So today I want to talk about one of the most important skills you can have as a human. Something that I think most of the most interesting, successful, and impactful people I know are very good at, and I'm talking about thinking. Now this may sound stupid at first because we all think all the time, our minds are worrying all the time, if anything our problem is getting away from our own thoughts, but when I say think here I mean something very specific, I mean giving sustained attention to potentially complicated or ambiguous information with the ultimate goal of building a new conceptual structure that has value to yourself or to the world.

This is what I mean by thinking. Now here's the thing, most people are very bad at this brand of serious thinking. The way most people go through their lives is as follows, first they outsource any sort of normative or ethical thinking to online tribal vibes and approval. I don't know, what does my team think?

Do they like this? They don't like this? What's going to get me not yelled at? What's going to get me approved? That's about as far as I want to go trying to actually build up some sort of framework for understanding what I stand for, what's good and what's bad.

Most people prioritize a sort of high energy emotion in the moment over the subtler satisfactions of real understanding and appreciation. They want to just feel something, and often their phone can give them that something quite easily. They don't want to do the work for actually deeply engaging with something beautiful.

Most people also gravitate when it comes towards the realm of accomplishment towards checklist productivity. Just give me a list of things I can follow where the key here is that the information is scarce, and I have a special list of things to do, and then I'll be in great shape, or then my web business will take off, or then I'll make six figures per month.

Just give me a checklist. I want secret information that I found online as opposed to seeking out to produce things that are unambiguously valuable. Serious thinkers live differently. They have a deep and evolving understanding of the world, what's good, what's bad, and what it means to live a good life.

They appreciate the beautiful. They appreciate the quality, and they find inspiration in it. Their output is often slower, but when it does come out, it's more impact, and it engenders more respect. So if you're interested in the deep life, serious thinking needs to be a goal that you are pursuing.

So here's what I want to do today is help you become a more serious thinker, and I want to do that in a practical way. I have five different practices. Each of these are concrete that I want to run through. These are all things you can start doing right away in your own life that if you stick with them, you will find after a month, your cognitive abilities are much better than they were before.

After six months, the experience of your day to day life is going to be notably different and richer, and after a year or so, you're going to find yourself actually able to produce ideas for yourself and the world that have real value. Really you're going to unlock major options.

So it's worth becoming a serious thinker. Let's go through five practices for how to do it. I'm going to illustrate, for those of you who are watching instead of just listening, by popular demand, I will illustrate what we're doing here. So on the screen, I'm going to put in the center my world famous picture of a brain.

So what we got here is a cerebellum, and we got some wrinkles and folds in the brain. So I have a brain in the center, and I'm going to illustrate around this. I'll put one expertly drawn icon per practice we are going to discuss. All right, so the first practice that I want to discuss is to improve the quality and decrease the quantity of information that you consume.

So to illustrate this with an icon, I'm going to expertly draw here, the Twitter T. I know they've switched to X, but I sort of am boycotting that. So I'm drawing a T, and I'll put in a circle with a line through it. I'm going to indicate consuming better quality and less quantity of information.

So what does this mean? I'm talking particularly here about news or other information you use to learn more things about the world. Stop using social media algorithms to curate your news flow. Social media algorithms are bad curators. Their interest is not making you as informed as possible. Their interest is making you as engaged as possible to make you as engaged as possible.

They are going to push you to places that are not emotionally healthy. It's also not going to lead you to the most nuanced understanding of issues. I want you instead to focus on a multi-scale news and information consumption. So I want your news and information consumption to be divided over three scales, daily, monthly, and seasonal.

And here's what I mean by that. Daily have a very small number, probably just one sources of quality, non-algorithmically curated news and information. This could be one of the growing number of daily news roundup newsletters. I like, for example, if you're a subscriber to the New York Times, I think David Leonhardt's Daily News Summary is a fantastic one.

I'm saying this mainly because they featured my profile from the New York Times Magazine from last year. They re-featured it recently in that newsletter, so we know that's expertly curated. It could be a daily news roundup podcast. It could be a physical newspaper that you pick up or have delivered.

At the monthly scale, you spend the time to go through a collection of, let's say, two to six in-depth long-form magazine articles. So now, this is still relatively current, but not day-to-day current. This is now information where enough time has passed for a professional journalist or writer to actually spend some time to really digest information about what's going on in the world and produce and have edited a long-form piece.

Now we're at a lag of a month or so from what's actually going on. This is where, for example, you can pull out a few selected articles from my own journalistic home, which is the New Yorker, maybe you pull out some long-form articles from the Atlantic or Foreign Affairs or the National Review or the Wall Street Journal's Sunday issue, whatever it is that you particularly follow.

It could be print, could be not print, tablet magazine. I'm just thinking of different things I've pulled from before, and you're like, "Here's my six articles I've gathered throughout the month, 3,000, 5,000 word beast. I'm going to go to a coffee shop somewhere. I've got these printed out," and let's just engage at this slower scale, deeper understanding, slower scale.

Now we jump up to the seasonal scale, and this is books. When there's something going on in the world you care about, you should get a book written by an expert, someone who has spent years working on this artifact based on many more years of actually engaging with this topic, and you get this beautiful artifact here that you can hold and consume in about a week or two that is going to give you as deep or nuanced as an understanding of a topic as you're ever likely to get outside of actually studying that topic professionally yourself.

You should at the seasonal scale have a book that you're reading on whatever thing is going on in the world that is most important to you. Let's take this multi-scale information consumption plan out for a spin with a particular topic. Let's compare it to what most people would normally do.

Let's talk about fears about AI. Now, what you could do, which is what most people do, is let me read a lot of tweets and histrionic YouTube videos and short articles on the online news sites. They're all like, "Oh my God, Google Gemini is doing this, ChatGPT just did that, Sam Altman just said this," and there's this sort of just frenzied sense of, "Oh, this is very uneasy and I don't know what's going on, and I'm kind of stressed all the time." What would it look like to engage this topic with a multi-scale information consumption approach?

Well, you would be getting daily information. When something important happened, it would be covered in whatever your high-quality non-algorithmically curated source of news would be. When Sam Altman, for example, got fired and then rehired, David Leonhardt's newsletter covered that, so you would get the main points. You're subscribed to Axios's daily news roundup, you would get the main points.

Then on the seasonal scale, you could actually say, "Let me sit down with, for example, the New Yorker's recent AI issue, and read some of these longer form pieces. Let me sit down and listen to, you know, Ezra Klein had a fantastic AI podcast recently with Kevin Roos and Casey Newhoff, I think, and let's just spend an hour and 20 minutes just sort of walking through what we know, maybe go back and finally read my New Yorker piece on the guts of how ChatGPT actually works." This is not so frenzied, this is more digested information, like, "Okay, I'm getting some deeper sense of what's going on." On the scale of a season, you say, "I'm going to read a book about artificial intelligence, maybe about the alignment problem or how people are thinking about its role in society," and now get like a really measured, deeper understanding of it.

That is how multiscale information consumption works. Serious thinkers are going to consume information that way, they have no interest for algorithmically curated social media information. The same thing, though, applies, I'm going to say this, in improvement of quality, decreasing a quantity, we can think of this also applying to other types of information as well.

Think about shows or movies you watch on streaming services. To increase the quality of that, simple heuristic, one-to-one ratio, fun smart. "Hey, quick interruption. If you want my free guide with my seven best ideas on how to cultivate the deep life, go to calnewport.com/ideas or click the link right below in the description." This is a great way to take action on the type of things we talk about here on this show.

All right, let's get back to it. If I watch a movie that is just pure fun, I want to watch something that's going to challenge me, either artistically, this is a well-respected movie, or informationally, it's a documentary on something that's complicated, but I want to know about it. One-to-one ratio, so that the quality of what you're engaging in the streaming media gets better.

You can do the same thing with podcasts. Here's a fun podcast, one-to-one ratio with something that I'm learning from, et cetera. All right, practice number two, increase your comfort with boredom. Let's draw a picture for this one as well. What I'm going to draw here is a rock. All right, there we go.

Standing on this rock, we see someone contemplating. Jesse appreciates my artwork. Increase comfort with boredom. What is the idea here before we get even more specific about the practices? If your brain is used to this idea that it is never bored, that when it lacks novel stimuli, you will always feed it a shiny digital treat in the form typically of your phone or an iPad or a browser tab, that's going to give you something emotionally salient in the moment.

It can't tolerate serious thinking because serious thinking requires you to keep your attention sustained, this inner eye of your attention sustained on a single abstract topic. That's boring because there's not a lot of novel stimuli. Your brain has to be comfort with boredom. By increasing your comfort with boredom, you're just teaching your brain, it's not that you're bored all the time.

It's also not trying to put too much of a positive value on boredom. It's just teaching your brain sometimes we're bored and sometimes we're not, and I'm comfortable with that state of boredom. How can you do this? Two things I'm going to suggest. One, actually have every day a particular outing or chore or task you do.

It can be short, but a particular thing you do without your phone. Go to the drugstore, go put in your laundry. It doesn't have to be long, taking out the garbage and do it with nothing in your ear. You're like, "Okay, I'm just doing this activity. There's no novel stimuli here.

I'm just having to be alone with my own thoughts." A lot of people who take this advice will also typically add a longer outing on the weekends, hour plus, no phone. You can ramp that up over the weekend. The other really important thing you can do is the phone foyer method.

The idea here is when you're at your home or your apartment or wherever you live, you keep your phone plugged in in one place. If you have a house with a foyer, it's in the foyer, or it's in the kitchen, if you have an apartment, whatever, but it stays plugged in when you're at home in one place.

If you need to look something up, you go to where it's plugged in and you look it up there. If you need to receive or text with someone, you go where the phone is plugged in and you receive and do text there, same with phone calls. You have to go to where the phone is.

It is not where you are. Now, this is going to be annoying at first, but what you're doing here is severing this permanent accessibility of the distraction. So now when you're watching something or doing something in your own house or in your own apartment, you can't pull out the phone.

It's somewhere else. You still have the benefits of I need to look this thing up, but you have to walk 10 feet to go do it. You're going to get more mini moments of boredom during your evenings and mornings at home. Very important if you want to prepare your brain to be a serious thinker.

All right. Third thing I want to suggest here, third practice for becoming a more serious thinker. Cultivate your ability to pay attention. So illustrate this here. You won't know at first what this means. So provocatively what I'm drawing here is stopwatch. Is there something on the top, Jesse? I don't know.

Let's do this. Perfect rendition of a stopwatch. Why am I drawing a stopwatch? Because one of the first things I'm going to recommend for cultivating your ability to pay attention is interval training. So actually increasing the timed intervals at which you're comfortable giving sustained attention to a single target.

These intervals should be intense. You only increase the time of the intervals as you get comfortable with the current duration, right? So what we're trying to do here is get your mind comfortable with sustaining attention. So the previous practice, getting a comfort for boredom, we think of that as the table stakes, the foundation.

Your mind has to be okay with not having a lot of stimuli. This practice now about focusing and practicing the actual activity of focus. The actual activity of sustaining attention. So you have to be able to do it and then you have to actually practice what this actually feels like.

So with interval training, you can do this with multiple activities. It could be a difficult work or school activity. It can also be, and I think this is critical, a high quality leisure activity like watching a movie, which a lot of people, especially young people right now, have a very hard time doing for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time without actually looking at their phone.

It's gonna be a high quality leisure activity or a difficult work activity to be reading a book, even anything that requires focus. You start with an interval that you're comfortable with. Keep it small at first, maybe even just 10 minutes. You use a real timer. Set that timer and might as well do it on your phone, by the way, because you want your phone right there in timer mode.

So you know for a fact if you use your phone because you've left the timer mode on your phone. Set that timer for 10 minutes and work on that work task, watch that movie, or read that book with as much concentration as you can muster, zero checks of anything screened outside of your target until that timer goes off.

If you break that concentration and say, "I just have to check Twitter. I just have to see what's going on in my text messages," you have to start that timer and start it over. It doesn't count. Once you're able to consistently hit the current time duration, you increase it by 10 minutes.

So this is just literally training the thing you want to be better at, sustaining attention on cognitive tasks, the absence of stimuli, sustaining the attention. You got to just train your brain what that feels like. Another thing you can do when it comes to cultivating your ability to pay attention is more passive, which is care about ritual, care about environment.

Set up this is where I go to read, and it's different than where I just sit and work or watch TV. I've set up a very special chair, and I have this light here, and it's by a warm radiator in the winter. This is where I go to work on deep work challenges versus just regular work or email.

I have a separate part of my house. I went up to the attic, and I've renovated an eave there, and that's where I go to do deep work. It's different than where I do my email and where the printer and all the filing cabinets are. The ritual I do before I watch a hard movie, I do a thing to get my mind into that mode.

I listen to a movie podcast while walking for 20 minutes. Ritual and environment will help you fall into that deeper attention mode. Combine that with interval training. All right, let's go to our ... Let's look at my list here. Let's go to our fourth idea to help you become a serious thinker, a fourth practice, I should say, and this is going to be strengthen your working memory.

I'm going to draw here is a person very determinedly walking, just because he loves my art, and this person is thinking about all sorts of things. Why am I drawing a person walking? Because my number one tip for increasing your working memory is productive meditation. This is an idea that goes all the way back to my 2016 book, Deep Work.

With productive meditation, you take a professional problem, or it could be a complicated personal problem, but a clear complicated problem. You go for a walk, and you try to make progress on that problem only using your head. The walking helps you do this. If you're just sitting and thinking, it's much more difficult, but the walking actually quiets some noises in your cognitive circuit, so it's a little bit easier to focus.

Every time you notice your attention wander away from the problem that you're trying to make progress on in your head, you notice that wandering, and you move your attention back to the problem. This forces you to get very comfortable holding lots of information in your head and trying to manipulate it and generate new information based on it.

You can make these walks longer and longer as you get more comfortable with this exercise. This is directly increasing your working memory strength. Your working memory strength is critical to being a serious thinker. Serious thinking requires you to pull multiple pieces of information and hold onto them in your mind's eye.

This piece, but also this piece, and this piece is over here, and how do these things relate, and then how do I connect that to this other thing I thought before? Working memory is at the core of deep thoughts. Most people have a bad working memory, however, because we're not used to holding a lot of stuff in our head in a way that we can actually access them with our mind's eye.

Active meditation is direct and intense practice for exactly this problem. It gets exactly to the heart of what you're trying to do here. All right, we've got one more practice to help you become a serious thinker. I'm going to draw one more picture. This final practice, I'm going to say it this way, practice being intellectual.

So let's see, let's draw our stick figure person here. So how do we know this person is intellectual? That's not going to work. I'm going to draw him in a turtleneck, but he needs a neck, Jesse, that's the problem. So let me give him a neck. My stick figure person, there we go, give him a big neck.

>> You're a French accent. >> I probably will give him a beret as well. >> And a pipe. >> Yeah, so there you go. Turtleneck, because he's an intellectual. All right, beret, because he's an intellectual. And a pipe, there you go. Practice being an intellectual. Now I joke by drawing this picture of like sort of a pretentious Frenchman with a pipe because intellectual is often used in modern conversation as a pejorative term.

But there's also a very specific and positive meaning here in say stance towards the world of information in which you are seeking out nuance and subtlety, you're also seeking out integration of information into complex understandings that you already have. So to be an intellectual is that you are engaging with the world of information, trying to master it and integrate it.

Now if you do this for a living like I do, if you're a professor, they teach you how to do this. I mean, this is what you do for a living, but we don't talk enough about everyone else. How do you practice this intellectual stance, an intellectual approach to the world of information?

I'm going to give you two very concrete ideas that I think almost anyone can do and it's going to make you literally seem much smarter. The first is pairing primary and secondary sources, pairing secondary and primary sources. Okay, here's what this means. It's most obvious with books. So you want to read a great book, let's say.

I want to read the Odyssey. I want to read Joyce. I want to read Epsilon Epsilon. The typical approach that I think professional intellectuals have, which is flawed because they forgot their own training, is they say, just read it. Just expose yourself to the ideas and then pretend like it's really changed your life.

But that's not actually the way you learn how to engage information and draw out nuance and complicate it. What you should do instead is say, okay, let me now get, before I read this hard book, a secondary source. A secondary source means it's a book about the book. So here is a book about why Faulkner is important or why Epsilon Epsilon is important.

Here is a book about the heroic Greek world in which Homer wrote the Odyssey and why this is such an important book. I'm going to read about the book first and then go and read the actual primary source itself. You are now approaching this primary artifact with a framework for how to understand it, what you're looking for, what's important about it.

And this gives your brain practice seeing things at a new level. You might not understand everything you saw in the secondary source, and you might not come away saying, I completely understand this book or it's changed my life, but you've practiced reading multiple layers below the surface. See, when we just tell people, read the great books, go to the museums, and you'll just be inspired.

We really are selling them short because that experience of inspiration requires you seeing multiple layers below the surface, and you got to practice that. Secondary sources first. Same thing with museums. I do not like this idea when parents have of like, all that's important is that we expose our child to art museums, and then they'll love art.

They're not going to come away from that loving art. What you're really just teaching them is how to be comfortable in the social context of an art museum, so they'll seem cultured if they're around other people. Staring at paintings does not make you a lover of paintings. Reading about those paintings.

Who was this artist? Why was this important? What was happening before when this artist came along? What was the historical context or turmoil created by this painting? And then you go and see the artifact. You have a completely different relationship with it. So you could teach kids even, let me give you some basic information.

Who was Jackson Pollock? What was going on with the abstract expressionist? What were they fighting against? Why was this so exciting if you lived in Soho in 1942? What was happening here? And then you see this artifact, and it's a different experience. It's like when you go to the Smithsonian and see Judy Garland's ruby slippers, what's exciting about the ruby slippers is not just they're shiny, but it's like those were the things in Wizard of Oz.

That was a really important movie, and this famous person wore them. That context helps. So you get in the habit of doing this. You can do it with art. You can do it with books. You can do it with movies. I do this all the time. Let me read five reviews about this movie.

Not like contemporary, but people looking back. It's a great movie. People looking back and writing essays about this movie. Roger Ebert did a lot of this later on. He went back and wrote this series of essays about the great movies. The Guardian over in the UK does a lot of this.

They'll write these retrospective essays about movies that might be decades earlier, and then you go and watch the movie. It's a completely different experience. It could be modern movies. It could be older movies. You read about, for example, center focusing, and then you watch George Miller's Mad Max Fury Road.

It's a completely different experience and appreciation when you just put the movie on without that type of knowledge about the cinematography. Secondary sources paired with primary sources. This is what academics do during their training. They read and write their own secondary sources based on these primary sources. So it becomes second nature, seeing levels below the surface on all sorts of things.

But if you're not going to a doctorate program, you're not getting this training, you have to do it yourself. It really makes your intellectual world a lot more interesting. Here's the other thing I want to recommend for practicing being intellectual. Maintain idea documents. These are actual documents you maintain, like a Microsoft Word file, just in your own personal files, or if you're a good handwriter, you could do this in journals, and you have particular topics that you are recording and updating a summary in your own words of your best understanding of that topic.

These can be just general, sort of timeless topics. Like I'm interested in Stoic philosophy, and I have this document I build out and add to about what Stoic philosophy is, who the thinkers are, what their major thoughts are, your current summary of how you're thinking about Stoicism being in your own life.

You are, through writing, consolidating information, structuring information. Now again, this is something that real intellectuals get good at doing naturally, but you have to practice it. Writing and updating these summaries is a good way of doing it. You can do this same thing with current event topics as well.

There's something going on in the world that you care about. You're like, "I don't know. This scares me, or interests me, or it just feels important to me." Create and begin maintaining a document of how you feel about this and why. This is a fantastic way to free yourself from the emotional ping pong game of just, "Let me expose myself to social media or algorithmic content.

Let me choose a tribe and make that tribe make me feel good or scared and help me get mad about the other tribe." It gets you out of that trap, and it allows you to begin building your own understanding of things. You're worried about AI. Start building out this document.

Here's what's going on. Here's the main types of AI. Here's where things are. Here's a list of thinkers and where they stand, and this thinker is against this thinker. You organize your thoughts. You're really worried or upset or conflicted or uneasy about conflict in the Middle East. Build out a document.

Shut down Twitter. Build out a document. Here's what's going on. This is why I'm trying to articulate my concerns here. I really worry about this, but this is making me feel bad as well, and this argument doesn't quite work, and here's why. You're talking about arguments and where it falls short for you, where it resonates.

Build idea documents as a way of structuring. To write is to think. To write about what matters is to help you think about what matters, and your brain gets used to organizing information in the conceptual structures, so actually, I have to practice being an intellectual. All right, so if you do these five things, all of which I've beautifully illustrated here, you begin improving the quality and decreasing the quantity of the information that you consume.

You get comfort with boredom. You do interval training for just maintaining your concentration. You do particular training to strengthen your working memory, and you actually practice engaging information as an intellectual. You can become a much more serious thinker. It's not something you just choose to do. It's not something you're just born to do or not.

It's something you cultivate, and hopefully, if you're a listener of the show, you do agree that this is worth cultivating because I think it is. You see someone who's doing something cool, they're probably a serious thinker. You see someone who's done really well for themselves, they probably have the way to do serious thought, and in this case, maybe it's applied to a business issue, a strategy, but there's serious thought going on there.

You see someone who just has a really interesting, engaged life, they're probably a serious thinker. They appreciate this. They can go to the movies and love the experience. They have things they're deeply engaged in. Your brain is your number one portal to the world, and if you train that brain to be a serious thinker, your experience of the world changes the technicolor.

The font gets smaller. The clarity gets much increased. It's just a different sort of improved experience with life, so train it. Train that thinking, and you will get better at it. All right, Jesse, we got, I think our questions today are all pretty tightly connected, which I appreciate. They're very tightly connected to this exact theme of increased thinking, but before we get to those questions, let's just first hear from our sponsors.

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It makes it easy to buy. The only thing holding us back is we don't yet have our great idea. We know how to sell it, Shopify. We don't yet have our great idea for what exactly we're going to put in our store. We can add some of the items from my favorite things.

Yeah. So my favorite thing will just be stuff we invent. We invent the sell, but I look forward to it. I look forward to coming up with cool things to sell. All right. Here's what I can tell you. Sign up now for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/deep.

Just be sure to type that in all lowercase, go to shopify.com/deep now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in that's shopify.com/deep. All right. So while I brainstorm ideas for our soon to come eCommerce store, let's get started with questions. What do we have today for questions?

Hi, first questions from Mir. You have said that four hours of deep work is the max per day. Does reading count towards this limit? Well, two things here. The four hour limit is approximate. Where that actually comes is from studies of professional musicians, looking at how long they're able to practice in a typical day.

Professional music caliber practice being essentially an extreme form of deep work. It's at the more extreme scale because it requires intense sustained concentration. That's harder to use your brain harder than a professional musician trying to learn a new piece. So we use that as our upper limit. The study I looked at found that the most common configuration of practicing for these professional musicians studied was a two hour session, a break, and then another two hour session.

So I recommend if you're doing the hardest type of deep work, you know, don't expect to be able to do more than four hours. There's huge variation here. Some people are more comfortable doing more. More commonly, however, is a lot of deep work is not as hard as what a professional musician does when they're practicing so that you can fit more in.

Computer programmers will often report they can go many, many hours in a row. And that's because if you really zoom in on the actual cognitive activity, when someone is computer programming, there's periods in there where it's very intense concentration. I'm trying to figure out new code from scratch, this sort of algorithmic logic to make this work, which is equally an intensity to learning a new professional music piece.

But then there's other parts where you're autopilot coding or you're looking up information. How does this library work? So it's a lot of ups and downs. So you see the programmer who works for 10 hours straight, there still may be only four hours total of super intense thinking in there.

So depending on what's going on with your deep work, you might be able to spend more time. So what about reading? How does this affect it? You know, it just affects, depends on how difficult the reading is. So if you're a Talmudic scholar who is trying to understand a complicated piece of the Gemara, that might be very difficult, similar to algorithmic thinking, similar to trying to learn a new piece of music.

And there's only so much of that you can do. On the other hand, if you're reading, as I am right now, as part of Thriller December, because of course in December I like to, among other things, read more thrillers, a Tom Clancy book written well after Tom Clancy's death about a stealth fighter crashing in Arizona and some spy thing happening in Eastern Europe, you're not taxing your brain that much.

So it just depends on the type of reading. The more intense it is, the more it's going to sort of pull from that pool of deep work reserves. And the more fun it is, the more you can do. I wouldn't worry about it. I just think reading is a good leisure.

Your mind is more happy engaging in reading than consuming passively. So keep reading as much as feels comfortable. All right, Jesse, what do we got next? Next question is from SR. I read and think a lot. Consequently, I have a lot of notes on all sorts of subjects, but I still feel like my understanding of these ideas are scattered when I attempt to communicate them with others.

My presentation just seems haphazard and shallow. How should I fix this? Well, sorry, I like this question because we've already done the answer in the deep dive, which is idea documents. So you might have noticed this among people who are more sort of traditionally intellectual or professional intellectuals. They're very good at I read this New Yorker piece or watch this documentary and can now with great confidence sort of talk on this topic.

In fact, I can talk sort of I'm speaking from experience here, sort of like 60 percent out of my butt on this. But like I picked up enough things that I can sort of talk about this really confidently. That's practice. That's practice with taking information and integrating them into a structure, a conceptual structure that you can then apply to generate new information.

So in conversation, I can now use this conceptual structure when engaging on this topic and be able to pull from it and seem really smart. How do you practice doing that is idea documents. You create these documents around ideas you care about or think are interesting. You begin to fill them out and evolve them.

The act of actually writing forces you to build conceptual structures because the writing is just a reflection of an internal abstract structure on the page. If you write something structured about a topic you care about, I've written something structured about the conflict in the Middle East, how I'm feeling about it, where my confusions are, who I don't agree with, who I do agree with.

That requires you to build a conceptual structure for the information you have. Now for a lot of people who are not professional thinkers, it really changes your experience of the world. Because if you're not building conceptual structures in which you integrate information, what you're doing instead is just surfing vibes.

You know, I don't know, like, I don't, I don't like this person. And that person seems to be on the other side of this thing. So like, boo, or I don't know, I saw this thing, someone tweeted, and it made me feel righteous at the time. No, I didn't try to actually integrate this into a conceptual structure.

So I just sort of feel like it, this is a clear cut issue, right? And like, we're just really right. And then you get into a conversation and you try to repeat the thing you saw tweeted that in that form felt so righteous, and it's like, this doesn't really feel so convincing anymore.

And the other person just said three things I wasn't thinking about, I don't know what to do. And your head sort of explodes, or you just, you know, you're on the other team. So we're not used to it. Most people are not used to this way of actually engaging with the world.

This is how you practice. Idea documents. So do this with actual topics that you talk to people about. Do this also with topics that are completely timeless that you want to know more about. If it's a technology, a type of philosophy. I built out a pretty extensive document a few years ago when I was listening to one of the great courses on the great ideas of Western philosophy.

And I sort of start building this thing out. Like, I don't know, let me just write this down. And this person thought this, it just really helped me sort of structure who is who and what they were thinking and how this is important. When you don't write it down, it all sort of just filters through.

So SR, start doing those idea documents and you're going to get better and better at this. All right. Let's keep rolling. Jesse, what do we got next? Next question is from Maggie. I work in data analysis and I'm regularly bored in my day to day tasks. At the same time, my side hustle has gotten to the point where I can spend the whole day in deep work without distraction.

What should I do in the interim to maintain my deep work muscle while also getting through the day? So Jesse, if you've gotten used to this type of question, we get the, I call it the leading the witness question, right? Where it's like, well, my work is bad and it's really boring and it's stupid and, but this other thing is really great and it's awesome and I could do it all day long and I, it gives me meaning in life.

What should I do? Yeah. It's a leading, leading the question. Yeah. So I want you to be careful here. This is Maggie. I want you to be wary of Grasses Greener Syndrome. So when you're just sort of going through your professional life with what in my book, so good, they can't ignore you, I call the passion mindset, which is what is this job offering me?

You're very susceptible to the grasses greener syndrome, which is like, I don't love like what I'm doing day to day right now. Maybe there's something where I would love what I'm doing day to day more. And when you start messing around with side hustles, this gets even more dangerous because it is easy to create a quote unquote side hustle that just like lets you do the thing you think is fun in the moment, right?

Because when you don't have to depend on that side hustle for all of your income, when you don't have to depend on that side hustle to actually create an impact in the world or support people, you can just make it whatever you want. And then you tell yourself the story that like, there's jobs like this out here, I could just be doing this really fun thing.

But over here on this other world in this non data analysis, there's, you know, I have to fill out memos and it's not always like that. My boss is kind of annoying and it's not always interesting what I'm doing. But in my side hustle, I'm writing a novel and it's like fun, I'm just writing all day.

But the issue is that side hustle could just be you cosplaying some sort of imaginary ideal of what work could be. It's a dangerous thing to have pulling you. So how do we get out of this situation? It's not just we say, well, just grin and bear whatever your job is, because maybe your job isn't in its current state what it should be.

The way you get out of this situation is lifestyle centric career planning. I have an ideal vision of where I want my life to be, and here's my sort of target in the next few years, all the aspects of my life, where I live, what I do, what my days are like, my engagement with community and the rest of the world.

All these things are really clear. And as part of this, you then look back and say, how does I use my working life to get me closer there? Then what you were doing in your working life is part of a intentional plan to get you closer to a more idealized version of your lifestyle.

That is much more effective than just the passion mindset of, do I like what I'm doing? Is there another thing I could be doing that I would like more? Maybe I should just be a novelist because this is fun. Like Cal, I bought a hipster keyboard and it clickety clacks and I'm drinking coffee and clickety clacky.

Brad Stolberg, by the way, Jesse, called my new keyboard a hipster keyboard. Oh, really? Yeah. He's like, ah, so you got one of those hipster keyboards. Does he see them a lot in coffee shops? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know about Asheville. There's probably a lot of hipsters there, right?

That's what I understand. Yeah. So he calls it a hipster keyboard, which it is. So you're like, this is fun. I clickety clack and wear a beret and a pipe in Starbucks, which is exactly what I do. I'm just like, ha, ha, ha. Right, right, right. I don't think this is fun and data now, this is, the other stuff is kind of, you know, it's annoying, right?

You're just going to get drawn into that. But if you're like, no, no, no, this data analysis job is part of the money it generates, what I'm doing now, but where I want to shift my position here eventually as I get to this level, I'm going to shift this to a consultant because I've saved this much money, and then it's going to be six months on, six months off, which is going to allow us, like, you have this plan worked out that the work you're doing now and what you're working towards with your work is part of a plan that connects to deeply with what resonates.

That's where you want to be, not just analyzing this, your day-to-day activity, something you enjoy or not, and then inventing, you know, this ideal job cosplay, like, well, I'm comparing it to that. You know, it couldn't be that. It's the equivalent of, like, you're looking at your romantic partner and then you're watching a Ryan Reynolds movie and you're like, oh, Ryan Reynolds seems kind of better.

I mean, he's funny, he's, like, pretty good shape, you know, he's like the handyman in this small town in this Christmas movie that, like, I didn't realize would teach me the meaning of Christmas. And then, you know, you look over at your romantic partner, like, oh, no, I mean, maybe it's probably because of Ryan Reynolds.

It's kind of the same thing when you're, you know, cosplaying on your hipster keyboard, like, well, this is more fun than, you know, my job that's sending my kids to private school. So I think working backwards, and I know I'm a broken record on this, but lifestyle-centered career planning gives you focus on what you're doing and why, which is what you need to keep moving.

Your motivational system needs an understanding of what you're doing and how it leads to something important, so that your episodic future thinking can see something that really resonates. That's what it needs. You don't need to enjoy every minute of what you're doing. That's the wrong metric. The athlete who really wants to be the best in their field does not enjoy all the time they spend in the weight room, but they're motivated to do it because it's part of their vision of being number one.

So that would be my advice there. Be careful of Grass's Greener Syndrome. All right, what's our next question, Jesse? - All right, this is the moment of truth, too. - Is this Slow Productivity Corner? - Yep. - All right, let's get some theme music. All right, what is our Slow Productivity Corner question of the day, Jesse?

- That came from Kiran. - Thank you, Kiran. - I'm a slow thinker, but at times my employee wants complicated answers quickly. I struggle at times to gather my thoughts into concise answers to appease management. How should I compensate? - Okay, well, I'm gonna give you a couple ideas here.

One of them will be concrete, and one of them's gonna be a little bit more psychological. Let me start with the concrete. Lean into your slowness here by cultivating, this could be like a quirky idiosyncratic trait of yours. When you get that email, "Hey, Dante, what about like whatever?" You say, "Interesting question, let me give this a thought.

I'll get back to you after lunch." You have a specific time. That then gives you enough time to sit down and say, "Okay, let me take a break, let me take a beat, and let me think through like what do I really wanna say here? And let me gather some points here and actually make this pretty thoughtful and then send it back by the time I said I was gonna send it back." So then people think like, "Well, Dante, yeah, he's a very thoughtful guy.

He never responds right off the cuff in the meetings. He says, 'Let me get back to you,' and then he does, and he gets back to us in the time he says." And it's always really thoughtful stuff. And now you're leaning into the slowness, instead of losing opportunities, like, "Ah, like Dante doesn't get back to us," or it's incomplete.

They're like, "This is just the way this guy operates. That's actually kind of cool. He's careful, so we can kind of trust him on careful stuff. And here's the bonus, Dante, they will maybe start leaving you out of this sort of knucklehead like back and forth hyperactive hive mind, like, "Let's just go back and forth 70 emails right now and try to like get some answer." You don't really wanna be a part of that anyways, like, "I'm slower, so no, I can't do the less than 70 emails next 30 minutes, but I can really help think what's really gonna be best for this client." To do this, you really have to deliver, though.

Really do think through and be deliberate. Here's my psychological answer. So that's like what you could do positively. There could be a negative aspect here as well. There could be some combination of perfectionism and imposter syndrome self-confidence issues going on here, right? So the other thing that might be happening is you're just worried about shooting off a response because you worry, "I'm insufficient.

This might not be smart. This might not make sense. If I send off this response too quick and I really haven't thought about it, the boss is gonna be like, 'Aha, I knew it. You're not smart. You're an imposter. Pack up and get out of here.'" And so you're crippled by this idea of, "Do I really belong here?

Are people gonna think I'm dumb?" It's sort of like a perfectionism imposter syndrome. That's also very common in these sort of work scenarios. And there you have to just basically, this is psychological, you have to harness your sort of inner American white maleness of just, "I will be very confident." Like, "Yeah, I know about this.

There." You know? And just be like, "It'll work out." You gotta have to kind of get that mindset a little bit. It's gonna feel artificial at first. It's sort of like, "Yeah, of course. Do this. Of course." You know? And then high-five people because that's what American white males do, I suppose.

We high-five each other. Yeah. They type on hipster keyboard. We're just like, "Let me just knock this out on my hipster keyboard. Give it up." Just round of high-fives. Everyone in the room is just high-fiving. So you got some of that's just mindset. People, here's the thing, people are not scouring over your responses.

They're not looking at them in detail. There's not a committee that's like, "Okay, here comes Dante. Let's put it up. Project it. Project it on the board." For some reason, they have it on a 1980s-style plastic film on the overhead projector, and they're all staring at it and thinking about it.

And then finally, someone in a tweed jacket shakes their head and says, "No, this is not good. This is not good at all." And then the other guy is like, "So we're gonna murder him?" Like, "Yeah, let's do it." And they all just run out of the room to come get you.

That's not what happens when you send a quick email. It's mainly just people who are really busy and overwhelmed and just trying to throw things. I need an answer to this because I have so many things going on. I'm super stressed. They don't really care. If you read most people's emails in the hyperactive hive mind situation, they often sound like you have a caveman who's dealing with a brain injury responding.

You know, it's like, "Me, client meeting, bad, 4 p.m., question mark, emoji," right? People are just throwing junk around. So the psychological answer is, like, you go a little easier on yourself. Just be like, "Yeah, it's fine. They're not people. Just the conversation needs to move forward." So you have some combination of these two options.

Don't be so worried about people scrutinizing your responses, or, and this could be complimentary, lean into being a slow thinker. "This is my thing. I take my time." But then I give you good responses. I like this second, this latter response just because I think it might free you from a lot of the back-and-forth hyperactive nonsense and in a way that's not costing you.

We don't involve Dante in, like, a lot, some of the back-and-forth nonsense because, not because he's not reliable, but because he's a slower, more careful thinker. So he probably won't respond to this right away. In fact, the fact that you are, you will respond to this right away makes me think, "Why aren't you more like Dante?" So it's like a positive way to actually get away from some knucklehead stuff.

So anyways, good question, Dante. That was our slow productivity corner. Should we hit the music again, Jesse? Yeah. All right. Let's do it. Just feel calmer. Do we have a call? Yeah. Let's do a call. We got a call. All right. Let's get someone on the phone. Who do we got here?

Here we go. Hey, Cal. Andy here. Thank you very much for your wonderful podcast. I've been enjoying going deep and dropping that into every sentence I use. So question for you today is quite simple. How do you take deep holiday? Thanks, Cal. Well, first of all, Andy makes me think we should have added a sixth practice to our deep dive about how to become a more serious thinker.

And that practice is adopt an English accent. Yeah. I think people just give you, what, 50% more intellectual seriousness? Yeah. I was hoping you'd use your French accent. Well, that's not an intellect. I think the English accent sounds smarter. Yeah. Yeah. I've got a fantastic English accent. Holiday, right, chop?

No, it's Russian. English accents make everything sound smarter. Deep holidays is a good question, especially if, you know, you do think for a living like I do. I had to figure this out. I used to think the goal for a vacation was to have nothing to do, because you get overwhelmed by having too much to do as you approach the vacations, you say, wouldn't this be great to have nothing to do?

Just it's me and my family and some fun books. It would stress the hell out of me, right? It's like you're a serious drinker and you say for the next two weeks, you know, I'm not going to touch it. It's difficult for those two weeks because you've been doing it all the time.

So I would have a huge difficulty on vacations, especially when we had young kids, just feeling uncomfortable and antsy and bored and weird because my brain was like, what are we doing here? So what I learned to do was to bring things to think deeply about on vacation. This will not cause stress.

Just make sure these things are fully disconnected from any sort of communication or back and forth to make sure they can't generate new tasks that you have to deal with and schedule that really what you want escape from is all of that cognitive context, shifting all of that, dealing with ever evolving collections of obligations and scheduling.

That's what you need to escape from. But actually the thinking hard about something interesting piece, well, that's actually the fun part of work. And so to be able to just do some of that, you know, I go for, I used to do this when we'd go to the beach, go for a walk on the beach every day and just think about something and take notes.

You don't need that much, but that's great. You know, planning is a good thing to do on vacations. I want to just like think through, like, what do I want to do with like this new book? So many of my book ideas have come together. The final stage of coming together has happened on vacation.

So having things to think through that are allow slowness, you can just spend time with them. There's no time sensitivity. No one's waiting for you. That generates no new obligations, no back and forth communication. To me, that's a deep holiday. You don't want to escape work. You want to just keep the coolest, most fun intellectual parts of work.

Those then are the, those then are the best trips. All right. So I want to end the second segment here with a case study. This is where one of your listeners sends in a case study about putting my ideas into practice in your real life. Today's case study comes from Misha, who says, I read digital minimalism and immediately started an electronic detox.

I do not have social media before, but I used to watch YouTube in particular Korean video logs, Netflix and Disney plus while cooking, cleaning, and sometimes for leisure, I used to complain that I had no time at all. I was struggling to get things done at work. I was not able to focus on finishing my data science certification bootcamp.

I was not able to spend quality time with my 12 year old son, and I was not getting enough sleep. When I started the 30 day detox, I noticed that I was able to focus more. I enjoyed spending time with myself and my thoughts. I was able to read and replicate some machine learning papers.

And most of all, I was fully aware of the present and improving my relationship with my son. Setting aside distractions such as YouTube and streaming services gave me my thoughts back. I always enjoyed silence, but I lost that after getting addicted to streaming services. I can now think in peace.

At the end of the 30 days, I was able to finish my data science certification. I'm currently sleeping eight to nine hours every night. I spend much more quality time with my son. I was able to read four books and my brain is not hungry for dopamine anymore. I mean, sometimes I want to just lay down and binge on something.

So I always have my Kindle with me. When I feel this way, I purchase a thriller, mystery, or a fantasy and fiction book that I get to read. I rediscovered the pleasure of reading. I also renewed my library card. I guess being connected all the time is not just a waste of time, but it shallows the brain and you feel like you've lost the power to work on deep issues, learn hard things, and get back to thinking.

Misha, I enjoy that case study. This is essentially practice number one from our deep dive earlier in the show. Consume higher quality information and consume much less of it. So when you cut a lot of these sources of information from your life, especially those that are just designed around an engagement model, it's a different intellectual world.

Everything is slower. You can spend time with your thoughts. You have a lot more time than you thought. Everything gets better. You're more present. There's just a slowness to not being caught up into this net of optimized, algorithmically curated information that the slow down and get appreciation out of subtle understanding material and not just as like emotional in the moment raw feelings really is a nicer way to live.

The only correction or addition I would give to this is I don't typically use the word detox. I use the word declutter, right? So the idea is not I'm just going to stop using all these things temporarily to get away from them. It is instead I'm going to stop using all these things so I can rediscover life without them and then very carefully decide what comes back or not.

Declutter the proverbial closet here. So what you've done here was not a detox, but a declutter. You stepped away from everything and now you could decide what do I really need in my life or not? You have cleaned up your digital life. The detox terminology is too often abused in the digital community to talk about breaks.

I'm not a big fan of breaks for the sake of breaks. I'm a fan of making permanent changes. So the declutter concept is better. You don't detox your closet by I empty out my closet for 30 days and put everything back in. You declutter your closet by taking everything out and only putting back in what you really need.

So a great example, Misha, I think people underestimate how much positivity in their life is waiting on the other side of a more minimalistic approach to the digital. All right, so I want to get to our final segment. Before we do, Jesse, let's hear from some more sponsors. I want to talk in particular about our friends at Mint Mobile.

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That's at MyBodyTutor.com. Let's go to our final segment where I react to things that are happening in the news. I want to start this segment actually by reacting to something that a listener sent us. So let me load this up over here. So long-time fans of the show know that we have this long-running joke where I pretend that the Patrick Rufus book, "Name of the Wind" was written by Brandon Sanderson.

Jesse, I got a very concerned email recently from a listener that was like, "Look, I feel bad about this. I love the show, but it's really, really bothering me. I think you have the wrong author. Brandon Sanderson did not write 'Name of the Wind.'" So this bit has been going on long enough that we have like a huge amount of our audience that just thinks I'm dumb, which I sort of appreciate.

Anyways, what's on the screen here, if you're watching instead of listening, one of our listeners, do we have their name somewhere? Yeah, it's, I'll get it. Alaska or something like that, mocked up a fake version of "Name of the Wind." Lazdi. Lazdi. Lazdi. So on the screen here is a fake version of "The Name of the Wind" with Brandon Sanderson as the author.

There seems to be a wizard, a lizard in some sort of medieval armor holding, I guess, a time block plan. So good. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I'm going to have to print that out. We'll put that in the studio. So there we go. It's the little things to make me happy.

But I have an actual article here to react to. Load this up on the screen right now. This appeared in Nature on November 29th. So if you're watching, I have it up on the screen here. Let's see here. You know, I'm looking at this, Jesse, this is actually, this is not the full article.

This is actually the description of the data tables that got pulled into here. Oh, okay. But I can tell you what's in, I can tell you what's actually in this article. So the title of the article is Remote Collaboration Fuses Fewer Breakthrough Ideas. Now, this was a study that was published in Nature where they took tens of thousands of actual research articles and patent applications, and they did some sort of analysis to figure out the nature of the work that was done to produce this intellectual artifact, in particular in person or over a long-distance collaboration.

And what they found was a strong connection between the original new ideas and working in person together. That these more long-distance collaborations were not as associated with as many new ideas. So I wanted to get into this a little bit because I have talked about various forces that could help explain what they were seeing here.

You see, what's going on when we think about the world of creativity and production is we're really excited about ideas like network theory and recombinant growth models, where we just imagine there's just pools of information out there, and different people have different pools of information. And if we just connect people, their pools of information connect, and we can have the information share with each other, and we get these interesting new combinations, and there comes innovation.

The networking itself is abstract to these models, it's just connect. So it's online, it's digital, whatever, it doesn't really matter. But this study here in nature is saying, "Well, actually, it does matter how you're actually bringing people together to work." And it's because we are missing from these abstract models something that's much more messy and concrete, which is actual human brain cognition.

Real human brains, messy collections of neurons that are actually trying to concentrate and create new thoughts, new important thoughts do not form from the low-friction recombination of abstract information. They're produced in brains, and it requires serious thinking by real people. It's a hard alchemical process that takes some information and produces new information that's valuable.

It is not just a recombination of ideas. Working in person with other people supports that process much better than virtual collaboration. Now why is that? Well, there's an effect I wrote about in deep work called the whiteboard effect. And what it said is, if you gather groups of people together to work on the same proverbial whiteboard on a problem for an extended period of time, that can actually unlock higher levels of cognition than people even just working on their own, because two things happen here.

One, there's the social pressure not to fall behind on the thread of thoughts. So we're at the whiteboard, we're trying to figure out an equation. People are going back and forth and sort of proposing their new additions. If you let your attention wander, if you switch your cognitive context, there's a social cost, because now you're going to fall behind the thread of conversation.

You're going to have to say at some point, "Hold on, guys. I'm sorry. Can you back up again?" Right? You're going to let your mind wander. So when multiple people are working on something hard concurrently, everyone is focusing longer and harder than they would than if it was just themselves.

So it's not much of a social cost if you let your mind wander by yourself. No one knows. And then you can kind of go back to it. So when you're working together, one thing that happens is you think harder, you focus longer, you do less context shifts. The second thing that happens is you get on-demand additions of new information.

I'm trying to figure out this proof. I'm stuck right here. This person right next to me might immediately be able to say, "Use this technique. I know this technique. You didn't. I can get you unstuck." Then we get to another place where they're stuck, you have a technique that gets them unstuck.

So you expand your available pool of conceptual tools to apply to the problem at hand. So people sitting together for hours focusing on something hard, they can actually produce more than just a single person thinking about it. So what happens when we have remote collaboration? Most of that does not unlock those same whiteboard effects.

Remote collaboration, because I did a lot of this during COVID, it's emailing things back and forth, and it's having Zoom conferences for relatively short periods of time, because if it's Zoom, you've scheduled it on your calendar and it's an hour, and you're kind of talking things through. And it's kind of useful.

You're exchanging some information, but you do not get those boost the cognition. You do not get those in the moment when I'm stuck and actually thinking, you help me get unstuck. When you do remote collaboration, the actual acts of collaboration are typically disassociated from the serious thinking, the alchemy when you're trying to produce new thoughts.

You lose those advantages. I see this. Let me give you an actual example from my own life as a professional thinker. So last year with some collaborators, I published a computer science paper that won an award. It won a best paper award. Here's what's interesting about working on that paper.

Took a long time. We were started during Zoom on Zoom because it's during the pandemic and my collaborators were all over the world. We usually would get together every year, but we weren't. And so we had these regular Zoom meetings for a long time. We knew this was a good problem, weren't making progress.

Some progress would get made, but just getting stuck because on Zoom, we would talk about it and then maybe we'd think about it some on our own and not much was happening. What got that paper unstuck? At some point I said, virus or no virus, those of you who are in this area, come to the Deep Org HQ.

We had the whiteboard in here. We spent the day, unlocked a lot of things. Now suddenly we had a real core to this paper. Around this time, Georgetown was back open again. Thanks for rock and rolling. So one of my collaborators who had been overseas as a Georgetown professor came back and we said, great, let's get together every, there's a day, it was a Wednesday, like we both taught on Wednesdays, between our classes, let's always get together and go to this whiteboard and just work.

And more things begin to unfold quicker now, quicker now. And the core results of this paper really fell out to the place where then we could go back on our own and each take a different thing and polish it on our own. Paper came together, won a best paper award.

So we couldn't make progress on this until we could figure out how to get back together. Still took us two years because a lot of this was still done virtually. Now I want to contrast that. I'm going to load up something on the screen here, a cool thing that theoretical computer scientists get to do.

So I've loaded on the screen a picture of this castle. This is Schloss Dagstuhl in Germany. This is hard to get to. You have to fly to Frankfurt and then take a train for a long time. And then you get to the end of the line of the train, you have to have a car waiting to take you the rest of the way to this castle in the countryside.

This whole castle is dedicated to hosting workshops for computer scientists to get together for a week and do nothing but think about problems. It's a really cool setup. They give you assigned seating for all the meals. So it rotates who you're with. They have unlimited coffee and unlimited honor system beer.

You can't keep track of how much beer you drunk and like you kind of pay them at the end. All day long, all you do. You can't even walk anywhere from here. You're stuck. All day long, all you do is just talk to people in person about work. You give informal presentations.

I went to these a long time, one of these a while back. It's a week. You're a week in this castle. More recently, I went back and tabulated how many papers came out of that week and it was six. Six peer review publications came out of that one. One week of just working all day in person with people unlocked the core results for six papers.

The paper that I just won that best paper award for, two years of effort. Two years of effort, one paper versus one week, six papers. There's something cognition enhancing to being in the same room with other smart people working on the same thing. That is what I think they found or at least they were finding evidence of in that Nature paper.

The groups that were working together have a bigger brain. It's a conceptual distributed combined cyborg brain. They have a bigger brain to apply to the problem, cooler solutions come out. We can't just think about, and this happens all the time, is we remove from the picture in lots of different areas when we think about technology intersecting our lives.

We remove from the picture this messy human brain that actually has to do cognition. We try to reduce everything to just abstraction and it causes trouble. When we think ideas are just recombining information, we're like, "Great. It's just a global marketplace of ideas and we're just sharing stuff on Twitter and Zoom and we'll get all these great new ideas." Not how it works.

Same thing happened in work. We saw the world of work is just like people have information that they have to get to each other. We adopted the hyperactive hive mind. Let's just connect everybody up. We're on Slack and email all day because all that matters is getting information to these abstract vessels of information that they need, not knowing or thinking about the fact that these messy collections of neurons between our ears can't keep switching back and forth between all these things.

That's not how thinking works. It's not a network router. It's something much messier. We all got miserable and our productivity fell. There's this, again, a cautionary tale that happens again and again when you deal with the intersection of technology and cultures. Do not forget the human brain and how it actually operates.

It's weird and it's idiosyncratic, but it can also be wonderful. But you need to actually work with the reality of how this organ functions if you want to get the most out of it. I thought that was a cool example. You can't just connect a lot of people with the internet and say, "We're going to have more ideas." Everything's more complicated than that, and a lot more messy and a lot more analog.

All right, Jesse, we should have a castle. Why don't we have a castle? >> A lot of space. >> A lot of space. That's our next goal. We need a Schloss-Dagstuhl-style castle that we get together to figure out podcast ad reads. I don't know what we're actually going to do at it.

Brandon Sanderson jokes. >> We're going to popularize our Shopify store. That's where we're going to think what's going to go on that Shopify store. Just imagine what we're going to produce. All right, enough nonsense for now. Thank you, everyone, for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode of the show, and until then, as always, stay deep.

>> Hey, so if you liked today's episode about how to become a more serious thinker, you should also check out episode 250, which is titled In Defense of Thinking, where I give a more thorough case for why deep contemplation is so important for living a deep life. Check it out.

The deep question I want to tackle, why is it important to preserve the vanishing art