So I was recently listening to Tim Ferriss interview the prolific fantasy author Brandon Sanderson Now there's an exchange in this conversation. It was early on. It's right around the nine-minute mark of the podcast that caught my attention When I heard it it caught my attention because I think it actually says something profound About some of the deep problems in the way we organize work in our current moment.

So here's what I want to do I'm going to first I'm going to play the clip. I'm going to detail what it is that that that lesson I think this clip is pointing towards then we're going to discuss a way to push back or try to correct for those issues and All this will really just be an excuse to geek out on Sanderson productivity chatter because all writers love to geek out on Sanderson productivity chatter All right.

So anyways, let's get to the clip. Let me set the scene here This is Tim has traveled to Utah To talk to Sanderson at the headquarters of his publishing and merchandising company Dragonsteel books It's like a 70 person company that Sanderson started Kind of his empire built around his fantasy books Let's hear now this clip from the interview and I will all of that stuff I I joke that I've just got so much Ram and I've filled it all with story ideas And so everything else kind of just squeezed out the ears.

It seems like where we're sitting and we're sitting at HQ. Mm-hmm. It seems like the design of Dragonsteel maybe the intention behind it is to allow you to do that on some level. Yeah. Yeah, I mean everything in our company is built around let Brandon cook and Take away from Brandon anything that he doesn't have to think about or you know It doesn't strictly need to I actually Alright, so that is the clip that caught my attention to let Brandon cook now as someone who writes a lot about knowledge work in the digital age.

I'm fascinated by this idea of cooking Which in the work context I define to mean Letting someone who has a high return skill. So a skill that returns hot value at a high level Design a workflow that enables them to just basically spend all their time applying that skill minimizing other distractions So we can think about this idea of letting someone cook as a particular Strategy for workflow design now, it makes sense to me that in this particular example that dragon steel books goes out of its way to protect Sanderson's ability to think and write he produces roughly 300,000 words a year He'll geek out on the details of this some years.

It's more he goes up to as much as 400,000. Sometimes it's less He does this on a pace of like roughly ten to twenty thousand words a week depending on whether he's revising or not Those words he produces is the raw material on which all revenue of dragon steel books is built You cut down those words It's like reducing the amount of steel that you're shipping to a Ford assembly line They're gonna produce less cars and if they produce less cars, they're gonna make less money So you you got to protect at the but what is the core raw material on which the value?

That dragon steel sells or bases its business off of it is the words that Sanderson produces So, of course this idea of yeah, let's let Brandon cook Make sense. It's the same thing as saying your assembly line Let's make sure we have plenty of steel coming in so we can build a lot of cars.

So that makes sense to me Here's what does it make sense to me? Why don't more? Companies have Sanderson figures Why is this model of cooking? Not more prevalent throughout the knowledge sector writ large where hey, we've set up our workflow so that this person can cook We've set up our workflows that that person can cook this person is producing the stuff that is at the core of our marketing company at the core of our technology company at the core of our research institute and we want them to produce that as much as Possible because that is going to help us be as successful as possible.

Let's let them cook. You think you would see that more often But we don't To me that paradox is really interesting Now I need to put a clear caveat here Before we get the complaints. I am NOT arguing that All knowledge work jobs would benefit from the Sanderson model cooking Workflow Actually, probably most knowledge work jobs would not let me use myself as an example at the moment right as a full professor in Georgetown's computer science department we rotate Several key administrative roles among the full professors its faculty governance of departments.

This is how academic institutions run I am currently the director of undergraduate studies for the computer science department at Georgetown. It's my turn So it came to me That is an example of a knowledge work role in Which there is not a single high return activity that I should be focusing on it's a much more varied role in terms of its its reactive it is it's taking in a lot of information and Processing it and coming up with answers.

It's helping get people the information they need It's also a very interpersonal like counseling role like working with individual students So in that particular job, which is like one of seven I have in that particular job It would not make sense to say hey, let Cal cook There's nothing here for me to cook on so I'm not arguing that Most jobs should have this model.

But what I am arguing is that most organizations should have some people who who are doing that Right that okay maybe not the director of undergraduate studies, but the the new professor who should just be doing research or the computer programmer or the the marketing ad writer or any number of a creative industry positions, right this just strategician the Economic analysis you should just be like there with the numbers trying to get the sort of the deepest most sophisticated analysis done There there should be a lot of positions in Which we would say yeah, of course, we want to let them cook This is what's going to produce the most value, but we don't so I think that's a paradox Let's explain this paradox So as I talked about at the opening of this show almost everything I talked about is motivated at the very top by the modern digital environment Everything I talked about is a reaction to that This is no different if you want to understand why it's so rare to see more Brandon Sanderson's in the world of knowledge work writ large it is because of digital business productivity software in particular digital communication tools So let's walk this through you introduce something like email Now you have an incredibly low friction way of reaching out and communicating with someone now.

Why does this cause trouble? Well, this means now the social capital as well as just the strict time and effort cost of me Commanding some of your time and attention has just radically diminished if I want to ask you a question if I want to request that you jump on a call if I want to like Put a quick task onto your plate.

I can do this at very low cost. So I'm gonna do this more Because every time I can command some of your time and attention what I am doing is reducing How much time and attention I have to expend? So now it becomes rational for me in a game theoretic way to try to command as much time and attention as possible from as Many people as possible because that will maximize What I can get out of my own time and attention so once you have this dynamic and You have this dynamic in a workplace where there are no hard structures or systems about here's how we figure out work Here's how we assign work.

Here's how we talk about work in a workplace without those structures What's going to happen is we are going to all pull each other inexorably downwards towards this suboptimal equilibrium this degenerate equilibrium where no one can escape and Everyone finds themselves doing way too many things you find yourself in a state of almost constant distraction you find yourself with workload saturation I can't take anything more on my plate.

I'm literally out of minutes to work on it this is what will happen in a world of Zero cost request of time and attention and every request gives you a personal benefit Everyone is going to drag everyone down until everyone is workload saturated and distracted So we don't have Sandersons of these companies cooking we have them checking email 150 times a day The technology I think is what created this if you're not in the mode of designing workflows or rules What will rule in your workplace is going to be something that emerges and unfortunately as I've captured in multiple books now in Digital knowledge work what's going to emerge?

Bottom up is going to be this state this hyperactive hive mind state of saturation and distraction So let's talk about what a world would be like without this. So so what is What would a cooking model be if I said enough of this? I hate this like we're all saturated and distracted all the time No, no, no, we're gonna come in and these rules here in our company We want we want to let those people cook.

What should a cooking model? Actually include well, we can go back to Sanderson here To help expand our understanding of what it means to let someone cook Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video Then you need to check out my new book slow productivity the lost art of accomplishment without Burnout.

This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talked about here in these videos You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow I know you're gonna like it. Check it out. Now. Let's get back to the video There's two elements that come up when we hear Sanderson talk about his approaches to productivity.

The first is reduction This is what was mentioned in that clip. We just listened to Where he said my company is set up to sort of take off my plate Everything I don't strictly need to do now. He goes on in that clip to give a like a somewhat facetious example He says there's someone who fills my water bottle for me, so I don't have to bother going to do it That is sort of a metaphor I mean, I'm sure that's probably true but that's sort of a metaphor for the broader things of all the decisions that have to be made the logistical steps that happen in producing merchandising and producing books and publishing books and marketing books and getting the rights from the Illustrator that you're Gonna use for the graphic on the self-published hardcover version of the book and the rights you need and all those type of things He gets himself out of those if I don't really have to be in those decisions Let's find a way for me not to be in them.

So he reduces his cookie model reduces the amount of things that he's responsible for Now yes, this makes other people other people have to do more things But this is not an egalitarian commune. This is a business where we're trying to maximize the value produced and So it's not about trying to have an equal level of convenience or Disconvenience among all people in the organization.

It's how do we get 300,000 words out of Brandon? You will do more of this stuff so he can do more of that stuff right, that is just Economics one-on-one the second element that I think goes into his cooking model and I got this from some of his essays Not from this interview is consolidation He reduces What's on his plate and then he consolidates?

What remains? To try to minimize its footprint now this requires everyone else being on board That's why this has to be part of like an agreed-upon workflow. I'm gonna read here a quote from a blog post He wrote about his habits here. I'm gonna read this here. So this is Brandon talking.

I Also set aside one day a week for business matters answering email signing things from my store phone calls with my agent, etc I'm lucky to have I'm lucky enough to have assistance I can trust I don't have to get distracted by day-to-day interruptions because I know my assistants will deal with most of it and only ask me about Things that really need my input and most of them can wait until my business day So he has one day where the stuff he really does need to do he can do So the other days he knows I'm just writing That's the cooking model Again, this model doesn't apply to a lot of jobs Maybe most jobs but the jobs that it does apply to could make a really big difference So why then is my final point I want to make about this.

Why should we care? I mean we should care if we're if we're a Brandon Sanderson type at our company. This would be great Yeah, I could just cook right I could just like rock and roll I could have one day where I have to like talk to people and then otherwise I'm writing or I'm programming or I'm doing strategy Or I'm crunching numbers or doing research, whatever it is.

Yeah for the small percentage of people in supply So that'd be great But why should the rest of us care about this because again most people have jobs like my temporary director of undergraduate study job My final point is here's why we should all care about it Here's why it would be a good thing if more organizations had a small number of people with cooking models for their workflows it would represent a notable incursion Against our broader embrace of pseudo productivity in the world of knowledge work So pseudo productivity this core concept for my new book slow productivity is the idea that Visible effort is a reasonable proxy for useful effort.

The more stuff you do the better Busyness is the goal This would be an incursion against that Right because when you say no, no, I'm gonna let this person just write You're saying busyness is not the goal The goal here is the number of words he produces because that's valuable.

I don't care if They respond to slacks quickly or if they're jumping on a bunch of zooms or we see them around the office I want them producing words. That is a completely different mindset. That is an output focused productivity mindset a result focused productivity mindset and once you have Established that as a valid mindset, even if you've just established in your organization for four people You've established that that is an alternative way to think about productivity.

It is a Alternative to pseudo productivity and once that alternative exists it can begin to spread and So like once you acknowledge, okay for this salesperson this programmer and this strategist They're gonna cook once you acknowledge. That's a very effective way of thinking about productive output you can use that knowledge for other positions and Now maybe for other positions is like okay.

I don't have one thing I should just be doing all day, but we're recognizing busyness is not that important So maybe in this other position like my director of undergraduate studies position Well, we have like this one day where all the meetings happen and this gets automated It allows you to explore workflow configurations that aren't just built on demonstrating busyness And once you're no longer just demonstrating busyness a lot of the pain points of modern knowledge work can be dissipated So that's why I'm interested in this in the in the big picture, right?

I got small picture interest for the Brandon Sanderson's of the of this sector Let them cook it's gonna be better for the company's a better for them big picture Once you're doing that for some people you have Acknowledged that pseudo productivity is not the only way You have an incursion against small But definitive incursion against that reality and I am convinced that it is the end of the pseudo productivity regime that will Spark the beginning of a new era of knowledge work in the digital age.

We can't actually reap the potential benefits of Digital technology and office work the potential almost like utopian visions We have for what work could be we cannot reap those until we take down the pseudo productivity regime Until we have our equivalent of pulling down, you know, the Saddam Hussein statue in Iraq we need somewhere for there to be some sort of metaphorical statue that is going to be Like a gmail unread message count and we're gonna pull on those ropes and pull that thing down and indicate that regime is done We're moving on to a new way of thinking about productivity.

All right, so Sanderson's cool. I Like his approach that they built the whole business around just laying them, right? more companies should do that for their Sanderson style characters and once we do that things could get better for everyone else and Just you'll be proud that I got that whole distance without doing The whole segment without doing a name of the wind joke He talks about his writing schedule as he wakes up late He writes somewhere from 2 to 5 or 6 and then hangs with his family.

Then he writes again from 10 to 2 in the morning. Yeah, a lot of people do that like they get that Tim Ferriss writes that way He's got like two sessions a day for an Itali up to eight hours I mean a lot of people the people I know night right just do the night session, but Samson's is the beast Yeah, do you imagine writing for eight hours a day?

No easy. They wrote four hours yesterday and they're the tear myself away Once you get going writing Right, like you just want to that's all you want to do. You probably average what three a day three I feel like three is a good session. Yeah, I wonder if he writes on the weekends That's a good question, I bet he does well, he's Mormon so I don't know if they Protect the Sabbath or not.

They might they have a lot of rules So maybe not on I guess their Sabbath will be Sunday. I don't know about that But he probably does. I think that guy works a lot. He works a lot I say he has a quick commute. He just walks to his layer.

I know we got to get to that layer Jesse We got to get to that layer We got to build a layer I watched the video with my son the other night where they took is like a boring Completely undecorated sort of home office room and they Renovated the whole thing into a dark academia Set so like old bookcases and leather-bound books and chairs and like a fake fireplace or whatever.

I was like, oh man That's so awesome. Didn't you do that in your home office? Yeah, I guess so, but I want to do it more here. But here's the problem you watch this video and it takes them forever They worked on this that the channel is called nerdforge.

It's like a Scandinavian maker DIY woman and it just must have been Three to four weeks of like all day work. Yeah, I would take away from writing. I keep telling my son I was like don't be You should not want to be a full-time youtuber this it's it's such hard work I guess I know the maker space best because I wrote that New Yorker article in that space I was like, it's such hard work.

You got to do these projects and they're hard. It's full-time work for like months Yeah you get one video and that video better get the views because you're kind of screwed if it does it and you have to Constantly be like thinking about these over-the-top projects that are like really hard to do It seems like a stressful job.

Mm-hmm, and the money's like, okay, but it's like Not there is no equivalent in that world of like Travis Kelsey's podcast contract Like if you want to look at independent media worlds like in podcasting there's paydays There's not really paydays like that in YouTube that the it's harder to squeeze dollars.

It's all with these sponsorship deals. It's harder to squeeze Dollars you need like multi-million view videos that you can do like six times a year is kind of a sweet spot and then you're doing You're still nowhere near Really successful podcasters, but the same thing which Brandon was talking about in the interview with Ferris's He wanted to start his own ecosystem to get off of relying on Amazon if you're just a full-time youtuber Oh, it's been your channel gets canceled.

What are you gonna do then? Oh, yeah, you put something out that yeah happens to get banned or the algorithm changes Yeah, like we see this we put our we put our you might be watching this on YouTube We put our podcast on YouTube because a lot of people actually listen to podcasts using the YouTube app.

So fine We'll put it up there or they'll watch it. They like to have it on or whatever but the the numbers like views is Incredibly fickle, right? Like if I overwrite our YouTube guys like change that word. It'll be like 10,000 less people will watch it It's crazy like podcast I'm used to podcasting books and email newsletter or like every person who is consuming your stuff is hard one But then they're just gonna consume your stuff It's like I have this many people who will read my newsletter and it took a long time to build them up and they'll read It every time I write it, you know Or I have like this many readers who will buy my new book When it comes out or we have our podcast numbers are very stable, you know, it's hard one There's no algorithms, but it's stable YouTube is man's Wild West.

Mm-hmm You just be like we have videos that'll have 600,000 views, you know And then other ones like nothing and also you'll you'll look in this world I guess we have to give more credit to our YouTube guy because I'll look at really popular podcasters Like Mel Robbins and like yeah, we're putting just huge massive podcast number one podcast this week actually on the Apple charts I've never even heard of that podcast before I'm going on it I don't know if I'm supposed to talk about that before but I may or may not be going on it We can edit it out.

Yeah, I guess I don't know if it's a secret or not but like her YouTube page her show is Very popular. She puts her episodes on YouTube like we do Maybe there's just like a little bit of thumbnail title stuff. That's different. It know it just almost no views Like we're crushing those videos even though her audience is probably 5x our audience.

So YouTube is yeah Put stuff on it, but it's like posting ghost. It's a hard world to make to make your main world But it has that appeal of you never know. There's this algorithmic lottery, right? You know what podcast he's just brutal. It's like no one listened to my podcast now five people downloaded it now seven people download It's brutal right there and there's no way that that's gonna change fast YouTube.

It's always like you never know There could be some virality thing I could get a million people could look at this and I think that keeps people locked in Mm-hmm. This is kind of a divergence. We've kind of We've gone off We've gone from our digital knowledge work category to our attention economy category But we'll bring it back.

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All right, Jesse. Let's move on to some questions The first questions from Joe, but before I said I have a quick question my own now that you don't wear the traditional podcast shirt Are you ever gonna wear that shirt again? I don't know why I've just been in a t-shirt mood recently I'll tell you what I I would like to Get a new set of podcast shirts But I don't know what they're gonna be something.

I was gonna ask you offline But I was like, I'm the audience might be curious. Yeah, I mean I've been in a t-shirt mode but I do need We should have like a giant selection show about this. I Want to find some got around to it. I want I want a new podcast.

I don't want to stick with t-shirts because I feel like It's such like a Silicon Valley cliche when like men in their 40s and 50s are like wearing Too many t-shirts and like formal settings, you know I couldn't wear a t-shirt in here because you run hot and I run cold.

I'll just be freezing I know like I am Like slightly on the warm side of like normal right now, and I'm sure it's pretty cold in here. Yeah. Yeah, I run hot Yeah, so I don't I don't want to stick with the t-shirts, but I gotta find I don't know I want to I want to upgrade the look of the show.

So I'm thinking about it. I don't know. Okay, probably I'm watching I'm doing a lot of PT right now and I've discovered like oh as everyone else knows you can watch Like dumb shows while you exercise especially like stretches or whatever and I'm watching like all the shows on Netflix I'm watching the Netflix documentary on the history of the TV show American Gladiators So I'm thinking is that any good?

Well, I think what I should be wearing is an American Gladiator one of the deep-cut onesies Like Nitro or Malibu more on that show. I have to lift a few more weights. All right. What's our first question? All right first question from Joe You commented on Justin Sung's YouTube video last month He's big on mind mapping and how to become a straight-a student The intro says I promise you won't find any mention of the Cornell note-taking method mental map diagrams or any other optimal learning technique What is your opinion?

Well, I mean that's an interesting quote you bring up there from the beginning of how to become a straight-a student that book came out in 2006 and I actually remember writing that introduction because at the time I Was looking at other not just student advice books, but sort of online Collections of student advice from university student resources websites or what-have-you and things were starting to get a little out of control like the number of systems and the complexity of systems were really expanding and my whole Unique selling proposition when I wrote that book is that I was a recent graduate like a graduate in 2004.

I wrote that book Largely in 2005 and so I was grounded in the reality of college life when I was thinking about that And I was like, this is crazy This is gonna take way too long no one is gonna take notes with multiple columns and go back through and then write the Clarification and then go back through there and try to put this into some sort of structure there's all of this research, which I thought was kind of Silly or they said yes If you do this like incredibly time-consuming super structured note-taking you understand the material better Sure, but it takes forever and no one's going to do it And so no one does so my whole thing with that book is like let's get down to what actually works Let's get every unnecessary piece of friction out of the system so that you're spending as much time as possible Just on like the actual core Cognitive activity that is best preparing you for your goal, which is like doing well on this test Like we get in physical activity, you know What are the actual things that matter for the muscle development and like let's focus on that, you know And so that's what I thought the problem was with that world back then I was trying to simplify it So no, I was never a fan of these more advanced study techniques So because of that I've never been a fan of things like mental mapping.

I mean, I don't I Don't mind it. Like if you like making mental maps, it's fine, right? You do you I don't think it's a bad thing But most professional thinkers I know don't use these sort of complicated thought organization techniques They don't use mental maps. They don't have zettelkasten systems.

They take in a lot of information They trust their brain Their brain is the best mental map producer and zettelkasten organizer. There is ideas stick They keep recurring and they say okay, I'm gonna take that idea and I'm gonna work on it for professional thinkers I say this all the time on the show The hardest thing the thing that requires all the effort and help is not the ideas It's the transforming those ideas into something of sufficient quality that it is shareable and interesting to the world That's where all the time goes in.

That's where the software matters. That's where the systems matters That's where like time management Maddox that takes forever. That's where it matters. If you're using Scrivener versus Microsoft Word That's where all of the the rubber is hitting the proverbial road is the taking the idea and turn it into something you can share And that people care about the ideas itself is like the easy part You know, I was thinking about this like when I write articles for the New Yorker Yeah, we come up with ideas, I don't know I'll have an idea an editor I'll write me what about this we dismiss both of them one kind of clicks like that makes sense Like that's not the hard part The hard part then is like how do we turn that into a 2000 word piece up to the caliber of New Yorker?

Now that is you're gonna sweat bullets and that's where all the stuff matters. So no, I'm not Against these type of systems, but I I don't buy That these systems unlock more creativity or more efficiency or productivity when it comes to professional idea production Keep your system stupid. Keep your output great All right.

Who do we have next next questions from Cara? How do you figure out the thing that really matters for developing career capital or maybe it's about optimizing from one to two qualities But still having satisfactory performance in many others. It's such such a key question and it's so hard.

It's so hard All right. So let me give you a couple points about this one where you say Optimizing one or two qualities, but still have satisfactory performance in many others. This is really important the foundation to any career capital strategy So any strategy of using rare and valuable skills to as leverage to shape your career to be better for you?

Any strategy like this you need a foundation Where you you're on the ball meaning? You do the things you say you're going to do and you do them at a reasonable level of quality That is the table stakes for any sort of interesting career capital strategy within a larger organization people trust if they ask you to do something that you are not going to forget it and it will get done and The quality will be good.

You're not going to say like look I just want to get this off my plate and this is sort of Inappropriate quality, but I'm just gonna put it out there. Anyways, that's not my problem. You take responsibility You get it done. You get it done. Well, even if that means in the in the moment like oh shoot I really have to scramble here because I don't know how to do this, right?

That's not about being fantastic at a single skill. That's just a foundational skill level. You have that foundational skill level Now they that organization wants you you are valuable You you are not a negative thing. You're a positive thing. So that has to be the table stakes and that's really much more about Organization, you know, you have full capture you do multi-scale planning You're just on the ball with what's going on what you need to do who you're waiting to hear back for all that sort of boring Organizational type strategy how to organize yourself in digital era knowledge work get that in place first Now you're invaluable and they don't want to lose you the next step is let me take a skill a singular skill or one or two skills like you say that has like really Unambiguous high value and let me start developing those and then that's where you really begin to become so good.

They can't ignore you But you've got to do that on a foundation of being reliable You're not gonna drop the ball and produce quality work because if not Here's a mistake a lot of people get into is they say I'm gonna obsess about getting awesome at this skill But otherwise I'm dropping the ball left and right and I'm annoying and annoying people They're not going to give you dispensation to keep working on that skill.

They're not gonna reward you for that skill They're gonna say stop working on that skill. What I need from you now is that if I email you about this thing I don't have to follow up 50 times. I don't want to hear the excuses, right? So you have to lay that foundation before you build the singular rare and valuable skill Second part of your questions.

How do you find that skill? It's so hard We don't talk about this enough Because knowledge work is so messy and ambiguous and we sort of just like jump on laptops and give each other slack Handles and begin sending out zoom invites and no one really ever talks about like what is your job and how do we measure it?

And what are you trying to do? And what does success look like? It's so ambiguous and messy so much It's so we have so many different roles There's so many different things were expected to do and it's so informal how we pass this around that it is not easy in many Knowledge work jobs to figure out what would make me invaluable.

What is the most important skill here? It is hard to figure that out but it is really worth doing so and I suggest you actually treat your own job as if you're a business journalist writing about your your particular industry sector You got a look you got talk you got talk to people you got take people out for coffee people who are more successful What is it that made you successful walk them through their career transitions for every promotion they got up?

What was at the core of it? What did they do that made them valuable look for examples? Here's someone from this other company that we really want to hire Why are we talking about them that way who is really favored within my team? Why are they really favored? What is it that they do that is valuable?

You have to be doing research on your own job to begin to build hypotheses about what you think is really valuable and That is really important because if you don't do that Here's what ambitious people do who don't do the work of actually studying their own job. They write their own stories You will write your own story ambitious people do this all the time You will write your own story about what you want to be important And then you'll go spend two years doing that and discover at the end No one cares Right.

You gotta figure out the reality. We call this evidence-based planning is the term we use You've got to figure out the reality of what matters you might not like what you discover But you've got to figure out the reality of what matters and it can be hard to figure it out But if you do it's like a superpower There's now other people are trying to distinguish themselves through pseudo productivity or answering emails Faster or just trying to do more things or pursuing random projects or kissing up to the boss.

You're over here mastering linear algebra because you're realizing if you could do some sort of Customization of language models, it could make you a hundred X more valuable to this team They could stop hiring etc, etc, and you have evidence that this is what matters and when you pull that trigger They're like, okay, you are now like very important to us.

Sure. You can go live you know in By the ocean and come in once a week and we have this weird setup and like yes Like you're making you're doing the steps actually matter All right So carry me says - that's a long answer to a short question but build the foundation of being responsible and delivering quality then do a lot of research on your own job like a journalist to figure out what Matters and then build that skill and then the final step is take that out for a ride Customize and shape your experience to be what resonates for you.

That is how great jobs are formed All right, what do we got next next questions from Lisa What's your view on Daniel Immer Wars review of multiple books on the supposed attention crisis? The author seems to base this conclusion largely in the claim that people who fret over ruined attention are elitist members of the knowledge class Well, I like Daniel.

So this this was a Big article in The New Yorker recently. So a fellow New Yorker writer. I like Daniel. He's a very good writer. I didn't Love this particular piece Felt a little bit like contrarianism for the sake of contrarianism. Here's the problem Here's the problem I think with the core argument there and I should say I'm biased because I think I was flagged in that article one of my Books was flagged just like an example of this class of books.

So clearly I'm coming from a place of bias, but his main claim is The concerns about attention and diminishing attention are being engineered by elitists like me Because we're upset that people are paying less attention to our stuff and paying attention to like the new stuff on new media.

I Think that's a bit of a nonsensical claim because here's the problem Everyone is feeling it Right if this was something where the average person is like, I don't I haven't really thought about this But oh, you're telling me this is a problem. That's interesting. Like are we losing our attention?

You know if it was something where most people did not have direct experience of this Sure, like yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's a problem. Maybe it's not right but the attention issue this idea that I have a hard time paying attention Everybody is feeling it. That's the problem with this argument.

Everyone is already feeling it. Everyone is already feeling it at their work I can't keep my focus on this memo I'm writing for more than a couple minutes. They see it with their kids I mean their kids can't get their eyes off of their phones for more than six seconds.

Of course, it's a problem I see it right here The teacher is like this is what I'm seeing in the classroom It's like every moment of your life. I feel increasingly Drawn from it. I went back recently. I wrote this thing for my book that got cut but I have all this like research I did and I was going back and tracing the Reaction to The Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows, right?

So this is this is kind of called out in Daniel's article as one of the core or text of the attention problem movement so Nicholas Carr writes this book The Shallows, which and this is in oh God, I should know 2009 probably 2009 I think so He writes this book the subtitles like what the Internet is doing to our brain and this was like the first book to really Call out a major journalist writing and saying I think the Internet is changing our attention.

I'm struggling to read books I think something is going on here and it gets a little bit to the neuroscience of why that might be the book was a surprise finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and not general nonfiction writing losing out only to Siddhartha's Mudeji's I think to his book on the gene or maybe the Emperor of All Maladies one of his books But it was it was like this big success.

I went and cataloged the elite contrarian pushback Dakar Which there was like right when that right when that book came out we had this sort of similar style pushback There's review in The Guardian. I called out where they were being very sarcastic Like well, I'm looking at all the footnotes in cars book And he doesn't seem to be having that much trouble reading because look at all these books He's citing and then it was like what we should do is Chop up the pages in his book and shuffle them around and read them out of order like the Internet is right now He's honestly that would probably be better Steven Pinker in The New York Times Had like a real negative review of it.

He's like Twitter is making me a better scientist, you know And he's like if you're having a problem, it was very quaint you're having a problem That's on you check Twitter less often. All right, like he was like really dismissive of the book Clay Shirky, you know Had that same year one of his books He had this whole series of books in that early 2000s late 90s about the Internet is this like utopian techno solutionist take on the Internet and Shirky is like The Internet is at the core of like the Arab Spring which was happening concurrently with this is bringing democracy to the world Like this is it's like this utopian force like all this pushback happened the cars book Then you trace this out.

You pull this thread out a little bit longer by 2014 You have Clay Shirky talking about oh my god I have to ban phones and laptops from my classroom because my kids can't they can't even Keep your attention on more than a thought. It's like completely Tapping their brains the idea that this was like a utopian force for changing the world that had gone away by this point There was like this almost universal acceptance at that point.

Actually, you're right I'm really distracted. I think this is a problem and what had changed between 2009 and 2014 was the mobile revolution So it was social media moving on the smartphones and then attention engineering really took off His attention engineering was not as big of a thing when it was on the web-based browser, right?

But once was on the phone was how do we get people to look at these things and everyone was feeling it? So there's this contrarian pushback to that idea that then dissipated based on people's lived experience with the phone and then it became kind of Accepted so it's kind of interesting now Another ten years after that that we're trying to go back to contrarianism, but it's too late.

Everyone is feeling it now everyone is feeling it there are there other types of things for this type of contrarianism makes sense because again Typically it is things where it's not you have to be told there's a problem or the problem is narrow, right? You have to be told the meat you're eating is Leading to heart disease like I kind of have to be told that someone has to be looking at the data.

Like I can't directly feel Arthrosclerosis like growing in my heart while you eat meat Someone has to kind of like tell that to me and then maybe like someone else could come in and say that's overblown and looking at the data, but not with Attention reduction in the digital era because everyone directly and clearly feels it It's why when for example, you survey teenagers increasingly and this is international You're increasingly getting these surveys where teenagers saying I really don't like my phone and social media It's making me anxious and distracted and I hate it huge super majorities of the Teenagers who are surveying these surveys are saying that you can't find a single person who works in like an office environment who won't tell you I hate how distracted I am or I'm struggling to keep my concentration.

So I think we're past the point of saying no, no, there's this is just like a Small group of people are complaining because people are looking at social media instead of their books. I I can't flatter myself Not that many people know who I am most people who will tell you I look at my phone too much And I feel distracted all the time.

Don't read elite people. They don't read me and Daniel in The New Yorker They don't listen to my pod. They're not in part of some like elite conversation They were never reading my stuff anyways, but they'll still tell you. Yeah, I'm distracted all the time. Mm-hmm. So I Don't know.

I mean a good article sparks good debate and I think this one did but I didn't agree with this one I actually have a question about that. So when I checked out the article online How can you tell if a New York article online is in the magazine? It'll say they'll put a byline usually at like the bottom.

I think it'll say like appeared in the February bullet whatever issue with the title and it'll give like the the print title. Okay. Yeah, that's usually can tell All right. We've got next next questions from Alan. I Personally benefited a lot from mentoring in my professional career career whether formally or informally I even consider podcasts such as yours some form of coaching or mentoring in your view Where does mentoring or coaching fit in the professional development of knowledge workers?

I think there should be a lot more coaching and knowledge work, right? I mean There's a lot of ambiguity Which means there is a huge inefficiencies that can be Exploited or taken, you know leverage. I don't say exploited seems negative But like there's huge inefficiencies where if you're more on the ball, you know, the stuff that matters the techniques that matters There's huge room for you to grow and succeed Right different than in an existing field that has like a really clear competitive structure like chess It's just hard and everyone is like training and more or less the same way and it's just really hard There's not you can only get better really slowly or whatever in knowledge work It's such the Wild West of cognitive activity and everyone's like on email all day and all this wasted cognitive resources There is a lot of benefit to coaching but there's not there's not a ton that happens.

I think there should be more So the way I see it and there is some that exist so let me let me kind of walk through this the way I see it is there's sort of a hierarchy of Coaches from like as you move up the levels here things get more effective and more expensive and more rare All right.

So like the base level of knowledge. We're coaching as it exists today I think of things like this podcaster books So it's not actually someone talking one-on-one to you But is giving specific advice about I think about how this world works and here's how it works and here's what matters and here's what?

Doesn't so like this podcast as we talked about the beginning of today's episode one of the three big issues we talked about under the umbrella of Conflicts and mismatches with the modern digital environment is work in the age of digital communication and technology, right? So like this is a form of coaching so you should start at least at this level read books.

Listen to podcast the next level and this is kind of new that this exists is this idea of It's like one-on-one coaching but the price is reduced from high-end one-on-one coaching because it's delivered through the internet So this is like I've been talking about done daily Because I know this is the guys over at my body tutor who longtime friends of the show They have this service done daily comm where you have a coach who checks in with you daily They use my sort of methodologies roughly speaking a multi-scale planning and full capture But you're checking in with a coach to help you on those plans and give you some accountability each day That is this sort of next level up now.

You are you actually have a coach But because it's delivered online, it's like cheaper than traditionally what it takes to have like a dedicated coach All right So that's kind of like a new thing and I'm kind of excited about that space because I think it's more accessible the level above that is There are a lot of people out there a lot of knowledge or don't know this there's a lot of people out there that have dedicated coaches that they like weekly have sessions with that are Business coaches and they're just helping you Be better at your job or be better in your business like this is very common It's like friend of the show Brad Stolberg like he does this.

He's like he's like a very well-known Executive coach and Don't try to sign up because I think his waiting list is you know a mile long Very popular, but if you're one of his clients once a week, you're talking to him and you're getting like expert level So that's like the next level up because Brad's like a very well-known thinker in the space or whatever so that's going to be more expensive than something like done daily and Then you have at the final level is like the high-end executive coaches where you know I have a fortune 500 company.

I'm paying my CEO Fifty million dollars a year and salary and stock options. You better believe I want that person Operate on full cylinders and we're gonna have these high-end executive coaches are you know? 100 $20,000 a year, you know that are gonna but if you're paying 50 million dollars for a CEO like yeah I want someone who all they do is think about how do you succeed running a company so that we have no inefficiencies there?

You don't have to learn these things from scratch There's even like this super high level Super high level executive coach like Tony Robbins used to coach Bill Clinton. Really? Yeah So there used to be like these super high level, you know, like money is no object. I think all of that is great and More people should avail themselves of this coaching pyramid You know, I think everyone in my audience who likes my digital productivity advice like you're already on this pyramid You're getting coaching and if you know people who are talented but are like overwhelmed or struggling in their job Like get them on the bottom of this period then where things get interesting is where more people move up and say, okay I'm now in a position where My business success is on the line or I I just got a promotion.

That is, you know a six-figure promotion. I Really got to succeed here I'm gonna move up a level and maybe I'm gonna go to like the done daily level and Have like an online coach to make sure I'm just like keeping things well organized because I do not want to let this slip up This is like a six-figure proposition or maybe I'm gonna go up a level over that and hire like a Brad Stolberg in my life Because like this is the difference between this multi-million dollar company succeeding or going bankrupt.

This is the difference between Me keeping this new like $350,000 a year job or like having my salary cut in half Yeah, I'm gonna pay the 500 or the 2,000 or whatever it is a month to keep that so this is something that we should think about more because knowledge work is complicated and ambiguous which means there's a lot of opportunity for you to make big strides and Separate yourself from the pack if you have wisdom and guidance But also without that wisdom and guidance you can drown.

So I'm a big believer in coaching There's a cool article that Sanjay not Sanjay Gupta. This was Who wrote the he's another New Yorker writer He wrote the checklist manifesto I'll look it up. Do you have a coach? I Yeah, I do. I have a coach who specializes in the business side of creative work She helps me with Thinking through like deep media and the stuff we do and how to try to make that fit a little go on Oh, I told one day man.

I can't believe I forgot a tool's name another New Yorker writer He had this cool, New Yorker piece years ago about in surgery Then discovering like for doctors like having a coach That's like I'm gonna coach you like on this particular procedure makes people much better. So anyways, I'm a big I'm a big believer in coach And coaching.

Yeah, so I got a coach that helps me once a month It's like all she does it'll be for example, like a movie director she works with right or Screenwriters like creatives who have These like organizational business challenges as well Like I have to figure out how to not just do the creative work But like keep the business around it or how do I make this fit?

This thing's taking up too much time. Can I cut this off? And so I'm always running scenarios by her trying to figure out how do I get from seven jobs? to less and like what are the right places to cut and what's working and what's not is a sounding board and to me that's Like absolutely worth the money.

Mm-hmm because like this is this is a big business. There's like a lot on the line There's a lot that matters, you know, and this is like a line item. It's not in the scheme of things Not that big of an expense All right. What do we got next?

We have our corner slow productivity corner. Let's hear that theme music So once a week we have a question that relates to my last book I Shouldn't say last book people think I'm done. Right most recent my most recent book slow productivity the lost art of accomplishment Without burnout.

I always get that wrong these days So we do a question about that each week and we call it a slow productivity corner. All right What's our slow productivity corner question of the week? It's from Sterling but real quick some fans have been requesting a for the year-end Anniversary a slow productivity themed episode.

Can we play the music for every question? If so, I'm on board Hi, Sterling says an episode 336. You mentioned that starting up companies isn't compatible with slow productivity I was wondering could it be possible to reconcile the two or is it just not feasible? I tend to think of Paul Jarvis and his company of one model where a more minimalist approach can be successful Well, we got to get Sterling a copy of the book because I talk in depth about Paul Jarvis in slow productivity So for those who don't know who haven't read the book or heard me talk about him before Paul Jarvis wrote this cool book called company of one and his whole premise Was if you build like a company around your skill So actually this can be an interesting comparison to our Brandon Sanderson discussion from before because Brandon did not read this book that's for sure he says if you've kind of built the business around your skill like Paul was a web developer programmer as you get better The the pressures in the world of business will be to grow.

There's a demand for your services. You only have so much time Hire more people and grow because if you can grow a business of a certain size Maybe 10-15 years down the line you can sell that business and get a nice payday out of it Jarvis's company of one model is no.

No, no, if you're getting better and there's demand for your work Raise your prices Don't hire more people just become more expensive raise your prices and double your income or as he would recommend raise your prices and Have your working time and he's saying that actually could be Directly more valuable than this like potential payday 15 years from now Like this was his model of like I'm becoming really good at web development so why don't I double my prices and cut my hours in half and only work a couple days a week and He moved to Vancouver Island over by Tolfino.

His wife was a surfer. There's a surf break there. They have greenhouses I talked about in the book. It's all sort of Rural and pastoral and his life is pretty cool because that's what he wanted to do So he said, okay, you can cash in your skill to make your life more flexible or to try to make more money down the line That's the company of one model This is a model that I then extrapolate in slow productivity, right?

Because it comes in the chapter on the principle of obsessing over quality so there's three principles of slow productivity do fewer things work at a natural pace and Obsess over quality. So in that obsess over quality chapter, I was like, okay. Why is this important? Why is important to obsess over quality?

And I said there's two effects that happen when you obsess over the quality of doing the things you do best The first thing that's going to happen if you obsess over quality busyness is going to seem superfluous The world of pseudo productivity will become increasingly intolerable when what you care about is doing something really well you begin to look at your inbox with Wrath in your eyes you begin to look at like a busy calendar full of zoom meetings as a tragic waste So the obsession over quality makes all the stuff I talked about in the first two principles Seem logical inevitable, like I don't need that's not how I'm about I'm not valuable through activity I'm valuable through doing this and this is getting in the way of this the second thing that made obsessing over quality Useful though I argue is that it then can give you The leverage required to actually start removing that other stuff from your life So it makes you begin to feel dismayed towards busyness while simultaneously giving you the leverage needed to actually reduce busyness And that's where I talked about Paul Jarvis that as you get better at something you get more options You can say I'm just going to do this because it's valuable to you.

I don't want to do these other things anymore You can double your rates and reduce your hours in the big organization You can say I want to trade accessibility for accountability hold me accountable. I'm going to produce this stuff Look at the dollars. I bring in the door, but I'm not doing meetings And like all right, we'll make that fair trade so as you get good you get more leverage To actually simplify your life at the same time that getting good makes you want to simplify your life.

I Talked to someone at a tech company not long ago Maybe I mentioned this in the book or he said yeah, we drown in meetings Except the sales staff They're exempt from meetings Is the sales staff has a big number that follows each of them around I brought this much money into the company and the sales staff is able to say This is what is Unambiguously valuable to our company just hold me accountable to that if I'm not bringing the money then you can fire me But if I am to let me do that and these meetings bring that number down so you guys have your meetings I'm gonna go bring in the money and the tech company allows them to do that because it brings in a lot more money If they have these people on zoom calls and teams meetings on slack all day those numbers would go down And so that's more important So as you obsess over quality You gain more freedom To simplify or slow down your life.

So yes Paul Jarvis's book is great I recommend company of one and I recommend that general model, you know as you get better you could grow or you could slow and Sometimes the slow option is going to be the good one We should have Paul on the show at some point.

Yeah, we can find him in the woods up there the woods up in so his book was edited by the editor who Edited so good. They can't ignore you and who? Acquired deep work. Okay same editor All right. What do we got next? We have a call. Oh, let's hear this Hey cow, my name is Antonio and I'm calling from my reading spot up in Griffith Park in the hills above Los Angeles I Have a 15 year old son and I did not give him a cell phone until ninth grade and the cell phone that he got Is it is a dumb phone where he can text and get music and browse maps, but he can't do anything else on it It has been great.

And it has also ruined his life. He has said all of his friends have iPhones I feel like it's part of a fashion accessory as well as a device and He is definitely gonna get one when he's 16, and I'm wondering do you have any advice for this transition?

For a kid whose life I've ruined To when he gets his cell phone for the first time a smartphone for the first time And I'm also wondering how you have navigated that with your own children as they get into I think they're probably middle school by now Any advice you or Jesse skeleton have for me and my son would be greatly appreciated Well, I think Jesse skeleton would just make bones puns If you were to ask Jesse skeleton for your advice so he would say 16 is the right age for a phone There's no make no bones about it Then he would just stare at the camera.

So we should be lucky that Jesse skeleton's not here Alright, so first of all, you're doing the right thing the the research Indicates that a I call it the John Height model. This is what height proposes but the height model is No smartphone till high school No social media till 16 those are often separated by a little bit like you get the high school before that So so smartphone Wait till high school social media wait till 16 Really what you're trying to go for here is to make sure that they get through certain developmental Milestones before they get this big influence of attention economy apps on their social development and their attention So if you're waiting till 16, this is going to be like a post puberty most likely also post social identity formation and It's just going to have much less of an effect than getting this at like 12 or 13 And I think the research is pretty clear on that.

He curses it now. He'll thank you in a few years I mean I hear this again and again from my undergrads the undergrads. I work with now whose parents did something similar They thank me now in college separated from a few years like man I'm so glad I didn't have to get stuck in that world and tell I was X years old So he will thank you later even if he's cursing now big picture the solution of this is just a collective action problem and I really feel like we're at The cusp of this change.

We're really at this cusp of like your situation now where it feels unusual the decision you're making among the peers of your kid to the place where that's going to be a Common behavior if not, the majority like the plurality of behavior that like yeah a large percent of the kids at your school Are getting a phone in high school social me at 16 I mean this this is just starting to become more culturally accepted once it's more widespread then you don't have the collective action problem and it's not going to be as much of a a Pull or lift from you as the parent if you're a parent right now and your kids are younger But you're thinking they're coming up to this age now or they're in an age where some kids are getting this Try to find if people locally are doing something like the wait to eight pledge Which says we will wait until after eighth grade to give phones to our kids It helps if you have a group of people and you can say to your kid I signed a pledge and I'm one of 20 families that has made the same pledge and that's what we're doing So no, you can't just argue like I made this situation individually and you're going to convince me.

It's wrong. You're arguing against this whole Community of people who've made a similar pledge in terms of my own kids. Yeah, my oldest is 12 so, you know, he is as likely to get a smartphone this year as he is to get a Commercial grade crossbow. I would say those are about equally likely.

He is as likely to be Chatting on his Android by the end of this school year as he is to be driving a Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle He's going to get a phone in high school. He'll get social media at 16 And again, that's going to become more and more standard.

It is becoming more and more standard and Your kid I'm telling you he's going to thank you in a couple years. So, you know what actually that was great I'm kind of glad you did that All right, what we got here Oh case study Where people write in the Jesse at Cal Newport comm with their own stories of putting the type of advice we talked about on the show into action in their own life Today's case study comes from Kyle Kyle says I'm a master student in biology Studying how monarch butterflies respond to strong winds during their over wintering period My research involves analyzing thousands of butterfly photos taken at regular intervals paired with wind condition data Boy, that's that's funny when people think about being like a graduate student biology They think about like Alan Grant in Jurassic Park like out in the Badlands digging up Velociraptors and now you're looking at pictures of butterflies all day long Alright back to the story I've reached a stage where I need to convert these photos into quantitative data to draw meaningful conclusions about their behavior After an unsuccessful search for both free and paid software to process my massive image collection I decided to take on the challenge of building my own tool With some background in Python and our programming and a passion for AI.

I discovered coding tools like windsurf cursor and Klein for VS code that go beyond simple chatbots These tools can read your entire code base make targeted edits and help create new files when needed Using just natural language prompting. I was able to build exactly what I needed in about a week It feels like I've created a custom woodworking jig a specialized tool that makes the real work more efficient and elegant I was inspired to share this story after hearing your recent episode about AI you predicted that non computer scientists Would soon have expanded abilities to create software and my experience confirms this While I'm more technically inclined than many of my biology peers I'm not a software engineer my image labeling tool feels like a glimpse into the future AI has dramatically boosted my confidence to tackle technical challenges and I expect this effect will only grow stronger.

I have attached a screenshot of the software to give you a sense of what I built Well, let's take a look at this. Alright, so for those who are Watching instead of just listening. We'll bring this up on the screen here That's interesting Yeah, that's better. I'll see that there it is full screen for those who are watching.

Okay, it's cool So there's a picture of trees and black and white and then some of the it's gridded and some of the squares are colored God, I see I didn't find butterflies in there Yeah, Wow, or his program is there's that's like a non-trivial piece of software That he produced without coding ability.

Yeah, that is this is my my argument about AI is There is One strain of discourse that's it's hype oriented in the sense of oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god Like look at this thing This massive model is going to like do everything for you and make 10% of the workforce obsolete by tomorrow And it's a good attention-grabbing headline Every prediction that has been made from that strain of discourse though has been like slow or not to come to fruition or non-existent At all.

I mean right from the beginning of chat GPT. It was like we're months away from X We're months away from Y and like the X and Y Impacts didn't happen. So there's this weird gap that's happening in AI development where AI Capabilities keeps hitting every every optimistic prediction that people make it's hitting it Well soon, it'll be able to do this hits it, but it can't do this But it will be soon hits it but the predictions about impacts Have not been panning out.

It's these jobs are all going to go away. Have it Homework apocalypse in the homework as we know it not really the case It's going to make it obsolete to teach like intro computer Like so these type of impact product predictions those have been way less accurate than the capability so there's a a gap between AI capability and AI impact and the reason is like my argument about this is because there is a time consuming complicated step that actually bridges this gap between Capabilities and impact which is the product market fit actually developing the tools that work That actually solve a real problem for a real group of people and this is sort of painstaking and distributed So you have a couple big companies building massive models but then you have to have a lot of companies trying to build these tools that use them that are much more specialized and 90% of them are going to fail and 10% are going to work and 1% is going to catch us off guard and be a killer app Like there's gonna be that 1% that is the email to AI world and suddenly it spreads like really far but that takes time because you have to spin up companies and build products and adjust the products and get Market feedback and then try to spread that product through the market the hope of companies like open AI was that?

That their their model with just a raw chat interface would be enough to have high impact, but it's not It's the type of thing. We're seeing here where Kyle Was able to build a custom butterfly tool and he otherwise wouldn't be able to do it Like it's these type of impacts and he was using tools that are built for VS codes over Visual Studio These were bespoke programming related tools built on the big models That's what it actually is going to take to get the impact and that just takes more time so the impact is coming from AI, but it's not going to be delivered through a single tool and It's going to be the aggregation in my opinion It's going to be the aggregation of many dozens of much more narrow impacts and over time that's going to add up It was similar to the Internet that there was like all of these Little things and innovations to begin to add it up.

These companies are doing this those companies are doing this over here They're doing this and all that sort of added up until you look back and said wow The way like our economy executes has transformed pretty fundamentally but it was a Hundred different more niche products and applications that went and spread that made that happen It wasn't just here's Netflix or here's Netscape and the world was changed That's what I think is happening here.

And one of the the the form factor of the tools. I think we're going to see first having Notable impacts over niches is like what Kyle talked about. I've talked about this in some talks I've been giving recently and on the show that that one of the early places.

We're gonna see impact is Raising the capabilities within specific software packages of the average user So now like the average user of a software can get their skill ability with that software closer to like an expert level Without actually having to go through the long cycle training and becoming an expert that's going to unlock a lot of productivity Right like an expert in Microsoft Excel Can do a lot more with that than I can if you give me a tool That's AI natural language base that allows me to approximate a lot of what an expert can do I'm unlocking a lot of productivity and you multiply that across lots of people using lots of tools This is going to be the place I think at first we're gonna see the the productivity gains much more so than here's a robot that is going to take over these people's desks Coding is one of the big places I hear from more and more people who are able to build bespoke useful applications You couldn't release this thing.

I'm sure it's buggy and The options are limited and it's probably not that elegant but building bespoke applications for things you need to do Like that is an example of where we're gonna get this like initial productivity boost from AI. So yeah, I think it's a good example I'm thinking about doing an in-depth episode Jesse with a AI expert do it I like I don't I guess our audience cares about this.

Yeah on YouTube Well, I don't bonus. Anyway, that's bonus. Anyways YouTube. They do not like AI content. Really? Yeah, or when we talk AI It gets destroyed No one cares because all the YouTube AI content is like the Terminator is literally at your house right now Like it is we here is how?

You can protect yourself from the Terminator that is at your house right now It is about to start shooting through the windows Here is how to use the mattress as a bulletproof shield, but the Terminator was back in the 90s as way before you I well Yes, but he traveled back in time.

It took place. He used a neural link to Skynet neural link chip remember Terminator 2 they they had to go and Find the chip and destroy it before they go. Yeah, but that's like the content right now you can't compete with that on YouTube if I'm like, excuse me, but um There are Excel macro features that you will now have access to in your data analysis if you use AI and that's going to give you a 15% bump in your analysis productivity and over here You've got some like Jack guy in his cold plunge like the Terminator is coming for you now How do you do jiu-jitsu?

against the AI power terminators Stay tuned can't compete with that on YouTube. But I guess our podcast listeners care, I guess Anyways, there's someone in mind a specific well-known expert that I that wants to come to show I want to come to show So we'll work that out. All right, so stay tuned make him sit in a cold place in a cold plunge and we're gonna flex I Don't know what else people talk about on and we're gonna how do you bow hunt the AI?

Terminator how to use your bow hunt arrow and drive a side track from your cyber truck The AI Terminator can't puncture the bulletproof glass on your cyber truck We could have so many more viewers Jesse. All right Let's get to our we have a tech corner coming up speaking of tech.

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All right, let's get to our final segment By popular demand we want to do a tech corner That's where I put on my computer science hat a little bit We geek out about things are happening the world technology and sometimes try to draw some lessons from that for the rest of us Today, I want to talk about an article from the I triple-e spectrum about our friend Alan Turing You know load this up here on the screen for those who are watching in addition to just listening All right, so and explain this to you and then I'm going to connect it back to our initial deep dive So be some professional podcasting here.

Here's the article The lost art the lost story of Alan Turing secret Delilah project so the the set here and I have a picture of his Delilah machine right here the setting here is there was just an auction of These papers of Turing that have brought the light in a way that we didn't know much about before his efforts sort of contemporaneously with his work at Bletchley Park on breaking the German codes and the enigma machine, but also They have another code.

I think it's like SK for R But basically his code breaking work around that same time and as that kind of wound down he was also working on another top-secret project in the middle the countryside and England where I think now is like the Their British equivalent of the NSA is out there.

He worked on this thing I have on the screen here the Delilah, which is a voice encryptor So I can talk this encrypts my voice and on the other end is decrypted So we didn't know much about this But now we do Because of these papers and the author of this article had been called in by the auction house to study the paper So he knows all about it.

This is picture. I have up here of a room with 50,000 kilograms worth of equipment This was the state-of-the-art from that time for doing voice encryption this was a setup for the Sig Solly system that Bell Labs did and so what was amazing about Turing's work is Right around that same time.

He came up with a similar tool that was this big and if you could see it on the screen It's like a big briefcase You could put it in a big backpack and carry it. So it's a cool story Now if you get into it, here's what I want to point out I don't know how much one gets a technical details.

So there was a Let me geek out briefly. It's a tech corner so he had been involved with Not just cracking the German Enigma text code. So by text code, I mean an encrypted text He also broke another German system or was involved in it called the sz-42 Again, it was a text based system.

So you you had text that you're encrypting The architecture of that German system is how we do most sort of digital encryption today so, you know the way this German system worked is The I'm talking about the sz-42 here is you had a sequence of letters You wanted to send to someone else and what you had was a box that generated Pseudorandom Characters, right?

So like really what's happening here is like each letters change into a number and then you have this Mechanical thing that was creating Random numbers. I say pseudorandom though, because if you start with the same settings It will always produce the same stream of numbers that seem pretty random And then what you do is it's called a stream cipher you add these together.

So like I'm trying to send, you know Activate Jesse skeleton as like my key command. Those are those letters If I was using a sz-42 I'm generating random numbers and I'm adding a random number to each of those letters from activate Jesse skeleton If you know on the other end how I configured my Thing that spit out the random numbers you can figure yours the same way It spits out the same random numbers you subtract them away and you get the original message.

That's actually how most Cryptography works now on the Internet like if you're communicating securely with a website you have just a digital version of one of these things that spits out a bunch of Random seeming numbers and as long as the person on the other ends like Amazon has the same key you have It can then create the same stream and take it off again, right?

So these stream ciphers are very fast And it's how it's what we use to encrypt most things the problem of course is how do you share the key because you and I have to have this we have to set up our Generator of random seeming numbers the exact same but if I tell you that value and someone else could see me telling you that value I can't send it over the same channel The way they had to do this back in World War two was like literally Put these in pouches and send them to people right you would have a booklet to look up like on this day at this time Here's the thing we use the big breakthrough in internet based Cryptography is a public key encryption.

So this was like the the key breakthrough. This is like RSA technologies to RSA algorithm Public key encryption is a way that I can encrypt something for you to read Send it to you No one can decrypt it except for you No, it's not very efficient. So I don't want to use this for my big message I want to send you so the big breakthrough in like internet cryptography was we use this very expensive method Asymmetric encryption public encryption just to trade our initial key to each other and then we can set up our very fast stream ciphers the same and then we can use that the communicate really fast So with like public key encryption you have a private key in a public key that are related You can publish your public key I can use your public key to encrypt something and send it to you and only someone who knows your private key can unencrypt it That's public key encryption.

So That's that's in depth my geekage Anyways, the way that Turing's design worked is he said great We're going to take voice which is sound waves and we're going to break it up into little Discrete time stamps like a thousand times a second and we're going to measure like what's the height of the sound wave at each of?

These points we'll make that a number. We'll add a random number to that Then we will this will give us like a random looking sound wave We'll send that like weird sounding sound wave across the radio channel or whatever And on the other end you subtract away those numbers from what you receive and then generate a new sound wave It'll be the original talking back.

So like that's what he's doing. Okay What was cool about this is if you read this article, so here's the lesson. I want to draw all of this I'm not just geeking out Turing didn't know a lot about electrical engineering and If you read this article He was able to here's like part of his lab notebook on the screen here.

He just went out to this place countryside There's like an army barracks there and like a mess hall to eat at and he could just spend months Figuring out electrical engineering and doing these experiments like this experiment. I have on the Screen here is just taking a particular component and just taking data Let me run it like this and this and how's this thing work and was just teaching himself Engineering just spending months doing that after about six months someone else joined the project Bailey b-a-y-l-e-y who was an accomplished engineer and he he began to give lessons to Turing like let me get you better up to speed about electrical engineering principles and like how to solder things correctly and and Turing got better at that and then Turing was able after about a year of this to mix his really innovative mathematical capability with this sort of Now reasonable engineering ability and they built this really cool thing I'm gonna connect this back to the beginning of the show Because what was the British government doing here during World War two and the immediate aftermath?

They're letting Turing cook Go spend six months in the woods Just doing experiments on these components and teaching yourself how to build machines because you're brilliant and you have these other skills Right you had all these mathematical skills that were relevant He had encountered Claude Shannon during his time at Bell Labs and was able to use some of the mathematics that Shannon had innovated About sampling theory and he was able to bring that back over here Like you have the mathematics skills to do something cool.

It's been a year figuring out the engineering Take your time Don't jump on zoom meetings. Don't do email. Don't be busy. We don't know what you're doing over there And come away of building this really cool thing. And then after he built this Delilah box now We had all this electrical engineering know-how in addition to his abstract mathematical and logic know-how.

What did he do post-war? He built some of the very first electronic computers So he was able to put that skill to use building Britain Britain's contributions to the world of early electronic computers, right and he wasn't the first to build those, you know It's not accurate to say he invented the computer, but he was in the mix Because he had learned these skills.

So anyways, the the nerd details about encryption are cool but I love this bigger notion of like why don't we people who have skills just let them cook and The return is so much bigger. You're getting so much more out of Alan Turing just let him cook than if he had to be Responding to memos and going to meetings at the the war HQ during the war.

We need more Need more of this of just letting people cook because they can produce stuff. That is so high-value That any inconvenience of them not being very accessible. I think it's washed away Two quick things when you're talking about the crypto it reminded me of Neal Stevenson's book crypt Omicron.

Yeah that sure I have yeah, Turing's in that book. Yeah. Yeah, I actually so the public key encryption algorithm that like made all of like internet encryption possible is RSA and The R in that is Ron Rivest And so when I was getting my doctorate MIT ITA for Ron in his like network security class So he's a cool guy because he he left and started a company RSA the Commercialized this thing and they sold it for Well over a billion dollars.

Mm-hmm, then he came back But he was loaded He came back Because he loved being a professor, but he had really good Red Sox tickets. That's why I remember they had seized That's what you would do in Boston. If you make a billion dollars like I'm gonna get some get some Sox tickets He was a brilliant guy.

I think it's still I think it's still active it then it turned out So, you know, they made bank, but then it turned out that a researcher in the NSA had solved the same problem in The 70s, but it was classified He solved it like so we were using it with within like the NSA and stuff like that But he couldn't talk about it.

So then these academics came along and Solved it later and then made bank. So and now it's known like at least the other guy gets credit for Discovering it but and then the other thing with cooking is a lot of people say in basketball like let Steph cook You know Steph Curry was like cooking and hitting Bill Simmons always uses this terminology.

Yeah. Yeah, I from like a physical standpoint I can't think of from like a physical discipline standpoint These define two ends of the wide spectrum would be like Steph Curry over here and Brandon Sanderson over here Like I wouldn't trust Sanderson to get the breakaway three, let's put it that way but and I wouldn't trust Steph Curry to write 300,000 words about yeah, you know the Kingkiller Chronicles or whatever, but wait a second, I think Kingkiller might be Patrick Rufus have I done it again?

Oh It starts again It starts again. I didn't want to do too many of our Like super insider name of the wind jokes yeah, I was like for the audience you like I'll get so many emails like the I actually see this on YouTube is gonna be like for shame for shame And like that'll be the they'll be so upset and that'll be the end of us on YouTube.

So I was trying to be respectful All right. That's all the time we have for today. Thanks for listening or watching We'll be back next week with another episode and until then as always stay deep Hey, if you like today's discussion about the power of just letting someone cook you might also like episode 37 where we get into how to hack remote work to make yourself much more happy and much more productive check it out But I thought this timing might be good To talk to those of you who still have some sort of remote work Set up in your job about the very general topic of how do you make the most of that?