Ep 384: What Should I Read for a Deeper New Year?

In our annual holiday episode, Cal tackles one of the questions he’s asked most often: What should I read? But with a twist. He recommends six books that are not from the self-help or advice genre that will nonetheless help you change your life into something deeper. For the rest of the episode, he then answers listener calls. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia CAL’S BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS: Walden by Henry David Thoreau [2:40]Lincoln’s Virtues by William Lee Miller [7:28]The Case for God by Karen Armstrong [10:54]You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier [21:25]The Shallows by Nicholas Carr [26:28]Falling Upward by Richard Rohr [28:45] CALLS: Concerned father and husband about smartphones [37:48] Living deeply with multiple gigs [43:27] Effective timeblocking [47:19] The Deep Life for non-knowledge workers [54:01] Dealing with overwhelming technology [58:59] The real cost of AI [1:02:59] Where to start with deep work? [1:07:33] Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba? Thanks to our Sponsors: monarch.com/deepwayfair.comnotion.com/calreclaim.ai/cal Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Cal Newport?

  This is the last time we're recording before Christmas, which means it's everyone's favorite time of the year in the Deep Questions Podcast, our holiday episode. This is when we let you, the listeners and viewers, take over the show. So we're going to do a deep dive on the question that I probably am asked the most by you, which is, what should I read? We're going to take a little bit of a twist here. What I'm going to do is talk about six books I pulled from my shelves that has what I think is deep wisdom for making your new year deeper, but none of them are self-help or advice books. So these are books that were not intended for you to help you improve your life, but nonetheless can help you make massive

• 0:50Cal Newport?

  positive changes in your life as we head to the new year. Then we're going to open up the phone lines. We have year calls, one after another. I haven't heard any of these in advance. I don't know if you're upset or angry or mad or have deep questions or small questions. We're going to get into it all because it is the holiday episode and you are in charge. All right. So I don't want to waste any more time. As always, I'm Kel Newport and this is Deep Questions. Today's episode, what should I read to start 2025 off right? And we'll get into all of that right after the music.

• 1:44Cal Newport?

  All right. So here's our plan for this deep dive. I literally just went to my bookshelves. I have to pluralize that because I have many shelves and many libraries, but I went to various locations in which I have many bookshelves and I pulled six books off the shelf that I all think have been played an important role in my own development and my own quest for a deep life. And I want to briefly talk about each. I didn't know how to organize these, so I decided I would just do them in publication order from the oldest to the newest. I want to emphasize, I don't like superlatives. I'm not good at saying like, here are the five best, or here is the number one best. So I'm not claiming these are the six best books to read to start off 2025 deeper. They're just six books I think will help you do that. They caught my attention. They're meaningful for me.

• 2:29Cal Newport?

  All right, I'm going to start with a book I talk about often on the show. I'll hold each of these up to the screen since they're my books, my copies, as we talk about them. I talk about this book often on the show, I'll hold it up now. We're talking about Thoreau's Walden, or Life in the Woods, as the subtitle. I have a lot of different copies of it. This is my Dover Thrift edition. I also have an older version, an early 20th century version that I keep on my desk at home. I once looked into, actually, Jesse, first editions, first printings. Oh, God, they're expensive.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  How expensive?

• 3:02Cal Newport?

  Many tens of thousands of dollars.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Really?

• 3:04Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So, you know, we need, we need a few more sponsors to make that possible. Walden is an important book. All right. So what's the deal with Walden? What should you get out of it if you're going to read this? It's often misunderstood. I think people will say, oh, Walden was one of the first great nature writing books. Now, it's true. It has beautiful nature writing in it in a way that there wasn't a ton of before this book came out, but that wasn't really the point of it. Other people say, no, no, it's an argument for why you should specifically leave civilization and go live in the woods. And then those people, other people come in and like, aha, I got you because I heard somewhere that his mom did his laundry. So he wasn't really living in the woods. And that becomes a whole debate. Not really what the book is about either. It is instead,

• 3:49Cal Newport?

  in my opinion, one of the first books to tackle the idea of lifestyle centric planning. This idea of, let me try to fix an understanding of what I want my life to be like and then work backwards from that systematically to figure out how I get there. We talk about that a lot on this show. Even today, that is a bit of an unusual notion. We tend to have ideas like, why don't you follow your passion or make one radical change to improve your life. But back when Thoreau was writing, man, that was a radical idea. You didn't engineer your life in any way back then. You had your place. I'm at, you know, this socioeconomic status in this part of the world. You know, this gender, this race, this is what I do. I'm not going to question it. Thoreau wasn't having it.

• 4:32Cal Newport?

  There was enough tumult and opportunity and flexibility and unsettling of cultural convention going on in the sort of post-colonial era America that people began to ask, well, wait a second. If we can invent our own lives, what lives should we invent? This is what Thoreau was doing in Walden when he went to sort of live in the woods by Walden Pond is he was running experiments. So he was having this idea of like, okay, I want to figure out what is the base amount of money I need to spend to survive, like to have shelter and to have enough food that I'm not hungry. And he goes through in the first part of this, and we can find that in the book, the first chapter in here is called economy.

• 5:17Cal Newport?

  There's a lot of these tables in here where he goes in with like a lot of detail and has real detailed accounting of exactly how much everything costs for him to build that cabin and to plant the food he planted, et cetera. Because his experiment here was what is the actual dollar amount it takes so that I'm no longer struggling? I have shelter and food. And then he said, once I have that number, that's why he kept all those numbers careful. Technically speaking, everything else I spend money on is optional, is for things I choose to spend money on. So what's actually important and what's not? How can I get the things in my life that are important without having to pay the price that I see other people here in Concord and where he lived are paying to get more money?

• 6:00Cal Newport?

  He was trying to figure out, once I know this is all I need, how do I get the other things in my life that are important without falling in the traps like debt or falling in the traps where you were conspicuously consuming things? He's talking about Venetian blinds and copper pots that required you to work all the time to pay for. And then what was the point? But it was like these lifestyle design experiments and like what is actually needed? That's why he says, I went out there to confront what it means to live deliberately. And then saying, okay, if that's what I need, it doesn't cost me much to survive.

• 6:32Cal Newport?

  Then how can I very carefully add back in other things in my life? So I don't end up with like three mortgages on a giant farm that I have to work 40 hours a day, you know, or 60 hours a day because I need all the that much farm produce to try to afford like my nice carriage or whatever. So his idea was not, oh, we should all go live really simply in the woods. That was just to get his baseline. What's my baseline I could live off of? And then he could start experimenting with what should come on top of there. And a lot of the book is him riffing on these ideas of what's important in life and what's not. And how do you figure out, you know, how can you get those in your life without falling into the traps of other sort of things? How have we gone astray? So it's a lifestyle centric planning guide. The very first, one of the very first, I think, sort of true, deep self-help type thinkers was Walden, and that's why this book is important. You can run similar experiments in your own life. What really matters?

• 7:17Cal Newport?

  And then how do I get the stuff on top of that now? How do I go forward once I have a baseline of survival? Adding good stuff without having to, at the same time, fall into the traps of bad. So important book. Next one I picked off the shelf. I don't even have the cover for this anymore. You can see I have bookmarks in, I've used it and cited it so many times. This is William Lee Miller's book, Lincoln's Virtues. William Lee Miller is an academic Lincoln historian. He writes in a kind of an older, kind of cool, Southern style. But this book is best described as a moral biography of Abraham Lincoln. So what he's actually writing about in this book is how the various moral precepts upon

• 8:00Cal Newport?

  which Abraham Lincoln increasingly lived his life was known for. How did he develop those? What did he encounter? What did he read? Who did he encounter? What experiences did he had? But I think it's a very clever idea for a biography. And it's one of the more interesting of the many, many Lincoln biographies I've read. One of the more interesting ones. What I got out of that book and what you might get out of it too, is what goes into actually developing moral intelligence? Because what Miller points out is it's not just you're born moral, you're not. Or we all have the same moral intuition fully formed. And it's just a matter of whether you listen to it or not. Lincoln had to develop it. He had those same intimations of what's right and wrong that a lot of people are born with.

• 8:43Cal Newport?

  And he had to work at it through reading and experience and encounter and above all, thinking, trying to organize his thoughts, give speeches, read some more, organize those thoughts, give more speeches. He did work over a lifetime to heighten those moral intuitions into actual Moral intelligence. And so by the time you have him heavily involved in the Civil War and his fight against slavery and to try to keep the Union together, by the time you get before that, him and the Lincoln-Schulke debates, you have someone with an incredibly powerful moral imagination that he was very confident in. And that can power real changes in the world. But the lesson you'll get out of reading this book is that you have to

• 9:26Cal Newport?

  develop your moral intuitions into an actual moral intelligence if you really want to leave a positive impact on the world. That takes work, but it's meaningful work and it's work that needs to be done. And it's not just exposing yourselves to things, it involves a lot of thinking. That's really a thing that goes through that book more than anything else. The amount that Lincoln learned by trying to organize his talks and give talks, organize his thoughts to give talks is really where so many leaps in his moral imagination actually happen. This is something that is completely at under threat right now in our current world as we offload or outsource more and more of our thinking to digital tools. We don't want to process complicated information anymore from the for entertainment

• 10:09Cal Newport?

  or for learning. So we let social media apps or chatbots do that for us. We don't want to produce our thoughts in an organized way anymore. That feels hard. So we have chatbots write for us or summarize things for us. We're running away from actually using our brain. Lincoln ran towards using his brain and it made him a moral giant of the likes that's at the top of our, you know, pantheon of American moral giants in the whole history of this country. There's an argument for using your brain, not trying to outsource difficult thinking, and to aim that work at becoming more moral, taking intuitions and sharpening them into things you can understand and take and argue and figure out actions based on. So, great ideas, caption of this book, very relevant to our current time. Also,

• 10:52Cal Newport?

  he's a very entertaining writer. All right, book number three. We're making big leaps in time here.

• 11:00Cal Newport?

  The Case for God by Karen Armstrong. This is another book I've read many times. I'm looking through it now. And it's really marked up. I really think it's an underappreciated work in thinking of, I guess, like theological apologia and moral imagination, all these type of topics, also just like as historical work. Karen Armstrong is a great religion, religious, I want to not say religious historian, religion historian. She's actually not religious in a traditional sense herself. She was a lapsed nun who now has no participation in any organized religions, but is a fantastic historian. Here's what this book is about. The central argument of this book, it's the history of religion from, you know,

• 11:42Cal Newport?

  the Paleolithic to today. It starts with what it must have, the experience of being in like the caves of Laskow with the flickering torchlight making the animal drawings on the walls appear as if they're moving, like the sort of this original sort of ritualistic connection to the transcendent, all the way to modern religions. And her big argument, and I can tell you why this is important in a second, but her big argument is that the Enlightenment messed up our understanding of religion. And the average person today, because we have Enlightenment shaped minds, doesn't know how to think about religion

• 12:21Cal Newport?

  properly. So post Enlightenment, we have all these ideas like the empirical evaluation of truth, history as a thing where I'm trying to like really clearly capture things that specifically happen, information being delivered in a sort of sequential action oriented way. Let me explain to you the steps of building a telescope to like observe the stars. A lot of the, even the notion of like truth as like empirical verifiable coming out of the scientific method. This has been looked at and this is true and this thing is not because we have a falsifiable example, but here we do not. All of these ideas that are just ingrained in our understanding of the world into what, you know, like a philosopher

• 13:04Cal Newport?

  would call like the episteme in which we're, we exist are post Enlightenment ideas. All of the ancient religions emerged before any of those ideas were around. So they don't work.

• 13:16Cal Newport?

  With the idiom of modernity, that's not what they were invented from. And when we think about religion through the idiom of modernity, this is where we have a big disconnect. But through these sort of post-enlightenment idioms, we look at and say, huh, I think about a religion as a collection of empirical, empirically verifiable facts that I'm assenting to. That this happened, that happened, this person is this, that person is that. But I don't, where's the evidence? No, and I don't have like the empirical evidence like a scientific thing. I don't want to assent to that. That's one way, you know, we start to think about it today. Is this true or not? Is the way that we're thinking about religion today? That would have been nonsense, Armstrong argues, to someone at, you know, the turn of the first millennium. What do you mean, is this true or not? What are you talking about?

• 14:01Cal Newport?

  That's not the way that we engage with like the world and their notions of, of making sense of the world back then. So she's really arguing for you need a pre-enlightenment mind to approach religion. And when you do, she says, a couple of things come up. Read all the ancient books from the main wisdom traditions, right? They all see God as ineffable, meaning too complicated for your pure and human minds to understand. You're never really going to be able to get your mind around and explain like what God is or how that concept even functioned. So everything we do, the ancients knew this. Everything we do is an approximation. We do these rituals, we tell these stories, we organize our world through these parables as a way of trying to like approximate

• 14:46Cal Newport?

  a truth that we'll never actually get our arms around. That through action, you get these intimations of what is actually true, that you'll never actually be able to articulate and write down in some sort of like clear post-enlightenment sort of empirical, scientific way. That's just not the way they thought. That's not the way religion works. Belief did not mean the way we would believe today that yes, the car that drove by 10 minutes ago was red or not. Belief meant commitment to the actual typically physical, often sort of physical to some degree, intellectual requirements of the religion. Through that action, I will increasingly find that the intimations and moral intuitions and transcendent intuitions I have begin to fall into a configuration that makes more sense. It is through the action.

• 15:28Cal Newport?

  And it's through the prayers, it's through the following of the Holocaust requirements, it's through the grappling with the text that over time, I feel like this complicated world and the way that I have these intuitions about it begins to fit into something that kind of makes sense. That's belief. That's the way they thought about it. The modern world were like, well, what facts am I assenting to? So anyway, she's an argument for going back to a pre-modern way of thinking of religion opens up the possibilities of introducing transcendent values into your life, which itself then can become like a fantastic foundation and buffer against which you can resist all of the sort of nihilistic winds of post-modern

• 16:11Cal Newport?

  digital and our current type of culture, right? So it's really thought provoking and will change the way you think about the transcendent values. I mean, I read this probably in the 2000s, which was like a really, for my generation, Jesse's generation, like a really interesting period. Religion had become like in the American context, like various, it'd become like politically coded. It'd become like intellectually coded. Religion in America was people were talking about like Christianity was like right coded. People forget like how important it was, like the Dover versus Kitz Miller decision that happened in the early 2000s, which was like this sort of court case against a school

• 16:52Cal Newport?

  district that was trying to teach intelligent design, some sort of non-evolution thing. And they kind of brought in all these scientific experts that sort of smacked down these sort of parochials. And it was a time where a lot of people, it was like John Stewart, then the new atheist, you know, post 9/11, religion is Bush, religion is like jihadism, it's superstition. It was like a really like an anti-religion time, but that wheel is kind of turning again because it turns out like the post-modern digital, that anything goes, culture is fluid, and we move quickly through like digital transition of information to reconfigure our own sort of very fragile maps and meaning that kind of shift from week to week. This isn't cutting it. There's a lot of nihilism and despair and sort of

• 17:34Cal Newport?

  existential whatever. So there's an interest back once again in transcendent values. You need something like Karen Armstrong, I think, to make sense of the moment. Like what does this actually mean? What are these values? What's the right way to approach them with like humility? What's the right way to engage spiritual technologies that they're actually likely to make your life better as opposed to lead you even farther astray? So I think this book should be making a comeback. Very smart, broad sweeping history, which I like as well. All right, Jesse, we got three more books to get through. First, however, let's just take a quick break. We got to pay the bills. I want to talk briefly about some of the sponsors that makes this show possible.

• 18:10Speaker 02

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• 18:40Cal Newport?

  All right, it's New Year's season, which means if you're like me, you're starting to think about how to get your finances back in order for 2026 so that you can start saving up for your visions of a deeper life. To do so, let me tell you what tool you should be using. Monarch, which was just rated Wall Street Journal's best budgeting app of 2025. Monarch is the all-in-one personal finance tool that brings your entire financial life together in one clean interface. And right now, just for our listeners, Monarch is offering 50% off your first year. Now, more on that soon. Let me first tell you what I like best about Monarch. You can access it like right on your phone or right on your laptop and, you know, it tells you what's going on with your assets and what you're doing with your

• 19:23Cal Newport?

  spending. But it visualizes this beautifully. This has to be the best looking finance app I've ever seen. And that really makes you much more likely to keep using it and checking. It's kind of a delight to check in. And in doing so, you begin to regain control over your finances. The holidays are the best time to start getting grips on your money and Monarch is the way to do it. Don't let financial opportunities slip through the cracks. Get this app. Now, here's the good news. As I mentioned, if you use code DEEP at monarch.com, load this in your browser for this to work, you will get half off your first year. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com if you use the code DEEP.

• 20:05Cal Newport?

  All right. I also want to talk about our friends at Reclaim AI. In our modern distracted world, focus is the ultimate competitive advantage. But staying focused isn't just about discipline. It's also about having the right systems and tools to help you protect your time. That's why I'm genuinely excited to share today sponsor reclaim.ai. Reclaim is a smart calendar assistant that helps you defend your time. It automatically blocks focus time, which is their term for what we call deep work here. It schedules meetings intelligently and even protects space for your habits and breaks, all without you having to obsess over the positioning of every last appointment. Now here's what's cool. Reclaims AI adjust as your priorities shift. So when things move around, your focus time doesn't just disappear. It adapts with you.

• 20:51Cal Newport?

  Most users gain, and this is a really amazing stat, around seven extra productive hours a week and cut their after hour work nearly in half when they use reclaim. So if you've been looking for a way to do more deep work in a world of KDA calendars, you need to check out reclaim.ai. It's like having an assistant who's fully committed to protecting your time for what matters most. You can sign up 100% free with Google or Outlook calendar at reclaim.ai/cal. Plus reclaim is offering my listeners an exclusive 20% off 12 months with discount code CAL20. And remember you will get your reclaim recapped 2025. When you sign up, that's a year in review of how much time you've been spending

• 21:34Cal Newport?

  on deep work meetings and work life balance over the whole year, including 30 plus productivity stats. Get that all at reclaim.ai/cal and use that code CAL20. All right, let's get back to our books.

• 21:47Cal Newport?

  All right, we're three in, we got three to go.

• 21:52Cal Newport?

  All right, the next book I want to talk about.

• 21:55Cal Newport?

  You are not a gadget, written by Jaron Laner. All right, so this was subtitled a manifesto. It came out in the late 2000s, I think like right around 2009 or 2010. This book was really influential to me because what Laner brought into the discussion of technology was humanism.

• 22:21Cal Newport?

  So he was talking about, in this case, Web 2.0, which was at this point dominated by browser-based social media like Facebook. Those were like the big players he's talking about in this book. Like Instagram was just starting to take off. So this was really like a Facebook era. And he was talking about the way that these online services, these massive online platforms, were robbing us of our humanity. He wasn't talking about it robbing us of our data. He wasn't talking about its impacts on other things in our life or the time it was taking. It was, it's dehumanizing us. Now, if you go to Jaron Lanier's website even today,

• 23:03Cal Newport?

  you will see that it's this really like cool, messy, old-school HTML-like website like you would see in 1993. He advocates in here for a much more individualistic, sort of eccentric homemade web. The aesthetic that dominated before the massive Web 2.0 companies took over and sort of homogenized all the web into these fixed interfaces. It's Facebook, or it's Twitter, or it's Instagram. And he says, "This is really robbing possibilities for self-expression." Like when you're on Facebook and you have to just select things from dropdown menus, that's your only chance for expressing yourself. Everything's going to look exactly the same. You're just changing like different statuses, or you have one little box to put your five favorite books. Like that's robbing you of your ability to really have self-expression, which is what the internet was all about.

• 23:46Cal Newport?

  Now, I'm not super jazzed up about like the particular arguments about expression necessarily that were big, self-expression and creativity that were really big back then. I'm more jazzed up about Lanier's approach, his philosophical approach, which is, we start first by prioritizing human flourishing and the human experience. Technology should serve that. And if we're not careful about that, it will come in and squash that. Without even thinking about it. The technology can have these massive side effects on our humanity without even caring, because it's trying, whatever, at that point, build up user count and later try to get engagement, try to sell more advertisements. So I think it's a, you know, his approach, it's like half insane.

• 24:29Cal Newport?

  He's a brilliant, sort of half insane type of writer. This was an important approach. Like, I'm flipping this open now, I'm just curious about, like, stuff I have highlighted. All throughout here, I have different highlights. All right, so I'm just gonna read something from it. Here's something I marked in here. Jaren says, "It seems ridiculous to have to say this, but just in case anyone's getting the wrong idea, let me affirm that I am not turning against the internet. I love the internet." He goes on to say, "The old, talking about a forum he was on that revives the magic of the early years of the internet, there's a bit of a feeling of paradise about it. You can feel each participant's passion for the instrument. We help each, we help one another because we become more intense.

• 25:13Cal Newport?

  It's amazing to watch." This is a forum for an ancient instrument called an oud, O-U-D. Oud players from around the world cheer on an oud builder as he posts pictures of an instrument and the construction. It's thrilling to hear clips from a young player capturing midair just as she's getting good. "The fancy web 2.0 designs of the early 21st century start off by classifying people into bubbles. You meet your own kind. Facebook tops up dating pools, LinkedIn corrals careerists, and so on. The oud forum does the opposite." Right? You will see this strain through a lot of my writing. I mean, I've done some writing for The New Yorker in particular about the magic of homemade communities online and how that's like the internet at its best.

• 25:52Cal Newport?

  A self-policing, really narrow, idiosyncratic, very thickly connected, eccentric communities that use the internet to bring people from different physical locations into a common cognitive space. I think there's a lot of magic in those spaces like the Oud Forum that Lanair talks about, or you know, I talked about the TalkNats.com website in one of my New Yorker pieces. There's so much more magic there. I completely agree with Lanair than what you get in, I am one of 500 million people that are like looking at and posting tweets on X today. And that it's being going through cybernetic algorithms just to try to show me the things that are going to press my buttons. It's the opposite of community. It's the opposite of expression. It's the opposite of I, these are real people that I know about, the details

• 26:36Cal Newport?

  of them and their life, and I see them as three dimensional. Not, I'm just on some massive conversation platform where everyone is just like a name and text in the exact same format one after another. So that's a very, he has some influential ideas in there and it really influenced my thinking and should influence the way you think about technology. Humans first, human flourishing first. Technology should serve that. Where it's not, we should be more willing to stand up and be stronger. All right. The next book came out the same year. This was also very influential, but it took a completely different tact on talking about technology. This was Nick Carr's The Shallows, What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. What he's doing in this book might seem old hat today, but it was pretty revolutionary at the time. He basically said, look, I don't know if you've noticed this, but I'm having

• 27:20Cal Newport?

  a harder time reading. I can't organize my thoughts as much. And then he does like really good, Carr's a good journalist, a lot of investigation, talking to scientists and reading the research literature on brain functioning and finding out, oh, these new technologies, us being on the web and on apps all the time, really could rewire your brain in a way that's permanent. Right? So this technology actually can have a permanent change on your brain. It will change the way your brain functions. That matters. We got to discuss that and care about it. It became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize sort of out of nowhere because the idea was like really big. And the Pulitzer Committee, let's be honest, is almost always now working backwards from, we want to have a book that celebrates this and a book that celebrates that. And I guess this was on their mind back

• 28:05Cal Newport?

  then, but it still is a mark that this is like a really important book. So now we're kind of more used to this. I mean, you wouldn't have like a John Height today without a Nicholas Carr of 15 years ago. I'm looking at the science of how this technology impacts us and we should know about it. So you get a good one-two punch here. Lanair, the humanism. The humanist impact of technology. How is this supporting or going against our ability to thrive is what it means to be humans. Humans have to be defined themselves separate from technology. And then cars like, we gotta care about the biology of technological impacts. What actually happens in our brain if we're looking at the screens so much? People talk about this book, but they didn't know what to do with it. So they just ignored it. And now it's really hard to ignore. It just, we're just dumber. We're just not thinking as much anymore.

• 28:50Cal Newport?

  And that's fine if we want to go back to like an early Neolithic type of situation where most of us don't have to think that much because mainly what we're doing is harvesting, you know, wheat. But I don't think our world or our economy is going to support that. So it matters that we're losing our ability to think. And this is sort of the Bible, the original source document about why technology is not just a tool. And all that matters is how you use it in the moment. It can have long-term impacts. All right, final book I want to talk about. Richard Rohr's Falling Upward. This is definitely, especially an important book if you're like leaving your early adulthood. So basically the idea of Richard Rohr, who is a Franciscan priest from New Mexico.

• 29:34Cal Newport?

  His basic idea is there's two phases to life. There's this first phase of life as you go through your twenties into your thirties, where what's happening here is it's all uphill, all ascent in a positive sense. Like you have your goals, you're going after them, you're making progress, you're moving up the career ladder. You get married, maybe you have a family, like things are going well, you're comfortable. Everything is all potential. And then he says, guess what happens at some point? The hammer falls and hardship happens. That's just the human condition. You lose this job, you get sick, this didn't work out the way you wanted, this plateaus, you deal with like some sort of other types of issues. The hardship enters the picture. And he says in this book, great, that's when the interesting stuff begins. It's the hardship that happens like as you approach midlife that you emerge out of.

• 30:17Cal Newport?

  And when you have this second peak, that is much more built around deeper wisdom. It's built around connection to others. It's built around helping others. It's built around like gratitude and understanding of the beauty of the world around you. Putting your circumstances into into context, getting out of this completely egocentric part of you. And he's like, this is where like the beautiful phase of life emerges if you navigate that second, that second slope properly. So it's like an instruction manual for what you do in life when there's hardship. David Brooks, like he took the same idea. He basically took Richard Rohr and wrote a longer version of this book with more stories. That's the second mountain. So if you want like a more digestible, story driven version of Rohr's ideas,

• 31:02Cal Newport?

  you can also read David Brooks's book, The Second Mountain, which is about the same thing, about Brooks going through this transition after his initial ascent to be a very successful writer, an op ed writer, his divorce and other and his nihilistic despair and sort of how he he refound in this second half of life, like a different way, a much more meaningful phase. So I think it's like, read this before you need it. It's a really important book when you're thinking about navigating life in a deep way. And it's a book that I keep thinking about. Again, when you look around the postmodern digital, especially with younger people, there is no framework to deal with hardship. And people just fall into hardship tunnels or fall in the trauma tunnels.

• 31:46Cal Newport?

  It all just becomes, I can barely function. We see these videos of, you know, college students who are like, I can barely, I'm overcome with disordering rage around, God knows, you know, something that you didn't even know was an issue until some academic idea made into the mainstream about, you know, oh, you, you, you mentioned this, whatever, whatever. Like people just crippled by hardship. We don't have the frames anymore. We have a lot of, in the postmodern digital, we get a lot of tools to explain and pass around understanding about all the different ways that everyone's harming everyone and the power dynamics, et cetera. But we don't have the tools for like, but how do you navigate that incline? How do you like term as a hardship is also like, how do you move through that?

• 32:29Cal Newport?

  How do you find like beauty in life through things not going the way you want? Like, we don't talk enough about that. This book is about that. And so I think it's really important, especially again, all of this goes into our current moment. We're on our phones and not in real life. We're letting processors think for us instead of our neurons. This moment has all sorts of negative side effects. These are the type of books that can help you find grounding and depth, even in that world. All right, so those Jesse, I grabbed those just off the shelf. So again, these aren't the best six, but they're six that I think are really important. I've read all those books multiple times.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Couple of fall offs. When do you think we should have these books read by?

• 33:03Cal Newport?

  I mean, let's be realistic, like you could take all the way to like the fifth of January. I don't want to be unreasonable. No, just read, I don't know, pick some, pick some that seem interesting, start reading them. Put down the phone, actually read them, you know? I have a goal for each just to because needing to get a book done by a certain time forces you to like, put aside reading time and not look at your phone because like, I'm not going to get this done if I have it there. So I don't know, read one of them the first week of the new year. How about that? And then see what goes from there.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  And then did IG start on a browser?

• 33:34Cal Newport?

  No, and that was part of why it was so innovative. Because it was using the phone on the, the camera on the phone, it was phone native.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 33:44Cal Newport?

  That's why it was so successful is that Facebook was going through all this effort to build out the mobile version of Facebook and like, how does this work? IG was mobile native because it had to use the phone. And that's why, and I'll give Zuckerberg credit, he's good at acquisitions. He's bad at ideas. Look at the metaverse, you know, look at their like stumbling AI plays, but he's good at acquisitions. And I think what he saw with IG was like, oh, wait a second. This has to be on the phone because that's where the camera is. But if this is on the phone, people are looking at it way more often because their phone is with them. Oh, having a good interface on the phone means you're going to 10x your engagement. So yeah, IG kind of kicked, IG is who I think kicked off the phone age. I mean, Facebook mobile was a thing, but the early versions of it were not very good.

• 34:28Cal Newport?

  And people are like, I'll just use the web.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  I guess one of the things about Zuckerberg and ideas is you can kind of look at it like a GM and make an acquisition, say a GM has been on a, of a team for like 10 years and he makes good acquisitions and bad acquisitions. I mean,

• 34:42Cal Newport?

  Yeah, yeah, like I think.

• 34:46Cal Newport?

  He's definitely had some good ideas. IG and WhatsApp, IG and WhatsApp are really good acquisitions.

• 34:52Cal Newport?

  He was, I think he was good to realize from a financial perspective, the engagement model. The main thing I think his, his most brilliant move was probably recognizing, a little late, but recognizing, oh, the power of data targeted advertising. He kind of, he learned that looking at Google, like, oh, they have like, they're using more information to target these ads, more they're using the, the search terms to target the ads. And them realizing, wait a second, we have a lot more data than that on people. Like our business is making money off of data. So everything is about gathering data and monetizing data. And we use apps to do that. I think that was like a huge shift in his thinking.

• 35:37Cal Newport?

  You gotta give him credit, that's, that company is, is almost a trillion dollar company, if not trillion dollar company right now. So, you know, he correctly saw there's a lot of money in that. And I guess when you have that much money, there's also something to be said for, you can take swings and absorb them. Why not? Yeah, it's kind of like the Yankees, the Dodgers. Yeah, you can take those swings. Like, I don't know if there's like Patriot of Japan's gonna, you know, pan out or not, but let's just do a 75 million dollar deal and see. Cause if they do, it can really help you in your World Series run. All right, enough of that, let's do, God, we're letting people take over the show, aren't we? Yeah. It's all calls? Yeah. How many do we got? Seven. All right, I'm gonna be quick. This is my thing, hold me to this, no long answers. I'm gonna be pithy, right? And I ask people to do short calls, they're mainly pretty short, right? Yeah.

• 36:22Cal Newport?

  Okay, and you will confirm, I have not heard any of these. Confirmed. All right, are these all from Mark Zuckerberg? You son of a bitch. He wants to hire you. Yeah. To write his biography. I want to buy deep media is the new WhatsApp. I want to buy your company. You know what biography? Actually, if he offered you like $5 million, you'd probably write his biography, wouldn't you? You know what biography? I would be really interested in writing, but I don't know why I would spend so many years doing this. Like, it makes no sense for me, but like, I could make a good pitch to the family foundation to do it. Crichton. Oh, would that be interesting? I think it would take me five years to do that, right? And that doesn't make sense. But I hope someone else does. But, man, it could be an epic, like a Crichton biography.

• 37:05Cal Newport?

  It spans before we landed on the moon, all the way through like the modern internet age. And he was kind of involved in all of this. And so there's like, there's a, there's a structural backbone there for like, the entire sort of history of the post second half of the 20th century of all these different economies and ideas and televisions and movies and what was happening in publishing. And he's this weird, interesting guy. There's a ton, there's a ton of papers on him. He's a very well documented guy. But I thought about that for a second. Because I've been reading a bunch of Crichton in my

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Thriller December.

• 37:38Cal Newport?

  Yeah. But I was like, oh, man, why would I do that, though?

• 37:41Speaker 01

  But if you could pick a foursome, he'd probably be in your golfing foursome, right?

• 37:44Cal Newport?

  Yeah. I mean, I don't think I'd go, I'd play golf, because it would be terrible.

• 37:48Speaker 01

  It'd be like, kind of like some metaphor.

• 37:50Cal Newport?

  Michael, I have a lot of questions for you. Let me just take my first shot here. And the club is in his eye. He's dead. I just killed him with my driver by accident. That would be the immediate.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  He probably didn't play much golf either. Putting greens.

• 38:02Cal Newport?

  Yeah, he was like 6'9" or something.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Was he that tall?

• 38:06Cal Newport?

  6'7". He's very tall. Maybe 6'6". Yeah, he was a really tall guy.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 38:11Cal Newport?

  Which I think makes golf harder, probably. I don't know.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Ken.

• 38:15Cal Newport?

  I don't know. I guess Michael Jordan played a lot of golf. All right, this, we're off track here. Let us get to our first call.

• 38:22Speaker 03

  Henry Kerr, beginning the Deep Work HQ from Norway. I went to hypnosis to get rid of my Facebook addiction back in 2010 to be able to finish my master's thesis. So later, when I discovered your books, it was like coming home. Thank you very much. Now I have two boys, one and four, together with a smartphone addicted mother. And there's a power struggle going on in the family, and I need your help to win it. My first question, I realized the toxic effect social media had on me on my own, the hard way. How can I help my boys do the same and come to the same conclusion? All the while, their mother and grandparents use iPads and smartphones as their go-to pacifier.

• 39:06Speaker 03

  My second question, when I have won the voice over to Team Dad slash no screens, how can we together shame their mother into submission to our screen-free cause? This is our most desperate hour. Help me, Obu and Kenobi. You're my only hope.

• 39:21Cal Newport?

  All right. I appreciate the question. As everyone, I think any good couples therapist will tell you, Jesse, one of the key strategies of couples therapy is shaming the other person in the submission. I think that's like the name of one of Esther Perel's books. Shame the bastard in the submission. Let me put aside what to do with your, your wife and grand and her parents or in-laws, like there be dragons. You can't change other adults' behaviors, but how you raise your own kids, this really matters. Remember, this idea that these technologies are somehow fundamental, this is like driving a car and everyone has to do it eventually. So like, why are we putting this off is absolute nonsense. It is a massive attention conglomerate that just tries to make money off of your distraction.

• 40:05Cal Newport?

  It doesn't mean that it's evil for everyone or that it necessarily needs to be banned, but it is not fundamental and it's not necessary. And the idea that it's somehow important for these kids to be exposed to it, or you're holding them off of an important life thing every month that you're saying you can't be on social media, it's nonsense. You've got to see this like you would see cigarettes.

• 40:23Cal Newport?

  Not that we necessarily want to ban them, but it's completely reasonable. Be like, my 14-year-old's not smoking. So I do think you need to hold the line. And the line I think you need to hold is, I would typically say, nothing like a smartphone. Here we would say till high school. That might be different in Norway, the ages, but like roughly that like 14, 15-year-old. And even that's gonna be like a, just for logistics. That's a heavily locked down phone, certainly no social media apps or access to YouTube. It's just like, you need to be able to do text messaging and like send photos around and look up movie times on the phone or whatever. And then 16 more or less is when you begin to pull the restrictions back. The thing I would hold until they leave the house, no matter where they are on that

• 41:03Cal Newport?

  scale, the kitchen lives in the kitchen, I mean, the, uh, the phone lives in the kitchen. When your home is plugged in, in the kitchen is not your property, it is mine, it is not a constant companion. You do not just carry that phone with you and you just kind of use it whenever. It is a tool and when you need it, you come to the kitchen. If you're in a text conversation, you sit there in the kitchen to finish the conversation, you need to look something up, you come to the kitchen and you look it up. They learn it's a tool, not a companion, and is the absolute best way to do it. And you should do the same with your own phone. You should ask your wife to join you. She probably won't, but whatever, you just do it your way. I think that is so vital. That's how you, you break the pacifier effect because so much what happens is people see this as, as, uh, binary. Either I'm not using a phone and it's like this big to do and I make a big

• 41:48Cal Newport?

  deal about it, or I do it all. Right? I mean, it's like someone saying like, I never touch a drop of alcohol. And then someone is like, well, you know, it's nice to have wine at dinner parties. And then they, they show up the next day with a foam dome on with two, uh, beer bottles on a helmet with straws coming to their mouth. You don't, it's not all or nothing. So it was like, okay, you're now in high school at the equivalent of Norway. You have a smartphone because like this is how you like call out, you know, you, you according with your friends and look up stuff. Doesn't mean you can be in your bedroom till four in the morning, you know, looking at porn while listening to far right podcast. No, I don't want you to do that. Not while you're living here. I'm still your parent. The phone lives in the kitchen. You use it there when you need it. You can bring it with you if you're going out with your friends. When you come back, you put it in kitchen.

• 42:30Cal Newport?

  So you just learn to do your homework, to watch TV, to be at meals with your family, to be reading a book in another room, that the phone is just not right there. You, you prevent it from becoming that default sort of pacification. I think that is so critical for kids. Now here's the other caveat I want to throw at you. An iPad is just an inconveniently large iPhone. It's the same, if they have an iPad with all those apps on it and the internet and it's theirs and they have it and they can keep it in their room, you've just given them a bad iPhone. It's hard to fit in your pocket, but it's, it's running iOS. It's the same thing. It's just a bigger screen. When the first iPads came out, this was the thing that they were mocked at first before they turned out to be a very popular, uh, product. The mocking was like, wait a second, this is just running the exact same phone operating and software with the exact same touch interface, just on like a bigger

• 43:15Cal Newport?

  phone. This is just like a worse phone. How is this ever going to sell? And then it did because people like having larger things for like reading and watching things and phones are pretty small, but it is just a phone. So if they have an iPad that lives in the kitchen too.

• 43:29Cal Newport?

  Same rules. It's completely locked down until you're 16. You do not have unrestricted access to your own iPad before like 14 or 15. The same rules. It's just an inconveniently large iPhone. All right. So that's, that's what I say you need to do. I think that is the best way to raise kids. You're giving them a massive competitive advantage, not just professionally and academically, but just in terms of human flourishing. So I would hold that line. See, this is just very important to me as a parent. I'll be the parent in charge of technology. That's fine. This is very important and that's what we're doing. All right. Who do we got next?

• 44:00Speaker 04

  Hey, Cal. This is Christian from Arizona. I have a question about building a creative deep life when your identity spans more than one craft. I'm a creative writer and photographer, and I also DJ and book music events. I also work a full-time digital job that leans on a lot of these same creative abilities. I'm efficient with the work, so I usually have time left at the end of the day. But after spending hours in a screen-heavy, creative but cello mode, I'm finding it hard to switch gears into deeper creative work when I'm done with my day job. Because of that, I tend to only have the energy for one craft at a time. The rotation has been a pattern for most of my life, but now that I'm well into my second career and have my day job fairly locked down, I'm trying to engage with my passions more intentionally, especially writing and photography, which I'd eventually like to bring forward as my main work. But the mental drain from my day job still makes

• 44:43Speaker 04

  it hard to give more than one creative pursuit steady momentum at any given time. So my question is, how do you design a deep life when your identity is genuinely multimodal, but your job draws from the same cognitive and creative bandwidth you need for your craft? Is this something you can handle through seasonal focus, or is there another way to think about it? Thanks.

• 45:02Cal Newport?

  You gotta just slow down, right? You just have to accept it takes a lot of energy to work on these projects. They can be very meaningful, these out-of-work projects, but it takes a lot of energy. And as you said, sometimes that energy is coming from the same reservoir you've been pulling on all day during work. So just be okay with that. Yeah, I'm just kind of working on one thing. And often I can just do a little bit. And then occasionally, like I have like a full day, I can make bigger progress. And I'm just happy I have that in my life. And I'm expanding out to like, what did I do this year? And not what did I get done this week? I'm leaving that sort of short-term churn productivity mindset with these non-professional tasks. And just it's a slow productivity. I'm just gonna, I work on this slow and steady.

• 45:44Cal Newport?

  A couple of things to consider. One, you can, if you need, have a much more definitive transition between work and non-work. That helps make it exercise-based, maybe outside, if you're able to do like a hard run and like an outdoor prison yard style workout, like something that gets you like completely changes your context and gets all your muscles working and exhausts you. And then you come in and like, you know, you eat and whatever, like you've completely swapped your context. Having a separate, really good space for doing your non-professional tasks works as well. Like, here's my really cool workshop I go to that I work on my photography or whatever and care about that space. So it's just sort of like fun to be there. That helps as well. And then also, like, this is more extreme, but if your career is going well, your finances are under control, I

• 46:26Cal Newport?

  think it's completely reasonable. Like, one of the lifestyle-centric planning plans you might explore at some point is like, I'm actually backing off my work some, and I'm going to spend more time working on other things. That's really common, actually, in lifestyle-centric planning, where people who have the ability to do so end up, this is the thing they change in their lifestyle, is less work, more non-work projects. And they just find that like a, maybe like a 50/50 balance is what they want. Now, that sounds crazy for a lot of people. How could you possibly do that? But some people are in a situation where they can. They work remotely, they're really good, they can raise their rates, they live cheaply, they, whatever it is, right? And they can kind of find a way to make that work. So I would keep those all in mind. I mean, it's kind of what I'm

• 47:06Cal Newport?

  doing here, Jesse, was trying to get the office of the Deep Work HQ. Really, I mean, it's hard for me to pull the trigger on that because it's a Rube Goldberg machine of parts that all fit together to try to get everything I want to do, the lights and this and that, and someone has to install this first before we do that. And I don't quite see the whole thing. But I really want that space to be a space about creation. It's like, half, everything is there for me to like be building things with like microelectronics and 3D printing, and half, like, everything is there for motivation for writing. And it's like a creative space where I go, and all I think there is like creating. And like, that makes a difference. Like, having that space makes it easier and more fun and more rewarding to switch over to that mindset. Mm-hmm. There we go. Let's, uh, what are we, we're only two questions in?

• 47:51Cal Newport?

  Yep. Should we, uh, should we do one more? And then we'll, we'll hear from a sponsor. Is that a good way to do it? Do one more, baby. Do one more. All right. It's gonna be a good one.

• 48:00Speaker 05

  So I work for myself and I largely get to make my own schedule. One of the challenges I'm encountering is that when I'm trying to time block out my schedule for the week, what I'll often encounter is that I'll be inspired to do some writing for the job while the time block has me doing something else, or I'm supposed to be making some big decisions, but my brain is just not cooperating. What would you recommend here? Do you stick with it? Do you just sit there even if you're not getting much done, but to build that muscle the way that sometimes you might be told to do in meditation, just stay on the cushion? Or do you switch to the task that maybe has more life force in it? Or something else entirely? Thank you.

• 48:45Cal Newport?

  I don't know. I think the answer is probably more amphetamines. You really can, boom, you can rock and roll on something when you're tweaking. And you're just like, let's do it. Emails, all caps emails. Boom. You say you type boom a lot when you're on amphetamines. Boom, attachment. I'm gonna give you a compromise. I think you're time blocking too far in advance. Don't try to figure out your whole week down to the scale of time. Instead, you might have a good weekly plan. I gotta get this writing done. I gotta do the research for this project. And then here's like some key tasks I need to get done. And during your weekly plan, especially for like key things where you have to go somewhere, maybe I have to go across town, you might want to get those on your calendar so you don't run out of time.

• 49:29Cal Newport?

  But then time block each day as you get there. Leave yourself flexibility so that you can approach the day and say, all right, I have some, you know, some room to decide what to do when. And you know what? I'm not really feeling writing this morning. So what if instead I do all of my tasks that I had for this week? That's the mood I'm in. I'm all hyped up on caffeine, but I'm feeling bad about this writing project. Or like, maybe I'm gonna write midday or like tackle each day, look at your weekly plan and make the best day you can. So now you're not trying to predict too far in advance. That works well. Now, if you've just made a plan for that day that's reasonable and now you're in that plan and you're like, I don't know, this is just kinda hard. I don't want to do it. That's then when this is the compromise. You're like, this is my time block. I made this time block plan for today. This is a reasonable mix of my mood and available energy and time.

• 50:14Cal Newport?

  This is what I'm gonna do. And you just kinda practice sticking with it, right? So I want it planned like next Friday. What you're going to be doing at 10, but if I plan what I'm doing today at 10, then I would do my best to actually stick with that. If you want a more extreme version of that, check out my interview with Oliver Berkman. That's a couple of years ago. Oliver is more on the side of like, just like, let it ride. Make sure you get worked on on whatever's most important that day, like whatever's most important to you. And then it's just like, whatever you're in the mood for. Now, we had an argument about it. I said, I think that's ideal, but most jobs just don't allow that. And we have to deal in the reality of the workloads of most people. You're working on 10 simultaneous things. You just can't, if you approach today, like, what am I in the mood to do? It's not going to work. But I did agree with him. From a cognitive standpoint, it is a nice way to approach work. So he pushes for a more extreme

• 50:59Cal Newport?

  version. So you could check that out. My interview with him, if you want to see something that leans more towards flexibility. But the compromise is where I would fall. All right. Now we're going to do, Jesse, a quick break to hear from another sponsor.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 51:42Cal Newport?

  There's been a lot of talk recently about AI, including some big radical visions of what this technology might one day do. But here's what I care about. How can the tools that exist right now make the shallow work that I do right now easier? I'm all about the pragmatism. This is where a new tool from Notion comes in. It's called Notion Agent, and it definitely caught my attention. So Notion, as you know, longtime sponsor of the show, is a service that brings all of your notes, documents, and projects into one connected space that just works. Notion Agent now makes this space even easier and more delightful by helping you do busy work on your behalf. Like, you just had a meeting? Notion Agent can read through your notes and add action items

• 52:26Cal Newport?

  right into Notion itself. It can tag other team members on Notion so they can go and see this information. Maybe you're prepping for a presentation. Notion Agent can go through your workspace and gather all the information you need and put together for you in a sample It can even go beyond your Notion workspace itself and use connected tools like Slack or Google Drive that try to help take this busy work off your plate. I love that. It's focused and practical. It's no wonder that over half of the Fortune 500 plus fast growing companies like OpenAI, Ramp and Versal are using Notion Agent to send fewer emails, cancel more meetings and stay ahead. Try Notion now with Notion Agent at notion.com/cal.

• 53:07Cal Newport?

  Now you have to type that in all lowercase letters, notion.com/cal to try your new AI teammate, Notion Agent, today. When you use our link, remember you're supporting our show. That's notion.com/cal. Let's also talk about Wayfair. When you need to get your home holiday ready fast, Wayfair has you covered from cozy bedding to festive decor for every room. They're literally a one-stop-shop for all things home. Now, let's say you need, for example, because we all do, evergreen accent pillows to make your living room more sort of seasonally appropriate. Wayfair has you covered. Maybe you need an inflatable snow globe for your yard because those are awesome. They have you covered too.

• 53:49Cal Newport?

  If you're like me and you think it's appropriate to set up a winter wonderland decoration scene inside of your house because that allows you to keep it up throughout all of January, Wayfair is going to have what you need for that as well. I use Wayfair all the time. There's three reasons. Three reasons why I'm a Wayfair fan. Number one, they have what I'm looking for. It's such a wide selection, but the stuff they have is often very distinctive. So you'll get that chair or decoration or accent pillow will be different than the other ones you've seen. Number two, good prices. Man, the prices are just right. And number three, the shipping is fast and easy, even on the big stuff. So you can get what you need when you need it. No more huge delivery frees for furniture. Get stuff like sofas, dining tables, beds, desks and more shipped to you for free. I love all those reasons. So I'm a big Wayfair fan.

• 54:33Cal Newport?

  In fact, we're redecorating my son's room this season in January. That's going to be a big Wayfair project. All right, but we're still in the holidays now. So get your last minute hosting essentials, gifts for all your loved ones and decor to celebrate the holidays for way less. Head to wayfair.com right now to shop all things home. That's W A Y F A I R dot com. Wayfair, every style, every home. All right, let's get back to the questions, Jesse.

• 55:01Cal Newport?

  I think we need to take a, I was just thinking about before we get to the next question, do we need a sleigh bell break? Sure. I'm worried that we're losing the, the holiday spirit. There we go.

• 55:14Cal Newport?

  Now we are ready

• 55:17Cal Newport?

  to hear some more questions on our holiday spectacular.

• 55:19Speaker 06

  Hey, Cal, Joe from Jerusalem, been a fan for many years. And I'm wondering if you see a way of building the deep life for areas and people who are not purely knowledge work, meaning salespeople or other professions that require other people's attention and are not strictly focus based. Thank you and would love to hear what you think.

• 55:44Cal Newport?

  Well, that's a good question. First caller from Jerusalem. That's cool. Yeah. That's a cool place to be around the holidays. Very like, you know, audiences from all over the world. It's a very international audience. Yeah. A lot of UK people too. Yeah, I get emails from all sorts of people. Well, my books are all over. I think it's like, we're getting closer to 50 languages now. So it's, it's hard to stay away from all things Cal Newport. I gotta help your terminology here. You're saying, can I do the deep life? If I'm in a job in which people constantly need my attention? Let's be careful of technology. The deep life is my description of a life that you have engineered to, to focus heavily on things that matter at you and to you and to reduce things that don't.

• 56:30Cal Newport?

  My argument is if you don't pursue a deep life, it's hard to do any of the other stuff I talk about, like why get off your phone if you have nothing to do when you put it down? Why like move away from a job that's all emails if it's just an empty, boring void when you're not, you know, an outlook? So I think the deep life is a foundation on which like everything else we talk about matters. My key technique for the deep life is lifestyle centered planning, working backwards from a vision of what you want in your ideal lifestyle and then saying, how do I move closer to that vision using the, the obstacles and opportunities that I currently possess? That's the deep life. I'm writing a book about that now, coming out next year. That's one topic. You're talking about more of the, the distraction in the workplace, which I cover in my books, Deep Work and in my book, A World Without Email. And to a lesser extent, my book, Slow Productivity. That's different.

• 57:15Cal Newport?

  A more focused topic, probably the one I'm known most for. So in that topic, what I'm arguing is the human brain has a hard time context switching from one thing to another. If you need to produce something new using your brain in a way that's time efficient and produces the best quality, it has to be able to focus without distraction on that thing. That's just how the human brain functions. So we should be careful. If that is your job, we should be careful about putting you in a work environment that has collaboration styles that require you to constantly be changing your attention back and forth. That's what that theory is about.

• 57:47Cal Newport?

  What you're talking about is like, if you have a job that's based on like responding to people, I don't see it as a problem with either of that, because they're, we're talking about different things. It has nothing to do with the deep life. That's a bigger picture. Like, what do I want my ideal lifestyle to be with? And am I moving forward to it? You should be doing that, by the way. But that's above the, the level right now of your specific job. And if you don't do deep work in your job, if you're not trying to create new value from scratch with your brain, then worrying about context switch or this or that is much less important. So you just worry about like, how do I do my job best?

• 58:18Cal Newport?

  And so you can be a believer in the ideas I talk about without feeling like you're doing something wrong by being in a job that's very like communication based.

• 58:25Cal Newport?

  The caveat is if there is stuff you do in your job that does require you create a new value with your brain. Like maybe you talk to a lot of clients, but you also have to create white paper, marketing white papers are really beautiful proposals to try to sell clients. Things where you're creating hard value with your brain. Find ways to take those efforts and to protect them. That doesn't mean like, I can't be reached by email and I'm in a cave, but it might mean like, I have these very specific times where I work in a different location. And that's when I get full focus on the creation things. And so if you have things in your work life that depend on deep work, protect those. But again, these theories fit for what they fit. They're not moral prescriptions for what makes a good life good or bad. The deep life is an intentional approach to living. Deep work and deep work theory and attention capital theory is just a

• 59:10Cal Newport?

  honestly, a cognitive science theory about how the brain functions and how you create symbolic knowledge using the brain. So you're probably okay. People mix all this stuff up all the time. It's my fault for not being clear, but.

• 59:21Cal Newport?

  You know, all these things describe very specific things.

• 59:24Speaker 01

  Well, over time, there's more and more terminologies that you've been using to and creating.

• 59:27Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I do. I do create new terminologies. Yeah, I think the right terminology for all the deep work stuff is attention capital theory. That the best way to make value out of attention capital, to take the attention capital someone has and to produce new value using it is often to make sure that you're creating a cognitive environment with minimal context shifts. That's attention capital theory. Deep life theory is about you need to focus intentionally on amplifying the stuff that matters and reducing the stuff that doesn't in order to get a life that feels like it's meaningful and resilient and robust, etc. All right, what we got?

• 1:00:01Speaker 07

  Hi, Cal. I'm trying to figure out how we got to this point.

• 1:00:07Speaker 07

  In the 90s, they called it disintermediation. And now we're all expected to do everything for ourselves. Each person, no matter old or young, is supposed to be their own IT department, dealing with a confluence of technology that's really just completely overwhelming to most people, let alone get your arms around understanding what's actually happening when you click a button. I would love to hear your thoughts about where this is headed and how we can actually deal with this going forward. I don't know.

• 1:00:48Cal Newport?

  All right. Good question. I've written about this exact issue many times. My book, World Without Email, I think gets into this probably in the most detail. Here is exactly what happened.

• 1:00:58Cal Newport?

  When it came to the idea of how do we increase productivity and knowledge work, especially with the advent of digital tools, the management class focused myopically on salary. They said, here is our expense is salary. So if we can reduce the number of people we pay salaries to, we are a more profitable and productive company. They were entirely indifferent to what were the things that you were paying these salaries to, which are essentially brains, your knowledge work company. Brains surrounded by a bunch of stuff that keeps the brain alive. You're extracting value from brains. That's your main capital is attention capital. And they completely ignored the reality of like, well, wait a second.

• 1:01:43Cal Newport?

  These brains cannot just endlessly produce value. They can only do certain things. It takes them a long time to learn new things. It takes a long time to switch from one thing to another. We have to really care about the environment in which we ask these brains to produce valuable stuff for our company. They completely ignored that and said, here's what matters salary. And so when the personal computer revolution in particular hit the front office. They said, great. This is making lots of things just easy enough that we can fire the people who did this as their full time job. We don't need typists. We don't need receptionists. We don't need secretaries. We don't need a travel pool to book to travel. We don't need people to keep track of memos and move them around because in theory we could do this all on computers. I can book my travel by filling out online forms.

• 1:02:28Cal Newport?

  I can send an email instead of having to write out a memo. I don't need someone to take my calls because they can just send emails to me. I don't need a typist because I can use a word processor. So even if I'm a bad typer, I can eventually make the thing in the word processor work. And then we can fire all those support staff. And now we're much more profitable. Now, of course, that didn't work because here's the thing. Those brains that remained had to learn to do all those other things. And those other things take time and more importantly, and this is my contribution that I think was missed from the literature, induce a lot more context shifts, which slows down everything else. Now you're getting a lot less work per unit time out of the brains that are left. So guess what? If you want to produce the same amount of output you had before, when all the support staff was there, you got to hire a lot more people and pay them a lot more salaries.

• 1:03:11Cal Newport?

  And you end up spending more money anyways. So it was a complete myopic view, a completely myopic view of productivity. We basically had this idea that if you can do something a support staff used to do on a computer that was free, now that would just automatically happen and we could fire that support staff. Not the way it worked. That takes time and it takes context. So I think that is at the core of the productivity paradox in the digital age. Is we did not think about how the human brains that produce value actually work. I think it's been, it's been a massive mistake that has left quite a lot of economic growth and human flourishing on the table.

• 1:03:47Cal Newport?

  I used to write a lot about that. It kind of bores people, it turns out. I'm very interested in it. It turns out it's not productivity theories is not, uh, it's not what the general public, general public wants to know what books to read. But anyways, I like that stuff. All right. What else do we got? All right, here we go.

• 1:04:04Speaker 08

  Hey there, Cal. Thanks so much for your thought leadership around AI. In both my personal and professional worlds, I feel exasperated by how many people seem to be ignoring the very real costs of AI. Loss of careers, not entire industries, we're seeing that already, diminishment of skill development related to everything from evaluation to prioritization, concerns about intellectual property, not to mention the environmental impacts. I could go on, but here's my question. What is your suggested two to three sentence response? That would bring forward these very real concerns about AI without coming across the way that I think I come across

• 1:04:46Speaker 08

  as an ignorant or cranky or both middle aged Luddite. Thanks.

• 1:04:52Cal Newport?

  I think with AI, here's what's important, and this actually might put me on the, the opposite side of you for some things as well. But I just want to tell you the way I think about this. I, I think it's important that we do not react to stories about what AI could do. We, there, there's enough we have to deal with, with the real world and real things that exist right now with technology, that we should be evidence based in the things that we're complaining about. That we should keep our, for the most part, our energy focused on, here is an actual thing that's happening that's bad. Here's why I think it's bad. And here's what I think we need to do to try to stop this from happening or reduce it. Too many of the AI concerns are concerns about stories about what AI might do.

• 1:05:36Cal Newport?

  And I think that's what's muddying the water. And then the things that are actually happening right now that we need to be concerned about, get mixed up with the stories. And then if you're just someone, the average person, you're like, well, God, you're complaining about everything. AI is going to do all the things. It's going to be, it's going to be the Terminator. It's going to take all my jobs. It's going to get rid of homework. It's going to be the end of movies and books. And it, it's all these things. Like it's, it sounds so dramatic that eventually when you get to the real thing. We don't have a power capacity in our grid for these data centers. Well, who's information is powering these things that exist right now? And why is that fair? That, you know, a couple hundred shareholders can reap all this value from like hundreds of thousands of authors, these things that are happening right now?

• 1:06:20Cal Newport?

  What really happens when we allow, you know, really online people to have conversations with simulacrum of people? Why do we think this is? Why are we letting you off the hook? The people that are setting up conversational sessions that are leading people to suicide right now? Why are we letting you off the hook? There's all these real issues. And the key to actually, I think, taking action is focus on the real. I think a lot of the storytelling reaction is actually coming from people who are happy to smokescreen the real. I mean, just look at the major AI company leaders over the last year and a half and the type of things they talk about and are afraid of.

• 1:06:59Cal Newport?

  It's always these like fairy tale fears of half a white collar jobs going away, superintelligence wiping out humanity. Because it takes your eye, once you've thrown all of this into the mixer, who's paying attention to the power usage of the new data center? Who's paying attention to psychotic breaks induced by introducing simulacrum of people into conversation? All these type of things. So focus on the things that are happening now. And there's so much happening now with AI and these other technologies. We can look at short form video technologies. These are causing harms right now. Look at John Height's book. Why was that so successful? It wasn't stories. I worry that phones one day are going to make us dumber. It was here's what's happening now to this group of people with this technology and

• 1:07:42Cal Newport?

  it's driving up self harm and it's driving down resilience and we can see it in the data and we, it's hurting these kids now. Let's stop hurting these kids now. That's a compelling argument. When you're instead like, you know, Eliezer Yudowsky, like we need to talk about what type of electronic net will do the best job of catching the Terminator robots when they come. You're in fantasy land talking about fairy tales and it takes the eye off the prize. So don't get caught up in things that aren't actually happening now, even if the story seems compelling. So don't get caught up in all the jobs are being replaced. That's not happening now. Don't get caught up in superintelligence, things taking over. That's not happening now. That's not really possible. Focus on the actual harms and say, I want to fix this thing that's happening right now.

• 1:08:27Cal Newport?

  This is bad. How do we stop this bad thing? I think that's the right way to talk about it. All right. What are we at here? One more. One more? All right. Let's hear it.

• 1:08:40Speaker 09

  Hey, Cal, a lot of people love the idea of deep work, but they're not able to pursue it because they don't know where to start. And they feel like if they stop all their distractions that are keeping them comfortable, they won't know what to do. So the result is they live a life of, like Tim Ferriss says, unhappiness instead of uncertainty. What advice would you have for someone who's really distracted, but wants to start deep work, but has no idea where to start and what to do?

• 1:09:17Cal Newport?

  All right, this is a great question to end on, because I think it's a fundamental question. This is why the notion of the deep life has become, I think, so important. Here's the way I think about this, one way to think about this. My book, Deep Work, I think one of the reasons why that book was popular

• 1:09:35Cal Newport?

  is there was an issue that people were recognizing in the workplace, which was, we're really pretty distracted. Like, I'm on email all the time, and we're running back and forth, and I have all these projects, and it seems very frenetic in work. This doesn't seem great, right? Like, I'm exhausted all the time, and what am I really doing? And what Deep Work came in and said, that book came in and said, yeah, this is a problem, but what I want to give you is a bigger, better offer. Deep Work is an alternative to shallow work that's dominating your day right now. The bigger, better offer was more compelling. Oh, I see what I could be spending my, this, instead of being on email all day, I could be producing something really hard. Oh, I want to do that. Bigger, better offer won out. In our current world with smartphone distraction, you're constantly looking at this thing to pacify yourself.

• 1:10:21Cal Newport?

  You need a bigger, better offer. That's what we're missing. And we're talking about be worried about TikTok, be worried about Meta Vibes and Sora, be worried about spending all your time yelling at people on X and mindlessly scrolling through auto recommendations on YouTube. What we're missing in that discussion is the bigger, better offer of what you should do next, because you are absolutely right. Without that bigger, better offer, people say, I'll take the devil I know, because it's kind of fun, then the devil I don't, which is staring into the pit of existential despair. That's exactly what was happening in the workplace. People are like, yeah, we do send a lot of emails, but like, what am I supposed to do instead?

• 1:10:56Cal Newport?

  Just like sit here, they needed a bigger, better offer. This is where the deep work enters the picture. I don't think we can deal with the issues of phones and non-professional technology use without giving people a vision of how to make their life so interesting and intentional, autonomous and meaning-producing, that the idea of looking at YouTube shorts all day is nonsensical to them. They're like, why would I do that? I have this other stuff that's so much more important. And so I say this in part to point out a problem in our current discussion about technology and meaning. I say this in part as a way to have empathy. If you're struggling to put down your phone, like you're talking about with your friends, this is not some moral flaw you have. This is not a lack of will or discipline.

• 1:11:38Cal Newport?

  It is probably a really rational calculus on the, on the part of your mind. I'm saying, we don't have anything else to go to. So I'd rather be here, it's, it's, I'd rather be here than staring into the pit, just like late 19th century in the lead up to prohibition. Well, I'd rather be at the bar with like my friends, like something to do than just be, you know, at the old turf house, you know, pioneer house, just depressed, right? You have to have a bigger, better offer. So that's where the deep life comes in. Now, I do have this whole book that's going to be here. So let's like get to some key principles right away. Like what you need to do is you need to fix a contingent vision of your ideal lifestyle. I say contingent, so you don't feel like you have to get this right from day one. Good enough for now.

• 1:12:23Cal Newport?

  What do I want my daily life to actually be like? This has to cover multiple areas on the show we often call these buckets. You can't just focus on your job. You can't just focus on a single hobby. You gotta cover all of the areas of your life and be able to describe in each what you want that part of your life to be like. Two, these descriptions can't be concrete. I want to have this job and live in this town. That's not a lifestyle vision, that's a goals. So describe what you want in each of these different areas in terms of first-person declarative properties. I live in a, a city that's high energy. My job is one in which I can be done with work by five and it's not a big deal, right? Like it's not dominating my time. You're describing the properties of the different areas of your life.

• 1:13:07Cal Newport?

  That's your lifestyle vision, buckets plus properties.

• 1:13:11Cal Newport?

  Now, the whole goal is how do I try to get closer to those visions in each of these buckets, given the particular obstacles I face and the particular opportunities I have? Not gonna start from scratch, but I want to navigate around specific obstacles. Oh, living in this city makes all these things really hard. Well, how do I get out of this city? Oh, God, if I could do this, this, this, and this, we could move and that's gonna make these other things better. Or I am a computer programmer. How could I use that? That's a valuable skill. Where could I go with that in a way that's gonna let me get closer to bucket A, B, and C? And then this becomes the main wheel cyclical process of lifestyle-centered planning. How do I move closer to these visions, these buckets? Repeat, repeat, repeat. And I suggest going bucket by bucket. Let's spend a month just working on the constitution bucket, the bucket about our physical health.

• 1:13:56Cal Newport?

  Let's do some one-time goals and get in place some new practices and feel good about that. Okay, now let's move on to the next bucket. All right, now we're dealing with craft, like my job. Not gonna solve it all now, but I have this lifestyle vision for what I want, these properties I want in my job. I want to spend a month or two making, getting closer to that, finishing some project that builds up a career capital store that might be useful in the future, changing up my practices so that I'm not so distracted and my work has less of a footprint on my life. And you move through each of your buckets and repeat and repeat. And at least once a year on your birthday, go back and make sure those properties are right. That is the rhythm for building a deep life. It's not done with one radical change. It's not something that's gonna happen in two weeks, but it's going to be accretive. Like it's going to get better. As you move closer to that ideal lifestyle vision, you're gonna feel more self-efficacious,

• 1:14:39Cal Newport?

  meaning you feel like you have the ability to actually produce positive change in your life. You're gonna feel more autonomous. And now the distraction merchants are gonna seem more superfluous. And now, suddenly, what used to be your lifeline, your pacifier, is gonna seem sort of trite. It's gonna seem kind of embarrassing. You've got stuff you gotta do. You don't need to be looking at a video of Abraham Lincoln, you know, breakdancing. I got real stuff I gotta do. I'm enmeshed in a real community that I'm taking a leadership role in. I don't care about the fight happening on Twitter about some nonsense, right? This is the type of thing that begins to happen as you begin the cycle of moving closer to your deep life. So I want to end on this question because I think as we enter the new year,

• 1:15:25Cal Newport?

  The week after you hear this episode, think about the deep life as your bigger, better offer for all this other stuff that's occupying your time. And suddenly that challenge of getting away from the sort of Zuckerbergs and Altman's of the world becomes a lot less something that is scary or seeming impossible and something that'll instead begin to seem inevitable. All right, Jesse. That wraps us, right? That's our questions? That's our questions. Let's get, can we get one more sleigh bells? I think Santa's coming. Deliver some coal to Mark Zuckerberg. And thank you for listening. I guess, I guess our next episode will be right before the new year. But we got another episode, I think we're gonna play a classic episode you'll like. And then we got some cool stuff all queued up in the new year.

• 1:16:08Cal Newport?

  So we got a lot coming up in the deep questions world, but we will see you soon. Have a good holidays. Until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that

• 1:16:53Cal Newport?

  afflict our world, you gotta sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.