How to Build a Cognitive Training Plan | Monday Advice

Testing your cognitive fitness

0:00I've been thinking recently about an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education that several of you sent me. It was titled, My Students Can't Read. Let me start here with the intro from the article. Here's what the intro of the article says. Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it. When I asked why, a student answered honestly. It was too long, and she kept losing

0:35track of what the paper was about. Now, when we hear accounts like this, our normal response is to wring our hands and worry that we're raising sort of a new generation of kids that are barely literate. But here's the follow-up question that we need to also ask. Could you read that 20-page article? Like, honestly, if you were given that much reading, are you still able to do it? See, I think if we pull on this thread a little bit harder, what soon becomes clear is that we don't really have a great way of quantitatively testing how fried our brains have actually become due to

1:11digital distraction. But we need these tests, right? Because in physical fitness, we have measures known as key performance indicators like your BMI or how long it takes you to run a mile that provide us a great way to get feedback on our physical health and gives us targets we can use to systematically work on improving. Well, here's my thought. We need something similar for our cognitive health. And this is what I want to talk about today. I'm going to propose three

1:42cognitive performance indicators that you can go and test today to see exactly how distracted your brain has or has not become. I'll then talk about how to systematically improve those scores if you're not happy with your results. All right. So if you've worried at all about your cognitive fitness starting to slip in recent years, then you need to listen to this episode. Let's get into it. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth

2:16in a distracted world.

Phase two of the cognitive revolution

2:24All right. Before we get into these KPIs, I want to start with unfolding this motivation a little bit more. I want to go back to March to an article that I published in the New York Times. Jesse, we can bring this up on the screen here. It called for us to take cognitive fitness as seriously as we take physical fitness. And here's a key quote from that article. I said, I think we're finally ready for a similar burst of self-reinforcing action in defense of our cognitive fitness. I'm done seeding my brain decor of all that makes me who I am to the financial

2:56interest of a small number of technology billionaires or the short-sighted conveniences of hyperactive communication styles. It's time to move past fretting about our slide into the cognitive shallows and decide to actually do something about it. All right. So what does that mean to do something about it? Well, this is what we're really talking about today. We're sort of answering that question that I first posed at the end of that New York Times piece from back in March, because here's what I think is going on. I think at the moment, we're in what we can call phase one

3:30of the cognitive fitness revolution that I called for in that article. So in phase one, we recognize there's a problem that we're losing our ability to think. Because of this, we're also trying random small things that we hope will help arrest this problem. Like we're making general commitments to use our phone last, or we're saying, hey, I should read more books, or maybe we're doing occasional detoxes or internet sabbathes, something like this. But as in physical health, just doing a few random good-natured things often doesn't lead to the major improvements that you're looking for.

4:05So what we need now is phase two of the cognitive fitness revolution. And in phase two, I think we need numbers. So this brings us to the premise I talked about in the intro. Phase two is where we start to turn to actual quantifiable numbers about where your ability to think, where your level of distraction actually are, so we can face clearly and boldly, this is where I am, and this is where I want to get. Now, I want to borrow a term that's used in physical training, which is, as I mentioned earlier,

4:40key performance indicators, which are sometimes shortened as KPI. These are numbers that you can track and try to improve through training. In physical fitness, there's a lot of these. I mentioned a couple before, your body mass index, your mile time, maybe you would have, you would have your max squat, or, you know, how many thousands of meters you can row on an ERG. Of course, producer Jesse, what do you row, like 20,000 a day? That's something kind of crazy. But we have a lot of these in

5:15physical fitness. We don't really have any of them when it comes to cognitive fitness. So that's what we are going to do today. Now, in particular, I came up with three cognitive KPIs. And I'm going to go through each of these. Each of them is going to be a specific concrete test that you could go after this episode or even pause this episode and go do, you know, take an hour or less, right? These are numbers you can get. And I'm going to tell you how to calibrate your score on

5:47these three KPIs to figure out what this says about where your brain is. So we're going to go through these one, two, three for each. Here's the concrete test. Here is what your score to this test means. Don't worry, because once we've gone through all three of those KPIs, I'll talk about the best way to actually improve those scores if you're not happy with the results that you got. Okay,

First KPI reading endurance

6:10so let's get into it. Let's start with our first KPI. I'll bring it up on the screen here for people who are watching. I call this KPI reading endurance. Okay, so here's the concrete test for KPI number one. What is the max number of minutes you can comfortably remain focused on conceptual nonfiction reading without context switching? Let's just unpack that a little bit. By conceptual nonfiction, I mean, nonfiction reading that has concepts or ideas for you to try to understand, right? So not

6:43just a history or, you know, here's a book about fun facts, but it's a book that has some sort of theories or ideas or arguments, right? So it's conceptual nonfiction. A key caveat here, it should be understandable to you, meaning if you grab a book that's going to use terminology or reference frameworks that you don't understand, that's going to be basically unreadable. So don't just go grab Heidegger, you know, on being and be like, I don't really understand what's going on here. It should not be anything that requires understanding you don't already have. So difficult, but within your

7:19current level of understanding, and you're going to read as many minutes as you can without context switching. So zero looks at a phone, zero looks at your computer, zero getting up to do something else. And when you find it, you can no longer really keep your concentration, stop the timer, then you have a score, a score that we could measure in minutes. All right. So how do we calibrate this score once you have it? I'm going to put a table up here that has five different categories of score. I'm rating these from most least cognitively fit, let's say to most cognitively fit. So the

7:54first level will be brain rotted, then we'll move up to distractible, then we'll move up to what I'm calling pre 2012 average. So in other words, this is going to be roughly speaking, where the average person would be before the advent of smartphones and the distraction crisis that followed. Above that will be the level impressive. And then finally, I'm going to throw in cognitive weapon. And this is where we'll look at, you know, someone historically who has pushed this KPI to a far extreme, just so we can see what the outer limit is for the human brain's capability. All right. So

8:28how do we calibrate your score on this test to this scale? Well, let's go through these one by one. If your max minutes of reading the nonfiction is five minutes or less, that would put you in the brain rotted category. So you have a pretty severe impact of technology on your ability to on your cognitive fitness. If you can make it to 15 minutes, that puts you in the distractible category, right? So you're more distractible than the 2012 average. I'm putting 30 minutes as my that'll put you at the

9:01pre 2012 average. That's like what I would expect, you know, someone 1520 years ago, to be able to sit down and read for 30 minutes, no problem, right? What is impressive? I'm going to say 75 minutes. So if you can make it to like an hour, 15 minutes or more, you have a really good cognitive fitness beyond where we were before the cognitive fitness crisis really began 15 years ago. All right. What about cognitive weapon level? I'm going to say one book per day. Now that might sound crazy, but that

9:33has been done before. Who did that? Theodore Roosevelt. Our man, Teddy Roosevelt, could read an entire book per day. How long did that take? Well, let me read you this quote here from the Theodore Roosevelt Center. He read in many different languages, including German, French, Italian, and Latin. On one day during the 1900 campaign, Roosevelt's schedule included six different mentions of reading, totaling four and a half hours of reading for a single day. That was in the middle of a presidential campaign. So I guess there is an

10:03extreme here. So, all right, that's KPI number one. Jesse, where do you think you would fall? You can, you easily, you easily read the very long foreign magazine article. So I think, what, the pre-2012 average would be no problem for you. I bet you'd be impressed. Yeah, like today I'd run on the plane for probably 45 minutes. Yeah. I don't have my phone or anything. Don't forget to show us your smiley face. There you go. So you're already at impressive. I guess that's where I am too. I mean, I can easily do impressive, but I cannot, a book a day. I mean, I could read some, I, maybe, but man, Roosevelt.

10:39How long did he read a book a day for? Supposedly, during his time in the White House, like most days. Isn't that crazy? In the White House. I don't know how, I mean, I write about Roosevelt, Teddy and Deep Work. And I talked about how he, like part of his, his secret weapon is intense focus. And he writes about it, especially during his time as a student at Harvard. He writes about his ability to what the kids now would call locking in. He could like lock in because he realized that was the most, he, he wanted to get things done. And like the most efficient way to get like his

11:13studies done or whatever was that if he could give it intense, crazy concentration, it would take less time, which is a formula that actually shows up in my, my much older book, how to become a straight A student. Total work produced equals time spent times intensity of focus. So you could, that's the thing to hack is intensity of focus goes up time required to get the same amount of work goes down. So Roosevelt, he kind of pushed out to an extreme. Plus it's so impressive. He's doing it in different languages. Yeah. I mean, look, what did this quote said? German, French, Italian, and Latin. We must be wasting so many cycles on media.

11:50Right. I mean, he was a busy guy and he spoke four languages and, and would read a book a day and did all sorts of other sorts of things. I don't know, man. You would have liked to look around his library. I know. I would like to see it. I would like, I have not yet, I want to visit Oyster Bay. So he has their house up in wherever New England, I don't know if it's up in New York state or Maine. I think it's upstate, upstate New York. Um, they're the house they would go to. And it has this like famous office in it that has a lot of animal heads on the wall, which we will soon be doing here at the

12:25HQ only endangered animals though, because I kind of want to make a point. A lot of koala bears. All right. Let's take a quick break from talking about these performance indicators to hear from

Sponsor break

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Second KPI contemplation control

15:03let's get back to our discussion. Let's move on to KPI. Let's see here. KPI number two. We'll bring this up on the screen. I'm calling this contemplation control. Remember, these are performance indicators for cognitive fitness. What is the contemplation control KPI? Let me read you the concrete test you do to measure this. Attempt to make progress on a personal or professional problem working only in your head while walking. Keep redirecting your attention back to the problem. If your mind

15:33wanders, keep going until you can no longer make reasonable progress, that you just can't get your attention back. The fans of my book, Deep Work, will recognize this as the activity of productive meditation, which I long talk about as one of the most effective ways to increase your ability to contemplate, your ability to actually direct your mind's eye intentionally. Now, the key thing about this test, your mind will wander. That doesn't stop your clock, right? You will think about an email you want to send or a conversation you just had. But as long as you can keep bringing your attention

16:07back to the problem and make more progress, that's okay. It's when you find yourself unable to really make more progress on the problem. Your mind is all over the place. It's exhausted. That's when you stop the timer and you got a number there in minutes about how long were you able to control your contemplation in this experiment. All right, so let's calibrate this. We got our performance levels here from brain rotted, the cognitive weapon. How do we calibrate how long you can do productive meditation on this scale? Here's the way I'm going to say it. Less than a minute. So

16:38basically, if you can't do it at all, that's brain rotted. Now, that might, if you're not in a younger generation, that might sound crazy. You might be saying like, well, of course I can think for a while. It's actually very hard to hold your mind's eye on something, push away the distractions, make progress on it. And I think there's a lot of people, especially if you grew up completely distracted by these technologies, like I can't do this at all. Obviously, the comp here is regular meditation, like mindfulness meditation. A lot of highly distracted people have a hard time doing it at all. It's like unbearable. They can't. The thoughts

17:10are so wild that it's sort of unbearable. So I'm going to say, if you can't really do it at all, or more than a handful of seconds, that's brain rotted. All right. If you can do one to three minutes, I'll say you're distractible. Like, okay, I have it. I kind of go, yeah, yeah. And then I lose it after a few minutes. What's the pre-2012 average? 10 minutes. This is hard, right? Productive meditation is hard. I talk about this in deep work, how, especially as a postdoc at MIT, I had a very intentional, productive meditation habit. And it made a big difference over time.

17:44Like, I really got better at this, but it took practice. So really, if you can sit 10 minutes of really making progress in your head, that is our sort of average from the pre-distractable age. 30 minutes is impressive. I could do 30 minutes to an hour now. I could do like pretty substantial outlining or writing in my head or make progress on a specific issue of a proof. I think over an hour would be difficult for me. All right. Cognitive weapon territory. So how do we push this to an extreme? The cognitive weapon territory is six to eight hours. All right. So who did that? Is

18:19that really possible? Yes. Our friend Friedrich Nietzsche. Let me read you a quote here that I got from a Margillian article. And this is actually quoting Nietzsche himself saying, I would walk for six or eight hours a day, composing thoughts that I would then later jot down on paper. All right. So we got a pretty wide range. 10 minutes is average, but Nietzsche could do this for six to eight hours. All right. So there we go. That's your second KPI. That's probably the

18:49quickest one to actually measure because it's the hardest. It's pretty hard. So you go out, you try it, you get your measurement on it. Have you ever tried? I don't think you've ever, you know, I talk about all the time. Have you tried productive meditation? I bring it up a lot. I try it when I bike to work. Oh, like I'm not necessarily walking, but I bike. But aren't you thinking about not getting killed by cars? Like, I'm on the path. Oh, okay. I don't have to like worry about cars really. Can you make progress on things?

19:19Probably pre-2012. You think about pre-2012? Yeah. I love productive meditation. I always say that's pull-ups for your mind because it's a similar level of hardness. Like pull-ups kind of suck. But if you do them as you're able to do them, it's, it works out all the muscles or whatever. You know, I'm back to those now. After my injury, my, my, my surgery, I couldn't do them. Um, and now Zach has me like slowly back doing like five at a time. The problem with the way he does demands that I do pull-ups though, full extension all the way arms lock completely full

19:55extension before you start the next one. So you have a bar in your garage where you can feed her off the ground. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have to bend my legs, but I can get to my, yeah, but it's a seven foot. I guess it's a six foot bar, seven foot bar. I don't know. Um, so there you go.

Third KPI written persuasiveness

20:10All right. One more KPI that I want you to consider for testing your cognitive fitness. This one's a bit of a pain. I think it's critical. Honestly, I think it's the one that AI is probably going to have the biggest negative impact. So those first two, I think smartphones have probably pushed a lot of people below the pre 2012 average. It's also going to affect this one. I think AI is going to have a particularly big impact on this. All right. So let's bring it up. KPI number three, I call written persuasiveness. Uh, here's the test. Make a written argument for a contested stance that

20:48you believe in contested mean there's multiple points of view on this. Different people believe different things. There's a point of view that you believe in strongly argue it in writing, type it out, write it out. That's the test. All right. So how are we going to measure this? Um, I'm actually going to assess your response. So the way you're going to assess your response is by the format and style of what you wrote. So let me go through this, right? We'll go from brain rotted, the cognitive weapon and get a better sense of what this means. All right. So

21:21how would we describe a written response that we would call brain rotted? I would say if what you wrote down was disorganized, appeal to emotions and relying on ad hominem attack. So just sort of, let's think a tweet, let's be honest. We're talking about a tweet here. It's like, I don't know this or that, or I don't know the other people are just evil and bad and, and, and terrible. And you know, they're, they're communist or the racist or whatever, like side of it's on. And just like everyone knows, right? Like basically Twitter, basically anything you're going to see on Twitter.

21:55All right. Then what would be the properties of a written response that would get up to the distractible category? Reasonable list of arguments in favor of your stance. So if now you can organize your thoughts into like, let me just put a few bullet points here because of this, because of that, because of this, these are like three or four things that I think are, um, speak to my, my particular stance or sort of support that support that stance. Right. Now at least you can like list and enumerate things, actual arguments. Now you're at distractible. What's the pre 2012

22:26average? I would say a prose argument for your stance and against the opposing view. So now you're at a bullet points. You can put an answer in prose and paragraphs like you would in school. And you're not only able to make an argument for why your stance is correct, but an argument for what is wrong about the other stance. And I think for this to really count as the pre 2012 average, it has to be a good faith portrayal of that other stance. Right. So in other words, like if it just caricatures it, like, and the problems with the other stance is that everyone who believes

23:00it is a loser, right? Like that doesn't count. But if you're able to actually be like, yeah, this is, this is where the other stance comes from. And I kind of can give you a pretty good characterization of it and then say, um, why that is worse than your stance. That's how we would get to, uh, that particular response. All right. So what would get us to the impressive level? I'm going to say a powerful argument from first principles. So what makes a really strong argument from a, uh, in my opinion is you're able to lay out. When I say first principles, we can think of

23:38these as axioms that everyone agrees on these like, okay, we kind of agree. This is a common starting place and you're able to build a logical scaffolding sort of inductively from those first principles that leads inevitably towards your stance being correct and the other stance having flaws. So now you're actually, um, have an impressive level of written persuasiveness. What is cognitive weapon here? I'm going to say, uh, for this, an argument that forever changes the world. So not only is what you write, something is persuasive, it changes the way

24:10like the world understands or thinks about things you change. It's so persuasive that it changes the body knowledge. My example here would be Rachel Carson. Let me read you from the national park service websites in the U S Carson's work led to the establishment of the environmental protection agency and the first earth day celebration in 1970. Silent spring influenced several federal conservation policies, including the band of DDT in 1972. It completely created an environmental movement and a whole government environmental apparatus and regulatory apparatus that we take

24:42for granted today did not exist. Her argument in this book was so powerful. It completely changed the way that we and the government thought about the environment. That is a very persuasive piece of writing. All right. So we've seen three KPIs that you can measure for your cognitive fitness. Do it, do at least one of these, get a score to see where you fall. The reason why you might be hesitating is because you're worried about what you will find. What if you're distractible or even

25:15brain rotted? Maybe you'll think this is like a neuronal scarlet letter that will hold you back from ever succeeding with the life of the mind. But this is not true. Just like with physical KPIs, the reason why we measure them is so that we know what to improve. It's a number that we can look at, do effort and see what makes it larger. We can focus our efforts. Cognitive fitness can be improved. Therefore, your KPI scores, if you're unhappy, can be boosted upwards. All right. So how do

25:47we do that? Well, again, let's look back to the physical analogy. If we have a physical KPI like your mile time or your squat, max squat weight or max number of pull-ups or whatever it is, what do you do? You train to improve that score. And what does training mean? Well, it doesn't mean just in general trying to be more healthy. I'm going to try to like take the stairs more often and not eat as much junk food. That's not going to have an impact on your mile time. That's not going to have an impact on your max squat weights. What is going to matter? Specifically training for those things. I'm actually running certain distances, trying to

26:24increase those distances, increase what distances I'm comfortable with, increase my speed. I'm starting with lower weights, getting my form just right, increasing the weight slowly. That's how you get those numbers to go up. And of course, the idea is getting those type of key indicators up is going to make you more healthy in general. So if you're putting a lot of effort to specifically train for your mile time, your cardiovascular health in general is going to get better. It's going to have all sorts of positive secondary side effects. You're going to be frustrated when you get stuck and make other changes in your life. Anything that's going to get that number down. So that's what we have to do with your cognitive KPIs. You have to train specifically those KPIs.

26:58All right. So you have to say, let me take the activity I'm measuring and try to push myself towards the score that would get me to the next level. That'll be very uncomfortable at first but really push myself until I can more consistently get up to that next level. Maybe I'm going to throw in some tactics or form, the cognitive equivalent of form here to help. Like if I'm struggling with reading, I'm going to maybe have some note-taking styles, be careful about what books I choose at first. Like I'm going to bring in some technical form or techniques or whatever is

27:29going to help me slowly start inching that score up towards the next level. So you train those cognitive KPIs just like the physical ones. And just like in the physical world, again, obsessing over one of those KPIs and moving it up is going to make your brain in general more healthy. There's just no way you're going to get to a place where you can do 30 minutes of productive meditation or read for an hour or some sort of conceptual nonfiction where your ability to focus and control your mind's eye in general is not going to improve in all sorts of different aspects of your life. So we're going to use these very precise numbers. We're going to train

28:03those precise activities as a very specific way into the general goal of becoming more cognitively fit. All right. So that's really where I wanted to bring you in this deep dive is to this idea of training. You measure a couple of these, you see where you are, and then you get the work training that activity, doing what it takes to move it to the next level. That is how you get your brain more healthy. I mean, the idea here, Jesse, is that in phase one of the cognitive fitness revolution, we're really doing the equivalent in the physical world of just saying like, hey, try to eat better

28:34or try to move more. That's what it is with what people are doing now. Like I made my screen grayscale on my phone, or I'm trying to like not have my phone when I watch TV, though I often do, but like I'm kind of trying not to. We know trying things that are easy in the moment, et cetera, get you nowhere in physical health. It's the same thing with cognitive fitness. So this is what unlocks phase two is now having numbers that you can specifically train for. There's a lot more that's involved in cognitive fitness. Obviously there's, there's all sorts of different things

29:05to train. There's general habits. There's these specific KPIs. This is just one element I'm adding to this bigger canvas. I hope to build of thinking through how to become more cognitively fit. All right. So that's enough hearing about what I find interesting. I also want to hear what you find interesting. This is where we like to do on these Monday episodes, where we open up our inbox to see what you have to share or ask me about. Remember, if you have a question or a comment or something that you think I might find interesting, you can send it to podcast at calnewport.com and

Information fatigue syndrome

29:40maybe we'll get into it on the air. All right, Jesse, who's our first message from? Our first message is from Gerald, who wants to know your opinion on a particular type of syndrome. Ooh, I like syndrome. Sorry. Let's see what Gerald has to say here. He says, I think the concept of information fatigue syndrome needs to be more mainstream. I never heard you mention that term before, and it seems right up your alley because the solution is essentially going on a data diet. I guess low quality data is the new ultra processed food. Interesting, Jesse,

30:14information fatigue syndrome. I haven't heard that before. Let's find out more. I have, he sent us a link. Let's bring it up on the screen. We'll take a closer look here. So he sent us an article from workplace psychology called Information Overload. Too much information becomes noise. This is a summary of an academic paper. We'll look at this briefly, but here's the intro here. It says, an information overload causes symptoms and solutions. An article for the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Learning Innovations Laboratory. Joseph Ruff says that we are bombarded

30:48with so much data that we are on information overload. Simply put, information overload is when our ability to process information is past its limit and further attempts to process information or make accurate decisions from the surplus information leads to information overload. Here's an actual quote from that article. Once capacity is surpassed, additional information becomes noise and results in a decrease in information processing and decision quality. The summary goes on to say there's even a name for it, information fatigue syndrome. Here are the

31:21symptoms, poor concentration, polyphasic behavior or multitasking, hurry sickness, pervasive hostility, habituation or overstimulation, plugged in compulsion, traditional stress include lower and immune response. All right. I believe it. I mean, let's think this through here for a second, Jesse. It's saying if you burn out your information processing circuits, essentially, any more information that comes in, you can't process and it begins to lead to negative fatigue style side effects. Didn't we talk about

31:55something like this? Didn't we have on, remember we did an episode, maybe early summer, late spring, where we were looking at a claim on Reddit and we had a psychologist from Georgetown weigh in and it was about not information but stimuli and the claim, if I remember this correctly, the claim that we were contesting or analyzing was that once you pass a threshold for stimuli, you get like overloaded with

32:25stimuli and then are like super stressed out and can't really function. And the psychologist came back that that's not really true. You can be exposed to stimuli all day long without reaching some capacity that then puts you into a negative state. And his example was if that was not the case, people who live in Singapore or Las Vegas would constantly be just like overloaded and unable to function because there's a huge amount of stimuli all the time. But he did say, if I'm remembering this properly, that really concentrated activity is something that you can sort of run out of steam for.

32:59So, I mean, I believe in thinking fatigue syndrome that there's only so much like hard thinking you can do in a given day. And that's also determined by how exhausted you are physically or mentally with other things. And once you get there, it's very hard to do more thinking. But information processing, maybe that's interesting if it's just reading or, I mean, I honestly, I think it's the concentration that matters, not the information. Like if you're, the information you're taking in is hard to consume, you're reading something complicated, you'll run out of steam. I think that's, that's a real thing.

33:32If the information is, you know, Netflix, I don't know, you could do it all day. You're processing information. People do do it all day. People do it all day. Right. And they're not like more, in fact, they're less exhausted than someone who is like doing something else. So I think there's a kernel in here that's true, but there's also maybe a temptation of something just makes sense. And then the name looks good, but it's not quite getting at what's true there. So we'll put that in the category of like interesting, but probably not quite accurate as stated. Hey, let's take a quick

34:03break from our inbox segment here to hear from some other sponsors to make this show possible, but make sure you stay tuned because coming up after the sponsor break, I do have a rant. So be ready for that. All right. So let's do the sponsor break, uh, real quick. Look, I've experienced firsthand that the thing about running a small business is you don't, uh, you don't just do your own job. You end up as the hiring manager, the payroll department and the benefits team all at once. This is where gusto enters the scene because it can help take these responsibilities off of your

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35:11after you run your first payroll. Our ad agency here at the deep questions podcast uses Gusto. So I can tell you from personal experience as someone who receives these payments that it has made my life quite easy. So try Gusto today at gusto.com slash deep and get three months free. When you run your first payroll, that's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash deep. One more time, gusto.com slash deep. I also want to talk about our friends at Babbel. Jesse, I just signed up to do

35:41a, give a speech next year out in Scandinavia and I want to brush up on my language skills. So at the very least I can, I can talk and say a few things and show a little bit of respect to the local culture. Look, I don't want to be the guy that only speaks English everywhere he goes, but luckily I have Babbel to help me out. So if you're traveling this summer, here's the travel hack. Don't wait until you land to start learning the language. Instead, use Babbel. Even just 10 minutes a day with Babbel can help you start having real conversations in as little as just three weeks.

36:14Instead of memorizing random vocab, you'll learn phrases that you will use doing things like ordering dinner or asking for directions or just chatting with the locals. The Babbel lessons are quick, practical, and built by more than 200 language experts. Babbel's award-winning app has sold over 25 million subscriptions and is backed by a 14-day money-back guarantee. So if you have travel coming up, now's the time to start so you can actually use what you learn on the trip. Right now, it's important. Babbel is offering listeners up to 60% off. Go to babbel.com slash deep. That's Babbel,

36:52B-A-B-B-E-L.com slash deep for up to 60% off. Rules and restrictions may apply. All right, let's get back to our inbox segment. All right, who do we got for message number two? Our next

The Parisian way to leisure

37:07message is actually from a publicist about a new book. Oh, yeah. So I was, okay, I remember this. I don't want other publicists. I get a lot of public press releases to our account. We delete them all, but I came across this one and I read it. Please do not read this as a excuse, publicist, to send me even more press releases. But this was a press release that a publicist sent me for a new book. And the book sounded interesting. And there was a quote about the book, a point, a summary of one of the points from the book that I thought was really cool. So let me read you the intro to the

37:40book. Here's what the publicist said. I want to give this book credit. In America, there seems to be a right way to do everything, even relax. We track our sleep, optimize our mornings, listen to podcasts on our walks, and feel vaguely guilty when an evening produces nothing at all. For best friends and lifelong Parisians, Alex Durand and Tom Carls, that instinct to make every minute count was one of the biggest culture shocks they encountered after moving to the U.S. Their new book, Pardon Our French, The Parisian Way to a Happier Life, which comes out on September 8th, offers a new way to

38:11think about ambition, leisure, and pleasure without asking Americans to give up their drive. All right, so what was the point from the book in this press release that caught my attention? I'll read it to you now. Here was the point was summarized as treat time like wine, not water. Rather than managing time as a scarce resource to conserve and maximize, Alex and Tom suggest treating it more like a glass of wine. Slow down, savor it, and stop rushing towards what comes next. I think that's kind of

38:41nice. As opposed to chugging water? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, actually that's a, well, I'm thinking about that for a second. I get the first half of this. All right, explain this to me. Like, I get the first half. Treating time like wine. Enjoy it, savor it. That's positive. This is very much like an Oliver Berkman type of thing that, like, wow, I have, like, an hour of just being here and enjoying it. I don't get the not water part. So you think it's because... Well, if you're, like, really thirsty and you chug water, maybe. Yeah. Yeah, you don't, you don't think about it. It's just functional.

39:14It's like chugging it. No, it's pretty good. Anyways, I like the idea that treat time like wine. So that's good. Maybe when that book comes out, we'll have to take a look at it. Have those guys on. Berets for the full episode. And you can, yeah, you can do your accent. Baguettes under our arms, full episode. Wonderful accent. Pipe. Pipe, full episode. Striped sailor shirt and full episode. Interrupting the guest every five to ten seconds. They'd be like, excuse me, monsieur, monsieur. I can speak a little French. We need Teddy Roosevelt here to be on

40:05that interview. Yeah. First of all, I'd be like, hold on a second. Book done. And then he would be like, I'm going to conquer and annex France. Yeah. Because that's the way he worked. All right. What do we got? What's message three? Our next message is from Rima, who is highlighting an interesting way to think about AI in thinking. All right. Let's see here. I'm

Cognitive framework for scholarly publishing

40:25always nervous, but interested in these AI ones. Rima says, I would like to share this interesting blog post series from the Scholarly Kitchen blog on cognitive responsibility framework and cognitive coherence and cognitive debt. As someone working in scholarly publishing at a university, I found this framework to be incredibly useful for thinking about the use of AI in academic publishing. All right. Let's look at this, Jesse. Let's bring it up on the screen. I have the article here. Reading Between the Lines, part one, a cognitive framework for AI scholarly

41:00publishing. Let's see if there's any interesting thoughts here. Here's the intro. As an editor, an editor asked AI to summarize a stack review reports before reading them herself. Days later, reviewing her own decision, she finds herself wondering whether the judgment she reached was fully her own. That small moment points to a much larger question now facing scholarly publishing. Generative AI has transformed scholarly publishing in three years, dot, dot, dot. It is now a permanent feature of the scholarly landscape. The question is no longer whether it should be used, but how it

41:34should be understood and governed. All right. So I'm going to skim down here a little bit. So there's a framework that they're going to suggest. The framework is not intended to classify people or rank scholarly activities. Rather, it offers a practical vocabulary for deciding where AI can appropriately extend human cognition and where human responsibility must remain primary. So what are some of these categories? She says there's a distinction between mechanical cognitive work, which AI can

42:05increasingly perform, and judgment-based cognitive work, where human responsibility must remain central. All right. I like this general approach. You know, as I do more digital ethics and think more about AI and my academic roles, I think there's an approach here which is useful, which is, again, I think, right, the way this is said is right. Clarity and vocabulary about cognitive activity so we can better discern where something like AI makes sense and where it does not. In other words, we can put structure to our otherwise vague or inchoate intuitions about something feeling icky or not. So this

42:41particular distinction, which I just summarized at the very highest level, but of cognitive versus judgment-based cognitive activities, that's useful. So if there's some sort of human judgment or originality applied, that should come from a human. If it's mechanical, we've got to take these numbers and we've got to put them into a chart and we've got to format that chart and there's no judgment here. It's just mechanical and annoying. AI could help speed that up. I think that's useful. Like I would add another category

43:11when I'm thinking about AI. I do not think there should ever be communication, written text communication that was like in any large part generated by AI that's not clearly labeled as such. I think it's cognitive and emotional fraud to have text that presumably came from you that was actually from AI because the way that text is actually ingested and processed on the receiver's end is that you're simulating the mind of the sender. You're simulating another mind. And if you believe you're simulating the mind of this particular human who's transferring inner states to you

43:43almost telepathically through these artifacts on the written page and it turns out it's not their mind. It's actually a machine. I feel like there's some sort of psychological or emotional fraud there. Writing is sacred and it's something that we should be really careful about. So anyways, I like this general. That's like my opinion. But like that's that this approach is useful. You're starting to break up different activities and be clear about where humanness is important and where mechanizing might make more sense. So I don't know if you've heard about this, Jesse. We should cover this in another episode. But Anthropa came out and said, we're going to introduce watermarking

44:16into that text output of Claude, meaning it will be very reliable for people to determine if computer code or text was generated by their LLM versus a human. And they're doing this because of compliance with some European AI legislation. And it's freaking people out because people are really freaked out about this idea of like, wait, so everyone can always tell if I wrote this or had an LLM do it. And I'm saying if that freaks you out, that is a sign that you weren't you knew this was like there's something icky here. There's something like if you're

44:51not just proud of like, sure, I this is AI. If you're kind of hiding it, it tells you there's some sort of ethical boundary that's being crossed, even if you can't put your finger on it. So that's why I think these type of efforts are useful. But those people just use another AI. Yeah, it would have to be universal across the AIs. You know how it works? It's actually kind of interesting. It has to do with there's a lot of places when you're generating tokens with an LLM where there's multiple different words that are synonyms that you could use, right? It basically, not to get too technical, but if you use a large language model, it creates

45:23output one token at a time where a token is a word or a part of a word. And then you just keep calling it again and again, to generate more and more tokens to get a full response. And what it actually gives you is not, this is the specific next token to expand your input by. It gives you what's known as a probability distribution over possible next tokens, right? It's trying to guess. Because again, an LLM thinks, I don't mean to anthropomorphize it, but the way it's trained is that the input it's given, it thinks that's a real text that exists in the world that's been cut off and it's trying to guess what the next word is. And it gives you a probability distribution over guesses. I think there's a 20% chance it's

45:56this. There's a 21% chance it's this. A lot of words have 0% chance. That just makes no sense. But often there's a bunch of words that could work and they might have kind of equal probabilities. They're kind of synonyms for each other. So what they're doing, I don't completely understand this yet, but essentially they have a pseudorandom number generator. So like if you have the same kind of a sequence of random numbers, but if you have the same seed, you can create the same sequence. And they use that to resolve choices where there's multiple tokens that are basically equally likely, they use this random number sequence

46:28that choose which of those tokens they, which of those synonyms they choose. So if I'm on the other end, if you give me that same pseudorandom sequence, I can sort of go through in some sense and say, hey, if there's a bunch of words that match this sequence, then for sure this was an LLM that was running this sort of watermarking software, right? It doesn't change the meaning or correctness of the text because these are like synonym words. So it's something like that. I've had those details a little bit wrong. But anyways, the point is it's the watermark is the text itself, not some hidden digital whatever. So you can't just like retype what

47:02you see on the screen in like a fresh window, like in Microsoft Word and get around it. It's the words themselves. So you really would have to substantially edit the text to get rid of the watermark, at which point you're kind of riding on your own anyway. So I think that's cool. I think because of my emotional, psychological fraud argument, all LLM tech should have that. The other thing is it's unclear whether you can copyright text or code produced by LLMs. I think that's great. I think copyright should protect the human brain's output, right? Not the AI

47:32company. So there's a lot there that's interesting. All right, let's do one more question. What

Disneyland lines and slow productivity

47:36do we got? Our last message is from Nathan, who had an article to share that's right up your alley. Oh man, let's see what Nathan says. Cal, this seems to have everything for you. Disneyland comments on high quality leisure and references to the need for slow productivity and deep living. Let's pull this up on the screen here, Jesse. What he was showing is that there's actually like a five part, I think it's the first of the five parts, a five part article on Cory Doctorow's blog, pluralistic. Let's see. And that's not it. Here it is. Boredom

48:10and its discontents. All right, that's part two. So let me go to part one. Part one was called, are we having fun yet? Anyways, it's a five part discussion about essentially the experience in Disneyland. And it's Cory Doctorow and he has all sorts of theories, but a lot of it's about the line experience and all the things they've tried to try to make the lines work. I'm going to be honest, Jesse, I read all five parts. You can imagine. You're talking about waiting in line, right? Waiting in line, yeah. Here was the kind of the, I'll summarize the coolest point of this piece. He goes back and reminds people of the original technology. This is probably in

48:46part two, so I'll go there. The original technology for dealing with lines in Disneyland was this. So when you, it cost a certain amount of money to get into the park, but you couldn't go on any rides without a ticket. And so you would also buy for separate money, a ticket book like the one I have up on the screen. And you had a certain number of A tickets, B tickets, C tickets, D tickets, and E tickets. You know, like two E tickets. And like, as you go down, you have more and more of these tickets. So like A tickets were for A rides, which are like small things. We like taking the

49:17horse-drawn carriage down the main street. D would be for like pretty extensive rides, like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. And E tickets would be for like the really big rides. It would be, you know, I don't know if they would have been back then, but like by the 60s, the Haunted Mansion or Pirates of the Caribbean or whatever. And what he argues is like this, having these ticket books, it changed your relationship to Disney. We could take this off probably. It changes your relationship to Disney because you could only go on two big rides, right? And you would think what those were,

49:53and there would be like two big rides, that'd be it. Which means there's never long lines for those big rides because everyone in that park could only go on two, and you would choose the two you really wanted to go on. And you would kind of ration out your experience. I'll do some of these A's and let me get two E's and three D's. You have a lot more downtime. And because of that, the experience of the park itself was a bigger part of it. You would just walk around, there'd be shows. You would see things. You would enjoy just being there. Maybe I'll take a horse-drawn carriage. I'm really building up to this afternoon where I'm going to go on one E-ticket ride. And he basically, like, once they got rid of that system and went to all-you-can-eat,

50:24you pay to get in the park and they can go on any ride you want. He's like, the whole thing fell apart because everyone just went to the E-ticket rides. And the lines got really crazy. And it's just been ever since then trying to deal with that in increasingly complicated ways, none of which have really solved the problem. And the original park experience with these ticket books was, in his argument, the best one, right? And it also, yeah, you'd come back. Let me come back again. I'll go on some other rides some other times. It's just fun to be there. It's beautiful. It's interesting. And so I like that. I like this because in some sense, it's right in that sweet

50:55spot of things I like. I mean, Disney, of course, but technology and technology's intersection with our human experience. This is a key point where the technology of tickets and line access to rides completely changes your experience of your life of the day that you're in this park. And we see this type of thing all the time with all sorts of different types of technologies in our life at home and in our work life where you introduce a technology and on paper, you have some perfectly good reason and you don't realize the degree to which that technology's presence completely shapes people's experience.

51:27When you switch from these to all-you-can-eat lines and you had FastPass as a way to try to get around that, it just created, it changed the whole experience of the park to be this sort of ride maximization. We're going to win the day and get in as many e-tickets as possible, rushing from thing to thing, always waiting in line. It completely changed the experience, just like technologically, the presence of email and the presence of AI in the college environment where you introduce this tool and it completely changes the experience. So I thought that was a really good example. As a bonus, Nathan then told me that Cory Doctorow, who I really like his

52:05writing, obviously, had included a link to one of my things recently. I'll bring this on the screen here in his newsletter from August 12th called Model Collapse was the name of this newsletter. He puts links. Cory Doctorow is a very interesting thinker. We've talked about him on the show, which I'm on the show, Jesse, but I think somewhere in there, he linked to one of mine. Let's see here. It's in his things I hate and people I hate section. People who are making matters

52:37worse. I don't know how this works. All right, here we go. Yeah, there we go. On AI coding and its discontent. So that was my newsletter article that actually made the rounds, Jesse. I did a newsletter article. Look, I'll click on it for those. Bring it back up here. On AI coding, its discontents. If you don't subscribe to my newsletter, you should. CalNewport.com. Most weeks, I send a dispatch from the fight for depth in a distracted world. This was from August 10th. I shared a story of a listener who wrote in to say, hey, back in January, you know,

53:09back in January, this listener had bothered me. He said, I think you're being too skeptical about agents. Cloud Code changed my life as a programmer. It's everything people said it's going to be. He wrote me again a month ago and said, I've had to completely change my relationship to Cloud Code. I crashed our major consumer website. I won't say what it is, but Jesse, you would have heard of it. Everyone would have heard of this. It's a major.com. I've crashed our website twice with code that was produced with Cloud Code. I'm going to get fired if I do it again. I'm back to coding largely by hand. And I put that out and a lot of people came out of the woodwork

53:43and are like, in their Soto voice, yeah, we're kind of doing the same. Like if you're not just vibe coding things or making minimal viable products, if you're trying to actually write production code, they're like, you just can't trust it. And it's too hard to review. It's hard to review code you didn't write and it takes forever. And now there's a lot of quiet retreat towards you use the Cloud or whatever AI coding agent more selectively. Like, can you do this piece for me? I'm going to do this piece because you really have to understand how your code works. And I think that's like a really important indication. Look, I've been writing about the

54:15intersection of digital technology and knowledge work for a decade now. And this is what happens. It's hard. Like some things can come through and change everything and break things like email did. And we still haven't figured out how to use it right properly. It's just hard. It's hard to have a silver bullet tool that just works and everyone uses it. And it's really, you know, it's going to be hard. Just AI like anything else. It's a normal technology. It's a cool technology, but it's not magic. It's not HAL 9000. It's not the, you know, small wonder from 1980 sitcom television. It's wonky and

54:49they're trying to figure it out. And some stuff is awesome. There's a lot of hard edges and it's expensive and it's difficult. And a lot of these companies will fail and some will figure it out. You'll have a mature industry, but exponentials don't last forever. And anyways, this goes back to my general AI stance, which is like cool, exciting technology. Let's cover it like cool and exciting technology, which means most people don't really need to be paying attention. And can we stop trying to

The reality of AI hype

55:10terrify everyone and hype out our butt because we're online and bored or not realizing that these people we're talking to from these companies or these think tanks are dyed in the wool, effective altruist rationalists whose entire reason for meaning is this belief that super intelligence will deliver either utopia or they will be John Connor and stop the apocalypse. And their whole meaning system comes out of this and they leave their group houses in the Bay Area to go talk to New York reporters and are like, this technology is very scary. And we don't realize they're from these weird sort of cultist like thinking. And we're like, oh my God, is this must

55:41be like COVID or something and not realizing that like they've got Spock ears on and they're in polyamorous group houses. We got to cut out the hype and just treat this like a cool, but normal technology. We've had other incredibly exciting technologies and it didn't make everyone stressed out all the time. So I don't, I don't want to preach about that, but John Conner and that's Terminator, right? Terminator. That's right. John Conner and Neo. That's what all these rationalists, like basically they recruited a bunch of high school students. I mean, college students who are like, I want to be Neo from the matrix. So we're the ones, I mean, look at Yukowski's writing

56:16from this period, right? It's a lot of like, he'll call himself a hero. He'll write things like, I think I'm the only one who can save the world, right? This is the way they were thinking and talking before their LLMs. They just love this idea of it's, it's, it's interest, transhumanist, futurist, you know, meeting dystopia type ideas. And it's spilling over into our discourse. And the issue is when I push back against that hype, people that interpret it as you're saying AI doesn't work. And therefore like, Hey, Hey, here's something AI, a cool new product. So you're wrong, right?

56:50This is not about this AI work or not. It's about, do we have to have this layer from the AI is a force that gives me meaning crowd of anxiety, hype, exaggeration amplified by online people who are just bored and live in a world of made up facts. Anyway, they live in a world of engagement, like the substrate in which this online world exists, where all these people are put up these YouTube videos and tweeting about AI, like this is it guys is the real deal with like alarm bells or whatever. They live in a world in which the, the, the normative substrate for the determination of what is valuable or not is engagement. And that has been completely

57:23wired into their heads. It's a completely different normative value than truth or rationality. And they're picking up on the AI is a force to give us meaning crowds type of nonsense and amplifying it everywhere. AI is not your God. AI is not going to solve all your problems. AI is not going to cause all your problems. It is a tool. It is technology. It'll be powerful. Some places, other places will be frustrating. It's going to create some people that we're annoyed at. We need to regulate it. We need to care about it. We don't need to obsess about it. So there we go. There's my rant, Jesse. Good rant.

Summer reading and final thoughts

57:52There we go. All right. Let's end like we like to do on Mondays by catching in with what I've been up to. I was just on another vacation. We always spend a week at the end of summer at the beach. I finished three books while there, Jesse. So I thought I'd go over them now. So these all are August books. I finished Tom Griffith's book, The Laws of Thought. This came out earlier this year, maybe in the fall. I think it was earlier this in the winter. And it's a popular science book about the various mathematical models we've developed

58:22over history for trying to understand thought, going back from like the sort of logic, trying to use propositional logic up to neural thinking, et cetera. I thought it was very good. I read Tim Berners-Lee's memoir. This is for everyone. Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web. I used to run into him all the time, Jesse, because when I was at MIT, I was on the sixth floor of the status center, which is where the theory group was. And Tim worked on the fifth floor, which is where the World Wide Web Consortium was. And we would ride the elevator sometimes together. That was a good book. History of the Web is interesting. I also read

58:55Into the Deep, a memoir of Bob Ballard, who he co-authored with Christopher Drew, who's a sort of nautical science writer, New York Times writer. He wrote Blind Man's Buff, which is a good book about submarine espionage. My brother was a submariner, so. Yeah, you mentioned that before, because there was like some references to another book that wouldn't have made sense, that nuclear book. It made no sense. It made no sense. Alarm bells? They don't have alarm bells on submarines, on nuclear submarines. It defeats the purpose. So Bob Ballard is, you know, Bob Ballard, the

59:25guy who discovered the Titanic. Yeah. Yeah, it was good. He was based out of Woods Hole, I think, for a little while. For a long time, yeah. Thelmuth, yeah. And then he went to, he's in Mystic and other places. He bounces around. Anyways, interesting guy, his memoir, serious scientist. Like his whole thing he's upset about, but it's like he will forever be known as the guy who discovered the Titanic. But he also had like the first direct, very quick summary. His big claim to fame in like the 70s, I guess, was like, hey, we should use these new deep sea submersibles.

59:59To actually do observational science on the ocean floor. Like we should go down there and look at things. There's a lot to discover versus just like dragging sonar over it and stuff like that. And they went down there and first of all, went down there and got like the first visual confirmation of plate tectonics, which was a kind of new theory then. He's like, oh, we can actually see at the bottom of the ocean where this plate ends and this plate begins. There's all this lava in between. Then they found the first hydrothermal vents, hot vents at the bottom of the ocean, which changed the way that we understood

1:00:30chemistry because there was, or geology, I guess. And then he found these black smoker hydro vents that had a new type of organism that never existed before that was like they would live off of the chemicals and the chemosynthesis, the photosynthesis. So he ended up changing geology textbooks, chemistry textbooks, and biology textbooks in like a 15-year period. So he did this like really big science and he found the Titanic in part because they needed a cover. He hasn't been able to talk about this to the last five years. He was working for the Navy. He was in the Navy in the reserves. He was working for the Navy

1:01:04on a mission to use the submersibles to check out the Thresher, which is a nuclear submarine that sunk out off of the Azores to try to see, have the Soviets been there? Like it's the containment vehicle, reactor vehicle intact. And they needed a cover story for going out there with all this equipment. And he said, well, what if on the way back, we stop and look for the Titanic? And then we can just tell people, oh, I'm out on a expedition to see the Titanic. And they were like, okay, that makes sense. And they did. They went to the Thresher and they blah, blah, blah. And on the way back, they looked for a Titanic and found it. But he couldn't talk about that till like more recently. So there you go.

1:01:39Interesting book. All right. I think that's enough for today. That's all we got for today. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next Monday with another one of these advice episodes. I know we've been kind of a little bit sparse on the AI reality checks. I'm sort of thinking through a more general format of that technology type of episode. So like there's a little bit delays now, but I have some pretty grand visions for a much more robust second technology themed episode for this feed. So, you know, bear with me. That's coming back soon. And until next time, as always stay deep. Hey, if you've made it this far, you must be ready to join my fight

1:02:14for depth in a distracted world. Now, the best way to do this is to join over 125,000 people who receive my email newsletter each Monday. You can sign up at calnewport.com slash ideas. And when you do, I will send you a free guide to my seven best ideas about cultivating a deep life. Sign up today, calnewport.com slash ideas.

1:02:44Thank you. Thank you.