so several people recently sent me the same article it was from the financial times it was written by John BN Murdoch and it had a provocative headline have humans past Peak brain power so I'm going to take a closer look at this claim I have two goals in mind first I want to develop a better understanding of why the data seems to show that we are getting Dumber but two I want to use that understanding it's my second goal use that understanding to help find practical ways that you as an individual can push back on that trend and not only not get Dumber but make sure that you continue to get smarter so this article that I was just citing was inspired by some recent analysis that was released by the organization for economic cooperation development they do this regular test called the Pisa which benchmarks teenagers around the world in their knowledge of math reading and science so we have sort of Trends over time it's a useful test to kind of understand what's going on um so they looked at there's a recent analysis of this the article looked at that recent analysis plus some other tests that have been given worldwide recently and the the author of the article made the following conclusion I'm quoting here across a range of tests the average person's ability to reason and solve novel problems appears to have peaked in the early 201s and have been declining ever since so I I have a graph to show here Jesse bring up this graph for those who are watching instead of just listening so here's one of the key graphs that indicates this point uh it shows per performance and reasoning and problem solving test over time on the left hand graft what you see is a line for science reading and maths and you can attest Jesse that right around 2012 all those lines go downward uh that's from the pza test we have a test from an adult on the right literacy uh takes a big spill right around 2012 and goes down dramatically ever since all right so we can bring that graph down so that indicates the thesis of the article that hey in the early 2010s at least according to test we're doing worse worse us being humans so why why are we doing worse well the article points to an obvious culprit based just on the forensic evidence of the timing these Trends seem to occur right around that 2012 to 2014 period is where we see these downward shifts that date should sound familiar there have been other things that worry us that got more prominently worrisome starting around that time for example teenage mental health deterioration is another one what happened around that 2012 period smartphones became ubiquitous this is when we got worldwide ubiquity of smartphones became a reality so the article points out correctly we seem to be seeing a negative turn on these tests of various reasoning and intelligence abilities around the time smartphones come and it's been getting worse ever since but I don't think it's useful to just leave it there so if we just say yes smartphone seem to have led to us getting Dumber it's unclear how we should respond we're probably not going to get rid of phones most people need various aspects of the phone and app ecosystem to operate so it sort of leaves us without much to do except for to shrug our shoulders and say well I guess phones may as Dumber but what are we going to do it's sort of like cars came along and traffic deaths you know got higher here's here's a source of 20,000 new deaths a year that didn't exist before cars but you know we kind of need cars and it was like this just something we're going to have to live with it feels that way sometimes when we're dealing with these cognitive impacts of smartphones but I think we can do better and I want to do better today so I'm going to look closer and I'm going to try to develop a hypothesis that explains at least partially specifically why What mechanisms of smartphones are making us perform worse on these tests making us Dumber because if we know more specifically what about these things is making us Dumber then maybe we have a chance of reversing that even without having to get rid of our phones so to look closer what I'm going to do is pull up another graph Jesse bring this up on the screen here here's another graph from this article that gets at what specifically is changing in the smartphone era so we see here on the left a graph over time measuring percentage of respondents that are saying they have difficulty thinking or concentrating this comes from another survey called monitoring the future which John burn beroch sort of pulled up what you notice here is it's relatively stable difficulty thinking or concentrating in until that same inflection point of around 2012 and then it shoots up and we see a a aggressive upward trend on the right we have another graph percentage of people saying they have trouble learning new things it's relatively flat starting in 1990 again right around 2012 shoots up same time that difficulty thinking or concentrating shoots up so of course right at this Smartphone inflection point we see mechanistically that people suddenly reported at much higher rates having difficulty thinking or concentrating and having trouble learning new things all right we can bring this down Jesse that is where I think we're seeing the effect of smartphones and if we look at a little bit closer why is smartphones now causing us to have difficulty thinking or concentrating or trouble learning new things keep zooming in I believe we can identify what I think of as a cognitive death spiral here and here's how I think this works so you now have a smartphone the phone itself is not the problem of course it's the the ecosystem of attention economy that arose around the smartphone pre- smartphone if you were building a sort of information platform your Facebook pre- smartphone you were building a product that was trying to be maximally useful to users I want to make Facebook so useful that people will think to log in and want to be a member of it so like all your friends are on here that's a marker of this being useful you can find out what your friends are up to that is a really useful thing post smartphone we had a shift towards an attention Paradigm where the idea now is not being useful but capturing as much attention as possible they realized users were you wanted a large user count if you were trying to raise money but once you had a company running you wanted to monetize those users and that's a different uh game and this is when the goal of platforms Chang to not being as useful as possible but being as addictive as possible so we get ubiquitous smartphone use pickup around this time why does that cause a cognitive death spiral well think about what happens you have this rhythm in your life of constantly being distracted because the apps on your phone are designed to grab your attention it has faster more desirable stimuli than other things in your life so now you're rewiring these circuits in your brain so that the reward circuits are very much tuned towards if a phone is nearby let's focus on that let's have our dopamine Cascade focus on the action of looking at that phone because that we have learned these circuits have ingrained that's going to give us a quicker hit than whatever else we are doing and because the phone is ubiquitous we constantly have those reward circuits firing because the phone is always there the reward is always there like if you put a donut in front of me I'm going to build up a reward you know every day at four you put out Donuts at the office I will build up a reward circuit where like I'm really looking forward to that dut if you now follow me everywhere I go with a card of donuts there's going to be a problem right so that's what started happening with a phone so now our mind gets rewired to craving this more faster pace of stimuli that can directly imp impact our ability to concentrate because that's distracting us we're trying to take a p a test we're going to do worse on it it's harder to sort of apply our existing intelligence but the reason why I think it creates a cognitive death spiral is that it also means we spend less time on the type of activities that could make us smarter if two things going on at the same time is our mind gets re rewired for faster stimuli we have a harder time applying our existing intelligence but we also have a harder time engaging in activities that would make us smarter now this is also captured in this article Jesse bring up one more chart here what we have on the screen here is a chart showing the decline of reading there's two plots on here so this is a percentage of US teenagers who uh read in their Leisure Time one one of these plots on here shows who says they hardly ever read and the other plot shows uh who reads almost every day so we see the almost everyday it's like moving mildly down through the 80s and 90s right around 2012 that goes down real sharply and the people reporting that they hardly ever read goes up real sharply all right so we can bring that graph down um so what's this is saying this is an example of an activity reading is an example of an activity that makes you smarter the brain circuits involved in Reading makes you smarter you can better understand other people you can better sustain your attention on abstract targets you can better manipulate information and build build and construct worlds in your mind reading is calisthenics for your mind it is just straight up exercise for your mind it's why it's been at the core of sort of every academic curriculum since the invention of the Codex so it's one among other activities that we do less of because it requires sustained attention and when we rewire our mind for faster stimuli we're less likely to actually as we see in that graph we're less likely to actually spend time doing that so we get this double whammy we have a hard time applying whatever intelligence we have and we slow down or completely stop the increase of our intelligence that should be happening over time as we do activities would naturally get us there the result we're dumber and we see it our performance on those test plummets we're not getting smarter and we're having harder time applying the intelligence we have okay so really now what we're talking about the our our issue is not with smartphones so much as it is with the specific effect of having a brain rewired for faster stimuli and because of this spending less time with AC activities that Foster intelligence hey it's Cal I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying this video then you need to check out my new book slow productivity the Lost start of accomplishment without burnout this is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos you can get a free excerpt at Cal newport.com slow I know you're going to like it check it out now let's get back to the video yeah so if we're looking for a response here we can actually come up with actions that don't involve us having to go back in time now before I talk about what that could particularly be here's the analogy that came to my mind from 60 years ago right we we had this issue 670 years ago where in the US for example the economy shifted from being primarily industrial agricultural to having this very strong sort of office Centric knowledge work sector and we noticed in the 1950s and in particular the 1960s this issue of we are having health problems at a higher rate than they existed before because before you were probably working on a farm and you were exercising all day long you were on your feet you were moving you were lifting things it very physical and now suddenly you're sedentary because you're in an office you're not getting that exercise this caught us off guard like oh that was important and we're not getting that anymore you know in the era before bypass surgery people just drop dead in their 60s that's just how it worked you just have a heart attack and die in your 60s like whoa what's going on here how do we respond to that well we didn't say we need to shut down the offices and go back to the Farms we said what was the thing we're missing now from the Farms now that we have this new knowledge sector oh it's the exercise okay I guess people need the exercise you didn't have to think about that before in 1920 you didn't have to think about exercising you just got it but in 1975 I got to go jogging you know I got to move some weights around because that is out of my life now and it is actually pretty important that is a good analogy for thinking about the smartphone induced dumbness issue we don't necessarily have to go back to uh pre2 12 technology era but we do now have to think explicitly about increasing our intelligence and maintaining our ability to hold attention in a way that we didn't have to in 2009 we just did this naturally now we have to think about it that's the mindset shift we have to exercise our minds in the same way we learned we have to exercise our bodies so what might that mean well we talk about this a lot on the show but just to give you four ideas you know that that gets your mind going about how one might have a cognitive exercise routine to push back on this dumbness Trend you could one force yourself to read reading is pull-ups and push-ups for your brain read every week read a book uh start with things you love easy to read you're excited to read but force yourself to sit there and read the best way to do this is to be outside of Arms Reach of a phone in fact be in a completely different room from a phone even better go for a walk and read on a bench without your phone so that you don't have to fight against a reward circuit that sees the phone and says it is right there we could pick that up dopamine dopamine dopamine so make your life easier but reading is calisthenics for your brain more generally in the constant companion model of your phone when you're at home plug it in in the kitchen go there if you need to look something up go there if you need to check your text messages go there if you need to make a call but don't have it with you when you're doing other things again you want to sort of break out of this pattern of I can at any moment get faster stimuli you certainly want to avoid and I just learned this term I don't know if you know this term Jesse but I just learned this term stimuli stacking I don't no I heard this from a younger person shout out to Nate uh stimuli stacking is where you're consuming multiple streams of stimulus at the same time so you're watching something while checking something on your phone and maybe you even have like a different device on which you're like something else and supposedly some of the streamers like Netflix are actually redesigning their shows to be more compatible with stimula stacking so if it requires you to have to if I missed what was said here I don't know what's going on that's a bad show because you can't actually look at your phone in the same time and watch that show so don't stimuli stack we want your mind to be used to like doing one thing for a long piece of time reflection walks is another great one go for a walk with a particular problem you want to solve it could be just a problem in your life I want to work this through and your mind is going to be everywhere it's going to be squirrel squirrel squirrel but you keep pulling it back be in the sunshine be in the woods get used to just being alone with your own thoughts and manipulating your thoughts you will get better at this this also pushes back on the the negative trends that smartphones are inducing and have hobbies that require concentration playing the guitar requires a lot of concentration to get better woodworking requires a lot of concentration you know to get better particular sport requires a lot of work and Focus to actually get better at it so have you know things that require sustained concentration and give you obvious rewards as you get better so notable rewards so you feel that appreciation all right so anyways I thought that was a cool article that's what I think is going on it's uh not just the phone itself makes us Dumber it's particularly the way that it's rewired our brain which creates that death spiral if we have a harder time applying our intelligence and we don't increase it so we just push back look man when you're in the office building Mad Men in the 1960s you got to start exercising you didn't have to exercise when you on the farm in the 1940s you got to exercise now in the office building the 1960s well same thing when I was in college in the early 2000s I didn't have to worry about how do I keep my brain sharp how do I keep getting smarter because we were just doing this all the time we had to read books and we didn't have like constant distractions and we were often bored and walking long distances in the interminable snow of hover New Hampshire going through the snow like trying to find our car but we couldn't because it was buried in snow and there's nothing in our ear and there was nothing to look at you would just have to think you were just thinking thoughts and mainly just I'm cold and why didn't I go to school at pepper Dy but you were thinking and then you would go and you trudge through this to a library and you're just stuck there with your book and you would sit there and have to like read your books for a while we'd have to think about it we're like the farmers in the 40s now 2025 you got to exercise so you got to like force yourself to read books you got to go for reflection walks so cool article scary Trend but at least on the individual level I think it's reversible when you read articles on a desktop or like a laptop do you what do you do if you get distracted just put stuff in the working memory so put like what are you talking about like if a thought comes up that's unrelated to the article yeah is trying to distract me um so you're not on your phone but you're on a laptop or a desktop I guess I would put it in working memory I don't know I'm pretty used to now when I'm doing something I lock in on that thing and then when I'm done like now what do I want to think about but do you ever just read articles on a desktop or or laptop yeah sometimes like so I'm trying to think it's a good question like this morning I read articles from both the New York Times And The New Yorker and in both cases I use the app on what type of device on my phone on your phone yeah I'll also read articles on the browser and I'll print articles it's like another thing I like to do um but I'm not very distracted by the web you know like I don't really have places to go to distract me yeah like maybe MLB trade rumors but that's only relevant for like a three month period each year so it's easier for me to just read an article and then I'm done reading that article right yeah well anyways we got a bunch of good questions coming up but first let's hear briefly from some sponsors talk about a relatively new sponsor of ours that I really enjoy called Factor uh Factor offers Chef M Chef made gourmet meals that make eating well easy uh Jesse let me ask you this let's say you're at home it's like a weekend you're not at work lunchtime what are you doing how like what's going to be a typical lunch for you well I actually only eat dinner that's right yeah Jesse eats like one meal a week and he has to be deadlifting while he does it all right dinner what are you gonna do where would you typically find the dinner I usually depending on say I'm at home I would make eggs with know cut up onions and vegetables and stuff like that yeah so okay you would be a perfect example where Factor would be really useful I've really been enjoying these uh they're really healthy tasty meals they're refrigerated you microwave them it's like two minutes MH I've been eating them all week two minutes and you have uh chicken and broccoli and cheese sauce or I had this thing that was uh some sort of like spiced ground meat with some sort of sauce or whatever it's just like 2 minutes you have it it's like it's healthy it's good portions or whatever it's a way of having like a variet of food and you can make it the ease with which you make it is what really surprised me I'm used to some of these microwave products where it's like yeah all you got to do is just like microwave for like 20 minutes and then you need to make like 17 incisions then microwave for just seven minutes but every 30 seconds you have to rotate it 45 degrees until you've gone past an obtuse angle at which point you want to turn it upside down and then once the vernal equinox comes you give it another five minutes and then you just put in the oven and cook it for a half hour like I was so surprised with factors like no you just put a couple splits you microwave it mix them stuff up tastes good so Factor arrives fresh and fully prepared uh at your house I've been seeing Factor Vans around here by the way yeah I've seen them too yeah so I guess they're coming from their own Vans uh you can lose up to8 pounds in eight weeks for example with Factor keto meals based on a randomized control trial with Factor keto the revs results will vary depending on diet and exercise uh more generally though there's 40 different options across eight dietary preferences on the menu each week so you can really pick what's tailored to your goals I worry about calories I want more protein I'm doing keto so you not only do you get healthy meals but you can choose exactly what you're looking for in your meals shows up put in the fridge throw it in the microwave when it's time to eat they also have these wholesome smoothies breakfast grab Ando snacks and more add-ons so an easy way to really take control of your nutrition make the eating kind of automatic and make it healthy so eat smart with Factor get started at Factor meals.com de50 off and used the code deep 50 off so the word deep the number 50 the word off to get 50% off your first box plus pre-shipping that's code de50 off Factor meals.com de50 off to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box they also want to talk about our longtime friends and longtime sponsor at grammarly Jesse I'm going to put you on the spot again what percentage of the work week do you think the average professional spins doing written communication 40 it is 50% that's pretty good though you are pretty close so grammarly uh helps you with the thing that you have like a a written word diet though right you you only you only write at night like you're eating you're only GNA write 10 words a day it's all part of um so grammarly helps you with this thing that you're spending half your week already doing which is writing with AI grammarly as your AI writing partner you can stay focused and get through your work faster with relevant real time suggestions wherever you write and you can download grammarly for free at grammarly.com podcast I'm going to talk about this more in the the in the final segment of the show but this is where I think AI is really going to make its move early on is form fit the specific uses and this is what grammarly is doing in the tools you already do to do this writing that takes up 50% of your time it is right there to help make that writing faster whether you're brainstorming whether you want to rewrite something um whether you want to check the tone of what you were doing want context aware suggestions of like what you're going to write grammarly is there for you to make your writing better and to get that good writing faster 90% of professionals say grammarly has saved them time writing and editing their work four out of five professional say grammarly helps them gain Buy in and action through their communication uh your data is secure never sold with grammarly it's been doing this for 15 years grammarly is like the gold standard of responsible AI in this space so get more done with grammarly download grammarly for free at grammarly.com podcast that's grammarly.com podcast all right Jesse let's do some questions first question is from Grant decentralized platforms such as maedon pixel fed and blue sky have been slowly gaining momentum is this a good idea or should we move from these types of platforms Al together well I know two of those platforms I know Mastadon new blue sky have you heard of pixel fed no well then I'm typing it in here just so we know what we're talking about all right pixel fed.com uh I typed in pixel Jed that if you're wondering that Ur is available all right so pixel fed.com I don't know about this all right this also decentralized photo sharing and social media powered by uh pixel fed all right so I think Mastadon and pixel fed are Twitter Instagram social media platforms that really show their decentralization so like individuals can start up their own servers and then different servers talk to each other blue sky is I think this was started by Jack dorsy it's a little bit more polished so the experience is much more directly like using Twitter but there's some technological changes underneath the hood so the question I think Grant is asking is like okay so is like this what we need to do keep working on like if Twitter SLX has all these problems we need to keep working to get a version of that that's better or do we not need a platform like that at all I tend to be in the camp if we don't need a platform like that at all I wrote an article about this a couple years ago back when meta announced threads which was their sort of Instagram Twitter clone I wrot a New Yorker essay that was titled we don't need a new Twitter and my argument is the issues with these platforms is not just the specific Rules by which they're run which is what a lot of the fight is right now so like Elon Musk takes over Twitter renames it X changes the content moderation and suddenly you get much more of this type of content and less of that type of content Blue Sky people move to Blue Sky and say we're going to moderate differently we'll be more hostile towards like right leaning ideas but very uh embracing of left leaning ideas Twitter kind of went the other way we're going to be much more embracing of right even far right ideas and we're hostile towards left line ideas so it's all about like what are we doing on these platforms my argument is like that's not not really the issue I mean it's an issue but the bigger issue is the whole idea of a global conversation platform this whole notion that we should have hundreds of millions of people trying to interact on the same platform that notion is broken like that is my argument is that is just guaranteed to lead the destabilization in Rancor because if you have hundreds of millions of people that are trying to communicate and yet we need some sort of notion of a common Zeitgeist like a small number of conversations that are being surface from this scrum that most people are going to encounter this is like the this is the the selling proposition of the global platforms as you kind of like create this of the- moment internet Zeitgeist you can put your finger on is going to require aggressive aggressive curation because you have hundreds of millions of messages from which you want to pull these like common threads a very small number of messages and once you have heavy curation like that you are going to lead towards all sorts of problems you're going to lead to behaviors at far extremes it's not going to be a pretty place it's not going to serve most people needs so I I have up the the uh point of view of like Global conversation platforms is a bad use of the internet I think a better use of the internet is more Niche conversations bringing together people from all around the world into smaller communities where they can talk about shared interest and create a shared sense of community these are our community standards based on our real Community not 300 million people on the same platform and we have to have like a group of people in pal Alto somewhere who say here's our community standards like this is a 100 people who like this baseball team and we like to get together and talk about it on this platform and we can come up with our own standards for how we talk about this because we're really a community or here's a group of people that like we like to get together to talk about like this type of movie or something like that we can create our own Community standards for that because it's a it's a real Community we know each other we care about what's going on we like each other we're trying to share information that is the use of the internet so I've been a long AR long been arguing that these Global platforms the idea that we need everyone using a small number of platforms only really serves investors in the really large platforms it's a way to try to concentrate a huge amount of monetization into a small number of people's pockets but it doesn't create a better experience for the users so my argument is uh Niche communities are better and once you have Niche communities I don't think the chronological timeline of like a Twitter this or that is necessarily best you want more of like a maybe like a forum metaphor discussion metaphor a chat metaphor uh or a live you know Discord style metaphor whatever one you want to use it's not necessarily just a sort of algorithmically curated or chronological timeline so no I don't think we need to fix Twitter with a different Twitter I think we need to move past this era where we thought that Twitter was a good idea all right what do we got next next question is from Kevin I took a job that pays more than double my previous gig there's a lot more pressure and I'm stressed out my wife works and we don't spend lavishly there is a job back at my old company for my initial pay how should I apply lifestyle Centric planning to my situation if I've only been at my new role for 6 months well this sounds like an example of Lifestyle Centric planning not being applied and now you have a little buyer's remorse so I talk about this in my book so good they can't ignore you from 2012 as one of the so-called control traps so I said look uh one of the traps that arises around taking control of your life and aiming it towards the things that resonate and away from the things that don't is that it's just as you're building up the skills that could give you that leverage that you will be tempted with forget taking control come get more money come get more Prestige so it's like exactly when you're good enough to start dictating what your working life is like that someone comes and says no no no this is the prestigious job double your salary come on scoreboard you're G to put points on the scoreboard it's it's precisely when people care enough about what you can do to try to lock you into things that are going to have uh obvious indicator there's a Prestige like title and income but that lock you in and prevent you from taking more control over your life so you have to be careful that's probably what happened here it's like this is impressive this job is double the money it's a hard job to get and I think I might be able to get it I'm winning the game here I'm proud of myself but then the problem is you have that job and you have to confront the reality of well how does this actually fit into my ideal lifestyle plan and Kevin it sounds like here it doesn't right it's taking up a lot of your time it's stressing you out you you're bothered by that stress you don't like the lifestyle that it's leading to so in general you know the way you avoid this and then we'll talk about what you can do now but the way you avoid this is you're always working back from the ideal lifestyle what is my day like an ideal day like what type of place do I live what's the schedule like what am I doing what type of places am I around who am I around what's going on how do I feel what do I see smell and touch right like you have this really clear picture like what your ideal lifestyle is like and then all you're thinking about is how do I move closer to that with the decisions I make if you have a really clear image of that it then might be the case when you look at a promotion that's going to give you a lot of money or a job that's going to give you a lot of money but if that job breaks many aspects of your your vision you're like of course I'm not going to do that but if you don't have that Vision in place you're like well the only scoreboard I have is like title and income so I want to keep putting up points so that's what I'm going to do now that you're already in this position that's okay let's do our lifestyle Centric planning now why are you stressed what is it that you're missing what is it that you're looking for at in the ideal life don't fixate on the solution fix it on where you want to be it's easy what happens is when people are unhappy with a situation is that they want to fixate on a specific solution so like maybe right now you want to fixate on like going back to your old job or something but don't get stuck yet in the solution just focus on the image of the ideal then you can do an evidence-based analysis of how to get around obstacles and what opportunities you have available and they're might be paths there that you you're not thinking about right now it might be oh maybe at my current new job I do this smaller pivot and that actually sets me up to get to these things as ideal lifestyle in different way or maybe the solution is yeah I got to go back I'm going to go back to this other position but don't fix it on this people like the the grand gesture don't worry about that yet worry about what it is you want in your life and be sober minded and careful about figuring out what are the obstacles to that what are the opportunities to get there I mean maybe in this new job it's possible like this money is going to allow you to do certain things you couldn't do before it's going to unlock all sorts of cool things in your lifestyle but the problem is the time but maybe you can get on top of the time by like using some Cal Newport techniques and actually I can really reduce the footprint of this job and still use the money like you don't know what the right answer is going to be until you know what you're trying to get to first so focused on the goal not the fixes I this comes up a lot Jesse like people people's reaction to a difficult situation is to focus on like a particular move not what's wrong where do I want to get what's five options to get there mhm they just want to have I guess it feels good in the moment I'm going to do something radical I'm gonna quit I'm GNA move the this country or whatever it is right you just you you get some some big idea and the radicalness of the idea gives you some suker but you're not actually thinking through what are the five different things I could do here and let me sober mindedly look at them and actually in the end this is not as exciting but this path here this one-year plan is going to end up in a much better place it's it's not people's instincts to work backwards from ideal lifestyle and be systematic and exploring different ways forward all right who do we got next next question is from Ravi I'm a 40-year-old software engineer my younger colleagues are technically sharper and bring more value to my manager this makes me dispensable what's my path towards relevancy well I think you have two options Robie one you have to keep in mind young people have more relevant skills because the thing they learned when they were learning this field because they're younger is much more recent so they're getting into the Technology field I'm they're putting in that initial push to learn skills they're learning whatever skill is relevant right now and if they just learned the skill a couple years ago it's going to be new and it's going to be relevant but this doesn't mean that you can't uh get back ahead of them again so yeah they're coming in with relevant skills but if you're pretty systematic about I'm going to put aside regular time the master what's new now you can get yourself back into that conversation right so it's not that the younger people are much smarter it's not that the younger people can learn skills much faster than you either they're just starting with the latest skill but once you've also learned the latest skill you're kind of have parody now like once they're working for this company they're not necessarily picking up the next thing that's going to come any faster than you can if you systematically put aside time to do it in fact you probably have an advantage if you're older you say you're 40 you're probably less stimuli addicted than they are look back at our deep diet from the beginning of this episode you probably have less of a problem with sustained concentration than they have you probably have less of a problem doing the type of activities that's going to make them smarter right your your brain is calmer your brain has been less drenched and high stimuli dopamine so if you are continually slowly and steadily keeping what's the new thing this here let me learn it okay what's the new thing to next year let me learn that you are going to be ahead of I think you'll get back ahead of the people who have joined more recently right and you can keep your relevancy aside so I always think uh you know young people have more time they have more energy but they are more distracted the other Advantage you have is because you're older more sober-minded you're probably better at mature decision- making communication personability you could also pivot which is like the common move towards more of a managerial role right where it's hard for a phone addicted 23y old is not going to be able to manage other people that just trouble interacting with them and just making mature decisions and impulsivity you're 40 you can do that in a way a young person can't so you can also pivot towards a role that actually rewards your age in that way as well so use your ability and hone your ability to focus the fact that you're not young and on Tik Tok all the time to either be systematically learning stuff faster than the new people or use your older more sober brain to Pivot to a role that the the the young people can't do as well I mean I've heard Scott Galloway talk about this this sort of the problem with the tech industry is he said sort of one of the big models in the tech industry is bring in people who are young and they might be only 70% as good as the people who've been there for a while but they are half the salary so keep hiring young people you don't have to pay them nearly as much as the older people they're not as good but they have high energy and it keeps the expenses low so that that's sort of the headwinds you're pushing back against here but I think by systematically and deliberately learning new skills you can actually be more Nimble than younger people and then move into the positions where the young people just can't take them the position where I can't hire the 23y old out of Stanford can't take that position they just are unable to deal with adults yet so I think those are your two options all right who do we have next next question is from sa my grand goal is to own a production company that writes and creates animations I currently am a producer that works on podcasts and TV shows we've been informed that our last deal will end this August and we'll get a year of severance I currently work about 3 days a week and Dabble in some freelance should I spend this time trying to look for another job or hone in on trying to make my long-term goal a reality uh I mean a couple points here first I would I would temper or complement goal-based thinking with lifestyle Centric based thinking so don't get completely fixated on this specific goal like I need to be running this type of company it might not be possible or it's possible but it's actually not going to make your life as good as you think so work backwards from lifestyle and this will you can see how this particular idea fits into your ideal lifestyle but it will also unlock other paths towards your ideal lifestyle that you might not be thinking about right now because they're less definitive or less sexy so I say that number one number two I think it's good right you're starting from a place of expertise you're working in podcast and TV show production so it's not like this is a pie in the sky dream you're you're not an insurance Actuarial an analyst who's like I want to have an animation company like so you know this world you know what's realistic I think that's really useful I would still use the advice from my book so good they can't ignore you to use money as a neutral indicator of value you need to actually see people paying for what you're offering as indication that what you're offering has value to the market so if you want to start an animation production Studio like you need to be producing anim that like okay I actually sold this project or that and maybe it's on the side at first but now it's making this much money that I would be okay if I switched to this full time like don't just hope or guess it's going to succeed wait to see that people are giving you their money not just giving you their encouragement but giving you their money as an indicator that your your project is valuable so if you could do this quickly like you have a Year's of severance so if you can do this in the next six months yeah go all in on it and see if it works if this is going to be a longer Endeavor it might take a few years to really get something making enough money to see if it's viable or not then you should be looking for another job at the same time that's my advice introduce lifestyle Centric planning not just goal-based planning to make sure that you see the full scope of both your opportunities and options but also like make sure that whatever you're doing is aimed in the right direction and then two use money as a neutral indicator of value right if you're making money off of this you can spend more time doing it if you're not then maybe it's not going to work it's a really good test of viability all right we got we got one last job question here right yep we got Sam I just got fired from my federal job as I was in a probationary period how do I recover from this setback I was partway through a quasi development program and I had some great career Capital opportunities lined up I'm worried that without finishing the program I won't be competitive for another job in this Niche and all my skills so far and and all my skills so far are specialized to this field well I mean look first of all empathy is due like I can see you're you're struggling with what happened and rightly so uh it sucks that you have a job and you lose it and in particular if it was a new job and you liked where it was taking you you had this plan it was a good plan and it got taken away like there's something traumatic in that and that comes through I think in your question so I think there's empathy here there nothing good about this situation so we need to regroup and we need to re attack and so we need to be wary of emotional attack M and narratives that are no longer possible so there's a particular narrative here about a particular development program that you're a part of and you you saw where that was going to lead you that may be off the table now it was it was only available to government employees you're not going to be able to get that government job back anytime soon so we have to Pivot here and the right way to Pivot is a to do a inventory of your career Capital like well what are my skills what are my rare and valuable skills and try to find where else are those going to be valid valued so I want to try to find another job uh you might also think look I might have to spend a couple years doing something else just because I have to put food on the table and I'm going to regroup in that new position build skills and think about my next move to get back on the track I was on before or another path towards whatever ideal lifestyle I have in place so it might be a regroup and re attack the regroup might take a couple years I got to find the job maybe I have to move I got to put my Capital to work maybe I have to take a lower position and work my up real quick I have to get back on my feet before I can make my really highly strategic plan I think this is hard for a lot of people if you've done a lot of work to set yourself up for a strategic move and then that gets taken away from you you want to just jump right into another equally strategic move but sometimes you have to go regroup especially if like the job loss is unexpected I got to just go find something that's going to take advantage of my career capital and let me build up Capital quick let me regroup Catch My Breath keep my bank account from emptying and be like okay now let me try again and that that I think that's going to be the case especially for a lot of probationary or federal workers who have lost their job you got to find something then you got to catch your breath and then you got to figure out okay now what do I want to do next now in your case Sam these very specific things you care about so like what you your your reattach might actually be back in the government it might be back in the same program but you need to go back it might take a year or two until that's available again right so your your reack might be back in what you're doing or it could be something really differently but you know don't hold on to the career narrative that unfairly got taken from you and we're not denying that it sucks but we can't get caught on it because we need to keep making forward progress so inventory your Capital find something that rewards it build more Capital create a new plan re attack the new plan we're not giving up we're strategically regrouping not retreating uh and then we're re attacking again I think that's the right way to think about your career during periods of turmoil it's not always a straight line upwards or straight down a path that you've planned before sometimes we get knocked off it's going to take us a little while to find our way back but we keep hiking some more okay so I feel for you Sam but you are going to be okay let's regroup and we'll re attack in a little bit all right do we got a call this week we do all right let's hear it hi Cal my name is Alfie I from the United Kingdom and my question is around the ability to do deep work while in a shallow job now a little bit of context I'm two years into my career and I'm on a rotational program at a bank and part of this rotation means that every six months I can change team and I've recently changed team to one which really prioritizes shallow work and really pseudo productivity is almost the name of the game it's very much celebrated there's a lot of context switching throughout the day so my question is really given that this is is a temporary role and given that at the moment I feel that my ability to concentrate and work deep has diminished what are some what are some practices I can do maybe over the weekends or in my free time to improve that ability to concentrate and what are and once I roll off this rotation and go into my new role what are some things I can do early on to get back into the deep work routines and habits to ensure that that skill maintains uh one I've trained well thank you well Alfie it's a good question um I think by the way Jesse because Alfie mentioned the word pseudo productivity which comes from my book slow productivity yeah that we could play the theme music I didn't schedule the corner someone brought up slow productivity organically so we're going to play the slow productivity theme music um all right Alfie it's a good question I mean first of all this emphasized there's some roles that where deep work is not rewarded like deep work is just a type of effort right it's an effort with sustained concentration it is a good way of maximizing cognitive abilities for a lot of tasks where that's important Alfie's in a role right now where it's not important so he's uh not spending a lot of time in the state of deep work so that's fine right this role doesn't require it but I think it's a cool question of like how do I make sure I don't lose that ability that ability to concentrate that you know will will be relevant again later with another job let's go back to the Deep dive right we talked about this in the beginning of this episode that if you're constantly in like a high stimuli type of situation you get less comfortable concentrating we see that in the data then you spend less time doing activities that make you smarter and then you get even less comfortable less smart and less comfortable concentrating you get a cognitive death spiral so do the type of things we talked about earlier in this episode force yourself to read books outside of work practice the the non constant companion model of the phone is plugged in not with me when I'm at home so you're just used to doing one thing at a time do reflection walks all the time I'm going to work on professional and personal projects just in my head while I'm walking with no source of distraction with me right these are all things that are going to help your mind be comfortable with sustained concentration and actually strengthen your mind's ability to do things you might add into there the hard hobby you know learn a new skill learn how to computer program learn how to do like micro Electronics or woodworking be really careful about cognitive calisthenics during this period in which you were basically doing the cognitive equivalent of smoking during the workday you got to sort of offset the damage that's happening with active improving activities so yeah you'll be out of this rotation soon do things like that in the background and then when it comes time to schedule deep work again in your next rotation you're not going to struggle with maintaining your concentration you're going to feel like your instrument is still well practiced all right we got a case study here all right our case study today uh this is from Ian all right Ian says great discussion on combon boards and systems I love the space and has been a great reminder to me of how Simplicity here is what works reminder I also needed attached our images of my engineering con Bon board which I created around 2014 or so that I thought you might find interesting still my most powerful organizing system yet uh I'm still yet able ble to I've still yet been able to replicate this to do or do better in very new roles now remote work was is hard this is around the third version revision of the system and nothing I've Done Yet has replicated the visual organizational power Simplicity and political leverage with internal customers so I'm going to read about his system that he uses and then for those who are watching he sent some pictures of it that I'll bring on the screen as well but let me read about it first so he says we do a we did a standup meeting so he's talking about like the the optimal way his his combon based system like how it operated at its peak we did a standup meeting in front of the board Monday Wednesday Fridays it was the center of the engineering office nestled between two filing cupboards and hard to miss we had custom cards with blue tack on the side of the cupboard and whiteboard we had constant visual reminder of what's going on we colorcoded by product or category we had red dots for crazy important stuff we had cues parking lots done piles Etc it worked really well for parking and queuing items rather than solve the last job that came in the door if there was a real fire we just made the call to drop everything and solve the fire I think we gave up on the percentage done bars on the cars as that just didn't add up value versus maintenance time great for visual prompt to others of what we were working on and where things were at I've tried digital systems and they just don't work nearly as well or as powerful as this I'm going to bring up some of these images here for those who are watching okay so here is the main con Bon board it is on the wall between two filing cabinets um for those who are listening it's on a whiteboard so there's blue tacked paper cards on a whiteboard that's up on the wall there's columns here one of these columns is uh to do next unassigned so we talked about this in slow productivity you have a place to keep track of work that needs to be done in your group that doesn't exist on anyone's plate all right uh it's not being forgotten but it's not just in someone's inbox or in someone's head it's on this column on this board all right in the middle is to do assigned now look this column it's a cool way of doing it it's split up into rows each row corresponds to a different person so you can see who's working on what so the person in the top row has nothing the person in the second row is working on three things you have those three cards the person in the fourth row has four things you can see specifically the four things they're working on and Noti Jesse two of these things are sort of on the border between two rows so I think that means those two people are working on that together maybe possibly um we can't actually read the cards but they have the information about the task it's got to be cuz there's another one at the end too yeah so that's to do next assigned and then they have a column for in progress so it's like what people are working on at the moment uh oh I see there's a lot more people down here okay oh cool so if we look down here we see there's rows for lots of people people have a lot of stuff queued up so they can they can cue up I talk about this in slow productivity doing this for yourself having a cue of like what you're going to work on in what order they just have this up on a board so I can look at Adam's row here and see 1 2 3 4 5 six seven things one with a red dot like things he's waiting to work on and then next to it be like here's the four things he's working on now knowing that as he finishes one of these things he'll pull something else over there so none of this is being kept trative in their head and none of this is being kept track of just their email inboxes it's really clear this is unassigned work here's work we've assigned but not being worked on here's the work people are working on and we can just see it visually who's working on what and its status notice over here on the left this is called parking lots so they have on the side of the uh cupboard parking lot this is a combon uh idea where it's things you don't know you're not looking to assign them you're kind of like let's put this on hold like these are things we're thinking about but we're not looking to get these done right now so you have a place to put those tasks so anyways what I love about this and I'm really big on this idea my book slow productivity is they're keeping track of what needs to be done at status and who's working on what in a centralized transparent way as opposed to allowing work loads to exist non-transparent inally and on individual plates it makes a huge difference in the experience of your day because now if you're one of these people represented by a row on this board you're only working on the things in your Row in the in progress column you don't have to do emails you don't have to take meetings and you don't have to waste cognitive Cycles on all these other things but Jesse look at how many things are in to do next on assigned and parking lot without a system like that all of those things would just exist on people's plates and be generating potentially hey what's going on with this emails or can we just have a quick meeting to check in on this emails or just in the back of your head is something you're supposed to be working on that you're not so I see all of those cards that are in all of those other places as cognitive overhead that's been removed from the system MH so they're going to finish stuff much quicker and people are going to be much happier so thanks for that what was this Ian and thanks for sending the picture uh that's a great demonstration of how these type of task Sport Systems can work for teams all right so we got a uh final segment coming up I want to have a hot take on AI but first let's here from another sponsor we'll talk about our friends at the defender line of vehicles we're talking about the Defender 90 the defender 110 and the defender 130 this is a very good-looking car they're designed in a way that has like the modern features or conveniences you would want from from like a modern high-end car but they also have that tough rigid body design uh durability that lightweight monoco architecture for extra strength that you can take this thing on adventures and I like that mix good-looking car that can be smooth and comfortable and yet also take you where Adventure might hold Jesse I got good news and bad news uh I going to get you from our sponsor Defender 110 that you can drive the bad news is it's wrapped with a picture of me so it's going to be like an advertisement for the podcast um so it's it's me I'm G to have like a big thumbs up on both sides of the car and there's a a speaker on top that's going to chastise people for being on their phone as you drive past so that's like the trade-off it's a cool enough looking car that you probably still get away with it yeah I've been seeing more and more of these I haven't seen the one yet again that was parked outside our office after the last Defender read um but I see him everywhere now that I know about him and it's cool it's a good looking car uh they know what they're doing there anyways if you want to see what these cars look like with or without the Cal Newport wrap I don't know if that's a standard feature yet it should be go check them out I really like the way this car looks uh go to landroverusa.com so you can visit landroverusa.com to learn more about the defender I also want to talk about our friends at expressvpn how do you choose which internet service provider to use the sad thing is most of us don't have very many options right isps are often operating like monopolies in your region this is the internet service provider that's nearby they use this Monopoly to take advantage of their customers because you don't have any other options often you don't have any other recourse if you don't like what they're doing and you get things like data caps and bandwidth throttling Etc but here's one thing that these isps are doing that you can push back on using an expressvpn they are trying to keep track of every website you visit right and here's how this works do you know what just I'm going to put you on the spot here I I never know like what network terminology is wellknown or not like if I say packet does that make what do you think of when I say like an internet packet I'm not sure you think yeah so this is the thing I always assume these terminologies known okay so when you're communicating on a network like you're communicating to the deeplife decom over the Internet your communication gets broken up into these little messages called packets and the the front of the packet is like a address on an envelope here's the website this message is going to here is the website that it's been sent from and then that packet gets sent through the internet it gets bounced from router to router until it gets to the website so every it looks at the every uh router has to look at the address along the way until it gets to where it's going and then the destination can open up that envelope and oh here's the here's what you're sending me a request for a podcast or something like like that and a lot of a lot of websites these days use uh secure protocol so that the stuff inside the envelope is encrypted so if I'm your internet service provider and you hand me this envelope hey get this to the deeplife decom I don't know what you're sending to the Deep life.com but I can see that's who you're talking to because I have to pass this on the address has to be plain so just like in the mail you can have a thick envelope so I really don't know what you're mailing but who you're mailing it to my post Manos all right so ISP is just look at the address on these uh on these envelopes and they know hey here's who you're talking to I don't know what you're saying but I know who you're talking to and they sell that data or they can with a VPN like expressvpn you get around that and the way you get around that is you take the the envelope you really want to send I really want to talk to the deeplife decom but I don't want people to know I'm going to put that inside another envelope and I'm going to send that envelope to a VPN server so now all the V all the uh your ISP knows is you know Jesse's talking to a VPN server and then the VPN server can open that out and take out your real envelope oh you really want to talk to the deeplife decom it will talk to the site on your behalf and then it will put the response back in a big envelope and send that back to you and now all your ISP learns is that you're talking to a VPN server that does that work as an explanation I like that explanation yeah okay you even have to use word encryption so uh that's what a VPN server does it makes it so among other advantages you can communicate uh with other sites and services without like your service provider knowing who you're talking to if you're going to use a VP PN use the one I recommend which is expressvpn uh this is fantastic software it's easy to use you fire up the app and click one button and now all of your network communication on that device is going to go through the VPN and is protected it works on phones laptops tablets and more so you can no matter what you're connecting to the internet with you can have VPN privacy with expressvpn it's been rated number one by Tech reviewers at CNET and The Verge among others so you should use a VPN and expressvpn is a great option option so protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com that's exp rsvpn domcom deep you can get an extra four months free but only when you go to expressvpn.com deep all right let's go on to our final segment all right that VPN ad got me into a technology mindset so do another tech corner I think like my goal here Jesse is to give people like at least one interesting thing throw into like a dinner party conversation about technology you should come out of the tech corner with like a little tidbit you can pull out to be smart I like it yeah so I want to elaborate briefly an idea that I've been playing with it came up in a panel discussion I was in recently I spoke at a a board of directors meeting this morning it came up again so I'm sort of playing with this idea that there's a potential blind spot in uh the world of AI and in particular a blind spot about where big impacts are going to come next so when we think about generative AI tools like chat GPT and economic impact which is really the the topic that's at the heart of a lot of my reporting on AI a lot of the focus when you see people talking about products or you see the products that being produced by the big players particularly like open AI or Microsoft or Google is a focus on the ability of these generative AI tools to generate text so we we're thinking about the advantages of these tools as the text they can produce it can write an email on my behalf it can write this memo on my behalf it can help me create this presentation right so we're thinking often when we're thinking about like sort of non-te applications of gener of AI so not like in programming or data analysis or these type of things it's a text generation that we focus on and that's important but I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the the first sort of UB ubiquitous why sort ubiquitous productivity gains from J of AI so gains that are going to be cross industry are going to come from the symmetric ability of these models which is to interpret text that's input so it does both things I can type something in the chat GPT it can understand what I'm saying very well and based on the understanding it can produce text very well I think the big next ubiquitous productivity gains are going to be based on the interpretation of text text and in particular the ability of these models to be natural language interfaces to other software tools so like the example I like to give is maybe I have a piece of software where I don't know how to use this software in an advanced way it's like a spreadsheet I don't really know how to do Advanced analysis or data cleaning in the spreadsheet an expert user might know I don't know how to use it I have a data analysis package I don't really know how to do it I know what I want it to do you know I wanted to like take this data and like do a regression but I don't know like what to click or where to pull or how to do this I haven't been learning this software this is a place where gener AI can help because you could just say in natural language here's what I want to do and what these models are very good at is translating between languages so it can translate what you want to do from natural English language to some sort of Highly structured macro machine language that the application understands so I don't know I want to take out all the column all of the rows from col B that have a dollar amount less than $5 and with the with the the rows that remain I want to build a pie chart that buckets them in intervals of $100 I just say that in natural language and the language model takes that and then spits out on the other end a bunch of sort of like very well formatted macro commands which you can then feed to the the spreadsheet and the spreadsheet does that work for you that's where I think the lwh hanging fruit is that's going to be plucked next or at least could be plucked next that more importantly to me than you writing the email on my behalf is you helping me take advantage of the power of software tools that already exist that's lwh hanging fruit productivity gains for both the individuals and for organizations because now um you need less experts and you need less people so that is what I'm what I'm keeping an eye on right now one of the reasons why I think this is not being emphasized is that interpretation of text and translation of it into a machine language doesn't require massive models and if you're anth propic if you're open AI Microsoft right if you're Google you want massive models to be the thing that people care about because you're among the only companies that can afford to create these massive models you really see the might and power of the massive models in production look at the graphic it created look at the very subtle text it created look at the uh the code it created and like how the code compiles right away like that's where you really get into the the power of it but you don't need a 600 billion parameter model to take natural language commands for Excel and turn them into like spreadsheet commands you could probably train a much smaller model to do that and like a lot of companies could probably do that so they they want the focus to be on text outputed because that requires the fanciest models but I really think this is the loow hanging fruit and the reason why I'm pretty sure it'll be plucked is that it again it doesn't require a 30,000 GPU you know nuclear power plant power data center in order to train like much more modest models can be natural language transl ators and so a smaller company can build their own or multiple companies can have their own version of these models for their particular tools so that's the idea I want to throw out here now don't just focus on the ability of language models to generate text focus on their ability to interpret text small agile models that unlock the power of existing software tools I think is going to be a big deal so uh along these lines like I I think it's a misnomer again people want to think about the language model for example doing all the work I think this is unnecessary as well they want to think about like I have a bunch of data I want to just input that data to my language model and the language model will analyze it like it's going to move through the language model and a result will come out the other side that's not really what we want we don't want a a a language model that's so big and it's been trained on so many things you can give it like a bunch of data and the model itself has can actually like do some statistical analysis no what you want is a really predictable depend highquality statistical analysis software and the language model you tell it what you want to do with the data and then it tells the statistical software here's the analysis we want to run and and then the statistical software does the analysis right like that's what we really want we we want and I think this again is where the lwh hanging fruit is going to be not massive models that just is like does everything you want it to do but they unlock the things that other software does for the average user all right so that's my big idea I'm throwing out there trademark trademark 2025 I don't have a catchy name for it but keep that in mind look for natural language processing as like the next maybe the first big killer app of this not this or oracular idea of just like I talk to this Oracle and I give it data just does everything for me I just don't think that's the most efficient way to get the near future value out of gener AI all right so there's my tech Corner idea of the week and with that I think we'll wrap up this episode we'll be back next week with some more deep questions but until then as always stay deep if you like today's discussion about how we're getting dumber and what to do about it you might also like episode 336 which was titled on screens and Solitude has a lot of good ideas there as well for getting back in control of your own brain check it out I think you'll like it so the writer Derek Thompson who I know and I like has a big new feature article in the Atlantic right now many of you sent it to me so you probably have heard of it it's titled the antisocial Century Americans are now spending more time alone than ever it's changing our personalities our politics and even our relationship to reality