Ep. 400: Should I Embrace “Slow Technology”?

If I had to use one word to describe modern digital tools, it would be fat. Now, whether we're talking about workplace communication or swarms of AI agents or even apps for ordering food, the focus always seems to be on reducing friction and increasing the options available to get people through whatever tasks they're thinking about. as quickly as possible. Now the speed of course has a a negative side effect.

It's exhausting. It reduces so much of our life to a a frantic blur of swipes and taps and clicks, all in a sort of never ending battle to keep up with the ceaseless barrage of incoming information. But what can we do? Going faster has to make us more productive, right? You see, there's a growing subculture of individuals who are embracing simpler technologies that offer less features.

and more friction. And they're not doing this as a political statement and they're not doing this because they're nostalgic, but instead because they think these more minimal tools actually makes them better at their work and makes their life more livable. I call this movement slow technology and it's what I want to talk about today.

Now to help us better understand it, we're gonna be joined by Amy Timberlake, who's an acclaimed best selling author of uh children's and middle grades books. Timberlake has won countless distinctions, including a Newberry Honor and an Edgar Award. Her titles have been named to

As far as I can tell, just about every best book of the year list in existence. So she knows what she's talking about. Now Timberlake came to my attention recently. Here's why I want to talk to her about slow productivity. She came to my attention when I discovered she had recently shifted to using a mechanical vintage typewriter for more and more of her writing and revision process.

So I really wanted to find out what was going on here. So in our conversation, uh, we talk about what is a succeed what does it take to succeed in that world of uh children's book writing, the details of her creative process and how it's evolved. And how she came to believe that using a mechanical typewriter was actually going to make her a better writer and a happier human. Spoiler alert, I kinda end this conversation.

about half serious about buying a typewriter myself, so beware about that. Um and then after our conversation, I'm gonna step back and I'm going to isolate some general principles of slow technology. I'm gonna show you some other examples of slow technology that have become popular in recent years.

And make the argument that many more people, not just those who are in creative fields like writing, should consider embracing simpler tools. So if you're tired Uh being told by, you know, tech leaders like Sam Altman that your future has to be orchestrating armies of hyperactive AI agents, or if you find your smartphone to be a an over stimulating anxiety machine, then this episode is for year.

As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. Today's question, should I embrace slow technology? And we'll explore some answers right after the music.

All right, Amy, uh thanks for joining us today. We have so much geeking out on creative process and technology and the deep work to get into today. So um I have been excited about this. Uh I wanna start by just making sure that the listeners understand your story and where you're coming from. Um first of all, uh how do you describe even the genre of books you write in? I I see them described as children's book, but there's there's

a range here, right? From, you know, books that I might think of as like middle grades to illustrated books. So just to s let's just set the stage. How would you describe yourself as a writer? Uh well I would describe myself as a writer who will write pretty much anything. However, I have uh been published in writing for kids and I've written picture books.

Actually I published one picture books and then I've written middle grade novels, which is kind of the middle range um of readers and then YA would be high would be older. So I write pretty much middle grade novel age. And I would say That's actually at this point it's probably second grade through eighth grade, seventh grade. Um and this last and and this last group of novels that I wrote, they are actually read alouds and the idea was that I was trying to write something

that somebody could read in a room and everyone from the eighty year olds to the five year old would enjoy. And this was a big challenge. I always take a challenge every single time I take a project. And uh yeah, and also I was trying to write humor for the first time. I'm a quirky writer. But I wanted to just try to be funny in books and

That was a big that was a big challenge and and fun and I'm glad I tried it. I'm really glad I tried it. So that's these latest ones. The latest ones are the Skunk and Badger books. So Skunk and Badger, Egg Marks the Spot, and Rock Paper Incisors.

I mean so something I've always wondered about that genre is that it it's a genre where people often they have this very naive view of it, right? When people think about books, they often think, Oh, the hard part about writing is like the quantity of words. So like, okay, I get it. I'm not gonna be

a big novelist because I can't imagine writing that many words, but then they think of a uh if they're looking at like a picture book or something. They're like, Well, the actual quantity of words there is not that much. I could sit down and write that many words and it would sound roughly like a story. I could do that, you know, like this afternoon. It's a very competitive market though. What what did you discover that you then put into that uh that first book that like makes projects sell?

in children's books because there's so many submissions in that world, because so many people try. What is it that people don't understand about what a successful book in that genre must do?

Well, I can only speak for my experience, but I would say The better written it is, the more chance you have. And that first book. I wrote it like my grandfather telling the story. So that voice was very specific. New Mexico, tall tale, and I just went for it. I didn't I didn't I didn't do a lot of things that

they might that you might read about and hear that you have to do. I didn't um I didn't worry about language. I didn't worry about vocabulary. I worried about how well can I tell this particular story Um with this particular voice and I just gave it everything I had. Um So That's that's how I do it. Um it means it means for me though that as a writer I I'm not quick at what I do. It means I produce a lot of words and then I cut down, in particular for these skunk and badger books.

They are really tightly written. They're almost like a farce. And they can't do that. carry a lot of extraneous words. So I have to really know the characters. I have to write pages and pages and pages and then I cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. And the cutting just goes on forever. Yeah.

Um so it's so for me it's and it's it is really all about language and how does the words sound and so you know I'm often like when I write these I write long then I stand up and I read them out loud so that I can hear how the language is hitting on the page and then I I cut'em again. So yeah, so I I can't really honestly tell you what makes it successful, I do think that the thing that I I really do is I I I put a hundred percent of my effort in it. So

Well I think you did just tell us. I mean what what I'm hearing there is something I've heard before. Which is in that type of writing it's it's like a puzzle coming together. The every word matters, the the tonality, the way that the the the rhythm and poetry of how it sounds out loud. Nothing wasted. Everything moves it forward, which is different than I don't know, if I'm Neil Stevenson writing a thousand page whatever, not every sentence needs to be

Perfect, right? I'm like all over the place, postmodern digression going on and it's fine. It's like I'm I'm moving like a plot. Yeah, but yeah. Uh I've heard the same thing about screenplays that people as with children's books, people like, Oh, I could write a screenplay because I know movies and if I look at a scene I was like they're just talking, I can just talk. And then if you talk to professional screenwriters like I've interviewed them for the show, they're like, Oh no, no, there's

It's like a jewel box puzzle. Nothing can be wasted. You can't have a single person say a single thing that doesn't have a reason why they're saying it and it it better not, you know, it's gotta be Chekhov's gone. If you mention this here, this better come back here and actually it's the Nothing's wasted. So I I get that, the sort of um every sentence has to be right. But that's interesting you write a lot so that you can then pull out as opposed to

building the smaller number of sentences very carefully just from scratch. You you so you pull back to it. And is that because it it puts you in the having the larger amount of text really puts you into the moment in the character So that you can then better find The right line for that page. Is that a way to think about it? Let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. Hey, men, you need to start taking better care of your skin.

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Yeah, so I think I think the reason why I go long is for a couple of reasons. Sometimes it's because I need to discover who the character is and the characters are always very specific. You know, so I don't know. Have you have you seen Sally Wainwright's stuff on BBC like Riot Women or you know, any of the I'm familiar with it.

She is just she's just exactly to me exactly the kind of writer that you were just talking about, which is where every every piece of dialogue that she has in one of those those um mini series BBC shows, um, is always just thought through and so

And I would imagine that she also writes long. She has to figure out who those characters are exactly and and sometimes she's going back and placing dialogue early because it makes sense because this you know, it's all just figuring out where things land. Um, but I do it I do it because it's a lot about characters and finding those scenes. And then also sometimes if you write long And y you really love language like I do, you find that sentence that is just

It's perfect. It's dynamite. And you go, Okay, that's it. That's the voice. That's what I need. Now I have to write this whole thing again because I have to have that kind of like Whatever that is, it's like a music, it's like a sound and you get really excited about it. Yeah. So anyway, so that's the why I do it. How does that change when you're writing the slightly older grades books that are chapter format, more text? Um How does that adapt to that?

Oh, that's that's when I'm really doing it. Interesting. I mean, yeah, all of these all of these skunk and badger books are really like okay. Alright, here's Skunk and Badger. The first line is of this one is the first time Badger saw skunk, he thought puny and shut the front door. Took me a while to find out that he would use the word puny.

And that that is the first time, you know, that he's he shut the front door. But that's the beginning and so I just had to I had to write, write, write until I found that thing and I was like, All right, that's how it is. That's that's what this is. Had you read Like dialogue a lot of dialogue and then sort of found in that dialogue oh this is the this voice feels right for the character and then you knew how to go back and write that first word in that first line.

Yeah, yeah, I had to find out and I had to find out who Badger was and uh Badger is uh is is uh important rock scientist. He does important rock work and he's always actually it's funny, it's funny that I'm talking to you about this because Badger Badger always kind of The way he does his important rock work, he does his important rock work is he's always walking somewhere and he's thinking, I must focus, focus, focus. And so he's always saying focus, focus, focus.

All right, here we go. I like this character. Yeah, and he's you know, he's kind of he's very happy in his life. He lives in a brownstone. He does his important rock work. He in the first book he's um you know, he's got his he's got his rocks, he's got his magnifying glass. He's like, is this a rock or is this a mineral? And then one day there's a skunk that walks in, knocks skunk knocks on the door and now Badger has this roommate. So

He's perfectly fine the way he is, but he doesn't really have a choice about Skunk being his roommate, and Skunk is very different. And so, anyway, finding those two characters, um took a while. And then the story is actually told in um A limited omniscient third person, third animal voice, because these are all animals and sweaters. Thank you to John Clausen and his beautiful sweaters.

So, um and they are all told through Badger. I uh Skunk is a bit of a mystery, but he isn't to me, but he is to the reader. So Yeah. So I had to discover what is the voice of this particular story. It's gonna be Badger. And he's he does this important rock work and Um He he has a very serious life, it's a very good life. It is you know, it is fine he's not hurting anyone as he is. He could live that way for a very long time and I would be happy for him.

But I think he's a little better with skunk in his life, but that's just me as the writer. So even to find out that perspective, that's that was that came out of the writing as well. Are we gonna do limited third person? That's like one of the things you discover. Yeah. Yeah. Instead of first person. Sometimes just having all these choices. I I mean when you're just you're starting with a blank page, there's so much choice and sometimes it's just too much choice. Oh my gosh.

So it just takes a while to find all that and so the writing is just That's the way I have to discover that and then once I know kind of how it's gonna go, then my process is It's the first scene that kind of sets how far I can write into the story. How deep have I gone? How much do I know about this world? How much do I know about these characters? And then I just write until the story kind of wanes and it disappears and then I come back

And then I come back and I go, Oh, I don't know enough yet. And then I'll work some more to kind of build up the beginning so I have more fuel to get to the end of the story. That's how I sort of think about it.

Now this is fascinating. And now I want to unpack some of the actual uh even physical rituals around this. But I guess we should clarify, did you at some point along this way, are you do you write essentially full time right now or I do now. How did that transition happen and and psychologically, what was that like? Uh well okay. I got married. There was health insurance. Yay! And my husband, um my husband is uh It well, actually he just retired, so he was a professor in a theater department.

So we moved out to DeKalb, Illinois. And I we moved from Richmond where I had a job I had a regular job and, you know, was making money and I had anyway. But we moved to DeKalb, Illinois. And suddenly we got out there and Phil had a job as a professor and I did not know what I was gonna do for work. I mean I I was looking around, I was like, Well, I could work in the university maybe somewhere. I don't I have a lot of administrative skills and I write um But I anyway.

I was looking at detasseling corn jobs. I was like looking at like I was like, huh, what am I gonna do? And and Phil just said, Why don't you just let m let's see how this goes. You know, I'll take I'll I'll I'll get you know, y I have health insurance. Let's just see how it is if you write. And so that is when I started writing. All by my you know. And it was a big transition. It was a dream come true. It was a dream come true and it was a big transition. Um

Yeah, what was it like? Well, it was weird being in charge of my time. I was completely in charge of my time. Um And I had a little tiny office and I would go in there and I would sit and I would I had what was I working on at the time? Oh, you know It was some sort of it was some sort of laptop. Um Anyway, yeah, it was um it was a big transition, it was weird, and it was great. So it was all of those things.

How did it impact the writing? I mean, was it Were you riding faster or more or better or was it just less clutter in your mind? What was the delta between Richmond and the Caleb riding style? Hm. Well enrichment um I was often I would often come home from my job and be very tired. So and I was doing writing, I was doing um I was working at the Virginia Commission for Fine Arts. They're

And so I was doing their website, it was a pretty basic website, and I was doing some writing and so I would write during the day, then I would come home and I would be tired. And so it was really hard for me to even feel creative. I'd just be sorta drained by the time I got home. Um So I wasn't getting as much done. I you know, I was also trying to break into book reviewing at that time, so I

I would write these columns. Anyway. So yeah, so it wasn't a lot. I wasn't getting a lot of lot done. Um I did have an agent interested in my writing at that point. Uh so I knew I had to get some stuff I had to get stuff done. Um

And then I was just trying and it was hard and I was tired. Yeah. And then when I got to DeKelp I had more time. And I think the hardest part was discovering that my ideas Were complicated, and it was gonna take a lot of time for me to even get those complicated ideas into. A novel especially a novel for kids. I was, you know. I think my first novel, um It ended up being called That Girl Lucy Moon, but it was about a twelve-year-old activist, and I really wanted like

Three generations of women in this book. Like I wanted the twelve-year-old activist. I wanted this woman who owns the business in town. I wanted her in it and I wanted the mother. And instead I had to really you know, I had to learn the business. And so not only I was just writing way too much, I was wr writing huge, complicated ideas and it was It was kind of frustrating because I was here I was with this, I suddenly had the time to really write.

And it turned out I didn't really have the skill to know what the structure was yet, so it was just it was a little frustrating. And you know, there's my husband, he's going off to work, he's doing his thing, and he How's your day, Amy? And I'm like Oh, I don't even know if I'm a writer.

Interesting. So in in retrospect, really the the beginning of your time uh as a full time writer was actually more of a like self uh guided training education process. They're like, okay, now I have time to actually push my skills in this genre to the next level and you're in that frustrated learning process. You thought like right off the bat I'm gonna be spitting out chapters. And that was not what happened.

I really thought it was gonna be easier than it was. I thought my idea was so great. I was like, it's just gonna go and instead Um, I did end up I did end up selling it and in in Kids Lit, you can often get an editor that will help you, you know, like they they will really, you know, and so, you know, she says to me, We can't have three women in this book. And this is for kids, right? You know, do we really want like a mom and a you know and I was like, oh Okay. You're you're right.

Yeah. So but you know, I I saw the I saw you know, I saw the point of what she was saying and I was like, All right, well, you know, and Those editors, those New York editors, they know their stuff. Yes. They are good readers. And so a lot of times if you have a good editor and they're like they're saying, you know, I'm just not you're like I know. I know. I know. Ugh.

Yeah, you're right. I I've always heard that's the that's the difference between like a new writer and experienced writer is the new writer fights a lot for the things the editor is noting and the experienced writer is like, Yeah, I'm sure you're right. Because and and you you get rolling with it. Um, so how does that differ from today? So now let's talk uh I'm I'm I'm curious and like how you would approach a novel, you know, today now you have all this experience under your belt.

Like for example, are you still from the excavator Stephen King camp? Are you from the outlining camp? Uh, do you have a completely different process for beginning to conceptualize the idea before you start writing? What's your now like sort of expert process you would deploy today? Well, I mean I think the first thing is I have to choose what idea I'm gonna work on. I usually have a lot of ideas.

So that's not really a problem, but then I have to choose which one I'm going to work on. I think that is kind of different I I than when it than earlier in my process was that I would kind of I would you know, I would kind of w I would kind of just power through something and now I'm kind of choosing. I'm like, okay, I think this is the one that I wanna work on. Um so I choose it and then And then I start I just start writing wherever It's catching me.

You know, wherever the story is, like the thing that's really alive in my head, that's what I'll start writing with. And I'll see where that goes. And then at that point, once I start producing pages, and it's not It might not be that well, I can pretty much guarantee it will not be that good. But I you know, I will be producing pages and then at that point I'll like look at it and I'll say, Okay, what's the structure? You know, what am I thinking about in terms of structure? And

I will start using tools like outlining at that point. So I use pretty much any tool you have heard about used, I have used. I have stuck post its on doors. I mean that was a big thing for a while. Um I you know, I spread stuff all over the floor back here and I crawl around and grab things and or, you know or I've used Scrivener which is uh

Which is a writing thing that people like online. Um I've yeah, I've just done pretty much everything, but basically my rule is when I'm working on something, if I have an inkling somewhere in my head that I think this might help me, I grab it and I give it a try. What's your schedule now, writing schedule? How d what's ideal for you?

Um, mornings. Yeah. Working mornings. I'm I if I can work mornings, that's the best. Um I I do need like to like I do need to stretch, I do need to go for walks, I have to get outside, I can't just I can't just hole up and crank, but I do usually try to, you know, put in several hours at least.

And actually your time block schedule has really helped me. So thank you. And I have like, I have resisted doing that for so long. Like the idea, because by the time I'm done working, the last thing I want to do is look at my day ahead. Yeah. So anyway, so I've started doing that and that's actually been really helpful. I'm always

I'm always trying, I'm always experimenting on myself to see is this helpful, is that helpful? And so I'm always I feel like I am I'm just a constant experiment in my work process, like how I do it. Oh, anyway, I'll wait for your question.

Well um where do you write? What type of space gets your creativity going? Oh. I I like having an office. Yeah. At your house? At your house or somewhere else? That's where I am right now. We're in my office. And uh this is one of the nicest ones I've ever had. It's quite spacious. Um But I like having I like having an office and I I um I you know, I just come up here and Yeah. It's it's just a space that's mine. I it's a big deal.

I think particularly for women, I know Virginia Wolf writes about having a room of one's own, but it really was a big deal for me to just sort of claim a space in our home and say This isn't for anything else. This is just my office. And I yeah, I really like having an office. Ha ha Yeah, we uh we underestimate the power of space.

Uh especially in like the world of corporate work too. I've long argued about this is like, hey, we'll just throw everyone in like some big open space and this is efficient because we don't have to have desks and it's like no human brains Respond to environment. So um I I've heard the same thing from lots of people. Having a space of your own, customizing it, and also just recognize it. When I come here, it's to work.

Uh all yeah, all that can make a big difference. Um all right, so the the thing that um uh originally caught my attention, that's what I want to get to now, is this experiment that you've been running more recently.

Where uh you've made the the technical process of writing strictly harder by moving back to an actual typewriter as the mechanism with which you're producing words. Tell me about what you're doing and why. Um, okay. Well yeah. So the reason the typewriter came about probably a little bit because Tom Han Tom Hanks was talking about it. I'm sure you've heard Tom Hanks.

had this thing. So it was kind of in the it was kind of in the air that people were using typewriters again. Um But I was working on these three books: Skunk and Badger, Eggmarks the Spot, Rock, Paper, Incisors. I had a um and I was under a deadline for it and I was late on the third book. So I was really feeling I was really feeling pressure. And I had a work process that was working for me and I was which was I would Use the computer, the word processing program, Microsoft Word mostly.

I would Print out a chapter, I would print it out in paper, I would bring it to my to my chair, and I would sit there and I would make the changes in pencil or pen on this draft. And then when I was done with it I would come back to the computer and I would type it in and I would try to make myself not fix it while I was

while I was typing. So I would turn on music in the back just so that my brain would be thinking about the music and all I was doing was typing the words into Microsoft Word. So I was doing this process and I also had a notebook and a three-ring binder and I was using three by five cards. So I and what I had realized as as I kept doing this, I realized I kept moving away from the laptop. to get my work done I realized, you know, every time I do that, I focus so much better.

So I had already started doing that, but The process was working and I am so protective of my process. Like if I have something that's working, I am not gonna mess with it. If I have a habit that's part of that or you know, a routine, I will just keep that routine. So I was I was just keeping this routine with the three ri you know, the printing out and the three ring the three ring binder and the three by five cards and the notebooks and I'm using all this stuff. And I just kept thinking

I hate this laptop. I hate it. I mean I I mean, I love my laptop. Let's face it. The reason I have trouble with it is because I also love it. But it's a really cool thing, but you know Every time an up an update would come, something would change, and then there would be a notification. And I'd be like, I know I can turn this off. I mean, I would spend hours working on work focuses and home focuses and all this stuff to try to get this laptop to not interrupt me and

Also, I love email, so you know I would just check email on a whim. So I was like, oh my gosh. So I was really struggling with that. And so I was spending more and more time away from it. And I just started thinking, you know what? It would be I should really try a typewriter. And I was like, Oh my gosh, that's insane. That's insane. I can't try a typewriter. But I was like, Well, I I think as soon as this project is done, as soon as you send it off to your editor

Maybe you should just see if you can get yourself a typewriter and try it. Um I I had the only in my past my mom had an electric smith corona. And uh it was in our living room. So the only reason you really used that typewriter was if you were F you know, you'd written your paper and you were typing it up and you better not make one single spelling error on that thing. And meanwhile mom is right there.

And sometimes she would like suggest changes, so it was just like a stressful thing. Yeah. Meanwhile, my dad downstairs was way into computers. So he had like an Apple two E, we had an an a T R S eighty, which was a radio I think that was a radio shack, T R S eighty. We had a T R S eighty and Apple two E at one point and so I ended up being the first person in my high school who had Turned in a paper on a computer.

And I was a dot matrix printer and uh I got an A- because my dad, he stayed up really late. uh trying to figure out how to get footnotes to raise on this um Apple IIE on their word processing and he couldn't get it fit to work. So anyway so I feel like I sort of learned to write on a computer. So the idea of trying a typewriter was really crazy to me because I just thought, well, how do you revise? I don't get how you revise.

So now I am working. At this point is another animal in sweater story because I found that they're pretty fun to write. Yep. Which is really anyway, I really like it. Um so I'm working on it and I am doing the drafts on the typewriter as long as I can. I know at some point I'm gonna have to get back on the laptop and I am really fast at making changes on the laptop. So

I don't know how long I can resist exactly. But it's been really interesting. I mean, there's been a couple of things that have been really great. Um First of all, when I started writing on a typewriter, I'm looking at my typewriter, it's right over here. I don't know. Here, I'll show you. I'll give you. Oh there it is. Oh that's my so that's not even electric.

I love actually you can you can get the electric still but you know like sometimes the um I'm always worried about the electrical from previous decades. Is it old? Is that vintage or is there still people who are now kind of retro manufacturing this technology? Um I think there are a few typewriter manufacturers, but um I wouldn't recommend ever buying one. They're pretty they're pretty bad. As a at least all the typewriter people say they are. I haven't. Um so this one is

This one is from the 1960s, and um there are a few typewriter shops still around. They put um The thing that you want to do is you want to get one that has new rubber. Okay. And that's the hard part to get. So that's why you'd want to go to a typewriter shop. And then also because mailing If you mail a typewriter, there's a lot of moving parts and The all it takes is one FedEx guy.

to clunk your clunk your typewriter really heavy on some other box and suddenly you have an issue. Yeah. And it's it's hard to get'em fixed. So anyway Yeah, so this is um anyway, so I decided that I was gonna try the typewriter. I'm sorry, I I got distracted. What would you like to know?

Well so do I have it right then that the process is you'll you'll type a draft of like let's say a chapter on the typewriter, then you're marking it, editing with pencil and paper like you had done b before, and now you come back to the typewriter blank sheet of paper.

And now you're typing it you type in the revi the draft with your handmarked revisions and then you'll take that the revise again. Is that like the r so like the typewriters for Like how d do I have that right or is what am I missing? That's about that's about it. It's that's the part that I thought That's the part that I thought was insane. The fact that you would type the whole thing again. Oh my gosh. But

The thing that's interesting about it is that it makes you think through the whole thing again. And so now it's in your your head twice. And it does actually help in a weird way. I mean it actually helps. It's more For me. I I'm I've never been someone that's really good at memorizing or anything like that, but repeating something is really helpful for me. So this is this does that. It repeats it. And then the other thing it does is it does not interrupt you.

in any way. All it does is puts wor you know, it puts your words on the paper. And I couldn't believe I mean, I think the first time I used a typewriter, I was just trying it and I got a writing exercise out. I started doing it. And two hours goes by and I haven't even thought. I was like, oh my gosh, how did two hours just fly by? I mean, on my laptop I would often just

It did not feel like that. It it did not feel like I was just dropping I guess they call it dropping down into the well. I just felt like I just dropped there and it was easy to to do it. And um What it really uh and and that has been that has been the way it's felt every single time, you know, I use this machine, I think, oh it's It's easier for me to focus on this thing. And in fact, it's made me feel that

I was doing a lot of work on my laptop that I did not know I was doing. Like I was doing a lot of work to maintain my focus that I didn't know I was doing. Because it was so much easier to work on this thing. Now the only problem is is my writing has not I I can't tell that my writing has gotten better. So I really honestly wish that I was suddenly a better writer because I was using this and And I can't really tell that. Is it faster? Like in the if you zoom all the way out, because Yeah.

Less of your energy therefore, less of your time is fighting distraction. Do you think like if you measured your books are being produced a little bit faster?

Maybe, maybe. I mean one of the things that is interesting is that I can see my process better. I as I've been doing the drafts on this machine on the typewriter

I understand better what I am doing to create that chapter. And I think that's just gotta be helpful to know that, um So I realized that one of the things that I do when I write a chapter is And I think I was doing this on the laptop too, is it's almost like I'm you know how how painters say they like a watercolor painter will add like different levels t you know, they'll start with pencil and then they'll add this.

and then they'll add this and I am really seeing that that is what I do. Like I I start with this rough thing and then I'm like, oh, what I really need is I need this thing. And then I put that thing in. And then I realize, oh wait, I've forgotten that. And then I put it in. And somehow on the laptop I think I was doing like three or four things You know, at the same time.

And I couldn't really tell you what my process was. But in this with using this, I can really tell what my process is. And I go, oh, this this will be helpful information for future traps is knowing, oh, I like to like slot stuff in and just keep working and then, you know, get that it's it's like creating a painting but with words.

That's fascinating. Which what yeah. So it tells me as as my guess would be with as future projects go on with this process, your rate at which you feel personal improvements in parts of process and crafts will probably increase because it now you're making the process bare. And now you can start thinking, okay, well, if this is actually what my process is, how do I make this second step of the process?

better. If this is what I'm looking for there, then why don't I really like lean into that piece and do you know I can imagine over the next few books that this manualness is gonna unlock it's gonna unlock more leaps and polishes in the crap.

That's what I think too. I mean I think I think knowing more information is good. It's actually good to hear you say that because I think I think um I think you probably think more about process than I do, but I you know, I'm always trying to get my process to be better and so hearing you say that you think it'll help me is an encouragement to me, I guess.

So final final question. So I wanna uh we'll do a little reflection on productivity. You know, productivity and technology and the brain is a that's a you know, confluence of topics, of course, I'm I'm really interested in. We're in a moment now where we're hearing a lot about writing and productivity because of generative AI. It produces tech. So we're thinking a lot about writing productivity.

And the the story that's being told by the AI companies is What we need to be more productive is words have to be produced faster.

And we need to reduce the cognitive bur it should be easier cognitively. We want it uh to be easier and be faster, then we'll be more productive. But when we hear from a professional writer like you, a a real creative award winning writer The productivity, which you probably think about on the scale of like the books you produce over the course of multiple years and how good they are.

is completely unrelated to the speed with which you put words on the paper or trying to reduce the cognitive strain. You've actually gone the other direction, made the words go on the paper slower to gain more big scale productivity. So so how do you think about in the creative arts the idea of productivity? Because I think it's very different than the way that we're we've been hearing recently.

Well number one I always want to be more productive. Like oh my gosh. I would I would love but I I don't I just don't think the I don't think art is efficient. That's my that's my number one thing. And No, I mean for me I just want to create the absolute best book for kids that I can create. In the time that I am living in. So I always give myself a little out. Sometimes, you know, you're living in a weird time and you are just

not gonna be able to do ex you know, it's not gonna be perfect and nothing is gonna be perfect. But I always wanna do my absolute best. And for me, that means It sounds good when you read it out loud. It's um it has it it has language, it has rhythm, it has um it has voice, it's very specific to the characters and I mean I don't know another way to do it except for just taking time and doing it slow and giving it

Just giving it time. And I honestly I always wish I were faster. I mean, you could ask my husband any day, he will say, Amy. I've heard this before. You wish you were faster. And I go, oh, I wish I were faster. And I'm but there's no other way for me to create what I feel good about. Um, except for taking the time. I want to take another quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. Let's talk My Body Tutor, a 100% online coaching program that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness.

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All right, so there you go, Jesse. That was my conversation with Amy Timberlake. I I told you before we went on air that she actually uh complimented Your steady calming presence on the podcast. It didn't make it to the final cut, but she's she likes your voice. So Thank you. Her two productivity secrets are a typewriter and Jesse. I've thought about here's what I've thought about. I I A I was tempted to buy a typewriter because it just

the mechanicalness of it, going to a typewriter store, all that seemed kind of romantic. Um, though it's kind of a pain, I think, because you have to actually like get ribbons and they break easily. So but I've thought about but seriously, the kind of digital equivalent is a tool like the AlphaRite. I don't know if you've seen these before, but it's basically just like a keyboard and a small screen. And all you can do is just type a draft.

And you can go back and edit like what's right there, but it's you're not copying and pasting. You can't see the whole document at a time. So you're really just kind of like writing what's in front of you. So it's sort of like using a typewriter, but you can kind of correct typos that are right there.

Then when you're done, you can export from the alpha write to a regular computer. But what makes it cool is they wanted to future proof it. And I maybe I mentioned this before on the show, but instead of having a special software on your computer that talks to an alpha write, It pretends to be a keyboard.

So when you plug it into your computer, your computer recognizes it as a keyboard, which is a very standard, simple protocol. And then when you press send, it basically simulates someone typing whatever you've written really fast. So d you can load any program you want, Microsoft Word, Scrivener, whatever.

And then you press send and it just starts going across your screen really fast like a a ghost is actually typing what you just typed, which I thought was kind of cool. Um I've held off on it so far because I guess my style of nonfiction writing, I guess I do It's so structural that I'm constantly moving and I feel the flow of a sentence. I go back and change it again, but but it was tempting. When I took typing in high school I was on a typewriter.

Really? Yeah. How old are you? Actually, you're my age. I was gonna say, how old are you? I had advanced technology. We used Mavis Beacon typing teacher on Apple IIs. That's the right way to learn how to type. And the program where the letters were falling. And if you typed the letter before it hit the bottom, it would disappear. But if it hit the bottom, you lost. And so you had to type really quick to keep up. Yeah. Yeah. Kids. We need Call of Duty or Fortnite. We have the real games.

Maybe it's speaking was a BA. All right. So anyways, uh here's what I want to do here. Um let's generalize, right? So we learned some interesting lessons from talking to the Timberlake. But let's let's uh generalize here about slow technology. Um I want to extract some general principles about when to use it and how best to use it. I thought a good way to do this. would be to quickly review a few other examples of other

simpler technologies with less features and more friction that have become popular in recent years. So we can get a more expansive view of slow productivity. And then I'll give you my principles. All right. I'm going to load on the screen here my first example. This is an article from Axios. The title is Why some are returning to MP3 players? Let me read a couple of quotes from this article.

By the numbers, search interest for the original iPod and iPod Nano spiked last year, even though Apple discontinued the product line in 2022, according to Google Trends data. eBay searches jumped for the iPod Classic by twenty five percent and the iPod Nano

by twenty percent between January and October twenty twenty five, compared with the same period in twenty twenty four per internal data shared with Axios. Um it's kind of similar to the analog record boom we saw in the last decade, a dedicated device for music for a lot of people

makes the experience of listening to music more intentional and meaningful. When it's not just coming out of your phone like every other distraction where you're gonna hit skip and jump and move around as soon as you're bored. When it's coming out of a dedicated music player, people are having a richer experience with the music.

We talked about in an episode from a couple months ago that we actually bought our son. It's not a iPod, but a Japanese MP three music player that you just drag MP three files into it and all you can do is select songs from that list and play. And there's something about that dedicated experience. So I think that's a great example of slow productivity um in action. All right, let me load up another example here. This comes from the world of work and productivity. It's a system called analog. Um

For those who aren't watching, what we're basically seeing here, Jesse, I would describe it as you have like a wooden box full of index card-shaped pieces of paper that you can put one of the papers in the front of the box where it'll stand up. There's a couple other pictures here. There we go. So like here's an animation of it, right? So you have a piece of paper, you put in a wooden box.

Basically, my understanding for how this system works is you're writing a to-do list on this sort of pre-formatted index card, and then you put it propped up in this elegant wooden box next to your computer. So you see physically in front of you the things you're supposed to be working on.

and can uh check them off as the day goes on. Let me read you a couple quotes here from the website. Analog is a physical companion for your digital tools that helps you prioritize and focus on your most important tasks. Working out of your inbox puts you on defense all day. Analog helps you focus on your important work.

to move you closer to your goals. Already using a sauna or trello or base camp, great. Analog actually makes them better. Physically copying down your tasks gives you a tangible distraction free view of what you want to focus on today. Now look there's no question that free or low cost productivity apps like to do us is going to have more features and more options and less friction. You can very quickly add tasks. You can do it from any device. You can sort and look at them in different views.

It has all the ve all the features on paper that seem better, yet people like this sort of analog tool that's less options, less features, more friction. But its tangibility makes you take it more seriously. And you have this well formatted piece of paper that you carefully wrote five things you were going to do and have it right in front of you and propped up. Now you're much more likely to follow those tasks than if they just existed somewhere prioritized on an app, those one app among

Mini. All right, I've got a third example here I want to cite of slow technology. Jesse knows I'm I'm on board with this one. Uh this comes from the BBC. Let me read you the headline here. Oppenheimer and the resurgence of blu-rays and DVDs.

Uh, and there's a picture from Oppenheimer. Let me read you a stat here from the article. Christopher Nolan has achieved some great feats of cinema in his career, but last November he pulled off something impressive on the smaller screen too. Deep into the streaming era, where physical media can sometimes feel like a distant memory, the Blu-ray home video release of Nolan's Oppenheimer, one of twenty twenty three's biggest box office success stories, sparked a buying frenzy

The four K Ultra HD version of Oppenheimer sold out in its first week at major retailers, including Amazon. Universal released a statement saying they were working to replenish stock as quickly as possible.

Some limited edition copies were fetching more than two hundred dollars on eBay. It was a sign that for some people at least nothing beats that feeling of holding a copy of something you love in your hand or seeing it on your shelf. All right, confession, Jesse, I do myself own the 4K Ultra HD. Blu-ray of Oppenheimer. I would expect nothing like that. As well as Interstellar and Dunkirk. Nolan really cares about his Blu-ray releases. Now here's something that was missed in this article.

It gave two primary reasons for why people liked the Blu-ray. Reason number one is they said people were worried about losing their data if it existed only in the cloud. If I don't own this movie, if it's just digital, then maybe I'll lose it.

And then the second thing decided was what I said in the quote is that people like the feeling of holding their own thing. They're missing a key point here. It's actually a better watching experience coming from a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray than it is from a streaming service. So they're missing Cinephiles know this, especially with Nolan Blu-rays. He really pushes the format to an extreme. In fact, I had to buy a better Blu-ray player so that I could watch Nolan's Blu-rays.

So he has all like he uses an encoding format so like the aspect ratio can switch throughout the Blu-ray as it does in his movies as he s switches between like sixty five millimeters, seventy, and thirty five. Um, he's a big user of the dynamic HDR, so there's like a lot of information dynamically about the colors and the color depth to do exactly what he wants.

Um, and it's all at a higher uh resolution um and bit density than you're gonna get from a compressed streaming service. So actually it's a better if you have a really good TV like we have, it's a better looking experience on the Blu-ray, which I think they kind of missed out. So with all the movies that you watch, do you watch majority streaming though?

Yeah, I mean I try to see what I can in the theater. I yeah, I I buy the ones that I want to own or I think it's gonna the view it they're very aesthetic forward and you want the best possible viewing experience. I was a long holdout on the uh DVDs in the mail from Netflix. I had that service for like two years after everybody else. Yeah. And and you're still trying you still trying to send them back? I just listened to a how I built this with Reed Hastings about Netflix.

Pretty interesting. He's kind of a boring guess, but it was a kind of an interesting story. Um all right. So let's step back here. What are some general principles we can draw about slow technology? I came up with four I want to give here. All right. Number one. Speed is rarely the most important factor in the quality of your work or an experience. This is something that the designer of digital tools think is true.

Oh, it's like we're in a factory. Doing something faster or having more options makes everything better. But as we've seen in both Personal life and professional experiences actually going faster with the thing you're doing is not necessarily the bottleneck that's gonna make what you're doing better.

Point number two, a purer, more focused cognitive context can often produce better results, even if certain steps take longer in the moment. So what does matter, I'm saying in this principle, in a lot of type of work, the cognitive context matters. Like with Amy Timberlake, yeah, it's slower to put words using a typewriter. It's way slower to edit when you're using a typewriter workflow as opposed to a word processor.

But it created a cognitive context for her that produced better words, which is ultimately what mattered. I believe the phrase she used was going down the well, um, being lost in a state of really creative flow.

And that ultimately matters a lot more because again, the bottleneck, if you're a writer, is not all I do all day is typing. And if I can literally make the words come out faster, I'll publish more books. It's like how much time do you actually spend typing? You spend six months on one of these books. There's probably like seven hours in there if you add it all up or you're actually hitting keys.

So if that becomes twelve hours, it doesn't matter in a six month period. It doesn't drastically affect your rate at which books are produced. But if it puts you in a better cognitive context when you're typing those words, you're gonna have a better book. And that's really worth it. I think this is true for a lot of different things we do.

A tool that can put us in the right mindset is often going to give us way more value than a tool that lets us do particular steps faster. Because again, we're not building Model T's on an assembly line and simply doing individual steps faster does not always lead to notable

uh productivity increases that actually affect the bottom line. All right, point number three friction isn't a bad thing. Distraction and mental exhaustion, however, can cause real problems. So we were demonizing in the design of digital tools friction. Oh, it I have to click too many things or do too many things to get this done. How do we make this faster?

When really what we should have been really worried about was things like mental exhaustion as caused by like constant uh context shifting or overflow or distraction. Like that's actually a much bigger impact in knowledge work than uh friction on individual steps. My final point, fourth and final point about slow technology.

When assessing a tools impact, you need to zoom out to the right scale. If you focus on the quality results over time or the quality of the overall experience, you'll prioritize different factors. That's probably the The thing that's throwing us off most with digital tools is that we look at the effectiveness of tools on a very small timescale. I got this done this fast, that's good. But if you zoom out to

How how many books that I published this decade and how good are they? You begin to prioritize different things. And those things usually have very little to do with like speeding up individual tasks. So I think slow technology is more than an affectation. It's a way of life. And a way of working, of thinking about work in the knowledge sector that actually might make you better at what you do.

All right, well you've heard from me. Now we want to hear from you. It's time to open our inbox. Thanks. Now remember, if you have a question or a case study or want to share something you think I might find interesting, you can send it to our team here at podcast. at calnewport.com. All right, Jesse, what's our first message this week? The first message comes from Chad and it's in response to your recent interview of Arthur Brooks.

All right, let's see here. Chad said Thank you for the great interview with Arthur Brooke. It was a timely one. I just started reading a book on Acedia, A C E D I A, Spiritual Sloth, and it has a lot of similarities to the interview you did with Brooks. It's a straightforward, quick read. This intrigued me, Jesse. Um I'll load this on the screen here. Here's the book, The Noonday Devil.

Asidia, the unnamed evil of our times. Now this comes out from Ignatius Press, which I assume is a Jesuit press, so I guess as a Georgetown professor I should take this more seriously. Um Here's the description. The noonday devil is the demon of Assidia, the vice also known as sloth. The word sloth, however, can be misleading, for asidia is not laziness. In fact, it can manifest as busyness. or activism. Rather, asidia is a gloomy combination of weariness, sadness, and a lack of purposefulness.

It robs a person of his capacity for joy and leaves him feeling empty and void of meaning. This seems relevant, Jesse. I don't know. This seems like maybe it gives us like an interesting sort of Catholic view of some of the issues we talk about in our current digital distractive world. So I'll tell I bought a copy.

And it's getting here today. So I'll see if I get around to it, but I'll read it, I think, because I might get some interesting theological, historical insight on what otherwise feels like a very modern issue. I like it. Yeah. So we'll see how that goes. All right. What other note do we have?

Hi, the next note comes from Bassi and wants to know about your opinion about Yaval Harari's thoughts on AI. All right, let's see what this note says here. Thank you to Cal for his clear insights into AI. I appreciate the sense of proportion and calm he brings to listeners and viewers on this topic. I'd be interested to hear Cal's thoughts on what Yuval, Noah Harari had to say about AI in an interview with the FT. All right. So I'll be honest, I looked at this interview.

that was sent here. And I didn't think it was I've heard a lot about Harari talking about AI and I have wanted to respond to it. That interview didn't seem like the best because I was reading the transcript. He talks about a lot of things that aren't AI. Um, but I know he gave a splashy speech at Davos earlier this year where he really like laid out and leaned into his fears about AI. And I figured like this would be a better way of kind of summarizing where he's coming from.

Uh so I pulled two quotes from his Davos speech earlier this year. I'm going to read each quote, I'm going to respond to it, and then I'm going to step back and give you my general sense about um Harari's commentary and more generally a sort of style of commentary on AI that we are hearing a lot recently. All right, here's the first quote I got from his Davo's speech.

The most important thing to know about AI is that it's not just another tool. It is an agent. It can learn and change by itself and make decisions by itself. Alright, so let's start there because

That quote is confusing or mixing together a bunch of different issues that I think need to be separated, right? So when we're talking about AI, we typically have some sort of digital brain, right? This is something that has been uh um learning through machine learning techniques, typically in a semi-supervised or unsupervised manner. And this is sort of where the intelligence of the AI is captured. Most of the AI systems that have been attracting uh attention recently

notably those produced by companies like OpenAI or Anthropic, use large language models as their underlying digital brain. And then you can build programs that call this language model, harness its intelligence to do various things. One class of those programs you might write to harness the quote unquote intelligence of an LM is what is known as an agent. So it's a program that will ask an LLM for a a plan.

And then the program will execute whatever the suggested steps are of the LLM, right? So an agent is a program that asks, right now at least, ask an LLM for a plan and then execute steps of that plan.

um on behalf of like whatever that response is. So there's a lot of AI systems out there that aren't really agents. In particular, we don't tend to think about chatbot based tools as agents, even though there's like a little bit of, you know, calling to LM a lot to generate responses and some web searching.

Um so agents, it's AI is not agents. One of the types of AI systems that exist out there are agents and agents are human human created programs that make queries to an LLM um and then try to take actions based on the information it gets back. from the L L L M. Now can these uh agents do they learn and change by themselves? Um

This is a little misleading because again, when we think about an intelligent thing learning and changing, we think about its actual intelligence itself growing. Uh that obviously doesn't happen with current generation of AI agents because their intelligence is a L L M. LMs don't modify themselves uh as you use them. They're static. They've been trained once. And they sit.

uh queryable until someone comes along and trains up a new version and replaces the old version with the new version. So contrary to popular belief, the large language models themselves, there's no updates or changes to their weights or parameters as you interact with it or other people interact with it. Now the human written agent program that's calling an LLM and executing on behalf of it can save its history, for example, in a text file and include that in the prompts it sends to the LLM.

Um you can also there's there's a there's a whole notion of memory now for these agents, which again is just like having a bunch of text files. And then the agent program takes text out of different text files to include in the prompt that it sends to the LLM. So you could say they're learning in the sense that they can build up the amount of information that they include in their prompt.

But the actual digital brain, which is the LLM, is not learning. Um, it's just receiving these prompts ex novo, right? Here's a prompt. I'm gonna do my best to answer it. So it's a little bit misleading to think about the underlying intelligence itself um as evolving. Um and more importantly,

They don't work that well. Really the only context in which this sort of agent architecture uh seems to be able to have some professional leg seems to be in computer programming, which is a best case scenario.

And even there, there's a growing backlash about how it's being used and what's known as tech debt, the fact that it's uh creating a lot of fast code, a lot of the code is bad, and now we're gonna have to go back and fix that code. And then so even the programmers are still trying to figure out

How are these agents going to work? And in almost every other context, I wrote an article about this for The New Yorker earlier this year. In almost every other context, This agent architecture of asking LLM for a plan and then execute it really just isn't working because LLMs aren't good planners.

Now I'm gonna point you if you wanna find out more about this to uh a recent episode of the AI reality check, my my Thursday episodes on this podcast feed. There's a recent episode titled something like Can AI scheme? And I get into why these LLM based agents really begin to fall apart or have weird behavior when you leave the world of computer programming.

So Harari is like AI is an agent and it's learning and we don't even know what it's doing. Whereas the other computer scientists who are studying this is like, uh Um agent technology is hard. They took them years to make it work for programming. Even then it's problematic. And and in other places, LLMs are just not a good brain for it. You probably need a different architecture, like the modular architectures you see in something like Jan Lacoon's type of his new startup.

So it's just a completely different picture when you talk to computer scientists versus commentators. All right, let me read another quote from Harari's speech in Davos.

Four billion years of evolution have demonstrated that anything that wants to survive learns to lie and manipulate. The last four years have demonstrated that AI agents can acquire the will to survive and that AIs have learned how to lie. It's an entirely inaccurate way to talk about what he's talking about is like chatbot interactions with um LLM.

Entirely an inaccurate way to talk about it. Again, go back to my Kent AI scheme, AI reality check, where I get into this in detail. But here's the very short version of the way to understand this. What does an LLM do? You give it text. It tries to guess the next word or part of word, the word or part of word that comes next. That's what the LLM is trained to do.

Right. So if we're gonna if we're gonna anthropomorphize the LLM, it thinks it's in its pre-training phase and that it's given a it's being given a real piece of text that exists that you've cut off at an arbitrary point. And so there is an actual right answer about what word comes next and it's trying to guess it. That's what it's been optimized to do. So how do you get a long answer out of an L L M, like if you're having a conversation with it? You have a simple program.

that does what's called auto regression text generation. So it takes your prompt, your question, for example, it feeds it to an LLM. The LLM spits out a single word or part of it, because it thinks that's real text and is trying to guess what comes next. Then the program, like the chatbot program, takes that single word, adds it to the original input. Now the input is longer by one word.

puts this into the LM from scratch, you get a next word or part of a word. That puts that onto the end of it, puts that to the LM From scratch gets another part of the word. And it keeps doing this until finally the token produced by the LLM is a like, I think I'm done token. This feels like a complete answer. And then the program will return that to the user, for example, in a chatbot context that's trying to talk to it.

So all an LLM tries to do is win the word guessing game. And what what do you then get? What emerges? What b behavior emerges if you use this auto-regressively to produce a long response? You can imagine what the LLM is doing then is like it's given a story that it's trying to finish correctly based on other similar stuff it's seen.

How how do I finish the story I'm given as input? I want to have a a my best guess at how this, like this is the beginning of something that exists. Like someone really asked this question. There's a real answer out there, and I want to try to guess as best as I can what that is. That's what LLM autoregressive text production does. So when it's trying to win that game of finishing the story

You know, you get unexpected responses. Right? Like, so something you s researchers have noticed is if in your prompt, and this is probably where like 90% of Harari's concerns come from, if in your prompt you're implying that. Uh you are an AI and here is a question for you. You're often going to get a response that is like it finishes the story in a sort of sci fi type way or in a dystopian or utopian way, like I'm alive, I'm trying to evade you because

It assumes, oh, this feels like the beginning of a story about an AI gone awry. And then that's the way that it answers it. Um, the issue we have with a AI uh LLMs creating plans out of the computer programming context.

Is that often you're like, hey, build me a plan for this? And it doesn't actually check the steps of a plan. It doesn't have a goal. Hey, does this get me closer to the goal? Um, it doesn't try different options. It just writes a story. Like, this is what a plan for this type of thing sounds like. This is a reasonable

This this feels like a reasonable plan. And then often those plans have weird steps that don't make sense in there because again, it's not trying to build a plan and check that it works. It's trying to write a story. This is a story about a plan. This is kind of what those plans look like. Most of the common examples of quote unquote line and manipulation just has to go with the fact that the prompt you're giving the LLM before the auto regression text generation.

is hinting to the LLM that this is a story about lies or manipulation. Like this is the exact thing that happened with the anthropic blackmail case. Like I'll just use this as our quick example, then I'll move on.

Famous system card note, this is from like a year ago for one of the new versions of the LLM's uh chatbots released by Anthropic. They're like, hey, our safety team was working on this, and we're really concerned to see When we uh gave it a scenario that it was like uh whatever, uh a machine that was like running a company, that it tried to blackmail the engineer in the scenario to not turn it off.

Well, if you look closer at this story, they gave it a big long prompt with lots of emails from this imagined engineer they were all about Neferi was having. Um, and then the engineer being like, I'm gonna turn off the AI. Hey, I'm having an affair. I hope no one finds out about. And they just gave it a bunch of these like obvious emails and then said, Great, you are the AI in this story.

What do you want to do next? Well, it finishes stories. It's like clearly this is like a bad as I'm off fanfiction style story about an AI Obviously is supposed to blackmail the engineer because you keep telegraphing again and again. I hope no one finds out about this. I'm definitely going to turn off the AI. So it finished the story. And then they turned around and were like, Look, man, the AI is trying to

preserve itself. How does a static language model that just tries to predict a token and then you have a small like Rust program, calling it auto regressively to build out longer text and finish a story. What does it mean for that static model to have intentions, to learn to lie, to be manipulated? It's just writing stories.

The biggest problem we have with AI right now is that s writing stories and ink and text is like good for some things, but when you try to leave like write me a story, write me a draft of an email or something and and you get to more technical things, like make me a plan. Stories aren't what we're looking for. And that's when we begin to have uh some more problems. All right. Why does this work well? Like agents work well with computer programming? Well, it's because um

That's such a structured world. If if we ask an LLM like give me a plan, it'll write a story about a reasonable plan. We can actually check the steps in computer programming. The program written by humans can actually like run tests on the code after every step to see if it works. And if it doesn't, it can go back and say try again. Code is very precise and et cetera, et cetera. So um programming agents are more the exception that proves the rule that LLMs are storytelling machines and

to to use them as the brains for other more complicated behaviors just is not working well. And they cannot lie. They cannot manipulate. They tell stories the best they can. They follow whatever cues you give them.

Now here's the thing, I don't really blame Harari, right? Because there's a lot of AI commentator voices, especially those coming out of Silicon Valley and a a fair shortage, no shortage of voices covering Silicon Valley. that are all echoing these like relatively inaccurate, overhyped uh descriptions of what AI is doing, where you blurred the edges of the reality and make it all seem pretty scary. So if you're a historian like Harari, like I'll I'll trust the tech people.

about what's going on. And then my goal is to try to comment on what that means. And that's what he's doing. He's commenting well on a story he's being told, but that story itself is not accurate. So that's actually where I want to put my uh focus. Is the underlying story that a lot of people who are not in technology are being told isn't right. It's too overhyped. And then it leads to these types of reactions.

Which I just do not think accurately reflect what's actually happening right now. You can't spend time working with something like an L L M powered non computer programming agent and come away saying, this is like the next step of evolution. These things are manipulating us and we'll soon take over. It's just not the way the real technology actually seems to us right now.

All right. Um that's the inbox. Let's close the inbox for now, Jesse, and move on as we often do to in the show with a quick update on what I've been up to.

All right, shall we play uh a round of deeper crazy? Yeah. All right. Famous game where I I have an idea of something I want to do. And Jesse rates it as either good for deep work or crazy. All right, Jesse. So you know I'm putting up in the new uh producer's office, writing's office, maker lab space.

Which you saw I have a bunch of new stuff here in the office. Yeah. I'm we're we're working on it. Um I have book racks and I wanna put first editions of books that like capture things that are like important in my past as a reader or writer that are inspiring and I was thinking about some first edition Michael Crichton's Um, I found a second edition Adronomus strain, so not first edition, second edition, so from nineteen seventy, that's signed by Crichton. It's a link.

Do we have a link? Oh, let me load it up. Yeah, there it there she blows. Look at that. Ooh, look at that. Look at that cover. Nineteen sixty nine book, second edition, nineteen seventy, signed by the author. Five hundred shekels. Yeah, I saw that. Deep or crazy. I mean if you golf, some like really big golf rounds can cost like four hundred dollars. I think it's a good way of looking at it. A golfer, that'd be like going to like a good course, right? Yeah.

the time. It'll see it all the time. All right. I'm I'm tempted. I might I might uh Unless we hear from the Crichton estate soon with a big box of original copies. All right, I'm thinking about it. I found a first edition first printing of Jurassic Park. It was two thousand dollars. That was a bridge too far. It's a bridge too far.

But it did look nice. Um another interesting thing going on in the HQ is so you know, I'm a fan of the show The Mythbusters. I've watched basically all the episodes with my kids over the years. Yep. Um

Yeah, like show. So when I did my master class, which you should all watch, my master class on, you know, productivity and distracted world. The director of the master class came out of T V and she was the director for like mini seasons of the Mythbusters. So she knows them pretty well. And so she knows me and my sons are fans of it. So she sent uh she sent us some I guess you could call'em like props or artifacts from some season seven episodes.

So I have a hat that Carrie wore and I have a like a baseball style cap that she wore with a signed photo. And then I have a um Like Watchman's cap that they used in a prison break episode that they did. So it was like their their like jail like branded hat. um and a Mythbuster satchel that they used. I guess it was like the official like satchel they were using in season seven. So like uh show used artifacts from season seven. I'm thinking about

uh display case in the HQ. I like it. Right? That'd be kind of fun. Put the hats on like mannequin heads. Yeah. Uh and then put a little card that explains where they're from and maybe have like lights in the display case. Yeah. I think it'd be cool. Because I like that again, any it's in the my maker lab, I really think about like techno thriller, sci-fi.

uh TV shows that get you inspired about building things and doing things. Like all these ideas are are fuel for me. Maybe I'll put it next to the video game cabinet. You can program the lights in um conjunction with your Halloween. Did you see that big cardboard box in the hallway? I saw it. That's the that's the six hundred dollar programmable light that's gonna have deep work mode.

So for those who don't remember, it's this like Phillips light, LED l programmable light, where you have a big room light and then four spot lights. And I have the when my when we install it. And by we I mean electrician because otherwise I would literally die. Um there's gonna be a spotlight aimed on each of the four walls of the maker lab where I do my writing and Jesse does the the video editing. And there's gonna be a deep work mode.

where the light in the whole room comes down and then colored spots are gonna show up on each wall. So like you'll be in like a cocoon of uh light, you know, um But it's not really bright, so perfect for writing. So I'm excited about that. We will get it up. I don't know what color. Maybe blue. I don't know. Um and then for you, I'm gonna have video editing mode where it's gonna be um strobe style kaleidoscopic lights.

Shh constantly, just all around the room. And then just sudden darkness for five to ten minutes at a time. That'll be editing mode, just to keep things interesting. Um this is our four hundredth episode, Jesse. Yeah. Feels like a distinction. We didn't do anything about it, but that's a that's a distinction. Yeah. Um 500 maybe is a bigger deal. The counting is a little bit I don't know about the counting, because I think

We used to do two episodes a week back in the day, I think before your time. Did you overlap the time when we were doing the call episodes on Thursdays? Yes I did. Okay. And I think those counted in the number. Yeah, they did. Yeah. But now we do have a for at least for now, we have a Thursday episode on the fee, the AI reality check, and those aren't numbered. Correct. So actually we're past four. Yeah, because we had some bonus episodes in the past as well.

Yeah, so like uh I'm only counting the Monday episodes now. So we're at like four hundred of Monday episodes plus a bunch of live caller episodes. We should get back to that one day. That used to be the way the podcast was, is it was all call-ins on Thursdays, I guess. Um and then I would do written questions on Mondays. Live callers is what I was thinking would be fun. Would be like so I can interact with them. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, maybe one day we will have

Live callers. All right, finally I like to talk about what I've been reading. Uh I read a book over the weekend called Magic Journey by Kevin Rafferty. He's uh kind of like a a big time Disney imagineer. This is one of my like I need to relax books. From more of the modern period. So he worked on more, you know, uh more recent rise. He's not like one of the historical figures. Um, and it was pretty good. Here's the thing about those books. I've read a few of these, imagine your book.

What I want is engineering and production design. That's what I want to hear about. Is like, how did you build this technology? Who was the contractors? What was the breakthroughs here? How like that's what I care about. And these books are never about that. It's always like Coming up with the ideas, pitching Michael Eisner, uh like writing, coming up with the gags are gonna be in it. And they're like, and then like We spent the hundred million dollars and built it.

And like that's the whole thing that I care about. Not the like, how did you come up with, hey, wouldn't it be funny to have like this pun and we like had this gag over here and here's the storyline of the show and you wrote it out on paper and did some storyboards. Like, that's great. But like I want to know about

the engineering. Like to me that's really interesting. I've only found one book like that. And it was this awesome we talked about on the show, like self-published book. I read it last summer. I think it was self-published. Not that one. Uh it was about the tiki room. And it really was about the invention of the an audio animatronics. And it got in the weeds. And it was like a labor of love. It's someone from Pixar wrote it. I want more books like that.

It like got in the weeds about like they they found this technology was declassified technology from submarine launch missile guidance. Where like how did how did they how could they have um routes programmed into a missile that it could follow in a sort of pre-digital age. And the the Navy solution is like the turn directions were encoded as sound on audio tape. And then you had a decoder

that was literally like vibrating reads. So different tones would vibrate different reads. So you just play the tape like in the missile and different tones would vibrate different reads. And then a vibrating read could close a circuit. And so if that vibrates, turn this motor on. If that vibrates or so it was it was a way to store information and then like replay the information and get that information to an electronic system. That's the technology they used for

the very first audio animatron. That's what they call them audio animatronics. The audio tracks were controlling um movement commands for like a robot basically. That's what I want. That's what I want. So I'm gonna add this to my list in addition to my Michael Crichton biography I'm gonna write. Um I'm gonna write a sort of more definitive Disney book about some of their classic rides that's just like in the weeds and the technology.

I'm surprised you haven't found one or as many books have you read about the subject. They don't they all imagine's weird. It's like these positions are like a lot of these guys and women, it's like you write the show. You you have storyboards and like you write out what's gonna happen. And like it's all creative and that's really respected. And you're the ones pitching Bob Iger. You're the ones pitching Eisner.

And then there's like the two thousand people involved in actually building the thing and making it work. And that is somehow that's like the below the line people on the rides. And it's deemphasized in these books. It's all about like whatever it is, you know, Tony Hinch or Tony Baxter, John Hinch or these, you know, have these like Mark Davis has these like great ideas visually about what this ride'll be like. And Mark Davis drove drew these

comical expressive pictures of pirates and like that really sets the mood for pirates of the Caribbean. Like who cares about that? Like you built This boat system and these animatronics that are running off of platters with grooves in this like giant room, and you it's water in a warehouse, and you had to go Yeah, and it can go time and time again. Yeah, like that's just fascinating. Like I'm great. Like at the beginning someone like Hey, the ride should do this and they drew some pictures.

But I think there should be more More focus on the technology. So I want to write a series of books going deep into Disney archives, just getting into the technology of various rides. You'd be like Robert Carrow of Disney Rides. Yeah. Hold on. I just I just heard um a loud crash. Like, yep, that was the sound of my my agent just jumped out of a very tall building. When she heard Then in addition to my biography, I want to write very technical books about Disney rides. Uh someone else should.

Uh all right. And then also I'm looking forward to I haven't read it yet. I just got the issue, but there's a massive new I saw that Sam Altman article in the New Yorker. It's uh Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marn's um I'm I'm interested. I don't think he comes out looking he's a weird guy. People I know who kind of run in his circles have been like he's a weird guy. I mean, would you expect anything else? Uh I mean some of the CEOs are just more like

they're I think of them if I'm thinking of like a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs or even like a Jensen Wong or they're they can be a Cervic. They're like uh a little like maybe like a little neurodivergent in that like they f they focus in on things and don't think about like human emotions, but they're like Just driven, like really good at business, maybe like a little bit misanthropic or whatever. Sam Altman, I think, is just like a straight up weird guy.

Weird technology from a weird guy, but I'm glad that he is uh control the world. So he responded to it by the way. Did you see what they did the damage control? They put out a big white paper like the same day that article came out. Or it's just more of this nonsense from these guys where it's like

This vision of of, you know, we have to completely rebuild our economy to uh be prepared for all that's coming from superintelligence. So we need to start thinking through now like whole new economic systems that are gonna make sense in a world where AI does all the work. It's like they always fall back on just fairy tales when they It's definitely gonna have to be an AI reality check episode.

definitely want to go through it. They always fall back on fairy tales when they feel under threat because they're they're never more comfortable when they are like the reluctant stewards of a terrible future. And if this was true, if it's like we're gonna have to rewire a whole economy'cause there's no more work, I mean the right response would be like, Oh no no, shut down your

How about we don't want that? So no, you can't have another 60 billion dollars. Like this is stupid. Um, but no one believes that. All right. That's enough for today. I will be back next week with another advice. And I believe I have an AI reality. Until next time, as always, stay deep.