How To Quickly Improve Focus & Productivity | Cal Newport

All right today I want to talk about Focus first however a quick logistical note you may notice I am not dressed as normal I am in a sweatshirt and producer Jesse is not dressed as normal either and that is because we are recording this right before Halloween and I decided to dress up as producer Jesse for Halloween and producer Jesse dressed up as me if you are new to this Channel and just stumbled across this clip and Have no idea what we're talking about good for you it's all nonsense you don't need to know all

right let's get back to what we're going to talk about today which is focus clearly I talk about this a lot I care about this a lot I even wrote a whole book about this called Deep work but simply distraction-free concentration is just a powerful powerful tool it produces quality results quick it's a source of real creativity it's deeply Human focusing however is hard especially in our current moment of digital distraction now when I talk about becoming better at focus in my books and on this show I have a standard what I would call long-term

protocols a standard set of long-term protocols for over time becoming better at focus and making it a part of your life over the years these protocols have uh call last around four in particular brain trading workload limits communication reform and Distraction moderation you've heard me talk about all these before but someone asked me the other day what they could do to get better at Focus quickly like get some improvements right away tomorrow the day after and I think this is a great question like you can't become an expert focuser and have your whole life built

around Focus overnight but you can get better at it overnight and I think having improvements quickly could be an important source of Motivation for people looking to make longer term changes so I love this idea of what can we do to get better at this key skill right away okay so I came up with five protocols for short-term improvements to your focus meaning these protocols work right away we get immediate benefits from all right so let's get into this protocol number one clearly differentiate your focus blocks so when you are working you have To imagine

there's a bit 01 when it's turned on you're doing something that requires focus when it's turned off you're not and you just have a simple set of rules for you treat Focus work the key rules being uh no distraction no email no slack no phone no web browser having a clear differentiation will right away make a big difference when you try to integrate focused activities with other things you're Doing uh you're going to be more distracted if you are saying for example yeah I'll just check my email a certain amount of times today to keep

up with it and you're working on something kind of hard and you haven't clearly segregated that focused work from other things you're going to have this constant fight with your own mind well should we check email now what about now what about now well shouldn't we check in to see like what they're saying on johnboy about the Yankees loss last night well this would be a good time to do that why not right when you have clearly differentiated Focus blocks you don't have to have these arguments the only argument you have is do I respect

the focus block rule or not so it's a simple thing but just differentiating for this specific amount of time which I have clear clearly specified 9 to 10:30 11 to 11:45 for the specific clearly specified duration of time I'm using my focus Rules that simple change really helps you get more out of those Focus blocks all right protocol number two Focus less here's the thing focus is great but if you get too ambitious like yeah I I want my life to be like the the the writer Robert Caro and I'm just going to spend eight

hours a day slowly turning pages in an archive and writing on a typewriter if you get overly ambitious you're setting yourself Up to fail when you fail your mind can give up on the whole project hey we try this Focus thing that's not for us when you have an overly ambitious plan you might also suffer from your mind realizing your plan is overly ambitious this is not sustainable we're not going to be able to focus for 6 hours today and even if we have 6 hours free today we're not going to have that free tomorrow

um so why begin right your brain is a plan evaluation machine and When it doesn't trust your plan it withholds motivation so it sounds counterintuitive but for a lot of people who are new to focusing being less ambitious is going to help you in the long term hey I just want to do an hour want to get an hour done every day right that seems very tractable your mind says I believe this could work you're likely to succeed at it momentum builds I was looking at a book the other day reading this book called Lost

in Thought and it had a some quotes that the author I think her name is Zena Herz had some some quotes early on from two books I know well but I forgot these these calculations in the books uh so she talked about oh God what's the book called I think it's called the intellectual life written by a Dominican uh frier sir Ines I'm saying his name wrong anyways I quote this in deep work it's a book from a while back about how to have An an intellectual life and maybe look that up just to see

if it's the intellectual life um supposedly according to Zena Herz in this book I missed this part the author says yeah your your goal should be uh like an hour a day if you can dedicate an hour a day to like really focusing on books and thinking you'll have an intellectual life the other book she mentions is how to live on 24 hours a day by Arnold Bennett a book of which I have a first Edition from the early 20th century a listener sent it to me um supposedly in there Bennett's argument for what you

need to have an intellectual life is he said you should aim for 90 minutes a day that should be enough but three days a week maybe a little more anyways they had formulas for this formulas for how much time you need to focus to build up like an intellectual life the key point being these times weren't big is it the intellectual life Yeah by SE changes Yeah so I always pronounce that name wrong it's a fantastic book what does it say it's hard to find what the original copy is from I'll check it out I'll

yeah it's new editions it's a fantastic book uh it was in not not to go out in a side here I'll do this briefly 1992 that's a a newer Edition probably I think um I had a cool version of it I I had stumbled across it early in my career at Georgetown in the library Stacks just like wandering through the stacks and I Found it and I read it for those who know Georgetown um there's like a patio outside of the ly Center that overlooks you have like the business school to your right and overlooks

down to the football field I remember reading this outside uh and taking notes on it and then it helped shape my thinking around deep pork it's a cool book The in21 1921 so I read like a 1921 edition of this book from the library it was very inspirational to me at the time I mean I Was like a first year Professor it was like the such a good book to find it was all about the mechanics of how to be an intellectual and some sense deep work is inspired by that and so deep work is

not about how to become an intellectual but how to become a deep worker but it's very similar like how do you craft a life built around your mind yeah yeah so that was a very influential find for me all right uh enough digression protocol number three use a focus Space have a different place you go to do Focus work I don't care what it is just make it different kitchen table if you're working from home uh conference room Reserve ve a conference room at your office you know the the the ones you can reserve when

you have to do Zoom meetings or whatever Reserve those just just like an hour at a time for uh a focus block every day going to a different space makes it much easier to focus now if you really want this to Work don't bring your phone right now people are sort of getting the DTs a little bit don't bring your phone and if you're working on your laptop deactivate Wi-Fi when you go in there now we're really cooking you're in like a conference room you're outside on your patio or a kitchen table you have no

internet connection it's just an hour um right away you're going to get a big hit to your ability to focus protocol number four produce Artifacts and what I mean by this is especially if you're new to focus you do not want to just say for this block I'm going to think it's going to be me alone with my thoughts like I'm used to doing that now but I've been doing this professionally for a couple decades uh for most people it's difficult to maintain Focus your mind wanders it can be frustrating so I recommend you should

be producing some sort of tangible artifact as you go of your focus section Typically this is something you're writing you're writing and shaping notes about your thoughts and then refining those notes uh when I would work on math proofs for example during deep uh work sessions I had a notebook and I'd be working through my thoughts what about this proof this equation doesn't work let me label where this equation breaks what about this let me Analyze This okay let me now this this this uh proof strategy failed let me say where when You're leaving an

artifact like this it focuses your thinking it gives you a scaffolding for your thinking which makes it much easier to proceed and it helps you sidestep a pernicious effect that we don't even know that's happening when we're trying to do intellectual work which is our mind likes to save energy so often it'll be sort of an Intuition or insight and you begin to get that that biochemical feeling of aha like o I'm kind of on to Something but your mind doesn't actually fully articulate that Insight it just gets close enough to it I think we're

near to something good that you get that good feeling and you sort of move on feeling like I did good thinking but you didn't actually finish that insight and pull it through to a completed thought which can actually take a lot more work after the fact you already feel like you're on to something when you're you're taking notes you have these Physical artifacts it forces you to write it all out this what happened a lot with me when I was working on a proof or like an algorithm analysis i' like oh I think that works

but then I'd have to force myself to write out why it works and do the math and a lot of times I feel I discover like oh I didn't really have that right or this Insight it seems good but I actually don't know how to apply it yet and here's where I'm stuck and there's always resistance to Do that but that's what actually helps you I I think of it as like the head of your thought is poked above the ground you have to pull the whole thing out of the ground you have to harvest

the thought before you can in this metaphor I guess cook it and eat it if this is like a vegetable or something and created an artifact as you go along really helps you do that so it gives you structure to your thinking and it helps you finish out your thoughts 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 SL slow I know you're going to like it check it out now let's get back to the video all right protocol number five walk we are good by we I mean humans at Thinking while we walk now this might be because we have a a long evolutionary history of covering great is walking we're bipedal we can't uh we're not meant to Sprint for short distances and then rest like an analou would um we're not meant to stay relatively stationary in one place and occasionally

moving we we are made to be very efficiently to be able to walk we can walk all day long we can walk in the the heat of the African savanas where Our evolutionary past comes back from uh we're we're not heavily furred we can sweat to change our temperature our hips are set up in a way that has a very efficient bip bipedal locomotion we're a walking animal so I I think it makes sense that we're very good at thinking while we're walking I also think there's an argument to be made for walking suppresses certain

circuits just because it gets your mind automatic portions of your mind working on the taking the Steps which sort of suppresses some circuits in your brain and actually freeze you from sort of random brain distraction I can always think through a thought much more clearly walking than sitting still there's also probably something about the sensory experience when your brain is seeing novel sensor scenes you're in the woods it's a tree look at this bush it's really bright and it contrasts nicely With the the stream over here that novelty opens up brain circuits which allows for

more creative Insight whereas if you're just at your same desk you always work there is nothing novel and you might entrench in sort of the same circuit and have a harder time being creative so it's an easy thing to do say okay I'm going to work for an hour and a half on something focused spend the first half hour thinking about it Walking right away you're going to feel smarter you're going to have better thoughts you're going to enjoy the experience more all right so those are my five protocols let me go through them again

clearly differentiate your focus blocks from non-focus blocks Focus less use Focus space produce artifacts along the way and spend more time walking there we go Jesse I don't know why I Call them protocols this time I often use that term because I'm a computer scientist but also Andrew huberman uses that term so maybe that means we'll get uh two million views on this video when you were at MIT you talked about how there were the allstar brains who just were like above and beyond everything do they do this type of stuff or do they just

not need to is it kind of like professional athletes who are just so Elite and eat whatever They want and still be fine no that's a good question uh they would do a lot of this stuff I mean they there were sitting still thinking there was a lot of that um but there was a lot of motion in thinking so there's a a mentor of mine uh a professor from epfl in Switzerland shout out to rashed he was a visiting professor at MIT kind of early on in my career he was really big on runs

so you would do he did his best thinking running uh because the motion Sort of just helped him think the problem was he was in much better shaped than I was so he'd be like yeah let's uh let's go for a run and we can like work on this proof be too far away seven miles like a fast pace he like yeah the key is you should be running um fast enough to talk but not sing and I was like I can't breathe what about not not being able to breathe is that is that that's

where I am right now so that's the problem with Running so I think for him for someone who's in really good shape you know a to them a slow jog is like a walk to other people like it's not really taxing you but man I don't know how many insights I got out of those runs but yeah no I saw a lot of that um definitely people had very specific ways they took notes on like how they built out notes on what they were working on I think that was a big thing as well do

your current students ask you about this a Lot um no but I am talking about it uh soon so we we have this new class at Georgetown for The Graduate students called research methodologies and it's a class where it's like just learning how to be like a researcher and I'm giv a talk to this class and I'm going to talk about these things yeah so we we should talk about these things more at MIT it was just assumed it was so Sinker swim it was like yeah you better figure this stuff Out because otherwise you're

out and so people were like highly and I would learn from mentors like the one I just talked about who these weren't students these were professors they taught me all these rules about okay here's how you work on a problem uh like I learned from uh Rasheed for example example in theory problems you start with the simplest possible formulation of the problem uh we will call it a toy version so like you've simplified a lot of the Complexities uh you've made the model very simple and it something that just gets to like the core of

the thing that you're interested in it's like solve the toy problem understand the toy problem and then you can add back complexities okay now that I have this Insight what happens when we make the model more standard or we add other things to it and you end up with something that's kind of complicated and contingent but it's like starting with the the the core Problem so like for example I worked on this paper with him way back when I think the title if you want to look this up uh theoretical computer scientist out there I

think the title of the paper was on malicious Moes and suspicious suspicious sensors and it was a paper about um trying to communicate wirelessly in like an abstract model um when you had maybe like a malicious Source nearby that could be trying to it could like jam your signal or try to Trick the receiver and the thinking something else was going on like how do you communicate securely um on a shared channel right and he simplified it I remember this we simplified it down to like let's just start with time is in rounds and my

my entire goal is there's uh I'm there's two s there's a cender and receiver Alice and Bob and Alice has a single bit it's either zero or one and Alice just wants Bob to figure out is her pit zero or one And we'll make time in like exact rounds and in every round like Alice can send something uh or not and in every round the uh there's one adversary we'll call it Charlie um can also send something or not and if they both send something it's they kind of like Collide like you just detect noise

like we simplified it as much as possible and this really like deep insight about the amount of communication required to jam communication this jamming game this This like whole like really deep Insight came out of looking at the simplest possible problem and then like a lot of papers have been written on this or whatever but uh yeah I guess the point being how you think matters uh not just like how you focus but how you approach problems how you approach articles how you approach books a lot of this information is often implicit and not made

explicit and you kind of just have to figure it out and other people's Don't so I really love efforts to try to mhm surface uh thinking like I have this idea for a short book I want to write at some point called in defense of thinking like a Manifesto and really get into thinking as a skill and there's all of these like skills and different types of thinking there's different ways to do it as this whole like Lively Rich actual activity and not like we think about it now it's just this like vague thing like

I don't Know I'm just in my head thinking about things so I've spent my life thinking for a living so I think a lot about thinking all right well we got some good questions coming up I should say before we get there Jesse I don't know how you wear these sweatshirts all the time they're they're warm well you get really hot I get really cold in the studio yeah it's crazy like right now I'm cold but you you run hot when you well you're talking a lot I do I do run hot like to Me

this is what I would wear outside I would say like down to 25 degrees Fahrenheit I hope you don't faint during this recording I going to make it nonsense according to the Arctic I have the air conditioning blasting too that's why that's why Jesse's Cold that's his punishment for making me wear a sweatshirt all right let's uh we got some questions coming up but first let's hear from one of our Sponsors I want to talk about our friends at Zach do an app that I just used the other day let me explain why zakok is

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grammarly For free at grammarly.com podcast that's grammarly.com podcast all right Jesse let's do some questions who do we got first first question is from confused you stated no time blocking outside of work but my life outside of work is more complex than work itself it's where I'd like to be more productive how should I manage family time friends volunteering in varied commitments and a side hustle well uh first I'll make a a Clarification in case this is helpful the main thing I want people to avoid is time blocking all their time if you time block

all of your waking hours uh it's too exhausting right it's too much to to remain in the time block mindset and you're going to give up you're also going to stress yourself out some people are in situations however where it's not like a traditional here's my job from 9: to 500 and then I have time off after my job People have unusual situations maybe they have work that happens in the evening or split shift work or they're not working a traditional job and actually like the main thing they're doing is like organizing what's going on

in their house and a lot of these efforts happen not during the day that's the easy time it's like in the afternoons or evenings this is where I think this more generalized rule helps your goal is not to time block all of Your time so for some people this might mean actually earlier in the day is untime blocked but this complicated part of my day like 3: to 7 I really time block that because that's what gets complicated the other thing you can do so let's say you have a 9-to-5 job and you're time blocking

it because you need to do that to keep your job some other things you can do to help control your life outside of work um is one make use of your Calendar so a lot of the things you mentioned like doing things with friends you're volunteering uh some side hustle activities these probably are happening at set time so that that's on your calendar that's fine right you look at your calendar what am I doing this evening okay here's my events um I know when they happen that's fine that's just your calendar that's not time blocking

every minute of your day you can Autopilot schedule regular work like on a side hustle or Hobbies I always do it in this place on these days at this time that makes sure this work gets done but it's not the same as building a an ad hoc time block plan on spec for every evening knowing that like Tuesday and Thursdays you leave work early and you work on your side hustle at the local coffee shop and that's just your routine is not the same as time blocking knowing you always work Out like right after work

before dinner starts that's an autopilot routine it's not the same as time blocking because um it's just something you do it's not you saying okay I built this onpc schedule for the next few hours that I have to follow that that takes more work um finally it's okay to sketch a plan for your evening just don't be super minute by minute precise like okay before I pick up the kids from baseball I want to try to get this done and and tonight After dinner remember to take out the garbage recycling you can just kind of

sketch out these plans to help guide you without having to have like every minute spoken for so really our principle here is do not time block your whole day uh every waking hour but there's still a lot of structure you can have you don't have to just have a big to-do list after you're work days is over and just rock and roll you can still have a lot more structure than That when they do work on the side hustle and they go to the coffee shop say on Tuesdays they should probably still time block that

right um yeah so if it's an autopilot schedule you just know that's when you do it right so I I I see that as different than time blocking but you're saying like within that block that block yeah I think that's fine okay CU your side hustle is work okay so I think That's fine yeah if you're like okay 90 minutes at the coffee shop what am I doing um if it helps the time block that out some I think that's that's fine all right what do we got next next question is from Anonymous I'm 25

and live at home I discovered you on YouTube from your guidance I now schedule times for gaming no more YouTube browsing and reading is my main form of entertainment I just started taking some more classes Online from my bachelor and computer information systems I got your time block planner but I have trouble prioritizing what to do there are so many things I want to get done I like this idea that for more people were the the last YouTube channel they ever discovered because like once they listen to us they don't browse on YouTube anymore um

and you know my advice for YouTube is treat it like a library or a cable TV station right so Look things up that you want to learn more about have a stable of shows like mine that are bookmarked that you watch the same way that you might have used to watch The MythBusters on Discovery Channel these are programs I like now it's it's funny not to do in a side Jesse but like last night we were watching a YouTube video uh two different YouTube videos maker YouTube videos so a mark Rober video and a hacksmith

video and and my wife was Watching with me in the boys and what she remarked which is absolutely right is they are converging on exactly the production style of like Circa 2000's cable reality TV so when you watch some of these videos now it's just like watching one of these uh reality shows you know at 3 o'cl in the Discovery Channel you know um the cuts the Talking Heads the like kind of force zaniness like we're all having fun the it so it's interesting It's like YouTube the the higher funded YouTube is now basically rediscovering

classic cable TV like reality competition program Styles um anyways back to your question all right so here's why I usually recommend the people who are going from unstructured to structured for the first time first of all congratulations the structured life is much better better than the unstructured life it's one of my Preparation steps for the Deep life more generally right we've talked about this before if you want to cultivate a deep life you have to get your act together first and this requires practicing and cultivating discipline organizing all the stuff you have to do in

your time uh and then I have a third one in there about taking back control of your brain so you're you're sort of on track to what you need to do to to cultivate a deep life here's what I recommend that People who are new to this three things number one autopilot the things that are most important it sounds like you have a lot of flexibility in your schedule that's great you don't want to just come to each day and say what are the things I want to do today what's important to me you want

to autopilot the important for you that should mean autop piloting your time for your online classes if you autopilot that time you can attack these classes much more systematically and get Through them much faster actually you'd be surprised by how many classes you can complete when it's like every day for 90 minutes uh typically I tell people who are new to structure to also autopilot Fitness or exercise in there and something Community oriented every week I have this like volunteer thing I do so you get the big rocks to use a step cvy term automatically

happening on your schedule next you want to use multiscale planning for everything Else this prevents you from having to Grapple moment to moment with the full scope of your ambition so once you realize like I can control my time and as you say here there are so many things I want to get done it could be paralyzing when it it's you know 10:00 on Tuesday oh my God which of these things should I do I'll never get through them all multiscale planning cures you of this Paralyzation because uh you don't have to think about everything

all the time at the scale of the Season or the quarter you're figuring out your big goals like what do I want to do this fall then when you make your weekly plan you're saying okay which of these things do I want to make sure reflected in my weekly plan you're moving around appointment scheduling some stuff on your calendar and then when you get to your day you have your autopilot Schedule you have the stuff you already add on there in the weekly plan you're really just time blocking your day you're looking at your task

list it's much less fraud so use multiscale planning to I would say confine your Ambitions so that it's not constantly rattling your brain the third thing avoid overload it is tempting as you gain more structure in your life to try to fit in a lot of things to try to catch up all At once you'll burn yourself out this way keep your schedule reasonable keep seeking out time for gratitude and awe and just straight up enjoyment of things you going to see the sunset the long walks the going to the concerts that sense of appreciation

of life is going to be the fuel to help you keep pushing on making your life more interesting because it's exactly this type of appreciation and Gratitude for cool things you're doing that you want more of so don't fill all your time with productive activity balance the productive activity with the enjoyment of the fruits of these these efforts all right who we got next next question is from Seb I work in Consulting where there are lots of sha meetings how can I do deep work to increase my job skills if my days are filled with

meetings Seb reached out to Me he was actually in Asia before and that's where there was a lot of meetings then he moved to Germany and the same problem occurred there oh this was the the guy who was saying but in Asia there was overtime yes yeah and in Germany there's not right so yeah so it's more structured in Asia was more structured like well the meetings you're being compensated for if this gets in the way of other work and Germany's more Western where it's like nah yeah Hy pror High m Um so said my

short-term advice is schedule meetings with yourself so if you're in a meeting driven job then just have some meetings on your calendar for deep work cuz you have to keep in mind you're being bombarded with meetings you say yes to a lot of them you say no to others some days are more full than others and you have to move meetings forward to try to find time for them so it's not like you're going to notice a Difference if you introduce some new meetings into this mix it's all still going to be you trying to

fit meetings into your days and some days are more full than others no one else is going to notice the difference either but if your mindset is in one of meetings if that is the fundamental structure of work at your company you have meetings we talk about things your calendar is your destiny then just put other cool stuff on your Calendar so I have this three days a week 90minut meeting it's with myself and it's when I work deeply on this project but I treat it like any other it's on my calendar I treat it

like any other appointment if we use a shared calendar in our company so that we can see when people are available that just shows up as a time when I'm busy don't make a big deal about it don't preach about it but you know we we have this tendency and modern knowledge work the Somehow value meetings with other people above the time we spend doing stuff with oursel and this is an inversion of reality meetings are typically supporting the efforts that eventually have to be done on our own through Focus so the focus has to

be very very important you can't just talk about the work you have to do it as well so it's this weird value we have about what matters is meeting with other people so Schedule meetings with yourself um two try to reduce meetings I know that's scary in a meeting culture but there's a few ways to do that one just say no to more meetings you don't have to say yes just because it comes your way you know people throw out media invites all the time about all sorts of things especially if they're just like hey

you might be interested in this you thought you might be interested in this why don't you why don't you listen in Just like no I'm I'm my calendar's full it's a busy week I've hit my workload limit I'm trying to cut back on it people don't care uh two use office hours so if if if there's a one-off meeting like hey let's discuss this thing because it's too complicated to do via email for example if you just have a set time twice a week you can defer more of those to that set time so has

a much smaller footprint uh and then use protocol and Processes more don't let people to the extent that this is possible don't let people use standing meetings as a replacement for real process thinking and time management don't let people say okay we're going to work on this project I worry we're not going to make progress so here's what we're going to do I'll put a standy meeting on our calendar so I know at least every week we'll talk about it now I don't feel stressed to progress won't Make progress right that is a weak way

to organize work like no no no if we're going to work on this project let's take a moment to figure out how we're going to do it what are the steps who's going to do what how do we find out who needs what from when where are we going to keep the information what are our deadlines for different things to happen like how do we actually want this work to Unfold not just let's just have a meeting and and small talk for 20 minutes and then do 5 minutes of talking or if you need say

look uh if we just want to check in come to my office hours once a week like hey how's it going uh or say I'll stop by your office once a week just to poke my head in and be like hey how are we doing going okay okay any questions you have anything that prevents a meeting that takes 30 minutes to an hour squatting there on your Schedule is probably going to be Advanced you can cut down on meetings but then ultimately just make what you do with yourself your deep work and meeting is as

well got a lot of meetings in my life these days Jesse do you like that no want to write and be left alone um I use a lot of office hours though yeah all right what do we got next next question is from Carson what are your all-time favorite Books oh well longtime lists know I can't do favorites like in any category um movies books Foods I am incapable it's not like an intentional Choice I'm incapable of rank ordering things I like I don't know why there's there's probably we could come up with a a

term about it like ordinal phobia something like that uh anti- ordination theism no maybe maybe ordinal anti- oralism ordinal phobia uh I just can't Do it all right I did however in preparation for answering this question I took a bunch of categories just looked at my shelf uh I took a bunch of categories and like what's a book that I that was influential to me in that category all right now this is not exhaustive because I was literally just looking at my bookshelf but I'll give you some ideas all right in religion a book that

was very influential to me was Karen Armstrong's The case for God this sort of came out during the period of the new atheist Richard Dawkins chrisopher Hitchens Etc and it gives a much more interesting I guess presentation of religion and uh the time in which religion emerged and how it was pre-enlightenment time and the issues that happen when you begin to combine post-enlightenment understandings of epistemology with the way religion operates really powerful book those Ideas have affected me they show up again and again in all sorts of of theological and religious writing and apologia but

I thought this book was just deep ideas well written very interesting it starts with like the cave paint like the book opens with like the earliest impulses towards religion it's pretty cool all right when it comes to the Arts uh Cinema speculation by Tarantino fantastic book just like in the mind of a movie Enthusiast and just how they think about movies and their pieces and their values very well written collection of essays and Sydney lumet's uh making movies fantastic book about film making where he he uses his own movies he looks at the different aspects

of filmm and uses his own movies for each to talk about his experience history I remember John Adams by David Maka being very influential when I first read that just because it was the way the narrative momentum and the psychological realism I know just fantastic book it won the pullit her so look I'm not the first to say it Lincoln's virtues by William Lee Miller weird i' never read something like that before it's like an ethical biography of Lincoln and has written in this like sort of interesting style very influential uh ideas idea books you

are Not a gadget by jiren lenir that was very influential I mean just like the idea of even like the pic and the single person and the exploring of ideas from different angles and trying to wrap your intellectual arms around the sort of complex emerging phenomenon that was an influential book uh I talk a lot obviously about Walden by thow I think one of the original big idea books and it should be read as an idea book I mean using ourselves to death by Neil Postman It's like you not a gadget but without the insane

Parts postman's a more of a careful thinker than jiren is um the jiren's a very fun thinker and Shop class of soulcraft by Matt Crawford I think it was 2008 maybe 2009 that was very influential when I read it was like a really big idea and it was new and it changed the way you understood things and it was humanist and it was a cool book finally in philosophy I was very influenced by all Things shining by Herbert dry and Shan dorren Kelly that's a cool book I I pull from it some in deep work

but it's worth a read on its own to sort of understand our current moment and how we see the world differently for example than someone living during the age of the the the the heroic age of the ancient Greeks and it's you know I thought it was a very fascinating thought-provoking book so I don't know if those are my favorites but those are all influential Books to me in in category so you you could do worse than the to read any one of those books all right what do we got next we have our Corner

ah slow productivity Corner let's hear some theme [Music] music Jesse I think we should sell sponsor space on my big white t- mug I think you should kind of like the patches in MLB just have like an element logo right Here and the um the logo on the helmet yes the like I was trying the Yankees had this St everyone had it I don't know what St is I didn't either but every team had it in the MLB playoffs so in some sense that's been effective advertising because we all know it in some sense it's

not because I have no idea what it is but um all right slow productivity corner for those who don't know we like to have one question each week that draws from my most recent book Slow productivity to L start of accomplishment without burnout if you like this show you need to buy that book about half of what we deal with is Rel to that book so check that out wherever books are sold all right Jesse what is today's slow productivity Corner question it's from Tisha I run a small high-end consulting firm that experienced a lot

of hires this past year they went from four to 14 people I read slow productivity and decided to Incorporate its principles with the new hires it all worked great however as a business owner I'm still stressed and have tons of work how can I apply the principles to myself to ease my burden yeah sometimes it's harder for the the owner of the business than the people that works for them because as as the owner you can kind of control what's been given to the people below you you can kind of give them processes and structures

that helps but you're the Back stop so everything that needs to get done that's not being handled by the other people of the company like eventually you have to do it you're also the intake so much new things Business Development issues that need to be solved vendors that have Solutions like come through you so it's like the hardest position the hardest position the good news is you have plenty of autonomy the bad news is you have a lot Of work right a couple things that I think help business owners separate active projects from waiting projects

right so workload management you can't say no to most of these things because the the things you're working on are just things the business has to do but just be really clear about I'm only actively working on these three things and once I hit a milestone with one of these I'll pull something else in so it reduces the number of things around Which you're doing active administrative overhead that will help help you got to make sure that the people collaborating with you on the work that you're waiting on know that right so it could be

a vendor so you're the owner of a company one of the things you have to do is upgrade your email service and whatever like uh I gotta talk to the rep from Google workplace and see if they have a solution for us it's it could be a pain and they kind of reached out you're like Yeah I want to do this but it's not active it's on your list it's like two things away from your active projects tell that vendor we're going to work on this uh it's in Waiting status I have two things ahead

of it I will email you as soon as this moves to active and then we'll set up a time the the chat right so when people are trying to set up meetings for example or sending you emails about stuff you're waiting on don't set up the meeting don't reply With the answers instead say look I'm on this this is in my waiting queue when it gets to my active queue which I which I estimate will happen within this time frame I will reach back out to you and we'll set this up an email and I'll

be giving this a lot of my attention will make progress so only working actively on a few number of things a time is going to make your work seem much less overloaded because you're putting the overhead of Everything in the waiting list on pause uh to separate your job in the different roles and treat it like you have multiple part-time jobs there's like an administrator role of like trying to run the company there's a strategy role I'm overseeing the teams and making the decisions about the prod and like what we're going to go with um

and maybe there's like a I don't know whatever role there'd be there's a technical role you know making sure that We have the the best technology or whatever treat those as separate jobs with their own task list on their own board you have different times different days for working on these different roles this will prevent the context switching that's going to make you feel more harried when you're working on strategy you're just working on strategy for that morning and you don't think about anything else when you're working on administrating stuff that's all You're doing and

you can really pick up speed and start getting a lot done this also will make delegation easier later because you've divided things in the roles and now it's much easier when you hire that coo to say like great this role I can just move over to you and it makes it easier to delegate what you're doing finally create processes stuff that happens regularly should have a regular way it happens this type of report we always Produce here is how it works it's like clockwork the draft goes here in this folder I sign off of it

digitally by this close a business on this day you send it to the designer who has all the instructions she needs to post it to the client web page or whatever it is make processes for things that happen regularly so that their footprint on your life and time is very predictable and they're not just another thing floating you're trying to minimize the Active floating things you're trying to juggle and have to trade emails and slack about you're the owner so you can push for as many processes as you want the only cave out there is

make sure that the people involved in the process are involved in the details of the process and feel like they have the ability to suggest changes without buyin people will resist the process with buyin that can make your life a lot easier all right so yes I Want to validate it could be much harder to be slowly productive as the owner of a business than as an employee of a business or as like a solo entrepreneur but it's still possible you've got plenty of autonomy you got to just deploy that to implement the right sort

of things all right so I think we have a call this week right Jesse we do all right let's hear what we Got hey K and Jesse just listened to the tech minute segment um from this week's show and I have to say as someone working in edtech and in analytics uh my first um inclination when I heard the um direction that that was going was my first thought was oh my goodness in a feature with um visual headsets as the three um window desktop of the future my first thought was the ey tracking that's

required to make that Tech possible will um really open up the floodgates for um Work from remote um surveillance and some of the um Mouse jigglers that we're seeing to give the proxy for useful effort um will just essentially Skyrocket so uh anyway I was just curious what your thoughts were on that that was immediately where my brain brain went when you started in on the uh discussion and I just wanted to see what your thoughts are um if we're living in a future with um glasses on everywhere we go especially at work um when

we put On our headsets um what what kind of feature does that present for us um as far as proxy for Meaningful effort um will eye tracking really be useful um in that future of work and and kind of what are your thoughts as it relates to that thanks for the Pod and thanks for all your work bye all right well great question though first of all Tech minute no no no Tech corner there's a huge different Tech minute that's a whole other thing we call that segment the Tech corner um all right it's a

good question uh it is a concern not a deep concern and let me explain why when we look at the current trajectory of the virtual screen uh apparatus so the visors to put the virtual screens into your life they're taking that screen from your laptop okay so like as it stands now if I'm using like the immersed visor which is still in testing uh or I'm using uh Apple Vision Pro to put screens in my real world or Quest 3 to put screens in my real world the the actual things I'm seeing on the screens

are just my normal applications running on my laptop so the applications don't know they're being viewed on a visor right so it doesn't in the first iteration of this Vision you're not writing as a company that's writing the software that people are seeing in their virtual world you're not writing this software for the virtual World it's taking your laptop screen right so when these are virtual screens it's the exact same as just plugging your laptop into an external monitor Microsoft Word doesn't know if you're looking at it on an external monitor or not and doesn't

care more broadly however going forward I think this is a critical point this is a privacy feature that has to be made Crystal Clear is physical privacy if I am a manufacturer of a Visor that can put screens in the world I need to be very clear is what is my API like am I exposing to Applications things they can access and I think the easiest thing is to say no just be a display there's no API there's nothing that Microsoft Word can access from the glasses themselves there's no interaction between the software in your

computer and the glasses except for display this is not going to be the case for most software because what's going To happen eventually is that people are going to want to actually modify their software to take advantage of the fact that they exist in a virtual space I mean we see this in for example the magic leap demo uh they seem to think that it's important that like your Google messages are things you can swipe with your hand and and sort around as opposed to there's just a screen floating in space and has a web

browser on it so in the in In the future I guess more apps might want to actually take advantage of the factor in Virtual space the Privacy here has to be very clear what information about my physical state does the applications accessing the device API have do they have any information about my eyes eye tracking location that's going to have to be very clear maybe that even has to be regulatory but we have time until that's a problem because I think and I've Argued this before the magic leap vision of we need special AR apps

and it needs to look like Minority Report we're throwing things around and it's all like visually beautiful and I grab the email and I throw it over there and I swipe things around that is not where we're going to go immediately because no one cares they just want more screens I want a bigger screen I got an email on my phone I want a type a response I want a 16inch screen to do that I don't want to Just look at my phone that's going to be the first iteration of this type of of uh

lifestyle uh where we're looking at the virtual screens so yeah down the road that API privacy has to be clear but it's not going to be the initial problem does that make sense Jesse the like yeah if you think about the glasses it's just a monitor you know we're not worried about the our monitor doesn't um talk to the Application you know the application doesn't care how it's being displayed I think that's that's the way that this technology is going to be at least for a while all right let's see here um we have a

case study but actually I'm going to jump past the case study because I'm looking at the the final segment where we're going to read about the books I read and I have a sort of long digression on one of the books there so I will uh save some time for That and so let's jump to the books I read in October but first before we do let's hear about another sponsor this show is sponsored by better help now here's the thing we talk a lot about cultivating a deep life on this show one of the

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all right Jesse let's do our final segment man every time I drink I think every time I drink I think yeah I think logo I'm seeing it on the camera here for people don't know who are watching we use we use um teleprompter so I can I can sort of I can see in Front of me every time I raise my glass you don't speak as a telec compter though I don't have any notes that's clear you talk you talk off the cuff all the time we talk off the cuff we do live the tape

the teleprompter lets me just see what is currently being recorded right so like now I see myself but if Jesse cuts the camera to himself I see so I can see what the current shot is um and if we're doing iPad drawing I can see like the IPad what's up on the screen so it's basically this is showing me the master shot uh that's actually being recorded all right so I want to talk about the five books I read in October I got a little Riff on the first one beware I haven't done a sort

of like in an intellectual academic Rift in a while so the first book I read Buckle in on settler colonialism by Adam kers all right so why this Book uh I got interested the thing that got me interested in this book was October 8th of last year so the day after October 7th 2023 well before there was for example the subsequent war in academic circles there was in some circles excitement and celebration of what had happened the day before now this is worrisome just just is like a generalistic um whenever you are seeing a sort

of dehumanization of the Jewish people in particular whenever you hear people start saying about Jews well they had it coming you got to Twitch your antennas a little bit right historically this has not gone well so what is going on what is this reaction coming out of Academia um it was intertwined pretty quickly it's pretty clear with rhetoric with specific terms like settlers and settler colonialism sort of a lot of France fenan sort of also being Channeled as well which as an aside is actually kind of ironic um France fenan was actually a a supporter

of the Zionist project a supporter of Israel it's interesting he's sort of uh he liked the Socialist nature of of what was going on over there sort of like an interesting sort of contradiction anyways um a lot of this turned out to be coming from a lot of this rhetoric in that sort of immediate celebration of what what happened October 7th was Coming from a academic Theory known as settler colonialism Theory so following my own dictates which is read about the things you're hearing about you know try to understand things by books where people have

taken time to to sit down and think about it I said I will write I want to read a book on this and a book came out this summer by Adam kers and it was called on settler colonialism um Adam is a a poet and literary critic I believe he was the Poetry editor I think For Harpers I might have that wrong um and he wrote this book let me say as an aside I love the idea of this style or form of publishing where you write a short book that's dealing with something that's like

very new you know as opposed to I going spend four years and work on this book or whatever we should have more of this like smart people that are like I'm going to turn around a book on this quick I've been thinking a lot about it I know about it let me so you Can get books into the conversation faster so Bravo to the publisher and Adam just in the general sense for doing it um so I read his book let me set this up uh kers is not a fan of settler colonialism Theory so

you got to take that into account when you read this book I do think he does a good job however of for most of the book just trying to give a straightforward here's what this is here Are the ideas here's where it came from here's the key readings and writings and then at the end of the book he gives more of his own critiques I think he was pretty fair but you have to come from the point of view that uh the book is not positive about settler colonialism Theory okay so what did I learn

uh settler colonialism Theory rose out of the 90s and was developed in the 2000s it emerged in Australia and then later in American circles it was getting this bigger influence and academic and academic activist circles but it was not as well known to the general public as other theoretical Frameworks that picked up more more prominence especially in the 2010s um racial and gender theories I think were getting more attention people were more familiar with those as theories than they were settler colonialism Theory but it was growing an Influence even if it was quieter so for

example land acknowledgements right you're probably used to this if you work in sort of any sort of large organizations or Arts organizations where um at the beginning of an event you acknowledge the indigenous peoples on Whose wits land you're currently doing you know the event or the play or the the meeting or whatever that actually as far as I can tell came out of settler colonialism Theory so it came out of these academic circles so it was having influence it's just uh its name as a theory was not as well known and then it really

took off uh began taking off when a they turned their attention from us and Australia so the original writing was really focused on the settler project of the US you know in the 17 and 16th century and of Australia in the 19th century and 18th century when they turned their attention more to Israel it began to pick up more Speed and then of course after uh October 7th it came the more public prominence because you had people using terminology from the theory that people hadn't heard before okay I came away uh not feeling very positive

towards this Theory I have two reasons number one is very general it's not specific to this Theory but I think it's an important point just worth emphasizing as you go through your own intellectual Journeys and think about The world of knowledge there are two different types of academic Theory I put them into these categories predictive and radical predictive Theory this is like the traditional notion of a theory there's some phenomenon you're trying to explain you come up with a theory that has a mechanism that explains what has been observed right this is is a a

plausible explanation for what we have Observed so you're trying to increase understanding of like how something works what makes Theory effective is it's predictive once you have this mechanism there's other predictions you can draw from it well if this was true we would also see this or we wouldn't see that and so you can then kind of test these predictions as a way to either strengthen your conviction in the Theory's Effectiveness or to discard the theory Oh this doesn't work or to modify the theory oh we have let's modify the mechanism because these observations over

here uh didn't match with the with what would be predicted now we're used to thinking about this for science but the same predictive framework holds for theories in other fields as well um for example sociologist Max vber had this sort of well-known famous theory for the capitalist energy in the US he saidwell This is because it's a the Protestant work ethic like the early us the pilgrims the early settlers a lot of these were Protestants and there's like a very specific component to Protestant um religion especially with predetermination that would push like really hard work

and that explains the sort of economic dynamism of colonial America and onward right it's a it's a good sounding Theory it kind of makes sense explains what's Going on um but over time it made other predictions that that didn't prove true I'm not an expert on this but then people started looking at other countries around that time that were primarily Protestant that did not have anything near the same type of economic Dynamics as the US and then we saw similar Dynamics or once we had a more religiously mixed population we didn't see uh much difference

in the Dynamics you know we had Catholic immigration Wasn't causing these groups in the population were not acting notably different economically speaking and so the theory has like largely been abandoned or at least heavily modified by sociologists right so that's predictive Theory at work radical Theory by context has some other elements um one they try to explain large swats of human behavior with a single explanation sort of the uh The Wider the Swath the sort of more exciting the theory two they tend to modify information they encounter to fit the desired conclusion as opposed to

modifying their conclusions def fit The observed information that's a radical Theory does that um three they tend to propose radical Solutions as cure alls they're often solutions that are kind of impossible but like hey if we could just do this everything would be solved that's where The radicalism comes from in the name radical Theory uh four they tend to enforce Purity they tend to have structures to enforce Purity among their adherence so there's a lot of like careful self-observation and aeriz or punishment of of insufficient Purity which is kind of needed because especially when you

have these other factors like you having to bend information to fit the conclusion and Sort of put some history away and um that makes you sort of fragile as a theory so you have to you have to enforce Purity typically radical theories include a theory for why people would critique them like a dismissive theory for why so uh if someone critiques this Theory art Theory explains they're doing so out of bad motivation so we don't have to take it seriously the classic radical theory of the 20th C cury of course was Marxism which uh as

it evolved was explaining more and more especially as you you got into sort of the early critical theories of the modern period as well so much was explained by these underlying mechanisms these economic mechanisms that Mark P put out everything had to be sort of explained and driven by these underlying mechanisms um all of sort of human behavior could be explained by these mechanisms uh all sorts of information Was ignored or modified the or just outright suppressed especially once you actually took this Theory and made it the foundation of running countries so there's a lot

of that going on the solutions were Radical obviously like running a a Marxist communist government was a big radical solution we had these big revolutions right um and finally of course there was strict uh Purity enforcement so of course in the political context this was actually Violent enforcement but in the academic context for a while it was um it was seen as like unsophisticated not follow these type of mechanisms right so classic radical Theory versus predictive Theory uh as presented by Adam kersch settler colonialism theory is a radical Theory it explains it tries to explain

basically everything bad through the ongoing impact of the original dispossession of the indigenous and a settler event so like everything Bad in America stems from the fact that America would dispossess the indigenous people of America with the settlers coming from England it's not seen as a one-time thing it's seen as the the classic war the classic phrase from settler colonialism theory is that um set setan is not an it's not an a single event it's an ongoing thing right so then they explain everything everything climate change income inequality all racial Strife um anything that is

bad is all has to come back to some sort of like um sustained and ongoing impact of this sort of single particular bad thing that happen so that there's that sort of grandio large swath to it as Adam points out uh there's huge amounts of just bad history ignoring information that's inconvenient there's no rigorous scholarship it's a radical Theory just everything gets reshaped to fit this conclusion um so that's not a predictive Theory that's radical Theory the radical Solutions I mean this is kind of the problem with it basically the radical solution is decolonization which

actually literally means like in the case of the US or Australia the 350 million people who live in the US basically leaving I suppose um and the reman Native American population takes back over the country like there's no other real solution just this propos other than a Decolonization um which that's literally where there's not there's no other sort of solution predicted um and and there's a lot of Purity restrictions within it right so if you're within these circles uh everyone has to one up each other with their purity to the decolonization mindset okay so again

I'm separating right now actually even the particular like the subject of the theory is very important like the colonial history of the world is a devastating history uh You know settler colonialism came out of the broader postcolonialism academic study project which was like a really important ongoing project to understand when the Age of Empire was finally dismantled in the mid 20th century to understand like what that had done and and what was needed to enforce Empire right we we we after World War I we realized oh Empire is not a good thing before World War

II like of course you kind of take over countries Or whatever and they they make cotton for you after World War II we're like whoops maybe Empire is not so great right this doesn't lead to good places and so like postc Colonial studies was um like necessary and and and there's a lot of really interesting thinking in there this came out of that but it's just gone into like a radical Direction and now it's just at least in my opinion reading what I've read about it it's it's uh shoty scholarship and people Trying to oneup

each other with who can be more purely adherent and more radical and I think that's dangerous in general radical Theory I think is a dangerous direction for Academia to go so I don't like radical theory in general right studying colonialism is important colonialism is bad confronting it is important radical theory is bad we can have both of those things be true at the same time all right so I came away uh just right word thinking negatively About settler colonialism Theory divorced from the specific content of the theory but because of its attributes as a radical

Theory and I don't think radical theory is helpful for better understanding the world and I don't think it's helpful for Progressive is M meaning progressivism in not the political sense but in the philosophical sense of striving to improve the world which I think people in academic institution should be doing again all This support implicitly or explicitly from the state to be a professor like yes you should be using your brain at least in part to improve the world and radical Theory gets in the way of that the other reason like I'm specifically suspicious of this

Theory and this goes back to what I said before um I just suspicious of any theory for which one of the immediate consequences is violence towards Jews Historically this has never ended up well for that theory right I'm not talking about the war in the Middle East I'm talking about the 3 to 500% increase in anti-semitic hate crimes I'm talking about uh Jewish Day schools being shot at Jews being randomly shot at this happened in Chicago just a few days ago just for being visibly Jewish this is not in Israel this is not the war

this is just North American Jews I'm talking about all of the students I hear about On college campuses who are saying I feel like I have to hide visible signs of my religion every time in the last 120 years where a theoretical framework led to that random violence against Jews Jews trying to hide their identity every single time the adherence to that theory said yeah yeah yeah but you know what kind of you know look you got to break some eggs to Make omelets they kind of have it coming and there's this really bad thing

that we're attributing to them or at least some juice somewhere and so that's kind of just like an unfortunate consequence every single time we've gone down that road it's ended up bad so I just see that as like the alarm system with any Theory the alarm system with any theory that if that is happening your theory is probably a problem so that is my that is a general Alarm system I have okay final key point because if there's anything you come to listen to my podcast for us to hear about the Middle East is I

do want to make very clear when it comes to specifically what's happening in the Middle East most people engaged in debate and protest and discussion about the wars in the Middle East could care less about settler colonialism Theory they don't know what It is it's not at the source of what they're thinking so it would be intellectually dishonest to try to use the problematic nature of this Theory which I think is very clear to try to for example dismiss everyone who is protesting debating or arguing against what's happening with Israel and Gaza this is sort

of unrelated from that in that sense you cannot paint everyone on one side um with this broad brush anymore than for Example you can look at every Israeli and say uh they all would be comfortable in netanyahu's right-wing cabinet right so we're talking about this particular Theory not talking about this much larger conflict that's happening but I do think if you are engage this is a serious issue that requires serious people making serious arguments and throwing radical Theory into the mix doesn't help if you are serious about this issue do not use this particular Theoretical

framework as your guide if you're a college student and you know you want to think hard about these issues that's fantastic be wary of this theoretical framework this particular theoretical framework is not helping any side of this conflict this particular theoretical framework I think is only going to gum up the works only going to get in the way of serious people trying to do serious work on the serious issue I do not like radical theory in general and so uh that is kind of my this is my PSA against radical Theory and again the book

I read and the things I've read about it are somewhat biased and but it's pretty easy to identify the the tenants of radical theories when you see him so as a scientist academic and not someone who's in the social science it's easier for me to say this I'm just going to say I don't like radical Theory I don't like that radical Theory it's a specific thing I'm saying but there we go there is my there's my lecture Jesse detailed detailed it was a good book you uh you should do like a detailed description like that

on kon's eruption that you read a couple months ago I now want to spend 30 minutes and I actually am equally passionate about this on how James Patterson messed up Michael kryton's eruption I don't know who the characters Were I'm 200 pages in this book and like so and so Susan walks in the door I don't know who Susan is 200 pages in I don't know who this character is I can't tell you right now the name of a single person from that book right you tell me Jurassic Park it's like oh you got Dr

Grant you got Satler you got Malcolm right like we we know these things I I could as soon as I finished that book I couldn't tell you it's bad writing it's bad Writing all right what other the books that I read that breaks the record for the longest I've ever talked about a book um I also read the small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon McMahon uh so Sharon McMahon is like a huge social media presence um she's like a government history scholar so it's surprising and it's fantastic she has this like huge Instagram it's

like about interesting people from History uh she wrote this book called the small and the mighty my publisher sent it to me um I really enjoyed it it's it's vignettes of historical figures that you don't know but who lived consequential lives and inspiring lives and that's and it's um divided into sections divided by kind of categories and then it follows these figures and and this is what I think Sharon does if if I understand it properly on her social channels as well This is like a drawn out version of it so I like that book

I saw Ryan Holliday mention his reading list as well you guys have the same Publishers heent I think it's what it is it must be a portfolio book um then I read chasing Dreams by Bob Weiss former head of the imagineers at Disney it wasn't what I was hoping you know you know I have this like weird Disney book Obsession uh and so this book came out By the former head of Disney imagineering I think what I was hoping it's not a knock on the book but I think what I was hoping was a lot

more about the technical details of how they built these theme parks like what goes into the technical innovations and the building like the Next Generation Ares or whatever but it was more of a traditional businessman more so it's much more like Bob and where he was going and the people he met and the the The stresses of the job which is fine but I kind of wanted to get into like how the Pirates of the Caribbean works yeah mainly because I was doing my Halloween decorations I was like yeah I want to get some some

like techniques I want to build some animatronics so was fine if you're into Disney was fine good business memo had an interesting wife Bob wise uh then I read the wave by Susan Casey huge Susan Casey fan I had read the wave a long time ago I went Back and reread it great book it's about big waves so half of the book is her hanging out with lar Hamilton and other big wave Surfers that's kind of that it's that's fantastic sort of like outside magazine Adventure writing and the other half is like hanging out with

wave scientists and they're kind of inter Le together but anyway I love that book and then I read tribal by Michael Morris this was an interesting book so he Studies tribalism but not not in the sort of What Not Like a sociological perspective of like the way we talk about tribalism now but like how our brain is evolved right like how does like the homo sapien brain deal with tribes and how is that different than other species of humans um and how that affect us today and his big argument which I thought was nicely contrarian

is that tribalism gets a bad Rap He says no no no the thing that allowed Homo sapiens to succeed over all of these other human style humanid whatever they call them humanid species like neanderthals Homo erectus like homo florensis he's like what L hum Homo sapiens to succeed is that actually we have this capacity to connect with and work with other people at a much broader scale like we can you all Harari talks about this in sapiens to some degree we Can come up with a way to feel like our state like a million people

are all our brothers like we can we can connect to and work with people at a much larger scale than other species Neanderthal is like I have my band and if someone else comes in like we're just going to eat them like we're going to kill them I I have no ability chimpanze are the same way you're not in my ban like yeah what what do we care like we'll just kill you right but but Homo sapiens could Cooperate with people from far away huge groups of people it's allowed us to do things like trading

and that allowed knowledge to move and we could build up giant cities so he's actually saying the homo sapien tribal instinct is one of um compassionate cooperation and so what we should do is leverage that to try to build get over to viid so actually like our our built-in mechanisms tribal mechanisms are things to leverage to overcome divides that this idea that our Instinct is the the the quickly draw a line between us and others and to be very suspicious of people who are not in our immediate group he's like that's not actually Homo sapiens

Instinct we have a huge capacity for greatly expanding who counts as our group and that it actually documents to build what we call tribalism now like a ingroup outgroup it takes a lot of work to try to put up those divides and you have to do a lot of work to try to demonize another side To to carefully set them up as being very different like it's more the it takes effort to keep people apart and our default is like we're much better at connecting so I thought it was a cool contrarian thesis and he's

like so we should leverage in like business and life and politics leverage this fundamental mechanisms of homo sapiens to like cooperate better to have teams operate better to overcome like uh political Divides and hatreds so contrary um this is one of these cases where it's like the topic the professor has been studying forever so it these are always good books when a professor writes their like big book on the thing that they've been studying forever so it it has that type of energy of like I've done all of these studies and I'm putting into a

book for the first time so a pretty good book tribal by Michael Morris all right I think that's it five Books maybe this will this will be our new standard Jesse I'll give a 30 minute speech every on one book every I like every week every week I have to put on my professor hat occasionally um as I always say please send all hate mail on this to jesse.com it'll definitely get to it will definit I'll definitely read it all right everyone thanks for listening we'll be back next week with a another episode and until

then as always stay de hey if You like today's discussion about protocols for focusing better you might also like episode 311 which is about finding focus in distracting times given that this video is being released I think the day before the US election day probably a good one to watch right now so check that out I think you'll like it so I thought this was a good excuse to talk about a topic that a lot of you have actually written me about in recent days which is how do You focus during distracting times