How to boost Your Productivity Using Deliberate Slowness | Cal Newport

24:50And then between let's say noon and like three or four o 'clock is podcast. Like we're doing this podcast right now at 2 PM because you still need to be creative, but it's not like, it's kind of like shared creativity. Like I'm talking to you and, and it's a little, it's a little easier than let's say writing a book. And, and then after that, I return like business related costs because again, not that business is easy, but it's not rocket science. You know, I have 30 years experience. I could do phone calls and I don't need to be like, have super high energy at that point. And so that's me scheduling and structuring my day.

25:31Very rarely will I switch from that, that format. And that's how, if I'm productive, like if I produce output in each one of those timeframes, then it looks like I'm amazingly only productive. Well, and also that structure you have on your time is implicitly a back pressure on your commitments as well. Like you, you might not think about it this way. Like I have an exact count of what types of things I work on and how many things I work on them, but you figured out this is, this is a reasonable day that over time is going to produce a lot of good stuff. Be creative, do podcasts, finish your business calls like normal end of day, then be done.

26:05This is probably a thousand times without you even really realized it been the back pressure that got you to say no to other opportunities. Because your mind is thinking, if I took on this, where's that going to fit? That's going to take a lot of time. Where's that time going to come from? Well, I'm going to have to take away the creative time in the morning. I'm going to have to work later. So there's something to being really clear and structured about this is my day. Like I commit to investing in these things, these time, carefully chosen, and just let that aggregate for a year and good stuff's going to happen.

26:36In 10 years, it's going to be very impressive. That's going on as well. Yeah, so do fewer things and then be very intentional about how you structure and approach those fewer things. That's it, right? That's the recipe to slow productivity. Everyone who, not everyone, but most people who you find stories of who have produced this super productive, interesting stuff, that's kind of what they're doing. One thing that's tricky, though, is that being younger is different than being older. So being in your 20s is different than being in your 30s, 40s, 50s. So, and this is where the Benjamin Franklin story comes in.

27:10So when he was in his twenties, that guy was just like kicking ass. Like he was, he had his publishing house. He was writing books. He started franchising his publishing to other cities. He was like Elon Musk of the 18th century. Right. He was doing a lot of things. Like, and it's not like travel or zoom was around, you know, to set up a publishing house in Boston and South Carolina while he lives, living in Philadelphia. It takes days to travel. And so he got burnt out. And as you point out, he, and this becomes a classic story throughout the book, basically, he delegates. So, and in order to delegate, he has to give up some, or in some cases, half of his income.

27:54But then, you know, if he's, if he had someone running all the administrative sides of his publishing, which is what he did, he suddenly blossomed to become the Benjamin Franklin we know. I invented the battery, the lightning rod, became a statesman, and so on. But my question is, in your 20s, it's harder to delegate. And also, you do have energy to do everything. So maybe slow productivity is not the right remedy for someone in their 20s. Someone in their 20s is just like kick-ass all the time, maybe. Well, I mean, it's certainly easier to not do slow productivity in your 20s, but there is also still a long-term cost.

28:30if we think about aggregate benefits over time. Because let's take the Franklin story. The flip side of that coin is also the Jane Austen story. They both get at the same point, but with different strategies for getting there. So Franklin didn't start doing cool things until he got a lot less busy. So he gave David Hall, this young shop assistant, you take over the business, I'll give up all this money. I don't care. I want to, you know, invent the lightning rod. Jane Austen did something similar, right? There's this myth around Jane Austen that she would write surreptitiously on scraps of paper.

29:03And then like people would come in, like Mr. Darling would come in the room and she'd have to hide it. And it was this trope that everyone knew that the door to the sitting room had a creak. And when she would hear the creak, she would hide her writing. It all turns out to be nonsense. During the socially busy parts of her life, she got no writing done. It wasn't until later in her life, after her father died, her and her mom and her sister and a friend were like, we're done. They went to this cottage that was owned by their brother, started wearing common labors, clothes and working in the garden, no more social engagements.

29:32They're just like, we're just going to take a break from life. She wrote five books in five years, like all of her famous books were done there. So there's this, this lesson there when you're busy, you can't do great things. So yeah, when you're in your twenties, you can get away with being very busy. Like you can do it. And it's not a bad strategy for advancement as well, right? In a world of pseudo productivity, the 25 year old's the person that can be up slamming on slack all night long and showing people that they're, hey, I'm visibly active. But you're also giving up the time that you could be getting good at things.

30:02Like down the line are gonna make the big difference. You know, Franklin didn't start doing awesome things until he was well into his 30s because that's when he started working on awesome things. You know? But it was in his 20s that he was able to set up the scenario that could provide him a lifetime of income, albeit less income than he would have if he stayed devoted to it. But he built the business that he was then able to delegate so he could go off and do what he wanted because now he had this steady income. Yeah. Same, similar to the story as Jenny Blake in, in your book, which is she had like 10 different streams of income from her coaching, but she was getting burnt out.

30:40So she wanted to take two months off a year and reduce her obligations, but she had to reduce the income also, but she built it in her twenties. Yeah. But Jenny is, Jenny is interesting because she's kind of the answer to this conundrum, right? So yeah, we have this issue of, you know, your toys are hungry. You know, I got to make money. I got to establish myself. I mean, Franklin had nothing, right? I mean, he had to hustle. He showed up with, you know, the proverbial dime in his pocket in Philadelphia and just had to somehow make it work. So then how do we balance both of these things where you have to get established in a world that supports pseudo productivity and you're able to, you don't have the ability to hire David Hall yet or to move to your cottage on your brother's property, but also you don't want to give up the opportunity cost of getting good at things that really matter, like that long-term are going to really give you the options and the support.

31:30Jenny Blake is an interesting answer. So she didn't give up her company. She didn't move to a cottage, but she engineered her life saying, okay, I'm going to take two months off every year. And yeah, that's about 20 % income. Great. I'll live 20 % cheaper so that I can have this extra time in my life. This is what I think people should be doing in their twenties, not necessarily taking two months off specifically, but engineering in time, really well-protected time where I'm going to just be working on core skills and become really good at it. All my other work, I have to make fit around that.

32:04And you know what? You will. You get more efficient. You get more careful about what you say yes or no to. But don't start at 100 % saturation and busyness. Start with a commitment to at least part of my day is towards the slow development of something that matters so that you have that rewards of the compounding interest of skill building. So when you hit 30 or 35, you're not just starting then you're like, I'm also, I'm a great writer. Now my, I'm a great coder. Now I'm a great, uh, artist now, uh, I've been developing that skill. So, I mean, I agree with you. Your twenties are probably, you know, you got to hustle, but don't hustle a hundred percent start from the very beginning, protecting your sort of Google 20 % time.

32:42And do you think that's more possible than people think? Like, This reminds me of a story where it's like in the 00s, I had already written a bunch of books or maybe, no, it was like 10 years ago. So like 2014 or so, I'd already written a bunch of books and I went out to dinner to see some friends I hadn't seen in like 10 or 15 years. The whole dinner, they were talking about the books they were going to write, the plays they were going to write. And it's 9 p.m., 10 p.m., 11 p.m. And I'm thinking to myself, how are you guys going to do anything? Because you're up this late. now you're going to wake up late.

33:17There's no time to do anything. I sort of feel people have more time than they realize. And, and, you know, there's a concept of time auditing. Like people don't, like, I know one guy who's been on this podcast, David Levine, he started writing murder mysteries just by writing a page a day on the subway ride to his work every day. Like, cause you kind of have hidden gaps of time where you, where you could, not that you want to fill up every moment to your point, but you do have these moments that are wasted that people, yes, they're resting, but maybe it's like wasteful resting. Yeah. I mean, I think that's absolutely true, especially when you're young.

33:54You have a lot more give. I mean, young people often approach work like in this bullish, let's just get after it type of mindset, not realizing how inefficient they are. I mean, all throughout grad school, I was writing books, which people around me thought I was crazy, but grad students aren't very organized. And I was like, okay, this isn't so hard. Like be 50 % smarter about time management than like the average grad student, which means like, you know, what day of the week it is, right? I mean, this is not, this is not a tall order. And I'm like, oh, there's plenty of time. This is fine. And it's not like it was an easy grad school, right?

34:24I was in the theory group in the computer science lab at MIT. Like this was a pretty hardcore grad school, but there's a lot of time. You know, I was writing people, my students hate when I talk about this, but I was writing a book while writing my doctoral dissertation. Because I was like, there's not enough to do while you're writing your doctoral dissertation. Like, how long can I spend each day working on this? And what am I going to do for the rest of my day? Everyone is saying, like, just focus on your dissertation. I was bored. So I wrote an unrelated book at the same time. So I'm with you on that too.

34:53You make the time and then try to make everything else fit. And then you realize, oh, I can actually make a lot more fit than I think. There's so much more give than people realize they have. Most of what they fear turns out to be not, I'm not going to get enough done. It's much more about these social interactions. Like, well, what if like a boss doesn't see me respond? Way more of what we think of as necessary work is more about necessary sort of negotiation of the social capital surrounding work. And that's its own issue. But it's not the workload that's going to kill you. That's not really what they're worried about.

35:26It's the like, what if someone notices, I can't go to a meeting at 9 a.m. because I'm writing right then. I think that's where people really get more worried. You know, and there's also this mythology of speed. Like, you know, you have the story of Jack Kerouac, where, by the way, I always thought he wrote On the Road in Three Weeks, which is the myth of Jack Kerouac until I read your book, where essentially you describe it was six years of drafts and then revisions and so on. And so it's, it's, I think also, and there's this concept of forgiving yourself if you're not fast, even the people who seem like super fast really took years to either develop the skills or they started playing with an idea and then it developed over time.

36:09And, and it's time really that compounds, you know, your product, the outputs of your productivity, not speed. Yeah. And you see this time and again, like I took scientists were a good crystallization. of this, I thought, because they really get to this point well. That's why I told the classic scientist stories. You zoom in on the actual TikTok CVs of the greatest scientists from history. It's all over the place. It's like, wait, you took 20 years to actually write down the principia after you had the original insights about the inverse square law when the apple fell from the tree? Newton, what were you doing?

36:46Galileo, you timed the swinging pendulum lights in the church with your pulse and it was five years later until you actually bothered to write that down in a paper. Marie Curie, you're like honing in on the radioactivity theory. You're isolating it in the substance called pitchblend. You're finding radium. You're going to win a Nobel prize for this work. You're honing in on it. You're like, oh, we're going on a three-month vacation. You know, so like scientists get at this great. We're like, oh, Einstein, Galileo, Marie Curie, Newton. How productive. They changed the world. But they're over time.

37:21Like you zoom in. Galileo really loved playing the lute and was very in the poetry and theater. And they took their time working on things. This is something I've pointed out as early as my early writing career, when I used to write about successful students. I had this phrase I used to call the paradox of the relaxed Rhodes Scholar. I said, I know some Rhodes Scholars. Why are they not as busy or stressed out as a bunch of these pre-meds that, you know, I see around me. And I was like, because you see their CV and you collapse all the things they've done and you imagine what would it be like to work on all of these things at the same time?

37:59Oh my God, how would you even find enough time in the day? But they don't, they do one thing after another, they just keep going and eventually it all adds up into something really impressive. You know, we can't compress time out of the picture. And so it's like good news, bad news, good news. That means you don't have to be working 50 hours, you know, the next three days on your work. Bad news is you kind of always need to be working on something. So you can't aggregate results if you're not producing things to aggregate. So it's like, that's the bad news. But the good news is you don't have to work 12 hours today.

38:31You know, you can go slow, but steady. It's really true. And it's scientists are a good example or writers are a good example like we look at their bios and we think like i'll take an example of a story not in your book but like larry david who created seinfeld and also obviously writes the the excellent show curb your enthusiasm he's in his 12th season of curb your enthusiasm so we think oh my gosh you know 0.1 of shows have 12 seasons must be incredibly hard worker and he probably is but sometimes there's five six years between seasons yep and it's we don't that's not in the biography the biography is he has 12 seasons of this show or you know thomas pinchon has these six or seven excellent novels people forget there was like a 20-year gap between you know gravity's rainbow and whatever came next i forget um but i'm i always think and And I think maybe this is true for everyone.

39:29I always think if I'm not putting up a win every year or every few months or every day in some cases, everyone's gonna forget about me and I'm gonna lose everything I built. And I think the misconception I'm having internally is the quantity versus quality. If you put out something quality, it brings everybody back even more. But quantity means nothing. I think that's right. I think that's exactly right. Like the quantity, I mean, outside of, and maybe this is a social media effect, right? Because it gives you less opportunities throughout the given year to put something out that's impressive.

40:10But that is like a theme I come back to again and again. It's over time that's what matters. And because of that, why be stressed out about today? Like this is how I describe my writing output. I write a lot, right? I mean, I write books pretty commonly. I do 20 or 1 ,000 words a year for The New Yorker as well. I always say I write a lot. I'm always writing, but I never write a lot. That's the way I think about it. Like, it's just a part of my day is like, I'm not happy if I don't write some. But I very rarely write a lot. I'm very rarely writing at night. I'm very rarely doing really long things.

40:43It's just I write a lot over time, not a lot in any one day. You know, I wrote this morning. It was an hour, hour and a half. I'm working on a piece for The Atlantic. Not a big lift at all. 90 minutes of work. Not a big deal. But if I do that every single day, you know, exempting Saturdays, it adds up. And you're like, oh, here's seven articles and I got this book done. You know, that's a lot of things. That's Larry David. I'm always kind of working on something, but never too hard. Like it's just, let's be working on something cool, but keep the pace reasonable. You know, keeping a natural pace is maybe harder now than it used to be before.

41:19I think pseudo productivity makes it harder for sure. But when you look at these classic... So pseudo productivity being, again, the concept that... activity matters. Both your brain and your bosses and maybe your spouses are judging you based on how many hours a day you're, you know, hitting a hammer against a stone. Yep. How visibly productive are you? And again, this gets really bad in knowledge work because digital tools give you all of these ways of signaling productive activity that we didn't have before. So now it's like, I got to be answering like emails and Slack and the whole thing becomes like Kabuki theater.

41:50or, hey, look, I'm a worker. See, I responded to your email really quickly. And so that pushes us to be like, I got to be busier. And then what's the irony? We produce a lot less Larry David shows. We produce a lot less New Yorker articles. The good stuff can't get finished because we're so exhausted trying to be busy that we can't actually do the good stuff. And it's the cruel irony of it. It's not like if you work really hard, it's tiring, but you also produce a lot more work. So it's a good trade-off when you do the really busy pseudo productivity game. It's not just that you're exhausted and it's hard.

42:25You actually do less of the stuff that matters. So it's a double whammy. It's it's there's an irony to it. That's almost tragic. I think, I think also it's not even just about producing. It's about learning who you are. So for instance, take Benjamin Franklin. If he spent 20 hours a day working on his printing business, instead of outsourcing half of his time to someone else, maybe he never would have realized he was interested in the elements of electricity or, you know, what was politically going on in the world and so on. Like I find when I don't have things to do, it's when I find what it is I'm really interested in.

43:06Yeah. Well, it's a trap of being smart too, right? So smart people have a really hard time with pseudo productivity because whatever game you fall into, you realize I can do good at this. Like that's Ben Franklin. He's like, oh, I can, I can win at the game of printing like this. Okay. I get it. I want here. I expanded here. I can outdo you. I can outmaneuver you because he was smarter than most of these other people. I mean, if you read, I was reading the HW Brands biography. I really like, uh, even more so than the Isaacson biography. Uh, he was just smarter than the other printers in Philadelphia.

43:37Like they just, it was a different, they didn't have the same like at all costs capitalistic mindset and he was just really well read had a very quick mind and just like saw that the problem is that's so appealing so when you're smart like well let's just keep rock and rolling with what we're doing i can win at the game of pseudo productivity and you're right then you never get the downtime required to find yourself and like that's what i think for example lin-manuel miranda did so i really get into his story of writing his first major play in the Heights, which won a bunch of Tonys. We forget about it now because of Hamilton, but it won a bunch of Tonys.

44:11It was a triumph. I think it was eight Tonys it won. He took seven years to write that. And when I really broke down the story beat by beat of what he was doing, what he stopped doing, how he came back to it, a lot of it was he had to just discover himself more. Like he wrote a version of that play in college. He was at Swarthmore and did a version of the play at Swarthmore, and it wasn't good because he was 19. You know, he didn't have just the self-awareness and creative maturity to make a Tony Award-winning caliber play. So he had to take a while and take breaks and work on other things because he just also wasn't ready to produce that, right?

44:50Discovering yourself is not just navel-gazing. It ties back to what you do. You know, you see what's important in the world. You see what matters, you know. So I'm completely with you on that.

45:17so it seems like there's there's three parts of this this slow productivity there's one is forgiving yourself because i cannot tell you how many times over the years over the decades I've either felt guilty or other people have tried to make me feel guilty for taking some time off. Like it's just part of society that if you're not working every hour, you're guilty. Then it's a matter of, you know, making your schedule fit who you are. Like, again, I'll take Jenny Blake, but also your story of Paul Jarvis. They didn't want to, Paul Jarvis in particular, doesn't want to make a billion dollars, wants to live a happy life.

45:55so he structured his income in his life so that he could all his needs are taken care of which is all you really want anyway you want freedom and he's a happy guy and you know doesn't work as hard as he could have he could have made a lot more money you know scaling his business you know charging more at the same time and and so on but instead he figured out he figured out the schedule that worked for him to have down time and be happy and so on and then i guess the third part again is is delegating and understanding the trade-offs. You know, Benjamin Franklin reduces income, delegated. I will tell you a tipping point for me was the first time I ever, you know, hired somebody to do a job I could have done, that was such a freeing moment for me.

46:41Even it meant money coming out of my pocket to pay someone else. Like, and it resulted in me building a business because I realized I didn't have to do everything myself. Well, and I had a similar experience with my podcast, for example, because I have my rule half day, half day a week. And I was doing two episodes. I was doing all of myself. And I was like, I'm having a hard time fitting this or whatever. And so that led me like, okay, I'm going to hire someone. I'm going to go down to one show per week. So first of all, I'm going to give up downloads and I'm going to hire someone so that I don't have to touch a computer, you know.

47:11And that made such a big difference because then I could just focus on the podcasting. But I want, the point you're making there more generally, I think is such a great one. it's it's like you have to it's two things um get over yourself and get into yourself and like what i mean by that i'm sorry just invented that phrase now so you have to bear with me but i'm thinking that's title of your next book it should be right and i'm just thinking about this now but so tell me if you buy this um the get over yourself part is you're not going to be the best in whatever you're doing anyways like at some point you have to get over the fact that you're not gonna be the best and also no one is really tracking you and care as much as you think right this is a freeing thing for me.

47:49I, again and again, I've had this experience in my life of being taught that lesson, right? So like, I'm a smart kid in college. I'm breezing through the, my computer science undergrad. I'm just like, this is easy. And I go to MIT and it's like, this is what smart looks like. And I'm like, oh, that's not me. All right. I get it. You know, uh, I'm not Richard Feynman. These people are right. And you just knew like, I'm never going to be as good at doing mathematics in theory as the people who are here on this floor right now. I start writing books. I'm going to make my way up the writing hardcover books.

48:24And my first big hardcover book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, did not do well out of the gate. And then I wrote Deep Work. And I remember Deep Work was just coming out or it just came out. And they had reduced my advance on Deep Work versus So Good They Can't Ignore You because So Good They Can't Ignore You hadn't yet done much. And I talked to my agent. I remember I was upset. I was like, they're not really promoting the book. And my friend, you know, went into a Barnes and Noble with his family to get a copy. They didn't even have it, you know? And she was like, you know, you got to move numbers, right?

48:54No one cares about your idea or your promise. Like your last book has only sold this month, so they're not going to put much work into it. I was like, oh my God, I see. So like these other books are just doing much better. Great. I get that. And then I started writing for the New Yorker more recently and I was like, oh, I see. Like I'm never going to be as good of a writer. So again and again, right? It's just like, you're not going to be the best and people don't care. Like they're not tracking it. So instead like do something really well, but do it in like a very sustainable way and get into yourself, like really understand yourself.

49:25What have gratitude for what's going well, build a life that's interesting and intellectually fulfilling as options. Get into what you care about. Get over the fact that you're not going to be the best. Get over this idea that everyone's tracking you and are laughing behind your back because your book didn't sell as much as this other person's book. I don't know. That's been really good for me. It's hard in the moment, but getting over my side. It's really hard. Yeah, it's really hard. I feel like I'm still going through that and I don't know if I'll ever get over that. It's a hard thing. You can feel it.

49:56Let's do third wave psychotherapy here. It's like you're always going to feel, especially if you're an achiever, you're going to feel the bad feelings when it's like, man, that thing is doing really well and my thing isn't, or I was rejected from this. but we can get better at not letting those feelings be so important. You know, it's like, yeah, of course, that's how I feel around book launches. I always get upset and weird. And I always see other people's books. Like, why are they doing so much better? And I get nihilistic, but just separating from that a little bit and be like, this is awesome.

50:24I get to write books for a living. You know, I'm trying to get better at that, that, uh, but I think we are driven. This is all, everything I just said was driven by one thing you said, which is, uh, you feel really guilty to ever take your foot off the pedal. And it's from this idea of like, everyone is watching me and monitoring me and they're going to be really upset if they see I slow down. And at some point you realize no one's following you. They care about themselves. They're not tracking your every move. No one noticed that you took time off. No one noticed that this book didn't do it.

50:55They're like, Oh, you're whatever it is. People aren't in as into you as you think. I don't know if that's true which sounds ridiculous it is true it is true no one knows what no one knows like when's the last time I wrote a book no one knows how well like my books did there's like seven people who know they're like oh you write books I read deep work that's fun and that's it like that's as much as anyone and I think about all of the sweat I've had about like oh my god if I built my platform properly and what's happening with this or that it's those people are like oh I read deep work that's cool you write books Hey, let me tell you about something else I do.

51:30You know, that's it, right? That's where most people are. Let me ask you, like, you've been writing about work for, that's like all your books and in a very broad sense. So, you know, whether it's, you know, how, you know, so good they can't ignore you, deep work, all the way up to this book, slow productivity. What do you think, and obviously you're very talented, skilled as a writer. What do you think could be another challenge for you? Like, are you going to write another 10 books about work? Well, no, no, I'm not. And also, I don't even think about those books entirely as being about work.

52:07No, I get it because they are, they are, they're different aspects of life. Well, honestly, I see a techno thread, right? Because think about the book you left out there. Digital minimalism is not about work, right? Yeah. And so I think that's actually why I left that out. Exactly. Well, so it didn't prove my example. I see it more as a text impact on our life, right? Right? So computer scientists who has turned to try to understand how these tools actually impact us, right? Deep work, what's it about? It's about the rise of these distractions in the office have made uninterrupted focus more difficult.

52:38Unexpected side effect of technological innovations like email. So we have to now prioritize that in a way we didn't have to before. Digital minimalism. We're on our phones all the time, more than we want to be. What do we do about it? A world without email returning to the deep work question, how did we get to this place? Like, why are we checking email once every five minutes? It doesn't take much digging to find out that this is a very unproductive way to leverage human brains. So how do we get here? And what would a real solution look like? And slow productivity, like, I'm stretching a little bit here, but I'm just trying this out.

53:10The whole motivating event that kicks off the need for slow productivity is the mix of pseudo productivity with the high-tech office. And those two things don't play together. So I think about it more that way. But what do I want to do next? I want to become a better writer, right? And like, this is a lot of my program over at the New Yorker. There's a ladder there to climb. I want to become better, right? Like that's a place where they care a lot about craft. I'm a pretty good writer. I would like to be a really good writer. And that there's a set way to do that. You got to train, you know, you got to stretch yourself.

53:41You got to work with these world-class editors. So I want to become a better writer. That's one thing I'm working on. Two, I helped found this new center at Georgetown called the Center for Digital Ethics. So, you know, I'm really interested in being more formal in these ideas I've investigated in my books about technology and how do we cope with it? Like from a humanistic perspective, like how do we prevent new technology from making our lives worse? How do we leverage new technology and make our lives better? I think that there's a life's work maybe built into that, right? So that's a big thing that's going on as well.

54:12And so I am changing, right? I can't just write, I don't know how many books I can write that are just going to be, here's an idea and here's advice. You know, I have other things that, that, that I'm percolating as well. I have to grow. Well, and I, and I, I bet, I guess I could see those threads right in your writing, because I would say the concept of so good, they can't ignore you. It's a very, it's a very great concept. Like it makes me think of like Seth Godin style concepts that, um, Um, you know, that's, that's really the key. That's, that's, that's this thread of quality over quantity.

54:51Um, and if they, if, if your work is so good, they can't ignore you. Now you have a career, like that's really the, the essence of making a successful career. And, but that evolves into like this latest book where it's a book about productivity and work, but now you're weaving in all these different stories. You have stories in that book as well, but here now it's, it's much more this writing style that you've been evolving. And so I see that direction. And it's interesting with the digital ethics. The one thing that makes me think is that both of these concerns, and it's almost cliche for me to bring this up, but both of these concerns are related to artificial intelligence.

55:31Because with artificial intelligence, someone can be a bad writer and write 20 books a year. And of course, with digital ethics, AI is going to be written all over that. And like right now you're a PhD thesis. Let's say I'm, let's say someone's not a good writer and they're also have writer's block, but they have to write a PhD thesis. This is why some PhDs take like eight years, nine years to finish. So people just don't write, sit down and write their PhD, but now they could put in all their formulas and say, write a thesis around this. and they can write their PhD thesis in like five days. And you have to be a good writer now to really stand out from, I see it now every day in the news, I can tell which articles are written by AIs.

56:14Too many adjectives, too many adverbs. It's a little too glowing without being analytical. But no, maybe other people don't realize that because it's got all the facts, so it's written. And obviously AI has a big role in ethics, but I think both these directions are going. are somehow related to AI. Plus the idea of productivity. Again, I can write my PhD now in one-tenth the time if I want to. Well, I mean, AI is definitely something I've been thinking about. You know, I did a big New Yorker piece last year that was just trying to, I think it was like one of the first big pieces to get in the guts of just how a large language model works.

56:50I really want to read that. Yeah, no technical terminology. The New Yorker does not do technical terminology. All analogies. Let's really explain how these things work. And that was interesting because that article then sparked off a lot of one-on-one and group meetings. I did multiple Senate briefings after that, for example, a bunch of board of directors meetings. Like, it was really interesting, right, to see how people were thinking about this. Then I have another big A article. I'm working on it now. When this interview comes out, I'll probably already be out in The New Yorker, looking at the shortcomings of language models and what the next generation, I think a lot about it.

57:25When it comes to writing, though, So I'll give an optimistic, skeptical take, which is it's true, for example, like when it comes to writing books that AI will soon be able to write like pretty good books. But here's the thing. There's already a ton of people that could write a pretty good book, but they don't because there's not a big market for pretty good books. Right. Like, in other words, you already have to stand out just to sell a book. So like AI is catching up to what like an average college educated person could write if they spent a lot of time. Maybe what it's automating more is time, not the output.

58:01But there's not a big market for that because there's a lot of people who could do that. And they don't because what do you do with like, yeah, this is like a perfectly reasonable, perfectly reasonable book. Perfectly reasonable books don't sell. I guess that's a really good point. That's why I was more interested or focusing on a short articles. so like gossip order if you read a gossip article on the web like oh kim kardashian's now dating so and so i could i bet there's like an 80 or 90 chance it's written by ai and phd theses i don't think are written yet by ai but actually should be because like the biologist with the thesis is not a writer and the writing is slowing him down from getting to his career or her career they should use AI to write a poorly written PhD thesis, which is what most PhD theses are.

58:49Yeah. Well, I mean, more importantly, probably also is a non-English speaking scientist allows you to actually much more effectively get your work out there because English is the language de facto of science. Thesis is, again, I have a little bit of skeptical optimism. The hard part about theses in most field is not the writing. I used to have this argument a lot. When I was early in my career, I did a lot of appearances of what are called PhD or doctoral or dissertation boot camps. So like Georgetown or nearby universities, you have a bunch of doctoral students who are writing their dissertations.

59:24Like we're all going to get together for a week and like encourage each other. And they would often have me come by because back then I was seen as the like student productivity guy. And they would only ever use this verb writing. Like, yeah, you got to get your writing in. That's the problem. You're just not doing your writing. We need more time for writing. And I would always push back. And I was like, writing's the easy part. It's like having the idea to write about the hard part. Like I'm a mathematician. It's incredibly difficult to solve a proof. That's like what I spend 90 % of my time doing.

59:52Oh, and then I have to write it up afterwards. That's not the hard part. My problem is not, don't just tell me, hey, write every day. It's how do I solve really hard math proofs when I don't know how to solve it? And it's actually the case for a lot of fields, even humanity fields. It's like, I need an original theoretical framework for understanding this that's like literate and interesting and smart. And they get stuck not because writing's hard, but because their idea is not quite there. And if it's not quite there, people will know. So I always think there too, like the writing's not the problem, it's the ideas.

1:00:19But I will say this is where I'm excited about AI intersecting with academia is mathematics. Now, language models can't do mathematics in any sort of interesting way. When you combine language models with planning engines, which is a big push going on, and that's what my new article is about. When you combine AI models with planning engines, which can simulate into the future, this makes it possible for them to tackle a lot of more non-trivial mathematics, in particular, like simplifying equations. You can set up like a probability function and it can try to simplify a concentration bound. A lot of stuff that I don't think the average person doesn't necessarily understand that a lot of science has a lot of applied mathematics where it's just a pain and it's really hard.

1:01:02It's hard not because it's interesting, but it's just hard to manipulate equations. That's like most of theoretical physics. 20 % having the big idea, 80 % trying to make these equations simplify and find equalities, right? It's algebra, right? It's very difficult algebra. It's what slowed down Einstein. He's very good at math compared to you or me, but was not very good at math as compared to theoretical physicists. And it really slowed him down on general relativity because his math chops aren't there. AI might be able to help with that. Mechanistic applied mathematics. And I just know from my own work as a theoretical computer scientist, that could have doubled my productivity.

1:01:37That's interesting. I believe that, because AI is going to have all the techniques for theorem proving at its disposal, whereas the average, even mathematician, might not have those techniques. And it's not even going to be theorem proving. It's going to be more like, okay, I want to show this probability that I'm expressing as this equation is bounded by something like this. And then it's, so can you simplify this equation? Simplifying equations is like 50 % of applied mathematics. And it's just really hard algebra. For whatever reason, the researchers I was talking to, like mainly at Meta, because they'll actually talk to reporters still, they're saying these planning engines combined with language models, they're really good at that.

1:02:21simplifying algebraic equations, it's one of these sweet spots where these new technologies are going to be good at. So it would be like Einstein could have got general relativity three years earlier if he didn't have to teach himself, you know, Rheinman spaces and non-Euclidean geometry, if he could have just had help with that hard math so that his brilliant ideas could be out. So anyways, I'm optimistic about that. Applied mathematics is going to be much more accessible, which means we can select more for people with brilliant ideas. I mean, not to harp on this, but this was my problem as a theoretical computer scientist.

1:02:53I was pretty good, but I'm not a great mathematician. And that slows me to hell down. You know, if I could have help on simplifying probability expressions, I really do think I could publish twice as much. You know, I think I would have more, I have some awards, but I probably have twice as many awards. You know, it really would make a difference. Now, I'm just curious, like, this is like a side thing, but you, while you're doing all this computer science and why you've been a professor at Georgetown, has writing these other books and writing for the New York, all this kind of stuff, this outside activity, did that help or hurt you getting tenure?

1:03:26No, it was a no-op. It was essentially not mentioned in my tenure case, right? Okay. Because, I mean, there's a lot about academia people mix up, but like when it comes to tenure, it's simpler and both, simpler and harder than people realize. The vast majority of a tenure decision is based on a collection of confidential letters that are solicited from top scholars in your particular academic niche. And these letters focus on one thing. How good is their research? Like how impactful is it on the field? How interesting and hard is it? Who would you compare them to in the field? Of people who like recently got tenured or at their same rank, who is better than them?

1:04:06Who is worse than them? Where do they line up? It's like recruiting for a basketball team. It's incredibly myopic. And that's everything for a 10-year decision. There's some things you can do that can disqualify you. So like if you have abysmal teacher ratings, they might say, there's a problem here, even though he's a great, and if you're still, even if you're a great researcher, they'll overlook it, but you could hurt yourself with that. But you can't get 10-year on anything but confidential letters from top scholars looking at. So when I went up for 10-year, I had written my fifth book, I think had just come out.

1:04:40There was a little paragraph somewhere, like on my service statement where it's like, oh, also I impact the broader community by doing writing and like there's a lot and that was like a paragraph. So it's a complete no-op from a positive perspective and if anything, the negative is it takes up a lot of time. But yeah, you do not and I just went up for full professor. I emphasize this stuff more because now I have the Center for Digital Ethics and I'm trying to argue that this is part of that but still that case is here's what I wrote, here's where it was published, here's the awards it won and they go out and they get letters.

1:05:12how important is the scholar that's everything in research universities it's uh your research okay i didn't know how that's how the tenure process worked yep but listen it's all part of the same thing that it's like slow and steady wins the race and it's part of this concept of slow productivity and i have to say i really enjoyed you know not only the concepts in the book but all the stories you have everybody from benjamin franklin to jewel who's been a guest on this podcast as well to friends of mine like jenny blake or paul jarvis or you know so many stories about writers too john grisham jane austen you know clive cussler it's just great stories great concepts really important for me as i've been going through what i feel is slow productivity but again combined with this guilt that either i impose on myself or others impose on me and And I feel like I've taken too long a break from writing another book.

1:06:09And so I was thinking about that while I was reading this book. I encourage people to read it just to have this sort of self-reflection about how their own work is satisfying their needs. But Cal, once again, you've been on for every book except the books that appeared before this podcast started. So that was over 10 years ago. This is like your fifth time on the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on. Once again, I really appreciate it. No, thanks, James. it doesn't feel real yet when I write a book until we've talked. So now I can actually feel like, okay, this is a thing. I have a new book out.

1:06:41Yeah, exactly. That's important.