Transcript for Ep. 297: The Deep Life Hardware

So I'm here back in my deep work HQ joined as always by my producer Jesse. Jesse, do you you miss the the mad cap primal excitement that is podcasting live in front of an independent bookstore crowd or you happy to be back to the the quiet and calm of our HQ studio?

Yeah, it was fun. We got we got to be in front of a bunch of people, a bunch of fans to a bunch of questions life was fun, but you know, it is nice to be back in our controlled environment I suppose.

Yeah, shout out to Adam. And we got some nice video on it. So you should watch the video if you haven't seen it. We have good video of that live event. And general for the video, I guess I should say videos of the episodes, the deeplife.com slash listen. You just go to the episode. You're interested in link to the video below. This is episode 297. We do have some visuals coming up. So you might want to find it on there if you want to see what we're talking about. So what are we going to talk about? Well, you know, there's three main categories of topics. We tend to cover in the show all about being deeper in a world of distraction. One digital knowledge work. Two is promised in parallel to new technology. And three is the sort of systematic engineering of depth, trying to engineer more depth into your life when there's all these distractions pulling from it. We're going to have a deep dive in that third category today. We haven't done this in a while. getting back to our bread and butter of engineering more depth in your life as a bulwark against digital distraction. Got some great questions. I think we have a call. Is there some music in the call we have? Is that what I heard earlier? All right, there'll be some live music in our call. We have a cool case study. And then a final segment about a new tool. You probably will not see me walking around with on anytime soon. So we've got a good show. Before we get into it, people have been asking me to try to keep them up the speed on interviews I'm doing. about my new book's low productivity. So they can check out conversations. And so I wanted to point out two podcast interviews I did in the last week that I think were particularly interesting. The first was on Scott Galaway's podcast, the Prof G podcast. That's just released. Uh, Scott Kelly is a good broadcaster, Jesse. It's interesting. I started listening to a lot of him. As I'm Bill Marellot. As I'm Bill Marellot, he has another podcast with Kara Swisher, George Townelom Kara Swisher, called the Pivot Podcast, which is really popular. But he's very, he reminds me of Bill Simmons in the sense of that he is well suited for the podcast, the medium, clear, provocative, you know,

I think his PR agency sent me a copy and we, we share a publisher. So his editor sent me a copy. It's a cool book. Yeah, it comes out at the day of this episode, heirs.

Anyways, so that was a cool interview. Phillip Professor podcasting. I also did Sam Harris's show. Always fun doing Sam Harris's podcast. You kind of have to bring your A game to that podcast. Because Sam will like think for a second and then ask like an incredibly profound question that you have to answer and then. A minute later, ask another like very profound question you have to answer. So it's always a cool deep conversation. So my second time on Sam show. So if you like. Harris checked that out on his making sense podcast that also came out last week. All right, Jesse, we will put those notes links in the show notes.

The algebra of wealth. Yeah. It's not just a financial book though. It's actually about, you know, I talk about it. One of the questions actually we're going to get into a little more. So stay tuned. All right. Enough of that. I think we should get started with our deep dive. So here's a common problem. You're tired of being listless or distracted just by screens in your life and you come up with some plan for regaining some intention and some depth, some idea to make your life much more focused. And you go flying out of the gate with the new plan, your guns blazing. But then things just sort of peter out. and before you know it, you're back to tick-tock binging while watching Netflix in the background. So today I want to diagnose one of the major causes of this type of failure to get your ambitious plans off and running. We'll then use this new understanding to try to come up with some systematic advice for overcoming it and having more success, introducing more intention into your life. So we're going to get started in a perhaps unexpected place example that will soon make sense once I explain how it connects to this topic. I got to bring this up on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening. I want to go back to the 1800s. I want to go back to Charles Babbage, the mathematician, and these crazy machines he thought of. What's on the screen here is a picture of one of his so-called difference engines. So if you're listing what you see here is a pile of brass gears arranged in interlocking columns. The difference engine was a mechanical machine, right? We're talking 19th century, that you could use to solve certain mathematical problems in particular problems that had to do with repeated arithmetic and subtraction, right? Addition subtraction. It took an at the type of algorithms that a mathematician might execute and it mechanically implemented them because of the close-up view. Okay, so then what happened? Why this is relevant? So stick with me here. He came up with a design for a more advanced machine called the analytical engine. And unlike the difference engine, the analytical engine could be programmed to solve different problems. Here's a scene, he didn't build one in his life, but a full one, but here's a scene from a part of a prototype he built. In 1871, here I'm loading up on the screen. This is a schematic he had of the analytical engine. You could actually specify to the machine what mathematical operations you wanted to do using punch cards, an idea that he borrowed from chocolate cards and his powered programmable looms. Interestingly, at a lovelace, At a love lace, heard about, you've probably heard the story, but at a love lace who was related, of course, to the poet John Byron, heard about Babbage's analytical engine in an article and designed a program for it. Like, oh, here's how you can use it to solve a particular math problem involving the Bernoulli numbers. This was probably the first example of a, what we would think of as like a computer program in history. She was designing, okay, this series of instructions on the punch cards can take this machine that Babbage designed and solve this particular problem that might be interesting, the Bernoulli number problem. Okay. So why is this interesting? Well, like up until this point, when we think about machines, we think about machines being constructed to do very specific things. I designed this machine to solve this problem. There could be some variability in the machine. I mentioned the jacard loom where you could use punch cards to specify the pattern that this machine loom would actually weave, but that's still just a machine meant to do one thing. And you're just changing the parameters of how it does this thing. What made this idea with the Babbage Analytical Engine and Out of Lovelace's program so interesting is that it introduced a new split into the world of machine operation, the split between hardware and software. So we have hardware which is going to be the machine itself and you have software which is what you give the machine to actually run. So now when we think about a hardware software split, you have two different initiatives that have to go on simultaneously. And I think I actually just we can bring this down off the screen now. I think I've shown what I need. You have two initiatives that go on simultaneously. People trying to make the hardware better. People trying to write software. Yeah, Babids trying to build this analytical image, this analytical engine. How do we get the gears to actually mesh? And we have a love lace thinking about what something we can do with this engine, how about the Bernoulli number. So we have these, this two separate worlds. This of course became the foundation of digital computation, fast forward to the 1940s. We get this famous memo that John Von Neumann writes saying like, hey, we should do something like this architecture with digital computers. We should have the program be its own thing that you input that runs on the hardware. You build the machine once and then the program you want the computer to run, we can put into the memory. We program it in. This was a big deal, like one of the first large electronic digital computers that iniac didn't have this capability. You had to actually adjust the way the thing was wired to get it to do different things. John by Neumann was saying, okay, with this new computer, the EdVac, why don't we just have the program be something we put into the memory, just like the data? It's completely separate from the machine. A couple other people suggested this terrain had a similar suggestion for a machine for the ace, the automatic computation engine around the same time. There's a debate about who came up with this idea first and how much they were influenced by Babbage. So the details don't matter. What matters is our current digital age is dominated by this idea of hardware software. The hardware better can be the software better. Here's something that quickly made sense for people in the computational world. The hardware determines what you can do with the software. The better your hardware, the more capability it had, the cooler software you could run. The great example of this, let's go to the world of video games, was the Atari 2600, one of the first widely sold at home video game players. The games on the Atari 2600, they look kind of weird. Why do they look weird? Well, it turns out that the hardware that the Atari 2600 was based on was essentially a pong plane machine, pong being the original Atari game where you're trying to knock the ball back and forth between the paddles. So what had happened is they had commissioned a chip, sort of like microprocessor type chip, to bring a pong to TVs at home, like an at home pong plane machine. So it was a chip that was meant to play pong. And then Atari realized, we should probably have, if we had lots of different games, this would be a big market, but we don't have the time or money to go build a different chip. So hey, game designers, you're dealing with a pawn plane chip. So all of these other games, that we think of with the Atari 2600 are dealing with a pong architecture where you have paddles and a ball and a field and you mirror one half of the game field onto the other half because it's two sides of a pong and one avatar like everything in the constraints and how you program the Atari game is you were taking a machine that was meant to play pong and you are you are tricking it and subverting it and stretching it to try to make these other games that don't look like pong at all but underneath the covers they are this fantastic book about this called racing the beam, which a computer scientist know about, a STS style people know about, about how the constraints of the Atari hardware really determined what you could produce. Then the Nintendo Entertainment System came along and said, oh, you know what? We have a graphics chip. And it's meant just the big games, not just the playpong. And you can just put whatever graphics you want in here. And suddenly, oh my god, we can make any type of game. And it was like a revelation, right? So the hardware matters. The Atari 2600, the hardware really limited what video games you could produce. All right. Let's connect this back to our original question. We want to succeed with our plans. I think of like the cool goals you have in your life. Here's the way I want to get deeper and get away from just being distracted. I think of that like software. If the cool flash you stuff, it's the video game. It's the like I am going to get really good at this or start a podcast or move to the woods or whatever it is. That's like your software. This has to run on hardware. So what is the hardware in your life? It's your background habits and routines. It's the control you have over your time and schedule. That's the internal sense of discipline you have, your efficacy, your belief that you are able to actually execute things that are non-urgent but might be important in the long term. This is the hardware in which all of the software of your big plans and visions run. What I think happens to a lot of people is that they neglect the hardware and go straight to the really cool software. They want to run super Mario World 3 in their life and yet they're still living in Atari 2600 existence. So what you have to do, once we apply this metaphor and use this, what we have to do is focus first on upgrading our metaphorical hardware before we get too caught up in the possibilities for the much more visible software. We have to get the boring stuff, the foundations of our life humming before we worry too much about the really cool idea that we want to run, the really cool place we want to actually move our life. So we've talked about this before on the show, but let's just get into it again. Let's get into what might be involved in upgrading your personal hardware. Okay, first of all, we've talked about before the importance of discipline. Let's apply discipline to this metaphor here. I like to think about discipline as something like the instruction set on your computer hardware. Like, if you have convinced yourself, you've written the story that I am capable in different parts of my life of making progress on things that are important, even if it's not urgent or no one's forcing me to do it and it's hard, if you've convinced yourself you're able to do this, it's like you've added more possible instructions to your metaphorical processor. You're increasing the scope of what you can use when you then write your programs. So this identity of discipline is a great place to start. And again, this is not the way most people think about this. Most people again want to jump to the big change. The change will redeem me. I'm going to quit my job and move and buy my podcast and microphone and and that this the change is going to redeem me. They don't like to think about just the building up this ability to do things that are hard and being convinced I can, but you need that discipline first. It's a good place to start. How do you do that? Well, as we like that we've said this before on the show. The best way to do this is to identify the different areas of your life that are important. We've called these various things like buckets, areas. If we want to use our computational metaphor, these could be like processing units. But you've got to identify the areas that are important for your hardware. We often use a literative Cs when thinking about this craft. The course should be on here. That is like what you do professionally. Confirmation should be on here. This is going to be sort of theology, philosophy. You should probably have community, well, you should definitely have community, your connection to others, constitution, that's your health, celebration, that is like your interest, the things you find great pleasure in that are outside of just your professional demands. That's a good place to start, but you find the areas that are important in your life and you have a identify, a daily discipline in each. These should be things that are tractable, right? So not impossibly hard to do consistently, but also not trivial. Just hard enough that you have to do a little bit of effort and you should track this and mark it down on a piece of paper. I'm doing my daily discipline daily. That is all about improving and increasing the instruction set available to your hardware. Because your mind begins to tell itself the story. All of these parts of my life are important and in each of them I am willing to do something that's not required and non-urgent but is pushing me towards something that's I find important. So you want to start building up your instructions set with daily discipline. Next, you need some sort of control over the obligations in your life. If it's all haphazard, all this stuff professionally, non-professionally, I need to do. I'm trying to keep track of it. I forget people are bothering me. Hey, what happened to this thing? You're late, and now I'm scrambling to get it done. This is like having in our computational metaphor, like a poorly designed data bus. And the instructions move slowly and get bottled necked and stuck. And it's hard to move data instructions around. You need control over the stuff going on in your life. So you need to place with this stuff as storage. You need some sort of capture system to use the Dave Allen methodology where all the things you need to do and the information related to the things you need to do are in a system that you trust and look at frequently. It's not just being stored in your head. I've talked about using Trello boards. You could do this in notebooks. You could do this in a Google Doc. It doesn't really matter. But having some sort of collection for tasks in the different areas of your life, I have one Trello board for each of the different roles in my life. And then within there, you have cards for the different obligations. The columns have to do with the status, back burner, waiting on, waiting to hear back, actively working on, et cetera, information relevant to each of these obligations on the cards. And you're looking at these things on a regular basis. We'll get into that more here in a second. But you have a place where everything is stored and organized that you need to do or you've committed to do. You got to get that outside of your head. Again, this is the boring stuff with the important stuff, getting the hardware upgraded so we can do the cool stuff later. I need a good scheduler. Any piece of good computational hardware, any is going to be based off of, there's going to be at the core of it, some sort of scheduler, the schedules. What are we doing next? Let me get the data I need. Here's the instruction. Let's get this to the right processing unit. Let's execute. You need a good scheduler in your own metaphorical hardware, which means some planning discipline. that allows you to actually be intentional about what you're doing. I'm of course a big proponent of multi-scale planning. You should have a big picture plan for the current season or year. You can look at that big picture plan each week when you make a weekly plan. When you make your weekly plan, this is when you can move around and tweak things on your calendar, check in on things, cancel things, consolidate things to make your weekly make more sense for what you want to work on. And then daily have some sort of plan for what you want to do that day. This is a scheduling discipline. Now, I've control my obligations. I have some control of my time. What do I want to be working on? When am I going to get this done? Now, your hardware is beginning to get some more functionality. Finally, we want to sort of clean out to the degree necessary, the junk that's junking up the system. We want to streamline our data. We want to streamline our instruction set. And what does this mean in practice? Now that you have control over your obligations and you're actually planning at multiple scales, you can find out pretty soon what's clogging up the system. You know, this obligation over here keeps really in the way of other things. It's not that important to me. Why am I spending time doing this so inefficiently? You can start removing things from your plate. You can also start using autopilot scheduling for the things that remain. Okay, this is something I do regularly. Why don't I just say I always do this Monday. I always do it right after lunch. Let me consolidate this here. So this is all about getting efficiency in the system. I want to get out the stuff that's clogging the system. I don't need to be doing. I want to take the regular routines and give them a sort of like dedicated time they run. So I don't have the waste cycles thinking about them or have them show up in in opportune times. This is all about getting the system to run smoothly. This is boring, but critical. So I'm going to summarize them all right here. You increase your metaphorical instruction set by developing an identity a discipline, daily discipline in the different areas of your life is a great way to do it. You gain control over your obligations. This is like having smart data management by having places where everything is stored by role and by status. You don't have to keep track of this in your head. You have easy access to all the possible things that need to be done. Use multi-scale planning to get your metaphorical scheduler working well. So you know what's on your plate, you know what's kind of with your time, you're making some intentional decisions about what to do with your time, and you're cleaning up your code and your instruction set by getting rid of stuff that you don't really need to be doing, simplifying your life, and making automatic, the regular things that can be made automatic, so that they're not taking up core processor cycles. Let's get some special circuitry going for those things. All right, you do all of that. You upgrade your hardware in this way. Now you can run some pretty cool software. Now when you say, OK, I want to make a major professional change. You can act on that now. You've got your act together, you're planning, you can figure out what you're going to do, you can make regular time for it, you can pick up this new skill, you can use that skill to make the leverage a new position, you can then go through what's necessary to like move to different location and just start to pick up this other hobby, whatever it is you're trying to do, your hardware can handle this much better than if your life is just haphazard. If you're just, I don't know, I just roll through things, I'm distracted all the time, I get inspired by something and I hope this inspiration carries me through to executing this good luck. your hardware is old, your hardware is simple. Inspiration doesn't matter. I could be the most inspired Atari program or possible. I'm not going to be able to have a side scroller video game like Mario Brothers, just like the hardware can't handle it. So anyways, we've talked about this in different ways before, but I think the hardware software split, which is a fundamental idea and computation really gives us a useful handle here. Work on your hardware before you work on your software. If you're not working your hardware, there's a reason why your software might be failing. It also gives us a new motivation for these type of hardware type activities because you know sometimes these get scrutiny where we have a good question coming up about this but sometimes these get scrutiny like well why are we bothering to try to like control our obligations and what are we doing here with this time management and discipline and like why do we care about this are we sort of just trying to like optimize ourselves or we distract ourselves like no we're upgrading our hardware so we can do the cool stuff. We want the schedule where we like watch birds all the time and have all this flexibility. That's a really cool program when you're better hardware to get there. So we get a much more functional approach to these type of things. It's not doing them for the sake of doing them. It's upgrading our potential so that we can then take advantage of that potential and and run some pretty cool run some pretty cool games. So I think that's a useful metaphor. And I think it gives us a new way to think about engineering depth in a distracted world. you know what they call that that book racing the beamjussie is man Atari's were so hard to program but there there was an incredibly limited amount of video memory not the geek out here but with a modern graphics chip like you would have on an NES You could just say there's a like a bite for every pixel on the screen and I can say like this is what I want each pixel to be and you put that in graphic memory and the graphic chip draws that on the screen not so at the Atari with the Atari you can first all the pixels are grouped in the groups of four so you can only say what color you want each group of four to be and there's only memory for like a little bit of like one row, like part of one row is all you can specify. So what you have to do is in your code, this is all one chip. You have to keep track of exactly where the electron beam is that's going across scanning the TV screen, right? And because that's how TV's worked. And electron beam would scan across the screen and turn off it on pixels. And you would say here's the electron beams about to go across this part of the screen. And you quickly write in the memory like exactly what the draw they are and it would draw those things. and you had to then quickly change it. So you were telling the electron beam right before it got to each part of the screen. Okay, this next chunk do this, this next chunk do this. And it was the same chip that does everything else. So then if you have other calculations, you need to do like what should we draw? Like is the ball moving? What's the enemy doing? You would wait until the electron beam was moving back up to the top again. And you could get some instructions in there. And you had the count like exactly how many microseconds each of these instructions took because you only had so much time before you had to start telling to beam what to do again. So it was like impossible to program. Hello, you and your other book. I don't know. I read that. Not super recently, but it was a professor, I know, I was a professor. A professor I know at Yale. We were at a conference. I remember this. God, where was that conference? I don't know, but this must have been 10 years ago or more. And he was telling me about this this book. And then I went and read it. Yeah, I sort of geeked out on it. It's really cool. And then the NES made it much better. I had to do not graphic programming, but I did some micro controller programming when I was in college. It was like my summer job to make money. And we also, I remember, I was controlling the, I built a system that I coded up a system for a, there's a complex piece of optical machinery. So you like lasers and films and things have to move very precisely. But I remember having to count, like, look up in the reference manual, the number of microseconds per op code, because you have the time things exactly, like exactly how many microseconds would it take to execute this code? I think Jesse, the people are figuring out I'm a nerd. I don't know. I think the secrets out. All right. Anyway, it's enough for that. Hardware software. I think it's a great way to think about engineering the deep life. So we got a lot of cool questions, but first, it's like about some sponsors. Our first sponsor is actually not just a friend of the show, but a friend of mine, Tim Ferriss. The Tim Ferriss show podcast crossed the $1 billion download mark in 2023 and is celebrating its 10 year anniversary this month. Tim has a bunch of cool things in store for 2024. Here's the thing. I've been on Tim's show, I think, three times now. I Tim was my first interview I did for slow productivity. I arranged for him to be the very first interview I was going to do on the book because Tim really is the best in the business when it comes to this sort of advice oriented interview format. He invented it. He's been called the Oprah podcasting and I think for good reason. A couple of things that are impressive about this show is that he's has this long track record of getting first time podcast appearances on his show. So Schwarzenegger, Jamie Fox, Jaco Willink, Rick Rubin, All of them did their first podcast appearances ever on Tim Ferriss Show. Little-known fact in the Jamie Fox interview, they talk about my book Deep Work, so I appreciated that. He also just gets other fantastic guests, including Seinfeld LeBron James. Jane Goodall, Renee Brown, Terry Cruz, Neil Gaiman, he gets everyone. You've probably heard of the show. I just want to tell you directly, if you like this show, I'm sure you would like the Tim Ferriss show as well. If for some reason you're not listening to that show yet, you have to check out the Tim Ferriss show. He has only cooler guest plan that all sorts of interesting stuff coming up for the year ahead. You can find the Tim Ferriss show wherever you get your podcast. You can learn more about the podcast, as well as five bullet Friday, Tim's newsletter that has nearly 2 million weekly subscribers at Tim.Blog. That's Tim.Blog. I also want to talk about our friends at Rowan R.H.O. N.E. and talk in particular about their commuter collection, which is a clothing collection that I very much appreciate. Why? Because, look, men's closets. are due for a radical reinvention. Roan stepped up to this challenge. Their commuter collection is the most comfortable breathable and flexible set of products known to mankind. We're talking about pants, dress shirts, quartersips, polos, right? So everything you might need for a business environment or an after business type environment. 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Now that you're using the wrong clothing and pick up golf, I should, because I want to, and I'm just, this is just a phrase that's coming to my head out of nowhere. I want to find my corner office comfort. And I think that will help me. I'll tell you what I like about golf. It'd be nice to be outside. I'll tell you what I would just like about golf. The part where you have to hit that ball and try to get to go near a hole. I feel like that would be frustrating, because I would want the ball to go towards the hole. But because I'm trying to hit it with a small metal stick, it would not go towards the hole. So I don't know if you've heard this analysis before, but I watched Tiger Woods over the weekend shoot a plus 10 in one round as like golf is hard sport.

Everyone would be mad at me. Yeah, if I was like if I was like okay, you know, county sports is going to play around at the master's like oh, it's kind of exciting. We know Cal like here's what would happen to be like the first the first hole. Alright, here we go. I was swinging, you know, I could kind of knock this ball, I'm swinging at the ball. What's going to happen is like, as I swing down immediately the ball is going to go exactly 90 degrees to the left. Like smashing an old lady in the face while my club goes out of my hand and like breaks the armor Roy, Roy, Mickle Roy. Like that's the first swing. Mackle Roy. Just like swing, fame, break, you know, something catches on fire. Yeah. The giant CBS broadcasting tower eventually just totters and falls and then explodes. That would be one swing of me at the masters.

You know, it's an interesting question because, coincidentally, I listened to two different podcasts in the last few days. that I think of as giving two different perspectives on this question. Both podcasts by people I know and respect. So let's start with these two perspectives I heard coincidentally just in the last few days. So the first was from Oliver Bergman. who wrote 4,000 weeks, friend of the show, he blurb slow productivity, I blurb 4,000 weeks, and he's really made a name for himself with this sort of much more like British sort of relaxed, appraisal of time management of productivity. I was listening to Oliver recently on Chris Williamson's podcast modern wisdom. And Bergman was sort of giving this idea. He was like, here's his approach, the personal productivity, how he thinks about these things right now. And I'm paraphrasing, but his system was like, have a few things you want to get done, but also be willing to let your interest guide you. If you don't really have energy for this thing, you want to do, but there's something else you're kind of excited about. Me work on that instead. Like you'll be okay. That's a paraphrase, but that's sort of a classic like 4,000 weeks approach. Let's call that the humanistic, call this humanistic personal productivity. It's sort of, what are we, you know, as humans, like what really kind of like fits the way we operate best. All right, then. Soon after, this sort of coincidentally, I was listing to Scott Galloway, who, you know, we talked about earlier in the show, I was just on his Proof G podcast, and then I was listing to a bunch of Galloway, and I was listing to him on Dan Seenor's podcast, Call Me Back. And they were talking about, at the end, Galloway's new book, the algebra of financial of wealth, of wealth, right? And he was sort of given his take on life and advice, and he sort of, Galloway had this take, which is like, look, in your 20s in particular. your biggest resources your time. Like what you want to be doing with this is really getting after getting good at something valuable. Because he's like, here's the end game. He's like, look, this is a reality that's not good, but it's a reality, especially in America. We are not kind to poor people. And if you can build up a skill, whether it's like knowledge, work, or in trades, you can use this as a foundation of financial security, and that's what you want. You want to be able to win your upper middle age to be able to take care of your kids, to be able to help your parents when they get older and sick, to not have to worry about, to go pursue things or interested in not be worried about money, like that's the game, and it's hard, and you need to take all this free time you have in your 20s, and you need to focus on, I am going to get good. So we'll call that sort of pragmatic personal productivity. And there's some tension between these two, right? All of us like, you know, just have a few things to do. And also, it's okay if you don't do those, like if your interest take you somewhere else. And Galilei is basically like, look, if you don't sort of get after it and like work really hard to master some good stuff, like your life's going to be miserable. So we kind of have these two different approaches, idealist humanistic and pragmatic. So I think what's going on here is that Berkman's approach, I think matches the human brain. This is ideally how humans are wired. This is really what productivity is to humans. Is this much looser? What am I going to do right now? Well, I need to go hunt this thing. We're going to go forward. You're sort of doing one or two things. You don't have complicated plans. And that this plans are also contingent. Well, I know it's kind of raining, so I'm not going to do this. I'm going to do this. Or there's a new urgent thing that came up. Let me work on that before. I do think you would be happier with the Bergman personal productivity. On the other hand, I think Galaway is right that it is really hard to be financially secure and like you do have to build up skills and it's hard and especially when you have a lot of free times here at 20s. Like you probably have to do some grinding, right? I mean because it's hard. It's hard to in a modern economy. It's hard to convince other people to give you money. You really want people to give you money because without money things are hard. And so we have to construct a sort of artificial relationship with time, just for a sort of financial survival, for a sort of basic economic security. So I don't know, maybe our goal is you want to get to a place in life where you can have a Bergman-style personal productivity, and that's going to require a Galois-style pragmatic personal productivity along the way. Maybe Bergman's giving us the goal, and Galois is giving us the path you have to take to be able to get to something like that goal. But I think back to the original question, the Galois style, pragmatic personal productivity can be, they don't have to be super anxiety-provoking, but it's hard. And you have to care about what am I doing? Am I making progress on what matters? You have to sort of fight back distractions. You have to make time for what's important. There's a sort of defensive time management in here. I can't let all these distractions encroach so much that nothing gets done. There's a sort of urgency of I have to keep working deeply on the things that matter. This is my time to start to get good. And some of that's stressful and some of that sort of anxiety producing. One thing I want to suggest, not to bring this back to me, But that my new book, Slow Productivity, maybe gives us a reasonable roadmap for walking this tight road. Right? For like, okay, we need to do something like Galaway-style personal productivity just to survive, but we're attracted to the Bergman-style personal productivity. Slow productivity sort of helps you split the difference. It says, we gotta do the work, we gotta get better. But let's make sure along the way that we're not doing too many things at the same time, that gets kind of productive and it's particularly stressful. Let's make sure along the way that we're giving ourselves a reasonable amount of time. We can't procrastinate forever, but let's not try to squeeze everything into the smallest time frame. Let's work consistently on getting better, but we can have variations in intensity and we don't have to have super unrealistic time frames. Slow productivity says, okay, if we really care about quality in a very specific way, what's the craft that matters? And let me actually work specifically on training that craft like I would train to get better on an instrument. We're going to get to that Galaway goal of security much easier. We're going to gain much more control over our schedule, much more autonomy quicker. If we're not just working really hard, but working hard at the specific goal of getting better at something that matters. Slow productivity, we can think of in other words as a way to navigate Galaway style personal, his pragmatic personal productivity in a way that minimizes the exhaustion in burnout. There's still probably going to be some anxiety there. It's hard to do hard things, and the pressure is on. But slow productivity gives us a way to navigate that, where not only are we more likely to be successful with getting to the Bergman promised land, but we are going to get there without it having to be an impossible or unsustainable slog. I don't believe that we have to grind it out in a miserable sort of way to get to a sort of security later on a professional career. I do think we have to be careful about our time. I do think we are going to have to prioritize like the deep efforts to get better. I do think we have to have defensive time management to make sure that other things don't come in and take over and prevent us from making progress. And I do think all that's kind of hard, but it doesn't have to be miserable. So I'm going to throw slow productivity in here as the way to follow the Galaway path as nicely and sustainably as possible on route to getting to the the Berkman promise land. Both good interviews. Actually. Yeah. I'll check them out. I did modern wisdom as well. If you're looking for another podcast interview with me, I did Chris's show. I recorded down in Austin, but that came out kind of recently. So check that out as well. My interview on modern wisdom.

So my best advice here is combine the two objectives. So you're going to start up a big hour startup. You're going to exhaust yourself if you're trying to have a sort of non-trivial, deep work requiring skill building sessions outside of all the hard work you're already doing for your startup. Again, going back to the Galloway vision, maybe if you're in your 20s, you kind of have the energy to do this. But I don't know, I'd rather spend the time you do have doing other things that are rewarding, servicing the other buckets of the deep life. So I think the right thing to do here is start to find ways that you can take on professional challenges that are useful for the startup in your career that require in order for you to succeed with them for your skills and strategic ways to get better. This is almost always the optimal way to do this. When you're trying to develop a professional skill, if you can integrate that into your existing professional life, that's almost always going to be better. As opposed to I'm studying to do this on my own, and then over here I have my job. And there's two reasons why it's better typically to integrate them. One is it's just more manageable. You're not requiring extra time. It's what you're already doing for your job. Your work to get better at this is directly helping something you're supposed to be doing. Getting better at the skill will give you immediate rewards. There's a course, an online course I do with Scott Young called Top Performer about getting better in your career. And this is one of the key ideas in the course is we have you design a professional activity that is straight up useful for you and your boss and your job. But also is going to make you get better at something that's useful to your job. So you combine it as much more manageable. You're not having to find extra time. And too as much more effective, right? There's a general rule of learning new skills that is like the more close you can get your practice to the actual application of the skill you're learning the better. You know, I had this conversation on a podcast the other day where they were saying, Hey, should I meditate to improve my ability to focus on hard work problems. And I said, well, if you want to improve your ability to focus on hard work problems, practice focusing on hard work problems. We don't do something similar. I hope that some of these skills transfer over, because this transferance can often be low fidelity and not that useful. Practice the thing you want to get better at. So if you want to learn how to like program or whatever, programs specific things that are useful for your company, don't take abstract programming classes. So you want to try to connect what you're doing. the training to the actual application. So that's my advice there is make what you're doing in implicit training session. And I think that'll solve a lot of your problems and give you the goal of, as you build these new skills, giving you more leverage and control, you know, so we always talk about, you get more control and leverage over your work in life and you can really take that out for a spin.

Yeah, I announced it in my newsletter's twice a year. Scott actually has a new book coming out in May, all about how to learn things, like how to learn hard things. And I'm setting up for him to come on the show. One of the ideas I have is to have Scott be a sort of like a guest question answerer with me. We could do a bunch of questions about learning skills and him and I can try to answer them together. So I'm having Scott and Scott forever. I do two courses with him. This new book is awesome. So anyways, we'll get more on that with Scott soon. on the podcast.

Lily, it's a great question and I love your thinking about this. You know, I love the self-awareness of this might be hard for me, but it's important. And I think it's before you to the details, the reason why that self-awareness is important is because when and if it's hard and it will be hard because again, you were not used to the sort of more expansive vision of the deep life growing up. When you struggle at first with it, You'll know this struggle is expected in your process. Like you'll know this is going to be hard. You're more likely to persist in pursuing depth as opposed to when the first obstacles come in up. Just saying maybe I'm not worthy of this or maybe this is not something's going to work for me. So I love the self-awareness. I'm going to give a preamble to my advice here. My general preamble to this advice is probably the biggest danger throughout this process to find you more depth. The biggest danger I want you to be wary of is your phone. Because what you're trying to do here and building a more expansive depth into your life is you're going to try to be servicing more of these areas that make life meaningful and important the contemplation craft community celebration constitution. This could be these broad areas these these elements that make the human life interesting and important. The phone can offer you a sort of low, high-sugar, low-quality, semi-alacromasace faction for a lot of these areas, right? Like, oh, you really like desire community. You don't have a lot of experience having friends. We can just kind of simulate having friends on the phone. Like, there's people in social media and their commenting and their clicking on things. And like, that's close enough and it's easy. You want to seek out beauty and interesting things. You want to get engaged in the world of what humanity can create. The phone's like, we got interesting stuff on here. Just scroll this thing and it'll look interesting and binge on these shows. What you're looking for, the phone can give you a cheap version of. You have a call to a moral intuition. I want to be involved of a moral intuition. The phone's like, we can just punch out rage buttons. Just look at these tweets. So the phone is going to subvert every human instinct you have as you try to build a more expansive depth. So now is the timing to be super wary of the phone. Right? Be very careful. What's on there? Be very careful. What services you're doing? You might consider temporarily taking social media off your phone. You should consider using something like the phone for your method when you're at home. You have it plugged in in a set place in your house. And that's where it stays or in your apartment. And you can go there to reference it, but it doesn't stick with you as a constant companion. Do things on a regular basis without your phone, just so you become comfortable being alone with your own thoughts. You have a lot of actual introspection you're going to have to do here. A lot of sort of building out your schema and your understanding of the world and how you fit into it. This is going to be a lot of just you with your own thoughts. So I'm talking about once or twice a week, long walks without your phones, errands without your phone. You have to be very wary of this thing in this very important but vulnerable moment you find yourself in. All right, with that in mind, how do we make progress here? Let's go back to the deep dive from earlier in the episode, work on your hardware first before you get too caught up in the software, right? You've had a very limited powerful, but very limited type of hardware you've been running on because of what you're what it was like growing up. You now want to build out this more expansive hardware. Let's focus on the boring hardware before we get into the sexy software. So that means you want to get some control over your obligations in time, like we talked about. Here's what I'm working on. Here's my planning. I know what I'm doing and I have control over what I do and when I do it, work on your discipline instruction set. I have daily disciplines in these areas of my life, including areas that I've never given any attention to before, but now I am because I want to tell myself I can do things that are non-urgent, but are important in the long term. Uh, simplify stuff that's clogging things up. Autumn get automation on the stuff. I don't think that's your big problem that piece because you're just getting started out. But get that hardware going, trust yourself. I have discipline. I can do things in different areas in my life. I have control over my obligations. I have a pretty reasonable control over my schedule. Now you can start working on your software. And here what I'm going to suggest is take one processing unit at a time by which I mean one area of your life at a time and give it a few months to do an overhaul on it. Right. All right. Let's start with maybe not community. Maybe we'll start with something like contemplation. Okay. I want to overhaul that part of my life. Like a regular reading habit, meditation habit, rediscovering a sort of religious connection and integrating them to my life. Let me spend a few months just working on that. Okay. Now I'm sort of feeling like there's meaning in life and I have, I can direct myself towards things that are important. All right. Now I'm going to focus on community for a few months. How do I start getting a service to my community, the friends I do have? How do I actually, how do I improve those relationships or meet new people? And you slowly go area by area, it kind of build up beta versions of very basic software and each of these areas. And then after a year, go back and let's do version one. Now you're going to iterate on this and make it better. And you can start building up really cool software. So beware of your phone, upgrade your hardware. So it's ready to handle this full expanse of the human experience. And then start working on your software in one area of your life at a time. The stakes are low here at first. That's why I said beta software. I just want some sort of cool program after about a year of work running each of the areas of my life. And now I'm ready to try to come up with the new version. This is going to take time. But I'm absolutely convinced that that you will get there because you care about it. You know about it. You know it'll be hard and you're committed to actually making change. All right. Who do we have next?

So as you know, we try to find one question per episode that's related to my book, slow productivity, the last start of accomplishment without burnout. If I'm not more about that book anywhere, books are sold or at calduport.com slash slow. If you like to show, you need to have that book because we reference it all the time. All right, Jesse, what's our slow productivity corner question of the day?

Sam Sula, all right, let's load this up for those who are watching. I have his YouTube channel. Let's load up one of these videos here. Let's see what we got here. All right, so here's the name of this video. This is from two days ago. The video title is not clickbait. It's spring cut day 16 dash cardio. And it's been viewed a hundred thousand times. It came out a couple days ago. All right. Here's Sam Suelek. He's just talking in his car. No fancy editing. Let me zoom forward. Now he's shirtless. I guess he's showing spring cut day. So he's showing what like how his cut looks. Because he's a bodybuilder. He's a bodybuilder. He's what we're seeing here. Yeah. Shown weight. Yeah. He's a muscular man. Picture in there. Um, okay. It's a good question. I mean, one of the reasons why I'm glad Matt's asking this question is because as you would imagine, Jesse, I'm often mistaken for Sam's who look. Right. Like, hey, Sam, I love your, oh, oh, sorry. So because we have like, I would say like kind of a comparable.

Make that full screen. Come on. That's sort of, is that much different? He's a very big guy. A lot of people have actually been writing me about Sam and asking us, he's an example of a slow YouTube movement, right? Like it's forget all of the whatever, just gonna have me on there. Here's what I think is happening with Sam is he has rediscovered a format that used to be in early YouTube days in incredibly popular, which is the vlog. the video log. This was like a big part of independent video early in YouTube days. I remember a lot of writers had these John Green, for example, had like a really big one. And it really was just people. It was web 2 in the talking to camera. And you would build up these parasocial relationships with the vlogger, the video blogger, because they would just talk about their life and what's going on. And over time, had this connection with them. Again, a parasocial connection. You felt like you really knew them. And you're like, I just want to check in and see what these people are doing. And it's a powerful format, typically for it to work. There had to be something sort of unusual or interesting about the person. That's kind of like the hook. So this is why I was saying John Green, if I'm remembering this correctly, had like a big vlog because he was like a well-known writer and he wrote for young audiences and young audiences were watching these things. So there's a connection they had. And I think there's something similar here because Sam Suelek is clearly like a very successful bodybuilder. Is this bodybuilding Jesse or is this something different? I don't know if he's like a competitive there's a difference I guess between like I compete and just like yeah, I want to look as big as possible but you know he's very successful at that so there's kind of a hook into it and then you build up this parasocial relationship and then you don't care what the the thumbnails are you don't care you know what the titles are you like I just I want to be connected to this person so yeah, I think Sam has rediscovered vlogs And vlogs I think is a really cool format because it's like an ongoing novel you really get in the mind of another person. The heart thing here I think is a chicken in the egg. Like this is why my vision of the future of independent video. I think video is critical for independent media because we just know this from TV, eating radios lunch. Video ultimately is way more powerful than audio by itself. So like I do think video is the future. The problem with video right now is YouTube is sort of the platform that works. They have the best tech, but it's an algorithmic recommendation environment. And that's even really matter if you have a lot of subscribers. It's like, it decides what people are being recommended and how it decides this is sort of arbitrary. These algorithms that you kind of have to chase if you want anyone including your own subscribers to see your video. So somehow, you know, Sam has gotten around this. I think a couple other YouTubers who've gotten around this like Andrew Huberman. You know, so he does not have fancy thumbnails and does not have clickbait titles. Doesn't matter. They still crush it. Luxe Friedman, just very simple thumbnails. His titles are just untie the person's name and like what we're talking about or whatever. So there is some critical mass if you have a big enough audience. They will somehow and I don't know how this works. I don't know if it's if they're getting notifications or they just check to see when the Sam have a newest video. You can get around the algorithmic world and still have people see your videos on YouTube. If you get past a certain critical mass, the question is how you do that. And maybe Sam did it by being so successful at body building and a human man had audio podcasts. Those audiences were huge so that could kind of carry people over. So I don't know. I don't know exactly how that works, but I do like the trend. I do like the trend where we think about the video platforms as hosting technologies. and how people curate and find that this becomes more person, the person, this becomes less algorithmic, this becomes more trust-based. I really like that movement forward. We're messing around on that with our channel. We just have someone, we record our podcast and then we have someone who puts on YouTube and puts on thumbnails and titles that are supposed to make sure that the people who actually subscribe, like YouTube will actually show it to them so they'll remember, okay, there's a new video and then they'll watch it. But they're like, It's a little clickbaity. It's like we're experimenting now with how can we, you know, still have the people who want to see my videos be shown the fact my new video exists without having to have the titles be like over some sort of cringe barrier or maybe without having to have like a surprise face thumbnail. It's like we're experimenting that with with that ourselves. How does this work? How can we How can we have a video presence for independent media that does not require us to have to either play ball with an algorithm, or be either metaphorically or in Sam's case physically, literally, big enough that it doesn't matter? That's the cool question. The question right now, I think, an independent video is getting around the curation problem. Because the vlog format's great. People have a real relationship with this guy. I remember this from, you know, Hank Green, maybe. John Green, Hank Green, I might get these names wrong. This was all like big YA writers in the early 2000s, but whatever. I like this. I like slow YouTube if that's what we're going to call it. The key is how to crack this code so that like more people can have YouTube just be the tech that hosts their videos. We need better ways of curation and finding videos, better ways for people to get videos. I mean, some equivalent of like RSS that we have for audio where it's just, I actually subscribe the people and there's like a custom channel that's created for me and there's no algorithm involved and I find those people through other people's videos. I don't know. There's a solution to this that hopefully doesn't involve, you know, everyone has to be like 50% Mr. Beast in order for just people who already subscribed to their videos that even see them. So I'm keeping an eye on this and I think Sam is a good example. I think it's a good example of the alternative things going on. What, my, my version of a Sam Sue like be long because he's mainly in the gym because that's what he does. Yeah. So with my version, just be like, uh, it would just be me sitting quietly at a keyboard piping for an hour.

My deep work is not as visually gripping as Samsung's work, I guess I would say.

I did not coordinate with Andrew human on that, but we did talk about it. He wanted to. Yeah, he was like, I would, I want to do deep work in like a zoom room with you, so I would be motivated to keep doing it.

That would be just like me. That's a good idea that what if it was like me with like various well-known people doing deep work together? It's like mainly it's just sort of like them typing and do typing and then like but occasionally like we kind of talk about what they're working on.

And he's kind of here some clicking. And like everyone could just sort of do it along. Like we're all just kind of deep working. And that's actually not a bad idea for a show. Work deeply with Kyle Newport. And it's live. So like the whole idea is like you can work along with, you know, Kyle and Scott Young. Yeah. It's different people rotate through like what do you work it on? How's it going? I like that idea. And I'd be sure it was like Samsung, it's like just like flexing all the time. His channel's popular, Jesse's, so there must be something to it. All right. What do we got next?

I like this inversion, by the way, because we usually get like the husband is annoying the wife with all of his like, calm new port dump. Yeah, I like the inversion. That's good. Your husband prides himself on living without any structure. I definitely imagine like the dude from the Big Lebowski.

Do we have any cream left for my white Russians? Well, and for some reason, like I mentioned, his wife has, like, on a green account inspector. It's to, like, works on her planners. All right. It's a good question, though, right? I would say, yeah, this is what's complicated. Because you need the hardware. Let's bring this all back to the deep dive. Like you kind of need the hardware in place before you do the cool software stuff. So you want to do cool stuff with your your your life as a married couple. It's helpful to have the hardware in place. Like yeah, we, you know, we have a sort of disciplines, the different areas. We can control our obligations to have some control over time. Now we can take this out for a spin and do kind of cool things. So it does limit the software you can run if the underlying hardware is not working that well. And it certainly can be a problem. If one part of a partnership is trying to do all the time management and the other partner, it doesn't want everything to do with this, that creates a lot of tension. It's like having a dual processor machine or one of the processors is not working well. It's that's going to make it frustrating to try to run software as well. I'm torturing this metaphor. But I have to keep going. What I would say is probably You need to ease him into having slightly better hardware. And by ease him, I mean, if you're a time management stop, you're probably way too advanced on stuff. And that's intimidating and it's scary and annoying. And so you can't jump him in at here is my rooted productivity system with like my notion powered multi-scale planning system. It's got to be the basics. You know, we talk twice a week about like what's coming up and we look at a calendar together. We have like just a list on the refrigerator of like stuff we need to do. So we could like, oh, let's do this this weekend or that this weekend. Like really really kind of simple stuff. Like we have a shared calendar where the ongoing stuff is on there and people can add stuff to it. So I think just getting simple stuff going matters. they'll upgrade your hardware so like at least like we we look ahead we kind of know what's going on we have a list of where things are not trying to force him too much beyond there that might be enough for you to start planning interesting stuff for you to do in your life and then at that point just be okay with it like as long as you have like a basic competency here in like at least like kind of know what's going on and I can see when things are coming up if he has that basic competency like that's enough you don't have to make him as good at time management as you are you can put my podcast on in the car sort of suddenly when you guys are going places see how that goes But you do need, I mean, I'm with you in the fact that he needs some basic hardware, but I'm also going to say, basic might be as far as you can get and don't preach about it, you know, simplest finds. Simple as better than nothing, not everyone's going to like really complicated time management.

Uh, pretty cool question. Cool caller. Yeah, played guitar and like productions of Hamilton.

Um, like I'm going to surprise everyone now by saying, uh, you need to become a private equity investor. That's that this is the key. greed makes the world go around. I'm embarrassed by your lack of money that makes you lesser. No. I'm joking with that. It's a good question. I think the core of this question is he's really good at guitar. He has a career with the guitar, but he also wants to, there's things he wants to do with that he wants to produce, do stuff in the world. It sounds like he wants to record his own music and the question is like, How much should that take up and how much should he focus on that? How much income can that put in? All right, I'm going to give a couple of sorted thoughts here. One, you do have to get your financial house in order. Like this goes back to the sort of Scott Galloway tough love from earlier. You know, you need to support yourself. You need some financial security. You need to make sure that you don't have to deal with the stresses of like it's hard to make ends meet. You do not want to chase an interest to financial difficulties. Right. So that's got to be a baseline here. So this might mean, and we didn't get into the details of this. Maybe if you have a good unionized pit job, like that's fine, like playing in the orchestra doesn't stuff. And if you do that work well, that's like fine financially. If that's the case, great. You need to keep doing that as your foundation. If that's not a good enough foundation, you have to find a way to expand that foundation. Like it's not sexy, but it's like you got to get the financial house in order. And so This could be music related, it could be whatever it is, lessons, instruction. I don't know the world well. I don't know the world well. Sound engineering, sound design. But make sure that financial house is in order. If that's in order, and then there are sort of related pursuits that are not greatly renumative, but like our interesting and really scratching edge, have those in there as well. I think that's fine. Even if it's difficult and you have to fight to make time, I think that's fine. Let me give an example of my own life. You ask about books, like, what would I write books if it wasn't super financed or rewarding? Now, here's the actual case study that's relevant for my life, for example, writing for the New Yorker. That's not like a super financially lucrative thing. And it certainly takes a lot of time and takes a lot of focus, right? It's like really hard to write those articles. But I really, really like doing it. I've been a writer my whole life and it's a fantastic venue for creating new writing at a level that my books tend to be more broad audience. You know, I like to do the smart self-help style where I have prescriptive advice with ideas. That's like its own thing. And my academic writing is very narrow audience and the New Yorker is just it's a creation that hits an audience in a way and that makes me a better writer and it's creatively very fulfilling. So that could be the equivalent of in your own life that having like a musical pursuit that is, you know, it's impressive and important and pushes your skills and has impact but it's not, you know, going to make you wealthy. It's not going to be how you pay your mortgage. I think that's absolutely fine. So that is fine. The trap to avoid, and I always tell people, is don't follow an interest into poverty. Don't follow an interest into a difficult situation. You have to solve the solving the difficult financial situation has to be the foundation. And then you can kind of go out of your way to make this other part of music in your life a major part of your life, and that's fine. But just make sure the foundation is very stable first. I like to be a played. We should get more people like playing music on their calls.

Yeah. That's pretty cool. All right, we got a case study. Actually, Jesse at the event, we did last week. One of the people who came to get their book sciences. I love the case studies. Make sure you keep getting Jesse to put those in. Okay. So, this is for whoever that was, here's our case study. There's where people send in some notes about their personal experience putting this type of advice we talk about in the practice. This one comes from Don. Don said, I just wanted to share details about the end result of the deep work and time block planning practices I learned from you. I first heard your ideas on an episode of MPR's Hidden Brain. At the time, I was beginning the research for a book about the chimpanzees used during the first space race, and your approach helped me reframe my expectations for writing and research sessions. My goal shifted from producing X number of words or finding X new sources to investing concentrated time in the work. Your time-block planner and podcast were regular reinforcers and best practices. As a side note, the book just received a starred review from Curtis, and the review noted the book's, quote, meticulous research. That meticulous research happened during deep work sessions, and I can't thank you enough. And this book was just came out, it's called Astro Chimps, America's First Astronauts. And it's a cool case study, right? I mean, we get We get flagged for the sort of hardware portion of the pursuit of the deep life. This idea of like you kind of have to like get your crap together and be organized and be control have control over your time and control of your obligations and be a little defensive in your time management so you can make sure that you're making progress and the stuff that really matters. Yeah, it's a little constraining, but it also is like what produces like a cool new book. It's what like a loud dawn to take this potential to produce something new in the world that's really interesting that wasn't there before and actually act on it. Like that's not going to be something that just, you know, you're going to stumble into or I'll work on it when I'm interested. Like at some point, you got to control your time to some degree. You got to put in the deep hours, even the days you don't want to do it. You know, so I think that's a cool example of like what we're going for here. We're not trying to Optimize something. We're not trying to science-bro out and be like the super humans and live 450 years. We're not trying to do this type of thing. We want to finish the book and get a start review. We want to be able to move to this cool place and have the freedom to mountain bike half the day. The things that make the standard deep life deep, it's hard to do without some good hardware in which you're running. That does require that I control my time. I control my obligations. I have to have some say on this chaos if in it, I'm going to form something that's really cool. So I thought there was a cool case study. I'll check out that book, Astro Chimps, and Dawn, thanks for sending that in. Alright, we got a final segment. But first, Jesse, let's do a couple more sponsors. When I talk about our friends at policy genius, the country's leading online insurance marketplace, it will save you time and money As you provide your family a financial net starting today, with policy genius, you can find life insurance policies that started just $292 per year for up to a million dollars a coverage. Some options offer same day approval and would allow you to avoid unnecessary medical exams. The thing is life insurance is one of these things that, you know, if there's people who depend on you, you know you need, you know you probably don't have enough. What's holding you back from doing this is just a logistics. How do I get life insurance? 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You have to head to policy genius.com slash deep questions. or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and the see how much you could save. That's policygenius.com slash deep questions. I also want to talk about a long time sponsors at Grammarly. We talked about this all the time on the show, but no matter what kind of work you do, the clarity of your communication is key. This is how you present yourself to the world, the more clear and professional your communication. The more capable and professional people will assume that you are. Grammarly can help you make your communication clear. It is your AI writing partner to help you communicate more effectively and efficiently so you can make that bigger impact. Grammarly, here's the thing. It works across 500,000 apps and websites, right? So you can use this wherever it is that you're already doing your writing. For once and now, 14 years, they've been using different AI strategies to help you figure out not just what's going on with my grammar, but to help you do much more sophisticated things like figuring out a better way to write something. To give you ideas for what you're about to write, tone detection is a feature I really like. Here is the tone of this, what you just wrote, how professional is it? Can we adjust the tone on it? Is there a better way to say what I'm saying? Grammarly keeps getting better and better as they up the AI background engine behind what they're doing. And it really is like having a partner that looks over your shoulder and just like, well, let's change that. This could be a little bit better. Why don't we rewrite it this way? This is reading as non-professional or too professional. You use it wherever you write to make your writing clear and to make your writing more professional. That's why 96% of Grammarly users reports that it helps them craft more impactful writing. So make a bigger impact at work with Grammarly, sign up and download for free at Grammarly.com slash podcast, that's GRAM-M-A-R-L-Y dot com slash podcast, easier said, done. All right, so your final segment. I file a segment. One of the things I like to do is react to interesting things in the news that are relevant to our quest here to find more depth than a world full of digital distractions. I want to bring up on the screen here for those who are watching. Here's a review from the verge of this new product that people have been talking about. The AI pen. The Humane AI pen. Let me read the first paragraph here of this review. The idea behind the Humane AI pen is a simple one. It's a phone without a screen. Instead of asking you to open apps and tap on a keyboard, this little wearable abstracts everything away behind an AI assistant and an operating system who main calls cause OS like Cosmos. Want to make a phone call, send the text message, calculate the tip, write something down or learn to population a Copenhagen. Just ask the AI pin. It uses a cellular connection to be online all the time, and a network of AI models to try to answer your questions and execute your commands. It's not just an app, it's all the apps. Right. So what they're pitching here at Humane, that for the Humane AI pin is that this is like a bridge to a post smartphone world. I just talked to this thing that looks like the Star Trek communicator pin. You actually touch this thing that turned it on and you just ask it things and it can give you back information. One of the weirder features of this is I'm going to show this to you, Jesse. There's a picture of it later. It has a laser, I don't even what you call this. Yeah, here we go. Laser projector. It's like, how do you get numbers and information from this pen? Instead of it talking and you can see this if you're looking on the screen, it will, you can hold your hand in front of this thing and it uses like a laser to like draw monochromatic numbers and letters like it can like print on your hand. So like here's a picture of it like actually printing some information on someone's hand. Those are the AI pen. All right, does this work well? Or here's another picture of that. Does this work well? No, not yet. That's to review here in the Verge is like, it does everything terribly. It just doesn't work very well. It's $700. Now that the technology is not quite there. That's to review that the Verge, I haven't tried it. That's to review the Verge gets it. Why? Why do I think it's interesting about this though? And if you read this review and you read the marketing materials for the pen, like this question comes up, like here's my first question. Like isn't this a problem that it's already solved with like our smartphones and Siri? Like what? Can you just have like an airpot in and just like, hey Siri, what's the population of Copenhagen? Hey Siri, can you add to my to-do list to do whatever? I mean, look, this technology with these tools is becoming better, especially as they can use large language models. What's the problem here? Why do we want to be talking into a Star Trek communicator and having it use a laser projector to put low fidelity monochrome on our hand? I mean, look, if We thought Google Glass was going to get you beaten up. I mean, this is going to get you thrown in a river. Here's what's interesting. It becomes clear when you read this that the problem they're solving is not, oh, there's no way to actually just have like a voice interface with a computer to get things done because our phones do this. The problem is people don't want to look at their phones. It's such an attention landmine for so many people that they might consider talking into this sort of dork pen and looking at laser projections on their hand just so they don't have to turn on their phone and be grabbed by all the stuff on there that's like grabbing their attention and manipulating them and making them unhappy and miserable. So we're going through great lengths with this product to avoid using a product that already does all this thing really well. So to me, the real story here is not The humane pins technology, but the technology that it is helping us flee, which is our existing phones. So what's the solution here if you want something like the humane pin technology, is take that junk off your phone. Remove from your phone any app where a multi-billion dollar company makes money the more you look at the app. You don't want to have to fight that battle every time you need to know the population of Copenhagen. Take all that off your phone. Make your phone boring or It has your calendar and your email and text messages and you can look up stuff, have Siri looks stuff up for you or you can look it up on like the Safari browser and like that's it. You use it to listen to audio and the like that send text messages to your friends and like to maps. Make your phone like the Steve job version of the iPhone from 2007 and now the problems that the Humane AI pin are solved and are already solved. You could just look at your phone when you need something or if you don't want to take your phone out, talk to Siri. That's the takeaway I'm coming from this is that people are drowning in their phones. And instead of trying to build alternatives to the phones, I think we just need to make the phone experience better that doesn't require new technology that requires the elimination of technology that's on there right now. Like just to have the boldness to say, just because TikTok exists doesn't mean it needs to be on here. Just because people are talking about things on Twitter doesn't mean I need to be on Twitter seeing what they're saying. Just because YouTube has these interesting Samsung videos, I don't need like the YouTube app on my phone to watch it. I can watch things on TV when it comes time to watch things on TV. We can fix this problem by fixing our relationship to the technology. Instead of trying to come with these weird technologies, they're doing an in-run around it. It's the same way I feel about these sort of dumb phone technologies, which I think are great for things like, my kid needs a phone, I don't have access to the internet. That's a fantastic use of a dumb phone. If it's, I don't trust myself as a grown-up to use my phone, then it becomes more of a, like, you need to grow the hell up moment. Get the junk off your phone. Focus on the stuff that matters. If don't use this stuff that is making you not even trust yourself with your phone, that's a problem solve the problem. You shouldn't have that problem. You know, don't go through the elaborate routines that try to like not be exposed to alcohol if you're not alcoholic, you know, get your addiction under control. Right. So that's where I am on this. We don't need to in-run around our phones. We need to just actually transform our phones to be much more boring. And then Syria or whatever can answer our questions about Copenhagen and book, put something on our to-do list and tell us what's on our calendar. If we need to see something, we can just look at this beautiful high-risk screen as opposed to a weird monochromatic laser trying to draw it on our hands. It all works fine. We just have to repair the relationship with this thing. We can't avoid it forever. It's like that weird ant you have. You're eventually going to see or I think it's given any ways you might as well fix the relationship. That's the way that I think more people need to think about their phone. So I'm not rushing out to buy an AI pin. I'm not bullish on this technology because I think we already invented this technology. We just have to make it less something that we're afraid of. $700, too. Yeah. Yeah.

But also a little non-secretorious. Okay. Yes, you could buy a fridge with that. So that's our review. Save your money and buy a refrigerator instead of buying the AI, you mean. Alright, well speaking of which, I think that's all the time we have. I think everyone who sent in their questions and calls and case studies will be back next week with another episode of the show, and it tell then as always, stay deep. Alright, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the deep questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living Deeply, I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70,000 subscribers get sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you gotta sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.