Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media | Lex Fridman Podcast #166
the following is a conversation with cal newport he's a friend and someone who's writing like his book deep work for example has guided how i strive to approach productivity and life in general he doesn't use social media and in his book digital minimalism he encourages people to find the right amount of social media usage that provides value and joy he has a new book out called a world without email where he argues brilliantly i would say that email is destroying productivity in companies and in our lives and very importantly he offers solutions he is a computer scientist at georgetown university who practices what he preaches to do theoretical computer science at the level that he does it you really have to live a focused life that minimizes distractions and maximizes hours of deep work lastly he's a host of an amazing podcast called deep questions that i highly recommend for anyone who wants to improve their productive life quick mention of our sponsors expressvpn linode linux virtual machines sun basket meal delivery service and simply safe home security click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note let me say that deep work or long periods of deep focused thinking have been something i've been chasing more and more over the past few years deep work is hard but is ultimately the thing that makes life so damn amazing the ability to create things you're passionate about in a flow state where the distractions of the world just fade away social media yes reading the comments yes i still read the comments is a source of joy for me in strict moderation too much takes away the focused mind and too little at least i think takes away all of the fun we need both the focus and the fun if you enjoy this thing subscribe on youtube or view it on apple podcast follow on spotify support on patreon or connect with me on twitter at lex friedman if you could only figure out how to spell that and now here's my conversation with cal newport what is deep work let's start with a big question so i mean it's my term for when you're focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task which is something we've all done but we had never really given it a name necessarily that was separate from other type of work and so i gave it a name and said let's compare that to other types of efforts you might do while you're working and see that the deep work efforts actually have a huge benefit that we might be underestimating what does it mean to to work deeply on something you know i had been calling it hard focus in my writing uh before that well so the context you would understand i was in the theory group in csail at mit right so i was surrounded at the time when i was coming up with these ideas by these professional theoreticians and that's like a murderer's row of thinkers there right i mean it's like turing award touring award macarthur tauren ward i mean you know the crew right theoretical computer science theoretical computer science yeah yeah so so i'm in the theory group right doing theoretical computer science uh and i publish a book so you know so i was in this milieu where i was being exposed to people uh where focus was their tier one skill like that's what you would talk about right like how how intensely i can focus that was the the key skill it's like your 4 40 time or something if you were an athlete right so so this is something that people are actually the the the theory folks are thinking about oh yeah really like they're openly discussing like how do you focus i mean i don't know if they would you know quantify it but but focus was the tier one skill so you you would come in here would be a typical day you'd come in uh and eric domain would be sitting in front of a white board yeah right with a whole group of visitors who had come to work with them and maybe that projected like a grid on there because they're working on some graph theory problem you go to lunch you go to the gym you come back they're sitting there staring at the same same white board right like that's the tier one skill this is the difference between different disciplines like i i often feel for many reasons like a fraud but i definitely feel like a fraud when i hang out with like either mathematicians or physicists it's like it feels like they're doing the legit work because when you talk closer in computer science you get to programming or like machine learning like the the the experimental machine learning or like just the engineering version of it it it's it feels like you're gone so far away from what's required to solve something fundamental about this universe it feels like you're just like cheating your way into like some kind of trick to figure out how to solve a problem in this one particular case yeah that's how it feels right and it's uh i'd be interested to hear what you think about that because um programming doesn't always feel like you need to think deeply to work deeply but sometimes it does so it's a weird dance for sure code does right i mean especially if you're coming up with original algorithmic designs i think it's a great example of deep work i mean yeah the the hardcore theoreticians they push it to an extreme i mean i i think it's like knowing that athletic endeavor is good and then hanging out with a olympic athlete like oh i see that's what it is now for the grad students like me were not anywhere near that level but the faculty the faculty in that group these were the cognitive olympic athletes but coding i think is a classic example of deep work because i got this problem i want to solve i have all of these tools and i have to combine them somehow creatively and on the fly but but so basically i had been exposed to that so i was used to this notion when i was in grad school and i was writing my blog i'd write about hard focus you know that was a term i used then i published this book so good they can't ignore you which came out in 2012 so like right as i began as a professor and that book had this notion of skill being really important for career satisfaction that it's not just following your passion you have to actually really get good at something and then you use that skills as leverage and there's this big follow-up question to that book of okay well how do i get really good at this yeah and then i look back to my grad school experience i was like huh there's this focus thing that we used to do i wonder how generally applicable that is into the knowledge sector and so as i started thinking about it it became clear there's this interesting storyline that emerged that okay actually undistracted concentration is not just important for esoteric theoreticians it's important here it's important here and so forth here and that involved into the uh the deep work hypothesis which is across the whole knowledge work sector focus is very important and we've accidentally created circumstances where we just don't do a lot of it so focus is the sort of prerequisite for basically uh you say knowledge work but basically any kind of skill acquisition any kind of major effort in this world can we break that apart a little bit yeah so so a key a key aspect of focus is not just that you're you're concentrating hard on something but you do it without distraction so a big theme of my work is that context shifting kills the human capacity to think so if i if i change what i'm paying attention to to something different really even if it's brief and then try to bring it back to the main thing i'm doing that causes a huge cognitive pile up to make it very hard to think clearly so even if you think okay look i'm writing this code or i'm writing this essay and i'm not multitasking and all my windows are closed and i have no notifications on but every five or six minutes you quickly check like an inbox or your phone that initiates a contact shift in your brain right we're gonna start to suppress some neural networks we're gonna try to amplify some others it's a pretty complicated process actually there's a sort of neurological cascade that happens you rip yourself away from that halfway through and go back to what you're doing and i was trying to switch back to the original thing even though it's also in your brain's in the process of switching to these emails and trying to understand those contexts and as a result your ability to think clearly just goes really down and it's fatiguing too i mean you do this long enough you get midday and you're like okay i can't i can't think anymore you've exhausted yourself is there some kind of um perfect number of minutes would you say so we're talking about focusing on a particular task for you know one minute five minutes 10 minutes 30 minutes is it possible to kind of context switch while maintaining deep focus you know every 20 minutes or so so if you're thinking of like this again maybe it's a selfish kind of perspective but if you think about programming you know you're focused on a particular design of a little bit maybe a small scale on a particular function or a large scale on a on a system and then the shift to focus happens like this which is like wait a minute is there a library that can achieve this little task or something like that and then you have to look it up this is the danger zone you go to the internets yeah and and so you have to now you it is a kind of contact switch because as opposed to thinking about the particular problem you now have switch thinking about like uh consuming and integrating knowledge that's out there that can plug into your solution to a particular problem it definitely feels like a contact switch but is that is that a really bad thing to do so should you be setting it aside always and really trying to as much as possible go deep and stay there for like a really long period of time well i mean i think if you're looking up a library that's relevant to what you're doing that's probably okay and i don't know that i would count that as a full context shift because the semantic networks involved are relatively similar right you're thinking about this type of solution you're thinking about coding you're thinking about this type of functions where you're really going to get hit is if you switch your context to something that's different and if there's unresolved obligations so really the worst possible thing you could do would be to look at like an email inbox because here's 20 emails i can't answer most of these right now they're completely different like the context of these emails like okay there's a grant funding issue or something like this is very different than the coding i'm doing and i'm leaving it unresolved so it's like someone needs something from me and i'm gonna try to pull my attention back the second worst would be something that's emotionally arousing so if you're like let me just glance over at twitter i'm sure it's nice and calm and peaceful over there right that could be devastating because you're going to expose yourself to something that's emotionally arousing that's going to completely mess up the cognitive platform there and then when you come back to okay let me try to code again it's really difficult this is both the information and the emotion yeah both both can be killers if what you're trying to do so i would recommend at least an hour at a time because it could take up to 20 minutes to completely clear out the residue from whatever it was you were thinking about before so if you're coding for 30 minutes you might only be getting 10 or 15 minutes of actual sort of peak lex going on there right so an hour at least you get a good 40 45 minutes plus i'm partial to 90 minutes that's a really good a really good chunk we can get a lot done but just before you get exhausted you can sort of pull back a little bit yeah and now one of the beautiful and you know people can read about in your book deep work but and i know this has been out for a long time and people are probably familiar with many other concepts but it's still pretty profound it has stayed with me for a long time uh there's something about adding the terms to it that actually solidifies the concepts like words matter it's pretty cool and uh just for me sort of as a comment there's uh it's a struggle and it's very difficult to uh maintain focus for prolonged period of time but the days on which i'm able to accomplish several hours of that kind of work i'm happy so forget being productive and all that yeah i'm just satisfied with my life i'm i feel i feel fulfilled it's like joyful and then i i can be i'm less of a dick to other people in my life afterwards it's a it's a beautiful thing and there there i find the opposite when i don't do that kind of thing i'm much more irritable like i feel like i didn't accomplish anything and there's the stress that then the negative emotion builds up to where you're no longer able to sort of uh enjoy the lot of this amazing life so so in that sense deep work has been a source of a lot of happiness i'd love to ask you how do you again you cover this in the book but how do you integrate deep work into your life what are different scheduling strategies that you would recommend just at a high level yeah what are different ideas there well i mean i'm a big fan of time blocking right so if you're facing your workday don't allow like your inbox or to-do list to sort of drive you don't just come into your day and think what do i want to do next yes i mean i'm a big plan of saying here's the time here's the time available let me make a plan for it all right so i have a meeting here of an appointment here here's what's left what do i actually want to do with it so in this half hour i'm going to work on this for this 90 minute block i'm going to work on that and during this hour i'm going to try to fit this in and then actually have this half hour gap between two meetings so why don't i take advantage of that to go run five errands i can kind of batch those together but blocking out in advance this is what i want to do with the time available i mean i find that's much more effective now once you're doing this once you're in a discipline of time blocking it's much easier to actually see this is where i want for example to deep work and i can get a handle on the other things that need to happen and find better places to fit them so i can prioritize this and you're going to get a lot more of that done than if it's just going through your day and saying what's next i schedule every single day kind of thing so as i try to in the morning to try to uh have a plan yeah so you know i do quarterly weekly daily planning so at the semester or quarterly level i have a big picture vision for what i'm trying to get done you know during the fall let's say or during the winter like i want to these are there's a deadline coming out for academic papers at the end of the season here's what i'm working on i want to have this many chapters done of a book something like this like you have the the big picture vision of what you want to get done then weekly you look at that and then you look at your week and you put together a plan for like okay what am i going to what's my week going to look like what do i need to do how am i going to make progress on these things maybe maybe i need to do an hour every morning or i see that monday is my only really empty day so that's going to be the day that i really need to nail on writing or something like this and then every day you look at your weekly plan and still only block off the actual hours so you do that that three scales the the quarterly down to weekly down to daily and we're talking about actual times of day versus so the alternative is what i end up doing a lot i'm not sure it's the best way to do it is uh uh scheduling the duration of time this is this is called the luxury when you don't have any meetings i'm like religiously don't do meetings all other academics are jealous of you by the way yeah i know no zoo meetings uh i i find those are that's one of the worst tragedies uh tragedies of the pandemic is both the opportunity to what okay the positive thing is to have more time with your family you know sort of reconnect in many ways and that that's really interesting uh be able to remotely sort of not waste time on travel and all those kinds of things the negative is actually both those things are also sources of the negative uh but the negative is like it seems like people have multiplied the number of meetings because they're so easy to schedule and there's nothing more draining to me intellectually philosophically just my spirit is destroyed by even a 10-minute zoom meeting like what are we doing here what's the meaning of life yeah i have every zoom meeting is i have an existential crisis so kierkegaard with the so what the hell were we talking about oh so when you don't have meetings there's a luxury to really allow for certain things if they need to like the important things like deep work sessions to last way longer than you uh maybe planned for i mean that's my goal is to try to schedule the goals to schedule to sit and focus for a particular task for an hour and hope i can keep going yeah and hope i can get lost in it and uh do do you find that this is at all an okay way to go and uh the time blocking is just something you have to do to actually be an adult and operate in this real world or is there some magic to the time blocking well i mean there's magic to the intention uh there's magic to it if you have varied responsibilities right so i'm often juggling multiple jobs essentially there's there's academic stuff there's teaching stuff there's book stuff there's the the business surrounding you know surrounding my my book stuff but i'm of your same mindset if a deep work session is going well you just rock and roll and let it go on so like one of the big keys of time block at least the way i do it so i even you know sell this planner to help people time block it has many columns because the discipline is oh if your initial schedule changes you just move over one next time you get a chance to move over one column and then you just fix it for the time that's remaining so in other words there's not there's no bonus for i made a schedule and i stuck with it like there's actually just like you get a prize for it right like for me the prize is i have an intentional plan for my time and if i have to change that plan that's fine like the state i want to be is basically at any point in the day i've thought about what time remains and and gave it some thought for what to do because i'll do the same thing even though i have a lot more meetings and other types of things i have to do in my various jobs and i basically prioritize the deep work and they get yelled at a lot yeah so that's kind of my strategy is like just be okay just be okay getting yelled at a lot because i feel you if you're rolling yeah well that's that's what it is for me like with writing i think it's writing so hard in a certain way that it's you don't really get on a roll in some sense like it's just difficult uh but working on proofs it's very hard to pull yourself away from a proof if you start to get some traction just you've been at it for a couple hours then you feel the uh the pins and tumblers starting to click together and progress is being made it's really hard to call pull away from that so so i'm willing to get yelled at by almost everyone of course there is also a positive effect to uh pulling yourself out of it when things are going great because then you're kind of excited to resume yeah as opposed to stopping in a on a dead end that's true that there's a the yeah there's a uh there's an extra force of procrastination that comes with if you stop on a dead end to return to the task yeah or or a cold start yeah whenever i feel like i'm in a stage now i submitted a few papers recently so now we're sort of starting something up from cold and it takes way too long to get going because it's very hard to it's very hard to get the motivation to schedule a time when it's not yeah we're in it like here's where we are we feel like something's about to give here we need the very early stages where it's just i don't know i'm going to read hard papers and it's going to be hard to understand them and i'm going to have no idea how to make progress is not it's not motivating what about deadlines can we um okay so this is like a therapy session uh it's uh why it seems like i don't i only get stuff done that has deadlines and so the one of the implied powerful things about time blocking is there's a kind of deadline or there's a artificial a real sense of urgency do you think it's possible to get anything done in this world without deadlines why why do deadlines work so well well it's i mean it's a clear motivational signal but in the in the short term you do get an effect like that in time blocking i think the the strong effect you get by saying this is the exact time i'm going to work on this is that you don't have to debate with yourself every three minutes about should i take a break now right like this is the big issue with just saying you know i'm going to go right i'm going to write for a while and that's it because your mind is saying well obviously we're going to take some breaks right we're not just going to write forever and so why not right now you have to be like well not right now let's go a little bit longer five minutes later we'll always take a break now like we should probably look at the internet now you have to constantly have this battle on the other hand if you're in a time block schedule like i've got these two hours put aside for writing that's what i'm supposed to be doing i have a break scheduled over here i don't have to fight with myself right and maybe at a larger scale deadlines give you a similar sort of effect is i know this is what i'm supposed to be working on because it's uh it's due perhaps but we're describing as much healthier sort of giving yourself over you talk about this in in the new email book is the process i mean in general you talk about it all over is creating a process and then giving yourself over to the process the but then you have to be strict with yourself yeah but what are the deadlines you're talking about it's like with papers like what's the main type of deadline work uh also papers definitely but you know publications like say this this podcast uh i have to publish this podcast next early next week one because your book is coming out i'd love to sort of uh support this amazing book but the other is i have to fly to vegas on thursday to run 48 miles with david goggins and so i want this podcast this conversation we're doing now to be out of my life like i don't want to be in a hotel in vegas yeah like uh editing the like freaking out while david goggins is yelling now we're on our 43 you're terrified but actually it's possible that they still will be doing that you know because that's not a heart that's a softer deadline right but those are sort of the life imposes these kinds of deadlines yeah i'm not so yeah papers are nice because there's an actual deadline but i i'm almost referring to like the pressure that people put on you hey man you said you're gonna get this done two months ago why haven't you gotten it done i don't see i don't like that pressure yeah i mean we now first i think we can i hate it too we can agree by the way having david goggins yell at you is probably the top productivity technique i think we'd all get a lot more done if he was yelling but see i don't like that so i i will try to get things done early i like i like having flex i also don't like the idea of this has to get done today right like it's due at midnight and we've got a lot to do as the night before because then i get in my head about what if i get sick or like what if uh you know what if i i don't i get a bad night's sleep and i can't think clearly so i like to have the flex so i'm all processed and that's like the philosophical aspect of that book deep work is that there's something very human and deep about just wrangling with the world of ideas i mean aristotle talked about this if you go back and and read the ethics he's trying to understand the meaning of life and he eventually ends up ultimately at the human capacity to contemplate deeply it's kind of a teleological argument it's the things that only humans can do and therefore it must be somehow connected to our ends and he said ultimately that's where that's refound his meaning but you know he's touching on some sort of intimation there that's correct that and so what i try to build my life around is regularly thinking hard about stuff that's interesting just like if you get a fitness habit going you feel off when you don't do it i try to get that cognitive habit so it's like i got it i mean look i have my bag here somewhere i have my notebook in it because i was thinking on the uber ride over i was like you know i could get some i'm working on this new proof and it just so you train yourself you train yourself to appreciate certain things and then over time the hope is that it accretes well let's talk about some demons because i wonder it's okay there's like deep work which uh and the the world without email books that to me symbolize the life i i want to live okay and then there is i'm like despite appearances an adult at this point and this is the life i actually live and i it's i'm in constant chaos you said you don't like that anxiety i hate it too but it seems like i'm always in it it's a giant mess it's it's like it it's almost like whenever i establish whenever i have successful processes for doing deep work i'll add stuff on top of it just to introduce the chaos yeah and and like i don't want to yeah but you know it's so you have to look in the mirror at a certain point and you have to say like who the hell am i like i keep doing this is this something that's fundamental to who i am or do i really need to fix this what's the chaos right now like i've seen your video about like your routine it seemed very structured and deep in fact i was really envious of it so like what's the chaos now that's not in that video many of those sessions go way longer i don't get enough sleep yeah and then i the main introduction of chaos is it's taking on too many things on the to-do list it's i mean i suppose it's the problem that everybody deals with was just saying not saying no but it's not like i have trouble saying no it's that there's so much cool in my life yeah okay listen i've there's nothing i love more in this world than the boston dynamics robots and the other yeah and they're giving me spot so there's enough to do what am i going to say no yeah and so they're getting me spot and i want to do some computer vision stuff for for the hell of it okay so that's now what to do item and then you go to texas for a while and there's texas and everything's happening to all the interesting people down there and then there's surprises right there power outage in texas there's constant changes to plans and all those kinds of things and you sleep less and then there's personal stuff like just you know people in your life sources of stress all those kinds of things and but it does feel like if i'm just being introspective that i bring it on to myself i suppose a lot of people do this kind of thing yes is they they flourish under pressure yeah and i wonder if that um if that's just the hack i've developed as a habit early on in life that needs you need to let go of you need to fix but it's all interesting things yeah that's that's that's interesting yeah because these are all interesting things well one of the things you talked about and deep work which is like really important is like having an end to the day yeah like putting it down yeah like that i don't think i've ever done that in my life yeah well see i started doing that early because uh i got married early so you know i didn't have a real job i was a grad student but my wife had a real job and so i just figured i should do my work when she's at work because you know hey when when works over she'll be home i don't i don't want to be you know on campus or whatever and so real early on i just got in that habit of this is when you know this is when you didn't work and then when i was a postdoc which is kind of an easy job right um i put artificial i was like i want to train i was like when i'm a professor it's going to be busier because there's demands that professors have beyond research and so as a postdoc i added artificial large time consuming things into the middle of my day i'd basically exercise for two hours in the middle of the day and do all this this productive meditation and stuff like this while still maintaining the nine to five so it's like okay i want to get really good at putting artificial constraints on so that i stay i didn't want to get uh flabby when my job was easy so that when i became a professor and now all of that's paying off because i have a ton of kids so so now i don't really have a choice that's what's probably keeping me away from cool things is i just don't have time to do them and then after a while people you know stop bothering well but that you know but that's how you have a successful life otherwise you're going to it's too easy to then go into the full hunter s thompson yeah like to where no nobody wants nobody functional wants to be in your vicinity like you're driving you attract the people that have a similar behavior pattern as you yeah so if you if you live in chaos you're going to attract chaotic people and then it becomes like this uh self fulfilling prophecy yeah and it feels like i'm not bothered by it but i guess this is all coming around to exactly what you're saying which is like i think one of the big hacks for productive people that i've met is to get married and have kids honestly it's it's very perhaps counter-intuitive yeah but it gets it's like the ultimate timetable enforcer yeah it enforces a lot of timetables uh though it has a huge kids have a huge productivity hit those he got away but here okay here's the complicated thing though like you could think about in your own life starting the podcast as one of these just cool opportunities that you put on yourself right yeah like you know i could have been talking to you at mit four years ago and like don't do that like your research is going well right but then everyone who watches you is like okay this podcast is the direction that's taking you is like a couple years from now it's gonna it'll be something really monumental that you're probably just gonna probably lead to right there'll be some really it just feels like your life is going somewhere it's going somewhere it's interesting yeah unexpected yeah yeah so how do you balance those two things and so what i try to throw at it is this this motto of do less do better know why right so do do less do better know why it used to be the motto of my website years ago um so do a few things but like an interesting array right so i was doing mit stuff but i was also writing you know so a couple of things are you know they were interesting like have a couple bets placed on a couple different numbers on the roulette table but not too many things and then really try to do those things really well and and see where it goes like with my writing i just spent years and years and years just training i want to be a better writer i want to be a better writer i started writing student books when i was a student i really wanted to write hardcover idea books i started training i would i would use like new yorker articles to train myself i'd break them down and i'd get commissions with much smaller magazines and practice the skills and it took forever until you know but now today like i actually get to write for the new yorker but it took like a decade so a small number of things try to do them really well and then the know why is have a connection to some sort of value like in general i think this is worth doing uh and then seeing where it leads and so uh the choice of the few things is grounded in what like a little like a like a little flame of passion like a love for the thing like a sense that you say you wanted to write and get good at writing you had that kind of introspective moment of thinking this actually brings me a lot of joy and fulfillment yeah i mean it gets complicated because i wrote a whole book about following your passion being bad advice which is like the first thing i kind of got infamous for i wrote that back in 2012. but but the argument there is like passion cultivates right so what i was pushing back on was the myth that the passion for what you do exists full intensity before you start and then that's what propels you or actually the reality is as you get better at something as you gain more autonomy more skill and more impact the passion grows along with it so that when people look back later and say oh follow your passion what they really mean is i'm very passionate about what i do and that's a worthy goal but how you actually cultivate that is much more complicated than just introspection is going to identify like for sure you should be a writer or something like this so i was actually quoting you i was uh on a social network last night uh in clubhouse yeah i don't know if you've heard of it i was wait i have to ask you about this because i was invite i'm invited to do a clubhouse i don't know what that means a tech reporter has invited me to do a clubhouse about my new book uh that's awesome uh well let me know when because i'll show up but what is it okay so first of all let me just mention that i was in a clubhouse uh room last night and i kept plugging your exactly what exactly you said about uh passion so we'll talk about it it was a room that was focused on burnout okay but first clubhouse is a kind of fascinating place in terms of your mind would be very interesting to analyze this place because you know we talk about email we talk about social networks but clubhouse is something very different and i've encountered it in other places discord and so on that's voice only communication so it's a bunch of people in a room they're just now eyes closed all you hear is their voices real time real time live it only happens live you're technically not allowed to record but some people still do and you know especially when it's big big conversations but the whole point is that they're live and there's different structures like on discord it was so fascinating i have this discord server that would have hundreds of people in a room together right we're all just little icons that commute and i mute our mics okay and so you're sitting there not so it's it's just voices and you're able with hundreds of people to not interrupt each other but first of all like as a dynamic system yeah like you see icons just like mics muted or not muted basically yeah well so everyone's muted and they unmute and they start it starts flashing yeah and oh so you're like okay let me uh get precedence yeah so it's the digital equivalent of when you're in a conversation like a faculty meeting and you sort of like kind of make some noises like while the other person's finishing and so people realize like okay this person wants to talk next but now it's purely digital you see a flashing but in a faculty meeting which is very interesting like even as we're talking now there's a visual element that seems to increase the probability of interruption yeah when it's just darkness you actually listen better and you don't interrupt so like if you create a culture there's there's always going to be but they're they're actually exceptions everybody adjusts they kind of evolve to the the beat of the room okay that's one fascinating aspect like okay that's weird because it's different than like a zoom call where there's video yeah uh it's just audio you think video ads but actually seems like it subtracts the second aspect of it that's fascinating is when it's no video just audio there's an intimacy it's feel it's weird because with strangers it you you connect you know in a much more real way it's very it's similar to podcasts yeah but with a lot of people with a lot of people and new people huh and then you and they they bring okay first of all different voices like low voices and like high voices and and it's it's more difficult to judge in discord you couldn't even see uh the people it was a culture where you do funny profile pictures as opposed to your actual face your clubhouse it's your actual face so you can tell like as an older person younger person in discord you couldn't you just have to judge based on the voice but there's a there's something about the listening and the intimacy of being surprised by different strangers it feels almost like a party with friends and friends of friends you haven't met yet but you really like now clubhouse also has an interesting innovation where there's a large crowd that just listens and there's a stage and you can bring people up onto stage so only people on stage are talking and you can have like five six seven eight sometimes 20 30 people on stage and then you can also have thousands of people just listening i see so there's a i don't know a lot of people are being surprised by this why is it called a social network it seems like it doesn't have there's not social links there's not a feed that's trying to harvest attention it feels like a communication uh so the the social uh network aspect is you follow people yeah and the people you follow now this is like the first social network that's actually correct use of follow i think you're more likely to see the rooms they're in so there's a your feed is a bunch of rooms that are going on right now okay and the people you follow are the ones that will increase the likelihood that you'll see the room they're in and so the final result is like there's a list of really interesting rooms like uh i have all these i've been speaking russian quite a bit there's practicing uh but also just like talking politics and philosophy in russian i've never done that before but it allows me to connect with that community and then uh there's a community of like it's funny but like i'll go in a community of all african-american people talking about race and i'll be welcomed yeah i've never had like i've literally never been in a difficult conversation about race like with people from all over the place it's like fascinating and musicians jazz musicians i don't know you could say that a lot of other places could have created that culture i suppose uh twitter and facebook a lot for that culture but there's something about this network as it stands now because it ain't no android users it's probably just because it's iphone people yeah uh is there it's conspiratorial or something well like less listen i'm an android person so i i got an iphone just for this network yes it's funny yeah is for now it's all like there's very few trolls yeah there's very few people that are trying to manipulate the system and so on so i don't know it's it's interesting now the downside the reason you're going to hate it is because it's so intimate because it pulls you in and pulls in very successful people like you just ever like really successful productive very busy people uh it it it's a huge time sink it's very difficult to pull yourself out interesting you mean once you're in a room well no the uh leaving the room is actually easy the beautiful thing about a stage with multiple people there's a little button that says leave quietly okay so cultural uh no etiquette wise it's okay to just leave yeah so you're not in a room when it's just you and i it's a little awkward to believe if you're asking questions i'm just gonna yeah but and actually if you're being interviewed for the book that's weird because you're now in the event and you're supposed to but usually the person interviewing would be like okay it's time for you to go it's more normal but the the normal way to use the room it's like you're just opening the app and there'll be like i don't know sam harris uh eric weinstein um i think joe rogan showed up to the bill gates these people on stage just like randomly just plugged in and then you step up on stage listen maybe you won't contribute at all maybe you'll say something funny yeah and then you'll just leave yeah and there's uh the the addicting aspect to it the reason it's the time sink is you don't want to leave what i've noticed about exceptionally busy people yeah that they love this this the their i think might have to do with a pandemic because might be a little bit yeah there's a loneliness yeah but also it's really cool people yeah like when was when was the last time you talked to sam harris or whoever like you think of anybody uh tyler cope like any any faculty this is like what university strives to create but it's taken because you know here's a cultural evolution try to get a lot of interesting smart people together that run into each other we have really strong faculty in a room together with no scheduling this is the power of it it's like you just show up there's no none of that baggage of scheduling and so on and there's no pressure to leave uh sorry no pressure to stay it's very easy for you to leave you realize that there's a lot of constraints on meetings and like faculty there's uh like even stopping by you know before the pandemic a friend or faculty or colleague and so on you know there's a weirdness about leaving yeah but here there's not a weirdness about leaving so they've discovered something interesting the but the final result when you observe it is uh it's very fulfilling i think it's very beneficial but it's very addicting so you have to make sure you moderate yeah that's interesting and okay well so maybe i'll try it i mean look there's no the things that make me suspicious about other platforms aren't here so the feed is not full of user-generated content that is going through some sort of algorithmic grading process with all the weird incentives and nudging that does uh and you're you're not producing content that's being harvested to be monetized by another company i mean it it seems like it's more uh ephemeral right you're here you're talking the feed is just actually just showing you here's interesting things happening right you're not jocking in the feed for look i'm being clever or something and i'm going to get a light count that goes up and that's going to influence and right and there's more friction there's more cognitive friction i guess involved in listening to smart people versus scrolling through yeah there's something there so there's no why are people so i see a lot of there's all these articles that seem i haven't really read them but why are we why are reporters negative about this competition the new york times wrote this article called unfettered conversations happening on clubhouse is uh so i'm right in picking up a tone from even from the headlines that there's some like negative vibes from the press no so i can say let's say well i'll tell you what the article was saying which is uh they're having cancelable conversations like the biggest people in the world almost trolling the press right and the press is definitely before channing the press yeah the press but by saying that you just you guys are looking for click bait from our genuine human conversations and so so the i think the honestly the press is just like what do we do with this we can't yeah um first of all it's a lot of work for them okay uh it's what naval says which is like this is skipping the journalists like they interview you uh if you go on clubhouse the interview you might do for the book would be with somebody who's like a journalist and interviewing you yeah that that's more a traditional yeah it'd be a good introduction for you to try it but the like the way to use clubhouse is you just show up and it's like again like me i'm sorry i'm like i can't i keep mentioning sam harris as if it's like the only person i know but like a lot of these uh major faculty i don't know max tegmark like just just major faculty just sitting there and then you show up and then uh i'll ask like oh don't you have a book coming out or something and then you'll talk about the book and then you'll leave five minutes later because you have to go get coffee and interesting so like that's the yeah it's not the journalistic you're not gonna actually enjoy the interview as much because it'll be like the normal thing yeah like you're there 40 minutes or an hour and there'll be questions from the audience right like i'm doing an event next week for the book launch where it's like jason fried and i are talking about email but it's using some more like a thousand people who are there to watch virtually but it's using some sort of traditional webinar clubhouse would be a situation where that could just happen informally like i jump in like jason's there and then someone else jumps in and and yeah that's interesting but for now it's still closed so even though there's a lot of excitement and there'll be quite famous people just sitting there listening to you yeah but the numbers aren't exactly high so you're talking about rooms like even the huge rooms are like just a few thousand right and this is this is probably soho in the 50s or something too just because of the exponential growth give it seven more months and if you let one invite be gets two invites because four invites begins pretty soon it'll be everyone and then the rooms in your feed are going to be whatever uh marketing performance enhancing drugs or something like that yeah but then and a bunch of competitors there's already like 30 plus competitors sprung up twitter spaces so twitter is creating a competitor that's going to likely destroy clubhouse yeah because they just have a much larger user base and they already have a social network so yeah i i i would be very cautious of course with the addictive element but it doesn't just like you said this particular implementation in its early stages doesn't have the like yeah the the uh well it doesn't have the context switching problem yeah it you'll just switch fantastically and you'll be stuck yeah the keep a context is great yeah yeah and but then i think the best way i've found to use it is uh to acknowledge that these things pull you in yeah so i've used it in the past uh like almost you know i'll go get a coffee and i'll tune into a conversation as if that's how i use podcasts sometimes i'll just like play a little bit of a podcast and then you know i can just turn it off the problem with these is it pulls you in it's really interesting and then the other problem that you will experience is like somebody will recognize you yeah and then they'll be like oh lex come on up come on no way i had a question for you and then it takes a lot for you to go like to to ignore that yeah yeah so yeah and then you pulled in and it's fascinating and it's really cool people so it's like a source of a lot of joy but it uh it's yet to be very very very careful the reason i brought it up is we uh there's a room there's an entire club actually on burnout and i brought you up and i brought david goggins as the process i go through which is you know my passion goes up and down it dips and i don't think i trust my own mind to to tell me whether i'm getting close to burnout or exhaustion or not i kind of go with the david goggins model of i mean he's probably more applying it to running but uh when it feels like your mind can't take any more that you're just 40 percent uh at your capacity i mean it's just like arbitrary levels the navy seal thing right the navy seal thing yeah i mean you could put that at any percent but it is remarkable that if you just take it one step at a time just keep going it's it's uh similar to this idea of a process if you just trust the process and you just keep following even if the passion goes up and down and so on then ultimately if you look in aggregate the passion will increase yeah your self-satisfaction will increase yeah i think and if you have two things this has been a big strategy of mine so that you can what you hope for is off phase off phase alignment like that sometimes it's in phase and that's a problem uh but off phase alignment's good so okay my research i'm struggling uh but my book stuff is going well right and so when you when you add those two waves together like oh we're doing pretty well and then uh in other periods like on my writing you know i feel like i'm just not getting anywhere but i've had some good papers i'm feeling good over there so having two things that they can counteract each other now sometimes they fall into sync and then it gets rough then when you know when everything because everything for me is cyclical you know good periods bad periods with all this stuff so uh typically they don't coincide so it helps compensate when they do coincide you get really high highs like where everything's clicking and then you get these really low lows where like your research is not working your program's not clicking you feel like you're nowhere with your writing uh and then it's a little rougher is do you do you think about the concept of burnout because i personally never experienced burnout in the way that folks talk about which is like it's not just the up and down it's like you don't want to do anything ever again yeah it like it's it's for some people it's like physical like to the hospital kind of thing yeah yeah so i do worry about it so when i used to do student writing like writing about students and student advice it came up a lot with students at elite schools and i used to call it deep procrastination but it was a real really vivid very replicatable syndrome where they stopped being able to do schoolwork yeah like this is due the professor gives you an extension and the professor goes to incomplete and says you got you you're going to fail the course you have to hand this in they can't do it right it's like it's a complete stop on the ability to actually do work so i used to counsel students who had that issue and often it was a combination of this is my best analysis is you have just the the physical and cognitive difficulties of they're usually under a very hard load right they're doing too many majors doing extracurriculars just you know really pushing themselves and the motivation is not sufficiently intrinsic right so if you have a motivational center that's not completely on board so a lot of these kids like when i'm dealing with mit kids they would be you know their whole town was shooting off fireworks that they got in there everyone's hoped that they were going there uh and that they're in three majors they don't want to let people down but they're not really interested in being a doctor or whatever so your motivation's not in the right place the motivational psychologist would say the locus of control was more towards the extrinsic end of the spectrum and you have hardship and you could just fritz out the whole system and so i would always be very worried about that so i think about that a lot i do a lot of multi-phase or multi-scale seasonality so i'll go hard on something for a while and then for a few weeks go easy i'll have semesters that are hard and semesters that are easier i'll take the summer really low so on multiple scales and in the day i'll go really hard on something but then have a hard cut off at five so like every scale it's all about rest and recovery because i really want to avoid that and i do burn out i burnt out pretty recently i get minor burnt outs i got a paper a couple papers that was trying to work through for a deadline a few weeks ago and i wasn't sleeping well and and um there's some other things going on and it just it knocks out and i get sick usually it's how i know i've pushed myself too far yeah and so i kind of pulled it back now i'm doing this book launch then after this book launch i'm pulling it back again so i like i seasonality for rest and recovery i think it's crucial and at every scale daily monthly you know and then at the annual scale an easy summer for example i think it's like a great idea if that's possible okay you just made me realize that that's exactly what i do because i i feel like i'm not even close to burning out anything even though i i'm in chaos yeah i feel the right exact ways of seasonality is the not not even the seasonality but like you always have multiple seasons operating it's like you said like because when you have a lot of cool going on yeah you there's always at least one thing that's a source of joy that there's always a reason i suppose the fundamental thing and i've known people that suffer from depression too the fundamental problem with the like the experience of depression and burnout is like why do like life is meaningless yeah and i always have an answer of like why why today could be cool yeah and yeah and you have to contrive it right if you don't have it you have to contrive it yeah i think it's really important like okay well this is going bad so now is the time to start thinking about i mean look i started a podcast during the pandemic it's like this is going pretty bad but you know what this could be something really interesting deep questions with colony abortion i do it all in that voice [Laughter] i love the podcast by the way but uh yeah i think david foster wallace said uh the key to life is to be unborable i i've always kind of taken that to heart which is like you should be able to maybe artificially generate anything like uh find something in your environment in your surroundings that's a source of joy like everything is fun yeah like did you read the pale king it goes deep on boredom it means it's like uncomfortable it's like an uncomfortable meditation on boredom like the characters in that are just driven to the like extremes of i just bought three books on boredom the other day uh so now i'm really interested in this topic because i was anxious about my book launch happening this week so i was like okay i need something else so i have this idea for a i might do as an article first but as a book like okay i need something cool to be thinking about because i was worried about like i don't know oh yeah is the launch going to work the pandemic what's going to happen i don't know if it's going to get there so i this is exactly what we're talking about so i went out and i bought a bunch of books and i'm beginning like a whole uh sort of intellectual exploration well i think that's one of the profound ideas and deep work that you don't expand on uh too much is uh boredom yeah well so deepwork had a superficial idea about boredom which was i had this chapter called embrace boredom and a very functionalist idea was basically you have to have some boredom in your regular schedule or your mind is going to form a pavlovian connection between as soon as i feel boredom i get stimuli and once it forms that connection it's never going to tolerate deep work so there's this very pragmatic treatment of boredom of your mind better be used to the idea that sometimes you don't get stimuli because otherwise you can't write for three hours like it's just not going to tolerate it but more more recently what i'm really interested in boredom is it as a fundamental human drive right because it's incredibly uncomfortable and think about the other things that are incredibly uncomfortable like hunger or thirst they serve a really important purpose for a species right like if something is really distressing there's a reason pain is really uncomfortable because we need to worry about getting injured thirst is really uncomfortable because we need water to survive so what's boredom why is that uncomfortable and and i've been interested in this notion that boredom is about driving us towards productive action like as a species i mean think about it like what what got us to actually take advantage of these brains what got us to actually work with fire what got us to start shaping stones and the hand axes and figuring out if we could actually sharpen a stick sharp enough that we could throw it as a melee weapon or a distance weapon for hunting mammoth right boredom drives us towards action so now i'm fascinated by this fundamental action instinct uh because i have this theory that i'm working on that we're out of sync with it just like we got we have this drive for hunger but then we introduced junk food and got out of sync with hunger and it makes us really unhealthy we have this drive towards action but then we we overload ourselves and we have all of these distractions and then that causes uh it's like a cognitive action obesity type thing because it short-circuits this system that wants us to do things but we put more things in our plate than we can possibly do and then we're really frustrated we can't do them and we're short-circuiting all of our wires so it all comes back to this question well what would be the ideal the ideal sort of amount of stuff to do and type of things to do like if we wanted to look back at our ancestral environment and say if i could just build from scratch what type how much work i do and what i work on to be as in touch with that as like paleo people are trying to get their diets in touch with that and so now i'm just let's see this is i'm just it's something i made up yeah but now i'm going deep on it and one of my podcast listeners i was talking about on the show and i was like well i kept trying to learn about animals and boredom and she sent me this cool article from an animal behaviorist journal about what we know about human boredom versus animal boredom so trying to figure out that puzzle is uh the wave that's high so i can get through the wave that's low of like i don't know about this pandemic book launch and yeah and my research my research is stumbling a little bit because of the pandemic and so i needed a nice you know high so there we go there's a case study well the is both a case study and a very interesting set of concepts because i didn't even realize that it's so simple i'm one of the people that uh has a interesting push and pull dynamic with hunger trying to understand the hunger with myself like i probably have an unhealthy relationship with food i don't know but there's probably probably a perfect that's a nice way to think about diet as action there's probably an optimal risk diet response to the the experience that our body's telling us the signal that a body's sending which is hunger and in that same way boredom is sending a signal and most of our intellectual activities in this world our creative activities are essentially a response uh to that signal yeah and think about this analogy that we have this hunger instinct that junk food short circuits yes right it's like oh we'll satisfy that hyper palatably and it doesn't end up well now think about modern attention engineered digitally-mediated entertainment we have this board of instinct oh we can we can take care of that with a hyperpalatable alternative is that going to lead to a similar problem so i've been fasting a lot lately like i'm doing um eating once a day i've been doing that for over a month just eating one meal a day and primarily meat but it's very fasting has been incredible for me for focus for well-being for a few i don't i don't know just for feeling good okay we'll put on a chart what makes me feel good and uh that fasting and eating primarily meat-based diet makes me feel really good and so but that ultimately what fasting did i haven't fasted super long yet like a seven day diet which i really like to do but even just fasting for a day for 24 hours gets you in touch with your with this signal it's fascinating like you get to listen to your you learn to listen to your body that like you know it's okay to be hungry it's like a little signal that sends you stuff and then and then uh i get to listen to how it responds when i put food in my body like and i get to like okay cool so like food is the thing that pacifies the signal like it sounds ridiculous okay yeah you could do that with and do different types of food it feels different so you learn about what your body wants for some reason fasting it's similar to the deep work embrace boredom fasting allowed me to go into mode of listening of trying to understand the signal that i could say i have an unhealthy appreciation of fruit okay i love apples and cherries like i don't know how to moderate them so if you take just same amount of calories i don't know calories matter but they say calories 2 000 calories of cherries versus 2 000 calories of steak if i eat 2 000 calories of steak maybe just a little bit of like green beans or cauliflower i'm going to feel really good fulfilled focused and happy yeah if i cherries i'm going to be i'm going to wake up behind a dumpster crying with like naked and like it's just all around with everything yeah and it's just like bloated just not and unhappy and also the mood swings up and down i don't know uh and i'll be much hungrier the next day sometimes it takes a couple days but when i introduce carbs into the system too many carbs i it starts it's just unhealthy i go into this roller coaster as opposed to a calm boat ride along the river in the amazon or something like that yeah so fasting was the mechanism of for me to start listening to the body i wonder if you can do that same kind of i guess that's what meditation a little bit is a little bit but yeah listen to boredom but so two years ago i had a book out called digital minimalism and one of the things i was recommending that people do is basically a 30-day fast but from digital personal entertainment social media online videos anything that captures uh your attention and dispels boredom and people were thinking like oh this is a detox like i just want to teach your body not to need the distraction to do that but it really wasn't what i was interested in i wanted there to be space that you could listen to your boredom like okay i can't just dispel it i can't just look at the screen and revel in it a little bit and start to listen to it and say what is this really pushing me towards and you take the new stuff the new technology off the table and sort of ask what is this what am i craving like what's the activity equivalent of 2 000 calories of meat with a little bit of green beans on the side and i had 1700 people go through this experiment like spend 30 days doing this and it's hard at first but then they get used to listening to themselves and sort of seeking out what is this really pushing me towards and it was pushing people towards connection was pushing people towards i just want to go be around other people it was pushing people towards high quality leisure activities like i want to go do something that's complicated and it took weeks sometimes for them to get in touch with their boredom but then it completely rewired how they thought about what do i want to do with my time outside of work and then the idea is when you were done with that then it was much easier to go back and completely change your digital life because you have alternatives right you're not just trying to abstain from things you don't like but that's basically listening to boredom experiment like just be there with the boredom and see where it drives you when you don't have you know the digital cheez-its okay so if i can't do that where is it going to drive me well i guess i kind of want to go to the library which came up a lot by the way a lot of people rediscovered the library you know physical books physical books like you can just go borrow them and like it there's like low pressure and you can explore and you bring them home and then you read them and you can like sit by the window and read them and it's nice weather outside and i used to do that 20 years ago they're listening to boredom so can you maybe elaborate a little bit on the different experiences that people had when they quit social media for 30 days like is that if you were to recommend that process what is ultimately the goal yeah digital minimalism that's that's my philosophy for all this tech and it's working backwards from what's important so it's you figure out what you're actually all about like what you want to do what you want to spend your time doing and then you can ask okay is there a place that tech can amplify or support some of these things and that's how you decide what tech to use and so the the process is let's actually get away from everything let's be bored for a while let's let's really spend a month getting really figuring out what do i actually want to do what do i want to spend my time doing what's important to me you know what makes me feel good and then when you're done you can bring back in tech very strategically to help those things right and that was the goal that turns out to be much more successful than when people take a abstention only approach so if you come out your tech life and say you know whatever i look at instagram too much like i don't like how much i'm on instagram that's a bad thing i want to reduce this bad thing so here's my new thing i'm going to spend less time looking at instagram much less likely to succeed in the long term so we're much less likely at trying to reduce this sort of amorphous negative because you know in the moment yeah but it's not that bad it would be kind of interesting to look at it now when you're instead controlling behavior because you have a positive that you're aiming towards it's very powerful for people like i want my life to be like this here's the role that tech plays in that life the connection to wanting your life to be like that is very very strong and then much much easier say yeah like using instagram is not part of my plan for how i have that life and i really want to have that life so of course i'm not going to use instagram so it turns out to be a much more sustainable way to tame what's going on so if you quit social media for 30 days you kind of have to do the work you have to do the work of thinking like what am i actually what makes me happy in terms of uh these tools that i've previously used and when you try to integrate them back how can i integrate them to maximize the thing they actually make yeah or what makes me happy unrelated to technology like what do i actually what do i want my life to be like well maybe what i want to do is be you know outside of nature two hours a day and spend a lot more time like helping my community and sacrificing on behalf of my connections and then have some sort of intellectually engaging leisure activity like i'm reading or trying to read the great books and having more calm and seeing the sunset like you you create this picture and then you go back and say well i still need my facebook group because that's how i i keep up with my cycling group but twitter is just you know toxic it's not helping any of these things and well i'm an artist so i kind of need instagram to get inspiration but if i know that's why i'm using instagram i don't need it on my phone it's just on my computer and i just follow 10 artists and check it once a week like you really can start to point it was the number one thing that differentiated in that experiment the people who ended up sustainably making changes and getting through the 30 days and those who didn't was the people who did the experimentation and the reflection like let me try to figure out what's positive they were much more successful than the people that just said i'm sick of using my phone so much so i'm just gonna white knuckle it just 30 days will be good for me i just gotta just gotta get away from it or something it doesn't last so you don't use social media currently yeah of do you find that a lot of people go into this process will uh will seek to basically arrive at a similar place to not use social media primarily about half right so so about half when they went through this exercise and these aren't quantified numbers you know this is just they sent me reports and yeah that's pretty good though so 1700 yeah yeah so so roughly half probably got rid of social media altogether once they did this exercise they realized these things i care about i don't social media is not the tools that's really helping the other half kept some there are some things in their life where some social media was useful but the key thing is if they knew why they were deploying social media they could put fences around it so for example of those half that kept some social media almost none of them kept it on their phone oh interesting yeah so i can't optimize if you don't know what it is the function you're trying to optimize so it's like this huge hack like once you know this is why i'm using twitter then you can have a lot of rules about how you use twitter and and suddenly you take this cost benefit ratio and it goes like way from the company's advantage and way over towards your advantage it's kind of fascinating because i've been torn with social media but i did this kind of process i haven't actually done it for 30 days which i probably should i'll do it for like a week at a time and regularly and thinking what what kind of approach to twitter works for me uh what up i'm distinctly aware of the fact that i really enjoy posting once or twice a day and at that time checking from the previous post it like it makes me feel even when there's like negative comments they go right past me and when there's positive comments makes you smile i feel like love and connection with people especially people i i know but even just in general it's like it makes me feel like the world is full of awesome people okay when you increase that from checking from two to like i don't know what the threshold is for me but probably like five or six per day it starts going into anxiety world like where negative comments will actually stick to me mentally uh and and positive comments will feel more shallow yeah yeah it's it's kind of fascinating so i uh i've i've been trying to there's been long stretches of time i think december and january where i did just post and check post and check that was that makes me really happy most of 2020 i did that made me really happy recently i started like i'll go you know you go right back in like a drug addict well you check it like i don't know what that number is but that number is high not good you don't come out happy and you don't no one comes out of a day full of twitter celebrating humanity and it's not even because i'm very fortunate to have a lot of just like positivity in my the twitter but i there's just the general anxiety i wouldn't even say i wouldn't even say it's uh it's probably the thing that you're talking about with the contact switching it's almost like an exhaustion i i wouldn't even say it's like a negative feeling it's almost just an exhaustion to where i'm not creating anything beautiful in my yeah life just exhausted an existential exhaustion existential exhaustion but i wonder do you think it's possible to use from the people you've seen from yourself to to use social media and the way i'm describing moderation or is it always going to become when people do this exercise you get lots of lots of configurations so for people that have a public presence for example like what you're doing is not that not that unusual okay i i post one thing a day and my audience likes it and and that's kind of it which but you've thought through like okay this supports something i value which is like having a sort of informal connection with my audience and being exposed to some sort of uh positive randomness yes okay that's probably because if that's my goal what's the right way to do it well i don't need to be on twitter on my phone all day maybe what i do is every day at five i do my post and check on the day so i have a writer friend um ryan holiday who writes about the stoics a lot and he has this similar strategy he post one quote every day from usually from a famous stoic and sometimes from a contemporary figure and that's just what he does he just posted and it's a very positive thing like his readers really love it because it's just like a dose of inspiration he doesn't spend time he's never interacting with anyone on social media right but that's an example of i figured out what's important to me what's the best way to use tools to amplify it and then you get advantages out of the tools so i like what you're doing i looked you up if i looked up your twitter feed before i came came over here i was curious you're not on there a lot no i don't see you yelling at people now do you think social media as a medium changed the cultural standards and i mean it in a have you read neil postman at all have you read like amusing ourselves to death it was a social critic technology critic um and wrote a lot about sort of technological determinism so the ways which is a really influential idea to a lot of my work which is actually a little out of fashion right now in academia but uh the ways that the the properties and presence of technologies change things about humans in a way that's not really intended or planned by the humans themselves that book is all about how different communication medium like fundamentally just changed the way the human brain understands and operates and so he sort of gets into the what happened when the printed word was widespread and how television changed it and this was all pre-social media but this one these ideas i'm having is like what's the degree to which i get into it sometimes on my show again to a little bit like the degree to which like twitter in particular just changed the way that people conceptualized what for example debate and discussion was like it introduced a rhetorical dunk culture where it's sort of more about tribes not giving ground to other tribes and and it's like it's a complete there's different places and times when that type of discussion was thought of differently right well yeah absolutely but i i tend to believe i don't know what you think that there's the technological solutions like there's literally different features in twitter that could completely reverse that there's so much power in the different choices yeah that are made and it could still be highly engaging and have very different effects perhaps more negative but or hopefully more positive yeah so it's i'm trying to pull these two things apart so there's these two ways social media let's say could change the experience of reading a major newspaper today one could be a little bit more economic right so so the internet made it cheaper to get news the newspapers had to retreat to a paywall model because it was the only way they were going to survive but once you're in a paywall model then then what you really want to do is make your tribe which is within the paywall very very happy with you so you want to work to them but then there's the sort of the determinist point of view which is the properties of twitter which were arbitrary jack and evan just whatever let's just do it this way influence the very way that people now understand and think about the world so the one influenced the other i think yeah they they kind of started adjusting together i i did this thing i mean i'm trying to understand this part of the part of the i've been playing with the entrepreneurial idea there's a very particular dream i've had of a startup that this is a longer-term thing uh it has to do with artificial intelligence but more and more it seems like there's a some trajectory through creating uh social media type of technologies very different than what people are thinking i'm doing but uh it's a kind of challenge to the way the twitter is done but it's not obvious what the best mechanisms are to still make an exceptionally engaging platform my clubhouse is very engaging and not have any other negative effects i for example there's uh chrome extensions that allow you to turn off all likes and dislikes and all of that from twitter so you all you're seeing is just the content yeah on twitter that to me is creates that's not a compelling experience at all because i still need i would argue i still need the likes to know what's a tweet worth reading yeah because i don't only have the limited amount of time so i need to know what's valuable it's like great yelp reviews on tweets or something exactly but i've turned off on for example on my account on youtube i've turned uh i wrote a chrome extension that turns off all likes and dislikes and just views yeah i don't know how many views the video gets and so yeah unless it's on my phone but you take off the recommendations uh the no no on youtube some people the distraction for youtube is a big one for people yeah no i'm not worried about the distraction because i'm able to control myself on youtube you don't rap at all no i don't rabbit hole so you have to know your demons or your addictions whatever on youtube i'm okay i don't have i don't keep clicking the negative feelings come from seeing the views on on stuff you've created have created oh so you don't want to see your views yeah so like i'm just like speaking to the things that i'm aware of of myself that yeah are helpful and things that are not helpful emotionally yeah and i feel like there should be we need to create actually tooling for ourselves that's not me with javascript but anybody's able to create sort of control the experience they that they have yeah well so so my my big unified theory on social media is i'm very i'm very bearish yes on the big platforms having a long future you are i think the moment i think the moment of three or four major platforms is uh not gonna last right so i don't know okay this is just perspective right so you can start shorting these stocks uh i'm on my don't tell that's not financial yeah yeah don't do robinhood um so here's here's i think the the big mistake the major platforms made as when they they took out the network effect advantage right so the original pitch especially something like facebook or instagram was the people you know are on here right so like what you use this was you can connect to people that you already know this is what makes the network useful we so therefore the value of our network grows uh quadratically with the number of users and therefore it's such a head start that there's no way that someone else can catch up but when they shifted and when facebook took the lead of say we're going to shift towards a news feed model they basically said we're going to try to in the moment get more data and get more likes like what we're going to go towards is actually just uh seeing interesting stuff like scene diverted information so people took this social internet impulse to connect to people digitally to other tools like group text messages and whatsapp and stuff like this right so you don't think about these tools as oh this is where i connect with people once it's just a feed that's kind of interesting now you're competing with everything else that can produce interesting content that's diverting and i think that is a much fiercer competition because now for example you're going up against podcast right i mean like okay i guess you know the twitter feed is interesting right now um but also a podcast is interesting or something else could be interesting too i think it's a much fiercer competition when there's no there's no more network effects right and so my sense is we're going to see a fragmentation into what i call long tail social media where if i don't need everyone i know to be on a platform then why not have three or four bespoke platforms i use where it's a thousand people and it's all we're all interested in you know whatever ai or comedy and it's we've we've perfected this interface and maybe it's like clubhouse it's audio or something and we all pay two dollars so we don't have to worry about attention harvesting and that's going to be wildly more entertaining i mean i'm thinking about comedians on twitter it's not the best internet possible format for them expressing themselves and being interesting that you have all these comedians that are trying to like well i can do like little clips and little whatever like i don't know if there was a long tail social media that's really this is where the comedians are and this podcast and the comedians are on podcast now so this is my thought is that there's really no there's really no strong advantage to having one large platform that everyone is on if all you're getting from it is i now have different options for diversion and and like uplifting aspirational or whatever types entertainment that whole thing could fragment and i think the glue that was holding together was network effects i don't think they realized that when network effects have been destabilized they don't have the centrifugal force anymore and they're spinning faster and faster but is is a twitter feed really that much more interesting than all these streaming services is it really that much more interesting than clubhouse is it that much more interesting than podcast i feel like they don't realize how unstable their ground actually is yeah that's fascinating but uh the thing that makes twitter and facebook work i mean the the news feed you're exactly right like you can just duplicate the news like if it's not the social network and it's the news feed then why not have multiple different feeds that are more that are better at satisfying there's a dopamine gamification that they've figured out yeah the and uh you so you have to whatever you create you have to at least provide some pleasure in that same gamification kind of way it doesn't have to have to do with scale of large social networks but i mean i guess you're implying that you should be able to design that kind of uh mechanism in other forms or people are turning on the that gamification i mean so people are getting wise to it and are getting uncomfortable about it right so if i'm offering something there are these existing sugar people realize sugar is bad yeah drinking a lot's great too but it also after a while you realize there's there's problems so some of the long tail social media networks that are out there that i've looked at they offer usually like a deeper sense of connection like it's usually interesting people that you share some affinity and you have these carefully cultivated i wrote this new yorker piece a couple years ago about the indie social media movement that really got into some of these different technologies but i think the technologies are a distraction we focus too much on you know mastodon versus you know whatever like forget or discord like actually let's forget the protocols right now it's the idea of okay and there's a lot of these long tail social media groups what people are getting out of it which i think can outweigh the dopamine gamification is strong connection and motivation like you're in a group with other guys that are all trying to be you know better dads or something like this and and you talk to them on a regular basis and you're sharing your stories and there's interesting talks and that's a powerful thing too one interesting thing about scale of twitter is you have these viral spread of information so sort of uh twitter has become a newsmaker in itself yeah i think it's a problem well yes but i wonder what replaces that because because then you immediately reporting some work again i don't know no the problem with reporters and journalism is that they're they're intermediary they have control i mean this is the problem in russia currently is that you have uh it creates a shield between the the people and the news the the interesting thing and the powerful thing about twitter is that the news originates from the individual that's creating the news like you you have the president united the former president of the united states on twitter creating news you have elon musk creating news you have people announcing stuff on twitter as opposed to talking to a journalist and that feels much more genuine and uh it's it it feels very powerful but actually coming to realize it it it doesn't need the social network you can just put that announcement on the youtube type of thing this is what i'm thinking right so this is my point about that because that's right it it the democratizing power of the internet is fantastic i'm i'm an old school internet nerd a guy that was you know telnetting in the servers and gophering before the world wide web was around right so i'm a huge internet booster and that's that's one of its big power but when you put everything on twitter i think the fact that you've taken uh you homogenized everything right so everything looks the same moves with the same low friction it's very difficult you have no what i call distributed curation right the only curation that really happens there's a little bit with likes and also the algorithm but if you look back to pre web 2.0 or early web 2.0 when a lot of this was happening let's say on blogs where people own their own servers and you had your different blogs there was this distributed curation that happened where in order for your blog to get on people's radar and this had nothing to do with any gatekeepers or legacy media it was over time you got more links and people respected you and you would hear about this blog over here and there's this whole distributed curation and filtering going on so if you think like the 2004 presidential election most of the information people are getting from the internet when the first big internet news driven elections was from you know you had like the daily costs and and drudge but there was like blogs that were out there and and this was back ezra klein was just running a blog out of his uh you know a dorm room at this point right and you would in a distributed fashion gain credibility because okay i people have paid it it's very hard to get people to pay attention to blog they're paying attention i get linked to this kid ezra or whatever it seems to be really sharp and now people are noticing it and now you have a distributed curation that solves a lot of the problems we see when you have a completely homogenized low-friction environment like friction where i mean twitter where any random conspiracy theory or whatever that people like can just shoot through and spread whereas if you're starting a blog to try to push q anon or something like that it's probably going to be a really weird looking blog and you're going to have a hard time like it's just never going to show up on people's radar right i mean so everything you've said up until the very last statement i would i would agree with this is a topic i don't know a ton about i guess there's uh i think i'll forget q anon uh yeah no but gyonan is yeah kyon could be that i also don't know i should no more i apologize i don't know more i mean that's the power and uh the downside you can have i mean hitler could have a blog today yeah and he would have potentially very large following if he's charismatic if he's has you know as good with words he's able to express the ideas whatever maybe he's able to channel the frustration the anger that people have about a certain thing and so i think that's the power of blogs but it's also the limitation but that doesn't we're not trying to solve that you can't solve that yeah the fundamental problem you're saying is not the problem the your your thesis is that there's nothing special about large-scale social networks that guarantees that they will keep existing and it's important to remember for a lot of the older generation of internet activists or the people who are very pro-internet in the early days they were completely flabbergasted by the rise of these platforms say why would you take the internet and then build your own version of the internet where you own all the servers and we built this whole distribute the whole thing with open protocols everyone anywhere in the world use the same protocols your machine can talk to any other machine it's the most democratic communication system that's ever been built and then these companies came along and said we're going to build our own let's own all the servers and put them in buildings that we own and the internet will just be the the first mile this gets you into our private internet where we own the whole thing it went completely against the entire motivation of the internet was like yes we it's not going to be one person owns all the servers and you pay to access them it's any one server that they own can talk to anyone else's server because we all agree on a standard set of protocols and so the the old guard of pro internet people never understood this move towards let's build private versions of the internet uh we'll build three or four private internets and that's what we'll all use it was the opposite basically well it's funny enough i don't know if you follow but jack dorsey is also uh as a proponent and is helping to fund create fully distributed version to twitter essentially that would potentially destroy twitter yeah but i think there you know there might be financial art like business cases to be made there i'm not sure but that seems to be another alternative as as opposed to creating a bunch of uh like the long tail uh creating like the ultimate long tail of like fully distributed yeah which is what the internet is but that's that's sort of like when i'm thinking about long tail social media i'm thinking it's uh like the text not so important like there's groups out there right i know where the tech they use to actually implement their digital only social group whatever they might use slack they might use some combination of zoomer it doesn't matter i think in the tech world we want to build the beautiful protocol right that okay everyone's going to use as just a federated server protocol in which we've worked out x y and z and no one understands it because then the engineers need it all to make i get it because i'm a nerd like this like okay every standard has to fit with everything else and no one understands what's going on meanwhile you know you have this group of bike enthusiasts that are like yeah we'll just jump onto zoom and have some slack and put up a blog the tech doesn't really matter like we built the world with our own curation our own rules uh our own sort of social ecosystem that's generating a lot of value i mean i don't know if it'll happen there's a lot of money at stake with obviously these large but i just think they're more they're so i mean look how quickly americans left facebook right i mean facebook was savvy to buy other properties and to diversify right but how quick did that take for just standard facebook news yeah everyone under the age of something we're using it and no one under a certain age is using it now it took like four years i mean this stuff is really i believe you people can leave facebook overnight yeah like i i think uh facebook hasn't actually messed up for like enough to there's two things they haven't messed up enough for people to really leave aggressively and there's no good alternative for them to leave i think if good alternatives pop up it would just immediately happen this stuff is a lot more culturally fragile i think i mean twitter's having a moment because it was feeding a certain type of and there's a lot of anxieties that was in the the sort of political sphere anyways that twitter was working with but its moment could go to as well i mean it's a really arbitrary thing short little things and i read a wired article about this earlier in the pandemic like this is crazy that the way that we're trying to communicate information about the pandemic is all these weird arbitrary rules where people are screen shotting pictures of articles that are part of a tweet thread where you say one slash n under it like we have the technology guys yeah to like really clearly convey in for long form information to people like why are we why do we have these and i know it's because it's the gamified dopamine hits but what a weird medium there's no reason for us to have to have these threads that you have to find and pin will you screenshot i mean we have technology to communicate better using the internet i mean why are epidemiologists having to do tweet threads well because there's mechanisms of publishing that make it easier on twitter i mean we're evolving as a species and the internet is a very fresh thing yeah and so it's kind of interesting to think that as opposed to twitter it's this is what jack also complains about is twitter's not innovating fast enough yeah and so it's almost like the people are innovating and thinking about their productive life faster than the platforms in which they operate can catch up yeah and so at the point you the gap grows sufficiently they'll jump a few people a few innovative folks will just create an alternative and perhaps distributed uh perhaps just many little silos and then people will jump and it will just continue in this kind of way but see i think like sub stack for example what they're going to pull out of twitter among other things is the audience that was let's say like slightly left of sinner but um slate lisa slender don't like trump uncomfortable with like post-modern critical theories made into political action right and they're like yeah twitter there's a people on there talking about this and it made me feel sort of heard because i was feeling a little bit like a nerd about it but honestly i'd probably rather subscribe the four subs you know i'm gonna have like berries and andrew sullivan's i love like uh jesse's signals like i'll have a few sub stacks i can subscribe to and honestly that's i'm a knowledge worker who's 32 anyways probably that's an email all day and and so like there's an innovation that's going to that group you know it's going to suck them off which is actually a very large group yeah that's a lot of that's a lot of energy and then once trump's gone i guess that's probably gonna dr that drove a lot of uh uh more like trump people off twitter like this stuff is fragile i think i but the fascinating thing to me because i've hung out on parlor for a short amount enough to to know that the interface matters it's so fascinating like that that it's not just about ideas yeah it's about creating like sub stack to creating a pleasant experience uh addicting experience you're right you're right about that and it's hard and that's why this is one of the conclusions from that indie social media article is it's just the ugliness matters and i don't mean even just aesthetically but just the clunkiness of the interfaces the um and i don't know it's to some degree the social media companies have spent a lot of money on this and to some degree it's a survivorship bias yeah right i think twitter every time i hear jack talks about this it seems like he's as surprised as anyone else the way twitter is being used i mean it's basically the way you know they had it uh years ago and then it was like great it'll be statuses right yeah this is what i'm doing you know and my friends can follow me and see it and without really changing anything it just happened to hit everything right to support this other type of interaction well there's also the javascript model which brendan ike talked about he just implemented javascript uh like the crappy version of javascript in 10 days threw it out there and just uh changed it really quickly yeah involved it really quickly and now has become uh according to stack exchange the most popular programming language in the world that yeah it drives like most of the internet and even the back end and now mobile and yeah and so that that's an argument for the kind of thing you're talking about where like like the bike club people yeah could literally create the thing that would uh you know run most of the internet you know 10 years from now yeah it's so there's something to that like as opposed to trying to get lucky or trying to think through stuff is just to uh to solve a particular problem do stuff yeah and do stuff do something like keep tinkering until you love it yeah yeah and then uh and of course the sad thing is timing and luck matter and that you can't really control that's the problem yeah but uh you can't go back to 2007. yeah that's like the number one thing you could do to have a lot of success with a new platform is go back in time 14 years so the thing you have to kind of think about is what is the like what's the totally new thing that uh 10 years from now would seem obvious i mean some people are saying clubhouse is that there's been a lot of stuff like clubhouse before yeah but it it hit the right kind of thing uh similar to tesla actually what clubhouse did is it got a lot of relatively famous people on there quickly and um and then the the other effect is like it's invite only so like oh all the smart like famous people are on there i wonder what's it's the fomo like fear that you're missing something really profound there's exciting happening there so those social effects and then once you actually show up i'm a huge fan of this it's the javascript model it's like clubhouse is so dumb like so simple in its interface like you literally can't do anything except mute a mute there's a mute button yeah and there's a leave quietly button yeah that's it yeah and it's it's kind of i love single-use technology that that sense yeah there's no like there's no it's just like trivial and uh you know twitter kind of started like that facebook started like that yeah but they've evolved quickly to add all these features and so on and you know i do hope clubhouse stays that way yeah be interesting or there's alternatives i mean like i mean even with clubhouse though so one of the issues with a lot of these platforms i think is uh bits are cheap enough now uh that we don't really need a unicorn investor model i mean the investors need that model there's really not really an imperative of we need something that can scale to 100 million plus a year revenue so because it's going to require this much seed and angel investment and and you're not going to get this much seed angel investment unless you can have a potential exit this this wide because you have to be part of a portfolio that depends on one out of ten exiting here if you don't actually need that and you don't need to satisfy that investor model which i think is basically the case i mean bits are so cheap everything is so cheap you don't necess so even like with clubhouse it's it's investor backed right this notion of like this needs to be a major platform um but the bike club doesn't necessarily need a major platform that's where i'm interested i mean i don't know there's so much money that's the only problem that bets against me is that you can concentrate a lot of capital if you do these things right i mean so facebook was like a fantastic capital concentration machine it's crazy how much where it even found that capital in the world that it could concentrate and ossify in the stock price that a very small number of people have you know access to right that's that's incredibly powerful so when there when there is a possibility to to to consolidate and gather a huge amount of capital that's a huge imperative that's very hard for the bike club to go up against so but there's a lot of money in the bike club you see with the wall street uh bets yeah and then when a bunch of people get together i mean it doesn't have to be a bike it could be a bunch of different bike clubs just kind of team up yeah and to overtake that's what we're doing now yeah yeah or we're going to repurpose off the shelf stuff yes that's not you we're going to yeah we're going to repurpose whatever it was for office productivity or something and like the the club's using slack just to build out these you know yeah let's talk about email yeah yeah that's right there i wrote a book you wrote uh yet another amazing book uh world without email maybe one way to enter this discussion is to ask what is the hyperactive hive mind which is the concept you open the book with yeah and the devil it's the scourge of hundreds of millions uh so i think so i called this book a world without email the real title should be a world without the hyperactive hive mind workflow but my publisher didn't like that right so we had to get a little bit more pithy i was trying to answer the question after deep work why is it so hard to do this like if this is so valuable if we can produce much higher people are much happier um why do we check email a day why are we on slack all day you know and so i started working on this book immediately after deep work and so my initial interviews were done in 2016. so it took five years to pull the threads together i was trying to understand why is it so hard for most people to actually find any time to do the stuff that actually moves to neil and the story was and i thought this was i hadn't heard this report anywhere else that's why it took me so long to pull together is email arrives on the scene email spreads i trace it it really picks up steam in the early 1990s between like 1990 and 1995 it makes its move right and it does so for very pragmatic reasons it was replacing existing communication technologies that it was better than it was mainly the fax machine voicemail and memos right so this was just better right so it was a killer app because it was useful in its wake came a new way of collaborating and that's the hyperactive mine so it's the like the virus that follows the the rats that went through western europe for the black pig as email spread through organizations in its weight came the hyperactive hivemind workflow which says okay guys here's the way we're going to collaborate we'll just work things out on the fly with unscheduled back and forth messages just boom boom let's go back and forth hey what about this you see this what about that client let's see what's going on over here that followed email it completely took over office work and the the need to keep up with all these asynchronous back and forth unscheduled messages as those got more and more and more and we had more there's a service the need to service those required us to check more and more and more and more right and so by the time and i go through the numbers by the time you get to today now the average knowledge worker has to check one of these channels once every six minutes because every single thing you do in your organization how you talk to your colleagues how you talk to your vendors how you talk to your clients how you talk to the hr department it's all this asynchronous unscheduled back and forth messaging and you have to service the conversations and it spiraled out of control and it has sort of devolved a lot of work in the office now to all i do is constantly tend communication channels so it's fascinating what you're describing is uh nobody ever paused in this whole evolution to try to create a system that actually works that it was um kind of like a huge fan of cellular automata so it just kind of started yeah uh very a very simple mechanism just like cellular time and it just kind of grew to overtake all the fundamental communication of how we do business and also personal life yeah and that's one of the big ideas is that the unintentionality yeah right so this goes back to technological determinism i mean this is a weird business book because i go deep on philosophy i go deep on for some reason we get into paleoanthropology for a while we do a lot of neuroscience it's kind of a weird book uh but i got real into this technological determinism right this notion that just the presence of a technology can change how people act that's my big argument about what happened with the hive mind and i can document specific examples right so i document this example in ibm 1987 maybe 85 but it's in like the mid to late 80s ibm our monk headquarters we're going to put an internal email right because uh it's convenient and so they ran a whole study and so i talked to the engineer who ran the study adrian stone like we're going to run this study to figure out how much do we communicate because it was still an era where it's expensive right so you have to provision a mainframe so you can't over provision like we want to know how much communication actually happened so they went and figured it out how many memos how many calls how many notes great we'll provision a mainframe to handle email that can handle all of that so if all of our communication moves to email the mainframe will still be fine in three days they had melted it down people were communicating six times more than that estimate so just in three days the presence of a low friction digital communication tool drastically changed how everyone collaborated so that's not enough time for you know an all hands meeting guys we figured it out you know this is what we need to communicate a lot more is what's going to make us uh more productive we need more emails it's emergent isn't that just on the positive end amazing to you like is isn't email amazing like in those early days like just the frictionless communication i mean email is awesome like the people say that there's a lot of problems with emails just like people say a lot of problems with twitter and so on it's kind of cool that you can just send a little note it was a miracle right so i i so i i wrote a there's originally was a new yorker piece from a year or two ago called was email a mistake and then it's in the book too yeah but i go into the history of email like why did it come along and it solved a huge problem so it was the problem of fast asynchronous communication yeah and it was a problem did not exist until we got large offices and we got large offices synchronous communication like let's get on the phone at the same time there's too much overhead to it there's too many people you might have to talk to asynchronous communication like let me send you a memo when i'm ready and you can read it when you're ready took too long and so it was like a huge problem so one of the things i talked about is the way that when they built the cia headquarters there was such a need for fast asynchronous communication that they built a pneumatic-powered email system they had these pneumatic tubes all throughout the headquarters with electromagnetic routers so you would put your message in a plexiglass tube and you would turn these brass dials about the location you would stick it in these things and pneumatic tubes and it would shoot and sort and work its way through these tubes to show up in just a minute or something at the floor and at the general office suite where you wanted to go and my point is the fact that they spent so much money to make that work show how important fast asynchronous communication was large offices so when email came along it was a productivity silver bullet it was a miracle i talked to the researchers who were working on computer support and collaboration in the late 80s trying to figure out how are we going to use computer networks to be more productive and they were building all these systems and tools email showed up it just wiped all that research off the map there was no need to build these custom intranet applications there was no need to build these these communication platforms email could just do everything yeah right so it was a miracle application which is why it's spread everywhere that's one of these things where okay unintended consequences right you had this miracle productivity silver bullet it spread everywhere but it was so effective it just you know i don't know like a drug i'm sure there's some pandemic metaphor here analogy here of a drug that like is so effective at treating this that it also blows up your whole immune system and then everyone gets sick but well ultimately it probably significantly increased the productivity of the world but there's a kind of hump that it now has plateaued and then we're the the fundamental question you're asking is like okay how do we take the next how do we keep increasing the productivity yeah no i think it brought it down so my think so my contention and uh so again there's a little in the book but i have a more recent wired article that puts some newer numbers to this i subscribe to the hypothesis that the hyperactive hive mind was so detrimental so yeah it helped productivity at first right when you could do fast asynchronous communication but very quickly there was a sort of exponential rise in communication amounts once we got to the point where the hive mind meant you had to constantly check your email i think that made us so unproductive that it actually was pulling down non-industrial productivity and i think the only reason why so it certainly has not been going up that metric's been stagnating for a long time now while all this was going on i think the only reason why it hasn't fallen is that we added these extra shifts off the books i'm going to work for three hours in the morning i'm gonna work for three hours at night and only that i think has allowed us to basically maintain a stagnated non-industrial growth we should have been shooting up the charts i mean this is miraculous innovations computer networks and then we built out these 100 billion dollar ubiquitous worldwide high speed wireless internet infrastructure with super computers in our pockets where we could talk to anyone at any time like why did our productivity not shoot off the charts because our brain can't contact switch once every six minutes so it's fundamentally back to the context switching is the poison in context switching is poison it's the what what is it about email that forces context switching is it both our psychology that drags us in yeah or is it expectation yeah right right because it's not i think we've seen this through a personal a personal will or failure lens recently like oh am i addicted to email yes uh i have bad etiquette about my email no it's the underlying workflow so the tool itself i will exonerate right i think i would rather use pop3 than a fax protocol right i think it's easier the issue is the hyperactive hivemind workflow so if i am now collaborating with 20 or 30 different people with back and forth unscheduled messaging i have to tend those conversations right it's like you have 30 metaphorical ping pong tables and when the balls come back across you have to pretty soon hit it back or stuff actually grinds to a halt so it's not it's the workflow that's the problem it's not the tools the fact that we use it to do all of our collaboration let's just send messages back and forth which means you can't be far from checking that because if you take a break if you batch if you try to have better habits it's going to slow things down so my whole villain is this hyperactive hive mind workflow the tool is fine i don't want the tool to go away but i want to replace the hyperactive my workflow i think this is going to be one of the biggest value generating productivity revolutions of the 21st century i quote an anonymous ceo is pretty well known who says this is going to be the moon shot of the 21st century is going to be of that importance there's so much latent productivity that's being suppressed because we just figure things out on the fly in email that as we figure that out i think it's going to be hundreds of billions of dollars you're so absolutely right the question is what is the world without email look like how do we fix email so what happens is at least in my vision you identify well actually there's these different processes that make up my workday like these are things that i do repeatedly often in collaboration with other people that do useful things for my company or whatever right now most of these processes are implicitly implemented with a hyperactive hive mine how do we do this thing like answering client questions to shoot messages back and forth you know how do we do this thing posting podcast episodes we'll just figure it out on the fly my main argument is we actually have to do like they did in the industrial sector take each of these processes and say is there a better way to do this and by better i mean a way that's going to minimize the need to have unscheduled back and forth messaging so we actually have to do process engineering this created a massive growth in productivity in the industrial sector during the 20th century we have to do it in knowledge work we can't just rock and roll in inboxes we actually have to say how do we deal with client questions well let's put in place a process that doesn't require us to send messages back and forth how do we post podcast episodes let's automate this to a degree where i don't have to just send you a message on the fly and you do this process by process and the pressure on that inbox is released and now you don't have to check it every six minutes so you still have email i mean like i need to send you a file sure i'll use email but we're not coordinating or collaborating over email or slack which is just a faster way of doing the hive mind i mean the slack doesn't solve anything there uh you have better structured bespoke processes i think that's what's going to unleash this massive productivity bespoke so the interesting thing is like for example you and i exchanged some emails so obviously i uh for let's just say my particular case i schedule podcasts there's a bunch of different tasks fascinatingly enough that i do that could be converted into processes yeah is it up to me to create that process or do you think we also need to build tools just like email was a protocol for uh helping us create proxy for the different tasks i mean i think ultimately the whole organization the whole team has to be involved i think ultimately there's certainly a lot of investor money being spent right now to try to figure out those tools right so i think silicon valley has figured this out in the past couple of years this is the difference between when i was talking to people after deep work and now five years later is this scent is in the air right because there's so much latent productivity so yes there are going to be new tools which i think could help they're already tools that exist i mean in the different groups i profiled use things like trello or basecamp or asana or flow and you know our schedule wants an acuity like there's there's a lot of tools out there the key is not to think about it in terms of what tool do i replace email with instead you think about it with i have a pro we're trying to come with a process that reduces back and forth messages oh what tool might help us might help us do that yeah and i would push it's not about necessarily efficiency in fact some of these things are going to take more time so writing a letter to someone is like a high value activity is probably worth doing the thing that's killer is the back and forth because now i have to keep checking right so we scheduled this together because i knew you from before but like most of the the interviews i was scheduling for this actually i have a process with my publicist where we use a shared document and she puts stuff in there and then i check it twice a week and there's scheduling options and i say here's what i want to do this one or this will work for this one or whatever and it takes more time in the moment than just but it means that we have almost no back and forth messaging for podcast scheduling which without this so like with my uk publisher i didn't put this process into place because we're not doing as many interviews but it's all the time and i'm like oh man i could really feel the difference right it's the back and forth that's killer i suppose it is up to the individual people involved like you said uh knowledge workers like they have to carry the responsibility of uh creating processes like how always asking the first principles question how could this be converted into a process yeah so you can start by doing this yourself like just with what you can control i think ultimately once the team teams are doing that i think that's probably the right scale if you try to do this at the organizational scale you're going to get bureaucracy right so if it's exactly right elon musk is going to dictate down to everyone at tesla or something like this that's too much remove you get bureaucracy but if it's we're a team of six that's working together on you know whatever powertrain software then we can figure out on our own what are our processes how do we want to do this so it's ultimately also creating a culture we're saying like in email sending an email just for the hell of it it should be taboo like so like you are being uh you're being destructive to the productivity of the team by sending this email yes as opposed to uh helping develop uh a process and so on uh that that will ultimately automate this that's why i'm trying to spread this message of the context switches it's poison i get so much into the science of it i think we underestimate how much it kills us they have to wrench away our contacts look at a message and come back and so once you have the mindset of it's a huge thing to ask of someone to have to take their attention off something and look back at this and if they have to do that for three or four times like we're just going to figure this out on the fly and every message is going to require five checks of the inbox while you wait for it well now you've created whatever it is at this point 25 or 30 contact shifts like you've just done a huge disservice to someone's day this would be like if i had a professional athlete it's like hey do me a favor i need to go do this press interview but to get there you're going to have to carry this sandbag and sprint up this hill like completely exhaust your muscles and then you have to go play a game like of course i'm not going to ask an athlete to do like an incredibly physically demanding thing right before a game but something as easy as thoughts question mark or like hey do you want to jump on a call and it's going to be six back and forth messages to figure it out it's kind of the cognitive equivalent right you're taking the wind out of someone yeah and by the way for people who are listening because i recently posted a few job openings for so on to help with this thing and one of the things that people are surprised when they work with me is how many spreadsheets and processes are involved it's like claude shannon right i talked about communication theater information theory it takes time to come up with a clever code up front so you spend more time up front figuring out those spreadsheets and trying to get people on board with it but then your communication going forward is all much more efficient so over time you're using much less bandwidth right so you you do pain up front yes it's quicker just right now to send an email but if i spend a half day to do this over the next six months i've saved myself 600 emails now here's a tough question uh for you know from the computer science perspective we often over optimize so you create processes and you okay just like you're saying it's so pleasurable to increase uh in the long term productivity that sometimes you just enjoy that process in itself yeah by just creating processes and you actually never uh like it has a negative effect on productivity long term because you're too obsessed with the processes is that is that uh a nice problem to have essentially i mean it's a problem i mean because let's look at the one sector that does do this which is uh developers yeah right so agile methodologies like scrum or kanban are basically workflow methodologies that are much better than the hyperactive hive mine but man some of those programmers get pretty obsessive i don't know if you've ever talked to a whatever level three scrum master they get really obsessive about like it has to happen exactly this way and it's probably seven times more complex than it needs to be i'm hoping that's just because nerds like me you know like to do that but it's it's a a broadly probably an issue right we have to be careful because you can just go down that that fiddling path like so it needs to be here's how we do it let's reduce the messages and let's roll you know um you can't save yourself through if you can get the process just right right so i wrote this article kind of recently called the rise and fall of getting things done and i profiled this productivity guru name merlin man and i talked about this movement called productivity prawn as like elite speak term in the early 2000s where people just became convinced that if they could combine their productivity systems with software and they could find just the right software just the right configuration where they could offload most of the difficulty of work would happen with the machines when you kind of figure out for and then they could just sort of crank widgets and would be and the whole thing fell apart because work is hard and it's hard to do and making decisions about what to work on is hard and no system can really do that for you so you have to have this this sort of balance between i uh contact switches are poison so we got to get rid of the context which is once like something's working good enough to get rid of the context switches then get after it yeah there's a psychological process there for me and the ocd nature like i've literally embarrassingly enough have lost my before when uh so in in many of the processes that involve python scripts the rule is to not use spaces underscore zone there's like rules for like how you format stuff okay and like i should not lose my when somebody had a space and maybe capital letters like it's okay to have a space i think because there's this feeling like something is not perfect yeah and uh as opposed to in the python script allowing some flexibility around that you create this programmatic way that's flawless and when everything's working perfectly it's perfect but actually if you strive for perfection it has the same stress like has a lot of the stress that you were seeking to escape with the contact switching yeah because you're almost stressing about errors like when the process is functioning you're there's always this anxiety of like i wonder if it's gonna succeed yeah i wonder if it's gonna succeed yeah no no i think some of that's just you and i probably i mean it's just our mindset right we're in we do computer science right so chicken and egg yeah and a lot of the processes end up working here are much rougher it's like okay instead of letting clients just email me all the time we have a weekly call and then we send them a breakdown of everything we committed to right that's a process that works okay i get asked a lot of questions because i'm the javascript guy in the company accepting it by email i have office hours this is what basecamp does all right so you come to my office hours that cuts down a lot of back and forth all right we're gonna instead of emailing about this project we'll have a trello board and we'll do a weekly really structured status meeting real quick what's going on who needs what let's go and now everything's on there and on our inboxes we'll have to send as many messages so like that rough level of granularity that gets you most of the way there so the parts that you can't automate and turn into a process so how many parts like that do you think should remain in a perfect world and uh for those parts where email is still useful what do you recommend those emails look like how how should you write emails when should you send them yeah i think email email is good for delivering information right so i think of it like a fax machine or something you know it's a really good fax machine so if i need to send you something and you just send you a file i need to broadcast a new policy or something like email's a great way to do it it's bad for collaboration so you're having a conversation like we're trying to reach a decision on something i'm trying to learn about something i'm trying to clarify what something what this is that it's more than just like a one answer type question then i think that you shouldn't be doing an email but see here's the thing like you and i don't talk often and so we have a kind of new interaction it's not so sure yeah you have a book coming out so there's a process and so on but say there don't you think there's a lot of novel interactive experiences yeah that's fine so you could just for every novel experience it's okay to have a little bit of exchange just fine like i think it's fine uh if stuff comes in over the transom or it's you hear from someone you haven't heard from in a while i think oh that's fine i mean that's that email at its best where it starts to kill us is where all of our collaboration is happening with the back and forth so when you've moved the bulk of that out of your inbox now you're back in that meg ryan movie like you got mail where it's like all right load this up and you wait for the modem you're like oh we got a message yeah yeah and there's like sent me a message this is interesting right you're back to the aol days so you're talking about the bulk of the the business world where like email has replaced the actual uh communication all the communication protocols required to accomplish anything everything is just happening with messages so if you now get most stuff done repeatable collaborations with with other processes that don't require you to check these inboxes then the inbox can serve like an inbox which includes hearing from interesting people right or sending something hey i don't know if you saw this i thought you might like it like it's great for that so there's there's probably a bunch of people listening to this they're like uh yeah but i work on a team and they're all they use is email how do you start the revolution from like the ground up yeah well do it do asymmetric optimization first so identify all your processes and then change what you can change and be socially very careful about it so don't necessarily say like okay this is a new process we all have to do you're just you know hey we gotta get this report ready here's what i think we should do like i'll get a draft into our dropbox folder by like noon on monday grab it uh i won't touch it again until tuesday morning and then i'll look at your changes i have this office hours always scheduled tuesday afternoon so if there's anything that catches your attention grab me then but i've told the designer who cc'd on this that uh by cob tuesday the final version will be ready for them to take and polish or whatever like the person on the other end is like great i'm glad you know cal has a plan so i just what do i need to do i need to edit this tomorrow whatever right but you've actually pulled them into a process that means we're going to get this report together without having to just go back and forth so you just asymmetrically optimize these things and then you can begin the conversation and maybe that's where my book comes in place you just sort of yeah slide it slide it across to buy the book and just leave it leave it out give it to everybody on your team okay so we solved the bulk of the email problem with this is there a case to be made that even for like communication between you and i we should move away from uh from email like for example there's a guy i recently i don't know if you know comedians but there's a guy named joey diaz yeah that i've had an interaction with recently and that guy first of all the sweetest human despite what his comedy sounds like he's the sweetest human being and he's a big proponent of just pick up the phone yeah and call yeah and it makes me so uncomfortable people call me yeah it's like i don't know what to do with this thing uh but it kind of gets everything done quicker i think if i remove the anxiety from that is there a case to be made for that or this email could still be the most efficient way to do this no i mean look if you if you have to interact with someone there's a lot of efficiency in synchrony right and this is something from distributed system theory where you know if you go from synchronous to asynchronous networks there's a huge amount of overhead to the asynchrony so actually the protocol is required to solve things in asynchronous networks are significantly more complicated and fragile than synchronous protocols so if we can just do real time it's usually better and also from a interaction like social connection standpoint there's a lot more information in the human voice and the back and forth uh yeah if you just call so very generational right like our generation will be comfortable talking on the phone in a way that like a younger generation isn't but an older generation is more comfortable with well you just call people whereas we so there's a happy medium but most of my good friends we just talk we have regular phone calls okay yeah it's not i don't just call them we schedule it we schedule it yeah just on text like yeah you want to talk sometime soon do you do you ever have a processes around friends not really no i feel like i should i feel like uh you have like a lot of interesting friend possibilities you have like an interesting problem right like really interesting people you can talk to well that's that's one problem the other one is the introversion where i'm just afraid of people and get really stressed like i freak out and so you picked a good line of work yeah now perhaps it's the goggins thing it's like facing your fears or whatever but but it's almost like there's uh it has to do with the timetables thing and the deep work that the nice thing about the processes is it not only automates sort of uh automates away the contact switching it ensures you do the important things too like yeah it's like prioritize so the thing is with email because everything is done over email you can be lazy in the same way with like social networks and and do the easy things first that are not that important so the process also enforces that you do the important things and for me the important things is like okay it sounds weird but like social connection no that's one of the most important things in all of human existence yeah and doing it the the paradoxical thing i got into this for digital minimalism uh the more you sacrifice on behalf of the connection the stronger the connection feels right so sacrificing non-trivial time and attention on behalf of someone is what tells your brain that this is a a serious relationship which is why social media had this paradoxical effect making people feel less social because it took the friction out of it and so the brain just doesn't like yeah you've been commenting on this person's whatever you've been retweeting them or sending them some text you haven't it's not hard enough and then then the the perceived strength of that social connection diminishes where if you talk to them or go spend time with them or whatever you're going to feel better about it so the friction is good i have a thing with some of my friends where at the end of each call we take a couple minutes to schedule the next then you never it's like i do with haircuts or something right like if i don't schedule it then yeah i'm never gonna get my hair cut right and so we it's like okay when you want to talk next you know yeah that's a really that's a really good idea i i just don't call friends and uh like every 10 years i do something dramatic for them so then we maintain the friendship like i'd murder somebody that they really don't like i just careful man joey might ask you just yet that's why it's one of my favorites in new jersey what's exactly what we're gonna do that robot dog of yours we're gonna go down to jersey there's a special human i i love the comedian world they've been shaking up i don't know if you listen to joe rogan all those folks they kind of um are doing something interesting for mit and and academia they're shaking up this world a little bit like podcasting because comedians are paving the way for podcasting yeah and so you have like andrew huberman who's a neuroscientist a stanford friend of mine now yeah you know he he's like into podcasting now and you're into podcasting of course you're not necessarily podcasting about computer science currently right yeah but that it it feels like you could have a lot of the free spirit of the comedians implemented by the people who are academically trained who actually have a niche specialty yeah and then and then that results i mean who knows what the experiment looks like yeah but that results me being able to talk about robotics with joey diaz yeah when he says you know drops f-bombs every other sentence and i the world is like i've seen actually a shift within uh colleagues and friends within mit where they're becoming much more accepting of that kind of thing it's very interesting that's interesting so you're seeing because i okay because they're seeing how popular it is they're like well you're really popular i don't know how they think about it at georgetown for example i don't know it's interesting but i think what what happens is the popularity of it combined with just good conversations with people they respect it's like huh okay wait this is the thing yeah and this is more fun to listen to than a shitty zoom lecture yeah about their work yeah it's like there's something here there's something interesting and we don't nobody actually knows what that is just like with like clubhouse or something nobody's figured out like where is this medium take is this a legitimate medium of education yeah or is this just like a fun well that's your innovation i think was we can bring on professors yeah and i know joe rogan did some of that too but but you know but your professors in your field like yeah you bring out all these mit guys who i remember you know well that's been the big challenge for me is i don't is i feel uh i would i would ask big like philosophical questions of only people like yourself that are like really well public like so for example you have a lot of excellent papers on uh you know that a lot has a lot of theory in it right and there's some temptation to just go through papers and i think it's possible to actually do that i haven't done that much but i think it's possible it just requires a lot of preparation and i can probably only do that with things that i'm actually like in the field i'm aware of but there's a dance that i would love to be able to try to hit right where it's actually getting to the core of some interesting ideas as opposed to just talking about philosophy yeah at the same time there's a large audience for people that just want to be inspired by like by disciplines where they don't necessarily know the details yeah but there's a lot of people that are like i'm really curious i've been thinking about pivoting careers into software engineering they would love to hear from people like you about computer science even if it's like theory yeah but just like the idea that you can have big ideas you push them through and it's interesting you fight for it yeah well there's some uh there's what is that computer file and uh uh number file these youtube channels there's uh there's channels i watch on like chess exceptionally popular where i don't i don't understand maybe 80 of the time what the hell they're talking about because they're talking about like why this move is better than this move but i love the passion and the genius of those people and just overhearing it yeah i don't know why that's so exciting did you look at like scott aronson's blog at all the yeah shuttle optimized yeah it's like the hardcore complexity theory but it's there's an enthusiasm or like terry towels blog a little bit of humor yeah dairy talk is a blog he used to yeah he would he uh and it would just be i'm going all in on you know here's the new affine group with which you can do whatever but i mean it's just equations well in the case of scott anderson he's good he's able to turn on like the inner troll and comedian and so on he keeps the fun which is the best and he's a philosophical guy he wrote that that turns out yeah yeah so you know we're exploring these different ways of communicating in science and and exciting the world speaking of which i got to ask you about computer science that's right i do some of that uh so i mean a lot of it a lot of your work is what inspired this deep thinking about productivity from all the different angles because some of the most rigorous work is mathematical work and in computer science that theoretical computer science let me ask the scott anderson question of like is is there something to you that stands out in particular that's beautiful or inspiring or just really insightful about computer science or the or maybe mathematics i mean i like theory and in particular what i've always liked in theory is the notion of impossibilities that's kind of my specialty so within the within the context of distributed algorithms my specialty is impossibility results the idea that you can argue nothing exists that solves this or nothing exists that can solve this faster than this and that's i think that's really interesting and that goes all the way back to turin there's his original paper on computable numbers with their connection to that it's a german iceland problem but basically the german name that hilbert called the decision problem this was pre-computers but he was you know he's english so it's written in english so it's very accessible paper and it's it lays the foundation for all of theoretical computer science he just has this insight he's like well if we think about like an algorithm i mean he figures out like all effective procedures or turing machines or basically algorithms we could really describe a turing machine with a number which we can now imagine with like computer code you could just take a source file and just treat the binary version of the file as like a really long number right but it's like every program is just a finite number it's a natural number and then he realized like one way to think about a problem is you have and this is like kind of the mike sipser approach but you have a sort of uh it's a language so of an infinite number of strings some of them are in the language and some of them aren't but basically you can imagine a problem is represented as an infinite binary string where in every position like a one means that string is in the language and zero means it isn't and then he applied cantor from the 19th century and said okay the natural numbers are countable so it's accountably infinite and infinite binary strings you can use a diagonalization argument to show they're they're uh they're uncountable so there's just vastly more problems than there are algorithms so basically anything you can come up with for the most part almost certainly is not solvable by a computer you know and then and then he was like let me give a particular example and he figured out the very first computability proof and he said let's just walk through with a little bit of simple logic the halting problem can't be solved by an algorithm and that kicked off the whole enterprise of some things can't be solved by algorithms some things can't be solved by computers and we've just been doing theory on that since the that was the 30s he wrote that so proving that something is impossible uh this is sort of a more a stricter version of that is it like proving bounds on on the performance of different algorithms yeah so those are yeah so bounds are upper bounds right so you say uh this algorithm does at least this well and no worse than this but you're looking at a particular algorithm and possibility proof say no algorithm ever could ever solve this problem so no algorithm could ever solve the halting problem so it's problem-centric it's it's making something diff making a conclusive statement about the problem and that's somehow satisfying because it's uh just philosophically interesting yeah i mean it all goes back to you you get back to plato it's all uh reductive ad absurdum so all these arguments have to start the only way to do it is there's an infinite number of solutions you can't go through them as you say let's assume for the sake of contradiction that there existed something that solves this problem and then you turn the crank of logic until you blow up the universe and then you go back and say okay our original assumption that this solution exists can't be true i i think philosophically it's like a really exciting kind of beautiful thing it's what i specialize in within distributed algorithms is more like time bound and possibility results like no no algorithm can solve this problem faster than this in this setting of all the infinite number of ways you might ever do it so you have of many papers but the one that caught my eyes smooth analysis of dynamic networks in which you write a problem with the worst case perspective is that it often leads to extremely strong lower bounds these strong results motivate a key question is this bond robust in the sense that it captures the fundamental difficulty introduced by dynamism or is the bond fragile in the sense that the poor performance it describes depends on an exact sequence of adversarial changes fragile lower bounds leave open the possibility of algorithms that might still perform well in practice that's a in in the sense of the impossible and the balance discussion presents the interesting question i just like the idea of robust and fragile bounds but uh what do you make about this kind of tension between what's provably like what the what bounds you can prove that are like robust and something that's a bit more fragile and then and also by way of answering that for this particular paper uh can you say what the hell are dynamic networks what are distributed i don't know this come i have no idea and what is smooth analysis yeah well okay so so smooth analysis it's so it wasn't my idea so spielman and tang came up with this in the context of sequential algorithms so just like uh the normal world of an algorithm that runs on a computer and they were they were looking at there's a well-known algorithm called the simplex algorithm but basically you're trying to whatever find a hole around a group of points and there's an algorithm that worked really well in practice but when you analyze it you would say you know i can't guarantee it's going to work well in practice because if you have just the right inputs this thing could run really long right but in practice it seemed to be really fast so smooth analysis as they came in and they said let's assume that a bad guy chooses the inputs it could be anything like really bad ones and all we're going to do is because and simplex they're numbers we're going to just randomly put a little bit of noise on each of the numbers and they said if you put a little bit of noise on the numbers suddenly simplex algorithm goes really fast like oh that explains this this lower bound this this idea that it could sometimes run really long was a fragile bound because it could only run a really long time if you had exactly the worst pathological input so then my collaborators and i brought this over to the world of distributed algorithms we brought them over the general lower bounds right so so in the world of dynamic networks so distributed algorithm is a bunch of algorithms on different machines talking to each other trying to solve a problem and sometimes they're in a network so you imagine them connected with network links and a dynamic network those can change right so i was talking to you but now i can't talk to you anymore and i'm connected to a person over here it's a really hard environment mathematically speaking and there's a lot of really strong lower bounds which you could imagine if the network can change all the time and a bad guy's doing it it's like hard to do things well so there's an algorithm running on every single node in the network yeah and then you're trying to say some something of any kind that makes any kind of definitive sense about the performance of that algorithm yeah so like uh we're sorry i just submitted a new paper on this a couple weeks ago and we were looking at a very simple problem there's there's uh some messages in the network we want everyone to get them if the network doesn't change you can do this pretty well you can pipeline them there's some algorithms that work basic algorithms that work really well if network can change every round there's these lower bounds that says uh it takes a really long time there's a way that like no matter what algorithm you come up with there's a way the network can change in such a way that just really slows down your progress basically right so smooth analysis there says yeah but that seems like a really you'd have really bad luck if your network was changing like exactly in the right way that you needed to screw your algorithm so we said what if we uh randomly just add or remove a couple edges in every round so the adversary's trying to choose the worst possible network we're just tweaking it a little bit and in that case this is a new paper i mean it's a blind submission so maybe i shouldn't it's not whatever um we basically showed an anonymous friend of yours submitted a paper anonymous friend of mine yeah yeah whose paper should be accepted so that even just adding like one random edge per round you uh the here's the cool thing about the simplest possible solution to this problem blows away that lower bound it does really well so that's like a very fragile lower bound because we're like it's it's almost impossible to actually keep things slow i wonder how many lower bounds you can smash open with this kind of analysis and show that they're fragile it's my interest yeah because in distributed algorithms there's a ton of really famous strong lower bounds but things have to go wrong really really wrong for these lower bound arguments to work and so i like this approach so this this whole notion of fragile versus robust i was like well let's go in and just throw a little noise in there and if it becomes solvable then maybe that lower bound wasn't really something we should worry about you know that's gonna embarrass that's really uncomfortable that's really embarrassing to a lot of people because okay this is the ocd thing with the with the spaces is it feels really good when you can prove a nice bound and uh if you say that that bond is fragile yeah that that's that's like there's going to be a sad kid that walks uh like with their lunchbox back home like yeah my my lower bond doesn't matter no i don't think they care it's all and i don't know it feels like to me a lot of this theory is just math muchismo yeah it's like whatever this was a hard bound to prove yeah do you what do you think about that like uh so if you show that something is fragile that's more important that's really important for in practice right uh so do you think kind of theoretical computer science is living its own world just like mathematics yeah and their main effort which i think is very valuable is to develop ideas it's not necessarily interesting whether it's applicable in the real world yeah we don't care about the applicability yeah like we kind of do but not really we're terrible with computers and can't do anything useful with computers and we don't know how to code and and you know we're not we're not productive members of like technological society but i do think things percolate exactly you percolate from the the world of theory into the world of algorithm design which will pull on the theory and now suddenly it's useful uh and then the algorithm design gets pulled into the world of practice where they say well actually we can make this algorithm a lot better because in practice really these servers do xyz and now we can make this super efficient and so i do think i mean i tell my i teach theory to the phd students at georgetown i show them the sort of funnel of like okay we're over here doing theory but it eventually some of this stuff will percolate down in effect at the very end you know a phone but it's a long it's a long tunnel but the very question you're asking at the the highest philosophical level is fascinating like if you take a system a distributed system or a network and introduce a little bit of noise into it like how many problems of that nature are fundamentally changed by that little introduction of noise yeah because it's all especially in distributed algorithms the model is everything like the way we work is we're incredibly precise about here's exactly it's mathematical here's exactly how the network works and it's a state machine algorithms are state machines there's rounds and schedulers we're super precise we can improve lower bounds but yeah often those lower those impossibility results really get at the hard edges of exactly how that model works so we'll we'll see if this goes so we we published a paper on this that paper you mentioned um that kind of introduced the idea to the distributed algorithms world and i think that's got some traction and there's been some follow-ups and we've just submitted our uh our next i mean honestly the issue with the next is that like the result fell out so easily and this is just a mathematical machismo problem in these in these fields is there's a good chance the paper won't be accepted because there wasn't enough mathematical self-flagellation that's such a nice finding so even it's just showing that very few just very little bit of noise yeah gonna have a dramatic uh make a dramatic statement about uh it was a big surprise to us but um once we figured out how to show it it's not too hard and these are these are venues that for theoretical yeah theoretical okay so the the fascinating tension there exists in other disciplines like one of them is machine learning now which it despite the the power of machine learning and deep learning and all like the impact of it in the real world the main conferences on machine learning are still resistant to application papers i'm not uh sort of and application paper is broadly defined meaning like finding almost like you would like darwin did by like uh going around collecting some information saying huh isn't this interesting yeah uh like those are some of the most popular blogs and yet as the paper is not really accepted i i wonder what you think about this whole world of deep learning from a perspective of theory what do you make of this whole discipline of the success of neural networks of how to do science on them are you excited by the possibilities of what we might discover about neural networks do you think is fundamentally an engineering discipline or is there something theoretical that we might crack open one of these days and understanding something deep about how system optimization and how systems learn i am convinced by is it tiger martin mit who's tag mark yeah tech mark right so his notion has always been convincing to me uh that the fact that some of these models are inscrutable is not fundamental to them and that we can we're going to get better and better because in the end you know the reason why practicing computer scientists often who are doing ai or working at ai on industry aren't like worried about so much existential threats is because they see the reality is they're multiplying matrices with numpy or something like this right yeah and and tweaking constants and hoping that the classifier fitness yeah for god's sakes before the the submission deadline actually like gets above something like it feels like it's it's linear algebra and and tdm right um but anyways i'm really convinced with his idea that once we understand better and better what's going on from a theory perspective it's going to make it into an engineering discipline so in my mind where we're going to end up is okay forget these metaphors of neurons and these things are going to be get put down into these mathematical kind of elegant equations differentiable equations that just kind of work well and then it's going to be when i need a little bit of ai in this thing uh plumbing like let's get a little bit of a a pattern recognizer with a noise module and let's connect i mean you know this feel better than me so i don't know if this is like a reasonable a reasonable prediction but that we're gonna it's gonna become less inscrutable and then it's gonna become more engineerable and then we're gonna have ai and more things because we're gonna have a little bit more control over how we piece together these different classification black boxes so one of the problems and there might be some interesting parallels that you might provide intuition on is you know neural networks are very large and they have a lot of it you know we were talking about uh you know dynamic networks and distributed uh algorithms one of the problems with the analysis of neural networks is uh you know you have a lot of nodes and you love a lot of edges to be able to interpret and to control different things is very difficult there's uh uh there's fields and trying to figure out like mathematically how you form uh clean representations that are like like one node contains all the information about a particular thing and no other nodes it's correlated to it so like it has unique knowledge and like but that ultimately boils down to trying to simplify this thing yeah into that goes against its very nature which is like deeply connected and uh like dynamic and just you know hundreds of millions billions of nodes yeah and in a distributed sense like when you zoom out the thing has a representation and understanding of something but the individual nodes are just doing their little exchanging thing and it's the same thing with stephen wolfram when you talk about cellular automata it's very difficult to do math when you have a huge collection of distributed things each acting on their own and it's almost like it's it feels like it's almost impossible to do any kind of theoretical work in the traditional sense it almost becomes completely like uh like a biology you become a biologist as opposed to yeah a theoretician you just study it experimentally yeah i i think that's the big question i guess right yeah is so so is the large size and inner connectiveness of the like a deep learning network fundamental to that task or are we just not very good at it yet because we're we're using the wrong metaphor i mean the human brain learns with much fewer examples and and with much less tuning of the whatever whatever whatever probably that requires to get those like deep mind networks up and running but yeah so i don't really know but the one thing i have observed is that the yeah there's a the mundane nature of some of the working with these models tends to lead people to think that to do it like it could be skynet or it could be like a lot of pain to get you know the thermostat to do what we wanted to do and there's a lot of open questions yeah in between there and then of course the at the distributors the distributed network of humans they use these systems so like you can have the system itself then the neural network but you can also have like little algorithms controlling the behavior of humans which is what you have with social networks it's possible that a very what is a toaster whatever the opposite of skynet when taking a scale was used by individual humans and controlling their behavior can actually have the skynet effect yeah so this the scale there we might have that now we might have that now we just don't know yeah like what has this happened is twitter creating a little mini skynet i mean because what happens it twirls out ramifications in the world and is it really that much different if it's a robot with tentacles or a bunch of servers that yeah and the destructive effects could be i mean it could be political but it could also be like you know you could probably make an interesting case that the virus the the coronavirus spread on twitter too in the minds of people like the fear and the misinformation in some very interesting ways yeah mixed up and maybe this pandemic wasn't sufficiently dangerous to where that could have created a weird like on instability but maybe other things might create instability like somebody god forbid detonates a nuclear weapon somewhere and then maybe the destructive aspect of that would not as much be the military actions but the way those news are spread on twitter yeah and the panic that creates yeah yeah i mean i think that's a great case study right like what what happened not but i'm not suggesting that lexico let off a nuclear bomb i meant the coronavirus but okay but but yeah i think that's a really interesting case study um i'm interested in the counterfactual of 1995. like do the same virus in 1995. so first of all it would have been i get to hear whatever the nightly news we'll talk about it and then they'll be my local health board we'll talk about it that meant mitigation decisions would probably necessarily be very sort of localized like our communities trying to figure out what are we going to do what's going to happen like we see this with schools like where i grew up in new jersey uh there's very localized school districts so even though they had sort of really bad viral numbers there my school i grew up and has been open since the fall because it's very localized it's like these teachers and these parents what do we want to do what are we comfortable with i live in a school district right now in montgomery county that's a billion dollar a year budget 150 000 kid school district it just can't it's closed you know because it's too so i'm interested in that counterfactual yes you have all this information moving around and then you have the the the effects on discourse as we were talking about earlier that the the neil postman style effects of twitter which shifts people into a sort of a dunk culture mindset of uh don't give an inch to the other team and we're used to this and was fired up by politics and the unique attributes of twitter now throw in the coronavirus and suddenly we see decades of public health knowledge a lot of which was honed during the hiv epidemic was thrown out the window because a lot of this was happening on twitter and suddenly we had public health officials using a don't give an inch to the other team mindset of like well if we say this that might validate something that was wrong over here and we need to if we say this and maybe like that'll stop them from doing this that's like very twittery yeah in a way that in 1995 is probably not the way public health officials would be thinking right now it's like well this is if we said this about mass but the other team said that about mass we can't give an inch so we got to be careful and like we can't tell people it's okay after they're vaccinated because that might we're giving them an inch on this and that's very twittery in my mind right that is the the impact of twitter on the way we think about this course which is a dunking culture of don't give any inch to the other team and it's all about slam dunks where you're completely right and they're completely wrong it's as a rhetorical strategy is incredibly simplistic but it's also the way that we think right now about how we do debate it combined terribly with uh election year pandemic yeah election year pandemic i wonder if we can do some smooth analysis let's run the simulation over a few times a little bit noise yeah see if it can uh dramatically change the behavior of the system okay we talked about your love for proving that something is impossible so there's quite a few still open problems and complexity of algorithms uh so let me ask does p equal np probably not probably not if p equals np what kind of you know and you'd be really surprised somebody proves it yeah what would that proof look like and why would that even be what would that mean what would that proof look like in what possible universe could p equals np is there something insightful you can say there it could it could be true and i mean i'm not a complexity theorist but every complexity theorist i know is convinced they're not equal and are basically not working on anymore i mean there is a million dollars at stake if you can if you can solve the proof it's one of the millennium prizes okay so here here's how i think the p not equals mp proof is going to eventually happen i think it's going to fall out and it's going to be not super simple but not as hard as people think because my my theory about a lot of theoretical computer science based on just some results i've done so this is a huge extrapolation is that a lot of what we're doing is just obfuscating deeper mathematics so like this happens to me a lot not a lot but it's happened to me a few times in my work where yeah we obfuscate it because we say well there's an algorithm and has this much you know memory and they're connected on a network and okay here's our setup and now we're trying to see how fast it can solve a problem and people do bounds about and in the end it turns out that like we were just obfuscating some underlying you know mathematical thing that already existed right so this has happened to me i i had this paper i was quite fond of a while ago it was looking at this problem called contention resolution where you you you put an unknown set of people on a shared channel and they're trying to break symmetry so it's like an ethernet whatever only one person can use it at a time you try to break symmetry there's all these bounds people have proven over the years about how long it takes to do this right and like i discovered at some point there's this one combinatorial result from the early 1990s all of these lower bound proofs all come from this in fact it improved a lot of them and simplified a lot you could put it all in one paper you know it's like are we really and then okay so this new paper that i i submitted a couple weeks ago i found you could take some of these same lower bound proofs for this contention resolution problem you could reprove them using shannon's source code theorem that actually when you're breaking contention what you're really doing is building a code over uh you know if you have a distribution on the network sizes it's a code over that source and if you plug in a high entropy information source and plug in from 1948 the source code theorem that says on a noiseless channel you can't send things at a faster rate than the entropy allows the exact same lower bounds fall back out again right so like this type of thing happens there's a there's some famous lower bounds and distributed algorithms that turned out to all be algebraic topology underneath the covers and they won the girdle prize for working on that so my sense is what's going to happen is at some point someone really smart to be very exciting is going to realize there's some sort of other representation of what's going on with these turing machines trying to sort of efficiently fall and there will be an existing mathematical result that applies someone or something i guess it could be ai theorem proverbs kind of thing it could be yeah i mean not a well yeah i mean there's theorem provers like what that means now which is not fun it's just a bunch of very carefully formulated postulates that but i take your point yeah yeah so okay uh you know on a small tangent on then then you're kind of implying that mathematics it almost feels like a kind of weird evolutionary tree that ultimately leads back to some kind of ancestral a few fundamental ideas that all are just like they're all somehow connected in that sense do you think uh math is fundamental to our universe and we're just like slowly trying to understand these patterns or is is it is it discovered or is it just a little game that we play yeah amongst ourselves to try to fit little patterns to the world yeah that's the question right that's the physicist's question i mean i'm probably i'm in the discovered camp but i don't do theoretical physics so i know they have a they feel like they have a stronger claim to answering that question but you don't come back to it everything comes back to it i mean all of physics the fact that the universe is well okay it's a complicated question so how how often do you think how deeply does this result describe the fundamental reality of nature so the the the reason i hesitated because it's something i'm i taught the seminar and did a little work on what are called biological algorithms so there's this notion of so physicists used mathematics to explain the universe right and it was unreasonable that mathematics works so well you know all these differential equations why does that explain all we need to know about thermodynamics and gravity and all the all these type of things well there's this kind there's this movement within the intersection of computer science and biology it's just kind of wolf ramyun i guess really that uh algorithms can be very explanatory right like if you're trying to if you're trying to explain parsimoniously something about like an ant colony or something like this you're not going to ultimately it's not going to be explained as an equation like a physics equation it's going to be explained by an algorithm so like this algorithm run distributedly is going to explain the behavior so that's mathematical but not quite mathematical but it is if you think about an algorithm like a lambda calculus which brings you back to the the world of mathematics so i'm thinking out loud here but basically abstract math is sort of like unreasonably effective at explaining a lot of things and that's just what i feel like i glimpse i'm not a um not like a super well-known theoretician i don't have really famous results so even as a sort of middling you know career theoretician i keep encountering this where we think we're solving some problem about computers and algorithms and it's some much deeper underlying math it's shannon but shannon is entropy but entropy was really you know goes all the way back to whatever it was boiler all the way back to looking at the early physics and and it's anyways to me i think it's amazing yeah i mean it but it could be the flip side of that could be just our brains draw so much pleasure from the uh deriving generalized theories and simplifying the universe that we just naturally see that kind of simplicity and everything yeah so that's the whole you know newton de einstein right so you can you can say this must be right because it's so predictive well it's not quite predictive because mercury wobbles a little bit but i think we have it set and then you turn out now einstein and then and then you get boar like no not einstein it's actually statistical and yeah so it's it's hard to also know like where a smooth analysis fits into all that or a little bit of noi like you can say something very clean about a system and then a little bit of noise like the average case is actually very different and so yeah i mean that's where like the quantum mechanics comes in it's like ugh why does that have to be randomness in this yeah it would have through this complex statistics yeah yeah so to be determined yeah that'll be my next book that'd be ambitious the fundamental the fundamental core of reality comma and some advice for being more productive at work can i ask you just if it's possible to do an overview and just some brief comments of wisdom on the process of publishing a book what's that process entail what are the different options and what's your recommendation for somebody that wants to write a book like yours a nonfiction book that discovers something interesting about this world so what i i usually advise is follow the follow the process as is don't try to reinvent i think that that happens a lot where you'll try to reinvent the way the publishing industry should work like this kind of not like in a business model ways but just like this is what i want to do i want to write a thousand words a day and i want to do this and i'm going to put on the internet and the publishing industry is very specific about how it works and so like when i got started writing books was at a very young age so you know i sold my first book at the age of 21. the way i did that is i found the family friend that was an agent and i said i'm not trying to make you be my agent just explain to me how this works not just how the world works but give me the hard truth about how would a 21 year old under what conditions could a 21 year old sell a book what would that look like and she just explained it to me well you have to do this and have to be a subject that it made sense for you to write and you would have to do this type of writing for the publications to validate it and blah blah blah and you have to get the agent first and i learned the whole game plan and then i executed and and so the rough game plan is with nonfiction you get the agent first and the agent's going to sell it to the publishers so like you're never sending something directly to the publishers and non-fiction you're not writing the book first right the you're going to get an advance from the publisher once sold and then you're going to do the primary writing of the book in fact it will in most circumstances hurt you if you've already written if you've already written it yeah so you're you're trying to sell well i guess the agent first you sell to the agent and the agent sells it to the publishers it's much easier to get an agent than a book deal so the thought is if you can't get an agent then why would you so you start with and also and the way this works with a good agent is they know all the editors and they have lunch with the editors and they're always just looking what projects you have coming what are you looking for here's one of my authors that's the way all these deals happen it's not you're not emailing a manuscript to a slush pile yeah and so so first of all the agent takes a percentage and then the publishers this is where the process comes in they they take also a cut that's probably ridiculous so if you try to reinvent the system you'll probably be frustrated by the percentage that everyone takes relative to how much bureaucracy and efficiency yeah ridiculousness there is in the system your recommendation is like you're just one ant stop trying to uh build your own ant colony well or or or if you create your own process for how it should work it's not gonna the book's not gonna get published so so there's a separate question the economic question of like should i create my own like self-publish it or do something like that but yeah but putting that aside there's a lot of people i encounter that want to publish a book with a main publisher but they invent their own rules for how that works right so so then the alternative though is self-publishing and the the downside there's a lot of downsides it's like it's almost like publishing an opinion piece in the new york times versus writing your own blog there's no reason why writing a blog post on medium can get way more attention and legitimacy and long lasting prestige than a new york times article but nevertheless for most people writing in a prestigious newspaper quote-unquote prestigious uh is is just easier and well and depends on your goal so you know like i push you towards a big publisher because i think your goal is it's huge ideas you want to impact right you can have more impact you know but even though like actually so there's different ways to measure impact the world of ideas in the world of ideas and also yeah in the world of ideas it's kind of like the clubhouse thing now even if the audience is not large that people in the audience are very interesting as it's like the conversation feels like it has long lasting impact yeah among among the people who in different and disparate industries that are also then starting their own conversations and all that kind of stuff because you have other so like so like self-publishing the book um the goals that would solve you have much better ways of getting to those goals might be part of it right so if there's the financial aspect of well you get to keep more of it i mean the podcast is probably going to crush right what the book's going to do anyways right yeah if it's i want to get directly to certain audiences or crowds it might be harder through a traditional publisher there's better ways to talk to those crowds it could be on club house with all these new technologies a self-published book's not going to be the most effective way to find your way to a new crowd but if the idea is like i want to have a leave a dent in the world of ideas then to have a vulnerable old publisher you know put out your book and a nice hardcover and do the things they do that goes a long way and they do do a lot i mean there's it's very difficult actually there's so much involved in putting together a book they get books into bookstores and all that kind of stuff all that stuff and from an efficiency standpoint i mean just the time involved and trying to do this yourself is there any process right like you said they have a process they've got a process i mean i know like jocko did this recently he started his own imprint and i have a couple other but it's huge overhead i mean if you like if you run a business and you so like jocko is a good case study right so he got you know fed up with simon schuster uh dragging their feet and said i'm gonna start my own imprint then if you're not gonna publish my kid's book um but he what does he do he runs businesses right yeah so i think in his world i already run i'm a i'm a partner in whatever in origin and i have this and that and so it's like yeah we can run businesses that's what we know how to do that's what i do i run businesses i have people but for like you or i we don't run businesses it'd be terrible yeah yeah or especially these kinds of businesses right so i do want to launch a business very different technology business it's very very different very difficult it's very very different yeah yeah i mean this is like okay i need copy editors and and graphic book binders and i need to contract with the printer but oh the printer doesn't have slots and so now i have to try to i mean it's i get so this i need to shut this off in my brain but i get so frustrated when the system could clearly be improved it's the thing that you're mentioning yeah it's like this is so inefficient this every time i go to the dmv or something like that right you think like ah this could be done so much better yeah but you know and the same thing is the worry with the with an editor which i guess would come from the publisher like who would who would uh how much supervision on your book did you receive like hey do you think this is too long or do you think the type like title how much choice do you have in the title in the cover in the presentation and the branding and all that kind of stuff yeah i mean all of it depends right so when it comes on the the relationship on the with the editor on the writing it depends on the editor and it depends on you so at this point i'm on my seventh book and i write for a lot of major publications and at this point i have what i feel like is a voice that i've and a level of craft that i i'm very comfortable with right so my editor is not going to be chicano is going to trust me and it's going to be more big picture like uh i'm losing the thread here or this seems like it could be longer whereas the first book i wrote when i was 21 i had notes such as you start a lot of sentences with so uh you don't use any contractions because i've been doing scientific writing yeah use contractions like you should probably use contractions that it was way more you know i had to go back and rewrite the whole thing yeah but ultimately the recommendation i mean we talked offline and sort of i was thinking loosely not really sure but i was thinking of writing a book and there's a kind of desire to go self-publishing not for financial reasons and the money can be good by the way right i mean it's very it's very uh power law type just distributed right so so the money on a hard cover is somewhere between one or two dollars a book so the thing is i personally don't but you give up 15 to the agent so i personally don't care about money as i've mentioned before but i i for some reason really don't like spending money on things that are not worth it like yeah i don't care if i get money i just don't like spending money on like feeding a system that's inefficient it's like i'm contributing to the problem that's my biggest problem right so you think that you're you're worried about the inefficiencies of the yeah the fact that like the overhead the number of people involved or the overheads yeah the emails again the the the the the fact that they have this way of speaking which i'm allergic to many people like that's very marketing speak like you could tell they've been having zoom meetings all day it's like as opposed to a sort of creative collaborators that are like also a little bit crazy yeah i suppose some of that is finding the right people finding the right people that's what i would say i say there's definitely and maybe it's just good fortune uh good fortune in terms of like my agents and editors i've worked with there's really good people who they're see the vision are smart or incredibly literary yeah and yeah i had a great editor when i was first moving into hardcover books for example it was my first you know big book advance and my first sort of big deal and uh he was like a senior editor and and it was very useful you know he was like we had a lot of long talks right i was so this was my fourth book so good they can't ignore you was my first my big hardcover idea book um and we had a lot of talks like even before i started writing it just let's talk about books and his philosophy he'd been in the business for a long time he was the head of the the head of the imprint it was useful yeah but uh i mean the other frustrating thing is how long the whole thing takes a long time yeah but i suppose that's he just had to accept well yeah i handed in this manuscript for the the the book that comes out now like when this i handed it in i mean over the summer like during the pandemic so it's not it's not terrible right and we were editing during the pandemic and i finished it in the spring we've talked most of today except for a little bit computer science most of today about a productive life um how does uh love friendship and family fit into that is there um do you find that is a tension is it possible for relationships to energize the whole process to benefit or is it ultimately a trade-off but because life is short and uh ultimately we seek happiness not productivity that we have to accept that tension yeah i mean i think relationships is the that's the found that's the whole deal like i thought about this the other day i don't think context was i was thinking about if i was going to give like an advice speech like a commencement address or like giving advice to young people and uh like the big question i have for young people is if they haven't already bad things are going to happen that you don't control so what's the plan right like let's start let's start figuring that out now because it's not all some people get off better than others but eventually stuff happens right you get sick something falls apart the economy craters the someone you know you know dies like all sorts of bad stuff is gonna happen right so how are we gonna do this like how do we like live life and life is hard and in ways that is unfair and unpredictable um then relationships is the that's the buffer for all of that because we're wired for it right i went down this this rabbit hole with digital minimalism i went down this huge rabbit hole about the human brain in sociality it's all we're wired to do it's like all of our brain is for this like everything all of our mechanisms everything is made to service social connections because that's what kept you alive you know i mean you had to your tribal connections is how you didn't uh starve during the famine people share food et cetera and so you can't neglect that and it's like everything and and people feel it right like there's no our social networks are hooked up to the pain center it's why it feels so terrible when you miss someone or like someone dies or something right that's like how seriously we take it there's a pretty accepted theory that the default mode network like a lot of what the default mode network is doing so the sort of the default state our brain goes into when we're not doing something in particular is practicing sociality practicing interactions think because it's it's so you know crucial to what we do it's like at the core of human thriving so i've more recently the way i think about it is like relationships first like okay given that foundation of putting like and i don't think we put nearly enough time into it i worry that social media is reducing relationships strong relationships strong relationships where you're sacrificing non-trivial time and attention resources whatever on behalf of other people that's the net that it's going to allow you to get through anything then all right now what do we want to do with uh the surplus that remains maybe i want to build some build some fire build some tools so put relationships first i like the worst case analysis from the computer science perspective put relationships first yeah because everything else is just uh assuming average case assuming things kind of keep going as they were going and you're neglecting the fundamental human drive like we we have to talk about the board of instinct we want to build things we want to have impact we want to do productivity that's not nearly as clear-cut of a drive of we need people but if we look at the real worst case analysis here is one day you're pretty young now but that's not going to last very long you're gonna die one day is that something you think about a little bit are you afraid of death well i'm up the mindset of let's make that a productivity hack i'm in the mindset of um we need to confront that soon yeah so let's do what we can now so that when we really confront and think about it we're we're more likely to feel better about it so in other words like let's let's focus now on living and doing things in such a way that we're proud of so that when it really comes time to confront that we're more likely to say like okay i feel kind of good about the situation so what uh when you're laying on your deathbed would you in looking back what would make you think like oh i did a i do okay i'm proud of that i optimized the hell out of that that's a good i mean it's a good question that the that go backwards on i mean this is this is like david brooks's uh eulogy virtues versus resume virtues right so his argument is that uh and that's another interesting dc area person i keep thinking of interesting syria people all right david brooks is here too um his argument he thinks eulogy virtues is so what we eulogize is different than what we promote on the resume uh that's his whole thing now right his second mountain wrote the character about these books or he has this whole premise of there's like this professional phase and there's a phase of uh giving of yourself and sacrifice on behalf of other people i don't know maybe it's all mixed together right you wanna i think living by a code is important right i mean uh this is something that's not emphasized enough i always think of advice that my undergrad should be given that that they're not given especially a place like georgetown that has this like deep history of you know trying to promote human flourishing because of the jesuit connection uh there's such there's such uh resiliency and pride that comes out of living well even when it's hard like living according to a code living accord to which which you know i think religion used to structure this for people and but in its absence you need some sort of replacement but this uh even when things were soldiers get this a lot right the experience is a lot even when things were tough i was able to persist in living this way that i knew was right even though it wasn't the easiest thing to do in the moment like fewer things give humans more resilience like having done that your relationships are strong right many people coming to your funeral as a standard like a lot of people are going to come to your funeral like i mean you matter to a lot of people and then maybe having done to to the extent of whatever capabilities you are happen to be granted you know and they're different for different people and some people can sprint real fast and some people can do math problems uh try to actually do something of impact i'll just uh promise to give gift cards to anybody shows up to the funeral you're going to hack it i'm going to hack even the funeral there's going to be a lottery wheel you spend when you come in and someone goes away with ten thousand dollars the see the problem is like with all the living by principles living in principle life focusing on relationships and kind of thinking of this life as this perfect thing kind of forgets the notion that none of it you know makes any sense right like the like it it kind of implies that this is like a video game and you want to get a high score as opposed to none of this even makes sense like why would he like what that like like what does it even mean to die it's going to be over it's like everything i do all these productivity hacks all this life all these efforts all this creative efforts kind of assume it's going to go on forever there's a kind of sense of immortality and i don't even know how intellectually makes sense that it ends uh of course got to ask you in that context what do you think is the meaning of it all especially for computer scientists i mean there's got to be some mathematical uh yeah 27 or what's the what's the douglas adams yeah or 40 40 42 okay 20 27 is a better number i should read more sci-fi um you're on to something with a 27. i don't want to give away too much but just trust me 27. invisible yeah um so i mean i don't know obviously right i mean i'm just hoping you would yeah i i don't know but but going back to what you're saying about the sort of the existentialist or the sort of the more nihilist style approach the one thing that that there is are intimations right so there's these intimations to human haves of somehow this feels right and this feels wrong this feels good this feels like i'm doing i'm aligned with something you know when i'm acting with courage to save whatever right it's not these intimations are a grounding against arbitrariness like one of the ideas i'm really interested in is that uh when you look at religion right so i'm i'm interested in world religions for for my grandfather was a like a theologian that studied and wrote all these books i'm very interested in this type of stuff and there's this great book that's it's it's not um specific to a particular religion but it's karen armstrong wrote this great book called the case for god she's very interesting she was a catholic nun who sort of left that religion and is but one of the smartest thinkers uh in terms of like accessible theological thinking that's not tied to any particular religion her whole argument is that the way to understand religion you first have to go way back pre-enlightenment where all this was formed we got messed up thinking about religion post enlightenment right and and um these were operating systems for making sense of intimations the one thing we had were these different informations of this field like ah and mystical experience and this feels some there's something you feel when you act in a certain way and don't act in this other way and it was like the scientists who were trying to study and understand the model of the atom by just looking at experiments and trying to understand what's going on like the great religions of the world were basically figuring out how do we make sense of these intimations and live in alignment with them and build a life of meaning around that what were the tools they were using they were using ritual they were using belief they were using action but all of it was like an os it was like a liturgical model of the atom that hardcoded in so it's it did uh through the evolutionary process sometimes i mean they wouldn't have called it that back then or yeah i mean whether they said who they didn't have that there's pre-enlightenment they just said this is here and and the directive is to to try to live in alignment with that well then i want to ask who wrote the original code yeah so that's so one question yeah so so armstrong lays out this good argument and where it gets really interesting is that that she emphasizes that all of this was considered ineffable right so the whole notion and this is like rich in jewish tradition in particular and also an islamic tradition we can't comprehend and understand what's going on here right and so the best we can do to approximate understanding and live in alignment is we like act as if this is true do these rituals have these actions or whatever post enlightenment a lot of that got once we learned about enlightenment we grew these suspicions around religion that are very much of the modern era right so like the the karen armstrong like uh sam harris's critique of religion makes no sense right the the critiques based on well this is you're making the ascent to propositions that you think are true for which you do not have evidence that they are true like that's an enlightenment thing right this is not the context and this is not the religion is the rutherford model of the atom like it's not actually maybe what is underneath happening but this model explains why your chemical equations work and so this is like the way religion was you you there's a god we'll call it this this is how it works we do this ritual we act in this way it aligns with it just like the model the atom predicted why you know n a and c l is going to become salt this predicts that you're going to feel and live in alignment right it's like this beautiful sophisticated theory which actually matches how a lot of great theologians have you know thought about it um but then when you come forward in time yeah maybe it's evolution i mean this is like what peterson hints at right like he's basically he's not he he doesn't like to get super pinned down on this but it's kind of seems where he's he's almost like searching for the words he focuses more on like jung and other people but uh i mean i know he's very union but but that same type of analysis i think roughly speaking like armstrong is sort of a it's kind of like a petersonian analysis but she's looking more at the deep history of religion than uh but yeah he throws in an evolutionary yeah and i wonder what holmen finds i i wonder what the new home is if religion dissipates uh what the new home for these kinds of natural inclinations are uh yeah well there's technology whether and if it's evolution i mean this is francis collins book also he's like well that's a religious that could be a very religious notion i don't i think this stuff is interesting i'm not a very religious person but i'm uh i'm thinking it's not a bad idea maybe maybe what replaces honestly like maybe what replaces religion is a return to religion but in this sort of more sophisticated i mean if you went back yeah i mean it's the issue with like a lot of the the the recent critiques i think is it's a it's a straw man critique in a complicated way right because the the whole way these the way this works i mean the theologians if you're reading paul tillich if you're reading heschl if you're reading these people they're thinking very sophisticatedly about religion in terms of this it's ineffable and we're just these things and this is deep it connects us to these things in a way that puts life in the line man we can't really explain what's going on because we our brains can't handle it right um for the average person though this notion of live as if is kind of how religions work is live as if this is true it's like an os for getting in alignment with because through ev cultural evolution like you behave in this way do these rituals live as if this is true um gives you the what the goal you're looking for but that's a complicated thing live as if this is true because if you especially if you're not a theologian to say uh yeah this is not true in an enlightenment sense but i'm living as if it kind of takes the heat out of it but of course it's what people are doing because you know highly religious people still do bad things where if you really were you know there's absolutely a hell and i'm definitely going to go to it if i do this bad thing you would never have you know no one would ever murder anyone if they were an evangelical christian right so so it's like what this is kind of a tangent that i'm i'm i'm on shaky ground here but it's something i've been interested off and on a lot well it's this fast i mean i think we're in some sense searching for because it is it does make for a good operating system we're searching for a good live as if x is true and we're searching for a new x yeah and maybe artificial intelligence will be the very the new gods that we're so desperately looking for or it'll just spit out 42. i thought it was 27. yeah this is uh as you know i've been a huge fan uh so are a huge number of people that i've spoken with so they've been telling me i absolutely have to talk to you this was a huge honor this was really fun thanks for wasting all this time with me yeah no likewise man i'm a long time fan so this is a lot of fun yeah thanks man thanks for listening to this conversation with cal newport and thank you to our sponsors expressvpn linode linux virtual machines sunbasket meal delivery service and simply safe home security click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from cal himself clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not thank you for listening and hope to see you next time you