How to Build a Cognitive Training Plan | Monday Advice

26:32That's how you get those numbers to go up. And of course, the idea is getting those type of key indicators up is going to make you more healthy in general. So if you're putting a lot of effort to specifically train for your mile time, your cardiovascular health in general is going to get better. It's going to have all sorts of positive secondary side effects. You're going to be frustrated when you get stuck and make other changes in your life. Anything that's going to get that number down. So that's what we have to do with your cognitive KPIs. You have to train specifically those KPIs. All right.

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

27:33So you train those cognitive KPIs just like the physical ones. And just like in the physical world, again, obsessing over one of those KPIs and moving it up is going to make your brain in general more healthy. There's just no way you're going to get to a place where you can do 30 minutes of productive meditation or read for an hour or some sort of conceptual nonfiction where your ability to focus and control your mind's eye in general is not going to improve in all sorts of different aspects of your life. So we're going to use these very precise numbers. We're going to train those precise activities as a very specific way into the general goal of becoming more cognitively fit.

28:10All right. So that's really where I wanted to bring you in this deep dive is to this idea of training. You measure a couple of these, you see where you are, and then you get to work training that activity, doing what it takes to move it to the next level, that is how you get your brain more healthy. I mean, the idea here, Jesse, is that in phase one of the cognitive fitness revolution, we're really doing the equivalent in the physical world of just saying like, hey, try to eat better or try to move more. That's what it is with what people are doing now. Like I made my screen grayscale on my phone, or I'm trying to like not have my phone when I watch TV, though I often do, but like I'm kind of trying not to.

28:47We know trying things that are easy in the moment, et cetera, get you nowhere in physical health. It's the same thing with cognitive fitness. So this is what unlocks phase two is now having numbers that you can specifically train for. There's a lot more that's involved in cognitive fitness. Obviously there's all sorts of different things to train. There's general habits. There's these specific KPIs. This is just one element I'm adding to this bigger canvas I hope to build of thinking through how to become more cognitively fit. All right, so that's enough hearing about what I find interesting. I also want to hear what you find interesting.

29:24This is where we like to do on these Monday episodes where we open up our inbox to see what you have to share or ask me about. Remember, if you have a question or a comment or something that you think I might find interesting, you can send it to podcast.calnewport.com and maybe we'll get into it on the air. All right, Jesse, who's our first message from? Our first message is from Gerald, who wants to know your opinion on a particular type of syndrome. Ooh, I like syndrome. Sorry, let's see what Gerald has to say here. He says, I think the concept of information fatigue syndrome needs to be more mainstream.

30:01I never heard you mention that term before, and it seems right up your alley because the solution is essentially going on a data diet. I guess low-quality data is the new ultra-processed food. Interesting, Jesse. Information fatigue syndrome. I haven't heard that before. Let's find out more. He sent us a link. Let's bring it up on the screen. We'll take a closer look here. So he sent us an article from Workplace Psychology called Information Overload. Too much information becomes noise. This is a summary of an academic paper. We'll look at this briefly, but here's the intro here. It says, An information overload causes symptoms and solutions.

30:43An article for the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Learning Innovations Laboratory, Joseph Ruff says that we are bombarded with so much data that we are on information overload. Simply put, information overload is when our ability to process information is past its limit and further attempts to process information or make accurate decisions from the surplus information leads to information overload. Here's an actual quote from that article. Once capacity is surpassed, additional information becomes noise and results in a decrease in information processing and decision quality. The summary goes on to say there's even a name for it, information fatigue syndrome.

31:21Here are the symptoms. Poor concentration, polyphasic behavior or multitasking, hurry sickness, pervasive hostility, habituation, or overstimulation. plugged-in compulsion, traditional stress include lower immune response. All right, I believe it. I mean, let's think this through here for a second, Jesse. It's saying if you burn out your information processing circuits, essentially, any more information that comes in, you can't process, and it begins to lead to negative fatigue-style side effects. Didn't we talk about something like this? Didn't we have on... Remember, we did an episode maybe early summer, late spring, where we were looking at a claim on Reddit and we had a psychologist from Georgetown weigh in.

32:11And it was about not information, but stimuli. And the claim, if I remember this correctly, the claim that we were contesting or analyzing was that once you pass a threshold for stimuli, you get like overloaded with stimuli and then are like super stressed out and can't really function. And the psychologist came back and said, that's not really true. You can be exposed to stimuli all day long without reaching some capacity that then puts you into a negative state. And his example was, if that was not the case, people who live in Singapore or Las Vegas would constantly be just like overloaded and unable to function because there's a huge amount of stimuli all the time.

32:51But he did say, if I'm remembering this properly, that really concentrated activity is something that you can sort of run out of steam for. So, I mean, I believe in thinking fatigue syndrome that there's only so much like hard thinking you can do in a given day. And that's also determined by how exhausted you are physically or mentally with other things. And once you get there, it's very hard to do more thinking. But information processing, maybe. That's interesting. if it's just reading or, I mean, I honestly, I think it's the concentration that matters, not the information. Like if you're, the information you're taking in is hard to consume, you're reading something complicated, you'll run out of steam.

33:30I think that's a real thing. If the information is, you know, Netflix, I don't know, you could do it all day. You're processing information. People do do it all day. People do it all day. Right. And they're not like more, in fact, they're less exhausted than someone who is like doing something else. So I think there's a kernel in here that's true, but there's also maybe a temptation of something just makes sense and then the name looks good, but it's not quite getting at what's true there. So we'll put that in the category of like interesting, but probably not quite accurate as stated. Hey, let's take a quick break from our inbox segment here to hear from some other sponsors to make this show possible, but make sure you stay tuned because coming up after the sponsor break, I do have a rant.

34:14So be ready for that. All right, so let's do the sponsor break real quick. Look, I've experienced firsthand that the thing about running a small business is you don't just do your own job. You end up as the hiring manager, the payroll department, and the benefits team all at once. This is where Gusto enters the scene because it can help take these responsibilities off of your plate quickly and seamlessly. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software that's built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use, so you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere.

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35:29That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash deep. One more time, gusto.com slash deep. I also want to talk about our friends at Babbel. Jesse, I just signed up to give a speech next year out in Scandinavia, and I want to brush up on my language skills so at the very least I can talk and say a few things and show a little bit of respect to the local culture. Look, I don't want to be the guy that only speaks English everywhere he goes, but luckily I have Babbel to help me out. So if you're traveling this summer, here's the travel hack. Don't wait until you land to start learning the language.

36:07Instead, use Babbel. Even just 10 minutes a day with Babbel can help you start having real conversations in as little as just three weeks. Instead of memorizing random vocab, you'll learn phrases that you will use doing things like ordering dinner or asking for directions or just chatting with the locals. The Babbel lessons are quick, practical, and built by more than 200 language experts. Babbel's award-winning app has sold over 25 million subscriptions and is backed by a 14-day money-back guarantee. So if you have travel coming up, now is the time to start so you can actually use what you learn on the trip.

36:43Right now, it's important, Babbel is offering listeners up to 60 % off. Go to babbel.com slash deep. That's Babbel, B-A-B-B-E-L.com slash deep for up to 60 % off. Rules and restrictions may apply. All right, Jesse, let's get back to our inbox segment. All right, who do we got for message number two? Our next message is actually from a publicist about a new book. Oh, yeah. So I was, okay. I remember this. I don't want other publicists. I get a lot of public press releases to our account. We delete them all, but I came across this one and I read it. Please do not read this as an excuse, publicist, to send me even more press releases.

37:27But this was a press release that a publicist sent me for a new book. And the book sounded interesting. and there was a quote about the book, a summary of one of the points from the book that I thought was really cool. So let me read you the intro to the book. Here's what the publicist said. I want to give this book credit. In America, there seems to be a right way to do everything, even relax. We track our sleep, optimize our mornings, listen to podcasts on our walks, and feel vaguely guilty when an evening produces nothing at all. For best friends and lifelong Parisians, Alex Durand and Tom Carls, that instinct to make every minute count was one of the biggest culture shocks they encountered after moving to the U.S.

38:04Their new book, Pardon Our French, The Parisian Way to a Happier Life, which comes out on September 8th, offers a new way to think about ambition, leisure, and pleasure without asking Americans to give up their drive. All right, so what was the point from the book in this press release that caught my attention? I'll read it to you now. Here was the point was summarized as, treat time like wine, not water. Rather than managing time as a scarce resource to conserve and maximize, Alex and Tom suggest treating it more like a glass of wine. Slow down, savor it, and stop rushing towards what comes next.

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

39:15No, it's pretty good. Anyways, I like the idea. Treat time like wine. So that's good. Maybe when that book comes out, we'll have to take a look at it. Have those guys on. Berets for the full episode. And then you can do your accent. Baguettes under our arms, full episode. Wonderful accent. Pipe. Pipe, full episode. Striped sailor shirt, full episode. Interrupting the guest every five to ten seconds. They'd be like, excuse me, monsieur, monsieur. J 'ai l 'air. J 'ai l 'air.

39:49Je parle un peu de français. peut être je comprends si vous parlez très lentement I can speak a little French we need Teddy Roosevelt here to be on that interview yeah first of all I'd be like hold on a second book done and then he would be like I'm going to conquer and annex France yeah because that's the way he worked all right what do we got what's message three our next message is from Rima who is highlighting an interesting way to think about AI in thinking. All right, let's see here. I'm always nervous but interested in these AI ones. Rima says, I would like to share this interesting blog post series from the Scholarly Kitchen blog on cognitive responsibility framework and cognitive coherence and cognitive debt.

40:40As someone working in scholarly publishing at a university, I found this framework to be incredibly useful for thinking about the use of AI in academic publishing. All right, let's look at this, Jesse. Let's bring it up on the screen. I have the article here. Reading Between the Lines, Part 1, A Cognitive Framework for AI Scholarly Publishing. Let's see if there's any interesting thoughts here. Here's the intro. As an editor, an editor asked AI to summarize a stack of review reports before reading them herself. Days later, reviewing her own decision, she finds herself wondering whether the judgment she reached was fully her own.

41:15That small moment points to a much larger question now facing scholarly publishing. A generative AI has transformed scholarly publishing in three years, dot, dot, dot. It is now a permanent feature of the scholarly landscape. The question is no longer whether it should be used, but how it should be understood and governed. All right, so I'm going to skim down here a little bit. So there's a framework that they're going to suggest. The framework is not intended to classify people or rank scholarly activities. Rather, it offers a practical vocabulary for deciding where AI can appropriately extend human cognition and where human responsibility must remain primary.

41:58So what are some of these categories? She says there's a distinction between mechanical cognitive work, which AI can increasingly perform, and judgment-based cognitive work where human responsibility must remain central. All right. I like this general approach. As I do more digital ethics and think more about AI and my academic roles, I think there's an approach here which is useful, which is, again, I think right. The way this is said is right. clarity and vocabulary about cognitive activity so we can better discern where something like AI makes sense and where it does not. In other words, we can put structure to our otherwise vague or inchoate intuitions about something feeling icky or not.

42:41So this particular distinction, which I just summarized at the very highest level, but of cognitive versus judgment-based cognitive activities, that's useful. if there's some sort of human judgment or originality applied, that should come from a human. If it's mechanical, we've got to take these numbers and we've got to put them into a chart and we've got to format that chart. There's no judgment here. It's just mechanical and annoying. AI could help speed that up. I think that's useful. I would add another category when I'm thinking about AI. I do not think there should ever be communication, written text communication, that was in any large part generated by AI that's not clearly labeled as such.

43:21I think it's cognitive and emotional fraud to have text that presumably came from you that was actually from AI because the way that text is actually ingested and processed on the receiver's end is that you're simulating the mind of the sender. You're simulating another mind. And if you believe you're simulating the mind of this particular human who's transferring inner states to you almost telepathically through these artifacts on the written page, and it turns out it's not their mind, it's actually a machine, I feel like there's some sort of psychological or emotional fraud there. Writing is sacred, and it's something that we should be really careful about.

43:56So anyways, I like this general. That's like my opinion. But this approach is useful. You're starting to break up different activities and be clear about where humanness is important and where mechanizing might make more sense. So I don't know if you've heard about this, Jesse. We should cover this in another episode. But Anthropa came out and said we're going to introduce watermarking into that text output of Claude. meaning it will be very reliable for people to determine if a computer code or text was generated by their llm versus a human and they're doing this because of compliance with some european ai legislation and it's freaking people out because people are really freaked out about this idea of like wait so everyone can always tell if i wrote this or had an llm do it and i'm saying if that freaks you out, that is a sign that you weren't, you knew this was like, there's something icky here.

44:50There's something like, if you're not just proud of like, sure, I, this is AI. If you're kind of hiding it, it tells you there's some sort of ethical boundary that's being crossed, even if you can't put your finger on it. So that's why I think these type of efforts are useful. But those people are just going to use another AI. Yeah, it would have to be universal across the AIs. You know how it works? It's actually kind of interesting. it has to do with there's a lot of places when you're generating tokens with an llm where there's multiple different words that are synonyms that you could use right it basically not to get too technical but if you use a large language model it creates output one token at a time where a token is a word or a part of a word and then you just keep calling it again and again to generate more and more tokens to get a full response and what it actually gives you is not this is the specific next token to expand your input by.

45:37It gives you what's known as a probability distribution over possible next tokens, right? It's trying to guess because again, an LLM thinks, I don't mean to anthropomorphize it, but the way it's trained is that the input is given, it thinks that's a real text that exists in the world that's been cut off and it's trying to guess what the next word is. And it gives you a probability distribution over guesses. I think there's a 20 % chance it's this, there's a 21 % chance it's this. A lot of words have 0 % chance. That just makes no sense. But But often there's a bunch of words that could work and they might have kind of equal probabilities.

46:06They're kind of synonyms for each other. So what they're doing, I don't completely understand this yet, but essentially they have a pseudorandom number generator. So like if you have the same kind of a sequence of random numbers, but if you have the same seed, you can create the same sequence. And they use that to resolve choices where there's multiple tokens that are basically equally likely. They use this random number sequence to choose which of those tokens they – which of those synonyms they choose. So if I'm on the other end, if you give me that same pseudorandom sequence, I can sort of go through in some sense and say, hey, if there's a bunch of words that match this sequence, then for sure this was an LLM that was running this sort of watermarking software, right?

46:49It doesn't change the meaning or correctness of the text because these are like synonym words. So it's something like that. I have those details a little bit wrong. But anyways, the point is it's – the watermark is the text itself, not some hidden digital whatever. So you can't just like retype what you see on the screen in like a fresh window like in Microsoft Word and get around it. It's the words themselves. So you really would have to substantially edit the text to get rid of the watermark at which point you're kind of writing on your own anyway. So I think that's cool. I think because of my emotional psychological fraud argument, all LLM techs should have that.

47:20The other thing is it's unclear whether you can copyright text or code produced by LLMs. I think that's great. I think copyright should protect the human brain's output, right? not the AI company. So there's a lot there that's interesting. All right, let's do one more question. What do we got? Our last message is from Nathan, who had an article to share that's right up your alley. Oh, man, let's see what Nathan says. Cal, this seems to have everything for you. Disneyland, comments on high-quality leisure, and references to the need for slow productivity and deep living. Let's pull this up on the screen here, Jesse.

47:55What he was showing is that there's actually like a five-part, I think it's the first of the five parts. A five-part article on Cory Doctorow's blog, Pluralistic.

48:07Let's see. And that's not it. Here it is. Boredom and its discontents. All right, that's part two. So let me go to part one. Part one was called Are We Having Fun Yet? Anyways, it's a five-part discussion about essentially the experience in Disneyland. And it's Cory Doctorow and he has all sorts of theories. But a lot of it's about the line experience and all the things they've tried to try to make the lines work. I'm going to be honest, Jesse, I read all five parts. You can imagine. You're talking about waiting in line, right? Waiting in line, yeah. Here was the kind of the, I'll summarize the coolest point of this piece.

48:40He goes back and reminds people of the original technology. This is probably in part two, so I'll go there. The original technology for dealing with lines in Disneyland was this. So when you, it cost a certain amount of money to get into the park, but you couldn't go on any rides without a ticket. And so you would also buy for separate money a ticket book like the one I have up on the screen. And you had a certain number of A tickets, B tickets, C tickets, D tickets, and E tickets. You had like two E tickets and like as you go down you have more and more of these tickets. So like A tickets were for A rides which are like small things.

49:16We like taking the horse-drawn carriage down the main street. D would be for like pretty extensive rides like Mr. Toad's Wild Ride and e-tickets would be for like the really big rides. It would be, you know, I don't know if they would have been back then, but like by the 60s, the Haunted Mansion or Pirates of the Caribbean or whatever. And what he argues is like this, having these ticket books, it changed your relationship to Disney. We could take this off probably. It changes your relationship to Disney because you could only go on two big rides, right? And you would think what those were and there would be like two big rides, that'd be it, which means there was never long lines for those big rides because everyone in that park could only go on two and you would choose the two you really wanted to go on.

50:01And you would kind of ration out your experience. I'll do some of these A's and let me get two E's and three D's. You have a lot more downtime. And because of that, the experience of the park itself was a bigger part of it. You would just walk around. There'd be shows. You would see things. You would enjoy just being there. Maybe I'll take a horse-drawn carriage. I'm really building up to this afternoon where I'm going to go on one E-ticket ride. And he basically, like, once they got rid of that system and went to all-you-can-eat, you pay to get in the park and they can go on any ride you want.

50:27He's like, the whole thing fell apart because everyone just went to the e-ticket rides. And the lines got really crazy. And it's just been ever since then trying to deal with that in increasingly complicated ways, none of which have really solved the problem. And the original park experience with these ticket books was, in his argument, the best one, right? And it also, yeah, you come back. Let me come back again. I'll go on some other rides some other times. It's just fun to be there. It's beautiful. It's interesting. And so I like that. I like this because in some sense, it's right in that sweet spot of things I like.

50:56I mean, Disney, of course, but technology and technology's intersection with our human experience. This is a key point where the technology of tickets and line access to rides completely changes your experience of your life of the day that you're in this park. And we see this type of thing all the time with all sorts of different types of technologies in our life at home and in our work life where you introduce a technology and on paper you have some perfectly good reason and you don't realize the degree to which that technology's presence completely shapes people's experience. When you switch from these to all you can eat lines and you had fast pass as a way to try to get around that, it just created, it changed the whole experience of the park to be this sort of ride maximization.

51:39We're going to win the day and getting as many e-tickets as possible, rushing from thing to thing, always waiting in line. you know it completely changed the experience just like technologically the presence of email the presence of ai and the college environment where you introduce this tool and it completely changes the experience so i thought that was a really good example as a bonus he then the same nathan then told me that cory doctor who i um i really like his writing obviously um had included a link to one of my things recently i'll put i'll bring this on the screen here in his um newsletter from August 12th called Model Collapse was the name of this newsletter.

52:17He had, you know, he puts links. Cory Doctorow is a very interesting thinker. We've talked about him on the show, but we should have him on the show, Jesse. But I think somewhere in there he linked a one of mine. Let's see here. It's in his Things I Hate and People I Hate section. People who are making matters worse. I don't know This works. All right, here we go. Yeah, there we go. On AI coding and its discontent. So that was my newsletter article that actually made the rounds, Jesse. I did a newsletter article. Look, I'll click on it for those. Bring it back up here. On AI coding and its discontent.

52:55If you don't subscribe to my newsletter, you should, calnewport.com. Most weeks, I send a dispatch from the fight for depth in a distracted world. This was from August 10th. I shared a story of a listener who wrote in to say, hey, back in January, you know back in January this listener had bothered me he said I think you're being too skeptical about agents Claude Code changed my life as a programmer it's everything people said it's going to be he wrote me again a month ago and said I've had to completely change my relationship to Claude Code I crashed our major consumer website I won't say what it is but Jesse you would have heard of it everyone would have heard of this it's a major.com I've crashed our website twice with code that was produced with Claude Code I'm going to get fired if I do it again I'm back to coding largely by hand and I put that out and a lot of people came out of the woodwork and are like in their Soto voice yeah we're kind of doing the same like if you're not just vibe coding things or making minimal viable products if you're trying to actually write production code they're like you just can't trust it and it's too hard to review it's hard to review code you didn't write and it takes forever and now there's a lot of quiet retreat towards you use the clod or whatever AI coding agent more selectively Like, can you do this piece for me?

54:08I'm going to do this piece because you really have to understand how your code works. And I think that's like a really important indication. Look, I've been writing about the intersection of digital technology and knowledge work for a decade now. And this is what happens. It's hard. Like some things can come through and change everything and break things like email did. And we still haven't figured out how to use it right properly. It's just hard. It's hard to have a silver bullet tool that just works and everyone uses it. And it's really, you know, it's going to be hard. Just AI like anything else.

54:37It's a normal technology. It's a cool technology, but it's not magic. It's not HAL 9000. It's not the small wonder from 1980s sitcom television. It's wonky and they're trying to figure it out and some stuff is awesome. There's a lot of hard edges and it's expensive and it's difficult and a lot of these companies will fail and some will figure it out. You'll have a mature industry, but exponentials don't last forever. And anyways, this goes back to my general AI stance, which is like cool, exciting technology. Let's cover it like cool and exciting technology, which means most people don't really need to be paying attention.

55:09And can we stop trying to terrify everyone and hype out our butt because we're online and bored or not realizing that these people we're talking to from these companies or these think tanks are dyed-in-the-wool, effective altruist rationalists whose entire reason for meaning is this belief that superintelligence will deliver either utopia or they will be John Connor and stop the apocalypse. and their whole meaning system comes out of this and they leave their group houses in the Bay Area to go talk to New York reporters and are like, this technology is very scary and we don't realize they're from these weird sort of cultist-like thinking and we're like, oh my God, this must be like COVID or something and not realizing that they've got Spock ears on and they're in polyamorous group houses.

55:49We got to cut out the hype and just treat this like a cool but normal technology. We've had other incredibly exciting technologies and it didn't make everyone stressed out all the time. So I don't want to preach about that. John Conner, that's the Terminator, right? Terminator, that's right. John Conner and Neo. That's what all these rationalists, like basically they recruited a bunch of high school students, I mean college students who were like, I want to be Neo from the Matrix. So we're the ones, I mean look at Yukowski's writing from this period, right? It's a lot of like, he'll call himself a hero.

56:19He'll write things like, I think I'm the only one who can save the world, right? This is the way they were thinking and talking before their LLMs. They just love this idea. of its interest, transhumanist, futurist, you know, meeting dystopia type ideas. And it's spilling over into our discourse. And the issue is when I push back against that hype, people then interpret it as you're saying AI doesn't work. And therefore, like, hey, hey, here's something AI, a cool new product. So you're wrong, right? This is not about does AI work or not. It's about do we have to have this layer from the AI is a force that gives me meaning crowd of anxiety, hype, exaggeration amplified by online people who are just bored and live in a world of made-up facts anyway.

57:05They live in a world of engagement, like the substrate in which this online world exists where all these people are putting these YouTube videos and tweeting about AI like, this is it, guys. This is the real deal with like alarm bells or whatever. They live in a world in which the normative substrate for the determination of what is valuable or not is engagement. And that has been completely wired into their heads. It's a completely different normative value than truth or rationality. And they're picking up on the AI is a force to give us meaning crowds type of nonsense and amplifying it everywhere.

57:34AI is not your god. AI is not going to solve all your problems. AI is not going to cause all your problems. It is a tool. It is technology. It will be powerful some places. Other places will be frustrating. It's going to create some people that we're annoyed at. We need to regulate it. We need to care about it. We don't need to obsess about it. There we go. There's my rant, Jesse. Good rant. There we go. All right, let's end like we like to do on Mondays by catching in with what I've been up to. I was just on another vacation. We always spend a week at the end of summer at the beach. I finished three books while there, Jesse, so I thought I would go over them now.

58:04So these all are August books. I finished Tom Griffith's book, The Laws of Thought. This came out earlier this year, maybe in the fall. I think it was earlier this in the winter, and it's a popular science book about the various mathematical models we've developed over history for trying to understand thought, going back from like the sort of logic, trying to use propositional logic up through neural thinking, etc. I thought it was very good. I read Tim Berners-Lee's memoir. This is for everyone. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. I used to run into him all the time, Jesse, because when I was at MIT, I was on the sixth floor of the status center, which is where the theory group was.

58:46And Tim worked on the fifth floor, which is where the World Wide Web Consortium was. And we would ride the elevator sometimes together. That was a good book. History of the Web is interesting. I also read Into the Deep, a memoir of Bob Ballard, who he co-authored with Christopher Drew, who's a sort of nautical science writer, New York Times writer. He wrote Blind Man's Buff, which is a good book about submarine espionage. my brother was a submariner so yeah you mentioned that before because there was like some references to another book that wouldn't have made sense that nuclear book it made no sense made no sense alarm bells they don't have alarm bells on submarines on nuclear submarines defeats the purpose so Bob Ballard is you know Bob Ballard the guy who discovered the Titanic yeah it was good he was based out of Woods Hole I think for a little while for a long time yeah and then he went to he's in Mystic and other places he bounces around Anyways, interesting guy, his memoir, serious scientist.

59:42Like his whole thing he's upset about, but it's like he will forever be known as the guy who discovered the Titanic. But he also had like the first direct – very quick summary. His big claim to fame in like the 70s I guess was like, hey, we should use these new deep sea submersibles to actually do observational science on the ocean floor. Like we should go down there and look at things. There's a lot to discover versus just like dragging sonar over it and stuff like that. And they went down there and first of all, went down there and got like the first visual confirmation of plate tectonics, which was a kind of new theory then.

1:00:17He's like, oh, we can actually see at the bottom of the ocean where this plate ends and this plate begins. There's all this lava in between. Then they found the first hydrothermal vents, hot vents at the bottom of the ocean, which changed the way that we understood chemistry because there was – or geology, I guess. And then he found these black smoker hydro vents that had a new type of organism that never existed before that was like they would live off of the chemicals and the chemosynthesis, the photosynthesis. So he ended up changing geology textbooks, chemistry textbooks, and biology textbooks in like a 15-year period.

1:00:53So he did this like really big science. And he found the Titanic in part because they needed a cover. He hasn't been able to talk about this for the last five years. He was working for the Navy. He was in the Navy in the reserves. He was working for the Navy on a mission to use the submersibles to check out the Thresher, which is a nuclear submarine that sunk out off of the Azores to try to see have the Soviets been there. like it's the containment vehicle, reactor vehicle intact. And they needed a cover story for going out there with all this equipment. And he said, well, what if on the way back we stop and look for the Titanic?

1:01:24And then we can just tell people, oh, I'm out on an expedition to see the Titanic. And they were like, okay, that makes sense. And they did. They went to the thresher and they blah, blah, blah. And on the way back, they looked for a Titanic and found it. But he couldn't talk about that until like more recently. So there you go. Interesting book. All right. I think that's enough for today. That's all we got for today. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next Monday with another one of these advice episodes. I know we've been kind of a little bit sparse on the AI reality checks. I'm sort of thinking through a more general format of that technology type of episode.

1:01:56So there's a little bit of delays now, but I have some pretty grand visions for a much more robust second technology-themed episode for this feed. So bear with me. That's coming back soon. And until next time, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you've made it this far, you must be ready to join my fight 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. You can sign up at calnewport.com slash ideas. And when you do, I will send you a free guide to my seven best ideas about cultivating a deep life. Sign up today, calnewport.com slash ideas.

1:02:39Thank you.