Should I Use Notebooks More Often? (Cal’s Strategy) | Monday Advice

Tell me if this sounds familiar: you buy a beautiful notebook, excited by all its possibilities to help refine your thoughts and generate new insights. Then it sits unused until you forget about it. The problem is not *what* notebooks you own but instead *how* you use them. In this episode, Cal walks through the four different notebooks he owns, and the four different ways he uses them. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia (0:00) Should I Use Notebooks More Often? (Cal’s Strategy) (30:11) Comments on a controversial article (33:18 ) Statistics about smartphone bans in schools (38:15) A practical question about remote work (40:57) A question about focus and the World Cup (46:08) What Cal is up to (48:12) What Cal is reading Books: Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Walter Ong) Lost (Rachel Hartigan) Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at www.calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at https://peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba? https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/a-neurologist-claims-gen-z-has-a-lower-iq-than-millennials/ar-AA1XAIFu https://x.com/JimenaJuani/status/2072095851816620191?s=20 Thanks to our Sponsors: https://www.superhuman.com https://www.factormeals.com/deep50off https://www.monarch.com/deep https://www.mybodytutor.com Cal Newport is not a Wealthfront client. Thanks to Jesse Miller for production and mastering, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Nate Mechler for research and newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Cal Newport?

  Do you like the idea of an old fashioned paper notebook? I mean, a lot of people do. There's something aesthetically pleasing about a well-made notebook. There's also the excitement of anticipating the original thoughts or insights that this tool is going to help you usher into the world. But then, if you're like most people, you buy that fancy new notebook and it ends up sitting idle and then eventually you forget about it. So here's the problem. It's not enough to simply own a nice notebook. You need a specific use for it that takes specific advantage of its analog format. When it comes to paper, in other words, it's how you use it that matters just as much

• 0:43Cal Newport?

  as what you own. This, of course, inspires the natural question, what are the most effective ways to make use of a notebook? Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this podcast, which is the perfect opportunity to go looking for some answers. All right, so here's my plan. I'm going to use myself as an example. I actually use four different types of notebooks on a regular basis. I have them here. And I'm going to go through them. I'm going to go through each of the four different types of notebooks that I use. I'm going to explain how I use each notebook. I even have close up shots of interior pages of each, so you can see that use in action. So if you've ever felt an urge to integrate more pen and paper into your daily life,

• 1:27Cal Newport?

  but you weren't sure how to make that habit worthwhile, then this episode is for you. All right, as always, I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world.

• 1:48Cal Newport?

  All right, so as mentioned, here's my approach today. I have four notebooks, four notebook types that I actually use. I brought four of my own notebooks here today. And for each, I'm going to go through and tell you three things. What activity I use that notebook for? Why that activity is well-suited for analog on paper instead of doing something digital? And then why the specific type of notebook I use for that activity? Why is that specific type of notebook the right one, at least for me? All right, so we're going to start with the first type of notebook I use on a regular basis, which is a planner. In particular, I use my own product, the Time Block Planner. What do I do with this particular type of notebook? I plan my days.

• 2:30Cal Newport?

  So if you haven't heard me talk about time blocking before, it's an idea that I first introduced in my 2016 book, Deep Work, where I say the best way to make the most out of your mind during a workday is to actually block out the time of that day, to give every minute of your workday a job, to make a plan for your cognition, as opposed to just reacting to what's happening, what's incoming, and what you feel like doing next. It can be an exhausting way to work, but it, I usually argue, gets about, on average, 2X more results per time. It makes it much easier to control distraction. It makes it much easier to arrive in states of depth. I'll pull up on the screen here, here's a sample time block plan page from inside that notebook. You see, it's pretty simple, right?

• 3:14Cal Newport?

  We have, on the left side of the page, the hours of the day, and then I'm just blocking off the hours of the day and saying what I'm going to do during them. So from 9:00 to 9:30, I'm reading. From 9:30 to 11:00, I'm finishing the podcast prep. From 11:00 to 12:00, maybe I'm recording a podcast. So I'm giving a plan for every minute of my day. Jess, you might notice my formatting here. I just evolve over time my own formats for time blocks, but you'll notice, dark lines, like around read, is how I indicate deep work. Double lines, like under finished podcast prep, is how I indicate administrative work, or work that doesn't require deep work. And then triple lines, I don't know where this came from, but triple lines on the right is an appointment. So something where it's actually also on a calendar.

• 3:58Cal Newport?

  Other time blocking tricks, I put a number in this admin block down here, and then up in the upper right, I can have a more detailed list of tasks that are supposed to fit in that block. I can't actually fit them all in there. All right? So that's a key part of my day. A key notebook use of mine is to use a time block planner. All right. Question two, why paper for this usage? We have all sorts of digital planning tools. Well, there's a few reasons why I like planning my day on paper. One, I think your day feels more intentional when you've actually sketched it out with that tactile feel of a pen on page. A little insider knowledge about the time block planner, because I actually sell this myself,

• 4:38Cal Newport?

  is the paper is carefully selected to feel optimal with the type of pen I most often use, which is a Uniball Micro 0.5mm ballpoint. Look, we got, Jesse has one for me here. Da, da, da. We have these all over the office. I have so many of these at home, Jesse. It's crazy. The paper in the time block planner is actually optimized for it. It's a little bit rough. It's not, no gloss, and it kind of pulls the ink off there, but without being so grainy that it blot. So I love the tactile feel of drawing out my day. Makes it seem intentional, much more so that if I'm just moving things around on a digital screen. I also want to separate my daily plan from my computer, because not all of my work is at the computer.

• 5:18Cal Newport?

  And sometimes I want to check what's coming next, without having to go into the digital rabbit hole of this fully connected multitasking digital distraction machine. So I like having my plan as something I can bring with me, that's not just on my computer. I also crucially have it in my room at night, so if I remember something, I can just go over to my time block plan, and I'll write it on the page for the next day. So that when I make my time block plan for the next day, I'll see it. So that's a way to try to get things out of my mind, without, again, having to interact with the whole digital ecosystem, every time I have any idea or reminder that I want to keep. Alright, so why this particular notebook types? Like, what's specifically good about this type of notebook, for this particular use

• 5:58Cal Newport?

  case of daily planning? Well, there's two things that were key to me, when I designed the time block planner. One was, I wanted it to be lie-flat. So we got good sturdy, double spiral bound bindings, that allows this thing to lie-flat, so I can work on it and plan it and have it on my desk. And two, I wanted full or near full-size pages, because you need a lot of room for planning. You don't have to have my particular notebook to do time block planning, but you want to look for those two features. A good sturdy, probably double spiral bound, easy lie-flat binding, and near full-size pages. Before I created this planner, I used to use the black and red double spiral bound notebooks,

• 6:43Cal Newport?

  which, you know, served a similar purpose for me. Alright, so that is notebook number one. Alright, notebook number two. This is going to be controversial, Jesse.

• 6:53Cal Newport?

  And we know already notebooks is a touchy subject. Well, this is going to be controversial because my second type of notebook is digital. And that is my Remarkable Paper Pro, which the good folks at Remarkable sent me at some point. And I really, actually, I really like, I really like this digital notebook. What do I use it for? We'll start there and then I can get into the details about why the Remarkable. Okay, so what I often use this for is for longer-term plans, strategic plans, or visions. So if I have some important, bigger thing, a sort of professional, big professional project I'm working on, or even more important, a Halloween display that is going to take

• 7:36Cal Newport?

  a lot of my focus or energy, I'm going to build out and update a plan that I'm going to use in reference to help guide my actions over many months, I will often use my Remarkable Paper Pro to keep that plan. So I'll load one up here on the screen. This is a screenshot. I kind of mocked this up a little bit, but this is a screenshot from the Remarkable Paper Pro itself. You can see, you can draw, that's what I love about this thing, even though it's e-ink, I'll get into that in a second, you can have different width pins, you can have colors, you can have highlighting. So here we have like a sample controller layout for a Halloween decoration plan. You can see here, we have our Falcon controller on a Raspberry Pi that's going through Ethernet hub over to a Pixel controller that then has strands and daisy chain spots on them with

• 8:20Cal Newport?

  the powered speakers coming out directly from the Raspberry Pi. So I can draw these things, I can make this plan, I can build a list of, okay, so what are the steps, where am I in this project? So it's good, I use this for bigger strategic plans. All right, so why do I want to use paper for this purpose? Well, first, we have to answer the question, is it paper if you're on a Remarkable as opposed to a paper notebook? And I would say it's very close. And here's the key thing I want to say technologically about a Remarkable versus like an iPad. It's not a lit screen. It is not an LED or LCD screen like you would have on an iPad or a smartphone where you have pixels that glow with different colors and then that gives you a screen, right? It's not that. So it's not like a TV, it's not like your phone, it's not like an iPad.

• 9:05Cal Newport?

  These actually use e-ink technology, the same things you would see in a Kindle. Underneath it all, you have physical discs that turn with electric. You put a little electric current, they turn. So you're actually sort of physically, you are physically creating, you're creating a physical mark. It's the pen is causing physical discs to switch. So it's flat, it's not lit. I mean, it has lighting on it, but it's like you're lighting a page. It's not the page itself is actually lit. It has a great paper-like feeling. There's a drag to it that the pencil goes across. You can feel friction. It can respond to friction. So it's very close to the feel of paper. The way it looks, the way you actually write on it.

• 9:47Cal Newport?

  But it has the other nice thing of you can have thousands of pages in here and they automatically back up to the cloud. So you can just grab a page from it and print it if you want to carry it with you portably. All right, so why I like to use paper or simulated paper for this type of strategic planning is that I don't just type. I like to draw shapes. I like to draw diagrams. You saw that in my example. I want to use color. I want to use highlighting. When I'm planning, I use all of those features. And so if I was just typing something, it's harder. You can't have a diagram. You can't have easily different colors. You can't highlight differently. That's one of the reasons why I use the Remarkable instead of an analog notebook is that I don't want to carry a bunch of colored pencils and highlighters with me. But all of that is built into the Remarkable.

• 10:30Cal Newport?

  Also, it's expensive, so I take it seriously and that somehow makes me take the plans more seriously. If I put a plan in there, I'm not going to lose it in the way that, you know, I have a lot of notebooks. And if I just write it in some notebook somewhere, who knows where that notebook's going to go. It's going to disappear in a backpack that I stopped using. But this thing I'm not going to lose. And so I like to put my more serious planning into it. All right, so that's both why paper and I guess why I'm using this particular notebook for those particular types of plans. Let's take a quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that make this show possible.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich isn't about having life all figured out. It's opening yourself to all the possibilities. That's why your dedicated financial advisor provides long-term planning built around you, meeting you where you are, and helping you get closer to where you want to be. So no matter where you're starting from, you can move forward with confidence. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 11:38Cal Newport?

  All right, we're making progress here. Let's move on to our third type of notebook and usage that you might use in your life. All right, so the next type of notebook I use on a regular basis are these. This is a Field Notes notebook. So if you're listening instead of watching, they're small. It's like soft staple binding. And the cover is just like a slightly thicker page. So it's very flexible pocket size notebook. I've used all different types, but I like the blank page variety I find to be the best. All right, what do I do with my Field Note notebooks? I use this for single-purpose brainstorming. So if I have a particular issue that I'm trying to make progress on, it could be working out a book idea.

• 12:23Cal Newport?

  It could be trying to improve something professionally, like, okay, how do we push this podcast to the next level? It could be figuring out a personal improvement. Like you have a vision for a new health milestone you want to get to. And you're trying to figure out like, how do I do that? Why am I having trouble with this? You have a naughty issue, K-N-O-T-T-Y, that you're trying to make progress on, and you're not quite sure how. Single-purpose planning says you have a dedicated notebook to that issue, that you take notes in, as you have insights, as you have ideas, you double back, you return to things. It's a sort of an extended dialogue captured in paper of you trying to solve a particular problem. I'll bring up a page here on the screen that I mocked up. This is sort of the type of things it looks like

• 13:07Cal Newport?

  in my single-purpose planning pages. Like, so here, it shows me trying to like, understand. Maybe this is YouTube and the role of YouTube in this podcast. And I have this sort of list here of on one side, do you want to just try to maximize views and there's some pluses and minuses, or you try to maximize quality, but there's some minuses and pluses and I have some notes on it. That's the type of thing that shows up in my single purpose notebook. So you could imagine, you know, if this notebook was dedicated to figuring out how to get more, what to do with YouTube and this podcast, that there'd be a lot of pages like that as I try to figure things out. All right. In general, I like single purpose planning like this because complicated problems take thought.

• 13:49Cal Newport?

  Like, we're not used to giving things extended thought anymore because we're so distracted and we're afraid of our own cognition. But hard things required hard thought. This is what I was taught as a theoretician at MIT. You want to solve a problem, you're going to come back to it again and again and again, and your mind gets better at it, you find different angles, and eventually, hopefully, you make progress. So, a single purpose notebook helps you do that. You don't forget the things you've written down, you accumulate knowledge, you can double back. It's a great way to make progress on difficult projects. So why paper for this usage? Well, for me, portability is the key thing. I want to be able to have the single purpose notebook with me so that I am ready when insight strikes. I don't just sit down with these type of problems, it's hard just to sit down and force it.

• 14:32Cal Newport?

  All right, I have an hour and I'm going to sit down and solve this problem. You might, or you might get stuck. What you really want is the ability that, you know, you're on a trip and you're reading something and suddenly you have an insight about this problem, and you want to be able to pull this out of either your pocket or whatever, it'll fit in whatever bag you have. Pull it out and jot down some notes. The portability is what matters. It's like, I'm working on this problem, I'm bringing this with me. I like to do problems on trips. But something I often do is like, if I'm heading off on a trip, I like a business trip, a book tour or something, I'll have a single purpose notebook, like, my goal for this trip is to make progress on this problem, and I'll bring it with me at all times, it'll be in my pocket, it'll be in my bag, it'll be in my backpack, and I'm just sort of working on making progress. So why this particular notebook? Well, if you want portability...

• 15:17Cal Newport?

  Field Notes is really a great way to go. They're small, they're flexible, they're light, they can fit in a pocket, they can fit in the front pocket of your backpack, they can fit in a purse, they can fit inside a jacket, inside the inside pocket. They're more portable than Moleskines, which I used to use for this purpose. Those are a nicer notebook, in my opinion. They're thicker with a hard binding, and you can't fit them in a jeans pocket very easily. They're not going to fit in a lot of inner pockets of jackets. So there's like an extra level of portability. Also, you can buy these things in bulk. Moleskines are kind of expensive. I buy these like 20 at a time, in just big packages, so you're not being precious. Like, I'm just grabbing thoughts, and maybe half the stuff I write in there doesn't matter. I don't care, because it's, you know, I got a ton of these. It's not a real expensive thing.

• 16:02Cal Newport?

  I think that helps as well. So that's why I use this particular notebook for that particular purpose. Alright, so we've made our way to the fourth type of notebooks that I use on a regular basis. So here's my fourth type of notebook that I use for extending my working memory. Alright, so let me be a little bit more clear about this. When I'm working, and I need to separate this from single-purpose notebook usage. When I'm working on a hard problem, this was particularly true, I'll say, when I was doing applied mathematics as a theoretical computer scientist, but I think it also expands to other types of technical problems, be them professional or in their personal life.

• 16:46Cal Newport?

  When I'm in the middle of trying to solve something with deep working concentration, you can become much smarter if you're able to extend your working memory beyond what your brain can handle. And the classic way you extend your working memory in the moment beyond what your brain can easily store is with paper. And so I like to use gridline composition notebooks, usually cheap ones like you would get for school. I classically use these when I'm trying to solve a problem, to take notes in the moment, draw diagrams, put down the mathematical equations, see if they actually work. I'll load a page up here. This is actually from working on, this is from the notebook I brought. This is from working on a particular problem a few, I don't know when this was, but like

• 17:31Cal Newport?

  five, six years ago. And it's just extending my memory. I'm drawing a bipartite graph and I have some questions about it, then I thought some more. And then I'm sort of, I was trying out a proof strategy here based on these different sized bands. You can see I'm working out on the side here, some, some simple math, just to see how things simplify. Okay, this is from July 2018, Jesse. So this is seven years old. So yeah, I'm working out the math here a little bit, just to make sure what I had in my head actually makes sense. This is just, like, if you look at this as a whole, doesn't really make sense. It's not like a well thought through argument. It's me just extending my memory. I'm, I'm having these thoughts in my mind, I'm writing them down, so I don't have to hold it just in my head.

• 18:15Cal Newport?

  And then I can check it, go back, think some more, where is that math right? Let me write it. So I use grid line notebooks as a way of extending my working memory when working on particular hard problems. Why is this different than the single use notebook? Because, you know, I, this is in the moment. The single use notebook, I might over a few weeks be working on one problem and building up more and more thoughts. This is, I am right now trying to make progress on a theorem and I'm using one page from this notebook to, to write down and extend my working memory in the moment. I don't, I don't need to go back to it. If I make progress on a proof or a technical problem, then I'll transfer that over to like, you know, LaTeX or wherever I'm writing up the formal paper, I'll send the notes via

• 18:59Cal Newport?

  email to my collaborators. It's, it's not archival. It's just in the moment, trying to extend your memory. So if I go through this particular notebook from five, six years ago, every page is completely different. You'll have a couple pages from one time I used it, a couple pages from another. So it's just about extending your working memory in the moment, but that does make you much smarter. This was actually my primary method really for working on mathematics. When I was doing theoretical computer science research is I would go for a walk. And I would try to make progress and I would stop and pull out a composition notebook from my bag. And take notes and see if it made sense and then keep going and pull, write some more in the notebook. Those composition notebooks and me on foot is how I did.

• 19:42Cal Newport?

  I would say like half of my mathematical insight and the other half was working on shared whiteboards with collaborators. Put those two things together and you got, you know, that's most of the mathematics that I've, I've published. So that is a fantastic use for a notebook, but why paper? Well, because look, what I'm doing, I'm doing a lot of math symbols. I'm doing a lot of diagrams. A lot of my work is sort of graph theory based, a mix of probabilistic randomized analysis and graph theories. You're going to draw a lot of graphs and you're going to do a lot of algebra. That, you know, pen and paper is the best for that. You could just, you could write all these different symbols and equations and simplify and kind of, you know, it's just the best for that. You can draw the picture. So it's by far the best technology for doing that.

• 20:24Cal Newport?

  And the portability was important because again, I would bring these things on walks all over the DC area. To work on thoughts and take notes in my notebook. And I would, I would use school ones, like this is a cheap one. I had some for a while. The marble composition classic notebooks from the eighties and nineties. I used a bunch of those. I didn't overthink it because again, it's just in the moment, making my brain smarter. It's not that it itself is archival, right? So why the particular, like what did I care about? Like why this particular notebook? Grid lining was the key to me. Right? Because if I'm going to be doing mathematical equations and drawing graphs and drawing diagrams and writing text. Grids are what's going to be useful for me.

• 21:07Cal Newport?

  Because it allows you to line up things. You can put different vertices in different boxes. You can line up your mathematical, you know, mathematical equations will have different levels. Big sigmas plus small subscripts. And so it makes it easy to write and line up all your different symbols. Also, when you're doing. You know, like I was doing, again, I mentioned, I ended up doing a lot of probabilistic analysis, which means anyone who's done like concentration bounds, you're going to get these like giant fractions and the numerator itself is going to have fractions. The denominator is going to have its own fractions. Those are going to be raised to exponents. You just need to be able to sort of expand and contract as needed on the page. The key thing for grid notebooks that I've learned in my life is it's really hard to find the right level of brightness for your grid.

• 21:52Cal Newport?

  If the grid is too defined, it is going to clutter your writing. And it's going to be hard to differentiate. You'll see the grid lines will be interpreted in your mind similar to your marks on the page and it's going to clutter the writing. I bought a 12-pack of grid notebooks recently, legal style, from Amazon because again, I use this all the time to expand my working memory and it's worthless to me because the grids are too strong and it clutters it. But like this notebook here, this level, this is pretty good. So it's, it's, the grids are noticeable, but you want them kind of in the background. So that this is blue and light. So when I'm writing with my black Uniball Micro on it, it clearly differentiates them. So like that was a big part of the trick.

• 22:34Cal Newport?

  Why this notebook is it's grid pages, but the right grid, blue and light. And that can be sometimes hard to get right. All right. So there we go. Let's just review these real quick because those are the, the four specific uses I use in my life for notebooks. In fact, let me grab them all here.

• 22:56Cal Newport?

  All right. Just to review, I use a notebook for daily planning. It used to be double spiral brown, lay flat, good paper. I use a notebook for longer-term strategic planning. I use a Remarkable Paper Plus because I can do all sorts of colors. I can do highlights. I can do diagrams and I take stuff in here seriously. So it makes me take those plans seriously. I do single-purpose planning in highly portable, pocket-sized, almost disposable notebooks like Field Notes. That's how I make progress on big, complicated projects. And I use cheap grid-lined composition notebooks for doing working memory extension. It's all about just being smarter in the moment. It's not archival. You don't want to be too precious about what you write in there.

• 23:40Cal Newport?

  There's other uses for notebooks as well. Of course, there's many other systems that are out there, but I wanted to give a sense of what I do, right? Paper is important. Paper plays a big part in my life.

• 23:52Cal Newport?

  But you have to know why you're using the paper. If you just buy a notebook from a museum gift shop because it looks nice, nothing's gonna happen with it. You have to buy a notebook for a reason. A reason that needs paper and needs the particular format of that particular notebook you bought. That's how you get the most use out of the analog. So think in terms of specificity and you will get more utility out of your analog tools. So there we go, Jesse.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  I have a couple of questions.

• 24:19Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  So with the reading block, is that the books that you review on the show or is that?

• 24:26Cal Newport?

  Oh, that's, yeah. So in the sample time block plan, which here I'll load it, I'll load it up here. I had a reading block in the morning.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  That's considered deep work.

• 24:36Cal Newport?

  Uh, considered a deep work, yeah. So the reason why I have it on there is, um, I'm trying something new right now, the last couple of weeks, which is because I'm, um, I need to cover a lot of reading for the new book I want to write about thinking. And my goal this summer is to read a lot of books about related topics, about thinking and the mind, the evolution of human thought or whatever, so that I really kind of know what I'm talking about. I can think through this book more, more carefully. To get through all those books, because they're kind of beast. Um, I have a rule where I want to do the 30 or 60 minutes of reading a day, just of those books.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 25:10Cal Newport?

  And then beyond that-

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Is that a 30-minute block?

• 25:12Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I put a 30-minute block down. Um, I'm at 45 minutes today, but I, I want to get to an hour. Uh, because that's the only way to get there. And then I do other reading, any, all the other stuff I read, I just read after that. And that, that's, that I'm not scheduling on my, my workday plan necessarily. So yeah, I'm, I'm trying to see. I've discovered I, it depends on the book, but on the book I'm reading now, I'm averaging about a page a minute. So if I do 60 minutes, I'm getting about like 70 pages done. This is like a 450-page book. So like, if I'm not putting aside an hour a day, I'm not going to get through it. It's going to take too long. So that's why that's on there. That's something I've been trying. So to me, that, that's professional reading. That's like part of the effort. That's part of my key deep work right now, this summer.

• 25:56Cal Newport?

  I'm done with one book. I'm in the early stages of thinking about another, and the way you do that is you read a lot.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:01Cal Newport?

  I just want to make sure I get it done.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  And then, do you still do a lot of math?

• 26:05Cal Newport?

  Not right now. Uh-

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Do you miss it at all?

• 26:08Cal Newport?

  I do a little bit, yeah. Yeah. Because like the summer, you know, the summer is when all those conferences were and I've been hearing about them and I've, you know, it's, it's, it's on my mind right now. But yeah, for people who don't know- I mean, I kind of have an interesting professional trajectory, but my academic training was in computer science and in particular, I distributed algorithm theory, right? So that's what I did. I trained under Nancy Lynch at MIT. That's my main work is doing algorithms and lower bounds for distributed, distributed systems. And that's, that's, that's what I did. That was my academic work. And then I was always writing books and articles at the same time. Those sort of merged together at some point around the pandemic as Georgetown

• 26:50Cal Newport?

  got very serious about digital ethics as an emerging field that they wanted to play a major role in, and they wanted me to play a role in them playing a role in it. So that happened. And also I ran out of promotions, right? So I'm a full professor. There's no more promotions to get. So it's not like I have to be super careful about keeping publication counts up to a particular level to make sure that I get the right letters to get promoted. Those two things came together. And in recent years, I've been much more aggressively focused on the question of the type of technology I did the math for, how it affects us and what we should do about it. So I haven't been doing almost any of the old mathematics. But I think I'm staying sharp because I'm reading a lot of hard things. I'm writing a lot. I don't know. I guess they're like

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Is it kind of like golf? If you don't do the hard math, you get a little

• 27:35Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I think you get rusty.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:37Cal Newport?

  Yeah. And I'll be honest, I was never great at math. I mean, I'm good at math compared to the average person, right? Because I'm a professor who does applied mathematics research. But compared to other theoretical computer scientists, it was always like one of my weaker, it was always one of my weaker skills was some of the detail, the algebra, like it's all experience. I'm fine at it, but I probably would have been, wasn't the best at it. But I do kind of miss it. It's fun. I miss the puzzles. But it's not like I'm not staying sharp because I, you know, hey, working on like a hard New Yorker piece or something like this.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  No, yeah.

• 28:12Cal Newport?

  Yeah, that pushes you as well. In somewhat different ways. It's, it's why, by the way, people detect if they really think about it, a certain type of rigor or like logic or puzzle pieces fitting together behind my writing and thinking. It's because I spent all my life doing mathematics. So it definitely affects the way I write. It's why you get that sort of feeling when you read my writing of like, oh, this all just kind of makes sense. It's because I'm making sure all the pieces click together like in a proof and your mind recognizes that subliminally. And it's like, oh, this makes more sense. Right? So I, I kind of structure my writing and thinking like a mathematician. All right. Do you use notebooks, Jesse? I gotta get you some notebooks.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Yes, I use

• 28:52Speaker 02

  two, two to three.

• 28:54Cal Newport?

  Two or three different types or two to three?

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Two to three different types. I have a field notes that I carry around.

• 28:58Cal Newport?

  For what use?

• 29:00Speaker 02

  General thoughts.

• 29:01Cal Newport?

  General thoughts, right.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Sometimes I try like the solving a problem and that will be a separate one. I have a time block planner that's, I make my own just because it's a little bit smaller. I like it smaller because it fits in my bag.

• 29:11Cal Newport?

  Can I just say something? Traitor.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  One word, traitor. And then I have a notebook for my Spanish classes.

• 29:21Cal Newport?

  So the field notes is because you want portability.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, that I can take everywhere. I have like a nice little case, like write random stuff down that I don't forget. And I do revisit it like I just like.

• 29:32Cal Newport?

  They're good for that, too. Like I usually have my time block planner for capturing things, but field notes can be good for that, too. Like capturing thoughts or like if you're on a trip, you can just bring one to capture stuff like to do's to come up. I gotta remember to do this. Like, so you can get things out of your mind. And then when you unpack from the trip, you just go through it. Like, yeah, it's another good use.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  And it's the same case that it fits a nice little case. And then I have like another piece of paper that I can like write my workouts on. And then I can also like, if I'm golfing, I could put my scorecard in there and put it in my back pocket.

• 30:02Cal Newport?

  You, but you write your workouts into field notes or you have?

• 30:04Speaker 02

  No, I have a separate piece of paper that goes behind it.

• 30:06Cal Newport?

  I see. And then what do you do with that later?

• 30:09Speaker 02

  If it fills up, I just get a new piece of paper.

• 30:11Cal Newport?

  And that's?

• 30:11Speaker 02

  I fold it up. So like every time I go to like a gym, I just like know what I'm doing.

• 30:15Cal Newport?

  Oh, so it has your workout on it?

• 30:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I write it out before I go.

• 30:19Cal Newport?

  Yeah.

• 30:19Speaker 02

  But I put in the same like.

• 30:21Cal Newport?

  So you don't have to be looking at your phone?

• 30:22Speaker 02

  No, I don't have my phone.

• 30:23Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I like that. Let's take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that make this show possible.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich isn't about having life all figured out. It's opening yourself to all the possibilities. That's why your dedicated financial advisor provides long-term planning built around you, meeting you where you are and helping you get closer to where you want to be. So no matter where you're starting from, you can move forward with confidence. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 31:00Cal Newport?

  All right, so there you go. That's enough about my thoughts. We want to hear what you have to say as well. Like we like to do on Mondays, we open up our inbox to see what you want to tell us about. If you have a question or an observation or want to send us something you think might be interesting, you can send it to [email protected]. All right, Jesse, let's open up this mailbox. Who do we have first?

• 31:22Speaker 02

  Our first message from Joe and Marcy, who shared a perhaps controversial article.

• 31:27Cal Newport?

  Well, controversial articles are my favorite type of articles. Let's pull this up on the screen and see what Joe and Marcy had to send. All right, the headline here, "A neurologist claims Gen Z has a lower IQ than millennials." Jesse, I believe that for sure because I'm a millennial. Let me just read a quote from this, see what's going on here. "For the first time since cognitive development data began to be collected in the late 19th century, an entire generation is showing lower intellectual results than its parents. That is the assessment made by Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist and former teacher before a United States Senate Committee. According to him, Generation Z, born between 1997 and the early 2010s, shows a measurable

• 32:09Cal Newport?

  decline in attention, memory, reading, mathematics, problem solving, and overall IQ." I read further, you know what he's going to blame that on. It has to do with technology. All right, that is controversial, right? It's controversial because every generation, there's a cliche that every generation thinks the generation that follows has all of these issues or flaws. But this is an interesting one. This is sometimes known as the reverse Flynn effect, this idea that the global increase in IQ began to stop around the time that smartphones became ubiquitous. Horvath is pointing towards data that shows that this, if you break it out by demographic cohorts, Gen Z is actually seeing a sharper decline in the IQs as compared to the millennials

• 32:54Cal Newport?

  or people who are only a little bit older. And so, I don't know, I guess he would point towards the mechanism Horvath would say is the use of technology during critical learning years. Horvath is very much against the use of technology in the classroom and ed tech, so I think he connects it probably to that as well. These are all complicated issues, but...

• 33:17Cal Newport?

  You know, I think is an important one to think about is I talked about cognitive fitness. I wrote that big New York Times op ed earlier this winter about cognitive fitness is the new revolution we need to care about. This is the type of data that should be capturing our attention. When you see a generation following on an IQ measure, when you see all generations starting to reverse IQ gains around the time certain technologies spread, it has to be the same as saying, hey, once we started using trans fats, we saw jumps in heart attacks. And so maybe that's a problem. I think we need to see this type of data through that lens. I'll tell you my other observation, if you bring this back up here again, Jesse, this is on MSNBC. My God, they got a lot of ads.

• 34:00Cal Newport?

  It's everywhere. Look at this. There's that. And then over on the right. And then there's another ad here. And this is surrounding and other articles like it's almost.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  It's unbearable.

• 34:10Cal Newport?

  Maybe that's why our IQs are getting lower. So we can't get to the text because there's so many ads. MSN, talk, talk about millennial references. Remember MSN? That was like the big deal. Microsoft was like, the internet is important. You got MSNBC and MSN.com. All right. What else do we have, Jesse?

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Our next message is from Jenny, who shares a surprising statistic from a recent report on how parents feel about smartphone bans in schools.

• 34:39Cal Newport?

  All right. So I'll just read the part of Jenny's letter where she gives the statistic from a recent report. Jenny says, the short report is about parents' thoughts and expectations around the ban of smartphones in schools. Interestingly, 39% of parents think that less screen time at school will mean more pressure for screen time at home. And 46% say that screen time is already one of the biggest causes of conflict at home. I think this highlights the need for support for parents and how to manage screen time at home and as conflict free a way as possible. All right. So that report, for those who are interested, is

• 35:15Cal Newport?

  Conducted by U. Switch, the letter U. Switch, and the report was called Cracked It. So if you want to look up more details there. I do think we need to think more about how parents deal with screen time. I'll tell you what a lot of parents are doing that's leading to the type of issues you see cited in this study is that they are being ambiguous and arbitrary. It's you talking to their kids, "Well, you have a phone and it's kind of yours and you have a right to use it, but I'm going to be kind of upset that you're using it and then I'm going to, but it's yours, but I'm going to kind of guilt you a little bit. Like, are you on your phone again?" And then occasionally just arbitrarily be like, "Put that phone away, you've been on

• 36:00Cal Newport?

  it too long." Which creates a situation in which it's entirely and always a negotiation. Like, "Okay, my parent is upset that I'm on the phone. Do I have to put away the phone now? Probably not if I argue it enough. Let me..." And it's, so you're just constantly going back and forth. Lack of clarity, lack of definitiveness. So what is the better way for parents to deal with phones? Well, first of all, wait till an appropriate age to actually give a kid a phone, which I think is restricted phone in high school, unrestricted phones after the age of 16 at the earliest. Your kid will be upset. Your kid also, you know, wants to drink beers at lunch and watch TV all day instead of going to school. If they want to do something, doesn't mean that it's necessarily critical for them.

• 36:44Cal Newport?

  Number two, when you do give your kid a phone, it's yours, it's not the kid's. The kid doesn't have a plan with AT&T or Verizon, they didn't sign a contract, they're not old enough to do it, they're not paying for it. It's your phone that you are letting them use for particular purposes. You make that clear right up front. This is not your phone, there is no portion of the Declaration of Independence that says thou are, you know, have the right to pursue, to own your own phone, it's your property that can't be taken from you. No, parents' phone. They're laying, you lease it on their terms. Three, I think those terms have to be, let's keep it simple, landlining. When you're in the house, all smartphones are plugged in in the kitchen.

• 37:26Cal Newport?

  That's just how it works. Now, here's the thing, you as a parent have to do it too. It'll be good for you, trust me. The phones are in the kitchen. If you need to look something up, you go into the kitchen, look something up. If you're expecting a call from a friend, you put on the ringer, you go into the kitchen when it rings. If you have text conversations you keep up with, you need to go stand there in the kitchen,

• 37:43Cal Newport?

  hunched over the toaster oven, doing those text conversations, which is gonna make you after a while be like, I don't wanna just do this all night. And it means when you're not in the kitchen, when you're at dinner, when you're watching a movie, when you're reading a book, you're not looking at your phone. It's not there as a second screen. It's not there as the second source of distraction.

• 38:01Cal Newport?

  I think that is the best way, I mean, because again, parents are like, here's why I have to give a phone to my kid. Is there some complicated scenario in which they're going here at this time, and they might miss a bus, and they need to coordinate with their friend for the ride, which I get. Like, this is why our family has like three or four dumb phones that we kinda give out to our kids as needed for various logistical things. I get it. But if that's why the kid needs the phone, then this is a fantastic way to introduce that into their lives without having it colonize their brain like the chessboard or, you know, aliens from the Ridley Scott movie. You have it, but you don't, it's not with you all the time, and at home, it's not up in your room, it's not with you everywhere you go. We're not fighting about it. It's my phone, you can use it, here's the terms plugged in when you're at home. That's it. That's just it.

• 38:47Cal Newport?

  And if you've already given your kid a phone and you're in these type of debates, it's an easy switch to make. You say, new household rule. Here's what I wanna do with my phones as the parent that I'm paying for. It's under my name, it's my contract. They're gonna live in the kitchen while we're at home. And that's just it. It's a binary rule. Boom, boom, boom. That's it. You want a phone, we do the rule. That's it. No more daily negotiations, no more arguments, no more vague shaming, like, well, if I just act upset enough, maybe they'll voluntarily use the phone less. They will thank you, their brain will thank you, your cognitive fitness will thank you, their mental health will thank you. So, to me, I think that is the way to deal with teenagers and phones in your own home. Don't argue with terrorists. Alright, what else we got, Jesse?

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Our next message is from Jackson, who has a practical question about remote working.

• 39:32Cal Newport?

  Oh, man, remote working. Remember how much we used to talk about that?

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:36Cal Newport?

  When we were doing the pandemic, like, it was a big, I wrote a lot of New Yorker stuff about that. Alright, this is a blast from the past here. Jackson says... I work remotely and my wife works out of the house. This means I'm home by myself most of the day. I have noticed I really struggle during downtime between meetings or deep work sessions with being unable to resist listening to a podcast or checking my phone. How would you suggest combating this urge? Alright, so Jackson, I would say two things are going to come together here. One, you need a time block plan, right? So by time block planning, you're not asking yourself the question, what's next? If you're asking yourself all day the question of what's next, then you're constantly going to have to answer why what's next should not be checking your phone or listening to a podcast. Hey, I'm feeling a little bit of exhausted.

• 40:21Cal Newport?

  I'm not really inspired. Let me go do that instead. Make the plan in advance. This is what I'm following. But you've got to couple this with part two. The plan needs to be very reasonable and sustainable. So if you're working from home, this is the key. Don't think about this as I'm in the office for eight hours that I have to fill. It's no, I'm making a reasonable time block plan for the day that's going to get a lot of good work done. But some days I'm going to finish that work at three and I'm going to have two hours before my wife gets home and I'm going to be done with my work and go do something else with that time that I feel is like very productive. I'm training, I'm running, I'm woodworking, I'm building complicated Halloween decorations or something like this, right? Or, you know, a couple of days a week, I'm going to start my day late and I'm going

• 41:05Cal Newport?

  to go my first block of the day, I'm going to go to the coffee shop, I'm going to read, I'm going to go for a long walk, or I'm going to have a long midday section some days as well. And some days are just going to be packed and I have so much to do and have a lot of meetings, the whole day is going to be full. So you use time blocking to get intentionality about your time so you don't have to question, what should I do next all day long? And then you couple that with, again, I call it variability and sustainability. So you have different schedules, different days, some days end earlier than others, you have breaks in there. And so you don't push yourself to exhaustion, but you also don't leave it up to yourself in the moment about to decide whether you're exhausted or not. And so that's what I recommend the remote work is especially in summer. Put some variety in there.

• 41:47Cal Newport?

  You know, just don't schedule meetings after three on Thursday and just be like, I'm going to leave at three and I'm going to go watch a movie. Like, that's how you get the value out of remote work. So time block plan, but be more variable and sustainable with your schedules. Alright, what we got next? Our next message is from Ulysses and it's about focus in the World Cup. Last night, you watched last night, Jesse?

• 42:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:15Cal Newport?

  Yeah, US didn't play a great game.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  I mean, they got crushed.

• 42:18Cal Newport?

  Yeah, crushed. I watched the, you know, it wasn't going well when you watched the goalie run up to kick a ball and just kick the ground instead and then someone else just scores on them.

• 42:29Cal Newport?

  I feel like that would be every play if I was the goalie in a World Cup game. Like to me, it is stressful. I don't know soccer very well, but it's stressful to me, the fact that like the goalie has to come way out of the goal all the time.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  And he can't use his hands.

• 42:43Cal Newport?

  Yeah, and they're constantly kicking it back to him and like you're constantly kicking the ball back towards your goal because it's like the right thing to do. Yeah. Meanwhile, in better news, the Nationals game last night.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  Oh, what happened?

• 42:56Cal Newport?

  Crazy. It was, um, when I turned it on, it was Astros were up 6-1 in like the third inning or whatever. Then the, then the Nationals turn around and come back and push it. Next time I started watching it now, uh, check back in, it was 12-6 Nationals.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Get out.

• 43:14Cal Newport?

  12-6 Nationals, including a James Wood grand slam, including a, uh, CJ Abrams three run homerun, including a Curtis Mead homerun. All right. Come back again, the 12-11 Nationals. By the time we get to the eighth inning, two outs, the lead's only one. Uh, they bring in Beeter, they hold on and win the game by one run. The 23 collective points. Yeah. It was a crazy game. A lot of home runs. Astros are a homerun hitting team as well. So, um, does that answer your question?

• 43:48Cal Newport?

  Who's our, who are we talking to?

• 43:49Speaker 02

  Ulysses.

• 43:50Cal Newport?

  Ulysses, that answer your question, Ulysses? I hope it did. All right. Wait, he had something about the World Cup, right? All right. So he sent us a tweet. This is the coach from Uruguay. So let me, I'll read, uh, this tweet here.

• 44:06Cal Newport?

  Weisler, who I think is the coach from the Uruguay World Cup soccer team, explained that the Uruguayan players asked him to shorten his 10-minute team talks. "I understand that today's youth struggle with attention, but is it right that professional players who earn millions can't concentrate for 10 minutes? Should coaches adapt? I don't know." Alright, that's interesting. So supposedly, allegedly, the players from Uruguay told their coach, "We can't listen to you for 10 minutes." Here's why I'm a little suspect about that, Jesse, is isn't a soccer match, it's like in a phenomenal feat of concentration, right?

• 44:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:42Cal Newport?

  Like, you're on that field for like, a lot of the game, and as we learned, you can't have like, a moment, if you have like, a moment of lost concentration, you kick the ground and they score on you easily, right? Like, you constantly have to be thinking where everyone is, what's the right play, what's happening over here. And so I have a hard time believing they can't concentrate.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  They probably have film sessions, too.

• 45:02Cal Newport?

  Right? Yeah, you have to study the other team, and your offense, and your defense, and also, these are, of all the young people in the world, the young people who probably spend the longest stretches of time without phones or distractions has to be these like, soccer athletes who have to train for hours a day, where it's like them and baseball players. These are long games without breaks, you know? So they're very used to not having that type of distraction. Maybe they just think his speeches are boring.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:29Cal Newport?

  Or, so here's my other theory, though, is attention contexts are unique. So that's the other thing that's possibly going on here, which is maybe a general point worth us all thinking about. Being able to concentrate in a particular context, it doesn't necessarily translate over to other contexts, right? So, you know, if you're in the context of playing a soccer game, your brain, there's nothing else that's voting for your brain's attention during that time, because it's put a lot of value on making the right plays, and a lot of negative value on making the wrong plays, and so staying focused on the game clearly wins the sort of, your brain voting for what we should do next. There's also no other real option, there's no phones out there, like, what else are you gonna do? But there's a completely separate attention context, which is I am, you know,

• 46:13Cal Newport?

  inside the locker room and this is a place where I look at phones and there isn't this drive of if I don't focus, I'm gonna make a mistake. And in that attention context, I don't want to sit and listen to a speech. I mean, I think that is probably common and it gets to a bigger point of like, don't put too much stock in the transference of skills, right? So, I mean, I've talked about this a lot. If you play chess, there's a lot of advantages you might get by playing chess. It's hard to do. You'll get very good at playing chess and it requires a lot of focus. It doesn't necessarily make you better at ignoring your phone when you're watching TV because it's a completely separate context. So if you want to practice concentrating in a particular context, you actually have to practice concentrating that context, which means you have to remove the very desirable

• 46:58Cal Newport?

  stimuli, take them off the table and rewire your brain so it gets used to actually gain value out of what's happening there. And so we have to be a little bit careful about if I do this one thing really well with focus, it's going to make me better at other things. There's tons of meditators who you can't get off their phone when they're at dinner because it's a different, it's a different cognitive context. So that might also be rearing its head. All right. As our final segment on Mondays, we like to do an update about what I have been up to. I'm back from travel. We managed to get enough of the Monday episodes in the can that you guys didn't miss anything. But I was out in Colorado. Jesse, we went to Crested Butte and then we went to Rocky Mountain National Park. I

• 47:40Cal Newport?

  decided that Crested Butte would be a really good location for summer book writing. Like if I was finishing a book, it's a, the town is literally at, have you been there?

• 47:50Speaker 02

  No.

• 47:50Cal Newport?

  It's at the end of the road. Like literally the road ends, you know, goes to the Gunnison Valley and ends at Crested Butte. There's like a dirt road you can take over the mountain to the Rocky Mountain Research Station, but like it's the end of the road. It's 8,000 feet. It's really high, but it's like a cool town, kind of a hippie ski dirtbag town with a western vibe and surrounded by beautiful mountains. You could rent like a house on the edge of town. I thought about it and you could like get up, you could go for a hike or mountain bike to Lower Loop Trail, ride all day, then go do like some athletic thing in the afternoon. It gets cold every night, no matter when it is because it's so high. So I like Crested Butte. The Rocky Mountains were beautiful as well. Did a lot of hiking out there. The whole state's on fire, which is not optimal, but, but otherwise

• 48:33Cal Newport?

  that was a pretty good trip. I didn't bring work on the trip. It's really been a while since I've had a trip like this. I wasn't riding in the morning. I was just on the trip. I wasn't even doing a lot of like brainstorming or planning because I was hiking with my my eight-year-old, considering the two kids are at camp. And when you hike with my eight-year-old, he has a sort of Dada-esque nonsense dialogue that he just goes mile after mile. Where like you can't, it's not an interaction. He's just sort of like saying things and just unloading things from his mind. It's very zen. So like, but if you're not talking, if you don't listen, he's not going to want to do the hike. So it's like meditative hiking. He's had to sort of just let, you know, these details about Minecraft that don't quite make sense wash over you mile after mile.

• 49:17Cal Newport?

  So it was actually a, it was interesting sort of cognitive cleansing trip for me, though I am kind of glad to be back writing. What am I reading? Two books I've finished since the last episode that we talked about it. I finally read Walter Ong's book, Orality and Literacy, The Technologizing of the Word. Everyone always cites Walter Young, right? So this, he's a mid-century to late mid-century, 20th century scholar. And he wrote this book, Orality and Literacy, about how writing changed the way the human mind works. Everyone cites it, but I never got around to reading it. And now I'm thinking, a lot of these people who cite it, I'm like, I don't know if they actually read it because they're often just citing the

• 49:58Cal Newport?

  the big picture thesis. But the book is, the details are fascinating, like really getting into just, and you can see it, you know, just the way we're able to think and how words as a technology changed the way the mind actually operated and perceived the world. It's academic, but I found it to be very readable. Couple interesting things in there. One is, he talks about the Phaedrae's dialogue from Plato, right? So this comes up, there's a time, the 2010s, where every technology book brought up this, this dialogue. It's a Plato dialogue from the Phaedrae's where the character of Socrates has a conversation with Phaedrae, this young Athenian.

• 50:39Cal Newport?

  And basically, he expresses skepticism about the written word. Here's why I'm worried about writing. We're going to forget things. You're not going to be able to really understand something if you can't debate it. Our memories are going to become bad. Like he's basically, and it's often brought up as like a famous example of techno-skepticism. I'd long maintain like, I think that's overblown. I think it's overreading what's really being said here. That Socrates, the character of Socrates is really talking specifically about philosophy. We do still actually privilege the Socratic method, back and forth dialogue. Like, it's a pretty reasonable point. But actually, Ong is on board with like, no, no, Plato was really suspicious about writing. But then Ong points out, which I've never

• 51:15Cal Newport?

  heard before, the irony of it is that Plato didn't realize the way he was thinking about writing, the way he was thinking about philosophy, everything in the way that he thought was only possible because of writing. He has a post-literate mind. So the rise of Greek rationality required writing. Without writing, you're back to more like the Homeric epics, where you're, everything is memorized, and you're, it's a completely different, you read Havelock, it's a completely different type of way of thinking and transmitting information. So Plato didn't realize that the very grounds on which he was criticizing writing were

• 51:57Cal Newport?

  formed by writing. And that's why, like, in The Republic, he's like, we need philosophers, not poets. That's basically saying, we need literate people instead of illiterate, right? In other words, writing made philosophy possible. Before that, you just had epic poets. And he's like, the philosophers with their systematic thinking, that's what we need in the ideal society. And then yet, in his other book, he was saying, oh, writing is bad. But writing made all of everything he did possible. He just didn't realize it yet, right? He didn't realize writing is what had changed, because you don't notice when ways of thinking change. So I thought that was interesting. Anyways, it's a really good book. Don't be afraid of its academicness. I really enjoyed it. I also read the book Lost by Rachel Hartigan, who's a Tacoma Park writer. She used to work for National Geographic, which is downtown.

• 52:42Cal Newport?

  It's about Amelia Earhart. The interesting thing about it is it's a dual narrative structure. You have the story of Amelia Earhart intertwined with the story of lots of people who, after her death, were trying to, like, find a plane, or had different theories about what really happened with her. The whole book came out of Rachel doing a few excursion. Versions for National Geographic on some of these trips that were going out to try to either find Earhart's plane at the bottom of the ocean near Howland Island, or to survey these, there's these theories about she actually landed and she died on this island or that, and there was these surveys to go try to find her bones and stuff like

• 53:24Cal Newport?

  this. So she went on some of these expeditions of people who were convinced they could, they had the real story of Amelia Earhart. So it intertwines those with the story of Amelia Earhart, and I found it interesting. And then I was at a, a museum in Chicago, the Wings Over the Rockies, Air and Space Museum, we stopped on the way to the airport, they had an exhibit of a Amelia Rose Earhart, who's actually not related, but in like the 2000s or 90s or something like this recreated her flight. So, interesting. Amelia Earhart's a fascinating character.

• 53:59Speaker 02

  Can you imagine trying to find her plane at the bottom of the ocean?

• 54:03Cal Newport?

  Mm-hmm. Bob Ballard tried.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  Oh, because he found the Titanic, right?

• 54:08Cal Newport?

  Yeah. And they did a really comprehensive survey with all the latest technology of a particular area and did not find it. I mean, the problem is, yeah, I mean, it's not like that we don't know where in the ocean. She was trying to, she was with Fred Noonan, her navigator. They were trying to land on a particular island, Howland Island. They got close, because they were, there was radio communication with a Navy ship that was out there, to try to help guide them in. But there was just a, like always with aviation disasters, a confluence of different mistakes. The radio wasn't being used properly, they didn't know Morse code, they had different, some miscommunications about things, the antenna for the directional

• 54:51Cal Newport?

  finder, they had taken it off the plane. There was winds that were strong enough to push you off course, but not strong enough that you would like see obvious signs of the winds on the white caps. And like, so it just seems like all these things added up, and they just, they, you know, you're 60 miles off where you need to be, and then you're in the Pacific. And so, so the plane's probably out there somewhere, but, but actually, it would mainly be disintegrated by now anyway, so. You know, it's interesting.

• 55:21Cal Newport?

  Jesse's put up well with my cables. With my ethernet cables. There's a lot of electronics in the HQ right now. Because I'm honing in on some projects.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  I do have one question for you. Did you listen to the Walt Disney episode on Acquired?

• 55:38Cal Newport?

  I did indeed. To me, this is significant. I don't quite know what this means. But I'm listening to Audible, a book on tape about Disney. I mean, I'm like an expert on the Walt Disney.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  I know.

• 55:52Cal Newport?

  I really am an expert. So I found another book about Disneyland. Like the machinations behind making that project work. And I was listening to that. And I stopped to go listen to the whole Acquired episode. And then came back to it. And then I was like, wow, man, this is interesting. These are very similar things. Like long form audio, they're within a couple hours of each other. One, they, you know, spent a couple of months working on. The other is like probably two years, three years of effort or whatever. They'll probably make more money on advertisements on that. I'm sure they will actually, on that episode. Than the author would make for the book that I read.

• 56:33Cal Newport?

  And so it felt significant to me to be doing both of those at the same time. Is this like the future of audiobooks? Is like what they're doing? Which is it's somewhere in between the effort required to research and write a whole book. But it's, you know, more detailed and comprehensive than just like a blog post or a substacked essay or something like that.

• 56:52Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. I didn't realize how many cigarettes he smoked.

• 56:55Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I mean, constantly.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  Like three packs a day?

• 56:58Cal Newport?

  Yeah, that's why he died at 65.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:02Cal Newport?

  He was kind of lucky to make it that far. I'm fascinated by him. I'm fascinated by the.

• 57:05Speaker 02

  And then how about the city you wanted to build in?

• 57:08Cal Newport?

  Epcot. Experimental city of tomorrow. Yeah.

• 57:13Cal Newport?

  I might, I might end up, I got a-

• 57:15Speaker 02

  Building a city?

• 57:17Cal Newport?

  I'm gonna build a city.

• 57:18Speaker 02

  With Halloween lights?

• 57:19Cal Newport?

  It's all Halloween.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  365 days.

• 57:21Cal Newport?

  365 days a year of Halloween. That's, alright, so that's what all these wires are for. I'm working on my, I mentioned, I'm building a much more complicated Halloween controller for this year. So I'm actually using open source software, but like real controller software, as opposed to just custom building. And I'm buying custom circuit board instead of building my own. And it's all networked, so like more professional or prosumer displays are ethernet networked. So you're, you're, all the different circuit controllers you're using can speak over ethernet to a common controller. But my hub is in the lab and I need to hardwire that to the internet. So I have 100 foot wire to, that's what that wire is here.

• 58:03Cal Newport?

  Because our router is here in the studio and I need to, for now, I'm hardwiring the, the hub and the other. So I'm, I'm making progress. I've been working on the light controller. I programmed my own light controller last year, so it's really nice to have a off the shelf light controller. It's a little more complicated. And that's what, that's what I'm working on now. And so, progress.

• 58:22Speaker 02

  Just like Walt Disney and his trains.

• 58:25Cal Newport?

  I thought about that. So, like Walt Disney is, I, I write about it in my new book, by the way, The Deep Life, coming out next year. I write about Walt Disney and his trains. And I actually argue about that as a general strategy. Seeking, I, I had a term for it, but like seeking these sort of remarkable projects that are completely nonsensical. It's just like interesting and completely non-instrumental. As a way of getting out of sort of the doldrums and sort of finding new inspiration, whatever. I give a lot of examples of different people doing that. So yeah, I go, I go deep on Disney and his trains. I know too much about Disney.

• 58:59Speaker 02

  Actually, when they were talking about the trains and the acquired, I was, just thought of your newsletter and the picture you had, so I could easily-

• 59:05Cal Newport?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, because I wrote about it.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:07Cal Newport?

  Yeah, yeah, I wrote about it last summer. Yeah, of him on the trains. Yeah. Fascinating stuff. All right. That's all the time we have for today. Back next Monday with another advice episode. The Thursday AI Reality Check episodes are a little bit off and on in the summer just because of my travel. There may or may not be one this week, but we're keeping the Monday ones going. So you'll always have your dose of Monday advice. So until next time, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you've made it this far, you must be ready to join my fight for depth in a distracted world. Now, the best way to do this is to join over 125,000 people

• 59:46Cal Newport?

  who receive my email newsletter each Monday. You can sign up at calnewport.com/ideas. And when you do, I will send you a free guide to my seven best ideas about cultivating a deep life. Sign up today, calnewport.com/ideas.