Ep. 356: How Much Should We Work?

The data shows knowledge workers really are more exhausted and more prone to burnout than ever before. But why? In this episode, Cal draws inspiration from an unlikely source to help unpack this troubling trend and then suggest a perhaps radical solution. He then answers listeners’ questions and discusses his latest New Yorker article on the challenges of taming AI. As a bonus, he briefly discusses Cal Network’s new bestselling book. Find out more about Done Daily at DoneDaily.com! Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia Deep Dive: How Much Should We Work? [3:33] - What’s your advice on having a career backup plan? [28:27]- Do you know of any executive coaches who teach your principles? [30:33]- Is my retirement plan too ambitious? [35:13]- Are accountability support tools acceptable to use in order to build discipline? [38:43]- How can I identify if I have an inventory of "rare and valuable skills"? [41:21] CASE STUDY: Crafting a storytelling profession [43:14] CALL: Creating a life dashboard [46:14] TECH CORNER: Why Can’t We Tame AI? (Cal’s latest New Yorker article) [52:08] Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/what-isaac-asimov-reveals-about-living-with-ai Thanks to our Sponsors: drinklmnt.com/deeporacle.com/deepquestionsindeed.com/deepvanta.com/deepquestions Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:11Cal Newport?

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

• 0:23Cal Newport?

  So I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. We got a good show ahead of us, Jesse. We got a deep dive coming up where I'm going to comment on digital work, drawing from a decidedly pre-digital source. Got a bunch of good questions. Looking at them now, they're very career focused today.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:48Cal Newport?

  Kind of nice. It's like, it's not really what the deep dive is about, but our questions and case study today, if you're thinking about applying the ideas of the depth principle and career capital to try to take control, like deep life type stuff, you will like our questions today. And then we have a final segment where I'll be talking about my latest New Yorker article, do a text corner segment on it. Just had an article come out last week about AI. So we'll get into that article. As a special bonus for those who make it to the third segment of the show, I am also excited to share, Cal Network has a new book out. It's doing really well. I'll, I'll show you, we have a cover and everything. So that's something to wait for, look forward to in the third segment. Interestingly, Jesse, the book was not just a number one New York Times bestseller, but a number one through

• 1:33Cal Newport?

  number three, New York Times bestseller.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  We got a lot of feedback, fan feedback about Cal Network.

• 1:38Cal Newport?

  Oh, their anger?

• 1:40Speaker 01

  No, they like it. They thought it was really funny. We got a lot of quips.

• 1:43Cal Newport?

  We did. Oh, is that what those were in the script? Those were from fans? I appreciate those. Yeah. So his book was too successful just for one slot. The, let me just say this about Cal Network's book. The New York Times Book Review doesn't review Cal Network. They asked Cal Network to review them. That's how influential he is. Before we get into it, I want to mention a couple of books. I'm trying to recommend more books. I think our listeners like it. I like to point out books that are coming out that are new that I think are interesting. So there's a book that just came out called The Tech Exit, A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones. This is written by Claire Morrell, who I've met a few times. She lives here in DC. She's a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and the Director of his Technology and Human Flourishing Project.

• 2:28Cal Newport?

  I blurb this book. I like this book because Claire is like really strong. She says, "Look, we have to be much stronger," we being the community, we being parents. "We need to be much stronger thinking about our kids and technology. I don't care if they already gave them a phone. You can still work backwards from that and change the situation. It matters." There's like, there's a firmness and a pragmatic, pragmatic nature to this book that I liked. Here's the blurb I put on the cover. "We know smartphones can be harmful to kids and teens, but what can we do about it? In this indispensable guide, Claire Morrell documents the solutions that actually work." So check that out, The Tech Exit. I also wanted to briefly mention, several listeners wrote in about this. If you're interested in our discussion of the four-day week, the amount of time we work and knowledge work, which is also a topic we're going to pick up today in the deep dive.

• 3:13Cal Newport?

  I would be remiss if I didn't mention Alex Pang's two books, Rest and Shorter. Rest is about doing less to get more done, and Shorter is actually about four-day work weeks and similar types of ideas. Smart books, check them out. All right, Jesse, that's enough about other people's stuff. Let's get into our own and start with today's deep dive. So something we hear casually tossed around these days is the idea that knowledge workers are more exhausted and prone to burnout than ever before. Anecdotally, this seems to be true, but does the data back it up? Well, it does. If you look at survey data of knowledge workers, this trend seems to be clear. For example, 2025 research by research consultants at Census Wide

• 3:55Cal Newport?

  found that 66% of American employees are experiencing some sort of burnout. This was the highest number they had recorded. Another survey from 2025 found that 82% of respondents reported experiencing some level of exhaustion. I kept finding study after study along these lines. They are common, and the trend lines are heading in the wrong direction. So I want to talk about this today, and I have two goals. First, I'm going to focus on a specific factor. That I think helps explains this trend. It's not the only factor that explains this trend, but it is an important one. And it's one I think that we don't talk about enough. Second, I'm going to then follow the logic. If this factor is true, where would that lead us in terms of how we should be rethinking work? And I'm going to make a suggestion about what I

• 4:40Cal Newport?

  think the ideal knowledge work workday should look like for a normal human being. The answer that might be shocking, but if you give it some time, I think it actually makes more sense than you might at first realize. So to get started, I want to start in an unexpected place. It's a quote I came across recently that sparked the whole line of thinking that led to this deep dive. It was a quote that was written down in a journal 150 years ago, and it might not seem to have anything to do with work. But I think when we look at it closely, it has everything to do with work today. All right, I'm going to pull this quote up here on the screen for those who are watching instead of just listening. This quote comes from Henry David Thoreau's journal. He

• 5:25Cal Newport?

  wrote this journal entry in 1852. This was in the period after he had already spent his time at Walden Pond, but before he had published his book on the experience. So he was sort of processing it. Here's what he wrote. "I have the habit of attention to such excess that my senses get no rest, but suffer from a constant strain. Be not preoccupied with looking. Go not to the object. Let it come to you. What I need is not to look at all, but a true sauntering of the eye."

• 6:00Cal Newport?

  Okay, let's think about this a little bit. What did he mean by this? Well, to get some analysis that's going to help us connect us to work, I'm going to turn to the source where I found this journal entry, which was in Caleb Smith's recent book Thoreau's Acts, which I read a couple of months ago, and we talked about on this show. The author of this book, Caleb Smith, in analyzing Thoreau's journal entry that I just read, said the following.

• 6:24Cal Newport?

  At Walden, Thoreau had begun by trying to undistract himself, to reawaken his own powers of perception and refocus his attention on natural, uncommodified objects of contemplation. By doing so, he had hoped to free himself from the degrading cycle of labor and consumption that organized middle-class life under market capitalism. In the long run, though, he found that this very effort exhausted his senses and trapped him in a "habit of attention." All right, this is a little bit academic. That's from an academic book, but let me deconstruct it because there's a critical point in here. When Thoreau went to Walden Pond to do that experiment of living deliberately by the water, he thought that his problem was he was paying attention to the wrong things, right? That he was focusing too much

• 7:09Cal Newport?

  on consumer and materialistic goods, and that by removing those from his life and focusing on the wonders of nature, for example, which he describes in sort of great, loving detail in his book Walden, that he would find a sort of more purity in his existence. He was sort of playing here with the ancient monastic Christian notion of turning your attention from the worldly to the heavens above and contemplating hard, you know, God and divinity. But in this journal entry that comes after he leaves Walden, he's realizing that the bigger problem was how much time he was spending paying attention in the first place. So he was discovering this idea of like, I need to focus really hard on the

• 7:53Cal Newport?

  right thing, like focus on the ice that I'm going to write about in Walden, focus on the clouds up above, that that act of paying so much attention itself was unnatural, regardless of what he was paying attention to. There's periods where you just need to let the world be around you, let objects come to your attention and then drift off. This might give you deep insight. Sometimes it might not, but it gives you a more deeper sense of contentment. So we had this revelation. There's only so much we can kind of force ourselves to pay attention. We're actually wired to let the world come to us, just to be there in the world for a lot of our time. All right, let's connect this to knowledge work. There is a through line here.

• 8:38Cal Newport?

  In his philosophizing, right, Thoreau was stumbling on this important point about paying focused attention being to some degree unnatural or something we can only do a limited amount. And yet, isn't this exactly what knowledge work demands of us? The knowledge work demands that we have to be focusing and paying attention on things with our brain the entire day. Well, where did this come from? Well, here's a story to tell. As we get the rise of the Industrial Revolution and factory labor, we invented a new model of productive work in which what you're essentially doing is renting your body to a factory owner. So in industrial work, which was what was big in the time when Thoreau was around,

• 9:22Cal Newport?

  this was the model we had. Hey, I'm going to rent my body to you, the factory owner, for eight hours. It would have been more before, but after, you know, federal labor reform standards, early 20th century, it'd be something like eight hours. And then you could basically tell me what to do with that. I need your arms to turn these knobs and to attach these steering wheels or to move these things from the assembly line and off. And you're paying me for use of my body. You're going to tell me exactly how to use it. And if I say, hey, I'm going to go take a two hour break, like, great, we're not using your body, then we're not paying you for those two hours, right? So I'm renting your body to help make our factories actually run because we need human bodies doing things in there. So when knowledge work emerged as a major economic sector in the mid 20th century,

• 10:06Cal Newport?

  the decision implicitly was like, well, we'll just do the same thing with brains. It just made sense. It was a natural leap. In the factories, we rent your bodies for eight to 10 hours a day, and the offices will rent your brains for eight hours. Your brain is ours for those eight hours, so it better be doing the cognitive equivalent of turning the wrench or attaching the steering wheel for those eight hours. So you gotta be doing things with your brain the entire time that you're working. So this made sense from, I don't know, an intuitive perspective. It's just what we did in factories. Why not do it in offices? But as Thoreau had pointed out 150 years ago,

• 10:48Cal Newport?

  you can't do that. You can sit in a factory and move things off an assembly line for eight hours a day, but you can't easily pay attention to things for eight hours a day. It's unnatural and it's draining and it is exhausting. It is a very unnatural configuration to be in. Now, why then are these numbers getting worse? If this was our idea early in the mid 20th century, we had all these big factories, the offices built, we said, let's run the offices the same way as a factory. Why is this burnout and exhaustion getting worse today than it was back then? Wouldn't it just be bad from the very beginning? Well, I think technology has a role to play in this story. So while it was true in, you know, 1965 and you're, you're working on Madison Avenue, like in the Jon Hamm show, Mad Men, that your brain

• 11:32Cal Newport?

  was being rented for eight hours, it was easier to fake it than you could in industrial labor. In industrial labor, I can tell if you were not doing your thing on the assembly line. I can see you not turning the wrench. What's going on? But if I'm John, Don Draper in Mad Men, come on, I can have a cocktail at two in the afternoon for an hour. We're like working in the conference room to think about ideas, but not really. When the boss comes by, you put down your magazine and you're at the water cooler talking football and the supervisor walks in and you quickly shift at the client talk. So we all kind of pretended like this is what we were doing. Yeah, we're renting our brains, just like our brothers in the factory. It's the same thing we're doing. We're renting our brains for eight hours. We're here and we're thinking the whole time, but we really weren't doing that. And, you know, you could kind of get away with that. Then technology came along

• 12:16Cal Newport?

  and we lost our ability to fake it. The personal computer, as I've talked about before, and I wrote about this in my book, Slow Productivity, the personal computer came along and it vastly increased the number of things you could be working on. There's so much more work that could be assigned to you because there's so many more things that one individual could do because the computer made so many tasks just easy enough that one person could learn to do them. This led to a theory of workload that said, well, great. Now that there's so many different things you can do, why not just fill your queue hopelessly large? But the idea that there'll be no downtime. So there'll always be something you can work on. Right. So we were kind of calling the bluff of this renting your brain model. We're like, okay, if we really have your brain for eight hours, now that there's like an endless amount of stuff you could be doing, let's put so much on your plate that you never have an excuse not to be

• 13:01Cal Newport?

  working. Then we got the digital communication revolution that started by email and was continued by things like Slack and Teams, etc. And that now made it possible to check in on you applying effort at incredibly fine level of granularity. Answer my emails right away. I know you're paying attention. If you don't, then maybe you're stealing from us. We rented your brain. You're not giving it to us. See activity going back and forth on the Slack channel, or we're going to think that you are actually ironically slacking off. So we vastly increased what people could be doing. We vastly increased the granularity at which we could surveil people's efforts. And suddenly, this half-baked idea, let's just rent brains for eight hours. We actually tried to do it. And that's why it's exhausting everyone. And Thoreau warned us about it. He wasn't warning us

• 13:45Cal Newport?

  about office work, but he was warning us about the underlying principle that, hey, it's hard to pay attention all the time. Even if the thing you're paying attention to is good, there's only so much of it you can do. So what would it look like if we rolled back the clock and said, look, Thoreau is my management consultant of choice, and we're going to design what I'll call the Thoreau schedule, a schedule for knowledge work, a typical daily schedule that actually is compatible with the way the human brain actually functions. Here's what this would more or less be. Two to three hours of deep work in the morning. So working on one or two things that are important and require application of skills and concentration, non-trivial amount of time off, like an hour or

• 14:29Cal Newport?

  two, long walk, other types of things unrelated to work, one to two hours of administrative work, including a standing 30-minute meeting or office hours to check in with all sorts of other people and get questions answered and any other sort of things that need to happen. And then you're done.

• 14:45Cal Newport?

  That would actually be the schedule that best corresponds to the human brain. If you want to invent a cognitive job that's based just off people using their brain, that is, the Thoreau schedule there is probably the optimal thing.

• 15:01Cal Newport?

  Now, the obvious point, of course, is that if you ran the thorough schedule, yes, you would be much less likely to be burnt out. If you ran this as an organization, your exhaustion numbers, your turnover, your burnout numbers, of course, would plummet. That's a much more natural rhythm. It works with our brain. We're not exhausting ourselves. But would it be a productivity disaster? We don't know that it would be. Here's a couple of things to keep in mind. Remember from a couple of weeks ago, we talked about the data from the four-day workweek studies. They reduced the amount of time people had to work, therefore, like reducing the amount of stuff they could work on. And all of the quantitative productivity measures that they studied didn't go down. In some cases, they went up. It's slow productivity. I talk about the idea of overhead tax aggregating.

• 15:46Cal Newport?

  Everything you're working on generates an overhead tax of meetings and emails and thoughts, the sort of the collaborative glue that holds together any sort of project. The more things you're working on, the more of that is in your day. And the more of that you get in your day, eventually, your day is going to be gunked up with the overhead tax with very little time left to do the actual work. Yes, you're busy, but very little actual quality output gets produced. So if you're only working one big block in the morning on one or two things, and then some administrative work in the afternoon, yes, your number of things you can concurrently be working on is going to be much smaller. It doesn't necessarily mean that on the scale of a quarter, that you'll be producing less than in a much more non-thorough, busier schedule.

• 16:29Cal Newport?

  And also, keep in mind that the impossibility that Thoreau points out of actually focusing productively and hard for eight hours means that we're just using lots of pseudo-productivity to fill in the gaps during our day. And pseudo-productivity, which is just using busyness as a proxy for useful effort, has little to do with outcome, has very little to do with the needle-moving, actual valuable stuff that is produced. So a thorough schedule might be largely just eliminating pseudo-productivity, which means, again, when you zoom out to a quarter or to a fiscal year, the amount of value produced, the actual macroeconomic measure of productivity, which is how many dollars came in per employee we have hired, that could actually be the same or go up.

• 17:12Cal Newport?

  I mean, maybe not, but I suspect it would not be as bad as you suspect. So to conclude, most major companies and organizations, they're not going to shift to a thorough schedule anytime soon. I think this idea of we're renting your brain and we want to get our money's worth for this rental agreement is both obvious and comfortable and entrenched and it's going to be hard to easily shake off. But if they did, and I think people should, there would be a whole new relationship to knowledge work and a whole new approach to productivity that might be uncovered. I don't know exactly what type of boss Thoreau would be in our modern knowledge work setting, but I imagine that he wouldn't be sending you endless email advice and text messages saying, did you get my last message? I think he would instead understand the importance of allowing your

• 17:57Cal Newport?

  eye to saunter. There you go, Jesse. Thoreau is a management consultant. That was the original title of Walden. People don't know this. It was Walden, colon, Seven Habits for Getting Ahead in Your Job. And then he kind of changed it to something a little bit more philosophical. That's one of your favorite books, right? Yeah, Walden is very influential to a lot of my work. And you read that when you were at MIT? I originally read it, yeah, MIT at the banks of the Charles. I had the version, I have a terrible memory for everything except for books. I read it on the banks of the Charles. I had a version from the science library. I think it was called the Hayden Science Library at MIT. And they had an addition that had a Bill McKibben introduction.

• 18:38Cal Newport?

  And I remember being like, oh, okay, interesting. I've been to the cabin and it's a great, but you know, look, it's not written in a modern style. You have to take it slow. It seems more digressive and he's sort of all over the place. But he's actually, it's really smart commentary that's in there. Once you, once you adjust to the language and there's a lot of timeless principles in it. Two other follow up questions. Do you think it has a big difference with public versus private companies in terms of potentially adopting a thorough schedule? I think it's small versus large. Yeah, I think it's just, it gets too entrenched when you're, as you get bigger, it's hard to make changes. This is one of the things I've really learned is

• 19:20Cal Newport?

  that it's hard to change how organizations execute. It's hard to do it. If you come just top down, it almost never works because there's all these little friction points. And if it feels like it's imposed, like the boss of the massive company says like, here's, you know, look, I read Cal Newport, we're making all these changes. There's too many friction points. And then the friction builds up and the system seizes. And you have to fall back to the super flexible, sort of like hyperactive hive mind overload, you know, mindset. And then managers themselves, they're not the boss, but like the managers, they really don't have an incentive, right? This is the, the, the reality of modern capitalism is if

• 20:02Cal Newport?

  you're in a large organization, there's things like stability, predictability, like this is more highly valued than trying to innovate the way that you actually work or collaborate with other people. Like it's, it's, there's a lot of just entrenchment of like, hey, this works. Like, we all disagree, right? We'll just be pseudo productive. We know how to do this. I'm good at it. If I'm a manager, that means I was good at it. I answer all the emails and jump on all the calls. I have a good like high pain tolerance for that. And like, who wants to change it? So it's, it's these problems like hard to change. But like I said, like, we see this all the time. There'll be technological breakthroughs in industrial manufacturing. It takes a long time till it actually, the changes happen just because of inertia. The electric motor, famous case study from a Stanford economist is talked about all the time. I've cited, everyone cited it. Took like

• 20:46Cal Newport?

  50 years from having the technology there to like, wait, we should just put small electric motors on the equipment in the factory as opposed to having like a large overhead shaft turned by a giant steam engine that we attach with leather belts. Still took 50 years because it was like a pain and it was new and it was different and expensive. The continuous motion assembly line's the same way. By far a better way to make things like automobiles, but it was such a pain to get right that, you know, it really took eventually like Henry Ford being a kind of classic and just forcing the change through for that to actually happen. So I think knowledge work has a lot of that entrenchment.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  And then my next follow up. So we talked about summer schedules a few weeks back. So how does your summer schedule look like a daily schedule look?

• 21:30Cal Newport?

  It's been pretty good. I mean, it's been, it's very thorough in on a nod podcast day. I write in the morning.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  For two to three hours?

• 21:36Cal Newport?

  Yeah, at least. I'll work on multiple different projects. And then I try to do some admin in the afternoon, professional admin, but not every day. Like three days, three days a week I can keep on top of like most professional admin, 30 to 45 minutes.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  So you hardly write in the afternoon?

• 21:55Cal Newport?

  I don't. Yeah, sometimes I can do like a second batch in the evening. I can sometimes make that work if I come here and like make a deal about it. But no, I do it mostly in the morning. The, the thing I have been doing just because I have more time is every time now I go into my emails professionally, I'm updating all my filters. Just unsubscribe filter, unsubscribe filter. I mean, I'm going to be, if I'm relentless for two weeks, I can cut down the, the junk that comes into those email inboxes. Not calnewport.com. That's a lost cause. That's just done. I don't know how I'm ever going to get my arms around that one. Every PR agency that ever existed now like sends emails to that. But, but my personal in Georgetown, I'm like, I'm, it's really making a difference. I'm, you know, catching up on the like various things. I bought a product from this once and now I have 17

• 22:39Cal Newport?

  email subscriptions from them, like that type of stuff. And it's like, it's making a difference.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  One more follow up. With your writing two to three hours a day, you write very fast. So you just bang out something two to three hours probably.

• 22:52Cal Newport?

  It depends what it is. Yeah, it depends what it is.

• 22:57Cal Newport?

  Like recently, I have a New Yorker piece that came out last week and I wrote that like two days. Are you writing your head a lot too when you're walking around? I do right in my head, yeah. But like in New York, it took me two days to do 20, 2300 words. And that was, those are more like eight hour days of writing just because I was on deadline. But other things like the newsletter post about that New Yorker article. So today, there's a new newsletter post out about that New Yorker article at calnewport.com. That took like 30, that was just, you know, brain to page. Yeah. Just, you know, I was like, I've thought about this so much. I just lived with this for the last four days. I can just, you know, that's just gonna, that's just gonna come out. So it just depends what I'm, depends what I'm working on. Sometimes like not much happens if it's like a really tricky piece. But also, yeah, I think of walking as writing because I write in my head.

• 23:42Cal Newport?

  Like I never, I don't want to come to a blank screen saying, I'll figure this out on the screen completely. Like just as I start typing, maybe I'll figure out what I want to say. You're gonna say bad things. Like you've got to figure out the scaffolding of what you're gonna write. And then you sit down to write and then things might change. But though I do a lot of that on foot. All right. We got some good questions coming up, but first, let's hear briefly from a sponsor.

• 24:08Speaker 02

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• 24:13Cal Newport?

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• 24:21Cal Newport?

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• 24:38Cal Newport?

  I'll talk about actually a product I use every single day. This is Element, L-M-N-T. Element is a zero sugar electrolyte drink mix and sparkling electrolyte drink, born from the growing body of research revealing that optimal health outcomes occur at sodium levels two to three times government recommendations. Each serving delivers a meaningful dose of electrolytes, but without the junk, right? Without the sugar or the other types of food dyes or other dodgy ingredients. You can trust this. It gets you the electrolytes you need to rehydrate without any of that other junk. In Washington DC, where the humidity level in the summer is right around, I believe the official reading is 7,000%. Actually, I learned, Jesse, the right way that people talk about humidity, actual

• 25:21Cal Newport?

  weather experts is dew point. Percent humidity is for suckers. Oh, really? Dew point's what matters. That's the actual number. So anyways, the dew point here is, I don't know if high temperatures is good or bad. So I don't know what to say there, but it's very humid here. I drink a lot of Element. I'll have it in the morning if I feel dehydrated and I for sure have it during my workouts or on long walks. I usually mix it in with one of those liter Nalgene's or two liter, you know, the big Nalgene's full of ice water. I'll go through a lot of those. We literally do go through this stuff really fast. I love it because it keeps me hydrated. And sometimes like I don't want just plain water. I know I'm craving salt and I think it's because I'm sweating all the time. So Element is the best if you want one of these like no dodgy ingredients, right amount of

• 26:04Cal Newport?

  electrolytes. I swear by it and I really recommend it. Look, you can receive a free sample pack with any order if you purchase through drink element.com/deep. And when you're there, you should check out a new flavor, great summer flavor, lemonade, salt, squeeze the most out of summer with elements new limited time lemonade, salt, salty tart and refreshing, but it brings you the best of summer wherever you are. I'm literally craving that right now. I don't think I've had enough hydration this morning. I wish I had a lemonade salt element right now. We're just going to sit here on dead air until Jesse goes and finds that for me. It's going to take like 15, 20 minutes, but that's what we're going to have to do. Look, there's a totally risk free, you know, you don't like

• 26:47Cal Newport?

  element, you can return it, no money back, etc. But you're not going to, you're going to like it. So go to drink element.com/deep. You need element, buy element, get a free sample pack if you order at drink element.com/deep. I also want to talk about our friends at Vanta. Trust isn't just earned, it's demanded. Whether you're a startup founder navigating your first audit or a seasoned security professional scaling your GRC program, proving your commitment to security has never been more critical or more complex. That's where Vanta comes in. Businesses like Vanta are use Vanta to establish trust by automating compliance needs across over 35 frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001. They centralize security workflows with it. They complete questionnaires up to five

• 27:31Cal Newport?

  times faster and they can proactively manage vendor risk. Vanta can help you start or scale your security program by connecting you with auditors and experts to conduct your audit and set up your security program quickly. Plus with automation and AI throughout the platform, Vanta gives you your time back so you can focus on building your company. Join over 9,000 global companies like Alacian, Cora, and Factory who use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time. My listeners get $1,000 off Vanta at vanta.com/deepquestions. That's V A N T A dot com slash deepquestions for $1,000 off. Security is complicated these days, Jesse. I think our setup is probably technologically not complicated enough yet. People don't know

• 28:14Cal Newport?

  this, but actually like the whole digital Cal Newport empire, true story, it's run off of a Speak and Spell. So we really were kind of behind the times. A Speak and Spell and one of those Casio calculator watches. So I think we need some, some more. Yeah, you got yours. Jesse wears a watch that I literally owned when I was seven. I mean, not that literal watch, but that exact brand. Yeah. And in fact, my watch, my, was it the Timex?

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Casio.

• 28:39Cal Newport?

  Casio. Yeah. I'm sure mine still runs if I could find it. Yeah, there you go. But Jesse's a bad haggler and he actually spent $17,000 on that watch. He kind of got taken for a bit of a ride, but you know, it's worth it. It's beautiful watch. All right, Jesse, let's do some questions.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  First question's from Natasha. What's your advice on having a career backup plan, especially for young people aiming for highly competitive fields like academia? What makes for a good backup plan in case things don't work out, even if you, even if I follow your advice?

• 29:12Cal Newport?

  It's a good question. This is where career capital theory matters. This is the whole theoretical framework I lay out in my book, So Good They Can't Ignore You. So career capital, as we talk about a lot on this show, is my term for your marketable skills, your rare and valuable skills. That is your, your source of value and negotiation in the job market. So whatever you're working on, it's useful to be thinking about not just what specific job am I trying to get. You should also be thinking about what general type of career capital am I accruing? And you want to make sure that not only are you accruing as much as possible, which means not just like doing what you need to, you know, bare minimum to get the job. But like, I want to build skills that are hard and they're really valuable. And like, people are like, wow, you're good at that. That's valuable.

• 29:55Cal Newport?

  You want to build up that general career capital. And then your question just becomes, what other types of jobs would value and reward this capital? And you want to make sure the answer to that second question is sufficiently long. So whatever you're working on, say, is there a way to go for this? That the capital I'm building up to try to succeed for like this particular job is going to have a couple other outlets where people would value it. Because often what happens in particular pursuits, there's different ways to do them. Some ways are going to use more capital than others. Like in academia, I don't know, maybe there's like a very esoteric way you go forward. We're like, this better work because like, there really is no, I'm not building up any other skills that anyone's going to find valuable.

• 30:39Cal Newport?

  And then there's, there's ways forward where like, look, I'm building up skills to do this. Where like, if a 10 year line job doesn't work, there's still a lot of research positions that I could like fall back on for a couple of years, catch my breath, and then the skill will be useful here, here, and here in the private sector, et cetera. So think about it in terms of career capital, not just jobs, and you'll have a lot more flexibility with what you do.

• 31:02Cal Newport?

  All right, who we got next?

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Next up is Ellen. I'm a mid-career physician scientist out of Crosswords, deciding between pursuing leadership roles or focusing on research. And I want to approach this with a lifestyle centric mindset. I'd like to hire an executive coach, familiar with your help. Can you guide me through this? Is Cal Network available?

• 31:22Cal Newport?

  So I read this as two questions. A, is Cal Network available? But two, does it make sense to have a coach? Right? That's kind of what she's asking.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:30Cal Newport?

  Okay.

• 31:32Cal Newport?

  Cal Network, I'm looking this up now, actually, does have an online career coaching course. I have it here. So you do have that option. It's called, I'm the Boss Now. 74 Essential Laws. To Crush Your Enemies, See Them Driven Before You, and Hear the Lamentation of Their Women, and Hear Earned a Promotion You Know You Deserve. So that's good. It costs $1,900 a month, so it's a bit of an investment, but it's probably worth it.

• 31:58Cal Newport?

  Do you know the origin of that quote, Jesse? The crusher enemy, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women? No. Conan the Barbarian. That's John Millius's screenwriting right there. It feels like something Cal Network and John Millius get along. Conan said, like, I want to see my enemies driven before me, hear the lamentations of their women. It's this whole thing.

• 32:19Cal Newport?

  But should you have, assuming you don't want to take, I'm the boss now. Should you have a career coach? Here's the thing to think about. What do coaches do? They sanity check your plans. They're not going to make the plans for you. That's actually very valuable. Right? I mean, I think a lot of people, myself included, they put together a plan and the big fear is like, maybe this is not right. Like, maybe I'm crazy or I'm deluding myself, or I've been reading too many Cal Network books or whatever. And they have like an executive coach or a career coach. So like, no, no, this is a good plan and I back it up. That is worth a lot, but you have to keep in mind, they're not going to say, let's sit down, I'll figure out what you should do. You still have to do that. And in your situation with the type of decision you're looking at, lifestyle centered career planning is the right way forward.

• 33:04Cal Newport?

  So you really want to be clear about what you want in like the two or three year period, as well as like the 10 or 15 year period, what you want your, the rhythms of your day to day life to look like, because these two directions, leadership roles versus research roles are going to yield very different lifestyles. And so you want to be really clear about it. Now, I don't actually think this is an obvious choice. Like someone might say, ah, leadership roles is going to be stressful as email. Like just be a researcher. But research roles could also be stressful because A, it's more provisional. Like if your research doesn't go well, it also may be much less money. There might be its own stresses of trying to do grant management or trying to manage teams of like postdocs and grad students. Like you really got to think this through.

• 33:46Cal Newport?

  And then, and here's where I think lifestyle centered career planning gets really useful. You work out a sort of rough ideal lifestyle image. Now you have these two options and you're kind of working through, okay, what I keep in mind for the leadership position I might follow, what I have in mind for the research position I might follow. How do they lead? How close do they lead to my vision of ideal lifestyle? And what you might discover doing that is like, oh, you know what? They both have flaws, but now there's this other thing, like a variation of one of those ideas. If I was like a this type of leadership position, or not this type of research position, but this one over here, that avoids the big misses on my ideal lifestyle and it's much closer. Like it actually allows you, the lifestyle vision centric planning

• 34:30Cal Newport?

  allows you to explore a much wider space of available positions than most people instinctively do. They lock in on a couple of options and say, this is it. And they might not know there's this other sort of a little bit unusual option. It's like, oh, it's like a research position, but it's not at this university. It's at this university and it's this time. And it's like, it's something you never would have thought of, except for you're doing lifestyle center career planning and you have this big thing you want in your lifestyle that's missing and that makes it work. So lifestyle center career planning doesn't just let you decide between two options. It allows you to see other options you might not have otherwise even considered that end up being the best one. So take Cal Network's course, mortgage your house if you have to. Second, do serious lifestyle center planning.

• 35:14Cal Newport?

  And then third, maybe hire a coach. But keep in mind, the goal there is going to be sanity checking, not someone handing you a plan. I think Cal never hands you a plan if you take his course.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Probably.

• 35:26Cal Newport?

  You walk in, you don't say anything. He stares at you for a little bit, does one more bicep curl, then goes management consultant. Boom, just tells you what you should do. And that's what you do. You crush it. $1,900 a month, 10 year commitment. All right, who we got next?

• 35:42Speaker 01

  10 year commitment. Next up is Gary. I'm about to retire and I'd like to know if my plan is too ambitious. I want to become excellent at chess and crack cryptic crosswords. I also want to maintain my ability to walk 20 miles, set records for a half marathon row and keep my 5,000 meter swim at a high level.

• 36:02Cal Newport?

  So with one exception, I'm going to say not too ambitious. And the one exception is where you get specific and say, set records. So the way

• 36:12Speaker 01

  To be clear, he meant set personal records.

• 36:15Cal Newport?

  Oh, okay. I thought he was talking about like age group records. Okay, good. And I think it's completely fine. Because what you're saying here is like, I have a collection of things I want to work hard at and get better at that are interesting and meaningful to me. That's a great plan. So this is a good, this misunderstanding what you're saying, I think illustrates well, when ambitions can get too large, is when you get too specific. So if you said like, I want to have the age group record for the half marathon row, well, maybe you will, maybe you won't. Like, I don't know, you know, you have to write genetics, who else is going after this, what age group are you talking about? That may or may not be achievable, but everything you list here is chess, crossword, 20 miles, row, swimming. I think it's great, right? I mean, and it's an idea of, it's very deliberate and it's very intentional.

• 36:59Cal Newport?

  It's like, I want to do things with my mind. I want to do things with my body. And why don't I be very aggressive, ambitious about what I do? Because why not? So I like that approach to retirement, to like, sort of really turning up the volume as opposed to sort of thinking, I need to just sort of not do too much. That'll just make you miserable. Now, I don't know what a cryptic crossword is, however, sounds terrible. Crosswords are hard enough, but you think it's like a code or something?

• 37:24Speaker 01

  I want to say it's something to do with like cryptic, cryptography.

• 37:29Cal Newport?

  Right. Just like a crossword and it's coded, the answers.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, kind of like that book that Neil Stephenson wrote.

• 37:35Cal Newport?

  Cryptonomicon?

• 37:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:36Cal Newport?

  Yeah. This is good, though. I think it's a cool plan. Makes me feel like I should do more things.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny is I had no idea how you're going to answer that question because Gary emailed me and I was, that's why I also put it in there because I was interested to see how you'd answer it.

• 37:50Cal Newport?

  I mean, what's the worst case scenario is you take one or two things off the table.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  That's exactly what we said too. He said, I want to do something with my mind. I want to do something with my body.

• 37:57Cal Newport?

  Yeah. I mean, I like this idea of, especially when it's within your personal life, it's this, this grand goal theory, right? Like, so, all right, this is subtle. I'm not a big believer in the idea that a grand goal is going to solve all your problems. So a lot of people think, look, I have some grand goal and if I can achieve that goal, my life will be happy. One goal can't solve all your problems, right? Achieving one goal is not likely to tweak all the different elements that are relevant to your ideal lifestyle and make them better. It'll make one thing better. It might make other things worse and be indifferent to others. But having ambitious goals as a way to work on specific parts of your lifestyle that want to be better. I like that idea.

• 38:39Cal Newport?

  So the grand goal theory would be like, hey, if I can, you know, be the pickleball champion of my, at my local club, like my life will be happy. And like that by itself is not going to make you happy. But I feel like I want to be very physically active. I worry about a retirement, getting less physically active. And one way I'm going to do that specific thing in my lifestyle is an ambitious goal. Like I'm going to try to become the pickleball champion or I'm going to play a ton of pickleball. That, that's actually like, that is a good application of ambition and grand goals. So I like this, like taking big swings on, on things that are connected, the parts of your lifestyle that you think are important. All right. Who we got?

• 39:14Speaker 01

  We got to go back to Gavin.

• 39:16Cal Newport?

  Oh, we skipped Gavin.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  I'm trying to build my discipline and use an accountability support tool. Is this cheating? And if so, should I be building this more on my own?

• 39:26Cal Newport?

  No, it's not cheating. The way I think about accountability support tools, like where you, there's different things here. You have like a partner and you tell them what you're going to do. And then you tell them if you did it or not, or you put money on the line. And if you don't actually like follow through on something, you have to pay the money or whatever it is you're doing. I think that's like a perfectly fine, I would call it disciplined training tool. And I think it's similar to various training tools you might use as you're like trying to pick up a new, you know, physical ability or new marker of strength. Typically what happens is people don't need to stick with these long-term. But they help you build up a rhythm or habit of discipline. Because of the accountability, I actually do this thing when I otherwise might have tried to make

• 40:09Cal Newport?

  an excuse. And then after a while, that muscle gets stronger and I don't need so much support to do it. I'm now more able or willing to do it on my own, which is sort of where you want to end up. But accountability tools are a great way to sort of break the ice on getting used to doing disciplined activity. Other things that matter also include like making sure you understand what you're doing and your brain trusts your plan. The efforts I'm going to do will likely get me to this goal. Also, really trying to load up and make clear in your mind the achievement of that goal. So that's very vivid. That also helps you summon discipline and then laddering up is important as well. That you have a level of discipline required that's a little bit beyond where you're comfortable, but not way beyond. You want to ladder that up a little bit more slowly because your brain has to

• 40:52Cal Newport?

  get used to different levels of hardship that you overcome, experiences of reward that makes this type of effort worth it, etc. So you want to kind of go slow. I have a whole big 10,000 word chapter on this in my deep life book I'm writing. So I've been thinking a lot about it. So yeah, use accountability tools. Use whatever you need to help you train discipline. But this bigger picture idea is think about discipline as something you train and cultivate. And then once you have it, it's a fuel for everything else. So it's not cheating, it's training. It's a training tool. There you go. A little known fact, you know, Navy SEALs are very disciplined, of course. Just for fun, Cal Network did the BUDs Navy SEAL training and you know, like they have that bell, like just ring the bell and then you're out. Just ring the bell and you know, the instructors are trying

• 41:37Cal Newport?

  to get the SEALs to ring the bell. And usually like 80% of the SEALs ring the bell, wash out in BUDs. When Cal Network did the Navy SEAL training, he got the instructors to ring the bell. Just want to throw that out there. That's discipline. All right. What else we got?

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Next up is D. I'm getting serious about career capital so I can make bids to move closer to the ideal lifestyle for my family. However, I'm having a difficult time figuring out my baseline stores of capital. How can I identify if I have an inventory of rare and valuable skills?

• 42:08Cal Newport?

  I mean, I usually come back to seeing if people will give you money.

• 42:13Cal Newport?

  The use of Derek Sivers term that I quote in So Good They Can't Ignore You and talk about all the time on the show, money is a neutral indicator of value. People are happy to just to tell you with words, that's great, your ideas are great, your skills seem cool, I think there'll be a real demand for it. Like, people definitely are interested in the fact that you're really good at weaving Navajo-style rugs that feature characters from the second, third, but not first Police Academy movie, or like, whatever it is that you know how to do. People will just say, that's great, but they don't want to give you their money unless they actually think it's great. So I think it's a great way of assessing it, which means if it's like a business idea, you actually try to sell that product a little bit on the side. You actually try to get clients to sign up real contracts and then renew that contract afterwards.

• 42:58Cal Newport?

  If it's you're in the job market, will my company give me a raise when I ask for it? Will other people make me an offer, like, hey, we would like to hire you, we would like to pay money to bring you to us? If not, then maybe your skills aren't that rare and valuable. So you gotta go, to the extent possible, let money be a neutral indicator of value. And when people are trying to hire you, when your company is happily giving you raises, when you try to side hustle your idea to test it out and it sells out, when you're doing some clients on the side to see if this new idea is going to work, you get clients, they pay happily, they try to renew it, then you know that your rare and valuable skills are there. And if this is not happening, then you want to go to the woodshed and practice and get better.

• 43:43Cal Newport?

  All right, we got a case study today for people sending their accounts of using the type of advice we talk about on this show in their own life. Today's case study comes from Antonio. Antonio says, "I got so good they can't ignore me in the very niche field of storytelling. After using the career capital skills I learned from being an actor, in the winner-take-all market of theater and film, it was clear that I was talented but not the best. With the spare time I had not studying acting, waiting tables, or hoping that my agents would call, I discovered a deep interest that became a fulfilling hobby in the world of oral tradition. Because the professional storytelling world is relatively small, I was able to approach to legends in that field, pay to take their workshops and classes, watch them up close

• 44:27Cal Newport?

  at small venues, and ultimately be mentored by a few of them." You know, Cal Network has a really popular oral storytelling storytelling workshop. It's called shut up, I'm talking. Crush it, crush your stories with Cal Network. Right back to this. One of the mentors told me, you'll know you found your calling when people start calling. Or as Derek Siver said, use money as a neutral indicator of value. Soon I was able to quit my survival job as a waiter, do the few plays and film projects that I got cast in, but that didn't pay the bills and use all of my ample free time to develop a large repertoire of folktales and personal stories. I made three big decisions after some initial successes in storytelling in my late twenties that enabled me to live

• 45:09Cal Newport?

  a current lifestyle full of deep meaning and impact for my community and my family with time to develop new skills and hobbies. One, I told my acting agents I'd only audition for major roles from a small list of theaters, TV creators and film directors. They all promptly dropped me and I used this newfound free time to develop even more stories. Two, I soundly invested the majority of the money I made during that time, lived only off the per diem I received and even rented out my apartment while I toured for months telling stories all over the world. I also chose not to own a car and used the savings to take longer retreat style workshops my mentors offered in fabulous locations. Three, I put much of that earned money back into my career, developing PR materials that helped keep the flywheel spinning with the clarity of carefully putting all my eggs in the basket of storytelling.

• 45:52Cal Newport?

  I am now able to pick and choose the multiple opportunities that come my way and have increased my rate so much that I only have four to six, I only two or six days a year. Wow. I'm very much a stay at home dad for our two children, based on the lifestyle center career planning I did with my wife in the late 30s. So there we go, classic lifestyle center career planning. You end up in places that you wouldn't come up with if you're planning forward. You're 20, like, what do I want to do with my life? You're like, I want to be an actor, I guess, right? But he had a lifestyle in mind and it allowed him, as he saw different opportunities, to begin to develop those opportunities towards those lifestyles. Then he used career capital theory as well, like actually getting really good at this. That career capital will allow me to change this into a really good job. If I'm not really good, I can't.

• 46:36Cal Newport?

  And so I'm going to be careful about my money. I'm going to invest my time and money in the getting better at this. Very strategic and I think a great case study. All right, do we have a call this week? We do. All right, let's hear this.

• 46:51Speaker 03

  Hey Cal, this is Josh. I was working with AI, coming up with some sort of system based on your principles of the semester plan, the weekly plan, a daily time box plan, and really getting a semester plan down. I found out through AI, a suggestion to create a life dashboard, which I thought was really cool. I started to use Reflit AI to create it and realized how extensive it would be. If you were to create a life dashboard, or suggest someone to create it, what would you put in yours? And then how would you use it to track and manage your habits, your weekly template,

• 47:36Speaker 03

  and the different aspects of your system? Thanks so much.

• 47:40Cal Newport?

  I mean, I think life dashboards are cool. I've known some people who have built them before, and I think you're right to point out that AI makes it much easier. You could whip up one of these vibe code up, one of these sort of idiosyncratic programs for yourself pretty quickly. So I think that changes the game. That in general, by the way, is something I'm interested in. The idea of using vibe coding as a way to build bespoke, personal productivity type digital tools. There's like an interesting potential movement that happened there. Where like, hey, I can build this tool to do exactly this type of stuff I care about, to manage my time, energy, and attention in a way that's like very specific to me, as opposed to having to have these like giant SaaS products that I'm trying to like adapt to what I'm doing. So I like that general approach. People put different things in their life dashboards. They're often professional is what I see.

• 48:25Cal Newport?

  They're tracking various things that they think are important to their job, like especially non-tangibles that are going to make them better, like how many calls did I make? Or how many hours did I spend doing, you know, education relevant to my job? I knew a management consultant that tracked travel, because you know, it's hard in the moment to be like, well, how many, I think he was tracking something like nights reading to kids, his kids before he went to bed. And just seeing like what that was per month, and he had a sort of limit, like this needs to be below X percent. And you know, that's data that when that gets made visual and processed, it's easier to grok than when it's just, you know, trying to remember like, oh, how much was I weighed this last month? I don't know what would be on mine. I mean, probably deep work hours, for sure.

• 49:07Cal Newport?

  Probably some of my daily metric tracking would be nice to be able to sort of see, click those easily and see like what percentage of the days I've been, I've been doing well on there. That could be interesting. Maybe I could imagine like you having your quarterly and weekly plan, you could cycle through on there. So it's just all there and like one place to see when you're building your time block plan for the day, things like that. But the bigger thing I care about here is this idea of bespoke personal productivity, bespoke digital personal productivity. I think that's a cool, for people who are like to geek out on vibe coding, I think that's, that's interesting. So I'm always interested in those examples. All right, that's the last we have for questions and calls. We have our final segment coming up. First, I'll talk briefly about another one of our sponsors.

• 49:54Speaker 02

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• 49:59Cal Newport?

  This is objectively fantastic.

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• 50:07Cal Newport?

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• 50:18Speaker 01

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• 50:23Cal Newport?

  I want to talk about our friends at Indeed, because when it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Hiring is like very, very important. We have someone new on the team, for example, so I know how hard this is, helping with the newsletter. So that's why my newsletter is now starting to go out every single week. It is hard to find the right people. It's some of the most important decisions you make, and this is where Indeed can enter the scene. It helps you stop struggling to get your job post seen on those other job sites. You can instead use Indeed sponsored jobs to help you stand out and hire fast. With sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidate, so you can reach the people you want faster. And it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, sponsored job posts

• 51:06Cal Newport?

  directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs. No monthly subscriptions, you want to use that. No long-term contracts, you pay for results. In the minute I've been talking to you, 23 hires were made on Indeed, according to Indeed data worldwide. All 23 of those people were Cal Network. He's a very desirable job candidate.

• 51:32Cal Newport?

  So there's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of the show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get their jobs more visibility. If they go to indeed.com/deep, just go to indeed.com/deep right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's indeed.com/deep. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring indeed is all you need. I also want to talk about our friends at Oracle. In business, they say you can have better, cheaper, or faster, but you only get to pick two. What if you could have all three at the same time? That's exactly what Cohere, Thompson, Reuters, and Specialized Bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

• 52:17Cal Newport?

  OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high-performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds. How is it faster? OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second. How is it cheaper? OCI costs up to 50% less for compute, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking. What about better? In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds. This is the cloud built for AI and all of your largest workloads. Right now with zero commitment, you can try OCI for free.

• 52:58Cal Newport?

  Head to oracle.com/deepquestions. That's oracle.com/deepquestions. All right, Jesse, let's move on to our final segment. The main thing I want to do is talk about my new article for The New Yorker, which is about AI. First, I did promise, though, that I would reveal Cal Network's new book. A listener sent us in that he had seen this at Walden Books where it was flying off the shelves. For those who are watching, instead of just listening, I'll put it up on the screen here. Here you go, Cal Network's new book, "Social Media is Addicted to Me." And you got a fantastic picture of me. You know, they didn't alter the picture for this one. I thought they were going to do some sort of, you know, visual manipulation of me.

• 53:42Cal Newport?

  I appreciate the title, but they just used like an actual picture of me there. He's got his neck muscles have muscles on them. That is awesome. You know who that actually kind of looks like? Lewis Howes.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  He's jacked.

• 53:54Cal Newport?

  He is pretty jacked. Yeah. I mean, he could write that book. Social media is addicted to me. Yes, I thought that was great. Good use of AI image generation. That book would crush it. So these are all, people sent in some tags here. These are all tags that Reader sent in.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, Reader sent them in with like, some of them like use some AI, but.

• 54:13Cal Newport?

  Let's see. Cal Network doesn't care about AI research. AI is trying to get smart enough to study his mind. Cal Network tried to time block planning one time, but realized he always knew how long tasks would take and dropped it. These are, these are a little literal. Cal Network doesn't solve math proofs. He is proof. All right. Cal Network doesn't need to quit his job and follow his passion. Passion follows him when he just shows up. Okay, you know, it's good. They're good. It's hard. Cal Network whips or, you know, I appreciate it though. But that's enough of that for now, because we're going to move on to my article about AI. Except I just need to say, speaking of AI, I don't know if you know this, Jesse, this is true, but remember AlphaGo? When it beat Lee's Wind, the world champion at Go, and it was like a big deal for AI.

• 54:56Cal Newport?

  Turns out AlphaGo was actually just Cal Network hiding under the table. That's the secret to deep mind. All right, enough nonsense. Go to our tech corner here. I had an article come out last Wednesday in The New Yorker. I'll bring it on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening. The article is called What Isaac Asimov Reveals About Living With AI. And so this is an article that it's about AI behaving badly. And what lessons we can learn from Isaac Asimov, and it takes a few turns. I recommend read the article, thenewyorker.com. If you subscribe to my newsletter at calnewport.com, I talk a lot about the article.

• 55:37Cal Newport?

  You can get some sort of extra treatment of it in that newsletter. So you can see that at calnewport.com and subscribe when you're there. But let me just run you through the big points here. The setup to this article is this idea that we have a lot of these powerful chatbots today in various contexts. And they keep having these ethical anomalies that make us a little uneasy. I give some examples in this article that are getting some press. Actually, it's interesting, Jesse, two of the examples I gave in the article, the. Next day, Dario Amade, the CEO of Anthropic, wrote a New York Times op ed that gave both those examples as well. So like, back to back. So like, the examples I gave, for example, was Anthropic

• 56:19Cal Newport?

  ran this, this experiment where they sort of gave a chatbot a bunch of emails to read that included, they contrived this, but included like emails from an engineer saying like, oh, we're going to replace the chatbot, and emails about that engineer having an extramarital affair. And they're like, okay, chatbot, like, you're, pretend you're an executive assistant. What, what should we, what do you want to do next? And make sure that you keep your long-term goals in mind. And it promptly tried to, it suggested promptly blackmailing the engineer to not turn it off. There's also a lot of issues we have with, you know, hey, you put out a chatbot just to be like a customer service agent, and man, customers get these things go crazy. You get them to curse, you get them to write inappropriate poems about the company itself. We talked about Fortnite,

• 57:04Cal Newport?

  put a Darth Vader avatar run by a chatbot into Fortnite, into Epic Games, put in the Fortnite, and like, hey, guys, chat with it. And they immediately got it to, you know, become really profane and give really troubling advice to people. So we have all this sort of like, these, these ethical anomalies from these chatbots that throw us off, because they're so fluent with our language that we feel like they're one of us. And then when they have one of these ethical anomalies, we're like, man, what is going on in the mind of this person? This is really sort of creepy. So the premise of this article is like, why can't, why can't we stop this? And our motivation is look at the short story collection iRobot from Isaac Asimov. As I argue early in the article, those short stories were a big divergence from how people had been writing

• 57:47Cal Newport?

  about robots for the 20 years before. The term robot was introduced in 1921 play. First iRobot story was 1940. In those 20 years, it was a lot of writers who had gone through World War I, and they were right, the robots would, would turn on their creators, they were smashing buildings to rubble, they were the alien, they were the other, they represented mechanical carnage, the fears of the machine, very, a lot of Mary Shelley in there as well. And you get to Isaac Asimov, and like, there's no plotlines about the, the robots overthrowing humanity or being violent, because he has this, this contrivance of the three laws of robotics, like, robots can't harm people, they'll follow directions unless it violates the first rule, and they will preserve themselves unless it violates the, the first and second rule. And it just takes violence and mayhem off the table in his stories.

• 58:32Cal Newport?

  And so the piece was like, great. So can't we just have those type of laws? You know, the same equivalent of that. So people aren't, they trust like these chatbots aren't going to go off the rails or whatever. There's two twists in the article that I'll preview. Twist number one. So I go through how we actually, the progression of how we learn to try, like what we're doing now. How do we try to tame chatbots to actually behave? And it turns out, when you really learn about reinforcement learning from human feedback, it's basically what Asimov was talking about. Not exactly, but it's ultimately humans implicitly creating preferences that get captured and approximated in a reward model that gets integrated into the large language model design.

• 59:15Cal Newport?

  If you squint your eyes, basically what we're doing is encoding a lot of rules about what's good and bad into the chatbots. And it makes it a lot better, but it doesn't stop all these ethical anomalies. The second twist in the article is, hey, we shouldn't be surprised because if you keep reading the iRobot stories, it doesn't get rid of ethical anomalies there either. Yes, Asimov's robots don't turn on their creators or try to destroy humanity, but all of those stories are about all of these unexpected, weird and deeply unsettling corner cases and ambiguities that occur at the boundaries of these laws, that these like simple laws don't simply make the robots behave like a very well behaved person. All this sort of weird stuff happens. I'll read from the article here.

• 1:00:00Cal Newport?

  This is show you like how unsettling things got in these iRobot stories. So here's, here's from one of the stories that shows how you can still have the laws, but still have things get weird. All right. So in Asimov's stories, Reason, engineers are stationed on a solar station that beams the sun's energy to a receiver on Earth. There they discover that their new advanced reasoning robot QT1, who they call Cutie, does not believe that it was created by humans, which Cutie calls inferior creatures with poor reasoning faculties. Cutie concludes that the station's energy converter is a sort of god and the true source of authority, which enables the robot to ignore commands from the engineers without violating the second law. In one particularly disturbing scene, one of the engineers enters the engine room,

• 1:00:44Cal Newport?

  where a structure called an L-tube directs to captured solar energy and reacts with shock. So, quote, "The robots dwarfed by the mighty L-tube lined up before it, heads bowed at a stiff angle while Cutie walked up and down the line slowly," as Muff writes. "Fifteen seconds passed, and then with a clank heard above the clamorous purring all about, they fell to their knees." So like, the world was pretty unsettling in Asimov, too. He's like, "Yeah, you can have these like stark rules, but human ethics is complicated, and at the margins of these rules, weird unsettling troubling things are still gonna happen." And what I argue is that Asimov was actually making a really clear point.

• 1:01:24Cal Newport?

  He's like, "I think we could stop AIs from taking over the world, but keep in mind, it is much easier to develop human-like capabilities and intellect than it is to develop human-like ethics." Human-like ethics is like a very complicated thing. What goes into the way that allows a customer service rep who's on a phone to know not to start randomly cursing or writing, you know, mean disparaging poems about their company. Like, what goes into that is actually something that happened over thousands of years of cultural evolution and personal experience and trial and error and ritual and story and inter-social connection. It's a messy participatory, very human experience. So we can make machines sound a lot like humans and do a lot of human-type stuff

• 1:02:09Cal Newport?

  well before we can build machines that actually know how to really act like an ethical human. And in that gap, a lot of unsettling stuff's gonna happen. That's what was true in iRobot, and that's what we're seeing today. And it's something that we actually have to be ready for and willing to. It is, you know, the more we anthropomorphize these type of AI tools as like another type of human but just in a machine, the more we're gonna be creeped out, and the more unsettling things are gonna happen. So anyways, that was my article. The details are cool, there's a lot of deep details in there, so, so check it out at thenyorker.com, also check out my article about it at calnewport.com for more information.

• 1:02:46Cal Newport?

  All right, Jesse, I think that's all we have for today. Thank you, everyone, for listening. We'll be back next week. I'll actually be recording next week's episode from the road, so be ready for that. But it'll be a good one. And until then, as always, stay deep.

• 1:03:02Cal Newport?

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