The Truth About Brain Rot

A recent New York Times op-ed reveals the true nature of “brain rot,” and in doing so reveals a much larger problem affecting us all. In this episode, Cal explores this broader problem then draws from an unlikely source from his childhood to help identify a dramatic solution. 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) The truth about brain rot (31:31) Will you address Immanuale Kants “Critique of Pure Reason” in your upcoming book about thinking? (33:42) What is the difference between the strategic plan and vision document? (36:59) Can I buy the “Deep Life” on pre-order? (39:30) Cal discusses his recent newsletters (41:54) My small business uses Claude. Is that ok? (44:45) Are any AI companies responsible to use? (45:28) The truth about LLMs (45:45) What are some AI book recommendations? (46:42) AI and regulation (50:25) What Cal is up to? 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/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WePNs-G7puA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIeeDcnu9Ck https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/08/opinion/gen-z-tiktok-ig-reels.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlnmQbPGuls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XRKcUtOkbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_zYn-HHcyA Thanks to our Sponsors: https://www.cozyearth.com (Use code “DEEP”) https://www.quo.com/deep https://www.gusto.com/deep https://www.drinklmnt.com/deep 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?

  I want to talk about brain rot. Now, to my middle-aged millennial brain, when I think about brain rot, I think about it as something that happens to your brain. Like, if you scroll too much, you begin to reduce your cognitive capacity. But Gen Z has another definition for this term. They use "brain rot" to describe a specific type of video content that is aggressively devoid of meaning. Let me give you an example here. This is a clip of a category of brain rot known as "skibitty toilet." Let's play that.

• 0:37Cal Newport?

  All right, let's do another example here. This is a clip of a category of brain rot that's popular, where you use AI to create hybrid animals. For whatever reason, this is big in Italy, so this clip is in Italian. It is of what is known as "trippy troppe." Let's look at that.

• 0:56Cal Newport?

  I can tell you right now, MIT is really proud about having given me a doctorate after watching me present "trippy troppe" and "skiditty toilet" to the public. But that's what brain rot, that's what brain rot content is. It's content like this, and it's very popular among Gen Z to watch videos of this type somewhat obsessively. Well, this obviously triggers some key questions, such as, "What is going on here? Why is a whole generation so obsessed with this particular type of content? Why has God forsaken us?" Real big questions that this phenomenon raises. Well, I didn't really have a good answer to any of those until recently I came across an op-ed in the New York Times that shed some light. It was titled "The Truth About Brain Rot",

• 1:41Cal Newport?

  and it was authored by a professor at Rowan University, Maxie Heitmeyer. This essay explains why the brain rot content phenomenon is so popular, and I'll tell you, the answer is not what I expected. It is actually an answer that is way more significant than I would have thought, an answer that has implications for all of us. So here's what I want to do today. I want to proceed in two parts. Part one, we're going to go through that New York Times essay, and we're going to get to the core of why the brain rot phenomenon exists and why this is actually a problem that is relevant. It's indicating a problem relevant to all of us. Part two, I want to talk solutions. And here, I'm going to look at my own childhood.

• 2:25Cal Newport?

  We didn't have brain rot when I was a kid, but we did have movies. And I'm going to actually turn to a cult classic movie from the late 1990s that I'm going to argue exactly captures the problems we're having right now as epitomized by the brain rot phenomenon, and provides us a potential way out. And so, we're going to get into all of that. What's going on, and what we can all do about it? So we have a lot to do, but before we get started, let's get another hit of that "skibitty toilet."

• 2:59Cal Newport?

  All right, that's the stuff. Let's go.

• 3:05Cal Newport?

  All right, so let's start by looking at this New York Times op-ed that I talked about before. I'll put it on the screen here for people who happen to be watching instead of just listening. All right, so as I mentioned, the article was called "The Truth About Brain Rot." I'm not going to go through the whole thing. I'm going to scroll down to some key quotes that I think get to the core of what I want to emphasize. All right, here is quote number one from this op-ed. "The business model of social media treats user focus as a commodity to be extracted and sold. The more time we spend, the more advertising revenue we generate for the owners of the platforms. This attention economy increases engagement. It does not promote high-quality content." Okay, so we can start there. This is well-known, right? This is what happens on these sort of social media platforms

• 3:49Cal Newport?

  that we all use, and in particular, Gen Z uses. But the article goes on. "What struck us in our interviews, however, was how clearly Gen Z understood this dynamic." They then go on to quote one of the Gen Z correspondents that they talk about, who said the following: "If everything is content now, then brain rot is anti-content. It is the only way to be free online, which is to do something so stupid that it can't be monetized." All right, let's move on here. I want to keep going. "Brain rot breaks the mold of social media through its absurdity, its deliberate refusal of narrative, purpose, or message.

• 4:32Cal Newport?

  A century ago, artists responded to the horrors of World War I by creating deliberately irrational, anti-aesthetic work. Da-da rejected the cultural logic that had led to industrialized killing. In its own meme-driven way, brain rot refuses to participate in the attention economy on the economy's terms. The joke is that there is no joke. The meaning is that there is no meaning. And for a generation that grew up with its every digital interaction tracked, measured, and monetized, that refusal is experienced as a form of honesty in a dishonest system." Let's stop there for a second. This is interesting. The brain rot phenomenon, according to this professor

• 5:15Cal Newport?

  who interviewed a lot of Gen Z members, members of Gen Z, is in some sense like a protest. They grew up so enmeshed in this world of digital attention economy distraction that the ultimate rebellion is to basically make themselves boring. "I'm going to consume the stupidest possible content. I'm not going to play the game that I saw the millennials play, where they get really attached to these figures that they're encountering on Twitter, on Instagram, and they feel like they have a parasocial relationship, and that they're part of a big discussion when they're really being exploited. We're not going to be exploited, and the way we're going to show that is by looking at the stupidest possible content, right? Every generation goes through something where they have their own type of rebellion. This is Gen Z's.

• 5:59Cal Newport?

  I mean, look at like Gen X, the slacker phenomenon. How did they respond to a sort of 80s corporatized rise of boring yuppie suburban capitalism that was happening in our culture? Is that they tuned out, they got ironic, they got sardonic? Nothing is interesting to me." We're seeing the same thing happening with Gen Z, but in the digital realm. "All right, you're going to turn me into a commodity, Mark Zuckerberg? You're going to try to monetize every minute of my day? Try to trick me into thinking that your fake, artificial, digital universe is somehow real? I'm going to watch "skibitty toilet." So it's a rejection in some sense. It's da-da. It's "do shop in the fountain" installation. But here's the key addendum to this observation.

• 6:43Cal Newport?

  So if we go, I'm going to go back to the article here in a second. But the author said, "Do not romanticize brain rot. Do not romanticize it. This ambivalence that Gen Z feels towards their world has its own darkness to it." So let me go back to the article and read this final quote here. "This ambivalence communicates the emotional register of people living inside a system they cannot escape. They see the manipulation, understand what the algorithms are doing, but they keep scrolling anyway because they cannot imagine a life outside the system. Most of them never lived one." So there's this melancholy kind of conclusion

• 7:26Cal Newport?

  to this analysis in this op-ed, that it is an act of rebellion and self-protection, but they're still stuck in the system. There's a nihilism here about, "This is the world I have to live in, and this is my sort of futile rebellion that at least allows me personally to feel like I maintain some sort of, you know, intellectual or character integrity." In other words, brain rot is less about resistance than it is resignation. Okay, so I read that article. This is really important. I think this is really important, right?

• 8:07Cal Newport?

  Because brain rot, as a performance being done by Gen Z, is pointing the figure to the world that everyone else lives in as well. My generation, my parents' generation, we're all living in this artificial digital world. It's just Gen Z, because they were born in it, are the ones who are actually doing this performance art, this digital da-da, to try to react to it by watching "skibitty toilet" and "trippy troppe." But it doesn't mean the rest of us aren't also trapped in the same world. They're just, they're just showing us. They're firing up the signal flare. They're the ones who are having the sort of resigned performance activities to show us, like, "This world is almost nihilistic in the way that it just breaks us down into bits

• 8:52Cal Newport?

  to be monetized, attention to be mined." So this is actually a really big problem.

• 8:59Cal Newport?

  And this is, you know, not what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear, yeah, Gen Z, they're impressionable and they got tricked into watching dumb videos. No, no, Gen Z is pointing out to the rest of us. This is a nihilistic situation, a digital artificial content universe in which like we are all now trapped and they're putting a sort of despair, a performative despair around that reality. Let's take a quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Look, if you're anything like me, as the world gets more stressful AI and sleep is harder to come by, you might find yourself reaching for that second or third cup

• 9:41Cal Newport?

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• 10:19Cal Newport?

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• 10:57Cal Newport?

  or share with a friend. I also want to talk about our friends at Gusto. One of the more annoying and time-consuming parts of running a small business is payroll. You want to focus on real productivity, but instead you're juggling tax forms and calculating withholdings. This is why you need Gusto. I called it Gusto, but it's Gusto. And I'm going to say that with some Gusto because it is a service that can take these headaches off your plate and let you get back to what you do best. Gusto is online payroll and benefit software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use. So you can play, pay, hire, onboard,

• 11:39Cal Newport?

  and support your team from anywhere. Automatic payroll, tax filings, simple direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, workers' comp, 401K, you name it. Gusto makes it simple and has options for nearly every budget. Unlimited payroll runs for one monthly price, no hidden fees, no surprises. The ad agency we work with here on this podcast uses Gusto to pay us. And I can tell you from my perspective, it makes my life so easy. I can only imagine how easy it's making theirs. So try Gusto today at gusto.com/deep and then get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com/deep. One

• 12:19Cal Newport?

  more time, gusto.com/deep. All right, let's get back to the show. But can we escape this nihilism? Or is Gen Z just pointing out the meteor is on its way and there's nothing we can do?

• 12:34Cal Newport?

  I have hope. I have hope. And the hope came from, this is an unexpected place, but a classic movie, one of my favorite movies from the second half of the 1990s that I rewatched recently, rewatched with my kids, and I realized it has a lot to tell us about the current moment that the brain rot movement is reacting to. And not only does it capture our current moment really well, but if you fast forward to the end of the movie, it shows us a way out. Okay, so what movie am I talking about here? I'm talking about the 1998 Jim Carrey vehicle, The Truman Show. I don't know if you've seen this or not. It was directed by Peter Weir. It was pretty successful, actually.

• 13:17Cal Newport?

  Peter did it on a $60 million budget. It made a quarter billion dollars at the box office. It was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Original Screenplay. There's a lot of big movies come out in the 90s, but it's stuck around as a bit of a cult classic. So the claim I'm going to make here is that this movie does a sort of almost eerily prescient job of describing our current moment and points us towards a solution. All right. So we have to start by sort of setting up. What is the setup for this movie? What is the plot? Well, Jim Carrey plays a character named Truman, who is an insurance salesman who lives in this sort of, kind of, perfect, polished

• 13:59Cal Newport?

  neighborhood. Little movie trivia, they actually filmed The Truman Show in a real planned community in the Panhandle of Florida. That's actually a real town that's actually sort of like this.

• 14:11Cal Newport?

  In reality, Truman, played by Jim Carrey, is in a reality show. So this town is fake. The surrounding landscape is fake. The roof, the ceiling is fake. The water that surrounds it is fake. It's actually housed in a giant dome built outside of Burbank, Los Angeles. And this whole dome and everyone in it is part of a show, except for the only one who doesn't know is part of the show is Jim Carrey, who's the star of this reality show. Billions of people have been following his every move since he was born. The cameras are hidden in trash cans and up in light fixtures. And so he's being filmed everywhere and doesn't realize it. There's, they say in the movie, there's

• 14:51Cal Newport?

  5,000 cameras placed around this fake town. He is, in other words, an object of entertainment, something that's being monetized for the sake of a corporation. They even say early on in the in the movie, he was the first human baby to be formally adopted by a corporation. So the corporation actually in some sense owns him. Does this sound familiar? Well, this setup is a fantastic metaphor for our current digital existence, that the digital world in which we spend so much of our time is this sort of almost too perfect, too engaging, too bright, too flashy. Everything kind of that we are encountering because of algorithmic curation is pressing

• 15:34Cal Newport?

  just the right buttons of what we want to see. And it's, we are, we are owned by the corporations like Truman, right? Like we are, our existence itself is being monetized so that the faceless corporation can actually just make money off of us and our existence. And we're placated by feeling like, yeah, we're in this world that's supposed to be so nice that why would we want to go anywhere, right? The world pacifies us. We are monetized, right? So the setup for The Truman Show is not a bad metaphor for our current setup. Okay, so what happens next? What's the conflict that really sets the plot in motion? Well, a series of events occur that begin to imply

• 16:18Cal Newport?

  to Truman that something's not quite right here. I think it starts, I think the first one is a spotlight falls from the top of the dome, which is, you know, looks like the sky. It falls and crashes on the ground right next to Truman. And he picks it up and it has like the name of a star from a constellation on it. Like this spotlight is assigned to being one of the stars up on the top of the dome, right? That makes him suspicious. Some other things begin to happen as well. The rain effect gets turned on, false, it goes haywire, right? So the rain for a couple of seconds is just falling just on Truman, like in a five by five square. He's like, and he jumps out of it and it moves to follow him. It jumps out of it, it moves to follow him. And then the

• 17:00Cal Newport?

  rain starts everywhere. So there's like a malfunction in the rain effect. And then he's driving through car and on his car radio, he picks up the transmissions from the earpieces of the actors and they're describing his every movement. And he's like, wait a second, people are talking about me. So he begins to, he begins to realize this life is, is this artificial? Something's not right about this life. Something's not real about it. And so the second act unfolds with a series of escalating attempts for Truman to try to leave the town. And it starts small, like he gets a bus ticket and then eventually he's like, has a car, he's trying to drive across a bridge. And every time he's stopped, the bus breaks, the route is blocked, there's fire,

• 17:44Cal Newport?

  there's people in hazmat suits. He instantly gets suspicious. He's like, I can't leave this town. This too, so the central plot engine of the movie, this is also interesting, right? This is also eerily prescient about our current moment because those attempts of him, as he kind of realizes this isn't real, there's something artificial, right? I'm not getting, I'm not getting a complete authentic existence. He tries with increasing urgency, but in relative obvious ways to escape. This is what we do with our digital reality. As we get to that point where we realize this is fake and I'm missing the grist of the human experience by meeting so much of my world through this

• 18:29Cal Newport?

  glass screen. When we realize that, a lot of us try, like Truman, to escape. We buy a bus ticket or try to drive out of town and we're foil. Those obvious attempts to disconnect ourselves from the digital artificiality often fail because it's there and it's so tempting and there's the cultural pressures and it's right on your phone and it beckons at you and it's with you all the time. So we're like Truman in the second act is where we are right now, realizing something's not right about this world. But when we just take some moderate efforts to, to find out what's, to do something more real, to leave the fakeness of the Sea Haven in the movie,

• 19:08Cal Newport?

  we're thwarted. So if the movie ended there, obviously it'd be pretty dark. But then we get to the third act of the movie. And this is where we start to get towards solution territories. So after all these attempts to escape, it looks like Truman has just gone back to his every life and the producers kind of calm down until they discover one day he's not in his house and that there's actually a tunnel he used to get out of his house without people knowing. And now the producers are desperately searching for him, even to the extent that they turn on the sun, which is done with spotlights in the middle of the day, so that all of the actors in the town can be searching to try to find him. But where is he? He had stolen a boat and just sailed out across the water.

• 19:53Cal Newport?

  Now, this is significant because they had established early in the movie that he had a fear of water. They gave him a fear of water by pretending like his dad drowned in the water and Truman watched him drown because they didn't want him to bother with the water. But he sets out anyways. He gets in a boat and he sets out across the water. The producers find him with the cameras and they said, "We got to stop him." So they begin with a series of storms. They turn on waves. They have fake lightning. He's battered. He's bashed. He falls into the water and he swims through the giant seas and grabs back on

• 20:35Cal Newport?

  the boat. He ties himself down. They're at the edge of killing him.

• 20:41Cal Newport?

  Until finally, they say, "He's not going to stop enough." And they turn off the storms and the boat keeps going until boom, it hits the edge of the dome. And it's painted, look like the sky, so it surprises him. Boom, he's at the edge of the dome. And there's a set of stairs going up the edge blended in with the fake sky. And Truman walks up those stairs and at the top of those stairs is a door. Suddenly, the producer, the main producer, played by Ed Harris, comes out over the PA system through the clouds like the voice of God. And in a whispered voice, he says, "Truman, you can speak. I can hear you." Now, we're in, you know, this is like Genesis.

• 21:23Cal Newport?

  This is like Bible territory. And the producer, played by Ed Harris, explains the truth. Yeah, he's the star of a television show. That's real. But he tries to exhort him to stay. And here's the line that Ed Harris says, "There's no more truth out there than there is in the world that I created for you. The same lies, the same deceit, but in my world, you have nothing to fear. I know you better than you know yourself." Sound familiar?

• 21:52Cal Newport?

  The algorithms that know us better than we know ourselves, that this world is safe, this world is predictable. The real world outside of your screen is friction, talking to people, it's rejection, it's discomfort. It's happening in The Truman Show. What Truman says, he says, "You never had a camera in my head."

• 22:14Cal Newport?

  Right? "You're afraid. That's why you can't leave," says the producer, trying to stop him.

• 22:21Cal Newport?

  "You can't leave, Truman. You belong here with me." Truman thinks. It's kind of a bittersweet moment. There's this yawning blackness of the door beyond him. He's thinking, he's contemplating. And then he looks up at the, up into the sky, into the producer. A smile comes on his face. He says the line that he, you know, his corny line from the show, "In case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night."

• 22:59Cal Newport?

  He then bows, walks through the darkness, disappears into the blackness off camera. Last time we see him in the movie.

• 23:08Cal Newport?

  In there, I see a solution to our current digital moment. Carrie left. It's the Truman option. He left. He left the artificial world for the world beyond. Now, you might be saying, "I've heard that before." People are like, "Yeah, why don't you just quit? Why don't you abstain? You know, just don't use these apps. Don't use your phone so much." And that's hard. I always come back. But the reason why I think the Truman option, as portrayed in this movie, is so important is because they showed how hard it was. They didn't make this seem like it was just an act of rationality. "Oh, yeah, of course. You should just like use your phones

• 23:47Cal Newport?

  less," right? This was a battle. They personified it as him in a battle against forces beyond his control. He was battered. He was tested. At the very end, there's a voice in his head saying, "No, but, but, but, but we, this is where you're happy. This is where you're safe." That personifies the psychological experience of trying to leave the digital artificiality in which so much of us live. The Truman Show captured that, that it's not a simple decision. It's an act of heroism. That's what they are capturing. And I think that's really important,

• 24:26Cal Newport?

  that we, we reconceive what it means to escape the digital. We conceive it not as, "Hey, you should stop smoking. It's bad for you." And instead, we, we accept and we amplify and embrace and acknowledge the heroic difficulty of doing it and then say, "It's worth it anyways." Hard is good. The most meaningful things are hard. Put down the brain rot and actually leave the dome. And it's not going to be easy and you're going to get metaphorically battered in waves and feel like you're drowning and you're going to have voices in your head trying

• 25:07Cal Newport?

  to talk you out of it. But it's still worth it to get to what is real. So what would that mean in the real world? What's our equivalent of walking out the door? You know, it's the stuff you would think. Like, the actual actions aren't that complicated to articulate, right? You've got to downgrade your phone so that instead of them being a constant companion, they're just a tool you use for specific things. You don't have it with you all the time. It's not what you look at when you're bored. It's there for when you need to look something up, you know, directions on a map or listen to a podcast. We need to untangle ourselves from the ecosystem of apps to make money off of our attention, right? We're in an unhealthy relationship with those apps. They beat us up, but then they're like, you know, "Hey, baby, like you're not, you can't leave. You need me," right? We've got to untangle

• 25:51Cal Newport?

  from those. We need to embrace the friction of real world efforts and commitments and community. It's not as easy as what you experience online, but it's more meaningful. So we know those are the actions. I've talked about those actions before. But the action that Truman had to do in The Truman Show is also easy to describe. Get in the boat and go. The description of the actions is not the problem. It's the psychological burden. It's the battle. It's what the turmoil that you're going to face trying to execute those actions. And what I think The Truman Show gets right in that final act is it's a hero's journey, not a rational choice, and it's still a journey that's worth doing. All right? So that's what I'm calling the Truman

• 26:35Cal Newport?

  option, is you step away from having your life, once and for all, so entangled in the world of digital artificiality. You are not an object to be monetized for the bank account of a small corporation, of a small number of people at a big corporation. You want to go live a real life in the real world with all the stuff the producer warned Truman of, like, "I want to be in the real world. That's what humans are meant to do." And the Truman option says, "You do that and you do that expecting it to be very hard. And you embrace the hardness and you trust yourself to be able to get through it." So I'd like that way of conceiving it. So basically, put this all together. Brain rot content, that phenomenon of Gen Z, is a cry

• 27:16Cal Newport?

  for help. It's a way of saying that the generation that grew up in the world that we all live in is like, we're, you know, playing the prison harmonica here. This is, we know what's going on and this is nihilistic. This is sad. The Truman option is the way we have to think about escaping. We make a break from these companies that have held so much of our attention in their hands for so long, and we're willing to have the waves and be battered and be talked out of and whisper in our ears, and we still walk through that dark door anyways. Now, clearly, there's a lot more to unpack here about this idea of the Truman option, this urge towards a heroic escape. So we'll probably, you know, keep talking about how one does this and why now is the time for it. But I just wanted to introduce, kind of set up this, set up the

• 28:01Cal Newport?

  issue and lay out the contours of this particular type of solution. So we'll talk about this more in future episodes for sure. But in the meantime, for now, put down this Skibidi Toilet video and without distraction, watch this 1998 classic because I think it captures a lot of what's going on now and a lot of what we actually probably need to do.

• 28:26Cal Newport?

  We're gonna take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Look, as you may or may not know, I get a little obsessive about Halloween displays. It's the type of a niche hobby that requires you sometimes to reach out to some small operations to get these sort of random parts that I need to make my visions real. And I have to tell you, it can be frustrating in these situations when I'm faced with some sort of weird voicemail message or a phone that just keeps ringing and no one picks it up. These kind of missed connections happen all the time when a team's phone setup is messy. This is why today's episode is brought to you by QUO, spelled Q-U-O, the business

• 29:07Cal Newport?

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• 29:48Cal Newport?

  days spent building complicated Halloween displays. That's why I'm excited about Cozy Earth's bamboo stretch knit pajama set. Longtime listeners know my family is a major fans of Cozy Earth, especially their sheets, which we love so much that we travel with them, which is why you shouldn't be surprised to hear that we're loving these pajama sets as well. As you'd expect from Cozy Earth, they're cozy yet breathable, perfect for watching a movie on the couch or sleeping in on a chilly fall morning. They also are great at regulating your body temperature so you're comfortable, but not overheated. Don't wait. Cozy Earth has ample return and exchange windows, and each purchase is backed

• 30:30Cal Newport?

  by warranty, so you can give it a go with little pressure. So head to cozyearth.com and use my code DEEP for up to 20% off home and sleepwear. That's code DEEP for up to 20% off on home and sleepwear. And if you see a post-purchase survey, please be sure to mention that you heard about Cozy Earth right here. All right, let's get back to the episode. All right, well, look, it's Monday. What I like to do on Monday is hold office hours where I get to hear what you are interested in. If you have things you want to share or questions you want to ask, you can send an email to [email protected]. Here's what I'm going to do. I've divided the office hour questions and comments into two categories.

• 31:15Cal Newport?

  The first are non-AI related, and then the second half will be, I'm going to do a sort of lightning round of questions and comments on some of my recent AI writing, because I know a lot of you have been following my sort of reluctant engagement in the AI discourse of the current moment. All right, but let's start with some non-AI related comments and feedback. All right, Mika wrote and said, "I'm currently reading a condensed history and philosophy. This made me realize how much philosophers have thought about thinking and its limits. Today, I was wrestling with the depiction of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and wondered whether you will address these developments in Thinking About Thinking in your upcoming book about thinking." So a lot of uses of the word thinking,

• 31:57Cal Newport?

  I think. See what I did there. Okay, first of all, let me clarify, because I, God, I write a lot of books. What's Mika talking about? Well, I have an upcoming book in March called The Deep Life, which I'll talk about more soon. What Mika's talking about is I have an idea for the next book I'm going to write, but I have, I'm just researching this now. I haven't sold it. I haven't started working on it. The next book I'm going to write, in theory, is going to be about thinking itself. The working title is Indefensive Thinking. So Mika is saying, there is a period of philosophy where a lot of philosophers thought about thinking, like Kant and Critique of Pure Reason, which is, I've actually never read that in its entirety, but I know about some of his ideas in there. And he's trying to

• 32:41Cal Newport?

  figure out, you know, the difference, pure reason, he's trying to think about a priori, what do you call it, reasoning, like the ability to form thoughts, not based on external observation, but just sort of internally. And, you know, it's a long book, but interesting one. So here's the thing, Mika, that whole period where you had a lot of philosophers thinking about the mind, a period we could start with like Descartes, you know, we'll start with, you know, Descartes, I Think Therefore I Am, and through the 18th century philosophers, you know, we got Kant, you get Heidegger, et cetera. They were sort of overshadowed in the 20th century, once we got psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Like once we actually started studying the brain itself, we stopped thinking about cognition

• 33:25Cal Newport?

  in the sort of abstract philosophical sense, and started thinking about it more as like an actual human activity that could be measured, modeled, and bounded. So we don't, we don't refer to this, these type of analyses as much, it seems, anymore when we think about thinking. So probably I won't talk a lot about that in my book, but I don't know, I'm still early. So maybe I will. All right, we have a note here from anonymous. He says, "With regards to your September 7th episode about your 2026 fall productivity system, could you speak to the difference between your strategic plan and your vision document, please? Or are they the same thing? I had the impression from past podcasts and articles

• 34:07Cal Newport?

  that your strategic seasonal plans tend to be quite lengthy, whereas this vision document seemed to be very simple and reduced." Okay, so it's a good question. These are different words for more or less the same thing, and I just want to give a caveat, though, right? So seasonal plan, you could also call a quarterly plan, you could call it a semester plan, you can call it a vision document. And it's just sort of your summary of like, what am I up to for this relatively long period of time, or, you know, typically two to four months type of thing. And it's something you can reference when you do your planning, your weekly planning each week to kind of remember, like, what are your major goals? What habits or practices are you following? What metrics are you tracking? You know,

• 34:52Cal Newport?

  you have that written down somewhere. What systems are you running? Is they organized? It's a root for all the other things that you are doing. For the fall system I described in that September document, I'll just write this down here, the document, the vision document is terse on purpose, because it's sabbatical fall, and I was trying to start with a very lightweight system. So this is the same thing. I call it a vision document in that episode, because I was keeping it pretty compact. But it's the same thing as a quarterly plan or a seasonal plan. The exception, the caveat I want to put out here is that I often will have strategic plans for parts of my life in separate, separate

• 35:35Cal Newport?

  documents, because they're kind of lengthy. And I will reference them from whatever that core seasonal or vision document is. All right, so for example, I might have a strategic plan I often do for like what I'm doing in the different professional pursuits I have, because I guess it's kind of complicated, like what's happening with my, my podcast, with my writing, with like my AI commentary. And I'll often reference that from the root document. So I'll have, I'll pull out of my big strategic plan for like my professional life. I might pull out like, hey, this fall, remember I'm working on these things, and then I'll point, have a pointer, but look at the strategic plan document for, for more details. And I won't necessarily read that all the time, but for sure, I'll read the

• 36:19Cal Newport?

  strategic plan in detail when I'm updating my semester quarterly plan. And I'll often like translate the core things from there, the big strategic plan, onto that sort of more time limited plan. But again, do what makes sense for you. The thing to me that's important is you need some sort of root document that's like, here's what I'm up to for the next few months. Here's the systems I'm using. Here's the habits I'm trying to follow. You need a root thing from which all of the other life organizations you do follow. So I point to complicated strategic plans out of that. You don't have to do that if your job is simpler or doesn't need that type of planning, but you do need some sort of root document that covers like the current quarter, season, or semester, that is at the core of every, everything else you do is described or can be linked to from that, that primary document.

• 37:05Cal Newport?

  We got a note here from Amanda. Amanda said, I just went on Amazon to revisit some of your other books and was excited to see that the Deep Life is already available for preorder. My birthday is March 6th and Slow Productivity and Deep Life had both been released right around then, so it's a fun birthday treat to have a new one of your books released. The Deep Life pre-ordered, check. Well, thank you, Amanda. It is true, the cover is up on Amazon, it's a cool cover. Yeah, we spend a lot of time trying to capture something very specific with that cover, I'm very happy with it. That's kind of it. Even the copy that's on the Amazon page, the description of the book is a placeholder. I'm still actually working on what the formal copy is going to be. So if you want to know where I am in the process of that book, which comes out in March,

• 37:50Cal Newport?

  as you're hearing this recording, I'm finalizing what's known as the past pages. And that's where you get in PDF format, the actual book laid out exactly how it's going to be laid out when it's printed. So every page looking exactly how it's going to look when it's printed. And it's like, it's the final check you do after all the production process. You're not like copy editing at this point, we've done many rounds of that, but you're looking for things like, is a headings misformatted, like, ooh, that's supposed to be a bigger heading because it actually matches that level and not that level, or is there like a mistake in a running header or something? So it's your final check of like, what is the book going to look like page by page? So we're really close to like having it locked in, then I'll update all the copy, then we

• 38:34Cal Newport?

  go looking for the blurbs, so that's happened soon, and that all gets added to the cover and to the Amazon page, then we're ready to print. So if you just want to view into how the publishing process works, that's where we are and that's what's coming up. If you do preorder the book now, excuse me, hold on to your receipt, you know, email, because I am going to have a very cool preorder offer for my listeners. I've decided to just try to do one thing that's awesome. Right, this is my two criterias. I want a preorder giveaway that's just awesome, like a bunch of little things, but just an awesome thing, and it's something that lets you get into the ideas of the book right away, even while you're waiting for it to come out.

• 39:15Cal Newport?

  So Amanda or anyone else who preorders now, just hold on to your receipt from, you know, wherever you bought it from in your email. And otherwise, I'll talk more about this book as we sort of finalize these final elements of production. All right, so we're going to talk a little bit about AI. I feel like I have to take a sip of coffee here. A lot's happened in the world of AI, I'm reluctantly commenting on it. I wrote a bunch of articles, I've been recording a lot of podcasts, I have kind of been reined into this, into this discussion in a way that's not always my favorite. As I talked about in last week's episode, I'm all about how do human flourishing in technological world, I care about the human, and so when it comes to AI, I'm much more

• 39:58Cal Newport?

  interested, like we talked about last week, AI's impact on the humans, not AI's impact on humanity. So all these sort of discussions of existential fear and government regulation, but I have some expertise I can communicate, so I'm somewhat involved in that story. So I published, I've published some articles on my newsletter about it, calnewport.com, including recently one that was called, "Superintelligence is a fairy tale, but chasing it can still cause harm." Actually, I can even load this up, put this on the screen here. This covered a lot of my views about Jacob Croxton coming out and saying AI is going to kill us all, and then several senior Anthropic employees replying and saying, yeah, I think

• 40:41Cal Newport?

  it will, I think it might kill us all, which is crazy, bonkers. So I wrote this article, it had three points, which I'll read, and then we're going to do rapid fire comments and reactions to this piece. The first point I made is Anthropic and OpenAI are not able to create superintelligent AI. I just don't think that's continuing to reinforcement train at the limbs, is not going to lead to hell 9000. Point two, but their obsession with superintelligence can still create harm. So I'm arguing that because they think that's on the table, they're being more reckless, and that's creating real harms. And point three is AI progress does not have to be this scary or dangerous.

• 41:22Cal Newport?

  So my final point is, those companies are being irresponsible in a specific way, that actually, we could have a thriving, exciting, interesting AI industry without all this doom existential fear weirdness that they've been spitting at us for multiple years. I'm trying to emphasize, this is not inevitable side effect of AI we're facing, it's in part very specific to the way that these two particular companies are pursuing AI. All right, so that was one of multiple things I wrote, but it got a lot of reaction, so I want to just rapid fire go through some notes from you, the reader. All right, so Madison said, "What should we be doing practically to call for this sort of reform? Is it not just boycotting OpenAI Anthropic?

• 42:07Cal Newport?

  Are there alts we know are acting responsibly as a small business executive who has our team on Claude? I am suddenly feeling conflicted." I think the first thing that needs to happen here is public transparency. We're talking about things like, how should we regulate AI? What, how do we get involved? How do we push back? And the problem is, is there's a huge fog of lack of knowledge. We don't understand really what they're talking about, right? A lot of the communication coming out of these companies is this, this like very stylized, abstract, rationalist, effective altruist style, non-technical discussion points about superintelligent AI. I mean, you have like exact terminologies from someone like Jacob Croxton, that you

• 42:52Cal Newport?

  can find specifically in like Elias Jukowski writing, like crunch time for humanity. Models increasingly, just like some vague notion of a model is evading our control and improving, and so it's very vague. It's very vague because it tends to be in the vernacular of rationalism and effective altruism, which have a relatively non-technical often engagement with these issues. So they speak in terms of like thought experiments or high level concepts. So we need to really understand what's going on. What AI is threatening humanity? What specific system are you working on now that you think will do that? Why are you working on it? Is there no way to stop? Why can't you stop that? What, we need to get more concrete about what exactly they're saying.

• 43:37Cal Newport?

  We also need to then counterbalance everything that comes out of, the figures that I identified in my New Yorker article, or my New York Times op ed, rather, from a few weeks ago, identified Altman, Amade, Musk, Jimiss Asabi, among others, has been particularly connected to these futurist ideologies like rationalism and effective altruism, and is really influencing the way their companies think and talk, as we saw when employees of Anthropic, for example, started tweeting in exactly the vernacular of rationalism and effective altruism. So we need to counterbalance all those explanations with explanations from other highly advanced AI companies that aren't as connected to those same ideologies, and make sure that we balance those two things off of each other.

• 44:21Cal Newport?

  We want to hear you out, but we want to hear what the other guy has to say as well, and let's compare these things together. So I think we need to understand more what is actually going on. We need to leave these vague sci-fi narrative tropes and talk concrete about technology. So we need to understand what's going on and why, can it be prevented, why is it not, before we figure out how to act. So we need transparency before we need action. All right, Peter says, "Any recommendations for responsible AI companies to use?" Again, we need to find out more, but in particular, OpenAI and Anthropic and DeepMind, the DeepMind have been sort of disbanded, those three companies in particular come very strongly

• 45:03Cal Newport?

  out of these futurist ideologies like rationalism and effective altruism, so be wary of them. It's not for nothing that when Jensen Huang from the Vidia, an old school hardware company that has very little connection to futurist ideologies, what was his reaction to the Anthropic claims about, we're probably going to kill everyone? He said they're quote, "outlandish." Interesting. Massive AI figures that are not connected to these futurist ideologies, they see things a little bit differently. All right, let's see what Nick said.

• 45:35Cal Newport?

  Please keep dropping truth bombs on this LLM BS as I genuinely think the world needs it. Thanks, Nick. I hate it. I really don't want to be involved in these discussions. I want, I, I deal with humans. I don't deal with threats to humanity, but Salavi is what I'm doing right now. Andreas says, makes your interesting newsletter. Do you have book recommendations on the ideology behind AI employees summoning their AI god or Messiah? I do indeed. You should read Adam Becker's book, More Everything Forever. I actually just did a, a podcast appearance with Adam on Ed Zitron's podcast. It came out last week. And I, Ed had asked me to come on and to talk about rationalism, effective altruism, because I'd written a New York Times op ed about it. And I said, oh, you got to have

• 46:17Cal Newport?

  Adam on as well. And Adam, because he spent years researching this book, he talked to a lot of the main figures, including Eliau Yukowski. He's read so much of what they've written. And he walks through the history of these movements, what they believe, where they came from, and there, we talk about their intersection with some of these existing AI companies. So at the very least, listen to that conversation, me and Adam with Ed Zitron. Read my New York Times op ed about rationalism from a few weeks ago. If you have more time, read Adam Becker's book. All right. Finally, Ian says, one thing I'm surprised you're not mentioning on this is the regulatory capture angle. I think a very real element is that the more anthropic can convince everyone they have a nuclear bomb, the more they think they can convince the US government to regulate AI the way they

• 47:00Cal Newport?

  want, which means stepping on competition and preventing progress on open weight models. You know, I hear this a lot because it's rational. Ironic, because rationalism is very influential on these companies. It's rational that they might be doing that. I think that theory is going around often, and I get why that's a popular theory. There's another theory going around that Dario Amade's letter that was calling for a global pause is angling for an antitrust waiver so that they can cooperate more with, say, open AI. Maybe they're seeing, you know, at some point, we need to kind of merge more, and this is the first step towards it. So there's all these economic rational arguments that might be true. But the more I look into this, the more I become convinced they're true believers.

• 47:44Cal Newport?

  They're true believers. I'm telling you, a big thread of the story that's going on right now, and we look back years in the future, is going to be the influence of these ideologies, these futurist ideologies, like rationalism, effective altruism, on figures like Dario Amade, Sam Altman, and many other high level executives at those firms, creating a culture that percolates down through their employees. They talk in the terms of these futurist movements. These futurist movements have been convinced since well before LLMs were a big deal. They've been convinced for decades that super intelligent AI is going to come and is the end through recursive self improvement, and it's going to be the end of history. And

• 48:25Cal Newport?

  if we can shepherd it properly, it will redeem history. And if we can't, it will destroy the earth. It's very eschatological. I think that's how Dario Amade sees himself. I have to shepherd the benevolent digital god. Otherwise, we'll end up with Eliau Yukowski's satanic digital god that will kill us all. But they're convinced that, of course, this is going to happen. And that's why you see all this, the, all this, this precision about extinction that comes right out of rationalism. The exact ways they describe what's going to happen, they're kind of like high level, it's recursive self improvement. The way they talk about models being aligned, but not specific products or system architectures

• 49:04Cal Newport?

  causing trouble. This all comes out of the futurism methodology. So maybe this is an economic play. I think they're actually true believers. Don't underestimate the power of an ideology that tells you that you are the hero of the world. You're Neo and John, and, you know, John Connor from the Terminator movie, mixed with Moses. Don't underestimate the power of that story. It's more compelling to people than I want to keep my open weight competitors down, so my stock is going to be worth a little bit more. I really think there's probably a true believer type of situation going on, which is why I tell people, always, always, always try to counter program what you're hearing from those companies

• 49:46Cal Newport?

  with people from academic sphere, or other companies, or other countries that aren't as connected to the Silicon Valley futurist method ideologies. And you hear really different things from them. Also, stay off X. X has become, it's just engagement farming, rationalist EA doomerism. And the problem is, we're in a new media world, and in new media, people become, we know this, so driven by X, and that's where they get their story ideas, and that's how they get their clicks. And so you have all of these new media news operations that are just in, sub stackers and stuff that are just all in on the EA rationalist doomerism, because that's what's really big on X. And, and that's sort of their epistemic

• 50:26Cal Newport?

  reality. And I think it shouldn't be. All right. Enough AI. I like to finish up my Monday releases by summarizing what I'm up to. Jesse, still know Jesse, but he will be back soon. We do miss him. I thought about bringing Jesse Skeleton back. But you know why I don't? Let me be honest about this. Why am I not bringing back Jesse Skeleton, even though Jesse's not here? And it's, I mean, it would make sense, getting closer to Halloween. Because to do Jesse Skeleton, I have to have a skeleton in the studio, which means I have to carry a skeleton from my house to the studio. And I got to tell you, the people in this town I live already are like, why is this professor, furious air quotes, always walking around in gym shorts? Doesn't he have a job? He's always kind of

• 51:09Cal Newport?

  in and out of the coffee shop, and because my office is down the street from the coffee shop. They see me carrying a skeleton down the street, they're like, he must just have like inherited money. He doesn't really have a real job, does he? It's just a bridge too far. So I didn't bring the skeleton, but we are looking forward to Jesse being back. As mentioned, I've been doing a ton on AI, whether I want to or not. So keep an eye on my newsletter at calnewport.com. Listen to that interview with Becker and Zitron. You could read my New York Times op ed from a couple of weeks ago about rationalism, effective altruism. It's, it really tried to capture those connections there. There's a Good New Yorker column by Josh Rothman that like summarizes my view about the systems that

• 51:50Cal Newport?

  caused trouble over the summer, and contrasted to the way Dorkish Patel talks about it. So if you kind of want to get into my technical world, check that out as well. But I think I'm going to otherwise leave it there. Maybe I'll have another episode this week. Maybe I'll have another AI episode. You know, I always do one episode each week, and then I try to have one or two other ones when I can. So we'll see how this week goes. But I'm getting so drowned doing, you know, interviews and phone calls and writing with AI, just don't have the time even to record the podcast episodes. But we'll be back to multi-week, multi-episode week soon. But I should probably call it quits for today. So we'll see you next time. And until then, as always, stay deep.