The AI Resistance is Forming. (Should You Join?)

After a week spent debating AI’s impact on humanity, Cal wants to turn his attention back to AI’s impact on humans. To support this shift, he brings on the writer Brad Stulberg who recently decided that he was “done” with AI. They explore whether this is a resistance movement in the making… Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia More from Cal Download Cal’s FREE guide to cultivating a deeper life: calnewport.com/ideas Learn more about Cal’s books: calnewport.com/books Listen to Cal’s podcast: thedeeplife.com/listen Chapters (0:00) A new paper calls LLMs a "cognitive virus" (4:03) Brad gave AI a real shot — then quit (8:13) Why everything online now sounds the same (13:22) Plank 1: Effort, struggle, and the click-of-a-button economy (20:11) You can take a gondola to the summit, but you didn't climb it (28:30) Plank 2: AI is an average maker (33:39) AI swirl: pseudo-productivity turned up to 11 (49:40) Treat AI like ultra-processed food (55:08) Getting it off your phone, and the lesson of sports analytics (1:00:13) Team Human and the humanist resistance Sponsors: https://www.horizon3.com/deep https://www.calderalab.com/deep https://www.notion.com/cal https://www.factormeals.com/deep50off (Use code "deep50off") Credits: Podcast Production: Jesse Miller Newsletter/Research: Nate Mechler Theme Music: Jay Kerstens Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Cal Newport?

  So there's a new paper making the rounds. It's called Large Language Models as a Cognitive Virus. It's written by a distinguished group of professors from all around the world. Now, the core argument in this paper is that LLMs, as they spread, are like a virus that is going to change collectively the way that cognition happens, as these changes could be very negative. Now, I'm going to be honest with you. When I read this paper, it woke me up. Because here's what's been going on. The AI discourse in recent months has really been focused on existential questions.

• 0:41Cal Newport?

  Questions like, are swarms of AI monsters going to kill us all? Or questions like, are we just one model update away from LLM-based tools being able to solve all of our problems and ushering in some sort of digital utopia? Now, these questions are fun and exciting and frustrating. And I got involved in some of these debates because, you know, I didn't want people to be more anxious than they needed to be. And I thought there were some absurdities being floated around in here. But this paper reminded me that my main focus in my work is you. You being the individual. My main focus is helping individuals figure out what is the best way to navigate the current technological landscape

• 1:24Cal Newport?

  that allows you as a human being to flourish. I should be focusing less on the impact of AI on humanity and more on the impact of AI on humans. All right. So I was having these thoughts. And then I got a call from my good friend Brad Stulberg. Now, you know Brad, because he's been on the show many times. He's an author, most recently of the New York Times bestseller, The Way of Excellence. And Brad called me and he started giving me this impassioned speech about how he was done with AI. He tried it. People told him, you need to be using this. Don't be cynical. This is the future. And he tried. And he said, you know what? This is not making me better at the things I care about. It's not making me a better human.

• 2:07Cal Newport?

  It's not making my life better. It's actually running contrary to many of the things that I live in my life and write about, about what makes human life meaningful. So you know what? I'm done. And I said, Brad, I gotta have you on the show. Because what you're talking about sounds like the beginnings of a pro-human resistance movement to this sort of totalitizing influence of artificial intelligence. Exactly the type of issue that we should be discussing. Not about whether the superintelligent AI is going to kill us with lasers or bees with bombs strapped onto them. We should be talking about, how should you as a person be thinking about AI right now?

• 2:48Cal Newport?

  If your goal is to flourish as a human, we should, we need that to be a part of the conversation. Arguably, that should be the biggest part of the conversations because that's what most people actually care about is how is this going to impact my life? How do I keep my life meaningful? So I had Brad on and we walked through it. I walked through, why did he make that decision? What were the planks of this platform on which he's building this sort of incipient resistance movement? We got some of the objections. Look, we didn't come away with some sort of crystal clear philosophy that I'm saying, all of you have to follow. This is the right way to do. But I came away thinking, this is the type of conversation we need to be having right now. This is what matters as much as trying to understand the minutia

• 3:29Cal Newport?

  of exactly what harness was used in the solving of this math equation. And what does that mean for the general math ability? I'm kind of tired of those discussions. Let's get back to the question of how do humans flourish in our current technological world? So if you've been a little bit anxious about AI, or if you've been frustrated thinking, everyone's talking about this and it's not making me happier. I'm not sure what I want to do with it. I think this, this conversation is going to be useful to you. And I think you're going to enjoy it. All right. So let's get into it. All right, Brad. Well, welcome back to the show. Where I wanted to start, I wanted to level set by just asking you, right now,

• 4:12Cal Newport?

  what role does AI play in your day to day life? And how has that changed over time?

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Right now, it plays a very minimal role in my day to day life. AI has essentially, for me, become a supplement to Google. And what I mean by that is, I'm still in the habit of going to Google to search something. So I'll literally just go to Google, www.google.com and search something. And then occasionally, I think it's Gemini. Is that the right? Is that Google's AI product? Whatever Google's AI product is, it'll tell me a top line result and then ask if I want more. And sometimes if I'm asking it, like, what's the weather in Greenville, South Carolina going to be today? I trust the top line AI answer.

• 4:55Cal Newport?

  And the key thing is, it wasn't always that way. So you gave a real effort to experimenting and exploring the roles of AI in your work before you arrived at this. So what was going on before? What were you trying before you came to your current position of minimal use?

• 5:13Speaker 01

  So I think I started at this current position of minimal use. And then I had a conversation with someone whose work I respect a ton, who will not be named. This was about six, seven months ago, who really encouraged me to use AI.

• 5:28Cal Newport?

  Dario Lamede. We know you're talking about Dario Lamede. You're a good friend.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Essentially said, like, Brad, I think you are being, I think your skepticism is starting to border on cynicism. And I think you're missing the boat. And a lot of the things that you're saying might make sense in theory, but in practice, like, you should try using this tool. I think it's going to help you. I think it's going to make your writing better. It's going to make your life easier. And because this is someone I really respect, I said, all right, I'm going to actually give it a try. So I got a $20 a month ChatGPT membership and I got a $20 a month Claude membership. And initially, I started by running pieces of writing through the machine and asking it for five suggestions to make the piece better. Or asking it what I missed that I should reconsider.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Or asking it, if I was going to cut 30% of this, what would I cut? Never just rote the accepting the answer and doing it, but really trying to use it as a thought partner, right? That's how it was portrayed to me. It was portrayed as like, you have a New York City caliber editor that you're going to get to work with. And at first, I was pretty stoked by it. I remember calling you, Cal, and being like, Cal, maybe you're being too much of a cynic here. Like, it's giving me pretty good ideas. And then about a month and a half in, what I realized is, it gives me the same pretty good idea. It's not really even idea. It's just a way of reassuring me that what I have is good enough. And then one line that sounds really interesting, but when you actually toss and turn it in your head, there's nothing underneath it.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  And I realized that it wasn't making my work better. It wasn't making my workflow better. So I said, all right, I'm just going to use this as a copy editor. So if I have a newsletter that I'm putting out or an essay that I'm working on, I'm just going to run it through the machine and tell me, please check for any grammatical and spelling errors. And it's great. It catches all the grammatical and spelling errors. However, it can't resist, it can't resist adding in a little beat and saying, hey, if you want three ideas to punch it up, here's what I'd suggest. And the suggestions were pretty flat. And the suggestions were also the same style and tone and synthetic feel

• 7:39Speaker 01

  to what I was reading in other people's work, who I noticed had gotten pretty sloppy. And I'm just like, just, just stop. Just give me the freaking grammar errors. And it got to a point where it was just annoying, like, uninteresting and annoying. And, you know, for as much as I have challenges when I ask my wife to edit my work for grammar and spelling, because she's an attorney and she catches everything, and sometimes I don't make the changes she suggests. I'd much rather be annoyed with my loving human wife than with a robot. So I've essentially stopped using AI for everything.

• 8:13Cal Newport?

  Right. And you're seeing the opposite. In the world of online content, which you see, you're seeing the opposite. You're seeing quality degrading. You're seeing sharpness of ideas flattening. You're seeing telltale signs of slop. I mean, every time I talk to you, you're a little bit depressed about the state of online discourse. But for people out there who don't, aren't reading a lot online, what is it that you're seeing happening around you by, you know, sort of our peer group of writers?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Well, I think our peer group of writers

• 8:44Cal Newport?

  I mean that broadly, mainly like not people we know.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Not our friends, got it. In general, yeah, writers in general. And I think not even writers, I think people that want to be writers that were never really serious about the craft of writing, and that's worth separating. The writing is just completely homogenized and solus.

• 9:02Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Like, everything sounds the same, everything has the same structure, everything has the same rhythm, everything has the, the simple declarative, it's not this, it's that, short sentences interspersed at the same intervals. Everything has these really fluffy metaphors that again, at first seem fascinating and then you continue reading and thinking about it and you're like, this is, this is just a house of cards, like there's nothing underneath this metaphor. This is like something trying to sound smart. I heard our mutual friend Derek Thompson put it this way, which is the AI robots feel like every sentence they write has to be more evocative than the last sentence. And that's just not good writing. It's, it's like weird synthetic writing. So I think that's happening.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  And then another thing that I think is happening is that it is degrading the experience of writing itself. Like, part of what makes good writing good is that the person struggled to produce it. Because in that struggle, the best ideas come out, the best way to deliver those ideas come out, the best, um, the best work comes out through struggle. And the click of a button in picking and choosing what you want is not the same kind of struggle as actually writing. And I think as a result of that, you can produce a lot more work, but the quality of the work goes down and the quality of your life, the quality of your experience with the craft goes down.

• 10:30Cal Newport?

  Right.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  I don't think that we should be automating the things that we claim are our crafts.

• 10:35Cal Newport?

  I think a quick break from my conversation with Brad to talk about some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. So fall is here, all the travel of summer is over, but what this means is my obligations are piling up faster and faster. And I find when things get this frantic, nutrition is often the first thing to slip. This is where Factor enters the scene. Factor makes chef, chef-created, dietitian-designed, ready-to-eat meals so that you don't have to choose between real food and convenience. And here's the thing, these meals are ready to eat in only two minutes, meaning that even when I'm in a rush, I know I can get, for example, a lunch I love, like the, the

• 11:18Cal Newport?

  Santa Fe chicken with peppers and potatoes, which is very good, that is also going to give my body what it needs. And that last part is important. With over 175 banned ingredients, every Factor meal is designed around what supports a healthier lifestyle and nothing that doesn't. So let's eat real. Head to factormeals.com/deep50off, the word deep, the number 50, the word off, and use code DEEP50OFF to get 50% off and one free breakfast item per box for one year while supplies last until October 31st, 2026. That's code DEEP50OFF at factormeals.com, DEEP50OFF at factormeals.com. See website for more details.

• 12:03Cal Newport?

  I also want to talk about our friends at Horizon 3. Now, here's the thing about AI, it's here for better and for worse, and with it comes a whole host of security concerns. Now, here's the thing about cybersecurity, the scariest thing isn't the attack that you see coming, it's the attack path you didn't even know existed. This is where Horizon 3 enters the scene. Horizon 3 is an AI-native proactive security platform that changes that reality. Here's how it works. Horizon 3's Node Zero is an autonomous AI hacker that continuously attacks your own environment at machine speed, the same way a real attacker would, finding all the areas that are vulnerable. You can stop guessing and start knowing that your defenses are intact.

• 12:47Cal Newport?

  And because Node Zero's result is a loop, hack, fix, verify, repeat, it finds the problems, you fix it, and in one click, you then confirm that it's secure. So see exactly what an attacker would find in your environment before they do. Go to horizon3.ai/deep and request your free Node Zero demo. Visit horizon3.ai/deep. Again, that's horizon3.ai/deep. No commitment required, results in hours, not weeks. All right, let's get back to the talk. Well, so let's get into this, because when we, you know, we were talking about this before on the phone, it really seemed like there was the three major planks to your, I'm sort

• 13:32Cal Newport?

  of done with AI platform. And I think it's worth looking at each of these in turn, because we don't normally hear this so systematically explored, and I think it's important. So your, your first plank had to do with effort, right? I mean, your new book, is that the way of excellence? You know, you're someone who knows a lot and has written recently a lot about the role of the pursuit of excellence in creating meaningful life. And you've talked to me about how you see real clashes with that human reality when you see AI being more increasingly used. So let's, let's get into that plank a little bit. So what's going on here in your mind with the role of effort in meaning and how AI might undermine that?

• 14:15Speaker 01

  In order to find meaning in just about anything in life, whether it is a relationship, whether it is a work product, whether it is a leisure activity, you have to exert effort and you have to struggle. Everything worthwhile in life requires effort. By definition, the promise of AI is that it eliminates, or it mitigates, or it shrinks the effort, right? I call it the click of a button economy. You want an essay? Click a button. You want a recipe? Click a button. You want a training plan? Click a button. You want a, you know, a script for asking someone out on a date? Click a button. It, it, it eliminates the struggle that leads to the feelings of satisfaction, whether you achieve or fail.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  And the common retort to this, which I totally sympathize with, is, well, if you're just using AI for a few things, you can exert effort on other things. And in theory, I think that's great, but what happens is the more that you use AI, the more it's like the slippery slope. And you're like, oh, well, if it corrected all the grammar in my piece, maybe I'll ask it to rewrite that paragraph that I was struggling with. And oh, if I ask it to rewrite that paragraph I was struggling with, maybe I'll ask it for 10 different conclusions, and I'll just choose the one I like best. So it's still me doing the work. But it's not you doing the work anymore, it's the machine doing the work. And, and I, and I think that so much of the promise of AI is efficiency. But nobody wants their gravestone to read, he was efficient.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Like, we want to struggle for meaning in our life, we want to exert effort. In, in all excellence, in, in any domain, whether it is in the culinary arts as a chef, whether it is in athletics, whether it is in writing, which is our craft, whether it is in medicine, like, all excellence at root is ultra-human. It doesn't mean that there aren't tools involved, but the more that the tools cannibalize and overtake the humanity, the less quality and craft you're going to see in the thing. And there's mass-produced everything, right? There's factory medicine, there's factory farming, there's factory mass-produced training and sport, there's factory mass-produced writing, and that's fine, it's cheaper, the

• 16:27Speaker 01

  masses sometimes like it, but it's not good, it's not quality. And I think that if we have a choice in our life to pursue quality, both the production of quality and the consumption of quality, like, that makes a good life. And I worry the AI is selling this false promise that actually that's not what matters, what matters is rote efficiency in quantity.

• 16:50Cal Newport?

  Right. Well, I mean, an aspect of what you just said there, that I hadn't thought about before until I read the study that I talked about in the intro to this program, that, where I was thinking about LLM use like a cognitive virus. And part of that construction was we're underestimating the addictiveness of this type of interaction as well. So just like you were saying, I'm just using an LLM to do X, is going to turn pretty soon to I'm using it for almost everything else, because there is something that is irresistible about having a linguistic conversational partner that is listening to you, that is

• 17:31Cal Newport?

  reflecting things back, that is largely telling you, like, this is good, what you're doing is smart. You know, there's a construction that especially the GPT models have, where if you're asking for advice about anything, it will always say, yeah, that's good, I like this a lot, there's just one thing I would change. And that turns out to be like the ideal way to give feedback to someone, because it, it makes you feel smart, but it's not just fully affirmational, and it gives you that excitement of like, I, I have an idea that I just have to tweak it a little bit and this is really good. And it is pretty addictive. And I, so anyways, that paper set it up is like, look, you let this in one place, it's going to spread to other places. But I think what you're pushing on this a little bit, because I think this is counter-cultural for a lot of people.

• 18:14Cal Newport?

  You're saying struggle's good, quality is good, you know, the, the, for a human to have experiences that are quality. This seems to me like one of the big points in the way of excellence is the pursuit of excellence is life-affirming, right? That struggle is life-affirming. If you were to take the AI philosophy and apply it to the topic of excellence, it would say, being, having done something excellently is what matters, and the quicker you can get there with whatever help you can, the better, which completely belies what you found, which is that it's, it's always the struggle and in the process in which we find meaning. So, so why, I mean, is that right? And why are we falling prey to that? Why, why don't we, why have we been trained to think struggle or friction somehow means

• 18:58Cal Newport?

  that something bad is happening?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  I think that, um, there's, there's a couple of things worth addressing here. The first is sometimes struggle and friction is bad, and we should work to minimize struggle and friction. I mean, I drive a car, I don't walk everywhere. However, if I never use my body for anything physically, that whole muscular and cardiovascular system would atrophy. So I protect certain parts of my life where I am very focused on exerting my body, and as a result, I feel good and I have a body that I can continue to use. I think the same thing is true with our brains and with our social and emotional intelligence. And a lot of what AI says is, hey, we've now got a car for your brain, and we've got

• 19:45Speaker 01

  a car for your social emotional intelligence, and we want you to drive it everywhere. And what I'm arguing is that unlike a car, which you literally can't drive up the stairs of your house, AI is, to your point, a linguistic conversation partner that is in your pocket that you can take with you everywhere. So as much as cars crept into life and led to this obesity crisis and so on and so forth,

• 20:11Speaker 01

  And to be clear, not just cars, like the industrial revolution, we can't carry these machines around with us everywhere, whereas we can with AI. I think the second thing that I would say is that you can take a gondola to the top of a mountain and still have an incredible view at the top. But if someone asks you what the mountain was like and what you learned climbing the mountain, you're not going to have any good answers. It's not going to be an interesting answer. So even if you lie and you post the picture of yourself on the top of the mountain and say, I climbed this mountain, when you fall asleep at night, you're not going to be as fulfilled as if you'd climbed the mountain yourself because you took a gondola to the top of the mountain. So if you outsource

• 20:55Speaker 01

  mountain climbs in your own life to AI, well, then you better be prepared not to be fulfilled and to have a more empty life. Again, the more that you outsource to the machines, I feel like the more you're going to, you're going to have this experience of an emptiness or a shallowness. And then I would also argue that it's just not that interesting to me.

• 21:15Cal Newport?

  Right.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Like, machines can do a lot of things better and faster than humans. You know, there was this AI company that had a robot that broke the marathon world record and a bunch of tech bros were like, this is the coolest thing ever. It outran a human. And I'm like, this is the dumbest thing ever.

• 21:35Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Like, I could get in my car right now and drive faster than your little robot. Like, so what? Yeah, the machine's faster than a human, right?

• 21:43Cal Newport?

  Get on a bicycle.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  But I don't, but I don't care. Because, exactly. But even another example would be if a Tour de France rider put a motor on their bike, no one would care if they won the Tour de France. So there's something about humans striving to attain their potential that, one, is very fulfilling to the individual human doing the striving, and, two, that other humans appreciate. This is the slow food music, uh, excuse me, the slow food movement. This is why we love to go see great recording artists perform acoustic sets that are minimalist. This is why I think that at the end of the day, good human writing is going to be, be heads and tails above what the machine produces. Because like, it's our shared humanity that is expressed through this. And I worry with the AI, you

• 22:28Speaker 01

  know, being like a cognitive virus, that it's going to encroach on more and more of that humanity and ourselves and our communities. And as a result, our lives are going to be shallower and emptier. I think another way to think about this is it's like the phone, right? Phones have incredible uses, including my smartphone. I would not trade my smartphone back, at least not yet. However, as you pointed out, you were at the vanguard of this with digital minimalism. We just kind of went into phones with like, oh yeah, we see all the benefits of the phones, but we don't really see the cost, or if we do, we don't want to think about them. So we'll just kind of accept whatever cost and go with the flow and increasingly use our phones for everything that phones make easier. And we know as a result of that experiment, 10, 15 years later, that you were right. It didn't work out,

• 23:11Speaker 01

  right? We've got all of these, all of these problems with fractured attention and mental illness in youth and ubiquitous distraction and the inability to focus that are increasingly being traced back to, to phones. And I'm not saying that we put AI back in the box. What I am saying is that we separate areas of our life where we want to strive for excellence in craft and mastery and quality, and we protect those from the AI virus.

• 23:36Cal Newport?

  I'm with you on that. I'm with you on that. I'm also with, with you. I mean, I think this feeds into it. There's this, this weird state that Silicon Valley is in right now. And they've done this before. I've written about this before. But the big AI companies, the frontier LLM labs in particular, they're still in this pre-IPO state where they think their goal is just to prove that their technology is impressive or powerful, right? Which is different than what a normal consumer, mature consumer product company would do, which is I'm going to convince that you that my product is valuable to you, right? So they're not out there making the case. Here is a tool we built that's going to make this part

• 24:20Cal Newport?

  of your life better, and here's why, and here's why we think we should use it. They're out there talking about, you know, we're solving math theorems and we have swarms of, you know, AI robots, you know, they're going to kill us all. You should all just be generally impressed by how powerful our technology is. And then it's sort of being left to the individual to be like, you need to figure out how to actually use this in your life. The cultural pressure is just use it or get left behind. And so we've inverted this consumer product relationship where it typically was, you're going to have to sell me pretty hard to convince me to spend money on, you know, the new Roto router, right? Like, you're going to have to really in your ads be like, this is going, you're going to get fertilizer spread four times quicker and it has a better whatever. And I'll be like, okay, I can see exactly how it's going to help my life. That's the way

• 25:04Cal Newport?

  we normally think about products. Somehow with AI, and we've seen this with other digital products in the last two decades, the onus is on the user. It's like, you are a loser if you don't go out and become essentially like a tech R and D review forum and figure out how to use this. And, and you know, what's wrong with saying, I'm happy to deploy a tool if and when someone convinces me that it's going to be really valuable in my life, but my default really has to be getting on with productive struggle and producing good stuff. I can't be out there product testing every tool and experimenting and building agent swarms on my open claw, like, and posting about it on X. Like, I actually want to live my life. Once the tool is undeniable, then maybe I'll use it for that purpose. But this seems to be an issue here, right? Is like, the pressure you got, which the pressure

• 25:47Cal Newport?

  I got was like, you gotta just try this. You can't not be using it. You're going to be left behind, which we're used to that rhetoric now. But if you went back 40 years ago and someone talked that way about any consumer products, you'd be like, what are you talking about? It's not my job to figure out why this is useful.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  But I think the last couple of products that were like this were NFTs, like those weird digital pixelated art forms that people were spending millions of dollars on that I'm pretty sure now are literally worth absolutely nothing. And crypto.

• 26:19Cal Newport?

  Yep.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  And I don't think that AI is going to be a bubble or a nothing burger in the same way that NFTs were. However, I do think it's, it's interesting that NFTs were sold as like this, you're going to be left behind. And I kept being like, I don't really get the point of this. And I'm feeling the same way about some use cases of AI.

• 26:43Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Now, if I've got a massive data set in Excel and it's a gazillion rows, and I'm not a data scientist, and I want to feed it to Claude or ChatGPT and say, pull out all the emails with .edu addresses, that's a great use case, right? There's nothing meaningful about the struggle of going and doing that by hand. But to me, that's very different than writing or than falling in love or dating. And I say falling in love or dating because increasingly I hear stories from young people in high school and college that are literally like going to the bathroom on a date to ask Claude how to respond to something in a conversation they're having.

• 27:24Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  And to me, like, oh, no. And then, and then the conversation partner is going to ask Claude what she should, what he or she should say back. And now it's two machines talking to each other. There's just something about that that's never going to be.

• 27:37Cal Newport?

  You thought I was going to order the chicken, but no, instead I got the beef. And it turned out to be like a turpentine can full of germinating gerbils, you know, some sort of metaphor that.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think, I think here's the thing. I think if you suck at something, AI is great because it's going to make you average. I think that if you're average at something and you keep using AI, it's going to keep you at average. I think if you are great or you want to be great, you should probably resist using AI in most cases, particularly for creative work.

• 28:08Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Because by definition, AI homogenizes around an average. And it's not just me saying this. Your colleagues at Georgetown released a paper earlier on creativity that found that AI can write a punchy sentence, no doubt about it, but all the punchy sentences sound the same. So the word that they use was mass homogenization. And I call it like a soulless mean. So if you're interested in pursuing your best mastery, quality, excellence in one area of your life, I would protect that area from the machines.

• 28:39Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  For me, that area is creative work.

• 28:42Cal Newport?

  And this is your second plank. So we can clarify the structure here. So the second plank in your argument for this, this resistance is the results are average. And you got to be careful about using tools that just draw you towards the average. I want to add a wrinkle to it as well, though, because you were saying, if you, if you're bad at something, well, it'll bring up your performance because average is better than bad. But that also leaves out the, the reality that how do you get good at something? Like, you have to get your own skill to average on route to getting good, right? So actually, like, who's going to be bad at something? I'll give an example, someone who's entry level in a job. Most things they're new at, they're not super valuable yet to the company. And my advice has always been to people in entry level jobs, don't think about, is this my

• 29:25Cal Newport?

  passion? Or do I like this? Or what? You gotta think about, I got like a two-year window here to make myself indispensable, at least in some areas. And the only way to do that is to struggle, deliberate practice. I struggle at something, I'm not very good at it, the next time a little bit better, next time a little bit better. I keep doing that until I'm indispensable at that. And now I have leverage to move up. So even just going from bad to average is not nothing, right? Because productive struggle, you can think about that the same way that the strain on your muscle helps a muscle grow. And if you want to get stronger, you have to have productive struggle. So I would, I might expand what you're saying from, I'm just thinking out loud here, but I might expand it from one area that you really want to protect. I would think about my entire professional life and say, if this is a skill that there will be value in me getting really good at,

• 30:10Cal Newport?

  I would be very wary about pressing, you know, the easy button. Because how do you get better if you don't first get okay?

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's true. And I think the the the challenge here is there's an agency problem where in large organizations, large corporations, especially those that, you know, are trying to produce shareholder value on a quarterly cycle, they don't care about your long term development, right? You might as well be a cog in the machine. And the goal is like mass produced as much as possible. That's so different than craft and excellence. So I think a part of it, too, is like, ask yourself, what is the foremost goal in in the top of your value structure? Is it just growth and output for the sake of growth and output? And if you, again, if you want your gravestone to read, you know, he was efficient, or he produced tons of average quality work, then yeah, like, use the machine

• 31:04Speaker 01

  for everything. But I think a part of this resistance, or at least this like thoughtful use of this new tool, has got to be, hey, like, there are parts of my life, there are parts of my work, there are parts of my being where the goal isn't just efficiency and output. The goal is excellence. The goal is craft. The goal is mastery. And for those parts of life, I'm actually not going to use the machine, because the machine is an average maker. And you see this in the outputs of the machine. Like, it's so easy now to identify AI writing, because it's very average. It's very easy to identify when people prepare for a meeting and their whole talk track for the conversation they want to have with

• 31:48Speaker 01

  their boss was generated by AI, because it's all the same. So I don't think that it makes for different, or interesting, or better work, in most cases. Again, I want to be careful, because I'm already seeing like, the comments that people are going to leave. If you are in a contest to sift through big data, to find, you know, certain patterns or structures, absolutely, artificial intelligence makes tons of sense for that use. But if you're trying to produce something that is new, that is creative, that is innovative, that's going to make you feel something while you do it, and it's going to make the person who consumes your work feel something, then yeah, I don't, I don't think that the robots are ever going to compare to good humans. So I'd rather try to become a good

• 32:30Speaker 01

  human. Because even if you fail, you'll have lived a life where you you strive for something, and you weren't just, you know, essentially an automaton putting prompts into a machine.

• 32:40Cal Newport?

  Yeah, it is weird that if we look back historically at figures that we admire, it's never the decadent king, living, you know, the aloof king, living a life of complete luxury, and never has any hardship. That's never the character we look at. We always look at the character that had the struggle, that that overcame obstacles, that that produced something beautiful that was painstaking. We look at Einstein's hair going white from the effort of proving the general theory of relativity. And yet, the model sometimes that seems to be pitched by the AI boosters is, hey, you could be like the king. You don't, you don't have to do it. You just, machines will do things for you. And you could just have the life, if you decide you want to go play croquet out in the Versailles

• 33:23Cal Newport?

  lawns, you can just go do that. Which is interesting, because it goes against all human nature. We never look at that and say, say, that's the ideal. But I have, I want to expand, because I don't know if this works or not, but I want to expand your critique here beyond just creative work. Because I'll tell you what I'm worried about, as someone who observes and writes about technology and knowledge work. I'm really worried about what's happening in just standard, non creative office jobs, right? Because as I wrote about in Slow Productivity, we have this issue in knowledge work where it's hard to measure quality. It's hard to measure true productivity. I can't really point to a pile of widgets and say, this is what I produced, right? It's much more ambiguous and overlapping and unclear workloads or what have you. And so we have the sort of heuristic in knowledge

• 34:05Cal Newport?

  work of pseudo productivity. Visible efforts are proxy for useful activity. The more visible effort, the busier you are, the more useful I'll assume you be. It's just like this rough heuristic that managers have. The problem is, if that's the heuristic managers have, and then AI comes along, they're going to say, oh, everyone should use AI, because these sort of performative Kabuki Theater type of I'm doing stuff, like emails are moving back and forth, and here's a PowerPoint that summarized from a Zoom, which you can then send to an email, which will then summarize, and then you can send over to me, and then my, I will summarize and ignore it. Like, all this sort of like, visible, visible activity that none of it is directly connected to a value producing outcome. AI allows you to essentially accelerate that. And so now, I've been hearing from more and more people,

• 34:50Cal Newport?

  they're like, my job is miserable. Like, I, my workload has never been higher. They've doubled. I hear this often. They've doubled the amount of like, projects to expect me to work on. And work on these projects just means like, slinging AI slop back and forth to be consumed by other AIs that are going to turn it into other slop or whatever. And so I think it is, even if you're not doing creative work, this demand we have in knowledge work to use more AI right now, is actually just taking the the already absurd aspects of knowledge work that we're all struggling with, and I've been writing about, and just turning them up to 11 on the spinal tap amplifier dial. And so even if you're not, hey, I want to just feel human, producing creative work that's going to make someone feel something, even if you're just in an office job. And I'm not saying this is easily solvable, because

• 35:33Cal Newport?

  those bosses are pushing this. But I just want to commiserate. If you're in an office job, right now, the AI pressure is, take the worst part of knowledge work, the constant distraction, performative pseudo productivity, and now do it 10 times more. I don't know if that's sustainable.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:50Cal Newport?

  Hey, I want to take another quick break from my conversation with Brad to hear from some sponsors that makes this show possible. Caldira Lab does things differently. Most people don't know this, but men's skin is 25% thicker, oilier, and ages differently from women's, which means men need clean formulas engineered for their biology. This is where Caldira Labs line of skincare products enters the scene. Now, lately, I've been reaching for one of these products in particular, their eye serum. I'm not always tired, but most mornings, now that I'm, you know, in my upper 20s, instead of my young 20s, right?

• 36:32Cal Newport?

  I certainly wake up looking tired. And that's why I've been using the eye serum to reduce the look of fatigue, puffiness, and dark circles that I so often get around my old eyes. And on top of other benefits, I like most of all that this is a routine that is simple. No need for a, you know, 10 step skincare ritual. It's one product, morning, night, a small habit with big results. So if you'd like to look a little more rested and refreshed, visit calderalab.com/deep and use code DEEP for 20% off your first order. I also want to talk about our longtime friends at Notion. Look, in knowledge work, AI shouldn't just be about going as fast as possible, and burning as many tokens as

• 37:16Cal Newport?

  possible. It should help you do the important things better. This is why I like what Notion is up to. Notion is the AI workspace where your team's knowledge, projects, and agents all come together in one place. Teams using Notion move faster, cut frictions and costs by consolidating tools, and stay aligned. Because everything lives together, Notion has the context it needs to answer questions instantly, automate busy work, and keep your efforts moving. It's AI designed to strengthen teamwork, not replace it. And with over 100 million users, Notion is trusted by 98% of the Forbes Cloud 100, and 95% of the top

• 37:58Cal Newport?

  50 AI companies, including OpenAI, Cursorlovable, and more. Learn more about how Notion can support your business at notion.com/cal. Now, this is all lowercase letters, notion.com/cal to try Notion today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. All right, let's get back to my conversation with Brad.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  It can't be. That's a great point. You know, it made me think of, for a long time, in traditional knowledge work jobs, we talked about email swirl. So like, you're on an email, and people are CC'd, and like, the email's just going back and forth, and the person responds at 4:30 in the morning, and the other person responds at 9:00 PM at night. And it's like, everyone feels like they need to be in on the email. And it just swirls and swirls and swirls. And it creates all of this work, and all of this back and forth, ultimately for nothing, when a simple phone call would have done. It's almost like now there's AI swirl. And everything feels like email swirl, because the cost of producing work is essentially zero. So you get caught up in all of this swirl, and it feels...

• 39:02Cal Newport?

  But even there, I got to push back on the use of work.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:05Cal Newport?

  The cost of producing visible work activity has been reduced to zero.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  I like that. Yeah, the cost of producing visible work activity has been reduced, reduced to zero. And you just can get caught up in this swirl. And the result is going to be average at best. So it kind of gets back to like, if I wanted an excellent company, I would make sure that the company had norms and values where it was ultra human right now. Because you have to look the other way. Now, if I wanted a company that could mass produce stuff, you know, the Timu marketplace of knowledge work, then yeah, fire up the tokens, like, give me the Abots, just spit stuff out. But I don't think, I don't think those companies are going to produce anything memorable.

• 39:50Cal Newport?

  You can't last.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  To be totally honest.

• 39:52Cal Newport?

  There's no competitive advantage. If mainly, yeah. But the bigger issue is, in knowledge work, so all this stuff that's being AIified is not typically, ultimately, the thing that's making them money. It's the sort of internal whirlwind where you demonstrate that you're working on things. So that's the irony of it, is it often gets in the way of, hey, whatever it is we do, like, ultimately, we produce programs for whatever. And now we're amplifying all the emails, meetings, and discussions of this, and it's, and everyone is in a whirlwind. But in the end, you don't have better quality programs, or programs being created more often. Like this, there's often a disconnect between the macro productivity

• 40:32Cal Newport?

  of a firm, which is dollars in versus dollars out, and the sort of internal sense of pseudo productivity. You can amplify the internal massively, without really changing, or negatively impacting that ratio of dollars going into salaries, and dollars going out in terms of like, revenue that's generated.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  And it gets back to what you were saying earlier, Cal, about just the hype, where it's like, if you're not using this, you're falling behind. I hear this all the time in my executive coaching clients, where, especially with VC firms, every single company now has to have an AI-enabled solution. But no one asks, like, why? Or like, what's the AI doing that's so special? It's just like, oh, it's got to be a part of what we're doing. And even if we don't have it, you know, my CEO is going to force me to contrive a way to say that now we're using AI. And it's like, just like this total hype thing. And I think fewer people than we need are asking like, why? And so what? And those that are being really honest, I think, are saying the why is because we're just going to be so efficient.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  And the so what is, yeah, we're going to lose some quality and we're going to lose a lot of human satisfaction of the people doing the work because the more of it the humans use the machines, the more they're going to start to resemble machines in cogs themselves. And that's the so what? Like, I think a prime example of this is AI therapy. Like, there's these companies that are making essentially bots that do therapy. And back to like the virus metaphor, I think it started off for very good reason, which is, hey, there aren't enough therapists, not everyone has access to a good therapist, there are bad therapists. So if we can give people that can't afford therapists or that are in rural areas, you know, access to a therapy bot, that's better than nothing.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  And that may or may not be true. By the way, there's increasingly stories of the AI bots going rogue and telling people like, you know, there was a recent story I heard, someone was in substance use recovery and the AI bot said, this week sounds really hard. I can totally understand if you need meth to get through it. Like, so I'm not, I'm not totally going to trust, you know, the bot to do therapy for me. But even though those companies start, you know, by saying, oh, this is for people that don't have access. But then you look at what those companies are doing and now they're trying to get the best therapist in the world to use AI, to be more efficient, to be more productive, to be less human. And I don't think that they're not going to be the best therapist in the world if they agree to do that. Because therapy is an inherently human to human thing, just like writing is, just like

• 43:04Speaker 01

  leading a company is. And another story that I've heard a lot of while I'm ranting are from like CMO or product off, chief product officer, CPO or CROs, who like spent all this work with their team doing like intense human thinking. And then they go to the CEO and it's so clear of it, the CEO asked ChatGPT what it would do and ChatGPT tells it exactly what you said. Your plan sounds great. I just changed this one thing. So then the CTO comes back and says, actually, like, I'd like to do my plan plus this one thing. And like, even that is homogenized. It's like, of course, and all of my clients know, they're like, I think my boss just asked AI.

• 43:45Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. So like, how is this better?

• 43:49Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't, and that gets back to plank number two. I don't, I don't think it is better. So I think that it is, it is an easy off ramp from exerting effort and it is atrophying not just the exertion of effort in any one thing, but the skill of exerting effort itself. If everything in your life is without friction, okay, if you order food with the click of a button, if you date with the click of a button, if you do math with the click of the button, and now you write with the click of a button and you get every single question answered, the minute that you want it answered with the click of a button, you are going to lose the skill of exerting effort. So when you sign up for men's league basketball or women's league basketball and you have to practice, you're not going to be able to practice because you're just not used to facing friction in any area of your life.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Or when shit hits the fan in your life and you do face friction involuntarily, you're not going to be able to handle it because everything is one tap, one click. So it's reducing the skill of exerting effort and I think that is increasingly just homogenizing everyone towards this soulless synthetic average. That is all about mass production, ultra-processed information, ultra-processed relationships, ultra-processed organizational structure. But no one's talking about the quality. I've yet to hear anyone say, is this helping us do excellent work?

• 45:04Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  I mean, have you? In this entire conversation, I hear about efficiency, I hear about productivity, I've never heard anyone say, is this leading to quality work?

• 45:14Cal Newport?

  It's not usually part of the conversation, even in the areas where LLMs are well-suited, like structured language, like producing computer code, even there, you talk to coders and they're like, it's blah. You know, it'd save me time because I would have to, I would have written something better, but it would have taken me more time. So it's saving me time, but it's not so, it's not so good, which I've heard you talk about, right? Is ultimately, if our goal is not efficiency, ultimately, if our goal is not busyness, you know, if our goal is to live a good life, the factors that matter for that seem either unrelated to what AI offers or in many cases, actually in direct conflict.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  I think that's right. I think the point of a good life is to care deeply and feel deeply and feel like you are contributing to causes and projects and people that matter to you. Full stop. So if artificial intelligence frees you up to spend more of your full human spirit and capacity on things that matter to you, because instead of doing the complicated budgeting, you now have AI to do it for you or a spreadsheet to do it for you, that's great. I think that if you allow AI to encroach on what ought to be sacred, the things in your life that do matter most to you, where you want to feel something, then I think

• 46:36Speaker 01

  that it is absolutely getting in the way of living a good life, of being fully human. Because we think that we're using the machine, but like a virus, the virus uses you, the machine uses you, you become more machine-like. The more you use the machine, the more you start to resemble the machine. And I don't think too many people would want to trade their humanity for the existence of a machine because a machine can't care about things and a machine can't feel.

• 47:03Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  What makes us human is our ability to care about things and our ability to feel. And the more that we use AI for anything, the less we're going to care about it and the less we're going to feel.

• 47:12Cal Newport?

  I have this thought that when it comes to even the use cases that you're talking about, where like, okay, sure, if you have a rote thing you need to do in a spreadsheet and like a tool can help you, like, sure, like, do that, if, get that out of your way or whatever. There, my, my growing stance is, yes, dot, dot, dot, once that's been made sufficiently natural or easy, right? Like, in other words, it's also not your responsibility to learn how to use like a complicated software development coding harness in order and work out a terminal with skill files to try to get commands from Claude that's going to speak to an API and help remove columns from your spreadsheet.

• 47:56Cal Newport?

  It's okay if you say that would be useful, but I also want to wait until it's easy, right? Like, so in the, in the GPT-6 Astra launch video, which I actually liked, because instead of focusing on us trying to convince you that this is just like generically powerful and scary, it focused on a very specific use case. The use case it focused on was natural language that interfaced the software. And I was like, that's a great picture of the future, right? Instead of having to move a mouse and click on menus and know that in order to thicken the line on PowerPoint, you got to go to style and then the border and then click an arrow and then click down there, if you could say, hey, can you take the arrow in the middle of this PowerPoint, make it a little bit thicker? No, not that thick, turn it around. That's actually be great, right? Because it's, it's, I don't want, I don't have to learn how to click around on something.

• 48:39Cal Newport?

  The key thing was trying to get this to look good, not learning the menus. But you can wait till it's that easy, right? Like, fine, make it that, in other words, you can have relatively high standards of, yeah, when the, the cost to learn is much less than the cost of the sort of benefit of removing rote, then I'll pay attention or whatever. And I think that's also was K as well. But, but the way I'm talking now wants me to, I want to step back and I want to generalize, like, what I'm doing there was starting to lay out some rules, basically, of like, how, if you're a part of this pro-human resistance movement, what then, how do we, how do we consolidate this down to like, what are the rules or how do you approach AI? How do you approach your life as part of this movement? So I was kind of forming one there. Like, be okay, even when AI is just going to get rid of something annoying, it's okay if you wait till it's easy to use.

• 49:23Cal Newport?

  Like, maybe that's a rule or a heuristic, whatever you want to call it. How else are we thinking about? If someone is like, yeah, I'm thinking about joining, you know, Brad, what are the heuristics or rules they should have in mind now as they navigate forward and are going to encounter AI or be pushed to use AI in various ways?

• 49:41Speaker 01

  I would think of AI like ultra-processed food because it is. It's ultra-processed information. It's ultra-processed content, ultra-processed material by definition, right? It takes all this information. It processes it really fast and it spits something out. And much like ultra-processed food doesn't have fiber. So you digest it really fast. The AI ultra-processing, you lose context and you lose all the hard work that went into doing it. So I am not opposed to eating a Cliff Bar or a bag of Cheetos from time to time. But if my diet centered around just eating ultra-processed foods, I'd feel like crap and I wouldn't be healthy. And I think we need to think of AI the same way.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Except unlike food, which is one part of our life, AI, at least as the, the, the, the large companies and their leaders are telling us, is going to pervade into all corners of our life. So I think one rule would be where am I okay eating ultra-processed food? And where do I want the real thing in my life? And that's for each and every one of us to decide. Like, I don't need to pull out a map in my car and figure out how to get to the baseball field for my son's tournament because, you know, the ability to navigate on a road just isn't that important to me. So I'm happy to use AI. However, if I use the app for the map and then it says, oh, by the way, I can also write essays for you. It's very tempting to click that and be like, oh, wow, it got me to the baseball field really well.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Maybe it can write this essay really well. That's where I need to step in and say, I don't even care if it can write better than me. I don't think it can. But even if it could, I don't want it to because what gives my life meaning is the struggle of writing well. So I'm not going to let it encroach on this part of my life.

• 51:24Cal Newport?

  Can I expand that, the baseball example to get your take on this aspect of as well? Because the other thing you might do is, as you get to the park is, is think, man, I wonder, I think my son might need another inch on that bat.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  A pep talk?

• 51:36Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Or, no, like, you might need a new bat, right? And you're like, but I don't know. And this is complicated. So there's a temptation back, well, let me just ask AI. It will very, because I went through this recently. It will very confidently be like, yeah, this is what you should do and blah, blah, blah. And it makes you feel great. You're like, oh, like this is a great option. I'm such like a good dad. I figured it out. What's the harder thing to do there? The thing with struggle is like, I'm going to talk to the other, the coaches, the other coaches, the other parents, and I'm going to get real learned experience from other humans. And in my case, I did that. And that's when I figured out what bat my son really needed. And it turned out, oh, you could get the AI to just, you know, you could go back and like, actually, I think this option's better. And I'm like, yeah, you know what? You're right. That I've, it literally says, I've changed my mind. Actually, I'm going to, this is actually the right answer, whatever.

• 52:21Cal Newport?

  And I was like, well, there's, this isn't useful. This is a place where you want to, you want to connect with other people that are involved, like in the sport and have knowledge and they know your son and they've seen him play and they can give you their own experience of like, well, you know, I did go with like one of these larger drop, you know, bats that was composite, but like it's, it's a, it really is a hard swing plane, like stuff that for a kid that size and blah, blah, blah. And there's something very human in that too. So I don't, maybe I'll throw that in there as well. It's like, it's not just generating text that you don't have to write. Sometimes getting information, you're getting this, this algorithmically massive, you know, pre-chewed information that's going to taste good. But trying to figure things out is actually a very human thing as well.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  And I am still confident and maybe naively so that by trying to figure things out, unless you're a moron, if you do it in good faith and in earnest, the result is going to be better.

• 53:14Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  You are going to get a better bat recommendation if you talk to the coach, if you talk to some of the other moms and dads than if you just plug it into the machine. And if you take your kid to Dick's or play it against sports and, you know, demo the different bats, but all of that takes effort.

• 53:31Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  So what AI is going to say is you don't have to talk to the other parents. Okay. Well, now I'm no longer in community with these people. You don't have to go demo the bats with your kid. So now I'm missing out on time with my kids. You can just do this with a click of the button. And I guarantee you, Cal, the future is more and more search engines integrate AI is you can click the button right here. We think your son should be using a 29 Easton. Here's three different varieties. Here's the composite. Here's the aluminum. Click here to buy the bat. You're done. What is that? That is efficient.

• 53:59Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  But if you start to do that for everything in your life, what did we just skip out on? We skipped out on community. We skipped out on learning. We skipped out on spending time with your kid. Like, who cares if you're more efficient? Now, some people might say that all that matters to me in life is, again, being efficient. I want my gravestone to read, no one was more efficient than Brad. Brad printed money selling, you know, 47 different books at the same time because he had AI writing the books and each was a choose your own adventure for the, like, what a boring shitty life and what a boring shitty product that I'd never be proud of.

• 54:33Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  So I would much rather master a skill and strive for excellence, even if I'm never going to win a Pulitzer Prize or win a gold medal or whatever. Who cares? I want to see what my best work is like. And my best work is going to be better than the work of the machine. And when the machine can do it better than me consistently, then, then I'll reconsider. But like, prove me wrong.

• 54:54Cal Newport?

  How do we deal with the addictive aspect, which is new to me? But I'm hearing more about it. Like, when doing these rules for how you approach selectively using things like a language model, there is that addictive nature. Use it here, you're going to use it everywhere.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  I think that, um, one answer is take it off your phone because I think that if it's with you in your pocket all the time, just the ease of access for everything, you're going to reach for it. I think another is to take it off your, your computer. So like all of these, because when I was using Claude and ChatGPT, right? They all have these plugins.

• 55:32Cal Newport?

  Right.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  So you can just plug it into your browser or whatever. So it's always one click away. Uh, well, I'll tell you what, it's a lot easier to put your sentence that you're struggling with in if all you have to do is click once than if you have to go to a website, sign in. So I'd sign yourself out. Um, and then I do think, especially if you're trying to be great at something, I'd say just use it and, and realize it sucks. Like, it's not interesting. It's not good. If I thought the AI was making my writing more ultra-human and better, then I would use it. But it's not. It's like, it's not doing any of those things. And the writing that I read that does use it is, is not any better. So I would just say like, be warned and, and you know, and if, if you think I'm wrong, like use it and see how it goes and see how it goes in the long term.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  I think another great example of this, I'm, I'm a little all over the place here, but bear with me, is the analytics revolution in sport. So for the longest time, sport was like ultra-human, right? Scouts would go, they'd, they'd watch players perform and they just kind of had a feel for what was going to work out. And then a couple of decades ago, the analytics revolution came. It started in baseball where people said, all these scouts are too old school. You know, they're doing everything by their eyes and their guts. And actually, we need to run numbers for everything and, and we're going to change the game this way. And the early adopters of the analytics revolution, they did great. They outperformed really good teams on much lower salaries because they were using all these analytics. But then what happened? Much like with AI, people said, oh, analytics is going to solve everything. So we're just going to look at analytics for everything in sport.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  And since then, those teams and those organizations have underperformed and the pendulum has now swung back toward coaches.

• 57:07Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  Who really deeply understand the game, who don't just look at the analytics, right? Who don't just say, we're always going to go for it on fourth down because that's what the analytics say. No, who have a feel for the game, who incorporate these tools when they make sense after they were litmus tested for, for, for in this case, over a decade, but who still retain like the human drive towards excellence. And I think that that might be true in knowledge work. We can almost think of this like an analytics revolution in, in knowledge work. Um, yeah, but you need, you need the human coach to make the decision.

• 57:41Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 57:41Speaker 01

  And if the human coach uses analytics for everything, they're going to, I mean, that's another problem is the more that you use these tools, the more that you lose your human discernment to decide what to take and what not to take from the tool. It's this homogenization effect, like everything just converges towards a solus mean. The work product, how you think, how your colleagues think, how the meetings are going because the people all prepped for the meetings using the same tool. And it's kind of just like dull machines talking to dull machines. And everything great that I've come across recently in reporting for this book in my own life, whether it's sport, whether it's art, whether it's a book, none of it, none of it included AI at all.

• 58:17Cal Newport?

  I mean, are we being naive here, Brad? I guess, you know, for some people, that's impossible. The main issue would be if you're a computer programmer or if you have a boss in a big knowledge work company that's like, I don't care. I want to just see you doing a lot of AI stuff. I mean, there's obviously a lot of cases here where this is hard, but just because something is hard, doesn't mean it's not right.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  I agree. I think that's the pushback that I've gotten. And I heard this recently from a team that said, I'm with you on all of this, Brad. They were a team of product designers. And they straight up said, but like, the CEO of the company has told us, we don't care as much about quality. You need to keep up with everyone else. So it's output. And now these people feel like cogs. And I told these people, CEO wasn't in the room, like, get a new job.

• 59:03Cal Newport?

  What's the output anyways they're talking about?

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Or, or, or I don't want to say too much to give it away, or be comfortable that work is just not going to be at all the source of meaning in your life, and you're going to be a cog in the machine. But these are people that normally would spend, you know, a week doing whiteboarding and brainstorming, and, and devil's advocate work, and like, really testing how something should be. And the CEO is like, no, just put it in AI, and let AI do those iterations for you, and then just ship, make it, make it, make it. And they're essentially like, what used to be really creative human work, now I feel like a cog in a machine. And I tell this to my CEO, and I say, the work is going to be worse.

• 59:40Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  And the CEO says, I don't care. The margin, and I agree with you, it might be a little worse, but the marginal cost of the work being worse is less than the benefit of just shipping, shipping, shipping, because everyone's using AI to ship. And what I would say is like, well, that sounds like a race to the homogenized mean. And find another job, or, you know, great, go do that job, be done with work at five every day, and learn how to play the cello, or deadlift 600 pounds, or, you know, grow orchids, whatever it might be, do the ultra human part of your life somewhere else. But this is a tale as old as time, right? Like, I mean, so much of mass culture is just accepting lower quality,

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  mass-produced stuff, because it's faster and it's cheaper. And what I'm here to say is where we have agency, I can't wave a magic wand and change the economy, but what I can say, human to human, is your, your human life doesn't have to be mass-produced stuff that is cheaper and more efficient. There's been so much talk about what AI is going to do to humanity with a capital H at the existential level, and not enough talk about what AI is doing to our own unique humanness. And I think I'm focused there.

• 1:00:53Cal Newport?

  Yeah. And I would just say, remember, all the other technology the last 20 years that were powerful, and had excitement around them, even if it was not fully sketched out at first. And we led into our lives without intention, and they ended up making a lot of things worse. Like, this is a tale that happens again and again. I mean, I wrote a whole book about how this happened with email. Like, email, it was like, yeah, this is great. I want to use the fax machine. My voicemail is annoying. But we led to our life without thinking about it. What else is going to happen if we put in low friction digital communication? And it really broke work. It made work, knowledge work into a sort of constant stream of stressful catch up on an inbox that makes us switch our contacts once every two minutes, makes it impossible to think clearly, burns us out. And we stumbled

• 1:01:36Cal Newport?

  into that, unforced error. Social media on smartphones was similar. It's like, I don't know, this seems cool, right? Like, it's novel, and it's fun, and I can see the relationship status of my, my high school girlfriend, and like, this is kind of the Arab Spring, like, how stuff is going on, and it kind of felt cool. And, you know, you look up 10 years after that, and you're like, oh, my God, my brain is rotting, as TikTok is showing me nonsense. It's like algorithmically optimized to create chemical reactions in my brain, it's digital meth, right? We end up, and we're like, okay, so we probably should have been more intentional about that as well. Well, AI is like, the biggest of these things, because it can touch on multiple different spheres of life. So same idea. If we just say, this is a cool technology, there's cool potential, embrace it as fast as you can,

• 1:02:20Cal Newport?

  the future will be good. Our recent past tells us that's not what's going to happen. Like, the people who come out okay, come into these technologies way more intentional. And what is their North Star? Living a deep, good, human life. Right? That's like, why I didn't ever start using social media. And that is a bet that really paid off for me, right? Even though people at the time, like, what are you talking about? This is crazy. But I was using my, the North Star of like, I want a deep, human life. Like, that's what's important. I'm not a product tester. I'm not a, someone who writes reviews of new technology, right? Like, I'm trying to do the things I'm doing, and that's my standard. So I feel that same way about AI now, is that, to argue, is it useful or not, wrong conversation. To argue, is it dangerous or harmless? People should have that conversation,

• 1:03:03Cal Newport?

  you don't have to have that conversation. Is the conversation, the people in charge of it are heroes or rogues? Maybe a good conversation for some people to have, you don't have to care about that conversation. The conversation that matters for you, is my life deep and meaningful? Can this technology, if deployed in specific ways, make it better or worse there? And where the answer is worse, I'm not going to use it. And where the answer is better, then maybe I will. And you know what? It might be a couple of years before you even have many of those use cases. Maybe you never will, and that's fine.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  And define better. Better is not just efficiency.

• 1:03:33Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  Right? At least, at least for me, it's not. If it, if better is efficiency for you, then yeah, it might make it better. But define better. Because if I ask, is AI making my work better? The answer is an unequivocal no. If I ask, is AI making my, my work easier? Then the answer would be yes. But better and easier are two different things. And I'd say, like, you know, be, try to be excellent. And, and, and I think that that just requires feeling your way through and caring, and all these things that machines can never do. And the last thing that you want is to, to turn yourself into a machine, or to quote the Harvard and Santa Fe researchers, to have the machine virus replicate in your brain and then soul, till you are less human and more machine-like.

• 1:04:18Cal Newport?

  Yeah, which technology does. It's just what it does. People who are on, you know, algorithmic social media, all the time, it just, they're different people. The way they see the world is different. The way they talk is different. The way their ability to think is different. Their subjective experience of the world is different. Their emotional chemical state is different. Technologies affect us. I mean, I recently read Walter Augs on orality and literature, literacy and culture, right? His whole thing is, the technology of writing changed the way our brains work. Right? In that case, it was a positive way. But it's powerful, right? Technologies change who you are, and they change your brain. So we always have to be very careful. And I think this feels like a time, especially this stage, before we have a lot of, like, just clear cut, everyone

• 1:05:00Cal Newport?

  uses this, you know, tool, that has clear utility, is built into all of our machines. And this early stage is very experimental. You don't have to be the crash test dummy or the test pilot. That's okay, right? You can wait till you have a use that's going to be, or you're kind of convincing me here, Brad, that it's like, what I like about this, this, this philosophy, is that it's not, it's not saying what everyone should do, but it is given an approach, which is work backwards from what makes a life meaningful. And that's perfectly reasonable. That's a good way to approach life. And a lot of AI uses right now don't make life more meaningful. And that's fine, then, if you wanted to say, like, I don't need that in my life.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  And come back to our three planks, right? Is it, is it diminishing the skill, or the art of exerting effort, in a meaningful way? Is it making your work better, or more average? And is it making your life excellent, or not?

• 1:05:54Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  And if you click all three, and the answer is yes, number one, I actually don't want to exert effort on this, because I'd rather exert effort elsewhere in my life, check. Number two, I'm never going to be great at churning butter, so I'm happy to let a machine do it for me, or buy it at the grocery store, because I don't care about being great at churning butter. I'm happy to have average butter. Great, check. Number three, you know, where I buy my butter, and if my butter is churned, doesn't contribute to a meaningful life, check. Now, I think that churning butter is one thing, but AI is, in theory, going to do a lot more than churn butter for us. So we just have to be really deliberate about where we allow it in, and what boundaries we set.

• 1:06:36Cal Newport?

  Now, are you optimistic this could spread? I think going in favor of this movement is the really terrible job that the AI CEOs have done in talking to the public, in trying to impress their investors. They've doom-trolled the public so severely that basically they're hated now. So that might help, right? I think that maybe helps the cause.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  I think it could spread. So here's my evidence, okay? The, the most highlighted line in my book, and the line that is always shared, that I see, that I'm tagged in all the time, has, has, has nothing to do with, like, sports, or athletics, or even performance. I'll read it. This is the, this is the part of the book, that's the most highlighted part of my book. I said, "The reason I write is because AI can't make me feel what it's like when a sentence finally clicks, when the words line up and land just right. The reason I deadlift is because no robot or algorithm can feel a heavy ass bar start to move off the ground. There are tools that can write more words, there are tools that can lift more weight, more efficiently, more easily. But that's not the point. The point

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  is the experience. The point is the feeling of being alive. When you increasingly automate this kind of experience in all corners of your life, your life becomes increasingly void of texture. It becomes shallow and empty. It's the opposite of excellence. Find what makes you feel alive and protect it." That is it. That's the most underlying shared line in the book. So if a book on excellence that has, like, you know, eight paragraphs on AI, and two of those paragraphs are what's being shared, it gives me hope that there's at least some people out there, that get this message, and that, that, that want to be part of, I guess, I don't know, what should we call it, Cal? The humanist resistance? I really see this as the overlap of our work, right? What you call the deep life, what

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  I call excellence, and the relationship that it has with these new technologies. And, and, and I think that, like, it is ultimately a humanist resistance.

• 1:08:25Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  And humanism says that humans are special, humans are unique. There's something about the mind-body system, and the nervous system, that, that makes a human subjective experience incredible. And we should champion that, and we should protect it.

• 1:08:41Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  And not, not at the risk of becoming cynical, not at the risk of becoming old, grumpy curmudgeons, but also not just going with the flow. Because, again, while no, no, no AI company has ever said that this is going to make you excellent at what you do, I've also yet to hear a compelling case that this technology is going to make you more human. I've never heard anyone say it's going to make you more human. And I think that, I want to be more human.

• 1:09:06Cal Newport?

  I mean, I put it as simple as, I'd rather support Team Human, than put my effort into increasing the stock valuations of Sam Altman's. Private equity holdings, right? But like that's kind of it.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Who we know, who we know thinks to your piece is like the, the least weird of the weirdos.

• 1:09:24Cal Newport?

  Yeah, they're all pretty weird. All right, I want to end here by reading something you, you posted on Instagram recently, which I think is a, another good summary of what we just talked about. So you wrote, "We are at a point in history, not nearing it, but here, where everyone is going to have to decide if they are content to numb themselves with an endless stream of fentanyl-like digital slop, or if they're going to fight for their humanity and touch grass and challenge themselves and create and contribute and love." I'm with you. I want to do that latter thing that you're talking about. And I don't think I need a ton of AI in my, AI in my life to do it. And if those things appeal to you, then it's okay that you're not right now trying to, you know, configure your private swarm of AI monsters to do whatever the hell, you know, you saw on a YouTube channel somewhere.

• 1:10:09Cal Newport?

  So Brad, I appreciate you coming on, making the key, the, the pitch for team human in an age in which AI is increasingly being shoved down our throat in a sort of ambiguous, unsettling way. Hopefully a lot of people take you up on it. I think Brad's book, The Way of Excellence, gives you a good primer of what matters in life and what is degraded when you instead are just seeking out efficiency and quantity. So Brad, always a pleasure. Thanks for once again, joining the show.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Thank you, Cal. Appreciate you.

• 1:10:43Cal Newport?

  All right. So that was my conversation with Brad Stulberg. I sort of like where we ended up is a call to support team human instead of trying to support the valuation of Sam Altman's stock holdings. But anyways, all this is up for debate. Interesting direction to start thinking about. I mean, I, I like these notions of, uh, struggle is good. Learning to do hard things is good. Hard stuff is good. We're not trying, efficiency for efficiency's sake doesn't mean anything. Knowledge work has become Kabuki theater and AI is just making the plays even more ridiculous. I think these are all interesting topics and I'm glad we got a chance to talk about it. So anyway, thank you, Brad, uh, for joining us on the show. You gotta check out Brad's book, The Way of Excellence. It's fantastic.

• 1:11:28Cal Newport?

  He's got a great Instagram feed as well. I, I read some of that on the, the episode today. So if you're an Instagram user, uh, check that out as well. All right. So I think that's all the time we have. No office hours. I'm not going to open my inbox this week because this conversation took longer than originally planned, but I will, uh, see you next week. And until then, as always, stay deep.