Ep. 250: In Defense of Thinking

00:00:00.000 | And so I thought let's get philosophical today.

00:00:02.880 | The deep question I want to tackle, why is it important to preserve the

00:00:09.240 | vanishing art of thinking?

00:00:11.720 | So I want to dive deep on that question.

00:00:13.600 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about working and

00:00:25.000 | living deeply in a distracted world.

00:00:27.320 | I'm here in my deep work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse.

00:00:37.440 | Jesse, you know why I'm in a good mood today?

00:00:40.120 | Why's that?

00:00:40.960 | Going to the ballpark.

00:00:41.960 | Yeah, baby.

00:00:43.160 | Seen the Nationals play, the Padres.

00:00:46.640 | I think, and Jesse, you'll back me up on this.

00:00:49.440 | The audience wouldn't mind if we then therefore dedicated today's show to the

00:00:56.160 | analytical picture of the 2023 Nationals.

00:01:00.360 | I think that's appropriate.

00:01:01.320 | I think it's appropriate.

00:01:02.360 | I watched a little of the game last night.

00:01:03.680 | They were down three, nothing.

00:01:04.640 | I'm not sure what happened.

00:01:05.480 | They tied it up for two run home run by Abrams and a one run home run by Thomas.

00:01:10.600 | But then Soto hit a home run and Erasmus gave up two runs and we lost by three.

00:01:16.760 | But what I want to get into, and I think everyone, especially our

00:01:20.440 | international listeners will be very interested in this, is trying to

00:01:23.440 | understand if the gap between Josiah Gray's FIP and ERA is something we

00:01:29.000 | should worry about, or if it's instead actually just capturing the increased

00:01:32.520 | weak contact we're getting off of his newly developed cutter.

00:01:35.480 | So I have three guests we're going to bring on to get into this in detail.

00:01:40.000 | No, I'm joking, but I am happy about going to the Nats.

00:01:42.000 | It's my first game I've seen of the season.

00:01:43.480 | I haven't made it out there yet, Jesse.

00:01:44.600 | So, uh, good atmosphere down there.

00:01:47.200 | Not a lot of people go to the games, but yeah, I think weeknight, though Soto

00:01:50.880 | might, you know, the Padres are in town, but yeah, weeknight, weeknight Nats

00:01:54.080 | might be a fun, like not that many people.

00:01:56.840 | Yeah.

00:01:57.280 | We'll see.

00:01:57.600 | They have 30,000 there this weekend.

00:01:58.840 | For one game?

00:02:01.440 | One game.

00:02:01.920 | Yeah.

00:02:02.320 | Yeah.

00:02:02.680 | 31,000.

00:02:03.320 | And what's it hold?

00:02:04.040 | Uh, God, 40 something.

00:02:06.960 | Okay.

00:02:07.600 | Yeah.

00:02:07.840 | Yeah.

00:02:08.600 | So like a playoff game, they'll get like 42 or 40, 43.

00:02:11.240 | Uh, but I'm not, I will say, I promise I won't actually, I won't actually

00:02:16.080 | talk that much about baseball.

00:02:18.600 | In fact, let me, let me change gears and talk about something completely unrelated.

00:02:22.000 | Uh, it was actually a pretty cool, it got me thinking, Jesse, it

00:02:24.680 | was a cool documentary from 1966.

00:02:27.400 | It's on YouTube and a listener sent it to me and I hadn't seen it before.

00:02:32.040 | And it's a documentary in which it's about John von Neumann.

00:02:35.640 | If you don't know John von Neumann, he's a sort of first half of the 20th century

00:02:40.760 | got mathematicians slash physicists slash electrical engineer for those in the know.

00:02:48.320 | Von Neumann is considered essentially one of the smartest human beings to ever live.

00:02:52.600 | He just made breakthroughs in field after field at a stunning speed.

00:02:57.680 | He was based largely, especially in the war period out of Princeton and the

00:03:02.560 | Princeton area, the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton university.

00:03:05.040 | Uh, and he was known for being able to walk in and goodwill hunting style,

00:03:08.960 | solve your equation, reconceptualize your whole physical framework build.

00:03:14.240 | He built one of the very first digital computers.

00:03:16.080 | And it was a very smart guy.

00:03:18.040 | Not as well known as some of his contemporaries like Girdle or

00:03:21.360 | Turing, but a very smart guy.

00:03:22.480 | Anyway, so it says 1966 documentary.

00:03:25.120 | It's old, muddy, black and white footage is shown on YouTube, but it included

00:03:30.840 | a clip that caught my attention.

00:03:33.440 | This was, uh, the physicist Edward Teller was being interviewed about von Neumann.

00:03:38.320 | I'm going to bring this up on the screen here.

00:03:40.560 | So if you're watching, you should be looking for episode two 50.

00:03:45.600 | At youtube.com/CalNewportMedia.

00:03:47.920 | You can also find it as episode two 50 at the deep life.com.

00:03:50.920 | So I have up on the screen here, a picture of Edward Teller

00:03:53.760 | from this 1966 documentary.

00:03:57.000 | And here he is talking about von Neumann.

00:04:00.600 | He says, many people have wondered how Johnny von Neumann could think so

00:04:05.960 | fast and so effectively how he could find so many original solutions in areas where

00:04:11.320 | most people did not even notice the problems.

00:04:13.440 | I think I know a part of the answer.

00:04:15.720 | Perhaps an important path or important part.

00:04:18.240 | Johnny von Neumann enjoyed thinking.

00:04:21.680 | I have come to suspect that the most people thinking is painful.

00:04:25.680 | Some of us are addicted to thinking.

00:04:27.520 | Some of us find it a necessity.

00:04:28.920 | Johnny enjoyed it.

00:04:30.960 | I even have the suspicion that he enjoyed practically nothing else.

00:04:34.840 | This explains a lot because, uh, what you like, you do well.

00:04:38.200 | And he liked thinking, not just in mathematics.

00:04:40.080 | He liked thinking in the clear and complete manner of a

00:04:41.840 | mathematician in every field.

00:04:43.080 | In mathematics and physics, in the business world, his father

00:04:45.360 | was a banker in many other fields.

00:04:48.360 | So this sent me down a cognitive rabbit hole.

00:04:52.760 | I began thinking, reflecting about thinking itself, thinking as an activity

00:05:00.040 | to which you can develop or have a relationship and the role of thinking,

00:05:04.200 | not just in our culture, but in the fully developed human life.

00:05:07.800 | And so I thought, let's get philosophical today.

00:05:11.440 | The deep question I want to tackle, why is it important to preserve

00:05:16.760 | the vanishing art of thinking?

00:05:19.480 | So I want to dive deep on that question.

00:05:21.360 | Then we'll have a collection of questions from you, my listeners that

00:05:25.720 | all vaguely relate to this general theme of how you improve your ability to think.

00:05:29.560 | And then we'll, we'll shift gears at the end of the show and talk about some

00:05:32.080 | of the books I read last month.

00:05:34.240 | All right.

00:05:35.120 | So let's jump into this deep dive.

00:05:36.200 | We need to start with definitions.

00:05:37.600 | What do we mean when we say thinking?

00:05:40.680 | Let's define it like this for now.

00:05:42.040 | The uniquely human activity of synthesizing and structuring existing

00:05:48.920 | information to create new information that's useful to understanding

00:05:52.360 | or acting in the world.

00:05:54.360 | So you bring in information, you structure it in your head in such a way that

00:05:58.960 | actually produces information that improves the world, you have a better

00:06:03.320 | understanding or it can impact the way people act and make more value happen

00:06:07.360 | in those actions, we're being pretty general here, but that's thinking.

00:06:09.840 | It's, it's, uh, building something new out of existing information.

00:06:16.920 | Now I'm going to claim that thinking is the core driver of human culture,

00:06:20.880 | of human invention and human civilization is what distinguishes us from other species.

00:06:28.120 | Uh, it also should not be surprising that this type of thinking, the

00:06:31.400 | creation of useful information is deeply satisfying for human beings in a way that

00:06:38.200 | it's hard for other activities to replicate.

00:06:42.320 | We've known this for a while.

00:06:44.160 | Aristotle wrote about this.

00:06:45.600 | I'm going to bring up an Aristotle quote here on the screen.

00:06:47.800 | Uh, this is from the ethics, I believe book 10, section seven.

00:06:52.960 | Here is Aristotle.

00:06:54.960 | "The activity of philosophic wisdom is admittedly the pleasantest

00:06:59.560 | of virtuous activities.

00:07:01.120 | At all events, the pursuit of thought, uh, to offer pleasures that are

00:07:06.280 | marvelous for their purity and their enduringness, and is to be expected

00:07:10.400 | that those who know will pass their time more pleasantly than those who inquire.

00:07:14.640 | The activity of reason, which is contemplative, seems both to be superior

00:07:19.160 | in serious worth and to aim at the no end beyond itself, to have

00:07:24.080 | its pleasure proper to itself."

00:07:26.640 | This is Aristotle in the ethics where he, in book 10, comes to this conclusion

00:07:31.160 | that the teleological necessity of human beings is our ability to think

00:07:36.160 | deeply, that we get pleasure out of that for no other reason than just thinking,

00:07:39.160 | because this is what humans can do that nothing else can.

00:07:41.800 | It is in thinking, in deep contemplation, what he calls

00:07:46.280 | philosophic wisdom, that we find our full expression.

00:07:50.520 | So we, from the beginning of us starting to reflect about the human condition,

00:07:54.040 | we knew thinking was important.

00:07:57.320 | All right, here's the problem.

00:08:01.480 | I believe we're in a moment where the value of thinking is decreasing.

00:08:06.640 | It's decreasing in part because we think about it less, that's

00:08:11.000 | sort of a circular irony there.

00:08:12.680 | We think about thinking less.

00:08:13.840 | We isolate it less as a standalone activity.

00:08:16.920 | We're much less likely to think of it as a particular pursuit that we might focus

00:08:23.480 | on or emphasize or cultivate in our own lives, thinking is getting pushed to the

00:08:28.360 | margins of our understanding of our culture.

00:08:32.680 | Now there's a lot of reasons why this is true.

00:08:35.000 | I want to point to one particular reason in particular, which I've been, I've

00:08:38.680 | been thinking about recently, and I'm trying to articulate, so I'm going to

00:08:41.160 | try out some rough thoughts for you here.

00:08:42.960 | And this is the impact that's coming from the knowledge sector, from the

00:08:46.520 | work, the world of work, in particular, knowledge work, intertwined with the,

00:08:51.840 | the world of technology, which itself is connected to the world of work.

00:08:56.520 | I've come to believe that the knowledge sector is uncomfortable with this

00:09:01.280 | Aristotelian, Jean van Neumann style understanding of thinking as this

00:09:06.400 | fundamentally creative human activity.

00:09:09.560 | The reason is if you're in the business of transforming information into value,

00:09:16.040 | this is what happens in the knowledge sector, human thinking in that type of

00:09:21.120 | purified, creative form is complicated for you.

00:09:26.600 | It is hard to predictably find people who can do it well.

00:09:32.600 | It is hard to evaluate thinking.

00:09:34.640 | Is someone thinking well, what value are they producing through their thinking?

00:09:37.720 | It's hard to manage thinking because it's interior and the

00:09:43.160 | results are not always obvious.

00:09:44.800 | And you can't tell what's happening in someone's head.

00:09:47.200 | Are they thinking or are they instead contemplating Josiah

00:09:51.320 | Gray's FIP instead of his ERA?

00:09:54.120 | And so it makes us uncomfortable, especially if you imagine a

00:09:56.720 | industrial sector that has, I mean, an economic sector that has come out of

00:10:00.680 | before this, it was a industry, it was manufacturing, before that it was

00:10:03.920 | agriculture, these were economic productions in which the, the chain

00:10:07.520 | between inputs and outputs is much more clarified.

00:10:09.880 | We really understand the different processes and how effective they are.

00:10:13.040 | All of this goes away when we're instead thinking about what's

00:10:15.760 | happening between someone's ears.

00:10:17.320 | This idea that just creativity and contemplation is going to eventually

00:10:22.000 | produce something that's real valuable.

00:10:23.240 | That's nerve wracking.

00:10:24.280 | If you own a company, if you manage a team, thinking the knowledge sector

00:10:31.680 | also leads to superstar dynamics.

00:10:33.400 | If you have built your industry on the quality, the competitive quality of rare

00:10:40.080 | raw thought stuff produced by your employee, that's going to lead to

00:10:43.120 | superstar dynamics in which having the very best thinker in a particular area

00:10:48.160 | is significantly more valuable than having the second best thinker or

00:10:52.320 | kind of good thinkers, and that creates problems for business.

00:10:54.960 | That also creates problems for employees as well.

00:10:58.960 | In fields where we do still directly value raw thought stuff, thinking like

00:11:04.040 | academia, it's an incredibly competitive superstar market where hundreds of

00:11:08.400 | people apply for any tenure track position and only one will actually get the position.

00:11:12.520 | So, so thinking also creates economic dynamics.

00:11:15.000 | Building revenue off of the sheer quality of what comes out of a brain is difficult.

00:11:20.800 | Because maybe only one company has an Aristotle, and if you don't,

00:11:23.760 | you're going to struggle.

00:11:25.840 | Well, that company is going to take all the business.

00:11:27.800 | All right.

00:11:29.240 | So what has the world of business done instead?

00:11:31.360 | Well, my argument is they would like to rely more on computation, not cognition.

00:11:38.560 | And we'd like to push human cognitive agency towards the margins of these efforts.

00:11:44.040 | I believe the world of knowledge work is more comfortable when they think of

00:11:47.720 | humans as the custodians of computation, as opposed to centers of original cognition.

00:11:55.680 | And I think they're being egged on, this industry sector is being egged on in

00:12:00.360 | this by the tech industry that is creating these computational tools.

00:12:04.760 | So what do I mean by this?

00:12:06.840 | Well, we're thinking about this almost assembly line type model that's

00:12:11.160 | developing in knowledge work in which what's important is data and computer

00:12:16.480 | programs that can find this data, that can analyze this data, that can generate

00:12:22.040 | insights from this data that's important.

00:12:24.200 | So the cogitation here is actually being reduced to algorithmic digital

00:12:27.960 | computation and what do humans do in this picture?

00:12:30.840 | They help identify what problems are important.

00:12:34.840 | They point these programs in the right direction.

00:12:37.520 | They massage the interface and the settings of the programs.

00:12:41.040 | They look at the resulting conclusions of these programs and then translate

00:12:45.920 | that into action, they get together to make decisions about where to actually

00:12:49.880 | aim this proverbial computational canon.

00:12:53.120 | But the actual human sitting there thinking hard thoughts and creating

00:12:57.560 | new value out of nothing is devalued in this framework.

00:13:01.640 | It is very similar to what happened in industrial manufacturing with the rise

00:13:05.360 | of assembly lines, where you went from a world of craft, I have all the expertise

00:13:12.800 | needed to build a complicated mechanism, like a automobile, a craftsman, Ben's

00:13:21.640 | working in the Oldsmobile Ben's factory in Germany in 1900, and it went from that

00:13:27.080 | to, now I turned the bolt that puts the steering wheel onto the Model T.

00:13:33.520 | All the thoughts is all the intelligence is in the process and I'm just a

00:13:38.280 | custodian of this complex process.

00:13:40.080 | I think that is comfortable, right?

00:13:42.320 | That opened up huge profitability in the industrial manufacturing sector.

00:13:45.480 | And I think that's something similar to this happening in knowledge work.

00:13:48.400 | Human cogitation is scary.

00:13:50.480 | We don't know what to do with it.

00:13:51.480 | A Salesforce database that's hooked up to some sort of custom ML analytic tool.

00:13:57.240 | And what you do as a humans is just have meetings on zoom, the sort of like pick

00:14:00.680 | targets and point the software in the right direction.

00:14:02.960 | That's much more comfortable.

00:14:04.760 | This obviously also makes a lot of sense for the tech companies because now all

00:14:08.560 | of the value is in the technological tools, it opens up the possibility for a

00:14:13.000 | tech company to have a massive piece of the economic pie in the sector.

00:14:16.680 | If you build a software, everyone is using, then you're going

00:14:19.680 | to make massive profitability.

00:14:21.080 | So now we can consolidate a huge amount of the revenue being generated in the

00:14:24.800 | economic sector and a small number of companies.

00:14:26.920 | This is what Microsoft did in the 1990s with their office productivity software.

00:14:31.200 | It's what open AI is hoping to do now in the 2020s with their plugin enhanced.

00:14:36.640 | Large language model interfaces where they're hoping to ingrain themselves

00:14:41.680 | into automating more and more of the piece of this knowledge work assembly

00:14:44.560 | line, and therefore have a small number of people siphon off a huge amount of

00:14:48.600 | these profits, this assembly line approach in which humans are custodians

00:14:52.400 | of computation is also good for knowledge work firms themselves because it makes

00:14:55.880 | work more predictable workers themselves become more interchangeable.

00:14:59.280 | It is a much more ordered world of valued knowledge production.

00:15:05.200 | Right?

00:15:06.520 | So in this context, we devalue good old fashioned, hard and original thinking.

00:15:09.920 | We don't even identify it as a standalone activity anymore.

00:15:12.920 | All of our terminology about what makes someone a valuable or productive

00:15:16.760 | employee is going to instead collapse on issues of efficiency.

00:15:20.800 | How quick can they get things?

00:15:23.040 | How quick can they move information around?

00:15:24.800 | How agile are they in actually working with these various information systems

00:15:29.920 | to extract information from it?

00:15:32.240 | We have just a general sense of this person is available.

00:15:35.480 | This person is busy as a mark that they are a good employee and

00:15:38.800 | that we should work with them.

00:15:39.800 | And what's gone out of this picture is how smart is this person?

00:15:43.120 | How original is their thinking?

00:15:45.280 | That's been pushed to the margins.

00:15:47.480 | So there's a lot we should do about this, right?

00:15:50.400 | This is a complicated issue that exists that many different scopes.

00:15:55.320 | And I don't want to get into most of those scopes.

00:15:56.880 | There's a whole economic argument to make here about the structure of

00:15:59.400 | knowledge, work and agency and whether the quote Braverman, if the de-skilling

00:16:05.800 | that so plagued the manufacturing sector is now itself being applied

00:16:11.480 | to the knowledge sector, there's theses you could write on this, but I want to

00:16:15.000 | focus as we do often on this show on the individual, what the individual response

00:16:20.320 | could be right now to the situation.

00:16:22.920 | And I think one of the first things we can do to push back this devaluing of

00:16:27.320 | thinking is as individuals reclaim it.

00:16:29.320 | If as individuals, we reclaim thinking as a, think of it as the signal of our

00:16:36.520 | humanity, something that we are proud of, that we want to get better at, that we

00:16:39.640 | want to put the center of our lives.

00:16:41.080 | This creates a back pressure against attempts to try to

00:16:45.320 | devalue it and push it to the side.

00:16:47.160 | We don't even know what we're losing if we don't actually spend time

00:16:50.720 | trying to support it or develop it.

00:16:54.320 | So of the various responses we need to this current moment, I think a good one

00:16:58.240 | is just us as individuals starting to talk about thinking again, in the same

00:17:04.120 | way, like we might talk about other abilities, we should reclaim it in our

00:17:08.440 | own lives, we should reteach our brains how to do it well, this has been considered

00:17:14.480 | before, I want to bring up a quote here on the screen.

00:17:17.320 | This is from Arnold Bennett in his 1910 book, how to live on 24 hours a day.

00:17:23.000 | One of the very first, what we might think of as a modern advice or self help book.

00:17:27.800 | I actually have a first edition of this book that a listener sent me.

00:17:31.000 | I forgot to bring it.

00:17:32.320 | It's on a display in my library at home.

00:17:34.720 | And it's an important part of my collection because Bennett is really an early thinker

00:17:40.120 | of this form of, you know, a smart person who's thought a lot about the world,

00:17:43.280 | trying to actually put their thoughts into a prescriptive framework as a way of

00:17:46.640 | actually trying to improve people's lives.

00:17:48.120 | So it's a very important book for those of us who write pragmatic nonfiction.

00:17:51.360 | But he tackled this issue in 1910.

00:17:53.960 | He was worried about with the rise of the sort of suburban knowledge work commuter

00:17:59.320 | that people were going to be increasingly alienated from actual thinking.

00:18:04.240 | And he gave real advice.

00:18:05.240 | Let's look at this here.

00:18:05.920 | I want to read a couple of quotes.

00:18:06.920 | He starts by setting the stakes.

00:18:09.440 | Without the power to concentrate, that is to say without the power to dictate to the

00:18:14.680 | brain, its task and to ensure obedience, true life is impossible.

00:18:19.920 | Mind control is the first element of a full existence.

00:18:22.720 | So this has Bennett saying, if you can't aim your brain at interesting or meaningful

00:18:27.440 | or useful activity and have it actually think deeply about it, you do not have a

00:18:31.560 | full existence.

00:18:32.560 | Aristotle would agree with this.

00:18:33.960 | So he goes on to say, hence, it seems to me the first business of the day should be to

00:18:37.880 | put the mind through its paces.

00:18:40.040 | Here's his specific piece of advice.

00:18:42.120 | When you leave your house, concentrate your mind on a subject, no matter what to

00:18:48.120 | begin with. You will not have gone 10 yards before your mind has skipped away under

00:18:52.280 | your very eyes and is lurking around the corner with another subject, but bring it

00:18:55.760 | back by the scruff of the neck.

00:18:57.200 | Have you reached the station?

00:18:59.840 | You will have brought it back about 40 times.

00:19:02.960 | So he's talking here about.

00:19:04.240 | Essentially, the subway station, this was the the era, the early 20th century was the

00:19:09.080 | era of the London suburbs, the growth of what he called the strap hangers, the people

00:19:13.480 | who would get on a train and hold on to the strap and drive into the city to actually

00:19:16.720 | do their work. That was new back then.

00:19:19.080 | Do not despair. Continue.

00:19:20.560 | Keep it up. You will succeed.

00:19:21.920 | You cannot by any chance fail if you persevere.

00:19:23.960 | It is idle to pretend that your mind is incapable of concentration.

00:19:28.000 | Do you not remember that morning when you received the disquieting letter which

00:19:31.400 | demanded a very carefully worded answer, how you let your mind steadily kept your mind

00:19:35.520 | steadily on the subject of the answer without a second's intermission until you

00:19:39.200 | reached your office, whereupon you instantly sat down and wrote the answer?

00:19:41.920 | That was a case in which you were aroused by the circumstances to such a degree of

00:19:46.400 | vitality that you were able to dominate your mind like a tyrant.

00:19:49.560 | You would have no trifling.

00:19:51.400 | You insisted that his work should be done and his work was done.

00:19:54.960 | Right. So even in 1910, we get this interesting advice from Arnold Bennett saying

00:20:00.200 | essentially what I call productive meditation in my books.

00:20:03.280 | This is him 100 years earlier saying, yeah, teach your mind how to think.

00:20:07.400 | Give it something to think about.

00:20:08.680 | Bring your attention back to the subject again and again.

00:20:12.160 | You have more control over your mind than you think if you do the work to be a good

00:20:17.640 | thinker is to be like someone who can run a fast mile.

00:20:21.000 | Humans are capable of running a fast mile, but it takes a lot of training.

00:20:24.920 | You have to get your heart and your lungs and your legs used to the distance.

00:20:28.800 | Bennett is saying you can do the same with your head.

00:20:31.560 | There's a lot of other things we might talk about here in terms of how you might

00:20:36.160 | reclaim thinking in your life.

00:20:38.560 | You've heard many of these mentioned in isolation before on the show.

00:20:42.240 | We're talking about ideas like avoiding cheap digital distraction as your default

00:20:46.600 | response to boredom, reading hard books, struggling with harder ambiguous ideas as

00:20:52.480 | a regular part of your leisure, simplifying the demands on your life so you have more

00:20:55.800 | space for open thought for toying with things, high quality leisure that pushes

00:21:02.000 | your mind to contemplate beauty and heart and art and high quality.

00:21:06.720 | All these things can matter.

00:21:09.160 | I think all these things are important.

00:21:10.480 | They're not trifles, uh, luxuries of the indulgent.

00:21:15.760 | They're really at the core of the human condition and we should care about it.

00:21:19.560 | Right at a time in which I think there's a lot of pressures as we just talked about

00:21:24.000 | a lot of the economic pressures to try to get us to ignore this most human of

00:21:28.200 | activity is the time I think that we should instead care more about it.

00:21:32.640 | We are not mere custodians of computation.

00:21:35.800 | We're not mere receptacles of digital distraction.

00:21:38.920 | We are like Aristotle or John von Neumann before us, beings capable, capable of

00:21:43.960 | wrangling information out of the ether and through force of concentration, produce

00:21:48.680 | new conceptual structures of majestic scope.

00:21:52.800 | So thinking matters and we should take it more seriously.

00:21:57.680 | Oh, no, these are early thoughts, Jesse, but I've been thinking a lot about

00:22:01.800 | thinking recently, which is kind of ironic.

00:22:04.560 | I like it.

00:22:05.760 | Yeah.

00:22:06.040 | But I like that, that von Neumann clip is like von Neumann was so in love with

00:22:11.560 | thinking that he became a superhero.

00:22:13.640 | Basically he could just, we're just breaking through his everywhere because

00:22:16.520 | his mind was so comfortable with it.

00:22:17.920 | And, uh, you know, it's not, it's not the way the world of business thinks right now.

00:22:22.560 | It's, it's too scary to think about.

00:22:24.280 | The mind and just think and produce great thoughts.

00:22:27.000 | We want to reward you for it.

00:22:27.960 | It's like, we'd much rather you be moving information around and visibly on Slack

00:22:32.520 | and email and in meetings and we're just much more comfortable with that.

00:22:35.840 | Did he live a long life?

00:22:38.080 | I think so.

00:22:38.920 | Yeah.

00:22:39.680 | Yeah.

00:22:40.640 | Um, growing up near Princeton, everyone would tell von Neumann stories.

00:22:43.960 | So he was, he was a smart guy.

00:22:46.160 | Uh, people think about like Richard Feynman.

00:22:49.200 | Richard Feynman was very smart in physics, but von Neumann was smart in physics

00:22:52.840 | and mathematics and artificial life and electrical engineering, really

00:22:55.440 | crazy, the polymath he was.

00:22:56.920 | Uh, put him up against someone like Turing and he would

00:23:00.480 | just blow him out of the water.

00:23:02.040 | Like Turing was a very creative guy, very original guy, but von Neumann was a heavy.

00:23:07.200 | Like he could come in and make a breakthrough in physics, make a

00:23:11.200 | breakthrough in graph theory, make a breakthrough in all these different fields.

00:23:13.960 | You know?

00:23:14.360 | Uh, so he was really an intellectual superstar.

00:23:17.800 | He's a cool guy.

00:23:18.320 | Interesting guy.

00:23:20.440 | All right.

00:23:20.920 | So what I want to do is some questions now that vaguely have to do with this

00:23:24.040 | general theme of prioritizing or improving your ability to think before we do.

00:23:29.840 | Let me first mention a sponsor that helps make this show possible.

00:23:32.920 | That is our friends at Rhone, R H O N E.

00:23:36.520 | In particular, I want to talk about their commuter collection, the most

00:23:40.600 | comfortable, breathable, and flexible set of clothing products known to man.

00:23:45.840 | I like Rhone clothing and this commuter collection only strengthens my

00:23:50.480 | appreciation of the products they make.

00:23:53.040 | So the commuter collection offers the world's most comfortable pants,

00:23:56.880 | dress shirts, fourth zips, and polos.

00:24:00.640 | It uses comfortable four-way stretch fabric to provide breathability

00:24:04.520 | and flexibility that leaves you free to enjoy what life throws your way.

00:24:07.520 | From your commute to your 18 holes of golf, golf, uh, it has wrinkle

00:24:13.560 | release technology, so wrinkles disappear as you stretch and wear the products.

00:24:16.720 | It has gold fusion, anti-odor technology.

00:24:19.080 | It's a hundred percent machine washable.

00:24:21.400 | I love this stuff because it's lightweight.

00:24:23.880 | It looks good and it breathes, especially if you're going to have a hard or long day.

00:24:27.880 | So if I'm going to be at a conference all day, or if I'm teaching, I love a Rhone

00:24:32.280 | shirt, cause it's going to be very lightweight.

00:24:33.880 | It's going to breathe.

00:24:34.640 | It is going to look wrinkle-free as you wear it, it gets smoother.

00:24:38.920 | You can, don't have to take it to the dry cleaner.

00:24:41.160 | It's a great match, I think, for the modern knowledge worker who's

00:24:46.840 | sometimes at home and sometimes on the road and is traveling and has long days.

00:24:51.520 | And once I go to the golf course from, from the office, the commuter collection

00:24:56.680 | at Rhone, it has what you need.

00:24:58.520 | So the commuter collection can get you through any workday and

00:25:01.600 | straight into whatever comes next.

00:25:02.920 | Head to rhone.com/cal and use that promo code CAL to save

00:25:07.120 | 20% off your entire order.

00:25:09.120 | That's 20% off your order.

00:25:11.080 | When you head to rhone.com/cal and use that code CAL, it's time to

00:25:16.720 | find your corner office comfort.

00:25:18.960 | And of course, no matter how well you look in terms of your clothing, you're

00:25:24.760 | not going to make the impression you want.

00:25:26.080 | If your shave is no good.

00:25:27.520 | So this brings us to another sponsor of the show, our friends at Hinson Shaving.

00:25:32.800 | This is the razor that I use.

00:25:36.120 | So I've talked about them before.

00:25:37.240 | Hinson Shaving is a family owned aerospace parts manufacturer.

00:25:41.280 | So they focus on making incredibly precise engineered parts for things like the

00:25:46.080 | international space station or the Mars rovers.

00:25:48.080 | They could then use this precision milling technology to

00:25:51.880 | build their Hinson's razor.

00:25:54.600 | It's milled out of aluminum to an incredibly precise specification.

00:25:58.080 | The blade that you put into a Hinson's razor extends only 0.0013

00:26:03.720 | inches beyond the edge of the razor.

00:26:05.560 | This is what allows it to give you a clean, close shave.

00:26:10.360 | If you have the razor extend too far, you get the diving board effect where

00:26:15.240 | the razor is moving up and down.

00:26:16.720 | That's, what's going to give you nicks.

00:26:17.880 | That's what's going to give you an uneasy shave.

00:26:19.600 | So the precision of the manufacturing of this razor gives you

00:26:23.240 | a incredibly close shave, reduces clogs as well.

00:26:27.880 | But here's, what's cool about it.

00:26:29.280 | The trade-off is because this razor is so precisely milled, you can use just a

00:26:35.280 | standard 10 cent safety razor blade inside the fancy razor.

00:26:40.000 | You don't need 19 blades that are laser guided with vibration

00:26:44.200 | technology to get a good shave.

00:26:45.480 | You need a quality razor to hold a standard blade.

00:26:48.200 | What this means is you will quickly make back the cost of the razor because of all

00:26:54.200 | of the savings you have on how cheap the blades become, and it doesn't take long

00:26:58.480 | before the cost of using the Hinson razor becomes significantly cheaper than using

00:27:04.160 | the disposables from the drugstore or the subscription services.

00:27:08.480 | It's also just a really nice piece of engineering as a tool.

00:27:11.800 | It's just a beautiful object.

00:27:12.960 | I have this milled aluminum stand.

00:27:15.040 | They gave me that I put my Hinson razor on.

00:27:18.320 | So it's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor

00:27:22.520 | that'll last you a lifetime.

00:27:23.760 | Visit hinsonshaving.com/cal to pick the razor for you and use code CAL and you'll

00:27:30.000 | get two years worth of blades free with your razor.

00:27:32.080 | Just make sure to add them to your cart.

00:27:34.400 | That's 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G.com/cal

00:27:42.560 | and use that code CAL.

00:27:45.120 | All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

00:27:47.280 | Who is first up?

00:27:48.440 | All right.

00:27:49.640 | First question is from Derek, a 34 year old engineer.

00:27:52.720 | Is there room in a deep life for watching movies and shows and how do you

00:27:56.960 | approach spending time on them?

00:27:58.720 | So one thing I wanted to point out in my answer here is that if you're watching

00:28:04.000 | a good movie and you're giving it your full concentration, it is a similar act

00:28:10.160 | to reading a good, let's say novel, your mind will have a lot of work to do to

00:28:16.000 | try to make sense of what's going on and what's it seen and what are the themes

00:28:19.680 | and how are those themes interacting with what you're seeing on the screen.

00:28:22.400 | And that's fantastic training for thinking because that is thinking.

00:28:26.080 | That is you taking these existing schemas of understanding your mind and trying

00:28:30.240 | to build off them or apply them to understand this interesting, complicated

00:28:34.320 | thing that you are seeing.

00:28:37.920 | Uh, this is particularly true of certain genres that just the other day, actually,

00:28:42.160 | Jesse, I watched Paul Schrader's film from 2017 first reformed Paul Schrader,

00:28:48.000 | the writer director known, uh, you know, namely for his scripts from the seventies

00:28:53.200 | like taxi driver and the last temptation of Christ.

00:28:56.240 | He did a lot of work with Scorsese.

00:28:58.080 | Uh, first of all, first of all, a great movie.

00:29:00.240 | I think it's 2017.

00:29:01.600 | It's first in a trilogy, uh, taxi driver type vibe.

00:29:06.080 | Right.

00:29:06.320 | There's a sort of Travis Bickle type vibe is this sort of slow degradation of the,

00:29:11.680 | the individual who sort of placid on the top and seating underneath.

00:29:15.760 | But it's a style that Schrader's really into a transcendentalist film, which

00:29:19.520 | means that the whole film is filmed in such a way that he calls it the delayed

00:29:24.240 | cut, the scene starts often before the actors even enter the scene and it ends

00:29:29.520 | once they've already left.

00:29:31.120 | So there's just space.

00:29:33.440 | The actual come in, they'll talk to leave it slow.

00:29:35.520 | There's space transcendentalist films are also known as being part of the slow film

00:29:39.600 | movement.

00:29:40.160 | But the whole point of this is to leave you as the viewer time to make your own

00:29:43.920 | cuts, to understand the, try to structure what you're seeing, what's going on here.

00:29:48.480 | Why might he say that they're giving you the space to actually do a lot of work

00:29:52.240 | yourself in your mind, which is all to say.

00:29:53.920 | Yes.

00:29:55.680 | Watching movies can be incredible training for your ability to think.

00:29:59.200 | Not always true.

00:30:01.120 | I watched Pacific rim with my boys the other day.

00:30:03.920 | I love Guillermo del Toro and it's a beautifully shot movie, but your mind

00:30:08.800 | doesn't have to work as much.

00:30:09.600 | I would say, or if your mind does work, you quickly become sort of angry and

00:30:15.360 | confused about the plot because look, and I don't want to complain Jesse about

00:30:19.120 | the plot of a movie, but the whole plot here is that there's an interdimensional

00:30:24.160 | portal opening in a sub oceanic rift, which happens.

00:30:27.680 | Giant monsters are coming through at the Kaiju, which happens.

00:30:30.720 | I do not understand why the only response we could think of is what we, we, we

00:30:36.800 | have to build giant metal robot mechs that are controlled by two operators

00:30:43.280 | who minds have the meld to fight the, the fight, the codes you coming out of this

00:30:47.360 | or that.

00:30:47.680 | I mean, my boys figured this out right away.

00:30:49.280 | It's like, couldn't you just have right next to the rift, like nuclear tip

00:30:53.440 | torpedoes, like, couldn't we just shoot like the big monsters, but couldn't we

00:30:57.200 | just like shoot missiles at them?

00:30:59.360 | Like, do we have to build metal robots that are 15 stories high to do hand, like

00:31:05.760 | the punch, the monsters, it can't possibly be the right answer.

00:31:08.960 | Can't possibly look, I'm going to fire seven, uh, whatever harpoon missiles

00:31:15.280 | from my Aegis destroyer that have like tactical nuclear warheads on them.

00:31:18.640 | They can just, they'll, they'll come in and shoot them.

00:31:20.400 | And blow up the Godzilla's no, we're going to have a sword.

00:31:26.160 | I think I saw some of that movie.

00:31:27.360 | I mean, it's, it's the point of course is not the actual, my point is the point

00:31:30.560 | is not the plot is that he, it's the, the cinematography and the, and the cool

00:31:33.760 | graphics and, and, you know, Del Toro having fun.

00:31:36.320 | My point is that's a movie where you're, you're not supposed to think it's

00:31:40.080 | supposed to be just.

00:31:40.720 | Expert experiential and that's fun, not helping your ability to think, but that's

00:31:45.040 | fun.

00:31:45.280 | But if you're not, you're not supposed to think, you're not supposed to think

00:31:48.320 | not helping your ability to think, but that's fun.

00:31:50.080 | But if you watch, you know, Paul Schrader film, well, then you're going to have to,

00:31:54.160 | you have to think that's good.

00:31:55.840 | So no, it's good movies, good movies.

00:31:57.440 | I think are like good novels.

00:31:58.480 | Uh, they can help you think.

00:32:00.400 | Um, some prestige TV shows have this too, you know, that was a complaint.

00:32:06.320 | I've been watching succession recently.

00:32:07.600 | I think it gets you thinking, but I'm comparing it to movies have, because I

00:32:13.280 | guess the directors have the space or I don't know.

00:32:15.200 | Movies do a better job than prestige.

00:32:17.360 | The prestige shows, they do get you thinking, but they keep you moving along.

00:32:21.360 | You know, Hey, what's it's very plot focused and, and reaction to the characters.

00:32:27.040 | And I don't know, but my point being is movies, good TV shows.

00:32:33.600 | Yes.

00:32:33.840 | This could be a big part, a big part of thinking.

00:32:36.560 | That's my main point.

00:32:37.520 | My secondary point is robots are not the right answer for battling.

00:32:44.000 | I mean, you could just have a submarine right at the rift.

00:32:46.640 | And every time a monster comes out, you tactical nuclear, you know, we don't even have

00:32:52.480 | summary.

00:32:52.720 | We just like, we just, we just have a bunch of tactical nuclear weapons.

00:32:56.400 | We just set it up at the rift.

00:32:57.600 | It's underwater, right?

00:32:59.280 | As soon as a kaiju comes out, we explode it.

00:33:00.960 | And then someone comes and set up another one.

00:33:02.480 | No, there are two solutions are giant mechs with swords, the like fist fight, and then

00:33:09.280 | also the build a wall around the Pacific ocean to which, which by the way, was not even as

00:33:16.160 | tall as the monsters themselves.

00:33:17.600 | So like the monster just came and just stepped over it, basically fire a missile.

00:33:23.040 | It doesn't make sense.

00:33:26.000 | I mean, they just surround that part of the ocean with, with planes and ships that just

00:33:30.400 | fire fire missiles.

00:33:32.000 | I just don't, I don't know.

00:33:35.280 | I don't know.

00:33:35.840 | Okay.

00:33:36.160 | Well, anyways, that's that let's do another question here.

00:33:39.120 | All right.

00:33:39.840 | Next question is from a meat, a 21 year old from Toronto.

00:33:42.800 | What's the difference between deep work and reading?

00:33:46.240 | If I've maxed out the four hours of deep week work I have in a given day, what are the activities

00:33:51.040 | left for my brain?

00:33:52.240 | Can I only do shallow activities thereafter?

00:33:54.960 | I mean, well, this is where Arnold Bennett, who I quoted earlier, this is where Arnold

00:34:00.160 | Bennett makes this very clear argument that I don't believe that your brain can't do

00:34:06.000 | interesting thinking.

00:34:06.880 | Arnold Bennett says your brain is either sleeping or can do high-end high quality thinking.

00:34:14.880 | That's his claim.

00:34:15.760 | Now I think that claim might be a little bit strong.

00:34:18.240 | I think there's obviously cases in which it's very difficult to do contemplation.

00:34:23.280 | If you're sick, it is very difficult to do any sort of interesting thinking.

00:34:28.480 | If you're really tired, you know, like you're sleep deprived, it could be very difficult

00:34:32.560 | to do really interesting thinking.

00:34:33.840 | But I do think there's a, there's a, a kernel of truth in this claim that is worth emphasizing.

00:34:40.720 | And I think he's right about, which is we underestimate what our mind is comfortable

00:34:46.240 | with.

00:34:46.560 | We, we make this division where we think, I don't know, watching the Paul Schrader film

00:34:51.520 | or reading an interesting novel or just going for a walk and thinking about things that

00:34:55.360 | this is demanding activities.

00:34:57.120 | This is like athletic training.

00:34:59.680 | And because of that, you know, I have to be in the right mood to do that.

00:35:03.440 | And I think what Bennett is saying is that through exposure, that can be more of just

00:35:06.880 | a default mode.

00:35:08.080 | That that's just what your brain is happy doing.

00:35:10.880 | That it is bored.

00:35:12.080 | If you give it the movie about Kaiju and it's like, okay, I'm happy with this novel.

00:35:16.960 | I'm happy with this book that you can, in other words, raise the baseline of just standard

00:35:21.120 | thinking from very low to being much higher.

00:35:23.520 | And so when you're, when you're tired, when you're sick, the really high end stuff is

00:35:28.080 | very high end.

00:35:28.720 | And the default stuff you can still do would be to someone else seeming really concentrating

00:35:33.520 | or really demanding, but to you, it's not.

00:35:35.200 | So you can raise your baseline.

00:35:36.480 | And probably we could make a physical analogy here that if you get a really good cardio

00:35:40.080 | vascular shape, you might say, you know, I'm tired.

00:35:43.360 | So I can't go run a five minute mile today, but I can jog a, an eight minute mile, right?

00:35:48.320 | Because you've raised your cardiovascular base.

00:35:50.320 | Whereas, you know, for me running an eight minute mile would be very, very difficult.

00:35:54.320 | So I think Bennett is onto a good general point there, which is as you re embrace thinking,

00:36:01.920 | as you practice thinking, as you push yourself on what types of thinking you are able to

00:36:07.600 | tackle and the amount of time you spend thinking, it becomes more second nature.

00:36:11.600 | And we begin to see less of this distinction between, oh, I have to either be shut down

00:36:16.480 | or in a rarefied moment where I can concentrate.

00:36:19.280 | And it says, no, no thinking about hard things or interesting things is just what I do as

00:36:24.080 | a human being with a brain.

00:36:25.280 | That's the place that you can get through, through enough exposure.

00:36:29.280 | All right, who do we have next?

00:36:34.320 | Next question is from John, a 43 year old physician from Potomac.

00:36:37.840 | What knowledge management systems and technology stacks do you use to keep track of advancements

00:36:43.280 | in your field and other interests?

00:36:44.800 | For example, building a second brain.

00:36:47.360 | Yeah, I want to talk about the role.

00:36:50.560 | I like this question because I'm interested in the notion of a second brain and what role

00:36:58.560 | that actually plays in thinking.

00:37:00.000 | So second brain, I mean, I think that is Forte, what's his name, Tig Forte?

00:37:06.240 | I'm sure if I have that right.

00:37:07.280 | I can look it up.

00:37:08.640 | Yeah, definitely last name Forte.

00:37:09.840 | I apologize if I'm mixing up first names in my mind.

00:37:14.000 | I think it's Tig Forte.

00:37:16.160 | Popularize the notion of the second brain as a piece of vocabulary that refers to, in

00:37:23.040 | general, having a external fully featured digital system to help track and organize

00:37:30.320 | information so you can get it out of your brain and you can store it and organize it.

00:37:34.800 | And typically part of the idea of a second brain is that it can surface new insights

00:37:40.880 | or essentially do some cogitation for you.

00:37:43.280 | So it's not just that you're storing lots of things.

00:37:45.280 | Oh, Tiago Forte.

00:37:46.800 | Sorry about that.

00:37:47.760 | Tiago, T-I-A-G-O.

00:37:49.360 | I don't know what Tig is.

00:37:50.560 | I'm thinking of the comedian.

00:37:53.360 | Tig.

00:37:54.900 | God, I can't remember.

00:37:57.040 | I can get one part of everybody's name.

00:37:59.520 | There's a comedian, Tig something.

00:38:04.320 | And then there's Tiago Forte is the second brain.

00:38:09.120 | Now I have to look that up.

00:38:10.800 | Look up comedian.

00:38:12.000 | Okay.

00:38:12.720 | Then T-I-G.

00:38:13.600 | See if I, this is going to torture me.

00:38:19.040 | Notaro.

00:38:19.760 | Tig Notaro.

00:38:20.880 | That's what I've seen.

00:38:21.840 | I'm getting old.

00:38:22.720 | Maybe I do need a second brain.

00:38:24.240 | Okay.

00:38:24.800 | So not Tig Notaro.

00:38:25.840 | Tig Notaro has very few things to say on digital information management.

00:38:30.400 | Tiago Forte does.

00:38:31.280 | So I think he popularized the term second brain, but it captures something that a lot of people

00:38:35.200 | have been interested in a long time.

00:38:36.560 | So we have systems to not only capture and organize information, but actually do some

00:38:40.160 | sort of outsource cogitation.

00:38:42.480 | So surface new insights or connections.

00:38:48.640 | So no, I don't use a digital second brain in that way.

00:38:52.800 | And the reason, what I wanted to bring up here is a lot of serious thinkers.

00:38:57.680 | I know what they focus on instead is taking better advantage of their primary brain.

00:39:04.880 | Right.

00:39:06.640 | So, so what, what they focus on is let me take the time when I'm encountering something

00:39:13.280 | that's potentially useful, a new idea or a concept or information.

00:39:17.040 | Let me take the time to work with it in my mind, to think it through, to associate it

00:39:23.600 | with my sort of existing schemas of understanding to integrate it into these, these, these whatever

00:39:30.240 | systems of understanding I have into my head.

00:39:32.640 | There's a, a slower pace to their intake of information, but by doing so they make their

00:39:39.040 | primary brain smarter.

00:39:40.480 | So then when it comes time to think an original thought, they have the, the structures of

00:39:45.840 | thought they're drawing from are more sophisticated and can produce better insights and draw from

00:39:50.800 | more examples and see more of these connections.

00:39:53.680 | And I think this, this may be the issue with second brain thinking.

00:39:58.480 | And, and again, I want to be clear when I say issue, there's a lot that's actually very

00:40:02.320 | useful about having good organizational systems.

00:40:04.640 | So there's a lot about this technology I like, but this issue that we need to outsource

00:40:09.520 | cogitation to a digital system.

00:40:13.680 | I think the, what we're missing here is that, that most people have not yet saturated their

00:40:19.280 | first brain and its capabilities.

00:40:21.040 | Let's focus on that first before we care about now we need to cybernetically augment that

00:40:27.120 | with another system.

00:40:27.920 | And this is what I see the difference between serious thinkers and others is that they take

00:40:32.160 | the time to do that.

00:40:33.360 | To saturate your primary brain is to actually spend time with information to walk and think

00:40:37.920 | and, and talk it through and, and the bat it around and the test it out in different types

00:40:42.960 | of essays that the, the effort to get your primary brain to be as sophisticated as possible

00:40:47.840 | can be a lifelong effort.

00:40:49.840 | And your primary brain can be the, the primary source of, of, of brilliant insights.

00:40:55.040 | Almost every great thinker in the history of thinkers with maybe the one exception of the

00:40:58.640 | guy who wrote the Zettelkasten book, who claims to have written a hundred academic papers

00:41:02.880 | based out of a second brain system.

00:41:04.560 | Almost every great thinker in the, in the history of world has produced his or her thoughts

00:41:08.560 | by working on making the primary brain better.

00:41:12.640 | And I'm using this as an example to get at thinking as an activity that we have to cultivate

00:41:16.880 | and work with that.

00:41:17.680 | If we want to make better use of information, we have to take time with it and get comfortable

00:41:21.200 | chewing on it and swirling it, proverbially speaking around our, our mind and where does

00:41:26.400 | it fit?

00:41:26.800 | And let me try out these ideas here and there.

00:41:29.440 | Now, of course, digital systems though, have a very important role to play in terms of

00:41:33.440 | capturing details, information that we might need to reference.

00:41:37.760 | Tego system is very good, good at this.

00:41:39.600 | For example, I think it's one of the really useful aspects of it.

00:41:42.400 | Making it easy to go in and collect and reference specific citations.

00:41:46.560 | You know, primary brains aren't great at memorizing little details.

00:41:49.360 | You know, I know this paper had this important idea that I've integrated into my schema,

00:41:54.080 | but I need to actually find that paper and quote it and having a digital system that

00:41:57.680 | can bring it up really quickly.

00:41:58.880 | That is a huge advantage.

00:42:00.000 | And that's where I think we get advantages with these sort of supplementary digital systems

00:42:04.720 | is making it easier to organize and retrieve specific details.

00:42:09.840 | It's the appendix that connects to the primary sources of thought that exist within our primary

00:42:16.240 | brain.

00:42:16.560 | I think that's, that's the setup that works best when it comes to actual human thinking.

00:42:23.120 | So digital tools are great for supporting the human brain, but I'm a big believer that

00:42:31.200 | we're so far, most of us are so far from getting the most out of our primary brain that it's

00:42:35.680 | not really time to think about outsourcing thinking yet.

00:42:39.520 | We're not there yet.

00:42:40.320 | We haven't reached our capabilities.

00:42:41.680 | All right, let's see what we got next, Jesse.

00:42:45.920 | All right, next question is from Nawal.

00:42:48.880 | What do you think of using technology like Kindle Scribe or Remarkable as a way of

00:42:54.320 | consolidating notebooks?

00:42:55.920 | I'm interested in this.

00:42:59.040 | This, this is, this is interesting to me, right?

00:43:02.080 | As I just mentioned, we're talking about second brains.

00:43:04.000 | I'm a big believer that the primary brain should be the main source of new ideas,

00:43:09.280 | but, but I just mentioned that what is digital systems good for is capturing information,

00:43:14.640 | having information ready so that you can cite the details you need to support your thinking.

00:43:19.840 | And I'm wondering, I'm actually working with this thought of our services like Remarkable,

00:43:26.080 | the, the Remarkable tablet.

00:43:27.680 | Maybe it would be interesting.

00:43:29.840 | And what I'm trying to figure out is, is that, is there an actual use case here or am I just

00:43:36.160 | being caught by the marketing?

00:43:38.000 | I'm going to load up their website here.

00:43:40.000 | See, let me load up a browser over here.

00:43:42.080 | I want to try to make this decision now on the air.

00:43:44.880 | I feel this intuitive attraction to the Remarkable tablet.

00:43:50.400 | And I want to figure out if it's just because I love the marketing or if there's actually

00:43:54.640 | an advantage here.

00:43:55.920 | Let me load up our browser.

00:43:57.280 | Jesse, Chrome doesn't seem to work on here.

00:43:58.640 | Let me see if Safari does.

00:44:01.280 | All right, so let's look up Remarkable,

00:44:05.040 | Remarkable tablet.

00:44:08.080 | All right.

00:44:10.980 | Do they have, okay, here we go.

00:44:13.120 | So I'm loading up the website here.

00:44:14.400 | Let me make this decision.

00:44:15.440 | For those who haven't seen the Remarkable, it looks like a notebook.

00:44:20.160 | It uses something that looks like the electronic ink technology of Kindle, where it's not a

00:44:26.400 | backlit screen, but it's actually, it's, it's little discs are flipping with different colors.

00:44:32.080 | So you're actually seeing the black and white is physical.

00:44:34.960 | It's not being, it's not being projected with light.

00:44:37.200 | The Remarkable is like that, except for instead of a Kindle that you're just reading, you

00:44:40.480 | can write on it with a stylus, but it feels like you're writing on paper and it looks

00:44:44.480 | like you're writing on paper, but it's digital.

00:44:46.320 | So you can, you can save that page and put it into electronic notebooks and sync it up

00:44:51.040 | online and, and have hundreds of thousands of pages that you can all have access to.

00:44:55.680 | And I use various notebooks.

00:44:56.800 | So I'm very curious, could Remarkable actually replace a lot of my notebooks, right?

00:45:00.880 | So I've just loaded it on the screen here and I'm going to see if I'm still sold.

00:45:04.000 | All right.

00:45:04.240 | It says meet Remarkable, the paper tablet, a digital notebook designed for tasks that

00:45:10.000 | demand focus.

00:45:11.040 | All right.

00:45:13.040 | There's a video.

00:45:14.560 | If I play this video, Jesse, you think it'll show on the screen?

00:45:16.960 | Let's give it a whirl.

00:45:17.680 | Let's give it a whirl.

00:45:18.480 | All right.

00:45:18.800 | All right, here we go.

00:45:21.200 | Someone fashionably coffee, fashionably dressed woman got her coffee.

00:45:25.920 | She's looking at, she puts down her laptop and her phone.

00:45:29.520 | She's disgusted.

00:45:30.720 | I'm narrating this here for people who are just listening.

00:45:32.960 | Now she pulls out a Remarkable tablet.

00:45:34.560 | Ooh, it's like the size of eight by eight and a half by 11 looking notebook.

00:45:38.000 | The sun's on her.

00:45:40.080 | She's contemplating.

00:45:41.120 | Yeah.

00:45:42.320 | See, okay.

00:45:42.720 | If you're watching.

00:45:43.200 | So she's writing on this notebook page and it looks a lot like writing with a, a pen.

00:45:49.280 | And I think you can save these pages, navigate them.

00:45:55.520 | Let's see.

00:45:55.840 | She's taking notes.

00:45:56.880 | She's typing.

00:45:57.680 | Oh, that's interesting.

00:45:58.800 | You can hook it up to a keyboard.

00:46:00.320 | Yeah.

00:46:00.560 | Then there's a folder menu.

00:46:01.520 | So you can save these things in various folders.

00:46:04.000 | So I guess it's internet connection.

00:46:06.400 | So here's what it says.

00:46:07.200 | Paper like handwriting, convert your handwritten notes to type text, view, sync and refine

00:46:11.920 | using our apps, all your notes organized and in one place.

00:46:15.280 | So I don't know.

00:46:17.680 | Here's my, Jesse, tell me if you think I need a Remarkable.

00:46:21.280 | Here would be my use case.

00:46:22.480 | Like what are the various notebooks that are relevant to me?

00:46:25.680 | I have my moleskin where I keep track of your thoughts about the deep life.

00:46:30.960 | So that's the one you keep in your pocket though, right?

00:46:32.640 | Yeah.

00:46:32.960 | Typically I have that in my, it's in my bag right now.

00:46:35.040 | And then I have a bigger notebooks I'll use if I'm working out ideas on, you know, I'm

00:46:41.600 | on the road or something like that.

00:46:42.800 | So if I'm working through an idea for a, an article or a business strategy or, you know,

00:46:49.440 | I'll have like bigger notebooks I'll use for that.

00:46:51.520 | So in theory, I could consolidate both of those.

00:46:54.480 | I'll use notebooks.

00:46:55.200 | I'm working on math problems, you know, where I'm just trying to like work through ideas.

00:46:58.960 | And so in theory, all of that could happen on the same Remarkable tablet.

00:47:02.320 | So I would have access to all of those things on the go and could go back and reference,

00:47:08.240 | Hey, remember we worked on this math problem two years ago.

00:47:11.760 | Let's go back and look at those notes so we can reference them today because maybe it's

00:47:15.360 | relevant for this problem we're working on today.

00:47:17.040 | It could be a book ideas, these types of things, article ideas.

00:47:22.640 | I may be having one in a place.

00:47:24.000 | >> Is the main driver to limit space?

00:47:25.280 | >> To have it all in one place, I guess could be useful.

00:47:28.160 | So I just have this one notebook I always have with me.

00:47:31.280 | So I can add an idea, a book idea or switch over and work on a math problem or switch

00:47:35.440 | over and work on a business strategy and it would all be in one place.

00:47:38.480 | >> I'm sure it's all backed up too.

00:47:40.000 | >> I'm assuming it would be.

00:47:41.360 | Yeah.

00:47:41.680 | It wouldn't, you know, wouldn't replace once I'm actually actively working on a project.

00:47:47.040 | So let's say I'm writing a book or a New Yorker article.

00:47:50.240 | The amount of resources I gather for that is way too big for this.

00:47:53.920 | So like I use Scrivener and I'll have hundreds of articles and notes and stuff like that.

00:47:58.240 | But that's fine.

00:47:58.800 | Scrivener is very good for once a product is active.

00:48:01.520 | If I'm writing an academic paper, that's going to move over to a LaTeX editor like Overleaf

00:48:07.200 | where all the math and like that's all going to start going into a specialized tool once

00:48:13.440 | I really get going.

00:48:14.480 | But that's okay.

00:48:16.400 | So I don't know.

00:48:17.840 | I'm thinking about it.

00:48:18.800 | >> How much are they?

00:48:19.760 | >> Well, I think the whole point here, Jesse, is that I'm hoping someone from Remarkable

00:48:24.960 | is hearing this podcast and says like, we need this in Califree one, right?

00:48:28.960 | Isn't that our play?

00:48:30.480 | How much are they?

00:48:31.040 | It's a good question.

00:48:31.760 | I feel like this is by the way, deductible, right?

00:48:36.480 | Because I'd be buying this as an experiment for our listeners.

00:48:41.120 | They're not telling me the price.

00:48:44.000 | Yeah.

00:48:44.160 | How do I get to the price?

00:48:45.120 | Yeah, we could do it.

00:48:47.280 | We could plan the show on it.

00:48:49.360 | All right, buy now.

00:48:50.160 | Here we go.

00:48:51.280 | $280.

00:48:55.460 | No joke.

00:48:57.760 | >> Yeah.

00:48:58.260 | >> No joke.

00:48:59.520 | It's kind of the, but yeah, it's interesting.

00:49:02.320 | Oh, and there's a subscription.

00:49:06.000 | $3 a month.

00:49:08.160 | >> $3 a month.

00:49:09.840 | That's a weird price.

00:49:12.240 | >> I kind of agree.

00:49:13.360 | I guess that's for the backing up and the connecting to the apps or whatever.

00:49:17.920 | And then there's this other thing, Kindle Scribe.

00:49:20.960 | I guess Kindle has a remarkable competitor.

00:49:25.440 | I assume, yeah, it looks like it.

00:49:29.040 | Oh, it's $400.

00:49:30.000 | Interesting.

00:49:32.880 | That makes the remarkable seem all the way better.

00:49:34.800 | So Kindle Scribe.

00:49:35.680 | All right, so there's tools.

00:49:37.920 | I'm loading this up, but nothing's more interesting on radio than listening to someone surfing the web.

00:49:46.720 | Listening to someone just looking at the price of things.

00:49:49.680 | My goodness.

00:49:50.240 | Kindle Scribe is $400.

00:49:53.840 | I guess it's the same idea.

00:49:57.760 | I've never heard of that.

00:49:59.840 | Okay.

00:50:00.320 | Anyways.

00:50:00.880 | >> It'll help pay for Basil's new yacht.

00:50:03.040 | >> Yeah, or to move the bridge for his existing yacht.

00:50:07.360 | >> Right, it's already driving around.

00:50:10.880 | >> Yeah, he's driving around with it.

00:50:13.200 | So let's get back to the original question.

00:50:17.440 | So Noelle, good question about these things.

00:50:19.600 | I don't know.

00:50:20.000 | I think it's interesting.

00:50:20.800 | That's what I say.

00:50:22.480 | And I love the marketing.

00:50:23.520 | All those videos like we just showed of the fashionably dressed woman getting frustrated

00:50:28.800 | and moving her laptop to the side.

00:50:30.400 | And then the sun comes through the window and shines on her sort of angelically as she pulls

00:50:34.880 | out her remarkable and Charles' business strategy notes.

00:50:38.320 | That stuff gets to me.

00:50:39.840 | So I like that.

00:50:40.480 | So anyways, I'm tempted.

00:50:41.680 | I'm tempted to think about it because then I could run my life off of two things.

00:50:46.240 | I'd have my time block planner for actually planning my day.

00:50:50.960 | Right.

00:50:51.920 | And it's important to me that I have the grid there and that it's have my capture and it's

00:50:55.840 | the metrics and I could see it.

00:50:56.880 | I can flip through the page that I would want to be physical, but I could imagine a world

00:50:59.600 | where my time block planner and something like one of these digital notebooks where

00:51:03.280 | it could basically have five or six notebooks all accessible in one place backed up online.

00:51:08.560 | That's intriguing to me.

00:51:10.320 | So anyways, I will report back if I end up buying one of these things and trying it.

00:51:14.080 | I will report back honestly about my experience using it.

00:51:18.400 | So we'll see.

00:51:20.400 | I'm a sucker for technology like that sometimes, Jesse.

00:51:23.200 | I'm not typically a sucker for technology, but their branding is getting to me on this.

00:51:26.880 | Well, we've talked about remarkable in the past and we had a lot of fan feedback on it

00:51:31.920 | as well.

00:51:32.400 | Yeah, they've been pushing it, right?

00:51:33.440 | Like we have a lot of fans who are fans.

00:51:35.360 | It came up probably nine months ago.

00:51:39.280 | Yeah.

00:51:40.480 | We had a lot of test cases and case studies.

00:51:43.920 | Okay, well, I'll report back.

00:51:46.640 | Let's do one more question.

00:51:47.600 | Next question is from Steven, a 33 year old from Canada.

00:51:52.560 | Maria Popova uses a note taking system that involves highlighting passages, writing the

00:51:58.960 | page number and concept on the blank pages in the front and back of the book.

00:52:02.640 | Your corner marking system is different.

00:52:05.360 | Why don't you follow Maria's approach?

00:52:08.720 | Maria's approach is a good one, which I have tried before.

00:52:11.920 | The friction is higher.

00:52:14.000 | So it takes more time because you have to go back and think about what you read and

00:52:18.560 | then summarize and then index in the front of the book all of the different key ideas

00:52:23.920 | or quotes.

00:52:24.400 | And then the idea is you can just turn to the front of your book and look at these annotations

00:52:29.760 | and one or two pages remind yourself of all of the big ideas.

00:52:34.080 | My corner marking system only does the first half of that.

00:52:37.040 | So I marked a corner of a page that has something relevant, and then I'll mark those relevant

00:52:41.280 | passages or sentences right there on the page with a pencil or a pen, maybe adding a few

00:52:46.160 | extra notes of thoughts or observations there.

00:52:48.400 | With the corner marking method, if you want to replicate or remind yourself of the knowledge

00:52:53.840 | captured in a particular book, you actually have to flip through the whole book.

00:52:56.480 | You're flipping through looking for marked corners, and then you go and look at what

00:52:59.920 | was highlighted on the pages that have the marked corners.

00:53:03.760 | This takes longer.

00:53:05.120 | This review process takes longer than being able to just look at the front of your book

00:53:08.880 | where all of this has been summarized.

00:53:11.600 | The reason why I go with my method, and again, these are deeply related, is that I think

00:53:18.160 | reducing the friction during the reading process is more important for me.

00:53:21.360 | I can get through more books if I don't have to go back and do that summary step.

00:53:26.160 | And also for what I'm typically doing with these books, the friction that is increased

00:53:31.200 | for reviewing is not a big deal.

00:53:34.000 | So typically what will happen to me is I'll remember whatever, this Neil Postman book,

00:53:38.800 | I vaguely remember reading it.

00:53:40.240 | It had a couple examples in there that I think are relevant to what I'm writing now.

00:53:44.800 | I just need to find those examples.

00:53:46.320 | So I'll just flip through looking at those corner pages, and I'll pretty soon find a

00:53:49.920 | right marked page and get that example out.

00:53:52.640 | It'll take me a minute or two to actually find it.

00:53:54.640 | And I think that's a perfectly good system.

00:53:56.560 | And it works because of what I talked about before, this idea that to become a better

00:54:02.160 | thinker, you need to focus on making your primary brain better.

00:54:05.440 | And one of the ways you do this is take time with information to think about it, to ingest

00:54:09.760 | it, to pull out the relevant parts, to compare them against what you already know or understand

00:54:15.280 | and integrate them into your existing schemas of knowledge.

00:54:18.400 | And when you do that, they're accessible.

00:54:22.240 | And so even years later, you remember this book might have something relevant.

00:54:26.720 | This philosopher I remember got me thinking about X, Y, and Z.

00:54:30.160 | So this could be relevant to and then having the pages marked will hone you in on the specifics

00:54:35.680 | there pretty quickly.

00:54:36.720 | So there's not a lot gained by being able to look just at the front pages versus flipping

00:54:41.200 | through the marked corners.

00:54:43.360 | Now, what Maria does as a job, it makes more sense to actually take the work up front to

00:54:48.160 | summarize the books, because what Maria does with marginalia, which used to be called brain

00:54:53.520 | pickings, is she writes summaries of entire books.

00:54:57.440 | So what she needs is access to all of the important books, points of a book and how

00:55:02.160 | they fit together.

00:55:03.360 | That's what she does with these books.

00:55:05.360 | And so doing that work up front as you read the book makes all the sense in the world

00:55:10.320 | for her.

00:55:10.640 | It means if I want to then write about this book on marginalia, I've done the work of

00:55:14.720 | consolidating all the ideas and how they fit together.

00:55:17.040 | And now I can translate that onto, let's say, my essay.

00:55:21.120 | And that's very different than how, let's say, I would typically use a nonfiction book,

00:55:24.160 | which is, I'm not going to summarize Neil Postman's amusing ourselves to death.

00:55:30.000 | Here's all the relevant quotes and how they fit together.

00:55:32.000 | I just want to get at the example he gave about the audiences for the Lincoln Douglas

00:55:37.840 | debates in the 19th century were comfortable with four hour long debates because they lived

00:55:43.360 | in a sort of textual linguistic world, typographic world.

00:55:46.560 | And I'd have a vague memory of that example as what I want, but I need to find the exact

00:55:50.640 | words.

00:55:51.040 | That's when the corner marking method is great.

00:55:53.200 | I'll flip through these corner mark pages.

00:55:54.880 | I'm sure that's one of the examples I marked.

00:55:56.400 | I'll get there in a couple of minutes.

00:55:57.520 | So the method could be dictated by how you hope to actually use the information.

00:56:03.280 | And for me, if I'm reading slowly and carefully and deeply like a thinker and I'm

00:56:09.680 | integrating into my schemas of understanding the ideas and concepts that are important,

00:56:14.000 | I just need the ability to get back to the specifics when I need it.

00:56:16.480 | I don't want to waste the time up front or spend the time up front.

00:56:19.840 | They're like fully summarize everything in the book and how all of it fits together.

00:56:23.760 | But if you're Maria or your book review or your professor who wants to teach these books,

00:56:28.000 | that might be exactly what you need to do.

00:56:29.600 | So I think your note taking method can be dictated by what you hope to actually do with

00:56:34.800 | the books themselves.

00:56:35.760 | I like Maria.

00:56:38.240 | Maria is cool because she's a she's an example of sort of old school internet.

00:56:42.800 | Yeah, she's been on Ferris a few times.

00:56:45.280 | Yeah, I get her email every Sunday.

00:56:47.120 | She's been doing that for a long time.

00:56:49.120 | She comes out of the original Web 2.0 era of, you know, I'm going to create a website

00:56:54.720 | tied to me.

00:56:55.920 | I'm going to produce content on this website.

00:56:58.160 | And it's interesting and ask for money for it.

00:57:01.280 | And I have nothing to do with social media and have nothing to do with these other large

00:57:04.560 | platforms.

00:57:04.960 | I own a server.

00:57:05.600 | I own a website.

00:57:06.240 | It was the original vision of Web 2.0.

00:57:08.320 | So I love people who exemplify that.

00:57:10.160 | It's not my tech talk.

00:57:12.320 | Videos have a lot of engagement.

00:57:13.760 | I'm trying to monetize my Instagram post.

00:57:15.920 | It's no.

00:57:16.720 | Here's my website.

00:57:17.760 | Here's what I do.

00:57:19.120 | I do it.

00:57:19.680 | Well, I'm supported for doing this directly by my my users.

00:57:23.680 | So so all of us sort of Web 2.0 pre social media internet fans.

00:57:28.000 | We all like Maria because she's a great example.

00:57:29.760 | That was the promise.

00:57:31.120 | And she's one of the few people that has survived all the disruptions of the social age and

00:57:37.200 | are still an exemplar of that older model.

00:57:38.880 | She reads a lot of her books on the treadmill.

00:57:41.520 | Oh, yeah.

00:57:42.560 | I think she goes to the gym like every morning and I heard she reads like eight hours a day.

00:57:48.080 | Yeah, because their whole job.

00:57:49.120 | Yeah, that's a lot of reading.

00:57:52.000 | But it goes to our walking to it goes to our earlier conversation, though, right about

00:57:56.320 | someone asked if I did a lot of deep work, maybe I can't read.

00:58:01.920 | I need to just do something shallow or distracting.

00:58:03.600 | Well, here's an example of someone who just through training and experience.

00:58:06.480 | That's all they do is read all day long.

00:58:08.000 | And Maria is completely comfortable doing that because that's what her mind is used to.

00:58:13.040 | And I would guess I don't know her, but I would guess her mind would have a hard time

00:58:16.480 | with Pacific Rim.

00:58:17.680 | It would be bored.

00:58:18.720 | Like there is no there are no deeper themes here.

00:58:23.200 | I'm not this is not a slow cinema transcendentalist style film where they're using the

00:58:28.880 | compressed aspect ratio to create a sort of spiritual claustrophobia.

00:58:32.480 | They're using slow cuts into which I myself am trying to project my own conceptual cuts

00:58:36.720 | to make sense of this complicated human experience.

00:58:38.960 | Now, robot punch big cause you go boom.

00:58:44.160 | So, again, Arnold Bennett would be proud of Maria Popov.

00:58:47.840 | I would assume.

00:58:48.400 | All right, well, that's enough questions.

00:58:50.880 | I want to move on to talk about some of the books I read in April.

00:58:53.600 | Before I do, let me briefly mention another one of the sponsors that makes the show

00:58:56.960 | possible, and that is our friends at Huel H U E L.

00:59:00.400 | When it comes to fitness and nutrition, I don't want to think about it more than I have

00:59:07.360 | to. So as I talk about many times on the show, my approach to nutrition is automate

00:59:12.000 | before dinner.

00:59:13.360 | Have some automatic options that get you energy and you know are healthy so you don't

00:59:17.520 | have to worry about them.

00:59:18.320 | They're causing more good than harm.

00:59:20.160 | And then just don't think about it again.

00:59:21.760 | And all of your your pleasure to find in food and experimentation with flavors and time

00:59:27.120 | among friends, you can spend that all on dinner.

00:59:28.800 | And that's what you can think about food.

00:59:30.960 | So just automate breakfast and lunch to be healthy and nutritional.

00:59:34.880 | It really goes a long way towards keeping your nutritional baseline strong, keeping

00:59:40.800 | it large.

00:59:41.360 | And one of the options I throw into my automation of breakfast and lunch is using Huel

00:59:46.880 | Black Edition as a meal replacement.

00:59:50.640 | It's fast.

00:59:51.280 | And I know it has what I need if I'm running a podcast or to a meeting, knowing that I

00:59:56.800 | can make one of their shakes in two minutes and it's going to give me everything I need

01:00:01.760 | to get the lunch, it's going to be nutritionally good, is a classic example of just

01:00:06.640 | automating away the decision fatigue of those meals of the day.

01:00:11.200 | So here's what you need to know about Huel Black Edition.

01:00:13.280 | It's high protein, nutritionally complete meal in a convenient shake.

01:00:16.400 | It's powder.

01:00:17.840 | You put it in the shaker, you add some water, put some ice, you shake it up very, very

01:00:22.160 | easy.

01:00:22.640 | With just two scoops, you'll get everything your body needs, including 27 essential

01:00:26.960 | vitamins and minerals and 40 grams of protein.

01:00:30.160 | It's vegan, gluten free, lactose free, no artificial sweeteners, naturally flavored,

01:00:34.480 | low GI, omega three and omega six is in there, GMO free, palm oil free, contains vegan

01:00:39.040 | vitamins, D2 and D3, and is available in nine flavors.

01:00:43.440 | It is also affordable.

01:00:44.800 | It works out to about $2.50 for each 400 calorie meal you replace with the shake.

01:00:52.160 | So it's cheap and fast and convenient and you don't have to worry.

01:00:56.000 | This will give me energy, give me some vitamins I need.

01:00:59.040 | Next, let's move on.

01:01:01.600 | Let's move on and we can save all of our decision energy surrounding food for thinking

01:01:06.640 | about dinner.

01:01:08.000 | I mean, tonight at the ballpark, Jesse, I imagine the food I eat will be the opposite

01:01:14.400 | of a nutritionally complete.

01:01:15.920 | He'll, uh, black edition shake pretty much impossible to eat.

01:01:21.920 | I don't know that the chicken tenders at national parks contain vegan vitamins, D2

01:01:25.920 | and D3.

01:01:27.840 | I guess I do a lot of, uh, a lot of fuel.

01:01:30.640 | Yeah.

01:01:30.800 | A lot of rowing with fuel, a lot of fuel, a lot of fuel and rowing to make up for tonight.

01:01:36.080 | Um, so here's the thing you can get this@huel.com/questions do that slash question.

01:01:41.040 | So Huel H U E L.com, but don't forget the slash questions because that will give you

01:01:46.160 | a free t-shirt and shake shaker with your first order.

01:01:50.560 | So that's Huel.com/questions automate one of the meals out of your day.

01:01:56.320 | Easy way to get your nutritional baseline higher and Huel is a great way to do it.

01:02:00.480 | Speaking of nutrition and fitness, we just talked nutrition.

01:02:04.000 | Let's now talk fitness.

01:02:05.280 | What about those muscles?

01:02:06.720 | Well, let's get my body tutor involved.

01:02:10.560 | I've known Adam Gilbert, my body tutors founders for many years.

01:02:14.000 | He used to be the fitness columnist for my study hacks blog back in the day.

01:02:18.640 | Adam's program, my body tutor, his company rather is a 100% online coaching program that

01:02:24.240 | solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, which is the lack of consistency.

01:02:29.360 | As Adam says in fitness, knowledge isn't the problem.

01:02:32.640 | Everyone I talked to already knows what to do or they struggle as turning information into action.

01:02:37.920 | My body tutor fixes that with daily accountability and expert support.

01:02:42.080 | The way it works is you get paired with a coach.

01:02:44.320 | This coach designs for you a custom workout plan to make sense for your goals,

01:02:49.280 | for your life, for the equipment you have access to.

01:02:54.000 | They also put together an eating plan.

01:02:56.080 | What should you eat or not eat?

01:02:57.920 | What's our strategies here customized to you?

01:03:00.880 | And then you check in with this coach online every day.

01:03:04.640 | That is the accountability consistency that Adam is talking about.

01:03:08.960 | That's how you get it.

01:03:09.760 | You know the coach is going to see what you eat and how you exercise.

01:03:14.640 | And they're going to give you encouragement.

01:03:15.840 | They're going to help you.

01:03:16.640 | Hey, this isn't working.

01:03:17.600 | Let's adjust it.

01:03:18.640 | Just knowing that you'll be talking to this coach gives you the motivation.

01:03:22.240 | You might have otherwise just talked yourself into not doing the workout.

01:03:26.160 | You might as well talk yourself into saying,

01:03:28.240 | let me get that second order of chicken fingers at Nats Park.

01:03:31.600 | So it's a brilliant idea because we know one-on-one coaching, of course,

01:03:35.040 | is incredibly valuable for getting in shape and improving your fitness,

01:03:38.160 | but it typically would be expensive.

01:03:39.920 | By making this relationship online, my body tutor makes it much more affordable.

01:03:45.280 | Here's the good news.

01:03:46.960 | If you mention deep questions when you sign up,

01:03:50.080 | Adam will give you $50 off your first month.

01:03:52.720 | Just mention that podcast deep questions when you sign up.

01:03:55.280 | So head over to mybodytutor.com.

01:03:58.080 | That's t-u-t-o-r mybodytutor.com and mention deep questions when you sign up.

01:04:03.040 | You get $50 off.

01:04:04.080 | It is a very smart way to get in the better shape.

01:04:07.760 | Better shape, Jesse.

01:04:10.160 | I bought some heavier dumbbells recently.

01:04:12.160 | What'd you get?

01:04:12.720 | Got some 50s and some 40s and 50s.

01:04:16.000 | So did you get them unique or do you get the things where you can slot them in?

01:04:19.680 | Got them unique.

01:04:20.240 | We get them from a gym supply store not far from here.

01:04:26.080 | Nice.

01:04:26.640 | But I think I need 60s too.

01:04:27.840 | Dumbbells are great because you don't need spotters and you can do weird stuff.

01:04:32.080 | But moving up the weights, gotta get serious.

01:04:37.120 | All right, let's do a final segment here.

01:04:41.040 | I want to talk about the books I read in April.

01:04:42.560 | All right, Jesse, here's the bad news.

01:04:43.840 | I lost my list.

01:04:44.720 | I don't know what happened to it.

01:04:47.280 | You were talking about this before the show and I think you should explain

01:04:51.120 | how you finished the book so early.

01:04:54.000 | Yeah, so you might be thinking, "Well, wait a second.

01:04:55.760 | Can't you just remember all the books you read in April?

01:04:58.160 | That was just last month."

01:04:59.120 | But here's the thing.

01:05:00.320 | I count books by the month I finished them and I'm on a weird rotation.

01:05:05.120 | I'm sort of out of sync.

01:05:07.440 | So I tend to finish the books for a month.

01:05:09.760 | I start them before the month begins and tend to finish them

01:05:12.880 | about halfway through the month.

01:05:15.920 | So I'm already, for example, a book and a half into my June books, even though it's

01:05:19.280 | May, whatever.

01:05:20.800 | So when I'm trying to remember my April books, a lot of these are books I started reading or

01:05:25.840 | maybe started reading, what, back in March.

01:05:28.320 | So this is just the weirdness of how I've sort of shifted off schedule.

01:05:32.160 | So I just walked around my library today and looked at books and, okay, that one I

01:05:37.840 | remember, that one I remember.

01:05:39.120 | So I was able, Jesse, to reconstruct four out of the five books I read in April.

01:05:43.840 | I can't remember the fifth.

01:05:45.600 | You had a remarkable notebook.

01:05:47.040 | Right now I would just be hitting the buttons, right?

01:05:51.200 | The sun would come in through the window.

01:05:53.120 | I'd be fashionably dressed with a macchiato and I would see the books.

01:05:58.080 | And then they're always, always in these videos, they always have like a business chart

01:06:02.400 | that they're labeling.

01:06:04.240 | In fact, here, switch over to the screen for a second.

01:06:08.720 | Here's the Kindle Scribe ad.

01:06:10.080 | Look at what's in the picture.

01:06:12.160 | Am I right?

01:06:14.320 | It's a chart that they're labeling.

01:06:16.320 | That's what always happens in these ads.

01:06:18.000 | They're always like, what?

01:06:19.920 | And they put like an exclamation point and they're drawing on a chart.

01:06:22.720 | That's what business people do is they label charts.

01:06:25.040 | But anyway, yes, my remarkable scribe would be able to find this.

01:06:28.080 | All right.

01:06:28.240 | But I did remember, I did remember four of them.

01:06:30.240 | See, it helped because I went on a vacation during that period.

01:06:34.400 | So it was easy for me to remember what books I brought on the vacation.

01:06:37.280 | So that, that helped me here.

01:06:38.320 | All right.

01:06:39.600 | So I read the book, The Real Work by Adam Gopnik.

01:06:44.160 | Gopnik is a longtime staff writer for the New Yorker.

01:06:48.880 | He's known for art criticism.

01:06:52.640 | So this was his first, the book takes a tentative step towards the pragmatic nonfiction world.

01:07:00.480 | So this book is about what really goes into mastery.

01:07:03.280 | Gopnik's a great writer.

01:07:05.520 | You'll see that as you read the book.

01:07:07.680 | And basically this, he builds reflections about mastery around different, I guess you

01:07:14.400 | could think of them as masters he spends time with or different activities he pursues.

01:07:19.040 | I was reading this actually in Las Vegas and I went to see David Copperfield.

01:07:24.880 | And so I appreciated that there's a whole section in this book where he's working with

01:07:29.440 | professional magicians.

01:07:31.440 | And this is where the real work that term comes from is the world of professional magicians.

01:07:34.960 | So anyways, it's a, it's a, he's a great writer.

01:07:37.600 | This is not a Gladwell book.

01:07:38.960 | So it's not going to let's break down mastery until like, you know, the contrarian understanding

01:07:44.240 | that you can then apply to your life.

01:07:45.680 | It's more reflective and philosophical than that, but is very well-written.

01:07:50.400 | I enjoyed it.

01:07:51.040 | Also read John McPhee's Levels of the Game.

01:07:54.240 | It's his book about tennis, Arthur Ashe versus Grabener.

01:08:00.480 | Brilliant example.

01:08:03.200 | It's sort of studied in nonfiction courses, just a brilliant example of what McPhee is

01:08:08.160 | known for, which is using sophisticated structure to try to generate insight.

01:08:13.360 | And so the structure of Levels of the Game, this book is from the sixties.

01:08:17.680 | This has been replicated a lot now, but I think McPhee was at the cornerstone of this

01:08:21.280 | is it's built around a single us open tennis match between Arthur Ashe and David Grabener.

01:08:26.800 | And it'll, it moves seamlessly without even section breaks between they'll be playing

01:08:33.120 | this point and then it's a backstory and then back to the point.

01:08:38.000 | And so it goes back and forth between these two tennis players, backstories and the game

01:08:42.560 | that's going on in a sort of complicated structure where they won't even, he won't even break,

01:08:47.760 | you know, it'll be a return.

01:08:49.520 | And then next paragraph is Arthur Ashe, you know, 15 years earlier, and he goes back and

01:08:57.040 | forth, back and forth.

01:08:58.080 | And the idea is, as you learn more and more about the backstory of these players, the

01:09:04.560 | nuances of their play, which are also learning more and more about, as you hear about the

01:09:08.640 | match become more clear that he's drawing this connection between their style of play

01:09:13.360 | and all these different things that went into their history and who they are as a person

01:09:16.720 | and what's going on in the culture around them.

01:09:18.320 | It was just a masterwork in narrative nonfiction.

01:09:21.280 | And one of the things that caught my attention, because I read that and I read Gottlieb's

01:09:25.360 | book at the same time, two New Yorker writers, obviously different generations is that McPhee,

01:09:30.240 | I don't know who's doing this right now, but I'm inspired by this.

01:09:35.520 | McPhee uses simple language, complicated structure to get the truth.

01:09:40.960 | And I, you know, I would say that's probably not a lot of people are doing that now.

01:09:46.240 | I would say the tone of the New Yorker right now, including my writing for better, for

01:09:49.840 | worse, also relies on lyricism to try to get at truth, more evocative sentences that have

01:09:58.720 | some sort of, you know, poetry in the writing that the writing and the rhythms, there's

01:10:03.840 | a lot of rhythm of writing work, I think is going on a lot now at the New Yorker that,

01:10:07.600 | that it's a almost lyrical nonfiction prose that can, can extract insights and understanding.

01:10:13.760 | And Gopnik's great at that.

01:10:14.720 | He's a very philosophical, self-reflective writer.

01:10:16.960 | McPhee was so different and his sentences are simple.

01:10:20.000 | They, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they,

01:10:24.080 | they, they read like, they read like they come out of one of those, you know, mid-century

01:10:30.720 | grammar guides, you know, Strunk and whatever.

01:10:35.280 | Or they might read like you speak, like people speak probably.

01:10:38.400 | Right.

01:10:38.560 | Well, what I meant by like the grammar guides and I'm, I'm, I'm forgetting like the classic

01:10:44.320 | Strunk and Strunk and white is a Strunk and right.

01:10:47.360 | Yeah.

01:10:47.760 | So in the sense of like, sometimes it's very formal grammar.

01:10:50.560 | It's like, oh, this is just perfectly constructed grammar is what I mean by it.

01:10:53.680 | Yeah.

01:10:54.480 | It's like this comma, this semicolon, this, but it's, it's, it's using grammar like you

01:11:00.160 | would see in Strunk and white, like, oh, this is a well-constructed sentence.

01:11:03.600 | Not like in maybe in like something I might write or modern New Yorker piece.

01:11:07.440 | You, you use grammar to help support something that's more poetic or lyrical or whatever.

01:11:12.400 | The sentences are just boom, boom, boom, boom.

01:11:14.320 | Subordinate clause, boom.

01:11:16.080 | Just very straightforward.

01:11:18.480 | And yet when combined with complicated structure is incredibly deep.

01:11:22.160 | So I don't know, not a lot of people are doing that now.

01:11:24.400 | Maybe a lot of, not a lot of people are doing that back then either, but I just as a writing

01:11:28.000 | masterclass exercise, reading sixties era McPhee, it just got me thinking a lot about how I write

01:11:36.080 | about how he wrote about his, his effect.

01:11:40.640 | Made me think about my own writing a little bit.

01:11:42.080 | So that was cool.

01:11:44.400 | That's how you, from my book group, I'm in a book group that just reads sports books.

01:11:47.440 | Yeah.

01:11:47.840 | Yeah.

01:11:48.160 | So that was, that was my, that was my turn to pick.

01:11:51.200 | And so of course I was going to pick like.

01:11:53.200 | Was there a lot of tennis strategy in there?

01:11:55.040 | Yeah.

01:11:55.540 | You should read it.

01:11:57.360 | I'll loan you, I'll loan you my copy.

01:11:58.560 | I should.

01:12:00.240 | Yeah.

01:12:00.480 | Because you, you play a lot of tennis these days.

01:12:02.400 | I play at least three times a week.

01:12:03.840 | Yeah.

01:12:04.080 | It's a complicated game.

01:12:05.600 | It's like golf.

01:12:06.320 | Oh my God.

01:12:07.200 | The sense I got.

01:12:08.080 | Yeah.

01:12:08.320 | It's like golf.

01:12:08.880 | That's the sense I got is you got to be playing since you were five.

01:12:12.000 | Not necessarily, but you need to play a lot.

01:12:14.160 | It takes a lot of maintenance.

01:12:15.600 | Like if you want to be any good, like you got to put a lot of time into it.

01:12:18.560 | So one of the things, maybe you would understand this is because you're playing tennis now,

01:12:21.600 | I didn't understand as much.

01:12:22.800 | So one of the big parts of Ash's game is that when he was being trained coming up as a kid,

01:12:27.680 | they wanted him, they almost exclusively was trained his backhand.

01:12:32.080 | They wanted the backhand to feel as comfortable to him as a forehand.

01:12:36.240 | Right.

01:12:36.480 | So it was just like, I'm very, very comfortable with it.

01:12:38.400 | Yeah.

01:12:38.560 | Cause a lot of times people just expose your backhand if it's weak.

01:12:41.360 | Yeah.

01:12:41.440 | So he's very comfortable with his backhand.

01:12:42.960 | And then he was a very innovative, creative player, right?

01:12:47.040 | So he was very much a risky, risky, exciting shots, cross court, drop shots, the winners,

01:12:53.520 | that type of thing.

01:12:54.080 | Whereas Grabener was much more of a mechanical play the odds.

01:12:57.600 | There's a lot of statistics in it.

01:12:58.720 | It was very interesting.

01:12:59.840 | Actually in air, there was a cool little commercial with Ash.

01:13:02.240 | Remember that in the beginning of the movie?

01:13:03.280 | Yep.

01:13:03.520 | With the racket.

01:13:04.240 | Yep.

01:13:04.400 | The wooden racket.

01:13:05.040 | Yep.

01:13:05.200 | They get into that because Grabener used to moved on to metal racket.

01:13:08.240 | So I think you would, I think you would like it.

01:13:10.560 | The thing, the tennis players, my book group were saying they were surprised by how fast

01:13:14.160 | Ash was serving.

01:13:16.240 | It really is not that far from today's era of monster serves.

01:13:19.920 | And he's, it was within, I mean, he was serving like one 30 or something like that.

01:13:25.600 | Wow.

01:13:25.840 | Or one 25 or like he was close with a wooden racket.

01:13:28.720 | So, yeah, it's like now it's supposed to be the age of the monster serve,

01:13:34.480 | but you read this match, like they would want to get,

01:13:37.680 | if you could get four aces in a row, you're like, that's kind of what I'm looking for.

01:13:41.440 | Is like in a lot of these sets, it's going to be all aces for the surf side.

01:13:44.480 | It's all about making use of the, the, the few mistakes that happen.

01:13:47.200 | It's interesting.

01:13:49.200 | All right.

01:13:49.520 | Other book I read the transcendent brain by Alan Lightman.

01:13:52.560 | I like Alan Lightman a lot, former physicist at MIT that went on to start their science,

01:13:58.000 | writing master degree program.

01:13:59.360 | I like him in part, as I've mentioned on the show, because their family has a cabin on this

01:14:04.320 | island up in Maine, and they go up there and spend the entire summer.

01:14:06.880 | I think it has electricity.

01:14:09.040 | Maybe there's no phone, there's no internet.

01:14:11.440 | And I always just, you know, I sort of knew I didn't know him.

01:14:14.000 | Well, my, my wife had crossed paths with him a few times when we lived in Boston and he was at MIT.

01:14:18.320 | I was at MIT and we had friends in common.

01:14:21.280 | I always loved that about him.

01:14:22.240 | But anyways, he now just writes these short provocative books for Pantheon.

01:14:27.040 | And which is cool, which I appreciate.

01:14:29.200 | And this one was trying to give a materialist explanation for spirituality.

01:14:33.600 | I'm trying to say you can appreciate and even organize your life around spiritual experiences

01:14:38.800 | while still maintaining a scientific materialist view.

01:14:42.720 | So he sort of gives a Darwinian explanation for why maybe we feel these senses of connection

01:14:48.640 | or moments of transcendent on trying to try to explain that materialistically.

01:14:52.880 | Typical Alan Lightman book, it's short and it dives into these interesting angles,

01:14:58.160 | different history of religion and brain science over here.

01:15:00.800 | And it doesn't write more than it needs to write.

01:15:02.720 | So I always enjoy a good Alan Lightman book.

01:15:04.560 | The final book I remember reading in April is called Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne

01:15:11.440 | Samard, who is a, I don't know what the field is, forestry maybe, who studied,

01:15:18.960 | she did a lot of the innovative work that discovered trees are connected to each other

01:15:23.520 | underground through networks of fungus.

01:15:27.120 | They can not only communicate with each other with these underlying fungus networks,

01:15:30.960 | they can actually move resources on it.

01:15:34.080 | Sugars, for example, from one tree to another.

01:15:36.800 | And you even have in forest, you'll find what she called the mother tree,

01:15:40.720 | these sort of this very old tree that was connected to a lot of younger trees and

01:15:44.080 | helps to redistribute resources to them, et cetera.

01:15:47.440 | You know, she did a lot of work on that.

01:15:49.040 | And so this book is about that.

01:15:51.040 | There's been a couple of books in the last 10 years about trees and communicating.

01:15:53.840 | This one is interesting because it's memoir.

01:15:56.560 | It's memoir slash science.

01:15:59.280 | So it's, she's actually a very good memoir writer.

01:16:01.760 | She had a very interesting upbringing in Canada.

01:16:03.680 | She comes from a one generation removed from a Canadian lumbering factor,

01:16:08.560 | a family and worked actually in the timber industry before she moved over to academia.

01:16:12.800 | It's actually a pretty astutely drawn self-portrait.

01:16:15.760 | That's intertwined with her scientific discovery.

01:16:18.960 | So you learn about her discoveries as they occur in her life, as she tells the story of her life.

01:16:25.200 | And it was, I thought it was a surprisingly well, a well-written book.

01:16:29.120 | And the science is interesting too.

01:16:31.040 | Now it's, there's a bit of a grain of salt that has to be taken with it.

01:16:35.520 | I mean, the, there's a, I don't know, a sort of like philosophical or,

01:16:41.040 | you know, political resonance to this idea that clearly has to be involved in the popularity

01:16:47.360 | and the push of these ideas.

01:16:48.560 | It's like, no trees don't compete.

01:16:50.240 | They share resources together.

01:16:52.080 | It's, they, they help each other and cooperate.

01:16:54.320 | They mother each other.

01:16:55.280 | I mean, there's very much like embedded in these scientific studies,

01:16:59.120 | also reflections of critiques of, you know, aspects of capitalist culture.

01:17:03.680 | And so it's a complicated field, but she found some really cool things,

01:17:06.720 | but the book was really well-written and she has a really, had a really interesting life.

01:17:10.160 | So I grabbed it randomly.

01:17:13.360 | This was a politics and pros table, you know, boom, let me just grab it.

01:17:16.960 | It's not new book.

01:17:17.520 | Sometimes when you're traveling, you have to just serendipitously grab something.

01:17:21.600 | And I'm glad I grabbed that one.

01:17:24.080 | All right.

01:17:24.480 | So those four books, there was a fifth.

01:17:25.680 | I just can't remember what it is.

01:17:28.720 | I should just make one up.

01:17:29.520 | Just see what would be the most impressive thing I could have read.

01:17:32.160 | I guess I was reading gravity's rainbow or a war in peace.

01:17:38.160 | Let's just make up what it is.

01:17:40.960 | I don't know.

01:17:42.160 | There was a fifth in there, but those are the four.

01:17:44.640 | Those are the four I can remember.

01:17:46.960 | All right.

01:17:48.640 | Well, I think that's a good enough, good enough for a show.

01:17:51.760 | We can all go off now and do some thinking on our own.

01:17:53.920 | And thank you everyone who listened or watched.

01:17:56.720 | I'll be back next week with a new episode of the podcast.

01:18:01.280 | And until then, as always, stay deep.

Ep. 250: In Defense of Thinking

Chapters