Your Brain Is Out Of Shape? - Simple Routine To Learn Faster, Achieve Focus & Enhance Memory

00:00:00.000 | So last week we talked about new testing data that was revealing that humans may have reached their

00:00:05.920 | peak intelligence levels right around the time smartphones became ubiquitous,

00:00:09.840 | and ever since that point our intelligence levels as measured by test have been going down. So my

00:00:16.840 | conclusion last time we talked about this is that in this new world of smartphones we might have to

00:00:23.300 | start training our brain in a way that we didn't worry about 20 or 30 years ago. And my analogy was

00:00:29.700 | physical fitness. That when you're in the first half of the 20th century we didn't think a lot about

00:00:34.780 | physical fitness because you got a lot of exercise just in your day-to-day life whether it's on the

00:00:40.320 | farm or you know you worked in a city. You know people walked a lot in cities Jesse if you think

00:00:45.880 | about it. People would just walk like four miles to work or whatever. But then when we got to the

00:00:50.200 | second half of the 20th century and people had more sedentary lifestyles and jobs, we had cars and

00:00:54.720 | offices and air conditioner etc. We had to start exercising. We never had to exercise before.

00:00:59.500 | Something changed about our world. We had to start exercising. I'm arguing that we probably have to

00:01:04.520 | do the same thing with our brains. 30 years ago, we didn't have to worry about specifically exercising

00:01:09.580 | our brains. Today we do. All right, so here is the follow-up I want to do in today's deep dive.

00:01:15.020 | I gave some basic advice last time. The cognitive equivalent of telling someone, hey, make sure you

00:01:21.600 | do some movement every day. Like get your go for a walk every day. But a lot of people ask me a follow-up

00:01:27.960 | question. What would it look like not just to sort of be active somewhat cognitively, but to get in

00:01:34.980 | really good shape? What is the brain training equivalent of those routines you see, you know,

00:01:41.800 | online where the people are in incredible shape? And it's like here is how you're going to completely

00:01:46.540 | change your fitness, your health, and your body. What is the equivalent of that for your brain?

00:01:49.580 | That's what I want to get into today. I'm going to suggest some ideas for if you wanted to be

00:01:53.800 | the equivalent of swole, but for your brain. I'm not going to say your IQ because this really isn't

00:01:59.580 | about doing well on IQ tests, but really just about the ability to hold your attention and think

00:02:03.020 | interesting thoughts. What would that look like? I am not recommending that everyone needs to do this.

00:02:07.420 | I just think it's an interesting thought experiment. What would it take to not just stave off the

00:02:14.900 | cognitive decline induced by smartphones, but actually become someone whose brain is a real

00:02:21.040 | asset? All right. So that is our goal here. Let me start just by reminding us of the advice I gave

00:02:31.400 | when I last talked about this, because I'm now going to take that advice, that basic advice, and say,

00:02:36.680 | this is just how you lay a base. The equivalent in cognitive fitness and physical fitness, just sort

00:02:42.280 | of getting your body moving and flexible and your muscles woken up so you're ready to actually do

00:02:46.120 | more intense training. So just as a reminder, last time we talked about this, I recommended go on walks

00:02:52.500 | and think during the walks. Don't have something in your ear. Avoid dopamine stacking. So just make a

00:02:59.440 | rule. I don't dopamine stack. So that means if I'm watching something, I'm not also on my phone.

00:03:03.680 | You know, if I'm reading something, I'm not also checking out videos. I just do one source of

00:03:07.880 | stimuli at a time. Read more. Doesn't matter what it is. Find what you're excited enough about that

00:03:15.220 | you're more likely to stick with it, but just grapple with the written word and maybe seek out a hobby

00:03:19.480 | that requires more concentration. Like you learn to play the guitar, practicing the guitar requires

00:03:23.780 | concentration, right? So those type of activities remain good activities for laying a base of cognitive

00:03:29.080 | fitness. Now I have some ideas for how you can push that base into something more elite.

00:03:34.100 | The first idea is interval training. Now this is the basic concept that I talked about, geez, I think

00:03:41.560 | all the way back in deep work. And it was something that I had actually messed around with prior to deep

00:03:47.500 | work when I was a graduate student, primarily writing books for students. And I was working with a lot of

00:03:52.720 | undergraduates to help them do better in school. And I worked with a variant of interval training

00:03:59.240 | because a lot of these undergraduates starting around this time, we're starting to struggle with

00:04:02.680 | concentration. This sort of the distraction era was, was, was on its way in. And we would do this

00:04:07.940 | training routine where you would focus hard on something. In their case would be academic work

00:04:13.400 | for a limited amount of time and they would have a timer, but they had to focus hard for that amount

00:04:18.600 | of time. If their attention wandered, it was like, um, no, no, you got to restart that. You need to

00:04:22.200 | focus for this amount of time. If you, if you look at your, wouldn't have been a phone back then, but if

00:04:25.580 | you jump on the internet or something like that, you have to restart. And then only once they got

00:04:29.780 | comfortable with a given interval, I would increase it by 10 minutes. All right, now let's try getting

00:04:34.380 | comfortable with this new length of time. So it's interval training. You get comfortable with an

00:04:37.740 | interval that's a stretch, and then you stretch that interval even farther. And I found in like

00:04:42.720 | a semester or two, you could get a relatively distracted undergraduate from this sort of

00:04:47.000 | pre-smartphone era up to like 90 minutes of concentration pretty comfortably. I can lock

00:04:52.160 | in for 90 minutes. So I'm going to recommend that as like the first elite training technique.

00:04:56.580 | The key is to have something demanding of concentration to be focusing on during your

00:05:03.080 | interval training sessions. And so this could be, you know, reading a hard book or taking an online

00:05:08.040 | course or working on a musical instrument practice is a great one that requires intense

00:05:12.420 | concentration or maybe a professional problem. This just like really challenging. You need a good

00:05:16.940 | thing to focus on that is hard. And then you use this timer. I recommend maybe once every two weeks

00:05:24.280 | or so. Like if you're comfortable with something, you want to give it at least two weeks before you

00:05:28.320 | increase it. And it might take more if it just takes you more time. If you find a duration, like you

00:05:33.660 | really can't get through it very well. It might take you longer until you're comfortable. That's okay.

00:05:38.360 | that stretches where your brain gets stronger. All right. The second idea, dialectical reading.

00:05:45.800 | I think this is, we're moving here from interval training is about just the generic ability to

00:05:51.840 | concentrate. Dialectical reading is now about your specific grappling with specific subject matters and

00:05:59.120 | your ability to actually work with complicated information, not just concentrate, but work with

00:06:03.620 | complicated information. So at the core of dialectical reading is the following. You want to avoid

00:06:11.500 | the engagement with content that the algorithmically driven internet promotes. So if you're looking at

00:06:19.620 | content on Twitter or the recommendation algorithms on YouTube, it's tuned to press a button in the human

00:06:28.540 | psyche. That's very satisfying, but also sort of almost anti-intellectual. The button it wants to

00:06:32.900 | press is your team is great. The other team is terrible. And here's an example of someone from the

00:06:38.340 | other team being terrible. And it's a slam dunk, how terrible they are. That feels great for, for a human

00:06:43.680 | beings that are wired for sort of in-group out-group thinking. It's sort of a sugar high of out-group

00:06:48.420 | isolation. So you watch like a Twitter thread is going to be, look at these, look what they're

00:06:54.240 | doing over. It's so obviously wrong. And aren't they terrible? And here's an example of terrible.

00:06:57.820 | They don't even realize how terrible it is. It wants to, there's this sort of righteousness of like,

00:07:01.100 | I am just super right. Feels great. My tribe is killing it. That tribe is terrible. And you get this

00:07:06.120 | on all sorts of divides of, you know, it could be from sports fandom, the political divides to,

00:07:12.300 | to whatever else is going on. Okay. Dialectical reading says, no, no, we're going to teach you how to

00:07:16.060 | actually engage with information. So what you do is you take a topic that's interesting to you,

00:07:20.480 | probably a topic where you feel like I have an instinct towards this is the right side.

00:07:25.280 | Instead of looking for outrage bait content, that's just going to pat you on the back and be like,

00:07:30.320 | yeah, you're, you're, you're right. You're Martin Luther King. And everyone on the other side is

00:07:35.480 | Bull Connors, right? Like, or it's just like an obvious setup where you're just the best and

00:07:38.760 | everyone else is dumb. What you do is you find a really good book pushing one side and you find a,

00:07:45.920 | the best possible defense of the other side of the issue. And you read both those books. That's the

00:07:52.200 | dialectic. So I'm reading two opposing, but very well-constructed takes on the same issue.

00:07:58.720 | The collision of two smart opposing takes creates a, an intellectual leap forward that is 10x more

00:08:09.780 | sophisticated than what you get just, you know, going to your choir stalls and having the preacher

00:08:14.980 | preached to you. It is, put the specifics of the content aside, it is a fantastic intellectual

00:08:21.580 | experience. I mean, this goes back to Socrates, who was a big believer in this method of intellectual

00:08:26.600 | engagement. Ironically, and not to do a big aside, ironically, Plato writing in the Phaedraeus

00:08:33.180 | dialogue in the voice of Socrates, Socrates was a character in it, had the character Socrates express

00:08:39.100 | skepticism about the written word. Like, Ooh, this is a problem that we're writing things down.

00:08:44.300 | And a lot of tech optimists pointed to that and say, look, we were worried about even books, which we

00:08:48.920 | know are great. So of course we worry about everything, but this is actually what Plato was

00:08:52.360 | capturing in the Phaedraeus dialogue was not that books were bad, but that when it comes to like

00:08:56.620 | developing ideas, you need this sort of dialectical interaction, right? Where you're going back and

00:09:02.560 | forth. I'm believing this, you're believing that, let's go back and forth and see what comes out of that

00:09:07.020 | collision. Well, you can do that now with books, ironically, because there are enough books. Here's a

00:09:11.760 | really smart person on this side. Let me read their take. Here's a really smart person on my side. Let me

00:09:15.280 | read their take. Smart people opposing makes you smarter. Now, one of the fears that people have about

00:09:21.040 | dialectical reasoning, it's going to make you smarter. It's just the level of sophistication with which you

00:09:25.460 | engage with content goes up. It's like, look, Jesse and I are here in Washington, D.C. You have a

00:09:31.200 | conversation with politics with just, you know, the average person you meet here in Washington, D.C.

00:09:35.720 | is going to be a completely different experience than in Kansas City because they're everyone here.

00:09:40.820 | There's so many experts who understand things. There's just, they have way more nuance and it's

00:09:44.940 | just the way they understand political information is so much more complicated than the average person.

00:09:49.280 | This dialectical reading gives you that type of more nuanced understanding. You see that it's the

00:09:54.860 | complexities and where people are coming from. It just opens up another layer of understanding of the

00:09:59.740 | world. People worry about it because if there's an issue they feel really strongly about,

00:10:04.320 | they're worried that this will somehow like trick them out of their belief. To which there's two

00:10:08.500 | responses. If encountering an opposing point of view is going to change your belief on something,

00:10:13.300 | then maybe it's actually not that good of a belief for you to have in the first place. Maybe it's more

00:10:16.820 | complicated than you thought. Maybe you're wrong. But two, what tends to happen is for the things where

00:10:21.340 | you really are right, like, you know, your instincts are right, dialectical reading makes that stronger.

00:10:26.480 | When you've encountered the very best arguments from the other side and you still come out saying,

00:10:30.420 | this is why I believe in this, that belief is stronger. Your ability to advocate for it is

00:10:34.660 | stronger. Your understanding of why your thing is right and how to advance that is stronger. So you

00:10:38.360 | should never fear reading different sides of things. So dialectical reading is just going to make your

00:10:42.400 | grasp of information of the world not only more sophisticated, it's going to make X or like TikTok

00:10:49.100 | content essentially like unreadable or watchable. You'd be like, oh my God, I've been watching, you know,

00:10:56.420 | succession. And now I've just gone back to leave it to beaver. Like I just, I, this is stupid. So it

00:11:03.740 | really will change your brain in an interesting way. Make you less mad too. Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to

00:11:08.520 | interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video, then you need to check out my new book,

00:11:13.980 | Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. This is like the Bible for most of the

00:11:22.240 | ideas we talk about here in these videos. You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com

00:11:28.860 | slash slow. I know you're going to like it. Check it out. Now let's get back to the video.

00:11:34.560 | Third idea, create idea documents. I'm a big proponent of this. Is there something you care

00:11:42.520 | about or you want to care about or you just find is interesting, right? So something you might want to

00:11:46.540 | care about is like, here's like a contemporary issue going on that affects me. And I really want to

00:11:49.860 | understand it well and have like a point of view and be able to support my point of view. And this

00:11:53.980 | is a cause I care about, or it's just something of intellectual interest. Like, you know what? I

00:11:58.320 | really want to engage more with the Socratic philosophers or Greek or the big ideas of like

00:12:04.060 | the American Republic or whatever. Keep a document where you take notes, take notes on what you've

00:12:09.660 | learned and how you think about it and keep updating and growing this document. In the writing down of

00:12:14.980 | information, in the editing of information, and in the rearranging of written information,

00:12:18.860 | your cognitive scaffolding around these ideas gets more sturdy, gets more sophisticated.

00:12:25.520 | Writing is thinking. And so as you listen to a podcast, listen to a book, maybe do like a great

00:12:33.740 | courses, you're doing a great courses course, audio, one lesson every day during your commute,

00:12:37.940 | take notes on what you're learning, update your sort of summary of where you stand on something.

00:12:42.860 | That act of writing will get you significantly more leaps in understanding than if you just take

00:12:49.660 | in the information and then don't engage with it again. So organize your thoughts on the paper is

00:12:54.060 | going to better organize your thoughts in your head. It's just going to make you a smarter person.

00:12:57.040 | It's why, by the way, like when you encounter professors, they're very articulate about the

00:13:00.820 | things they care about because they're always writing about it, you know? Or, you know, if you get

00:13:05.440 | me going on one of my hobby horse issues, like get me going on email in the workplace or something like

00:13:11.840 | this, right? Something I've written about extensively, I can just go, right? I can just cook and I can give

00:13:17.300 | you 15 minutes of preacher-like content with this point, that point, this point, that point. It's because

00:13:22.380 | I've written about this so much, it has organized and structured my thoughts and I can access that

00:13:27.520 | better. So it'll just make you sound smarter if you're working with written forms of the things you

00:13:31.940 | care about. Next, I'm going to recommend become a connoisseur in something. So become really good,

00:13:40.380 | not good at an activity, but good at understanding quality in that activity. You can become a connoisseur

00:13:48.240 | of NFL football without having to become good at playing NFL football. But you can really understand,

00:13:53.920 | for example, the complexities of different offensive schemes or defensive schemes, like what's going on,

00:13:58.120 | right? You can become a connoisseur of music without having to become a musician,

00:14:00.940 | become a connoisseur of movies without having to actually make your own movies.

00:14:03.880 | I've seen this again when you come to more elite level thinkers. When you learn how to appreciate

00:14:10.020 | what really good means in one field, that translates to others. Even if you're not an expert on those

00:14:15.160 | other fields, you have an appreciation for expertise. You have an appreciation for quality. It adds shades

00:14:21.360 | of nuance and subtlety into the world. It's like the number of colors available in the world gets

00:14:27.440 | increased. When it's not just, oh, music is on and I'm hearing it. But you're instead understanding,

00:14:33.860 | like, oh, this is why this was brilliant. Like the ability to hear, see, or encounter something and

00:14:38.640 | say, that's brilliant. That ability to do that just allows you to see so many more shades. The world

00:14:45.460 | becomes richer. It becomes technicolor. It goes from, you know, the industry standard aspect ratios to 70

00:14:53.400 | millimeter projection, the cinemascope or something like that. So it changes your world and the richness

00:15:00.900 | of information that seems available. So for whatever reason, that just works really well. Again, if you're

00:15:05.340 | trying to push your brain, final, final suggestion, digital diet, start to get careful and selective about what

00:15:15.640 | information you consume digitally. Because again, a lot of the stuff that you're encountering is working

00:15:21.740 | counter to all the benefits you're trying to have here. So maybe very wary about my Instagram scrolling

00:15:29.340 | habit. That might not be serving your interest in making your brain smarter and having been more of

00:15:37.580 | like an elite cognitive athlete. That's kind of the equivalent of like, I really like my McDonald's

00:15:41.020 | milkshakes, but I'm also trying to train for the marathon. I think I have to not take the milkshakes for

00:15:44.840 | a while. So become really careful. I'm, you know, it's like, it's books, it's TV shows. If it's online content,

00:15:51.720 | maybe you're moving towards podcast, newsletters, maybe like YouTube videos that are, you're not

00:15:59.420 | surfing recommendations, but you've bookmarked the pages where it's someone who is, you know,

00:16:05.380 | more thoughtful, more expert, more interesting commentary, right? I mean, there is a world of

00:16:09.760 | just to name someone who's killing it right now. Like think about Ezra Klein right now, who's actually

00:16:13.240 | killing it, Jesse. I don't know. He's everywhere. Him and Derek Thompson with their, um,

00:16:17.400 | with their new book. Right. Uh, and he's great. There's a world of difference, right? If it's,

00:16:23.240 | I'm going to listen to like Ezra's podcast versus I'm going to go on X to hear people talk about the

00:16:29.380 | same political issues, right? It's just a, it's just a world of difference. It's, it's, uh, still

00:16:33.340 | digital content. You're going to learn a lot about important issues in politics if you care about that,

00:16:38.720 | but it's thoughtful, it's thought through, it's going to, it's going to be presented with nuance,

00:16:44.020 | for example, a completely different experience than, you know, the WWE battle that's going on.

00:16:50.580 | If you're in something like, uh, an X thread or like an apologist show or something like that.

00:16:54.980 | So digital diet matters. So start caring about that. Just like if I was giving you advice for

00:16:59.600 | getting like in really good shape, we were going to have to end somewhere saying you have to care

00:17:03.780 | about what you eat. And that's the case as well. All right. So here it is. Let's see if I can summarize

00:17:07.940 | all my suggestions, lay the base before you try to, you want to become a cognitively elite,

00:17:12.900 | lay the base with stuff like walking dopamine stack bands, reading and concentration requiring hobbies.

00:17:20.000 | Once you're sort of like used to that somewhat more heightened life of the mind, interval,

00:17:25.100 | train your concentration, engage in dialectical reading, keep idea documents, become a connoisseur

00:17:31.100 | in at least one thing, and then put in place a digital diet. Do that for a season. Your cognitive

00:17:37.980 | experience of the world is going to be different. It's just, it's going to be, you're going to seem

00:17:40.600 | smarter to other people. You're going to seem smarter to you. You're going to see nuances you

00:17:43.560 | lost before. Your stress levels will probably be lower. Your ideas, your creativity is going to be

00:17:48.000 | higher. I think life would just be better. Not everyone has to do all, not everyone has time or

00:17:51.720 | interest in becoming like a cognitive athlete, but if you do, that's the type of thing I believe

00:17:56.340 | you need to do. You know, this is kind of what college used to be. I guess it kind of still is,

00:18:02.320 | was like a four-year cognitive athlete training program. Yeah. I say used to because someone sent

00:18:09.180 | me an article, and maybe it was on someone's newsletter, but someone, one of our listeners

00:18:14.220 | sent me an article that was, it was a professor at like a mid-tier U.S. college, and he was complaining.

00:18:21.320 | He's like, look, I know I'm Gen X. I've been a professor for 30 years. I know when you complain

00:18:26.860 | about students, people are like, oh, there you go again, telling kids to get off your lawn. But he's

00:18:30.280 | like, this is important, and I need to say it. And he kind of goes through, like, here's what I've seen

00:18:33.580 | change in, you know, these students at the college where he teaches. And he starts by saying they're

00:18:39.860 | functionally illiterate, right? And he's like, they don't read. They don't read. They don't do any of the

00:18:44.800 | assignments. They lie about it. I don't think they could read. I think if I gave them just like a

00:18:48.640 | Richard Powers book, like an award-winning book, but not like Finnegan's Wake, but like a book that

00:18:53.720 | like it's out right now, or like Colson Whitehead, they couldn't read and understand it, right? Like he's

00:18:57.580 | really worried about it. And when you get to the bottom, and he's like, they can't write, and the

00:19:01.380 | punctuation and capitalization is all over the place, and, you know, there's no form. And when you get to

00:19:06.160 | the bottom, you're like, okay, what's going on here? He's like, well, it's the phone, stupid. He's

00:19:09.300 | like, it's the phone. They're completely addicted to the phones, and this is like a huge problem.

00:19:14.020 | So I don't know if you're not at like an elite school like Georgetown, where I don't know. The

00:19:20.560 | kids do read, and they're very smart, and they're very locked in, and they're like more professional

00:19:24.060 | than I am. Like they're great students. But if you're not at like one of these top 20 type schools,

00:19:27.980 | college is no longer necessarily going to be for sure like, yeah, you're going to get your four years

00:19:33.380 | of cognitive training. That's what I think college used to be. Like all this reading and writing

00:19:36.920 | and discussion, dialectical discussion in classrooms and with other students, you come

00:19:41.920 | out smarter than when you started. Not just because you took in literal information, but because you

00:19:46.460 | trained your brain. And then the knowledge economy is like, great, these people, we have smarted them

00:19:51.120 | up. And now like they can handle like the complexity of what they're going to have and like the knowledge

00:19:55.340 | economy. I don't know if it's necessarily the case at all schools anymore. So you might have to,

00:19:59.740 | you know, we have to think more about training, I guess, on your own.

00:20:04.180 | Are you a big fan of Succession? Uh, that's a great show. Yeah. Yeah. I watch Succession.

00:20:10.080 | We're watching all the shows. There's like a lot of shows right now. Yeah. Right now because White

00:20:15.060 | Lotus is just ending, but it's still going. Pit is great. The Pit. I've seen a couple of those.

00:20:20.840 | Yeah. I'm a big ER guy. So Noah Wiley. Um, it's like, we've been liking The Pit and then there's this

00:20:26.500 | new show on, oh, Severance. Like we, I realized like, I guess I have to watch that given what I write

00:20:31.580 | about. Yeah. So that's going on and there's a new season of that. And then there's this new show.

00:20:36.560 | Seth Rogen has a show on Apple TV called The Studio. I'll have to check that out. He's a studio. He gets

00:20:43.260 | put in charge of a movie studio. It looks fantastic. So there's like all sorts of shows out here right

00:20:46.580 | now. Did you read the article in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago about the White Lotus director?

00:20:51.820 | Yeah. Uh, Sean White, not Sean, Sean something. It's white. It is white. Yeah. Yeah. White Lotus,

00:20:57.740 | white. Um, yeah. And there was also like a lot of video. He did a lot of press and there's like a lot

00:21:01.960 | of videos going around about his creative technique. Yeah. He got really into that. Um, so yes, I do

00:21:09.540 | watch those shows. Nice. Succession. That was a good show. Have you ever met? Occasionally I come

00:21:14.820 | across people who are just very rich. Um, it's interesting. It's like, okay, someone that's spot

00:21:20.540 | on. Like they spent a lot of time in that show. Only like really rich people would know this. Like

00:21:24.860 | there's, it's this like norm core stuff. There's like a, like the nondescript baseball hat, right?

00:21:30.160 | To like strong Jeremy Strong will wear it. It'd be like a specific, like $500 baseball hat. Yeah.

00:21:35.780 | It's a lot of like, it's not supposed to be flashy. Um, but people who know, know that's like a super

00:21:42.440 | expensive hat. And supposedly the other things, because they had consultants who were like, no,

00:21:46.380 | this is how you should actually act. Right. If you're really that rich. And the other thing,

00:21:50.400 | supposedly they told them early on is don't duck when you get off and on the helicopter. Because

00:21:56.100 | if you were that rich, you'd be doing so much private helicopter flying. You would know that

00:22:00.280 | like, it's too tall. It's not going to hit your head and you want it bought. Like ducking is what

00:22:03.840 | you do if you've never really been on a helicopter before. Neither here nor there. Um, all right.

00:22:10.240 | So we've got some questions coming up, but first let's hear about a sponsor. I want to

00:22:16.500 | talk about our friends at notion because this is a product that, uh, I am a huge fan of notion

00:22:20.920 | combines your notes, docs, and projects into one space that simple and beautifully designed.

00:22:25.180 | It allows you to easily build basically custom information, software tools without having to

00:22:31.940 | be the type of person who knows how to build, you know, a custom software product that you're

00:22:36.860 | just, you're, you're setting things up very easily. This is whether you're talking about,

00:22:41.200 | you know, an individual setting up a somewhat more advanced system for keeping track of all the

00:22:46.040 | things you have to do. I mean, all, I get so many messages from leaders, readers who have taken my

00:22:50.440 | ideas into custom notion systems, or you're like a really large company that's building like major

00:22:55.200 | information tracking systems. Notion lets you do this really quickly. Uh, I mean, you,

00:22:59.740 | you've integrated just, you've had your share of time working with it because our ad agency had that

00:23:04.000 | really cool system they built out of notion that made stuff a lot easier. Yeah. And you could see

00:23:08.720 | all the different pieces of information that were applicable to the podcast and it would give it in

00:23:13.700 | different views. That was the cool part. So it was like, Hey, what ad reads are happening on this

00:23:17.120 | day? Oh, let me click on that advertiser. Show me all of the ad reads we're doing in the next six

00:23:22.720 | months from that advertiser. All I remember is we were doing something before that that was much worse.

00:23:27.300 | and I don't remember what it was. Weren't they just like sending us spreadsheets? Yeah. It was all

00:23:31.040 | tracking like a, it would send us like a, yeah, like a spreadsheet as an email. I don't know. There'd

00:23:35.420 | be like a, a guy with an old timey newsboy cap would come up with a telegraph. Western union,

00:23:41.360 | Western union, just then you got a Udacity, Udacity ad next episode. Stop. Make sure you mention

00:23:50.920 | whatever. Stop. That's how we were doing it before. Uh, and it made it much easier. So I love notion

00:23:56.440 | because I love smart information systems and they're, they're the best in the business they

00:24:00.620 | have. Here's what's cool though. What they've done recently, which I just want to underscore quickly

00:24:04.660 | is they have integrated AI to make your systems like immediately much smarter. The fully integrated

00:24:12.140 | notion AI helps you work faster, write better, and think bigger doing tasks that would normally take

00:24:15.980 | you hours in just seconds. So there's a lot of ways the AI now is seamless. Um, searching for

00:24:21.740 | certain information using AI, you can do like a really intuitive, simple search. It just, it can go

00:24:26.660 | through your information and find what you're looking for. When you're actually entering information into

00:24:30.720 | the system, it's right there to help you write faster, get a first draft or brainstorm or polish up notes.

00:24:36.760 | Right. So you've, you've, uh, this is a big one for me. Sometimes I take notes on the computer when I'm

00:24:40.960 | doing an interview and it's very sloppy. And if you're throwing them in a notion system, the notion AI can

00:24:44.280 | clean it up and fix the sort of obvious mistakes. Um, so it's cool. So they're, they're continuing

00:24:49.620 | a product. I already love is using AI in a really cool way. Uh, there's a reason why notion is used

00:24:54.260 | by over half of fortune 500 companies because teams that use notion, send less email, cancel more

00:25:00.160 | meanings, save time searching for work and reduce spending on tools. Notion is my type of software.

00:25:06.580 | So try notion for free. When you go to notion.com slash Cal, that's all lowercase letters, notion.com

00:25:12.680 | slash Cal to try the powerful, easy to use notion AI today. When you use our link, you're supporting

00:25:18.020 | our show. Go to notion.com slash Cal. I also want to talk about a new sponsor Kensta Insta with a K

00:25:26.820 | something I've spent a lot of my adult life doing is dealing with WordPress. Every website that I ever

00:25:35.720 | have going back to the original study hacks blog has been loaded on some sort of WordPress host.

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00:25:47.220 | It'll be unintuitive controls. It'll be security flaws that aren't updated. And above all else,

00:25:53.400 | these installations tend to get really slow. This is where Kensta enters the scene. It does WordPress

00:26:00.340 | hosting, right? They focus, focus, focus on speed, speed, speed. We're going to keep our installation

00:26:06.900 | fast so that your site actually loads, which again, if you're doing WordPress hosting, this becomes a real

00:26:13.280 | issue. They're great at it. They also have enterprise level security. You're not worried about, oh, we're

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00:26:30.080 | these WordPress hosts. And again, Jesse, you don't have to see a lot of these because you don't do as

00:26:33.200 | much of the web stuff, but a lot of them look like they were basically out of the movie war games

00:26:38.480 | starring Matthew Brodwick, you know, where he's like typing into the, the, the green text, like goes

00:26:43.580 | across and the Kensta interface is fantastic. Perhaps like that's my second favorite thing about

00:26:51.040 | them. My first is the speed. Second favorite thing, real support. 24 hours a day, seven days a week,

00:26:55.920 | 365 days a year. You get a real human on the line when you have an issue, right? So if you've dealt

00:27:01.200 | with WordPress, all of these pain points should sound familiar. And then I can point you with confidence

00:27:06.440 | towards the solution you should use for your WordPress hosting, which is Kensta. I wish I had known

00:27:12.020 | about them. God, it's been 20 years. I think I launched calnewport.com on an old WordPress

00:27:18.080 | installation in 2006. 20 years. I wish I knew about Kensta 20 years ago. Sure. They didn't exist 20

00:27:24.500 | years ago, but that's no excuse. It would have made my life a lot easier. So if you're tired of being

00:27:29.020 | your own hosting support team, switch to Kensta and get your first month free and don't worry about the

00:27:34.260 | move. They'll handle the migration for you. No tech expertise required. Just visit kensta.com

00:27:41.440 | slash deep questions to get started. That's K-I-N-S-T-A.com slash deep questions. All right,

00:27:49.820 | Jesse, let's move on to some questions. All right. First questions from Anna. I envision a future where

00:27:56.800 | I live close to family, grow my own food, work from home, and have time for painting. However,

00:28:01.500 | job opportunities in my animation industry are dwindling, especially remote work. Should I change

00:28:07.280 | careers to achieve my ideal lifestyle? I feel like it's our second animation question in a few weeks.

00:28:13.120 | It's interesting. I wonder if that's quite a coincidence. I'm reading a book on another Disney

00:28:18.160 | book right now, and it's talking about the period where they get CalArts up and running. So this was

00:28:23.120 | basically like the training camp that Disney helped fund to help generate new animators. So I know more

00:28:30.860 | about animation than I probably should. All right, but Anna, this is not about animation when you're

00:28:34.880 | asking a question about lifestyle-centric planning. So first of all, I love the approach you're taking

00:28:38.620 | here. This is classic LCP. You have an ideal lifestyle vision in mind, and now you're working

00:28:44.180 | backwards from that vision to saying, how can I actually make this possible? So when you're working

00:28:49.000 | backwards from a lifestyle vision, the things that matter typically is going to fall into the

00:28:53.360 | categories of obstacles and opportunities. What are the obstacles in the way for me getting where I am

00:28:58.580 | right now to something closer to that ideal lifestyle? The opportunities are, what can I

00:29:03.400 | leverage? What type of like unique setup? This could be like career capital or family connection or

00:29:08.400 | whatever. What opportunities do I have to leverage as well? So you want to systematically work at reducing

00:29:13.680 | or bypassing obstacles while taking advantage of everything that you have, all the opportunities you

00:29:18.760 | have as well. So that's probably the right thing to do here. The key obstacle in this analysis is you're

00:29:24.600 | seeing the particular types of jobs you have in the animation industry is not remote work friendly,

00:29:29.860 | and your lifestyle vision, when you work backwards from it, remote work really makes that work.

00:29:34.600 | Right? Because if you can be in a lower cost of living place, you could be at home and growing food

00:29:40.360 | and be near family and maybe not need to work as many hours because where you're living is less

00:29:44.340 | expensive. If instead of being, you know, near Burbank or Disney is, you're instead, you know,

00:29:49.300 | where you grew up in Indiana, it's going to be cheaper to live. Like remote work seems to be at the core

00:29:53.480 | of it. So there's a key obstacle here. If your current job trajectory isn't making that possible.

00:29:58.600 | So now you know what you're doing. Oh, I am systematically exploring and looking for insight.

00:30:03.500 | It might not be obvious, but I'm looking for a moment of insight about how do I reduce that

00:30:06.940 | obstacle? That's probably going to come from leveraging the opportunity of the various skills

00:30:11.020 | you have and looking for adjacent applications. So like, sure, maybe if I want to be in like feature

00:30:15.440 | motion picture animation, there's like three options. They're all based in California and they're

00:30:19.140 | cutting back and there's not remote work options, but maybe there's an adjacent step here. Actually,

00:30:23.980 | this graphic skills I have could be used, maybe not in like feature film, whatever animation, but it

00:30:30.800 | could be used in whatever game development, object design, or in certain types of advertising or

00:30:36.480 | something. There's there. I find that adjacent field where it's very useful. And now I have taken

00:30:43.080 | an opportunity and gone around an obstacle. So it's not easy, but it's specific. That's what's

00:30:48.380 | key about LCP is that it's very specific what you're doing here. I have this obstacle. I'm enumerating

00:30:53.860 | my opportunities. The only piece of like semi-advanced advice I would give is that if you're stuck,

00:30:59.700 | A, keep searching for ideas and inspiration, talk to people, read things, listen to things. You're

00:31:04.660 | looking for that path. It could be narrow, but you're looking for the path that gets you closer.

00:31:09.340 | Increasing the opportunity side is often a low hanging fruit that can make a big difference.

00:31:13.680 | And that might mean learning a new skill, a relevant skill. I know how to do this. What if I learned how

00:31:19.200 | to do this, which is someone who already knows how to do this first thing would have an easier time

00:31:23.140 | learning it, like looking for these adjacent skills that if you learned would open up new opportunities.

00:31:27.340 | So you're kind of playing a game here, but you're thinking about it the right way. You have a lifestyle

00:31:32.940 | in mind. You're trying to work backwards from it. So, so you're doing the right thing and don't be

00:31:36.420 | frustrated if it takes a while to finally find that path. Also, I'll throw in one more coda.

00:31:41.800 | You know, you know, you know what you want your, your ideal lifestyle. You can isolate some of the

00:31:47.640 | general properties here, like a little bit more of a slowness, a connection back to nature when you're

00:31:52.080 | growing your food connection to community. Keep in mind, even while you're looking for a larger

00:31:57.540 | reconfiguration to get to your full ideal lifestyle, you could be making changes to your life as it exists

00:32:03.480 | now to have more of those properties. So even if you're not getting the full right off the bat,

00:32:09.600 | I'm on the, the, the land with the farm near my family's house in Indiana or whatever, if you're not

00:32:14.500 | there yet, use this lifestyle to help isolate. These things are important to me and get that into your

00:32:20.460 | life right away. And maybe now you have a plot in a community garden and you've adjusted your hours.

00:32:25.520 | It's still the in-person job, but it's, it's a four day a week job. Now you have a little bit more

00:32:29.180 | slowness going into it. Uh, you're more community involved where you live, even if you can't be

00:32:34.320 | closer to family, play with these things you're identifying as important and start getting them

00:32:40.140 | in your life. Now, don't let perfect be the enemy of better. And that's like a key thing with LCP is

00:32:47.720 | that it's not just until I'm living on the houseboat, I'm in trouble. It's what is it I'm identifying as

00:32:53.080 | important? Let's keep adding this to my life. And actually that might open up other ideas for how to

00:32:56.760 | get there. So anyways, uh, good luck with that, but thanks for the good LCP example.

00:33:01.200 | All right. Who do we got next?

00:33:03.400 | Next question is from Ruben. I'm currently learning how to code during my free time to get a job as a

00:33:08.740 | software developer. I believe it would be an ideal career path towards achieving my life. I want,

00:33:13.880 | is this a bad idea to leave part of my career capital with my BA in psychology? I'm 24 years old.

00:33:19.940 | Well, I mean, the good news is you're 24 years old, so you can't really have much career capital

00:33:24.680 | anyways. So like you're, you're at the beginning. You have a lot less opportunity, loss opportunity

00:33:30.620 | cost threats here. So yeah, this is not a bad time. I'm right out of college and I'm building out my

00:33:36.880 | career capital portfolio. You're starting from low stores in all of your career capital category. So

00:33:42.120 | I think it's completely fine. You could probably leverage the BA a little bit. Like here's something

00:33:46.360 | I would say, here's a, an interesting piece of data that's been touted in the last few months.

00:33:51.480 | We're starting to see some of the first places in the labor statistics. So not just anecdotally,

00:33:58.760 | but some of the first places in the labor statistics where we think we're seeing the impact of AI

00:34:03.660 | is in a class of people, uh, technical jobs called programming, which is different than software

00:34:10.180 | development. So programming jobs post chat GPT have been suddenly declining. Software development

00:34:18.860 | jobs have not at all. They're, they're basically the same, if not like up a little bit, you have to

00:34:23.380 | kind of go into the weeds. What's the difference? Well, programming jobs, I guess there's, there's a,

00:34:27.620 | a very specific type of computer programming related technical position where it's, you're given

00:34:34.100 | very specific things to implement often with like simpler programming languages, like, okay, go add

00:34:39.360 | this feature now. Can you go onto the side and change that? So it's like very, you're doing very

00:34:43.480 | little planning or creativity. You're not watching the lifestyle of a product. You're just sort of

00:34:46.880 | implementing. Chat GPT can produce that type of simpler code pretty well. And so now, uh, the person

00:34:53.640 | who was tasking the programmer with that work could just sort of use AI help and might as well do it

00:34:58.840 | themselves. Software dev is more complicated. You're actually, uh, it's part of the lifestyle of the,

00:35:03.460 | the life cycle of the product you're involved in. It's creative. It's figuring out what the program

00:35:07.280 | needs just as much as what code it has to be in there. You might be able to leverage your BA

00:35:11.400 | in psychology to say, look, I, I speak normal person speak. I can like think about the consumer

00:35:17.760 | and what they want in their product. I understand, uh, I understand other people. I can manage other

00:35:24.760 | people. There is, I think, potentially a career capital advantage to be someone who's technically

00:35:29.280 | savvy, who also can communicate like a normal human being. And I'm sort of throwing

00:35:33.280 | my fellow computer scientists under the bus here, but let's just say, you know, we're not

00:35:37.380 | all, uh, expert communicators. Like this is not necessarily, we're not necessarily, uh, it's

00:35:44.080 | not a bunch of like John F. Kennedy's when you're at a computer science conference, right? Uh, it's,

00:35:48.840 | it's, we, uh, I, I do pretty well, but you know, it's a lot of leet speak, right? It's a lot

00:35:54.660 | of like weird sort of, uh, technical terms and jargon. So you might have an advantage with your,

00:36:00.860 | your BA in psychology. My, my poor wife used to come to some of these MIT events, like holiday

00:36:07.920 | parties or whatever. And what's going on? Don't take me to these things anymore. Like why half the

00:36:14.360 | people here can't communicate at the other half are very normal. It's just, you get a higher

00:36:17.960 | percentage than normal of people who are, you know? Yeah. Like if you see early footage of like Bill

00:36:23.800 | Gates, it's just like a lot of him, like rocking and writing a simpler code in his head.

00:36:28.960 | Yeah. Yeah. It's not exactly, you wouldn't want a, a, a theoretical computer science student at MIT,

00:36:35.020 | like on a, uh, like a radio talk show host or something. Yeah. Like it wouldn't be a popular

00:36:39.660 | show. You wouldn't want to replace mad dog with like one of my, my commenters. And they'd be like

00:36:44.680 | the, uh, performance, the Red Sox was highly illogical. His numbers against the lefties were,

00:36:51.360 | the performance were obviously lower. And now I'm going to recap in great detail

00:36:57.340 | information from the latest Star Wars or Star Trek. I don't know. We are going to go through

00:37:04.160 | the 10 points that make it clear that Star Trek Deep Space Nine is superior to the next generation.

00:37:08.120 | I believe this is obvious. All right. I'm sorry. Actually, most of the computer science I know

00:37:11.500 | are cool, but programmers aren't always. So maybe you do have an advantage there. So take advantage of

00:37:17.080 | that. All right. Who do we got next? Next question from Bill. Do you have examples of

00:37:21.360 | truly fair performance evaluation systems? How should merit be rewarded in a revenue constrained

00:37:27.020 | environment? I work at a national nonprofit. Um, I think what you should do, and I think the,

00:37:33.020 | the lawyers will back me up is you want to, uh, sort people into different like demographic groups

00:37:39.160 | and then just pay your favored groups more is probably like, so if you like the country they're

00:37:43.880 | from, pay them more than no. Aren't we allowed to say that now? Is that, aren't we all just like,

00:37:47.840 | whatever, anything goes, I don't want my funding cut. So yeah, just no DEI. Um, no, there is,

00:37:57.000 | so it is tricky, uh, performance-based review there. I wrote a New Yorker piece back in the pandemic

00:38:02.540 | from, there is a system called ROE, R-O-W-E, results-oriented workplace environment. And there's

00:38:09.880 | a book about this that's called something like work, like work doesn't have to suck or something

00:38:14.940 | like that. I mean, there's only so many business books that have like that in the title, so you'll

00:38:18.840 | find it. It's fascinating. It is a attempt to rebuild an office. If you apply the ROE methodology,

00:38:25.840 | you rebuild your office entirely around results is all that matters. And there's no expectations on

00:38:33.700 | you. Like, Hey, when you want to work, you work. I don't care. There's no vacation. There's no hour.

00:38:36.820 | You don't have to be here any particular hours. You, you essentially sort of like negotiate, okay,

00:38:41.260 | I will work on this now. Here's like the measure of success. Here's how we're going to communicate

00:38:45.560 | about it to make it done. And you kind of have like this portfolio of projects that you do and

00:38:48.860 | you're held accountable to it. It really does work pretty well when it's implemented. But the point

00:38:54.100 | of this article is it's very hard to implement it. And honestly, the big issue they have, and I

00:38:59.780 | interviewed the, the, one of the creators of it and I read the book and talked to a CEO of a company

00:39:03.980 | that uses this methodology. The, one of the biggest issues they have is not figured out how to measure

00:39:08.340 | performance. It actually gets pretty clear. Like, okay, you're doing this. All right. We know what

00:39:12.940 | success means here, right? Or like, are you, we can just look at like in a ROE environment, I could just

00:39:16.760 | be like, these are the three things you did last quarter. Does this seem valuable or not? Like there's no

00:39:20.560 | hiding. The hard part actually is trying to eliminate the last vestiges of pseudo productivity

00:39:27.300 | thinking in the office, right? Pseudo productivity being my term for my book, slow productivity for

00:39:32.800 | using just visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. There is a huge amount of the ROE, I guess

00:39:39.440 | you would call it like a application effort, trying to conversion efforts, is trying to get rid of

00:39:44.480 | pseudo productivity speak. And they call it sludge in the book. But it's just this idea of people are

00:39:50.460 | very, because of the way we built knowledge work, are just very uncomfortable about like, why aren't

00:39:54.340 | you here or I can see you? Why didn't you answer an email right away? It is a difficult mindset to get

00:40:00.480 | away from perform, performing activity to generating measurable results. And it's a hard shift. They also

00:40:08.320 | found that they won't naturally, the people who created this methodology say it all goes well. But

00:40:14.220 | when you talk to people who have actually implemented it, they will tell you, you're going to lose a lot

00:40:19.300 | of people. Not everyone can do this. The CEO I interviewed for this New Yorker piece lost like

00:40:24.040 | 20% of his non-managerial staff and about 20% of the managerial staff. The non-managerial staff,

00:40:28.960 | they're like, I am actually not able to perform like this. I could be busy. My TPS reports are handed

00:40:36.340 | in. I answer emails. I'm always jumping on calls or whatever. But if you just say, forget all that,

00:40:39.740 | just tell me what you did this last month. Some people like 20% are like, I actually am not

00:40:44.260 | comfortable just focusing and doing hard things. And they lost 20% of the managers because they're

00:40:48.460 | like, I don't know how to do this if I'm not just like being able to demand quick responses and just

00:40:54.300 | have people jump. So it's possible, but it's hard. Read my New Yorker piece. That would have been from

00:40:59.120 | like 2021. And I forgot what it was called, but just search like Cal Newport, R-O-W-E, you'll find it.

00:41:05.340 | And in that book, Work Doesn't Have to Suck or something like that. We'll talk about that

00:41:09.800 | philosophy. All right. Who we got next? Next question is from Ben. In episode 345, you talked

00:41:16.380 | about the value of more niche online communities. What do these small alternatives look like and how

00:41:21.600 | do people find and engage in them if they're not hosted on these global platforms? There's a few

00:41:26.700 | forms. So these more like niche online discussion communities, which I think by the way, is like

00:41:31.340 | the right way to extract the community building value of the internet. A few places to find these.

00:41:36.020 | Bulletin boards are a big one. Oftentimes now the technology is not going to be a straight up

00:41:42.540 | bulletin board technology. It might be like at talknats.com, the example I often use in my writing

00:41:48.100 | of a Washington Nationals-based community. What they actually do, and a lot of sports sites do this,

00:41:53.360 | is they'll post like a blog post and the conversation is happening in the comments of the blog post.

00:41:59.260 | Straight up bulletin boards are fine. I actually look at Reddit threads as in this, even though

00:42:03.460 | Reddit is a large global platform, the individual Reddit threads are not algorithmically sorted and

00:42:09.860 | they are managed by the community themselves. Substack or other newsletter-based comments has

00:42:16.440 | become a big place. Like I get a substack from some writer I like. The comments underneath the

00:42:23.100 | substack becomes like a community gathering place. A lot of people have Discord servers set up,

00:42:27.280 | like you like a given show or a given type of whatever. Discord servers are big. You jump on

00:42:32.580 | there and you can talk and it's like a relatively smaller group of people. So all of this is out

00:42:37.200 | there. Podcast, so anything that's Patreon protected, there's discussion communities around it, whether

00:42:43.160 | it's actually using Patreon or, you know, its own homegrown solution. So you'll see this with like,

00:42:49.280 | I don't know, like if you're within like Sam Harris's walled garden, there's like places you can

00:42:53.240 | chat with other people. So they're out there. They're out there. The key though is that it is

00:42:57.880 | a self-selected group of people interested in the same topic. It is a manageable number of people who

00:43:03.300 | are there. So you actually like know a lot about these people. Like you've interacted them with

00:43:07.620 | enough. You recognize them and have a bit of a shared history with them, even if you don't know who

00:43:11.200 | they are like really in the physical real world. And it's not algorithmically curated. It's just the

00:43:16.160 | content is there, probably just chronological. And the standards are set by the community.

00:43:20.860 | that's what you're looking for, for, I think like a richer online engagement.

00:43:24.520 | All right. Who else do we got?

00:43:26.520 | Steven asks, how can partners support each other in building a deep life?

00:43:31.460 | I think the key here is that the life is one that you are coming up with together.

00:43:37.280 | So when you have your sort of vision of an ideal lifestyle that you're, you're sort of working

00:43:42.160 | towards, you need a shared vision first. Like this is where our family wants to be. This is what our

00:43:49.520 | family life should be like in five years and in 10 years. Like if you have kids, for example,

00:43:53.220 | you should break this up by the sort of like pre-elementary school, elementary, elementary

00:43:58.340 | period, the sort of middle school, high school period, and then sort of the post high school

00:44:02.340 | college period. What is our family life? What do we want? Like where we live, the rhythm, what it's

00:44:06.700 | like. Is there someone home after school? What's our weekends like? You want to have that figured

00:44:10.980 | out together. Then underneath that, you can have your individual. Okay. Now here's the things that are

00:44:16.160 | important to me. Like what I want to do with my physical fitness, for example, might be different

00:44:20.560 | than like what my wife wants to do or my interest in my hobby interest are for sure, you know,

00:44:25.440 | different. So start with the shared thing. That's priority one. We're on the same page. We're planning

00:44:30.660 | with that. And then you can have your own sort of buckets you're working on. And there, I think it's

00:44:35.060 | helpful to some degree to kind of like, Hey, here's what I'm working on. What are you working on? What's

00:44:38.120 | important to you? What's important to me? How can I help you with what you're doing? How can you help me

00:44:42.120 | with what I'm doing? Uh, and that, that works out as well, but make sure that there is a shared

00:44:46.400 | component like this stuff. If you're in a partnership with someone, that partnership has to extend to your

00:44:52.160 | vision of what the deep life is. All right. Let's see here. I'm going to suggest we, cause I want to,

00:45:01.400 | I'm going to, we're going to skip either the call or the case study just so we can roll into the tech

00:45:04.460 | corner with time to go today. Okay. Which one let's, uh, I'm going to skip the call. Okay. And I'm

00:45:09.020 | going to jump right ahead to the case study. This is where we find out that the call we skipped was,

00:45:13.580 | I was going to say from someone famous, but I couldn't, I don't know like what name I'm not

00:45:17.600 | up with like the hip references. Like, you know how old fashioned I am. Mr. Beast. Yeah. Well,

00:45:22.700 | let's see. My first instinct was to be like King Charles. So how to touch. Yeah. Mr. Beast called in

00:45:28.680 | and we missed it. It's like, I need you on my channel stat. All right. Our case study today comes from

00:45:33.200 | Chris. Chris says, I was recently approached by a firm looking to fill a position that I was uniquely

00:45:38.560 | qualified for. It would have been a dramatic step up in pay with a profit sharing component that may

00:45:43.540 | have doubled or even tripled my current income in a good year. I received an offer for the role and

00:45:48.280 | part of me wanted to just go for it because the income increase was so dramatic, but I decided to

00:45:52.340 | put it through a more holistic lifestyle centric evaluation. I VBLCCP'd it. Here's what I realized

00:45:59.500 | after further reflecting. This role was something of a grand goal trap. I was telling myself that if I

00:46:05.460 | could just get to this executive level, I would have quote, made it end quote, and everything else

00:46:09.360 | would have fallen into place. But in reality, the position would have required to move to a higher

00:46:13.940 | cost of living area and from a fully remote role to a three days per week in office plus travel

00:46:18.800 | requirements that seem to grow exponentially. As I really pressed the hiring team to clarify,

00:46:23.320 | this would have substantially reduced the number of hours I'm able to spend with my three-year-old who I'm

00:46:27.740 | committed to being present parent for and would have required a big renegotiation of the parenting

00:46:33.020 | burden with my partner. It was also a high risk, high reward job, meaning what I would have been

00:46:37.180 | more fearful of termination if I wasn't performing with complete excellence. I also did the work to

00:46:44.500 | process what enough meant for the income requirements, my lifestyle vision. And I realized that while I do

00:46:49.880 | need a bit more coming in annually, I'm not that far off. Instead of taking this dramatic leap up in both

00:46:55.440 | income and work hours, I'm looking at other options like a more modest move to a full-time role

00:46:59.820 | that increases pay but maintains most of my current balance.

00:47:03.020 | That there, Jesse, is VBLCCP in action, values-based lifestyle-centric career plan. There you go. When

00:47:10.160 | you know what matters to you, what you want your life to look like, what's happening, like your job

00:47:15.120 | becomes just a tool you have among other tools to craft this life. And that's a fantastic decision.

00:47:21.160 | I talk about that in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. That is one of the control traps,

00:47:25.980 | that just as you get good enough to have some leverage over your life is exactly when people

00:47:30.760 | are going to come to you and give you shiny opportunities to take your autonomy away.

00:47:34.440 | So just as you're like, I'm pretty good at this, I'm making good money and have flexibility,

00:47:38.920 | that's exactly when they say, hey, we want to triple your salary. But then in the quiet voice,

00:47:43.560 | but you're never going to see your family again, you're going to travel all the time and be stressed.

00:47:47.160 | But hey, you were going to triple your salary, right? That's the second control trap in action.

00:47:51.220 | Lifestyle-centric career planning helps protect you against it.

00:47:53.840 | Like I think, as Chris, is going to probably be substantially more happy on average the next 10

00:48:02.780 | years with the decision he made than if he had just gone for the bigger job. Because why are you

00:48:08.000 | doing the bigger job? Like it's all about what it's serving or like the work itself. So the work

00:48:11.980 | itself wasn't going to be more interesting to him and the stress was higher and it was going to get in

00:48:16.000 | the way of multiple different goals, other things that were important. So now he's just tweaking what

00:48:21.140 | he has to get a little bit more money and then they're good. So I think that's great. I just want

00:48:25.760 | to flag real quick how he talked about the processing what enough meant. We've talked about that in a prior

00:48:31.540 | show, but it's just worth underscoring. That's this idea of you make sure you know the numbers.

00:48:37.640 | Like how much money do we need for like this type of lifestyle we're looking for? Having the specific

00:48:42.940 | numbers matter as opposed to just more. If you just say I need more money, you might take the triple

00:48:48.040 | income job and be miserable where he crunched the numbers and said, we're close. We need to just fill

00:48:53.560 | in this. Now let me be really, really careful in figuring out how to fill in that in a way that's

00:48:57.280 | not going to get rid of all these other goals. So anyway, it's fantastic. Lifestyle-centric career

00:49:00.440 | planning in action. All right. We got a tech corner coming up, but first let's hear from another

00:49:07.920 | sponsor. We have a new sponsor this week. This is a company I've used for. I know this company well,

00:49:14.720 | so I'm happy to have them as a sponsor. That is the online course company Udacity.

00:49:22.480 | Am I saying that right, Jesse?

00:49:25.560 | You are.

00:49:26.120 | Udacity. I think I should get a bell for pronouncing it. It's one of these things I've

00:49:30.420 | used Udacity courses for a long time, but you don't have an occasion to say them out loud

00:49:35.140 | until you're actually talking. So Udacity is the site you go to if you want to learn skills that

00:49:42.180 | are going to command high salaries. It's the online learning platform that has courses on all sorts

00:49:46.260 | of topics, but including AI, data, programming, and more. I have attended or purchased multiple

00:49:54.280 | Udacity courses. The most recent one I was doing with my son, it was a computer game programming

00:49:58.760 | course. I did another one with my other son on like Tinkercad based 3D design,

00:50:03.620 | like intro to 3D design. It's fantastic. It's a really easy interface. You can purchase the course

00:50:09.280 | easily. Some are free. They're video based, keeps track of where you are. Knowledge is power. We talked

00:50:15.180 | about this in the very first segment of the show. Like how do you get smarter? Online courses are a big

00:50:19.580 | way. I mean, you've been messing around with this. You just signed up for one, right?

00:50:23.100 | Udacity course. Yeah. I signed up for a digital marketing class. Oh, excellent. Yeah. And I'm

00:50:27.400 | teaching one now on Udacity about how to do a killer French accent. So it's, you know, it's been a real

00:50:32.940 | hit. Have your pipe. On a related note, someone just handed me a note and I am no longer welcome

00:50:38.760 | in France. Oh, okay. Well, that's good to know. They just sent me a note. So I guess that got me in

00:50:43.840 | trouble. There's tons of options for learning tech skills, but only Udacity is consistently ranked as

00:50:49.560 | a top skill development platform because unlike others, it actually works. I can attest to this

00:50:54.800 | with real world projects and human experts that grade your work. You'll truly get the skills you

00:50:58.720 | need. Yeah. When my son and I were doing the game programming, I mean, you're building the games.

00:51:02.480 | Like you're doing, you're doing the work right there. When you have a certification from Udacity,

00:51:08.640 | recruiters and employers take notice. So for a better job, better salary and better skills,

00:51:13.480 | check out Udacity today. I saw a YouTuber, a DIY YouTuber. I was watching with my kids the other

00:51:19.900 | day and he said his habit, he's a brilliant guy. He said his habit is to spend the first 30 minutes

00:51:26.300 | every day on an online course. He's like just making myself smarter before I move on to like the rest of

00:51:31.280 | my day. I love that idea. So maybe do that. Sign up for Udacity. Always have a course you're working on

00:51:35.720 | first 30 minutes of your day, get smarter, get your brain working. So the tech field has always evolved

00:51:41.280 | and you should be too. Always evolving and you should be too. You can try Udacity risk-free for

00:51:47.000 | seven days. Head to udacity.com slash deep and use the code deep to get 40% off your order. Once again,

00:51:53.900 | that's udacity.com backslash deep for 40% off and make sure you use my promo code deep so they know I

00:52:01.240 | sent you. I also want to talk about our friends at ZocDoc. I went to the dentist this morning.

00:52:06.100 | All right. This true story. I went to the dentist this morning that we are recording this.

00:52:10.520 | How did I originally find this dentist? It was like years ago, I was canvassing friends and someone

00:52:17.420 | said, Oh, there's this new dentist in town. And I, I got in and I liked him and it's been great,

00:52:23.880 | but the word got out and he's very popular. He's now booking seven months out. So like,

00:52:31.080 | if you want to make an appointment with them, it's like seven or eight months before there's an

00:52:33.920 | appointment. And so I was thinking today, as they were booking my next appointment,

00:52:37.200 | like seven or eight months out. Uh, imagine if I was looking for a new dentist now,

00:52:41.500 | what would I do? Like if I asked my friends and they're like, Oh, here's this one dentist and he

00:52:45.700 | doesn't have any openings for months. Like that is what it's like right now. Often trying to find the

00:52:50.300 | medical care you're working for. You get like one or two recommendations. And especially in a city,

00:52:54.680 | when you say, I would like to actually come see a practitioner, like maybe, maybe at like some point

00:52:59.980 | during like the current presidential administration, they just laugh like, Oh, you fool. You think the

00:53:07.320 | dentist actually can see you. And then there's like a lot of laughter and you hear them call someone else

00:53:11.740 | over and then they start laughing. Uh, and then like the doorbell rings and someone runs in and just

00:53:15.980 | punches you in the stomach because they're, they're making fun of you that much. This is where ZocDoc enters

00:53:20.360 | the scene. ZocDoc is a free app and website where you can search and compare high quality in-network

00:53:25.280 | doctors and click to instantly book an appointment. You can search for, here's what I'm looking for.

00:53:30.920 | And then see which of these take my insurance, which of these are actually booking appointments,

00:53:37.040 | right? This is how you would have found my dentist a few years ago. Oh, he's actually looking to take on

00:53:41.640 | new patients. Uh, okay, great. When is their next appointment available? Let me book it right now.

00:53:47.220 | Let me do some of the paperwork online using the ZocDoc interface. Actually, my dentist uses ZocDoc. So it's,

00:53:51.820 | so it's interesting. It makes it so much easier and so much less stressful and honestly humiliating to try to

00:53:57.780 | find because no one's laughing in your face for daring to ask if they have actual openings. Uh, so this is the

00:54:03.440 | way that you find medical care. Appointments made through ZocDoc also happen fast, typically within 24 to 72

00:54:08.860 | hours of booking. You can even often score same day appointments. So stop putting off those doctor's

00:54:16.220 | appointments and go to ZocDoc.com/deep to find an instantly book a top rated doctor today. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com/deep.

00:54:24.460 | All right, Jesse, let's do our final segment. All right. Because I can't help myself. We're a tech

00:54:34.140 | corner segment. We're going back to AI. There's so much to keep up with, with AI right now. And I want you

00:54:39.180 | to be up to speed. All right. Here's what I've been rabbit holing on recently.

00:54:45.100 | This idea that these new AI large language models like DeepSeq and the new O family of models from

00:54:52.220 | OpenAI can quote unquote reason. So you give them like a math problem or something and they can sort

00:54:58.140 | of work through the steps to get to an answer. They're doing much better on like math tests or

00:55:03.180 | crossword puzzle tests or something like this, right? Like they, they are reasoning. I'm really

00:55:08.140 | interested in this. All right. How did these things reason? Well, let's ask the companies. They're giving

00:55:14.060 | incredibly vague language and a lot of journalists are just repeating this language. So like OpenAI,

00:55:19.580 | when they talk about their new models, they say, uh, the new models, they, they slow down to think

00:55:25.500 | more and that's how they're reasoning. And this is the way it's being reported in like mainstream

00:55:31.180 | journalism. We're talking about, there was like just an article out in the times a couple of days

00:55:34.700 | ago about how do these new models reason. And it's just saying like, yes, the new models, what they do

00:55:39.580 | is they slow down. They slow down and they think, they think more. And so they can, they can produce

00:55:44.460 | more reason answers. What does that mean? Right? Like Jesse, when you think about like a model,

00:55:49.740 | like slowing down and thinking like, what does that mean? It feels like it's like an actual person.

00:55:52.780 | That's like, what, taking a deep breath and like, I'm going to like take my time. Like what's slowing

00:55:57.900 | down? Right. So I, you know, I called the source and, uh, talked about it. Like, Hey,

00:56:03.100 | walk me through this tech, point me to the right papers. Here's what's as best we can tell is actually

00:56:08.940 | going on. Okay. Uh, there was this idea that actually precedes chat GPT, right? This is an idea

00:56:15.420 | from the academic community, studying language models, 2022, you get this paper that says,

00:56:19.500 | if you want to increase the reasoning performance of language models,

00:56:24.460 | you should use something called chain of thought prompting, C O T prompting. And what they were

00:56:30.780 | showing in this paper is, uh, in the question, you're asking the language model, you basically

00:56:37.340 | tell it, I want you to show your work. Don't just give me the answer. Like show me your steps. This is

00:56:43.500 | what I'm looking for is walk me. I'll give you an example of it. See how I'm solving this problem here.

00:56:48.700 | Step-by-step. Give me an answer to this new problem with similar style of step-by-step explanation.

00:56:54.460 | And right. And what happened is this would give you better answers because language models, of course,

00:56:59.900 | are there, they're trained to, um, expand text in predictable ways. They're trained on taking real text,

00:57:05.820 | taking words or sequence of words out of them and having the language models, try to fill those in.

00:57:09.900 | And the closer they get to real words there, like the, the more they get rewarded in their training.

00:57:13.820 | So like what was happening is you would give a language model, like a logic problem.

00:57:18.620 | You know, Jesse has this many apples and then someone comes along and takes this many apples.

00:57:22.540 | And then the person who's taller gives you back this many apples. How many apples does Jesse have?

00:57:26.540 | And what the language models would sometimes do is give an answer that sounds like what an answer

00:57:31.100 | to that problem would look like. Like, yeah, I'm saying Jesse has some number of apples. Like that's a,

00:57:35.900 | for our language models perspective, that looks like, like a reasonable response to this prompt.

00:57:41.660 | It's talking about Jesse. It's talking about apples. There's a number, but that number could be arbitrary.

00:57:46.140 | Chain of thought prompting says, no, no, you, you have to really ask the language model,

00:57:50.220 | walk me step-by-step through your reasoning for how you get to the answer. And I'll give you an

00:57:53.820 | example of me doing that in my prompt. Now you do something similar. When it walks through its reasoning

00:57:58.460 | in the answer, it's more likely to get the correct answer because, um, as it fills out its reasoning,

00:58:03.820 | it's actually accessing relevant circuits that do different parts of the reasoning. And it's actually more

00:58:09.660 | likely, you're more likely to activate like the relevant circuits that can do the different

00:58:13.180 | calculations and put them together in the right way. And you're more likely to get the right answer.

00:58:16.940 | That's chain of thought prompting. Okay. So the issue is now we get, uh, chat bots and they're

00:58:23.660 | getting popular. We really can't rely on prompt engineering as something that like the average

00:58:28.620 | user is going to do, right? This is like the big, the big push with consumer facing large language model

00:58:35.260 | tools is like, we can't expect the users to write these incredibly complicated prompts to get their

00:58:40.860 | results. Researchers were doing this, but we can't expect the users to do this. So what seems to have

00:58:47.420 | happened is they said, can we basically use reinforcement learning to kind of force one of these models to

00:58:54.380 | always act as if it's being prompted to show its work? Right? So this is the key. And I'm not,

00:59:00.460 | I'll just be incredibly brief on this, but like the, the, the key that got like the original chat GPT so

00:59:05.820 | much notice is they took the first really large, large language model with was GPT-3, which could do

00:59:11.660 | amazing stuff, but you really had to write incredibly careful prompts to get it. And the big innovation,

00:59:16.940 | second innovation open AI had the first being just make the model large was this thing called, uh,

00:59:21.740 | we think of it as like re a reinforcement learning based fine tuning, where they took this model

00:59:26.300 | that had all this knowledge in it. And if asked correctly, could produce all sorts of stuff.

00:59:30.860 | And then they started running it with a bunch of prompts. And every time it gave like a good type of answer,

00:59:36.780 | they would zap it with a happy zap. And it was sort of like, Ooh, whatever weights we were using here,

00:59:41.340 | let's make those stronger. And whenever it gave an answer that was, they didn't like, they would give it a,

00:59:45.100 | a, an unhappy bad person's app. And it would be like, Ooh, let's kind of reduce some of these weights

00:59:49.980 | that gave us this answer. And so for like chat GPT, they were saying, we're going to run,

00:59:54.620 | we train GPT-3 and we're going to run a bunch of prompts. And when you answer this, like, uh, an

00:59:59.260 | agent that you're chatting with a human, we're going to give you a happy zap. And then, so it got good

01:00:04.460 | at answering questions without you having to write really careful prompts. I think what is happening,

01:00:09.020 | according to my source is that they're just doing this now for chain of thought reasoning.

01:00:12.860 | So they take one of these models, they'll, they train it up the old fashioned, you know,

01:00:16.700 | with all the, all the texts on the internet and just like any of these other models.

01:00:20.060 | And then as they start running through answers to it, giving it questions,

01:00:24.380 | when it shows more of its work, they give it a happy zap. And when it just gives an answer,

01:00:29.340 | they give it a negative zap. So this reinforcement learning fine tunes this big model,

01:00:33.340 | like, okay, okay, okay. I, I get it. You want answers where I explain my work.

01:00:38.300 | You could do this for anything, right? This is how they, um,

01:00:41.660 | stop certain types of content from coming out of these language models. It's completely trained.

01:00:45.580 | And then they, they give it some questions that might elicit responses that are like violent or

01:00:51.100 | something they don't like. And every time it gives a bad answer, they zap it. And then like over time,

01:00:54.940 | it's like, I'm not going to give those type of answers.

01:00:56.620 | So this is what I believe the reasoning models have done is they take a standard big train model,

01:01:02.700 | and then they do a reinforcement fine tuning step where they're saying, show your work,

01:01:06.620 | show your work, show your work, give us big, long answers. Um, and when we know this since 2022,

01:01:12.060 | pre-chat GPT, that when the chat bots, when the language models rather have to explain their work,

01:01:17.340 | they're more likely to give accurate answers. All right. Now, part of what they're doing here,

01:01:22.300 | in addition to that is these answers are so long, they're now hiding a bunch of it. It's like,

01:01:28.140 | what's really happening is the, the chat bot is giving this like incredibly long

01:01:31.500 | explanation for its answer, which helps the accuracy of it. But the explanation is so long

01:01:36.620 | that if you're a user who asked a question, you're like, oh my God, I don't want to see all of this.

01:01:40.380 | So they're, they're hiding a lot of that. And we know this because, uh, if you actually look at the

01:01:45.820 | user agreements, what's happening now, if you use these reasoning bots is they say, don't just count

01:01:50.780 | the tokens that you see. There's something called hidden tokens that it generated part of its answer

01:01:57.580 | that we're hiding from you and the user, because you don't need to see all that,

01:02:00.300 | that, but we have to charge you for it. Like, I mean, it produced all of this.

01:02:03.180 | So you can kind of quantify that, oh, they are generating these really long answers and then

01:02:07.340 | they're hiding a lot of it. So that like what you see is just some of the steps and then you get the

01:02:11.900 | final answer. So that's what reasoning is. It's not thinking slower. The reason why it takes longer

01:02:18.620 | is that it's just generating a much longer answer, right? That's what the slower is. Like when you

01:02:23.420 | see, you know, you see this when you use chat GPT, you know, it takes a lot, each token they produce,

01:02:28.460 | chat GPT still produces token by token. Deep seek is a gains efficiency by doing a few words at a time,

01:02:34.540 | but you notice how the words like come in one by one. It's because for every one of these things they're

01:02:39.100 | generating, you have 500 billion parameter, uh, transformer-based model pushing through to generate

01:02:45.500 | just that word. So it takes longer to generate these reasoning model answers because what it's really

01:02:50.700 | doing is writing like pages of explanation all the way up until its final answer. It just takes a long

01:02:57.740 | time to do all that. They don't show you all that work, but that's what the slowness is,

01:03:02.620 | is it's just giving really long answers. So that's what reasoning is. Um, it is different than

01:03:08.780 | when I talked around the New Yorker last year about planning and how language models can't plan. And they

01:03:13.340 | said, ultimately what language models will need to be, uh, flexible planners is planning engines outside

01:03:19.340 | of the language model. And it like you, and you need some sort of coordinator that is going to, uh,

01:03:25.500 | talk to a language model and talk to a planning engine. The canonical example is like playing

01:03:29.980 | chess against an AI bot. Like ultimately you can't just have a giant neural network that can, uh,

01:03:35.660 | be hard coded to, to look ahead a hundred thousand possible moves because that's just too big of a

01:03:41.340 | neural network to hard code. You, you, you need some sort of like systematic simulator to check those.

01:03:45.820 | And then maybe like the neural network to look at its quality, et cetera. So I still think there's only

01:03:50.940 | so much, this helps answers. It's, it's not the, the really sophisticated how from 2001 style

01:03:57.340 | reasoning is going to require non language model components that can actually recurse and do loops

01:04:03.180 | and have state and actually explore things more systematically. But that is what I think is going

01:04:07.020 | on with reasoning. It's the same language models based on the same type of original training that we've

01:04:12.300 | seen recently. These big 500 billion parameter models, plus reinforcement learning that gets it to show its

01:04:18.940 | work. And when language models show their work for certain types of problems, they're more likely to

01:04:23.180 | be accurate. So that is what is going on. I can't find this explanation in almost any common press

01:04:28.060 | article about this, but I think that is what is really happening. All right. So I can't help myself,

01:04:32.780 | Jesse, but there we go. Are you going to write an article about it? I mean, it's not really like a

01:04:37.660 | New Yorker article. I don't know. This is more of like a science, like a tech explanation article.

01:04:42.140 | You did a chat GPT article, didn't you? I've done some. Yeah. It's kind of boring.

01:04:47.980 | Yeah. So I'm making you guys listen to this instead.

01:04:50.860 | I think it's interesting. I'm just kind of frustrated that none of like the,

01:04:55.100 | the, the people who write the tech explainer articles, all the big names,

01:04:58.220 | they're all just falling back on this. It's just taking time to think more. And that's how the

01:05:02.940 | reasoning works. It's like, well, let's like actually understand, like, is there something,

01:05:06.380 | is there a new architecture? Is there a new technology? Like what's happening?

01:05:09.260 | Yeah. I had to read academic papers to try to just get that explanation. I think that's what's going

01:05:13.580 | on. All right. Well, speaking of slowing down, I think that's all the time we have for today,

01:05:17.900 | but we'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always stay deep.

01:05:22.460 | If you liked today's discussions about how to become a more elite thinker,

01:05:26.940 | you should check out episode 345, where I first introduced the idea that we need to train our brain.

01:05:32.860 | That was called, are we getting dumber? I think you'll like it. Check it out.

01:05:36.300 | So several people recently sent me the same article. It was from the financial time. So it was written

01:05:41.660 | by John Byrne Murdoch and it had a provocative headline, have humans past peak brain power.

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