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

“So it certainly has not been going up. That metric's been stagnating for a long time now while all of this was going on. I think the only reason why it hasn't fallen is that we added these extra shifts off the books. I'm going to work for three hours in the morning. I'm going to work for three hours at night. And only that, I think, has allowed us to basically maintain a stagnated non-industrial growth. We should have been shooting up the charts. I mean, this is miraculous innovations and computer networks. And then we built out these hundred billion dollar. Ubiquitous worldwide high speed wireless internet infrastructure with supercomputers in our pockets where we could talk to anyone at any time. Like why did our productivity not shoot off the charts? Because our brain can't context switch once every six minutes.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, I think it brought it down. So, my. My contention, and so again, there's a little bit in the book, but I have a more recent Wired article that puts some newer numbers to this. I subscribe to the hypothesis that the hyperactive hive mind was so detrimental. So yeah, it helped productivity at first, right, when you could do fast asynchronous communication, but very quickly there was a sort of exponential rise in communication amounts. We got to the point where the hive mind meant you had to constantly check your email. I think that made us so unproductive that it actually was pulling down non-industrial productivity. And I think the only reason why”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it was a miracle application, which is why it spread everywhere. But it's one of these things where, okay, unintended consequences, right? You had this miracle productivity silver bullet. It spread everywhere, but it was so effective. It just, you know, I don't know, like a drug. I'm sure there's some pandemic Metaphor here, analogy here of a drug is so effective at treating this that it also blows up your whole immune system and that everyone gets sick.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work its way through these tubes to show up in just a minute or something at the floor and at the general office suite where you want it to go. My point is the fact that they spent so much money to make that work show how important fast asynchronous communication was to large offices. So when email came along, it was a productivity silver bullet. It was a miracle. I talked to the researchers who were working on computer supported collaboration in the late 80s trying to figure out how are we going to use computer networks to be more productive. And they were building all these systems and tools. Email showed up. It just wiped all that research off the map. There was no need to build these custom intranet applications. There's no need to build these communication platforms. Email could just do everything.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was a problem that did not exist until we got large offices. We got large offices, synchronous communication. Like, let's get on the phone at the same time. There's too much overhead to it. There's too many people you might have to talk to. Asynchronous communication, like let me send you a memo when I'm ready and you can read it when you're ready, took too long. And so it was like a huge problem. So one of the things I talked about is the way that when they built the CIA headquarters, there was such a need for fast asynchronous communication that they built a pneumatic powered email system. They had these pneumatic tubes all throughout the headquarters with electromagnetic routers. So you would put your message in a plexiglass tube and you would turn these brass dials about the location. You would stick it in these things and pneumatic tubes and it would shoot and sort.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A miracle, right? This was so I So I wrote a, there was originally a New Yorker piece from a year or two ago called Was Email a Mistake. And then it's in the book too. But I go into the history of email. Like, why did it come along? And it solved a huge problem. So it was the problem of fast asynchronous communication.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Drastically changed how everyone collaborated. So that's not enough time for an all hands meeting. Guys, we figured it out. This is what we need to communicate a lot more is what's going to make us more productive. We need more emails. It's emergent.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's my big argument about what happened with the Hive Mind. And I can document specific examples. So I document this example in IBM 1987, maybe 85, but it's in like the mid to late 80s. IBM Armonk headquarters, we're going to put in internal email, right? Because it's convenient. And so they ran a whole study. And so I talked to the engineer who ran the study, Adrian Stunt, like, we're going to run this study to figure out how much do we communicate because it was still an era where it's expensive, right? So you have to provision a mainframe. So you can't over provision. Like we want to know how much communication actually happened. So they went and figured it out, how many memos, how many calls, how many notes? Great. We'll provision a mainframe to handle email that can handle all of that. So if all of our communication moves to email, the mainframe will still be fine. In three days, they had melted it down. People were communicating six times more than that estimate. So just in three days, the presence of a low friction digital communication tool.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one of the big ideas that the unintentionality. So, this goes back to technological determinism. I mean, this is a weird business book because I go deep on philosophy, I go deep on, for some reason. We get in the paleoanthropology for a while. We do a lot of neuroscience. It's kind of a weird book. But I got real into this technological determinism, right? This notion that just the presence of a technology can change how people act.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The average knowledge worker has to check one of these channels once every six minutes because every single thing you do in your organization, how you talk to your colleagues, how you talk to your vendors, how you talk to your clients, how you talk to the HR department, it's all this asynchronous unscheduled back and forth messaging. And you have to service the conversations. And it spiraled out of control and it has sort of devolved a lot of work in the office now to all I do is constantly tend communication channels.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Better, right? So it was a killer app because it was useful. In its wake came a new way of collaborating. And that's the hyperactive 5 mind. So it's like the virus that follows the rats that went through Western Europe for the black pig as emails spread through organizations in its wake came the hyperactive hive mind workflow, which says, okay, guys, here's the way we're going to collaborate. We'll just work things out on the fly with unscheduled back and forth messages. Just boom, boom, boom. Let's go back and forth. Hey, what about this? Did you see this? What about that client? What's going on over here? That followed email. It completely took over office work. And the need to keep up with all of these asynchronous back and forth unscheduled messages as those got more and more and more. And we had more of those to service. The need to service those required us to check more and more and more and more, right? And so by the time, and I go through the numbers, but by the time you get to today.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, my initial interviews were done in 2016. So it took five years to pull the threads together. I was trying to understand why is it so hard for most people to actually find any time to do this stuff that actually moves to Neil? And the story was, and I thought this was, I hadn't heard this reported anywhere else. That's why it took me so long to pull it together, is email arrives on the scene, email spreads, I trace it, it really picks up Steam in the early 1990s, between like 1990 and 1995, it makes its move, right? And it does so for very pragmatic reasons. It was replacing existing communication technologies that it was better than it was mainly the fax machine, voicemail, and memos, right? So this was just”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and the devil It's the scourge of hundreds of millions. So I think I called this book a world without email, the real title should be a world without the hyperactive hive mind workflow by publisher didn't like that. So we had to get a little bit more pithy. I was trying to answer the question after deep work why is it so hard to do this if this is so valuable if we can produce much higher if people are much happier why do we check email a day why are we on Slack all day you know and so I started working on this book immediately after deep work”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we're doing now, yeah, or we're going to repurpose off the shelf stuff. That's not, you're going to, yeah, we're going to repurpose whatever it was for office productivity or something. And like the club's using Slack just to build out these. Yeah.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, so Facebook was like a fantastic capital concentration machine. It's crazy how much Where it even found that capital in the world that it could concentrate and ossify in the stock price that a very small number of people have access to, right? That's incredibly powerful. So when there is a possibility to consolidate and gather a huge amount of capital, that's a huge imperative that's very hard for the bike club to go up again.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or there's alternatives. I mean, even with Clubhouse, though, so one of the issues with a lot of these platforms, I think, is bits are cheap enough now. That we don't really need a unicorn investor model. I mean, the investors need that model. There's really not really an imperative of we need something that can scale to 100 million plus a year revenue because it was going to require this much seed and angel investment. And you're not going to get this much seed and angel investment unless you can potential exit this wide because you have to be part of a portfolio that depends on one out of 10 exiting here. If you don't actually need that and you don't need to satisfy that investor model, which I think is basically the case. I mean, bits are so cheap. Everything is so cheap. You don't necessarily, so even like with Clubhouse, it's investor-backed, right? It's this notion of like this needs to be a major platform, but the bike club doesn't necessarily need a major platform. That's where I'm interested. I mean, I don't know. There's so much money. That's the only problem that bets against me is that you can concentrate a lot of capital if you do these things, right?”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't go back to 2007. That's like the number one thing you could do to have a lot of success with a new platform is go back in time 14 years.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you're right. You're right about that. And it's hard. And that's why this is one of the conclusions from that indie social media article is it's just. The ugliness matters. And I don't mean even just aesthetically, but just the clunkiness of the interfaces. And I don't know to some degree the social media companies have spent a lot of money on this. And to some degree, it's a survivorship bias Twitter, every time I hear Jack talks about this, it seems like he's as surprised as anyone else the way Twitter is being used. I mean, it's basically the way they had it years ago. And then it was great. It'll be statuses, right? This is what I'm doing, you know, and my friends can follow me and see it. And without really changing anything, it just happened to hit everything right. Support this other type of interaction”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a lot of energy. And then once Trump's gone, I guess that's probably going to drove a lot of Trump people off Twitter. This stuff is fragile, I think.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But see, I think like Substack, for example, what they're going to pull out of Twitter, among other things, is the audience that was, let's say, like slightly left of center, but slightly sinner, don't like Trump uncomfortable with postmodern critical theories made into political action, right? And they're like, yeah, Twitter, there was a people on their talking about this, and it made me feel sort of heard because I was feeling a little bit unert about it. But honestly, I'd probably rather subscribe the four subs, you know, I'm going to have like berries and Andrew Sullivan's. I'll have like a Jesse signals. I'll have a few sub stacks I can subscribe to and honestly that's I'm a knowledge worker who's 32 anyways probably that's an email all day and And so, like, there's an innovation that's going to, that group is going to suck them off”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What a weird medium. There's no reason for us to have these threads that you have to find and pin when you screenshot. I mean, we have technology to communicate better using the internet. I mean, why are epidemiologists having to do tweet threads?”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The stuff is a lot more culturally fragile, I think. I mean, Twitter's having a moment because it was feeding a certain type of, I mean, there's a lot of anxieties that was in the sort of political sphere anyways that Twitter was working with. But its moment could go too as well. I mean, it's a really arbitrary thing. Short little things. And I read a wired article about this earlier in the pandemic. Like, this is crazy that the way that we're trying to communicate information about the pandemic is all these weird arbitrary rules where people are screenshotting pictures of articles that are part of a tweet thread where you say one slash in under it like we have the technology guys to like really clearly convey in for long form information to people like why are we why do we have these and i know it's because it's the gamified dopamine hits but”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bike enthusiasts that are like, yeah, we'll just jump on a Zoom and have some Slack and put up a blog. The tech doesn't really matter. We've built a world with our own curation, our own rules, our own sort of social ecosystem that's generating a lot of value. I don't know if it'll happen. There's a lot of money at stake with obviously these large, but I just think they're more. I mean, look how quickly Americans left Facebook, right? I mean, Facebook was savvy to buy other properties and to diversify, right? But how quick did that take for... Just standard Facebook news feed. Everyone under the age of something were using it and no one under a certain age is using it now. It took like four years. I mean, this stuff is.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that's sort of my long. When I'm thinking about long tail social media, I'm thinking it's like the text's not so important. There's groups out there, right? I know where the tech they use to actually implement their digital only social group, whatever. They might use Slack. They might use some combination of Zoom. It doesn't matter. I think in the tech world, we want to build the beautiful protocol that, okay, everyone's going to use as a federated server protocol in which we've worked out X, Y, and Z, and no one understands it, because then the engineers need it all to make, I get it because I'm a nerd like this, like, okay, every standard has to fit with everything else, and no one understands what's going on. Meanwhile, you have this group of”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Communication system that's ever been built, and then these companies came along and said, We're going to build our own, we'll just own all the servers and put them in buildings that we own. And the internet will just be the first mildest to get you into our private internet where we owned a whole thing. It went completely against the entire motivation of the internet was like, yes, it's not going to be one person owns all the servers and you pay to access them. It's any one server that they own can talk to anyone else's server because we all agree on a standard set of protocols. And so the old guard of pro internet people never understood this move towards let's build private versions of the internet. We'll build three or four private internets and that's what we'll all use. It was the opposite basically.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's important to remember for a lot of the older generation of internet activists, the people who are very pro-internet in the early days, they were completely flabbergasted by the rise of these platforms. Why would you take the internet and then build your own version of the internet where you own all the servers? And we built this whole thing. We had open protocols. Everyone anywhere in the world could use the same protocols. Your machine can talk to any other machine. It's the most...”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there were blogs that were out there, and this was back as reinforced dorm room at this point, right? And you would, in a distributed fashion, gain credibility because, okay, people have paid it. It's very hard to get people to pay attention to blog. I pay attention. I get linked to this kid Ezra or whatever. It seems to be really sharp. And now people are noticing it. And now you have a distributed curation that solves a lot of the problems we see when you have a completely homogenized low friction environment like friction where, I mean, Twitter, where any random conspiracy theory or whatever that people like can just shoot through and spread, whereas if you're starting a blog to try to push QAnon or something like that, it's probably going to be a really weird-looking blog. You're going to have a hard time. It's just never going to show up on people's radar, right?”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the fact that you've taken, you homogenized everything, right? So everything looks the same, moves with the same low friction. It's very difficult. You have no what I call distributed curation, right? The only curation that really happens, I was a little bit with likes and also the algorithm. But if you look back to pre-Web 2.0 or early Web 2.0, when a lot of this was happening, let's say on blogs where people own their own servers and you had your different blogs, there was this distributed curation that happened where in order for your blog to get on people's radar and this had nothing to do with any gatekeepers or legacy media it was over time you got more links and people respected you and you would hear about this blog over here and there's this whole distributed curation and filtering going on so if you think like the 2004 presidential election most of the information people are getting from the internet was one of the first big internet news driven elections was from you know you had like the daily costs and and drudge”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is what I'm thinking. Right. So, this is my point about that because that's right. The democratizing power of the internet is fantastic. I'm an old school internet nerd, a guy that was, you know, telnetting in the servers and gophering before the World Wide Web was around, right? So I'm a huge internet booster. And that's one of its big power. But when you put everything on Twitter,”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People realize sugar is bad for you. Yeah, drinking a lot's great too, but it also, after a while, you realize there's problems. So some of the long tail social media networks that are out there that I've looked at, they offer usually like a deeper sense of connection. It's usually interesting people that you share some affinity and you have these carefully cultivated. I wrote this New Yorker piece a couple years ago about the indie social media movement that really got into some of these different technologies, but I think the technologies are a distraction. We focus too much on Mastodon versus whatever. Forget or Discord. Actually, let's forget the protocols right now. It's the idea of, okay, and there's a lot of these long-tail social media groups, what people are getting out of it, which I think can outweigh the dopamine gamification is strong connection and motivation. Like you're in a group with other guys that are all trying to be, you know, better dads or something like this. And you talk to them on a regular basis and you're sharing your stories and there's interesting talk.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mechanism in other forms, or people are turning on that gamification. I mean, so people are getting wise to it and are getting uncomfortable about it, right? So if I'm offering something, these exist sugar.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not the best internet possible format for them expressing themselves and being interesting. You have all these comedians that are trying to like, well, I can do like little clips and little whatever. I don't know if there was a long tail social media. It's just where the comedians are. And there's podcasts and the comedians are on podcasts now. So this is my thought is that there's really no strong advantage to having one large platform that everyone is on if all you're getting from it is I now have different options for diversion and like uplifting aspirational or whatever types of entertainment that whole thing could fragment and I think the glue that was holding together was networked effects and I don't think they realized that when network effects have been destabilized they don't have the centrifugal force anymore and they're spinning faster and faster but is a Twitter feed really that much more interesting than all these streaming services is it really that much more interesting than clubhouse is it that much more interesting than podcast i feel like they don't realize”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is where I connect with people. Once it's just a feed that's kind of interesting, now you're competing with everything else that can produce interesting content that's diverting. And I think that is a much fiercer competition because now, for example, you're going up against podcasts, right? I mean, like, okay, I guess the Twitter feed is interesting right now, but also a podcast is interesting or something else could be interesting too. I think it's a much fiercer competition when there's no more network effects, right? And so my sense is we're going to see a fragmentation into what I call long tail social media, where if I don't need everyone I know to be on a platform, then why not have three or four bespoke platforms I use where it's a thousand people and it's all, we're all interested in, you know, whatever, AI or comedy. And we've perfected this interface and maybe it's like club.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So here's, I think the big mistake the major platforms made is when they took out the network effect advantage. So the original pitch, especially of something like Facebook or Instagram, was the people you know are on here. So what you use this for is you can connect to people that you already know. This is what makes the network useful. So therefore, the value of our network grows quadratically with the number of users. And therefore, it's such a head start that there's no way that someone else can catch up. But when they shifted and when Facebook took the lead of say we're going to shift towards a news feed model, they basically said we're going to try to in the moment get more data and get more likes. Like what we're going to go towards is actually just scene interesting stuff, like seeing diverting information. So people took this social internet impulse to connect to people digitally to other tools, like group text messages and WhatsApp and stuff like this, right? So you don't think about these tools as”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So my big unified theory on social media is I'm very bearish The big platforms having a long future. I think the moment of three or four major platforms is not going to last, right? So I don't know, okay, this is just perspective, right? So you can start sorting these stocks on my don't laugh. It's not financial advice. Yeah, yeah, don't do Robinhood.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm trying to pull these two things apart. So there's these two way social media, let's say, could change the experience of reading a major newspaper today. One could be a little bit more economic, right? So the internet made it cheaper to get news. The newspapers had to retreat to a paywall model because it was the only way they were going to survive. But once you're in a paywall model, then what you really want to do is make your tribe, which is within the paywall very, very happy with you. So you want to work to them. But then there's the sort of determinist point of view, which is the properties of Twitter, which were arbitrary. Jack and Evan just whatever, let's just do it this way, influenced a very way that people now understand and think about the world.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just changed the way that people conceptualized what, for example, debate and discussion was. Like it introduced a rhetorical dunk culture where it's sort of more about tribes not giving ground to other tribes. And it's like it's a complete, there's different. Places and times when that type of discussion was thought of differently, right?”
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 see you yelling at people. Now, do you think social media as a medium changed the cultural standards? And I mean it in a, have you read Neil Postman at all? Have you read like Amusing Ourselves to Death? He was a social critic technology critic and wrote a lot about sort of technological determinism. So the ways, which is a really influential idea to a lot of my work, which is actually a little out of fashion right now in academia, but the ways that the properties and presence of technologies change things about humans in a way that's not really intended or planned by the humans themselves. And that book is all about how different communication medium, like fundamentally just changed the way the human brain understands and operates. And so he sort of gets into what happened when the printed word was widespread and how television changed it. And this was all pre-social media. But this is one of these ideas I'm having is like, what to the degree to which I get into it sometimes on my show, I get into a little bit, like the degree to which Twitter in particular.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I have a writer friend, Ryan Holliday, who writes about the Stoics a lot, and he has a similar strategy. He posts one quote every day usually from a famous Stoic and sometimes from a contemporary figure. And that's just what he does. He just posts it. And it's a very positive thing. Like his readers really love it because it's just like a dose of inspiration. He doesn't spend time. He's never interacting with anyone on social media, right? But that's an example of I figured out what's important to me. What's the best way to use tools to amplify it? And then you get advantages out of the tools. So I like what you're doing. I looked you up your Twitter feed before I came over here. I was curious. You're not on there a lot.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When people do this exercise, you get lots of configurations. So for people that have a public presence, for example, what you're doing is not that unusual. Okay, I post one thing a day and my audience likes it, and that's kind of it, but you thought through like, okay, this supports something I value, which is like having a sort of informal connection with my audience and being exposed to some sort of positive randomness. Okay, then you could say, if that's my goal. The right way to do it? Well, I don't need to be on Twitter, on my phone.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't optimize if you don't know what the function you're trying to optimize. So it's like this huge hack. Once you know this is why I'm using Twitter, then you can have a lot of rules about how you use Twitter. And suddenly you take this cost-benefit ratio and it goes like way from the company's advantage and then way over towards your advantage.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, so roughly half probably got rid of social media altogether once they did this exercise, they realized these things I care about, social media is not the tools that's really helping. The other half kept there are some things in their life or some social media was useful. But the key thing is if they knew why they were deploying social media, they could put fences around it. So for example, of those half that kept some social media, almost none of them kept it on their phone.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About half, right? So about half when they went through this exercise, and these aren't quantified numbers, you know, this is just, they sent me reports”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were much more successful than the people that just said, I'm sick of using my phone so much, so I'm just going to white knuckle it. Just 30 days will be good for me. I just got to get away from it or something. It doesn't last.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or what makes me happy unrelated to technology? What do I want my life to be like? Well, maybe what I want to do is be outside of nature two hours a day and spend a lot more time helping my community and sacrificing on behalf of my connections and then have some sort of intellectually engaging leisure activity like I'm reading or trying to read the great books and having more calm and seeing the sunset. You create this picture and then you go back and say, well, I still need my Facebook group because that's how I keep up with my cycling group. But Twitter is just toxics on helping any of these things. And well, I'm an artist, so I kind of need Instagram to get inspiration. But if I know that's why I'm using Instagram, I don't need it on my phone. It's just on my computer and I just follow 10 artists and check it once a week. Like you really can start deploying. And it was the number one thing that differentiated in that experiment, the people who ended up sustainably making changes and getting through the 30 days and those who didn't was the people who did the experimentation and the reflection. Like let me try to figure out what's possible.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much less likely to succeed in the long term. So we're much less likely at trying to reduce this sort of amorphous negative because in the moment you're like, yeah, but it's not that bad and it would be kind of interesting to look at it now. You're instead controlling behavior because you have a positive that you're aiming towards, it's very powerful for people. Like, I want my life to be like this. Here's the role that tech plays in that life. Connection to wanting your life to be like that is very, very strong, and then it's much, much easier to say, yeah, like using Instagram is not part of my plan for how I have that life. And I really want to have that life. So of course, I'm not going to use Instagram. So it turns out to be a much more sustainable way to tame what's going on.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Digital minimalism, that's my philosophy for all this tech. And it's working backwards from what's important. So you figure out what you're actually all about, like what you want to do, what you want to spend your time doing. And then you can ask, okay, is there a place that tech can amplify or support some of these things? And that's how you decide what tech to use. And so the process is let's actually get away from everything. Let's be bored for a while. Let's really spend a month really figuring out what do I actually want to do? What do I want to spend my time doing? What's important to me, you know, what makes me feel good? And then when you're done, you can bring back in tech very strategically to help those things, right? And that was the goal. That turns out to be much more successful than when people take an abstention only approach. So if you come at your tech life and say, you know, whatever, I look at Instagram too much. I don't like how much I'm on Instagram. That's a bad thing. I want to reduce this bad thing. So here's my new thing. I'm going to spend less time looking at Instagram.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Physical books, so like you can just go borrow them. And there's like low pressure, and you can explore, and you bring them home, and then you read them and you can sit by the window and read them in its nice weather outside. And I used to do that 20 years ago. They're listening to boredom.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's hard at first, but then they get used to listening to themselves and sort of seeking out what this really pushing me towards. And it was pushing people towards connection. It was pushing people towards, I just want to go be around other people. It was pushing people towards high quality leisure activities. Like I want to go do something that's complicated. And it took weeks sometimes for them to get in touch with their boredom. But then it completely rewired how they thought about what do I want to do with my time outside of work. And then the idea is when you're done with that, then it was much easier to go back and completely change your digital life because you have alternatives, right? You're not just trying to abstain from things you don't like. But that's basically a listening to boredom experiment, like just be there with the boredom and see where it drives you when you don't have, you know, the digital cheese it's okay. So if I can't do that, where is it going to drive me? Well, I guess I kind of want to go to the library, which came up a lot, by the way, a lot of people rediscovered the library, you know.”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Little bit, but yeah, listen to boredom. But so two years ago I had a book out called Digital Minimalism. And one of the things I was recommending that people do is basically a 30-day fast. But from digital personal entertainment, social media, online videos, anything that captures your attention and dispels boredom. And people were thinking like, oh, this is a detox. Like, I just want to teach your body not to need the distraction, this or that, but it really wasn't what I was interested in. I wanted there to be space. that you could listen to your boredom like okay i can't just dispel it i can't just look at the screen and revel in it a little bit and start to listen to it and say what is this really pushing me towards and you take the new stuff the new technology off the table and sort of ask what is this what am i craving like what's the activity equivalent of 2000 calories of meat with a little bit of green beans on the side and i had 1700 people go through this experiment like spend 30 days doing this”
2021-03-05 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #166 – Cal Newport: Deep Work, Focus, Productivity, Email, and Social Media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source