Before You Rot Away At Home - How To Rebuild a Life of Meaning In a Digital World | Cal Newport

So the writer Derek Thompson who I know and I like has a big new feature article in the Atlantic right now many of you sent it to me so you probably heard of it it's titled the antisocial Century Americans are now spending more time alone than ever it's changing our personalities our politics and even our relationship to reality for this article Derek talked to a lot of different experts and explored a lot of different Related ideas but today there's one point in particular from the article want to focus on because I think it represents one

of the biggest issues created by our modern digital environment the good news is once we make that issue clear the solution will also be quite obvious all right so start here let's talk a little bit more about what Dereck is saying in this article then we'll point out the part I care about for Those who are watching instead of just listening I have it up on the screen here there's the uh the headline the opening graphic all right so I want to read uh going to read a quote from this but just to set it

up that the key idea in this article is Derek notes a lot has been said about the so-called loneliness epidemic so loneliness is an actual negative subjective state connected to the sense that you are not connected to Other people Derek says this is a bit of a misnomer in the sense that if you look at the data around loneliness in particular it's not like that is is getting a lot worse or that's getting worse in some sort of pronounced way he says the real issue is Solitude which he Des finds his time spent alone Solitude

does not depend on you feeling bad about it it's just an actual physical state let me read you uh a key quote about this from his Article the privatization of American leure Leisure is one part of a much bigger story Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data going back all the way to 1965 between that year and the end of the 20th century in-person socializing slowly declined from 2003 to 2023 it plunged by more than 20% according to the American time use survey an

annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics so the issue is not necessarily that we're lonely but that we're spending more time alone and a lot of cases we don't mind it Derek goes on to say self-imposed Solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America all right so there's a lot of problems that Derek surveys in this article that come from this rise in solitude but there's one point in Particular that I want to highlight because I think it's uh particularly relevant to the modern digital environment so

again I'm going to quote from the article here this is Derek talking about one of multiple problems with Solitude Richard V Reeves the president of the American Institute for boys and men told me that for men as for women something hard to Define is lost when we pursue a life of isolationist is Isolationist Comforts he calls it needed the way we make ourselves essential to our families and Community I think at some level we all need to feel like we're a jigsaw piece that's going to fit into a jigsaw somewhere he said this needed can

come in several forms social economic or or communitarian our children's and partners can depend on us for care or income our colleagues can rely on us to finish a project or to commiserate about An annoying boss our religious congregations and weakened poker parties can count us to fill a Pew or to bring the dip all right so let's talk about uh this notion of needed I think we can kill this here Jesse um in my book digital minimalism which actually made a lot of points that I think are being underscored by the experts in this

article I made this related argument where I said look when it comes time When it comes to sociality what our brain really looks for is US sacrificing non-trivial time and attention on behalf of someone else so we have evolved to think about if I am sacrificing non-trivial time and attention so so reproductively relevant survival relevant resources on behalf of another person that person is someone with whom I have an important con connection we're connected we are in a community right this is this is an Important person to me so it's sort of measuring how much

you sacrifice for someone to measure how important that person actually is in your life so you can imagine uh if we're drawing a social graph so we put points for all the different people around you like in a tribe back in the Paleolithic period and you draw a line between people if uh they're sacrificing non-trivial attention on behalf of each other and what you would want is your point in the Middle of that graph to be densely connected into this web you have lots of people to whom you're connected to and a lot of those

people are connected to each other as well so now imagine you're drawing your Social Life one of these social graphs today the problem is if you're not sacrificing non-trivial time and attention behalf of someone you don't get to draw a line and so we're seeing a lot of people Social graphs are sparse and if your social graph is sparse you're not feeling that needed that Reeves talk about so I just think this is two sides of the same coin he talks about needed uh that's a subjective description of what it means to have a a

connection to an individual community that they need you you play an important role I you sacrifice of non-trivial resources as a sort of quantitative or Functional description of what this type of connection means it's about what are you actually giving up on behalf of another person so the more of these actual needed or sacrifice connections you have to other people around you the more resilient you become the more fulfilled you become the more satisfied you become about your life so why then is this dissolving as Reeves points out in Derek Thompson's article well I think

Technology plays a major role in that story of dissolution and it does so in two major ways that sort of work together into a negative Symphony so the first type of way where the modern digital technology plays a role in this is it leads us away from that type of behavior that sacrifice and non-trivial time and attention that's really required to feel connected to someone let's think about the ways in which it does this digital Communication low friction digital communication simulates enough of the idea of connecting to another person that it can help saave off

loneliness but it doesn't require sacrifice so it doesn't give us that needed that we also crave and there a subtle Point that's really important here it's easy to text message someone that's very low friction it's easy to jump on someone's Social Feed see what they're doing and leave a comment it's low risk low friction doesn't take much energy if you're doing enough of this you're probably not going to feel lonely because you're you're interacting with people like I am not alone in this world there are other people that I am interacting with but this is

so low friction it's not requiring you to sacrifice any non tral time and attention you're not taking out your afternoon Putting everything aside to go like for a walk with a friend to help them figure something out you're not cooking soup and driving it over to your friend's house because they're sick and giving it to them you're taking that you're making that sacrifice to make their life better you're not doing anything any significant investment or resources so the the social circuits in your mind don't see these people as being a part of your Social Graph

so we get this mismatch I don't have loneliness because I'm simulating these social connections and without loneliness what's driving you to sacrifice this attention there's nothing left to drive you it's comfortable to be at home you don't feel particularly bad in the moment why get off the couch and go for that walk or deliver that soup this is a point that's emphasized actually in dereck's article that loneliness serves the purpose of feeling Really bad so to make that bad feeling go away we get off our butts and go do things for other people and then

needed this follows social media and digital or in particular digital communication more generally short circuits the loneliness Loop and so we feel completely contented to keep sitting there not really noticing that that actual substantial social graph is quietly beginning to dissipate behind us social media itself if we focus in here more also plays a Role in being led astray from these type of non-trivial sacrifice behaviors because it gives us a sense if you're a user that you're a part of a community yeah I'm a I'm a community I have leadership I'm out there I'm needed

right there's my followers need me because look I post the things and they give me reactions and it passes around so again it short circuits the sort of natural human drive we have to be in Community to be there for our community to be someone that people look up to and depend on it kind of simulates that enough that we don't feel bad about ourselves but those deeper parts of our our social circuitry say we're not sacrificed on behalf of a community we're not really out there doing something that is hard and requiring energy these

aren't real connections these are uh pkin podiums at which we're making our imagine Grand Speeches but it's just an algorithm jinning up some fake response so that we feel important so again this is a theme that we see video games are doing the same thing especially for young men it scratches that itch to be a leader to stand up and be someone people can count on because your Call of Duty Squad is killing a bunch of Nazis but you're not really you're you're deeper down your mind knows this isn't real where's the actual physical pain

or hardship where a Time we're actually investing you know helping the guy down the street dig you know dig his car out after the storm we're not actually doing the stuff our brain counts so again this theme comes back again and again where the technology scratches the itch that per of the that would otherwise drive us to do the stuff that matters just enough we don't do the stuff that matters and we have a disconnect between one part of our brain is happy with the simulated Sociality but the other part of our brain is not

and and we don't have that needed because we know deep down our Call of Duty Squad and our social media followers don't really need us and is it really a friend if all we're doing is trading text 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 startart 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 the final way that technology I think is leading to this actually comes from the world of work this seems maybe like it's coming from uh out of nowhere but I think it connects so like I write about in my Book slow productivity we have uh pseudo productivity the management heuristic that visible activities are proxy for useful effort combined with mobile computing so now I can do work at a very visible fine grain level in any location on Earth those

two things have made us very very busy especially are notably outside of our normal work hours of course I wrote a whole book about this but from the point of view of what we're talking about here needed in the social Graph being more and more busy outside of normal work hours means there's less and less time the sacrifice nontrivial time and attention on behalf of other people so that too is getting in the way of building these strong social graphs which give us that sense of needed all right so modern technology is playing a big

role in this Solitude problem but I said there is a second way that there is two major ways that technology is playing This role well the first way we just talked about it's it's making our graph sparer the second way and this is where it becomes an insidious insidious I almost said it chesse I almost said insid Insidious cycle uh it helps numb from the pain of not having that needed it drives us away from needed and then gives us the suker so that we can survive not having it or just barely and that's where

we really get That self-reinforcing cycle I don't feel needed anymore my social graph is sparse I'm not really connected into a a thick network of people who depend on me and I depend on them uh this makes me uncomfortable let's distract myself let's Tik Tok let's video game Let's endlessly scroll let's get caught up in I don't know it could be a conspiracy theory or whatever we want to do this going to give us some sort of like distraction Away from this big lack that's actually happened in our Liv so then we use devices more

or we work more to try to fill in that void and then we get even more distance from our actual sacrific driven social graph and our need this goes down even more severely it's a terrible cycle it was a cycle that got Amplified of course by Co and other types of Trends with Computing and it brings us to where we are now and to where Derrick's article is all right so here's the good news once we know what's going on here the solutions are obvious we got to add back more links to that sacrific social

graph that's it we got to add back more links now that we know that's the problem that those are being taken out because of Technology we need to add those back in and we could be indirect about this and I think this is the problem is too Often what happens in these discussions as we say well maybe we need to think about how to get rid of the forces that are causing this problem in the first place and we have to completely reform both our relationship and our culturals relationship with technology and work so that

we can finally have the time and and drive to get back to to building social lives in a way that we're more used to doing it or we could just say I'm just going to go add links directly We'll figure that out on the way I just want to go sacrifice non-trivial time attention on behalf of people I care about let me just go do that just do that first let's just directly add the lines back and then we can figure out how to fix a bigger problem and fix our culture and and and get

Utopia so it's not a hard thing to understand that we need to do spend more time actually doing things for other people that's what we need to do how Many people like in the last month have you like gone out of your way to really be there for them or to sacrifice on behalf of them like if you have a family you've probably done it for your kids maybe for one friend or another but this should actually be something I'm doing multiple times a week you start adding those lines back in your graph you could

even draw one of these things here's a DOT for like all the people I really know Well and each month I'm going to draw a line if I do at least one non-trivial sacrifice on their behalf and each month like how thick can I get this graph to look how how how many points on this star can I actually create if I'm at the center and they're around the periphery not a bad exercise to actually do now here's the good news if you go right to that solution what are you going to find well you're

going to find something Getting reactivated within you and suddenly that drive to be on the devices so much goes down because this is better we're on our devices a lot because we were missing this we're on our devices a lot because we're convincing ourselves this counts the sociality but when we get reexposed to the real thing suddenly this other stuff this digital simulation comes across as sort of trivial or a low resolution simulation It's no longer as appealing as we get used to sacrificing other people we see that's important no I'm not going to do

email all evening we'll have to just figure that out I'll have to figure out another approach to my work either grow some confidence or change some systems or this is just what it's going to have to be it pushes back on the digital so the digital pushed us into this problem sure but instead of trying to fix our Digital Life first Just go right back and fix this social problem and actually the digital itself will suddenly seem less urgent so I think that's the good news in this because really you know what we do on

this show is like we're often navigating The Perils of the modern digital environment figuring out what are causing the disorders and mismatches of this and then trying to figure out how to actually solve it this is one of the biggest perils right now this lack of Need needed caused by the sparsification of the sacrifice social graph and no Jesse I don't like to create a litera unnecessarily technical terms that's just it's just how normal people talk let's just be clear about that sparsification of the sacrific driven sociality graph that's how normal people talk about let's

be honest this is I think one of the big problems of culture right now technology us there technology is keeping us there but going back to Our Roots as a social being suddenly makes technology role in this seem more glaring and hard to miss and therefore the role that technology plays in our lives begins to reduce a little bit so I want to throw it out there I can't help but connect these type of issues to technology and here's a place where we have a big negative impact but we also have a very clear lever

to pull to make things more positive I like that phrase Sparsification of sacrifice driven social graph it's like a computer science paper title right there I like it too yeah all right so there we go uh we got bunch of good questions we have a deep dive not deep dive a reaction piece coming up later a tech Corner which once again is an article I just wrote for the New Yorker so we're getting a bunch of Cal New Yorker this week or this month um so I'm excited to get to that but first Talk quickly

about a sponsor we actually have a new sponsor this week this is a company that came into my life at a very opportune time we're talking about uplift the uplift desk is at the Forefront of ergonomic Solutions promoting better posture and health through adjustable standing desk design to help you live a healthier lifestyle plus they have all kinds of accessories to keep you moving throughout your day even if you work for Only a few hours at your desk uplift came into our life as a potential sponsor I mentioned at a good time because man my

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so my abdomen is is now my abdomen is healed my back is messed up so now I have to like rest strengthen the abdomen and get my back is hurting all the time and anyways man do I understand now posture and how much this Matters I don't think I would have understood my my uh the associate director of undergraduate studies I work with at Georgetown he was showing me last semester his uplift desk which I was like oh that's a beautiful desk um it looks great it's like bamboo this bamboo style and it's it just

the the lifting mechanism is now really built into the legs in a way you don't even know it's a standing desk I feel like the old standing Desks correct me if I'm wrong here Jesse my memory of like back in the day when this technology came around is it looked basically the technology looked roughly in size footprint to like Mike Mulligan steam engine huge Contraption you know there's there's like a fourman blowing a whistle and these giant gears start turning these uplift desks now like oh that's just a normal desk in just like the normal

leg on the side it's like in There I don't I don't know how anyway so I was like oh it's beautiful desk but you know I didn't I was like what why do you need standing desk for now I get it because like oh my God posture is everything for me right now um so I am working standing sitting all sorts of different ways a lot more working standing so one of the things I'm using now and I don't mean to preach on this but it's like my whole life right now is uplift it's not

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stuff really matters in a way I didn't think about before I also got I'm going to bring it to the HQ uh wobble stool and can put it in front of the 3D printer so it's like you can sit on it but instead of just sitting completely still you can wobble on it and kind of like move your core around it doesn't you can't fall you're not going to fall over but you can like kind of move and work out your core um I I originally was like oh my kids will like it but like

oh God I need this thing now so anyways I I'm going on a rant here but like I am obsessed now with posture and ergonomics because my whole life is like about this right now so uplift came into my came into my life at a good time you guys got to care about this stuff the uplift desk is the industry standard but their accessories are cool as well so anyways let me get to an actual call to action here make This year Yours by going to uplift desktop /de and use our code deep to get

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time you'll probably be fine but all it takes is just that one drop and you'll wish you had spent those extra few dollars on a Case well that's what it's like using the internet without a VPN because every Time you connect to an unencrypted Network you're at the airport you're at the hotel you're at a coffe coffee shop your online data is not secure any hacker who is right there can see the packets that you were sending including who it is that you're talking to a VPN protects you from all of this when you use

a VPN what happens is you take the message you really want to send and you encrypt it so no one can read it and then you send that to a VPN server then The VPN server un encrypts it talks to that site or service on your behalf encrypts the response sends it back to you so now if I'm the hacker next to you at the coffee shop all I can learn by looking at your packets being sent over the radio waves is that you're communicating with a VPN server I have no idea what actual site

or service you're talking to all of that is off you skated from me um so you do need a VPN to protect yourself and your privacy if You're going to use a VPN used to one I recommend which is expressvpn its encryption is super secure there's enough bits there in the encryption that no computer feasible computer in the world could ever crack it it's very easy to use you just turn on the app and now it's working just use your other apps and browsers just like you would normally it just automatically works in the background

you can use on your phone your laptop your tablet so it's easy to Stay secure it's been rated number one by not just me but top Tech reviewers like CNET and The Verge so you need a VPN to be on the internet in the modern world expressvpn should be your friend so secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com that's expressvpn.com and you can get an extra four months free expressvpn.com all right Jesse let's do some questions first question is from K I'm a medical doctor switching Specialties This requires I study for entrance exams I

time block my nights for studying after my 8 to 5 doctor work but I struggle with this as I'm too tired this leaves only the weekends to study how can I improve on scheduling and falling through on weekdays well as I learned doing research for last week's episode on morning routines I think the key is and Jesse will agree with me is to do your studying from within a cold plunge because what that's going to do is the Cyto kindes are going to sharpen your focus muscles and then it's going to be very difficult um

actually what you need to do is in the cold plunge you need you need a cold plunge that's deep enough that you can do pull-ups while in the cold plunge you're you're maybe doing pull-ups in and out of the cold plunge and then that will that will help you get after it now okay let's let's get to the the heart of this here um okay I'm going to tell you first of all to use a Phrase from the old version older episodes of the show to face the productivity Dragon here which means confronting and accepting

the reality of a particular workload uh that you're struggling with you have a very hard job and so you're finding it hard to also do a lot of hard studying after your job is over that is just the reality that's not a broken thing it's It's Not Unusual it's Not inexplicable it's not a problem in fact it's not at all surprising it's hard to be a doctor those are long shifts and so the the study something intense after a hard shift might just be really hard so we have to just accept that at first right

we can't see it to ignore the productivity dragon is just to really want something to be doable to be frustrated that it's not and just hope if you get upset enough or focus on it enough you can just sort of make it Possible that dragon is there and sometimes it's going to block you from getting where you want to go all right once we accept that now we can review what are our options and tools here without yet trying to assess whether any of these is going to solve the problem let's just put on the

table there's a dragon up here all right towns people what weapons do we have let's like let's see what we have and then we can build a plan so in your case there's A few things that could be relevant better energy could help right there's things you could do that you're coming off of your shift you just you have higher energy maybe you're able to persist in more studying than you are now these are things like sleep exercise nutrition those are probably the big ones maybe with like a good shutdown routine from the doctor job

in theory if you're in really good shape and have really good health in theory You probably would have more energy you could probably spare I don't know if that's going to be a lot because the physical and intellectual are related but they're not completely congruent but that's a tool we have have on our table that might take a while though to get healthy to get in the good shape well that takes time and kind of ironically you don't have a lot of time each day to work on this we could get around that doctors get

around that they work out at The hospital Etc um but it takes a lot of time to get in you know to get healthier and you might have to be done with this in a couple months all right another tool though better study habits so if you're using the right study habits maybe a shorter amount of time per day you can get more out of it also studying is less exhausting when it's more focused and you trust it right when you're a really good studier I was a really good studier I wrote Books about how

to study when you're a really good studier it's a lot less exhausting why because the sense of exhaustion from studying in particular is sometimes generated from your mind having resistance to the activity that you're about to do it doesn't want to do it so it's like I don't want to do this and now you're competing with your mind trying to drag it into this activity that's exhausting and not super sustainable why does your Mind reject studying well one of the ways it one of the reasons why it rejects it is because studying is not a

precise verb your mind doesn't think you have a particularly good plan for how you're going to get prepared your mind knows that you're just going to sit down and open up your books and then look at your phone and then look at your instant messenger and then kind of read some things and kind of look over at something else it has no confidence that This is going to lead to anything good at all and so it holds back motivation so now you're dragging your mind through it by contrast if you're a really good stud your

mind's like oh yeah we got a good plan we know how to prepare for these type of questions we're giving this 50 hard minutes and it we are going to really make progress in these 50 minutes you're going to have a lot more motivation to do it even if it's Intellectually harder so improving your study habits is something else that could help here let's step back now and look at more drastic or reconfiguration based plans you could just take longer you know maybe you want to sit for these Master's exams in 3 months maybe like

what really need to do here is do this six months from now or a year from now because my studying is going to be I can't study uh every night and maybe I'm doing my set on the weekends Or just one night a week it's going to take me a lot longer to prepare so if I push this off by a year then I can get there in a reasonable time frame that's like a real slow productivity type of idea no one knows how long it took you to do something they just know in the

end what things you did and often like the key to sustainability is simply just taking longer years from now all people are going to know is like oh you made this shift in Your clinical practice they don't remember exactly how long did it take from you having this idea to you taking the entrance exams the final tool we can put on the table here is change your work situation temporarily maybe you take a leave for two weeks you can just do nothing but seriously study and just like get this thing done all right so we

have different tools on the Table and your question is just okay what combination of these is going to get me where I need to get facing the productivity dragon rarely as people fear leads them to the conclusion of this thing that's important to me I can't do that's not what happens what happens is you come up with a more reasonable plan for how to get there and it might not be as easy as you hope or as quick as you hope or as painless as you hope but typically you find a way to Get take

care of that Dragon once you actually see it and you're looking at it and having an honest conversation about what options you actually have so probably some combination of those things I mentioned uh will get you there and I almost certainly it's not going to end up being as quick or as easy as you hoped when you first went down this path but that's okay sometimes paths have dragons on them we still have to figure out how to get up to the castle so Hopefully not hopefully you will you'll find a way to get there

when did you come up with a term productivity Dragon I feel like it was early in the show oh it wasn't before it was definitely early in the show because when I was listening to I loved it when I was just a fan should we look it up well I'm looking it up was it I was thinking maybe you discover when you're in your 20s no no no but it's possible so here's I'm looking this up Now so here's what's possible is that like I wrote about it on my newsletter um around the time the

show was coming up okay I thought you had it for I don't think 15 years before but God now you're making me doubt myself Jesse all right man so it's definitely here's it's definitely early study hacks because I'm seeing uh a clip from August of 2020 okay so that'd be pretty early but here's a it's Like 5 years old here's an article from July of 2020 on confronting the productivity Dragon take two okay so uh you know why this is take two it wasn't great so I I wrote this art now I remember this July

of 2020 I wrote this article about confronting the productivity dragon and so I just grabbed some image online of St George fighting a dragon because like that's the classic and like here's a picture of It now of like him you know artwork I didn't realize the picture I had drawn I guess St George has white supremacist connections as well I kid you not this picture I posted was St George stabbing a dragon and it was like his cloak or his sword swastikas swastikas people are like all right that checks that's what I feared I think

I put a note about this uh no I didn't but oh yeah I did down here um it was from W Wiki Commons that's why you know I was like oh it's a Wiki Commons like no because no copyright image so I I didn't expect it okay so here's what I said in my first attempt to post this article I grabbed an image of St George from Wiki Commons that seem to be of the right resolution in Dimensions but I missed one crucial detail his heralding was full of swastikas whoops oh my God but anyways

if I read This article from July of 2020 it opens by saying on a recent episode of my podcast someone asked me and I I I mentioned this term so I think it was the podcast a very early episode yeah a very early episode of the podcast I came up with okay I kind of want to return to it let's revisit the productivity Dragon I love the term I just thought maybe you had it like a poster of your of the Dragon like in your college dorm or something I don't Know I maybe I did

so I had to look it up but no it mainly it's just a vehicle for me to put swastika imagery on I thought like my site was going to get put on a hate watch list or something like I was like there's probably Bots that are just you know following sites and be like oh they posted a lot of swastikas like we got to take them you know it's good thing you weren't on Facebook at the time yeah That would not have gone well yeah maybe that's the real reason why I'm not on social media

they just I got kicked off all of them for and it got reposted a few places too I think because people just repost my articles um anyway we should do a a productivity drag and like revisit okay I'll not that all right what do we got next next question is from David as a non-te person interested in Tech I enjoy your comments on AI can you comment on Leopold Ashen Brenner's situational awareness essay it's getting a lot of hype and criticism yes I think I have something I loaded up something here okay um I'm not

going to load up so for people who don't know Leupold uh um Ashen Briner I think now he's a investor he runs a fund but used to be in Tech uh wrote this essay called situational awareness AI from now to 2034 which is basically he's synthesizing he like all these conversations with people in teac and he's laying out this like vision of axioms and predictions for the future of AI and it's pretty extreme and it's it's it's because of that Gathering a lot of attention um I'm not going to read that that or even go

through the essay because I think it's like 160 something pages long I mean it's a book basically it's like this huge really long thing But I did find a good Mike Allen has a good summary of the main points on axios so I'll read a few of these I have it on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening like here are some of the points that were made some of the the stickier points that were made in this big long essay um One Trust the trend lines the trend lines are

intense and they were right the magic of deep learning is that it just works and the trends lines have Been astonishingly consistent despite naysayers at every turn another big point over and over again year after year Skeptics have claimed deep learning won't be able to do X have been quickly proven wrong point three it's strikingly plausible that by 20127 models will be able to do the work of an AI research engineer by 2027 rather than a chapot you're going to have something that looks more like an agent like a Coworker um number five the data

wall there's potentially important source of variance for all this we're running out of internet data number six AI progress won't stop at the human level we would rapidly go from Human level to vastly superhuman systems he points the idea of super intelligence possibly by 8 2030 and so on okay so um these These are the type of ideas that are in this essay and it's You know it's it's an interesting essay and it's getting a lot of attention um I would say you know beware to just naively dismiss this essay because Ashton brener knows a

lot about this technology and he really did talk to a lot of people like he really has a sense for it on the other hand you do have to take his Essay with a grain of salt because his fund is basically focused on we are investing in the technologies that are going to lead Directly to AGI like that's his pitch to investor so it is of course very much in his benefit very much to his benefit for people to believe that AI uh Technologies Trends are very extreme and noteworthy because that's the pitch of his

fund as well so you have to keep those things in mind um a couple I'll add a couple observations these aren't like limits to what he's saying but I'm going put a couple I'll put a couple potential breaking observations to the Keep in the mix here so one thing that interests me that Ashton Briner doesn't talk about in the summary at least you know he says over and over again year after year Skeptics have claimed deep learning won't be able to do X and have been quickly uh proven been wrong if there's one lesson we've

learned from the past decade of AI it's that you should never bet against deep learning well it is true like its capabilities keep Growing and as we say well it's still bad at this then Engineers work on this and then for a lot of those this is it gets better at but there have been year after year of predictions that have not been coming true which is the predictions about the Practical impact in our lives as soon as chat GPT came out there it was like we're six months away from this disruption whole industry are

going away homework apocalypse education as we know It is done these whole sectors are gone look this guy over here fired half of his his call center that's going to be everyone that these jobs are gone people are so far there's been almost no major disruption so the one place where there is a gap is the impact Gap so we we the the connection that we've been getting wrong is we thought there would be this type coupling between functional breakthrough and disruption that as the magnitude of a Functional breakthrough on AI models jumped the immediate

disruptions would jump as well well it turns out that there's there's at the very least a large lag between these two things I think this is a significant thing to keep in mind it is turning out that to make this technology high impact on people's day and day lives there is no escaping the actual sort of hard hardto predict product development Cycle that it's not just the fact that these models can do amazing things doesn't mean that it's doing amazing things in people's lives people still have to now do the painstaking work of integrating this

AI in the specific products nine out of 10 ways you do this is not going to work or be that useful so it's hard there's competition companies are going to fail initiatives are going to lose money for these big companies and then in there you're going To find oh here's the right product that actually works it's the internet was the the consumer internet was the same way we knew it was a big deal and a lot of companies were like this is a big deal this changes everything which it did did but we thought at

first like great so if I just throw put money into anything Internet it's going to be successful and it was that in most of the early things we did then it really work and we had the first DOC crash in the early 2000s And then what ended up being required was like years of different companies and startups and people trying like well what's the right way to get the internet to people or how do people actually want to use it and then we got out of it some of these like Web Two based models that

have then become incredibly profitable right so but you had in 1999 people being like yeah we well Time Warner should be on just we'll buy AOL we'll have this sort of uh online Version of the Articles and web van will we warehouses full of food you can buy on the internet and we're all going to make a lot of money none of that worked but you fast forward another 25 years and meta has a trillion plus dollar market cap so like they were right but it just took a long time to try to figure out

what worked and what did it so that's going to slow down ai's progress some because we're three years out of Highly capable language models and don't yet have large disruption use cases so it that just that lag is longer than we think on the flip side that means when the disruptions come it might seem like it's coming out of nowhere because it's not going to be tightly coupled to an innovation I actually think the power I was just giving a talk at Microsoft recently we're talking about this I actually think the we have sufficient capability

in AI tools Today to support major disruption to the way knowledge happens we don't actually need if we have no future Innovation like we have to freeze everything like where it is now we have sufficient capability and Power in these models for for sufficient disruption knowledge work we just haven't figured out the right tools or way to integrate it yet in the products and that's what everyone's working on right now so it it might be slower till the everyday person is Feeling the disruption but the disruption might also seem to be somewhat out of nowhere

because again it won't be tied to a recent Innovation it will be product Innovation that finally just works just right all right so that's one idea I want to point out that I think is relevant the second is I think there's a there's a pause or or wall or sort of AI mini winter that is coming up because there's there's there's two limits we're Coming up against and as Brer mentions one of these limits one we're running out of data so this this idea of we're going to train these sort of Transformer based language models

you feed forward language models we're going to train them with with text Data there's not much text left we've kind of used all the text on the internet I mean meta has this Advantage I heard Scott Galloway talking about this I think it's probably a smart analysis he was saying don't uh Don't bet too hard against meta right now because there's a couple wins in their favor like Tik Tok perhaps going away um which would be good for them because reals has become an effective Tik Tok loan but the other thing is they have a

lot of extra text because of all the platforms all their platforms have these giant Archives of text and text is what you need to train these and so maybe they can they can eek out some more training than like open AI who Maybe is just limited to like the full open internet every book every written so to also have everything ever said on Facebook that's more text so more text helps but there's we're kind of running out of text to train these things on so we're sort of getting to the limit of data these are

because of the inefficiency of how how uh the training happens and knowledge is represented you need a ton of data to train these things so we could be kind of running out of What we get through capabilities now there's different training methods that matter right like the 01 model and I don't want to go down too deep down this rabbit hole but you know the newest chat GPT is better at reasoning and this this is in part due to the way they train it now like it turns out you can make these things a little

bit better at feed for networks better at reasoning if you do a particular type of training where what you really do is you say when you give An answer it's a simple idea but it has a huge impact there's actually a Dartmouth kid who figure this out uh Jason wi I think but it's a simple idea when you give an answer chat GPT we want you to explain your steps that lead to your answer and if you give an answer that doesn't have a lot of steps we're going to zap you during trading with a

bad signal and if you give an answer where you kind of spell out your steps we're Going to zap you with a good signal that's called reinforcement learning and we're going to add that onto your normal training this is how they train these models not to like say bad things or to avoid certain topics well they're just saying oh we'll just zap them while we're training like hey show your work so if I ask you like a math problem don't just say the answer to that math problem is 27 I'm going to give you a

happy zap If instead of just saying that You say well let's let's walk this through we started with this many apples and we took away this apples with left this many apples so now the answer is 27 so by zapping it like hey we really like when you show your work now when you're training these networks they're more likely to train in a way that actually captures more of the logic because they have to actually say the steps along the way and then they're more likely to do reasoning Better so stuff you can do but

we are going to hit a limit where we're going to run out of data I also am this big believer that the feed Ford Network model there's only so far we can get with that there is no State there is no recurrence there is no looping there is no let's try out a bunch of things there's no here's a novel state of a problem in the world and we want to now explore what to do with this and compare this to other stuff we know feed forward No everything has to be stuck in these forward

connections of the deep learning model so I think the limitations of that structure Plus data limitations means we might hit an AI mini winter the way we're going to break out of of that I think is going to be with more complicated model structure we're going to have multiple models individual models might go through deep learning to actually learn what they're doing but they're going to interact with each Other and some of these models or modules are going to be human coded and not learned um and it's going to be in The Ensemble of different

models this is keeping a state here's a simulator model here's like an understand the world model over here is a like prediction model over here is like a meta model uh all of these working together is what's going to I think get us out of the AI Mini winter and actually move AI to that next level which is going to be a much Bigger step towards something like AGI so I'm getting kind of technical here but there we go AI mini winter is going to come but then we'll eventually get through it and the the

impact gap on AI we should not look down on it takes years actually the go from this Tech is great to this Tech is having a great impact on people's lives we got to factor that in so that wasn't quite 165 pages worth of material Jesse but I think it was close on Rog and Zuckerberg Talked about how AI can basically do the work of an a average programmer now did you hear that I mean it just depends what you mean by that yeah yeah yeah it's good at generating code um but it's unclear so

when you look at professional programmers yeah so it it it can produce code like okay code but it's not really where it's impacting productivity and programming where it's impacting productivity and programming based on the programmers I've talked to is it's Preventing you from having to do what for the last 10 or 15 years programmers have been doing which is I know there is some sort of Library call I need to make here to erase the screen or whatever I don't remember what it was so I'm going to Google it that Google is going to load

up a page on the the stack Overflow forum and the stack overl form is going to have the answer like oh that's that's the name of that library and wait what are the parameters Okay great and then they go back over and you type it in so this is a lot of programming nowadays you don't Master you don't memorize everything you're constantly Googling things and then uh you're getting answers and going back to what you're doing AI is very good at like I don't even have to do that I can just like start typing and

it kind of figures out like oh you're looking for this here's it here's the name of the library and here's the parameters you Don't have to leave your development environment or you can kind of even ask it like what's the thing that I need to draw circles or just write it like what would I call it Circle drawing thing and it says is this what you mean and like yeah that's what I mean right so uh for programmers it's literally shaving time off of what they're doing but they would never put in a bunch of

code on the other hand I know a lot of people who aren't programmers at all who are now Building simple programs who wouldn't have been able to without AI uh this is one of the ideas I kind of introduced this in this talk I was giving the other day but I think one of the first big productivity impacts is going to have in knowledge work is really going to be this in general unlocking complex software capabilities in individuals without complex software training and it's not just with program pramming but just with software has powerful Capabilities

often only Power users know how to do it AI is going to make it easier for non-power users to get power capability so I'm going to be able to do crazy stuff in Excel without having to really understand Excel macros and how these sort of complicated things work because I can just kind of describe what I want and the AI can understand that and turn it into a macro language that Excel understands and I can get it done so like that's where I think the first Productivity gains are going to happen is unlock these more

powerful features so like now I don't program but I can write a simple program that's useful I kind of know about Excel but I don't know how to do like an advanced sort or the swap the rows with these numbers with these other like I don't know how to do those operations now I AI will help me do it right so I think unlocking power features without power user training will be one of the lwh hanging Fruits where we're going to see some impact all right what do we got next next question is from Colin

I'm fortunate to have a remote job that supports flexibility but I often struggle to translate the values I care about learning curiosity self-improvement connection and Adventure into concrete goals in actions I want to be able to sustain these practices too often I find myself stuck in a cycle of pseudo productivity going Through the motions without feeling truly fulfilled I think this is a common problem especially if you you have the blessing of time is you get kind of systematic and say okay well here's the things that matter to me and and then you kind of

start I'm going to do this I'm going to do that and I'm going to do this this and it it feels sort of soulless like I I have these like checklist of things I do every day that's that's connecting to The things that I value and I don't know it just feels like going through the motions it doesn't actually feel like it's infusing my life with value that's a really common problem actually like acting on your values in a way that's really meaningful I have four things I want to mention that could be helpful here

one you know once you've identified what's important to you you have your buckets have some sort of Keystone Habit In each sure it's a starting point something you do for each of these values or things you care about on a regular basis that's not trivial but but tractable so you're just signaling to yourself I care about these things sure but then choose one and say this is the thing I'm going to really work on for the next six months this is the thing for the next season I'm going to try to figure out through experimentation

and focus how to Integrate this into my life in the coolest possible way because it actually can be hard you could say I like Adventure great building an ual rhythm of Adventure that's meaningful to you in your life that might take a lot of experimentation it's not an obvious thing to do so maybe you spend a full summer like really focusing on that like well what if I go like on weekend trips and that's not enough maybe what I want To do is like once a quarter go on a let me try one of these

quarterly trips what's that feel like maybe I want to have a challenge myself every week like to go go to a place that you know I haven't been before maybe I want to get a group of friends we do this together like you you figure out what's really pressing my buttons on this value and how how do I best integrate that into a part of my life and that takes time and experimentation so just focus on one Till you feel good about it and then you can move on to another it can take years to

kind of button down a full lifestyle setup and then at the end of that you kind of say okay now I wanted I had kids whoops we got to change all these again like what Adventure means is very different now than it did before and that's okay so spend more time and go one by one in figuring these things out there's a patience thing the second solution go back to Lifestyle Centric Planning the better understand what it means for these values to be a part of your life in particular the part of Lifestyle Centric planning

that's key when you're thinking about these type of values like curiosity or adventure for example is to find examples that resonate like you know what what I'm looking for is someone who is doing something in their life that really that specific thing they're doing really resonates with me So get more concrete move from the abstract to the more concrete like oh I really love the the way this guy this guy works like maybe you're really when it comes to Adventure and you try to get concrete the thing that resonates with you is this movie which

I watched a bunch as a kid wonder if you would know this one Jesse K2 oh yeah Spacey is it Spacey yeah right oh it might be yeah um where they they they go to climb K2 It doesn't go well I oh no that was that was an every one it's a mountain climbing movie wait I'm looking this up because um it's no he was in like k something else yeah oh oh the K packs exactly exactly what you're talking about no I can I can think of I'm looking this up here uh 1991 film

man I used to like this film oh it's Michael Bean yeah Michael bean and Matt Craven spoiler alert don't think it goes well for Matt Craven anyway so it was this Mountain climbing movie K2 you know is the second highest mountain in the World Behind Everest and it's like the most danger melted people die I mean people die all the time I mean okay not the rabbit hole but the reputation of K2 at the time was like this is the real killer like Everest you can have these companies that like take you up to the

top if you pay them $660,000 you don't have to be a world class athlete K2 is Really really hard it's the second highest amount it was really really hard and it had the highest death toll it was like one out of five people die or whatever but then after this movie came out you know you get the disaster on Everest when crack hour into th air was there where like all these people died and then like a lot of people died on Everest after that so like no one thinks about Everest as being easy I

mean it's in theory you can do it without being an Elite athlete you can pay to do it but now its death rate's also pretty high anyways the reason why I think about this movie because I saw it all the time is that Michael Bean was a corporate executive in this movie and they were always showing he was in his skyscraper office and he had like a Nord track machine in there cuz he was training for this like so he was like a world-class Mountaineer and had this job right so maybe that really resonates with

you Like yeah that's that's what I want to be like Adventure is like I I have my job just fulfills other things for me and it's specific and corporate or whatever but I want to be the guy who's also has like the Nord track machine in my office because I'm training to go do like these extreme things and like there's these like two sides of me like so so maybe that's what resonates with you then that gives you like a a concrete way of thinking about Integrating Adventure into your life so you look for what

resonates because sometimes the abstract principle you don't know what about that appeals to me or what way of integrating that into a life really is interesting to me and the concrete examples I get there so you want to use a single purpose notebook for this or have like a Fields note or mol skin notebook where you're taking notes on these things as you watch Things as you read things as you meet people take notes on what's resonating and that's going to give you some better ideas of how to uh implement this solution three you might

want to simplify right maybe maybe want to simplify down the things you're focusing on so that you're not you don't have too many specific things that you're trying to make progress on so um you know connection it might be like heart heart body mind you know heart is like Community and connection body is I want like the be in good shape and healthy and it fuels all these other things and go do things that like uses my body and mind is like I want to like enjoy the world of ideas and interestingness and just do

cool stuff with my minder like simplify it and then under those things there's lots of different things you could do and maybe you do different things at different times like I'm going to start by this season like this winter I want to read these like five great books and have like a discussion group about them and you know maybe in the summer I'm doing something else with my curiosity and with my body right now maybe it's just like in my case getting my back to work again but then like the next season I might be

working on you know returning to to my like Alex scars guard workout and getting giant traps or whatever and it might get more extreme right so you you simplify it smaller Categories that have many more possibilities under them now you have less going on at any one time all right my final thing I would mention here make sure you're not missing a foundation of what David Brooks would call second Mountain virtues it's like in your list outside of connection we have learning curiosity self-improvement and Adventure none of these are second Mountain virtues are service virtues

you serving other people In the world this is like a foundation of meaning especially as you get past a certain age so often this will happen as people leave their 20s and move through their 30s is that they'll find that just the sort of self-focused things the things we see in the beginning of those morning ritual videos I'm up and I have 17 steps I do just to like perfect my you know every aspect of my being um they don't fulfill It's not exciting anymore you feel this bit of a lack you're like I'm trying

to kill it at my job and be in really good shape and go on all these adventures and and catalog them or whatever and it's it's feeling a little bit empty after a while the second Mountain virtues which are character and service based that's when these kick in and really give you a strong foundation and and really probably a life where a lot of your discretionary time is on second mou and Virtues and then on top of that you're able to do these sort of you you know I I'm training to Mountain climb is like

my other thing I do or I'm really in the movies and me and my friends like really in the movies that that becomes that balance of of second Mountain virtues versus like other types of self-focused Virtues that ratio needs to shift as you get a little bit older so it might just be that like it's more about like your heart and soul you have to get cleaned Up and then the other things maybe will be less important or you'll enjoy them more or you don't have to do as many of them to get the same

fulfillment so I long answer because you know I'm thinking about a lot of this from my deep Life Book which is actually I'm on like a six week pause writing that because I I'm doing this New Yorker thing yeah you mentioned that so I am excited to get back to it you know I took over Kyle shaka's colum for one Month and I'm writing the third or fourth of the fourth four articles right now I'm kind of looking forward on the other end of that just easy my way back into the uh the Deep Life

Book kind of building up the speed um has been fun writing columns but man that's a fast pace all right who do we got next next question is from Holden speaking of writing how would you recommend somebody go about deliberate and consistent Improvement in writing you know my thing For writing it's like other any other sort of skilled activity you have to train right it's doing it a lot will get you part of the way so if I'm writing a bunch I want to do my pages every day that will help you will become a

better writer than if you don't do that at all you get more used to it it's less hard you build some circuits in your brain words come more easily then you're going to hit a wall and if you want to get Better you have to have uh activities designed to stretch you in specific ways past where your current capabilities are writing for editing is really the best way to do that I'm trying to make this good enough that this person likes it so like someone's going to evaluate it and you're going to get that feedback

like it stretches you and the feedback helps you get better in particular ways taking on specific writing challenges also helps I want to Work on this technique here I'm going to read people who are good at that technique try to understand it and then use that knowledge in this thing I'm writing now so it's writing where you are specifically stretching a particular piece of the writing Talent it's the stretch and the specificity that's going to that's going to make you better so you got to think about it as something that you're going to train I

mean it's why for example at the very upper levels Of fiction writing like Elite literary fiction writers so many of them go to MFA programs they just often need that final really learning and being pushed with other writers and reading their stuff and they're reading your stuff you just need that final push of like where you're still a little rusty seeing someone who's better at something than you are and like reading their thing and then trying to be better in yours the next time they need that Final training push if you want to be like

an elite level fiction writer but that persists at every uh every level on the writing ladder you got to train to get to the next level so that's the way I usually think about that all right what's next we have our Corner slow productivity Corner this is each week we have a question about my latest book slow productivity the Lost start of accomplishment without burnout the main reason we do this segment is so That we can play the segment theme song which we're going to hear right [Music] now all right Jesse what's our slow productivity

Corner question of the week it's from JJ many individuals who've reached the absolute Pinnacle of their fields from athletes like Michael Jordan to entrepreneurs like Elon Musk seem to follow a different pattern of obsessive allc consuming work without clear boundaries while your approach clearly Leads to meaningful achievements and a fulfilling life I wonder if someone can truly reach the uppermost echelons of their field while maintaining the balance approach you discuss in slow productivity well it's a good question um I don't know necessarily that you would use balance as one of the key adjectives for slow

productivity I would say it's focused I would say it's sustainable um I would say it's kind of The opposite of pseudo productivity which is performative activity for the sake of activity that's what it rejects but I was thinking about people in the top 1% of their field and in a lot of fields Elite level performers if you look at how they approach their work it echoes a lot of the ideas from slow productivity so let's consider for example Elite Writers I used Elite writers as examples frequently in the book slow productivity because to be an

elite writer you almost always have to take a slow productivity approach you're not working on many things like you're you're basically just like all in on the book you're writing you kind of simplify your life in that way you're course are obsessing over quality if you're an elite writer like I want this thing to win the whatever literary priz is that I'm hoping it Become a New York Times notable books you really care about quality more than anything else and uh yeah it's seasonal I'm really working on a book hard now I'm completely doing nothing

now I'm brainstorming the next book now I'm editing a book like there's there's real variations and because they have such autonomy there can be seasonality in their day often these writers have specific hours they write in and then They're done they're not writing all day long and there's could be seasonality in their month or week like I was thinking if I was just a full-time writer like just a book writer I bet this back thing I'm dealing with would be so much easier to deal with because like all I'm doing is writing I could just

take the foot off the gas pedal while I work on this rehab and it's bothering me and then just put it back on again because writers or Full-time writers and you know sometimes have to be pretty much aite to do it full-time have that type of ability to be more seasonal Elite athletes I actually think about as practitioners of slow productivity as well I mean they they do one thing they're sport they're not working on 30 things right they're not answering emails and jumping off and on calls they training for their sport of course they

obsess over quality that's what makes them Elite athletes And their work is literally seasonal here's the sports season here's the offseason we treat these things very differently so they have different rhythms of their week Elite academics often they become Elite because again they are slow productivity uh practitioners as well hey I'm focusing on just the this result uh Academia is very seasonal teaching non- teing but also working on a result that being done with a result It might take you a couple years before you get going again on another big project and they obsess over

quality now of course a lot of academic positions have the slow productivity subverted by the the injection of the administrative but in this context we note that's a problem like they say I'm worse at being a professor now because I have to do all this administrative work so like what made them Elite was not the busyness you see of a later stage career Professor Holding all these administrative positions what made them a lead is when they were more true to the productivity principles so I see it I mean what what's missing here you mentioned balance

I think what you mean by balance is like the total number of hours you're working in a day is not too bad um athletes I guess violate that because it takes a lot of hours if you're just in a season yeah writers don't work huge number of hours so I think that's still Okay Elite academics they can work a lot of hours yeah I think especially if it's a lab based Academia so like fair enough on that point there are of course you mentioned Elon Musk that points towards the idea that there are in which

Elite level is not really compatible with slow productivity principles entrepreneurship is probably the classic example of that like starting up a company you just you aren't doing one thing you're doing lots of things it's not seasonal it's all out All the time and it's not really obsessing over quality because you don't have time or energy to do that it's just like putting out fires and trying to keep things rolling forward so yeah starting big companies is usually not compatible with slow productivity uh Elite leaders of complicated teams those type of position often aren't compatible I'm

thinking about like Navy commanders you're the co on a big ship like a destroyer or Something like that's not compatible slow productivity it's it's doing many many different things it's all out all day uh it's getting things done right but not trying to like push the quality you don't have the time energy or luxury of like I'm just going to obsess over quality in one thing it's like trying to prevent bad things from happening so yeah no not every job has the elite levels be compatible with slow productivity but a lot do and You'll see

that if you read the book because I draw from stories of knowledge workers who done Elite work in times past to draw at these principles so it should be no surprise all right uh I think we decided right Jesse we're now doing the music on the way out as well we sure did all right let's hear [Music] that this is my my competitor product for dund daily.com all it is is uh every Five minutes it just plays that music it's like an app just plays that music every five minutes just just it'll relax people they'll

get good work all right do we have a call this week we do all right let's hear it hi Cal this is Chris I'm a data architect in Minnesota and I have a question about how do you manage different projects in the columns specifically active and waiting on someone Else I created a personal project in aana that I have one task for each of my projects and I have the active column and I'm trying to keep that to no more than three open projects at a time but I also have projects that I'm waiting on

other people to get back to me for and so I'm curious if you have any advice or rules of thumb around what to do if that list of projects that I'm Waiting on people starts to stack up and then say four people get back to me at the same time wondering if you have any advice on that yeah okay really appreciate the show thanks all it's a good question about these task storage boards um two things I want to say first of all I don't have everything I need to do on my task storage board

these tend to be sort of like tasks that need to get done uh but what's not typically included on Those boards for me is like ongoing work you know if I'm working on a book chapter for example that's a major thing I'm working on there's not a task on my T taskboard that says like work on book chapter that's something that's going to come up in my weekly planning I'm like what am I doing right now oh I'm working on uh my book is one of my big goals for this quarter so what do I

want to get done this week well let's see if I could finish a draft of chapter three this Week that would actually be good great let put that on my weekly plan like today's big you know this week's focus is working on chapter 3 and in fact maybe I want to actually block out a few big writing blocks to make sure I have time on my calendar for working on on chapter 3 right nothing here ever touched the task on a trell board but the trell board stuff might be they often are they're like one-off

task or individual tasks like stuff I need to do Or get back to people that I don't want to forget about all right so I I'll keep that in mind first um second okay so what happens if you have a lot of stuff waiting to hear back from well you you put these items on the waiting to get back Callum so you don't forget about them you're telling your mind yeah I sent out this request I don't want to forget that that's out there like that person may never get back to me again that's going

to be an Open loop that's going to generate stress in my brain so I want to make sure I remember like yeah I I'm I asked Jesse about this that I'm waiting to hear back and a good waiting to get back card on a trailer board will say what you're going to do when that comes back when that gets back make a decision and tell Jeremy so here's what I'm waiting here back on and here's what I'm going to do when I get it okay you don't have to Execute that right away so you know

if someone gets back to you um you can take that off the waiting to get back to you list now hey that's back in my world but then what you do with that's up to you it's kind of like a new task has entered your life you could put it on you could just do it right then you could put on your active list as something like I want to try to get to this as soon as possible or it could go on a back burner list all right Ball's back in my court I'm not

going to act on this right now but like okay it's it's it's changed the status has changed I've heard back I have this information now I have a new thing to do I'm going to put that back you know under whatever column is appropriate so you don't have to do those things right away the the goal of that list is you know not to forget things that are outstanding but you don't have to execute those things right away all Right so hope hopefully that helps and also you know I'm pretty loose about these things like

often the things I have on my active list it's it's non- major things like I but from my list of things I kind of want to make progress on and as I go through my daily plan I um and I have like put aside admin blocks I'll go look at those and see how many of those I can turn through but you know hey sometimes things take longer or you lose some admin blocks you don't get Them done and like that's fine I find that kind of loose like the critical stuff is going to end

up being a part of my weekly plan and probably make its way on my calendar so hopefully that makes sense about waiting for just because you've been waiting for something for a while does it mean you have to act on it right away when it comes back to you all we got a case study this week where people send in description of using that type of advice we talk about Here on the show and their lives if you have a case study you can send them to Jesse atal newport.com to this case study comes from

Amy who we talked to in episode 323 she was also one of the listeners who pointed us towards the Derek Thompson article that we talked about earlier in the Deep dive so thank you Amy all right so I don't remember episode 233 Jesse in detail but I guess it was about she was going back to grad School it had been a few years since she'd been in school she's in her early 30s and we were giving some advice about um how to tackle school and I think one of the points we made is hey don't

be too stressed about this you probably are going to find coming back to school in your 30s is not going to seem as hard of a job as it was when you were 20 whatever M all right so here's her follow-up case study I got all A's in my first semester of graduate school going To school and doing well is much easier at 34 than it was at 18 and it wasn't like I wasn't interested in my college education I went to College of Music because I was and still am obsessed with music but after

having some more life experience my grad school program though challenging and demanding feels much easier than undergrad my unsolicited advice for anyone considering college or grad school take a gap year if you're 18 and planning to go to college seriously Consider deferring your acceptance for a year this is a common practice in other countries for various reasons but Americans would be well do well to adapt it to I appreciate that Amy it is a true point older people find School easier because school is not that hard once you're used to doing hard things an 18-year-old

is not really used to doing hard things but a 34 year-old is and if it's their full-time job they say it's not too hard to study like studying is Not fun but honestly this is going to take me like five hours this week to be prepared for this exam five hours is not that much time I used to spend five hours just on my inbox on Monday morning alone this is no big deal I noticed this again and again when I would advise non-traditional college students so at Georgetown I would help advise or give talks

to the advising program that would work with non-traditional college students so people coming back later in Life but also uh we did some work with veteran programs so people coming back on the GI Bill and they would just crush it right because they'd seen real hardship if you are new to school the Gap year is a good idea another idea just read my book How to Become a Straight A Student read it and do it your friends are idiots when it comes to studying do not look at how they study take no advice from them

they are really bad at It do the stuff in that book you'll get very good grades that's just it like that book is like here's how the people who get after it this is how they actually study this is the stuff that works this is what you really need to do do that stuff it tells you how to be organized how to take notes the right way to study for math right way to write papers just do it that way and you're going to get really good grades and it's going to be a lot easier

than what your Friends are doing so yeah if you treat being a student like a job it's like a easy job if on the flip side you do what many student students do is you treat being a student like a vacation then you're like this is a really crappy vacation because I keep having to go to the library and and you see like everything you have to do is somehow be negative because it's getting in the way of you having fun but if you see it as a job you're like this the Easiest job we

ever had it's like a halftime job and I'm doing great and getting a lot of praise for it so Amy thanks for helping to emphasize that point we have a cool Final segment coming up we react to one of my own articles but first let's briefly hear from another sponsor I want to talk about the defender the class of vehicles that we have been promoting here on the show because it seems to kind of fit with our Theme right I mean it is a a vehicle that is well suited for those who are seeking something

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to bother going to get it or can I just continue to drive over it it would help me there anyways cool car rugged but also comfortable adventurous but also relaxing so you can design your Defender at landroverusa.com build your Defender at Landroverusa.com also want to talk about our friends at Shopify everyone we know and okay I'm not fact checking that statement so let's say so many people Jesse and I know who are in this business who sell things they just use Shopify that's just what you do like if you're going to sell something online or

in a store you use Shopify because they have selling things nailed down it just is going to make it professional and easy and effective nobody does selling Better than Shopify they have the number one checkout on the planet and they're not so secret secret shopay which boost conversions up to 50% people who are thinking about buying your thing are going to buy it because shop feay pushes them forward that means less carts go abandoned so if you're into growing your business your Commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling

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corner where I talk about technology or a cal reacts where I react to something on the internet today we're doing both again because I am reacting to My Own latest article for the New Yorker that is an article about technology I'm going to pull this up on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening to show you what I think is Probably the most disturbing graphic that has ever accompanied something I have written Jesse I would describe it as a phone melting somebody's face so okay pretty intense cool graphic though actually

it's like a do you ever know the graphics they're going to use no they do it kind of last minute yeah yeah there's been occasions where I wish I had a version of it so it's not like the book cover input that you have yeah I don't know how it works sometimes They're drawing it from scratch and sometimes they're like they have it already I I don't quite know how it works um but I guess this is probably not an artwork I want blown up large in my house because it would give me nightmares it's

a cool picture though all right here's the article I wrote It's a column this is me again I took over Kyle shaka's infinite scroll column for a month uh this column is titled what happened when an extremely offline Person tried Tik Tok so the premise was hey I'm recovering from this injury I've got kind of laid up a little bit maybe it would be fun to try Tik Tok the formal journalistic experiment I was doing here was to see how is the experience of social media and our relation with relationship with social media changed since

when I was last like really actively writing about like how people use social media whether they should use social media which was really About a decade ago I'm just going to point out a couple points so the perhaps one of the most striking things I found is that when I was writing about quitting social media this was like 2013 and 2016 that's when I became known for that I went back and read those articles again for this there were really big debates happening supporters of social media had very strong reasons why it was important I

was deba against those reasons so my articles were like very Carefully walking through these arguments and saying these arguments are not as strong as you think and people would get upset about those stances it was really a a pretty robust debate I've talked about this before on the show but like I would write a times oped and then the times would publish a response oped or I would go on the radio to talk about that article and they would bring on someone to push back on me on the radio show to say you know Cal

is wrong like It was a pretty contentious debate uh that was unfolding at that time most of those articles that I arguments I used to debate against none of them apply anymore to social media we used the same phrase but when I was on Tik Tok or trying YouTube shorts or Instagram reals the arguments that people used to make in favor social media just don't apply anymore they said this is how you keep up with your friends and your Social life no one keeps up with their friends or social life on Tik Tok they said

this is going to open up career opportunities this was a big one people were like you're crazy you're going to disappear and have no job if you're not using these platforms no one's saying that about Tik Tok no one saying like yeah I got my job because my my boss at the insurance company thought my Tik toks were fire right that just doesn't happen the other major argument from 10 Years ago was this is the online Town Square this is where like culture is being formed right this is like the Twitter argument back then the

most important articles are moving around Facebook Tik Tok Instagram reals YouTube shorts you're getting these incredibly individualized atomized feeds your feed looks nothing like the person next to you it's not creating Collective culture it's creating isolated customized distraction so I was really struck I was Like man all this fighting I used to do none of it's relevant anymore right so there these big Arguments for why social media is important don't apply to the latest most popular generation of of of social media so I went and I talked to some young people who do use these

Services I had them show me Tik Tok I was like well why do you use it and here's the thing they don't have a great answer none of these young people were giving full-throated Defenses of Tik Tok in the way that I used to get full-throated defenses of Facebook Twitter uh and Instagram back in the day they're like yeah it's pretty stupid but it's diverting the one guy talk to Zach would talk about it's like H there's these memes these video memes and it's funny and he showed them to me and they're funny and interesting

and they remind me of some of the the absurdest type of humor that was popular on the early web when I was in college In the early 2000s and I get it but that's not like a profound argument it was like yeah this is funny I like him I I uh he would actually use the funny Tik toks he found as just a social lubricant like you could send these to friends and via text message and it gave you something an excuse like Ping your friend or to talk to someone uh this other young woman

I talked to was like I don't know it like it feels kind of authentic it feel it's Creates emotions she sent me some Tik toks it was like a recipe thing it was visually appealing and a video of vets returning home early to surprise their kids and I was like touching like none of them have the a grandiose Theory like you used to get from communication professors back in 2013 about why this was at like the keyy of culture or this was at the Key of your success or it's at the key it's the Evolving

Civic life people are just like I don't know it's diverting and I could use a little diversion in my life there's a lot of fears around this because it's very diverting and we see young people that they have a hard time turning their eyes away from this because once we get rid of all those other justifications you can hone in on just being as engaging as possible and that could be pretty addictive but I found that almost hopeful not in this if We're no longer fighting for social media then I think its footprint on our

lives is going to get smaller I think the yes it's addictive nature maybe is higher but the addiction is no longer protected it's no longer protected in uh the clothing of virtue it's just addicting it's cigarettes in the 80s versus cigarettes in the 50s no one wants to be smoking anymore we all get it it's still hard to stop but everyone kind of agrees like yeah I probably Should do this less so we used the term social media today we used the term social media 10 years ago but it's describing something different and in some

ways it's something more uh Insidious but in other ways it's something that feels like it's much more solvable because it feels much less important its grasp is hard but its grounding is shallow so I actually came away from this Like not as scary because no one's fighting me on this we're all on the same side and the fact that we have the Tik Tok ban at least in some form seems like it's going through that would be positive as well you see one of these Services being be banned that also just like helps change their

mindset of like yeah these things are kind of optional it was okay we took that one away we all survived it just kind of emphasizes the optionality the triviality the Tangentiality of these services so it was an interesting experiment Jesse I had no by the way I have no interest in they're on my phone now because I was doing the experiment I think I have no interest in cooking those apps I don't know if you've used Tik Tok before it's just I've never used it but I get you would get used to it if like

it was these young people are more used to it do you think elon's going to buy it um maybe yeah maybe I don't I Don't know what's going to happen uh I I always get I'm bad at predicting the legislature legislative so like we're recording this on Friday before the ban could go into effect very quickly but like probably like Congress wants to expand it I don't know what's going to happen I think he's going to buy it you know I just wish expensive but he I don't think he has the money he'll raise it

yeah maybe a Syndicate yeah I I just hope it goes Away uh just so we get used to this idea of like yeah these things come and go which I think is the reality of social media today like these things come and go the guy I talked to for the article Zack shout out to Zach he also uses Instagram reals which is very similar to Tik Tok and he mixes them up he doesn't care he like oh here check out this Tik Tok and really it's an Instagram re like there's no it doesn't matter like

they're all just there's no social graph Tik Tok you don't most people like the typical Tik Tok user according to PE research doesn't ever even touch their biofield doesn't know anything about you other than the videos you like it's not like your friends are in there your followers are in there if you leave the platform it's a problem you know I can jump over to reals and and see videos on there and I'm getting the same experience like I don't it doesn't matter these things have become portable They're just uh becoming increasingly generic sources of

short form distraction and that feels very different than like man I would get yelled at people thought I was like an eccentric Lite uh anti-democratic weirdo for not using like one of these three platforms that is just not the case anymore he bought Twitter for 44 billion right how much would Tik Tok be like 200 billion I don't know that's a good question so I Mean Twitter's user base is in the hundreds of millions and Tik Tok is much bigger than that uh would think it' be at least four times Tik tok's generating a lot

more Revenue as well yeah I mean I don't that's not money to raise he's in trouble right now for some of the details of how he used his own stock to raise the sec's Madden for how he raised the money for Twitter you know he's like taking loans against his own stock and I just read that SPF book from Lewis about FTX yeah he could have bought it not anymore not anymore it's a lot of abbreviation similar thing of all com England funds yeah maybe we should buy it just be all like slow productivity Corner

theme music and Jesse skeleton that would be a good Just Like Jesse skeleton doing like funny things and slow PR activity Corner theme music that would be a successful platform I recorded that all right anyways uh let's wrap it up for now We'll be back next week with another episode and until then as always St hey if you like today's discussion I think you'll also like episode 330 in which we explore how to tackle social media's hidden dangers check it out I think you'll like it the final part of this deep dive I will then

connect what's going on in Australia with all of our general struggles to control the role of Technology For Better or For Worse in Our lives