Why Your Phone Makes You Feel Empty, Lost & Addicted...

00:00:00.000 | Today, I want to give you an argument about why you feel uneasy about your smartphone

00:00:05.300 | that you've likely never heard before.

00:00:08.860 | It is, however, I think an important argument to hear.

00:00:12.600 | Why?

00:00:13.700 | Because it draws from a source that far predates these modern digital technologies.

00:00:20.860 | I'm going to make you an argument about why you're uneasy about your smartphone that goes

00:00:24.380 | back to the foundational moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

00:00:30.980 | We're talking about a philosopher from the 1700s who is arguably the most influential

00:00:36.420 | source of moral ideas since the Bible.

00:00:40.260 | And it turns out, if you read Kant correctly, he has a lot to say about decidedly modern

00:00:47.840 | inventions such as Twitter and TikTok.

00:00:50.020 | So I'm going to ask you to stick with me here.

00:00:52.980 | We're going to get a little bit technical, but I'm going to walk you through.

00:00:55.400 | We're not going to get too technical.

00:00:56.580 | All of these ideas will be accessible, and we're going to come out on the other end of

00:00:59.260 | this exploration with a better understanding of the role technology plays in your life

00:01:06.040 | right now, why that makes you uneasy, and changes you can make.

00:01:09.660 | So I think it's a cool thing to add to the argument.

00:01:12.060 | All right, so I'm going to be drawing today entirely from a single academic paper from

00:01:18.660 | 2021.

00:01:19.660 | I'll pull it up on the screen here.

00:01:22.540 | I have a preprint version here that I could access, which has a link to the official final

00:01:27.620 | version.

00:01:28.620 | I'll put it on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening.

00:01:33.420 | The paper we're going to be drawing from is titled, Is There a Duty to Be a Digital Minimalist?

00:01:41.420 | This was published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy back in the summer of 2021.

00:01:48.180 | For those of you who are tracking at home, that's volume 38, number four.

00:01:51.380 | The authors are Timothy Aylsworth and Clinton Castro.

00:01:55.700 | These are philosophers from Florida International University.

00:01:59.220 | All right, so I'm going to jump through this paper somewhat selectively to pull out what

00:02:04.900 | I think the important parts are.

00:02:08.340 | So I'm actually going to start by jumping ahead here a little bit.

00:02:11.700 | I'll sort of keep up with this on the screen, I suppose, for those who are watching.

00:02:16.380 | But I'm going to read everything, so don't worry if you're just listening.

00:02:19.300 | Okay, so I'm going to jump ahead here.

00:02:22.920 | They're talking here about digital minimalism.

00:02:25.980 | Let me read from the paper.

00:02:29.100 | Authors like Cal Newport, who coined the term digital minimalism, argue that we would be

00:02:33.780 | better off if we restructured our relationships with technology on our own terms.

00:02:38.620 | He understands digital minimalism as, quote, a philosophy of technology use in which you

00:02:42.980 | focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities

00:02:48.420 | that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

00:02:53.540 | A philosophy of technology use is a personal philosophy that covers which digital tools

00:02:57.820 | we allow into our lives, for what reasons, and under what constraints.

00:03:04.140 | Newport's definition outlines a noble ideal, but we are happy to adopt a less demanding

00:03:08.900 | understanding of this notion, and kind of jumping ahead here a little bit.

00:03:12.980 | We understand a digital minimalist as one whose interactions with digital technology

00:03:16.840 | are intentional, such that they do not conflict with their ends.

00:03:21.180 | For most, being a minimalist will involve a serious reduction, in some cases to the

00:03:26.580 | point of elimination, of interactions with smartphones, smartphone apps, and social media

00:03:31.460 | sites.

00:03:32.460 | For some, it may even require living up to Newport's ideal.

00:03:36.100 | I'm going to jump ahead one more time here.

00:03:39.980 | Newport may very well be right that we have prudential reasons to reduce our smartphone

00:03:43.900 | usage.

00:03:44.900 | Perhaps most people would be better off if they became digital minimalists.

00:03:49.020 | But if the Kantian argument that follows is sound, then we might have even more compelling

00:03:54.420 | reasons to adopt the end of digital minimalism.

00:03:56.860 | We may have moral reasons.

00:03:59.180 | All right, so let's make sense of what just happened there.

00:04:02.980 | They introduced my idea of digital minimalism.

00:04:05.820 | They simplify it a little bit to make it a little bit more general.

00:04:08.220 | But they say, basically, yes, this idea that Newport introduced is one of being very intentional

00:04:12.940 | about how you use your technology so that it supports instead of impeding what you value.

00:04:18.340 | That is the core idea of my book, Digital Minimalism.

00:04:21.020 | It's at the core of my personal technology philosophy.

00:04:24.180 | The key thing they say, this is setting up the argument that we're going to explore,

00:04:29.060 | is they say, look, Cal in his book has what they call prudential reasons for why you should

00:04:37.340 | be a digital minimalist.

00:04:38.340 | What they mean is like practical reasons.

00:04:39.340 | I go through, like, hey, when you let technology get in the way of your values, there's like

00:04:45.140 | all this stuff that you don't do that you would otherwise like to do, and I think you're

00:04:48.580 | going to like your life better.

00:04:49.580 | I'm a sort of pragmatic, practical, direct argument to your experience and intuition.

00:04:54.380 | They're saying, yes, that might all be true, but we are going to make an argument that

00:04:59.460 | draws from Kant that says there is also a moral reason, that we can draw from moral

00:05:05.160 | philosophy that says whether you want to or not, you are obligated to be a digital minimalist.

00:05:12.320 | That now is the argument that is made in this paper that we are going to draw out, a moral

00:05:17.620 | argument for being a digital minimalist.

00:05:19.340 | All right.

00:05:20.340 | So I'm going to jump back to the beginning here.

00:05:23.420 | They set up a quick example, which they use to explore some of the issues with modern

00:05:27.940 | technology.

00:05:28.940 | So they begin by drawing from a quote from a comedian.

00:05:32.580 | So let me read this to you.

00:05:34.620 | I wish I could read.

00:05:35.620 | I really do, says comedian Esther Poviditsky.

00:05:40.220 | I try to read.

00:05:41.540 | I buy books.

00:05:42.540 | I open books, and then I black out, and I'm on Instagram, and I don't know what happened.

00:05:47.260 | To many of us, this is a familiar occurrence.

00:05:49.240 | All too often, we set out to complete a task, but we are interrupted and subsequently derailed

00:05:54.420 | by our wireless mobile devices.

00:05:59.380 | Incidents of this kind might involve a moral failure, for insofar as we are morally required

00:06:05.860 | to cultivate and protect our autonomy, we fail to meet this requirement by falling prey

00:06:12.520 | to mobile phone addiction.

00:06:14.140 | Okay.

00:06:15.140 | So the first link in the chain they're going to make in this moral argument is that our

00:06:22.600 | issues with smartphone usage, as captured by this anecdote of this comedian saying,

00:06:27.340 | "I try to read, but I can't.

00:06:29.800 | I'm going to read this book, but I end up on Instagram," they say this could be seen

00:06:34.000 | as impacting our autonomy, and if it impacts our autonomy, we might be able to find a moral

00:06:40.120 | reason why this is bad.

00:06:41.480 | First, however, they have to establish, is the way we use things like smartphones actually

00:06:47.580 | affecting our autonomy, and what they do here is they go through three different ways that

00:06:51.120 | other thinkers have thought about autonomy, and for each of these says it's basically

00:06:54.700 | self-evident that the behavior we're thinking about, the behavior we observed in that comedian

00:06:58.640 | Povedisky, is violating these definitions of autonomy.

00:07:03.460 | All right.

00:07:04.460 | So let's go through these real quick.

00:07:05.940 | They say, "In order to substantiate the claim that smartphone addiction undermines autonomy,

00:07:11.260 | we must say more about the concept at issue.

00:07:16.220 | Personal autonomy has been defined in a variety of ways, but we believe that a minimal definition

00:07:20.200 | of self-governance is sufficient for our purposes here."

00:07:24.260 | So they're going to go through some examples here of definitions of autonomy.

00:07:28.180 | They say, "Let's return to Povedisky's case from the beginning.

00:07:32.940 | According to what they call the Frankfurt Dworkin model, Povedisky's first order desire

00:07:40.480 | to check Instagram while reading is inconsistent with her higher order desire, i.e., to want

00:07:47.420 | to read."

00:07:48.420 | All right, so the Frankfurt Dworkin model talks about first order and higher order desires,

00:07:54.100 | the things that actually is directing your activities right now versus what you want

00:07:57.940 | to be the case, and if these are out of sync, you have an autonomy problem.

00:08:02.580 | So like by that model, looking at Instagram when you want to read is an autonomy issue

00:08:06.940 | because your higher order desire is, "I want to read," but your first order desire that's

00:08:10.660 | actually directing your activities is looking at Instagram.

00:08:13.380 | All right, here's another model due to Watson.

00:08:16.420 | On Watson's characterization, what is distinctive about compulsive behavior is that the desires

00:08:22.840 | and emotions and questions are more or less radically independent of the evaluational

00:08:27.100 | systems of these agents.

00:08:29.500 | Povedisky's smartphone use is inconsistent with her evaluative judgments about what she

00:08:32.660 | ought to be doing, and the behavior is compulsive.

00:08:34.900 | All right, so Watson says, "If you're doing something that you would evaluate to be not

00:08:40.780 | good or less good than something else, then the behavior must be compulsive."

00:08:45.300 | By the way, that connects to the way psychologists think about behavioral addiction, the persistence

00:08:52.700 | in an activity even though it's, you know, it's not valuable or it's in the way of things

00:08:57.060 | you know to be more valuable.

00:08:58.220 | Finally, they have a model of autonomy due to Bratman.

00:09:02.180 | Bratman defends a model of autonomy that requires harmony between what the agent does and her

00:09:08.660 | more or less long-term plans.

00:09:11.780 | Surely Povedisky's behavior fails on this count as well.

00:09:15.180 | We can suppose that Povedisky, like many of us, would like to read many books over the

00:09:18.220 | course of her life and to develop a disposition of being able to sit and enjoy reading for

00:09:22.440 | long stretches.

00:09:24.140 | The action of looking at her phone compulsively is not consistent with her long-term plans.

00:09:28.300 | All right, so to summarize, no matter which model one adopts, the result is likely to

00:09:33.020 | be the same.

00:09:34.020 | Povedisky is not autonomous with respect to her smartphone usage.

00:09:38.340 | All right, so we've established this first link in our argumentative chain.

00:09:43.860 | The way we use smartphones today seems to be hurting our autonomy.

00:09:49.800 | We can look at several official definitions of autonomy and see that smartphone usage

00:09:55.300 | of the type that we think of, the type in that example, is breaking those models.

00:10:00.700 | Hey, it's Cal.

00:10:01.700 | I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need

00:10:06.540 | to check out my new book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:10:14.020 | This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

00:10:19.460 | You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow.

00:10:24.820 | I know you're going to like it.

00:10:26.620 | Check it out.

00:10:27.620 | Now let's get back to the video.

00:10:29.580 | Okay, so why is that bad?

00:10:33.780 | This is the next link in their moral argument chain.

00:10:37.780 | This is where we turn our attention to Immanuel Kant.

00:10:43.100 | Although some ethicists reject the very notion of duties to oneself, Kant makes them a central

00:10:48.980 | component of his moral theory.

00:10:50.780 | In fact, I'll turn to this in the article here.

00:10:55.220 | For those who are watching along at home, I'm just scrolling.

00:10:58.780 | This is section three.

00:11:03.000 | He says that they take first place and are the most important of all.

00:11:07.780 | He goes so far as to suggest that duties to oneself are the foundation of duties to others,

00:11:12.020 | making them the precondition of all moral duties.

00:11:16.380 | But he worries that they have not been properly understood and claims that no part of morals

00:11:20.740 | has been more defectively treated than this of the duties to oneself.

00:11:24.980 | He thinks that they have been misunderstood as a mere elevation of self-interest, a duty

00:11:28.560 | to promote one's own happiness, which he dismisses as an absurdity.

00:11:32.740 | Rather than grounding such duties in egoism, Kant argues that humanity, i.e. rational nature,

00:11:38.460 | has an absolute inherent value, and this generates self-regarding obligations insofar as the agent

00:11:44.540 | is morally required to respect humanity in her own person.

00:11:47.900 | Thus duties to oneself are derived from the humanity formulation of the categorical imperative,

00:11:51.780 | which tells us that we must always treat humanity, even in our own person, as an end, never merely

00:11:57.660 | as a means.

00:11:58.660 | All right, so Kant is arguing we have a duty to ourselves as much as we have a duty to

00:12:05.740 | other people, and we have a moral duty in particular for self-governing what is most

00:12:13.700 | important about our humanity.

00:12:15.860 | Okay, so what is that?

00:12:17.940 | Jump ahead briefly.

00:12:20.140 | Kant famously claims that human beings, in virtue of their rational agency, have a uniquely

00:12:23.860 | elevated status which he calls "dignity."

00:12:28.340 | So the idea that we are rational beings and no other creatures or objects are gives us

00:12:33.220 | this sort of special value, and preserving what he calls the dignity of ourselves as

00:12:39.800 | rational beings is sort of the highest good.

00:12:44.180 | We have an obligation to help protect this in ourselves and others.

00:12:49.860 | Moving on here, on this view, our actions can either express or fail to express the

00:12:54.820 | kind of respect that is becoming of human dignity.

00:13:01.020 | So he's saying our actions need to be focused on respecting our human dignity, and our human

00:13:08.980 | dignity is based on the idea that we are rational beings.

00:13:11.220 | All right, so we're really in the weeds here, Jesse.

00:13:14.020 | We're deep in moral reasoning, but out of this and a bunch of other words that I'm kind

00:13:18.420 | of skipping, we get to an actual argument form here, all right?

00:13:26.100 | So they end up with three propositions that lead to a conclusion.

00:13:32.140 | Humanity is proposition one.

00:13:33.980 | Humanity, i.e. rational agency, has an objective, unconditional, non-fungible value, which is

00:13:38.620 | dignity.

00:13:39.980 | Proposition two, anything that has dignity ought to be respected as an end and never

00:13:44.900 | treated as a mere means.

00:13:48.780 | Proposition three, if humanity ought to be respected as an end and never treated as a

00:13:53.020 | mere means, then we have an imperfect duty to cultivate and protect our rational agency.

00:13:58.820 | Therefore, the conclusion of these three propositions, we have an imperfect duty to cultivate and

00:14:05.500 | protect our rational agency.

00:14:06.700 | All right, we're getting in the weeds here, logical philosophy, morality all pulled together.

00:14:14.820 | They then put these together, they get to their core argument.

00:14:20.120 | We have an imperfect duty to cultivate and protect our rational agency.

00:14:24.140 | If we have an imperfect duty to cultivate and protect our rational agency, then we ought

00:14:27.340 | to adopt the end of digital minimalism, therefore we ought to adopt the end of digital minimalism.

00:14:33.460 | If you take my discrete mathematics course at Georgetown, where we study propositional

00:14:38.100 | logic, you will actually recognize this argument and could probably turn it into the corresponding

00:14:44.140 | argument form.

00:14:46.460 | So basically we have just done a lot of reasoning based on Kant's ideas that end up with the

00:14:52.060 | conclusion we ought to adopt the end of digital minimalism.

00:14:59.680 | If we simplify all of this, we're basically saying it is important to respect our own

00:15:08.060 | dignity as rational beings.

00:15:11.660 | The way that we use smartphones when we're unintentional robs us of our ability to do

00:15:18.940 | this because it robs us of autonomy, and autonomy is at the core of respecting the dignity of

00:15:25.260 | being a rational being because at the core of being a rational being is the ability to

00:15:28.580 | make decisions about what you do rationally.

00:15:32.620 | The Kantian framework is seeing this core tension between we need to respect the fact

00:15:40.020 | that we are rational beings and smartphones take away our ability to make rational decisions

00:15:44.420 | about what we want to do with our life and our time, therefore an approach to life that

00:15:52.660 | reduces smartphone's ability of taking away our autonomy is justified.

00:15:59.160 | Digital minimalism is sort of the definition of such a life.

00:16:04.180 | It's an approach to digital technology.

00:16:05.660 | It says we want to be intentional, not be robbed of our autonomy, therefore there's

00:16:09.240 | a sort of fundamental Kantian moral argument that we should be very intentional about our

00:16:13.220 | technology use using something like digital minimalism.

00:16:19.100 | Let me read the conclusion of this paper because I think they sum this up very nicely.

00:16:24.100 | They're all lit up here on the screen for those who are watching at home.

00:16:26.100 | All right, so here's the conclusion of the authors in this paper.

00:16:30.260 | We have argued that there is a moral obligation to be intentional about our use of smartphones

00:16:33.940 | and other addictive devices.

00:16:36.420 | We have this duty because we are required to protect the most valuable commodity we

00:16:39.780 | possess, autonomy.

00:16:42.820 | Kant believes that the proper exercise of our autonomy is the only thing that is good

00:16:46.260 | without qualification, something that shines like a jewel having its full worth in itself.

00:16:52.860 | To wantonly forfeit some of our agency by falling prey, the technological heteronomy

00:16:59.980 | is to demonstrate a failure to respect this precious capacity as the treasure that it

00:17:03.980 | is.

00:17:04.980 | All right, so why are we geeking out on, so it's like a technical academic argument for

00:17:13.140 | the type of things we talk about here on the show, and actually not just the type of things,

00:17:17.620 | specifically what we talk about on the show because, of course, they're talking about

00:17:19.940 | my specific digital minimalism philosophy.

00:17:23.940 | It's because I think it is easy in thinking about technology and human flourishing to

00:17:31.060 | fall back on arguments such as, look, kids these days, for example, they're always using

00:17:38.020 | different technology, we get worried about it, but that's just the wheels of progress.

00:17:43.660 | Or we fall back on an argument that says every new technology creates moral panics, right?

00:17:49.300 | And then we get over it.

00:17:50.600 | We worried about the car, but now we just drive cars.

00:17:52.660 | We worried about TV, now we don't worry about TV as much.

00:17:56.300 | It's easy to fall back on these arguments of status quo thinking.

00:18:01.180 | What's critical about this particular argument is it says, no, there's justifications for

00:18:07.340 | our concerns about these technologies that are much more fundamental than thinking about

00:18:10.700 | specific technologies.

00:18:13.140 | Our uneasiness about these technologies is not just a naive reaction to the latest techno

00:18:18.180 | disruption and a long line of techno disruptions that ultimately end up being not so bad.

00:18:24.360 | We are actually reflecting a specific harm, denial of autonomy, and that we can go back

00:18:32.060 | to Kanter before to see that this is at the core of the human experience, is at the core

00:18:37.700 | of what we value as humans.

00:18:39.900 | And so yes, we're uneasy, not because we're naive, we're uneasy because something basic

00:18:44.140 | to our humanity is at stake.

00:18:48.280 | So this Kantian argument is pointing towards the exceptional nature of the issue we face

00:18:53.300 | with things like smartphones.

00:18:55.500 | We cannot just ontologically speaking put in the same category as like any other type

00:18:59.980 | of techno fear.

00:19:01.320 | It is a specific technical fear which requires analysis on its own terms and when we do that,

00:19:06.420 | we see there are specific harms here that cannot be ignored.

00:19:12.180 | So if someone's giving you a lot of trouble about your digital minimalism, if they're

00:19:17.420 | making fun of you or if they're trying to self-justify their own heavy phone use, you

00:19:21.820 | can now throw a lot of sort of annoying technical philosophical terms at them.

00:19:27.500 | You could say things like heteronomy and ontological.

00:19:34.240 | You can mention the categorical imperative, keep dropping the word Kantian and they will

00:19:41.260 | just have to be quiet.

00:19:42.260 | All right.

00:19:43.260 | So there we go.

00:19:44.260 | A nerd argument for a very real issue.

00:19:49.660 | So I actually found that article, Jesse, because there's a follow-up article that said, all

00:19:54.000 | right, if that's true, there's also an obligation others have to protect your autonomy through

00:20:00.360 | digital technology as well.

00:20:01.960 | That there's like a moral imperative not to distract other people.

00:20:04.200 | It's a whole interesting argument.

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00:24:46.160 | All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

00:24:50.880 | First question's from Kirsten from Missouri.

00:24:53.400 | "I just ordered digital minimalism to help me stop wasting time.

00:24:57.040 | I tried, without success, to use some distraction-free apps.

00:25:00.760 | Can these apps actually work?"

00:25:02.480 | Well, let me back up a little bit, because it looks like you're thinking about digital

00:25:07.560 | minimalism as a collection of tips for trying to stop wasting time or to be less distracted.

00:25:17.440 | That's the standard cultural paradigm we often have for thinking about advice, especially

00:25:21.000 | for things like digital distraction.

00:25:23.200 | Give me some tips.

00:25:24.600 | I want to read the five ways to save your attention in some sort of magazine article,

00:25:28.520 | and let me put a couple of those into play.

00:25:30.880 | It looks like you heard about distraction-free apps.

00:25:33.120 | I do talk about them in the book.

00:25:34.280 | You're like, "Hey, I tried them.

00:25:35.280 | It didn't work well."

00:25:37.240 | The first thing I want you to understand is that digital minimalism is not a collection

00:25:40.840 | of tips, but a philosophy.

00:25:43.040 | It's a philosophy of technology use, a consistent way of thinking about the role of technology

00:25:48.440 | in your life and how you curate and engage with technologies in your life.

00:25:52.520 | It's a bit of a binary proposition.

00:25:54.800 | You either need to adopt the philosophy or not.

00:25:59.620 | You can't just pick and choose specific things to show up in the philosophy itself.

00:26:05.440 | The metaphor I like to use is cleaning out a closet that's overstuffed with junk.

00:26:10.720 | So if you had a closet that's overstuffed with junk, what you are doing—so the equivalent

00:26:15.800 | in the closet metaphor of like, "Hey, I'm going to try to help my online distraction

00:26:19.480 | because I heard apps might help"—that's the equivalent in our closet metaphor of going

00:26:23.480 | to the container store and being like, "Hey, I bought some organizers."

00:26:27.560 | And then you return to your overstuffed closet and you're like, "Okay, I have a few organizer

00:26:31.040 | bins here that I put some of the stuff in."

00:26:32.800 | Your closet's still a nightmare.

00:26:35.640 | What works better for the closet?

00:26:38.160 | Well the Marie Kondo approach of, "I'm going to empty the whole thing out, empty it to

00:26:42.560 | zero.

00:26:43.560 | I'm going to put everything that was in that closet in the piles.

00:26:45.880 | I'm going to go through and say, 'Which of this stuff do I really, really need?'

00:26:49.400 | And that stuff I will put back into the closet very carefully.

00:26:52.240 | If I don't really need it, it doesn't go back in."

00:26:54.040 | That's how you organize your closet.

00:26:57.040 | It's a net-zero budget.

00:26:58.320 | You start from zero and add back in the stuff you need carefully, not just trying to throw

00:27:03.700 | organizational bins at the junk that's already in there.

00:27:07.820 | So that's what digital minimalism is, right?

00:27:09.640 | Instead of just throwing a particular piece of advice at your digital distraction, you're

00:27:13.280 | going to reinvent your digital life from scratch, taking everything out, reflecting for a month,

00:27:18.480 | and then only adding back in what matters with rules about how you're going to use it.

00:27:22.400 | Okay.

00:27:23.400 | To get to your specific point about distraction-free apps, in this process they can have a use—typically

00:27:32.960 | they're useful training tools.

00:27:35.320 | If there's a particular technology that you need to use but only use in a limited way

00:27:39.760 | and you have a very strong urge to keep going back to it, distraction-free apps can help

00:27:44.520 | you train to resist that urge because it makes it very difficult to access those technologies

00:27:50.080 | in times you don't want to.

00:27:52.600 | Typically what happens with people is after a few months of using distraction-free apps,

00:27:58.040 | they lose the urge to go use that technology compulsively because they've gotten that groove

00:28:03.580 | out of their mind, their reward circuit weakens, and then they don't use them anymore.

00:28:08.160 | So you might use a distraction-free app as part of your efforts to recreate your digital

00:28:11.960 | life, but typically their uses are more temporary, they're a training tool, not a permanent feature

00:28:17.380 | of your digital landscape.

00:28:20.280 | I love the condo advice, how she—and you get rid of something and you express gratitude

00:28:25.240 | to it, and then you're like, "Bye."

00:28:27.320 | TikTok, I express gratitude to the role you play in my life.

00:28:30.360 | But now our journeys have crossed.

00:28:34.200 | Our journeys have parted.

00:28:35.200 | Yeah, she's very calming.

00:28:36.200 | All right, who do we got next?

00:28:39.140 | Next question is from JP, "I get stressed with my goals due to fear of failure, I keep

00:28:43.880 | everything in my head and can't distinguish from urgent and non-urgent, I pretty much

00:28:47.560 | never finish what I start."

00:28:48.820 | Well, look, you can't, in the modern world, you can't organize your life just in your

00:28:55.640 | head.

00:28:56.640 | Just trying to remember what you want to do, all the things you have to do, your priorities,

00:29:02.760 | somehow use this all to make a decision about what to do next.

00:29:06.380 | The human brain can't do that.

00:29:08.900 | It's like trying to teach a bear to drive a car.

00:29:12.100 | It might be funny or terrifying, but it's probably not going to work very well.

00:29:17.200 | The human brain can't, on its own, organize a modern life.

00:29:21.880 | So what do you need to do instead?

00:29:22.880 | Well, you're going to need something like multi-scale planning that is a system that

00:29:28.960 | can get all of the stuff you need to do and your plan for how you're going to tackle it

00:29:34.800 | out of your head and into a sort of trusted permanent system that you can frequently access.

00:29:40.080 | You basically have to extend your mind like a cyborg with other tools to make this complicated

00:29:46.000 | task of organizing your life much more tractable.

00:29:49.700 | So multi-player scanning, which I talk about a lot on this show, has you planning things

00:29:54.380 | on multiple scales, each of which have their own systems to go with it.

00:29:58.080 | At the highest scale, you have a plan for the current season or quarter where you're

00:30:01.060 | making sense of your bigger priorities.

00:30:04.460 | You reference that quarterly or seasonal plan every week.

00:30:08.220 | When you make a weekly plan, you physically write out your weekly plan.

00:30:11.820 | Also when you do your weekly plan, you confront your calendar.

00:30:14.100 | You make adjustments.

00:30:15.100 | You add to your calendar appointments with yourself to work on particularly important

00:30:19.300 | priorities from your quarterly or seasonal plans.

00:30:22.780 | So now you have a written weekly plan and a calendar that's been updated and corrected

00:30:25.960 | for the week.

00:30:27.660 | And then every day, you look at your calendar and your weekly plan when you make a time

00:30:31.180 | block plan for that day where you give every minute of your workday a job.

00:30:34.900 | So you're not just trying to decide on the fly, "What do I want to work on next?"

00:30:40.760 | You've made a plan for the time that remains in your day between meetings and other appointments,

00:30:44.680 | what you want to do at that time, so you can balance your energy with your needs.

00:30:49.680 | You can batch.

00:30:50.680 | You can be efficient.

00:30:51.680 | You can avoid excessive context switching, etc.

00:30:55.980 | So each of these levels, you have different tools.

00:30:58.740 | All of this is going to be supported by a task system where you're going to keep track

00:31:01.540 | of all the obligations you have to do.

00:31:03.620 | You'll look at that task system when you're doing your weekly plans.

00:31:05.980 | You'll reference it during admin blocks in your daily plans.

00:31:08.820 | All of these are external systems with structure around them that you use so that your brain

00:31:16.340 | doesn't have to be responsible on its own for keeping track of what you have to do and

00:31:20.700 | making decisions in an ad hoc way.

00:31:22.180 | So you need something like multi-scale planning if you're going to keep track of your life.

00:31:30.620 | So you shouldn't be worried, I would say, that you're struggling to do this in your

00:31:34.540 | head.

00:31:35.540 | That's a bear driving a car.

00:31:37.180 | That is pretty impossible.

00:31:38.340 | Actually, a true point about bears driving cars, Jesse, really hard to get insured.

00:31:43.660 | It's a really high insurance rate.

00:31:46.380 | Especially if you live in the west coast of Florida.

00:31:49.460 | If you live in the west coast of Florida, yeah, get a bear to drive a car, high insurance

00:31:54.900 | rate.

00:31:55.900 | All right.

00:31:56.900 | What do we got?

00:31:57.900 | Next question is from Joseph.

00:31:58.900 | I'm a teacher looking to improve my efficiency with admin tasks.

00:32:03.780 | When I have a quiz in two different subjects to grade and record, is the task context switching

00:32:08.900 | effect less if I were to grade and record one class than the other or if I were to grade

00:32:13.700 | both and then record both as blocks?

00:32:15.860 | Well, it's a good question because I'm glad you're thinking about context shifting as

00:32:19.660 | more or less the number one productivity poison you want to be wary about.

00:32:23.620 | Long-time listeners know this.

00:32:25.340 | It takes time to switch your target of your attention from one target to another.

00:32:29.900 | So if you're moving your attention back and forth rapidly, you're going to put your mind

00:32:32.980 | into the state of continuous partial attention, which is a self-imposed cognitive deficit.

00:32:38.200 | You make yourself quite literally dumber.

00:32:41.980 | In this case, recording grades into a gradebook is mechanical and largely non-cognitive.

00:32:52.180 | In other words, you don't have to do difficult thinking.

00:32:56.080 | You're just taking numbers, matching it to a name, writing that name in there.

00:32:58.780 | You don't have to do difficult thinking.

00:32:59.780 | You don't have to load up complicated cognitive context.

00:33:03.300 | You don't have to make decisions or pull from complicated memories.

00:33:08.380 | So I'm not too super worried about the context shift price when you go to just entering grades.

00:33:16.000 | Because again, mechanical thing, it's almost like you're working hard on something like

00:33:19.740 | writing a hard book chapter.

00:33:21.060 | If you get up and go make a cup of tea and then come back, that's not actually going

00:33:25.900 | to be a big hit.

00:33:27.640 | That context shift is not going to be a big hit on your primary test because it's mechanical

00:33:31.620 | and not cognitive.

00:33:33.700 | So this is all to say, it doesn't really matter where you put the grade recording.

00:33:39.520 | It's whatever you have preference for.

00:33:40.820 | So you could grade one thing, then grade the other thing, and then have a long block of

00:33:43.860 | just mechanically entering grades.

00:33:45.460 | Or you could grade one thing, enter the grades, grade another thing, enter the grades.

00:33:49.520 | It's not going to make a difference cognitively.

00:33:52.260 | It's just going to be a matter of what's going to feel better for you.

00:33:55.820 | I would suspect the difference would come down to how demanding the grading is.

00:34:00.220 | So if the grading is really hard, and if the subjects between the two things you're grading

00:34:05.580 | the two quizzes is separate, like it's not the same cognitive context, I would enter

00:34:11.180 | the grades right after grading to give your mind a breather.

00:34:18.700 | I would also consider, let's get advanced here, cognitively advanced.

00:34:25.220 | After grading the first thing, before you enter those grades, go look at the second

00:34:31.300 | thing, and maybe read one of the quizzes to try to start loading that cognitive context.

00:34:39.020 | Grade a single quiz of the next thing.

00:34:44.380 | This is going to go slow at first, right?

00:34:46.420 | Because you now have colliding cognitive context as you look at the second quiz for the first

00:34:51.380 | time, that's a separate context from the quiz you just graded, and so there's going to be

00:34:57.380 | a collision as your brain is trying to shut down the context of the first grading block

00:35:01.660 | and load the context of the second.

00:35:03.260 | So grading that first quiz of the second, the first assignment of the first quiz, I

00:35:07.780 | don't know how to say this, Jesse.

00:35:09.540 | It's a quiz, and he has multiple quizzes to grade, and there's two different quizzes.

00:35:13.300 | That make sense?

00:35:14.300 | Yeah.

00:35:15.300 | All right.

00:35:16.300 | So you're in the second type of quiz, and you grade the first quiz from the second type

00:35:18.340 | of quiz, and that's very hard because it's a new context.

00:35:22.460 | Grade just one from the second type of quiz.

00:35:25.860 | Then here's my advanced advice.

00:35:27.760 | Go back and enter the grades from your first quiz, because here's what's happening.

00:35:33.500 | While you are entering the grades from the first type of quiz, your brain is continuing

00:35:37.820 | in the background the process of switching its context over to the second type of quiz.

00:35:41.540 | You initiated that by looking at a single quiz of that second type, and now you go back

00:35:46.780 | and just mechanically enter grades, your brain is going to continue making this switch.

00:35:50.520 | So now when you're done entering those grades and you return to the second type of quiz,

00:35:54.540 | your context has more thoroughly shifted, and your grading is going to get up to speed

00:35:58.540 | much quicker.

00:35:59.540 | All right.

00:36:00.540 | This is kind of an advanced way of thinking about it, but this is what you probably would

00:36:03.540 | see this effect.

00:36:06.140 | If instead you grade the first type of quiz, you enter the grades, then you turn to the

00:36:10.420 | second type of quiz, it might take—you might have to grade five or six students' quizzes

00:36:16.040 | before you get that momentum going of your brain completely shifting.

00:36:20.540 | Whereas with my tactic, you grade the first type of quiz, grade one of the second type,

00:36:25.420 | enter the grades, then return to the rest of the second type, you'll probably get up

00:36:28.740 | to speed much quicker.

00:36:30.340 | This is just, at this point, like attention hacking.

00:36:32.340 | The differences might be minor.

00:36:34.740 | But I do like the type of thinking this induces, which is to think about cognitive context.

00:36:38.700 | It's like one of the most important properties of modern work, and it's the property that

00:36:44.940 | we think almost nothing about in modern office productivity.

00:36:49.400 | We completely disregard it.

00:36:51.920 | We put low friction as a priority.

00:36:54.060 | We put information velocity as a priority.

00:36:56.320 | We put access to tools and data as a priority, and we completely disregard the cost of context

00:37:00.980 | shifting.

00:37:01.980 | So I love any discussion like this that gets us in the weeds on it.

00:37:05.100 | This sort of psychologically aware productivity is really where we should be.

00:37:10.240 | So I appreciate the chance to sort of nerd out on that.

00:37:12.760 | We'll have to have Joseph respond and see how it goes.

00:37:16.380 | Yeah, he should.

00:37:17.380 | So Joseph, if you hear this, let us know if that technique works.

00:37:19.860 | All right, where are we?

00:37:22.740 | Next question is from Francois.

00:37:25.020 | I'm a professor and also have a French podcast.

00:37:27.860 | My university has agreed to include it in my official duties.

00:37:31.220 | I haven't accepted their offer yet.

00:37:32.820 | However, if I do accept it, how should I think about organizing my podcast within the traditional

00:37:38.140 | academic framework of research, teaching, and service?

00:37:41.440 | Should this be included in my academic tasks?

00:37:45.580 | It's a good question, Francois.

00:37:48.820 | I had a French podcast for a while.

00:37:49.980 | I don't know if you know this.

00:37:50.980 | Yeah, and you had a pipe and a hat.

00:37:52.420 | I had a pipe and a hat, and I just did my French accent.

00:37:57.380 | Long story short, I am no longer welcome in the Republic of France.

00:38:02.660 | I have been banned from setting foot in France after they heard my awesome accent.

00:38:08.940 | Francois, it's a good question.

00:38:10.660 | I don't know the French system super well, so I'm going to answer this from the perspective

00:38:15.480 | of the American academic system, which I think is roughly congruent.

00:38:21.620 | All right, so in the American academic system, by far the most important thing for promotion

00:38:29.020 | and recognition is research.

00:38:32.140 | You have to do service.

00:38:33.340 | You need to be a good teacher.

00:38:36.340 | But those alone can't get you promoted or recognized.

00:38:38.780 | It has to be the quality of your research.

00:38:41.660 | So if your university is going to allow you to count your podcast as an official academic

00:38:46.220 | task, I would recommend that you are very clear about which of the three major tasks,

00:38:53.500 | research, service, and teaching, that it counts as, and I would try to make it count as, service.

00:39:00.340 | When you count it as service, what this means is you can reduce the amount of other service

00:39:05.260 | you do, let the podcast take the place of other service obligations so you're not increasing

00:39:10.740 | your time obligations, and critically, you're not reducing the time you spend on research.

00:39:16.500 | Because when it comes to service and promotion, it's a little bit more binary.

00:39:21.780 | Was this person a good citizen of the institution and his community?

00:39:25.900 | Not how good of a service person were they, right?

00:39:28.500 | So if you can use your podcast as a way to reduce other types of service so your overall

00:39:32.540 | time footprint's the same, that's great.

00:39:34.580 | Do not let it, however, impinge on the time you spend doing research.

00:39:37.980 | That's ultimately what matters most.

00:39:41.460 | Trust me, I've gone through two promotions.

00:39:44.540 | I'm done with promotions now, but I went through both my promotions from assistant to associate

00:39:47.900 | with tenure and from associate with tenure to full.

00:39:51.700 | Both of those promotions, I had large portfolios of more public-facing work, and I had to deal

00:39:59.100 | with them carefully.

00:40:00.100 | When I was promoted to associate, I didn't mention my books.

00:40:03.660 | It was all computer science research.

00:40:07.100 | When I went to full, I did mention them, because as we just saw in the deep dive, some of the

00:40:13.500 | work, public-facing work I did also has a very big academic footprint, right?

00:40:18.300 | We just did a whole paper from the Journal of Applied Philosophy in the deep dive that

00:40:21.660 | was responding to my digital minimalism book.

00:40:24.540 | My book, Deep Work, has been cited in academic articles close to 800 times now.

00:40:29.220 | I was just looking at that the other day.

00:40:30.900 | So I did sort of count that more, but I didn't lean into my podcast, even though I was past

00:40:37.020 | a 10 million download point at that point, because it didn't quite fit clearly into it.

00:40:42.180 | It's not research.

00:40:43.180 | I didn't have an agreement like yours that this counted as service.

00:40:45.940 | I sort of had it as sort of on the side.

00:40:48.500 | So I know this world well.

00:40:50.460 | Ultimately promotions matter.

00:40:51.460 | Are you doing work that's influencing the academic culture?

00:40:56.260 | So that's what you've got to be careful about.

00:40:57.260 | So yeah, if you can use your podcast to reduce other service loads, then I think that's great

00:41:04.060 | because your podcast will probably have a higher impact than the other service you're

00:41:07.820 | replacing.

00:41:08.820 | Just don't let it get in the way of research.

00:41:11.220 | So now that you're a full professor, do you still have to write as many papers?

00:41:16.020 | It's more flexible.

00:41:17.540 | Yeah, it's more flexible.

00:41:21.260 | Right now I'm focusing more on technology and digital ethics than I am computer science.

00:41:25.420 | And that's the type of thing you can explore.

00:41:27.260 | It's sort of the advantage of full professoredom in 10 years.

00:41:29.620 | You can make those explorations.

00:41:31.500 | And if you don't like the way it's going, you can switch back to something else.

00:41:35.000 | One of the things that made a big difference for me is that-- so Google Scholar is a quick

00:41:40.880 | way you can keep up on people's publications.

00:41:43.060 | What have they published?

00:41:44.060 | How much have they been cited?

00:41:45.900 | What are their statistics, like their H index, their I-10 index?

00:41:48.620 | What are their total citation counts?

00:41:50.220 | What are their total citation counts by years?

00:41:53.500 | Once Google Scholar figured out-- because I write under two different names.

00:41:58.240 | My academic computer science papers are typically written under Calvin Newport.

00:42:02.620 | And of course, my public-facing writing is under Cal Newport.

00:42:05.400 | When it figured out, oh, Calvin Newport and Cal Newport are the same person, it really

00:42:12.900 | changed my statistics.

00:42:14.260 | So where you saw a bit of a fall off in citations in recent years now shows a steady high level

00:42:21.900 | of citations because the public-facing work on technology I was doing as Cal Newport gets

00:42:27.100 | cited a lot academically.

00:42:29.100 | So it shows a sort of smooth transition from less computer science, more digital ethics.

00:42:34.220 | And the impact is measured by citations as sort of stayed steady.

00:42:38.060 | I thought you were saying the other name was going to be your French name.

00:42:41.100 | Yeah.

00:42:42.100 | Well, yeah.

00:42:43.100 | There's Calvin Newport.

00:42:44.100 | There's Cal Newport.

00:42:45.100 | And there's Pierre, Pierre Le Newport.

00:42:48.900 | Actually, I do have a French-- I do have French heritage.

00:42:54.060 | My paternal grandmother was a Levelle, the Levelle family.

00:43:04.060 | And the Levelle family goes all the way back to the French Huguenots that came over here

00:43:08.140 | pre-Revolution.

00:43:09.140 | And they used to be Levalve.

00:43:10.380 | So it's French.

00:43:11.380 | I have a French Huguenot blood back in there.

00:43:14.860 | All right.

00:43:15.860 | What do we got next?

00:43:16.860 | We have our corner.

00:43:17.860 | Oh, Slow Productivity Corner.

00:43:19.500 | Let's hear that theme music.

00:43:27.500 | So for those who are new, Slow Productivity Corner is the question.

00:43:31.180 | We do one question each week related to my most recent book, Slow Productivity, the Lost

00:43:35.380 | Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout.

00:43:38.260 | Went to Amazon.

00:43:39.260 | So I can see this now.

00:43:40.260 | Went to Amazon's Best Business Books of 2024 and the winner of Best Business Book of the

00:43:44.060 | Year from the S-- something, something, something-- S-A-B-E-W.

00:43:51.340 | It has those letters in it.

00:43:52.340 | There's a huge cash prize, guys.

00:43:54.020 | This is an important award, somewhere between $60,000 and $600,000 award.

00:43:58.720 | My award-winning book, Slow Productivity, we try to do a question each week that comes

00:44:03.420 | from that book.

00:44:04.420 | If you haven't read the book yet, come on.

00:44:05.420 | Get the book.

00:44:06.420 | Half the stuff we talk about comes from it.

00:44:07.660 | All right.

00:44:08.660 | What's our Slow Productivity Corner question of the week?

00:44:10.540 | It's from Madonna's Gold Tooth.

00:44:12.780 | Yikes.

00:44:13.780 | What do you think about the slow living craze on the internet?

00:44:16.780 | And do you think it's just a fad or will it be permanent?

00:44:18.780 | All right.

00:44:19.780 | So do you know what this is, Jesse?

00:44:21.820 | There's a YouTube video.

00:44:23.440 | You have a YouTube video.

00:44:24.440 | Yeah.

00:44:25.440 | It'll explain what slow living is?

00:44:28.660 | Because I don't actually know what this is.

00:44:29.940 | All right.

00:44:30.940 | Let's load this up.

00:44:31.940 | Let's listen here.

00:44:32.940 | We're going to be learning this together, what slow living is, and then I can answer

00:44:35.660 | this question.

00:44:38.980 | Madonna's Gold Tooth.

00:44:39.980 | All right.

00:44:40.980 | There seems to be--

00:44:41.980 | One of the things I am most scared of in my life is looking back with regret.

00:44:48.280 | Looking back at all the little moments that I missed in pursuit of more.

00:44:52.400 | This year, I've been really working on slowing down and trying to be more present for the

00:44:57.140 | little moments that make up most of our lives and making sure that I'm actually building

00:45:01.580 | a life by design and not just by default.

00:45:04.340 | So these are some simple, tiny habits that I have implemented that have really helped

00:45:08.340 | me slow down.

00:45:09.340 | Five minutes of nothing.

00:45:10.560 | This is literally a block that I have on my calendar every day just to have five minutes

00:45:15.540 | of nothing happening.

00:45:17.420 | Doesn't sound like a lot, but when you don't have any music, no podcast, no work that you're

00:45:21.660 | thinking of, no work that you're doing, no book that you're reading for just five minutes

00:45:25.180 | and you sit there and you stare at a wall, not trying to meditate, but you just let your

00:45:28.840 | brain do its thing and you observe it.

00:45:31.100 | It's a beautiful time for me to just reset and make sure that there's actually breaks

00:45:35.640 | in my life to remember that my life is not online.

00:45:38.380 | It's not on a computer screen and sometimes I need physical breaks to make that happen.

00:45:42.480 | Three zones.

00:45:43.480 | For me, this is my sauna, my cold plunge.

00:45:45.980 | All right.

00:45:46.980 | I think I get the idea.

00:45:48.540 | Well, first of all, for those who are just listening instead of watching, the video had

00:45:54.340 | like a faux graininess while they played like really relaxing music and he washed eggs from

00:46:01.100 | the chickens that he just stared at.

00:46:03.760 | I think with that type of music.

00:46:05.760 | I like the music a lot.

00:46:06.760 | Yeah.

00:46:07.760 | I think almost anything seems, almost anything seems profound.

00:46:10.560 | 73,000 views.

00:46:12.000 | Yeah.

00:46:13.000 | I mean, almost anything I think will sound sort of important and meaningful and somber.

00:46:19.660 | You could have a video of someone earnestly trying and failing to life threatening in

00:46:27.640 | a life threatening way to get a bear into the car to drive it.

00:46:31.480 | Played to that music.

00:46:32.480 | Like good for him.

00:46:33.720 | Good for him.

00:46:34.720 | The bear's mauling him as he's trying to get him into a Chevy Impala.

00:46:39.160 | Play it to that music and cut to some scenes of someone washing eggs.

00:46:42.000 | You'd be like, "Yeah, life is like a bear trying to get into a car."

00:46:44.700 | Drive to the insurance agency and get the insurance card.

00:46:46.760 | Just him at the insurance agency, just his face ripped up in bandages trying to get the

00:46:51.080 | insurance guy is just shaking his head.

00:46:52.600 | You'd be like, "Yeah, that's...

00:46:53.920 | Play that music."

00:46:54.920 | You're like, "Yeah, it's profound."

00:46:58.680 | So no.

00:47:00.120 | Slow living and slow productivity are different.

00:47:01.920 | So let me tell you how, and then I'm going to tell you what slow living seems to be like

00:47:07.560 | connected to some other stuff we talk about.

00:47:10.320 | Slow productivity is about work.

00:47:11.960 | It's about knowledge work.

00:47:13.760 | It's about how do we define what productivity means in knowledge work.

00:47:18.960 | The core argument of that book is that we have a bad implicit definition that we tend

00:47:22.520 | to fall back on, which is pseudo productivity, which is to use visible effort as a proxy

00:47:27.320 | for useful activity.

00:47:29.240 | Slow productivity is a alternative.

00:47:31.440 | It says our goal in knowledge work should not be to be as busy as possible.

00:47:35.320 | We should instead focus on not doing too many things at the same time, keeping our pace

00:47:39.760 | of work varied and natural, but then really obsessing over quality.

00:47:43.440 | This is a better, more sustainable definition of productivity.

00:47:45.880 | This is about work.

00:47:47.280 | Slow living seems to be about life outside of work and a lot to do with distraction,

00:47:51.860 | especially digital distraction.

00:47:54.320 | So it's probably closer to digital minimalism when it comes to the things I talk and write

00:47:59.000 | about than anything else.

00:48:01.280 | I think if you're a digital minimalist, your life will seem slower in the way that's being

00:48:06.000 | talked about in this video, because a digital minimalist works backwards from their values

00:48:10.500 | to dictate their technology use, and so, you know, if you value your chickens and washing

00:48:17.240 | your eggs or whatever, you are going to be careful about crafting your technological

00:48:20.920 | use so that you're not always looking at your phone and you can't enjoy doing that.

00:48:24.120 | In general, digital minimalists do feel like their lives are slower and richer.

00:48:28.500 | There is a neurological reason for this, right?

00:48:31.940 | Your life is what you pay attention to.

00:48:35.200 | So if you're constantly paying attention to your phone, you perceive your life as very

00:48:38.200 | sort of like fast-paced, emotionally activated, sort of this like really sort of shaky, jittery

00:48:44.400 | world that's always rolling past, because when you're looking at your phone, everything's

00:48:47.640 | moving fast.

00:48:48.640 | Swipe, swipe, swipe.

00:48:49.640 | Tap, tap, tap.

00:48:50.640 | Look at this.

00:48:51.640 | Look at that.

00:48:52.640 | Jump over there.

00:48:53.640 | Time moves fast because you're moving fast on your phone.

00:48:56.320 | Also time moves fast because you're doing this sort of homogenous behavior.

00:49:00.900 | So when you're doing sort of the same thing, you don't have a really good sense of how

00:49:04.740 | long time is.

00:49:06.280 | Time can just sort of unfold.

00:49:08.560 | When you're not on your phone and engaging in specific behaviors, it is just by definition

00:49:13.160 | slower because everything is slower than using your phone.

00:49:16.500 | And because those behaviors are novel, they're different specific things in novel specific

00:49:20.820 | locations, your perception of time is of it being much slower.

00:49:25.340 | Your day seems longer.

00:49:27.660 | Your experience is richer.

00:49:30.140 | So I think digital minimalism will probably lead you to something like slower living.

00:49:36.220 | Start with the digital minimalism and end up at the slower living.

00:49:38.980 | It's sort of a consequence of getting intentional about your life and technology.

00:49:44.180 | But it is quite separate from slow productivity.

00:49:45.960 | They share the same word slow, but they're only connected by this idea of sort of intentionality.

00:49:51.200 | Slow productivity is about your work at your desk.

00:49:53.680 | Slow living is about your life outside of work.

00:49:55.600 | Does that seem reasonable, Jesse?

00:49:57.760 | Yeah.

00:49:58.760 | Maybe we should have chickens in here.

00:50:00.840 | I like that video.

00:50:01.840 | We should do more of that music.

00:50:03.760 | We have kind of music, cooler music like that for the in-depth episodes.

00:50:08.600 | Yeah.

00:50:09.600 | That's a little more like a meditative music.

00:50:12.000 | All right.

00:50:13.000 | Do we have a call this week?

00:50:14.440 | We do.

00:50:15.440 | All right.

00:50:16.440 | Let's hear this.

00:50:17.440 | Hi, Cal.

00:50:18.440 | I've noticed I struggle with tiredness and a lack of focus in the afternoons, especially

00:50:23.040 | during my scheduled deep work blocks.

00:50:25.600 | After lunch, my mind doesn't feel as sharp and I often find myself drifting off and daydreaming.

00:50:30.040 | Do you have any strategies to help maintain focus and mental clarity during these times?

00:50:35.280 | Thanks.

00:50:36.280 | Well, first of all, we have to keep in mind that there's a limited capacity to do deep

00:50:42.360 | work in a given day.

00:50:44.000 | So if you're talking about like highly demanding focused activities, things that require you

00:50:48.800 | to use your full cognitive capacity, probably do those in the morning.

00:50:53.200 | Do those first thing before you've had a lot of context shifts so your mind is still clear.

00:50:57.920 | And be okay.

00:50:58.920 | I got in a good, hard early session.

00:51:02.040 | I'm okay not having to return to these cognitively demanding activities in the afternoon because

00:51:05.960 | I'm just not going to have enough cognitive gas.

00:51:09.080 | If it's more just, "No, I have administrative stuff to do.

00:51:13.120 | I have to take notes.

00:51:14.120 | I have to send emails."

00:51:15.720 | It's not cognitively demanding, but I just sort of lose focus and drift and lose energy

00:51:19.760 | in the afternoon.

00:51:20.760 | Well, that's very common as well.

00:51:22.960 | And a couple things that helps is time blocking.

00:51:26.020 | So instead of having to constantly have an argument with yourself of like, "What should

00:51:29.040 | I do next?

00:51:30.440 | Should I keep doing this?

00:51:31.720 | Should I take a break?"

00:51:33.280 | Time block those afternoons and just make the single commitment to stick to your time

00:51:36.440 | block schedule the best you can.

00:51:38.640 | So you get rid of a lot of that decisional friction that comes from being more freeform

00:51:43.440 | in your approach to your afternoon.

00:51:46.320 | Second in that time block schedule batch.

00:51:49.160 | So let me do a lot of similar tasks together because even if minor, sticking within the

00:51:54.600 | same cognitive context makes it easier.

00:51:57.380 | This can apply even to cleaning out your email inbox.

00:52:01.360 | I recommend if you have like a super stuffed inbox and it's like three o'clock and you're

00:52:04.920 | exhausted but you kind of have to get through it, create a folder or label for the current

00:52:10.280 | messages you're answering.

00:52:12.000 | And then go through and grab a bunch of messages of the same type.

00:52:16.240 | So they're all relevant to the same cognitive context, they're all scheduling messages.

00:52:19.940 | They're all messages related to like an upcoming event.

00:52:22.960 | Move those all to that label or folder and then tackle those just by themselves.

00:52:27.040 | So now you're doing messages without having to change your context.

00:52:29.480 | Then go and grab another type of messages and do the same.

00:52:33.400 | What happens is if you follow the alternative of just sort of doing your emails in the order

00:52:37.500 | they exist in your inbox, you're switching potentially your cognitive context from message

00:52:42.200 | to message to message and that's exhausting.

00:52:44.980 | So that can help as well.

00:52:46.880 | Third, end your day earlier.

00:52:48.880 | Hey, I'm exhausted by three or four that may be like stop your day between three and four.

00:52:53.520 | Time block your day.

00:52:54.520 | If you're doing multi-scale planning, you have a good weekly plan, your weekly plan

00:52:57.800 | is in touch with your quarterly plan.

00:53:01.000 | This is a key idea from my book Slow Productivity.

00:53:03.360 | The second principle, it says work at a natural pace, which says this idea that like the perfect

00:53:07.880 | calibration for humans that do cognitive work is nine to five all out every day is preposterous.

00:53:12.740 | Why would that just happen to be optimal for everyone?

00:53:16.340 | You might find out working till three or 3.30, this is really what's optimal.

00:53:20.140 | You're time blocked, you're on it, and then when you're done, be done.

00:53:23.980 | Or maybe four, maybe two, it could be different for different people.

00:53:26.620 | But don't feel like you're too stuck with it has to be this exact eight hour day.

00:53:32.160 | Some people just run out of gas earlier than others.

00:53:34.080 | Your work might be harder than others, so you need to end earlier.

00:53:36.740 | I talk about in, I don't know if this is in Slow Productivity, I think this is in my book

00:53:41.420 | A World Without Email.

00:53:43.380 | I talk about this type of programming called extreme programming, and it's pair-based and

00:53:49.160 | it's super intense, and it produced fantastic code, but it's super intense.

00:53:54.500 | I report that companies that do this type of coding, they produce really cool stuff,

00:53:59.380 | but they have to let people go home by like 2.30 or 3.00.

00:54:02.300 | It's just too exhausting.

00:54:03.740 | You can't do it till five.

00:54:05.900 | People at first have to go home and take naps.

00:54:08.340 | So don't assume that everyone is perfectly calibrated to work all out till five.

00:54:13.200 | Figure out what works for you.

00:54:14.620 | If you're organized and on the ball, you'll produce good work.

00:54:18.620 | So I would vary it that way as well.

00:54:21.300 | All right, let's see here.

00:54:23.260 | We have a case study.

00:54:25.540 | This is where we have people write in where they talk about their personal experience

00:54:29.460 | putting the type of things we talk about the show in the practice in their own lives.

00:54:32.540 | All right, so today's case study comes from Zach.

00:54:36.980 | Now here's what Zach says, "Recently, I've made a monumental life change for the better

00:54:44.180 | in no small part due to CALS, books, podcast, and newsletter.

00:54:48.460 | I graduated in March of 2020.

00:54:51.020 | While my classes went online, I decided to get my real estate license and pursue my interest

00:54:54.740 | in real estate investments because of the high autonomy and market activity due to the

00:54:58.740 | interest rate environment at the time.

00:55:01.460 | I was successful.

00:55:02.660 | I specialized in commercial investment sales and became proficient in my field because

00:55:06.900 | of my implementation of deep work principles.

00:55:09.800 | The only problem was that I was miserable at work.

00:55:13.380 | My days mostly consisted of cold calling and driving all over the state for client meetings.

00:55:17.340 | So even though I was making decent money and had full autonomy, my lifestyle wasn't great

00:55:22.660 | and it was trending in the wrong direction.

00:55:25.560 | On top of that, I was working mostly solo while I'm a very team oriented person.

00:55:32.700 | After listening to your podcast religiously on my long drives, my mindset began to shift.

00:55:37.420 | I realized I was optimizing for autonomy and money without much thought to lifestyle and

00:55:42.580 | long term life design.

00:55:45.180 | So I saved up some money and quit.

00:55:47.220 | Believe me, this was tough.

00:55:48.660 | Leveraging CALS principles got me far relatively quickly.

00:55:51.380 | So I had a promising career trajectory.

00:55:53.100 | But when I looked at guys way further down the road, they had a lot of material success

00:55:56.100 | without intentional design.

00:55:58.580 | After hunting and interviewing with jobs that align with my long term lifestyle vision for

00:56:01.940 | a few months, they successfully landed a job at a tech startup that provides me a much

00:56:06.620 | better day today.

00:56:08.740 | It's a short, beautiful commute to an office in my favorite part of town.

00:56:11.700 | My work is varied, challenging and interesting.

00:56:15.040 | And most importantly, I'm working with a like minded team who are all just as obsessed about

00:56:19.100 | productivity systems as I am.

00:56:21.740 | I just finished my first week and I'm blown away at what a difference this intentional

00:56:26.380 | change has made in my life.

00:56:28.260 | For the first time in years, I'm bursting with excitement to go to work.

00:56:31.900 | Should I have applied for jobs while working?

00:56:33.540 | Probably.

00:56:34.540 | But I was so burnt out that I had a burn the ships mindset.

00:56:36.900 | I'm eagerly awaiting your next book nearly as much as I am awaiting Brandon Sanderson's

00:56:41.540 | the author of Name of the Wind.

00:56:43.820 | I didn't include that, leave that in there.

00:56:49.380 | Brandon Sanderson.

00:56:50.380 | I still want to go down.

00:56:51.740 | I told you I have an invitation to go see his lair.

00:56:54.100 | Yeah.

00:56:55.100 | I have to do that.

00:56:58.380 | My wife is going on a trip down there.

00:57:00.540 | To Brandon Anderson?

00:57:01.540 | Well, no, not to it.

00:57:03.300 | That would be weird.

00:57:04.300 | She's like, I'm going on a trip, I'm going to be spending a week in Brandon Sanderson's

00:57:10.020 | dungeon.

00:57:11.020 | I'd be, I'd be worried about that.

00:57:12.500 | No, she's going to that part of the country.

00:57:14.020 | And all I could think is like, if that was me going on that trip, I would be able to

00:57:18.620 | see Sanderson's lair.

00:57:20.420 | Yeah.

00:57:21.420 | It'd be interesting if I get there and it's just half of it's just a sex dungeon.

00:57:26.740 | Probably not.

00:57:27.740 | I think he's a pretty straight laced Mormon, but you never know.

00:57:35.340 | The least popular pornographic video of all time is titled "Brandon Sanderson's Sex Dungeon."

00:57:44.260 | Six views.

00:57:45.260 | All right.

00:57:46.260 | That's a great, Zach, I appreciated that.

00:57:49.500 | Two things I want to point out about that case study.

00:57:51.500 | One, lifestyle centric planning.

00:57:53.420 | That's the way to think about your career.

00:57:56.900 | It's one of the most important dials you have to turn in trying to construct your lifestyle.

00:58:01.460 | But what matters is the target lifestyle.

00:58:03.340 | What do you want the day-to-day of your life to be like?

00:58:05.540 | You work backwards from that vision.

00:58:07.140 | That's how you help figure out what work to do or not do.

00:58:09.700 | This is much more effective than either following your passion or just blindly following a clear

00:58:16.260 | metric like money and just hoping by happenstance that will lead you being happy.

00:58:21.820 | The other thing I want to point out about this example though is, okay, Zach started

00:58:24.980 | one job, didn't work out, he switched.

00:58:28.700 | Is that a failure?

00:58:30.220 | No.

00:58:31.220 | It's very common.

00:58:34.100 | Figuring out the components of your ideal lifestyle is difficult and it evolves with

00:58:39.980 | experience.

00:58:42.700 | He had a hypothesis, I think, built on autonomy and financial security.

00:58:48.460 | He had a hypothesis of a lifestyle vision that he thought would be ideal for him.

00:58:54.780 | Zach pursued a job that matched that hypothesis and then learned through real-life experience,

00:59:00.220 | "Oh, there's these other things I care about.

00:59:02.620 | I didn't realize them until I had them not be present in my life.

00:59:07.100 | I didn't realize autonomy without X, Y, and Z wasn't so good, the money thing I don't

00:59:12.020 | care so much about."

00:59:13.260 | Through life experience, he updated his priors.

00:59:16.420 | His vision of the ideal lifestyle evolved and he said, "Great.

00:59:20.060 | Let me now leverage my career capital and make a shift that's going to get me closer

00:59:23.140 | to that lifestyle."

00:59:24.140 | Now, in this case, the career capital he leveraged was literal capital.

00:59:28.380 | He was making good money, so he saved up enough to buy him time to make a switch.

00:59:34.340 | He was early enough in his career that sort of skills-based career capital was less useful

00:59:38.420 | or less important because he was still a pretty early-stage career.

00:59:42.100 | Then he used that money to buy him some time to find a job that focused on other things

00:59:46.460 | he had discovered were important and now he's much happier.

00:59:48.900 | That's lifestyle-centric career planning in action.

00:59:53.900 | It evolves, it's tactical, it's not sexy.

00:59:58.580 | It's not Brandon Sanderson's Sex Dungeon sexy, but it's what over time is going to

01:00:03.900 | make your life more fulfilling.

01:00:06.460 | I've worn my VBLCCP hat a few times now.

01:00:09.220 | I've been wearing my Deep Life hat regularly.

01:00:12.860 | No one has asked me yet or noticed what VBLCCP means.

01:00:16.900 | I haven't got a reaction to it yet, but I'm still thinking we'll find our first.

01:00:20.740 | You get any questions about Deep Life or people just assume it's a brand?

01:00:25.140 | No, no questions yet.

01:00:27.780 | Yeah, I'll see.

01:00:28.780 | I'm going to keep wearing mine until I find a true believer, but I haven't found them

01:00:32.420 | yet.

01:00:33.420 | All right, we've got a cool final segment coming up, a Tech Corner segment, but first

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01:03:35.780 | When you think about businesses whose sales are rocketing like Feastables by Mr. Beast

01:03:42.260 | or Thrive Cosmetics or Silicon Valley's Weekend Uniform supplier Cotopaxi, you think about

01:03:48.140 | an innovative product or a progressive brand or buttoned down marketing.

01:03:54.860 | But an often overlooked secret is how these brands actually do their selling.

01:04:01.700 | The experience of buying from these brands online.

01:04:06.480 | These brands, along with millions of others, use Shopify.

01:04:10.700 | All right, nobody does selling better than Shopify.

01:04:16.100 | It's home of the number one checkout on the planet and the not so secret secret which

01:04:20.420 | is ShopPay that boost conversions up to 50%.

01:04:24.940 | This means that way less carts go abandoned and way more sales get done.

01:04:31.460 | So if you're growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever

01:04:35.260 | your customers are scrolling or strolling.

01:04:37.820 | On the web, in your store, in their feed, and everywhere in between.

01:04:42.020 | Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify.

01:04:46.820 | Upgrade your business and get the same checkout that Feastables or Thrive or Cotopaxi use

01:04:53.500 | when you use Shopify.

01:04:55.940 | Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/deep.

01:05:00.340 | But type that in all lowercase.

01:05:03.340 | Go to shopify.com/deep all lowercase to upgrade your selling today, shopify.com/deep.

01:05:08.980 | All right, Jesse, let's go to our final segment.

01:05:13.220 | All right, for our final segment today, we want to do a triumphant return to my tech

01:05:20.680 | corner segment where we get into a technical topic that is relevant to the type of things

01:05:27.680 | we talk about today.

01:05:28.680 | So I put on my computer science hat a little bit to help give us some more insight on topics

01:05:32.480 | relevant to living a deep life in a distracted world.

01:05:35.200 | All right, in today's tech corner, I want to talk about how do recommendation algorithms

01:05:39.360 | work.

01:05:40.360 | Why?

01:05:41.360 | Because, in part, this is really relevant to the ongoing discussion about social media

01:05:47.400 | and social media regulation.

01:05:49.960 | So if we look at some of the new child safety legislation like COSA or COPA 2.0 or California's

01:05:57.440 | big law, we see that one of the things that they are pushing for is that when kids are

01:06:03.380 | using social media that we have to be careful about what it does recommend or not recommend.

01:06:09.720 | Right?

01:06:10.720 | So you sort of see these arguments, okay, we're not talking about censoring information

01:06:16.440 | that can exist on social media, but we want to be careful about what we recommend or don't

01:06:19.840 | recommend.

01:06:21.120 | We also see this in discussions about things like Twitter or Twitter alternatives like

01:06:25.320 | Threads or Blue Sky, where there's often this notion of the recommendation algorithm can

01:06:30.720 | be tuned up or tuned down.

01:06:32.640 | We saw this a lot with the discussions around Threads when it was released, that they were

01:06:35.920 | tuning down, they claim, the political nature of content and tuning up recommendations for

01:06:40.800 | others.

01:06:41.800 | There's this idea that there is a "algorithm" that is in charge of showing us stuff, and

01:06:48.080 | this algorithm is really important, and we can change this algorithm to change the experience

01:06:53.640 | or maybe strip it out altogether and have an experience without it.

01:06:56.480 | It is at the core of many discussions around social media and its harm, so I thought we

01:06:59.920 | would talk about, well, how do these algorithms actually work?

01:07:05.560 | So what I'm going to do here is greatly simplify the idea of how a sort of machine learning-based

01:07:11.960 | optimization recommendation algorithm actually works.

01:07:14.920 | I want to start by saying there is a spectrum on which these algorithms exist.

01:07:21.040 | So if we look in the social media ecosystem, on one end of the spectrum will be something

01:07:24.360 | like Twitter, which actually is relatively non-algorithmic.

01:07:28.960 | The way curation decisions are made on Twitter, a lot of it is actually cybernetic, which

01:07:34.440 | means it's based on individual humans' decisions to retweet or not, and when those are combined

01:07:39.440 | with the network structure of Twitter, which has power law dynamics, it's really good at

01:07:43.880 | sort of selecting for certain content to have explosive growth and start trending.

01:07:49.080 | But it's largely non-algorithmic.

01:07:50.680 | It's actually just the aggregate of a lot of human decisions.

01:07:53.120 | On the other end of the spectrum is TikTok, which is essentially entirely algorithmic.

01:08:00.400 | It doesn't care who you follow or don't follow or what other people like.

01:08:03.920 | It just uses an algorithm to select what to show you next, then what to show you next,

01:08:09.080 | and what to show you next.

01:08:10.480 | So we're going to be leaning more towards that TikTok side, where really it's like a

01:08:13.800 | computer is deciding, not other humans, what it is you should see.

01:08:17.520 | I'm going to give you a highly simplified way of thinking about this, then we can draw

01:08:20.480 | some conclusions from it afterwards.

01:08:23.080 | All right.

01:08:24.720 | So let's pretend, for the sake of this example, that we're building an algorithm to recommend

01:08:30.760 | TikTok videos.

01:08:31.760 | And I am going to do a lot of drawing here, God help us.

01:08:35.120 | So if you're listening instead of watching, you might want to actually load up the YouTube

01:08:40.320 | version of this.

01:08:41.320 | This is, what are we Jesse?

01:08:42.320 | This is episode 327.

01:08:43.320 | Is that right?

01:08:44.320 | Yep.

01:08:45.320 | All right.

01:08:46.320 | So you just go to, what, the deeplife.com/listen, look for episode 327.

01:08:50.920 | You'll see the video there.

01:08:51.920 | It usually comes up within the same day or the day after the episode lands.

01:08:56.680 | Okay.

01:08:57.680 | So we're TikTok, and we want to recommend videos to a user.

01:09:03.800 | So we need ways, first of all, of describing the videos we have in our collection, and

01:09:10.920 | we want to describe them in a way computers can understand.

01:09:13.740 | So we want to use numbers.

01:09:15.360 | So let's start really simple.

01:09:17.880 | Let's say we're going to assign a single number to every video that we're going to use to

01:09:22.800 | help describe it.

01:09:25.540 | All right.

01:09:28.440 | Hold on a second.

01:09:32.880 | Let me press again.

01:09:33.880 | There we go.

01:09:34.880 | All right.

01:09:35.880 | So now I can draw.

01:09:36.880 | All right.

01:09:37.880 | So we're going to have videos, we're going to describe each videos with a single number.

01:09:43.800 | Let's say, you know, this number, for example, here is going to describe for each video,

01:09:50.000 | the number of cats in that video.

01:09:52.800 | And so we have this a single number on which we can categorize videos.

01:09:57.160 | I drew a line here, and we can imagine this as this is our space in which videos can fall.

01:10:03.720 | And I'm sort of adding numbers to this line.

01:10:07.280 | And in this very simple example, kind of numbered from, you know, zero up to eight.

01:10:13.920 | We could use yellow dots in this example to be different videos, and we can just sort

01:10:16.800 | of place them on this line, depending on how many cats they have in them.

01:10:21.520 | So there's a couple videos with a lot of cats, and some five, a couple over here, and I don't

01:10:28.560 | know, we have fractional numbers of cats, whatever.

01:10:31.520 | So we're describing all these videos by a single number.

01:10:35.600 | Okay.

01:10:36.940 | In this simple example, now let's let a user come along.

01:10:41.260 | And what we do is we want to look at the videos that you are looking at.

01:10:48.840 | And let's say we want to categorize them simply as a video you like or don't like.

01:10:53.700 | So in like the Facebook days, there'd be an actual like button.

01:10:56.960 | The way we think TikTok works is that it actually looks at how long you watch a video.

01:11:01.000 | So if you quickly swipe to the next video, you don't like it.

01:11:03.820 | If you watch it long enough, then we can consider that you do like it.

01:11:07.680 | So we're gonna start showing you videos, and we are going to start, let's say, let's just

01:11:13.140 | keep track of the videos you like, so the videos that you actually watch for a little

01:11:17.780 | while.

01:11:18.780 | And I'm gonna plot those on this same one-dimensional line here with a purple dot, and so maybe

01:11:27.260 | you like a couple videos with five cats, you like one with zero cats, six cats, there's

01:11:33.420 | a three-cat one, another six-cat, maybe one eight, maybe another couple more zero ones.

01:11:38.540 | So I'm just keeping track of, okay, these videos you liked, where did they fall in this

01:11:44.260 | range of number of cats?

01:11:47.660 | Now after we've done this for a while, what I can do, and this is how these sort of basic

01:11:51.300 | algorithms work in a very simplistic way, I can say, okay, where on average, where on

01:11:58.820 | average are these videos you like falling on this single value I care about?

01:12:04.780 | And there's different ways to do this.

01:12:07.180 | You can think about what we're trying to do here is basically find the average point,

01:12:11.880 | think about this as like we're trying to find a point that has like the best overall distance

01:12:16.460 | to all of your points, it's interesting, my controller is weird.

01:12:24.180 | In reality, the way this is typically done is actually trying to minimize the average

01:12:29.200 | square of the distances, don't worry about that here.

01:12:31.660 | What I'm trying to do here is sort of find a point on here that's sort of in the middle,

01:12:35.980 | it's the average, it's minimizing distance to all of your likes.

01:12:39.500 | So you have a bunch of zeros you like here, but you have like a bunch of fives, sixes

01:12:42.780 | and eights.

01:12:43.780 | So, you know, maybe your average is like right where that X is, that's kind of the center

01:12:48.460 | point of where the videos you like fall.

01:12:53.560 | So now when it comes time for me as TikTok to show you another video, what I can do to

01:12:59.300 | be smarter is say, great, I'm going to randomly select you a video from all the videos that

01:13:04.780 | exist, but I'm going to weight the probability that I select a given video depending on how

01:13:10.460 | close it is to this point that we said was kind of at the center of your preferences.

01:13:16.940 | So in here, right, this point is like somewhere between four and five cats is kind of like

01:13:21.300 | the center of your preferences when we measure videos by cats.

01:13:24.780 | So you know, it's possible that I could select you a video out here, but I'm much more likely

01:13:30.100 | to select the videos around here.

01:13:31.220 | So you're gonna get a lot of videos with like four or five cats and sometimes some videos

01:13:35.020 | with less cats and sometimes some videos with more.

01:13:37.660 | But pretty soon you're gonna be like, wow, this is eerie, TikTok has really figured out

01:13:40.820 | that there's kind of, I like videos that have, you know, like a couple armfuls of cats in

01:13:44.220 | them.

01:13:45.700 | Again, this is simplified, but it roughly gets to how these type of things work.

01:13:51.380 | All right, so this is a single number.

01:13:55.740 | Of course, these videos are going to have more dimensions on which we're going to want

01:14:00.780 | to measure them.

01:14:01.820 | But that's okay, because the same thing works even as we go to more dimensions.

01:14:07.940 | So maybe we say, okay, there's two numbers, let me select this here, maybe there's two

01:14:13.420 | numbers by which we want to describe all of our videos.

01:14:18.300 | So one number is the number of cats, and then the another number is like the number of skeletons.

01:14:26.220 | So we could just draw this if you're looking at the screen here as just like another axis,

01:14:29.620 | like now we're in a two dimensional space.

01:14:31.740 | And again, we can do the same thing.

01:14:33.700 | All the videos fall somewhere.

01:14:35.820 | Every video has a spot somewhere in here.

01:14:38.500 | You know, a video with seven cats and one, two, three skeletons would show up right here

01:14:43.040 | in this space.

01:14:44.040 | A video with like zero cats and four skeletons might be over here.

01:14:49.460 | And again, we see, we plot every time you like a video, we kind of plot it in this two

01:14:56.300 | dimensional space, and we can do the exact same thing we did before, where we find like

01:15:00.980 | roughly speaking where the center is by some sort of center metric, okay, roughly speaking,

01:15:06.100 | this is the center of all the videos you've liked.

01:15:08.420 | And so now when we randomly select videos, they're going to be kind of roughly in this

01:15:11.460 | range, like you're gonna see a lot of stuff with a good number of cats and a fair number

01:15:14.860 | of skeletons.

01:15:16.500 | And like, you're very rarely going to see something with like a bunch of cats and a

01:15:19.380 | bunch of skeletons or no cats and you know, whatever, right?

01:15:23.580 | We could do this with three numbers.

01:15:25.500 | Now we would be in three dimensional space and you could imagine there's regions where

01:15:29.300 | you have lots of videos you like in that three dimensional space.

01:15:31.500 | And when we randomly select videos, we select them near there, we can expend the number

01:15:36.100 | of numbers we use to describe these videos, they can get much larger.

01:15:40.340 | And something like TikTok is going to have probably thousands of different numbers, each

01:15:44.940 | describing different parts of these videos.

01:15:48.300 | Now we can't draw this, once we get past three numbers, we can't really draw these in a way

01:15:52.580 | that makes sense to us, but the same mathematics works.

01:15:56.700 | So the videos are described by a ton of numbers.

01:15:59.980 | We keep track of the videos you like.

01:16:03.020 | And then we can select for videos that are in some sense close to the clusters of videos

01:16:09.340 | that you like.

01:16:10.340 | All right, two complications here.

01:16:14.020 | What if you like multiple, there's, if we look in this region where you have a bunch

01:16:18.900 | of clustered videos you like, what if there's like multiple types of videos you like?

01:16:23.860 | This just shows up as like multiple clusters, kind of like multiple clusters in this multidimensional

01:16:29.700 | space of videos that you like.

01:16:32.060 | We have ways of finding a bunch of different center points.

01:16:34.260 | We do things like k-means averaging.

01:16:35.740 | Okay, there's a bunch of different center points that each correspond to like a type

01:16:39.480 | of video that you like.

01:16:40.740 | And so now when we randomly select a video to show you, we're giving extra probabilities

01:16:46.780 | to anything near one of these clusters, and the bigger the cluster, the more likely we

01:16:49.600 | are to show you a video from there.

01:16:52.380 | The other complication, well, how do we know if you like something that you've never seen

01:16:56.300 | before?

01:16:57.300 | TikTok answers this by alternating between just purely showing you something weighted

01:17:03.400 | towards the things you like versus showing you something new.

01:17:06.940 | So it will opportunistically show you new things just to see, give you a chance to show

01:17:12.840 | a preference for things you've never seen before.

01:17:15.200 | That's why when you use TikTok at first, it kind of drifts over time until you finally

01:17:19.060 | stabilize into the clusters you like.

01:17:20.900 | It'll show you a lot more random stuff at first to try to see what you like.

01:17:26.180 | It's like very roughly speaking, something like this is going on.

01:17:28.460 | All right, so here's some conclusions about this.

01:17:33.260 | These algorithms are automatic and agnostic to content details, right?

01:17:37.500 | It's not computer code where you can come in and it has in there political content,

01:17:46.040 | unsafe for kids content, sports content, and you can turn a knob, let's turn down politics

01:17:52.040 | and turn up sports content, or turn down controversial and turn up non-controversial.

01:17:58.220 | It's agnostic to that.

01:17:59.660 | It has all these numbers, most of which, by the way, are figured out using embedding tools

01:18:04.400 | that are machine learning tools so that you don't know what they are in advance, right?

01:18:07.740 | You're not choosing what these numbers are.

01:18:10.280 | The software just figuring out what numbers matter.

01:18:12.960 | That's just automatically plotting your videos that you like or don't like and finding these

01:18:17.360 | sort of center spaces in the space and randomly selecting.

01:18:20.280 | The algorithm has no idea what these spaces are from a content point of view.

01:18:23.420 | It's agnostic to that.

01:18:24.840 | It's selecting vectors that are weighted to be near other vectors that you've expressed

01:18:28.480 | preferences for.

01:18:31.080 | So it can be remarkably effective.

01:18:33.860 | That's why when you purify these algorithms, like TikTok does, it seems eerie, like how

01:18:37.760 | did TikTok figure out that, you know, I like videos about, you know, bears working on crafts?

01:18:45.640 | But this type of exploration of the space and weighted selection will pretty quickly

01:18:49.900 | cluster these things together and the intersection clusters will have a lot of weight.

01:18:54.240 | It will just automatically find these things.

01:18:56.460 | It seems very eerie, but it's actually quite simplistic mathematically what's happening

01:19:00.200 | underneath.

01:19:02.520 | But because it's automatic, they're not nearly as controllable as we think.

01:19:09.760 | Controlling these type of recommendation algorithms is difficult because of their automatic content

01:19:13.620 | agnostic nature.

01:19:16.520 | What we end up needing to do is things like human-in-the-loop dead zone definitions.

01:19:23.760 | So we show a lot of content to real people and we say, "Here's the type of stuff we're

01:19:27.360 | worried about."

01:19:28.920 | And when they see the stuff that, to their human intuition, matches things we're worried

01:19:33.920 | about, they kind of hit a button.

01:19:34.920 | Okay, that's bad.

01:19:35.920 | That's bad.

01:19:36.920 | That's bad.

01:19:37.920 | And they create what you can think of as a like dislike plots in this space.

01:19:41.560 | And then you can find the sort of centers of these spaces of stuff that people or testers

01:19:45.360 | said was bad, and you can reduce weight for videos near those.

01:19:49.360 | It could give you sort of negative probability weight if you're near one of those zones,

01:19:55.360 | right?

01:19:56.360 | But this is, again, it's kind of indirect.

01:19:57.720 | It's not just you coming in saying, "Don't do this type of content."

01:20:00.960 | You have to have humans calling stuff bad, and that translates into this inscrutable

01:20:05.700 | multidimensional space, and it sort of affects the weight.

01:20:08.680 | So it's kind of an imperfect way of trying to tame this algorithm.

01:20:14.560 | Stuff that the human testers haven't seen or clicked on is going to be treated like

01:20:18.420 | anything else.

01:20:20.480 | And so these algorithms, we just, we have to keep this in mind.

01:20:24.160 | Algorithms are automatic and mathematical and not easily tamable in a sort of human

01:20:29.580 | understandable way.

01:20:32.200 | So when thinking about reforms of these technologies, do not think about like a newspaper editor

01:20:37.280 | who's making decisions.

01:20:38.280 | You could just say, "Hey, do less of this."

01:20:41.960 | It's much more automatic than that.

01:20:43.840 | It can give you like eerily successful results in terms of honing in on your interest, but

01:20:50.320 | it's also very hard to keep an algorithm like that successful.

01:20:54.040 | And somehow have it avoid lots of stuff, because it doesn't know what stuff means.

01:20:58.280 | Humans have to get in there, and it's messy at best.

01:21:01.440 | So anyways, I hear a lot about algorithms.

01:21:03.920 | They're often discussed to be these like highly tunable, understandable things.

01:21:07.400 | They're simple algorithmically, but complicated in their effect and complicated to tame.

01:21:12.640 | So there you go, Jesse.

01:21:14.400 | We did philosophy and computer science in the same episode.

01:21:19.760 | We just kind of got our nerd bona fides up here, probably also lost half our audience.

01:21:24.440 | You got a professor, guys.

01:21:26.640 | You have a professor podcasting.

01:21:27.640 | Sometimes you're gonna get some of that.

01:21:28.640 | Anyway, so thank you all for listening.

01:21:30.240 | We'll be back next week with another episode.

01:21:31.840 | It'll be a little bit less heady next week.

01:21:34.040 | We'll see.

01:21:35.040 | See what the feedback is.

01:21:36.040 | But until then, as always, stay deep.

01:21:38.080 | Hey, if you liked today's discussion about the philosophical underpinnings of digital

01:21:42.320 | minimalism, I think you'll also like episode 298 about intentional information in which

01:21:48.980 | we go deep at understanding the role of information and human flourishing.

01:21:52.800 | Check it out.

01:21:53.880 | I think you'll like it.

01:21:54.880 | So today I'm going to argue that we misunderstand the impact of how we obtain information on

01:22:02.520 | the overall quality of our lives.

Why Your Phone Makes You Feel Empty, Lost & Addicted... | Cal Newport

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