Ep. 393: Can Movies Save Us From Our Phones?

25:47Now, that's a cool double feature you're going to get right there. Taxi Driver, I mean, it's an unsettling movie, but man, the camera work in there, the confidence of that movie. Let's go modern, like 21st century. Dunkirk, I think, is a masterpiece of writing and filmmaking. I think I've been pushing zone of interest not a very cheery movie takes place right outside the gates of Auschwitz so I guess you could double feature this with Fritz Lang movie I think it's a masterpiece there's a lot about that movie it's so original the way that it was like crafted and constructed I saw in the theater I think it's fantastic if you want something that's in the theaters now the best thing I've seen recently is Marty Supreme it's one of the Softie brothers fantastic kind of again you got to read about it right it's it's commentary on the american experience on capitalism on the tension between ambition and family and where we come from and is beautifully shot and acted and the energy is just like a really well done thing all right so i don't know i'm leaving out all good movies but that's a place to get started what am i missing jesse i mean crossroads should be most of your time i saw that in the theater i saw that in the theater and got yelled at by the people behind me what happened i was making fun of it so much that at the end of the movie they were like you ruined this for us because you wanted to shut up and i like it was so bad like you should have been on your phone so you were distracted by me yeah that's the problem nowadays they wouldn't have noticed it would have been on their phones oh man what am i missing well robert duvall just passed away yeah okay we gotta do some like apocalypse now yeah you gotta watch apocalypse now there's there's such great beautiful remasterings of that movie.

27:29It's visually beautiful. That's a fantastic movie. Colonel Kilgore, that's classic Duvall. Godfather, one and two. It's like out of favor to say that's a good, it's a great movie and he's great in that. He wasn't in three because they weren't going to pay him enough. Yeah, and three wasn't very good. Yeah, three was horrible. The great Santini, he's very good. I think Robert Duvall's, I mean, he was in Network too. He was in Network is a great movie. His most challenging role and hopefully the role that he's remembered for and the one that you should watch, I think, is his appearance as the father of the Vince Vaughn character in Four Christmases.

28:09That's an underrated movie. My wife and I love the, it's like a 2006 movie, Four Christmases. It's Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn at the end of that era where like you would just put Vince Vaughn in a movie and he would talk fast and it was kind of funny and robert duvall played his like functional alcoholic divorced father mad dog had a critic on talking all about him and he said that he was offered the jaws leading role but he didn't want to be a main guy yeah i know a lot about i just read about again everyone was offered those roles and you know how schneider got it spielberg was like at a thing socially with schneider and was uh just telling about the movie and he's like what do you mean the lead and he's like, you know what?

28:52Yeah, that makes sense. And that was that. And that's how he ended up in the, and they put him in the lead. Roy Schneider. All right, we're going to take another quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. Sierra has all the best active and outdoor brands you need from athletic stuff, like a full court pickup game, swish, to athletic stuff, like a half mile stroll. Get those steps in. And for morning hikes up the mountain trail, good pace to nighttime ghost stories from the camping chair. What a twist. Whatever level of active, Sierra loves it all. Head to Sierra or Sierra.com for the brands you want at the prices that let you do it all.

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32:13I think a lot of people have been sent this a lot of times. It's an essay that's been going around on X that went viral. It's written by an AI startup entrepreneur named Matt Schumer, and the essay is called Something Big is Happening. And it is a right down the middle. AI is about to change everything. For real this time, let's all be worried type of essay. I got sent this so many times. For whatever reason, this crossed over in the normie culture and out of tech culture and tech journalism culture. Everyone seems to be reading this. So by popular demand, I'm going to go through this a little bit.

32:45I picked out three or four sections I think are important for understanding the message and approach of this essay. And then I'm going to respond to it and we'll try to get down to the ground truth here. So I'll have this on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening. All right. I'm going to read something here. I'll start with something from the introduction to the piece. All right. So here's Matt Schuber. I've spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world, and I'm writing this for the people in my life who don't, my family, my friends, the people I care about who keep asking me, so what's the deal with AI, and getting an answer that doesn't do justice to what's actually happening.

33:23I keep giving them the polite version, the cocktail party version, because the honest version sounds like I've lost my mind. And for a while, I told myself that this was a good enough reason to keep what's truly happening to myself. But the gap between what I've been saying and what is actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy. All right, that's quite the setup there. There's some sort of classic AI reporting traps that are happening here. There's no actual information in it. It's pure emotional manipulation, trying to give you a sense of the digital ick, make you feel uneasy.

33:56It sets you up for this. The emotional state it puts you in, if you're not someone who's following AI closely, is like, yeah, your worst suspicions are true. It's crazy what's going on out there. And you know what? All right. I'm going to let you in what's going on. That is a classic. Before we get to the content of this essay, that is a classic move. Like I'm going to reveal to you what's happening and it's worse than you think. I mean that's like the classic move for everything. conspiratorial thinking, for radical health trends. It's a very compelling way to set up whatever you're going to say.

34:28All right, let's get into the content itself. I'm going to skip ahead a little bit now. Here's the first, I think, substantive thing that's said here. For years, AI had been improving steadily, big jumps here and there, but each big jump was spaced out enough that you could absorb them as they came. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress. And then it got even faster and then faster again. Each new model wasn't just better than the last, it was better by a wider margin. And the time between new model releases was shorter. I was using AI more and more, going back and forth with it less and less, watching it handle things I used to think required my expertise.

35:07All right, I'm going to stop right there. This is our first piece of evidence that, oh, this writer is willing to essentially make things up if they fit the vibe that he's trying to portray. The way he describes this is actually, in some sense, the opposite of reality. As someone who has been covering the AI, the generative AI revolution very closely for the New Yorker and here for this show, this is not how things happen. It's opposite. Things were moving really fast when pre-training scaling was working. The jump from two to three and three to four were these impressive leaps. This is where you're in the steep part of the lost power locker from the Kaplan scaling paper.

35:50The period he's talking about as we arrived into 2025 is actually when progress slowed down. It became a problem for the AI companies. The general overall capability boost that happened from pre-training scaling stopped happening. And they had to shift instead to a backup plan, which was we're going to do this sort of post-training work on very specific tasks. And we're going to do things like post-inference time compute. And we're going to turn our focus from like general ability improvements that are clearly impressive to any user to instead chasing down these arcane named benchmarks that we can sort of teach the model to specifically do well on.

36:29And there was this whole period where this was a – for users were like I don't really – the main thing I'm noticing is like the personality of the chatbots changing. And you were getting incremental improvements on specific activities where they could specifically try to post-train for that activity. It was actually a bad period for growth, not a good period. So this idea that changes were speeding up, most I would say close watchers are saying, no, no, this actually slowed down. and they had to try to find specific areas where some sort of notable improvement could make. They found video generation was one that ended up being a bit of a bust.

37:04And then the other place was in computer programming tools. So I think he's extrapolating continued progress on the computer programming tools, which I'll get into in a second. It was not exponential but hard one with like the models in general. We're getting faster at some sort of bigger pace. It's simply not true. I know it fits the vibe of people talk about cloud code more, but it's simply not true. All right, so let's read the rest of this quote here. Then on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day, GPT-53 codex from OpenAI and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic, and something clicked.

37:41Not like a light switch, more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest. Again, these were just continued incremental improvements on these coding-related agents, which I've been reporting on for a while. They've been impressive for a while. They've been making progress in these somewhat frequent but relatively small steps that are built on fine-tuning and other types of post-training that they're doing specifically around programming tasks. There is something like an inflection point where the latest – these latest models on certain sorts of like code auto-generation, agentic auto-generation tasks, like it got just to a level where more and more people were like, I think I can start using this more in my day-to-day.

38:21But these are kind of technical shifts. and they're very focused on what's specifically happening in programming so the idea that there's this these models in general are exponentially speeding up this is the opposite of exponential incremental steady progress on a small number of narrow applications or other applications that they thought the models would be much better at so far they failed to be making progress on all right let's jump into the details of the programming itself matt writes i am no longer needed for the actual technical work on my job i describe what i want built in plain english and it just appears not a rough draft I need to fix to finish thing.

38:54I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find a work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave. All right, I'll skip the final details here. So he's saying in the narrow world of computer programming, this is the inflection point advance, that you can now as a computer programmer just tell the AI, This is what I want and come back four hours and you have that app built. He goes on to talk about that.

39:25It not only builds the app, it tests the app, it fixes it. You don't have to do anything anymore. All right. So is this how people are now using this technology, the latest models that were released earlier this month? Well, who can tell? I can tell because I'm in the middle of a reporting project that I started just last week. So with the exact models he's talking about, where I have so far received detailed notes on how they use AI from active computer programmers, I have over 250 such case studies. I've made my way through about half of them so far. So I'm still kind of early in this progress.

40:03But here's what I can tell you. No one is saying make me an app and walking away and coming back four hours later and is like, there I have it. Let's release this. That is not how programmers are using these very latest tools. That only works for very specific types of apps. They have to be in one of a small number of like very common style of applications that are much more – it's like special languages, sort of interface focused, not too big, and you don't need to be particularly stable. So you can – as like a hobbyist kind of vibe code, hey, can you make me a Tetris game with Dungeons & Dragons characters or something?

40:40And we'll like do that. You can come back. You'll have something. But the 250 serious programmers I'm talking to, that's not the way they're using the auto code generation. It's much more narrow and specified. Those who are doing this, and a lot of them aren't, those who are doing this talk a lot about how you have to use these super clear specs. This is exactly what I want you to do. And then they let the model build that code for this piece. And then they have to extensively test it because, again, the models make mistakes 20 percent of the time, right? And then they run a bunch of unit testing on it.

41:12Okay, I think this is working. Let's integrate that in. Okay, now here's the next thing I need you to do. And like one out of five of these attempts are like, okay, the AI just doesn't get it. I'll just do it myself. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening here with AI, but what he's describing so confidently is what a minuscule fraction of this broad sample of real active professional computer programs I talk to, a minuscule fraction is using the tools in this way. It's cool what's happening, but it's not, hey, go make me go do this. I'll come back four hours later. It's just done, and I'm moving on in my life.

41:44These are heavily supervised right now. All right. Let's keep rolling here. Here's the next quote from the piece I want to highlight. The AI labs made a deliberate choice. They focused on making AI great at writing code first because building AI requires a lot of code. If AI can write that code, it can help build the next version of itself, a smarter version, which writes better code, which builds an even smarter version. Making AI great at coding was a strategy that unlocks everything else. This is grade A nonsense. It's just vibing nonsense. these ai agents do not let us make better ai models that's not how that works that's not what's happening they're they they're very useful especially like if you talk to these programmers like i've been doing the reason why they're saving time is that it's there's a lot of very tedious tasks that happen when you build various software stacks or applications like building out the interface and connecting all the interface elements to, you know, like the right functions or integrating multiple different data sources into, you know, a common framework so that you can pull data from any of them.

42:58This is tedious type of coding, especially if you're not an expert at exactly like you haven't built 100 of those type of apps before. And it takes people a long time because they have to look up, oh, God, what's the library call for the button? What's the what do I how do I access this sort of data source here for this? What's the call? I got it. What do I have to import? And this type of stuff, these models can do automatically. They know it already. You're like, God, that's saving so much time. It's so tedious. I don't have to do the tedious thing. What they cannot do is like invent a new model of intelligence, improve the fundamental mathematics of like machine learning, you know, build us a better model for AI than we've ever seen before.

43:40That's not how this works. And none of the innovations in general of AI are programming related innovations. They're all conceptual mathematical innovations where someone who is an expert in machine learning realizes like, oh, reinforcement learning could be applied to a language model if we work through the different renormalizations of the vectors properly. And then someone goes off and programs it. So this idea that tedious code or code that requires you to look up a lot of information can be automatically coded and that saves you a lot of time. You cannot jump from there to say, oh, AI can write itself now and now we're going to have this self-reinforcing loop.

44:12That idea has been in the zeitgeist all the way back to the 1960s when J.L. Goode wrote the first paper on ultra-intelligence and introduced the idea of recursive self-improvement. It is not, not, not what these tools are meant to do. They cannot do that. That's not what's going on. This notion that the AI companies chose to build AI agents first, I mean coding agents first, so that they could build better models that could then do everything else is wrong. The reason why we're hearing more about coding agents is because it's one of the only narrow tranches of applications where they could find a market.

44:54There's a lot of other things that the AI companies promised products in. I just I wrote an article back in January for The New Yorker about this where in early 2025, they said this is the year that we're going to have these general use agents for all sorts of jobs. We're there. It's going to happen. It didn't happen because it turns out that's much harder than coding agents. They put a lot of effort in the video generation and like that did pretty well. But there was no market there because people didn't want to pay$200 a month to make TikTok videos. They want there to be other markets. They're just the technology is not good enough.

45:26It's not interesting enough. It's not helpful enough. We're not seeing it move the needle in other positions as much. So we're hearing about coding because it's like the only place right now where there's real progress being made. And it is a good market. And this technology could be really useful for programmers. Again, I'm doing these surveys and I'm going to do a much bigger thing about this soon. But this is like a narrow thing that's happening right now. Now, one of the places where these models have always been good, all the way back to the Instruct model, the Instruct GPT model that was helped to make the GPT-3.5 that ChatGPT was made on, from the very beginning, the last half decade, we've known the one thing these models are good at is structured code because it's very structured language with lots of good training examples.

46:07And they've been making steady improvements on it using post-training techniques, and they've been passing various milestones as they do these. And this is a good story for the computer industry, and it's an interesting story. We might lose jobs. We might gain jobs. We don't know. We should cover it well. But the idea that the AI companies chose to do that first so that they could then make their own model smarter and then there's going to be this takeoff and AI takeover. Straight up vibe nonsense. That's not what's actually happening. So, okay, I'm going to leave it here, Jesse, because this essay makes me a little bit upset.

46:41But let me be clear. Summarize. there are struggles with the ai industry post gpt4 the failure of project orion the failure of the behemoth model the failure of uh the grok 3 failure where they moved to 100 000 you know gpus for training didn't get big improvements the shift towards post training more incremental improvements and benchmark chasing i've written about this look at my article last august uh for the new yorker for more about this this is the the portrait of an industry that's not like it's failing but it's also not going gangbusters. This is why, you know, the right now, the investment community is like a little bit nervous about the stocks for the big AI companies.

47:21Like we need to see where your big revenue is going to come from and we're not seeing it yet. It's like just a mixed story. It's a cool technology. They're trying to find markets. They're finding some niche markets, customer service, you know, video production. That's a pretty small market, but there's good stuff there. And in programming, they're pretty good at programming and they've been making steady incremental progress and the tools are now good enough now that it's beginning to affect the actual workflow rhythms of non-trivial percentages of programmers. And that's a cool, interesting story.

47:48This essay is about a science fiction dream. This is not an inflection point for most people if you're not a computer programmer. This is not from here we get some rapid takeoff. From here everything changes. And I've seen article after article after this essay came back, including one, if you read my newsletter today and get it at calnewport.com, I dissect an Atlantic article that does so much vibes on exactly this. I just don't think that's an accurate way to think about this, all right? Interesting stuff is happening to computer programming. This is not an inflection point that AI is about to rise over our heads and change everything.

48:22Again, it's a task for which these models are supremely well-suited, and all this progress has been incremental but steady. It's to continue to refine and update because it's the only place where they're getting non-trivial monthly subscription fees right now is honestly in that space. So I don't want to say nothing's happening, but also I think this essay is alarmist. And I think he gets the technology wrong and he mixes truth with fiction and makes statements confidently that just aren't right. So there's a lot of good reporting out there about AI. This is not it. You could ignore this one. You could ignore this one.

48:58So I don't know. There you go, Jesse. Did you see that essay? Everyone sent me that essay. I did not see it until I saw it in the script. I mean he wrote it in part with AI and you can tell. I don't know. The bigger thing – not the bigger thing. The other story here is these essays on X going viral is like definitely I think a thing of the winter of 2026. And obviously that opportunity is going to get saturated and go away. But remember that Dan Coe essay we did? That was also one of these X essays that went viral. So I think we're in this moment where like you can go viral on X doing these long-form essays and I bet it's not going to last past March.

49:32It's going to get saturated and then that opportunity is going to go away. But man, you're going to – how many YouTube videos do you think are being made right now about how to go viral with your XSAs? There's probably so much content about this. I know. I don't know. I don't like to think of myself as an AI skeptic, but I see myself as an AI realist. I really want to ground everything I do and what's actually happening. I don't like this vibe approach. Well, I love the fact how you referenced on an earlier show as well that you're doing all the reading with your students from the past. and you see all the recurring themes.

50:04Yeah. The doctoral seminar I'm teaching on superintelligence with AI doctoral students. Yeah. These themes are very powerful and they've come up again and again and again. People, it doesn't mean they're true right now. All right. Let's hear from a listener here. News and notes. Let's get a note here. We got an interesting email that was related to the Olympics, which are just sort of ending as we record this episode. We got an email from Katie I want to read and then I'll react to it. Katie says, I've been following your work for years and has helped me immensely in both my personal and professional life, so thank you.

50:35I thought of digital minimalism as I was reading Ilya Malin's Instagram post after his heartbreaking solo performance in the Free Skate a few days ago. He cites, quote, vile online hatred, end quote, as an impetus for his literal downfall. I don't know if you saw that, Jesse, but I guess the quad god, he's from Vienna, he's around here, fell during solo. Yeah. They said – man, I'm living so hard. They said there's no athlete who's more favored in his sport than he was in his sport. But the two times I watched him, he did not win a gold medal. They got on the team though. All right. Back to Katie's email.

51:16I was struck by this, especially in the aftermath of Simone Biles' well-publicized experience in which she cited similar demons. I would have thought that elite athletes would have taken note and began to see social media and really any media coverage of themselves as far more of a liability than an asset. No doubt an online present helps with sponsorships and other business deals. But is it worth it if it prevents someone from truly achieving the highest status in their sport? If elite athletes will meticulously attend to their food consumption, why do they seem hesitant to limit their media consumption?

51:46It seems to me that as sports grows and becomes more competitive, the edge might be less and less in workout plans and diet regimes but in the still countercultural practice of social media abstinence. All right, Katie, I think that's a really good note. It is going to happen. It is kind of happening in elite athletics. The coaches in the front offices are realizing this. I've had conversations with like multiple GMs from the NBA. I had – I talked with like the head of an internationally ranked rugby team. So athletes are beginning to – at least the teams are beginning to realize, oh, this is a huge edge in a sports setting where small edges really matter.

52:27The problem is the players are young and they're addicted because they've been on these things all the time. And their whole life has often been about just training for sports and it's an anxiety-producing type of life. They don't have a lot else going on because they have to focus so diligently on the sports. And so they use the phone as like, here's my escape. Here's my way to numb. Here's my way to self-medicate. And it's better than actual drugs or alcohol because I need to keep my body performing. And they end up addicted and it's really hard for them. It's why, for example, from what I hear talking to sports executives, the biggest issues are in the NBA.

53:03Why? Youngest players. You have the smallest gap from high school. You can go right from high school into playing for an NBA team. Compare this to something like Major League Baseball where, man, it's a long road. You're like Eli Willits and you get recruited at 17. You're going to go through all of these minor league teams. Also, the games are played. They're long and you don't have technology with you. So NBA has this worse. But anyways, I think eventually people are going to put their foot down from a coaching perspective and realize this is getting you. You're going to be better if you don't use this at all.

53:35I think it would be a non-trivial advantage. And once elite athletes are doing it, this often – that's why I like this trend – often accelerates trends into the general public. Just like there are certain types of exercise and diet and recovery routines that elite athletes do that make their way down to how the general public does it, this could have a big impact. To hear like really top athletes say, I don't even touch that stuff and it helps means more people who aren't elite athletes might be like, OK, that's not so eccentric anymore. One person who does do this is Alex Honnold, the rock – the climber.

54:09He's talked about this a lot because for him, it's not just if I lose a 5 % edge, I'm going to have a bad performance in a basketball game. It's like if I lose that edge, I could fall and die. So he goes on like a very long period in the lead up to his free solo climbs where he doesn't look at a phone, no social media, nothing, so that his head can just get clear and he can get into this like mind space where he can concentrate more. more athletes have got to follow this. I mean, especially like these Olympians, these young Olympians, it just gets in their head. Like, especially if you're like, if you're going to wear what you have to wear as a figure skater, you don't want to be on social media.

54:49If you look like you're in Blades of Glory, like you do look like the character from Blades of Glory, like you don't want to be on social media. Just do your quad jumps, you know? So I think Katie is right. I think we are going to see that trend. And I think that's good. did you watch any of the alex documentary and climb the skyscraper i watched it live watched it live um and then i watched it kind of was a bummer i watched a video of a professional rock climber talking about it and he was like i can't emphasize how easy this was he's like this is not this is this is uh not a challenging climb for alex honnold that kind of goes with your theme of you know watching 30 minutes of a movie and then reading a review it did change my experience yeah yeah it was interesting but yeah but basically they put it on the rating and it was like a relatively low rated climb he was like the only he said you could do this like if you repeated this a thousand times maybe he falls once but probably zero times like for alex it's like for us if someone's like i want you to climb this step ladder you're like yeah i can climb the ladder like i'm not going to fall or whatever it's like they said the main thing is just um making sure that you had the right uh make sure that you're trained up enough you don't get arm fatigue it was like 70 minutes long i basically fast forwarded so it only took me like 20 minutes yeah i was chilling i got the gist i was chilling with some friends and then we just had it on yeah i was at a friend's house for his birthday we kind of had on the ipad just like hey does he fall no all right the scariest part was really the end you see the end yeah he's standing on that little thing with those winds up there i mean but then he went on his phone right i wonder if he went on social media he's like i finally got here let me get on tiktok he was like oh my god and then he fell let me bad for him be good for us though right metaphorically alex honnell publicly on live tv falling to a gruesome death while his wife was there be good for reviews we do well kind of a bummer that didn't happen cow's kidding it's kind of a bummer um all right let me do another note quick update on my book right so as long time watchers and listeners know my next book which i actually it's taking me much longer than i thought is i'm writing a book about the deep life because i have this idea that uh like when it came to distractions digital distractions in the office what actually worked is when i wrote a book called deep worked it said yeah distractions are bad but what I want to give you is a bigger, better offer.

57:12So books that were just about email being bad don't sell as well as the book that was, here's what you should do instead. I realized I needed something similar for our digital lives outside of work. It's hard to tell someone to get off their phone when the life outside of the phone is sort of unsettling or uneasy or anxiety producing or just boring. So you need a bigger, better offer. We don't need to hear more about why the phone is bad. We need to create lives that the phone is not that interesting. So that's what the deep life is i talk about a lot on this show anyways the update jesse is i i handed in my manuscript so i finally finished a draft of the entire book it's in the hands of of my u.s and uk editors right now there's still a lot of work to be done after that like significant rewriting happens during the editing phases but still symbolically to get a complete manuscript that's like all right i got my arms around it so i'm pretty psyched about it can we talk about the a conclusion in your strategy with that or is that yeah top secret you mean my conclusion that i haven't written yet yeah yeah i feel like the audience would love that i so you're right i didn't submit the full manuscript i submitted the manuscript minus the conclusion but i've done this before because the point is this is just like a book writing thing but that's the last thing you write and typically when you finish a whole manuscript and i was like i wanted to get it done before i went on a trip the conclusion is kind of rushed and they're bad because of that And I find it's much better to like finish a whole book, step away from it for a few weeks, clear your mind, maybe even get edits back and then say I'm going to write the conclusion.

58:43If the conclusion is the only thing you're writing and you've cleared your brain and you're no longer exhausted, then you'll write a really good conclusion. But if it's the last thing you're writing at the very end of like a really hard push, conclusions end up bad. So I handed the whole manuscript except the conclusion and I said, look, I'm going to take a couple of weeks and then I'll attack the conclusion on the end. So that's my story. I also leave the introduction towards it. That was the last thing I wrote before I submitted it was the introduction. Over the summer when you were abroad for the month or not abroad but just away, you had written a part and then had to throw it away.

59:15I threw away a lot of that book. Did that happen multiple other times? I've thrown away a lot, a lot. Is that typical with books or? It just depends for me. This one, this one I've thrown out as many words as I've written. because I just submitted. I've thrown out at least that many words. There's a lot of that. The first approach to the book wasn't right, so I threw that out. The second approach was the right approach, but the way I was writing it wasn't right, so I threw out a bunch of that. Some of that stuff I salvaged and could use in other places. Brandon Sanderson has a good quote about this, by the way.

59:52You might know Brandon Sanderson as the author of Name of the Wind. Actually, you know my son? My middle son is reading a lot of Sanderson. Oh, nice. He just finished the third book in The Mistborn. I told him about The Storm something. I don't know. I don't know what Sanderson says. Well, The Storm something, Way of Kings. I don't know. But his other like major like epic one, he's like, oh, I got to read that. But I was listening to Ferris' interview with Sanderson again, which is like a great interview. And he said, this is the big divide between amateur and professional writers. Amateur writers don't like to throw out chapters.

1:00:27and professional writers do it all the time. It's like, I guess I'm a professional because I threw out a hell of a lot of chapters. It's like, this is good writing, but it's not the right writing. And then you got to throw it out. But I think this book is going to be good. It's a handbook. I mean, I really wrote it like a handbook. I mean, it's like, it's practical. It's linear. This builds on this, builds on this, builds on this. It's really meant to be, let's talk about cultivating a deep life so your phone's less interesting as like a engineering challenge. Like let's be like very systematic about it.

1:00:58So Slow Productivity came out in 2024, I think in spring. When do you think this one will eventually come out? A year from now. So spring of 2027? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And then you'll do like a book tour and everything? Yeah. Similar to the last time? Yeah. I will be out and about book touring it up and doing all of our things. We did a podcast here. We did a live podcast here in Tacoma Park. That was fun. We did politics and prose around here. Did you come to that one? Yeah. Yeah, that was fun. Yeah. We got a big crowd. Went to LA, went to Austin. Do the stuff. We'll do the stuff. All right. Finally, what am I reading?

1:01:36I finished two books on vacation, and I'm doing the count, Jesse. This gets me up to four for February because I know you don't trust me anymore, and I'm almost done with my fifth. So we're recording this. What's the date? Like the 18th? Yeah. I'll finish my fifth probably tomorrow. I believed you. I just wanted to keep in the audience. You don't trust me at all. You think I'm trying to pull a fast one. All right. So I finished on vacation – I finished a book I started before. So we went to the Florida Keys for a long weekend. I finished a book, a new book called Attensify, like A-T-T, like a mix of attention and intensify.

1:02:07It's like a splashy new like manifesto. It's a collective of academics who are thinking and writing about attention and the attack on attention from digital devices. And this is their big new bold book. It's smart actually. It's smart writing. Yeah. Actually, there's a couple ideas in there. I'll probably talk about, maybe make a future deep dive about. But that was a smart book, definitely some good ideas. And then the thriller, I needed a thriller to read when I was in the Keys and I needed to be related to that part of the country. So I found a Lincoln, Preston and Child's Gideon Cruise thriller called The Lost Island, which takes place in the Caribbean.

1:02:49It's a little nuts. It's a little nuts. uh the it was good set pieces the structure was not great like it was very disjointed um interesting i don't want to spoil it jesse but they're cyclopses and i didn't think and i wasn't it's not a fantasy book it's just a cyclops i have two quick questions yeah would you ever want to be an editor or you just don't have any time right that would be just rather right I would rather write. Yeah. Yeah. But you talk to editors all the time. Yeah. God bless them. I don't want the job. Because they don't read all the time, right? Yeah, which seems like it's fun.

1:03:28But I think the frustration would be is like you get – here's the problem. If you're an editor, you develop fantastic taste because all you're doing all day long is reading. You know what's successful. You know what's not. Like you know – you're just so good at assessing like what's good or bad. And like 80 percent of what you read, you're like, this is not great. you know that's the problem like you occasionally get a book you're like this is great but you you know too well why the stuff that's not great is not great and i think that's got to be but but what can you it's not your book yeah so you're like i'll help the author but like i would have written this book completely differently i think that's got to be frustrating yeah um also they put too much work on editor's plates right now so it's like i think i wrote about this in a world without email uh digital technology like email changed the structure of the job of being editor in the sense that it and personal computers they added like seven or eight more parts of the book publishing process onto the plate of the editor like now like you're involved much more and more constantly in marketing and sales and book shipping and fulfillment and the cover design and all the you're in the mix on everything and because of this it's becoming much more like admin overhead heavy, like logistical nightmare of a job.

1:04:46Whereas, you know, a hundred years ago, it's like you had your manuscripts, you took them to your house in the Hamptons, like without the digital technology, there was less, you had to have your hands in beyond like working on the books and editors don't publish more book per editor now than they did pre email, but they're just, they're just more busy. Right. So it's one of these things where on paper, they're like each of these new things, email lets editors do makes them more productive on paper because it's how could it be wrong to have more information or more say on things but in reality it doesn't produce more good books so it's like one of these classic case studies of uh you think in the narrow this technology will make people more productive but then you zoom out on the metric that matters and it didn't so i think it's a hard job um but they're the cool thing i work with editors they read so many books is their like feedback is like on it yeah you know like you give it to a friend or someone or like they're like oh i like this or what about this and like sometimes it's useful sometimes not the editor like they see straight to your soul they're like this nope yes no what were you doing here you're forcing that like because they're just so good at it so i love working with editors i don't think i could do the job i wouldn't be any good at it and then last question did you read the rogan article on the new yorker rimnicks yeah yeah did you read it yeah i read it yeah i got that that issue kind of late so i only read it more recently um that's pretty good i i just we're talking about off air a little bit i the idea of rim neck listening to like these rogan episodes where all fall you know the moon landing is fake and like some of the more extreme rogan episodes like oh man it's that's funny but rogan's a compelling broadcaster so it's not like the hardest job i thought it was a pretty good profile the main thing here's what i've noticed i think the the sort of elite writer world that i'm a part of like the – in the academic elite world, like the biggest problem they have with Rogan is that it's our frame.

1:06:43It's like our frame for seeing the world is very much like rationalist intellectual frame. Everything is about ideas and knowledge and argument. And so like Malcolm Gladwell did a big thing about this. Remnick was really upset about this. It's like why your job, like Joe Rogan, is to be looking for wrong information and pushing back on wrong information and building correct structures of epistemology and knowledge or whatever. It's actually not the way that most people approach the world. Most people approach the world like Joe through like social relations, like connection with people, like these type of things, emotional reactions, what's interesting, what's not interesting.

1:07:22This makes me upset. This makes me happy. This is – makes me feel good. I want to like be a leader and a friend. And it's like all these things that are pre-writing, rationalist, post-enlightenment type of thinking that all our elite people do. And so they just see it very differently. Like Rogan is like, oh, someone is here. I want to like connect with them and see if I can generate interesting emotions or like I want something that's going to catch my attention. But if it's like Remnick or Gladwell or me, our instinct is like the world – the reality is shaped by structure of information and you cannot deform that structure of information in like incorrect ways.

1:08:01And if someone is saying something incorrect, you have to push back on it. Then there's also like blind spots in it too because it becomes more – if the people are saying something incorrect on the things I really care about, you better push back on it. But if it's like something where it's like, OK, yeah, this is incorrect information, but like it's thematically I get what you're getting at. I'm with you on that. Like that's fine, right? So it becomes a little bit – I'm just critiquing my own circle here. It gets a little bit selective. where it might be like, oh, thematically, we're not going to get mad at something that maybe is like making a strong progressive point, but in doing so is being loose with facts and reality.

1:08:40And a lot of commentators from like the elite circles will be like, yeah, but like thematically that point is right. So that's fine. But if you are on like some health topic or something, like you're getting at thematically this point of whatever, we should, we trust big medicine too much, but your facts are wrong. It's like, how can you not stop that person? So we all have blinders on as well. But it was a good profile. And Will Rinn, he's a good writer. He's a Pulitzer. Alright, I think that's all the time we have for today. Thank you for listening and watching. We'll be back next week with another episode.

1:09:11And until then, as always, stay deep.