Someone recently sent me one of those long-form idea articles that you post on X and hope that it does well.
This one was titled, Your Brain is About to Need a Gym.
Now at a high level.
This new piece is responding to my own New York Times op-ed that came out in March, in which I argued that we need a cognitive fitness revolution to save our increasingly fried brains.
Much in the same way that in the 20th century we needed a physical fitness revolution to save our increasingly unhealthy bodies.
Now this new article takes that proposal and follows it through to all of its implications.
Here I want to read a quote from it.
I also think cognitive fitness becomes a market, a big one.
Imagine the cognitive equivalent of what the fitness industry built between 1980 and 2020.
Apps that force you to think slowly.
Coaches who train your attention the way trainers train your hamstrings.
Schools that reteach deep reading after generation lost at the scrolling.
Corporate programs that audit and report your team's cognitive endurance, the way they currently audit lines of code.
Insurance discounts for verified daily reading habits.
A Strava for hours spent away from a screen.
The Peloton of writing by hand.
I'm half joking and half not.
Alright, so this new article, in other words, is asking a fascinating question.
Fitness is a $100 billion industry.
What would our commitment to cognitive fitness look like if we got equally serious about it?
Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this show, which is the perfect opportunity to explore some answers.
All right, so here's my plan.
I want to approach this topic with tears.
Organized from moderate to intense commitment to cognitive fitness.
At each tier, I'm going to give you an ever more intense set of tools or ideas to think about for how to push your cognitive fitness to the next level.
We'll end up on some prediction for some perhaps truly insane places that this revolution might end up in the near future.
So if you feel like the onslaught of the digital from hyper palatable distractions on your phone to the increasing urge to offload mental strain to AI is making you dumber, and if you're fed up and you're ready to start pushing back, then this episode is for you.
As always, I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world.
All right, so let's start on our first tier of commitment to cognitive fitness.
We'll call this moderate intensity.
Now last month on this show I described a collection of five simple exercises for your brain that I say are the laying, the foundation of sort of good cognitive fitness.
They're the...
The mental health equivalent of what we do in physical health, where we say, like get enough steps or eat some vegetables, easy things you can do on a regular basis.
That will really make a big difference over time and starting to get more fit.
This is our least intense tier of cognitive fitness intervention.
So I want to go through these five exercises again real quickly.
I actually have the prop I used in that episode from a month ago.
So we can use that again.
And let's just briefly review the sort of moderate intensity commitment that I'm suggesting for cognitive fitness.
My first suggestion... was to read every day.
Consuming the written word is like getting steps for your physical health that forces your brain to work together in a ways that otherwise wouldn't do.
It forges new connections.
And over time, this literally makes your brain more capable.
You become smarter.
So you want to have a certain number of pages you read every day that you treat similarly in your physical health, to getting a certain number of steps every day.
All right, the second easy exercise I recommended was don't avoid writing.
It is very tempting, because of AI tools, to offload that strain you feel when you look at a blank page by just having that chat bot or just clicking on that Gemini button in Google Doc.
Just like, hey, give me a draft of this.
Just put some words down.
I'd rather sort of just like edit what you have to say than having to.
You know, conjure de novo words from scratch, but do not flee that strain.
That strain, you have to reconceptualize it.
It's not a negative thing you're trying to avoid.
It's the feeling of strength.
It's the feeling of growth.
It's like feeling a burn in your muscle when you lift a heavy weight.
Head towards the strain of filling an empty page and be proud when you finish, that little high you get after you've completed the act of cognitive construction, cognitive creation,
Writing is, I'm going to say, like the pull-ups of your brain, right?
So if reading is like getting enough steps, it's our foundation of movement.
Writing is like pull-ups right a simple exercise that works every muscle and is gonna make you stronger.
All right, a third of my moderate intensity tier suggestions is to go on thinking walks.
While on foot, try to stick with a singular thought.
It could be a professional thought.
It could be just an idea thought.
You're trying to make sense of a complicated idea or self-reflection.
You're trying to solve or make sense of an issue in your own life.
Do not bring your phone or have your phone often in your bag so that it's hard to access for distraction.
Practice being alone with your own thoughts.
Practice aiming your mind's eye on targets that you have intentionally chosen.
We have lost the art of just long, consistent, self-directed thinking.
Thinking walks will help you get it back.
Before, here I said plug in your phone.
What I talked about there was while at home, keep your phone plugged in your kitchen.
After this episode, one of our listeners wrote in and said, hey, you should call that landlining.
You turn your smartphone into like a landline, because it's plugged in and it remains plugged in in your kitchen.
This means, at the very least, when you're at home, you do not have the option of quickly glancing at your phone at the slightest hint of boredom or distraction.
Your brain then gets used to feeling the feeling of I'm not 100 entertained right now and that's okay.
All right, the final of these moderate intensity tier suggestions was learn a hard skill.
Just have something you're doing.
You have to do it every day, but have something you're doing that forces you to actually have to concentrate.
I'm trying to learn how to play the song on the guitar.
I have to concentrate.
I'm trying to get better at hitting a softball for my softball team.
I'm going to go to the batting cages.
I have to concentrate.
I got to think, adjust, focus, act, focus, adjust.
That's all just getting your brain going.
Again, this is going to be the physical equivalent of like I'm going to play pickup basketball.
I'm going to play ultimate Frisbee with like the dads in the park.
It's like an activity that gets your body moving in a way that you otherwise wouldn't.
You need an activity that keeps your mind moving. in ways that you otherwise might avoid.
All right, so that's tier one, moderate intensity commitments.
You've heard those things before.
Let's move up to tier two. the serious intensity, right?
So if the first tier was the equivalent of having some reasonable health habits like getting some steps and eating vegetables, the next, most intense tier needs to be more like going to a gym on a regular basis, right?
So if we think about our physical health, you start with just everyday activity and basic healthy habits and then you move up to I'm actually gonna go out of my way to go to a gym.
I'm gonna drive somewhere.
I'm gonna go through an exercise routine.
It's gonna take 45 minutes.
I'm gonna sweat.
It's gonna be hard.
That is the next tier of intensity in physical health.
We need that equivalent. and cognitive fitness.
We need something that is like a brain gym.
Well, I've been thinking about this recently.
I've been thinking about more intense cognitive fitness style activities I've been doing in my own life that might be the mental equivalent of going to the gym, And I have two techniques here that I want to share.
I think it's the first time I've talked about either.
So this is ratcheting up our intensity here.
All right, the first technique I call immersive thinking.
And here's how it works.
You build out a mini excursion, something that might take anywhere between one to four hours.
It is designed to leverage novel environments to help push your brain temporarily into a higher gear than you would normally be.
Just like going to a gym.
You're going to lift much heavier weights than you're going to sort of come across in your everyday life.
Immersive thinking is about trying to leverage novel environments to push your brain to a new level of thinking that you want to normally do in everyday life and therefore get better both comfort with thinking and growth of thinking ability.
Now there's three elements for an immersive speaking thinking, rather mini excursion to actually work.
Element one, you need an environment that's novel and thought provoking.
So a place that you associate with contemplation and that you don't associate with other things in your life is why your kitchen doesn't work or the conference room at your office doesn't work.
You have too many other associations with that that will be distracting.
The second element of making this idea work, have a warmup routine.
Now, just like at the gym, you need to do a warmup routine before you start lifting those heavy weights.
I am going to argue.
When you're doing immersive thinking, you need some sort of cognitive warmup routine that should be based on the consumption of information.
That just sort of gets those brain circuits fired up.
Your brain activity is going.
Now you're in a mode of, I wanna, my brain is connected in different ways.
I'm ready to start using it.
And then finally, the third element of immersive thinking will be some sort of exercise routine in which you use this warmed up brain to produce new information, Information that is a stretch for you or otherwise, demanding and interesting.
This is now the cognitive equivalent of actually lifting that heavy weight trying to push things towards failure.
Environment, warm-up, exercise.
That is what you need for the immersive thinking strategy to work.
Now, what I want to do here is give you a case study from my own life.
This is something I've actually done on multiple occasions here in my hometown of Washington, D.C.
I'm going to sort of describe the three elements of an immersive thinking mini excursion that I've done before.
All right.
So for my example, immersive thinking excursion, the environment I used was the National Gallery of Art.
Here in Washington, D.C., down on the Mall.
So for me, I can jump on the Metro where I live, go a few stops.
I'll get out like in Judiciary Square and maybe walk, whatever it is.
Third of a mile, half a mile, down to the Mall.
I sort of like that walk, and it helps clear my mind.
It's not too far away.
All right, so I went to the National Gallery of Art.
My warm-up routine...
I would go to a particular gallery within the larger art museum.
Like here is a room that has whatever Dutch still life paintings.
I would read an article about about either one of the artists featured in that gallery or the style in general, and then consume the paintings.
Let me look at these paintings, try to understand what's going on, in light of what I just read about it.
This is a warm-up routine, because now I'm consuming information that's stimulating my brain and putting me into more of an intellectual or contemplative state.
Then for the actual productive exercise I have done this on a couple occasions go down to the Cascade Cafe, which is in the basement of the National Gallery.
It's actually on the underground tunnel that's connecting the modern from the non-modern art wing.
You can see there's a waterfall that starts up top, and you can see the waterfall from the cafe.
And I get very bad cell service down there.
So you're effectively disconnected while you're down there.
Get a coffee, sit down. and now try to write something.
I would typically would be writing like either solving a proof or trying to write some sort of difficult idea or essay.
That is the brain equivalent of.
I went to a gym to see my trainer.
We got warmed up and then went through a pretty hard routine.
Let's take a quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that make this show possible.
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All right, let's get back to the show.
All right, so I have a second technique to recommend here for the sort of more intense tier.
I'm going to call this a cognitive cardio point system.
All right, so I've got to explain what I mean here.
It's hard to believe.
Let's back up.
In the world of physical health, it's hard to believe that cardiovascular exercise was once considered bad, and I'm talking as late as, like the 1950s and 1960s, men were advised.
This is true, men were advised not to do cardiovascular exercise after the age of 40 because they thought this would avoid heart attacks.
And women were told essentially avoid breaking a sweat altogether if possible.
Now, the person perhaps most responsible for changing our understanding of exercise was Dr Kenneth Cooper, who was a former Air Force doctor who, in 1968, published a groundbreaking book called Aerobics, which made the case that cardiovascular activity is not a heart attack machine, but actually a way to make your heart and body healthier and you'll live longer.
And not only should you do some cardiovascular activity, you should probably do a lot.
I recently read Cooper's memoir.
We talked about it here on the show.
And he talks about how, when that book first came out, fellow doctors thought that his advice was deranged and dangerous.
One of them actually said the streets will soon be filled with the corpses of dead joggers, because advising middle-aged men to go running was going to cause deaths left and right.
Well, of course, Cooper was right and they were wrong.
We now know cardiovascular exercise, of course, is healthy for you.
Anyways, if we go back and read Cooper's early work, Here's what's interesting to me how he advised people how to get enough cardiovascular activity.
A lot of people have forgotten this about his work, but it's really interesting.
He introduced back in the 60s and updated it throughout the years a point system that He got lots of different activities and assigned them points.
These would be like appendixes in the back of his books, even to today.
And then he gave you a goal.
30 points a week.
So you had some flexibility in when and how you got your cardio, but you knew your goal was to get to 30 points.
And this would often require quite a bit of activity.
I actually loaded up here.
I mean his systems evolve, but I have here to load up a version of his system from 1982.
So he kept updating it just to get a sense of what we're talking about here.
I don't know, Jesse, we'll see how we stack up.
All right, so at the top here, he's talking about points for various walking and running sessions.
So if you...
Run a mile.
How fast would we run a mile, Jesse?
You think between 6.41 and eight minutes?
Or are you faster?
Yeah, that's probably over seven now.
All right, so over seven would be five points, right?
If you can run a mile under 5.43, that's seven points.
Look, he goes, if you run two miles...
Let's see what we take here.
If you can run two miles... Oh, man, I think that would take me 20 minutes.
If you could get it under 20 minutes you could get nine points, but between 20 and 24 minutes is seven points right.
Walking is going to give you fewer... What do we got here?
Look how detailed this is, Jesse.
It's like every distance you might go, and every time he tells you how many points, oh look, all you got to do is run 15 miles under an hour 25, and you get 120 points.
It wasn't just walking, running like here's cycling.
I don't know cycling well, but look, if you do a, If you do a two-mile ride in seven minutes, you get 15 points, and so on.
So he had all these different mappings of activities to points.
And maybe you like cycling.
Maybe you like running.
Maybe you like walking.
Maybe you like doing high-intensity weight training.
You would add up your points and try to get to 30 in a week.
And it would take a non-trivial – like you really had to be –
Putting aside time and training in order to hit the 30 points.
So that was a good way of conveying it takes a lot of exercise to get as much as you need.
I think we could use, here's my idea, we could use an equivalent point system for cognitive fitness.
That we could have a collection of assignments of points to different types of cognitive fitness activities and then, following Cooper's model, say your goal is to get 30 points a week as a way to get you past just doing some basic activities and actually doing a lot of the stuff you need.
Now, I came up with a sample point system.
I'll read a few of these ideas off here.
Maybe you get one point for 20 pages of easy reading, two for 20 pages of moderately complex and three for 20 pages let's just say pages, not minutes of hard reading.
Maybe two points for a 30 minute thinking walk, two points for 15 minutes of deliberate practice, five points for 20 minutes of writing.
Five points for 20 minutes of programming, no AI maybe do.
Three points for 30 minutes of being immersed in a craft-based hobby, and so on, right.
So we can imagine a system like that.
So if we use the sample system I just talked about, here is an example of a collection of activities that would get you to 30 points in a week.
Reading 100 pages of a moderately complex book, which gets you 10 points.
Taking a 30, I think I'm thinking here, two different 30-minute thinking walks.
I have to have six points.
An hour total of deliberate practice on guitar, eight points.
And an hour spent working in the garden, six points.
I might not have got that exactly right, but something like that adds up to something like 30 points on my scale, right?
So that's like a non-trivial amount of cognitive fitness work.
So you would have to actually put aside some time and have some intention to actually get there.
Now I don't have like a final definitive point system to recommend yet.
And I think that's something I might actually work on for an upcoming episode.
But for now, you might consider doing something like this on your own writing out a system, a point system for various cognitive fitness activities and setting a 30 point a week goal, keeping track of it.
And this will push you to do more stuff with your brain than you otherwise might have.
All right, so that's our second tier.
That's sort of like serious intensity of cognitive fitness activity.
As we continue this thought of experiment, of taking seriously what will happen if cognitive fitness becomes 100 billion industry, let's go to our third tier, which I'm going to call insane mode intensity.
And what I want to do here is look to the future.
So the first two tiers are things you can do. varying intensity of things you can do right now.
But if cognitive fitness really becomes a massive industry like physical fitness, there's going to be an industry built around cognitive fitness.
And so I want to put out three predictions about what we might see in the near future, if and when cognitive fitness becomes an actual major industry.
All right, so the first prediction is that we're going to see high-end thinking trainers.
I've spent most of my life as a professional thinker, and if you're a professional thinker, there's lots of places.
You get informal but pretty comprehensive training.
Like when I was at MIT.
You're basically taught maybe through osmosis as an example how to think, how to do math, how to sustain concentration on complicated problems.
But I think there might be great benefit to bringing this sort of professional thinking training to people in all sorts of different walks of life, not just people that prove theorems for a living.
Now, this isn't fully new.
I had long heard about Josh Waitzkin, who was the chess prodigy that was featured in the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, who started from.
My understanding is that Waitzkin does this type of training.
He does thinking training for people for whom being able to think clear is vital to their success.
I think his early clients were in finance where if you're running a hedge fund, The difference between being exceptional at thinking and kind of good could be like a 500 million delta.
Like it really matters.
Of course, we're going to hire a trainer.
We don't want to leave any stone unturned.
You know, I think this is going to become more common.
Why don't we actually load up his page, Jesse, just to see what he's talking about.
So he calls his company now Stoke Ventures.
He's very into foil surfing, so it's probably connected to that.
Let's read his quote here.
At the razor's edge of peak performance in decision making.
Athletics business finance, chess or anything deeply nuanced.
The greatest insight is often right next to a blunder.
Our genius is often entangled with our eccentricity, our virtuosity.
All right, that's pretty... but let's go and talk about what their training actually includes.
Areas of focus and training with Whitskins Company involves training to love training and the growth it unlocks.
Embodying quality as a way of life.
Cultivating presence and mindfulness.
The systematic cultivation of the art of focusing on what matters most.
Developing introspective sensitivity.
Identifying, supporting windows of peak creativity and flow.
Developing let's see non-local and parallel learning, training to learn the mini from the one, and so on.
Right
So this is just an offering where they're going to help you get more out of your brain.
I think weight skins on to something because in a lot of industries, that is a huge difference.
We'll pay money for software or tools or productivity ideas, but getting your brain sharper is the ultimate productivity hack.
I think for a living, I don't use social media.
I was trained professionally to be a thinker.
And because of that, to use myself as an example, I can, for example, write incredibly quickly.
I can sit down and have an idea and 30 minutes later have like a polished newsletter article or draft of an op-ed or a script for a podcast.
That's an incredible productivity boon that I've gained, not by...
Using like AI, but by training a brain to produce better.
So I think that's going to be something we see.
Another thing we're going to see as we get to sort of insane mode cognitive fitness industry is going to be the rise of non-instrumental courses.
People taking classes in person or online like learning languages or hard math or training about puzzles or mastering difficult crafts, just to get their mind sharp.
The whole point is this is going to push your mind.
It's going to be hard to do.
Your hardest course you took in college.
You're doing it now as a middle-aged man because you want to make sure you keep pushing your mind, not because the skill you're learning is instrumental, but because the learning itself is going to get your mind sharp.
I think we're going to see this process-focused marketing as opposed to skill-focused marketing for courses in the near future.
All a cognitive fitness play.
Finally, I want to elaborate an idea that was mentioned in that article that we opened this episode with.
I do think cognitive endurance testing is going to be something that actually we do more often.
It's going to be numbers we know, and it's going to be numbers that we are going to use, which will completely change our conception of cognitive fitness, how to quantify it and its value.
There'll be some sort of standardized test that gives you a number that I think might play a role in hiring you.
I mean, why wouldn't it?
If you're in a non-trivial knowledge work job, what is your capability of sustaining focus on a hard task and actually making progress through complexity?
Can you resist distraction and actually use your brain to add value to information?
This might be like a primary ability we're looking for if I'm hiring in one of these jobs, right?
And that we might like give you a test right there and see what your score is.
This might also become not something we use to gatekeep, but also a measure that we aim to improve.
I could imagine and I think I would approve of this.
A world in which we're thinking about schooling instead of our standardized testing notions, all being content-based.
We want to make sure that our students know all of these things from some sort of list that experts produced is like this is the knowledge you need to know.
You need to know about Andrew Jackson's presidency, but not Calvin Coolidge's presidency.
You need to know about euclidean, you know geometry, but you don't need to know about uh calculus, on the trigonomic functions right, we have these like big lists that we're just like.
These are what you have to know and not and let's test everyone and see where they are in knowledge.
Imagine instead, schools are saying we want to see kids improving in cognitive endurance.
That's just as important.
Why they're here.
Can you deploy your brain with intention?
If you're cognitively fit, then no matter what you go off to do, you are going to have more success professionally.
You're going to thrive more personally and we want to train your ability to focus and use your brain and we're going to test your cognitive endurance and different people will be at different places, but we want to see yours go up.
Improvement in cognitive fitness is maybe going to be the number one sign that a particular educational institution is actually delivering on its promise.
I think we're going to see that and it will completely reorient the way we think about things.
We're not going to be giving everyone tablets and throwing stuff up on our smart whiteboards and we're just going to let's just edit Google Docs instead of writing, because kids these days need computers, because that's going to be reflected in slow or no improvement at all in cognitive endurance.
Like, no, do it the hard way because we want your brain to feel strained.
That's okay.
That feeling of strain is like the burn of muscles if you're trying to get stronger for a football position.
It's good.
You're getting stronger.
Fitness is good.
It's not something we fear.
It's something that we embrace.
So high-end thinking training, non-instrumental courses being a major part of the information economy, and cognitive endurance testing being ingrained in both education and our professional lives.
These are what I see in the future in the sort of the most intense tier of cognitive fitness that we might see with the revolution that's coming.
All right, so let's go back.
What am I trying to say here?
Don't sleep on cognitive fitness.
Cognitive fitness is having your brain fit.
It's going to help you resist brain rot.
It's going to prevent technology companies from fully colonizing your mental life.
But it's more than that.
Cognitive fitness might very well be the key to healthy thinking, thriving and healthy, thriving and, dare I say, deep life in the 21st century.
I think it's an incredibly important trend that's just getting started.
You could be ahead of the curve.
Start taking cognitive fitness seriously now.
Start with the moderate tier, experiment with my more intense tier and be ready for the insane mode intensity that is going to follow.
The future is going to be won by those with strong brains, not those that are the most comfortable with tools or using the most AI or the most up on the latest phone apps.
It's going to be the people who can get the most out of what's between their ears.
I want you to be one of them.
Let's take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that make this show possible.
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All right, let's get back to the show.
All right, well, that's enough about my thoughts.
I want to hear what you have to say.
On Mondays, we like to open our inbox and read notes from our listeners.
As always, if you have a question, reaction or something you want to share, you can send a note to podcast at calnewportcom.
All right, so for our first message, instead of responding to a single message, I thought what might be nice would be to go back, and I'm doing this with some trepidation.
But go back to that episode from last month that was about reversing brain rot, where I introduced those five exercises we talked about today in our moderate tier, and read some of the YouTube comments to the YouTube version of that episode, because this will all be feedback on the same type of ideas we talked about today.
So it seemed relevant.
But Jesse, I'm a little bit nervous because, you know, reading YouTube comments can.
It can go both ways.
All right, so I'm going to read a few of these here.
I'll also put some of these up on the screen for those who are interested.
All right, this comment says, Cal, a single-handedly has got me out of a major rut in life.
Thanks for everything.
I will forever be in your debt.
The deep life is the only life.
Oh, so far so good, Jesse.
All right, another one says, I boiled...
My own daily self-care routine down to a pithy three words, read, write, sweat.
Those three things don't make my day better, but on days when I do those three things are usually better days.
Another person says my brain rot.
Prevention practice is one meditation guided, 20 minutes, two exercise, 30 minutes of strength training, 30 minutes of cardio.
Three, yoga, guided from 30 to 50 minutes.
Four.
Two 90-minute study blocks, one for career strictly and 90 for math and statistics, also career related.
I try to do as many of these as possible.
Doing the meditation, exercise, and yoga all in one morning before work changed my life.
When I do my 90-minute study block and anything involving reading, I read aloud to practice speaking what I'm thinking when I can.
I guess we can keep these off the screen, Jesse.
The text is so small, it's kind of hard to see.
Someone else said, In the past four months, I've read almost 20 books.
I'm a busy mom of two teen girls who are involved with sports.
These past four months have been some of the most peaceful of my life.
Social media is a cancer and you won't realize it until you finally make the decision to put it down.
Someone else says the thinking walk advice made me think of a quote from Nietzsche never trust a thought that occurs to you indoors.
Oh, I love that one.
Let's see here.
Running analogies in a Cal Newport podcast is so good.
Well, I appreciate that.
They're pretty positive, Jesse.
Where's the, like, you but? you bought, and then some sort of meme reference I don't understand.
Low-key based.
Yeah.
Low-key based.
I've never been able to read in bed, but I do love reading in the morning, preferably with a massive cup of coffee.
I can get a good 50 to 100 pages in before work.
This is my sacred me time.
As far as what to read, I recommend walking around your local used bookshop, library or Goodwill and bring home a nice, nourishing pile of books that look interesting.
I would never trust an AI or algorithm or even a friend to recommend books.
You know what you like.
I think these are all positive comments and there's a bigger thread that runs through this.
Cognitive fitness matters.
Like when you start caring about your mind, people are having profound impacts.
I would argue a lot of these impacts sound a lot more profound even than what people talk about when they add exercise to their life.
A calmness they've never felt before.
Their days are much better.
And they're willing to go farther towards this.
Like we know there's people who are really committed to physical fitness and we're impressed by it.
We should be equally impressed by these examples.
I get up early and read a hundred pages every day.
I just don't use social media at all.
These are the type of things that are leading to really positive impacts in people's lives.
So I think that's a good collection of messages to talk about here, because this revolution is going to happen and I would like you to be a part of it.
All right.
What do we got as our second one here, Jesse?
We have a message here from Rob who is sharing a disturbing new article by a college professor.
All right.
So I haven't read this article yet that Rob sent us.
So we're going to do this in real time together.
Let me pull it up here.
The title is from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The title of the article, uh-oh, My Students Can't Read.
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
Let's just read the intro to this, Jesse.
I'm sure this is going to get worse before it gets better.
Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article.
It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago.
Not one student finished it.
And it's not positive.
When I asked why, a student answered, honestly, it was too long.
And she kept losing track of what the paper was about.
This was not a remedial class.
These are students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here.
Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read.
The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote and what I'm seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch.
There is a measurable generational collapse.
All right, well, Rob, I'm glad you sent that along.
I mean, this is alarming.
We saw something similar in physical health when we saw, you know, the real...
A real canary in the coal mine, a real warning sign, a real sort of point of break for a lot of medical professionals.
Where the crisis alarms went off was seeing a sudden rise in type 2 diabetes among kids.
Kids didn't get type 2 diabetes.
It used to take a long time, through bad eating habits et cetera, to sort of get the type two diabetes.
But we got so bad in our diet and we cut out so much physical activity that we began to see kids with it.
This is a trend that really picked up in the 21st century.
This is when the alarm sirens went off for a lot of physical health practitioners.
This is the equivalent, I think, for cognitive health.
College students, High school graduates wrote essays to get into college, had the test scores, are looking at a 20-page article and say I can't read that.
That is the cognitive equivalent of having type 2 diabetes.
Your brain is not working.
It is not anywhere near where it needs to be to be a functioning, thriving member of our sort of civic democracy and a knowledge work economy.
This is a big deal.
It's the type of thing that makes us say cognitive fitness matters.
And it goes back to that cognitive endurance testing.
That's what I want if I'm a college, maybe.
I want to see where you are.
Take one of these tests in a testing center.
I don't care about your AI generated college essay.
Take one of these tests.
How much can you focus?
That's what I'm looking for.
Do that one change.
Let me tell you what you could do right now.
I'm thinking about this on the fly.
You want to change the trajectory of this country.
You want to give new opportunities and the ability for our current young generation to have the best chance of thriving in their lives.
Add alongside mandatory SAT testing for college admissions, add cognitive endurance testing.
You get all these kids knowing oh, my ability to focus and sustain concentration is going to play a role in whether I can go to whatever school I want to go to, be it Georgetown or Dartmouth.
Now suddenly, they're going to look at their phone like a liability.
They're going to look at TikTok like the thing that's going to keep them out of the Ivy League.
They're going to look at a book like the activity that's going to help set up my future.
And as a side effect and this might be sort of leveraging a sort of crass instrumentality, but a side effect is these brains are going to be stronger and these are going to be more capable, more thriving, more successful citizens and individuals.
So this is a crisis, but it's also an opportunity.
I'll tell you what we don't need to do.
It's a well.
AI is not going away, so why don't we just let all of our kids do everything with AI in school?
And then are we high-tech.
Looking around, we're cool, right?
I'm going to put on my 90s-style skater chain wallet because I'm a 45-year-old, right?
I'm cool, right?
We're all cool.
We're all going to use AI, right?
It's going to be cool.
No, the whole point is to get smarter.
Having a machine do your work for you.
What does that have to do with getting smarter, which is the whole point of school?
So I appreciate that message.
Jesse still wears and insists on wearing a chain wallet.
Is that true?
Yeah, it's true.
With carpenter pants?
Yeah.
And Vans.
Yeah.
Jesse's a big skater.
It's always him with like 13-year-olds at the skate park.
He's always like, man, tubular, man.
Radical.
Radical, front nose, ollie.
Goofy foot?
Yeah.
Or an ACL.
Yeah, he's like, all right, kids, watch out this.
And up, tore my ACL.
And then you just hear an ambulance come and they just sort of pick him up and walk off into the stretcher.
All right, do we have a third message?
We do.
All right.
Our final message comes from Tyler, and it involves your interview with Laura Vanderkam from a few weeks ago.
Ah, yes.
That's where we – Laura was talking to us about free time and scheduling and the myth that we don't have enough time.
All right.
Tyler says, that was a great interview with Laura Vanderkam.
I had already implemented several of her ideas independently into my life, so it was validating to hear this.
Are you familiar with the Paul Graham maker schedule versus manager schedules concept?
Laura's idea that we don't need long stretches of free time isn't exactly the same thing as the long stretches of unscheduled time that makers have in Paul Graham's article, but there are parallels and it made me wonder if us creative types are over-romanticizing the idea of long uninterrupted time to work.
All right, there's a couple different things going on in here.
So first of all, I think he's asking a question about...
Laura's idea that, when it comes to our life in general, We have this imagination that we need very sort of like open schedules to be happy and that we're all really impoverished on time.
And because of that, we just have to run around busy.
And she's like you can do more with your existing schedule than you think if you're just a little bit intentional about how you use your time.
You can actually get a lot of fulfillment out of your life without having to drastically reduce, like what's going on in your life.
And he's comparing this.
The first thing Taylor's doing is comparing that the Paul Graham's maker schedule versus manager schedule.
I don't know.
We've talked about this essay before.
It's really famous.
It's from like 20 years ago.
I mean, basically his idea is.
Makers like computer programmers need long stretches of uninterrupted time.
Managers however, want to jump into a lot of meanings and catch up with what's going on with things.
And these two scheduling philosophies are in conflict.
And when the makers are forced to try to interface with manager schedules, the makers get miserable and can't produce stuff.
All right.
So I guess he's saying the maker schedule seems to be something that the importance of a maker schedule is maybe contrasting to Laura's idea that, like you, have enough time.
You just have to make better use of it.
Right.
You don't need to drastically simplify things.
Laura's not talking about.
So to respond to this first point, Laura's not talking about deep work, right?
She's not saying you should be very frenetic at work and just jumping back and forth between meetings and email and you don't need long stretches of deep work.
If your work requires depth, I produce complicated computer code.
I have to write complicated reports.
I'm a professor looking on research.
Then that's part of the activities that you will be scheduling.
So I don't think she's giving a referendum on the importance or lack of importance of depth.
But I like.
The second point is also worth talking about where Tyler says are knowledge workers in general over-romanticizing this idea of a maker schedule, of having long stretches of time that isn't interrupted?
Well, here's what I think is relevant here.
If you're not used to depth, if you're not used to deep work and you just clear out a schedule then yeah, you might find that you have over-romanticized it and you don't really know what to do with all this time.
And it doesn't necessarily make your professional life better.
What I recommend people do is they start with specificity.
When it comes to deep work schedule, like a meeting or appointment, deep work on your calendar for specific, deep objectives, not just I've protected all day.
But you say here's two and a half hours I'm going to spend trying to get this draft of this report done.
This afternoon I blocked off 90 minutes to specifically work on trying to run down this bug in this computer program.
I'm working on
So schedule specific deep work at first.
Now what's going to happen is You're going to learn a lot about depth and how much time and concentration it requires and what schedule is best for it, as you do this exercise.
Sometimes you'll learn for a certain task that the amount of time you put aside was too much, and for a lot of times you'll be butting up against the boundaries of the time you put aside.
Like man, I could have used a lot more.
This is where you learn.
This type of hyper-specific time blocking is where you learn about the reality of your brain and the type of things you do.
This knowledge can then be deployed going forward into simpler heuristics.
Like you might realize okay, the best way for me to get this, this and this done is to keep my whole morning clear of meetings.
So I need to get started with writing and then do my debugging.
And I need to have that done by 11, while I'm still caffeinated, or I'm just not going to get it done at all.
So you learn. what type of maker schedule works for you and what you do in that maker schedule.
So you're right.
You can't just jump in and switch to a maker schedule.
You might waste a lot of time.
But maker schedules are really valuable if you have a lot of self-awareness about what your brain is capable of, what this work looks like.
What are the most important things for you to do?
So start with hyper-specific time blocking, schedule time for deep work blocks, but be specific about what you're doing and then allow that to evolve into a maker schedule that makes sense for whatever type and intensity and volume of making that you actually do in your job.
So there's a lot of kind of complicated points that are all hidden within that same discussion.
All right, we like to end our episodes on Monday with giving you an update about what I am up to.
The book I finished last week was Football by Chuck Klausterman.
You might like this one, Jesse.
I might loan it to you.
Yeah.
It's like a collection of essays.
You know, Cluster Mendoza is sort of like very observational, like, essays.
And he's just riffing on a lot of ideas.
He's a super football fan.
Obsessive.
And he's just riffing on a lot of ideas about football as a sport and its cultural position and its relationship to his own life.
And I've always really enjoyed his writing.
So it's good.
How did it compare to America's Game when you read that a couple years ago?
You know, it's very different because America's Game is a history.
It's like, what is the history of the NFL?
Like, how did this go?
Klosterman...
He just like has ideas and runs with them.
So it's esoteric, kind of nonlinear eccentric, observational essays, like on football, like the tactics or like the media component of it, and stuff a little bit.
On tactics, I mean different stuff right, like so let me be specific.
Like there's one long essay where he's just trying to grapple with the question of like who's the best football player ever?
Okay, And then from there he really gets into like how do we measure such a thing?
Because like, training technology has gotten better.
And if you take an athlete from today and brought him back in time to the era of Jim Thorpe, like they're going to be incredibly more athletic than Jim Thorpe.
But relative to other athletes, Jim Thorpe was – way more impressively athletic.
And he ends up concluding that Jim Thorpe's the best football player of all time.
He's like, but how do we compare that to like Tom Brady?
So he gets like really, you know, he'll get really, he'll get really into that.
He has a whole long thing of trying to understand, like Randy Moss and the idea of mossing.
It's like my son – I asked my son at the pool the other day.
He's like, oh, I mossed you.
I was like, do you know who that's named for?
I have no idea.
What does it mean?
So mossing, like if you talk to a 13-year-old, is where someone's throwing a ball to someone and you out-jump them and grab it out of the air like Randy Moss used to do.
And so it's a term now.
In fact, there's even a game called Moss where, like you throw the ball and you all try to like fight to get it.
And they have no idea who Randy Moss is.
Yeah.
So like there's something on that.
He gets into like fantasy football and betting.
He gets in the fandom.
He gets into like how should we – how should we ethically deal with like CTE?
He has this like whole theory about how, like football is kind of screwed and you know why, like 20 years, like he has this whole history of how it's going to like fall apart.
Why did football become popular?
And like horse racing used to be the most popular thing.
Why is it not?
And the answer is because we used to all have a lot of interaction with horses.
So, like horse racing was huge in like the 1920s and 1930s, because we all – horses were something we all knew intimately.
And now no one knows anything about horses, so it's become – anyways, I like it.
I got a signed copy.
I'll loan it to you.
I think you'd like it.
I have two more books I'm working on that I'm about to finish, but we'll get to those soon.
What have I watched?
All right.
So Jesse and I both went to see Pressure.
The Brendan Fraser as Dwight Eisenhower movie about.
This is not the most exciting description of a movie.
The meteorology involved in the D-Day invasion.
Yeah.
We saw it on the D-Day anniversary. which was Saturday.
Okay.
I saw it Friday.
You saw it Friday.
What was your review?
I have thoughts.
The reason why I saw it was because Mad Dog had the author on the book a week prior about the whatever the guy's name was.
I forgot already.
Yeah the, it was a neurologist.
Yeah, clearly clearly stuck with us.
Yeah yeah uh, i liked it.
I haven't been in the movies in a long time, so why aren't you going to movies?
I just i watch them at home.
I guess We went to the movie where you can get food and stuff.
I mean, it's not cheap, but I liked it.
Yeah, you got to go to the movies more.
I'm going to take you to the movies.
I go to so many movies.
The average...
Pre-pandemic, what was it?
At the height, the depression, the average American would buy 30 movie tickets a year.
Really?
And like 2018, 2019 pre-pandemic, it's fallen to four.
I would estimate that I see 20 to 30 movies a year.
I think 20 in the theater.
That's awesome.
I think I see 20 in the theater.
I liked it.
I mean, look, I like they're making that type of movie.
It's like a small to mid-budget type movie.
I mean they used.
You know, it's mainly like in the house where, like the, the central, the command was right.
So it's like mainly in a house and like the grounds, right.
They use, you see stock footage of like some warships and stuff like that.
And then they like recreated basically two scenes from saving private Ryan, where they use like exactly the Janice Kaminsky's like visual aesthetic with like the camera behind the machine gun from the German nest and the people in the handheld camera.
They just like, we're just going to replicate like three shots.
From Saving Private Ryan.
You know that opening shot of Saving Private Ryan took like four weeks to film and cost 12 million.
Did it really?
And that was 25 years ago?
90, 99, uh, 98.
And then it was 99 Oscars.
Yeah.
It was robbed for best picture by Shakespeare in love.
Um, I liked, I mean, I liked that they're making these movies.
Um, My note was I don't know if you noticed this as well they didn't do like Aaron Sorkin would have been better about this in the screenplay.
They didn't do a good enough job of setting up.
What specifically about how the whatever the guy's name is, what specifically about the way he was doing meteorology was different than what the other guy was doing Chris Messina was doing.
Yeah right, like you, like sorkin was very good.
He could create tension about abstract concepts, like you would understand.
Like oh, there's this new school of doing meteorology based on these principles and the old school is based on those principles, And this is where the tension is.
People don't trust this new principle.
And this is how we would verify.
Oh, but this is how we know that principle is right.
They didn't actually try to explain the meteorology.
So it took some of the like friction out of the tension.
Yeah.
Just say like you're moronic.
This is dumb how you're doing it.
But it's like I think it's the weather is going to be this.
Right.
But like, what was the difference?
Yeah, that's a good point.
Right.
Like, was it like jet stream?
Was it using the high atmosphere?
So I think that was like bad technical screenwriting maybe too many long pauses and speeches and a little bit more momentum.
And the wife subplot wasn't in it enough for it to make sense.
You see in the beginning and then like, oh, by the way, her hospital got bombed.
And then like just and that's it.
Right.
Like, I don't think she was in it enough.
Also, she looked too much like the Eisenhower's.
Oh, yeah.
What's her name?
Yeah.
Who was also his, you know, that was his lover.
Oh, I did not know that.
Yeah, like famously, that was... Makes sense.
Yeah.
But that actress looked exactly like the wife.
I was like, is this the same person?
Is this like... Like, why?
Make him look different.
What'd you think about Brendan Fraser as Dwight D. Eisenhower?
Mad Dog didn't like it.
He thought it was cast wrong.
I didn't mind it.
Yeah.
That was Mad Dog's only complaint about the movie.
He didn't like that.
It did seem Brendan Fraser-y, but we don't have a good sense of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
You could do anything there.
I'm like, all right, I guess that's what he was like.
I don't know.
All we know of Dwight D. Eisenhower are these stilted speeches to camera as president.
So I don't know what he was like.
So I guess that kind of hurt it.
I mean, it was no like Daniel Day Lewis and Lincoln speaking of Spielberg, like that performance was crazy.
Yeah.
It completely lost in this, completely like naturalistic character.
And Um, when Matt dog had the author on, he was saying he had video of when Eisenhower went to D day, like four days after her, five days after or whatever it was.
And he was saying that he was, like astoundingly relieved that it worked.
I could imagine.
Yeah.
Like that was the whole thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like that, that really had to happen.
I had to.
I watched some, so we rewatched the opening that on on D day anniversary.
We rewatched the the Utah Omaha beat scene from saving private Ryan my, my dad and my my oldest son.
And then I looked up like a bunch of uh historians talking about like what they liked or didn't like about it.
It was pretty realistic is what they concluded.
Um, But, you know, there's more tanks.
Your grandfather's fight in World War II?
He was, like, on a ship as, like, a cook.
I see.
My one grandfather was in the Pacific as well.
Got shot.
Okinawa.
Couldn't ever use his elbow quite the same way again.
He was a trucking.
He was the, like, logistics guy in charge of the trucks.
And there was a Japanese soldier in one of those foxhole hiding hole things.
Popped up, shot him, then his buddy shot him.
Different times.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, we've had to deal with... building the video game cabinet is not easy, right?
Sometimes the Metro is not as air conditioned as I would like.
So like we all, every generation has their, their hardships, but that way.
All right.
And what am I up to otherwise where I went?
So, you know, from last week's episode, I was in Asheville.
I was down there with my with my writer friend, Brad Stolberg.
We trained with our our shared trainer.
You get into good workouts.
Yeah.
He has a sled sled.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One of those friction sleds.
Yeah.
Those are no fun.
How long were the workouts?
One was about an hour.
Other time we were like working on form for stuff because we typically do remote.
Did you watch Brad deadlift like 500 pounds?
I guess he was deadlifting.
I think one of the days he was doing shoulders.
Have you ever seen a pendulum squat or whatever it is?
It's like yeah right, like you're like on a seat and you like rotate all the way down and then come all the way back, so it's like you're doing a really deep squat, but in a seat that like yeah, pendulums around.
Yeah, i've done that once.
Yeah, it's not fun in phoenix.
Yeah yeah, it's not fun.
Yeah, we got to find a good place to train jesse.
We'll find a place.
We'll build a gym.
All right.
That's all the time we have for today.
Thank you for listening.
Stay tuned.
I'll likely have an AI reality check episode on Thursday, but otherwise next Monday we'll be back with another.
Monday advice episode.
So stay tuned.
And until then, as always, stay deep.
Hey, if you made it this far, you must be ready to join my fight for depth in a distracted world.
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