Ep. 398: How Do I Find Purpose in a Distracted World? (W/ Arthur Brooks)

Did smartphones make us miserable or were we already miserable and then turn to smartphones to cope and this ended up making things worse? Now, this answer matters. If the second option is right, then creating a deep life in a distracted world is not just about reforming our use of technology, it involves fixing a more fundamental problem.

This is what I want to talk about today. To help me, I'll be joined by Arthur Brooks, who is a number one New York Times best selling author called us for the Atlantic and professor who teaches leadership and happiness at Harvard. Brooks has a new book out that's called The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose, and

an Age of Emptiness. In it, he argues that we entered into this Age of Emptiness, starting in the 1990s, and then in the last decade, new technologies like smartphones and social media served to make things worse. In our discussion, we get into the details of the shift and just as importantly, we explore

Brooks's advice for rediscovering the purpose that we've lost.

“So if you're at all interested in seeking depth in our current moment, you need to listen”

to this episode.

As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions.

To show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. And we'll get started right after the music. Arthur Brooks, it's great to have you back on the show. To talk about a book, I'm really excited about because I think there's a lot of ideas in here, especially when it comes to the complicated bi-directional relationship between things

like meaning and technology that we are in a really good dialogue, and we're kind of coming from the same place. So this is a conversation I've been looking forward to, but I want to start it where you started the book, which is sort of setting up the problem that we're going to address and how you encountered it.

So I want to start it with you returning the academia after a 10-year hiatus, running a think tank here in Washington, you returned academia, I think it was Harvard with your position after that. Right. Tell me about what it was.

This is interesting to me. What it was that you noticed seemed to different than it had been 10 years ago. Yeah, so you and I are a long time academics.

“I'm a third generation academic, and the truth is, I love academia.”

I always did love academia because it was a happier place than the rest of the society, generally

speaking. People when they're in college, they made friends, they fell in love, they were encountering interesting and new ideas, they weren't in the milieu of ordinary life, and that was a good thing, is a matter of fact. And I left academia in 2008 to become the president of this think tank in DC, and that

was completely consuming position. So I wasn't paying attention to what was going on in my old happy academic home. Well, I came back 11 years later, and it's like a plague had gone through my village when I got back because it wasn't happier than the rest of the society and the contrary, people weren't falling in love more.

They weren't in a better mood. They weren't paying attention to new and scary ideas, with an open heart in mind. On the contrary, it's exactly the opposite of all that. There were higher rates of depression than in the rest of the society, as a matter of fact, depression rates had increased by about a factor of three anxiety, generalized anxiety, which

is a diagnosis such had gone up, had doubled. People were lonely on college campuses, then they were outside of colleges, and it turns out that that was just sort of the tip of the iceberg because as behavioral scientists, of course, this really, really gets my attention, and I started looking at what's going on, and this is raging through society for people under 30.

Something happened after 2008, that massively spike the amount of misery. There's a psychogenic epidemic, which is just what we behavioral scientists, we get tenure by making up fancy ways of saying simple things. That's misery that doesn't have a biological origin. And so, Boyle Boyle was interested in figuring out what this is, but more importantly, I needed

to figure out what we could do, what's the problem, what do we, where do we go to find

“a solution, and then how do we need to live differently to solve it?”

Now, you're the OG on this, man, because your stuff has been about this for a long time. I got there a little bit later, but this book really elucidated to me the biggest problem in our society today. So I like the idea that you went through your thought process for eliminating options, and the first option you pointed to that you ultimately eliminated as the primary explanation

for what was going on, is something we hear a lot today, which never really rang true

for me, so I was glad to hear you also say this doesn't really explain what's going on,

ever been before, that somehow the boomers have taken everything, and this is like there's

this sort of new hardship, there's no jobs, I'm never by house, it's like I hear this

all the time, it's become a standard mantra, and this was an explanation we hear a lot for why people were upset, why they're depressed, why they're anxious. I have my reasons why I didn't buy that, but why didn't you buy that?

“Because the data just don't support it, the idea that life is uniquely hard, I mean, there's”

two bidirectional explanations for why everything is so tough, people my age, and so I'm 40 years older than undergraduates, you're 20 years older than undergraduates, and people who are in the early 20s today, people my age will say it's because they're weak, it's because they're weak people, we've made them weak, or societies made them weak, or wealth has made them weak,

and they say no, it's because you ruin the world, and so it's like this intergenerational

blame game that's I was actually happening, and the truth of the matter is they're not weaker than generations passed, and life isn't harder than generations passed. Both of those don't actually hold water when you look factually, and in the book I look factually at those explanations, I want to rule those, particularly things out. When I talk to young people when they say, well, house is more expensive than they used to be, and in common qualities worse than it used to be,

“and the environment is worse than they used to be, and one by one, I'll talk about how the world”

is actually not perfect, and in some ways gotten harder, but in most ways it's actually gotten better, and then I'll explain to people my age, how people actually aren't weaker now, and they aren't more feeble than they've been in the past, because I have data on what people my age looked like at that age, and that wasn't that great either. We hear it every generation, I'm sure. I mean, my dad's a baby boomer, I'm mom's a baby boomer, and I often think about their stories,

and I'm like, well, that sounds harder than my life. I mean, the defining feature of my dad's college and grad student years was like, oh, sorry, I have to put this on hold to go in the basic training for the army down in Louisiana and Texas, and do that for a few years, and then come back, or to hear my mom talk about, look, my parents, her parents were clear, like, you're going off the college, you're not coming home, and there wasn't that many job opportunities,

necessarily, for a woman coming out of a small college, you had to become a flight attendant, teach yourself how to computer program, they lived in a small East St. Louis apart. Like, I was like, that sounds hard. It didn't sound like this was, you know, this was uniquely easy, but I'm sure their parents said the same thing, which was, oh, yeah, I had to go through the great depression. Yeah, my parents are called the silent generation, and they were named that

by the greatest generation, which was my grandparents generation, and the greatest generation was named that by the greatest generation, by the way, and they called the silent generation that that, because they were bunch of slackers. Yeah. And there's every generation actually does this. So that's not the reason that we have this unbelievable explosion of mood disorders and misery. That's happened since 2008. It's not because there's something uniquely wrong or something new

about society. That's not it. Yeah. Okay. So what do you think is going on? So when I, when I'm doing a data analysis as a behavioral social scientist, I look at a bunch of survey data. Okay. I start to find patterns, but then I do what old school scholars used to do. Like, you know, Adam Smith, when he was writing about the nations, he went out and walked around factories and talked to workers. I mean, that is like the, and just at, and asked him,

because what do you do is a social scientist? Do you listen to the words that people say, and you say, and you listen to the words that keep popping up again and again and until the penny drops. And in doing that, I actually found that people, young people in particular, they said, yeah,

“you know, my life is good. It's good, but it feels fake. It feels like a simulation.”

It feels meaningless. They kept saying this word meaning over and over again. I don't know what I meant to do. I'm just doing everything I'm doing, but I don't know what I meant to do. And I don't know what the meaning of what I'm doing. And most importantly, and this is actually in the data very clearly, the number one predictor of mood disorders, like just depression and anxiety, is the answer to the question, does your life feel meaningless? And people saying, yes,

yes, answers, and then what meaninglessness of life question, that's what best predicts the misery that we see today. It's a meaning problem, Cal. Interesting. Well, let me read you a quote from the book that I think gets at this well. And this is quoting, I believe, a young person you talk to. Right felt unreal, full of false rewards, empty accomplishments, therapeutic talk, and fake experiences all curated the past the time as painlessly as possible. So that's explaining what life

without meaning, those are the things that define. That's right. I mean, we're basically just like,

we're not happy, we're not satisfied. It doesn't feel real. And so therefore, we got more therapy

of young people say that they're kind of just scrolling their phones like they're in an airport

lounge, waiting for a flight to take off. And you don't even know even the status of the flight. You don't even know if it's going to get canceled. You just sit there. I got to want to do this. But you know, I'm waiting for something. They all say they're really like you're waiting for something. And they don't even know what it is. That's the sense of emptiness. Well, I, so I want to get now, I want to drill on this technology connection now because now we're getting, obviously,

into a neck of the woods that I'm interested in. Real reason. Right. Let's get where you know.

“I want to be, this is, okay. So let me, I think this aligns with the way you're thinking about it.”

I'll just run by like one of the things that emerged from I think in writing post-pandemic

that confused people, but I don't think it should be confusing is when I started talking about

this concept of the deep life, which is a life of meaning and intention. So in line with like what you're talking about here, and people would say, why are you talking about that? You're the technology distractions, you know, deep work. There's a minimalism guy. Why are you talking about trying to build a life of meaning and what have you? And I said, well, let me tell you the lesson I learned from my book Deep Work is just talking to people about your distractions that

work are bad, then it get too far. But if you have this bigger better offer, Deep Work is great. This is more meaningful than it's much easier to move away from all the distractions because you have a bigger better offer. And when it came to people being on their phones all the time and social media all the time and being caught up into these sort of webs of distractions, I realize you can't just talk about that directly. You have to talk about what's the bigger better offer. If that's

somewhere you fall, if you don't have anywhere else to go, you're lacking meaning, you're anxious, you want to nom, you want to escape or you're just bored, then you fall back to the phone. So just telling someone, don't be on TikTok show. Yeah, it doesn't solve the problem because they're going there for a reason. So I ended up having to talk about this while I love having you on the show is because actually what you're talking about, the meaningful life, is something that you have to

“figure out if you want to figure out how do I not stare at like a video game or a phone all day?”

Are we aligned on this? Yeah, this is not a book about, I mean, it wouldn't be original if it was about the fact that phones are addictive and the technology is a problem. And there's plenty in this book about that fact, what this is a book about is what you deeply want and that you can't get and that you need to go and get. This is about the bigger better offer. That's really what it comes down to exactly what we're talking about, which by the way, is the same thing in any addictive

process. You know, if you come to me and say, "Hey, Arthur, man, I'm just drinking all the time." You know, I'm drinking my breakfast, I'm drinking my lunch, and I would say, "Cal, I got some which were incredibly new and bold piece of advice for you. Stop drinking." No, that's not what I'm going to do. That's obviously true, but I'm going to find out why you're drinking so much. What it is that you're actually seeking, is that a feeling is it relief from your anxiety?

Is it because you're really bored? Is it because you're having trouble at home? Let's talk about what their actual problem is. Generally speaking, people who just start drinking is because they're trying to cut the connection between their, they're a mixture, and they're preferable cortex because they're suffering from a lot of anxiety. And it's very effective for doing so. Or they're bored and lonely. Or all of those things. And so I want to know

what those things are, and I want to fill those holes in their life. Otherwise, they're not going to stay off the sauce. And the same thing is true for this. So the beginning of this book is, okay, what is the meaning of life? And then why is it such a problem because we're all getting

“so addicted to this stuff? And then what is it that you really want and how do you have to live”

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we sent you. All right, let's get back to my conversation with Arthur Brooks. So why did the chicken a little bit longer with the motivation? What happened with, you know, in 2000, what just window 2008 to 2019? Why did this generation begin to have more of these

“meaning prompts? Which we will then perfectly solve the next one about. But what's going on here?”

So it predates the iPhone and I know a people are thinking right now. 2007, the first iPhone was delivered 2008. It became ubiquitous by 2009. It was in everybody's pocket, by 2010. Everybody had apps on the iPhones and we proceeded a pace. That's actually not the exact explanation. The iPhone was produced as part of a broader culture of hustle and technology. It was part of the broader culture that said all of these deep complex needs in your life for love and beauty and suffering and

calling and transcendence. We can solve it with these complicated things. We can actually bring genius to bear in engineering that can solve these problems. Which has been the mantra of the age, man. And there's something really new about that, but that really really started exploding in the new century before the iPhone. The iPhone was produced to solve problems that it can't solve. All these tech things do. I mean, think about it when Facebook was invented at

my university. I mean, the promise was it was going to wipe out loneliness. Lowliness is a complex human problem. The, you know, that the Facebook is a complicated engineer and algorithm and complicated algorithms can't solve complex human needs. They can't. The result is if you try to do that, you're going to get lonelier, not less lonely. If you're trying to wipe out your loneliness for social media, you're going to wind up lonelier and I got the data to show it. I've got the

studies that actually show that. And that's the same thing with everything else. So the problem

was in the iPhone. The problem is how we use it because this is the way the culture has been

“pushing us in the first place. This was like Silicon Valley. What was the change of the culture?”

It was the shift of the economy towards a more of like a tech IP post dot com bus. You have the new dot com boom. So there's different elements, I guess. It was shifting us towards this more technical or technocratic way of thinking about human emotion. What are the forces that are coming together here? So this is what we've called a post-industrial revolution. The industrial revolution everybody understands actually what it, how it worked and when it created the middle class, but

but it also destroyed a lot of indigenous ways of living, a lot of normal ways of families being together led to a lot of urbanization and family fragmentation, et cetera, et cetera. The post-industrial revolution is very similar in its way. And what it basically says is that we're going to move toward algorithmic approach to the things that to the basic human needs that we actually all care about. So as for example, when the industrial revolution, what it is it made physically weak people strong

by adding machines to the way that we work, the post-industrial revolution, it makes people smarter. It actually is an enhancement of cognitive skill. But the important thing to keep in mind is that it doesn't enhance all your cognitive skills. You have two kinds of cognitive skills. You got the the left brain complicated stuff. And you have the right brain complex stuff. And the right brain is all the why questions of love and mystery and meaning. That's real life. On the left brain,

you have all the algorithms that you're actually trying to solve. And we have these things every day and they're important. How do I get my food? How do I get to work? How do I find my destination?

the post-industrial revolution, gives us this massive left brain, but it lies to us. It says that we

can actually with that massive left brain, solve our right brain needs for mystery, meaning love, and happiness, and it can't be done. Now, it's this explain or it's this a data point of supporting that claim, the idea that you talk about in your book that you saw the suffering was worse among young people that were in the most sort of elite striving. Like at Harvard,

“this was like a really big problem. That would sort of track with, I think, the otherwise widely”

accepted understanding of in the post-industrial age. You see elite educational institutions separated themselves from all those things you just said. We don't really want to be in the business of the new minutes. We don't want to be in the business of the transcendent. We don't want to be talking about value and love and moral courage. We want to be talking about theory. We want to be talking about science. We want to be talking about a very sort of highly educated way of seeing the world.

In fact, we're going to separate the world in between people that can sort of approach it through complex applications of expertise and then those who don't, who don't really know what's going on. STEM, baby. STEM. Like forget the humanities. It's all STEM. Forget the good life. If you're not actually studying something that will, I mean, learn to code, which people used to say before coding became completely overtaken by events and, you know, back in these things.

And it's interesting because I had this kind of natural experiment. You know, I've got three kids, but my two older kids are sons and they're only two years apart. And one of them went to Princeton to study, you know, math and math and economics. And the other one didn't go to college. He worked on a farm and didn't join the Marine Corps as sniper in the Marine Corps. Okay, now my kids are fine and they're doing really, really well. But I'm really interested in their communities.

What I've found was my older son was surrounded by people with his on Wii and the sense of emptiness and looking for meaning and okay, I guess I'll get into the hustle and grind culture and then all day long on the phone. And my younger son, he wasn't spending time on his phone at all. On the contrary, he's goofing around with his friends, none of his friends went to college, because they were enlisted US Marines. And they were having a great time and they were super happy.

What's up with that? My younger son was living the old way. And my older son was living the new way. And that is exactly what actually helped me to crack the case here was just looking at my own kids. That's fascinating. That's almost like my own sibling dump, right? Where my brother went to the Naval Academy and the Navy was on subs and I went to Dartmouth and MIT and did like math and computer science. Yeah, he lives life. Oh man, he lives life. He's like, this is great.

He lives in California. He's always out there mountain biking and surfing and going on, you know,

he's like really into it. All right. So this is fascinating. Yes, you have escaped the matrix. You actually escaped the matrix that many computer scientists are stuck in, because you didn't fool yourself or you didn't let the world lie to you to tell you that you're training, which is the massive increase of your left hemispheric activity could solve your right brain needs. You love your wife in real life. You love your kids in real life. You're a man of

faith in real life. And you're not mediating that your phone is out in the foyer. Well, I know that

“they read your stuff. Well, it helps. I think what helped that was the fact that I ended up after”

grad school at Georgetown, which is a Jesuit university, that is a liberal arts institution. That cares about those things. And it's still, you'll still walk by, you know, a Jesuit priest will walk by. They'll be an OVA going by. They care about, they care about humanistic values. They care about justice. They care about transcendence. And you're surrounded by it. And it's sort of colors even the STEM work. But, okay, so let me, there's a complicated thing that confused me,

and I think there's an answer to this complicated scenario in your book, right? Because I agree with what you're saying, you have a change in the culture in the 21st century that leads to this this problem of meaning, meaninglessness among young people. But there is also these timing hooks into some of the negative effects we see to technology, right? Like, especially the spread of the smartphone, led in certain circumstances, you see these large bumps in the mental health issues.

Certainly, you'll see this on college campuses. Partially, like, put me on what I write about was getting the Georgetown, and in, like, 2012, talking to the head of the mental health counseling to cat program there, and her just saying, we've, like, double or tripled, anxiety-related disorders, like in the last couple of years. And I was like, what's the difference? She was like, it's the

phones. The first kids you shut up with phones, it's getting worse. But tell me if I have this right,

“because I think there's an answer in your book, which is the way you talk about the doom loop,”

which is this idea of, it's not that we were fine, and then we got the phones, and then we got bad. It was, no, we were in this new perilous situation. I'm throwing this out here. You tell me if this is right. We're in this new perilous cultural situation in which we're getting disconnected from these traditional right-frame sources of meaning in that situation when iPhones came along,

meaning that we were already having by falling into what you call the doom loop. Is that correctly resolving this sort of tension-exactly right? And doom loops are characteristic of any addictive cycle. And, and the brain chemistry is very same, is very much the same across all of these different cycles. So you'll find, for example, if you're bored and anxious, then your drinks are alcohol, and what that does is it makes you feel better for a minute, then you're more bored and anxious,

and so you drink some more alcohol, and then you escalate and down and down and down and down and down and go. So the same thing is more or less true with the way that we're in a society that has a lack of inherent meaning that we actually will, but because we're anxious and we're bored, so that we use the technology to distract ourselves. We use the technology to pass the time, and that makes us more bored and anxious, and that's the doom loop that we can't quite get out of.

“The other way you should, we can think about it is the simulation, because that's what a lot of”

young people told me in this. It's kind of like you remember in 1999, sorry to shock you with that's 27 years ago, now at this point. So even a young guy like you's going to feel really old, but that's where the matrix was actually when it came out. And the plot of that movie was that in the years 21, 1999, science fiction flick, but they think it's 1999 in the movie, because they're living in pods, being fed a simulation of real life, because an artificial intelligence, a super

engineered machine intelligence, is sucking the energy out of humans in terms of their energy, in terms of their attention. And you have to pacify them by keeping them in the simulation. Cal, we're in the matrix. We're stuck in the matrix. That's the doom loop, because we don't know how to get out of the matrix. And so that's a lot about that. That's a, under the way to think of the same problem. Do we, is it, is it useful or is this craft to try to find useful analogies to

the fit and all crisis in the sense of, you start with the same ground, which is a disconnection

from traditional sources of meaning. So the problem is already there. In this case is for various

economic drivers. Then you introduce into the picture a vehicle of escape that has lots of negative externalities. In this case, at least a lot of deaths of despair and overdose deaths. Whereas in the social media world, you throw social media into a ground where we're disconnected from eating. And we tend to get great amplifications of anxiety related disorders. But in both cases, there's an underlying problem. And then you throw into the mix a sort of escape that becomes

addictive and causes its own amplifies problems or causes its own problems. Is that a reasonable analogy? Well, we can, but we don't want to push it too far. It harder reasons because for many, many millions of people, social media is not a net bad. It isn't a net bad. It's not heroin. I mean, by the way, there are a lot of analgesic pain killers that are not a net bad if you

“actually need them for that matter. But for many people, especially older people that remember”

the four times, social media is a phenomenal way to stay abreast of your friends and to connect with your grandchildren and to get a good chuckle from time to time because they can actually

use it in a moderate way. The problem is people who use it to treat an underlying problem of

misery and dislocation and loneliness. When they use it for that and distract themselves and solve the problem of boredom, my goodness. You know, boredom is really important. And yet it's really uncomfortable because it's boring, but Mother Nature of the Force doesn't care. And we've never been able to do it. But when we solve the problem of boredom, we invite all kinds of maladies. I mean, I'll tell you something that my great-great-grandfather Lee Roy Brooks, I guarantee you,

he never said to Mary Ellen, my great-grandmother. He never came home and said, "Honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today." Right? And the reason is because it wasn't a thing because his brain wasn't malfunctioning because he was bored a lot. But and here's the great irony of the doom loop that we're actually in today. His life was very boring moment-to-moment behind that mule,

but a guarantee you his life wasn't boring. People today are never bored moment-to-moment,

“but their life is grindingly boring. What's going on with that? To eradicate moment-to-moment”

boredom, we've traded away an interesting life. That's what has come down to because our brains are working wrong and that's an encapsulation of the doom loop that we're stuck in. Interesting. Yeah. So to seek that stimulation in the moment you prevent the the bigger picture action, well, so let's get into these equations then because you know I like equations. So I've never seen this before. Your relation of happiness to meaning is okay happiness is an equation is this plus this

plus this. One of those factors is meaning. Those other two factors we have, it's not a problem. But the meaning, if we don't have the meaning, we don't have the happiness and then we can zoom in and say okay then what is meaning? Well meaning is this plus this plus this. So there's other two factors and happiness. We're enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. So you think enjoyment, satisfaction,

Okay. And then because we're getting enjoyment satisfaction just because we have stuff to do

if you're a striver at Harvard like you're doing lots of satisfying stuff and we have enjoyment because we have access to like endless things that in the moment give us all sorts of pleasure. And we have friends and people actually have friends and they do things together a lot not as much

“as they should to be sure. But enjoyment is pleasure plus people plus memory. That's how enjoyment”

actually works. So it's not just pleasure. The secret of happiness is not the pursuit of pleasure. The pursuit of pleasure leads to rehab, not happiness. But when we actually do things and young people do they're really good at it. It's actually kind of extraordinary. Gen Z they tend to be better in enjoyment than boomers as a matter of fact. And this is an achievement based society. There's satisfaction levels, which is the joy from an accomplishment after struggle. They're

really good at that. But meaning is in a cellar, meaning the bottom is absolutely dropped out. All right. So there's a four big things you talk about in the book. I'm going to ask about some of these out of order just thinking about my audience's interests. All right. I want to start with the one that overlaps my work hauling. All right. This is what you're doing in your profession. All right. I'm nervous about this one because I wrote a book back a long time ago.

I was still a postdoc. But I wrote a book a long time ago that said we put too much emphasis in our job being a major source of passion and meaning. Actually do something really well. You can craft it into something that's meaningful in your life. But don't be searching for like the perfect work. Use a calling is important. All right. To help me understand what that means. And I want to see if I can make it compatible with my calling is this feeling that you're doing

“something that you're meant to do, whether you're in joy at all the time or not. That's what it”

comes down to. Now I, you know, I teach at the Harvard Business School. So I have a lot of people that really are really going to go work hard. Lots and lots and lots of hours. And one of the things that I tell them is don't worry about work life balance. We're about work life integration because your work should be part of your life and it should make your life better and and and your life outside work should make your work better is what it comes down to. So if you're only strategy for

finding satisfaction in life is working all the time, you're doing it wrong. And that's why in the chapter on calling, I have as part of your calling doing leisure right. Now leisure is actually not chilling on a beach. If you're chilling on a beach in every vacation, it means you're so exhausted that all you're trying to do is to get ready to work more. And you're doing it wrong is what it comes down to. Leisure according to Joseph Peeper, you know, the great 20th century German philosopher

really comes down to it comes down to doing something with purpose that they don't pay you for. Something generative that they don't pay you for, where you grow as a person and he puts it into three kind of categories, spiritual development, relationship development and intellectual development. In other words, go read the brothers' caramazov if you're going to be on the beach for Pete's sake and do it with the love of your life and then go pray or something like that. I mean,

it's basically what it comes down to is developing yourself and that is so important that it actually

is part of the calling per se. What you're meant to do is a person. But how do you find a calling? Yeah. So finding a calling really comes down to and, you know, there's a lot of stuff written on this, of course, there's a lot of philosophy written on this. It's looking for compensation that comes in two ways that you find, and this is, you know, I've been all the economists, so behavioral economists, so this is, you know, you go back to your computer science days. I go back to the equation of

the board as an economist and the two things that actually predict people feeling like their work is a meaningful calling have nothing to do with money or position or prestige or title. There's two things. Number one is the belief that they're earning their success, which is to say, I feel like I'm creating

value with my life and value in my work for me and for others. And the second is they feel

that they're needed because they're serving other people. That's what it comes down to. And again, that doesn't mean that you're changing the world. You get enough to be mother Teresa. Maybe you feel like your co-workers need you. That, you know, it would matter if you didn't show up. But if you feel like you're acknowledged and rewarded for your hard work and personal responsibility, merit is everything Cal. Merit-based systems are so important. You and I both know that

tenure-based systems are not very motivating. We're both academics. Loyalty-based systems like in government are the worst, actually, for motivating people. But what everybody knows,

“when they're there or the basis of merit, and that's what actually helps. But more important”

is that they're serving their fellow women and men. That's what it comes down to. So it's earning your success and serving other people. Well, then you know you're in the zone of calling. Well, okay, so there's two things there that that puts you so much on my, my wavelength that I'm excited about it to the point where my readers like, oh, yeah, that's Cal, right? Like the two

this is not about the matching of the specific content of the job to some sort of narrow preexisting

inclination, which is what my generation was taught. Follow your passion was 1990s into the

“early 2000s. We were taught what matters is the content of your job. You have to figure out through”

introspection that you're meant to be a beat reporter for a baseball team and that's your passion. And if you can match that to your job, you'll be happy otherwise you won't. Nothing you said was about the content of the job. It was about the properties. So you don't have to figure out in advance. What is the perfect job for me? And then two, those things you're talking about feeling like you're valued and have on a real merit basis and being able to really be serving

people, that develops over time, right? That does go along with you might not feel that way as much

in the first month of a job out of college, then where you're going to be 20 years after you've

built up real expertise and and real skills that are important, you understand the industry. So it's something that you developing gets richer over time. Those two notes are music music to my ears. So I think we're seeing a little bit of learning that through long experience. You know, when I was in my 20s, when I thought that my passion, my everything, my all, was classical music. I was a professional French horn player. I was playing the Barcelona City Orchestra. I was going to be the

“world's greatest French horn player. So I thought, I thought that was the only thing I was actually”

made for and if I didn't do that, and might as well die, Cal, and the reason is because I'd been taught to follow my passion. And what I found was that I wasn't going to be the world's greatest French horn player. And I married a woman who said it doesn't really matter. And I went back to school. And I found I was interested in all these different things. And I was good at things. I didn't actually know I was. And I went to a completely different direction for Pete's sake. I became a

behavioral scientist. And then later on, I became a CEO of a big think tank in Washington, DC.

And now now I teach happiness at a business school. And the truth is, it's the best, man,

because what I'm doing is I'm cycling around is what that, there's an old research by social psychologists at USC named Michael Driver who talked about the, the kinds of careers based on psychological profiles. And a lot of really accomplished professionals are called spirals, meaning that they reinvent themselves every seven to twelve years. Which you did, I mean, you're a, you know, a very, you know, conventional computer scientist. And now you're

right how to people to be happy for Pete's sake. Thank God you teach a Georgetown because, you know, you can actually do stuff like that. Because you're a spiral every seven to twelve years, you're reconceive of yourself thinking, what can I do now based on where I am in my life, my relative skills, and my, my crystallized intelligence, and how I'm changing, and how I see the world, or I can earn my success, and I can serve others those are the two questions.

I want to ask you about religion. I have a question for you about religion, because I'm on, I'm on board with you, listening the transcendent as one of the key factors for actually regaining this meaning. But I want to ask you a question about quote unquote kids these days

“and their relationship to religion, because it's confusing to me or unknown to me, right?”

So my generation, when we, when we came of age, we came of age in that sort of George W. Bush era where there is this sort of interesting schism that happened, the left moved away from religion, that became the the rights sort of domain. We got, this was like the intelligent design debates, and there became the sort of cultural split. This is when new atheism arose post 9/11. There's all of these forces that made a real sort of antagonistic relationship to religion,

and often associated it with, I don't know, conservative politics and simplicity on the other side of science. And so my generation grew up with like John Stewart making fun of even jellicles. Right? And so we had, we had a complicated relationship with religion that now the millennials are sort of repairing. What's going on with Gen Z? Where are they? What are you seeing? Are they pro-election, anti-religion, and different to religion, dislike it matters? Like what's going on

with this new generation? So until about three or four years ago, the answer was they continue to walk away from religion, and you saw more and more people self-identifying as nuns, not like nuns with habits, Catholic nuns that you were at Georgetown with and UNS and O and E S. People were identifying as having no spirituality or religious tradition. The year I was born in 1964, nice, long time ago, that was 1% of the population. Right now it's 32% of the population. It's what we find.

It's so it's massively increased, and that was largely because of Gen X and millennials who were coming through exactly the bubble that we talked about here. But something has happened in this sort of age of emptiness. It's solvus, there's a bill of goods that they've been sold, not that there's a particular religion that's that's soothing it, but we found in the past three

people who are actually starting to identify as spiritual religious starting with young men. And that's usually how it goes by the way. You know, the whole idea where every time religion is is is waning, people on a gag, no man. That's it. That's it. And then it starts to wax again. Yeah. Right. And it's gone through this. I mean, we go back to the time of the American Revolution for example. People are about as ear religious as they are today. And then we go to after the Civil War

“it does massive boom in religious experience where I mean, that's what we can all see. Yeah,”

that's what all of the reforms Jewish temples in America were coming across between the Civil

War and the First World War. Boom, man. That's when the Mormons were there, the Methodists and

the Baptists were just doing these tent revivals, the Temporance Movement, the self-improvement movements, which are quasi-religious movements. And then, you know, in the 50s it was more traditional religion. And then, you know, through the hippie revolution, it changed. And then there was a cult. There was all a cults that actually came through in the moonies and all this kind of stuff. And this is just American life. And so what's happening right now is when people feel this on

we, this acute sense of emptiness, religion is going to be, is not going to be very far behind. And sure enough. That's actually the beginning of what we're starting to see today. But it helped me resolve this tension. Right. So we're in this new moment that started sort of

“early 21st century, which is much more algorithmic and technocratic way of thinking about”

treating life. It seems like it's causing two, uh, two counterforces. Right. So force number one

is that creates an on-weir meaninglessness, which will drive people back to, I need something like religion. The act is like the operating system for the new minutes of my life. But at the same time, the culture itself has the defense mechanism against religion and makes you uncomfortable about religion. If you're steeped in this much more technical scientific algorithmic culture, because you say, "I have lost the ability to comfortably deal with something that doesn't exist in the,

the matrix of empiricism. It doesn't exist in terms of like this is, uh, uh, we're making observations, putting them on tables, and we're, we were verifying if this is true or false, and we're thinking about fact checking and, and you know, it's the, the whole cultural

milieu that you're talking about is one in which if you're in that world, religion doesn't

make sense. So it's driving us towards religion. But it's also a culture that's going to make us uncomfortable with religion. I guess what that creates, like we saw coming out of Silicon Valley in the 2010s, a lot of people that were talking about, there's a period where every friend I had was saying they were spiritual but not religious, which to me would be an exact personification of exactly those tensions. But what's going to win here? Because we have counterforces.

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All right, Jesse. Let's get back to the show.

“So I think that what's going to win is the desire to be happier. That's what's going to win because”

you know who's going to choose misery forever on purpose is the whole point. So here it's actually a deeper problem than what you're talking about. You know the work of the Amigilkris, the great neuroscientist and philosopher at Oxford, now emeritus. He did the work on hemispheric lateralization that I talked about before where the left brain does the complicated engineering stuff and the tech that you're dealing with every day and the right brain is the why questions

that don't have answers about love and mystery and meaning and happiness. And so what happens is that when you're only on the left brain because you're on the tech all day long and near in the hustle and grind culture, it's not that you can't deal with religion. It's just that you don't even it doesn't even occur to you to deal with religion because you're literally in the wrong part of your brain all day long to deal with religious questions. Now that means that when people become

miserable enough they'll say what is actually missing and that's when you get a whole rush of books by cats like you and me that say let's take a little look at what you've been missing and when they do you get a cultural revolution. I don't mean in the Chinese sense. I mean in the sense of when we actually get these religious waves in our society and when people start to rebel against it and that's actually what I see for the first time. I'm a Silicon Valley all the time. Look,

I'm super into tech. I actually believe that AI is going to wind up at the end of the day, mostly making us happier because a lot of people are going to figure out that all the left brain stuff that it does actually freeze us up to have a lot more time. The tech, the industrial revolution initially made people work more but then it created the weekend and on the weekend they actually hung out with their kids and what AI is ultimately going to do is do a lot of left brain nonsense

and in the free time that we ultimately will have we will have like do crazy old fashion stuff like falling in love and having babies and praying and meditating and I actually figure that that's

the direction that we're going to go because that's the humans when humans ultimately always do in the

end that they choose happiness. So, well, I don't know if I share your optimism. Unfortunately, AI just because I've studied too many workplace technologies and the possibility is always there, we always messed it up. We always messed it up. We always end up making our lives more frantic

“because we're... Yeah, but each one of us can make that decision. That's how, by the way.”

I agree. Which is why you write your books. Yeah, right. And I've been telling people, yeah, think about AI, how can I automate something that's annoying? If you're using it to avoid strain in your brain, there are be dragons. Like actually, no, no, no, you want to keep that piece. That's sort of humanistic. I'm trying to create new value with my brain. Keep that. But if this means you have to not format a PowerPoint slide. Oh, fantastic. There's no reason for you

to be doing it. All right. So you also should make formatting PowerPoint slides. Unless that's your actual thing is what it comes down to. And by the way, don't use it as a substitute for your relationships. Yes. That's the biggest mistake that people make is making it you're getting the girlfriend experience from AI or making it your buddy or God forbid your therapist. That actually is a

substitute. And your brain will know the difference. It will never pass the true ring test of the

right hemisphere of your brain. And even though you say, wow, that's really good advice. That will make you feel empty to press the anxious because your right brain is craving a true human experience. Yeah, and it knows the difference. Well, let's talk about that because I was another one of your things you mentioned as resources of meaning. It's fall in love. Have relationships. I know this is being said. It's a struggle, especially for younger people. Why and what should they do to overcome

that struggle? To begin with, it's been we've made it a lot worse with a technical mediation

“of relationships themselves. You know, the truth is that the best possible way to find a mate”

is to go someplace where those people actually are and to deal with them over an interest that you have in common. That's actually how you meet people, which is why traditionally people would meet their mate and college or in the workplace, right? Another great way to do it is that somebody

really good and actually finding people because they're dealing with a complexity of the human

person themselves. When you interdisintermediate that with dating apps, what you're doing is you're reducing people to a two-dimensional facsimile of themselves and that is inherently unsatisfying. That's one of the reasons that people who date a lot of the apps, they get way more dates than they used to and they find less attraction than they used to and when it turns into a long-term relationship, it's less stable and satisfying than it used to be. So marriages, by the way, 62%

long-term relationships are starting in the app's today. They're fundamentally and notably significantly less stable and have less attraction than relationships that don't start in the app's, because they're starting literally in the wrong side of the brain. Interesting. So that right right brain, appreciation of humanity, this is a separate, this is a person, this is a soul, this is like another human being, you know, blessed by God to be sort of like infinitely valuable

and we are like interacting in space. Your brain is literally encoding a different understanding then it's like, this is an option five. I swept right on or something like that. It's not like, I know exactly everything. You're actually not encountering the people that your right brain needs. Why? Because your left brain is ascertaining who the greatest match is going to be and your left brain is getting it wrong. Your left brain gets it wrong and your right brain knows.

You remember when you met your wife, which is right, you how old were you in college when

“you met your wife? We're in college. Yeah. And you matter what, it's like, what were you doing?”

You're like having dinner or something and somebody introduced you? She was on my floor in my freshman dorm. Right. No, man. Good stuff. But what's that? But I'll say this about it is we used to do things like in high school. We would do things like go to parties and it was it was social bootcamp because it was weird and awkward. You had to navigate incredibly complicated real world situations. Like trying to figure out is my popularity sufficient to be in this room with these particular

people and how do I navigate this? And it was very difficult and stressful and you would drive

around with your friends and you got good at it. And I always think about by time I got the college

as then I could function competently in the new social circumstances and like fraternities and dorms and this or that which allowed me to attract a mate who's now been, you know, my wife for 20 years. So there's like something about it. I'll flex human experience. And if you were on the apps God forbid, you'd know if she is she look hot in a picture, does she like to eat saracha, does she want to live in in in Austin and does she vote for Democrats or something like that? You say, okay,

I guess I go on a date with her, right? And she'll be like, is he over six foot three? Does he have a good

“lustrous head of hair in your case, boy, is that ever true? And the truth is that, you know, this stuff”

is incidental. When I first met my wife, she didn't speak a word of English and I just speak a word of Spanish and I was talking to her and I could smell her and I thought to myself, I don't know why, but she smells like a cantaloupe in August. I really, really like that. Now what's happening is a right side of my brain in concert with the factory bulb in my brain was saying something about her major history compatibility complex, which is telling me something about the the

dissimilarity of our immune systems. And that was telling me something like attraction, attraction, attraction because there we have babies. They're going to have really good immune systems because you're really different than each other. Thank God for all that, man, but you're not going to get that on hinge. I can't wait to, I would love to hear what you're wedding valves were like,

let me, let me talk about the immune system. I love it. All right, so we're basically out of time here.

So let's just try to bring it down to, all right, so I want to be concrete, which is impossible to be too concrete, but there's a list of mine that are green with all of this. Like I want to add the meaning to the equation. This is what I'm missing. This is brings a lot of pieces together, but I want to get concrete, like what am I doing in the next few weeks, from the next few months, just to start moving in the right direction towards mean while I'm waiting for my copy of

Arthur's book. Yeah, book. No one. Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Number one, get clean. Number one is actually start to do some things to rebel against the machine that's actually putting you into the doom loop. Number one, people should be really angry that they're actually stuck in this thing. And I talk about the fact that in all addictive processes, the number one

“instigator of of of actually recovery is getting just pissed off. You know, that's what it comes”

down to. You know, talk to anybody who's a former, you know, really bad alcoholic. They'll say, it's like, I got so mad about what I was doing to myself, what I was doing to the family, and what I just like, no, I'm not going to do this anymore. You read, Dustyowski's the gambler, which he wrote, by the way, because he was so out of money that he was that he actually had to

pay off his gambling debts. And he wrote it about a gambler. And the whole thing is just like,

he's like, basically, you know, tell with it all is what he said at the end of the day.

The second thing is you basically have to understand how your brain is getting hooked onto these machines and actually how it works. And again, I'm not anti-tech. I'm not anti-phoned. I'm not

“if it's social media. I've got all of it and so do you. You have to understand how you need to”

learn to manage your devices, so they don't manage you. And I've got a bunch of protocols in this book to actually do that, but it starts with your methods for device free times and you're sighted in this book. And that's like, first hour of the day, during meals, last hour of the day. The gold standards of your phone for your method, by the way, where you're actually when you're home, you're actually doing this. Then the last part is actually working to get bored on purpose.

And so I recommend that people actually work out without headphones, that people go for walks for an hour in the morning, call the Brava Mahorta in Vedic wisdom, without devices that they drive in silence, a whole bunch of actual interventions to do that. So that's number one is getting clean. Number two, before the book shows up, because by the time the book shows up, there's a whole bunch of cool stuff to actually do, but everybody can do this is actually getting into what the Greeks

call the state of Aporia, which is the state of puzzlement by actually thinking about big questions that don't have answers. And talking about it with other people. Here's two. Why am I alive? Here's another. For what would I give my life? You know, that's when you're in college.

“That's what you were talking about at 11 30 PM after the party when you met your wife.”

Now, what are people doing at 11 30 PM after the party? Zit, zit, zit, zit, sending themselves right over to the left side of the brain. This is what every major religious tradition has in common. If you're trying to become a Zen Buddhist monk, you're going to learn Collins. What's the sound of one hand clapping? The big questions, the deep questions. The questions that matter most in life. That is pure therapy for the right hemisphere of the brain.

You're not going to find the answers to the questions, and that's not the point. What you're going to find is that you put yourself into a position where meaning starts to find you. All right. Well, this I'm on board with all this Arthur. I think like the right brain for its left brain, the equations, y-mean is lacking. All this stuff resonates with me. A lot of insights in this book that I hadn't had before but helped explain things I'd noticed, which to me is usually

the mark of a good theoretical framework. So to my audience, the book is called the meaning of

“your life. You need to go order it. It's going to definitely help you with all the things we talk”

about here on this show. And Arthur, it's always a pleasure to have you on the show. We'll have to

have you back on again soon. But thanks for joining us. I love it. Thank you, Kel. Thank you for your work. It's really helped my life a lot. And a lot of other millions of other people too. I appreciate it. Right. All right. So there we go. Jesse, that was my discussion with Arthur Brooks. It's interesting how ideas seem to travel in packs. So for the years I was working on my new book about the deep life, which is coming out next year, it really felt like it was sort of out of left field.

And I was the only one thinking about this. And now all at once, there's lots of books about this same general idea. Arthur Brooks is one of these books. Jim Collins, they just sent me a new copy of his book that's coming out that's also about trying to find more meaning in your life. So I think it's just in the air right now that we're in a mode where people are ready to say, let's stop just talking about the problems and start also talking about the solutions.

Now, all of our books do something different. So they'll complement each other. But I'm kind of happy to see that we're entering a moment in this year of questioning how do we cultivate a life of purpose as opposed to being so unique, like focus very myopically, I just individual issues that we might want to solve. Like I said, we call this like the meaning Renaissance? I don't know.

Yeah. Did you end up writing your conclusion yet?

No, what I'm doing, I haven't been the conclusion yet because I want to see, I'm in the first

round of edits for my book The Deep Life. And what I've been struggling on all week, honestly, is more of my personal story and introduction, my editor wants, and I'm pretty uncomfortable writing about myself. But there are some pretty deep motivations from like my 20s where I developed a lot of the ideas like Lifestyle Center planning that then play a big role in my theory of the deep life involving some stuff I went through back then. So I'm trying to write about it.

God is going slow. I could write 3,000 word, you know, New York or essay, easier than I could write this sort of 1500 words about like my own story. But it was also like completely un- anticipated, right? Like you didn't expect it. Do that when it editor came back with those comments? No, I mean, I knew she was right. I was just hoping she wouldn't notice.

Okay. Yeah. It was like different. But it's, she's right. Like when you're talking about something like cultivated deep life, it is as personalized that is technical. So it is right.

this afternoon, actually, after we record. And then move on to like more normal editing that I'm comfortable with, which is about shortening stories, adding stories, clarifying things, cutting things that don't need to be there. There's my happy zone. I love cutting and simplifying. But man, it doesn't help that I'm lying a lot. So like in my story, it's a lot of me in war zones.

I basically just like took a lot from a mix of like Sebastian Junger's books about being embedded

in Afghanistan and the Navy seal Richard Marcinko's autobiography of starting seal team six. So I kind of mix a lot of that in there. I guess it maybe readers will notice. There's a lot of a lot of me doing halo jumps high altitude, low opening parachute jumps into

“terrorist camps. But you know, I want to keep it. Keep it real. Keep it real. That's what I say.”

That's what we do here. All right. Speaking of keeping it real, you've heard from me and Arthur. And now it's time to hear what you have to say, Jesse, it's time to open our inbox. And just as a reminder, if you want to ask a question or share a case story, or maybe just attempt the prod me into a rant, send a note to [email protected]. I think we now have a three different people who read that inbox. So it's your best chance of

actually getting your information in front of me and on the show. All right, Jesse, what's the first message

we're going to cover today? All right, first message. Adam recommended an article for you to read. All right, so what do we got here? This is from Adam Scott. You think this is the actor Adam Scott from Severance and Parks and Recreation? Yes, let's just assume yes. Look, this is Hidswords, not mine. I mean, nominated actor Adam Scott essentially sees me as like one of his biggest

“inspiration. I think we can just assume that's true. All right, what did Adam Scott have to said?”

He said, uh, here's an article that will be quote right up Cal's alley. All right, so let's load up this article. I put up here on the screen that Adam Scott sent me. It's from Gizmodo. Here's the title. Peck employees are reportedly being evaluated by how fast they burn through LLM tokens. Is that terminology known? Do you think Jesse, like if you hear me say LLM tokens, you know what that means? I'm not sure if my audience does. Can you define it? So this is what you

actually, uh, how you're actually charged for using something like a language model. So when you use a large language model, you give it text as input. And the output is a single token, which is either a word or a part of a word, right? So what the language model thinks it's doing is it thinks the input is from a real piece of text that already exists and that it is trying to correctly guess what word or part of the word comes next. So how do you get a whole long response out of it?

“Well, you have a computer program, like a chat bot, for example, would have a computer program”

that continually calls the LLM again and again. So you give it a prompt. It gives it as input to the LLM. It gets out one token. It adds that token to the end of your prompt. Now you have a slightly longer input. It feeds that into the LLM. It gets another prompt token, adds that to the end of your input, feeds that back in. So you're growing out of response, one word or part of a word at a time. This is called auto regression, where you keep feeding back your, uh, your output

back into the input to try to grow the final output. And at some point, the LLM will output a special token that says that the end of my answer, um, at which point then you return that to the user if you're in like a chat bot scenario. So every time you produce a token, your input has to go through all of the layers of the LLM and all of the hundreds of billions of parameters have to be involved in multiplications. So that's the measure of how much computation is necessary for a particular

response is how many tokens had to be generated. So it's the same thing as saying how many, how many times do we have to call the LLM? All right. So when it says tech employers are being evaluated by how fast they burn through LLM tokens, it means how much they're using language models. So let me read from this article. This article is actually, it's quoting a Kevin Roots column from the New York Times that really we should be reading Kevin's, but this is what the,

this is what they sent me. So I'll read what's actually in the Gizmoto article. All right. So it says, and I'm quoting here, according to a column by the New York Times, Kevin Roots, employees that companies including meta and open AI compete on quote internal leaderboards that show how many tokens each worker consumes in quote, at meta in particular and also Shopify Roots says volume of AI use has become a metric to go into people's evaluations with managers, quote, rewarding workers

who make heavy use of AI tools and chastening those who do not the resulting numbers in terms of both tokens and money are absolutely staggering. One open eye engineer according to Roots burned through

210 billion tokens, which Roots equates to 33 Wikipedia's, a sweet as softer engineer claims to Roots

that his company spends more than his salary on cloud code tokens alone. And then because I guess

Well, I think this is just suitor productivity laid bear. But it's a big idea we talked about in

“last week's episode, which is why I'm nominated actor Adam Scott sent me this article this week,”

is this idea that in knowledge work in general, we tend to use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort. The visitor you are, the more stuff you're doing, the more productive we think you are, this is why we send tons of emails and jump in tons of meetings, even if that's not actually producing more of whatever it is that makes money for our institution. Well, this is that made even more quantitative. I don't care what you're doing. I don't care if it's producing better software.

I don't care if it's shipping more things than matter faster. I just want to see that you're making lots of hits on the LLM because that means you're doing lots of things. So it's suitor productivity

laid bear, but suitor productivity is often a trap. Because there's lots of stuff you can do faster

or more frenetically that doesn't move to bottom line. So what was my suggestion last week? My suggestion last week is have a better scoreboard. Measure the things that directly produce value.

“That's what you should care about. How many meaningful features were shipped to our software”

clients, for example? Maybe that's what we care about. Now, if that requires a lot of LLM use or not, if you use a lot of tokens or maybe use few tokens because you have very very careful, well constrained prompts. And that actually makes you more effective in the guy that's just shooting left and right prompts left and right and getting clogged in all sorts of weird loops. Right? Focus on the scoreboard that matters. Not whatever is more approximate and whatever is

easier. So I think this is a great example of the digital productivity tool traps we fall into. Me very wary of looking at zoomed in speed of things and be much more interested in the big picture

actual production of value. Because what leads there is not always, doesn't always seem as busy

or frenetic or fast paced as you might assume. So I do appreciate that article. All right, Jesse, what are the messages do we have? Next much, we have a note from an anonymous student who has a question about digital books. Oh, see, we can find this. All right, so here's the note. It reads, I've a 22 year old softer engineering student. I've recently been trying to apply your ideas on digital minimalism, but I have a question about reading digital books. Recently, I started

quote unquote reading PDFs using a combination of visual reading and text to speech, which I listen to while following the text. This helps me stay focused and feel like I absorb more. Here's my question. For developing deep focus, cognitive improvement and strong critical thinking, is this combined method as effective as traditional reading? Or does it reduce the long-term

“cognitive benefits of reading? All right, so I think in this context, yes, it is”

reducing the long-term cognitive benefits of reading. What I think is happening here is that you are trying to reduce the cognitive strain involved in consuming the written word. So by having your audio system going, you're taking the strain off of just my mind has to just purely decode these symbols and create meaningful representations in my brain. You're sort of short-circiting that. The audio allows you to sort of take your foot off the cognitive gas pedal and just listen

for a while and then read for a while, then listen for a while. It is a loss, lot less cognitively demanding way to consume words. But if your interest isn't using books to help develop your brain, your ability to contemplate, which I define to mean your ability to actually control and aim your mind's eye at particular targets towards useful outcomes, if that is your goal, then you want the strain. What you're doing would be the physical analogy of saying, "Hey, good, good news.

My Navy SEAL training was really hard. I hate the pull-ups that make us do, but I figured out how to use a pulley system." And if I put some counterweight on the pulley system, these pull-ups are much easier for me to do. I just feel like I can do them easier. Well, at the feet of the purpose of the pull-ups, you want to strain your muscles so they get stronger so that when you're in deployment, you can actually carry that rucksack for the long hiker or whatever the analogy here is.

So, no, you want to confront the actual symbols printed on a piece of paper. And I want you to change your mindset that strain you feel, think about it like Arnold Schwarzenegger and pumping iron, loving the strain he feels in his bicep when he's lifted. He's like, "Yeah, that means I'm getting stronger." So, I would much rather you do shorter reading sessions at full intensity than longer reading sessions where you're trying to reduce the intensity because you're

not actually getting the cognitive benefits of increased contemplation ability, which it sounds like you're actually trying to get. So, that would be my recommendation. There is a magic to decoding printed symbols with no other types of input that creates deep reading processes, strength and those deep reading processes builds cognitive patients with focus and allows you to then reverse those circuits when the time comes when you're thinking or writing to produce

the reading you do at a higher level of intensity. He also asked about audiobooks. I think audiobooks

are a fine way to absorb information, right? I think it's, you know, hey, listen to this book an audio, especially like a nonfiction book, where either it's just entertainment or you want to get some ideas out of it. But if what you're looking to do is increase your cognitive capacity, you really want to read physical books for that purpose, right? So, audiobooks are fine, but don't think of audiobooks as your primary way of building the strongest possible cognitive

results. It's just the less strain is involved. So, I'm all for audiobooks, like half my book sales

“now are audiobooks, but it shouldn't be the only thing you're doing if you're trying to train your”

brain. Half your book sales are audiobooks. That crazy? Wow. I don't know that. When I first got in the game, it was like none. And then when like audible became a thing and Amazon made it easier, it was like a quarter. I think I went back and looked this up for digital minimalism. It was came out in 2019. If you're looking at those first year sales, it's like a quarter of the sales.

Now, if you look at slow productivity is 50%. Wow, incredible. So, partially that's a shift in

book consumption habits. And partially it's a reality the fact that we have a podcast and I do a lot of podcast and a lot of people encounter me doing audio format. So, that also, that also bumps it up. Like I've noticed, if you look for sales spikes based on particular publicity related events, if it's a podcast related event, you get an audio book spike. And if it's a print related event, it's more hard covers. It's like more evenly balanced. So, like when I went on

“like Andrew Schuberman's podcast on launch day for slow productivity, that was an audiobook spike.”

Right. In fact, my slow productivity was on the Amazon charts for multiple weeks. The top 20 most red or most bought books of the week. But it was the audio version. Because like really, I was on a lot of big podcasts. But if I get something like a big article in the New York Times or something, then you're going to get many more hard cover. So it kind of depends on the audience. But a lot of our audience now finds me through this podcast, so they do a lot more audio books.

The bad news is that means I have to record my own audio books in this a terrible process. This terrible. You explained prior blog. I know. I'm not looking forward to it with the new book. But, say Levy. All right. We're going to a little shorter today since we had a very long interview. But I like to end each show by briefly checking in with what I've been up to recently. Let's start with reading. I'm working on my fifth book of March. We're recording this

on March 24th. So I wrote the red the first four books. My fifth book is mentioned as this

brand in Sanderson book. Missborn. My middle son has insisted that I read just to you. I'm about 400 pages into this book, which for Brandon Saterson title means like I'm basically finishing up the prologue. I'm just getting started. These are these are long books. I'm enjoying it, though. You know, I hadn't read him before. I read, I don't read a ton of fantasy. I read some game of thrones. I read some Patrick Rufus. I hadn't read this before. I had read a snarky profile and

wire. There's this like famous mean profile of Brandon Santerson from wired magazine. And I had read that. And it was like really down on his writing. It was like, oh, it's like super expositional. And he's explaining redundantly how characters were feeling. And I was like, oh, maybe this is going to be clunky writing. Like, he just raised these things fast. But I don't

“think so at all. I think it's a very well-paced adventure style book against a backdrop of a”

complicated world-building magic system. I was like, this is like very well executed. I mean, it's not Ursula, the Gwen. But it's also not like I was expecting after that wired article. I read a lot of thrillers. I read a lot of adventure writing. Like, this is like well crafted, especially for a six, seven-to-page book that keep the momentum going. Great world building. So I am impressed. I was more impressed by Brandon Santerson than that snarky article.

Lead me to believe. Let's check it on the HQ. I got a bunch of stuff just to see I'm about to bring over here. It's our foyer is full. We got a video game cabin in there. We got my $500 light is in there. We got a new giant rug. So we're going to rug the whole floor in there. So it's going to be not so live and echoey or whatever. I got a lot of stuff. I got the vintage video game maintenance manual from 1980 for the Galaxian arcade cabinet because I'm

taking out some of the circuit diagrams to frame the put up in there. So like, I need this done by May because that's when my semester ends and my sabbatical begins. And how long is your sabbatical go for it? It'll be the next academic year. So I need, because I'm going to be spending a lot of time in their working. And so I need that to all get done by May. Here's the, the open question I

in front of where the computers are where I write and Jesse does video editing. What, I want to put

“books on them that are going to be a source of inspiration. But I will take suggestions about what type”

of books to put there. My current thought has long been, but let me test this with the audience.

I want to put first edition techno thrillers up on that wall because AI associate that with my

childhood reading in the 1990s, which was like a lot of creative energy and inspiration to start of

“like my intellectual life. And two, I think of techno thrillers. I think of this idea that writing”

and thinking about technology can be, it can be interesting or fun or mode over like really be something that catches people attention. And I like that, you know, I don't want to put just like books in the mainstream what I write about like tech criticism up there or something like that. I want it to be a little bit more oblique. So that's my current idea, Jesse. But I'm, I'm open, I'm open to other suggestions that people have it. But I want to sort of inspiring

wall of books with the spotlight for my $500 light shining right on them when I'm sitting there writing. So that's my current thought. How many books do you think? Well, ten, five. Yeah,

I think ten maybe. Yeah, let's think ten. I'm not doing first printings, but that's too expensive.

“But first editions. That's what I'm thinking. First edition hard covers. We'll get them up there.”

They're red acrylic picture ledges. All the stuff's going to be such a pain to hang, but I'm having someone come to do it. Yeah, just hanging everything all at once because it's all I hate doing that type of thing. All right. Well, sort of send your advice to podcasticellnewport.com. Or if you're the Michael Crichton estate, I will lovingly put up your first editions you send me. They will be well displayed. We will, we will find a good home. All right, that's all time we have for today.

On Thursday, we have an AI reality checkup. So coming up and the next Monday will have another main

episode. So until then, as always, stay deep.