Ep 384: What Should I Read for a Deeper New Year? | Deep Questions with Cal Newport

This is the last time we're recording before Christmas, which means it's everyone's favorite time of the year.

On the Deep Questions podcast, our holiday episode.

This is when we let you, the listeners and viewers, take over the show.

So we're going to do a deep dive on the question that I probably am asked the most by you, which is what should I read?

We're going to take a little bit of a twist here.

What I'm going to do is talk about six books I pulled from my shelves.

That has what I think is deep wisdom for making your new year deeper, but none of them are self-help or advice books.

So these are books that were not intended for you to help you improve your life, but nonetheless can help you make massive and positive changes in your life as we head to the new year.

Then we're going to open up the phone lines and we have your calls one after another.

I haven't heard any of these in advance.

I don't know if you're upset or angry or mad or have deep questions or small questions.

We're going to get into it all because it is the holiday episode and you are in charge.

All right.

So I don't want to waste any more time.

As always, I'm Cal Newport.

And this is Deep Questions.

Today's episode, what should I read to start 2025 off right?

And we'll get into all of that right after the music.

All right, so here's our plan for this deep dive.

I literally just went through my bookshelves.

I have to pluralize that because I have many shelves and many libraries.

But I went to various locations in which I have many bookshelves and I pulled six books off the shelf that I all think have played an important role In my own development and my own quest for a deep life.

I want to briefly talk about each.

I didn't know how to organize these, so I decided I would just do them in publication order from the oldest to the newest.

I want to emphasize I don't like superlatives.

I'm not good at saying like here are the five best or here is the number one best.

So I'm not claiming these are the six best books to read to start off 2025 deeper.

They're just six books I think will help you do that.

They caught my attention.

They were meaningful for me.

All right.

I'm going to start with a book I talk about often on the show.

I'll hold each of these up to the screen since they're my books, my copies, as we talk about them.

I talk about this book often on the show.

I'll hold it up now.

We're talking about Thoreau's Walden. or Life in the Woods as the subtitle.

I have a lot of different copies of it.

This is my Dover Thrift Edition.

I also have an older version, an early 20th century version that I keep on my desk at home.

I once looked into, actually, Jesse, first editions, first printings.

Oh, God, they're expensive.

How expensive?

Many tens of thousands of dollars.

Really?

Yeah.

So, you know, we need a few more sponsors to make that possible, but Walden is an important book.

All right, so what's the deal with Walden?

What should you get out of it if you're going to read this?

It's often misunderstood.

I think people will say, oh, Walden was one of the first great nature writing books.

Now, it's true.

It has beautiful nature writing in it in a way that there wasn't a ton of before this book came out.

But that wasn't really the point of it.

Other people say no.

No, it's an argument for why you should specifically – leave civilization and go live in the woods.

And then those people, other people come in and like aha, I got you, because I heard somewhere that his mom did his laundry.

So he wasn't really living in the woods and that becomes a whole debate.

Not really what the book is about either.

It is instead, in my opinion, one of the first books to tackle the idea of lifestyle-centric planning.

This idea of let me try to fix an understanding of what I want my life to be like and then work backwards from that systematically to figure out how I get there.

We talk about that a lot on this show.

Even today, that is a bit of an unusual notion.

We tend to have ideas like why don't you follow your passion or make one radical change to improve your life?

But back when Thoreau was writing, man, that was a radical idea.

You didn't engineer your life in any way back then.

You had your place.

I'm at this socioeconomic status in this part of the world, this gender, this race.

This is what I do.

I'm not going to question it.

Thoreau wasn't having it.

There was enough tumult and opportunity and flexibility and unsettling of cultural convention going on in this sort of post-colonial era America that people began to ask well, wait a second.

If we can invent our own lives, what lives should we invent?

This is what Thoreau was doing in Walden when he went to sort of live in the woods by Walden Pond is he was running experiments.

So he was having this idea of like, OK, I want to figure out.

What is the base amount of money I need to spend?

To survive, like to have shelter and to have enough food that I'm not hungry.

And he goes through in the first part of this, and we can find it in the book.

The first chapter in here is called Economy.

There's a lot of these tables in here where he goes in with a lot of detail and has real detailed accounting of exactly how much everything costs for him to build that cabin and to plant the food he planted, etc.

Because his experiment here was what is the actual dollar amount it takes, so that I'm no longer struggling.

I have shelter and food.

And then he said, once I have that number – that's why he kept all those numbers careful.

Technically speaking, everything else I spend money on is optional.

It's for things I choose to spend money on.

So what's actually important and what's not?

How can I get the things in my life that are important without having to pay the price that I see other people here in Concord and where he lived are paying to get more money?

He was trying to figure out, once I know this is all I need...

How do I get the other things in my life that are important without falling in the traps like debt, or falling in the traps where you were conspicuously consuming things?

He's talking about Venetian blinds and copper pots.

They required you to work all the time to pay for.

And then what was the point?

It was like these lifestyle design experiments and like what is actually needed.

That's why he says I went out there to confront what it means to live deliberately and then say okay if, if that's what I need, it doesn't cost me much to survive.

But then how can I very carefully add back in other things in my life?

So I don't end up with like three mortgages on a giant farm that I have to work 40 hours a day, you know, or 60 hours a day because I need all that much farm produce to try to afford like, my nice carriage or whatever.

So his idea was not, oh, we should all go live really simply in the woods.

That was just to get his baseline.

What's my baseline I can live off of?

And then he could start experimenting with what should come on top of there.

And a lot of the book is him riffing on these ideas of what's important in life and what's not.

And how do you figure out?

You know how can you get those in your life without falling into the traps of other sort of things?

How have we gone astray?

So it's a lifestyle-centric planning guide.

The very first, one of the very first, I think, sort of true deep self-help type thinkers was Walden.

And that's why this book is important.

You can run similar experiments in your own life.

What really matters?

And then, how do I get the stuff on top of that now?

How do I go forward once I have a baseline of survival, adding good stuff, without having to, at the same time, fall into the traps of bad?

So important book.

Next one I picked off the shelf.

I don't even have a cover for this anymore.

You can see I have bookmarks in.

I've used it and cited it so many times.

This is William Lee Miller's book, Lincoln's Virtues.

William Lee Miller is an academic Lincoln historian.

He writes in kind of an older, kind of cool Southern style.

But this book is best described as a moral biography book. of Abraham Lincoln.

So what he's actually writing about in this book is how the various moral precepts upon which Abraham Lincoln increasingly lived his life was known for.

How did he develop those?

What did he encounter?

What did he read?

Who did he encounter?

What experiences did he have?

I think it's a very clever idea for a biography and it's one of the more interesting.

Of the many, many Lincoln biographies I've read one of the more interesting ones.

What I got out of that book and what you might get out of it too is is what goes into actually developing moral intelligence.

Because what Miller points out is it's not just you're born moral, you're not.

Or we all have the same moral intuition fully formed, and it's just a matter of whether you listen to it or not.

Lincoln had to develop it.

He had those same intimations of what's right and wrong that a lot of people are born with, and he had to work at it through reading and experience and encounter and, above all thinking, trying to organize his thoughts.

Give speeches.

Read some more.

Organize those thoughts.

Give more speeches.

He did work over a lifetime to heighten those moral intuitions into actual moral intelligence.

And so by the time you have him heavily involved in the Civil War and his fight against slavery and to try to keep the Union together, by the time you get before that him and the, You have someone with an incredibly powerful moral imagination that he was very confident in.

And that can power real changes in the world.

So the lesson you'll get out of reading this book is is that you have to develop your moral intuitions into an actual moral intelligence if you really want to leave a positive impact on the world.

That takes work, but it's meaningful work and it's work that needs to be done.

And it's not just exposing yourself to things.

It involves a lot of thinking.

That's really a thing that goes through that book more than anything else.

The amount that Lincoln learned by trying to organize his thoughts to give talks is really where so many leaps in his moral imagination actually happen.

This is something that is completely under threat right now in our current world, as we offload or outsource more and more of our thinking to digital tools.

We don't want to process complicated information anymore for entertainment or for learning, so we let social media apps dominate.

Or chatbots do that for us.

We don't want to produce our thoughts in an organized way anymore.

That feels hard.

So we have chatbots write for us or summarize things for us.

We're running away from actually using our brain.

Lincoln ran towards using his brain and it made him a moral giant of the likes that's at the top of our pantheon of American moral giants in the whole history of this country.

So it's an argument for using your brain not trying to outsource difficult thinking and to aim that work at becoming more moral, taking intuitions and sharpening them into things you can understand and take and argue and figure out actions based on.

So great ideas, caption of this book, very relevant to our current time.

Also, he's a very entertaining writer.

All right, book number three.

We're making big leaps in time here.

The Case for God.

By Aaron Armstrong.

This is another book I've read many times.

I'm looking through it now, and it's really marked up.

I really think it's an underappreciated work in thinking of, I guess, like theological apologia and moral imagination, all these type of topics also just like as historical work.

Karen Armstrong is a great religious historian, religion historian.

She's actually not religious in a traditional sense herself.

She was a lapsed nun who now has no participation in any – organized religions, but is a fantastic historian.

Here's what this book is about.

The central argument of this book.

It's the history of religion from, you know, the Paleolithic to today.

It starts with what it must have the experience of being in like the caves of Lascaux, with the flickering torchlight making the animal drawings on the walls appear as if they're moving like the sort of this original, sort of ritualistic connection to the transcendent all the way to modern religions.

And her big argument and I can tell you why this is important in a second.

But her big argument is that the Enlightenment messed up our understanding of religion.

And the average person today, because we have Enlightenment-shaped minds, doesn't know how to think about religion properly.

So post-Enlightenment we have all these ideas like the empirical evaluation of truth, History as a thing, where I'm trying to like really clearly capture things that specifically happen.

Information being delivered in a sort of sequential action oriented way.

Let me explain to you the steps of building a telescope to observe the stars.

A lot of – even the notion of like truth as like empirical verifiable coming out of the scientific method.

This has been looked at and this is true, and this thing is not because we have a falsifiable example, but here we do not.

All of these ideas that are just ingrained in our understanding of the world, into what, like a philosopher, would call like the episteme in which we exist, are post-enlightenment ideas.

All of the ancient religions emerged before any of those ideas were around.

So they don't work together. with the idiom of modernity.

That's not what they were invented from.

And when we think about religion through the idiom of modernity.

This is where we have a big disconnect.

But through these sort of post-Enlightenment idioms, we look at it and say huh.

I think about a religion as a collection of empirically verifiable facts that I'm assenting to.

This happened, that happened, this person is this, that person is that.

But where's the evidence?

I don't have the empirical evidence, like a scientific thing.

I don't want to assent to that.

That's one way we start to think about it today.

Is this true or not is the way that we're thinking about religion today.

That would have been nonsense, Armstrong argues.

Someone at the turn of the first millennium.

What do you mean?

Is this true or not?

What are you talking about?

That's not the way that we engage with the world and their notions of making sense of the world back then.

So she's really arguing for you need a pre-enlightenment mindset. who approach religion.

And when you do, she says a couple things come up.

Read all the ancient books from the main wisdom traditions, right?

They all see God as ineffable, meaning too complicated for your puny human minds to understand.

You're never really going to be able to get your mind around and explain what God is or how that concept even functions.

So everything we do the ancients knew this everything we do is an approximation of We do these rituals.

We tell these stories.

We organize our world through these parables as a way of trying to approximate a truth that will never actually get our arms around.

That through action you get these intimations of what is actually true that you'll never actually be able to articulate and write down in some sort of like clear post-enlightenment sort of empirical scientific way.

That's just not the way they thought.

That's not the way religion works.

Belief did not mean the way we would believe today that yes, the car that drove by 10 minutes ago was red or not.

Belief meant commitment to the actual, typically physical, often sort of physical, to some degree intellectual requirements of the religion.

Through that action I will increasingly find that the intimations and moral intuitions and transcendent intuitions I have begin to fall into a configuration that makes more sense.

It is through the action.

And it's through the prayers.

It's through the following of the halakhic requirements.

It's through the grappling with the text that, over time, I feel like this complicated world and the way that I have these intuitions about it begins to fit into something that kind of makes sense.

That's belief.

That's the way they thought about it.

The modern world, like, well, what facts am I assenting to?

So anyway, she's an argument for going back to a pre-modern way of thinking of religion, opens up the possibilities of introducing transcendent values into your life, which itself then can become like a fantastic foundation and buffer against which you can resist all of the sort of nihilistic winds of post-modern, digital and our current type of culture right.

So it's really thought-provoking and it will change the way you think about the transcendent values.

I mean...

I read this, probably in the 2000s, which was like a really – for my generation, Jesse's generation like a really interesting period.

Religion had become like in the American context, like various – it had become like politically coded religion.

It had become like intellectually coded.

Religion America was – people were talking about like Christianity was like right-coded.

People forget, like how important it was, like the Dover versus Kitzmiller decision that happened in the early 2000s, which was like this sort of court case against a school district that was trying to teach – intelligent design, some sort of non-evolution thing.

And they kind of brought in all these scientific experts, that sort of smacked down these sort of parochials.

And it was a time where a lot of people, it was like Jon Stewart, then the new atheist you know post 9-11 religion is bush religion is like jihadism it's it's it's superstition it was like a really like an anti-religion time but that that wheel is kind of turning again because it turns out like the post-modern digital that anything goes culture is fluid and we move quickly through like digital transition of information to reconfigure our own sort of very fragile maps and meaning that kind of shift from week to week this isn't cutting it There's a lot of nihilism and despair and sort of existential whatever.

So there's an interest back once again in transcendent values.

You need something like Karen Armstrong, I think, to make sense of the moment.

Like what does this actually mean?

What are these values?

What's the right way to approach them with like humility?

What's the right way to engage spiritual technologies that they're actually likely to make your life better as opposed to lead you even farther astray?

So I think this book should be making a comeback.

Very smart, broad sweeping history, which I like as well.

All right, Jesse, we got three more books to get through.

First, however, let's just take a quick break.

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All right, let's get back to our books.

All right, we're three in.

We got three to go.

All right, the next book I want to talk about, You Are Not a Gadget, written by Jaron Lanier.

All right, so this was subtitled A Manifesto.

It came out in the late 2000s, I think like right around 2009 or 2010.

This book was really influential to me.

Because what Lanier brought into the discussion of technology was humanism.

So he was talking about, in this case, Web 20, which was, at this point, dominated by browser-based social media like Facebook.

Those were like the big players he's talking about in this book.

Like Instagram was just starting to take off.

So this was really like a Facebook era.

And he was talking about the way that these online services, these massive online platforms, were robbing us of our humanity.

He wasn't talking about it robbing us of our data.

He wasn't talking about its impacts on other things in our life or the time it was taking.

It's dehumanizing us.

Now, if you go to Jaron Lanier's website even today, you will see that it's this really cool messy, old-school HTML-like website, like you would see in 1993.

He advocates in here for a much more individualistic, sort of eccentric, homemade web.

The aesthetic that dominated before...

The massive Web.

20 companies took over and sort of homogenized all the web into these fixed interfaces.

It's Facebook or it's Twitter or it's Instagram.

And he says this is really robbing possibilities for self-expression.

Like when you're on Facebook and you have to just select things from drop-down menus.

That's your only chance for expressing yourself.

Everything's going to look exactly the same.

You're just changing, like different statuses, or you have one little box to put your five favorite books.

Like that's robbing you of your ability to really have self-expression, which is what the internet was all about.

Now I'm not super jazzed up about like the particular arguments about expression necessarily, that were big self-expression creativity, that were really big back then.

I'm more jazzed up about Lanier's approach, his philosophical approach, which is we start first by prioritizing human flourishing and the human experience.

Technology should serve that.

And if we're not careful about that, it will come in and squash that without even thinking about it.

The technology can have these massive side effects on our humanity without even caring because it's trying to whatever.

At that point build up user count and later try to get engagement, try to sell more advertisement.

So I think it's a, you know, his approach, it's like half insane.

He's a brilliant sort of half insane type of writer.

This was an important approach.

Like I'm flipping this open now.

I'm just curious about like stuff I have highlighted all throughout here.

I have different highlights.

All right.

So I'm just going to read something from it.

Here's something I marked in here.

Jaron says.

It seems ridiculous to have to say this, but just in case anyone is getting the wrong idea, let me affirm that I am not turning against the Internet.

I love the Internet.

He goes on to say talking about a forum he was on that revives the magic of the early years of the Internet.

There's a bit of a feeling of paradise about it.

You can feel each participant's passion for the instrument.

We help one another because we become more intense.

It's amazing to watch.

This is a forum for an ancient instrument called an Oud, O-U-D.

Oud players from around the world cheer on an Oud builder as he posts pictures of an instrument on the construction.

It's thrilling to hear clips from a young player capturing midair just as she's getting good.

The fancy Web 2.0 designs of the early 21st century start off by classifying people into bubbles.

Do you meet your own kind?

Facebook tops up dating pools.

LinkedIn corrals careerists and so on.

The Ood Forum does the opposite, right?

You will see this strain through a lot of my writing.

I mean I've done some writing for The New Yorker in particular about the magic of homemade communities online and how that's like the internet at its best.

A self-policing, really narrow idiosyncratic, very thickly connected community, eccentric communities that use the internet to bring people from different physical locations into a common cognitive space.

I think there's a lot of magic in those spaces, like the Ood Forum that Linair talks about, or I talked about the TalkNatscom website in one of my New Yorker pieces.

There's so much more magic there I completely agree with Linair than what you get in.

I am one of 500 million people that are looking at and posting tweets on X today.

And that it's been going through cybernetic algorithms just to try to show me the things that are going to press my buttons.

It's the opposite of community.

It's the opposite of expression.

It's the opposite of.

These are real people that I know about the details of them and their life, and I see them as three-dimensional.

Not.

I'm just on some massive conversation platform where everyone is just like a name and text in the exact same format, one after another.

So that's a very – here's some influential ideas in there, and it really influenced my thinking and should influence the way you think about technology.

Humans first.

Human flourishing first.

Technology should serve that.

And where it's not, we should be more willing to stand up and be stronger.

All right, the next book came out the same year.

This was also very influential, but it took a completely different tact in talking about technology.

This was Nick Carr's The Shallows, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

What he's doing in this book might seem old hat today, but it was pretty revolutionary at the time.

He basically said, look, I don't know if you've noticed this.

But I'm having a harder time reading.

I can't organize my thoughts as much.

And then he does like really good Carr's a good journalist a lot of investigation, talking to scientists and reading the research literature on brain functioning and finding out oh, these new technologies us being on the web and on apps all the time really could rewire your brain in a way that's permanent.

Right?

So this technology actually can have a permanent change on your brain.

It will change the way your brain functions.

That matters.

We got to discuss that and care about it.

It became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize sort of out of nowhere, because the idea was like really big.

And the Pulitzer Committee, let's be honest, is almost always now working backwards from.

We want to have a book that celebrates this and a book that celebrates that.

And I guess this was on their mind back then.

But it still is a mark that this is like a really important book.

So now we're kind of more used to this.

I mean, you wouldn't have like a John Haidt today without a Nicholas Carr book.

15 years ago I'm looking at the science of how this technology impacts us and we should know about it so you get a good one-two punch here linear the humanism the humanist impact of technology how is this supporting or going against our ability to thrive is what it means to be humans humans have to be defined themselves separate from technology and then cars like we got to care about the biology of technological impacts what actually happens in our brain if we're looking at the screens so much People talked about this book, but they didn't know what to do with it, so they just ignored it.

And now it's really hard to ignore.

We're just dumber.

We're just not thinking as much anymore.

And that's fine if we want to go back to, like an early Neolithic type of situation where most of us don't have to think that much because mainly what we're doing is harvesting wheat.

But I don't think our world or our economy is going to support that.

So it matters that we're losing our ability to think.

And this is sort of the Bible, the original source document about why technology is not just a tool and all that matters is how you use it in the moment.

It can have long-term impacts.

All right, final book I want to talk about, Richard Rohr's Falling Upward.

This is definitely especially an important book if you're like leaving your early adulthood.

So basically the idea of Richard Rohr, who is a Franciscan priest from New Mexico.

His basic idea is there's two phases to life.

There's this first phase of life, as you go through your 20s into your 30s, where what's happening here is it's all uphill, all ascent, in a positive sense.

Like you have your goals.

You're going after them.

You're making progress.

You're moving up the career ladder.

You get married maybe.

You have a family.

Things are going well.

You're comfortable.

Everything is all potential.

And then he says, guess what happens at some point?

The hammer falls and hardship happens.

That's just the human condition.

You lose this job.

You get sick.

This didn't work out the way you wanted.

This plateaus.

You deal with some sort of other types of issues.

The hardship enters the picture.

And he says in this book, great, that's when the interesting stuff begins.

It's the hardship that happens as you approach midlife that you emerge out of.

And when you have the second peak...

That is much more built around deeper wisdom.

It's built around connection to others.

It's built around helping others.

It's built around like gratitude and understanding of the beauty of the world around you, putting your circumstances into context, getting out of this completely egocentric part of you.

And he's like this is where like, the beautiful phase of life emerges, if you navigate that second phase, that second slope, properly.

So it's like an instruction manual for what you do in life when there's hardship.

David Brooks, he took this same idea.

He basically took Richard Rohr and wrote a longer version of this book with more stories.

That's The Second Mountain.

So if you want like a more... story-driven version of Rohr's ideas.

You can also read David Brooks' book The Second Mountain, which is about the same thing, about Brooks going through this transition after his initial ascent to be a very successful writer, an op-ed writer, his divorce and his nihilistic despair and sort of how he refound in the second half of life like a different way, a much more meaningful transition.

So I think it's like, read this before you need it.

It's a really important book when you're thinking about navigating life in a deep way.

And it's a book that I keep thinking about.

Again, when you look around the postmodern digital, especially with younger people, there is no framework to deal with with hardship and people just fall into hardship tunnels or fall in the trauma tunnels.

It all just becomes i, i can barely function.

We see these videos of, you know, college students.

They're like, i can barely i'm, i'm overcome with uh, disordering rage around.

God knows, you know something that you didn't even know was an issue until some academic idea made into the mainstream about you know all you you, you mentioned this whatever whatever, like people just um uh, crippled by hardship.

We don't have the frames anymore.

We have a lot of in the postmodern digital.

We get a lot of tools to explain and pass around understanding about all the different ways that everyone's harming everyone and the power dynamics, etc.

But we don't have the tools for like but how do you navigate that and climb?

How do you like turn as a hardship is also like, how do you move through that?

How do you find like beauty and life through things not going the way you want?

Like we don't talk enough about that.

This book is about that.

And so I think it's really important, especially again, all of this goes into our current moment, where we're on our phones and not in real life.

We're letting processors think for us instead of our neurons.

This moment has all sorts of negative side effects.

These are the type of books that can help you find grounding and depth, even in that world.

All right.

So those, Jesse, I grabbed those just off the shelf.

So again, these aren't the best six, but there are six that I think are really important.

I've read all those books multiple times.

A couple of follow-ups.

When do you think we should have these books read by?

I mean, let's be realistic.

Like you can take all the way to like the 5th of January.

I don't want to be unreasonable.

No, just read.

I don't know.

Pick some.

Pick some that seem interesting.

Start reading them.

Put down the phone.

Actually read them.

You know I have a goal for each.

Just because needing to get a book done by a certain time forces you to like put aside reading time and not look at your phone because like, I'm not going to get this done if I have it there,

So I don't know.

Read one of them the first week of the new year.

How about that?

And then see what goes from there.

And then did IG start on a browser?

No.

And that was part of why it was so innovative, because it was using the phone on the camera on the phone.

It was phone native.

Okay.

That's why it was so successful is that Facebook was going through all this effort to build out the mobile version of Facebook.

And like, how does this work?

IG was mobile native because it had to use the phone.

And that's why I don't give Zuckerberg credit.

He's good at acquisitions.

He's bad at ideas look at the metaverse, look at their stumbling AI plays but he's good at acquisitions.

And I think what he saw with IG was like, oh, wait a second.

This has to be on the phone because that's where the camera is.

But if this is on the phone, people are looking at it way more often because their phone is with them.

Oh, having a good interface on the phone means you're going to 10x your engagement.

So yeah, ig kind of kicked.

Ig is who, i think, kicked off the phone age.

I mean, facebook mobile was a thing, but the early versions of it were not very good and people like i'll just use the web.

I guess one of the things about zuckerberg and ideas is you can kind of look at it like a gm and make an acquisition.

Say, a gm has been on a of a team for like 10 years and he makes good acquisitions and bad acquisitions.

I mean yeah yeah, like i think um, He's definitely had some good ideas.

IG and WhatsApp were really good acquisitions.

He was – I think he was good to realize from a financial perspective the engagement model.

The main thing I think his most brilliant move was probably recognizing – a little late, but recognizing, oh, the power of data-targeted advertising.

Yeah.

He learned that looking at Google.

Like, oh, they have like – they're using more information to target these ads.

More they're using the search terms to target the ads and them realizing – wait a second, we have a lot more data than that on people.

Like our business is making money off of data.

So everything is about gathering data and monetizing data.

And we use apps to do that.

I think that was like a huge shift in his thinking.

And you got to give him credit.

That company is... almost a trillion dollar company, not trillion dollar company right now.

So, you know, he correctly saw there's a lot of money in that.

And I guess when you have that much money, there's also something to be said, for you can take swings and absorb them.

Why not?

Yeah.

It's kind of like the Yankees.

Yeah.

Dodgers.

Yeah.

You can take those swings.

Like I don't know if there's like picture of Japan's going to, you know pan out or not, but let's just do a 75 million deal and see, because if they do it can really help you in your world series run.

All right.

Enough of that.

Let's do... God, we're letting people take over the show, aren't we?

Yeah.

It's all calls?

Yeah.

How many do we got?

Seven.

All right.

I'm going to be quick.

This is my thing.

Hold me to this.

No long answers.

I'm going to be pithy, right?

And I ask people to do short calls.

They're mainly pretty short, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

And you will confirm I have not heard any of these.

Confirmed.

All right.

Are these all from Mark Zuckerberg?

You son of a bitch.

He wants to hire you.

Yeah.

To write his biography.

I want to buy deep media is the new WhatsApp.

I want to buy your company.

You know what biography.

Actually, if he offered you like 5 million, you'd probably write his biography, wouldn't you?

You know what biography...

I would be really interested in writing, but I don't know why I would spend so many years doing this.

Like it makes no sense for me, but like I could make a good pitch to the family foundation to do it.

Crichton.

Oh, would that be interesting?

Again, I think I would, it would take me five years to do that.

Right.

And that doesn't make sense.

So I hope someone else does, but man, there could be an epic, like a Crichton biography.

It spans before we landed on the moon and, All the way through like the modern internet age.

And he was kind of involved in all of this.

And so there's a structural backbone there for, like the entire sort of history of the post second half of the 20th century, of all these different economies and ideas and televisions and movies and what was happening in publishing,

And he's this weird, interesting guy.

There's a ton of papers on him.

He's a very well-documented guy.

I thought about that for a second.

Cause I've been reading a bunch of Crichton in my thriller December.

Yeah.

But then I was like, oh man, why would I do that though?

But if you could pick a foursome, you'd probably be in your golfing foursome, right?

Yeah.

I mean, I don't think I'd go, I play golf because it would be terrible.

It'd be like kind of like some metaphor.

Michael, I have a lot of questions for you.

Let me just take my first shot here.

And the club is in his eye.

He's dead.

I just killed him with my driver by accident.

That would be the immediate.

He probably didn't play much golf either.

Yeah.

He was like six, nine or something.

Was he that tall?

Six, seven.

He's very tall.

Maybe 6'6".

Yeah, he's a really tall guy.

Wow.

Which I think makes golf harder, probably.

I don't know.

It can.

I don't know.

I guess Michael Jordan played a lot of golf.

All right, we're off track here.

Let us get to our first call.

Henrik here, beginning the Deep Work HQ from Norway.

I went to hypnosis to get rid of my Facebook addiction back in 2010 to be able to finish my master's thesis.

So later when I discovered your books, it was like coming home.

Thank you very much.

Now I have two boys, one and four, together with a smartphone addicted mother.

And there's a power struggle going on in the family and I need your help to win it.

My first question, I realized the toxic effect social media had on me on my own the hard way.

How can I help my boys do the same and come to the same conclusion?

All the while, their mother and grandparents use iPads and smartphones as their go-to pacifier.

My second question when I have won the voiceover to Team Dad, slash No Screens, how can we together shame their mother into submission to our screen-free cause?

This is our most desperate hour.

Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi.

You're my only hope.

All right.

I appreciate the question.

As everyone.

I think any good couples therapist will tell you Jesse, one of the key strategies of couples therapy is shaming the other person in the submission.

I think that's like the name of one of Esther Perel's books.

Shame the bastard in the submission.

Let me put aside what to do with your wife and her parents or in-laws.

Like, there be dragons.

You can't change other adults' behaviors.

But how you raise your own kids, this really matters.

Remember this idea that these technologies are somehow fundamental.

This is like driving a car, and everyone has to do it eventually.

So why are we putting this off is absolute nonsense.

It is a massive attention conglomerate that just tries to make money off of your distraction.

It doesn't mean that it's evil for everyone or that it necessarily needs to be banned, but it is not fundamental and it's not necessary.

And the idea that it's somehow important for these kids to be exposed to it, or you're holding them off of an important life thing every month.

That you're saying you can't be on social media.

It's nonsense.

You've got to see this like you would see cigarettes.

Not that we necessarily want to ban them, but it's completely reasonable to be like my 14-year-old's not smoking.

So I do think you need to hold the line.

And the line I think you need to hold is I would typically say nothing like a smartphone.

Here we would say until high school.

That might be different in Norway, the ages, but roughly that 14, 15-year-old.

And even that's going to be just for logistics.

That's a heavily locked down phone.

Certainly no social media apps or access to YouTube.

It's just like you need to be able to do text messaging and send photos around and look up movie times on the phone or whatever.

And then 16, more or less, is when you begin to pull the restrictions back.

The thing I would hold until they leave the house, no matter where they are on that scale...

The kitchen lives in the kitchen.

I mean, the phone lives in the kitchen.

When your home is plugged in in the kitchen, it's not your property.

It is mine.

It is not a constant companion.

You do not just carry that phone with you and you just kind of use it whenever.

It is a tool.

And when you need it, you come to the kitchen.

If you're in a text conversation, you sit there in the kitchen to finish the conversation.

You need to look something up.

You come to the kitchen and you look it up.

They learn it's a tool, not a companion, and it's the absolute best way to do it.

And you should do the same with your own phone.

You should ask your wife to join you.

She probably won't, but whatever.

You just do it your way.

I think that is so vital.

That's how you break the pacifier effect because so much what happens is people see this as binary.

Either I'm not using a phone and it's like this big to-do and I make a big deal about it, or I do it all.

Right.

I mean, it's like someone saying, like, I never touch a drop of alcohol.

And then someone is like, well, you know, it's nice to have wine at dinner parties.

And then they show up the next day with a foam dome on, with two beer bottles on a helmet, with straws coming to their mouth.

You know, it's not all or nothing.

I was like, OK, you're now in high school, the equivalent of Norway.

You have a smartphone because like this is how you call out, you know you according with your friends and look up stuff.

Doesn't mean you can be in your bedroom till four in the morning, you know, looking at porn while listening to far right podcast.

No, I don't want you to do that.

Not while you're living here.

I'm still your parent.

The phone lives in the kitchen.

You use it there when you need it.

You can bring it with you if you're going out with your friends.

When you come back, you put your kitchen.

So you just learn to do your homework, to watch TV, to be at meals with your family.

You'll be reading the book in another room, but the phone is just not right there.

You prevent it from becoming that default sort of pacification.

I think that is so critical for kids.

Now, here's the other caveat I want to throw at you.

An iPad is just an inconveniently large iPhone.

It's the same.

If they have an iPad with all those apps on it and the internet, and it's theirs, and they have it and they can keep it in their room.

You've just given them a bad iPhone.

It's hard to fit in your pocket, but it's running iOS.

It's the same thing.

It's just a bigger screen.

When the first iPads came out, this was the thing that they were mocked at first, before they turned out to be a very popular product.

The mocking was like, wait a second.

This is just running the exact same phone, operating and software with the exact same touch interface, just on like a bigger phone.

This is just like a worse phone.

How is this ever going to sell?

And then it did because people like having larger things for like reading and watching things, and phones are pretty small.

But it is just a phone.

So if they have an iPad, that lives in the kitchen too.

Same rules.

It's completely locked down.

Until you're 16, you do not have unrestricted access to your own iPad before like 14 or 15.

The same rules.

It's just an inconveniently large iPhone.

All right.

So that's what I say you need to do.

I think that is the best way to raise kids.

You're giving them a massive competitive advantage, not just professionally and academically, but just in terms of human flourishing.

So I would hold that line.

So this is just very important to me as a parent.

I'll be the parent in charge of technology.

That's fine.

This is very important.

And that's what we're doing.

All right.

Who do we got next?

Hey Cal, this is Christian from Arizona.

I have a question about building a creative deep life when your identity spans more than one craft.

I'm a creative writer and photographer, and I also DJ and book music events.

I also work a full-time digital job that leans on a lot of these same creative abilities.

I'm efficient with the work so I usually have time left at the end of the day.

But after spending hours in a screen-heavy creative bachelor mode, I'm finding it hard to switch gears into deeper creative work when I'm done with my day job.

Because of that, I tend to only have the energy for one craft at a time.

The rotation has been a pattern for most of my life, but now that I'm well into my second career and have my day job fairly locked down, I'm trying to engage with my passions more intentionally, especially writing and photography, which I'd eventually like to bring forward as my main work.

But the mental drain from my day job still makes it hard to give more than one creative pursuit steady momentum at any given time.

So my question is how do you design a deep life when your identity is genuinely multimodal but your job draws from the same cognitive and creative bandwidth you need for your craft?

Is this something you can handle through seasonal focus or is there another way to think about it?

Thanks.

You got to just slow down, right?

You just have to accept that. it takes a lot of energy to work on these projects.

They can be very meaningful, these out-of-work projects, but it takes a lot of energy.

And, as you said, sometimes that energy is coming from the same reservoir you've been pulling on all day during work.

So just be okay with that.

Yeah, I'm just kind of working on one thing.

And often I can just do a little bit.

And then occasionally, like I have like a full day, I can make bigger progress.

And I'm just happy I have that in my life.

And I'm expanding out to like, what did I do this year?

And not what did I get done this week?

I'm leaving that sort of short-term churn productivity mindset with these non-professional tasks.

And just it's a slow productivity.

I'm just going to, I work on this slow and steady.

Now, a couple of things to consider.

One, you can, if you need, have a much more definitive transition between work and non-work.

That helps make it exercise-based, maybe outside, if you're able to do like a hard run and like an outdoor prison yard style workout.

Like something that gets you, like completely changes your context and gets all your muscles working and exhaust you.

And then you come in and like, you know, you eat and whatever.

Like you've completely swapped your context.

Having a separate really good space for doing your non-professional task works as well.

Here's my really cool workshop.

I go to that, I work on my photography or whatever, and care about that space.

So it's just sort of like fun to be there.

That helps as well.

And then also like this is more extreme.

But if your career is going well, your finances are under control.

I think it's completely reasonable.

Like one of the lifestyle centric planning plans you might explore at some point is like I'm actually backing off my work some.

And I'm going to spend more time working on other things.

That's really common actually in lifestyle-centric planning, where people who have the ability to do so end up – this is the thing they change in their lifestyle is less work, more non-work projects.

And they just find that like a – maybe like a 50-50 balance is what they want.

Now, that sounds crazy for a lot of people.

How could you possibly do that?

But some people are in a situation where they can.

They work remotely.

They're really good.

They can raise their rates.

They live cheaply.

Whatever it is, right?

And they can kind of find a way to make that work.

So I would keep those all in mind.

I mean it's kind of what I'm doing here, Jesse, was trying to get the office of the Deep Work HQ.

I mean it's hard for me to pull the trigger on that because it's a Rube Goldberg machine of parts that all fit together to try to get everything.

I want to do the lights, and this and that and so I have to install this first before we do that.

I don't quite see the whole thing.

But I really want that space to be a space about creation.

It's like half everything is there for me to like be building things with like microelectronics and 3D printing, and half like everything is there for motivation for writing.

It's like a creative space where I go and all I think there is like creating.

And like that makes a difference.

Like having that space makes it easier and more fun and more rewarding.

To switch over to that mindset.

Mm-hmm.

There we go.

Let's – what are we at?

We're only two questions in?

Yep.

Okay.

Should we do one more and then we'll hear from a sponsor?

Is that a good way to do it?

Let's do one more.

All right.

It's going to be a good one.

So I work for myself and I largely get to make my own schedule.

One of the challenges I'm encountering is that when I'm trying to time block out my schedule for the week, what I'll often encounter is that I'll be inspired to do some writing for the job, while the time block has me doing something else, or I'm supposed to be making some big decisions, but my brain is just not cooperating.

What would you recommend here?

Do you stick with it?

Do you just sit there, even if you're not getting much done, but to build that muscle, the way that sometimes you might be told to do in meditation, just stay on the cushion.

Or do you switch to the task that maybe has more life force in it or something else entirely?

Thank you.

I don't know.

I think the answer is probably more amphetamines.

You really can...

Boom.

You can rock and roll on something when you're tweaking.

You're just like, let's do it.

Emails.

A lot of all caps emails.

Boom.

You type boom a lot when you're on amphetamines.

Boom.

Attachment.

I'm going to give you a compromise.

I think you're time blocking too far in advance.

Don't try to figure out your whole week down to the scale of time.

Instead, you might have a good weekly plan.

I got to get this writing done.

I got to do the research for this project.

And then here's like some key tasks I need to get done.

And during your weekly plan, especially for like, key things where you have to go somewhere.

Maybe you have to go across town.

You might want to get those on your calendar so you don't run out of time.

But then time block each day as you get there.

Leave yourself flexibility so that you can approach the day and say, all right, I have some room to decide what to do when.

And you know what?

I'm not really feeling writing this morning.

So what if instead I do all of my tasks that I had for this week?

That's the mood I'm in.

I'm all hyped up on caffeine, but I'm feeling bad about this writing project.

Or like maybe I'm going to write midday or like tackle each day.

Look at your weekly plan and make the best day you can.

So now you're not trying to predict too far in advance.

That works well.

Now, if you've just made a plan for that day, that's reasonable.

And now you're in that plan and you're like, I don't know, this is just kind of hard.

I don't want to do it.

That's then when this is the compromise.

You're like, this is my time block.

I made this time block plan for today.

This is a reasonable mix of my mood and available energy and time.

This is what I'm going to do.

And you just kind of practice sticking with it.

Right.

So I want it planned like next Friday. what you're gonna be doing at 10.

But if I plan what I'm doing today at 10, then I would do my best to actually stick with that.

If you want a more extreme version of that, check out my interview with Oliver Berkman.

That's a couple of years ago.

Oliver is more on the side of like, just like let it ride.

Make sure you get worked on on whatever's most important that day, like whatever's most important to you.

And then it's just like whatever you're in the mood for.

Now we had an argument about it.

I said, I think that's ideal, but most jobs just don't allow that.

And we have to deal in the reality of the workloads of most people.

You're working on 10 simultaneous things.

If you approach the day like, what am I in the mood to do?

It's not going to work.

But I did agree with him from a cognitive standpoint.

It is a nice way to approach work.

So he pushes for a more extreme version.

So you could check that out my interview with him if you want to see something that leans more towards flexibility.

But the compromise is where I would fall.

All right.

Now we're going to do, Jesse, a quick break to hear from another sponsor.

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All right, let's get back to the questions, Jesse.

I think we need to take a – I was just thinking about before we get to the next question do we need a sleigh bell break?

Sure.

I'm worried that we're losing the holiday spirit.

There we go.

Now we are ready. to hear some more questions on our holiday spectacular.

Hey, Cal.

Joe from Jerusalem.

Been a fan for many years.

And I'm wondering if you see a way of building the deep life for areas and people who are not purely knowledge work, meaning salespeople or other professions that require other people's attention and are not strictly focus-based.

Thank you.

Um, we'd love to hear what you think.

Well, that's a good question.

Um, first color from Jerusalem.

That's cool.

Yeah.

That's a cool place to be there around the holidays.

Very like, you know, audiences from all over the world.

It's a very international audience.

Yeah.

Um, a lot of UK people too.

Yeah.

I get emails from all sorts of people.

Well, my books are all over.

I think it's like, we're getting closer to 50 languages now.

So it's, it's hard to stay away from all things.

Kyle Newport.

Uh, I got to help your terminology here.

Um, You're saying can I do the deep life if I'm in a job in which people constantly need my attention?

Let's be careful of technology.

The deep life is my description of a life that you have engineered to focus heavily on things that matter to you and to reduce things that don't.

Um, my argument is if you don't pursue a deep life, it's hard to do any of the other stuff I talk about.

Like why get off your phone if you have nothing to do when you put it down?

Why like move away from a job that's all emails if it's just an empty boring void when you're not, you know, an outlook.

So I think the deep life is a foundation on which like everything else we talk about matters.

My key technique for the deep life is lifestyle-centric planning working backwards from a vision of what you want in your ideal lifestyle and then saying how do I move closer to that vision using the obstacles and opportunities that I currently possess?

That's the deep life.

I'm writing a book about that now, coming out next year.

That's one topic.

You're talking about more of the distraction in the workplace which I cover in my books Deep Work and in my book A World Without Email and, to a lesser extent, my book Slow Productivity.

That's different. a more focused topic, probably the one I'm known most for.

So in that topic, what I'm arguing is the human brain has a hard time context switching from one thing to another.

If you need to produce something new using your brain in a way that's time efficient and produces the best quality, it has to be able to focus without distraction on that thing.

That's just how the human brain functions.

So we should be careful.

If that is your job, we should be careful about putting you in a work environment and that has collaboration styles that require you to constantly be changing your attention back and forth.

That's what that theory is about.

But what you're talking about is like, if you have a job that's based on like, responding to people, I don't see it as a problem with either of that, because we're talking about different things.

It has nothing to do with the deep life.

That's a bigger picture.

Like, what do I want my ideal lifestyle to be with?

And am I moving forward to it?

You should be doing that by the way, but that's above the level right now of your specific job.

And if you don't do deep work in your job, if you're not trying to create new value from scratch with your brain, then worrying about context switch or this or that is much less important.

So you just worry about like, how do I do my job best?

And so you can be a believer in the ideas I talk about without feeling like you're doing something wrong by being in a job that's very like communication based.

The caveat is if there is stuff you do in your job that does require you create a new value with your brain like maybe you talk to a lot of clients but you also have to create white paper, marketing white papers or really beautiful proposals to try to sell clients things where you're creating hard value with your brain.

Find ways to take those efforts and to protect them.

That doesn't mean like I can't be reached by email and I'm in a cave, but it might mean like I have these very specific times where I work in a different location and that's when I get full focus on the creation things.

So if you have things in your work life that depend on deep work, protect those.

But again, these theories fit for what they fit.

They're not moral prescriptions for what makes a good life good or bad.

The deep life is an intentional approach to living.

Deep work and deep work, theory and intention.

Capital theory is just honestly, a cognitive science theory about how the brain functions and how you create symbolic knowledge using the brain.

So you're probably okay.

People mix all this stuff up all the time.

It's my fault for not being clear, but all these things describe very specific things.

Well, over time, there's more and more terminologies that you've been using too and creating.

Yeah, I do.

I do create new terminologies.

Yeah, I think the right terminology for all the deep work stuff is attention capital theory.

The best way to make value out of attention capital, to take the attention capital someone has and to produce new value using it, is often to make sure that you're creating a cognitive environment with minimal context shifts.

That's attention capital theory.

Deep life theory is about you need to focus intentionally on amplifying the stuff that matters and reducing the stuff that doesn't, in order to get a life that feels like it's meaningful and resilient and robust, etc.

All right, what we got?

Hi, Cal.

I'm trying to figure out how we got to this point.

In the 90s, they called it disintermediation theory.

And now we're all expected to do everything for ourselves.

Each person, no matter how old or young, is supposed to be their own IT department dealing with a confluence of technology that's really just completely overwhelming to most people, let alone get your arms around understanding what's actually happening when you click a button.

I would love to hear your thoughts about where this is headed and how we can actually deal with this going forward.

All right.

Good question.

I've written about this exact issue many times.

My book, World Without Email, I think gets into this probably in the most detail.

Here is exactly what happened.

When it came to the idea of how do we increase productivity and knowledge work, especially with the advent of digital tools, the management class focused myopically on salary.

They said, here is our expense, is salary.

So if we can reduce the number of people we pay salaries to, we are a more profitable and productive company.

They were entirely indifferent to what were the things that you were paying these salaries to, which are essentially brains.

You're a knowledge board company.

Brains surrounded by a bunch of stuff that keeps the brain alive.

You're extracting value from brains.

That's your main capital is attention capital.

And they completely ignored the reality of like, well, wait a second.

These brains cannot just endlessly produce value.

They can only do certain things.

It takes them a long time to learn new things.

It takes a long time to switch from one thing to another.

We have to really care about the environment in which we ask these brains to produce valuable stuff for our company.

They completely ignored that and said, here's what matters, salary.

And so when the personal computer revolution, in particular, hit the front office, They said great, this is making lots of things just easy enough that we can fire the people who did this as their full-time job.

We don't need typists.

We don't need receptionists.

We don't need secretaries.

We don't need a travel pool to book the travel.

We don't need people to keep track of memos and move them around, because in theory, we could do this all on computers.

I can book my travel by filling out online forms.

I can send an email instead of having to write out a memo.

I don't need someone to take my calls because they can just send emails to me.

I don't need a typist because I can use a word processor.

So even if I'm a bad typer, I can eventually make the thing in the word processor work.

And then we can fire all those support staff.

And now we're much more profitable.

Now, of course, that didn't work because here's the thing.

Those brains that remained had to learn to do all those other things.

And those other things take time.

And more importantly, this is my contribution that I think was missed from the literature, induce a lot more context shifts, which slows down everything else.

Now you're getting a lot less work per unit time out of the brains that are left.

So guess what?

If you want to produce the same amount of output you had before, when all the support staff was there, you got to hire a lot more people and pay them a lot more salaries.

And you end up spending more money anyways.

So it was a complete myopic view, a completely myopic view of productivity.

We basically had this idea that if you can do something a support staff used to do on a computer, that was free,

Now that would just automatically happen and we could fire that support staff.

Not the way it worked.

That takes time and it takes context.

So I think that is at the core of the productivity paradox in the digital age is we did not think about how the human brains that produce value actually work.

I think it's been a massive mistake that has left quite a lot of economic growth and human flourishing on the table.

I used to write a lot about that.

It kind of bores people, it turns out.

I'm very interested in it.

It turns out it's not productivity theories.

It's not what the general public wants to know what books to read.

But anyways, I like that stuff.

All right, what else do we got?

All right, here we go.

Hey there, Cal.

Thanks so much for your thought leadership around AI.

In both my personal and professional worlds.

I feel exasperated by how many people seem to be ignoring the very real costs of AI loss of careers, not entire industries.

We're seeing that already.

Diminishment of skill development, related to everything from evaluation to prioritization, concerns about intellectual property, not to mention the environmental impacts.

I could go on, but here's my question.

What is your suggested two to three sentence response that would bring forward these very real concerns about AI without coming across the way that I think I come across as an ignorant or cranky or both middle-aged Luddite.

Thanks.

I think with AI, here's what's important.

And this actually might put me on the opposite side of you for some things as well.

But I just want to tell you the way I think about this.

I think it's important that we do not react to stories about what AI could do.

There's enough we have to deal with with the real world and real things that exist right now with technology, that we should be evidence-based in the things that we're complaining about.

That we should keep our for the most part, our energy focused on.

Here is an actual thing that's happening.

That's bad.

Here's why I think it's bad.

And here's what I think we need to do to try to stop this from happening or reduce it.

Too many of the AI concerns are concerns about stories about what AI might do.

And I think that's what's muddying the water.

And then the things that are actually happening right now that we need to be concerned about.

Get mixed up with the stories.

And then if you're just someone, the average person, you're like well God, you're complaining about everything.

AI is going to do all the things.

It's going to be the Terminator.

It's going to take all my jobs.

It's going to get rid of homework.

It's going to be the end of movies and books.

And it's all these things.

It sounds so dramatic that eventually, when you get to the real thing, We don't have a power capacity in our grid for these data centers.

Well, whose information is powering these things that exist right now?

And why?

Is that fair that a couple hundred shareholders can reap all this value from like hundreds of thousands of authors?

These things that are happening right now.

What really happens when we allow really online people to have conversations with simulacrums of people?

Why do we think this is – why are we letting you off the hook?

The people that are setting up conversational sessions that are leading people to suicide right now.

Why are we letting you off the hook?

There's all these real issues.

And the key to actually, I think, taking action is focus on the real.

I think a lot of the storytelling reaction is actually coming from people who who are happy to smoke screen to real

I mean, just look at the major AI company leaders over the last year and a half and the type of things they talk about and are afraid of.

It's always these like fairytale fears of half a white collar jobs going away, a super intelligence wiping out humanity because it takes your eye.

Once you've, you've thrown all of this into the mixer.

And Who's paying attention to the power usage of the new data center?

Who's paying attention to the psychotic breaks induced by introducing simulacrum of people into conversation?

All these type of things.

So focus on the things that are happening now.

And there's so much happening now with AI and these other technologies.

We can look at short-form video technologies.

These are causing harms right now.

Look at John Hite's book.

Why was that so successful?

It wasn't stories.

I worry that phones one day are going to make us dumber.

It was.

Here's what's happening now to this group of people with this technology, and it's driving up self-harm and it's driving down resilience and we can see it in the data and it's hurting these kids now.

Let's stop hurting these kids now.

That's a compelling argument.

When you're instead like you know, Eliezer Yudowski like we need to talk about what type of electronic net will do the best job of catching the Terminator robots when they come.

You're in fantasy land talking about fairy tales and it takes the eye off the prize.

So don't get caught up in things that aren't actually happening now, even if the story seems compelling.

So don't get caught up in all the jobs are being replaced.

That's not happening now.

Don't get caught up in super intelligence, things taking over.

That's not happening now.

That's not really possible.

Focus on the actual harms and say, I want to fix this thing that's happening right now.

This is bad.

How do we stop this bad thing?

I think that's the right way to talk about it.

All right.

What are we at here?

We have one more.

One more?

All right.

Let's hear it.

Hey, Cal.

A lot of people love the idea of deep work, but they're not able to pursue it because they don't know where to start.

And they feel like if they stop all their distractions that are keeping them comfortable, they won't know what to do.

So the result is they live a life of, like Tim Ferriss says, unhappiness instead of uncertainty.

What advice would you have for someone who's really distracted but wants to start deep work, but has no idea where to start and what to do?

All right.

This is a great question to end on because I think it's a fundamental question.

This is why the notion of the deep life has become, I think, so important.

Here's the way I think about this.

One way to think about this.

My book Deep Work.

I think one of the reasons why that book was popular is there was an issue that people were recognizing in the workplace, which was we're really pretty distracted.

Like I'm on email all the time and we're running back and forth and I have all these projects and it seems very frenetic in work, this doesn't seem great right.

Like I'm exhausted all the time.

And what am I really doing?

And what deep work came in and said, that book came in and said, yeah, that's, this is a problem.

But what I, what I want to give you is a bigger, better offer.

Deep work as an alternative to shallow work that's dominating your, your day right now.

The bigger, better offer was more compelling.

Oh, I see what I could be spending my this.

Instead of being on email all day, I could be producing something really hard.

Oh, I want to do that bigger.

Better offer one out.

In our current world with uh smartphone distraction is constantly looking at this thing to pacify yourself.

You need a bigger, better offer.

That's what we're missing.

And we're talking about.

Be worried about tech talk.

Be worried about meta, vibes and Sora.

Be worried about spending all your time yelling at people on X and mindlessly scrolling through auto recommendations on YouTube.

What we're missing in that discussion is, is the bigger, better offer of what you should do next.

Because you are absolutely right.

Without that bigger, better offer, people say, I'll take the devil I know because it's kind of fun.

Then the devil I don't, which is staring into the pit of existential despair.

That's exactly what was happening in the workplace.

People are like yeah, we do send a lot of emails, but like, what am I supposed to do instead, just like sit here.

They needed a bigger, better offer.

This is where the deep work enters the picture.

I don't think we can deal with the issues of phones and non-professional technology use without giving people a vision of how to make their life so interesting and intentional, autonomous and meaning producing that the idea of looking at youtube shorts all day is nonsensical to them.

They're like why would i do that?

I have this other stuff that's so much more important.

And so I say this in part to point out a problem in our current discussion about technology and meaning.

I say this in part as a way to have empathy.

If you're struggling to put down your phone, like you're talking about with your friends, this is not some moral flaw you have.

This is not a lack of will or discipline.

It is probably a really rational calculus on the part of your mind as saying we don't have anything else to go to.

So I'd rather be here.

It's it's, it's.

I'd rather be here than staring into the pit, just like late 19th century in the lead up to prohibition.

Well, I'd rather be at the bar with like my friends, like something to do, than just be, you know, at the old turf house, you know, pioneer house, just depressed, right.

You have to have a bigger, better offer.

So that's where the deep life comes in.

Now I do have this whole book, but it's going to be here.

So let's like get to some key principles right away.

Like what you need to do. is you need to fix a contingent vision of your ideal lifestyle.

I say contingent so you don't feel like you have to get this right from day one.

Good enough for now.

What do I want my daily life to actually be like?

This has to cover multiple areas on the show we often call these buckets.

You can't just focus on your job.

You can't just focus on a single hobby.

You got to cover all of the areas of your life and be able to describe in each what you want that part of your life to be like.

Two, these descriptions can't be concrete.

I want to have this job and live in this town.

That's not a lifestyle vision.

That's goals.

So describe what you want in each of these different areas in terms of first-person declarative properties.

I live in a city that's high energy.

My job is one in which I can be done with work by five and it's not a big deal, right?

Like it's not dominating my time.

You're describing the properties of the different areas of your life.

That's your lifestyle vision, buckets plus properties.

Now the whole goal is how do I try to get closer to those visions in each of these buckets, given the particular obstacles I face and the particular opportunities I have?

I'm not going to start from scratch.

But I want to navigate around specific obstacles.

Oh, living in this city makes all these things really hard.

Well, how do I get out of this city?

Oh God, if I could do this this, this and this, we could move, and that's going to make these other things better.

Or I am a computer programmer.

How could I use that?

That's a valuable skill.

Where could I go with that in a way that's going to let me get closer to bucket A, B, and C?

And then this becomes the main wheel. cyclical process of lifestyle-centric planning.

How do I move closer to these visions and these buckets?

Repeat, repeat, repeat.

And I suggest going bucket by bucket.

Let's spend a month just working on the constitution bucket, the bucket about our physical health.

Let's do some one-time goals and get in place some new practices and feel good about that.

Okay, now let's move on to the next bucket.

All right, now we're dealing with craft, like my job.

I'm not going to solve it all now, but I have this lifestyle vision for what I want, these properties I want in my job.

I want to spend a month or two getting closer to that, finishing some project that builds up a career capital store that might be useful in the future, changing up my practices so that I'm not so distracted and my work has less of a footprint on my life.

And you move through each of your buckets and repeat and repeat.

And at least once a year on your birthday, go back and make sure those properties are right.

That is the rhythm for building a deep life.

It's not done with one radical change.

It's not something that's going to happen in two weeks.

But it's going to be accretive.

It's going to get better.

As you move closer to that ideal lifestyle vision, you're going to feel more self-efficacious, meaning you feel like you have the ability to actually produce positive change in your life.

You're going to feel more autonomous.

And now the distraction merchants are going to seem more superfluous.

And now suddenly what used to be your lifeline, your pacifier, is going to seem sort of trite.

It's going to seem kind of embarrassing.

You've got stuff you've got to do.

You don't need to be looking at a video of Abraham Lincoln breakdancing.

I got real stuff I got to do.

I'm enmeshed in a real community that I'm taking a leadership role in.

I don't care about the fight happening on Twitter about some nonsense.

This is the type of thing that begins to happen as you begin the cycle of moving closer to your deep life.

So I want to end on this question because I think, as we enter the new year, the week after you hear this episode, think about the deep life as your bigger, better offer for all this other stuff that's occupying your time.

And suddenly that challenge of of getting away from the sort of Zuckerberg's and Altman's of the world becomes a lot less uh, something that is scary or seeming impossible, and something that will instead begin to seem inevitable.

All right, Jesse, um, that wraps us, right?

That's our questions.

Let's get quick at one more sleigh bells.

I think Santa's coming.

Deliver some coal to Mark Zuckerberg.

And thank you for listening.

I guess our next episode will be right before the new year.

So we got another episode.

I think we're going to play a classic episode you'll like.

And then we got some cool stuff all queued up in the new year.

So we got a lot coming up in the deep questions world.

But we will see you soon.

Have good holidays.

Until then, as always, stay deep.

Hi, it's Cal here.

One more thing before you go.

If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewportcom.

Each week I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply.

I've been writing this newsletter since 2007 and over 70000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week.

So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewportcom and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.

Thank you.

[Deep Life Wisdom: Curating Your Reading and Mindset for 2025]-[Ep 384: What Should I Read for a Deeper New Year?]

📋 Summary

Deepening Your Life: A Curated Reading List for 2025

1. Lifestyle-Centric Planning: Henry David Thoreau’s Walden

2. Developing Moral Intelligence: William Lee Miller’s Lincoln’s Virtues

3. Reclaiming Transcendent Values: Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God

4. Humanism in the Digital Age: Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget

5. The Biological Cost of Distraction: Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows

6. Navigating Midlife Hardship: Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward

Conclusion: The Bigger, Better Offer

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Deep Life Wisdom: Curating Your Reading and Mindset for 2025]-[Ep 384: What Should I Read for a Deeper New Year?]

📋 Summary

Deepening Your Life: A Curated Reading List for 2025

1. Lifestyle-Centric Planning: Henry David Thoreau’s Walden

2. Developing Moral Intelligence: William Lee Miller’s Lincoln’s Virtues

3. Reclaiming Transcendent Values: Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God

4. Humanism in the Digital Age: Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget

5. The Biological Cost of Distraction: Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows

6. Navigating Midlife Hardship: Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward

Conclusion: The Bigger, Better Offer

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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