Should I Use Notebooks More Often? (Cal’s Strategy) | Monday Advice

Summary

Podcast Summary: Deep Questions with Cal Newport – "Should I Use Notebooks More Often? (Cal’s Strategy)"
Date: July 13, 2026
Host: Cal Newport

---

Episode Overview

In this Monday Advice episode, Cal Newport explores the utility of analog notebooks in the digital age, showcasing his personal system built around four distinct notebook types. He shares the purpose and practical aspects of how he uses each, why he chooses analog over digital for certain activities, and how specificity of use is the key to making paper notebooks worthwhile. The episode closes with listener questions and a stimulating discussion on topics from screen time to strategic focus, delivered in Newport’s practical, thoughtful, and lightly humorous style.

---

Cal Newport’s Four Notebook Strategies

1. Daily Planner: Time Block Planner

Timestamp: [03:03] – [11:00]

• Purpose:
  • "I plan my days...the best way to make the most out of your mind during a workday is to actually block out the time of that day. To give every minute of your workday a job." ([03:18])
  • Employs time blocking, a method first introduced in his book Deep Work.
• Why Paper?
  • "Your day feels more intentional when you’ve actually sketched it out with that tactile feel of a pen on page." ([07:12])
  • Physical separation from digital distractions.
  • Allows for quick jotting of ideas at night without succumbing to the "digital rabbit hole".
• Why This Notebook?
  • Designed to "lie flat…so I can work on it and plan it and have it on my desk." ([09:05])
  • "Full or near full size pages because you need a lot of room for planning." ([09:23])
  • Uses a Uniball micro 0.5mm ballpoint pen for optimal feel.

Notable Techniques:

• Dark lines: deep work; double lines: admin; triple lines: appointments.
• Numbered admin blocks with a detailed task list in the corner.

---

2. Long-Term Strategic Planning: Remarkable Paper Pro (Digital Notebook)

Timestamp: [11:02] – [18:20]

• Purpose:
  • For "longer-term plans, strategic plans or vision…big professional projects…Halloween display…" ([11:06])
• Why (Simulated) Paper?
  • "It’s very close to the feel of paper, the way it looks, the way you actually write on it." ([14:24])
  • E Ink means low distraction, unlike iPads or computers.
  • Thousands of pages, easy to back up and print, but "I take it seriously, so it makes me take the plans more seriously." ([16:32])
• Why This Notebook?
  • Offers drawing, color, highlights, diagrams—no need to carry physical accessories.
  • "If I put a plan in there, I’m not going to lose it..." ([16:39])
  • Higher value and permanence for significant plans.

---

3. Single-Purpose Brainstorming: Field Notes Pocket Notebooks

Timestamp: [22:00] – [26:00]

• Purpose:
  • "I use this for single-purpose brainstorming...working out a book idea...figuring out a personal improvement...just trying to make progress on a knotty issue." ([22:24])
  • Each notebook is dedicated to one complex problem or theme; accumulates focused thought over time.
• Why Paper?
  • Portability: "I want to be able to have the single-purpose notebook with me so I am ready when insight strikes." ([23:48])
  • Enables capturing ideas during daily moments, especially travel.
• Why This Notebook?
  • "They're small, they're flexible, they're light, they can fit in a pocket...more portable than Moleskins." ([25:01])
  • Cheap and semi-disposable: "I buy these like 20 at a time...I don't care because…it's not real expensive…That helps as well." ([25:38])

---

4. Working Memory Extension: Gridline Composition Notebooks

Timestamp: [20:34] – [22:00]

• Purpose:
  • "When I'm in the middle of trying to solve something with deep work and concentration, you can become much smarter if you're able to extend your working memory beyond what your brain can handle." ([20:53])
  • Used in-the-moment for mathematical problem solving, theorem proving, technical diagrams, etc.
• Why Paper?
  • "Pen and paper is the best for that...you can draw the picture." ([21:40])
  • Portability for walks and mobile problem-solving.
  • Not archival: not precious, just for in-the-moment external cognition.
• Why This Notebook?
  • "Grid lining was the key to me...it allows you to line up things." ([22:55])
  • Prefers blue, light grids: "If the grid is too defined, it will clutter your writing...the grids are noticeable, but you want them in the background." ([23:34])

Notable Quote:

• "Those composition notebooks and me on foot is how I did. I would say like half of my mathematical insight and the other half was working on shared whiteboards with collaborators." ([21:23])

---

Key Insights and Takeaways

Specificity is Key

• "It’s not enough to simply own a nice notebook. You need a specific use for it that takes specific advantage of its analog format." ([00:51])

Choose Analog When:

• The activity benefits from tactile feel, reduced digital distraction, or high portability.
• The thinking task requires spatial freedom—drawing diagrams, arranging equations, or capturing ideas in fleeting moments.

Don’t Be Precious

• For brainstorming and in-the-moment notes, use inexpensive, semi-disposable notebooks to encourage capturing ideas without worry.

Use the Right Format

• "Buy a notebook for a reason, a reason that needs paper and needs the particular format…" ([25:10])

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "A lot of people do [like notebooks]. There's something aesthetically pleasing about a well made notebook...But then if you’re like most people, you buy that fancy new notebook and it ends up sitting idle and then eventually you forget about it." ([00:09])
• On teaching: "Hard things required hard thought. This is what I was taught as a theoretician at MIT." ([23:22])
• On digital temptation: "I also want to separate my daily plan from my computer because not all of my work is at the computer. And sometimes I want to check what's coming next without having to go into the digital rabbit hole…" ([08:34])
• On grid notebooks: "The key thing for grid notebooks that I’ve learned in my life is it’s really hard to find the right level of brightness for your grid." ([23:34])

---

Listener Q&A & Extended Discussion

Reading Blocks and Deep Work ([26:34])

• Cal shares his new summer habit: time-blocking daily "professional reading" to build expertise for his next book.
  • “My goal this summer is to read a lot of books about related topics about thinking and the mind...To get through all those books...I have a rule where I want to do either 30 or 60 minutes of reading a day…” ([26:51])

On Math & Academic Background ([28:18])

• Cal reflects on moving from theoretical mathematics to digital ethics and writing, noting how mathematical rigor shapes his thinking and writing.
  • "There's a certain type of rigor or logic or puzzle pieces fitting together behind my writing and thinking is because I spent all my life doing mathematics." ([30:26])

Jesse’s Notebook Habits ([31:03])

• Jesse uses field notes for "general thoughts," a smaller time block planner for daily planning, and a notebook for Spanish classes. Portability is the prime driver.

Article Reactions

• Discusses an article citing "Gen Z has a lower IQ than Millennials," and another parental survey about screens in schools and homes.
  • "Lack of clarity, lack of definitiveness...creates a situation in which it’s entirely and always a negotiation." ([39:22])
  • Advocates for the "Landlining" strategy to minimize family phone conflicts: "phones are in the kitchen...If you need to look something up, you go into the kitchen, look something up." ([41:17])

Remote Work & Focus Strategies

• "You need the time block plan...so by time block planning you’re not asking yourself the question what’s next?" ([43:41])
• "Couple that with variability and sustainability...some days are just going to be packed...That’s how you get the value out of remote work." ([44:29])

Soccer and Concentration Contexts ([47:51])

• Cal riffs on reports that professional soccer players can't focus on 10-minute talks:
  • "Being able to concentrate in a particular context doesn’t necessarily translate over to other contexts...don't put too much stock in the transference of skills." ([48:58])

---

Cal’s Life Updates, Reading, and Fun Segments

Travel:

• Recent hiking trip to Colorado—"cognitive cleansing" with his eight-year-old son.

Reading:

• Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong—fascinated by how writing changed the process of thought.
  • “Writing made philosophy possible. Before that, you just had epic poets.” ([54:40])
• Lost by Rachel Hartigan (about Amelia Earhart): enjoyed the dual narrative.

Halloween Projects:

• Working on "a much more complicated Halloween light controller" with professional-grade, ethernet-networked hardware—a highly enjoyable, non-instrumental side project.

---

Actionable Takeaway

If you want to use notebooks more often and effectively:

• Assign each notebook a specific purpose that benefits from the analog experience.
• Choose the right form factor and price point to match that purpose (lies flat for planning, pocket-sized for capturing ideas on the go, grid for math/diagrams).
• Don’t be afraid to use digital tools that emulate paper well when you need the advantages of search, color, storage, and portability.
• Be intentional—with notebooks and with your days.

---

Conclusion Quote

"Paper is important. Paper plays a big part in my life. But you have to know why you're using the paper. If you just buy a notebook from a museum gift shop because it looks nice, nothing's going to happen with it...You have to buy a notebook for a reason, a reason that needs paper and needs the particular format of that particular notebook you bought. That's how you get the most use out of the analog." ([25:10])

---

For more insights on deep work, intentionality, and paper vs. pixel debates, keep following Deep Questions with Cal Newport.

Transcript

[A]

Do you like the idea of an old fashioned paper notebook? I mean, a lot of people do. There's something aesthetically pleasing about a well made notebook. There's also the excitement of anticipating the original thoughts or insights that this tool is going to help you usher into the world. But then if you're like most people, you buy that fancy new notebook and it ends up sitting idle and then eventually you forget about it. So here's the problem. It's not enough to simply own a nice notebook. You need a specific use for it that takes specific advantage of its analog format when it comes to paper. In other words, it's how you use it that matters just as much as what you own. This, of course, inspires a natural question. What are the most effective ways to make use of a notebook? Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this podcast, which is the perfect opportunity to go looking for some answers. All right, so here's my plan. I'm going to use myself as an example. I actually use four different types of notebooks on a regular basis. I have them here and I'm going to go through them. I'm going to go through each of the four different types of notebooks that I use. I'm going to explain how I use each notebook. I even have close up shots of interior pages of each so you can see that use in action. So if you've ever felt an urge to integrate more pen and paper into your daily life, but you weren't sure how to make that habit worthwhile, then this episode is for you. All right, as always, I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. All right, so as mentioned, here's my approach. Today. I have four notebooks, four notebook types that I actually use. I brought four of my own notebooks here today, and for each, I'm going to go through and tell you three things. What activity I use that notebook for, why that activity is well suited for analog on paper instead of doing something digital, and then why the specific type of notebook I use for that activity, why is that specific type of notebook the right one, at least for me? All right, so we're going to start with the first type of notebook I use on a regular basis, which is a planner. In particular, use my own product, the Time Block Planner. What do I do with this particular type of notebook? I plan my days. So if you haven't heard me talk about time blocking before, it's an idea that I first introduced in my 2016 book, Deep Work, where I say the best way to make the most out of your mind during a workday is to actually block out the time of that day. To give every minute of your workday a job, to make a plan for your cognition as opposed to just reacting to what's happening, what's incoming, and what you feel like doing next. It could be an exhausting way to work, but I usually argue gets about, on average, 2x more results per time. It makes it much easier to control distraction. It makes it much easier to arrive in states of depth. I'll pull up on the screen here. Here's a sample time block plan page from inside that notebook. You see, it's pretty simple, right? We have on the left side of the page the hours of the day. And then I'm just blocking off the hours of the day and saying what I'm gonna do during them. So from 9 to 9:30, I'm reading. From 9:30 to 11, I'm finishing the podcast prep. From 11 to 12, maybe I'm recording a podcast. So I'm giving a plan for every minute of my day. Just. You might notice my formatting here. I just evolve over time my own formats for time blocks. But you'll notice dark lines, like around read is how I indicate deep work. Double lines, like under finished podcast prep is how I indicate administrative work or work that doesn't require deep work. And then triple lines. I don't know where this came from, but triple lines on the right is an appointment. So something where it's actually also on a calendar. Other time blocking tricks. I put a number in this admin block down here and then up in the upper right, I can have a more detailed list of tasks that are supposed to fit in that block, that I can actually fit them all in there. All right, so that's a key part of my day. A key notebook use of mine is to use a time block planner. All right, question two. Why paper? For this usage, we have all sorts of digital planning tools. Well, there's a few reasons why I like planning my day on paper. One, I think your day feels more intentional when you've actually sketched it out with that tactile feel of a pen on page. A little insider knowledge about the time block planner, because I actually sell this myself, is the paper is carefully selected to feel optimal with the type of pin I most often use, which is a uni ball micro 0.5 millimeter ballpoint. Look, we got Jesse has one for me here. We have These all over the office. I have so many of these at home, Jesse. It's crazy. The paper in the time block planner is actually optimized for. It's a little bit rough, it's no gloss, and it kind of pulls the ink off there, but without being so grainy that it blots. So I love the tactile feel of drawing out my day. Makes it seem intense. Much more so than if I'm just moving things around on a digital screen. I also want to separate my daily plan from my computer because not all of my work is at the computer. And sometimes I want to check what's coming next without having to go into the digital rabbit hole of this fully connected, multitasking digital distraction machine. So I like having my plan as something I can bring with me that's not just on my computer. I also crucially have it in my room at night. So if I remember something, I can just go over to my time block plan and I'll write it on the page for the next day so that when I make my time block plan for the next day, I'll see it. So that's a way to try to get things out of my mind without again having to interact with the whole digital ecosystem every time I have any idea or reminder that I want to keep. All right, so why this particular notebook types like? What's specifically good about this type of notebook for this particular use case of daily planning? Well, there's two things that were key to me when I designed the time block planner. One was I wanted it to be lie flat. So we got good, sturdy double spiral bound bindings that allows this thing to lie flat so I can work on it and plan it and have it on my desk. And two, I wanted full or near full size pages because you need a lot of room for planning. You don't have to have my particular notebook to do time block planning, but you want to look for those two features. A good sturdy, probably double spiral, brown, easy lie flat binding and near full size pages. Before I created this planner, I used to use the black and red double spiral bound notebooks, which, you know, serve the similar purpose for me. All right, so that is notebook number one. All right, notebook number two. This is going to be controversial, Jesse, and we know already notebooks is a touchy subject. Well, this is going to be controversial because my second type of notebook is digital and that is my remarkable paper pro which the good folks at Remarkable sent me at some point. And I really, actually, really like this digital notebook. What do I use it for. We'll start there and then I can get into the details about why the remarkable. Okay, so what I often use this for is for longer term plan, strategic plans or vision. So if I have some important bigger thing, a sort of professional, big professional project I'm working on, or even more important, a Halloween display that is going to take a lot of my focus or energy, I'm going to build out and update a plan that I'm going to use in reference to help guide my actions over many months. I will often use my remarkable Paper Pro to keep that plan. So I'll load one up here on the screen. This is a screenshot. I kind of mocked this up a little bit, but this is a screenshot from the remarkable Paper Pro itself. You can see, you can draw what I love about this thing, even though it's E Ink. I'll get into that in a second. You can have different width pins, you can have colors, you can have highlighting. So here we have like a sample controller layout for a Halloween decoration plan. You can see here we have our Falcon controller on a Raspberry PI that's going through an ethernet hub over to a Pixel controller that then has strands and daisy chain spots on them with the powered speakers coming out directly from the Raspberry PI. So I can draw these things. I can make this plan, I can build a list of. Okay, so what are the steps? Where am I in this project? So it's good. I use this for bigger strategic plans. All right, so why do I want to use paper for this purpose? Well, first we have to answer the question, is it paper if you're on a remarkable as opposed to a paper notebook? And I would say it's very close. And here's the key thing I want to say technologically about a remarkable versus like an iPad. It's not a lit screen. It is not an LED or LCD screen like you would have on an iPad or a smartphone, where you have pixels that glow with different colors and then that gives you a screen. Right? It's not that. So it's not like a tv, it's not like your phone, it's not like an iPad. These actually use E Ink technology. The same things you would see in a Kindle. Underneath it all, you have physical disks that turn with electric. You put a little electric current, they turn. So you're actually sort of physically. You are physically creating. You're creating a physical mark is the pen is causing physical disk the switch. So it's flat, it's not lit I mean, it has lighting on it, but it's like you're lighting a page. It's not the page itself is actually lit. It has a great paper like feeling. There's a drag to it that the pencil goes across. You can feel friction. It can respond to friction. So it's very close to the feel of paper, the way it looks, the way you actually write on it. But it has the other nice thing of you can have thousands of pages in here and they automatically back up to the cloud. So you can just grab a page from it and print it if you want to carry it with you portably. All right, so why I like to use paper or simulated paper for this type of strategic planning is that I don't just type. I like to draw shapes. I like to draw diagrams. You saw that in my example. I want to use color, I want to use highlighting when I'm planning, I use all of those features. And so if I was just typing something, it's harder. You can't have a diagram. You can't have easily different colors. You can't highlight differently. That's one of the reasons why I use the Remarkable instead of an analog notebook, is that I don't want to carry a bunch of colored pencils and highlighters with me. But all of that is built into the Remarkable. Also, it's expensive, so I take it seriously, and that somehow makes me take the plans more seriously. If I put a plan in there, I'm not going to lose it in the way that I have a lot of notebooks. And if I just write it in some notebook somewhere, who knows where that notebook's going to go? It's going to disappear in a backpack that I stop using. But this thing, I'm not going to lose. And so I like to put my more serious planning into it. So that's both why Paper and I guess, why I'm using this particular notebook for those particular types of plans. Let's take a quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that make this show possible. Look, longtime listeners know that I'm fed up by the sheer amount of distracting nonsense that Knowledge Work throws at us. Messages to read, documents to review, decisions to be made. This is where Superhuman Go enters the scene. Imagine an AI chat that is always there when you need it, already aware of what you're doing and doesn't ask you to start from zero. So maybe you're in the middle of writing an email and you need to fact check a stat that you included or you're referencing a project, you need a summary of its most recent status as stored over in your JIRA task management system. Well, with Go you can just ask right there and get exactly what you need without having to switch to a different application or to go hunting for the information you need. Now imagine having this type of AI collaboration in over 100 different apps that you already use. To me, this is one of the more rational futures of AI, right? It's not about blasting away at ever bigger models that do ever better on obscure benchmark tests. The real key is figuring out how to bring AI as it exists now to where you are already doing your work so that you can do that work better. Superhuman Go helps you be the best version of yourself at work without the friction, the context switching or the busy work so that you have the time and brain space to solve the problems that matter. To find out more, go to superhuman.com I also want to talk about our friends at Factor. Here's a common scene. You've time blocked your day. You're locked in. You just finished a long deep work block and you have a tough admin block to follow. And then you realize you're hungry. Now it's tempting to grab a slice of pizza or just crush a bag of chips, because that's what's easy in the moment. This is where Factor enters the scene. Factor Pre made meals are delivered fresh, never frozen. You can heat them in just two minutes and right away have a meal that will fuel you while meeting your nutrition goals, whether that's weight loss or protein or GLP1 support or even workout recovery. Every meal from Factor is made with the best stuff. No artificial colors, no high fructose corn syrup, no refined seed oils, so you can trust it. And with 100 rotating weekly options, you will never get bored. I have had success automating healthy eating with Factor and you will too. So head to FactorMeals.com deep50off and use the code deep50off the word deep the number 50 the word off to get 50% off and free daily greens per box with new subscriptions only while supplies last until September 27, 2026. See the website for more details. All right, let's get back to the show. All right, we're making progress here. Let's move on to our third type of notebook and usage that you might use in your life. All right, so the next type of notebook I use on a regular basis are these. This is a field notes notebook. So if you're listening instead of watching, they're small. It's like Soft staple binding and the COVID is just like a slightly thicker page. So it's very flexible. Pocket size notebook. I've used all different types, but I like the blank page variety I find to be the best. All right, what do I do with my field note notebooks? I use this for single purpose brainstorming. So if I have a particular issue that I'm trying to make progress on, it could be working out a book idea, it could be trying to improve something professionally, like, okay, how do we push this podcast to the next level? It could be figuring out a personal improvement, like you have a vision for a new health milestone you want to get to and you're trying to figure out how do I do that? Why am I having trouble with this? You have a knotty issue, N o t y that you're trying to make progress on and you're not quite sure how. Single Purpose planning says you have a dedicated notebook to that issue that you take notes in. As you have insights, as you have ideas, you double back, you return to things. It's sort of an extended dialogue captured in paper of you trying to solve a particular problem. I'll bring up a page here on the screen that I mocked up. This is sort of the type of things it looks like in my Single Purpose planning pages. So here it shows me trying to understand Maybe this is YouTube and the role of YouTube in this podcast. And I have this sort of list here of on one side, do you want to just try to maximize views? And there's some pluses and minuses. We try to maximize quality, but there's some minuses and pluses and have some notes on it. That's the type of thing that shows up in my Single purpose notebook. So you could imagine if this notebook was dedicated to figuring out how to get more what to do with YouTube and this podcast, there'd be a lot of pages like that as I try to figure things out. In general, I like single purpose planning like this because complicated problems take thought. We're not used to giving things extended thought anymore because we're so distracted and we're afraid of our own cognition. But hard things required hard thought. This is what I was taught as a theoretician at mit. You want to solve a problem, you're going to come back to it again and again and again, and your mind gets better at it, you find different angles and eventually, hopefully, you make progress. So a single purpose notebook helps you do that. You don't forget the things you've written down, you accumulate knowledge, you can double back. It's a great way to make progress on difficult projects. So why paper for this usage? Well, for me, portability is the key thing. I want to be able to have the single purpose notebook with me so that I am ready when insight strikes. I don't just sit down with these type of problems. It's hard just to sit down and force it. All right, I have an hour and I'm going to sit down and solve this problem. You might, or you might get stuck. What you really want is the ability that, you know, you're on a trip and you're reading something and suddenly you have an insight about this problem and you want to be able to pull this out of either your pocket or whatever. It'll fit in whatever bag you have, pull it out and jot down some notes. The portability is what matters. It's like, I'm working on this problem. I'm bringing this with me. I like to do problems on trips. That's something I often do is if I'm heading off on a trip, I like a business trip, a book tour or something, I'll have a single purpose notebook. My goal for this trip is to make progress on this problem and I'll bring it with me at all times. It'll be in my pocket, it'll be in my bag, it'll be in my backpack. And I'm just sort of working on making progress. So why this particular notebook? Well, if you want portability, field notes is really a great way to go. They're small, they're flexible, they're light, they can fit in a pocket. They can fit in the front pocket of your backpack. They can fit in a purse, they can fit inside a jacket, inside the inside pocket. They're more portable than moleskins, which I used to use for this purpose. Those are a nicer notebook in my opinion. They're thicker with a hard binding and you can't fit them in a jeans pocket very easily. They're not going to fit in a lot of inner pockets of jackets. So there's like an extra level of portability. Also, you can buy these things in bulk. Moleskins are kind of expensive. I buy these like 20 at a time in just big packages. So you're not being precious. Like I'm just grabbing thoughts and maybe half the stuff I write in there doesn't matter. I don't care because it's, you know, I got a ton of these. It's not a real expensive thing. I think that helps as well. So that's why I use this particular notebook for that particular purpose. All right, so we've made our way to the fourth type of notebooks that I use on a regular basis. So here's my fourth type of notebook that I use for extending my working memory. All right, so let me be a little bit more clear about this. When I'm working, I need to separate this from single purpose notebook usage when I'm working on a hard problem. This was particularly true, I'll say, when I was doing applied mathematics as a theoretical computer scientist. But I think it also expands to other types of technical problems, be them professional or in their personal life. When I'm in the middle of trying to solve something with deep work and concentration, you can become much smarter if you're able to extend your working memory beyond what your brain can handle. And the classic way you extend your working memory in the moment beyond what your brain can easily store is with paper. And so I like to use grid line composition notebooks, usually cheap ones like you would get for school. I classically use these when I'm trying to solve a problem to take notes in the moment, draw diagrams, put down the mathematical equations, see if they actually work. I'll load a page up here. This is actually from working on. This is from the notebook I brought. This is from working on a particular problem. A few, I don't know when this was maybe like five, six years ago. And it's just extending my memory. I'm drawing a bipartite graph and I have some questions about it. Then I thought some more. And then I was trying out a proof strategy here based on these different size bands. You can see I'm working out on the side here some simple math just to see how things simplify. Okay, this is from July 2018, Jesse. So this is seven years old. So yeah, I'm working out the math here a little bit just to make sure what I had in my head actually makes sense. This is just like if you look at this as a whole, doesn't really make sense. It's not like a well thought through argument. It's me just extending my memory. I'm having these thoughts in my mind. I'm writing them down so I don't have to hold it just in my head and then I can check it, go back, think some more. Wait, is that math?

[B]

Right?

[A]

Let me write it. So I use gridline notebooks as a way of extending my working memory when working on particular hard problems. Why is this different than the single use notebook? Because this is in the Moment the single use notebook. I might over a few weeks be working on one problem and building up more and more thoughts. This is. I am right now trying to make progress on a theorem and I'm using one page from this notebook to write down and extend my working memory in the moment. I don't need to go back to it. If I make progress on a proof or a technical problem, then I'll transfer that over to latex or wherever I'm writing up the formal paper. I'll send the notes via email to my collaborators. It's not archival, it's just in the moment trying to extend your memory. So if I go through this particular notebook from five, six years ago, every page is completely different. You'll have a couple pages from one time, I used it a couple pages from another. So it's just about extending your working memory in the moment. But that does make you much smarter. This was actually my primary method really for working on mathematics when I was doing theoretical computer science research is I would go for a walk and I would try to make progress and I would stop and pull out a composition notebook from my bag and take notes and see if it made sense, then keep going and write some more in the notebook. Those composition notebooks and me on foot is how I did. I would say like half of my mathematical insight and then the other half was working on shared whiteboards with collaborators. Put those two things together and you got. That's most of the mathematics that I've published. So that is a fantastic use for a notebook. But why paper? Well, because look what I'm doing. I'm doing a lot of math symbols, I'm doing a lot of diagrams. A lot of my work is sort of graph theory based, a mix of probabilistic randomized analysis and graph theory. So you're going to draw a lot of graphs and you're going to do a lot of algebra. Pen and paper is the best for that. You could write all these different symbols and equations and simplify and kind of, it's just the best for that. You can draw the picture. So it's by far the best technology for doing that. And the portability was important because again, I would bring these things on walks all over the D.C. area to work on thoughts and take notes in my notebook. And I would use school ones. This is a cheap one. I had some for a while, the Marble Composition Classic Notebooks from the 80s and 90s, I used a bunch of those. I didn't overthink it because again, it's Just in the moment, making my brain smarter. It's not that it itself is archival. Right, so why the particular, like, what did I care about, like, why this particular notebook grid lining was the key to me, right? Because if I'm going to be doing mathematical equations and drawing graphs and drawing diagrams and writing text, grids are what's going to be useful for me because it allows you to line up things. You can put different vertices in different boxes. You can line up your mathematical, you know, mathematical equations will have different levels, big sigmas plus small subscripts. And so it makes it easy to write and line up all your different symbols. Also, when you're doing, you know, like I was doing, again I mentioned, I end up doing a lot of probabilistic analysis, which means anyone who's done like concentration bounds, you're going to get these like giant fractions. And the numerator itself is going to have fractions. The denominator is going to have its own fractions, and those are going to be raised to exponents. You just know need to be able to sort of expand and contract as needed on the page. The key thing for grid notebooks that I've learned in my life is it's really hard to find the right level of brightness for your grid. If the grid is too defined, it is going to clutter your writing and it's going to be hard to differentiate. You'll see the grid lines will be interpreted in your mind similar to your marks on the page, and it's going to clutter the writing. I bought a 12 pack of grid notebooks recently, legal style, from Amazon, because again, I use this all the time to expand my working memory and it's worthless to me because the grids are too strong and it clutters it. But like this notebook here, this level, this is pretty good. So the grids are noticeable, but you want them kind of in the background so that this is blue and light. So when I'm riding with my black Uniball micro on it, it clearly differentiates them. So that was a big part of the trick. Why this notebook? It's grid pages, but the right grid, blue and light. And that can be sometimes hard to get right. All right, so there we go. Let's just review these real quick because those are the four specific uses I use in my life for notebooks. In fact, let me grab them all here. All right, just to review. I use a notebook for daily planning. Used to be double spiral, brown lay flat, good paper. I use a notebook for longer Term or strategic planning. I use a remarkable paper plus because I could do all sorts of colors, I can do highlights, I can do diagrams. And I take stuff in here seriously, so it makes me take those plans seriously. I do single purpose planning in highly portable pocket size, almost disposable notebooks like field notes. That's how I make progress on big complicated projects. And I use cheap grid lined composition notebooks for doing working memory extension. It's all about just being smarter in the moment. It's not archival. You don't want to be too precious about what you write in there. There's other uses for notebooks as well. Of course, there's many other systems that are out there. But I want you to give a sense of what I do right. Paper is important. Paper plays a big part in my life. But you have to know why you're using the paper. If you just buy a notebook from a museum gift shop because it looks nice, nothing's going to happen with it. You have to buy a notebook for a reason, a reason that needs paper and needs the particular format of that particular notebook you bought. That's how you get the most use out of the analog. So think in terms of specificity and you will get more utility out of your analog tools.

[B]

So there we go. Jesse, I have a couple questions.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So with the reading block, is that the books that you review on the show or is that.

[A]

Yeah. So in the sample time block plan, which here, I'll load it up here, I had a reading block in the

[B]

morning that's considered deep work.

[A]

Considered deep work, yeah. So the reason why I have it on there is I'm trying something new right now, the last couple of weeks, which is because I need to cover a lot of reading for the new book. I want to write about thinking. And my goal this summer is to read a lot of books about related topics about thinking and the mind, the evolution of human thought or whatever so that I really kind of know what I'm talking about. I can think through this book more carefully to get through all those books because they're kind of beast. I have a rule where I want to do either 30 or 60 minutes of reading a day just of those books.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

And then beyond that 30 minute block. Yeah, I put a 30 minute block down. I'm at 45 minutes today, but I want to get to an hour because that's the only way to get through. And then I do other reading. All the other stuff I read, I just read after that. And that I'm not Scheduling on my workday plan necessarily. So, yeah, I'm trying to see. I've discovered it depends on the book. But on the book I'm reading now, I'm averaging about a page a minute. So if I do 60 minutes, I'm getting about 70 pages done. And this is a 450 page book. So if I'm not putting aside an hour a day, I'm not going to get through it. It's going to take too long. So that's why that's on there. That's something I've been trying to. So to me, that's professional reading. That's like part of the effort. That's part of my key deep work. Right now, this summer I'm done with one book. I'm in the early stages of thinking about another. And the way you do that is you read a lot. Yeah, I just want to make sure I get it done and then.

[B]

Do you still do a lot of math?

[A]

Not right now.

[B]

Do you miss it at all?

[A]

I do a little bit, yeah. Yeah, because like the summer, you know, the summer is when all those conferences were and I've been hearing about them and I've, you know, it's on my mind right now. But yeah, for people who don't know, I mean, I kind of have an interesting professional trajectory. But my academic training was in computer science and in particular I distributed algorithm theory. So that's what I did. I trained other Nancy lynch at mit. That's my main work is doing algorithms and lower bounds for distributed systems. And that's what I did. That was my academic work. And then I was always writing books and articles at the same time. Those sort of merged together at some point around the pandemic as Georgetown got very serious about digital ethics as an emerging field that they wanted to play a major role in and they wanted me to play a role in them playing a role in it. So that happened. And also I ran out of promotions. So I'm a full professor. There's no more promotions to get. So it's not like I have to be super careful about keeping publication counts up to a particular level to make sure that I get the right letters to get promoted. Those two things came together and in recent years I've been much more aggressively focused on the question of the type of technology. I did the math for how it affects us and what we should do about it. So I haven't been doing almost any of the old mathematics, but I think I'm staying sharp because I'm reading a lot of Hard things. I'm writing a lot. I don't know. I guess the, like.

[B]

It's kind of like golf. If you don't do the hard math, you get a little.

[A]

Yeah, I think you get rusty.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Yeah. And I'll be honest. I was never great at math. I mean, I'm good at math compared to the average person. Right. Because I'm a professor who does applied mathematics research. But compared to other theoretical computer scientists, it was always, like, one of my weaker. It was always one of my weaker skills was some of the details, the algebra. Like, it's all experience. I'm fine at it, but I probably would have been. Wasn't the best at it. But I do kind of miss it. It's fun. I miss the puzzles. But it's not like I'm not staying sharp because I, you know. Hey, working on, like a hard New Yorker piece or something like this.

[B]

No. Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

That pushes you as well, in somewhat different ways. It's. It's why, by the way, people detect, if they really think about it, a certain type of rigor or logic or puzzle pieces fitting together behind my writing and thinking is because I spent all my life doing mathematics. So it definitely affects the way I write. It's why you get that sort of feeling when you read my writing of like, oh, this all just kind of makes sense. It's because I'm making sure all the pieces click together like in a proof, and your mind recognizes that subliminally. And it's like, oh, this makes more sense. Right. So I kind of structure my writing and thinking like a mathematician. All right. Do you use notebooks, Jesse? I gotta get you some notebooks.

[B]

Yes, I use two. Two to three.

[A]

Two or three different types. Or two to three, two to three different types.

[B]

I have a field notes that I carry around for what use general thoughts.

[A]

General thoughts, right.

[B]

Sometimes I try, like, the. Solving a problem and that will be a separate one. I have a time block planner that's. I make my own just because it's a little bit smaller. I like it smaller because it fits in my bag.

[A]

Can I just say something? Trader. I know one word trader.

[B]

And then I have a notebook for my Spanish classes.

[A]

So the field notes is because you want portability.

[B]

Yeah, that I can take everywhere. I have, like a nice little case, like write random stuff down that I don't forget. And I do revisit it.

[A]

They're good for that, too. I usually have my time block planner for capturing things, but field notes can be good for that too. Like Capturing thoughts. Or if you're on a trip, you can just bring one to capture stuff. Like, to dos to come up. I gotta remember to do this, like, so you can get things out of your mind. And then when you unpack from the trip, you just go through it, like. Yeah, it's another good use.

[B]

It's the same case that it fits in a nice little case. And then I have, like, another piece of paper that I can, like, write my workouts on. And then I can also, like, if I'm golfing, I can put my scorecard in there and put in my back pocket.

[A]

You. But you write your workouts into field notes or you have.

[B]

No, I have a separate piece of paper that goes behind it.

[A]

I see. And then what do you do with

[B]

that later if it fills up? I just get a new piece of paper and that's. I fold it up. So, like, every time I go to, like, a gym, I just, like, know what I'm doing.

[A]

Oh, so it has your workout on it?

[B]

Yeah, I write it out before I go. Yeah, I put. But I put in the same.

[A]

Like, so you don't have to be looking at your phone.

[B]

No, I don't have my phone.

[A]

Yeah, I like that. Let's take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that make this show possible. Now, some of my proudest moments from earlier in my life are hitting key financial milestones. I still remember the day I finally paid off the last of my student loans from college. Now you know what I wish I had had back then? Monarch. Monarch is the personal finance app that goes beyond just telling you what you've spent, but to also help you set goals, map out big purchases, and see if you're actually on track before it's too late to adjust. For example, Monarch can send you a weekly AI recap of your spending, which makes it easy to discover if there have been major changes or other spikes in your habits that are causing problems. Do you have a question that might help you make financial decisions? Like, maybe you want to know how much did I spend on travel last summer? Well, you can use Monarch's AI Assistant, and it will get you the information you need. It's like having a financial advisor in your pocket. If I had had access to this app back when I was first starting out, I would have hit many more of those meaningful key financial milestones, probably much earlier. So I want you to write your own money story with Monarch. Use code [e-mail] to get your first year of Monarch core half off at just $50. That's 50% off your first [e-mail] with code DEEP. Now I just want to talk about our friends at mybody Tutor. Do you want to get in better shape but struggle to follow through? Here's the solution. MyBody tutor T U T O R an online coaching program that actually delivers results. Now, how does it do this? Well, when you sign up, you're assigned a coach. They help you devise nutrition and exercise plan custom fit to your specific goals and circumstances. And then, and this is the key part, you quickly check in each day on the MyBody Tutor app to let your coach know how things went. It's this accountability that really helps you follow through. It also puts an advocate in your corner who can help you adjust your plan to whatever life throws your way or notice where you might be struggling and offer help. So if you want to get healthier, go to MyBody Tutor today and if you do, mention that I sent you and they will give you $50 off your first month. That's MyBody Tutor T U T O R.com all right, let's get back to the show. All right, so there you go. That's enough about my thoughts. We want to hear what you have to say as well. Like we like to do on Mondays, we open up our inbox to see what you want to tell us about. If you have a question or an observation or want to send us something you think might be interesting, you can Send it to podcastalnewport.com all right, Jesse, let's open up this mailbox. Who do we have first?

[B]

Our first message from Joe and Marcy who shared a perhaps controversial article.

[A]

Well, controversial articles are my favorite type of article. So let's pull this up on the screen and see what Joe and Marcy had to send. All right, the headline here. A neurologist claims Gen Z has a lower IQ than Millennials. Jesse, I believe that for sure because I'm a millen. Let me just read a quote from this, see what's going on here. For the first time since cognitive development data began to be collected in the late 19th century, an entire generation is showing lower intellectual results than its parents. That is the assessment made by Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist and former teacher before United States Senate committee. According to him, Generation z, born between 1997 and the early 2010s, shows a measurable decline in attention, memory, reading, mathematics, problem solving and overall iq. I read further. You know what? He's going to blame that on it has to do with technology. All right, that is controversial, right? It's controversial because every generation, there's a cliche that every generation thinks the generation that follows has all of these issues or flaws. But this is an interesting one. This is sometimes known as the reverse Flynn effect. This idea that the global increase in IQ began to stop around the time that smartphones became ubiquitous. Horvath is pointing towards data that shows that if you break it out by demographic cohorts, Gen Z is actually seeing a sharper decline in the IQs as compared to the millennials or people who are only a little bit older. I don't know. I guess you would point towards the mechanism Horvath would say is the use of technology during critical learning years. Horvath is very much against the use of technology in the classroom and ed tech, so I think he connects it probably to that as well. These are all complicated issues, but I think it's an important one to think about. I talked about cognitive fitness. I wrote that big New York Times op ed earlier this winter about cognitive fitness is the new revolution we need to care about. This is the type of data that should be capturing our attention. When you see a generation following on an IQ measure, when you see all generations starting to reverse IQ gains around the time certain technologies spread, it has to be the same as saying, hey, once we started using trans fats, we saw jumps and heart attacks. And so maybe that's a problem. I think we need to see this type of data through that lens. I'll tell you my other observation. If you bring this back up here again, Jesse, this is on msnbc. My God, they got a lot of ads. It's everywhere. Look at this. There's that and then over on the right. And then there's another ad here. And this is surrounding and other articles like, it's almost.

[B]

It's unbearable.

[A]

Maybe that's why our IQs are getting lower, so we can't get to the text because there's so many ads. Msn. Talk about millennial references. Remember msn? That was like the big deal. Microsoft was like, the Internet is important. You got msnbc and msn.com. all right, what else do we have?

[B]

Jesse, Our next message is from Jenny, who shares a surprising statistic from a recent report on how parents feel about smartphone bans in schools.

[A]

All right, so I'll just read the part of Ginny's letter where she gives this statistic from a recent report. Ginny says this short report is about parents thoughts and expectations around the ban of Smartphones in schools. Interestingly, 39% of parents think that less screen time at school will mean more pressure for screen time at home. And 46% say that screen time is already one of the biggest causes of conflict at home. I think this highlights a need for support for parents and how to manage screen time at home in as conflict free a way as possible. All right, so that report for those who are interested is conducted by uswitch letter U Switch and the report was called Cracked it. So if you want to look up more details there, I do think we need to think more about how parents deal with screen time. I'll tell you what a lot of parents are doing that's leading to the type of issues you see cited in this study is that they are being ambiguous and arbitrary. It's you talking to their kids. Well, you have a phone and it's kind of yours and you have a right to use it. But I'm going to be kind of upset that you're using it. And then I'm going to, but it's yours, but I'm going to kind of guilt you a little bit. Like, are you on your phone again? And then occasionally just arbitrarily be like, put that phone away. You've been on it too long. Which creates a situation in which it's entirely and always a negotiation. Like, okay, my parent is upset that I'm on the phone. Do I have to put away the phone now? Probably not if I argue it enough. So you're just constantly going back and forth. Lack of clarity, lack of definitiveness. So what is the better way for parents to deal with phones? Well, first of all, wait till an appropriate age to actually give a kid a phone, which I think is restricted phone in high school, unrestricted phones after the age of 16 at the earliest, your kid will be upset. Your kid also, you know, wants to drink beers at lunch and watch TV all day instead of going to school. Because they want to do something doesn't mean that it's necessarily critical for them. Number two, when you do give your kid a phone, it's yours, it's not the kid's. The kid doesn't have a plan with AT&T or Verizon. They didn't sign a contract. They're not old enough to do it, they're not paying for it. It's your phone that you are letting them use for particular purposes. You make that clear right up front. This is not your phone. There is no portion of the Declaration of Independence that says thou are, you know, have the right to pursue to own your own phone as your property. That can't be taken from you. No parents phone. They're letting you lease it on their terms. Three, I think those terms have to be, let's keep it simple, Landlining. When you are in the house, all smartphones are plugged in in the kitchen. That's just how it works. Now here's the thing. You as the parent have to do it too, but it'll be good for you, trust me. The phones are in the kitchen. If you need to look something up, you go into the kitchen, look something up. If you're expecting a call from a friend, you put on the ringer, you go into the kitchen when it rings. If you have text conversations you need to keep up with, you need to go stand there in the kitchen hunched over the toaster oven, doing those text conversations, which is going to make you, after a while be like, I don't want to just do this all night. And it means when you're not in the kitchen, when you're at dinner, when you're watching a movie, when you're reading a book, you're not looking at your phone. It's not there as a second screen. It's not there as the second source of distraction. I think that is the best way. I mean, because again, parents are like, here's why I have to give a phone to my kid. Because there's some complicated scenario in which they're going here at this time and they might miss a bus and they need to coordinate with their friend for the ride. Which I get. This is why our family has three or four dumb phones that we kind of give out to our kids as needed for various logistical things. I get it. But if that's why the kid needs the phone, then this is a fantastic way to introduce that into their lives without having it colonize their brain. Like the chessburster aliens from the Ridley Scott movie. You have it, but it's not with you all the time. And at home, it's not up in your room, it's not with you everywhere you go. We're not fighting about it. It's my phone. You can use it. Here's the terms plugged in when you're at home. That's it. That's just it. And if you've already given your kid a phone and you're in these type of debates, it's an easy switch to make. You say, new household rule. Here's what I want to do with my phones. As the parent that I'M paying for. It's under my name. It's my contract. They're going to live in the kitchen while we're at home. And that's just it. It's a binary rule. Boom, boom, boom. That's it. You want a phone, we do the rule. That's it. No more daily negotiations, no more arguments, no more vague shaming like, well, if I just act upset enough, maybe they'll voluntarily use the phone less. They will thank you. Their brain will fake you. Their cognitive fitness will thank you. Their mental health will than thank you. So I, I, to me, I think that is the way to deal with teenagers and phones in your own home. Don't argue with terrorists. All right, what else do we got? Jesse?

[B]

Our next message is from Jackson, who has a practical question about remote working.

[A]

Oh, man. Remote working. Remember how much we used to talk about that?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

When we were doing the pandemic in the pandemic, like it was a big. I wrote a lot of New Yorker stuff about that. All right, this is blast from the past year. Jackson says I work remotely and my wife works out of the house. This means I'm home by myself most of the day. I have noticed I really struggle during downtime between meetings or deep work sessions with being unable to resist listening to a podcast or checking my phone. How would you suggest combating this urge? All right, so, Jackson, I would say two things are going to come together here. One, you need the time block plan, Right. So by time block planning, you're not asking yourself the question what's next? If you're asking yourself all day the question of what's next, then you're constantly going to have to answer why what's next should not be checking your phone or listening to a podcast. Hey, I'm feeling a little bit exhausted. I'm not really inspired. Let me go do that instead. Make the plan in advance. This is what I'm following. But you got to couple this with part 2. The plan needs to be very reasonable and sustainable. So if you're working from home, this is the key. Don't think about this as I'm in the office for eight hours that I have to fill. It's no, I'm making a reasonable time block plan for the day. That's going to get a lot of good work done. But some days I'm going to finish that work at three and I'm going to have two hours before my wife gets home and I'm going to be done with my work and go do something else with that time that I feel is, like, very productive. I'm training, I'm running, I'm woodworking, I'm building complicated Halloween decorations or something like this, or a couple days a week, I'm going to start my day late, and I'm going to go my first block of the day. I'm going to go to the coffee shop, I'm going to read, I'm going to go for a long walk, or I'm going to have a long midday section. Some days as well, and some days are just going to be packed. And I have so much to do and have a lot of meetings. The whole day is going to be full. So you use time blocking to get intentionality about your time so you don't have to question, what should I do next all day long. And then you couple that with again, I call it variability and sustainability. So you have different schedules, different days, some days into earlier than others. You have breaks in there. And so you don't push yourself to exhaustion, but you also don't leave it up to yourself in the moment about decide whether you're exhausted or not. And so that's what I recommend to remote workers, especially in summer. Put some variety in there. Just don't schedule meetings after three on Thursday and just be like, I'm going to leave at 3 and I'm going to go watch a movie. That's how you get the value out of remote work. So time block, plan, but be more variable and sustainable with your schedules. All right, what we got next?

[B]

Our next message is from Ulysses, and it's about focus. In the World cup

[A]

last night. You watched last night, Jesse? Yeah, yeah. US didn't play a great game.

[B]

I mean, that got crushed.

[A]

Yeah, crushed. I watched the. You know, it wasn't going well when you watched the goalie run up to kick a ball and just kick the ground instead, and then someone else just scores on him. I feel like that would be every play if I was the goalie in a World cup game. Like, to me, it is stressful. I don't know soccer very well, but it's stressful to me. The fact that, like, the goalie has to come way out of the goal

[B]

all the time and he can't use his hands.

[A]

Yeah. And they're constantly kicking it back to him. And, like, you're constantly kicking the ball back towards your goal because it's like the right thing to do. Yeah. Meanwhile, in better news, the Nationals game last night.

[B]

Oh, what happened?

[A]

Crazy. It was. When I turned it on, it was. Astros were up six, one in like the third inning or whatever. And the. Then the Nationals turn around and come back and push it. Next time I started watching it now, check back in, it was 12, six nationals get out. 12, six nationals, including a James Wood Grand Slam, including a C.J. abrams three run, home run, including a Curtis Mead home run. All right, come back again. The 12, 11 Nationals. By the time we get to the eighth inning, two outs, the leads only one. And they bring in beater, and they hold on and win the game by one run, 23 collective points. Yeah, it was a crazy game. A lot of home runs. The Astros are a home run hitting team as well. So does that answer your question? Who are we talking to?

[B]

Ulysses.

[A]

Ulysses, does that answer your question? Ulysses? I hope it did. All right. Wait, he had something about the World cup, right? All right, so he sent us a tweet. This is the coach from Uruguay. So let me. I'll read this tweet here. Baisla, who I think is the coach from the Uruguay World cup soccer team, explained that the Uruguayan players asked him to shorten his 10 minute team talks. I understand that today's youth struggle with attention, but is it right that professional players who earn millions can't concentrate for 10 minutes? Should coaches adapt? I don't know. All right, that's interesting. So supposedly, allegedly, the players from Uruguay told their coach, we can't listen to you for 10 minutes. Here's why I'm a little suspect about that. Jesse, is. Isn't a soccer match. It's like a phenomenal feat of concentration, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like you're on that field for like a lot of the game. And as we learned, you can't have like a moment. If you have a moment of lost concentration, you kick the ground and they score on you easily. You constantly have to be thinking where everyone is, what's the right play? What's happening over here? And so I have a hard time believing they can't concentrate.

[B]

They probably have film sessions too, right?

[A]

Yeah. You have to study the other team and your offense and your defense. And also these are of all the young people in the world. The young people who probably spend the longest stretches of time without phones or distractions has to be these soccer athletes who have to train for hours a day. Or it's like them and baseball players. These are long games without breaks. So they're very used to not having that type of distraction. Maybe they think his speeches are boring or. So here's my other theory, though, is attention contexts are unique. So that's the other thing that's possibly going on here, which is maybe a general point worth us all thinking about being able to concentrate in a particular context, it doesn't necessarily translate over to other contexts. Right. So if you're in the context of playing a soccer game, there's nothing else that's voting for your brain's attention during that time, because it's put a lot of value on making the right plays and a lot of negative value on making the wrong plays. And so staying focused on the game clearly wins the sort of your brain voting for what we should do next. There's also no other real option. There's no phones out there. Like, what else are you going to do? But there's a completely separate attention context, which is I am inside the locker room and this is a place where I look at phones and there isn't this drive of if I don't focus, I'm going to make a mistake. And in that attention context, I don't want to sit and listen to a speech. I mean, I think that is probably common. And it gets to a bigger point of like, don't put too much stock in the transference of skills. Right. So, I mean, I've talked about this a lot. If you play chess, there's a lot of advantages you might get by playing chess. That's hard to do. You'll get very good at playing chess. And it requires a lot of focus. It doesn't necessarily make you better at ignoring your phone when you're watching TV because it's a completely separate context. So if you want to practice concentrating in a particular context, you actually have to practice concentrating that context, which means you have to remove the very desirable stimuli, take them off the table, and rewire your brain so it gets used to actually getting value out of what's happening there. And so we have to be a little bit careful about. If I do this one thing really well with focus, it's going to make me better at other things. There's tons of meditators who you can't get off their phone when they're at dinner because it's a different cognitive context. So that might also be rearing its head. All right, as our final segment on Mondays, we like to do an update about what I have been up to. I'm back from travel. We managed to get enough of the Monday episodes in the can that you guys didn't miss anything. But I was out in Colorado, Jesse. We went to Crested Butte, and then we went to Rocky Mountain National Park. I decided that Crested Butte would be a really good location for summer book writing. Like if I was finishing a book. The town is literally at the. Have you been there? No, it's at the end of the road. Like literally the road ends, goes to the Gunnison Valley and ends at Crested Butte. There's like a dirt road you can take over the mountain to the Rocky Mountain Research Station. But like it's the end of the road. It's 8,000ft, it's really high. But it's like a cool town, kind of hippie ski dirtbag town with a western vibe and surrounded by beautiful mountains. You could rent a house on the edge of town. I thought about it and you could get up, you could go for a hike or mountain bike to lower loop trail, ride all day, then go do some athletic thing in the afternoon. It gets cold every night no matter when it is because it's so high. So I like Crested Butte. The Rocky Mountains were beautiful as well. Did a lot of hiking out there. The whole state's on fire, which is not optimal. But otherwise that was a pretty good trip. I didn't bring work on the trip trip. It's really been a while since I've had a trip like this. I wasn't riding in the morning, I was just on the trip. I wasn't even doing a lot of like brainstorming or planning because I was hiking with my, my 8 year old because remember the two kids are at camp and when you hike with my 8 year old, he has a sort of Dada esque nonsense dialogue that he just goes mile after mile where like you can't. It's not an interaction. He's just sort of like saying things and just unloading things from his mind. It's very zit. But if you're not talking, if you don't listen, he's not going to want to do the hike. So it's like meditative hiking. He's had to sort of just let these details about Minecraft that don't quite make sense wash over you mile after mile. So it was actually an interesting sort of cognitive cleansing trip for me. Though I am kind of glad to be back writing. What am I reading? Two books I finished since the last episode that we talked about it. I finally read Walter Ong's book Orality and the Technologizing of the Word. Everyone always cites Walter Yang, right? So he's a mid century to late mid century 20th century scholar and he wrote this book, Orality and Literacy about how writing changed the way the human mind works. Everyone cites it, but I never got around to reading it. And now I'm thinking a lot of these people who cite it, I'm like, I don't know if they actually read it because they're often just citing the big picture thesis. But the book is. The details are fascinating. Like really getting into just. And you can see it that. Just the way we're able to think and how words as a technology change the way the mind actually operated and perceived the world. It's academic, but I found it to be very readable. Couple interesting things in there. One is he talks about the Phaedrus dialogue from Plato. So this comes up. There's a time, the 2010s where every technology book brought up this dialogue. It's a Plato dialogue from the Phaedrus where the character Socrates has a conversation with Phaedrus, this young Athenian. And basically he expresses skepticism about the written word. Here's why I'm worried about writing. We're going to forget things. You're not going to be able to really understand something if you can't debate it. Our memories are going to become bad. And it's often brought up as a famous example of technoskepticism. I'd long maintain. I think that's overblown. I think it's over reading what's really being said here, that Socrates, the character of Socrates. Socrates is really talking specifically about philosophy. We do still actually privilege the Socratic method. Back and forth dialogue. It's a pretty reasonable point. But actually Ong is on board with like, no, no, Plato was really suspicious about writing. But then Ong points out, which I've never heard before, the irony of it is that Plato didn't realize the way he was thinking about writing, the way he was thinking about philosophy, everything in the way that he thought was only possible because of writing. He has a post literate mind. So the rise of Greek rationality required writing without writing. You're back to more like the Homeric epics where everything is memorized. And it's a completely different. You read Havelock. It's completely different type of way of thinking and transmitting information. So Plato didn't realize that the very grounds on which he was criticizing writing and were formed by writing. And that's why in the Republic he's like, we need philosophers, not poets. That's basically saying we need literate people instead of illiterate. In other words, writing made philosophy possible. Before that you just had epic poets. And he's like the philosophers with their systematic thinking. That's what we need in the ideal society. And then yet in his other book, he was saying, oh, writing is bad. But writing made all of everything he did possible. He just didn't realize it yet. He didn't realize writing is what had changed because you don't notice when ways are of thinking change. So I thought that was interesting. Anyways, it's a really good book. Don't be afraid of its academicness. I really enjoyed it. I also read the book Lost by Rachel Hartigan, who's a Takoma park writer. She used to work for National Geographic, which is downtown. It's about Amelia Earhart. The interesting thing about it is it's a dual narrative structure. You have the story of Amelia Earhart intertwined with the story of lots of people who, after her death, were trying to find a plane or had different theories about what really happened with her. The whole book came out of Rachel doing a few excursions for National Geographic on some of these trips that were going out to try to either find Earhart's plane at the bottom of the ocean near Howland island or to survey. There's these theories about she actually landed and she died on this island or that, and there's these surveys to go try to find her bones and stuff like this. So she went on some of these exped of people who were convinced they had the real story of Amelia Earhart. So it intertwines those with the story of Amelia Earhart. And I found that interesting. And then I was at an Aaron's Museum in Chicago, the Wings over the Rockies Air and Space Museum. We stopped on the way to the airport. They had an exhibit of Amelia Rose Earhart, who's actually not related, but in the 2000s or 90s or something like this recreated her flight. So interesting. Amelia Earhart's a fascinating character.

[B]

Can you imagine trying to find her plane at the bottom of the ocean? Mm.

[A]

Bob Ballard tried.

[B]

Oh, because he found the Titanic, right? Yeah.

[A]

And they did a really comprehensive survey with all the latest technology of a particular area and did not find it. I mean, the problem is. Yeah, I mean, it's not like that. We don't know where in the ocean. She was trying to. She was with Fred Noonan, her navigator. They were trying to land on a particular island, Howland Island. They got close because there's radio communication with a Navy ship that was out there to try to help guide them in. But there was just, like always with aviation disasters, a confluence of different mistakes. The radio wasn't being used properly. They didn't Know Morse code. They had different. Some miscommunications about things. The antenna for the directional finder, they had taken it off the plane. There was winds that were strong enough to push you off course, but not strong enough that you would see obvious signs of the winds on the white caps. And so it just seems like all these things added up and they just. You're 60 miles off where you need to be and then you're in the Pacific. And so the plane's probably out there somewhere. But actually it would mainly be disintegrated by now anyway. So it's interesting. Jesse's put up, well with my cables, with my Ethernet cables. There's a lot of electronics in the HQ right now because I'm honing in on some projects.

[B]

I do have one question for you. Did you listen to the Walt Disney episode on Acquired?

[A]

I did indeed. To me, this is significant. I don't quite know what this means, but I'm listening to Audible, a book on tape about Disney. I mean, I'm like an expert on the Walt Disney. I really am an expert. So I was like, I found another book about Disneyland, like the machinations behind making that project work. And I was listening to that

[B]

and

[A]

I stopped to go listen to the whole Acquired episode and then came back to it. And then I was like, man, this is interesting. These are very similar things, like long form audio. They're within a couple hours of each other. One they spent a couple months working on. The other is like probably two years, three years of effort or whatever. They'll probably make more money on advertisements on that. I'm sure they will actually, on that episode than the author would make for the book that I read. And so it felt significant to me to be doing both of those at the same time. Is this like the future of audiobooks is, like, what they're doing, which is. It's somewhere in between the effort required to research and write a whole book. But it's more detailed and comprehensive than just like a blog post or a substack essay or something like that.

[B]

I didn't realize how many cigarettes he smoked.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, constantly.

[B]

Like three packs a day. Yeah.

[A]

That's why he died at 65.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I was kind of lucky to make it that far. I'm fascinated by him. I'm fascinated by the.

[B]

And then how about the city you

[A]

wanted to build and Epcot experimental City of Tomorrow? Yeah, I might end up. I got a building a city. I'm going to build a city with Halloween lights. It's all Halloween.

[B]

365 days.

[A]

365 days a year of Halloween. So that's what all these wires are for. I'm working on my. I mentioned I'm building a much more complicated Halloween controller for this year. So I'm actually, actually using open source software, but real controller software as opposed to just custom building. And I'm buying custom circuit board instead of building my own. It's all networked, so more professional or prosumer displays are Ethernet networked. So all the different circuit controllers you're using can speak over ethernet to a common controller. But my hub is in the lab and I need to hardwire that to the Internet. So I have a hundred foot wire to. That's what that wire is here. Because our router is here in the studio and I need to. For now I'm hardwiring the hub and the other. So I'm making progress. I've been working on the light controller. I programmed my own light controller last year. So it's really nice to have off the shelf light controller. It's a little more complicated and that's what I'm working on now. So progress.

[B]

Just like Walt Disney and his chains.

[A]

I thought about that. So like Walt Disney, I write about it in my new book, by the way, the Deep Life coming out next year. I write about Walt Disney and his trains and I actually argue about that as a general strategy. Seeking. I had a term for it but like seeking these sort of remarkable projects that are completely nonsensical. It's just like interesting and completely non instrumental as a way of getting out of sort of the doldrums and sort of finding new inspiration, whatever. And I give a lot of examples of different people doing that. So yeah, I go. I go deep on Disney and his trains. I know too much about Disney actually.

[B]

When they were talking about the trains and the acquired. I just thought of your newsletter and the picture you had, so I could easily.

[A]

Oh yeah, yeah. Because I wrote about it.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

I wrote about it last summer.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Of him on the trains. Yeah. Fascinating stuff. All right, that's all the time we have for today. Back next Monday with another advice episode. The Thursday AI Reality Check episodes are a little bit off and on in the summer just because of my travel. So there may or may not be one this week, but we're keeping the Monday ones going. So you'll always have your dose of Monday advice. So until next time, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you've made it this far, you must be ready to join my fight for depth in a distracted world. Now the best way to do this is to join over 125,000 people who receive my email newsletter each Monday. You can sign [e-mail] ideas and when you do, I will send you a free guide to my seven best ideas about cultivating a deep life. Sign up [e-mail] ideas.