Ep. 212: The Productivity Dragon | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

00:00:00.000 | People like really smart people in academia, when they leave academia.

00:00:05.120 | Are more prone than the average person to end up in more eccentric or conspiratorial

00:00:11.840 | or like way out of the mainstream type of views.

00:00:14.520 | I'm Cal Newport, and this is deep questions.

00:00:25.800 | Episode two, 12.

00:00:28.200 | On this show, I answer questions and share case studies for my audience about the various ideas I write about with a particular focus on the struggle to live and work deeply in an increasingly distracted world.

00:00:46.320 | If you want to be a part of this show, submit your own questions or case studies, go to calnewport.com/podcast for instructions.

00:00:57.080 | I'm here in my deep work HQ as usual.

00:01:00.520 | I am joined by my producer, Jesse.

00:01:04.200 | Jesse, the HQ looked different today when I came in.

00:01:07.600 | Exciting stuff.

00:01:09.280 | Very exciting.

00:01:10.240 | We've got some trash and some desk removed.

00:01:12.280 | It's a yeah.

00:01:13.240 | Empty.

00:01:13.680 | The studio has remained the same, but the other rooms in the HQ have been emptied out.

00:01:18.640 | We had junk haulers here this afternoon.

00:01:20.280 | When I first leased this office, it was August of 2020.

00:01:26.600 | I needed a place to record.

00:01:27.720 | I needed a place to do talks and work, do publicity while my kids' school was closed.

00:01:33.440 | And it was full of all these old desks and bookcases the last tenant had in here.

00:01:37.080 | And I just told the property manager, just leave them, whatever I need.

00:01:39.400 | I need desk.

00:01:40.040 | Like what else?

00:01:40.640 | I'm not going to, I'm not going to go worry about decorating an office a few months into the pandemic.

00:01:45.760 | Uh, well, anyways, that, that old furniture probably lasted too long.

00:01:50.200 | And so Jesse and I pulled the trigger.

00:01:52.480 | We've emptied out the HQ.

00:01:53.640 | Now we're going to, we're going to re refill it from scratch.

00:01:57.520 | Jesse, I want to go through with the idea that a listener literally suggested this.

00:02:01.000 | This was months ago.

00:02:02.600 | I asked at some point, like, what should I do if I cleared the space out?

00:02:06.440 | And I used to refer to this as my cave.

00:02:09.000 | And their suggestion was, uh, actually put in realistic rocks, stalactites, stalagmites,

00:02:17.440 | and make it look like an actual cave.

00:02:19.440 | We now have that capable.

00:02:21.400 | It's possible.

00:02:22.080 | The rooms are empty.

00:02:23.520 | We could do it.

00:02:24.400 | They are empty.

00:02:25.360 | It would be confusing to every single person who came in here to do this show.

00:02:28.800 | They'd be like, why do you have a realistically molded and eerily lit cave?

00:02:34.360 | We wouldn't explain.

00:02:36.240 | Just say it cause we're deep.

00:02:38.000 | It motivates you to write.

00:02:39.480 | Motivates me to write.

00:02:40.600 | I sit in a cave like Batman.

00:02:42.240 | Oh, well.

00:02:43.560 | Um, all right.

00:02:44.320 | Important public service announcement for listeners.

00:02:47.480 | We have changed the way that we collect questions to use on this show.

00:02:53.320 | For the longest time, I would occasionally send a link only to my email newsletter.

00:02:58.840 | And that link gate took you to some magic survey where you could submit the questions

00:03:02.160 | that we would use on the show.

00:03:03.400 | We have changed that.

00:03:04.800 | The link for submitting questions is now publicly available.

00:03:08.720 | Just go to calnewport.com/podcast.

00:03:11.840 | And it is right there.

00:03:12.880 | Anyone can submit questions at any time.

00:03:16.120 | You don't have to have received that one email at just the right day to do so.

00:03:19.560 | So please go over there.

00:03:20.560 | Please start submitting questions.

00:03:22.000 | This is the first episode where we actually have some questions from the new form,

00:03:26.400 | but we need a lot more.

00:03:27.240 | So calnewport.com/podcast.

00:03:29.920 | You'll notice if you go there, there's a new feature we want to do on this show,

00:03:35.080 | which is share more case studies of people who have put the advice they heard here in

00:03:42.480 | the practice and are now reporting back.

00:03:44.040 | Here's how it went.

00:03:44.800 | Success stories, non-success stories, real on the ground information about what it's

00:03:50.960 | like trying to live deeply.

00:03:52.640 | So you'll notice if you go to that form, you can submit a question or you can

00:03:55.800 | submit a case study.

00:03:56.520 | We want both.

00:03:57.880 | And you, the listener will hear more of those case studies as we get more of them

00:04:03.400 | to actually tell.

00:04:05.560 | We should be excited.

00:04:07.560 | We do have a good show.

00:04:09.200 | There's a good collection of questions, right, Jesse?

00:04:10.800 | You were going through those earlier.

00:04:12.360 | Yeah, we've got some good questions.

00:04:13.760 | We've got a good deep dive.

00:04:15.120 | Excellent.

00:04:15.800 | We return a phone calls too, right?

00:04:17.760 | We have some live phone calls.

00:04:18.880 | Yep.

00:04:19.200 | We got two.

00:04:19.760 | Excellent.

00:04:20.800 | We do have to settle a quick debate.

00:04:24.240 | And so the audience who is watching this episode, so who are watching the YouTube

00:04:29.880 | version of this episode at youtube.com/calnewportmedia can weigh in on

00:04:37.480 | this.

00:04:37.960 | Multiple people in recent weeks, including Jesse, have pointed out something about

00:04:44.120 | the computer I use to do my writing.

00:04:46.480 | And it's up on the screen now for those who are writing.

00:04:49.520 | My keyboard's a little bit unique.

00:04:51.440 | Jesse, how would you describe what the viewers are seeing right now?

00:04:53.840 | It was so good.

00:04:54.880 | So last week when we were talking about doing the, you know, getting the junk

00:04:59.000 | haulers in, you put your laptop on and I looked at the keyboard for the first time.

00:05:02.840 | I was like, Oh wow, you've been writing.

00:05:04.520 | So amazing.

00:05:06.800 | Right.

00:05:07.320 | So if you're looking at this, what you would see is the 10 or 15 of the most

00:05:11.080 | commonly used keys, the black on the keys have been completely worn away to the

00:05:15.480 | point where you can see through the keys to the, to the keyboard.

00:05:18.680 | And then you can see through the keys to the, to the actual

00:05:21.440 | mechanisms underneath on the laptop.

00:05:24.240 | So the debate is, does this mean I need a new laptop or not?

00:05:29.200 | Well, let them know how long you've had that for.

00:05:31.920 | You hadn't had that long, right?

00:05:33.000 | A little more than two years.

00:05:34.120 | That's amazing.

00:05:34.640 | Yeah.

00:05:34.880 | I got it early in the pandemic.

00:05:36.440 | Here's the thing.

00:05:37.160 | This is okay.

00:05:37.840 | So that's the debate.

00:05:38.920 | I mean, I have to completely touch type of course, because I can't see any letters

00:05:42.040 | on this anymore and I can see the Q and the Y, the Z and the X no problem, but

00:05:47.200 | most of the letters are gone now.

00:05:48.400 | So it is a testament.

00:05:49.560 | Unrelated to how I, what decision I make.

00:05:52.880 | It's a testament to how I reacted to the pandemic.

00:05:55.400 | The way I reacted to the pandemic was, uh, you know, hold my beer.

00:05:59.120 | I'm going to write.

00:05:59.680 | I wrote a lot.

00:06:01.920 | I have been writing a lot of the last two years and I wore away the keys on my, on

00:06:06.240 | my keyboard and otherwise like pretty new, pretty good machine.

00:06:08.880 | That's so good.

00:06:09.800 | Even when I was just like a fan, just listening, you would always talk about

00:06:13.440 | like coming out of the pandemic with like a, you know, full fed, full head of steam

00:06:18.080 | doing some things that a lot of other people weren't doing.

00:06:20.040 | It really resonated.

00:06:21.200 | It's how I, especially early on when it was a little more anxious.

00:06:24.000 | I dealt with a lot of that of just, uh, writing.

00:06:27.440 | I wrote a lot, a lot of essays, books.

00:06:32.040 | I think I've done like 20 articles for the New Yorker during the pandemic.

00:06:35.200 | I mean, I wrote a lot.

00:06:36.400 | I'm writing a new book.

00:06:38.000 | I'm a bunch of academic papers.

00:06:40.280 | So got to write.

00:06:43.120 | So I don't know if I need a new computer or not.

00:06:44.280 | Maybe I'll buy a new one.

00:06:45.240 | I should, or I guess I could replace the keys.

00:06:47.520 | But anyways, a lot of people were making fun of my keyboard

00:06:49.600 | in the last couple of weeks.

00:06:50.360 | A lot of people just happen to see it and want to know what's

00:06:52.960 | going on with my computer.

00:06:53.840 | So there you go.

00:06:54.400 | If you're on Twitter or Instagram, you could post it.

00:06:56.560 | I think it's a classic humble brag, right?

00:07:00.240 | Like, look at my keyboard.

00:07:02.120 | I'm so, I guess I write too much or blessed.

00:07:06.720 | I don't know what you see on Instagram.

00:07:08.960 | All right.

00:07:09.520 | So anyways, we got good questions.

00:07:10.840 | Um, before we get into the questions though, like I often like to do

00:07:14.800 | the start, these episodes, I like to kick things off, which

00:07:17.120 | is what I call a deep dive, where I take a query that's been on my

00:07:21.200 | mind for a long time and spend some time with it.

00:07:23.880 | So the topic of the deep dive that, uh, I'm going to get into today is

00:07:30.240 | will four day weeks solve burnout.

00:07:35.480 | Now, one of the motivations was, is there's been a lot of articles about it.

00:07:40.080 | This is an article that's on the screen now for people who are watching.

00:07:43.920 | It's actually from February, but it's one of many articles like this that

00:07:47.440 | I've come across recently that are talking about the, the increased

00:07:51.920 | popularity for the last year or two.

00:07:54.400 | And the idea of knowledge workers in particular doing four day work weeks.

00:07:59.840 | So typically Monday through Thursday, instead of Monday through Friday.

00:08:04.360 | Now it's not an idea that is brand new in deep work, which I published back in 2016.

00:08:11.040 | I talked about the four day work week experiments at base camp.

00:08:15.840 | They then were and continue to do today.

00:08:19.480 | A part of the year is four day work weeks of the summer.

00:08:22.560 | And I got into some of those details in that book, Alex Peng at a well

00:08:27.640 | timed the book out called shorter.

00:08:29.800 | That was all about this concept that came out.

00:08:32.960 | And this is where I say, well-timed March of 2020.

00:08:37.000 | So that book was right there for people during the pandemic induced remote work,

00:08:41.560 | where we began rethinking how we might structure our efforts.

00:08:44.840 | That book was well-timed to be there.

00:08:46.320 | So this idea has been around last year or two, though, it's gotten a lot more attention.

00:08:51.880 | The pandemic pushed it to the forefront.

00:08:53.640 | So if we look at this particular sample article I have on the screen, this is from

00:08:57.080 | wired from February written by Kat, uh, Caitlin Harrigan, we see, it talks about.

00:09:04.400 | Uh, this concept, it notes that several trials or trials have been launched in

00:09:08.960 | several countries in the past few months.

00:09:11.600 | So this is something that, that has been happening over the last year or two is

00:09:15.360 | countries, government funding studies from countries are looking into this where

00:09:18.640 | they'll, they'll take a bunch of companies and temporarily move them.

00:09:21.800 | The four day weeks and then interview, uh, the employees afterwards

00:09:26.640 | about what's this better.

00:09:27.360 | Was this not, so there's a lot of these investigations going on.

00:09:29.320 | Typically in Europe, Iceland was one of the first countries to do this.

00:09:32.000 | They actually had results back spoiler alert.

00:09:34.440 | People like the four day work week there in this particular wired article, they

00:09:38.880 | went and talked to 15 workers at six tech companies that had already adopted a

00:09:43.800 | shortened work week and found that employees generally approved.

00:09:48.080 | So that's the actual quote I have up here.

00:09:51.440 | Um, but some saw it as a mixed blessing.

00:09:55.720 | All right.

00:09:57.240 | So here's the question is this highly visible intervention, a good solution to

00:10:03.840 | the burnout that knowledge workers increasingly feel my argument has been.

00:10:11.080 | No, I do not think shifting to the four day work week is going to be a longterm

00:10:20.280 | or sustainable solution to a lot of the actual valid concerns that people have

00:10:25.720 | about work, its role in their life and the stress and burnout that it is creating.

00:10:29.360 | I think by contrast, the issue might be the notion of a work week in general.

00:10:35.640 | Not its length.

00:10:37.560 | So let's go back and think about where the concept of a

00:10:40.640 | standardized work week came from.

00:10:42.200 | In the U S it comes from the fair labor standards practice in 1938.

00:10:47.520 | This is the oppression era legislation.

00:10:49.640 | It established 40 hours as a standard work week for many industries.

00:10:53.320 | In other words, if you wanted to have an employee work longer than 40 hours,

00:10:56.720 | they would have to be paid overtime.

00:10:58.560 | This very much largely concerned manufacturing and industrial jobs, jobs

00:11:04.880 | where there was an hourly component to the work jobs where the biggest knob you

00:11:10.920 | had to turn in terms of impacting the difficulty of the work was how many

00:11:15.120 | hours people were actually working.

00:11:18.680 | This was the context for something like a standardized work week.

00:11:22.680 | Made sense.

00:11:23.600 | Knowledge workers have been relatively exempt from that law because it

00:11:30.040 | is a different type of situation.

00:11:31.720 | Knowledge work is way more autonomous.

00:11:33.560 | The number of hours you are working or expected to work don't necessarily mean

00:11:38.440 | a lot in a lot of knowledge work jobs.

00:11:40.000 | It's very outcomes based.

00:11:41.640 | You're given work, you're expected to accomplish the work.

00:11:44.800 | The work week is at best a loose framework for, you know, roughly speaking

00:11:51.720 | when you might be expected to be available for meetings, when we might expect a

00:11:56.480 | response to emails and when we might not.

00:11:58.920 | So, okay, we don't work on the weekends, then we can't

00:12:02.160 | schedule a meeting on the weekend.

00:12:03.600 | We don't schedule meetings at 8 PM typically because like we have this rough

00:12:07.040 | work week, but that's about it.

00:12:08.120 | There's no notion of, wait a second, I'm only supposed to work 32 hours and, uh,

00:12:13.520 | and I'm just at the assembly line turning the crank into those 32 hours are up.

00:12:17.640 | So in knowledge work, the work week is that again, just a loose framework for

00:12:21.120 | setting certain expectations, not the core defining factor of the efforts that

00:12:26.040 | you actually, that you actually are going to execute.

00:12:29.840 | All right.

00:12:31.400 | So what should we do?

00:12:32.440 | If knowledge workers feel burnt out, what type of things are going to make a

00:12:38.800 | difference?

00:12:39.280 | One of my big arguments is that more transparent and humane systems for work

00:12:46.040 | assignment, execution, and review is what is critical.

00:12:51.280 | Moving past the haphazardness with which we just toss work around in the knowledge

00:12:56.640 | work environment today, where anyone at any time can just say, Hey, take a look

00:12:59.800 | at this.

00:13:00.000 | Can you do this?

00:13:00.640 | Do this meeting, take care of this problem.

00:13:02.520 | What are your thoughts on this?

00:13:03.400 | Just with an email or a conversation in the hallway or a Slack message, work can

00:13:07.600 | be dropped on anyone's plate by anyone at any time without anyone tracking.

00:13:10.800 | How much are you doing?

00:13:11.680 | Does it make sense for you to do more?

00:13:13.120 | Does it make sense what it is that you're working on?

00:13:15.400 | When are you going to work on this?

00:13:16.600 | What do you need to actually get this done?

00:13:18.160 | We don't have any of those conversations.

00:13:20.000 | We plug people into the cybernetic hive mind of Slack and email and zoom and say,

00:13:25.840 | get after it.

00:13:27.440 | And we end up with these completely overloaded task lists and ambiguity and

00:13:32.680 | stress.

00:13:33.160 | And I could care less if you tell me that my work week is supposed to end on

00:13:36.440 | Thursday or not.

00:13:37.040 | I have all this stuff.

00:13:37.920 | I have to get it done.

00:13:38.720 | So we need more humane and transparent systems.

00:13:41.120 | Here's how we keep track of what you're working on.

00:13:43.520 | We can see it.

00:13:44.960 | Here's how much we think you should have on your plate at any one time.

00:13:48.200 | You have too much.

00:13:48.840 | You get nothing more.

00:13:49.560 | Here is how we think you should actually execute the work.

00:13:53.640 | Well, this is what the mornings are for.

00:13:56.800 | These days are all just concentration.

00:13:58.400 | Meetings can only happen in these places.

00:13:59.920 | Transparency, so we can see the system and see the workloads.

00:14:03.320 | And humanity, which I mean, you are trying to align these systems to the way that

00:14:09.480 | the human brain actually functions.

00:14:10.880 | That's the reform we need.

00:14:12.320 | Ours is a knob that's relevant for the factory.

00:14:16.320 | Task assignment systems.

00:14:19.720 | That is the relevant knob for knowledge work.

00:14:22.760 | And there's all sorts of ideas here.

00:14:24.560 | Like poll systems is something I've advocated for.

00:14:26.880 | They do this in software.

00:14:28.360 | We could do this other places.

00:14:29.520 | Let me work on one thing at a time.

00:14:31.240 | When I'm done, I'll pull in a new thing.

00:14:32.920 | And you know what?

00:14:33.600 | My team or my boss or my supervisor can be involved in deciding on what that next

00:14:37.400 | thing should be, but I do one thing at a time.

00:14:39.480 | You cannot just throw things on my plate and have me organize it.

00:14:42.200 | I work on one thing at a time.

00:14:44.040 | We need a systemic collection mechanism for actually keeping track of all the

00:14:48.200 | things the company needs to do.

00:14:49.280 | Shouldn't just be in my inbox.

00:14:50.640 | Shouldn't just be on my task list.

00:14:52.360 | Protocols and processes that everyone agrees on.

00:14:55.280 | That's blessed by the head of the company, the head of your team.

00:14:59.080 | Protocols and processes for how regular ongoing work happens.

00:15:02.240 | This is the process we meet at these days.

00:15:06.000 | There's office hours you come into for short questions.

00:15:08.280 | Here's what email can and can't be used for.

00:15:10.280 | Again, just rock and rolling.

00:15:13.040 | Here's the tools.

00:15:13.880 | Here's your handle.

00:15:14.800 | Here's your address.

00:15:15.440 | Go for it.

00:15:16.080 | Doesn't work.

00:15:16.800 | Protocols and processes.

00:15:19.000 | In general, trading accountability for this accessibility that we've come to

00:15:26.080 | expect is what we would also want to get out of this.

00:15:28.360 | So forget this, like, let's just make everyone accessible and we'll

00:15:31.720 | sort of figure things out and make accountability be the new buzzword.

00:15:35.400 | We agreed what you're going to do.

00:15:37.120 | Did you do it?

00:15:37.640 | How well did you do it?

00:15:38.520 | What hours you did it?

00:15:40.360 | What days you did it?

00:15:41.200 | I don't care.

00:15:42.040 | That's not my business.

00:15:44.000 | That is something we could be moving towards.

00:15:45.760 | I think that's more natural for the type of work that we're

00:15:47.840 | doing in the knowledge sector.

00:15:49.960 | Let me throw out one more radical idea here.

00:15:52.400 | I don't think talking about the nature of the work week is that important, but I am

00:15:57.800 | kind of interested in talking about the nature of the work year, and I'm going to

00:16:03.080 | get into this a little bit later in the show, but we assume that the ideal work

00:16:10.920 | year for a knowledge worker is you work all year with the exception of maybe a

00:16:16.160 | vacation week here, a vacation week there.

00:16:17.800 | I think we need way more variety there.

00:16:20.800 | I mean, imagine a world in which there were alternatives.

00:16:25.680 | My engagement with this company is six months a year.

00:16:27.920 | My engagement for this company is it's eight months and four months off.

00:16:32.560 | My engagement is 11 months and I take one full month off.

00:16:37.040 | I mean, imagine if you had these different options and you had salaries.

00:16:41.440 | Adjusted and matching these different configurations, giving people way more

00:16:46.280 | flexibility in how they actually structure their lives.

00:16:50.280 | This could be a big thing.

00:16:52.560 | When I've asked this question before, and I think the answer is interesting.

00:16:56.520 | How many people today, if you said, would you be willing to take 10 12ths of your

00:17:02.360 | current salary if you didn't have to work in the summer, a lot of people say, of

00:17:06.200 | course, I will go from whatever, 150,000 to 125,000, 130,000, or what would,

00:17:14.240 | however the math works out there, I guess it's 120,000 there.

00:17:16.480 | If I also don't have to work in July and August, like that type of flexibility,

00:17:21.200 | we don't think about it, but it's another way to think about burnout, especially

00:17:24.560 | with jobs where when you're doing the work, it's incredibly intense.

00:17:28.400 | I mean, if I'm McKinsey or Wilmer Hale law firm, and like our whole model is

00:17:35.800 | bringing in incredibly smart people to work on these engagements that are

00:17:39.640 | incredibly demanding, we're trying to monetize their brains, you're probably

00:17:44.120 | gonna have a lot more sustainability.

00:17:45.600 | If you had these different options.

00:17:47.680 | Yeah.

00:17:47.800 | Here's someone who's going to come work for eight years, eight months, and then

00:17:49.920 | take four where they're not working and recharging and doing other sorts of

00:17:54.120 | things, you're going to probably keep that employee around for a lot longer

00:17:56.520 | than saying, look, we're doing a hundred hour weeks until your ears bleed.

00:17:58.720 | So I'll throw that out there too.

00:18:00.320 | All right.

00:18:01.920 | So I think those are the, those are the type of solutions that matter

00:18:04.600 | for knowledge, work burnout.

00:18:05.520 | So why is there so much energy behind the four day work week?

00:18:11.600 | Let's go back to that Wired article.

00:18:13.040 | And I think we can see some clues.

00:18:15.680 | All right.

00:18:17.440 | So quoting an employee from one of the companies that this reporter talked to

00:18:22.640 | said, this strategy shows that the company really does care.

00:18:27.960 | The reporter goes on to say this arrangement is a boon for businesses

00:18:35.120 | because you curry goodwill without raising pay, without decreasing workload.

00:18:40.440 | So this is what I think is going on with this.

00:18:43.240 | It's signaling, right?

00:18:46.440 | Oh, we care about our employees.

00:18:48.680 | We're doing radical things.

00:18:49.640 | This sounds radical.

00:18:50.480 | We're dropping a whole day off the work week.

00:18:52.040 | Even if what it really means is you do the same amount of work.

00:18:54.680 | You just maybe aren't allowed to schedule meetings on one day, but you have to do

00:18:58.400 | more work on the other day and they feel more packed, you end up in the same place.

00:19:02.040 | Right.

00:19:02.200 | It doesn't really change much.

00:19:03.840 | Like, look, we have no systematic way of tracking what you're supposed to be

00:19:08.960 | working on, what's a reasonable workload.

00:19:10.440 | That's not going to change.

00:19:11.560 | Your workload's not going to change.

00:19:12.840 | We don't have a system where we can turn that down by 20%.

00:19:15.840 | So yeah, we'll tell you, you get a Friday's off.

00:19:18.360 | Same stuff gets done.

00:19:19.760 | We look like we are being progressive.

00:19:22.040 | Uh, and I think they've done a pretty good job of selling this.

00:19:25.760 | They give a lot of more reform minded commentators or journalists, especially

00:19:31.240 | on Twitter who are like, this seems big.

00:19:33.520 | I like the idea of making a big change.

00:19:35.200 | They feel like it's sticking it to the companies and that feels good, but it's

00:19:38.040 | not really the whole thing I think is a PR exercise.

00:19:41.040 | We need real solutions and real solutions requires us to get to the very nature of

00:19:45.480 | how work actually happens in knowledge work.

00:19:48.400 | I don't care how many hours you tell me my work week is.

00:19:50.640 | I don't install tires on an assembly line.

00:19:54.720 | What I do is way more annoying and frustrating and vague and ambiguous.

00:19:58.000 | So you can keep your four day work week and let's talk about how you actually

00:20:02.760 | assign tasks, how much I should be working on, what are our protocols?

00:20:05.280 | What are our systems?

00:20:06.760 | So let's see.

00:20:09.840 | There you go.

00:20:10.560 | So we'll see.

00:20:11.120 | Uh, if you're interested, this is the type of thing I get into in my most

00:20:19.240 | recent book, a world without email.

00:20:21.320 | So if you want a deep dive on some of those issues, uh, I'm pulling

00:20:25.600 | from, from a lot of those thoughts.

00:20:26.840 | All right.

00:20:30.840 | We've got a good collection of questions.

00:20:32.640 | Let's get into them soon.

00:20:33.920 | First, speaking of work, we have to pay the bills.

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00:20:56.520 | instead make a secure encrypted connection to a VPN server, you tell that server

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00:21:18.720 | They don't get any of that.

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00:21:41.040 | So I'm surprised that more people don't use VPNs.

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00:22:44.840 | I also want to talk briefly about better help.

00:22:49.600 | Last week on this podcast, I discussed how I get anxious as we get near the fall

00:22:56.960 | because all of my organizational systems have to start getting turned

00:23:00.760 | on again as the workload increases.

00:23:03.240 | That's always a source of stress for me.

00:23:05.480 | Other people experience the fall in a similar way.

00:23:09.560 | It's stressful.

00:23:10.520 | It's back to school, work ramps up, people aren't on vacations anymore.

00:23:13.560 | It can be a stressful anxiety producing time.

00:23:17.640 | If this anxiety is a becoming a problem, if it's something that's uncomfortable,

00:23:21.240 | if it's something you wish didn't have to be such a big part of your life,

00:23:24.000 | therapy is something to consider.

00:23:27.040 | And if you're thinking of therapy, better help is a great option.

00:23:32.400 | It's convenient, accessible, affordable, and entirely online.

00:23:37.160 | You get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey and you can

00:23:41.120 | switch your therapist at any time.

00:23:45.040 | So if you want to get a better control over your anxiety, if you want to become

00:23:50.720 | a much better problem solver, therapy can help you get there.

00:23:55.000 | Visit betterhelp.com/deepquestions today to get 10% off your first month.

00:24:02.920 | That's betterhelp.com/deepquestions.

00:24:10.120 | All right.

00:24:12.000 | Well, Jesse, speaking of questions.

00:24:14.600 | What's the first question we have from one of our listeners?

00:24:17.640 | All right, here we go.

00:24:19.400 | We got a question from Wander.

00:24:21.520 | He's a financial advisor in Seattle.

00:24:23.640 | He goes on to say, "I have recently been granted a scholarship to do what is

00:24:27.760 | essentially a master's level program.

00:24:29.640 | This really puts me in a position of staring the productivity

00:24:34.840 | dragon in the face.

00:24:36.040 | My question is, what are some signs or smells I should watch out for that I

00:24:40.400 | would suspect I am doing too much and would benefit from scaling down my

00:24:44.640 | expectations?"

00:24:45.520 | Well, I appreciate the reprisal of the productivity dragon.

00:24:52.040 | That's from old, old school, old school deep questions, sort of the pre-Jesse days.

00:24:58.240 | We used to talk a lot about the productivity dragon.

00:25:00.560 | And for those who weren't listening to the show back then, the metaphor was pretty

00:25:04.120 | straightforward.

00:25:04.800 | When it comes to your workload, what's on your plate, the things you have to get

00:25:08.200 | done, the best thing to do is to confront it head on.

00:25:12.000 | That's what we used to call facing the productivity dragon.

00:25:15.080 | I'm not going to try to hide from it.

00:25:17.040 | I'm not going to try to pretend like I don't have too much to do.

00:25:19.160 | I'm not going to say, you know what, just let's just zone out tonight and look at

00:25:21.760 | the phone and, and I don't know, like stuff will get done.

00:25:24.720 | You look at it.

00:25:25.920 | Everything I need to get done, the time it's going to take, is this reasonable?

00:25:29.120 | What are we going to do about it?

00:25:30.120 | You have to face the productivity dragon.

00:25:31.880 | It's scary, but in the end, it's going to be a lot less stressful than trying to

00:25:36.520 | pretend like it's not up there on the metaphorical mountain with smoke

00:25:40.560 | billowing out of the cave.

00:25:42.840 | So what do you do when you, when you stare at the productivity

00:25:47.560 | dragon, uh, what are your options?

00:25:50.080 | You can walk the systems.

00:25:52.680 | All right.

00:25:54.200 | I'm going to need the, I need a better system for how I get this reoccurring work

00:25:57.400 | done.

00:25:57.560 | I need a better process for how I deal with the paperwork coming home from my kids'

00:26:01.600 | schools, whatever it is, you can make the systems better to reduce the fear or the

00:26:05.200 | impact of what you face.

00:26:06.880 | You can look at simplification.

00:26:08.200 | This is too much.

00:26:10.200 | This Scott's to go.

00:26:11.280 | This Scott's to go.

00:26:12.280 | I told you I could do this.

00:26:13.480 | I'm sorry.

00:26:14.000 | I can't.

00:26:14.640 | It is much easier to make these decisions when you see the whole picture before you,

00:26:20.240 | instead of just in the moment when you're dealing on something you're late at.

00:26:22.640 | And then finally, the best you can do is swing as in take a swing at it or swing

00:26:27.480 | your sword, which is okay.

00:26:28.760 | This just has to get done.

00:26:30.560 | I know it's hard, but I know what I need to do.

00:26:32.640 | And I'm going to just start swinging that sword, put my head down and get after it.

00:26:36.560 | So what's the right way to actually face the productivity dragon and make these

00:26:40.720 | decisions?

00:26:41.240 | I think and wonder, it's what I'll suggest for you is set up something like an

00:26:45.560 | autopilot schedule for the first month or so of you working on this new program.

00:26:50.880 | And this is where you're really trying to work out on your calendar.

00:26:53.440 | When and where various types of work that needs to get done is going to get done.

00:26:57.960 | When you're going to these classes, when you're doing the various school work that

00:27:02.400 | these classes are going to entail, where your normal work is happening, where the

00:27:05.720 | stuff outside of your work is happening, where your exercise is happening, your

00:27:08.880 | socialization, whatever else is happening, move these pieces around, make your

00:27:13.680 | calendar really crowded, experiment with your calendar to see how could you try to

00:27:17.800 | make everything fit?

00:27:19.480 | And I say, do this for about a month because it'll take about a month until you

00:27:23.960 | really understand all the different things going on in your new life.

00:27:26.960 | Now that you have these new obligations on your plate.

00:27:31.440 | Now you're going to tell, this is going to give you clear feedback.

00:27:33.560 | Does this fit?

00:27:34.480 | You find yourself moving all these pieces around in your calendar and running out of

00:27:39.880 | room, needing to grab late night spots or early morning spots.

00:27:43.320 | And it just doesn't look sustainable.

00:27:44.680 | It seems like a house of cards.

00:27:46.440 | You can barely get all these things to fit.

00:27:48.160 | There is your clear sign that you have to simplify.

00:27:50.800 | Okay.

00:27:52.360 | I have too much.

00:27:53.040 | I'm going to have to get rid of it.

00:27:53.960 | This exercise will also give you a lot of feedback about what to simplify, because

00:27:59.240 | as you're putting the pieces together, you're going to get a good intuition for

00:28:03.000 | what's really gunking up the works.

00:28:04.640 | And here's where you might say, you know what?

00:28:06.080 | Of all the various things going on, this obligation I agreed to.

00:28:10.800 | It's three times a week and it's at this four to five 30 slot.

00:28:15.680 | And I can't make the, uh, the new program work with that.

00:28:18.880 | Now I have to try to shift work into the evening and I have to drive over there.

00:28:21.520 | Like this is in the middle.

00:28:22.400 | If I didn't have this, I could make these three things fit.

00:28:24.320 | That's the type of insight you get when you actually see all the pieces laid out.

00:28:28.280 | So you can figure out, do you need to cut back?

00:28:30.000 | And if so, what are the things to cut back on?

00:28:32.880 | That's going to make the biggest difference.

00:28:34.600 | And then for what remains system, system systems, when do I do this work?

00:28:40.640 | How do I do this work?

00:28:41.480 | How do I organize things to minimize the impact for the coursework for the new

00:28:45.960 | course, go back and read one of my classic books, like how to become a straight A

00:28:50.040 | student, where we get into reducing friction, increasing effectiveness of how

00:28:54.400 | you actually organize intellectual material for scholastic ends.

00:28:58.560 | For your existing job, you should get into read deep work, read the type of

00:29:04.400 | things I talk about in my newsletter, calnewport.com.

00:29:07.680 | This is the time that tighten down the hatches to make sure the stuff that

00:29:10.320 | remains is not picking up more work than it does.

00:29:12.520 | So that is my suggestion.

00:29:14.960 | That's my suggestion for anyone who's worried about being overwhelmed.

00:29:18.240 | Autopilot schedule.

00:29:20.440 | When does all this work get done on a regular basis?

00:29:22.520 | Look at that to make your decision about, do I need to do something?

00:29:25.720 | And if I do, what needs to go?

00:29:28.600 | You want to pile a lot of stuff, right?

00:29:31.240 | Still.

00:29:31.840 | Yeah.

00:29:32.360 | Yeah.

00:29:32.920 | Yeah.

00:29:33.400 | Uh, I do, you know, I really try to figure out like with podcasting stuff, with

00:29:38.960 | exercise, with writing, writing for sure.

00:29:42.200 | Yeah.

00:29:42.520 | And so I get a very clear sense.

00:29:44.400 | I mean, I'm not just sort of making this advice up.

00:29:46.040 | I get a very clear sense of something's not working and, uh, and, and it's, it's,

00:29:51.360 | it's how I'm able to be very definitive in my scheduling.

00:29:53.960 | It's how I'm able to say, okay, I have these academic obligations.

00:29:59.080 | Let's say that are going to show up for the next three months.

00:30:01.000 | I see the pieces don't fit.

00:30:03.640 | I can't autopilot out the writing because I have courses here and here,

00:30:06.760 | and I'm doing this committee here.

00:30:08.080 | And so what I'm going to do is pull back on this and

00:30:11.280 | just be really clear about it.

00:30:12.800 | So, you know, I did something like this last spring semester.

00:30:16.440 | So, so at Georgetown, uh, spring semester is January through early May.

00:30:21.080 | And I saw the writing on the wall because I, I worked out my autopilot schedule.

00:30:24.560 | That I was teaching two classes and I was chairing a big committee.

00:30:29.040 | And then there was some other work I was doing as well.

00:30:31.760 | I was on another search committee, a lot of things fell and I was seeing, I can't

00:30:37.480 | autopilot out, for example, nearly enough time to do the type, the level of writing.

00:30:41.920 | I was doing, there's this like not the time for that there.

00:30:44.720 | And so seeing that reality facing that productivity drag, and I made the decision

00:30:48.880 | of, okay, I'm three months, three and a half months aggressively pulling back

00:30:53.480 | from the writing and then at the end of that aggressively turning on the throttle.

00:30:57.720 | So go back and look at my New Yorker archive.

00:30:59.400 | Piece, piece, piece, piece, piece up to January, then crickets.

00:31:05.200 | And then piece, piece, piece, piece, piece up to now.

00:31:08.440 | Right.

00:31:09.040 | Uh, same thing with my writing and my books.

00:31:11.200 | I sold a book during that period that was going to be a time for

00:31:15.880 | me to start writing in the summer.

00:31:18.160 | And so I was able to work around it and the definitive, this really matters.

00:31:21.320 | As the alternative, if you don't face a productivity, dragon is you try to write.

00:31:26.080 | So a counterfactual version of my life without facing the dragon

00:31:29.760 | would be, I'm trying to write.

00:31:31.280 | It's not working.

00:31:32.840 | I'm frustrated.

00:31:34.200 | My editors are frustrated.

00:31:36.120 | My book editors are frustrated.

00:31:37.600 | It's taken away from the work I'm supposed to be doing at Georgetown.

00:31:40.240 | I'm not doing that as well.

00:31:41.200 | Everyone is frustrated and I'm just stressed out all the time, but instead by

00:31:45.840 | facing the dragon and being definitive, I could do my work I'm doing well.

00:31:49.760 | And I could have extreme clarity to the people in my writing life.

00:31:53.600 | So they knew what was going on.

00:31:55.440 | And you, you probably remember that was a period where I, um, I, we really

00:32:00.000 | kind of tightened up the ship on the podcast recording.

00:32:02.040 | I mean, it was like, we need to get in, we need to do this.

00:32:04.600 | And I need to get out.

00:32:06.000 | And I was often, you know, in and out pretty aggressively.

00:32:09.920 | So in that period, do you write at all or do you just shelve it entirely?

00:32:13.360 | I mean, I still, uh, my weekly essay, roughly weekly essay that I write.

00:32:17.920 | So I write a weekly essay, you know, since 2007, I probably pulled that back to.

00:32:23.440 | Two times a month, but I still wrote that.

00:32:26.040 | So, and by the way, if you don't get that, you should, uh, calnewport.com.

00:32:29.640 | And I was still doing background research, thinking through what's going to happen

00:32:33.160 | on the books, doing background research, but it was, uh, the, the key points of

00:32:36.880 | the background research is self-paced non-urgent as I have time, keep reading.

00:32:42.480 | As I have time, do some walks to think about this and take notes.

00:32:45.720 | If I don't have time, it's not a big deal.

00:32:47.120 | No one's expecting anything.

00:32:48.120 | And I go back and forth and I'll do the same thing with research where I'll take,

00:32:52.440 | you know, a few months where I do no research and I'm just writing

00:32:55.080 | and then I bring it back in and not to get too specific about my

00:32:58.400 | eccentric life as a, as a professor writer.

00:33:00.640 | The general point here is you face the reality and then you work with it.

00:33:05.360 | And this is one of the ideas that is in my new book.

00:33:08.760 | I'm writing on slow productivity.

00:33:11.080 | Principle number two of the three I, uh, illustrate on slow productivity

00:33:15.840 | is work at a natural pace.

00:33:17.120 | And I'm getting better at this.

00:33:20.200 | It was hard for me, which is this notion of, especially with important work.

00:33:25.320 | It it's rarely just, I grind on it day after day, after day, month,

00:33:31.000 | after month, year, after year, it stuff has to ebb and flow in the shorter period.

00:33:35.160 | And that's okay.

00:33:36.440 | Zoom out, zoom out the five years and say, I published two or three books.

00:33:42.280 | Some articles I'm really proud of, did some great work at Georgetown,

00:33:45.320 | published some good academic pieces.

00:33:46.520 | It seems like a very productive period.

00:33:48.080 | Zoom into a particular month.

00:33:50.400 | Maybe you're only really working on one of those.

00:33:52.320 | Maybe this goes on the shelf for a while.

00:33:54.200 | And that more natural pace of things ebbing and flowing less

00:33:57.720 | things than any one time stretch out how things are, uh, the time period over

00:34:02.360 | which things are actually executed.

00:34:03.720 | I think it matters.

00:34:05.560 | Actually spending more time on something where you come and go can

00:34:08.120 | actually let it ripen some and add some depth or intellectual sophistication.

00:34:12.640 | So these are all things I myself am, I'm working on.

00:34:15.840 | So it's a good question.

00:34:18.920 | All right.

00:34:20.040 | What else we got here?

00:34:21.080 | Okay.

00:34:22.880 | Next question's from Noah.

00:34:24.160 | He asks, did the passion hypothesis originate from people who weren't able to

00:34:29.080 | find meaning in their life outside of work?

00:34:31.360 | Yeah, that's a good question.

00:34:33.040 | The passion hypothesis again, for people who don't know, it's from my

00:34:37.840 | 2012 book, So Good They Can't Ignore You.

00:34:41.000 | The passion hypothesis is a common belief about career satisfaction that says the

00:34:48.440 | way to really love your work is to step one, identify your natural, innate passion.

00:34:56.640 | Number two, match your work to that passion.

00:35:00.720 | That according to this theory, this hypothesis, that is where

00:35:03.800 | career satisfaction comes from.

00:35:04.960 | It's the match of the right job to your existing natural passion.

00:35:07.760 | This hypothesis is often summarized with the, the pithy

00:35:12.720 | career axiom, follow your passion.

00:35:15.240 | And so in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, I, I dismantle that.

00:35:19.640 | I say, this is not really where a passion for one's work comes from.

00:35:24.560 | It's, it's something that's cultivated over time.

00:35:26.800 | You don't start with the passion.

00:35:28.080 | Most people aren't wired for a particular job.

00:35:30.440 | You have to take a job that's available and transform it into a real

00:35:34.840 | source of meaning, et cetera, et cetera.

00:35:36.320 | Uh, we've talked about this ad nauseum.

00:35:38.520 | Maybe go back and listen to a recent episode, I think 210, where I get into

00:35:44.440 | like lifestyle centered career planning.

00:35:45.880 | I think that's pretty useful, but Noah's asking, okay, but

00:35:49.120 | who came up with this notion?

00:35:50.240 | This idea that you should follow your passion.

00:35:52.640 | Where did it come from?

00:35:54.200 | Uh, I got into this actually in So Good They Can't Ignore You.

00:35:57.120 | It's sort of an interesting story.

00:35:58.360 | The phrase follow your passion does not show up in the context of career advice

00:36:04.640 | as best I can tell until the late 1980s.

00:36:07.240 | You don't actually start to see follow your passion used frequently in the

00:36:12.640 | context of career advice until the 1990s.

00:36:15.480 | It's like when Jesse and I were kids, we were the first generation to really

00:36:19.640 | hear follow your passion frequently.

00:36:21.440 | So it's actually a relatively new concept.

00:36:24.200 | So I tried to trace its intellectual origins and I, and I had a couple

00:36:28.000 | of hypotheses of where this came from.

00:36:29.480 | I thought there was three things that came together in the period leading up

00:36:33.320 | to the late eighties and early nineties that helped spur this

00:36:35.640 | particular hypothesis into life.

00:36:37.400 | Uh, so number one, I think was Richard Bowles who wrote

00:36:41.160 | What Color Is Your Parachute.

00:36:42.720 | First came out in the early seventies, but gained in popularity

00:36:47.880 | in the decades that followed.

00:36:50.360 | What Color Is Your Parachute is a classic career book.

00:36:52.960 | It's one of the first career books to really focus on this question of you

00:36:58.480 | need to figure out what you want to do and then go out and figure

00:37:02.480 | out how to get that job.

00:37:03.200 | That seems really commonsensical to us today, but in 1970, for most people

00:37:10.160 | that really would have come across as somewhat exotic.

00:37:13.240 | I think most people, there was relatively prescribed paths based on where you

00:37:18.320 | lived, your socioeconomic status, what your parents did that was going to

00:37:22.800 | specify what you did for work.

00:37:24.680 | You know, I live in Flint, Michigan.

00:37:27.360 | I'm going to work at probably one of these factories or, you know,

00:37:31.080 | my dad's a doctor or a lawyer.

00:37:32.600 | So I'm going to become a doctor or a lawyer.

00:37:34.200 | It, it was more pragmatic.

00:37:36.200 | There's no sure that no, you should navel gaze and figure out what's

00:37:39.120 | going to make me happy and work.

00:37:40.280 | That was more new and Richard Bowles helped articulate that.

00:37:43.960 | Like, how do you figure out what it is you really want to do?

00:37:46.000 | So that was a very influential book that made a big difference.

00:37:50.120 | Element number two in the rise of the passion hypothesis, I believe is Joseph

00:37:55.880 | Campbell being interviewed by Bill Moyers.

00:37:58.400 | Now we're talking about the mid 1980s where there is this famous multi-part

00:38:04.000 | mini series on PBS called the power of myth where, where Bill Moyers interviewed

00:38:08.560 | the late great mythologist, Joseph Campbell at the George Lucas Skywalker

00:38:13.640 | ranch, and it was the most popular series in the history of PBS up to that time.

00:38:19.400 | And Campbell's a fascinating thinker, hero of a thousand faces, the hero's

00:38:22.920 | journey really influenced, for example, George Lucas and the structure of star

00:38:27.360 | wars, that's why they're at Skywalker ranch in that interview, in that interview,

00:38:32.920 | Campbell said the following, I have the transcript here.

00:38:34.960 | If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there

00:38:41.680 | all the while waiting for you.

00:38:42.880 | And the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living, whatever you

00:38:47.320 | are, if you are following your bliss, you're enjoying that refreshment, that

00:38:49.680 | life within you all the time.

00:38:50.960 | Follow your bliss was introduced in that interview, or at least I would say it's

00:38:55.560 | popularized that interview.

00:38:56.880 | And I think that was very influential.

00:38:58.560 | Follow your passion.

00:38:59.560 | I believe it's just a, a, a minor linguistic evolution from that phrase

00:39:04.440 | from 1985 to follow your bliss, right?

00:39:07.880 | So we have two things now, Richard Bowles teaches the country.

00:39:10.640 | You got to think hard about what you want to do.

00:39:12.800 | It's not just, well, of course, I'll be a lawyer.

00:39:14.280 | Of course, I'll go to work at the factory.

00:39:16.600 | Element two, we have this follow your bliss idea becoming very popular.

00:39:20.320 | Coming out of this PBS series.

00:39:23.120 | So those two things are coming together.

00:39:25.400 | And then the third element is just the economic backdrop of the seventies into

00:39:29.720 | the nineties.

00:39:30.360 | This is post industrialization in America, where we saw a big shift of our economy

00:39:34.520 | away from more of industrial manufacturing towards the knowledge sector.

00:39:39.120 | The knowledge sector, of course, is way more mobile, way more flexible and way

00:39:44.160 | less prescribed than the industrial sector.

00:39:47.440 | You would now travel potentially anywhere in the country to take a job.

00:39:51.600 | I'm going to go work at IBM's headquarters in New York or at the

00:39:54.320 | Rand corporation in California.

00:39:55.920 | I mean, suddenly work was very mobile.

00:39:57.400 | You could go really wherever to get these jobs.

00:39:59.320 | Knowledge work is more ambiguous and amorphous.

00:40:01.480 | So you have a general amount of training.

00:40:05.040 | I went to college.

00:40:05.960 | I can write, I'm generally a smart person and you're qualified for a myriad variety

00:40:12.240 | of jobs, right?

00:40:13.280 | And so, so there was way more choice in career.

00:40:16.240 | It was happening as a result of post industrialization and we have follow

00:40:19.600 | your bliss and we have Richard Bowles.

00:40:20.880 | Those are the ingredients that I think came together to create follow your

00:40:25.400 | passion as a relatively new piece of career advice.

00:40:28.720 | Some people ask me if the Catholic notion of calling having a calling was this

00:40:35.840 | involved in it too, and I think not the much older concept, uh, the theological

00:40:41.200 | notions of callings, like you'll see in Catholic theology have way more of

00:40:45.560 | an element of sacrifice in it.

00:40:47.200 | So it's really not about self-actualization in the sense of proximate reward.

00:40:52.440 | I will feel happy today because I'm doing what I'm meant to do.

00:40:55.680 | Typically the theological notions of calling was more about, let's say

00:40:59.200 | actualization in the, in the sense of better alignment with God and the

00:41:03.880 | structure of the universe callings could be very onerous.

00:41:06.600 | I'm going to do this because it's what God requires of me.

00:41:10.000 | So it's much less self-focus and self-actualization focused, and

00:41:13.760 | it's been around for a long time.

00:41:15.040 | Follow your passion did not come along until the eighties and nineties.

00:41:18.600 | So those are the, those are the three factors I think played into it.

00:41:20.720 | And the only reason why I emphasize that is because it's new and that should give

00:41:25.560 | you confidence when you say, maybe there's a more sophisticated core to the story.

00:41:29.680 | The story of my working life, when you realize how new and somewhat arbitrary

00:41:33.840 | follow your passion is you become willing to say, let's step back and say, is that

00:41:39.120 | really going to be what guides me in my career journey or will I have a more

00:41:44.400 | sophisticated take of cultivating a career and cultivating meaning?

00:41:48.520 | There you go.

00:41:50.120 | That's my best guess on where the passion hypothesis came from.

00:41:52.680 | All right, Jesse, what do we got?

00:41:56.200 | All right.

00:41:57.320 | Next question is from Marlo.

00:41:58.800 | He's an emergency physician, single dad, and also has an administrative

00:42:03.080 | role as a EMS medical director.

00:42:06.240 | He feels like one of his greatest challenges is implementing a fixed

00:42:09.240 | schedule because his schedule is always changing.

00:42:12.200 | For instance, if he spends like a shift from 9am to 6pm on a clinical shift, it's

00:42:17.240 | then hard to figure out what he, when he can do the admin work.

00:42:19.760 | So he's asking what are the best ways for people who don't have a fixed schedule to

00:42:23.960 | get the benefits of fixed schedule productivity?

00:42:26.480 | Well, Marlo, let's do a little terminology clarification.

00:42:30.520 | Fixed scheduled productivity in the sort of universe of my ideas is a really

00:42:36.000 | specific concept where you, you fix a workday hours, like I work during these

00:42:41.040 | hours and then work backwards to make sure that your work stays contained in those

00:42:45.800 | hours.

00:42:46.240 | So it's a, it's a specific productivity strategy.

00:42:48.600 | I'm not sure if that's what you mean.

00:42:50.400 | When you reference fixed schedule, I don't know if that's what you mean or if

00:42:53.600 | what you mean is something more like a time block scheduled or a pre-planned

00:42:56.960 | schedule, or maybe something like an autopilot schedule.

00:42:59.320 | So I'm just going to throw in that caveat that some of these terms mean things

00:43:02.920 | specific in my universe, and it might not be the same thing that you mean here.

00:43:06.840 | So let's, let's try to clarify this question to my job is demanding.

00:43:13.480 | My shifts are demanding, and I don't really know when to get the other type of

00:43:17.160 | work, like admin work on my plate done.

00:43:19.000 | So let's simplify it to that.

00:43:21.200 | Well, let's face the productivity dragon here.

00:43:24.400 | What is the admin work you have to do?

00:43:27.640 | How much is it?

00:43:30.720 | Let's think about the systems and processes and protocols and make sure you're not

00:43:33.800 | leaving efficiency on the table here, but once you're careful about this work, how

00:43:39.080 | much time do you need to do it?

00:43:40.120 | And let's not, let's not run away from that answer.

00:43:44.520 | Right.

00:43:46.160 | And maybe the answer is something like, I honestly need two full half days to get

00:43:51.400 | this done.

00:43:51.840 | So then you have to ask, do I have two full half days?

00:43:54.640 | And if not, that's a problem.

00:43:55.640 | If you do find them autopilot them, put them aside.

00:43:58.320 | Problem solved.

00:43:59.520 | If you don't, let's move on to step two, which is okay.

00:44:01.960 | You face the dragon and you realize you can't slay it with what you have.

00:44:05.320 | There's too much on your plate.

00:44:07.280 | So something has to give either you have to drop a shift or you have to drop the

00:44:13.800 | admin role.

00:44:14.520 | I know it's always better in people's minds to not give up anything, but this is

00:44:19.560 | the, the core requirement of facing a productivity dragon is to see how much work

00:44:26.160 | do I actually have to do?

00:44:27.360 | Can I get this done?

00:44:29.280 | If I'm careful, can I get this done in a way that is sustainable, that I'm happy

00:44:33.200 | to live this way?

00:44:33.960 | And if not, then something has to go and it might mean less money, or it might mean

00:44:37.040 | this particular career trajectory you had to become the, uh, the chief attending at

00:44:41.600 | your hospital's ER.

00:44:42.680 | Maybe you can't do that path anymore because you have to step away from this

00:44:46.360 | extra admin role because you can't make it work, but you know what?

00:44:48.960 | That's not a tragedy.

00:44:50.880 | Figure out a different path, change your plan, go back and do some lifestyle,

00:44:56.320 | messenger career planning.

00:44:57.160 | Here's what my, what my lifestyle to be like.

00:44:59.000 | Oh, I can't really get there this way because it's just too much work, um, to be

00:45:04.320 | sustainable in my lifestyle.

00:45:06.400 | I vision doesn't have this much work.

00:45:07.560 | So let me come up with a different thing I can do, which in your case with this

00:45:10.840 | very powerful leverage, which is you are a well-trained doctor in E R's, which is

00:45:15.800 | incredibly in demand.

00:45:16.800 | You have so many options, so many places you can go.

00:45:18.840 | So many people who will throw money at you to come do shifts or whatever.

00:45:22.280 | You have a huge amount of flexibility.

00:45:24.240 | You're not talking about your family starving.

00:45:26.080 | If you try to change anything here.

00:45:27.400 | And so this just comes back to the bigger point.

00:45:29.720 | When you face the dragon, you have to be ready for what you find.

00:45:32.160 | So hopefully you'll find.

00:45:33.280 | All right.

00:45:34.880 | I see how my shifts are, what days I have free when I'm sleeping off the night

00:45:38.240 | shifts, you know what?

00:45:39.240 | Thursdays are my best bet.

00:45:41.640 | That's an admin day, or you figure out you have to take something back, but don't

00:45:44.920 | pretend like the dragon's not there.

00:45:46.440 | Don't minimize it.

00:45:47.600 | Don't hope that it will go away.

00:45:49.400 | So we haven't done a call in a while.

00:45:50.920 | Yeah.

00:45:52.080 | It's time for a call.

00:45:53.240 | Yeah.

00:45:53.560 | Let's hear someone's voice.

00:45:54.600 | We have a Kevin from Minnesota.

00:45:57.000 | Excellent.

00:45:57.760 | Basically asking about when's a good time to rest.

00:46:02.160 | When you're dead, Kevin.

00:46:04.960 | This is Kevin from Minnesota.

00:46:06.680 | I'm a bit of a writer and a teacher and a learner and love the deep questions

00:46:13.000 | podcast.

00:46:13.720 | And here is my question for you.

00:46:16.000 | I always appreciate how you put hard edges on topics and nuances that help us

00:46:21.680 | improve.

00:46:23.040 | And my question is, how do you know when it's time to rest?

00:46:26.560 | And I mean, in terms of the work itself.

00:46:28.680 | So sometimes you get a little fatigued and whether it's writing or some other

00:46:33.040 | piece of work, and I don't know whether I can push ahead and get it done or it's

00:46:38.200 | time to just put it aside for a day or two and let it kind of go.

00:46:42.600 | So love to get your nuances and if you will, a little more edge on thinking of the

00:46:46.720 | question about how do you know when it's time to stop, pause on something versus

00:46:52.640 | push through and get it done.

00:46:53.840 | Thanks.

00:46:54.480 | Well, yeah, Kevin, there's a couple of facets to this.

00:46:58.520 | So how do you know when to take a break from a particular thing you're working

00:47:03.080 | on?

00:47:03.280 | There's a physical facet.

00:47:04.680 | So know your body, know your mind.

00:47:07.640 | I mean, if you're feeling something, you know, you're feeling something.

00:47:10.360 | So know your body, know your mind.

00:47:11.800 | I mean, if you're feeling, if you're tired, if you're sick, you can just feel

00:47:16.000 | that you're not getting traction.

00:47:17.160 | Even that you do your rituals, you get into the work, it's time blocked and not

00:47:20.520 | much traction is coming on.

00:47:21.640 | Then you need to give your brain a break.

00:47:23.280 | All right.

00:47:24.280 | So, so I think there's the physical aspect to it.

00:47:26.440 | There's also the, I would say the non-physical sort of creativity aspect to

00:47:31.800 | it.

00:47:31.960 | I'm not quite sure what the right word to use here.

00:47:33.600 | So let's just use creativity, which is you feel fine.

00:47:36.400 | You're not sick, you're not tired.

00:47:39.200 | But you're not, you're not rolling.

00:47:41.400 | You're not making traction.

00:47:42.520 | Like for me, what this looks like with let's say article writing and I have a

00:47:48.080 | relevant story that just happened to me, I think is relevant to this is you know, I

00:47:53.800 | feel fine.

00:47:54.120 | So I'm working, I'm writing, but it's not jelling.

00:47:57.160 | It's just, I'm, I'm, I'm going through the motions of like, I need to get this

00:48:01.280 | done by this point.

00:48:02.160 | That's my weekly plan.

00:48:03.320 | That's part of this bigger strategic plan.

00:48:04.680 | I need to get this article draft done and I'm writing, writing, writing, but I know

00:48:07.600 | it's not working.

00:48:08.320 | And for me, I feel it as a physical unease.

00:48:11.160 | This is how I am with writing.

00:48:12.120 | If it's not completely, if it's not working, it just doesn't feel right.

00:48:15.640 | So there's this creativity, cognitive aspect.

00:48:18.120 | And again, without giving too much details about things in progress, which I always

00:48:22.600 | try to be very careful about keeping, you know, private, I've been working on an

00:48:29.400 | article and I was just locked in, like, I need to get this done because I have this

00:48:34.360 | whole strategic plan of finish it this week so I can start on this next week,

00:48:37.720 | et cetera.

00:48:38.920 | I ground it out.

00:48:39.560 | I felt fine.

00:48:40.040 | So I ground it out and a thing ballooned 7,000 words and it's for a magazine, right.

00:48:46.040 | And it just, it wasn't working.

00:48:48.360 | It just wasn't working, you know?

00:48:50.320 | And I, I, at some point I said, okay, I got to pull the rip cord on this.

00:48:54.840 | Take a couple of days off, take a weekend off, come back to it fresh.

00:48:57.800 | I came back to it fresh and, uh, hand grenaded the thing in the fragments, took

00:49:02.120 | the fragments I liked re rewrote it from scratch, took me an extra week, but it's

00:49:06.720 | much closer to where it should be.

00:49:08.160 | So that's the other fear is like, I have energy, but my mind's just not there.

00:49:13.560 | And there that's another instance where you say, I need to step back, take a

00:49:16.240 | couple of days, come back, come back out this fresh.

00:49:18.800 | And in this case, it was a walk.

00:49:21.400 | I took two days off and in one walk, 20 minutes long, I just, the structure,

00:49:27.040 | the structure fell into place.

00:49:28.720 | It was like, Oh yeah, cut that, cut that, cut that.

00:49:31.000 | Start on this intertwined this, make that shorter.

00:49:33.480 | At 20 minutes, the whole thing was redone.

00:49:36.280 | But I think without the 48 hours before that 20 minutes, I wouldn't

00:49:40.160 | have been able to have the insight.

00:49:41.040 | So Kevin, uh, that's what I would suggest.

00:49:44.040 | Physical, physical fatigue.

00:49:46.320 | You gotta, you know, your body, you're not going to get anything by forcing it

00:49:49.440 | through except for more tiredness, prolonged sickness and work you're not

00:49:53.440 | proud of, but then also critique creative fatigue, give yourself a couple of days.

00:49:59.000 | Come at it, come at it fresh.

00:50:00.760 | All right.

00:50:01.760 | So good luck.

00:50:03.040 | Good luck with your writing.

00:50:04.320 | All right.

00:50:08.120 | Ooh, what do we got next?

00:50:09.760 | All right.

00:50:10.800 | Next question is from Mika.

00:50:12.280 | As a professor who studies distributed systems, what do you think about local

00:50:17.280 | first software implemented using conflict-free replicated data types?

00:50:22.800 | Do you think this is a technology that will be more important in the future?

00:50:26.480 | Well, a, a sexy topic.

00:50:29.520 | I don't even know what half those words mean.

00:50:33.400 | But I had a dollar for every time Jesse and I've just been hanging out in the

00:50:36.320 | studio and he's like, let me tell you, and don't get me started, but let me tell you

00:50:40.680 | what I think about conflict-free replicated data types.

00:50:42.680 | I mean, I would have a lot of dollars.

00:50:44.560 | Um, I'm going to tackle this a, because I'm a nerd and I want to hat tip.

00:50:49.360 | I am actually a know quite a bit about the mathematics between distributed

00:50:55.840 | data structures and the provable reduction or elimination of conflict.

00:50:59.960 | So it is a really cool topic, but I'm not going to nerd out too much on it.

00:51:04.240 | I'm going to use it instead to pivot into a, a, a brief little

00:51:08.520 | future of work fugue here.

00:51:12.160 | So, uh, I think no, in the longterm, we are not going to see this, uh, CRDT or

00:51:20.840 | however, your abbreviate CFR DT model taking over.

00:51:24.400 | So the key thing to know about this for the non nerd listener is this is a model

00:51:29.520 | where instead of everything being stored in the cloud, and so when you're doing

00:51:33.920 | any sort of work, like on your Google doc or something, it's all stored in the

00:51:37.040 | cloud and you're just talking to the cloud servers and it's updating your

00:51:39.800 | document up in the cloud and everyone can access in the cloud in the model that,

00:51:43.360 | uh, Mika is talking about.

00:51:44.800 | The data is on local people store it local.

00:51:47.600 | They do work on it locally, no internet connection.

00:51:49.680 | And if multiple people are collaborating on the same, uh, Document, then like later

00:51:55.200 | on, they can reconcile the stuff they did.

00:51:58.640 | So when they want to connect to the internet, they can kind of reconcile

00:52:00.720 | and update their local copy.

00:52:01.840 | So sort of any old coder, old school coder, who's used to conflicts and, uh,

00:52:08.320 | CVS, et cetera, this all sounds familiar.

00:52:10.920 | I don't think it's going to be the future.

00:52:13.120 | I think the future is actually gonna be the opposite.

00:52:14.920 | I think we're going to see in consumer computation, a move towards

00:52:19.880 | virtualization and the same that we see with commercial computation.

00:52:24.960 | We're gonna see more and more of the computation behind the things you are

00:52:27.720 | interacting with in your day-to-day life, your phone videos, video games, more of

00:52:33.760 | that computation is going to happen, not on a device that you hold, but

00:52:36.640 | in a server farm somewhere.

00:52:37.760 | All right.

00:52:39.480 | And what you're going to, what you're going to have is a interface devices.

00:52:43.680 | It's like a screen, basically a glorified screen.

00:52:48.160 | I think this is clearly going to be the future of computation and

00:52:52.640 | it has a lot of big implications.

00:52:54.160 | There's going to be two phases to this future.

00:52:56.240 | Uh, the first phase, which we're getting close to is where the wireless

00:53:00.720 | internet you have access to is sufficiently fast to send screens.

00:53:04.600 | Right.

00:53:05.840 | So here's what I mean by that.

00:53:07.480 | If I have a good enough internet connection that you can, you can send to

00:53:11.000 | me exactly what to show on my screen and all the computation of what's being put

00:53:17.080 | on that screen is done at a server somewhere far away.

00:53:19.720 | Now, all I need is the device that is capable of connecting to the internet,

00:53:24.320 | receiving these images, what should be on my screen and puts them on the screen.

00:53:27.920 | So like, for example, you're playing a video game.

00:53:29.800 | If we had a good enough internet connection that the, uh, call of duty or

00:53:35.200 | whatever is running on a server somewhere.

00:53:36.960 | And all that high end graphics that are being generated is

00:53:39.560 | happening on a server somewhere.

00:53:40.840 | And all I'm being sent over the internet is what my screen should look like.

00:53:44.360 | Just the pictures of what should be on the screen.

00:53:46.280 | I don't need a essentially personal supercomputer.

00:53:51.320 | Like what you have, if you have a modern PlayStation or X-Box generating

00:53:54.720 | and doing all these graphics, we can have a whole bank of these supercomputers

00:53:58.960 | somewhere that's doing that work and just showing me the screen.

00:54:02.480 | Same thing for anything, right?

00:54:04.760 | I, okay.

00:54:05.400 | I want to use a Photoshop or something.

00:54:07.760 | I don't need to run any sort of image processing on my computer and

00:54:10.680 | have all these different options that can all live in Adobe's cloud somewhere.

00:54:13.480 | All I need to see is as I click the mouse that goes back to the servers, they

00:54:18.160 | update things, they send you back what your screen should look like, right?

00:54:20.520 | So the first shift we're going to see as internet connections get

00:54:22.960 | sufficiently reliably fast enough.

00:54:25.160 | As a move towards what you can think of as like visually advanced terminals.

00:54:31.120 | Just it's a screen and a chip that just displays graphics

00:54:36.080 | that receives with the internet.

00:54:36.960 | There's huge advantages to this.

00:54:39.240 | Right?

00:54:40.440 | Uh, advantage number one, of course, is now you don't have to worry about

00:54:43.760 | software software versioning.

00:54:45.040 | You can just constantly be updating the software running in the cloud.

00:54:47.800 | Version two, uh, advantage two is you can have incredibly powerful computation.

00:54:51.200 | So now you can have like in your video games, they could be using the world's

00:54:55.280 | best graphic card banks, and you can get a, maybe a fidelity that, that you.

00:55:00.080 | Be too expensive to get that much computational power in your own tower.

00:55:04.760 | Right?

00:55:04.960 | So you now have access to incredibly powerful computation.

00:55:08.040 | If I want to do a video editing, for example, that if that's all happening,

00:55:12.840 | the cloud is just sending me back and forth what I should see on my screen.

00:55:16.240 | I don't have to worry like everyone else does about how much memory

00:55:19.280 | do I have on my computer?

00:55:20.240 | How slow is my video editing?

00:55:21.560 | You'll be able to video edit as if you're on the fastest

00:55:24.840 | of professional computers.

00:55:25.880 | So that makes a lot of sense.

00:55:27.000 | Uh, and then three it's better battery usage.

00:55:29.000 | If all my device is doing is displaying screens that are being

00:55:34.440 | sent to me over the internet.

00:55:36.000 | I can have a chip that is optimized to do exactly that.

00:55:40.240 | And if optimized chips can sit power, like I have a dedicated low power

00:55:44.160 | chip that just talks to the internet and passes along to images, to the,

00:55:47.440 | the custom circuitry that just decompresses and displays them.

00:55:51.320 | So I think that's inevitable.

00:55:53.040 | Milestone two is augmented reality.

00:55:58.200 | So then once we get augmented reality at a sufficiently usable level.

00:56:04.560 | And Zuckerberg.

00:56:06.840 | So, so Jesse sent me an interview, uh, with Mark Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan show.

00:56:11.000 | I was thinking about this as you're speaking.

00:56:12.880 | Yep.

00:56:13.120 | Yeah.

00:56:13.480 | And he, he gets in, he he's, he's talking through their AR strategy.

00:56:16.720 | So Facebook's thinking about this, by the way, just an aside, Jesse, I

00:56:19.920 | don't know if you noted this.

00:56:20.760 | He so much corporate speak with Mark Zuckerberg, um, steadfastly refused to

00:56:28.400 | really reference any other company or product in the market.

00:56:31.520 | So I don't, he was talking about augmented reality and he's like, well,

00:56:35.120 | here's like where we are.

00:56:36.200 | He would only talk about Facebook.

00:56:37.360 | He wouldn't note that magic leap exists as like $3 billion in investment and have

00:56:42.440 | a product that's like way more advanced than these Ray-Ban smart glasses that

00:56:45.880 | Facebook produce, they don't mention Microsoft's hollow lens, which has given

00:56:50.080 | a reasonable, uh, anyways, that's another, that's another aside.

00:56:53.400 | The bigger point being is the big players are thinking about this, but when

00:56:56.800 | augmented reality gets good enough.

00:56:58.680 | It's in a completely normal form factor and you have a wide field of view.

00:57:04.280 | And then even the, the visually enhanced terminals are unnecessary.

00:57:09.920 | So I can make a screen anywhere and all my AR device does is communicate.

00:57:15.440 | Do the servers where they send you, here's what you should be seeing all

00:57:19.840 | the computations done on the servers.

00:57:21.240 | And it just has to display it into the world around you.

00:57:24.000 | So now if I want to make a, play a video game, I can just open a screen anywhere

00:57:29.240 | and run any program on it.

00:57:30.440 | Watch any movie, play any video game, just stretch with my hands.

00:57:33.840 | There it is.

00:57:34.360 | Need to make a phone call.

00:57:35.920 | I don't have a phone with software on it.

00:57:37.880 | I just stretch open a screen, go through my contacts, click something.

00:57:41.600 | All that software is actually running on these high end

00:57:44.480 | virtualized servers somewhere.

00:57:45.600 | It will be the end of consumer electronics as a hardware business.

00:57:49.320 | I think this is a going to be hugely disruptive.

00:57:52.040 | I don't think people have followed this thread of thought through too much,

00:57:54.240 | but this is how it's going to happen.

00:57:55.400 | Dumb terminals is going to, uh, help innovate all the technology needed to,

00:58:00.640 | in a low power and efficient way, stream screens, then AR is going to get rid of

00:58:04.920 | this temporary period of having these dumb terminals, just say, let's just do it.

00:58:07.760 | All in the glasses.

00:58:09.320 | So it'll be very disruptive economically because Samsung goes away.

00:58:13.560 | Uh, Apple goes away.

00:58:16.960 | Right.

00:58:17.640 | I mean, major disruptive things, Foxconn.

00:58:20.560 | We don't need those factories.

00:58:22.920 | There's only one device to make it's the glasses.

00:58:25.240 | We don't have to make 50 different types of smartphones and tablets.

00:58:28.800 | So I think it's gonna be hugely disruptive.

00:58:30.200 | It's probably the more efficient way.

00:58:33.160 | Does I mean, consumer electronics, what's the more efficient way to do this?

00:58:36.240 | Even just thinking from like energy consumption is probably to have giant

00:58:40.200 | warehouses of incredibly optimized machines, virtualizing hardware is way

00:58:45.720 | more efficient than everyone has their own collection of batteries,

00:58:48.960 | chips, and glowing screens.

00:58:50.880 | So it's probably a more efficient way to do this, but it's

00:58:52.520 | going to be very disruptive.

00:58:53.440 | And so Micah, that's our Mika.

00:58:55.360 | That's why I answered your sort of very technical question about, uh, data

00:59:00.080 | structures is so I could ignore it and then pivot into a rant about the future

00:59:04.680 | technology.

00:59:06.120 | All right.

00:59:06.720 | I always, I fit those in, I sneak those in.

00:59:09.600 | They're great.

00:59:10.200 | I love when you riff on that, not really relevant to living your life in a deeper

00:59:14.600 | way, but like I, so I have to kind of sneak them in, but I do Zuckerberg was

00:59:18.400 | talking about, you know, no need for like the rectangular screen and yeah, he, he

00:59:23.600 | doesn't seem as, um, I want him to like be more ambitious about this, but I did

00:59:27.280 | think it was important how he was talking about, you did get that sense that

00:59:30.360 | virtual reality, which they're all in, in, it's just a, it's a, it's a, it's a

00:59:33.880 | whole, it's all in, in it's just a step towards that, that future.

00:59:38.680 | Yeah.

00:59:39.640 | So that'll be interesting.

00:59:41.680 | All right.

00:59:43.360 | So it is the first episode in September to come out.

00:59:49.080 | So as is my tradition, speaking of segments that aren't directly related to

00:59:53.800 | help you live your life deeper, as is my tradition, these traditions are going to

00:59:56.720 | live on Jessie.

00:59:57.400 | Uh, I talk about the books I read the month before.

01:00:01.280 | I briefly mentioned the five books I read in August of 2022.

01:00:07.560 | Now I have to say this list is a summer list.

01:00:11.520 | So a warning, it's very much influenced by the fact that I was on vacation.

01:00:16.960 | So you're going to see, uh, the beginning of the list is vacation books.

01:00:21.360 | And then the other part of the list is I got back from vacation.

01:00:25.040 | All right.

01:00:25.320 | So let me start with golden.

01:00:27.800 | I mentioned this on the show before 2016 book by Matthew Parker.

01:00:33.480 | This is a book about Ian Fleming, the novelist who created James Bond about

01:00:39.560 | the house he built in Jamaica and its influence that his time in Jamaica and

01:00:45.880 | its influence on the James Bond series.

01:00:49.600 | Uh, it's a British book, very deeply researched.

01:00:52.720 | I learned quite a bit about late stage colonial England, what happened in

01:00:59.360 | Jamaica, how that country was transformed.

01:01:01.880 | You get a lot of interesting context and a lot of tidbits about how, uh,

01:01:05.760 | Fleming and his life is basically a biography of Fleming is basically a

01:01:08.680 | biography of, uh, late stage colonialism in the British empire, all mixed up into

01:01:14.840 | this package, a very ambitious book.

01:01:16.680 | Yeah, that's interesting.

01:01:17.880 | Also a lot of good, uh, you know, uh, cabin.

01:01:22.200 | What you might call, there's a book called cabin porn, where it's

01:01:25.760 | just pictures of beautiful cabins.

01:01:27.280 | This is sort of like deep work, writing porn, right?

01:01:29.480 | It's, uh, on a bluff writing over a cove that you snorkel in every day.

01:01:34.360 | So you get a lot of that too.

01:01:35.240 | One interesting point to say about that book, when Ian Fleming is a reveal in

01:01:41.280 | the book, when Ian Fleming, uh, left the service after the war, so world war II,

01:01:45.280 | you know, he was obviously like in the military and that's where he was

01:01:48.440 | stationed in Jamaica briefly.

01:01:49.640 | That's how he found out about it.

01:01:50.720 | And that's why he built his house there.

01:01:52.000 | He got a job after the war with a newspaper group that owned the Sunday

01:01:56.400 | times and he was the manager coordinator of foreign correspondents.

01:02:00.280 | His contract he negotiated included three months vacation a year.

01:02:03.920 | So that's how he could go to Jamaica every winter.

01:02:07.040 | It's just, this is contract.

01:02:08.160 | He was like, I just had gone in the winter.

01:02:09.640 | So, I mean, of course, uh, this is British class privilege at its finest.

01:02:18.280 | You could just imagine his boss being like, good show old chop.

01:02:20.680 | Yes.

01:02:21.080 | Uh, you'd go away in the, in the winter.

01:02:23.520 | You can't, you can't work then.

01:02:25.720 | By the way, spot on English accent.

01:02:28.200 | Very good.

01:02:29.040 | Very good.

01:02:29.320 | Just the Scotland sounds identical.

01:02:30.960 | Exactly.

01:02:31.800 | I would pass as a native in Scotland.

01:02:34.120 | Um, but I mentioned this earlier in the show.

01:02:36.760 | Yeah, right now you have to be like a pseudo aristocrat in 19, late

01:02:41.520 | 1940s Britain to get a contract like that.

01:02:43.720 | But why is that not more common?

01:02:46.600 | Like, why is if you're Facebook, are you not trying to attract

01:02:50.320 | engineers by saying, Hey, and if you're willing to do nine 12ths of the salary,

01:02:54.640 | you can take three months off a year.

01:02:55.960 | You would get more people.

01:02:57.040 | We need more variety like this.

01:02:58.600 | That should not be so rare.

01:02:59.800 | So there we go.

01:03:01.160 | All right.

01:03:01.640 | Book number two.

01:03:02.320 | So I read gold and I said, well, I better read a James Bond book.

01:03:04.920 | I'm reading about his house.

01:03:07.800 | I know so much about Fleming.

01:03:08.880 | I was on vacation at the time.

01:03:09.960 | It's like, I should probably read a James Bond book.

01:03:11.320 | Interesting observation.

01:03:13.040 | They're temporarily not available on Kindle.

01:03:17.280 | I don't really know what's going on here.

01:03:18.480 | Just a standard James Bond book.

01:03:20.560 | American translations are not available on Kindle.

01:03:23.320 | I think there was a, there's been a transfer of rights.

01:03:26.000 | I think something about Amazon buying Paramount and maybe Paramount owns the

01:03:30.720 | rights and there's some, I saw something I should look into this deeper.

01:03:33.960 | I saw something about there.

01:03:35.880 | Maybe they're reformatting and going to republish these, but

01:03:38.160 | it was very hard to find.

01:03:38.960 | So I basically got a pirated copy.

01:03:40.480 | The only one I could find on my Kindle, because I was on vacation.

01:03:42.640 | So I, and I didn't want to, I couldn't just Amazon a book.

01:03:45.800 | The only one I could find is basically a pirated E-copy of Moonraker.

01:03:49.440 | It's one of the early, it's a 1960s James Bond novel.

01:03:54.320 | Interesting point, two interesting points about it.

01:03:57.560 | One, it has the first third of the book is James Bond playing bridge

01:04:05.760 | at a fancy club in London.

01:04:07.800 | Second two thirds of the book, he is at a high-tech missile installation.

01:04:14.440 | Trying to stop a villain from dropping a nuclear bomb on London.

01:04:18.880 | So it seems a little incongruous.

01:04:20.280 | I looked into it.

01:04:20.960 | It turns out Moonraker was based off a teleplay that Fleming wrote

01:04:24.480 | about the missile and this or that.

01:04:25.840 | It wasn't long enough.

01:04:26.480 | Was it long enough when he translated to a book?

01:04:28.720 | Like this is not, we can't, it's not long enough to sell us a novel.

01:04:31.560 | So he's like, well, I'll just add a, a scene, extended scene where

01:04:34.800 | he plays bridge with the villain.

01:04:37.240 | And you know what?

01:04:37.800 | It's a great scene.

01:04:38.920 | Like the whole premise of the scene is the villains cheating and M as

01:04:42.320 | Bond come figure out how he's cheating and they get into all this is so

01:04:45.520 | Fleming, all of the details of this very fancy upper crust club and the

01:04:49.120 | food and how they, and the specific drinks that they're drinking and

01:04:53.280 | sort of classic Fleming point.

01:04:54.800 | Number two, it's a surprisingly modern techno thriller.

01:04:59.000 | I think we give credit to Crichton.

01:05:00.800 | We give credit to Clancy is sort of inventing the genre of high, high

01:05:05.240 | pace adventure type thrilling thriller writing that has a lot of technology.

01:05:08.720 | Moonraker feels like it could have been from that same genre.

01:05:13.520 | I mean, it's a lot of the technology of the missiles and how it's going to work.

01:05:18.000 | There's these details involved of it reads like a modern techno thriller.

01:05:21.600 | I don't think Fleming gets enough credit for techno thriller writing.

01:05:24.920 | I had, I guess I had assumed that James Bond books were going to be a little

01:05:27.920 | bit more like British and ornate and, or maybe like a little bit more, a little

01:05:33.360 | bit more sort of classic spy type writing where you have the sort of spy who came

01:05:38.800 | out of the cold Alistair McLean style writing.

01:05:40.640 | No, it reads like Crichton this missile and whatever.

01:05:44.560 | Interesting point.

01:05:45.280 | Number three, this was before the space programs got started.

01:05:50.640 | So Fleming's take on space technology, those specific is very wrong.

01:05:58.640 | So it's clearly, he was just guessing.

01:06:01.920 | You know, this was the early sixties.

01:06:03.440 | He was just guessing, uh, what would be involved in sending rockets in his world.

01:06:08.960 | His guest was like, obviously like you can't send a rocket very

01:06:11.920 | far without the fire melting it.

01:06:13.600 | So like the whole plot was around how this villain had cornered the market on

01:06:17.680 | this special material that could hold up to the flames of a rocket and that

01:06:21.360 | that was going to be the key.

01:06:22.240 | It's not even a ballistic missile.

01:06:23.520 | It's just a missile that can go a thousand miles.

01:06:27.200 | Sub ballistic required special material and just huge thing.

01:06:30.720 | And it was interesting.

01:06:32.160 | All right.

01:06:35.120 | Then, uh, the, the, this was speaking of techno thriller.

01:06:38.000 | So also on vacation, this was at the house.

01:06:40.000 | I always try to find a thriller just like where I am.

01:06:42.320 | They had a Michael Crichton techno thriller that I had not read

01:06:46.080 | 2004 state of fear.

01:06:49.440 | And my memory was, I didn't read this.

01:06:52.400 | Even though I used to read all the Crichton, I didn't read this one

01:06:55.760 | because I had heard it was sort of.

01:06:58.720 | Weirdly grumpily sort of like polemically anti-climate change.

01:07:03.920 | Like the whole book was just him being grumpy.

01:07:08.160 | This is kind of what I had heard about, about, uh, environmentalist

01:07:11.840 | and climate change scientists.

01:07:13.200 | Uh, reality that's true.

01:07:15.040 | It does read as like, he's, he was a grumpy guy, but I mean, it was,

01:07:18.960 | it was grumpy.

01:07:19.680 | It's he has, he's long, I mean, just, he, he has citations throughout the book

01:07:25.360 | and he has this character, this MIT professor, whose whole job is to have

01:07:28.640 | conversations with a good intention, but annoying environmentally minded

01:07:33.120 | people who are like, but everyone just knows that blah, blah, blah,

01:07:36.160 | about climate change.

01:07:36.960 | And then the MIT professor speaking as a proxy for Crichton would be like,

01:07:40.080 | well, it's actually not true.

01:07:41.520 | Blah, blah, blah.

01:07:42.240 | And then Crichton would put real citations under there.

01:07:44.560 | So I don't know.

01:07:45.060 | Someone got under his skin about this.

01:07:48.320 | Um, I think a green piece boat ran over his dog or something.

01:07:51.360 | I'm not sure.

01:07:51.760 | So that is true.

01:07:53.920 | Also, it's not his best unrelated to that because it starts too slow.

01:07:58.800 | And it's, it's, it's 150 pages before you're really rolling at what the actual

01:08:02.800 | plot is.

01:08:03.760 | Once it gets rolling though, actually very well paced thriller, really great

01:08:08.960 | set pieces.

01:08:09.840 | And we've got, there's one in Antarctica.

01:08:12.640 | That's pretty cool.

01:08:13.440 | The, and again, this speaks to his grumpiness.

01:08:17.200 | There's a, a actor who's clearly supposed to be Martin Sheen.

01:08:21.200 | It's an actor who played the president on TV.

01:08:24.480 | Actually.

01:08:24.960 | Yeah, that's right.

01:08:25.600 | The timing's right.

01:08:26.560 | He was like very environmentalist spoiler alert gets eaten by cannibals in the Solomon

01:08:33.360 | Islands.

01:08:34.000 | It's anyways.

01:08:34.640 | So here's what I'd say.

01:08:35.440 | If you can get through a hundred pages, it's a, it's a fine paced thriller.

01:08:37.760 | He's a, he's good at pacing thrillers.

01:08:39.360 | And if you don't like climate change, you'll love it, but it's also otherwise kind of

01:08:44.240 | annoying.

01:08:44.880 | All right.

01:08:45.760 | Quickly, two other books, Washington goes to war written by David Brinkley in the

01:08:51.440 | 1980s, David Brinkley, the former ABC news correspondent.

01:08:54.880 | It is a book about Washington DC and the transformation it made because of world

01:09:00.160 | war II.

01:09:00.880 | And the, the interesting thing about the book is that in the eighties, when Brinkley

01:09:05.440 | was writing this, the leaders, the people who were not 18 year olds, but were a little

01:09:11.120 | bit older during world war II, they were all dying.

01:09:14.240 | And so there was this sort of race against time where he went to gather all these oral

01:09:17.600 | histories.

01:09:18.000 | And if you live in Washington DC, it's a cool book.

01:09:20.080 | It talks about how 1940 Washington DC is a sleepy, very Southern town.

01:09:27.120 | And by 1945, it's a completely different thing.

01:09:29.760 | So if you live in DC, very interesting.

01:09:32.320 | If you don't, probably not well-written though.

01:09:33.920 | Brinkley's art, it's a really good, really well-written nonfiction book.

01:09:38.720 | So hats off.

01:09:40.400 | And then finally, uh, Tolkien, the 2015 biography of Tolkien written by Raymond Edwards, caveat

01:09:49.520 | inter, it is an academic biography.

01:09:52.320 | So it really gets deep into the, the work academically that Tolkien was working on and

01:10:00.960 | its influence on the books he eventually wrote.

01:10:04.240 | So this is, it's written by a scholar who's in a similar field.

01:10:09.680 | And it's the study of, it's the study of ancient linguistics, but, but from a standpoint of

01:10:14.480 | using the language to try to recreate stuff about the culture.

01:10:17.520 | And it's a very precise field.

01:10:20.160 | And so it can be a little bit rough going two things.

01:10:22.640 | I'll point out about this, then we'll move on.

01:10:24.160 | Number one, uh, the reason why Lord of the Rings was so successful is that Tolkien just

01:10:31.200 | spent decades building a mythology for Anglo-Saxon England because there wasn't one.

01:10:39.360 | So there was a, a founding mythology for Norse culture.

01:10:42.400 | There's a founding mythology for Germanic cultures, uh, but it was lost, whatever this

01:10:47.040 | was for Britain was lost.

01:10:49.760 | And so he was basically creating one from scratch and he was spent decades.

01:10:53.120 | He called it his legit legendarium.

01:10:55.280 | And he, and at some point he, he kind of moved away from it being specifically about England

01:10:59.840 | and about a sort of fantastical realm.

01:11:01.280 | That is what he pulled from for the Hobbit a little bit, and then deeply for Lord of

01:11:05.760 | the Rings.

01:11:06.000 | So he had just decades of work as someone who is, uh, it's called philology is what

01:11:09.920 | they called it back then an expert at ancient languages and its connection to culture and

01:11:14.720 | mythology.

01:11:15.440 | And he had all of that worked out.

01:11:17.440 | So that's why when you read Lord of the Rings, it feels like one of these lost culture books

01:11:23.120 | where they're just referencing this rich, deep world.

01:11:25.360 | It feels like it's real.

01:11:26.240 | It's because he, he, he not only created this world, but he created this world with

01:11:29.520 | academic soundness.

01:11:30.880 | I mean, this is a guy who for fun was organizing, uh, I I I Icelandic, uh, Icelandic mythology

01:11:40.080 | reading groups where they would read in the ancient Islandic languages, you know, saw

01:11:45.120 | Viking sagas.

01:11:46.000 | And so that's why that was so good.

01:11:48.320 | And why it's so hard, nothing else really approaches the depth.

01:11:51.840 | You get more of the rings that, uh, that sense of reality.

01:11:55.360 | If there's a deep culture here that just takes place on it's because it was like the world's

01:11:59.040 | expert on doing that, who spent his whole life doing it.

01:12:01.040 | Number two, it's a painful book to read if you're a professor, because the whole thing

01:12:06.240 | is about his frustration with academic administrative load.

01:12:09.040 | I mean, his whole life was defined by being overwhelmed by academic load and, and, and

01:12:17.760 | non-research type work.

01:12:19.200 | And he was constantly short on money and constantly stressed out.

01:12:22.000 | And this was sort of post-war liberal England.

01:12:24.080 | So even after you couldn't just sort of leave and be like, I'm just going to write because

01:12:27.280 | even after Lord of the Rings became a huge hit, the taxation rates were such an England

01:12:32.160 | at the time that as Edwards talks about it, you know, it helped, but like, it didn't make

01:12:38.240 | him wealthy even at like a lower level.

01:12:41.760 | Because you could lose like 80 plus percent of your royalty income like that.

01:12:46.640 | The government was like, thank you.

01:12:47.680 | So he was not, so that's, so it's not like he could.

01:12:50.720 | So even at the, the very height of his success, like he couldn't, wasn't making them that

01:12:55.520 | that wealthy.

01:12:56.080 | So interesting.

01:12:57.520 | So it stressed me out, Jesse, though, all I was like, man, this is just like detailing.

01:13:00.800 | It makes modern academic life seem free and flexible and great.

01:13:05.840 | I mean, Oxford in the early part of the 20th century just sounds like it was brutal.

01:13:10.640 | Just the work they would pour on you.

01:13:12.400 | And it was in the infighting and it's an interesting portrait of academia.

01:13:17.760 | Talk about slow productivity though, when he was coming up with that world, right?

01:13:21.680 | Decades.

01:13:22.320 | Yeah.

01:13:22.640 | Yeah.

01:13:23.120 | And then even he was writing these books like the Hobbit.

01:13:26.080 | It's a 10 year window between when he was like starting to work out the story for his

01:13:31.040 | kids.

01:13:31.360 | And when he sort of finally published it, like you just spend decades on things.

01:13:35.840 | Yeah.

01:13:36.080 | It's definitely slow productivity.

01:13:38.000 | Like you can't have Lord of the Rings without 20 years of, uh, philology.

01:13:42.800 | That's incredible.

01:13:43.600 | Yeah.

01:13:43.760 | So it was a cool book.

01:13:45.680 | Again, it's not super approachable.

01:13:47.120 | His son wrote a book.

01:13:49.520 | Christopher wrote a book that gets really into like his work habits and stuff like this

01:13:53.520 | and focuses more on the Lord of the Rings.

01:13:55.600 | Like that's probably the better book than this, unless you're like you're into linguistics.

01:14:01.280 | All right.

01:14:03.440 | Well, let's take a quick break here.

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01:17:00.000 | All right, let's do another call, Jesse.

01:17:03.840 | I like these.

01:17:04.320 | All right.

01:17:05.200 | We got a call about smartwatches.

01:17:07.200 | Hello, Cal.

01:17:07.840 | My name is Connor Beck.

01:17:09.600 | I'm a copywriter and content marketing specialist from St. Paul, Minnesota.

01:17:14.400 | And my question has to do with smartwatch technology.

01:17:18.880 | So I think I know what your answer to this question might be, but I'll ask it anyways.

01:17:23.920 | I just wanted to get your general thoughts on smartwatches.

01:17:27.760 | I really try and not stay glued to my phone or get too distracted throughout the day.

01:17:34.160 | But I thought maybe I could use a smartwatch in a very simplified way in order to screen

01:17:41.280 | out text messages that are not important versus those that are.

01:17:44.800 | My partner occasionally texts me throughout the day and sometimes it is very time sensitive

01:17:50.320 | and important in terms of what she texts me about.

01:17:54.560 | So again, I think I might know your answer, but I'm just wondering what you think of smartwatch

01:17:58.960 | technology and if that technology can be used in a very simplified way so that it actually

01:18:05.040 | helps you eliminate distraction rather than create more distraction.

01:18:09.840 | And if you can use that technology in a way that allows you to tune out distractions rather

01:18:16.480 | than be overcome by that.

01:18:18.400 | So thanks again for your insight and your wisdom.

01:18:20.960 | It is very much appreciated.

01:18:23.520 | Thank you to both you and Jesse for sharing the deep life and keep up the good work.

01:18:29.360 | Thank you.

01:18:29.840 | Well, so Connor with smartwatches, we should separate two different common uses.

01:18:35.440 | So there's productivity.

01:18:37.520 | That's where we'll, that's the category where we'll put what you are talking about now.

01:18:41.280 | So looking at text messages and emails, being able to communicate through your watch for

01:18:46.640 | productivity purposes.

01:18:48.560 | Then there's fitness, which is a whole other world, which I'll put aside for now.

01:18:53.600 | So in the productivity world, as you seem to be guessing, no, I'm not that impressed

01:18:58.880 | by the idea of needing a smartwatch to make you more productive.

01:19:04.240 | I think you should be spending less time with notifications, not more.

01:19:09.040 | I don't buy the screening argument.

01:19:11.840 | So there's two possible responses here.

01:19:14.720 | One is what would happen if, and this is the way I typically run things.

01:19:19.200 | I check my phone sometimes.

01:19:22.480 | And so text messages that come in when I don't have my phone with me, I won't see for a

01:19:29.200 | while.

01:19:29.700 | The right answer to that question is nothing bad will happen.

01:19:33.040 | And you can come up with a lot of scenarios where, well, so my partner is literally on

01:19:37.920 | fire.

01:19:38.800 | And if I don't get the text message in time, I can't use this app I have set up to trigger

01:19:46.000 | a complex Rube Goldberg style watering system that will put out our flames.

01:19:49.600 | You can come up with these scenarios, but here's the thing.

01:19:51.920 | Until just about a minute ago, we did not have the ability to contact people like that.

01:19:56.080 | And very few people burn to death because their partners couldn't access to Rube Goldberg

01:20:02.080 | watering system.

01:20:02.800 | So we were fine without that before.

01:20:04.400 | I think most people would be fine today.

01:20:05.840 | It's easy to come up with those scenarios, but they just don't happen enough.

01:20:08.880 | They don't happen enough.

01:20:11.200 | And when they do happen, the cost is such that it's not worth months and months of

01:20:18.080 | consistent distraction because every four months, you missed a call that caused someone

01:20:23.520 | to get mad at you.

01:20:24.080 | I say fair trade.

01:20:24.880 | All right.

01:20:26.960 | Number two, I would say about that is, okay, if you really are worried about it because

01:20:30.400 | your partner spends a lot of time around fire and you spent a long time building that Rube

01:20:34.000 | Goldberg apparatus, then just do the extra five minutes of work to set up the filter

01:20:39.040 | on your phone so that for calls, you have a white list and people on that list, their

01:20:46.080 | call comes through, put their number on it, put your ringer on.

01:20:51.360 | All right.

01:20:53.040 | Call here if there's really an emergency.

01:20:55.280 | You know, this comes up a lot.

01:20:56.400 | I talked about this in my book, A World Without Email, where this was in the context of

01:21:03.920 | business where you're making yourself less accessible.

01:21:06.800 | And we called it the steam valve.

01:21:09.120 | You have the emergency steam valve where you say, okay, I know I'm not going to be as

01:21:12.960 | accessible on email or Slack or whatever, whatever the plan is you're talking about,

01:21:17.200 | but don't worry.

01:21:17.920 | We have an emergency backup.

01:21:19.760 | Call this phone number.

01:21:21.440 | So there's always a way you can reach me.

01:21:23.840 | There is no actual period where you can't reach me.

01:21:26.160 | And the whole point of those backup emergency steam valves, we called it strategies, was

01:21:32.000 | not so that you could avert emergencies because they never happen.

01:21:35.840 | You talk to people who set up like, okay, here's my special number.

01:21:39.600 | Call me if you can't wait till the next time I'm supposed to be online or my office hours

01:21:43.840 | or whatever.

01:21:44.560 | No one ever calls.

01:21:45.920 | The emergencies don't happen.

01:21:47.520 | They exist just so that people feel better.

01:21:49.600 | They know if they really had to reach you, they could.

01:21:51.680 | And I always thought that was an interesting observation is that we're worried that all

01:21:54.640 | these emergencies are happening.

01:21:55.920 | They rarely do.

01:21:58.720 | The potential existence of these specters should not be sufficient to get you to live

01:22:03.520 | all of your time in a much more distracted state.

01:22:06.240 | So there's a question like, what watch do I use?

01:22:10.800 | As Jesse will attest, I actually hang off of my belt, an old fashioned sand hourglass.

01:22:18.640 | That's true, Jesse.

01:22:19.280 | It's true.

01:22:20.480 | So I have a sundial I consult.

01:22:23.200 | And so when the shadow gets to the top of an hour, I flip over the hourglass.

01:22:29.280 | It weighs about seven pounds.

01:22:30.720 | It's about yay big, but you know, it's simple.

01:22:33.040 | You don't run out of batteries with your sand.

01:22:35.600 | Am I right, Jesse?

01:22:36.240 | No, actually, I will say the watch I use is like my favorite, my favorite physical object

01:22:45.520 | that I own.

01:22:46.160 | So I'm not in the cars.

01:22:47.440 | I don't dress very well or collect a lot of things, but I do.

01:22:52.720 | My watch is like very symbolic to me.

01:22:54.800 | It is something I really enjoy.

01:22:56.000 | So I use a, uh, it's upside down here and a mega speedmaster,

01:23:01.120 | highly analog winded every day with a little, uh, mechanism.

01:23:07.680 | Its mechanism is brilliantly engineered.

01:23:10.240 | They updated this in 2021.

01:23:11.920 | It loses, you know, a second in it per day or something.

01:23:16.640 | So there's just like beautiful engineering inside of this thing.

01:23:18.800 | No batteries, no electricity, no quartz crystals, no text messages being shown through.

01:23:23.920 | And the backstory I like about this, other than being like a nice, like well engineered

01:23:28.480 | piece of analog handicraft is that this was the watch that was approved by NASA for the

01:23:33.760 | Apollo missions.

01:23:34.560 | Speedmaster went into space and you can get a lot of pictures of the astronauts.

01:23:40.240 | They actually wore it on the moon.

01:23:42.160 | They would, they got bigger straps that could go around the outside of the UVA suits, but

01:23:46.400 | I liked it as a metaphor to this that I think is nice for the type of techno criticism I

01:23:50.160 | do, which is when Apollo 13 was having their famed troubles on the way to the moon, they

01:23:57.360 | had to shut down all the computers to save battery power, right?

01:24:00.160 | So they shut down all the computers.

01:24:01.680 | And so they're just, this thing was just flying analog and they had to do these burns of

01:24:07.600 | the engine to correct their trajectory so that they want to skip off the atmosphere

01:24:13.600 | of the earth.

01:24:14.080 | They had to do these precise burns, but the computers were shut down.

01:24:16.560 | And so how did they do them?

01:24:18.560 | Well, they had a reticule, like a little crosshairs, which they aimed at a very particular,

01:24:26.320 | you know, I think it was the horizon, the terminal horizon on the moon.

01:24:29.680 | And then Lovell timed it with the Speedmaster.

01:24:33.280 | So this analog piece of beautifully engineered gears, when all the electricity had to be

01:24:38.400 | turned off, essentially it was this piece of analog handicraft that actually that plus

01:24:43.120 | a crosshairs plus fire is how the astronauts did what otherwise a computer would do.

01:24:48.720 | So this is a nice metaphor about the beauty and analog simplicity versus the complexities

01:24:54.880 | and distraction of the digital.

01:24:57.440 | So I can use that all to justify otherwise a sort of kind of absurdly expensive thing

01:25:03.520 | to wear on your wrist.

01:25:04.240 | There we go.

01:25:06.740 | All right, let's do another question.

01:25:10.960 | We got time.

01:25:11.760 | OK, this question is from Jeffrey.

01:25:14.000 | He talks about you introduced the idea of feedback councils in episode 200.

01:25:19.840 | Would you speak more about starting them up?

01:25:21.840 | How formal, informal to create them?

01:25:24.480 | I mean, do you officially ask them to join your council?

01:25:27.040 | How frequently would you inquire with them and so forth?

01:25:29.920 | Yes, the idea behind feedback councils, again, from episode 200 is you do want feedback in

01:25:37.120 | your life about what you're working on or how you think about things.

01:25:40.320 | You just don't want that feedback to come from Twitter or Instagram or TikTok.

01:25:45.200 | And we got into it, these these digital social networks, the feedback from those networks.

01:25:51.200 | It's highly salient and our mind takes it seriously, but it's not at all representative

01:25:54.960 | and it can warp the way you think and keep you away from things that are important or

01:25:58.320 | move you in weird directions.

01:25:59.440 | So what I recommended was having a diverse group of individuals who you trust and know

01:26:06.240 | you sample the feedback from them on things you're thinking or doing the way you're in

01:26:10.560 | the world, the projects you're working on and use that as your primary feedback.

01:26:13.760 | Not whether people are yelling at you on Twitter, not whether or not you got a thumbs up or

01:26:18.560 | thumbs down on Instagram.

01:26:19.760 | So how do you put together these councils?

01:26:21.920 | No, you don't don't formally call them that or tell people that's what you're doing, because

01:26:26.960 | it's kind of weird.

01:26:27.600 | Like within this small circle of trust, we're weird, but it's good.

01:26:32.560 | But the outside world doesn't understand that.

01:26:34.640 | So you don't have to tell them that's what you're doing.

01:26:36.960 | What's more important is it's people you already know.

01:26:39.120 | You start evolving your relationship to the point where it's not unusual if you ask them,

01:26:45.840 | hey, can you take a look at this or that you have when you typically just have conversations

01:26:50.560 | to get together for drinks, you guys are just chatting that you push the conversation sometimes

01:26:54.400 | towards topics you you care about or you're confused by or maybe especially if you have

01:26:59.040 | a strong view on something and you're like, I don't know, man, it might this is a real

01:27:02.400 | good view or my it might be a little hot headed here.

01:27:05.040 | Let me bring this up, see how they feel about it, like a very open minded sort of way.

01:27:07.840 | So you just start transforming existing relationships that way.

01:27:11.040 | And you also set out as you meet people at work and hobbies at your kids school, wherever

01:27:16.000 | it is that you're meeting people.

01:27:17.120 | Seek out some people who aren't just like you and do the effort of like, I want to try

01:27:22.160 | to bring this person into my friend group.

01:27:24.160 | Let me talk with them and find some common interest.

01:27:26.240 | So you want to try to make your the groups of people you trust.

01:27:30.240 | More diverse than all the different types of.

01:27:32.000 | Spectrums, you might measure that the way they think about things, their ethnic background,

01:27:38.320 | the type of jobs they have, the gender, everything right.

01:27:42.320 | And then just start cultivating those relationships like it's not weird if I send you an article,

01:27:46.720 | take a look at or we we get into a dorm room style about political issues.

01:27:51.760 | And I do it with an open heart, so it's not going to annoy you.

01:27:54.480 | But the key is you're getting feedback from an interesting group of people that you trust

01:27:58.400 | way more effective than Twitter.

01:28:00.720 | You'll also end up such an interesting person.

01:28:02.480 | So that's why I suggest and just stop getting feedback from Twitter.

01:28:05.680 | Stop getting feedback from TikTok or Facebook or whatever.

01:28:08.000 | You'll be a lot less stressed out and your your your points of view are going to be a

01:28:10.640 | lot more interesting.

01:28:11.360 | All right, so my vague memory is this guy had a follow up question, right?

01:28:17.040 | Yes.

01:28:17.920 | Yep.

01:28:19.120 | It was something controversial.

01:28:20.160 | What's the.

01:28:20.640 | So he's very curious if you think the crazy professor phenomenon happened to Jordan

01:28:27.760 | Peterson and Brett Weinstein.

01:28:29.600 | That's right.

01:28:30.080 | That's right.

01:28:30.560 | All right.

01:28:30.800 | So there's no way I'm going to get in trouble talking about this topic right now.

01:28:35.360 | You'll be fine.

01:28:35.920 | So first of all, I I forgot that I had called this phenomenon crazy professor phenomenon.

01:28:41.840 | I don't know if that's a fair name, but for people who didn't hear me talk about that before,

01:28:44.880 | it was the idea that if you people like really smart people in academia, when they leave academia.

01:28:53.520 | Are more prone than the average person to end up in more eccentric or conspiratorial or like

01:28:59.440 | way out of the mainstream type of views.

01:29:02.160 | And my argument was is because the fact you're an academic academia in the first place means

01:29:06.960 | that they typically have high octane minds.

01:29:09.200 | They're used to this idea that they're smarter than a lot of people and can figure things

01:29:12.960 | out that other people can't.

01:29:14.080 | But in academia, you have so many other minds pushing back on you.

01:29:18.240 | It's hard to get too weird.

01:29:20.720 | Right, because people you also respect and fear intellectually are going to be like,

01:29:24.160 | that's nonsense.

01:29:25.440 | I'm not going to put all my money in the gold, et cetera.

01:29:27.760 | When you leave academia, you lose that feedback buffer.

01:29:29.920 | And so you're much more likely to end up in weird places because you're intellectually

01:29:33.280 | confident and you're intellectually curious, but you don't have the dampers.

01:29:36.320 | So Jeffrey's asking, do I think that happened to Jordan Peterson or Brett Weinstein?

01:29:43.760 | I think it's Weinstein, right?

01:29:46.400 | Or Weinstein.

01:29:47.760 | I think it's Weinstein like Einstein.

01:29:49.200 | I'm not.

01:29:50.400 | If I'm getting that wrong, Brett, big apologies.

01:29:53.920 | So in his case, I think some of that might have happened.

01:29:58.320 | So if people don't know, Brett and his wife, Heather Herring, I believe, they were in academia.

01:30:06.800 | They were biologists, did a lot of stuff on evolutionary theory.

01:30:10.960 | They're at Evergreen University, which is, I think, a state university, a public university

01:30:16.880 | in Oregon or Washington state.

01:30:18.960 | It's very progressive, has these very progressive educational models where you don't quite get

01:30:24.080 | how it works.

01:30:24.640 | The classes are done in a really interesting, kind of unusual way.

01:30:28.560 | And they got into some sort of cancellation issue there.

01:30:32.720 | And it really got out of control where students were roaming the campus looking for them and

01:30:38.000 | maybe even physically threatening them.

01:30:39.840 | Long story short, they had to leave.

01:30:42.880 | They left academia.

01:30:43.840 | And so I think it's a mixed bag.

01:30:45.920 | Again, I don't know a ton about them.

01:30:47.120 | I know they have a new book out that sort of seems completely mainstream.

01:30:52.800 | And it has to do about what you can learn from evolutionary theory and the history of

01:30:57.120 | our species about modern life, like sort of down the middle.

01:31:00.560 | But I do think Brett went to some weird places with COVID during the pandemic that felt a

01:31:08.800 | little bit like this phenomenon.

01:31:10.000 | When I'd sample in a show here and there, where there's just like a lot of confidence

01:31:13.360 | on something that was very much out of the mainstream and did not in the end turn out

01:31:17.680 | to be at all really kind of right.

01:31:20.080 | There was a lot of this sort of confident out of the mainstream, a couple of places

01:31:24.800 | like that he felt.

01:31:25.440 | So I think that's probably a great example of that effect in action is because it's this

01:31:29.680 | very smart guy and Heather's very smart.

01:31:32.000 | And so it completely makes sense in their minds that we can kind of see something that's

01:31:36.400 | not widely recognized now.

01:31:38.560 | So maybe that's an example of it.

01:31:40.640 | Jordan Peterson, I think it's a much harder case.

01:31:43.280 | It's much harder to assess here.

01:31:46.800 | So like Peterson had been on my radar for a long time before he became a big public

01:31:52.960 | figure.

01:31:53.360 | Because again, when I would do student advice, I would occasionally hear from students who

01:31:58.320 | would talk about Dr.

01:31:59.440 | Peterson, especially students who were like first generation college students, students

01:32:04.960 | of color found a lot out of a lot good in his work.

01:32:10.240 | He's like a mentor like figure for a lot, a lot of people.

01:32:13.200 | And so it was kind of on my radar.

01:32:14.880 | He's a weird character.

01:32:16.160 | Like the thing to understand about Jordan Peterson that I think not a lot of people

01:32:19.120 | in just the non academic world understand is that he's an unusual character.

01:32:23.920 | He came out of what was like essentially the Canadian version of like West Texas, right?

01:32:29.440 | The sort of ranch country in the middle of Canada, a very cold kind of rough place comes

01:32:37.280 | out of there.

01:32:38.080 | So with no really a leader academic background and is like an incandescent star with an

01:32:44.080 | academia.

01:32:44.720 | I mean, he goes, he ends up at Harvard as a young professor where he's tenured in the

01:32:50.000 | psychology department.

01:32:51.200 | Harvard does not tenure from within very often in psychology.

01:32:54.000 | I mean, it was like a, this guy was seen as this bright star, you Toronto bottom away,

01:33:00.400 | right?

01:33:00.640 | Like, come, we're going to make you an offer you can't refuse.

01:33:03.600 | So he was like a superstar academic who had came out of nowhere, like not at all of an

01:33:09.360 | environment where you would expect to have a mind like that.

01:33:12.800 | So he was sort of this, I think that's often missed.

01:33:15.360 | I think for those who dislike him, it's more comfortable.

01:33:18.480 | This idea that he's sort of like a grifter type guy.

01:33:20.800 | That's just sort of like spouting off wisdom.

01:33:22.400 | And, you know, like obviously me as a reporter, much smarter than this guy.

01:33:25.360 | Now he was an incandescent star, like sort of out of the ranches of Canada.

01:33:29.840 | But from what I understand, it's hard to talk about this phenomenon with him because he

01:33:34.160 | always was sort of a loner and a little bit eccentric, even when he was in academia.

01:33:39.200 | I think because of this unusual background, he came, got out of, and this is secondhand,

01:33:44.880 | but, but I think he was again, already didn't really care about what the feedback was from

01:33:51.520 | colleagues or whatever.

01:33:52.800 | I don't know if that's true, but I've heard some things like that.

01:33:55.120 | So it's hard to say, you know, when he left academia and then, then of course you have

01:33:59.120 | this other confusing factor, confounding factor of the huge celebrity and the huge detraction

01:34:05.600 | that occurred when he became a public figure, the warping effect of that on someone has to

01:34:10.720 | be so powerful that it's going to swamp out any signal we're going to get about just,

01:34:14.720 | well, when he left academia, he may be without this type of cognitive structure and feedback,

01:34:21.840 | maybe got a little bit more eccentric.

01:34:24.400 | How can we separate that signal from the crushing, completely unbearable, completely unusual

01:34:34.320 | worldwide phenomenon and attacks?

01:34:36.080 | I mean, that had to have such a bigger impact on his life, his mental life than the changing

01:34:42.560 | his context of being academia or not that, that, that must swamp out that signal.

01:34:46.160 | So because of those two confounding factors, I can't tell what change leaving academia

01:34:51.360 | had on Peterson.

01:34:52.000 | So again, the summarize, he already was really iconoclastic and eccentric when he was in

01:34:55.760 | academia.

01:34:56.560 | And two, there's too many other things happened to him right when he left the, I can't pull

01:35:01.600 | apart.

01:35:01.920 | I can't pull apart those pieces.

01:35:03.760 | So there you go.

01:35:06.320 | Though I don't like crazy professor phenomenon.

01:35:08.160 | I don't think that's a good title.

01:35:08.960 | I should, I didn't realize I called it that before.

01:35:11.200 | I'll come with a better title, but again, it's very consistent though.

01:35:17.840 | Academics who leave academia, they usually have a lot of medical breakthroughs.

01:35:22.320 | They get become masters of finances.

01:35:24.240 | Like I can understand the financial system.

01:35:27.040 | And to get, and I don't want to go off on this, but like also like media criticism becomes

01:35:32.720 | a big thing because again, if you're like Brett Weinstein, you're a really smart guy

01:35:36.400 | and you get kind of resentful against some reporters.

01:35:38.800 | You're like, I'm just smarter than you and you annoy me.

01:35:41.680 | And like, then you get really angry at the media and it's a, it's a whole interesting

01:35:45.680 | thing.

01:35:45.920 | So if I ever left Georgetown, Jesse, you'd have to stop me from becoming like very conspiratorial

01:35:51.120 | and offering a lot of medical advice and financial advice and just attacking the media all the

01:35:57.760 | time.

01:35:58.000 | Though we'd probably get more subscribers.

01:36:00.800 | So, all right, that's enough of that.

01:36:04.400 | We should wrap up this show.

01:36:05.600 | Thank you everyone who sent in their questions, calnewport.com/podcast for instructions on

01:36:11.280 | how you too can participate in the show.

01:36:13.360 | youtube.com/calnewportmedia to watch this episode and clips.

01:36:17.520 | We'll be back next week with a new episode of the Deep Questions Podcast.

01:36:22.080 | And until then, as always stay deep.

Ep. 212: The Productivity Dragon | Deep Questions With Cal Newport

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