Why Do Digital Detoxes Fail? What Works Better? | Monday Advice

27:58You have those books with you at all places or training. You have the ability to do physical training or exercise like the stuff you need is at least right there to get started on it. You need to make the paths to these deep rewards accessible and ubiquitous if they are going to compete with your phone. You also need sufficient pathways to deep rewards in your life that you have a sufficient density of options. You probably need three to six different deep reward producing activities that you sort of keep juggling or are in the hopper, they're there as possibilities. I mean, again, I saw this with the digital declutter results.

28:31It's the people that did a lot during that period without their phone that had the best success after that period ended. Because if there's just one thing you do, there's a lot of situations where that's not something you can really reasonably make progress on, and then there's nothing to compete against the phone. All right, so if I pull these threads together, I just thought this was really interesting to learn about what's really going on. And it's all about simulations of possibilities. And if the simulation ends with a really big reward, going down that path can win out. But the only way that the thing at the end of that simulation is going to get received in your brain in the basal ganglia as a real reward is if you've actually experienced it before.

29:14And that's why I say it's like a bootstabbing process. You have this initial process of like, I'm forcing myself to do a lot of things to generate deep rewards that I wouldn't normally do at this level or density. But the more you do it, the more easy it will be to keep doing it. And then eventually you fall into this rhythm where you're much more interested in pursuing deep rewards than, you know, seeing someone get hit by a bull on X. So it bootstraps on each other. So this is why the digital declutter was successful is because it's not because it got people away from their phones. It's because it got people analog reprogramming.

29:51It bootstrapped the process of helping the simulations win over the consistent but moderate value signals of picking up the phone. And so stop thinking so much about how do I get away from my phone and think much more about how do I get towards the things that are better. It'll be hard at first. You'll have to force yourself and take some days off. I don't know however you want to do it, but it will get easier if you keep pursuing those rewards. all right so there you go jesse reporting from my studio in dc how uh how do you rate my my neuroscience lecture i kind of like it have you finished the book yet no i have it here i am on page uh no i'm on page 261 is this part of the thinking research or is it just a random it is yeah so so you know i'm working on this book about thinking and so i'm reading a lot about thinking and its role like the history of thinking so if i want to know the history of thinking i realize i need to know the history of the human brain and that is why yeah so that's why i'm reading this book it's like my fourth or fifth book my plan is to read like maybe 10 books this summer that are just about thinking the impact of thinking i'm just trying to understand thinking as well as possible before i move forward in that new book project i'm thinking about hey let's take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that make this show possible.

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34:34Our first note comes from Paul, who is passing along an article. All right, so Paul says, in case you haven't seen it, I was sure you'd find this essay interesting. Well, Paul, I'll be the judge of that. Maybe I won't, but let's see what Paul had to send along. I'm going to bring this up on the screen for people who are watching. All right, so here's the article. It's from the New York Times. The title is The Lo-Fi Way I Broke My Addiction to the Algorithm. There's a sort of claymation picture here. I did read this. So Paul, I have seen this before, but let me try to get to the core of it. All right.

35:17So the author of this article says, it's why I've been trying to live a summer of LUD, a term I'm cribbing from a group that has been papering flyers all over New York City this past few weeks in an effort to get people off their phones, dot, dot, dot. For me, less and less has been, okay, I've been staging an experiment for the past few months. I've removed to all my social media apps, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and moved them onto an old iPhone I had lying around my house. I dubbed this phone my scroll phone. I designated a single spot in my home where I could use it, a stripy armchair in my living room, which I have now anointed the scrolling chair.

35:54All right. So this is this op-ed about this idea of all my social media is on one phone that I only use while sitting in a particular chair. And this author said like, okay, that's been really successful. Jesse, what's your I have a complicated take on this. What's your guess though? What's your guess on where I'm going to come down on this suggestion? Oh, that's a good question. Pro or con or in between? I guess it depends on how long she sits in the chair. Yeah, she goes on to say she sits in the chair 17 hours a day. Con. She just sits there scrolling constantly. just put in my veins. Actually, it's a hard question to ask you because I have sort of mixed reactions.

36:43The thing I think that is good about this advice, if we're going to put on our neuroscience hat, is that what you're tuning down is the pattern recognition from the cortex, the old cortex of the phone and the phone being nearby, right? So like those apps are not on her normal phone. They're only over by a chair. She's sort of convinced herself that's the only place you use the phone. So she's not in a context where she has time or is near the chair. It's just not coming up as an option as much. So that does probably help, right? Is that your brain then is like not really voting for using your phone unless you're like in the room where the chair is and have time to go sit in the chair.

37:21That also puts a little bit of friction on it.

37:26So On the other hand, you know, what you really need to do eventually is like what we just talked about, which is analog reprogramming, right? So like what you really need to do is to, instead of just having elaborate ways to try to put gates around this otherwise highly appealing activity, is to make more valuable activities more appealing. They get to a place where even if your pattern recognizers are sparking about your phone, you're not drawn to pick it up, right? So I think analog reprogramming is going to be much more effective in the long term than simply trying to add more friction or gates around phone usage.

37:59My bigger issue is that this reminds me a little bit. I mean, I don't know. This has vibes of the alcoholic that has like the super complicated rules around like when and how they drink. And I, you know, it's only on these days if like I've seen I'm around this person and only this much and I keep it over here and I keep the alcohol. And in the end, you're like, man, you're going through a lot of effort to make it seem like you're doing something about your drinking issue, but making sure that the alcohol stays in your life. It does kind of have that feel a little bit, that sort of like the elaborate rules that drunks end up having that they put around their drinking.

38:37So if you're having to have a scrolly chair and all these other times, an old phone or this or that, I mean, at some point you're like, maybe I just shouldn't use social media. So I'll throw that out there as well. But anyways, I like the idea. I like that it's successful. We know from our brain science some reasons why that that we would expect that to be successful um but i don't think by itself it's a full solution even before like when i was just a fan of the show and you had all your advice about social media i just basically followed it so now i never go on it but if people like text me a link or something i'll open it because i still have the apps i just never go on it so i can see like a link if somebody sends me a link or something like that so that's all i do well that's probably where you want to get right is in some sense you want to be in a place where you don't have to have elaborate rules and gates to try to keep you away from it it's just not as appealing to you you don't i mean it's all bootstrapping yeah you you use it less other things build more rewards um however i did draw a line a couple days ago somebody sent me a tiktok link and i was like i can't open it so the next time i saw him i was like you have to show me on your phone because i'm not going to download the tiktok app so good for you good for you i know it's funny like i have most of these apps somewhere on my phone from various articles i've written in the past where i have to use them or this or that but like i don't know i have tic tac i have tic talk on here i think from the article i wrote for the new yorker last year where i use tic toc um and i have zero interest in like i'm clicking on it now does this even work anymore all right clicking on tic toc update your app so there we go it's like i can't expected me to bury an entire airplane in my backyard.

40:20Is that Brad? No, sounds like Brad. All right, there's a video of someone burying an airplane. I mean, that's awesome. I take it back. Can I tell you what I just saw, Jesse? Is this real? All right, so I just saw a guy, and this whole video is only like two minutes long. He buried an airplane in his backyard, like a passenger jet it looked like covered it over put grass on top of it cut off the front put like hobbit doors on it so you can go down this like passage in his backyard to be inside an airplane and it's probably a deep work studio i take it back we all should be watching tiktok this is so look this is what i have to contend with reading my book about the history of brain structures or watching a video of a guy burying a plane in his backyard.

41:17Oh man. Um, okay. What else do we got here? Danny has a follow-up to last week's interview with Brad Stolberg, right? Last week we had Brad on, we were talking about optimization and about how over optimization doesn't necessarily, uh, lead you. It can make things worse. All right. So Danny says, this isn't necessarily a new article or link but i was listening to your episode with brad stolberg about the optimization paradox and a lot of the discussion revolved around problems that are basically explained by good heart's law this is the idea that once an indicator becomes a metric that is targeted it loses its power as a useful indicator all right i feel like i should load this up here good heart's law so i found the summary of it i'd heard it but people mention this a lot in the context of AI.

42:08So I have a summary here. What is Goodhart's law? There's three key takeaways. Let's just look at these. Takeaway number one, Goodhart's law warns of distorted metrics when tied to goals. It states when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure, emphasizing how metrics can lose their effectiveness when manipulated to meet specific objectives. The second takeaway, the law highlights the risks of over-focusing on targets, prioritizing specific metrics can lead to unintended consequences such as gaming the system, neglecting broader goals, or sacrificing quality. And three, the takeaway is balancing metrics with context is key to avoid the pitfalls of Goodhart's law.

42:47Organizations should treat metrics as tools for guidance rather than rigid targets, ensuring they align with long-term objectives and core values. I don't know if that needs to be a law, but I do think that is common sense, that if you have a single metric that you're like, this is what I'm pursuing, that doesn't necessarily optimize the actual result that you care about if those two things are different. Okay, I completely believe that because this, to me, is the core problem of knowledge work right now, right? So in my book, Slow Productivity, I talk about this idea of pseudo-productivity, that the primary way that we try to organize our efforts in the knowledge work context is around the belief that visible effort is a proxy for useful effort.

43:32So the more busy you seem, the more useful we assume you're being, right? So there we have a metric, busyness, visible activity, that a lot of people in knowledge work are trying to maximize. But as we know, if you listen to my podcast or read my books, busyness is often far disconnected from actually producing things of value. So we've seen this real clearly with AI and computer programming, there was this period that already has come to an end. But there was this brief period this year, after the coding harnesses got successful, in which we had, but before the prices had actually been raised to their actual real prices, when everything was still heavily discounted, we had a bunch of companies that would say the metric we care about for you as a programmer is how many AI tokens you burn using our coding harnesses.

44:18So the more AI tokens you're burning, we will assume the more useful code you are producing. We're going to have leaderboards at many of these companies to see who's burning the most tokens. This turned out to be a terrible metric to optimize for because it's very easy to get these AI models to burn endless tokens and produce code that it checks the code and this code goes to that code and here's 30 versions of the code. It doesn't mean that you're producing good code and it doesn't speed up the rate at which features actually get added or products actually get shipped. Now, pretty quickly, the token leaderboards went away because, again, as I mentioned, to try to get people to use these harnesses on top of these models, Anthropic and OpenAI were selling tokens at a real discount.

45:06They basically had these unlimited accounts. You pay$200 a month and burn as many tokens as you wanted. It was costing a lot more to actually do this compute because it's expensive. And so when they adjusted to say, here's the real price, all those leaderboards went away because you had people who were spending tens of thousands of dollars a month to get to the top of that leaderboard. And again, if it was leading to massive increases in the amount of value being shipped from the companies, then maybe it was worth it, but it doesn't. And it's kind of the paradox of AI programming is that AI tools help you produce a lot more code, but they don't necessarily massively speed up the rate at which features get added or products get shipped.

45:45The real place you see the major productivity gains is if you're building proof of concepts, if you're trying to hack together prototypes, or if you don't really care about the quality of the code, it seems magical. If you're working on a mature code base, things are much more complicated. So Goodhart's Law, I think that is useful. Again, I think we got this with if we rewind to clock with pseudo productivity. We get like email response times, amount of times you're on Slack, the number of meetings you're jumping in and out of all metrics you can maximize that aren't directly connected to actually producing value.

46:17So I agree, Danny, I think Goodhart's law. I think that is that's useful. That's useful, you know, useful terminology for us to throw into the mix here. All right, Jesse, what do we got for question three? Our next note is from Nina, who is sharing a policy article she thought you might find interesting. Interesting. Yeah. So Nina said, I want to share a screen time policy piece someone reached out to me about. Well, hey, you know, nothing gets me more interested than screen time policy pieces. This is like catnip for me. Let's load this up here on the screen for those who are watching. All right.

46:55So this article is showing up in health affairs. the title is digital addiction is a public health problem is public health law the solution and we see a group of authors here lead author sophia palmieri all right the subhead says engagement maximizing architecture such as infinite scroll autoplay and emotionally targeted notifications remain broadly permissible that gap however is now being challenged on multiple fronts. So I'm going to read a core paragraph here. Let's see, where did I find this? Okay. I read this earlier, so I'm just going to hone in on this paragraph, which I think kind of gets to the big idea here.

47:38Public health law has long addressed harms arising from commercially engineered products by deploying a familiar regulatory toolkit, product design standards, warning and disclosure requirements, advertising restrictions, age-based access controls, surveillance obligations, and funding mechanisms for treatment and prevention. These tools align with different public health objectives. Regulators might prioritize reduced consumption. Controlled access restricts availability to ensure that only patients with appropriate clinical indications can obtain prescriptions or safer engagement through mandatory design standards.

48:18All right, so what they're saying here, and let me find, there's one other paragraph I want to define here. Okay, so up here it says, contemporary digital platforms are explicitly designed to maximize engagement by leveraging well-characterized reinforcement mechanisms. What scholars study gambling have termed addiction by design, including variable reward schedules, emotionally salient feedback, and frictionless continuation and social media algorithmic feeds and ai chat system the risk is further amplified by hyper personalization modern recommendation systems continuously infer user preferences emotional states and vulnerabilities tailoring content or conversations real time to maximize engagement intensifying exposure to emotionally salient or validating stimuli and reinforcing compulsive use through variable and individualized reward structures so what they're arguing is like hey, this sounds familiar to other things that we have regulated.

49:10And if we look at the way those other regulations have happened, we might see a possibility for how we would regulate screen time. If you read the article more, and I read it in some detail earlier, again, they have these models of tobacco use, gambling, and other age opioids. And they said, we have overlaps between all three of those with screen time. And each of those has particular solutions. So like with tobacco use, we had age gating, right? It was kids shouldn't use tobacco because their brains can't handle it. And we have education. We're going to educate about the harms and addictive nation of tobacco.

49:54With opioid, it's controlled access. Actually, the state is going to control who gets access to it and under what circumstances. And then when it comes to gambling, there is design restrictions, right? So like there are restrictions on what you can and can't do when you're doing gambling games, right? Like what is allowed, what's not, what you can do with the variable reward schedules or not. There's a lot of restrictions, for example, around slot machines, like how slot machines are allowed to behave or not behave, et cetera. So they said we have like responses for all three of these things that overlap screen times.

50:27And as I read closer, they said the gambling response is probably the most relevant. So in the same way that we have restrictions about how games designed to be addictive in a casino work, we could imagine a world in which we had similar restrictives about digital addiction. So they say here, yeah, so they called it design safeguards to mitigate engineer addictiveness. I'm interested in this, right? I would say traditionally I had been skeptical about the idea of regulating reduced addictiveness of technology because my main concern is when I read thinkers and digital ethicists and policymakers talking about engineered addictiveness, they hone in on, they have this mental model where they can hone in on these like particular things you added onto a digital product that made them addictive and you could just turn them down.

51:23This was my issue with it is I don't think that model is correct. So they're like, well, you know, in this mental model, they'd be like, you know, you know, something like Twitter or TikTok, the issue there is, well, you have infinite scroll, or you have a particular way that like the new posts pop up, that's like a slot machine. And that's kind of, that's addictive, where they talk about dark patterns, which is really kind of a nonsense term for like, well, the way it interacts with you emphasizes addictiveness. The whole point here in this type of thinking and this mental model is we could turn those features off and then have a version of TikTok or Twitter that wasn't addictive.

52:01But that's not actually my understanding of how these things work. I think the addictive loop, the thing that makes the basal ganglia always vote to pick up that phone and look at that app is actually typically just in the core functioning of the app, right? It's I'm showing you videos and I'm selecting the video to show you based on things you liked before. It's a very simple feedback loop that pretty quickly locate subsets of the videos in the space of possible videos that generate a novelty or humor or other type of positive reaction in you and then you want to keep looking at it there's not a feature you turn off that makes that not addictive that's the that's the issue with the engineered addictiveness approach is that i think this this model just isn't correct now you could say we'll turn off the algorithm but that the algorithm is just a thing that decides what video to show you next in the context of TikTok.

52:53It's using a pretty basic multi-armed bandit style optimization. If you turn off the algorithm, what's it showing you then? Like what videos does it show you? So that's always been my issue, is that I don't think the mental model of social media is fine, and then we added addictive features, made it bad, turned us back off again. I just don't think that mental model is right. I think for a lot of people, it's built in, there's this sort of valence switch on things like Twitter, where for a while, if you were more like a left-leaning academic, Twitter was great and exciting. And then it kind of got as shitified and got worse.

53:30And so you have this paradise loss idea of something must have made this worse, so we can go back to the way it was before. And I actually just think it's somewhat fundamental. On the other hand, this is what's interesting to me, is like, okay, let's pull this thread. If we really were serious about no engineered addictiveness is bad. So using recommendation algorithms that are using fine-grained observations of your behavior to decide what to show you to be as engaged, like you can't do that anymore, that's not allowed. TikTok goes away, right? That is what TikTok is, but maybe that's not the worst thing.

54:08And if you're Instagram, right, or you're Facebook, you go back to follower feeds. these aren't algorithmically curated so i'm just seeing a reverse chronological timeline of like stuff that's being posted by people actually have to follow that wouldn't be the worst thing i think these things would be much less addictive like the way twitter used to work is like you would look at your timeline and then if you came back to look at it 10 minutes later you're like none of the 100 people i follow who i think are interesting said anything new there's nothing there all right let me move on with my life new acts will be like no no no hold on hold on hold on let me show you a i have a someone getting sucked into a drain pipe to show you or a fight or someone getting hit in a car like i'll just show you there's always stuff here to see so actually the thing i thought was a bug with the engineered addictiveness reduction regulation argument the fact that like it's just fundamental to how these things work actually maybe is a feature then like if you can't be engineered addictiveness it you can't have a lot of these platforms or they have to go back to the way they were before when they were interesting, but not compelling in this way.

55:15Our understanding of brain science that we talked about today helps us understand why this is, right? If like looking at X, sometimes you get something new that's interesting from someone you follow and most of the time you don't, means that it's reward signals way more inconsistent and the power of the votes for picking up the phone to look at X is going to be much less than in a world in which it will always find something using a personalized algorithm to show you. So I think that's interesting. But again, there's all devil's advocate. But then someone will say, but what if Netflix wants to recommend shows?

55:46Does it mean it can't do that anymore? And wouldn't we want there to be auto-recommendations? And hey, maybe not. Maybe we want this all to be human curated. So I don't know. Jesse, I've had a complicated history with this type of regulatory path. I don't think people's mental model of engineered addictive is right but the actual model actually if we get rid of that that's a much bigger swing but maybe it's something we have to consider i don't know what would you think about like a netflix this is not the addictive issue with netflix because it's not a close a rapid feedback loop like with tiktok but if you got rid of recommendations on netflix i don't think that would really matter i think most people are just finding they're happy to be like recommended stuff by people but i don't know maybe i'd be naive here yeah all right what else do we got our final question comes from jessica and it's about deep work in the age of ai all right let's see here jessica says my law school assigned deep work as summer reading oh that's cool we should find out what law school that is jesse yeah and i'm reading it does you know or is it not i don't know no okay and I'm finding it to be incredibly relevant in this current AI-centric climate, despite it being published before the ongoing chokehold that AI has on everyone, especially students.

57:08I really wanted to know if you had some new thoughts or a kind of follow-up to the book in the context of generative AI currently and its effect on deep work. To me, deep work regarding law is more important than ever. Yet, as I read the book, I can't help but wonder how many of my fellow students will only ask ChatGPT to summarize it for them and not bother reading it for themselves. do you have any thoughts or insight as to the value of deep work now in relation to many falling back on AI for tasks that had previously been worked through manually? The book is as relevant as ever, but I find myself wanting some commentary on deep works place directly in the context of the heavy use of AI among students.

57:45It is a good question because the context surrounding deep work has changed from when I wrote that to now. And here's one of the big changes I've seen in the AI age. In 2016, when that book came out, the number one issue was that people were undervaluing deep work. So they weren't spending enough time doing true deep work. And because of that, the value they were producing was being artificially capped. By prioritizing other things like responsiveness or meetings or pseudo productivity, you didn't get enough time for actual pure deep work. And because of that, it actually was holding you back how much value you could produce.

58:20The other issue I was trying to correct in that book is that people didn't understand what deep work was. So even when they thought they were doing deep work, they were doing things like quick checks of email inboxes and Slack channels and not realizing that that was a catastrophe for their cognitive capabilities, that all of that cognitive context shifting was causing lots of issues. And so if you could be more careful about how you approach deep work and you prioritized it more, you would be happier, you'd produce more value. So it was about people just not doing enough deep work or understanding how to do it well.

58:53In the AI moment, we have this other issue, which as Jessica mentions, is people outsourcing things that would normally require deep work, like reading a book. Basically, anything that causes cognitive friction, which almost always is going to be abstract processing. We're using our brain in ways that we weren't evolved for. So any times we're grappling to understand words or to produce words or understand mathematics or produce mathematics, these are examples of activities that cause cognitive friction. People are turning to AI to try to reduce that friction. So typically, you would need to use deep work to understand a book in a law school class.

59:29But now you could get a summary of it, and you have to expend a lot less energy. The reason why this is a problem is that it makes you dumber. And if you're dumber, you're worse at deep work for when it actually has to happen. The friction is what you want. that is the feeling of the metaphorical muscle getting stronger if you want to be stronger you actually have to do the exercising and so if you don't grapple with a book which is hard and causes cognitive friction you don't really understand that material very well and if you don't understand it very well you can't deploy it very well later when you need to when you whatever you're doing in this context in your law context it makes you dumber you're just not getting the benefits deep work gives you benefits in terms of understanding same thing with writing it's uncomfortable to have to yoke together many different parts of your brain to put letters onto a blank sheet of paper but writing is how your brain categorizes makes sense and better refines your understanding of things this is i mean we've been doing it this way for a while at law school you struggle with text you struggle to write about those texts that is making your brain stronger so that you can do law if you have a machine do those things for you your brain is not getting stronger you will be a worse lawyer.

1:00:40It's the equivalent of just having another student do your work for you. Yeah, that's easier. But the whole reason why you're doing that work is because you're trying to create a lawyer brain, which requires a lot of training. Just like if we're going to make you into a special operations operator, we would want you to do all this PT that we're doing at Naval SEALs training because we need your body to get very strong and your endurance to be very high. Otherwise, you're going to struggle when we put you in the missions. Same thing. If you want to be a lawyer, we need to do cognitive PT, which is going to be reading these terrible books and going through all these footnotes and wrangling with it to try to write clear briefs.

1:01:14And your mind as you write, like, this doesn't quite make sense. My logic's not quite there. And in all of that, your brain is getting in the Navy SEAL shape because that's what you need for the equivalent of a Navy SEAL mission in our cognitive world, which is like working on a complicated law case. So yeah, I used to worry that people just weren't doing enough deep work. and now i'm worrying that they're outsourcing the deep the obvious deep work that remains and are getting out of the benefits because of that so yeah i do think it is an issue uh you know it's funny i have a call right after this about ai policy at the university level so i've been thinking a lot about this um and you know we need to i think we're at a point now with ai where we have to think about the human brain why it's important what we value about and what we're trying to do about it.

1:02:01From a humanistic standpoint, what is the goal? What do we want to do with our brains and why? And then step back and say, so where do I want to use AI or not? Just like we would do with physical fitness. I could drive around on a rascal scooter and make sure that I never moved my body at all. And that would be easier in the moment, but it's not good for my body. It'd make me less healthy and I'd be more miserable about it. We just got to start thinking that same way about our mind. Again, I think the role of AI in education right now should be incredibly limited right incredibly limited it should be it should be basically focused only when there's ai driven tools that's used in a professional academic context as you get to the right level of training you can learn how to use those tools but otherwise this is navy seal training for your brain if you're at law school you're at a university it doesn't make sense to bring in polio to lift the weights or to have someone else do the sit-ups for you.

1:02:57So, you know, I think we're going to get better at this. We're all still trying to grapple with this, Jesse, but, um, my new book, which I haven't just an inkling in my eye, my indefensive thinking book, we'll get into this, but all I'm doing now is reading books that maybe will help me figure out what this book would be about. It's so far from now. I can't even think about it, but in theory, it's something I am going to tackle. So your last book, you signed a two book contract. Are you going to do the same thing? No, I want to just sign. I just want to sell this next book because i don't know what's going to come next i i'll do a two book context if i have two good ideas i mean i signed my last two book deal is like basically at the end it was in the pandemic and i it was uh slow productivity in the deep life and i was like i knew i wanted to write those two books next it's many years later that finally we're almost there but this time i just want to write this next book and then see what comes next after it yep all right well let's uh before we conclude for today, we like to briefly check in on one of the episodes about what I'm up to.

1:03:58Clearly I'm not in the deep work HQ. Jesse is, uh, I'm up in Vermont. I'll tell you what's clutch about this place. Jesse, we were in different places each year, uh, for now until I build my, my deep work HQ North, which will happen. It will happen. Mark my words. This place is walking distance to a trail system. Okay. To me, that's important. I love thinking walks, thinking walks in the woods are great. and to be able to walk into a trail system and do my thinking walks, that has been clutch. So I'm adding that to my list for things that the Deep Work HQ North is going to have to have. Do you have a thinking walk schedule for today?

1:04:40Yeah, I hope so. Let me see. We work on the podcast. I have a call that we're going to go into town. Yeah, tonight. If the rain holds off, I'll definitely do. a thinking walk uh definitely do a thinking walk tonight yeah i've been working on an article up here so like i've been i just submitted a draft so that's that's the only reason why so i don't even know what i'm thinking about um i don't know where i am with the book i think i'm gonna have to do like a july book round up the old-fashioned way next week jesse because i don't know we put a couple episodes in the can i don't know what the last book i talked about i've been reading a lot of books i'm in the middle of a lot of books i don't even know so i'm gonna just wait until next week when I'm back and I have my reading list from home and I'll go back but I'm I I don't know where I am just as long as the audience knows that you haven't quit reading is no I'm about to finish two books in the next couple of days I think I finished a couple books right before I left um I think this might be a seven book month I think in the end but we'll see but yeah I don't even I don't even remember where we are so I have not quit I'm reading more than ever i'll do an old-fashioned book roundup um once i'm back to the hq next week uh otherwise hopefully hq is doing okay i ran a lot of experiments in there when you were gone jesse you might notice there's like a growing number of circuits in the in the maker lab area yeah let me just say this for people who understand when i'm thinking about my halloween animatronics I successfully, before I left for this trip, can now, uh, am able to program, uh, sequence and X lights that I can then download onto my Falcon player controller on a Raspberry Pi, which can then connect to, uh, uh, light controller.

1:06:28I'm using Elgato plus light controller over an ethernet network. And that controller can then control multiple programmable lights. So I now have the full work chain in place for doing professional caliber sound lights, and actuator motor synchronization and control so that I can achieve my goal for this year of having a fully coherent Disney style animatronic Halloween scene with movement lights and sound all synchronized and a countdown timer in between execution. So I have all the technical chain in place. Now I actually have to just start working on the actual props. So that's, I've been hard at work with that.

1:07:06I know you follow that closely and you check all my circuitry when you come in. So hopefully it all looks okay. But I, I am happy about that. As long as you don't turn into Walt Disney and smoke three packs a day, then you're fine. Uh, I don't know, man. He was creative. That's like a Mason Curry book. What artists do. I'm going to have to start smoking through it. Not just three packs a day. He also, this, this, this all I'll have to do as well. He, you know, he had bad back because he had injuries from playing polar or whatever. And so by the late 40s, early 50s, every day he had a nurse, a full-time nurse named Hazel George.

1:07:44And every day at the end of the workday, she would give him a pretty extensive back massage in his office, but she would mix him a whiskey-based drink, which he would drink through a straw because he was on the massage table. so he could be drinking. And I would bet you, I would bet you, you know, Mickey Mouse's shoes that he had a cigarette in the other hand as well when he was doing that massage. Let's be honest. This guy had it figured out. If you're going to smoke three packs a day, you don't have much downtime. Yeah, you got to get after it. So think about that. Daily massages while drinking whiskey through a straw and smoking a cigarette.

1:08:24This guy lived life. Did die at 65. um i am reading a disney book by the way that is excellent it's uh i'll talk more about it you know next week in the roundup it's an academic book it's a crazy book an academic book new book princeton university press by an art historian at uc irvine named ronald bethencore uh that is getting into like the precise use of industrial automation technology deployed for rides in Disneyland and kind of like there's, there's a, there's an academic thesis here about Disneyland as being a place to sort of like expose and expose people to the logics of automation, et cetera, et cetera.

1:09:10But man, this thing is research. He is like in the weeds on his art historian, but he's in the weeds on my type of nerd stuff. Like this type of programmable logic controller was used and wired up in this way for the, the, the, for the, the Matterhorn Bob sleds, Like just all of the technical details of the engineering behind these rides. I'm like, this is a crazy book. But I am happy it exists. So I have some good Disney content for sure. All right. That's enough of that. We should probably call it here. But thank you everyone who's listening. I believe next week, we'll be back in HQ, right? This is the only one we're recording while I'm on the road?

1:09:44Yes. All right. So I think next week I will be back in the deep work HQ. No. So, and probably we will have, I don't know. I think there'll probably be an AI reality check. I get so mixed up on what we're recording, what we're not. You know what? Just stay tuned. Stay tuned. You never know what you're going to get, but I'll always be good on the deep questions feed. So 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 received my email newsletter each Monday, you can sign up at calnewport.com slash ideas.

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