Ep. 359: Should We Fear Cognitive Debt?

A blockbuster new study out of MIT takes a closer look at the impact of writing with the help of AI. In today’s episode, Cal breaks down this paper with the help of author Brad Stulberg (who made waves online recently with his reaction to its findings), picking apart the role of AI in deep work activities. Cal then answers listeners questions, and presents a twist on his typical final segment in which he now describes what he is not reading this week, which provides him a thinly-concealed excuse to rant about AI coverage. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia Deep Dive: Should We Fear Cognitive Debt? [2:15] Can AI be creative? [44:35] What’s the smallest change I can make to address my disorganization? [48:31] How do I find time for personal projects? [53:12] How should I choose my next internship? [1:06:08] How did you develop your goal-setting philosophy? [1:11:46] CALL: Inbox Zero and Notion [1:14:50] CASE STUDY: A Thoreau Schedule [1:24:01] WHAT I’M (NOT) READ: AI CEO’s hot takes on work [1:32:49] Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?fortune.com/2025/06/20/openai-ceo-sam-altman-ai-phds-entry-level-corporate-job-cuts-what-is-left-gen-z-college-gradautes/ Thanks to our Sponsors: shipstation.com/deepsmalls.com (Use code “DEEP”)notion.com/calharrys.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:11Cal Newport?

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

• 0:24Cal Newport?

  So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer Jesse. Jesse, I have a question for you. Have you at any point ever used AI to help you while you were writing something?

• 0:38Speaker 01

  No, a lot of people have been asking you this, though.

• 0:41Cal Newport?

  Have been asking me or been asking you?

• 0:42Speaker 01

  You, like through email.

• 0:44Cal Newport?

  This, I think, is the point. Most people right now know about tools like ChatGPT, but are not actively using them for things like to help their writing. But more and more people are. It's this sort of growing movement. This is what we're going to get into into our deep dive today. There's a blockbuster new article that came out of the MIT Media Lab that did some really interesting experiments to figure out what happens when you're writing with AI. What is the impact on Deep Work? So that's coming up. I'm going to have a special surprise guest join me to help me dissect that article and understand this relationship between Deep Work and AI. So that should be fun, Jesse. Then we've got questions, including a really good case study where you're going to get a sort of bullet point

• 1:27Cal Newport?

  description of the systems for time management and attention management that this particular individual do. And I think it's a really smart system for those looking for the deep life so that you'll like it. And then our final segment, I'm going to do a twist on my normal what I'm reading segment. I'm adding a twist to it. What I'm not reading. This is just an excuse, Jesse, for me to rant about something that has been bothering me recently. I will preview, more importantly, we have a little bit more Cal Network art in that final segment, this time a completely undocked photo. So we should look forward to that. If you stick around for anything, it is to see the next beautiful piece of Cal Network art.

• 2:06Cal Newport?

  So we've got a lot to do. So I think we should just get rolling and start with our deep dive.

• 2:15Cal Newport?

  So last month Ezra Klein went on the How I Write podcast. The host David Perel asked Ezra about using AI for his writing and Ezra's answer generated some controversy. It began when Ezra said the following, and I quote, "I think it is very dangerous to use ChatGPT in any serious way for writing." Ezra then goes on to give some reasons for this claim. One of the reasons is that AI can help you rewrite or polish or check what you've written, but it can't tell you if the ideas itself are good or not. As Ezra elaborates, "You have to be attuned to that voice in you. It's like, not right, not right, not right, not right.

• 2:57Cal Newport?

  You're not trying to bypass that or get around it or get to where it's soft. You're trying to get to the point where you're like, ah, got it right. And that's usually intellectual labor." Ezra later adds, "ChatGPT can't identify fundamentally wrong ideas." When later asked specifically about AI and journalism, Ezra says, "I'm not completely against anything, and I have not, and not for lack of trying, and I think not for lack of being informed or interested in the issue, found a way that I consistently use AI in my work. I'll sometimes use it right now as a replacement for Google searches and is valuable for that." A lot of people appreciated Ezra's points, but some people, including several I know

• 3:39Cal Newport?

  and who wrote into the show, thought that his stance was nostalgic and out of touch, like sticking with a typewriter in the age of word processors. A few cranky people might do it, but it's basically just a worse process that makes you slower at your craft. The future of writing, they're convinced, must include a symbiotic relationship with AI. So who is right on this point? Ezra? Or AI's defenders? Well, this question has been on my mind. And that's when I saw that my good friend and longtime friend of the show, the author Brad Stulberg, sent me an Instagram post, which he had recently published about a new paper that came out to MIT that took a closer look at the impact of using AI in writing.

• 4:23Cal Newport?

  This post hit a nerve online and it caught my attention, too. This paper, I would argue, points us towards a stronger, broader argument about AI writing in our culture that shows Ezra is perhaps on to something. Anyway, here's the good news. In a coincidence of timing, Brad is here in DC visiting his family. So I asked him if he would swing by the HQ to talk with me about this paper and get into it on this topic for our deep dive today. And fortunately, he agreed. So we are joined today by Brad. Brad, thanks for coming.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Hey, it's great to be here, Cal.

• 4:56Cal Newport?

  So tell me about this paper that you you wrote about. You know, what is it? Who wrote it? What's the big points?

• 5:02Speaker 02

  The paper is called "Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for an Essay Writing Task." The paper came out of MIT. And the highest level summary is for four months, a team of researchers from the MIT Media Lab followed 54 study participants who were using ChatGPT to heavily assist them in writing essays. And the top line finding, and I'm going to quote the research, the top line finding, and I'm going to quote the researchers directly, is that LLM users consistently underperformed

• 5:45Speaker 02

  at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.

• 5:49Cal Newport?

  So those are the three things?

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Those are the three things that they evaluated. On the neural level, EEG brain studies found that there was a 47% reduction in brain activity with the heavy ChatGPT users. So their brains were using 47% less neural connections as they were quote unquote "writing." I guess in this case, they were getting a lot of help from the model. Behaviorally, Researchers found that 83% of the heavy model users couldn't quote anything from what they'd just written. This compares to about 10% from the group that used no technology, and very similarly, about 13% from the group that used a simple Google search to aid them

• 6:35Speaker 02

  in their writing. And then on the linguistic level, they had neutral arbiters give subjective qualitative analyses of the writing. And words that came up repeatedly to describe the AI writing was, and I'm quoting, "soulless, empty, lacking individuality, typical."

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Now, the last thing that I'll say is perhaps the biggest finding from this study, and it's right there in the title, this term cognitive debt. And what the researchers found is that, yes, using ChatGPT to write for you is absolutely more efficient than writing yourself. You don't have any cognitive strain, it's not hard, you just put the prompt in, you massage it a little bit, and it's done.

• 7:18Cal Newport?

  And they looked at the time required, and they finished earlier.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Of course they finished earlier, because they're just prompting the model. So, yes, you have this short-term benefit, if you will, of being much more efficient. But what you pay in the long term to get that benefit seems like tenfold the cost in decreased cognitive fitness and cognitive health, and that's the term cognitive debt. They essentially argue that when we use AI to write for us, we pick up a fair amount of cognitive debt. We are mortgaging our future cognitive fitness, really our ability to think for ourselves, for this sort of short-term efficiency.

• 7:55Cal Newport?

  I mean, this is interesting. It reminds me of the article I told you about that I wrote last year for The New Yorker. And it was about students using AI for writing. And I looked virtually over the shoulder of a graduate student writing a paper. And that's what surprised me, and this was one of the points of that article, is it wasn't about speed for the student. It wasn't about producing text they otherwise couldn't. Like, oh, this is somehow going to produce writing. I'm not ready to produce. It mainly seemed to be about strain reduction. That's what really seemed to be going on is that writing is a pain, quite literally, like cognitively. It doesn't feel good to write. And they would go back and forth with the, what about this? What about that?

• 8:39Cal Newport?

  And it gave them all these moments of release from strain. Or sometimes it would take them a long time to get a sentence by just asking the model again and again. But it was better than, from a strain perspective, the de novo construction, right? It's easier to ask questions of a model than to produce stuff from scratch with the brain. But okay, but this is interesting. This cognitive debt idea, it's arguing there is this huge benefit that comes from writing. And yet we often think about productivity enhancing tools and making things easier. How do you understand? What is the dividing line between activity where you want it to be hard versus the hardness is a bug, not a feature?

• 9:22Cal Newport?

  I think that's at the core of this argument.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  I think you're spot on. The metaphor that I used in the little mini essay that I wrote for Instagram is this notion of fitness. So if you think about physical fitness, there's a whole manner of reasons that one would train their body. But let's just focus on physical health. We know that lifting weights, running, pushing yourself physically is good for your health. You live longer. It is associated with a reduced risk of certain diseases, both physical and cognitive and so on. Now, if you went to the gym with a forklift or some other apparatus to lift the weight for you, you could spend the same hour in the gym, but it would be much more comfortable. You wouldn't be straining.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  And that gym session would be a lot easier, but you wouldn't accrue those health benefits. And I think essentially what's happening when we over rely on a tool like ChatGPT to write for us is we're sacrificing our cognitive fitness. We are replacing the strain of thinking, of writing with a forklift. In this term, the, excuse me, we're replacing it with a forklift. And in this case, it's the model that does the work for us. And I think the result is a decline in cognitive health and cognitive fitness. And that's precisely what this paper showed. Another point I'll make real quick, Cal, before turning it back to you, is the researchers also found that when they took ChatGPT away from the group that had been using it for four months,

• 10:53Speaker 02

  they wrote worse than people who had never used ChatGPT before.

• 10:57Cal Newport?

  This is scary.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 10:59Cal Newport?

  That's interesting. So you're losing familiarity with the mental processes yet required to produce thought. I mean, something that comes to mind here is when I wrote that article for The New Yorker, I went deep on what happens in your brain when you write. And it is really complicated, right? Because writing is unnatural. We're not evolved to write. Linguistic communication is a cultural invention, not a, not an evolutionary invention. So in order to write, we have to hijack a lot of different parts of our brain and get them to work together. There's like visual cortexes involved. There's spatial reasoning involved. I didn't learn this until I read this, but there's a spatial reasoning component, the same part of your brain you use to keep a map in your head. Like, how do I get from here back to the watering hole? That gets used to spatially position the outline of your arguments in your

• 11:44Cal Newport?

  heads. You're trying to understand where you are in an abstract argument. The visual cortex brings up images. The linguistic centers bring up like words. The auditory centers like convert those words to sounds. You can think about how to put them into words. I think I used the term as like a symphony being conducted in your brain. This is probably all very beneficial. We know this in the context of reading. So there's, there's research on what reading does for us. And writing is just reading in a reverse. You're producing the words instead of reading it. But we know reading, the research from Marion Wolf, among others, argues, we develop these deep processes, deep reading processes, which creates stronger connections between all these brain areas. Once they've been formed, then you can access them more easily. Now you

• 12:28Cal Newport?

  can access and string together different parts of your brain, and it allows for more advanced reasoning, more sophisticated reasoning, more empathy, et cetera. So. I guess this is what they're seeing, probably, when EEG's activity goes down using ChatGPT, is you're probably taking whole parts of your brain offline that you otherwise would be using during the writing process. And so those connections aren't getting strengthened. So like the equivalent of the muscle getting stronger is probably literally neurons wiring together because they were firing together. And so if we think about it like cognitive weightlifting, yeah, I think you're, I think you're absolutely right. Like those muscles aren't getting worked. But what is the, that's what I was trying to figure out. What's the context where we want to get stronger? Right? Because we do use forklifts to follow the physical analogy. Like if I'm in a warehouse,

• 13:11Cal Newport?

  a forklift is great because we used to have to use, you know, the, the longshoreman would have to pick things up and hurt their backs or use pulleys and forklifts are better. We can move things on to it. But in the gym, I want to do the work. So how do we think about this? Like, how do you think about it in intellectual work?

• 13:29Speaker 02

  I think it's a trade off between what capacities do we want to maintain and strengthen versus what capacities are we okay letting go? By no means am I personally an anti-AI purist. I think there are so many good use cases. And I do think it's true that whenever there's a new technology, there tends to be this kind of hysteria or moral panic. It happened with the fire. It happened with the wheel. The industrial revolution was so beneficial for so many different reasons. However, there's tons of public health data that shows that the invention of the vacuum cleaner, for example, helped people to clean a lot faster. And as a result, you are a lot more

• 14:12Speaker 02

  sedentary because you're not having to crouch down and stand back up and cover your whole house on your hands and knees to clean. Is it good that we have vacuum cleaners? Yes. But if we don't replace that, then you have these negative health consequences. You have obesity if you're just sedentary all the time. And I think that when it comes to something like writing, Which really is maybe the best proxy that we have for thinking. If you want to think well, then it helps to write well. I don't think that we should be so flippant with outsourcing our ability to think. Our ability to think is a central feature of our humanity. In many ways, it separates us from other species. We can very quickly become like Pavlov's dog. Putting something into the AI, it responds. We either like it or we don't. We give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  We ask it the next question and then we're sacrificing so much of our humanity. Now, if AI was going to be able to, let's say, run a gazillion different permutations to somehow get to the bottom of cancer. Well, then the cost benefit is pretty clear. Let it do that. Let it use all of its computing power to figure that out. But in the case of writing, we're essentially letting AI think for us. And I just don't think that that's a smart thing to outsource.

• 15:21Cal Newport?

  I like this idea, by the way, of a moral panic around the invention of fire. I like to think of like a Stone Age John Height. When these kids are looking at this fire, they're not out there learning how to mammoth hunt. And do we really want kids who can't mammoth hunt come on fire? Fire is a problem. So then what if we say, let me throw, I'll throw out a proposal. You tell me what you think. School, don't use LLMs. It defeats the whole purpose. School is the closest thing we have to an intellectual gym. So why would we put a forklift or eco-skeleton in the gym? That's the whole point of writing in school. It's not getting us to something else that we're trying to get to and making that more efficient would be good. The writing itself would be the case.

• 16:04Cal Newport?

  I'm going to say school, don't use LLMs to write at all. I would say maybe if you're a professional writer too. This seems to be Ezra's argument. It's like, I do this for a living. If you listen to this, you know, I'm trying to be really, really good at this. The outsourced parts of my thinking, my thinking is what I'm paid for. Like, that's the whole ballgame. This doesn't make sense to me. Like, why would I want to outsource any? All I do is write these scripts for my episodes. That's my whole job, to make that a little bit faster. Like, what, what, what am I trying to do here? This is not, it doesn't get me to something else faster. So, okay. Do you agree with those or am I missing something? School, professional writing.

• 16:44Cal Newport?

  You shouldn't be using LLMs in the actual crafting a prose process. I don't know. Am I getting this right? I'm sort of doing this on the fly here.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  I'm doing it on the fly with you. I do think you're getting it right. I think that you would add maybe composing music, or if you're going to be writing emails or notes to family members that feel important. Essentially, if you step back and you look at this maybe more philosophically or spiritually, if there are activities that require strain in the short term, but in the long term, you derive satisfaction from, then those are activities worth protecting. So the thought experiment that makes this so simple because it's an extreme, is imagine that you could press one button, and perhaps we'll get here in a few years, who knows? And you could say, "I want a Grammy Award-winning folk song."

• 17:37Speaker 02

  And you press that button, and the song comes out, and you spend maybe 30 minutes going back and forth making edits, and then you win the Grammy. Would you be as satisfied with that Grammy than if you worked on that album for two years, and the lion's share, if not all of it, came out of your brain? I don't think so. I think that you'd be much more satisfying if you did the work. Now, there could be a world where a part of doing that work is using this as a tool, but that's very different than relying on it or having it replace the actual act. So I think it's twofold. I think it's exactly what you said, which is you don't want to use it in areas that are core to how you live your life, how you make your living, if you get paid to think, or you're a knowledge worker, you want to be really careful about protecting your ability to think.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  And I think we just need to be careful of this, this is a tale as old as time, this trade-off between short-term convenience and long-term satisfaction. And I personally am hesitant to outsource things that are hard in the moment, but give me satisfaction, make me content, make me satiated, allow me to feel like I'm falling asleep after a good day's work because I put in the effort. I don't want to click two buttons and have that done for me.

• 18:43Cal Newport?

  I have a term I just invented.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  You're so good at naming things.

• 18:46Cal Newport?

  All right, what do you think about this? It's an adjustment of an existing term, "type-two thinking." Right? So we type two fun is this well-known term for activities that like aren't fun in the moment while you're doing them like hard mountaineering or something like this or a really hard workout, but it's very satisfying and fun. When you're done, you're glad that you've done them. We should have the same thing for thinking type two thinking is difficult in the moment. The blank page is difficult in the moment, but having composed something that you're proud of is like deeply satisfying and long-term, you know, it's going to make you better and smarter. And so you think about type two thinking like type two fun like, yeah, hardness is the feature here. Maybe that'll catch on. I don't know.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  I love that. And I also think that there's, there's a chance that in the future we'll have essentially cognitive gyms where like you set aside time and you say during this hour and a half, I'm not going to use the model at all. I'm going to walk on a treadmill instead of, instead of drive the car. I do have one question for you, and this is going to be perhaps some pushback from your listeners. I know that people who read my work are probably thinking this. I think the pushback would be this is a tool and it's all about how you use it. And what if you get the type too hard by getting better at using the tool? So why would you spend two hours writing if you could sit there and prompt the tool back and forth? And you're still going to have that cognitive strain. It's still going

• 20:07Speaker 02

  to be really effortful. And it's going to be, as you said in the opening, a symbiotic relationship where the skill that you're developing or the competency that you're developing is prompting and using the tool.

• 20:17Cal Newport?

  I mean, I think it's a much more, probably the response would be it's a much more narrow cognitive activity, right? Like there is some like sophistication, you'll like look on them in the gym and I have the animatronic that's lifting the weights for me. There's a lot of, I have to like control it and have a, make a lot of decisions and move this lever and that lever. It's not easy, right? To get it's a different type of hard, but it's not the type of hard that you're hoping to get out of the gym, which was getting stronger. So prompting carefully to try to work back and forth to get out stuff you can use is probably a much more narrower band of your mind you're using. It's a very sort of like tool functional type. We're already good at that, by the way, like we're, we are very good at like using these type of consumer facing tools, which are made to be really easy. That's, that's, that's not necessarily something we have to work really hard at.

• 21:00Cal Newport?

  Whereas the connections we get in writing, those are hard won. They make you smarter. They make you more empathetic. You're able to better understand the world and manipulate ideas, which I think is more of a superpower. I mean, I don't, I'll ask you where you draw, you would draw your line. I think I'm probably similar to Ezra here. It, I think these tools... Are fine as a better Google search. We're kind of already used to doing Google searches. Sometimes it's like a Google search that'll do some summaries for you. I have to be a little bit careful about it because it hallucinates a lot, but that can be useful. Sometimes if I'm writing an article on deadline, I'll do some copy editing with it. Not that I can't copy edit myself, but that, you know,

• 21:41Cal Newport?

  if I'm in a hurry, I will sometimes like, hey, I'll let LLM help me copy edit. Because if this is clean or grammatically, it's just going to make the next editing pass faster. Like, I wouldn't necessarily bother with a book because we have time. But if it's on a tight deadline for an article, I might do that. I'm wary about deep research unless it's really, hey, here's some quantitative data. I kind of know where it is. Will you O2 or something put this into a spreadsheet or into a format? Like, actually do data manipulation in a way that makes it easier to work with. Like, that makes sense to me. I'm a little bit more wary of like, hey, go summarize everything on this topic, because I just don't think it does a good job. And also, that's part of the work of journalism is knowing like your sources and following those trails. I think it doesn't do a great job. I don't know. That's where I am.

• 22:25Cal Newport?

  But maybe we're being arbitrary here. But I draw the line where it's like the actual construction of the ideas or prose. Like, I'm filling the blank page. When you have your sources, I think I agree with Ezra there. You grapple. You make all these connections. You write. It goes slow. 20 minutes in, it starts to pick up speed. That's where a lot of interesting stuff happens. But your cognitive, let me go back to your cognitive gym idea. In some sense, that's what we want to avoid. Like, what we want to avoid is getting in a world where this, I mean, it's exactly what happened, as you said, in physical health. We became much more sedentary and then had to invent activities just to try to get some exercise back. We could do this intellectually. We kind of outsource all of our thinking. Our brains are much worse. And now there's like a small number of us that have to like go to cognitive gyms to like,

• 23:10Cal Newport?

  try to keep the brain up. Or we could just not outsource the intellectual activities. Because having my student paper written faster, it doesn't make my, it doesn't make, open up new opportunities or like, open up new economic opportunities or growth. It's just sort of convenience in the moment. I want to, it would be nice to avoid the cognitive gyms. And so, thinking about type 2 thinking, maybe that's the way to do it.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  Unsurprisingly, I'm going to completely agree with you here. We can continue to build this metaphor out in a way that I have found really helpful in relation to health and fitness. So we talked about the production of writing or thinking, and we made the parallel to lifting weights. And sometimes you do want to outsource lifting, the heavy thing at the warehouse. But if the goal is to maintain strength, in this case, if the goal is to maintain the ability to think for ourselves, we certainly don't want to outsource that. I would say at all, but we don't want to become reliant on it. The metaphor extends to what we consume. So at the same time, we underwent the Industrial Revolution and we became more sedentary. There was also this massive change in food technology in the creation of ultra-processed

• 24:20Speaker 02

  or highly-processed foods. And highly-processed foods are easy, they're convenient, they taste great, they have a kind of addictive quality about them. The more that you eat them, the harder it is to enjoy more nourishing foods. And what happens when you eat too much ultra-processed foods is you have all sorts of metabolic issues and dysfunction, and you tend to struggle with overweight and obesity. And we've got a built environment around us where not only are we sedentary, but there's ultra-processed foods everywhere. And we spent a lot of time talking about the production of writing, but I also think there's something to say for the consumption. And if you are consuming a bunch of short-form AI-generated content on TikTok, on Instagram,

• 25:05Speaker 02

  on Twitter, wherever it is, the same type of contact that, the same type of content that these researchers coined as soulless, empty, lacking individuality slop, well then, not only are you not exerting energy to build cognitive fitness, but you're also consuming all of this highly ultra-processed information that has a very synthetic feel to it. And I think that is my biggest fear, is that we enter a mental-built environment that is similar to the physical-built environment, where we're not exerting ourselves and we're consuming ultra-processed content.

• 25:39Cal Newport?

  And this comes up in the reading research, that when you're reading like on a screen, like Lightweight material that sort of just immediately is interesting, but it's not challenging. It doesn't develop what they call deep reading processes. So there actually is a distinction. It's not all reading is reading. It doesn't matter whether it is on your phone or if it's in a classic book. The harder the thing you're reading, the more your brain has to work. And the real intellectual advantage is the reading research says, and I think Proust and the Squid's a great book on this, if you, if you want one, says it's, it's really when you're challenged, you're grappling with the ideas or the complicated character tree or complicated structure to what's going on. That's where the brain gets stronger. So yeah, I agree with this a lot.

• 26:19Cal Newport?

  I mean, my prescription, like if I was going to be, follow this analogy through to prescriptions, it would be, you need to read hard things, you need to write, and you need to consume the sort of ultra-processed content sparingly. You know, have some things you pursue, go on the smart end of it, have like Brad's Instagram feed, which is all textual, by the way, that he writes. It's like the thing we're talking about today. Like, sure, you have some of those. Or if yours, like a particular, I always talk about like Instagram is good if you need motivation for a particular pursuit you do. Like some people like, look, I'm a triathlete. It helps for me to see videos from the triathletes. It gives me like, hell yes, right. I need to keep doing this.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  This is digital, this is your digital minimalism to a T, right? It's set aside specific time, call the people that you follow, use it for a particular purpose. Don't just go in there and go with the default flow because the platform is going to own you. You're not going to own it.

• 27:15Cal Newport?

  So one of the things I discovered when I, I wrote something about this in the new book I'm working on, and I was looking at the history of how we came to understand physical obesity as an issue. And it's interesting. It took a long time. And so I'm wondering what, I don't think we have our arms fully around what the equivalent cognitive obesity is really going to be. So we don't, we don't always see the problem when it's developing. Now we see the problem in the physical world. Oh, okay. Obesity, we can measure. We have a very specific BMI type of way of talking about it. We know exactly what the chronic health conditions it really makes worse. And that's understood now. It wasn't understood in 1982, when the, the graph started the hockey stick up and calories in went up, sedentariness went up as well. We're in like those early stages of cognitive obesity, and I don't think we know.

• 27:58Cal Newport?

  Exactly what it's going to look like, but I don't know. I'll tell you, man, when I'm on like an airplane and I see the 21 year old in the seat across and it's the Tik Tok is scrolling and you look, I don't know if you've seen this, you're not a Tik Tok guy, but three seconds swipe, one second swipe, like six seconds swipe, like what is this doing to the brain?

• 28:21Speaker 02

  I don't know. I have a funny Tik Tok story as an aside. It's actually not funny. It's terrifying. But um, maybe two years ago, I was told that Tik Tok's going to be the next thing for authors like us because there's this book talk.

• 28:31Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  And I got a Tik Tok account and I was on Tik Tok for a day and the only way that I can describe that day is it felt like if I had eaten 100 bags of Skittles and then at the end of eating 100 bags of Skittles, I, my whole body just felt like synthetic yuck. And I remember telling the marketing person that told me I should be on Tik Tok that I just can't do it. I'm happy to forfeit whatever fame or book publicity I'm going to get. This is not good for my brain and it's precisely for, for that reason. I think another piece of prescriptive advice that I would have is it's just the importance of being aware of the trade offs

• 29:13Speaker 02

  when you're producing or consuming this highly processed information and then having some rules and constraints, as you mentioned, Cal, about how you use it. The metaphor or to continue the analogy here, it's very hard to just merely exist in the modern food environment and be healthy. A huge part of the obesity problem, in my opinion, is a lack of education on a carbohydrate, a protein, a fat, added sugars. How many calories do you actually need? People that are able to maintain decent health in a terrible food environment, nobody just goes with the flow because if you just went with the flow, you would eat fast food because it's easy and it's on every corner and it tastes great. You have to have some level of knowledge and then with that

• 29:57Speaker 02

  knowledge, you have to have some sort of constraints and some sort of rules. People can take this into overdrive with cockamamie diets and all kinds of restriction, but you have to at least think and be intentional and deliberate about what you eat, when you eat it and why you're eating it. And I think at the very least, we should approach our information environment similarly because there's going to be fast food restaurants popping up on every corner in the world of thinking.

• 30:21Cal Newport?

  Are you saying people who are healthy often? There's, it's not like it's hardship, but there's hard rules they follow and there's points of friction all the time.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 30:31Cal Newport?

  I'm, I'm not going to have this. I'm at this. I'm not at the poker night. I'm not having the whatever. Like it doesn't dominate their life, but it's a constant feature that like there's, I'm aware of what I'm doing. So if you don't have something like that in your digital life, you have to be worried that how do I know I'm not going to end up cognitively obese? If it's like, hey, just go with the flow. Like this is interesting. Why not use that? This seems to be making things easier. Why not use that as well? Like if you can't point towards here is where I draw the line. Here is where I'm, people look at me weird, then that's probably, that's probably a problem. It's like I always tell this to my wife when we talk about financial budgeting. I say, if you, if you haven't said

• 31:13Cal Newport?

  no to spending money, if we haven't said no recently, we don't have a budget, right? If, if, because a budget doesn't exist unless it's actually inducing constraints that change behavior. Like we would have normally spent money on this, but we didn't. If, if that's not happening, you can say you have a budget, but you don't really have a budget. So yeah, maybe there's a, there's a cognitive analogy there. All right. Final thing. How do we think about writing where we don't think it's writing we do, where AI could, I guess, help. I'm thinking like emails, right? Like business logistical writing, where we don't think about that writing as being key to cognitive development, right? It's not like writing a paper in school or an article as a professional writer. This is something I've been grappling with a few

• 31:52Cal Newport?

  thoughts on AI in professional writing, where it is, the writing is fully functional. It's just, look, I need to coordinate this team to get a meeting on the books. I need to get a summary of these notes to this person so that they can like integrate them into the slide deck or something like that. That's the other major use case of AI and writing right now. I think I have some thoughts. Have you thought about this at all? About where we don't think the writing is cognitively important? Should, should we just be having AI write those emails? Like what, what do you, how do you think about that?

• 32:26Speaker 02

  You are more the expert on this than, than I am. So I'm going to defer to you, but you asked me the question. The only thing that I've thought about is I do think what will happen is we'll have a world where my AI is talking to your AI and the AIs are just going back and forth about when to schedule the meeting or any other number of administrative overhead tasks. One question that I have is if you're gonna have AI write it for you, then do you really need to be writing it in the first place? Because you kind of have to assume if you're gonna have AI write it for you, then perhaps the recipient is gonna have their AI read it, or at the very least have their AI respond. And now you get robots talking to robots. Does there even need to be a human in the process at all?

• 33:11Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I mean, I think I agree with that. An overwrought AI email, yeah, why, what are we doing here? Like linguistic communication in the workplace is a crude solution to a more complicated problem. There's usually a coordination problem that needs to be solved. This information needs to get to this person. A decision needs to be made. People need the right information to make that decision. And we happen to have this tool. We have ways of like typing text back to each other that like, we'll use this tool as like a crude proxy for reaching this decision. But you're right, it seems like if there's a more direct way to do it, that's probably what we should do. If I'm having AI write like a really complicated email to try to figure out what information you need for a meeting, man, wouldn't it be easier if my AI could just go to your AI and get the information that it needs? Or they could go back and forth directly.

• 33:56Cal Newport?

  I also think when it comes to things like email communication, there is an art to it. And it's not about making your brain smarter. But I think it's about, I don't know, efficiency at a broader level. Like what is it? I write in my book, A World Without Email, I get into this. I mean, it's a lot about like, what's the, what's the end goal here? What are we, what is this communication serving? Oh, we want to get this project done. We want to get a meeting on the books. And it's actually non-trivial to sit down and be like, well, what's the best way to do this? And let me capture that in this message in a way that kind of gets us there as effectively and efficiently as possible. And there's a real art to that. And all that art goes out the window when it's AI back and forth. Right? The other way I think people are using AI for professional writing, they just don't trust their writing ability.

• 34:41Cal Newport?

  And that goes back to like, probably because you're not writing. So there's a sense of, I don't really trust myself to write this in a way that the person on the other end is, is going to see as professional or something like that, right? In which case, that probably goes back to it. That being said, I think there's a lot of places in professional communication where it just straight up saves time and is probably fine. Like, oh, man, I gotta go through these notes and summarize the five points from the meeting, and this is just drudgery. AI will do that for you.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  Just, just like it's, just like I'll eat a Clif Bar or on the way home from my son's baseball game, if it's eight o'clock and we haven't eaten, we'll stop at McDonald's or Burger King. Now, if I built a diet on McDonald's or Burger King, I would be very unhealthy. I wouldn't feel good. I'd lose physical health and physical fitness. But if I'm intentional and deliberate and there are specific times when it just makes sense, I think that's fine. I think the analogy holds. You look at nutrition purists who are like, I shall never do this. And they have all these rigid rules. Those rigid rules end up consuming them. So I'll come back to that and say, by no means in the little piece that I wrote, am I saying that we should shun AI. I just think that we should be really deliberate and intentional about it because we weren't

• 35:55Speaker 02

  with smartphones and the adoption of social media. And it's becoming pretty clear that there are a lot of detrimental, negative impacts. Most people are probably listening to this podcast on a phone, which is also proof that there are so many great things about this modern technology. But we went into it just kind of arms open, let's see what happens. And I think with AI and AI writing and AI consumption or consumption of AI written material, what I'm arguing for, I think what you're arguing for is let's learn from our mistakes with the adoption of social media and smartphones. And let's be really deliberate and intentional about how we use this technology instead of just going wherever the current takes us.

• 36:32Cal Newport?

  All right. So it sounds like we're kind of on Ezra's page here. Then I'll summarize then the advice that seems like we're saying, or at least I'm saying. If you're a student. Don't use AI to help your writing. The whole point there is to make you smarter, make you a better thinker. Writing is an incredible tool, is to pull up the pull up of the cognitive world. Don't use AI. If you're a professional writer, that's your whole job is to have a nuanced subtle grasp of this. It's like an athlete needs to actually do a lot of training. Don't use AI to do your writing. If you're in a professional circumstance and there is a sort of tedious work to be done of, I have information in one form, I need to move it into another. Or I have a long CC'd email chain where people are talking about their availabilities and I want to suggest three times that works for everyone.

• 37:16Cal Newport?

  Fine, that's maybe a good use of AI because that drudgery is not helping you. It's annoying that we have to do this via email in the future. We wish like my AI could just schedule with your AI. But in the short term, fine, use it if it's going to automate that. The final thing I would add, if you're in a professional context and you're nervous about your writing quality, maybe you're sending out an important email. You're like, look, AI can help me, it can check the tone, Grammarly does this well. It'll actually say like, here's places you could make this sound more professional. I would say in the short term, if you're worried, hey, that could be helpful. Long term, that should also be a signal. I should actually deliberately work on my writing in lower stake situation till I get to the point where I'm not so nervous about it. I think it's sort of like you're, you go to the national park and you're like, I don't

• 38:01Cal Newport?

  know that I can actually make these trails. I'm going to like drive a scooter around. The scooter will get you to the end of that trail or whatever in that context, but you should come away from that saying like, maybe I should get in better shape so like next time I go to a park, I don't have to take the scooter around. So, all right, those are my four pieces of advice. So Ezra, like we're, I think we're on your page here. This is not using a typewriter in the age of word processors. This is someone who uses their brain for a living, worried about their brain, wanting their brain to be as strong as possible. So I would say not nostalgic, not moral panic, but actually pretty reasonable.

• 38:35Cal Newport?

  Am I hitting it? What am I missing?

• 38:37Speaker 02

  I think you're nailing it. The only thing that I would add is in that fourth example, if you're someone who's worried that your writing could be better and you're using the tool to help, I wouldn't do it on autopilot. I would pay attention to the edits that it gives you. If you think it sounds better, I would stop and think, strain a little bit, why does this sound better? How did it change it in a way that is better? And now, next time, let me try to get closer to that on my own.

• 39:01Cal Newport?

  Maybe even say, "Tell me if this is professional or not," or like rank it on, you know, "but don't give me a better version. Let me now try a different version and see if I can get that ranking up." I mean, do that with caution because, look, it's not an actual person and it is very confident in what it tells you. It doesn't mean that it's right. But yeah, you could even use it as a training mechanism. That's fine. But going back and forth about your sentences, yeah, you gotta be worried about it. All right. Brad, thanks for coming in. I think we cracked this problem. It's interesting. Thanks for turning my attention to this paper. This is obviously a much bigger issue that we both write about in our essays and books, and I'm working on this in my new book. And I'm sure we'll touch on it more in the future. But cognitive fitness, cognitive debt, cognitive

• 39:44Cal Newport?

  obesity, AI, all of these issues are wrapped up together. We'll have a lot more to say about in the future, but at least this gives us an interesting view at what's going on right now. So, thank you, Brad.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  Thanks, Cal. This was a pleasure.

• 39:55Cal Newport?

  Let's take a quick break to hear from another one of our sponsors. Notion AI is an all-in-one AI powered by your work in all-in-one place. It automatically captures meeting notes, instantly finds the exact content you need, drafts detailed docs for you, and lets you chat with the best AI models. Notion AI just became twice as powerful for teams, making it the best AI tool for work. Little background here. Jess and I have long been fans of Notions. We have used various custom tools built on Notion over the years. Clearly, our listeners love it, too. The caller we just heard from mentioned his custom Notion task system, right?

• 40:37Cal Newport?

  So this is something that we we've known for a while, but they've added these new features recently that I think are really cool. Jesse and I were experimenting with one of these new features, which really caught our attention. They call it enterprise search, but here's the idea. You can use keywords or an open ended question for a single powerful search experience across all of your connected tools and information. You're unifying now your scattered knowledge right within your workplace and can get quick AI summary of those results. You can use something called AI connectors to have the search be able to connect into other work tools you are already using. For example, Jesse and I use Google Workspace for running the podcast here.

• 41:22Cal Newport?

  So with Notion Enterprise Search, we can do a search that might combine information we have stored in Notion with like the episode scripts that we have stored in Google Drive, and it can find, hey, look for this example from some episode and summarize what we said, and it can find it and summarize it and connect it to other information. It really does bring the power of AI to your information and not just some sort of like general chatbot like you might be used to using. Notion uses the top AI models built in, and you can choose which ones you want. GPT-41, Claude 3.7, Sonnet, chat with it directly in Notion, no subscription, separate subscription needed. You don't have to go over to a separate tab and type into a separate window. Look, we're not the first to discover Notion.

• 42:06Cal Newport?

  It's used by over half of Fortune 500 companies and teams that use Notion. Send less email, cancel more meetings and save time searching for their work. That's all music to my ears, of course. Check out Notion, the best AI tool for work right now at notion.com/cal. Now you need to type that in all in lowercase letters, notion.com/cal to try the powerful all in one Notion AI today. When you use our link, you will be supporting our show. So go to notion.com/cal. I also want to talk about our friends at ShipStation. If you ask Jesse. Where all of these packages he orders from e-commerce stores come from, he will say,

• 42:49Cal Newport?

  and this is absolutely true, Jesse, you can back me up on this, a stork delivers them. He told me this just earlier today. He thinks that's how they come. But for those of you who actually run an e-commerce store, you know, packages don't arrive by magic. For a lot of companies, it is a huge source of labor and stress. This is where ShipStation can make your life so much easier. Last year alone, over 700 million orders were fulfilled with ShipStation, half of which were creatine shipments going to Jesse. With ShipStation, you can sync orders from everywhere you sell into one dashboard. This is key. You have one dashboard, and you can replace manual tasks with custom automations to reduce shipping errors. And all of this is at the fraction of the cost you probably were already spending

• 43:34Cal Newport?

  for fulfillment. Now, here's a couple of things about ShipStation that caught my attention. It's the fastest, most affordable way to ship products to your customers because it has discounts up to 88% off UPS, DHL Express, and USPS rates, and up to 90% off FedEx rates. It also seamlessly integrates with the services and selling channels you are already using. So you can manage all of your orders over multiple different channels and systems in one easy to see dashboard. All right, you want to hear something cool? During the time I've been reading the spot, 1,400 packages were shipped with the help of ShipStation, and none of them, Jesse, were delivered by a stork. Come on. Upgrade to a smoother shipping

• 44:18Cal Newport?

  experience. Go to shipstation.com/deep to sign up for your free trial. No credit card or contract is required, and you can cancel anytime. That's shipstation.com/deep. All right, let's get back to our show.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  All right, first question is from Antonio. Can AI models be creative? My naive take on this is that AI models can explore very well the space that is well described by the training data, but they are not very well suited to explore beyond the training data. I feel that this would be, this capability of going beyond the training data is what I call creativity.

• 44:56Cal Newport?

  Well, Antonio, this is really one of the key questions or key goals in AI research. Some of the terminology used for this is called generalization beyond the distribution. So it's sort of a holy grail of sort for artificial intelligence systems. The idea would be that you train a system, what they would hope to happen is you would train a system on some sort of data. And in doing so, they would learn generalizations about how the various things in that data work and interact with each other. And then using those generalizations, you can produce new understanding and new ideas and new output that doesn't directly reflect the type of things you saw in the training data. So humans do this, we're pretty good at generalization.

• 45:41Cal Newport?

  So maybe we, we learn, looking at a particular example, how gravity works. And then we can understand that same rules of gravity are going to apply with these things we've never seen before in a new context, right? So we can, we can generalize and apply that generalization. This is a big debate right now, how much generalization is happening in AI models based off of large language models? The sense I get from the research community seems to be not as much as researchers would hope. Some of this comes from just AI researchers I've talked to for recent articles. They would like there to be more generalization, but it takes a huge amount of data and they don't know how much this is happening. There's an important new paper that came out a couple of weeks ago, Apple put this

• 46:26Cal Newport?

  out, where it was looking at the reasoning capabilities of cutting-edge large language models. And they were basically arguing the reasoning, quote unquote, really doesn't generalize. It can't go beyond applying directly rules that were inferred during training. So it seems like the way that language models are working right now, for the most part. Is if you give it a bunch of examples of stuff during training, it can build pattern recognition into a transformer architecture for sort of understanding. This is one of these examples and they can infer some sort of general rules about how, and I'm using rules here, not in the traditional AI sense, but in my own informal sense. They can, they can sort of embed in their, their actual neural network architecture,

• 47:08Cal Newport?

  some sort of rules about how these types of examples go forward. So if you give them a novel version of that example, it'll recognize it as that, and it can sort of apply the rule to get some sort of answer. So for example, if it's seen a lot of simple arithmetic problems, that the pattern recognition piece of the neural networks can recognize, hey, there's an arithmetic addition problem in this prompt I'm seeing. And there could be some then rules embedded informally into the architecture that captures like different numbers being added together. Here's what the result would be. And it can then see your novel problem. And even if it hasn't seen that exact math problem, it sort of knows how to do that math. Like that seems to be what it's doing, but you're not going to get like a sort of a generalization

• 47:53Cal Newport?

  about the properties of numbers beyond it. So no, language models, at least as we're seeing it, are not scaling into the generalization. We would hope we're kind of running out of data on which to scale them in a massive sense. So to get that type of creativity you're talking about, Antonio, is probably going to require other types of systems. Maybe they have language models plus symbolic reasoning and other types of more explicit type of thinking and ontological organization in there. So you're not going to get real big generalization from even the very best models. There's some people disagree with me on that, but it is possible with AI, just not the systems we have right now. All right, what do we got next, Jesse?

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Next up is Michelle. I feel like I'm incredibly disorganized in my work life. What's the smallest possible first step I can take to generate real improvement?

• 48:41Cal Newport?

  All right, that's a good question. A lot of people ask about this, like what is step one? If I want to get some sort of minimum effective dose, get some sort of sense of organization out of it? I thought about this a little bit. Here's what I would suggest. You're completely disorganized at work and at home, and you constantly feel like you're behind things. And maybe you're in your email inbox a lot, or on your text threads, like reacting to crises. I think you need some sort of master list. You need some place where you write down everything that is just in your landscape of things you might have some responsibility for or need to deal with. This is probably step number one. And you have to tend to it, right? So at the end of every day, just dump what came up today that I'm just keeping track of in my head. What text messages did

• 49:25Cal Newport?

  I get that I'm kind of forgetting about? What is coming through on some emails? And now I realize like, there's a bigger project I need to do. Just get it all written down somewhere. Do it on like a legal pad. So you can like carry it with you, or maybe like a Google Doc or something like that. That is probably like the minimum thing you can do. But what it does give you is permission to not have your brain be constantly trying to refresh and remember everything that could cause a problem. Your brain does not like stress. It does not like that negative, subjective experience of, oh, man, I forgot this. And now they're calling and saying, where are you? We don't like that. Your brains don't like that. And if it thinks that this could happen unless it remembers something

• 50:08Cal Newport?

  you're forgetting, it will put in a lot of cycles to try to prevent that negative experience from happening. So if you can reassure your brain, you don't have to keep track of everything anymore. We're not forgetting something. It's all on this list. And I just have it and I throw stuff on it. And I look at it, you know, a few times a day. And I don't know how I make sense of it. But at least I see like, oh, God, I forgot about that. Or I should do this. Or I'm never going to do this. But at least I wrote it down and I'm reading every day. That's going to make a huge psychological difference. And that's the foundation on which real time management can then be built. The hard part is, how do you figure out what to do? And when you're going to do it? How do you organize these into bigger projects and make sure that progress is made? But that's more complicated.

• 50:50Cal Newport?

  The master list is the time management equivalent of saying, just get up and make sure you walk 5,000 steps a day when it comes to trying to get yourself back into shape. Just get used to movement from sedentary-ness is a big first step in the physical world. So, full capture, to use the David Allen term, versus haphazardly keeping track of things spread between emails, chats, texts, and your brain is like a really big step. And you're going to feel an urge after a while that, well, I have this all down here. I look at it and I keep it up to date and it's reasonable. It's not much friction, like it's not some big lift that I'm going to be like, this is impossible, I'm going to give up on. Eventually, your mind's going to start saying, okay, well, maybe we could have a couple of

• 51:33Cal Newport?

  rules for how we make sense of this, or maybe we're going to make a list for the day, or maybe we're going to look at our calendar. And sort of organically, you get this bottom-up time management that'll emerge from it. So I think that's the minimum effective dose. It's not going to give you a fully, it's not going to give you like a fully organized life, but it is going to save you from the worst of the stresses that could be caused by disorganization. I'm thinking about, Jesse, a podcast topic, we might actually do this next week, I'm not quite sure, but I'm thinking about like, what is the minimum time management organization system that can kind of keep your head above water for a while? Because I'm interested in this question of like, in the summer, for example, if you're

• 52:14Cal Newport?

  a very organized person, it takes a lot of cognitive load and effort to maintain a intricate time management system. So what is like the minimum effective dose system that you can downgrade to? Something that if you tried to do it for five years, like you're going to start missing stuff and it's not sustainable, but you could do a couple of months in the summer and not come out of the summer feeling like you're really behind and stressed out. So I'm thinking about that now. I have some ideas for it. So stay tuned, I might do that for next week's podcast episode.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  Is this something you're going to try, or?

• 52:44Cal Newport?

  Uh, maybe, yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe. I, maybe that's what I'll do, maybe I'll try it. And by try it, I mean I'll make you try it.

• 52:54Cal Newport?

  And I'll warn you, it does involve semi-regular electric shocks. But this way, like you don't forget, it's all Pavlovian, guys. If you get shocked every time you forget an appointment, you're not going to forget those appointments anymore. All right, who do we got next?

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Next up is Duncan. I have lots of projects I would love to tackle in my life outside of work, but struggle to ever find enough time. What can I do to fix this?

• 53:21Cal Newport?

  Okay, I'll tell you Duncan, I'm going to connect this to an unexpected source, maybe. But it makes sense for me because I just got back from Disney and I've read a lot of things about Disney. But because I was at Disneyland, I'm rereading this book I first read five years ago about the history of Disneyland itself. Okay, interesting analogy from that book, interesting case study, I guess, right? It's the 1940s. Disney is like a big concern at this point. They've had a bunch of hit movies. They have been more really involved in the war effort. It's a big, big-ish company. Walt Disney's pretty famous.

• 54:02Cal Newport?

  Also, like a little bit stressed out and dealing with some depression. He begins to put a lot of time into the development of a scale-sized train for himself, for himself. So he buys a new house that has five acres of land for this train idea. Then he has a custom-built locomotive, actual steam locomotive, but it's scaled down. I don't know the scale, specific numbers, but it was just big enough that you could sit on it and like kind of have your feet up front. So think about like a Hot Wheels, not Hot Wheels, Power Wheels. What's the, you know, the, the plastic cars kids can drive? Like that's sort of like that size, right?

• 54:46Cal Newport?

  And he, he had this thing built and he built rolling stock. And then they built this track through the property that he bought. I don't, I think this was in like Beverly Hills or something like that. And it was elaborate, right? They had a train bridge on it with trussels, trestles that was so big. It was big enough that it fell under like the jurisdiction of, of the county for you actually have to have it inspected like any other bridge you would have. They, he built a tunnel that did an S-turn. So that when you go into the tunnel, so it's a big enough tunnel that like people, grownups riding on a train can go. When you go into the tunnel, you can't see the light on the other side because it goes through a turn to get to it so that you have the effect of like, I don't know how long this tunnel is going to go. So they, you know,

• 55:29Cal Newport?

  they're like buried over, completely landscaped this whole thing. I forgot the exact total length of the track, but maybe it was something like a quarter of eight, half a mile or something like that. Anyways, here's what hit me about this. That's an incredible amount of time. This is a hobby, so to speak, and it was like an incredible amount of time and treasure to build this thing. And he is a very busy person. He's the CEO of this like large movie company that was doing lots of different projects and there's lots of money things moving back and forth. So I was wondering, like, how did Disney have time to build like such a big project? Now, part of the answer is, well, if you own the company, you know,

• 56:14Cal Newport?

  you have more flexibility. That's true. Part of the answer is also in a pre-digital world, you had a lot more flexibility. You didn't have to be on demand in the same way because you couldn't be on demand in the same way. There was no email, right? There were no Slack messages. People were used to more autonomy just because of actual obstacles to access. You know, every time Disney needed to go talk to financiers in New York, that's three days on a train and then three days back from the train. When he goes on vacation to Europe to rest, that's going to be six weeks. It just takes that long to get across the country, to get on a boat, to take the boat across. So we're more used to it. It wasn't as fast paced as things were back then, but still, he was a busy guy and he found time to do

• 56:58Cal Newport?

  this massive project over about a two-year period. So part of what's going on here, I think, is the mindset.

• 57:06Cal Newport?

  So it mindset is, hey, this thing is really important to me. You find time. You find time. There's a lot of gives in the schedules. You, you, you, you come home early. You're working on this at night. You kind of build a lunch break around doing it. Right? When something becomes important to you, if you could find something that sparks you in the right way, you'll be surprised by the time you find. Now, we've seen this effect a few weeks ago. We did a podcast on data out about the four day work week. People had that counterintuitive, unexpected response where they just, as in these experiments, just said, this day of the week is gone, like no big prep work for it. And it was fine. It turned out there was all this given the schedule all along. Their schedule could have been four days instead of five. They had plenty of time, but we sort of fill in time.

• 57:50Cal Newport?

  We, we, we, we make things take longer. We add more meanings to it. So that would argue the Disney argument here would be find an important enough project that you actually really want to make progress on it. You'll be surprised by how much progress you can make. Here's my second thing I want to say about this. See how much time you get back when you don't use screens. It's another thing that is using an inordinate amount of people's time and they don't realize it. Is this sort of default to like, let me put on a streaming service and/or look at my phone. And you don't realize how many hours of your time outside of work are getting eaten up by that. So a good experiment is do something like the digital declutter I talk about in my book, Digital Minimalism, and say for a month, I'm not going to use these, these tools at home.

• 58:35Cal Newport?

  I'm not going to look at my phone for social media. I'm only allowed to watch a streaming thing if it's with other people. So like family movie night, put those type of rules in place. You're going to be kind of bored at first, like, wow, I have a lot of time. I woke up, I don't have to leave for another 45 minutes. What am I going to do for those 45 minutes? Right? I'm home, it's five. I'm not really going to start dinner for another hour. Like, what am I going to do? I'm bored. And you let that boredom drive you towards projects like, oh, I make, I get, make progress on things. This is, for example, how Walter Isaacson wrote many of his initial historical bestsellers, his Einstein biography, his Franklin biography. How did he write these? I've heard an interviewer ask when he was also CEO of Time Warner. This is a busy, busy job like Disney. And his answer was, I don't watch TV at night.

• 59:21Cal Newport?

  He would come home instead of watching TV. He's like, I'm gonna write. And then he sort of got used to that and he could, he would write into the night a little bit and he sort of got used to it and just like, hey, stuff gets done. Be surprised by how much can be produced. So that's what I put together. Make your project exciting enough that you want to fight to get it done. And then take screens out of your life experimentally. Put those two things together and I think you might be surprised by how much you get done. What happened, Jesse, with the train to Lily Bell's team with the locomotive. What happened with Disney is the train. They had a crash and it scalded like a little girl, like not in a bad way, but like there's an injury. And he was like, put it away. We're done. I'm done with the train. And they just put it away.

• 1:00:03Cal Newport?

  And he went on because that was, that gave him the inspiration he needed for Disneyland. And he was like, I learned something from this. And then he turned his attention to creating Disneyland. So it's interesting.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  How depressed was he?

• 1:00:15Cal Newport?

  You know, it's hard to tell because they didn't have, they didn't talk a lot about it back then. So you really had to sort of. Pick this out from the way that people who worked with them talked about like what was going on with them. There's a lot of like.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  What do you think?

• 1:00:30Cal Newport?

  I mean, I think he was depressed because.

• 1:00:33Cal Newport?

  Well, A, we didn't have mental health back then, but it was the war. So the war, you have this company.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  World War II, right?

• 1:00:39Cal Newport?

  World War II. You have this company. It's growing. You have Snow White, huge hit, right? Then now you have this, you're a movie studio. Things are going really well. The war comes and now your European market's gone. And that's a big part of their revenue. And so now suddenly they have to cut back, they have to fire a lot of people and change, put most of their efforts towards government contracts. So like you're having the biggest movie in the world.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  Government contracts that make stuff for the war?

• 1:01:08Cal Newport?

  It was like animations for like the war effort, like.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Oh, like propaganda and stuff?

• 1:01:13Cal Newport?

  Propaganda stuff. Yeah. Like it would be like, I've seen a bunch of it. It would be like, oh, it's, you know, animations of like the fighter, the planes flying around the globe and. Yeah. Like propaganda videos, like US propaganda videos, which is not what he wanted to be working on. And so I think he just kind of got depressed.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  He got paid for that though, right?

• 1:01:28Cal Newport?

  They got paid for it, but it was just to try to keep the lights on because this is not the same as having like a hit movie. So it was like they had to fire a lot of people, then they had a lot of labor issues, right? There's the, the animators had gone on strike. This might've been pre-war. That really disillusioned him. Like he had all this like disillusionment happening for years. And so I think he just, when you're really driven like that. And you suddenly are taken out of your life. The things you were working on and succeeding on, I think he just got depressed. Disneyland took him out of it. He's like, we're gonna build this park. And everyone thought he was crazy. He's like, we're gonna make it happen. And it was, it was very successful. And that was actually sort of saved Disney with these parks eventually. They generate a lot of money. Just, I don't know if you know this, when you go to Disneyland,

• 1:02:13Cal Newport?

  they have abundant opportunities for you to spend money.

• 1:02:18Cal Newport?

  I don't know if you know about it. It's almost as if, almost as if they're trying to make money off of their guests. Yeah, it's, I always say like, what are the two more, most like, powerful ways to make money off of people? A convincing them that they might make a lot of money. So that's casinos. Or B, their kids. Uh, I want my kids to have the right experience. And so you write these checks. I had an aha moment and not

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  What else would you buy though, other than a ticket and like food and stuff? So souvenirs?

• 1:02:47Cal Newport?

  So this was an aha moment I had. Not me, but actually my, my, the guy who does my hair had to figure this out. Right? So we're in Star Wars world or whatever they call it at Disneyland. I don't know what it's called. They spent a billion dollars on just like this part of the park. And it's all like Star Wars-y.

• 1:03:03Cal Newport?

  And we come across this thing where there's like a guy out there. They're promoting something and we're like, what's going on here? And like, oh, it's a, it's a make your own lightsaber experience. Right? And like, oh, that's, that sounds interesting. And he's like, yeah. And you know what? We have some spots. It's reservationally, we have some spots like, oh yeah, this is interesting. Like this could be fun. You have spots right now. Great. He's like, great. So how much is it? He's like, it's $237 a person.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Weird number.

• 1:03:27Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So we're like, well, we're not doing that. Right?

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  You had five people.

• 1:03:31Cal Newport?

  Yeah. And we're not gonna spend that money. My wife's like, we're not spending

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  A thousand dollars.

• 1:03:35Cal Newport?

  On lightsabers.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:37Cal Newport?

  He's like, well, he's like, I'll tell you. He's like, yeah, I get it. I get it. He's like, you know, at the, this gift short shop though, you can build plastic ones and it's like $30 a lightsaber. Like, oh yeah, that's much better. Okay, good. Here's the insight my hair guy had. There's no 200, there was nothing behind that wall. There was no $237 build a lightsaber thing. The entire point of that is to get you to buy the 30, the $30 lightsabers. Right? Because that'd be brilliant. Like, hey, we, your kids want to build lightsabers? Like, yeah, like, it's gonna be $250, like, boo. And then they're like, well, I guess you could, I guess you could do this $30 experience.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  Well, some people almost pay the 250.

• 1:04:16Cal Newport?

  That's probably what's really happening. But I like this idea that it was like just for, because it's a very effective way to get you to spend $30 on a lightsaber. Uh, no, it seemed like it was, uh, I want to say it.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  But some people wouldn't shake your stick at 237.

• 1:04:29Cal Newport?

  I'm trying to say it nicely. There, I think there were plenty of people in the Star Wars portion of the park who seemed like they would spend the $237.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:39Cal Newport?

  And I would say they were, um,

• 1:04:43Cal Newport?

  they're in their twenties.

• 1:04:48Cal Newport?

  Probably live with their parents and don't spend a lot of time in the gym. That's, that's probably how I would describe it. There was a certain demographic.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  See, I think about it totally differently. I think, I could see like people abroad, like flying private over there and be like, oh, no problem. Like, whatever.

• 1:05:01Cal Newport?

  Yeah, but are they that interested in a lightsaber? Probably.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  If they fly there from like Japan or something.

• 1:05:06Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Okay. So you're like, this is nothing. We spent so much money.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:10Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I get that. We spent so much money to come here. Like, why not just add that?

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Yeah, because you can do like private tours there. It's $800 a day or something like that.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  I mean, think about if you fly private there, I mean, that's 50K right there.

• 1:05:26Cal Newport?

  Yeah. And then you do the private tour where you spend like a thousand bucks for your party and you get to go to the front of every line. So it's like a private tour, but all it is, is they don't want to just say, if you're rich, you don't have to wait any lines. So it's like, oh, we have a private tour and our tour guides are able to bypass the lines. But all they do is just let you get on the rides right away. So yeah, you're spending a thousand bucks a day on that anyways. Yeah, you're right. The 237 for the lightsaber.

• 1:05:54Cal Newport?

  Whatever. Point is, who was the original question from?

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  Duncan.

• 1:05:59Cal Newport?

  Duncan. Point is Duncan, beware of lightsaber scams. I think we handled that one perfectly, Jesse. All right, who do we got next?

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  Next up is Fred. I have an internship in mainframe development with a rare unvaluable skill. Very few people have the skill set within my organization and many of them are nearing retirement. However, it's long hours and often overlooked by management. This fall, I have an opportunity to transition into a data analyst role for a third internship. However, there are drawbacks as well. How should I manage my internships?

• 1:06:29Cal Newport?

  You know, I don't care as much about internships, right? It's not your job. So the default there would be, eh, do the data analyst one. You're just gathering data, right? See what that's like. Maybe there's something about that you like. Like you're gathering information with these internships. I'm not going to overthink that. When it comes to actually choosing what you want to do for a job after the fact, especially if these internships open up, each thing you did internship in opens up a job opportunity.

• 1:06:56Cal Newport?

  The question is always twofold when it comes to these career capital moves, right? But building up rare and valuable skills and using them to construct your career. Is there an opportunity in this job to build career capital? So are there rare and valuable skills that I could develop? For the mainframe job that your mainframe internship could lead to, the answer seems to be clearly yes. You describe it as a rare and valuable skill. Most people don't know how to still work with these mainframes, but you need to upkeep them. So yeah, yes. The second question you have to ask is, will there be an opportunity for me to cash in career capital if acquired to gain some autonomy or control over how my career unfolds? That's often the sticking point. And that's what you would really have to assess here.

• 1:07:41Cal Newport?

  So if for whatever reason, this company is very rigid about people in their mainframe development group, no, this is just what that job is and the salaries are here and that's it. And we don't really care. We feel like you're expendable. Then the answer to that second question is no, and you'd be wary about it. If on the other hand, you're like, look, yeah, they don't realize the value of this. But if I got really good at that and was like, hey, I'm keeping up 10 of these systems. And now I want to change so that I'm doing this like remotely, or I'm here once a week, or I'm whatever you want to do. And they're like, oh, okay, yeah, we don't want to lose you. If there's a, if you think there would be a chance to apply your capital to get leveraged, then like, I think it could be good, whether or not they're recognizing the value right now.

• 1:08:22Cal Newport?

  The classic place where the second question trips up people is law partners. As an example from the book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. In law, especially like big law, so like working at the big law firms in the big cities, you for sure are building up a rare and valuable skill, right? Because you are mastering a specific part of the legal code that is literally very valuable to clients. And not a lot of people can do it. And you're using your law degree and your brain and your ability to like really work hard to learn it. You build up a huge amount of career capital in law. But at big law firms, they give you a very limited number of options for investing that career capital. Like really, the only option they give you is investing it into having more salary.

• 1:09:05Cal Newport?

  If you get good at this, you can become a partner and then you can become a managing partner and what you're going to get in exchange for that is more money. And they are very rigid about that is it. If you're going to be at this firm, here is the path and here are the expectations. And the only thing you can open up by getting better is moving to the next step. And so it's a classic example of a place where, yeah, you can build up a lot of career capital, but they make it very hard for you to have flexibility and how you cash in that career capital to take control over your career. And that's a problem. And it's why a lot of lawyers end up with, with good bank accounts, but really unhappy because they got really good, but they have no choice with what to do with that, except for just to make more money. And for a lot of people, other parts of their ideal lifestyle than being trampled on because they don't have control over it. So you always have to get both of those questions.

• 1:09:49Cal Newport?

  So that is how you should evaluate the career opportunities to come out of these internships. Can I build a rare and valuable skill? And will I have options if I do? And that's what you're looking for is whatever has the strongest affirmative answer to both of those. When it comes to your internships, yeah, do the other internship, right? Like might as well open up more opportunities, learn more things. That information is not going to hurt you. What's going to matter is the choice you make for what job you go after. And then once you do, once you have that job. So that would be, that would be my advice.

• 1:10:22Cal Newport?

  I mean, there are some options for cashing out your locker capital, but they're hard. You have to leave the big firms. You have to try to do your own thing. You have to renegotiate your situation. I know someone, for example, who successfully renegotiated, I'm not going to, I'll leave the partner track. We can like, keep my salary where it is. And I'm going to do this many hours because billable. So I'm going to do this many hours. So actually, maybe the salary is going to be lower than I would be getting if I was doing 80 hours a week at billables or whatever. But I'm going to live remotely. I'm going to work remotely and live somewhere else. And where I'm living, what you're paying me for this like actual 40 hours of work I'm doing each week is way better than what most people are being paid here for working 40 hours a week. Sure, it's not as prestigious and it's not on the track

• 1:11:06Cal Newport?

  and I'm not going to make a million five, but it's a good salary for a reasonable amount of work. And now I can live in this other part of the country. So I've seen that before. You've also seen people like try to put out their own shingles and there you could have some control. But law like famously is, I think it's a classic example is you build a lot of capital, but you only have one thing you're allowed to invest in. It's like the company store back in the old days of mining companies. Like they would pay you a good wage to be a miner, but the only thing you could do with it is spend it at the company store. You had to live in the company town. You had to live in the company housing and you had to buy from the company store and they kind of just got all that money back. That's how I think about some of those partnership track, sort of elite jobs sometimes. All right. Who else have we got?

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  Next up is Joel. I've noticed that much of Cal's goal setting philosophy aligns with research on goal hierarchies, top level subordinate goals, down to specific goals for the current day. Has Cal ever seen this research or explored similar evidence-based frameworks in shaping his approach to goal setting or behavior change?

• 1:12:05Cal Newport?

  I mean, I don't know. I find goal research to be so boring. There is this research that often comes out of business schools and there's often long acronyms. And like here is the whatever 17 letter long word type of goal setting paradigm. And it's really not that interesting to me. I don't find the research interesting. Like you give someone a framework, you're giving them structure to their thinking and planning that they didn't have before. And like, it does better. And like, look, this is a good framework. So no, I, I kind of find that research boring. But I would say this. The type of things you're talking about like multi-scale planning, et cetera. I don't see that as goal setting. I just see it as time management. Like, what is time management in the end, other than making intentional decisions about what should I do next? Like, that's time management.

• 1:12:49Cal Newport?

  And there's a particular segment of people, sort of this modern, like, educated, knowledge worker, spend a lot of time on a computer screen type people, where you have this tension between bigger picture things you want to work on that are going to be long-term important for you and maybe for your professional prospects, and the dizzying whirlwind of digital distractions that just sort of like makes up your day-to-day. And so you have to be very intentional. Otherwise, you're just in the whirlwind and nothing gets done, and you get stuck and you get stagnant, and you're basically trying to prove your worth through your pseudo-productivity, which is a young man's game and something that's not going to lead to like a sustainable life. And so you need some way of making a smarter decision in the moment about what to do next, beyond just like, who wants my attention right now?

• 1:13:31Cal Newport?

  And so having multiple scales of thinking about what's important helps you trickle big-picture ideas down to small-picture decisions about what to come next. To me, this is just common sense, and it works well in practice. But I don't really see it as goal-setting so much as I see it as making smart time-management decisions in a current digital work culture, where it is very hard on the fly without structure to make smart decisions about your time. Other people don't have this issue, right? I mean, if you're in a situation where you're not in a whirlwind of digital distraction workplace, it might be much easier. If you're working on one big project, you could run like Oliver Berkman's schedule, which is basically deep work for three hours on the thing you're doing that's important to you, and then just sort of like do your best with the rest of the day.

• 1:14:13Cal Newport?

  See what you're in the mood for, keep up with stuff that's urgent, and just try not to work too much. Like, that's fine if like maybe you're a professional writer, for example, or an independent thinker or something like that. But if you are trying to build career capital and find meaning and move the needle in a sort of busy, knowledge-work job, I just, I think time management requires some care about what you want to work on next. It requires some care in terms of how do you make the decision about what's the right usage of my time, and multiple scale seems to make sense. So I don't know if there's a lot of research on it, but there is a lot of good experience of real people who have tried this. All right, do we have a call this week?

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  We do.

• 1:14:52Cal Newport?

  All right, excellent, let's hear it.

• 1:14:56Speaker 03

  Hello Cal, my name is Jamie Chalmers, a long time listener, first time caller. I want to thank you for your books. They've been tremendously helpful in my creative career. I've got several different projects that run concurrently and I was listening to your recent episode about Inbox Zero, which was fascinating, in particular the method that you use using Trello and your working memory text file to capture information out of email and plug it into your card system. Now, I've listened to that episode and you talking about that about half a dozen times, I've got my head around it. And while I've had some success in using the working memory file to get emails out of my inbox, as it were, I've not had a

• 1:15:37Speaker 03

  lot of success in translating those into my Notion task system. And so I kind of wondered whether you could just dig back into that a little bit more, explain some of the mechanics, perhaps the headspaces that you get into when you're focusing on translating that information into action. That would be super helpful because I can see that it would be a really useful way to go about things. And yeah, I'd love to find out more. So thank you once again for everything that you do, massively important in my life. I appreciate you and look forward to hearing from you.

• 1:16:09Cal Newport?

  All right, Jamie, it's a good question. And I think part of like to hang up here might be that I go from inbox to working memory.txt. And then from there, there's a lot of directions where that information can go, only one of which is a task system. So like, let's do this again, real briefly. So the basic idea here is how do you clear an inbox, right? I don't recommend going message by message necessarily and trying to dispatch completely is each message before moving on to the next. The context switching there becomes a real cognitive load. It becomes very exhausting. It become, you know this strain, everyone knows it of like, why can't I just keep going through these messages? Why am I so resistant to it? It's because your mind can't keep switching.

• 1:16:55Cal Newport?

  From one topic to another so quickly, it's mentally really dragging on it, right? And so what I do is, is I go through my inbox, I grab, I don't handle the message. I just put a summary of like what that message demands of me into a text file. Really, just as fast as I can type, right? It doesn't have to be, you know, clean or interesting or something like that. And then I have all of those in my text file, I can organize them. In fact, I was thinking what I'm gonna do, Jesse, is I'm gonna load up an inbox right now while we're talking. So I can just give an example of how I'm gonna read real messages from my inbox right now and talk about like, what would be my summary in my, my working memory.txt file, okay?

• 1:17:40Cal Newport?

  So like I'm loading up, I have so many inboxes, this is crazy. This is my personal, it's a, it's a personal inbox, an inbox that we do kind of behind the scenes stuff for the podcast and for like my books or whatever. All right, so I'm looking through this now, first email is, is a newsletter, so it doesn't matter. Next one is a meeting scheduling for an appointment with a trainer. So what would I, I put there, I would just type down, uh, schedule training. All right, next one ironically is from a PT I used to work with checking in. So I'd be like, get back to their name.

• 1:18:20Cal Newport?

  There's a, something from you, Jesse, so I, I put that in, ignore. It's immediately where that goes. Button I press there. I got a scheduling email about a club I help run at my kid's school. So I just put, again, get back to blah, blah, blah, about whatever. I have an invoice, pay, pay invoice.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  Do you delete these emails? After you make the note?

• 1:18:47Cal Newport?

  Yes, so then I would be-

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  Do you delete, make the note?

• 1:18:50Cal Newport?

  I don't delete, I archive.

• 1:18:52Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, you archive.

• 1:18:53Cal Newport?

  I archive, right? And so there's enough information, so when I say like, get back to blank, I put their name. So now I know I can just type that name to Gmail and that, that email will come back. Invoice to pay, pay invoice, okay.

• 1:19:09Cal Newport?

  Respond to, it's a note from, actually a well-known podcaster, who I sent the note to, and he got back to me and.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  Rogan?

• 1:19:18Cal Newport?

  It's not Rogan.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, he doesn't like you.

• 1:19:20Cal Newport?

  He doesn't like me. He's like.

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  I'm convinced he doesn't like you.

• 1:19:23Cal Newport?

  Like, why don't you tweet me? You're moved, buddy. Tweet me. Mailing list, mailing list. Someone sent to me a galley of something.

• 1:19:34Cal Newport?

  North, South Korea publicity thing, put on calendar, right? And something to schedule. It's a note to myself. Put such and such a schedule for two o'clock on Thursday. So that type, that's like what I'm writing.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  Hold on, you emailed yourself?

• 1:19:49Cal Newport?

  Because I was somewhere else.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  Okay, and then you're gonna note that that's actually kinda funny.

• 1:19:53Cal Newport?

  Yeah, because I was, I was out and about. Like, if I'm getting my haircut, and we're like, oh, let's schedule the next haircut while I'm here.

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  You had a lot going on at this hair appointment.

• 1:20:01Cal Newport?

  This is a.

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  Disneyland emailing yourself.

• 1:20:04Cal Newport?

  Key to today's episode. You'd like this guy, actually.

• 1:20:09Cal Newport?

  Real into, anyways, I'll email myself on the fly, because I know when I next clean my inbox, that'll move to workingmemory.txt, and then I'll take care of it. Alright, so those are the type of things I'd write. Then you sort them by type, right? So like, a bunch of these were schedule. I'm just gonna like, copy and paste. When I say sort, I mean, I'm just copying and pasting text within a text file, plain text file. I'm gonna put like, the scheduling things all in a row. So I just have a bunch of like, scheduling things like, in a row. There's like, getting back to people things. I can be like, alright, getting back to people. And I'll put those like, next to each other, whatever. So I'm kind of like, grouping these things by, by type. By type a message, or if there's a bunch of things on the same subject matter, like, if I had multiple. I did a lot of foreign press this week for some reason. So like, I

• 1:20:52Cal Newport?

  would have like, multiple things about foreign press. I'd put all those things together. I'm just kinda like, sorting things.

• 1:21:00Cal Newport?

  Then I will go through and tackle these things by group. And it's just easier when the groups are all the same type of thinking. So now I have like in that list there, four or five scheduling things. I'm going to open up my calendar, open up my inbox. I'm like, all right, now we're doing scheduling and doing this all at once has like a lot of advantages. Right? So most of those, first of all, are not going to end up on my task list. I'm just going to go through one by one and do the scheduling. And some of these, there's a link to a calendar. I'll do it that way. And other ones I email back like, here's the time I want to suggest. I'm just handling it right there. So I'll go back and find those again in my inbox and like respond to them as needed. I'm handling it right there.

• 1:21:41Cal Newport?

  But because I'm doing all this scheduling together, it allows me to have some extra efficiencies as well. Because I might be like, man, this is going to pepper my, I don't want to pepper my week with these things. All right, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make like Friday afternoon, my like appointment call time next week. And I'm just going to offer that time to everybody. And that way, the rest of this week will stay clear. Right? So seeing them all together, or I might say, I'm going to take these two things. I'm going to punt them and be like, you know what? I don't, let's, let's get at this later in the summer. I was like, this is feeling like there's too many things. I'm, but I see how many things I'm scheduling. I'm like, this is too much. This is my, I, I'm going to punt two of these things aren't that important. When I see it all together, I can make that decision more clearly. Right? And then I'm like, let me get back to people. And now I'm like in that mindset.

• 1:22:26Cal Newport?

  Again, those are things where I'm just responding. And some of these things will require actual putting a task, right? Like the, the, the South Korean publicity thing. Oh, this is like a non-trivial amount of work I need to do here. I'm not going to do it right now. So maybe I'm going to add this to my, my Trello as a task card. Maybe I need to actually connect this to a deadline. So I'm going to put the deadline on the calendar. Like this is like the drop dead deadline for getting these like answers back to this question. And I'll paste the questions into a Trello card and move on from there. So it's moving things from the inbox into hastily typed lines in a working memory.txt, sorting those things manually into like groups and then dealing with those groups where I'm either ignoring them or dealing with them right away.

• 1:23:10Cal Newport?

  Scheduling something on my calendar or creating a task where the information, I'll point to the information. And I still do it the old fashioned way where I just copy the subject line and put it in the Trello card. So I know what to search for when I get to that task and I'll be able to find it right away. I know people have been telling me there's ways to link directly to the message in Gmail. People keep emailing me this and I, I keep ignoring it. But yeah, there are more advanced ways of doing it. So hopefully that's helpful. Does that make sense, Jesse? Like what I'm talking about here? It feels like an extra step, but I'm telling you like this is much easier mentally than if I just went from each email to each email and tried to answer it until I was done with it. Like I'm scheduling this appointment. Now I'm responding to someone about this. Now I'm trying to get back to this person about this. Now I'm scheduling an appointment.

• 1:23:54Cal Newport?

  It just becomes overwhelming and it's surprising that it does, but underneath the covers is just a context switching. All right, we got a case study here. Comes from Taff. All right, Taff says, "I was listening to you talk about the Thoreau schedule today and you essentially described the working schedule I've managed to carve out for myself over recent years. It resulted due to a variety of factors, including COVID and having a young family. I have a pretty mid-range marketing job for a CPG brand managing a small team and my current role of, current role, the career capital I've developed enables me to take ownership on my schedule because the management team knows that I will deliver strong work regardless of where and when I work."

• 1:24:38Cal Newport?

  I'll stop right there briefly to point out this is a common application of career capital. If you do, you have very valuable skills and you deliver, people trust you. You do the things you say you're going to say when you say you're going to do them. You are now a super rare commodity and there will be a lot of accommodations because, oh my God, here's someone who actually does what they say they're going to do when they're going to do it. Like we do not want to lose this person. You have a lot of control there. So here now is the schedule that Taff created. So that being said, my schedule borrows from many concepts you've discussed. All right. So here's the schedule. I wake at 6:00 AM and read, but not on my phone. I go to my office at 7:00 AM and start my day, clearing emails and checking in on core project timelines to make sure there's nothing urgent on the cards.

• 1:25:22Cal Newport?

  I find that staring, starting at 7:00 AM means I'm working before most of my colleagues are logged on, which means there are very few distractions or meetings booked during this time, and I can just focus on what I need to get done. Then I have time blocked my calendar from 7:30 AM to 10:30 AM for my highlight. This is a term that comes from the time dorks, where I focus on the one major priority deep work project that is most critical to my day. Then at 12:00 PM, having completed five hours of work, I stop and work out. I'm outside and that allows me to think. And then, once I come home, I cover off the last two to three hours of the day with any shallow work admin meetings and sign off at 4:00 PM to be with my family. In the evening, after my daughter has gone to bed, my wife and I read for about one to two hours before bed.

• 1:26:05Cal Newport?

  I always have a number of books on the go, a novel, something nonfiction, something theological, and a book of poetry, so that I have plenty of choice for whatever mood I'm in. I basically read until I fall asleep, and I like the idea of reading at the very start and end of each day. Some additional habits that help. I have no social media apps on my phone. I use Trailer to organize my work and personal life. I have one central board with my priorities for today, which contains anything critical. The rest fall into priority two or backlog. Anything that sits in backlog for a long time eventually gets archived if nobody raises it as important. I treat my Outlook as if it's an actual mailbox, so I close it once I'm finished with it and then go back to check it at specific intervals in the day. I've found this reduces the impulse of reading emails as they arrive and constantly being distracted.

• 1:26:50Cal Newport?

  They also have a two folder system for my email. My inbox has incoming mail or emails I need to address, and then filed has everything else. My reasoning is that, once I've read an email, it can be filed, and if I need again, I can search for it. This has reduced all email admin and unnecessary folder assignment or rules. Finally, I time block my workdays with recurring meetings, so that I'm automatically blocked off every day for my morning highlight, my lunchtime 10K run.

• 1:27:18Cal Newport?

  And my time with my family at 4:00 PM. This means every day has the same structure and my calendar availability is prescribed for anyone booking meetings. I've never had any issues or pushback from colleagues with this approach and people rarely book meetings across my time blocks. So there we go. Someone that it's not a sexy story of I became like the only nuclear physicist in the world that could handle this and therefore I have a job where I work one day a week and surf all day. It's not a sexy story like that. It's just someone who does their job very well. They deliver, they're reliable, they do high quality. They combine this with lifestyle centric planning or lifestyle engineering or lifestyle architecting, whatever you want to call it, to work backwards from their ideal lifestyle. And it's not something that would catch your attention if you hear it described, but it is a really good lifestyle.

• 1:28:01Cal Newport?

  Reading in the morning, done at work at four, doing a long run and workout in the middle of the day. Get stuff done, deep work every day, meetings are constrained, email checks are not all the time. People are okay with it because they deliver and the life is really good. So I think that is a really good example. I appreciate you sending in that case study. All right. So we have a good final segment coming up here. We've got some Cal Network artwork and a what I'm not reading segment to get into as well. But first let's take a quick break to hear from some sponsors. Jesse, I have a question for you. How many people do you think stopped me when I was at Disneyland recently to compliment

• 1:28:46Cal Newport?

  how good my shave looked?

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  Three.

• 1:28:49Cal Newport?

  It was 1,700 people. All right. Now whether or not that's actually true, I will say I have been enjoying shaving more recently because I have been using Harry's. Harry sends the best quality razors right to your door for a fraction of the price of the big brands. We're talking about really good German engineered blades, these nice, comfortable sort of rubber coated handles. I really like them, but also shaving products. Get like excellent shaving cream delivered right with your razors. One I like is that you can also get a richly lathering skin softening body wash in scents like Redwood, Wildlands, and Stone. Interestingly, Jesse, richly lathering skin softening is

• 1:29:31Cal Newport?

  how a lot of people describe this podcast. There you go. They said this holds your door, it's automatic, you set it up, so you don't have to remember to go to the store, you don't have to add another task to your to-do list. I love that about them. Before I started using Harry's, I was basically in the Stone Age when it came to shaving. I might as well have been scraping my face with a piece of sharpened flint. Take your own grooming out of the Stone Age, get Harry's. Normally their trial set is $10, but right now you can get it for just $6 if you go to harrys.com/deep. That's our exclusive link, harrys.com/deep, to get a $6 trial set.

• 1:30:12Cal Newport?

  I also want to talk about a new sponsor, our new friends at Smalls Cat Food. I grew up with cats. I don't know if you know this, Jesse. I grew up with two Siamese cats, Sing Ha and Nitnoi. Also, little known fact, a full grown African lion. So that went well. The lion ate and killed some people, but the cats, the Siamese cats, I love and I miss having cats. So I'm still kind of tuned in to the world of cats and cats food, which is why I have been noticing more and more people who do have cats, to this day, mentioning Smalls Cat Food.

• 1:30:52Cal Newport?

  If you have digestive issues with your cat, maybe they're throwing up their food, or you just don't like what you're feeding them, and you're like, I don't, I think we could do better, you should check out Smalls. Smalls Cat Food is protein-packed, uses protein-packed recipes, made with preservative-free ingredients that you'd find in your fridge, and they deliver it right to your door. I love to deliver stuff because I don't want extra tasks on my task list. That's why cats.com named Smalls their best overall cat food. They get 60% off your first order plus free shipping. Head to Smalls.com and you can use the promo code DEEP for a limited time today. Look, Smalls was started in 2017 by a couple of guys who are home cooking

• 1:31:35Cal Newport?

  cat food in small batches. It's grown from there. They work with the humane world for animals. They've donated over a million dollars worth of food to help cats. Like, they know cats are important, what cats need. Not everyone is like this. Jesse, I don't mean to throw you under the bus, but you tell me all the time, "Hey, when it comes to cats, I feed them mainly unmixed cement powder and garbage." That's what you told me. And there's people like you that don't understand the value of actually good cat food, and that is what you're gonna get from Smalls. After switching to Smalls, 88% of cat owners reported overall health improvement. That's a big deal. The team at Smalls is so confident, your cat will love their product, that you can try it risk-free. That means they will refund you if your cat

• 1:32:18Cal Newport?

  won't eat their food. So what are you waiting for? Get your cat the food they deserve for a limited time only, because you are a Deep Questions listener. You can get 60% off your first Smalls order plus free shipping, but you gotta use my code DEEP. That's 60% off when you head to Smalls.com and use promo code DEEP. Again, that's promo code DEEP for 60% off your first order plus free shipping at Smalls.com. Alright, let's get back to the show. Alright, so in our final segment, I want to do a twist on my what I'm reading segment that's called "What I'm Not Reading." But first, Jesse, I wanted to quickly cover a new piece of Cal Network artwork that came in. I do have to sort of ding this person

• 1:33:03Cal Newport?

  a little bit, because a lot of people have been making sort of like custom artwork. In this case, they just took an existing photo of me and added to the existing photo a copy of a fake Cal Network book, but I still think it is interesting. So here we go. We'll put it on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening. And what we've got here is a, this is my author photo, actually. I don't know if you've seen it. This is what's on my book jacket. Cal Network with his Georgetown tank top. That's what I wear to teach.

• 1:33:34Cal Newport?

  Veining out, as I constantly do, with Austen Aviator sunglasses, holding Cal Networks' hit bestselling book, I'm the Boss Now, which is his career advice book. So there we go. It's my author photo with a mocked up book. So I always appreciate some good Cal Network artwork. All right. So to our final segment, I have been doing recently what I'm reading, where I talk about like interesting articles and books that either cover interesting ideas you might like, or I think are just good books or articles for those looking for some more depth. I want to rant briefly here today. I'm going to call this segment, What I'm Not Reading. It's a particular type of article that's been common recently, and I want to give you permission to ignore every single one of them because they're nonsense and are going to cause unnecessary stress. I have

• 1:34:19Cal Newport?

  loaded here a sample of one of these type of articles that I'm going to suggest you don't read. I'll put it on the screen here for those who are listening instead of watching instead of just listening. The article's from Fortune, and here's the headline, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Says AI Can Rival Someone With a PhD Just Weeks After Saying It's Ready For Entry-Level Jobs. So What's Left For Grad? This came out on June 20. This is an article, I saw this because like Google notification just showed it to me on my phone. There are a lot of articles like this, where there is some sort of over the top alarmist headline, which makes anyone who's just loosely following the AI be like, oh my God,

• 1:35:02Cal Newport?

  we're so screwed. But I want to look a little bit deeper at this article to try to explain why you could ignore this type of thing. All right. So if we read this article, I have a couple of quotes here. Here's the first paragraph. Earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that the technology can already perform the task equal to that of an entry level employee. Now, in a podcast posted just last week, the ChatGPT mastermind went even further, saying AI can even perform tasks typically expected of the smartest grads with a doctorate. Soon after, it says, as companies like Amazon have admitted, they will soon cut their corporate ranks thanks to AI. And Anthropic CEO Dario Amade warning that the technology could wipe out half of all entry level white collar jobs.

• 1:35:47Cal Newport?

  It begs the question, what jobs will be left for those tossing their graduation caps into the air in the coming years? There are a lot of articles like this where tech CEOs are saying pearl clutching.

• 1:36:00Cal Newport?

  Growing tightening, scary type of things like this. This is all nonsense. And let me try to explain to you why. Okay, first of all, let's start with the claim here that, and I'm going to read this. AI can perform tasks typically expected to the smartest grads with a doctorate. What are they actually talking about here? What they're actually talking about here is the fact that OpenAI carefully tuned one of their foundational models to work on a specific type of math competition question. So they hired, we got some correction on this from a listener. They used a data set from a company that hired math PhDs and paid them $100 an hour

• 1:36:42Cal Newport?

  to write math problems of this type with step-by-step solutions. And then they could use reinforcement learning techniques to try to tune one of these foundation models to do well on this very specific type of math problem. A professor involved in this project said, oh, these are hard math problems, not the type you would assign an undergrad, but the type you might assign a graduate student. From there, we get AI can now do PhD level workers' jobs. That is a nonsense leap from a very specific type of math competition problem that is like of the type that might get assigned in a graduate student problem set to AI is doing graduate level jobs.

• 1:37:26Cal Newport?

  And not only is it a huge exaggeration, but as we went over in the what I'm reading segment a few weeks ago, even those results are highly contested because OpenAI was like, look, these are hard problems and we can do them. And independent research firms said, great, let's take that, these models and we'll put them on other similar math competitions that happened recently, and they did terribly. Leading to the idea that they had been very, very fit to this very specific type of problem that happened to be really well suited for the reinforcement learning techniques that we know how to use now on AI. So that is a massive exaggeration. Another massive exaggeration that's happening with a lot of this reporting is conflating of the post-pandemic tech downturn, which

• 1:38:10Cal Newport?

  Is leading to lots of layoffs. It's getting a little bit better now, but it's leading to lots of layoffs because there was a huge boom in the tech industry during the pandemic and post pandemic, there's we're cyclical. There's a it's a hard job market there. You know, companies are cutting back. Let's, we put a lot of money into a lot of these areas. We need to cut back because we need our profit, our profit ratios to be higher for the, for the stock market. And just, just what happens? Companies are cyclical. So there's a cutback. And there's a lot of this sort of disingenuous conflating by these reporters to make it seem like without maybe necessarily a hundred percent claiming it that these job losses are because AI is automating the jobs. This is nonsense. It is not what is happening.

• 1:38:54Cal Newport?

  Yes, Amazon is cutting. Meta cut a bunch of people. Microsoft is cutting a bunch of people. Why? Because they're bloated. They cut those revenue numbers. They cut those employee, the, the, those are expenditure numbers go down, the profitability goes up. They got too big. They are not replacing hundreds of thousands of people or tens of thousands of people with AI that's automated them. AI cannot do that yet. So I, I think that is very disingenuous. I saw an article the other day that said, look, CS majors are cratering. They're going down and it's because AI is taking all the jobs. It's like, hold on a second. CS majors are down because the tech industry is down. The same thing happens every time the tech industry goes down.

• 1:39:39Cal Newport?

  When I was a computer science undergraduate, we had the same issue. Post dot com bust in early 2001, the tech industry contracted. Majors went down because there was less jobs and then majors went back up again when there was the, the web two boom brought a lot more investment in, there's more jobs again. There's a contraction post pandemic. Jobs that made jobs for, except for, you know, specialized AI jobs, like if you're a machine learning person are contracting some, so majors go down. And yet people will conflate it and say, oh, it's because AI is taking the jobs. AI is not replacing software developers. Most of the cuts that these companies are not software developer jobs.

• 1:40:22Cal Newport?

  So I think it's really disingenuous reporting, but there's a lot of this going on.

• 1:40:28Cal Newport?

  Later in the article, we see some of this evidence. So here they say, for example, they do note, well, okay, however, I'm reading from the article now later in the article. However, in the tech industry in particular, volatility in the jobs market is nothing new, said Art Zale, CEO of the tech career platform Dice. After all, nearly 600,000 tech employees lost their jobs between 2022 and 2024, according to layoffs@FII. Yes, the tech industry has really, post pandemic contracted. So yes, there's a lot of job cuts. That's not because in 2022, before ChatGPT was out, AI was taking those jobs. It contracted and then it will grow again once more investment capital comes back in. Look at like Dario Amade saying, technology

• 1:41:11Cal Newport?

  could wipe out half of all entry level white collar jobs within like two years, wherever he said. All right, here's the reality. It's not going to do it. And he's just blowing hot air. And Sam Altman knows that AI is not taking PhD level jobs because it's not really taking any jobs right now. They're blowing hot air. Why are they blowing hot air? Because it requires a massive amount of investment capital, ongoing investment capital to keep these places afloat. OpenAI is desperately in need of this massive loan from SoftBank, this huge, many, many billion dollar loan, which is happening in tranches to like go through. And they need excitement around their tools. And the more you feel like these tools are going to in the future be immensely

• 1:41:54Cal Newport?

  disruptive, the more you overlook right now that they're losing three to $4 billion a year. So it is, it is in the interest of the CEOs of tech companies to push any possible narrative of very large world shaking disruption, because you will overlook any issues with their business right now. If you think where they're going is going to be the biggest disruption that we've had, sort of like in the history of humanity. So they are now just spewing anything they can get attention for, because they know they will get articles like this. They know they can look at a, a model fine tuned to do well on math problems, but not really because when other people tested it, it didn't and say, well, now even PhD level jobs are gone. That is a

• 1:42:36Cal Newport?

  Nonsense leap, just like it was a nonsense leap when Sam Altman talked about how AI was going to help us build Dyson spheres around the sun, the power, the growth of the universe. Just like it was a massive leap when Scott Alexander very confidently says in Project 2027 of like, well, yeah, I mean, pretty soon the AI is not only going to be able to program its own super intelligences, it's going to build self replicating robots, it'll build the data centers, and this will all happen in the next three years. That's not going to happen.

• 1:43:06Cal Newport?

  So anyways, I wanted to do a little bit of a rant and say, you can feel confident right now when you see like these like super alarmist headlines that don't reflect anything you've seen in your own life or your own industry, your own career. All these jobs are gone, and it's quoting some sort of tech CEO. You can essentially ignore those for now. Follow the more like tech reporting, tech journalism, but also just wait to actually see major changes in your own world. I think the hype coming out of these CEOs is becoming almost like parody, and this has now entered my list of what I'm not reading is alarmist articles about whatever the latest chaos, crazy, nonsensical hot air thing that Sam Altman has said and will be widely repeated by outlets looking to get people to click. All right, there we go. That's my rant,

• 1:43:51Cal Newport?

  Jesse.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  Wait, so do you have notifications on your phone?

• 1:43:55Cal Newport?

  I don't know what I, okay, let me rant about this. So you have to have this Google app on your phone. They force you to have it for, I had to get it because I can't, couldn't like consistently log in the Gmail. You have to have this Google app. It's this.

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  You have an Android?

• 1:44:17Cal Newport?

  No, I have, it's iPhone.

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  Oh, you have an iPhone?

• 1:44:19Cal Newport?

  Yeah. So something about like the two factor authentication, you have to have the Google app to use like Google things. And so that app just like shows me, I don't know, notifications, I guess, like it just will pop up, like these articles will pop up and like little bars on my iPhone. But I can't get rid of the Google app because then I can't use my email.

• 1:44:38Speaker 01

  Can you turn off the notifications?

• 1:44:40Cal Newport?

  I don't know. Is that something I can do?

• 1:44:44Cal Newport?

  I don't.

• 1:44:44Speaker 01

  It cracks me up.

• 1:44:45Cal Newport?

  I have no idea. Let's see here. I don't probably. But anyways, because I read a lot of AI content in my job as like a tech, when I do tech journalism, it's always showing me these nonsense articles. It's always like Dario Amade says, you have 17 minutes left to live before AI driven robots harvest your brains for their, to lubricate their self replicating robot machines. Just like these type of headlines again and again and again. So I see a lot of this nonsense and it's what I am not reading because again, every time you look at it, it's like some super exaggerated claim like here, or they just make it up. Amadea is just like, half the jobs will be gone next year. Reporter's like, oh, that sounds bad. I'm gonna headline about that. That'll be really bad. Right?

• 1:45:29Cal Newport?

  It's great. It's crazy. And you're like, well, how is that gonna happen? I don't know. Key unlocks. It's gonna happen. I don't know. I could write these articles. I should just do reports like as the deep media LLC head. And be like, we're gonna be able to fly robotic pterodactyls next month. All right. Why not? Like, that would be a big deal.

• 1:45:51Cal Newport?

  Bees with lasers are gonna start murdering our dogs within, by 2028. Sure. Right? I mean, I don't know. It's possible. Lasers exist. Bees exist. There's someone, there's the robo bee project that, you know, happened at Harvard 20 years ago. It's possible. I sometimes feel like this is what, there's so much interesting stuff happening with AI and so much particular impacts and good stuff and bad stuff. There's so much serious reporting happening that I hate that all this junk is getting out there. I mean, the robot bee thing is true though, so be careful about that. All right. That's all the time we have for today. We'll be back next week with another episode of the podcast. And until then, as always, stay deep.

• 1:46:38Cal Newport?

  Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions Podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com. Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you gotta sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.