#568: Cal Newport — The Eternal Pursuit of Craftsmanship, the Deep Life, Slow Productivity, and a 30-Day Digital Minimalism Challenge

Brought to you by Magic Spoon http://magicspoon.com/tim delicious low-carb cereal, Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, and Athletic Greens http://athleticgreens.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement. Cal Newport (calnewport.com https://www.calnewport.com/) is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University who previously earned his PhD from MIT. His scholarship focuses on the theory of distributed systems, while his general-audience writing explores intersections of culture and technology. Cal is the author of seven books, including, most recently, Deep Work https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/dp/1455586692/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, Digital Minimalism https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Minimalism-Choosing-Focused-Noisy/dp/0525536515/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, and A World Without Email https://www.amazon.com/World-Without-Email-Reimagining-Communication/dp/0525536558/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. He is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker and the host of the Deep Questions https://www.calnewport.com/podcast/ podcast. Please enjoy! This episode is brought to you by Magic Spoon http://magicspoon.com/tim cereal! Magic Spoon https://magicspoon.com/tim is a low-carb, high-protein, and zero sugar cereal that tastes just like your favorite sugary cereal. Each serving has 13–14g of protein, 4g of net carbs, and 0g of sugar. It’s also gluten free, grain free, soy free, and keto friendly. And it’s delicious! It comes in your favorite, traditional cereal flavors like Cocoa, Frosted, Peanut Butter, and Blueberry. Magic Spoon https://magicspoon.com/tim cereal has received a lot of attention since their launch. Time magazine included it in their list of Best Inventions of 2019, and Forbes called it “the future of cereal.” My listeners—that’s you—get $5 off and a 100% happiness guarantee when you visit MagicSpoon.com/Tim https://magicspoon.com/tim and use code TIM. And some great news for Canadian listeners: Magic Spoon http://magicspoon.com/tim now also ships to Canada! * This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep http://eightsleep.com/Tim! Eight Sleep’s Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. And now, my dear listeners—that’s you—can get $250 off the Pod Pro Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim. Simply go to EightSleep.com/Tim http://eightsleep.com/Tim or use code TIM at checkout. * This episode is also brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, “If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim is offering you their Vitamin D Liquid Formula free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit AthleticGreens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive the free Vitamin D Liquid Formula (and five free travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive all-in-one daily greens product. * The one lesson from comedian, actor, author, and mean banjoist Steve Martin that hit Cal “like a lightning bolt.” [05:40] What does it mean to be living “the deep life?” [08:17] The story of Cal’s Study Hacks blog, why he needed to write his first three books, the unique way he went about securing his first book deal as an unproven 20-year-old, and how he signed with the agent who’s been with him for the past 20 years. [11:20] What was Cal’s focus in high school and college? [24:03] How did Cal consciously set out to sharpen his writing skills in college, and what part have humor and mathematics played in their evolution? [26:14] What advice does Cal have for someone who wants to hone their funny bone for humor writing? [31:14] Fresh thoughts on slow productivity. [40:47] There’s no way to know if someone like Isaac Newton would have achieved greatness had he lived in the present day — when slow productivity isn’t the social default. But are there any contemporary examples of people who have mastered slow productivity in spite of 21st-century distractions? [46:36] These days, Cal is well-known for eschewing the temptations of social media. But why did he initially refuse to sign up for Facebook when it was the shiny new thing everyone was talking about? [53:11] Documents and disciplines Cal and I find instrumental in crafting the lives we desire. [58:41] How Cal integrates seasonality into his routine for ample periods of downtime, where he roams to recharge and reset, and his pen of choice for taking notes both literary and mathematical. [1:06:11] Why Cal and I are big fans of Scrivener software for writing. [1:13:37] How Cal uses Trello to organize tasks under the different hats he wears throughout the day. [1:17:17] Books in the “anti-productivity” category Cal thinks might be worth your while. [1:21:34] Who was John Newport? [1:28:18] Who Paul Tillich was, an explanation of the confusing term “Christian apologist,” and understanding why Cal describes himself as a concentration apologist. [1:30:53] How does Cal focus on contemplation and matters of the soul? Why does he believe someone who’s quick to dismiss a philosophy or religion without trying to understand its most basic foundation does themselves a disservice? What are his thoughts on the takes Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson have on moral frameworks, and what need is satisfied by such contemplations? [1:33:06] Considering the spiritual as an exercise of meticulous craft and creation, and understanding that some materials serve the purpose better than others. [1:41:09] With so many options from which to choose, how might someone who has had either bad experiences with religion, no experience with religion, or no interest in religion explore spirituality? Are we programmed to seek out religion? [1:45:44] Can you make it through Cal’s 30-day digital minimalism declutter? Here’s how to set the rules that are right for you and give it a whirl. [1:54:13] What shutdown ritual does Cal use at the end of his workday? [2:03:06] Parting thoughts. [2:05:07] * For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors http://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, Balaji Srinivasan https://tim.blog/2021/11/15/balaji-srinivasan-2/, Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/, Dr. Andrew Huberman https://tim.blog/2021/07/06/andrew-huberman/, Dr. Michio Kaku https://tim.blog/2022/01/07/michio-kaku/, and many more. 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• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. My God, am I in love with Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30% of Americans struggle with sleep, and I'm a member of that sad group. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat has always been my nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, putting them back on, and repeating ad nauseam. But now, I am falling asleep in record time, faster than ever. Why? Because I'm using a simple device called the Pod Pro Cover by Eight Sleep. It's the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced, but most user-friendly solution on the market.

• 0:44Tim Ferriss?

  I polled all of you guys on social media about the best tools for sleep, enhancing sleep, and Eight Sleep was by far and away the crowd favorite. I mean, people were just raving fans of this. So, I used it, and here we are. Add the Pod Pro Cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit or as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. My girlfriend runs hot all the time. She doesn't need cooling. She loves the heat, and we can have our own bespoke temperatures on either side, which is exactly what we're doing. Now, for me, and for many people, the result: Eight Sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster,

• 1:28Tim Ferriss?

  reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40%, and get more restful sleep overall. I can personally attest to this because I track it in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery, so you can take on the next day feeling refreshed. And now, my dear listeners, that's you guys, you can get $250 off of the Pod Pro Cover. That's a lot. Simply go to eightsleep.com/tim or use code TIM. That's eight, all spelled out, E-I-G-H-T, sleep.com/tim, or use coupon code TIM, T-I-M. Eightsleep.com/tim for $250 off your Pod Pro Cover.

• 2:11Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon is a low carb, high protein and zero sugar cereal that I eat all the time. I ate a huge bowl of their cocoa flavor about an hour ago after a short workout. And it's so easy to prepare. It's instantaneous practically and you get a lot of goodness. You get a lot of bang for the buck. Time Magazine included Magic Spoon in their list of best inventions of 2019 and Forbes called it "the future of cereal." It tastes just like your favorite sugary cereal from childhood. Remember those? But it's actually good for you. Each serving has 13 to 14 grams of protein, four grams of net carbs and zero grams of sugar. It's also gluten-free, grain-free, soy-free and keto-friendly. It's delicious and I don't say that lightly because most healthy versions of unhealthy

• 2:55Tim Ferriss?

  foods are not delicious, but these guys really nailed it and I know they did a ton of testing because I know the founders. Magic Spoon comes in your favorite traditional cereal flavors like cocoa, frosted and blueberry. You can try them all by grabbing a variety pack at magic spoon.com/tim. I'm going to order some more cocoa today, in fact, because I need more. Cocoa is my personal favorite, but that might change soon because they're launching two limited edition flavors, oatmeal cookie and honey gram, both of which I'm excited to try. And another fun fact, my friends are also obsessed with Magic Spoon. One of this podcast's most popular guests, Dr. Peter Attia routinely crushes six to seven servings at a time. That's a lot, by the way, with practically no glycemic response. That's a blood sugar response.

• 3:39Tim Ferriss?

  And he's checked this with a glucometer. He likes it so much that he invested and two other friends, very fine gentlemen, also past podcast guests, Kevin Rose and Ryan Holiday also invested. So check them out. Go to magic spoon.com/tim and grab a variety pack or my favorite cocoa or anything else. My friends love this stuff. Their kids love this cereal. So whatever strikes your fancy, but you should check it out. My listeners, that's you, get $5 off and a 100% happiness guarantee when you use code TIM at checkout. So if you don't love it, they'll give you a full refund, no questions asked. One more time, that's magic spoon.com/tim.

• 4:14Speaker 01

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

• 4:23Speaker 02

  No, we're just in an appropriate time.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 4:39Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is a very well caffeinated Tim Ferriss. Welcome once again to the Tim Ferriss Show. My guest today is Cal Newport. Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, who previously earned his PhD from MIT. His scholarship focuses on the theory of distributed systems, while his general audience writing explores intersections of culture and technology. Newport is the author of seven books, that's a lot of books, man, including, most recently, Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and A World Without Email. I think some of those allude to how he's able to get so much done. He is also a contributing writer for The New Yorker

• 5:20Tim Ferriss?

  and the host of the Deep Questions podcast. You can find him online at calnewport.com. And there are a number of things conspicuously absent from this bio, and thank you so much, Cal, for sending me an elegant streamlined bio. I sometimes get five or six pages that need to get cut down dramatically. So, welcome to the show. Nice to see you, Cal.

• 5:42Cal Newport?

  Thanks for having me.

• 5:43Tim Ferriss?

  I thought we would start where so many good things start, and that is with Steve Martin. You have written about Steve Martin before on your blog. You are prolific on your blog, which I very much appreciate, since that's where I started as well, in the blogosphere. What are some of your favorite lessons, or any lessons, that come to mind for you from Steve Martin? And he's fresh on my mind, because I had COVID recently, and while I was recovering, I was watching comedians in cars getting coffee. And one of my favorite episodes was with Steve Martin. So, let's start there. I'll pass the mic over.

• 6:19Cal Newport?

  Martin was a big influence on me early on in my career because of that book he wrote, because he wrote his memoir, Born Standing Up, which was a professional memoir. The whole point of the book, the way he explained it in interviews, was I wanted to actually capture how I got from nothing to being a very well-known and influential comedian. I didn't want to skip the steps. He complained a lot of celebrity biographies would sort of skip the interesting part, that one day they would just be playing at the Copa. You say, how did they get there? So, he wrote this professional biography. It came up, it might have been 2007, 2008, somewhere in there. I was a young grad student then. I had started grad school around 2004, 2005. So, I was at MIT. I was blogging. I was writing books. I was doing research.

• 7:05Cal Newport?

  And that book was very influential to me in part and maybe mainly due to something he never actually said in the book, but he said in a Charlie Rose interview about the book where Charlie was asking him like, well, what's your, let's boil it down. What's your advice? What's your advice for aspiring entertainers? And Martin said, I always tell them the same thing, and it's never what they want to hear. They always want to hear, here's my tips for finding an agent. Here's my way for tips for doing an in-run around the typical pipeline. He says, my advice instead is always be so good, they can't ignore you. If you do that, lots of other good things will come. That was his advice. That hit me like a lightning bolt. I mean, I remember at this time as a young scholar, second, third year PhD student, I published some books. I was thinking up

• 7:49Cal Newport?

  all sorts of schemes. Well, how do I market my work? How do I have a new angle on research that people haven't seen? How do I, maybe if I write in a cross-discipline way no one else is doing? And that hit me like a lightning bolt. It was basically saying, actually, wait first, just do really good work. And that's hard. You're probably not that good yet, and you need to practice and get a lot better. That became the foundation for almost everything else that happened in my professional life and so much of what I wrote about. I owe him quite a bit for that inspiration.

• 8:17Tim Ferriss?

  So let's use that as a segue into focusing not just on what you do, but also perhaps beginning to touch on what you don't do. Because just as with Steve Martin, a lot of what I find fascinating, or some of what I find fascinating about you is what is absent. Sort of like the, the case of the dog that didn't bark in Sherlock Holmes, right? Really paying attention to absence sometimes. And for those people who have heard a lot of bios on this podcast, social media handles are not prevalent in your bio, among other things. We don't have to focus directly on that, but let's perhaps start with your

• 8:58Tim Ferriss?

  definition of the deep life, this phrase, this term. Could you just unpack that for us and, and tell us what that means to you and what the constituent parts are?

• 9:09Cal Newport?

  The term "the deep life" is something that emerged in the early pandemic, though the ideas and sentiment had been around for a long time in my writing. The pandemic hits and I make a lot of changes. Suddenly, I'm not seeing my readers, I'm not seeing my students, much more isolated. And I began a podcast so I could connect to people. And I went on a heroic one-month period where I wrote an essay every day. And the whole direction of what I was writing about shifted pretty dramatically. I mean, I was in the, at that point, I was finishing up a business book, a book about communication in the business world. And I'd been writing much more about the impact of tech on business at that time. I was sort of on a roll with that. And suddenly, I found myself in my writing and in major segments of the podcast,

• 9:55Cal Newport?

  like talking about life and building a life of resilience and meaning and depth. And that is where this term "the deep life" came up. My audience just really was interested in this. And we, in a symbiotic fashion, really began to work out what we meant by it. But at a high level, the deep life is a term for one of these things. We all know it when we see it. We just haven't really been approaching it systematically. It's when you see someone living a life in such a way that it resonates. It feels authentic and interesting and resilient. They're not the type of person who's going to look back at the end of their life and say, "What did I do?" We, as humans, have a deep craving for that. But we often suppress that craving because it's complicated and we don't know what to do about it.

• 10:37Cal Newport?

  And we don't have a lot of cultural support for this idea of crafting a deeper life right now. That's not where the cultural pressures are. So we kind of avoid it and look for the short-term burst of good chemicals, the short-term burst of, "I feel good about this. I got a like on this. This beer makes me feel good," or whatever it is. And we put it aside. And so I tried to excavate it. I think the disruption of the pandemic cleared aside a lot of the noise. And I've been working on that. It's one of the things I've been talking about quite a bit is systematically speaking, let's put like a Cal Newport overly systematic nerd computer science brain to this. Can we break down what the deep life is? How you get there? What you need to do, what you don't need to do? And it's really emerged as something I've thought a lot about.

• 11:20Tim Ferriss?

  We may take a bit of a boomerang path to come back to that, but I think a lot of these topics will intersect. So I want to go back in time a bit. So we were just talking about pandemic. Let's go much further back. And part of the reason I want to do that is these days, say, if someone comes up to me on the street, it's nine times out of 10 about the podcast. And let's call it in 2010, 2012. If someone emailed me, it would have been about tech investing and startups. But my career, at least in any credible sense, I didn't start with that.

• 12:04Tim Ferriss?

  And really, it was the four hour work week that put me on any map to speak of. One of my employees knows you and got to know you through study hacks. And he moved from overseas to Canada to university. He went from skating through high school because there really wasn't much required to getting his first Fs and was panic stricken because he needed to correct course, ended up finding study hacks, your work, and transformed himself into an A student. Is that where you first

• 12:48Tim Ferriss?

  found your groove, would you say, in terms of public audience and feeling some momentum in your career? Or was it before or after that?

• 12:58Cal Newport?

  Right. It's a good history to get into that my, my initial books, the first three books I wrote were aimed at students. There are books, roughly speaking, of student advice, though the third one, we'll touch on in a second, began to veer away from that. And actually, that third book intersected with you in a, in a way that you may not remember. But I think I wrote an essay for your blog back then about one of the ideas. But I started with student books and my blog in the early days was called Study Hacks because it was advice for students. And the, the backstory on that is as a high school student during the late 90s, I had started a dot com company. This was the first dot com boom. No one really understood this technology. So there was this brief period where we

• 13:41Cal Newport?

  Thought that if you're young, that must mean that you really know about tech in a way older people didn't. So it's like a brief moment of insanity. They would give seventeen year olds, tens of thousands of dollars to do things we didn't know how to do. But as an effect of that, I was a seventeen year old who knew the business and productivity section of Barnes and Noble very well. So I was reading business books and productivity books because I was trying to figure out what the hell I was doing. Then I went to college and I'm, you know, I'm taking on student loans. I want to do well. I'm trying to take my, my college career seriously. And I said, great, let me go to Barnes and Noble and get the books about here's how the top student studies. So I can figure this out, just the way I bought a David Allen book or a Stephen Covey book to figure

• 14:23Cal Newport?

  out how to do business stuff. And those books weren't really there back then. There was a sense in the publishing industry back in the nineties that you had to be quote unquote cool, or students would reject the book. And in that effort, they accomplished the opposite. So it's all these books with like kooky people on the covers and it's all about, you know, your crazy roommate and how to deal with the dorm food. And, and I just had this idea. I was like, look, what we need to do is write a book for college students who want to know how to do well, exactly like a business book. This, this doesn't exist. Don't try to talk about naked roommates and dorm food. Just be like, here's how the top students.

• 15:01Tim Ferriss?

  Don't talk about the naked roommates. That's more of a show, don't tell kind of situation. Continue.

• 15:06Cal Newport?

  That I would, I would say so. Yeah. You only need to see that once. Yeah. And so that's what got me started. So I had this idea and I was a writer in college. I was doing computer science and I was also writing and, you know, I was the editor of the humor magazine. I was a columnist for the newspaper. I was really into actually humor writing, but I could write. I'd trained myself to write in college. And I was in New York and hanging out with an entrepreneur friend of mine. And he's like, well, stop talking about just write the damn book. So I was like, okay, we'll figure that out. And then I figured out how to, you know, it's not that hard to figure out. I, in a sort of a Tim Ferrissian style, I, I found an agent and said, look, I don't want you to be my agent. I want you to just teach me how this whole industry works. I want you to teach me how can a twenty year old get a book deal? There's a very narrow path you would have to navigate as

• 15:49Cal Newport?

  a twenty year old to get a book deal. And she laid it out for me and it has to be a book about students and you have to know how to write. And we figured it all out.

• 15:55Tim Ferriss?

  And I literally. Let me pause you for one second. Did she end up becoming your official agent or not?

• 16:01Cal Newport?

  No, I was true to my word. No, she was a fiction agent, right? Now, my memory was, this was actually. She was an agent who represented, I think maybe Ann Patchett. It's like very well respected. I might have that wrong, but that was my, my memory was like Bel Canto had come out around this time.

• 16:14Tim Ferriss?

  So I want you to, don't lose track of this timeline, but how did you get her attention? Why would she take this time to sit with you?

• 16:24Cal Newport?

  So this was a family connection. My memory was, my uncle's a journalist and I said, would you be willing to connect me for a, and again, this was very Tim Ferriss style, the way I went around this. This is why I think we're simpatico. Your book kind of come out, you have, it was very Tim Ferriss style. I said, look, one hour is when I talk to them on the phone. I do not want them to be my age and I'm not going to try to sell myself to them. I just feel that I need to understand the landscape. I'm not going to be able to navigate this because it's too atypical and too young. I'm going to be ignored. I knew there'd be a narrow path. And so, and I was true to my word. And, and so she was a fiction agent, so she wouldn't have been able to represent, she wouldn't have represented me anyways. That was my memory. So I was very clear and you know what? She gave me the roadmap. She, she told me like, here is exactly what, what you would have to do.

• 17:07Cal Newport?

  Like among other things, she said, you have to go do commissioned writing. So I went out and started selling articles to these middling, college focused websites and magazines. So I could, I could have commissions.

• 17:18Tim Ferriss?

  Now, is that important just to show that you're credible or that there is a market for your writing?

• 17:24Cal Newport?

  They're going to want writing samples and they wanted, they were going to want writing samples on the type of writing I was going to do. And if I was going to be writing a student advice book, I needed advice articles. So I did that. The second thing she said any agent would be worried about when I actually went to find an agent was, is the content going to be good? And so what I did there is I sold a commission for no money, $200 or something for a, a nothing online college magazine. I'll leave you remember what it was. I used that commission to do all of my research for my first book. So I mean, I, I talked to, because the first book, I talked to a bunch of Rhodes Scholars and Marshall Scholar. Like the premise was, I'm going to talk to the best of the best and extract advice from them. And this article required me probably to talk to two people and I talked to 20.

• 18:09Cal Newport?

  You know, it's just person after person. Oh, it's for an article. I'm writing this article. Can I, can I interview, interview for this article? And I had to figure out how to find them, but it turns out it's not hard. You look up press releases from colleges to, to learn who had just been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship or a Marshall Scholarship or a Truman Scholarship. And then you could, often at this point, email directories were private, but all you had to do was find the email address of any student on that campus. And then you said, ah, there's the naming convention. You know, at Harvard, it's like first name dot last name at F A S dot Harvard dot E D U. So then you could figure out how to get to them. And so I did all of the interviews for the first book and then wrote out the whole annotated table of content. So I could come, when I started to talk to agents to actually be my agent, I could say,

• 18:53Cal Newport?

  I can write, look, I'm an editor of a magazine at college. I write in the paper. Here's articles I've written for student advice. I have a good idea. Here is the whole thing laid out. And then the third thing I did is I made the format of my first book as easy as possible. It was 50 short rules, each with a contrarian title, each two to three pages long. So I made the task as tractable as possible. I was not going to try to do some sort of sophisticated take. And so all of those pieces came together. And then the final piece was how do you find the right agent? And what I did there is I used the acknowledgement sections of target books to see when the author think their agent. So I could see what agent was working on what book.

• 19:35Cal Newport?

  And I took the business book whose format I was completely copying for my student book, found the agent of that book, wrote that agent and said, I want to do this book, but with student advice instead. Here's all the stuff. And she signed me right before my 21st birthday and I've been with her for 20 years now, actually. So that's how that all started.

• 19:54Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing. So let's see, what year roughly would that have been when you signed that agent?

• 20:03Cal Newport?

  So this was 2003. So in the spring of 2003, if my memory serves, I was 20, I turned 21 that June. I was a junior in college. I signed a contract, the book, I had pitched it as conquer college. And the head of the agency said, you can't have the hard K's right after each other. So if we, we changed it to how to win at college. And I wrote it the fall of my senior year of college. I would just wake up early and write for 60 to 90 minutes every morning. I just would wake up and write for 60, 90 minutes. The format of the book was perfect for it because you could do a draft of one chapter in 60 to 90 minutes. And that was that. And that book, I finished that book while, while still at college and it came out right after I graduated. I sold another book while still in college.

• 20:47Cal Newport?

  So while that was still in production, I upgraded. It's like, okay, I'm now going to do a book with normal chapters. And this was how to become a straight A student. This, this ended up becoming probably the, the biggest of my student books. I had no idea how much it had been selling in the background because it was never a big bestseller, but I checked last week.

• 21:06Cal Newport?

  And that little book has sold like 300,000 copies.

• 21:08Tim Ferriss?

  That's amazing.

• 21:09Cal Newport?

  Which is with never selling more than a very small amount in any one week or month. It just chugs along. So in that book, what I did is I said, okay, let's get past the more vague stuff. I just talked to 50 straight A students and it was hardcore. Like this is how you take notes for a math class. This is how you should study for a, an English class. This is how you prepare for a blue book exam. It was just nuts. Here's how you manage your time. This was like one of the first books to seriously tackle time management for students and treat this as something you should do. And so I wrote that almost immediately and, and, and I submitted that right after I started grad school. So, so by my first year of grad school, I had one book come out and another book in the can. So I just sort of knocked those off real quick.

• 21:51Tim Ferriss?

  I have many follow up questions, so a few observations. The first is you, you were mentioning that as a 17 or 18 year old back in the, the dot com boom, and then subsequent busts, you could get tens of thousands of dollars to try anything. I think we've learned our lesson because now you have to be at least 20 to get hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 22:11Tim Ferriss?

  So what could go wrong? And a couple of other things that just popped to mind as I'm listening to this, because it is kind of like deja vu all over again for me as well. There are a lot of similarities and one does not tie in perfectly to your story. But when you spoke to this first fiction agent to ask for advice, if you had not promised, actually even if you had promised not to pitch yourself, I do want to mention that there's a saying, or there was at least when I was here in Silicon Valley. If you want money, ask for advice and if you want advice, ask for money. And that very often the indirect path can actually reap dividends, right?

• 22:55Tim Ferriss?

  In terms of asking for advice, which this did, it just did it in a, in a, in a more indirect fashion. Right? It kind of laid things out longitudinally. And then the other piece I wanted to, to mention that I think it strikes me as important is that while you were in college, you created a book that was easy to read, but perhaps first and foremost, you created a book that you were capable of writing. And that is why, for instance, in the four hour body or other books, tools of titans, certainly, I have written books in a modular way, not just because it allows people to dip in and out in this choose your own adventure type of.

• 23:36Tim Ferriss?

  Approach, but because it makes it easier for me to write. Because ultimately, if the book doesn't get written, it doesn't matter how easy it is to read. And so that that also occurred to me, right? If you had chosen to try to reverse the order and write the, let's call them normal chapters, instead of the two to three page chapters with principles, maybe that first book never would have been written, just given the time constraints. Right?

• 24:01Cal Newport?

  Yeah, and skill, I don't think I could have done it yet.

• 24:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So this leads me to ask, and we're going to bounce all over the place because that is how my brain functions or malfunctions. You graduate from college, what does your first six to 12 months look like out of college?

• 24:17Cal Newport?

  I mean, the two things I did in college is I wrote and I did computer science. I was a real computer guy. I think we actually overlapped. When I was in high school, I went to high school in a small town near Princeton. And so I think this may be even overlapped when you were there as an undergrad. I ran out of computer science to take, and so I was taking computer science at Princeton in the university classes when I was still in high school. So I went to Dartmouth College and was really just doing very well into computer science. So I was really like a locked in sort of computer science student, and so I rolled right out of Dartmouth into MIT.

• 24:51Tim Ferriss?

  What type of focus did you have within computer science? What were you most interested in and focused on?

• 24:57Cal Newport?

  As an undergrad, it's just you're learning everything. The research I was doing as an undergrad was more network systemsy. And I made a big leap when I went to MIT. You know, you interview, the way it works is potential PhD advisors. You go and you meet with them and then they they essentially make you offers. I'm going to make you an offer to come join my group. And so you go and meet with them and it was mainly the systems oriented professors who were meeting with me. But I had been a real big fan, you know, I wrote of a Richard Feynman. I'd read like the James Gleick biography, genius. I was a fan of John von Neumann of Einstein. I had in my mind, just this, this image of mathematical research of standing at a whiteboard and proving a proof. It just was incredibly romantic for me, even though.

• 25:41Cal Newport?

  Math wasn't really considered my strong suit. And so there was one theory professor who said, I need a systems person to come to my group to help build wireless network systems. And I had done wireless network research. So I went to her group and then just pulled a fast one and just immediately started trying to write theory papers and became a theoretician. And so, you know, I haven't programmed a computer since I arrived, since 2004, when I left school and went to MIT. I joined a theory group at MIT and have been a theoretician ever since. So I haven't touched a computer since, really.

• 26:15Tim Ferriss?

  All right, so if we, if we look at programming, though, and we look at writing prose, if we look at poetry, there are some similarities, right? And it depends on who you talk to, of course. But I think of, for instance, an artist named Dmitry Cherenyak, who works in generative art predominantly at the moment. And he put up a post recently on Twitter where he showed a screenshot of his code and he said, this is my art. So it occurs to me that you can strive for and find elegance and beauty in all of those different domains. So there's perhaps more overlap than one might expect, at least from a first principles perspective.

• 26:59Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned in passing that I trained myself to write in college. I want to hear more about that because I would imagine it wasn't this sloppy ad hoc approach, just given what I think I know of you. How did you train yourself to write?

• 27:17Cal Newport?

  One of the things I always tell people, because it was my experience, is that in order to get the deliberate practice aspect of skill acquisition applied to writing, like if you want to get better at writing fast, you have to be writing for editing and you have to be writing in the context of acceptance and rejections. Because writing is one of these things where everyone can do it well enough that if you're mainly just writing on your own, so I'm writing in a journal, I'm writing a blog, I'm doing National Novel Writing Month, it's just me, you know, working on my novel, you don't necessarily get that stretch that's going to improve your skills. And so the thing that mattered for me is that I was writing for editing and for acceptance and rejection.

• 27:54Tim Ferriss?

  For editing, meaning writing for an editor? You have a reader?

• 27:58Cal Newport?

  Yes, an editor who's going to edit it and also will reject it if it's not good. And so this is actually why writing for the humor publication was a big deal. You probably remember from your time, in Ivy League schools in particular, there's a real culture around humor writing because it used to be, back in the days where everything was the sort of old boys' network, the vast majority of comedy writers for shows like SNL or The Tonight Show, they were a lot, they were coming out of these Ivy League humor societies.

• 28:25Tim Ferriss?

  What is the name of the humor magazine at Dartmouth?

• 28:28Cal Newport?

  At Dartmouth, it's the Jack-o'-lantern.

• 28:30Tim Ferriss?

  The Jack-o'-lantern. And people may have heard the term lampoon, the lampoon is out of Harvard, and then you have the, a number of different magazines at Princeton and so on.

• 28:43Cal Newport?

  Yeah, exactly. And then they all have these huge old histories, you know, so like Dr. Seuss did cartoons for the Dartmouth Jack-o'-lantern in the 1920s. And so that's a very competitive world. You would pitch pieces. And if they were funny, they would go, so back then it would be, you know, print magazines, you would pitch pieces. And if they were funny enough, they would get in. If they weren't, they won it. It was, it was just starkly competitive. And then I wrote a humor column for the paper, but it was the same thing. To become a columnist, they would say, no, no, no, yeah, we'll do that one. No, yeah, we'll do that one. And if you got five in the paper, you had the possibility of doing a column. So I think that really stretched my skill. And that helped. That helped. And, and, you know, I'll say the two things that helped my writing the most, to your original point here, is, A, humor writing turns out to be incredibly

• 29:27Cal Newport?

  useful for any type of writing, because humor writing is all about the timing, the pacing, and the music of the words. You have to replicate the timing of a stand-up comedian, using grammar and word choice, and having to get the right rhythm to set up the punchline, way to beat and nail it. You have to do that all with words. That gives you an incredible facility with sentence crafting. And so, I mean, I'll tell you like today, as a writer for The New Yorker, which is very craft focused. You know, they really care. Writing craft is a really big deal over at The New Yorker. The training I did as a humor writer is incredibly applicable because you hear the words as music and the pausing and the rhythm, it's you have to actually, the performance of the reading. You think a lot about it and that actually really helps over there.

• 30:11Cal Newport?

  And then mathematics, just like programming, that has been the other key to my success. Because if you do proofs, for example, you develop this sense where, uh, it's not right. This doesn't work. The pieces don't fit. And then when the pieces fit, it's the chorus of angels, right? Like your mind is like, I don't like when things don't quite fit. And when they do, it's dopamine coming out of your ears. It led to my style of writing, which is my advice writing is very intricate. You know, it's layout, the generative theory that lays out these pieces and these pieces all fit together. And you might not notice it consciously when you read it, but part of the experience of my writing is that all of the pieces I'm laying out there all click together into a hole where everything fits nicely. And this is symmetric with this, and this makes sense here, and nothing is hanging out.

• 30:53Cal Newport?

  And it reduces this cognitive drag that happens sometimes when writing's a little bit less. The ideas are a little bit less formed and it makes it harder to write. But I think that's been a bit of a secret sauce in my work is that it's cognitively pleasing. Because your brain appreciates the fact that sort of nerdishly and obsessively, all the pieces actually fit together.

• 31:14Tim Ferriss?

  So a few things. Number one, I think we might have to call this podcast Cal Newport, A Course of Angels.

• 31:21Tim Ferriss?

  That may be where we go with this, just to get people in the door. And the second is what you're talking about in terms of symmetry and structure. If anybody listening is interested in exploring that further, there's a book called Draft Number Four by John McPhee, who's a staff writer at The New Yorker and just a

• 31:44Tim Ferriss?

  Behemoth of a craftsman and really, really thinks about structure a lot and lays out structure pieces graphically. So draft number four makes for a really fun read if you are willing to go into the weeds and be a super nerd when it comes to that type of topic. I want to ask you about humor writing. So I was the graphics editor, so an illustrator and graphics editor at the Princeton Tiger, which is kind of the equivalent of the Jack Lantern. And just a piece of trivia for people for whom this will make any sense.

• 32:25Tim Ferriss?

  I took that job, or I applied to that job more accurately because Jim Lee had previously held that post when he was a student and Jim Lee at the time was one of my favorite comic book pencillers, or just beforehand had been one of my favorite comic book pencillers has had rebooted the X-Men. I think he's now at DC, still need to get him on the podcast. And I would sit at this desk and at Princeton, there's this street called Nassau Street with all these gigantic mansions called eating clubs of different names and they all have their particular personalities. And, you know, F. Scott Fitzgerald was at Ivy over here and JFK was also at Ivy.

• 33:09Tim Ferriss?

  And then this person was at such and such. So it has this storied and bizarre history, but when he would go out, I don't think this is speaking out of school, it's pretty funny. People go out, I want to say it was Thursdays and Saturdays and just get hammered. And I didn't get hammered too much, but I opened up the drawer at one point of this desk and I found drawings that Jim Lee had done clearly when he had come back from being completely hammered. At least that was my impression and I was like, oh my God, these are treasures. And I don't know if I ever told anyone about them because I didn't want them to disappear. They're like my little secret in this desk. But the reason I brought this up is that the head editor of the magazine at the time

• 33:54Tim Ferriss?

  ended up shortly thereafter going and becoming the editor in chief of Maxim Magazine, which at the time was a very, very big deal. So it just kind of goes to show you how quickly you can jump. My question for you is,

• 34:09Tim Ferriss?

  How one can practice humor writing or cultivate an awareness of that timing and so on that you're talking about if they don't, and most people won't, have access to working at such a magazine. Do you have any thoughts?

• 34:25Cal Newport?

  It has to be for editing. You have to find a place to submit with-

• 34:29Tim Ferriss?

  You need someone who can reject you and help you improve.

• 34:32Cal Newport?

  You need someone who can reject you because it's like the little things matter. So one of the things that the Jack O'Lantern did is we would also do sort of Onion Style once or twice a year, fake newspapers. So there's a daily newspaper at Dartmouth called The Dartmouth, and we would print the paper that was exactly the same format. We just changed like the U to a V or something, and we would put it in the machines where the regular newspaper was, but it was all Onion Style. And I was good at Onion Style stuff because there's a certain like dryness that has to work. And for whatever reason, I have this memory, I did a piece for it once. And so the timing matters. I don't have exactly a title, but it was something like, "Team from Amish University Places Last at Robotics Competition."

• 35:14Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 35:14Cal Newport?

  Which you gotta just, there's a straight lacedness of it. And I remember I wrote this thing, I wrote it as maybe a sophomore or something like this. And it was just, it had to be the exact rightness of drying. And I remember the editor came in and added some extra things to it, like some quotes, like, "Oh, and then Jebediah said..." Like, I had made it really dry, where I was trying to do it very repertorial style. And like, at some point, you figure out they put like tinfoil on a cat or something. It was something, but it was just, it would be revealed very dryly. And I just remember he added a few quotes from some of the people, and I felt like the whole thing fell apart, you know? I was like, "That's out of the character. You're breaking the dry in it. Like, there's a hole, whatever." But the only way you're going to get that type of fine tuning is submit things, have it be rejected, have things be accepted, and then try to understand

• 35:58Cal Newport?

  why the thing they added is ripping up your... You're like, "This is just, this is making me, it's just not right." I think that really matters. And then the other thing for comedy writing is you have to consume a lot of stand-up comedy, I think. You gotta see the timing. The timing of the top stand-up comedians is actually the foundation on which all humor writing comes out of. Like, at the time when I was doing my column for the paper- My column, I tried to a Dave Barry style.

• 36:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 36:25Cal Newport?

  I don't know if you remember Dave Barry.

• 36:26Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I was just thinking of Dave Barry. Yeah.

• 36:28Cal Newport?

  He won a Pulitzer for his comedy column. That's crazy.

• 36:31Tim Ferriss?

  Incredible. Yeah.

• 36:32Cal Newport?

  Incredible. Yeah, but he was a timing guy.

• 36:35Tim Ferriss?

  Dave Barry is great. Do you have any favorite books? Or if people wanted to start with something, do you have any suggestions?

• 36:40Cal Newport?

  Just read his collections. His collections are fantastic. Because his whole thing was to set up and then he would come in with the absurd punch to the gut. He would set you up and it'd be kind of dry and the timing would be just right, beat. And then something completely absurd. And then he would just keep rolling. So he'd be writing about, it would be mundane. Like people bring too much stuff on the plane to put into the overhead compartment. But I still remember at some point in his piece, there's people with full grand pianos and a, you know, such and such brand John Deere yard tractor that they're trying to get up there. It's like the precision and the absurdity that he just boom, comes out of nowhere and hits you with it. That, that has a good. Simon Rich is really good at that style.

• 37:22Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know Simon Rich.

• 37:24Cal Newport?

  Yeah, he's a younger guy. He was at SNL, I believe. I think he's a lampoon. So he came out of the lampoon. He's at SNL. He does some shouts and murmurs for the New Yorker. That's hilarious. He's sort of the, I think he's the modern young version of Dave Barry. It's a little edgier than Dave Barry is. The absurdity and what he does really well, not to geek out too much on comedy writing, but he does the-

• 37:44Tim Ferriss?

  Nope, let's do it. Don't hold back.

• 37:47Cal Newport?

  The amplification of absurdity. So he'll set up an absurd situation. He'll take it very seriously and he'll be very dry about it. And it just, the absurdity of what's going on increases and like the Simon Rich, what he's really known for is you end up in just like the most absurd places, but without ever losing the dryness. So he had this great piece during COVID about, what should you do if you're like an advice column? Like, what should I do if my kid's afraid of monsters in the closet? At first it starts off with kind of reasonable advice. And then it becomes pretty clear that this column exists in a world in which there has been a portal that has opened up and like savage monsters are actually out there in the world and are coming in and taking and devouring children.

• 38:29Cal Newport?

  And like by the end of the article, it's all about have your shotgun and you're explaining to your kid that you're going to die for the cause as you leave. You know, the go fight the monsters that have been whatever. But he keeps the dry. All of that builds up within the idiom of a Q and A advice column. And it's great. I love it. And in the end, the thing, great thing about Simon, unlike Barry, is like, it's actually a whole metaphor for like, the stress and anxiety parents were feeling about COVID and how like, we're trying to, you know, use the idioms of normal news while everyone's terrified. And so there's, there's, there's a heart to it that was really sophisticated. But that's the dream. And maybe I should have done that.

• 39:04Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know, never say never. I am going to throw one more hat in the ring, and that is Bill Bryson. And for people who want a place to start, A Walk in the Woods, which is rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, is just an outstanding, outstanding book. Also, very, very good with timing.

• 39:27Tim Ferriss?

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• 40:10Tim Ferriss?

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• 40:48Tim Ferriss?

  I want to perhaps just return to, and I think these are related on some level, a term that I have in front of me, I suppose, I'm coming back to it visually, I haven't mentioned it yet, but could you speak to slow productivity? And perhaps you could speak to John Gribbins' book, The Scientists, you mentioned a bunch of scientists earlier in this conversation, because you strike me also as kind of a proof case, or a test case, of slow productivity in a world where it is thought by and large to not be possible, or to just be outdated. So could you just expand on that in any way that makes sense to you?

• 41:28Cal Newport?

  Well, I mean, I'll tell you, and this is literally true, what I was doing in the moments before we logged on to do this discussion right now, it was in the other room in my office this year, with a notebook, working on slow productivity, notes on slow productivity, because I'm thinking about maybe writing a book on it, but I'm still in the earlier stages, and I had gone for a walk earlier, and had been developing some new thoughts, and I wanted to get them down. So I was actually pretty frantically taking notes in my notebook, as I was looking at the clock, like I got to get into, to talk to Tim. So when I say it's fresh on my mind, I mean, it's literally, it's literally fresh on my mind. And so, that's a big caveat, that means this is not a fully baked idea.

• 42:07Tim Ferriss?

  I love half-baked ideas.

• 42:09Cal Newport?

  The ingredients are, yeah, so the ingredients are swirling. So look, here, I'll pitch you what I wrote down this, an hour ago. As of an hour ago, this is the way, because what I do when I'm thinking about ideas, is I try to basically re-pitch them out from scratch, and I do that again and again, and each time I do it, there's overlap with the previous times, but also new pieces. And that's how it polishes. It's why it takes me six months to a year, to get, for example, a book idea, ready to even propose. It's just, this is the, like, we talked about the math mind, like, I need the pieces to make sense. So my current take on slow productivity is, the problem itself, so here's the problem we're facing. The human brain is wired, it's good at making a plan for executing something that you think

• 42:52Cal Newport?

  is important, and it makes you feel good when you complete that plan. This is critical to humans, why we're different than a lot of animals, we can, we can actually come up with a plan to do something, and feel motivation to do it, and feel good when we actually, you know, we need to fix the fence, we fix the fence, the cattle can't get out, we feel really good. The issue is, if you don't do anything, let's say, I'm not making any plans, I don't want to do anything, we know that makes you feel terrible. So you take away people's autonomy, their sense of efficacy, and they're miserable, we know that. But if you put too much on people's plates, so that now you have more on your plate, more obligations to which you have some sort of ascent to complete, then you can easily conceive actually all getting done, you short-circuit that drive. Just like your drive for hunger is really important, but if you eat like a huge

• 43:37Cal Newport?

  amount of junk food, it short-circuits the drive and you end up unhealthy. So when we have way too much on our plate, more than we can easily imagine how it's going to get done, it makes us really unhappy because we're short-circuiting a cognitive drive here, and we get sort of anxious and overwhelmed, and it doesn't feel good. And so we can't treat humans like we would a computer processor. When a computer processor, you want to pipeline as many instructions as possible that are sitting there, so that not a single cycle is wasted, because you just want to make sure that you always have something to do. But for the human brain, that huge pipeline of things that are waiting to be done actually makes the brain unhappy. Our solution to this type of overload, we have too much on our plate, in work and in our life admin as well. Our solution

• 44:16Cal Newport?

  has been to use fast productivity. So fast productivity are like tactics and systems for increasing the amount of things you finish on the scale of days and weeks. So how do I get more stuff? This is what all productivity software is about. Lower friction, easier access to information, take out seven steps in the process of getting this meeting scheduled, we want to maximize the number of things we can execute on the scales of days and weeks. My emerging concept of slow productivity says, shift that scale up to years, months and years. I want to maximize the amount of meaningful stuff I get done in the next five years. It completely changes the game in a way that becomes very compatible with the human brain. Because now suddenly, while

• 44:58Cal Newport?

  I'm going to try to do a lot less, the stuff I'm doing, I'm doing it on a larger timescale, so maybe I'm working a lot on it this week, and then I go a month without doing it at all, and I have a hard day today and an off day tomorrow, you have the seasonality, up and down rhythms, which is a better fit for the human brain. You get rid of the sense of overload, because if you want to produce, you know, a good book in the next two years... That's a very different set of initiatives than I want to do as many writerly-related promotional things as possible this week. Like, that latter could be a real source of stress and overload. The former can be a real source of fulfillment, and you tend to produce things of higher value, because when you're just focusing on maximizing what you can do in the scale of days or weeks, it diverts the sustained application of energy and attention needed to actually do the things

• 45:43Cal Newport?

  that move the needle or that you're proud of. And so I think it's a real issue. I think in the workplace, we have to completely rethink work allocation. Our current mode of doing this is completely incompatible with slow productivity. We basically just throw an unlimited amount of work at individuals and say, "It's up to you to self-regulate." It's an impossible task to ask. And so, you know, I had this New Yorker piece recently called "Why Do We Work Too Much?" And I sort of make this argument in there that if we have to self-regulate, we're just going to end up with 20% too much on our plate. We're going to let stress be the feedback function that slows us down. And in our personal lives, we probably need to be doing significantly less, but the stuff we're doing, do it better and over longer time periods. So there's just this fundamental mismatch with our brain that's happening right now, that this epidemic of

• 46:28Cal Newport?

  busyness, I think, is causing issues because of its mismatch with our brain. And maybe something like slow productivity is the way out of it.

• 46:37Tim Ferriss?

  Let's look at some beacons of hope, perhaps, but we're going to, we're going to look at the ghosts of Christmas past first. So, very briefly, in "The Scientists" by John Griffin, you wrote on your blog, this was 2021, I think it was towards the end of July, that you're, that you're reading his magisterial tome, I'm not quoting verbatim, "The Scientist", and you're up to page 190, which is you're only up to Isaac Newton. Now I'm going to read verbatim. "Even early on, I become intrigued by repeated observation. Though The Scientist, profiled in Griffin's book, are highly productive," in quotation marks, "by any intuitive definition of this term, the daily pace of their work was incredibly slow by any modern standards

• 47:18Tim Ferriss?

  of professional effectiveness." And this comes, then, to, I'm skipping ahead, what you just said. When viewed at the fast scale of days and weeks, the famed scientists in Grubin's books seem spectacularly unproductive. Years would pass during which little progress was made on epic theories. Even during periods of active work, it might take months for important letters to induce a reply, or for news of experiments to make it across a fractured Europe. Now, I'm going to ask you a follow-up question on that piece. I'm only going to read a little bit more. "When we shift, however, to the slow scale of years, these same scientists suddenly become immensely productive." And, last line I'll read, "No one remembers Newton's lazy lockdowns, but his Principia achieved immortality." And I'll ask a few questions,

• 48:03Tim Ferriss?

  and then feel free to tackle them, or answer a different question, however you like. So the first is, I would imagine some people hear this, say, "That's great, but we just live in different times." Like, we are contending with different problems, and a volume of stimulation that these people could not even conceive of. And had there been TikTok, and Twitter, and so on, perhaps Newton never would have achieved anything. Which, maybe, maybe not. And that's why I wanted to just note that I wanted to ask about important letters taking months to induce a reply, and so on. They had some inbuilt friction in the system that has been removed in certain ways, and you could perhaps reintroduce it.

• 48:45Tim Ferriss?

  So the question this leads me to, which is really the real question, is, are there any people who come to mind for you who are more contemporary? They could be dead, but let's just say within the last 20 years, who stick out as being particularly good at slow productivity. It could be a category of person, but do we have any contemporary examples?

• 49:11Cal Newport?

  There's a couple of places where we still see a lot of slow productivity. So one is fiction writers, and in particular literary fiction writers, but also some genre fiction writers. This is one of the few places where you're allowed to basically say, "Leave me alone. I'll come back when I have a book." And so if we look, for example, at Dave Eggers, the novelist Dave Eggers, he works in a house on a laptop that doesn't have internet connectivity. So there's no wifi and he just basically works nine to five. He's pretty hard to reach. He talks to a couple of times a week. From what I understand, he does have like assistants to deal with some of the logistical stuff, but he just, he doesn't do much, but work on, on his books.

• 49:49Cal Newport?

  Another example is, you know, Neil Stephenson, he wrote that great essay years ago, why I'm a bad correspondent.

• 49:57Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, so good, so good.

• 49:59Cal Newport?

  It's so good. It's inspiring, but basically his point was, he's mellowed out some, by the way, I remember going to see him do a book publicity tour back in Cambridge. And, and back then, that was the only time he would leave was to do publicity tours and he seemed so upset that he had to be there. He just wanted to be writing and he really didn't want nerd, he hated nerd questions about like the canon of his books. But anyways, but the bad correspondent was like, if I answer all your messages and go to all your conferences and answer all your emails, what will I have in the end? I'll have like a couple thousand messages I sent to individuals. If I instead don't do that and write a book that I'm really proud of, then maybe, you know, a million people are going to read that book. And so my impact will be bigger if I ignore your message so that I can be basically writing something for a lot of people. So John Grisham is another example.

• 50:43Cal Newport?

  I went down this rabbit hole recently. He, not long ago, his longtime assistant retired and he didn't hire anyone else because he didn't need one. He has created this life, from what I understand, he has created this life where basically his editor knows how to get in touch with him. Outside of his two weeks of book publicity, you can't reach him. He doesn't do things. I know he does do some things, he does do some political fundraising and stuff, but basically he says, I write my books once a year. He said, I didn't need to rehire my assistant because not enough people knew my phone number for it to make any sense. You know, so basically he just set that up and, and he put his energy other places. He, he built a bunch of baseball fields and became the commissioner of the little league in the, one of the, the town he lived. So he put a lot of time into that. He's really into coaching.

• 51:29Cal Newport?

  So that was inspiring. And then if you look at. Mathematicians and scientists like that are really at the cutting edge. They're just getting after it. They're not on Twitter tweeting all day long for the most part, putting aside, let's say like public health stuff during COVID. But for the most part, the top mathematicians, the top theoretical computer scientists, I know the really leading edge lab scientists, they're doing their thing. They're, they're going for their Nobel. They're trying to get their fields. They're trying to, they're trying to do the work. And so that's another category, I think, that you see where this is not for me. So I take great inspiration from, you know, novelists that really can just disappear. I collect stories, by the way, of dual home professional writers. It's always just they live in a city in the winter and then they have like a farm they go to in the summer. It's just my dream one day.

• 52:14Cal Newport?

  So yeah, there's people out there doing it and there's people like, and like me, like you, you hinted at it before. It's like the weirdest thing about me, as far as anyone is concerned, is that I've never had a social media account. And it turns out it's allowed, like today, everyone understands it, but until like a minute ago, people thought I was literally insane. And it's fine. I had friends who knew what was going on in the world and sold a couple of books. So, you know, it's like, I, I think we tell ourselves that like we're stuck in this way of existence. We're not really stuck. We have a lot of options.

• 52:40Tim Ferriss?

  Let me just add a few footnotes. Thank you for that. So Neil Stephenson, for people who don't know, first of all, N E A L Stephenson, S T E P H. And he'll pop up as soon as you type in N E A L. But if you've heard the term metaverse, probably came from his novel, Snow Crash, has written many Seven Eves. My favorite is probably Cryptonomicon, which I think is a rare choice as a favorite, but personally, I think Crypton.

• 53:09Cal Newport?

  Well, not in my world.

• 53:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 53:11Cal Newport?

  Computer scientists love Cryptonomicon.

• 53:12Tim Ferriss?

  It's so prescient in so many ways. I mean, if you look at, you know, cryptographic cryptography, leading into decentralized currencies and so on, like he is, he has spotted so many things around corners 10, 15, 20 years in advance. It is really quite mind boggling. Neil Stephenson's piece, Why I Am A Bad Correspondent, I'll put it in the show notes as well. I was going to include why I'm a bad correspondent in this book that I was working on a few summers ago that I ended up canceling.

• 53:48Tim Ferriss?

  Which was the no book, the placeholder title was the no book. And I kept writing and writing and writing this book on how to say no and coming up with compelling reasons for why I should not write the book myself. So it was kind of this recursive situation where I ended up saying no to the no book. But the why, why I'm a bad correspondent is outstanding. So we'll put that in the show notes. You mentioned writers, you mentioned scientists, and then one of the things that is perhaps weird or the people consider weird about you and that, and that is that you don't have social media accounts. So I'm going to ask you, just to let this bake for a minute, what other things people would consider unusual or strange? And you can take that in any direction you want, but about you, your workflow, how you

• 54:33Tim Ferriss?

  work, how you live, anything. But before we get to that, the no social media, so found a GQ piece on you and digital minimalism. And you mentioned that you had tech company during the dot com bubble. And you've joked that you originally didn't sign up for Facebook because maybe there's, I'll just read the quote, "There was probably a little bit of petty jealousy," Newport says, "like, oh, why is this company so popular? I'm not going to give him the satisfaction of using his products." So did you commit, is that just purely in jest or did you early on commit to that? And then it just worked for you, so you continued it?

• 55:17Tim Ferriss?

  In other words, was it like a first principles decision or did it start off in a different way?

• 55:23Cal Newport?

  Through the sands of time, I'm trying to remember, because I had to go back and do some research and I did confirm that Facebook arrived at my college in 2004 and I confirmed that was true. And that was the first major, there's things before that, there's Friendster, et cetera, but those were more niche, like there wasn't a real pressure to sign up for those.

• 55:40Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 55:41Cal Newport?

  My memory, and again, this is through the sands of time, is that there was two factors why I didn't sign up for Facebook. One was just what you were talking about. So Mark Zuckerberg was a contemporary of mine. He was a computer science student at Harvard at the time that I was a computer science student at Dartmouth. We had both started companies around the same time. His has been a little bit more successful. So, you know, Facebook ended up a little bit more successful than Princeton Web Solutions, which is what, which is what I had been, I had been running. I mean, you know, comparable, if you just add seven zeros.

• 56:14Cal Newport?

  So there was some of that because especially I remember like all the women I knew and they were like, oh, this is so fun. I want to be on there. Like, why are they interested in this guy's service? There was some of that. The other thing, and I think this is true, because I have a really strong memory of this. I have a weird, it's not a phobia, but um, an inability to do rank list. So if you ask me, hey, what's your favorite book, which I get asked on podcasts, I don't know how to answer it. If you say, what's your two favorite movies? I can't, it's a, there's probably a name for it.

• 56:42Tim Ferriss?

  Our rapid fire questions are going to be great towards the end of this.

• 56:45Cal Newport?

  Oh, I feel you'll see, you'll see, I'll free, I freeze on these all the time. Or if I know they're coming, like I've done Ezra Klein show a few times.

• 56:52Tim Ferriss?

  Like, sorry, sorry, you're cutting out. I'm sorry. What was that? Yeah, your, your connection's really bad.

• 56:57Cal Newport?

  They're all great. It's like enumeration and numeracy, if I'm going to invent the word. And that was what early Facebook was. Your profile was a favorite quote, favorite movies, favorite books. It was a lot of Irving Goffman presentation of self type sociology. You had to decide like, what am I going to say in my favorite movie is my favorite quote to try to create a presentation of self that was, and I can't do that. I can't. So I really remember it's a combination of those two things. I was like, now this isn't for me. And I got to tell you, all it took was a few years of separation that suddenly I felt like Margaret Mead among the Polynesian Islands. Because I was the only person not using this and it was so interesting, like from a remove, it was like really interesting. And I was like, okay, I think I'm just going to run with this for a while because I got to tell you, from the outside,

• 57:42Cal Newport?

  it seemed more and more absurd. Not that the services seemed absurd in isolation. The thing that seemed absurd, my memory, was this presumption of universality. That these are technologies that everyone has to use and it's weird if you don't. I thought they seemed kind of niche, like they're kind of cool. And if you're into technology or web 2.0, maybe it's interesting. I had nothing against them. But I was really wary about this rising presumption that everyone has to use it. And I, you know, I'm an internet nerd from the early days and I'm like, I don't know that we should consolidate the internet into two or three companies where they built their own private shadow version of the internet that they can control. We already have the internet. Do we have to use these private walled garden versions of the internet?

• 58:23Cal Newport?

  And this idea that it was weird not to use it, that was the thing that really probably made me an advocate in the skeptical calm among social media was not that I thought what was happening on Twitter was bad. It was, why is it such a big deal that I don't use it? That's really what pushed me into a place of, you know, something weird's going on in our culture.

• 58:42Tim Ferriss?

  Thank God your personal Everest is putting together lists of favorite books and movies. If you hadn't had that problem, who knows where you'd be. You'd be, you could be just another troll on Reddit or something. So that's a good thing that you had that friction. We're going to shift gears a little bit because I want to continue to focus on the unusual and unusual, not in any sense of impracticality, but uncommon, uncommon things that you do or don't do. What is your roles and values document? Do you still have a roles and values document?

• 59:15Cal Newport?

  I do. Yeah, it's part of what I pitch. I pitched this multi-scale approach to planning things out. And when I say pitch, I mean, you know, like on my podcast or my articles, roles and values are at the top. And this comes right out of Stephen Covey, Sharpening the SAW, Seven Habits. Here are the different roles in my life and here are the values to define how I want to execute each of these roles. There's a professor, family, parent, right? You know, whatever the writer, whatever the rules, community member. And here are my values. And there they are, and I look at them and I refine them and you have to think about them. And then in my scheme, you look at those when you then create your plan for the current quarter. Because you want to be in a line with your values when you make that plan. And then you look at your quarterly plan when you create your plan for the week.

• 1:00:01Cal Newport?

  Because you want your week, what you do this week to be in line with what your bigger vision is for the quarter. And then when you build your plan for each day, figuring out what to do with your time, that's influenced by your weekly plan. And there you have a thread that connects everything you're doing indirectly, but without any breaks into links all the way back up to your values. So what I'm doing right now is a multi-link connection all the way back up to here's the things I care about.

• 1:00:22Tim Ferriss?

  Let's get into some specifics, more specifics here. You've written very well on, and I'm going, I'm going to get the phrasing imperfect, but you've written very well on how many meetings are created or scheduled because people otherwise don't have good systems for keeping track of things. In other words, they're afraid of forgetting to do something and therefore they just drop a meeting in the calendar with no clear agenda because at least it functions to prevent the sand from slipping through the fingers.

• 1:00:59Tim Ferriss?

  You have this document, the roles and values document. If I were to create a roles and values document, say in Google Drive, I would be super excited, I would focus on it. I might look at it the next day, but if I did not have some system for forcing me to look at it, evaluate it, revise it, it would become lost very, very quickly. I would forget I ever put it together. So could you just walk us through how you ensure that doesn't happen for you personally? With the roles and values documents and then furthermore, with the quarterly plan and so on? What is your workflow or your flow look like for those things?

• 1:01:40Cal Newport?

  Well, I'm a big believer in what I call rooted productivity. There has to be somewhere, I call it the root document, that says, these are the core big picture systems that I execute in my life. And therefore, the only commitment I really have to make is that I will follow this root document, that this is the commitment. Either I'm someone who follows this root document or my life is chaos. And then that root document is what lays out what I'm talking about here. It lays out that multi-scale planning, that these are the types of planning I do. There's a few other things that lays out. It lays out that I do David Allen style full capture. I'm a big believer about not having open loops.

• 1:02:18Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry to interrupt, but I will, do you, so do you read that every morning? Is this like your boot up sequence?

• 1:02:24Cal Newport?

  It's internalized now, but it's written down. And my listeners do the same thing, like we put it in a directory. You call it root and you put all your planning documents in that directory. And you don't have to look at it every day. Once you, you internalize it pretty quickly, but just knowing it's there. And you can assess yourself as, am I following that or am I not? And it's a binary. And then everything else comes out of it. So we call it a root because then the tree of all these different systems and stuff grow out of it. And then you might be really nitpicking with all these other small little systems, but they all eventually connect back to the root. And to me, that's a really big deal, that the biggest decision you make if you're going to live a deep life, like productivity in isolation, I don't even know what that means, who cares. But if you're going to live a deep life, like the ultimate original commitment

• 1:03:09Cal Newport?

  is I'm going to commit to discipline in the sense of things I am going to do on a regular basis because they matter, even if I don't feel like it. And like, that is the biggest binary zero to one flip that happens in crafting a life. What you commit to, that evolves over time. You might find like, this is a bad idea. I've been trying to whatever, write down notes on a thing once a day, and that's not really working. And it all evolves over time. But the zero to one commitment is, do I have some sort of structure I'm committing to with the goal of making my life deeper? Or am I winging it? That's the zero to one bit that I think matters more than any other.

• 1:03:44Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any particular levers, actions, anything that have helped facilitate that for you personally, sort of disproportionately? So I'll share a few things for myself, which are, I think, sometimes embarrassingly primitive for me to even talk about, because some of my readers and listeners just imagine like, I wake up every morning with this like, mental karate chop and just like, matrix my way through the day with all these sophisticated systems. And that is not really how it plays out. And I will say, though, that there are

• 1:04:24Tim Ferriss?

  a few things. One is looking at my calendar on an annual basis and trying to block out extended periods of time for being offline. And by extended, that's one, two, or three weeks. And ensuring that I have, hopefully, something of at least a week once a quarter. So I'm actually leaving tomorrow for three weeks off the grid. And I will have no Wi-Fi and no phone for three weeks. And that's important to me. On a multitude of levels. Number one is it allows me to check in and see how comfortable I am with myself when I am not over busied. It provides me with time to reflect without

• 1:05:08Tim Ferriss?

  the ability to indulge in the temptation to go on Twitter or check something. So I don't, I don't need to rely on self-control. In other, in other words, I'm sort of saved from myself. It allows my system physiologically time to kind of reboot and recover. And it also forces me to put in place or revisit systems that allow me to be gone for three weeks. So as an example, figuring out right now and yesterday and today that my usual checks and balances with team members and assistants for wire approvals isn't going to work while I'm gone. So we need to upgrade those systems so that we don't have any issues because my assistant, unless there is an emergency that assists states a satellite

• 1:05:51Tim Ferriss?

  phone is not going to be able to reach me. Right. And then those systems outlive the time off the grid. That's an example of one thing that I do that seems simple. It is simple in theory at least, that has this huge spectrum of ripple effects. And there's some other things that come to mind, but I'd love to know for you, if you're trying to focus on this deep life and rooted productivity, which levers or actions have been particularly impactful for you that come to mind?

• 1:06:27Cal Newport?

  Well, I mean, I think periodic reflection plays a critical role for me too. As a professor, there's a seasonality that's built into my work, which I wish could be widely replicated.

• 1:06:37Tim Ferriss?

  So jealous. Yeah. I mean, I suppose I could do it, but man, it's such a great, such a wonderful thing.

• 1:06:43Cal Newport?

  Everyone who runs their own business, who's entrepreneurial, where you have some flexibility, I think you should integrate seasonality into what you do. I have a big believer in seasonality in all scales, by the way, busy and not busy parts of your day, busier and non-busier days of the week, busier and non-busier months in the season. I mean, I think at all scales, we need it being Pegged all the time, filling your time all the time is not healthy for us. So for me, there's the December break and the summer break. So December 6th is my last lecture on campus. That's when the semester ends. And for all of the time after that, between then and when the semester begins again, each week, I've already blocked off one full day off from no

• 1:07:24Cal Newport?

  meetings, no phone calls, no podcast recordings, no nothing, plus an additional half day off for what I call adventure work, where typically I'll go to trails outside, somewhere scenic. Sometimes I'll go to the museums in downtown DC to just think about one problem in a awe inspiring or unusual location. I've already blocked those days off because I want to get the most out of December. And then when I get to the summer, with professors, it's a little bit weird. We're not really paid during the summer. What you do, at least at a research university, is you get summer salary from research grants, and that's how you cover the two months in the summer. And at some point, after tenure, when I didn't have to worry about that so much, is I decided, I'm not going to take research grants for the summer. I'm just going to take the summers off. I'll fill in the gaps in income with

• 1:08:09Cal Newport?

  writing or what have you. And so I actually literally am not working for the university for two months out of the summer. And that's really critical for me. That type of seasonality is probably the, one of the biggest advertisements for the professor life that I could give.

• 1:08:24Tim Ferriss?

  What do you do on your days off?

• 1:08:26Cal Newport?

  It's not clear like what on or off means for me. I mean, I read a lot. I think a lot. I take a lot of notes. Like for me, a day off, what I care about is a day where I don't have to be interacting professionally with other people. To me, that's what off is. I don't have to go on Zoom. I don't have to go in for a meeting. I'm not in front of an audience. It's, I'm in full control of my time. I don't actually like not doing things when I have control of my time. I love to do things where I have complete autonomy over my time. I'm going to go for a walk and think this through. I'm going to go work on a book proposal. I'm going to read this book. Then when my kids get home from school, we're going to go do something else. And so for me, a day off is a day where I have

• 1:09:05Cal Newport?

  full autonomy over what I do. The blank calendar day to me is one of the more glorious sites. If you really want to hear the chorus of angels, forget solving a math proof or getting a sentence to work right. Seeing a day on the calendar where there's nothing in Gmail, I think Gmail should have a feature where they just sort of, you know, holates and angelic glow. If you see, if you see any of the little, little feedback, right? The little feedback loop.

• 1:09:32Tim Ferriss?

  I'm looking for some inspiration. So these half days of adventure work at inspiring or cool locations, I don't want you to dox yourself, but like, what are some locations you've used or types of locations? And why did you choose them? Right? Because even if you say museum, if you're in a city, there are multiple museums you could choose. So how did you choose a particular place? And then when you are working on some larger problem or project, what does that actually look like? Is it just pen and paper? Is it laptop where you've knocked out the wifi? If you could give maybe one or two real world examples, that would be super helpful.

• 1:10:17Cal Newport?

  I think a lot about location. So if I'm down at the mall in DC, for example, there's a couple of different games I'll play. Sometimes I'll go to the Botanical Gardens, the National Botanical Gardens, it's a giant greenhouse. And so it's just, it resets your whole context because you're in a tropical climate with palm trees and there's these paths that go through it and there's benches and it's, you're going to get really sweaty. It's very humid. But I'll go there. Sometimes I'll go to the National Gallery because there's a, there's a certain type of connection to history, classical antiquity mindset you get if you walk through and here's a Leonardo. You're looking at, I especially like the Italian Renaissance floor. And then there's a, an underground cafeteria at the National Gallery that connects to East and the West wings, in which there's essentially no cellphone

• 1:11:00Cal Newport?

  reception. So then you go down there and you get coffee from the coffee place and there's this waterfall and that you can see through the glass. And then hiking, there's the Paksak National Wildlife Refuge just not far from me. Go there and you can hike there. There's the Rachel Carson Greenway that used to be closer to my old house and I would hike the same thing every week. And so I got really good at the change of seasons. It was a real thorough move, like noticing week by week how things were changing and what was happening with the leaves. And I had names for all the places and I would do the same hike again and again. And this is all pen and paper. It's me, notebook, a Uniball Micro, you know, 0.5 millimeter roller pen.

• 1:11:42Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, a 0.5 guy. I like that. I like that. I, you know, I'm torn between the 0.7 and the 0.5.

• 1:11:49Cal Newport?

  Well, the bleeding, you know, I don't know.

• 1:11:53Cal Newport?

  I don't know, man. I think if you're using the point seven, you're going to start to get some bleed when you're a

• 1:11:57Tim Ferriss?

  I'm thinking of a massacre.

• 1:11:58Cal Newport?

  Because also, if I'm doing CS work, I'm doing math. And so there's a lot of little Greek, if you're drawing in epsilon, or you're doing exponents, or you need a point five.

• 1:12:09Tim Ferriss?

  My notebooks are so full of exponents and epsilons. I don't even know what to do with myself. So you have your, you have your point five millimeter exponent ready pen. You have your pad. You go to the botanical gardens. You're drinking coffee. You're sweating your face off. What type of work are you doing? What does it look like for that half day? What? If we're looking over your shoulder, what is, what's happening there?

• 1:12:36Cal Newport?

  Either I'm trying to solve a particular proof. So if I'm doing my, have my computer scientist hat on, I'm trying to solve a proof. And I'm, it's literally, I'm, I do a lot of kind of graph theoretical stuff and you're drawing graphs, you're doing a quote, you're just trying to make it work. Or at least make aspects of it work, or figure out why it doesn't work. I'm drawing equations, I'm drawing graphs. Or if I have my writer hat on, I'm trying to crack structure. So writing has to have, for me, writing, of course, has to happen with a computer and, and that's, it's a whole other thing. But I put a huge amount of time in figuring out the structure of the ideas that I want to write. And especially if I'm working on something like a book proposal, I mentioned before, it takes me six to 12 months. Again and again, you're going to find me somewhere with a notebook, just like I was doing this morning, right before I got on the call with you here.

• 1:13:21Cal Newport?

  Just writing, trying to structure out, index, outline, ah, it's not quite working, you know, how does this fit together? What about this format for the book? I'll sometimes buy a dedicated notebook for a book idea. It's a trick of mine.

• 1:13:32Tim Ferriss?

  I do the same thing. Yeah. Dedicated notebook.

• 1:13:35Cal Newport?

  That's what I'm writing. Yeah. So it can be one of those two things.

• 1:13:38Tim Ferriss?

  What do you use for writing books? What's, do you have a preferred software? As you're talking about indexing and playing with table of contents and structure. I have found Scrivener just to be a lifesaver in that department. I'm sure there are a million other options, but I've used Scrivener for many, many years. What do you use for your book writing?

• 1:13:59Cal Newport?

  When I switched to contributor status at The New Yorker is when I switched to Scrivener. I haven't tried it yet for a book. We'll see about that. But I definitely, for all of my articles, all my New Yorker work, all that Scrivener, I love it.

• 1:14:11Tim Ferriss?

  Why was that the catalyst to switch to Scrivener?

• 1:14:15Cal Newport?

  New Yorker writing is very dense. It's like dense information. So you're citing a huge number of different, you know, you saw it in the article I wrote about you. There's like a huge number of things you have to cite. And so the double pane feature Scrivener is an absolute lifesaver. Like, okay, I can just grab the article I'm citing and it's on the right pane. And then I can quote from it directly on the left pane. Or I can take a different section of the article and put it on the right pane. So that the left pane, I can properly reference it. And then you just jump into composition mode when you're, so you're pulling in information and kind of getting a draft of it. And then you shoot to composition mode, full screen, best composition mode of any tool out there. And then your word polishing and then you jump back. It's a great tool. I've loved it. I've been a fan ever since I started using it.

• 1:14:59Tim Ferriss?

  Just for people who don't have context, add a little bit more. So Scrivener for me, the reason I began using it is that prior to that I'd use Word. And if you're using Word and you have, let's just say, as in my books, which are both long and have many components. If you have 27 chapters and you have 15 open documents, because you also have research documents and reference documents, your computer will cease to function and your brain will cease to function. But with Scrivener, at least the way that I use it, you have these stripped down, format minimal documents that can all be looked at within a single application.

• 1:15:42Tim Ferriss?

  And you can format it in different ways. A lot of screenwriters or playwrights use Scrivener. I think that's initially how it came onto my radar. I had not seen anyone use it for nonfiction at that point. But if you imagine your screen cut right down the middle, on the left hand side, you have this table of contents. It's the easiest way to think about it. And I will immediately break my book into three or four sections, even though I may not even have labels for the sections. And then I decide which documents will go into each of those sections. And you can just drag them around so you can play with the order. You can create another section as an example.

• 1:16:24Tim Ferriss?

  And then you have research at the bottom of that left hand pane. On the right side, if you split that in half.

• 1:16:32Tim Ferriss?

  Horizontally, what I'm working on, this is just how I do it. What I'm working on will be in the top right pane. And then below that, the bottom right pane, I will have whatever research doc I'm referring to, since my stuff is also very, very factually dense and requires citations and references and so on. And by doing that, you don't have to click back and forth between tabs or between programs, between documents. It's a really, really elegant solution. And I hope you're not offended by me focusing on some of the tactical stuff, but I'm curious in the thought process behind some of your decision making, right? That's much more interesting than just the output of the decision. It's like, okay, how did you arrive at this?

• 1:17:17Tim Ferriss?

  So when I was reading about your quarterly plan, sample week plan, et cetera. In the end of this blog post, and that was from January of 2021, and I don't know if this is still the case, but I'll just read this last paragraph. To be clear, most of my obligations on my plate exist as concrete items in my task lists, which as my podcast listeners know, I maintain using Trello. But most of the projects that move the needle in my career, working on a research paper, writing a major article, never get discretized, I'm not even sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, into bite sized actions on a list. I instead treat them with the level of intention that their formidable difficulty deserves.

• 1:17:57Tim Ferriss?

  So the Trello use, I've used Trello, I like Trello, I tend to use, I've used both Trello and Asana. I'm curious how you've ended up arriving at Trello.

• 1:18:09Cal Newport?

  Trello has been my tool of choice recently for organizing tasks. And the way I actually use it is I do a different board for different professional roles. So I have a writer board, I have a board for CS research, so my role is a researcher, and then a board for the teaching and administrative. Pieces of being a professor. So there are three separate roles. They have separate boards. The columns that I then divide those boards into represent different categories. You know, I have a column for, I gotta process this. This is a David Allen idea where I need to put this down somewhere, this thing, but I don't really even know what this thing means I need to do. It's, you know, A, we need to recruit someone.

• 1:18:52Cal Newport?

  Like, okay, I don't know what that means, but I don't want to, so let me just write that down under to process. Like another hack I do is anyone I meet with on a regular basis, they'll have their own column on the particular board. So if anything comes up, I need to ask them. I actually just put it on a card and put it under their meeting column. And then when I meet with them, I just go and boom, boom, boom, go through it. Then typically I'll have a column for like, okay, definitely this week, this needs to happen. So I, when I go through my weekly planning, I'll, I'll move things to that. And so I like that, that different roles, different columns. And I like that the virtual cards and all these tools can hold a lot of information. So I'm a big believer that all the relevant files, all the relevant notes, if someone emailed me something about this task that's relevant, you can just copy and paste this all onto the virtual back or attach it to the card.

• 1:19:37Cal Newport?

  It actually is also an information management system, not just a task management system. That's been what I've been, I've been using. And then typically I really go through those all at the beginning of the week. But when I build out my weekly plan, I'm often identifying off those boards, this is what I really want to get done this week. And then I'm often executing largely off that weekly plan. Though I shouldn't, let me, actually, Tim, I'm going to give a broader context here because I'm kind of a weird guy. I talk about a lot of things. So I'm going to attempt to try to put all the weird things I do into some sort of context. Because we've covered a lot of territory.

• 1:20:10Speaker 02

  To unweird the weird.

• 1:20:12Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Or just to like illustrate the weird. There's these two different main hats I wear. So there's, there's a hat where I'm a computer scientist and I, I publish papers on, I'm mainly like theory of distributed systems. Then there's a sort of journalistic, public commentary critique type writing. This is like my articles for The New Yorker, my New York Times op-eds. My books mainly, and my books especially recently have really been about tech and culture and their impact, though they have a real practical aspect, too. But then I often also talk about productivity, largely because it's just people are kind of interested in how I do these other things. So it's like, it's not necessarily like a tier one topic that I write about, though I kind of do, because Deep Work, I think, talks about this for sure. But then also, we talk a lot on my blog and in my newsletter and my podcast about like

• 1:20:57Cal Newport?

  what we're talking about here, because I don't think we talk enough about this in general. So people are out there, well, how do I organize my aspirations? How do I structure a life to be deeper and not get lost in the noise, but not be overscheduled? And so we geek out a lot on productivity as well. So just to give, I don't know if that's useful, but a landscape of I do these two big things, but then I have to care a lot about productivity to do these big two things. So then I talk about what do I do to make sure that I can still write an academic paper and a New Yorker piece and a book and whatever? Like, how does that all fit into my life? And, because I care a lot about it. So I don't know if that's useful, but that's my lay of the weird landscape for the various things I do.

• 1:21:35Tim Ferriss?

  We are gonna talk about, say, for instance, a 30-day digital minimalism experiment. So I do wanna dig into that. Before we get to it, we've got in 2019, the artist and writer Jenny Odell, is that right?

• 1:21:49Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:50Tim Ferriss?

  Helped kind of start the trend, which we're gonna talk about, when she published a book titled How to Do Nothing, subtitle, Resisting the Attention Economy. So that becomes a New York Times bestseller. Barack Obama, one of his favorite books, 2019. Then it was followed, I guess, a year later, following spring, by Celeste Headley. I'm not sure if I'm saying that correctly, but Do Nothing, subtitle, How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving. Then you have Anne Helen Peterson's Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, maybe a little less inspiring sounding. It doesn't, I'm always curious about titling decisions and the thought process behind it. Maybe, I mean, it could be a fantastic book, but I haven't read any of these. And then Devon Price's Laziness Does Not Exist.

• 1:22:36Tim Ferriss?

  These are, I wouldn't say entirely new in the sense that you can go back to Thoreau or Emerson, and certainly you can go thousands of years back to like Hockley, and you can find discussions of overwork, busyness, laziness versus contemplation. Are there any books, and I know I'm pushing on your weakness here in terms of listing, so I'm not asking you to list, but there are there any books in the last five or 10 years from, broadly speaking, this kind of category that really stand out for you?

• 1:23:12Cal Newport?

  It's an interesting category, first of all. Like, I sometimes call it like the anti-productivity category, though that's not quite the accurate label, but it's a really interesting category. So, you know, my book came out the same month as How to Do Nothing, so we were, me and Jenny were paired, and so many, so in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Ringer, there's all these articles that came out where it was always talking about us, those two books together. So that was definitely had a close experience. Price's book is great, I blurb that book. Celeste Headley's book is great, I interviewed her for The New Yorker in a piece I did. I would say that what I would add more recently, a book that's done really well, and I think, and I'll get into a reason why I think it did, was Oliver Berkman's new book, which is, maybe it's called 4,000 Hours, I might have the number wrong.

• 1:23:55Tim Ferriss?

  Oliver Berkman?

• 1:23:56Cal Newport?

  Yeah, yeah, he's a British writer, and I blurb that book because it's great. Anyways, and the subtitle's something like Time Management for Mortals or something like this. But it killed it. The book did great. It came out a few months ago, or maybe over the summer, I have a bad sense of time. But the, the number of hours, I'm getting the number wrong, probably.

• 1:24:16Tim Ferriss?

  4,000, 4,000 weeks, Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Berkman.

• 1:24:22Cal Newport?

  Weeks.

• 1:24:22Tim Ferriss?

  Berkman with an E, B U R K E M A N, yeah, 4,000 weeks, Time Management for Mortals.

• 1:24:27Cal Newport?

  And he writes a column for The Guardian. So 4,000 weeks is how many weeks you have to live. I think that really hit, and it really hit in particular because it was introducing a Like a values driven productivity, you could think about it like it's about all that really matters when it comes to organizing your time or being organized is what you're trying to do is you only have so much time and you want to do things with it that's useful, meaningful and effective. And to just be busy for the sake of being busy isn't good. I think all of those books make that argument. I think they're all pushing back on the like an empty crushing busyness. I am all the stuff I'm doing. It's always

• 1:25:08Cal Newport?

  frenetic, but I'm papering over the existential void. I don't want to stare down by doing all of this, when what I probably need to do is stare into that void for a while, wait until the vertigo goes away and then get up and actually start building something real. And I think they're all touching on that because there's this whole sort of fractured sense of overload that's happening right now. We have all these different things coming together. You have like the digital distraction piece, which obviously I'm sort of associated with is really a symptom of the bigger problem. So yes, our phones can be a palliative to this existential despair, but the despair is there and the despair is not going to be fixed by just getting rid of the palliative and saying, let's not use Instagram anymore.

• 1:25:53Cal Newport?

  It's still going to be there. We're using these things all the time because we just it's more palatable to be active and busy all the time than sometimes to face what's hard about what's going on in our, in our lives or the world. And I think all of these books are picking up on that. And like, we need to slow the hell down, figure out what we really want to do, do these things at a reasonable pace, slow productivity, not fast, and face the hard stuff and make the good stuff better. All these books, I think, are getting at that main thing. They all just have different angles at this. So each of them have a different approach they take to this issue. And that's like its own interesting topic. I mean, everyone comes at this from different ways. Berkman comes at it from like a humanist way. I kind of come at it from a humanist way too, and digital minimalism.

• 1:26:37Tim Ferriss?

  What does that mean to, let's say in Oliver's case, to come at it from a humanist perspective? What is, what does that mean?

• 1:26:43Cal Newport?

  Like from a perspective of sort of trying to maximize or improve the flourishing of the, the sort of unique and cherished being that is the humans, right? Like as a human, you're an important, unique. Entity to be cherished and should think about crafting a life in which you flourish. That's the humanist. So it's kind of in this lives of indiscriminate busyness where I'm just overwhelmed all the time and distracted in every moment is you're diminishing your humanity. There's a humanist approach where Anne Helen Peterson might come at this more with a sort of post-liberal, anti-capitalist type approach that this is productivity culture is really just part of the superstructure that supports the base of exploitative capital extraction. It's an economic argument. Just to take these different arguments, Celeste

• 1:27:25Cal Newport?

  is more comes out of a more of a cultural, Odell comes out with a mix of humanist and economic and artistic. And I think that's why that's a phenomenal book. I think it's very smart, very original. And so we all, there's just these different takes that are all coming at it and all add something. But they're all getting at the same underlying issue of this sort of sense of crushing overwhelm and busyness.

• 1:27:47Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I was thinking if this New Yorker gig CS professorial life doesn't work out for you, you could actually work on some sobering children's books along the lines of Dr. Seuss and the first one could be could be called The Despair is There.

• 1:28:10Tim Ferriss?

  Let's get these kids sobered up quick.

• 1:28:14Cal Newport?

  It's only gonna get worse, buddy. Get ready.

• 1:28:17Tim Ferriss?

  So, looking at that through, and this, this may not be the best segue, but I'm gonna give it a shot anyway. We were talking about the deep life and I'm gonna lead into this through that. I'm looking at a post of yours from 2020 and it says, "I strive to divide my focused attention among four categories: community, family, friends, et cetera, craft, work and quality leisure." I love that term, "quality leisure." Constitution, health, in parentheses, and last, contemplation, and then in parentheses, matters of the soul. So I'm gonna ask you, not the second, but I'm gonna ask you about that fourth one, contemplation matters of the soul. And the way that we're going to move into that is through John Newport.

• 1:29:01Tim Ferriss?

  So, who was John Newport?

• 1:29:05Cal Newport?

  Well, it's my father's father, my grandfather, a Baptist theologian and scholar and one of the only of his era Baptist apologist, meaning basically someone who he was Southern Baptist, who was very interested in actually going out there and encountering other worldviews, understanding other approaches to things, and then trying to make a case. Let me make a case for the Baptist Christian worldview. Let me actually go out there and make my case. As opposed to saying the non-apologist approach of battening down the hatches. We have it right. I don't want to hear about what else is going on there. My grandfather was someone who he hung out with Carl Jung. He would walk with Heschel in Central Park when Heschel was still at the

• 1:29:49Cal Newport?

  seminary there. He was at Harvard for a year hanging out with Niebuhr, right? I mean, he was out there exposing himself to every interesting idea and worldview and approach that's out there. He would want to understand them deeply and then try to understand why the advantages of his through comparison and not to get too philosophical, but it was a sort of Socratic

• 1:30:11Tim Ferriss?

  dialectical. Oh, this question is very much a philosophical question. So let's, let's not.

• 1:30:17Cal Newport?

  But he would find that you, you would get more strength in what you, which is a big thing I took from him. He was alive till I, right around, I mean, he, he died basically on his way to my high school graduation. So I knew him throughout my entire, up to the beginning of my adult life. The dialectical method of encountering and fully understanding a different approach, your understanding of the world and your convictions will get stronger, that you don't want to try to avoid or sidestep or discredit before you have to see them. Go hang out with Heschel. Go hang out with Niebuhr. Go hang out with Tillich. You wrote a book on Paul Tillich. Go hang out with Jung and really understand.

• 1:30:53Tim Ferriss?

  Who was Paul Tillich? Just so I know, I'll admit, I don't, I don't know that name.

• 1:30:57Cal Newport?

  He was a Christian apologist. He was like a Christian theologian that did a lot of, you know, sort of of the same rough era as C. S. Lewis, but was a little more academic than Lewis. But so it was like the very smart apologia, like really trying to explain like the Christian worldview.

• 1:31:12Tim Ferriss?

  So let me pause for a second. So apologists, I would imagine for some people has a

• 1:31:19Tim Ferriss?

  Sort of a negative connotation to it, but it doesn't seem like that's how you're using this word. Would you mind just explaining the use of that term?

• 1:31:30Cal Newport?

  There's a technical definition that I'm using. So like the technical definition of an apologist, it's just that you're someone who is out there making a case for the thing that you believe in the effort of explaining it to other people. It doesn't have to be evangelical in the general sense of that term, in terms of you're trying to convince people, but at least you're trying to encounter other people and explain why you're, what you, the thing that you're trying to explain is right. So, I mean, a lot of like what writing you do or I do is technically would be apologia. Like if I write a book, you know,

• 1:32:01Tim Ferriss?

  I'm a productivity apologist.

• 1:32:03Cal Newport?

  Yeah, like I'm a concentration apologist.

• 1:32:05Tim Ferriss?

  That's a confusing term. Do you have any idea how that became like the, the etymological reasons? Came out of theology.

• 1:32:14Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I think it might have. I don't want to talk out of school. I might be wrong about that. You're right, though. It's not in common parlance. So I should advocate, maybe. But the main point is, in the Southern Baptist Church at that time, you wouldn't see a lot of apologia because you didn't want to go out there and encounter other worldviews. I just don't even want to know about that. And I think we see a lot of that today. I mean, outside of the religious context. And so, we talk about this a lot on my podcast, but don't be afraid of ideas or worldviews or approaches or philosophies that are, that seem different than what you believe in. You're not going to get tricked out of your convictions or believing something that's false. You actually strengthen your understanding of the world and therefore strengthen your own convictions by encountering other ideas

• 1:32:57Cal Newport?

  that are well-formed. And that's, it's at the core of the intellectual life for the last, however many centuries, we want to say it, that that's sort of a core operation. And he personified that.

• 1:33:06Tim Ferriss?

  So if we look at the contemplation bucket, and then parentheses, matters of the soul. So this is one of your four categories of focused attention. What does that mean to you? How do you focus on contemplation and matters of the soul?

• 1:33:25Cal Newport?

  The way I would generically tackle that would be to say that humans have these intimations, where this seems right, or good, or awe inspiring. This doesn't seem right. This doesn't seem good. Like, certain behaviors you see, you know, in a movie, the villain, and it's just, it hits this thing inside. That's not right. You're watching Secession on HBO, and you're like, "All of my moral intuitions are telling me that these are bad people. Don't be like these people." Right? You know what I mean? And we get on the other side, too. You encounter the inspiring, the person who sacrifices, or what have you, and it just hits something inside, and you feel it, right? And so you can call these intimations. John Height would call these moral intuitions.

• 1:34:08Cal Newport?

  There's different terminologies for it. Critical, I think, and this, obviously, by "I", I mean, like, all of philosophy, but critically, I think, and all of theology for that matter, too, is figuring out how to actually structure a life around these intimations. A life that pushes you more towards the things that just instinctually hit you as this is, this is right and good, and I just know it, and away from the things and the behaviors and the approaches to life that just hit you at a gut level, is this is not right. This is not good. This is what philosophy does. This is what religion does. If we think about it from a big-picture perspective, is it is ideas evolved over time through experience and argument that essentially help you align your life with the things that, the moral intuitions that are positive and away from

• 1:34:53Cal Newport?

  the ones that are negative. It's why you shouldn't be quick, for example, to dismiss a field of philosophy or religion as, "Oh, I can just figure this out from scratch", or "It's talking about mythologies that I can't empirically validate in the world." What you really have there is a moral technology, something that's been evolved over time to align your life with these intuitions that you feel. And that's the contemplation bucket, is... You better be doing something along those lines because just winging it is not going to matter. And so, you know, I spend a lot of time trying to think about that bucket. Some details of how I tackle that maybe is personal, some are not. I engage a lot in philosophy. There's religious engagements in my life. I'm not formally practicing and associated with a particular religion.

• 1:35:37Cal Newport?

  But that's also something that might not, I don't think that's necessarily a permanent state. I think there is a lot of intuition and brilliant human moral engineering in religions.

• 1:35:50Tim Ferriss?

  Well, if you're open to it, I'd love to, to talk a bit more about this because I've, I've heard, for instance, conversations between Sam Harris, who's a friend, and Jordan Peterson. And I'm going to, I'm sure misrepresent both sides, so sorry, guys. I'm just gonna kind of paraphrase, but you know, in general, Jordan refers to mythology and the Bible as moral frameworks that have been time-tested. Which is not to say, I don't think he would say that we should base all of our lives on Cain and Abel or something like that. But the fact of the matter is that as humans, we've had a whole lot of trial and error over a very, very long period of time.

• 1:36:35Tim Ferriss?

  Certain stories have struck a chord and stuck. And maybe there's value in those stories. And then again, sorry, Sam, I'm sure misrepresenting, but if Sam is perhaps arguing that you should start from first principles, you do not need theology or religion, but can build a moral code and framework for yourself. I think Jordan's response to that would be, you're expecting too much of people. People are just gonna have too much trouble doing that. They want something out of the box that is good enough to be helpful. So what I'd love to ask you is, and I spend a good amount of time thinking about these things for myself, just for myself, not for anything else, but my life. And

• 1:37:20Tim Ferriss?

  I would love to know what this does for you. Maybe we could start there. What is the need that it satisfies or the unease that it quells to have contemplation slash matters of the soul as one of the four main categories? Maybe we could start there and I'd just love to hear you expand in any way you feel comfortable.

• 1:37:42Cal Newport?

  In that particular division, my instinct is that Jordan is probably more on the right path. And I'll tell you a book that really was striking to me that I think gets right at this. There's this great book called All Things Shiny. And it was written by a philosopher from Harvard and a philosopher from Berkeley, Dreyfus, and I forgot the other name. But they talk about this issue, right? So this was, this was the central issue that, that this was what Nietzsche was worried about. Like we are now going to have to create morality from scratch and that's not going to go well. Right. And obviously Jordan is very keyed into this because his early interest was in the rise of totalitarian regimes that occurred in the 20th century in that context. And spoiler alert, things did not go well.

• 1:38:28Cal Newport?

  But there's this lament in that book about, it's looking at these prior periods in human history where they use the word the sacred, but they talked about life was just infused with the sacred and in ancient Greece, the classical Greece, they really did feel like the gods, the Olympian gods would inhabit you. Ares would inhabit you and that was to feel like these feelings you would have was literally gods inhabiting you. And in the medieval Christians, everything had a place and a sacredness to it, even objects in the world. And then that all went away and they opened the book with David Foster Wallace and basically use him as personifying, I can just figure this all out from scratch from first principles.

• 1:39:11Cal Newport?

  And they use them as a, it's a really poignant but tragic story because of course it's a story that ends up with Foster Wallace's suicide. And they use that to set up the difficulty of trying to build everything up from scratch. And especially when, I guess that's what Jordan likes to point out is We have these intuitions that are really deep and incredibly powerful. And Jordan was very inspired by Jung, so he's really drawing from Carl Jung's J U N G, his archetypes, his idea that there's these, the collective unconscious that has these archetypes that all humans have, they have a deep history, preculture. And that like our myths, the reason why certain myths resonate is they're pressing these buttons.

• 1:39:54Cal Newport?

  And those buttons, what he would call archetypes, Jung, I think of as intuitions. And that we have these technologies for sort of, and I'm using technology, not digital or electronic, but philosophical and theological technologies, like it really, it aligns your life to these things. We're meant to be aligned to them, just like our sense of thirst means we really need to drink water. We shouldn't just ignore that and say, is there another way for me to achieve like the proper isotonic balance in my bloodstream? Like actually the instinct just wants to drink water. All of those things have been very effective to me, you know, with an A, effective in the sense of like affecting me. And so I think there's something to that is that, I mean, a life that's aligned with these intuitions can be very resilient and rich. And then we just have personal experience.

• 1:40:38Cal Newport?

  And you know, some people get this through philosophy and some people get this through religion, but they're drawing from the same internal hooks. And so I get very nervous when I think about the challenge, the Nachian, that's a word, challenge of going back to first principle. And we tried, I mean, this was all of philosophy tried to do this for a couple of hundred years, like what Kant was trying to do. I mean, we all, we tried this, it's very difficult. And I know Sam disagrees and he's smarter than me. So like, you know, let's listen to him maybe more, more than we listen to me. But that's where I fall on that, if that makes sense.

• 1:41:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, well, you know, it's, this is a topic of kind of infinite interest to me. And I'd love to keep batting things around for a little bit, if you're open to it. So I actually have All Things Shining downstairs. All Things Shining, subtitle, Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age by Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly. I was gifted this book and you would think, based on the title and how much of a Stoicism and philosophy nerd I am, that I would have just taken to this like a fish to water. I found it very challenging to read. And I think perhaps it was just all of the references to Moby Dick and The Odyssey.

• 1:41:53Tim Ferriss?

  It could have been that, I'm not sure, but I found it very. Dense in a way that made it hard for me to at least process at the time that I was I was gifted it. And I'm just going to mention a few things, kind of in no, no particular order. The fact of the matter is, I don't know Jordan Peterson well. We've spoken before, and I've had him on the podcast, but I don't know him well. I would say I know Sam well, and have spent a lot of time around Sam. I use his Waking Up app. I've read many of his books, and we've just spent a lot of time in person. Sam, by and large, seems to me to be a very happy, at peace guy. Right? So that's interesting. Now, is that Sam out

• 1:42:35Tim Ferriss?

  of the box? How much of that is nature versus nurture and training versus default? I can't say. I have no idea. But he has managed, it seems, to thread the needle and create meaning and frameworks for himself that really seem to work well. And certainly, there are counterexamples. And when I see a book like All Things Shining, do you know the backgrounds of the two co-authors? In other words, were they backing into the book from the perspective of people with religious upbringings? Or do you not know the background?

• 1:43:16Cal Newport?

  I mean, I know their background. I think Sean was, Kelly was Dorrance's advisee or some such, but I don't know. I think they're, because they end up in a nonreligious place, by the way, right? So if you get to the end of that book, where they end up basically saying craftsmanship, craft, is the solution to reinjecting sacredness in a secular world. So they do not end up with saying what we need is religion, or Stoicism or a particular philosophy. They end up saying craft is partially our savior, because when you're trying to do something at a high level, you have a rigid framework of value, that if you're a wheelwright, some wood is better than others, regardless of what other system you've created. It's just an external reality. This wood is better than that wood. And it's

• 1:44:01Cal Newport?

  a way to actually get some firmament. So they end up saying you should focus on, basically... Your work or craft and like a taste and quality and which is actually maybe not that far from where Sam is. So maybe I think it's a really interesting point.

• 1:44:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, maybe they ended up converging. I mean, it's also very not to paint with too broad a brush, but having lived in Japan and having gone to school there and speaking and reading and writing Japanese, I feel like I have some credibility to say that it's all it's also a very Japanese or very prevalent sort of Japanese sentiment and predisposition is to focus on the sort of meticulous attention to detail within craft as a means of creating the sacred. Whether you look at the tea ceremony, you look at Kyodol, which is the Japanese archery. There are many, many different sort of instantiations, if that's the right word,

• 1:45:00Tim Ferriss?

  of this throughout the culture, which is by and large, not always, but by and large, can be experienced through a secular or religious lens in Japan. Japan's a fascinating example. I can't remember the exact expression. It's in Japanese. I'm doing a terrible job of of mangling a translation here, but it's something along the lines of, you know, we are Buddhists when we're born, Christian when we get married, and Shinto when we die. I might actually have it in the exact opposite, but you know, Shinto when we're born, Christian when we're married,

• 1:45:42Tim Ferriss?

  and Buddhist when we die. But what comes to mind for me when looking at all of these different approaches to trying to check the box of contemplation or matters of the soul, is that, and I'd love to hear what you think of this. Because there's no right and wrong. How would I prove this? Is that humans really do not like the discomfort of uncertainty and the paradox of choice presented by a life that is largely messy and outside of our control. And therefore, we want frameworks and rules so that we constrain the universe of things that we need to think about. Does that make sense?

• 1:46:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So as such, something like the 10 commandments, very helpful, right? And having strict rules for what you can say eat or not eat are very helpful in some ways. It just removes certain territories of life that you need to think about, or at least you have some reassurance that you don't need to worry about. And at the same time, there's part of me that thinks, well, religion is fantastic for that. And I did not grow up religious. I've been exposed to a lot of religion. And honestly, very often, I have extreme envy of people with strong religious conviction for precisely

• 1:47:09Tim Ferriss?

  that reason, right? Because I just feel like I'm trying to David Foster Wallace my way through life, and it's really fucking hard and can be very, at least for me, destabilizing just to have this universe of infinite options and potential decision making. At the same time, I think, well, if we are accepting religion because it is this pervasive, not to make it bad, but almost universal instinct of humankind, which it seems to be like myth-making, I'm not saying that's what religion is, but meaning-making through stories and religion in some fashion really seems to be an evolved instinct of some type.

• 1:47:53Tim Ferriss?

  But we could also say, without certain constraints, there are other impulses humans have that we constrain. And so I don't even, I know I'm going on and on a bit here, but it's, these are some of the questions that, you know, remain with me as I continue to explore. In my case, I think I've sort of

• 1:48:19Tim Ferriss?

  Past the point of no return with respect to a specific denomination of religion. I just, I don't expect that I will be able to, for a million reasons, get there. So, looking at the alternatives, these are some of the questions that I end up pondering. I mean, if you are talking to someone, let's say you're talking to students who are in a similar position, maybe they had a really terrible experience being brought up in a religious household, or perhaps just for any number of reasons, they're just not going to end up at religion. Are there other ways you would suggest they explore? Because you said philosophy, but philosophy is so broad, right?

• 1:49:00Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, you could just go and walk into a philosophy department at any university, and man, you've got, you do have a paradox of choice situation on your hands. If you're an undergrad and going to like epistemology 101 and kind of getting walked through it, that's fine. But if you're trying to use philosophy to help figure out your life and starting from scratch, do you have any secular recommendations for folks? Any other recommendations or thoughts?

• 1:49:25Cal Newport?

  I just want to throw one, one idea into the mix. It's a common idea in some theological circles, but I think the author Karen Armstrong makes this argument very well in her book, The Case for God. She is actually not religious affiliated. She used to be a nun and had a bad experience and left the Catholic Church. But she has this magisterial book called The Case for God. And long story short, she said, "We don't understand religion today," and by today, she means after the Enlightenment, "because we think about it as the ascent to empirically validated truths. To be religious means that here's this thing, that this happened, this person did this, and I agree that this happened and this is true." But I don't quote unquote, "believe" that or what have you.

• 1:50:09Cal Newport?

  And her whole argument is like, through all the history of religion, it's actually a commitment to action, and is after you do the action that the insight comes, that you start by doing the things, and then later that gains you revelation. That's where you actually start to gain insight and understanding. You don't start with, okay, I think this is right, like some empirically validated thing, like I think gravity is right, and so now I can be all on board with it. And that was a really interesting take. I thought that was really interesting. We're not as used to it now because we're used to a world after Descartes where it's all about we're in our head doing rationality. So like, okay, religion, like any philosophy, we have to work our way up to it and believe it, and then we can go off and do it. And, you know, some religions are better about that than others. I think the Jewish tradition doesn't care so much about what's going on

• 1:50:52Cal Newport?

  in your head. Do these things, and then you'll have revelation, which is like through experience, acting as if. Don't overthink this. This God, Yahweh, and you gotta do this, and don't eat that, and do that, and you need to, your family's very important, blah, blah, blah, and you do this stuff, and over time, you then you deepen your understanding of the, what she calls the ineffable, things you can't even put in the words anyways. In her mind, all of religion is trying to basically get intimations of the ineffable through action. And we think about it too much, like, here's an alternative to my history book, and do I think this is right or not, which is interesting. And I think it's like a really, it's one of these mind blowing, I don't know what to do with it. I just think it's a really interesting point, and I've been just trying to get people to read her because I think that's a really cool book and is underappreciated. Philosophy can do, you're right, a lot of

• 1:51:36Cal Newport?

  philosophy is complicated. I think this is why, you know, our mutual friend, Ryan Holiday, is really doing well right now is because he's making Stoicism accessible. And I know he's very influenced by you and in that work, and you've done a lot to make Stoicism accessible, and that has done a lot of good for people. I think also committing to communities of character seems to help people. So, okay, people are very committed to their role in the military. It's a community of character, a community in which there are certain aspects of character that are underlined and emphasized, and there's sort of a structure there. People get this through other types of causes or volunteerism, where you're committed to a community that actually tries to live true to certain characteristics, elements of character they think are important. I think that can get you there, too. But I'm really taken

• 1:52:21Cal Newport?

  by that Armstrong idea of act first, insight second.

• 1:52:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:26Cal Newport?

  Get out there and start doing it. Yeah.

• 1:52:28Tim Ferriss?

  It's a quote, I don't have the attribution, but I think about it often, which is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting. And what you say also brings up for me. Memories from several trips to the Middle East. So I've, I've spent a decent amount of time in the Middle East. And what I've heard more than once from both Jews and Muslims is you would hope for us to find more common ground because in our religions, and I say this as a non-Jew and a non-Muslim, so forgive me if anyone out there, if I get this wrong, but we believe in action. Like what you do matters. What you believe is really secondary. What you do matters.

• 1:53:10Tim Ferriss?

  And that's at least, you know, they would contrast that with some other religions where like what you believe matters first. You can do all the worst things in the world and believe certain things and then you are saved. Those are fundamentally very, very different. Right? And I don't, I don't have a particular perspective to add there, but it is a contrast. And these are things that I will obviously continue to, to think on because I find precisely for maybe some of the reasons that you already mentioned, the persistence of and the endurance and durability of religion to be fascinating, even if I disagree with any of the tenets

• 1:53:51Tim Ferriss?

  of, say, all religions, the fact that it is so persistent is very, very interesting. Right? Like, are we evolutionarily programmed to create, have, adhere to religion in the same way that birds are programmed to build bird nests? I don't know. Maybe. It's, it seems entirely possible. I'm going to take a super hard left turn on topic shift, if that's okay with you, because I promised it. So segueing from religion and finding meaning and contemplation, let's talk about digital minimalism for a second. So I would love to hear you expand.

• 1:54:32Tim Ferriss?

  On your suggestion of people doing a 30 day digital minimalism experiment where one removes optional technologies.

• 1:54:40Cal Newport?

  I appreciate the congruence we're making here between the Islamic and Jewish understanding of the meaning of the world in life and also my 30 day declutter. These are all basically the same. We're all in kind of the same ontological category here.

• 1:54:54Tim Ferriss?

  Tomato, tomato, you know, we're all going in the same direction.

• 1:54:57Cal Newport?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, but we got, you know, we have the profits and also, you know, 30 day declutter.

• 1:55:04Tim Ferriss?

  Now, in fairness, if, if you have, let's just say, stocks on your iPhone and Twitter push notifications and everything else, just giving you a psycho emotional death by a thousand paper cuts, how do you expect to find ultimate meaning in life? It's going to be tough. It's going to make it an uphill battle. That's my attempt at tying it together. All right. So, so let's, let's talk about this, this suggestion, this experiment potential and what that might look like for people. And feel free to obviously add anything that you would like, but this is something that I think a lot of my listeners would be very, very interested in considering doing.

• 1:55:48Cal Newport?

  The 30 day declutter is at the core of my philosophy of digital minimalism. So this was my take on what do we do about the fact that, starting around 2016, people became very uneasy about their phones in a way that they weren't in 2014. There was this flip that switched where at some point we realized, I'm looking at this thing too much. Like, this is a problem. Like, we got, we got uneasy and I could tell very precisely where that happened, just based on reactions to my own work, when it switched from, you're crazy, you're crazy, you're crazy, you're crazy, you're absolutely right, you're absolutely right. It happened in like a very quick period where my social media skepticism in particular really switched. And so.

• 1:56:31Cal Newport?

  My approach to it was you can't start with the habits and the tactics, right? You can't start with like, let me get right to setting filters and turning off notifications and not having my phone in my bedroom and putting my phone in the grayscale and moving my icons onto the back screen of my iPhone. That doesn't work. You're going to end up back where you were. And so digital minimalism, by contrast, was this humanist philosophy where it says, no, you got to figure out what you're all about, what you really care about and what you want to do, and then work backwards and say, what tech supports that? And that's how you choose what tech you use in your personal life and what rules you put around it. You start with what's important to me and then you put the tech to work. That's much more sustainable. But how do you figure out this question?

• 1:57:14Cal Newport?

  Like, how do you get that insight into what do I really want to do? What's important to me? When you already have all that distraction, that's where the declutter came in. And so I said, take 30 days where you don't use social media, you don't stream online videos, the only podcast you listen to is Tim and Mind's and everyone else you stop listening to. No video games, no online news that's very influenced by you and your low information diet, for example, and you experiment and you reflect and you think about life and go for walks and join things and ride your bike and hang out with friends without sending them messages on a glowing bitmap screen and you figure out what you're all about. And then at the end of the 30 days, you say, what do I want to do? And so I had that idea. I mentioned it to my newsletter because I was working on this book, but it was in the early days.

• 1:57:57Cal Newport?

  And I said, does anyone want to try this? And my thought was, this is a big ask, so maybe seven people would say yes. And my plan was, that's great. I will follow these seven people and see how it goes and write like pretty long profiles of them. It'll be good for the book. 1,600 people came back and said, yeah, I'm doing it. So I threw that idea that I was going to follow everyone. 1,600 people did it. One of the people who was doing it was the roommate of a New York Times reporter. So then the New York Times was covering the declutter. Like, it became a whole thing. I got hundreds and hundreds of reports back from people about their experience and what worked and what didn't. But the main takeaway was it is much more effective if you want to tame the technology in your personal life, if you want to tame that, if you're working backwards from first

• 1:58:42Cal Newport?

  principles of this is what I want to do with my life, how can tech help? It's incredibly sustainable. If you instead say, I'm unhappy with all the tech I'm using now, so let me try to put in rules to use it less, that's incredibly non-sustainable. You're almost certainly going to go back to where you were before.

• 1:58:56Tim Ferriss?

  So if people want to give this a shot, what should they do?

• 1:59:01Cal Newport?

  Well, I mean, beyond the the obvious of buying the the book I ended up writing, Obviously. Of course, you should start with, yeah, and and a copy for each of your friends, because it's easier for them to read it than you to have to explain it. Once you've done that, it's actually straightforward.

• 1:59:17Cal Newport?

  So literally, what I say is just, I call them optional personal technologies. And I want to draw a really clear line here. This is really about your personal life. I've written other books about email and Slack and and technology in the working world. That's a whole other issue, and it seems similar, but there's different issues underlying it. So therefore, different solutions. But I'm talking about the stuff you do outside of work that largely speaking has you looking at your phone. You take a break from them from 30 days. If it's a dual use technology, like I mainly use this for personal reasons, but there's some reason I need to use it, then you put up fences. So if you're like, I don't want a text message, but my daughter uses text messaging to tell me when she needs to be picked up from practice, you put up a fence and say, well, I'll still

• 2:00:00Cal Newport?

  do that, but I'm not going to participate in text change with my friends for the 30 days. So you can set the rules how you want to set the rules. And then the only key thing is you go through 30 days, be very active. So in that experiment, the people who treated this like a detox, and I hate the application of that term, the technology, I think it's a complete misappropriation of that term, people who tried to just white knuckle it and say, yes, I'm just not going to use these technologies for 30 days, and just by not using them, something positive will happen, they never made it 30 days. But the people who are like, I will now be very aggressive about reflection and experimentation, trying new things, going places, going to the library, buying a bike, joining a running club, reading books, going on long walks, they're the ones who really kept with it.

• 2:00:45Cal Newport?

  And then at the end of the 30 days, you literally write out a code. Here is the tech I use and the rules by which I use it. I'm going to use Instagram because I'm an artist. But the only way I'm going to use it is on my computer. The only people I'm going to follow are these 10 artists that really inspire me. And I have a glass of wine and look at their latest post on Friday evening. And it's the only interaction I have with that service. You get specific. I'm using this for this reason here. So I use it. And then you're you've reset. You've Mary condoed your digital closet. You took everything out. You only put back in the stuff you cared about and and you go for it.

• 2:01:18Tim Ferriss?

  Wine on Friday for an Instagram scroll through 10 inspiring artists does sound like it would spark joy. So thank you, Rick Konda. She's the tiniest woman I've maybe ever met in my life. She was on a podcast 100 years ago. I actually interviewed her in Japan and she had the most perfect porcelain skin I've ever seen on any human. Really may, may in fact be an alien. Very sweet.

• 2:01:45Cal Newport?

  Very, very organized, a very organized alien, though. So.

• 2:01:48Tim Ferriss?

  She's very organized. You've really, you're really discouraging if this hyper advanced alien civilization showed up and they're really, really fucking disorganized. Couldn't figure things out. You'd be like, oh, no, we thought we had, we thought we had so much clarity to look forward to. And it sounds like from your description that the people who approach this type of digital minimalism experiment as one of subtraction, and that's their focus. They fail. And those who view it as an experiment with new additions or substitutes to kind of crowd out default

• 2:02:34Tim Ferriss?

  tech behaviors are the ones who end up benefiting most. Is that a fair description?

• 2:02:40Cal Newport?

  We're good at humans to committing to things that are positive. Like, that's very motivating for us. We're bad at trying to avoid things that are negative. It's very bad for us to be like, I think I use Instagram too much. I'm going to try to use it less. It's like, that doesn't, isn't very compatible with our wiring. But on the other hand, you're like, I have this vision of my life that it's really positive and it makes me feel good. I'm really into it. Oh, and by the way, that's a vision in which I don't use Instagram is way more effective.

• 2:03:06Tim Ferriss?

  Do you still use? And this could be a dead end and we can just cut it if so. Do you still use a shutdown ritual when you close your computer? You do. All right. Could you please describe for folks what the shutdown ritual is?

• 2:03:21Cal Newport?

  At the end of your workday, at the end of your workday, you go through and you close, use the David Allen term, all the open loops. So, okay, let me make sure there's nothing I missed. There's not like an email I had to answer that was very urgent that I forgot about. You look at your weekly plan in your calendar. What's going on tomorrow? I know what I'm doing tomorrow. Okay, my plan makes sense. You look at your task list. I didn't forget to do something today that was very urgent. All right, I'm good to stop working. And then you have to do some sort of demonstrative ritual at that point to indicate that you did all those checks. So, back in the early days of my blog, the thing that me and my readers always talked about doing was actually saying the phrase, "Schedule shutdown complete."

• 2:04:03Cal Newport?

  Because it's absurd, right? Like, it's a weird absurd thing. But the whole idea was, then later on, when your monkey brain turns on, is like, "Work, work, work. I'm sure we're missing things. Ahhhhh", right? Like, we do. Instead of having to go back and say, "I have to now have a whole conversation with my monkey brain about, well, let me look at my calendar, and I did this, I did that." You can short circuit all of that and say, "I said the absurd phrase. I would not have, any other time in my life, have said that phrase if I hadn't actually gone through all the steps of making sure there was nothing open. So, I don't need to get into it. I said the phrase. I know I'm okay." And when people would do this, it would take about a week or two, and it would significantly reduce that evening or morning work anxiety, where your mind's like, "Ohhhhh, I'm sure we're forgetting something. Ohhhhh, let's go over

• 2:04:46Cal Newport?

  the email that we sent. Was that the wrong thing to send?" And you can just say, "I said the stupid thing." And I would never have said that stupid thing if, like, I hadn't shut it down. It, look, I created it because I needed it. As a grad student, I created it, and it took on a life of its own. There's a lot of people out there, looking left, looking right, making sure they're alone, and then, under their breath, going, "Schedule shutdown complete."

• 2:05:07Tim Ferriss?

  Schedule shutdown complete. That is so fantastic. Oh, it's just great. Well, Cal, this has been a very fun conversation. Thank you for taking the time. I don't want to end it prematurely. I want to, of course, ask, is there anything else that you would like to share? I'm in no rush. Is there any type of closing comments, requests for the audience, anything you'd like to point people to? Anything at all that you'd like to say or ask before we wind to a close?

• 2:05:41Cal Newport?

  No, this has been great. I love the territory we covered.

• 2:05:44Tim Ferriss?

  Awesome. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time. It's nice to see you. And for everybody listening, we will have show notes, links to everything, all the resources to all of Cal's books, including Deep Work, Digital Minimalism, and his latest, A World Without Email. We will also link to a number of his New Yorker pieces, to the Deep Questions podcast, and you can find him online, not on any social media platforms, but at calnewport, C-A-L-N-E-W-P-O-R-T dot com. And until next time, be safe, experiment often, and thanks

• 2:06:27Tim Ferriss?

  for tuning in. Schedule shutdown complete.

• 2:06:32Tim 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 1.5 and 2 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 podcasts, guests, and these strange esoteric

• 2:07:17Tim Ferriss?

  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 Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon is a low carb, high protein, and zero sugar cereal that I eat all the time. I ate a huge bowl of their cocoa flavor about an hour ago after a short workout. And it's so easy to prepare. It's instantaneous practically, and you get a lot of goodness. You get a lot of bang for the buck.

• 2:08:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:08:44Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:09:29Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:09:45Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:10:29Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:11:13Tim Ferriss?

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