Kind: captions
Language: en
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
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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
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and now let me leave you with some words
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clarity about what matters provides
clarity
about what does not thank you for
listening and hope to see you
next time
you