The collapse of modern attention (and how to get it back) - Cal Newport

1. 0:00 – 3:57

   Did Cal Predict the Collapse of Modern Attention?

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      Dude, you must be feeling like Cassandra at the moment. So prescient, the distraction, the necessity of deep work, the inherent bombardment of our attention. Do you f- do you feel like you saw the future earlier than what even at the time maybe felt late with deep work and focusing on quality over quantity and stuff?

   2. CNCal Newport0:20

      I mean, I think part of what I noticed was the present was crazy to me, and no one else recognized it. So it's less even predicting the future. I, I, I feel like there was a time, God, it's like 10 years ago now, where I was looking around and, yeah, saying two things. One, social media doesn't make sense. Why are we all pretending like this is at the, the center of democracy and civic life and all business, and we all have to be on here all the time? And two, email doesn't make sense. Not what was gonna happen in the future. I'm just, like, looking at the way we're working today with email, then Slack and Teams was coming. Like, this completely does not make sense. You're switching your context once every two or three minutes. This is a terrible way to actually use your brain. So I never thought of myself as predicting the future as much as just telling people what was going on then, didn't make sense, and everyone thought I was crazy, and 10 years later, it just kinda jumped from I was crazy to it's common sense. So it's not even that interesting that I'm saying it anymore. So I kinda skip the part where-

   3. CWChris Williamson1:12

      Mm. Mm-hmm

   4. CNCal Newport1:13

      [laughs] Where it sounded prescient.

   5. CWChris Williamson1:15

      Do you feel vindicated?

   6. CNCal Newport1:17

      Um, I think certainly on a couple issues. The social media issue was a big one because I used to get a lot of flack for that, for, for going out... And I wasn't even saying that social media was bad or that no one should use it. Really, what I was pushing back on was just the idea of ubiquity, the idea that everyone had to use it. I said, "This doesn't make sense. I get there are some people this makes sense for. There's a lot of technologies that have markets that make sense for it, but why is there this pressure for everyone to be on these services? This is not going to a good place." They're, they're spending a lot of money to mine attention, and they're gonna get better at it, right? And at the time, this was considered, uh, crazy. What do you mean, like, you wouldn't use social media? I wrote a, a New York Times op-ed back... I, I looked this up the other day. It was 2016, and it argued maybe social media is not the biggest thing for a young person to focus on if they're thinking about their career. That's what it was. It was like, focus on your career instead of social media. Actually doing things well is what really matters. And you would think, you know, that I had just come on and said, like, America has an idea is done, and grandmothers should be kicked. Like, people were upset about this. The New York Times commissioned a response op-ed two weeks later that was-

   7. CWChris Williamson2:27

      [laughs] No fucking way

   8. CNCal Newport2:28

      ... that went through mine. I mean, it... and said, "This is what is wrong about Cal Newport's op-ed," or whatever, because it made such a furor to suggest it. And today it's, it's boring to suggest, like, eh, you know, social media has problems, and most people probably shouldn't use it. People, people agree with that. The one that upsets me though, that one I feel like people have come along to, and more and more people are being much more selective and minimalist about their social media. The distraction email, Slack, constantly jumping back and forth between different things.

   9. CWChris Williamson2:56

      Mm.

   10. CNCal Newport2:56

       That just got worse. I mean, I think people recognize it now. This is probably not a good way to work. But I thought because there was dollars and cents here, this is less productive from an economic productivity standpoint to have all of your workers changing their attention all the time. You're just getting a really low return on all the money you're investing in these human brains. So I thought, "Oh, this is dollars and cents. This is the one that's gonna change." Social media is fun. Like, that's gonna be hard to change people's behavior, but certainly this hyper distraction thing in knowledge work, that'll change because we're leaving money on the table. It hasn't changed at all. It's gotten worse. It's worse than it was. It's... I'm at the 10-year anniversary now of the book Deep Work, so this... like, this month is the 10-year anniversary. It's worse than it-

   11. CWChris Williamson3:35

       Congratulations, dude. That's fucking seminal. Like, that, that has become a part of the lexicon. That's really, really cool.

   12. CNCal Newport3:41

       Yeah, but it's, it's got me a little bit depressed because I've been doing this 10-year reflection. Like, okay, it's been 10 years and the book was a hit and it's millions of copies, et cetera.

   13. CWChris Williamson3:49

       Mm.

   14. CNCal Newport3:50

       And the just, the issues I talked about are worse. They're, like, really worse than they were 10 years ago. So people know the problem. Nothing has changed.

2. 3:57 – 9:56

   Why Distraction Is Exploding Right Now

   1. CWChris Williamson3:57

      What does the data suggest around the worse-ness of it now?

   2. CNCal Newport4:04

      I've been... The, the one I've been following, the study that I think is useful as a trend line is Microsoft actually does this annual report where they gather data from Microsoft 365, so it's like Office and Word and PowerPoint and Excel. Nowadays, you use this sort of... the web-based version of these. It's very common. So they can gather data from just tens of thousands of knowledge workers actually using all these different, the tools, and the latest report they put out in 2025 now has the interruptions on average once every two minutes. So it, it's just gotten out of control, so switching to a communication tool once every two minutes. They also found in the latest report, and this is depressing to me as well, there's one time in the week where they see a notable rise in the use of the non-communication, so actually using the core productivity tools like Word or PowerPoint, and it's Saturday and Sunday morning. So we've just put the work off until the weekend when there's no expectations of responses and spend the actual weekdays talking about work, which I just don't get. Like, that is not economically productive. Like, companies are leaving money on the table, but it's just where we are. We really can't quit this behavior.

   3. CWChris Williamson5:13

      Isn't it interesting that you had to try and appeal to a very utilitarian approach for this? That you didn't say, "This is probably making staff miserable. Uh, it's not a good use of time. We've got some really strong evidence that suggests that doing one thing and getting better at it over a protracted period of time actually makes you feel more satisfied. You get into a flow state," et cetera, et cetera. "You look back on your day and you can look at the things that you did." None of that, which is the much more immediate experiential, uh, way that people interface with distraction. You tried to appeal to the bottom line, which-

   4. CNCal Newport5:49

      Yeah

   5. CWChris Williamson5:49

      ... you thought, "Well, you, you... Incentives, incentives. Align the fucking incentives." Um, and that didn't work, which obviously means also that people's level of administrative burden miseryIt's also coming along for the ride at the same time. Yeah, it's a, it's a fucking mess, dude. And I think, you know, even with what I do, it's not a very big team, but Slack, Slack is like, it's so useful and invites so much chaos at the same time. It is... And was Slack-- Slack wouldn't have been that big during Deep Work, I'm gonna guess.

   6. CNCal Newport6:23

      It wasn't big. It wasn't out yet.

   7. CWChris Williamson6:25

      Right.

   8. CNCal Newport6:25

      I, I talk in Deep Work about these very early instant messenger tools that no longer exist, like HipChat, that was just emerging among the programmer class. I was basically saying there be dragons, like, let's be careful about that. But I wrote an article about Slack years later, uh, when Slack was bought. So I think Salesforce bought Slack. I wrote an article about it for The New Yorker, and I think the title of that article gets to the core of the issue you're talking about. Uh, the title was, "Slack Is the Right Tool for the Wrong Way to Work." And I think what happened, here's my whole theory on Slack, is that when email arrived, it moved us to this new style of collaboration that I call the hyper- a hyperactive hive mind, where we'll just figure things out, um, on the go with ad hoc back and forth unscheduled messaging, just sort of like shooting messages back and forth. We'll figure things out like we're all just kind of connected all the time. That's a terrible way to work for all the reasons I talked about. It's distracting, it's context switching, you can't do anything deep, it's hard to produce value. But if that's the way you're gonna work, email clients are not a very good tool for that. You have threads, and it's clunky, and there, it's hard to search through your email and find what you did before. So Slack came along and said, "Look, if this is the way you're gonna work, hyperactive hive mind, constant back and forth ad hoc coordination, we'll build you a better tool for that." So that's why people both love and hate Slack. It's a really good tool for that style of collaboration. It works really well, but that style of collaboration makes us miserable. So it's this weird love-hate relationship we have. Like, this works great. I hate the thing that it's making easier.

   9. CWChris Williamson7:53

      Why does it, why does it make us miserable, that style of collaboration?

   10. CNCal Newport7:57

       Because our brain isn't meant to switch our target of attention that quickly. It just takes us a long time if we're talking about targets that are abstract and symbolic. It takes us a long time to switch from one to another. Physical world targets we can switch quickly, right? We're wired for that. If there's a tiger's roar, I can, boom, one hundred percent attention, what's going on over there? But when we're thinking about abstract things, information, ideas, things that are symbolic and in our head, that's us-- We're basically, uh, reappropriating our brain hardware to do something we're not evolved to do. It takes a lot of effort to do symbolic thinking, to think about, uh, abstract concepts. And we know it takes ten to twenty minutes to fully change our attention context from one abstract target to another. It takes a long time. That's why if you sit down to write something, everyone has this experience, the first five or ten minutes, you're like, "Man, this is terrible."

   11. CWChris Williamson8:47

       Yeah.

   12. CNCal Newport8:47

       Like I, I, I'm making no progress or whatever. And then after a while you're like, "Oh, this is starting to flow, like it's going better." That's because it took that much time for your brain to load up all of the relevant information and to inhibit all the unrelated circuits and get your brain really ready to do that activity. So if you now interrupt that brain once every two minutes, it never can lock in on anything. And what you feel then is this sort of diffuse cognitive friction that we begin to experience as fatigue, cognitive fatigue. And it's a really frustrating experience. It's why if you go to an email inbox, you're like, "I have time, I'm gonna empty this inbox. I'm gonna go message by message. Here's the best way to do it, right on paper. I'm, I'm gonna go message by message, and I'm gonna answer these messages." Why does that get so hard? Why do you find yourself like jumping around and looking for easier messages? Because each message is a different context than the other, and that's torture for the brain. It's really, really hard to go from, all right, this is a complicated question one of my employees is asking me, and now this is a completely different issue, completely unrelated to that, where I have to think up like a good title for something. And now here's a completely different issue, and you're trying to switch one after another. Our brains aren't wired for that. It really makes us unhappy.

3. 9:56 – 14:30

   Can You Actually Retrain Your Attention?

   1. CWChris Williamson9:56

      What would you say to someone who wants to try and retrain that attention? Maybe, maybe they, they're gonna try and make some sort of a stand inside of Slack and say, "I will only be available at certain times of the day." But regardless of the inbound, let's say that they fix the inbound, because that's a totally separate problem. That's much more sort of structural, um, unless you've got any advice for that as well. But how, how does someone go about re-appraising, retraining their mind away from that? Because we be-- we do become, um, we get like Stockholm syndrome, the Slack Stockholm syndrome-

   2. CNCal Newport10:35

      Yeah

   3. CWChris Williamson10:35

      ... where our captor tormentor becomes the way that we operate, and we've got our favorite little ways of working, and it feels like we've done. But then at the end of the day, we look back and have this sort of odd malaise thing about, well, what did I actually do today? What got, what got done? Well, not much. Not much got done.

   4. CNCal Newport10:57

      Yeah. Well, it's hard unilaterally. If you've changed nothing else about your workload or your communication protocols, if you just say, "Uh, I'm not gonna be on Slack from this hour to this hour. I only check my email twice a day," or whatever that standard advice was from fifteen years ago, it doesn't work well. Because if you're involved in a large number of projects that are timely, and the way progress is gonna be made is with ad hoc back-and-forth messaging, you have to be in there checking. That's the brutal part of the hyperactive hive mind, is that it has defenses to its elimination built into its very nature. Because if this is how we're gonna figure this out, like we have to have five or six back-and-forth messages to figure out what we're gonna do about this client coming tomorrow, and we have to get this done today. That means you have to see my next message right away so that we have time for me to answer you and you to answer me, and for that ping pong match to happen, that means you have to be checking your inbox or Slack constantly. Otherwise, you're not gonna see my next message in time for this whole game to unfold. So the very nature of that style of collaboration demands constant inbox checking, which is what I think people often get wrong about this. When they think about things like Slack or email, they think too often about, uh, either-Information like, "Oh, I've got so many messages in my inbox that I don't need. I have all these newsletters and spam." That's not a problem. That's a minor problem. That's an easily solvable problem. You... It's like clutter. You know, that's not a big problem. Um, the issue is actually my collaboration style requires me to be in there. Because if I miss messages in a timely fashion, everything falls apart.

   5. CWChris Williamson12:27

      Yeah.

   6. CNCal Newport12:27

      And so the issue is not how do I interact with my inbox, it really has to be how do I change the way the inbox is being used. I, um, so I ended up, I feel like had three big ideas on this that spanned three different books, right? So, um, in Deep Work, like one of the big ideas was you can train your personal ability to focus. Uh, focusing is really important. Putting aside for now all the things trying to prevent you from focusing, you have to practice it, and if you practice it, you'll get better at it, and if you get better at it, you'll be a superstar because, like, that's what matters in the knowledge economy. Everything good comes out of focus. Then, uh, I wrote a book after that called A World Without Email.

   7. CWChris Williamson13:05

      [laughs]

   8. CNCal Newport13:06

      And in that book, I was arguing, uh, the way we ... The thing I was telling you about, hyperactive hybine. Communication is a problem. This is a real problem. The fact that we are using this method for, uh, coordination is causing all these trouble, is really causing problems, and I went through all the data and all the research and made the case this is super non-productive. I went back through the archives of the New York Times business section in the '80s and '90s to exactly document the rise of email and how people were talking about email when it first came onto the business scene, and I made the case the way we work is arbitrary. This hyperactive hybine was not a plan. It wasn't seen to be more productive. We stumbled into it. So we really should change it. So that was that book. And then the, the most recent book, Slow Productivity, from a couple years ago, in that book, I argued, oh, wait a second, workload matters, too. The other issue of this problem is we don't put any limits or transparency on how many things we're working on, and if you pile too many things on your plate, too much communication interruption becomes unavoidable because they each have little issues they need you to deal with. So, so I've now, over this 10-year period, have kind of broken down this problem. There's, like, training yourself to focus-

   9. CWChris Williamson14:12

      Mm.

   10. CNCal Newport14:12

       ... fixing your communication protocols, like how do I communicate in a professional context, how do we collaborate, and then managing workload to be more reasonable. All three of ... And this might be why this problem's not solved. There's no one thing to fix, right?

   11. CWChris Williamson14:25

       Mm.

   12. CNCal Newport14:26

       So all three of these things go into the, the issue, and they're each complicated.

4. 14:30 – 22:56

   Cal’s Sharpest Strategies to Hone Your Focus

   1. CWChris Williamson14:30

      What of ... A- across those three books, all of which are great, and everyone needs to go and check out. I think we've done episodes about each of them, so they can just go and listen to those-

   2. CNCal Newport14:37

      Yeah. They can. Yeah, yeah

   3. CWChris Williamson14:38

      ... and then buy, and then, and then buy the books. Um, looking back across this portfolio of productivity advice, w- what have you heard from readers or what has been the stickiest strategies for you? Y- you look back and you go, "Okay, that's the 80/20 of, of, of what I've published over the last three books."

   4. CNCal Newport15:02

      To me, I think the, the big two that give you the biggest results, and I'll tell you the one that's the hardest, and this is why this book probably sold the least. Um, the big two that gives you the biggest results is taking focus seriously like a skill. That really does make a difference. Practicing focus, you get better at it, and it has a, a demonstrable difference. You sit down to work, and you're just producing better stuff, or you're trying to pick up some complicated new thing. Like, oh, God, I can learn this faster. That makes a huge difference. Um, and then the second one, which was more recent in my life, was, oh, you really gotta control the workload. So much is downstream from how many things you've agreed to work on. You have to leave the mindset of everything I say yes to brings with it value. So saying yes to more things is just gonna aggregate more value. That's not the right mindset. That's not the way ... It's a, it's a nonlinear, uh, you know, um, reward function there. There's a certain point as you add more things that not only does value stop growing, uh, it begins to go down on the other side, and that there's a real ... Uh, saying no to many more things is actually a way to optimize reward and output, which is not natural. Uh, it doesn't make sense at first. It doesn't feel like common sense. So workload and tr- focus training, you can control those more than you think, and you're gonna have huge results from those.

   5. CWChris Williamson16:19

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   6. CNCal Newport17:51

      Yeah

   7. CWChris Williamson17:52

      ... only half a decade ago.

   8. CNCal Newport17:53

      Yeah.

   9. CWChris Williamson17:54

      In that time, you've had to go from needing that opportunity to actively being able to say no to something that's probably better than it. Uh, Alex, my friend, taught me about ... You remember, uh, in The Matrix, the woman with the red dress?And Neo turns around and he says, "Were you looking at me? Were you looking at the woman in the red dress? Look again." And it's a, an agent with a gun in his face. And the analogy that Alex used was, and now imagine that she's not a 10 out of 10, but imagine 1,000 hypothetical 1,000s out of 10, and you need to be able to say no to them, which previously you w- didn't even know existed. So this, I think the kind of, um, uh, it's almost like reverse entropy or c- habituation. You know, y- your opportunities get better, which means that your capacity to say no needs to get better more quickly than that. You can't be chasing your tail trying to learn to be able to say no less quickly than the opportunities get more seductive.

   10. CNCal Newport18:52

       Yeah. It's almost perverse-

   11. CWChris Williamson18:54

       [laughs]

   12. CNCal Newport18:54

       ... uh, the way that works. It's like when you have all the time in the world, all you want is opportunities.

   13. CWChris Williamson19:00

       Yeah.

   14. CNCal Newport19:00

       And then when you have opportunities, all you want is all the time-

   15. CWChris Williamson19:03

       And a fucking peace

   16. CNCal Newport19:04

       ... free in the world. I had to change-- I don't know what you do, but I had to change my rule at some point, this was hard for me, to the default no. Like, that's just how I have to operate now. It... 'Cause as soon as you try to have a triage rule, "Well, look, I'm not gonna do this opportunity unless I only do speaking gigs that have this much money or this," or, "I only gonna go meet with someone if they're, like, this interesting or this or that," eventually, the number of things that satisfy that criteria overwhelms you-

   17. CWChris Williamson19:32

       It keeps ramping up

   18. CNCal Newport19:32

       ... just as well.

   19. CWChris Williamson19:32

       Yeah.

   20. CNCal Newport19:32

       It's just so I've, I, I've just had to fall back on the default no.

   21. CWChris Williamson19:36

       Uh, dude, you are-

   22. CNCal Newport19:37

       And then kind of-

   23. CWChris Williamson19:37

       You're, you're talking to somebody who came back from a two-day trip to Qatar at the start of this week. So I spent as much time traveling as I did in the country to, to give a talk. And as I looked around, there was this first, the first night dinner, and there was maybe 300 people there, and I'm talking to Logan Paul, and Stephen Bartlett's over his shoulder, and the CEO of Qatar Airways is here, and the Middle Eastern director for Meta's over there. And I was looking around thinking, "Everybody here wants to be here. It's very exciting. Everyone's really lovely. But also everyone here can't say no."

   24. CNCal Newport20:10

       [laughs]

   25. CWChris Williamson20:10

       "Everybody in this room [laughs] is chronically incapable of saying no" because it's a-

   26. CNCal Newport20:15

       I've said no to this one several times, by the way. I, I... The amount of invites-

   27. CWChris Williamson20:19

       [laughs]

   28. CNCal Newport20:20

       ... to the, both Qatar and the UAE and other places, I have, I have said no to many of those.

   29. CWChris Williamson20:24

       All right. Well, consider me a fucking... Consider me a slut compared to you, Cal, whatever, whatever it is. I must be easy, a, an, an, an easy booty call. They tried to get Cal Newport. We couldn't get Cal, so we'll ring Chris instead.

   30. CNCal Newport20:35

       The default no. Oh, man. Yeah. It's, it's crazy the things you end up saying no to after a while. But the... I mean, there's a currency shift. For me, time to think is such a valuable... That's a more valuable currency than money, right? You get to a point where you're like, "Oh, I'm doing fine," but if I don't have time to think, what's the point? And then that becomes this, like, really rare currency that's, that's much harder to get a hold of, and that's the only way I can protect it now, is anything that requires me to, like, go somewhere, it's a default no. And then I can talk myself out of it later, right? I'm like, "You know what? I could bring my family with it. We could have a trip," right? "So actually, you know what? I, I will do this." Or, uh, you know, I just did a, uh, I had a MasterClass course released, um, this week. I spent a year and a half saying no to that. And then, like, eventually, I sort of talked myself-- I talked to some people.
5. 22:56 – 33:29

   Should We Have Shorter Work Weeks?

   1. CWChris Williamson22:57

      Didn't you look at some experiment of shorter work weeks?

   2. CNCal Newport23:01

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson23:01

      What, what did you learn from that?

   4. CNCal Newport23:03

      There was a lot of these right around the pandemic, right before and then right after in Europe and Iceland. So some European studies, I think Germany did one, Iceland did one, UK did one, and they were looking at four-day work weeks. So what would happen if we take away one, one day? The interesting thing about those experiments is what they found is the m- whatever measures of productivity they came up with, uh, they didn't get worse, which I thought was very interesting. They took a day away, and yet the perceived productivity or the measured productivity didn't go down. And there's, there's two ways to look at it. The one way to look at it is to say, "Oh, this means that, like, we should have a four-day workweek because it, things didn't get worse." And-

   5. CWChris Williamson23:42

      Mm

   6. CNCal Newport23:42

      ... okay, maybe, maybe, right? But to me, there was, like, a bigger observation that came out of that, which is like, wait, so what were we... What are we doing during the workdays? Like, this, there's something going on here that should really catch our attention. What does work mean that we could take an entire day off the table with no other preparation, and the, the valuable stuff being produced doesn't change? This tells us that, like, whatever we're doing while we're sitting here in work is not just sitting down and trying to produce value. We clearly have all sorts of other sorts of distractions going on, uh, context switching, time just being devoured, Parkinson's law is at play.

   7. CWChris Williamson24:19

      Yeah.

   8. CNCal Newport24:19

      Uh, work must be broke. To me, that was the more important observation, is that, like, if you can take away a day and nothing changes-And I don't think we're doing in the office what we think we're doing in the office.

   9. CWChris Williamson24:29

      Parkinson's Law was on the tip of my tongue. Work expands to fill the time given for it, and if you give people five days, they'll take five, and if you give them four days, then they'll do it in four. And, and look, [clears throat] everybody knows just how much time they waste not doing the work, not doing the thing that they're supposed to do. And this isn't victim blaming. This is a lot of the time dealing with admin, unnecessary meetings. You can't get out of them. You have to be there-

   10. CNCal Newport24:56

       Yeah

   11. CWChris Williamson24:56

       ... for whatever reason. So it's not as if it's bottom up. A lot of it is top-down dictated. This is the environment that you work in, and you have to do this. But even outside of that, when you do have your one hour in between meetings, y- your inability to not... I, I remember I used, when I used to run nightclubs, and I'd get in at two thirty in the morning. The final part of the night was cashing the till. So this was before we switched to tickets, which was sort of the late teens, just before COVID.

   12. CNCal Newport25:25

       Yeah.

   13. CWChris Williamson25:26

       Uh, digital tickets online, which meant that you didn't have to cash as much money in the till. Uh, but before that, it was all, you know, five pounds and ten pound note and twenty pound notes and s-single pounds and all the rest of it, and I would go into the office with the manager of the venue, and we would be counting the money. But this is the final task, the final bit of the night. It's fucking two fifteen or two thirty in the morning. We've just taken the t- taken the till off, as it's called. Anybody that's coming in doesn't get to come in, blah, blah, and we're not gonna take any more money. And I'm sat up there doing l- like light lift mental arithmetic. But for me, somebody who hadn't done math since I was sixteen, it was a relatively heavy lift. Flicking through the money, flicking through the money. There's light, you know, huge fluorescent overhead lights just before. And then I get to drive home, and I'm like thinking about it, and I gotta go put the money in the till, and I gotta write it in the, the spreadsheet, and then I get into bed. And as I go into bed, my eyes below my eyelids would start flicking left and right. I wouldn't be able to tune myself... I'm also doing this, let's not forget, in a sweaty beer stinking office above a room going [mimicking club music] .

   14. CNCal Newport26:28

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson26:29

       I've had to walk through the club. I've had to shout at the, the hostesses. One of them's getting fingered on the dance floor. "Stop doing that. You're supposed to be at work." The DJ's pissed. I need to... You know, it's chaos, and I've tried to coordinate this orchestra of bullshit. And then I've had to do mental arithmetic, and then I get to drive home, and then I'm like, "Okay, chill out, brain." And it doesn't want to.

   16. CNCal Newport26:46

       Yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson26:46

       And that eyes moving left and right thing I think is the sort of optical equivalent, ocular equivalent of how people feel when they finally get a moment.

   18. CNCal Newport26:58

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson26:58

       And say, "Oh, okay, all of my stuff is done." And then they try and sit down to work on the thing that ostensibly that's actually there to do, right? 'Cause all of the other bullshit, the meetings, you're not there to do the meetings. You're not there to do the Slack. You're not there to do... All of that is foreplay to get you to do the thing that you're there to do, and then you sit down to do the thing you're there to do, and your eyes are moving behind your eyelids is the equivalent. You have-

   20. CNCal Newport27:22

       Yep

   21. CWChris Williamson27:22

       ... swiping and moving across the screen, and you've got a few different other, "Well, I'll just check on this thing." Like, what the living fuck is going on? I've like trained-- The environment that I work in has trained me out of being able to do my work.

   22. CNCal Newport27:36

       Well, it, it, we are meant to do. Like what would be the ideal workday in an office environment that would actually match the human brain? It would probably be you come in, you work on something hard for a while. Like, that's what you do in the morning. You have lunch, and then you, like, catch up with, have some meetings, talk to some people. "Hey, what's going on?" And, and, you know, do some task, and that's your day. Like, that's basically what we can do, like two things. One big burst of like, "Let me focus on something hard," and then we can kind of come down the mountain after that with, "Let me chat with people, what's going on," some decisions need to be made or whatever. That's probably about optimal. Instead, we juggle a dozen to two dozen tasks that all have their own demands. They all have their own communication needs. Uh, this is why the Microsoft data shows all the work happens the Saturday and Sunday morning. It is really hard. You can't go from... And meetings are very hard as well. We think like, "Oh, I'm not actually doing work during meetings," but what you are engaging in a meeting is all the parts of your brain that deal with social interaction. And those are a large part of your brain, and that is a fraught and mental energy-consuming activity to sit in a room or on a Zoom screen and try to manage all these different people and how do I look and what am I saying and what's going on here, and I have to say the right things. It's draining, and you come out of something like that, it's difficult just to jump right back into something else. And if you come out of something like that, and there was a lot of obligations generated, "Oh, we discussed in this meeting things I need to do," and now you try to go straight from that meeting into another, well, now that's really in the back of your head. What about this? What about this? We can't forget this. We just made our obligations. That, that feeling of fatigue, it's a, it's a really is fatigue is what it feels like, a mental fatigue, like there's a-

   23. CWChris Williamson29:18

       Mm

   24. CNCal Newport29:18

       ... sand in your brain, sand in the gears of your brain. That's the state that a lot of people who work fr-in front of a computer screen, like that's the state they're in most of the day, and they don't even realize, oh, that's a bad feeling. That's a negative state. That's, that's not how it needs to feel because you have nothing else to compare it to. Yeah, the, the amount of things we're doing, the amount we're trying to switch back and forth, I always thought that part of the problem was a lot of our current thought about work culture and hustling and what it means to produce was influenced by Silicon Valley in the nineties and two thousands because that was considered this very, um, ascendant part of the economy, you know, through the two thousands, through the Steve Jobs era. We looked at Silicon Valley like, "These are the coolest companies. They're doing all the coolest stuff." Over there, I think they adopted a model of work that was very inspired by computer processors, right? So because that was what was in the air in the eighties and nineties in Silicon Valley was the computer processor wars, you know, the three eighty-six versus the forty-six versus the Pentium, and it was all about speed. And the thing with a computer processor, if you're a computer type, what matters is, uh, you never want the pipeline to be empty, right? You wanna always make sure you have stuff for that processor to do, so it never wastes time. The processor will, every command you give itIt operates the same as any other. It can switch. It doesn't care what they are. It just sits there and operates one command after another. And the whole game with getting processors to be effective is, like, don't have downtime. Like, the real fear... If I can put on my computer scientist hat for a second, the real fear in computer processor design is that you sometimes get to a command that's gonna generate a huge delay. So you say, like, "Oh, go get something from memory." Uh, that takes a lot of time from the perspective of, like, a computer processor cycle. It's just sitting there cycle after cycle doing nothing while you're waiting for the memory bus or whatever. So we invented these processor pipelines, like, oh, while we're waiting to get something back from memory, here's some other stuff the processor can run so that it's never not working. And the idea was you wanna move as fast as possible, and you never wanna have downtime, and that's how you get the most out of a computer processor. The human brain is, like, 180 degrees different. We can't just switch back and forth between unrelated commands. You switch me from one to another thing and boom, 30 minutes of my mind is fried. Humans operate very differently. But I think Silicon Valley associated... It said, "Here's the thing we're gonna associate with being really good at your job." It might have used to have been, I don't know, your skill. It was, uh, Don Draper in Mad Men. Remember that conception of, of what does it mean to be good at your job? They weren't showing Don Draper grinding it out. Like, man, Don Draper is, like, in the office till, you know, 3:00 AM every night or whatever. No, he took the 5:00 train back to, you know, Connecticut or whatever. It was he, he was really, really good at coming up with ad copy. He was good at what he did. That's what you used to respect. And then after the '80s, '90s, Silicon Valley became pervasive. Like, no, what matters is you never have a no-op. You never have a down cycle. You might as well say yes to more things. You might as well get more emails so you never have time where you're not working. That's what productivity is gonna be, and that was a disaster for the human brain.

   25. CWChris Williamson32:24

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6. 33:29 – 48:53

   Is Workslop Destroying the Modern Workplace?

   1. CWChris Williamson33:30

      There's definitely an element of this that it's very public productivity. It's very obvious. Look at how hard I'm working, right? If you're the one that replies quickest on Slack or on email, then it's evident that you're the o- i-it looks like you're the one that's working hardest because you're the one that's most responsive, whereas the person who's silently working on their own, they can't broadcast it. By design, they can't broadcast it to everybody else. So yeah, this, uh, um, obvious productivity in a way is way less sexy. So I think, you know, the new elephant in the room is AI and how that is enabling an increase in pace, uh, of output, but almost certainly a decrease in quality. So fold AI into your existing worldview because to me it just seems like a huge force multiplier for what already was pretty sloppy. Slack, email, async communication that's always on, people taking their work home with them, never being able to not context switch, not focusing on quality and instead focusing on quantity, not being able to f- to d-dial themselves in to do deep work for one moment. And now that is enhanced and magnified even more by the use of LLMs to help you put out more, to help you think less. So your focus is actually... You're, you're in Slack with your LLM. It wouldn't surprise me if there is a LLM integration into Slack at some point in future. I don't know whether-

   2. CNCal Newport35:06

      Of course

   3. CWChris Williamson35:06

      ... there is, um, where you can just do it in there, so you're just talking back and forth in one fucking workspace. Talk to me. Fold AI into this. You must have a million thoughts.

   4. CNCal Newport35:15

      Oh, there's a lot going on with AI. Uh, I mean, I think in its current instantiation... So when we think about, like, an office worker for the most part, put programmers aside, I'll get back to them, but non-programmers are really interacting with chatbots. Like, that's the main way they're integrating right now with AI. It's exagger- exactly what you said. For a lot of people, it's exaggerating the problems that already exist. Now, there's a term for this that comes out of a Harvard Business Review article from last year. They call it workslop, so they put together as one word, and they have some pretty compelling data on this.

   5. CWChris Williamson35:45

      What's w- so what's workslop? Define workslop for me.

   6. CNCal Newport35:47

      So workslop is AI-generated work products in the knowledge work sector, so like emails, reports, and PowerPoints or what have you, that are generated quickly by AI, but they're so low quality that they actually... It's very difficult to... Th-they make everyone else's jobs harder. This seems to be... This is, like, the defining aspect of workslop. It's quick to produce, but it's so low value that it actually no real progress is made. So, like, you get a workslop email from, you know, your boss or whatever, and, like, this isn't useful to me. It's this weird wordy thing that's broken up into sections, and it doesn't get to the core of the problem we have to solve. So you made that email quick, but in the bigger s- uh, scheme of things, we made very little progress towards, uh, what we want to do. Or you put together a workslop PowerPoint presentation so that you would have something at the meetingBut now we're spending twenty minutes looking at this nonsense, and nothing... It's not helping us. It's not helping us actually do things. So this is what's happening, or at least my fear. I mean, the reality is most people aren't using these tools in the office. Uh, I mean, let's just set the reality, right? So but for the people who are using them right now, um, which is a healthy percentage, but it's not-

   7. CWChris Williamson36:54

      Do you know what the numbers are?

   8. CNCal Newport36:56

      Well, it's difficult because there's a lot of fudging of the numbers here. There's a lot of mistaking a have used or experimented with, with are regularly using them. So I see this mistake happen a lot, um, and so it's difficult to get good numbers. There, there was like famously, um, maybe it was an Ethan Mollick article where he was talking about in my world, like academia, the homework apocalypse, and he's like, "Look at this study. Students just don't do work anymore. Nine out of ten are just using chatbots now." But you look at that study, and what it actually said was nine out of ten had tried using a chatbot at least once, and if you looked at who's using them regularly, it was like two out of ten, right? Because like for most of the students, it was, wasn't helping the way they thought it would. So I don't know what the numbers are. Um, if you count like advanced Google use, I think it's larger. Like, yeah, I search for information on this instead of going to Google, that's larger. But in terms of people who are actually making office work product out of it, I think it's smaller than the people who follow AI commentary or talk about it on AI Twitter or AI YouTube. I think it's a lot smaller than they probably assume just because in their world it's pervasive. But the people who are using it, this is the problem. Uh, they're trying to avoid, this is my theory on this, is like, what... how is AI helping like an office worker now? Well, their brain is exhausted from all this context switching.

   9. CWChris Williamson38:14

      Mm-hmm.

   10. CNCal Newport38:14

       So what problem are they looking to solve? They're looking to avoid having to do hard moments of cognition because their brain is so fried.

   11. CWChris Williamson38:21

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   12. CNCal Newport38:21

       It's really difficult to like solve the blank page problem. Oh, God, I got to send this email. I got to... It's a blank screen. I got to start writing from scratch. That's really hard.

   13. CWChris Williamson38:30

       Yeah.

   14. CNCal Newport38:30

       And if I have something-

   15. CWChris Williamson38:31

       The, the inertia that they've been trained out of overcoming because of the prime. It's almost like a, a one-two punch.

   16. CNCal Newport38:38

       Yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson38:38

       Humans were primed to not like heavy cog-- Well, we already didn't like heavy cognitive load, then our ability to deal with it and get through that initial resistance was decreased through the context switching.

   18. CNCal Newport38:50

       Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson38:50

       And now we're, "Don't worry about it. Don't worry about, don't worry about it, carbon-based life forms. The silicon-based life forms are coming."

   20. CNCal Newport38:57

       And let's throw in one, uh, one other aspect in there. Also, outside of work, we had these distraction machines in our hand that were further degrading our comfort with concentration because any possible moment of introspection we would have had even outside of work, why would I do that when TikTok has like the perfect dashcam video of, you know, uh, a Karen getting punched or something? Like, I gotta watch that, right? Uh, and so we've com... we, we, we have that revolution comes along, plus the email revolution. We completely atrophy our ability to think-

   21. CWChris Williamson39:25

       Yeah

   22. CNCal Newport39:25

       ... and we exhaust our brain. So the other aspect of it-

   23. CWChris Williamson39:27

       Yeah

   24. CNCal Newport39:27

       ... as we talked about, it's really exhausting to go through your day context switching. So like I don't have any reserves left to write this PowerPoint. That seems impossible. And then AI is like, "Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, I can do it for you. It'll be fine. It'll be fine. It'll be good enough. It'll be good enough." You're like, "Oh, okay. I can smooth over..." I used this, uh, analogy in a New Yorker piece last year. It's like it takes... Your effort graph looks like spikes, like an EKG or something like that.

   25. CWChris Williamson39:52

       Mm-hmm.

   26. CNCal Newport39:52

       And AI smooths over those peaks, and so you don't have to... Your peak concentration required can come down. Like, well, you can fill the blank page, and then maybe I have to work with it a little bit, but that's easier than doing it from scratch, but the stuff being produced is no good. And so I feel like workslop, it's almost less of a, uh, s- it's less of a, um, critique of AI than it is AI making obvious a problem with the way we were already working. I think that's what's going on there. I think this is even happening with computer programmers. This is considered, you know, heretical right now, but I guess I'm used to being yelled at. Uh, people are really excited by this workflow where I have seven or eight Claude code agents going concurrently, producing code and testing them, and I'm just a manager of all these different processes, and they're all producing this code on my behalf, and it feels really cool and interesting, like this has to be the future. I don't know that that is. I mean, I don't know the context. The problem is outside of like demos or internal tools or just having fun, that's not really code you can trust very well. And it, it does though completely lower the peaks of being a computer programmer, those peaks of cognition. It's much, much easier to manage a bunch of Claude code processes than it is to come up with an algorithm, and then you have that same blank page. So I'm... I think the jury is still out on even where we're gonna end up in the AI impact on programming. I don't know where it's gonna end up, but the way it's being talked about in the last few months after the latest Claude Code, uh, update, which is sort of, I guess, that's something humans don't do anymore.

   27. CWChris Williamson41:28

       Mm.

   28. CNCal Newport41:29

       I don't think we're there ready to say that yet.

   29. CWChris Williamson41:31

       I get popped with Claude Code ads. I get... I, I, I... You give me a terminal, I have no idea what to do. I'm like, I'm like, you know, someone's grandmother trying to use an iPad. I have no idea what's going on. So they are pushing very, very hard at the moment for this.

   30. CNCal Newport41:46

       Well, it's, it's, it's ki- It's funny, but it's a little bit crazy, but it's my world, right? I'm a computer scientist. Is that, uh, for engineer computer scientist types, they, they forget how technically advanced they are. So yeah, Claude Code, uh, works in the terminal, right? And that's why it works so well. It exists in a world of text only. Text command line commands like the old DOS command line. It's all text commands, um, which you can do a lot with. You can create and edit and compile a computer program, so it's very good at that, and it's a limited set of textual commands. That's perfect for a language model. Um, and the engineers are like, "Oh, we can use this terminal-based tool to do all sorts of other stuff that's not computer programming. Great. This is the pro... This has solved the pro... Everyone's gonna be doing this. Everyone is gonna have these sort of personal assistants based on something on Claude Code." I'm like, "Man, do you realize how foreign a command line interface is to peop... You realize like how weird and nerdy and complicated your world is?" You're like, "Yeah, this will be great. My grandma will just on the command line understand that like the Claude Code agent can bring up a batch script that's just gonna cat those files over to the, the regex grep, you know, and it'll be fine." They don't... No one knows how to do [chuckles] any of that type of stuff. So it's sort of funny seeing the en-engineers-Building these incredibly intricate, nerdy, wonderful tools they've custom built for Clodcode to help them in their life, and they think the gap between that and everyone else having AI automate things in their life is like, "Oh, it's this real small thing." I'm like, "Oh man, I don't think you understand." I mean, people are still not quite sure about the right click. I think you got [chuckles] you still have a ways to go before they're, they're-
7. 48:53 – 1:00:31

   Can AI Reliance Open Up Opportunities For Us?

   1. CWChris Williamson48:53

      What opportunities do you think an increasing reliance on AIOpens up. 'Cause I, I get the sense that as more people use LLMs to do work for them, this will create advantages in some areas for people who don't need to be reliant. So have you thought about the, the holes, market openings that have... will occur?

   2. CNCal Newport49:13

      It will. I mean, the way I think about LLM-based AI versus more advanced AI that we don't know how to do yet is, you know, my theory is the, what is being affected is gonna be more narrow at first. It's gonna be places where there's a- an exact match between what generative AI existing tools can do, um, and existing mar- m- uh, market sectors. We saw this actually, the week we're recording this, we actually saw this reflected in the stock market. It was this interesting paradox that was going on this week, where the stock price of software companies that deal with stuff that is well suited for an LLM went down. There was, there was... They call it the, the, the SaaSpocalypse, right? The software service apocalypse. So, um, you know, companies that do, like, legal advice, uh, companies that do graphic design like Figma and Adobe, because a lot of... You know, we have generative image generation is making... Building images from scratch is less useful. Uh, customer service, so companies that do a lot of customer service type software. We saw the stock was sliding on these very specific software industries because like, look, I think LLMs are gonna be able to do this. It was triggered by Anthropic releasing some plugins that made it easier to integrate LLMs into your services without having to hire these other companies. But you would think that's would be good news for the big tech companies building the AI that's gonna replace all this.

   3. CWChris Williamson50:30

      Mm-hmm.

   4. CNCal Newport50:30

      Their stock was sliding as well. And so the big tech companies had this big slide that at the end of the week we're recording this, there was a rebound at the end, but w- it was like a trillion dollars in market cap disappeared from the, the big tech companies at the same time. So what does that mean the market was betting on? What are investors betting on at that point what was gonna happen? And they were betting that in the near future, the next year or two, what we're gonna see is, uh, sel- selective impacts in specific fields from generative AI, but also that too much money is being invested in these AI companies, uh, as it, uh, already, which means they're betting that they're not about to automate most of the economy. They're not about to, you know, just one more iteration away from a huge economic disruption.

   5. CWChris Williamson51:12

      Mm.

   6. CNCal Newport51:12

      They're not, they're not, uh, at this peak of, like, complete transformation because if they were, you would be trying to increase your holdings in these companies. Like, I don't care how much money they're investing, these companies are gonna be worth an astronomical amount of money. But the market is betting, I think, the impact is gonna be more limited in the one to two-year window than, uh, a lot of the commentary we're seeing. So I, I think that's important because talk is cheap, but tech stocks aren't. And so people, the way they spend their money actually often has more of... I think there's a lot of information in that versus just, "I've been reading these articles online, and my God, the vibe really seems to be saying this is a big deal." Uh, so I, that's... I kind of agree with the market's consensus right now. For sure, there's gonna be industries that are affected, but it's not gonna be one of these situations where you say, "Okay, any work that's not just the deepest creative work is all gonna be automated in the next few years. I better go learn how to, like, do art or something like that." I don't think it's gonna be that broad at first. I don't think the current generation of AI technology can support as broad of impacts as people think. There's a lot of extrapolation from, well, if it can do this with code-

   7. CWChris Williamson52:18

      Mm-hmm

   8. CNCal Newport52:18

      ... certainly it could do this with all these other jobs. If it could do this with this industry, well, uh, certainly next it'll do it for all these other industries. We have to be wary of those extrapolations.

   9. CWChris Williamson52:26

      Right. You, you... I think I read an article from you, What If AI Doesn't Get Much Better Than This?

   10. CNCal Newport52:31

       Yeah.

   11. CWChris Williamson52:31

       Sort of if we have, I don't know, some sort of Flynn effect thing that kicks in but for AI, where, mm, you know, 'cause I think a lot of people would agree ChatGPT-2 to 3, fucking hell, to 4, 4o-

   12. CNCal Newport52:47

       Yeah

   13. CWChris Williamson52:47

       ... I know is this, there's a whole furor on the internet about people that have got girlfriends or boyfriends that are virtual on 4o, and they're all getting up- upset and sad about it. Uh, and I don't understand. I don't think I use the tools sufficiently deeply to be able to test this and benchmark it. It's like, uh, my Fire TV Stick's remote isn't working well. Um, I, I, I, it, it was able to do that fucking five years ago. Um, but is your, your thinking is that we're maybe gonna reach asymptote for what LLMs generally and transformer technology is able to do, and then it's gonna be a new architecture entirely if we're going to actually get beyond this?

   14. CNCal Newport53:25

       Yes. Yeah. That's what that article was about. I think that was a very... Uh, of the articles I've written, I think that was a really important one. That, that came out, um, in August. And the, and the story it tells, and a lot of other people have told this story as well, or, you know, around that time and since. But the story it tells is basically what happened is there was this big paper that was published in 2020. The lead researcher, Kaplan, Jared Kaplan, I think, was, uh, at Anthropic at the time. And it was this paper where they said, "Hey, something weird is happening here. If we make LLMs bigger and we train them longer, they perform better." Uh, technically they're seeing the loss decrease. That sounds kinda obvious, but in, like, machine learning circles, that was surprising because there's this idea of overfitting where if you just make your model bigger, um, the performance goes down. So it used to be like you have to find the perfect size model for your problem space. That's the way people thought about machine learning until this paper came out and like, I don't know, transformer-based LLMs, uh, they were using GPT-2, and they were systematically making it bigger, and they were seeing that the performance just kept going up. And like, this is interesting, so let's try it. And that was GPT-3. All right. Let's actually make this, like, 10X bigger. Surely this can't be right, and it was. It matched the Kaplan curve exactly. Like, oh my God, this actually got way better just by making this bigger. Like, all right. Well, certainly that must be the end of it. Let's try it with GPT-4. They made it bigger. They trained it much longer. Months and months they trained it. You know, Microsoft had to build these custom data centers to train it with new AC technology that didn't exist before. And it fit the curve. It was, like, way better. And the thing GPT-4 did-It really got... So GPT-4 set off the whole industry. The thing it did is it started showing abilities beyond just language, and that's where people got excited, like, oh, wow, if you train a language model on enough language, it learns about things that isn't just producing language. It can play games, it can do math problems, it can do logic. I mean, this was super exciting. It was super exciting. So the assumption was, do this two or three more times, you have AGI. So that's what the whole industry was based off of. When we went from three to four was this is legitimate, justified excitement.

   15. CWChris Williamson55:33

       Mm.

   16. CNCal Newport55:34

       Expand the size and the training duration two or three more times, and the economy is gonna happen in a box. I mean, it was so ex- That's where all of... That was the, the engine for all this excitement. So they tried. Uh, at OpenAI it was called Project Orion. They made a bigger model than four, they trained it even longer, like, here we go. And they tried it, and they said, "It's not much better." And this was this big, uh, brick wall surprise for the industry. Like, wait, it didn't get better. Um, everyone else tried as well, right? Grok, they tried this with Grok as well at the Colossus Data Center. With like, we're gonna have two hundred thousand GPU data center. No one's ever built anything this big, and it was like a little bit better. Uh, Meta tried this. They had a model called Beemoth. They're like, "We built the biggest data. It's bigger than any one we've had before." They didn't release it because it was marginally better than the last model that they had. And so this was a huge issue, right? You couldn't just make the models bigger and train them bigger. So what they did was they switched to, what are other ways we can get, uh, performance increases, and can we get more narrow by what we mean with performance? And this is when we began to get all the alphabet soup models. Well, it's GPT-O, O three dash mini slash whatever. Uh, and they switched the focus from just this is amazing if you use it, to we have these benchmark graphs and look at these graphs. Things are going better on these benchmarks. It all became about benchmarks because these are very narrow things that you could train models to do well on. They weren't intuitive. GPT-4 was just awesome. By the time we got to GPT-5, their whole launch, their launch page had 28 graphs of, uh, benchmark names that no one knew what they were. And so then they had to look for all these other ways to get improvement, and that's where you got like inference time compute. Well, what if we, we compute longer for harder questions? And they began really pushing fine-tuning. Well, for specific types of problems, we can get datasets that have answers and, uh, questions and answers, and we can use reinforcement learning to try to take this pre-trained model a- and make it better at this particular type of problem, and then we can have a benchmark that shows us we got better at this problem. And my argument in that article is like, this is a way different game than we were playing when we went from two to three and three to four. We're no longer scaling to AGI. We're taking basically GPT-4, and we're doing all of this like tuning and adding extra stuff on top of it and around it and, and measuring these very narrow benchmarks. And that's why people have this feeling ever since, like I, I guess they're better, but it's not in an obvious way. It's better in specific tasks, or if I vibe code this, it looks better, I guess, and it seems more narrow. Um, and so yeah, we're, we're reaching an a- There's a long answer to a short question, but I- we are reaching an asymptote on, um, just pure fine-tuned LLMs as an engine for AI. We're gonna need more architectures. It's gonna take more time.

   17. CWChris Williamson58:21

       Well, presumably ChatGPT-6 could come out and, oh, fuck, they just blew through the entirety of my prediction. This curve no longer curves flat in the way that I thought, and shit, this is, this is a different universe now.

   18. CNCal Newport58:37

       Yeah, but that won't happen because they, they tried, and it, it... They don't know how to do that. So it's not gonna be just an LLM. Uh, I mean, my, my prediction of the future of AI is I think what we're gonna see... I think LLMs are very powerful, but what we're gonna see is much more of hybrid models that are custom, custom fit to particular problems, where, okay, this system does this thing better than a human. And in its guts there's like a, an LLM in there, not a huge frontier model, but one that's like souped up and optimized for this particular type of thing. But there's also like five or six other models and going... There's an explicit world model. There's a future predictor. There's a policy network trained through reinforcement learning to try to evaluate situations to see what's good or bad. There's a whole logic engine on top of this that hooks these together. These are what I think the, the AI systems of the future are gonna be like. They're gonna be bespoke, and there's gonna be a ton of them. So when we get to AGI, it's not gonna be GPT-7 can do everything you ask it as well as a human. It's gonna be a world in which there's ten thousand different AI products, and you realize everything I can think of now, there's some product out there somewhere that can do this better than humans. Just like there's AI that can play chess better than humans. There's a different AI that can play Go better than humans.

   19. CWChris Williamson59:46

       Mm.

   20. CNCal Newport59:46

       There's an AI now that can beat, uh, professional poker players at Texas Hold 'em no limit. They're all different systems with their own pieces in them, and a lot of them have some language models in them as well, but a lot of other pieces as well. It's distributed AGI. That's what it's gonna be like, where it's gonna wake up one day and say, there's fewer and fewer things where we say humans can do this better than computers. And it's a different model than Hal 9000. There's one giant... It's a really inefficient way to imagine solving this problem. If we just have a big enough language model, it's gonna do all activity, it's gonna power all agents, it's gonna automate all systems. That really doesn't make sense. I think it's gonna be a much more distributed path towards AGI and AI.

8. 1:00:31 – 1:03:33

   Why AI Should Push Us Toward Hard Thinking

   1. CWChris Williamson1:00:31

      Given what AI can and can't do and what the quality of work is that it puts out at the moment, what is some good advice for somebody who wants to work against the weaknesses that are going to be exposed in other people because of their reliance on AI by avoiding it themselves or by using it appropriately? What would you focus on?

   2. CNCal Newport1:00:54

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:00:54

      Because again, it seems to me like quantity is easier to achieve than ever before. Quality is going to be rarer. That inertia, getting the project off the launchpad, the blinking cursor of the blank pageWhere, where should people focus their time and their attention in order to capitalize this?

   4. CNCal Newport1:01:13

      I think you need to begin thinking about the feeling of cognitive strain the way that, you know, a weightlifter thinks about the burn of a muscle or a runner thinks about burning lungs, as a thing that is uncomfortable in the moment, but man, I'm excited about this feeling because it's-- I'm getting stronger. You gotta make yourself really comfortable thinking hard. That is the differentiating factor. I mean, obviously I've been saying this since, well, 10 years now. But that's, that's even more now gonna be the differentiating factor, right? And if you talk to athletes, they're like, this is like Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron talking about pump, and that's really painful what he's doing actually, right? Like lifting the, the, the level of weights that the physical pain he's in is high, and he compares it to an orgasm, right? Because if you're a weightlifter, you're like, "Oh, that pain is directly translating to more strength and more, more muscle mass." You gotta think that same way about your brain. You cannot flee cognitive strain. You have to think about it in a knowledge work cognitive age. That is the feeling of my brain getting more capable. Yeah, I wanna seek that out. Let's go get it. Let's go get some, right? Like I wanna... This, I'm, nope, bring my focus back to this thing. I'm gonna try to push this through. And then when you're done, be like, "Oh man, I exhausted my brain. That's awesome." That was like a, that was like a really good cognitive workout.

   5. CWChris Williamson1:02:27

      Mm.

   6. CNCal Newport1:02:28

      So don't-- while everyone else is using AI to run away from strain, you should be the person running for it, because especially in the American context, I mean, the knowledge economy is now a massive portion of our GDP, and the knowledge economy itself is shifting more towards, uh, cognition intensive work. So, you know, knowledge work can capture anything where you're not building things. But now all the lower level knowledge work is being outsourced or automated. A lot of it has been replaced over the last 30 years by software. We don't have support staff and assistants and secretaries like we used to because, well, you can use Microsoft Word and email. We don't need separated people. Um, and so the, the work that's left in our economy, the knowledge economy, has been getting more and more cognitively demanding. And so the number one skill is I'm used to straining my brain, learning hard new things, and maintaining focus. That's what I would train.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:03:16

      That's so good. I, I, I really, really agree. And it's, uh, the funny thing is, that's why I asked at the top if you just felt like fucking Cassandra, because each subsequent development in technology makes this more important. Uh-

9. 1:03:33 – 1:13:27

   Why You Need to Work Smarter, Not Harder

   1. CNCal Newport1:03:33

      Yeah

   2. CWChris Williamson1:03:33

      ... I do... There, there's always gonna be that seductive whisper in the back of someone's mind that, well, yeah, but I can work faster with AI. I can work quicker by y- y- what if my boss sees me doing executive functioning through Slack more, whatever. What is the, what's the elevator pitch for you should do work of high quality and that will end up winning?

   3. CNCal Newport1:03:59

      You, you have to think about employment. Ultimately, it's a marketplace. There's a lot of obfuscation and fog and smoke, but it's ultimately a marketplace, right? Uh, you're paid money. In exchange, you produce things that have economic value. That's what makes that exchange make sense. There is not ultimately an underlying economic value to the coordination activities by themselves. There is no actual economic value to the speed of your Slack responses or the number of meetings you go into or the number of like bullet pointed emails with those sort of ChatGPT emojis that you put out. That itself doesn't generate economic value. The stuff that does in knowledge work almost always requires you mastering hard skills and applying them through concentration, and ultimately that shakes out. There, there's only so far you can get or so far you can hide being busy because busyness can't be monetized.

   4. CWChris Williamson1:04:49

      Mm.

   5. CNCal Newport1:04:49

      And you know, of course you can create a smoke for a while. Like, I don't know, like, you know, uh, Chris seems like productive I guess. Like he's always on these emails and this and this and that. But if you're not actually producing things that have economic value, like ultimately that catches up to you. Your opportunities narrow. You're gonna get found out at some point. Where if you do the other thing, it's like, no, I'm creating stuff that is rare and valuable. It's unambiguously, uh, has value in the marketplace. You write your own ticket. Like what? You wanna have a, a business where you work half the year? You can do it. You wanna get paid a huge amount of money? You can do it. You wanna like work for a company, but you all-- you choose when you come into the office and you declare like, "I don't wanna do meetings." That's actually a thing, by the way. I talked to, uh, a marketing team at one of the major tech companies not long ago, and they said, "You know what? Um, w- we're in the sales side, and like our group, the sales group, we are exempt from meetings," because they can directly monetize, "Oh, you brought in this many dollars. We can see it. And if you're bringing in dollars, then like you can do what you want." And they could also see if we make you go to meetings, those dollars go down. It's like, forget the meetings for you. Everyone else where there's not a clear number where they can see how much value you're bringing, like, "Oh, you better be there in the meetings."

   6. CWChris Williamson1:05:59

      I, I've, dude, I've, I've always thought this, the, the, the big problem that most people have that doesn't exist in the world of sports stars. If you're a sports star, everything that you're doing is to facilitate performance, and performance is very tightly bounded, and it's quantifiable. If you're a weightlifter, that 300 kilos is 300 kilos.

   7. CNCal Newport1:06:21

      Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson1:06:21

      You either pick it up or you don't pick it up. And your sleep and your recovery and your nutrition and your hydration and your game tape and your technique work and your S&C and your body work and massage and soft tissue and all of that stuff combine to this output. It's a very, very sort of single ordinating principle. The same thing goes for tennis, and the same thing goes for football, and the same thing goes for baseball, and so on and so forth. You do not perform well, you begin to scrutinize all of the contributing elements that, that come toward that. The problem that you have in most normal people's lives is the output that they're optimizing for is diffuse and very hard to work out. It's, well, I wanna be a good father, but I also wanna perform at work. Uh, you know, and I, I do Brazilian jujitsu on an evening time, and my wife makes me go dancing, and I wanna be engaging at a cocktail party. OkayUh, well, first off, that's lots of things. It's not a single ordinating principle. And secondly, define to me the lineage between your disrupted sleep last night and your poorer performance around the dinner table or in Brazilian jujitsu or whatever. The diffuse thing contributes because you inevitably have to make trade-offs from one thing in order to, to do another. But also it's just hard. It's hard to work out how your performance is performing, and this is the same in the work life. The perfect example, the salespeople. We just know if we do make you do this thing, we lose that thing, and that thing is more important than this thing.

   9. CNCal Newport1:07:51

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson1:07:51

       It would be like if for some reason sports stars were being encouraged to stay up late and go, "Well, we know if we make you stay up late answering fucking Slacks, your performance in the game the next day decreases." But for most people, there's this implicit assumption that part of what you do is the contribution to the strategy and the operations and the, the executive function culture and so on. Which means that you forget what you're there for. I think people have forgotten what they're there for.

   11. CNCal Newport1:08:21

       Yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson1:08:21

       What, what, what am I supposed to be here at work doing? What is my out- my, my outcome goal?

   13. CNCal Newport1:08:25

       There's so much fat in the Ameri-American knowledge work sector right now, right? 'Cause it-- we're so wealthy, and there's so much money being slung around that we can have whole organizations where most people don't even know how they're directly connected to producing that value, and they could just be doing email all day or whatever, right? It's so inefficient. But there are... I mean, there are plenty of knowledge work areas where people don't put up with a bunch of this nonsense, and it's all areas where it's very easy to quantify-

   14. CWChris Williamson1:08:53

       Mm-hmm

   15. CNCal Newport1:08:54

       ... your production. I, I did this essay a couple years ago where I did a reflection where I said, "God, almost every thought I've had in my books all came out of my experience as a grad student at MIT." So I was at the, the theory of computation group in the computer science department at, at MIT. Don't call it department, but the theory of computation group in the CI, CS lab at MIT, which is like a group. The professors there, the students, we weren't like this, but the professors were super geniuses. Like literally Turing Award, Turing Award, MacArthur, MacArthur, Turing Award, Dijkstra Prize, like smartest people in the world. And it was incredibly clear if you were successful or not. What major theorems did you prove in the last few years? That's it. That's all that mattered, right? And that required a lot of thinking. So they were terrible with email. They had no interest in social media. Uh, meetings, like if you're trying to throw meetings at them, they would just ignore you, right? I, I wrote about this in Deep Work even, and, and people pushed back. But I was like, "This is what it's like in that world." If you send someone an email in this world, like one of these professors, and you're like, "Uh, this isn't, this is ambiguous. You kind of didn't word this well," or, "I don't really wanna do this," they just ignore it. Like, "That's on you, buddy. Like, I have to get... You know, I'm being-- I will lose my job if I'm pre-tenure if I don't come up and solve theorems." And they put up with no nonsense. And a lot of that actually infused the-- my-- the book Deep Work because like, you know what? I came of age in an environment where all anyone cared about was focus and everything else was secondary. Like athletes, just like you said. If this is getting in the way of my launch angle going down or my batting average adjusting, I'm gonna, I'm gonna change it. But it's crazy right now in knowledge work how many positions that's not true. But what I advise people then, get in a position where that's true.

   16. CWChris Williamson1:10:37

       Mm.

   17. CNCal Newport1:10:37

       Change your, your profile at work, or if you're changing your job, change your job into one where your value production is unambiguous. Now, this is a double-edged sword 'cause it swings both ways.

   18. CWChris Williamson1:10:47

       'Cause you can't hide anymore.

   19. CNCal Newport1:10:48

       You can't hide anymore. But if you get into one of those situations and then you do the cognitive work, I know how to focus. I build the skills. I apply the skills. I'm not afraid of cognitive strain. You're in the absolute best position in our economy, right? You can write your own ticket. But you have to be willing to go into a, a, a circumstance of like this is the only world I know. Academia is what did you publish? That's all that matters. That's all we care about. What'd you publish? Book writing, how many copies did your last book sell? That's all that matters. There's no, "You know what, though? He answered our publisher email so quickly, so let's give him another deal, folks." No, it's exactly how many dollars did you make us last time. That's what we care about, you know, for the next time. So it's a scary world where you're being held accountable. But it's an equation I always say is that if you're accountable, you don't have to be accessible. If you're like, "I can point to this is the value I produced, and I'm killing it for you," then I don't answer emails. I don't go to these meetings. I don't do fifty sort of things. You can get away with almost anything you want. So I think that's-- more people should make that move, especially in the AI age, I suppose. More people should make that move towards like, "Hey, hold me accountable," and then do the work to actually show up. It makes your life so-- it's such a better way to go through knowledge work. You get away from that hyperactive hive mind, brain melting, distracting, soul-crushing, Slack all day long nonsense.

   20. CWChris Williamson1:12:13

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10. 1:13:27 – 1:27:53

    Why Organisations Obsess Over Busyness (and How to Stop It)

    1. CWChris Williamson1:13:28

       Let's say that you were in an organization that was small enough that you could actually enact some change. Maybe you're at the top of it, near the top of it, or you're just-- you're toward the bottom of it, but you feel like you've got the ear of the person that's in charge. If you were to say, we've got the classic diffuse hive mind, pseudo-productivity malaise, like the, the, the, the ambient soup that everybody's swimming in, how would you... What would you do? What would you... How would you rework the internals of an organization that still needs to communicate, obviously. There has to be coordination. People aren't working in silos. There is gonna be inevitable communication and coordination that needs to happen. How, how do you survive the modern world? What, what would you propose? How would you restructure things?

    2. CNCal Newport1:14:11

       Yeah, I, I mean, I would do a few things. One, I would say we're gonna have explicit workload tracking and management, right? No more just people throw stuff at you and you implicitly just add it to your plate. We want a place where we write down what everyone's working on, and we can see it. And now we can start talking about things like what is an ideal WIP? What's an ideal work in progress limit for an individual? How many things do we want someone working on at the same time before that curve, uh, starts to go the other way? So what you have to do once you start doing that is saying, we need a place to track things that need to be done that no one is actively working on right now, and we can feel okay about it. So I would definitely wanna set up where, where things enter into our radar of this needs to be done, there's a place for that to go and to be stored, where it's no one-

    3. CWChris Williamson1:14:54

       Oh, it's like an, it's like an organizational getting things done inbox.

    4. CNCal Newport1:14:58

       Yes. And it's not on anyone's plate. Because here, as soon as you are responsible for something, it generates email, Slack, and meetings. So once it's on your plate, it begins to spin off administrative overhead. In Slow Productivity, I call it the overhead tax. That gets spun off as soon as it's on your plate. So everything by default goes to a team plate. No one's working on it. Then we keep track of, from that plate, as we move things to people's individual responsibilities, we have like, I don't... You should do three things at a time. That's it. And when you finish something, you can pull something else in. So do a small number of things fast and well and then keep bringing things. So I would definitely do that. Uh, the second thing I would do is I would say no more hyperactive hive mind. Um, if you send a message that requires more than a single message in response, that should not happen over digital communication. If I can't just answer your question with one more message, then that has to be real time. Now, we can't have that turn into an explosion in meetings, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna have daily office hours for everyone. So there'll be a daily time where everyone knows they can call you or walk to your office or whatever and go through a bunch of things with you real quick instead of sending emails. We're gonna have morning stand-up meetings within the teams for sure. Who's working on what this morning? Who needs what from who to get that done? Go do the work. We're gonna have, uh... So we'll, we'll definitely do those as well. We might throw in phone hours. It's a new idea I'm thinking about, where you say, "Look, there's a longer period of time, like maybe all afternoon, where you can always call me if there's something that's so urgent you can't wait till the next office hours." There's enough friction in phone calls that that actually turns out to work pretty well. Like, I'm not just gonna call you because I'm, wanna get something off my plate.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:16:35

       Mm.

    6. CNCal Newport1:16:35

       I won't call you unless it really is serious. So I would, I would do that as well. And then I would say, okay, what ongoing work does this not work for? What type of projects do we work on on a regular basis where this isn't working because it, it's too long, uh, to have to wait till the afternoon's a problem. I'd say, "Great, let's identify those. And for each of those, let's build a protocol. Here is our protocol for collaboration on this type of work," and however that's gonna work. But it's like the information goes into this spreadsheet, and then whatever. Someone checks it in the morning. They move things to shared files. I don't know what it is, but whatever it is that prevents us to have, uh, ad hoc unscheduled messaging isn't necessary. So explicit workload management. I would have, uh, this rule of no hyperactive hive mind.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:17:17

       Mm.

    8. CNCal Newport1:17:17

       I would have protocols for any type of recurring collaboration. We could be explicit about how we actually wanna do this. And then I would have a culture of talking about deep work and concentration like a tier one skill. How's it going? Uh, how many deep work hours did you get in this week? Are you happy about that? What was getting in the way of that? Did you have a particularly good session? Tell everyone else about it. Like, what worked?

    9. CWChris Williamson1:17:37

       Yeah.

    10. CNCal Newport1:17:37

        Oh, I see. You, you, you did music. You have a different look. Oh, let's all think... You know, hey, here's a good idea that we can borrow. Make deep work culturally something you talk about as like, this is a, a tier one skill that we're really proud about. You do those things, you're not gonna two X your profitability. This is the thing that's always frustrated me about these ideas is like, you could make more money if you do it, but that's... It's really hard. Those changes I just talked about, it's hard. There's friction, there's personalities, and this is the thing I really underestimated when I wrote those books.

    11. CWChris Williamson1:18:11

        Mm.

    12. CNCal Newport1:18:11

        The way we work now is like a, uh, a, a low energy point, right? It's like the easiest possible configuration of work. So if you feel friction, you're trying to do something more structured, you're trying to do something that makes better use of our brain, and you're getting resistance, the place you're gonna fall when you give up is the way we're doing it now. So it's not arbitrary, I've realized. This hyperactive hive mind, let's just figure things out on the flow, no workload management, it's not arbitrary. It's the low energy. It's like this local minimum. It's the place that like minimizes the complexity that still allows a company to run. And I think that's why we keep falling back. In mathematical terms, it's a suboptimal Nash equilibrium. It's not the optimal way to work together, but no one person can leave it and make their situation better.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:18:56

        Mm.

    14. CNCal Newport1:18:56

        It's a low energy state. It's a, it's an attractor. It's a local minimum in the utility landscape. Whatever mathematical metaphor we wanna use. And so it's, it's not arbitrary. I was like, oh, it's like a law of work physics. This thing is like a neutron star in the world, the universe of work that just attracts everything back to it, and it takes a huge amount of energy to escape its pull. That's why I think we've had so much trouble, uh, solving this problem.Even though you would make more money if you did it

    15. CWChris Williamson1:19:27

        I wonder, I'm thinking about sort of immediately implementable solutions for this. I get the sense that you could probably tell people, "We don't use Slack before 1:00 PM." Like, nobody is to post in Slack before 1:00 PM.

    16. CNCal Newport1:19:44

        Yeah.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:19:44

        Because that, uh, uh, you can ring if it's SOS emergency-

    18. CNCal Newport1:19:49

        Yeah

    19. CWChris Williamson1:19:49

        ... scenario. You can just call somebody. We just don't use it, and then it means that everybody knows that they should not be doing... That it's a company-wide deep... Well, I mean, look, are there gonna be some departments, HR for instance, probably would be used. But your job is, your, your, your job is HR. Or you're in the PR department or something like that. Your, your job is actually about comms.

    20. CNCal Newport1:20:10

        Yeah.

    21. CWChris Williamson1:20:10

        Uh, but if you're in marketing or if you're in accounting-

    22. CNCal Newport1:20:13

        Yeah

    23. CWChris Williamson1:20:13

        ... something like that, okay, sit down and do your fucking work. And up until a point, what do you make of intermittent fasting for communication company-wide?

    24. CNCal Newport1:20:20

        Yeah, it works, especially, though, what really makes that more sustainable is if you have that quick morning standup on the team scale at the beginning of the day, where everyone says, "Here's what I'm gonna be working on during these morning hours. Here's what I need from each other to make progress on this." So you, you, what would've unfolded over Slack and email, you're doing in 10 minutes. So you say, "Okay, here's what I'm working on this morning. I'm working on the, the new white paper. Here's what I need, though. I need those figures from you. Can you g- When can you get them to me? By 9:30? All right. You're gonna get them to me by 9:30, and I need those quotes you promised. Can you g- just do that right away? Okay. Oh, so you all know what I need from you? Okay. Now I'm gonna put my head down and write that report." So having that, uh, that meeting ahead of time where everyone says what they need and what they're gonna do, that makes that time work better, and then the thing that really works, do the same thing on the other end of the morning. "All right. You said you were gonna work on this, this, and this. What happened?" So there's accountability on the other end. You can't run away from... You know, if you just went on email and social media, they're like, "Well, wait a second. I thought you were gonna write the white paper."

    25. CWChris Williamson1:21:26

        You said you were gonna do this thing.

    26. CNCal Newport1:21:27

        Yeah, and if other people flake, they don't send you the figures, they don't send you the quotes, you're like, "I got stuck, man. I never got this."

    27. CWChris Williamson1:21:33

        Fucking Cal. Cal didn't, Cal didn't do what he said he was gonna do.

    28. CNCal Newport1:21:35

        And they're there in the same room, and they're like, "Oh, okay. I get it. I get it. I, I can't just ignore stuff," right? Like, I actually have to do it. I think that's a great idea. I think, I think something like that works well if you put that accountability, uh, before it and you put it after it. That scares people by the way, though. That, that really does scare people, uh, because you actually have to do the work.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:21:57

        Yeah.

    30. CNCal Newport1:21:57

        And this is the thing with... Really social media and smartphones killed this way worse. AI's gonna make this worse, but that was a big inflection point, uh, in terms of losing our comfort with concentration. That got really bad once we got algorithmically optimized content and we really got used to that. And so it's scary. If you just go to a company and say, "Here's the new plan, boss. Uh, we're gonna have a meeting in the morning. You gotta tell me what you're gonna do for the next five hours, and then you gotta do it, and we're gonna check in after that five hours and see how it went," that's a nightmare for a lot of people. That is like, "Oh, God. I don't know what I'm gonna do."
11. 1:27:53 – 1:32:46

    Is Quantum Computing Useless in AI?

    1. CWChris Williamson1:27:54

       Talk to me about the role of quantum computing in AI.

    2. CNCal Newport1:27:58

       Minimal to nonexistent. Uh-

    3. CWChris Williamson1:28:00

       Oh, so QAI is all just bullshit?

    4. CNCal Newport1:28:03

       Yeah, I'm not... Yeah. I mean, quantum computing is really interesting. There's a huge amount of technical problems just to actually get these things scaled to the number of qubits in which they're useful, and there's a, there's a fallacy out there in thinking about quantum computing that it's basically like a normal computer but times a million.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:28:20

       Yeah.

    6. CNCal Newport1:28:20

       Which is just not the way these things function, right? So there's only very specific problems you can solve with a quantum computer because you actually have to express the problem in the language of physics in such a way that you're creating what's known as a wave function, that when it collapses, it's going to collapse to a configuration that's the right answer, therefore, like implicitly searching a large state space in sublinear time. Only certain problems allow you to do that. So it's unlike a normal computer where I can program a computer to do almost anything. Quantum computers, it's much more narrow what you can do with it. Uh, you can-

    7. CWChris Williamson1:28:52

       Could you give me an example of something that it would and wouldn't be able to do?

    8. CNCal Newport1:28:55

       Well, like the, the big example, this was a guy who was at MIT when I was there, Peter Shor early on was the one who figured out like, hey, one of these complicated wave function collapsing things you could do could factor prime numbers. Or, or, uh, fact-

    9. CWChris Williamson1:29:07

       Q day.

    10. CNCal Newport1:29:08

        Yeah, factor numbers to see... to find their prime factors rather. Find the prime factors of big numbers. Um, that's a really big deal because, uh, RS-

    11. CWChris Williamson1:29:16

        Security.

    12. CNCal Newport1:29:17

        Yeah, public, public key encryption, and ironically, this, this just goes to show how crazy MIT was, is also at MIT is Ron Rivest, who I TA'd for, who invented... You see R in RSA. He invented public key encryption. So like the guy who invented public key encryption is there next to the guy who figured out how quantum computers could-

    13. CWChris Williamson1:29:36

        Could maybe undo it

    14. CNCal Newport1:29:37

        ... undo it, yeah. So it's kind of interesting. So it's good at that. Uh, there's a lot of problems that are based around, um, simulation of quantum or physical... physics systems, and that's... You, you can simulate quantum physics systems directly using quantum in a way instead of having to try to simulate them with... So it's very good for that. There's a certain type of search. It gets a little technical, but there's a, there's a certain type of, uh, search that you can implement that has applications. So, so there are interesting applications. Um, but I, I... The thing I was beginning to sense recently which made me worry is that there was a sense of like, um, height migration. So people are getting a little bit frustrated, sort of like post-GPT-5 of like, this isn't filling my need to have something to be in, you know, a technology that is gonna change everything. I love that concept, and they begin sniffing around, okay, but what if we just... Quantum somehow will unlock AI and solve all these problems we're having. I think it's way more complicated than that. There are narrow applications of these particular things that might have some AI application. Um, but you can't like run an LLM on a quantum machine, and now it's a billion times better. That's just not how it works. So quantum's interesting. It's just really hard. The problem is the errors multiply. I mean, the, the... Make these qubits, these, uh, these quantum bits they use for these algorithms. It's incredibly complicated. You have... There's different ways to do it, but in some ways you have laser beams in a super cool chamber holding like a, a particle in a very careful state, and what ha- it, it generates errors, and then the errors add up with other errors, and it's... After you make enough of these things, then, then the errors, they swamp out of control. It's a really, you know, it's-

    15. CWChris Williamson1:31:09

        Okay, so you're telling me that the, the, the fucking M6 chip in the MacBook Pro is not gonna be a quantum one. It's not gonna be the Q6 chip.

    16. CNCal Newport1:31:17

        It's not. In fact, I, I was... I'm... Now I wanna know what QAI is. What is QAI? You mentioned QAI. [laughs]

    17. CWChris Williamson1:31:22

        QAI, quantum, quantum AI

    18. CNCal Newport1:31:24

        Yeah, but I mean, is there a particular product or just people talking about quantum's gonna just make AI better?

    19. CWChris Williamson1:31:29

        Yes. Yeah, there is. Um, I have a, a, a friend who I train with. She-- Like, it-- This, this is like... You know what I love? P- Some of the people that I love the most are-

    20. CNCal Newport1:31:38

        Yeah

    21. CWChris Williamson1:31:38

        ... the ones who you wouldn't predict, uh, have the life that they do. And there's a girl who trains at Lift ATX on a Saturday. Lovely girl, I've trained with her a bunch of times. Real cool. Boyfriend's cool. Like, does fitness modeling. S-s-super hot, the long hair, lift the big a- all the, you know, like, but super strong, all the rest of the stuff, like feminine as well. Quantum computing degree, like works in, works, works in quantum computing, and she was telling me about quantum AI. And she was telling me about, uh, Q-QAI as it's referred to, and it's a burgeoning field supposedly, un-unless she's lied to me.

    22. CNCal Newport1:32:11

        No.

    23. CWChris Williamson1:32:11

        Unless she's totally fucking lied to me.

    24. CNCal Newport1:32:12

        Yeah, I'm curious what they're working on. Uh, uh, UT Austin has good quantum theorist. Like, I'm searching for it. Uh-

    25. CWChris Williamson1:32:20

        Yeah

    26. CNCal Newport1:32:20

        ... a guy I knew from IT, they, they hired him away there. Let's see, quantum, quantum AI. Merges quantum compute with machine learning the process. High-dimensional data faster than classical systems. Yeah, they're working on it, but I don't know, uh, I don't know how that's gonna work, basically.

    27. CWChris Williamson1:32:37

        All right. Well-

    28. CNCal Newport1:32:38

        So I don't know what they're working on, but, um, it's not something that, that you hear a lot in computer science circles yet, so maybe it'll have some breakthroughs. It's worth looking at, but I don't know how that's gonna work.

12. 1:32:46 – 1:44:08

    Why It’s So Important to Read

    1. CWChris Williamson1:32:46

       Okay. Uh, one of the other elements I guess, of, that people struggle with when it comes to deep anything, uh, is learning, the process of learning. Talk to me about the mechanics of teepping-- keeping a, a, a deep reading habit alive.

    2. CNCal Newport1:33:05

       Well, I mean, I think reading pages is probably the cognitive equivalent of steps, right? So if you're a ten thousand steps a day person, as like this is just, like, a baseline to make sure that, like, at least my physical systems are being used, you should have a, a page count. Twenty-five pages a day, twenty pages a day, uh, of reading a book. It just is, like, getting those cognitive steps in because I, I think we recognize more and more reading i-i... I would say it's the cheat code, but it's, it's better to think about it as like reading is the thing that formed the modern brain, and I'm like, I'm more and more convinced about this. I have, I have a book idea I'm working on now where I'm sort of exploring this idea. Uh, the brain before we had the Neolithic Revolution, it s- it was the same neurons, right, uh, fifteen thousand years ago that we have right now. But if we go pre-reading, those neurons were doing the things they were evolved to do, which is very much about, like, the visual system and the audio system, and we could communicate through spoken language, and that's fine. And then we invent reading, and this is v- this is not something that our brain has evolved for. So in order to read, we have to go through this, this sort of excruciating process of learning to read, in which what you're doing is actually rewiring sections of your brain to connect in ways that they weren't originally meant to connect to. So we're, we're reforming our brain when we learn how to read, and we develop what Maryanne Wolf calls deep reading processes, where you've now yoked together different parts of your brain that don't normally work together that can now have to work together in order to understand written text. Once your brain is wired to do that, it can gen... If you reverse this and write, you can generate much, much more sophisticated thoughts than you can if you haven't done this wiring and your understanding of things. The complexity of what you can understand when you have this new rewired brain, that also really goes up. So reading is like, uh, it's not just, oh, I get stronger in my brain. It reconfigures your brain into, like, the modern, you know, post-cognitive revolution-

    3. CWChris Williamson1:35:00

       Mm.

    4. CNCal Newport1:35:00

       brain.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:35:01

       Okay. Wh-why is it important to read physical books then? What, what, what is lost if I read Substack? I know that you're a fan of Substack. I, I love Substack. I think it's fantastic. Uh, what's the difference between reading it on a laptop versus a phone versus a Kindle versus a physical piece of paper?

    6. CNCal Newport1:35:20

       Well, there's two different things going on here. There's medium and content type. Uh, like, so if you're reading a book in a, a physical book or you're reading in a Kindle, um, doesn't matter, right? I mean, they're both actual physical medium. Like, the way that the, the Kindle is actually a physical experience. It's, it's, it's actual little disks that are, you know, dark on one side and light on the other, and they make a page. They have little electrical impulses, and you shock the disk you wanna turn, and you don't shock the ones you don't wanna turn. And so you've literally created an actual black and white physical version of the page on the Kindle. You're not... Unlike a, a computer screen or a TV where it's light being emitted, there's no light being emitted. It's physically, that's the page. It just created a new physical page that has text on it. That's why you have to actually have a light on a Kindle to read it. Um, so it's just a page that reconfigures itself into a new page. I love e-ink technology. I think it's really cool. Uh, content type, the issue is, I mean, there's a lot of this research we've known since the nineties. A lot of this is captured in, um... The best book on this would be, uh, The Shallows, Nick Carr's book, The Shallows. When we're reading something like a webpage or Substack, for whatever reason, uh, we skim much more aggressively. That's the main issue. We jump around, uh, much more aggressively just trying to pull out the key points, and I think that's all just acculturated, right? Like, you could sit and read. Like, if you print out a Substack article and sit in the library and you read it carefully, it's the exact same thing as reading a book. It's the exact same thing in, in, in sense of the experience. On screens, we tend to skim around more. The other advantage of, like, a book that was actually published versus, like, a post you see online, it's just better thought through, right? So when you write a book, you spend a couple years on it. Like, you're really, uh, you spend a couple years crafting the book, and you might've been based on a lifetime of thinking about this topic. And so you take your time when writing a book, and it gets edited and re-edited, and you go back. Like, I'm writing a book now. I've been working on it off and on for, like, three or four years. I've rewritten this book, like, three times. It, it's like this isn't right, this isn't clear enough. It's, you know... And so when you go through text that has been that carefully thought through and structured, that's also, you just get a different experience 'cause the pieces click together at different-

    7. CWChris Williamson1:37:30

       Mm

    8. CNCal Newport1:37:30

       ... scales, and it just uses y- the... You build in your brainThese intricate interlocking pieces that all hook together and is beautiful, and you get that aha moment feeling. There's an actual physical endorphin rush you get in your brain. Um, so I, you know, I think reading smart books written by smart people that took a long time to write, that's your calisthenics for your brain. It, it literally changes your... You're a smarter person if you do that versus if you don't.

    9. CWChris Williamson1:37:57

       So good. I have to say reading full-length books has been, uh, the, m-m, the volume that I do that has been decreased over the last few years largely because of Substack. So, uh, there's a extension for Google Chrome called Push to Kindle, and if I press it-

    10. CNCal Newport1:38:16

        Yeah

    11. CWChris Williamson1:38:16

        ... the article appears on my Kindle. Because I don't like reading on my phone, and I don't like reading on my laptop, probably for the reason that, that you said. But when I think about it, it very much is, uh, running downhill because, uh, what's the longest Substack that you're gonna read? Twenty minutes maybe? Twenty-five. Twenty-five minutes is a fucking long article.

    12. CNCal Newport1:38:36

        Yeah.

    13. CWChris Williamson1:38:37

        Uh, and y- maybe part of that, maybe part of my penchant for it is that I do get the outcome, right? What, what is it that I'm looking to learn? Oh, I wanna b- find out from Steve Stewart-Williams about sex differences in mate, br- a desire for sexual novelty, something like that. Okay. Well, I'll, I'll, we'll learn the outcome in the same way as I could feed myself food that was just a cube of calories, and that would sort of give me the caloric intake that I needed. But what you're presumably reading for, apart from just the enjoyment of reading it, is to be able to recall it and for it to be woven into the broader, uh, mental landscape that you've got-

    14. CNCal Newport1:39:21

        Yeah

    15. CWChris Williamson1:39:21

        ... which actually n- probably means you need to spend time and attention with it, and some of the leanness and brevity that comes with an article, uh, actually m-might work against you. Maybe you need it to be said to you in five different ways. Maybe you need the author to meander off onto a story that takes three pages to, to explain about this guy who owned a Ferrari and parked it outside of a hotel so that you can then come back in, and each one of these is a little Velcro latch hook that you can hook yourself into. And yeah, I wonder whether, I wonder whether the reading or, or discriminating toward reading stuff that is exclusively shorter form results in the sense that I'm learning lots. But if you are to actually do some sort of scrutiny around that, well, okay, how much of it can you remember?

    16. CNCal Newport1:40:12

        Yeah.

    17. CWChris Williamson1:40:13

        How long did you spend with this idea? Did you spend long enough for it to be a part of now your mental models and the framework that you... How, how much can you recall? That would be an interesting, an interesting challenge.

    18. CNCal Newport1:40:25

        And the frameworks to understand that are shallower just because it's less time to establish them. So like in a subs... And just not a bad thing, but, you know, what can you do? You typically have like one idea, and like here's something that supports that idea, and here's maybe like a different idea and here's why that doesn't work. And if that's all you're consuming, that becomes your mental model for how knowledge is gained. And I think we see a lot of this. I, I mean, think about internet culture now is much more conspiratorial, and I don't mean in the like sort of grand conspiracy theory, which it is, but not in, not just in like the grand conspiracy type of thinking, but in the confidence. There's this quick jump to confidence where you're like, "That's wrong because of this," and boom. And you think that like this is like this slam dunk case or something like that. That's a result of not reading a lot of books. You read a lot of books, you're like, "Okay, this is way more complicated." Uh, doesn't mean there's-

    19. CWChris Williamson1:41:19

        Everything is way more complicated than you thought it was.

    20. CNCal Newport1:41:21

        Yeah. And there's probably a clear truth here, but clear truths are more complex. Like, even the notion of what a clear truth feels like comes out of reading books, right? Like, and you understand, oh, ultimately, like this person was right, but it's complicated. And like, yeah, this was not so clear cut, and th-this is like a compromise, and this was really important. And these factors were here, but honestly, those factors aren't as big as you think, and this factor really was more important, and so like this really was the right thing to do. So even like your notion of what's true or what's not true or what it means for something to be clear is like different than if you're-

    21. CWChris Williamson1:41:57

        Interesting

    22. CNCal Newport1:41:57

        ... just looking at boom, slam dunk. I think it's a big problem online. Es- both sides of the political spectrum do this. Like you, you want everything just to be this person is just garbage and completely wrong, and there's like this one simple thing I know-

    23. CWChris Williamson1:42:11

        Mm

    24. CNCal Newport1:42:12

        ... that means you're completely wrong and I'm completely right, and you're wrong in like the worst possible sort of way.

    25. CWChris Williamson1:42:16

        [laughs]

    26. CNCal Newport1:42:16

        Uh, and that is like such a sophili-sophilific... I'm saying the word wrong. [laughs]

    27. CWChris Williamson1:42:20

        Solipsistic.

    28. CNCal Newport1:42:21

        Soph- yeah, exactly. You said it, right? I have to read more.

    29. CWChris Williamson1:42:24

        Sorry.

    30. CNCal Newport1:42:24

        Um, but it's sophistry for sure, right? This idea of, uh, this is how truth and argument unfolds is like there's an obvious flaw that's easy for me to grok, which I guess now could actually be a verb as opposed to just meaning to understand. Also, I could literally grok it, I guess. Um, and now it's clear that you're wrong, and I feel righteous, you know. And then we go seeking that, and then we want to simplify everything in the world to you're just terrible, and this person is perfect, and this idea makes the most sense, and if you disagree with this idea, it's because like you want to eat children. And you know, it just becomes... It's a different under... This is what I think we get wrong. It's not just like we're, we're, uh, we don't have the right information. We've changed what our notion of truth is because we're not exposed to the complexity of truths. When you read a, not only a scholar, like a, a smart case for it, but then you read the arguments that they confronted. And then you read someone else that's arguing against their point, and you're like, "Oh, okay. I've, I've seen the clash of like minds." And now in that clash, like I kinda see what's going on here. Like yeah, the truth really leans this way, and it's... I feel really real conviction in that because I've seen like the best minds come at this from either side, and I really understand, and it's not cut and dry. But ultimately, like this is the right thing to do. Um, that was like a very familiar thing to people and leaders like in times past, and where you lose it if you're exposed to these, uh, low-resolution copies, these low-resolution simulacrums, these easy to digest pre-chewed versions of argumentation and understanding. It just changes the way your brain thinks about what true even means.
13. 1:44:08 – 1:45:10

    Where to Find Cal

    1. CWChris Williamson1:44:08

       no, they don't. Cal, you fucking rule. Let's bring this one home. Where should people go to keep up to date with everything you're doing?

    2. CNCal Newport1:44:13

       Oh, God. Uh, calnewport.com, I guess. My books are on Amazon. My podcast, uh, Deep Questions on YouTube or wherever you get podcasts. Newsletter at calnewport.com. Deep Work. Too many things going on now, Chris. Deep Work, its 10-year anniversary. I'm excited about it. All new, uh, I replaced all the blurbs on the back with... Most of them are now organic. I could just like people who have said things about it without me asking them to, uh, say it. So that's fun, and I have a masterclass out on, on this stuff too. So I don't know. It's everywhere. Too many places.

    3. CWChris Williamson1:44:45

       You're everywhere, man.

    4. CNCal Newport1:44:45

       I feel too busy, I guess.

    5. CWChris Williamson1:44:46

       For a person who's a, a digital recluse, you are everywhere, but that's a function of focusing on quality, not quantity. I can't wait to speak again, man. This is, this has been so much fun. I appreciate the help.

    6. CNCal Newport1:44:55

       Always a pleasure, Chris. Always, always a, always a pleasure to talk with you.

    7. CWChris Williamson1:44:58

       [outro music] Congratulations. You made it to the end of an episode. Your brain has not been completely destroyed by the internet just yet. Here's another one that you should watch. Come on.

Episode duration: 1:45:10