Can we make learning as addictive as social media? Last week, I talked briefly on the show about a TED talk that has been going viral recently. It was done by Louis Von Ahn, the co-founder of Duolingo. Today, I wanna take a deeper look at this question. I wanna draw from the science of motivation and distraction to argue number one, Von Ahn's specific claims about making learning as addictive as social media are doomed to failure, but number two, if we look more closely at how the brain actually functions, we can find there is a lasting and effective way to make learning more appealing, and yes, even more appealing to social media.

It's just gonna be different than the Duolingo approach. In the second argument, we are gonna see a more general playbook for cultivating a deeper life in general. All right, so let's jump into this. I wanna start with the video. I'll put it up here on the screen. For those who are watching, you can see this is Louis Von Ahn giving his talk.

I wrote down here the main points from his talk so that we can be on the same page here. So what does he argue in this? Well, he argues that Duolingo wants to give equal access to education for everyone. This is why they're moving language learning onto mobile phones.

They use a freemium model. Some people pay for it, or you can watch the ads. The people paying for it help subsidize the people who can't afford to pay to it so you get more people to see it. To make learning more engaging, Duolingo uses techniques like streaks, notifications, and a fun mascot that game and social media apps use to hook users to make the learning more addictive.

They're showing you can use addictive techniques for good. Millions use the apps to learn languages more than in all US high schools combined. Von Ahn hopes that these techniques can be applied to teaching other subjects like math on phones. So we can even take a closer look. I'm gonna switch to another video here that will just show us some actual app usage of Duolingo in progress.

So I have it up here on the screen now. You can see, if you're watching this as opposed to just listening, I'll narrate it to you. I'll narrate if you're just listening, you'll see you're selecting avatars, you're clicking on things, questions are coming up, quick, bright graphics so you can see what's happening.

There's an avatar that looks nice. There's an owl that looks really fun. Things are moving around, questions are coming up. So it does really look like a really sort of friendly, colorful app. And so it's supposed to have this addictive feel so that when you feel that urge to pull your phone out of your pocket instead of going to TikTok, so what we're gonna do Duolingo.

There's an owl with glasses. We're gonna have fun with this, let's go. All right, so let me start by saying a couple things I like about Duolingo. I wanna give credit where credit is due. Using applications on the internet to make information more accessible, especially information you can use to better yourself in terms of learning is a really good idea.

I think it was a really good idea when Khan Academy did this, for example, having a very easy to grok visual format for teaching mathematics and then making those mathematic lessons widely available. That did a lot of good. That is the internet being used towards its full potential. We're gonna see similar leaps in the ability for people to teach themselves material delivered through the internet.

Similar leaps are about to happen due to the integration of large language models like ChatGPT in learning. They're actually very good at this. ChatGPT and related language model-based chat tools are really good. You can go back and forth and ask it questions, for example, about a mathematics technique. Well, can you give me an example of this?

Why did you do this here? We are gonna see big changes happening in terms of tutoring and education with those tools as well. This is all great. The internet bringing more information to more people. But what about this idea that we can make a learning app as addictive as social media so that people will pull out this app instead of something else and over time will essentially addict people to learning and increase the level of learning in the world?

Well, here is where I think we need to get a little bit more wary. And to understand my wariness here, we actually are gonna have to look a little bit deeper about how the brain gets motivated to do things. There are two separate types of motivational systems that are relevant to this discussion.

If we're gonna understand the problem with Vaughn On Strategy and if we're gonna understand an alternative that might work better, we have to understand these systems. And so to help us understand the first system, I'm bringing an article up here on my screen. The title is "Dopamine Smartphones and You, A Battle for Your Time." This is written by Trevor Haynes.

And what I like about this article is that it does a good job of explaining the dopamine system which is gonna be the relevant system when we think about the urge to pull out a phone and do something on the phone. So when we think about addictiveness, quote unquote, surrounding apps, this is the system that's at play.

I'm gonna read a couple of quotes from this article that'll be relevant for our purpose here. Here's the first quote that I wanna read. Dopamine is a chemical produced by our brains that plays a starring role in motivating behavior. It gets released when we take a bite of delicious food, when we have sex, after we exercise, and importantly, when we have successful social interactions.

If you can do all four of those things at the same time, you're really winning. In an evolutionary context, it rewards us for beneficial behaviors and motivates us to repeat them. So this is sort of what we've heard about dopamine. It's kind of the layman's understanding. It has something to do with motivating us to do pleasurable behaviors.

Let's look a little bit deeper here. Every time a response to a stimulus results in a reward, every time a response to a stimulus results in a reward, these associations, so the associations mediated by the dopamine system, become stronger through a process called long-term potentiation. This process strengthens frequently used connections between brain cells called neurons by increasing the intensity at which they respond to particular stimuli.

Now, this is really important. When we look closer at the mechanisms of the dopamine system, we see a Pavlovian aspect to it. There's a response, some sort of stimuli, and there's a response to that stimuli that feels good. So this is an immediate thing. Stimuli response, stimuli response. So what's building up here in neurons is this immediate connection.

I pull out this app and almost right away, I'm seeing something that triggers an emotional reaction, be it an outrage if I'm looking at a sort of outrage peddler on Twitter, or amusement if I'm looking at TikTok videos from a curated list that's towards funny videos, and your brain builds this stimuli response, stimuli response type of connection.

The dopamine system then plays off of this and says, "Let's go do this behavior right now to get the response right away." So there's a real immediacy there. I have one more quote here. Just to give us another technical term, "Research and reward learning and addiction have recently focused on a feature of our dopamine neurons called reward prediction error encoding.

These prediction errors serve as dopamine-mediated feedback signals in our brains." So we're constantly, the system is constantly monitoring this very tight feedback loop. There's a particular stimulus and what type of response do we get, and where it has learned that a stimulus gives you often a positive response, then it really drives you to do it.

Now, this was the effect, all of this was unlocked. When this effect was uncovered in the context of apps on phones accidentally by Facebook. This happened about a decade ago. Facebook engineers, we've talked about this before, but it's worth repeating. Facebook engineers had this very pragmatic idea that we are gonna add the like button to our Facebook mobile app, because it is highly inefficient when a Facebook post is generating lots of simple, positive, affirmative responses, don't have much information, lots of congrats, great, that's awesome.

And the Facebook engineers were very pragmatic and they said, "Here's the problem. I post a triumph, everyone's saying great and congratulations, that buries the more meaningful comments." So I post the picture of myself with my diploma and everyone's saying, "Great, congratulations." And you have 30 or 40 of these short exclamatory comments.

You don't realize that three pages into those comments is the guy who's saying, "Hey, in the background, there's a Yeti stealing your Jeep." And that's like the interesting comment probably about this picture, but you don't find out about the Yeti stealing the Jeep in the background 'cause it's buried.

So I said, "Oh, we'll add a like button." So if all you're gonna do is say, "That's great." You click the like button and we can save the comments for more meaningful information, like letting people know there's a Yeti stealing their Jeep. This was the idea behind the like button.

They turn it on, almost immediately they noticed, "My God, people are using the app a lot more." And the reason was, is that the accumulation of likes was a positive reward signal. The clicking of the app, that little white F in the blue box on your phone, was a very clear stimulus, boom.

You press that stimulus and often you get this nice reward of people liked what I did. Hey, it's Cal here. I just wanted to mention, if you wanna have help taking action on the type of ideas we talk about in this show, sign up for my email newsletter. The link is right here below in the description.

Two to four times a month, I send out detailed articles about the types of ideas we discuss here. It's the best way to stay connected to me and my audience's quest to live a deeper life. So sign up below. That created a association. So now we get these reward prediction error encoding neurons involved.

Once that association was very strong, your dopamine system is like, "Click that button. Click that button." And people would click it more and more and more. That was the birth of the attention engineering era that we're in now. That was the realization among attention economy platforms that if we hack the dopamine system, we can 5X, 6X, now in the case of TikTok, probably 10X engagement on these apps.

And that's just more data, more ads to sell. So that is the system that's at play when you keep pulling out your phone. So what Vaughn is saying in his TED Talk is let's try to win at that game. You know, let's make this sort of fun and there'll be a nice reward because when you click on the app, there's an owl wearing glasses and stars fly around and you have streaks and that dopamine system will say, "Hey, let's take out this app and let's play it." All right, here's the problem about that.

If you had nothing else going on on your phone, if it was your phone had the weather app and Duolingo, that's a nice reward and you might feel compelled to pull out the Duolingo and play with it. The problem is, is that you are competing with TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, mobile games.

You're competing with applications that are also trying to hack the dopamine system. So now you need to out-reward them. You want your dopamine neurons associated with Duolingo to have a stronger reward response, a notably stronger reward response than these other attention engineered applications. And the reason why I think that is almost likely not going to happen is because you cannot engineer the reality, cannot engineer out the reality that learning requires strain.

Learning is hard. This is something I've talked about first in my book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You." I think this also comes up in deep work. I think this also comes up in my book, "Digital Minimalism." This comes up time and again, this notion that how do you learn a complicated new procedure?

It's through a process known as deliberate practice. Deliberate practice forces you to strain yourself with the activity at hand, be it conceptual or physical, past where you're comfortable. And it's in that strain past where you're comfortable that you're able to actually move forward your capabilities. If you want to play a guitar lick faster, you have to actually push yourself past where you can comfortably play that guitar lick.

And at first you have to concentrate on that playing that guitar lick faster with your full concentration, really stretching yourself. And it's really hard, you're making mistakes. You're giving it your full attention not to make mistakes. You know what happens? You get better at it, and eventually that speed becomes easier.

I know that analogy 'cause I actually captured that in my book, "So Good They Can't Ignore You," where I talked about deliberate practice. I spent time with a professional guitar player, and I documented, journalistically, the amount of strain this guy had practicing. Trying to move the speed of his fingers on guitar picking faster, he would concentrate so hard that he would forget to take a breath.

And then after a while, he would have the savage intake gas as his body was trying to stave off him going unconscious from lack of oxygen. That's how hard he was concentrating, but that's what actually makes you better. Same thing applies for conceptual goals, be it learning Spanish or calculus.

You have to stretch yourself past where you're comfortable to make a higher level comfortable. Now, I used to have this debate all the time on my website at calnewport.com with my articles and on my newsletter, because people would often take these type of activities and say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, you gotta get in a flow state." And I had to keep coming back and saying, "This isn't a flow state." The flow state, a concept that was invented and studied by the late great performance psychologist, Anders, no, it's not Anders Ericsson, this was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who I had corresponded some with, actually.

Flow states, you lose yourself in the activity. Flow states, time seems to disappear. It's the downhill skier just getting lost in executing the ski route, and you're completely lost in the activity. Flow states are very pleasurable. Deliberate practice is not. You can get lost playing a song you really know well on stage and get lost in the music.

You never get lost when you're practicing a song because you're pushing yourself so damn hard that you're like, "Oh my God, this is miserable." So learning is hard. It requires strain. To try to learn without strain would be like saying, "I wanna grow a muscle without ever having to tire my muscles." Isn't there a way I could grow my biceps bigger without having to actually lift heavy things in a way that's heavier than I'm used to?

No, you have to actually overload your muscle before it can grow. The same thing happens cognitively. So learning is always gonna have that strain. It's not pleasant. And so you can add as many owls with glasses and streaks as you want around it, but TikTok doesn't have the unpleasant strain.

It's just like saying, "If I want you to eat more broccoli, I can put it in a Happy Meal box. It could be in like a fun wrapper where confetti flies open when you open the wrapper. But when you get down to it, the broccoli is still gonna be pretty bitter and the french fries are gonna taste much better.

And in the end, I'm gonna eat the french fries if it's just they're both sitting there in front of me." So I'm not sure that when you take an activity, meaningful as it is, that has an inherent cognitive strain to it as part of its character, that you are gonna be able to win in the dopamine neuron game against other types of stimulus reward pairings that don't have that strain.

The reward is simply much more pure with TikTok. Just like if you wanted to compare TikTok to meth, the reward for meth is probably much stronger than TikTok because now you have a substance that is crossing the blood brain barrier, right? So if I'm a meth addict, I'm like, "Well, I like TikTok, but what I really like is some meth." Just like if I'm using TikTok, I might say, "Well, I really like Duolingo, but my God, I wanna use some TikTok." So if it's just an apples to apples comparison of reward stimulus game, these attention engineered applications that we think of as modern social media just have the upper hand on any type of learning app.

Okay, so does that mean that we're out of luck, that basically social media is gonna take all of our time? No, we're not out of luck. And the reason why is because there are other systems, and in particular, one other system that our brain uses to motivate behavior that is not built off of this near term stimulus reward dopamine neuron mediated system.

We have another system that is at the core of how humans have done what we have done. It's at the core of what defines humans versus almost any other species. It helps explains why humans are so successful in a way that other smart animals like ravens or dolphins are not.

And that's gonna be our ability to build motivation based off of future predictions. So let me tell you what I mean here. I'm gonna bring up an article for those who are watching instead of listening. I'm gonna bring up an article that'll help us make sense of this. This was an article that was written by Jane McGonigal for TED.

It's called "Mental Time Travel is a Great Decision-Making Tool. This is How to Use It." I like this article because it has a good summary of the otherwise complicated neuroscience. So I'm gonna skip way ahead here and to what I think is the relevant portion. All right, I'm reading now from the article.

Scientists call this form of imagination episodic future thinking or EFT. EFT is often described as a kind of mental time travel because your brain is working to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there. EFT is not an escape from reality.

It is a way of playing with reality to discover risks and opportunities you might not have considered. EFT is not a daydream in which you fantasize about waking up in a world where your problems are magically solved. It is a way of connecting who you are today with what you might really feel and do in the future.

More quotes. Because EFT allows us to pre-feel different possible futures, it's a powerful decision-making, planning, and motivational tool. It helps us decide, is this a world I wanna wake up in? What do I need to do to be ready for it? Should I change what I'm doing today to make this future more or less likely?

According to fMRI studies, EFT involves heightened activity and increased connectivity between 11 distinct brain regions. Compare this to simply remembering a past event which activates just six of those 11 regions of the brain. To get a little more technical here, during EFT, your brain goes on a hunt for realistic details and plausible ideas.

To do this, it activates the hippocampus, the seat of memory and learning, and digs through your memories plus any other facts and ideas you've stored away. Depending on what kind of future you're imagining, the hippocampus identifies the most relevant stuff and retrieves and recombines it into a new scene.

One last thing to say about that, those are called clues to the future. Your brain fires up the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, otherwise known by the catchy acronym, VMPFC, a region that's heavily used whenever you set goals and track your progress. Like the hippocampus, the VMPFC can suggest any goals you've had or previously considered.

One of the most interesting things about the EFT is that the motivations that pop into your mind first are likely to be closely linked to your deepest values and most essential needs, like always learning something new, helping others, pushing yourself to do brave things, taking care of your family, being creative, or putting new ideas or art into the world.

You still have to figure out the best way for your future you to achieve these future goals. So then the putamen, P-U-T-A-M-E-N, also part of the motivation and reward system kicks in. The putamen, which I'm almost certainly saying wrong, helps keep track of what specific actions and behaviors typically lead to positive results for you.

It's the part of the brain that knows things like, I feel better when I get some fresh air. Okay, I read all those technical details so you could get a lay of the land that this is a different type of motivational system. It is based on you projecting yourself into the future, imagining a result in the future that is very positive because you have evidence from your past it will be positive and it connects to your deeply held values and goals.

This then fires up other parts of your brain that gives you motivation to do the thing right now that's gonna help lead you to that future state. EFT is a different motivational system than the dopamine system. It is a system that can beat the dopamine system. This is critical to human survival.

This is why you can have in the caveman times some nice looking food. Okay, there's honey on the ground and I really want honey. I like honey, I need sugar. My dopamine neurons say, eat that honey. My God, eat that honey, that's gonna feel good. But also I know there's a bear nearby 'cause there's honey on the ground.

And the EFT system says, the thing about bears is they tend to eat you and that's not good. And so we're gonna override the dopamine system that says, go get that honey because we don't wanna be eaten by a bear, which is something that might happen here. The EFT system is what allows us to rise above our base instincts and say, let's invent the ax, let's invent the wheel, let's invent systems of philosophy.

It's what allows us to do human flourishing and creative actions. The ideas, the leaps of creative thinking that Yuval Harari in "Sapiens" identifies as the crux that makes humans humans, what makes our species what they are. So this EFT style motivation is more powerful because it's what allows us to do big and great things.

It's what allows us to rise above our base instincts in a way that a tiger cannot or a house cat cannot. So when we think about, hey, how do we learn more? We don't wanna play the dopamine game. We don't wanna say, how do I make learning feel the same as checking Facebook to see if I get those likes.

We instead wanna master our EFT system, the episodic future thinking system. And what this means is we have to fill up that hippocampus with all sorts of concrete details and experiences and memories that allow us to connect, allow us to connect this behavior with very positive futures. It requires us to have really deeply instilled values about what we care about so that we can then say, this activity that I know a lot about now leads me to something that I feel really strongly about.

Now, I talk about this a lot in the context of the deep life as lifestyle-centric planning, where you start with this clear vision of what you want your life to look like and use that to work backwards to build plans. This is no accident. This is no mere contrivance.

This is a instruction manual to fully leveraging your EFT. So if you wanna learn more, you have to expose yourself to as many resonant examples as possible of people who have learned and you admire, people who are really well-learned and what they do in their life or how they approach the world resonates with you on a deep level.

You need to watch these documentaries, read these profiles, read the biographies, look for these types of videos, meet these people in real life, go to their talks, go to see their presentations. You need to surround yourself in examples of people who have converted a love of learning into a life that really resonates with you.

And then you need to clarify your values of what is the value here that's at stake and make that a big part of your vision for yourself and your life. It'd be engaging ideas in a way that is above base rancor, or maybe about taking your mind and pushing to its fullest potential so you can have impact on the world.

Maybe there's a religious impulse here, a sort of Newtonian interest in trying to uncover the workings of God. You know that there's almost a religious impulse to be able to understand things better. Maybe it's, I want to support my family and my brain is gonna be one way I can do this.

There's whatever it is, you have a clear value and you expose yourself to example after example that resonates about people who have pursued this value. And they're showing you tangibly in their example, something you really want. You do these things, your EFT system can kick your dopamine system's butt.

And you say, yeah, there's a TikTok is there and it's gonna give me a little reward in the moment. It's gonna feel good. But this future I'm projecting feels even better. And so you know what, I'm not gonna take out TikTok. I'm gonna read, I'm going to go watch this movie.

I am going to go through the discomfort of stretching my mind past what it can do or not, whether or not there's an owl wearing glasses or an avatar stars a shootout when I do it. So, I mean, I think Vaughn is on to something when he says, we shouldn't just take learning for granted and say, learning is good, you should learn more.

Here's a workbook. We really should think about how do you make learning desirable? And I think it's fantastic that he is thinking about that, that he is identifying learning as this sort of tier one activity that can improve people's situation, that can improve the world in so many different ways.

I'm arguing though, the right way to spread that is less about playing the dopamine game and more about playing the EFT game. And this applies not just to learning, but almost to any type of activity that will take a shallow life and make it deeper. So when we understand the brain, we get a more nuanced playbook for how we convince ourselves to work towards the best vision of our future and not just the most desirable understanding of what could happen right now.

There you go, Jesse, that's my take on that video. - Yeah, I like it. - EFT. There's some pretty long acronyms. Neuroscientists have their acronym game on point. Not catchy, no vowels in a way that it sounds like a real word. And what I really loved was, if you're watching instead of just listening, the mix of lowercase and capital letters in an acronym.

So like, it really makes it confusing. So way to go neuroscientists. So I got a bunch of questions, all roughly about learning and these types of things. We have a call in there, we have a case study in there, but first let us hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible.

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- I like it too. - Yeah, there we go. There we go. All right, what do we got Jesse? What's our first question? - First question's from Matt. I believe my curiosity is my strongest quality and I read and learn constantly about all kinds of topics. The problem is my company's core business is exceedingly uninteresting to me.

I like being an attorney, but learning as much as I can about law stuff makes me want to chug Drano. Does your advice against follow your passion have room for a need to be interested in the subject of one's work? - I'm gonna be careful here, Matt. I'm gonna be careful and a little bit 50% curmudgeonly and 50% skeptical because there is a danger that we might be wandering close towards, which is a standard notion in our current world in which we want our work to be everything.

I think this is an outgrowth of this idea that first arose in the 1990s, this follow your passion idea that really became a mimetic vector that spread widely starting in the 1990s and beyond that your work is gonna be your main source of passion and meaning and identity. This is something I've written about.

I would point people, for example, towards my New Yorker piece from, I guess probably last January about quiet quitting where I get into the ways different generations grappled with work and meaning and how this idea of the baby boomers invented for their kids this idea of well, you need to work like a normal job, right?

Because the baby boomers tried counterculture and that didn't work. So you need to work a normal job but make the job still a source of passion. So for the baby boomers, they had this countercultural idea, leave the world of work and find passion in other things like hemp seed oil.

And that kind of didn't work because it turns out you need money to buy things. And so they sort of shifted and said, okay, well, you need to work and pay for your mortgage but your work itself maybe should be a source of passion. We've really internalized that. So we want our work to be everything.

Should be interesting, it should be engaging, it should make me feel good, it should be my main source of community, it should be like everything needs to come from my work, which is this impossibly high bar to meet, especially if you think about what work was like until basically a minute ago.

So it's not necessary. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it's not in any ways necessary that your job has to be day-to-day, very exciting and novel. There's other major sources of meaning that your job can provide. A connection to people, impact on the world, a sense of mastery, a foundation of being a reputable member of the communities that you care about.

This is where like in the mid 20th century, jobs were much more boring. You sold insurance or maybe you were a farmer, right? These weren't jobs where the things you were doing every day was super exciting, you were learning all this novel stuff. But you could be as the farmer, also head of the local agricultural union and a deacon at your church and you're providing for your family and you know the other farmers and you're involved in coaching the football team and it's just part of your identity and an important part of what you do.

The insurance salesman is also at the rotary club and it's just a piece, you're supporting your family, you're a productive member of your community, you're giving back to these various causes. So the job itself has to be, this is what has to be exciting and interesting, that's a new notion.

So I say that first just to lay the foundation that like let's come off the ledge a little bit, Matt, we'll look at this a little bit more closely, but let's come off the ledge of, oh my God, this is a crisis, something has to change. This is not a crisis.

Yeah, lawyers have boring jobs. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't have lawyers. All right, does that mean though you definitely shouldn't try to change something? Well, no, maybe. Now that we're off the ledge, we've calmed down a little bit, we had a couple of drinks, now we're relaxed. I'm gonna say, okay, look, I mean, having something interesting in your job is good too.

There's a way to make a lateral move in terms of career capital stores. So if you're a lawyer, something that makes use of the fact you trained so long to become a lawyer, but maybe it's more interesting lawyer work, I find consider that. Don't throw everything out. Don't throw out your career capital.

Don't say, I'm gonna become someone who dresses up as pirates for kids' birthday parties because that just sounds more interesting than being a lawyer because you're starting with no career capital. There's people who I suppose are very good at dressing up as pirates for kids' birthday parties and you're not, and it's gonna be hard to make a living.

So it's a completely reasonable move to redeploy your career capital towards some new challenges or more interesting aspect of your work. But I don't want you to fixate on this idea that your work has to be the source of that. So the best thing you can do here, Matt, and this is such a broken record in everything I say on this show, is gonna be some lifestyle-centric career planning.

Fix the full vision of what you want your life to be like five years, 10 years, and 15 years from now, all aspects of your life, not just your job, where you are, what you're doing, the character of the day, the people you're around, how the day unfolds, your surroundings, how it looks, how it smells, how it feels, this visceral, resonant image of what all the aspects of your life.

And then you work backwards from that and say, what changes do I make to progress closer towards that vision? And that will give you a lot more confidence. And you might find that actually, my job is just fine. There's other parts of my life I need to update. Or you might say, no, no, actually, I need to use my job as the main leverage for getting this new vision.

But at least now you're changing things as part of a more coherent vision and not a sort of more primal or spasmatic switch between, I don't know, this seems boring, let's do something else. So maybe you're a lawyer in the city, in the suburb of a city, and you're in, you know, whatever, you're in Northern Virginia, and you're a lawyer for whatever, and it's the commute, and it's boring, and things are expensive, and you have this vision that, you know, it's a mix between the Gilmore Girls, but you're near the ocean, and you're walking in the woods or something like this.

And so then maybe as you're like working through all the details of this vision, you realize like I could be an estate, wills and trust lawyer in a town up in Cape Ann, you know, north of Boston, and small town kind of near the water, we live cheaper. This work is, it's not that the work is more interesting here, but having a small shingle out up near Newberry Port allows us to be in this better location and have more flexibility, and it's near the woods.

And so when you're working from a lifestyle image, this lifestyle-centric career plan, you can make these really targeted changes. 'Cause I really, as long-time listeners know, get very nervous about random or obsessive changes. I'm just obsessed on this piece, my work's boring. If I made my work less interesting, everything's gonna be better.

You gotta have the whole lifestyle image in place. And when you're fixing this lifestyle image, keep in mind your job's not supposed to do everything for you. Now most of history's people's jobs were boring, but a lot of people had interesting, meaningful lives. So you gotta open up the window to the full part of your life once you start making your plan, and then you can actually work with the full set of tools that you have in crafting something deeper.

All right, what do we got next, Jesse? - Next question's from Dylan. When it comes to learning, I often fall victim to deep procrastination. As a medical student, when I'm revising a topic, I tend to spend way too much time on a topic. I feel the urge to read a condition from many sources.

Instead of covering a module in one day, I end up covering one topic in that entire day. A few days later, it appears like I haven't retained any of it very well. It feels uncomfortable moving on from topic when my mind still has more questions. How do I remedy this?

- Well, Dylan, I got good news and bad news. The good news is what I'm about to tell you is fixable, and in fact, just knowing it's a problem is half the battle. The bad news is you're very bad at learning. I think this is an important point to make because we don't often contextualize learning as a skill that has a spectrum of proficiency.

We too often think of learning or studying as this abstract verb that all that matters is the quantity of it that you do. I gotta go study. I'm gonna study more than this other person. I'm gonna stay up a couple more hours studying. And so we just think about this generic thing that we all do, it's just a matter of how much we do it, but that's not the case.

You know, I wrote some books about this back in the day, in particular, "How to Win at College," "How to Become a Straight-A Student." Those books have been out there for 15 years now, at least, 2006, 2005. So I used to think a lot about how students actually learn.

And in fact, Jesse, I just got the royalty statements. Those books are quietly, they quietly move on. - That's good. - Those three student books, 400,000 copies all in, almost like 275,000, 275,000 on "How to Become a Straight-A Student." - I mean, they're great books. - It just sort of trickle, trickle, trickles, you know, word 'em out.

So you know the stuff is actually right in there. But what I learned working on those books is studying is a skill, and the better you get at it, the better you do. And so you need to be super specific about how you learn. And this is probably gonna require some learning about learning.

So you could read something like my book, "How to Become a Straight-A Student," but it's also going to involve a lot of experimentation. We talked about this in episode 272. If you go to the Q&A in that episode, the number one "New York Times" bestselling author, David Epstein, joined me in the Q&A and had some really good ideas about actually keeping a journal about all of the various experiments that you're running in your life so that you can see what works and what doesn't.

You have to do that with your learning, Dylan. How do I study cardiology? How do I break up the work? Do I copy notes over here? Do I read things? Do I go on, like you said in your extended answer, on the YouTube and start watching videos about it?

Take notes, what works, what didn't? And then after each exam, go back and do a post-mortem, what I used to call in the early days of my calnewport.com newsletter, a post-exam post-mortem. Go back and say, what activities did I do preparing for this exam that mattered? What didn't help at all?

What was a waste of time? What should I have done? What could I have done that would have led to a larger, better performance that I didn't do? And you use that feedback to refine your study plan for the next time around. Evidence-based evolution of how you actually do this work.

When I read your extended answer, Dylan, what I see is that you're just doing all sorts of random stuff for no real reason. You study like Darwin, so in an evolution, natural selection type style, you're gonna get better, better, better really fast. And you're gonna stop spending all day on a topic and look at YouTube videos, and you're gonna get it down to a science.

Here's how you study it. You make five flashcards, you wait till you get the flashcards once, you do one out loud lecture of each topic in a way that makes sense, you check it off, you put it in another folder, you take out the next topic, we could do seven topics in an hour.

You figure out what works. And this really is the secret of the top performing students. And I know this because I was one of those students. I started college as a average or slightly above average student, freshman at Dartmouth College coming out of public school. I didn't know how to study with the intensity of all these private school kids.

I didn't have the background in the math and science as all these private school kids. So I was like an average or above average student. Into my freshman year, I got very serious about studying how I studied, taking notes. Let's try this, let's try that for this type of test.

Let's do this for problem sets, let's try that. Seeing what worked, seeing what didn't work, evolving my study habits. Result of that, four-year GPA, every quarter sophomore year, every quarter junior year, every quarter senior year, except for my senior spring where I got one A minus. 3.96 or something GPA.

I mean, I was like an A away from being the valedictorian of the entire graduating class of my Ivy League college. I didn't get smarter between my freshman year and the three years that followed. I got better at studying. And I'll tell you what, when I got really professional about this, the time it took me to study plummeted.

I didn't do all-nighters. I didn't like studying past 8 p.m. I would be bored during exam periods because everyone else was in the library and I didn't have anything else to do. It's like one of the reasons why I started writing books. And what were my initial books about?

How to do what I did. How do you study like this? Why are people studying so much? They need to be better about it. So I'm really passionate about this, Dylan. You're bad at learning, that's tough love, you're bad at it. But if you get better at it, your life is gonna get so much better.

And it's not that hard, it's not that hard to learn. So I have faith that things are gonna get better for you if you just take your learning more seriously and stop just in a self-flagellating manner, just studying until you sort of feel your guilt has been absolved. That's not the right way to do it.

So get better at learning, Dylan, and you're gonna find it's not nearly as hard as you feared. - What was the A minus in? - Political philosophy. I don't hold grudges, but. (Dylan laughs) See, I was safe, I was taking a lot of math and science and computer science courses where it was just, you could know you were gonna get an A if you just blew everyone away.

Like I just got more points than everyone else. - Mm-hmm. - Yeah, you get to the philosophy course and it could just be like, eh, no one should have an A, you know? It gets a little trickier. - Yeah. - It's a little trickier. All right, what do we got next?

- Next question is from Nicole. Our child is in the sixth grade. He has no struggles academically. He's well-adjusted socially, and he has plenty of friends of all ages and a sense of community inside and outside of school. We wanna put him on a path to cultivate the skills required to later be able to do deep work.

What do you recommend we look for in schools? We were visiting for middle school, but also in the future, like in high school. - I would care less about the school than I would care about what you are modeling in your own life. Now, I don't mean don't care about the school at all, but when it comes to choosing the school for your kid, just use the normal common sense stuff that anyone would think about when choosing a school.

Is it convenient where the location is? Is his friends there? Do we like the philosophy? Does it look like good people? They run the school well. Do they have good programs, like stuff he's interested in? Do they have those programs? The normal stuff anyone would think about if they're choosing a school, that's fine.

But when it comes to this more advanced stuff, like, well, we want him to be a deep thinker, an intellectual, someone who can really succeed in an intellectual standpoint, there your modeling's gonna matter more. They see that you prioritize this. They see that you have a life of the mind.

They see you're engaged with books and ideas. They see that you're not on your phone all the time. This stuff makes a big difference. The other thing that matters at home here is just more pragmatically, making sure that your sixth grader going on seventh grader, that they do not have unrestricted access to these dopamine hacking, smartphone delivered, attention economy platform applications, like we talked about in the deep dive.

That's just like saying, make sure that my aspiring athlete doesn't get a smoking habit. So yes, you do wanna make sure that you're not, you could short circuit everything by giving your 12 year old unrestricted access to the internet through a phone. When they say all my friends are doing it, you say that you're unlucky.

Your parents listen to Cal Newport. You don't get a smartphone. And that's just gonna have to be that. So yes, keep them away from complete brain short circuiting distraction that a sixth or seventh grader cannot handle. Model a life of the mind, of respect for deep work and intellectualism.

And then beyond that, just choose a good school. This stuff really makes a big difference. Like for example, in my own life, for whatever reason, growing up my dad really admired mathematicians and theoretical physicists of extreme intellect. So we heard a lot growing up about Richard Feynman. We heard a lot growing up about John von Neumann.

This idea of just these like big brains that could manipulate ideas in their heads and just produce ideas. We just heard a lot about it. My dad was really interested in all that. And it really made a difference. So when I was going to MIT out of college, I was not known as a math person.

I was not known as a theory person. I was being recruited to work in systems groups. And I sort of tricked my way into a theory group because I had just grown up with this idea that is there anything cooler to do if you're capable of doing it than staring at a whiteboard and solving math equations.

And so I tricked my way into a theory group by saying, I'll do systems work for you. And then as soon as I got to the theory group, I said, nevermind, I'm gonna do theory. And I just made myself into a theoretician. It's because of what I grew up with, what I was surrounded by.

So model a life of the mind. Model a life that respects the mind and isn't staring at screens all day. Model a life that's engaged and that's reads. Have a house full of books. Talk about people you admire in the different types of, it doesn't have to be professors, it could be artists or filmmakers or poets, but these great thinkers that you admire, let your kids see that and keep them away from TikTok.

Do those two things and give them a fine school. Don't overthink that. You're doing everything you can. You're not gonna be able to engineer your kid. We see a lot of that. This is a real DC suburb thing. That if I just get the right supplemental activities and tutoring and do all these things, I can engineer my kid into a great brain.

But if I don't do that, they're not gonna get there. And it's like, here's the spoiler alert. If your kid's gonna be an intellect and have a career as an intellectual, it's not gonna be because you got them in Russian math. And so you doing that or not doing it is not gonna make a difference.

If they're seeing that, they have the right brain for it, that's where they'll end up. And if they don't, there's nothing you can do that's gonna make that happen. So you could just relax a little bit. Model what's important to you. Keep them away from brain melting stuff. And then you're gonna have to let the kid do what the kid's gonna do.

- All right, what do we got next? - Next question's from Mara. I'm a junior UX designer working at a consultant agency. And I would like to hear your opinion on balancing time after work and taking time to reflect on things that happened during the working day. After I finished my day, I'm usually pretty done mentally.

And I just wanna close everything and not be in a seat anymore. If I come back later to reflect on work or learning, I often end up feeling like I need to check something, then I end up doing work. Do you have any suggestions or practices to incorporate time to reflect on learnings and feelings and ideas that are not strictly work output, but are work-related?

- Mara, I've got two suggestions. One, integrate the reflection, the closing of loops, the engagement with how you feel about things. You need to integrate that into the work you do throughout the day. So what a lot of people do is calendar filling. Let me try to fill every minute of my day.

And I rush through it full speed from meeting in the meeting, jumping over here, jumping over there. It's like this adrenaline high day. And you get to the end of the day and say, "My God, how do I make sense of all this?" And then you get just lost.

You're exhausted. And then you get lost just trying to like make sense of everything. You're in email and it just spirals out of control. And either you abandon it, or like a lot of people these days, you have the second shift where you're spending hours on your computer at night.

And that's how you're even just trying to grapple these things. The solution is to deal with things each day as they come up, which means you have to put aside the time to do that. So if I'm scheduling a meeting, we have a Zoom call, I'm putting an hour on my calendar.

I'm adding another 15 minutes to the end of that appointment for processing. That time is now protected. So after this meeting is over, there's a 15 minutes of protected time to process everything from that meeting. Let me update my to-do list on my calendar. Let me walk around the block and think about this.

Okay, now I am gonna send my response email. I know how to deal with this. Now I can close the loop on that before I move on to the next thing. Do the same type of post session loop closing session after long deep work blocks as well. You know, I'm working on this project for the next two hours.

Well, what I'm gonna do is put 30 minutes or 20 minutes at the end of that, not to keep working, but to wrap up what I was working on. Figure out what I'm gonna work on next, send out the request I need for the information I didn't have, schedule on my calendar when I'm gonna return to this again, close that loop, maybe have an extra five minutes left just to go for a walk or just completely clear my mind.

So you need to close the loops on things as they go throughout the day. You do not get a prize for squeezing in these extra things. In the long run, it doesn't mean you get more done. It just exhausts you and makes you less productive anyways. So spend more time on the things that you're gonna spend time on.

Give yourself time to close down. All right, so what's the second thing I'm gonna recommend? Have a good shutdown ritual. It sounds like you don't have a good shutdown ritual. If thinking about your work as you say, thinking about your work at the end of the day leads you back into work and email, you're not really shutting down.

So you need a good shutdown ritual. You close enough loops to be confident you're not forgetting anything. Even if it's just you frantically writing down things on a piece of paper to get back to and putting a half hour appointment in your morning the next day to process it, you're making sure that nothing is floating out there that you have to remember.

And then you have some sort of shutdown routine, a phrase you say, the shutdown complete checkbox on the top of every day in my time block plan or however you wanna do it. And when you're shut down, you're shut down. There is no wandering back in the email when you're shut down, you're shut down.

So close loops after the things, right after they happen during your day and close your day with a better shutdown routine. I think you're gonna be less stressed. You're gonna work less. Your brain's gonna be better and you're gonna be happier. All right, let's keep rolling. What do we got next, Jesse?

- All right, next question's from Brian. I just finished reading Scott Young's book, "Ultra Learning" and wondered what your thoughts were on how the concepts in that book interact with slow productivity. I wanna get up to speed as quickly as possible on my new career while keeping the concepts and practices of slow productivity in mind.

- Well, I was just talking to Scott yesterday, Brian. So this is a timely question. There's zero conflict between ultra learning and slow productivity. I think what might be happening is you're changing the definition of ultra productivity to somehow, or ultra learning to somehow mean super fast learning or learning all day long.

But if you read "Ultra Learning," a book I really enjoy, what you'll see is it's about how do you learn really hard things, things you might've thought like, this is harder than I would be able to do. How do you raise your ambition for learning? And the answer is it has to do with the techniques you use to actually learn.

You have to learn how people who learn really hard things or really ambitious things, how do they approach this task? You can't just go at it randomly like we had in a previous question. In ultra learning, Scott says, here are these principles you need that people who learn hard things use.

Now, the pace at which you learn hard things is up to you. The quantity of hard things you learn, that's up to you. If anything, ultra learning is a type of skill you would see a slow productivity practitioner deploying. They're saying, okay, I'm going to, over time, in my obsession over quality, principle three of slow productivity, master this really complicated thing.

Because once I've mastered this really complicated thing, it's gonna open up way more possibilities. It could be, if anything, like a classic slow productivity move, whereas a fast productivity practitioner would say, I don't have time for that. I just need to be frenetic all day. I need to be emailing and jumping around in meetings.

That's too slow. Ultra learning is too slow. I don't have time to master this really difficult new body of mathematics that's gonna help me in my career. I'm gonna send emails and do TikTok videos. So ultra learning, I think, is one of the key tools in the toolkit of the slow productivity practitioner, not something that sits contrary to it.

It's a really cool book, and I recommend that you check it out. Should we try a call, Jesse? - Yeah. - All right. Let's see if this works. - All right. - Hi, Cal. What would you recommend for someone who's seriously learning and pursuing multiple avenues, in my case, music, graphic design, and copywriting, while working a full-time job?

I'm a delivery driver, and I work 40 to 50 hours a week. Thank you. - Well, Randall, I'm gonna differentiate here, or ask for you to differentiate between hobbies and a systematic plan to learn a skill as part of a bigger picture, vision, or strategy you have. So if there's something that's a hobby, I'm interested in music, I like playing music, the key there is you wanna integrate this into your life, but give yourself grace.

Now, there's busier periods where I'm not able to do it as much, but I try to play most evenings, and I've set myself up for success. And I talk about this in "Digital Minimalism," by the way, how to build plans for leisure activities where you, instead of just randomly do it, you say, "Okay, I'm not just gonna "randomly noodle on my guitar.

"I'm gonna learn all the songs from this album "to play at this party in six months." So you might build up some structure, and I call it structured leisure. But you give yourself some grace. I do this 'cause I enjoy it, I listen to music, and so I feel more meaningful when I'm learning music, I'm immersing myself in it, but if I have a busy, I'm taking two shifts, and it's a busy week, and I just don't get to it, who cares?

It's there to make my life better, not to make my life harder. Now let's say there's something in here that's part of a structured strategy for improving or changing your life in a very specific way. I'm learning graphic design 'cause this job, which I've convinced myself would be available to me if I built these skills, would allow me to implement this.

I could reduce my delivery hours and do this consulting. It's part of this bigger strategy that gets me closer to my ideal lifestyle vision. In that case, you do need to be a little bit more systematic. You schedule time like that, like you would with the doctor. I do it first thing in the morning, Fridays after my half shift.

You have to be very systematic about where that work happens, how I do that work, how I make sure I'm making progress. There might be some nights there, there might be some early mornings there. It might be some pain that you're going through because you know it's gonna deliver something good.

Just don't mix those two things up. Don't mix up the leisure that's giving you release or relaxation from the systematic acquisition of a new skill that's gonna get you closer to your lifestyle. And just treat those differently. 'Cause if you make everything a necessity, it becomes impossible and you beat yourself up and you might stop doing everything.

To be very reasonable about, these are the things I'm systematically pursuing. And don't have too much of those. You know, just only be realistic about your capacity and keep everything else a little bit looser. I think that's gonna be the best way to balance those. I wanna read a quick case study that was sent in by Cage, who says the following.

Cage says, "I bought 'How to Become a Straight A Student' "and 'Deep Work'," reading the former multiple times over. "Through techniques in the book, "I have fully recovered my GPA "into Magna Summa Cum Laude Condition "and have been on the Dean's List "since coming back to school, "while managing a research position "in two internships in conjunction with my schooling.

"One thing I would like to highlight "is the benefit I've found in the quantification of goals "in regards to their estimated time. "I have created a task planner in Excel "that I will readily admit is both over-engineered "and integral to my daily life. "It contains rows for all my projects, school or otherwise.

"The first column is the day I put into the planner. "The second is the project name. "The third is the due date. "The fourth is the days left." So the current date minus the due date. "The fifth is the class or job it is for, "and the sixth is the estimated time it will take.

"The seventh is the percentage complete, "and the eighth is the time left in the project." Cage gives an equation for this. Estimated time minus quantity, estimated time times percentage complete. And the eighth, well, there's eight columns. "And the eighth is the time left per day. "When I designed this system, "I had no idea how much the estimated time "and time left per day would change my life.

"Though not perfect, I can usually guess within an hour "how extensive a project is going to be. "Through this system, I am able to flag projects due in a day "and with the exception of those, "tackle problems based on the time left per day. "This keeps big research papers from distracting me "from smaller projects that are coming up fast, "while still allowing me to ensure I attack them "in a timely manner without procrastinating.

"This triaging has been essential to my life, "and now this Excel project "has essentially become my time block planner. "Additionally, I can see exactly how many hours per day "I have work in total I have done, "how many projects I have open, "how many I've completed, and much more.

"The reason I bring this up is because I think that "this sort of quantification "allows for major stress reduction "and preventing things from creeping up." It's a very complicated system, probably more complicated than I would recommend for most people, unless that's the type of thing you like. But what I wanna highlight about Cage's approach is he's controlling his time by being realistic about what's on his plate, how long it takes.

You don't necessarily have to have eight columns with equations to get there, though that's one way to do it. People who just use basic time blocking, so people who use my time block planner just in its basic form, for example, get 80% of that benefit, because when you're blocking off time for things and having to adjust your schedule, every time something goes past the block you gave it, you begin to get a realistic feel for your timing.

It's why if you do weekly planning, over time this feedback tells you, "Oh, I thought I would just edit this article this week. "I didn't get anywhere near finishing it. "This is really a month-long project." So when you quantify, you get this feedback on how long things actually take, because you're being specific about when you're gonna do things and how long you think they'll take.

This gives you, like Cage talks about, this more realistic understanding of what things really require. And with realistic understanding, you can move around the chess pieces of your schedule and be in the driver's seat. That's a weird mixed metaphor, but let's just go with it. You know what's on your plate, what's realistic.

You know when to say no, you know when to say yes. You know how to make sure the things that need to get done get done in early enough time that you don't have pileups, you don't have that stress. It does reduce stress. It does help you feel more in control.

It does help you get more of a return for the hours you have available to invest. So I like this case study because it tells you if you don't have control over what's going on in your life, it has control over you. And it's not gonna drive you and your chess pieces in the direction most likely that you wanna actually go.

So it's a cool principle. So I would say just multi-scale plan, quarterly, weekly, daily, time blocking, that's probably gonna get you half, most of the way there. Have a good task capture system that you review where things have statuses and you have different lists or boards for different contexts.

All the stuff we talk about gets you towards the same place, but it's why control is a key layer in my deep life stack because if you don't control all the stuff on your plate, it's very hard for you to actually control your life and the direction that it's going.

All right, so I wanna move on to our final segment, but before I do, I have a couple other sponsors I want to mention. Our first is Blinkist, our longtime friends at Blinkist, which is an app that enables you to understand the most important ideas or things from over 5,500 nonfiction books and podcasts.

The short summaries it provides, which they call Blinks, take just 15 minutes to read or to listen to. The way I use Blinkist, the way Jesse uses Blinkist, is as a triage mechanism for the reading life. You have a book you're thinking about, I'm interested in this topic, I've heard about this book.

Before you just buy it, you instead, if you're a Blinkist subscriber, quickly read the Blink for that book, and you can just read it on your phone or you can play the audio Blink when you're doing something else. This really tells you what you need to know. If you've been reading for a little while, this 15-minute summary is usually what you need to know if this book is for you or not.

It's eerie how effective this is. It's eerie how well you can pin down really quickly, uh-oh, this book is a brochure that's been padded out to 300 words. Yeah, I'm good, versus, ooh, this sounds fascinating. I really want to find out more about this framework being summarized here. I have to buy it.

So it will make your hit rate on nonfiction books much higher. By hit rate, I mean the fraction of books you buy that you love is gonna be much, much higher if you first triage with Blinkist. Now, people use it for other ways as well, to quickly learn a field, to learn a lot of big ideas about a topic, to get a lay of the land of various authors and what they write about.

There's a lot of uses for Blinkist, but the book triaging is just one in particular that I really like. So this is a tool for people who take an intellectual life seriously to seriously consider. Now, right now, Blinkist has a special offer just for our audience. If you go to blinkist.com/deep to start your seven-day free trial, you'll get 25% off a Blinkist premium membership.

That's Blinkist, spelled B-L-I-N-K-I-S-T, blinkist.com/deep to get 25% off in a seven-day free trial. That's blinkist.com/deep. And right now, for a limited time, you can use their Blinkist Connect promotion to share your premium account. You will get two premium subscriptions for the price of one. Let's also talk about our friends at ExpressVPN.

If you use the internet, you need a VPN. Here's why. People can see what sites and services you're accessing. So if you're in a coffee shop, anyone in that coffee shop can listen to your packets being sent over the radio waves to the access point and see what sites and services you're talking to.

Yes, the content of your messages might be encrypted, but not the destination. So they can say, aha, you are spending an inordinate amount of time going to jessyskeleton.com or sending the authorities. Same thing with using the internet at home. You might say, I live in the middle of nowhere.

No one knows who I'm using on the internet. Well, you know who does? Your internet service provider. They can see, aha, this guy spends a lot of time on jessyskeleton.com and they can sell that information to advertisers or in this case, to the Department of Homeland Security because you are a security threat.

A VPN gets you around that type of surveillance. The way it works is instead of talking directly to jessyskeleton.com, you make a connection to a VPN server. You then send an encrypted message to the server saying, who I really wanna talk to is jessyskeleton.com. The server talks to the website on your behalf, encrypts the response, sends it back to you, you unencrypt it and see those beautiful jessyskeleton clips.

What does your internet service provider learn? What does the guy with the antenna sniffing your packets learn? Nothing. You're talking through a VPN server to somewhere. So you get that privacy back. If you're gonna use a VPN, I would recommend the VPN I use, which is ExpressVPN. They've got servers all around the world.

So wherever you are, there's probably one nearby. An added benefit of that is you can also connect to a VPN server in another country and get around and don't tell them I told you this, regional restrictions. So I can connect to a VPN server in England and then through there, talk to bbc.com and be able to play the videos that I wouldn't otherwise have access to outside of England.

So there's an added benefit. They have a lot of bandwidth as well. The tech is very easy to use. You install it on the devices you already access the internet from, you press a button, it turns on and you use everything like normal. So if you wanna protect your shameful, shameful jessyskeleton addiction from other people or whatever else you're doing, or just gain some privacy back in your life, go to expressvpn.com/deep and you will get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free.

That's expressvpn.com/deep, expressvpn.com/deep to learn more. All right, Jesse, our final segment, books I read in October, 2023. All right, so as I do each month, I summarize the books I read in the month previous. I should be clear, it's the books I finished in the month previous. So it gets kind of complicated, but whatever.

All right, so what books did I finish in October, 2023? The first one was "Build the Life You Want" by Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey. This was a very successful book. I read it because it reminds me of the type of things we talk about here about the deep life.

It's a book about engineering your life to be better. So being systematic about how you do that. I don't wanna say too much about it now because Arthur is actually gonna join us on the show, Jesse, so I don't know if you know that, but Arthur Brooks next month is gonna join us on the show and we'll learn about engineering your life.

We'll also learn about working with Oprah. Should be a good one. - Yeah. - I also read "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius. So if you're a listener to the show, you know this because I did an earlier episode, I did a segment about ideas from "Meditations," but I don't think I'd ever read it before.

I told you about this, Jesse, but it was amazing when I bought this book, a translation, we looked this up, it was from like 2004 or something like this. It's not like it's a new translation. Top 100 on Amazon. - Yeah. - Yeah, that thing sells. Then I read "Dr.

No" by Ian Leeming, one of the original James Bond's books. I just needed a something fun. It's a good one, "Dr. No," early James Bond. One flaw with that, I mean, I'm a thriller aficionado, I'm an adventure book aficionado. The one flaw with that book, and I don't wanna spoil this too much, is "Dr.

No," Bond is escaping from the torture tunnel. So "Dr. No" puts him in a torture tunnel. He puts Bond in a torture tunnel and the woman he's with, they stake down outside on a path where Jamaican black crabs every day migrate with the idea that the crabs are gonna eat you, eat you alive.

So big setup, real thriller. You can tell by the way this is grade A literature here. Here's my problem, two problems. One, how did she get out of it? They were just like, oh, it turns out "Dr. No" didn't really understand much about crabs. Crabs have no interest in eating people.

So she just sort of waited till the crabs were gone and got up. So that's not really a fulfilling way to get out of that. Bond gets out of the torture tunnel, that's fine. The issue is, so now he has to kind of escape the island. He kills "Dr.

No" halfway through the escape. It should be the climax of the escape is finally killing the main villain, but instead it's like he's on his way, he takes over a crane and just dumps a bunch of bird guano on top of "Dr. No." And like goes on and kills 10 more people and there's chases that happen.

It's like almost anticlimactic. It's like, this is this big villain they've set up and they're just like in the middle of escape, like, oh, I just killed him. And they like keep going with like the rest of the stuff. It should be like the final person you kill. I think this is like thriller 101.

So those are my two issues with "Dr. No." These are not the type of analysis you'll hear from someone who's talking about their experience having read "Ulysses" by James Joyce. I read "Awe" by Docker Keltner. So sort of the buzzy, one of the buzzy new popular science books from the last six months.

So Docker is at, I think Berkeley. Anyways, he's a psychologist who has innovated the scientific study of awe, A-W-E, as a feeling. So it's a book that was, hey, let me get into my research and how this works. And so it's interesting. The final book I read was "Israel" by Noah Tisby.

So this is actually one of three books I'm reading on Israel right now. Because I'm a real believer in, let's say there's a big thing happens and it's traumatic or scary or whatever. You got a couple options. You can turtle, like, okay, let's just watch reality shows on Macs.

You can go to social media and say, get me mad. Like I need a team and I need to yell and just like get chemicals. Or you can read. And so what I did after October 7th is I talked to a rabbi and said, I want you to recommend me books.

I wanna learn about Israel. I want you to cover the political spectrum in Israel in terms of perspectives. So the three books, so the Noah Tisby's book, this is, you could think of this as coming from like "Riot of Sin" or Israeli politics. It's sort of more, not apologia, but it's more like "Riot of Sin" or pro-Israel.

For the center book, and I just finished this, but it's November now, so it's not on this list, is Martin Gilbert's epic history of Israel, 650 pages. I thought I could do it in a week, took me two weeks. He's a British historian, sort of, look, I don't have a dog in this fight.

Just this is the history starting mid 19th century to late 1990s, right, just like TikTok history, finished that. And now I've just ordered Yusuf HaLevi's letter to my Palestinian neighbor to cover the perspective from left of center Israeli politics. HaLevi is someone who had started as a right-wing Israeli politics and changed over to being a progressive in terms of thinking about on the left of Israel.

So I'm reading all three of these books. Let's boom, right, boom, center, sort of outside of Israel history, boom, someone who's coming more from the Israeli left. So I'm reading. - Yeah. - I'll tell you, it feels like a more productive, calming, just focused response to things than I gotta tweet about somebody.

I don't know who, but someone I gotta get on there or I need to just start yelling. Sometimes reading, at least for me, let me learn. It's a calming effect, but like a determined way. It's not an avoidance. It's like, let me figure out what's going on. So I am learning more about the history of Israel in this very short period than I thought I would be, but that's what I'm up to.

- David Remnick just had a awesome article on the November 6th issue of "The Yorker 2." I just finished that. - So how'd you like it? I haven't read it yet. - It was very detailed. It explained a lot of the history that I wasn't really aware of. - Yeah, and David went.

- He was there. - He went over there right away after October 7th. I think he's back now, but he reported from there for weeks. - Mm-hmm. - Yeah. Yeah, you never wanna not read something David Remnick writes about a political situation. I mean, this is one of the preeminent writers of geopolitical nonfiction journalism of the last few generations.

He has a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Russia. He really knows his game. He's made a few missteps in his life. Like his magazine allowed this guy who blogs about productivity to write for them sometimes. Like that was a clear mistake. But you know, you're not gonna bat 100.

Not gonna bat 100. You're gonna eventually, you're gonna occasionally, accidentally get people writing about getting things done, the pages of "The New Yorker." But yeah, other than that, other than that, I think it was a pretty high hit rate. But I think there's bigger lesson in that. Like outside of any particular issues going on, read.

Read. What happens when you read a book is you're taking another human mind who has spent years, if not a lifetime, thinking about something, and then years trying to get their thoughts as clear as possible. And you mind meld with someone when you read a book. You mind meld with them.

And really get to understand these nuances and their perspective. I mean, it is the way that as like heightened intellectual beings, we should engage with the world. And you mind meld with people who are from different backgrounds and have different views on things. It's why I, the one, like charity cause I really push often on this podcast, I do this auction every year, this authors of color auction, is because I really like what they do is they give scholarships to help people from more diverse backgrounds get into publishing.

Because there's often, it can be hard to get onto the track to be in publishing because there might be these like very low paid jobs or internships. If you don't have other sources of money, you can't get on this track. But since books are everything and it's the portal to other people's minds, it's the portal to understanding ideas and experiences, the more interesting books we have, the more things we cover, the more people can understand the world.

So I really love that cause. It's like, if we can get different people, a bigger variety of people in the publishing, they will bring in a bigger variety of books, which means we, the readers, can get a bigger variety of understanding about other people. So I'm just such a huge believer of books and reading.

It really is the right approach to almost everything. So I'm now 800, 900 pages in my Israeli reading. I have a three or 400 more, but I'm there. By next week, I'll have finished my reading assignment. So we'll have to like ask the fake rabbi segment where I'll just very knowledgeably kind of get slightly wrong questions about the history of Israel.

- We'll be great. - You get some new music and the-- - Sound effects. - Yeah. - Everything, man. I want, we have eight sound effects on there. We have pads, room on there for eight sound effects. I want eight sound effects. We wanna, we got just rock and roll.

I want wacky car horns. I want applause for sure. - Yeah. - I don't think this is pretentious. I think like whenever I say something particularly smart, I want, and let's not be crazy, but like 30 seconds of sustained applause. (laughing) And I'll just blow kisses to the camera.

You know, I don't think it's crazy, but just so people know, they don't always know, like this was really smart what I just said. And then we can have like enthusiastic applause could be a different one. It was a really good point where the applause then crescendos into cheering and just bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, bravo, and like whistles.

And then I'll be like, "Oh, come on, please. "It'll be great." (laughing) Feigned applause, that's the secret. All right, enough of this nonsense. That's all the time we have for today. Thank you for listening. If you liked it, by the way, you leave a review, subscribe, that type of stuff really helps other people get in on this nonsense.

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 discussion about how to make learning as appealing as the distractions that you can find on your phone, you might also like episode 270, which is called "Depth Versus Distraction." Check it out.

About struggling to take back control of their life from powerful sources of distraction.