A Better Way to Think About Tech

It’s become hard to talk about technology. Commentators have split themselves into two increasingly extreme teams: the pessimists and the optimists. But what about the rest of us who don’t hate technology but are wary of obvious harms? In today’s episode, Cal proposes a third option: technoselectionism. 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) Is technology good or bad? (35:19) Applying digital minimalism to LLMs (38:19) An overlooked negative impact of using too much AI (40:22) A reformed relationship with social media (42:20) An article about focus, writing spaces and New Yorker staff writers (49:52) What Cal is up to October Books: Simplify (Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, Roy Schwartz) Telephone (John Brooks) Roll That Calls (Ari Emanuel) Cancel Me If You Can (Dave Portnoy) The Treeline (Ben Rawlence) 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://ludditebicentenary.blogspot.com/2012/04/12th-april-1812-letter-from-g-ludd-to.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2024-04/Learning%20from%20Ricardo%20and%20Thompson%20-%20Machinery%20and%20Labor%20in%20the%20Early%20Industrial%20Revolution%20-%20and%20in%20the%20Age%20of%20AI.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/answering-the-techno-pessimists-complete?hide_intro_popup=true https://www.youtube.com/shorts/P4m8-9KJpTQ https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/its-time-to-dismantle-the-technopoly Thanks to our Sponsors: https://www.vanta.com/deepquestions https://www.pipedrive.com/deep https://www.monarch.com (Use code “DEEP”) https://www.superhuman.com Today’s episode was produced and mastered by Jesse Miller. Nate Mechler provided research and newsletter support. It was edited by Ben Crain and Rob Montz. The theme music is from Jay Kerstens. 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?

  Have you noticed that it's become increasingly hard to talk about technology? I think this is because a lot of commentators have divided themselves into two different groups, both of which can become pretty extreme. All right, so on one side, we have what we can call the techno pessimist. Now, the techno pessimists are worried about the harms that new technologies can cause and the things that we value that new technologies might make go away. I think the classic example of techno pessimism would be the Luddite movement from the early 1800s, who were worried about new automated manufacturing technologies like the steam loom and their input on artisan crafts. They felt really strongly about this.

• 0:44Cal Newport?

  I have a letter here from 1812, written by members of the movement and signed by the sort of fictional creation of General Lud. And in this letter, they said they would rather die than see their children, which they called your neighboring fellow creatures starve because hand weavers were going to be put out of business. Now, the thing about techno pessimists is that they're often right in the sense that the harms they're worried about are real and they are harmful and they do hurt. The issue with the techno pessimists is that sometimes we have to go through short-term pain to get to long-term innovation that ends up making everybody's lives better.

• 1:25Cal Newport?

  If we go back to the Luddite movement, let's zoom out to the Industrial Revolution writ large. And what we see is, yes, for a lot of professions, the Industrial Revolution was very painful in the moment. Techno pessimists of the time were right, but the Industrial Revolution also delivered essentially all of the wealth on which the modern world was built. We would not actually want to be living in a world today in which the Industrial Revolution never happened. Okay, on the other extreme, we have what we can call the techno optimist. He really don't care about short-term harms or things we could lose in the, in right now, things we already value, because they are often in love with this vision

• 2:07Cal Newport?

  of some sort of much better future that the technology will deliver and the short-term cost in their mind is always worth it. This can get to pretty unnerving places. Like, let me play you a clip here. This is Elon Musk talking to Peter Diamandis about humankind and super intelligent AI.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  I mean, several years ago, I said, humans are the biological boot loader for digital super intelligence.

• 2:31Cal Newport?

  Yes, we are a transitional, we're a transitional species.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  We're a boot loader.

• 2:36Cal Newport?

  So what they're saying in this clip is that humans right now are essentially what they called biological boot loaders. Basically, just a step that gets us to the technological utopia they really care about, which is one in which we have a super intelligent AI that delivers us some sort of mystical world where, you know, everyone is happy and our consciousness are uploaded into a Dyson sphere-powered, celestial, digital consciousness or something like this, right? I mean, clearly, we see why the techno optimist view would push far enough, gets to these sort of anti-humanist, pretty icky places. So where does that leave the rest of us? Those of us who recognize that we need technological advances

• 3:18Cal Newport?

  to continue to improve the state of human existence and yet are also not really interested in hanging out with the biological boot loader crowd. Like, we actually do care about real humans who live right now and harms they might feel. I want to argue to you today that there is a third option for the silent majority of people who have a more nuanced, practical view of technology. I call this third option techno selectionism. Now, techno selectionism is not new. I actually introduced the term in an essay that I published in The New Yorker back in 2023, but I was rereading it recently and had this epiphany. This is more relevant right now than it has ever been before. So that's what we want to talk about today. What is techno selectionism?

• 4:03Cal Newport?

  How does it differ from these existing more extreme ways of thinking about technology? And what action can you take right now to become a techno selectionist? And by doing so, regain control over technology and its influence on your life? All right, so we've got a lot to get into. Let's get into it.

• 4:24Cal Newport?

  All right, so to start our discussion, I thought a visual metaphor would be useful. I'm going to bring a picture up here on the screen that I drew. For people who are listening, I'll explain it to you. It's a map, I would say, a beautifully drafted map. I think Jesse would agree with this. This is the dew on the leaves of the mountains summon a view of a New England fall day or whatever. So I have a beautifully drawn map. Here's what's important about it. In the lower left-hand corner is a region labeled current moment. In the upper right is a region labeled better future. And there's a bunch of obstacles all around this map. I have like scary snakes and there's fire and I don't know, these Xs, Jesse, I think are like thorn thickets

• 5:08Cal Newport?

  and we got some water or something like that. So we got a current moment and then we see far away a better future. All right, so there's two different ways to think about this and I'll draw them. If you are a techno pessimist, and I'll use a, I don't know, let's use a black line here. You're a techno pessimist, you're starting a current moment. How are you going to navigate this landscape? You're gonna stay nearby the current moment because there's dangers out there. So we'll sort of work on technologies similar to what we have because we don't want to run into any of these dangers, which could cause pain or harm. So I represented that with this black path that just sort of circles around the current moment.

• 5:50Cal Newport?

  On the other hand, if you are a techno optimist, you say, who cares about that? Let's just make a beeline for the better future. So as I drew this line straight from our current moment to the better future, we went over all sorts of dangers. We hit a snake, we went over fire, we clipped over the water. So we go through all sorts of different pains and obstacles on our way to get to a better future, right? So either we have the pessimist approach where we steer near the current moment or we have the optimist approach where we go straight to the better future, but along the way, we have all sorts of pain. Techno selectionism is going to offer us a different route. Now, before I show it to you on this visual metaphor,

• 6:34Cal Newport?

  let's take this down for a second, Jesse, because I'm going to load up that New Yorker article we talked about. And I want to read to you how I define techno selectionism. And then we'll go back and we'll add it to our visual metaphor of a map. All right, so we bring up on the screen here a key quote from that New Yorker article. I'm going to read this here from the article. "Techno selectionism is a perspective that accepts the idea that innovations can significantly improve our lives, but also holds that we can build new things without having to accept every popular invention is inevitable. Techno selectionists believe that we should continue to encourage and reward people who experiment with what comes next,

• 7:17Cal Newport?

  but they also know that some experiments end up causing more bad than good. Techno selectionists can be enthusiastic about artificial intelligence, say, while also taking a strong stance on settings where we should block its use. They can marvel at the benefits of the social internet without surrendering their kids' mental lives to TikTok." You know, jump down slightly where I then say, "If we aggressively repudiate the technologies that are clearly causing net harm while continuing to embrace those that seem to be more beneficial, we can direct our techno-social evolution much more intentionally." All right, so that is how I describe techno selectionism in the pages of The New Yorker.

• 8:01Cal Newport?

  So to put that more plainly, it's saying the middle route is one where we say, we want technology to advance, but we do not do so without curation. We do not do so without change or analysis. We do not do so without intention. So if we go back to our map here, what the techno selectionist is trying to do, I'll draw their path as, let's say, a orange line here. What the techno selectionist is trying to do is get from the current moment to the better future, but try to steer the path. Can we go around some of these obstacles? And maybe we still clip a few, but if we're more careful, if we navigate our path,

• 8:46Cal Newport?

  we can avoid more of the pain and the harm as we try to get to our destination. So for those who are listening, you were lying that, you know, it went around most of the obstacles, maybe clipped one here at the end. That's what we mean by techno selectionism, okay? So it means you are actively involved. Again, I'm going to keep hitting this point. To be a techno selectionist means you're actively involved in trying to shape the adoption development of technology to maximize the good while avoiding as many harms as possible.

• 9:16Cal Newport?

  Let's take a quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Now, look, I know a little something about debt. I took out a lot of loans to attend college. And when it finally came time to start paying them off, the amount had grown to something sizable, especially for a young postdoc, which I was at the time. Now, do you know what tool I wish I had back then? Monarch, the personal finance app that goes beyond just telling you what you've spent, but also helping you set goals, map out big purchases, and see if you're actually on track. In particular, Monarch now has a debt pay down simulator and visualizer that can show your exact debt free date based on your actual activity.

• 9:59Cal Newport?

  You can also test out different payment scenarios. You can simulate them side by side to see what the difference would be if I paid this much or that, what would the impact be on how long it takes for me to pay everything off? That is exactly what I wish I had back when I was first facing my student loans. And this is just one of the many incredibly useful features offered by Monarch. I know this because my wife and I recently started using it. We are carefully tracking our spending using Monarch so we can see if we're out of whack in one category or the other and make adjustments before we get to our monthly budget. One of our favorite tools, one of the cooler tools they have in there that we really like is the AI assistant that you can ask anything about your finances.

• 10:41Cal Newport?

  It's like having a financial advisor in your pocket. So write your own money story with Monarch. Use code DEEP at monarch.com to get your first year of Monarch Core half off at just $50. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com code DEEP. That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com code DEEP.

• 11:04Cal Newport?

  I also want to talk about our friends at Superhuman. You know, you know, I try to slow down and protect my deep work, but unfortunately, whether I like it or not, there are still countless docs and emails and meetings that can be hard to keep up with. AI has promised to solve this issue time and again, but ultimately what I want out of an AI tool is simple, to spend less time on administrative and logistical efforts. So I have more time to focus on the things that move the needle. This is where Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly enters the scene. It is different from the other AIs that I've tried because instead of jumping from tab to tab and shifting your context from the tool to back to what you're working on, or trying to go find where your AI lives and tell it what you're up to,

• 11:49Cal Newport?

  Superhuman Go works along with you in your tab on the sites you are already using. It's there when you need it. Now, here's why I like Go in particular. It's built for what I already do on the websites I already use. No new tabs, no gimmicky nonsense. You get what you need without losing where you are. So check out Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly and see what you've been missing out on, find out more at superhuman.com. All right, let's get back to the show.

• 12:21Cal Newport?

  All right, so then the question becomes, how do you do that? So how do we be a techno selectionist? This seems like kind of a hard balancing act. Well, I'm going to argue that there are four things you can do to adopt a techno selectionist mindset. Because I like alliteration, I start all the names with C's. So I'm going to pull this up on the screen here. I have four Cs up here on the screen and I will fill them each in. So the first C, which represents the first action you could do to become a techno selectionist, I will fill in as choosing. You can choose what technology you do use or do not.

• 13:01Cal Newport?

  Just because a technology is popular or is a big part of the cultural conversation, or everyone on X keeps saying, holy expletive, and then has some sort of, you know, AI written statement about some new breakthrough of the technology, that doesn't mean you have to use it. You are in charge of what technologies you use or you don't. Give you a couple of examples. Earlier this fall, I had on friend of the show Brad Stolberg. We were talking about what I call the AI resistance. And what Brad said, if you'll recall, is he said, look, I know there are use cases for LLMs, not for me. For what I do as a living, as a writer and a coach, I don't need the supposed efficiencies that I've been told.

• 13:47Cal Newport?

  And it gets in the way of me producing my best ideas and it makes me unhappy. Not for me, I'm not going to use it. Let me give you another example. Back in the 2010s, when I came out and said, I'm not going to use social media. People got really upset. There was a fervor, what do you mean you're not using social media? I don't understand. Are you Wendell Berry? Where's your horse? But I had done the calculus and I said, yeah, there's benefits, there's harms. And for what I do, the harms outweigh the benefits. I don't want to use it. And you know what? Now, 10 years later, no one thinks that's crazy and a lot of people have actually joined me in that stance. So that's your first action available to you as a techno selectionist, choosing what technologies you use or not. You're never required to use a technology just because a lot of people do, or that's part of the cultural conversation.

• 14:33Cal Newport?

  All right, let's fill in the second C here. And that is configuring.

• 14:41Cal Newport?

  I'll write that.

• 14:43Cal Newport?

  So if you are using a particular technology, you're allowed to set the rules for how you use it or how you don't. You can place constraints on the usage of your technology that best reflects the things that you value. Now, in my 2019 book, Digital Minimalism, I get into this. This is one of the big things I suggest. The term we use in that book is fences. You can put up fences around your own, your own fences around how you use particular technologies. So back then in 2019, there was two big examples I gave. One involved Facebook groups. I don't know if it's the case anymore. I don't know, just what do people use today? I guess more like WhatsApp. But it used to be the case that Facebook groups was a very popular technology for,

• 15:28Cal Newport?

  if you have a student group or volunteer group or community group, it's how you would organize because the technology was easy to use. And there was a lot of people who were self-proclaimed digital minimalist who said, I need to use Facebook for the groups because my biking club organizes on there. But that doesn't mean I have to be on Facebook all the time. For the young listeners, Jesse, Facebook was a social network that used to be popular and a lot of people actually used to use. You read Digital Minimalism, it's everywhere. But a lot of these digital minimalists came up time and again, my research for that book said. So I reconfigured Facebook so I only see groups. They would have it on their computer. They had different tricks they could use to make the news feed be empty. And so all they could see what was in their groups.

• 16:14Cal Newport?

  And so they were choosing, they were configuring rather, how they were going to use the technology. Another example was Instagram. I gave a story in that book about a visual artist and he said, look, Instagram serves a purpose for me. I get inspiration by following the feeds of other visual artists because I need to see a lot of ideas to spark my own creativity. But also, I don't want to be on Instagram all day. So they just configured their use of Instagram. They said, well, here's what we're going to do. It's Friday. That's when I look at it. I only follow artists. I check on everything they posted on Friday. I have a glass of wine, takes 20 minutes. It's, it's, you know, inspiring and creative and I don't touch Instagram otherwise. Another person I talked to in that book was a fitness influencer. And he was like, oh, man, Instagram is so hard for me to get away from.

• 16:59Cal Newport?

  It's very addictive and you have to use the camera on your phone. So I can't get away from it because I have to take pictures of my muscles. And then I'm on the phone with the app. It's hard not to use. You know what he ended up doing? He got a GoPro and he would take the photos with that and had his, someone else in his company actually do the interaction and uploading to Instagram. So you're allowed to configure how you use technologies. All right, the third thing that matters here, third C, call it changing.

• 17:30Cal Newport?

  You're allowed to change your mind about what technologies you use or don't use.

• 17:39Cal Newport?

  Right? Just because you started using something, doesn't mean that you have signed some sort of Faustian blood pack and now you have to stick with it no matter what happens. It's completely fine to say, this seemed cool. I wanted to test it out because I like cool things. It's making my life worse now. Took a turn, I'm going to stop using it. You are allowed to do that. That sounds obvious, but a lot of people don't know that that's the case. This has never been more clear than what happened with social media over the last four years or so, where essentially, and I wrote a piece about this, an essay about this for The New Yorker, that I recommend, actually, it was a good piece. It was, it was called TikTok in the fall, the social media giants. So basically what happened is we had these big incumbent social media companies and it

• 18:23Cal Newport?

  was Facebook and it was Instagram and it was Snapchat and I don't know, whatever the kids were using, right? You had these like major networks. Then TikTok came along, right? Not a US company coming out of China, ByteDance. TikTok comes along and starts eating everyone's lunch. It's doing really well. It's very addictive. People are on it all the time and it's taking users away from the existing legacy. Oh, Twitter, I forgot to mention there. And so what did these legacy social media networks say? It's like, oh, we're going to be more like TikTok. And see, TikTok doesn't care about your friends, doesn't care about who you follow, doesn't care anything about any social graph that you created, which used to be the entire selling point of social media.

• 19:05Cal Newport?

  It's just an algorithm that shows you stuff, thing after thing after thing, that in its mental, its internal digital simulation of your reward center seems to generate a reward. And all it wants to do is generate that sort of neuro engagement, right? And that's very effective because you look at the screen all the time. So Instagram, so Facebook, so Twitter, they all move towards this model of, I don't care who your friend is, I don't care who you chose to follow. We're no longer going to just play the game where I show you stuff from people you said you wanted to see stuff from. Forget the social stuff. Put it in my veins. Put it in my veins, right? Just boom, boom, boom, boom. That made those services really bad for a lot of people. A lot of people said, I signed up for Facebook or Instagram, like Facebook to follow my friends. I signed up for Instagram

• 19:50Cal Newport?

  because there's like these particular writers or fitness influencers or tradwives or whatever, but like specific people I chose to follow because I like to see what's going on in their lives. It's like my own TV network. And now I'm just getting these automatically fed, algorithmically curated things, which are very addictive. I can't put down my phone. They're making me miserable. It's not why I signed up for these services in the first place. You're allowed to leave. You're allowed to change your mind. I signed up for this, you did that. I don't like it. I think we're seeing a lot of this with AI right now. Early adopters like, this is cool. I can talk to this thing like a person. I automated the spreadsheet tasks that I do. This is great. And then at some point, they're realizing

• 20:30Cal Newport?

  I'm in full cognitive surrender. I can't even do the most minor of tasks. Like I can't even put my thoughts into an email without talking to the AI and having it write it for me. I'm losing my ability to think. I'm suffering from mild psychosis. The line between fantasy and reality is being blurred. You're allowed to change your mind. Like, oh, that got bad fast. I think I'm gonna step away from it. Alright, you know, it's like you go on that blind date and you're like, oh, this person's attractive, or we're having, you know, pretty good conversation. They bring out the binder of the Pokemon cards. You're like, I kind of changed my mind about this date. I think I'm gonna back away slowly from the table. Alright, so you're allowed to change your mind. Alright, final C, fourth C.

• 21:14Cal Newport?

  Complaining. You have the right to speak up to the institutions and communities where you're involved about the technologies they're using and say if you like it or don't like it and why. This is where we get a pretty important bridge between the individual and the systemic. Most of the major changes that we have seen in terms of negative techno impacts being curbed because of community or institutional rule changes, they come from individuals speaking up and saying, I don't like this. I don't like this for me. I don't like this for my

• 21:55Cal Newport?

  kids. Explain yourself. Pressure from individuals is what's moves, that's what moves things in this country. Why did 2025 become the year where we got smartphone bans bell to bell in schools across the country? It's not because the schools, you know, got some new data or had a change of heart. It was parents. I don't like my kid being stuck on their phone all day. You gotta do something about it. I read John Height's book. The data is compelling. I don't want my kid on this all day at home. I don't want him on this all day at school. And that changed. What happened in 2026? A lot of people don't realize this yet, but there's been a giant groundswell of pushes coming out of legislatures and direct parental action about other types of tech in the classroom. So-called ed tech, the screens, the non-phone

• 22:40Cal Newport?

  screens that students use. 16 different states had their legislatures propose laws limiting how much time kids in their state can spend looking at one of these ed tech screens. This is all driven by parental pressure. Things are changing, right? So when you speak up and you push back, it has a big influence on the communities and institutions with which you're involved. So this is what it means to be a techno selectionist. You're not just looking at everything in terms of the harms and saying, let's just stay where we are because beyond this is dragons and thickets and fires. But you're also not just saying, the future is coming. We gotta get there. Pain has always happened. Luddites, you know, they were wrong. Industrial revolution was good. Let's just go. It doesn't matter.

• 23:24Cal Newport?

  We'll destroy things left and right. Pain left and right. It's worth it. TikTok is good because I don't know, social media is the future, blah, blah, blah. We don't have to be either. We can try to navigate around the obstacles. And so those four Cs, choosing, configuring, changing, and complaining. Those are four things that you as an individual can do that not only allows you as an individual to navigate the technologies available in a way that preserves benefits and minimizes harms, but it's the foundation on which we have our communities, our institutions, and our culture navigate those changes as well. The more we have that four C techno selectionist mindset, I think the better we can actually navigate this current moment. So I think we need a term and a plan for those who don't like the extremes.

• 24:05Cal Newport?

  Right? And I think this is, this is a bad moment for it. I've really definitely experienced this, especially with AI. I think it's because of the engagement pilling of the people on X right now, who then influenced a lot of other people, media and people in business or whatever. There's this mood out there right now where it's sharks and jets, right? And like the one gang is the engagement pill people who like the bigger disruption, the more they feel like their life has meaning when otherwise it doesn't. And then you have like the other gang that like really doesn't like those people at all or what's going on. And everyone's trying to claim you from one side or the other. So if you come in, I speak from experience here, Jesse, but if you come in and say, hey, the way you're talking about this one thing that just happened, that's not quite right. And you're kind of

• 24:49Cal Newport?

  scaring people. Let's like make that more realistic. Then the sharks are gonna come in and be like, you think the AI doesn't work at all? And look at this thing it did so like you bad, right? And then like you have the other gang over there, you know, they find out that like, oh, this, there was a, the numbers are bad, or this, this, this, this was kind of a hype, like Black Monday, Black October, this idea that there was this huge cybersecurity crisis because of a PHP bug. That was, I don't want to get too much into it, Jesse, but this is important. There was, there was this, there was a lot of hype out there that AI was about to break the internet because it found the vulnerability in PHP, which a lot of websites use. Here's the thing. There's hundreds of vulnerabilities

• 25:34Cal Newport?

  in PHP that we've been finding for years. Many of them have never been fixed. We found them the way we always did with various computer tools. There was multiple vulnerabilities in PHP found earlier this year. But because an AI model was involved in this one, it caught a lot of attention. And then they're like, and then, and the, the swarms are breaking into the banks. These were individuals who got their hands on Muse or Dots, these new sort of personal AI agents, which I think you gotta be super careful about because again, LLMs are very unpredictable and LM-driven agents, be very careful about using them. It was just individuals got their hands on these personal agents and sent them to do banking for them. And the banks were like, we have agents trying to access their banks. Yeah, it's people being dumped. Anyways, I don't mean to belittle the cybersecurity threats of AI, but just

• 26:17Cal Newport?

  all to say, like this was a case where there's a huge hype around something that was like turned out not to be hype. But you have people on the, the jets in my metaphor here be like, see, I told you AI doesn't work. So it's, we're in this world where you gotta be on one gang or the other. It's basically a techno discourse prison yard. And if you don't join, you know, either the, the white nationalist or the fascist group or whatever, you're gonna get beat up in the cafeteria. And it's enough. Most people aren't a part of any of these gangs. And they're willing to say, that's cool. That's not. So why don't we do more of that and less of that? That's techno selectionism. So we need a third way. I think most people want a third way. So that's what I'm gonna offer. I want to end here by reading one more quote from my New Yorker piece. I actually don't have this one highlighted, Jesse, so I'll just

• 27:02Cal Newport?

  read off my, my hard copy here. Just because a tool exists and is popular, doesn't mean that we're stuck with it. Given the increasing reach and power of recent innovations, adopting this attitude might have even have existential ramifications. We have no other reasonable choice but to reassert autonomy over the role of technology in shaping our shared story. This requires a shift in thinking. Decades of living in a technopoly have taught us to feel shame in ever proposing the step back from the cutting edge. But as in nature, productive evolution here depends as much on subtraction as addiction. So that's my suggestion. You don't have to be a super optimist or a super pessimist. You could say, show me the good

• 27:43Cal Newport?

  and I'm on board. When I see the bad, I'm gonna call it out. Remember the four Cs. Techno selectionism, I think, is the right foundation for navigating our current technological moment. So there we go, Jesse. The four Cs.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  I like it.

• 27:59Cal Newport?

  I remember that article. New Yorker stuff. The term doesn't like roll off the tongue. The techno selectionism, I think that's the right way to think about it.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  Can you explain to the audience how you use AI for directions and stuff like that?

• 28:14Cal Newport?

  For directions? You mean like GPS?

• 28:17Speaker 02

  Um, oh, yeah. You gave me that tip a while ago and it's actually really helped.

• 28:22Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Okay. So people are always wondering like, as a techno selectionist, what uses of AI do I choose? Right? So I use it a lot. What it's really good for, and in particular, chatbots. There are a lot of different AI technologies out there, but there's a particular chatbot application I like, which is when you're essentially looking for a missing manual for some sort of piece of software or something like this, where you can say, I'm using this software. I'm trying to do this. I'm getting this error message or I can't figure this out. What should I do? It's, it's pretty useful for that. So I, I use, you know, my, my, for my Halloween decorations. I got them all running by the way, Jesse.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  We'll, we'll provide a picture to the audience.

• 29:04Cal Newport?

  We'll provide a picture. Maybe after Halloween so they can't track down the house. Maybe that would be, maybe that would be better.

• 29:15Cal Newport?

  But, and I'll just say this, because I think this is an important innovation. I'm using the, the open source tools that the Christmas lights people use, who do those like synchronized to music, Christmas light displays where the lights dance while it plays like music or whatever, which is not my cup of tea, but I use their ecosystem to make immersive Halloween scenes, because now I can have like thunder and the lightning flash and zaps of electricity and stuff like this. But these aren't super well documented tools, they're mainly open source. So, so I use a lot of chatbots. They're not perfect though, right? They hallucinate a lot, because this is not super well documented software. So it does Google searches, basically with these chatbots, they do Google searches and then they process them to try to give you your answer. Something, they hallucinate things

• 29:58Cal Newport?

  a lot, like menu items that don't exist or options, and you tell them like, oh, you're right, that, that doesn't exist in the software, but try this instead. I had some troubleshooting, I had a lot of, a lot of issues when I was, the final push to get my display up and going, the, the, the issue is my controller, which runs on a Raspberry Pi, is on a local isolated ethernet network with a lighting controlling circuit. And then the, um, it's complicated, because the Raspberry Pi is also on a separate wireless network, so I can talk to it with my laptop. And I was just really having a hard time getting that local wire, isolated ethernet network to work. I just couldn't, uh, access the lighting controller on it. And I was trying to use ChatGPT to help me there, and it, it, it was kind of leading me down rabbit holes. I was like, I know this is wrong, I'm not

• 30:39Cal Newport?

  going to do it. So I went over to Gemini, and it had the right answer, which was, when Jim and I will more aggressively use Google searching, um, unplug the ethernet and plug it back in to the lighting circuit, that's going to actually trigger a hard reset of the ethernet configuration, because I had changed the, the static IP address. So, so I use it a lot for that, but you know, it's, it's hit or miss, basically. Um, there's a lot of like, I don't think you're right about that. But so it's like kind of having a friend that knows more about a lot of this, but is also not like your smartest friend. And like, sometimes we'll come up with these theories for what to do, where you're like, that sounds dumb, so I'm going to ignore you. And that was actually been a pretty productive relationship. So like, my main two uses of AI is, is that, Halloween lighting decorations.

• 31:21Cal Newport?

  Also, I have it write, every word you're hearing here is an AI generated script that's being made audible with 11 Labs. Is that, is that an issue, Jesse? I haven't, as a person, written or spoken an actual human word in this microphone in two years. It's all AI scripts with 11 Labs. I tried to use 11 Labs, it's like a, a, a sound generator, to make sound effects for my Halloween display, and they weren't very good. And so I just went and bought free ones, they work better. But, there you go. I want to take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Now, here's a stat that genuinely shocked me. Sales teams spend about 50% of their time on admin work, rather than selling, building relationships, and closing deals.

• 32:06Cal Newport?

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• 32:47Cal Newport?

  Pipe Drive handles the rest. So switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople, and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive. My link gets you an exclusive 30 days free, instead of the usual 14 day trial. No credit card or payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com/deep to get started. That's pipedrive.com/deep, and you can be up and running in just minutes. If you're a small business, the right hire can be a make or break decision. Just hoping that the right people see your job posting isn't the best growth strategy. When the pressure's on and you need the right hire, this is a job for sponsored jobs. When you need to find the right talent with the exact right skills

• 33:32Cal Newport?

  and qualifications, Indeed Sponsored Jobs can provide the extra visibility that you need. Here's how it works. Sponsored Jobs boost your job post and search results, so you can reach the people that can help your business thrive. Plus, with Indeed Sponsored Jobs, you only pay for results. People are finding quality hires on Indeed right now. In the minute that I've been talking to you, companies like yours made 27 hires on Indeed, according to Indeed data worldwide. And sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. So spend less time searching and more

• 34:15Cal Newport?

  time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves, if you go to indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now, and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. So again, that is indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 34:58Cal Newport?

  All right, let's get back to the show. All right, uh, it's Monday, so after we do our deep dive, we like to open up the inbox and see what you have to say. Remember, if you have a question, a comment, or reaction, or something interesting to send to us, send it to [email protected]. We got a few questions today. Jesse, what do we got first?

• 35:19Speaker 02

  Our first question is from Robert, who asks about applying digital minimalism to LLMs.

• 35:24Cal Newport?

  Digital minimalism, LLMs, all right, this is going to be relevant. We can apply our techno-selectionism maybe. Let's see, I'm excited about that. All right, here's what Robert said. "In your book, Digital Minimalism, in the context of social media, you stressed how important it was to not simply run digital tools on autopilot, over reliance on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, whatever, can easily be a time waster, but controlled and responsible access to it can make it very helpful." All right, so I'll pause here for a second. That's the configuring C I talked about techno-selectionism, that idea of, you can have rules about how you use technologies, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. All right, back to Robert's letter. "The same principle applies to LLMs.

• 36:06Cal Newport?

  Simply using them to answer questions and offload your cognitive abilities is harmful. However, you can control your use of LLMs and ask them to quiz you, or guide you without directly giving you the answer. That's in fact, the entire premise of AI study tools. When used carefully, just like social media, they can be really helpful for active recall, creating more practice questions, or to repeatedly explain things in ways that can be exasperating for human teachers." Robert, that's a really good point. That's a perfect example of techno-selectionism applied to LLM-powered chatbots. Instead of just saying, if I'm going to use this, I'm going to use it for everything, you can say, what uses do I think promote things I value and, and avoid harms? How do I move closer to a better future while avoiding the obstacles?

• 36:51Cal Newport?

  And this is actually a really good use. You could say, explain this concept to me, I don't quite understand that, why doesn't this work? Uh, I know as a mathematics professor, that, there's a lot of like, basic mathematics, it's actually really good. If you, if you want to, don't quite understand something in your notes, it's a pretty good tutor. Hey, I, I'm looking at this new expectation formula. I don't understand why this works. Or, I tried this, and I, let me show you my answer, and this didn't work. Like, if you, if you go back and forth on things that have a, uh, like a very logical or clear, like, right and wrong answer, and something it's trained on, you get tutoring out of it. And if you do that, instead of saying, just give me the answer, instead of cognitive offloading and leading to cognitive surrender, you're actually becoming smarter, and will do better

• 37:36Cal Newport?

  on the test, and understand the information better. So I think that's really cool. Cog item two, though, as I keep encountering, be careful about what area in which you are doing this, because it will also confidently give you wrong information. So there's, you, you need to, um, you need to be careful. It's helpful if you point it towards a page that has an explanation you don't quite, uh, understand, and say, I want you to make this simpler for me. It's more likely to follow the structure of that and get it right. But anyways, stepping back, Robert is right. That's a way to think about LLM-based chatbots right now. All about the configuring C. What makes my life better? Not just what's easiest, not just, if I'm using this, I better use it for everything. All right, what else have we got?

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Our second question is about an overlooked negative impact of using too much AI.

• 38:23Cal Newport?

  Another one. All right, let's see what we missed here. This is from Augustino. In your newsletter titled, "The Good Thing About Hard Things," your newsletter, "The Good Thing About Hard Things," was very interesting. I'm a professor in the medical field. I am also the Chair of the Well-Being Initiative Committee for our House Officers, the interns and residents. House Officers are increasingly reliant on AI for medical records, and who knows what else? My big question is that doing hard things is not only important for cognitive fitness, but also for mental, uh, mental fitness, which he puts in parentheses, "mental health." When we overcome hard things, when we push our boundaries, we get stronger, more resilient. We realize we are capable of hard things. I am so worried that using AI will not only impact the cognitive function, but also mental health.

• 39:08Cal Newport?

  Because we're not able to do hard things anymore. Everything comes easily and fast. That is a really good point. So first of all, if you don't subscribe to my newsletter, you should. Comes out usually most weeks, and it's just me sharing ideas. They're often like more like in reaction to something I just saw, so you sort of see my thinking in action. But ideas about this general topic of human flourishing and technological world that we cover here on this podcast as well. So Augustino was talking about a recent newsletter called "The Good Thing About Hard Things," where I was making the case for, uh, doing cognitively demanding things is good. And if you offload them, you can lose your taste for it, and you can lose your ability to do it. But this is a good follow-up point. Avoiding hard things can also hurt your mental health.

• 39:54Cal Newport?

  Again, this comes back to techno-selectionism. Just because a tool exists that we can use to offload certain types of tasks that we used to do, doesn't mean that we necessarily should. If it's going to make our mind weaker for other tasks where we have to use our mind, or if it's going to make us less happy, as Augustino points out, then we don't have to use it. So this is again, it's the techno-selectionist hat. These questions that we have, these first two are trying to illustrate this sort of techno-selectionist mindset. All right, what do we got next? We're doing well here.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  Next, we have Jay, who wants to share a story about how he reformed his relationship with social media.

• 40:29Cal Newport?

  I always appreciate such stories. Uh, Jay says, "First, I quit Instagram and all other social media four years before, when I was in high school and read your book, Deep Work, especially that chapter called Quit Social Media. Then I got a bit stuck with Twitter, but also left it after reading your book, Digital Minimalism. And now that I have started to fill the gap, uh, now I've started to fill that gap by reading newspapers, which also helps me keep up with the world. With limited useful updates, I wanted in the free time, um, I wanted in my free time that remained, I began developing the habit of reading, something which worked for me in different ways, and just wanted to share with you. I edit this slightly. Jay was, uh, English not his first language, so I'm sort of editing it slightly, but what Jay was saying here,

• 41:13Cal Newport?

  he was just walking through an experience of reconfiguring, applying choice, um, and changing his mind. He backed away from social media, but by backing away from social media, he wasn't, he had no idea what was going on. So he started reading newspapers. Now he had this like good setup where he would read a newspaper. He knew what was going on in the world, but still had a lot of free time. In that free time, social media is still back in. So what did he do? He picked up the habit of reading, and with the habit of reading, now his time is filled. It's fulfilling to him. So he's choosing a sort of landscape or menu of technologies here. He's kept up with the world. He's, he's encountering interesting things,

• 41:55Cal Newport?

  and he's not falling into these rabbit holes of digital algorithmic curation that he was stuck in before. That's a great example of someone taking control of their technological fate and saying, "I'm going to reconfigure this into something better." You can do that. That's what I mean by the, the choosing step here. You can choose not to use this and to use this instead. You can configure how you use what's still there. This is all within your control. All right, I think we have time for, for one more. What else do we have here?

• 42:23Speaker 02

  Finally, James shares an article that you, he thought you might like.

• 42:28Cal Newport?

  I said Substack. James says, "This covers many things you touch on, focus, writing spaces, New Yorker staff writers. All this is missing is professional Halloween decorations, Jesse." Someone did send me an article, by the way, about AI and professional Halloween haunted houses. I was like, "Oh, that's a combination I love." They were complaining that a lot of professional haunted houses are using AI-generated graphics and flyers and stuff, and like, "Come on, make those look better." All right, so let me load this article. It's from, uh, Substack. It's written by Brian Curtis. It's called, "Why Lawrence Wright Believes." Uh, it's about the acclaimed writer Lawrence Wright, longtime writer for The New Yorker,

• 43:10Cal Newport?

  also the author of many acclaimed books, including "The Looming Tower," about the, um, origins of the 9/11 attacks. Okay, so there's a cool article here about, uh, Wright's story. Uh, there's some cool points in here, including the fact that living in Austin took him more out of the mainstream of what was going on and events and hanging out with other writers like would have happened if he lived in New York, but he thinks that's what allowed him to basically just stay focused on just writing stuff that really interests him, which led to better writing. There's one thing in here I wanted to show, though, which I, I found cool. All right, look at this, Jesse. This is his filing cabinet, and I think this is for "The Looming Tower."

• 43:53Cal Newport?

  So for those who are listening, uh, this is the organizational system that Lawrence Wright uses for his research. It's a bunch of small folders. I think these are, I don't know if these are like notebook size, or I'm not sure. And they each have just tabs on them, and there's what, like a hundred different manila folders with tabs in here? I think we can, well, I can't zoom in on Substack, but you know, I can see, if I look closely down here, this is "Looming Tower Osama Bin Laden," and then the one next to it's "Looming Tower Al Qaeda." So this like whole row here on the right is just cards with information related to Osama Bin Laden as part of his research for the book, "A Looming Tower."

• 44:38Cal Newport?

  So one says cave, another says Jews, uh, probably not nice things to say there. I don't think Osama Bin Laden was fans of the tribe. Health, we got here, Syria, jihad. And Wright would actually just write quotations or notes or ideas as he came across them and filed them in this filing cabinet. Okay, why am I pointing this out? "Looming Tower" was a, a magisterial book. It won major, major awards. It was a really important effort in understanding the, the cultural, political, and religious conditions that led to the 9/11 attacks. And this is a pretty old-fashioned organizational system.

• 45:20Cal Newport?

  It's handwritten cards in folders in a filing cabinet. Here's why I bring that up, because it comes back to our thoughts about, uh, we're just talking about the good thing about hard things. This isn't a super efficient way to do things. And the, our current sensibility would be, "No, no, no," especially if you're again on X with the, the AI people.

• 45:40Cal Newport?

  You have to have an AI agent that is like categorizing the information automatically into some sort of, uh, cloud database that can do rag-style queries on it and get you the information as you need it, and put it in and polish it in a way that is easier for you to bring into your, your, your chapter that you're writing on. And you just spend days and days trying to get this thing working using AI itself, the vibe code, the various controls, with a dashboard that you make and JavaScript, and the whole thing's going to be great. And here's the point, none of that matters. Because the core thing to writing a book is not how automated is your research management system. It's the long, hard effort of touching on ideas, moving ideas, putting them on paper, moving the papers around.

• 46:27Cal Newport?

  When you're writing this section and Osama Bin Laden's health is relevant, to go to that filing cabinet and find that and pull out those cards and look through them, and find the perfect thing to say there.

• 46:37Cal Newport?

  That's what you needed to do, and the slowness was probably part of it. The human brain is slow to adapt. That allows you to sort of reshift to what you're doing. It allows you to craft something important, to craft something original and something beautiful. So that, to kind of put a bow on our whole discussion today of techno-selectionism. Speed for speed's sake, who cares? Right? The publisher didn't pay Lawrence Wright for how quickly can you organize research. They paid him for how good of a book can you write? Efficiency for efficiency's sake, who cares? Automation because you can. That's great if it's your hobby, but don't lose sight of the things that actually matter. Producing the things that are valuable. Using your brain in a way that's sustainable and enjoyable and meaningful to the people who are consuming what you produce. Techno-selectionism says, "Yeah, those things matter."

• 47:22Cal Newport?

  So when you cares about technology, you might say, "I don't want to have an agent that's keeping, you know, uh, embeddings of research in a rag database." My, my filing cabinet slows me down enough that I can actually think and produce good work. That's good enough for me.

• 47:38Cal Newport?

  Right? But when I'm writing, maybe I do want to use an AI grammar checker because I keep making the same mistake, or I reuse the, but semicolons in the wrong place. It's all about figuring out what matters most for doing the things that matters most to you, right? That's techno-selectionism. I thought this was kind of a cool idea, uh, cool example of that. So thank you, James, for the example.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  Couple of things about that. Holiday does the same thing, right, with his book, "Curation Process."

• 48:05Cal Newport?

  He does, yeah. He keeps, uh, index cards with stories and quotes on them from different individuals' stories. Because his form is story-based, when it comes time to write one of his books, he just, he can take out and arrange index cards from all of his files and be like, "Oh, that's this chapter." And again, if you talk to Ryan, he'd be like, "Yeah, I don't want it to be faster than that. Like, I need to sit with these." By writing those down, he's told me this before, by taking the time to copy these quotes or ideas onto these index cards, they get filed away in my brain. So then when I'm working on something, my brain can be like, "Ooh, I think I know the perfect thing." It's much better than asking, you know, a chatbot. It's going to come up with some generic, "Hey, did you think about telling the story?" of like, whatever.

• 48:45Cal Newport?

  If we just want to generic, like obvious examples, we don't need to pay a lot of money to writers, right? We could just have sort of like generic examples. So he would say that, that system is just exactly as efficient as it needs to be to actually be effective. You don't need an AI agent going to databases.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  And then last week, I liked how, when you were talking to Haley about touching on ideas, like on a weekly basis, and it was a little different, but the same concept.

• 49:08Cal Newport?

  Yeah, I thought that was cool, right? Where she was like, "We needed the..." The, the, I forgot his name. They're all pseudonyms anyways, but like one of our clients wanted to make progress on his most important projects every day, but it wasn't always reasonable to spend a lot of time on it. And they found that like just doing a two minute thing sort of satisfied his idea of I haven't dropped the ball on this. Like I'm touching base on this idea. You know, I just read it, opened it up, looked at it, shut it again. I haven't given up on it. Even if most, some days I can spend more time, other days I can't. The brain is a weird thing. You've got to be worried about messing around with it to automate this, offload that, you know, there be dragons. If you're in the business of using your brain to create value, you got to be very careful, which is what a techno selectionist would

• 49:51Cal Newport?

  naturally do. All right. I like to end with a quick updates about what I'm up to. I mentioned, finally got my automated, my immersive Halloween scene up and going. That was a big deal. We're making progress here in the studio. There's going to be a new backdrop. So for those who watch, you know, be ready for that. We got to get rid of the black. I like the black, but it just, it doesn't work in almost any form. Whenever I am next to someone else on a video, like I'm doing an interview, it's like a black hole and the bright light of their scene. And it just doesn't look right. It messes up zoom. It messes up Riverside. It doesn't know how to deal with the black. We need a lighter backdrop. I'll miss it,

• 50:33Cal Newport?

  Jesse. But that's what we have to do. I was going to update you on the October books, the books I read in October. October is not over yet when we are recording this. I already finished my five books. I left the list at home. So let's see if I can do this off memory. So I think I already mentioned the book, Simplify. And that was written by the founders of Axios. I talked about on the show. And then I think I mentioned I, at some point I was about to finish the book Telephone from 1975, The History of AT&T, the first book that where the, the author got access to AT&T files. So I, I did finish that. I read Ari Emanuel's memoir, Roll the Calls. Ari Emanuel's the, the super agent, brother

• 51:18Cal Newport?

  to Rahm Emanuel and Zeke Emanuel. And pretty good. All right. He had, he, it's good, right? Because he's using the same ghostwriter who ghostwrote the Andre Agassi memoir. And I think ghostwrote the Prince Harry spare memoir, very good ghostwriter.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  And he wrote The Tender Bar, right?

• 51:37Cal Newport?

  Yeah. And he wrote his own book, The Tender Bar, right? So he's, he's a good ghostwriter. And so I thought, I thought it was, it was, so it was psychologically astute and written in the tone of the way his mind thought. The main thing I noticed, because I, I know Hollywood books well. If you compare it to Mike Ovitz's memoir, which I also read, Mike Ovitz's memoir does something that I was expecting Ari to do, but did not. Mike Ovitz's memoir is all about, let me tell you stories about the specific celebrities and projects I was involved with. So like in Ovitz's memoir, it'd be like, let me tell you about working with Michael Crichton on Jurassic Park. And like, that'll be a story. Let me tell you about signing Julia Roberts. Let me tell you about like her ascent and what deals I brokered or whatever. Ari really doesn't get into the detail of his clients. He doesn't, he's

• 52:22Cal Newport?

  not giving, he talks about his life and his career, but his style, for better or for worse, he, he does not tell a lot of Hollywood stories of like, let me tell you about, like Mark Wahlberg is like one of his big clients. Let me tell you about his rise and what role I had to play in it. So.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  Wahlberg was essentially the character in Entourage, right?

• 52:40Cal Newport?

  Yes. So Wahlberg.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Was Vince.

• 52:44Cal Newport?

  Wahlberg was Vince. So Wahlberg was Ari Emanuel's client. And Wahlberg said, I want to do a show about my entourage when I first got to LA. And so Ari brought that to HBO and they did the show and Jerry, Jeremy Piven played the agent Ari Gold, who's based off of Ari Emanuel. But she said it actually kind of became an issue because he, they got so conflated with each other. And they, they really took a lot of things from Ari Emanuel's life for the Ari Gold actual character. So, but it was, it was interesting book.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  I was listening to a podcast with Ari recently because I'm sure he's promoting the book, but he said he makes like a hundred phone calls a day or something like that?

• 53:24Cal Newport?

  Yeah. Yeah. That's what's Roll the Calls. So like you have an assistant who's on the line. So you never hang up. It just goes from one call to another call. All he does is call. All he, I'd be the worst agent. I'd be like, do we really need to work this year? Going to call someone back? What are we talking about? Be the worst agent. So then I read in memoir mode, Dave Portnoy, who found the Barstool Sports, which I don't know much about actually. Do you, do you do any Barstool stuff?

• 53:53Speaker 02

  No, I don't. But I know that he has a house on Nantucket.

• 53:56Cal Newport?

  Yeah. I learned that from the memoir. He bought that early on and then he kept upgrading it as, as he did better. So I listened to his new memoir about starting Barstool Sports because it has a huge digital component. So podcasts are like at the core of it. So I was hoping to get some sort of insights about how they, what they thought about that industry and like how they knew to make that pivot. But it was more just like stories about stuff that happened to him that his fans know about. And like, he wanted to tell his story, like when they got arrested for protesting Roger Goodell after Deflategate. And they handcuffed themselves together in the headquarters of NFL and they went to jail. And it's like a lot of stories like that, which I guess if you know who he is, you're like, oh, and, and then a lot of him like defending himself against various like

• 54:40Cal Newport?

  charges and stuff like that. So it was, it was interesting. Like I, I went through it kind of quick, but it.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  He owns High Noon, right?

• 54:46Cal Newport?

  I don't know. Yeah, he does. The drink. Yeah.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  That's popular.

• 54:50Cal Newport?

  You know how many big podcasts came out of there? Cause it was all like Alex Cooper, Call Our Daddy, came out of his network. And then Pat McAfee was, came out of his network. And then Pardon My Take is still, you know, in his network or whatever. And they have, there's a whole new book out just about that podcast. So maybe I should read that. But what I've learned is memoirs aren't really about business strategy. I got to learn this. Like this book does not get into how they surveyed the landscape of digital media and decided a shift towards audio is going to be whatever. So it was fun, but it didn't have what I, the, the niche thing I was looking for. What else did I read? Oh,

• 55:30Cal Newport?

  tree line. So that was, that was a dense book. I like that book. It's an environmental book from like 2022, 2023. My neighbor lent it to me. And this environmental reporter, and my apologies, I don't have his name offhand, kind of went around the world, looking at the tree line, like where the boreal forest or whatever type of forest it is, but like where the forest stops. You know, in Siberia, at some point the forest stops as you get to the Arctic, or in Scandinavia, at some point it stops, or in Alaska, at some point the trees go away. And he goes around the world to, to the tree line, all around the world. One place he couldn't visit because of COVID, but he visited virtually. And it's sort of about the, I guess the tree line is shifting up because of global warming.

• 56:14Cal Newport?

  And so it's an environmental book and about these different places, incredibly deeply researched, slow going. More so than like other environmental writers like a Bill McKibben or an Elizabeth Colvert's going to be a little bit more, the narrative's final move more. This guy is voluminously researched and it's in there. Like there's no, he's, he's taking his time. You're going to learn about this type of tree and that and this person, the history and this and that. So it's a very dense book, but very well written and just in a momentous amount of research. So I think those are those. So does that count? Does that up to five?

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:46Cal Newport?

  Yeah. There you go. Those are the October books. I finished October early this year. It was like October 20th or something. I was rolling. It's because the book on tapes just rolled.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 56:57Cal Newport?

  I did the two memoirs on tape. Those are like the only things I can listen to on tape. I now, I started Warren Littlefield's because I listened to the Seinfeld acquired.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  Oh, I just read the Wall Street Journal article about that.

• 57:09Cal Newport?

  Yeah, that's great. I might do a short podcast episode about a idea from that. So then I got Warren Littlefield, who was the like entertainment executive NBC that was there who started must see TV and like was there for Seinfeld, his memoir about how they made must see TV Thursday night on NBC a big thing. But it's not going well on audio because it's a lot of like transcript stuff. Like they interviewed people and they have transcripts of it. So and so said this, so and so said this, like as opposed to fully out narrative. And that works better in print, I think in audio, but I'm still kind of going. I'm learning a lot about making TV in the eighties. So, all right, that's enough of this nonsense. We'll be back Monday with another flagship episode. Maybe I'm, I'm trying to do more shorter episodes in between when I can. So maybe you'll see me before

• 57:54Cal Newport?

  Monday, but until you see me next, as always, stay deep. Today's episode was produced and mastered by Jesse Miller. Nate Meckler provided research and newsletter support. The video was edited by Ben Crain and Rob Moss. The theme music is adapted from an original composition by Jay Kerstens. For weekly ideas from me to show up in your inbox, sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com.