Classic Episode: How Do I Learn Hard Things? | Monday Advice

25:49Inside my Remarkable 2, I have dozens of different individual virtual notebooks for keeping track of ideas, reflections, concerns, et cetera. So those are the three categories, Mark. Do those three categories. Different tools for each. Different rates of refresh and reset for each working memory. You're resetting this every 10 minutes or so. Your obligation list you're working with every day. your bigger idea capture is something you maybe go over in detail much less often. Hey, I'm going to have a summit now to rethink this part of my business. Let me go back and look through my notes. Maybe that's just once every few months or so.

26:22So that's really it. There are more complicated systems and methodologies. We have a lot of fans here of Zettelkasten type systems. We also have a lot of fans here of interesting note-taking software that really gets into the details of how you store notes, how you connect notes, the format in which the notes are stored. That is optional. It's more about your interest. If you like information management as a hobby, you can build more complicated systems around it. But you don't need complicated systems to successfully take notes. Those are the three areas you have to take notes. Just make sure those are all three covered with some sort of reasonable techno system.

27:07And then you're doing a fine job. But I think that separation is key. Don't mix all this stuff together. Don't have a moleskin somewhere in which you're trying to keep your tasks next to your vision for living on a cabin in 20 years next to a grocery list you want to remember when you go to the store. We need some separation for note taking to keep up with the complexity of modern life. All right. What do we got next, Jesse? Next question is from Reshab. As a 26-year-old software developer who has recently landed a well-paying job, I'm looking to pursue my interest in learning to play the guitar, drawing, and some days gardening.

27:45However, I'm concerned about whether it's feasible to schedule all these activities into a single week while maintaining a focus on deep life core fundamentals. In your expert opinion, would it be possible to balance all these pursuits effectively within a given week without compromising on essential life habits? Well, I think this is a objective question for which you can get an objective answer by becoming quantitative. So let's just work with your calendar. I'm assuming you're professionally speaking, you're organized, you time block your days, you have a clear shutdown. So there's some clarity about your time outside of work.

28:23Play with that time. So start autopilot scheduling some of these hobbies. Maybe you garden on weekday mornings. Maybe you alternate a guitar practice session. And what was the other thing? Drawing practice session on different days. You do it an hour before dinner. Autopilot this out. See if it fits. And if the stuff does fit, execute this autopilot schedule for a while and say, does this feel sustainable? Or do I feel like I'm constantly running from one thing to another or it's overfilling my time? I used to run this exercise with undergraduates who are trying to figure out their academic programs, their extracurricular programs.

29:06And I would say, we got to sit down and just build a plan for your proposal here. You want to do these five extracurriculars and double major? Show me the time. Then they would go through and block off the time for studying and how long is this going to take and put on their meetings and the time to work on their activities. And it either fit or it didn't. And sometimes if it just barely fit, they would come back a week later and say, this is crazy. Every minute of my life is scheduled. So if it doesn't fit or it fits and your life feels too crowded, then you just pull back. You're getting an objective feedback here.

29:36You pull back. And it doesn't matter if you're pulling back. These are hobbies. The thing is you want to be spending quality time outside of work on things that matter. The quantity isn't important. So if it doesn't fit or it barely fits, maybe you do seasonal pursuits. In the spring, I'm working a lot on my garden. in and in the winter I'm spending a lot more time on guitar because that's sort of inside and I do drawing in the fall. You could have seasonal pursuits. You could stack these one over another or maybe what you need to do is just slow down your ambition for these pursuits and instead of saying look I'm going to do four hours of guitar a day and I want to be shredding in like six months.

30:16You say I'm going to spend less time good hard practice like we talked about the deep dive trying to move up the stair steps towards expert knowledge, but I'm just willing for this to take longer. A few years from now, I'll be a pretty good guitar player, but I'm playing, you know, just an hour every other day. That doesn't take up as much time. I'm doing so. I have a drawing class I take once a week. And on Fridays, I get out of work early and go to a park to work on the drawing. This is maybe I'm going to learn these skills slower, but that makes their footprint on my schedule smaller. And I have more give and more flexibility and don't feel like I'm overscheduled.

30:47So treat this like a quantitative question. Get clear feedback. If it's too much, reduce or slow down. It doesn't really matter for your goal here, which is just to make sure that you're engaged in deeper pursuits. That's what matters. Not the speed at which you're getting better at things, not the quantity of things that you're actually going after. All right. Who do we got next? Next question is from Craig. I'm a college student trying to be more smart about how I study and organize my learning. I'm relatively new to this stuff. Strangely, most productivity tips on YouTube are about the top 10 to-do lists and note-taking apps.

31:25Will I be less effective if I don't use one of those apps? It seems like a lot of work and setup to learn all those apps to be efficient, and I dread thinking about the heavy lifting prep those apps require. What should I do? Well, I think my answer here at first is going to be ironic because you may be listening to this answer on YouTube, but I'm going to tell you in a second why what I'm about to say here is not oxymoronic. Don't use YouTube to get advice on studying. So when you're getting information, especially information on improving your life, you have to understand the incentive structures in place.

32:03And for people who are purely doing YouTube, so if you're a pure study habits YouTuber, the incentive structure is for views. that's what you look about, that's what you care about. I want more views on my videos. To get more views on your videos on YouTube, you have to work with the idiosyncratic properties of the recommendation algorithm. And you get into this feedback loop where your content, it morphs more and more towards what's giving you this better feedback from the algorithm. And after a while, it's the algorithm specifying your content. So you maybe started out as a YouTuber saying, I want to help students study better because this is an audience out there that cares about this.

32:49And after six months of interacting with the algorithm, it's, you know, the top 10 to-do list apps or whatever, because this is what's getting them the best view numbers. The advice might have very little to do, however, with the nuts and bolts of becoming a better student. So the incentive structure matters. So if you want to become a better student, and this is going to sound very self-serving, but I'm going to say, read my book, How to Become a Straight-A Student. Now, why is that better? Because what is the incentive structure of books? When you write a book like How to Become a Straight-A Student, let me tell you this from experience.

33:24This is not a, we're going to go hard out of the gate. There's going to be a number one New York Times bestseller. I'm going to be on the Today Show talking about this book and every major podcaster wants to have me on. That is not the play when you write a book on student advice. The play is this better work. So some people will buy this because they heard about it from me or saw it on a table. I'm embarrassed to admit this, Jesse, but when that book came out, it was my first year at grad school at MIT. I would sometimes go to the Harvard co-op, as they call it, the coop, and I would, it was on tables and kind of hang around.

34:02People would pick up the book and look at it, but that's like how people discovered it at first. I didn't have a social, there was no social media back then. It wasn't on a big podcast. People would find it on tables and then it's all word of mouth. And what is going to make someone recommend a book to someone else? This worked. This made me get better grades. You should read it. My kids' grades got better after they read this. So what you want to look for, if you want to align incentive structures with advice here is where you want to find a book on student study habit advice that just had a quiet entry into the marketplace and over time sell, sell, sell, sells.

34:39And I just looked it up before the show. I think the sales, um, on how to come a straight A student is approaching 250 ,000 copies. A book that has never had any major promotion has never been talked about on a single major podcast show or had any footprint on social media. That's all word of mouth. So there you verify the incentive there for me to make that book, sell that many copies. I was obsessed about this better work, what really works. So books have a better incentive structure surrounding their information than YouTube does. So you buy my book or any other book that has sold a lot of copies that focus on this topic, you're much more likely to get advice that works, and you're not going to hear anything about note-taking apps or to-do lists in that book.

35:23My book gets right down to the brass tacks of what are the different academic tasks you have to do, and what is the right way to do these? How do you take information from a textbook and learn it efficiently to the point that you can do well on a test? How do you write a paper? How do you break that down into multiple steps so that it's a good paper that you're going to get good grades on? How do you learn mathematics to the level that you can sit down for a mathematics exam and get a really good score on it? Well, here's exactly how you want to organize your notes. Here's how you should study it.

35:51These would make excessively boring YouTube videos from the perspective of the algorithm, but they also lead to notably high GPAs. All right, so now let's come back to the oxymoronic fallacy early on. Aren't you hearing advice now on YouTube? Well, here's how I exempt what we're doing here is that if you're watching this on YouTube, what you are seeing is the video of a podcast. The podcast is the game here. We put the video of the podcast on YouTube. Podcasting has a good incentive structure. It's similar to books. There is not an algorithm to please. In other words, there's not a hard, inscrutable, complex feedback mechanism that drives your content in podcasting.

36:38It is just like books. If someone likes your show, they will tell someone else about it and your audience grows a little bit. and that's how podcasts grow is people find what you're talking about to be effective enough that they will then go on to tell someone else about it. So that's what I think saves us here if you're watching this on YouTube is that what we're trying to do is get more podcast listeners and I see that the exact same way as trying to get more book readers. The stuff's got to work. We play some tricks with the thumbnails and the titles to try to get some algorithmic juice our YouTube guy does that.

37:16But the content comes out of the podcast. So I think incentive structures matter. So keep that in mind. So peer YouTubers are not necessarily a great source of advice on a lot of topics. You want to find sources of advice where the incentive structure is for the advice to work. That's what's going to make it actually do better. All right, let's keep rolling, Jesse. What do we got next? Next question is from Emil. I've reached a point in my career where I'm at the top level for my discipline. I'm trying to figure out what to do next. I want to learn something new, but I also don't want it to be random.

37:51Any thoughts? Start a YouTube channel. That'd be ironic. You got to start a YouTube channel and crush that algorithm. The key is, and Emil, I can't emphasize this enough, is to be really emphatic about asking people to crush that subscribe button, hit the bell notification button so that you can get your 5 % bump in YouTube subscribers. No, I mean, it's a good question. It's a very hard question. And that's what I want to emphasize. Figuring out what to get good at next, especially in a professional field, is a question that you should treat with a lot of respect because the answers aren't obvious.

38:29This is actually good news. Most people do not spend enough time trying to understand what is worth getting better at. So they choose things randomly and some people randomly choose a skill that ends up to be really valuable and it really helps their career and most people don't. You can game this system by actually thinking about this question. So you're absolutely right to say, I don't want to just learn something random. Don't. Deconstruct your field. Look at people who are farther ahead of you in your field, whose current position is set up you admire and try to understand how they got there.

39:05What were the key things they did that allowed them to move ahead? Was it particular numbers, knowledge of a new system? Did they take over a different niche? Get hard evidence about what matters in your field and use that to make a really good educated bet on what's going to pay off well and then put your energy on there. Most people wander in their jobs through the landscape of possible skills, some of which have higher value in a sort of metaphorical fitness landscape here than others and people just randomly walk around here and some people wander up the high hills. If you're being systematic, you can just go straight uphill.

39:40Get a bigger return. Bigger return for your effort. So I'm glad you asked that question in the mail because I'm going to say that's the right question to ask. Don't be thrown by the fact that it's hard to answer. That's what makes it important. I want to take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Look, you've heard me talk about Caldera Lab before on this show. They make high-performance skincare designed specifically for men's skin, which is 25 % thicker, oilier, and ages differently than women's. Well, Caldera Lab have one product in particular that I really want to emphasize today, which is their eye serum.

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40:55Jesse, I am going to label this next question as this week's slow productivity corner question. Let's get some slow productivity theme music, please.

41:11So for those who don't know, in honor of my book, Slow Productivity, which comes out in March, we like to have one question every episode that is relevant to my philosophy of slow productivity. If you want to find out more about that book and get a excerpt so you can dive into these ideas right away, go to calnewport.com slash slow. All right, Jesse, what is our slow productivity? activity corner question of the day. Hi, this question is from Gabrielle. I'm 15 years old in school and learning app development for two months so I can launch a business I've been planning. Exams are coming up and I have a paper to write.

41:46My deadline is to be able to code a high quality app by the start of the year. Currently, I wake up, do my routine, then code every day for two hours in the morning. And on days where I don't have school, I work for sessions of two hours and I take breaks in between on an ideal non-school day, I get in eight hours, but occasionally I'll only get six hours of coding done. For people in situations similar to mine, what's the best way to focus on rapidly learning the skills necessary to do well in the industry slash job you're trying to get into, even if you have large obligations that might take up most of the days of the year?

42:23Okay, so I'm already burnt out just listening to the question. I mean, even the freneticism of this question, I do this, but also this, and sometimes these hours and how to get more hours. What I'm going to suggest here is slowing down. All right, now here's the model I want you to think about is the model we talked about during the deep dive earlier in this episode. I gave this model for how do people learn complicated things. It's this slow process of step, step, step. And each step requires time invested into a deliberate activity that pushes you to a new level of skill. If you want to get really good at app development to the level where you could actually sustain a serious business, you've got a lot of steps in your future.

43:11This is not the way that you're thinking about it, which I think aligns with the false model of skill acquisition we talked about in that deep dive. This is not a situation where if you just get after it for a few months, you're going to be programming the next Roblox. You have a lot of these little steps you have to do, and each one takes some time. There's a refactoring period of recharging. It's just not something you're going to be able to force. So I'm going to suggest you slow down the rate at which you learn how to do this. You're a student. You're in school. You have exams coming up. You should be doing very little of this during exam time.

43:48And then you have a little bit more come in during the after exams. And then it slows back down again when it's back to another busy period during school. Now, here's the thing. In the short term, you will feel like you're making less progress. And that's true. If you take a slower approach, natural pace, so less at once, taking longer with ups and downs of your intensity, in the period of, let's say, the next three months, the slower approach will get you a lot less far than just getting after it like you're talking about here. I want to get eight hours in each week, and where can I find more time to code?

44:22So after three months, you will feel like you're going unnaturally slow, and you'll be worse off. Fast forward out to a year or two years, you will be in a much higher level of skill with a slower approach than the fast approach. Why? Because the fast approach, you'll burn out after a few months. Trying to fit every hour doing coding, you're realizing you can't jump from here to be an expert app developer anyways. It's going to be frustrating. You only have so much time, you're 15. And so you'll build up some basic skills and burn out and go back to like, can I just play video games or do one of these things where I can just like make easy progress and I don't want to bother with it.

44:56Whereas the slow approach is sustainable. Step, step, step, a year goes by step, step, step, slow periods, faster periods, but always making over time progress up this ladder. A year goes by, you're higher up these staircases, much higher than you were when you began. Another year goes by. Now you're at the top of a flight of metaphorical stairs where you're really able to program very professionally. And as you're approaching college, you have a lot of options. It's helping you get into technical schools. It's opening up side hustle possibilities that are really cool. Maybe it allows you to work part-time and pay all your college bills.

45:34All these things are open up, but it took two years of step, step, step. there's a key slow productivity principle take longer vary your pace and it comes up again and again in my book i talk about example after example there's a whole part of the book work at a natural pace where i get into this people who do cool things work this way they don't just decide i'm going to write hamilton i'm going to become a great novelist i'm going to become a great artist. Let's get after it for three months and then I'm there. Some of that idea that this is how people get really good at things, and I think this is true.

46:12People might think this is an exaggeration. I think for young people it comes from video games. Video games are expertly calibrated to require like a month or two of, you get better each day you play it and after a month or two you've mastered it. Like the cycle of a big video game is one to three months to finish the game, playing fairly regularly, but not all the time. So we're used to this cycle of, you know, I first started playing whatever the game is, Call of Duty Black Ops, and I was really bad at it. Then after three months, I do pretty well when I'm playing online. And then we sort of build this mental model about how long it takes to get good at things.

46:48But most things that are valuable take a lot longer. If you could get good at them in three months, a lot of people would do that to extract a value, and then the value of it would plummet. So things take time, take longer, vary your pace. This is a patience game, but sustainability over time is going to aggregate more skill than having these temporary bursts that then fizzle out. All right, so that's why I'm going to call this my slow productivity question of the day, because slowing down, though frustrating right now, is going to get you to a much cooler place one to two years from now. All right, there we go, Jesse, the slow productivity corner.

47:34Ah, feel good. All right, let's do a call. Do we have a call? Yes, we do. All right, let's hear what we have here. Hey, Cal, this is Karan, and I am back in the cabin doing my annual tradition where I find a place, submerge myself in solitude, and read books and just think deeply about how I want to live my life. and I am reading currently, one of the books that I'm reading in my rotation is So Good They Can't Ignore You. It's one of the last two books in your canon that I have not read fully. So as I'm reading the book, it hit me, and you've said this in a previous episode, where all of the books that you have written address an exigence that you are currently conflicted with.

48:24So I'm using that term kind of loosely from Fitcher's rhetorical situation where there is a problem that the mass culture is dealing with, and you're the speaker that has the quote-unquote solution for that. And then you're dealing with certain constraints. And so, so good they can't ignore you. You're fighting against the past and hypothesis. Deep work, how do I get now the skills I need to build up that career capital? And I can go so on and so on with digital minimalism and a world without email. But to not belabor the point and to get to my question, I'm wondering how does slow productivity address the exigence you're currently dealing with?

49:11And so I see it in so good they can't ignore you. You've always in the back of your mind been thinking about this slow productivity. Like, how do I see myself in five years, in 10 years, building this thing I need now instead of thinking of the immediate moment? So you've always been kind of building up to this. But I'm curious, how does slow productivity address the exigent you are trying to work with now? Thanks, Cal. Well, Graham, that's a great question. I can tell you exactly where that came from, where slow productivity comes from as a book. So what we get before is let's combine So Good They Can't Ignore You deep work in a world without email.

49:52Let's combine those into a trilogy of sorts, right? Because as you mentioned, So Good They Can't Ignore You was me confronting the passion hypothesis as part of in my own life answering the question as a postdoc at MIT, how do you cultivate a career that's going to be a source of passion? That was a really important question to me at the time because I was about to make a career decision, which might be the last career decision I ever made, setting myself on the tenure track. And so I really wanted to understand how do you cultivate a working life that you really love? And So Good They Can't Ignore You came out of that quest.

50:31One of the big answers from So Good They Can't Ignore You was get really good at things that are rare and valuable, and then you get autonomy over your working life. That led to deep work. How do I get really good at things that are rare and valuable? Oh, in the type of stuff I do in the sort of elite knowledge economy, unbroken concentration is the only thing that's producing the real value. Everything else just gets in the way. So I have to really cultivate concentration as a tier one skill if I'm going to get really good at things so I can leverage the effects I talked about and so good they can't ignore you and gain autonomy over my career and steer it towards something that's really satisfying.

51:05Well, it's frustrating to try to cultivate concentration. There's a lot you can do on your own that I talk about in deep work, but it seems like I was in the working world now, a professor. The whole knowledge work apparatus is built around distracting you with all these emails and meetings and chats. And so a world without email was like, let's get deep on where did that come from? Is it really damaging? Yes. Is this way of working fundamental? No. Is it possible to do something different? Yes. So there's a primal scream of frustration with email and meetings. That's where that book came from.

51:38All right. So we have that trilogy that takes me from, that's basically my 30s. So, so good. They can't ignore you came out right around the time I turned 30 and a world without email came out right before I turned 40. So that kind of covered my 30s. Like how do I enter into world of work, get after it, succeed, gain control, build something that can be a real source of passion. And I succeeded in this. I got tenure early. I've got this great professorship at Georgetown. My books are doing well. I'm a pretty successful writer. Now, where am I in life? Well, now I'm in my young forties and I have kids that are no longer babies or toddlers where we're just sort of in survival mode of like, how do we just make sure they're fed and like take them so they're distracted.

52:23Now I have elementary age school kids. I have all boys. I'm beginning to notice that like the thing they need at this age more than anything else is time with their dad. It's really, really important. This is, especially for dads, where parenting really takes off. And the next question that comes up is, okay, so now what's next? How do I continue to do work that I'm really proud of? How do I take advantage of whatever skills I have cultivated or been bestowed to continue to produce stuff that improves the world, that makes my time here worthwhile, but in a way where I also am able to invest a lot of time into my kids and community.

53:02This is middle age is the time where this is so critical. Slow productivity emerged out of that question. I needed to switch my mindset away from the mindset that got me 10 year early, away from the mindset that has produced whatever I have, 70 or 80 peer reviewed papers, 5 ,000 citations, three best paper awards in my field. my eighth book is about to come out how do I find a sustainable pace now going forward continue to produce stuff I'm proud of but I'm not having to produce what I'm doing here is doing it at a really high rate what I'm doing here is just impressing you with the sheer volume of what I'm doing slow productivity you can think of Quran as the answer to that question a reconfiguration of productivity that is based around producing stuff that really makes you proud as part of a life that is really deep and interesting and varied.

54:01So that was my personal motivation for the book. There is also, just like with all my other books, it's not just what I'm going through. It is also what the culture writ large is going through. And this also, of course, informs slow productivity. And I get into this in the book. In fact, I get into this in the introduction to the book, which is what we've just made available as the excerpt I was talking about earlier. So if you go to, what was the URL? calnewport.com slash slow. The excerpts you'll download is of the introduction where I make this case clear, like the cultural case for slow productivity.

54:33But essentially what happened is in the pandemic, people realized we have no good definition for productivity in knowledge work. We're not measuring metrics and seeing like, does this way of working make us more effective? We have this nonsense heuristic we call pseudo productivity, which just says more work is better than less. This is making us miserable. This is not sustainable. We need a new definition of productivity as the knowledge sector writ large that's much more sustainable than just do as much as you can. More is better than less. So there's a cultural question I'm answering with this book.

55:07What is a sustainable definition of productivity for knowledge work in general? But there's also a personal question I'm answering, which is what do I do now in my 40s? How do I keep producing good work without having to work all the time, without having to be so hard, without having, like I talk about in the final chapters of deep work, I talk about the exhaustion of writing deep work at the same time I was trying to get tenure at the same time that my second kid was born. So slow productivity answered that personal question as well. So if you're thinking about I run a business and how do I rethink productivity so I'm not stressed, the book would be for you.

55:46But also if you're thinking about how do I think about my life in the long term where I'm using my gifts but also enjoying the gifts of life that go beyond just what you're doing in work, the book is deeply personal in that way as well. So we kind of got like an extra slow productivity corner, Jesse. We did. I think we get the music one more time because of that is what I'm saying. Any excuse to play it?

56:15All right, let's do a case study. This is where you, my listeners, send in examples of you putting the type of things we talk about on this show into practice. And you give us a sort of report from the trenches, as it were, about what actually happened in your life. This case study comes from Andrew. Andrew said,

57:02opening up discussions and exchanging ideas for sustainable, productive work. The impetus for the group was my appreciation of your books and your podcast. 30 people from across the university and in various roles expressed interest, which is very good for a university of our size. I added all these people to a page I created through our learning management system so they could access the resources I put there, which included, among other things, a description of the basic idea, links to articles, book recommendations, videos, and podcasts, a bit about writing accountability groups, a module for the exchange of ideas, suggestions for good places to work off and on campus, and an open discussion forum.

57:38As one might expect from any academic group, participation varied widely. Some people never really engaged, but some appeared to check in on the online resources periodically, even though that was it. And others regularly attended a monthly Zoom meeting where we commiserated, shared challenges and successes. I was even given a small budget,$500, with which several of us met for lunch on more than one occasion, and I purchased about$250 in books for a lending library. Three of us formed a writing accountability group, and all three of us found it helped increase writing productivity during the semester.

58:11Going forward, I'd love to get more interest and engagement. That said, it's clear that some people are loathe to commit to anything that suggests that you'll have to do activities. These people I would describe as being more interested in the slow aspect of the group, and in particular, they seemed more interested in discussing burnout, work-life balance, and related ideas. But if you were interested in learning more about the writing group, even if they didn't participate this time, I'd like to put together some workshops where folks could attend and perhaps do a few exercises here and there with the idea that they might gradually embrace more ideas of slow productivity.

58:44Well, first of all, I love that idea, and maybe this is something I should encourage more once the book comes out, creating your own groups in your place of work to discuss the ideas behind slow productivity. So Andrew, I'm hoping when the book actually comes out, it will really help this working group go forward because it's going to be a much clearer framework than trying to piece together ideas from things I've talked about on the podcast and in articles. But I think it's important that you're talking to each other. And I know you're noticing with maybe a little bit of frustration this divide between the people who focus on the slow aspect of slow productivity and the people who focus on the productivity aspect, but both are really important.

59:27And actually what I've found working on this topic is that for a lot of people, just to get out the slow piece, right? Just to express their frustration about not being able to slow down or the difficulties of not being able to slow down is a really important first step. Work can really be somewhat deranging. This arrangement we have, which is more is better than less. And it's up to you to figure out how much to do. Go. It just puts people in this impossible situation where they have to constantly be arguing against themselves. More work or more other things in my life. You have to wage war between the other parts of your life and work.

1:00:06This is one of the real negative outcomes of making productivity almost entirely personal. This is something I document in detail in the book, how this happened and why it's a problem. So there's a lot of real frustration there. And some people have more of this than others. If you have a family, it's worse than if you don't. It's often worse for women than it is for men. So some people are dealing with a lot more of this than other people. So being able to just express that frustration first, I think, is really important. And then moving on to, so what can we do systematically to make this better?

1:00:39That then becomes the next step. So anyways, this is cool. Hopefully my book will help. It would be funny if the end of this case study was, and all 30 of these people have since been fired. It would be less successful. but I'm sure this will be useful. You know, I used to run these groups way back when, when I wrote student advice books, I had this program called study hacks on campus. Then we had like 30 college campuses. Students would start up student groups following my curriculum where they would just get together regularly to talk through studying and how to study and what they're having issues with and, and their frustrations with it.

1:01:17And it helped. And a lot of what they did was strategic, but a lot of what they did was just support. And a lot of what they did is venting. So I like this. idea. I might steal it. Maybe when slow productivity comes out, we'll put out some guides for how to run your own slow productivity group. I think step number one, there's going to be two key steps, definitely going to be two key steps in my advice for starting slow productivity groups. Step number one is important regardless of the size of the group that you spend at least $3 ,000 on copies of slow productivity. That's going to be step number one.

1:01:50I think that's important. Step number two, and Jesse agrees with this, you need to spend at least 15 to 20 minutes per group meeting listening to the slow productivity music. Come on, Jesse, hit me. Hit me. There we go. There we go. All right, enough of that nonsense. Thanks for the case study, Andrew. I really appreciated it. All right, so we have a final segment. This is our first episode in January, so I'll talk about the books I read in December 2023. All right, book number one, Home Economics by Wendell Berry. This is an essay collection from Wendell Berry. I found this in a little free library around Tacoma Park.

1:02:35It's one of his most famous, I think, essay collections because it includes some of his most famous essays. In particular, it has his really well-known two economies essay is in this particular collection. I'm a big Wendell Berry fan. I think Wendell Berry has influenced now two generations. So the generation older than me and my generation, two generations of people who think somewhat radically about reconfiguring our relationship with the world, with work, with the environment. He's had influence on a lot of people. You see a lot of Wendell Berry, for example, in Bill McKibben. You see a lot of Wendell Berry, for example, and Michael Pollan.

1:03:15Very influential writer. Left his NYU, we've talked about it on the show before, but left his NYU professorship to move back to Kentucky to farm on this land near where he grew up, farming without gas power, using horses. And he really gets into old school agriculture. So he is the OG of thinking about intentional living and minimalism. So great collection of essays. I enjoyed it. I'm glad I have it. as well. All right. Next, I went in the opposite direction. So if Wendell Berry is plowing fields with horses, let's go the opposite direction and read a book about streaming media. In particular, I read Peter Biskins book, Pandora's box.

1:04:02And this is a history, sort of a tick tock history, you know, like step by step, they hired this person. This happened of the prestige TV era. So starting with HBO's emergence as a producer of prestige, original content, following what happened with the basic cable channels like FX and AMC that also follow to start doing prestige TV leading up through the rise of the digital steamer. So Netflix, et cetera, taking on this mantle. I think it's a good, a good tech talk history. If you want to know who are the people involved, what was the timeline involved with these coming up and down? What were the shows?

1:04:42When did they put out? How do we sequence this? When did Mad Men come out versus The Sopranos versus The Shield? Like when did this stuff all time out? And some of the characters are interesting as well. So it's not one of these books that really brings you to some like new insight or understanding with really cool access to sources, but it accomplishes the goal. a competent journalist who brings you into this world and explains how it unfolds so it's a cool book, I'm glad I read it I have a lot of thoughts, I won't bore you with them now but I'm building this theory on the future of independent media that is stuff like we're doing here and I have this theory it's going to end up a lot more like linear TV than we realize and it's going to be a lot less connected to recommendation algorithms than we realize but I'll hold the details of that for another time All right.

1:05:34Then I read Where the Deer and the Antelope Play. This is the latest book by Nick Offerman, the actor you probably know from Parks and Recreation. It's probably what he's most known for, Ron Swanson, but does a bunch of other shows as well. Uneven is what I would say. I really like Nick Offerman's first book. I think it was called Paddle Your Own Canoe or something like this. This book was a little bit more uneven where Nick is great and he has. long sections of this book where he's great is where he's in this Mark Twain style of telling a story about something that happened to him. Like, let me, let me walk through this story.

1:06:13And when he really gets into it, he's a fantastic storyteller and it's, it's, it's warm and it's human and it's funny and it's, it's unexpected. And he can be, he's, I think he's as good at doing this type of storytelling as anyone doing it right now. The standout in this book is his, the long section on when, uh, him and his wife, Megan, uh, Malawi Malini or Malawi the, the, the actress from Will and Grace, um, buying an RV during the pandemic and going on this long road trip. It's fantastic storytelling. Um, so some of it's really good. Some of the story, some of the stories seemed like they just weren't that good of stories and weren't that interesting.

1:06:52The thing it was kind of annoying about this book is he keeps switching over to this mode of politics but it's not interesting politics it's like the most cringy cliche of a Hollywood bubble person who's like read some things on left wing Twitter and is giving you like the simplest most like I'm completely unnuanced convinced makes everyone else cringe simplistic view of things. That part's not helping the book. And maybe this is just because I'm in Washington, D.C., so everyone's politics here is pretty nuanced because they work and live in this world. But it was so simplistic. I don't care where you are on the spectrum.

1:07:38You could be very progressive. You're just going to find the way he talks about these things. It's so simplistic. And he's so sure. It's like he just discovered. Someone just gave him a copy of Imbrun Kindy's book and showed him some, like, here's 20 tweets from progressive Twitter. And he's like, Oh, it just the simplest possible regurgitation of these things. And it, it comes across as, you know, um, it's a little cringy because it's just, I don't know. It's like, why is this here? You're such a great storyteller. You're not a great political thinker. This is going to, uh, a, whatever half your readers are Republican are going to just hate the book.

1:08:15And then 80 % of your, uh, left wing readers are going to be kind of like, this is pretty, this is like my seventh grader coming home. So I don't know. I didn't like the, I didn't think the, the politics were not done well and seemed out of place. And I kept taking you out of the storytelling. Who knows? We're so, what's the word here in DC cynical on politics, right? You can't, you can't have simplistic politics here because the person you're talking to is probably the legislative director for the Senator that, you know, oppose that bill. And so if it's just like, read his first book though first.

1:08:53If you haven't, if you read, I think it's called paddle your own canoe. It tells his whole story. It's fantastic. I love Nick Offerman. His story is great. All right. The next two books are by the same writer. The first book I really recommend. It's called who wrote the Bible by Richard Elliot Friedman. Let me tell you why I recommend this. This book is doing something that is incredibly hard to do. Well, and when I see it done well, I really appreciate it. Here we have a scholar who is an expert on a very complicated scholarly topic, which is textual biblical criticism. This is a secular study of the Bible that started in the 19th century for the most part.

1:09:41It's called the critical method. It came out of Germany that uses analysis of the words in the Bible to break it out into different authors, right? So you can study various attributes of the words that are used. You can also study various attributes about the Hebrew. How old is this version of Hebrew? And you can pretty clearly identify that when you're looking at the first five books of the Bible, so the Pentayach or the Torah, that there is five different authors involved. And you can just get here from text analysis. This is a really complicated field because you're debating over and it shifts around.

1:10:18Is this part of this author or not? And we're looking at a lot of ancient Hebrew etymology, really complicated. He makes it not only accessible, but it reads like a detective novel. He has somehow abled, Friedman here, this book is old, but I think it came out in the 80s, but huge bestseller because it's really well written. He's able to just get to the core thread. this is where we are now in the field and I'm not going to get caught up in the minutia. And then this happened and he writes with rhetorical questions that he answers and the whole thing just moves. So anytime I see a scholar taking an incredibly complicated topic and without diluting the complexity of the topic, making it compelling to read for the lay reader, I tip my cap because I know how hard it is.

1:11:04So even if you're not interested in the topic, it's a pretty cool book. The topic itself is pretty cool. I didn't know much about this type of historical criticism. What they figured out basically is, this is this new generation, a new, I mean, he's old, but this generation of scholars from the 70s onwards figured out how to look at what historically what was being said, the historical context of what was being said to figure out where these authors were from. And it becomes kind of interesting because you say, like, look, the way the words that the author of this part of the Bible is using to talk about X, Y, or Z makes it clear that they must be from the period, for example, before the kingdom split in the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

1:11:52They must be from the north because the way they're talking about this is a subtle dig at what was happening in the south. it turns out if you actually look at what's being said here you can actually figure out, oh, you probably are from this period of time living in this part of the Near East. And so they can actually pretty closely figure out where these different writers were in time and where they were in location. In some cases you can even get to a particular individual like the Deuteronomist, maybe where you know, Ezra is involved in redacting all of this. Like, it's really cool. It's completely secular history, but complicated.

1:12:35It's such a complicated field. And the book reads like, you know, a mystery novel. So I was really impressed. So the next book I wrote was a follow-up written by Richard Elliott Friedman called The Exodus. And it's about all the most recent scholarship using this method to try to understand what do we actually know about the book of Exodus? What really, what can we figure out about what really happened there by studying the text itself? And why are there, there's Egyptian names are used here, but not here. The song of the sea mentions, you know, mentions this, but doesn't mention that. The, you know, so it's this complicated analysis of like what is being said or not being said, trying to put in the historical context.

1:13:17And he has this whole theory, which I think is widely but not universally subscribed, that the book of Exodus is probably describing a particular band of probably the Levites, so not the entire Jewish people, all 12 tribes, but one group of people did leave Egypt, led by someone named Moses. They then brought the Exodus story to the broader Jewish people at the time, which then integrated into a national story. So it wasn't, you know, two million or whatever the number was, the whole kingdom of Israel and Judah leaving Egypt. It might have been a smaller group that brought that story that was then adopted as the national story.

1:14:06So it's like this really interesting. You get down to the details of who mentions who where and how this times up. It was really cool. I love historical scholarship presented as a mystery. We're figuring this out. This evidence accrued here and it's not this. And again, his style is lots of rhetorical questions. So why not this? Well, this is why we don't think this. But what about this? Yeah, this is a pretty good piece of evidence. What about that? Well, this is kind of a problem, but this is what we think is going on. So you get like this insight into this really complicated bit of scholarship where you have to spend your whole life mastering archaic Hebrew to even get your shoes on.

1:14:43And you can get a glimpse into this reading a 200-page book. So I love both those books, Who Wrote the Bible and The Exodus. You've got to be an expert to write those books. All right, everyone, that's what we got. Those are my December books, first episode of the new year in the bag. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode of the show. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you made it this far, you must be ready to join my fight for depth in a distracted world. Now, the best way to do this is to join over 125 ,000 people who receive my email newsletter each Monday.

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