#722: Cal Newport — How to Embrace Slow Productivity, Build a Deep Life, Achieve Mastery, and Defend Your Time

Cal Newport https://calnewport.com/ is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he is also a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics. His books have sold millions of copies and been translated into over forty languages. He is also a contributor to The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/cal-newport and hosts the popular Deep Questions podcast https://calnewport.com/podcasts/. His new book is Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout https://www.amazon.com/Slow-Productivity-Accomplishment-Without-Burnout/dp/0593544854/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. Please enjoy! Timestamps for this episode are available below. Resources from this episode: https://tim.blog/2024/02/21/cal-newport-slow-productivity/ Sponsors: AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.) Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover https://eightsleep.com/Tim sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating: https://eightsleep.com/Tim (save $200 on the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep this winter) Momentous https://livemomentous.com/tim high-quality supplements: https://livemomentous.com/tim (code TIM for 20% off) Timestamps: [00:00] Start [06:14] Unforced Errors: The Internet Story. [09:41] Techno-selectionism. [18:06] Why YouTube and podcasts aren’t ideal bedfellows. [23:03] Amish technology and Steve Martin. [28:07] What prompted Cal to write Slow Productivity? [31:35] Becoming a better writer through blogging. [36:54] The benefits of obsessing over quality. [40:54] How did Cal decide to identify himself as a writer? [52:02] People who exemplify slow productivity. [58:45] Trade-offs on the path to 21st-century slow productivity. [1:03:16] Push systems vs. pull systems. [1:04:34] Quota systems. [1:06:08] Why slow productivity isn’t a zero-sum game. [1:09:33] Language that clarifies. [1:13:17] Sender filters. [1:16:20] What people might miss about Slow Productivity‘s message. [1:21:24] How Cal defines productivity. [1:25:36] Derek Sivers and money as a neutral indicator of value. [1:28:34] Contemporary slow productivity champions. [1:33:18] Asynchronous vs. real-time conversations. [1:35:51] Making group scheduling less hellish. [1:40:13] Cal’s problem with Frederick Winslow Taylor. [1:42:01] How The New Yorker maintains its old-timey charm where other publications fail. [1:49:05] Cal’s dream publications. [1:51:07] Mental models for cultivating a slow productivity mindset. [1:56:27] The consequences of playing the algorithm game. [2:03:14] The renewed viability of newsletters. [2:08:03] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. 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• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 0:41Tim Ferriss?

  I think generally in my experience, my partners prefer the high side and I like to sleep very, very cool. So stop fighting, this helps. Based on your biometrics, environment and sleep stages, the Pod Cover makes temperature adjustments throughout the night that limit wake-ups and increase your percentage of deep sleep. In addition to its best-in-class temperature regulation, the Pod Cover sensors also track your health and sleep metrics without the need to use a wearable. Conquer this winter season with the best in sleep tech and sleep at your perfect temperature. Many of my listeners in colder areas, sometimes that's me, enjoy warming up their bed after a freezing day. And if you have a partner, great, you can split the zones and you can sleep at your own ideal temperatures. It's easy.

• 1:24Tim Ferriss?

  So go to eightsleep.com/tim, spelled out, eightsleep.com/tim, and save $200 on the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep this winter. Eight Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU and Australia.

• 1:43Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Momentus. Momentus offers high-quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support and more. I've been testing their products for months now and I have a few that I use constantly. One of the things I love about Momentous is that they offer many single ingredient and third-party tested formulations. I'll come back to the latter part of that a little bit later. Personally, I've been using Momentous Magthreanate, Lthianine, and Apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep. Now, the Momentous Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients.

• 2:25Tim Ferriss?

  I've also been using Momentous Creatine, which doesn't just help for physical performance, but also for cognitive performance. In fact, I've been taking it daily, typically before podcast recording, as there are various studies and reviews and meta-analyses pointing to improvements in short-term memory and performance under stress. So those are some of the products that I've been using very consistently, and to give you an idea, I'm packing right now for an international trip. I tend to be very minimalist, and I'm taking these with me nonetheless. Now, back to the bigger picture. Olympians, Tour de France winners, Tour de France winners, the US military, and more than 175 college and professional sports teams rely on Momentous and their products. Momentus also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world-class

• 3:10Tim Ferriss?

  products to market, including a few you will recognize from this podcast, like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Starrett. They also work with Dr. Stacy Sims, who assists Momentous in developing products specifically for women. Their products contain high-quality ingredients that are third-party tested, which in this case means informed sport and/or NSF certified, so you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. And trust me, as someone who knows the sports nutrition and supplement world very well, that is a differentiator that you want in anything that you consume in this entire sector. So, good news. For my non-US listeners, more good news, not to worry. Momentus ships internationally, so you have the same access that I do. So, check it out.

• 3:52Tim Ferriss?

  Visit livemomentous.com/tim and use code TIM at checkout for 20% off. That's live momentus, L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash tim and code TIM for 20% off.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question?

• 4:14Speaker 02

  No, it is an inappropriate time.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 4:31Tim Ferriss?

  Howdy, how. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world-class performers from all different disciplines. And my guest today is Cal Newport. Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he is also a founding member of the Center for Digital Ethics. In addition to his academic work, Newport is a New York Times bestselling author who writes for a general audience about the intersection of technology, productivity, and culture. His books have sold millions of copies and have been translated into more than 40 languages. He is also a contributor to The New Yorker and hosts the popular Deep Questions podcast. His new book is A Slow

• 5:10Tim Ferriss?

  Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Cal is not active on social media. This is usually where I would say you can find him on these following social media profiles, but you can't find him. He is really not active outside of his YouTube channel, which is the @calnewportmedia channel, and the podcast, and everything else you can find at calnewport.com. In this conversation, we talk about slow productivity, human-paced productivity, the dangers of checklists and to-do lists and approaches that are similar. We talk about so many things that Cal puts into practice himself. He walks the walk. And part of what I find so impressive about him is how effectively he has put positive

• 5:55Tim Ferriss?

  constraints around his work and within his life so that he can do what he does best with the fewest distractions possible. So I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. And without further ado, Cal Newport.

• 6:13Tim Ferriss?

  Let me ask you, if you don't mind, we'll just roll right into it. Does that work for you?

• 6:17Cal Newport?

  All right, let's roll into it.

• 6:17Tim Ferriss?

  Unforced errors. That should be basically a review of the last 10 years, right? I mean, that could be the Walter Isaacson sort of biography of a generation. Unforced errors. And I feel this way in the sense that we're talking right now about things kind of horseshoeing back around to many of the Certainly some advantages, but many disadvantages and trappings of, say, television. So despite our best efforts, many of us seem to somehow get corralled into these unforced errors or corral ourselves into unforced errors.

• 6:56Cal Newport?

  Right. I mean, you could almost write a book called Unforced Errors: The Internet Story. It could just be about all of the ways we wandered off of some of the central motivations of the internet in the places that made everyone but a small number of investors really unhappy. But let's take what we were talking about just before, because I think it's actually an example of a, something that seems at first to be an unforced error in terms of our engagement with the internet, which is going to be video rising, podcasts shifting more towards television show style production. I actually think in that example, there is a good sign. I think there's something positive in there.

• 7:32Tim Ferriss?

  Tell me.

• 7:33Cal Newport?

  The real unforced error that I think hit content creation was algorithms. The shift of I am going to create content on behalf of a small number of large companies that will then curate for each individual user, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, whatever. They'll curate with algorithms, streams of interesting information from this giant pool of information that people are creating. This, I think, was a huge problem for content quality. Podcasts, by contrast, right? So we come back to podcasts is the opposite of the algorithm. I mean, one of the reasons why I was excited about this medium as it arose is that there is no algorithms in it. A podcast grows because a listener likes the podcast and tells another listener. It's very similar to books in that way. Hey, read

• 8:16Cal Newport?

  this. You should listen to this. I, growth is slow, often with podcasts, but there is no countervailing content curation force from an algorithm. There's nothing you can do in a podcast episode that is going to make it go viral in the way that a tweet can, or an Instagram can, because you can't share them that way. Video, I think, is now inevitable, just because visual is more interesting. Radio, for example, in the 1920s, 1930s was a really well-developed technology. Radio shows were very good. Radios were cost-effective. Radios were portable. You could put them in a, in a car. They weren't too expensive. And when TV came along, it was much more complicated. It was more expensive. The experience was squashed. They had to stay between these really bright Klieg lights

• 8:59Cal Newport?

  on these small stages because of the limitations of the early lenses and detectors. And it just ate radio's lunch. Because visual's really interesting. So we can't help but watch when we have a chance to watch. So I think this is where podcasting is going. It's going to reinvent basically linear TV. Like it was at the heyday of cable. There's a lot of channels and you hear about a show. Hey, have you heard about the show Mad Men? It's really good. The people go and watch it. But I think that's actually net-net positive because still what's driving this sort of podcast into the video podcast revolution, as long as it has to be quality, which is what you have to fall back on when you don't have algorithms. I think it's a good countervailing force to social media. So there might be a silver lining in that particular movement.

• 9:40Tim Ferriss?

  Let me bounce some thoughts off of you related to that. So my feeling is that, and I think you'd agree with this, the ecosystem and the dynamics of the podcast world changed very dramatically in the last five to 10 years. The 10th year of this podcast is coming up in April. And I agree that at a certain critical mass, it seems like podcasts and books share it a lot in common. There were some fundamental differences in the sense that podcasting, consuming audio was a secondary activity for most folks. They were doing something else while they were listening, whereas much harder to do that with a book, at least in text format. Although we've seen the commensurate rise, almost in exact tandem of audiobooks,

• 10:24Tim Ferriss?

  certainly with podcasts as smart devices and broadband to become more ubiquitous. I think when podcasts were on a volume basis, similar to books, in so much as, let's just say there's 100,000 books published in the US per year through major publishers, I have no idea if that number's accurate, but something like that, let's just say a small handful of those make the bestseller lists. Those are used as shopping lists. Now all of a sudden, you have a fixed... Set of podcasts, but then you have this long tail and people listen to them and they recommend them and so on. Similar, I think now that you have millions of podcasts, the discovery problem, maybe it's similar to books on say, Amazon, but it seems to be

• 11:09Tim Ferriss?

  that the recommendations are now hinged on this very much kind of, in some respects, determining variable, which is video. So the YouTube has always been a huge asset. I think Rogan was probably the first that I know of to really use clips and YouTube well, as one of the world's largest search engines to drive consumption of audio. But I think there are a couple of other factors like TikTok, for instance, and the both kind of fear of TikTok as a competitor and then emulation of TikTok by major platforms that has led to this divorce of long form and short form content. Right? So for instance,

• 11:54Tim Ferriss?

  even for this podcast, we've had clips that have with clear visual attribution, everything in the description related to Tim Ferriss show do 100 million views and they have translated exactly zero to longer form, say, content consumption. So I don't think we are free of the algorithm, I suppose is what I'm saying, in the sense that there is still word of mouth, but I've noticed a tremendous change in the last handful of years as things get more and more algorithmically driven. And I feel like the big joke, don't worry guys, this isn't going to be all cynicism and Tim Ferriss talking about the glass half full with respect to podcasting.

• 12:35Cal Newport?

  On his podcast.

• 12:36Tim Ferriss?

  On my podcast. But I feel like the big kind of cosmic joke for me is that if people are consuming podcasts, long form podcasts as video, by and large, those are in background tabs or they're on a phone as they're listening to Spotify that is running video, but they're listening to audio while they're in the car, killing their cellular data or whatever. So in a sense, it's like You need the video to play the game. You need the machine to recognize and value your video. But in many, many cases, humans are not actually consuming this beautiful product that you're producing. There are exceptions, and there are some amazing cinematic experiences that get produced. But the reason that I'm delivering this sort of scent of a woman,

• 13:21Tim Ferriss?

  hellfire and brimstone talk about formats is because this relates, I think, to a lot of what I would love to ask you about. And I went back through our last conversation also, and all of the notes on that conversation. Because the reason I'm wearing this goofy headset, Audio Technica, which actually has great audio quality, I'm shocked on some level that I didn't use this earlier, because it clears up a lot of table space for my notes and so on, is that it allows me to be mobile. It allows me to stay true to, one might call it the root document, maybe, the initial intentions and reasons for choosing this medium in the first place. That could be, and probably will be, to my commercial detriment. I think

• 14:02Tim Ferriss?

  it will hurt the growth of the podcast for me not to focus more on video. However, that begets all sorts of questions. Why is growth important? Why is A, B, and C more important than the initial drivers that led you to adopt this medium as your home base, let's just say? So what are some of the, for people who aren't familiar with you, because a lot of people listening to this will be listening to you for the first time, or at least on this podcast, for the first time, what are some of the ways that you have kind of pushed back against prevalent social behaviors, social adoption, technology adoption, et cetera? Just so folks have an idea.

• 14:40Cal Newport?

  Let me set the stage. I'm a computer science professor who also does a lot of writing about technology and the way it intersects with all parts of our lives, our work, our life outside of work, the way we connect with each other. In this role, I do a lot of writing as a contributor to The New Yorker, where I really explore those ideas in depth. In addition to my books, I'm often thinking about this. How do we work with technology? I have a philosophy, this is actually new since the last time I was on your show. I did a New Yorker piece in late 2023, where I introduced this notion I called techno-selectionism.

• 15:15Cal Newport?

  And I said, this is really the way we should think about dealing with technologies in our life, but also in our organizations and our culture. So at multiple scales is it's hard to predict in advance always the impact a new tool is going to have. I always give the example of going back and watching Steve Jobs keynote speech in 2007 when he's introducing the iPhone. He doesn't even get to the internet features until 30 minutes into the speech. I mean, he was just jazzed that your iPod was going to be on the same thing as your phone and you wouldn't have to switch back and forth. I had no way of predicting eight years later, you're going to have, for example, a teenage mental health crisis. So techno selectionism says, be willing to actually aggressively step backwards. Be willing to

• 15:57Cal Newport?

  say, this looks interesting. Let me try this out. Oh, no, no, no, this is not matching what's really important to me. So you're out of here. All right. This I will do this. I won't. So being more willing to both experiment and reject after the fact, to move away from these narratives of techno progressivism that says new technology is good and there are bumps along the way, but you can't put this genie back in the box. And I say, we can build all sorts of new boxes and that's probably the right way to go for it. So in my own life, for example, what I used to be really known for was the fact that I never signed up for traditional social media. So I never had a Facebook account or a Twitter account or an Instagram account. And for a long time, I was seen as essentially a crazy

• 16:39Cal Newport?

  person. I actually wrote about this in that New Yorker piece on techno selectionism. I wrote about my experience in 2016, writing a Times op ed that said, quit social media and how like the world fell down on me. Like this cannot stand. This can't be, it was like a glitch in the matrix. Someone cannot be saying this in the pages of the New York Times. The New York Times commissioned a response op ed. They brought someone in to write an op ed two weeks later that went point by point to my op ed and said, don't worry everyone, you can ignore this. This isn't right. Just don't, don't worry about this.

• 17:14Tim Ferriss?

  In the case of a water landing, assume the brace position.

• 17:16Cal Newport?

  Exactly. It's gonna be fine. And of course now, you know, within a couple of years, that's a very normal position. You say, oh, I don't use Twitter and people say like, good for you and move on with their life. So things do change. So I come at things from those perspectives. What is the underlying value here? If a technology or a way I'm using technology is not serving that value, then we can push back or change it, which is what you were doing. If we bring it back to the headset, which as we were joking before is going to be a metaphor for the the deep life, the headset you're wearing right now. What that represents is you have a vision of what you want podcasting to be that does not require you.

• 17:51Tim Ferriss?

  For me.

• 17:52Cal Newport?

  For you.

• 17:52Tim Ferriss?

  For me.

• 17:53Cal Newport?

  Right. Like what you care about right now in your life that does not require you to rent one of these warehouses and build the big soundstage in the middle of the stage and and have the crew with the five cameras set up or what have you. That's techno selectionism. I want to put my coda on the video thing, though, is that I don't think YouTube is the future of video for podcasts. In fact, YouTube and podcasts don't play well together at all. They really just don't. Most people are not successfully growing their podcast using YouTube unless it's really YouTube specified. And so I think that mismatch is doling the impact of the YouTube algorithm on the podcast ecosystem because those audiences don't play well together. I think the future of video for podcasting, it's going to be on smart TVs.

• 18:35Cal Newport?

  I think it'll probably be, I subscribe to this app that has on it.

• 18:39Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so you think people will single task, they'll watch.

• 18:42Cal Newport?

  Which, by the way, you know, I was talking to our own YouTube guy, and the reason why I'm on YouTube, by the way, is practice. Because I think video is going to be key. YouTube itself, right now, it's not going to drive my podcast, but I want to be used to this medium. He was saying on a lot of big shows, and I think he was giving me the numbers from Lex Fridman, smart TVs will often be the number two or the number three most common device on which the podcast is consumed.

• 19:04Tim Ferriss?

  Really?

• 19:05Cal Newport?

  Yeah, because if you think about it, you can load the YouTube app on your smart TV. Podcasters are now filming in high def 4K. And when you're watching, you select a podcast, it's not that different than going to Netflix and selecting a show.

• 19:18Tim Ferriss?

  It's watching TV.

• 19:19Cal Newport?

  It takes up the whole show, and they don't like the stuff that's on anyways. So I think that's going to be the future, probably, is you're going to have some app. You're like, okay, I subscribe to this app. It's the equivalent of a 2004 linear cable channel that you would have had on your menu. It's a nice Netflix interface, and it's Cal Newport's latest shows and Tim's and like Ryan Holiday's, whatever, like a group of people doing similar stuff. It's a channel, and you go through a horizontal carousel, there's a new episode of whatever, and you watch it on your screen. I think podcasting is going to compete with streamers and cable because the overhead, the key number. Used to be in cable, dollar per hour of production cost. And this is why Discovery Channel was the profitable king of the first decade of the 2000s is that they got that down to something like $400,000 an hour, which it was a miniscule cost per hour because they're doing these reality shows.

• 20:04Cal Newport?

  Podcasts, you can get that down even with high production values, another order of magnitude or more.

• 20:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, but like one tenth the cost for like the super cinematic stuff.

• 20:12Cal Newport?

  One tenth the cost of, yeah, even the people with the $60,000 tricasters for the three camera setups, et cetera. So that's a bit of an aside, but that's where I think this is who should be thinking about podcasts. I think YouTube, I don't like the YouTube algorithm. It doesn't play well with podcasts.

• 20:28Tim Ferriss?

  Why do you say that? Because there are the anointed demigods of the YouTube podcast ecosystem, right? Lex Friedman, certainly Andrew Huberman.

• 20:35Cal Newport?

  It's very hard to do that.

• 20:36Tim Ferriss?

  There are certain names, Jordan Peterson, Gabor Maté even, for instance, there are certain people who, once they have been given the elixir of life by the YouTube algorithm, they could fart into a microphone for 10 minutes and get 3 million views, which is not to diminish what they do. I think actually everyone I mentioned has produced some really spectacular content. So it's not to minimize it in any way, but why do you say it doesn't play nice? Because it seems like that is the primary arena in which many podcasts are trying to grow their, I would say viewership, because they're really not podcasts anymore in the sense that they're, they're video first. Because the thumbnails and the salacious headlines and the clickbait and so on are all being sold visually.

• 21:20Tim Ferriss?

  So I feel like it's more, as you put it, kind of competing on a TV menu using visual candy as a TV show, like as a visual Charlie Rose versus as a podcast. Like it's almost a misnomer to consider them podcasts at this point for a lot of folks.

• 21:37Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I think that's true, but I think two things are going on here. One, I think it's less podcasts, just as a per capita basis, less podcasts than we think that are seriously competing in that space. I mean, that's YouTube land, but there's so many, this whole middle class of podcasters, by which I mean you're earning a Kevin Kelly, 1,000 true fans, middle class or above income that just aren't playing in that arena. It's a golf podcast. It's a fitness podcast, what have you, or it's on video, but it doesn't really matter. I mean, they have the cameras and younger people listen to it on the video, but it's not like that's driving its growth. Huberman and Lex, they're outliers in ways. It's not useful to pursue. I mean, to pursue that is similar to being early in your TV career and saying, well, let's just do what Oprah's doing. She has a lot of listeners. It's,

• 22:22Cal Newport?

  it's hard to replicate. I think there's a self reinforcing ecosystem already that they're all a part of. Also, the length of their videos, that tends to be favored by the algorithm. If you go two or three hours and people actually watch it, that's really favored by the algorithm. And it's so extreme, though. It's like the only game in town is chicken and the egg. People like them. So they'll watch a full three hour video. And then the YouTube algorithm is like, oh, my God, people are watching three hours. That's a lot of time. And we're going to really push this. But I don't know that most podcasts need YouTube. But also, even if you do, it just doesn't work. It's really difficult. YouTube's algorithm wants Mr. Beast way more than it wants, you know, Ezra Klein. It's just the reality of what's going on with that.

• 23:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, I think there are a bunch of open questions, but I want to come back to the, I'll attempt to come back to the 30,000 foot view with the techno selectionism, I think it was, which, by the way, folks, if you're not aware, you may have even mentioned them in your piece. I apologize, I haven't read it. But the Amish do something very similar. They do adopt new technology. They're just very strict about how they approach it. The first thing I'd say is if podcasts end up on smart TVs, there's a question about how they end up on smart TVs. Presumably, there is some platform or hardware company deciding on that. And they might use YouTube as a proxy for who to choose as their content partners, just in terms of popularity. So it may indirectly still be a determinant, YouTube, that is, of who gets placement. Otherwise, you

• 23:48Tim Ferriss?

  just run into the same discovery problem that people experience right now, which is like, I want to find a great podcast. Well, you can rely on the Spotify algorithm to recommend something similar. But then you run into the issue of like, I listened to one country song once, and now I just get served hundreds of country songs every day. Like, how do I change my specifications? But to zoom out, just on the techno selectionism side, because I think you mentioned something that's worth underscoring. I think of new technology like I would think of new drugs, in the sense that at one point in time, for instance, thalidomide was considered a huge breakthrough. And then low and behold, it has all these horrific side effects and birth defects and so on. And then it was. Pulled back and there were rules put in place and the FDA changed A, B, and C,

• 24:32Tim Ferriss?

  and so on, to make things safer. There's no reason to treat technology any differently, in my mind. Drugs are a technology, so it's sort of a subset. But social media, same, same. Wearing a headset where you have the illusion of depth perception, but in reality lurking at a screen that's less than a few inches from your eyes and so on. There's just no real way to know what the long-term implications are, which doesn't mean you become a Luddite. But even living in Silicon Valley for 17 years, I was sort of a sharp-edge adopter, but not a cutting-edge adopter. I never really took things on personally through self-experimentation or as an investor, really, if they were kind of first of their kind. I always waited around a little bit.

• 25:17Tim Ferriss?

  And you can still be really early and catch the right waves, even if you have a certain built-in delay. And that's how I'm treating a lot of technologies and also behaviors. Like, if technologies are just, and I'm not going to use a dictionary definition here, but let's just say "tools" in quotation marks of various types, which could be behaviors to accomplish a certain task, solve a certain problem, right? It could be a stick that a chimpanzee uses in a termite mound, but it could also be a certain type of behavior that you use, which is basically an algorithm. It's a recipe, step-by-step, A to L to get something done. I really want to think about, like, what are, and this is what makes the best investors

• 26:00Tim Ferriss?

  in the world also, in my opinion, is they think about not just primary, but like secondary and tertiary effects. It's kind of like the character loosely based on Peter Thiel in the first season of Silicon Valley, who's like, "Who is this Burger King?" And he runs through this whole thing on the sesame seeds, and then it gets to the locusts, and he's like, "The 30-year cycle is going to coincide," right? And the reason I mention that is, if we think about, for instance, video, I think many people who are adopting video have never experienced what it is like to have widespread...

• 26:35Tim Ferriss?

  Public recognition, like visual recognition when they walk around on the street. And so they're not familiar with that side effect, which people have experienced through other medium like television. And I have to my own limited experience that I'm not Brad Pitt or anything like that. But I have certainly, again, it is hard for a lot of people I know with popular podcasts that have any video component to like go hang out at a coffee shop. They can't go to a coffee shop and just sit down and read a book because they'll get interrupted every five to 10 minutes if it's in any decently sized city in the US at least, if they're US based podcasters. And for that reason

• 27:13Tim Ferriss?

  that I'm also kind of taking the techno selectionism slash Amish approach where I'm like, okay, I can afford to wait. This isn't true with everything, but I think this ties into also slow productivity. Like I can afford to wait six months. I can afford to wait 12 months. Yep. And if I am, I'm giving you credit for this, but it's certainly one of my favorite, in my case, audiobooks, Born Standing Up, Be So Good They Can't Ignore You, Steve Martin. Rule number one, Daniel Day Lewis was not on TikTok in between all of his movies, making omelets, or teaching people seven easy steps to financial freedom, or what to do when Bitcoin

• 27:54Tim Ferriss?

  crashes. Or he was working on his craft and getting so fucking good that every few years he would just show up and win best actor and then disappear again. All right. Thank you for going to my TED Talk. But let's come back to slow productivity. So the new book, I want to talk about this. Subtitle is The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. Who doesn't want that? The last time you were on this podcast, the episode was published February 2022, and you were telegraphing this a bit. You were talking about slow productivity a bit. And you were like, well, I'm thinking about making this book. So I'm just curious to know, process wise, if you'd indulge me. What happened between then and now? Because now you have a finished book and people can buy

• 28:38Tim Ferriss?

  it. And this is a maybe a side angle at trying to determine how you choose your primary projects, the things to say yes to. Because writing a book takes a lot of energy. So what happened between, let's just say, January 2022 and now we're recording January 2024 with respect to this book and making decisions about where to put your time?

• 29:01Cal Newport?

  Well, it's a good case study because I was testing the idea then. I went back and actually pulled out this timeline. I think the first time I used the term slow productivity was maybe 2020 or 2021, right around there. Right before I came on your show the last time, I was ready to ratchet up my testing of the concept. So I could also develop it more. So I wrote a New Yorker piece that January where the title was, It's Time to Embrace Slow Productivity. Now, the piece just had one idea of what would eventually become the full blown philosophy of slow productivity. And then I came on your show, we talked about it some more. Then, pretty soon after I was on your show, I'm writing the book. Seriously, I had pulled together, okay, I think

• 29:43Cal Newport?

  I really understand all the pieces. So that's like a two year ideation process. You know, I get the inspiration for the book in 2020. It's the mix of the start of the pandemic and some stuff happening in my own life. This is where I began playing with those ideas. 2022, I'm still trying to pull together the ideas in the best possible form. You know, that summer, I'm up, you know, up in New England writing. I'm up actually writing the book. So that's the process.

• 30:10Tim Ferriss?

  This is summer of 2022.

• 30:12Cal Newport?

  Summer of 2022. I would have handed this in, in spring of 2023 is when I would have handed in my first manuscript.

• 30:20Tim Ferriss?

  Fast. Good for you. It's incredible.

• 30:23Cal Newport?

  Well, see, I disappear. Part of my methodology is I disappear in the summer. You know, I'm a professor, so typically professors in the summer take what's called summer salary. You don't actually get paid by your university at a research institution. You don't get paid in the summer. They pay you for 10 months. And then you can take on through grants, summer salary to keep working on research is what you're supposed to do. And at some point I realized, well, you know, I make money from writing books. I don't actually have to.

• 30:47Tim Ferriss?

  Now, is university the one who's providing the grant? Or is it some independent foundation?

• 30:53Cal Newport?

  It would be independent, right. So I'm like a theoretical computer scientist, applied mathematician. So we'd get our money from the NSF, for example. And that's just what you do because you're researching.

• 31:03Tim Ferriss?

  National Science Foundation.

• 31:04Cal Newport?

  Exactly, yeah. And I realized at some point after I got tenure, I don't actually need that salary. Like, this is what the book advance should be for. And I began disappearing in the summer and really, let's write, let's really get ahead of steam. And so, within a month or two after being on your show, I was beginning to seriously write that book. And then it's about a 10-month process for me to get a manuscript done. Then you get about four or five months of editing and then it locks in. So that locked in last summer. Last summer, that book was finally locked in.

• 31:35Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm going to selfishly just ask you a couple of questions about writing for myself. Because I'm working on my first book project in six years, seven years, something like that.

• 31:42Cal Newport?

  Oh, excellent.

• 31:43Tim Ferriss?

  And there are many reasons for it. It's one of those things that just refuse to go away. One of those ideas where I'm like, okay, this is just going to ricochet around inside my skull indefinitely unless I let it out somehow. So, let's do it. And I'm excited about it. I'm very excited about it. I also want to, and I keep saying this, I've said this for years, so I'm calling bullshit on myself on some level. Get back into writing on the blog. And in part because I feel I have more differentiation with that particular capacity. Not that I'm the best writer, but there's a particular style of writing.

• 32:22Tim Ferriss?

  There's a particular way of deconstructing things that people, at least some people, seem to like, right from the 1,000 True Fans perspective. Whereas in the interview format podcast world, there are a lot of very, very good people with very high production quality. So I feel like that arena is becoming more of a red ocean per se, as opposed to a blue ocean. So I'd like to experiment with doing more on the blog also, just to reinforce something you said, because the blog, number one, it's a platform that I own. It's on open source, it's WordPress. And the sort of barrier to comment is a little higher, which I like. There's a little more friction in the process. People can't just be like, that's so fucking dumb LOLZ, you know, on the blog.

• 33:07Tim Ferriss?

  There's more involved. There is a little more process involved in terms of leaving comments. So the signal tends to be higher. It allows me to workshop things also, quickly workshop things and see how they land. And I still think that for like memetic testing, text is pretty hard to beat. They're very different laboratories. Text and voice are very different laboratories. I think voice helps you to talk through whatever is percolating to develop ideas that you can then test really effectively via text, if that makes any sense. So I have two questions for you. The first is, we, in our last conversation, when I interviewed you on the podcast, talked about the humor magazine at Dartmouth.

• 33:49Tim Ferriss?

  And one of the main things that helped you, not specific to that, or I should say, limited to that, was that you're either writing for editors or writing for acceptance and rejection. You had some feedback loop whereby you could improve your writing. As it stands right now, I'm not going to get much of that from my readers. God bless them, right? Because it's not their role, it's a heavy lift. They're gonna either like it or not like it and provide some feedback in the comments. But in terms of becoming a better writer, how would you approach that if you were me, writing blog posts? If I have a book, I will have possibly an editor. I will have friends read a chapter here or there. But how would you approach that? Because I would like to try to mimic, say Seth Godin,

• 34:33Tim Ferriss?

  like short blog posts, which I'm fucking terrible at. I tend to be very verbose, which is why all my books are phone books. So I want to really make a goal for myself to do short blog posts, because that'll be more sustainable, hopefully. How would you create that feedback? Because I want to get better.

• 34:47Cal Newport?

  And I'm happier going back to writing because I mean, I think you're right that it's a much harder skill and it's a much rarer skill. I write constantly. That's basically my baseline for my career is I'm always writing. I'm always writing. Now it's mainly books and New Yorker pieces. In the six weeks, counting today and going back six weeks from today, when we're recording, I've published three pieces in the New Yorker. I'm just writing, writing, writing, writing, because I think that's the rare skill. Because you're right, people can become good podcast interviewers, like good enough. It's pretty quick. I mean, people, I don't know, they-

• 35:23Tim Ferriss?

  With ChatGPT, if they're telegenic and they have a good video setup, they can do it.

• 35:26Cal Newport?

  Yeah, they can do it.

• 35:27Tim Ferriss?

  Give me 10 questions in the style of Lex Friedman, if he were to interview such and such a guest who happens to be my next guest. And then you'll get 10 questions and you can finesse them and then you have your iPad and you're ready to go.

• 35:38Cal Newport?

  And if you have on interesting people, you're really just kind of getting out of the way. And actually, it's an advantage. We have this whole new generation of podcasters who just don't say much and that turns out to actually work well. You know, anyways, but writing is hard as anything. Writing is hard. You can't write without practice. I mean, you've written, what, four or five phone books worth of books and Tim dot blog.

• 35:56Tim Ferriss?

  Five, yeah, published five, yeah.

• 35:59Cal Newport?

  And the blog was going for-

• 36:00Tim Ferriss?

  Thousand blog posts.

• 36:01Cal Newport?

  Really long time. Right. So I think that makes a lot of sense. One idea I would have is particular stylistic targets that you're working with. This post or for the next week or the next month, I like what's happening in this writing over here. This is resonating with me. So my taste is saying this is good. Let me deconstruct that and try that in my post. Like, oh, I like what's going on here with meter. I like what's going on here with abstraction or story. Let me try that. And this is what I did before I had a steady edited gig is that I would deconstruct articles and try to practice particular things I found from them. It was all toolkit building. And then the bigger the toolkit, the more tools you have available. So then you're working on a book chapter, what have you.

• 36:44Cal Newport?

  And you can pull out the, whatever the metaphorical equivalent of the Phillips head screwdriver is here, the saw there. I think the regularity matters too, but it's that taste issue. And this is actually an idea that's in the new book, the slow productivity book, because one of the principles is obsess over quality. And if anything, that becomes the core principle for slowing down.

• 37:04Tim Ferriss?

  I pulled that out because in my notes, it was on like page three or four. And I was like, okay, this seems like- The mother quality.

• 37:12Cal Newport?

  It is.

• 37:13Tim Ferriss?

  In a sense that allows for the birth of all these other qualities.

• 37:18Cal Newport?

  You can't be busy and frenetic and bouncing off the walls with a hundred projects. If you're obsessed about doing something really well, it's incompatible with that. Now, doing something really well means you might have some really intense periods when you're pulling something together. But it is incompatible with being busy. Like Chris Nolan, the director, doesn't even own a smartphone. He is just, I'm making Oppenheimer and that's what I'm doing for the next three years. And then when I'm done, I'm going to go away for six months and just read. That's what I do. I cannot be on YouTube, like your Daniel Day Lewis example, because when you obsess over quality, like two things happen. One, you can't be busy because that gets in the way of actually getting really good at something.

• 37:59Cal Newport?

  And then two, if you're doing something really well, that actually gives you the autonomy to push the other junk out of your life and slow down even more. You know, as you get better at something, the more say you get over the way your life unfolds. That's why you've been podcasting 10 years and you can say, I'm not going to do this video thing right now. Because you're really good at it, right? You have some autonomy to figure out how I actually want to do this. I call that principle, the glue. It holds everything else together.

• 38:26Tim Ferriss?

  The glue is the quality first, competency slash quality first.

• 38:29Cal Newport?

  Obsessed over quality. Yeah, because the other two principles are do fewer things and work at a natural pace. But if you're only doing those two things, you've set up a sort of adversarial relationship with work in general. It's like, all I'm looking about is like, how do I do less? I see work adversarially. I want to have more variety in my pacing. You're just sort of trying to get away from reduce or change work. And if that's all you're doing, you're just building up this negative attitude towards work, which I think, by the way, is one of the dominant reactions to burnout right now. And let's say elite culture, it's just an all out rejection of work itself. Like, well, any drive to do things, it's a capitalist construction and the real thing to do is just do nothing.

• 39:10Cal Newport?

  But that doesn't last and the people who are telling you to do this are not doing nothing. They're striving really hard to make sure that their sub stacks and books about doing nothing are going to have a really big audience. They're giving talks on it. So you can't just focus on the doing less part. You need the obsess over quality part, and that's where you're able to still fulfill that human drive to create. And that's where you still build the leverage to control your life and make a living. And so that's why I think it's the glue. You have to do the other things. But if you just do the other things, you know, you're going to end up doing quiet quitting TikToks or something like that. You're not going to end up where you want to be.

• 39:45Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no purgatory.

• 39:50Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first

• 40:33Tim Ferriss?

  subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink AG1, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 40:54Tim Ferriss?

  Returning to, because this relates to the writing of slow productivity, choosing to spend your entire summer working on this, dog with a bone with respect to the writing process. So I will come back to that, but not to bore everybody who is not a writer in the audience. Although, by the way, folks, I'm talking about creative process and choosing projects. So I want to talk about choosing to write slow productivity because Wanting to or understanding the importance of, say, obsessing over quality, which I think you would agree is the best promotion, like rather than worrying about all the different ways you can market something like product first is a great marketing plan. You still need to choose which thing to become great at because you could choose quiet quitting TikToks

• 41:37Tim Ferriss?

  as your particular specialty. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's not for me, but you chose instead to do other things. So how do you choose to use the sort of metaphor? I think it's probably apocryphal, but the stones, the big rocks to put in your jar before the gravel and the sand. How did you choose slow productivity? Why that versus the many other things you could do? So presumably you get all sorts of speaking invites. You could have just crammed a bunch of those into the summer and done, done really well financially. You could have done, who knows what? Maybe have people emailing you about like film adaptations of this or who knows? You have stuff that gets lobbed over the transom. Maybe you even have great or exciting ideas. Two in the morning, like, oh God, it'd be so cool if I did X.

• 42:22Tim Ferriss?

  At the end of the day, you chose to focus on this. Why?

• 42:24Cal Newport?

  There's a general and a specific answer. The general is writing is what I do. That is what I do. I come up with ideas that I think are important and I put them into writing with the best possible craft. I'm not happy if I'm not writing. So that's why I'm not giving a hundred talks a year. It's why I'm not releasing an app. It's why you can't hire the deep work academy consultants. Or you don't know how many times people have told me like, we would give you any amount of money. They'll come to our company and like redesign our practices to be focused on deep work and less distracted by email. And I'm like, no, I'm going to write instead.

• 43:02Tim Ferriss?

  I wrote the book.

• 43:03Cal Newport?

  Read the book.

• 43:04Tim Ferriss?

  You guys can just buy it.

• 43:05Cal Newport?

  Yeah, buy, buy many, many of those that try to replicate what they would pay. But then specifically that idea, I spend years, I spend years cultivating ideas before I'll select one to write a book about. This is one of the skills I think is lost in the internet age because again, going back, let's tie this all to the algorithm. That surfaces something or that promotes something very different. It's a volume. Among other things, I want to put a lot of stuff out there to see what the algorithm hits. It's a format game. It's also a lot of chasing trends game. You say, okay, what just took off two days ago on related channels? Now you're going to get 70 videos all doing the same thing. It's a completely different way of thinking. I think part of my secret sauce and the secret sauce

• 43:50Cal Newport?

  for a lot of people, it could be at least, is really waiting to get started. You know, I wrote this years ago on our mutual friend, or the friend who introduced me to your work, actually, or Meet Sethi, way back when, in his early blog, I remember writing an article for him that said, "Don't get started." It was like my advice, because my thought was, it's really hard to get a good idea. And so like, take your time. And then to cultivate a good idea takes years. And you have to write, you have to, you know, you're going to dedicate a lot of your life to it. So really, don't get started if you can at all hold back until you're really, really sure about it. And then people say, "Yeah, but I worried that I'm just gonna procrastinate forever." And in some sense, it's like, well, then maybe you're not meant to do this type of work. But the solution to that is not just, let's just go. Let's just like tweet this. Let's do this

• 44:35Cal Newport?

  video. Let me jump over this. Let me start using generative AI, looking for, if I crypto this thing, just looking for some quick thing that you can connect. And you gotta just not want to get started until you can't help but get started. I think that's frustrating for a lot of the internet generation, because it takes a really long time.

• 44:53Tim Ferriss?

  So I do want the specific, I mean, you did mention it, I guess, because you're a writer, but that not to go like it's turtles all the way down. But I will ask, like, how did you decide that you're a writer? Looking at your CV, one might conclude, yes, he does a lot of writing, but he's also a computer science theoretician, and he's this, and this, and this, and da, da, da, da, da. So to say, "I am a writer," is something that I think also many folks right now, who are in any form of content, would have a lot of trouble saying, "I am X." They might say, "I'm a YouTuber," but usually it's like 15 hyphens. And therein lies many opportunities, and also many temptations to be resisted. I would say that, a few observations. The first is that as you're talking about, "Don't get started," it makes me think of Warren Buffett

• 45:38Tim Ferriss?

  and the "don't just do something, stand there."

• 45:42Tim Ferriss?

  Like you don't need to make a hundred thousand investments. You don't need to be a day trader. Wait for the fat pitch, like figure out what the fat pitch looks like, figure out what your kind of zone of genius is. What is your advantage? And you are, I would say also, like the, it seems to me like, and I'm really putting together a question with a million semicolons here. But you do get started, but you're not over committing to half baked ideas. You are exploring and experimenting and workshopping, which is also, as I think I might have mentioned, and another reason why I want to get back to the blog posts. Because if you look at, say, the four hour body, the four hour body was workshop for years before it ever came out.

• 46:24Tim Ferriss?

  Just wasn't under that name. The first blog post that ever went super mega viral on dig at the time, D I G G. And perhaps a few others was from Kevin Rose.

• 46:34Cal Newport?

  Sure, Kevin.

• 46:35Tim Ferriss?

  Was from Geek to Freak about gaining a bunch of muscle. And the response to that, it was what made me very interested in workshopping adjacent material to see if it would be similarly received. And if I would enjoy it, if I would be good at it, et cetera. And so that was workshop for years. That doesn't mean wasting time. It means that by the time I decided to really commit resources, the likelihood of success in my mind was, I'm not going to say all but certain, but it was as certain as I could possibly be. I had already tested this. Four hour work week was workshop for six, seven years in lectures. So how did you decide that you were a writer, that you would identify that way?

• 47:15Tim Ferriss?

  Because identifying that way is a story that enables you to then be very selective and focused in what you do.

• 47:24Cal Newport?

  Right. It's a good question because I decided early, I decided I was a writer when I was 20. And I became a professional when I was 21. So I signed with my agent when I was 20 and signed my first book deal right after I turned 21. So I came to it early because I was a big reader.

• 47:45Cal Newport?

  And was verbally precocious.

• 47:47Tim Ferriss?

  It's gonna be in the title of the podcast.

• 47:49Cal Newport?

  But you know, I, I, I read a lot.

• 47:51Tim Ferriss?

  The glue of high quality and being verbally.

• 47:53Cal Newport?

  Verbally precocious and, and literally precocious, I suppose. I mean, it was like gifted and talented reading program. People think, you know, the Johns Hopkins talent surfs to C T Y camps. People think, oh, you probably went to one of those for math, but I was invited for the creative writing one. I went to college and I said, as I went to college, I'm not going to be a writer. I, I just, it's really hard. Writing's really hard, so that's not what I'm going to do. I was a walk on under the crew team instead. Is that the right build for it? And like, this is what I'm going to do, I'm going to do sports. This is great.

• 48:22Tim Ferriss?

  Was that lightweight or regular weight?

• 48:24Cal Newport?

  A hundred sixty pounds, this guy. There was a lot of sauna and weight cutting in that. Yeah, I was the.

• 48:30Tim Ferriss?

  Brutal.

• 48:30Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I was the big guy. I mean, you know that from wrestling, but I was the big guy that would cut down. Anyways, and I may have talked about this before on the show, I'm not sure, but I, long and short of it, I developed a congenital heart condition, a sort of rapid heartbeat. So I had to stop rowing. And so I said, maybe I'll see about riding. And that's when I started writing.

• 48:46Tim Ferriss?

  I don't think you mentioned this.

• 48:47Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I mean, it was, I was a pretty good rower, actually. It was, you know, a bunch of recruits on this freshman boat from prep schools. And then it was like me and one other walk on. It just, I was a middle distance sprinter in high school. I was the right build for it, whatever. So I was, I was like, I could maybe make a go of this and had to stop. It was just out of nowhere, just, all right, I have a, it's called an atrial flutter. Okay, so I guess I, I can't do this anymore. And so then I said, let me try, I need some sort of activity. I guess grudgingly, grudgingly, I'll try writing. And the very first thing I wrote was an op ed about nine 11 for the student newspaper. A couple of weeks after nine 11 and I started, I started writing columns for him. I got involved in the humor magazine.

• 49:30Cal Newport?

  After a year or so of that, I was like, oh, maybe I, I am good at writing. And that's when I decided I'm going to write a book. Let's become a writer, let me write a book. And that's what we talked about last time was figuring out, how can a 21 year old sell a book? And it would have to be the right topic. And we did all of that, but that's when I declared. But when it comes to your other part of this question, which is how do you figure out what to work on? I think you have two options and you can do both. One option is to actually have like you did, or I have a way of test driving idea. So, you know, I use like you used to do my newsletter and my blog to test drive it. The fact that you. Pointed out, like you honed in on slow productivity as something you wanted to talk to me about was a really good signal. Okay, this topic probably has legs.

• 50:13Cal Newport?

  So I do a lot of that. So you're right. If you read my newsletter, I'm trying a lot of things, most of which will never become a book. If you don't have that, then the other option, and this is what I think of as like the MFA option, is you have to develop really good taste.

• 50:27Tim Ferriss?

  MFA, meaning Masters in Fine Arts?

• 50:29Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So if you go back, I took an award, the Penn Hemingway Award for First Time Novelists. I just chose the whatever year was most recent, and here's the finalist. And I went through their bios, like all but one had come through an MFA program. And so what's going on there, it's not that these MFA programs, which are creative writing graduate programs, they don't really teach you, it's not instructive. Like here's how you do paragraphs, or here's techniques you didn't know, but it increases your taste. Meaning your ability to recognize what's good and what's not, and what's possible with good things. So that's the traditional option in sort of a pre-internet age, is you get really discerning about other people's work. You read a lot and just know, this is a good novel and this is not, or you know, I read a lot of New Yorker,

• 51:12Cal Newport?

  and I know what makes like a really good long-form, non-fiction journalist article. And then you can apply that taste to your own work and be your own worst critic. This isn't there yet, this isn't there yet. Oh, this is getting better. So you either need a way to test what you're doing, and the internet makes that easier than it was 20 years ago, and/or you really have to put in the work to develop taste. So you understand what makes this good. I'm not there yet, but this is the closest thing I've done so far. So let me go after this, or I can see how good this is. So I know, I'm not going to try to publish this as a novel, but I could probably do a short story over here. Taste can also become the way you do it. But one way or the other, you do need some sort of discernment function to figure out what ideas are worth pursuing, because if you're just going off of inspiration in the moment,

• 51:58Cal Newport?

  I mean, that's a huge crapshoot. Like, you're really unlikely to be successful that way.

• 52:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And I'm also, and maybe this is just because I'm curmudgeon, and one of the old Muppets up in the balcony, Mortimer. But I think offline is incredibly uncrowded and...

• 52:18Tim Ferriss?

  Absurdly valuable in the sense that if you're looking for real time feedback, go volunteer for 10 bucks an hour to teach a class at Learning Annex and see what sticks, see what works, see what's confusing. The feedback loop is so fast. You do that once a week for a month, you're going to know a lot. I mean, you're going to know more than if you'd written 100 blog posts, by far, in my opinion. I try to test things live. And for people who might be curious, people who test material tend to test material in a lot of different ways, in my experience. If you've listened to, for instance, my Jamie Fox episode from way back in the day, 2015, it was podcast of the year at the time, back when that was possible, when they were like, oh, only a few thousand podcasts to choose

• 52:58Tim Ferriss?

  from. But he was, even in that podcast, working on material, seeing what my response was. And you can do that with nonfiction, too. Just as a quick example of taste, I'm listening to a book right now, which I've read excerpts of, but it's called The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby, and it's about venture capital. He wrote a book also called More Money Than God, which is nonfiction, encyclopedic and beautifully written romp through the world of hedge funds, which blew me away because he was very good at making the sort of esoteric, very graspable, similar to, in some senses, Michael Lewis. But The Power Law book, I

• 53:41Tim Ferriss?

  know most of the content. I lived in that world for a long time. I know most of the history. And still, I was listening to it in the car yesterday. I was like, good God, it's just so good. Like, the writing and the timing that we've talked about before, and Dave Barry, for like, just like, setting up the punchline and like, ending the chapter on the right note where you're like, oh, it's so good. It's just so, so good. The same way I felt about, say, Joe Abercrombie and this fantasy trilogy, which starts with the blade itself, where I was just like, oh, God, it's so well architected. It's not just the prose, but it is the prose as well. So that taste and building up that barometer being so important. And let me ask you-

• 54:25Tim Ferriss?

  On the topic of slow productivity, could you give some examples, I mean, you mentioned Chris Nolan, could you give some examples, old and new, of people who in your mind exemplify slow productivity?

• 54:36Cal Newport?

  I was motivated by slow food as an example, where they look back to traditional cuisines, where cultures had evolved over generation and generation, like what's the right way to eat in this region of Italy? And the slow food movement would look back at that for inspiration. I look back at what I call traditional knowledge workers. So people who did things with their brain, but not the normal 1950s and onward, I'm in an office or working at a computer screen. So like artists and philosophers, scientists, the original knowledge workers, they tended to have a lot more freedom and autonomy than we did today. So I said, great, we can study them to see what did they gravitate towards in terms of how they approached or structured their really important work, because they had freedom and flexibility.

• 55:20Cal Newport?

  So we can identify what matters and then adapt that to the sort of modern life. So a lot of my examples are these traditional knowledge workers. So one of the early examples is Isaac Newton. And I said, okay, we all know he wrote this great masterwork, the Principia. Calculus is just invented in that as part of the effort to specify the laws of gravity, that gives celestial order to the way that the cosmos works. He wrote that thing over decades, decades. He would go and do other things and come back. It wasn't this frantic push until it's done, but no one remembers how long he spent working on that. They're just like, yeah, that thing changed the way we understand the world. Lin-Manuel Miranda with his first play in The Heights, the same way. I do his whole story.

• 56:04Cal Newport?

  It's a seven-year odyssey from when he first performs his first version of that play as a student play, which wasn't very good, to when it first goes on to a professional stage, his pre-Broadway debut. That's a seven-year period. And he's working on it, then he's not, then he's working on it again, and he's not. We don't know about that now. We're just like, oh, yeah, his first play won a lot of Grammys, and he did Hamilton. He's like a really good playwright.

• 56:28Tim Ferriss?

  Right. If you read Wikipedia, you're like, oh.

• 56:30Cal Newport?

  Yeah, you don't realize.

• 56:31Tim Ferriss?

  The synopsis in one sentence.

• 56:32Cal Newport?

  His dad told him, like, when he left, when he graduated from college, his dad was like, you really should go to law school. He took a job as a substitute teacher. He was spending a lot of time with a freestyle rap troupe called Love Supreme that would travel around doing like freestyle rap shows. So if you zoomed in on a particular day in the almost decade that Lin-Manuel Miranda was working on in The Heights, you'd be like, man, you're so lazy. You're not even working on your thing. Like, what's going on? Why aren't you getting after it? Why aren't you, you know, why aren't you crushing it? Because things take longer. I use Georgia O'Keeffe as an example of seasonality, that her productivity as an artist didn't really pick up until she began. So you know what?

• 57:13Cal Newport?

  In the summers, I'm going with Alfred Stiglitz, we're going to Lake George and I'm going to sit there in a shanty that she called it the shanty. It was an outbuilding near the lake. I'm just going to paint and be inspired and then I'll come back after the summer and finish the artwork and show them and do all the other sorts of stuff. Most productive years of her life. By actually slowing down for a season every year, her productivity exploded. She became, you know, one of the most famous early modernists of that whole era of painting, right? So we see those examples. Well, Murray Currie, at the pinnacle of about to discover in pitch blend, the substance she's studying, about to isolate radioactivity and win her first of two Nobel prizes, goes to France with her family on vacation for two months.

• 57:54Cal Newport?

  In the moment, you're like, what are you doing? You got to be getting after, you got to be crushing it. But we don't see that now. We're like, yeah, she was great. She won two Nobel prizes. Like, way to go.

• 58:03Tim Ferriss?

  She wasn't part of the hustle culture.

• 58:04Cal Newport?

  There was no hustle culture. That's the interesting thing. So when you go back and study people producing things of real value, using their brain, they were smart and they were dedicated and they worked really hard, but they didn't hustle and they didn't work 10-hour days, day after day. They didn't work all out year round. They didn't push, push, push until this thing was done. It was a more natural variation. They had less on their plate at the same time and they glued it all together by obsessing over quality. That's the slow productivity approach. It still produces stuff that you're really proud of. But it doesn't burn you out and it doesn't leave you in this weird out of sync balance where work is taking up almost all of your time.

• 58:45Tim Ferriss?

  I think a lot of choosing a path is about choosing trade offs. So if you choose slow productivity, there's the question of what you should be prepared to face in terms of trade offs. What are the pressures, expectations, psychological challenges, et cetera, that you should be prepared to face? Why don't we start there? Because I think most people listening will agree, like, yes, I don't want to be doing quiet quitting TikTok videos. In other words, I'd rather be building the Sistine Chapel instead of sand castles that just get wiped away every time a wave comes in. But the fact of the matter is, you know, I have a mortgage. I've got this, I've got this, this, this, and I can't just disappear for months at

• 59:29Tim Ferriss?

  a time and take two decades to write my masterwork. I can see how a lot of folks would rightly say that, at least at face value. So what should people be willing to accept as trade offs or should be prepared to face if they choose slow productivity? And is it mutually exclusive? Like presumably Lin Benwell Miranda had a way to buy groceries and it wasn't from doing freestyle rap, right? So maybe I'm making a, creating a false dichotomy here.

• 59:58Cal Newport?

  Lin was a teacher and was also a columnist. He was writing reviews and columns for a paper while he was working on this in his spare time. But the bigger point, the important one, is how do we take an example like Newton and the Principia and apply it to someone who has just a 21st century corporate semi remote hybrid work job for a big company? So how do we isolate the principle and then make it pragmatic for people who are not traditional knowledge workers, but just modern knowledge workers? So like if we start with the first principle, do fewer things. Well, what this really means, if you have a normal corporate job, is starting to be very explicit about workload management, which is something that everyone does workload management, but we tend to do it in really inefficient ways.

• 1:00:42Cal Newport?

  Because this is left to the individual in the knowledge work context, in most jobs, not in software development, but in most other jobs, it's up to you just to manage what's on your plate. People send you emails and you just say, yeah, sure, I'll do it. So what most people do, for example, is they wait until they feel really stressed. And then they say, all right, I have psychological cover to say no because I'm so overwhelmed that I feel justified in taking the social capital hit for saying no. It's a terrible way to manage your workload. So you can be much more explicit about how you manage your workload. Here's how many slots I have. Oh, I've filled them. I mean, this is really sort of four hour work week style. Let's get in and write the systems for how we manage workload. You could go to a pull based system instead of a push based system. You can do reverse to do list.

• 1:01:27Cal Newport?

  And there's a lot of things you can do to make sure that the amount of work on your plate doesn't get too large in a way that's fully compatible. Work at a natural pace. Well, there's organizational things you can do here so that you're not at full intensity, but you can also just do this yourself. You can titrate your workload. I go easier in the summer than I do in the rest of the year. And I can do this in a way that my employer doesn't notice. You know, it's pretty subtle and like what projects you take on or don't take on. You can quiet quit for two months and no one notices. Whereas if you quiet quit for 20 months, people say, okay, wait a second. I know your worth as a human is not defined by your labor, but your worth to me as an employee is you gotta do something, right?

• 1:02:04Tim Ferriss?

  Quiet quitting is just not doing very much work.

• 1:02:07Cal Newport?

  Quiet quitting is doing the bare minimum. Yeah. And it comes out of a place of this sort of late stage capitalism critique of like, why should I have to do work, which is a whole other thing. And then if you couple this all with obsessing over quality, that then becomes the accelerant that allows you to do these other things faster and better. So as you hone in on, okay, here's what I'm going to own within this company and I'm going to get better and better at this and make myself more and more valuable. Now you're able to much more easily and much more aggressively do fewer things. Now you're able to much more easily and aggressively say, I'm gone in August. I don't do work at June. You gain autonomy as you get better and then you're able to accelerate these things. So the vision is even if you work for someone else, these principles can be implemented, whether they're on board or not.

• 1:02:51Cal Newport?

  And it's going to get you something like the slow productivity benefits of a, I'm doing good work. Work is not taking up most of my life.

• 1:02:59Tim Ferriss?

  And I think we can safely assume that a lot of the audience listening will be self-employed or have some agency, at least as most people would assume beyond, say,

• 1:03:10Tim Ferriss?

  Mid-level HR manager at a large company.

• 1:03:13Cal Newport?

  Yeah, makes it a lot easier, by the way.

• 1:03:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, makes it easier. I think that a lot of folks listening will be self-employed. So we can use that lens if it makes it a little easier. But perhaps they run, who knows, a software, like a B2B SaaS company, and they have employees and so on. But they can set rules at the end of the day. They can create systems that build in some of what you're talking about. What is a pull system instead of a push system?

• 1:03:40Cal Newport?

  I mean, it's okay, here's how many things I work on at a time. So I only pull something new in when I'm done with something, which is different than the default of anyone can push work onto your plate at any time. And it's up to you to just sort of manage this. You have an unlimited load. A pull system says, no, this is what I'm working on now. I can't do something else until I'm done with this. Now, we can have a holding tank, and this is where it is. Here's how I estimate when I'm going to get to it. There's this many things ahead of it. Software developers already do this because they already have Kanban-inspired cards on a whiteboard system where you pull in, I'm going to work on this feature now. And over here, you have the holding tanks of features that need to be done. And when you're done on with the feature you're working on, it moves to the next column and you can pull something else into its place.

• 1:04:26Cal Newport?

  You could do this more with more other types of work. The idea being you don't want to be juggling too much at the same time because the overhead gets to you.

• 1:04:33Tim Ferriss?

  How do you do that personally?

• 1:04:35Cal Newport?

  The similar alternative to that for people in highly autonomous roles, like mine is a professor writers quota systems. So that's more what I will lean into. Break up work into the different types of things I need to do. And quota, here's how many of these I do per semester. Here's how many of these I do at a time. The idea is I still hit the different areas of stuff that is part of my responsibilities, but it's capped. So if I have a quota as a professor for here's how many paper reviews I do per semester, when I hit that cap. I can now say to someone, hey, thanks for thinking about this. I do a lot of paper reviews. I like doing paper reviews. I've already hit my quota for the semester, however, so I can't take anymore on this semester. This is really effective because for someone to push back

• 1:05:19Cal Newport?

  against that, they basically just have to argue your quota is wrong. Well, whatever it is, is wrong. You should be doing more, you know, as opposed to saying, I'm really busy, you know, I don't know if I have time. And they're like, everyone's busy. It'd be good for me if you would just do this.

• 1:05:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. Don't worry. I can make this a really light lift for you.

• 1:05:36Cal Newport?

  Yeah, don't worry about it and will whatever. There's nothing more quixotic than the overburdened worker who is trying to not say no, but get the person who's giving them the work to voluntarily agree to not give them the work. It never works. If someone's trying to get you to do something, and you're like, well, I guess I could, but you know, I am pretty busy. They're never going to say, you sound busy. Don't do this. They're like, oh, good. Well, I'm glad you can do it. Here you go. Get this off my plate. What are you talking about? I'll lean more into quotas. And I'm really careful about that.

• 1:06:08Tim Ferriss?

  When you say careful, what do you mean? Careful about taking on too much?

• 1:06:11Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I'm very careful.

• 1:06:12Tim Ferriss?

  Is that what you mean?

• 1:06:13Cal Newport?

  Yeah. And not only do I have quotas for, I only do this much per semester. I'll think about, I'm not going to do any of this work this season, or I'm riding this season. So I'm going to disappear and not do this. Or this season, I'm working on research. I'm very wary of workload and workload management. How many things do I have on my plate? That's the number I check with a lot of trepidation and a lot of anxiety. You know, one of my core ideas is the problem about putting a lot of things on your plate, even if they don't have colliding deadlines, or it's up to you when you finish them, is once something is on your plate and you've agreed to do it, it generates overhead. People are going to check in on it. There's going to be calls you have to jump on to talk about it. It has some cognitive space. And

• 1:06:57Cal Newport?

  what's been happening a lot in modern knowledge work is that people have put so much stuff on their plate that the overhead of just managing all of this stuff, not doing the work, just the administrative overhead of calls and emails and meetings, takes up most of their schedule. And it's this weird, almost Sisyphean position that so many knowledge workers are in today, where all day long, it's just talking about their work. And it's, okay, maybe late at night or on the weekend, I do a little bit of work. Like, it makes no sense, right? If your workload gets too big. The overhead takes over more and more of your time and it takes longer to get through your actual workload. It's an incredibly inefficient way of executing work. It's one of the reasons why, by the way, that this is not a zero sum game, slow productivity. It doesn't make you worse at your job, but happier. It actually makes you better at your

• 1:07:42Cal Newport?

  job. I mean, if I'm an employer, I should like the idea of slow productivity because my workers are going to produce better stuff. We will make more money if we don't pile 15 things on their plate because more of their time is going to be working on value-producing objectives and not talking about objectives that they don't have time to actually get to. There's actually really a useful alignment happening here between clients and entrepreneurs, between employers and employees. Slow productivity produces good stuff. It doesn't just make the workers happier. It doesn't just make you happier. You produce better stuff. I mean, your company has more profit. Your clients are happier. You can charge more for the services you offer. So it's not zero sum. It's more win-win than anything else.

• 1:08:26Tim Ferriss?

  I would have to imagine that also if any company were to have the emperor of the universe dictate that they embrace the tenets of slow productivity for, say, a three to six month period of time, the companies that would not do well on at least one level would probably be those who have not clearly defined what the high leverage, most important things are. So if somebody at the top or if a manager hasn't actually clearly thought through and taken the measure twice, cut once approach to determining kind of what domino tips over a bunch of other dominos or makes them irrelevant, they'll probably be quite bad at slow productivity. I mean, that would make them bad at most types of

• 1:09:09Tim Ferriss?

  productivity, I would say, other than just like the volume game of tonnage of here doing other 30 tasks, but remaining really focused, right? Which I think is a risk.

• 1:09:21Tim Ferriss?

  Or I'd say that risk is increased when you are not good at defending yourself against the agendas of everyone else, in a sense, right? If you take on too much. From a tactical perspective, you mentioned the, I only do say, making this up. I've committed to only doing five peer-reviewed article reviews per quarter. Really appreciate you thinking of me, but unfortunately I've already hit that and I'd need to focus on A, B, or C. So the actual language that is used for defense, I'm very interested in. What other types of language do you use when you get stuff over the transom, which I have to imagine you do? Are there other approaches, other specific types of phrasings that you have found you

• 1:10:06Tim Ferriss?

  come back to?

• 1:10:07Cal Newport?

  Right.

• 1:10:07Tim Ferriss?

  Because they're effective?

• 1:10:08Cal Newport?

  Well, extreme clarity is the most important. I think people tend to focus too much in this type of situation on politeness, which is really not that important to the person making the request. They want this thing done and they want to know if you're going to do it or not. Now, you don't want to be rude, but actually clarity is the key. You can have zero wiggle room and anyone, I'm sure you're very good at this. I mean, anyone who has a lot coming over the transom learns, you have to say, I can't do this. And then you can give some explanations, but you can't give any ambiguity. So you say, unfortunately, I can't do this because you can give some explanations. Most people don't read past the, I can't do this. Like they're already emailing the next person that they're going to ask about this once they get to that line.

• 1:10:53Cal Newport?

  So I think short and sweet and clear. Clarity is underrated in this. I mean, what do people really want? They want something done and they also want clarity about when is this going to get done? Because they want to be released from having to keep track of something in their mind. And so it's why this company that made their clients sign a communication agreement. This is how we are going to talk to you. Like this is how we're going to discuss things. You can't just email or call us whenever. What we're going to do is we're going to have, and I believe their setup, this was a few years ago, but I believe their setup was, we're going to have this weekly check-in call and we're going to take careful notes during this check-in call. If any questions you have that we don't have the answer on right away, we're going to take careful notes on that and we'll post it and get you that information back. All right, this is what we're going to do.

• 1:11:37Cal Newport?

  One of the two partners of this company was thinking, this is it, right? Like we're going out of business because clients don't want anything taken away from them. They want full flexibility. They're going to see this as weird and eccentric and who are we to say this? The clients didn't care. They didn't care because what do the clients want? If I have an issue, I need to know it's going to be taken care of. So if you have no communication agreement, what that means is, okay, I just sent you an email about this as soon as I thought about it.

• 1:12:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, nebulous anxiety.

• 1:12:04Cal Newport?

  Nebulous anxiety.

• 1:12:04Tim Ferriss?

  They don't know when something is going to be addressed.

• 1:12:06Cal Newport?

  You better get back to me right away. Because if you don't get back to me right away, I worry that you're going to forget this. And so I'm just going to keep bothering you about this until you get back to me. So then you think, oh, what the client wants is responsiveness. But if you give them an alternative, here's a shared document. Write anything that comes up in here. And on our Thursday call, we're going to go boom, boom, boom. Like, we're going to go through this whole thing. That solves the same problem for them. You're like, great, I can just write this here. And the win for the client is not you responding to an email right away. That's not what they really care about. The win is the anxiety of having to keep track of this has been relieved. And I don't really care how that happens. And I don't care if I have to write it on the, a little piece of paper to attach to a homing pigeon that I'm going to send out the window. And it's going to make it to the roost that you, you know, that your intern check. I don't care. I don't have to worry about it.

• 1:12:51Cal Newport?

  It's not about politeness so much. I mean, you don't want to be rude. It's not about managing and massaging the relationships. It's clarity. Okay, great, you can't do this. Or you can do this, but here's how we're going to talk about it. Okay, good. I trust this will get done now. I know what's coming next. I have 100 other emails in my inbox. I've already moved on. So, you know, I think clarity, clarity, clarity is the key. Once you start actually managing your workloads much more explicitly.

• 1:13:16Tim Ferriss?

  Any other keys for you personally in terms of whether it's like preemptively stemming the tide by having public rules or blog posts or auto response or something like that that basically says, these are the things I can and can do or will or won't do. Do you have any other systems in place or anything like that that lessens the burden of it? Maybe the answer is you just don't get a lot of this because people are already very well aware that sort of your existence and positioning in the world is the deep work guy. So they just don't send you a ton of stuff. I don't know.

• 1:13:46Cal Newport?

  And I'll tell you one thing that helps is so many people have switched to a social media paradigm for communication. Oh, I'm going to DM you on whatever. The fact that I'm not on.

• 1:13:55Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:56Cal Newport?

  They're like, I don't know. I don't know how to reach you. People forgot about email. I also have.

• 1:14:02Cal Newport?

  I do have though, you know, I call them communication channels, very specific. There is no, here is the general way to talk to Cal Newport. I have very specific channels for specific reasons with clear expectations. I used to call these sender filters and I still really depend on these today. Like if you have this type of request, you can send it here. If you want to send me a link or something, you can send it here, but you're not going to get a reply, but I probably will see it. If this is an interview request, you know, I'm aiming you at a publicist. If this is a speaking request, I'm aiming you at a speaker. Here's a big warning about using my academic address. If you send a non-academic thing here, it will not be read. So you're not outsmarting anyone. And then I add on top of that, and this is controversial, but I think it's common.

• 1:14:46Cal Newport?

  I add on top of that, a second layer of filter, which is default to not answering. And if I don't know a person and they come in with a request, because I have these filters set up, right? That's pretty clear. Like this is not just a general purpose address. That's my final filter.

• 1:15:01Tim Ferriss?

  And you've made this explicit.

• 1:15:02Cal Newport?

  It's explicit.

• 1:15:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. How do you phrase that? You're like, if I don't know you, it's very low likelihood that I'll reply, which is fine. Just wondering how you convey it.

• 1:15:10Cal Newport?

  The particular channels have this, right? So it'll be send this here, this here, this here, this there. And it'll be clear, I'm not going to respond probably, but I probably will see it. And I have other people, this is not even going to me. It's when people circumvent that, they get to my personal address or they go to my Georgetown, they go to my professor address. My default becomes not to respond, which, you know, it's a little bit controversial, but actually it's not a bad filter. I learned that from professors at MIT when I was there. That was sort of how the grand professors at MIT, Magister inbox was if I don't respond, that means you need to try again, right? Like whatever you sent here, it was their way of saying, no, try again. You need to be more clear or have a more specific ask or something I can actually help with. And so that's my final wall is getting past that.

• 1:15:55Cal Newport?

  And that took me a while to, I felt comfortable doing this. My final wall is like, if I don't know how to respond to this easily, I'm probably just not going to respond to it. And that sort of works a lot of things out as well. There's just not this expectation. This is not a conversation in person. To not answer this email is not the same as you coming up to me and me just pretending like you're not there. It's a different sort of asymmetric medium. So you can feel more comfortable about just not answering.

• 1:16:20Tim Ferriss?

  What do you think in this book, I ask this question a lot, because it's usually something that pops up, which is, what do you think is tremendously important that people might gloss over? For instance, for the Four Hour Workweek, it's the Filling the Void chapter. People are like, "Oh, yeah, it must be a nice problem to have. Like, you gotta worry about how you fill your time." I'm like, "Actually, no, it's a very, very, very, very important thing, because if you are a work machine and you're always in sixth gear and then you remove work, your life doesn't just get auto-populated with awesome stuff that makes you fulfilled. You kind of have to plan for it." And people gloss over that, right? Because they're like, "Ah, I'll worry about that later." And then they end up in these existential crises. So is there anything in this book, could be anything, like a philosophical kind of foundational

• 1:17:02Tim Ferriss?

  piece, could be strategic or tactical, where you're like, "Hmm, based on people I've talked to, based on proofreaders, based on whatever, I'm like, hmm, if I could draw attention to something I think people might gloss over or not give its full weight of importance, would anything come to mind?"

• 1:17:19Cal Newport?

  I think people don't realize the degree to which they don't actually have a sensical definition of productivity. There's a part in the book where I survey 700 of my readers, and one of the questions I ask them is just define productivity. No one has an answer. What most people did was just describe their job. Productivity is producing good software. Like, they just sort of list what it is their job is supposed to be. So I think people, they think they know what productivity is, and that it's just a matter of your relationship to that. Like, "Well, productivity, I don't like it, and so I want to do less of it." But the reality is, no one really knows what it means. I think people don't realize how chaotic and haphazard and impromptu the way they're

• 1:18:04Cal Newport?

  organizing their work is, how chaotic it really is, right? I don't think people realize that. What we really did, and by we, I mean like the whole knowledge sector, is in the 1950s, when knowledge work emerged as a major economic sector with really large companies, with a large number of people working in offices... There wasn't a clear idea, how do we measure how someone's productive? Because all the ideas about that came from manufacturing and agriculture, and they didn't apply. Like in manufacturing, you could tabulate the labor hours per Model T produced. And in agriculture, you could count bushels produced per acre of land. You had numbers. And so you could say, oh, the assembly line increases this number. So let's do that instead. Or this Norfolk crop rotation method increases like the bushes. You know, so let's do that instead.

• 1:18:49Cal Newport?

  Knowledge work couldn't have any number like that because the jobs are more diverse and the organizational systems were autonomous. Like, it's just up to you to figure out how to organize yourself. There was no organizational wide way of assigning and monitoring work that you could test and see, what if we change this? Is it better? So what what happened was, we invented this idea called pseudo-productivity, which was, we will use activity that's visible as a proxy for useful effort. So it's just, hey, you're doing something that's good. Doing more things is better than less. That's where the sort of notion of sort of busyness is good. And how are you on busy? And then what happened is my contention is, once we got mobile computing and the internet, and we got networks and email, and I could work on my laptop, you can't combine that with pseudo-productivity.

• 1:19:34Cal Newport?

  Because if more activity is better than less, and you have endless work that you can do in any place, you just spiral into just constant work and guilt. And that's where you get the burnout crisis.

• 1:19:44Tim Ferriss?

  You're done.

• 1:19:44Cal Newport?

  You're done, right? Like, it kind of worked.

• 1:19:47Tim Ferriss?

  You're going to incinerate on reentry. Yeah, you're done.

• 1:19:50Cal Newport?

  Like pseudo-productivity worked for Don Draper. It's like, yeah, okay, visible activity is better. But you can only see me when I'm in the office. And let's all agree that we can have three martinis at lunch. And so it's like, okay, fine, whatever. Put the magazine down when someone comes by your office. It doesn't work with an iPhone. It doesn't work with a, when you have a MacBook and you could be doing Slack. So I mean, this is the thing I think people miss is they think they know what productivity means. They have a lot of opinions about it. And my argument actually is, you don't have a sensical definition. We just have this like, activity is somehow good, which is clearly not, especially for non-entry level knowledge work. Busyness doesn't produce high value. And so I think people too often think of something like slow productivity.

• 1:20:32Cal Newport?

  As I'm willing to trade off economic output for psychological sustainability. I'm willing to trade off making more money for feeling better about myself. And that's not what it is. It's no, what you're doing now is crazy. You're building Model Ts with the lights off. Like, it's a terrible way to work. It's like, no, let's get a real definition of productivity that is very sustainable, but also is going to produce good stuff. And so I think people think they're stepping away from something that works, but it's hard. Just gets it done, but it's hard on me. The thing that we're doing now doesn't work. It's not a sensical way of connecting human brains to add value to information. It's not a good way of working.

• 1:21:13Cal Newport?

  So like, almost any alternative that's intentional is going to be better than what we have. So we might as well choose one that's also sustainable and makes us feel good. But I think people get that wrong a lot.

• 1:21:23Tim Ferriss?

  What's your definition for yourself of productivity?

• 1:21:27Cal Newport?

  Let's go back to the book you mentioned, Born Standing Up, which, as you know, is influential for me. I mean, I wrote a book called So Good They Can't Ignore You.

• 1:21:35Tim Ferriss?

  It's so good. It is so good. Yeah, it's a great book.

• 1:21:39Cal Newport?

  But I loved what Martin said in that, which was basically, you take a craft that you think is important and that you could be good at, and that's interesting to you. And then you really put on your blinders for a decade. Get really good at something that's important. Everything else will work itself out. Like, his exact quote was, be so good they can't ignore you. If you do that, everything else has a way of working out. That's really been my thing. I mean, the decision I made in college after I got that heart condition and I couldn't recruit anymore was, here's the two things I'm going to do. I'm going to do computer science, I'm going to write. And like, that's all I did. Like, that was it. Let me do computer science, let me write, I don't want to do Instagram, I don't want to do Twitter. Let me just do that. I just want to get good at this and let me read people who are really good.

• 1:22:24Cal Newport?

  I want to get better and better at this. That's where all of my energy was. Like, let me just try to do these two things as well as I can. And that's the way I think about productivity now is how good is the best thing I've produced recently? That's it. I want to be better at things that are hard and meaningful. And that's it. I don't want to be famous.

• 1:22:39Tim Ferriss?

  And by good, you mean an internally driven evaluation of quality?

• 1:22:46Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:46Tim Ferriss?

  By good, just not to be nitpicky, but right? Good is not, as we already know, based on your description of not using social media, but it's not likes, it's not this, it's not that. How much of it is how you feel about a piece versus, say, with The New Yorker, how well something does, the feedback you get from editors or other inputs?

• 1:23:05Cal Newport?

  I think external is good if it's a trusted evaluation because you can't BS yourself. Unambiguous indication of value is really, I think, the right thing to chase because it keeps you honest. Like in computer science, when I last talked to you, I was working on a theoretical computer science paper, an algorithms paper, and there was an idea in there I thought was really good. And I was like, I think there's something really interesting here. And we published it and won an award, it was Best Paper Award, right? Like, this was the best paper at this conference in the fall of, you know, 2022. That's important to me. It's hard. It's hard to write papers. It's hard to get them passed, accepted, and it's hard to win an award. That's something to strive towards. And the same thing with The New Yorker.

• 1:23:48Cal Newport?

  It's like just really hard to write for them. It's really hard to get a piece accepted. It's really hard to get a piece out there that seems to be resonating with people. So I'm looking for that. Or even numbers. I mean, so I'm not against external numbers. I mean, seeing a book find an audience is important to me because I'm not a good marketer. So if a book finds an audience, all my books that have been super successful have taken years to get there. It's a mark that something in there is actually working. So having, let's call these high-value external indicators versus serendipitous or low-value external indicators. So I think virality on a YouTube video is a low-value external indicator because there's a lot of serendipity in there. It's not a linear dose function on quality of input.

• 1:24:30Cal Newport?

  So it's not the better the video you create just from a sheer quality, then the more views it's going to get. It could be whatever. You know, like you have a very popular video about peeling a hard-boiled egg.

• 1:24:44Tim Ferriss?

  I was just gonna say, my most popular YouTube video is like eight billion views or 10 million views is how to peel hard boiled eggs without peeling the whole egg.

• 1:24:53Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:53Tim Ferriss?

  Filmed in my kitchen on a shitty camera, God knows when. So if I had followed that as my indicator, can you imagine what my whole YouTube channel and life would be?

• 1:25:02Cal Newport?

  So much peeling.

• 1:25:03Tim Ferriss?

  Like the, you know, the Kitchen Hacks Martha Stewart of YouTube. I mean, that's what I would have turned into.

• 1:25:08Cal Newport?

  Well, and by the way, if it makes you feel better, Mark Rober, who's a major YouTuber, 20, 30 million view videos, his number one video is how to peel a watermelon inside the whatever. So yeah, you guys.

• 1:25:19Tim Ferriss?

  People have problems with peeling things.

• 1:25:21Cal Newport?

  People have problems with peeling things. But for you though, compare that.

• 1:25:27Tim Ferriss?

  Just thinking about peeling a watermelon, it sounds very high labor.

• 1:25:30Cal Newport?

  Well, anyway. Somehow he does it without cutting through. I don't know. And I'm gonna go watch the stupid video. So there you go. But think about, compare, compare your eight million views on the egg video to your first book hitting number one, the New York Times bestseller. I would say number one of the New York Times bestseller, that's more of a high value external indicator. It's very hard to do. You've developed an audience and you've spoken to that audience. You know, that's difficult to do. So I like the high value external. This is controversial, but I learned this from Derek Sivers, who told me that money is a great, here's his quote, neutral indicator of value. People don't like to give away their money. So like, it means something if clients buy your product.

• 1:26:10Cal Newport?

  It means something if people buy your book. It means nothing for me to click to watch your egg video because I don't know, whatever. What am I gonna lose? But to give $20 to get your book, like I care about my $20. So I think high value external indicators of value aren't a bad thing. They're scary because people don't like the rejection and they don't like that it's very hard. But I think that's fine because it keeps you honest. It keeps you honest.

• 1:26:35Tim Ferriss?

  What do you think Derek meant by neutral indicator as opposed to positive? I would think it would be a positive indicator, but maybe I'm using a different scale than he is.

• 1:26:45Cal Newport?

  So he meant neutral in the sense of unbiased, I think. This is what he did at every stage of his career. When he had the next thing he wanted to do, so he was working as a record executive, for example, and wanted to go full time with his band. He would wait till the next thing was making as much money as the current thing. And then that's when he would say, let me go do that. And so he waited till CD Baby then was creating as much money as he was making as an artist before he went all in and just working on his startup. But he meant neutral because if you just ask people their opinion on your idea, or ask them, hey, do you think I should do this? They're not neutral. They like you and they want to be nice. So like, yeah, man, go for it. Yeah, you should definitely quit your job to do a band. Like, that would be awesome. Like, I wish I could do that. It's not useful feedback. It's not neutral.

• 1:27:30Cal Newport?

  But as soon as you ask for their money, they become Switzerland. They're like, all right, well, you know.

• 1:27:35Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, we're gonna stay out of this.

• 1:27:37Cal Newport?

  I'm not a partisan here. Like, okay, hold on a second. Well, how good is your band? Wait a second. Are you that good? Yeah, so it's a different thing. It's a different thing.

• 1:27:45Tim Ferriss?

  I'm really not qualified to evaluate such a thing. But Derek would stand out to me as someone who's unrushed. Right? And I would say also, if this is helpful for folks, if you feel like you have to rush to compete in something, race in some way, chances are you don't have a great sustainable competitive advantage. I would say almost certainly you don't have any sustainable competitive advantage. In which case, if you telescope out and just ask yourself, what does this look like? What does my life look like in one year, three years, five years? It's gonna break. Like, something's gonna break. It's just a question of when it breaks. So you want to preemptively think through how to prevent that or look at other ways to kind of augment your.

• 1:28:30Tim Ferriss?

  Ability to not rush. I think Derek is very, very good at this. Who are some other contemporaries? I know that, and maybe we'll talk about it, but Jane Austen would be another example, historically speaking. Who are some contemporaries within the last 20 years who stand out? 10 years. Just because the technological landscape, I think about this a lot, like how many Newtons, how many DaVinci's, how many

• 1:28:52Tim Ferriss?

  Currys are just making TikTok videos right now? And they're never actually going to make something that is fulfilling their full potential. I would have to imagine it's vast swaths of the population. So let's just say the last five to 10 years or current day, people who stand out to you.

• 1:29:10Cal Newport?

  Well, I think where you see this most often today is in the arts. So like I'm a movie buff. You see this with the great directors, you know, it's, I gotta get the right project. It takes a long time to get the project together. You spend a long time on that project till it's right and then you do it, right? I mean, if you look at Tarantino, you look at Greta Gerwig, you look at Chris Nolan, they take their time. And also they're not filling in the gap. Let me be on YouTube. Let me be on Twitter. Let me have a really sort of active presence out there. They take their time. Novelists are very good at this, especially literary novelists, because their books need to be really good. That's their whole selling proposition. So they take their time. An example, a specific example I like is John Grisham.

• 1:29:53Cal Newport?

  I did this comparison. I uncovered this old interview of Michael Crichton once. It was an interview of Michael Crichton when he was 27 years old. And so I wrote this essay about compare Michael Crichton to John Grisham. You're going to see two different approaches to roughly the same job, which is writing popular genre fiction. Crichton was all about busy. So you read this essay, this was after the Adronima strain had come out, and it's all ambitions for things he wants to do. I want to direct. I want to do movies. I have five books in development. I'm writing screenplays. I just moved out to LA. Like it's this huge plan. John Grisham, on the other hand, like as soon as the firm did well, it was his second book. His first book was a flop, A Time to Kill, when it first came out, but he's like, I'm going to write two.

• 1:30:36Cal Newport?

  And if one of the two works, then I'll keep doing this. The firm blew up, did really well. And as soon as he had some autonomy, he simplified, simplified, simplified. To the point where at some point more recently, this would have been in the 2000s. He had this longtime sort of assistant to work for him. When she retired, he's like, I don't have to hire anyone else because no one bothers me. Like my agent and my editor know how to contact me. I don't do anything. I write my book once a year. That's it. Like I spend a lot of time doing stuff in my town. And he was the commissioner of the Little League. He had a lot of stuff he did unrelated to work. He just slowed down. He's like, I just want to write. That's all I do. I don't need to have TV shows and I don't need to write the screenplays for my books when they get made into things.

• 1:31:20Cal Newport?

  And I don't need to create a six part series and direct my whatever and get into television. He's like, I'm just gonna, I'm getting paid a lot of money. I'm gonna write. That's what I want to do. I want to simplify. So Grisham has always stood out to me and I know a couple of people who know him and they underscore this, that he's like, I write, I do one book a year and you're not going to hear from me until it's done. And then you get me for like four weeks and I'll do like some publicity, but people know who I am.

• 1:31:46Tim Ferriss?

  Do the dog and funny show.

• 1:31:47Cal Newport?

  Four weeks, right? And then leave me alone. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go do other things. So he's a great example. So it's two different types of ambition. The Crichton ambition is now that I have all these opportunities, I want to do every single one I can. It's a, I've been starving for years and now I'm at the buffet and I'm going to fill my plate. And Grisham had the complete other mindset. Now that I'm successful, I have the leverage to do nothing. No, no, no, no, no. I just wanted to like do this one thing. Isn't that great? So he's definitely slow productivity.

• 1:32:17Tim Ferriss?

  And then maybe that's your next book, The Leverage to Do Nothing. It's actually a pretty good title. Thinking of Grisham as someone who decided from the outset to use a rowing example to, is it sculling? One person, single person rowing. It's like, yeah. So he's out there. On the Charles, just like thinking about his next book, Rowan by himself. And then there are a lot of other people out there and I've been in this position before. So I'm not throwing too many stones in my glass house, but you're like, how did my life get so fucking complicated? And you're like, shit, instead of sculling, I built Noah's Ark. I've got two of every goddamn animal in here and I have to unload this fucker. Like, if I want to simplify, I have to get these goddamn animals off this boat.

• 1:33:01Tim Ferriss?

  I want to jump into some ways to simplify. If you are able to maintain that from the outset, God bless you, you're a miracle worker. I wish I could do what you do, maybe I can, but I often slip. I backslide and then I'm just like, oh, okay, now I have to unload Noah's Ark again. One of the points in the notes here that I have is work to reduce collaboration overhead. We talked about overhead, right? Talking about work instead of doing it by replacing asynchronous communication with real time conversations. So this, I think, will strike a lot of folks as counterintuitive. Could you expand on this, please?

• 1:33:34Cal Newport?

  Well, asynchronous is a problem. So asynchronous meaning not real time. So email, for example, I send you a message, you read it when you're ready to read it, then you reply. So it's not real time. Asynchronous has advantages because there's an overhead to having to arrange real time conversation. You and I have to agree somehow. This is when we're going to get on the phone together. The problem with asynchronous is that if you use it for drawn out conversations, there's going to be seven back and forth messages for us to decide on something. This now requires me to constantly monitor whatever channel we're using here. Because if we're going to get through seven back and forth messages today, because we're trying to decide on something, I have to see most of those messages,

• 1:34:17Cal Newport?

  let's say, within 10 or 15 minutes of it arriving, because we have to knock this ball back and forth enough times, 15 minutes per knock, you know, we're already a couple of hours into it. So now I have to be checking these inboxes all the time. But if I'm checking these inboxes all the time, I'm seeing lots of other stuff as well. Now I'm in a state, to borrow a term from Linda Stone, of partial continuous attention, which drains my energy, I can't think well, I'm exhausted and I can't produce anything deep. I can't do any really good work. So asynchronous is one of these things that looks good on paper, but as soon as you start doing back and forth planning or conversations of any type with asynchronous, it destroys everything. It is one of the most potent productivity poisons. And the thing about it is that we think it's actually making us more efficient. Because, oh, look, I can just press send and I don't have to go on a phone.

• 1:35:02Cal Newport?

  So instead of having regular times to talk real time, it can actually be much more efficient. The key is not to have a separate meeting for everything you might need to discuss because now you have a separate problem, which is your schedule is crowded. So I think the answer to all of this is just office hours. Like this is it every day, this hour to 90 minutes. My phone is on, I have a Slack channel, my door is open and you just punt everything to office hours. Yeah, good question. Grab me at the next office hours you can. Yeah, we should get into that. Grab me at the next office hours you can. Oh yeah, a bunch of requests are coming in for interviews, you know, for my book coming out. Great. Next office hours you can come and we'll go through them all. So you consolidate synchrony into a regular periods.

• 1:35:45Cal Newport?

  You're not wasting a lot of time arranging the synchrony. I think that's a sweet spot for collaboration.

• 1:35:50Tim Ferriss?

  So to get into the nitty gritty of that, you mentioned Slack. I'm curious from a flow perspective, what that looks like. So if you're communicating with your team via Slack and they're like, what about this? You know, like grab me at the next office hours. Do you then have like a Calendly or some automated tool where it's like, hey, every Friday? I'm curious what this looks like for you, if you use it or how you've seen other people implement this? Just from a flow perspective, Friday from 1pm to 6pm, I am available in 30 minute slots or whatever. And then here's a Calendly link, if I'm getting the service name correct, where you can book a time and we're not doing it via email. Because one of my personal versions of hell is group scheduling. I fucking hate it with such a passion.

• 1:36:35Tim Ferriss?

  How about Tuesday at two? No, that doesn't work. What about Thursday at three? How about Monday at this? It's, it's, is one of my least favorite things in the world. So from a flow perspective, what does that look like? And have you found any particular day or way of clustering office hours to work well for you? Or for other people?

• 1:36:51Cal Newport?

  Well, I mean, first of all, don't use Slack. That coordinate with your team. That'd be the first advice because it's a tool that's built around ongoing. At any point, conversation could come in. I've suggested this a couple of times in the pages of the New Yorker. Just stop using Slack. Essentially, come back to it. It's funny, actually, when Salesforce bought Slack, right after they bought Slack, I had an article that was titled Slack Built: The Right Tool for the Wrong Way to Work. And it was sort of a critique of this sort of hyperactive hive mind. And Salesforce, unrelated, they didn't know about it. They invited me to come give like a high-priced lecture. And I was like, hey, I'm honored, but I should point you towards this article I just published. And then they

• 1:37:33Cal Newport?

  came back. And in fairness, this was the marketing company that was organizing this conference for Salesforce. They came back and said like, well, yeah, you know, I think we're okay. I think, I don't think we need you. But to your question about office hours, actually, you want to lean more into academic-style office hours, which are unscheduled. And so if it was a completely in-person situation like we used to be, then it would just be my doors open. That's how I run office hours with my discrete math students, right? You look, oh, someone's in your office. I wait till they're out, then I come in. But you can simulate this digitally using Zoom, for example, and just have a waiting room. So people come to your Zoom conference, they just know the Zoom link is open for this 90 minutes every afternoon at this set time. So they can just log in there. And if you're talking to someone else,

• 1:38:17Cal Newport?

  they're just waiting in the waiting room till you bring them in. And I mentioned Slack, so I probably should have elaborated that. But what some people do is say, I have a Slack channel called Office Hours, but I only monitor it during my office hours. So you just know from like 3:00 to 4:30, then we can go back and forth and chat. That's what I'm here to do, is just talk to people. So I will have that Slack channel, that office hour channel, open from 3:00 to 4:30. And there, if we want to go back and forth on Slack, that's still real time, right? And we're going back and forth in real time. It's not asynchronous, that's fine as well. But I'll never look at that channel outside the office hours. And then you can tack on to this, another 30 minutes with 10-minute chunks and a calendar link, where you can say to someone,

• 1:39:01Cal Newport?

  Either stop by my office hours or grab one of the one-on-one slots. Here's the link. I mean, I actually have an article out today, the day we're recording this called how to have a more productive year. And I talk about exactly this, having a open office hour plus an extra 30 minutes of one-on-ones. And having a webpage that says, here's how we talk. Show up during these office hours and just rock and roll, or grab one of these slots if you want a little bit more time. And that you just throw that link at people like confetti at Mardi Gras, just, yeah, it's link, link, link. Just toss it at people to try to squash these asynchronous back and forths.

• 1:39:33Tim Ferriss?

  And the how to be more productive this year, that's in the New Yorker?

• 1:39:36Cal Newport?

  Yeah, yeah, it came out today. Or is that a New Yorker? A New Yorker piece where we just thought, it's not typical New Yorker fare, but my editor and I were just thinking, why don't we just write an article about how to be more productive? Now, okay, I couldn't resist because it was the New Yorker. It also has a meta-commentary on productivity advice itself. And I go through every decade from the 1950s to the 2000s, the dominant productivity book of that decade, and how the advice changes from, there's some New Yorker-y stuff in there, but there's also some like real hardcore advice.

• 1:40:03Tim Ferriss?

  Did you mention Ouroboros? Is there a snake eating its own tail in this piece?

• 1:40:07Cal Newport?

  I should have, yeah.

• 1:40:09Tim Ferriss?

  Sneak one in.

• 1:40:09Cal Newport?

  I should have done Ouroboros. Yes, that's always a good one. You always have to mention, this is like, if you write for an elite publication and you mention productivity, you always have to mention Frederick Winslow Taylor. This is like a pet peeve of mine is from the mind of people who are professional writers, who critique productivity, in their mind, Frederick Winslow Taylor is like the central figure of American capitalism and productivity basically means him there with a stopwatch, looking at your movements. And he wasn't that influential of a person. It's such a pet peeve of mine. Scientific management, it was esoteric and kind of cult-like and it had a following,

• 1:40:49Cal Newport?

  but it got completely pushed out of the way by Fordism and the idea of building smart production processes. Winslow Taylor was a weird guy. These time-motion studies with these incentive-based pay scales was weird, and he was weird, and they determined that's not so important. What's important is an assembly line is a much better way to build a car than the other way. The systems matter a lot more. And also forget this weird incentive scale of I'll pay you 10 cents more if you're 10 cents faster, shoveling whatever Ford figured out, pay your workers a lot of money because the turnover is more expensive than trying to whatever. So anyways, it's a pet peeve of mine. Frederick Winslow Taylor does not yield an outsized influence on the way we think about productivity. Our

• 1:41:33Cal Newport?

  issues with productivity do not come from Frederick Winslow Taylor. They actually come from Peter Drucker and there's a whole other argument I could make here, but that's my pet peeve is like, you don't have to mention him every time you try to critique productivity. So rant aside.

• 1:41:47Tim Ferriss?

  And Peter Drucker, I gotta say, man, hit so many nails on the head. The Effective Executive, still to this day, just such an incredible short book that punches above its weight class. So to scratch my own itch here, The New Yorker also has this typographical convention that has always been kind of confusing to me and seems a little highfalutin. Tell me if I'm getting this right. It always stands out. It jumps out like a wart on someone's face every time I see it. They put an umlaut over, maybe it's the second vowel that is repeated, like coordinate and they'll put an umlaut over the second L or something like that. Why do they do that? That's not in the Chicago book of style. Like what's going on there? Or is that just a New Yorker thing?

• 1:42:31Cal Newport?

  Well, I mean, that's true. So they do, yeah, umlaut's on second vowel. So like reengage, you would have an umlaut and then also focus, they do British. So double S, because I write a lot about focus. So you double S focus and focusing. That's there. And then email, the convention for email is, I forgot exactly what it was, but the way they write about emails, it's tradition. It's an old magazine. It's been around for a long time. And so there was a style guide invented early on when a lot of this was more up for grabs. And I think it's just, it's tradition. Like, let's hold on to the style guide to whatever. There might be a deeper story to it, but that's what I've always understood.

• 1:43:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, why not? I mean, tradition's fun.

• 1:43:11Cal Newport?

  Yeah. And they format it the same way. So a lot of that's tradition. I mean, their whole thing, which I love about it, is they're not chasing trends. I really love that publication. Anyone who reads it, the reason why you should read it is that their whole approach is just to try to make themselves the favorite place that their writers have ever written for. And their whole theory is make your place really, really right or friendly and writers will write cool things. And I think that's cool. And they have a subscription base. They don't have to chase web traffic. They don't have to worry so much about ads. They have a million people who pay a hundred dollars a year for the magazine and you've got this great foundation. Like, okay, so we can just write. It's not big. Yeah. Anyway, it's not to go out of New Yorker rant, but.

• 1:43:48Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let me play devil's advocate on that because it seems like when the New York Times went from predominantly ads to predominantly subscriber revenue, they ended up producing more news coverage to please their base of subscribers and it became a much more exaggerated kind of left-leaning caricature of itself in a way that is not helpful for contending with polarized tribalism and so on, in my opinion. So you feel like that is not, I mean fundamentally, they're different outlets. I mean, they're very different, but are there inherent risks of the business model or the current media dynamics at play for the New

• 1:44:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yorker? Because I've seen these formerly when I would consider highly credible publications. Hold on, my phone is always off, but I have to pull this up because this example is so nuts. My friend sent me this screenshot because he said, here we go. The Economist stepping up their copy game. And the screenshot he sent me is the sort of super script is the swine. And then it says, feral super pigs are raising hell on the Canadian prairies. They're well adapted to the cold with thick fur, long legs and tusks as sharp as steak knives. And it has this photo of these pigs running over a hill. And I'm like, this is The Economist, man. What the fuck is happening? And I love The Economist, no offense to The Economist, love The Economist. But I was like, oh, man, like, everybody's getting

• 1:45:17Tim Ferriss?

  pulled down into the mud here in the quest for traffic and attention. That's a bit of a ramble, but how does the New Yorker resist the temptation slash incentives slash risks?

• 1:45:31Tim Ferriss?

  Of the modern online world as we know it.

• 1:45:35Cal Newport?

  Well, I mean, you're pointing out a real effect. It's a trade off. If we're going to talk about trade offs, it's a trade off of facts. And I think the Times really did have to face this trade off. When you move to their subscriber model, what they gain is they don't actually have to do the attention chasing, right? So this is one thing about the Times is they don't need the Super Feral Pig example. They do not have a model based on chasing attention, right? Where other publications, I think, had an issue when the web grew, where they began just really pushing volume and trying to find social media virality. The New York Times saved themselves from that so they could actually focus on what they wanted to write. They did not have to chase. So that was a positive. But the audience capture effect, I think, is also real.

• 1:46:20Cal Newport?

  When you don't have to, and this is now a standard, I think, accepted critique in the world of journalism, when you have to service big advertisers, you sort of stay pretty neutral on things because the consumers of those products are all over the place. So you're like, okay, like, we want Procter and Gamble to buy a lot of ads in 1995 New York Times, so we're going to be really good, but like down the middle. You're absolutely right that when you go to subscriber base, that subscriber base was way more progressive left leaning than the public writ large. And then you get the audience capture effect. Now, I think there was other dynamics that happened as well, where you had the rise of certain ideological frameworks coming out of the colleges and young staffers coming to the New York Times. But it was the subscription model gave them the cover to, we can change even our definition of news, especially post-Trump.

• 1:47:05Cal Newport?

  I think it really changed towards our goal here is to promote the right. That's the best way I could describe what happened there is that when they know there's something that is clearly right, pushing the thing that is right is like a noble thing to do, even more important than certain journalistic standards. The New Yorker avoids that because they're not a news magazine. I think that's the main thing. That's not their model. So they've been a subscription model from the beginning.

• 1:47:28Tim Ferriss?

  They still have a print magazine that they sell in the newsstands, right? I don't know how much of a consideration that is for business model.

• 1:47:34Cal Newport?

  It's a big part of their income. New Yorker subscribers get the magazine and the digital. I don't know the numbers, but they're way more combined than with the New York Times. I think it's I subscribe to the New Yorker. I get the magazine and I get access to the online. That's a big part of what they do, but it's a magazine of ideas. It's a slow magazine. They don't slow productivity in action. They don't want to be the first to talk about a news story. That's not their goal. And also you have to keep in mind, the New York Times is massive. It's massive. They have their own building. It's thousands of people. It's a huge company.

• 1:48:06Tim Ferriss?

  I've been there. It's gigantic.

• 1:48:07Cal Newport?

  New Yorker has a floor. So it's a different thing. So the New Yorker is not a news magazine. I think then they get the advantages of the subscription model without the disadvantages. The advantages being we don't have to chase attention or clicks or volume. And so we could just try to write whatever we find to be interesting. It's, you know, like DT Maxx has a piece in a recent issue where it's just profiling this lady who spent 500 days in a cave. Really interesting article, you know, it's like really well constructed. She goes into the cave. She comes out, she's like, this was great. And then he's spending more time with her and like slowly it comes out that this was this like horrific experience. It's like, great. It's awesome. It's like a really interesting article.

• 1:48:44Tim Ferriss?

  The New Yorker, I would say probably more, if I were to go back and look at the pie chart of magazine or outlet attribution, I'd say probably the New Yorker has the highest hit rate of inclusion and Five Bullet Friday, my newsletter, in terms of pieces I think are worth sharing. It's probably got the highest hit rate, at least in the US. Are there any magazines or outlets that you would just like cut off a pinky Yakuza style to write for? Obviously I'm exaggerating or would have loved to have written for that never got the chance to write for like Parish Review or anything else? Is there anything sort of on your wish list outside of the New Yorker? Or have you already summoned at Everest and you're like, I'm good?

• 1:49:24Cal Newport?

  I mean, that was my wish. My agent has reminded me of this, that early on in my career, I remember watching John O'Leary at the time, who was my age, early on in his career, get some New Yorker slots. And this is how I said to my agent, like, what I want to do, this is what I want to do outside my books, is write for the New Yorker. So like, that was my Everest. I've written for the other places as, you know, well, I've written for the New York Times and Wired and The Atlantic. They're great places to write, and they have huge audiences. So like, a New York Times piece, I always feel lucky when they publish something of mine, because our audience is just huge. Like, if you write something for them, people read it, and people see it. And I have written for them, you know, that's also cool. Like, I think one of the coolest jobs in journalism might be New York Times op-ed staff. So

• 1:50:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:06Cal Newport?

  Krugman and Brooks. And that's, because they, they get a write about ideas, but it's big swing impact. And those things hit a lot of eyeballs. So like, when Ezra Klein left Vox and took the op-ed spot at the New York Times, I was like, that doesn't confuse me at all. That's a really cool job, because you can affect the national conversation on a regular basis. I don't know who else can offer that, that you can shape conversation on a regular basis. That'd be a cool job.

• 1:50:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's true. It's true. I mean, the New York Times also has some great stuff. It's that the discovery problem, to come back to that, is a little bit harder than, say, with the New Yorker, unsurprisingly, because you have such an immense volume of stuff. But the op-ed narrows that down quite a bit. You are right, in terms of impacting the national conversation and getting in front of eyeballs. I suppose it's another advantage of the subscriber model, although you're hitting one subset of the political spectrum, so there is that. But all's fair and love and editorial. Well, Cal, we've talked about a lot, and people should check out the new book, You Walk the Walk, which

• 1:51:13Tim Ferriss?

  is sort of the most, for me, critical litmus test of material, especially if there's any prescriptive

• 1:51:22Tim Ferriss?

  Aspect in sort of a productivity self-help way, and I could define productivity. I define it pretty similarly. The new book is Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. And people cannot find you on social. Cannot. But there's the YouTube channel, Cal Newport Media, so people can find that. And there's the Deep Questions Podcast and calnewport.com. Certainly, people can find a lot there. I'm curious, maybe as we're beginning to wind this to a close, if there are any other heuristics or mental models or anything that make slow productivity easier or more appealing for people to embrace. And I would, for instance, say that by and large, I succumb to the shiny objects occasionally. But by and large, I think I fall into the slow productivity camp.

• 1:52:06Tim Ferriss?

  For instance, I mean, the book that I'm working on now, I mean, it started five years ago. Notes and like wrote 72,000 words five years ago and tabled it and shelved it. And then have been kind of workshopping things. One of the, to maybe start with sharing on my side, one of the things that helps me with this is thinking about choosing my projects, which is why I'm so interested in choosing projects, how people choose projects. I choose my projects generally on what skills and relationships they help me to develop that could transcend that project. So even if the project, quote unquote, fails by all external metrics, if I've developed or improved relationships, it could be pre-existing or new relationships,

• 1:52:49Tim Ferriss?

  and developed skills that will apply to other things, having a long timeframe is a huge, huge, huge advantage. And it's kind of the ultimate in a world of attention compression, like having a long time horizon is a unbelievable advantage in so many ways. But thinking about my projects and how they snowball in that cumulative way gives me the peace of mind and confidence to take those longer time horizons, if that makes any sense. So I'm wondering if there's anything like that that could just be kind of philosophical one-liners or beliefs that you have that allow you to embrace this without the fear and the FOMO that I think a lot of folks would have.

• 1:53:31Cal Newport?

  I agree about the way that I definitely see you as an example of the slow productivity mindset. I mean, I think, for example, your focus on the podcast. Okay, this is the main thing I'm going to do. I'm going to stop the book publication cycle. I'm not going to seek out a lot of TV opportunities or whatever. I think that's a good example, which is why I'll be disappointed if your new book turns out to be titled, "To Peel an Egg: 101 Hacks in Your Kitchen That'll Amaze Your Friends," or whatever.

• 1:54:01Cal Newport?

  See you on the cover.

• 1:54:02Tim Ferriss?

  101 Kitchen Tricks for Any Occasion.

• 1:54:04Cal Newport?

  Fully Illustrated.

• 1:54:06Tim Ferriss?

  As it stands, no egg peeling in the new book.

• 1:54:09Cal Newport?

  The heuristic, I don't, here's the heuristic, maybe, that ties a lot of this together is that, at least for professional stuff, in the end, it's craft. Craft is what matters. Respecting craft, developing craft, applying craft, finding meaning in craft. Just keep watching on repeat Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Just go back and watch that like once a month, because the more you think about, craft is where I get fulfillment, craft is where I impact the world, craft is where I gain autonomy over my professional life and can provide for the people I care about and give interesting opportunities in my life. It all comes back down to craft. You slow down, your timeframes become much longer. Psychologically, you get so much resilience.

• 1:54:50Cal Newport?

  Maybe you couple that, if I can add a second heuristic, is ignore the internet. It's a crazy-making machine. It's just a crazy-making machine. It like, don't require random people on social media to be a regular part of your life. Don't require like metrics you have to look at on a day-to-day basis of being important. I could just feel it. Like, we do, my podcast, we put the episodes on YouTube, because I think, as we talked about before, video will be the future, not YouTube, but we should practice. And I have a YouTube guide, and I say, "You can do whatever you want to like the thumbnails and the titles. I don't know, you understand YouTube, but I don't want to know about how it's doing. I don't want to feel any impact from that algorithm. I want to do my podcast show where there is no cybernetic loop,

• 1:55:35Cal Newport?

  pushing back and changing what you're doing beyond these super-large scales. Over the last six months, if we average out downloads, I think we're trending upwards, right? So maybe you put those two things together. Craft is everything. You can build a psychologically resilient, sustainable, successful, professional life on craft and ignore the internet. Do those two things. You're going to be really happy, especially if you're talented and have like a particular talent or ambition, that's where you should aim it. Don't let an attention algorithm suck all that skill out of you and basically monetize all that potential into AdSense views that can help Google investors or whatever. Craft, focus on craft and get fulfillment out of craft even beyond results and then just be incredibly wary about the internet.

• 1:56:20Cal Newport?

  Uh, maybe I'll stay away from them, I'll stay away from that. Like, that's the two things. Do those two things. It's night or day. Like what your life is like is night or day.

• 1:56:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that makes me think of, can't remember the attribution. I mean, there are many versions of this, but would you rather fail or partially succeed being who you are or succeed being someone you're not? Those types of quotes I think about quite a bit because possibly, you know, if we take this vanity metric, and look, it is a real metric if you're dependent on advertising on YouTube videos as an example, but let's say you looked at your numbers and you were trending down over six months. Does that mean you stop? Or does that mean that you're calling the herd and over time refining to the point where you're actually getting to your 1,000 or 10,000 true fans?

• 1:57:05Tim Ferriss?

  And you went from basically doing speeches at state fairs and now you're standing on the TED stage. Is that bad? You know what I mean? Like I'm saying like, maybe there's a win embedded in what you're perceiving as a failure, even if it's trending in the, in the wrong direction, right? Because otherwise, man, the stuff, oh, here, let me show you one. Let me see if I can find it. I'll show you another one and I'll describe what this is just because this is the YouTube equivalent of The Economist, Feral Super Pigs.

• 1:57:35Cal Newport?

  It gets so much worse on YouTube.

• 1:57:36Tim Ferriss?

  It gets so bad, but I was texting with my team, went on YouTube and I was like, oh my God, this is what happens to everyone on YouTube. If they stay on long enough and they get trained by the incentives, this is what happens to everybody. So I don't know if you can see this.

• 1:57:54Cal Newport?

  There's a woman wearing very little clothes. Is that a robot? What is that?

• 1:57:58Tim Ferriss?

  This is a, this is like a big, huge muscular dude in a toga slash sarong type thing, walking away. It's a woman on the other side. He's saying bye. She's got question marks overhead. She's in a thong, pointing away from the camera, holding her ass cheeks, like pulling them apart. And then the headline is stoicism, 10 lessons men learn too late in life, in parentheses, might hurt your feelings. And I'm not saying, look, I'll give these guys credit. This is because the thumbnail got me. Stoic wisdom wonders, 1.9 million views, put up one month ago. And I was like, oh, man, you're going to get trained by the algorithm. Like, if you're not careful, and even if you are careful, if you're paying attention to quote unquote, the right things,

• 1:58:40Tim Ferriss?

  everything converges into a chick with a thong, spreading her ass cheeks in a thumbnail, like with like, what to do before the imminent financial collapse? Everything, doesn't matter if you're covering climate change, hoping to change the world with renewable energy, you're gonna end up there.

• 1:58:56Cal Newport?

  Noam Chomsky on like, the structure of manufacturer consent. And there's a woman in a bikini.

• 1:59:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah, there you go. You know, for me, and I gotta give this guy's credit. They just got a bunch of free promotions. So good for them. And it got my attention. But I think the approach of treating these tools and new behaviors, it's sometimes hard to recognize that we're engaging with tools, new technology, as new drugs. Would you want to be the first chimpanzee, you know, injected with this? Or maybe you wait until you're the 100th chimpanzee? You can still be an early adopter, but like, let's see what the long-term effects are. And if you feel like you gotta rush, you're in the wrong game. You're just in the wrong game. And you could win, but like, be very careful about what winning looks like when

• 1:59:44Tim Ferriss?

  you do that telescoping out. Like, okay, if this just gets faster, if things just change more frequently, if the shifting sands of algorithm favoritism.

• 1:59:56Tim Ferriss?

  Just start pouring from the sky and become much, much harder to track. Require me to have now, I don't have just a full-time thumbnail guy. I've got a full-time algo chaser and analytics person, and it becomes kind of moneyball. Do you want to win that game? And what does it look like? And they're going to be people, just like, for instance, you know, going to school and a lot of I-banks, investment banks and so on recruited there. And nine out of 10 people, probably 19 out of 20 would wash out. They would just get destroyed because they weren't built for that. And then one out of 20 was just perfectly built for it. Fantastic. And they would thrive in that environment. But I do think that when we're looking at some of these platforms where the numbers are probably even less favorable.

• 2:00:41Tim Ferriss?

  It's like, okay, 99 out of 100 are going to wash out. And then one will just be the Michael Phelps of YouTube and awesome, like good for them. But if everyone tries to do that, what a cataclysm. Not to make it sound too dark, but it's like, there are so many opportunities for slow productivity hiding in plain sight. And there are counter examples. And if you want a sustainable competitive advantage, and who doesn't? Having a longer time horizon and being unrushed with most things is just about as big as I can think, at least at this point. Sorry, rant complete.

• 2:01:17Cal Newport?

  I completely agree with your rant. The numbers on algorithmic content, just look at real numbers. Let's use real numbers, not to go, I'm going to extend your YouTube rant slightly. Let's look at real numbers.

• 2:01:28Tim Ferriss?

  Please, Coda.

• 2:01:29Cal Newport?

  What's like the take home CPM essentially on YouTube is low. People are monetizing these videos to the tune of maybe like $5 per 1,000 views.

• 2:01:41Tim Ferriss?

  Cost per thousand.

• 2:01:42Cal Newport?

  Whereas for podcasting, it is significantly larger, right? It's at least five times larger than that per ad. And you can have up to four ads per episodes. I mean, it's not even comparable. We're talking orders of magnitude. So just to be like concrete, you could have a YouTube channel where, you know, you have a million views a month or something like this, but a podcast that has 30,000 regular downloads a week, like you have an Audience of 30,000 is it's bigger than 1,000 true fans, but not that much bigger. I've done the math on that and that is like a professor salary. You could make like a very good living off of that and it's much more stable. But if you build up a 30,000 person audience, they're there for a reason. They're not going to leave fast either. That's something you could then do for years, whereas YouTube is going to be way more fickle.

• 2:02:26Cal Newport?

  And then the technology is going to go away and there'll be another thing that's coming into town anyways. Or the algorithm is going to change, or you started as a channel and know him Chomsky. And then you end up like Mr. Beast, like Mr. Beast, who I respect what he's doing, but he's just the, he's the platonic expression of the algorithm and he'll say this, he's broken down what matters. Like you have to have an outrageous but interesting visual thing that you're going to deliver. You need to show the person right up front. You're going to see this, this and this, here's some clips of it. And then you need it to move every 15 seconds. It's moving forward, they're beautifully edited things, but they're just pure it. It's just, we're going to drive expensive cars and just go, go, go, go, go, go. That's the distillation of the algorithm. And so, yeah, there should be some Mr. Beast out there doing that.

• 2:03:09Cal Newport?

  But like for most other people, build a successful podcast over five years. Like a newsletter is another thing. This is another slow productivity example is.

• 2:03:18Tim Ferriss?

  I was just gonna say, if you think podcast CPMs are high, look at niche newsletters like CIOs or hedge fund managers or whatever, like, I mean, we're talking hundreds of dollars CPM, right?

• 2:03:30Cal Newport?

  Yeah, and you don't have to be famous either. I know so many people have done, I have a good newsletter and it's or a subscription base. It's fantastic, right? If people are paying $5 a month, I mean, okay, that works out to an incredibly high CPM. Because you could show that same person a huge number of ads. So it's just a different game. The example I was going to give was the writer, Andrew Sullivan, who lives here in DC. And, you know, he, he was the editor of the New Republic and wrote for New York Magazine before he sort of got pushed out for, you know, political ideological reasons. He has a Substack now and the way he talks about it, he's like, well, this is great. Like I have a pretty fair sized audience. I make a lot of money off of this. Like, why would I want to do anything else? This is great. I can write for this audience. It's a big audience.

• 2:04:11Cal Newport?

  I make more money doing this than I ever made as a magazine writer and I can write what I want. And I don't need to do anything else and I don't need like a studio and there's nothing else I need to do, you know? So I agree, anything where an algorithm is driving attention, don't make that, I mean, you could, again, you could. But be wary of it. Also be wary is my other warning heuristic of checklist productivity. So if you learn from a YouTube course, all right, here is how you're going to make a lot of money on Twitter. What you need to do is these tweet threads where at the, the last tweet in the thread needs to say, hey, if you enjoyed this thread, you should follow me because I do these threads every so often. It's like, you can't all just follow these same checklist. That's not the way economies work. It's not just if I just do these 10 things.

• 2:04:54Cal Newport?

  Pick your niche. Make sure on a regular basis, you have a thread, format your thread this way. And if you do this, it used to be like in our childhood, the Carlton Sheets infomercials where he was like, look, do you remember those?

• 2:05:06Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, man, I haven't heard that name in ages.

• 2:05:08Cal Newport?

  His logic is kind of the same as checklist productivity on Twitter. His logic was, well, think about it. Put a classified ad for something you're drop shipping. And let's say you put a classified ad in one paper and you make $10 drop shipping. Well, then put it in a hundred papers and you're going to make a thousand dollars, completely leaving out the fact that by far the most common outcome is that zero people buy it, no matter how many papers you put it in, because they don't want to buy a random piece of crap from a classified ad. That part was left out. You're like, well, let's think about it. If you make this much money here, then there's this many papers, you'll make this much money. This is crazy logic, but it reminds me a lot of where you see like, oh, if I just do these videos and I do it right and have the right sign off and I write my titles carefully, it'll scale. It's like, most people, nothing will happen.

• 2:05:53Cal Newport?

  Algorithmic attention economies, be very wary. Do the slow productivity attention economies. They're hard, but it's fantastic if you're able to establish yourself there. If your books work, your podcast works, it's way, way better.

• 2:06:06Tim Ferriss?

  And I would also say these are not mutually exclusive, right? So if you want to play in the algo arena, go for it. Look, I have a YouTube channel and I do this, that and the other thing. And even podcasting is, let's be honest, on some level, like if Apple decides to kneecap everybody, which happens occasionally, it's like, oh, oops. I just read this article. It's actually very well done. I wish I had the proper attribution. It was something called like the great shrinking podcast economy, something like that. And the incredible power of platforms to dictate your metrics is hard to overstate.

• 2:06:39Tim Ferriss?

  But I would say if you want to play that game, some of it's fun. I get it. I like competing and I'm not going to be doing any dangerous competitive sports anytime soon. So I got to channel that somewhere. So, okay. I could like firewall 20% of my attention for dicking around with that. That's fine. Or 50, like whatever, but like have some percentage that you dedicate to trying to find something where you can cultivate this slow productivity. So maybe it's a slow carve out at first, but if you don't have that, it's like driving on a race course in a sports car where the race course changes constantly, right? Like curve seven is a longer curve seven.

• 2:07:21Tim Ferriss?

  It used to be a straightaway and now it's a hairpin curve and you don't have an airbag or any type of

• 2:07:25Cal Newport?

  You're gonna crash.

• 2:07:26Tim Ferriss?

  Seatbelt on or eight point harness. Yeah, like you're gonna crash eventually. So like you need some type of safety net and long time horizon and slow productivity for me at least has been, it's been my safety net for 20 years. I have no reason to think that that should change. And the more frenetic things get, the faster things change. We didn't even get to AI, but the more the kind of avalanche of information continues to grow in volume, the more all of these things will be an advantage that I'm discussing. So check out the book, folks. Slow Productivity. Cal, anything else you'd like to mention? Any TikTok videos you'd like to point people to?

• 2:08:08Cal Newport?

  My peeling video channel, which is now going to be a thousand of, by the way.

• 2:08:11Tim Ferriss?

  Peeling squash.

• 2:08:12Cal Newport?

  So thanks for introducing that.

• 2:08:13Tim Ferriss?

  Cal Newport, peeling squash.

• 2:08:15Cal Newport?

  Yeah, you've introduced that notion now. No, this has been great. Yeah. No, it's slow productivity. It kind of, it connects everything together. Do something really well. Get meaning out of it. And then, yeah, talk about it, different platforms, have fun, play on it. But you're right. There's a difference between I like to take my car to the track because it's fun and my mortgage depends on me staying on this racing team. It's a different dynamic that's going on out there. So slow is just better. I think people are ready for it too. You know, I mean, I think this is just where we are is we want something different. The first wave of different we were offered was Just stop trying things. Work is bad. Stop trying. Don't do anything. That's at a stick because well, I still like to do things and also I need to, you know, feed my family.

• 2:08:58Cal Newport?

  So I think now we're getting the second generation of thinking about this, which is do it better. Like figure out like, how do you really want to work? What makes sense? And, and so hopefully this works, but I appreciate it talking about it. I put an excerpt, by the way, I'm not on social media, but at calnewport.com/slow, we put an excerpt up. So like, if you're like, ah, maybe you can actually like read the whole introduction of the book. There's a lot of, you'll appreciate it, Tim, because there's a lot of John McPhee. I opened the book on John McPhee and I know as a, as someone who took his course at Princeton, which I'm jealous of, you'll appreciate the McPhee. It's rich McPhee content in that free excerpt.

• 2:09:34Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I can't wait. Okay. So I will read that. We'll put that in the show notes as well. Yeah, I learned more from McPhee in one semester about writing than I have in all of my reading and practice and classes outside of that one seminar. I wish I could go back and take it again, frankly. You never know. Who knows? I went back, you know, I actually have all my notes and all of my assignments from that class to this day.

• 2:09:55Cal Newport?

  Like marked up?

• 2:09:56Tim Ferriss?

  I have the marked up notes and I go back and sometimes I look at my writing and I'm like, I think worse writer now. I think I'm a better teacher, but like my actual pros, I think could use some more weight training. So I'll get back into it. The glue of high quality. And I should also say that slow productivity, yes, slow is an aspect, but in my mind, and tell me if you disagree with this, certainly, but it's really about proactive productivity instead of reactive productivity. And that's a way like selective productivity, selective and proactive productivity, which happens to usually correspond to more sustainable, long-term thinking.

• 2:10:40Cal Newport?

  Or intentional, intentional productivity, have an actual consistent coherent philosophy for how I'm going to do my work. That's more sophisticated than just, I'll be busy because at least if I'm busy, I'm not going to self recriminate. Like if I'm busy, at least I know I'm trying. Like that's people's default. Be more intentional and not everyone like if you're an investment banker like you talked about, or you're trying to become a law partner, a very intentional coherent reasonable productivity plan involves working all the damn time because that's like specifically what works in that world. But for most people, when they're intentional, they realize 80% of what I'm doing is just trying to generate smoke from friction, but there's no fire. Like it's just, I'm trying to be busy because I don't know what else to do. Like slowness becomes almost always inevitable.

• 2:11:24Cal Newport?

  Once you actually start to be intentional about what am I really doing here? Like what really works? What matters? What does it?

• 2:11:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And if people really pause to think about many of the figures they might respect most for what they've accomplished in investing or business, the Warren Buffetts, Jeff Bezos, certainly. Go back and read the first 10 shareholder letters for Amazon and you will see kind of how well planned and prescient in some respects, seems obvious in hindsight, but so does everything Bezos was in planning and how methodical and patient, the blend of being kind of relentless and patient is an interesting one. Holy shit. I mean, it's rare

• 2:12:09Tim Ferriss?

  to find like relentlessly focused and also very patient with criticism and skepticism and so on. Remarkable. So slower activity is actually kind of hidden all around us. If we pause to look at the people we most respect, almost all of them are going to fall in there somewhere.

• 2:12:30Cal Newport?

  It's all I do as a writer, basically, is come up with two word terms for things that widely exist and everyone already knows about, right? So deep work already exists. I just put a name to it. Digital minimalism. It's like, yeah, I'm just putting a name to a philosophy. That's my whole secret is like, and I've said this before to people about pragmatic nonfiction writing. The goal is not to try to teach someone something completely new they didn't know about. The goal is just to try to help people articulate something they already know deep in their gut is true. They just don't have a framework or terminology for it. Like that's what really has an impact. It's like, yeah, I know slow productivity is better. I said, I have a Aim for it, or a framework, you know, don't try to convince people of new things. Explain to them what they already know in a way that lets them take better action.

• 2:13:15Cal Newport?

  I think that's the secret to nonfiction, prescriptive nonfiction writing is you're not really teaching people something new. It's just a, how do I leverage something my gut tells me is true? I just don't have my fingers around it all the way.

• 2:13:28Tim Ferriss?

  Six Minute Abs. If anybody gets the reference, it might be Seven Minute Abs. That's The Hitchhiker and Something About Mary. So Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment, without burnout. People can check it out and we'll link to, of course, Cal Newport and all the other links in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast. We'll put everything in there that we've spoken about. Thanks so much for taking the time, Cal. Nice to see you.

• 2:13:50Cal Newport?

  Yeah, thanks, Tim. I appreciate it.

• 2:13:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and for everybody listening or watching, check out the show notes. And until next time, be a little kinder than is necessary, maybe a little slower than is necessary. Take your time. The good things will wait because it's uncrowded. The really important things, those domains are typically very, very uncrowded. So be a little bit kinder to others and to yourself. Take things a little bit more slowly. Until next time, and thanks for tuning in.

• 2:14:18Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

• 2:15:00Tim Ferriss?

  And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday. Type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday. Drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Momentus. Momentus offers high-quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more. I've been testing their products for months now, and I have a few that I use constantly.

• 2:15:45Tim Ferriss?

  One of the things I love about Momentous is that they offer many single ingredient and third-party tested formulations. I'll come back to the latter part of that a little bit later. Personally, I've been using Momentous Mag3-8, L-theanine, and apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep. Now, the Momentous Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients. I've also been using Momentous Creatine, which doesn't just help for physical performance, but also for cognitive performance. In fact, I've been taking it daily, typically before podcast recording, as there are various studies and reviews and meta-analyses pointing to improvements in short-term memory and performance under stress. So those are some of the products that I've been using very consistently, and to give

• 2:16:30Tim Ferriss?

  you an idea, I'm packing right now for an international trip. I tend to be very minimalist, and I'm taking these with me nonetheless. Now, back to the bigger picture. Olympians, Tour de France winners, Tour de France winners, the US military, and more than 175 college and professional sports teams rely on Momentous and their products. Momentus also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world-class products to market, including a few you will recognize from this podcast, like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Starrett. They also work with Dr. Stacy Sims, who assists Momentous in developing products specifically for women. Their products contain high-quality ingredients that are third-party tested, which in this case means informed Sport & or NSF certified, so you can trust that what is on the label

• 2:17:15Tim Ferriss?

  is in the bottle and nothing else. And trust me, as someone who knows the sports nutrition and supplement world very well, that is a differentiator that you want in anything that you consume in this entire sector. So, good news. For my non-US listeners, more good news, not to worry. Momentus ships internationally, so you have the same access that I do. So check it out. Visit livemomentous.com/tim and use code TIM at checkout for 20% off. That's livemomentus, L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash TIM and code TIM for 20% off.

• 2:17:51Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:18:33Tim Ferriss?

  I think generally in my experience, my partners prefer the high side and I like to sleep very, very cool. So stop fighting, this helps. Based on your biometrics, environment and sleep stages, the Pod Cover makes temperature adjustments throughout the night that limit wake-ups and increase your percentage of deep sleep. In addition to its best-in-class temperature regulation, the Pod Cover sensors also track your health and sleep metrics without the need to use a wearable. Conquer this winter season with the best in sleep tech and sleep at your perfect temperature. Many of my listeners in colder areas, sometimes that's me, enjoy warming up their bed after a freezing day. And if you have a partner, great, you can split the zones and you can sleep at your own ideal temperatures. It's easy.

• 2:19:16Tim Ferriss?

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