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EVERY SPOKEN WORD
65 min read · 12,917 words- 0:00 – 1:25
Intro
- CNCal Newport
If I'm being honest, the month of September wasn't that easy for me. I was overwhelmed with those sort of schedule-busting, time-sensitive obligations that can really make it feel almost like you're drowning. The, the way I actually described how I felt last month was flat. Like, I was very busy, but not actually getting anywhere. Like, I was existing more than I was living. Now, this is what I wanna talk about today, because actually I think that, that feeling, that experience I had last month is one that more and more people are having, and technology is actually making it worse. And so I wanna try to understand what is going on when we feel overwhelmed and flat, and then once we have this understanding, use that to figure out how best to escape that negative state. And what I'm gonna do is explain to you exactly what I did to get out of the sense of flatness I was feeling. It was a strategy that's so simple that it could fit on a single sheet of paper, and I will explain to you, uh, exactly how to do it in your own life when you end up in the same type of situation that I was just in. It is a strategy to get out of flatness and back into a deeper rhythm of your life. In, in our current technological landscape, it's a strategy that I think we all need in our back pocket, so let's get right into it.
- 1:25 – 5:17
Why Overload Makes Life Feel Flat
- CNCal Newport
All right, I wanna get started by looking closer at the problem. What was it that I was feeling and that other people are feeling increasingly today? Well, it came out of overload. As I mentioned, I, I had an unusual amount of stuff that was landing on my plate, and it was time sensitive, and it was busting up my schedule. There's a lot of reasons for this. Some of it has to do with AI. I've sort of reluctantly, as you've probably seen, been dragged into a national conversation about AI and the AI labs and what's really going on and why it's going on and what we should do about it, and I feel like it's my duty, but it generates a huge amount of last-minute urgent things that really dominate my schedule. But I also had other things going on as well. The back to school season is often something that puts a lot of non-professional obligations into my life, and I happen to have some other projects that were either ending up, like my book, or were just starting, like our studio renovation. So it's just all too much. But overload is not new. People have always suffered through periods where they had more going on than what's probably reasonable to handle. What I have realized is that technology makes overload worse. Now, a big reason why this is true is that all of these things that are on your plate no longer just sit there until you're ready to work on them. They create these sort of constant digital intrusions into your life. I have a whole list here. Uh, email, Slack, WhatsApp, text messages, calendar invites, video conferences. These are all digital intrusions that each of these things on your plate starts generating, and they require this constant vigilance because you never know when the next message comes in that you have to answer quickly or the next quick meeting falls on your schedule, and now you have to rush from here to there and then from there back, and now two hours have been completely eaten up. So the digital vector that these obligations use to intrude into your cognitive reality are incredibly numerous and incredibly relentless. This, I think, is the real problem, because if I'm analyzing again my own experience in September, what happens is once you're completely in the state of responsiveness, your brain starts to... And it, it's a defense mechanism. Your brain starts to actually slow down other types of natural ways of being. In particular, I... This is what I experience, that tendency or instinct to envision the future, to get excited about something that's coming up, to, to work on projects that are optional but are deeply important to you. That becomes subdued pretty quickly, and then when that becomes subdued, you also begin to lose your ability to just be present or have gratitude. This is where I think the flatness comes from. You just fall into a mode of, "I'm just trying to stay on top of all of these digital intrusions that are being generated by my overload. It never ends. My brain goes into self-protection mode. Suddenly, I'm no longer excited about the future. Suddenly, I'm no longer having those just moments of, 'Isn't this great? I just enjoy... It's nice weather out, walking through my town. This weekend's gonna be exciting.'" When that is gone, your world flattens. Now, I wanna give a name to this. I'm gonna borrow this from, uh, Greg McKeown, from his book Essentialism. I call this force that creates this flatness the whirlwind. Let's use that as our, our name, because you're, you've... you're surrounded by all the digital intrusions that your overload creates. Whirlwind is a bad state to be in. I was not happy being in the whirlwind last month. Many of you have probably found yourself at the center of a whirlwind as well recently, and you have felt that same type of numbness or flatness where you're living instead of just existing. All right, so that's the problem. That's kind of a bummer.
- 5:17 – 21:54
The Two Plus Five Plan
- CNCal Newport
But once we know the problem, we can come up with some solutions, and I think this is a key division, and this is something that I've missed before in my life, but I'm getting better about now. There's the short-term solution, and there's the long-term solution. So the short-term solution is, what do you do when you're in the middle of the whirlwind? You can't stop that tomorrow. Long-term, yes. We'll talk long-term solutions here in a second, but when the whirlwind sneaks up on you, you're not gonna get out of it right away. How do you avoid being flat during the worst of one of these whirlwinds? How do you avoid avoiding future thinking and excitement and gratitude and presence? So in other words, how do you keep your life livable during the worst of these moments while waiting to execute or complete whatever long-term solution you have. So I wanna talk about each in turn. I wanna start with the short-term solution, and then the long-term. It's the short-term solutions where I have been innovating more recently. The long-term solution, you can probably predict where I'm going there. I've written books about this. But short-term, in the whirlwind, what did I do last month when I was in the middle of it? This is my one-page strategy. I call it a Two Plus Five Plan. All right? The idea is, and I'll show you an example in a second, but the idea is you're gonna capture two practices that you're gonna do daily, and five projects or big tasks that you're working towards finishing as quickly as you can. Your goal is to get through that whole list, and then you can reset or do something differently. That's it. Two practices, five projects and tasks, and you're gonna keep up with those practices and just myopically focused outside of the stuff you have to do of just I wanna knock things off of this one list of five, and that is it. Let me show you an example here about what I mean by practices and projects. I'll, I'll write it up here, um, on my trusty tablet. Um, so okay. So this white page I'm showing up on the screen, you can imagine that is, uh, a, a blank sheet of paper. So you would start with your practices. So I'll just write the word practices right on here. Right? Okay, so you start with practices. I'll give you two sample ones. Uh, maybe you'll do ping one person, and I'll explain each of these in a second. And then two, reading lunch. Maybe I should add three, practice calligraphy, because I'm... Jesse, it's not looking great. Okay, so these are examples of the type of practices I'm talking about. I put down two under the word practices, ping one person, reading lunch. What is that? What are these examples? Um, ping one person means, in this example, reach out to one person. Call them, talk to them if you see them in person, or send them a text message. But it's a, it's an example of a daily practice that's not incredibly time-consuming. You can fit it in. Takes five minutes in the worst-case scenario, if not less. But it's a thing that is important to you. It's not mandatory. There's no deadline. But I wanna stay in touch with people, with my friends and my family. Reading lunch, that's a simple idea. The idea is when you read... when you eat lunch, don't look at your phone, try to read a chapter or two of a book. Again, a simple practice. You could do it almost every day, 'cause you're gonna eat lunch most days anyways. So you can accomplish it even in the middle of the whirlwind, but it's something that is optional and connects you to something that you think is important, in this case, developing your mind and getting lost in a world of either ideas or fiction. We're gonna take a quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Now, some of my proudest moments from earlier in my life were hitting key financial milestones, whether it was buying my first home or finally paying off my student loans. 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If I had had access to this app back when I was first starting, I know I would have hit more of my key financial milestones much quicker. 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 with code DEEP. I also wanna talk about our friends from Superhuman. Too much of the talk about AI these days is focused on abstract benchmark scores or attention-catching ghost stories about experiments gone rogue. But do you know what I want out of AI? I want it to reduce the time I spend on administrative and logistical efforts, so I have more time to focus on the deep things that really move the needle. This is why I'm so excited about Superhuman Go from the makers of Grammarly, which is different from many other AI products that I've seen out there on the market. So let me give you a specific example that I found exciting. Let's say you're writing an email to your boss about the status of an automation project you're leading, and you realize you want to include a status report based on the current state of this project in Jira, and you want to do this without having to leave your email client. Well, now you can do it. Without leaving G- Gmail, you can pop up a Go window, type in Add quick summary from Jira at the end, and boom, off it goes, reads the information, composes the summary, adds it back into your email. You never had to change your attention, never had to change your focus. Here's why I like Go. It lets you focus on the things that matter without all the brain-destroying context switching. No new tabs, no switching apps. You get what you need without losing where you are. To find out more about Superhuman Go, visit superhuman.com. That's superhuman.com for more information. All right, let's get back to the show. All right, so let's give some examples for what I mean by projects. So I'll write the word projects here. And I'll put some example ones, yeah, we got room, so that we can have a sense of the scope I'm talking about here, right? Because a project is not gonna be start a business and move it to $100 million of revenue. We're gonna be way more narrow than that. So I'll put down some sample ones here. All right. Peloton Split Program. This is very specific, Jesse. You don't know about these, but for those who have Pelotons, they have weight training videos on there as well, not just biking, and they have these programs called split programs, which they'll, they'll often be over, you know, um, four or five weeks. And it's like a normal type of workout where they'll have three different workouts to do in a week, and they're working on different muscle groups, so you're splitting, like you would do with like a normal workout. So when I put Peloton Split Program here, I mean, hey, try to get through one of these four-week programs, four weeks worth of, uh, these classes. Okay. Um, here's a, a cliched one that everyone has done at some point in their life. Halloween spotlight program. I actually was working on this last weekend, Jesse, but, uh, it's a project, in this case, a hobby project. What this means here is, um, you know, I've, I've... I have a program to synchronize various computer-controlled spotlights to a soundtrack, so we can do like lightning or other types of effects. But it's an example of a project that maybe takes a couple hours, and it's not instrumental, it's not critical to my job. There's no deadline. But it's, you know, hey, it's something I wanna do 'cause I'm gonna enjoy doing it. Let's see. I'm just writing... These are things I've thought about before, some of these. Uh, hike to Wheaton. I've long wanted to do this. There's a, this Sligo Creek Trail near where I live. If you walk on it long enough and then are willing to go through some neighborhoods at the end, you can get all the way to this large park called Wheaton Regional Park that I like that has some cool trails and gardens. It's like seven miles or something. Like, that'd just be a thing to do. Figure that out. Find an afternoon. You have to have someone come pick you up. Um, but just do it because why not do it? All right. There... Here is a... There's... Oh, I went to the eraser. The tablet is trying to erase that one. It doesn't like that idea. Um, I'll put something else on here that is like a little more professional. I'm putting down author photo rights. These are all actual... Some of these things are things I've done recently. So I recently acquired the rights to some photo, some author photos that were taken for a, a profile of me in an international magazine, and I love the photos, and I contacted the photographer and bought the rights to use, so we can use them going forward. Not that my existing author photos are problematic, but they do make it look like I'm 24 years old, so we had to kind of be more reasonable. But again, it's like a project that's like, "Hey, I should do this." It's not... No one's forcing me to do it, but this would be like productive. It'd be useful in a non-urgent type of way. And then, uh, I'll put a cliched one down like replant garden. So maybe you have like a... I don't do this, but maybe you have like a garden box, and it's like, "Hey, why don't I get that set up for the fall season?" All right. So what do these type of examples have in common? I have five projects. What's special about these projects? Doing a, like a Peloton split program, a hobby project, a hike, like a one-time thing, um, a kind of a productive non-urgent thing in your professional life and a, a like a hobby household type of project, right? None of them are urgent. None of them have a deadline. They're all things you would enjoy doing and/or would make you feel like you have autonomy or efficacy. You're making progress on things that are important to you, even when you're not being forced to do it. So with this Two Plus Five Plan, you would say, "Great, I'm gonna try to do these two practices every day. They're designed to be done every day, even if the day is busy, and I'm gonna try to get through these lists when I'm thinking about, you know, my week or the weekend or each day. Is there one I can make progress on or get done?" They're not super hard. You can knock off one in a week, even if you're very busy. But you make progress. You don't refill them. You're just like, "I want to try to finish this list." All right. So what do you do with your Two Plus Five Plan? You print it, and you put it in your sock drawer. That's kind of the key here because that's the one place where it's safe, right? It's not out on a surface where you're gonna lose it, but you'll see it every day. Every day that you wear socks, you'll open that drawer and be like, "Oh yeah, yeah, there's my Two Plus Five. Let me remember to do those practices. Can I do one of these? Can I do one of these today?" All right. So why does this work? What's the importance of this? Well, the key is that even when you're in the middle of the whirlwind, you feel like you have autonomy. You're still getting a minor but regular dose of doing things that you think are important or you're excited about, even though it's not something that's being demanded of you, and that resists the flatness. These are easy enough that it's not setting yourself up for failure. But even amid the whirlwind, you're like, "You know, I got a couple hours in on my Halloween thing," and that was just presence, gratitude presence, enjoying it. Or, "I worked for, you know, 30 minutes and kind of figured out this author's photo right thing." You're feeling like, "Hey, I'm making progress on my projects, things I want to do, not things that people are forcing me to do." And it only takes a little dose of this sometimes to have your mind avoid falling into the flatness. So these daily practices and then a work here, work there, maybe even just once a week, it's just enough, that's what I found, to maintain some sense of, "I'm still doing things I want to do. I'm still excited about things. I'm still in command of my own life. I'm not gonna collapse down the flatness and just feel like I am reacting, and that's all I do." So it's all about immunizing yourself to the virus of whirlwind-induced collapse into flatness. This is not about, "Let's make sure that we accomplish your greatest goals." This is not about, "Let's transform your life, and if you just can get through these five things, your life will be changed forever." No, these are minor things. It's about the psychology that gets you through whirlwinds in the short term Without having your psyche collapse into that flatness.
- SPSpeaker
What about your normal time management system? Does this replace it or anything?
- CNCal Newport
Yeah, that's a good question, right? What about, like we talked about, uh, earlier this fall, I talked about having, um, a slimmed down time management system, you know, when, when things are busy. So, so is this even slimmer? Are we moving from, uh, a fully featured Cal Newport time management to a slimmer one down to just this? Uh, and the answer is actually no. This is separate from organizational time management. So you do need to control your time. You do need to have capture, right? So no matter what's going on, outside of like a day or two where like you're completely booked, you gotta get obligations out of your head, that's capture, into a trusted system that you do look at, and you have to have some look or say or autonomy over what you're doing with your time. When your schedule gives you breathing room, I like multi-scale planning. I think it's where you should, you should have your, um, you're looking at your big picture quarterly plan that might link out, or semester plan or seasonal plan, whatever you wanna call it, that has this big sort of big picture vision. It might link to the, to more detailed strategic plans, so like sub plans for things like your professional life, and then you look at that each week to build a weekly plan to make sure that you're making progress on these big goals that are important to you. And then each day you're doing daily time block planning, all with a schedule shutdown confirmed, so you have a separation between work and not, and you control the rhythm and intensity of your life. Like, you turn these knobs, you have easy days and hard days, easy weeks, hard weeks, easy months and hard weeks. Like, that's the full, the full featured system is what you, you, you wanna get to in a steady state. And I will say... I've mentioned this before, Jesse, but in the book, my new book that's coming out in March, on the deep life, I have a section where I walk through all of that.
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- CNCal Newport
I know I've talked about this all before on the podcast, and bits and pieces have been in another book, but I just have this section where it's like, let's just build you a time management system from scratch. Then when times are a little bit harder, like during a whirlwind period, fall back on the simpler systems like I talked about, I guess that was like early September, that episode.
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- CNCal Newport
Um, early September, maybe late August, I had an episode about a sort of a busy period version of that system where you get just the, you know, there is capture, you're looking at task lists, you're getting basic control over your time. So that oscillates. This is different, right? Because even when you fall back on that really simplified time management system, so you still have some capture and control, but you're not working on grand plans and multi-scale planning in any interesting way. Even when you're there, you could still go flat, because here's what happens. You're doing your best to capture, things are going to the to-do list, you're getting things out of your head, you're looking at your calendar carefully to make sure that your schedule fits, but you're still day-to-day just executing and reacting, and you'll still feel flat. Like I am completely organized while still feeling flat. So the Two Plus Five plan is not a time management system, it's a mind management system. It's a strategy you deploy when you're in the bunker with your simplified time management system trying to like keep yourself from falling into a stress spiral. It's... That... The time management system will do that. You throw the Two Plus Five to get to a more positive subjective affect, to get away from flatness and still feel alive, to still feel like depth matters in a time when that could be taken away from you. So Jesse, that was a good question, because you gotta have both. If you give up on controlling your time and obligations, you're just gonna fall into anxiety and stress. That's no way to live. But just doing that alone still can push you into flatness if there's enough whirlwind, and that's where the Two Plus Five plan can help you in the short term.
- 21:54 – 26:04
The Long-Term Fix: Workload Management
- CNCal Newport
The long-term solution is to minimize the number of times you fall into the whirlwind. That should not be your steady state. That should not be something that happens time and again. So when you're in the middle of the whirlwind, you kinda have to think, "What is causing this?" And almost always, that means looking at your, your, uh, your workload of things you've agreed to do professionally and personally. Because again, the interruptions, the distractions, these are being generated by the obligations. So we really gotta understand this picture. You have the things you've said yes to. Then digital technology is helping to affect how those things then affect you, how many intrusions it generates, how reactive it makes you, how busy it makes you. Uh, so the digital technology is changing the way that it actually affects your life. If you try to solve this problem at the bottom of this, like, "Okay, I'm going to try to, uh, organize all the digital mediated intrusions and be better about them. I'm gonna be better about how I use my inbox and my expectations about Slack or this or that," that's gonna be a losing battle. Once you're overloaded enough and you have these digitally mediated intrusions coming at this incredible volume, eventually you're gonna be moving the deckchairs on the Titanic. So long term, to prevent whirlwind is really a workload management issue. It's saying, "Oh, how do I make sure I don't get so many things on my plate?" And honestly, something that I've experienced and I've seen other people experience as well, is where this often gets hard is where they don't think about workload management in their personal life, and that begins to build up. And then when they have a sort of normal cyclical, you have a little bit more load than normal in their work, it adds up to too much, and the intrusions really take over. So long term, workload management really matters. All of the strategies for this, the best place to find them in my canon would be my last book, which was Slow Productivity. Rule number one is do fewer things. It's all about workload management, all sorts of practical strategies in there. But so that's the long-term solution, is to say, "This is bad. I don't wanna be in this state all the time. So I have to control how many things I'm actively working on, and I do all the types of things I talk about in Slow Productivity, but I'll apply the types of rules, strategies, and ideas in that book to my professional life and to my personal family life as well, because I don't wanna be back in the whirlwind." All right? So short term- Two plus five helps you from falling, preventing from falling in the flatness during the whirlwind. Long-term, it's workload management to make sure that's not too common of an occurrence. So hopefully that makes sense. Does that make sense, Jesse, that distinction between you gotta have time management, but that has to be on a spectrum where you're able to pull it back to the simplest possible things when you're busy, but you never just give it up? And then you have these other types of things you do, like big, big-picture workload management to stop being in the busy situations, and then psychological, mind management, psychology management, like the Two Plus Five Plan, to say, "When I'm in one of those situations, later I can figure out why and try to prevent it from happening. How do I prevent my mind from closing down or shutting down?"
- SPSpeaker
Yeah. No, it makes sense.
- CNCal Newport
Yeah. So sometimes you got to, uh, you gotta hack the brain as much as you have to hack your schedule. Um, by the way, things are getting better now. I'm, I, I'm doing the slow productivity stuff. I'm deploying new rules, no new this, I'm spreading this out, I'm saying no to a lot more things, and I'm readjusting, but the Two Plus Five Plan helped. That helped, and there were some Halloween-related things in there, I'll tell you that.
- SPSpeaker
Did you do a Peloton Split?
- CNCal Newport
No, I don't do those anymore. I mean, I've, I've-
- SPSpeaker
Your trainer
- CNCal Newport
... Zach, yeah. That I stick with. That I stick with. Uh, Zach is always impressed. He's like, "Wow, you stick, you... At, at the very least, like, you really don't skip workouts." But for me, it's become that's my stress management.
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- CNCal Newport
So that's just become a, a something I, uh, I really, really feel bad to miss one, and I'm gonna catch it up one way or the other. Like, last night I was doing it, you know, pretty late at night, but I was like, "I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna miss this." All right, so there we go. That's my, uh, that's my deep dive for today. Uh, because this is a Monday,
- 26:04 – 31:50
Office Hours: Rebuilding After a Health Crisis
- CNCal Newport
we like to hold some office hours and see what is on your mind. Remember, if you have a question or a comment or something you wanna share in the Office Hour segment, you can send an email to podcast@calnewport.com. All right, Jesse, who is first in our office hour queue this week?
- SPSpeaker
Our first question is from someone using a semester plan to move out of a hard situation.
- CNCal Newport
Yeah, this is... I, I was reading this before. So I, first of all, I'm gonna say this is, uh, I've an- I've anonymized this. I cut out a lot of details to keep it anonymous, but I thought it was important and I did wanna share it because it is s- in the same theme of what we just talked about, but a much more extreme situation than I found myself in in September. Let me read it, but then you'll see what I mean, and then we'll, we'll talk about it. All right. "In March, I came down with a rare autoimmune neurological disorder called Guillain-Barré syndrome. My immune system attacked my periphery nervous system, and I was temporarily paralyzed from the neck down. The timeline for GBS recovery is six to 24 months, and while I'm hopefully skewing on the shorter side, my doctors say it will be a year before I fully feel back the baseline." Uh, I wanna give a, like a, a couple little details here. I'll keep it anonymous. Um, this, the, the, the correspondent here was explaining you have to relearn... You, you get... The paralysis goes away, but you have to relearn all, like, how to hold something. Like, you really gotta relearn all of this physical stuff that we take for granted. So this is, this is a hard recovery. All right, let me go back to the, the letter here. "As you'll see in the semester plan I attached..." So they, they sent me a, a copy of their, their semester plan for the fall, and they have a draft of their plan for the spring. Um, they're academic-related, so they, they, they're thinking about things in semesters like I do, as opposed to quarters like a business person. Um, "As you'll see in the semester plan I attached, very few things, if any, fall into the category of 'these must be done by this specific date,' because I get very tired very fast right now, and it's, uh, my energy is unpredictable. My plan focuses instead on creative endeavors for personal and professional nourishment, rebuilding my body, and fortifying my mind," um, [clears throat] and fortifying my mind. Oh, I, I put those together, but rebuilding my body and then the third one is fortifying my mind. "Thank you for your continued work and inspiration. I feel like I'm finally on track, partly because of my disorder, to do less, do better, and know why. I spent the first 35 years of my life in a rush, and I don't wanna live that way anymore." [clears throat] So this, A, it's inspirational, and I think it's, it's, it's, it's touching and informative. So this person has a major shock. I mean, I- it doesn't get much bigger than this, to be temporarily paralyzed and then having to suddenly be out of your busy life and trying to rebuild your body and your mind sort of from scratch. And instead of seeing that just as an obstacle that you curse, this correspondent said, "This is gonna be my wake-up call. I was busy all the time." It sounds like the description of flatness that I was feeling in September that we just talked about. This was how they were feeling before the infection. And now, when that's no longer an option, they're seeing, "Wait a second. Obviously my situation is incredibly hard and I wish it didn't happen, but rebuilding from the situation is showing me that there's a different rhythm to life. There's a deeper rhythm that's possible, where a lot of the things I'm working at are, they're instrumental in the sense, like, I wanna re- get stronger," and you'll s- I saw on the plan, there's very specific goals about steps and milestones you're trying to get to. But it's not ambitious in the sort of just professional sense. It's not urgent. It's not, "Here's the deadline. I have to get this done or people will be mad at me." It's, "I'm choosing to do this, and I wanna get stronger again, and I want my mind to come back, and I want my soul, I wanna nourish that soul. I wanna be doing things that are gonna make my soul feel better." So for the rest of us who aren't going through such a major disruption, I think there's a really key lesson in there. The, the power of simplifying and the power of beginning to insist on optional but important deep practices and projects changes everything. It can change things so much that even in the face of such a terrible situation, your f- your, this, this correspondent is f- is seeing a benefit. You know, there's benefits to this compared to what my life was like before. So it's... This is not like productivity hacks we're just talking about here. It's psychology. It's the human experience. It's the what's necessary for a deep life, the I am insisting on doing things that no one is telling me to do, and there's no urgent deadline, but they make my life better. And that's a big part of my life, is embracing my life and seeking ways to get more enjoyment out of it or to, to make my experience in this world better, more quality. And you... The easiest way to do that is not to always have a two plus five list that you're squeezing in, but to slow down, reduce your plate so you have more than enough time to do those types of things. So I thought that was a really nice letter, I think, um, and I, I wish them all the luck in their recovery. And keep me posted. I wanna see how your plan's unfolding. I'll give you some advice. All right, what else do we got?
- 31:50 – 46:54
Landlining and Taming Your Phone
- SPSpeaker
Eric points us to a product that supports one of our ideas.
- CNCal Newport
An i- product that supports one of our ideas. Let's see. Eric says, "Looks like a company commercialized your landlining idea." So remember, landlining is the idea of keeping your phone in the kitchen when you're at home. That's where you go to use it, that's how you communicate to people, that's how you look things up. There's all of this talk of all these different things you might do to make your life simpler and to simplify your phones, but this is like the number one thing you can do because it has whole portions of your day where it's not your default mode diversion. There's all these benefits. So let's see. Let's load on the screen here. All right, here we go. It's Cali- no, coily.com, and we can see here on the screen. They say, "The modern landline. Give your phone a home with our retro wall perch and coiled charging cable so you can hang up and get your evenings back." Let's zoom in. All right, so it's a iPhone on a s- perch on the wall with an old-fashioned telephone coiled, uh, cable that's plugged into it and plugged into the wall. So you would actually hold your iPhone with that coiled telephone cable connecting it to the wall. I, I like this, Jesse. What do you think?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
If you're gonna landline, you might as well make it look good, right?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- CNCal Newport
If you try to walk away, you have it. Did you have that growing up, the-
- SPSpeaker
Yeah
- CNCal Newport
... w- I mean-
- SPSpeaker
I remember vividly
- CNCal Newport
... people who did not grow up in the '90s don't remember that, like, the way we dealt with privacy in phone calls is you just had a really long coiled cable. Like, our kitchen phone had, God, it must've been a 10-foot cable-
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm
- CNCal Newport
... that you could stretch even more because it's coiled. So you would just, like, take the phone and walk down the hallway and go into another room. And, like, I remember when wireless, like, cordless phones became a thing. That was like a game changer. You're like, "Oh, I can carry the phone around the house." Yeah, that was, like, the, that was, like, the big deal. Uh-
- SPSpeaker
And answering machines.
- CNCal Newport
Answering machines. When answering machines became digital was a big deal 'cause it used to be you would press the button, it was like a dishwasher, so complicated, and it would have to, like, rewind the tape and then play it, and then go back to an empty part of the tape. And I guess it had another tape that had the m- recording on it.
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- CNCal Newport
And then they became digital, so you could just, like, go through, and then you got, uh, telephone service voicemail where you would dial in, the telephone service would do your messages and store them, and you would call in and type in a code, and then you... Because, uh, you could call in from anywhere and type in a code and advance through your messages by, like, pressing buttons on your, on your whatever. Those were the days. Um, I like this. We should get one of these for the HQ. That'd be kind of cool, right? Like, when we come in you could put your phone in one.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- CNCal Newport
Uh, landlining in general, it's the easy... I mean, it's not easy to do, but it's the easiest solution, right? Because you retrain your brain. Think about all the... If your phone at home was in the kitchen with, like, a Coily or something like this, think about all the s- things you would now do without a phone: watching TV, watching movies, being at the dinner table, talking to people, reading books. And your brain would get used to this idea of I don't get digital candy at the slightest hint of boredom. You do that long enough, and the part of your short-term reward system that is trying to, uh, motivate you to pick up the phone chills out. Just chills out. The, the grip on you, uh, gets much better. I, I think landlining is more important than any number of, um, apps that monitor your usage or complicated rules or digital Shabbats or any of that. This will beat all of that. It's not easy to do, but it's incredibly easy to describe.
- SPSpeaker
With the redesign, you might have to put one in the background.
- CNCal Newport
Yes.
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
Yeah, we could put one back, we could put one back here.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- CNCal Newport
What if I get a call? I could take it.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- CNCal Newport
Reach back. "Hello?" You used to have to say, like, "Hello, Mr. Newport."
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
"This is Jesse. Is Cal there?" Like, you would have to talk to adults. It's like a whole thing. I wanna take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that makes this show possible. Here's a stat that shocked me: sales teams spend about 50% of their time on admin work rather than selling, building relationships, and closing deals. Now imagine if you could get that time back. Imagine if every sales rep would walk into calls already briefed and stay focused instead of taking notes, and then have their CRM updated minutes after the call completed. If they could sell and allow a tool to handle the admin. Well, this is where today's sponsor, Pipedrive, comes in. It's an intelligent AI-powered sales CRM that is loved by growing sales teams. Now something I like about Pipedrive is that it can remember your deal history and create a pre-meeting brief that automatically pulls email records and previous conversations into one place right before you make whatever important sales call is about to happen. You can figure out in a moment exactly where things left off. Their new AI note taker is also a game changer. During your meetings, it records what you're saying, your conversation, takes notes so you don't have to. You can stay in the conversation confident that Pipedrive is handling the rest. So switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople, and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipedrive. 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 minutes. I also wanna talk about our friends at Scribe. Here's something I've learned running my media company. One of our most valuable assets is our knowledge about the best way to execute all of the different things we do here internally. So if we lose a key person, we lose their knowledge, and this is a big deal. And if we hire someone new, we're gonna have to teach them everything from scratch, which can also be a big pain. This is where today's sponsor, Scribe, enters the scene. Scribe is a workflow AI platform trusted by 94% of the Fortune 500 that captures any workflow in real time and turns it into documentation automatically. No manual writing, no manually taking screenshots, no starting from scratch with each new hire. You just turn on their browser extension or desktop app, execute your normal processes, and it builds the guide as you go, capturing your steps automatically. New employees will then enjoy real-time on-screen guidance that shows them exactly where to click inside the actual tool. Now if you're worried about personal information like names or account numbers, don't be. Scribe will auto-redact them from every screenshot. And this goes beyond documentation. Scribe can show you which steps are redundant and where the workflow could be simpler or more automated. Jesse, we have a lot of processes here, and this might be exactly what we need to try to document all it is that we do. So if you wanna see what Scribe could look like for your organization, head to scribe.how/deep and mention Deep Questions for your first month of Scribe Capture free on select pa- plans. That's S-C-R-I-B-E.how/deep, and don't forget to mention Deep Questions. All right, let's get back to the show. [whooshing] All right, uh, what else do we got? Alfred has another idea about taming your phone. All right. Cal, I listened to your latest episode where you talked about dumb phones versus boring phones. Um, you can actually have a smartphone without the downsides you mentioned, like being able to reinstall Instagram instantly. You need to use Android and install And Off, which adds an artificial delay before you can perform certain actions. It's literally life-changing. All right. Let's look at this one as well. All right, what do we got? What we got here? Oh man, this looks less cute. [laughs] All right. So for those, uh, who are just listening instead of watching, we have basically technical release notes. I, I... This is not a polished product. I think this is more of a tech product. Uh, but here's what it says. The main purpose of And Off, so it's the word and and the word off put together. The main purpose of And Off is to lock down Android devices. It provides features that allow you to take advanced control over your device and the apps installed on it. And Off can be used to reliably prevent yourself from using any app on your device, including Android WebView, factory resetting your device, or abusing safe mode to bypass common protection apps. Additionally, it can lock down configurations on your device that are needed for third-party services to function correctly, such as DNS or VPN settings. Uh, I don't know, man. I think Coily might have, like, more of a general public appeal. Um, so this is, A, if you're techy, this is what this is for. It's, like, bare metal control apps that, like, you set up and configure yourself and are super powerful. I, like, I, I, I get the idea of having these type of apps. I think they are useful to people. They go pretty far though, which makes me not worried about the apps, but about people. Like, if you read this description of And Off, they're like, "Yeah, you can't even factory reset your phone once... You're never gonna turn off this app." It makes me nervous, 'cause what if you accidentally click the wrong thing and it's like you can't use your phone anymore, or so you forget your password? Like, they're like, "We wanna make sure there's nothing you can do." It, it, it makes you feel like you're reading the, like, security constraints for a vault at a Swiss bank or something. Like, "The best thieves in the world will be trying to use Instagram on your phone, but they will not be able to with this app." At some point you're like, "Man, maybe you need a different... You need a dumb phone at some point." Like, if you have to have such security... Um, but really what I think is going on here is that this is just techy forward, and there's versions of this software that's easier to use and download and, um, I think we did an episode about this a while ago. It's actually trickier than you think to have this type of software on your phone if you use, like, iOS. Apple doesn't really want you to do this. You have to use their service, Screen Time, and it's really easy to get around. But I'm glad this exists. But I'm telling you, landline. You landline enough, the appeal of the phone goes down. So landline and take social media off of it. If you have to look at social media, do it on your laptop and in the web interface, and you'll feel like it's 2007, uh, and that you need to watch the season finale of Survivor when you're done looking at Friendster. So do that. Take the social media apps off your phone, landline. Like, that's enough Takes back control of your phone. Make your phone boring, you don't necessarily have to have a dumb phone, or you could use this more complicated software, but, um, it makes me nervous
- SPSpeaker
Did you see the profile about the Survivor guy in New York Times recently?
- CNCal Newport
No. Is my reference timely? [laughs] What, what happened?
- 46:54 – 55:57
Talking to AI, Star Trek Style
- SPSpeaker
Peter has a suggestion for AI use from an unlikely source.
- CNCal Newport
Unlikely source. Let's see. Peter says, "Maybe this is helpful. Crew members in both Star Trek TOS and TNG..." Uh, TNG is The Next Generation. TOS, I don't know. The original? I don't know. [laughs] This is like, "Uh, excuse me, I believe Deep Space Nine came s- third in the chronology." Um, crew members in Star Trek generally do not say please when giving commands to the ship's computer. The interaction style is direct and functional. I do the same when interacting with an AI program. It's funny, I had the same conversation today. I was recording an interview for, uh, another podcast and with the, the host was actually someone from the film industry, and he brought that up. He brought up the way they talk to the computer in Star Trek, and he mentioned that in the movie Star Trek IV, which I find very amusing. I know, Jesse, you're a major Star Trek fan, but, uh, in case you missed this, Star Trek IV is when they were the, the, the motivation was we need to do another Star Trek movie, but we don't wanna spend a lot of money. So the premise was, what if the crew went back in time to Los Angeles in the exact year that they were making the movie? So then you could just, like, film them in normal locations. And one of the scenes the host of this podcast was telling me about, I, I'd forgotten this, was Spock goes up to a computer and he's trying to talk into the mouse. And he's like, "I don't understand what's going on here." And that's an important scene because I think what it emphasizes is actually talking to the computer, that's the thing that makes sense. Like, that's gotta be... That is the, the ultimate... What they do in Star Trek- ... has got to be the ultimate intuitive interface for computers. Like, I think Gene Roddenberry got that right, you know? Because, uh, what we do now, we're used to, it's barbaric. We move a block on a table, and we translate the flat 2D motion to vertical 2D motion so we can, we can click on things, and then we, we, uh, train our fingers through, like, great repetition to press down springy keys to represent, like, the letters of our language at... All of this at a much slower rate than, like, I can just talk or normally explain ourselves. I think they got it right. Uh, a lot of futurists get this wrong. Like, I think Minority Report, the Spielberg movie, I think it got it wrong, where it's like, yeah, what people are gonna wanna do is have a super mouse. Or, you know, Tom Cruise would move the things with his hands on the AR display. I think Star Trek got it right. There's a lot of bits of information in speaking, but okay, let's get back to what Peter was saying, is he's r- referencing something I said in a recent episode where... Uh, actually, it was last week's episode, where I said anthropomorphizing AI can be a problem, and it's creating psychosis and, and actual self-harm, and even death among kids because we're not ready for interacting with something that interacts like another being. It uses personal pronouns. It, it's, it's, uh, has a personality. Like, there's a lot of danger, Will Robinson, in that. And I said, "I like natural language interaction, but it, it shouldn't be anthropomorphized." You know, it's just, like, the... And so Star Trek is actually a good example, is they're not friends with the computer. They're not having conversations with the computer. They're just using spoken language to say what they wanna do as efficiently as possible. You know, "Computer, set..." We're gonna get so, so much angry letters after I try to do Star Trek speak. "Set warp engines to five tesseracts."
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
But it's just efficient. You say what you need to do, uh, isolate the whatever area, and I think the computer can ask follow-up questions, and it's always in, like, a robotic tone. I think that's right. And in fact, I think it's what people want out of LLMs. They don't wanna hear the, the sci-fi ghost stories from these futurists anymore about how they're gonna, you know, create a transhuman race of digital space babies or we're, we're all gonna die. Like, just, just stop. Build useful products. And what's the most useful product you can build? Natural language interface to software. I want that. I don't wanna type and use a mouse anymore. Like, I don't wanna learn, like, Riverside we use or, uh, uh, OBS. There's all this clicking and oh, wait, where do we go? And, like, w- like, before we started recording, Jesse and I were trying to figure out some problem. How do we get the video up on O- It wasn't working, and we had to figure out how to get to the right properties for the right video source and then switch from one thing and back to the other. Jesse, we could have just said, like, "Computer, I'm not seeing the video f-," the, whatever, "the video source is not up there. Fix to the active video source." And it would just go do that. Or, "Computer, we're doing podcast rep- recording. Configure." And it's like, great, we'll get all the things set up for you. So I like that. I like the idea of natural language interfaces, and I like the idea of it's gotta be Star Trek style. We're talking to a computer. There's no thing there. Do not try to trick the human mind into thinking there's a thing there. Tesseract is from Avengers. [laughs] Is that, is that the same universe?
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
- CNCal Newport
Is that... That's gonna get us in trouble. I know the Avengers is a different cinematic universe than Star Trek. All right, what else do we got?
- SPSpeaker
Luis has a bone to pick with one of our recent changes to the show's format.
- CNCal Newport
Oh, yeah, this is controversial. All right, L- uh, Luis says, or Lewis, "I love the show, but I wish you would bring back the old intro music. I always take a moment to jam out when it comes on." We, we're working on this, Jesse, right? So two points. Yes, in the new... As we're upgrading the show, we're in the middle of a rebranding, a sort of, like, 2.0 version of the show, and more about that soon. We've talked some about it. Uh, the intro music is shorter, but it's, it's, uh, adapted from the original intro music. So if you listen to that transition music when I say, "Let's get into it," that's actually from the intro music. It's just a sort of slowed down and a piece of it. It's, uh, not the [singing] But we don't wanna lose our classic intro music, so Jesse, we're putting it at the end, right?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- CNCal Newport
So if you listen to the end, Lewis, you can jam out.
- SPSpeaker
To be quite honest, I really like listening to it too.
- CNCal Newport
Yeah, I know, but we're doing the right thing.
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- CNCal Newport
I have, I have a lot of thoughts. Um, especially in the-
- SPSpeaker
I don't mind it at the end. I think it's fine at the end.
- CNCal Newport
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so we... Uh, basically what's happening, I'll open the curtain a little bit. Like, the, the, the evolution that's happening in the world of podcasting is that all of these tropes that over 10 years evolved around what an audio podcast should be formatted and structured as are all starting to die off, and things are becoming a little bit more, uh, produced and a little bit more, I don't wanna say visual first, but they're more in the style you would get from a, uh, like a class- like a radio program or a classic TV program. And, and so the tropes that are going away, for example, is stuff we got really used to, like, "Hey, here's who I am. Here's my show. Here's what the show is about. We have some long music. There's some chatter up front." All the stuff that when Jesse and I started was just commonplace, it's disappearing left and right 'cause the, the medium is evolving to a higher level of professionalism, which I think ultimately is good because this is gonna... I want new media to be the new media and not just, like, a, a side thing, so this evolution is necessary. But we have to strip it away. So, like, if you wanna see another example of this, like, listen to... If you listen to Ezra Klein's podcast, and he's got a really good team over there at The New York Times, you'll notice over the y- especially this last year, a lot of stuff has been stripped out of his intro. Remember, it's like, "I'm Ezra Klein. This is The Ezra Klein Show." Um- As always, like questions and comments, you can send it to ezraklein@newyorktimes.com. All that's gone. All that's gone because that's old podcast thinking. People know who you are. They, they know who the... They know what the show is. They don't wanna stop the momentum to hear what email address they can use to, to contact you. So it's the new style, for better or for worse, I think only for better, is things, they move a little bit quicker. Intro footprints are smaller. No more like, "Here's who I am. Here's what the show is about," because they're kinda realizing, like, yeah, people don't do that really in shows and other mediums. People know what the show's about. They've watched it before, or th- someone told them to watch it. So you don't need the host. You know, David Letterman wouldn't come out and be like, "You know, I'm David Letterman, and this is a variety show where, you know, it's five days a week, and there's a monologue, some sketches, and then we're gonna have some celebrity guest." Um, Paul, like, what's, uh, you know, uh, what do you think about the show going on? No, there's like the music, the energy, like it gets right into it or whatever, so anyways. But I love the music, so it's still at the end. And remember, the music that's there now comes from the theme song, so we haven't, we haven't gotten rid of
- 55:57 – 1:06:44
September Books and Studio Update
- CNCal Newport
it. All right, we like to end Monday episodes with an update about what I'm up to. I'm having a book crisis, Jesse, because I lost, temporarily, I've lost my book notebook, the field notes notebook where I keep track of the books I've read. I'll find it, but I'm having a hard time finding it. I don't know what happened to it. I have a lot of field note notebooks because I buy them 50 at a time.
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- CNCal Newport
And I have probably 20 of them spread out between my various desks.
- SPSpeaker
I don't think we all knew that you write all the books in one specific field note notebook.
- CNCal Newport
One field note notebook. It's where I keep track of... I like to keep track of everything I, everything I've read. And I can't-
- SPSpeaker
Just books, right?
- CNCal Newport
Just books. Just bo- It's month, year, and then the, the five books. But so anyways, I had to go back and try to reconstruct this. We're recording this, it's, we're still in September when we're recording this, but does this come out... It's still September when this comes out, I think.
- SPSpeaker
It comes out on October 1st.
- CNCal Newport
It comes out on October 1st, okay. So we're s- we're recording this almost a week-
- SPSpeaker
I know. It comes out on October 5th.
- CNCal Newport
What's today?
- SPSpeaker
Today is the 29th.
- CNCal Newport
Oh, okay. 29th. All right. Um, so we're, we're at the end of September. Uh, because Jesse wasn't around, I've been talking about books. I'm trying to go back. I had to remember... See, I don't have my notebook. I had to reconstruct this. But I do know I read, earlier in September, I read the book Floating Mountains by Joe Rohde. So Joe Rohde is, like, a famous Imagineer from Disney who was in charge of Animal Kingdom and some other stuff. So he had a new memoir that came out in September, so I wanted to read it. And I enjoyed it, but the, the... I keep having the same issue with Imagineer memoirs, which is not a problem with the book, but a problem with me, where those books tend to go heavy on the art of creativity. So it's all about the brainstorming process. The, the, uh, Bob Weir's book, Chasing Dreams, is the same way. It's all about the brainstorming process, the, like, we were in the room trying to figure out, like, what the main thing in the center of Animal Kingdom should be, and we were bouncing it around. There's no wrong ideas. 'Cause they imagine rightly that, like, the average person isn't gonna build rides, but they, creativity matters, and so that's how we're gonna have a general audience. I wanna know how you build rides, and I always get frustrated. I was like, I wanna know about the details, the electromechanical details. I wanna know about how did you get around this problem and figure this out. So I literally went searching for a book like that right after I finished this one, and I found it. This also came out, this is fortuitous, it came out in September I think, or July. It came out recently. Um, Steve Alcorn, writing with, uh, Jim, uh, Carstensen, wrote a book called Journey Into Imagination, and it is exactly what I actually wanted, which is he was one of the ride engineers that was at Epcot when they were building Epcot. Um, they're just talking about trying to get the Journey Into Imagination ride running, and it's all about the circuits and the software and, like, how hard it is to debug those things, and I was like-
- SPSpeaker
You have to get him on the show
- CNCal Newport
... this book is for me. This book was for me. Like, he was getting into the control boxes and why this wiring was too complicated and exactly what com- It was everything I want. That's, that's really what I want. What I discovered reading that book is the Imagineers like Joe Rohde really do... They're like artists. They do the creative stuff, and then it's these other engineers that have to figure out, um, how to have a, they have an optical sensor as the fins go by, and they can use the brake and the brake beam to, to calculate which car is this and then calculate the position of each car, and it goes back to the computer, and then the computer sends back controls to the tire, motor controllers for tires that spin that move the cars around and, like, how do they do that. I loved it. And it's very... This and that other book, that Bethencourt book I read about automation in Disney. Like, that's... So I was very happy about that. Um, I then read Dungeon Crawler Carl. It's actually for a book group I joined. That's what they wanted to read, so I read that. Um-
- SPSpeaker
Any comments on that?
- CNCal Newport
It's a f- it's a, it's a genre called lit RPG, like literature RPG. So the character's, like, in a game essentially, and it's like you're watching a Twitch streamer in the sense of, like, they get achievements, they level up, they're moving through. And then it has, like, their, their, their personal, you know, like, what's going in their mind, and there's drama and this and that, but it's all structured like you're watching a video game. I don't know if that's, like, really clever or depressing. I'm not sure. Um, but it was creative. Yeah. It was one of those books, not, not to spoil, but it's one of those books, like, so there's this dungeon crawl, like aliens come and something, something, and there's all these levels, and if they can get to you, it's set up pretty early, like, okay, to survive, you would have to get to at least this level. So you think, you're like, "Oh, this is great. I wonder how they get through all these levels." But then the book goes on and you're like, "I'm really far in this book. They're still on level one." And then, like, they get to level two, you're like, "I'm really getting far in this book." And then at some point you realize, like, oh, it's gonna take a whole series just to get through this dungeon. It was the exact same revelation I had when I first watched the ABC series Lost, where as the season was wearing down, I was like, man, they're really running out of time to explain what's going on on this island and to get rescued. Like, they're down to, like, a few episodes here. It really wasn't 'til the last episode that I realized, oh God, this is gonna be dragged out over many seasons. Um, and then the book I'm ab- uh, I'm about to finish, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow, who I like a lot. Um, the reverse centaur is a reference to... So, so in, in human computer interaction, there's a notion of a centaur system where a human is augmented by a computer, and then they can perform better than a human alone can. So centaur chess is where the term comes from. For if you have expert players playing with expert chess engines, that combination can play higher chess than a human or a computer by itself. The reverse centaur is Doctorow's term for, like, you're being used by the technology. So the, the, like, the AI is, like, using you basically, and it's, uh, it's no good. So I, I, I will finish that before we, you know, tomorrow, so before we get to the end of October. Then, so it's gonna be a race to the five books. I think I'm okay because I also earlier in the month got more than halfway through a 600-plus page Brandon Sanderson novel, which I count those as two books when I'm done. So maybe I could count the first half as a book. Also, though, I'm half, two-thirds of the way through, uh, a really good book my neighbor loaned me called The Tree Line, which is, it's a environmental, environmental book. One of these sort of McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert style books where they travel, the author travels to these locations. And it's great, but it is dense and slow-going. So I might also, depending on what I do, I, uh, might finish that as well, or pretty close. So I have a couple different paths to five, but I'm... It's because I, I, I spent a long time on that 600-page book, and then I spent a long time in that really dense, slow book before I really got serious about I gotta finish some books. So it's coming down to the finish line, but I'll get my five in. Uh, I think if I finish Centaur Guide, which I will tomorrow, I'm okay because I have the first half of the Sanderson book, but I'm gonna try to get, finish The Tree Line book as well so I have, like, full complete titles. It just feels better to me.
- SPSpeaker
And then once you finish it, you'll find your f- your field notebook.
- CNCal Newport
I gotta find that thing. It's also, uh, the, the flatness thing was an issue too. The sort of, like, overload thing that was happening in September was slowing me down. And forcing myself, like, "No, I gotta hit my five," going back in the books that are completely unrelated to my work actually was, like, very useful as well. Like, that's why I put a reading example in there. Books are a, a good way out. All right. Also an update on the, the studio. Um, we've got some notes about, hey, if you're gonna put wood paneling and a couple shelves behind you, what's on the shelves matter. So that we gotta figure out, Jesse. What are we gonna put on-
- SPSpeaker
I think we put one of those landlines.
- CNCal Newport
Put a landline on there. I like that. I don't know what else to, I don't know what else to do.
- SPSpeaker
It might look a little weird. [laughs] We can at least try it.
- CNCal Newport
But why don't we put an old-fashioned phone?
- SPSpeaker
Yeah.
- CNCal Newport
Like, an actual, like, r- like a, a, like, just get an actual phone.
- SPSpeaker
Put a phone booth. [laughs]
- CNCal Newport
Let's have a phone booth. Yeah, let's have it all just be analog things. I want a phone booth. I want a fax machine that's just constantly spitting out papers. So-
- SPSpeaker
Before every episode, you just come out of the phone booth. [laughs]
- CNCal Newport
"Oh, hi. I didn't see you there. Welcome. Hold on one second. I need to get a fax." And then I'll go over to the fax machine, uh, and get out a fax. We do have old-fashioned video game cabinets. Uh, someone suggested unhelpfully that we put a screen behind us that livestreams video games being played-
- SPSpeaker
[laughs]
Episode duration: 1:06:44
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Transcript of episode 5_6sXI4Ka40
