← Deep Questions with Cal Newport
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A
Does this sound familiar to you? You have some sort of significant project that you need to complete. Like maybe your passport is expired and you have to figure out how to renew it. Or you volunteered to update the text on your organization's website and you're not quite sure how to get started, and you find yourself day after day unable to make progress. It goes on your list and it stays there, untouched. Now, to the outside world, it might look like you're lazy in the sense that you know that there's something you need to do and you're simply not doing it. But you know inside that things are not so simple. You're not just sitting around playing video games, you're constantly in motion on your devices. You're sending and receiving messages, you're checking in on the news, you're tumbling down potentially productive rabbit holes, and your days are filled with this little P productivity, but not the big P productive accomplishments that actually matter. Well, I struggle with this sometimes, and I'm convinced that technology has made the situation much more common and much more worse. But what exactly is happening in our adult brains when we find ourselves procrastinating on important projects like this? And once we understand what that is, how might we fix it? Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this show, which is the perfect opportunity to tackle these questions. So here's my plan. I recently came across a Reddit post from the R Habits subreddit that originally got me thinking about this topic. The title of this post was you're not lazy, you're overstimulated. And it proposes. This post proposes some answers to the questions that we just asked. So we're going to use that as our jumping off point today. But then I'm going to bring in the help of a psychology professor that I know. We're going to pick apart what this post gets right about our brains and what it does not. And we will use this updated understanding to identify some advice that will help any of us avoid the overstimulation trap. So if you're always feeling busy but aren't feeling accomplished, then this episode is for you. So let's get into it. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. Alright, to get started, I'm going to look at this Reddit post, I'm going to read some selections from it, and then we'll go from there. Alright, so I'm reading from the post here. There's a version of Laziness that has nothing to do with discipline, motivation, or character. It looks like laziness. It feels like laziness. You'll call yourself lazy because there's no other word that seems to fit. But what's actually happening is closer to a system overload than a personality flop. Your brain has a limited capacity for stimulation per day. Not a metaphorical limit, a real one. Every notification, every scroll session, every app swish, every group chat, every autoplay video is an input your brain has to process, evaluate, and respond to. Most of these inputs are low value, but they all cost the same processing resources as high value ones. So what happens when you burn through that capacity before noon? You sit down to work and nothing comes. You know what you need to do. You can see the task in front of you, but the gap between knowing and starting feels enormous. So you pick up your phone again, not because you want to, but because your brain is reaching for the only kind of input it still has, the energy to process. Something short, easy, and immediately rewarding. That's not laziness. That's a depleted system reaching for the lowest friction option possible. All right, so that's the essay I originally saw. And I'll tell you, it feels directionally right. Because we've had this experience where we're jumping around with all these devices and technology. We feel very stimulated, and it's like our brain has seized up or run out of energy, and we just really have a hard time then settling into larger tasks. So it feels directionally right. But before we get into solutions, we should probably take a moment to look a little bit closer at the details about how exactly this article explains what's happening in our brains. Like this article says, we have a limited capacity for stimulation per day. Is that true? Is it true that if we go through a stimulation budget, that we'll feel depleted and that's what causes us to stop working? And if it's not that, what's really happening in our brains? Let's get to the bottom of that before we move on to some advice. So, to help understand the psychological reality of overstimulation, I turned to one of my colleagues at Georgetown. He's a professor in the psychology department named Kassadin Kuschlev, who. Who directs the Happy Tech Lab. I sent him a copy of this Reddit post and I said, hey, this is your area of expertise. Let me know what this might not quite get right. All right, so let me read you what he said, his original thing. He said, this is Costadin here. He wrote me and said the idea that the brain has an actual daily limit of stimulation is patently false. If this was the case, people living in New York City or Bangkok would be comatose by noon. All right, let's pause there for a second. I think that's actually a really good observation. Stimulation, that can't be the right word. It can't be just having a lot of stimuli exhaust us. Because he's right. If you're walking through Times Square in New York City, you're bombarded with stimuli, and yet we don't end up out of our stimulation budget and comatose by noon when we're in the city. So there must be something else going on here. All right, let's go back to Costadin's notes. He then says, what is true is people are not good at multitasking. They simply switch from one task to another, which requires more top down cognitive effort. That ability to direct our attention can get depleted, though it's still not a preset limit. For example, a cup of coffee can sometimes do wonders. So after a day of trying to redirect your attention back and forth from various notifications, you might be less able to focus your attention on what you want. All right, well, that's interesting, right? So what Kostadin is saying is like, there are things that get depleted. It's not, however, a capacity for stimulation. Bright lights, loud sounds, things you have to process. It's actually something I've talked a lot about on the show and in my books. Context switching, turning your attention from one target to another is something that is exhausting and can be cumulative. So if you're doing more and more context switching between this subject of attention to that, you can get a growing exhaust in your brain. It's not like a fixed limit. If you're more rested, if you're more caffeinated, if the work is more interesting, if there's a deadline, you can do more of it. But that can build up. It's the context shifting, not the processing of stimuli that can, over time, make it feel like you're having a harder time working. I wrote about this in a world without email. There's a neuroscience correlate to this. Why is that depleting? One of the neuroscientific explanations that I have heard is that turning your attention from one focus to another requires a lot of things to happen in your brain. You got to inhibit certain types of networks and processing centers that were related to the first target. And you have to excite different types of semantic networks and processing centers that might be relevant to the new target. This takes time and energy after a while, especially if you switch to one thing and before your brain can entirely reorient to that context and switch to another, you get these overlapping context and it muddles up the brain and eventually you're like, my brain is all over the place. I really am having a hard time focusing. So there's a neuroscientific explanation for what Kostadin is pointing out from a psychology point of view. Now it turns out that Kostadin actually published a paper on this effect last year. That's why he was quick to point it out. The core finding of the paper that Costa Den published found that people performed better on a sustained attention task after taking a two week break from the mobile Internet. Now if this sounds familiar, it's because back in mid May we actually did a whole podcast episode on that paper. But now we can understand this in the context of depletion of context switching capability, that if you're spending all your time doing mobile Internet, you're constantly exhausting your brain. When you fall out of the habit of doing all this context switching, then your brain has more energy left to actually sustain focus on one target. All right, so what else did Kostadin have to say about this Reddit post? Well, he also had an additional explanation for what's going on when we feel overstimulated. That also might be playing a role. All right, let me read from his response here. Kostadin says the idea that quick and easy stimulation can change your ability to focus and sustain attention is based on solid ground. The brain self regulates itself if it's exposed to too much dopamine. In neuroscience this is called down regulation and it is related to why we have things like drug withdrawal or needing ever higher doses of a drug to feel the same high. All right, so if we integrate these two elaborations from Costadin, we end up with the following refined understanding of this overstimulation theory. So here's like the more expert backed understanding. Two things are playing a role when you overstimulate yourself. One, the Reddit article is correct in its general idea that being overstimulated with easy and engaging distractions can make it harder to sustain focus on more meaningful tasks. So that's why this article caught my attention. The thing it is pointing out, the problem it is diagnosing does exist. Overstimulation makes it harder to focus on more important projects. But two, as Costadin elaborated, the Reddit article's explanation for why this happens isn't quite right. It's not about depleting a fixed stimulation budget. It is instead about exhausting your brain through excessive context switching and over time down regulating your dopamine system to require more and more engaging stimuli in order to actually sustain your attention. So we've got a short term and a long term factor at play in our brains. In the short term, we're exhausting it with the context switching that's induced by all the things that are stimulating us. And long term exposure to this stimulation down regulates our dopamine system. So we need more and more stimulation just for a particular task to grab our attention. The boring but important project doesn't, after a while, generate enough of that response and so it's very hard to focus our attention on it. If that last point sounds familiar, a few weeks ago we did an interview on the podcast Talking about this with Anna Lemke about the dopamine system so you can go back and learn more about it there. Let's take a quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Now here's something I've learned running my media company. One of our most valuable assets is our knowledge about the best way to execute all of the different things that we do here internally. So if we lose a key person, we lose their knowledge, which is a big deal. And if we hire someone new, we have to teach them everything from scratch, which can also be a big pain. This is where today's sponsor Scribe enters the scene. Scribe is a workflow AI platform that captures any workflow in real time and turns it into documentation automatically. No writing, no manually taking screenshots, no starting from scratch. With each new hire, you just turn on their browser extension or desktop app, execute your normal processes and it builds the guide as you go, capturing your steps automatically. New employees will then enjoy real time on screen guidance that shows them exactly where to click on each step. Are you worried about personal information like names or account numbers? Scribe can automatically auto redact those from every screenshot. Scribe can even suggest improvements to the underlying workflows that you're capturing. Jesse, we have a lot of processes here. This might be exactly what we need to try to document all it is that we do. So if you want to see what Scribe could look like for your organization, head to Scribe. How deep? And mention deep questions for your first month of Scribe capture. Free on select plans. That's S C R I B E How deep. I also want to talk about our friends at Cozy Earth. There's a lot I like about summer. But there's one thing that I dread and that is feeling hot. Fortunately, I have a secret weapon to help feel cool even during the grossest days. Cozy Earth. The fabrics they use in their bedding and their loungewear is not just super comfortable and soft, but it has a cooling effect that feels so nice. Now you know my family is a huge fan of their sheets, which are the only sheets we use at home now. But now that it's summer, I've become a big fan of their all day tea as well. It's a way to keep that so and that cooling effect with me as I navigate the brutal weather of this season. Which is all to say, now is the time for you to try Cozy Earth. And don't worry, they stand behind everything they make and they offer a lifetime warranty and 30 days of hassle free returns if anything isn't right on the clothing. So head to cozyearth.com and use my code DEEP for an exclusive 20% off. That's code DEEP for an exclusive 20 percent off. And if you see a post purchase survey mention that you heard about Cozy Earth, right here. All right, let's get back to the show. All right, so now we have this more refined version of a problem that this article is right to point out, even if it didn't quite get it right. The next question becomes, okay, so how do we avoid this type of overstimulation in our life? Well, that original Edit Reddit essay actually proposed multiple pieces of advice, and I think this is a good place to start. So I want to take what do I got here? One, two, three. All right, four pieces of advice I pulled out of the Reddit article and I'm going to go through them one by one and where relevant, I'm also going to bring in Costadin's take on each of these pieces of advice as well. So we'll read them and then I'll give my take. And Kostadin's take on Is this piece of advice good or bad? And I want to give this a rating to make this interesting, I want to give this a rating scale. So for each of these four pieces of advice, I'm going to rate it on a scale of yay, meaning I approve and so does Costadin. To nay, meaning no, no, no, I don't like this advice. I don't think this is sound with a third option of meh, meaning I'm indifferent. It's not going to hurt, but might not be as effective as the article says. So we have this Yay. Nay and meh scale. You can kind of grate along as I go here and try to guess where I'm going to actually end up. All right, here we go. Advice from the article. Let's evaluate it. The first piece of advice the article suggests is to spend the first hour of your day away from your phone. Let me read you the exact wording from the article. The first hour of the morning should be completely offline. Phone stays in another room, not airplane mode, where it's still within reach, actually in another room. The first input of the day sets the baseline for the rest of it. Well, the idea of starting your day without a phone, obviously I'm going to be in favor of any sort of time away from your phone. But this idea that it sets a baseline, that if your day starts without a phone, that this is going to give you these extended benefits as the day goes on because you've set some sort of stimuli baseline, that sounded a little suspect to me. Right. What's the psychology or neuroscience behind that? I asked Kostadin. Here's what he had to say. There is actually no evidence that morning digital detox helps, but it is an appealing idea that deserves more testing. Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. Okay, so here's what we got. It can't be bad to spend time without your phone. We don't really know that doing that in the first hour has a bigger impact than doing that at other time, but it's possible even without data. So I'm going to rate this one. Meh. All right, strategy number two. Batch check your phone and email. Let me read you the exact words here from the Reddit essay. I check messages and email three times a day at set times. Not perfectly. I still slip, but the default shifted from always on to mostly off. And the difference in how my brain feels by early afternoon is significant. So this idea that you must be continuously responsive is clearly that will be overstimulating. And we've talked about this often on the show. Like this idea that I always have to be checking email and slack on my phone. There's just no way that's good. So a notion of like I need to bat somehow, which I just take as I don't need to be constantly checking communication channels like that. That feels like it has to be good. I asked Costa Den. He liked this idea too. He said the recommendations to reduce notifications and batch them is based on empirical evidence. He pointed to a paper he wrote on this topic that was titled sort of informatively batching smartphone notifications can improve well being. So he had actually studied this exact effect. Now, there is a caveat I do want to give to this strategy. As I discussed in my book A World Without Email, which you should read if you haven't already, there's research from Gloria Mark's team that found that batching email in an office environment can actually increase stress and anxiety for people with a certain personality type. In particular, there's a big five personality trait called neuroticism. And if you're high on that trait, it's actually very stressful. If you're just simply batching email because you obsess and get worried and anxious about the messages that you haven't answered, and it in some sense can make things worse. Ultimately, the best solution is the solution that I talk about in A World without email, which is actually changing your communication processes so that you don't have channels and inboxes that are building up with urgent messages that arrive haphazardly, that you minimize the messages arriving in the first place of that style. And now you don't have that pressure to have to check these as often. But in general, if we interpret this advice as find a way not to be checking communication constantly, I think we got to give that a yeah or a yay. I'm going to say that. Jesse, say yeah. All right, strategy number three from the article, engage in microlearning sessions. All right, let me read from the essay here. Research on neuroplasticity shows that consistent daily microlearning, even just 10 minutes, can actually start to rewire your brain's reward pathways. Over time, your brain adapts to whatever you feed it repeatedly. If the repeated input is fragmented junk from feeds all day, your dopamine system calibrates to that. But if you swap even a portion of that scroll time for short focused learning, the brain starts recalibrating towards inputs that require slightly more sustained attention. It's gradual, but the shift is real. This sounded suspicious to me. If you feed your brain highly stimulating junk all day, how much can the occasional short doses of learning really matter? Furthermore, the idea of micro learning seems like a contradiction in terms as far as I'm concerned, because non trivial learning is almost always an act of deliberate practice. You have to isolate the relevant neural circuit so that you can have a clean firing of those circuits on the new pattern that can then strengthen those connections and make that future application of thought easier. That type of deliberate practice is not pleasant. You'll just do it real quick. It can take 10 or 15 minutes just to sufficiently clear out your brain that you can even start the hard work of learning something new. So this was a little bit suspicious to me. I asked Kostadin. He also was not impressed. Here's what he had to say, quote, I'm quoting him here. The claim that just 10 minutes a day of learning can rewire your brain is total marketing hype and makes no sense. If the average person spends hours scrolling on social media, replacing 10 minutes of that with microlearning ain't gonna do it. I have heard this claim in commercials and if you know what study they may have in mind when they are saying that, please do share. But I am convinced that this is not what the research shows. All right, so I think we have to give that piece of advice a strong nay. All right. Our final strategy from the Reddit essay that I want to consider actually involves one of my books. Let me read it here. Stolen Focus by Johann Hari is worth reading on the bigger picture. Not a self help book, more of an investigation into why attention is collapsing at a population level and who benefits from that. Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport is the more actionable companion to it. So I'm going to read that advice as saying you should read my book Digital Minimalism. I don't even need to check with Kostadin on this one because I think we can all agree that that's a triple yay. Of course you have to do that. That's going to make all of the difference. All right, so based on my experience, based on Kostadin's corrections and elaborations here, what advice would I give if I was extending this list of extend this list of advice? I would basically base all of my advice here for this particular issue of overstimulation leading to procrastination to say that you should permanently reduce your stimulation. You need to rebalance your dopamine system and avoid exhausting your brain unnecessarily from too much context switching, if that's really what's going on here. Down regulation Long term context switching fatigue in the short term, you have to rewire your life so that you avoid that down regulation on stimulation so that you can find sufficient stimulation from things that aren't casino flashy and in the moment. You need to rebuild your day so that you're not forced to constantly context shift and exhaust your brain temporarily. This would mean, for example, take off of your phone, any app that makes money off of your attention. This means, for example, landlining at home when you're at Home, you have your plug phone in the kitchen with the ringer on and that's where you go when you need to check for messages, look something up or take or make a phone call. It's not with you as a default. So you get very used to doing other activities in your house without that other type of down regulating dopamine stimulation. Easily accessible when at work. You need to separate deep from shallow work and if possible go somewhere different for the deep work, hopefully without your phone. Again, you want to create a different stimulation environment for deep work. You don't want to have to combat other types of stimulation. You want to just be make it as easy as possible to sustain focus on one target. And you need to practice getting positive stimulation from efforts that require sustained focus. Your long term motivation centers in your brain can override the short term stimulation centers that want you to go pick up your phone if they get regular exposure to long term focus, leading to more deep rewards. So this could mean, for example, leisure activities, hobbies, projects, practices that maybe are unrelated to work, but just help you learn. Hey, I got better at this and then the chair I built was really good and then I got a deep reward out of that. Or I worked on the song until I could perform it and that was fun and I got a deep social reward out of that. You want to give ammo to your long term motivation system so it can win in the psychological war against a short term variant. All right, so some conclusions here to this deep dive. I think we learned a lot. Overstimulation is different than laziness, but it can make you feel lazy because you're not able to make progress on the things you want to. Understanding what specifically happens in your brain is the best way to understand how best to push back on the overstimulation problem. This Reddit essay captured a common style of advice that's given in these cases, which is short term fixes. Do a morning Detox microlearn for 10 minutes a day. These are fixes that sound like meaningful, like I could do them, but they avoid the hard thing. You got to change your relationship to your phone. You have to change your relationship to your work. It's very much like if you have an alcohol dependency. Looking for the advice that doesn't involve a step of you stop drinking. That's kind of what I see going with a lot of this Internet advice. No, you can still use your phone and do all the apps and be on the AI all day or whatever, but don't pick it up first thing in the morning and microlearn. It's not enough. And the real solutions are harsher, probably like you need to permanently fix this relationship. You need to greatly reduce the amount of stimulation that you're exposed to. So there we see. I mean, I think this is a nice symbiosis. Right? Like this popular essay online pointed out a problem that's real and is directly correct in a way that an academic might not otherwise like directly tackle. But talking to an expert psychologist helped us contextualize the problem and therefore get better advice. So this is also like a meta case study in the best way to move forward with the type of problems that we face on a regular basis in our increasingly distracted world. So there we go. Were you surprised, Jesse, by any of those ratings? I figured you would probably be able to predict them.
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B
Yeah. No, I wasn't surprised. Most part.
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A
Yeah, it was a mixed bag. But a good article. I don't even know someone sent it to me. I'm trying to think where it came from. I think someone sent it to me.
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B
How often do you cross paths with Kassadin?
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A
I should cross paths with him more because he's doing a lot of research on devices.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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A
And its effect on like well being and impact. So we've crossed paths before. But you know, I should go see what's going on at that lab.
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B
Has he written any books?
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I don't think so. I mean, I don't want to say no if he has.
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B
Yeah, yeah.
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A
If he does. We'll have him on the show though. Yeah, he's definitely. He's definitely doing some good work. I want to take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Starting a new business is hard. I remember what it was like starting up the media company that produces this podcast and here's what I learned. Don't reinvent the wheel. Trust industry leaders where you can. This is where Shopify enters the scene. If you need to sell something, you need Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from big names like Allbirds and Mattel to new brands. Just getting started. Do you want to sell online? Well, you can get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style. Do you need help spreading the word? Shopify can help you easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. If we ever start selling products related to this show, I know exactly what platform we'll use. We'll use Shopify. It's time to turn those what ifs into into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com/go to shopify.com/that's shopify.com/ I also want to talk about our friends at Caldera Lab. I'm never someone who thought a lot about my skin, but as I've gotten older, I've discovered something that 99% of women already know but never told me. You have to actually take care of your skin. And that's why I'm a fan of Caldera Lab, which offers a line of skincare products engineered specifically men's skin, which is 20% thicker, oilier, and ages differently than women. Here are three products that you need to know about the Great which is a clinically proven anti aging serum that leaves your skin looking firmer and healthier. The Hydrolayer, a moisturizer that just won Men's health grooming award for best anti aging moisturizers. And the eye serum, which targets the most visible signs of aging, the puffiness or fine lines around your eyes. I've tried all three of these products and it really does make a difference. I don't think I even knew what moisturized skin was supposed to feel like until I tried the hydro layer. So here's the thing. Using Caldera Lab products is a small habit with big Results. Go to calderalab.com deep and use code DEEP to get 20% off your first order. All right, let's get back to the show. All right, well, that's enough hearing from me. We want to hear from you. Like we like to do on these Monday advice episodes is open up our inbox and listen to what you have to say. Remember, if you have a question, you have something you want to share or a comment, you can Send it to podcastalnewport.com all right, Jesse, what's our first message here?
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B
Our first message comes from Emma. It's a reaction to your email newsletter from last week about your latest New Yorker article on AI.
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A
We got layers here. My past newsletter about a past article. I don't know if we talked about my latest New Yorker piece on the show yet.
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B
Maybe. No, we mentioned it.
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A
Right. Okay, so let me read her message and we'll look at the article. I'll do my best to answer it. All right, so Emma said, thank you so much for sharing your ideas this week on the ways that AI is actually transforming the knowledge sector. If you have a minute, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on how those entering into the knowledge sector will be able to learn and scale their skill sets if higher level programmers consultants are now automating the creation of those quick and dirty tools instead of hiring young people to create them. So the article she's talking about, I'll put it on the screen here, came out of the New Yorker on June 5th. It's titled Instead of taking your job, AI might transform it. Now what she's mentioning is this article actually opens on me talking about a job I had after a summer. We couldn't figure out what summer it was. I didn't remember, but some summer in high school I had a job in which Here, I'll just read you from the article here. Each morning I drove through rush hour traffic to an office park near Princeton, New Jersey. On the crowded route, one corridor at a desk in some sort of equipment room, I coded quick and dirty database tools for internal use. One of my programs simplified the process of logging hours in the timesheets. Another tracked inventory for the IT department. My role is to find small ways to improve the lives of my coworkers. The reason why I told that story in the article is that I essentially conclude the A section by saying when I talk to people who are running businesses and using AI who are not software development businesses but other types of businesses, one of their major uses is not automating jobs in the sense of I'm going to replace people's jobs, but to build quick and dirty tools that make people's lives easier. Like the role I played for that consulting firm back when I was in high school. Then in the article said there was another use I'm seeing which is something called freestyle work, but that's a little more complicated because it requires you have to use a coding agent for non coding uses. That might be a longer use case might be a little bit longer time frame before that becomes popular. But there is a lot going on now of companies not replacing employees but building new tools for them. Instead of saying let's take some off the shelf piece of software that kind of does what we need and use that, you could just build your own piece of software. It can be kind of buggy. It doesn't have to be super secur, use it internally to make your life easier. And this is what I did for this consulting company because I guess I was a huge nerd. But this was my job, Jesse. I programmed for I was a computer programmer in high school. So that's what that article was saying. So Ima my read of Emma and I got a lot of messages like this, to be honest, where people said, yeah, but AI is automating jobs. It automated your job you had in high school programming and that's the first step towards these other jobs. So isn't that a problem? Here's what the key point here is. Here's what I was trying to say in that article. The job I had in high school is that's not really a job, that's not a common job. There was a weird confluence of things that came together which was the fact that I was a big nerd in the sense that I was a really good computer programmer. When I was 14 years old, a family friend I think was head of IT for this consulting firm and was like, do you want to come build tools for us? These are things we don't have time to build, but they would be useful if I wasn't available. So if you didn't have access to a teenage nerd, they just wouldn't have had that role. So that's not a role that really widely existed of building quick and dirty tools for internal use. Because if you had programming talent that you were paying a full time programmer salary, you want them building things you can sell or that are more directly tied to income. So we're simulating 14 or 15 year old me. That's what we're doing with AI. But there wasn't a lot of 14 and 15 year olds me. Just most companies just didn't have a 14 or 15 year old me. Now a lot of companies do. That's sort of what's happening here. That's kind of the story, by the way, Jesse, of my life, my teenage years. It's what I did after my first year of college as well because again, I'm awesome and cool. The job I had after my first year of college is a company in my hometown. They had a device that measured properties of optical films. So it would, using prisms and lasers, you could like shot and precision stepper motors. You could look at the refraction of laser beams coming out of pieces of optical film that measure properties of the films. And this is. People are at the edge of their seats right now, by the way. They're like, oh my God, I want to hear about this. All right, but this is important to establish how awesome I am and definitely not a nerd. The machine was run off of the, it was run off of computers where they had like a special circuit board plugged into the computer and the computer could control it. But the ability to make these circuit boards got expensive and the slots that put them in the computers were disappearing as computer technology advanced. So what I was hired to do, and I got to say I successfully did this in like a month, is I programmed from scratch in a similar language, a microcontroller that could be on the device itself. And now it could talk to any computer through a serial cable. And now the computer could just send a command, do a measurement, and the microcontroller on board the machine actually controlled everything and got all the data and did all the precision stuff and then just sent the data back to the computer to analyze so the computer didn't run anymore. So I had to understand that program and rewrite it from scratch in a similar language to run on a microcontroller.
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B
Kind of similar to your Halloween lights.
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A
It's similar to my Halloween lights. Yeah, it's. This year's Halloween display is not going to be as popular, but it's going to be really focused on optical refraction properties.
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B
How was the pay?
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A
It was, you know, I was 19.
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B
Probably pretty good for a 19 year old.
- [34:27]
A
Well, it was. And then I had to keep working on it because I now I built the product. So he, you know, they bought me a laptop and they kept flying me home from Dartmouth because like, like now the whole product depended on, I built the whole control system for the product. So it was great because I could just work remotely at a custom laptop just for working on that and I would fly home as needed. So that was my job in college. That's how I paid for books, that's how I paid for food. That was my income was working for this company where I rebuilt their product from scratch until my senior year when I signed my first book deal. And then that's when book income became my next source of income.
- [35:10]
B
So when you left the company, were
- [35:11]
A
they sad they finally found someone else to take over? Yeah, that was fun. Programming a similar language, man, it's fun. You actually had to. Again, this is riveting. This is the type of thing you're not going to hear on Joe Rogan or call your daddy. The fact that if you're doing a precision stepper motor moving with assembly language, you know, how timing works, how timers work. When you're programming that low level, you get out a reference manual for the chipset and you count. It tells you exactly how many microseconds each operation takes because it's how many clock cycles, you know, the timing of the clock cycle. And we'll say this opcode will take seven clock cycles to operate. So then you go through your loop and you count up every single operation in your loop, how many clock cycles, multiply it by the clock cycle time, and you know exactly how many microseconds one iteration of that loop takes. And then to get to the exact time you want, you put in one clock cycle. No ops until you have enough of those. Like I need 76 of them. Exactly. So that when we loop back, I know exactly how many, exactly how much time it took to execute this code. So there's no timer commands. You're counting the microseconds per opcode. What's a clock cycle?
- [36:33]
B
What's a clock cycle?
- [36:35]
A
A computer processor operates in clock cycles that's driven by a little quartz crystal, like in a watch. And in every clock cycle, it's just a big circuit. But there's one advancement. You can think of it as inputs through the circuitry. So all computer programs are just moving things through circuits in these sort of discrete chunks. You have a command and data, and then you execute. One command, might take the data out of this register and run it through an adder circuit, and another result comes out which gets stored back in the register. And then that clock cycle ends, latches. And then you have the next clock cycle, you push through the electricity and you do another operation through the circuit. So all a computer processor is, is running electricity through circuits in these little discrete chunks. Boom, chunk, clock cycle one. Boom, chunk, clock cycle two. So this is why, like in the 90s, what everyone cared about with computer performance was the speed of processors. That was just how much time passed between each clock cycle. So as processors got faster, they were just executing the clock cycles faster and faster. And then they stopped caring about that at some point in the 2000s because you kind of saturated that speed. And then they. They looked at multicore as another way to get faster. All this stuff is fascinating. I think. I think what people want, Jesse, and you'll agree with this is like a hardcore engineering segment in each podcast. And we can alternate between a hardcore discrete mathematics combinatorics session. And we'll just go back and forth between circuitry and thinking about combinatorics and
- [38:12]
B
single purpose notebooks and notebooks.
- [38:17]
A
I don't know. This will be the new call your daddy. All right, what else do we got?
- [38:21]
B
Our next message is from April, who sees a positive lesson in the recent box office successes of the Gen Z films obsession in backrooms.
- [38:32]
A
Do you know anything about these? I'M gonna assume not as a. Essentially like a boomer. No, no, I didn't. I didn't know much about these either. There's two films that came out a couple weeks ago that are. Not only are they Gen Z directors, but they're based off of what's called original Internet ip, so just ideas that were circulating in chat rooms and social media feeds online. So it was almost like a meme that existed online and they made movies out of them. And in both cases, the movies were very successful. I think Backrooms or Obsession, one of these two things made more money than Spielberg's new movie in the first weekend because it's getting young people into the theater because they know what's going on. Let me see here. Oh, we have an actual message. All right, let me read the actual message for Riff on this. So the message says, I've recently written a blog post that I think you'll appreciate. It's inspired by the recent box office successes of Obsession and Backrooms among younger audiences and what this says about attention, art and community in the attention economy. All right, so here's the article. I'll show it on the screen here. April Owens wrote this. It's called the Art we need from her Digital Age Humanities. What's this? A substack? Okay, I'm going to read a couple quotes I pulled here. 1. In the past few weeks, I've frequented my local cinemas nearly every day to watch a variety of films, from Finding Emily to Tuner to Sheep Detectives to the devil wears Prada. 2. That my impromptu mini film festival coincided with the release of Obsession and Backrooms. A one, two punch of Gen Z directed horror films drawing a lot of attention right now was a happy coincidence. I was independently excited for these movies, but I didn't anticipate just how successful and important they would be. These films are culturally significant in part because they are both directed by Gen Z filmmakers who got their start on the Internet, particularly YouTube. Later, she says Obsession and backrooms have dominated in the box office, trouncing the new Star wars, flickering and leading many to prognosticate about the future of cinema. What interests me, however, is who is turning out to see these movies. Under 35s make up the majority of the audiences for both films. Later, she says part of the reasons for these movies younger turnout likely has to do with the fact that the directors are themselves young Internet natives. Younger audiences, for maybe the first time, see something of themselves on the big screen. Then she says later, sitting in those dark theaters with strangers fully present Watching something made by people my age with some. Something real to say, it started to feel like something larger, like a generation quietly insisting on its own humanity. It gives me hope of a coming renaissance wherein collective experience, deep attention, and human scale art are prized and valued over the attention fracking economic model. That is fine most of the 21st century. All right, So I think that's very hopeful. There's a young person saying, we're happy to go see art. We're happy to go to a theater and sit there for two hours and not be on TikTok. If it's something that, like, it reflects us and interests us. These are our filmmakers, our versions of Spielberg and Coppola. Maybe they're coming up and we care about what they have to say. They're speaking to our experience. There is a renaissance. We don't want to just be on our phones all the time. We don't want to have relationships with chatbots. But we have to evolve. The culture has to keep evolving and be relevant to us. The fact that those two movies did really well, I think is a big deal. I don't know what they are, however. So what I thought we would do today, and Jesse, you'll join me on this is. Let's look at. Which one is this? Backrooms.
- [42:06]
B
Yeah.
- [42:06]
A
All right. Jesse and I are going to watch here in real time because we're not. We're millennials. We're going to watch the trailer for Backrooms. We'll do it without audio so that we can do commentary over it, but we'll put it on the screen. Let's see what we make of this, Jesse. All right, so we got an empty room.
- [42:23]
B
All right.
- [42:23]
A
It's an A24 release. That's fancy. That's good cinematography.
- [42:28]
B
Yeah.
- [42:28]
A
Who? The camera goes through the floor and there's another room below it. There's a chair. And an empty room so far is like the opposite of, like, TikTok hyper engagement. Oh, oh, now we're going down even lower. That's another. So this is like going down layer after layer. I clearly don't understand this meme. And now we're down in an empty room. So the room is getting more and more. Jesse, I have no idea what's going on. What the hell is happening now? There's a door in the room, and now we're in, like, the severance. Now we're like an empty office building, all yellow walls. Is something scary going to happen? It says back rooms. It flickers. That's it. We are so out of Touch Jesse. All right, so for those who were listening instead of watching, how would you explain this? It was like a real room with a window and yellow walls and a. Oh, is this another trailer plane?
- [43:27]
B
Yeah.
- [43:27]
A
Is this backrooms as well?
- [43:30]
B
Yeah, it's a longer trailer.
- [43:32]
A
You think they'll actually show.
- [43:33]
B
You want to put it on the screen?
- [43:34]
A
Yeah, let's put it on the screen. Because there's no people in the teaser trailer. It just showed a room, and then it kept going down lower and lower level, showing that room, like, getting more and more empty and abstract. And then it just said backrooms.
- [43:44]
B
I kept on thinking of that show Silo on Apple tv.
- [43:48]
A
Oh, he's in this. All right, so they got real actors. Okay, now they're showing. This is the official trailer, not the teaser. He's in this empty room with a bunch of office equipment piled in the middle.
- [44:01]
B
It does look like severance, too, doesn't it?
- [44:03]
A
It does look like severance. It's a highly art. Oh, there's someone down a long hallway. He's walking slowly towards a person standing creepily at the end of a long hallway. Then it says, this May. You think Luke Skywalker is going to come out? What if it was all just like a super corporate Disney movie? Oh, now they're showing him in the real world, so he must be having dreams or something like that. Now there's some found footage. Found footage stuff. Oh, that was the girl from shrinking, the daughter from shrinking. They have a rope going down this hallway. So this is like a dream world that people. They're going into. There's some cool, disorienting cinematography. There's some found footage in here. Kane Parsons. So it keeps going back and forth between the real world and this, like, sort of fantastical backroom world. I guess I would go see this in the movies. I would see it in the movies. I don't like jump scares. So if it's, like pure, like, jump scare, horror, I have a bit of a hard time. I. Whoa. There's guys with, like, hazmat suits on. All right. I don't know. I'll tell you what. This seems distinctive, right?
- [45:17]
B
Yeah.
- [45:17]
A
Like, I mean, they. I don't know. Stop that. They have, like, this director. Kane Parsons definitely has, like, a point of view. This is like. There's, like, an original idea. Clearly, this seems to be a metaphor for alienation or something, right? Like, there's. He has ideas. It was visually interesting looking. They had good actors. I couldn't tell what the hell was happening without the audio. But, like, that would probably make it. I think it's supposed to be a disorienting experience. I mean, you would. Because otherwise, like, the cliche would be like, oh, well, when Gen Z makes movies, it's just going to be like a bunch of kids on their phone and just like talking about, you know, brain rod and memes and let's go or whatever. It's going to be, dude, perfect, basically, like in the.
- [45:59]
B
Yeah.
- [46:00]
A
And no, this is like culturally very original. All right, maybe I'll have to go see it. Am I allowed to see it if you're under 35? Are you over 35? Are you allowed to just pay double? We have to subsidize the kids whose AI is taking all their jobs. All right, that gives me hope. Jesse, huge movie person. I'm happy to see Gen Z saying, you know what? Art is more interesting than TikTok. All right, do we have anything else?
- [46:24]
B
Yeah, we do. Michael writes in about an old school tool he bought for his wood shop.
- [46:29]
A
All right. It's like the opposite of Gen Z. All right. Michael says, hi, Cal and Jesse thought you'd enjoy that. I bought a $10 calculator for my wood shop after another woodworker recommended it. I've been using my phone calculator, but as you already know, that invariably leads to time wasted due to unrelated distractions. I still used a phone one for the rare trigonometry needs, but 95% better. Anyway, thanks for your work. Cheers. All right. And he sent us a picture, right?
- [46:55]
B
Yep.
- [46:56]
A
All right. You'll see it. Look at that, Jesse. Old fashioned calculator with big buttons you press. I'll tell you, this is a truism as someone who's had to buy a bunch of, like, you know, we buy dumb phones for our kids and stuff like that. The only, like, old school technology you can buy always has like giant buttons because it's all made for old people. Yeah, that's the market that's left for like non digital, like fancy tools is old people. So it's all like the phones, the flip phones we bought for our kids when they have to take the bus or whatever. It's like big old buttons for 85 year olds to not get confused. We have time for one more, right?
- [47:31]
B
Yeah.
- [47:31]
A
All right, what we got.
- [47:32]
B
Our final message is from Kat, who has a new solution to Landlining.
- [47:38]
A
Okay, let's see what we got here. Cat says, I want to share another version of Landlining I think your podcast listeners may find interesting. I used to charge my phone in the kitchen Until a family health issue meant I didn't want to risk missing emergency calls overnight, I considered getting an actual landline for emergencies. But then I learned about landline phones that connected to your cell phone with Bluetooth. Instead of paying for a landline, I bought the landline phone, connected it to my cell, and I keep that in my bedroom in case I need to answer a call. Since I already have my cell set to silence unknown callers, the phone only rings when a contact calls. This solution keeps the phone out of the bedroom while giving me the peace of mind that I won't miss an important call. Bonus Benefit Instead of the kitchen, I started charging my phone in the basement beside my exercise mattress. So now I'm following through more on my morning workout routine. That's a cool technology I think that does definitely one up landlining. I'm thinking this through Jesse, so here's the problem. So I think if your main concern that's keeping you back from landlining like with cat, is important phone calls, this works great. You can have an old fashioned 90s style phone that rings loudly if there's a call from a contact and you can go pick it up and talk without having to be distracted by your phone. The issue is I think a lot of people's communication that they're doing with their phone is text based. Their landlining by just having your phone in the kitchen works well because you can go check the text messages or WhatsApp. You got to go in the kitchen to do it so it's not with you. But if your phone was in the basement, then the physical landline phone's not going to ring for text messages, you won't be able to hear them obviously. I think that's a cool solution if phone calls is what you really care about. If you're deep into text messages, if you're a parent right now, that's hard to avoid. Then plugging the phone in the kitchen so it's nearby but not within reach is probably the best solution. Cool technology though. We like to end our Monday episodes by getting you up to date about what I have been up to. Jesse I finished three books last week, so the count is up. I didn't read them all from scratch last week, but I finished three books last week. I finished Derek Thompson's first book, the Hitmakers, which is about why things are popular or not popular. It's like a classic 2010 style idea book with stories and science and he's a good writer and I enjoyed it. Then I finished Molly Haskell's book, Steven A Life in Films. This is actually an academic press book. She's a well known film critic. It's like a biography of Spielberg, but told through his films what was going on in his life as he wrote each film. I wanted to finish that before I went to see Spielberg's new movie. And so I finished that right before. There's only really two good biographies of Spielberg. There's this one and Joseph McBride's one. They're both psychological. So the McBride biography is very Freudian. Right. It was written in the 90s, so it's a lot of like trying to understand Spielberg through his relationship to his parents. Haskell's a little bit Freudian too, but she's more like a feminist psychology lens through seeing Spielberg. So basically both of our big Spielberg biographies are very much delivered through a psychological lens, like psychotherapeutic way of understanding Spielberg and his actions we don't yet have, which is a little non modern like you'd be, you know, we don't have like a non psychological biography, which I would be really. I mean, there needs to be more Spielberg biographies. I think the issue is he never. He won't participate.
- [51:05]
B
How old is he?
- [51:06]
A
He just about turn 80.
- [51:09]
B
I didn't realize he was that old.
- [51:10]
A
Yeah, 1946.
- [51:11]
B
And he's still working all the time.
- [51:12]
A
Yeah. I mean, Clint Eastwood was making movies to his 90s.
- [51:17]
B
I was telling you off air about how Seth Rogen had an interview on New York Times and he was talking about when he was. Because he was in the Spielberg. He was the dad. Right. In when Spielberg was a kid.
- [51:29]
A
Right? Oh, Fabelman's.
- [51:31]
B
Yeah. Oh, he was in the movie.
- [51:33]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [51:34]
B
And he would talk to Spielberg all the time.
- [51:36]
A
It's a good movie.
- [51:37]
B
How do you film xyz? What are you thinking here?
- [51:40]
A
Spielberg is doing podcasts for the first time for his latest movie release. He's never done it before.
- [51:45]
B
What are the big movie podcasts?
- [51:47]
A
Well, he did rewatchables and they did 2001. I'm still listening to it. It's like an hour and a half long and it's great. And he's so with it. I mean, he might as well be 60 years old, not 79. But there's a room here for a good Spielberg biography that is not told through a psychological lens, which feels dated to me a little bit. But through, I don't know, artistic lens, I think an economic lens would be interesting. I often will read lots of biographies. I've read a lot of Disney, Walt Disney biographies. It's just interesting. You get these different lenses that you can tell these stories. I think economic, what was going on in the film industry. Economic, artistic. That would be an interesting biography on him. So after I finish my Crichton biography, I guess I'll have to write.
- [52:31]
B
I was just going to say that.
- [52:32]
A
Yeah, then I'll write a Spielberg biography and I'll tell it entirely through a sort of economic or film technology lens. I also finished a book that's actually not coming out till October. I had it in electronic galley form, which is James Marriott's upcoming book, the New Dark Ages, about the important role that reading played in modernity and what we're losing. What's going to happen to our society and culture is reading becomes less often. I don't want to talk too much about a book that's not actually out yet, but I'm doing a lot of reading right now on thinking consciousness, technology, communication, as I'm thinking about a new book idea of my own. So I liked it, but I'll talk about it more when it comes out in the fall.
- [53:17]
B
All right.
- [53:18]
A
So I finished three books. Also saw a movie. I went to see Disclosure Day on the weekend it came out, which is Spielberg's new movie. Pretty good.
- [53:27]
B
Are there aliens?
- [53:29]
A
There's aliens. Spoiler. I mean, the premise of the book is like. Of the movie is it's a chase film, and it's like the two main characters want. And this is just, you know, this from the trailers is like they're wanting to get the word out that there are aliens and the government's been covering it up since the 40s, and this agency is trying to stop them. So it's like ultimately a chase film. It sits somewhere. It's interesting. It sits somewhere between, in terms of tone, ET And War of the Worlds. There's sort of this dark agency. It's like if ET Spent a lot more time with the agents who came at the end to kidnap the kids. It's like the third act. That's the way I'd understand it. It's kind of like the third act of ET Made into, like a full. Made into a full movie. Right. So it has a bit of that War of the Worlds fight, but it also has some of the wonder he's still putting in. Like, it's not dystopian, and he has those wonder notes from Close Encounters and ET and it's not just like, this is scary or this is good. And so I thought it was good. I always look when I watch Spielberg Film. He always likes to do some virtuosic camera work because that's his thing. And I will tell you, film nerds out there, if you go to see this, the scene you got to watch. And we'll hear more about this scene once the movie's been out for a while, long. You have to. The tracking shot at the farmhouse fence outside of Virginia at the safe house. I don't even quite know how he did it. To set up the scene, there's a split rail fence. The main character is trying to escape because on the other side of the fence is all these, like, the agency has arrived and all these cars, black cars and SUVs and SWAT teams to, like, try to come and get him. And he's, like, trying to sneak away from the. Down the fence as they're on the other side of the fence heading towards the house. And Spielberg does a long, unbroken tracking shot where he. The camera keeps going from one side of the fence to the other. So it'll, like, swoop down and follow him and then come through the fence and be looking at him from the other side of the fence and then come back through the fence and be on the other side and then follow them as he jumps over. So that's just Spielberg trying to be virtuosic. I assuming he's got to be doing. There's probably hidden cuts in motion tracking, I guess, because there's no way to actually physically, the camera's up, down through a fence, back through a fence, turning 180. I'm interested in how he does it. I think it's some sort of motion track. I don't know how they do it. Anyways, it's a cool shot. I don't know how many people noticed that, but he puts in those types of. He has to put in those type of shots. The camera's always moving. All right, you got to see it. Yeah, we got to see. What's it? Backrooms. Yeah, I might have to see back rooms. It was like a whole Internet. It was just like someone posted a picture of, like, a. It turned out later people discovered it was like a retail shop to being closed down. It's just like this, like, empty room. It was just, like, generically, whatever. And it just became a thing online with people, like, inventing a whole backstory about this. Whatever. They made a movie out of it, and it made, like, $80 million.
- [56:43]
B
Damn.
- [56:44]
A
Yeah.
- [56:44]
B
It's crazy.
- [56:46]
A
When we do our Cal Network versus Jesse Skeleton movie, it'll be the voice of our generation. Actually. There's already a lot of filmmakers our age. That's not gonna. That's not gonna work. I imagine it like he man master the universe, but it's Cal Network and he just thwarts the enemies immediately. And then it kind of morphs into essentially a remake of My Dinner with Andre. Do you know this movie from the 90s? 90 minutes of just that one dinner table, and it's just Jesse Skeleton, so it's like all of the CGI and you see the monsters and Skeletor type monsters, and then Cal Network, like, immediately dispatches them, and then you're at a table and it's just conversation, existential conversation for the next 90 minutes. That's gonna be our movie. That movie will show you what our generation can do. All right, that's enough nonsense for now. It's all the time we have. Back next week with another Monday advice episode. Probably an AI reality check on Thursday as well. So stay tuned for that. Subscribe to my newsletter, Kel Newport.com and until next time, as always, stay dead.