561 - The Best Case for Not Fearing AI, Help with Email and Creative Diet with Cal Newport

26:54And he had this very public facing, like famous, he was famous to everybody as the leader of this tech company. And now we entered this space where we think we're listening to technology people and we're actually listening to salespeople and we don't hear the difference. And so the real huge takeaway for me is every time one of these people say something, just realizing that they have this economic incentive, primarily that's like what's driving them is making sure that their investors continue to think that they're, this is going to be worth this much money that they've poured into it. Um, and I feel like that shift alone has helped me like weed out a little bit of the fear mongering of just like, Oh, every time they say something, they have a really good reason to say that.

27:40I think, I think it's really useful to keep in mind. I mean, if they came out and they were honest and they're like, if I'm Sam Altman, I'm like, okay guys, like here's, here's what's going on is we have this sort of like improved version of Google and chat GPT, which is like useful. It's it's it's not really profitable because it's also kind of expensive to do the queries. And we're doing coding agents. And like this is about how much revenue this is making. We've brought in like a couple hundred billion dollars worth of like CapEx spend or this or that. Investors are like, oh, my God, well, I'm not giving you a dime.

28:10Like, how are you going to make back? How are you going to make back that money? I mean, OpenAI at this point needs to become the fastest growing company in the history of companies in order to just service their existing debt and make their investors at least happy, right? And so I feel like, yeah, we're helping coders produce code and we have a better Google. And you're like, oh, wait, but isn't Google also going to just add this directly to Google? And probably, like, yeah, they are doing it. And obviously they're going to master that because they're the masters of doing lower cost infrastructure.

28:40That's a scary investment picture. So if you're Sam Altman, you have to be like, we are going to be running the entire economy. So what we really need to talk about is like, how do we make sure there's enough wood for the trash can fires that all the fire knowledge workers are going to use to cook their pets? Like that is a much better place for him to be talking about because they're now the most important company in the history of the history of the world. But there's another thing going on, which I throw into your Venn diagram, which there was a weird thing. And I think this confused a lot of reporters.

29:08There is a weird thing that happened in Silicon Valley writ large. So even beyond just like the specific AI companies where the idea of like AI, either apocalypse or utopian scenarios became almost like a religion for a large number of people over there. Right. There is there's sort of a meaningless crisis in Silicon Valley. You know, it's it's religion's not rational. We're super optimal. And you kind of you have a bit of a meaning crisis out there. And a lot of people latched on to this. Right. So these ideas were percolating pre-open AI and chat GPT. It came out of, really briefly, it came out of, we had this thing, the rationalist community.

29:49So we had this community that was very popular in Silicon Valley where you try to bring hyper-rationality to understanding the world and your life. And it's a very Silicon Valley type of thing. And there was a subculture in the rationalist community that focused on existential risks. And they cared a lot about, like, let's think a lot about the rare things that might have a huge impact. So we should think about asteroid hits. We should think about pandemics. We should think about super intelligent AI. Not that any of these are very probable, but their cost is so big. If we're being super rational, the expected value we have to like, it's worth spending money and attention to reduce this rare risk because the cost would be so big.

30:26And AI was on the list with asteroid strikes and like killer pandemics or whatever. So this whole community was studying this, right? And they cared about this a lot. The rationalists, they're online. They're on blogs. They had meetings. There was the Singularity Institute out there had a lot of overlap with the rationalist. And then when OpenAI came along and released ChatGPT, this little switch flipped in their heads. We're like, hey, what if one of these things we're worried about and talking about, what if it was true? That would make us the prophets. Like we're now, we're Ezra now, right?

31:01We're Micah now. Like we were the ones that were seeing what's going to happen and we're the ones who can save the world. My life now just has meaning. And it became the church of existential risk. And this was a big deal in Silicon Valley. So in like 2021, 2022, 2023, if you're out there at like a dinner party in Silicon Valley, you're meeting these people whose entire structure of meaning comes from the belief that AI is an existential risk. Yeah. And they just were, but they're very clear spoken and super confident about this. And it really spooked a lot of reporters, right? I think it really set the tone.

31:36And some of these people were in the companies like OpenAI and they, they left the companies and were like very vocal about like, this stuff is going to destroy the world. And I've never been more confident. And for a lot of reporters who are like literature majors, they're like, these guys are engineers. They're worried. They're the people who know the best. So that was a big role was the church of existential risk among engineers made it seem like the people who knew. So it was very reminiscent of like the infectious disease doctors in February 2020 being like, you need to be more worried about this than you think.

32:10It hit those vibes for a lot of reporters. But in this case, they weren't infectious disease doctors. They were it was the church of existential risk. They were sort of in some sort of weird sort of geek religion world. So that also played a really big role here.

32:39I'm always trying to up my game creatively. Recently, it's been comedy writing for my books and talks, and there's only really one place I know of where the literal best in the biz share all their tips and tricks, and it's Masterclass. The class with writer, director, producer Judd Apatow is especially great. I've been listening to it on audio mode while driving and doing chores. One thing that he said that I instantly started to apply was prioritizing FaceTime with the people working in creative roles that you wish you had. It erases your limiting beliefs when you see that they are human just like you.

33:13This was true for me meeting working illustrators when I was in college, but now I'm like, how can I interview people on this podcast that are where I want to go next? I know a lot of listeners to this show are interested in upping their storytelling game, so maybe the class Learn How to Tell a Story with Big Short and Moneyball author Michael Lewis could be a good starting point for you. I love that three out of four Masterclass members say they feel inspired every time they watch. 83 % say they have applied ideas from the classes to their real life, and every new membership comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

33:46Masterclass keeps adding new classes, so there's never been a better time to get in. Right now, as a listener of this show, you get at least 15 % off the annual membership at masterclass.com slash pep talk. That's 15 % off masterclass.com slash pep talk. Head to masterclass.com slash pep talk to see the latest offer. Man, I can't tell you how badly I wish I had been able to find a great therapist that accepted my insurance back in my mid-20s. I was figuring out I was ADHD, I was struggling in my career and struggling to support a new family and finding a good therapist that I could afford would have been a total game changer.

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34:56Rula patients typically pay$15 per session when they use their insurance. And I love how this is making therapy accessible to more people. Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high quality therapy that's actually covered by insurance. Visit Rula.com slash pep talk to get started. That's R-U-L-A dot com slash pep talk. You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget. I can't even put my finger on exactly why this helped ease my existential dread around AI exactly. But it's something about the training of these models initially went better than expected.

35:41I'm putting it in a nutshell. They thought we're going to keep feeding it this data and then it's going to hit this ceiling. And then it didn't hit this ceiling. It actually surpassed all the expectations. And then we lived in this brief moment where everyone's freaking out that when we hit AGI is going to happen just like in no time. And then in that little brief moment, everyone's freaking out. Everyone thinks this is going to change the world. And then that they hit a real ceiling. It was just a bit higher than they thought it was going to be. And then since then, there's a correlation between the technology is not growing like they thought it was going to.

36:15And now we now all of the people in charge of these companies have has to create more buzz, even though there isn't much of a story. Does that sound right? I don't I kind of want to just bring it up because it's something that I've heard you speak about that. I never hear anyone speak about this other than some of the, you know, techno critic people like you. but it's not a major story. Like that's not a thing that I think most people are even aware of that happening. I've been trying. Yeah. That's more or less right. I have been trying. So like I, I wrote a big New Yorker article about this last August.

36:51And then that led to, so I went on all things considered and did a bunch of hits on it or whatever. And then if the listeners want the long version of this, the day we're recording this, there's a podcast episode of mine that came out. That's AI reality check. Our LLM is a dead end. And I do like a long gloss on it. But what you're saying is more or less right. I'll put in the shout outs for people. The kind of like the two-minute version of this is that LLM technology went through three stages. We're in the third stage right now. The first stage is what you're talking about. This was pre-training scaling stage where they kept making the models bigger and the amount of time they trained them longer.

37:26It came out of a paper that was written by some open AI engineers in 2020, where they said, actually, we have reason to believe by experimenting with GPT-2 that if we keep making these things bigger, they're going to keep getting better, which was like a big idea because typically in machine learning, if you make things too big, they overfit and get worse. And the whole idea of this paper was that might not happen with LLMs. Like, actually, they might just get better. And it did happen. It happened until 2024. so they scaled up gpt2 by a major factor to get gpt3 it got much better then they scaled that up a lot to get gpt4 in early 2023 which was much better than gpt3 and and in a way that was just demonstrable to any user like they were just discovering oh my god like this is good at this now it's good at this now like it was really amazing and so the idea was then by the time we get to the summer of 2023 after GPT-4 has come out, they said, if we just do this a few more times, just make these bigger, train them longer, this model is going to get as good as humans are better on almost everything.

38:30And we're going to have AGI and we could just replace basically any type of economic role with this is going to change the world. It was like this moment of huge utopian fervor. And you see it in Sam Altman's writing at this time. It's when he starts writing about needing universal basic income. So people still have a way of having money. And it's going to be like, just the AI is going to run everything. And then that's stage one. Then it stopped working. So like open AI immediately after GPT-4 was like, of course, we're going to play this back. And they built an even bigger model. They trained it even longer.

39:01They called it Project Orion. They trained this thing up and they're all excited about it. And it wasn't much better. And Meta had the same problem with Project Behemoth, which they had the shell because it wasn't much better xai had this problem with croc 3 which they just they trained it on a hundred thousand cutting edge gpus in their colossus data center and it wasn't much better in the way that they thought it was going to be so that entered stage two which was like oh god these aren't just getting smarter by making them larger how do we still show improvement and stage two which really picked up in 2024 was the age of post training so they would take something like basically it was like gpt4 gpt45 which is what we got out of orion a pre-trained model that was like not much better than we were in 2023 and like how can we make this pre-trained model do better on specific type of tasks for which we have a lot of really good data that we can use to kind of like tune it to be better at those tasks right and so that's when we got the alphabet soup models instead of gpt5 we got gpto gp201 gpto23 mini slash nano and these were all just the same pre-trained model that they were tweaking and prodding to try to make them better at individual tasks.

40:12That's when benchmarks became the major thing they focused on. GPT-4 was just better. When you used it, you're like, this is better. These other models, they would have to tell you, look at this benchmark for this reasoning challenge. The chart, it's going up on the chart. And then we entered, and that kind of hit its final point in GPT-5, which was the late summer 2025. And people were like, what's better about this, right? So then they shifted in that fall to the new strategy, which is now, this is the stage where now, all right, let's turn our attention to the applications that are prompting the LLM, right?

40:48The applications that sit between the user and the LLM. Let's try to make those a better product market fit. And that's where we get like cursor and cloud code and codecs getting good enough that they become commercially viable. And that's the stage we're in now. So really, that stage of this thing's going to keep growing until it's AGI. The tech CEOs knew we had left that stage by like the end of 2023. But we're still have that mindset of like, there's rapid advances. There's not rapid advances. Ask yourself, what really is qualitatively, impressively, significantly better about LLM-based tools like now than a year ago.

41:26And like most of what people can say is the programming tools fit better now into enterprise code-based workflows. That's it, really. I mean, what else has, because we haven't been making the brain smarter, we're just building better tools on it. So that does help me feel better as well, is that particular AI trajectory is rich to its mature stage. And we're going to build a lot of cool applications on it, but the underlying capability is not on some sort of scary trajectory upwards. And to me, my kind of understanding of that is like the scary growth of the tech is maybe reached a peak. And then now we're going to see it applied in a way that actually is meaningful in some areas.

42:06Yes. Yeah. It's not going to be it's not going to keep going on that trajectory. OK, last question on AI. You're I feel like you're an interesting person to answer this because you're a computer scientist, but you're also a writer. So you're a creative person and a science person. You can see it from both angles. What do you think the, I have this feeling that the corporations that are kind of in control of mass media and entertainment and all of these things really don't understand something fundamental about creativity and why people consume creative stuff and what their relationship is with creative stuff and artists.

42:49I haven't really heard you speak about that or the creative side of AI, but you're a writer and you are a content creator and you do all these things in that field. What do you think? Do you have any gut feelings around what's missing in this conversation or just, I don't know, interesting perspective on this? I mean I have been thinking about it um I I recently had a big uh riff on this and this is paywall so it's not worth paying for but in the chronicle of higher education uh I did a big feature interview about academic creativity academic thought and AI and like one of the big ideas in that interview is that creative endeavors like the reason why creative endeavors are useful and important and appealing is that they're fundamentally an act of mind reading.

43:42I have a cognitive state within my own brain that I want to then transfer into your brain. It's a person communicating a complicated, deeply human cognitive state to another human. And the way I'm going to do that is through whatever art form I'm doing. If I'm writing, then I want to use the structure of language to try to recreate in your head this feeling. If I'm doing the visual arts that I want through like the application of whatever it is, pigment the page canvas to try to create a certain state within you. So it's an incredibly human to human thing, right? It's very, when you take the human out of it, it defeats the purpose, right?

44:22It's like, it defeats the purpose. It's like a sex robot. It just like defeats the purpose. You know what I mean? And I think that's what a lot of people are missing when they're like, oh, the AI can write for me. Writing's hard. The AI can write for me. But the whole point of writing is it's a deeply human endeavor of, I have an idea and in a certain way, it makes me feel and it's interesting and it's in my mind and I want to put it in yours. It's a human communicating their brain state to another human. So I've been, you know, I've been coming at this from a deeply humanistic point of view where I've been arguing, don't let AI write for you, right?

45:00If the writing is important, that's a deeply human endeavor. And if it's not, and AI could just do it, then writing is the wrong medium for whatever that communication is. And you should build some, there should be some sort of just like protocol or something like that, right? Don't use the human English or whatever language, like a human communication language. It should either be humans communicating with humans. And if it's not, if it's like, no, I'm just trying to get this information to this other person, then like, don't use prose, like have a different way to, you have a spreadsheet with things ticked off about like, what information is in here or put it in whatever, right?

45:31Like the English language is written language and glyphs are not the right way to communicate this. So that's, I've been deeply like humanistic about this. That makes tons of sense. And it aligns with some of the things I've been thinking about on it. One of this one's kind of imperfect. I don't even know exactly what I'm trying to say, but I'm thinking about it like comparing us and gorillas, like gorillas are interested in other gorillas for mates and connection. And it's not like they look at us and think they're so much better looking or their communication so much better. We just were obsessed with humans now.

46:02Like it just doesn't seem like it happens that way. And then the other piece that I think about a lot is I get my fears kind of satisfy a little bit from thinking about how the conversation around cancel culture and this idea of do we want to consume from people that we think are monsters? and then I think monster now people still do they're they're they're less proud of it an artist that is a known monster is going to have a much harder time building a career or sustaining a career like a lot of people don't want to wear t-shirts of people that they know are you know just terrible people um and I think monsters and robots are in a similar category right like if we don't want to consume from monsters we're not going to be that jazzed about consuming from robots You know what I mean?

46:52So it's kind of in a, I think it's a similar headspace is what you're talking about. I think that's right. I like, I like that idea too. The same type of idea of it matters because it's mind reading, right? It matters to me, this is communication. So it matters to me where this is from. And if it's from someone who's a monster, like I don't want to mind meld with a monster. And if it's from a robot, you're like, I don't want to mind meld with a robot, right? Like I don't want to be, um, you know, uh, walking Phoenix and her, like that's That's not appealing. Like that's the whole sense of the movie is how disturbing it is really.

47:25Yeah. Okay. I want to get to another piece. I want to talk about productivity. I was dubbing this section neurodivergent productivity because I haven't had almost any success adopting productivity tips from other people. And I would say three categories have from you have made a huge impact and in a way that stuck with me, I wanted to see if I could just tell you those three categories. You could say like, here's what I think the number one misconception or the number one like problem that people have with dealing with this. And we could kind of go from there. So the three categories are going to be email, project management and time blocking.

48:14Um, these, you know, the only time that I've ever had an inbox under control has been about in the past year. And it came back from you talking about it in, uh, an episode of your podcast going deep kind of on your process with email. So like email, just, I could never wrap my head around it. Um, and now I use a lot of the tools that you talk about and I have, I get to inbox zero most weeks, which is, is just kind of unbelievable. Um, what do you think is the number one thing that people get wrong about email? Well, I look what emails is a disaster for everybody. Right. Right. So, so that's sure.

48:58You, you grappling with email is not exceptional. Right. Uh, and, and one of the reasons why it's a disaster for everyone is that it's incredibly exhausting from like a brain standpoint to do that context switching. Like we really underestimate how terrible it is from a brain standpoint to go through an inbox in sequential order because you're going from what this message is in this context. The next message is completely unrelated. And then the next message is related to something completely different. That is really, really hard for the brain to do, right? It takes a long time for us to switch these sort of non-physical, you know, abstract context.

49:33And so when you go message to message to message, it's incredibly draining. So that's why cleaning inboxes, even though on paper, Like, what's the problem? Just go one message at a time and none of them take that long to deal with. Why is this so hard? It's the cognitive context switching cost and everyone deals with that. The other thing people get wrong is they don't understand what is the source of all these emails? What is the reason why I keep checking it, right? So they have the wrong answer for both of those. There's actually a unified answer. So they think there's too many emails because people are doing something wrong.

50:05Oh, you just don't know, you know, when to write an email and people are bad at writing emails. And we could just, if we could just sort of fix that or people have too many mailing lists I subscribe to, think that's the problem. And they think the issue with checking the email too much is because of willpower. I just, ah, it's a disciplined thing. Like I should just batch and do it twice a day. That's wrong. Actually, both of those problems come from the same source, which is the way we're using email is as a low friction tool for on-demand collaboration. So we're going sort of unscheduled messaging back and forth to figure things out, like with clients or family or team members or whatever.

50:41That's why we have so many messages. It's also why we have to check so often, because if we're figuring something out by bouncing messages back and forth, I can't wait till three o 'clock to check my inbox again, because I have to see this message in response. You can respond and I can respond and you can respond and we can figure this out before the end of the day. So the constant checking of email, that sense of like, there's always messages in there, I'm always checking, is downstream from the collaboration strategy. It's downstream from the idea of let's use ad hoc back and forth messaging to collaborate.

51:11It's not a willpower and it's not a norm issue. So those are the two things that are happening. The collaboration strategy makes constant inbox checking unavoidable. And when we're in an inbox, the context switching cost is cognitively devastating. And we don't realize that. And we just are like, I guess I'm just tired. and i think that one is a particular issue uh for for neurodivergence because context switching boom boom boom boom boom boom that's hard for everyone but that's particularly hard i think especially you know i work with a lot of people with some degree of adhd like that's a really hard it's a killer for me yeah not right there that's the thing i thought you would say because that was the game changer for me could you just um explain what context uh switching is so that everyone's clear on it.

51:58It's just changing your target of attention, right? So I'm changing my target of attention from an email about a client contract to an email about trying to organize a trip like my brother's coming in from out of town. Mentally, your brain actually has to do a lot of work. Like if it wants to answer a question about the client, it actually has to inhibit certain networks and excite other networks and basically get the brain ready to think and deal with and come up with a good answer there. Then when you switch to the brother coming to town, it has to inhibit these networks related to the client and has to bring up the networks about like what's going on with my schedule and what matters here or this or that.

52:34That can take like 10 or 15 minutes to really switch into something. I mean, artists know this, right? From if you're working on something creative, it takes 10 or 15 minutes before you hit your stride. It's how long it took for your brain to sort of refocus on this thing. So the human brain can refocus really quickly on physical environment changes. Like that's what it's evolved to do fast. The tiger growl, we could be like, boom, all of my attention is over there and not on like the fire I was trying to make. But when we're doing abstract thinking and planning, right? It's a logistics for a visit.

53:09It's trying to take in feedback from a client and give them the right feedback. Our brains aren't evolved for that. And it takes a long time for it to do those switches. So when you try to force those switches, you know immediately switch to another thing immediately switch to another thing you're trying to do the work without the context fully loaded and that's you know you're dragging the the the dog sled on dry land right like it's just incredible amounts of friction and it's it's you experience as i feel which we all know of this sort of deep-seated cognitive fatigue that is the feel of trying to rapidly move between context without giving your brain time to actually catch up.

53:49I don't know if this is an analogy that you came up with and I heard it from you, but the thing that comes to mind is that TV trope where the character agreed to be in two places at once. And so I don't know, it's like the Flintstones boy meets world has one of these and you at one point you're at the dinner party, then you're at home at the baseball game or, you know, whatever, and you're going back and forth and back and forth. And it's just like, your brain cannot do that in an inbox. For me, the way that I've approached it, kind of adapted all your recommendations around email. The way that I will move through my inbox and think, I'm going to do one pass where I'm deleting stuff.

54:29Then I'm going to do one pass for quick replies where it's like, I can just do it. This is just something I just need to answer a question. And then I'm going to do a pass where this is stuff that requires a task and I'm going to add that task to my to-do list, my Google tasks, and copy, this is something you've talked about too, that's really helpful. Copy the subject line of that email into the description of the task and then archive that email. And then know that when I do that task, that's when I can email them back. And so it's Not exactly. You have other steps and other parts to the way that you approach it.

55:06But yeah, I have a modification to suggest. Yeah, please. Okay. All right. So after you do that first pass of deleting, which is fine, like just to leave stuff you don't need. Consider doing those second two steps in a subject specific manner. So right. So do you use Gmail? Is that your primary? Yeah. Okay. So like I'm going to create a label called like holding tank or focus or something like that. Now I'm going to go through and find all the emails that are related to the same thing. So if it's like I'm working on whatever logistics for whatever, and there's a bunch of, I'm going to get all those messages and move them archive and put them in this label.

55:44These are podcast emails. These are illustration emails. These are my book projects. Yeah. So grab one of those topics and move every email related to that into like this, this new label and then just load up those emails. Then do those second two steps. Yeah. So now you're entirely within the same cognitive context. And so you're going to find as you get going, like, okay, once I've loaded up this context, I can deal with each. It's not so bad. Like I could deal with this now. You're making sharp decisions. You're moving stuff around. Like you make good progress. Then you go back to your inbox and you grab a whole other collection and move it in there.

56:18so you keep it you work within individual cognitive context it seems like on paper like how is it faster i'm i'm looking at the same messages right in both cases in the end it's the same 50 messages it will feel 5x less fatiguing yeah because you're not context switching so that would be my only concern with your original way of doing it is when you go through to do the quick replies even a quick reply going to these different contexts you got to go to different context. And then that makes it a lot less onerous. And then the big picture thing I always suggest to people is longer term, look at what these emails are and say, are any of these part of like an ongoing or regular collaboration that I could move out of an inbox permanently, right?

57:01Is this something that we could have a better process for? Can I have office hours every day that half of these things I can just say, you know, three to five, my phone is on every weekday. Just give me a call next time you can and we'll work this out, right? And then so how can I move more collaboration? That's the big picture goal. How do I move more collaboration out of just, they shot off a message, I shoot one back, they shoot one back, like start to see that as like productivity poison. And you want to try to detoxify your cognitive life as much as possible. Yeah, I absolutely love that.

57:32So I had other things to talk about in this category, but I'm going to switch gears. Maybe next time we could talk a little bit about, I've really successfully implemented Trello for managing the podcast. So each podcast episode has a card. Nobody that doesn't use Trello knows what I'm talking about, but maybe we could talk about that next time. Also time blocking. I have a really simple version of that. But let's move to, we'll go, maybe if we get to talk again, we can talk about some of those things that have been really helpful. Or I'll touch on them in a solo episode and send them back to you.

58:05Let's talk about creative diet. This is something I'm thinking about all the time because I think that we are potentially at the start of like a punk movement or an indie movement. And it's at the heart of it is going to be like a techno criticism thing where we're going to think really critically of how we've been trained to consume creative content. You did an episode all about movies recently, which is kind of in this vein. I don't know if you, where you want to start with this, But I'm curious if you're feeling that same thing and maybe you could just talk about how you think a short form video is kind of like junk food just as like a starting point.

58:54Well, I mean, the timing is good because the morning after we're recording this, so it'll be out when this comes out is I have this in theory, like knock on wood, you know, breaking news could happen. but it's in the CMS system now, so it should come in now. But I have this major New York Times sort of like lead Sunday op-ed, cover of the opinion section, multi-thousand word manifesto about we need a cognitive fitness revolution that echoes the physical health revolution we had in the 20th century. And it uses the analogy of consumption and exercise, right? So I'm, this will be in the world by the time this comes out.

59:36There's two things that make this metaphor useful. One, if you look back at the history of the physical health revolution, which I mean just like the idea we take for granted now that what you eat matters and exercise matters, right? That actually entered a cultural consciousness sort of in a 10-year period in the mid 20th century. There's like actual like events that happened that sort of changed everything. It was Dwight Eisenhower's heart attack in 1955 when everyone started learning about like, oh, what you eat affects heart health. And then we had Dr. Kenneth Cooper wrote aerobics and he's like, Hey, look, I'm a military doctor.

1:00:09I've been doing exercise research for NASA. I think we need to be doing cardiovascular exercise, not to get better at a sport or because we're in the army and need strength, but because like we'll live longer. Right. Right. And it's because, sorry, I just wanted to say one little bit. It's because they, this is where, I don't know if you hit this, where the, the work shifted to be in an office and everybody was, was suburbs. And yeah, yeah. Like it wasn't relevant before. Like the one thing that a farmer in 1920 wasn't lacking was cardiovascular exercise. Right. Yeah. But anyways, it sparked a huge revolution.

1:00:44Obviously we have a long way to go within health, but you can look at the statistics and it's been like a massive, massive improvement increase in like cardiovascular health and stuff that's happened like since that period. And I'm arguing we're in a similar point right now with our cognitive health. Right. And I used a metaphor of, of diet and exercise. So like it, I think it ties into this really well. And I said to your question there, I said, we've, we've learned in like the food world, you shouldn't be eating that much ultra processed food, like Oreos and Doritos. Like it's a Franken food.

1:01:14It's this weird reconstitute. It's not a real food and it's really terrible for us, right? And like maybe you occasionally have an Oreo at like a kid's birthday party, but like you shouldn't be pounding these things. And I'm like, what is short form video content if not ultra processed, right? It's this, it's not real like artisan, actual creative content. It's these vast databases of content that algorithms sift and sort through and break down and reconstitute. And they come back together with a digital Oreo that's like weird food, but it's like irresistible or whatever. Right. And just as we're like, if I'm a grownup, I'm not pounding Oreos, you know, every day, maybe I need to stop consuming ultra process content.

1:01:54Like, should I really be consuming a lot of short form video? Like what's going on here just because it like feels good. And so we need to think about that way. And on the exercise front, like you get 10 ,000 steps a day, like you should be thinking, I should be reading this many pages of a physical book a day. I should be spending like this much time alone with my thoughts, trying to hold the thought steady, you know, even as like distraction encroaches. So I think cognitive fitness will be the big thing. And I think in the creative fields, just like with when it came to our physical health, once we started to care about food, that really fractured into like you had people that really begin to care a lot and value cuisines and authentic and interesting food and trying to get to like traditional cuisines and Michael Pollan type of stuff, right?

1:02:37I think you're absolutely right. We're gonna see that with creative content consumption as well, where you're going to have big movements that are like, I really, I really prioritize and care about very specific types of creative production that I think like are authentic and have ties back to tradition and are interesting and meaningful and eccentric. And, and, and, you know, this will become the equivalent today of people who are like, I get my, this at Whole Foods because it's whatever, it's like healthier. And I really, you know, whatever, I go to my farmer's market or something. So I think you're, I think this is happening.

1:03:10That's why I wrote this thing when I did, because I think it's a movement that's happening where we're like, enough is enough. We can't just let all of these companies and weird habits we have just colonize our brains. Like I asked this question in the, in the piece I'm like, and the what end, like, why are we willing to completely give up our ability to do the most human, the most human thing we do, which is thought the ability to actually hold thought on abstract concepts and not just like immediately what's happening in front of it is the most human thing this is aristotle you know early on we realized like this is the most human this is this is the bible right this is this is genesis this is like the metaphor of uh adam when and named all the animals so what is that that's like the metaphor for we got the ability to have language which gave us the idea of abstraction and thought the tree of good and evil is like a metaphor for the evolution of the brain right yeah why are we giving this up so that mark zuckerberg can buy the other half of kawaii so that like sam altman won't be embarrassed about like how much money he raised and it didn't like lead somewhere like what what are we giving this up for because it's like it feels convenient in the moment to be on slack all day like there's no real good reason why we're giving up our heritage as a species, right?

1:04:30So I don't know, I'm real fired up about this now, but I think you're absolutely right. I think that's a really useful analogy for people is think about health and food. I think the thing that gives me hope that I don't see, you know, the general vibe online is we're cooked in all these ways. And I think they're really zoomed in to their own personal life, knowing I don't really want to consume this much short form video, but I am doing that. I can't control it. These giant corporations with billions of dollars have spent all of their time attacking me with their technology so that I can't even defend myself.

1:05:07And I think that I get what feels hopeless about that in the micro. But if you zoom out, you can see how smoking was like this, food was like this, fitness was like this. We've had these times where, and then punk comes along and indie comes along. Even if you think about, I've thought a lot about how, how similar, uh, short form video is to bad TV when back in the day when it was normal, where everyone was watching TV while they ate and just consuming TV all the time. Like it's all, it's funny. Like short form video is televangelism, infomercials, and then America's funniest videos. Like that's, that's what it is.

1:05:45And I just think we don't give ourselves credit enough to like, when it becomes culturally, gross to do something. We do change. We do make changes and we're not prisoners to this just because it feels good. We will have, and even my kids give me a lot of hope with this because they really hate AI slop. They really don't like, you know, they're constantly picking on each other. They're friends for being phonies, people that are just all on their phone, looking at their phone. And I just think we are just unaware of how resilient we are when it comes to this kind of thing. Look at Sora. Right. Exactly.

1:06:27It comes out and people are like, okay, A, let's carry new stats. Like this is the end of creativity. Like there'll be no reason for there to be filmmakers or anything anymore. Everyone will just create their own thing. OpenAI is like, hey, people like short form videos that are distracting. So why not make a whole social network around it? This is great. This is going to make all this money. And people's universal reaction was like, no way. Are you kidding me? I don't want to just know like you're like that's a that's a bridge too far. Right. So it does give me hope. It also gives me hope that we forget.

1:06:55And I write about this in the piece. It's not just the change of awareness that happened. That came first. And then that was followed by decades of actual action, building up of infrastructure and scaffolding and information. And so like if you if you talk to someone in like 1955 and they were in a suburb for the first time and they're getting out of shape and you're like, you need to be you need to be like healthier and like in better shape. They'd be like, I don't know how to do that. Like, what do I do? Now compare that to today. We're like, oh, we know so much about exercise and fitness. Well, I can join a gym.

1:07:26There's one that's right down the street and I can have a trainer. And there's like 10 different methodologies. And they say, use this methodology and here's what you should do. That, you know, we didn't have the scaffolding yet, right? So sometimes it's not just the awareness. And sometimes it's just making the awareness in the right vector. This is what happened with kids smoking, right? Is coming in the 90s, we had all this money from the settlement with the tobacco companies. that we were going to spend to try to reduce you smoking. What ended up working pretty well was the ad council's truth campaigns because they realized like, oh, the right vector, these were big in the 90s, the right vector for this awareness for kids is to emphasize the fact that these tobacco companies are run by these old men in suits who are laughing about how they're manipulating you and making money off of you.

1:08:09And the kids were like, in the 90s? No way, man. That was the whole, like we were influenced by Gen X and like be authentic and don't be a sellout. and we're like, I'm not a sellout. And it was a lot of like faux hidden footage. I don't know if you remember these ads. I do. Faux hidden footage, hidden camera footage of like tobacco executives kind of laughing about how they're trapping all these kids or whatever. That was pretty effective. So sometimes it's just getting the right vector, which is where we are with kids in social media now. Like they're no fan of Mark Zuckerberg. Right. They're no fan of Elon Musk, right?

1:08:38Like they're not like, I can't wait to be on their services. And so I'm with you. I think we are more resilient than you think. The way that I'm taking kind of conceptualizing action around this is potentially with my podcast community starting some kind of book club and movie club. I feel like those things are going to become more frequent as we, because I know so many people are like, I can't even watch a movie anymore. And you did a whole episode about film students struggling to watch movies. And I think, yeah, I hope we see a lot more of that. I have this idea for a podcast. I don't have time to do it, but someone should do this well in this vein.

1:09:15Someone should, you could do a really great show that's called Why Is This Good? And you take some sort of like artisan, like creative endeavor, it's beautiful music, a great movie or whatever that you've been told time and again, like this is the best whatever, right? But you're like, why? Why is like the White Album so great? Like why is Beethoven good? Why do people love Taxi Driver, right? And then you like break it down. This, let's talk about what was going on in this and how this was different than what other people were doing and look at this here and this type and this is why people really loved it like the the hear about connoisseurship i think is something that people have almost forgotten what that's like it's like when i just mentioned movies casually in my podcast i'm like oh i saw this movie here's why i liked it which is like casual chatter at the end people really love it because it's like even just this idea of appreciating some type of piece of like creative how do you do that right i think it's very appealing and i think that's what people want And I think they want, they want to understand how to watch movies again.

1:10:12They want to understand like how to appreciate a book. They want to like love music. And like, this is why I love this band because they're doing this and I'm really into it. Yeah. That'll be the new indie movement, I guess, of the 2020s. I think so. And it makes me think of, this has been on my mind a ton. I've actually thought about how maybe I'll shift my podcast a little bit to be not just about creating things, but consuming creative things differently because I'm really, I get, because creativity is almost like a religious practice to me. I think of it that way, both in the creating and the consuming of it.

1:10:51I love what Simon Critchley, who is this British philosopher, did a book called On Mysticism. And one of the things he gets at is how the loss of religion has changed our relationship to creative things because it was disciplined to sing together and look at paintings and read scripture and just all that kind of thing which is a type of literature um and i think we're at this moment where we have religion is this seen as this medicine and then entertainment is seen as sugar and they're not they're not connected whatsoever and that's why i'm so interested in I love a conversation around you love that show.

1:11:35And it's even a mainstream thing, like stranger things, what you loved about it, what it made you feel, what, you know, all these different angles. Like, yeah, that that's been on my mind a ton. So that's a good nudge. Yeah. Yeah. Things that are lighting you up, right. Like getting into it, having people on who also like really know and appreciate it or just talking about why this is great. Like, I think that'd be great. Yeah. Thanks for spending so much time with me. I had a bunch of other questions, but we'll have to get them, uh, get to them another time and, uh, good luck with, uh, the rest of the book project and all the other stuff that's on your plate.

1:12:08Yeah. Anytime. Always happy to come back. We'll chat again soon. Thanks Cal.

1:12:31I'm back with our creative call to adventure. It's called one, two, three, Z. It's as easy peasy as one, two, three, Z to get some of that humanity back. And you've got three options from this episode. Number one is if you like the taste of this AI talk with Cal Newport, he does whole episodes of his show now that are like the AI report reality check to like check in with what's actually happening instead of just, you know, intravenously injecting the PR that the AI companies are just sending out to us in every form because their whole freaking companies are at stake with you believing this is the end all be all of humanity and our story as a species.

1:13:16Go check out the first option is if you need more than that, go check out his reality check episodes. when you go to his podcast, Deep Questions with Cal Newport, and I'll put a link in the show notes. There are episodes that have episode art with blue backgrounds. Those are the reality check, the AI episodes. It's also, it'll give you clues in the title, but I highly recommend it. He knows his stuff. He talks to experts. He's been following it very closely and he has such a sober attitude about this stuff. And I think as creatives, we need this. That's why I wanted to give them a platform here to say some of that, but then also direct you to it.

1:13:52The second one, so we've got one, two, threezy. Two is if you need a more human approach to your productivity, highly recommend Cal's book, Slow Productivity. And I recommend his podcast for the same reason, but he talks, he has so many practical, pragmatic approaches to productivity to get you out of the pseudo productivity that is modern life. It's not about how many emails you could send. It's about how to send email well, so you don't have to send that many. And so that you can do what creatives do, which is not stay on top of everything, but get to the bottom of things. That's an idea that came from a mathematician who I can't remember his name, but if you know the quote, put it in the comments or send me a message so I can put it in the show notes.

1:14:39But I like this idea, like creatives, your job is not to stay on top of everything with email and all that pseudo productivity, but to get to the bottom of stuff of our humanity. So I highly recommend slow productivity. And number three, if you just feel like, man, I just need to remember, I need to feel what it feels like to be a human. I recommend going and getting some time with a book, time with a movie, time with something that even maybe challenges you because there's nothing more human than suffering. But yeah, or, you know, I really like to challenge myself with music, like listen to something that, you know, has some critical acclaim or a friend told me about, and maybe it's not a genre that I'm familiar with or a fan of yet.

1:15:25And just put that on a few times until something about it kind of clicks. Yeah, that's my challenge to you. All right. Thanks, Cal Newport, for coming on the show and just fighting the good fight out there for humanness and deep stuff. I'm all about it. Hope to chat with you again soon. Massive thanks to Sophie Miller for being an editor and producer on the show. Thanks to Connor Jones. Huge thanks to Connor Jones of Pinning Beautiful for audio edits, video edits, animation, and sound design. Thank you to Yoni Wolf and the band Y for our theme music and soundtrack. Until we speak again, stay pepped up, y 'all.

1:16:09Thank you.

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