I recently stumbled across a fascinating 2024 essay written by a Norwegian psychology professor.
In this essay, he talks about how he was asked to teach a course about intelligence.
And he was excited about this because he used to teach that class a lot, but hadn't recently.
So he thought what he would do is he would open this class the way he always had before, by talking about the so-called Flynn effect, which is this observation, originally made by James Flynn, that IQs worldwide have been rising since roughly the post World War II period.
So here's what the professor wrote in his essay.
The Flynn effect has been rising suddenly for so long that I thought I'd bring an updated graph an updated graph to 2024 numbers, because it's always fun to tell students that their generation is the smartest people who would ever live.
But then he added those new numbers to his old chart of rise in IQs and was floored by what he discovered.
IQs weren't going up anymore.
And not only had IQ increases slowed down in recent years, IQ scores had begun to decrease.
His students were not the smartest generation to have ever lived. they were getting dumber.
Today, I want to talk about this so-called reverse Flynn effect.
There are some convincing arguments for why this is happening.
And I want to talk about these, but my main purpose is to then introduce an additional factor that I think is getting overlooked.
But once we recognize this additional factor, it will give you some compelling opportunities for getting ahead in an increasingly stupid world.
I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions.
Today's episode, why are we getting dumber and what you should do about it.
All right, let's start by trying to verify this idea that IQ scores are actually now going down.
There have been multiple different studies that have gathered information on IQ in multiple different ways that seem to be showing something similar.
They all show somewhere in the roughly 2010s, usually somewhere between 2006 and 2012, we begin to see the measured IQs take a turn and begin decreasing.
So I want to load up on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening.
One of the better studies I could find.
This is a chart I'm putting on the screen here that came out of a 2023 paper was published by a team from Northwestern in the journal Intelligence.
The chart on the screen, this is kind of the key chart in the paper.
The details are a little bit complicated, but the trend is very clear.
So what you see for the listeners, what you would see if you're looking at this chart, is a bunch of different colored lines that are angling downwards.
Now, if you look at the bottom X axis, you're going to see years starting from 2006 going up to 2008.
And on the Y axis or the vertical axis, you're going to see a standardized average IQ score on a 35 item composite.
I car intelligence test.
Why are there different lines?
Well, these are broken out by different education levels, from graduate education down to less than 12 years of schooling.
So what you see is, as you sort these lines by education, the higher the education level, the higher the line.
So you in general have higher IQ scores if you have a graduate education versus less than 12 years education.
That makes sense.
But what's interesting about these charts is that the lines all head downwards.
So we see, yes, this is the so-called reverse Flynn effect in bright technicolor.
IQ scores are getting lower.
If you look at charts from 1932, you see they go up on average like three to five points per decade.
And now we begin to get this decline as we get to the 2010s.
Below it is another chart that breaks this out by gender as well.
Basically no difference.
They both go down.
There's not any meaningful difference there between genders.
All right, so we see the study decline.
It hits all education levels more or less equally, even though they start from different places.
Very little difference between gender.
If you break out specific intelligence measures within this 35 item test, you see that all but one measure decreased.
So there is actually one intelligence measure that's often tested IQ test that still is increasing.
And that is three dimensional rotational scores.
So test of your ability to have a 3D object in your mind and the rotate it within your head.
We're still getting better at that.
But on everything else, we have begun to decline.
All right, so why is this happening?
There's one argument in particular that is common.
It's well known.
It's been articulated by many different people and many different contexts.
And it is pretty convincing.
Here's the short version of this most common argument for the reverse Flynn effect.
We stopped reading.
So the idea that reading rates are down drastically, this is well covered.
This is known.
We did an episode I don't know when that was Jesse, but probably like in the spring where we went over a lot of like the more recent data about how much people are reading and how much people are reading for pleasure, and how these have had a steady decline.
So this is just, this is well known.
Now, many have argued that this shift away from books and towards other types of media, such as television at first, now more recently also the internet and smartphones, can explain at least in part why we are getting dumber.
So how does this work?
Well, I want to play you a clip here.
This is James Marriott.
He's a critic in calmness for the times of London.
This is a podcast appearance from a couple of weeks ago where James tries to summarize this sort of general argument that the now well accepted fact that we're reading less is impacting our overall intelligence and helps explain to reverse flint effect.
It's kind of a long clip, but I think it's worth hearing in its entirety because James sort of lays out clearly how this chain of argument goes.
So, Jesse, let's hear this clip.
When you look at the way that information is structured in a book compared to where the information is structured in a phone, it makes a lot of sense.
Books are exceptionally dense with information.
They're exceptionally dense with argument.
Print requires us to make a logical case for a subject.
A really significant feature of books is that if you make a case in print, you have to make it logically add up.
You can't just assert things in the way you can on TikTok or on YouTube or on a podcast or in conversation.
And print privileges a whole way of thinking and a whole way of processing the world that is logical, that is more rational, that is more dense information, that is more intellectually challenging.
And if you lose these things in our culture which I think we really are in the process of losing them it's not surprising that people are getting stupid and their reasoning skills are declining.
We seem to find the IQ is declining.
So that's a really interesting argument.
If you spend more time consuming media through things like television or James is focusing in particular on smartphones, you are missing essentially a sort of intellectual cross-training that you get by reading books that force you to do a sort of more logical type of analytical thinking, which gives you a brain that can do really well on IQ test.
Now this is not a new idea.
So Marriott here is not making a new idea.
It's something that really big thinkers, a sort of like big minds of techno criticisms and media studies from decades past, have been grappling with.
I want to play another short clip from Marriott where he talks about the sort of esteemed history of people thinking about these type of issues.
Exactly.
There's been a lot of interesting research and writing on this done in the 60s and 70s, when TV and radio had really begun to find mass adoption in Western households, and people like Walter Ong and another guy, Eric Havelock, a classicist, compared the information environments of oral societies with literate societies.
And they made a series of really brilliant cases that literate culture enables things like analytic thought when you can Right.
So in other words, this idea even before smartphones, as soon as TV came up, there was this big thinker started saying wait, a second literate society.
So society based on information consumption primarily through the written word.
Their brains just operate differently.
And one of the most influential thinkers to try to tackle this concept, this connection between reading and IQ, was delayed NYU communications professor Neil Postman, who's been a major influence on my own thinking and writing as a technology critic.
In 1985 he published a classic book which we've talked about on the show several times, amusing ourselves to death.
Public discourse in the age of show business.
Now, this book was all about how the shift in our culture from a he called the lexigraphic culture, but a culture in which newspapers and books were the main way through which we gained information, to a world of television.
It changed the way literally, that we thought, our definitions of truth, the processes by which we tried to make sense of the world.
I'm going to read you a key quote here from chapter two of that book.
Postman writes.
Under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different than it is now, generally coherent, serious and rational.
Under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd.
Now here's another quote from that chapter where he sort of elaborates how these changed happens.
Here's Neil.
My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse.
It does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth telling.
I will say once again that I am no relativist in this matter and that I believe the epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a print based epistemology, but is dangerous and absurdist.
So what he argues in this book is that literally we think differently.
We think differently in a culture that is broadcast based versus lexigraphic base, where we consume information created to us visually or in audio form versus reading it for ourselves.
And it leads to a worse country.
It's like, I'm not a relativist.
It's not well.
Things change and some things are better than others said.
No, the lexigraphic governance.
When we read that was better.
That was better suited for a democratic country and democratic life and just for intellectual life in general.
That was actually a really good match for what we needed from the human brain.
So there we go.
As we moved away from reading, from television to smartphones, our brains thought in a different way.
And the way we thought, to put it crudely, the way we think now, it's just a dumber.
When you use a 35 item eye car intelligence test, you measure like yes, we are starting to do worse on these measures because our brains just don't get the same cross-training they got before.
And we're not exposed to the same sort of sophisticated analytical discourses and epistemological definitions of truth telling that we used to have before.
Now I want to be clear.
It's not like this is a consensus claim that the decline of reading is making us dumber.
Those are big thinkers with big ideas.
In our current world.
I mean, there are a lot of researchers who will say the typical thing to a lot of researchers will say which is like?
Well, it's complicated.
And it is probably complicated.
The post-literacy hypothesis for explaining the reverse Flynn effect is solid, but by no means a complete explanation.
So just for the sake of Clarity here.
I want to quote here one of the authors from that Northwestern paper where I showed you the chart from that showed the reverse Flynn effect.
The corresponding author of that paper, Elizabeth Dork, who is a research professor at the Northwestern Medical School.
She said we don't really know why we're seeing this.
Let me read a quote from her here.
There's debate about what's causing it, but not every domain is going down.
One of them is going up.
So she's referencing there to the 3D spatial reasoning.
If all the scores were going in the same direction.
You can make a nice little narrative about it, but that's not the case.
We need to do more to dig into it.
Dwork goes on to suggest several other theories bouncing around for the reverse flint effect, like maybe there's a decline in motivation among the test takers.
So something about the effect of how they recruited people to take the test.
Or it could be things and she's just been hypothetical here just to show who knows what the.
It could be a lot of things, but she said, hypothetically maybe, something about the shift to STEM education and public education has de-emphasized other subjects that might have been better for the analytical reasoning that's tested on IQ tests.
So she's like, look, we don't really know.
So I don't want to give the sense that the post-literacy hypothesis is a consensus.
But I do want to note the sort of pushback here isn't exactly damning.
I think the fact that we're still getting better at manipulating visual objects in our head doesn't contradict the post-literacy hypothesis.
That is a type of intelligence that really has nothing to do with reading.
And, in fact, using video games and more visual culture, we're having to simulate more virtual worlds ahead.
Maybe that is something we got better at.
It would make sense, actually, with the change in the media landscape.
The fact that changes the STEM education or some other changes to the American educational system might be de-emphasizing skills to show up on IQ tests.
That might be true, but the reverse flint effect is showing up consistently in many different countries that have their own educational systems and priorities.
And yes, maybe in their particular research design they could be dealing with lack of motivation on the test takers.
But again we're seeing the same decline in IQ tests for many different studies that gather data from many different sources.
So I want to emphasize that there's not a consensus around this issue, but it's not like there are massive holes in the post literacy hypothesis of oh, this is really a flawed theory.
It's still a convincing explanation for at least part of what we are observing.
Okay.
Now I want to give my explanation.
Now, I should qualify this here by saying, I actually think the post literacy hypothesis is Right.
I think that explains a lot of what we see.
But there is another factor that sometimes mentioned that I think gets overlooked.
It is also playing a large role, especially in the recent decreases in IQ.
Now, given my interest as a technocratic and the fact that this podcast focuses on technology's impact on our ability to live deep lives, you might not be surprised by what I'm going to say.
But I think the missing factor here is The smartphones impact on our attention.
So this is different.
Let's think about this.
The post literacy hypothesis is saying when we stop reading, the way our brain processes information changes and it becomes less analytical and dumber.
So our capabilities, like what our brain can do goes down.
All right.
Fair enough.
But the rise of smartphones and in particular hyperpalatable algorithmic content delivered through smartphones, has a additional impact of reducing our ability to sustain concentration.
Now, this is not about the way our brain processes information.
It's not about our epistemology, as Neil Postman would say.
It's about the fact that we are constantly overwhelming our short-term motivation circuits with this hyperpalatable content, to the point where our brain begins to suffer when we ask it to put sustained concentration on one target.
So it's like the push literacy hypothesis explains the capability of our brains going down.
And the attention hypothesis claims, our ability to make use of whatever processing ability we have is also being reduced.
You put these two things together and you get a much more heightened effect.
And I think this is a major effect in the Flynn effect.
And I think we have two pieces of evidence that I want to point to here that shows that the attention hypothesis is playing a big role here.
One, Reading began to decline, of course, well before the advent of ubiquitous smartphones.
I mean we talked about, you know, Walter Ong was writing in the 1960s about the death of literate society with the rise of television.
Neil Postman was writing in the 1980s.
We've seen declines in the statistics in reading.
This has started going down in the 80s and the 90s.
So none of this is new.
It continues to get worse, but none of this is new.
And yet if you look closer at the reverse Flynn effect studies, they all point to an inflection point increases, slow down, but the point where it turns and starts going IQ scores start going down.
On average lands somewhere around 2010.
What happens around 2010?
Not some major shifts in our reading habits, but the ubiquitous introduction of smartphones.
So smartphones entering the picture, we already were reading less.
We already were watching some crazy amount of television a day.
But then our attention began to get worse.
And so now this slow reduction of our brains ability to process had this other factor added to it.
We can't even get that the full capacity that our brain has reduced as it might be.
Here's another piece of evidence.
If we return to that Northwestern study, they also broke out these IQ declines by age group.
And guess what age group has had the sharpest decline in IQs in this sort of period, starting in 2010?
18 to 22 year olds.
So what do we know about 18 and 22 year olds?
Two things.
They are the heaviest users of smartphones.
And they are the first generation to not have that formative experience of going through childhood education, primary education and post primary education without smartphones, which used to be this sort of neurological crucible where you practice concentration.
You come out of the schooling system and your ability to focus on abstract things has really been elevated.
That was one of the main skills.
Today's 18, 22 year olds have studied in.
You know 18, 22 years from the last decade has studied in that paper.
They had the smartphone aspect throughout all of that.
So they, they were the.
They had a notable and progress meant in attention ability that was probably more heightened than what we saw in other sort of demographics.
And they had their things go down the worse.
They had their IQ scars fall the fastest.
So we put all these pieces together.
There's a lot of things that might come together to explain to reverse flint effect, and the post literacy hypothesis has to be a part of it, right.
I mean, if we were still in a largely lexicographic area, I mean, a society, we would be smarter.
And moving on from that has and continues to make a difference.
But smartphones have added their own extra special dumbness spice on top of this Sunday of badness, which is we also struggle to concentrate and use the skills we already have.
So we're in a post-literacy society, but also a post-concentration society.
You put those together and we are accelerating our descent towards dumbness.
All right, so that's my idea.
But what I wanna do is because I think there's an opportunity here.
Right?
I mean on this show.
What I'm trying to do is not just give you ideas, but figure out what are the concrete takeaways that these ideas imply.
How can you, in other words like, what ideas can we draw from these ideas that you can put in the practice in your life, to try to find more depth in a world in which technology threatens to take that away?
So what I want to do now is move on to kind of adding this.
We've added some theme music, right, Jesse?
Yeah.
Some theme music for at the end of the deep dive, it's time for concrete takeaways.
You know what that music reminds me of?
What?
Like a high intensity bass fishing television show.
I can't you imagine like an opening montage where like guys are just like wrestling large bass out of the water and then like high fiving each other.
Yeah.
And like crushing a Bud Light and like catching another bass.
That's where that.
That's what I think about that music, which means it is a perfect fit for our concrete takeaways on subtle variations in the 35 item I car intelligent test.
All right.
What's our takeaways?
What does this mean for you?
Okay.
So if losing your ability to pay attention is making everyone dumber, if you cross train or systematically train your ability to maintain concentration compared to everyone else, you'll be getting relatively smarter.
So you have an opportunity here to basically take an IQ boosting pill.
You're not actually gonna get smarter, but you are going to be hurting your IQ less than most of the other people around you.
And so if you are relatively smarter and get relatively smarter compared to the people around you, obviously it's going to open up way more job opportunities, but it's also going to allow you to just appreciate nuances and information in the world.
It's sort of like a little superpower you can get.
So we can take our sort of IQ boosting pill.
Metaphorically speaking, if we can practically figure out how to counteract the post concentration society's pull on your ability to pay attention.
So I'm going to get really specific here.
I've got four things to tell you.
Number one to the extent possible, I want you to quit apps on your phone or your computer where the company who makes the app makes more money the more you use it right.
TikTok.
Instagram, any of those games that have like a bunch of coins that fall out when you press a button and you never paid for, and it's just there on your phone and you start playing it on the flight to Chicago and then you look up and you're in Chicago and you haven't moved from your seat and your leg is asleep.
Anything where your attention is what is valuable, get those off your phone.
That's just designed to degrade your short-term motivational system, the concentrate on something.
It's going to hyper-palatable, it's going to take that over.
Two for things that maybe fit that profile but you can't quit or delete because they have some uses you need to preserve.
Join the attention resistance.
This is an idea from my 2019 book, Digital Minimalism, which says basically Find a way, through using new rules and technologies, to make these technologies that have specific use cases you need to make them no longer hyper palatable.
Make them not a source of distraction in your life.
So for example, if you say, I need to use YouTube occasionally for looking things up, right?
Like this is a good reference library when I figure out how to change the oil on my minivan.
Great.
Get a browser plugin. only access it on the browser on app and get a browser plugin.
There's many that exist like this that hide the recommendations.
Now, YouTube is just a cool library.
You search for oil change.
You see the results.
They're all oil change videos.
You click on one.
You're doing an oil change.
And you don't see over on the right hand side.
You know how oil changes are part of the secret, the secret mega agenda to put microchips and Epstein's vaccines right.
You don't see those recommendations on the side.
You're just getting the oil change video.
That's joining the attention resistance.
You have to use Instagram for your business for like whatever reason.
We've got a post, because we have to post what's going on at our local bookstore, or something like that.
So people get news.
Fine.
Have a Google Doc where you put the information.
One of your employees once a day, if five o'clock takes that, puts it into a post and puts it up.
You never even see Instagram.
Right.
So hey, I'm getting used out of you Instagram without you being on my phone and me having again to.
You know, go on this short chain from like hey, my book store is open at five.
Like is five too late for my bookstore to be open?
Oh my God, is the oil change on my car part of a MAGA conspiracy to put microchips in Jeffrey Epstein's vaccines right?
Like you don't have to play that game anymore.
It's like I'm getting some advantage out of Instagram without having to deal with that.
All right, concrete takeaway number three, this is a huge one.
I've been really pushing this one.
It's a hard one.
I want you to hear me out on this.
When you're home, keep your phone in your kitchen.
Plug it in.
And that's where it is when you're home.
If you need to look something up, you go to your kitchen, look it up.
If you need to check, there's a text conversation going on.
You're making plans with your friends.
You got to go over there in the kitchen and see what's going on with the text conversation and sort of make your plans there and then go back to what you're doing.
If you want to listen to a podcast or whatever, AirPods.
And if you're in a mansion then I guess you can have your butler move it to another part of your house to plug it in.
I know Jesse has this issue.
So Jesse, your butler can move the iPod from your kitchen to the catering kitchen if you're in your basement fitness center, and then they can move it to the conservatory greenhouse when you're in your West Wing library.
But the point is, is it's plugged in in a location and not on your person.
This changes everything.
It's not a companion when you're at your house.
It's not no matter what I'm doing, I'm checking this.
I'm eating at dinner, my family, I'm checking it.
I'm watching TV, I'm checking it, I'm watching sports, I'm checking it.
I'm doing chores, I'm checking it.
I'm working out in between sets, I'm checking it.
When it's plugged in somewhere, you can't do that.
And once you've gone just three or four days without doing that, you still have all the advantages of it.
I can look stuff up or whatever, listen to the podcast when I'm doing my dishes.
But when it's not there to check, when you're bored, your brain adapts so quickly and says okay, that's not what happens when we're bored anymore.
That impulse goes away, your concentration ability, it jumps up.
That's a hard one, but it's a critical one.
By the way, it's what I've been recommending.
I've been giving writing a bunch of talks because it's back to school, talks about kids and phones, right.
What's the right thing to do with kids with phones?
And, you know, I have my standard rules.
A restricted smartphone should be when you get to high school.
Unrestricted smartphone that might have social media or other apps should be when you're 16.
But until you leave the house to go to college, your phone's in the kitchen when you're home.
It's not your property.
I'm loaning you a phone the family's paying for.
You can use it when you need to like coordinate with your friends or whatever.
You don't bring it up to your room.
You don't get to sit there and look at it while we're watching TV as a family.
You don't get to have it at the table.
This is not your property.
I checked a declaration of independence.
There is no mention of WhatsApp access in there.
I'm sorry, it sits here at home when you're here.
The greatest gift you could give to a teenager at home because they are stepping out of the post attention society.
And what's the effect?
You just gave them IQ pills.
This is as effective as hiring an expensive tutor in terms of like, the overall impact on, like their academic performance in high school and college, and beyond.
It's like the greatest gift you can give.
So keep your phone in the kitchen, keep your kids phone in the kitchen.
And if your kid is not in high school, take the phone back, because they really shouldn't have it yet.
Number four, train your attention, do this daily.
There's two main techniques I talk about for actually trying to improve your attention.
Both of these come out of my book, Deep Work, from 2016.
So yes, I've been beating on this drum for a while now.
Number one is these Roosevelt dashes, named for Teddy Roosevelt, who used to have this habit, especially even as a college kid, and beyond as well, where he would do work in short but ultra intense burst, where he would give it his absolute, complete attention.
The amount of work you could get done doing this was monumental.
He would read a book a day.
Go look at Teddy Roosevelt and concentration is crazy.
But those Roosevelt dashes are actually a great training mechanism.
And you should do it with a timer and you should start with 10 minutes and you take something hard that you want to do.
It could be doing a crossword puzzle or trying to figure out a new, complicated concept for work or school.
You set the timer and you start it and you, just you focus as hard as you can for that short amount of time and you really try to bear in like really hard.
Your brain wanders like bring it right back and you do that.
It's really hard, but you do that hard thing until it's not hard and then you add five more minutes.
So it's just like doing interval training with running, and the amount of distance you can sprint gets longer and longer as you keep pushing yourself this way.
The other way I've been talking about for a decade now to train your attention is you go for walks without anything in your ear and nothing in your pocket.
It's just you, your thoughts in the world around you.
You just practice being out there in the world with nothing but yourself to keep you company.
You get used to your own mind.
Now the bonus you add to this is you can maybe give yourself a particular problem you wanna try to work on in your mind while you walk.
I call this productive meditation.
And now you're really starting to play with things like working memory and the ability to sustain stable state things and working memory.
I have to put this thing here while I think about this and then bring this back again into the problem.
It's calisthenics your ability to pay attention to your mind's eye, to aim your mind's eye in a way that is focused, and to do so with sustained attention.
So you can train your attention.
So quit apps where people make money off you.
You don't have to be on these things.
Stop telling yourself you do.
It's kind of embarrassing to be on TikTok.
It's no longer kind of a cool trend that we're joking about.
There's no ha ha, just get off TikTok.
Come on, let's be serious.
The apps you do have to use join the attention resistance, put technology tools around it.
So like the addictive features are turned off and it's sort of like a middle finger to those companies.
It's fun.
Keep your phone in the kitchen, your kid's phone in the kitchen too, when you're home.
Hard but critical, trust me four days your life will be different.
And actually actively train your attention.
All right, those are my takeaways.
Now my bonus takeaway would be read more books, because we're going to post literary society, so that'll slowly help your brain maybe operate better.
But these are the things, the attention is the thing where you have control over.
You read more books, your brain will get smarter, but still society around you is kind of dumb because no one's really reading.
But the attention thing, man, you can get real results fast.
Real results fast.
You will find yourself in a matter of months feeling smarter.
So I don't love the reverse Flynn effect, but there is an advantage there for those of us who know why it's coming.
The technology plays a big role because we can reverse the reverse Flynn effect.
And then a reverse of the reverse, I guess we're back to the original Flynn effect.
Is that how that works?
It's like a double negative.
That's the type of wisdom we offer here on this show.
So look, all the focus ability in the world will only do you so good if your circuits Oh, if your circuits are dull okay, never mind.
I was going to say, I had a really clever phrase there, but I'm going to take it.
I messed it up.
I think I've been using my phone too much.
It's all good.
So I like your clarification for the quid apps that make money off your attention.
So that wouldn't necessarily apply to like the New York Times app, right?
No.
Because you pay much of the subscription.
Yeah, yeah.
So you got to get into the economics.
So the New York Times, I mean, they want you to like the app.
Yeah.
Right.
So that's where they have games and other stuff in there, so that you, When you come up and see your credit card statement, you're like oh, do I still want to pay this much for the New York Times?
No, I like the New York Times, right?
But they don't care in a given day.
They don't make more money necessarily.
I mean they have ads but really like their goal is for you to love the app, not to keep you on there as much as possible.
The apps that need to keep you on there as much as possible.
You know it because they suffer from like we talked about in an earlier episode that Corey doc trial and shitification.
But like, if that's how they make money, the apps over time get worse and worse.
Like the experience actually gets worse because they're trying to like, exploit and keep you on there and exploit every last ounce of your attention.
Streaming services are also in that similar situation.
Like Netflix, they want you to not cancel Netflix, but it doesn't really matter to them.
If you use it 10 hours today or you use it 30 minutes every day or 30 minutes a week, it's just they want you to feel like it's important to have it.
So they don't try to be addictive.
YouTube wants you to use as much as possible.
TikTok never wants you to put it down.
Instagram doesn't want you to put it down.
X doesn't want you to put it down.
They want you to be on there and stay on there.
So those are the ones I worry about.
Yeah, I've taken your advice about the phone in the kitchen like years ago.
The thing that you realized is like say, you go to a hotel or something and it's in your bedside, you know, just because the room's not big.
You don't check it that much.
Right.
So you've lost that instinct when you're at home.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I still keep it away.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So there you go.
So it changes the way you think about it.
Yeah.
It doesn't really take long.
So there you go.
I mean, I talk about attention a lot, but this is like another reason why you should care about it.
I'm not interested in just like abstract moralizing.
Attention is good and distraction is the tool of the devil.
I read that whole book.
We talked about Thoreau's Acts on the show.
That was all about the moralization of attention in sort of mainly 18th and 19th century writing.
We don't need to moralize attention here.
I don't want you to be dumber because your life will be better if you're smarter.
So we're getting kind of concrete here.
All right.
So there you are.
We're becoming dumber, but you don't have to be.
All right.
So.
We've got a good show ahead.
So if you're tuning in this is your first time tuning in don't tune out, because let me tell you what we still have coming up ahead here.
We've got questions from listeners on issues surrounding trying to live and work deeply in the world.
It has more and more technological distractions, including a call and a case study, where you're going to find out about someone who struggled, was always doing too many projects and made progress on none of them.
Took a very specific piece of advice from my writing.
And now has succeeded immensely with a single creative project and is being like praise for this album.
She did.
It's a great story.
And then in the final segment I want to talk about cell phones and schools, because we're back to school season, some interesting dynamics about what's going on there.
So all of this is coming up.
But first we're going to do the thing that most people tune into this show to hear, which is a word from our sponsors.
Here's the thing, Jesse.
And I'm tired of you doubting me on this.
You doubt me on this all the time.
You need a VPN.
Jesse hates to hear that from me.
He says, I don't need a VPN.
I want people to violate my privacy, because this is a it's a cruel world and I just I'm nihilistic, right.
That's Jesse not wanting VPNs.
It's crazy.
The rest of you need a VPN.
Here's why you need a VPN.
When you connect to the internet, your traffic is contained in little bundles called packets.
And the specific information you're sitting around the internet might be protected in encryption.
But the address, like who is this information going to?
That's in the plain text.
So anyone who can look at your packets knows what sites and services you're using.
So at home.
This means, like your internet service provider knows all the sites and services you're using.
If you're at a public place using Wi-Fi.
It's like simple apps you can run on your computer.
That allows you just to use your radio on the computer to see like what sites and services are people near you accessing.
A VPN protects you from this.
And the way it does this is, instead of just directly accessing a site and service, you take the message you want to send to the site and service, you encrypt the whole thing and you send it to a VPN server.
It unencrypts it and talks to the site and service for you, encrypts the answer and sends it back.
So now what does your internet service provider find out?
It's just that you're talking to a VPN.
What is the guy who's looking at the packets in the coffee shop?
There's a lot of meanings for that, but I mean the technical meaning.
What is he finding out?
Nothing other than you're accessing a VPN.
So that is how you gain back privacy.
They use the internet without a VPN is like disabling mute on Zoom.
Sooner or later someone is going to learn something about you that you didn't mean to share.
All right, Jesse.
So stop telling me that we don't need VPNs.
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All right, Jesse, let's get to some questions of our own.
First question's from Sam.
I'm an executive on the West Coast struggling to reclaim morning hours from meetings, as my East Coast colleagues often schedule them.
Do you have any advice on how I can incorporate more deep work hours?
Yeah, it's a tough issue because if you're on the West Coast and you have East Coast colleagues, even if they're trying to wait till their mid-morning or midday to schedule meetings, those are still going to fall at the beginning of your day.
And most people don't do that.
They just used to scheduling meetings whenever and have one at nine, right?
That's now a six I am meeting on the West Coast, right?
So it is a big problem that West Coast people who work with East Coasters have.
I have two things to recommend here.
One start adding some of your own meetings here calendar meetings with your esteemed colleague Dr Deep PhD.
What I mean by that is just meetings for you to do deep work.
Not every day.
You're not gonna get away with saying hey, I can't ever meet until like noon, East Coast time, but just throw some meetings on your calendar for working on particular projects without disruption.
And then, when it comes time to schedule meetings with your East Coast colleagues, use whatever standard meeting scheduling tool that your office or organization uses and just have those meetings with Dr Deep PhD show up on there like any other meetings.
It's like, yeah, let's meet, here's my calendar, choose a spot.
And some spots are already taken up.
They don't know that that's a meeting for you to do deep work, versus just a meeting with like another client.
And then so they find meetings that work in the space that remains.
If your company doesn't use a meeting scheduler, you should like, yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Here you go.
Here's my calendar.
Here's a schedule once link, just like grab any time that works for you.
Let's make this easy.
And these meetings with Dr. Deep just sort of show up as time that you're not available.
So just make, just put the time aside and see what happens.
It turns out like, hey, Everything else will work itself out.
You've gone through other periods of your career where you've had projects going on that take up certain times in the morning.
You've had those schedule around them.
So schedule time for yourself.
The other thing that a lot of West Coast workers have to do that have East Coast headquarters is they have to learn how to do afternoon depth.
That's hard because often your energy is lower in the afternoon.
But the advantage of your afternoon is that the East Coast is logged off.
So it could be, in theory, good time for deep work, but you're going to have to do a lot more effort to get good deep work out of your afternoon.
Then you would have to do good deep work in the morning.
So one of the things you're going to have to do is clear out your cognitive context.
You're going to have to recharge your body and reset your mind to a mode of concentration.
So this is going to mean a ritual ritual ritual.
You're really going to have to lean into these.
If there's a separate location you can go to to do your afternoon depth like maybe shut down at your office and then go to another place to do your afternoon deep work, that will help.
If there is a sort of exercise type thing you can do to sort of reset your body and your energy rhythms, that will really help as well.
The sort of two o'clock like quick workout, hit the bike and then go straight to deep work in another location.
That will make a difference as well.
Make that location exotic and difference.
Your brain is like, oh, this is a deep workplace.
It's the shed out back at home.
It's the conference room across campus.
It's going to the work in the city.
It's going to the museum.
And working as like a quiet spot at the museum, where there's not usually people, and sit there with my laptop to do the work.
Make it exotic so your brain thinks of it as different.
Build nice rituals around it.
Hey, here's like a nice drink I have with it.
If you don't drink caffeine, like a non caffeine drink or like a sort of healthy snack that you like or that there's like a really nice walk you do.
You have to do a lot of work to make afternoon depth work.
But if you're a West coaster that has to do East Coast schedules, That's really worth it because you could probably get two to three good hours a day if you have the right rituals.
It won't be that hard to schedule because it's past the East Coast office's times.
That's my two recommendations.
All right, who do we got?
Next question is from Barbara.
While doing routine tasks, I always have music or short self-help audio clips playing in the background.
Does my habit of filling all quiet moments with media prevent me from being fully present and mentally clear?
I usually flip that around.
This is the difference between the existential and the universal.
So is it a problem that there exists a lot of moments in which you have background music or content on while you're doing routine tasks?
No.
Would it be a problem if, in all such moments, you have some sort of background media or content going on?
Yeah, that would be.
The existential is not a problem.
There exists times when you're doing this.
It's not bad in isolation. universal is a problem.
If you never have time alone for your own thoughts, then you will sort of lose touch with like yourself and your ability to concentrate in self-reflection as well and just starting to get to know yourself better and having the nervous system calmness of just presence in a situation.
So the right way to think about this, I think, is not reducing background media.
It's adding solitude periods.
So I'm going to just proactively add into my schedule enough times alone with my own thoughts in the world around me that I feel like I'm getting a benefit.
And then I don't have to care about the other times.
If I want to listen to a podcast, if I want to put on music or whatever, like I don't have to self-recriminate because I've added positively enough time for self-reflection that I don't have to worry about what I do in the other times and I can you know.
I assume just listen to my episodes again and again and again, because that's what you should be doing.
All right.
So that's what I say.
So you need solitude, but you don't need your whole life to be in solitude.
Same thing with boredom.
We talked about this with boredom.
I'm not a big boredom fan.
I mean, boredom is a deep drive that humans evolve to try to get us to do useful things.
Otherwise, we just go in energy conservation mode like a cat.
And until we get like hungry or thirsty, we would just sit there in the sun.
Boredom got humans to use this big brain we evolved to actually go up and do things.
And this is all culture and civilization was built on this.
Boredom like listen to it.
Go do stuff when you're bored, but.
You know, to be bored sometimes is pretty good, just so that your brain learns you're not always stimulated.
And then when you're away from your phone or something, it doesn't go crazy.
So it's another example where the thing it's not like okay, you should spend all of your time bored, but you should have some boredom.
Same thing.
You shouldn't spend all your time just sort of thinking, with your own thoughts being meditative and philosophical, but you should have sometimes like that on a regular basis.
So that's the way I think about it.
It kind of gets me thinking about this week.
I was a big transition for me because it's basically the start of the NFL and I felt factoring eight hours of NFL content to stay like somewhat in the know.
This is a good.
I have a new theory about the reverse flint effect and involves the NFL season and the amount of content that's available.
When we were kids, what You could watch Sunday, one game, Monday, you could watch a game.
And I guess if you had the radio on on the way to school you could hear like a little bit of a local sports radio guy who wouldn't be that good.
Actually, no, we had sports center.
So we had ESPN growing up.
But that was the big thing.
You had sports center, was it?
Like you could wait till sports center and you would see like seven minutes of content on like your sport and that's it.
Yeah.
What eight hours of content are you consuming?
There's multiple podcasts, multiple mad dog spots.
Those are long spots anywhere from a half an hour to an hour.
Yeah.
And but you can listen on the app on demand, but I mean, there's a lot.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When I make my little pics with my buddies, I need to be informed. are you in a league?
There you go.
And I'll just say about that.
But that's probably I don't know.
That's good content.
That's complicated.
I was listening to content.
It's entertaining.
I mean, the NFL is so entertaining.
So my boy Grant Paulson here in DC was watching a clip of him talking to.
He has on a real.
I don't know who he is, but a football expert, a coach expert that talked through strategy for the commanders.
And man, like Grant Paulson knows a lot about football.
This guy is melting his brain.
He pulls up these diagrams and he's just going on and on and be like well, you have to understand.
See what happens with Devo Sanders.
Is we're going to have like a force nickel configuration?
But if you go on the force nickel configuration and he then moves in motion, you're going to have to pull in a linebacker to cover him.
But a linebacker is going to have probably the worst coverage player on the field.
And now you've created unfavorable mashup.
So like I get it.
Yeah, it's complicated content.
If I was doing a Nat's podcast right now, a Washington Nationals podcast, I'd be like it'd be huge like intro music and be really complicated.
And it would like the camera would swoop in on like MLB network and I'd be sitting there and be like oh, we go deep, deep in the strategy of like what the Washington Nationals need to do.
And then would zoom in on me and I'd be like, stop losing.
You're playing bad, play good, good baseball.
The white things, the bases.
Don't leave that white thing in such a way that the other people tag you because you're doing that a lot.
Hit ball, win more, stop losing.
And then it'd be like a 10 minute outro sequence and that'd be the episode.
There you go.
All right, who do we got next?
Next up is Emily.
My company uses a ticketing system.
Our protocol has us respond in 30 minutes to confirm that a ticket has been created.
Some days I have lots of tickets, whereas other days I've hardly any.
On quiet days, I work on personal projects.
My problem is that it's difficult for me to regain my focus on these personal projects after busy days.
All right, so there's a specific advice for this issue, and then I have a bigger point about ticketing systems.
Do you know what that means?
By the way, you think people know like what she says ticketing system.
You should probably explain it.
Right.
You know, because I've been talking about it for years, but yeah.
So it comes out of IT.
And so it's a way when someone has like an issue they want to send to the IT department, like my laptop's broken, instead of just calling or sending an email, because now just this is on the man, stuff just comes in and the IT department has to try to juggle different things.
They invented these things called ticketing systems, where I submit my problem and it generates a ticket and the ticket has a number and the ticket has a status.
And so if I'm on the IT process, if I'm an IT person at the company, I can see like a whole list of the open tickets.
These are all of the issues that people have sent in.
And I can select one to work on and change its status.
Oh, it's in progress.
Or if I have a question about it, I can write back here.
So I have a question for the person and they might respond that all of this gets stored on the tickets, all in one place.
So now, if I'm the IT person, I'm not just juggling an inbox with like stuff coming in and people randomly bothering me like hey, did you look at this issue yet?
I'm just dealing with tickets.
All right, I'm gonna take this ticket.
Let me make progress.
Okay, now I'm stuck.
I'm waiting for a response.
I'll mark that, let me move to this ticket.
On the other hand, the people who are submitting the issues can just ask, like what's the status of my ticket?
And they're like, here's where it is.
Someone's working on it, right?
So it was a way of organizing effort with IT departments that reduced unnecessary cognitive context switching and actually really boosted productivity of those departments.
I use this example of my book World Without Email to try to emphasize the implicit productivity tax that most people pay by working in a collaboration environment in which you have to constantly be monitoring ad hoc unscheduled messages and answering them on the manage they come in.
When you get rid of that, a lot more gets done.
Okay, so this person is saying, this is a Emily.
Some days, there's not a lot of tickets to answer.
So she has time to work on personal projects.
And then other days there's a lot of tickets to answer and it might be okay.
I've had a couple of busy days.
It can be hard for her to return to her project.
So there's a bigger point here, which is when you have a project that requires focus, how do you sort of shut down that project in such a way that when you need to open it up again later, you can do so with minimum effort or overhead?
And it really does matter how you shut down a project, especially when it requires deep work.
It matters how you shut it down when it comes to how easy it is to pick it up again a couple of days later.
But if you just stop in the middle of something like a lot of loose ends And then you come back a few days later, you're going to feel a lot of resistance to loading that project back up because your mind is going to have to recreate a complicated cognitive context before you can really make progress on it.
And that takes a lot of effort.
You have to have to sit there and like, try to remember everything that was going on, recreate where you were.
This whole time it has to try to resist other distractions to try to stop that cognitive context or pollute it from loading in a pure way.
In your mind, like that seems like a lot of effort.
And if this isn't really urgent, I don't want to do it.
So what you want to do is shut down the product in such a way that it's easier to load up.
So it's worth always taking some times to tie up loose ends, even if you have to come back and stay a little late that day to tie up to loose ends, like maybe some tickets came in and you got interrupted.
Come back and tie up to loose ends.
You want to tie up to loose ends.
You want to have, if possible, a narrative that you're leaving for your future self.
Here's where we are and here's what needs to happen next.
It's useful if you can identify the very next thing that needs to be done and maybe have some of the pieces already in place so that you can hit the ground running.
There's a lot of stories of famous writers who would do things like this with their manuscripts.
They would sort of finish what they're working on and sort of start the next paragraph, so you can kind of hit the ground running like read through that paragraph and then just keep writing.
And by reading up to the point where you stopped, you would get your attention going.
So do something similar.
Like, okay, this is where we're picking it up is answering this question.
And here are the three websites that are relevant to it.
And we have to figure out, like, this is where I was stuck.
Now when you load that product up a couple days later, you're like, okay, that's exactly where I am.
I'm trying to answer this question.
This was the information I'm using and where I was stuck.
Okay, I can get back into that quicker.
It's easier to pick back up.
So tie up loose ends and set yourself up with a narrative about where you are and clarity about exactly what you need to do next.
It'll be easier to start deep work on that project the next time.
My bigger point about ticketing systems is I've long I haven't quite figured how to do this, but I've long been a proponent of the idea that we should have more communication protocols like this outside of just IT people.
As it gets you out of this sort of informal on-demand ad hoc communication patterns that we do with email and Slack.
It has a central place where the all of your communication threads are stored.
All the communication relevant to one project is in one place.
It has a status that people can check in on is like, how is this thing going that I asked you about?
It gives you as the person doing work, more of a pull model.
Okay, when I'm done with what I'm doing, I then look at my ticket dashboard to select what the work on next.
That's very different than the interrupted push model that we use with email and Slack, which is I'm working on this, but someone can push in something else on my plate with an email that I need to answer because otherwise it'll get lost.
That's way, way, way worse from a cognitive performance standpoint.
So I think there's a product to be built here that's like a more user-friendly ticketing type system, which means when I bother you about something, there's a number and maybe we can hide that.
We can make the product nicer, but there's like, here is this issue.
I can check on the status. they haven't looked at it yet.
Okay, they saw it and they put a quick note like I see this, I've asked so and so to give me an answer.
I'll let you know when I hear back.
Like, so you know what's going on.
You don't have to ping someone.
You don't have to wait for a response.
If you send a follow up or they respond to you, it's all tracked in one place.
You can see the whole conversation right there.
And when you're working, you can just come to this ticket dashboard and we'll call it something different in our project.
So it's not so nerdy.
But you come to this dashboard and you say oh, here's some new projects, here's some updates to these projects.
It gives you a more sort of autonomous way of navigating and communicating about work.
I think there's a space there for a cool product.
All right, what do we got?
Next up is Bart.
I'm a full-time software engineer with a background in machine learning and computer engineering, aiming to transition into digital management consulting.
I've had little success of my applications and feel stuck.
Should I continue on my current learning path, hoping that a better opportunity will arise, or should I consider pursuing an MBA or something similar degree to strengthen my profile?
Are there's two things in here that worry me, Bart, one, the word hope?
Like, hey, should I just hope this will work?
I don't want you hoping.
Let's find out.
I'm going to tell you how to do that in a second.
Second, so should I just go get a graduate degree?
Because I don't know what else to do.
Jesse knows I hate that.
Graduate degrees are not a default behavior, because you don't want to spend like a little bit more time figuring out like what really matters in your field.
It's a lot of time and a lot of money.
You have to have a specific reason to get them.
I think what you're missing here, Bart, is an evidence-based plan.
So you're saying, I don't know, I feel stuck.
I just hope that I'll maybe do better if I keep working on the stuff.
Find out why your applications are failing.
Get the truth, the unvarnished truth from someone in this industry that you know.
Why would someone like me not get hired?
Why are people not looking at my application?
What type of applications would you look at and why?
Get the real answer.
Don't invent an answer or have a theory.
Get the real answer.
Now, here's the thing.
You might love what you hear.
Like, oh, I'm just missing this one thing.
I could go figure that out in two months and then I'm gonna be super attractive.
I didn't realize that this one thing was messing me up and you could love the answer or you could hate the answer.
You could be like, oh God.
I see.
I'm never going to get these rules.
They're hiring only out of MIT for these digital consulting jobs with Core 6 CS majors who had all A's.
And they're not even sneezing in the direction of my applications.
There's no way I can fix that.
OK, this is not a good idea.
I'm going to have to have another plan.
But at least you know you should always be acting from evidence.
So get the answers to the question of why you're not getting these jobs, the real answer.
And we'll use that to make our plan.
In fact, here's three people recently from a similar background who had an MBA from a school of this caliber or hire, and we hired them.
So if you got an MBA from a school of this caliber or hire, we would hire you.
Then, okay, then you could think about, is it worth the expense in time?
And if it is, then you know why you're getting that MBA.
That's when you would do that.
So we call this evidence-based planning.
It's one of the things that's going to go into my deep life book.
You got to make these concrete plans for making progress on a specific objective.
They have to be based off of the reality of how the world works, not what you want to be true, not off of hope and not off of like well, maybe I should just get a graduate degree.
You don't stumble into things with graduate degrees.
You have a specific reason why you're getting that particular degree.
The only other thing I'm going to say here Bart, is also make sure that you've done some lifestyle syndrome planning and you haven't just fixated on digital consulting as like a thing you heard about and then just sort of convinced yourself like hey, if I did this, maybe I'd be happy.
And then it just becomes a self-fulfilling, almost abstraction, right?
Like there's this thing digital and that's what I'm doing.
If I could do that, that's what I'm focusing on.
And you haven't even really stopped to ask, what do I want my ideal lifestyle to look like?
And then what role does that play in that?
Is that part of a overall plan for systematically moving closer to this ideal lifestyle?
Or is it just sort of like a random thing I came up with?
So make sure you've updated your lifestyle centric plan and that this still makes sense as well.
So evidence-based planning LCP, the whole thing, to make sure that you're not just fixating on like a random thing because you need something to fix it on.
All right, who do we have?
Next up is Karen.
I just achieved one of my grand goals, a 10 year track law professorship.
I want to take advantage of this fresh start to get really intentional about my planning and time management systems.
How should I treat this blank start?
So here was the one confusion I had.
And I don't know if it was clear in the longer question, Jesse.
Law school professorships are, they're weird to me.
Like sometimes it's what you all you're doing is being a law school professor, but sometimes these law school professors also practice law.
He was getting, or she's getting, out of law.
Okay, so she's leaving.
She's transitioning from what she called the constant fire drills.
I think she said at some point that she faces as a lawyer.
She's leaving that to go in the tenure track academia.
Okay, Karen, you're gonna find it in a lot of ways easier in some ways harder.
So the ways you're gonna find it easier is you don't have to, you won't be on for nine 10 11, 12 hours a day billing and seven and a half minute increments.
Like you don't have to be locking in your brain and just squeezing out activity without break.
When you're a professor, if you leave for an hour to go see a friend, no one yells at you.
Like no one comes in and is like, these are billable minutes.
Like what's going on here?
No one cares.
No one cares.
I just appear for months at a time.
No one notices.
I put a mannequin.
It's a true story.
What I do is I put a mannequin in my office and I have an old wiper motor so that it kind of moves back and forth.
And for like a couple of weeks my department chair will just walk by and be like oh, Cal must be in there.
I see someone moving behind the door and I'll be gone for a month.
No, it's not true.
I'm not gone for months at a time.
But the point is it's your time.
No one's billing you.
It's up to you.
Write cool papers, teach good classes.
However you want to do that, get it done.
So if you're a lawyer, what I would suggest doing is like here's what I would keep from your lawyer life.
The ability to okay I'm during this time, I have to do this thing and this is my time to work on this client and needs to get done.
I'm gonna lock in and get it done.
Time block and keep that sort of intensity to get the class prep done and then make sure you're making progress, like whatever research you're doing.
If you're doing that, I don't know, you need four hours a day outside of like the classroom time.
And so my other advice is don't feel guilty about that.
And right, I would spend the first semester just like work on your classes, don't do any research, just like walk around the campus, enjoy the students, write cool lectures, you know, and then you can kind of add some research.
In terms of specific systems and do time block planning.
That matters in academia because the work will fill the space.
But if you have a time block plan, you realize you don't need as much work as you thought, as much time as you thought.
You definitely need quotas.
So the thing about academia is that there are certain things that you need to do.
They will be offered to you that you need to say yes to, at least sometimes, because it's just part of being a good academic citizen.
But you might have so many of these requests coming in that you can't say yes to all of them.
Like you need to do some reviews of papers, but you can't say yes to every request to review a paper.
You need to sit on committees, but you can't say yes to every offer to sit on committees.
So have quotas.
There's only papers.
Review how many recommendation letters I write, how many committees I sit on, how many program committees I'll be on, how many students I supervise.
Set quotas are the stuff that's important.
So you're doing the stuff that's important, but then you have a limit on how much of it you do.
And when you get past that limit, you say, look, I love this activity.
I do a lot of it, but I've hit my quota.
So I can't help you out this semester.
So have quotas.
They make a big difference, definitely in academia.
Use autopilot scheduling for all the autopilot stuff.
So in particular in teaching, there's a lot of stuff that happens regularly.
Like I have to prepare Lectures, I have to just type a grading.
I have to like stuff that happens week in, week out when, where and what you do, just have it auto scheduled on your calendar.
Don't even think about it.
Like yeah, like after lunch, I go to this library and that's when I do my grading.
I do that on Thursdays because they handed their essays on Wednesdays.
Like autopilot it, it makes your life easier.
And it also means, like when other things fall into your schedule, it's not going to steal the time you need to get the basic repeated stuff done that you need to get done.
And then I would have communication protocols, especially for students.
You know, hey, here's how you get in touch with me.
We come to my office hours maybe have multiple email addresses, like an email address for class questions that are like, just for that, that's separate from what you use to talk to.
Like your community have a separate research address.
Like, so have communication protocols, read a role with that email.
You have a ton of autonomy as a professor, so you might as well lean into it.
But I think you're gonna find this job.
It'll actually stimulating and refreshingly not so grinding as law was.
And don't make it into a grinding job.
Enjoy the fact that it doesn't have to be.
It's been a year and a half since I've actually set foot on Georgetown.
I don't think anyone's noticed.
Not true.
Not true.
You were kind of talking about your office.
What does your office look like?
I have a lot of offices.
I have two offices at Georgetown now.
Your papers everywhere is kind of neat. decorate my office, man.
It's kind of depressing.
So I had my original office.
I had brought stuff in, I had a coffee maker and a table and a carpet and there was like a bookshelf and a certain place and what have you?
And then I moved offices because we renovated the floor or whatever, right before the pandemic.
And so I didn't decorate when we moved in.
And then I just lost that momentum.
And so it's kind of depressing.
It's undecorated.
I mean, there's like this weird bookshelf in there that just has random books on it.
Then I have on the shelf behind me, my desk is like a bunch of my books lined up.
There's a true story.
Segment producer from the Today Show did that because they were interviewing me and they were shooting B-roll in my office.
And they're like I think it's going to look better if there's something back here, because your office looks like a place in which a monk committed suicide.
So we need to make this look more interesting.
So they took a lot of books of mine off my shelf and they set them up behind like so that the shot of me at my desk would at least have something in the background.
And that's been there ever since.
So it's really depressing.
I don't even have any degrees on the wall, though I will say it's why do you have two offices?
Well, so OK, I have another office in which I didn't know until recently.
So this one I'm excited about.
I haven't seen it yet.
So there's a Georgetown.
I'm a computer science professor, but I'm also a founding faculty member of the Center for Digital Ethics, right?
So a lot of my work at Georgetown now is about technology and its impact.
So the Center for Digital Ethics is headquartered in this cool new building by the law school campus.
So it's down by the Capitol.
Oh, that's Narragansaga.
Yes, Narragansaga.
Yeah, it's a couple blocks off North Capitol.
Yeah, it's real, real close to like the NPR headquarters, Union Station and the Capitol, and the double are in the double.
Oh, the restaurant?
Oh, yeah, meet up there.
So anyways, the point is, I have an office there too, which I haven't seen yet, but like that's, it's cool down there because I can take the metro there.
I was just going to say that.
Yeah, which is nice.
And you can see the capital from the building probably not from my office, but there's certain rooms in the building where and the public policy schools down there and the law schools down there.
So yeah, so I have two offices.
There, and I have an office here, and I have two offices at home.
You've got to spruce up your office on the main campus.
I don't have my diplomas up, but you know what?
I remember reading this really interesting paper years ago, when I was writing how to become a high school superstar, where I got deep into the psychology of impressiveness.
It's a cool book, by the way.
I always recommend people read it, whether you're going to college or not.
And one of these studies I found was on counter signaling, where not bragging makes you more impressive, right.
And they talked about like nature.
This happened some places where In nature, it's more raw.
The idea is, there's certain displays you can do to attract mates, but it also makes you more easily attacked by predators.
So there's kind of like this balance you have to figure out.
But in social psychology for humans, it shows up in subtle ways.
And there was this famous not famous study, a study that's famous to me because I thought it was very clever.
In the UC system, they randomly selected a bunch of professors of different ranks.
So like tenured professors, down to like non-tenure track professors.
And they called at night when no one was around.
They called their phones to get their voicemail.
To see how they describe themselves on their voicemail.
And the higher the rank or like the status of the professor, the less likely they were to say PhD.
So like me as like a full professor and this would be much more likely like, Hey, this is Cal.
I'm not here, like leave a message.
But if you were a lower rank or non tenure track, you'd be much more likely to be like.
This is Cal Newport, PhD.
You know, and so they were saying it's counter signaling that like, as you move your way up of like status hierarchies, you You would less mention that you want to put PhD I don't have PhD after my name on my books, because it's counter signaling.
It looks like you're trying too hard to prove.
So it becomes you signal less.
So anyways, that's how I explained the fact I've never had my MIT diplomas hung up anywhere.
I was like, I don't need to show my diplomas.
So I say, it's really because I'm lazy.
I don't need to show my diplomas.
Like that's, like I don't need to convince someone that I'm so highly educated and like I'm at the top, I can't get any higher in academia.
I'm at the highest rank you can get.
So I'm not going to go out of my way in any way to indicate my training or whatever.
You should at least bring back the rug and the coffee maker.
Yeah, the coffee maker broke.
And someone took it.
I gave the table to someone else.
I have a whole plan, but no, I got to decorate.
I've got a whole plan to continue to change the office here that I'm renovating.
I got to finish that plan first.
Yeah.
And then I'll start working on my offices.
I should make that office cool.
It's really interesting that people, by the way, like sharing about my office decoration.
We have a case study.
We do.
All right.
I want to do that just so we can hear the case study music.
The music still makes me think about the case study then starting with just straightforward brutal violence.
Because I love that contrast.
Here's what they don't tell you about the feel of blood on your hands.
It's slippery, like an eel.
That's what I thought.
They looked at the body of the bus driver.
Okay.
I just think it would be a funny contrast is what I'm saying is from that music.
But that's not what our current case today is actually about.
It's written by Rebecca. who writes to say, I've always had trouble committing to one thing.
I went to art school, worked at galleries, did freelance reporting, designed jewelry and more.
Meanwhile, I'd been writing songs since high school and releasing an album every eight years.
My songs are lyric focused, but I found lyrics excruciating to write.
So I took forever to finish them.
At any time I was working on at least three ambitious unrelated projects.
This reminds me, we should find, I have it somewhere, the CD that my high school band cut.
Should play that on the air.
I have it somewhere.
I know we're going to find a CD player.
Let's give you the harder part.
I was thinking the exact same thing.
We wrote the theme song for our senior prom.
I'm very proud of that.
It was a song we wrote and recorded.
All right, anyways, it's called Get Off Your Damn Phone.
All right, anyways, back to Rebecca's story.
At any given time, I was working on at least three ambitious, unrelated projects.
I attended the either jump ship before going fully deep with one discipline or wait until right before I deadline to finish a project with no time to bring it to its full potential.
True to form, I pivoted the web development a few years ago.
Then I read your books, digital minimalism, deep work, and slow productivity in succession.
While reading deep work, I took a lyrical seed I had jotted down a year earlier and started working on it every morning for one hour.
First thing I have to drop in my kid at school.
Some days I free wrote on the song's theme, other days I labored over one line.
Even if I disliked everything I wrote that day, it felt productive to just be ruling things out.
By working on one song consistently, I found I was always mulling it over in the back of my mind.
After two and a half months of doing this almost every morning, I solved the puzzle of the song.
The final verse came around in a pleasing way I could never have predicted.
Even though I spent more hours on these lyrics than on both songs, the overall timeline was shorter.
I decided this is the way for me to work, going forward, and finished another lyrically ambitious song soon after one that would later strike a prominent music journalist when he saw me open for a bigger act, and which would eventually lead to an album review.
After reading slower productivity, I realized I needed to solely focus on finishing the album.
I've been obscure for two decades, but since this album came out, people seem to be connecting with my music on a new level.
So here's some examples.
Uncut magazine called the album a triumph of dramatic storytelling.
Rolling stone called it fantastic and describe the second song I wrote during the One Hour Blocks as one of the wittiest and warmest parenthood songs you'll hear this year.
Aquarium Drunkard wrote before the future.
Is that rare thing an album that feels as satisfying and complete as a great short story collection.
I attribute this all to both a higher level of songwriting than before and my new willingness to focus on one project and see it through to the end, including the packaging and promotion phase.
Most importantly, I no longer dread working on lyrics.
I have faith that if I kept at it, I will eventually solve the song, and I feel hopeful that I can release my next album in two to three years instead of eight.
That's a great case study because what this tells us.
It's like what we talked about last week on the podcast, when we talked about work-life balance and what it takes to not be mediocre in the reality of that.
Is what really matters?
Relentless, disciplined work over a long period of time on a thing that you're trying to do really well.
So if we look at this Rebecca story here, Rebecca of course is a pseudonym for Taylor Swift.
I assume.
I assume.
If we look at Rebecca's story here, what she's saying is like okay, I worked on the hard thing lyrics.
I worked on the hard thing every day, even if I didn't want to.
I worked on the hard thing every day.
If it meant all I got done was writing one line or just ruling out things that didn't work.
Nothing worked today, but I'll still call that progress, because I now know new things that don't work.
And I do the hard work and I do it every day whether I want to or not.
That led to a rave review and rolling stone.
The stuff she has struggled for years and years to make progress on.
Now she was making progress on it.
That's hard work, that's her litmus discipline, that's diligence, but you know what it's not?
Hard to do in the sense of long grinding days.
Hard to do, in the sense of I have to sacrifice almost everything else in my life to make this happen.
Hard to do, in the sense of I don't sleep anymore or like I have to cut off all ties to anything that I value.
No, it's two hours a day.
The magic of relentless deep work is not in what you do in any one day.
It's how much you did over the last year.
And when that's your game, I wanna aggregate a large amount of actual deep work on hard stuff that matters over a year or two years.
What you do in a particular day doesn't really matter.
It doesn't have to be exhausting.
It doesn't have to be busy.
It doesn't have to be performative.
In fact, if you do that, you're gonna burn out and the amount of work you get done is gonna be much less.
They've never underestimate the power of like, in this case, an inspired mom and songwriter who's getting one to two hours a day in on the absolute hardest, most important stuff she could be doing creatively.
And eventually that worked.
So I think that's a great example.
Rebecca, I appreciate it.
We included the URLs for music in the show notes.
Oh, yeah.
Then the show notes.
Okay.
Yeah, this is Rebecca Schiffman.
Yeah, check that out in the, in the show notes.
Again, suited in for Taylor Swift.
I assume I'm Taylor Swift's muse.
I was trying to think about this the other day.
I think I could name, this is true, three Taylor Swift songs.
Could you name more than three?
I would recognize them, but I can name them.
I think I recognize three.
There's a song called Love Story.
There's a song that was in the Singing Animals movie that when my kids were younger they watched the Sing Off movie.
Sing shake it off.
These are older songs.
I don't know where newer songs.
And there's something like bad.
Yeah.
Something, right?
Yeah.
Bad.
Kidney Stone or something.
I don't know.
I don't know what it actually is.
You would probably, you could probably go on for two hours because you listened to a podcast on, I'm sure, about like Kelsey's.
I don't listen to their performance.
I don't listen to their podcast, actually.
No, just you probably hear about him from football context.
All right.
Anyways, I should know more Taylor Swift.
I thought you were talking about the Kelsey podcast.
No, I just mean you probably know more about her fiance than you do about her.
I guess is what I've seen.
Oh, yeah.
Isn't it a football player?
All right.
Do we have a call this week?
We do.
All right.
Let's hear it.
Good morning.
This is Kelsey from South Africa.
I want to start off by saying thank you to Cal for all the knowledge and insight that you've provided over the years.
In terms of your books and your podcast.
I've found it incredibly valuable and I appreciate your efforts around this.
I have a question when a person is in the weeds again after potentially working for a while and sort of losing control over all of the commitments and everything that one needs to pay attention to, How does one sort of put a stake in the ground?
And I need some strategies to understand how one goes through the review process to get back on track in terms of commitments, in terms of projects, et cetera.
Is there a framework or a strategy that you would recommend in order to put a stake in the ground, start again from scratch and understand exactly how to proceed from there?
Thank you so much.
Take it.
Kelso, I appreciate the question.
That's actually the second Kelso I've met.
It's unusual name, but that's the second Kelsey that I've met.
Kind of ironic that we also talk about Kelsey.
I was worried at first that there's like, yeah, this is Kelsey.
Why don't you know my fiance songs?
A, B, how do I hear this live?
Because you're recording the tape.
I just do.
Taylor has that technology.
C, I'm coming to fight you, which would be a highly rated episode.
All right, this is a good question.
There's two different types of resets here that matter.
There's like a purely professional reset which is just You know you're making progress at various, you're all locked in.
You have time blocking and multi-scale planning and working on different initiatives and keeping on control of stuff.
And then you go through like a super chaotic work period because there's like a crisis or something and all that flies out the window.
It's just like our hair's on fire.
We're trying to make this done.
And how do you turn back on your time management systems?
We've talked about it on the show before about how you recover.
I would point towards if that was the issue.
There was an issue, a podcast we did over the summer And maybe you remember this more Jesse, but we did a podcast over the summer where I talked about like going to a one-page productivity system, like a highly reduced productivity system.
And if you're looking for it, it's called one-page productivity.
And this would have been like six episodes ago.
Episode 6360.
Episode 360, so nine episodes ago.
So if that's the issue like look, we have a fire drill at work and so all of my systems are out the door just go in the summer mode and fall back on like a one-page productivity system that just sort of keeps your head above water, prevents major things from being missed and makes you have some sort of peace of mind.
And then, once you have a little bit of breathing room after the crisis dies down, then you can sort of one by one turn your systems on.
If it's a life overload, so it's not just work, it's all sorts of stuff going on.
Maybe it was like a health issue with you or someone in your family, or there's like a major disruption or a natural disaster.
It's just all sorts of stuff that can happen that throws your whole life in the chaos.
And like, I don't even know what, um, you know, doing anymore.
I'm just running from one crisis to another.
Maybe I've fallen into some unhappy, unhealthy substance habits.
Things aren't going well, but now the acute emergency has died down and I want to get out of it.
This is more of a reset, where I would look at something like I'm thinking about my deep life book, where part two is about what's this crash course and becoming a more capable human.
It's something I say, You can do this a lot of times in life.
Like when things go chaotic, how do you get things back?
So, without going into too much detail, because I haven't finished this part of the book yet, the basics of these sort of like I want to reset my whole life is you take four areas and you do one of the two things per area, one month at a time.
That's like the framework you want to think about.
I think I talk about this.
We re-released a podcast episode like this in August, where it was like four months to something, something.
So I've talked about, you might find a sample system like that if you go back a few episodes.
366.
But mainly what you wanna do if you're trying to reset your life is be like okay, it's gonna be like health, that's gonna be relationship.
If your religious is gonna be God fixing that relationship, and then it's gonna be social and then maybe work.
So like four or five things.
And then you just like, you go one by one.
Like I got to just throw a daily habit into each and just get that back, something that doesn't take that long, but just like a small exercise habit, a small like connecting with people habit, a small like spiritual habit, right.
And you go through like two to four weeks for each one thing.
Maybe you go through again.
Add a second thing.
You're not trying to jump into, like my ideally configured life where I'm making the maximum progress in my deal lifestyle.
It's like I am back in control, in the sense of I'm not where I want to be right now, but I'm taking action that's optional on things that are important, and that resets you.
And it's going to take six months, take four months, whatever it is.
And then you can say, all right, great.
Now, now I'm back in it.
Where do I need to start making major changes?
I got to get this whole thing, this whole problem out of here.
I need to shift this job.
And then you're sort of back in a mode of capability where you can start taking big action on optional things that are important.
So that's what I recommend.
All right.
Our final part, I want to check in on the cell phone and school's debate.
I think it's interesting now that we're going to do a school year to see where we are.
But first, something that's even more exciting.
I'm going to briefly mention a sponsor.
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And he actually mentioned the phrase about how one of the things he was sort of having the struggle with is making sure that he had SOC2 compliance.
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So I was like vanta and they asked me quietly to leave at that point because it's sort of weird that I jumped up and you'll, vanta.
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All right, Jesse, let's move on. our final segment.
So it's back to school season.
I am scheduled to give no fewer than three talks in the near future about kids and phones, which I'm happy to do because I feel super strongly about this topic.
So I've been sort of clued in with like, how is this back to school season going?
So I'm going to pull up an article here from the New York Times.
This was from earlier.
This actually came out in the spring, but it was looking ahead to this current back to school season.
The title of this article was, who's against banning cell phones in schools?
So inspired by the governor of New York, Kathy Hochl's push to have a New York be one of the latest states to have a statewide ban on self under schools.
This reporter was checking in who's for this and who is against it now.
This has been a long evolving issue, with alliances coming and going.
Mainly the groups of people who have been in favor of these bans have been growing, while those against have been declining.
So this is an interesting question.
Who is still against smartphone bans in schools?
This, by the way, is an article by Gina Belafonte.
All right.
So just a couple of quotes I want to read here.
Let's talk about the context for this article.
Governor Kathy Hochl's recent campaign is to ban cell phones in schools across New York.
At least eight other states, including Florida and Louisiana, have instituted restrictions of varying kinds.
In September, Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Phone Free Act, requiring every school district in California to devise a policy limiting the use of smartphones by July 2026.
So the smart statewide smartphone bans in schools are spreading its blue states and red states.
There used to be a talking point.
I think killer rins was really pushing this that somehow this was like a Republican thing.
Blue States, red States, New York, California, but also Florida, also Louisiana.
Let's look at what's going on with New York's proposed ban.
In a rare instance of agreement between labor and government.
It is supported by the United Federation of Teachers, the Union representing New York City school teachers.
As Michael Mulgrew, the president of the UFT put it, it is simple.
And everyone knows what the expectation is, right?
So who's in favor of the cell phone bands, the state of New York, and the teachers unions.
And it's hard to get them to agree on almost anything.
So I think that's pretty impressive.
So who is left to be against these right now outside of like high school students who just like to have their phones?
This is the interesting point of this article.
So the reporter looks into this.
The constituents most opposed to all day phone bands are the mothers and fathers, who seem to be addicted to constant filial contact.
Twist, this is a twist for those of us who have been following this issue.
For so many years, the debate was between the data-driven academics and the theory academics.
So the data driven academics for the social psychologist and the childhood psychologist, the demographers and the economists who were looking at data and they care about data methodology.
This is people like John Heit.
This is people like Gene Twingy who are like look, I have no dog of this fight, but we're looking at this data.
This stuff is bad for kids.
We should get this out of schools.
Almost certainly is going to make things better.
And then the fight was always against.
There's another corner of academia who writes about technology.
Here's the framework that's dominant in our field right now.
And sort of my job is to sort of keep protecting this framework.
And those type of academics, they cared about things like techno determinism.
They didn't like the idea of just like a technology by itself could be good or bad.
They were much more interested in their frameworks, which were more person focused and about conflicting hierarchies of power, et cetera, et cetera.
They sort of like complicated postmodernism inspired, And so for a long time they just kept throwing up roadblocks for their other professors.
And at first the roadblocks were when Gene Twangay came out in 2017 and said by the way, there's a lot of these trends I'm seeing that are kind of bad.
And I think it's because of phones.
And at first, like, no, it's because of other things.
But then they look closer and said actually these trends start just when phones start, not when these other things started.
So they kind of moved on from that.
And then you have the social psychologists come in and say, oh, no, we're looking at this data.
And there seems to be these retrospective giant social surveys.
There's these correlations between heavy social media use and bad mental health outcomes.
And then the against the idea, there's like, no, our real complaint was not about the timing.
Our real complaint was these correlations are small and there's other correlations you can come up with.
And it just matters how you look at the data.
No one really knows what's going on here.
And then we got better at analyzing the data and they stuck around.
And then we got a lot of other types of study designs, like prospective studies and randomized control trials and self reports and natural experiments, and they all were pointing towards the same thing.
Oh yeah, these are bad. or teenagers.
So then the same people like that was, that's not really our complaint.
Um, I think they're complete.
Now is like well, maybe cell phones are bad, but you can't ban them because we're going to invent hypotheticals where there is, you know, a particular kid in a particular situation, where it'll be bad for that particular kid.
And the kid is marginalized and we get points because we came up.
We should get virtue points because we realized that could be a problem when you didn't.
So like, There's been, this has been the battle.
These professors fighting these professors.
These professors are like the data keeps showing this and these other professors keep throwing up different roadblocks.
Like, well, what about this?
What about that?
So this is the twist.
Who's really against these bands now is anxious parents.
And that's something that those of us who are in the academic argument maybe weren't paying attention to.
Let me read a little bit more of a quote here.
And Governor Hochl has spoken to aggrieved first grade teachers, who told her that they are overseeing classrooms full of children wearing smartwatches.
Mommy and Daddy were checking in all day long saying I miss you and can't wait to see you.
That's a parental need, she said, not a student need.
The continuation of these patterns, she worried, was bound to keep children from emerging as fully functioning adults.
I've heard the same thing in some of the talks that I give that part of the solution to getting kids off phones, especially in schools, is therapy for the parents.
And I get it, if you're prone to anxiety, I'm out of parent of three.
If you're prone to anxiety, This is a really good vector for anxiety.
I know about anxiety.
A great vector for anxiety is my kid and my kids like safety.
And you can ruminate on that six ways to Sunday.
And once you start ruminating on that, you start telling yourself all these stories of all these disasters are going to happen and that the only way to give yourself some peace is to be able to sort of be in touch with your kid and see, this is not a problem.
Unfortunately from a social utilitarian perspective, dooming an entire demographic to have to have these sort of highly distracted, low quality educational experiences so that a smaller group of parents can feel better.
It's just not the right trade off, right?
There has to be other ways to work on that anxiety.
The kids will be fine.
Your ability to contact them in the day.
It's not going to help.
Also, who are these new parents who are talking to their kids every day?
I know I have three kids, Jesse.
I think by the third kid.
We're like rolling them out of the car at the school as like we're on our way to celebrate school starting at like.
Would you call it Dubliner?
Is that the bar you like?
Yeah.
We're not, we're not sitting around.
Oh, poopsie, whoopsie.
I hope you're okay.
We're like, we got stuff to do.
I'm on the peloton.
The margarita.
There you go.
Sorry.
I thought that was interesting Jesse, that this is again.
I've watched some of these things.
You just you get a sense of the data early on.
And you're like, I see the way this is going.
And we're going to have to have this battle for a while.
And this has just been one of those issues.
Kids should not be on these things.
It's certainly not in school.
And almost everyone is now on board with this.
Most of the places of resistance are gone.
Again, there's still the professors who don't like techno determinism, the academics who are just now.
They're just throwing out random stuff.
I don't know.
They should have phones in school because you have a poopy head.
I don't know.
It's kind of like down to there.
I don't know.
But for the most part we're like They shouldn't have phones in schools.
Anxious parents is the next generation of things we have to deal with.
So there you go.
That's who's against phones and schools.
The article.
All right.
That's all the time we have for today.
Thank you for listening.
We'll be back next week with another episode and until then, as always, stay deep.
Hi, it's Cal here.
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