#166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media

The following is a conversation with Cal Newport. He's a friend and someone who's writing, like his book, Deep Work, for example, has guided how I strive to approach productivity and life in general. He doesn't use social media, and in his book, Digital Minimalism, he encourages people to find the right amount of social media usage that provides value and joy. He has a new book out.

called A World Without Email, where he argues brilliantly, I would say, that email is destroying productivity in companies and in our lives. And... Very importantly, he offers solutions. He is a computer scientist at Georgetown University who practices what he preaches. To do theoretical computer science at the level that he does it, you really have to live a focused life.

minimizes distractions, and maximizes hours of deep work. Lastly, he's a host of an amazing podcast called Deep Questions that I highly recommend for anyone who wants to improve their productive life. Quick mention of our sponsors, ExpressVPN, Linode Linux Virtual Machines, Sun Basket Meal Delivery Service, and SimpliSafe Home Security. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that deep work or long periods of deep focused thinking have been something I've been chasing more and more over the past few years. Deep work is hard. but is ultimately the thing that makes life so damn amazing. The ability to create things you're passionate about in a flow state where the distraction of the world just fade away. Social media, yes.

Reading the comments, yes, I still read the comments, is a source of joy for me in strict moderation. Too much takes away the focused mind, and too little, at least I think, takes away all of the fun. We need both. the focus and the fun. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, if you can only figure out how to spell that.

As usual, I'll do a few ads now, none in the middle. I try to have fun with them more and more, aka I try not to give a damn what the sponsors are actually requesting. I try to only include sponsors I actually use and love. So if they want to drop me, that just means they don't love me back. And any successful relationship requires two-way love, my friends. So please do support the sponsors while they're still here because they may not be here for long. This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.

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This episode is also sponsored by Linode, which are Linux virtual machines. It's an awesome compute infrastructure that lets you develop, deploy, and scale whatever applications you build faster and easier. This is both for small personal projects and huge, huge systems. Linode pretty effectively challenges AWS, so I'm really excited about that because competition is always good.

I could list a bunch of ways they stand out, but the one that really jumps to me is the customer service with actual real human beings, 24-7, 365. I've actually been locked out of Instagram recently. I send my love to the engineers at Instagram and Facebook. I mean, these are just amazing people, but a lot of them have written to me with just a lot of love, which I really appreciate.

Sort of that's like personal stuff. That's not customer service. Customer service is creating a pipeline where if shit goes wrong, you can always communicate with somebody and fix it. And okay, you can argue that Instagram is probably not as important as a computer infrastructure.

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And by nice, I mean it's something that I'm told humans enjoy. I'm not a big fan of fun. It's a distraction. But if you are a fan of fun and variety, they have... delicious, now that I'm a fan of, prepared meals, meal kits, and raw ingredients, like just a nice New York strip steak. And now I'm officially hungry. I think my favorite meal would be just a nice steak with a side of vegetables. Sun Basket has a bunch of different varieties of that.

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Michael Malice has entered the chat. Anyway, go to simplisafe.com slash Lex to customize your system and get a free security camera. Yes, friends, I said free. Again, that's simplisafe.com slash Lex. And now, here's my conversation with Cal Newport. What is deep work? Let's start with a big question. So, I mean, it's my term for when you're focusing without distraction on a cognitive demanding task, which is something we've all done.

but we had never really given it a name necessarily that was separate from other type of work. And so I gave it a name and said, let's compare that to other types of efforts you might do while you're working. and see that the deep work efforts actually have a huge benefit that we might be underestimating what does it mean to to work deeply on something you know i've been calling it hard focus

in my writing before that. Well, so the context you would understand, I was in the theory group in CSAIL at MIT, right? So I was surrounded at the time when I was coming up with these ideas by these professional theoreticians. And that's like a murderer's row. of thinkers there, right? I mean, it's like Turing Award, Turing Award, MacArthur, Turing Award. I mean, you know the crew, right? Theoretical computer science. Theoretical computer science, yeah.

Yeah. So I'm in the theory group, right? Doing theoretical computer science. And I publish a book. So I was in this milieu where I was being exposed to people where focus was their tier one skill. Like that's what you would talk about, right? How intensely I can focus. That was the key skill. It's like your 440 time or something if you were an athlete, right? So this is something that people actually, the theory folks are thinking about. Oh, yeah.

Really? Like they're openly discussing, like, how do you focus? I mean, I don't know if they would, you know, quantify it, but focus was the tier one skill. So you would come in, here would be a typical day, you'd come in. And Eric Domain would be sitting in front of a whiteboard with a whole group of visitors who had come to work with him. And maybe they projected a grid on there because they're working on some graph theory problem. You go to lunch, you go to the gym, you come back.

they're sitting there staring at the same whiteboard, right? Like that's the tier one skill. This is the difference between different disciplines. Like I often feel for many reasons like a fraud. But I definitely feel like a fraud when I hang out with either mathematicians or physicists. It feels like they're doing the legit work. Because when you talk closer in computer science, you get to programming.

or like machine learning, like the experimental machine learning, or like just the engineering version of it, it feels like you're gone so far away from what's required to... solve something fundamental about this universe it feels like you're just like cheating your way into like some kind of trick to figure out how to solve a problem in this one particular case yeah that's how it feels right and it's uh i'd be

interested to hear what you think about that because programming doesn't always feel like... you need to think deeply, to work deeply. But sometimes it does. So it's a weird dance. For sure, code does, right? I mean, especially if you're coming up with original algorithmic designs. I think it's a great example of deep work.

I mean, yeah, the hardcore theoreticians, they push it to an extreme. I mean, I think it's like knowing that athletic endeavor is good and then hanging out with a... olympic athlete like oh i see that's what it is now for the grad students like me we're not anywhere near that level but the faculty the faculty in that group these were the cognitive olympic athletes but coding i think is a

classic example of deep work because I got this problem I want to solve. I have all of these tools and I have to combine them somehow creatively and on the fly. But so basically I had been exposed to that. So I was used to this notion when I was in grad school and I was writing my blog, I'd write about hard focus. You know, that was the term I used. Then I published this book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, which came out in 2012. So like right as I began as a professor.

And that book had this notion of skill being really important for career satisfaction, that it's not just following your passion. You have to actually really get good at something and then you use that skills as leverage. And there was this big follow-up question to that book of, okay, well, how do I get really good at things?

And then I look back to my grad school experience. I was like, huh, there is this focus thing that we used to do. I wonder how generally applicable that is into the knowledge sector. And so as I started thinking about it.

it became clear there was this interesting storyline that emerged that, okay, actually, undistracted concentration is not just important for esoteric theoreticians. It's important here, it's important here, it's important here. And that evolved into the deep work hypothesis, which is...

across the whole knowledge work sector focus is very important and we've accidentally created circumstances where we just don't do a lot of it so focus is the sort of prerequisite for basically uh you say knowledge work but basically any kind of skill acquisition, any kind of major effort in this world. Can we break that apart a little bit? Yeah. So a key aspect of focus is not just that you're concentrating hard on something, but you do it without distraction.

So a big theme of my work is that context shifting kills the human capacity to think. So if I change what I'm paying attention to to something different. really, even if it's brief and then try to bring it back to the main thing I'm doing, that causes a huge cognitive pileup that makes it very hard to think clearly. So even if you think, okay, look, I'm writing this code or I'm writing this essay.

And I'm not multitasking and all my windows are closed and I have no notifications on. But every five or six minutes, you quickly check like an inbox or your phone. That initiates a contact shift in your brain, right? We're going to start to suppress some neural networks. We're going to try to amplify some others. It's a pretty complicated process, actually. There's a sort of neurological cascade that happens.

you rip yourself away from that halfway through and go back to what you're doing. And now it's trying to switch back to the original thing, even though it's also in your brains in the process of switching to these emails and trying to understand those contexts. And as a result, your ability to think clearly just goes really down.

And it's fatiguing too. I mean, you do this long enough, you get midday and you're like, okay, I can't think anymore. You've exhausted yourself. Is there some kind of perfect number of minutes, would you say? So we're talking about focusing. on a particular task for, you know, one minute, five minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, is it possible to kind of context switch while maintaining deep focus, you know, every 20 minutes or so? So if you're thinking of like...

Again, maybe it's a selfish kind of perspective, but if you think about programming, you're focused on a particular design of a little bit, maybe a small scale on a particular function or large scale on a system. And then the shift of focus happens like this, which is like, wait a minute, is there a library that can achieve this little task or something like that? And then you have to look it up.

this is the danger zone you go to the internets yeah and and so you have to now you it is a kind of contact switch because as opposed to thinking about the particular problem you now have switched thinking about consuming and integrating knowledge that's out there that can...

plug into your solution to a particular problem. It definitely feels like a contact switch, but is that a really bad thing to do? So should you be setting it aside always and really trying to, as much as possible, go deep and stay there?

for like a really long period of time. Well, I mean, I think if you're looking up a library that's relevant to what you're doing, that's probably okay. And I don't know that I would count that as a full context shift because the semantic networks involved are relatively similar.

Right. You're thinking about this type of solution. You're thinking about coding. You're thinking about this type of functions where you're really going to get hit is if you switch your context to something that's different. and if there's unresolved obligations. So really the worst possible thing you could do would be to look at like an email inbox, right? Because here's 20 emails. I can't answer most of these right now. They're completely different.

Like the context of these emails, like, okay, there's a grant funding issue or something like this is very different than the coding I'm doing. And I'm leaving it unresolved. So it's like someone needs something from me and I'm going to try to pull my attention back. The second worst would be something that's emotionally arousing.

So if you're like, let me just glance over at Twitter, I'm sure it's nice and calm and peaceful over there, right? That could be devastating because you're going to expose yourself to something that's emotionally arousing. That's going to completely mess up the cognitive plateau there. And then when you come back to, okay, let me try to code again.

It's really difficult. So it's both the information and the emotion. Yeah, both can be killers if what you're trying to do. So I would recommend at least an hour at a time because it could take up to 20 minutes to completely clear out the residue from...

whatever it was you were thinking about before. So if you're coding for 30 minutes, you might only be getting 10 or 15 minutes of actual sort of peak lex going on there, right? So an hour at least you get a good 40, 45 minutes plus. I'm partial to 90 minutes as a really good.

a really good chunk. We can get a lot done. But just before you get exhausted, you can sort of pull back a little bit. Yeah. And one of the beautiful... you know people can read about in your uh book deep work but and i know this has been out for a long time and people are probably familiar with many of the concepts but it's still pretty profound it has stayed with me for a long time

There's something about adding the terms to it that actually solidifies the concepts. Words matter. It's pretty cool. And just for me, sort of as a comment, there's... It's a struggle and it's very difficult to maintain focus for a long period of time. But the days on which I'm able to accomplish several hours of that kind of work.

I'm happy. So forget being productive and all that. I'm just satisfied with my life. I feel fulfilled. It's like joyful. And then I can be, I'm less of a dick to other people in my life afterwards. It's a beautiful thing, and I find the opposite. When I don't do that kind of thing, I'm much more irritable. I feel like I didn't accomplish anything, and there's this stress that then... the negative emotion builds up to where you're no longer able to sort of enjoy the hell out of this amazing life.

So in that sense, deep work has been a source of a lot of happiness. I'd love to ask you, how do you, again, you cover this in the book, but how do you integrate? deep work into your life what are different scheduling strategies that you would recommend just at a high level yeah what are different ideas there well i mean i'm a big fan of time blocking right so if you're facing your work day don't allow

like your inbox or a to-do list to sort of drive you. Don't just come into your day and think, what do I want to do next? I mean, I'm a big planner saying, here's the time, here's the time available. Let me make a plan for it. So I have a meeting here. I have an appointment here. Here's what's left. What do I actually want to do with it? So in this half hour, I'm going to work on this.

For this 90 minute block, I'm going to work on that. And during this hour, I'm going to try to fit this in. And then actually I have this half hour gap between two meetings. So why don't I take advantage of that to go run five errands? I can kind of batch those together. But blocking out in advance, this is what I want to do with the time available.

I mean, I find that's much more effective. Now, once you're doing this, once you're in a discipline of time blocking, it's much easier to actually see this is where I want, for example, the deep work. And I can get a handle on the other things that need to happen and find better places to fit them so I can prioritize this. And you're going to get a lot more of that done than if it's just going through your day and saying, what's next?

I schedule every single day kind of thing. So it's like try to in the morning to try to have a plan. Yeah. So, you know, I do a quarterly, weekly, daily planning. So at the semester or quarterly level, I have a big picture. vision for what I'm trying to get done during the fall, let's say, or during the winter. There's a deadline coming up for academic papers at the end of the season. Here's what I'm working on. I want to have this many chapters done of a book, something like this.

the big picture vision of what you want to get done. Then weekly, you look at that and then you look at your week and you put together a plan for like, okay, what's my week going to look like? What do I need to do? How am I going to make progress on these things? Maybe.

Maybe I need to do an hour every morning or I see that Monday is my only really empty day. So that's going to be the day that I really need to nail on writing or something like this. And then every day you look at your weekly plan.

until you block off the actual hours. So you do that three scales, the quarterly, down to weekly, down to daily. And we're talking about actual times of day versus, so the alternative is what I end up... doing a lot and I'm not sure it's the best way to do it is scheduling the duration of time. This is called the luxury when you don't have any meetings. I'm like, religiously don't do meetings. All other academics are jealous of you, by the way. Yeah, I know. No Zoom meetings.

I find those are, that's one of the worst tragedies of the pandemic is both the opportunity to, the positive thing is to have more time with your family. you know sort of reconnect in many ways and that that's really interesting uh be able to remotely sort of not waste time on travel and all those kinds of things the negative is

Actually, both those things are also sources of the negative. But the negative is like, it seems like people have multiplied the number of meetings because they're so easy to schedule. There's nothing more draining to me intellectually, philosophically. Just my spirit is destroyed by even a 10-minute Zoom meeting. Like, what are we doing here? What's the meaning of life? Every Zoom meeting, I have an existential crisis. Kierkegaard with an internet connection.

What the hell were we talking about? Oh, so when you don't have meetings, there's a luxury to really allow for certain things if they need to, like the important things. like deep work sessions to last way longer than you maybe planned for. I mean, that's my goal is to try to schedule. The goal is to schedule, to sit and focus for a particular task for an hour and hope I can keep going.

and hope i can get lost in it and uh do you find that this is at all an okay way to go and uh the time blocking is just something you have to do to actually be an adult and operate in this real world Or is there some magic to the time blocking? Well, I mean, there's magic to the intention. There's magic to it if you have varied responsibilities, right? So I'm often juggling...

multiple jobs, essentially. There's academic stuff, there's teaching stuff, there's book stuff, there's the business surrounding my book stuff. But I'm of your same mindset. If a deep work session is going well... just rock and roll and let it, let it go on. So like one of the big keys of time block, at least the way I do it. So I even, you know, sell this planner to help people time block. It has many columns because the discipline is, Oh, if your initial schedule changes.

you just move over one next time you get a chance to move over one column and then you just fix it for the time that's remaining so in other words there's not there's no bonus for i made a schedule and i stuck with it It's not like you get a prize for it, right? For me, the prize is I have an intentional plan for my time. And if I have to change that plan, that's fine. The state I want to be is basically at any point in the day, I've thought about what time remains.

and gave it some thought for what to do because i'll do the same thing even though i have a lot more meetings and other types of things i have to do in my various jobs and i basically prioritize the deep work Uh, and they get yelled at a lot. So that's kind of my strategy is like, just be okay. Just be okay. Getting yelled at a lot because I feel you if you're rolling. Yeah. Well, that's, that's what it is for me. Like with writing, I think it's writing so hard in a certain way that it's.

You don't really get on a roll in some sense. Like it's just difficult. But working on proofs, it's very hard. to pull yourself away from a proof if you start to get some traction. You've been at it for a couple hours, then you feel the pins and tumblers starting to click together and progress is being made. It's really hard to pull away from that. So I'm willing to get yelled at by almost everyone.

Of course, there is also a positive effect to pulling yourself out of it when things are going great, because then you're kind of excited to resume. Yeah. As opposed to stopping on a dead end. That's true. There's an extra force of procrastination that comes with if you stop on a dead end to return to the task. Yeah, or a cold start.

Like I'm in a stage now, I submitted a few papers recently. So now we're sort of starting something up from cold. And it takes way too long to get going because it's very hard to...

it's very hard to get the motivation to schedule a time when it's not yeah we're in it like here's where we are we feel like something's about to give here when in the very early stages where it's just i don't know i'm going to read hard papers and it's going to be hard to understand them and i'm going to have no idea how to make progress is not

it's not motivating what about deadlines can we um okay so this is like a therapy session uh is uh why it seems like i don't i only get stuff done that has deadlines and so the one of the implied powerful things about time blocking is there's a kind of deadline or there's a artificial or real sense of urgency. Do you think it's possible to get anything done in this world without deadlines? Why do deadlines work so well?

Well, I mean, it's a clear motivational signal, but in the short term, you do get an effect like that in time blocking. I think the strong effect you get by saying, this is the exact time I'm going to work on this.

is that you don't have the debate with yourself every three minutes about, should I take a break now? This is the big issue with just saying, I'm going to go write. I'm going to write for a while and that's it because your mind is saying, well, obviously we're going to take some breaks. We're not just going to write forever.

And so why not right now? They're like, well, not right now. Let's go a little bit longer, five minutes. Why don't we take a break now? Like we should probably look at the internet. Now you have to constantly have this battle. On the other hand, if you're in a time block schedule, like I've got these two hours put aside for writing. That's what I'm supposed to be doing.

I have a break scheduled over here. I don't have to fight with myself, right? And maybe at a larger scale, deadlines give you a similar sort of effect. I know this is what I'm supposed to be working on because it's due. Perhaps, but we are describing as much healthier. sort of giving yourself over, and you talk about this in the new email book, is the process. I mean, in general, you talk about it all over, is creating a process and then giving yourself over to the process.

But then you have to be strict with yourself. Yeah. But what are the deadlines you're talking about? It's like with papers? What's the main type of deadline work? Well, so papers, definitely. But, you know, publications, like say this podcast, I have to publish this. podcast early next week. One, because your book is coming out. I'd love to support this amazing book. But the other is I have to fly to Vegas on Thursday.

to run 40 miles with David Goggins. And so I want this podcast, this conversation we're doing now to be out of my life. Like, I don't want to be in a hotel in Vegas, like, uh, editing the, like freaking out while David Goggins is yelling an hour, an hour 40. three of your tarathon thing but actually it's possible that they still uh will be doing that you know because it's that's not a hard that's a softer deadline right but those are sort of life imposes these kinds of deadlines yeah um

So yeah, papers are nice because there's an actual deadline. But I am almost referring to the pressure that people put on you. Hey, man, you said you're going to get this done two months ago. Why haven't you gotten it done? See, I don't like that pressure. I hate it, too. We can agree, by the way, having...

David Goggins yell at you is probably the top productivity technique. I think we'd all get a lot more done if he was yelling, but see, I don't like that. So I, I will try to get things done early. I like, I like having flex. I also don't like the idea of this has to get done today, right? Like it's due at midnight and we've got a lot to do as the night before, because then I get in my head about what if I get sick?

Or like, what if, you know, what if I don't get a bad night's sleep and I can't think clearly? So I like to have the flex. So I'm all process. And that's like the philosophical aspect of that book, Deep Work, is that there's something very human and deep. about just wrangling with the world of ideas. Aristotle talked about this. If you go back and read the ethics, he's trying to understand the meaning of life and he eventually ends up ultimately at the human capacity to contemplate deeply.

It's kind of like a teleological argument. It's the things that only humans can do, and therefore it must be somehow connected to our ends. And he said, ultimately, that's where he found his meaning. But he's touching on some sort of intimation there that's correct. And so what I try to build my life around is... regularly thinking hard about stuff that's interesting. Just like if you get a fitness habit going, you feel off when you don't do it.

I try to get that cognitive habit. So it's like, I got it. I mean, look, I have my bag here somewhere. I have my notebook in it because I was thinking on the Uber ride over, I was like, you know, I could get some, I'm working on this new proof and it just. so you train yourself you train yourself to appreciate certain things and then over time the hope is that it accretes well let's talk about some demons because i wonder okay there's like deep work which

and the World Without Email books that to me symbolize the life I want to live, okay? And then there is, I'm like, despite appearances, an adult at this point. And this is a life I actually live. And I'm in constant chaos. You said you don't like that anxiety. I hate it too, but it seems like...

I'm always in it. It's a giant mess. It's almost like whenever I establish, whenever I have successful processes for doing deep work, I'll add stuff on top of it just to introduce the chaos. And I don't want to. You have to look in the mirror at a certain point, and you have to say, who the hell am I? I keep doing this. Is this something that's fundamental to who I am, or do I really need to fix this? What's the chaos right now?

I've seen your video about your routine. It seemed very structured and deep. In fact, I was really envious of it. So what's the chaos now that's not in that video? Many of those sessions go way longer. I don't get enough sleep. And then the main introduction of chaos is it's taking on too many things on the to-do list. I see.

I mean, I suppose it's a problem that everybody deals with, which is not saying no. But it's not like I have trouble saying no. It's that there's so much cool shit in my life. Okay, listen. There's nothing I love more in this world than the Boston Dynamics robots. Spot. Yeah.

And they're giving me spot. So there's an to-do. What am I going to say? No. So they're giving me spot. And I want to do some computer vision stuff for the hell of it. OK, so that's not a to-do item. And then you go to Texas for a while. And there's Texas. And everything's happening.

interesting people down there and then there's surprises right there are power outage in in texas there's constant changes to plans and all those kinds of things and you sleep less and then there's personal stuff like just you know people in your life sources of stress all those kinds of things and but it does feel like if i'm just being introspective that i bring it on to myself i suppose a lot of people do this kind of thing is is they

They flourish under pressure. Yeah. And I wonder if that's just a hack I've developed as a habit early on in life that you need to let go of. You need to fix. But it's all interesting things. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah, because these are all interesting things. Well, one of the things you talked about in deep work, which is like really important, is like having an end to the day. Yeah. Like putting it down. Yeah.

I don't think I've ever done that in my life. Yeah. Well, see, I started doing that early because I got married early. So, you know, I didn't have a real job. I was a grad student, but my wife had a real job. And so I just figured I should do my work.

when she's at work because you know hey when when work's over she'll be home and i don't want i don't want to be you know on campus or whatever and so real early on i just got in that habit of this is when you know this is when you end work and then when i was a postdoc which is kind of an easy job, right? I put artificial. I was like, I want to train.

I was like, when I'm a professor, it's going to be busier because there's demands that professors have beyond research. And so as a postdoc, I added artificial, large, time-consuming things into the middle of my day. I'd basically exercise for two hours in the middle of the day and do all this productive meditation and stuff like this.

While still maintaining the nine to five. So it's like, okay, I want to get really good at putting artificial constraints on so that I stay. I didn't want to get flabby when my job was easy so that when I became a professor and now all of that's paying off because I have a ton of kids. So now I don't really have a choice. That's what's probably keeping me away from cool things is I just don't have time to do them. And then after a while, people stop bothering.

Well, but that's how you have a successful life. Otherwise, it's too easy to then go into the full Hunter S. Thompson. Yeah. Like to where nobody... wants nobody functional wants to be in your vicinity like you're driving you attract the people that have a similar behavior pattern is you yeah so if you if you live in chaos you're going to attract chaotic people and then then it becomes like this uh self uh fulfilling prophecy yeah and it feels like i'm not bothered by it

But I guess this is all coming around to exactly what you're saying, which is like, I think one of the big hacks for productive people that I've met is to get married.

and have kids honestly it's it's very perhaps counterintuitive yeah but it gets it's like the ultimate timetable enforcer yeah it enforces a lot of timetables uh though it has a huge kids have a huge productivity hit those you got to weigh it but okay here's the complicated thing though like you could think about in your own life starting the podcast as one of these just

cool opportunities that you put on yourself, right? Like, you know, I could have been talking to you at MIT four years ago and be like, don't do that. Like, your research is going well, right? But then everyone who watches you is like, okay, this podcast is, the direction that's taking you is like a couple years from now. It's going to, there'll be something really monumental that you're probably, there's going to probably lead to, right? There'll be some.

really it just feels like your life is going somewhere it's going somewhere it's interesting yeah unexpected yeah yeah so how do you balance those two things and so what i try to throw at it is this this motto of do less do better know why right so Do less, do better, know why. It used to be the motto of my website years ago. So do a few things, but like an interesting array, right? So I was doing MIT stuff, but I was also writing.

You know, so a couple of things are, you know, they were interesting, like have a couple bets placed on a couple of different numbers on the roulette table, but not too many things. And then really try to do those things really well and see where it goes. Like with my writing, I just spent years and years and years just training. I want to be a better writer. I want to be a better writer. I started writing student books when I was a student.

I really wanted to write hardcover idea books. I started training. I would use New Yorker articles to train myself. I'd break them down, and then I'd get commissions with much smaller magazines and practice the skills. And it took forever until, you know, but now today, like I actually get a right for the New Yorker, but it took like a decade. So a small number of things tried doing really well. And then the know why is have a connection to some sort of value. Like in general, I think.

this is worth doing and then seeing where it leads. And so the choice of the few things. is grounded in what? Like a little flame of passion, like a love for the thing, like a sense that you say you wanted to write, get good at writing.

You had that kind of introspective moment of thinking, this actually brings me a lot of joy and fulfillment. Yeah, I mean, it gets complicated because I wrote a whole book about following your passion being bad advice, which is like the first thing I kind of got infamous for.

I wrote that back in 2012. But the argument there is like passion cultivates, right? So what I was pushing back on was the myth that the passion for what you do exists full intensity before you start, and then that's what propels you.

Where actually the reality is as you get better at something, as you gain more autonomy, more skill and more impact, the passion grows along with it. So that when people look back later and say, oh, follow your passion, what they really mean is I'm very passionate about what I do and that's a worthy goal. But how you actually cultivate that is much more complicated than just introspection is going to identify.

Like for sure you should be a writer or something like this. So I was actually quoting you. I was on a social network last night in Clubhouse. I don't know if you've heard of it. Wait, I have to ask you about this because I'm invited to do a Clubhouse. I don't know what that means. A tech reporter has invited me to do a clubhouse about my new book. That's awesome. Well, let me know when because I'll show up. What is it? Okay. So first of all, let me just mention that I was in a clubhouse.

a room last night, and I kept plugging exactly what you said about passion. So we'll talk about it. It was a room that was focused on burnout. Okay. But first, Clubhouse. is a kind of fascinating place in terms of your mind would be very interesting to analyze this place because we talk about email, we talk about social networks.

But Clubhouse is something very different. And I've encountered in other places, Discord and so on, that's voice only communication. So it's a bunch of people in a room. They're just eyes closed. All you hear is their voices. In real time. real-time live it only happens live you're technically not allowed to record but some people still do and you know especially when it's big big conversations but the whole point is it's they're live and there's different structures like on discord

It was so fascinating. I have this Discord server that would have hundreds of people in a room together, right? We're all just little icons that can mute and unmute our mics. Okay. So you're sitting there, so it's just voices, and you're able with hundreds of people to not interrupt each other.

First of all, as a dynamic system. Yeah. You see icons, just like mics muted or not muted, basically. Yeah, so everyone's muted, and they unmute, and it starts flashing. Yeah. Oh, so you're like, okay, let me get precedence.

Yeah. So it's the digital equivalent of when you're in a conversation, like at a faculty meeting, and you sort of like kind of make some noises like while the other person's finishing. And so people realize like, okay, this person wants to talk next, but now it's purely digital. You see a flashing.

But in a faculty meeting, which is very interesting, like even as we're talking now, there's a visual element that seems to increase the probability of interruption. When it's just darkness, you actually listen better. and you don't interrupt so like if you create a culture there's there's always going to be but they're they're actually exceptions everybody adjusts they kind of evolve to the the beat of the room

Okay, that's one fascinating aspect. Okay, that's weird. Because it's different than a Zoom call where there's video. Yeah. It's just audio. You think video adds, but it actually seems like it subtracts. The second aspect of it that's fascinating is when it's no video, just audio, there's an intimacy. It's weird. Because with strangers, you connect in a much more real way. It's similar to podcasts. Yeah. But- With a lot of people. With a lot of people and new people. Huh. And they-

They bring, okay, first of all, different voices, like low voices and like high voices. And it's more difficult to judge. In Discord, you couldn't even see. It was a culture where you do funny profile pictures as opposed to your actual face. In Clubhouse, it's your actual face. So you can tell like as an older person, younger person, in Discord, you couldn't. You just have to judge based on the voice.

But there's something about the listening and the intimacy of being surprised by different strangers that feels almost like... a party with friends and friends of friends you haven't met yet, but you really like. Now Clubhouse also has an interesting innovation where there's a large crowd that just listens and there's a stage.

And you can bring people up onto stage. So only people on stage are talking. And you can have like five, six, seven, eight, sometimes 20, 30 people on stage. And then you can also have thousands of people just listening. I see.

I don't know. A lot of people are being surprised by this. Why is it called a social network? It seems like there's not social links. There's not a feed that's trying to harvest attention. It feels like a communication. So the social... uh network aspect is you follow people yeah and the people you follow now this is like the first social network that's actually correct use of follow i think

you're more likely to see the rooms they're in. So your feed is a bunch of rooms that are going on right now. Okay. And the people you follow... are the ones that will increase the likelihood that you'll see the room they're in. And so the final result is there's a list of really interesting rooms. I have all these, I've been speaking Russian.

quite a bit there's practicing, but also just like talking politics and philosophy in Russian. I've never done that before, but it allows me to connect with that community. And then there's a community of people like. It's funny, but I'll go in a community of all African-American people talking about race, and I'll be welcomed. I've literally never been in a difficult conversation about race.

Like with people from all over the place. It's like fascinating. Musicians, jazz musicians. I don't know. You could say that a lot of other places could have created that culture. I suppose Twitter and Facebook a lot for that culture. But there's something about... This network, because it stands now, because no Android users.

it's probably just because it's iphone people uh it's there it's conspiratorial or something well like less listen i'm an android person so i i got an iphone just for this network which is funny yeah uh is for now it's all like there's very few trolls yeah there's very few people that are trying to manipulate the system and so on so i don't know it's it's interesting now the downside the reason you're going to hate it

is because it's so intimate, because it pulls you in and pulls in very successful people like you, just like really successful, productive, very busy people. it's a huge time sink. It's very difficult to pull yourself out. Interesting. You mean once you're in a room? Well, no. Leaving the room... It's actually easy. The beautiful thing about a stage with multiple people, there's a little button that says leave quietly. Okay. So culture, no, etiquette-wise, it's okay to just leave.

yeah so you and i in a room when it's just you and i it's a little awkward to leave if you're asking questions yeah but and actually if you're being interviewed for the book That's weird because you're now in the event and you're supposed to, but usually the person interviewing would be like, okay, it's time for you to go. It's more normal. But the normal way to use the room was like, you're just opening the app. And there'll be like, I don't know, Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein.

I think Joe Rogan showed up to the app, Bill Gates. These people on stage just like randomly just plugged in and then you'll step up on stage, listen, maybe you won't contribute at all. Maybe you'll say something funny and then you'll just leave. And there's... uh the the addicting aspect to it the reason it's the time sink is you don't want to leave what i've noticed about exceptionally busy people yeah

That they love this. I think it might have to do with the pandemic. It might be a little bit, yeah. There's a loneliness. They're all starved. But also, it's really cool people. yeah like when was when was the last time you talked to sam harris or whoever like think of anybody uh tyler like any any faculty this is like what universities strive to create but it's taken

because you don't have to cultural evolution to try to get a lot of interesting, smart people together that run into each other. We have really strong faculty. in a room together with no scheduling. This is the power of it. It's like you just show up, there's none of that baggage of scheduling and so on, and there's no pressure to leave. Sorry, no pressure to stay. It's very easy for you to leave. You realize that there's a lot

a lot of constraints on meetings and faculty. Even stopping by before the pandemic, a friend or faculty or colleague and so on, there's a weirdness about leaving. But here, there's not a weirdness about leaving. So they've discovered something interesting. But the final result, when you observe it, is it's very fulfilling. I think it's very beneficial.

But it's very addicting. So you have to make sure you moderate. Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, well, so maybe I'll try it. I mean, look, there's no, the things that make me suspicious about other platforms aren't here. So the feed is not full of user-generated content that is going through some sort of algorithmic rating process with all the weird incentives and nudging that does. And you're not producing content that's being harvested.

to be monetized by another company i mean it seems like it's more uh ephemeral right you're here you're talking the feed is just actually just showing you here's interesting things happening right you're not jockeying in the feed for look i'm being clever or something and i'm going to get a light count that goes up and that's going to influence and right and there's more friction there's more cognitive friction i guess involved in listening

the smart people versus scrolling through. Yeah, there's something there. So there's no... Why are people so... I see a lot of... There's all these articles that seem... I haven't really read them, but why are reporters negative about this? Competition. The New York Times wrote this article called Unfettered Conversations Happening on Clubhouse. So I'm right in picking up a tone, even from the headlines, that there's some negative...

vibes from the press. No, so I can say, let's say, well, I'll tell you what the article was saying, which is there... having cancelable conversations, like the biggest people in the world almost trolling the press. Right. And the press is desperate. Like forechanning the press. Yeah, forechanning the press by saying that you guys are looking for clickbait. from our genuine human conversations. And so I think, honestly, the press is just like, what do we do with this? We can't.

First of all, it's a lot of work for them. Okay. It's what Naval says, which is like, this is skipping the journalist. Like the interview you, if you go on Clubhouse, the interview you might do. for the book would be with somebody who's like a journalist and interviewing you yeah that that's more a traditional yeah it'd be a good introduction for you to try it but the like the way to use clubhouse is you just show up And it's like...

Again, like me, I'm sorry, I keep mentioning Sam Harris as if it's like the only person I know. But like a lot of these major faculty, I don't know, Max Tegmark, just major faculty just sitting there and then you show up.

And then I'll ask like, oh, don't you have a book coming out or something? And then you'll talk about the book and then you'll leave five minutes later because you have to go get coffee. Interesting. So like that's the, it's not the journalistic, you're not going to actually enjoy the.

interview as much because it'll be like the normal thing yeah like you're there for 40 minutes or an hour and there'll be questions from the audience right like i'm doing an event next week for the book launch where it's like jason freed and i are talking about email, but it's using some more, like a thousand people who are there to watch virtually, but it's using some sort of traditional webinar.

Clubhouse would be a situation where that could just happen informally. I jump in, Jason's there, and then someone else jumps in. Yeah, that's interesting. But for now, it's still closed. So even though there's a lot of excitement and there'll be... quite famous people just sitting there listening to you yeah

But the numbers aren't exactly high. So you're talking about rooms, like even the huge rooms are like just a few thousand. Right. And this is probably like Soho in the 50s or something too, just because of the exponential growth. give it seven more months and if you let one invite begets two invites begets four invites begin pretty soon it'll be everyone and then the rooms in your feed are going to be

whatever, marketing performance enhancing drugs or something like that. Exactly. Yeah. But then, and a bunch of competitors, there's already like 30 plus competitors sprung up, Twitter spaces, so Twitter is creating a competitor that's going to likely destroy Clubhouse. Yeah. They just have a much larger user base and they already have a social network. So I would be very cautious, of course, with the addictive element, but it doesn't just like you said.

this particular implementation in its early stages doesn't have the context switching problem. You'll just switch to it and you'll be stuck. Yeah, to keep a context is great. But then I think the best way I've found to use it is to acknowledge that these things pull you in. Yeah. So I've used it in the past. like almost, you know, I'll go get a coffee and I'll tune into a conversation as if that's how I use podcasts sometimes. I'll just like play a little bit of a podcast.

And then, you know, I can just turn it off. The problem with these is it pulls you in. It's really interesting. And then the other problem that you'll experience is like somebody will recognize you. and then they'll be like oh lex come on up come on oh hey i had a question for you and then it takes a lot for you to go like to ignore that yeah Yeah. So, and then you pulled in and it's fascinating and it's really cool people. So it's like a source of a lot of joy, but.

You have to be very, very careful. The reason I brought it up is there's an entire club, actually, on burnout. I brought you up and I brought David Goggins as the process I go through, which is, you know, my passion goes up and down. It dips. And I don't think I trust my own mind to... to tell me whether I'm getting close to burnout or exhaustion or not. I kind of go with the David Goggins model of, I mean, he's probably more applying it to running, but.

when it feels like your mind can't take anymore. that you're just 40 uh at your capacity yeah i mean it's just like arbitrary right level it's the navy seal thing right the navy seal thing i mean you could put that at any percent but it is remarkable that if you just take it one step at a time, just keep going, it's similar to this idea of a process. If you just trust the process and you just keep following, even if the passion goes up and down and so on, then ultimately,

If you look in aggregate, the passion will increase. Your self-satisfaction will increase. And if you have two things, this has been a big strategy of mine, so that what you hope for is off-phase. off phase alignment like that sometimes is in phase and that's a problem uh but off phase alignment's good so okay my research i'm struggling but my book stuff is going well

Right. And so when you, when you add those two waves together, like, oh, we're doing pretty well. And then in other periods, like on my writing, you know, I feel like I'm just not getting anywhere, but I've had some good papers. I'm feeling good over there. So having two things that.

that can counteract each other now sometimes they fall into sync and then it gets rough then when you know when everything because everything for me is cyclical you know good periods bad periods with all this stuff so uh typically they don't coincide so it helps compensate

when they do coincide, you get really high highs, like where everything's clicking, and then you get these really low lows where your research is not working, your program's not clicking, you feel like you're nowhere with your writing, and then it's a little rougher. Do you...

Do you think about the concept of burnout? Because I personally never experienced burnout in the way that folks talk about, which is like, it's not just the up and down. It's like... you don't want to do anything ever again yeah it like it's for some people it's like physical like to the hospital kind of thing yeah yeah so i do worry about it so when i used to do

student writing, like writing about students and student advice, it came up a lot with students at elite schools. And I used to call it deep procrastination, but it was a real, really vivid, very replicatable. syndrome where they stop being able to do schoolwork. Yeah. Like this is due and the professor gives you an extension and the professor gives an incomplete and says, you got it. We're going to fail the course. You have to hand this in and they can't do it.

Right. It's like it's a complete stop on the ability to actually do work. So I used to counsel students who had that issue. And often it was a combination of this is my. The best analysis is you have just the physical and cognitive difficulties of they're usually under a very hard load, right? They're doing too many majors, too many extracurriculars, just really pushing themselves. And the motivation is not sufficiently intrinsic.

So if you have a motivational center that's not completely on board, so a lot of these kids, like when I'm dealing with MIT kids, they would be, you know, their whole town was shooting off fireworks that they got in there. Everyone's hoped that they were going there.

And that they're in three majors. They don't want to let people down, but they're not really interested in being a doctor or whatever. So your motivation is not in the right place. The motivational psychologist would say the locus of control was more towards the extrinsic end of the spectrum. And you have hardship. And you could just fritz out the whole system. And so I would always be very worried about that. So I think about that a lot. I do a lot of multi-phase or multi-scale seasonality.

So I'll go hard on something for a while and then for a few weeks go easy. I'll have semesters that are hard and semesters that are easier. I'll take the summer really low. So on multiple scales and in the day, I'll go really hard on something, but then have a hard cut off at five. So like every scale.

It's all about rest and recovery because I really want to avoid that. And I do burn out. I burnt out pretty recently. I get minor burnt outs. I got a paper, a couple of papers that was trying to work through for a deadline. a few weeks ago and i wasn't sleeping well and and um there's some other things going on and it just it knocks out and i get sick usually

is how I know I've pushed myself too far. And so I kind of pulled it back. Now I'm doing this book launch. Then after this book launch, I'm pulling it back again. So I like seasonality for rest and recovery. I think it's crucial. And at every scale, daily, monthly.

you know, and then at the annual scale, like an easy summer, for example, I think is like a great idea if that's possible. Okay. You just made me realize that that's exactly what I do. Cause I, I feel like I'm not even close to burnout or anything, even though I. i'm in chaos yeah i feel the right exact ways of seasonality is the not even the seasonality but like

You always have multiple seasons operating. It's like you said, because when you have a lot of cool shit going on, there's always at least one thing that's a source of joy. There's always a reason. I suppose the fundamental thing, and I've known people that suffer from depression too, the fundamental problem with the experience of depression and burnout is like, life is meaningless.

And I always have an answer of like why, why today could be cool. Yeah. And you have to contrive it, right? If you don't have it, you have to contrive it. Yeah. I think it's really important. Like, okay, well, this is going bad. So now is the time to start thinking about, I mean, look, I started a podcast during the pandemic. It's like, this is going pretty bad, but you know what? This could be something. Really interesting. Deep questions with Kyle Newport. And I do it all in that voice.

I love the podcast, by the way. But yeah, I think David Foster Wallace said the key to life is to be unboreable. I've always kind of taken that to heart, which is like, you should be able to maybe artificially generate. anything like uh find something in your environment in your surroundings that's a source of joy like everything is fun yeah like did you read the pale king it goes deep on boredom

It's like an uncomfortable meditation on boredom. The characters in that are just driven to the extremes of... I just bought three books on boredom the other day. Uh, so now I'm really interested in this topic because I was anxious about my book launch happening this week. So I was like, okay, I need something else. So I have this idea for, uh, I might do it as an article first, but as a book, like, okay, I need something cool to be thinking about.

Because I was worried about like, I don't know if the launch is going to work, the pandemic, what's going to happen. I don't know if it's going to get to that. So this is exactly what we're talking about. So I went out and I bought a bunch of books and I'm beginning like a whole.

sort of intellectual exploration well i think that's one of the profound ideas in deep work that you don't expand on too much is uh boredom yeah well so deep work had a superficial idea about boredom, which was, I had this chapter called Embrace Boredom, and a very functionalist idea was basically, you have to have some boredom in your regular schedule or your mind is going to form a Pavlovian connection.

between as soon as I feel boredom, I get stimuli. And once it forms that connection, it's never going to tolerate deep work. So there's this very pragmatic... treatment of boredom of your mind better be used to the idea that sometimes you don't get stimuli because otherwise you can't write for three hours like it's just not going to tolerate it but more more recently what i'm really interested in boredom is it as a fundamental human drive

Right. Because it's incredibly uncomfortable. And think about the other things that are incredibly uncomfortable, like hunger or thirst. They serve a really important. purpose for our species right like if something is really distressing there's a reason pain is really uncomfortable because we need to worry about getting injured thirst is really uncomfortable because we need water to survive so what's boredom why is that uncomfortable and and i've been

interested in this notion that boredom is about driving us towards productive action. As a species, think about it. What got us to actually take advantage of these brains? What got us to actually... work with fire, what got us to start shaping stones and the hand axes and figuring out if we could actually sharpen a stick sharp enough that we could throw it as a melee weapon or a distance weapon for hunting mammoth, right? Boredom drives us towards action.

So now I'm fascinated by this fundamental action instinct because I have this theory that I'm working on that we're out of sync with it. Just like we have this drive for hunger, but then we introduced junk food and got out of sync with hunger and it makes us really unhealthy. We have this drive towards action, but then we overload ourselves and we have all of these distractions. And then that causes...

uh it's like a cognitive action obesity type things because it short circuits this system that wants us to do things but we put more things in our plate than we can possibly do and then we're really frustrated we can't do them and we're short circuiting all of our wires so it all comes back to this question well, what would be the ideal sort of amount of stuff to do and type of things to do? Like if we wanted to look back at our ancestral environment and say, if I could just build from scratch.

what type how much work i do and what i work on to be as in touch with that as like paleo people are trying to get their diets in touch with that and so now i'm just but see this is i'm just it's something i made up yeah but now i'm

going deep on it. And one of my podcast listeners I was talking about on the show and I was like, well, I keep trying to learn about animals and boredom. And she sent me this cool article from an animal behaviorist journal about what we know about human boredom versus animal boredom. So trying to figure out that puzzle.

is the wave that's high so I can get through the wave that's low of like, I don't know about this pandemic book launch. And my research is stumbling a little bit because of the pandemic. And so I needed a nice... you know high so there we go there's a case study well the it's both a case study and a very interesting set of concepts because i didn't even realize that it's so simple i'm one of the people that

has a interesting push and pull dynamic with hunger, trying to understand the hunger with myself. Like I probably have an unhealthy relationship with food. I don't know, but there's probably a perfect, that's a nice way to think about.

diet as action, there's probably an optimal diet response to the... the experience that our body's telling us the signal that a body's sending which is hunger and in that same way boredom is sending a signal and most of our intellectual activities in this world are creative activities are essentially a response to that signal. Yeah, and think about this analogy that we have this hunger instinct that junk food short circuits.

It's like, oh, we'll satisfy that hyper-palatably, and it doesn't end up well. Now think about modern, attention-engineered, digitally-mediated entertainment. We have this boredom instinct. oh, we can take care of that with a hyperpalatable alternative. Is that going to lead to a similar problem? So I've been fasting a lot lately. I'm eating once a day. I've been doing that for over a month. just eating one meal a day and primarily meat. But it's very, fasting has been incredible for me.

for focus, for wellbeing, for feel, I don't know, just for feeling good. Okay, we'll put on a chart what makes me feel good. And that fasting and eating primarily a meat-based diet makes me feel really good. And so, but that ultimately what fasting did, I haven't fasted super long yet, like a seven day diet, which I really like to do, but even just fasting for a day for 24 hours.

gets you in touch with the signal. It's fascinating. You get to learn to listen to your body that it's okay to be hungry. It's like a little signal that sends you stuff. And then I get to listen to how it responds when I put food in my body. And I get to like, okay. Cool, so food is a thing that pacifies the signal. It sounds ridiculous, okay? No, and do different types of food, it feels different. So you learn about what your body wants. For some reason, fasting...

It's similar to the deep work, embrace boredom. Fasting allowed me to go into mode of listening, of trying to understand the signal that I could say, I have an unhealthy. Appreciation of fruit. Okay. I love apples and cherries. Like I don't know how to moderate them. So if you take just same amount of calories, I don't know calories matter, but they say calories, 2000 calories of cherries versus 2000.

calories of steak if i eat 2 000 calories of steak maybe just a little bit of like green beans or cauliflower i'm going to feel really good fulfilled focused and happy if i eat cherries i'm going to be i'm going to wake up behind a dumpster crying with like naked and like it's just all around yeah with everything face yeah and just like bloated just not and unhappy

and also the mood swings up and down. I don't know. And I'll be much hungrier the next day. Sometimes it takes a couple days. But when I introduce carbs into the system, too many carbs. It starts, it's just unhealthy. I go into this roller coaster as opposed to a calm boat ride along the river in the Amazon or something like that. So fasting was the mechanism for me to start listening to the body.

I wonder if you can do that same kind of, I guess that's what meditation a little bit is. A little bit, but yeah, listen to boredom. But so two years ago, I had a book out called Digital Minimalism. And one of the things I was recommending that people do is basically a 30-day fast. But from digital personal entertainment, social media, online videos, anything that captures your attention and dispels boredom. And people were...

thinking like, oh, this is a detox. Like, I just want to teach your body not to need the distraction or this or that, but it really wasn't what I was interested in. I wanted there to be space that you could listen to your boredom. Like, okay, I can't just dispel it. I can't just look at the screen.

And revel in it a little bit and start to listen to it and say, what is this really pushing me towards? And you take the new stuff, the new technology off the table and sort of ask, what is this? What am I craving? Like, what's the activity equivalent of?

2000 calories of meat with a little bit of green beans on the side. And I had 1700 people go through this experiment, like spend 30 days doing this. And it's hard at first, but then they get used to listening to themselves and sort of seeking out what is this really pushing me towards. And it was pushing people towards connection.

It was pushing people towards, I just want to go be around other people. It was pushing people towards high quality leisure activities. Like I want to go do something that's complicated. And it took weeks sometimes for them to get in touch with their boredom.

But then it completely rewired how they thought about what do I want to do with my time outside of work? And then the idea is when you're done with that, then it was much easier to go back and completely change your digital life because you have alternatives, right? You're not just trying to abstain from things you don't like.

But that's basically a listening to boredom experiment. Just be there with the boredom and see where it drives you when you don't have the digital Cheez-Its. Okay, so if I can't do that, where is it going to drive me? Well, I guess I kind of want to go to the library. which came up a lot by the way a lot of people rediscovered the library. With physical books. Physical books. You can just go borrow them.

And like there's like low pressure and you can explore and you bring them home and then you read them and you can like sit by the window and read them and it's nice weather outside. And I used to do that 20 years ago. They're listening to boredom.

So can you maybe elaborate a little bit on the different experiences that people had when they quit social media for 30 days? If you were to recommend that process, what is ultimately... the goal yeah digital minimalism that's that's my philosophy for all this tech and it's working backwards from what's important so it's you figure out what you're actually all about like what you want to do what you want to spend your time doing

And then you can ask, okay, is there a place that tech could amplify or support some of these things? And that's how you decide what tech to use. And so the process is let's actually...

get away from everything. Let's be bored for a while. Let's, let's really spend a month getting really figuring out what do I actually want to do? What do I want to spend my time doing? What's important to me? You know, what makes me feel good. And then when you're done, you can bring back in tech very strategically to help those things. Right. And that was the goal.

That turns out to be much more successful than when people take a abstention only approach. So if you come out your tech life and say, you know, whatever, I look at Instagram too much. I don't like how much I'm on Instagram. That's a bad thing. I want to reduce this bad thing. So here's my new thing. I'm going to spend less time looking at Instagram, much less likely to succeed in the long term.

So we're much less likely at trying to reduce this sort of amorphous negative because, you know, in the moment, you're like, yeah, but it's not that bad. And it would be kind of interesting to look at it now. When you're instead controlling behavior because you have a positive that you're aiming towards, it's very powerful for people. Like, I want my life to be like this. Here's the role that tech plays in that life. The connection to wanting your life to be like that is very, very strong.

And then it's much, much easier to say, yeah, like using Instagram is not part of my plan for how I have that life. And I really want to have that life. So of course I'm not going to use Instagram. So it turns out to be a much more sustainable way to tame what's going on. So if you quit social media for 30 days, you kind of have to. do the work you have to do the work of thinking like what am i actually what makes me happy in terms of uh these tools that i've previously used and

When you try to integrate them back, how can I integrate them to maximize the thing that actually makes me happy? Yeah, or what makes me happy unrelated to technology? Like, what do I actually, what do I want my life to be like? Well, maybe what I want to do is be outside of nature two hours a day and spend a lot more time like helping my community and sacrificing on behalf of my connections and then have some sort of intellectually engaging leisure activity like I'm reading or trying to.

read the great books and having more calm and seeing the sunset. You create this picture and then you go back and say, well, I still need my Facebook group because that's how I keep up with my cycling group. But Twitter is just...

you know, toxic is not helping any of these things. And while I'm an artist, so I kind of need Instagram to get inspiration. But if I know that's why I'm using Instagram, I don't need it on my phone. It's just on my computer. And I just follow 10 artists and check it once a week. Like you really.

can start deploying it was the number one thing that differentiated in that experiment the people who ended up sustainably making changes and getting through the 30 days and those who didn't was the people who did the experimentation and the reflection like let me try to figure out what's positive

They were much more successful than the people that just said, I'm sick of using my phone so much. So I'm just going to white knuckle it. Just 30 days will be good for me. I just got to get away from it or something. It doesn't last. So you don't use social media currently. Yeah. Do you find that a lot of people going through this process will seek to basically arrive at a similar place to not use social media primarily? About half.

Right. So about half when they went through this exercise, and these aren't quantified numbers, you know, this is just, they sent me reports and yeah. That's pretty good though. So 1,700? Yeah. Yeah. So roughly half. probably got rid of social media altogether. Once they did this exercise, they realized these things I care about, social media is not the tools that's really helping. The other half kept some, there were some things in their life where some social media was useful.

But the key thing is, if they knew why they were deploying social media, they could put fences around it. So, for example, of those half that kept some social media, almost none of them kept it on their phone. Oh, interesting. You can't optimize if you don't know the function you're trying to optimize. So it's like this huge hack. Once you know this is why I'm using Twitter, then you can have a lot of rules about how you use Twitter.

And suddenly you take this cost-benefit ratio and it goes like way from the company's advantage and way over towards your advantage. It's kind of fascinating because I've been... torn with social media but i did this kind of process i haven't actually done it for 30 days which i probably should i'll do it for like a week at a time and regularly and thinking what what kind of approach to twitter works for me

I'm distinctly aware of the fact that I really enjoy posting once or twice a day and at that time checking from the previous post. it like it makes me feel even when there's like negative comments they go right past me and when there's positive comments makes you smile i feel like love

and connection with people, especially with people I know, but even just in general, it's like, it makes me feel like the world is full of awesome people. Okay. When you increase that from... checking from two to, I don't know what the threshold is for me, but probably five or six per day, it starts going to anxiety world, where negative comments will actually stick to me mentally.

and positive comments will feel more shallow. It's kind of fascinating. So I've been trying to, there's been long stretches of time. I think December and January, where I did just post and check, post and check. That makes me really happy. Most of 2020, I did that. It made me really happy. Recently, I started, I'll go.

you know you go right back in like a drug addict where you check it like i don't know what that number is but that number is high not good you don't come out happy no one comes out of a day full of twitter celebrating humanity and it's not even because i'm very fortunate to have a lot of just the positivity in my the twitter but i there's just a general anxiety i wouldn't even say

I wouldn't even say it's, it's probably the thing that you're talking about with the contact switching. It's almost like an exhaustion.

I wouldn't even say it's like a negative feeling. It's almost just an exhaustion to where I'm not creating anything beautiful in my life. Just exhausted. Like an existential exhaustion. Existential exhaustion. But I wonder, do you think it's possible to use... the people you've seen from yourself to use social media in the way i'm describing moderation or is it always going to become when people do this exercise you get lots of lots of configurations

So for people that have a public presence, for example, like what you're doing is not that unusual. Okay, I post one thing a day and my audience likes it and that's kind of it. But you thought through like, okay. This supports something I value, which is like having a sort of informal connection with my audience and being exposed to some sort of positive randomness. Okay, then you can say, if that's my goal...

What's the right way to do it? Well, I don't need to be on Twitter on my phone all day. Maybe what I do is every day at five, I do my post and check on the day. So I have a writer friend, Ryan Holiday, who writes about the Stoics a lot. And he has this similar strategy. He posts one.

quote every day from usually from a famous stoic and sometimes from a contemporary figure and that's just what he does he just posts it and it's a very positive thing like his readers really love it because it's just like a dose of inspiration he doesn't spend time He's never interacting with anyone on social media, right? But that's an example of, I figured out what's important to me. What's the best way to use tools to amplify it? And then you get advantages out of the tools.

So I like what you're doing. I looked up your Twitter feed before I came over here. I was curious. You're not on there a lot. No. I don't see you yelling at people. Now, do you think social media is a medium? change the cultural standards. Have you read Neil Postman at all? Have you read Amusing Ourselves to Death? He was a social critic, technology critic, and wrote a lot about technological determinism.

The ways, which is a really influential idea to a lot of my work, which is actually a little out of fashion right now in academia, but the ways that the properties and presence of technologies. change things about humans in a way that's not really intended or planned by the humans themselves. And that book is all about how different communication medium, like fundamentally just changed the way the human brain

understands and operates. And so he sort of gets into what happened when the printed word was widespread and how television changed it. And this was all pre-social media. But this one of these ideas I'm having is like what the degree to which I get into it sometimes on my show, I get into a little bit like the degree to which like Twitter in particular just changed the way that people conceptualized what, for example, debate and discussion was.

Like it introduced a rhetorical dunk culture where it's sort of more about tribes not giving ground to other tribes. And it's like, it's a complete, there's different places and times.

When that type of discussion was thought of differently, right? Well, yeah, absolutely. But I tend to believe, I don't know what you think, that there's a technological solution. There's literally different... features in twitter that could completely reverse that there's so much power in the different choices yeah that are made and it could still be highly engaging and have very different effects perhaps more negative but or hopefully more positive yeah

I'm trying to pull these two things apart. So there's these two ways social media, let's say, could change the experience of reading a... a major newspaper today one could be a little bit more economic right so so the internet made it cheaper to get news the newspapers had to retreat to a paywall model because it was the only way they were going to survive but once you're in a paywall model then then what you really want to do is make your

tribe which is within the paywall very very happy with you so you want to work to them but then there's the sort of the determinist point of view which is the properties of twitter which were arbitrary jack and evan just whatever let's just do it this way

influenced the very way that people now understand and think about the world so the one influenced the other i think yeah they they kind of started adjusting together i i did this thing i mean i'm trying to understand this part of the part of the I've been playing with the entrepreneurial idea. That's a very particular dream I've had of a startup that is a longer term thing. It has to do with artificial intelligence.

More and more, it seems like there's some trajectory through creating social media type of technologies, very different than what people are thinking I'm doing. But it's a kind of challenge to the way the... Twitter has done. But it's not obvious what the best mechanisms are to still make an exceptionally engaging platform. Like Clubhouse is very engaging. and not have any other negative effects i for example there's chrome extensions that allow you to turn off

all likes and dislikes and all of that from Twitter. So all you're seeing is just the content. On Twitter, that to me creates, that's not a compelling experience at all because I still need I would argue I still need the likes to know what's a tweet worth reading. Yeah. Because I don't only have a limited amount of time, so I need to know what's valuable. It's like great Yelp reviews on tweets or something. Yeah, exactly. But I've turned off on...

For example, on my account on YouTube, I wrote a Chrome extension that turns off. all likes and dislikes and just views. I don't know how many views the video gets unless it's on my phone. Did you take off the recommendations? On YouTube, some people, the distraction-free tube is a big one. No, I'm not worried about the distraction because I'm able to control myself on YouTube. You don't rabbit hole.

I don't rabbit hole. So you have to know your demons or your addictions or whatever. On YouTube, I'm okay. I don't keep clicking. The negative feelings come from seeing the views on stuff you've created. Oh, so you don't want to see your views. Yeah. So I'm just speaking to the things that I'm aware of myself that are helpful and things that are not helpful emotionally. And I feel like there should be, we need to create actually tooling for ourselves.

That's not me with JavaScript, but anybody is able to create, sort of control the experience that they have. Yeah. Well, so my... my big unified theory on social media is I'm very, I'm very bearish on the big platforms having a long future. You are. I think the moment, I think the moment of three or four major platforms is not going to last.

Right. So I don't know. OK, this is just perspective. Right. So you can start shorting these stocks on my. It's not financial. Yeah. Yeah. Don't do Robin Hood. So here's here's I think the the big mistake the major platforms made. as when they took out the network effect advantage. So the original pitch, especially of something like Facebook or Instagram, was the people you know are on here. So what you use this for is you can connect to people that you already know.

This is what makes the network useful. So therefore, the value of our network grows quadratically with the number of users. And therefore, it's such a head start that there's no way that someone else can catch up. But when they shifted and when Facebook took the lead of, say, we're going to shift towards.

a newsfeed model. They basically said, we're going to try to, in the moment, get more data and get more likes. What we're going to go towards is actually just seeing interesting stuff, like seeing diverting information. So people took this social internet

impulse to connect to people digitally to other tools, like group text messages and WhatsApp and stuff like this, right? So you don't think about these tools as, oh, this is where I connect with people. Once it's just a feed that's kind of interesting.

Now you're competing with everything else that can produce interesting content that's diverting. And I think that is a much fiercer competition because now, for example, you're going up against podcast, right? I mean, like, okay, I guess, you know.

the Twitter feed is interesting right now, but also a podcast is interesting or something else could be interesting too. I think it's a much fiercer competition when there's no, there's no more network effects. Right. And so my sense is we're going to see a fragmentation into what I call long tail social media. Where if I don't need everyone I know to be on a platform, then why not have three or four bespoke platforms I use where it's a thousand people and we're all interested in whatever.

AI or comedy, and we've perfected this interface, and maybe it's like Clubhouse, it's audio or something, and we all pay $2 so we don't have to worry about attention harvesting. And that's going to be wildly more entertaining. I mean, I'm thinking about comedians on Twitter.

not the best internet possible format for them expressing themselves and being interesting that you have all these comedians that are trying to like, well, I can do like little clips and little whatever. Like, I don't know if there was a. long tail social media. And it's really, this is where the comedians are in this podcast and the comedians are on podcast now. So this is my thought is that there's really no, there's really no strong advantage to having one large.

platform that everyone is on, if all you're getting from it is, I now have different options for diversion and uplifting and aspirational or whatever types of entertainment, that whole thing could fragment. And I think the glue that was holding together was network effects. And I don't think they realized that when network effects have been destabilized, they don't have the centrifugal force anymore. And they're spinning faster and faster. But is a Twitter feed really...

that much more interesting than all these streaming services is it really that much more interesting than clubhouse is it that much more interesting than podcast i feel like they don't realize how unstable their ground actually is yeah that's fascinating but uh The thing that makes Twitter and Facebook work, I mean, the newsfeed, you're exactly right. You can just duplicate the newsfeed. If it's not the social network and it's the newsfeed, then why not have multiple different...

that are better at satisfying you. There's a dopamine gamification that they've figured out. And so you have to, whatever you create, you have to at least provide some pleasure in that same gamification kind of way it doesn't have to have to do with scale of large social networks but i mean i guess you're implying that you should be able to design that kind of mechanism in other forms. Or people are turning on that gamification. I mean, so people are getting wise to it.

and are getting uncomfortable about it. Right. So if I'm offering something there, these exist out here. People realize sugar is bad. Yeah. Drinking a lot is great too, but it also, after a while you realize there's. There's problems. So some of the long tail social media networks that are out there that I've looked at, they offer usually like a deeper sense of connection. It's usually interesting people that you share some affinity and you have these carefully cultivated.

I wrote this New Yorker piece a couple of years ago about the indie social media movement that really got into some of these different technologies. But I think the technologies are a distraction. We focus too much on, you know, Mastodon versus, you know, whatever, like forget. or discord like actually let's forget the protocols right now it's the idea of okay and there's all a lot of these long tail social media groups what people are getting out of it which i think can

outweigh the dopamine gamification is strong connection and motivation. Like you're in a group with other guys that are all trying to be you know, better dads or something like this. And you talk to them on a regular basis and you're sharing your stories and there's interesting talks and that's a powerful thing too. One interesting thing about scale of Twitter is you have these viral spread of information.

So sort of Twitter has become a newsmaker in itself. Yeah, I think it's a problem. Well, yes, but I wonder what replaces that because then you immediately... Reporting? Well, no. The problem with reporters and journalism is that they're intermediary. They have control. I mean, this is the problem in Russia currently is that you have...

It creates a shield between the people and the news. The interesting thing and the powerful thing about Twitter is that the news originates from the individual that's creating the news. You have the former president of the United States on Twitter creating news. You have Elon Musk creating news. You have people announcing stuff on Twitter as opposed to talking to a journalist. And that feels much more genuine. And it feels very powerful, but actually coming to realize it doesn't need the social.

You can just put that announcement on a YouTube type thing. This is what I'm thinking. Right. So this is my point about that, because that's right. The democratizing power of the Internet is fantastic. I'm an old school Internet nerd, a guy that was, you know. telemetting in the servers and gophering before the world wide web was around right so i'm a huge internet booster and that's that's one of its big power but when you put everything on twitter

I think the fact that you've homogenized everything, right? So everything looks the same, moves with the same low friction, is very difficult. You have no what I call distributed curation. Right. The only curation that really happens is a little bit with likes and also the algorithm. But if you look back to pre Web 2.0 or early Web 2.0, when a lot of this was happening, let's say on blogs where people own their own servers and you had your different blogs.

There was this distributed curation that happened where in order for your blog to get on people's radar, and this had nothing to do with any gatekeepers or legacy media, it was... Over time, you got more links and people respected you and you would hear about this blog over here. And there's this whole distributed curation and filtering going on. So if you think like the 2004 presidential election, most of the information people are getting from the Internet was when the first big Internet.

news-driven elections was from, you know, you had like the daily costs and drudge, but there was like blogs that were out there. And this is back, Ezra Klein was just running a blog out of his, you know, dorm room at this point, right? And you would, in a distributed fashion,

and gain credibility because, okay, people have paid it. It's very hard to get people to pay attention to your blog. They're paying attention. I get linked to this kid Ezra or whatever. It seems to be really sharp and now people are noticing it and now you have a distributed curation. That solves a lot of the problems we see when you have a completely homogenized low friction environment like friction where, I mean, Twitter, where any...

random conspiracy theory or whatever that people like can just shoot through and spread. Whereas if you're starting a blog to try to push QAnon or something like that. it's probably going to be a really weird looking blog and you're gonna have a hard time. Like it's just never going to show up on people's radar. Right. I mean, that, that, so everything you've said up until the very last statement, I would, I would agree with, this is a topic I don't know a ton about, I guess. So there's a,

I think I'll forget QAnon. QAnon could be that. I also don't know. I should know more. I apologize. I don't know more. I mean, that's the power and the downside. You can have, I mean, Hitler could have a blog today. And you would have potentially a very large following if he's charismatic, if he's...

is good with words, is able to express the ideas of whatever, maybe is able to channel the frustration, the anger that people have about a certain thing. So I think that's the power of blogs, but it's also the limitation. But that doesn't, we're not trying to solve that. The fundamental problem you're saying is not the problem.

Your thesis is that there's nothing special about large scale social networks that guarantees that they will keep existing. And it's important to remember for a lot of the older generation of internet. or the people who were very pro-internet in the early days, they were completely flabbergasted by the rise of these platforms. Why would you take the internet and then build your own version of the internet?

where you own all the servers. And we built this whole, distributed the whole thing. We had open protocols. Everyone anywhere in the world can use the same protocols. Your machine can talk to any other machine. It's the most democratic.

communication system that's ever been built. And then these companies came along and said, we're going to build our own. We'll just own all the servers and put them in buildings that we own. And the internet will just be the first mile to get you into our private internet where we own the whole thing. It went completely against the entire...

motivation of the internet was like, yes, it's not going to be one person owns all the servers and you pay to access them. It's any one server that they own can talk to anyone else's server because we all agree on a standard set of protocols. And so the old guard of... pro-internet people never understood this move towards let's build private versions of the internet.

We'll build three or four private internets, and that's what we'll all use. It was the opposite, basically. Well, it's funny enough, I don't know if you follow, but Jack Dorsey is also a proponent and is... helping to fund create fully distributed versions of twitter essentially a thing that would potentially destroy twitter yeah but i think there you know there might be financial

Are business cases to be made there? I'm not sure. But that seems to be another alternative as opposed to creating a bunch of the long tail, creating the ultimate long tail of fully distributed. Yeah, which is what the internet is. But that's sort of when I'm thinking about long tail social media, I'm thinking it's like the tech's not so important. Like there's groups out there.

Right. I know where the tech they use to actually implement their digital only social group, whatever, they might use Slack. They might use some combination of Zoom or it doesn't matter. I think in the tech world.

We want to build the beautiful protocol that, okay, everyone's going to use as just a federated server protocol in which we've worked out X, Y, and Z. And no one understands it because then the engineers need it all to make, I get it because I'm a nerd like this. Like, okay, every standard has to fit with everything else and no one understands what's going on. Meanwhile, you have this group of bike enthusiasts that are like, yeah, we'll just...

jump onto Zoom and have some Slack and put up a blog. The tech doesn't really matter. We built a world with our own curation, our own rules, our own social ecosystem that's generating a lot of value. I don't know if it'll happen. There's a lot of money. stake with obviously these large... But I just think they're more... I mean, look how quickly Americans left Facebook, right? I mean, Facebook was savvy to buy other properties and to diversify, right? But how quick did that take for...

Just standard Facebook newsfeed. Everyone under the age of something were using it and no one under a certain age is using it now. It took like four years. I mean, this stuff is really... I believe people can leave Facebook overnight. Yeah. I think Facebook hasn't actually messed up enough to... There's two things. They haven't messed up enough for people to really leave aggressively, and there's no good alternative for them to leave. I think if good alternatives pop up...

It would just immediately happen. The stuff is a lot more culturally fragile, I think. I mean, Twitter's having a moment because it was feeding a certain type of, I mean, there's a lot of anxieties that was in the sort of political sphere anyways that Twitter was working with. But its moment could go to as well. I mean, it's a really arbitrary thing. Short little things. And I read a Wired article about this earlier in the pandemic. Like, this is crazy.

that the way that we're trying to communicate information about the pandemic is all these weird arbitrary rules where people are screenshotting pictures of articles that are part of a tweet thread where you say one slash in under it. Like we have the technology guys. really clearly convey long-form information to people. Why do we have these? And I know it's because it's the gamified dopamine hits, but what a weird medium. There's no reason for us to have to...

Have these threads that you have to find and pin, will you screenshot? I mean, we have technology to communicate better using the internet. I mean, why are epidemiologists having to do tweet threads? Well, because there's mechanisms of publishing that make it easier on Twitter. i mean we're evolving as a species and the internet is a very fresh thing yeah and so it's kind of interesting to think that as opposed to twitter is this is what jack also complains about is

Twitter's not innovating fast enough. And so it's almost like the people are innovating and thinking about their productive life faster than the platforms on which they operate can catch up. And so the point...

the gap grows sufficiently, they'll jump. A few people, a few innovative folks will just create an alternative and perhaps distributed, perhaps just... many little silos and then people will jump and then we'll just continue in this kind of way but see i think like substack for example what they're going to pull out of twitter among other things is the audience that was let's say like slightly left of center but um

Slightly just slender, don't like Trump, uncomfortable with postmodern critical theories made into political action, right? And they're like, yeah, Twitter, there was people on there talking about this, and it made me feel...

sort of heard because i was feeling a little bit like a nerd about it but honestly i'd probably rather subscribe to four subs you know i'm gonna have like berries and andrew sullivan's i'll have like a jesse signals like i'll have a few sub stacks i can subscribe to and honestly that's i'm a knowledge worker who's

32 anyways probably that's an email all day and and so like there's an innovation that's going to that group you know it's going to suck them off which is actually a very large group yeah that's a lot of that's a lot of energy and then once trump's gone i guess that's probably going to drive that drove a lot of uh

uh more like trump people off twitter like this stuff is fragile so i but the fascinating thing to me because i've hung out on parlor for a short amount enough to to know that the interface matters it's so fascinating like that That it's not just about ideas. It's about creating, like Substack 2, creating a pleasant experience. Addicting experience. You're right about that. And it's hard.

This is one of the conclusions from that indie social media article. It's just the ugliness matters. And I don't mean even just aesthetically, but just the clunkiness of the interfaces, the... And I don't know, to some degree, the social media companies have spent a lot of money on this, and to some degree, it's a survivorship bias. Twitter, every time I hear Jack talks about this, it seems like...

he's as surprised as anyone else the way Twitter is being used. I mean, it's basically the way, you know, they had it years ago and then, you know, it was a great, it'll be statuses, right? This is what I'm doing.

You know, and my friends can follow me and see it. And without really changing anything, it just happened to hit everything right to support this other type of interaction. Well, there's also the JavaScript model, which Brendan Eich... talked about, he just implemented JavaScript, like the crappy version of JavaScript in 10 days, threw it out there and just...

changed it really quickly, evolved it really quickly, and now has become, according to Stack Exchange, the most popular programming language in the world. It drives most of the internet and even the backend and now mobile. And so that's an argument for the kind of thing you're talking about where like like the bike club people yeah could literally create the thing that would you know run most of the internet yeah 10 years from now yeah

So there's something to that, like, as opposed to trying to get lucky or trying to think through stuff is just to solve a particular problem. Do stuff. Yeah. And then do stuff. Do stuff. Keep tinkering until you love it. Yeah. Yeah. And then. And of course, the sad thing is timing and luck matter and that you can't really control. That's the problem. Yeah. But you can't go back to 2007. Yeah. That's like the number one thing you could do to have a lot of success with a new platform is.

go back in time 14 years so the thing you have to kind of think about is what is the like what's the totally new thing that uh 10 years from now would seem obvious i mean some people saying clubhouse is that There's been a lot of stuff like Clubhouse before, but it hit the right kind of thing. Similar to Tesla, actually. What Clubhouse did is it got a lot of relatively famous people on there quickly. And then the other effect is like,

it's invite only. So like, oh, all the smart, like famous people are on there. I wonder what's, it's the FOMO, like fear that you're missing something really profound or exciting happening there. So those social effects. And then once you actually show up. I'm a huge fan of this. It's the JavaScript model. It's like Clubhouse is so dumb, like so simple in its interface. Like you literally can't do anything except mute, unmute.

there's a mute button yeah and there's a leave quietly button yeah that's it yeah and it's it's kind of i love single use technology that that sense yeah there's no like there's no it's just like trivial and uh you know twitter kind of started like that facebook started like that yeah but they've evolved quickly to add all these features and so on

And, you know, I do hope Clubhouse stays that way. Yeah. Be interesting. Or there's alternatives. I mean, even with Clubhouse, though, so one of the issues with a lot of these platforms, I think, is bits are cheap enough now. that we don't really need a unicorn investor model. I mean, the investors need that model. There's really not really an imperative of we need something that can scale.

to 100 million plus a year revenue. So because it was going to require this much seed and angel investment and you're not going to get...

this much seed annual investment unless you can have a potential exit this wide because you have to be part of a portfolio that depends on one out of 10 exiting here. If you don't actually need that and you don't need to satisfy that investor model, which I think is... basically the case i mean bits are so cheap everything is so cheap you don't know so even like with clubhouse it's it's investor backed right this notion of like this needs to be a major platform um

But the bike club doesn't necessarily need a major platform. That's where I'm interested. I mean, I don't know. There's so much money. That's the only problem that bets against me is that you can concentrate a lot of capital.

if you do these things, right? I mean, so Facebook was like a fantastic capital concentration machine. It's crazy how much, where it even found that capital in the world that it could concentrate and ossify in the stock price that a very small number of people have access to, right? That's...

That's incredibly powerful. So when there is a possibility to consolidate and gather a huge amount of capital, that's a huge imperative that's very hard for the bike club to go up against. But there's a lot of money in the bike club, as you see with the Wall Street bets.

Yeah. When a bunch of people get together. I mean, it doesn't have to be a bike. It could be a bunch of different bike clubs just kind of team up. Yeah. To overtake. That's what we're doing now. Yeah. Yeah. Or we're going to repurpose off-the-shelf stuff. Yes. That's not, you were going to, yeah, we're going to repurpose whatever it was for office productivity or something. And like the, the clubs using Slack just to build out these, you know. Yeah.

let's talk about email yeah that's right i wrote a book you wrote uh yet another amazing book a world without email Maybe one way to enter this discussion is to ask, what is the hyperactive hive mind, which is the concept you opened the book with? Yeah, and the devil. And the devil. It's the scourge of hundreds of millions. So I think...

So I called this book a world without email. The real title should be a world without the hyperactive hive mind workflow. But my publisher didn't like that. So we had to get a little bit more pithy. I was trying to answer the question after deep work. Why is it so hard to do this? If this is so valuable, if we can produce much higher, if people are much happier, why do we check email all day? Why are we on Slack all day? And so I started working on this book immediately after Deep Work.

And so my initial interviews were done in 2016. So it took five years to pull the threads together. I was trying to understand why is it so hard for most people to actually find any time to do the stuff that actually moves to Neil. And the story was, and I thought this was, I hadn't heard this reported anywhere else. That's why it took me so long to pull it together, is email arrives on the scene.

Email spreads. I trace it. It really picks up steam in the early 1990s. Between like 1990 and 1995, it makes its move.

And it does so for very pragmatic reasons. It was replacing existing communication technologies that it was better than. It was mainly the fax machine, voicemail, and memos. So this was just better. So it was a killer app because it was useful. In its wake... came a new way of collaborating and that's the hyperactive hive mind so it's the like the virus that follows the the rats that

went through Western Europe for the black pig as email spread through organizations in its way came the hyperactive hive mind workflow, which says, okay, guys, here's the way we're going to collaborate. We'll just work things out on the fly with unscheduled back and forth messages. Boom, boom, boom. Let's go back and forth. Hey, what about this? Did you see this? What about that client? What's going on over here? That followed email. It completely took over office work. And the need...

To keep up with all of these asynchronous back and forth unscheduled messages, as those got more and more and more, and we had more of those to service, the need to service those required us to check more and more and more and more, right? And so by the time, and I go through the numbers, but by the time you get to today,

Now the average knowledge worker has to check one of these channels once every six minutes. Because every single thing you do in your organization, how you talk to your colleagues, how you talk to your vendors, how you talk to your clients, how you talk to the HR department, it's all this asynchronous, unscheduled back and forth messaging.

And you have to service the conversations. And it's spiraled out of control. And it has sort of devolved a lot of work in the office now to all I do is constantly tend communication channels. So it's fascinating what you're describing is... Nobody ever paused in this whole evolution to try to create a system that actually works. That it was kind of like a huge fan of cellular automata.

So it just kind of started a very simple mechanism, just like cellular automata. It just kind of grew to overtake all the fundamental communication of how we do business and also personal life. That's one of the big ideas is the unintentionality. This goes back to technological determinism. This is a weird business book because I go deep on...

philosophy I go deep on. For some reason, we get into paleoanthropology for a while. We do a lot of neuroscience. It's kind of a weird book. But I got real into this technological determinism, right? This notion that just the presence of a technology can change how people act.

That's my big argument about what happened with the hive mind. And I can document specific examples, right? So I document this example in IBM 1987, maybe 85, but it's in like the mid to late eighties, IBM, our monk headquarters. We're going to put an internal email, right? Because it's convenient. And so they ran a whole study. And so I talked to the engineer.

who ran this study, Adrian Stone. Like, we're going to run this study to figure out how much do we communicate because it was still an era where it's expensive, right? So you have to provision a mainframe so you can't...

over provision. Like we want to know how much communication actually happened. So they went and figured it out. How many memos, how many calls, how many notes. Great. We'll provision a mainframe to handle email that can handle all of that. So if all of our communication moves to email, the mainframe will still be fine.

In three days, they had melted it down. People were communicating six times more than that estimate. So just in three days, the presence of a low friction digital communication tool drastically changed how everyone collaborated.

So that's not enough time for, you know, an all hands meeting guys. We figured it out. You know, this is what we need to communicate a lot more is what's going to make us more productive. We need more emails. It's emergent. Isn't that just on the positive end? Amazing to you. Isn't email amazing? Like in those early days, like just a frictionless communication. I mean, email is awesome.

People say that there's a lot of problems with emails, just like people say a lot of problems with Twitter and so on. It's kind of cool that you can just send a little note. It was a miracle, right? So I wrote a... There's originally was a New Yorker piece from a year or two ago called was email a mistake. And then it's in the book too, but I go into the history of.

email like why did it come along and it solved a huge problem so it was it was the problem of fast asynchronous communication yeah and it was a problem did not exist until we got large offices And we got large offices, synchronous communication, like let's get on the phone at the same time. There's too much overhead to it. There's too many people you might have to talk to. Asynchronous communication, like let me send you a memo when I'm ready and you can read it when you're ready. Took too long.

And so it was like a huge problem. So one of the things I talked about is the way that when they built the CIA headquarters, there was such a need for fast asynchronous communication that they built.

a pneumatic powered email system they had these pneumatic tubes all throughout the headquarters with electromagnetic routers so you would put your message in a plexiglass tube and you would turn these brass dials about the location, you would stick it in these things and pneumatic tubes and it would shoot and sort and work its way through these tubes to show up in just a minute or something.

at the floor and at the general office suite where you wanted to go. And my point is the fact that they spent so much money to make that work show how important fast asynchronous communication was to large offices. So when email came along, it was a...

productivity silver bullet. It was a miracle. I talked to the researchers who were working on computer supported collaboration in the late eighties, trying to figure out how are we going to use computer networks to be more productive? And they were building all these systems and tools.

email showed up, it just wiped all that research off the map. There was no need to build these custom intranet applications. There was no need to build these communication platforms. Email could just do everything. So it was a...

miracle application, which is why it spread everywhere. That's one of these things where, okay, unintended consequences, right? You had this miracle productivity silver bullet. It spread everywhere, but it was so effective. It just, you know, I don't know, like a drug. I'm sure there's some pandemic.

metaphor here analogy here of a drug that like is so effective at treating this that it also blows up your whole immune system and then everyone gets sick but well ultimately it probably significantly increased the productivity of the world but there's a kind of hump that it now has plateaued and then where...

the fundamental question you're asking is like, okay, how do we take the next, how do we keep increasing the productivity? Yeah, I think it brought it down. So my contention, and so again, there's a little bit in the book, but I have a more recent Wired article.

put some newer numbers to this. I subscribe to the hypothesis that the hyperactive hive mind was so detrimental. So yeah, it helped productivity at first, right? When you could do fast asynchronous communication, but very quickly there was a sort of exponential rise in...

communication amounts once we got to the point where the hive mind meant you had to constantly check your email i think that made us so unproductive that it actually was pulling down non-industrial productivity and i think the only reason why so it certainly has not been going up That metric's been stagnating for a long time now while all this was going on. I think the only reason why it hasn't fallen is that we added these extra shifts off the books.

I'm going to work for three hours in the morning. I'm going to work for three hours at night. And only that I think has allowed us to basically maintain a stagnated non-industrial growth. We should have been shooting up the charts. I mean, this is... miraculous innovations of computer networks. And then we built out these hundred billion dollar

ubiquitous worldwide, high-speed wireless internet infrastructure with supercomputers in our pockets where we could talk to anyone at any time. Why did our productivity not shoot off the charts? Because our brain can't contact switch once every six minutes. So it's fundamentally back to the contact switching. Contact switching is poison.

Contact switching is poison. What is it about email that forces contact switching? Is it both our psychology that drags us in? Or is it the expectation? Yeah, right, right. Because it's not, I think we've seen this through a personal will or failure. lens recently, like, oh, am I addicted to email? I have bad etiquette about my email. No, it's the underlying workflow. So the tool itself, I will exonerate.

I think I would rather use POP3 than a fax protocol. I think it's easier. The issue is the hyperactive hive mind workflow. So if I am now collaborating with 20 or 30 different people, With back and forth unscheduled messaging, I have to tend those conversations, right? It's like you have 30 metaphorical ping pong tables and when the balls come back across, you have to pretty soon hit it back or stuff actually grinds to a halt.

So it's the workflow that's the problem. It's not the tool. It's the fact that we use it to do all of our collaboration. Let's just send messages back and forth, which means you can't be far from checking that because if you take a break, if you batch, if you try to have better habits.

it's going to slow things down. So my whole villain is this hyperactive hive mind workflow. The tool is fine. I don't want the tool to go away, but I want to replace the hyperactive hive mind workflow. I think this is going to be one of the biggest value generating productivity revolutions of the 21st century. I quote an anonymous CEO is pretty well known who says this is going to be the moonshot of the 21st century. It's going to be of that importance. There's so much latent productivity.

That's being suppressed because we just figure things out on the fly and email that as we figure that out, I think it's going to be hundreds of billions of dollars. You're so. Absolutely right. The question is, what does a world without email look like? How do we fix email? So what happens is, at least in my vision, you identify, well, actually...

There's these different processes that make up my workday. These are things that I do repeatedly, often in collaboration with other people that do useful things for my company or whatever.

Right now, most of these processes are implicitly implemented with the hyperactive hive mind. How do we do this thing? Like answering client questions to shoot messages back and forth. You know, how do we do this thing? Posting podcast episodes, we'll just figure it out on the fly. My main argument is we actually have to do like they did in the industrial sector.

take each of these processes and say, is there a better way to do this? And by better, I mean a way that's going to minimize the need to have unscheduled back and forth messaging.

So we actually have to do process engineering. This created a massive growth in productivity in the industrial sector during the 20th century. We have to do it in knowledge work. We can't just rock and roll an inbox as we actually have to say, how do we deal with client questions? Well, let's put in place a process that doesn't require us to...

send messages back and forth. How do we post podcast episodes? Let's automate this to a degree where I don't have to just send you a message on the fly. And you do this process by process and the pressure on that inbox is released. And now you don't have to check it every six minutes.

So you still have email. I mean, like I need to send you a file. Sure, I'll use email, but we're not coordinating or collaborating over email or Slack, which is just a faster way of doing the hive mind. I mean, Slack doesn't solve anything there. You have better structured bespoke processes. I think that's what's going to unleash.

this massive productivity bespoke so the interesting thing is like for example you and i exchange some emails so obviously i uh for let's just say my particular case i schedule podcasts there's a bunch of different tasks fascinatingly enough that I do that could be converted into processes. Is it up to me to create that process? Or do you think we also need to build tools just like email was a protocol for helping us create processes for the different...

tasks. I mean, I think ultimately the whole organization, the whole team has to be involved. I think ultimately there's certainly a lot of investor money being spent right now to try to figure out those tools, right? So I think Silicon Valley has figured this out in the past couple of years. This is the difference between

When I was talking to people after deep work and now five years later is this scent is in the air, right? Because there's so much latent productivity. So yes, there are going to be new tools, which I think could help. There are already tools that exist. The different groups I profiled use things like Trello or Basecamp or Asana or Flow and our schedule wants and acuity. There's a lot of tools out there.

The key is not to think about it in terms of what tool do I replace email with? Instead, you think about it with, we're trying to come up with a process that reduces back and forth messages. Oh, what tool might help us do that? Yeah. And I would push, it's not about necessarily efficiency. In fact, some of these things are going to take more time. So writing a letter to someone is like a high value activity. It's probably worth doing. The thing that's killer is the back and forth.

Because now I have to keep checking, right? So we scheduled this together because I knew you from before, but like most of the interviews I was scheduling for this, actually, I have a process with my publicist where we use a shared document and she puts stuff in there and then I check it twice a week.

week and there's scheduling options. I say, here's what I want to do this one. Oh, this will work for this one or whatever. And it takes more time in the moment than just, but it means that we have almost no back and forth messaging.

for podcast scheduling which without this so like with my uk publisher i didn't put this process into place because we're not doing as many interviews but it's all the time and i'm like oh man i could really feel the difference right it's the back and forth that's killer i suppose it is up to the individual people involved like you said uh knowledge workers

They have to carry the responsibility of creating processes. Always asking the first principles question, how can this be converted into a process? Yeah, so you can start by doing this yourself. Like just with what you can control. I think ultimately once the teams are doing that, I think that's probably the right scale. If you try to do that at the organizational scale, you're going to get bureaucracy, right? So if it's, you know, right. If, if, if Elon Musk is going to.

dictate down to everyone at Tesla or something like this, that's too much remove and you get bureaucracy. But if it's, we're a team of six. that's working together on, you know, whatever powertrain software, then we can figure out on our own, what are our processes? How do we want to do this? So it's ultimately also creating a culture where saying like an email.

sending an email just for the hell of it it should be taboo like yeah so like you are being uh you're being destructive to the productivity of the team by sending this email yeah as opposed to uh helping develop uh a process and so on that will ultimately automate this. That's why I'm trying to spread this message of the context switches as poison. I get so much into the science of it. I think we underestimate.

how much it kills us to have to wrench away our context, look at a message and come back. And so once you have the mindset of, it's a huge thing to ask of someone. to have to take their attention off something and look back at this. And if they have to do that for three or four times, like we're just going to figure this out on the fly and every message is going to require five checks of the inbox while you wait for it. Well, now you've created whatever it is at this point, 25 or 30.

contact shifts. Like you've just done a huge disservice to someone's day. This would be like if I had a professional athlete. It's like, hey, do me a favor. I need you to go do this press interview. But to get there, you're going to have to carry the sandbag and sprint up this hill, like completely exhaust your muscles. And then you have to go play a game. Like, of course, I'm not going to ask an athlete.

fleet to do like an incredibly physically demanding thing right before a game but something as easy as thoughts question mark or like hey do you want to jump on a call and it's going to be six back and forth messages to figure it out it's kind of the cognitive equivalent right you're taking the wind out of someone

Yeah. And by the way, for people who are listening, because I recently posted a few job openings for someone to help with this thing. One of the things that people are surprised when they work with me is how many spreadsheets and processes are involved.

And it's like Claude Shannon, right? I talked about communication theory or information theory. It takes time to come up with a clever code up front. So you spend more time up front figuring out those spreadsheets and trying to get people on board with it. But then...

Your communication going forward is all much more efficient. So over time, you're using much less bandwidth, right? So you do pain up front. It's quicker just right now to send an email. But if I spend a half day to do this over the next six months. I've saved myself 600 emails. Now, here's a tough question. From the computer science perspective, we often over-optimize. So you create processes, and you... Okay. Just like you're saying...

It's so pleasurable to increase in the long-term productivity that sometimes you just enjoy that process in itself by just creating processes. and it has a negative effect on productivity long-term because you're too obsessed with the processes. Is that a nice problem to have, essentially?

I mean, it's a problem because let's look at the one sector that does do this, which is developers. So agile methodologies like Scrum or Kanban are basically workflow methodologies that are much better than the hyperactive hive mind. Man, some of those programmers get pretty obsessive. I don't know if you've ever talked to a whatever level three scrum master. They get really obsessive about like it has to happen exactly this way. And it's probably seven times more complex than it needs to be.

I'm hoping that's just because nerds like me like to do that, but it's a broadly probably an issue, right? We have to be careful because you can just go down that. that fiddling path like so it needs to be here's how we do it let's reduce the messages and let's roll you know um you can't save yourself if you can get the process just right, right? So I wrote this article kind of recently called The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done. And I profiled this.

productivity guru named Merlin Mann. And I talked about this movement called productivity prawn as like elite speak term in the early 2000s where people just became convinced that if they could...

combine their productivity systems with software and they could find just the right software, just the right configuration where they could offload most of the difficulty of work, what happened with the machines. We'd kind of figure it out for, and then they could just sort of crank widgets and it'd be, and the whole thing fell apart because work is hard.

And it's hard to do and making decisions about what to work on is hard and no system can really do that for you. So you have to have this, this sort of balance between I. context switches are poison. So we got to get rid of the context, which is once like something's working good enough to get rid of the context, which is then get after it.

Yeah, there's a psychological process there for me, the OCD nature. I've literally, embarrassingly enough, have lost my shit before when, so in many of the processes that involve Python scripts. The rule is to not use spaces. Underscore zone. There's like rules for like how you format stuff. Okay. And like. I should not lose my shit when somebody had a space and maybe capital letters. It's okay to have a space because there's this feeling like something's not perfect. Yeah.

And as opposed to in the Python script, allowing some flexibility around that, you create this programmatic way that's flawless. And when everything's working perfectly, it's perfect. But actually, if you strive for perfection,

it has a lot of the stress that you were seeking to escape with the contact switching. Yeah. Because you're almost... stressing about errors like when the process is functioning you're there's always this anxiety of like i wonder if it's gonna succeed yeah i wonder if it's gonna succeed yeah no no i think some of that's just you and i probably i mean it's just our mindset right

And we do computer science. So chicken and egg, I guess. And a lot of the processes that end up working here are much rougher. It's like, okay, instead of letting clients just email me all the time, we have a weekly call and then we send them. a breakdown of everything we committed to, right?

That's a process that works. Okay. I get asked a lot of questions because I'm the JavaScript guy in the company. Instead of doing it by email, I have office hours. This is what Basecamp does. All right. So you come to my office hours, that cuts down a lot of back and forth. All right. We're going to, instead of emailing about this project, we'll have a Trello board.

And we'll do a weekly really structured status meeting real quick. What's going on? Who needs what? Let's go. And now everything's on there and on our inboxes. We don't have to send as many messages. So like that rough level of granularity, that gets you most of the way there. So the parts that you can't automate and turn into a process. So how many parts like that do you think should remain in a perfect world?

For those parts where email is still useful, what do you recommend those emails look like? How should you write emails? When should you send them? Yeah, I think email is good for delivering information. Right. So I think of it like a fax machine or something, you know, it's a really good fax machine. So if I need to send you something and you just send you a file, I need to broadcast a new policy or something like email is a great way to do it. It's bad for collaboration.

So if you're having a conversation, like we're trying to reach a decision on something, I'm trying to learn about something, I'm trying to clarify what something, what this is, that's more than just like a one answer type question, then I think you shouldn't be doing an email. but see here's the thing like you and i don't talk often and so we have a kind of new interaction it's not so sure yeah you have a book coming out so there's a process and so on but

Don't you think there's a lot of novel interactive experiences? Yeah, I think it's fine. So just for every novel experience, it's okay to have a little bit of an exchange. I think it's fine. I think it's fine if stuff comes in over the transom or you hear from someone you haven't heard from in a while. I think all that's fine.

I mean, that's email at its best. Where it starts to kill us is where all of our collaboration is happening with the back and forth. So when you've moved the bulk of that out of your inbox, now you're back in that Meg Ryan movie, like You Got Mail, where it's like, all right.

load this up and you wait for the modem like, oh, we got a message. Yeah. Lex sent me a message. This is interesting, right? You're back to the AOL days. So you're talking about the bulk of the business world where like email has replaced the actual. all of the communication protocols required to accomplish anything. Everything is just happening with messages. So if you now get most stuff done, repeatable collaborations with...

with other processes that don't require you to check these inboxes, then the inbox can serve like an inbox, which includes hearing from interesting people, right? Or sending something, hey, I don't know if you saw this, I thought you might like it.

I think it's great for that. So there's probably a bunch of people listening to this. They're like... uh yeah but i work on a team and they're all they use is email how do you start the revolution from like the ground up yeah well do it do asymmetric optimization first So identify all your processes and then change what you can change and be socially very careful about it. So don't necessarily say like, okay, this is a new process we all have to do. You're just, you know, hey.

We got to get this report ready. Here's what I think we should do. Like I'll get a draft into our Dropbox folder by like noon on Monday. Grab it. I won't touch it again until Tuesday morning. And then I'll look at your changes. I have this office hours always scheduled Tuesday afternoon. So if there's anything that catches your attention, grab me then. But I've told the designer who's CC'd on this that by COB Tuesday.

The final version will be ready for them to take and polish or whatever. Like the person on the other end is like, great. I'm glad, you know, Cal has a plan. So I just, what do I need to do? I need to edit this tomorrow, whatever. Right. But you've actually pulled them into a process. That means we're going to get this report together without having to just go back and forth. So you just.

asymmetrically optimize these things. And then you can begin the conversation. And maybe that's where my book comes in place. You just sort of. Slide it, slide it across the desk. So buy the book and just leave it, give it to everybody on your team. Okay, so we solved the bulk of the email problem with this. Is there a case to be made that even for communication between you and I, we should move away from

from email. For example, there's a guy recently, I don't know if you know comedians, but there's a guy named Joey Diaz that I've had an interaction with recently. And that guy, first of all, the sweetest human, despite what his comedy sounds like, is the sweetest human being. And he's a big proponent of just pick up the phone and call. And it makes me so uncomfortable when people call me. It's like, I don't know what to do with this thing. But it kind of gets everything done.

quicker, I think, if I remove the anxiety from that. Is there a case to be made for that? Or is email could still be the most efficient way to do this? No, I mean, look, if you have to interact with someone, there's a lot of efficiency and synchrony.

Right. And this is something from distributed system theory where, you know, if you go from synchronous to asynchronous networks, there's a huge amount of overhead to the asynchrony. So actually the protocols required to solve things in asynchronous networks are significantly more complicated and fragile than synchronous protocols.

So if we can just do real time, it's usually better. And also from an interaction like social connection standpoint, there's a lot more information in the human voice and the back and forth. Yeah, if you just call stuff very generational, right? Like our generation will be comfortable.

talking on the phone in a way that a younger generation isn't, but an older generation is more comfortable with, well, you just call people. So there's a happy medium, but most of my good friends, we have regular phone calls. Okay. Yeah. I don't just call them. We schedule it. We schedule it. Yeah. Just on text. Like, yeah, you want to talk sometime soon. Do you ever have a process around friends? Not really.

I feel like I should. You have a lot of interesting friend possibilities. You have an interesting problem. Really interesting people. you can talk to well that's that's one problem the other one is the introversion where i'm just afraid of people and get really stressed like i freak out and so you picked a good line of work yeah

Now, perhaps it's the Goggins thing. It's like facing your fears or whatever. But it's almost like it has to do with the timetables thing and the deep work that the nice thing about the processes is... it not only automates sort of automates away the context switching, it ensures you do the important things too. It's like prioritize. The thing is with email, because everything is done over email, you can be

lazy in the same way with social networks and do the easy things first that are not that important. So the process also enforces that you do the important things. And for me, the important things is like... okay it sounds weird but like social connection no that's one of the most important things in all of human existence yeah and doing it the the paradoxical thing i got into this for digital minimalism

the more you sacrifice on behalf of the connection, the stronger the connection feels, right? So sacrificing non-trivial time and attention on behalf of someone is what tells your brain that this is a serious relationship.

which is why social media had this paradoxical effect of making people feel less social because it took the friction out of it. And so the brain just doesn't like, yeah, you've been commenting on this person's whatever. You've been retweeting them or sending them some text. You haven't.

It's not hard enough. And then the perceived strength of that social connection diminishes, where if you talk to them or go spend time with them or whatever, you're going to feel better about it. So the friction is good. I have a thing with some of my friends where at the end of each call...

we take a couple minutes to schedule the next. Then you never have to, it's like I do with haircuts or something, right? Like if I don't schedule it, then I'm never going to get my haircut. Right. And so we, it's like, okay, when do you want to talk next? You know?

Yeah, that's a really good idea. I just don't call friends, and every 10 years, I do something dramatic for them so that we maintain the friendship. I'd murder somebody that they really don't like. Yeah, exactly. Careful, man. Joey might ask you to do it.

That's right. This is one of my favorite things. Lex, I need you to come down to New Jersey. That's exactly what we're going to do. With that robot dog of yours. We're going to go down to Jersey. There's a special human. I love the comedian world. they've been shaking up. I don't know if you listen to Joe Rogan, all those folks, they kind of, um,

are doing something interesting for MIT and academia. They're shaking up this world a little bit, like podcasting, because comedians are paving the way for podcasting. And so you have Andrew Huberman, who's a neuroscientist in Stanford, a friend of mine now. He's into podcasting now, and you're into podcasting. Of course, you're not.

necessarily podcast about computer science currently right yeah but that it it feels like you could have a lot of the free spirit of the comedians implemented by the people who are academically trained. Who actually have a... niche specialty yeah and then and then that results i mean who knows what the experiment looks like yeah but that results me being able to talk about robotics with joey diaz yeah when he says you know drops f-bombs every other sentence and

I, the world is like, I've seen actually a shift within colleagues and friends within MIT where they're becoming much more accepting of that kind of thing. It's very interesting. That's interesting. So you're seeing, because I, okay.

Because they're seeing how popular it is. They're like... Well, you're really popular. I don't know how they think about it at Georgetown, for example. I don't know. It's interesting. But I think what happens is the popularity of it combined with... just good conversations with people they respect it's like oh okay wait this is the thing yeah and this is more fun to listen to than a shitty zoom

Yeah. About their work. Yeah. It's like, there's something here. There's something interesting. And we don't, nobody actually knows what that is. Just like with like Clubhouse or something. nobody's figured out like, where is this medium take? Is this a legitimate medium of education? Yeah. Or is this just like a fun? Well, that's your innovation. I think was we can bring on professors. Yeah.

And I know Joe Rogan did some of that too, but, but, you know, but your professors in your field, like you bring on all these MIT guys who I remember, you know. Well, that's been the big challenge for me is I don't. I would ask big philosophical questions of people like yourself that are really well... So for example, you have a lot of excellent papers that has a lot of theory in it, right? And there's some temptation to just go through papers.

And I think it's possible to actually do that. I haven't done that much, but I think it's possible. It just requires a lot of preparation. And I can probably only do that with things that I'm actually in the field I'm aware of. there's a dance that I would love to be able to try to hit right where it's actually getting to the core of some interesting ideas as opposed to just talking about philosophy. At the same time, there's a large audience of people that just want to be inspired by like,

by disciplines where they don't necessarily know the details. But there's a lot of people that are like, hmm, I'm really curious. I've been thinking about pivoting careers into software engineering. They would love to hear from people like you about computers. science even if it's like theory yeah but just like the idea that you can have big ideas you push them through and it's interesting you fight for it yeah well there's some uh there's what is it computer file and uh

Numberphile, these YouTube channels. There's channels I watch on chess, exceptionally popular. where I don't understand maybe 80% of the time what the hell they're talking about, because they're talking about why this move is better than this move. But I love the passion and the genius of those people and just overhearing it. I don't know why that's so exciting. Do you look at like Scott Aronson's blog at all? Yeah, Settled Optimized. Yeah, it's like hardcore complexity theory, but it's...

There's an enthusiasm or like Terry Tao's blog. A little bit of humor. Terry Tao has a blog? He used to, yeah. And it would just be... I'm going all in on, you know, here's a new affine group with which you can do whatever. I mean, it was just equations. Well, in the case of Scott Harrison, he's good. He's able to turn on like the... inner troll and comedian and so on yeah he's he keeps the fun which is the best and he's a philosophical guy yeah yeah so you know we're exploring these different

ways of communicating science and exciting the world speaking of which i gotta ask you about computer science yeah that's right i do some of that uh so i mean a lot of it a lot of your work is what inspired this deep thinking about productivity from all the different angles, because some of the most rigorous work is mathematical work and in computer science, that theoretical computer science. Let me ask the Scott Aronson question of like, is there something

to you that stands out in particular that's beautiful or inspiring or just really insightful about computer science or maybe mathematics? I mean, I like theory. And in particular, what I've always liked in theory is the notion of impossibilities. That's kind of my specialty. So within the context of distributed algorithms, my specialty is impossibility results. So the idea that you can argue nothing exists that solves this.

Or nothing exists that can solve this faster than this. And I think that's really interesting. And that goes all the way back to Turing. His original paper on computable numbers. with their connection to the, it's in German, the Eichletung problem, but basically the German name that Hilbert called the decision problem. This was pre-computers, but he was, you know, he's English, so it's written in English, so it's a very accessible paper.

And it lays the foundation for all of theoretical computer science. He just has this insight. He's like, well, if we think about like an algorithm, he figures out like all effective procedures or Turing machines are basically algorithms. We could really describe a Turing machine with a number.

Which we can now imagine with like computer code, you could just take a source file and just treat the binary version of the file as like a really long number, right? But he's like, every program is just a finite number. It's a natural number. And then he realized like one way to think about a problem is you have, and this is like kind of the Mike Sipser approach, but you have a sort of.

It's a language. So of an infinite number of strings, some of them are in the language and some of them aren't. But basically, you can imagine a problem is represented as an infinite binary string. Where in every position, like a one means that string is in the language and a zero means it isn't. And then he applied...

Cantor from the 19th century and said, okay, the natural numbers are countable, so it's countably infinite. And infinite binary strings, you can use a diagonalization argument and show they're uncountable. So there's just...

vastly more problems than there are algorithms. So basically anything you can come up with for the most part almost certainly is not solvable by a computer. And then he was like, let me give a particular example. And he figured out the very first computability proof. And he said, let's just walk through with a little bit of simple logic.

The halting problem can't be solved by an algorithm. And that kicked off the whole enterprise of some things can't be solved by algorithms. Some things can't be solved by computers. And we've just been doing theory on that. That was the 30s he wrote that. So proving that something is impossible is sort of a stricter version of that. Is it like proving bounds on the performance of different algorithms? Yeah, so bounds are upper bounds, right? So you say...

this algorithm does at least this well and no worse than this, but you're looking at a particular algorithm. And possibility proofs say no algorithm ever could ever solve this problem. So no algorithm could ever solve the halting problem. So it's problem-centric. It's making a conclusive statement about the problem.

And that's somehow satisfying because it's— It's philosophically interesting. Yeah. I mean, it all goes back to—you get back to Plato. It's all reducto ad absurdum. So all these arguments have to start. The only way to do it is because there's an infinite number of solutions. You can't go through them. You say, let's assume—

for the sake of contradiction, that there existed something that solves this problem. And then you turn to crank a logic until you blow up the universe. And then you go back and say, okay, our original assumption that this solution exists can't be true.

I just think philosophically, it's like a really exciting kind of beautiful thing. It's what I specialize in within distributed algorithms is more like time bound and possibility results. Like no, no algorithm can solve this problem faster than this in this setting. of all the infinite number of ways you might ever do it so you have of many papers but the one that caught my eye is smooth analysis of dynamic networks in which you write

A problem with the worst case perspective is that it often leads to extremely strong lower bounds. These strong results motivate a key question. Is this bound robust in the sense that it captures the fundamental difficulty introduced by dynamism? Or is the bond fragile in the sense that the poor performance it describes depends on an exact sequence of adversarial changes? fragile lower bounds leave open the possibility of algorithms that might still perform well in practice. That's a...

in the sense of the impossible and the bounds discussion presents the interesting question. I just like the idea of robust and fragile bounds, but what do you make about this kind of tension between what's provably, like what bounds you can prove that are like robust and something that's a bit more fragile. And also by way of answering that for this particular paper, can you say,

what the hell are dynamic networks? What are distributed outcomes? You don't know this? Come on now. And I have no idea. And what is smooth analysis? Yeah, well, okay. So smooth analysis, it wasn't my idea. So Spielman and Tang came up with this in the context of... sequential algorithms, just like the normal world of an algorithm that runs on a computer. And they were looking at, there's a well-known algorithm called the simplex algorithm, but basically you're trying to...

whatever, find a hole around a group of points. And there was an algorithm that worked really well in practice. But when you analyze it, you would say, you know, I can't guarantee it's going to work well in practice because if you have just the right inputs, this thing could run really long, right?

But in practice, it seemed to be really fast. So smooth analysis, as they came in and they said, let's assume that a bad guy chooses the inputs. It could be anything, like really bad ones. And all we're going to do, and simplex their numbers. We're going to just randomly put a little bit of noise. on each of the numbers. And they showed if you put a little bit of noise on the numbers, suddenly simplex algorithm goes really fast.

Like, oh, that explains this lower bound, this idea that it could sometimes run really long was a fragile bound because it could only run a really long time if you had exactly the worst pathological input. So then my collaborators and I brought this over to the world of distributed algorithms.

them over the general lower bounds, right? So in the world of dynamic networks, so distributed algorithm is a bunch of algorithms on different machines talking to each other, trying to solve a problem. And sometimes they're in a network. So you imagine them connected with network links.

And a dynamic network, those can change, right? So I was talking to you, but now I can't talk to you anymore. Now I'm connected to a person over here. It's a really hard environment, mathematically speaking. And there's a lot of really strong lower bounds, which you can imagine if the network can change all the time. and a bad guy is doing it it's like hard to do things well so there's an algorithm running on every single node in the network yeah

And then you're trying to say something of any kind that makes any kind of definitive sense about the performance of that algorithm. Yeah. So I just submitted a new paper on this a couple of weeks ago, and we were looking at a very simple problem.

some messages in the network. We want everyone to get them. If the network doesn't change, you can do this pretty well. You can pipeline them. There's some algorithms that work, basic algorithms that work really well. The network can change every round. There's these lower bounds that says it takes a really long time. There's a way that no matter what algorithm you come up with, there's a way the network can change in such a way that just...

really slows down your progress basically, right? So smooth analysis there says, yeah, but that seems like a really, you know, really bad luck if your network was changing like exactly. in the right way that you needed to screw your algorithm. So we said, what if we randomly just add or remove a couple edges in every round? So the adversary is trying to choose the worst possible network. We're just tweaking it a little bit. And in that case, this is a new paper. I mean...

It's a blinded submission, so maybe I shouldn't. It's not. Whatever. We basically showed. An anonymous friend of yours submitted a paper. An anonymous friend of mine. Yeah. Yeah. Whose paper should be accepted. So that even just adding like one random edge per round.

And here's the cool thing about it. The simplest possible solution to this problem blows away that lower bound and does really well. So that's like a very fragile lower bound because it's almost impossible to actually... keep things slow i wonder how many lower bounds you can smash open with this kind of analysis and show that they're fragile this is my interest yeah because in distributed algorithms

There's a ton of really famous strong lower bounds, but things have to go wrong, really, really wrong for these lower bound arguments to work. And so I like this approach. So this whole notion of fragile versus robust, I was like, well, let's go in and just... throw a little noise in there. And if it becomes solvable, then maybe that lower bound wasn't really something we should worry about. You know, that's going to embarrass. That's really uncomfortable. That's really embarrassing.

to a lot of people because okay this is the ocd thing with the with the spaces is it feels really good when you can prove a nice bound and uh if you say that that bound is fragile yeah that that's that's like

there's going to be a sad kid that walks, uh, like with their lunchbox back home. Like my bottom, my lower bottom doesn't matter. I don't think they care. It's all, I don't know. It feels like to me, a lot of this theory is just math machismo. Yeah. It's like, whatever. This was a hard bound to prove. What do you think about that? So if you show that something is fragile, that's really important in practice, right?

so do you think kind of theoretical computer science is living its own world just like mathematics yeah and their main effort which i think is very valuable is to develop ideas it's not necessarily interesting whether it's applicable in the real world yeah we don't care about the applicability yeah like we kind of do but not really

And we're terrible with computers and can't do anything useful with computers and we don't know how to code. And we're not productive members of technological society. But I do think things percolate.

Exactly. You percolate from the world of theory into the world of algorithm design, where we'll pull on the theory and now suddenly it's useful. And then the algorithm design gets pulled into the world of practice where they say, well, actually we can make this algorithm a lot better because in practice, really these servers do XYZ and now we can.

this super efficient and so i do think i mean i tell my i teach theory to the phd students at georgetown i show them the sort of funnel of like okay we're over here doing theory but it eventually some of this stuff will percolate down and affect at the very end you know a phone But it's a long tunnel. But the very question you're asking at the highest philosophical level is fascinating. Like, if you take a system, a distributed system or a network, and introduce a little bit of noise into it...

Like how many problems of that nature are fundamentally changed by that little introduction of noise. Yeah, because especially in distributed algorithms, the model is everything. The way we work is we're incredibly precise about, it's mathematical, here's exactly how the network works, and it's a state machine. Algorithms are state machines. There's rounds and schedulers. super precise so we can prove lower bounds. But yeah, often those impossibility results really

get at the hard edges of exactly how that model works. So we'll see if this... So we published a paper on this, that paper you mentioned, that kind of introduced the idea to the distributed algorithms world. And I think... that's got some traction and there's been some follow-ups and we've just submitted our, our next. I mean, honestly, the issue with the next is that like the result fell out so easily. And this shows the mathematical machismo problem in these, in these fields is.

There's a good chance the paper won't be accepted because there wasn't enough mathematical self-flagellation. That's such a nice finding. So even showing that very few, just very little bit of noise can have a dramatic... uh make a dramatic statement about uh it was a big surprise to us but um once we figured out how to show it it's not too hard

And these are venues for theoretical work. Okay, so the fascinating tension there exists in other disciplines, like one of them is machine learning, which... despite the power of machine learning and deep learning and all the impact of it.

in the real world, the main conferences on machine learning are still resistant to application papers. I'm not sort of, and application papers broadly defined, meaning like, finding almost like you would like darwin did by like uh going around collecting some information saying huh isn't this interesting yeah uh Those are some of the most popular blogs, and yet as a paper, it's not really accepted. I wonder what you think about this whole world of deep learning from a perspective of theory.

What do you make of this whole discipline of the success of neural networks, of how to do science on them? Are you excited by the possibilities? of what we might discover about neural networks? Do you think it's fundamental in engineering discipline? Or is there something theoretical that we might crack open one of these days in understanding something deep about optimization and how systems learn?

I am convinced by, is it Tegmark at MIT? Tegmark? Yeah, Tegmark, right? So his notion has always been convincing to me that the fact that some of these models are inscrutable is not fundamental to them. And that we can, we're going to get better and better because in the end, you know, the reason why practicing computer scientists often who are doing AI or working at AI industry aren't like worried about so much existential threats is because they see the reality is they're.

multiplying matrices with NumPy or something like this, right? Yeah. And tweaking constants and hoping that the classifier fitness, for God's sakes, before the submission deadline actually gets above some... It feels like it's linear algebra and...

tedium right um but anyways i'm really convinced with his idea that once we understand better and better what's going on from a theory perspective it's going to make it into an engineering discipline so in my mind where we're going to end up is okay forget these metaphors of neurons and these things are going to be put down into these mathematical kind of elegant equations differentiable equations that just kind of work well and then it's going to be when i need a little bit of ai in this thing

plumbing. Let's get a little bit of a pattern recognizer with a noise module and let's connect. You know this field better than me, so I don't know if this is a reasonable prediction, but we're going to... It's going to become less inscrutable and then it's going to become more engineerable. And then we're going to have AI and more things because we're going to have a little bit more control over how we piece together these different classification.

black boxes so one of the problems and there might be some interesting parallels that you might provide intuition on is you know neural networks are very large and they have a lot of it you know we were talking about uh you know, dynamic networks and distributed algorithms. One of the problems with the analysis of neural networks is, you know, you have a lot of nodes

and you'll have a lot of edges. To be able to interpret and to control different things is very difficult. There's fields in trying to figure out mathematically how you form. uh clean representations that are like like one node contains all the information about a particular thing and no other nodes is correlated to it. So like it has unique knowledge and like, but that ultimately boils down to trying to simplify this thing into.

that goes against its very nature, which is deeply connected and dynamic and just... you know hundreds of millions billions of nodes yeah and in a distributed sense like when you zoom out the thing has a representation and understanding of something but the individual nodes are just doing their little exchanging thing and it's

Same thing with Steven Wolfram when you talk about cellular automata. It's very difficult to do math when you have a huge collection of distributed things, each acting on their own. And it's almost like. It feels like it's almost impossible to do any kind of theoretical work in the traditional sense. It almost becomes completely... You become a biologist as opposed to a theoretician. You just study it experimentally. Yeah, I think that's the big question, I guess, right?

Is the large size and interconnectedness of a deep learning network fundamental to that task, or are we just not very good at it yet because we're using the wrong metaphor? I mean, the human brain... learns with much fewer examples and and with much less tuning of the whatever whatever whatever probably that requires to get those like deep mind networks up and running but yeah so i don't really know but the one thing i have observed is that the yeah there's a

the mundane nature of some of the working with these models tends to lead people to think that to do it, like it could be Skynet or it could be like a lot of pain to get, you know. the thermostat to do what we want it to do. And there's a lot of open questions in between there. And then, of course, the distributed network of humans that use these systems. So you can have...

the system itself than your own network, but you can also have like little algorithms controlling the behavior of humans, which is what you have with social networks. It's possible that a very, what is it, a toaster or whatever, the opposite of Skynet. when taken at scale used by individual humans and controlling their behavior can actually have the Skynet effect. So the scale there. We might have that now.

We might have that now. We just don't know. Is Twitter creating a little mini Skynet? Because what happens, it twirls out ramifications in the world. Is it really that much different if it's a robot with tentacles? or a bunch of servers that yeah and the destructive effects could be i mean it could be political but it could also be like you know you could probably make an interesting case that the virus the the coronavirus spread On Twitter, too. In the minds of people.

like the fear and the misinformation in some very interesting ways mixed up. And maybe this pandemic wasn't sufficiently dangerous to where that could have created a weird instability, but maybe other things might create instability. Like somebody, God forbid, detonates a nuclear weapon somewhere. And then maybe the destructive aspect of that would not as much be the military actions, but the way those news are spread on Twitter and the panic that creates.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's a great case study, right? Like what happened? I'm not suggesting that Lexi let off a nuclear bomb. I meant the coronavirus, but yeah, I think that's a really interesting case study. I'm interested in the counterfactual of 1995, like do the same virus in 1995. So first of all, it would have been, I get to hear whatever the nightly news. We'll talk about it. And then there'll be my local.

health board will talk about it, that mitigation decisions would probably necessarily be very sort of localized. Our community is trying to figure out what are we going to do? What's going to happen? We see this with schools, like where I grew up in New Jersey.

There's very localized school districts. So even though they had sort of really bad viral numbers there, my school I grew up in has been open since the fall because it's very localized. It's like these teachers and these parents, what do we want to do? What are we comfortable with? I live in a school district.

right now in montgomery county that's a billion dollar a year budget 150 000 kid school district it just can't it's closed you know because it's too so i'm interested in that counterfactual yes you have all this information moving around and then you have the the effects on discourse that we were talking about earlier, that the Neil Postman style effects of Twitter, which shifts people into a sort of a dunk culture mindset of don't give an inch to the other team.

and were used to this and was fired up by politics and the unique attributes of Twitter, now throw in the coronavirus and suddenly we see decades of public health knowledge, a lot of which was honed during the HIV epidemic, was thrown out the window because a lot of this was happening on Twitter. and suddenly we had

Public health officials using a don't give an inch to the other team mindset of like, well, if we say this, that might validate something that was wrong over here. And we need to, if we say this, then maybe like that'll stop them from doing this. That's like very Twittery in a way that in 1994.

is probably not the way public health officials would be thinking. Or now it's like, well, this is, if we said this about masks, but the other team said that about masks, we can't give an inch to this. So we gotta be careful. And like, we can't tell people it's okay after they're vaccinated because that might. We're giving them an inch on this. And that's very Twitter-y in my mind, right? That is the impact of Twitter.

on the way we think about discourse, which is a dunking culture of don't give any inch to the other team. And it's all about slam dunks where you're completely right and they're completely wrong. It's as a rhetorical strategy is incredibly simplistic, but it's also the way that we think right now about how we do debate. It combined terribly.

with uh election year pandemic yeah election year pandemic i wonder if we could do some smooth analysis let's run the simulation over a few times a little bit noise yeah see if it can uh dramatically change the behavior of the system Okay, we talked about your love for proving that something is impossible. So there's quite a few still open problems and complexity of algorithms. So let me ask, does P equal NP? Probably not.

Probably not. If P equals NP, what kind of, and you'd be really surprised somebody proves it. Yeah. What would that proof look like and why would that even be? What would that mean? What would that proof look like? In what possible universe could P equals NP? Is there something insightful you could say there? It could be true. I mean, I'm not a complexity theorist, but every complexity theorist I know is convinced they're not equal.

and are basically not working on it anymore. I mean, there is a million dollars at stake if you can solve the proof. It's one of the millennium prizes. Okay, so here's how I think the P not equals NP proof is going to eventually happen. I think it's going to fall out.

And it's going to be not super simple, but not as hard as people think. Because my theory about a lot of theoretical computer science based on just some results I've done, so this is a huge extrapolation, is that a lot of what we're doing is just obfuscating. deeper mathematics.

So this happens to me a lot, not a lot, but it's happened to me a few times in my work where we obfuscate it because we say, well, there's an algorithm and it has this much memory and they're connected on a network. And okay, here's our setup. And now we're trying to see how fast it can solve a problem.

And people do bounds about it. And in the end, it turns out that like we were just obfuscating some underlying, you know, mathematical thing that already existed. Right. So this has happened to me. I had this paper I was quite fond of a while ago. It was looking at this.

problem called contention resolution where you you you put an unknown set of people on a shared channel and they're trying to break symmetry so it's like an ethernet whatever only one person can use it at a time you try to break symmetry there's all these bounds people have proven over the years about how long it takes to do this, right? And like I discovered at some point, there's this one combinatorial result from the early 1990s. All of these lower bound proofs all come from this.

And in fact, it improved a lot of them and simplified a lot. You could put it all in one paper. It's like, are we really? And then, okay, so this new paper that I submitted a couple of weeks ago, I found you could take some of these same lower bound proofs for this contention resolution problem. You could reprove them.

using shannon's source code theorem that actually when you're breaking contention what you're really doing is building a code over uh you know if you have a distribution on the network sizes it's a code over that source and If you plug in a high entropy information source and plug in from 1948, the source code theorem that says on a noiseless channel, you can't send things at a faster rate than the entropy allows.

the exact same lower bounds fall back out again, right? So, like, this type of thing happens. There's some famous lower bounds in distributed algorithms that turned out to all be algebraic topology underneath the covers, and they won the Gerdel Prize for working on that. So my sense is what's going to happen is at some point, someone really smart to be very exciting is going to realize there's some sort of other representation of what's going on with these.

Turing machines trying to sort of efficiently compute. And there'll be an existing mathematical result that applies. Someone or something, I guess. It could be AI theorem provers kind of thing. It could be, yeah. I mean, not a, well, yeah. I mean, there's theorem provers, like what that means now, which is not fun. It's just a bunch of very carefully formulated postulates that, but I take your point. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. You know, on a smart engine and then...

You're kind of implying that mathematics, it almost feels like a kind of weird evolutionary tree that ultimately leads back to some kind of ancestral few fundamental ideas that all are just like, they're all somehow connected. In that sense, do you think math is fundamental to our universe and we're just slowly trying to understand these patterns or is it discovered?

Or is it just a little game that we play amongst ourselves to try to fit little patterns to the world? Yeah, that's the question, right? That's the physicist's question. I mean, I'm probably, I'm in the discovered camp. But I don't do theoretical physics, so I know they feel like they have a stronger claim to answering that question. But everything comes back to it. Everything comes back to it. I mean, all of physics. The fact that the universe is...

Well, okay. It's a complicated question. So how often do you think, how deeply does this result describe the fundamental reality of nature? So the reason I hesitated, because it's something I'm, I taught this seminar and did a little work on what are called biological algorithms. So there's this notion of, so physicists use.

mathematics to explain to universe, right? And it was unreasonable that mathematics works so well. You know, all these differential equations, why does that explain all we need to know about thermodynamics and gravity and all these type of things? Well, there's this movement within... the intersection of computer science and biology, just kind of Wolframium, I guess, really, that algorithms can be very explanatory, right? Like, if you're trying to explain parsimoniously...

something about like an ant colony or something like this, you're not going to, ultimately it's not going to be explained as a equation, like a physics equation is going to be explained by an algorithm. So like this algorithm run. distributedly is going to explain the behavior. So that's mathematical, but not quite mathematical. But it is, if you think about an algorithm like a lambda calculus, which brings you back to the world of mathematics. I'm thinking out loud here, but basically...

So abstract math is sort of like unreasonably effective at explaining a lot of things. And that's just what I feel like I glimpse. I'm not like a super well-known theoretician. I don't have really famous results. So even as a sort of middling career theoretician, I keep encountering this where we think we're solving some problem about computers and algorithms.

And it's some much deeper underlying math. It's Shannon, but Shannon is entropy, but entropy was really, you know, goes all the way back to whatever it was, Boiler, all the way back to looking at the early physics and, and it's. Anyways, to me, I think it's amazing. Yeah, but it could be the flip side of that could be just our brains draw so much pleasure from the deriving generalized theories.

That's simplifying the universe that would just naturally see that kind of simplicity and everything. Yeah, so that's the whole, you know, Newton to Einstein, right? So you can say this must be right because it's so... predictive well it's not quite predictive because mercury wobbles a little bit but i think we have it set and then you turn out

No, Einstein. And then, and then you get more like, no, not Einstein. It's actually statistical. And yeah, so it's hard to also know like where a smooth analysis fits into all that or a little bit of noise. Like you can say something. very clean about a system and then a little bit of noise, like the average case is actually very different. And so, I mean, that's where like the quantum mechanics comes in. It's like, ugh.

Why does it have to be randomness in this? Yeah. It would have to do this complex statistics. Yeah. Yeah. So to be determined. Yeah. That'll be my next book. That'd be ambitious. The fundamental. The fundamental core of reality, comma, and some advice for being more productive at work. Can I ask you just if it's possible to do an overview and just some brief...

comments of wisdom on the process of publishing a book. What's that process entail? What are the different options and what's your recommendation for somebody that wants to write a book like yours? a nonfiction book that discovers something interesting about this world. So what I usually advise is follow the process as is. Don't try to reinvent.

I think that happens a lot where you'll try to reinvent the way the publishing industry should work. Like this is kind of not like in a business model ways, but just like, this is what I want to do. I want to write a thousand words a day and I want to do this and I'm going to put it on the internet. And the publishing industry is very specific about how it works. And so like when I got started writing books, which at a very young age, so, you know, I sold my first book at the age of 21.

The way I did that is I found a family friend that was an agent. And I said, I'm not trying to make you be my agent. Just explain to me how this works. Not just how the world works, but give me the hard truth about how would a...

21-year-old. Under what conditions could a 21-year-old sell a book and what would that look like? And she just explained it to me. Well, you have to do this and have to be a subject that it made sense for you to write. And you would have to do this type of writing for other publications to validate it and blah, blah, blah. And you have to get the agent first. And I learned the whole game plan.

And then I executed. And so the rough game plan is with nonfiction, you get the agent first, and the agent's going to sell it to the publishers. So you're never sending something directly to the publishers. In nonfiction, you're not writing the book first. right? You're going to get an advance from the publisher once sold, and then you're going to do the primary writing of the book. In fact, it will...

in most circumstances, hurt you if you've already written it. If you've already written it. Yeah. So you're trying to sell, well, I guess the agent, first you sell it to the agent, then the agent sells it to the publishers. It's much easier to get an agent. than a book deal. So the thought is, if you can't get an agent, then why would you? So you start with... And also, the way this works with a good agent is they know all the editors.

And they have lunch with the editors and they're always just like, hey, what projects do you have coming? What are you looking for? Here's one of my authors. That's the way all these deals happen. It's not, you're not emailing a manuscript to a slush pile. Yeah. And so first of all, the agent takes a percentage and then the publishers, this is where the process comes in. They take also a cut that's probably ridiculous. So if you try to reinvent...

the system, you'll probably be frustrated by the percentage that everyone takes relative to how much bureaucracy and efficiency or ridiculousness there is in the system. Your recommendation is like, you're just one ant. Stop trying to build your own ant colony. Well, or if you create your own process for how it should work, the book's not going to get published. So there's the separate question, the economic question, like, should I create my own...

like self-publish it or do something like that. But putting that aside, there's a lot of people I encounter that want to publish a book with a main publisher, but they invent their own rules for how that works, right? So then the alternative, though, is self-publishing and the downside... There's a lot of downsides. It's almost like publishing an opinion piece in the New York Times versus writing your own blog. There's no reason why writing a blog post on Medium can't get way more attention.

and legitimacy and long-lasting prestige than a new york times article but nevertheless for most people writing in a prestigious newspaper quote unquote prestigious uh is is just easier And well, and depends on your goal. So, you know, like I push you towards a big publisher because I think your goal is it's huge ideas you want to impact. Right. You're gonna have more impact.

you know even though like actually so there's different ways to measure impact in the world of ideas in the world of ideas and also yeah in the world of ideas it's kind of like the clubhouse thing now even if the audience is not large The people in the audience are very interesting. It's like the conversation feels like it has long lasting.

impact among the people who in different and disparate industries that are also then starting their own conversations and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, because you have other, so like self-publishing a book.

The goals that would solve, you have much better ways of getting to those goals might be part of it, right? So if there's the financial aspect of, well, you get to keep more of it. I mean, the podcast is probably going to crush what the book's going to do anyways, right? Yeah. If it's, I want to.

get directly to certain audiences or crowds, it might be harder through a traditional publisher. There's better ways to talk to those crowds. It could be on Clubhouse with all these new technologies. A self-published book's not going to be the most effective way to... find your way to a new crowd. But if the idea is like, I want to have a, leave a dent in the world of ideas, then they have a vulnerable old publisher, you know, put out your book and a nice hardcover and do the things they do.

That goes a long way. And they do do a lot. I mean, it's very difficult, actually. There's so much involved in putting together a book. They get books into bookstores and all that kind of stuff. And from an efficiency standpoint, I mean, just the time involved in trying to do this yourself is...

They have a process, right? Like you said, they have a process. They've got a process. I mean, I know like Jocko did this recently. He started his own imprint and I have a couple other, but it's a, it's huge overhead. I mean, if you like, if you run a business and you, so. Like Jocko is a good case study, right? So he got, you know, fed up with Simon and Schuster, uh, dragging their feet and said, I'm going to start my own imprint then if you're not going to publish my kid's book. Um, but he.

What does he do? He runs businesses, right? So I think in his world, like I already run, I'm a partner in whatever, an origin and I have this and that. And so it's like, yeah, we can run businesses. That's what we know how to do. That's what I do. I run businesses. I have people, but for like you or I, we don't run business.

It'd be terrible. Yeah. Yeah. Well, especially these kinds of businesses, right? So I do want to launch a business that's very different. It's a technology business. It's very different. Very different. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is like, okay, I need copy editors and graphic book. binders and I need to contract with the printer but oh the printer doesn't have slots and so now I have to try to I mean it's I guess so

I need to shut this off in my brain, but I get so frustrated when the system could clearly be improved. It's the thing that you're mentioning. It's like, this is so inefficient. Every time I go to the DMV or something like that. You think like, ah, this could be done so much better. But, you know, and the same thing is...

The worry with an editor, which I guess would come from the publisher. Who would... How much... supervision on your book did you receive like hey do you think this is too long or do you think the title like title how much choice do you have in the title in the cover in the presentation and the branding and all that kind of stuff yeah i mean all of it depends right so

When it comes on the relationship with the editor on the writing, it depends on the editor and it depends on you. So at this point, I'm on my seventh book and... I write for a lot of major publications. And at this point I have what I feel like is a, a voice that I've, and a level of craft that I, I'm very comfortable with. Right. So my editor is not going to be, she kind of is going to trust me and it's going to be more big picture.

I'm losing the thread here, or this seems like it could be longer. Whereas the first book I wrote when I was 21, I had notes such as you start a lot of sentences with, so you don't use any contractions because I've been doing scientific writing. We don't use contractions. Like you should probably use contractions. It was way more, you know, I had to go back and rewrite the whole thing. Yeah.

But ultimately, the recommendation, I mean, we talked offline. I was thinking loosely, not really sure, but I was thinking of writing a book. And there's a kind of desire to go self-publishing, not for financial reasons. And the money can be good, by the way, right? It's very power law type distributed, right? So the money on a hardcover is somewhere between $1 or $2 a book.

So the thing is, I personally don't... But then you give up 15% to the agent. I personally don't care about money, as I've mentioned before, but I, for some reason, really don't like spending money on things that are not worth it. I don't care if I get money. I just don't like spending money on feeding a system that's inefficient. It's like I'm contributing to the problem. That's my biggest problem. You're worried about the inefficiencies of the...

Yeah, the fact that... Like the overhead, the number of people involved. The overhead, the emails again, the fact that they have this way of speaking, which I'm allergic to many people, like that's very marketing speak.

Like you could tell they've been having Zoom meetings all day. It's like, as opposed to... sort of creative collaborators that are like also a little bit crazy yeah i suppose some of that is finding the right people finding the right people that's what i would say i say there's definitely and maybe it's just good fortune good fortune in terms of like my agents and editors I've worked with, there's really good people who see the vision or smart or incredibly literary. Yeah. Psychologically.

Yeah, I had a great editor when I was first moving into hardcover books, for example. It was my first big book advance and my first sort of big deal. And he was like a senior editor. It was very useful. We had a lot of long talks. This was my fourth book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. It was my first big hardcover idea book. We had a lot of talks even before I started writing it.

Just let's talk about books and his philosophy. He'd been in the business for a long time. He was the head of the imprint. It was useful. Yeah, but I mean, the other frustrating thing is how long the whole thing takes. Takes a long time.

But I suppose that's, you just had to accept that. Well, yeah, I handed in this manuscript for the book that comes out now. I handed it in, I mean, over the summer, like during the pandemic. So it's not terrible, right? And we were editing during the pandemic and I finished it. in the spring. We've talked most of today, except for a little bit computer science, most of today about a productive life. How does love, friendship and family fit into that?

Do you find that there's a tension? Is it possible for relationships to energize the whole process to benefit? Or is it ultimately a trade-off? But because life is short. and ultimately we seek happiness, not productivity, that we have to accept that tension. Yeah. I mean, I think relationships is the, that's the whole deal.

I thought about this the other day. I don't know what the context was. I was thinking about if I was going to give an advice speech, like a commencement address, or giving advice to young people. And, uh, like the big question I have for young people is if they haven't already, bad things are going to happen that you don't control. So what's the plan, right? Like, let's start, let's start figuring that out now because it's not all good. Some people get.

off better than others, but eventually stuff happens, right? You get sick, something falls apart, the economy craters, someone you know dies, all sorts of bad stuff is going to happen, right? So how are we going to do this? Like how do, how do we like live life and life is hard and in ways that is unfair and unpredictable. Um, then relationships is the, that's the buffer for all of that.

Because we're wired for it, right? I went down this rabbit hole with digital minimalism. I went down this huge rabbit hole about the human brain and sociality. It's all we're wired to do. It's like all of our brain is for this. Like everything, all of our mechanisms, everything is made to service social connections because it's what kept you alive. You know, I mean, you had the, your tribal connections is how you didn't.

starved during a famine, people would share food, et cetera. And so you can't neglect that. And it's like everything. And people feel it, right? Like there's no, our social networks are hooked up to the pain center. That's why it feels so terrible when you miss someone or like someone dies or something. Right. That's like how seriously.

We take it. There's a pretty accepted theory that the default mode network, like a lot of what the default mode network is doing, so the sort of the default state our brain goes into when we're not doing something in particular is practicing sociality, practicing interactions, because it's so...

you know, crucial to what we do. It's like at the core of human thriving. So I've more recently, the way I think about it is like relationships first. Like, okay. Given that foundation of putting like, and I don't think we put nearly enough time into it. I worry that social media.

is reducing relationships, strong relationships. Strong relationships where you're sacrificing non-trivial time and attention, resources, whatever, on behalf of other people. That's the net that is going to allow you to get through anything. Then... all right, now what do we want to do with the surplus that remains? Maybe I want to build some fire, build some tools. So put relationships first. I like the worst case analysis from the computer science perspective. Put relationships first.

Yeah, because everything else is just... assuming average case, assuming things kind of keep going as they were going. And you're neglecting the fundamental human drive. Like we have this, we talked about the boredom instinct. We want to build things. We want to have impact. We want to do productivity. That's not nearly as clear cut of a drive of we need people.

But if we look at the real worst case analysis here is one day, you're pretty young now, but that's not going to last very long. You're going to die one day. Is that something you think about? A little bit. Are you afraid of death? Well, I'm of the mindset of... Let's make that a productivity hack. I'm of the mindset of...

We need to confront that soon. So let's do what we can now so that when we really confront and think about it, we're more likely to feel better about it. So in other words, let's focus now on... living and doing things in such a way that we're proud of so that when it really comes time to confront that, we're more likely to say like, okay, I feel kind of good about the situation. So what, when you're laying on your deathbed, would you, in looking back,

What would make you think like, oh, I did okay. I'm proud of that. I optimized the hell out of that. That's a good question to go backwards on. I mean, this is like David Brooks's eulogy. virtues versus resume virtues. Right. So his argument is that, and that's another interesting DC area person. I keep thinking of interesting DC area people. All right. David Brooks is here too. Yeah.

His argument, he thinks eulogy virtues is – so what we eulogize is different than what we promote on the resume. That's his whole thing now, right? His second mountain, the road, the character of both these books are – he has this whole –

premise of there's like this professional phase and there's a phase of giving of yourself and sacrificing on behalf of other people. I don't know. Maybe it's all mixed together, right? You want to, I think living by a code is important, right? I mean, this is something that's not emphasized enough.

I always think of advice that my undergrad should be given that they're not given, especially at a place like Georgetown that has this deep history of trying to promote human flourishing because of the Jesuit connection. There's such a...

resiliency and pride that comes out of living well, even when it's hard, like living according to a code, living accord to which, which, you know, I think religion used to structure this for people. But in its absence, you need some sort of replacement, but this, uh,

Even when things were at soldiers get this a lot, right? The experiences a lot, even when things were tough, I was able to persist in living in this way that I knew was right. Even though it wasn't the easiest thing to do in the moment, like fewer things give humans more resiliency. It's like having done that.

your relationships were strong, right? Many people coming to your funeral is the standard. Like a lot of people are going to come to your funeral. Like, I mean, you matter to a lot of people. And then maybe having done to, to the extent of whatever capabilities you are. happen to be granted, you know, and they're different for different people. Some people can sprint real fast and some people can do math problems. Try to actually do something of impact.

I'll just promise to give gift cards to anybody who shows up to the funeral. You're going to hack it. I'm going to hack even the funeral. There's going to be a lottery wheel you spin when you come in and someone goes away with $10,000. the see the problem is like with with all this the living by principles living a principle life focusing on relationships and kind of thinking of this life as this perfect thing kind of forgets the notion that none of it

you know, makes any sense, right? Like the, like it kind of implies that this is like a video game and you want to get a high score as opposed to none of this even makes sense. Like, why would he... Like, what does it even mean to die? It's going to be over. It's like everything I do... All of these productivity hacks, all this life, all these efforts, all these creative efforts kind of assume it's going to go on forever. There's a kind of sense of immortality.

And I don't even know how it intellectually makes sense that it ends. Of course, got to ask you in that context, what do you think is the meaning of it all? Especially for a computer scientist. I mean, there's got to be some mathematical... Yeah, 27 or what's the... What's the Douglas Adams? Yeah. Or 42. Okay. 27 is a better number. I should read more sci-fi. Maybe you're onto something with a 27. I don't want to give away too much, but just trust me, 27. It's divisible. Yeah.

So, I mean, I don't know, obviously, right? I mean... I was hoping you would. Yeah, I don't know. But going back to what you were saying about the sort of the existentialist or sort of the more nihilist style approach, the one thing that... there is our intimations, right? So there's these intimations that human halves of somehow this feels right and this feels wrong. This feels good. This feels like...

I'm doing, I mean, aligned with something, you know, when I'm acting with courage to save whatever, right? It's not, these intimations are a grounding against arbitrariness. Like one of the ideas I'm really interested in is that when you look at religion. So I'm interested in world religions. My grandfather was a theologian that studied and wrote all these books, and I'm very interested in this type of stuff. And there's this great book that's not...

specific to a particular religion, but it's Karen Armstrong wrote this great book called The Case for God. She's very interesting. She was a Catholic nun who sort of left that religion, but one of the smartest thinkers. in terms of accessible theological thinking that's not tied to any particular religion.

Her whole argument is that the way to understand religion, first of all, you have to go way back pre-Enlightenment where all this was formed. We got messed up thinking about religion post-Enlightenment, right? And these were operating systems for making sense of intimations.

The one thing we had were these different informations of this feel like awe and mystical experience. And there's something you feel when you act in a certain way and don't act in this other way. And it was like the scientists who were trying to study. and understand the model of the atom by just looking at experiments and trying to understand what's going on. The great religions of the world were basically figuring out...

How do we make sense of these intimations and live in alignment with them and build a life of meaning around that? What were the tools they were using? They were using ritual. They were using belief. They were using action. But all of it was like an OS. It was like a liturgical model of the atom.

It's hard-coded in. So it did through the evolutionary process. I mean, they wouldn't have called it that back then. Or, yeah, I mean, whether they said, they didn't have that as pre-enlightenment. They just said, this is here.

The directive is to try to live in alignment with that. Well, then I want to ask who wrote the original code. Yeah. That's the open question. Yeah. So Armstrong lays out this good argument. And where it gets really interesting is that she emphasizes that all of this was considered ineffable. Right. So the whole notion, and this is like rich in Jewish tradition in particular, and also in Islamic tradition.

we can't comprehend and understand what's going on here. Right. And so the best we can do to approximate understanding and live in alignment is we like act as if this is true, do these rituals, have these actions or whatever. Post enlightenment, a lot of that got. Once we learned about enlightenment, we grew these suspicions around religion that are very much of the modern era, right? So like to Karen Armstrong, like Sam Harris's critique of religion makes no sense.

Right. The critiques based on, well, this is, you're making the ascent to propositions that you think are true for which you do not have evidence that they are true. So like, that's an enlightenment thing, right? This is not the context and this is not, the religion is the Rutherford model of the atom. Like it's not actually maybe what. is underneath happening.

But this model explains why your chemical equations work. And so this is like the way religion was. There's a God. We'll call it this. This is how it works. We do this ritual. We act in this way. It aligns with it. Just like the model of the atom predicted why Na and Cl is going to become salt, this predicts that you're going to... feel and live in alignment, right? It's like this beautiful, sophisticated theory which actually matches how a lot of great theologians have thought about it.

But then when you come forward in time, yeah, maybe it's evolution. I mean, this is like what Peterson hints at, right? Like he's basically, he's not. He doesn't like to get super pinned down on this, but it kind of seems where he's almost like searching for the words.

He focuses more on like Jung and other people, but I mean, I know he's very Jungian, but that same type of analysis, I think, roughly speaking, like Armstrong is sort of a, it's kind of like a Petersonian analysis, but she's looking more at the... deep history of religion and uh but yeah he throws in an evolutionary yeah and i wonder what home it finds i wonder what the new home is if religion dissipates what the new home for these kinds of natural inclinations are

Yeah. Whether it's technology, whether... And if it's evolution, I mean, this is Francis Collins' book also. He's like, well, that could be a very religious notion. I think this stuff is interesting. I'm not a very religious person, but I'm... I'm thinking it's not a bad idea. Maybe what replaces, honestly, like maybe what replaces religion is a return to religion, but in this sort of more sophisticated, I mean, if you went back.

Yeah, I mean, it's the issue with a lot of the recent critiques, I think. It's a Strauman critique in a complicated way, right? Because the whole way this works, I mean, the theologians, if you're reading Paul Tillich, if you're reading Heschel, if you're reading these people, they're...

thinking very sophisticatedly about religion in terms of this. It's ineffable, and we're just these things, and it connects us to these things in a way that puts life in alignment. We can't really explain what's going on because our brains can't handle it, right? For the average person, though,

This notion of live as if is kind of how religions work. Live as if this is true. It's like an OS for getting in alignment with, because through cultural evolution, like you behave in this way, do these rituals. Live as if this is true. you the what the goal you're looking for but that's a complicated thing live as if this is true because if you especially if you're not a theologian to say yeah this is not true in an enlightenment sense but I'm living as if it kind of

takes the heat out of it but of course it's what people are doing because you know highly religious people still do bad things where if you really were you know there's absolutely a hell and i'm definitely going to go to it if i do this bad thing you would never have No one would ever murder anyone if they were an evangelical Christian. This is kind of a tangent that I'm on shaky ground here.

It's something I've been interested off and on a lot. I mean, I think we're in some sense searching for, because it does make for a good operating system. We're searching for a good live as if X is true, and we're searching for a new X. Yeah. And maybe artificial intelligence will be the new gods that we're so desperately looking for. Or it'll just spit out 42. I thought it was 27. Cal. This is, as you know, I've been a huge fan. Saw a huge number of people that I've spoken with.

Tell me, I absolutely have to talk to you. This was a huge honor. This was really fun. Thanks for wasting all this time with me. Yeah, no, likewise, man. I've been a longtime fan, so this was a lot of fun. Yeah, thanks, man. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Cal Newport. And thank you to our sponsors, ExpressVPN, Linode Linux Virtual Machines, Sun Basket Meal Delivery Service, and SimpliSafe Home Security.

Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Cal himself. Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.