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

Cal Newport is a computer scientist who also writes about productivity. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod and use code LexPod to get 3 months free – Linode: https://linode.com/lex to get $100 free credit – Sun Basket: https://sunbasket.com/lex and use code LEX to get $35 off – SimpliSafe: https://simplisafe.com/lex and use code LEX to get a free security camera EPISODE LINKS: A World Without Email (book): https://amzn.to/3blXyjv Deep Work (book): https://amzn.to/3c0npMM Digital Minimalism (book): https://amzn.to/3kJPMmx Cal’s Website: https://www.calnewport.com/ Deep Questions (podcast): https://www.calnewport.com/podcast/ PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LexFridmanPage – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (08:24) – Deep work (13:10) – Focus (18:52) – Time blocking (25:47) – Deadlines (35:22) – Do less, do better, know why (38:04) – Clubhouse (52:07) – Burnout (58:34) – Boredom (1:06:19) – Quit social media for 30 days (1:16:13) – Social media (1:41:21) – How email destroyed our productivity at work (1:51:07) – How we fix email (1:58:09) – Over-optimization (2:02:23) – When to use email and when not to (2:10:06) – Podcasting (2:14:42) – Alan Turing proving the impossible (2:18:41) – Fragility of math in the face of randomness (2:27:30) – Neural networks (2:36:16) – What will the P=NP proof look like? (2:39:55) – Is math discovered or invented? (2:44:02) – Book publishing (2:54:09) – Love (2:57:30) – Death (3:00:26) – Meaning of life

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Cal Newport. He's a friend and someone who's writing, like his book Deep Work, for example, has guided how I strive to approach productivity and life in general. He doesn't use social media and in his book Digital Minimalism, he encourages people to find the right amount of social media usage that provides value and joy. He has a new book out called A World Without Email, where he argues brilliantly, I would say, that email is destroying productivity in companies and in our lives. And very importantly, he offers solutions. He is a computer scientist at Georgetown University who practices what he preaches. To do theoretical computer science at the level that he does it,

• 0:44Lex Fridman?

  you really have to live a focused life that minimizes distractions and maximizes hours of deep work. Lastly, he's a host of an amazing podcast called Deep Questions that I highly recommend for anyone who wants to improve their productive life. Quick mention of our sponsors: ExpressVPN, Linode Linux Virtual Machines, Sun Basket Meal Delivery Service, and SimpliSafe Home Security. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that deep work, or long periods of deep focused thinking, have been something I've been chasing more and more over the past few years.

• 1:24Lex Fridman?

  Deep work is hard, but is ultimately the thing that makes life so damn amazing. The ability to create things you're passionate about in a flow state where the distraction of the world just fade away. Social media, yes, reading the comments, yes, I still read the comments, is a source of joy for me in strict moderation. Too much takes away the focused mind and too little, at least I think, takes away all of the fun. We need both, the focus and the fun. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Fridman,

• 2:07Lex Fridman?

  if you can only figure out how to spell that. As usual, I'll do a few ads now, none in the middle. I try to have fun with them more and more, AKA, I try not to give a damn what the sponsors are actually requesting. I try to only include sponsors I actually use and love. So if they want to drop me, that just means they don't love me back. And any successful relationship requires two-way love, my friends. So please do support the sponsors while they're still here, because they may not be here for long. This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. Yes, it's a thing that protects your privacy, and yes, it's a thing with a big red button

• 2:48Lex Fridman?

  that I just can't get enough of, but it also lets you watch stuff on Netflix that are geo-restricted in some way. There are thousands of shows that are only available on Netflix outside of the United States. I did not know there are places outside of the United States. I have heard about places like Australia, but other than that, I thought it was just the 50 we got. ExpressVPN lets you fake your location, hence how you can get the whole Netflix thing to work. I do think that at the core of what a VPN does, there's a lot of interesting ideas about the future of how human beings that are operating in the physical space are going to function successfully in the digital space.

• 3:30Lex Fridman?

  It feels like there should be layers of protection where the person has the control about how much information is revealed. A VPN is a strong layer, but I wonder if we'll be adding more and more layers, which will enforce greater privacy and put more control in the hands of people versus governments, nations, all that kind of stuff. Anyway, go to expressvpn.com/lexpod to get an extra three months free on a one-year package. That's expressvpn.com/lexpod.

• 4:01Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also sponsored by Linode, which are Linux virtual machines. It's an awesome compute infrastructure that lets you develop, deploy and scale whatever applications you build faster and easier. This is both for small personal projects and huge, huge systems. Linode pretty effectively challenges AWS, so I'm really excited about that because competition is always good. I could list a bunch of ways they stand out, but the one that really jumps to me is the customer service with actual, real human beings, 24/7, 365. I've actually been locked out of Instagram recently. I send my love to the engineers at Instagram and Facebook. I mean, these are just amazing people,

• 4:45Lex Fridman?

  but a lot of them have written to me with just a lot of love, which I really appreciate. But sort of that's like personal stuff. That's not customer service. Customer service is creating a pipeline where if shit goes wrong, you can always communicate with somebody and fix it. And okay, you could argue that Instagram is probably not as important as a compute infrastructure and you would be 100% right, which is why it's especially important that Linode provides that customer service. I could say a lot of other stuff, just the interface. Everything is really easy. Everything is really nice. I'm a big fan, hence why they're a sponsor. If it runs on Linux, it runs on Linode. I think that's their superhero catchphrase. Visit linode.com/lex and click on create free account button

• 5:30Lex Fridman?

  to get started with 100 bucks in free credit. That's linode.com/lex. This show is sponsored by Sun Basket. These guys and gals deliver fresh, healthy, delicious meals straight to your door. As you may know, my diet is pretty minimalist, so it's nice to get some healthy variety into the mix. And by nice, I mean it's something that I'm told humans enjoy. I'm not a big fan of fun. It's a distraction. But if you are a fan of fun and variety, they have delicious, now that I'm a fan of, prepared meals, meal kits and raw ingredients, like just a nice New York strip steak. And now I'm officially hungry.

• 6:12Lex Fridman?

  I think my favorite meal would be just a nice steak with a side of vegetables. Sun Basket has a bunch of different varieties of that. And I think on top of that steak and veggies will be just like a good friend. Oh, add some wine into the mix. Maybe wine at first and then some vodka. It's kind of interesting how central food is to social interactions. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh, yes. Sun Basket is offering $35 off your order when you go to sunbasket.com/lex and enter promo code Lex at checkout. Again, that's sunbasket.com/lex. Use code Lex, how many times can I say Lex, to get 35 bucks off your order. This show is also sponsored by SimpliSafe, a home security company.

• 6:57Lex Fridman?

  Protect your home with a simple 30-minute setup. You can customize the system for your needs on simplisafe.com/lex. I have it set up in my apartment and I love it. The ad reads today are great. So SimpliSafe is the protection in physical space. ExpressVPN is the initial protection in digital space. How cool would it be if there is now like a hybrid physical, digital space? And then we have tools that we can carry from the physical to the digital and back. The protection will come along with us. And of course, if the anarchists have their say, that will be provided by private companies and will compete over their customers. And through that process of capitalism,

• 7:39Lex Fridman?

  we then create the best product and the most affordable product. That is, if the anarchists have their way. Michael Malice has entered the chat. Anyway, go to simplisafe.com/lex to customize your system and get a free security camera. Yes, friends, I said free. Again, that's simplisafe.com/lex. And now here's my conversation with Cal Newport.

• 8:24Lex Fridman?

  What is deep work? I start with a big question.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  So I mean, it's my term for when you're focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task, which is something we've all done, but we had never really given it a name necessarily that was separate from other type of work. And so I gave it a name and said, let's compare that to other types of efforts you might do while you're working and see that the deep work efforts actually have a huge benefit that we might be underestimating.

• 8:54Lex Fridman?

  What does it mean to to work deeply on something?

• 8:58Speaker 01

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

• 9:21Lex Fridman?

  Theoretical computer science.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Theoretical computer science. Yeah. Yeah. So, so I'm in the theory group, right? Doing theoretical computer science and I published a book. So, you know, so I was in this milieu where I was being exposed to people where focus was their tier one skill. Like, that's what you would talk about, right? Like, how intensely I can focus, that was the V key skill. It's like your 440 time or something if you were an athlete, right?

• 9:45Lex Fridman?

  So this is something that people were actually the the theory folks are thinking about?

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:51Lex Fridman?

  Really? Like, they're openly discussing, like, how do you focus?

• 9:55Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know if they would, you know, quantify it, but but focus was the tier one skill. So you would come in, here'd be a typical day, you'd come in and Eric Demain would be sitting in front of a whiteboard, right? With a whole group of visitors who had come to work with them. And maybe they projected like a grid on there because they're working on some graph theory problem. You go to lunch, you go to the gym, you come back. They're sitting there staring at the same same whiteboard, right? Like that's the tier one skill.

• 10:23Lex Fridman?

  This is the difference between different disciplines. Like I, I often feel for many reasons like a fraud, but I definitely feel like a fraud when I hang out with like either mathematicians or physicists. It's like, it feels like they're doing the legit work because when you talk, we're closer in computer science, you get to programming or like machine learning, like the, the, the experimental machine learning or like just the engineering version of it. It, it's, it feels like you're gone so far away from what's required to solve something fundamental about this universe. It feels like you're just like cheating your way into like some kind of trick to figure out how to solve a problem in this one particular case.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:05Lex Fridman?

  That's how it feels.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:07Lex Fridman?

  And it's a, I'd be interested to, to hear what you think about that because um, programming doesn't always feel like you need to think deeply to work deeply. But sometimes it does. So it's a weird dance.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  For sure. Code does, right? I mean, especially if you're coming up with original algorithmic designs. I think it's a great example of deep work. I mean, yeah, the, the hardcore theoreticians, they, they push it to an extreme. I mean, I, I think it's like knowing that athletic endeavor is good and then hanging out with a Olympic athlete like, oh, I see that's what it is.

• 11:44Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Now for the grad students like me, we're not anywhere near that level, but the faculty, the faculty in that group, these were the cognitive Olympic athletes. But coding, I think, is a classic example of deep work because I got this problem I want to solve. I have all of these tools and I have to combine them somehow creatively and on the fly. But, but so basically I had been exposed to that. So I was used to this notion. When I was in grad school and I was writing my blog, I'd write about hard focus. You know, that was the term I used. Then I published this book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, which came out in 2012. So like right as I began as a professor. And that book had this notion of skill being really important for career satisfaction,

• 12:25Speaker 01

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

• 12:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  And then I look back to my grad school experience. I was like, huh. There is this focus thing that we used to do. I wonder how generally applicable that is into the knowledge sector. And so as I started thinking about it, it became clear, there's this interesting storyline that emerged that, okay, actually, undistracted concentration is not just important for esoteric theoreticians, it's important here, it's important here, and it's important here. And that involved into the deep work hypothesis, which is, across the whole knowledge work sector, focus is very important, and we've accidentally created circumstances where we just don't do a lot of it.

• 13:09Lex Fridman?

  So focus is the sort of prerequisite for basically, you say, knowledge work, but basically, any kind of skill acquisition, any kind of major effort in this world. Can we break that apart a little bit?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a key, a key aspect of focus is not just that you're, you're concentrating hard on something, but you do it without distraction. So a big theme of my work is that context shifting kills the human capacity to think. So if I, if I change what I'm paying attention to, to something different, really, even if it's brief, and then try to bring it back to the main thing I'm doing, that causes a huge cognitive pileup that makes it very hard to think clearly. So even if you think, okay, look, I'm writing this code, or I'm writing this essay, and I'm not multitasking, and all my windows are closed, and I have no notifications on, but every five or six minutes, you quickly check, like an inbox or your phone, that initiates a context shift in your brain, right? We're going to start

• 14:03Speaker 01

  to suppress some neural networks, we're going to try to amplify some others. It's a pretty complicated process, actually. There's a sort of neurological cascade that happens. You rip yourself away from that halfway through and go back to what you're doing. And now it's trying to switch back to the original thing, even though it's also, your brain's in the process of switching to these emails and trying to understand those contexts. And as a result, your ability to think clearly just goes really down. And it's fatiguing, too. I mean, you do this long enough, and you're, you get midday, and you're like, okay, I can't, I can't think anymore. You've exhausted yourself.

• 14:32Lex Fridman?

  Is there some kind of perfect number of minutes, would you say? So we're talking about focusing on a particular task for, you know, one minute, five minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes. Is it possible to kind of context switch while maintaining deep focus, you know, every 20 minutes or so? So if you're thinking of like, this, again, maybe it's a selfish kind of perspective, but if you think about programming. You know, you're focused on a particular design of a little bit, maybe a small scale on a particular function or large scale on a, on a, on a system. And then the shift of focus happens like this, which is like, wait a minute, is there a library that can achieve this little task or something like that?

• 15:17Lex Fridman?

  And then you have to look it up. This is the danger zone. You go to the internets.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:22Lex Fridman?

  And, and so you have to now you, it is a kind of context switch because as opposed to thinking about the particular problem, you now have switch thinking about like, uh, consuming and integrating knowledge that's out there that can plug into your solution to a particular problem. It definitely feels like a contact switch, but is that, is that a really bad thing to do? So should you be setting it aside always and really trying to as much as possible go deep and stay there for like a really long period of time?

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think if you're looking up a library that's relevant to what you're doing, that's probably okay. And I don't know that I would count that as a full context shift because the semantic networks involved are relatively similar. All right. You're, you're thinking about this type of solution. You're thinking about coding, you're thinking about this type of functions. Where you're really going to get hit is if you switch your context to something that's different. And if there's unresolved obligation. So really the worst possible thing you could do would be to look at like an email inbox. Right? Cause here's 20 emails. I can't answer most of these right now. They're completely different. Like the context of these emails, like, okay, there's a grant funding issue or something like this is very different than the coding I'm doing. And I'm leaving it unresolved. So it's like someone needs something from me and I'm going to try to pull my attention back.

• 16:39Speaker 01

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

• 16:56Lex Fridman?

  So it's both the information and the emotion.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, both, both can be killers if what you're trying to do. So I would recommend at least an hour at a time because it could take up to 20 minutes to completely clear out the residue from whatever it was you were thinking about before. So if you're coding for 30 minutes, you might only be getting 10 or 15 minutes of actual sort of peak lex going on there. Right? So an hour at least you get a good 40, 45 minutes plus. I'm, I'm partial to 90 minutes as a really good. A really good chunk, we can get a lot done. But just before you get exhausted, you can sort of pull back a little bit.

• 17:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and one of the beautiful, you know, people can read about in your book, Deep Work. But, and I know this has been out for a long time and people are probably familiar with many of the concepts. But it's still pretty profound and it has stayed with me for a long time.

• 17:46Lex Fridman?

  There's something about adding the terms to it that actually solidifies the concepts, like words matter. It's pretty cool. And just for me, sort of as a comment, there is, it's a struggle and it's very difficult to maintain focus for a prolonged period of time. But the days on which I'm able to accomplish several hours of that kind of work, I'm happy. So forget being productive and all that. I'm just satisfied with my life. I'm, I feel, I feel fulfilled. It's like joyful and then I can be, I'm less of a dick to other people in my life afterwards. It's a, it's a beautiful thing and there, I find the opposite.

• 18:31Lex Fridman?

  When I don't do that kind of thing, I'm much more irritable. Like I feel like I didn't accomplish anything and there's this stress that then the negative emotion builds up to where you're no longer able to sort of enjoy the hell out of this amazing life. So, so in that sense, Deep Work has been a source of a lot of happiness. I'd love to ask you, how do you, again, you cover this in the book, but how do you integrate Deep Work into your life? What are different scheduling strategies that you would recommend just at a high level?

• 18:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:00Lex Fridman?

  What are different ideas there?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I'm a big fan of time blocking, right? So if you're facing your workday, don't allow like your inbox or to do list to sort of drive you. Don't just come into your day and think, what do I want to do next?

• 19:14Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm a big planner saying, here's the time, here's the time available. Let me make a plan for it, right? So I have a meeting here, I have an appointment here, here's what's left. What do I actually want to do with it? So in this half hour, I'm going to work on this. For this 90 minute block, I'm going to work on that. And during this hour, I'm going to try to fit this in. And then actually I have this half hour gap between two meetings. So why don't I take advantage of that to go run five errands? I can kind of batch those together. But blocking out in advance. This is what I want to do with the time available. I mean, I find that's much more effective. Now, once you're doing this, once you're in a disciplined time blocking, it's much easier to actually see this is where I want, for example, the deep work. And I can get a handle on the other things that need to happen and find better places to fit them.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  So I can prioritize this and you're going to get a lot more of that done than if it's just going through your day and saying, what's next?

• 20:00Lex Fridman?

  I schedule every single day kind of thing. So as I could try to in the morning to try to have a plan.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you know, I do a quarterly, weekly, daily planning. So at the semester or quarterly level, I have a big picture vision for what I'm trying to get done. You know, during the fall, let's say, or during the winter. Like I want, these are, there's a deadline coming up for academic papers at the end of the season. Here's what I'm working on. I want to have this many chapters done of a book, something like this. Like you have the, the big picture vision of what you want to get done. Then weekly, you look at that and then you look at your week and you put together a plan for like, okay, what am I gonna? What's my week gonna look like? What do I need to do? Or how am I gonna make progress on these things? Maybe, maybe I need to do an hour every morning or I see that Monday is my only really empty day. So that's going to be the day that I really need to nail on writing or something like this. And then every day you look at your weekly plan and see only block off the actual hours.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  So you do that, that three scales, the quarterly down to weekly, down to daily.

• 20:56Lex Fridman?

  And we're talking about actual times of day versus, so the alternative is what I end up doing a lot. And I'm not sure it's the best way to do it is uh, uh, scheduling the duration of time. This is, this is called the luxury when you don't have any meetings. I'm like religiously, don't do meetings.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  All, all other academics are jealous of you, by the way.

• 21:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I know. No Zoom meetings. Uh, I, I find those are, that's one of the worst tragedies, tragedies of the pandemic. Is both the opportunity to, what, okay, the positive thing is to have more time with your family. You know, sort of reconnect in many ways and that, that's really interesting. Uh, be able to remotely sort of not waste time on travel and all those kinds of things. The negative is, actually, both those things are also sources of the negative. Uh, but the negative is like, it seems like people have multiplied the number of meetings because they're so easy to schedule. And there's nothing more draining to me intellectually, philosophically.

• 22:01Lex Fridman?

  Just my spirit is destroyed by even a 10 minute Zoom meeting. Like, what are we doing here?

• 22:08Speaker 01

  What's the meaning of life?

• 22:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I have every Zoom meeting is I have an existential crisis.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  So Kierkegaard with the internet connection.

• 22:19Lex Fridman?

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

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:49Lex Fridman?

  And hope I can get lost in it. And do you find that this is at all an okay way to go? And the time blocking is just something you have to do to actually be an adult and operate in this real world? Or is there some magic to the time blocking?

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, there's magic to the intention. There's magic to it if you have varied responsibilities, right? So I'm often juggling multiple jobs, essentially. There's, there's academic stuff, there's teaching stuff, there's book stuff, there's the, the business surrounding, you know, surrounding my, my book stuff. But I'm of your same mindset. If a deep work session is going well, yes, rock and roll and let it, let it go on. So like one of the, the big keys of time block, at least the way I do it. So I even, you know, sell this planner to help people time block. It has many columns because the discipline is, oh, if your initial schedule changes, you just move over one, next time you get a chance to move over one column and then you just fix it for the time that's remaining.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  So in other words, there's not, there's no bonus for, I made a schedule and I stuck with it. Like there's actually, it's not like you get a prize for it, right? Like for me, the prize is I have an intentional plan for my time. And if I have to change that plan, that's fine. Like the state I want to be is basically at any point in the day, I've thought about what time remains and, and gave it some thought for what to do because I'll do the same thing, even though I have a lot more meetings and other types of things I have to do in my, in my various jobs. And I basically prioritize the deep work and they get yelled at a lot.

• 24:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  That's kind of my strategy is like, just be okay, just be okay getting yelled at a lot because I feel you. If you're rolling. Yeah, well, that's what it is for me. Like with writing, I think it's writing so hard in a certain way that it's, you don't really get on a roll in some sense. Like it's just difficult. Uh, but working on proofs, it's very hard to pull yourself away from a proof. If you start to get some traction, just you've been at it for a couple of hours and you feel the, the pins and Tumblr starting to click together and progress is being made. It's really hard to call pull away from that. So, so I'm willing to get yelled at by almost everyone.

• 24:54Lex Fridman?

  Of course, there is also a positive effect to pulling yourself out of it. When things are going great, because then you're kind of excited to resume.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:05Lex Fridman?

  Supposed to stopping on a, on a dead end.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 25:08Lex Fridman?

  That there's a, the, yeah, there's a,

• 25:12Lex Fridman?

  uh, there's an extra force of procrastination that comes with if you stop on a dead end to return to the task.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, or, or a cold start. Yeah. Whenever I fit, like I'm on a stage now, I submitted a few papers recently. So now we're sort of starting something up from cold and it, it takes way too long to get going because it's very hard to, it's very hard to get the motivation to schedule the time when it's not, yeah, we're in it. Like here's where we are. We feel like something's about to give here. We're in the very early stages where it's just, I don't know. I'm going to read hard papers and it's going to be hard to understand them and I'm going to have no idea how to make progress is not, is not motivating.

• 25:47Lex Fridman?

  What about deadlines? Can we, um, okay. So this is like a therapy session.

• 25:53Lex Fridman?

  Is, uh, why, it seems like I don't, I only get stuff done that has deadlines. And so the, one of the implied powerful things about time blocking is there's a kind of deadline. Or there's a artificial or real sense of urgency. Do you think it's possible to get anything done in this world without deadlines? Why, why do deadlines work so well?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Well, it's, I mean, it's a clear motivational signal, but in the, in the short term, you do get an effect like that in time blocking. I think the, the strong effect you get by saying, this is the exact time I'm going to work on this. Is that you don't have the debate with yourself every three minutes about, should I take a break now? Right? Like this is the big issue with just saying, you know, I'm going to go write. I'm going to write for a while and that's it. Because your mind is saying, well, obviously we're going to take some breaks. Right? We're not just going to write forever. And so why not right now? You have to be like, well, not right now. Let's go a little bit longer, five minutes. So why don't we just take a break now? Like, we should probably look at the internet. Now you have to constantly have this battle. On the other hand, if you're in a time block schedule, like I've got these two hours put aside for writing. That's what I'm supposed to be doing. I have a break scheduled over here. I don't have to fight with myself, right?

• 26:59Speaker 01

  And maybe at a larger scale deadlines give you a similar sort of a fact is I know this is what I'm supposed to be working on because it's, uh, it's due.

• 27:07Lex Fridman?

  Perhaps, but we are describing as much healthier, sort of giving yourself over when you talk about this in, in the new email book is the process. I mean, in general, you talk about it all over is, is creating a process and then giving yourself over to the process, the, but then you have to be strict with yourself.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. But what are the deadlines you're talking about? It's like with papers? Like what, what's the main type of deadline work?

• 27:33Lex Fridman?

  Well, so papers, definitely, but you know, publications, like say this, this podcast, I have to publish this podcast next, early next week, one because your book is coming out. I'd love to sort of, uh, support this amazing book, but the other is I have to fly to Vegas on Thursday to run 40 miles with David Goggins. And so I want this podcast, this conversation we're doing now to be out of my life. Like I don't want to be in a hotel in Vegas, like editing the, like freaking out while David Goggins is yelling.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  An hour, an hour 43 of your, of your Tarot thing.

• 28:14Lex Fridman?

  But actually it's possible that I still will be doing that, you know, because it's, that's not a hard, that's a softer deadline, right? But those are sort of, life imposes these kinds of deadlines.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:25Lex Fridman?

  I'm not, so yeah, papers are nice because there's an actual deadline. But I am almost referring to like the pressure that people put on you. Hey man, you said you're going to get this done two months ago. Why haven't you gotten it done?

• 28:39Speaker 01

  I don't see, I don't like that pressure.

• 28:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  So maybe we now, first of all, I think we can all

• 28:42Lex Fridman?

  I hate it too.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  We can agree, by the way, having David Goggins yell at you is probably the top productivity technique.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  I think we'd all get a lot more done if he was yelling. But see, I don't like that. So I will try to get things done early. I like, I like having flex. I also don't like the idea of this has to get done today. Right? Like it's due at midnight and we've got a lot to do as the night before, because then I get in my head about, well, what if I get sick? Or like, what if, uh, you know, what if I, I don't get a bad night's sleep and I can't think clearly? So I like to have the flex. So I'm all process. And that's like the philosophical aspect of that book, Deep Work, is that there's something very human and deep about just wrangling with the world of ideas. I mean, Aristotle talked about this. If you go back and read the ethics, he, he's trying to understand the meaning of life and he eventually ends up ultimately at the human capacity to contemplate deeply.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  It's kind of like a teleological argument. It's the things that only humans can do, and therefore it must be somehow connected to our ins. And he said, ultimately, that's where, that's where he found his meaning. But, you know, he's touching on some sort of intimation there that's correct. And so what I try to build my life around is regularly thinking hard about stuff that's interesting. Just like if you get a fitness habit going, you feel off when you don't do it. I try to get that cognitive habit. So it's like, I got it. I mean, look, I have my bag here somewhere. I have my notebook in it because I was thinking on the Uber ride over, I was like, you know, I could get some, I'm working on this new proof and it just. So you train yourself. You train yourself to appreciate certain things. And then over time, the hope is that it accretes.

• 30:17Lex Fridman?

  Well, let's talk about some demons because I wonder, so again, there's like deep work, which, uh, and, uh, the, the world without email books that to me symbolize the life I, I want to live. Okay. And then there is, I'm like, despite appearances, an adult at this point. And this is the life I actually live. And I it's I'm in constant chaos. You said you don't like that anxiety. I hate it too. But it seems like I'm always in it. It's a giant mess. It's it's like it it's almost like whenever I establish, whenever I have successful processes for doing deep work, I'll add stuff on top of it just to introduce the chaos.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:01Lex Fridman?

  And and like, I don't want to.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:03Lex Fridman?

  But you know, it's so you have to look in the mirror at certain point and you have to say like, who the hell am I? Like, I keep doing this. Is this something that's fundamental to who I am? Or do I really need to fix this?

• 31:15Speaker 01

  What's the chaos right now? Like, I've seen your video about like your routine. It seemed very structured and deep. In fact, I was really envious of it. So like, what's the chaos now that's not in that video?

• 31:26Lex Fridman?

  Many of those sessions go way longer. I don't get enough sleep.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:29Lex Fridman?

  And then I the the main introduction of chaos is it's taking on too many things on the to do list.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  I see.

• 31:36Lex Fridman?

  It's I mean, I suppose it's a problem that everybody deals with, which is saying not saying no. But it's not like I have trouble saying no. It's that there's so much cool shit in my life.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:48Lex Fridman?

  Okay, listen, I there's nothing I love more in this world than the Boston Dynamics robots.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Spot and the other, yeah.

• 31:56Lex Fridman?

  And they're giving me spot. So there's an to do. What am I gonna say? No?

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:00Lex Fridman?

  So they're getting me spot and I want to do some computer vision stuff for the hell of it. Okay, so that's now a to do item.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  And then you go to Texas for a while and there's Texas. Everything's happening that all the interesting people down there.

• 32:11Lex Fridman?

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

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:34Lex Fridman?

  Is they they flourish under pressure.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:39Lex Fridman?

  And I wonder if that if that's just the hack I've developed as a habit early on in life.

• 32:47Lex Fridman?

  That needs you need to let go of, you need to fix.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  But it's all interesting things.

• 32:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's, that's interesting. Yeah, because these are all interesting things.

• 32:56Lex Fridman?

  Well, one of the things you talked about in deep work, which is like really important is like having an end to the day.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:02Lex Fridman?

  Like putting it down.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:05Lex Fridman?

  Like that, I don't think I've ever done that in my life.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, see, I started doing that early because I got married early. So, you know, I didn't have a real job. I was a grad student, but my wife had a real job. And so I just figured I should do my work when she's at work. Because, you know, hey, when, when work's over, she'll be home and I don't want, I don't want to be, you know, on campus or whatever. And so real early on, I just got in that habit of this is when, you know, this is when you end work. And then when I was a postdoc, which is kind of an easy job, right? I put artificial, I was like, I want to train. I was like, when I'm a professor, it's going to be busier because there's demands that professors have beyond research. And so as a postdoc, I added artificial, large, time consuming things into the middle of my day. I'd basically exercise for two hours in the middle of the day and do all this productive meditation and stuff like this.

• 33:53Speaker 01

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

• 34:19Lex Fridman?

  Well, but that, you know, but that's how you have a successful life. Otherwise you're going to, it's too easy to then go into the full Hunter S. Thompson.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:27Lex Fridman?

  Like to where no, nobody wants, nobody functional wants to be in your vicinity. Like you're driving, you attract the people that have a similar behavior pattern as you.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:42Lex Fridman?

  So if you, if you live in chaos, you're going to attract chaotic people. And then, then it becomes like this self fulfilling prophecy.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:51Lex Fridman?

  And it feels like. I'm not bothered by it, but I guess this is all coming around to exactly what you're saying, which is like, I think one of the big hacks for productive people that I've met is to get married and have kids. Honestly, it's very, perhaps counterintuitive.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:09Lex Fridman?

  But it gets, it's like the ultimate timetable enforcer.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, it enforces a lot of timetables, though it has a huge, kids have a huge productivity hit, those you gotta weigh it. But here, okay, here's the complicated thing, though. Like, you could think about in your own life, starting the podcast as one of these just cool opportunities that you put on yourself, right?

• 35:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Speaker 01

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

• 35:50Lex Fridman?

  It's going somewhere. It's interesting.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:52Lex Fridman?

  Unexpected, yeah.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So how do you balance those two things? And so what I try to throw at it is this, this motto of do less, do better, know why, right? So do, do less, do better, know why. It used to be the motto of my website years ago. So do a few things, but like, an interesting array, right? So I was doing MIT stuff, but I was also writing, you know? So a couple of things are, you know, they were interesting, like, have a couple bets placed on a, on a couple of different numbers on the roulette table, but not too many things. And then really try to do those things really well and, and see where it goes. Like, with my writing, I just spent years and years and years just training, like, I wanna be a better writer, wanna be a better writer. I started writing student books when I was a student. I really wanted to write hardcover idea books.

• 36:35Speaker 01

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

• 36:59Lex Fridman?

  And so the choice of the few things is grounded in what, like, a little, like, a, like, a little flame of passion, like, a love for the thing, like, a sense that you say you wanted to write, get good at writing. You had that kind of introspective moment of thinking this actually brings me a lot of joy and fulfillment.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it gets complicated because I wrote a whole book about following your passion being bad advice, which is like the first thing I kind of got infamous for. I wrote that back in 2012, but but the argument there is like passion cultivates, right? So what I was pushing back on was the myth that the passion for what you do exists full intensity before you start. And then that's what propels you. Or actually, the reality is as you get better at something, as you gain more autonomy, more skill and more impact, the passion grows along with it. So that when people look back later and say, oh, follow your passion, what they really mean is I'm very passionate about what I do. And that's a worthy goal. But how you actually cultivate that is much more complicated than just introspection is going to identify. Like for sure, you should be a writer or something like this.

• 38:03Lex Fridman?

  So I was actually quoting you. I was on a social network last night in Clubhouse. I don't know if you've heard of it.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Wait, I have to ask you about this because I was invited to do a clubhouse. I don't know what that means. A tech reporter has invited me to do a clubhouse about my new book.

• 38:20Lex Fridman?

  That's awesome. Well, let me know when because I'll show up.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  But what is it?

• 38:24Lex Fridman?

  Okay, so first of all, let me just mention that I was in a clubhouse room last night and I kept plugging your exactly what exactly what you said about passion. So we'll talk about it. It was a room that was focused on burnout.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 38:38Lex Fridman?

  But first clubhouse is a kind of fascinating place in terms of your mind would be very interesting to analyze this place. Because, you know, we talk about email, talk about social networks, but clubhouse is something very different. And I've encountered in other places, discord and so on, that's voice only communication. So it's a bunch of people in a room. They're just eyes closed. All you hear is their voices.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Real time.

• 39:07Lex Fridman?

  Real time, live. It only happens live. You're technically not allowed to record, but some people still do. And, you know, especially when it's big, big conversations. But the whole point is that they're live and there's different structures like on discord. It was so fascinating. I have this discord server that would have hundreds of people in a room together. Right? We're all just little icons that can mute and unmute our mics.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 39:32Lex Fridman?

  And so you're sitting there, not so it's just voices. And you're able with hundreds of people. To not interrupt each other. First of all, like as a dynamic system.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:46Lex Fridman?

  Like.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  You see icons, just like mics muted or not muted, basically.

• 39:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, well, so everyone's muted and they unmute and they start, it starts flashing.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so you're like, okay, let me get precedence.

• 39:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 39:57Speaker 01

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

• 40:10Lex Fridman?

  But in a faculty meeting, which is very interesting, like even as we're talking now, there's a visual element that seems to increase the probability of interruption.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:20Lex Fridman?

  When it's just darkness, you actually listen better and you don't interrupt. So like if you create a culture, there's, there's always going to be assholes.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:30Lex Fridman?

  But they're, they're actually exceptions. Everybody adjusts, they kind of evolve to the, the beat of the room. Okay, that's one fascinating aspect. It's like, okay, that's weird. Cause it's different than like a zoom call where there's video.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:45Lex Fridman?

  It's just audio. You think video adds, but actually seems like it subtracts. The second aspect of it that's fascinating is when it's no video, just audio. There's an intimacy. It's weird because with strangers, you, you connect in a, in a much more real way. It's very, it's similar to podcasts.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:08Lex Fridman?

  But.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  With a lot of people.

• 41:10Lex Fridman?

  With a lot of people and new people. And then you, and they, they bring, okay, first of all, different voices, like low voices and like high voices. And, and it's, it's more difficult to judge in discord. You couldn't even see the people. It was a culture where you do funny profile pictures as opposed to your actual face. In Clubhouse, it's your actual face. So you can tell like as an older person, younger person in discord, you couldn't, you just have to judge based on the voice. But there's a, there's something about the listening and the intimacy of being surprised by different strangers. That feels almost like a, a party with friends and friends of friends you haven't met yet, but you really like.

• 41:56Lex Fridman?

  Now, Clubhouse also has an interesting innovation where there's a large crowd that just listens and there's a stage and you can bring people up onto stage. So only people on stage are talking and you can have like five, six, seven, eight, sometimes 20, 30 people on stage and then you can also have thousands of people just listening.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  I see.

• 42:15Lex Fridman?

  So there's a, I don't know, a lot of people are being surprised by this.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Why is it called a social network? It seems like it doesn't have, there's not social links, there's not a feed that's trying to harvest attention. It feels like a communication.

• 42:29Lex Fridman?

  So the, the social network aspect is you follow people.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:33Lex Fridman?

  And the people you follow, now this is like the first social network that's actually correct use of follow, I think. You're more likely to see the rooms they're in. So there's a, your feed is a bunch of rooms that are going on right now.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 42:48Lex Fridman?

  And the people you follow are the ones that will increase the likelihood that you'll see the room they're in. And so the final result is like, there's a list of really interesting rooms. Like I have all these, I've been speaking Russian quite a bit, there's practicing, but also just like talking politics and philosophy in Russian. I've never done that before, but it allows me to connect with that community. And then there's a community of people, like, it's funny, but like, I'll go in a community of all African American people talking about race and I'll be welcomed.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:23Lex Fridman?

  I've never had, like, I've literally never been in a difficult conversation about race, like with people from all over the place. It's like fascinating. And musicians, jazz musicians. I don't know. You could say that a lot of other places could have created that culture, I suppose. Twitter and Facebook a lot for that culture, but there's something about this network as it stands now, because no Android users.

• 43:49Lex Fridman?

  It's probably just because it's iPhone people.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  It's less conspiratorial or something.

• 43:54Lex Fridman?

  Well, like less, listen, I'm an Android person, so I got an iPhone just for this network. Which is funny. Is for now, it's all like, there's very few trolls. There's very few people that are trying to manipulate the system and so on. So I don't know, it's, it's interesting. Now, the downside, the reason you're going to hate it is because it's so intimate, because it pulls you in and pulls in very successful people like you, just every like really successful, productive, very busy people.

• 44:27Lex Fridman?

  It, it, it's a huge time sink. It's very difficult to pull yourself out.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Interesting. You mean, once you're in a room?

• 44:34Lex Fridman?

  Well, no, the, leaving the room is actually easy. The beautiful thing about a stage with multiple people, there's a little button that says leave quietly.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 44:42Lex Fridman?

  So culture, no etiquette wise, it's okay to just leave.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:47Lex Fridman?

  So you and I in a room, when it's just you and I, it's a little awkward to leave.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  If you're asking questions, I'm just gone.

• 44:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but, and actually, if you're being interviewed for the book, that's weird because you're now in the event and you're supposed to. But usually the person interviewing would be like, okay, it's time for you to go. It's more normal, but the, the normal way to use the room was like, you're just opening the app. And there'll be like, I don't know, Sam Harris, Eric Weinstein. I think Joe Rogan showed up to the app, Bill Gates, I mean, these people on stage, just like randomly just plugged in. And then you'll step up on stage, listen, maybe you won't contribute at all, maybe you'll say something funny.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:31Lex Fridman?

  And then you'll just leave.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:32Lex Fridman?

  And there's the, the addicting aspect to it. The reason it's a time sink is you don't want to leave. What I've noticed about exceptionally busy people.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:42Lex Fridman?

  That they love this, this, the, their, I think might have to do with the pandemic.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  It might be a little bit, yeah.

• 45:47Lex Fridman?

  There's a loneliness.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, a long arc, yeah.

• 45:49Lex Fridman?

  But also it's really cool people.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:52Lex Fridman?

  Like, when was, when was the last time you talked to Sam Harris or whoever? Like, think of anybody, Tyler, like, any, any faculty.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  This is like what universities strive to create, but it's taken hundreds of years of cultural evolution. Trying to get a lot of interesting, smart people together that run into each other.

• 46:09Lex Fridman?

  We have really strong faculty. In a room together with no scheduling. This is the power of it. It's like you just show up. There's no, none of that baggage of scheduling and so on. And there's no pressure to leave. Uh, sorry, no pressure to stay. It's very easy for you to leave. You realize that there's a lot of constraints on meetings and like faculty. There's the, uh, like even stopping by, you know, before the pandemic, a friend or faculty or colleague and so on. You know, there's a weirdness about leaving.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:40Lex Fridman?

  But here there's not a weirdness about leaving. So they've discovered something interesting. The, but the final result, when you observe it is, uh, it's very fulfilling. I think it's very beneficial, but it's very addicting. So you have to make sure you moderate.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's interesting. Okay, well, so maybe I'll try it. I mean, look, there's no, the things that make me suspicious about other platforms aren't here. So the feed is not full of user generated content that is going through some sort of algorithmic rating process with all the weird incentives and nudging that does. And you're, you're not producing content that's being harvested to be monetized by another company. I mean, it, it seems like it's more ephemeral, right? You're, you're here, you're talking. The feed is just actually just showing you here's interesting things happening, right? You're not jockeying in the feed for look, I'm being clever or something. And I'm going to get a like count that goes up and that's going to influence and.

• 47:35Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  And there's more friction. There's more cognitive friction, I guess, involved in listening to smart people versus scrolling through. Yeah, there's something there.

• 47:43Lex Fridman?

  So there's no.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Why are people so, I, I see all, I have, there's all these articles that seem, I haven't really read them, but it seemed, why are, why are reporters negative about this?

• 47:51Lex Fridman?

  Competition. The New York Times wrote this article called unfettered conversations happening on Clubhouse. Is, uh.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  So I'm right in picking up a tone from, even from the headlines that there's some like negative vibes from the press.

• 48:04Lex Fridman?

  No, so I can say. Let's say, well, I'll tell you what the article was saying, which is they're having cancelable conversations, like the biggest people in the world, almost trolling the press.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:18Lex Fridman?

  And the press is desperate.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Like forechatting the press?

• 48:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, forechatting the press. But by saying that you just, you guys are looking for clickbait from our genuine human conversations. And so the, I think the, honestly, the press is just like, what do we do with this? We can't, first of all, it's a lot of work for the, okay. It's what Naval says, which is like, this is skipping the journalist. Like the interview you, if you go on Clubhouse, the interview you might do for the book will be with somebody who's like a journalist and interviewing you.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:52Lex Fridman?

  That, that's more traditional.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:54Lex Fridman?

  It'd be a good introduction for you to try it. But the, like, the way to use Clubhouse is you just show up. And it's like, again, like me, I'm sorry, I'm like, I'm, I keep mentioning Sam Harris as if it's like the only person I know. But like, a lot of these major faculty, I don't know, Max Tegmark, like just, just major faculties, just sitting there. And then you show up and then I'll ask like, oh, don't you have a book coming out or something? And then you'll talk about the book and then you'll leave five minutes later because you have to go get coffee.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 49:27Lex Fridman?

  So like, that's the, it's not the journalist that, you're not going to actually enjoy the interview as much because it'll be like the normal thing.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:35Lex Fridman?

  Like you're there for 40 minutes or an hour and there'll be questions from the audience.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Right. Like I'm doing an event next week for the book launch where it's like Jason Fried and I are talking about email. But it's using some more, there'll be like a thousand people who are there to watch virtually, but it's using some sort of traditional webinar. Clubhouse would be a situation where that could just happen informally. Like I jump in, like Jason's there and then someone else jumps in and, and yeah, that's interesting.

• 50:01Lex Fridman?

  But for now, it's still closed. So even though there's a lot of excitement and there'll be quite famous people just sitting there listening to you.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:10Lex Fridman?

  But the numbers aren't exactly high. So you're talking about rooms, like even the huge rooms are like just a few thousand.

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Right. And this is, this is probably Soho in the 50s or something too, just because of the exponential growth. Give it seven more months. And if you let one invite be gets two invites, but gets four invites, because then pretty soon it'll be everyone. And then the rooms in your feed are going to be whatever, uh, marketing performance enhancing drugs or something like that.

• 50:36Lex Fridman?

  Exactly.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:37Lex Fridman?

  But then, and a bunch of competitors, there's already like 30 plus competitors sprung up Twitter spaces. So Twitter is creating a competitor that's going to likely destroy Clubhouse.

• 50:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:47Lex Fridman?

  Because they just have a much larger user base and they already have a social network. So

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:52Lex Fridman?

  I, I, I would be very cautious, of course, with the addictive element, but it doesn't, just like you said, this particular implementation in its early stages doesn't have the like.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:02Lex Fridman?

  The, the, uh, it doesn't have the context switching problem.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:07Lex Fridman?

  You'll, you'll just switch to it and you'll be stuck.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. To keep a context is great.

• 51:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:13Lex Fridman?

  And, but then I think the best way I've found to use it is, uh,

• 51:19Lex Fridman?

  to acknowledge that these things pull you in.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:22Lex Fridman?

  So I've used it in the past, uh, like almost, you know, I'll go get a coffee and I'll tune into a conversation.

• 51:31Lex Fridman?

  As if that's how I use podcasts sometimes. I'll just like play a little bit of a podcast. Uh, and then, you know, I can just turn it off. The problem with these is it pulls you in. It's really interesting. And then the other problem that you will experience is like, somebody will recognize you. And then they'll be like, oh, Lex, come on up.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Come on.

• 51:50Lex Fridman?

  No way. I had a question for you. And then it takes a lot for you to go like to, to ignore that.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:58Lex Fridman?

  And then you pulled in and it's fascinating and it's really cool people. So it's like a source of a lot of joy, but it, uh, it's, you have to be very, very, very careful. The reason I brought it up is we, uh, there's a room, there's an entire club actually on burnout. And I brought you up and I brought David Goggins as the process I go through, which is, you know, my passion goes up and down. It dips and I don't think I trust my own mind to.

• 52:28Lex Fridman?

  To tell me whether I'm getting close to burnout or exhaustion or not, I kind of go with the David Goggins model of, I mean, he's probably more applying it to running, but when it feels like your mind can't take anymore, that you're just forty percent at your capacity.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:48Lex Fridman?

  I mean, it's just like arbitrary.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:49Lex Fridman?

  Level.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  It's the Navy SEAL thing, right?

• 52:51Lex Fridman?

  The Navy SEAL thing.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:52Lex Fridman?

  I mean, you could put that at any percent, but it is remarkable that if you just take it one step at a time, just keep going, it's similar to this idea of a process. If you just trust the process and you just keep following, even if the passion goes up and down and so on, then ultimately, if you look in aggregate, the passion will increase.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:13Lex Fridman?

  Your self satisfaction will increase.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, and if you have two things, this has been a big strategy of mine, so that you can, what you hope for is off-phase, off-phase alignment, like that sometimes is in-phase, and that's a problem, but off-phase alignment's good. So, okay, my research, I'm struggling, but my book stuff is going well, right? And so when you, when you add those two waves together, like, oh, we're doing pretty well. And then in other periods, like on my writing, you know, I feel like I'm just not getting anywhere, but I've had some good papers, I'm feeling good over there. So having two things that, that can counteract each other, now, sometimes they fall into sync, and then it gets rough, then when, you know, when everything, because everything for me is cyclical, you know, good periods, bad periods with all this stuff. So typically, they don't coincide, so it helps compensate. When they do coincide, you get really high highs, like where everything's clicking,

• 54:00Speaker 01

  and then you get these really low lows where like your research is not working, your program's not clicking, you feel like you're nowhere with your writing, and then it's a little rougher.

• 54:09Lex Fridman?

  Is, do you, do you think about the concept of burnout? Because I, so I personally have never experienced burnout in the way that folks talk about, which is. Like it's not just the up and down. It's like you don't wanna do anything ever again.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:24Lex Fridman?

  It like it's it's for some people, it's like physical, like to the hospital kinda thing.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So I do worry about it. So when I used to do student writing, like writing about students or student advice, there it came up a lot with students at elite schools. And I used to call it deep procrastination, but it was a real, really vivid, very replicatable syndrome where they stop being able to do schoolwork.

• 54:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  Like this is due, and the professor gives you an extension, and the professor gives an incomplete and says, you got it, you you were gonna fail the course, you have to hand this in. And they can't do it, right? It's like it's a a complete stop on the ability to actually do work. So I used to counsel students who had that issue. And often it was a combination of, this is my best analysis, is you you have just the the physical and cognitive difficulties of they're usually under a very hard load. Right? They're doing too many majors, too many extracurriculars, just, you know, really pushing themselves. And the motivation is not sufficiently intrinsic.

• 55:20Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  So if you have a motivational center that's not completely on board, so a lot of these kids, like when I'm dealing with MIT kids, they would be, you know, their whole town was shooting off fireworks that they got in, they're everyone's hope that they were going there. Uh, and that they're in three majors, they don't wanna let people down, but they're not really interested in being a doctor or whatever. So your your motivation's not in the right place. The motivational psychologist would say the locus of control was more towards the extrinsic end of the spectrum, and you have hardship. And you could just fritz out the whole system. And so I I would always be very worried about that. So I think about that a lot. I do a lot of multi-phase or multi-scale seasonality. So I'll go hard on something for a while, and then for a few weeks, go easy.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  I'll have semesters that are hard and semesters that are easier. I'll take the summer really low. So on multiple scales, and in the day, I'll go really hard on something, but then have a hard cutoff at five. So like every scale, it's all about rest and recovery. Because I really wanna avoid that. And I do burn out. I burnt out. Pretty recently, I get minor burnt outs. I got a paper, a couple of papers that we're trying to work through for a deadline a few weeks ago, and I wasn't sleeping well, and and um, there's some other things going on. And it just, it knocks out of me. I get sick usually, is how I know I've pushed myself too far.

• 56:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  And so I kinda pulled it back. Now I'm doing this book launch, then after this book launch, I'm pulling it back again. So I like I seasonality for rest and recovery, I think it's crucial. And at every scale, daily. Monthly, you know, and then at the annual scale, like an easy summer, for example, I think is like a great idea if that's possible.

• 56:48Lex Fridman?

  Okay, you just made me realize that that's exactly what I do. Cause I, I feel like I'm not even close to burnout or anything, even though I, I'm in chaos.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:58Lex Fridman?

  I feel the right exact way is the seasonality is the, not, not even the seasonality, but like, you always have multiple seasons operating. It's like you said, like, cause when you have a lot of cool shit going on.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:11Lex Fridman?

  You, there's always at least one thing that's a source of joy that there, there's always a reason. I suppose the fundamental thing, and I've known people that suffer from depression too. The fundamental problem with like the experience of depression and burnout is like, why do, like, life is meaningless.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:31Lex Fridman?

  And I always have an answer of like, why, why today could be cool.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:36Lex Fridman?

  And.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  And you have, and you have to contrive it, right? If you don't have it, you have to contrive it.

• 57:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  I think it's really important. Like, okay, well, this is going bad. So now is the time to start thinking about. I mean, look, I started a podcast during the pandemic. It's like, this is going pretty bad, but you know what? This could be something really interesting.

• 57:55Lex Fridman?

  Deep questions with Kyle Newport.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  And I do it all in that voice.

• 58:01Lex Fridman?

  I love the podcast, by the way, but uh, yeah, I think David Foster Wallace said, uh, the key to life is to be unborable. Uh, I've always kind of taken that to heart, which is like, you should be able to maybe artificially generate anything, like, find something in your environment, in your surroundings, that's a source of joy. Like everything is fun.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Did you read The Pale King? It goes deep on boredom. It means it's like uncomfortable. It's like an uncomfortable meditation on boredom. Like the characters in that are just driven to the like extremes of, I just bought three books on boredom the other day. So now I'm really interested in this topic because I was anxious about my book launch happening this week. So I was like, okay, I need something else. So I have this idea for, I might do it as an article first, but as a book, like, okay, I need something cool. To be thinking about because I was worried about like, I don't know.

• 58:57Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 58:57Speaker 01

  Is the launch going to work? The pandemic? What's going to happen? I don't know if it's going to get there. So I, this is exactly what we're talking about. So I went out and I bought a bunch of books and I'm beginning like a whole sort of intellectual exploration.

• 59:09Lex Fridman?

  Well, I think that's one of the profound ideas and deep work that you don't expand on too much is boredom.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, so Deep Work had a superficial idea about boredom, which was, I had this chapter called Embrace Boredom. And a very functionalist idea was basically you have to have some boredom in your regular schedule or your mind is going to form a Pavlovian connection between as soon as I feel boredom, I get stimuli. And once it forms that connection, it's never going to tolerate Deep Work. So there's this very pragmatic treatment of boredom of your mind better be used to the idea that sometimes you don't get stimuli because otherwise you can't write for three hours. Like it's just not going to tolerate it. But more, more recently, what I'm really interested in boredom is it as a fundamental human drive. Right? Because it's incredibly uncomfortable. And think about the other things that are incredibly uncomfortable, like hunger or thirst.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  They serve a really important purpose for our species, right? Like if something is really distressing, there's a reason. Pain is really uncomfortable because we need to worry about getting injured. Thirst is really uncomfortable because we need water to survive. So what's boredom? Why is that uncomfortable? And, and I've been interested in this notion that boredom is about driving us towards productive action. Like as a species, I mean, think about it, like what, what got us to actually take advantage of these brains? What got us to actually work with fire? What got us to start shaping stones and the hand axes and figuring out if we could actually sharpen a stick sharp enough that we could throw it as a melee weapon or a distance weapon for hunting mammoth, right? Boredom drives us towards action.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  So now I'm fascinated by this fundamental action instinct. Because I have this theory that I'm working on that we're out of sync with it. Just like we got, we have this drive for hunger, but then we introduced junk food and got out of sync with hunger and it makes us really unhealthy. We have this drive towards action, but then we overload ourselves and we have all of these distractions. And then that causes, it's like a cognitive action obesity type thing. Because it short circuits this system that wants us to do things, but we put more things on our plate than we can possibly do. And then we're really frustrated, we can't do them and we're short circuiting all of our wires. So it all comes back to this question, well, what would be the ideal? The ideal sort of amount of stuff to do and type of things to do. Like if we wanted to look back at our ancestral environment and say, if I could just build from scratch,

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

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

• 1:01:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  But now I'm going deep on it. And one of my podcast listeners, I was, I was talking about on the show and I was like, well, I, I keep trying to learn about animals and boredom. And she sent me this cool article from an animal behaviorist journal about what we know about human boredom versus animal boredom. So trying to figure out that puzzle is the wave that's high. So I can get through the wave that's low of like, I don't know about this pandemic book launch and, you know, and, and my research, I'm, my research is stumbling a little bit because of the pandemic. And so I needed a nice, you know, high. So there we go. There's a case study.

• 1:02:14Lex Fridman?

  Well, the, it's both a case study and a very interesting set of concepts because I didn't even realize that it's so simple. I'm one of the people that has a interesting push and pull dynamic with hunger, trying to understand the hunger with myself. Like I probably have an unhealthy relationship with food. I don't know. But there's probably, probably a perfect, that's a nice way to think about diet as action. There's probably an optimal diet response to the, the experience that our bodies telling us, the signal that our bodies sending, which is hunger. And that same way boredom is sending a signal.

• 1:02:55Lex Fridman?

  And most of our intellectual activities in this world, our creative activities are essentially a response to that signal.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and think about this analogy that we have this hunger instinct that junk food short circuits.

• 1:03:12Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Right. It's like, oh, well, we'll satisfy that hyper palatably and it doesn't end up well. Now think about modern attention engineered, digitally mediated entertainment.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  We have this boredom instinct. Oh, we can, we can take care of that with a hyper, a hyper palatable alternative. Is that going to lead to a similar problem?

• 1:03:31Lex Fridman?

  So I've been fasting a lot lately, like I'm doing, eating once a day. I've been doing that for over a month. Just eating one meal a day and primarily meat, but it's very, fasting has been incredible for me for focus, for wellbeing, for a few, I don't, I don't know, just for feeling good. Okay. We'll put on a chart what makes me feel good. And that fasting and eating primarily a meat based diet makes me feel really good. And so, but that ultimately what fasting did, I haven't fasted super long yet, like a seven day diet,

• 1:04:09Lex Fridman?

  which I really would like to do, but even just fasting for a day for 24 hours gets you in touch with your, with the signal. It's fascinating. Like you get to listen to your, learn to listen to your body that like, you know, it's okay to be hungry. It's like a little signal that sends you stuff and then, and then I get to listen to how it responds when I put food in my body. Like, and I get to like, okay, cool. So like food is a thing that pacifies the signal. Like it sounds ridiculous. Okay. You could do that with-

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  And do different types of food. It feels different. So you learn about what your body wants.

• 1:04:50Lex Fridman?

  For some reason fasting, it's similar to the deep work, embrace boredom. Fasting allowed me to go into mode of listening, of trying to understand the signal that I could say, I have an unhealthy appreciation of fruit. Okay. I love apples and cherries. Like I don't know how to moderate them. So if you take just same amount of calories, I don't know, calories matter, but they say calories, 2,000 calories of cherries versus 2,000 calories of steak. If I eat 2,000 calories of steak, maybe just a little bit of like green beans or cauliflower. I'm going to feel really good, fulfilled, focused and happy.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Lex Fridman?

  If I eat cherries, I'm going to be, I'm going to wake up behind a dumpster crying with like naked and like it's just.

• 1:05:38Speaker 01

  Pits all around.

• 1:05:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, with everything.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  Face, yeah.

• 1:05:41Lex Fridman?

  And it's just like bloated, just not and unhappy and also the mood swings up and down. I don't know. And I'll be much hungrier the next day. Sometimes it takes a couple of days, but when I introduce carbs into the system, too many carbs. I, it starts, it's just unhealthy. It's a, I go into this roller coaster as opposed to a calm boat ride along the river in the Amazon or something like that.

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Lex Fridman?

  And so fasting was the mechanism of for me to start listening to the body. I wonder if you can do that same kind of, I guess that's what meditation a little bit is.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  A little bit, but yeah, listen to boredom. But so two years ago, I had a book out called Digital Minimalism. And one of the things I was recommending that people do is basically a 30 day fast. But from digital personal entertainment, social media, online videos, anything that captures your attention and dispels boredom. And people were thinking like, oh, this is a detox. Like I just want to teach your body not to need the distraction of this or that, but it really wasn't what I was interested in. I, I wanted there to be space that you could listen to your boredom. Like, okay, I can't just dispel it. I can't just look at the screen and revel in it a little bit and start to listen to it and say, what is this really pushing me towards? And you take the new stuff, the new technology off the table and sort of ask, what is this?

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  What am I craving? Like, what's the activity equivalent of 2000 calories of meat with a little bit of green beans on the side? And I had 1700 people go through this experiment, like spend 30 days doing this. And it's hard at first, but then they get used to listening to themselves and sort of seeking out, what is this really pushing me towards? And it was pushing people towards connection. It was pushing people towards, I just want to go be around other people. It was pushing people towards high quality leisure activities. Like I want to go do something that's complicated. And it took weeks sometimes for them to get in touch with their boredom. But then it completely rewired how they thought about what do I want to do with my time outside of work? And then the idea is when you're done with that, then it was much easier to go back and completely change your digital life because. You have alternatives, right?

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  You're not just trying to abstain from things you don't like. But that's basically a listening to boredom experiment. Like, just be there with the boredom and see where it drives you when you don't have, you know, the digital Cheez-Its. Okay, so if I can't do that, where is it going to drive me? Well, I guess I kind of want to go to the library, which came up a lot. By the way, a lot of people rediscovered the library, you know?

• 1:08:06Lex Fridman?

  With physical books?

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

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

• 1:08:20Lex Fridman?

  So can you maybe elaborate a little bit on the different experiences that people had when they quit social media for 30 days? Like, is that if you were to recommend that process, what is ultimately the goal?

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, digital minimalism, that's, that's my philosophy for all this tech. And it's working backwards from what's important. So it's, you figure out what you're actually all about, like what you want to do, what you want to spend your time doing. And then you can ask, okay, is there a place that tech could amplify or support some of these things? And that's how you decide what tech to use. And so the, the process is let's actually get away from everything. Let's be bored for a while. Let's, let's really spend a month getting, really figuring out what do I actually want to do? What do I want to spend my time doing? What's important to me, you know, what makes me feel good? And then when you're done, you can bring back in tech very strategically to help those things, right? And that was the goal. That turns out to be much more successful than when people take a abstention only approach.

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  So if you come out your tech life and say, you know, whatever, I look at Instagram too much. Like, I don't like how much I'm on Instagram. That's a bad thing. I want to reduce this bad thing. So, so here's my new thing. I'm going to spend less time looking at Instagram, much less likely to succeed in the long term. So we're much less likely at trying to reduce this sort of amorphous negative because, you know, in the moment, you're like, yeah, but it's not that bad and would be kind of interesting to look at it now. When you're instead controlling behavior because you have a positive that you're aiming towards is very powerful for people. Like, I want my life to be like this. Here's the role that tech plays in that life. The connection to wanting your life to be like that is very, very strong. And then it's much, much easier to say, yeah, like using Instagram is not part of my plan for how I have that life. And I really want to have that life, so of course I'm not going to use Instagram.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  So it turns out to be a much more sustainable way to tame what's going on.

• 1:10:02Lex Fridman?

  So if you quit social media for 30 days, you kind of have to... Do the work.

• 1:10:07Speaker 01

  Yes, to do the work.

• 1:10:08Lex Fridman?

  Of thinking like, what am I actually?

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:10Lex Fridman?

  What makes me happy in terms of these tools that I've previously used? And when you try to integrate them back, how can I integrate them to maximize the thing that actually?

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, or what makes me happy unrelated to technology? Like, what do I actually, what do I want my life to be like? Well, maybe what I want to do is be, you know, like outside in nature two hours a day and spend a lot more time like helping my community and sacrificing on behalf of my connections and then have some sort of intellectually engaging leisure activity, like I'm reading or trying to read the great books and having more calm and seeing the sunset. Like you, you, you create this picture. And then you go back and say, well, I still need my Facebook group because that's how I, I keep up with my cycling group, but Twitter is just, you know, toxic, it's not helping any of these things. And well, I'm an artist, so I kind of need Instagram to get inspiration. But if I know that's why I'm using Instagram, I don't need it on my phone. It's just on my computer and I just follow 10 artists and check it once a week. Like you really can start to point.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  It was the number one thing that differentiated in that experiment, the people who ended up sustainably making changes and getting through the 30 days and those who didn't was the people who did the experimentation and the reflection, like, let me try to figure out what's positive. They were much more successful than the people that just said, I'm sick of using my phone so much, so I'm just going to white knuckle it. Just 30 days will be good for me. I just gotta, I just gotta get away from it or something. It doesn't last.

• 1:11:26Lex Fridman?

  So you don't use social media currently?

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:29Lex Fridman?

  Of, do you find that a lot of people going through this process will, uh, will seek to basically arrive at a similar place to not use social media primarily?

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  About half. Right, so, so about half when they went through this exercise, and these aren't quantified numbers. You know, this is just, they sent me reports and, and yeah.

• 1:11:49Lex Fridman?

  That's pretty good though, so 1700?

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so, so roughly half probably got rid of social media altogether. Once they did this exercise, they realized these things I care about, I don't, uh, social media is not the tools that's really helping. The other half kept some, there were some things in their life or some social media was useful. But the key thing is if they knew why they were deploying social media, they could put fences around it. So for example, of those half that kept some social media, almost none of them kept it on their phone.

• 1:12:18Lex Fridman?

  Oh, interesting. Yeah.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  I can't optimize if you don't know what the function you're trying to optimize. So it's like this huge hack. Like, once you know, this is why I'm using Twitter, then you can have a lot of rules about how you use Twitter. And suddenly you take this cost benefit ratio and it goes like way from the company's advantage and then way over towards your advantage.

• 1:12:34Lex Fridman?

  It's kind of fascinating because I've been torn with social media, but I did this kind of process. I haven't actually done it for 30 days, which I probably should. I'll do it for like a week at a time and regularly and thinking, what kind of approach to Twitter works for me? What I'm distinctly aware of the fact that I really enjoy posting once or twice a day and at that time checking from the previous post. It like, it makes me feel, even when there's like negative comments, they go right past me. And when there's positive comments, it makes you smile. I feel like love and connection with people, especially these people I know.

• 1:13:16Lex Fridman?

  But even just in general, it's like, it makes me feel like the world is full of awesome people. Okay, when you increase that from checking from two to like, I don't know what the threshold is for me, but probably like five or six per day, it starts going to anxiety world, like where negative comments will actually stick to me mentally. And, and positive comments will feel more shallow. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of fascinating. So I, I've, I've been trying to, there's been long stretches of time, I think December and January, where I did just post and check, post and check. That was, that makes me really happy. Most of 2020, I did that, made me really happy.

• 1:14:01Lex Fridman?

  Recently, I started like, I'll go, you know, you go right back in like a drug addict. Well, you check it like, I don't know what that number is, but that number is high.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Not good. You don't come out happy.

• 1:14:12Lex Fridman?

  And you do not.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  No one comes out of a day full of Twitter celebrating humanity.

• 1:14:16Lex Fridman?

  And it's not even, because I'm very fortunate to have a lot of just positivity in my, the Twitter. But I, there's just a general anxiety. I wouldn't even say. I wouldn't even say it's probably the thing that you're talking about with the contact switching. It's almost like an exhaustion. I wouldn't even say it's like a negative feeling. It's almost just an exhaustion to where I'm not creating anything beautiful in my

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:41Lex Fridman?

  life, just exhausted.

• 1:14:42Speaker 01

  Like an existential exhaustion.

• 1:14:44Lex Fridman?

  Existential exhaustion. But I wonder, do you think it's possible to use from the people you've seen, from yourself, to use social media in the way I'm describing in moderation? Or is it always going to become?

• 1:14:56Speaker 01

  When people do this exercise, you get lots of, lots of configurations. So for people that have a public presence, for example, like what you're doing is not that, not that unusual. Okay, I, I post one thing a day and my audience likes it and, and that's kind of it. Which, but you've thought through like, okay, this supports something I value, which is like having a sort of informal connection with my audience and being exposed to some sort of positive randomness. You know, okay, that's, then you could say, if that's my goal, what's the right way to do it? Well, I don't need to be on Twitter on my phone all day. Maybe what I do is every day at five, I, I do my post and check on the day. So I have a writer friend, Ryan Holiday, who writes about the Stoics a lot. And he has this similar strategy.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  He posts one quote every day from, usually from a famous Stoic and sometimes from a contemporary figure. And that's just what he does. He just posts it and it's a very positive thing. Like his readers really love it because it's just like a dose of inspiration. He doesn't spend time, he's never interacting with anyone on social media. Right? But that's an example of, I figured out what's important to me. What's the best way to use tools to amplify it? And then you get advantages out of the tools. So I like what you're doing. I looked you up, I looked up your Twitter feed before I came, came over here. I was curious, you're not on there a lot.

• 1:16:12Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  I don't see you yelling at people. Now, do you think social media as a medium changed the cultural standards? And I mean it in a, have you read Neil Postman at all? Have you read like Amusing Ourselves to Death? He was a social critic, technology critic, and wrote a lot about sort of technological determinism. So the ways, which is a really influential idea to a lot of my work, which is actually a lot of fashion right now in academia. But the ways that the, the properties and presence of technologies change things about humans in a way that's not really intended or planned by the humans themselves. And he is, that book is all about how Different communication medium like fundamentally just changed the way the human brain understands and operates. And so he sort of gets into the what happened when

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  the printed word was widespread and how television changed it. And this was all pre-social media. But this one of these ideas I'm having is like, what's the degree to which I get into it sometimes on my show, I get into a little bit like the degree to which like Twitter in particular just changed the way that people conceptualized what, for example, debate and discussion was. Like it introduced a rhetorical dunk culture, where it's sort of more about tribes not giving ground to other tribes. And, and it's like, it's a complete, there's different places and times when that type of discussion was thought of differently, right?

• 1:17:27Lex Fridman?

  Well, yeah, absolutely. But I tend to believe, I don't know what you think, that there's the technological solutions, like there's literally different features in Twitter that could completely reverse that. There's so much power in the different choices that are made. And it could still be highly engaging and have very different effects, perhaps more negative, but or hopefully more positive.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'm trying to pull these two things apart. So there's these two ways social media, let's say, could change the experience of reading a major newspaper today. One could be a little bit more economic, right? So, so the internet made it cheaper to get news. The newspapers had to retreat to a paywall model because it was the only way they were going to survive. But once you're in a paywall model, then, then what you really want to do is make your tribe, which is within the paywall, very, very happy with you. So you want to work to them. But then there's the sort of the determinist point of view, which is the properties of Twitter, which were arbitrary. Jack and Evan just whatever, let's just do it this way, influenced the very way that people now understand and think about the world.

• 1:18:26Lex Fridman?

  So the one influenced the other, I think. They kind of started adjusting together. I, I did this thing. I mean, I'm trying to understand this. Part of the, part of the, I've been playing with the entrepreneurial idea. There's a very particular dream I've had of a startup that this is a longer term thing with has to do with artificial intelligence. But more and more, it seems like there's a some trajectory through creating a social media type of technologies, very different than what people are thinking I'm doing. But it's a kind of challenge to the way the Twitter is done, but it's not obvious what the best mechanisms are to still make

• 1:19:08Lex Fridman?

  an exceptionally engaging platform. Like Clubhouse is very engaging and not have any other negative effects. I, for example, there's Chrome extensions that allow you to turn off all likes and dislikes and all of that from Twitter. So you, all you're seeing is just the content.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:27Lex Fridman?

  On Twitter, that to me is creates, that's not a compelling experience at all because I still need, I would argue, I still need the likes to know what's a tweet worth reading.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:39Lex Fridman?

  Cause I don't only have a limited amount of time, so I need to know what's valuable. It's a great Yelp reviews on tweets or something.

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:19:46Lex Fridman?

  But I've turned off on, for example, on my account on YouTube, I've turned, I wrote a Chrome extension that turns off all likes and dislikes and just views.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:59Lex Fridman?

  I don't know how many views the video gets and so on, unless it's on my phone.

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  Did you take off the recommendations?

• 1:20:06Lex Fridman?

  The, no, no.

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  It's on YouTube. Some people, the distraction free tube is a big one for people. Yeah.

• 1:20:11Lex Fridman?

  No, I'm not worried about the distraction because I'm able to control myself on YouTube.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  You don't rabbit hole.

• 1:20:16Lex Fridman?

  No, I don't rabbit hole. So you have to know your demons or your addictions or whatever. On YouTube, I'm okay. I don't have, I don't keep clicking. The negative feelings come from seeing the views on, on stuff you've create, have created.

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  Oh, so you don't want to see your views?

• 1:20:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So like, I'm just like speaking to the things that I'm aware of, of myself that are helpful and things that are not helpful emotionally.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:41Lex Fridman?

  And I feel like there should be, we need to create actually tooling for ourselves. That's not me with JavaScript, but anybody is able to create, sort of control the experience they, that they have.

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, so, so my, my big unified theory on social media is I'm very, I'm very bearish.

• 1:20:59Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  On the big platforms, having a long future.

• 1:21:02Lex Fridman?

  You are.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  I think the moment, I think the moment of three or four major platforms is not going to last. Right? So I don't, okay, this is just perspective, right? So you can start shorting these stocks. On my, don't tell. It's not financial advice. Yeah, yeah, don't do Robin Hood. So here's, here's, I think the, the big mistake the major platforms made is when they, they took out the network effect advantage, right? So the original pitch, especially of something like Facebook or Instagram, was the people you know are on here, right? So like what you use this for is you can connect to people that you already know. This is what makes the network useful. We, so therefore the value of our network grows quadratically with the number of users. And therefore it's such a head start that there's no way that someone else can catch

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  up. But when they shifted and when Facebook took the lead of say, we're going to shift towards a newsfeed model, they basically said, we're going to try to, in the moment, get more data and get more likes. Like what we're going to go towards is actually just seeing interesting stuff, like seeing diverting information. So people took this social internet impulse to connect to people digitally to other tools, like group text messages and WhatsApp and stuff like this, right? So you don't think about these tools as, oh, this is where I connect with people. Once it's just a feed that's kind of interesting, now you're competing with everything else that can produce interesting content that's diverting. And I think that is a, a much fiercer competition because now, for example, you're going up against podcasts, right? I mean, like, okay, I guess, you know, the Twitter feed is interesting right now, but

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  also a podcast is interesting or something else could be interesting too. I think it's a much fiercer competition when there's no, there's no more network effects, right? And so my sense is we're going to see a fragmentation into what I call long tail social media, where if I don't need everyone I know to be on a platform, then why not have three or four bespoke platforms I use where it's a thousand people and it's all, we're all interested in, you know, whatever, AI or comedy. And we've, we've perfected this interface and maybe it's like Clubhouse, it's audio or something and we all pay $2 so that we don't have to worry about attention harvesting. And that's going to be wildly more entertaining. Like, I mean, I'm thinking about comedians on Twitter. It's not the best internet possible format for them expressing themselves and being interesting.

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  That you have all these comedians that are trying to like, well, I can do like little clips and little whatever. Like, I don't know if there was a long tail social media. It's really, this is where the comedians are and this podcast and the comedians are on podcasts now. So this is my thought is that there's really no, there's really no strong advantage to having one large platform that everyone is on. If all you're getting from it is I now have different options for diversion and like uplifting aspirational or whatever types of entertainment, that whole thing could fragment. And I think the glue that was holding together was network effects. I don't think they realized that when network effects have been destabilized, they don't have the centrifugal force anymore and they're spinning faster and faster. But is, is a Twitter feed really that much more interesting than all these streaming services? Is it really that much more interesting than Clubhouse?

• 1:24:00Speaker 01

  Is it that much more interesting than podcasts? I feel like they don't realize how unstable their ground actually is.

• 1:24:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's fascinating, but the thing that makes Twitter and Facebook work, I mean, the news feed, you're exactly right, like you can just duplicate the news. Like if it's, if it's not the social network and it's the news feed, then why not have multiple different feeds that are more, that are better at satisfying you? There is a dopamine gamification that they've figured out.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Lex Fridman?

  And so you have to, whatever you create, you have to at least provide some pleasure in that same gamification kind of way. It doesn't have to have to do with scale of large social networks. But I mean, I guess you're implying that you should be able to design that kind of mechanism in other forms.

• 1:24:49Speaker 01

  Or people are turning on that gamification. I mean, so people are getting wise to it and are getting uncomfortable about it, right? So if I'm offering something, there, these exist.

• 1:24:58Lex Fridman?

  Like sugar, people realize sugar is bad.

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, sugar's great. Yeah. Drinking a lot's great too, but it also, after a while, you realize there's, there's problems. So some of the long tail social media networks that are out there that I've looked at, they offer usually like a deeper sense of connection. Like it's usually interesting people that you share some affinity and you have these carefully cultivated. I wrote this New Yorker piece a couple of years ago about the indie social media movement that really got into some of these different. Technologies, but I think the technologies are a distraction. We focus too much on, you know, Mastodon versus, you know, whatever, like, forget, or Discord. Like, actually, let's forget the protocols right now. It's the idea of, okay, and there's all the, a lot of these long-tail social media groups, what people are getting out of it, which I think can outweigh the dopamine

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  gamification, is strong connection and motivation. Like, you're in a group with other guys that are all trying to be, you know, better dads, or something like this. And, and you talk to them on a regular basis, and you're sharing your stories, and there's interesting talks, and that's a powerful thing, too.

• 1:25:56Lex Fridman?

  One interesting thing about scale of Twitter is you have these viral spread of information. So, sort of, Twitter has become a newsmaker in itself.

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's a problem.

• 1:26:07Lex Fridman?

  Well, yes, but I wonder what replaces that, because, because then you immediately...

• 1:26:12Speaker 01

  Reporting?

• 1:26:13Lex Fridman?

  Well, no.

• 1:26:14Speaker 01

  Reporters would have to do some work again, I don't know.

• 1:26:16Lex Fridman?

  No, the problem with reporters and journalism is that they're intermediary. They have control. I mean, this is the problem in Russia currently, is that you have, it creates a shield between the people and the news. The, the interesting thing and the powerful thing about Twitter is that the news originates from the individual that's creating the news. Like, you, you have the President of the United, the former President of the United States on Twitter creating news. You have Elon Musk creating news. You have people announcing stuff on Twitter as opposed to talking to a journalist. And that feels much more genuine, and it's, it feels very powerful, but actually, coming to realize it, it doesn't

• 1:27:00Lex Fridman?

  need the social network. You can just put that announcement on a YouTube type thing.

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  This is what I'm thinking, right. So, this is my point about that, because that's right. It, the democratizing power of the internet is fantastic. I'm, I'm an old-school internet nerd, a guy that was, you know, telnetting in the servers and gophering before the World Wide Web was around, right? So, I'm a huge internet booster, and that's, that's one of its big power. But when you put everything on Twitter... I think the fact that you've taken, you homogenized everything, right? So, everything looks the same, moves with the same low friction is very difficult. You have no what I call distributed curation, right? The only curation that really happens, there's a little bit with likes and also the algorithm. But if you look back to pre Web 2.0 or early Web 2.0, when a lot of this was happening, let's say on blogs, where people own their own servers and you had your different blogs.

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  There was this distributed curation that happened where in order for your blog to get on people's radar, and this had nothing to do with any gatekeepers or legacy media. It was over time, you got more links and people respected you and you would hear about this blog over here. And there's this whole distributed curation and filtering going on. So if you think like the 2004 presidential election, most of the information people are getting from the internet was one of the first big internet news-driven elections was from, you know, you had like the daily costs and drudge. But there was like blogs that were out there and this was back Ezra Klein was just running a blog out of his, you know, dorm room at this point, right? And you would in a distributed fashion gain credibility because, okay, I, people have paid it. It's very hard to get people to pay attention to your blog, they're paying attention.

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  I get linked to this kid Ezra or whatever, it seems to be really sharp and now people are noticing it. And now you have a distributed curation that solves a lot of the problems we see when you have a completely homogenized, low friction environment like friction where, I mean Twitter, where any random conspiracy theory or whatever that people like can just shoot through and spread. Whereas if you're starting a blog to try to push QAnon or something like that, it's probably going to be a really weird looking blog and you're going to have a hard time. Like it's just never going to show up on people's radar, right?

• 1:29:03Lex Fridman?

  That, so everything you've said up until the very last statement, I would, I would agree with.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  This is a topic I don't know a ton about, I guess.

• 1:29:11Lex Fridman?

  So there's a, I think, I forget QAnon.

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:16Lex Fridman?

  But QAnon is, QAnon could be that. I also don't know, I should know more, I apologize, I don't know more. I mean, that's a power and the downside, you can have, I mean, Hitler could have a blog today.

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:30Lex Fridman?

  And you would have potentially a very large following if he's charismatic, if he's, you know, is good with words, is able to express the ideas, whatever, maybe he's able to channel the frustration, the anger that people have about a certain thing and. So I think that's the power of blogs, but it's also the limitation, but that doesn't, we're not trying to solve that.

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  You can't solve that, yeah.

• 1:29:51Lex Fridman?

  The fundamental problem you're saying is not the problem. The your your thesis is that there's nothing special about large scale social networks that guarantees that they will keep existing.

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  And it it's important to remember for a lot of the older generation of internet activists, or the people who are very pro internet in the early days, they were completely flabbergasted by the rise of these platforms. Say, what, why would you take the internet and then build your own version of the internet where you own all the servers? And we we built this whole distributed, the whole thing, we had open protocols. Everyone, anywhere in the world could use the same protocols. Your machine can talk to any other machine. It's the most democratic communication system that's ever been built. And then these companies came along and said, we're going to build our own, we'll just own all the servers and put them in buildings that we own. And the internet will just be the the first mile that's get you into our private internet where we own the whole thing.

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  It would would completely against the entire motivation of the internet was like, yes, we it's not going to be one person owns all the servers and you pay to access them. It's any one server that they own can talk to anyone else's server because we all agree on a standard set of protocols. And so the the old guard of pro internet people never understood this move towards let's build private versions of the internet. We'll build three or four private internets and that's what we'll all use. It was the opposite, basically.

• 1:31:10Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's funny enough, I don't know if you follow, but Jack Dorsey is also is a proponent and is helping to fund, create fully distributed versions of Twitter, essentially a thing that would potentially destroy Twitter.

• 1:31:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:25Lex Fridman?

  But I think there, you know, there might be financial art, like business cases to be made there, I'm not sure. But that seems to be another alternative is as opposed to creating a bunch of. Uh, like the long tail, uh, creating like the ultimate long tail of like fully distributed.

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is.

• 1:31:43Lex Fridman?

  Which is what the internet is.

• 1:31:44Speaker 01

  But that's, that's sort of my long, when I'm thinking about long tail social media, I'm thinking it's, uh, like the tech's not so important. Like there's groups out there, right? I, I know where the tech they use to actually implement their digital only social group, whatever. They might use Slack, they might use some combination of Zoom or it doesn't matter. I think in, in the tech world, we want to build the beautiful protocol.

• 1:32:03Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  That, okay, everyone's going to use as the, does the federated server protocol in which we've worked out X, Y, and Z. And no one understands it because then the engineers need it all to make, I get it because I'm a nerd like this, like, okay, every standard has to fit with everything else and no one understands what's going on. Meanwhile, you know, you have this group of bike enthusiasts that are like, yeah, we'll just jump on a Zoom and have some Slack and put up a blog. The tech doesn't really matter. Like we built the world with our own curation, our own rules, uh, our own sort of social ecosystem. That's generating a lot of value.

• 1:32:32Lex Fridman?

  I think.

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  I don't know if it'll happen. There's a lot of money at stake with obviously these large, but I just think they're more, they're so, I mean, look how quickly Americans left Facebook, right? I mean, Facebook was savvy to buy other properties and the, and to diversify, right? But how quick did that take for just standard Facebook news?

• 1:32:49Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  Everyone of, under the age of something, we're using it and no one under a certain age is using it now. It took like four years. I mean, this stuff is really.

• 1:32:56Lex Fridman?

  I believe you, people can leave Facebook overnight.

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:00Lex Fridman?

  Like I, I think, uh, Facebook hasn't actually messed up for like enough to, there's two things. They haven't messed up enough for people to really leave aggressively and there's no good alternative for, for them to leave. I think if good alternatives pop up, it would just immediately happen.

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  The stuff is a lot more culturally fragile, I think. I mean, Twitter's having a moment because it was feeding a certain type of, I mean, there's a lot of anxieties that was in the, the sort of political sphere anyways, that Twitter was working with.

• 1:33:28Lex Fridman?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  Um, but its moment could go to as well. I mean, it's a really arbitrary thing. Short little things. And I read a Wired article about this earlier in the pandemic, like this is crazy. That the way that we're trying to communicate information about the pandemic is all these weird arbitrary rules where people are screenshotting pictures of articles that are part of a tweet thread where you say one slash in under it. Like we have the technology guys to like really clearly convey in for long form information to people. Like why are we, why do we have these? And I know it's because it's the gamified dopamine hits, but what a weird medium. There's no reason for us to have to. Have these threads that you have to find and pin with your screenshot. I mean, we have technology to communicate better using the internet. I mean, why are epidemiologists having to do tweet threads?

• 1:34:13Lex Fridman?

  Well, because there's mechanisms of publishing that make it easier on Twitter. I mean, we're evolving as a species and the internet is a very fresh thing.

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:22Lex Fridman?

  And so it's kind of interesting to think that as opposed to Twitter, this is what Jack also complains about is Twitter's not innovating fast enough.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:32Lex Fridman?

  And so it's almost like the people are innovating and thinking about their productive life faster than the platforms on which they operate can catch up.

• 1:34:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:42Lex Fridman?

  And so at the point, the gap grows sufficiently, they'll jump. A few people, a few innovative folks will just create an alternative and perhaps distributed, perhaps just many little silos and then people will jump and then we'll just continue this kind of way.

• 1:34:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. But see, I think like Substack, for example, what they're going to pull out of Twitter, among other things, is the audience that was, let's say, like slightly left of center, but slightly left of center, don't like Trump, uncomfortable with like post-modern critical theories made into political action, right? And they're like, yeah, Twitter, there was a people on there talking about this and it made me feel sort of heard because I was feeling a little bit like a nerd about it. But honestly, I'd probably rather subscribe to four subs. You know, I'm going to have like Barry's and Andrew Sullivan's. I'll have like a Jesse signals. Like I'll have a few Substacks I can subscribe to. And honestly, that's, I'm a knowledge worker who's 32 anyways, probably that's an email all day. And so like there's an innovation that's going to, that group, you know, it's going to suck them off.

• 1:35:41Lex Fridman?

  Which is actually a very large group.

• 1:35:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a lot of, that's a lot of energy. And then once Trump's gone, I guess that's probably going to drive, that drove a lot of more like Trump people off Twitter. Like this stuff is fragile, I think.

• 1:35:53Lex Fridman?

  I, but the fascinating thing to me, because I've hung out on Parler for a short amount enough to know that the interface matters. It's so fascinating, like that, that it's not just about ideas.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:06Lex Fridman?

  It's about creating like Substack too.

• 1:36:10Lex Fridman?

  Creating a pleasant experience, addicting experience.

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  You're right. You're right about that. And it's hard. And it's why the end, this is one of the conclusions from that indie social media article is it's just the ugliness matters. And I don't mean even just aesthetically, but just the clunkiness of the interfaces, the

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  and I don't know, it's to some degree, the social media companies have spent a lot of money on this. And to some degree, it's a survivorship bias.

• 1:36:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  Right. I think Twitter, every time I hear Jack talks about this, it seems like he's as surprised as anyone else, the way Twitter's being used. And it's basically the way, you know, they had it years ago. And then, you know, it was a great, it'll be statuses, right?

• 1:36:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  This is what I'm doing, you know, and my friends can follow me and see it. And without really changing anything, it just happened to hit everything right. To support this other type of interaction.

• 1:36:56Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's also the JavaScript model, which Brendan Icke talked about. He just implemented JavaScript, like the crappy version of JavaScript in 10 days, threw it out there and just

• 1:37:07Lex Fridman?

  changed it really quickly.

• 1:37:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:09Lex Fridman?

  Evolved it really quickly and now it's become, according to Stack Exchange, the most popular programming language in the world.

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:15Lex Fridman?

  It drives like most of the internet and even the backend and now mobile.

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:20Lex Fridman?

  And so that that's an argument for the kind of thing you're talking about where like, like the bike club people.

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:27Lex Fridman?

  Could literally create the thing that would, you know, run most of the internet.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:32Lex Fridman?

  10 years from now.

• 1:37:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:34Lex Fridman?

  It's so there, there's something to that, like as opposed to trying to get lucky or trying to think through stuff is just to to solve a particular problem.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  Do stuff. Yeah.

• 1:37:43Lex Fridman?

  And then do stuff.

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  Do stuff, like you keep tinkering till you love it.

• 1:37:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:46Lex Fridman?

  And then, and of course, the sad thing is timing and luck matter. And that you can't really control.

• 1:37:53Speaker 01

  That's the problem. Yeah.

• 1:37:53Lex Fridman?

  But

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  You can't go back to 2007. Yeah, that's like the number one thing you could do to have a lot of success with a new platform is go back in time. 14 years.

• 1:38:02Lex Fridman?

  So the thing you have to kind of think about is what is the, like, what's the totally new thing? That

• 1:38:10Lex Fridman?

  10 years from now would seem obvious. I mean, some people saying Clubhouse is that there's been a lot of stuff like Clubhouse before.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:17Lex Fridman?

  But it it hit the right kind of thing. Uh, similar to Tesla, actually, what Clubhouse did is it got a lot of relatively famous people on there quickly. And, um, and then the, the other effect is like, it's invite only. So like, oh, all the smart, like famous people are on there. I wonder what's, it's the FOMO, like fear that you're missing something really profound or exciting happening there. So those social effects. And then once they actually show up, I'm a huge fan of this. It's the JavaScript model is like, Clubhouse is so dumb, like so simple in its interface. Like you literally can't do anything except mute, unmute. There's a mute button.

• 1:39:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:00Lex Fridman?

  And there's a leave quietly button.

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:02Lex Fridman?

  And that's it.

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:03Lex Fridman?

  And it's, it's kinda.

• 1:39:05Speaker 01

  I love single use technology, that, that sense. Yeah.

• 1:39:08Lex Fridman?

  There's no like, there's no, it's just like trivial and, uh, you know, Twitter kinda started like that. Facebook started like that.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:19Lex Fridman?

  But they've evolved quickly to add all these features and so on. And, you know, I do hope Clubhouse stays that way.

• 1:39:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:25Lex Fridman?

  Be interesting.

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  Or, or there's alternatives. I mean, I, I mean, even with Clubhouse though, the, the, so one of the issues with a lot of these platforms, I think, is uh, bits are cheap enough now, uh, that we don't really need a unicorn investor model. I mean, the, the investors need that model. There's really not really an imperative of, we need something that can scale to a hundred million plus a year revenue. So because it was going to require this much seed and angel investment and, and you're not going to get this much seed angel investment unless you can have a potential exit this, this wide, because you have to be part of a portfolio that depends on one out of 10 exiting here. If you don't actually need that, and you don't need to satisfy that investor model, which I think is basically the case.

• 1:40:10Speaker 01

  I mean, bits are so cheap. Everything is so cheap. You don't necessarily, so even like with Clubhouse, it's, it's investor backed, right? There's this notion of like, this needs to be a major platform. Um, but the bike club doesn't necessarily need a major platform. That's where I'm interested. I mean, I don't know. There, there's so much money. That's the only problem that bets against me is that you can concentrate a lot of capital. If you do these things, right?

• 1:40:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:31Speaker 01

  I mean, so Facebook was like a fantastic capital concentration machine. It's crazy how much. Where it even found that capital in the world that it could concentrate and ossify in the stock price that a very small number of people have, you know, access to, right? That's, that's incredibly powerful. So when there, when there's a possibility to, to, to consolidate and gather a huge amount of capital, that's a huge imperative that's very hard for the bike club to go up against. So.

• 1:40:55Lex Fridman?

  But there's a lot of money in the bike club. If you see with the Wall Street bets.

• 1:40:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:59Lex Fridman?

  And then when a bunch of people get together, I mean, it doesn't have to be a bike, it could be a bunch of different bike clubs just kind of team up.

• 1:41:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:07Lex Fridman?

  And to overtake.

• 1:41:08Speaker 01

  Is what we're doing now. Yeah.

• 1:41:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  Or we're going to repurpose off the shelf stuff.

• 1:41:11Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:41:12Speaker 01

  That's not, you were gonna, yeah, we're gonna repurpose whatever it was for office productivity or something. And like the, the club's using Slack just to build out these, you know?

• 1:41:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Let's talk about email.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. I wrote a book.

• 1:41:25Lex Fridman?

  You're, you wrote, uh, yet another amazing book, uh, World Without Email. Maybe one way to enter this discussion is to ask, what is the hyperactive hive mind, which is the concept you opened the book with?

• 1:41:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the devil.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  It's the scourge of hundreds of millions. Uh, so I think, so I, I called this book A World Without Email. The real title should be A World Without The Hyperactive Hive Mind Workflow. But my publisher didn't like that.

• 1:41:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  So we had to get a little bit more pithy. I was trying to answer the question after Deep Work. Why is it so hard to do this? Like, if this is so valuable, if we can produce much higher, if people are much happier, um, why do we check email a day? Why are we on Slack all day?

• 1:42:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  You know? And so I started working on this book immediately after Deep Work. And so my, my initial interviews were done in 2016. So it took five years to pull the threads together. I was trying to understand, why is it so hard for most people to actually find any time to do this stuff that actually moves to Neil? And the story was, and I thought this was, I hadn't heard this reported anywhere else. That's why it took me so long to pull it together, is email arrives on the scene. Email spreads, I trace it, it really picks up steam in the early 1990s, between like 1990 and 1995, it makes its move, right? And it does so for very pragmatic reasons. It was replacing existing communication technologies that it was better than. It was mainly the fax machine, voicemail and memos, right? So this was just better, right? So it was a killer app because it was useful.

• 1:42:53Speaker 01

  In its wake, came a new way of collaborating. And that's the hyperactive hive mind. So it's the, like, the virus that follows the, the rats that went through Western Europe for the Black Pig. As email spread through organizations, in its wake came the hyperactive hive mind workflow, which says, okay, guys, here's the way we're going to collaborate. We'll just work things out on the fly with unscheduled back and forth messages. Just boom, boom, boom, let's go back and forth. Hey, what about this? Did you see this? What about that client? Let's, what's going on over here? That followed email. It completely took over office work. And the, the need to keep up with all of these asynchronous back and forth unscheduled messages, as those got more and more and more, and we had more of those to service,

• 1:43:35Speaker 01

  the need to service those required us to check more and more and more and more, right? And so by the time, and I go through the numbers, but by the time you get to today, now the average knowledge worker has to check one of these channels once every six minutes. Because every single thing you do in your organization, how you talk to your colleagues, how you talk to your vendors, how you talk to your clients, how you talk to the HR department, it's all this asynchronous unscheduled back and forth messaging. And you have to service the conversations. And it spiraled out of control. And it has sort of devolved a lot of work in the office now to all I do is constantly tend communication channels.

• 1:44:07Lex Fridman?

  So it's fascinating what you're describing is, uh, nobody ever paused in this whole evolution to try to create a system that actually works. That it was, um, kind of like a huge fan of cellular automata. So it just kind of started, uh, very, a very simple mechanism, just like cellular automata, it just kind of grew to overtake all the fundamental communication of how we do business and also personal life.

• 1:44:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's one of the big ideas, is that the unintentionality.

• 1:44:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:38Speaker 01

  Right? So this goes back to technological determinism. And this is a weird business book because I go deep on philosophy. I go deep on, for some reason, we get into paleoanthropology for a while. We do a lot of neuroscience. It's, it's kind of a weird book. But I got real into this technological determinism, right? This notion that just the presence of a technology can change how people act. That's my big argument about what happened with the hive mind. And I can document. Specific examples, right? So I document this example in IBM nineteen eighty seven, maybe eighty five, but it's in like the mid to late eighties, IBM Armonk headquarters. We're going to put in internal email, right? Because it's convenient. And so they ran a whole study. And so I talked to the engineer who ran the study, Adrian Stone, like, we're going to run this study to figure

• 1:45:22Speaker 01

  out how much do we communicate? Because it was still an era where it's expensive, right? So you have to provision a mainframe. So you can't over provision. Like, we want to know how much communication actually happens. So they went and figured it out. How many memos? How many calls? How many notes? Great. We'll provision a mainframe to handle email that can handle all of that. So if all of our communication moves to email, the mainframe will still be fine. In three days, they had melted it down. People were communicating six times more than that estimate. So just in three days, the presence of a low friction digital communication tool drastically changed how everyone collaborated. So that's not enough time for, you know, an all hands meeting. Guys, we figured it out. You know, this is what we need to communicate a lot more is what's going to make us more productive. We need more emails. It's emergent.

• 1:46:06Lex Fridman?

  Isn't that just on the positive end amazing to you? Like, isn't email amazing? Like, in those early days, like, just the frictionless communication. I mean, email is awesome. Like, people say that there's a lot of problems with emails, just like people say a lot of problems with Twitter and so on. It's kind of cool that you can just send a little note.

• 1:46:27Speaker 01

  It was a miracle, right? This was so I, so I wrote a, there's originally was a New Yorker piece from a year or two ago called was email a mistake? And then it's in the book, too. But I go into the history of email, like, why did it come along? And it solved a huge problem. So it was, it was the problem of fast asynchronous communication. And it was a problem that not exists until we got large offices. We got large offices synchronous communication, like, let's get on the phone at the same time. There's too much overhead to it. There's too many people you might have to talk to asynchronous communication, like, let me send you a memo when I'm ready and you can read it when you're ready. Took too long. And so it was like a huge problem. So one of the things I talked about is the way that when they built the CIA headquarters, there was such a need for fast asynchronous communication

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  that they built a pneumatic powered email system. They had these pneumatic tubes all throughout the headquarters with electromagnetic routers. So you would put your message in a plexiglass tube and you would turn these brass dials about the location. You would stick it in these things and pneumatic tubes and it would shoot and sort and work its way through these tubes to show up in just a minute or something at the floor and at the general office suite where you wanted to go. And my point is the fact that they spent so much money to make that work show how important fast asynchronous communication was large offices. So when email came along, it was a productivity silver bullet. It was a miracle. I talked to the researchers who were working on computer supported collaboration in the late 80s, trying to figure out how are we going to use computer networks to be more

• 1:47:53Speaker 01

  productive? And they were building all these systems and tools. Email showed up. It just wiped all that research off the map. There was no need to build these custom Intranet applications. There's no need to build these, these communication platforms. Email could just do everything. Right? So it was a miracle application, which is why it spread everywhere. That's one of these things where, okay, unintended consequences, right? You had this miracle productivity silver bullet. It spread everywhere, but it was so effective. It just, you know, I don't know, like a drug. I'm sure there's some pandemic metaphor here, analogy here of a drug that like is so effective at treating this that it also blows up your whole immune system and then everyone gets sick. But

• 1:48:30Lex Fridman?

  Well, ultimately, it probably significantly increased the productivity of the world, but there's a kind of hump that it now has plateaued. And then where the fundamental question you're asking is like, okay, how do we take the next? How do we keep increasing the productivity?

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think it brought it down. So my

• 1:48:46Lex Fridman?

  I think so.

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  My contention and so again, there's a little bit in the book, but I have a more recent Wired article that puts some newer numbers to this.

• 1:48:56Speaker 01

  I subscribe to the hypothesis that the hyperactive hive mind was so detrimental. So yeah, it helped productivity at first, right? When you could do fast asynchronous communication, but very quickly, there was a sort of exponential rise in communication amounts. Once we got to the point where the hive mind meant you had to constantly check your email, I think that made us so unproductive that it actually was pulling down non-industrial productivity. And I think the only reason why, so it certainly has not been going up. That metric's been stagnating for a long time now while all this was going on. I think the only reason why it hasn't fallen is that we added these extra shifts off the books. I'm going to work for three hours in the morning. I'm going to work for three hours at night. And only that, I think, has allowed us to basically maintain a stagnated, non-industrial growth.

• 1:49:40Speaker 01

  We should have been shooting up the charts. I mean, this is miraculous innovations, computer networks. And then we built out these hundred billion dollar ubiquitous worldwide, high-speed wireless internet infrastructure with supercomputers in our pockets where we could talk to anyone at any time. Like, why did our productivity not shoot off the charts? Because our brain can't contact switch once every six minutes.

• 1:49:58Lex Fridman?

  So it's fundamentally back to the contact switching.

• 1:50:00Speaker 01

  Contact switching is poison.

• 1:50:01Lex Fridman?

  And contact switching is poison. It's the, what is it about email that forces contact switching? Is it both our psychology that drags us in? Or is it the expectation of?

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, right. Because it's not, I think we've seen this through a personal, a personal will or failure lens recently. Like, oh, am I addicted to email?

• 1:50:20Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:50:20Speaker 01

  I have bad etiquette about my email. No, it's the underlying workflow. So the tool itself, I will exonerate. Right? I think I would rather use POP3 than a fax protocol. Right? I think it's easier. The issue is the hyperactive hive mind workflow. So if I am now collaborating with 20 or 30 different people with back and forth unscheduled messaging, I have to tend those conversations. Right? It's like you have 30 metaphorical ping pong tables. And when the balls come back across, you have to pretty soon hit it back or stuff actually grinds to a halt. So it's the workflow that's the problem. It's not the tool. It's the fact that we use it to do all of our collaboration. Let's just send messages back and forth, which means you can't be far from checking that. Because if you take a break, if you batch, if you try to have better habits.

• 1:51:05Speaker 01

  It's going to slow things down. So my whole villain is this hyperactive hive mind workflow. The tool is fine. I don't want the tool to go away, but I want to replace the hyperactive hive mind workflow. I think this is going to be one of the biggest value generating productivity revolutions of the 21st century. I quote an anonymous CEO is pretty well known, who says this is going to be the moonshot of the 21st century. It's going to be of that importance. There's so much latent productivity that's being suppressed because we just figure things out on the fly and email. That as we figure that out, I think it's going to be hundreds of billions of dollars.

• 1:51:41Lex Fridman?

  You're so absolutely right. The question is, what does a world without email look like? How do we fix email?

• 1:51:50Speaker 01

  So what happens is, at least in my vision, you identify, well, actually, there's these different processes that make up my workday. Like, these are things that I do repeatedly, often in collaboration with other people that do useful things for my company or whatever. Right now, most of these processes are implicitly implemented with a hyperactive hive mind. How do we do this thing? Like answering client questions to shoot messages back and forth? You know, how do we do this thing? Posting podcast episodes, we'll just figure it out on the fly. My main argument is we actually have to do like they did in the industrial sector. Take each of these processes and say, is there a better way to do this? And by better, I mean a way that's going to minimize the need to have unscheduled back and forth messaging. So we actually have to do process engineering. This created a massive growth in productivity in the industrial sector during the 20th century.

• 1:52:35Speaker 01

  We have to do it in knowledge work. We can't just rock and roll an inbox is we actually have to say, how do we deal with client questions? Well, let's put in place a process that doesn't require us to send messages back and forth. How do we post podcast episodes? Let's automate this to a degree where I don't have to just send you a message on the fly. And you do this process by process and the pressure on that inbox is released. And now you don't have to check it every six minutes. So you still have email. I mean, like, I need to send you a file. Sure, I'll use email. But we're not coordinating or collaborating over email or Slack, which is just a faster way of doing the hive mind. I mean, Slack doesn't solve anything there.

• 1:53:07Speaker 01

  You have better structured bespoke processes. I think that's what's going to unleash this massive productivity.

• 1:53:12Lex Fridman?

  Bespoke. So the interesting thing is like, for example, you and I exchange some emails. So obviously, I, let's just say, my particular case, I schedule podcasts, there's a bunch of different tasks. Fascinatingly enough, that I do that could be converted into processes.

• 1:53:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:28Lex Fridman?

  Is it up to me to create that process? Or do you think we also need to build tools, just like email was

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:34Lex Fridman?

  A protocol for helping us create process for the different tasks?

• 1:53:40Speaker 01

  I mean, I think ultimately, the whole organization, the whole team has to be involved. I think ultimately, there's certainly a lot of investor money being spent right now to try to figure out those tools. Right? So I think Silicon Valley has figured this out in the past couple of years. This is the difference between when I was talking to people after deep work and now five years later, is this scent is in the air. Right? Because there's so much latent productivity. So yes, there are going to be new tools, which I think could help. There are already tools that exist. I mean, in the different groups I profiled, use things like Trello or Basecamp or Asana or Flow and you know, our schedule wants and Acuity, like there's, there's a lot of tools out there. The key is not to think about it in terms of what tool do I replace email with?

• 1:54:21Speaker 01

  Instead, you think about it with, I have a pro, we're trying to come with a process that reduces back and forth messages. Oh, what tool might help us, might help us do that? Yeah. And I, and I would push, it's not about necessarily efficiency. In fact, some of these things are going to take more time. So writing a, a letter to someone is like a high value activity that's probably worth doing. The thing that's killer is the back and forth. Cause now I have to keep checking, right? So we scheduled this together because I, I knew you from before, but like most of the, the interviews I was scheduling for this, actually I have a process with my publicist where we use a shared document and she puts stuffs in there. And then I check it twice a week and there's scheduling options. And I say, here's when I want to do this one, or this will work for this one or whatever.

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  And it takes more time in the moment than just, but it means that we have almost no back and forth messaging for podcast scheduling, which without this, so like with my UK publisher, I didn't put this process into place because we're not doing as many interviews, but it's all the time. And I, I'm like, oh, I could really feel the difference, right? It's the back and forth that's killer.

• 1:55:20Lex Fridman?

  I suppose it is up to the individual people involved. Like you said, uh, knowledge workers, like they have to carry the responsibility.

• 1:55:30Lex Fridman?

  Of creating processes, like how always asking the first principles question, how can this be converted into a process?

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you can start by doing this yourself, like just with what you can control. I think ultimately, once the teams are doing that, I think that's probably the right scale. If you try to do this at the organizational scale, you're going to get bureaucracy, right? So if it's, you know, all right, if Elon Musk is going to dictate down to everyone at Tesla or something like this, that's too much remove and you get bureaucracy. But if it's we're a team of six that's working together on, you know, whatever powertrain software, then we can figure out on our own, what are our processes? How do we want to do this?

• 1:56:07Lex Fridman?

  So it's ultimately also creating a culture where saying like an email, sending an email just for the hell of it, it should be taboo. Like, so you are being, you're being destructive to the productivity of the team by sending this email.

• 1:56:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56:21Lex Fridman?

  As opposed to helping develop a process and so on, that, that will ultimately automate this.

• 1:56:29Speaker 01

  That's why I'm trying to spread this message of the context switches as poison. I get so much into the science of it. I think we underestimate how much it kills us to have to wrench away our context, look at a message and come back. And so, once you have the mindset of it's a huge thing to ask of someone, to have to take their attention off something and look back at this. And if they have to do that for three or four times, like we're just going to figure this out on the fly and every message is going to require five checks of the inbox while you wait for it. Well, you've now you've created whatever it is at this point, 25 or 30 context shifts. Like you've just done a huge disservice to someone's day. This would be like if I had a professional athlete, like, hey, do me a favor. I need you to go do this press interview, but to get there, you're going to have to carry this sandbag and sprint up this hill, like completely exhaust your muscles and then you have to go play a game.

• 1:57:12Speaker 01

  Like, of course, I'm not going to ask an athlete to do like an incredibly physically demanding thing right before a game, but something as easy as thoughts, question mark? Or like, hey, do you want to jump on a call? And it's going to be six back and forth messages to figure it out. It's kind of the cognitive equivalent, right? You're taking the wind out of someone.

• 1:57:28Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:57:41Speaker 01

  And it's like Claude Shannon, right? I talked about communication theory or information theory. It takes time to come up with a clever code upfront. So you spend more time upfront figuring out those spreadsheets and trying to get people on board with it. But then your communication going forward is all much more efficient. So over time, you're using much less bandwidth. Right? So you do pain upfront.

• 1:58:01Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:58:01Speaker 01

  It's quicker just right now to send an email. But if I spend a half day to do this over the next six months, I've saved myself 600 emails.

• 1:58:09Lex Fridman?

  Now, here's a tough question for, you know, from the computer science perspective, we often over-optimize. So you've create processes and you, okay, just like you're saying, it's so pleasurable to increase in the long-term productivity that sometimes you just enjoy that process in itself.

• 1:58:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:32Lex Fridman?

  By just creating processes and you actually never, like, it has a negative effect on productivity long-term because you're too obsessed with the processes. Is that, is that a nice problem to have essentially?

• 1:58:47Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a problem. I mean, because let's look at the one sector that does do this, which is developers.

• 1:58:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:53Speaker 01

  Right? So agile methodologies like Scrum or Kanban are basically workflow methodologies that are much better than the hyperactive hive mind. But man, some of those programmers get pretty obsessive. I don't know if you've ever talked to a whatever, level three Scrum master. They get really obsessive about like, it has to happen exactly this way and it's probably seven times more complex than it needs to be. I'm hoping that's just because nerds like me, you know, like to do that. But it's, it's a broadly probably an issue, right? We have to be careful because you can just go down that. That fiddling path like so it needs to be here's how we do it. Let's reduce the messages and let's roll, you know? You can't save yourself through if you can get the process just right, right?

• 1:59:37Speaker 01

  So I wrote this article kind of recently called the rise and fall of getting things done. And I profiled this productivity guru named Merlin Mann, and I talked about this movement called productivity prawn. As like elite speak term in the early 2000s where people just became convinced that if they could combine their productivity systems with software. And they could find just the right software, just the right configuration where they could offload most of the difficulty of work would happen with the machines. Would kind of figure out for and then they could just sort of crank widgets and it'd be, and the whole thing fell apart because it's work is hard and it's hard to do. And making decisions about what to work on is hard and no system can really do that for you. So you have to have this, this sort of balance between I, uh, context switches are poison.

• 2:00:20Speaker 01

  So we've got to get rid of the context switches. Once like something's working good enough to get rid of the context switches, then get after it.

• 2:00:26Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:01:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:00Lex Fridman?

  And as opposed to in the Python script, allowing some flexibility around that. You create this programmatic way that's flawless. And when everything's working perfectly, it's perfect. But actually, if you strive for perfection, it has the same stress, like has a lot of the stress that you were seeking to escape with the context switching.

• 2:01:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:22Lex Fridman?

  Because you're almost.

• 2:01:25Lex Fridman?

  Stressing about errors.

• 2:01:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:27Lex Fridman?

  Like when the process is functioning, you're, there's always this anxiety of like, I wonder if it's gonna succeed.

• 2:01:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:34Lex Fridman?

  I wonder if it's gonna succeed.

• 2:01:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, I think some of that's just you and I probably, I mean, it's just our mindset, right? We're in, we do computer science, right? So chicken and egg.

• 2:01:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:43Speaker 01

  I guess, and a lot of the processes in of working here are much rougher. It's like, okay, instead of letting clients just email me all the time, we have a weekly call and then we send them a breakdown of everything we committed to, right? That's a process that works. Okay, I get asked a lot of questions because I'm the JavaScript guy in the company. Instead of doing it by email, I have office hours.

• 2:02:02Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:02:03Speaker 01

  This is what Basecamp does. All right, so you come to my office hours, that cuts down a lot of back and forth. All right, we're gonna, instead of emailing about this project, we'll have a, a Trello board and we'll do a weekly, really structured status meeting, real quick, what's going on? Who needs what? Let's go. And now everything's on there and on our inboxes without to send this many messages. So like that rough level of granularity, that gets you most of the way there.

• 2:02:23Lex Fridman?

  So the parts that you can't automate and turn into a process. So how many parts like that do you think should remain in a perfect world? And for those parts where email is still useful, what do you recommend those emails look like? How, how should you write emails? When should you send them?

• 2:02:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think email, email is good for delivering information. Right? So I think of it like a fax machine or something, you know? It's a really good fax machine. So if I need to send you something and you just send you a file and you need to broadcast a new policy or something like email's a great way to do it. It's bad for collaboration. So if you're having a conversation, like we're trying to reach a decision on something, I'm trying to learn about something, I'm trying to clarify what something, what, what this is, that, that's more than just like a one answer type question, then I think you shouldn't be doing an email.

• 2:03:16Lex Fridman?

  But see, here's the thing. Like you and I don't talk often. And so we have a kind of new interaction. It's not how it so sure. Yeah, you have a book coming out. So there's a process and so on. But say there, don't you think there's a lot of novel interactive experiences?

• 2:03:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fine.

• 2:03:34Lex Fridman?

  So you could just for every novel experience, it's okay to have a little bit of exchange.

• 2:03:39Speaker 01

  It's fine. Like, I think it's fine. If stuff comes in over the transom, or it's you hear from someone you haven't heard from in a while. I think all that's fine. I mean, that's that's email at its best. Where it starts to kill us is where all of our collaboration is happening with the back and forth. So when you've moved the bulk of that out of your inbox, now you're back in that Meg Ryan movie, like you got mail, where it's like, all right, load this up. And you wait for the modem, like, oh, we got a message. Yeah, Lex sent me a message. This is interesting, right? You're back to the AOL days.

• 2:04:06Lex Fridman?

  So you're talking about the bulk of the the business world where like email has replaced the actual communication, all the communication protocols required to accomplish anything.

• 2:04:15Speaker 01

  Everything is just happening with messages. So if you now get most stuff done, repeatable collaborations with with other processes that don't require you to check these inboxes, then the inbox can serve like an inbox, which includes hearing from interesting people. Right? Or sending something, hey, I don't know if you saw this, I thought you might like it. Like, it's great for that.

• 2:04:33Lex Fridman?

  So there's, there's probably a bunch of people listening to this. They're like, yeah, but I work on a team and they're all they use is email. How do you start the revolution from like the ground up?

• 2:04:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, do it. Do asymmetric optimization first. So identify all your processes and then change what you can change and be socially very careful about it. So don't necessarily say like, okay, this is a new process. We all have to do. You're just, you know, hey, we got to get this report ready. Here's what I think we should do. Like, I'll get a draft into our Dropbox folder by like noon on Monday, grab it. I won't touch it again until Tuesday morning. And then I'll look at your changes. I have this office hours always scheduled Tuesday afternoon. So if there's anything that catches your attention, grab me then. But I've told the designer who CC'd on this that by COB Tuesday, the final version will be ready for them to take and polish or whatever. Like, the person on the other end is like, great, I'm glad, you know, Cal has a plan. So I just, what do I need to do? I need to

• 2:05:28Speaker 01

  edit this tomorrow, whatever. Right. But you've actually pulled them into a process. That means we're going to get this report together without having to just go back and forth. You just asymmetrically optimize these things. And then you can begin the conversation and maybe that's where my book comes in place. You just sort of slide it, slide it across the desk.

• 2:05:45Lex Fridman?

  Buy the book and just leave it, leave it, give it to everybody on your team. Okay. So we solved the bulk of the email problem with this. Is there a case to be made that even for like communication between you and I, we should move away from, from email. And for example, there's a guy recently, I don't know if you know comedians, but there's a guy named Joey Diaz.

• 2:06:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:05Lex Fridman?

  That I've had an interaction with recently. And that guy, first of all, the sweetest human, despite what his comedy sounds like, is the sweetest human being. And he's a big proponent of just pick up the phone.

• 2:06:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:16Lex Fridman?

  And call.

• 2:06:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:17Lex Fridman?

  And it makes me so uncomfortable when people call me.

• 2:06:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:20Lex Fridman?

  It's like, I don't know what to do with this thing. Uh, but it kind of gets everything done quicker, I think, if I remove the anxiety from that. Is there a case to be made for that? Or is email could still be the most efficient way to do this?

• 2:06:33Speaker 01

  No, I mean, look, if you, if you have to interact with someone, there's a lot of efficiency and synchrony. Right. And this is something from distributed system theory where you know, if you go from synchronous to asynchronous networks, there's a huge amount of overhead to the asynchronous. So actually the protocols required to solve things in asynchronous networks are significantly more complicated and fragile than synchronous protocols. So if we can just do real time, it's usually better. And also from an interaction, like social connection standpoint, there's a lot more information in the human voice and the back and forth. Uh, yeah, if you just call, so very generational, right? Like our generation will be comfortable talking on the phone in a way that like a younger generation isn't. But an older generation is more comfortable with, well, you just call people.

• 2:07:14Speaker 01

  Whereas we, so there's a happy medium, but most of my good friends, we just talk, we have regular phone calls.

• 2:07:20Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 2:07:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's not, I don't just call them, we schedule it, we schedule it. Yeah. Just on text, like, yeah, you want to talk sometime soon.

• 2:07:27Lex Fridman?

  Do you, do you ever have a process around friends?

• 2:07:29Speaker 01

  Not really. No.

• 2:07:31Lex Fridman?

  I feel like I should, I feel like, uh,

• 2:07:33Speaker 01

  Well, you have like a lot of interesting friend possibilities is you have like an interesting problem, right? Like really interesting people you can talk to.

• 2:07:41Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's, that's one problem. And the other one is the introversion where I'm just afraid of people and get really stressed. Like I freak out and so.

• 2:07:48Speaker 01

  You picked a good line of work.

• 2:07:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Now perhaps it's the Goggins thing. It's like facing your fears or whatever, but, but it's almost like. There's a, it has to do with the timetables thing and the deep work that the nice thing about the processes is it not only automates, sort of automates away the contact switching, it ensures you do the important things too.

• 2:08:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:15Lex Fridman?

  It's like prioritize. So the thing is with email, because everything is done over email, you can be lazy in the same way with like social networks and do the easy things first.

• 2:08:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:28Lex Fridman?

  They're not that important. So the process also enforces that you do the important things. And for me, the important things is like, okay, it sounds weird, but like social connection.

• 2:08:39Speaker 01

  No, that's one of the most important things in all of human existence.

• 2:08:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:44Speaker 01

  And doing it, the paradoxical thing, I got into this for digital minimalism. The more you sacrifice on behalf of the connection, the stronger the connection feels, right? So sacrificing non-trivial time and attention on behalf of someone is what tells your brain that this is a serious relationship, which is why social media had this paradoxical effect, making people feel less social. Cause it took the friction out of it. And so the brain just doesn't like, yeah, you've been commenting on this person's whatever, you've been retweeting them or sending them some text. You haven't, it's not hard enough. And then, then the perceived strength of that social connection diminishes. Where if you talk to them or go spend time with them or whatever, you're going to feel better about it. So the friction is good. I have a thing with some of my friends where at the end of each call,

• 2:09:29Speaker 01

  we take a couple of minutes to schedule the next. Then you never, it's like I do with haircuts or something, right? Like if I don't schedule it then.

• 2:09:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:36Speaker 01

  I'm never going to get my haircut, right? And so we, it's like, okay, when do you want to talk next? You know?

• 2:09:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's a really, that's a really good idea. I, I just don't call friends and like every 10 years, I do something dramatic for them. So then we maintain the friendship. Like I'd murder somebody that they really don't like.

• 2:09:52Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:09:53Lex Fridman?

  I just.

• 2:09:53Speaker 01

  Careful, man. Joey's, Joey might ask you to do that.

• 2:09:56Lex Fridman?

  That's why, that's one of my favorite.

• 2:09:58Speaker 01

  Lex, I need you to come down to New Jersey.

• 2:10:00Lex Fridman?

  That's exactly what we're gonna do.

• 2:10:01Speaker 01

  With that robot dog of yours.

• 2:10:04Lex Fridman?

  We're gonna go down to Jersey. There's a special human. I love the comedian world. They've been shaking up. I don't know if you listen to Joe Rogan, all those folks. They kind of are doing something interesting for MIT and academia. They're shaking up this world a little bit. Like podcasting, because comedians are paving the way for podcasting.

• 2:10:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:26Lex Fridman?

  And so you have like Andrew Huberman, who's a neuroscientist at Stanford, a friend of mine now.

• 2:10:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 2:10:31Lex Fridman?

  He's like into podcasting now, and you're into podcasting. Of course, you're not necessarily podcasting about computer science currently, right?

• 2:10:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:40Lex Fridman?

  But that, it feels like you could have a lot of the free spirit of the comedians implemented by the people who are academically trained.

• 2:10:53Speaker 01

  Who actually have a niche specialty.

• 2:10:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and then that results, I mean, who knows what the experiment looks like.

• 2:11:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:00Lex Fridman?

  But that results me being able to talk about robotics with Joey Diaz.

• 2:11:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:04Lex Fridman?

  When he says, you know, drops F bombs every other sentence and I, the world is like, I've seen actually a shift within colleagues and friends within MIT where they're becoming much more accepting of that kind of thing. It's very interesting.

• 2:11:19Speaker 01

  That's interesting. So you're seeing, because I, okay.

• 2:11:21Lex Fridman?

  Because they're seeing how popular it is. They're like.

• 2:11:24Speaker 01

  Well, you're really popular. I don't know how they think about it at Georgetown, for example.

• 2:11:28Lex Fridman?

  I don't know. It's interesting, but I think what what happens is the popularity of it combined with just good conversations with people they respect. It's like, oh, okay, wait, this is the thing.

• 2:11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:42Lex Fridman?

  And this is more fun to listen to than a shitty Zoom lecture.

• 2:11:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:47Lex Fridman?

  About their work.

• 2:11:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:11:48Lex Fridman?

  It's like, there's something here.

• 2:11:49Speaker 01

  There's something interesting.

• 2:11:50Lex Fridman?

  And we don't, nobody actually knows what that is, just like with like Clubhouse or something. Nobody's figured out like, where is this medium take? Is this a legitimate medium of education?

• 2:12:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:12:01Lex Fridman?

  Or is this just like a fun?

• 2:12:03Speaker 01

  Well, that's your innovation, I think, was we can bring on professors.

• 2:12:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:07Speaker 01

  And I know Joe Rogan did some of that too, but, but, you know, but your professors in your field.

• 2:12:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:14Speaker 01

  You bring on all these MIT guys who I remember, you know.

• 2:12:17Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's been the big challenge for me is, I don't, is I feel.

• 2:12:24Lex Fridman?

  I would, I would ask big like philosophical questions of, of people like yourself. They're like really well, like, so for example, you have a lot of excellent papers on, you know, that has a lot of theory in it, right? And there's some temptation to just go through papers. And I think it's possible to actually do that. I haven't done that much, but I think it's possible. It just requires a lot of preparation. And I can probably only do that with things that I'm actually, like, in the field I'm aware of. But there's a dance that I would love to be able to try to hit right, where it's actually getting to the core of some interesting ideas as opposed to just talking about philosophy.

• 2:13:06Lex Fridman?

  At the same time, there's a large audience of people that just want to be inspired by, like, by disciplines where they don't necessarily know the details. But there's a lot of people that are like, hmm, I'm really curious. I've been thinking about pivoting careers into software engineering. They would love to hear from people like you about computer science, even if it's like theory.

• 2:13:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, but just like the idea that you can have big ideas, you push them through and it's interesting. You fight for it, yeah.

• 2:13:34Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's some, there's, what is it? Computer File and Number File, these YouTube channels. There's, there's channels I watch on like chess, exceptionally popular, where I don't, I don't understand maybe 80% of the time what the hell they're talking about. Cause they're talking about like, why this move was better than this move. But I love the passion and the genius of those people and just overhearing it. I don't know why that's so exciting.

• 2:14:01Speaker 01

  Do you look at like Scott Aronson's blog at all? The Settle and Optimize? Yeah, it's like hardcore complexity theory. But it's, there's an enthusiasm or like Terry Tao's blog.

• 2:14:10Lex Fridman?

  A little bit of humor. Terry Tao has a blog?

• 2:14:13Speaker 01

  He used to, yeah. He, and it would just be, I'm going all in on, you know, here's the new affine group with which you can do whatever, whatever. I mean, it was just equations.

• 2:14:22Lex Fridman?

  Well, in the case of Scott Aronson, he's good, he's able to turn on like the inner troll and comedian and so on. He keeps the fun, which is the best of.

• 2:14:32Speaker 01

  And he's a philosophical guy. He wrote that.

• 2:14:33Lex Fridman?

  He turns on the philosophy.

• 2:14:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so, you know, we're exploring these different ways of communicating science and exciting the world. Speaking of which, I gotta ask you about computer science.

• 2:14:46Speaker 01

  That's right, I do some of that.

• 2:14:48Lex Fridman?

  So, I mean, a lot of it, a lot of your work is what inspired this deep thinking about productivity from all the different angles, because some of the most rigorous work is mathematical work and in computer science, that theoretical computer science. Let me ask the Scott Aronson question of like, is there something to you that stands out in particular that's beautiful or inspiring? Or just really insightful about computer science or maybe mathematics?

• 2:15:17Speaker 01

  I mean, I like theory. And in particular, what I've always liked in theory is the notion of impossibilities. That's kind of my specialty. So, within the context of distributed algorithms, my specialty is impossibility results. The idea that you can argue, nothing exists that solves this, or nothing exists that can solve this faster than this. And that's, I think that's really interesting. And that goes all the way back to Turing. His original paper on computable numbers with their connection to the, it's in German, the Eichlitz-Dung problem, but basically the German name that Hilbert called the decision problem. This was pre-computers, but he was, you know, he's English, so it's written in English, so it's a very accessible paper. And it's, it lays the foundation for all of theoretical computer science. He just has this insight.

• 2:16:02Speaker 01

  He's like, well, if we think about like an algorithm, I mean, he figures out like all effective procedures or Turing machines, or basically algorithms, we could really describe a Turing machine with a number, which we can now imagine with like computer code, you could just take a source file and just treat the binary version of the file as like a really long number, right? But he's like, every program is just a finite number. It's a natural number. And then he realized like, one way to think about a problem is you have, and this is like kind of the Mike Sipser approach, but you have a sort of, it's a language, so of an infinite number of strings, some of them are in the language and some of them aren't, but basically you can imagine a problem is represented as an infinite binary string. Where in every position, like a 1 means that string is in the language and a 0 means it isn't.

• 2:16:42Speaker 01

  And then he applied Cantor from the 19th century and said, okay, the natural numbers are countable. And so it's countably infinite. And infinite binary strings, you can use a diagonalization argument to show they're they're they're uncountable. So there's just vastly more problems than there are algorithms. So basically, anything you can come up with, for the most part, almost certainly is not solvable by a computer. You know, and then and then he was like, let me give a particular example. And he figured out the very first computability proof. And let's just walk through with a little bit of simple logic. The halting problem can't be solved by an algorithm. And that kicked off the whole enterprise of some things can't be solved by algorithms. Some things can't be solved by computers. And we've just been doing theory on that since the that was the 30s. He wrote that.

• 2:17:27Lex Fridman?

  So proving that something is impossible is sort of a more stricter version of that. Is it like proving bounds on on the performance of different algorithms?

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  Yes, those are, yeah, so bounds are upper bounds, right? So you say, this algorithm does at least this well and no worse than this. But you're looking at a particular algorithm. And possibility proofs say, no algorithm ever could ever solve this problem. So no algorithm could ever solve the halting problem.

• 2:17:51Lex Fridman?

  So it's problem centric. It's it's making something different, making a conclusive statement about the problem.

• 2:17:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:17:58Lex Fridman?

  And that's somehow satisfying because it's.

• 2:18:01Speaker 01

  It's philosophically interesting.

• 2:18:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:02Speaker 01

  I mean, it all goes back to you. You get back to Plato. It's all reducto ad absurdum. So all these arguments have to start. The only way to do it is because there's an infinite number of solutions. You can't go through them as you say, let's assume for the sake of contradiction that there existed something that solves this problem. And then you turn to crank a logic until you blow up the universe. And then you go back and say, okay, our original assumption that this solution exists can't be true. I just think philosophically, it's like a beauty is a really exciting, kind of beautiful thing. It's what I specialize in within distributed algorithms is more like time bound and possibility results. Like no, no algorithm can solve this problem faster than this in this setting. Of all the infinite number of ways you might ever do it.

• 2:18:41Lex Fridman?

  So you have of many papers, but the one that caught my eye is Smooth Analysis of Dynamic Networks. In which you write, "A problem with the worst-case perspective is that it often leads to extremely strong lower bounds. These strong results motivate a key question: is this bound robust in the sense that it captures the fundamental difficulty introduced by dynamism? Or is the bound fragile in the sense that the poor performance it describes depends on an exact sequence of adversarial changes? Fragile lower bounds leave open the possibility of algorithms that might still perform well in practice." That's in the sense of the impossible and the bounds discussion presents the interesting

• 2:19:23Lex Fridman?

  question. I just like the idea of robust and fragile bounds. But what do you make about this kind of tension between what's provably like what the bounds you can prove that are like robust and something that's a bit more fragile? And also, by way of answering that for this particular paper, can you say what the hell are dynamic networks?

• 2:19:50Speaker 01

  You don't know this? Come on now.

• 2:19:52Lex Fridman?

  And I have no idea. And what is smooth analysis?

• 2:19:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, okay. So, so smooth analysis, it's, so it wasn't my idea. So Spielman and Tang came up with this in the context of sequential algorithms. Just like the normal world of an algorithm that runs on a computer. And they were, they were looking at, there's a well-known algorithm called the simplex algorithm, but basically you're trying to, whatever, find a hole around a group of points. And there was an algorithm that worked really well in practice. But when you analyze it, you would say, you know, I can't guarantee it's going to work well in practice because if you have just the right inputs, this thing could run really long, right? But in practice, it seemed to be really fast. So, smooth analysis is they came in and they said, let's assume that a bad guy chooses the inputs. It could be anything like really bad ones. And all we're going to do is, and simplex their

• 2:20:39Speaker 01

  numbers. We're going to just randomly put a little bit of noise on each of the numbers. And they showed if you put a little bit of noise on the numbers, suddenly simplex algorithm goes really fast. Like, oh, that explains this, this lower bound, this, this idea that it could sometimes run really long was a fragile bound because it could only run a really long time if you had exactly the worst pathological input. So then my collaborators and I brought this over to the world of distributed algorithms. We brought them over the general lower bounds, right? So, so in the world of dynamic networks, So distributed algorithm is a bunch of algorithms on different machines talking to each other, trying to solve a problem. And sometimes they're in a network. So you imagine them connected with network links. And a dynamic network, those can change, right? So I was talking to you, but now I can't talk to you anymore.

• 2:21:21Speaker 01

  Now I'm connected to a person over here. It's a really hard environment, mathematically speaking, and there's a lot of really strong lower bounds, which you could imagine if the network can change all the time and a bad guy's doing it, it's like hard to do things well.

• 2:21:34Lex Fridman?

  So there's an algorithm running on every single node in the network?

• 2:21:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:37Lex Fridman?

  And then you're trying to say something of any kind that makes any kind of definitive sense about the performance of that algorithm?

• 2:21:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like, we're, so I just submitted a new paper on this a couple of weeks ago, and we were looking at a very simple problem. There's, there's some messages in the network. We want everyone to get them. If the network doesn't change, you can do this pretty well. You can pipeline them. There's some algorithms that work, basic algorithms that work really well. If the network can change every round, there's these lower bounds that says it takes a really long time. There's a way that like, no matter what algorithm you come up with, there's a way the network can change in such a way that just really slows down your progress, basically, right? So smooth analysis there says, yeah, but that seems like a really, you had a really bad luck. If your network was changing like exactly in the right way that you needed to screw your algorithm.

• 2:22:25Speaker 01

  So we said, what if we randomly just add or remove a couple of edges in every round? So the adversary is trying to choose the worst possible network. We're just tweaking it a little bit. And in that case, this is a new paper. I mean, it's a blinded submission, so maybe I shouldn't. It's not, whatever. We basically showed-

• 2:22:40Lex Fridman?

  An anonymous friend of yours submitted a paper-

• 2:22:42Speaker 01

  Anonymous friend of mine, yeah, yeah, whose paper should be accepted. So that even just adding like one random edge per round, you, the, and here's the cool thing about it. The simplest possible solution to this problem blows away that lower bound and does really well. So that's like a very fragile lower bound because we're like, it's, it's almost impossible to actually keep things slow.

• 2:23:04Lex Fridman?

  I wonder how many lower bounds you can smash open with this kind of analysis and show that they're fragile?

• 2:23:11Speaker 01

  This is my interest, yeah. Because in distributed algorithms, there's a ton of really famous, strong lower bounds, but things have to go wrong. Really, really wrong for these lower bound arguments to work. And so I like this approach. So this, this whole notion of fragile versus robust. I was like, well, let's go in and just throw a little noise in there. And if it becomes solvable, then maybe that lower bound wasn't really something we should worry about.

• 2:23:34Lex Fridman?

  You know, that's going to embarrass. That's really uncomfortable. That's really embarrassing to a lot of people. Because, okay, this is the OCD thing with the, with the spaces. Is it feels really good when you can prove a nice bound? And if you say that that bound is fragile, that, that's, that's like, there's going to be a sad kid that walks like with their lunchbox back home like, my, my lower bound doesn't matter.

• 2:24:01Speaker 01

  No, I don't think they care. It's all, and I don't know. It feels like to me, a lot of this theory is just math machismo. It's like, whatever. This was a hard bound to prove.

• 2:24:09Lex Fridman?

  What do you think about that? Like, so if you show that something is fragile, that's more important. That's really important for in practice, right? So do you think kind of theoretical computer science is living its own world, just like mathematics? And their main effort, which I think is very valuable is to develop ideas. It's not necessarily interesting, whether it's applicable in the real world.

• 2:24:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, we don't care about the applicability. Yeah, like we kind of do, but not really. And we're terrible with computers. You can't do anything useful with computers and we don't know how to code. And, and you know, we're not, we're not productive members of like technological society. But I do think things percolate.

• 2:24:45Lex Fridman?

  Exactly.

• 2:24:45Speaker 01

  You percolate from the, the world of theory into the world of algorithm design, where we'll pull on the theory and now suddenly it's useful. And then the algorithm design gets pulled into the world of practice where they say, well, actually we can make this algorithm a lot better because in practice, really these servers do X, Y, Z. And now we can make this super efficient. And so I do think, I mean, I tell my, I teach theory to the PhD students at Georgetown. I show them the sort of funnel of like, okay, we're over here doing theory, but it eventually, some of this stuff will percolate down in effect at the very end, you know, a phone. But it's a long, it's a long tunnel.

• 2:25:17Lex Fridman?

  But the very question you're asking at the, the highest philosophical level is fascinating. Like if you take a system, a distributed system or a network and introduce a little bit of noise into it, like how many problems of that nature are fundamentally changed by that little introduction of noise?

• 2:25:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's all especially distributed algorithms, the model is everything. Like, the way we work is we're incredibly precise about here's exactly, it's mathematical. Here's exactly how the network works and it's a state machine. Algorithms are state machines. There's rounds and schedulers. We're super precise, we can prove lower bounds. But yeah, often those lower, those impossibility results really get at the hard edges of exactly how that model works. So we'll, we'll see if this, so we, we published a paper on this, that paper you mentioned. They kind of introduced the idea to distributed algorithms world. And I, I think that's got some traction and there's been some follow ups. So we've just submitted our, our next. Honestly, the issue with the next is that like the result fell out so easily.

• 2:26:18Speaker 01

  And this shows the mathematical machismo problem in these, in these fields is there's a good chance the paper won't be accepted because there wasn't enough mathematical self flagellation.

• 2:26:27Lex Fridman?

  That's such a nice finding. So even just showing that very few, just very little bit of noise.

• 2:26:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:33Lex Fridman?

  Can have a dramatic, make a dramatic statement about the.

• 2:26:37Speaker 01

  It was a big surprise to us, but um, once we figured out how to show it, it's not too hard.

• 2:26:43Lex Fridman?

  And these are, these are venues that for theoretical.

• 2:26:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:46Lex Fridman?

  For theoretical, okay. So the, the fascinating tension there exists in other disciplines, like one of them is machine learning. Now, which despite the, the power of machine learning and deep learning and all like the impact of it. In the real world, the main conferences on machine learning are still resistant to application papers.

• 2:27:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:08Lex Fridman?

  I'm not uh, sort of, and application papers broadly defined, meaning like finding almost like you would like Darwin did by like uh, going around, collecting some information and saying, huh? Isn't this interesting?

• 2:27:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:25Lex Fridman?

  Like, those are some of the most popular blogs and yet as a paper, it's not really accepted. I, I wonder what you think about this whole world of deep learning. From a perspective of theory, what do you make of this whole discipline of the success of neural networks of how to do science on them? Are you excited by the possibilities of what we might discover about neural networks? Do you think it's fundamental engineering discipline? Or is there something theoretical that we might crack open one of these days in understanding something deep about how system optimization and how systems learn?

• 2:28:01Speaker 01

  I am convinced by, is it Tegmark at MIT? Who's?

• 2:28:05Lex Fridman?

  Tegmark?

• 2:28:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, Tegmark, right? So his notion has always been convincing to me that the fact that some of these models are inscrutable is not fundamental to them. And that we can, we're going to get better and better because in the end, you know, the reason why practicing computer scientists often who are doing AI or working at AI and industry aren't like worried about so much existential threats is because they see the reality is they're multiplying matrices with NumPy or something like this, right? Yeah. And tweaking constants and hoping that the classifier fitness, for God's sakes, before the submission deadline actually like gets above some, like it feels like it's linear algebra and TDM, right? But anyways, I'm really convinced with his idea that once we understand better and better

• 2:28:49Speaker 01

  what's going on from a theory perspective, it's going to make it into an engineering discipline. So in my mind, where we're going to end up is, okay, forget these metaphors of neurons and these things are going to be put down into these mathematical kind of elegant equations, differentiable equations that just kind of work well. And then it's going to be when I need a little bit of AI in this thing, plumbing, like let's get a little bit of a pattern recognizer with a noise module and let's connect. I mean, you know, this feels better than me, so I don't know if this is like a reasonable, a reasonable prediction, but that we're going to, it's going to become less inscrutable and then it's going to become more engineerable. And then we're going to have AI in more things because we're going to have a little bit more

• 2:29:29Speaker 01

  control over how we piece together these different classification black boxes.

• 2:29:35Lex Fridman?

  So one of the problems, and there might be some interesting parallels that you might provide intuition on is, you know, neural networks are very large and they have a lot of. It, you know, we were talking about, uh, you know, dynamic networks and distributed algorithms. One of the problems with the analysis of neural networks is, uh, you know, you have a lot of nodes and you love a lot of edges. To be able to interpret and to control different things is very difficult. There's, uh, uh, there's fields in trying to figure out like mathematically how you form, uh, clean representations that are like, like one node contains all the information about a particular thing and no other nodes is correlated to it.

• 2:30:19Lex Fridman?

  So like, it has unique knowledge and like, but that ultimately boils down to trying to simplify this thing into, that goes against its very nature, which is like deeply connected and, uh, like dynamic and just, you know, hundreds of millions, billions of nodes.

• 2:30:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:30:39Lex Fridman?

  And in a distributed sense, like when you zoom out, the thing has a representation and understanding of something, but the individual nodes are just doing their little exchanging thing. And it's the same thing with Stephen Wolfram, when you talk about cellular automata, it's very difficult to do math when you have a huge collection of distributed things each acting on their own. And it's almost like, it's, it feels like it's almost impossible to do any kind of theoretical work in the traditional sense. It almost becomes completely like, uh, like a biology, you become a biologist as opposed to a theoretician. You just study it experimentally.

• 2:31:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, so I think that's the big question, I guess, right? Yeah. Is, so, so is the large size and interconnectiveness of the, like a deep learning network fundamental to that task? Or are we just not very good at it yet because we're, we're using the wrong metaphor? I mean, the human brain learns with much fewer examples and, and with much less tuning of the whatever, whatever, whatever probably that requires to get those like deep mind networks up and running. But yeah, so I don't really know, but the one thing I have observed is that the, yeah, there, there's a, the mundane nature of some of the working with these models tends to lead people to think that, to do it like, it could be Skynet or it could be like a

• 2:31:59Speaker 01

  lot of pain to get, you know, the thermostat to do what we want it to do.

• 2:32:03Lex Fridman?

  And there's a lot of open questions in between there. And then of course, the, at a distributed, the distributed network.

• 2:32:12Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:32:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:35Lex Fridman?

  So the, the scale there.

• 2:32:36Speaker 01

  We might have that now.

• 2:32:38Lex Fridman?

  We might have that now. We just don't know.

• 2:32:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:40Lex Fridman?

  Like, as this happens.

• 2:32:41Speaker 01

  Is Twitter creating a little mini Skynet? I mean, because what happens? It twirls out ramifications in the world and is it really that much different if it's a robot with tentacles or a bunch of servers that?

• 2:32:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And the destructive effects could be, I mean, it could be political, but it could also be like, you know, you could probably make an interesting case that the virus, the coronavirus spread on Twitter too, in the minds of people, like the fear and the misinformation in some very interesting ways.

• 2:33:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:14Lex Fridman?

  Mixed up. And maybe this pandemic wasn't sufficiently dangerous to where that could have created a weird like instability, but maybe other things might create instability, like somebody, God forbid, detonates nuclear weapons away. And then maybe the destructive aspect of that would not as much be the military actions, but the way those news are spread on Twitter.

• 2:33:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:37Lex Fridman?

  And the panic that creates.

• 2:33:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a great case study, right? Like what, what happened? Not, but I'm not suggesting that Lexi go let off a nuclear bomb. I meant the coronavirus, but.

• 2:33:47Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 2:33:48Speaker 01

  But, but yeah, I think that's a really interesting case study. I'm interested in the counterfactual of 1995. Like do the same virus in 1995. So first of all, it would have been, I get to hear whatever, the nightly news will talk about it and then there'll be my local health board will talk about it. That mitigation decisions would probably necessarily be very sort of localized. Okay. Our community is trying to figure out what are we going to do? What's going to happen? Like we see this with schools, like where I grew up in New Jersey, there's very localized school districts. So even though they had sort of really bad viral numbers there, my school I grew up in has been open since the fall because it's very localized. It's like these teachers and these parents, what do we want to do? What are we comfortable with?

• 2:34:32Speaker 01

  I live in a school district right now in Montgomery County that's a billion dollar a year budget, 150,000 kid school district. It just can't, it's closed, you know, because it's too. So I'm interested in that counterfactual. Yes, you have all this information moving around. And then you have the, the, the effects on discourse that we were talking about earlier, that, that the, the Neil Postman style effects of Twitter, which shifts people into a sort of a dunk culture mindset of, uh, don't give an inch to the other team. And we're used to this and was fired up by politics and the unique attributes of Twitter. Now throw in the coronavirus and suddenly we see decades of public health knowledge, a lot of which was honed during the HIV epidemic, was thrown out the window because a lot of this was happening on Twitter. And suddenly we had public health officials using a don't give an inch to the

• 2:35:16Speaker 01

  other team mindset of like, well, if we say this, that might validate something that was wrong over here. And we need to, if we say this, then maybe like that'll stop them from doing this. That's like very Twitter-y.

• 2:35:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:27Speaker 01

  In a way that in 1995 is probably not the way public health officials would be thinking. Or now it's like, well, this is if we said this about masks, but the other team said that about masks, we can't give an inch to this. So we gotta be careful. And like, we can't tell people it's okay after they're vaccinated because that might, we're giving them an inch on this. And that's very Twitter-y in my mind, right? That is the, the impact of, of Twitter on the way we think about discourse, which is a dunking culture of don't give any inch to the other team. And it's all about slam dunks. We are completely right and they're completely wrong. It's as a rhetorical strategy is incredibly simplistic, but it's also the way that we think right now about how we do debate. It combined terribly with a election year pandemic.

• 2:36:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, election year pandemic. I wonder if we could do some smooth analysis. Let's run the simulation over a few times.

• 2:36:10Speaker 01

  A little bit of noise. Yeah.

• 2:36:12Lex Fridman?

  See, see if it can dramatically change the behavior of the system. Okay. We talked about your love for proving that something is impossible. So there's quite a few still open problems and complexity of algorithms. Uh, so let me ask, does P equal NP?

• 2:36:29Speaker 01

  Probably not.

• 2:36:31Lex Fridman?

  Probably not. If P equals NP.

• 2:36:36Lex Fridman?

  What kind of, you know, and you'll be really surprised, somebody proves it.

• 2:36:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:36:41Lex Fridman?

  What would that proof look like? And why would that even be? What would that mean? What would that proof look like? In what possible universe could P equals NP? Is there something insightful you could say there?

• 2:36:52Speaker 01

  It could, it could be true. And I mean, I'm not a complexity theorist, but every complexity theorist I know is convinced they're not equal. And are basically not working on it anymore. I mean, there is a million dollars at stake if you can, if you can solve the proof. It's one of the millennium prizes. Okay, so here, here's how I think the P not equals NP proof is going to eventually happen. I think it's going to fall out. And it's going to be not super simple. But not as hard as people think, because my, my, my theory about a lot of theoretical computer science, based on just some results I've done. So this is a huge extrapolation is that a lot of what we're doing is just obfuscating deeper mathematics. So like, this happens to me a lot, not a lot, but it's happened to me a few times in my work where, you know, we obfuscate it because we say, well, there's an algorithm and has this much, you know,

• 2:37:37Speaker 01

  memory and they're connected on a network and okay, here's our setup. And now we're trying to see how fast it can solve a problem. And people do bounds about it. And then the end, it turns out that like, we were just obfuscating some underlying, you know, mathematical thing that already existed. Right? So this has happened to me. I had this paper I was quite fond of a while ago. It was looking at this problem called contention resolution, where you, you, you put an unknown set of people on a shared channel. And they're trying to break symmetry. So it's like an ethernet, whatever. Only one person can use it at a time. You try to break symmetry. There's all these bounds people have proven over the years about how long it takes to do this. Right? And like I discovered at some point, there's this one combinatorial result from the early 1990s.

• 2:38:21Speaker 01

  All of these lower bound proofs all come from this. And in fact, it improved a lot of them and simplified a lot. You could put it all in one paper. You know, it's like, are we really? And then, okay, so this new paper that I submitted a couple of weeks ago. I found you could take some of these same lower bound proofs for this contention resolution problem. You could reprove them using Shannon's source code theorem. That actually, when you're breaking contention, what you're really doing is building a code over, you know, if you have a distribution on the network sizes, it's a code over that source. And if you plug in a high entropy information source and plug in from 1948, the source code theorem that says on a noiseless channel, you can't send things at a faster rate than the entropy allows, the exact same lower bounds fall back out again, right?

• 2:39:03Speaker 01

  So like this type of thing happens, there's a, there's some famous lower bounds and distributed algorithms that turned out to all be algebraic topology underneath the covers and they won the Godel Prize for working on that. So my sense is what's going to happen is at some point, someone really smart, it's going to be very exciting, is going to realize there's some sort of other representation of what's going on with these Turing machines trying to sort of efficiently compute.

• 2:39:27Lex Fridman?

  It'll naturally fall out of that.

• 2:39:28Speaker 01

  And there'll be an existing mathematical result that applies.

• 2:39:33Lex Fridman?

  Someone or something, I guess, it could be AI theorem provers kind of thing.

• 2:39:37Speaker 01

  It could be, yeah. I mean, not a, well, yeah. I mean, there's theorem provers, like what that means now, which is not fun.

• 2:39:44Lex Fridman?

  It's just a bunch of.

• 2:39:46Speaker 01

  Very carefully formulated, postulates that, but I take your point, yeah.

• 2:39:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So, okay.

• 2:39:53Lex Fridman?

  You know, on a small tangent, and then you're kind of implying that mathematics, it almost feels like a kind of weird evolutionary tree that ultimately leads back to some kind of ancestral, a few fundamental ideas that all are just like, they're all somehow connected. In that sense, do you think

• 2:40:14Lex Fridman?

  math is fundamental to our universe and we're just like slowly trying to understand these patterns or is it, is it discovered? Or is it just a little game that we play amongst ourselves to try to fit little patterns to the world?

• 2:40:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the question, right? That's the physicist's question. I mean, I'm probably, I'm in the discovered camp, but I don't do theoretical physics, so I know they have a, they feel like they have a stronger claim to answering that question. But everything comes back to it, everything comes back to it. I mean, all of physics, the fact that the universe is, well, okay.

• 2:40:54Speaker 01

  It's a complicated question.

• 2:40:56Lex Fridman?

  So how often do you think, how deeply does this result describe the fundamental reality of nature?

• 2:41:06Speaker 01

  So the reason I hesitated, because it's something I taught this seminar and did a little work on what are called biological algorithms. So there's this notion of, so physicists use mathematics to explain the universe, right? And it was unreasonable that mathematics worked so well. Yeah, all these differential equations, why does that explain all we need to know about thermodynamics and gravity and all these type of things? Well, there's this movement within the intersection of computer science and biology. This is kind of Wolframium, I guess, really, that algorithms can be very explanatory, right? That like if you're trying to, if you're trying to explain parsimoniously something

• 2:41:48Speaker 01

  about like an ant colony or something like this, you're not going to, ultimately it's not going to be explained as a equation, like a physics equation, it's going to be explained by an algorithm. So like this algorithm, run distributedly is going to explain the behavior. So that's mathematical, but not quite mathematical. But it is, if you think about an algorithm like a lambda calculus, which brings you back to the world of mathematics. So I'm thinking out loud here, but basically abstract math is sort of like unreasonably effective at explaining a lot of things. And that's just what I feel like I glimpse. I'm not a, not like a super well-known theoretician. I don't have really famous results. So even as a sort of middling, you know, career theoretician, I keep encountering

• 2:42:32Speaker 01

  this where we think we're solving some problem about computers and algorithms and it's some much deeper underlying math. It's Shannon, but Shannon is entropy, but entropy was really, you know, goes all the way back to whatever it was Boyle or all the way back to looking at the early physics. And, and it's, anyways, to me, I think it's amazing.

• 2:42:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but it could be the flip side of that could be just our brains draw so much pleasure from the deriving generalized theories and simplifying the universe that we just naturally see that kind of simplicity in everything.

• 2:43:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's the whole, you know, Newton to Einstein, right? So you can, you can say this must be right because it's so predictive. Oh, it's not quite predictive because mercury wobbles a little bit, but I think we have it set. And then you turn out now Einstein and then, and then you get more like, no, not Einstein. It's actually statistical and yeah, so.

• 2:43:25Lex Fridman?

  It's hard to also know like where a smooth analysis fits into all that. Where a little bit of noise, like you can say something very clean about a system and then a little bit of noise, like the average case is actually very different. And so, I mean, that's where like the quantum mechanics comes in. It's like, uh, why does that have to be randomness in this?

• 2:43:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, or do this complex statistics?

• 2:43:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:43:50Lex Fridman?

  So to be determined.

• 2:43:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, that'll be my next book. That'd be ambitious. The fundamental, the fundamental core of reality, comma, and some advice for being more productive at work.

• 2:44:02Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you just if it's possible to do an overview and just some brief comments of wisdom on the process of publishing a book? What's that process entail? What are the different options and what's your recommendation for somebody that wants to write a book like yours, a nonfiction book that discovers something interesting about this world?

• 2:44:26Speaker 01

  So what I, I usually advise is follow the, follow the process as is. Don't try to reinvent. I think that, that happens a lot where you'll try to reinvent the way the publishing industry should work. Like this is kind of not like in a business model ways, but just like, this is what I want to do. I want to write a thousand words a day and I want to do this and I'm going to put on the internet and, and the publishing industry is very specific about how it works. And so like when I got started writing books, which at a very young age, so, you know, I sold my first book at the age of 21. The way I did that is I found a family friend that was an agent and I said, I'm not trying to make you be my agent.

• 2:45:09Speaker 01

  Just explain to me how this works, not just how the world works, but give me the hard truth about how would a 21 year old, under what conditions could a 21 year old sell a book and what would that look like? And she just explained it to me, well, you have to do this and have to be a subject that it made sense for you to write. And you would have to do this type of writing for other publications, the validated and blah, blah, blah. And you have to get the agent first and I learned the whole game plan. And then I executed and so the rough game plan is with nonfiction, you get the agent first. And the agent's going to sell it to the publishers. So like, you're never sending something directly to the publishers and nonfiction, you're not writing the book first. Right. The, you're going to get an advance from the publisher once sold. Uh, and then you're going to do the primary writing of the book. In fact, it will, in most circumstances hurt you if you've already written.

• 2:45:52Lex Fridman?

  If you've already written, yeah. So you're, you're trying to sell, well, I guess the agent first you sell to the agent and the agent sells it to the publishers.

• 2:45:59Speaker 01

  It's much easier to get an agent than a book deal. So the, the thought is if you can't get an agent, then why would you? So you, you, you start with, and also, and the way this works with a good agent is they know all the editors. And they have lunch with the editors and they're always just like, okay, what projects do you have coming? What are you looking for? Here's one of my authors. That's the way all these deals happen. It's not, you're not emailing a manuscript to a, a slush pile.

• 2:46:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And so, so first of all, the agent takes a percentage and then the publishers, this is where the process comes in. They, they take also a cut that's probably ridiculous. So if you try to reinvent, uh, the system, you'll probably be frustrated by the percentage that everyone takes relative to how much bureaucracy and efficiency.

• 2:46:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:46:35Lex Fridman?

  Ridiculousness there is in the system. Your recommendation is like, you're just one ant. Stop trying to, uh, build your own ant colony.

• 2:46:43Speaker 01

  Well, or, or, or if you create your own process for how it should work, it's not going to, the book's not going to get published. So, so there's the separate question, the economic question of like, should I create my own, like self-publish it or do something like that? But, but putting that aside, there's a lot of people I encounter that want to publish a book with a main publisher. But they invent their own rules for how that works, right?

• 2:47:02Lex Fridman?

  So, so then the alternative though is self-publishing and the, the, so the downside, there's a lot of downsides. It's like, it's almost like publishing an opinion piece in the New York Times versus writing on blog. There's no reason why writing a blog post on Medium.

• 2:47:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:47:18Lex Fridman?

  Can't get way more attention and legitimacy and long lasting prestige than a New York Times article. But nevertheless, for most people, writing in a prestigious newspaper, quote unquote prestigious, uh, is, is just easier.

• 2:47:35Speaker 01

  And well, and depends on your goal. So, you know, like I push you towards a big publisher because I think your goal is it's huge ideas. You want impact.

• 2:47:44Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:47:45Speaker 01

  You're gonna have more impact, you know?

• 2:47:47Lex Fridman?

  Even though in like actually, so there's different ways to measure impact.

• 2:47:50Speaker 01

  In the world of ideas.

• 2:47:51Lex Fridman?

  In the world of ideas. And also, yeah, in the world of ideas, it's kind of like the clubhouse thing now, even if the audience is not large, the people in the audience are very interesting. It's it's like the conversation feels like there has long lasting impact.

• 2:48:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:48:09Lex Fridman?

  Among among the people who in different disparate industries that are also then starting their own conversations and all that kind of stuff.

• 2:48:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, because you have other, so like self publishing a book, the goals that would solve, you have much better ways of getting to those goals might be part of it, right? So if there's the financial aspect of, well, you get to keep more of it. I mean, the podcast is probably going to crush.

• 2:48:31Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:48:31Speaker 01

  What the book's gonna do anyways, right? Yeah. If it's want to get directly to certain audiences or crowds, it might be harder through a traditional publisher, there's better ways to talk to those crowds. It could be on clubhouse with all these new technologies, self published books not going to be the most effective way to find your way to a new crowd. But if the idea is like, I want to have a leave a dent in the world of ideas, then to have a vulnerable old publisher, you know, put out your book and a nice hard cover and do the things they do, that goes a long way. And they do do a lot. I mean, there's it's very difficult, actually. There's so much involved in putting together a book.

• 2:49:06Lex Fridman?

  They get books into bookstores and all that kind of stuff.

• 2:49:09Speaker 01

  All this and from an efficiency standpoint, I mean, just the time involved in trying to do this yourself is.

• 2:49:14Lex Fridman?

  They have a process, right? Like you said, they have a process.

• 2:49:17Speaker 01

  They've got a process. I mean, I know, like Jaco did this recently, started his own imprint and I have a couple other, but it's a it's huge overhead. I mean, if you like, if you run a business and you so like Jaco is a good case study, right? So he got, you know, fed up with Simon and Schuster dragging their feet and said, I'm gonna start my own imprint then, if you're not gonna publish my kids book. But he, what does he do? He runs businesses, right?

• 2:49:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:39Speaker 01

  So I think in his world, like I already run, I'm a, I'm a partner in whatever in origin and I have this and that. And so it's like, yeah, we can run businesses. That's what we know how to do. That's what I do. I run businesses. I have people. But for like you or I, we don't run businesses. It'd be terrible.

• 2:49:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49:54Lex Fridman?

  Well, especially these kinds of businesses, right? So I do want to launch a business, but very different technology business.

• 2:49:59Speaker 01

  Very different.

• 2:50:00Lex Fridman?

  Very different.

• 2:50:00Speaker 01

  Very, very different. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is like, okay, I need copy editors and graphic book binders. And I need to contract with the printer, but the printer doesn't have slots. And so now I have to try to, I mean, it's.

• 2:50:11Lex Fridman?

  I get so, I need to shut this off in my brain, but I get so frustrated when the system could clearly be improved. It's the thing that you're mentioning.

• 2:50:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:50:19Lex Fridman?

  It's like, this is so inefficient. Every time I go to the DMV or something like that, you think like, ah, this could be done so much better.

• 2:50:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:50:27Lex Fridman?

  But, you know, and the same thing is the worry with, with an editor, which I guess would come from the publisher. Like who would, who would, uh, how much supervision on your book did you receive? Like, hey, do you think this is too long? Or do you think the title, like title? How much choice do you have in the title, in the cover, in the presentation and the branding and all that kind of stuff?

• 2:50:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, all of it depends, right? So when it comes on the, the relationship on the, with the editor on the writing, it depends on the editor and it depends on you. It's like, at this point, I'm on my seventh book and I write for a lot of major publications. And at this point I have what I feel like is a, a voice that I've, and a level of craft that I, I'm very comfortable with, right? So my editor is not going to be, she kind of is going to trust me and it's going to be more big picture. Like, uh, I'm losing the thread here, or this seems like it could be longer. Whereas the first book I wrote when I was 21, I had notes such as, you start a lot of sentences with so. You don't use any contractions because I've been doing scientific writing.

• 2:51:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:31Speaker 01

  Use contractions. Like you should probably use contractions. That language was way more, you know, I had to go back and rewrite the whole thing. Yeah.

• 2:51:38Lex Fridman?

  But ultimately the recommendation, I mean, we, we talked offline and sort of, I was thinking loosely. Not really sure, but I was thinking of writing a book and there's a kind of desire to go self-publishing, not for financial reasons.

• 2:51:51Speaker 01

  And the money can be good, by the way, right? I mean, it's very, it's very power law type just distributed, right? So, so the money on a hardcover is somewhere between one or $2 a book.

• 2:52:01Lex Fridman?

  So the thing is, I personally don't.

• 2:52:03Speaker 01

  But then you give up 15% to the agent, so.

• 2:52:05Lex Fridman?

  I personally don't care about money, as I've mentioned before, but I, for some reason, really don't like spending money on things that are not worth it. Like, I don't care if I get money, I just don't like spending money on like feeding a system that's inefficient. It's like I'm contributing to the problem. That's my biggest problem.

• 2:52:25Speaker 01

  Right. So you think that you're worried about the inefficiencies of the.

• 2:52:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the fact that.

• 2:52:30Speaker 01

  Like the overhead, the number of people involved or.

• 2:52:32Lex Fridman?

  The overhead, the emails again, the, the, the, the fact that they have this way of speaking, which I'm allergic to many people, like that's very marketing speak. Like you could tell they've been having Zoom meetings all day. It's like, as opposed to a sort of creative collaborators that are like also a little bit crazy.

• 2:52:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52:55Lex Fridman?

  And I suppose some of that is finding the right people.

• 2:52:57Speaker 01

  Finding the right people. That's what I would say. I say there's definitely, and maybe it's just good fortune. Good fortune in terms of like my agents and editors I've worked with, there's really good people who they're, see the vision or smart or incredibly literary. Yeah. And like, yeah, I had a great editor when I was first moving into hardcover books, for example. It was my first, you know, big book advance and my first sort of big deal. And he was like a senior editor and, and it was very useful, you know? He was like, we had a lot of long talks, right? I was, so this was my, my fourth book, So Good They Can't Ignore You was my first, my big hardcover idea book. And we had a lot of talks, like even before I started writing it.

• 2:53:40Speaker 01

  Just let's talk about books and his philosophy. He'd been in the business for a long time. He was the head of the, the head of the imprint. It was useful.

• 2:53:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but I mean, the other frustrating thing is how long the whole thing takes.

• 2:53:51Speaker 01

  Takes a long time.

• 2:53:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I suppose that's you just have to accept.

• 2:53:55Speaker 01

  Well, I yeah, I handed in this manuscript for the the book that comes out now, like when this I handed it in. I mean, over the summer, like during the pandemic. So it's not. It's not terrible, right? And we were editing during the pandemic and I finished it in the spring.

• 2:54:09Lex Fridman?

  We've talked most of today, except for a little bit computer science, most of today about a productive life.

• 2:54:16Lex Fridman?

  How does love, friendship and family fit into that? Is there um? Do you find that there's a tension? Is it possible for relationships to energize the whole process to benefit? Or is it ultimately a trade off? But because life is short. And ultimately. We seek happiness, not productivity. That we have to accept that tension.

• 2:54:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think relationships is the that's the found that's the whole deal. Like, I thought about this the other day. I don't the context was I was thinking about if I was going to give like an advice speech. Like a commencement.

• 2:54:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:57Speaker 01

  Address or like to give an advice to to young people. And like the big question I have for young people is. If they haven't already, bad things are going to happen. That you don't control. So what's the plan? Right? Like, let's start. Let's start figuring that out now because it's not all good, you know. Some people get off better than others, but eventually. Stuff happens, right? You get sick, something falls apart, the the economy craters, the. Someone you like you know dies, like all sorts of bad stuff is going to happen, right? So how are we going to do this? Like, how do how do we like live life and life is hard and in ways that is unfair and unpredictable? Then relationships is the. That's the buffer for all of that. Because we're wired for it, right?

• 2:55:40Speaker 01

  I went down this rabbit hole with digital minimalism. I went down this huge rabbit hole about the human brain and sociality. It's all we're wired to do. It's like all of our brain is for this. Like everything, all of our mechanisms, everything is made to service the social connections because it's what kept you alive. You know, I mean, you had the, your tribal connections is how you didn't starve during the famine. People would share food, et cetera. And so you can't neglect that. And it's like everything and, and people feel it, right? Like there's no, our social networks are hooked up to the pain center. It's why it feels so terrible when you miss someone or like someone dies or something, right? That's like how seriously we take it. There's a, a pretty accepted theory that the default mode network, like a lot of what the default mode network is doing.

• 2:56:21Speaker 01

  So that's sort of the default state our brain goes into when we're not doing something in particular is practicing sociality. Practicing interactions, think because it's, it's so, you know, crucial to what we do. It's like at the core of human thriving. So I've more recently, the way I think about it is like relationships first. Like, okay, given that foundation of putting like, and I don't think we put nearly enough time into it. I worry that social media is reducing relationships, strong relationships, strong relationships where you're sacrificing non-trivial time and attention, resources, whatever, on behalf of other people. And that's the net that is going to allow you to get through anything. Then, all right, now what do we want to do with, uh, the surplus that remains? Maybe I want to build some, build some fire, build some tools.

• 2:57:05Lex Fridman?

  So put relationships first. I like the worst case analysis from the computer science perspective. Put relationships first. Yeah, because everything else is just, uh, assuming average case, assuming things kind of keep going as they were going.

• 2:57:19Speaker 01

  And you're neglecting the fundamental human drive. Like we, we have this, we talked about the boredom instinct. We want to build things. We want to have impact. We want to do productivity. That's not nearly as clear cut of a drive of we need people.

• 2:57:30Lex Fridman?

  But if we look at the real worst case, uh, analysis here is one day, you're pretty young now, but that's not going to last very long. You're going to die one day. Is that something you think about?

• 2:57:44Speaker 01

  Little bit.

• 2:57:45Lex Fridman?

  Are you afraid of death?

• 2:57:46Speaker 01

  Well, I'm of the mindset of, let's make that a productivity hack.

• 2:57:51Speaker 01

  I'm of the mindset of, um,

• 2:57:54Speaker 01

  We need to confront that soon.

• 2:57:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:56Speaker 01

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

• 2:58:14Lex Fridman?

  So what, when you're laying on your deathbed, would you, in looking back, what would make you think like, I did a, I did okay, I'm proud of that. I optimized the hell out of that.

• 2:58:25Speaker 01

  That's a good, I mean, it's a good question to go backwards on. I mean, this, this is like David Brooks's eulogy virtues versus resume virtues. Right? So hi- his argument is that, and that's another interesting DC area person. I keep thinking of interesting DC area people. All right, David Brooks is here too.

• 2:58:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:44Speaker 01

  You, he, his argument, he thinks eulogy virtues is, so what we eulogize is different than what we promote on the resume. That's his whole thing now, right? His second mountain wrote the character of both these books are, he has this whole premise of there's like this professional phase and there's a phase of, of giving of yourself and sacrificing on behalf of other people. I don't know, maybe it's all mixed together, right? You wanna, I think living by a code is important, right? I mean, this is something that's not emphasized enough. I always think of advice that my undergrad should be given, that, that they're not given, especially at a place like Georgetown that has this like deep history of, you know, trying to promote human flourishing because of the Jesuit connection.

• 2:59:23Speaker 01

  There's such, there's such a resiliency and pride that comes out of living well, even when it's hard, like living according to a code, living accord to, which, which, you know, I think religion used to structure this for people. But in its absence, you need some sort of replacement. But this, even when things were, soldiers get this a lot, right? They experience this a lot. Even when things were tough, I was able to persist in living this way that I knew was right, even though it wasn't the easiest thing to do in the moment. Like fewer things give humans more resiliency. It's like, having done that, your relationships were strong, right? Many people coming to your funeral is the standard. Like, a lot of people are gonna come to your funeral, like, I mean, you matter to a lot of people.

• 2:59:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:00Speaker 01

  And then maybe having done, to, to the extent of whatever capabilities you are, happen to be granted, you know, and they're different for different people. Some people can sprint real fast and some people can do math problems. Try to actually do something of impact.

• 3:00:15Lex Fridman?

  I'll just promise to give gift cards to anybody who shows up to the funeral.

• 3:00:19Speaker 01

  You're gonna hack it?

• 3:00:20Lex Fridman?

  I'm gonna hack even the funeral.

• 3:00:22Speaker 01

  There's gonna be a lottery wheel you spin when you come in and someone goes away with $10,000?

• 3:00:26Lex Fridman?

  The, see, the problem is like with, with all this, the living by principles, living in principle life, focusing on relationships and kind of thinking of this life as this perfect thing, kind of forgets the notion that none of it, you know, makes any sense, right? Like the, like it, it, it kind of implies that this is like a video game and you want to get a high score. As opposed to none of this even makes sense. Like, why would he, like, what that, like, like, what does it even mean to die? It's gonna be over. It's like everything I do, all of these productivity hacks, all this life, all these efforts, all this creative efforts, kind of assume it's gonna go on forever.

• 3:01:11Lex Fridman?

  There's a kind of sense of immortality and I don't even know how intellectually it makes sense that it ends. Of course, gotta ask you in that context, what do you think is the meaning of it all? Especially for a computer scientist. I mean, there's gotta be some mathematical.

• 3:01:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, 27 or what's the, what's the Doug Letts Adams? Yeah, 42, 42, okay.

• 3:01:32Lex Fridman?

  27 is a better number.

• 3:01:33Speaker 01

  I should, I should read more sci fi.

• 3:01:35Lex Fridman?

  Maybe you're on to something with a 27.

• 3:01:37Speaker 01

  I don't want to give away too much, but just trust me, 27.

• 3:01:41Lex Fridman?

  Visible, yeah.

• 3:01:44Speaker 01

  So, I mean, I don't know, obviously, right? I mean, I'm a.

• 3:01:47Lex Fridman?

  I was hoping.

• 3:01:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, I don't know, but, but going back to what you were saying about the sort of the existentialist or the sort of the more nihilist style approach, the one thing that, that there is are intimations, right? So that there's these intimations that human has of somehow this feels right and this feels wrong. This feels good. This feels like I'm doing, I mean, aligned with something, you know, when I'm acting with courage to save, whatever, right? It's not, these intimations are a grounding against arbitrariness. Like, one of the ideas I'm really interested in is that when you look at religion. Right, so I'm interested in world religions for my grandfather was like a theologian that studied and wrote all these books. And I'm very interested in this type of stuff.

• 3:02:30Speaker 01

  And there's this great book that's it's it's not specific to a particular religion, but it's Karen Armstrong wrote this great book called The Case for God. She's very interesting. She was a Catholic nun who sort of left that religion and is but one of the smartest thinkers. In terms of like accessible theological thinking that's not tied to any particular religion. Her whole argument is that the way to understand religion, you first of all, you have to go way back pre enlightenment where all this was formed. We got messed up thinking about religion post enlightenment, right? And and these were operating systems for making sense of intimations. The one thing we had were these different intimations of this field like awe and mystical experience.

• 3:03:12Speaker 01

  And this feels some there's something you feel when you act in a certain way and don't act in this other way. And it was like the scientists who were trying to study and understand the model of the atom by just looking at experiments and trying to understand what's going on, like the great religions of the world were basically figuring out. How do we make sense of these intimations and live in alignment with them and build a life of meaning around that? What were the tools they were using? They were using ritual. They were using belief. They were using action. But all of it was like an OS. It was like a liturgical model of the atom that

• 3:03:44Lex Fridman?

  It's hard coded in, so it did through the evolutionary process.

• 3:03:48Speaker 01

  And they wanted, but I mean, they wanted to have called it that back then, or yeah, I mean, whether they said who they didn't have that as pre enlightenment. They just said, this is here and and the directive is to try to live in alignment with that.

• 3:04:00Lex Fridman?

  Well, then I want to ask who wrote the original code.

• 3:04:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so

• 3:04:03Lex Fridman?

  That's the open question.

• 3:04:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Armstrong lays out this good argument and where it gets really interesting is that that she emphasizes that all of this was considered ineffable, right? So the whole notion, and this is like rich in Jewish tradition in particular, and also in Islamic tradition. We can't comprehend and understand what's going on here, right? And so the best we can do to approximate understanding and live in alignment is we like act as if this is true. Do these rituals, have these actions or whatever. Post enlightenment, a lot of that got Once we learned about enlightenment, we grew these suspicions around religion that are very much of the modern era, right? So like the Karen Armstrong, like Sam Harris's critique of religion makes no sense, right? The critiques based on, well, this is you're making the ascent to propositions that you think are true for which you do not have evidence that they are true.

• 3:04:49Speaker 01

  She's like, that's an enlightenment thing, right? This is not the context and this is not the religion is the Rutherford model of the atom. Like, it's not actually maybe what is underneath happening, but this model explains why your chemical equations work. And so this is like the way religion was. There's a God, we'll call it this, this is how it works. We do this ritual, we act in this way, it aligns with it, just like the model of the atom predicted why, you know, Na and Cl is going to become salt. This predicts that you're going to feel and live in alignment, right? It's like this beautiful sophisticated theory, which actually matches how a lot of great theologians have, you know, thought about it. But then when you come forward in time, yeah, maybe it's evolution. I mean, this is like what Peterson hints at, right? Like, he's basically, he's not, he doesn't like to get super pinned down on this, but

• 3:05:33Speaker 01

  it kind of seems where he sees it that way.

• 3:05:36Lex Fridman?

  He's almost like searching for the words.

• 3:05:38Speaker 01

  He focuses more like Jung and other people, but, I mean, I know he's very Jungian, but that same type of analysis, I think, roughly speaking, like Armstrong is sort of a, it's kind of like a Petersonian analysis, but she's looking more at the deep history of religion than, but yeah, he throws in the evolutionary.

• 3:05:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And I wonder what home it finds, I wonder what the new home is if religion dissipates, what the new home for these kinds of natural inclinations are.

• 3:06:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:06:05Lex Fridman?

  With their technology, with their...

• 3:06:07Speaker 01

  And if it's evolution, I mean, this is Francis Collins's book also. He's like, well, that's a religious, that could be a very religious notion. I don't, I think this stuff is interesting. I'm not a very religious person, but I'm, I'm thinking it's not a bad idea. I mean, maybe, maybe what replaces, honestly, like maybe what replaces religion is a return to religion, but in this sort of more sophisticated, I mean, if you went back, yeah, I mean, it's the issue with like a lot of the, the recent critiques, I think, is it's a... It's a strama critique in a complicated way, right? Because the whole way these, the way this works, I mean, the theologians, if you're reading Paul Tillich, if you're reading Heschel, if you're reading these people, they're thinking very sophisticatedly about religion in terms of this.

• 3:06:48Speaker 01

  It's ineffable and we're just these things and this is deep, it connects us to these things in a way that puts life in alignment. We can't really explain what's going on because we are, our brains can't handle it, right? For the average person, though, this notion of live as if is kind of how religions work. Is live as if this is true. It's like an O S for getting in alignment with, because with, through cultural evolution, like you behave in this way, do these rituals, live as if this is true, gives you the, what the goal you're looking for. But that's a complicated thing, live as if this is true, because if you, especially if you're not a theologian, to say, yeah, this is not true in an enlightenment sense, but I'm living as if, it kind of takes the heat out of it. But of course, it's what people are doing, because, you know, highly religious people

• 3:07:33Speaker 01

  still do bad things, where if you really were, you know, there's absolutely a hell and I'm definitely going to go to it if I do this bad thing, you would never have, you know, no one would ever murder anyone if they were an evangelical Christian, right? So, so it's like what, this is kind of a tangent that I'm, I'm, I'm on shaky ground here, but it's something I've been interested off and on a lot.

• 3:07:52Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's fascinating. I mean, I think we're in some sense searching for, because it is, it does make for a good operating system. We're searching for a good live as if X is true and we're searching for a new X.

• 3:08:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:08:03Lex Fridman?

  And maybe artificial intelligence will be the very, the new gods that we're so desperately looking for.

• 3:08:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, or it'll just spit out 42.

• 3:08:13Lex Fridman?

  I thought it was 27. Yeah. This is, as you know, I've been a huge fan, so are a huge number of people that I've spoken with, so they've been telling me, I absolutely have to talk to you. This is a huge honor. This is really fun. Thanks for wasting all this time with me.

• 3:08:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, likewise, man. I've been a longtime fan, so this was a lot of fun.

• 3:08:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, thanks, man. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Cal Newport. A thank you to our sponsors, ExpressVPN, Linode Linux Virtual Machines, Sun Basket Meal Delivery Service, and SimpliSafe Home Security. Click the sponsor links to get a discount and to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Cal himself. Clarity about what matters provides clarity about what does not. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.