distracted it's going to be more like I want to be the person people count on I want to be the person that people look back afterwards and say like Kelly was a rock during this and it was really useful it's going to be about leadership uh you're going to have to have a

lot more self-care maybe you want to start replacing phone selfcare with Other selfcare but you're not replacing it with like I want to go be productive but maybe uh I'm going to spend more time whatever going for like long runs or hot baths or going to like movies like stuff that you feel like is maybe a little bit more uplifting or less numbing that still helps distract you but it's like you have to do a whole separate lifestyle career planning for this period That's based on like how do I get through this in a way

that I'm Proud of and then when this crisis is over and it will be over go back to what you're doing before because it sounds great you're envisioning what's matters to you and you're pursuing that and you're building your own idiosyncratic path to a life that is uh in the moment something that you're proud of and in long term is opening up cool options so you're doing the right things Kelly don't be so worried about what's happening now keep focusing on who you Want to be and then get back to your bigger Vision when the

emergency is over all right we got a off the rails Tech Corner coming up all things AI but first let's hear from another sponsor hiring the right people quickly is important uh this is something I need to get better at Jesse I don't know if I remember this entirely correctly but the the way I I remember we started working together was Uh it involved me lurking around a CrossFit gym with a butterfly net and then I think I I caught you like jumped out from behind the bushes that's not the most efficient way to hire

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cloud bill in half if you move to oci for new US customers with minimum Financial commitment offer ends March 31st see if your company qualifies for this special offer at oracle.com Deep questions that's oracle.com de Questions speaking of deep questions and AI Jesse let's move on to our final segment all right so I want to talk a little bit about AI here and jam way too many ideas into a A short segment the thing I want to react to to kick things off is Ezra Klein's recent podcast I have this up here on the screen

for those who are watching instead of just listening this uh is Ezra and he is uh talking here with Ben Buchanan Biden Administration AI related official There's a quote from this podcast I want to read and then I want to use that to riff off of all right so here is the quote this is Ezra talking at the beginning of this recent episode of his podcast he said for the last couple of months I have had this strange experience person after person from artificial intelligent Labs from governments have been coming up to me and saying

it's really about to happen we're going to get artificial general Intelligence what they mean is that they have believed for a long time that we are on a path to creating transform transformational artificial intelligence capable of doing basically anything a human being could do behind a computer but better they thought it would take somewhere from 5 to 15 years to develop but now they believe it's coming in 2 to three years during Donald Trump's second term they believe it because of the products they're releasing right now and What they're seen inside the places they work

and I think they're right right so not surprising ly this podcast has many of my New York Times reading Coastal friends worried about AI like if you just kind of hear this wording casually and you're not in the AI industry and you're not a computer scientist this does kind of sound like uh we're a couple years away from Skynet right machines getting out of control machines making us unnerved about Turning them off machines that are causing consequences that uh we didn't anticipate so existential challenges but are we well no and I want to start by

saying there is a meaningful distinction between AGI and that other scenario which we should better call Super intelligence and I think it is is worth reviewing this distinction if for anything so you'll have a more accurate view of what's Coming and also have a more accurate view of other things that maybe are farther in the future that's worth keeping an eye on all right so AGI in the way Ezra is talking about here is actually you know it sounds like a big thing we achieve AGI something has happened when that happens we cross that threshold

something is worrisome it is really you could think of it as an arbitrary quality Threshold for the things that these language models are already doing this is actually what experts mean when they talk about AGI right now so like right now I can ask chat GPT to create a memo summarizing whatever historical factors relating to like the adoption of a certain type of technology and it will do this like pretty well it'll like pull on information it'll be written properly it'll be on the topic um probably not as Good as like having a researcher do

it but it would do it pretty well it's going to get better at this and at some point it'll get good enough at writing this memos we'll say like that's cross the AGI threshold like that's as good as like a good researcher would do it's like this arbitrary threshold so it's not that when we cross that threshold there'll be suddenly new things that artificial intelligence can do that it hasn't been able to do before it's the Things you already know it can do have gotten past the sort of arbitrary subjective threshold of like that seems

as good as like humans are doing it it's like kind of around there right now like it can write a pretty good memo it can write a pretty good joke it can write pretty good computer code but not quite as good as a person like soon it will be as good as a person that's AGI now this has real economic and security consequences the better these Models get at these things there are these real world consequences that get worse and Ezra and Ben get into these uh in the interview it really is about both e

security and economic consequences of this but when you recognize what AGI is is like an arbitrary quality threshold and stuff AI is already doing pretty well and not some sort of new capabilities we realize it is serious but it's not the type of thing that James Cameron's going to make a movie About let's talk though about the things that James Cameron did make a movie about and that is this idea of super intelligence of AI getting increasingly autonomous and smart until it's smarter than us as designers and then also sorts of sci-fi chaos happens this

is something that people are also worried about it is separate as we just established from AGI but it's not impossible so why don't we talk about That so here's the here's the conversation Ezra did not have which is like what what would be needed for super intelligence and are we on track to that or not so let's have that conversation now I begin to wrap up my conversation or consolidate my conversation of like what would be needed to create to quote like an original article from the 50s about Rosen bat's very first self-learning machine Learning

model the the perceptron electromagnetic perceptron was called the Frankenstein machine what would be needed for AI to become something that was James Cameron esque like oo either I feel uncomfortable turning it off or it's doing stuff I didn't intend for it and it's scary um there's four things you need and I call these the Frankenstein fact one understanding so the machine has to be able to understand uh complex Concepts know the reasoning behind them be able to like apply these understandings to create new information just have like an understanding of stuff and ideas and Concepts

number two is World modeling a system needs some sort of to do this some sort of uh model of the world around it and that it's in three it needs some sort of incentive system like here's what matters to me and what doesn't and for it needs some sort of actuation all of these things a Way of actually like impacting the world around it and so then the the what you need then is a system that uh has a state of the world using its understanding and its incentives can explore actions it can take through

actuation that will change its World state to something that is better in its incentive whatever its incentives are the things and values and that is like the action Loop that makes things interesting so if you don't have a world Like an updated understanding of yourself and the world around you where you are and what's happened to you there's no way for you to have any sort of like uh synthean because there's no memory there's no State nothing changes right and if you don't have incentives then your model's not your your system's not doing anything if

you don't have actuation there's no way for you to act on your incentives but you put those four Frankenstein factors together now You have the possibility of a system that goes AR and I think this is actually what people the lay person has in mind when they get worried about artificial intelligence not the economic or security consequences of machines continuing to get better at things are already doing even though that's really where the uh the Practical attention is right now all right so I have some good news about it and then uh a piece of

bad news so there's Some good news about these Frankenstein factors one all of the energy is just focused on one of those which is building models with understanding that's what these language models are right now is they have complicated understanding the concepts built through training World modeling incentives actuation like most of this right now is just left to the people using the models because there isn't any real direct Immediate economic incentive to to building those type of machines like having a model with lots of understanding that a human with their own incentives and model of

the world and here's what I want to do and I can take the results and apply them over here this is actually like the most efficient use of this technology right now so there is no push to build systems with complicated of the Frankenstein factors all of the Focus right now is Just on understanding modul some sort of like relatively minor scripted agent systems uh another thing that should make us feel better is that the Frankenstein factors two for four World modeling incentives and actuation these aren't trained they're engineered I think it's a really important

point I mentioned before but I just want to underscore it here the language models we're building for understanding are trained meaning that we have these large Transformer based neur networks we give them a lot of training data and they somehow adjust their internal wiring until they do what we ask them to do really well and we don't really know how they're doing it so they have this sense of an alien mind as I talked about in my New Yorker piece from a couple years ago or sort of like emerging abilities that can catch us off

guard or surprise us that's very unsettling we don't know how this thing works but it just starts Working and we kind of Watch what it can do these other factors World modeling incentives actuation any reasonable way we have thinking about building these these aren't systems we train and don't know how they operate they're just going to be hand engineered by people so we choose the incentives that gives us a lot of power about what these machines can do we choose like how the actuation works what actuation it can and can't do that gives us a

lot of Control over what these things can do remember the understanding that we have encoded in language models language models are inert they're giant matrices full of numbers that we can run through gpus to create probability distribution tables on tokens or token sequences they have no States no recurrence no Loops no ability to no autonomy right it's just a a large PL machine we turn to crank and out of the other side comes tokens so it a language model has no Ideas has no memory has no State can't do anything it is these other engineered

systems that could work with a language model if you want to have a fully autonomous sort of digital intelligence and those are hand engineered and they can be what we want to be and I point to the example often here of Cicero the multimodel system that played the game board game diplomacy very well noan Brown worked on this before he got hired A way to open AI this is probably one of the closest systems we've seen to having all the Frankenstein factors it used language models and it had incentives and it had actuation it could

actually like communicate with people over the Internet to play this game but because everything was engineered except for the model that like evaluated moves and created language they could say for example we don't want you to lie and because they could control the Actuation and the and the incentives and the simulation of the world they could just program in don't consider options with lies so there's this kind of nice this the Frankenstein factors have a lot of control outside of the understanding component I call this I AI or intentional AI the idea that if we're

going to build an autonomous type of system if and when we get to that we'll have more control over that than we imagine when we think about self uh the Unsupervised training of language models the other thing we should feel good about it's another idea I'm actually writing a paper about this right now we don't have any reason to believe that our colloquial notion of super intelligence is actually computationally tractable so we just have this idea of like well computers are doing these things pretty well so we can just Imagine a sufficiently powerful computer doing

thinking at a level that is sufficient significantly more complicated than what humans could ever do and then that computer would have power over us but this sort of cognition that computers are doing these are actual you could think of these like actual problems being solved by computers and here's something that every theoretical computer scientist knows right this is just ingrained into Us in like every Theory class we ever taken this goes back to Turing most things can't be done by computers most problems are unsolvable or if they're solvable they're computationally intractable so we don't actually

know that it is possible for there to be a computer program that is somehow representing something like a supercharged human intelligence that is like a fallacy of it's it's a it's a common philosophical Fallacy to imagine we can make computers more powerful so the things computers can do they'll be able to do increasingly more sophisticated complexity theorists know like our main frustration is like most things can't be solved most problems are just impossible or if it's possible it's it's computationally infusible it's actually the rare problem that a computer can efficiently solve so we have no

reason to believe that super intelligence uh is Actually computationally feasible like we might be hitting the limits of like what cognition a computer can do in any sort of like Regional computational efficiency like right I mean think about it might be true we're building the biggest possible computer systems that are feasible right now they might have tens of thousands of gpus and these giant custombuilt data centers like we can't really build these systems any larger we just could be pretty close to Some limit of like this is it right so it's a logical fallacy to

uh extend a curve things got smarter they'll keep getting smarter we don't know that's the case most problems are unsolvable now I'll throw in my final thing which is like yeah but you don't need a super intelligence for one of these autonomous systems built on the four Frankenstein factors to create a lot of problems in fact some of like the common scenarios We imagine of these things creating a lot of problems is more about like recurrent spiraled out of control I have some understanding which means I can do a lot of stuff so I'm A

system that has a language model I can use which means like for example I can analyze code and produce computer code and I'm pretty good at producing computer code and I have an incentive over here that says like I want to spread somehow like or it thinks that's What I want to do and I have a world model that's like trying to figure out it's evaluating different things we could do against those incentives and then like that model might simulate and figure out like oh the right thing to do is so like try to um

break through the security of this network and copy myself over here and then the program's going to do the same thing and then we have actuation I can actually like communicate on a network and copy code And it might not be anything super intelligent but you you turn this thing on you come back the next day and there's 100,000 copies of this bringing down computer networks around the world so like actually the real first concern with an autonomous style I think uh AI system is not going to be we get something alive we feel bad

about turning off it's not going to be Skynet super intelligence it's going to be like A supercharged power of a computer virus it's going to be like the Morris worm from hell that's a reference Jesse as Robert Morris in the early days of the internet when it was still really just something among universities a young graduate student uh at Carnegie Mel and Robert Morris wrote this very simple program and he was like oh it's going to spread Itself by exploiting I think it was a a flaw in the Unix inmail program like an Early email

program it could use to copy it self on the other computers and it was kind of just like an experiment and it ended up like taking over and crashing half the internet um that was the moris Swarm interestingly I ended up taking distributed systems with Robert Morris at MIT during my my graduate days and they always had this story that uh he wasn't allowed to do there's a big pistol shooting team at MIT they have a world class team and it was always like Robert Morris tried to sign up to do pistol shooting and Kun

it because he has a federal record from the Morris worm and the story doesn't check out like if you really think these pieces don't check out but it was like a big story uh his class was hard too distribut Sy through Robert Morris um anyways that that type of thing can happen so this is where I think the Frankenstein factors get out of control but okay now I'm G to Judo flip that Again into a positive which is that's not a bad way to bring attention to the to the potential danger of the Frankenstein factors

all coming together is like you have some supercharged moris worm type things happen that catches everyone attention and like whoa whoa we got to be much more careful about when we attach a world model and actuation to understanding maybe actuation needs to remain under human control and you know this is going to be some of the really Interesting sort of AI safety talks of a few years from now right now the focus is on AGI which again that's a scary term we should really just think about uh a quality threshold for stuff that language models

already do past which their potential Economic andity Security impacts become harder to ignore that's what we're focusing on now I think that's hard for a lot of people in their day-to-day life to get their arms around um but if we want to talk About autonomous AIS doing stuff it's the Frankenstein factors that'll matter and that's a whole other complicated story but it's one that I don't think is as scary because again that like I don't want to turn this off or it's Skynet there's so many it's there's so many things between us and that and

so many other things are going to happen first so basically Jesse I'm just ranting on AI here I'm covering a lot of ground this is like multiple different papers I Could write right now but I just uh I listened to Ezra's podcast and figured let's rock and roll so is the paper for Georgetown oh I don't know I'd write it for an academic Journal yeah yeah yeah it' be a Georgetown thing by the way I'm looking at this video from Ezra's podcast he now wears like a Blazer and I didn't even know that was him

well that's not him that's Ben bu yeah yeah yeah he has a beard now I've done a show a couple times it used to be more casual Uh yeah look at that he's got like he I should wear a blazer look they have a fireplace oh man we got to up our game New York Times has uped our game when I first did Ezra show back when he was still at Vox they used slate studios here in downtown DC and it was just like a nondescript just uh studio with sound eight crates and there's no

video back then so he we just sent a t-shirt or whatever and then during the pandemic I did a show and it's just at his house And yeah he would just like zoom in or whatever so he's up to his game um so what's an example of a problem that can't be solved like is there a god no I so so okay you have to formalize not to go down this Rabbit Hole too much much but you have to formalize what we mean by a problem um so like one way you can formalize a problem

is you can imagine like you your abstract computer algorithm is given an input like some sort of data or like a string and all You have to do is accept it or reject it is this good or bad and so in in this formulation this is like Mike cser's formulation of computability from his famous textbook I also studied with Mike ziper um in this formulation a problem is just a ction of inputs that you should accept so to solve a problem in this particular formulation it's just you have the ability of accepting any input that's

from that that set and rejecting anything that's not and Because these sets can be infinite like you can't just have it all hardcoded right if you just think of a problem that way the number of problems is what's known as uncountably infinite whereas the number of programs is countably infinite and these are two different sizes of infinity they're vastly different it's the difference between whole numbers and numbers with like infinite decimal places then and Turing did all this by the way in is Original paper uh uncomputable numbers and their application to the anung theory so

it's like famous 1930s paper that like laid out all these issues pre-computer he then said look we can look at we can identify specific problems that can't be solved so like here is the the the very first problem he identified that can't be solved that like actually is a problem that I of these like uncountably infinite problems most of them don't have like a short Summary they're just abstract problems but there's a lot you can identify that are specific problems that can't be solved the very first unsolvable problem identified by Turing was the halting problem

so he said like a imagine here's your challenge you have a program and the input we're going to give your program is two things another program and an input to that other program right so like here's some source code and here's like a file you're going to run The program on and your job as the program is to say if I run this input program on this input will it Al or will it Loop forever like if I run this on this will it eventually halt or will it Loop forever that's called the halting problem

um this turns out to be like a really this is a mathematically significant problem because they were trying to understand this problem of um does there exist a machine that can tell if there's a proof for every there's This there's this whole thing about uh mechanically Computing proofs for math problems but the because it's before computers but put that aside he pretty easily proved that can't be solved and he did it by contrad you said like let's assume you had a program that could always solve that I'm going to use that as a sub routine

in another program that contradicts itself so like that was the very first problem we identified that couldn't be solved there is no unified Does this program halt program um and now you know there's whole textbooks on this or this or that but most problems can't be solved and so we don't know where super intelligent falls into this universe of problems so and then of the problems that can be solved most can't be solved uh computationally efficiently so there might be problems like in theory yes you can solve this problem but if we can't solve it

in a number of uh like Computing steps that can be Expressed as a polinomial the input size it's something that the most powerful computers in the world will run until the heat depth of the universe will never solve so like most problems that can be solved are computationally intractable so like what we're really talking about when we talk about solving problems is problems that can be solved and can happen to be solved in like a relatively small amount of time and that's like a pretty small collection of Things and those are the things we do

with computers but super intelligence I don't know it's all may it's not I took Theory with Mike zipser he was the chair of the math department MIT he's a cool guy all right well anyways uh that's enough geeking out I don't know what's going to what's losing more viewers all the basketball references from the in-depth last week or the Mike sipser references about computability and complexity Theory this week but between Those two I think we're down to like three listeners and they are like MIT graduates who love basketball so there we go uh so we'll

be back next week with another episode thank you for listening and until then as always stay deep hey if you like today's discussion of minimally viable productivity systems you might also like episode 342 in which I talk about the good life algorithm a mechanical way of trying to figure out what's going to make your life more Meaningful check it out I think you'll like it so I want to talk today about the desire to build a good life one that's focused on what you care about one that feels meaningful