Ep. 345: Are We Getting Dumber?

Multiple listeners recently sent in a Financial Times article that asks whether humans have passed “peak intelligence.” In this episode, Cal looks closer at the data in this article to try to understand why we seem to be getting dumber, and more importantly, what are the practical steps individuals can take to avoid the trend. He then answers listener questions and ends with a tech corner segment that highlights a blind spot in current discussions of AI. Find out more about Done Daily at DoneDaily.com! 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 Deep Dive: Are We Getting Dumber? [2:58] - Is it possible to build a better Twitter? [24:58] - Should I ditch my higher paying job to avoid stress? [29:59] - Can I remain relevant with younger, tech-savvy colleagues? [34:56] - How should I navigate my time during while receiving severance? [38:35] - What should I do next after being fired from my federal job? [41:18] - CALL: Practicing focus on the weekends [45:01] CASE STUDY: An engineering Kansan system [48:41] TECH CORNER: The AI Blind Spot [1:00:04] Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba? on.ft.com/3DIItJK Thanks to our Sponsors: factormeals.com/deep50off landroverusa.com expressvpn.com/deep grammarly.com/podcast Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the slow productivity 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.

• 0:11Cal Newport?

  I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questioned, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world.

• 0:23Cal Newport?

  So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Right before we started the microphones, we were talking about one of the two websites that I run. So I have calnewport.com, which is the website for both my writing and academic career. So it's sort of the website for me as a person. But then the, I guess we don't use the word multimedia anymore, but like video and newsletter and podcast has its own home, the deeplife.com. We put that up. When was that, Jesse? Like during the pandemic?

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, two years ago.

• 0:59Cal Newport?

  Okay, so we had that designed and put up, but now we're thinking it's time to revisit and update. So we're thinking about ideas for how we can make that site more useful. Jesse, you had a good idea.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we should have a page there that has monthly articles, books, suggestions like that, some good resources to check out.

• 1:20Cal Newport?

  Should this be things we talk about on the show or just in general?

• 1:24Speaker 01

  Things we talk about on the show. It could also be things that the audience would be interested in reading.

• 1:28Cal Newport?

  Okay, what should we, I don't know what we'd call something like that. Deep something. You always go deep in.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  Deep library.

• 1:35Cal Newport?

  Deep library. Go deep in the deep libraries and deep books. All right. So I like that idea. That plus like an AI tool that will read any article in my French accent.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:45Cal Newport?

  I think those two things plus a whole subdomain dedicated to Jesse Skeleton, which I think is broken, by the way.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  The Skeleton?

• 1:54Cal Newport?

  Yeah. I think it was broken in this year's Halloween.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  It had a good life.

• 1:59Cal Newport?

  We'll have to get another one.

• 2:02Cal Newport?

  The bad, good news is we'll get another one. Bad news is that skeleton cost $1,800. So this is a, you know, we, everything's more expensive in the, the world of show, show business, the business of show, as we like to call this. All right. So anyways, we're thinking about it. We want to kind of refresh and update that site as what we've been doing has been growing. So as always, your thoughts are appreciated too. You can send them to [email protected]. But Jesse, we've got a good show today. I'm going to react to an article that a bunch of people sent us, right?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:28Cal Newport?

  Yeah. I always like when more than one person sends us the same article. I think there must be something here that the audience likes. We got some good questions and then got a tech corner coming up and continuing our stream of AI conversations. I have a hot take, Jesse, a hot take on a, what I'm calling a potential blind spot in our current discussions of AI. So you'll get a sort of interesting idea to pepper into your conversations when we get to that final segment. So I guess we should get started with our deep dive. So several people recently sent me the same article. It was from the Financial Times. It was written by John Bern Murdoch and it had a provocative headline, "Have Humans Past Peak Brain Power?" So I'm going to take a closer look at this claim. I have two goals in mind.

• 3:13Cal Newport?

  First, I want to develop a better understanding of why the data seems to show that we are getting dumber. But two, I want to use that understanding, it's my second goal, use that understanding to help find practical ways that you as an individual can push back on that trend and not only not get dumber, but make sure that you continue to get smarter. So this article that I was just citing was inspired by some recent analysis that was released by the Organization for Economic Cooperation Development. They do this regular test called the PISA, which benchmarks teenagers around the world and their knowledge of math, reading and science. So we have sort of trends over time. It's a useful test to kind of understand what's going on. So they looked at, there's a recent analysis of this.

• 3:57Cal Newport?

  The article looked at that recent analysis, plus some other tests that have been given worldwide recently. And the, the author of the article made the following conclusion, and I'm quoting here, "Across a range of tests, the average person's ability to reason and solve novel problems appears to have peaked in the early 2010s and have been declining ever since." So I have a graph to show here. Jesse, bring up this graph for those who are watching instead of just listening. So here's one of the key graphs that indicates this point. It shows performance in reasoning and problem solving tests over time. On the left-hand graph, what you see is a line for science, reading, and maths.

• 4:36Cal Newport?

  And you can attest, Jesse, that right around 2012, all those lines go downward. That's from the PISA test. We have a test from an adult on the right. Literacy takes a big spill right around 2012 and goes down dramatically ever since. Alright, so we can bring that graph down. So that indicates the thesis of the article that, hey, starting in the early 2010s, at least according to the test, we're doing worse. Worse us being humans. So why, why are we doing worse? Well, the article points to an obvious culprit based just on the forensic evidence of the timing. These trends seem to occur right around that 2012 to 2014 period is where we see these downward shifts.

• 5:21Cal Newport?

  That date should sound familiar. There have been other things that worry us that got more prominently worrisome starting around that time. For example, teenage mental health deterioration is another one. What happened around that 2012 period? Smartphones became ubiquitous. This is when we got worldwide ubiquity of smartphones became a reality. So the article points out correctly, we seem to be seeing a negative turn on these tests of various reasoning and intelligence abilities around the time smartphones come, and it's been getting worse ever since. But I don't think it's useful to just leave it there. So if we just say, yes, smartphones seem to have led to us getting dumber. It's unclear how we should respond. We're probably not going to get rid of phones.

• 6:06Cal Newport?

  Most people need various aspects of the phone and app ecosystem to operate. So it sort of leaves us without much to do, except for to shrug our shoulders and say, well, I guess phones may as dumber, but what are we going to do? It's sort of like cars came along and traffic deaths, you know, got higher. Here's a source of 20,000 new deaths a year that didn't exist before cars. But, you know, we kind of need cars. And it was like, this is just something we're going to have to live with. It feels that way sometimes when we're dealing with these cognitive impacts of smartphones. But I think we can do better and I want to do better today. So I'm going to look closer and I'm going to try to develop a hypothesis that explains at least partially specifically why, what mechanisms of smartphones are making us perform worse on these tests, making us dumber.

• 6:47Cal Newport?

  Because if we know more specifically, what about these things is making us dumber? Then maybe we have a chance of reversing that, even without having to get rid of our phones. So to look closer, what I'm going to do is pull up another graph. Jesse, bring this up on the screen here. Here's another graph from this article that gets at what specifically is changing in the smartphone era. So we see here on the left, a graph over time, measuring percentage of respondents that are saying they have difficulty thinking or concentrating. This comes from another survey called Monitoring the Future, which John Bern Murdoch sort of pulled up. What you notice here is it's relatively stable, difficulty thinking or concentrating, until that same inflection point of around 2012, and then it shoots up.

• 7:32Cal Newport?

  And we see a aggressive upward trend. On the right, we have another graph, percentage of people saying they have trouble learning new things. It's relatively flat, starting in 1990. Again, right around 2012, shoots up, same time that difficulty thinking or concentrating shoots up. So of course, right at the smartphone inflection point, we see mechanistically that people suddenly reported at much higher rates, having difficulty thinking or concentrating, and having trouble learning new things. All right, we can bring this down, Jesse. That is where I think we're seeing the effect of smartphones. And if we look at a little bit closer, why is smartphones now causing us to have difficulty thinking or concentrating or trouble learning new things? Keep zooming in.

• 8:16Cal Newport?

  I believe we can identify what I think of as a cognitive death spiral here. And here's how I think this works. So you now have a smartphone. The phone itself is not the problem, of course. It's the ecosystem of attention economy that arose around the smartphone. Pre-smartphone, if you were building a sort of information platform, your Facebook pre-smartphone, you were building a product that was trying to be maximally useful to users. I want to make Facebook so useful that people will think to log in and want to be a member of it. So like, all your friends are on here. That's a marker of this being useful. You can find out what your friends are up to. That is a really useful thing. Post-smartphone, we had a shift towards an attention paradigm where the idea now is not being useful, but capturing as much attention as possible.

• 9:01Cal Newport?

  They realized users were, you wanted a large user count if you were trying to raise money. But once you had a company running, you wanted to monetize those users. And that's a different game. And this is when the goal of platforms changed to not being as useful as possible, but being as addictive as possible. So we get ubiquitous smartphone use pick up around this time. Why does that cause a cognitive death spiral? Well, think about what happens. You have this rhythm in your life of constantly being distracted because the apps on your phone are designed to grab your attention. It has faster, more desirable stimuli than other things in your life. So now you're rewiring these circuits in your brain so that the reward circuits are very much tuned towards if a phone is nearby, let's focus on that.

• 9:46Cal Newport?

  Let's have our dopamine cascade focus on the action of looking at that phone because that we have learned, these circuits have ingrained, that's going to give us a quicker hit to whatever else we are doing. And because the phone is ubiquitous, we constantly have those reward circuits firing because the phone is always there. The reward is always there. Look, if you put a donut in front of me, I'm going to build up a reward. You know, every day at four, you put out donuts at the office. I will build up a reward circuit where like, I'm really looking forward to that donut. If you now follow me everywhere I go with a cart of donuts, there's going to be a problem. Right? So that's what started happening with the phone. So now our mind gets rewired to craving this more faster pace of stimuli.

• 10:26Cal Newport?

  That can directly impact our ability to concentrate because that's distracting us. We're trying to take a P as a test, we're going to do worse on it. It's harder to sort of apply our existing intelligence. But the reason why I think it creates a cognitive death spiral is that it also means we spend less time on the type of activities that could make us smarter. With two things going on at the same time is our mind gets rewired for faster stimuli. We have a harder time applying our existing intelligence, but we also have a harder time engaging in activities that would make us smarter. Now, this is also captured in this article. Jesse, bring up one more chart here. What we have on the screen here is a chart showing the decline of reading.

• 11:10Cal Newport?

  There's two plots on here. So this is a percentage of US teenagers who read in their leisure time. One of these plots on here shows who says they hardly ever read, and the other plot shows who reads almost every day. So we see the almost every day, it's like moving mildly down through the 80s and 90s. Right around 2012, that goes down real sharply, and the people reporting that they hardly ever read goes up real sharply. All right, so we can bring that graph down. So what's this saying? This is an example of an activity. Reading is an example of an activity that makes you smarter. The brain circuits involved in reading makes you smarter. You can better understand other people, you can better sustain your attention on abstract

• 11:55Cal Newport?

  targets, you can better manipulate information and build and construct worlds in your mind. Reading is calisthenics for your mind. It is just straight up exercise for your mind. That's why it's been at the core of sort of every academic curriculum since the invention of the codex. So it's one among other activities that we do less of because it requires sustained attention, and when we rewire our mind for faster stimuli, we're less likely to actually, as we see in that graph, we're less likely to actually spend time doing that. So we get this double whammy. We have a hard time applying whatever intelligence we have, and we slow down or completely stop the increase of our intelligence that should be happening over time as we do activities would naturally get us there. The result, we're dumber. And we see it. Our performance on those tests plummet.

• 12:37Cal Newport?

  We're not getting smarter, and we're having a harder time applying the intelligence we have.

• 12:43Cal Newport?

  Okay, so really now what we're talking about, our issue is not with smartphones so much as it is with the specific effect of having our brain rewired for faster stimuli and because of this spending less time with activities that foster intelligence. So if we're looking for a response here, we can actually come up with actions that don't involve us having to go back in time. Now, before I talk about what that could particularly be, here's the analogy that came to my mind from 60 years ago, right? We had this issue 60, 70 years ago where in the US, for example, the economy shifted from being primarily industrial agricultural to having this very strong sort of office-centric knowledge work sector.

• 13:26Cal Newport?

  And we noticed in the 1950s and in particular the 1960s, this issue of we are having health problems at a higher rate than they existed before because before you were probably working on a farm and you were exercising all day long. You were on your feet, you were moving, you were lifting things, it's very physical. And now suddenly you're sedentary because you're in an office, you're not getting that exercise. This caught us off guard. Like, "Oh, that was important and we're not getting that anymore." You know, in the era before bypass surgery, people would just drop dead in their 60s. That's just how it worked. You just have a heart attack and die in your 60s. Like, "Whoa, what's going on here?" How do we respond to that? Well, we didn't say, "We need to shut down the offices and go back to the farms."

• 14:09Cal Newport?

  We said, "What was the thing we're missing now from the farms now that we have this new knowledge sector? Oh, it's the exercise. Okay, I guess people need to exercise." You didn't have to think about that before. In 1920, you didn't have to think about exercising, you just got it. But in 1975, "I gotta go jogging. You know, I gotta move some weights around because that is out of my life now and it is actually pretty important." That is a good analogy for thinking about this smartphone-induced dumbness issue. We don't necessarily have to go back to a pre-2012 technology era, but we do now have to think explicitly about increasing our intelligence and maintaining our ability to hold attention in a way that we didn't have to in 2009. We just did this naturally. Now we have to think about it.

• 14:53Cal Newport?

  That's the mindset shift. We have to exercise our minds in the same way we learned we have to exercise our bodies. So what might that mean? Well, we talk about this a lot on the show, but just to give you four ideas, you know, that get your mind going about how one might have a cognitive exercise routine and the pushback on this dumbness trend. You could, one, force yourself to read. Reading is pull-ups and push-ups for your brain. Read, every week, read a book. Start with things you love, easy to read, you're excited to read, but force yourself to sit there and read. The best way to do this is to be outside of arm's reach of a phone. In fact, be in a completely different room from a phone. Even better, go for a walk and read on a bench without your phone so that you don't

• 15:38Cal Newport?

  have to fight against a reward circuit that sees the phone and says, "It is right there. We could pick that up." Dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. So make your life easier. But reading is calisthenics for your brain. More generally, in the constant companion model of your phone, when you're at home, plug it in in the kitchen. Go there if you need to look something up. Go there if you need to check your text messages. Go there if you need to make a call, but don't have it with you when you're doing other things. Again, you want to sort of break out of this pattern of, "I can at any moment get faster stimuli." You certainly want to avoid, and I just learned this term, I don't know if you know this term, Jesse, but I just learned this term, stimuli stacking.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  I don't, no.

• 16:15Cal Newport?

  I heard this from a younger person. Shout out to Nate. Stimuli stacking is where you're consuming multiple streams of stimulus at the same time. So you're watching something while checking something on your phone, and maybe you even have like a different device on which you're like following something else. And supposedly, some of the streamers like Netflix are actually redesigning their shows to be more compatible with stimuli stacking. So if it requires you to have to, if I missed what was said here, I don't know what's going on, that's a bad show because you can't actually look at your phone at the same time and watch that show. So don't stimuli stack. We want your mind to be used to like doing one thing for a long piece of time. Reflection walks is another great one. Go for a walk with a particular problem you want to solve. It could be just a problem in your life.

• 16:59Cal Newport?

  I want to work this through, and your mind is going to be everywhere. It's going to be squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, but you keep pulling it back. Be in the sunshine, be in the woods, get used to just being alone with your own thoughts and manipulating your thoughts. You will get better at this. This also pushes back on the negative trends that smartphones are inducing and have hobbies that require concentration.

• 17:20Cal Newport?

  Playing the guitar requires a lot of concentration to get better. Woodworking requires a lot of concentration, you know, to get better. A particular sport requires a lot of work and focus to actually get better at it. So have, you know, things that require staying concentration and give you obvious rewards as you get better. So notable rewards, so you feel that appreciation. All right. So anyways, I thought that was a cool article. That's what I think is going on. It's not just the phone itself makes us dumber. It's particularly the way that it's rewired our brain, which creates that death spiral. If we have a harder time applying our intelligence and we don't increase it, so we just push back. Look, man, when you're in the office building Mad Men in the 1960s, you gotta start exercising. You didn't have to exercise when you're on the farm in the 1940s.

• 18:05Cal Newport?

  You gotta exercise now in the office building in the 1960s. Well, same thing. When I was in college in the early 2000s, I didn't have to worry about how do I keep my brain sharp? How do I keep getting smarter? Because we were just doing this all the time. We had to read books and we didn't have like constant distractions and we were often bored and walking long distances in the interminable snow of Hanover, New Hampshire, going through the snow, like trying to find our car, but we couldn't because it was buried in snow and there was nothing in our ear and there was nothing to look at. You would just have to think, you were just thinking thoughts and mainly just, I'm cold. And why didn't I go to school at Pepperdine? But you were thinking and then you would go and you'd trudge through this to a library and you're just stuck there with your book and you would sit there and have to like read your books for a while.

• 18:49Cal Newport?

  We didn't have to think about it. We were like the farmers in the 40s. Now 2025, you gotta exercise. You gotta like force yourself to read books. You gotta go for reflection walks. So cool article, scary trend, but at least on the individual level, I think it's reversible.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  When you read articles on a desktop or like a laptop, do you, what do you do if you get distracted? Just put stuff in the working memory?

• 19:13Cal Newport?

  So you put like, what are you talking about? Like if a thought comes up that's unrelated to the article?

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:18Cal Newport?

  That's trying to distract me.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  So you're not on your phone, but you're on a laptop or a desktop?

• 19:23Cal Newport?

  I guess I would put it in working memory. I don't know. I'm pretty used to now when I'm doing something, I lock in on that thing. And then when I'm done, like now, what do I want to think about?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  But do you ever just read articles on a desktop or laptop?

• 19:34Cal Newport?

  Yeah, sometimes. At least I'm trying to think, it's a good question. Like this morning, I read articles from both the New York Times and the New Yorker. And in both cases, I use the app.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  On what type of device?

• 19:45Cal Newport?

  On my phone.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  On your phone?

• 19:47Cal Newport?

  Yeah. I'll also read articles on the browser and I'll print articles. It's like another thing I like to do, but I'm not very distracted by the web. You know, like I don't really have places to go to distract me.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:59Cal Newport?

  Like maybe MLB trade rumors, but that's only relevant for like a three month period each year. So it's easier for me to just read an article and then I'm done reading that article.

• 20:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:08Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Well, anyways, we got a bunch of good questions coming up, but first let's hear briefly from some sponsors. Talk about a relatively new sponsor of ours that I really enjoy called Factor. Factor offers chef made gourmet meals that make eating well easy. Jesse, let me ask you this. Let's say you're at home. It's like a weekend. You're not at work. Lunchtime. What are you doing? How like, what's going to be a typical lunch for you?

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Well, I actually only eat dinner.

• 20:38Cal Newport?

  That's right. Yeah. Jesse eats like one meal a week and he has to be deadlifting while he does it. All right, dinner. Now, what are you going to do? Where would you typically find the dinner?

• 20:47Speaker 01

  I usually, depending on, say I'm at home, I would make eggs with cut up onions and vegetables and stuff like that.

• 20:56Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So, okay, you would be a perfect example where Factor would be really useful. I've really been enjoying these. They're really healthy, tasty meals. They're refrigerated. You microwave them. It's like two minutes. I've been eating them all week. Two minutes and you have chicken and broccoli and cheese sauce. Or I had this thing that was some sort of like spiced ground meat with some sort of sauce or whatever. It's just like two minutes. You have it. It's like, it's healthy. It's good portions or whatever. It's a way of having like a variety of food and you can make it. The ease with which you make it's what really surprised me. I'm used to some of these microwave products where it's like, yeah, all you gotta do is just like microwave for like 20 minutes.

• 21:39Cal Newport?

  And then you need to make like 17 incisions, then microwave for just seven minutes. But every 30 seconds, you have to rotate it 45 degrees until you've gone past an obtuse angle, at which point you want to turn it upside down. And then once the vernal equinox comes, you give it another five minutes and then you just put it in the oven and cook it for a half hour. I was so surprised with factors like, no, you just. Put a couple of splits, you microwave it, mix some stuff up, tastes good. So Factor arrives fresh and fully prepared at your house. I've been seeing Factor vans around here, by the way.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've seen them too.

• 22:08Cal Newport?

  Yeah, so I guess they're coming from their own vans. You can lose up to eight pounds in eight weeks, for example, with Factor Keto meals, based on a randomized controlled trial with Factor Keto. The results will vary depending on diet and exercise. More generally, though, there's 40 different options across eight dietary preferences on the menu each week, so you can really pick what's tailored to your goals. I worry about calories, I want more protein, I'm doing keto. So not only do you get healthy meals, but you can choose exactly what you're looking for in your meals. Shows up, put in the fridge, throw it in the microwave when it's time to eat. They also have these wholesome smoothies, breakfast, grab and go snacks, and more add-ons. So an easy way to really take control of your nutrition, make the eating kind of automatic, and make it healthy.

• 22:52Cal Newport?

  So eat smart with Factor. Get started at factormeals.com/deep50off and use the code DEEP50OFF. So the word deep, the number 50, the word off, to get 50% off your first box plus pre-shipping. That's code DEEP50OFF at factormeals.com/deep50off to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box. I just want to talk about our longtime friends and longtime sponsor at Grammarly. Jesse, I'm going to put you on the spot again. What percentage of the work week do you think the average professional spends doing written communication? Forty. It is 50%. That's pretty good, though. You're pretty close.

• 23:36Cal Newport?

  So Grammarly helps you with this thing that you're spending half your week already doing, which is writing. With Grammarly as your AI writing partner, you can stay focused and get through your work faster with relevant real-time suggestions wherever you write. And you can download Grammarly for free at grammarly.com/podcast. I'm going to talk about this more in the final segment of the show, but this is where I think AI is really going to make its move early on. Is form fit to specific uses? And this is what Grammarly is doing. In the tools you already do to do this writing that takes up 50% of your time, it is right there to help make that writing faster. Whether you're brainstorming, whether you want to rewrite something, whether you want to check the tone of what you are doing, what context where suggestions of like what you're going to write.

• 24:21Cal Newport?

  Grammarly is there for you to make your writing better and to get that good writing faster. 90% of professionals say Grammarly has saved them time writing and editing their work. Four out of five professionals say Grammarly helps them gain buy-in and action through their communication. Your data is secure and never sold with Grammarly. It's been doing this for 15 years. Grammarly is like the gold standard of responsible AI in this space. So get more done with Grammarly. Download Grammarly for free at grammarly.com/podcast. That's grammarly.com/podcast. All right, Jesse, do some questions.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  First question is from Grant. Decentralized platforms such as Mastodon, Pixelfed and Blue Sky have been slowly gaining momentum. Is this a good idea or should we move from these types of platforms altogether?

• 25:12Cal Newport?

  Well, I know two of those platforms. I know Mastodon, new Blue Sky. Have you heard of Pixelfed?

• 25:17Speaker 01

  No.

• 25:18Cal Newport?

  Well, then I'm typing it in here just so we know what we're talking about. All right, pixelfed.com.

• 25:26Cal Newport?

  And I typed in pixelged. That, if you're wondering, that URL is available. All right, so pixelfed.com, I don't know about this. All right, this also decentralized photo sharing and social media powered by Pixelfed. All right, so I think Mastodon and Pixelfed are Twitter, Instagram-style social media platforms that really show their decentralization. So like individuals can start up their own servers and then different servers talk to each other. Blue Sky is, I think this was started by Jack Dorsey. It's a little bit more polished, so the experience is much more directly like using Twitter, but there's some technological changes underneath the hood. So the question I think Grant is asking is like, okay, so is like this what we need to do?

• 26:11Cal Newport?

  Keep working on like if Twitter slash X has all these problems, we need to keep working to get a version of that that's better? Or do we not need a platform like that at all? I tend to be in the camp of we don't need a platform like that at all. I wrote an article about this a couple of years ago, back when Meta announced Threads, which was their Instagram slash Twitter clone. I wrote a New Yorker essay that was titled, "We Don't Need A New Twitter." And my argument is the issues with these platforms is not just the specific rules by which they're run, which is what a lot of the fight is right now. So Elon Musk takes over Twitter, renames it X, changes the content moderation,

• 26:53Cal Newport?

  and suddenly you get much more of this type of content and less of that type of content. Blue Sky, people move to Blue Sky and say, "We're going to moderate differently. We'll be more hostile towards right-leaning ideas, but very embracing of left-leaning ideas." Twitter kind of went the other way. "We're going to be much more embracing of right, even far-right ideas, and more hostile towards left-leaning ideas." So it's all about, what are we doing on these platforms? My argument is that's not really the issue. I mean, it's an issue, but the bigger issue is the whole idea of a global conversation platform. This whole notion that we should have hundreds of millions of people trying to interact on the same platform,

• 27:30Cal Newport?

  that notion is broken. Like, that is, my argument is that is just guaranteed to lead to destabilization and rancor. Because if you have hundreds of millions of people that are trying to communicate, and yet we need some sort of notion of a common zeitgeist, like a small number of conversations that are being surfaced from this scrum that most people are going to encounter. This is the selling proposition of the global platforms. As you create this of-the-moment internet zeitgeist you can put your finger on, it's going to require aggressive, aggressive curation, because you have hundreds of millions of messages from which you want to pull these common threads, a very small number of messages. And once you have heavy curation like that, you are going to lead towards all sorts of problems. You're going to lead to behaviors at far extremes. It's not going to be a pretty place.

• 28:15Cal Newport?

  It's not going to serve most people's needs. So I have the point of view of global conversation platforms as a bad use of the internet. I think a better use of the internet is... More niche conversations, bringing together people from all around the world into smaller communities where they can talk about shared interest and create a shared sense of community. These are our community standards based on our real community, not 300 million people on the same platform and we have to have like a group of people in Palo Alto somewhere who say, here is our community standards. Like, no, this is 100 people who like this baseball team and we like to get together and talk about it on this platform and we can come up with our own standards for how we talk about this because we're really a community. Or here's a group of people that like, we like to get together to talk about

• 28:58Cal Newport?

  like this type of movie or something like that. We can create our own community standards for that because it's a, it's a real community. We know each other, we care about what's going on, we like each other, we're trying to share information. That is the use of the internet. So I've been a long, long been arguing that these global platforms, the idea that we need everyone using a small number of platforms only really serves investors in the really large platforms. It's a way to try to concentrate a huge amount of monetization into a small number of people's pockets, but it doesn't create a better experience for the users. So my argument is niche communities are better. And once you have niche communities, I don't think the chronological timeline of like a Twitter, this or that is necessarily best. You want more of like a, maybe like a forum metaphor, discussion metaphor, a

• 29:40Cal Newport?

  chat metaphor, or a live Discord style metaphor, whatever one you want to use. It's not necessarily just a sort of algorithmically curated or chronological timeline. So no, I don't think we need to fix Twitter with a different Twitter. I think we need to move past this era where we thought that Twitter was a good idea. All right, what do we got next?

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Next question's from Kevin. "I took a job that pays more than double my previous gig. There's a lot more pressure and I'm stressed out. My wife works and we don't spend lavishly. There is a job back at my old company for my initial pay. How should I apply lifestyle centric planning to my situation if I've only been at my new role for six months?"

• 30:18Cal Newport?

  Well, it just sounds like an example of lifestyle centric planning not being applied, and now you have a little buyer's remorse. So I talk about this in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, from 2012, as one of the so-called control traps. So I said, look, one of the traps that arises around taking control of your life and aiming it towards the things that resonate and away from the things that don't is that it's just as you're building up the skills that could give you that leverage, that you will be tempted with, forget taking control, come get more money, come get more prestige. So it's like exactly when you're good enough to start dictating what your work in life is like,

• 31:02Cal Newport?

  that someone comes and says, no, no, no, this is the prestigious job, double your salary, come on, scoreboard, you're gonna put points on the scoreboard. It's precisely when people care enough about what you can do to try to lock you into things that are going to have obvious indicators of prestige, like title and income, but that lock you in and prevent you from taking more control over your life. So you have to be careful. It's probably what happened here. It's like, this is impressive. This job is double the money. It's a hard job to get, and I think I might be able to get it. I'm winning the game here. I'm proud of myself. But then the problem is you have that job, and you have to confront the reality of, well, how does this actually fit into my ideal lifestyle plan? And Kevin, it sounds like here it doesn't, right? It's taking up a lot of your time, it's stressing you out,

• 31:43Cal Newport?

  you're bothered by that stress. You don't like the lifestyle that it's leading to. So in general, you know, the way you avoid this, and then we'll talk about what you can do now. But the way you avoid this is you're always working back from the ideal lifestyle. What is my day like, an ideal day like? What type of place do I live? What's the schedule like? What am I doing? What type of places am I around? Who am I around? What's going on? How do I feel? What do I see, smell and touch? Right? Like you have this really clear picture, like what your ideal lifestyle is like. And then all you're thinking about is how do I move closer to that with the decisions I make? If you have a really clear image of that, it then might be the case, when you look at a promotion that's going to give you a lot of money, or a job that's going to give you a lot of money. But if

• 32:24Cal Newport?

  that job breaks many aspects of your vision, you're like, of course, I'm not going to do that. But if you don't have that vision in place, you're like, well, the only scoreboard I have is like title and income, so I want to keep putting up points. So that's what I'm going to do. Now that you're already in this position, that's okay. Let's do our lifestyle centric planning now. Why are you stressed? What is it that you're missing? What is it that you're looking for in the ideal life? Don't fixate on the solution, fixate on where you want to be. It's easy. What happens is when people are unhappy with a situation is that they want to fixate on a specific solution. So like, maybe right now, you want to fixate on like, going back to your old job or something, but don't get stuck yet in the solution. Just focus on the image of the ideal.

• 33:05Cal Newport?

  Then you can do an evidence-based analysis of how to get around obstacles and what opportunities you have available. And there might be paths there that you're not thinking about right now. It might be, oh, maybe at my current new job, I do this smaller pivot, and that actually sets me up to get to these things, this ideal lifestyle in a different way. Or maybe the solution is, yeah, I gotta go back. I'm gonna go back to this other position. But don't fixate on this. People like the grand gesture. Don't worry about that yet. Worry about what it is you want in your life. And be sober-minded and careful about figuring out, what are the obstacles to that? What are the opportunities to get there? I mean, maybe in this new job, it's possible. Like, this money is going to allow you to do certain things that you couldn't do before. It's gonna unlock all sorts of cool things in your lifestyle,

• 33:48Cal Newport?

  but the problem is the time. But maybe you can get on top of the time by, like, using some Cal Newport techniques, and actually, I can really reduce the footprint of this job and still use the money. Like, you don't know what the right answer is going to be until you know what you're trying to get to first. So focused on the goal, not the fixes. And this comes up a lot, Jesse. Like, people's reaction to a difficult situation is to focus on, like, a particular move. Not, what's wrong? Where do I want to get? What's five options to get there?

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:20Cal Newport?

  They just want to have, I guess it feels good in the moment. I'm gonna do something radical. I'm gonna quit. I'm gonna move to this country, or whatever it is, right? You just, you get some, some big idea, and the radicalness of the idea gives you some sugar. But you're not actually thinking through, what are the five different things I could do here? And let me sober-mindedly look at them. And actually, in the end, this is not as exciting, but this path here, this one-year plan, is gonna end up in a much better place. It's, it's not people's instincts to work backwards from ideal lifestyle and be systematic and exploring different ways forward.

• 34:54Cal Newport?

  All right, who do we got next?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Next question is from Ravi. I'm a 40-year-old software engineer. My younger colleagues are technically sharper and bring more value to my manager. This makes me dispensable. What's my path towards relevancy?

• 35:08Cal Newport?

  Well, I think you have two options, Ravi. One, you have to keep in mind, young people have more relevant skills because the thing they learned when they were learning this field, because they're younger, is much more recent. So they're getting into the technology field. They're putting in that initial push to learn skills. They're learning whatever skill is relevant right now. And if they just learned the skill a couple of years ago, it's going to be new and it's going to be relevant. But this doesn't mean that you can't get back ahead of them again. So yeah, they're coming in with relevant skills. But if you're pretty systematic about, I'm going to put aside regular time, the master what's new now, you can get yourself back into that conversation, right? So it's not that the younger people are much smarter.

• 35:53Cal Newport?

  It's not that the younger people can learn skills much faster than you either. They're just starting with the latest skill. But once you've also learned the latest skill, you're kind of have parity now. Like, once they're working for this company, they're not necessarily picking up the next thing that's going to come any faster than you can, if you systematically put aside time to do it. In fact, you probably have an advantage. If you're older, you say you're 40, you're probably less stimuli addicted than they are. Look back at our deep dive from the beginning of this episode. You probably have less of a problem with sustained concentration than they have. You probably have less of a problem doing the type of activities that's going to make them smarter, right? Your brain is calmer. Your brain has been less drenched in high stimuli dopamine.

• 36:37Cal Newport?

  So if you are continually, slowly and steadily keeping, what's the new thing this year? Let me learn it. Okay, what's the new thing the next year? Let me learn that. You are going to be ahead of, I think you'll get back ahead of the people who have joined more recently, right? And you can keep your relevancy aside. So I always think, you know, young people have more time, they have more energy, but they are more distracted. The other advantage you have is because you're older, more sober minded, you're probably better at mature decision making, communication, personability. So you could also pivot, which is like the common move towards more of a managerial role, right? Where it's hard for a phone addicted 23 year old is not going to be able to manage other people, they had just trouble interacting with them and just making mature decisions

• 37:22Cal Newport?

  and impulsivity. You're 40, you can do that in a way a young person can't. So you can also pivot towards a role that actually rewards your age in that way as well. So use your ability and hone your ability to focus the fact that you're not young and on TikTok all the time to either be systematically learning stuff faster than the new people or use your older, more sober brain to pivot to a role that the, the, the young people can't do as well. I mean, I've heard Scott Galloway talk about this, it's sort of a problem with the tech industry is he said, sort of one of the big models in the tech industry is bring in people who are young and they might be only 70% as good as the people who've been there for a while, but they're half the salary.

• 38:05Cal Newport?

  So keep hiring young people. You don't have to pay them nearly as much as the older people. They're not as good, but they have high energy and it keeps the expenses low. So that, that's sort of the headwinds you're pushing back against here. But I think by systematically and deliberately learning new skills, you can actually be more nimble than younger people and then move into the positions where the young people just can't take them. The position where I can't hire the 23 year old out of Stanford, can't take that position. They just are unable to deal with adults yet. So I think those are your two options. All right. Who do we have next?

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Next question is from Sala. My grand goal is to own a production company that writes and creates animations. I currently am a producer that works on podcasts and TV shows. However, we've been informed that our last deal will end this August and we'll get a year of severance. I currently work about three days a week and dabble in some freelance. Should I spend this time trying to look for another job or hone in on trying to make my long-term goal a reality?

• 38:59Cal Newport?

  I mean, a couple of points here. First, I would, I would temper or complement goal-based thinking with lifestyle centric based thinking. So don't get completely fixated on this specific goal. Like, I need to be running this type of company. It might not be possible, or it's possible, but it's actually not going to make your life as good as you think. So work backwards from lifestyle. And this will, you can see how this particular idea fits into your ideal lifestyle, but it will also unlock other paths towards your ideal lifestyle that you might not be thinking about right now because they're less definitive or less sexy. So I'd say that, number one. Number two, I think it's good, right? You're starting from a place of expertise. You're working in podcasts and TV show production. So it's not like this is a pie in the sky dream.

• 39:44Cal Newport?

  You're not an insurance actuarial analyst who's like, I want to have an animation company. Like, so you know this world, you know what's realistic. I think that's really useful. I would still use the advice from my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You, to use money as a neutral indicator of value. You need to actually see people paying for what you're offering as indication that what you're offering has value to the market. So if you want to start an animation production studio, like you need to be producing animation that like, okay, I actually sold this project or that, and maybe it's on the side at first, but now it's making this much money, that I would be okay if I switched to this full time. Like, don't just hope or guess it's going to succeed.

• 40:27Cal Newport?

  Wait to see that people are giving you their money, not just giving you their encouragement, but giving you their money as an indicator that your project is valuable. So if you could do this quickly, like you have a year's severance, so if you can do this in the next six months, yeah, go all in on it and see if it works. If this is going to be a longer endeavor, it might take a few years to really like, get something, make it enough money to see if it's viable or not, then you should be looking for another job at the same time. That's my advice. Introduce lifestyle centric planning, not just goal-based planning, to make sure that you see the full scope of both your opportunities and options, but also like, make sure that whatever you're doing is aimed in the right direction. And then two, use money as a neutral indicator of value. Right? If you're making money off of this, you can spend more time doing it. If you're not, then maybe it's not going to work.

• 41:12Cal Newport?

  It's a really good test of viability. All right. We got another, we got one last job question here, right?

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Yep. We got Sam. I just got fired from my federal job as I was in a probationary period. How do I recover from this setback? I was partway through a quasi-development program and I had some great career capital opportunities lined up. I'm worried that without finishing the program, I won't be competitive for another job in this niche. And all my skills so far, and, and all my skills so far are specialized to this field.

• 41:42Cal Newport?

  Well, I mean, look, first of all, empathy is due. Like, I can see you're, you're struggling with what happened and rightly so. It sucks that you have a job and you lose it. And in particular, if it was a new job and you liked where it was taking you. You had this plan, it was a good plan, and it got taken away. Like, there's something traumatic in that. And that comes through, I think, in your question, so I think there's empathy here. There's nothing good about this situation. So we need to regroup and we need to reattack. And so we need to be wary of emotional attachment to narratives that are no longer possible. So there's a particular narrative here about a particular development program that you're a part of, and you, you saw where that was going to lead you. That may be off the table now. It was, it was only available to government employees.

• 42:27Cal Newport?

  You're not going to be able to get that government job back anytime soon. So we have to pivot here. And the right way to pivot is A, to do a inventory of your career capital. Like, well, what are my skills? What are my rare and valuable skills? And try to find where else are those going to be valued? So I want to try to find another job.

• 42:49Cal Newport?

  You might also think, look, I might have to spend a couple of years doing something else just because I have to put food on the table. And I got to regroup in that new position, build skills, and think about my next move to get back on the track I was on before, or another path towards whatever ideal lifestyle I have in place. So it might be a regroup and reattack. The regroup might take a couple of years. I got to find the job. Maybe I have to move, I got to put my capital to work, maybe I have to take a lower position and work my up real quick. I have to get back on my feet before I can make my really highly strategic plan. I think this is hard for a lot of people. If you've done a lot of work to set yourself up for a strategic move and then that gets taken away from you, you want to just jump right into another equally strategic move. But sometimes you have to go regroup, especially if like the job loss is unexpected.

• 43:34Cal Newport?

  I gotta just go find something that's going to take advantage of my career capital. Let me build up capital quick. Let me regroup, catch my breath, keep my bank account from emptying. And they'd be like, okay, now let me try again. And that, I think that's going to be the case, especially for a lot of probationary or federal workers who have lost their job. You gotta find something, then you gotta catch your breath. And then you gotta figure out, okay, now what do I want to do next? In your case, Sam, there are these very specific things you care about. So like what you, your reattack might actually be back in the government. It might be back in the same program, but you need to go back. It might take a year or two until that's available again. Right? So your reattack might be back in what you're doing or it could be something really differently. But you know, don't hold on to the career narrative that unfairly got taken from you.

• 44:19Cal Newport?

  And we're not denying that it sucks, but we can't get caught on it because we need to keep making forward progress. So inventory your capital, find something that rewards it, build more capital, create a new plan, reattack the new plan. We're not giving up. We're strategically regrouping, not retreating. And then we're reattacking again. I think that's the right way to think about your career during periods of turmoil. It's not always a straight line upwards or straight down a path that you've planned before. Sometimes we get knocked off. It's gonna take us a little while to find our way back, but we keep hiking some more. Okay? So I feel for you, Sam, but you are going to be okay. Let's regroup and we'll reattack in a little bit.

• 45:01Cal Newport?

  All right, do we got a call this week?

• 45:02Speaker 02

  We do. All right, let's hear it. Hi, Cal. My name is Alfie. I'm from the United Kingdom and my question is around the ability to do deep work while in a shallow job. Now, a little bit of context, I'm two years into my career and I'm on a rotational program at a bank. And part of this rotation means that every six months I can change team. And I've recently changed team to one which really prioritizes shallow work and really pseudo productivity is almost the name of the game. It's very much celebrated. There's a lot of context switching throughout the day. So my question is, really, given that this is

• 45:45Speaker 02

  a temporary role, and given that at the moment I feel that my ability to concentrate and work deep has diminished, what are some of, what are some practices I can do maybe over the weekends or in my free time to improve that ability to concentrate? And what are, and once I roll off this rotation and go into my new role, what are some things I can do early on to get back into the deep work routines and habits to ensure that that skill maintains one I've trained well? Thank you.

• 46:22Cal Newport?

  Well, Alfie, it's a good question. I think, by the way, Jesse, because Alfie mentioned the word pseudo productivity, which comes from my book, Slow Productivity. Yeah. That we could play the theme music. I didn't schedule the corner. Someone brought up slow productivity organically. So we're going to play the slow productivity theme music. All right, Alfie, it's a good question. I mean, first of all, this emphasizes there's some roles that where deep work is not rewarded. Like, deep work is just a type of effort, right? It's an effort with sustained concentration. It is a good way of maximizing cognitive abilities for a lot of tasks where that's important. Alfie's in a role right now where it's not important. So he's not spending a lot of time in the state of deep

• 47:03Cal Newport?

  work. That's fine, right? This role doesn't require it. But I think it's a cool question of like, how do I make sure I don't lose that ability, that ability to concentrate that, you know, will be relevant again later with another job? Let's go back to the deep dive. We talked about this in the beginning of this episode, that if you're constantly in like a high stimuli type of situation, you get less comfortable concentrating. We see that in the data. Then you spend less time doing activities that make you smarter. And then you get even less comfortable, less smart and less comfortable concentrating. You get a cognitive death spiral. So do the type of things we talked about earlier in this episode. Force yourself to read books outside of work. Practice the, the non-constant companion model of the phone is plugged in not with me when I'm at home.

• 47:48Cal Newport?

  So you're just used to doing one thing at a time. Do reflection walks all the time. I'm going to work on professional and personal projects just in my head while I'm walking with no source of distraction with me. Right? These are all things that are going to help your mind be comfortable with sustained concentration and actually strengthen your mind's ability to do things. You might add into there the hard hobby, you know, learn a new skill, learn how to computer program, learn how to do like microelectronics or woodworking. Be really careful about cognitive calisthenics during this period in which you were basically doing the cognitive equivalent of smoking during the workday. You gotta sort of offset the damage that's happening with active improving activities. So yeah, you'll be out of this rotation soon. Do things like that in the background.

• 48:31Cal Newport?

  And then when it comes time to schedule deep work again in your next rotation, you're not going to struggle with maintaining your concentration. You're going to feel like your instrument is still well-practiced.

• 48:41Cal Newport?

  All right, we got a case study here.

• 48:45Cal Newport?

  All right, our case study today, this is from Ian. All right, Ian says, "Great discussion on Kanban boards and systems. I love this space and has been a great reminder to me of how simplicity here is what works. Reminder I also needed. Attached are images of my engineering Kanban board, which I created around 2014 or so, that I thought you might find interesting. Still my most powerful organizing system yet.

• 49:14Cal Newport?

  I'm still yet able to, I've still yet been able to replicate this to do or do better in very new roles now, remote work is hard. This is around the third version revision of the system and nothing I've done yet has replicated the visual organizational power, simplicity and political leverage with internal customers." So I'm going to read about his system that he uses. And then for those who are watching, he sent some pictures of it that I'll bring on the screen as well. But let me read about it first. So he says, "We do a, we did a stand-up meeting." So he's talking about like the, the optimal way his, his Kanban-based system, like how it operated at its peak. We did a stand-up meeting in front of the board Monday, Wednesday, Fridays. It was the center of the engineering office nestled between two filing cupboards and hard to miss.

• 49:56Cal Newport?

  We had custom cards with blue tack on the side of the cupboard and whiteboard. We had constant visual reminder of what's going on. We color-coded by product or category. We had red dots for crazy important stuff. And we had queues, parking lots, done piles, et cetera. It worked really well for parking and queuing items rather than solve the last job that came in the door. If there was a real fire, we just made the call to drop everything and solve the fire. I think we gave up on the percentage done bars in the cars as that just didn't add up. Value versus maintenance time. Great for visual prompt to others of what we were working on and where things were at. I've tried digital systems and they just don't work nearly as well or as powerful as this. All right, I'm going to bring up some of these images here for those who are watching. Okay, so here is the main Kanban board.

• 50:39Cal Newport?

  It is on the wall between two filing cabinets. For those who are listening, it's on a whiteboard. So there's blue-tacked paper cards on a whiteboard that's up on the wall. There's columns here. One of these columns is to do next, unassigned. So we talked about this in slow productivity. You have a place to keep track of work that needs to be done in your group that doesn't exist on anyone's plate. All right. It's not being forgotten, but it's not just in someone's inbox or in someone's head. It's on this column on this board. All right, in the middle is to do assigned. Now, look, this column is a cool way of doing it. It's split up into rows. Each row corresponds to a different person. So you can see who's working on what. So the person in the top row has nothing.

• 51:25Cal Newport?

  The person in the second row is working on three things. You have those three cards. The person in the fourth row has four things. You can see specifically the four things they're working on. And those, Jesse, two of these things are sort of on the border between two rows. So I think that means those two people are working on that together, maybe?

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Possibly.

• 51:43Cal Newport?

  We can't actually read the cards, but they have the information about the task.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  It's got to be because there's another one at the end, too.

• 51:49Cal Newport?

  So that's to do next, assigned. And then they have a column for in progress. So it's like what people are working on at the moment. Oh, I see. There's a lot more people down here. Okay. Oh, cool. So if we look down here, we see there's rows for lots of people. People have a lot of stuff queued up. So they can queue up. I talk about this in Slow Productivity, doing this for yourself, having to queue of like what you're going to work on and in what order. They just have this up on a board. So I can look at Adam's row here and see one, two, three, four, five, six, seven things, one with a red dot, like things he's waiting to work on. And then next to it would be like, here's the four things he's working on now, knowing that as he finishes one of these things, he'll pull something else over there. So none of this is being kept track of in their head. And none of this is being kept track of just in their email inboxes.

• 52:35Cal Newport?

  It's really clear. This is unassigned work. Here's work we've assigned, but it's not being worked on. Here's the work people are working on, and we can just see it visually, who's working on what and its status. Notice over here on the left, this is called parking lots. They have on the side of the cupboard, parking lot. This is a Kanban idea where it's things you don't know, you're not looking to assign them. You're kind of like, let's put this on hold. Like, these are things we're thinking about, but we're not looking to get these done right now. So you have a place to put those tasks. So anyways, what I love about this, and I'm really big on this idea in my book, Slow Productivity, is they're keeping track of what needs to be done, its status, and who's working on what in a centralized, transparent way,

• 53:17Cal Newport?

  as opposed to allowing workloads to exist non-transparently, informally, and on individual plates. It makes a huge difference in the experience of your day. Because now, if you're one of these people represented by a row on this board, you're only working on the things in your row in the in-progress column. You don't have to do emails, you don't have to take meetings, and you don't have to waste cognitive cycles on all these other things. But Jesse, look at how many things are in to-do next, unassigned, and parking lot. Without a system like that, all of those things would just exist on people's plates and be generating potentially, hey, what's going on with this emails? Or can we just have a quick meeting to check in on those emails? Or just in the back of your head is something you're supposed to be working on that you're not.

• 54:00Cal Newport?

  So I see all of those cards that are in all of those other places as cognitive overhead that's been removed from the system. So they're going to finish stuff much quicker and people are going to be much happier. So thanks for that. Who was this? Ian. Thanks for sending the picture. That's a great demonstration of how these type of task board systems can work for teams. All right. So we got... A final segment coming up. I want to have a hot take on AI. But first, hear from another sponsor. We'll talk about our friends at the Defender line of vehicles. We're talking about the Defender 90, Defender 110, and the Defender 130. This is a very

• 54:43Cal Newport?

  good looking car. They're designed in a way that has like the modern features or conveniences you would want from from like a modern high end car, but they also have that tough rigid body design, durability, that lightweight monocoque architecture for extra strength that you can take this thing on adventures. And I like that mix. Good looking car that can be smooth and comfortable and yet also take you where adventure might hold. Jesse, I got good news and bad news. I am going to get you from our sponsor Defender 110 that you can drive. The bad news is it's wrapped with a picture of me. So it's going to make sure like an advertisement for the podcast. So it's me. I'm going to have like a big thumbs

• 55:26Cal Newport?

  up on both sides of the car. And there's a speaker on top that's going to chastise people for being on their phone as you drive past. So that's like the trade off. It's a cool enough looking car that you probably still get away with it. Yeah, I've been seeing more and more of these. I haven't seen the one yet again, that was parked outside our office after the last Defender read. But I see them everywhere now that I know about them. And it's cool. It's a good looking car. They know what they're doing there. Anyways, if you want to see what these cars look like with or without the Cal Newport rap, I don't know if that's a standard feature yet, it should be. Go check them out. I really like the way this car looks. Go to Land Rover usa.com. So you can visit Land Rover usa.com to learn

• 56:08Cal Newport?

  more about the Defender. I also want to talk about our friends at Express VPN. How do you choose which internet service provider to use? The sad thing is, most of us don't have very many options, right? ISPs are often operating like monopolies in your region. This is the internet service provider that's nearby. They use this monopoly to take advantage of their customers because you don't have any other options off and you don't have any other recourse if you don't like what they're doing. And you get things like data caps and bandwidth throttling, etc. But here's one thing that these ISPs are doing that you can push back on using Express VPN. They are trying to keep track of every website you visit.

• 56:51Cal Newport?

  Right. And here's how this works. Do you know what? Just I'm gonna put you on the spot here. I never know like what network terminology is well-known or not. Like if I say packet, that make, what do you think of when I say like an internet packet? I'm not sure. You think, yeah. So this is the thing. I always assume these terminology is known. Okay. So when you're communicating on a network, like you're communicating to the deeplife.com over the internet, your communication gets broken up into these little messages called packets. And the, the front of the packet is like a address on an envelope. Here's the website this message is going to. Here's the website that it's been sent from. And then that packet gets sent through the internet. It gets bounced from router to router until it gets to the website. So every, it looks at the, every router has to look at

• 57:35Cal Newport?

  the address along the way until it gets to where it's going. And then the destination can open up that envelope and, oh, here's the, here's what you're sending me, a request for a podcast or something like that. And a lot of, a lot of websites these days use secure protocol so that the stuff inside the envelope is encrypted. So if I'm your internet service provider and you hand me this envelope, hey, get this to the deeplife.com. I don't know what you're sending to the deeplife.com, but I can see that's who you're talking to because I have to pass this on. The address has to be plain. So just like in the mail, you can have a thick envelope. So I really don't know what you're mailing, but who you're mailing it to, my postman knows. All right. So ISPs just look at the address on these, on these envelopes and they know, hey, here's who you're talking to. I don't know what you're saying, but I know who you're talking to and they sell

• 58:19Cal Newport?

  that data or they can. With a VPN, like ExpressVPN, you get around that. And the way you get around that is you take the, the envelope you really want to send. I really want to talk to the deeplife.com, but I don't want people to know. I'm gonna put that inside another envelope and I'm gonna send that envelope to a VPN server. So now all the, all the, your ISP knows is, you know, Jesse's talking to a VPN server. And then the VPN server can open that out and take out your real envelope. Oh, you really want to talk to the deeplife.com. It will talk to the site on your behalf and then it will put the response back in a big envelope and send that back to you. And now all your ISP learns is that you're talking to a VPN server. That, does that work as an explanation? I like that explanation. Yeah. Okay. You even have to use word encryption. So that's what a VPN server does.

• 59:03Cal Newport?

  It makes it so, among other advantages, You can communicate with other sites and services without like your service provider knowing who you're talking to. If you're going to use a VPN, use the one I recommend, which is ExpressVPN. This is fantastic software. It's easy to use. You fire up the app and click one button and now all of your network communication on that device is going to go through the VPN and is protected. It works on phones, laptops, tablets, and more. So you can, no matter what you're checking to the internet with, you can have VPN privacy with ExpressVPN. It's been rated number one by tech reviewers at CNET and The Verge, among others. So you should use a VPN,

• 59:42Cal Newport?

  and ExpressVPN is a great option. So protect your online privacy today by visiting expressvpn.com/deep. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash deep. You can get an extra four months free, but only when you go to expressvpn.com/deep. All right, let's go on to our final segment. All right, that VPN ad got me into a technology mindset, so we'll do another tech corner. I think like my goal here, Jesse, is to give people like at least one interesting thing to throw into like a dinner party conversation about technology. You should come out of the tech corner with like a little tidbit you can pull out to be smart.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  I like it.

• 1:00:21Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So I want to elaborate briefly, an idea that I've been playing with. It came up in a panel discussion I was in recently. I spoke at a board of directors meeting this morning. It came up again. So I'm sort of playing with this idea that there's a potential blind spot in the world of AI, and in particular, a blind spot about where big impacts are going to come next. So when we think about generative AI tools like ChatGPT and economic impacts, which is really the topic that's at the heart of a lot of my reporting on AI, a lot of the focus when you see people talking about products, or you see the products that are being produced by the big players, particularly at like OpenAI or Microsoft or Google, is a focus on the ability of these

• 1:01:05Cal Newport?

  generative AI tools to generate text.

• 1:01:09Cal Newport?

  We're thinking about the advantages of these tools as the text they can produce. It can write an email on my behalf. It can write this memo on my behalf. It can help me create this presentation. Right? So we're thinking often when we're thinking about like sort of non-tech applications of generative AI. So not like in programming or data analysis or these type of things. It's a text generation that we focus on. And that's important. But I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the the first sort of ubiquitous why sort of ubiquitous productivity gains from generative AI. So gains that are going to be cross industry are going to come from the symmetric ability

• 1:01:54Cal Newport?

  of these models, which is to interpret text that's input.

• 1:02:00Cal Newport?

  So it does both things. I can type something in the chat GPT. It can understand what I'm saying very well. And based on the understanding, it can produce text very well. I think the big next ubiquitous productivity gains are going to be based on the interpretation of text and in particular, the ability of these models to be natural language interfaces to other software tools.

• 1:02:21Cal Newport?

  So like the example I like to give is maybe I have a piece of software where I don't know how to use this software in an advanced way. It's like a spreadsheet. I don't really know how to do advanced analysis or data cleaning in the spreadsheet. An expert user might know. I don't know how to use it. I have a data analysis package. I don't really know how to do it. I know what I want it to do. You know, I wanted to like take this data and like do a regression, but I don't know like what to click or where to pull or how to do this. I haven't been learning the software.

• 1:02:50Cal Newport?

  This is a place where generative AI can help because you could just say in natural language, here's what I want to do. And what these models are very good at is translating between languages. So it can translate what you want to do from natural English language to some sort of highly structured macro machine language that the application understands.

• 1:03:10Cal Newport?

  So I don't know, I want to take out all the column, all of the rows from column B that have a dollar amount less than $5. And with the, with the rows that remain, I want to build a pie chart that buckets them in intervals of $100. I just say that in natural language. And the language model takes that and then spits out on the other end, a bunch of sort of like very well formatted macro commands, which you can then feed to the spreadsheet and the spreadsheet does that work for you. That's where I think the low hanging fruit is that's going to be plucked next, or at least could be plucked next. That more importantly to me than you writing the email on my behalf, is you helping me take advantage of the power of software tools that already exist.

• 1:03:51Cal Newport?

  That's low hanging fruit productivity gains for both the individuals and for organizations. Because now you need less experts and you need less people. But that is what I'm, what I'm keeping an eye on right now. One of the reasons why I think this is not being emphasized is that interpretation of text and translation of it into a machine language doesn't require massive models. And if you're Anthropic, if you're OpenAI, Microsoft, right? If you're Google, you want massive models to be the thing that people care about because you're among the only companies that can afford to create these massive models. You really see the might and power of the masses models in production. Look at the graphic it created, look at the very subtle text it created.

• 1:04:33Cal Newport?

  Look at the, the code it created and like how the code compiles right away. Like that's where you really get into the, the power of it. But you don't need a 600 billion parameter model to take natural language commands for Excel and turn them into like spreadsheet commands. You could probably train a much smaller model to do that. And like a lot of companies could probably do that. So they, they want the focus to be on text outputted because that requires the fanciest models. But I really think this is the low hanging fruit. And the reason why I'm pretty sure it'll be plucked is that it, again, it doesn't require a 30,000 GPU, you know, nuclear power plant powered data center in order to train. Like much more modest models can be natural language translators.

• 1:05:14Cal Newport?

  And so a smaller company can build their own or multiple companies can have their own version of these models for their particular tools. So that's the idea I want to throw out here now. Don't just focus on the ability of language models to generate text. Focus on their ability to interpret text. Small agile models that unlock the power of existing software tools. I think it's going to be a big deal. So along these lines, like I think it's a misnomer. Again, people want to think about the language model, for example, doing all the work. I think this is unnecessary as well. They want to think about like, I have a bunch of data. I want to just input that data to my language model and the language model will analyze it. Like it's going to move through a language model and a result will come out the other side.

• 1:05:58Cal Newport?

  That's not really what we want. We don't want a language model that's so big and it's been trained on so many things. You can give it like a bunch of data and the model itself has can actually do some statistical analysis. No, what you want is a really predictable, dependable, high-quality statistical analysis software. And the language model, you tell it what you want to do with the data and then it tells the statistical software, here's the analysis we want to run. And then the statistical software does the analysis, right? Like, that's what we really want. We want, and I think this again is where the low hanging fruit is going to be, not massive models that just is like, does everything you want it to do, but they unlock the things that other software does for the average user. All right. So that's my big idea I'm throwing out there.

• 1:06:43Cal Newport?

  Trademark, trademark 2025. I don't have a catchy name for it, but keep that in mind. Look for natural language processing as like the next, maybe the first big killer app of this, not this oracular idea of just like, I talk to this oracle and I give it data, it just does everything for me. I just don't think that's the most efficient way to get the near future value out of generative AI. All right. So there's my tech corner idea of the week. And with that, I think we'll wrap up this episode. We'll be back next week with some more deep questions, but until then, as always, stay deep.

• 1:07:20Cal Newport?

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