Ep. 339: Let Brandon Cook

I'm Kyle Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ. Joined, as always, by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, you sent me here ranking top 20 computer science podcast. I don't know who made this list, but let's say... Extreme experts who we should respect the feed spot feed spot. Well, if I read it right, we were number one. Is that true? The number one computer science podcast. We are also consistently.

Top 20 on Apple's chart for technology podcast. But we were talking before the show. Okay, like is why is that the right category for us? I feel as if sometimes our content. drifts away from technology. But in my mind, everything goes back to technology. I want to give you, I was actually thinking about this just the other day. I want to give you my, my latest way. I think about the category, like what this show does.

Okay. In my own mind, right? And this goes back to the Tao of Cal episode from a couple months ago, but I've been cooking on it a little bit. All right, so here's the way I think about it. The broad thing we talk about on this show is the mismatches between the modern digital environment and our Paleolithic brains and Neolithic culture. So technology impacts us, creates lots of opportunities and problems.

I'm a computer scientist. I'm a tech writer. Makes sense. There's three categories of topics under that broad subject that most of the stuff on the show falls into. So I would say the number one of those topics is. Digital knowledge work. So what does work mean in the age of modern technology? What are the problems? How do we get around them? That's like a lot of our stuff. You might call that productivity content, but it's productivity content that is related to...

The current state of work, which is defined by technology. All right. Number two, attention economy stuff. Your phone, distraction, social media, the economics of the internet. We talk about that a lot. All right. And that, again, goes right to modern digital environment. Number three, I'm now thinking about this as like crafting an intentional life or a deep life in the 21st century. So that is something that...

People have cared about philosophers and pragmatic nonfiction writers have cared about for time in memoriam. But each new age has their own specific obstacles and opportunities to deal with when tackling that question of how do I craft my life? We tackle it in our current age as defined by technology. So like the internet, knowledge work, the extreme mobility, internet economics opens up all sorts of interesting new opportunities.

To put into your toolbox for crafting your life, it also puts in place lots of new obstacles when trying to actually craft the meaningful life. And so even that third topic, deep life in the 21st century, relates back to the overarching umbrella. of digital and how it affects us we buy it summarize like a true professor that's there we go so it all fits it all comes back to it it's sometimes it feels

We're talking about Seneca and crafting your life. It feels like we're far from the modern digital environment, but we're not. It defines everything. So I'm glad now that we're the number one computer science podcast, and I'm glad we're top 20 podcasts in technology now pretty consistently. Not easy. I mean, we did the count. There's like 20 or 30 categories on Apple. Yeah. Hard to be top 20 on any of those categories.

Yeah, we have the link for FeedSot in the show notes. All right. There we go. We are a technology show. At least if anyone at Georgetown in my computer science department asks why I'm recording my podcast instead of being at some meeting, it's because this is technology related and it's important as a professor of computer science that I do this podcast. That's what we're telling everybody. All right.

So we got a good show today. Let me put it into the categories. I want to react. I'm going to be reacting to something I heard in the podcast world, and it will relate to that first category of knowledge work in the digital age. I think that's good. We've got a bunch of questions. And then by popular demand, tech corner. It's going to be an Alan Turing-themed tech corner in the final segment.

But we're going to draw some lessons out of this tech corner that are going to, again, be relevant to slow productivity and digital knowledge work. So we kind of have that theme through today's episode. Exciting. All right. So let's get rolling with today's Deep Dive. So I was recently listening to Tim Ferriss interview the prolific fantasy author, Brandon Sanderson. Now there's an exchange in this conversation that was early on. It's right around the nine minute mark of the podcast.

that caught my attention when I heard it. It caught my attention because I think it actually says something profound about some of the deep problems in the way we organize work.

in our current moment so here's what i want to do i'm going to first i'm going to play the clip i'm going to detail what it is that that that lesson i think this clip is pointing towards then we're going to discuss a way to push back or try to correct for those issues and all this will really just be an excuse to geek out on sanderson productivity chatter because all writers love to geek out on sanderson productivity chatter all right so anyways let's get to the clip let me set the scene here

This is Tim has traveled to Utah to talk to Sanderson at the headquarters of his publishing and merchandising company, Dragon Steel Books. It's like a 70-person company that Sanderson started kind of his empire. built around his fantasy books um let's hear now this clip from the interview and i will all of that stuff i i joke that i've just got so much ram and i've

filled it all with story ideas, and so everything else kind of just squeezed out the ears. Well, it seems like where we're sitting, where we're sitting at HQ, it seems like... The design of Dragonsteel, maybe the intention behind it is to allow you to do that on some level. Yeah, yeah. I mean, everything in our company is built around let...

Brandon cook and take away from Brandon anything that he doesn't have to think about or doesn't strictly need to. I actually. All right. So that is the clip that caught my attention. Let Brandon cook. Now, as someone who writes a lot about knowledge work in the digital age, I'm fascinated by this idea of cooking, which in the work context I define to mean letting someone who has a high return skill.

So a skill that returns value at a high level. Design a workflow that enables them to just basically spend all their time applying that skill, minimizing other distractions. So we can think about this idea of letting someone cook. as a particular strategy for workflow design. Now, it makes sense to me that in this particular example, that drag and steal books goes out of its way to protect Sanderson's ability to think and write.

He produces roughly 300,000 words a year. He'll geek out on the details of this. Some years it's more. It goes up to as much as 400,000. Sometimes it's less. He does this on a pace of like roughly 10 to 20,000 words a week, depending on whether he's revising or not. Those words he produces is the raw material on which all revenue of Dragon Steel Books is built. You cut down those words.

It's like reducing the amount of steel that you're shipping to a Ford assembly line. They're going to produce less cars, and if they produce less cars, they're going to make less money. So you've got to protect at the – what is the core raw material on which to value? that dragon steel sells or bases its business off of it is the words that sanderson produces so of course this idea of yeah let's let brandon cook makes sense it's the same thing as saying your assembly line

Let's make sure we have plenty of steel coming in so we can build a lot of cars. So that makes sense to me. Here's what doesn't make sense to me. Why don't more companies have Sanderson figures? Why is this model of cooking not more prevalent throughout the knowledge sector writ large where, hey, we've set up our workflow so that this person can cook. We've set up our workflow so that person can cook. This person is producing the stuff that is at the core of.

our marketing company, at the core of our technology company, at the core of our research institute, and we want them to produce that as much as possible because that is going to help us be as successful as possible. Let's let them cook. You think you would see that more often, but we don't. To me, that paradox is really interesting. Now, I need to put a clear caveat here before we get the complaints. I am not arguing that all knowledge work jobs...

would benefit from the Sanderson model cooking workflow. Actually, probably most knowledge work jobs would not. Let me use myself as an example. At the moment, right, as a full professor, In Georgetown's computer science department, we rotate several key administrative roles among the full professors. It's faculty governance of departments. This is how academic institutions run. I am currently.

the director of undergraduate studies for the computer science department at Georgetown. It's my turn. So it came to me. That is an example of a knowledge work role. In which there is not a single high return activity that I should be focusing on. It's a much more varied role in terms of it's reactive. It's taking in a lot of information and processing it and coming up with answers. It's helping get people.

the information they need. It's also a very interpersonal counseling role, like working with individual students. So in that particular job, which is like one of seven I have, in that particular job, it would not make sense to say, hey, let Cal cook. There's nothing here for me to cook on. So I'm not arguing that most jobs should have this model. But what I am arguing is that most organizations should have some people who are doing that, right?

That, okay, maybe not the director of undergraduate studies, but the new professor. who should just be doing research or the computer programmer or the marketing ad writer or any number of creative industry positions, right? The strategician, the... The economic analysis, you should just be like there with the numbers trying to get the sort of the deepest, most sophisticated analyses done there. There should be a lot of positions.

in which we would say, yeah, of course we want to let them cook. This is what's going to produce the most value, but we don't. So I think that's a paradox. Let's explain this paradox. So as I talked about at the opening of this show... Almost everything I talk about is motivated at the very top by the modern digital environment. Everything I talk about is a reaction to that.

This is no different. If you want to understand why it's so rare to see more Brandon Sanderson's in the world of knowledge work writ large, it is because of digital business productivity software, in particular, digital communication tools. Let's walk this through. You introduce something like email. Now you have an incredibly low friction way of reaching out and communicating with someone. Now, why does this cause trouble?

Well, this means now the social capital as well as just the strict time and effort cost of me commanding some of your time and attention has just radically diminished. If I want to ask you a question, if I want to request that you jump on a call, if I want to put a quick task onto your plate, I can do this at very low cost. So I'm going to do this more.

Because every time I can command some of your time and attention, what I am doing is reducing how much time and attention I have to expend. So now it becomes rational for me in a game-theoretic way to try to command as much time and attention as possible from as many people as possible because that will maximize...

what I can get out of my own time and attention. So once you have this dynamic and you have this dynamic in a workplace where there are no hard structures or systems about here's how we figure out work, here's how we assign work, here's how we talk about work.

In a workplace without those structures, what's going to happen is we are going to all pull each other inexorably downwards towards this suboptimal equilibrium, this degenerate equilibrium, where no one can escape and everyone finds themselves.

doing way too many things. You find yourself in a state of almost constant distraction. You find yourself with workload saturation. I can't take anything more on my plate. I'm literally out of minutes to work on it. This is what will happen in a world of... zero cost request of time and attention and every request gives you a personal benefit everyone is going to drag everyone down until everyone is workload saturated and distracted so we don't have

Sanderson's of these companies cooking, we have them checking email 150 times a day. The technology I think is what created this. If you're not in the mode of designing workflows or rules. What will rule in your workplace is going to be something that emerges. And unfortunately, as I've captured in multiple books now, in digital knowledge work, what's going to emerge, bottom up.

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

Well, we can go back to Sanderson here to help expand our understanding of what it means to let someone cook. There's two elements that come up when we hear Sanderson talk about his approaches to productivity. The first is reduction. This is what was mentioned in that clip we just listened to where he said, my company is set up to sort of take off my plate.

everything I don't strictly need to do. Now, he goes on in that clip to give a somewhat facetious example. He says, there's someone who fills my water bottle for me so I don't have to bother going to do it. That is sort of a metaphor. I mean, I'm sure that's probably true, but that's sort of a metaphor for the broader things.

All of the decisions that have to be made, the logistical steps that happen in producing merchandise and in producing books and publishing books and marketing books and getting the rights from the illustrator that you're going to use for the graphic on the self-published hardcover version of the book and the rights you need and all those type of things.

He gets himself out of those. If I don't really have to be in those decisions, let's find a way for me not to be in them. So he reduces, his cookie model reduces the amount of things that he's responsible for. Now, yes, this makes other people have to do more things, but this is not an egalitarian commune. This is a business where we're trying to maximize the value produced.

And so it's not about trying to have an equal level of convenience or disconvenience among all people in the organization. It's how do we get 300,000 words out of Brandon? You will do more of this stuff so he can do more of that stuff. That is just economics one-on-one. The second element that I think goes into his cooking model, and I got this from some of his essays, not from this interview, is consolidation. He reduces what's on his plate.

And then he consolidates what remains to try to minimize its footprint. Now, this requires everyone else being on board. That's why this has to be part of like an agreed upon workflow. I'm going to read here a quote from a blog post he wrote about his habits here. I'm going to read this here. This is Brandon talking. I also set aside one day a week for business matters. answering emails, signing things for my store, phone calls with my agent, etc. I'm lucky to have...

I'm lucky enough to have assistants I can trust. I don't have to get distracted by day to day interruptions because I know my assistants will deal with most of it and only ask me about things that really need my input. And most of them can wait until my business day. So he has one day. Where the stuff he really does need to do, he can do. So the other days he knows I'm just writing. That's the cooking model. Again, this model doesn't apply to a lot of jobs. Maybe most jobs.

But the jobs that it does apply to could make a really big difference. So why then is my final point I want to make about this? Why should we care? I mean, we should care if we're. If we're a Brandon Sanderson type at our company, this would be great. Hey, I could just cook. I could just like rock and roll. I could have one day where I have to like talk to people and then otherwise I'm writing or I'm programming or I'm doing strategy or I'm crunching numbers or doing research, whatever it is.

The small percentage of people that supply us, that'd be great. But why should the rest of us care about this? Because again, most people have jobs like my temporary director of undergraduate study job. My final point is here's why we should all care about it. Here's why it would be a good thing if more organizations had a small number of people.

with cooking models for their workflows. It would represent a notable incursion against our broader embrace of pseudo-productivity in the world of knowledge work. So pseudo-productivity, this core concept from my new book, Slow Productivity, is the idea that visible effort is a reasonable proxy for useful effort. The more stuff you do, the better. Busyness is the goal.

this would be an incursion against that, right? Because when you say, no, no, no, I'm going to let this person just write, you're saying busyness is not the goal. The goal here is the number of words he produces because that's valuable. I don't care. If they respond to slacks quickly or if they're jumping on a bunch of zooms or we see them around the office, I want them producing words. That is a completely different mindset. That is an output focused.

productivity mindset, a result-focused productivity mindset. And once you have established that as a valid mindset, even if you've just established in your organization for four people, You've established that that is an alternative way to think about productivity. It is an alternative to pseudo-productivity, and once that alternative exists, it can begin to spread.

And so once you acknowledge, okay, for this salesperson, this programmer, and this strategist, they're going to cook. Once you acknowledge, that's a very effective way of thinking about productive output. you can use that knowledge for other positions. And now maybe for other positions, it's like, okay, I don't have one thing I should just be doing all day, but we're recognizing busyness is not that important. So maybe in this...

Other position, like my director of undergraduate studies position, well, we have like this one day where all the meetings happen and this gets automated. It allows you to explore workflow configurations that aren't just built on demonstrating busyness. And once you're no longer just demonstrating busyness.

A lot of the pain points of modern knowledge work can be dissipated. So that's why I'm interested in this in the big picture, right? I got small picture interest. The Brandon Sanderson's of this sector, let them cook. It's going to be better for the companies and better for them. Big picture, once you're doing that for some people, you have acknowledged that pseudo-productivity is not the only way. You have an incursion against small, but definitive incursion against that reality.

And I am convinced that it is the end of the pseudo-productivity regime that will spark the beginning of a new era of knowledge work in the digital age. We can't actually reap the potential benefits of... Digital technology and office work, the potential almost like utopian visions we have for what work could be. We cannot reap those until we take down the pseudo-productivity regime.

We have our equivalent of pulling down the Saddam Hussein statue in Iraq. We need somewhere for there to be some sort of metaphorical statue that is going to be like a Gmail unread message count. And we're going to pull on those ropes and pull that thing down and indicate that regime is done. We're moving on to a new way of thinking about productivity. All right. So Sanderson's cool. I like.

His approach that they built the whole business around just laying them right. More companies should do that for their Sanderson style characters. And once we do that, things could get better for everyone else. And Jesse, you'll be proud that I got that whole distance without doing.

The whole segment without doing a name of the wind joke. He talks about his writing schedule as he wakes up late. He writes somewhere from two to five or six and then hangs with his family. And then he writes again from 10 to two. In the morning. Yeah. A lot of people do that. Like they get that. Tim Ferriss writes that way. He's got like two sessions a day for a tally up to eight hours. I mean, a lot of people, the people I know night write just do the night session, but citizens is the beast.

Could you imagine writing for eight hours a day? Oh, easy. I wrote four hours yesterday and I had to tear myself away. Once you get going writing, right? Like you just want to, that's all you want to do.

You probably average, what, three a day? I feel like three is a good session. I wonder if he writes on the weekends. That's a good question. I bet he does. Well, he's Mormon, so I don't know if they protect... the sabbath or not they might they have a lot of rules so maybe not on i guess their sabbath would be sunday i don't know about that um but he probably does i think that guy works a lot he works a lot so he has a quick commute he just walks

To his lair. I know. We got to get to that lair, Jesse. We got to get to that lair. We got to build a lair. I watched a video with my son the other night where they took, it was like a boring... completely undecorated sort of home office room and they re uh renovated the whole thing into a dark academia set so like old

bookcases and leather bound books and chairs and like a fake fireplace or whatever. I was like, oh man, that's so awesome. Didn't you do that in your home office? Yeah, I guess so. But I want to do it more here. But here's the problem. You watch this video and it takes them for it.

Ever. They worked on this. The channel is called Nerd Forge. It's like a Scandinavian maker DIY woman. And this must have been three to four weeks of like all day work. Yeah. That would take away from writing. I keep telling my son. I was like, don't be – you should not want to be a full-time YouTuber. It's such hard work. I know the maker space best because I wrote that New Yorker article in that space. I was like, it's such hard work. You've got to do these projects, and they're –

It's full-time work for like months to get one video and that video better get the views because you're kind of screwed if it does it. And you have to constantly be like thinking about these over-the-top projects that are like really hard to do. It seems like a stressful job and the money's like, okay, but it's like not, there is no equivalent in that world of like Travis Kelsey's podcast contract. Like if you want to look at independent media worlds, like in podcasting, there's paydays.

There's not really paydays like that in YouTube. It's harder to squeeze dollars. It's all with these sponsorship deals. It's harder to squeeze dollars. You need like multi-million view videos that you can do like six times a year. It's kind of a sweet spot. And then you're doing, you're still nowhere near really successful podcasters. But the same thing, what Brandon was talking about in the interview with Ferris is he wanted to start his own ecosystem to get off of.

relying on amazon if you're just a full-time youtuber and your channel gets canceled what are you going to do then or just say you put something out that happens to get banned Or the algorithm changes. Yeah. Like we see this. We put our – you might be watching this on YouTube. We put our podcast on YouTube because a lot of people actually listen to podcasts using the YouTube app.

So fine, we'll put it up there or they'll watch it. They like to have it on or whatever. But the numbers like views is incredibly fickle, right? Like if I overwrite our YouTube guys, like change that word. That'll be like 10,000 less people will watch it. It's crazy. Like podcasting, I'm used to podcasting books and email newsletter where like every person who is consuming your stuff is hard one, but then they're just going to consume your stuff.

It's like I have this many people who will read my newsletter and it took a long time to build them up and they'll read it every time I write it, you know, or I have like this many readers who will buy my new book when it comes out or we have our podcast numbers are very stable. You know, it's hard one. There's no algorithms, but it's stable. YouTube is mad. It's wild west. You just be like, we have videos that'll have 600,000 views, you know, and then other ones like nothing.

And also you'll, you'll look in this world. I guess we have to give more credit to our YouTube guys. I'll look at really popular podcasters like Mel Robbins. And they're like, yeah, we're putting just huge. Massive podcast. Number one podcast this week actually on the Apple charts. I've never even heard of that podcast before. I'm going on it. I don't know if I'm supposed to talk about that before.

I may or may not be going on it. We can edit it out. Yeah, I guess it's okay. I don't know if it's a secret or not. But like her YouTube page, her show is very popular. She puts her episodes on YouTube like we do. Maybe there's just like a little bit of thumbnail title stuff that's different. No, it just almost no views. Like we're crushing those videos, even though her audience is probably five X our audience. So YouTube is man.

put stuff on it but it's like posting ghost it's a hard world to make to make your main world um but it has that appeal of you never know there's this algorithmic lottery right? You know, with podcasts, it's just brutal. It's like, no one listened to my podcast. Now five people downloaded it. Now seven people downloaded. It's brutal, right? And there's no way that that's going to change fast. YouTube, it's always like, you never know.

There could be some virality thing. I could get a million people could look at this. And I think that keeps people locked in. This is kind of a divergence. We've kind of, we've gone off. We've gone from our digital knowledge or category to our attention economy category, but we'll bring it back. All right. We got some good questions to go through. But first, I want to briefly talk about one of our sponsors. In particular, I want to talk about our friends at Cozy Earth.

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$100. All right, Jesse, let's move on to some questions. The first question is from Joe, but before I ask that, I have a quick question of my own. Now that you don't wear the traditional podcast shirt, are you ever going to wear that shirt again? I don't know why. I've just been in a t-shirt mood recently. I'll tell you what. I would like to get a new set of podcast shirts, but I don't know what they're going to be.

I was going to ask you offline, but I was like, the audience might be curious. Yeah. I mean, I've been in a t-shirt mode, but I do need, we should have like a giant selection show about this. I want to find, I just haven't got around to it. Got it. I want, I want a new podcast. I don't want to stick with t-shirts because I feel like it's such like a Silicon Valley cliche when like men in their forties and fifties are like wearing

too many t-shirts and like formal settings, you know? Um, I couldn't wear a t-shirt in here cause you run hot and I run cold and I'd just be freezing. I know. Like I am. like slightly on the warm side of like normal right now. And I'm sure it's pretty cold in here. Yeah. Yeah. I run hot. Yeah. So I don't, I don't want to, I'm probably not going to stick with the t-shirts, but I got to find, I don't know. I want to, I want to upgrade the look of the show. So I'm thinking about it. I don't know.

Okay. Probably I'm, I'm watching cause I'm doing a lot of PT right now and I've discovered like, Oh, as everyone else knows, you can watch like dumb shows while you exercise, especially with like stretches or whatever. And I'm watching like all the shows on Netflix. Uh, I'm watching the Netflix documentary on the history of the TV show, American gladiators. So I'm thinking, is that any good? Well, I think what I should be wearing is an American gladiator. One of the deep cut onesies.

like nitro or malibu wore on that show i have to lift a few more weights all right what's our first question all right first question from joe you commented on justin sung's youtube video last month He's big on mind mapping. In How to Become a Straight-A Student, the intro says, I promise you won't find any mention of the Cornell note-taking method, mental map diagrams, or any other optimal learning technique. What is your opinion?

Well, I mean that's an interesting quote you bring up there from the beginning of How to Become a Straight-A Student. That book came out in 2006, and I actually remember writing that introduction because at the time, I was looking at other… Not just student advice books but sort of online collections of student advice from university student resources websites or what have you. And things were starting to get a little out of control. Like the –

number of systems and the complexity of systems were really expanding. And my whole unique selling proposition when I wrote that book is that I was a recent graduate, like a graduate in 2004. I wrote that book. largely in 2005. And so I was grounded in the reality of college life when I was thinking about that. And I was like, this is crazy. This is gonna take way too long.

No one is going to take notes with multiple columns and go back through and then write the clarification and then go back through there and try to put this into some sort of structure. There's all of this research, which I thought was kind of silly, where they said yes. If you do this like incredibly time-consuming, super structured note-taking, you understand the material better. Sure. But it takes forever and no one's going to do it. And so no one does.

So my whole thing with that book is like let's get down to what actually works. Let's get every unnecessary piece of friction out of the system so that you're spending as much time as possible just on like the actual core. cognitive activity that is best preparing you for your goal which is like doing well on this test like we get in physical activity you know what are the actual things that matter for the muscle development and like let's focus on that you know

And so that's what I thought the problem was with that world back then, and I was trying to simplify it. So no, I was never a fan of these more advanced study techniques. So because of that, I've never been a fan of things like mental mapping. I don't mind it. Like if you like making mental maps, it's fine, right? You do you. I don't think it's a bad thing. But most professional thinkers I know don't use these sort of complicated thought organization techniques.

They don't use mental maps. They don't have Zettelkasten systems. They take in a lot of information. They trust their brain. Their brain is the best mental map producer and Zettelkasten organizer there is. Ideas stick.

They keep recurring and they say, okay, I'm going to take that idea and I'm going to work on it. For professional thinkers, I say this all the time on the show, the hardest thing, the thing that requires all the effort and help is not the ideas. It's the transforming those ideas into something.

of sufficient quality that it is shareable and interesting to the world. That's where all the time goes in. That's where the software matters. That's where the systems matters. That's where like time management matters. It takes forever. That's where it matters if you're using Scrivener versus Microsoft Word.

That's where all of the rubber is hitting the proverbial road is the taking the idea and turn it into something you can share and that people care about. The ideas itself is like the easy part. Now, I was thinking about this like when I write articles for The New Yorker. Yeah, we come up with ideas. I don't know. I'll have an idea. An editor will write me what about this. We dismiss both of them. One kind of clicks like that makes sense. Like that's not the hard part.

The hard part then is like how do we turn that into a 2,000-word piece up to the caliber of New Yorker? Now that is you're going to sweat bullets, and that's where all this stuff matters. So no, I'm not against these type of systems, but I don't buy that. these systems unlock more creativity or more efficiency or productivity when it comes to professional idea production. Keep your system stupid. Keep your output great. All right, who do we have next? Next question is from Kara.

How do you figure out the thing that really matters for developing career capital? Or maybe it's about optimizing for one to two qualities, but still having satisfactory performance in many others. It's such a key question, and it's so hard. It's so hard. All right. So let me give you a couple points about this. One, where you say optimizing one or two qualities but still have satisfactory performance and many others. This is really important. The foundation.

To any career capital strategy, so any strategy of using rare and valuable skills as leverage to shape your career to be better for you. Any strategy like this, you need a foundation. where you're on the ball, meaning you do the things you say you're going to do and you do them at a reasonable level of quality. That is the table stakes.

for any sort of interesting career capital strategy within a larger organization. People trust if they ask you to do something that you are not going to forget it. It will get done. And the quality will be good. You're not going to say like, look, I just want to get this off my plate and this is sort of.

inappropriate quality, but I'm just going to put it out there anyways. That's not my problem. You take responsibility. You get it done. You get it done well. Even if that means in the moment, like, oh, shoot, I really have to scramble here because I don't know how to do this right. That's not about being fantastic at a single skill. That's just a foundational skill level. You have that foundational skill level. Now that organization wants you. You are valuable.

You are not a negative thing. You're a positive thing. So that has to be the table stakes. And that's really much more about organization. You have full capture. You do multi-scale planning. You're just on the ball with what's going on, what you need to do. who you're waiting to hear back for all that sort of boring organizational type strategy, how to organize yourself in digital era knowledge work, get that in place first. Now you're invaluable and they don't want to lose you.

The next step is let me take a skill, a singular skill or one or two skills, like you say, that has like really unambiguous high value. And let me start developing those. And then that's where you really begin to become so good they can't ignore you. But you've got to do that on a foundation of being reliable. You're not going to drop the ball and produce quality work. Because if not, here's a mistake a lot of people get into.

is they say, I'm going to obsess about getting awesome at this skill. But otherwise, I'm dropping the ball left and right. And I'm annoying and annoying people. They're not going to give you dispensation to keep working on that skill. They're not going to reward you for that skill. They're going to say, stop working on that skill. What I need from you now is that if I email you about this thing, I don't have to follow up 50 times. I don't want to hear the excuses.

Right? So you have to lay that foundation before you build the singular rare and valuable skill. Second part of your question is how do you find that skill? It's so hard. We don't talk about this enough.

Because knowledge work is so messy and ambiguous and we sort of just like jump on laptops and give each other Slack handles and begin sending out Zoom invites and no one really ever talks about like what is your job and how do we measure it and what are you trying to do and what does success look like?

It's so ambiguous and messy so much. We have so many different roles. There's so many different things we're expected to do. And it's so informal how we pass this around that it is not easy in many knowledge work jobs to figure out what would make me invaluable. What is the most important skill here? It is hard to figure that out. But it is really worth doing so. And I suggest you actually treat your own job as if you're a business journalist writing about your particular industry sector.

You got to look, you got to talk, you got to talk to people, you got to take people out for coffee, people who are more successful. What is it that made you successful? Walk them through their career transitions for every promotion they got up. What was at the core of it? What did they do that made them valuable? Look for examples. Here's someone from this other company that we really want to hire. Why are we talking about them that way?

Who is really favored within my team? Why are they really favored? What is it that they do that is valuable? You have to be doing research on your own job to begin to build hypotheses about what you think is really valuable. And that is really important because if you don't do that, here's what ambitious people do who don't do the work of actually studying their own job. They write their own stories.

You will write your own story. Ambitious people do this all the time. You will write your own story about what you want to be important. And then you'll go spend two years doing that and discover at the end, no one cares.

You've got to figure out the reality. We call this evidence-based planning is the term we use. You've got to figure out the reality of what matters. You might not like what you discover, but you've got to figure out the reality of what matters, and it can be hard to figure it out. But if you do, it's like a superpower.

Because now other people are trying to distinguish themselves through pseudo productivity or answering emails faster or just trying to do more things or pursuing random projects or kissing up to the boss. You're over here.

mastering linear algebra because you're realizing if you could do some sort of customization of language models, it could make you... a hundred x more valuable to this team they could stop hiring etc etc and you have evidence that this is what matters and when you pull that trigger they're like okay you are now like very important to us sure you can go live you know in

by the ocean and come in once a week and we have this weird setup but like yes like you're making you're doing the steps actually matter all right so carry me just to that's a long answer to a short question but

Build a foundation of being responsible and delivering quality. Then do a lot of research on your own job like a journalist to figure out what matters. And then build that skill. And then the final step is take that out for a ride. Customize and shape your experience to be what resonates for you. That is how great jobs are formed. All right. What do we got next? Next question is from Lisa. What's your view on Daniel Immerwar's review of multiple books on the supposed attention crisis?

The author seems to base this conclusion largely in the claim that people who fret over ruined attention are elitist members of the knowledge class. Well, I like Daniel. A big article in The New Yorker recently. So a fellow New Yorker writer. I like Daniel. He's a very good writer. I didn't love this particular piece. Felt a little bit like contrarianism for the sake of contrarianism. Here's the problem.

Here's the problem, I think, with the core argument there. And I should say I'm biased because I think I was flagged in that article. One of my books was flagged as like an example of this class of books. So clearly I'm coming from a place of bias. But his main claim is. The concerns about attention and diminishing attention are being engineered by elitists like me because we're upset that people are paying less attention to our stuff and paying attention to like the new stuff on new media.

I think that's a bit of a nonsensical claim because here's the problem. Everyone is feeling it, right? If this was something where the average person is like, I don't. I haven't really thought about this, but, oh, you're telling me this is a problem. That's interesting. Like, are we losing our attention? You know, if it was something where most people did not have direct experience of this.

Sure. Like, yeah, I don't know. Maybe it's a problem. Maybe it's not. Right. But the attention issue, this idea that I have a hard time paying attention. Everybody is feeling it. That's the problem with this argument. Everyone is already feeling it. Everyone is already feeling it at their work. I can't keep my focus on this memo I'm writing for more than a couple minutes. They see it with their kids. I mean, their kids.

can't get their eyes off of their phones for more than six seconds. Of course it's a problem. I see it right here. The teacher's like, this is what I'm seeing in the classroom. It's like... Every moment of your life, I feel increasingly drawn from it. I went back recently. I wrote this thing for my book that got cut, but I have all this research I did. And I was going back and tracing the...

The reaction to the Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows, right? So this is kind of called out in Daniel's article as one of the core texts of the attention problem movement. Nicholas Carr writes this book, The Shallows, which – and this is in – oh god, I should know. 2009 probably. 2009 I think.

So he writes this book, the subtitles, like what the internet is doing to our brain. And this was like the first book to really call out a major journalist writing and saying, I think the internet is changing our attention. I'm struggling to read books. I think something is going on here, and it gets a little bit into the neuroscience of why that might be. The book was a surprise finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction writing, losing out only to Siddhartha Mutaji's.

I think his book on the gene or maybe the improv all maladies, one of his books. But it was, it was like this big success. I went and cataloged the elite contrarian pushback Dakar. Which there was. Like right when that book came out, we had this sort of similar style pushback. There's a review in The Guardian I called out where they were being very sarcastic.

Like, well, I'm looking at all the footnotes in Carr's book, and he doesn't seem to be having... that much trouble reading because look at all these books he's citing and then it was like what we should do is chop up the pages in his book and shuffle them around and read them out of order like the internet is right now because honestly that would probably be better

Steven Pinker in the New York Times had like a real negative review of it. He's like, Twitter is making me a better scientist. And he's like, if you're having a problem, it was very quaint. If you're having a problem, that's on you. Check Twitter less often. He was really dismissive of the book. Clay Shirky had that same year one of his books. He had this whole series of books in that early 2000s, late 90s about…

The Internet is this like utopian techno solutionist take on the Internet. And Shirky is like the. Internet is at the core of the Arab Spring, which was happening concurrently with this. It's bringing democracy to the world. It's like this utopian force. All this pushback happened to Carr's book. Then you trace this out. You pull this thread out a little bit longer.

By 2014, you have Clay Shirky talking about, oh my god, I have to ban phones and laptops from my classroom because my kids can't – they can't even keep their attention on more than a thought. It's like completely – sapping their brains. The idea that this was like a utopian force for changing the world, that had gone away by this point. There was like this almost universal acceptance at that point. Actually, you're right.

I'm really distracted. I think this is a problem. And what had changed between 2009 and 2014 was the mobile revolution. So it was social media moving on the smartphones. And then attention engineering really took off. Because attention engineering was not as big of a thing when it was on the web-based browser, right? But once it was on the phone, it was how do we get people to look at these things? And everyone was feeling it.

So there's this contrarian pushback to that idea that then dissipated based on people's lived experience with the phone, and then it became kind of accepted. So it's kind of interesting now, another 10 years after that, that we're trying to go back to contrarianism, but it's too late. Everyone is feeling it now.

Everyone is feeling it. There are other types of things where this type of contrarianism makes sense because, again, typically it is things where it's not – you have to be told there's a problem or the problem is narrow. You have to be told. the meat you're eating is leading to heart disease. Like I kind of have to be told that someone has to be looking at the data. Like I can't directly feel arthrosclerosis.

growing in my heart while I eat meat. Someone has to kind of like tell that to me. And then maybe like someone else could come in and say that's overblown and looking at the data, but not with attention reduction in the digital era because everyone directly and clearly feels it.

It's why when, for example, you survey teenagers increasingly, and this is international, you're increasingly getting these surveys for teenagers saying, I really don't like my phone and social media. It's making me anxious and distracted, and I hate it. Huge supermajorities of the teenagers.

who are surveying these surveys or saying that. You can't find a single person who works in like an office environment who won't tell you, I hate how distracted I am or I'm struggling to keep my concentration. So I think we're past the point of saying, No, no, this is just like a small group of people are complaining because people are looking at social media instead of their books. I can't flatter myself.

Not that many people know who I am. Most people who will tell you, I look at my phone too much and I feel distracted all the time. don't read elite people. They don't read me and Daniel and the New Yorker. They don't listen to my pod. They're not in part of some like elite conversation. They were never reading my stuff anyways, but they'll still tell you, yeah, I'm distracted all the time. So.

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

usually at like the bottom, I think that'll say like appeared in the February, whatever issue with the title and it'll give like the print title. Okay. Yeah. That's usually you can tell. All right. Who do we got next? Next question is from Alan. I personally benefited a lot from mentoring in my professional career, whether formally or informally. I even consider podcasts such as yours some form of coaching or mentoring.

In your view, where does mentoring or coaching fit in the professional development of knowledge workers? I think there should be a lot more coaching in knowledge work, right? I mean, there's a lot of ambiguity, which means there is a...

Huge inefficiencies that can be exploited or taken, you know, leveraged. I don't say exploited seems negative, but like there's huge inefficiencies where if you're more on the ball, you know, the stuff that matters, the techniques that matters. There's huge room for you to grow. and succeed. Different than in an existing field that has like a really clear competitive structure like chess. It's just hard and everyone is like training in more or less the same way.

And it's just really hard. You can only get better really slowly or whatever. And knowledge work, it's such the wild west of cognitive activity. And everyone's like on email all day and all this wasted cognitive resources. There is a lot of benefit to coaching, but there's not.

There's not a ton that happens. I think there should be more. So the way I see it, and there is some that exist. So let me kind of walk through this. The way I see it is there's sort of a hierarchy of coaches from like as you move up. The levels here, things get more effective and more expensive and more rare. All right. So like the base level of knowledge work coaching as it exists today, I think of things like this podcast or books.

So it's not actually someone talking one-on-one to you, but is giving specific advice about, I think about how this world works and here's how it works and here's what matters and here's what doesn't. So like this podcast, as we talked about at the beginning of today's episode.

One of the three big issues we talk about under the umbrella of conflicts and mismatches with the modern digital environment is work in the age of digital communication technology, right? So like this is a form of coaching. So you should start. at least at this level. Read books, listen to podcasts. The next level, and this is kind of new that this exists, is this idea of

It's like one-on-one coaching, but the price is reduced from high-end one-on-one coaching because it's delivered to the internet. So this is like I've been talking about done daily because I know this is the guys over at My Body Tutor who are longtime friends of the show.

They have this service, dondaily.com, where you have a coach who checks in with you daily. They use my sort of methodologies, roughly speaking, of multi-scale planning and full capture, but you're checking in with a coach to help you on those plans and give you some accountability each day.

That is the sort of next level up. Now you actually have a coach, but because it's delivered online, it's like cheaper than traditionally what it takes to have like a dedicated coach. All right. So that's kind of like a new thing.

And I'm kind of excited about that space because I think it's more accessible. The level above that is there are a lot of people out there. A lot of knowledge don't know this. There's a lot of people out there that have dedicated coaches that they like weekly have sessions with that are.

business coaches and they're just helping you um be better at your job or be better in your business like this is very common it's like friend of the show brad stolberg like he does this he's he's like a very well-known executive coach. And don't try to sign up because I think his waiting list is a mile long. Very popular. But if you're one of his clients, once a week you're talking to him and you're getting like...

So that's like the next level up because Brad's like a very well-known thinker in the space or whatever. So that's going to be more expensive than something like done daily. And then you have at the final level is like the high-end executive coaches.

where, you know, I have a fortune 500 company, I'm paying my CEO $50 million a year in salary and stock options. You better believe I want that person operating on full cylinders. And we're going to have these high end executive coaches are, you know.

$100,000, $200,000 a year. But if you're paying $50 million for a CEO, you're like, yeah, I want someone who all they do is think about how do you succeed running a company so that we have no inefficiencies there. You don't have to learn these things from scratch.

There's even like the super high level, super high level executive coach like Tony Robbins used to coach Bill Clinton. Really? Yeah. So there used to be like these super high level, you know, like money is no object. I think all of that is great. And. More people should avail themselves of this coaching pyramid. I think everyone in my audience who likes my digital productivity advice, like you're already on this pyramid. You're getting coaching. And if you know people who are talented.

but are like overwhelmed or struggling in their job, like get them on the bottom of this period. Then where things get interesting is where more people move up and say, okay, I'm now in a position where my business success is on the line. or I just got a promotion that is, you know, a six figure promotion. I really got to succeed here. I'm going to move up a level and maybe I'm going to go to like the done daily level and have like an online coach to make sure I'm just like keeping.

things well organized because i i do not want to let this slip up this is like a six-figure proposition or maybe i'm going to go up a level over that and hire like a brad stolberg in my life because like this is the difference between This multimillion dollar company succeeding or going bankrupt. This is the difference between me keeping this new like $350,000 a year job or like having my salary cut in half. Yeah, I'm going to pay the 500 or the 2000 or whatever it is a month to keep that.

So this is something that we should think about more because knowledge work is complicated and ambiguous, which means there's a lot of opportunity for you to make big strides and separate yourself from the pack if you have wisdom and guidance. But also without that wisdom and guidance, you can drown. So I'm a big believer in coaching. There's a cool article that Sanjay – not Sanjay Gupta. This was – who wrote the – he's another New Yorker writer.

He wrote the checklist manifesto. I'll look it up. Do you have a coach? Yeah, I do. I have a coach who specializes in the business side of creative work. She helps me with... thinking through like deep media and the stuff we do and how to try to make that fit. Alul Gawande. Atul Gawande. Oh, man, I can't believe I forgot Atul's name. Another New Yorker writer. He had this cool New Yorker piece years ago about in surgery.

Then discovering like for doctors, like having a coach that's like, I'm going to coach you like on this particular procedure makes people much better. So anyways, I'm a big, I'm a big believer in coach.

uh, and coaching. Yeah. So I got a coach that helps me once a month. Um, it's like all she does, it'll be, for example, like a movie director she works with. Right. Or, um, screenwriters like creatives who have these like organizational business challenges as well like i have to figure out how to not just do the creative work but like keep the business around it or how do i make this fit

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

Because like this is big business. There's like a lot on the line. There's a lot that matters, you know, and this is like a line item. It's not in the scheme of things, not that big of an expense. All right. What do we got next? We have our corner. Slow productivity corner. Let's hear that theme music. So once a week, we have a question that relates to my last book.

I shouldn't say last book. People think I'm done writing. Most recent book. My most recent book. Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. I always get that wrong these days. So we do a question about that each week and we call it the slow productivity corner. All right. What's our slow productivity corner question of the week? It's from Sterling. But real quick, some fans have been requesting a for the year end.

anniversary a slow productivity themed episode can we play the music for every question if so i'm on board all right sterling says In episode 336, you mentioned that starting up companies isn't compatible with slow productivity. I was wondering, could it be possible to reconcile the two or is it just not feasible? I tend to think of Paul Jarvis and his company of one model where a more minimalist approach can be successful. Well, we got to get Sterling a copy of the book.

Because I talk in depth about Paul Jarvis in Slow Productivity. So for those who don't know, who haven't read the book or heard me talk about him before, Paul Jarvis wrote this cool book called Company of One. And his whole premise was... If you build like a company around your skill. So actually this can be an interesting comparison to our Brandon Sanderson discussion from before because Brandon did not read this book. That's for sure.

He says, if you've kind of built the business around your skill, like Paul was a web developer programmer. As you get better, the pressures in the world of business will be to grow. There's a demand for your services. You only have so much time. Hire more people and grow. Because if you can grow a business of a certain size, maybe 10, 15 years down the line, you can sell that business and get a nice payday out of it.

Jarvis' company of one model is, no, no, no, no. If you're getting better and there's demand for your work, raise your prices. Don't hire more people. Just become more expensive, raise your prices and double your income, or as he would recommend, raise your prices and have your working time. And he's saying that actually could be.

directly more valuable than this like potential payday 15 years from now. Like this was his model of like, I'm becoming really good at web development. So why don't I double my prices and cut my hours in half and only work a couple of days a week? And he moved to Vancouver Island over by Tolfino. His wife was a surfer. There's a surf break there. They have greenhouses. I talk about in the book, it's all sort of rural and pastoral. And his life is pretty cool because that's what he wanted to do.

So he said, okay, you can cash in your skill to make your life more flexible or to try to make more money down the line. That's the company of one model. This is a model that I then extrapolate in slow productivity, right? Because it comes in. the chapter on the principle of obsessing over quality. So there's three principles of slow productivity, do fewer things, work at a natural pace.

And obsess over quality. So in that obsess over quality chapter, I was like, okay, why is this important? Why is important to obsess over quality? And I said, there's two effects that happen when you obsess over the quality of doing the things you do best.

The first thing that's going to happen, if you obsess over quality, busyness is going to seem superfluous. The world of pseudo productivity will become increasingly intolerable. When what you care about is doing something really well, you begin to look at your inbox. with wrath in your eyes. You begin to look at like a busy calendar full of Zoom meetings as a tragic waste. So the obsession over quality makes all the stuff I talk about in the first two principles

seem logical, inevitable. Like I don't need, that's not how I'm, I'm not valuable through activity. I'm valuable through doing this and this is getting in the way of this. The second thing that made obsessing over quality useful though, I argue, is that it then can give you the leverage required to actually start removing that other stuff from your life.

So it makes you begin to feel dismayed towards busyness while simultaneously giving you the leverage needed to actually reduce busyness. And that's where I talked about Paul Jarvis, that as you get better at something, you get more options. You can say I'm just going to do this because it's valuable to you. I don't want to do these other things anymore.

You can double your rates and reduce your hours. In the big organization, you can say, I want to trade accessibility for accountability. Hold me accountable. I'm going to produce this stuff. Look at the dollars I bring in the door, but I'm not doing meetings. And like, all right.

We'll make that fair trade. So as you get good, you get more leverage to actually simplify your life at the same time that getting good makes you want to simplify your life. I talked to someone at a tech company not long ago. Maybe I mentioned this in the book.

Or he said, yeah, we drown in meetings, except the sales staff. They're exempt from meetings. Because the sales staff has a big number that follows each of them around. I brought this much money into the company. And the sales staff is able to say,

This is what is unambiguously valuable to our company. Just hold me accountable to that. If I'm not bringing the money, then you can fire me. But if I am, then let me do that. And these meetings bring that number down. So you guys have your meetings. I'm going to go bring in the money.

And the tech company allows them to do that because it brings in a lot more money. If they have these people on Zoom calls and Teams meetings on Slack all day, those numbers would go down. And so that's more important. So as you obsess over quality... you gain more freedom to simplify or slow down your life. So yes, Paul Jarvis's book is great. I recommend Company of One and I recommend that general model. You know, as you get better, you could grow or you could slow.

And sometimes the slow option is going to be the good one. We should have Paul on the show at some point. Yeah. We can find him in the woods up there. The woods up in. So his book was edited by the editor who. edited So Good They Can't Ignore You and who acquired Deep Work. Okay. Same editor. All right. What do we got next? We have a call. Oh, let's hear this.

Hey, Cal. My name is Antonio, and I'm calling from my reading spot up in Griffith Park in the hills above Los Angeles. I have a 15-year-old son, and I did not give him a cell phone until ninth grade. and the cell phone that he got is a dumb phone where he can text and get music and browse maps, but he can't do anything else on it. It has been great, and it has also ruined his life, he has said.

All of his friends have iPhones. I feel like it's part of a fashion accessory as well as a device. And he is definitely going to get one when he's 16. And I'm wondering, do you have any advice for this transition for a kid whose life I've ruined? um to when he gets his cell phone for the first time a smartphone for the first time and i'm also wondering how you have navigated that with your own children as they get into i think they're probably middle school by now

Any advice you or Jesse Skeleton have for me and my son would be greatly appreciated. Well, I think Jesse Skeleton would just make bones puns if you were to ask Jesse Skeleton for your advice. So he would say 16 is the right age for a phone. There's no make no bones about it. Then he would just stare at the camera. So we should be lucky.

That Jesse Skelton's not here. All right. So first of all, you're doing the right thing. The research indicates that a – I call it the John Height model. This is what Height proposes. But the Height model is – no smartphone till high school, no social media till 16. Those are often separated by a little bit, like you get to high school before that. So smartphone, wait till high school, social media, wait till 16.

Really what you're trying to go for here is to make sure that they get through certain developmental milestones before they get this big influence of attention economy apps on their social development and their attention. So if you're waiting until 16, this is going to be like a. post-puberty most likely, also post-social identity formation. And it's just going to have much less of an effect than getting this at like 12 or 13.

And I think the research is pretty clear on that. He curses it now. He'll thank you in a few years. I mean, I hear this again and again from my undergrads. The undergrads I work with now whose parents did something similar, they thank me now in college separated from a few years like, man, I'm so glad I didn't have to get stuck in that world until I was X years old. So he will thank you later even if he's cursing now.

Big picture, the solution to this is just a collective action problem. And I really feel like we're at the cusp of this change. We're really at this cusp of like your situation now where it feels unusual. The decision you're making among the peers of your kid to the place where that's going to be a common behavior, if not the majority, like the plurality of behavior that like, yeah, a large percent of the kids at your school.

Or getting a phone in high school, social media at 16. I mean, this is just starting to become more culturally accepted. Once it's more widespread, then you don't have the collective action problem, and it's not going to be as much of a pull. or lift from you as the parent. If you're a parent right now and your kids are younger, but you're thinking they're coming up to this age now or they're in an age where some kids are getting this.

Try to find if people locally are doing something like the wait to eight pledge, which says we will wait until after eighth grade to give phones to our kids. It helps if you have a group of people and you can say to your kid.

I signed a pledge and I'm one of 20 families that has made the same pledge and that's what we're doing. So no, you can't just argue like I made this situation individually and you're going to convince me it's wrong. You're arguing against this whole community of people who've made a similar pledge. In terms of my own kids, yeah, my oldest is 12. So, you know, he is as likely to get a smartphone this year as he is to get a commercial-grade crossbow.

I would say those are about equally likely. He is as likely to be Snapchatting on his Android by the end of this school year as he is to be driving a Kawasaki Ninja motorcycle. he's going to get a phone in high school. He'll get social media at 16. And again, that's going to become more and more standard. It is becoming more and more standard. And your kid, I'm telling you, he's going to thank you in a couple of years. Like, you know what? Actually, that was great. I'm kind of glad you did that.

All right, what do we got here? Oh, case study. It's where people write into jessie at calnewport.com with their own stories of putting the type of advice we talk about on the show into action in their own life. Today's case study comes from Kyle. Kyle says, I'm a master student in biology, studying how monarch butterflies respond to strong winds during their overwintering period. My research involves analyzing thousands of butterfly photos taken at regular intervals.

paired with wind condition data. Boy, that's funny. When people think about being like a graduate student in biology, they think about like Alan Grant. in jurassic park like out in the badlands digging up velociraptors and now you're looking at pictures of butterflies all day long um all right back to the story i've reached the stage where i need to convert these photos into quantitative data to draw meaningful conclusions about their behavior

After an unsuccessful search for both free and paid software to process my massive image collection, I decided to take on the challenge of building my own tool. With some background in Python and R programming, and a passion for AI, I discovered coding tools like Windsurf, Cursor, and Klein for VS Code that go beyond simple chatbots. These tools can read your entire codebase, make targeted edits, and help create new files when needed.

Using just natural language prompting, I was able to build exactly what I needed in about a week. It feels like I've created a custom woodworking jig, a specialized tool that makes the real work more efficient and elegant. I was inspired to share this story after hearing your recent episode about AI. You predicted that non-computer scientists would soon have expanded abilities to create software, and my experience confirms this.

While I'm more technically inclined than many of my biology peers, I'm not a software engineer. My image labeling tool feels like a glimpse into the future. AI has dramatically boosted my confidence to tackle technical challenges and I expect this effect will only grow stronger.

I have attached a screenshot of the software to give you a sense of what I built. Ooh, let's take a look at this. All right, so for those who are watching, instead of just listening, we'll bring this up on the screen here. That's interesting.

Yeah, that's better. Let's see. There it is, full screen for those who are watching. Okay, it's cool. So there's a picture of trees in black and white, and then some of the, it's gridded, and some of the squares are colored. God, is he identifying butterflies in there? Yeah. Wow. Or his program is. That's like a non-trivial piece of software that he produced without coding ability. Yeah, that is, this is my argument about AI is there is...

One strain of discourse, it's hype-oriented in the sense of, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Look at this thing. This massive model is going to do everything for you and make 10% of the workforce obsolete by tomorrow. And it's a good attention-grabbing headline.

Every prediction that has been made from that strain of discourse, though, has been like slow or come to fruition or nonexistent at all. I mean, right from the beginning of ChatGPT, it was like we're months away from X. We're months away from Y. And like the X and Y. impacts didn't happen. So there's this weird gap that's happening in AI development where AI capabilities keeps hitting every optimistic prediction that people make. It's hitting it.

Well, soon it'll be able to do this. Hits it. But it can't do this, but it will be soon. Hits it. But the predictions about impacts have not been panning out. These jobs are all going to go away. Haven't. Homework apocalypse. The end of homework as we know it. Not really the case. It's going to make it obsolete to teach like intro computer. So these type of impact predictions, those have been way less accurate than the capability. So there's a gap.

between ai capability and ai impact and the reason is like my argument about this is because there is a time-consuming complicated step that actually bridges this gap between capabilities and impact, which is the product market fit. Actually developing the tools that work, that actually solve a real problem for a real group of people. And this is sort of painstaking and distributed.

So you have a couple of big companies building massive models, but then you have to have a lot of companies trying to build these tools that use them that are much more specialized and 90% of them are going to fail and 10% are going to work and 1% is going to catch us off guard.

And be a killer app. Like there's going to be that 1% that is the email to AI world and suddenly it spreads like really far. But that takes time because you have to spin up companies and build products and adjust the products and get. market feedback, and then try to spread that product through the market. The hope of companies like OpenAI was that their model with just a raw chat interface would be enough to have high impact, but it's not. It's the type of thing we're seeing here.

where Kyle was able to build a custom butterfly tool. And he otherwise wouldn't have been able to do it. It's these type of impacts. And he was using tools that are built for VS Code, so for Visual Studio. These were bespoke programming-related tools built on the big models. That's what it actually is going to take to get the impact, and that just takes more time. So the impact is coming from AI, but it's not going to be delivered through a single tool.

And it's going to be the aggregation, in my opinion, it's going to be the aggregation of many dozens of much more narrow impacts. And over time, that's going to add up. It was similar to the Internet that there was like all of these.

little things and innovations to begin to add it up these companies are doing this those companies are doing this over here they're doing this and all that sort of added up until you look back and said wow the way like our economy executes has transformed pretty fundamentally but it was

a hundred different more niche products and applications that went and spread that made that happen. It wasn't just here's Netflix or here's Netscape and the world was changed. That's what I think is happening here. And one of the form factor of the tools I think we're going to see first having notable impacts over niches is like what Kyle talked about.

I've talked about this in some talks I've been giving recently and on the show that one of the early places we're going to see impact is raising the capabilities within specific software packages of the average user. So now like the average user of a software can get their skill ability with that software closer to like an expert level without actually having to go through the long cycle training and becoming an expert. That's going to unlock a lot of productivity, right?

Like an expert in Microsoft Excel can do a lot more with that than I can. If you give me a tool that's AI natural language-based that allows me to approximate a lot of what an expert can do, I'm unlocking a lot of productivity. and you multiply that across lots of people using lots of tools, this is going to be the place I think at first we're going to see the productivity gains, much more so than here's a robot that is going to take over these people's desks. Coding is one of the big places.

I hear from more and more people who are able to build bespoke, useful applications. You couldn't release this thing. I'm sure it's buggy and the options are limited and it's probably not that elegant. But building bespoke applications for things you need to do.

That is an example of where we're going to get this initial productivity boost from AI. So yeah, I think it's a good example. I'm thinking about doing an in-depth episode, Jesse, with an AI expert. Do it. I guess our audience cares about this. Yeah. On YouTube. Well, in-depth is bonus anyway. It's bonus anyways. YouTube, they do not like AI content. Really? Yeah. When we talk AI, it gets destroyed. No one cares. Because all the YouTube AI content is like.

The Terminator is literally at your house right now. Here is how you can protect yourself from the Terminator that is at your house right now. It is about to start shooting through the windows. Here is how to use the mattress as a bulletproof shield. But the Terminator was back in the 90s. That was way before AI.

Well, yes, but he traveled back in time. It took place in the future. He used a Neuralink, the Skynet Neuralink chip. Remember Terminator 2? They had to go and... find the chip and destroy it before they go yeah but that's like the content right now you can't compete with that on youtube if i'm like excuse me but um there are excel macro features that

you will now have access to in your data analysis if you use AI, and that's going to give you a 15% bump in your analysis productivity. And over here... You've got some like Jack guy in his cold plunge. Like the Terminator is coming for you now. How do you do jujitsu against the AI powered Terminators? Stay tuned. Can't compete with that on YouTube.

But I guess our podcast listeners care, I guess. Anyways, there's someone in mind, a specific well-known expert that wants to come to the show. I want to come to the show. So we'll work that out. All right. So stay tuned. Make them send a cold plunge. Make them send a cold plunge and we're going to flex. I don't know what else people talk about on... How do you bow hunt the AI Terminator? How do you use your bow hunt arrow? And drive a Cybertruck. From your Cybertruck. The AI Terminator can't...

puncture the bulletproof glass on your cyber truck. We could have so many more viewers, Jesse. All right. Let's get to where we have a tech corner coming up speaking of tech. But first, I want to talk about another sponsor. One of our oldest sponsors of this show is our friends at Grammarly. Here's the thing. Your time and expertise are valuable. And with professionals spending nearly half the work week on written communication.

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By popular demand, we want to do a tech corner. That's where I put on my computer science hat a little bit. We geek out about things that are happening in the world of technology and sometimes try to draw some lessons from that for the rest of us. Today I want to talk about an article from the IEEE Spectrum about our friend Alan Turing. I'm going to load this up here on the screen for those who are watching in addition to just listening.

I'm going to explain this to you, and then I'm going to connect it back to our initial deep dive. This would be some professional podcasting here. Here's the article, The Lost Story of Alan Turing's Secret, Delilah. So the set here, and I have a picture of his Delilah machine right here. The setting here is there is just an auction of these papers of Turing that have brought the light in a way that we didn't know much about before.

His efforts sort of contemporaneously with his work at Bletchley Park on breaking the German codes and the Enigma machine, but also they have another code. I think it's like SK or R. But basically his code-breaking work. Around that same time, and as that kind of wound down, he was also working on another top-secret project in the middle of the countryside in England where I think now is like their British equivalent of the NSA is out there.

He worked on this thing I have on the screen here, the Delilah, which is a voice encryptor. So I can talk, this encrypts my voice, and on the other end it's decrypted. So we didn't know much about this, but now we do. because of these papers. And the author of this article had been called in by the auction house to study the paper, so he knows all about it. This is a picture I have up here of a room with 50,000 kilograms worth of equipment.

This was the state of the art from that time for doing voice encryption. This was a setup for the SigSally system that Bell Labs did. And so what was amazing about Turing's work is... Right around that same time, he came up with a similar tool that was this big. And if you could see it on the screen, it's like a big briefcase. You could put it in a big backpack and carry it. So it's a cool story. If you get into it, here's what I want to point out.

I don't know how much I want to get into technical details. So there was a, let me geek out briefly. It's a tech corner. So he had been involved with not just cracking the German Enigma text code. So by text code, I mean an encrypted text. He also broke another German system or was involved in it called the SZ-42. Again, it was a text-based system, so you had text that you're encrypting. The architecture of that German system...

is how we do most sort of digital encryption today. So, you know, the way this German system worked is, I'm talking about the SC42 here, is you had a sequence of letters you wanted to send to someone else. And what you had was a box that generated pseudo-random characters, right? So like really what's happening here is like each letter is changed into a number. And then you have this electromechanical thing that was creating...

random numbers. I say pseudorandom though, because if you start with the same settings, it will always produce the same stream of numbers that seem pretty random. And then what you do, it's called a stream cipher. You add these together. So like I'm trying to send, you know, activate jesse skeleton as like my key command those are those letters if i was using a sd42 i'm generating random numbers and i'm adding a random number to each of those letters from activate jesse skeleton

If you know on the other end how I configured my thing that spit out the random numbers, you configure yours the same way. It spits out the same random numbers. You subtract them away, and you get the original message. That's actually how most...

cryptography works now on the internet. Like if you're communicating securely with a website, you have just a digital version of one of these things that spits out a bunch of random seeming numbers. And as long as the person on the other end, so like Amazon. has the same key you have, it can then create the same stream and take it off again, right? So these stream ciphers are very fast and it's what we use to encrypt most things. The problem, of course, is how do you share the key?

Because you and I have to have this – we have to set up our generator of random numbers the exact same. But if I tell you that value and someone else could see me telling you that value, I can't send it over the same channel. The way they had to do this back in World War II was like literally put these in pouches and send them to people, right? You would have a booklet to look up. Like on this day, at this time, here's the thing we use. The big breakthrough in internet-based…

cryptography is a public key encryption. So this was like the key breakthrough. This is like RSA technologies to RSA algorithm. Public key encryption is a way that I can encrypt something for you to read. Send it to you. No one can decrypt it except for you. Now, it's not very efficient. So I don't want to use this for my big message I want to send you.

So the big breakthrough in like internet cryptography was we use this very expensive method. It's called asymmetric encryption and public encryption just to trade our initial key to each other. And then we can set up our very fast stream ciphers the same. And then we can use that to communicate really fast.

So with public key encryption, you have a private key and a public key that are related. You can publish your public key. I can use your public key to encrypt something and send it to you, and only someone who knows your private key can unencrypt it. That's public key encryption.

That's in-depth my geekage. Anyways, the way that Turing's design worked is he said, great, we're going to take voice, which is sound waves, and we're going to break it up into little discrete timestamps, like a thousand times a second. And we're going to measure like what's the height of the sound wave at each of these points. We'll make that a number. We'll add a random number to that.

then we will, this will give us like a random looking sound wave. We'll send that like weird sounding sound wave across the radio channel or whatever. And on the other end, you subtract away those numbers from what you receive and then generate a new sound wave and it'll be the original talking back. So like, that's what he's doing. Okay. What was cool about this is if you read this article, so here's the lesson I want to draw on this. I'm not just geeking out.

Turing didn't know a lot about electrical engineering. And if you read this article, he was able to, here's like part of his lab notebook on the screen here. He just went out to this place, countryside. There's like an army barracks there and like a mess hall to eat at. And he had to spend months figuring out electrical engineering and doing these experiments. Like this experiment I have on the screen here is just taking a particular component.

And just taking data, let me run it like this and this, and how does this thing work? And was just teaching himself engineering, just spending months doing that. After about six months, someone else joined the project, Bailey. B-A-Y-L-E-Y, who is an accomplished engineer.

He began to give lessons to Turing, like, let me get you better up to speed about electrical engineering principles and how to solder things correctly. And Turing got better at that. And then Turing was able, after about a year of this, to mix his... really innovative mathematical capability with this sort of now reasonable engineering ability. And they built this really cool thing. I'm going to connect this back to the beginning of the show.

Because what was the British government doing here during World War II and the immediate aftermath? They were letting Turing cook. Go spend six months in the woods. Just doing experiments on these components and teaching yourself how to build machines because you're brilliant and you have these other skills.

He had all these mathematical skills that were relevant. He had encountered Claude Shannon during his time at Bell Labs and was able to use some of the mathematics that Shannon had innovated about sampling theory, and he was able to bring that back over here. You have the mathematics skills to do something cool.

a year figuring out the engineering. Take your time. Don't jump on Zoom meetings. Don't do email. Don't be busy. We don't know what you're doing over there. And come away building this really cool thing. And then after he built this Delilah box... Now he had all this electrical engineering know-how in addition to his abstract mathematical and logic know-how. What did he do post-war? He built some of the very first electronic computers. So he was able to put that skill to use.

building Britain's contributions to the world of early electronic computers, right? And he wasn't the first to build those. You know, it's not accurate to say he invented the computer, but he was in the mix because he had learned these skills. So anyways.

The nerd details about encryption are cool, but I love this bigger notion of like, people who have skills, just let them cook. And the return is so much bigger. You're getting so much more out of Alan Turing, just let him cook than if he had to be. responding to memos and going to meetings at the the war hq during the war we we need more need more of this of just letting people cook because they can produce stuff that is so high value

that any inconvenience of them not being very accessible, I think it's washed away. Two quick things. When you're talking about the crypto, it reminded me of Neil Stevenson's book, Cryptomicon. Have you read that? Sure, I have. Yeah, Turin's in that book. Yeah. Yeah. I actually, so the public key encryption algorithm that like made all of like internet encryption possible is RSA. And the R in that is Ron Rivest. And so when I was getting my doctorate at MIT, I TA'd for Ron.

In his network security class. But he's a cool guy. Because he left and started a company, RSA, to commercialize this thing. And they sold it for well over a billion dollars. And then he came back. But he was loaded. He came back because he loved being a professor. But he had really good Red Sox tickets. That's what I remember. That's what you would do in Boston if you make a billion dollars.

Get some socks tickets. He was a brilliant guy. I think he's still active. And then it turned out – so they made bank. And then it turned out that a researcher in the NSA had solved the same problem. In the 70s, but it was classified. He solved it. So we were using it within the NSA and stuff like that, but he couldn't talk about it. So then these academics came along and solved it later and then made bank.

And now it's known, like at least the other guy gets credit for discovering it. And then the other thing with cooking is a lot of people say in basketball, like let Steph cook. You know, Steph Curry was like cooking and hitting other shots. Yeah, because Bill Simmons always uses this terminology. Yeah. Yeah.

From like a physical standpoint, I can't think of, from like a physical discipline standpoint, these defined two ends of the wide spectrum would be like Steph Curry over here and Brandon Sanderson over here. Like, I wouldn't trust Sanderson to get the Breakaway 3. Let's put it that way. And I wouldn't trust Steph Curry to write 300,000 words about, you know, the Kingkiller Chronicles or whatever. But, uh-oh, wait a second.

I think King killer might be Patrick Rufus. Have I done it again? Oh, it starts again. It starts again. I didn't want to do too many of our. like super insider name of the wind jokes, because I was like, for the audience who like, like the eyes who see this on YouTube is going to be like, for shame, for shame. And like, that'll be the, they'll be so upset. And that'll be the end of us on YouTube.

So I was trying to be respectful. All right. That's all the time we have for today. Thanks for listening or watching. We'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply.

I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world. You got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.