Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Sari: It's preferable to live in a world where people are limited by their imagination than by their skills. Meaning like the people that will thrive in this new era are not the people with the skills. It's the people with the imagination, right? It's the people that, the imagination and the courage.

[00:00:27] CODY: Hey everyone. Welcome back to Mind Hack. I'm your host, Cody McLean, and today's episode is gonna be about AI and productivity. It's been driving everybody crazy lately, and it's created this endless pursuit to be more productive, to move faster, to do more, and maybe that's also what's making us miserable today.

[00:00:49] CODY: I have Sherry Azu with us today. Sherry is the founder of Sublime, and honestly, she's a pretty refreshing voice in this whole tech space. Everyone [00:01:00] is obsessing about how AI can make us more productive. Sherry is out here asking, what if we have this backwards? What if AI and, and this idea of productivity is actually slowing us down and preventing us from doing our best work.

[00:01:14] CODY: I found her through her essay, the End of Productivity, and it hit me because it really challenges the belief that AI is, goes hand in hand with meaning and productivity. And perhaps it's not all about success and efficiency. Her company Sublime is building something entirely different. It's a creative tool that's more about meaningful engagement rather than just checking boxes off a to-do list.

[00:01:43] CODY: And with all the crazy lately about how DeepMind or Deep Seek has really been changing the game. I want to dig in about how our, how is ai. Productivity, is that something that goes hand in hand? Is that something that we [00:02:00] can work with to expand our productivity? Sherry, I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

[00:02:05] CODY: How does, how does AI fit in with deep work or productivity? Or can it?

[00:02:12] Sari: Yeah. I mean, I think I've always said like, technology is never good or bad. It just is, and it can be put to work in so many ways. So you can use AI to be infinitely more productive. You can use AI to be infinitely more creative. It really, I think, depends on the set of values that you're building with, right?

[00:02:29] Sari: What do you mostly care about, right? If you're building a product that, you know, allows people to, uh, churn out thousands of half-baked, like boilerplate, SEO perfect, ready content marketing things to, you know, drive traffic to your site, AI can help you do that. Perfect. If you're trying to write the perfect essay, you know, there's.

[00:02:53] Sari: AI that can help you be infinitely more creative and explore variations and edit that to perfection. And, and so I think AI is an [00:03:00] incredibly, incredibly powerful tool. And I think right now as a species, I think that technology advances far faster than our capacity to internalize and understand the implications or really understand what we want out of them.

[00:03:16] Sari: And for me, one of my worries is that we basically spent like years and decades, um, since the Industrial Revolution really behaving like robots. And so we kind of talk about how AI is becoming more human, but I think we rarely talk about how humans became so robotic, you know, in so many ways. I think kind of like go into a nine to five job and do all of these things that can be replaced.

[00:03:41] Sari: It's really calling into question what is our unique kind of role in the world? And, and so for me, what I'm excited about is the possibility for AI to help us. Create the things that only we can create be infinitely more creative. And that actually has nothing to do with speed, right? It's [00:04:00] not about pressing a button and automating a hundred SEO articles.

[00:04:05] Sari: It's about intentionality. So I think in my life, the way that AI is showing up is there's a million things that I wanna automate, but what are the things that I don't wanna automate? I think human beings will always want to create for the sake of creation. You know, I, it doesn't matter that AI can write a children's book faster than I can, I still have a point of view.

[00:04:26] Sari: And, you know, the little kind of quirks and the tone and like that manifestation, it matters. And so I'm just much more interested in AI to help you make something wonderful than AI to help you make something fast.

[00:04:38] CODY: I've been really head deep in AI development. I find it interesting, I'll be in like a discord because we have Bolt, we have, uh, repli and we have, uh, like cursor, various AI development tools that will automatically code for you.

[00:04:53] CODY: And we've been showing that, you know, studies have come out and showing that AI has increased like the, the productivity of developers by like [00:05:00] 130% of like junior or or mid tier developers. And now it seems like if it's taking over our work, does that deprive us of the meaning of the satisfaction of having done it ourselves?

[00:05:13] CODY: And I'll be in a discord and I'll, I'll be talking about how to overcome some issue with it, and then somebody will just pop in and be like, wow, this is so amazing. Like, can't believe it can do all these things. And simultaneously I'm like, uh, well just wait. Because they're also going to, to see how, how it's not really able to produce the kind of work that they want to produce.

[00:05:34] CODY: But I want to go back on that point of. How does it perhaps deprive us of the meaning of the satisfaction? You know, if you're able to write a blog post and then just have AI do everything for you, does that make us less motivated to continue writing?

[00:05:48] Sari: I think that in some ways, I think we have it backwards in the sense that the place where I fully embrace AI is that I think we basically have lived in a world thus far where you have to, uh, [00:06:00] develop all of these skills in order to be creative.

[00:06:03] Sari: And now it's like, no, you can just be creative. Like, you know, you don't need all of these skills. And I actually think that's incredible and takes us closer to our meaning. If I have an idea for a game that I wanna develop and I don't have the coding skills, now more and more I'll be able to manifest that creative vision without having the coding skills.

[00:06:22] Sari: So, so I actually think that AI will take us closer, uh, because it's going to basically reduce that gap between imagination and reality. Whatever you can imagine, you can make true. Now, I do think a lot of these kind of like fortune cookie Twitter people saying like, you know, all engineering jobs will disappear within three years.

[00:06:40] Sari: Like, I think they're completely overblown as somebody who's like basically spends 12 hours a day in front of a computer building software. There's just so much for humans to do, and I think that, you know, the, the layer at which humans will add value will change, and I think for the better. But I also think that so much of [00:07:00] the, of the value in building things comes down to craft and taste and interface details.

[00:07:07] Sari: And, you know, if you prompt clo like Claude or Chacha Pier or Deep See or whatever, it can suggest hundreds of ways of doing something, but it's not going to suggest your way of doing something. And so I, I really think that in a world where AI is making so many things a commodity, what's not a commodity is like human attention.

[00:07:28] Sari: Why will people care about your thing? If you like, why will people be bothered to read something that you couldn't read yourself or that you didn't care about yourself? And so, I don't know, I just think that there's just gonna be a lot more noise. And consequently, uh, the stories, the motivation, like we're not just building some line because there's this kind of mercenary belief that we need a knowledge management tool or because we ran a search and realized, you know, that people would pay for this.

[00:07:54] Sari: There's just like deep rooted philosophical reasons for building this thing. And I think [00:08:00] people care about that. We are, we create kind of connection and understanding and stories, and it's about taking people on, on a journey. So yeah, I think all of these things, uh, really comes down to what are truly the things that will matter in a world where.

[00:08:15] Sari: A lot of the, the technical and hard skills will become more commoditized.

[00:08:19] CODY: Well, actually, I, I want to go back and, and look at, so Mark Andreessen said, had this Twitter post where he said, in the past, creativity was, was really the root of a lot of success. And then it became, uh, execution and having to do all this work yourself.

[00:08:36] CODY: And now we're kind of back to creativity in the sense that you can have AI do the work for you, but as you said, you can ask AI for something and you can get like a hundred different types of responses. A lot of it right now, it comes back on. How well did you engineer that prompt? And if you want to build a good app, it's how well did you build the schema and the database and the instructions, uh, prior to just, [00:09:00] uh, putting it in a box and telling it to build.

[00:09:02] CODY: I guess that's a defining feature between where we are right now, is that it's still on the human to create a really good prompt and utilize AI as a tool to help them accomplish what they want to do. I wonder how long though it's gonna be until we have maybe general ai or just that it improves, say, at the end of this year where it will have a better understanding about the objective that you're trying to achieve.

[00:09:24] CODY: And then, especially with Deep Seek that came out, you know, they, they spent maybe $6 million and they're able to come up with a model that is consistently proving to be better than all of the other closed source models out there. And it shows you, it's, it's really a fascinating if you have a use it, uh, if you click on the Deep Think and it tells you.

[00:09:42] CODY: Its thinking process, and I'm sure O one, you know, from chat, GPT has that as well. But it's just fascinating to to see the, the development of ai. So right now it's a tool that is only useful to the person who's good enough to use it properly. Um, but I wonder how long it's gonna take to [00:10:00] transition where it understands the objective and a very well understood way.

[00:10:06] Sari: I could not agree more with what Mark Andreessen said, that we're, we're going back to creativity. I also would agree that AI is probably more creative than 99% of human. So I'm not gonna sit here and say, you know, creativity is completely in the domain of humans and AI cannot be creative. That said, I think creativity is about so much more than outcome.

[00:10:29] Sari: Creativity is about a, the story. You know what, why should I trust? You know, there's two people that prompted an ai, but one of them has a much more powerful story around why they created that than the other that really truly matters. And then the other piece about it is I think that AI is very good at providing huge number of ideas, but it's really about how you choose the final idea and how you execute on refining it.

[00:10:58] Sari: Right? So I was like [00:11:00] prompting Claude the past couple weeks to help with, um, some like growth and creative campaign ideas. Most of what I recommended was just like off brand and not aligned and not really culturally relevant when it did suggest something really good there. You know, depending on how you prompt it, there's infinite kind of work choices and feelings and, and I just think that the power of brand and craft and aesthetics and.

[00:11:27] Sari: You know, in a, in a world, like, I even think that, like, basically with AI and people being able to create like UGC with avatars that you, you probably should go back to direct mail as a form of, of market really comes down to what is AI making abundant? And as a result of that, what is becoming scarce. And so we are thinking of like, even just from a growth perspective with sublime, like we are like shipping people, physical artifacts.

[00:11:53] Sari: We created a, a zine. Like there's just, you know, content is becoming so commoditized that you have to [00:12:00] do things that are different. And I think that that will never, humans will never stop chasing novelty, right? And so six months ago, a lot of the a stuff was novel. Now it's not, people are gonna get bored of it.

[00:12:12] Sari: So, so it's really about that chasing that frontier of like making people feel something. And that's always going to require somebody that is really in tune with culture. And can earn trust at the end of the day, which is not something that AI can do for you.

[00:12:27] CODY: This great newsletter called Morning Brew and they, they have like the, the Sunday edition that's more of like a deep dive into something.

[00:12:34] CODY: And I remember the, this, this edition where the editor was saying that he had some really viral, uh, content pieces, but he spent hours in a library, uh, reviewing old newspaper clippings and articles because those were not readily available in AI or Google. And so he seemed to argue that in order to be different, you have to be willing to do things that other people are not doing, which most people are just typing in, [00:13:00] uh, something on Google or chat gp t now and getting, uh, this response and that's gonna be no different than really anybody else's content.

[00:13:08] CODY: And that's what's making this harder and harder to be able to, uh, compete.

[00:13:13] Sari: So you're getting at the heart of why I think that. Sublime is so necessary. But the way I describe it is really we need, the competitive advantage will be Source grounded ai. So it's not enough to just prompt the generic internet.

[00:13:27] Sari: You have to curate a corpus of content that is unique, that pulls from, you know, a diverse set of sources. You know, 'cause at the end of the day, like what data you're using dictates the outcome. And that layer, that curation layer is critical. And we think that's so much of, of the work that we're doing on Sublime is, is enabling that curation.

[00:13:47] Sari: You curate and save anything from anywhere. You create these collections of content that then you can use that content, feed it into the ai, but that curation is grounded in the sources that you love and trust. And [00:14:00] so, yeah, I mean, I think ultimately I embrace AI fully because I think it's preferable to live in a world where people are limited by their imagination than by their skills.

[00:14:11] Sari: Meaning like the people that will thrive in this new era. Not the people with the skills, it's the people with the imagination, right? It's the people that, the imagination and the courage, right? Because if you can do anything, like, sure you can do anything, but, but will you, you know? So, so yeah, I think that these themes that you're touching on are spot on, and I think, I don't think, I think curation will always, always, always matter.

[00:14:34] Sari: So

[00:14:34] CODY: you've mentioned Sublime a few times, and so Sublime as I understand, it's a, it's a PKM or, or personal knowledge management tool. It's similar to, uh, apps like say, uh, notion or Evernote, um, or even Rome or Obsidian on, on the more obscure sides of it. Uh, and then there's also read wise, so I've, I've looked at Sublime and my, my brain immediately went to, oh, this is kind of like read Wise, because Read Wise [00:15:00] started out just, you know, sending out a, a like a daily, like here are your 10 highlights from books that you've read, because it'll sink Kindle notes.

[00:15:08] CODY: Then they went into the Read Wise Reader, which allows you to go and add articles online to the, to the read wise thing. It is, it was kind of similar to GI Pocket, which is kind of like the first tool in that space that allows you to like clip articles to read later. Can you describe like what is your USP or your unique selling point and how is it differentiate?

[00:15:27] Sari: Yeah, totally. So you're right. So Sublime is in the domain of personal knowledge management. We are purpose built to essentially curate a library of all the interesting things you come across. So whether it's uh, you know, images, screenshots, links, articles, videos, podcasts, highlights, we bring all of that in one place we integrate with Read Wise.

[00:15:49] Sari: So Read, read Wise can compliment sublime and really the differentiation between Sublime and other tools really comes down to three things. One is we looked at all the tools in this space [00:16:00] and as creatives ourselves, everyone in the team is a creative in some way. Um, either, you know, Substack. Or, you know, a creative technologist.

[00:16:09] Sari: None of the tools spoke to us. We felt there was a huge and steep learning curve. So if, you know, the, the analogy that a user came up with the other day is most, uh, PKM tools look like an airplane cockpit. Sublime feels like a yoga studio. So the first kind of vector of differentiation is simplicity. The second one is, it's not about just collecting ideas.

[00:16:29] Sari: It's about connecting them. So if you think about, uh, you see a quote somewhere on the internet that you wanna save, you can dump it in your obsidian or your apple node or your notion, and that's it. That's kind of the extent of its world. On sublime. Everything you add unlocks a gateway of related ideas and insights from both your library and other people's libraries.

[00:16:52] Sari: This is what people love about it. So essentially you are combining the utility of a single player knowledge management tool [00:17:00] where you're saving all the interesting things you come across. But along with the serendipity of a multiplayer experience. So imagine if you're a writer and you are interested in writing about the future of productivity with ai, you can start to dump kind of thoughts into notion.

[00:17:15] Sari: But if you do the same thing on Sublime, you'll be fed, um, just like all of these delightful curated thoughts and ideas from other people's libraries. And because we think with Kindle highlights and things like that, you're just gonna find these non-obvious gems that you would never find in the kind of SEO optimized internet.

[00:17:37] Sari: So, so all that to say that the thing people love about it the most is that it is multiplayer. There's other people. And so you can put in a thought or idea and discover many more. And for our customers who for the most part are either intellectually curious people or people who are producing kind of intellectual or creative output, consistently sublime is just this inspiration engine.

[00:17:59] Sari: And [00:18:00] yeah, some people, um, say that they tried to use kind of chat GPT in the past to do what a blind does, but they couldn't get it to provide the kinds of like, culturally relevant, high quality recommendations. And so we basically have a body of like millions and millions of curated, you know, ideas, links, thoughts, images, screenshots, and, and so you can kind of get inspiration on demand for any project that you're working on as, as you build your own knowledge management, uh, tool.

[00:18:28] Sari: So, so I always say that sublime is, um, has two. So the practical side, which is everyone consent spends a lot of time consuming information, but they forget a lot because our memories are, are leaky and limited. Uh, and sublime is like exists so that you can build kind of repository of all those things you come across, search them intelligently.

[00:18:46] Sari: You know, we use all sorts of like AI things to help you make that process easier. But then there's the philosophical side of sublime, right? So there's the practical and the philosophical. And the philosophical really is. We see ourselves as not [00:19:00] just creating knowledge management software, but really inverting the Internet's kind of consumption model.

[00:19:07] Sari: Because if you think about the web today, you essentially open Twitter and see a feed of all sorts of unrelated ideas designed to distract you, right? So it's the, you know, tweet about like Donald Trump. The other thing about somebody's cat dying, the other tweet about the fires, and like our brains are just not designed to cope with, you know, the, just this context shifting.

[00:19:30] Sari: And so with Sub Blind, it's really about shifting from hijacking your attention, which is what social media does to deepening your intention, right? You put in a thought or idea because you're gonna, maybe, you know, your next podcast guest, you're gonna talk about, you know, user interfaces in an AI world or whatever.

[00:19:49] Sari: So you can create a collection about that theme on sublime, and it's gonna pull you down a rabbit hole of related ideas. At the end of that session, you're gonna feel like, wow, you're [00:20:00] closer to creating than you are to having lost five hours passively consuming the web, feeling like shit about yourself.

[00:20:07] CODY: Do you also generate like a, a knowledge, uh, tree, uh, based on the content? Like obsidian?

[00:20:12] Sari: Not exactly like, uh, obsidian, I would say, I don't know exactly what you mean by by knowledge tree, but basically the information architecture of sub line is we have cards and collections. Anything you add to Sub Lime is a card.

[00:20:24] Sari: We do all sorts of things behind the scenes to appropriately kind of create the right metadata so you can retrieve it. So the way that we think about organization is you now have semantic search. So basically like you could write like you think or the way you would ask a friend and you should be able to retrieve most things you're looking for.

[00:20:42] Sari: So I think in, in, in some respects kind of traditional tagging, uh, knowledge tree organization we think is obsolete. But we do have collections and if you look at the way people use collections on some lime, very different from timing. Uh, collections are more personal [00:21:00] contexts that are more actionable.

[00:21:02] Sari: Right? So you mentioned that every piece that I wrote when I first, uh, was commissioned to write this piece, I created a collection on Subline to dump inspiration. And that is something uniquely human because it is all of these ideas and how me, how I am, like uniquely thinking about those ideas. But it's not, here's this a thought, let me tag it.

[00:21:25] Sari: Creativity or productivity. You know, we, we just feel like tagging is unnecessary with semantic search.

[00:21:31] CODY: I do love that. It, it's, it reminds me of like a commonplace book. I know that's been popular throughout history. Like Thomas Edison, uh, a lot of famous writers in history would have a book that they, they had with them their entire lives, and then they would put highlights and thoughts into this one book.

[00:21:47] CODY: And so a lot of their writing will refer back to this commonplace book. I know that we have Notion and Evernote, and I think a lot of the problem with some of these existing is, uh, that you end up spending more time trying to [00:22:00] understand like the architecture and how to organize it than you do actually, like, spend, like actually looking at the notes and I'd, I'd built up like this impressive, like Evernote collection of all these things.

[00:22:11] CODY: And I still find that when I'm interested or I'm trying to research something, I would just default to Google and now it'll be like cha, GBT. And in some ways it doesn't make, it doesn't make you wanna like instantly search for, for your existing knowledge base. So I like how you kind of combine not only knowledge that you find and collect.

[00:22:32] CODY: And it combines other people's knowledge. So it's not just stuff that you have, and then probably in a, in a way that is not something where you have to, to under figure out, okay, how am I gonna structure this so that I can find the relevant, uh, information. So I do love that, and I think that's definitely the right approach and how we're evolving.

[00:22:52] CODY: Um, because if somebody goes and asks Chad GPT to, to write an article or something, it's gonna use generalized knowledge. And that's not gonna [00:23:00] differentiate you from anybody else. But if you use a tool like Sublime, then all of a sudden you're being able to see that correlations, maybe stories, quotes, ideas, philosophies that is not just in the confines of this narrow structure of information that any kind of LLM is gonna pull from,

[00:23:18] Sari: uh, you.

[00:23:19] Sari: Yeah. So many things you said there that, that are spot on. I think first the, the reference to commonplace books is a, is an incredible one. We get this all the time. Some of our users have said The sublime is. Digital collaborative commonplace book and that, you know, it was just like the dream of all of these kind of, um, historical figures that, as you said, um, relied on commonplace books for, for their writing.

[00:23:42] Sari: And so that's an incredible analogy, especially because I always say that if you think about, uh, knowledge management tools, you have Apple, like, you have the kind of like jack of all trades note taking tools, whether it's Apple Notes, obsidian, Rome, they're designed for everything. It's like your to-do list and your [00:24:00] task manager and your kind of meeting notes and your CRM and uh, and then you have kind of sublime, which is really purpose built to be the home for all the interesting things you come across.

[00:24:11] Sari: And I always say, I don't want my kids like health insurance information alongside the kind of ideas that resonate with those two things kind of deserve to be in different places. And so sublime is not the analogy with like a tool like. Notion, et cetera. It's, you know, it's an imperfect analogy because the reality is that we are not a to-do list.

[00:24:33] Sari: We are not a CRM tool. We are not a project management tool. Sublime is purpose built to be a library of all the interesting things you come across. And that, I think, allows us to go really deep into that use case. Because if you think about the architecture of a tool like, uh, Evernote or Notion, like you can figure out how to kind of patch it up to become that, but it's, it's designed to be a Swiss Army knife that does a million other things.

[00:24:57] Sari: And consequently there's just a high learning [00:25:00] curve to retrofitting it for this use case. Whereas on Sublime, the moment you come in, you just, you just add cards to your library, you know, it, the atomic unit is kind of the card and the inside and with our browser extension is just so, so easy to, you know, in our iOS app to just like save anything interesting.

[00:25:16] Sari: You come across as you go and just build this library of ideas that on notion you'd have to be like, oh, but where do I place this? What page does this belong in? And it's just like, so. It's this like, daunting question of how do I organize this? And I think we, we completely like get rid of the other thing that you mentioned around, you know, having this kind of ever no repository but then defaulting to, to Google search.

[00:25:35] Sari: And, uh, I think that is why it's such an interesting time to be building knowledge management tools because in the past, the ROI of using these tools was really bad. You would essentially spend all this time collecting things, but when it came time to search and retrieval, you couldn't find it. It was just very hard to find.

[00:25:54] Sari: And now with AI that, you know, the, the search capabilities are becoming insanely good. [00:26:00] And so it's no longer a waste of time to spend your time kind of curating these resources. And then in addition to that, what you said of, um, you know, you can prompt chat GBT and do what everyone else is doing, or you can curate a set of resources that is uniquely your own, that is a result of kind of painstaking effort and an awareness of your domain and, and a degree of taste and an understanding.

[00:26:22] Sari: That is just uniquely your own. And I think that's a competitive advantage. So I, I truly, truly believe that a curated personal knowledge base has never mattered more,

[00:26:31] CODY: but at the same time, so if, if we're combining all of this information, even if it's, even if it's information that we've discovered on our own or we've learned or we've clipped and highlighted from books that we've read, I, I wonder though if we're still, we're outsourcing, we're delegating this, all of the interconnect, like the ideation and the connection of ideas to an ai and we're, we're asking it to do all of this hard work.

[00:26:58] CODY: And so is that going to [00:27:00] impact our ability to, to think critically? And I think that was like a huge, uh, uh, criticism of AI is if we have a tool that we can literally outsource our thinking to. Is that going to make us, uh, unable to think, you know, like dumb and dumber, like we're just not gonna be able to have that level of, I could thinking, uh, what's your take on that?

[00:27:22] Sari: I think that the world is just gonna be a little bifurcated, right? Some people will use AI to outsource their thinking and in the same way that they don't cook anymore because the order a burrito on their phone, uh, and they don't kind of compute anymore 'cause they use a calculator and you know, you can then never have to write an email again 'cause you'll just prompt ai.

[00:27:41] Sari: And I think that there's a, you know, the re like the, the history of kind of humanity and our progress as a, as a species has been like just more and more convenience. And so I think there's gonna be a large swath of the population that's gonna just go down this path of convenience and kind of lowest common denominator.

[00:27:59] Sari: And [00:28:00] that is certainly is gonna happen and is already happening. I think that you could also use AI to think deeper. Every single thing that I've written over the last couple months, I would say the bar has been higher because I now have a thinking companion available 24 7 that can help me see connections I hadn't seen before that can help me figure out the right questions that can, you know, one thing is like artificial intelligence, have the AI do the work, but what about artificial inquisitiveness?

[00:28:27] Sari: What if you prompt the AI to ask you questions and help you go deeper? And so I don't, I just don't think that AI has a mandate or is prescriptive in any way. You can kind of use it in any way you want. And I think that is kind of the concern I was getting to is that we're not having enough time to adapt to this technology in the ways that are conducive to our overall health as a species.

[00:28:50] Sari: And the same thing happened with social media. I think we kind of created these networks and platforms never really kind of understanding how they would play out. I don't think [00:29:00] Steve Jobs ever imagined how addictive these devices would be, that we would spend, you know, six hours a day scrolling that, you know, they would completely hijack our ability to concentrate and focus and deepen our intention and spend time with loved ones.

[00:29:13] Sari: And so I think that is like the risk of, of AI that you know, that these things just become hyper addictive, hyper available, and that we don't have time to kind of adapt and educate ourselves to, to use them in ways that actually further our intentions. Uh, so that's a real, a real question and one that I think we should all be grappling

[00:29:31] CODY: simultaneously.

[00:29:32] CODY: Steve Jobs didn't allow his children to have iPads. Uh, so I think he had some perception of how technology might impact us to, uh, to one degree or another. I guess if I were to look at like, uh, samurai Sword Makers in Japan, you know, that's probably something that takes decades of mastery to learn. I. I mean, what kind of world are we gonna be in?

[00:29:55] CODY: In which nobody has to have expertise on something. And, and I also [00:30:00] realize this doesn't have to be a debate if we agree on certain, certain perspective, not trying to push you into a corner simultaneously. I'm somebody who uses chat GBT for a lot of things. I mean, my new motto is, you know, what would chat GPT do?

[00:30:11] CODY: And anytime I come up problem, I find myself just, I have, I have the action button on the iPhone. So I find my press, I, I have that hook to just open up chat GPT. And anytime I come across a problem or an issue, I'm defaulting to just using that now where say in the past it maybe would've been Google, or maybe I would've called a friend and I would've, you know, asked them this question, but simultaneously would've been like a method of connecting with them.

[00:30:37] CODY: And so I think there's still like a lot of fears. I think we all see the potential of ai, but there's also like the unknowns. And I think that's also kind of scary to look at if it's, if we're, we're delegating our thinking to it. But it's. Allowing us to, to create, to have more creative work? Is that creativity?

[00:30:56] CODY: Um, I don't know.

[00:30:58] Sari: Yeah. I mean, I think you're getting at something [00:31:00] that, um, I deeply agree with, which is that in a world where so many things can be summoned by pressing a button, we are just becoming incapable of being patient people that invest in things that take a very long time to come to fruition.

[00:31:21] Sari: And I think that there are things in life that you wanna compress and make more efficient. And, you know, maybe like sending out, you know, responding to the three meals in my inbox this morning is something that, you know, I'm perfectly fine doing more efficiently, but there are things where the value and the meaning are precisely in the kind of effort you have to invest.

[00:31:42] Sari: I keep coming back to, you know, for example, like Giro Dreams of Sushi, the movie of, uh, this Japanese chef and just like. How he devoted life to perfecting this niri. And, uh, and I just think that's incredible. And I also think that our, that, that the generations that we're [00:32:00] raising are kind of like more and more incapable of that kind of like, sustained attention into like the mundane.

[00:32:07] Sari: But I also think back to the question of what will become scarce is that being able to create like a brick and mortar experience or a coffee shop or an artisanal something like a lot of these things will become extremely valuable because it's a sign of like artisanship in ways that a lot of the kind of things that happen digitally are not.

[00:32:30] Sari: So I think a lot of the signaling is gonna shift away from digital towards things that demonstrate more kind of effort and pain involved. So, yeah, so I do think it is a problem that for the most part, the, the values in which we've built technology is all about making work easier, making things faster.

[00:32:48] Sari: As opposed to like, I genuinely think that so many people are just like, feel anxious because the pace at which technology is advancing and all of these tools available to us, kind of like [00:33:00] encouraging us to live a faster life. You know, even if you think about like, the taglines of a lot of these tools, like from thought to action faster than humanly possible or, you know, create all the content you need and, and like, we'll post it for you.

[00:33:13] Sari: And it's like, that's not our natural rhythm as humans. You know, we are slow thinkers, but we are, uh, deep and in terms of empathy. And so, yeah, again, I, I, I really think that it's very easy to lose the plot in terms of building more and more technology and losing sight of what are the actual human values.

[00:33:30] Sari: We're trying to. To optimize for. And I do think at some point, like there is an inconvenience to convenience and we're to some extent seeing it now. You know, we built like an ability to connect with anyone in the world and yet loneliness is, you know, the highest it's ever been. So how do you square those things?

[00:33:48] CODY: I would actually challenge you. I, I came across an article recently that was a, a study. I, I dunno if it was a meta study, but it, it seemed to indicate that, uh, a lot of the research that indicated that [00:34:00] we're, uh, lonely is not, uh, not necessarily true, that it may be an inaccurate representation. I don't have like a lot of more information.

[00:34:07] CODY: I, I'm gonna actually say that. I'll put a link to that article in the show notes and then maybe you can research it afterwards. You mentioned like this, the idea of deep work and I think, I know Cal Newport is the most. Tangible figure on this idea of deep work. Uh, I know he, he said the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time.

[00:34:28] CODY: It is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. And yeah, yeah, you're right. Is that we have all of these tools. There was some, some kind of funny acronym, uh, that it was, I was trying to show the, the, uh, how ai, like everything is ai, you could actually buy a vacuum cleaner that has AI in it, you know, like the, like the Samsung vacuum.

[00:34:49] CODY: It's just ridiculous how every company is, is really jumping on this ai. They're touting it as something that's gonna make you more productive. They're gonna, you, you, you insert some [00:35:00] text, generates an automatic slide presentation for you, and it removes a lot of the execution behind it. Simultaneously, people are using it not only for execution, but also creativity.

[00:35:11] CODY: Uh, and right now there's like a, we're still early in this era, so the people who use AI tools are gonna have a heads up over the people who don't. But then I wonder, what is our world gonna look like when everybody's using AI tools for execution and creativity? It reminds me of like the, the dead internet theory, which is the, the, you know, this idea that maybe 80% of everything you see on the, in, on the internet is bots interacting with bots.

[00:35:37] CODY: You know, like, is that gonna be our, our future?

[00:35:39] Sari: It's a huge question. I think we're already seeing that and, you know, misinformation and, you know, the social fabric of our kind of generations past is really based on this kind of shared reality. I think that AI just completely ruptures that, right? Because everyone's in their own bubble and like the pace of [00:36:00] content being generated by AI and by bonds, you know, I, I think that that's gonna be a huge issue.

[00:36:05] Sari: I, I, I think it's gonna ironically make a lot of people go offline. Like, just like offline will be the new luxury and the new kind of, um, frontier of, of trust. Back to the, the, the question of deep work. I find it shocking that we've essentially delegated our attention to the world's largest advertising companies.

[00:36:27] Sari: 'cause that's what we've done. If you think about the six plus hours a day most people spend trolling, they are just giving six hours of their precious life away daily to advertising companies that don't have their best interest at heart. And I completely agree with Cal Newport that the disruption of our attention, it just compromises our ability to make progress on anything worthwhile in our lives.

[00:36:53] Sari: And so what I always say and have advocated for is you don't need to go live in a cabin or swear off [00:37:00] Netflix, but you do have to live more deliberately, right? It's like we are living in, in what I call the post information age, where the barrier is no longer information. The barrier is intention, it's self-regulation, it's courage, right?

[00:37:15] Sari: It's like saying, I want to spend, you know, the next three months, heck, whatever, like creating a recipe book to conserve my grandmother's recipe. I have that intention. Uh, let me have that courage. Let me regulate myself, let me get that done. Uh, because there's so many distractions. And so I think so much of the problem today is that we are exposed to so many of the world's problems.

[00:37:39] Sari: And no one benefits from just scrolling and feeling sad. You know, if you're just gonna scroll and like, read about the la fires and feel really sad about it, but not do anything about it. I just don't think there's a lot of value to spending time being informed there. I think there's a lot more value to choosing and carving out your own lane, your own little plot of land, your own little [00:38:00] digital garden where you're like, this is my lane.

[00:38:02] Sari: You know, mind hacks, mindful productivity. I'm just gonna focus on that where I can make an impact, where you have a deep intention. And so I'm just very interested in truly building Sublime to help you further that intention. I think it was the, the founder of Polaroid who once said that his whole life was about teaching people that intense concentration for hours and hours can bring out in people resources that they didn't know they had.

[00:38:29] Sari: And I just think that's increasingly a luxury that we don't have. And it's just so ironic that we spend a thousand dollars buying these devices and now we're spending like hundreds of dollars buying these like tech blocking devices that helpless curb addiction or block apps at certain times. You know, in some ways like.

[00:38:49] Sari: It's the equivalent of what happened with food, right? With the industrialization of food. We had, you know, fast food and you know, like mass market stuff. And that was all great. It got more people fed, [00:39:00] food became cheaper, but it also made more people unhealthy, more people obese. And so in response we have organic food.

[00:39:06] Sari: And I just think we're starting to enter that phase of damn, like we, we, we industrialized the internet and like we all became addicted and we kind of, you know, all of these, you know, there was like misinformation everywhere. And now it's like, all right, let's kind of rebuild the organic web, uh, to some extent.

[00:39:21] Sari: And, and we're kind of beginning to see that. And I think, I think that's kind of where we're sublime. It's playing that, that more kind of human artisanal web, if that makes sense.

[00:39:31] CODY: That is brilliant. I love that explanation. And the way that you describe it, it seems like, uh, sublime is doing the world a service and it's out here trying to have a positive impact no matter, uh, how big or small it is.

[00:39:44] CODY: You're doing what you can. Because, yeah, as you're right, where in, in a world where we are so filled with distraction, nothing is more luxurious than an ability to pay attention. You know, we're having, uh, a DHD meds being [00:40:00] prescribed way more than that they've ever been. And our, we don't realize that when we go to the toilet and we take out our phone, or we're in the checkout line and we look at our phone, we're comforting.

[00:40:11] CODY: We're self-soothing ourselves from the anxiety and the boredom that we would otherwise experience having to sit there. And that's where ideas come from, that that's how our subconscious kind of communicates to our conscious. We're able to let the feelings and the thoughts kind of come up to the surface.

[00:40:31] CODY: If we're constantly distracting ourselves, then we don't get to have that level of communication and then we end up like living a life that's kind of stale, where we're not thinking about how to improve our life or what's wrong, um, or really able to contribute in a meaningful way to, uh, the people and the world around us.

[00:40:50] CODY: So yeah, I think that's very accurate. And I would add on about recently I found it quite fascinating, uh, not in a good way how when TikTok, they turned [00:41:00] their app a few hours. Uh, before that they were supposed to be banned and you could just see how everybody was panicking and, uh, you could see all these, all these people just trying to figure out what to do next.

[00:41:11] CODY: And then all of a sudden this, uh, I think Red Book, this other Chinese app, uh, started to gain popularity. And so the government tried to ban this one app and then everybody just went to another app also from China. It seems like, you know, you can't stop this thing, uh, of this population because everybody's addicted to this now.

[00:41:33] CODY: And I really hope that it's not gonna lead to our own self-destruction. Um, but I think the audience of people who are even interested in learning about smaller attention is of limited subset of people. Um, because a much larger group of people would just rather take Adderall and assume that's gonna solve the problem, um, instead of looking inward.

[00:41:55] CODY: Uh, and it kind of makes me sad to think about, uh, I don't know. Do you have any thoughts?

[00:41:59] Sari: It's interesting what you [00:42:00] described. Does, uh, people instantly migrating from TikTok to a little red book? 'cause I, I do think that we've talked about a lot about the harms of being perpetually distracted and how like, just like that's a very bad thing for us.

[00:42:13] Sari: I think oftentimes it's very easy to point fingers and say like, Facebook or Meta destroy this generation or whatever. But the reality is that I think most problems are. Cultural and not technological. And in some ways, like what we've seen is that there's such a dramatic difference between stated preferences and reveals preferences.

[00:42:34] Sari: So people will say, I hate Instagram. I don't wanna go on Instagram. I feel bad about myself. But there reveals preference is they continue to go there, right? And if you give them an experience, the most concrete example of this is the four you feed. People will say, I hate the four you feed on, you know, Instagram or Twitter or whatever.

[00:42:53] Sari: Let me control my feed. But then the revealed preference is that actually the four you feed is a lot more addictive and people stick [00:43:00] with it much longer and scroll far longer. So there is this disconnect between people wanting to control their online kind of experience and, and have more friction. And the actual like reality, which is like the more passive, the less you do, uh, the, the more other people kind of do on your behalf.

[00:43:19] Sari: The more people gravitate towards, towards those experiences and, and frankly, as somebody building software, we see it, you know, like the realities that are are, you know, we've been kind of spoiled and conditioned by these tools that are so seamless and have zero friction that you, the moment you put something that has a little bit more friction, you know, it just doesn't work.

[00:43:41] Sari: I find it interesting that a lot of technologists are trying to solve some of these problems with technology, right? It's like, you know, like build an Instagram alternative, but, you know, um, where like you control the feed or build like a Twitter alternative, like blues sky, but on the blockchain, [00:44:00] or let's solve, you know, like for kind of, I don't know, the, the classical, like Uber for babysitting when like the solution is like befriend your neighbors, you know?

[00:44:09] Sari: So I think that in some ways there's just something about how we try to kind of blame technology and solve with technology things that are truly human. Problems. And so even when it comes to intention over attention, we are building sublime to help you deepen that intention to help you sustain your concentration.

[00:44:29] Sari: And there's a lot of very kind of specific choices that we've made that are conducive to that. But the reality is that no technology is a good substitute for like your own personal will and motivation to do a thing. You know, even though I've invested the last years of my life building knowledge management software, and I truly think that the Lime is the best tool for people that want a simple experience, the constraint is less the tool and more, you know, the person's like willingness to kind of act.

[00:44:58] Sari: It doesn't matter. Like [00:45:00] having a second brain is like a great idea, uh, whether you do it on sublime or something else. So, I don't know. I just find it very interesting that we live in a, in a world where most of the problems are, are human problems, not technology problems. And yet, you know, all of our effort goes into solving things through technology.

[00:45:17] CODY: Yeah, I think that that speaks to our nature. There was a great book I remember reading about that argued that we, we are by default lazy. So, uh, you, you are not being a lazy person because you don't wanna get up off the couch and go exercise. Your body is designed to minimize the amount of energy expenditure you have to utilize in order to live your life.

[00:45:40] CODY: And it's, it's, that's a, a self preservation type of measure. But now we're in this era where technology is both the problem and the solution to everything that is happening to us, especially our restrictive attention spans. And, uh, we, we tend to default to, like, I've had people who like, [00:46:00] uh, will take out their, their dumb phone at parties, you know, and show everybody that, Hey, look, I'm, I don't have my phone with me as like a source of pride.

[00:46:08] CODY: Then there's apps now, I think one's called Clear Space, that you can restrict how often you open up Instagram or these other restricting apps. In this particular app, it's a pretty novel idea where you have to do like 10 pushups or you have to, you have to walk for a certain number of minutes before it unlocks the app.

[00:46:25] CODY: But I guarantee that eventually you would just become so frustrated at this, at this paywall of sorts that you uninstall the app. And I haven't really met anybody who hasn't became frus, become frustrated with one of these tools. That's the, uh, that kind of ties you to, to the mast, you know, per se, so that you can have, you can have your cake and eat it too.

[00:46:46] CODY: And it just doesn't work. And really, it's all comes back to that idea of self-regulation. I've been able to find that, for me, meditation has been one way of doing that. You know, it teaches you that meta [00:47:00] awareness. And that's something that, that where increasingly like, lacking as a society now, you know, we're, we're trying to outsource our awareness to other tools to tell us, Hey, you're not being productive.

[00:47:11] CODY: Hey, you're being distracted right now. But in some ways it's like, it reminds me of that popular device that became popular. You put on your head, that's like an EEG monitor for meditation and it will, um. I'm forgetting the name, but it will have, like, a birds will start chirping and it's like an indicator to you that you're not being focused.

[00:47:30] CODY: Um, but it's the same thing in some ways. You're, you're trying to outsource the awareness to a technology device when it defeats the whole purpose of meditating itself. Since that, that awareness is supposed to come from within. So yeah, it's gonna be interesting to see where all of this takes us, you know, 10, 20 years from now,

[00:47:51] Sari: the irony of building these like massive consumer software businesses off of like, meditating, using your phone.

[00:47:58] Sari: But yeah, I think like you're [00:48:00] absolutely right. I think that we are definitely seeing early signs of status signaling, like being offline as a, as a status signal. And, and the reality is that, you know, I wish I didn't have to be super present on social media, but I, you know, it's just a luxury I can't afford, it's a part of my business.

[00:48:17] Sari: And I, I wouldn't be able to build some lime if we didn't have a presence on social media. It is an interesting world because in some ways it's like we are, you know, I think if you were to ask most people, if they could kind of, nobody would wanna just leave social media alone. But if all of us kind of, you know, collectively decided to abandon these platforms and you know, we would do it.

[00:48:42] Sari: So it's just, uh, there's definitely a collective action question here.

[00:48:46] CODY: I love this. Uh, on your sublime account, you retweeted, i, I don't know if you call it, uh, or you reposted this image, uh, of like a, trying to find the flow state and to achieve the flow state, you, you have to increase [00:49:00] the, the boredom and increase the anxiety, but you have to do it, uh, in just the, the right way.

[00:49:05] CODY: You posted something like, like honey, I'm, I'm trying to, uh, be bored so I can achieve the flow state. And I just, I, I love that. I was like so reminiscent of, you know, the, the, the new luxury that the new thing to tout is, uh, a willing, I think that's gonna be the next thing really, is a willingness to be bored, a willingness to demonstrate to others that you are okay with being bored because so much of that deep inner fulfillment.

[00:49:33] CODY: Comes from a place of being bored. It's that boredom that sparks creativity. You know, there's a Linus, the creator of Linux, after he created Linux, uh, the operating system, he went on to like start this marketing company and he sold it. But then he dealt with this, this lack of meaning, this, this inability to work.

[00:49:50] CODY: And so he decided to step back and just let the creativity come to him. That was on the most recent, every debt too. That's where I'm getting that from. The most recent blog post on that [00:50:00] and how he, uh, it was called Selfish Software. I don't know if you read that, that article. Instead, he was allowing the ideas to come from within and then to develop software for himself and, you know, to, to pursue the intrinsic motivation that can come from a place of boredom.

[00:50:16] CODY: Um, rather than pursuing extrinsic motivation of, and I need to make more money,

[00:50:20] Sari: I, I love that. I actually, I didn't read that piece, but I read the, the headline and I, I found it, the idea of salt assault, like very, very kind of on point. Um. What you said reminds me, the, the quote from, uh, Blaise Pascal who said all of man's problems stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

[00:50:39] Sari: And I just, you know, I have little kids and yeah, I just feel like that is just becoming, um, they, they're completely unable to be bored. And so in some ways, I think we're the last generation that like grew up without devices, but it'll be interesting. I, I think the other part of the selfish [00:51:00] software comment is I think that because we are so exposed to other people's beliefs, we don't trust our own instincts until we've found them reflected in other minds, right?

[00:51:13] Sari: And so, and so selfish software is really about, you know, dialing up the value of your own intuition, the volume of your own intuition, and really kind of cultivating that relationship with your gut. One of my New Year's resolutions for this year. I spent so much time last year doing one-on-one calls with users of Sublime and getting feedback, and it was grin, it was necessary.

[00:51:36] Sari: But this year I came in and I said, my goal is actually to take less feedback in my subconscious, have all of these opinions from people. And that's, it's great to carry that, but now I needed to take all of this and not just treat it as a checklist, but rather like really, again, spend time alone, self-reflecting and figure out how does all of this, how should all of this manifest in a way that makes sense for my product?

[00:51:59] Sari: And [00:52:00] that's where I think the selfish lens is a really interesting one

[00:52:02] CODY: when it comes, it's a building software. I, I wholly agree. Uh, you know, if you cater to the whims and the feedback of all of your users, you're catering to everyone. And then in essence, you're catering to no one. You can't build everything and anything.

[00:52:18] CODY: Uh, you, you have to build the thing that you think is gonna help the, the target audience and the subset of, of people that you're trying to help with, the objective that you're trying to achieve. So, yeah, I think that that's an important point, uh, is that sometimes there's, there's a time and place for other people's opinions and other people's feedback, but ultimately that's, that's a tool just like Google, just like Chad ct.

[00:52:39] CODY: You have to take that information and then make up your own interpretation of that. Not just take it verbatim,

[00:52:46] Sari: getting too much feedback, sort of like distances you from often your motivation to begin with. And it also, there's just this reversion to the meme. I don't know if you ever saw that, um, that photograph of, um, uh, it was a drawing [00:53:00] of if Apple was a democracy and so, and they had a, a drawing of the iPhone if it implemented all of its feedback.

[00:53:06] Sari: And it was just this like gigantic phone with like a million buttons and, and you know, obviously very, very far from what it is today. And so I think so much of the job of the products builder is to figure out what to, to say no to and maintain the, the integrity of the product. I think that kind of level of decision making and craft and judgment, um.

[00:53:26] Sari: There's so many ways to, like, you can tell 10 different people to build a, a product to solve the problem that Sublime is solving. And they're gonna come up with completely different products. They can be using ai, prompting AI differently. But, but that's the, the magic of it is that there's no right one right thing.

[00:53:44] Sari: It's really a manifestation of different points of views and, and sets of values and things like that.

[00:53:50] CODY: I wanna jump back to something you mentioned earlier with, I know that you're a mom with two kids and you're raising them in this technological revolution, uh, especially with [00:54:00] AI changing the game. I remember for Christmas, I'm a nephew and I pulled out ca, GBT and had the Santa Voice because they had like the open, the Voice of Santa, and he asked him, uh, uh, like, what do you want for Christmas?

[00:54:12] CODY: And then, you know, that was like his first interaction with Santa. And you could see his face light up when he heard Santa's voice and speaking to him in his name. So it's incredible what like AI and technology can do, but simultaneously we've all been to a restaurant where you see a family and you see two kids just glued to their screens and I see what happens if there's a TV in the room with my 2-year-old nephew, he just instantly looks at that tv.

[00:54:40] CODY: You know, he is glued. I'm sure you have this experience like your kids are just glued to this device. You have to question what's, what's going on here? And there is this controversy around this YouTube channel. I think it's what Coco Melon there is like this hit piece on how Coco Melon is just destroying our kids' brains and destroying their attention [00:55:00] because they're literally optimizing this content for maximum addiction with kids.

[00:55:04] CODY: You know? And it seems morally wrong, but of course if we, we have the data and the metrics, somebody's gonna do it. And now with ai, there's this rise of Nate, a faceless, uh, YouTube channels. And I guarantee there's gonna be way more of that, of trying to hijack our kids' attention and it's gonna be on a part of the parents to restrict that.

[00:55:24] CODY: And on the other hand, it, I've talked to a parent who said, you know, if you're a parent and you don't judge the other parents who have their kids on their iPads, because you know what that's like and. I, I guess, uh, but I, I, my sister's family, they're very good with screen time. Um, so I don't know, maybe can you balance that?

[00:55:44] CODY: I don't know. What are, what are your thoughts on all this?

[00:55:46] Sari: You had said earlier in the conversation that Steve Jobs didn't let his own children use the phone. And so I think, yeah, there's definitely a degree of, once you see how the sausage gets made, you don't wanna eat the sausage. Uh, and I think because I've been [00:56:00] close to the tech industry and, and, you know, for, for years have, uh, just been very interested in understanding incentives and dynamics and, and the consumer web.

[00:56:09] Sari: I don't want my, my children to be glued to their devices. I think what's the nuance there is that I don't think devices are bad. Like if you think of YouTube, there's so much slop on YouTube, there's so much goodness on YouTube. And so how do you kind of steer and discriminate the good versus the bad?

[00:56:28] Sari: Because that's the kind of middle ground that I'm trying to strike with my own children is. I don't wanna restrict technology altogether because at the end of the day, there's just so much value. Like my, my son taught himself how to fish on YouTube and he's learning the piano on, on YouTube, and those things are incredible.

[00:56:47] Sari: But then, you know, they can just fall down a rabbit hole watching YouTube shorts and there's just so much slot there. So I don't have an answer to that. I empathize with every parent. I think raising a, a child in this day and age, the [00:57:00] amount of like distraction and dopamine and the inability to be bored is, is, is really hard.

[00:57:05] Sari: I just try to maximize the amount of time they spend outside and, and doing sports. So that's, that's kind of what we try to optimize for.

[00:57:14] CODY: Yeah. And, and if you're a parent and you force your kids to, to, to not play you, you can't play video games, you can't have a phone, um, you, you can't do all these things, then it tends to have this re this very well known rebound effect, right?

[00:57:28] CODY: Where when they leave the college, all of a sudden they're addicted to video games and then they can't do their schoolwork. 'cause you're not there to tell them. No. And it's partially like this whole debate about, uh, how, you know, you can be a soldier here in the US but you can't drink. And I know in, in Europe it's, it generally speaking, it's okay to, to have your child drink as long as a parent is present.

[00:57:51] CODY: You know, they, they, they're, they have, uh, different rates of alcohol abuse obviously in Europe, uh, versus, versus here in the us and it's, it's attributed [00:58:00] to this, this effect. And so whenever it's parenting think you have to have this gentle, this gentle balance, right? Uh, you, you can't be a helicopter parent, um, but you can't be completely loose.

[00:58:11] CODY: And what, and just letting your kids do whatever, do whatever they want. Um, if I, if I were to have a guess, I would say that one thing I think we should do, which I don't think I've, obviously not gonna happen, but we should teach self-discipline and awareness, is ultimately it's gonna be up to the kids at some point to determine what they want to do.

[00:58:31] CODY: And if they can have the awareness to recognize, Hey, I'm being, being addicted to this thing, and maybe I should step back from that, then we're, we're teaching them this, this inner, uh, knowledge and, uh, confidence and belief rather than just either telling 'em what they can and cannot do because it's gonna make them wanna do the bad thing.

[00:58:50] Sari: That's exactly right. I think that prohibiting a child from doing something and then, you know, at age, whatever, 15, 18, giving that to them, like [00:59:00] we've seen how that's played out with alcohol and, you know, other things. So, so it, you know, it's very tricky. I also think that we spend a lot of time thinking about how to control children's screen time and screen addiction and not enough time of, you know, how are we going to control our kids' screen addiction if, if adults are addicted as well.

[00:59:18] Sari: So, I mean, children learn about the world through modeling and so the best way to teach them self-discipline, self-regulation and healthy boundaries is for us as adults to have those healthy boundaries ourselves. So it just feels very hypocritical to be the kind of parent that's, you know, obsessed with not giving your children, um, screen time or coco melon when you're just scrolling.

[00:59:42] Sari: TikTok, uh, you know, for hours on end. So, you know, I just, I just think that the problem begins with us.

[00:59:47] CODY: And on that, I think that, I think that that's it for the episode. Uh, do you have any other comments or things that you might want to add?

[00:59:54] Sari: No, thank you. I mean, you, you just had a lot of, um, very on point, uh, comments, and I Yeah.

[00:59:59] Sari: Appreciate that. Yeah, [01:00:00]

[01:00:00] CODY: I appreciate you. So, uh, so if you're listening and you found this as interesting as I did, we're gonna link to her substack newsletter in the show notes. And if you're intrigued by the idea of this more thoughtful, creative approach to, to knowledge work, uh, and having a personal knowledge management tool, I'd, uh, suggest going to Sublime App as the, as the website.

[01:00:26] CODY: And until next time, uh, remember slowing down is probably the best way to move forward.

[01:00:35] CODY: Hey guys, this is Cody again. I hope you enjoyed that episode of Mind Hack. And if you're interested in getting more mind hack worthy stuff straight to your inbox, then you might consider signing up for my weekly newsletter. It often contains links to new episodes, blog posts, and other interesting finds I found on the in interweb in the past week.

[01:00:54] CODY: It pretty much focuses around productivity and efficiency. So if that's your thing, then be sure to visit my [01:01:00] website@codymcclain.com. That's M-C-L-A-I n.com to sign up. Also, if there are any interesting websites, companies, books, blog posts, quotes, or anything else that was mentioned in this episode, you can find it all in more by visiting the official website for the Mind Hack show@mindhack.com.

[01:01:21] CODY: And as always, if you have any feedback, good or bad, I want to hear it, send me a tweet, email, or what have you on either of my websites, as my goal with this show is to give you the maximum value in this shortest amount of time. That's all for now, guys. Thanks again for listening and I'll catch you guys again soon.

Sari Azout

Guest

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