YouSaid · the spoken record

Cal Newport

lines on the record: 201
first: 2021-03-05
most recent: 2021-03-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah 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”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think that's the big question, I guess, right? Yeah. So is the large size and interconnectiveness of the deep learning network fundamental to that task or are we just not very good at it yet because we're using the wrong Metaphor. I mean, the human brain learns with much fewer examples and with much less tuning of the whatever, whatever, whatever probably that requires to get those deep mind networks up and running. But yeah, so I don't really know. But the one thing I have observed is that the mundane nature of some of the working with these models tends to lead people to think that do it could be Skynet or it could be like a lot of pain to get the thermostat to do what we want it to do.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“TDM, right? But, anyways, I'm really convinced with his idea that once we understand better and better what's going on from a theory perspective, it's going to make it into an engineering discipline. So in my mind, where we're going to end up is, okay, forget these metaphors of neurons, and these things are going to get 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 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 and more things because we're going to have a little bit more control over how we piece together these different classification black boxes.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am convinced by is it Tegamart at MIT who's Yeah, Tech Mark, 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, the reason why practicing computer scientists often who are doing AI or working at AI and industry aren't worried about so much existential threats is because they see the reality is they're multiplying matrices with numpy or something like this, right? Yeah. And tweaking constants and hoping that the classifier fitness. For God's sakes, before the submission deadline actually gets above some, it feels like it's linear algebra and”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, often those lower impossibility results really get at the hard edges of exactly how that model works. So we'll see if this, so we published a paper on this, that paper you mention that kind of introduced the idea to distributed algorithms world. And I think that's got some traction and there's been some follow-up. So we've just submitted our next. Honestly, the issue with the next is that the result fell out so easily, and this is just the mathematical Machismo problem in these fields, is there's a good chance to paper won't be accepted because there wasn't enough mathematical self-flagellation.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, because it's all about, especially in distributed algorithms, the model is everything. 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 so we can prove lower bounds”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Percolate from the world of theory into the world of algorithm design, which we'll pull on the theory, and now suddenly it's useful. And then the algorithm design gets pulled into the world of practice where they say, well, actually, we can make this algorithm a lot better because in practice, really, these servers do XYZ, and now we can 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 eventually some of this stuff will percolate down in effect at the very end, you know, a phone. But it's a long tunnel.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't care about the applicability. We kind of do, but not really. And we're terrible with computers and can't do anything useful with computers, and we don't know how to code. And we're not productive members of technological society. But I do think things percolate.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think they care. It's all, I don't know. It feels like to me a lot of this theory is just math muchism. It's like, whatever. This was a hard bound to proof”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My interest, yeah, because in distributed algorithms, there's a ton of really famous strong lower bounds, but things have to go wrong really, really wrong for these lower bound arguments to work. And so I like this approach. So this whole notion of fragile versus robust, I was like, 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.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Submitted a paper. An anonymous friend of mine. Yeah. Yeah. His paper should be accepted showed that even just adding like one random edge per round Here's the cool thing about 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. Actually, keep things slow”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The right way that you needed to screw your algorithm. So we said, What if we randomly just add or remove a couple edges in every round? So the adversary is trying to choose the worst possible network. We're just tweaking it a little bit. And in that case, this is a new paper. I mean, it's a blinded submission, so maybe I shouldn't. It's not whatever. We basically showed”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Performance of that algorithm. Yeah, so like I just submitted a new paper on this a couple weeks ago, and we were looking at a very simple problem. 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 network can change every round, there's these lower bounds that says it takes a really long time. There's a way that no matter what algorithm you come up with, there's a way the network can change in such a way that just really slows down your progress, basically, right? So smooth analysis there says, yeah, but that seems like a really bad luck if your network was changing exactly.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bound this idea that it could sometimes run really long was a fragile bound because it could only run a really long time if you had exactly the worst pathological input. So then my collaborators and I brought this over to the world of distributed algorithms. We brought them over the general lower bounds, right? So in the world of dynamic networks, so distributed algorithms 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 in a dynamic network, those can change. So I was talking to you, but now I can't talk to you anymore. Now I'm connected to a person over here. It's a really hard environment mathematically speaking. And there's a lot of really strong lower bounds, which you can imagine if the network can change all the time and a bad guy's doing it. It's like hard to do things well.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, okay, so smooth analysis, so it wasn't my idea. So Spielman and Tang came up with this in the context of sequential algorithms. So just like the normal world of an algorithm that runs on a computer. And they were looking at, there's a well-known algorithm called the simplex algorithm, but basically you're trying to find a hole around a group of points. And there was an algorithm that worked really well in practice. But when you analyzed 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, because in simplex they're numbers, we're going to just randomly put a little bit of noise on each of the numbers. And they showed if you put a little bit of noise on the numbers, suddenly simplex algorithm goes really fast. Like, oh, that explains this lower.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Philosophically interesting I mean, it all goes back to you get back to Plato, it's all reducto ad absurdum. So all these arguments have to start. The only way to do it is because there's an infinite number of solutions. You can't go through them. You say, let's assume for the sake of contradiction that there existed something that solves this problem. And then you turn to crank a logic until you blow up the universe. And then you go back and say, okay, our original assumption that this solution exists can't be true. I just think philosophically it's like it's 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 algorithm can solve this problem faster than this in this setting of all the infinite number of ways you might ever do it.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there's just vastly more problems than there are algorithms. So basically anything you can come up with for the most part almost certainly is not solvable by a computer and then he was like, let me give a particular example and he figured out the very first computability proof and he said let's just walk through with a little bit of simple logic the halting problem can't be solved by an algorithm. And that kicked off the whole enterprise of some things can't be solved by algorithms. Some things can't be solved by computers. And we've just been doing theory on that since the that was the 30s he wrote that.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“SIPS are approach, but you have a sort of it's a language, so an infinite number of strings, some of them are into language and some of them aren't, but basically you can imagine a problem is represented as an infinite binary string, where in every position, like a one means that string is in the language and a zero means it isn't. And then he applied cantor from the 19th century and said, okay, the natural numbers are countable. And so it's countably infinite. And infinite binary strings, you can use a diagonalization argument to show they're uncountable.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 that's in German, the Eischlictung problem, but basically the German name that Hilbert called the decision problem. This was pre-computers, but he was, you know, he's English, so it's written in English. So it's a very accessible paper. And it lays a foundation for all of theoretical computer science. He just has this insight. He's like, well, if we think about like an algorithm, he figures out all effective procedures or Turing machines are basically algorithms. We could really describe a Turing machine with a number, which we can now imagine with 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 one way to think about a problem is you have, and this is like kind of the”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 impossible.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Used to. Yeah. And would just be, I'm going all in on here's the new affine group with which you can do whatever. I mean, it was just equations.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you look at Scott Aronson's blog at all that settled off to Mice? Yeah, it's hardcore complexity theory. But there's an enthusiasm or like Terry Tow's blog. A little”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's your innovation, I think. We can bring on professors. I know Joe Rogan does some of that too, but Your professors in your field, like, yeah, you bring on all these MIT guys who I remember, you know.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's one of the most important things in all of human existence. 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 because it took the friction out of it. And so the brain just doesn't like, yeah, you've been commenting on this person's whatever. You've been retweeting them or sending them some text. It's not hard enough. And then the perceived strength of that social connection diminishes where if you talk to them or go spend time with them or whatever, you're going to feel better about it. So the friction is good. I have a thing with some of my friends where at the end of each call, we take a couple minutes to schedule the next. And then you never have to, it's like I do with haircuts or something, right? Like if I don't schedule it then.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you have like a lot of interesting friend possibilities. You have like an interesting problem, right? Like really interesting people you can talk to.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's usually better and also from an interaction like social connection standpoint, there's a lot more information in the human voice and the back and forth. Yeah, if you just call stuff very generational, right? Like our generation will be comfortable talking on the phone in a way that a younger generation isn't, but an older generation is more comfortable with, well, you just call people. Whereas we, so there's a happy medium, but most of my good friends, we have regular phone calls I don't just call them. We schedule it. We schedule it. Yeah. Just on text. Like, yeah, you want to talk”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, look, if you have to interact with someone, there's a lot of efficiency and synchrony, right? And this is something from distributed system theory where you know if you go from synchronous to asynchronous networks, there's a huge amount of overhead to the asynchronous. So actually the protocol is required to solve things in asynchronous networks are significantly more complicated and fragile than synchronous protocols. So if we can just do real time.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We got to get this report ready. Here's what I think we should do I'll get a draft into our Dropbox folder by 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 hour is 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 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.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, 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,”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything is just happening with messages. So if you now get most stuff done repeatable collaborations 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, or sending something, hey, I don't know if you saw this, I thought you might like it. Like, it's great for that”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit of an exchange, it's fine. I think it's fine if stuff comes in over the transom or you hear from someone you haven't heard from in a while. I think all that's fine. I mean, that's email at its best, where it starts to kill us is where all of our collaboration is happening with the back and forth. So when you've moved the bulk of that out of your inbox, now you're back in that Meg Ryan movie, like you got mail, where it's like, all right, load this up and you wait for the modem, like, oh, we got a message. Yeah. Like sent me a message. This is interesting, right? You're back to the AOL days.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think email is good for delivering information, right? So I think of it like a fax machine or something. It's a really good fax machine. So if I need to send you something and you just send you a file, I need to broadcast a new policy or something, like email is a great way to do it. It's bad for collaboration. So if you're having a conversation, like we're trying to reach a decision on something, I'm trying to learn about something. I'm trying to clarify what this is. It's more than just a one answer type question, then I think that you shouldn't be doing an email.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trello board, and we'll do a weekly really structured status meeting real quick. What's going on? Who needs what? Let's go. And now everything's on there and on our inboxes. We don't have to send as many messages. So like that rough level of granularity, that gets you most of the way there.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think some of that's just you and I probably. I mean, it's just our mindset, right? We do computer science, right? So chicken and egg. Yes. And a lot of the processes end up working here are much rougher. It's like, okay, instead of letting clients just email me all the time, we have a weekly call and then we send them a breakdown of everything we committed to. 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 email, I have office hours. This is what Basecamp does. All right. So you come to my office hours that cuts down a lot of back and forth. All right, we're going to, instead of emailing about this project, we'll have a”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sort of balance between context switches are poison, so we got to get rid of the context switches. Once something's working good enough to get rid of the context switches, then get after it.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't save yourself through if you can get the process just right, right? So I wrote this article kind of recently called The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done and I profiled this productivity guru named Merlin Mann. And I talked about this movement called Productivity Prawn as like elite speak term in the early 2000s where people just became convinced that if they could combine their productivity systems with software and they could find just the right software, just the right configuration where they could offload most of the difficulty of work what happened with the machines when it kind of figured out for and then they could just sort of crank widgets and it would be and the whole thing fell apart because work is hard and it's hard to do and making decisions about what the work on is hard and no system can really do that for you. So you have to have this.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a problem. I mean, because let's look at the one sector that does do this, which is developers. So agile methodologies like Scrum or Kanban are basically workflow methodologies that are much better than the hyperactive hive mind. 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 is 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 a broadly probably an issue, right? We have to be careful because you can just go down that fiddling path. So it needs to be here's how we do it. Let's reduce the messages and let's roll, you know.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anti-Claude Shannon, right? I talked about communication theory or information theory. It takes time to come up with a clever code up front. So you spend more time up front figuring out those spreadsheets and trying to get people on board with it. But then your communication going forward is all much more efficient. So over time, you're using much less bandwidth, right? So you do pain up front. It's quicker just right now to send an email. But if I spend a half day to do this over the next six months, I've saved myself 600 emails.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Have to wrench away our context, look at a message, and come back. And so once you have the mindset of it's a huge thing to ask of someone to have to take their attention off something and look back at this. And if they have to do that for three or four times, like we're just going to figure this out on the fly, and every message is going to require five checks of the inbox while you wait for it, well, now you've created whatever it is at this point, 25 or 30 context shifts. You've just done a huge disservice to someone's day. This would be like if I had a professional athlete, it's like, hey, do me a favor. I need you to go do this press interview, but to get there, you're going to have to carry this sandbag and sprint up this hill and like completely exhaust your muscles. And then you have to go play a game. Like, of course, I'm not going to ask an athlete to do 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.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 whatever powertrain software, then we can figure out on our own what are our processes, how do we want to do this.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Elon Musk is going to.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing that's killer is the back and forth because now I have to keep checking, right? So we scheduled this together because I knew you from before, but like most of the interviews I was scheduling for this, actually I have a process with my publicist where we use a shared document and she put stuff 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. And it takes more time in the moment. But it means that we have almost no back and forth messaging for podcast scheduling, which without this, so like with my UK publisher, I didn't put this process into place because we're not doing as many interviews, but it's all the time. And I'm like, oh, man, I could really feel the difference, right? It's the back and forth that's killer.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 our schedule wants and acuity. There's a lot of tools out there. The key is not to think about it in terms of what tool do I replace email with. Instead, you think about it with, I have a pro, we're trying to come up with a process that reduces back and forth messages. Oh, what tool might help us do that? Yeah, and I would push, it's not about necessarily efficiency. In fact, some of these things are going to take more time. So writing a letter to someone is like a high value activity is probably worth doing.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 scint is in the air.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Episodes. Let's automate this to a degree where I don't have to just send you a message on the fly. And you do this process by process, and the pressure on that inbox is released. And now you don't have to check it every six minutes. So you still have email. I mean, like, I need to send you a file. Sure, I'll use email. But we're not coordinating or collaborating over email or Slack, which is just a faster way of doing the hive mind. I mean, Slack doesn't solve anything there. You have better structured bespoke processes. I think that's what's going to unleash this massive productivity.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what happens is, at least in my vision, you identify, well, actually, there's these different processes that make up my workday. These are things that I do repeatedly, often in collaboration with other people that do useful things for my company or whatever. Right now, most of these processes are implicitly implemented with the hyperactive hive mind. How do we do this thing? Like answering client questions to shoot messages back and forth. How do we do this thing, posting podcast episodes? We'll just figure it out on the fly. My main argument is we actually have to do like they did in the industrial sector, take each of these processes and say, is there a better way to do this? And by better, I mean a way that's going to minimize the need to have unscheduled back and forth messaging. So we actually have to do process engineering. This created a massive growth in productivity in the industrial sector during the 20th century. We have to do it in knowledge work. We can't just rock and roll an inboxes. 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 podcasts?”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you take a break, if you batch, if you try to have better habits, it's going to slow things down. So my whole villain is this hyperactive hive mind workflow. The tool is fine. I don't want the tool to go away, but I want to replace the hive active 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”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wasn't the expectation, yeah, right, right. Because it's not, I think we've seen this through a personal will or failure lens recently, like, oh, am I addicted to email? I have bad etiquette about my email. No, it's the underlying workflow. So the tool itself I will exonerate, I think I would rather use Pop3 than a fax protocol. I think it's easier. The issue is to 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 tin those conversations. 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.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source