Transcript for Ep. 300: Hidden Technology Traps

I'm Calendue Port and this is Deep Questions. The show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ. I joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, a little bit of personal news. I don't know if I've mentioned this to you or not. This would only make sense to people who understand the American academic system. This is all nonsense to everyone else, but my promotion to full professor came through.

This is why we sweat over these things and no one understands. Or you before associate professor. So the American system, okay, this is not that interesting. The American system when you get hired is a 10-year track professor. You start as an assistant professor and that's without 10-year. The next rank is associate professor. Typically, though not always, that goes hand in hand with 10-year. So you get promoted to associate professor with tenure. So if you see an American professor, a professor in American University, say they're an associate professor, that means they've gotten tenure, which is sort of the hard hurdle. Later in your career, you can go up for full professor, which is the final rank you can get to. So if you can think of it as going to associate professor is based in part on what you've done, But also, like, you're still your potential academically, okay, you know, I've done good stuff and I'm on a trajectory to do important stuff on my field. Full professor is almost all retrospective. You're saying, here's what I have done as an academic and then that's being judged to see if it's sufficient to move to the full rank. So they don't, it's confusing because in the American system, you don't use the word full in the title, you just use professor. So in America, if someone is in an academic context called, you know, Professor Miller, that means they're a full professor. And they say associate professor would mean they're associate professor. So they just leave off anything professor by itself. And Europe, that means something completely different.

Yeah, how to do it. Oh, yeah, as a professor's move around a lot. Yeah, yeah, and they do get poached and different different departments, so kind of side a lot and be like, hey, so uh, interested maybe in something something and so no professor has agents. You don't, they don't have agents. Yeah. So it's the blind leading the blind. So it's like professors who know nothing about any sort of real life common sense, being poached by other professors. So it's, you know, nothing, it's not Jeremiah, let's put it that way. But it does happen a lot. Professors move around a lot. The real tricky move. Okay. Here's the tricky move. The professor that will, start to get poached, go down that path up to like, I've interviewed, I've gotten letters to use as negotiation with their home university to get paid more. Yeah, to do something like something they want, something they want more of.

Yeah. So like a little of that happens in academia. So we'll see. There we go. So as of August 1st, I can scrub the word associate. It's funny. I have a friend writers. The trueism and writing is professors who write, everyone always tells them and they're right. No one understands academic systems, no one knows the different ranks, no one knows the difference between tenure track professors, non tenure track professors. I have a friend of the show who does, he has like an affiliate position with a well-known university where once a year he will teach a sort of a seminar there. And he's, like, as far as my readers are concerned, I'm just, like, a full professor at this university. This is someone who's no, no PhDs. Everything is actual professor. Like, people don't know. They're like, oh, uh, Georgetown. In fact, a lot of people think I'm an MIT professor because they see vaguely like I studied at MIT or something. So we sweat it. We're like, okay, I don't want to be associate. I want to be full. And, you know, most people just see the fact that, like, you went to some university and like, oh, I think he's the president of that school. If the readers don't know, they don't care.

Lex Friedman. I told the secret question. He's the last I heard he was a lecturer. which is like an adjunct position. So you can get these, so Lex Friedman was an AI lecturer, which I believe at MIT is like a long-term contract adjunct type positions, right? So when it comes to adjunct professors or professors who are not on the tenure track, but come and go in universities, there's typically short-term contracts and long-term contracts. So short-term is we have to cover this class. We don't have the personnel to cover this class in the fall. And you'll bring in an adjunct professor, maybe, who will help teach that class, they didn't get these multi-year contracts, where it's like, no, no, we want you to be affiliated with developing courses and teaching them, you have other things going on, so you're not a full-time professor doing research when you're in the tenure track, we have a long-term relationship with us at Georgetown, we call these multi-year, not tenure line faculty. So, Lex was that. And I don't know if he still is just a good question. I think he moved the Texas. So yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. That's a good question.

Yeah.

And we're talkers. We're professional talkers. I can tell you doing Angie Huberman show with his, which was, you know, in my memory, it took, it was like seven hours long, not really, but he has like a sheet, one sheet of paper. So we did a three and a half hour conversation. He had one sheet of paper with essentially doodles on it. Like a word here, like something here, just a reminder of points. And he would occasionally glance on that three and a half hours. Yeah. So professors can talk. There should be, I would say there should be more professor podcasters. But the problem is we can talk for a long time, but we don't necessarily talk in ways that humans understand. So you can't just grab a random professor and say podcasters because we get pretty specialized. We also get very careful because in a world of academic writing, It's incredibly nuanced, like I'm taking this complicated argument, especially in humanities, and I'm taking this piece of this argument, and I'm trying to advance it. And so you have to be pretty careful, because there's so many experts in here. I can't just come in and be sweeping, because I have to be very careful about what I'm doing this as provisional, which is a different tone than when you're trying to do public facing communication. So you have to somehow as a professor to do public facing communication, take the ability to talk for a long time. and then change how you talk so that like human beings don't want to poke their eyes out with needles. That's the sweet spot. Less needles more talking. Alright speaking of talking we've got a good episode coming up of a deep dive speaking of professors about young people in technology but with some ideas in there that I think are going to be relevant to everyone who's worried about technology, destabilizing their economic future. We've got some good questions and I think a nice I'm going to call it a sort of profile in slowness for a final segment. So it's sort of nice uplifting profile, someone doing something slow, but really interesting. Alright, so Jesse, let's get started. They're deep dive. So I recently went on Scott Galaway's podcast, Prof. G, to promote my book, slow productivity. After that, I began doing more of a deep dive on Scott's work. One of the things I came across was a TED talk he just gave recently. I have it up on the screen for people who are watching instead of just listening. They're Scott Galaway on stage at TED. All right, here's the title of this TED talk. How the US is destroying young people's future. So in this talk, he gives a list of reasons for why the way we have things set up right now in the US is really bad for young people. A lot of it's economic, like put some of these charts up on the screen. All right, let's see here. Yeah, there's various charts on the screen. You can see it if you're watching. A lot of it's economic policy. Economic policy that more benefits, like baby boomers than it does to youth. But he did mention technology. So near the end of the talk, he said technology is also part of how we're sort of screwing young people. And in particular, he talked about social media and the way that it is hurting young people, especially their mental health, citing a lot of the work that John Hight has in his new book, the anxious generation. So this got me thinking. I agree with Scott and John Height that social media is a problem for young people. It is going to affect their mental health. But I think the story of how technology might be destabilizing young people's future is larger and more interesting than just that. And in particular what I want to argue in today's deep dive is that there are multiple realities about our current technological future that are going to sort of screw the current young generation in terms of their economic professional future in the decades ahead. So I have three things I want to mention that weren't mentioned in Scott's talk where technology is setting up young people for professional failures. In their 20s and into their 30s and then I'll talk about for each of those at the end a couple things that you might be able to do to help counteract some of these forces right now. All right, let's get started. What's the the first issue here that has been mentioned yet? The idea of treating our phones like a constant companion. Has an economic ramification for young people. All right. Let me tell you what I mean here. First, let me quantify what I mean by this. I'm going to bring up on the screen here a 2023 report from common sense media. It's about young people in phones, the report is called constant companion a week in the life of a young person's smart phone use. I'm going to take some credit. This idea of constant companion is a term to describe our relationship with phones as something I introduced in the pages of the New York Times back in 2019. I wrote an op-ed about the problem with the constant companion model of smart phones and also in my book Digital Minimalism. So I'll take credit for that. There's a chart in here. I want to pull up in particular. Let's quantify what we mean by using a phone like a constant companion. So what's on the right here on this chart is a figure that's labeled average daily smartphone pickups by participant eight. So number of times you pick up your phone during a day. There's three bands for each of these frequencies for different ages. Let's look at the dark green band. That's going to be 16 and 17 year old. So sort of the teenagers in this study. And what we'll see is for the top two groups here, which are the smallest number of pickups. Zero to 25 pickups a day, 26 to 50 pickups a day. These have the smallest shares of 16 to 17 year old. So that they're least likely. The least likely number of times, you're going to see one of these teenagers in the study pick up a phone or the smaller numbers. What's the most common number of pickups you're going to see? with teenagers in the study 51 to 100 times followed very closely by 101 to 150 times followed closely behind that with 151 to 200 times. So somewhere between 50 to 200 times is where the bulk of the survey responses fell. When they did the math over all the age groups that averaged out to about 100 times a day, you're picking up your phone. That's the constant companion model. of using your smartphone and it's different than a course waste the smartphone was originally introduced the tool it was originally introduced as it was not introduced as a tool to be your constant companion but something you use to make calls and listen to audio content integrated into a a really nice unified package as I've written before Steve Jobs never meant for the smartphone to be something we looked at a hundred times a day but that's what it became This was driven mainly by mobile, the mobile social media revolution. It's once the social media companies turned their goals as they were heading towards IPO to getting engagement minutes up as opposed to just getting subscriber numbers up. That's when they began engineering mobile versions of their experience that were meant to pull you back to your phone. This retrained us in general to look at our phones all the time. Okay, so why is this a problem for the professional future of the young people who are growing up right now with the constant companion model? There's two impacts that are relevant. One is that it prevents the robust development of your ability to focus. If you're looking at a phone on average a hundred times a day, you are going to have very few moments in which you are actually sustaining concentration on something difficult for an expanded period of time. without some sort of cognitive relief by looking at distraction. Now as I write about in my book Deep Work, this is a problem because it's actually in that sustained concentration that important things happen, especially in denology economy. Important things such as learning hard news skills quickly and producing really high quality results and reasonable amounts of time. If you do not develop that focus muscle because you have no experience with just keeping your focus on one thing without cognitive relief, This is a real hindrance to your professional development, right? So if someone like me or whose older than me, we went through a childhood, we went through college years, we went through our early young adult years without a constant companion phones. I graduated college in 2004. The constant companion model didn't really take off until the 2010s. So I was able to develop and practice the ability to focus. I didn't have This handicap in the way that the current young generation does, that's going to give my generation a real cognitive advantage over our younger peers. Because when we're comfortable locking in, learning something hard, producing something difficult. The other, this is subtle, but the other problem of the constant companion model on the professional future of current young people is that it creates what I called in my book digital minimalism solitude deprivation. We have to be really careful about how we define this term. In my book, I use a definition of solitude that is common, and I think it's important, which means time free from inputs from other minds. So in this definition of solitude, it's not about physical isolation. It's about being alone with your own thoughts. you're observing the world around you and you're thinking about stuff in your own head, you're not listening or reading someone else's thoughts. The constant companion model of the smartphone made it possible for the first time in human history to essentially banish all solitude. All of the moments where historically, in my historically, Jesse I'm talking about, you know, when we were in college. I'm kind of upset to dust out his story. But in this context, it kind of is historically when Jesse and I were in college, you know, and we had to take the wagon to pick up our togas or get our horses from the horseshoe place, you had to hold you all the time. Because you would just be in line somewhere. You would be walking across campus. You would be waiting for a lecture to begin. You got there a little bit early. And what would you do in this time? It's you and your own thoughts. You're looking around. You're thinking about things. All right. As I argued in digital minimalism, solitude is very important, especially for young people because it's where you make sense of your life. This thinking, being alone with your own thoughts is where you integrate your experiences and feelings with your growing schema for understanding your life, your position in the world and the trajectory that you're going on. You literally, and maybe that literally, I guess you psychologically, I should say, you psychologically develop your adult identity through a flexion and time spent alone with your own thoughts, especially when you're young and so much is changing and so much input is new, you got to sit there and make sense of it. This is really important for your professional future. This is how you become, you put on, try and for size, polish off and convince yourself this is right, your sense of adult identity, which you need to succeed professionally. You have to come out of this sort of social psychological cocoon to grow into a sort of professional butterfly. You have to do a lot of work inside. This is who I am. This is different than how I was before. This is kind of scary, but this is okay. Here's how I fit into this world. Here's what's important to me. You need time alone with your own thoughts to do that. When you don't get that, what you're going to experience is more of a sense of an arrested development, especially with people in their 20s going to their 30s, you get terminology like adulting becomes more common. That's a direct reflection. of missing out on the time alone with your own thoughts, we make sense of yourself and what is my adult identity? So it gives you more of a comfort and confidence with navigating the professional world, taking on responsibility, stretching yourself, dealing with difficulties and hardships that occur and work and how you're going to navigate that, it's how you gather the respect of other people. It is how traditionally we become leaders as opposed to being in our childhood phase followers. So a lot of this gets impeded if we don't have time alone with our own thoughts. I know it's a subtle thing, but its ramifications aren't. All right, so the constant companion model of the phone, which didn't affect us or anyone older during our developmental years, is going to have a professional impact on young people. All right, issue number two, I think of this as the influencer culture tax. by which I mean there's a, there's a tax that is levied on individuals who grew up in this age of social media and social media influence. And I don't mean by influencer culture, just this idea of there being very professional social media users who are influencers. I mean the whole culture that this engenders, which is a culture that says you have to see yourself as a mini influencer. Even if this is not your job, you need to cultivate a following online. It could be small, but it could be your friends and some random people. But you gotta think a lot about this online persona. what you stand for, what you don't stand for, being interesting, producing content, tending to your followers, carefully monitoring to make sure that you haven't transgressed some sort of implicit overton boundary that's specific to your particular online tribal cohesion. This uses a lot of time, attention, and energy. Here's the problem. It's exactly the flavor of time, attention, and energy that you would have otherwise been putting into. developing your status within your real-world professional context. So it's subverting. This influencer culture is subverting the instinct we have as humans to monitor like the communities in which we exist in to try to emerge as a trusted authority or leader in those communities to help manage our social standing in the communities. This is exactly the energy you have to expend to begin to develop professionally. This is traditionally the energy we would expend to think about my actual communities that I'm involved in, including my professional communities. I want to what's going on here. I want to read the room. I want to understand the different points of view. I want to emerge as a leader in here. This is a really important thing we do. A really important drive that humans have. It's a really important drive for getting ahead in business and your job and the social media influence culture is subverted that energy over there. where it doesn't, it's a fake online world where what everyone is really doing is just clocking in into their data factory on behalf of Mark Zuckerberg so that his stock price can go up. So when you put all of your energy about how do I become a trusted member of the community in leader to these sort of fake online worlds, it doesn't get expended in the real worlds where you actually have a job and where you're really dealing with these people. And we're putting in an intense amount of energy to become a leader in that community would have really big economic benefits for you. So we don't talk about this one as much, but I think it matters. I think it matters. We're subverting the drive that we really should be if you're young in your 20s. You should be putting a lot of that energy to how do I get a lot of followers at the nonprofit where I work? How do I get a lot of likes in the department I work for this large company? So that energy is being subverted for the benefit of a small number of people who own shares in these companies in a way from your economic future. All right, the final issue that I think is disproportionately, technology driven that's disproportionately impacting the economic and professional future of young people is this rise of pseudo productivity. So of course, it's one of the big ideas of my new book's slow productivity that knowledge work is built on this idea of pseudo productivity, which says visible activity is going to be our proxy for useful effort. And as I argue in the book, when that combined, with the front office IT revolution, email Slack, personal computers, mobile computing. It's super charged this idea of performative business. It's super charged the experience of knowledge work as this sort of frantic, fine granularity demonstration that you're constantly doing things. Lots of emails back at four, saying yes to a lot more projects, constantly having all this administrative overhead. It's productivity as activity, making those two things anonymous. Suitor productivity been around for a long time, but it was in the 2000s, especially at 2010s, that it really took off as technology tools really amplified it. This disproportionately hits young people, right? Because what a suitor productivity do. Well, by force you just to be busy all the time, showing activity all the time, you're not able to do the slow development of new skills that are going to be valuable. What I call in my book so good they can't ignore you career capital development. If you're in your 40s like I am, you've already built up a lot of skills. You know, that's what you do in our 20s when we were getting better at things, et cetera. Super productivity is not so bad because it gives me a little bit more flexibility. I can step off of the cognitive difficulties of building new skills and being held accountable for what I produce and just, hey, if I want to spend the next five or six years to jump in on a lot of calls and being in meetings and whatever that's fine, it gives me a little bit of breathing room. But it stinks for the young people because they're never actually building the skills they're going to give them security. You put a 23 year old in a technology, hypercharged, pseudo productivity environment. They can play that game well because they don't have other obligations. They have a lot of energy. They can stay up late, just doing emails and responding to things. But they're not building up the career capital, the hard, rare and valuable skills on which ultimately you need to take leverage over your career. So suitor productivity kind of frustrates people of my age because we're like, this is not real work and it's frustrating, but it can be a major obstacle, more than just frustrating, but a major obstacle to professional development for young people is they're not getting the chance that other generations had to do the hard deliberate practice of building up new skills. So all three of these things, We have the constant companion model of smartphones. We have the influencer culture subverting our instinct towards leadership and we have pseudo productivity blocking us from actually building up skills that we can use as leverage. All three of these things I think are they're all really a technology. They're all three presenting obstacles to young people's professional future, especially when we're talking about knowledge work. There's stuff we can do about this. I'll give a couple of quick examples. Maybe I'll give an example or two for each of these three things. Alright, so the constant companion model, if you're young and you want to push back about that, begin to think about concentration like a muscle that you have to develop and you need to put in the time to develop it. I get into a lot of this in my book Deep Work, but you need to be practicing focusing. You need to be very careful when you're working. The block time that's non-destracted working versus time where you're doing more distracting things and in the non-destracting time, I'm working on one thing and it feels uncomfortable but that's okay I keep going because you know what the bench press feels uncomfortable but if you do it long enough your muscles get bigger. So you have to adopt a mindset of focus is something I have to train and we live in a world of cognitive junk food so I have to be pretty intentional about doing that training. Because otherwise, the default is I'm going to fall out of proverbial shape here. You also need to prioritize solitude. That is time alone with your own thoughts. which is going to mean do things without your phone on a semi regular basis. You just get comfortable with like I went for a hike, I went for a walk, I went on some errands without my phones. I'm not not having my phone all the time, but on a regular basis, I'm alone with my own thoughts. So you get used to solitude, journaling can help with this as well because journaling helps jump start this idea of self reflection with your own thoughts. Okay, let me try to make sense of these thoughts. If you journal enough, you get pretty good at this and even when you're just waiting on the train, or you're going on an errand, you're able to more with more facility, think about things that happen to you and make better sense of your life. But time alone with your own thoughts, plus journaling, is just trying to claw back in this sort of self-reflective solitude into your life. And the pushback on the influencer tax, if you don't get paid to be saying things online, stop posting things online. We won't get into like consuming social media right now and some of the questions will get into that fine. You want to consume social media for this professional, this question of professional development, let's not put, let's put that aside. But don't post things. That's a simple change. But when you're not posting things, you're not commenting, you're not putting things up. It removes this idea that you have this important audience that you have to tend to and that cares what you're doing and it needs a lot of your attention. And when you remove that idea, you're still going to have that impulse. because you're young and you're becoming an adult and we're a social species. You'll still have that impulse. And when it does not have managing this sort of simulacrum of a community that the online world gives you, you will seek other places for this impulse to be fulfilled. And that's going to become potentially your working world. So just don't post things. You're not an influencer. Don't think about your audience. Your audience is the people that actually you work with day to day. Your audience is the people that write paychecks for you. Your audience is the clients that actually forward you money because of the services you're giving them. Put that energy into making that audience happy. Not this fake audience that was been constructed by the social media companies to play exactly on those things just to get you to look at a glowing piece of glass longer each day. And finally when it comes to pseudo productivity, what you have to resist it and it look I just wrote a whole book about this that my book's low productivity is is in detail how you systematically rebuild the notion of productivity in your job so that you don't get trapped with student productivity and yet you also are able to succeed with these changes without annoying everyone in your orbit it's a complicated thing we talk about a lot on the show but let's just set the intention busyness is not usefulness productivity is not synonymous with activity It's what did I produce that matters? And probably the simplest mindset shift you can make. It's starting to ask your question, what did I produce this year? And what did I produce during this last quarter that I'm proud of? Write those things down. That's the list you want to grow. Everything else will come from there. We say, I wanted to enter the your point back to things I did I'm proud of. And then you ask yourself in the moment, what am I doing today so that that list I'm going to be more impressed by? Suddenly, The I got through my inbox quickly and squeezed in seven Zoom meetings is going to seem as sort of nihilistically absurd as it really is. Because none of that is directly connected to producing the stuff you're proud of. Again, there's a lot we talk all the time to show about specifically how to escape suitor productivity. But you got to start by just recognizing suitor productivity is not the game you're playing. If you're playing the suitor productivity game in your 20s, you'll do well at it in your 20s because you have energy and you're on your phone all the time anyways. But then you'll get to your 30s and 40s and realize all these points I was rocking up in these games aren't actually worth much. Now that I'm what leverage and control over my career, I want stability, I want to do something new or bold. You say, oh, the game I should have been playing is building up skills that matter. And that's a different game. So just recognize that's not the game. And so starting to look at metrics that aren't just busyness in the moment is a one thing you can do to make that change. All right. So that's my Addendum to Scott Galerways talk. Technology has all sorts of subtle ways that it's undermining young people's professional future. Those are three not exhaustive, but three particular ways and some advice in there that hopefully will help you think better about that. All right, I think about Jesse, if the people that get caught up in managing their social media audience that aren't like professional influencers, that same energy put into your day job would make a huge difference.

Yeah, don't post it if you're not getting paid. I mean, look, we can get the same effect and save you some money. Just send a check to Mark Zuckerberg once a month. Same idea. And then it's quicker. It's more efficient. Just send them a check, right? And getting a pause machine. Send Mark Zuckerberg a check. And then just like a few times and throughout the day, just look out in the space and say a clever clip and press the pause machine button. People love, you really love me, and then send your check to Mark Zuckerberg. Get see the same effect. But saves that energy now for actually getting a better paycheck. All right. Let's do some ads. So I want to talk about our longtime friends and element LMNT. You've heard me talk about element for a long time when I talk about their electrolyte drink mix that has the right amount of electrolytes you need. to rehydrate after you've been out there exercising or doing a long day of book touring or lecturing or being at a conference all day, but it has none of the junk in it. The next sugar doesn't have weird ingredients. I'd use element all the time. After I work out, I use it. If I'm really dehydrated in the morning, I use it, especially after a long day of teaching or podcasting, it's how I rehydrate. So I have a big element fan, have been for a long time. I wanted to mention though, they have this interesting new product element sparkling. A 16 ounce can of sparkling water that includes their zero sugar electrolyte formulation that you already know from their drink mix packs. I'm very excited about this. Now here's the thing. Elements sparkling is not yet available just to the general public, but it is available to element insiders. So if you're an element insider, I mean you've you've bought an element insider bundle in the last nine months. you're eligible to get sort of early access to element sparkling. You could just go to the element sparkling product page, a drink element dot com and they'll don't help you figure out if you're an insider or not, but I just wanted to mention that. So we got the drink mix, which I love. And now coming soon is element sparkling, which element inciders can try right now before the main public release. So you can get a free sample pack. With any drink mix purchase, if you go to drinkelement.com slash deep, that's drink lmnt.com slash deep. And if you're an element insider, you will also have first access to element sparkling, a bold 60 notes can of sparkling electrolyte water, that's drinkelement.com slash deep. Also want to talk about our friends at cozy earth, cozy earth makes the sheets that I absolutely love. We have multiple pairs of these sheets because I cannot tolerate any others. They are incredibly comfortable, very soft and temperature-regulating. They don't, something about the bamboo viscous bamboo, they make it out of temperature-regulates. I also now have a cozy earth, I guess you call it like a sweatshirt made out of that same material. It's cool on the skin even when it gets a little bit warm. I wear that thing all the time. I love it. We just bought some cozier for, I'm going to tell you two real cozier stories. My parents are coming to watch the kids. I'm going to England to do some book tour stuff and my wife's going to join me for some of that. My parents are going to watch the kids. Our gift to them is we bought them some cozier. products because, like, we know they will love it. Secondly, we went on a trip recently, just a weekend trip, a beach rental. And similarly, normally, we would just have the linen service, like bring us sheets. This time we said, no, no, no. I would rather have the difficulty of having to bring our own sheets and undo the beds and bring the sheets home so that we can bring our cozy or sheets with us. cozy earth knows this, they now actually have a tote, a travel friendly hassle free cozy earth bedding that can come in an adorable tote. So it's very easy to travel. We're not the only ones who love this so much that we want to bring it with us when we travel. So if you want to rest easy on your vacation or any other time, take a trip to cozyearth.com slash cowl. Then you have to type in my personal code cowl at checkout and you'll get an exclusive 35% off that's promo code cowl for 35% off. It's my way of saying thanks for listening. Oh, one favorite choose podcast in the survey they offer you after you order and then select my show from the drop down menu. I know it's like an extra 10 seconds, but that's how cozy Earth really knows you came for my show and it really makes a big difference. So hopefully you'll do that. That's cozy earth.com slash calipro, McCode Cal. Thanks and happy sleeping. All right. Let's do some questions.

Well, I sort of have a double-barrel to answer to this question that my two answers will seem different, but they can relate. So my first answer is like, like, hard days are hard days. You know, you're sick. You're really tired. It's okay to say, yeah, I'm not going to get a lot done this day. Let's start with that, right? We want to adopt a slow productivity mindset, which is about over time producing stuff you're proud about, which is very different than a fast or pseudo productivity mindset, which says what matters is activity. If you've internalized the pseudo productivity mindset to be kind of sick and like I didn't really get much done today, seems like a problem. I was unproductive. I was less valuable to the world. This was a quote unquote bad day. If you have a slow productivity mindset, doesn't matter. Like, yeah, today's not a day. I'm going to produce much of this good. So I did it. What matters though is, hey, I'm still on track for at the end of this season to have like, produce some stuff I'm proud of. I mean, I talk about it in my book slow productivity. One of the examples I give. Mary Curie, honing in on isolating radium. So she could build a, have a first example and really understand radio activity in a way that wasn't known before. She was going to win a Nobel Prize for this work working in this, uh, in Paris in this sort of drafty basement research lab, honing in summer comms. So now we're going on vacation for two months. We're going to France. The pseudo productivity mindset is like, oh my god, you're so invaluable. Why would you do that? That's your unproductive. The slow productivity mindset says, I am working on something cool. I'm going to produce something cool and she did. And she came back and she kept working on it and she got the result and she got Nobel Prize. Took some more vacations. Got another Nobel Prize. Things were fine. So let's get rid of the mindset of taking time or slowing down or having variation in your intensity is somehow a bad thing. It's not. Now here's my other answer, which could also be relevant. If what you're thinking is like, look, it's not that I'm feeling really bad and there's nothing I could do. It's just like if anything goes off a little bit, I get stuck in a sort of rabbit hole of distracting behaviors. When there's better things I could have been doing, not maybe more productive things, but like it takes away the quality of my day. Like if it's a relapse type situation, it's not what I wanted my day to be. It just, that was enough to hook me into that. There's a lot of ideas about this from the addiction literature. These are called habit triggers. smokers have this big problem after they quit that there's very certain things that happen. The thing is associate with the cigarette when those things happen, it's very difficult not to smoke. The addiction literature they say, yeah, you have to practice and cultivate alternative habits. All right, in this situation, it's like, I'm a little bit tired and I'm not really on my schedule. Like, what do I do? What's like the habit I fall back onto to sort of like rewind or recharge? That's not just going down a YouTube rabbit hole for eight hours. And you practice with something different until you associate those triggers with the new behaviors. So you have to define the triggers that I'm tired, I'm a little bit sick. I mean, for you, I think it's the like something is often it knocks me off the ability to follow a more Optimizer structured schedule have different fallbacks you do in those situations which are recharging but don't leave you with this feeling of I really don't not happy with how my day unfolded so both of these answers can be true at the same time ease up on yourself Productivity is not activity. It's outcome over time. And the second, if you're not happy with yourself when you fall into these, like, I don't want to do this regardless. I don't care if I'm sick or not. I don't want to be on TikTok all day. It's a trigger. You have to have a specific other thing you associate with that trigger. And it'll take a few cycles of finding what works well and doing it a few times until you change your association with that. So, I notice, thank you, Nate. Who do we got next?

My first question is why not cut out all these technologies? The things you're mentioning that you're not able to do anymore seem like they're important to you. movies, reading, having long conversations. Those feel like things that you don't want to necessarily give up. Now, what are you giving them up for? Scrolling TikTok and Instagram and other apps on your iPad. So why don't you consider prioritizing that first group of things over the second group of things? Now, if you want to structure this a little bit, abstention might sound scary. Do a digital declutter. Like I talk about on my book, digital mentalism, say I'm gonna take a 30 day, I guess step away for 30 days from all these optional personal technology uses. 30 days. Then during those 30 days, I'm gonna very aggressively Explore alternative activities that are important to me. I'm going to build rituals around them. I'm going to put aside time for them. I'm going to go to the library. I'm going to read in the woods. I'm going to set up a lot of social events with friends. I'm going to go to the revival house movie theaters three times a week to see all these different movies that are playing. You really aggressively start experimenting with instruction your day around other sorts of valuable activities. Don't just sit there and white knuckle it. Do other things. And then at the end of the 30 days say, OK, is there something really important that I'm missing? from the technologies I temporarily put aside. I think you're going to find for most of these things, you're going to say no. Nothing really bad happened that I wasn't on TikTok, right? There may be a few uses that pop up, we're like, well, you know, using Instagram to keep up whatever with my nieces and nephews and the photos that are posted to them. Like that is important to me because then when I'm on like the text threads, I feel more connected to what's going on in my family. If you find these specific uses, Then you can say, great, if that's what I need to really miss about this tool, how do I put that back into my life in a more focused way with fences around it? It's like in this example, If this is really the thing you missed about Instagram, you could say, well, it doesn't have to be on my phone. What I really should do is like, why don't I on Fridays, you know, log on to Instagram on my computer, it's kind of an ugly interface on there. Only follow my family members see what's going on, like with my nephew's or nieces, or maybe just like move more of this to our family text thread, which doesn't have that same sort of addictive pull that the app has and just sort of post more my own photos on there so other people are posting photos and now we can really keep up with each other without having to be in an addictive ecosystem when you know what you're trying to do with the technology you can put up good fences right this is very different than what most people do which is saying I by default bring these technologies into my life if they could be cool and I wait until I feel as if the negative the negative pressures of this technology are so big that I feel like okay now I just I have to throw up my hands and get rid of it. That doesn't work very well because unless the technology is really destroying your life it's a hard burden the past. It is bad but a lot of times it's not bad. I guess the issue with these tools. Instagram or TikTok. Like a lot of it is fine. It's the volume of what you do. It's how it makes you feel over time. It's specific content on the tools. So if you're just strictly trying to build a case against something, it's a very hard case to make when it comes to technology. If you're instead trying to build a case for using something, like what's the positive case for using this tool? Like what do I really need in my life? That's a very important this tool. That becomes difficult as well. Like well, there's not much there really. Or this thing's important, but I could why not just put these fences around it. So do the digital declutter, Nate and be willing or exactly, sorry, be willing to radically change a relationship with these tools. Like I want to be the one to tell you, if you're not watching movies and reading and talking with your friends and family and this matters to you. And you're doing this because you need to scroll TikTok more Instagram more. That's a problem and you should fix it. And those first things are more important than these second things. Those first things, especially as you get older, are going to bring more sort of sustainable goodness into your life than the second set of things. The second set of things is your factory shift. You're checking in at your factory at the bite dance or metapactory to do your shift, giving data over so they can make money off of it. You don't have to keep that job. if you find these other things to be more important. So I'll give you that strong message. Leave those technologies is not a bad thing. But do the digital declutter and find out a little bit more subtly what's important here and what's not. All right, who do we got?

Good questions, sort of like a classic early cow academic advice question. Auto pilot what you can. So any work that happens regularly each week, you just know this thing is do every Friday, we have to do reading response every Tuesday and Thursday. Find the right time and the right place to do that work and then keep that constant week to week. And you got to be really realistic about this. Like how much time do I really need? to do this problem set. Well, it might be you need three sessions. And one of them has to be three hours. Like be realistic about how much time you need the successfully finished or recurring work, at least 90% of the time, same day, same places on your calendar recurring, so that you're taking out the decision-making, the energy expenditure of like, what do I want to work on next? and talking yourself into actually getting the energy to work on it. So autopilot as much work as you can. The other heuristic I tell students is don't waste first thing in the morning. If your first class is at 10, there might be a really nice block in there, right? That like 830 to 10 or something where you could get a big chunk of things done. So don't necessarily wait until you're well into the day before you start thinking about time as being fair game for getting things done. That time in between class is a lot can get done there. If it's too scattered to finish big things, figure out consistently how to break up big things. So like, okay, here's what I do. I have this hour between these two classes, for example. It's not enough time to finish a problem set. But I know consistently that's usually enough time to prepare a problem set that I'm working on. Go through the problems, answer the easy ones, figure out what the hard ones are and what I need to look that up for and like where that material is. And that's like problem set prepping. And then maybe the next day I have like this two hour block where if I tackle a prepped prom set I can get a draft of like all of the answers typically and then another day I have another hour long slot which is a prom set polishing right go through and I rewrite all of my answers for my notes under what I'm going to submit and I double check the math that takes about an hour if I do these three blocks consistently same time same places every week the prom set gets done it looks good. So if these blocks are small And the things you do are big, have a consistent way of breaking up the work and then autopilot to a smaller schedule. So on a big fan of recurrent work and school should have a recurrent strategy for being handled. All right, rock and roll and Jesse, who do we have next?

Well, Danny, first I appreciate the mini case study there. Zachary from before. Listen to the benefit Danny got from digital decluttering. reading Reddit and YouTube comment sections, which was probably just like a default behavior for Danny, was giving him anxiety. And he learned as the clutter, I feel better when I'm not doing that. He no longer does that. His life feels better. We don't realize sometimes the cognitive burden of our technological habits until we take a break from them. All right, to this specific question, video games versus books, I'm going to argue having rituals around both Danny being intentional about it. So when it comes to video games, I think it's fine if there's like a particular video game you really like playing or you like the idea of there's a new video game. I like video games. I'm gonna play this through over the next month or two and then it like a new game comes out. I get that game and I play it through. I think that's fine. Video games are a pretty impressive media art form right now. They have budgets bigger than Big Hollywood movies. They make more money than Big Hollywood movies in a lot of cases. This is an interesting art form. The danger here I think has online video games, so if it's a video game that you play it online with other people, those can be some of the most addictive activities in the whole digital space be very wary of those engineered games that are meant to be played over about a 40 to 50 hour period that you spread out over a couple months and it has an arc and then it finishes it's like a drawn out movie or novel experience fantastic online games I just say there be dragons you know that can eat up endless time and press buttons in a way that almost nothing else can If you want more on that read, add them, altars, book, irresistible, where it talks about addictive technology, those multi-massively multiplayer online video games are the most addictive technology. So be wary of those. All right. So what do I mean by rituals? Have a ritual around video games. This is when and how I do it. I look forward to it. Have a ritual around reading hard books. This is when I wear. I do it. I've learned to look forward to it. like from video games it can be like yeah there's certain nights like Thursday night after dinner I have this nice period and also like Sunday morning as these like my video game times and I've put it aside and I can really get lost in the game for three hours and I do this two times a week or three times a week you know that can be fine so when I do it where I do it I look forward to it Same thing with books. Yeah, I really want to get in this habit of reading hard books. And here's how I do it. It's like most nights at seven, like after dinner, but before I put on TV and I make the certainty or have like a little bit of whiskey or like whatever, you know, you can make a thing about it, put on a record. And I just make this a habit of a ritual around it. It's done at the same times. Just have these really nice rituals around both of the things. rituals that are built to a schedule that gives you a reasonable balance. So I think video games are cool. I just don't like the massively multiplayer online ones. They're meant to be addictive. If the game cost you 70 bucks and you can only play it for 40 hours, I have no problem with that. If the game was free and you could play it 40 hours a week, I mean, and still not be enough, be very, very wary about that. Right. That's the way I think about that. So just make rituals and schedules about both those things and keep both of those things still in your life and congratulations on the declutter sticky. I mean, imagine all the cool stuff you can do without that time spent stressing about Reddit and YouTube comments. All right. What do we got next?

Oh, fantastic. Let's get that music.

A good question, Dirk. For people who don't know, slow productivity corner is our question. Once per episode, we have at least one question. that is related to my new book's low productivity. All right, so Dirk is talking about an idea I mentioned in an earlier question of this episode as well. That slow productivity says look at productivity on longer time scales. Not did I have a productive day, but like was the last five years productive, right? When you think about productivity at larger time scales, you don't sweat the busyness of a particular day. What you worry about is like returning to important things over time. All right, so Dirk, what you're saying is like, you know, if I'm later on in life, they don't want to be thinking about a 10 year time frame. I think that's fine. I think fair enough, right? There's other reasons, by the way, that you don't want to be thinking about a too long of a time frame as well unrelated to being older. So Dirk, like in slow productivity, I talk about there's a section where I talk about laying out your vision for the long term and measuring your productivity against it. And I said, there's natural, there's sometimes there's natural breaks in this. Like if you're in school, you're probably thinking about what do I want to look back on my school experience and say this is what I did and here's what I'm proud of it. That could just be two more years. You're a sophomore. You're thinking about your next two years of school. It could be a particular job like a posting. I work for the State Department. I've been posted to, you know, Tel Aviv for the next two or three years. That's a natural constraint. I want to just think about what do I, what do I want to look back on this post, this, this, this, this time limited part of my life. What do I want to look back at and say happened in here? I would do this when we had babies, right? Like, I would see that as, there's this particular year typically when you have a new baby. And like, what do I want that year to look like? And it's very different because it's a very difficult year in terms of like you're trying to take care of this young thing. And you have a different, different measure of what productive means than another part of your life. So, Dirk, these, the longer time scales don't have to be decades. It could be like, what do I want to do? Like, what would productive be for me for this year? What would productive be for me for this season? It's particularly, uh, completely fine time scale. Like, okay, it's winter time. What do I want to do? What would I look back and say this is a successful winner? Well, you know, I want to learn how to do this. I want to finally like clean that out. I want to like spend time outside every, like build a habit of like getting outside every day when it's cold. So we can, the time scale bigger than just the immediate future is key for slow productivity, but it doesn't also have to be the distance future that time scale used to slowly measure productivity can vary depending on what's going on in your life. All right, so good, slow productivity question, Dirk. I think we need that music one more time, Jesse. All right, let's do a call. We do. Let's do a call.

That's a great question. So let me talk briefly generally about my philosophy around the deep life. And then let's get to your specific question about what someone at your age, a high school senior, how you should be thinking about these ideas. So what's my general conception around the deep life, a term that I coined early in the pandemic, and it's sort of our shorthand for a life that's lived on purpose. It's intentional. You've constructed the life in a way to amplify the stuff you really care about and reduce the stuff you don't. It's a life you're sort of proud to be living. It's a life that's remarkable to other people who know you. So this is what people really want. that sense of I have designed my life as mine is on purpose is what people really seem to want and what a lot of people seem to be missing. So what's my general philosophy around this? Well, long time listeners are the show knows I'm not a fan of what I would call goal centric planning, which I think is the dominant This is the dominant mode of thinking about something like the deep life in the Western culture, especially American culture, of the last 150 years, especially the last 100 years or so. It's this idea of, you need a big, cool, cool goal, right? Like this big thing I'm going to go after and do, and if I can get that cool goal in its slipstream, the rest of my life will become good. Often this is professional. Right? So this could mean a couple things. It could mean we have the follow your passion terminology here. So often this means like, well, if I can just find the perfect job this my passion, my whole life is going to feel redeemed and validate. I'm going to really enjoy my life. Sometimes it's much more just boldly achievement focused. If I could just reach this level of achievement in this complicated competitive path, the rest of my life will fall into place. It's a big bold goal. We see, especially during times of disruption, like the financial crisis and then more recently during the pandemic, We have location-based goal-based planning. If I could just move to this dramatic place, my life is going to be better. I could just leave the city and be on a farm or whatever. In the side effect of this one big change is going to make a big difference. The other type of goal that goal-centric planning often builds around is ideology. If I could just have an all-encompassing ideology that I can dedicate my life towards. than I'm going to have. My life is going to be remarkable and all the other parts are going to be good. Here's the problem that doesn't typically work because there's a lot of elements that go into defining your everyday experience. It is unlikely that the pursuit of a specific grand but narrow goal is going to have happen to have the right positive change in all these different aspects of your life, maybe of which have nothing to do with professional pursuits. So I'm a big believer in lifestyle centric planning. Why don't you just directly identify this is what I want the different aspects of my life, the be like? And then say, how do I directly engineer my life to get closer to these things? And now it's more like you're moving chess pieces around the chessboard. The chess pieces here being the particular options you have. Well, if I go for like this job, in this place, in this way, these three different things I can sort of get closer to. And this thing over here I could handle by doing this. It's just directly getting to the core of the issue, which is what defines the quality of your life is not what is the top item on your like resume or your obituary. It tends to be what is most days feel like. Where am I living? What am I doing? Who am I around? What's taking up my time? What's not taking up my time? It's the day-to-day lifestyle that determines your subjective well-being. So why not like directly identify an engineer that lifestyle to be what you want? As opposed to hoping that one big goal, one big swing will somehow fix all these parts of your life and just some sort of happy coincidence. That's really my approach towards the deep life lifestyle centric planning of a gold centric planning. Alright, so now let's get to the particular question here. The caller is in high school about to go to college and says, I don't know how to make these plans yet. To which my answer is, yeah, you don't. That's fine. The first like reasonable lifestyle centric plan that you should produce will be later in your college career when you're deciding what to do right out of college. So you're going to have a, you're going to build your first plan later in your college career to cover you like through your mid 20s, expect to revise that plan after a few years out of college and in the real world. And then you'll be able to revise that plan to cover like all of your time through your 20s and set you up for interesting options in your 30s, but not be too specific. As you approach your 30s, you're going to revise this plan again. So you revise these plans a lot. You are too young to have your first plan. So what is your goal for college? It's going to be, Gathering enough raw material to build your first plan later in your college years. Some of this is going to come from just you getting older and being in an environment where you have more autonomy that you can just reflect and figure out yourself and your identity. You're going to be learning things about yourself and about the world and you can build your first draft of your adult identity which will help you identify your first lifestyle centric plan. It's also where you're going to be able to expose yourself to new fields. You're going to gain a lot of information. about like what people do this person graduated. They went through this job. You're just going to learn a lot about yourself and about the world that will help you make your first plan later in your college career. So you're off the hook having to have a vision right now. So then how do you select a college? Lower the stakes in your mind. Okay. You're not selecting a college right now as a key. This college has to be just right. Otherwise, my plan for a good life won't happen and I'll be miserable. Lower those stakes. You know, go to probably like the best school that is reasonable for you to go to. Like the best school I can get into when we can afford. Like you're never going to go wrong with that. I want to be around interesting people think about interesting things and have access to as many opportunities as possible. So when it comes time to determine my first lifestyle centric plan start making some decisions for life after college, I'm going to have as many interesting opportunities as possible. So it's like go to the the best school that you can afford is not bad advice. You know, and for a lot of people that means like let me aim because college is an expensive folks. It might mean like let me aim for like I have a good state university in my state unless like things or my academic whatever's going well enough that I can maybe get access to like a pretty elite school we can we can figure out a way to make that work to maybe that's worth it or if you're like if you have a very specific skill set or or interest there's also some matches that happen here I mean if you're a really into math if you're really like in the science of math and a really good at it and it turns you on and you're like bored, then like a school like MIT is going to give you an experience you're not going to get elsewhere. If you're really into government, like for whatever reason you're young, build Clinton, think about Georgetown. Right. I mean, there's classes here that we teach at our campus downtown where the class walks to the capital to sit in on hearings as part of the class. Right. So, you know, you're, we have a long time listener who's a French horn player shout out what the jewelry are because, okay, that makes sense. But if you don't, it's not like I need this very specific thing. The best school you can that makes sense. It would be around the best people you can have access to the best opportunities you can. That's the raw materials. Gather gather gather. and then we'll make our first plans to get near the end of college. Let me point you towards a couple things to help you get through that college experience. Then I want you to point you towards my newsletter. My early days of my newsletter where I was mainly addressing college students. Go to calnewport.com slash blog, go to the archive, go back to 2007-2008, read my post on this invalid story and read my post on the romantic scholar. I'm going to lay out there a mindset and framework for going through your undergraduate years in a way that you're exposed to lots of interesting things. You open up lots of potential interesting opportunities. but you also have a sustainable, meaningful experience, intellectual, social experience on campus that's really, you really enjoy that you get to know yourself that is fulfilling. So you can get some advice there about how to navigate these years. We can gather raw material, get to know yourself, really love your time at college, have cool opportunities, get all those things done. What I hate to see, for example, is when people see college as like a boot camp. Yeah, I got to grind through this thing because that's what's going to open up the whatever job. I really the really elite job. It's all going to suffer through college. I can get that job and then I'll get the benefit. Of course, you go to the first few years of that job. Well, this really sucks. That's okay. If I could just suffer through this, I'll get the managing director and then I'll get the benefit. Well, then you get to that. Well, this is, you know, I want to get partner. And so now I really got to suffer through it. It never ends. Don't have the mindset if I want to suffer through so that the benefit comes. So you know, check those things out to help guide you, romantic scholars in Valley Victorian, to help guide you through college, go to the best school you can that makes sense, best school that makes sense for you that you can. Gather the raw material, learn how your adult identity and how to get interested in things and be an autonomous human. And then we'll make our first lifestyle plan as that is that gets a little bit farther along. I'm thinking about a lot more of this now, Jesse, because I'm in the early stages of my deep life book. And so I'm starting to think through more, how do more clearly articulate what the deep life is? This idea that emerged during the pandemic here on this podcast and the newsletter, and how to actually pursue it. I'm really leaning into now just the idea of just being practical. If we put aside the what? of your definition of a deep life and just get to the how of like how does someone figure out what's important to them and then make that actually happen. So take out the the specificity of like these are the things that should matter to you. And more about here's how you find out what matters you. And then here's how you much more systematically get more of this in your life. It's not going to be one bold goal. It's going to be this sort of lifestyle-centric planning that we talk about on the show. I'm really trying to work that out.

I filled one. Yeah, so I have to open up another one. I spent like a month to last month of my book tour just working on these ideas and a single person purpose notebook. And then recently, I finally, I feel the feels note. I finally kind of cracked, like, okay, I see a structure for this book I'd be happy with. And I recently then moved that all into Scrivener. So now there's a Scrivener project for the book where I can start gathering sources for the chapters and it's moved out of my notebooks into like my more formal professional system. Now that the project's unfolding and it's going to generate a huge amount more of ideas and sources, it's moved from my single purpose notebook and into Scrivener.

Yeah, yeah, definitely check that out. It's on the YouTube channel as well. All right, let's do a quick case study before we get to the final segment. Case studies where people send in a report of using some of the things we talk about on the show in their own life. So we can see what these things look like in actual people's lives. So this one comes from Valerie. who says, tweaking cows practices to my personal life as a retiree. I love adapting cows practices to the range of activities I undertake in my life, voluntary work, life management, deepening hobbies, and interest. Today I had some fun thinking about how I had used a range of cowlisms. Sure, I feel that that word. A range of cowlisms to a long-winded but important task. In my new time block planner, I have decided to have themes for a morning's tasks to avoid context switching. And today, my theme was health. Specifically, I dealt with three things relating to a long-term ability issue. Number one, a concentrated period dedicated to making a query about my medical insurance and its coverage. two, tackling a related subject because my brain was in the zone, which was investigating ordering some orthotic shoes online and three, and one on very proud of searching for and finding appropriate YouTube videos to learn more about chair-based yoga. Much of this got done as a result of deciding and overall context. Apologies for the detail, but it amused me to see how over the years of listening to Cal various elements of practice have become a way of life. And having written this email, I've included another element, reflection for future learning, which I got from your episode with Dave Epstein. So many things can't wait for the next episode. So Valerie, I appreciate that. Case study, the thing I want to underscore from that for everyone else is the appreciation of the cost of context switching. We get into this a lot, but it's really hard for the human brain to switch its context rapidly between different things. This is why just going through an email inbox in order is very tiring. because you have an email about your kid's camp and the next email is about an unrelated event and the next email is about your car needs to be taken into the registration renewed each one of these emails triggers a cognitive crisis in your brain trying oh my god what's this about what do we know about this let me shut down these neural networks and turn on these other neural networks We kind of force our way through and move on to the next context before we ever fully switch. There's very tiring. So if you can put a lot of tasks that share the same cognitive context together, it feels less difficult. That's because of the way our brain works. And that's what Valerie did. These are tasks that are annoying. But if you put them all together, she kind of got into the zone, because she's like, I'm in my personal health, kind of logistical mode. She picked up steam and got through a lot of these, including stuff that was optional, that she otherwise wouldn't have done, like, finally learning about Cherubes yoga. It's a great idea. You can do this in your personal life. You can do this in a professional life. Type together tasks at the same type. You should even do this when answering emails. You know, have a label in Gmail for like temporary inbox and go select a bunch of emails that are all the same context. It's all about the same project or it's all about your kid's school and then just label those and show only those on your screen and answer those one by one by one. You get like one or two emails in like I'm in the zone because your brain loads to context once and uses it again and again and then go find another group of emails that are another context. Go through those. Is it going to feel much better than you're going to get better results than trying to take all these emails that never leave them together? So I love the idea of I call it monotasking, but work it on the same context as long as you can even when dealing with small things. And also I appreciate the mention of the Dave Epstein episode. That's another sort of secret fan favorite. Dave is great. He's got the best ideas, I think. So check that out. That's God. It feels like it was recently. It was not. Yeah. It's been a little while, right? It's probably looking up. Yeah. Anyways, what's checking out? All right. We got a final segment coming up, like sort of like profiles and slowness, which I'm looking forward to. But first let's take a brief break to hear from another sponsor. I want to talk in particular about our longtime friends at Express VPN. Look, if you use the internet, you need a VPN. Here's why when you access a site or service, you might be encrypting like the contents of your message, but the address of those messages is not encrypted. So if you're using a wireless access point out somewhere in public, people can look at what you're sending on the airwaves and see exactly what site and service you're talking to. If you're at home in the privacy of your own home, your internet service provider sees what sites and services you're talking to. They can gather that data. They can sell that data. They do gather that data. They do sell that data. Going into private mode in your browser does nothing about that. You're still sending packets. that have the address of the site and service you're using, anyone who's interested can see it. A VPN solves that problem. With a VPN, you do the following. You say, OK, if I want to access this site, right? I want to access CalNewPort.com, and I'm going to Google the word, Calism. There's a new website, Calism.com, and I'm coming barest to go there. If I use a VPN, what happens? Instead of contacting that site directly, you send an encrypted message to a VPN server. And inside that encrypted message, you say, what I really want to do? is go to the Calism website. And the VPN server contacts that site and your behalf gets to response and encrypts it and sends that back to you. So what is people near you looking at your packets in the area internet service provider? What do they learn that you are contacting a VPN server? That's it. They have no idea what sites and services you're actually using. So you need to use a VPN to predict your privacy online. If you do, I suggest express VPN. They have servers all around the world. So you're never that far from a server to go nice connection speed. They have a lot of bandwidth. They're software super easy to use. Once you've installed it and you can install it on any of the devices you use to access the internet, you can even install it on your wireless router at home. So just all communication in your house goes through a VPN server. Once you've installed it, you turn it on with a click and you use your sites and services like normal. You don't even know it's on, but you get the privacy protection that got plenty of bandwidth. Really express VPN is one of the best in the business. It makes it easy to get the protection of VPNs. So if you're like me and you believe your data is your business, secure yourself with the number one rated VPN on the market, visit expressvpn.com slash deep. And you will get three extra months for free. That's EXP, R-E-S-S VPN.com slash deep. Go to expressvpn.com slash deep to learn more. I also want to briefly talk about our friends at my body tutor, T-U-T-O-R. This is a online health and fitness company that I really believe in because their idea makes so much sense. Do you want to get healthier? The hard part is not necessarily getting the information. What you should eat, how you should exercise. It's a consistency. Actually following the advice with my body tutor, you get an online coach dedicated to you. They help you build a specific plan around your nutrition and your fitness fit to your life. And then, and here's the magic you check in every day online. Here's how I went with my eating, here's how I went with my exercise. So you get the consistency of knowing someone being held accountable, someone who really knows your goals and your situation. is keeping up with what you're doing. And that that that that since accountability means you're much more likely to be consistent. They can also help you adjust and correct as needed. This isn't quite working. Let's make a change. I have a trip coming up. What should I do? And you have that coaching. But because it's 100% online, it's going to be much cheaper than having a personal trainer in person or a personal nutritionist. So the price is right for a fantastic product, which is helping you take control over your own health and fitness. So if you're serious about getting fit, Adam Gilbert, the old fitness advice guru for my website and the founder of my body tutor, is giving deep questions listeners $50 off their first month. All you have to do is mention the podcast when you sign up. Like if you have any questions, Adam wants you to call or text, he puts his personal cell phone number at the top of every page. That shows you like how much of a dedication that customers this in. It's crazy. Adam's crazy. I love it. So go to mybodytutor.com, T-U-T-O-R, mention deep questions to get $50 off. It is D-Ray to get healthier. All right, Jesse, store a final segment. I wanted to react to something I found online that I just thought was cool. It's a demonstration of slowness in practice. That's why I'm calling it kind of a case study in slowness. All right, I'm going to load this on the screen. Definitely if you're listening, if you want to see this, the link is in the show notes, but also this is episode 300. Just go to thedeflife.com slash listen. Go to that episode, we'll post a video below. All right, so what this is? It's a website called a a portrait of a to not to tell him. I'm not saying that quite right, but the original name for Mexico City. It's not to tell him. Now you see this picture on here, Jesse. This looks like a photograph of a city. What this is is a entirely computer generated, meticulously researched computer generated image of this city circa 1518. Right. So this Thomas, I believe this is his name is Thomas Cole. He's a programmer from the Netherlands. Just took on this project. He's like, what, what did Mexico City when it was before the Colombian contact? What when it was still, let's see, an empire ruling over more than 5 million people with 200,000 people in the city alone. This old Aztec's capital. What did it look like back then? And he began this long slow process. Here's more. Look at that. That's computer generated, Jesse. Let's see that. The temples, the causeway across the lake. And he spent About a year and a half, just slowly learning about this, learning all the tools he used to build this were open source, right? It's just using free software, just slowly learning. There's another rendering and just sort of meticulously working on this because he just thought like it would be cool to just what would it look like to go back in a time machine? There's another picture here. Look at this. Here it is, the main temple at sunset, the twin pyramids. It was these pictures are cool. They're beautiful. Here's another one. So you can see like the main temple and the lake and this is like what this, this is accurate stuff as well. So archeologists, people who work on this have commented on this project and said, this is really cool. I have a couple quotes from Thomas here. Let's see here. Here's a quote from them. The really hard part was gathering all the information and trying things out. How do you create a city when you don't really know anything about it? How do you start gathering that information? That was really difficult and involved throwing out a lot of things when I found different sources of conflicting information. That's part of being a pioneer, venturing into the unknown into what no one has done before. But also, that's very difficult because it takes a lot of time. Also, I don't speak Spanish, and I'm not an academic, so I really approach this as an outsider. There's a rainstorm coming across the city. Another cool shot. All this done with free software, too. Here do these comparison shots so you can see same angle before and after. So this Mexico City today, the Aztec capital in the 1500s. What I liked about this, this one's cool. The new fire ceremony. So it's the Aztec calendars on a 52 year cycle and they would do this ceremony every 52 years to begin the new cycle. It's beautiful renders historically well done. He got a lot of appreciation for this from people who studied this Aztec history. But this is a profile of slowness. It's something he thought would be worthwhile and interesting. And he just took his time to do it well. He did it on the side. It's not a business. He's not trying to crush it, not trying to hustle, not trying to build up followers. Just worked on the slowly, built up something that was beautiful and cool that he really liked and other people really liked as well. Took him all those two years. Slow productivity right there. There's no hustling here. There's no complicated, you know, organizational systems. He just took us time to produce something cool. He's pretty happy it's done, but that was probably also a really fulfilling two years just sitting there and working on this and making progress and seeing this thing that was important to you come to the light. So he was, I just wanted to show this because I'd love this type of thing. The slow pursuit of something cool can be just as rewarding as the fast pursuit of attention or cloud or shallow achievement. Sometimes just taking your time to do something that feels worth doing can be one of the more fulfilling things. So we've got a case study here of a deep life intersecting with slow productivity hitting all the buzzwords. I'm sure you used a lot of deep work to do this and he's a digital minimalist and got some career cap a lot of this as well. So Thomas, you've hit You've hit the Bingo card, the County Park Bingo card, but well done with this project. I love this type of thing. I bet when my kids get older, I need like, I need to do something like this, I think. But for me, it's going to be Richmond over the top. No, it's going to be over the top Halloween animatronics. It's going to be like to the point where people are a little bit worried about me. That's what, that's going to be my version of this project. is over the top Halloween animatronics, but there's just something I'm just working on this slowly for no other reason that I want to see my intentions made manifest concretely in the world. It's a cool way to do things. Anyways, Thomas, thanks for sharing that links in the show notes. That's all the time we have. Next week, I'm going to be in England, so you'll see I'm going to be playing an interview of an interview episode. It's actually me being interviewed. I think you'll like it. And then after that, we'll be back with another standard episode of the podcast. So, see you in two weeks. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the deep questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living Deeply, I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70,000 subscribers get sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness to the flicked our world, you gotta sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.