Ep. 336: On Screens and Solitude

In a recent article for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson writes about the troubling trends toward increased solitude. In this episode, Cal looks at the role technology plays in these trends, pointing out some surprising factors and then using these insights to come up with a practical plan for reconnecting with the world. He then answers listener questions and concludes with a tech corner segment inspired by yet another New Yorker column. 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: On Screens and Solitude [3:09] - How can I study at night after my doctor work? [26:49] - Can you comment on Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness essay? [36:45] - How do I successfully pursue my non-work values? [51:33] - How can I become a better writer? [1:00:56] - Can someone break into the top 0.1% of their respective field without periods of unsustainable and obsessive work? [1:02:44] - CALL: Managing active projects [1:08:42] CASE STUDY: A follow-up from Episode 323 [1:13:02] CAL REACTS: An Offline Person Tries TikTok for the First Time [1:19:34] Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba? axios.com/2024/06/23/leopold-aschenbrenner-ai-future-silicon-valley theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/american-loneliness-personality-politics/681091/ newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/what-happened-when-an-extremely-offline-person-tried-tiktok Thanks to our Sponsors: upliftdesk.com/deep landrover.com/usa expressvpn.com/deep shopify.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:11Cal Newport?

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

• 0:24Cal Newport?

  I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, some irony, you know, last week we did this episode, we were talking about morning routines, and we were kind of lamenting the over the top nature of morning routine videos online. And we looked at some of those, like Jaco and Joe Rogan talking about his ice bath. But anyways, we put out the video of that episode, and our YouTube guy named it optimal morning routine, and the video is doing really well. So we have become, YouTube is treating us like one of those over the top morning routine videos, even though the video was itself actually critiquing a lot of those morning routine videos. So I thought it was funny.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, he did say that those types of videos generate a lot of attraction.

• 1:10Cal Newport?

  Yeah, God knows how that algorithm works.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Morning routines have been a big thing for years now.

• 1:17Cal Newport?

  I saw it mentioned even, like in the article we're going to talk about today in the deep dive, the Derek Thompson Atlantic article, he talks about it at some point in there, how he has become, or he became sort of addicted to watching morning routine videos and TikToks. So I guess it's like a genre that's just interesting in itself, just watching people with their really organized, really organized mornings. My morning routine video, like an actual day in the life, will be a lot more stressful. There'd be a lot of, "You said you were just going upstairs to get your hat. You were up there for 10 minutes. We've got to go." Just a lot of me yelling at my kids, "Why is your shoe not tied? Every morning, every morning, you tie your shoe. I should not have to tell you this."

• 2:02Cal Newport?

  It'd be like something you would show before you interrogated

• 2:07Cal Newport?

  enemy combatant, just to kind of get them all stressed and anxious so that you could get your answers out of them. Anyways, I thought that was pretty funny. I yet, I haven't had yet a chance to try out, we're talking about this done daily. That like the online coaching thing I was interested in, I haven't tried it out yet, but I know several of you told me you did sign up. So remember to send in your reports. I kind of fascinated by this model done daily. Have like an executive coach, but it's online and accountability, multi-scale productivity with a coach. I'm just curious.

• 2:37Cal Newport?

  I think that's it. I don't know if we have any other, we're like out of the season when I'm bragging about slow productivity anymore because we're done with the best of the year list. So I feel like we're, we're lean and mean now.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Just a quick heads up for the deep dive that we're going to do. That article came from Amy, who's actually the follow up case study.

• 2:54Cal Newport?

  Oh, there we go. So the thing we're going to talk about today came from Amy, who is also our source of our case study.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a follow up case study. She was also in episode 323, I think.

• 3:04Cal Newport?

  All right. It's all things Amy today. I love it. All right. Well, speaking of that, let's, uh, let's get started with our deep dive.

• 3:10Cal Newport?

  So the writer Derek Thompson, who I know and I like, has a big new feature article in the Atlantic right now. Many of you sent it to me, so you probably have heard of it. It's titled, "The Anti-Social Century. Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It's changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality." For this article, Derek talked to a lot of different experts and explored a lot of different related ideas. But today there's one point in particular from the article I want to focus on because I think it represents one of the biggest issues created by our modern digital environment. The good news is, once we make that issue clear, the solution will also be quite obvious.

• 3:54Cal Newport?

  All right. So start here. Let's talk a little bit more about what Derek is saying in this article, then we'll point out the part I care about. For those who are watching, instead of just listing it, have it up on the screen here. There's the, uh, the headline, the opening graphic. All right, so I want to read, I'm going to read a quote from this, but just to set it up, the key idea in this article is Derek notes, "A lot has been said about the so-called loneliness epidemic." So loneliness is an actual negative, subjective state connected to the sense that you are not connected to other people. Derek says this is a bit of a misnomer in the sense that if you look at the data around loneliness in particular,

• 4:39Cal Newport?

  it's not like that is getting a lot worse, or that's getting worse in some sort of pronounced way. He says, "The real issue is solitude," which he defines as time spent alone. "Solitude does not depend on you feeling bad about it. It's just an actual physical state." Let me read you a key quote about this from his article.

• 5:02Cal Newport?

  "The privatization of American leisure is one part of a much bigger story. Americans are spending less time with other people than in any other period for which we have trustworthy data going back all the way to 1965. Between that year and the end of the 20th century, in-person socializing slowly declined. From 2003 to 2023, it plunged by more than 20%, according to the American Time Use Survey, an annual study conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The issue is not necessarily that we're lonely, but that we're spending more time alone, and in a lot of cases, we don't mind it."

• 5:38Cal Newport?

  Derek goes on to say, "Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America." All right, so there's a lot of problems that Derek surveys in this article that come from this rise in solitude. But there's one point in particular that I want to highlight because I think it's particularly relevant to the modern digital environment. So again, I'm going to quote from the article here. This is Derek talking about one of multiple problems with solitude.

• 6:09Cal Newport?

  Richard V. Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told me that "for men as for women, something hard to define is lost when we pursue a life of isolationist comforts." He calls it "neededness," the way we make ourselves essential to our families and community. "I think at some level, we all need to feel like we're a jigsaw piece that's going to fit into a jigsaw somewhere," he said. "This neededness can come in several forms: social, economic, or communitarian. Our children's and partners can depend on us for care or income. Our colleagues can rely on us to finish a project, or to commiserate about an annoying boss. Our religious congregations and weakened poker parties can count us to fill a pew

• 6:54Cal Newport?

  or to bring the dip." All right, so let's talk about this notion of neededness. I think we can kill this here, Jesse. In my book, Digital Minimalism, it's actually made a lot of points that I think are being underscored by the experts in this article. I made this related argument where I said, "Look, when it comes to sociality, what our brain really looks for is us sacrificing non-trivial time and attention on behalf of someone else." So we have evolved to think about if I am sacrificing non-trivial time and attention, so reproductive, survival-relevant resources, on behalf of another person, that person

• 7:37Cal Newport?

  is someone with whom I have an important connection. We're connected. We are in a community, right? This is an important person to me. So it's sort of measuring how much you sacrifice for someone to measure how important that person actually is in your life. So you can imagine if we're drawing a social graph, so we put points for all the different people around you, like in a tribe back in the Paleolithic period, and you draw a line between people if they are sacrificing non-trivial attention on behalf of each other. And what you would want is your point in the middle of that graph to be densely connected into this web. You have lots of people to whom you're connected to, and a lot of those people are connected to each other as well.

• 8:17Cal Newport?

  So now imagine you're drawing your social life, one of these social graphs today. The problem is, if you're not sacrificing non-trivial time and attention on behalf of someone, you don't get to draw a line. And so we're seeing a lot of people's social graphs are sparse. And if your social graph is sparse, you're not feeling that neededness that Reeves talk about. So I just think this is two sides of the same coin. He talks about neededness, that's a subjective description of what it means to have a connection to an individual community, that they need you, you play an important role. I use sacrifice of non-trivial resources as a sort of quantitative or functional description of what this type of connection means.

• 8:58Cal Newport?

  It's about what are you actually giving up on behalf of another person? So the more of these actual neededness or sacrifice connections you have to other people around you, the more resilient you become, the more fulfilled you become, the more satisfied you become about your life. So why then is this dissolving, as Reeves points out in Derek Thompson's article? Well, I think technology plays a major role in that story of dissolution. And it does so in two major ways that sort of work together into a negative symphony. So the first type of way where the modern digital technology plays a role in this is it leads us away from that type of behavior, that sacrifice of non-trivial time and attention

• 9:43Cal Newport?

  that's really required to feel connected to someone. Let's think about the ways in which it does this. Digital communication, low-friction digital communication simulates enough of the idea of connecting to another person that it can help stave off loneliness. But it doesn't require sacrifice, so it doesn't give us that neededness that we also crave. Thing is a subtle point that's really important here. It's easy to text message someone. That's very low friction. It's easy to jump on someone's social feed, see what they're doing and leave a comment. It's low risk, low friction, doesn't take much energy. If you're doing enough of this, you're probably not going to feel lonely because you're

• 10:28Cal Newport?

  interacting with people. Like, I am not alone in this world. There are other people that I am interacting with. But, this is so low friction, it's not requiring you to sacrifice any non-trivial time and attention. You're not taking out your afternoon, putting everything aside to go like for a walk with a friend to help them figure something out. You're not cooking soup and driving it over to your friend's house because they're sick and giving it to them. You're taking that, you're making that sacrifice to make their life better. You're not doing anything, any significant investment or resources. So, the social circuits in your mind don't see these people as being a part of your social graph. So we get this mismatch. I don't have loneliness because I'm simulating these social connections. And without loneliness, what's driving you to sacrifice this time and attention? There's nothing left to drive you.

• 11:10Cal Newport?

  It's comfortable to be at home, you don't feel particularly bad in the moment, why get off the couch and go for that walk or deliver that soup? This is a point that's emphasized actually in Derek's article, that loneliness serves the purpose of feeling really bad. So to make that bad feeling go away, we get off our butts and go do things for other people and the neededness follows. Social media and digital, or in particular, digital communication, more generally, short circuits the loneliness loop. And so we feel completely contented to keep sitting there, not really noticing that that actual substantial social graph is quietly beginning to dissipate behind us. Social media itself, if we focus in here more, also plays a role in being led astray from these type of non-trivial sacrifice behaviors.

• 11:55Cal Newport?

  Because it gives us a sense, if you're a user, that you're a part of a community. Yeah, I'm a community, I have leadership, I'm out there, I'm needed, right? There's my followers need me.

• 12:07Cal Newport?

  Because, look, I post the things and they give me reactions and it passes around. So again, it short circuits the sort of natural human drive we have to be in community, to be there for our community, to be someone that people look up to and depend on. It kind of simulates that enough that we don't feel bad about ourselves. But those deeper parts of our, our social circuitry say, we're not sacrificing on behalf of a community. We're not really out there doing something that is hard and requiring energy. These aren't real connections. These are Potemkin podiums at which we're making our imagined grand speeches. But it's just an algorithm ginning up some fake response so that we feel important.

• 12:52Cal Newport?

  So again, this is a theme that we see. Video games are doing the same thing, especially for young men. It scratches that itch to be a leader, to stand up and be someone people can count on because your Call of Duty squad is killing a bunch of Nazis. But you're not really, you're, you're deeper down, your mind knows this isn't real. Where's the actual physical pain or hardship? Where's the time we're actually investing, you know, helping the guy down the street dig, you know, dig his car out after the storm? We're not actually doing the stuff our brain counts. So again, this theme comes back again and again.

• 13:22Cal Newport?

  Where the technology scratches the itch that per of the, that would otherwise drive us to do the stuff that matters, just enough, we don't do the stuff that matters. And we have a disconnect between one part of our brain is happy with the simulated sociality. But the other part of our brain is not. And we don't have that neededness because we know deep down our Call of Duty squad and our social media followers don't really need us. And is it really a friend if all we're doing is trading text? The final way

• 13:53Cal Newport?

  the technology I think is leading to this actually comes from the world of work.

• 13:57Cal Newport?

  So it seems maybe like it's coming from out of nowhere, but I think it connects. So like I write about in my book, Slow Productivity, we have pseudo-productivity. The management heuristic that visible activities are proxy for useful effort combined with mobile computing. So now I can do work at a very visible, fine-grained level in any location on earth.

• 14:17Cal Newport?

  Those two things have made us very, very busy, especially or notably outside of our normal work hours. Because I wrote a whole book about this. But from the point of view of what we're talking about here, neededness in the social graph, being more and more busy outside of normal work hours means there's less and less time to sacrifice non-trivial time and attention on behalf of other people. So that too is getting in the way of building these strong social graphs, which give us that sense of neededness. All right. So modern technology is playing a big role in this solitude problem. But I said there was a second way, that there's two major ways that technology is playing this role. Well, the first way we just talked about, it's, it's making our graph sparser. The second

• 15:00Cal Newport?

  way, and this is where it becomes an insidious, insidious, I almost said it, Jesse, I almost said insidious, insidious cycle, it helps numb us from the pain of not having that neededness. It drives us away from neededness and then gives us the succor so that we can survive not having it, or just barely. And that's where we really get that self-reinforcing cycle. I don't feel needed anymore. My social graph is sparse. I'm not really connected into a thick network of people who depend on me and I depend on them. This makes me uncomfortable. Let's distract myself. Let's TikTok. Let's video game. Let's endlessly

• 15:44Cal Newport?

  scroll. Let's get caught up in, I don't know, it could be a conspiracy theory, or whatever we want to do that's going to give us some sort of like distraction away from this big lack that's actually happened in our lives. Then we use devices more, or we work more to try to fill in that void. And then we get even more distance from our actual sacrifice-driven social graph and our needing this goes down even more severely. It's a terrible cycle. There's a cycle that got amplified, of course, by COVID and other types of trends with computing. And it brings us to where we are now, to where Derek's article is. All right. So here's the good news.

• 16:20Cal Newport?

  Once we know what's going on here, the solutions are obvious. We've got to add back more links to that sacrifice social graph. That's it. We've got to add back more links. Now that we know that's the problem, that those are being taken out because of technology, we need to add those back in.

• 16:37Cal Newport?

  And we could be indirect about this, and I think this is the problem is too often what happens in these discussions is we say, well, maybe we need to think about how to get rid of the forces that are causing this problem in the first place. And we have to completely reform both our relationship and our cultural relationship with technology and work so that we can finally have the time and drive to get back to building social lives in a way that we're more used to doing it. Or we could just say, I'm just going to go add links directly. We'll figure that out on the way. I just want to go sacrifice non-trivial time and attention on behalf of people I care about. Let me just go do that.

• 17:08Cal Newport?

  Just do that first. Let's just directly add the lines back. And then we can figure out how to fix the bigger problem and fix our culture and get utopia. So it's not a hard thing to understand that we need to do. Spend more time actually doing things for other people.

• 17:24Cal Newport?

  That's what we need to do. How many people like in the last month?

• 17:28Cal Newport?

  Have you like gone out of your way to really be there for them or to sacrifice on behalf of them?

• 17:33Cal Newport?

  Like if you have a family, you've probably done it for your kids, maybe for one friend or another, but this should actually be something I'm doing multiple times a week. You start adding those lines back in your graph. You could even draw one of these things. Here's a dot for like all the people I really know well. And each month I'm going to draw a line if I do at least one non-trivial sacrifice on their behalf and each month, like how thick can I get this graph to look? How many points on this star can I actually create if I'm at the center and they're all around the periphery? Not a bad exercise to actually do. Now here's the good news. If you go right to that solution, what are you going to find? Well, you're going to find something getting reactivated within you. And suddenly that drive to be on the devices so much goes down. Because this is better.

• 18:18Cal Newport?

  We're on our devices a lot because we were missing this. We're on our devices a lot because we're convincing ourselves this counts as sociality. But when we get re-exposed to the real thing, suddenly this other stuff, this digital simulation comes across as sort of trivial or a low resolution simulation. It's no longer as appealing. As we get used to sacrificing other people, we see that's important. No, I'm not going to do email all evening. We'll have to just figure that out. I'll have to figure out another approach to my work. Either grow some confidence or change some systems, or this is just what it's going to have to be. It pushes back on the digital. So the digital pushed us into this problem. Sure. But instead of trying to fix our digital life first, just go right back and fix this social problem.

• 19:01Cal Newport?

  And actually, the digital itself will suddenly seem less urgent. So I think that's the good news in this because really, you know, what we do on this show is like, we're often navigating the perils of the modern digital environment, figuring out what are causing the disorders and mismatches of this, and then trying to figure out how to actually solve it. This is one of the biggest perils right now. This lack of neededness caused by the sparsification of the sacrifice social graph. And no, Jesse, I don't like to create alliterative unnecessarily technical terms. That's just, that's just how normal people talk. Let's just be clear about that. Sparsification of the sacrifice driven sociality graph. That's how normal people talk, come on, let's be honest. This is, I think, one of the big problems of culture right now. Technology got us there. Technology is keeping us there.

• 19:43Cal Newport?

  But going back to our roots as a social being suddenly makes technology's role in this seem more glaring and hard to miss. And therefore, the role that technology plays in our lives begins to reduce a little bit. So I want to throw it out there. I can't help but connect these type of issues to technology. And here's a place where we have a big negative impact, but we also have a very clear lever to pull to make things more positive. I like that phrase. Sparsification of sacrifice driven social graph. It's like a computer science paper title right there.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  I like it too.

• 20:17Cal Newport?

  Yeah. All right. So there we go. We got a bunch of good questions. We have a deep dive, not deep dive, a reaction piece coming up later at Tech Corner, which once again is an article I just wrote for The New Yorker. So we're getting a bunch of Cal New Yorker this week or this month. So I'm excited to get to that. But first, talk quickly about a sponsor.

• 20:37Speaker 02

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• 21:06Cal Newport?

  We actually have a new sponsor this week. This is a company that came into my life at a very opportune time. We're talking about Uplift. The Uplift desk is at the forefront of ergonomic solutions promoting better posture and health. Do adjustable standing desk design to help you live a healthier lifestyle. Plus, they have all kinds of accessories to keep you moving throughout your day, even if you work for only a few hours at your desk. Uplift came into our life as a potential sponsor. I mentioned at a good time because, man, my back, I'm having all sorts of problems because I don't talk a lot about this on the show. Very short answer. I got an abdominal injury, being awesome in the gym.

• 21:49Cal Newport?

  Just being really cool with weights and people were thinking I'm awesome. Got abdominal injury. Screwed up my core, I needed a surgery, blah, blah, blah. Point being, when your core gets messed up and I had to wear like braces and stuff for a couple of months and then that messes up your back. So now my back is really messed up. So my abdomen is, now my abdomen is healed. My back is messed up. So now I have to like re-strengthen the abdomen and get my back is hurting all the time. And anyways, man, do I understand now posture and how much this matters. I don't think I would have understood. My, the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies I work with at Georgetown, he was showing me last semester his Uplift desk, which I was like, oh, it's a beautiful desk. It looks great.

• 22:32Cal Newport?

  It's like bamboo, it is bamboo style and it's just the lifting mechanism is now really built into the legs in a way you don't even know it's a standing desk. I feel like the old standing desks.

• 22:42Cal Newport?

  Correct me if I'm wrong here, Jesse. My memory of like back in the day when this technology came around is it looked basically, the technology looked roughly in size footprint to like Mike Mulligan's steam engine.

• 22:53Cal Newport?

  Huge contraption, you know, there's, there's like a four man blowing a whistle and these giant gears start turning. These uplift desks now, like, oh, that's just a normal desk in just like the normal leg on the side. It's like in there. I don't, I don't know how, anyway. So I was like, oh, it's beautiful desk. But you know, I didn't, I was like, why do you need a standing desk for? Now I get it because like, oh my God, posture is everything for me right now. So I am working standing, sitting all sorts of different ways, a lot more working standing. So one of the things I'm using now, and I don't mean to preach on this, but it's like my whole life right now, is uplift, it's not just a desk, they have these accessories, the anti-fatigue mat. They sent me one of those. That's been a life, that's really helped. So you stand on this mat. So it's not just your full weight,

• 23:34Cal Newport?

  just like on your feet, just on the hard ground. Like either you could wear those shoes that people wear now that have, and I think the official measurement is like 17 inches of heel. Or like you walk around like a clown still, or you can have this mat and it's just so you don't have that pressure as much. Like this stuff really matters in a way I didn't think about before. I also got, I'm going to bring it to the HQ, a wobble stool. I can put it in front of the 3D printer. So it's like you can sit on it, but instead of just sitting completely still, you can wobble on it and kind of like move your core around. It doesn't, you can't fall, you're not going to fall over, but you can like kind of move and work out your core. Originally, I was like, oh, my kids will like it, but like, oh God, I need this thing now. So anyways, I'm going on a rant here, but like I am obsessed

• 24:19Cal Newport?

  now with posture and ergonomics because my whole life is like about this right now. So uplift came into my, came into my life at a good time. You guys got to care about this stuff. The uplift desk is the industry standard, but their accessories are cool as well. So anyways, let me get to an actual call to action here. Make this year yours by going to upliftdesk.com/deep and use our code DEEP to get four free accessories, free same day shipping, free returns, and then industry leading 15 year warranty that covers your entire desk and an extra discount off your entire order. That might be the most free things I've ever heard.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:56Cal Newport?

  For a discount code.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  It's pretty good.

• 24:57Cal Newport?

  Yep. That's Uplift Desk, U.P.L.I.F.T. desk.com/deep for a special offer and it's only available at that link. Start 2025 right. Stand up, move, thrive with Uplift Desk. Also want to talk about our longtime friends at ExpressVPN. Look, getting, going online without ExpressVPN is like not having a case for your phone. Most of the time, you'll probably be fine, but all it takes is just that one drop and you'll wish you had spent those extra few dollars on a case. Well, that's what it's like using the internet without a VPN, because every time you connect to an unencrypted network, you're at the airport, you're at

• 25:37Cal Newport?

  the hotel, you're at a coffee shop, your online data is not secure. Any hacker who is right there can see the packets that you are sending, including who it is that you're talking to. A VPN protects you from all of this. When you use a VPN, what happens is you take the message you really want to send and you encrypt it, but no one can read it. And then you send that to a VPN server, then the VPN server unencrypts it, talks to that site or service on your behalf, encrypts the response, sends it back to you. So now, if I'm the hacker next to you at the coffee shop, all I can learn by looking at your packets being sent over the radio waves is that you're communicating with a VPN server. I have no idea what actual site or service you're talking to. All of that is obfuscated from

• 26:19Cal Newport?

  me. So you do need a VPN to protect yourself and your privacy. If you're going to use a VPN, use the one I recommend, which is ExpressVPN. Its encryption is super secure. There's enough bits there in the encryption that no computer, feasible computer in the world could ever crack it. It's very easy to use. You just turn on the app and now it's working. Just use your other apps and web browsers, just like you would normally. It just automatically works in the background. You can use it on your phone, your laptop, your tablet, so it's easy to stay secure. It's been rated number one by not just me, but top tech reviewers like CNET and The Verge. So you need a VPN to be on the internet in the modern world. ExpressVPN should be your friend. So secure your online data today

• 27:02Cal Newport?

  by visiting expressvpn.com/deep. That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com/deep and you can get an extra four months free. Expressvpn.com/deep. All right, Jesse, do some questions.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  First question is from Kay. I'm a medical doctor switching specialties. This requires I study for entrance exams. I time block my nights for studying after my eight to five doctor work, but I struggle with this as I'm too tired. This leaves only the weekends to study. How can I improve on scheduling and following through on weekdays?

• 27:37Cal Newport?

  Well, as I learned doing research for last week's episode on morning routines, I think the key is, and Jesse will agree with me, is to do your studying from within a cold plunge. Because what that's going to do is the cytokines are going to sharpen your focus muscles and then it's going to be very difficult. Actually, what you need to do is in the cold plunge, you need a cold plunge that's deep enough that you can do pull-ups while in the cold plunge. You're maybe doing pull-ups in and out of the cold plunge and then that will help you get after it. Now, okay, let's get to the heart of this here. Kay, I'm going to tell you first of all to use a phrase from the old version, older episodes of the show, to face the productivity dragon here,

• 28:21Cal Newport?

  which means confronting and accepting the reality of a particular workload that you're struggling with. You have a very hard job and so you're finding it hard to also do a lot of hard studying after your job is over. That is just the reality. That's not a broken thing. It's not unusual. It's not inexplicable. It's not a problem. In fact, it's not at all surprising. It's hard to be a doctor. Those are long shifts. And so the study, something intense after a hard shift, might just be really hard. So we have to just accept that at first. But we can't see it. To ignore the productivity dragon is just to really want something to be doable,

• 29:02Cal Newport?

  to be frustrated that it's not, and just hope if you get upset enough or focus on it enough, you can just sort of make it possible. That dragon is there and sometimes it's going to block you from getting where you want to go. All right, once we accept that, now we can review, what are our options and tools here? Without yet trying to assess whether any of these is going to solve the problem. Let's just put on the table, there's a dragon up here. All right, townspeople, what weapons do we have? Let's see what we have and then we can build a plan. So in your case, there's a few things that could be relevant. Better energy could help, right? There's things you could do so that you're coming off of your shift. You just, you have higher energy. Maybe you're able to persist in more studying than you are now. These are things like sleep, exercise, nutrition.

• 29:47Cal Newport?

  Those are probably the big ones. Maybe with like a good shutdown routine from the doctor job. In theory, if you're in really good shape and have really good health, in theory, you probably would have more energy you could probably spare. I don't know if that's going to be a lot because the physical and intellectual are related, but they're not completely congruent. But that's a tool we have on our table. That might take a while, though, to get healthy, to get in a good shape. Well, that takes time. And kind of ironically, you don't have a lot of time each day to work on this. We could get around that. Doctors get around that. They work out at the hospital, et cetera. But it takes a lot of time to get in, you know, to get healthier. And you might have to be done with this in a couple of months. All right, another tool, though, better study habits.

• 30:31Cal Newport?

  So if you're using the right study habits, maybe a shorter amount of time per day, you can get more out of it. Also, studying is less exhausting when it's more focused and you trust it, right? When you're a really good studier, I was a really good studier. I wrote books about how to study. When you're a really good studier, it's a lot less exhausting. Why? Because the sense of exhaustion from studying in particular is sometimes generated from your mind having resistance to the activity that you're about to do. It doesn't want to do it. So it's like, I don't want to do this. And now you're competing with your mind, trying to drag it into this activity. And that's exhausting and not super sustainable. Why does your mind reject studying? Well, one of the ways that, one of the reasons why it rejects it is because studying is

• 31:16Cal Newport?

  not a precise verb. Your mind doesn't think you have a particularly good plan for how you're going to get prepared. Your mind knows that you're just going to sit down and open up your books and then look at your phone and then look at your instant messenger and then kind of read some things and kind of look over at something else. It has no confidence that this is going to lead to anything good at all. And so it holds back motivation. So now you're dragging your mind through it. By contrast, if you're a really good studier, your mind's like, oh yeah, we got a good plan. We know how to prepare for these type of questions. We're given this 50 hard minutes and we are going to really make progress in these 50 minutes. You're going to have a lot more motivation to do it, even if it's intellectually harder. So improving your study habits is something else that could help here.

• 31:57Cal Newport?

  Let's step back now and look at more drastic or reconfiguration based plans. You could just take longer. You know, maybe you want to sit for these master's exams in three months. Maybe like what I really need to do here is do this six months from now or a year from now, because my studying is going to be, I can't study every night. And maybe I'm doing my studying on the weekends or just one night a week. It's going to take me a lot longer to prepare. So if I push this off by a year, then I can get there in a reasonable timeframe. That's like a real slow productivity type of idea. No one knows how long it took you to do something. They just know in the end what things you did. And often like the key to sustainability is simply just taking longer.

• 32:39Cal Newport?

  10 years from now, all people are going to know is like, oh, you made this shift in your clinical practice. They don't remember exactly how long did it take from you having this idea to you taking the entrance exams. The final tool we can put on the table here is change your work situation temporarily. Maybe you take a leave for two weeks. You can just do nothing but seriously study and just like get this thing done. Right? So we have different tools on the table.

• 33:03Cal Newport?

  And your question is just, okay, what combination of these is going to get me where I need to get? Facing the productivity dragon rarely, as people fear, leads them to the conclusion of this thing that's important to me, I can't do. That's not what happens. What happens is you come up with a more reasonable plan for how to get there. And it might not be as easy as you hope, or as quick as you hope, or as painless as you hope. But typically you find a way to get, take care of that dragon. Once you actually see it and you're looking at it and having an honest conversation about what options you actually have. So probably some combination of those things I mentioned will get you there. And almost certainly it's not going to end up being as quick or as easy as you hoped when you first went down this path. But that's okay. Sometimes paths have dragons on them. We still have to figure out how to get up to the castle.

• 33:48Cal Newport?

  So hopefully, not hopefully, you will. You'll find a way to get there.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  When did you come up with the term productivity dragon?

• 33:56Cal Newport?

  I feel like it was early in the show.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  It wasn't before? It was definitely early in the show because when I was listening to it, I loved it when I was just a fan.

• 34:04Cal Newport?

  Should we look it up?

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Well, I'm looking it up. I was thinking maybe you discovered it when you're in your twenties.

• 34:10Cal Newport?

  No, no, no, but it's possible. So here's, I'm looking this up now. So here's what's possible is that like I wrote about it on my newsletter.

• 34:18Cal Newport?

  Around the time the show was coming up.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Okay. I thought you had it for fifteen years before.

• 34:23Cal Newport?

  But God, now you're making me doubt myself, Jesse. All right. Man, so it's definitely, here's, it's definitely early. Study hacks because I'm seeing a clip from August of 2020.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 34:39Cal Newport?

  So that'd be pretty early, but here's a.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Like five years old.

• 34:42Cal Newport?

  Here's an article from July of 2020. On confronting the productivity dragon, take two. Okay. So. You know why this is take two? That wasn't great. So I wrote this art. Now I remember this July of 2020. I wrote this article about confronting the productivity dragon. And so I just grabbed some image online of St. George fighting a dragon. Because like that's the classic and like, here's a picture of it now of like him, you know, artwork. I didn't realize the picture I had drawn. I guess St. George has white supremacist connections as well. I kid you not, this picture I posted. Was St. George stabbing a dragon? And it was like his cloak or his sword?

• 35:27Cal Newport?

  Swastikas. Swastikas.

• 35:33Cal Newport?

  People are like, all right, that checks. That's what I feared. I think I put a note about this. Oh, no, I didn't. But, oh yeah, I did down here.

• 35:43Cal Newport?

  It was from Wiki Commons. That's why, you know, I was like, oh, it's a Wiki Commons, like no, because no copyright image. So I didn't expect it. Okay. So here's what I said. In my first attempt to post this article, I grabbed an image of St. George from Wiki Commons that seemed to be of the right resolution and dimensions, but I missed one crucial detail. His heralding was full of swastikas. Whoops.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 36:05Cal Newport?

  Anyways, if I read this article from July of 2020, it opens by saying, on a recent episode of my podcast, someone asked me, and I mentioned this term. So I think it was the podcast, a very early episode.

• 36:20Cal Newport?

  Yeah, a very early episode of the podcast I came up with.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:24Cal Newport?

  I kind of want to return to it. Let's revisit the productivity dragon.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  I love the term. I just thought maybe you had it like a poster of your, of the dragon, like in your college dorm or something.

• 36:32Cal Newport?

  I don't know. Maybe I did. So I had to look it up. But no, it mainly is just a vehicle for me to put swastika imagery online.

• 36:40Cal Newport?

  I thought like my site was going to get put on a hate watch list or something like that. I was like, just probably bots that are just, you know, following sites and be like, oh, they posted a lot of swastikas. Like, we got to take them, you know.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  It's a good thing you weren't on Facebook at the time.

• 36:57Cal Newport?

  Yeah, that would not have gone well. Yeah. Maybe that's the real reason why I'm not on social media. They just, I got kicked off all of them for and it got reposted a few places too, I think, because people just repost my articles. Anyways, we should do a productivity dragon, like revisit.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Okay, I'll note that.

• 37:12Cal Newport?

  All right. What do we got next?

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Next question is from David. As a non-tech person interested in tech, I enjoy your comments on AI. Can you comment on Leopold Aschenbrenner's situational awareness essay? It's getting a lot of hype and criticism.

• 37:29Cal Newport?

  Yes, I think I have something. I loaded up something here. Okay. I'm not going to load up. So for people who don't know, Leopold Aschenbrenner, I think now he's an investor. He runs a fund, but used to be in tech, wrote this essay called situational awareness, AI from now to 2034, which is basically he's synthesizing, he like all these conversations with people in tech and he's laying out this like vision of axioms and predictions for the future of AI. And it's pretty extreme. And it's, it's, it's because of that gathering a lot of attention. I'm not going to read that or even go through the essay because I think it's like 160 something pages long.

• 38:13Cal Newport?

  I mean, it's a book, basically. It's like this huge, really long thing. But I did find a good, Mike Allen has a good summary of the main points on Axios. So I'll read a few of these. I have it on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening. Like, here are some of the points that are made, some of the stickier points that were made in this big, long essay. One, trust the trend lines. The trend lines are intense, and they were right. The magic of deep learning is that it just works, and the trends lines have been astonishingly consistent despite naysayers at every turn. Another big point, over and over again, year after year, skeptics have claimed deep learning won't be able to do X, and have been quickly proven wrong. Point three, it's strikingly plausible that by 2027, models will be able to do the work

• 38:57Cal Newport?

  of an AI research engineer. By 2027, rather than a chatbot, you're going to have something that looks more like an agent, like a coworker. Number five, the data wall, there's potentially important source of variance for all this. We're running out of internet data. Number six, AI progress won't stop at a human level. We would rapidly go from human level to vastly superhuman systems. He points to the idea of superintelligence, possibly by AD 2030, and so on. Okay, so these are the type of ideas that are in this essay, and it's, you know, it's an interesting essay, and it's getting a lot of attention. I would say, you

• 39:38Cal Newport?

  know, be wary to just naively dismiss this essay, because Ashton Brenner knows a lot about this technology, and he really did talk to a lot of people, like, he really has a sense for it. On the other hand, you do have to take his essay with a grain of salt, because his fund is basically focused on, we are investing in the technologies that are going to lead directly to AGI. Like, that's his pitch to investors. So it is, of course, very much in his benefit, it's very much to his benefit for people to believe that AI technologies' trends are very extreme and noteworthy, because that's the pitch of his fund as well. So you have to keep those things in mind. A couple, I'll add a couple of observations. These aren't like limits to what he's saying, but when you

• 40:20Cal Newport?

  put a couple, I'll put a couple of potential breaking observations to keep in the mix here. So, one thing that interests me, that Ashton Brenner doesn't talk about in the summary at least, you know, he says, over and over again, year after year, skeptics have claimed deep learning won't be able to do X, and have been quickly proven wrong. If there's one lesson we've learned from the past decade of AI, it's that you should never bet against deep learning. Well, it is true, like, its capabilities keep growing.

• 40:48Cal Newport?

  And as we say, well, it's still bad at this, then engineers work on this. And then for a lot of those, this is it gets better at. But there have been year after year of predictions that have not been coming true, which is the predictions about the practical impact in our lives. As soon as ChatGPT came out there, it was like, we're six months away from this disruption. Whole industries are going away. Homework apocalypse, education as we know it is done. These whole sectors are gone. Look, this guy over here fired half of his, his call center. That's going to be everyone that these jobs are gone. People are so far, there's been almost no major disruption. So the one place where there is a gap is the impact gap. So we, we, the, the connection that we have been getting wrong is we thought there would

• 41:32Cal Newport?

  be this type coupling between functional breakthrough and disruption. That as the magnitude of a functional breakthrough on AI models jumped, the immediate disruptions would jump as well. Well, it turns out that there's, there's at the very least a large lag between these two things. I think this is a significant thing to keep in mind. It is turning out that to make this technology high impact on people's day in day lives, there is no escaping the actual sort of hard, hard to predict product development cycle. That it's not just the fact that these models can do amazing things. It doesn't mean that it's doing amazing things in people's lives. People still have to now do the painstaking work of integrating this AI into specific products.

• 42:18Cal Newport?

  Nine out of 10 ways you do this is not going to work or be that useful. So it's hard. There's competition. Companies are going to fail. Initiatives are going to lose money for these big companies. And then in there, you're going to find, oh, here's the right product that actually works. It's the internet was the, the consumer internet was the same way. We knew it was a big deal. And a lot of companies were like, this is a big deal. This changes everything, which it did. But we thought at first like, great. So if I just throw, put money into anything internet, it's going to be successful. And it was. And then most of the early things we did didn't really work. And we had the first dot com crash in the early 2000s. And then what ended up being required was like years of different companies and startups and people trying like, well, what's the right way to get the internet to people? Or how do people actually want to use it? And then we got out of it, some of these like web two based models that have then

• 43:02Cal Newport?

  become incredibly profitable, right? So but you had in 1999, people being like, yeah, well, well, Time Warner should be on just buy AOL. We'll have this sort of online version of the articles and web van will warehouses full of food you can buy on the internet. And we're all going to make a lot of money. None of that worked. But you fast forward another 25 years, and Meta has a trillion plus dollar market cap. So like, they were right, but just took a long time to try to figure out what works and what didn't. So that's going to slow down AI's progress some. Because we're three years out of highly capable language models, and don't yet have large disruption use cases. So it just that lag is longer than

• 43:46Cal Newport?

  we think. On the flip side, that means when the disruptions come, it might seem like it's coming out of nowhere, because it's not going to be tightly coupled to an innovation. I actually think the power, I was just giving a talk at Microsoft recently, we were talking about this. I actually think that we have sufficient capability and AI tools today to support major disruption to the way knowledge work happens. We don't actually need if we have no future innovation, like we have to freeze everything, like where it is now. We have sufficient capability and power in these models for sufficient disruption knowledge work. We just haven't figured out the right tools or way to integrate it yet in the products. And that's what everyone's working on right now. So it might be slower till the everyday

• 44:29Cal Newport?

  person is feeling the disruption. But the disruption might also seem to be somewhat out of nowhere, because again, it won't be tied to a recent innovation. It will be a product innovation that finally just works just right. Alright, so that's one idea I want to point out that I think is relevant. The second is, I think there's a, there's a pause or wall or sort of AI mini-winter that is coming up because there's, there's, there's two limits we're coming up against. And Asher Brenner mentions one of these limits. One, we're running out of data. So this, this idea of we're going to train these sort of transformer-based language models, these feed-forward language models, we're going to train them with, with text data.

• 45:12Cal Newport?

  There's not much text left. We've kind of used all the text on the internet. I mean, Meta has this advantage. I heard Scott Galloway talking about this. I think it's probably a smart analysis. He was saying, don't, uh, don't bet too hard against Meta right now because there's a couple wins in their favor, like TikTok perhaps going away, um, which will be good for them because Reels has become an effective TikTok clone. But the other thing is they have a lot of extra text because of all the platforms. All their platforms have these giant archives of text and text is what you need to train these. And so maybe they can, they can eke out some more training, like OpenAI, who maybe is just limited to like the full open internet, every book, every written. But to also have everything ever said on Facebook, that's more text. So more text helps, but there's, we're kind of running out of text to train these things on.

• 45:55Cal Newport?

  So we're, we're sort of getting to the limit of data. These are, because of the inefficiency of how, how the training happens and knowledge is represented, you need a ton of data to train these things. So we could be kind of running out of what we get to capabilities. Now, there's different training methods that matter, right? Like the O1 model, and I don't want to go down too deep down this rabbit hole, but you know, the newest ChatGPT is better at reasoning. And this, this is in part due to the way they train it now. Like, it turns out you can make these things a little bit better at, feed-forward networks better at reasoning. If you do a particular type of training where what you really do is you say, when you give an answer, a simple idea, but it has a huge impact. It's actually a Dartmouth kid who figured this out. Uh, Jason Nguyen, I think. But it's a simple

• 46:38Cal Newport?

  idea. When you give an answer, ChatGPT, we want you to explain your steps that lead to your answer.

• 46:47Cal Newport?

  And if you give an answer that doesn't have a lot of steps, we're going to zap you during trading with a bad signal. And if you give an answer where you kind of spell out your steps, we're going to zap you with a good signal. That's called reinforcement learning. And we're going to add that on to your normal train. This is how they train these models not to like say bad things, to avoid certain topics. Well, they're just saying, oh, we'll just zap them while we're training. Like, hey, show your work. So if I ask you like a math problem, don't just say the answer to that math problem is 27. I'm going to give you a happy zap if instead of just saying that, you say, well, let's, let's walk this through. We started with this many apples and we took away this apples with left this many apples. So now the answer is 27. So by zapping it, like, hey, we really like when you show your work. Now, when you're training these networks, they're more likely to train in a way that actually captures more of the logic because

• 47:32Cal Newport?

  they have to actually say the steps along the way. And then they're more likely to do reasoning better. So it's just stuff you can do. But we are going to hit a limit where we're going to run out of data. I also am this big believer that the feed forward network model, there's only so far we can get with that. There is no state, there is no recurrence, there is no looping, there is no let's try out a bunch of things. There's no here's a novel state of a problem in the world, and we want to now explore what to do with this and compare this to other stuff we know. Feed forward now, everything has to be stuck in these forward connections of the deep learning model. So I think the limitations of that structure plus data limitations means we might hit an AI mini winter. The way we're going to break out of that, I think is going to be with more complicated model structure. We're going to have multiple models, individual models might go through deep learning to actually learn what they're doing. But they're going to

• 48:17Cal Newport?

  interact with each other. And some of these models or modules are going to be human coded and not learned. And it's going to be in the ensemble of different models. This is keeping a state. Here's a simulator model. Here's like an understand the world model over here is a like prediction model. Over here is like a meta model. All of these working together is what's going to, I think, get us out of the AI mini winter and actually move AI to that next level, which is going to be a much bigger step towards something like AGI. So I'm getting kind of technical here, but there we go. AI mini winter is going to come, but then we'll eventually get through it. And the the impact gap on AI, we should not look down on. It takes years, actually, to go from this tech is great to this tech is having a great impact on people's lives. We got

• 48:59Cal Newport?

  So that wasn't quite 165 pages worth of material, Jesse, but I think it was close.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  On Rogan, Zuckerberg talked about how AI can basically do the work of an average programmer now. Did you hear that?

• 49:10Cal Newport?

  I mean, it just depends what you mean by that.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:13Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's good at generating code.

• 49:18Cal Newport?

  But it's unclear. So when you look at professional programmers, yeah, so it it can produce code like OK code. But it's not really where it's impacting productivity and programming, where it's impacting productivity and programming, based on the programmers I've talked to. Is it's preventing you from having to do what for the last 10 or 15 years programmers have been doing, which is. I know there is some sort of library call I need to make here to erase the screen or whatever. I don't remember what it was, so I'm going to Google it. That Google is going to load up a page on the the Stack Overflow forum. And the Stack Overflow forum is going to have the answer like, oh, that's that's the name of that library. And wait, what are the parameters? OK, great. And then they go back over and you type it in. So this is a lot of programming nowadays.

• 50:04Cal Newport?

  You don't master, you don't memorize everything. You're constantly Googling things and then you're getting answers and going back to what you're doing. AI is very good at like, I don't even have to do that. I can just like, start typing and it kind of figures out like, oh, you're looking for this. Here's it, here's the name of the library and here's the parameters. You don't have to leave your development environment. Or you can kind of even ask it like, what's the thing that I need to draw circles? Or just write it like, what would I call it? Circle drawing thing. And it says, is this what you mean? And like, yeah, that's what I mean, right? So for programmers, it's literally shaving time off of what they're doing. But they would never put in a bunch of code. On the other hand, I know a lot of people who aren't programmers at all, who are now building simple programs, who wouldn't have been able to without AI.

• 50:48Cal Newport?

  This is one of the ideas I kind of introduced us in this talk I was giving the other day. But I think one of the first big productivity impacts is going to happen. Knowledge work is really going to be this, in general, unlocking complex software capabilities in individuals without complex software training. And it's not just with programming, but just with software has powerful capabilities. Often only power users know how to do it. AI is going to make it easier for non-power users to get power capabilities. So I'm going to be able to do crazy stuff in Excel without having to really understand Excel macros and how these sort of complicated things work, because I can just kind of describe what I want. And the AI can understand that and turn it into a macro language that Excel understands, and I can get it done.

• 51:32Cal Newport?

  So like, that's where I think the first productivity gains are going to happen, is unlock these more powerful features. So like, now, I don't program, but I can write a simple program. That's useful. I kind of know about Excel, but I don't know how to do like an advanced sort, or the swap the rows with these numbers with these other, like, I don't know how to do those operations. Now, AI will help me do it. Right? So I think unlocking power features without power user training will be one of the low-hanging fruits we're going to see some impact. All right, what do we got next?

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Next question is from Colin. "I'm fortunate to have a remote job that supports flexibility, but I often struggle to translate the values I care about, learning, curiosity, self-improvement, connection, and adventure, into concrete goals and actions. I want to be able to sustain these practices. Too often, I find myself stuck in a cycle of pseudo-productivity, going through the motions without feeling truly fulfilled."

• 52:25Cal Newport?

  I think this is a common problem, especially if you, you have the blessing of time, is you get kind of systematic and say, okay, well, here's the things that matter to me. And, and then you kind of start, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, and I'm going to do this. And it's, it feels sort of soulless. Like, I have these like checklist of things I do every day that's, that's connecting to the things that I value. And I don't know, it just feels like going through the motions. It doesn't actually feel like it's infusing my life with value. That's a really common problem, actually, like acting on your values in a way that's really meaningful. I have four things I want to mention that could be helpful here. One, you know, once you've identified what's important to you, you have your buckets. Have some sort of keystone habit in each, sure, as a starting point.

• 53:06Cal Newport?

  Something you do for each of these values or things you care about on a regular basis. That's, that's not trivial, but it's, but it's tractable. So you're just signaling to yourself, I care about these things, sure. But then, choose one and say, this is the thing I'm going to really work on for the next six months. This is the thing for the next season. I'm going to try to figure out through experimentation and focus, how to integrate this into my life in the coolest possible way. Because it actually can be hard. You could say, I like adventure. Great. Building an actual rhythm of adventure that's meaningful to you in your life, that might take a lot of experimentation. It's not an obvious thing to do. So maybe you spend a full summer, like really focusing on that. Like, well, what if I go like on weekend

• 53:49Cal Newport?

  trips and that's not enough? Maybe what I want to do is like, once a quarter, go on, let me try one of these quarterly trips. What's that feel like? Maybe I want to have a challenge myself every week, like to go, go to a place that, you know, I haven't been before. Maybe I want to get a group of friends. We do this together. Like you, you figure out what's really pressing my buttons on this value. And how do I best integrate that into a part of my life? And that takes time and experimentation. So just focus on one till you feel good about it. And then you can move on to another. It can take years to kind of button down a full lifestyle setup. And then at the end of that, you kind of say, okay, now I want to, I had kids. Whoops. We got to change all these again. Like what adventure means is very different now than it did before. And that's okay. So spend more time and go one by one in figuring these things out. There's a patience thing.

• 54:32Cal Newport?

  The second solution, go back to lifestyle centric planning, the better understand what it means for these values to be a part of your life. In particular, the part of lifestyle centric planning that's key when you're thinking about these type of values like curiosity or adventure, for example, is to find examples that resonate. Like, you know what, what I'm looking for is someone who is doing something in their life that really, that specific thing they're doing really resonates with me. So get more concrete, move from the abstract to the more concrete. Like, oh, I really love the, the way this guy, this guy works. Like, maybe you're really, when it comes to adventure, you try to get concrete. The

• 55:15Cal Newport?

  thing that resonates with you is this movie, which I watched a bunch as a kid. I wonder if you would know this one, Jesse, K2.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Right?

• 55:24Cal Newport?

  Is it spacey?

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, right?

• 55:27Cal Newport?

  Oh, it might be.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:31Cal Newport?

  Where they, they, they go to climb K2, it doesn't go well.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  Oh, no, that was, that was it everyone.

• 55:36Cal Newport?

  It's a mountain climbing movie. Wait, I'm looking this up because.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  It's the, he was in like K something else.

• 55:41Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Oh, oh, this K.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  K-Pax.

• 55:44Cal Newport?

  Exactly, exactly what you're talking about. No, I can, I can think of, I'm looking this up here.

• 55:51Cal Newport?

  1991 film. Man, I used to like this film. Oh, it's Michael Bean. Yeah, Michael Bean and Matt Craven. Spoiler alert, don't think it goes well for Matt Craven. Anyway, so it was this mountain climbing movie. K2, you know, it's the second highest mountain in the world behind ever since like the most dangerous mountain. People die, and people die all the time. I mean, okay, not the rabbit hole.

• 56:14Cal Newport?

  But the reputation of K2 at the time was like, this is the real killer. Like Everest, you can have these companies that like take you up to the top. If you pay them $60,000, you don't have to be a world-class athlete. K2 is really, really hard. It's the second highest mountain. It was really, really hard. And it had the highest death toll. It was like one out of five people die or whatever. But then after this movie came out, you know, you get the disaster on Everest where Krakauer into thin air was there. Where like all these people died and then like a lot of people died on Everest after that. It's like, no one thinks about Everest as being easy. I mean, it's E, in theory, you can do it without being an elite athlete. You can pay to do it, but now its death rate's also pretty high. Anyways, the reason why I think about this movie, because I saw it all the time, is that Michael Bean was a corporate executive in this movie.

• 57:00Cal Newport?

  And they were always showing he was in his skyscraper office and he had like a Norda track machine in there. Cause he was training for this like, so he was like a world-class mountaineer and had this job, right? So maybe that really resonates with you. You're like, yeah, that's, that's what I want to be like adventure is like, I have, my job just fulfills other things for me and it's specific and corporate or whatever. But I want to be the guy who's also has like the Norda track machine in my office. Cause I'm training to go do like these extreme things and like there's these like two sides of me. You're like, so, so maybe that's what resonates with you. Then that gives you like a, a concrete way of thinking about integrating adventure into your life. So you look for what resonates because sometimes the abstract principle, you don't know what about that appeals to me.

• 57:43Cal Newport?

  Or what way of integrating that into a life really is interesting to me? And the concrete examples to get there. So you want to use a single purpose notebook for this, or have like a fields note or Moleskine notebook where you're taking notes on these things as you watch things, as you read things, as you meet people. Take notes on what's resonating and that's going to give you some better ideas of how to implement this. Solution three, you might want to simplify. Right? Maybe, maybe you want to simplify down the things you're focusing on so that you're not, you don't have too many specific things that you're trying to make progress on.

• 58:14Cal Newport?

  So, um, you know, connection, it might be like heart, heart, body, mind, you know, heart is like community and connection. Body is, I want like the, be in good shape and healthy and it fuels all these other things and go do things that like uses my body and mind is like, I want to like enjoy the world of ideas and interestingness and just do cool stuff with my mind or like simplify it. And then under those things, there's lots of different things you could do and maybe you do different things at different times. Like I'm going to start by this season, like this winter, I want to read these like five great books and have like a discussion group about them. And you know, maybe in the summer, I'm doing something else with my curiosity and with my body right now, maybe it's just like in my case, getting my back to work again.

• 58:57Cal Newport?

  But then like the next season, I might be working on, you know, returning to, to my like Alex Skarsgård workout and getting giant traps or whatever, and it might get more extreme. Right? So if you simplify it, smaller categories that have many more possibilities under them, now you have less going on at any one time. All right. My final thing I would mention here. Make sure you're not missing a foundation of what David Brooks would call second mountain virtues. Like in your list, outside of connection, we have learning, curiosity, self-improvement and adventure. None of these are, second mountain virtues are service virtues. You serving other people in the world. This is like a foundation of meaning, especially as you get past a certain age.

• 59:37Cal Newport?

  So often this will happen as people leave their twenties and move through their thirties is that they'll find that just the sort of self-focused things.

• 59:45Cal Newport?

  The things we see in the beginning of those morning ritual videos. I'm up and I have 17 steps I do just to like perfect my, you know, every aspect of my being. They don't fulfill, it's not as exciting anymore. You feel this bit of a lack. You're like, I'm trying to kill it at my job and be in really good shape and go on all these adventures and catalog them or whatever. And it's, it's feeling a little bit empty after a while. The second mountain virtues, which are character and service based, that's when these kick in and really give you a strong foundation and really probably a life where a lot of your discretionary time is on second mountain virtues. And then on top of that, you're able to do these sort of, you know, I'm training to mountain climb is like my other thing I do. Or I'm really into movies and me and my friends

• 1:00:27Cal Newport?

  like really into movies. That, that becomes that balance of, of second mountain virtues versus like other types of self-focused virtues. That ratio needs to shift as you get a little bit older. So it might just be that. Like it's more about like your heart and soul, you have to get cleaned up. And then the other things maybe will be less important, or you'll enjoy them more, or you don't have to do as many of them to get the same fulfillment. So I, long answer, because you know, I'm thinking about a lot of this for my deep life book. It's actually, I'm on like a six week pause writing that because I, I'm doing this New Yorker thing.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, you mentioned that.

• 1:01:01Cal Newport?

  So I am excited to get back to it. You know, I took over Kyle Shaka's column for one month, and I'm writing the third or fourth of the fourth, four articles right now. I'm kind of looking forward on the other end of that, just easing my way back into the, the deep life book, kind of building up the speed. It has been fun writing columns, but man, that's a fast pace. All right. Who do we got next?

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  Next question is from Holden. Speaking of writing, how would you recommend somebody go about deliberate and consistent improvement in writing?

• 1:01:32Cal Newport?

  You know, my thing for writing, it's like other, any other sort of skilled activity, you have to train, right? It's doing it a lot will get you part of the way.

• 1:01:44Cal Newport?

  So if I'm writing a bunch, I want to do my pages every day, that will help. You will become a better writer than if you don't do that at all. You get more used to it. It's less hard. You build some circuits in your brain. Words come more easily. Then you're going to hit a wall. And if you want to get better, you have to have activities designed to stretch you in specific ways past where your current capabilities are. Writing for editing is really the best way to do that. I'm trying to make this good enough that this person likes it. So like someone's going to evaluate it and you're going to get that feedback. Like it stretches you and the feedback helps you get better in particular ways. Taking on specific writing challenges also helps. I want to work on this technique here. I'm going to read people who are good at that technique, try to understand it and then use that knowledge in this thing I'm writing now. So it's writing where you are specifically stretching a particular piece of the writing talent.

• 1:02:29Cal Newport?

  It's the stretch and the specificity that's going to, that's going to make you better. You've got to think about it as something that you're going to train. I mean, it's why, for example, at the very upper levels of fiction writing, like elite literary fiction writers, so many of them go to MFA programs. They just often need that final really learning and being pushed with other writers and reading their stuff and they're reading your stuff. You just need that final push of like where you're still a little rusty. Seeing someone who's better at something than you are and like reading their thing and then trying to be better in yours the next time. They need that final training push if you want to be like an elite level fiction writer. But that persists at every, every level on the writing ladder. You got to train to get to the next level. So that's the way I usually think about that. All right, what's next?

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  We have our corner.

• 1:03:15Cal Newport?

  Slow productivity corner. This is each week we have a question about my latest book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. The main reason we do this segment is so that we can play this segment theme song, which we're going to hear right now.

• 1:03:37Cal Newport?

  All right, Jesse, what's our slow productivity corner question of the week?

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  It's from JJ. Many individuals who've reached the absolute pinnacle of their fields, from athletes like Michael Jordan to entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, seem to follow a different pattern of obsessive, all-consuming work without clear boundaries. While your approach clearly leads to meaningful achievements and a fulfilling life, I wonder if someone can truly reach the uppermost echelons of their field while maintaining the balanced approach you discuss in slow productivity?

• 1:04:04Cal Newport?

  Well, it's a good question. I don't know necessarily that you would use balance as one of the key adjectives for slow productivity. I would say it's focused. I would say it's sustainable. I would say it's kind of the opposite of pseudo productivity, which is performative. Activity for the sake of activity. That's what it rejects. But I was thinking about people in the top 1% of their field. And in a lot of fields, elite level performers, if you look at how they approach their work, it echoes a lot of the ideas from slow productivity. So let's consider, for example, elite writers. I used elite writers as examples frequently in the book Slow Productivity, because to be an elite writer, you almost always have to take a slow productivity approach. You're not working on many things.

• 1:04:49Cal Newport?

  Like, you're basically just like all in on the book you're writing. You kind of simplify your life in that way. You're a courser obsessing over quality if you're an elite writer. Like, I want this thing to win the whatever literary prizes that I'm hoping or become a New York Times notable books. You really care about quality more than anything else. And, uh, yeah, it's seasonal. I'm really working on a book hard. Now I'm completely doing nothing. Now I'm brainstorming the next book. Now I'm editing the book. Like, there's, there's real variations. And because they have such autonomy, there can be seasonality in their day. Often, these writers have specific hours they write in, and then they're done. They're not writing all day long. And there's could be seasonality in their month or week. Like, I was thinking, if I was just a full-time writer, like, just a book writer,

• 1:05:33Cal Newport?

  I bet this back thing I'm dealing with would be so much easier to deal with. Because, like, oh, all I'm doing is writing. I could just take the foot off the gas pedal while I work on this rehab and it's bothering me, and then just put it back on again. Because writers are full-time writers, and, you know, sometimes have to be pretty much elite to do it full-time, have that type of ability to be more seasonal. Elite athletes, I actually think about as practitioners of slow productivity as well. I mean, they, they do one thing. Their sport. They're not working on 30 things. Right? They're not answering emails and jumping off and on calls. They're training for their sport. Of course, they obsess over quality. That's what makes them elite athletes. And their work is literally seasonal. Here's the sport season. Here's the off-season. We treat these things very differently.

• 1:06:18Cal Newport?

  So they have different rhythms of their week. Elite academics, often they become elite because, again, they are slow productivity practitioners as well. Hey, I'm focusing on just this result.

• 1:06:32Cal Newport?

  Academia is very seasonal, teaching, non-teaching, but also working on a result, to being done with a result. It might take you a couple of years before you get going again on another big project. And they obsess over quality. Now, of course, a lot of academic positions have the slow productivity subverted by the injection of the administrative. But in this context, we note that's a problem. Like, they say, "I'm worse at being a professor now because I have to do all this administrative work." Like, what made them elite was not the busyness you see of a later-stage career professor, holding all these administrative positions. What made them elite is when they were more true to the slow productivity principles. So, I see it. I mean, what's missing here, you mentioned balance. I think what you mean by balance is like, the total number of hours you're working in a day is not too bad. Athletes,

• 1:07:17Cal Newport?

  I guess, violate that because it takes a lot of hours if you're just in a season. Yeah. Writers don't work huge number of hours. I think that's still okay. Elite academics, they can work a lot of hours. Yeah, I think, especially if it's a lab-based academia. So, like, fair enough on that point. There are, of course, you mentioned Elon Musk, that points towards the idea that there are careers in which elite level is not really compatible with slow productivity principles. Entrepreneurship is probably the classic example of that, like, starting up a company. You just, you aren't doing one thing. You're doing lots of things. It's not seasonal. It's all out, all the time. And it's not really obsessing over quality because you don't have time or energy to do that. It's just like putting out fires and trying to keep things rolling forward. So, yes, starting big companies is usually not

• 1:08:01Cal Newport?

  compatible with slow productivity. Elite leaders are complicated teams. Those type of positions often aren't compatible. I'm thinking about, like, Navy commanders. You're the CO on a big ship, like a destroyer or something. Like, that's not compatible with slow productivity. It's doing many, many different things. It's all out, all day. It's getting things done right, but not trying to, like, push the quali... You don't have the time, energy, or luxury of, like, "I'm just going to obsess over quality in one thing." It's like trying to prevent bad things from happening. So, yeah, no, not every job has the elite levels be compatible with slow productivity, but a lot do. And you'll see that if you read the book, because I draw from stories of knowledge workers who've done elite work in times past to draw up these principles. So, it should be no surprise. All right. I think we decided, right, Jesse? We're now doing the music on the way out as

• 1:08:46Cal Newport?

  well?

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  We sure did.

• 1:08:47Cal Newport?

  All right, let's hear that.

• 1:08:59Cal Newport?

  This is my competitor product for dundaily.com. All it is, is every five minutes, it just plays that music. Like an app just plays that music every five minutes. It'll relax people, they get good work. All right, do we have a call this week?

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  We do.

• 1:09:13Cal Newport?

  All right, let's hear it.

• 1:09:16Speaker 03

  Hi, Cal. This is Chris. I'm a data architect in Minnesota, and I have a question about how do you manage different projects in the columns specifically active and waiting on someone else? I created a personal project in Asana that I have one task for each of my projects, and I have the active column, and I'm trying to keep that to no more than three open projects at a time. But I also have projects that I'm waiting on other people to get back to me for.

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

  And so I'm curious if you have any advice or rules of thumb around what to do if that list of projects that I'm waiting on people starts to stack up and then, say, four people get back to me at the same time. Wondering if you have any advice on that?

• 1:10:14Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:15Speaker 03

  Really appreciate the show. Thanks.

• 1:10:17Cal Newport?

  That's a good question about these task storage boards. Two things I want to say. First of all, I don't have everything I need to do on my task storage board. These tend to be sort of like tasks that need to get done. But what's not typically included on those boards for me is like ongoing work. If I'm working on a book chapter, for example, that's a major thing I'm working on. There's not a task on my task board that says like, work on book chapter. That's something that's going to come up in my weekly planning. I'm like, what am I doing right now? Oh, I'm working on, my book is one of my big goals for this quarter. So what do I want to get done this week? Well, let's see, if I could finish a draft of chapter three this week, that would actually be good. Greatly put that on my weekly plan. Like today's big, you know, this week's focus is working on chapter

• 1:11:02Cal Newport?

  three. And in fact, maybe I want to actually block out a few big writing blocks to make sure I have time on my calendar for working on on chapter three, right? Nothing here ever touched a task on a Trello board. But the Trello board stuff might be, they often are, they're like one-off tasks or individual tasks, like stuff I need to do or get back to people that I don't want to forget about. All right, so I'll keep that in mind first. Second, okay, so what happens if you have a lot of stuff waiting to hear back from? Well, you, you put these items on the waiting to get back column, so you don't forget about them. You're telling your mind, yeah, I sent out this request. I don't want to forget that that's out there. Like that person may never get back to me again. That's gonna be an open loop that's going to generate stress in my brain.

• 1:11:43Cal Newport?

  So I want to make sure I remember like, yeah, I, I asked Jesse about this, that I'm waiting to hear back. And a good waiting to get back card on a Trello board will say what you're gonna do when that comes back. When that gets back, make a decision and tell Jeremy. So here's what I'm waiting to hear back on it. Here's what I'm gonna do when I get it. Okay. You don't have to execute that right away. So, you know, if someone gets back to you, you can take that off the waiting to get back to you list now. Hey, that's back in my world. But then what you do with that's up to you. It's kind of like a new task has entered your life. You could put it on, you could just do it right then. You could put on your active list as something like, I want to try to get to this as soon as possible. Or it could go on a back burner list. All right, ball's back in my court.

• 1:12:26Cal Newport?

  I'm not gonna act on this right now, but like, okay, it's, it's, it's changed. The status has changed. I've heard back, I have this information. Now I have a new thing to do. I'm gonna put that back, you know, under whatever column is appropriate. So you don't have to do those things right away.

• 1:12:42Cal Newport?

  The, the goal of that list is, you know, not to forget things that are outstanding, but you don't have to execute those things right away. All right, so hopefully that helps. And also, you know, I'm pretty loose about these things. Like often the things I have on my active list, it's, it's non-major things. Like I, but for my list of things, I kind of want to make progress on. And as I go through my daily plan, I, and I have like, put aside admin blocks. I'll go look at those and see how many of those I can churn through. But you know, hey, sometimes things take longer or you lose some admin blocks. You don't get them done. And like, that's fine. I find that kind of loose. Like the critical stuff is going to end up being a part of my weekly plan and probably make its way into my calendar. So hopefully that makes sense about waiting for.

• 1:13:23Cal Newport?

  Just because you've been waiting for something for a while, doesn't mean you have to act on it right away when it comes back to you.

• 1:13:31Cal Newport?

  We got a case study this week where people send in description of using that type of advice. We talked about here on the show in their lives. If you have a case study, you can send them to [email protected]. This case study comes from Amy, who we talked to in episode 323. She was also one of the listeners who pointed us towards the Derek Thompson article that we talked about earlier in the deep dive. So, thank you, Amy. All right. So, I don't remember episode 233, Jesse, in detail, but I guess it was about she was going back to grad school. It had been a few years since she'd been in school.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  She's in her early 30s.

• 1:14:04Cal Newport?

  And we were giving some advice about how to tackle school. And I think one of the points we made is, hey, don't be too stressed about this. You probably are going to find coming back to school in your 30s, it's not going to seem as hard of a job as it was when you were 20, whatever. All right. So, here's her follow-up case study. "I got all As in my first semester of graduate school. Going to school and doing well is much easier at 34 than it was at 18. And it wasn't like I wasn't interested in my college education. I went to Berklee College of Music because I was and still am obsessed with music. But after having some more life experience, my grad school program, though challenging and demanding, feels much easier than undergrad.

• 1:14:48Cal Newport?

  My unsolicited advice for anyone considering college or grad school, take a gap year. If you're 18 and planning to go to college, seriously consider deferring your acceptance for a year. This is a common practice in other countries for various reasons, but Americans would be well, do well to adapt it too." I appreciate that, Amy. It is a true point. Older people find school easier because school is not that hard, once you're used to doing hard things. An 18-year-old's not really used to doing hard things, but a 34-year-old is. And if it's their full-time job, they say, "It's not too hard to study." Like, studying's not fun, but honestly, this is going to take me like five hours this week to be prepared for this exam. Five hours is not that much time. I used to spend five hours just on my inbox on Monday morning alone. This is no big deal."

• 1:15:31Cal Newport?

  I noticed this again and again when I would advise non-traditional college students. So, at Georgetown, I would help advise or give talks to the advising program that would work with non-traditional college students. So, people coming back later in life, but also we did some work with veteran programs, so people coming back on the GI Bill, and they would just crush it. All right. Because they'd seen real hardship. If you are new to school, the gap year's a good idea. Another idea, just read my book, How to Become a Straight-A Student. Read it and do it. Your friends are idiots when it comes to studying. Do not look at how they study. Take no advice from them. They are really bad at it. Do the stuff in that book, you'll get very good grades. That's just it. Like that book is like, here's how the people who get after it, this is how they actually study.

• 1:16:14Cal Newport?

  This is the stuff that works. This is what you really need to do. Do that stuff. It tells you how to be organized, how to take notes, the right way to study for math, the right way to write papers. Just do it that way and you're going to get really good grades and it's going to be a lot easier than what your friends are doing. So yeah, if you treat being a student like a job, it's like an easy job. If on the flip side, you do what many students do is you treat being a student like a vacation, then you're like, this is a really crappy vacation because I keep having to go to the library. And you see like everything you have to do is somehow be negative because it's getting in the way of you having fun. But if you see it as a job, you're like, this is the easiest job I ever had. It's like a half time job and I'm doing great and getting a lot of praise for it. So Amy, thanks for helping emphasize that point. So we have a cool final segment coming up, we'll react to one of my own articles.

• 1:16:59Cal Newport?

  But first, let's briefly hear from another sponsor.

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

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• 1:17:32Cal Newport?

  I want to talk about the Defender, the class of vehicles that we have been promoting here on the show. Because it seems to kind of fit with our theme, right? I mean, it is a vehicle that is well suited for those who are seeking something deeper in life. But it's also pretty cool. It's rugged and comfortable, which is, by the way, how people like to describe me. Rugged, rugged and comfortable. I've always liked these cars. There's actually the current Defender line of cars. They have the 90, the 110 and the 130 model. The 130 model can now hold up to eight seats. This is a car that has a very durable rugged design that you can take adventurous places.

• 1:18:17Cal Newport?

  But it's very comfortable inside. It's got all of the latest technologies to make driving not just comfortable, but easy. I particularly like they have the under the car camera system. So if you're driving like in some sort of situation off road, you could see what's under the car. Like where is that big rock? Because I want to make sure that I'm going around it with my tire. And you see it like you're seeing through your car on the screen, which is really cool. Or of course, the way I would use that feature, which is okay, what kid toy am I currently running over right now in our driveway? And how valuable is it? Do I have to bother going to get it? Or can I just continue to drive over it? It would help me there. It's a cool car, rugged, but also comfortable, adventurous, but also relaxing.

• 1:19:00Cal Newport?

  So you can design your Defender at landroverusa.com. Build your Defender at landroverusa.com. Also want to talk about our friends at Shopify. Everyone we know, and okay, I'm not fact checking that statement. So let's say so many people Jesse and I know who are in this business who sell things, they just use Shopify. That's just what you do. Like if you're going to sell something online or in a store, you use Shopify because they have selling things nailed down. It just is going to make it professional and easy and effective. Nobody does selling better than Shopify. They have the number one checkout on the planet and their not so secret secret Shop Pay,

• 1:19:42Cal Newport?

  which boosts conversions up to 50%. People who are thinking about buying a thing are going to buy it. As Shop Pay pushes them forward, that means less carts go abandoned. So if you're into growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling on the web, in your store, in their feed, and everywhere in between, businesses that sell more sell on Shopify. So upgrade your business and get the same checkout that basically everyone we know who's selling things online uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com/deep. Just be sure to type that in all lowercase to get the discount. Go to Shopify.com/deep to upgrade your selling today. That's Shopify.com/deep.

• 1:20:27Cal Newport?

  All right, Jesse, let's move on to our final segment. We like to do one of two segments in the end, either a tech corner where I talk about technology, or a Cal reacts where I react to something on the internet. Today, we're doing both again, because I am reacting to my own latest article for The New Yorker, and it is an article about technology. I'm going to pull this up on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening, to show you what I think is probably the most disturbing graphic that has ever accompanied something I have written, Jesse. I would describe it as a phone melting somebody's face. So, okay, it's pretty intense. A cool graphic, though, actually. It's like a...

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  Do you ever know the graphics they're gonna use?

• 1:21:08Cal Newport?

  No, they do it kind of last minute.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:11Cal Newport?

  Yeah. It's been occasions where I wish I had a version of it.

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  So it's not like the book cover input that you have?

• 1:21:18Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I don't know how it works. Sometimes they're drawing it from scratch, and sometimes they're like, they have it already. I don't quite know how it works. But I guess this is probably not an artwork I want blown up large in my house, because it would give me nightmares. It's a cool picture, though. All right, here's the article I wrote. It's a column. This is me again. I took over Kyle Shaka's infinite scroll column for a month. This column is titled, "What Happened When An Extremely Offline Person Tried TikTok?" So the premise was, hey, I'm recovering from this injury. I've got kind of laid up a little bit. Maybe it would be fun to try TikTok. The formal journalistic experiment I was doing here was to see how is the experience of social media and our relationship with social

• 1:21:59Cal Newport?

  media changed since when I was last, like, really actively writing about like how people use social media, whether they should use social media, which was really about a decade ago. I'm just going to point out a couple of points. So the perhaps one of the most striking things I found is that when I was writing about quitting social media, this was like 2013, 2016, that's when I became known for that. I went back and read those articles again for this. There were really big debates happening. Supporters of social media had very strong reasons why it was important. I was debating against those reasons. So my articles were like very carefully walking through these arguments and saying these arguments are not as strong as you think. And people would get upset about those stances.

• 1:22:42Cal Newport?

  It was really a pretty robust debate. I've talked about this before on the show, but like I would write a Times op ed and then the Times would publish a response op ed, or I would go on the radio to talk about that article and then they would bring on someone to push back on me on the radio show to say, you know, Cal is wrong. Like it was a pretty contentious debate that was unfolding at that time. Most of those articles that I arguments I used to debate against, none of them apply anymore to social media. We use the same phrase, but when I was on Tik Tok or trying YouTube shorts or Instagram reels, the arguments that people used to make and favor social media just don't apply anymore. They said, this is how you keep up with your friends and your social life. No one keeps up with their friends or social life on Tik Tok.

• 1:23:26Cal Newport?

  They said, this is going to open up career opportunities. This was a big one. People were like, you're crazy. You're going to disappear and have no job if you're not using these platforms. No one's saying that about Tik Tok. No one's saying like, yeah, I got my job because my, my boss at the insurance company thought my Tik Toks were fire. Right? That just doesn't happen. The other major argument from 10 years ago was this is the online town square. This is where like culture is being formed. Right? This is like the Twitter argument back then. The most important articles are moving around Facebook. Tik Tok, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, you're getting these incredibly individualized, atomized feeds. Your feed looks nothing like the person next to you. It's not creating collective culture. It's creating isolated, customized distraction. So I was really struck. I was like, man, all this fighting I used to do, none of it's relevant anymore.

• 1:24:11Cal Newport?

  Right? So these big arguments for why social media is important don't apply to the latest, most popular generation of, of, of social media. So I went and I talked to some young people who do use these services. I had them show me Tik Tok. I was like, well, why do you use it? And here's the thing. They don't have a great answer. None of these young people were giving full-throated defenses of TikTok in the way that I used to get full-throated defenses of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram back in the day. They're like, yeah, it's pretty stupid. But it's diverting. The one guy I talked to, Zach, would talk about, it's like, there's these memes, these video memes, and it's funny, and he showed them to me, and they're funny and interesting, and they remind me of some of the absurdist type of humor that was popular on the early web when I was in college in the early 2000s, and I get it, but that's not like a profound

• 1:24:56Cal Newport?

  argument. It was like, yeah, this is funny, I like him, he would actually use the funny TikToks he found as just a social lubricant, like you could send these to friends via text message, and it gave you something, an excuse like ping your friend or to talk to someone. So the young woman I talked to was like, I don't know, it feels kind of authentic, it creates emotion, she sent me some TikToks, it was like a recipe thing that was visually appealing, and a video of vets returning home early to surprise their kids, and that was like touching. Like, none of them have a grandiose theory, like you used to get from communication professors back in 2013, about why this was at the key of culture, or this was at the key of your

• 1:25:39Cal Newport?

  success, or it's at the key, it's the evolving civic life. People are just like, I don't know, it's diverting, and I could use a little diversion in my life. There's a lot of fears around this because it's very diverting, and we see young people, they have a hard time turning their eyes away from this, because once we get rid of all those other justifications, you can hone in on just being as engaging as possible, and that could be pretty addictive. But I found an almost hopeful node in this. If we're no longer fighting for social media, then I think its footprint on our lives is going to get smaller. I think, yes, its addictive nature maybe is higher, but the addiction is no longer protected. It's no longer protected in the clothing of virtue. It's just addicting.

• 1:26:24Cal Newport?

  It's cigarettes in the 80s versus cigarettes in the 50s. No one wants to be smoking anymore. We all get it. It's still hard to stop, but everyone kind of agrees, like, yeah, I probably should do this less. So we use the term "social media" today, we used the term "social media" 10 years ago, but it's describing something different, and in some ways, it's something more insidious, but in other ways, it's something that feels like it's much more solvable because it feels much less important. Its grasp is hard, but its grounding is shallow. So I actually came away from this like, oh.

• 1:26:57Cal Newport?

  Not as scary because no one's fighting me on this. We're all on the same side. And the fact that we have the TikTok ban, at least in some form, seems like it's going through. That would be positive as well. You see one of these services being be banned. That also just like helps change their mindset of like, yeah, these things are kind of optional. It was okay. We took that one away. We all survived. It just kind of emphasizes the optionality, the triviality, the tangentiality of these services. So it was an interesting experiment, Jesse. I had no, by the way, I have no interest in, they're on my phone now because I was doing the experiment. I have no interest in clicking those apps. I don't know if you've used TikTok before. It's just.

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  I've never used it.

• 1:27:34Cal Newport?

  But I get you would get used to it if like it was, these young people are more used to it.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  You think Elon's gonna buy it?

• 1:27:42Cal Newport?

  Maybe. Yeah, maybe. I don't, I don't know what's gonna happen. I always get, I'm bad at predicting the legislative. It's like, we're recording this on Friday before the ban could go into effect very quickly, but like probably like Congress wants to expand it. I don't know what's gonna happen.

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  I think he's gonna buy it.

• 1:28:03Cal Newport?

  You know, I just wish.

• 1:28:03Speaker 01

  It'll be expensive, but.

• 1:28:05Cal Newport?

  He doesn't think he has the money.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  They'll raise it.

• 1:28:08Cal Newport?

  Yeah, maybe a syndicate. Yeah. I just hope it goes away. Just so we get used to this idea of like, yeah, these things come and go, which I think is the reality of social media today. Like these things come and go. The guy I talked to for the article, Zach, shout out to Zach, he also uses Instagram reels, which is very similar to TikTok, and he mixes them up. He doesn't care. He's like, oh, here, check out this TikTok. And really it's an Instagram reel. Like there's no, it doesn't matter. Like they're all just, there's no social graph. TikTok, you know, most people, like the typical TikTok user, according to peer research, doesn't ever even touch their bio field. Doesn't know anything about you other than the videos you like. It's not like your friends are in there, your followers are in there. If you leave the platform, it's a problem. No, I can jump over to reels and, and see videos

• 1:28:51Cal Newport?

  on there and I'm getting the same experience. Like I don't, it doesn't matter. These things have become portable. They're just becoming increasingly generic sources of short form distraction. And that feels very different than like, man, I would get yelled at. People thought I was like an eccentric, Luddite, anti-democratic weirdo for not using like one of these three platforms. That is just not the case anymore.

• 1:29:14Speaker 01

  He bought Twitter for 44 billion, right? How much would TikTok be? Like 200 billion?

• 1:29:21Cal Newport?

  I don't know. It's a good question. So I mean Twitter's user base is in the hundreds of millions and TikTok's much bigger than that.

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  You would think it'd be at least four times.

• 1:29:29Cal Newport?

  TikTok's generating a lot more revenue as well. Yeah. I don't, that's not easy money to raise. He's in trouble right now for some of the details of how he used his own stock that raised, the SEC's mad at him for how he raised the money for Twitter. You know, he's like taking loans against his own stock and.

• 1:29:46Speaker 01

  I just read that SBF book from Lewis about FTX.

• 1:29:51Cal Newport?

  Yeah, he could have bought it. Not anymore. Not anymore. It's a lot of abbreviations.

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  Similar thing of all coming in funds.

• 1:29:58Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Maybe we should buy it. Just be all like slow productivity corner theme music.

• 1:30:05Cal Newport?

  And Jesse Skeleton. That would be a good, just like Jesse Skeleton doing like funny things and slow productivity corner theme music. That would be a successful platform. I look forward to that. All right. Anyways, let's wrap it up for now. We'll be back next week with another episode and until then, as always, stay deep.

• 1:30:26Cal 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.