Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 141: Is the Era of Social Media Ending?

Episode Date: October 25, 2021

DEEP DIVE: Is the Era of Social Media Ending? [2:37]DEEP WORK QUESTIONS: - Did COVID-19 closures change my (Cal's) thoughts on my working situation? [18:01] - Should I stick with management consulting? [37:06] - How do I lead my organization away from email? [40:17] - How do I pick a specialization in a broad field? [44:55]DEEP LIFE QUESTIONS: - Do I (Cal) use my smartphone for directions and photos? [48:48] - How do I choose my minor? [51:37] - What is something I (Cal) have changed my opinion on in recent years? [55:00] - Should I publish this book? [56:53] - Do I (Cal) regret becoming a public intellectual? [1:02:28]Thanks to Jay Kerstens for the intro music and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This podcast is sponsored by Magic Spoon. As you've heard me say before, when I was growing up, one of my favorite escapes was being able to eat that sugary treat cereal that really seemed to define the 1980s. Now I'm a grown-up. I can't do that anymore. It's not good for you. Inter-Magic Spoon. They are producing great-tasting soup.

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This is one of my favorite escapes, a bowl of healthy yet delicious magic spoon. So go to magic spoon.com slash cow to grab a custom bundle of cereal to try today. Be sure to use that promo code Cal at checkout to save $5 off your order. Magic Spoon is so confident in the product that is backed with a 100% happiness guarantee. If you don't like it for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. So get your next delicious bowl of guilt-free cereal at magic spoon.com slash cow and use that code cow to save $5 off. I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions. Episode 141.

I'm recording this on the Friday before it's scheduled to be released. The Deep Work HQ smells interesting. A little known tidbit about the HQ because I'm I am above a restaurant. Shout out to Republic Tacoma Park. On certain days, we get certain interesting smells. It means they're cooking something interesting, I guess. That's how you know I'm running a real classy operation here is the variable smells of my HQ.

So for all of you who in the near future may be coming into my studio to record with me to be a guest, you have that to look forward to. On that subject, you know, I talked a lot about guest when I was setting up my studio for guest. I guess this was over the summer or maybe late last spring. And then I haven't had guest on since I more or less completed the work. Two reasons for that. One, and primarily I just am lazy slash busy. So I got things set up and then the semester began.

I began writing this twice a month column for the New Yorker and just did not really have the time to do anything outside of the bare minimum routine. So that's one reason why even though the studio got set up, I've not been bringing in a studies from a guest. And then two is I knew I was going to start hiring. I figured as long as I'm bringing some people into the organization to help me manage the whole media operation here, that that would make it a lot smoother working with guests. I think we'd have a lot better episodes. So I figured I might as well wait until that.

And there's progress being made there. So which is all to be said, the plan still remains to have guests on a semi-regular basis in here in the studio as much as possible. So DC-based guests as much as possible. that's coming. We will still, of course, have the main format as me doing questions, but I would like twice a month or so, maybe two episodes, at least a month, to have a guest joining me for that Q&A. So stay tuned. And, of course, I'm always interested in any thoughts or suggestions people have about the show.

You can send those to interesting at calnewport.com. So speaking of thoughts, we have a good collection of questions to do today, some on deep work and some on the deep life. but before we get going into those questions, why don't we do a quick deep dive? The question I want to tackle in today's deep dive is the following. Is the era of social media ending? There are, of course, many different angles from which to attack this question,

many different angles from which we might be finding evidence or we could predict in the future that angle being a source of the destabilization, of social media's dominance, the dominance that it enjoys today. There is, for example, the political cultural angle on the demise of social media. This is probably the most talked about angle right now. This is the angle that talks about our culture shifting. Maybe we become so upset about the role of social media in the body politic.

We become so upset about the role of social media in civic cohesion or public health responses, etc. or that as a culture we say we're done with it. There's a political element to this. Perhaps there's legislation that's passed that literally makes big social media impossible because it breaks up the largest platform monopoly and fragments the market. So that's certainly one angle by which you can get towards the era of social media ending. There is a health-related angle, right? This was a key part of those leaked Facebook slides was that Facebook itself is seen in their

that social media is unhealthy, especially for young people. So there could be an angle where, like we did with smoking, we just change our understanding about the healthiness of this. And see, this could actually be a real danger. We have to be more restrictive about who uses social media, and that alone could also really destabilize it. But today, I want to explore a third angle towards this question, this question of the era of social media ending,

that I don't hear discuss that much. And that is the technological angle. from a technological perspective are the fundamental ingredients of social media's dominance beginning to dilute. So what got me thinking about this was the other day, I've been watching for the last three years with my boys, MythBusters.

We went back to the very first episode. We've been buying the seasons one by one and we finally made our way to the end of the cycle. We started doing this around the time my youngest son was born and we've been working on it ever since. And just last week, we caught up to where we had started watching the episodes. We've now seen every episode more or less. And something that keeps catching my attention is that this show, which really had its dominance in the first decade of the 2000s,

they're constantly talking about their fan site. Go to discovery.com and there's a fan site there. Presumably a bulletin board where people will give feedback to the show's host. and producers or share ideas and the host would often draw ideas from the fan board or say, here's some place where our fans are upset. Now, today, the idea of a fan board hosted on a dot com website, the dot com website for your media company that publishes your show or something like this seems really old-fashioned. And that's because that technology went away.

And I think it's worth going back and examining why that technology went away because we're going to see those factors maybe are no longer as strong as they once were. So if you remember, we had the first rise of the consumer web happened in the 1990s, the second half of the 1990s. This was largely a think of it as B to C type play. Large businesses would invest a lot of money to build out these very fancy websites, fancy catalogs, fancy bulletin boards. You know, here's my nice, slick looking website that you as a consumer could come and get information from or maybe do some e-commerce on. In the late 1990s, I had a web development company and we did this. Hey, you have a law firm.

We'll hope you have a nice website so people can find out about you and you can get client leads, etc. You would hire people like me and designers and you build fancy websites. There's the big bust that happens in 2001. We have that the first dot-com bust. And in the rubble of that first bust rose what Tim O'Reilly dubbed Web 2.0. So now we had the web, but it wasn't just about businesses having very nice, easy to access interactive homes on the web, websites. You could find out more about the companies. Now we had opportunities for the individual consumers to interact with each other to post their own content, to get feedback on what they said.

The web became interactive. This was the key of Web 2.0. It's not just a small number of companies that can afford expensive web servers putting up nice information for millions of consumers to read. Now the consumers can post and blog post and comments and bulletin boards and interact with each other. This was very exciting, right? Because now the web really opened up what it could do and the ways that different people could interact with it. And this was the error in which you got things like the Discovery.com fan board for Mythbusters. Hey, we can put up a bulletin board that fans can talk on and go back and forth and moderate and give ideas and talk to the host and complain and celebrate the things they liked.

This was the early days of Web 2.0. The reason why we don't see fan sites is because the business model that emerged was we can consolidate all of that. There's flaws with these ad hoc, homemade, feeling, interactive websites out there. What if we built a small number of massive websites that everyone belongs to? And this is where all of the WebPoint 2O interaction can happen. This was basically, for example, the pitch of Facebook as it started to rise towards prominence towards 2006 to 2012. Now, they had three big reasons why having a giant platform monopoly that everyone belonged to was probably the best way to have Web 2.0 type interactivity online. The first was the technology was better.

Facebook had really good engineers, so the interfaces were slick, it looked really good, it was easy to use. if you created a Facebook group and everyone you knew was on Facebook you created a group for the people that you wanted for your biking club or your baking club or what have you that the technology was great it was slick you could see all the posts they were automatically arranged

you could browse through them real easily it was just better technology than you were getting if you were using one of these open source bulletin board software type things or you were typing text into an HTML form that was going to go into a CGI script and it was going to be pretty clunky and Facebook had great technology

It just was a better interface. It looked better. And the second argument that these companies made, these platform monopolies, was the network effect argument. They say, you know, interacting online with people is fine, but you probably really want to interact with people you know online. You know, like your cousin, your friends from high school, your college roommate, you know, your siblings, you want to share pictures with them, see what they're doing. So if we have one platform like Facebook that everyone joins, then everyone you might want to talk to is already there. We can't have a bunch of little Facebooks because probably no one you know would be on that Facebook.

So the network effect, if everyone joins the same platform, then you can use their nice interface to interact with people you actually know. That was a big selling point. And the third was interesting content. Now, go back again, we're thinking 2006, 2007, 2008. He had TV and you had cable TV and there was like TV shows you could watch, but the main content on the internet was text-based. There was people writing blogs and building out, you know, their own websites or what have you.

And these big platform monopolies like Facebook and then later Twitter, which launched in 2006, could say, we have lots of interesting people on here. Entertainers and comedians and scientists and celebrities and they're on here. So if you're on this platform, there's interesting people on here writing interesting things. So instead of trying to just go to random.com websites, like you might have been 2004,

you might have gone to, you know, if you were the daily cost.com or the drudge report.com, like just come to our, and once we're on this one platform, there's lots of interesting people here. And you can follow those people as easy as you can follow your cousin

and then automatically you get their stuff. And it shows up right there. I'll put it in a feed for you. It's all easy. So better looking and functioning technology network effects, everyone you knew it was on it. And interesting people are on it. So it really unlocked Facebook and then later Twitter.

Then after that, Instagram really unlocked the internet as a source of distraction and entertainment. Now, there's a reason to look at your phone when you were bored because there's interesting people on these platforms. We'll pull it to a place where you can see it. So those are the three things that help support this idea that we should all join a small number of these interactive platform monopolies. This is why we did not need a MythBusters fan site. They could just have a group on Facebook or a Twitter account that we could tweet towards. Now let's fast forward to today because it seems to me that those three technological advantages, which really did exist in 2006, are much less pronounced today in 2021. First of all, there's a better technology issue. Web 2.0 style technology, technology for creating threads and interacting with each other and having conversations and groups, that has gotten much better.

Facebook does not now have some massive edge. Twitter does not have some massive edge. Instagram does not have some massive edge over other types of open source software that anyone can set up or run or more specialty services you can sign up and create bespoke networks for. There's beautiful interfaces everywhere now. A lot of this has become standardized. So I can set up, you know, a very nice looking website with a really good discussion comment section that would look and operate just as seamlessly as Facebook. So we caught up. They do not have better interface technology.

They do not look better. Their apps and websites do not look better than what other smaller alternatives could create. What about network effects? Well, as I've argued many times on this show, the network effect advantage of the platform monopolies has radically dissipated from when they got started because they stopped putting the emphasis on this tool is about connecting to people you know and seeing what they are up to. That behavior, the original behavior of Facebook, the original behavior of Twitter,

Facebook used to be about, here's my wall, come check it out because you know me. Twitter used to be about, I'm just posting on what I'm up to and who would follow me, people who know me. The very original service that Twitter co-founders had in mind was one where you wanted to be updated what your friend was up to throughout today. Oh, where are they? Oh, they're over there having a sandwich. Let me go find them.

It was all about people you know seeing what they were up to. They moved away from that because that does not generate enough active user minutes. I like you, but I'm not going to look at my phone 150 times a day to see what you're up to because you're kind of boring. So they moved away from that model and moved towards the model of stream. We have a news feed. We have a Twitter timeline. It's algorithmically populated using statistical models to be as interesting as possible. If you're bored, look at the screen, we'll press some buttons.

What happened because of that is that digital interaction with people we know. No, didn't go away. We just migrated it to other services. Now we are on group text message threads. Now we're on WhatsApp. And yes, I know Facebook bought WhatsApp, but this is why they bought it. Because we don't want to have our interaction with our friends anymore be on some public channel that's being filtered in an unpredictable way into the news feeds of people we don't know. I would rather send the joke on a group text thread with my high school friends.

I would rather send the picture of my kid to the family text thread, not on Instagram. So the network effects don't matter anymore for the platform monopoly. I can connect with people I know in technologies that are more bespoke and private and vanilla and less exploitative, and I'll actually feel better about it. So that advantage of monopolies has gone away. Finally, we have the interesting content monopoly. That made a lot, or I should say monopoly justification. That made a lot of sense when the primary content on the internet was text-based.

And it was difficult. It's text-based websites where I'm trying to find interesting text. And there was individual people's websites that were interesting. But, hey, Facebook and Twitter made it much more interesting to get the people's interesting text-based content. Obviously, now there are a lot more options for diversion to be delivered digitally. I think the biggest example here is the rise of the streaming wars. The content on streaming services is world-class. You have world-class artist and world-class production values and millions of dollars being spent to make a nearly endless library of really great and smart streaming video.

That's much more interesting than, oh, I really want to see what, you know, this celebrity I know wrote in a tweet. You have a podcast, right? So now we have a way for people like me and many other people in my similar situation, people who are writers and thinkers to have long and extended conversations on interesting ideas. that you can consume and interact with at almost any time during your day. And that's much more interesting than maybe seeing what a celebrity posted on Facebook. So the idea that, look, we have interesting people on here. Yeah, who cares?

You know, take a number. There are a lot of interesting people delivering content in a lot of interesting ways in the digital world right now that has nothing to do with social media. That's no longer a huge advantage. It was an advantage when it was Facebook versus me just Googling and having bookmarks on delicious of individual people's blogs I like. Yes, Facebook seem better. But today I think I'd rather go to HBO or go to my Spotify podcast app than I would

put some more people who are kind of famous into a Twitter timeline. Now, this is my main point. Those three main technological advantages that justified the existence of most people belonging to a small number of social media platforms have been severely degraded. So when we're thinking about social media's dominance and how much we're don't like it. We should not take for granted this idea that it is here to stay, that it is an 800-pound gorilla in the cultural room that we're not going to be able to dislodge.

And the best we can do is hopefully restrain it or keep it in a corner. I think its place in our culture is much more precarious than a lot of people realize. Technologically speaking, its huge advantages have been degraded. There's a lot of money at stake. There's a lot of big companies working at grabbing these eyeballs and grabbing this attention. and there is a reasonable case to be made that five years from now we are going to see these large platform monopolies be marginalized. They'll exist. They'll have specialized services.

They'll stay alive through acquisitions of other types of sectors and other types of companies. But this notion that, like, of course you belong to one of three services and use it all the time. For just technological reasons, that could become something to we look back at and say that was a weird moment. But it doesn't describe right now. All right, that's enough with the deep dive. Let's do some questions about deep work. Our first question comes from Art. Art asks, will you or do you expect to and or do you want to return to the same employment situation that you had prior to COVID-19 closures?

Art goes on to elaborate that his life changed dramatically overnight and he no longer. wants to return to what he was doing. He's considering all kinds of options with the basic principle of change. So, Art, what I'm going to do here is start by answering your specific question, and then I'm going to step back and give a bit of a rant about COVID and closures of offices in general, so be warned about that coming. All right, in terms of your specific question, did I personally, did I, Cal want to change something about my employment situation the way it was prior to COVID-19 now that COVID-19 has happened, it's probably fair to split my employment situation into academic Georgetown life and writing and writing-related

life. When it comes to my academic Georgetown life, I did not like the campus being closed. I could tell it was bad for my students. They were getting increasingly depressed, and I'm very happy that it's open. I'm very happy that I'm back on campus teaching. I'm back on campus attending seminars. I'm back on campus working with my colleagues at white boards in person trying to solve proofs. I'm back walking around that campus, seeing the life of that campus.

There's people all over the place. There's things going on. I really like that. I did not like when it was closed. Nothing about the COVID-19 situation made me feel as if university life as it was pre-COVID-19 needs to significantly change, at least for me. All right. Now, what about my writing life? I mean, obviously, this was a life that was something I did from home on my own schedule anyway.

So it's not as if a COVID-19 closure significantly changed my writing life in the sense that, oh, I can't commute to the office anymore. It did, however, create some shifts in that area of my life that I think are positive and will be more permanent. The two biggest examples being I started a podcast, which I'm going to categorize more generally as I got more serious about independent. media production during COVID closures because my opportunity to produce media through others vanished. I couldn't fly and go give talks. I couldn't go to TV stations. I couldn't go to radio studios.

I couldn't go to other people's in-person podcast tapings. I felt very cut off from my audience when all of these different channels for reaching audiences basically froze. And so I said, I should do more of this on my own. And the podcast started. That led then to the Deep Work HQ. Now I have my own office space in studio. And then the studio is getting built out to do video.

And now I'm looking into bringing on employees. They're going to allow me to produce better podcast, more podcast, video of my podcast, video of other things, a lot more independently produced content. I see myself now as owning a small media company that I'm growing careful. I need to keep that deep to shallow work ratio well calibrated, but I did not have that pre-COVID. So COVID had a big impact in that way on my writing life. It turned me from an independent writer that did a lot of media

into the owner of a small media company. And I think ultimately that's positive and it's going to be good for me and hopefully good for my audience and it's going to allow me to grow faster and reach more people. But in my academic life, COVID was almost entirely just bad. You know, I did not like COVID academic life. I'm very happy to be back.

The other type of academic life, even if, by the way, I've already been sick a bunch of times this fall. Okay, so that was the one thing, maybe the one advantage of not my kids not being in school and me not being on campus is I get sick a lot. And we're back to that. I've been COVID tested three times this week already. I get sick a lot. So that's fair trade, though.

Fair trade. All right. So, Art, what about you? It sounds like you are thinking about a change. And I think that's good. I think that what the COVID disruption did for people is gave them a pause for reflection. It created a bit of quiet in their life because their life was no longer overwhelmed by the den of the meshing gears of their normal grinding routine. And in that silence, they could better attune to the intimations inside of what they care about and what they don't.

what is despairing them and what is attracting them. And in that space and in that silence, when you can listen to those intimations, a lot of people came away saying, wait a second, unlike, let's say, Cal and his Georgetown life, or he missed it and it only reinforced that, they're saying, I don't like what I do.

Or I don't mind what I do, but this commute is killing me. I don't like where I live. I think there's a better life I could be having. Now, I think that is a fantastic realization and one of the silver linings of an otherwise quite, dark cloud that was the pandemic was the number of people who were in a position to actually have that insight.

My only advice here aren't is, A, of course, take that seriously, but be, be wary of change for the sake of change. It is actually quite difficult to act on the impulse for a deep reset. Sometimes what we focus on inappropriately intensely is the change itself, just making some sort of change, doing some sort of reset in that moment of re-recent. But in that moment of reinvention, the reinvention itself, the thrill of the old being discarded and the new being brought in is where I'm going to find my meeting. The problem is that that dissipates. And the change becomes a new standard.

And if the change in its steady state is not better, you're not necessarily in a better situation. And we probably paid some penalties for making the change. So don't just change for the sake of changing. Do the work of unpacking these intimations, figuring out what it is that, really is going to make your life better, what really would be required to get there, and put in that hard, perhaps, long-term work to get to the sustainable new, better location. So do the lifestyle-centric career planning. I want to have a picture of what my life could be like that I can see and I can smell and I can

taste and I just know deep in my bones. That is better. Do the systematic, realistic career capital style planning for how do I get there. Well, how much money would I need? Where could I use these skills in this other situation? You're trying to figure out the puzzle pieces. Do the deep life bucket exercises I always talk about. It's not just work.

You have these many different areas of your life. Let's take some a month or six weeks for each of them and reflect and really understand what's important to you there and start to change that part of your life in the miniature. So you become better attuned to what matters and what doesn't so that you have a better picture and understanding of what lifestyle you want. I don't want to get in too much detail at all these aspects are. But basically, change is going to give you just a short-term thrill that will go away. And it's going to cost a lot of hardship too.

So if you're going to go through that, spend the time first to really figure out what change is worth doing. All right, I promised you a rant. I will give you a quick rant. I published an article a couple weeks ago in the New Yorker called When Will Offices Open? So it's kind of relevant here, Art. I was looking into the places in which offices are still closed. your reaction to that statement, by the way, will tell me a lot about where in the country you live.

So if your reaction is, yeah, of course offices are closed. When will they open? You live in a blue area. If your reaction is there's offices that are closed still, you live in a red area. This is a very regional thing. And so in this, which, by the way, a lot of people don't get. It's true.

A lot of people in the red areas are surprised to learn that there's people not going to their office buildings just like they did before COVID. and people in blue areas are surprised to find out that a lot of places people have been going back to their offices since early, you know, the summer of 2020. So no one really knows what's happening in each other's world. But I wrote this article where I was looking at the places where offices are still closed. There was a little bit of muckraking in this article because the argument I was making is that the executives that are in charge of making the decision of when these still closed offices will reopen are. being purposefully vague.

Like Paxatani Phil, the groundhog, they want to just stick their head up out of their groundhog den as they get closer to the last date they announced for opening. Look around, see if they see their shadow, and then say either, nope, two more months and walk away or say, okay, now we can open. No specificity. They don't come out and say, okay, here are the things we're worried about. So our goal in reopening is accomplishing X, Y, and Z. Here are the metrics that we are tracking in consultation with public health experts that we think if these metrics are matched, then we will almost certainly achieve our goal.

They don't do that. Now, if they did that, what would we have? Two things. Predictability. You would have a much better sense as you were getting towards the last announced reopening date of what was going to go on because you could look at those metrics. Are they doing really well? Are they doing really bad? Or is there some concern they're going to turn?

You have a lot more predictability. you also have transparency into thinking because now you know what it is that your company cares about what their goals are, what metrics they think will get them to that goals. You can scrutinize this and you can say, for example, your goals are way too aggressive and it makes me nervous and I think I'm going to get sick. Or you could say those goals are crazy conservative. That's crazy. You're being way too safety conscious, right? We don't know what you're thinking if you don't announce what it is that you're trying to achieve. So if we don't have predictability, that's a problem because people have to make decisions about their lives that require long runways.

So if we have to just wait until a few weeks before the date and just have you pop up and say two more months or not, that's really hard. That's really hard if I have to figure out, for example, do I sign up for a non-refundable before and aftercare program for the school? Because if I have to commute to my office, then I can't drop my kid off at school and pick them up at the normal time. time. I need to know if like, yeah, we're almost certainly are going to open then. I need to know that. So I put down that deposit now. But if I don't know and I put down that deposit and then you say, no, never mind, let's wait till the winner. Like maybe I'm out of a lot of money, right? These type of things make a difference. We need to know what's going on. And the transparency makes a difference. You have to be clear about what you're trying to accomplish. I quoted a Harvard professor named Joseph Allen in this piece. And he had been disparaging of some of the university administrators approach to restrictions and mitigation factors on campus. And he looked, I believe it was his alma mater, Yale. And Yale has all these strong restrictions. But everyone is vaccinated there. It's like 99. something percent vaccination rate.

And there's almost no spread of going on. And he made this argument of like, okay, you got to say what you're trying to accomplish. And maybe we will all agree with it. Or maybe we'll think it's stupid. But you've got to tell us. Like, you got to tell us what you're trying to accomplish here. So we have a chance of saying, well, that's crazy. Like if you're trying to accomplish, there's never a case ever on campus.

Well, you'll get pushback. because we're all going to get COVID in the next three to five years. It's going to be an endemic disease. So that wouldn't be a good reason. Maybe there's a better reason. Like, well, we want to wait until community transmission race before this so that students, vaccinated, breakthrough infections doesn't have a chance of going into the town or something. Great.

Say it. So we can look at it and argue about it and say it's as good as this bad. So my argument is the reason why these executives are being vague is because it's in their interest to have flexibility. What they want to do is read the room. they want to read the room, see where the backlash is coming from, and try to minimize their discomfort or inconvenient. So they don't want to be pinned down on anything. They would like to just keep it vague so that they can minimize their personal dissatisfaction. This was Joseph Allen's conclusion about Yale.

The reason why they're not being clear about what they want to accomplish is that they are deploying a de facto public health policy of, we will keep these mitigations in place until the backlash against it outweighs the backlash against removing it and then we'll change it. And he said, that's no way to do public policy. And I think that's what a lot of these still closed offices are doing is let's just keep our options open. I want to see, you know, am I getting yelled out on Twitter or internal slack channels or not? And that's how we're going to decide when to reopen. That's a bad way to do policy because you lose the predictability and you lose the transparency, which gives us the chance to actually assess and push back on your view of what's safer, what's not safer, what our goal should be. So that was my muckraking rant in The New Yorker was, if your offices are still closed, forget your convenience.

Forget the pain of backlash. Forget people being upset about you on Twitter. Be clear. Here's what I'm thinking. Here's why. Here's how we're making these decisions. It's better for the people who work for you. I think I ended that article saying the symptom these executives are really trying to avoid is their own public relations headache.

not actually symptoms of sickness in their actual employees. All right. So this really had nothing to do with your question other than your question was about COVID and work restrictions, but I wrote that piece and I wanted a chance to sort of, I don't know, yell about it on air. This show is sponsored by Optimize, an online network dedicated to helping you live a deeper life.

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All right, so let's speed things up. We have a question here from Still a Consultant. The short version of the question here is, what considerations do you highlight to people considering a job career switch? But it gets more interesting when you look at this question asker's elaboration. I don't know if this is he or a sheet. so I'll just say she. She says, I've been in the workforce for six years after finishing undergrad. Having studied engineering, I was recruited to work at a large management

consulting firm in the U.S. and have been stuck with the consulting path. The challenges are often not as meaty and substantive as I would like. So really, I see this question as should I stick with management consulting? My short answer is probably not. For most people who are able to get a management consulting job, and you know, typically the big fancy management consulting firms, hire people with good grades and fancy degrees from fancy schools. It's typically a stepping stone into a more specific job. The idea is in management consulting, you get exposed to a lot of different elements of business, and then you take those expertise to go work for, run, start a particular business and a particular industry. Some people really

like the actual nuts and bolts of management consulting. They like working with their clients. they like recruiting clients, they like working with their teams. I have a friend, for example, who's at McKinsey really enjoys it. Like really enjoys the actual work of doing consulting, and he's stuck there and he's a partner now and is very happy. But you know it. You know it pretty soon if that's your path. And I can tell already from your two-sentence elaboration that you don't like it that way. So yeah, you've got to think about moving on.

Don't just get stuck there. And the reason why you don't want to just get stuck there is because the hours are hard. the work is demanding and you're going to start suffering from deep procrastination at some point. How do you figure out what to do instead? Lifestyle-centric career planning. Figure out the lifestyle, where I live, what my day is like, the type of work I do, the relationship I have with the community, what I'm doing with my time, what I'm doing with my spirit and my soul. You want to be able to feel, touch, and smell that image and feel it in your bones that this is what I want my life to be like. and then work backwards and say,

okay, let's look at some reasonable paths that take advantage of the career capital. I have already built up as a consultant, which good news is widely applicable. Again, this is why management consulting is not a bad choice for a smart kid coming out of a good school. You build up broadly usable career capitals.

You have a lot of options and take that out for a spin. Well, I want to live here. So what if I did this type of work that I could do from there? This type of capital would get me there. I'd have to take this job first. I'd save up this much money.

You start working the angles. Work backwards from the lifestyle. Come up with some plans to get to that lifestyle that are reasonable and take advantage to your capital. And then still a consultant, hopefully when I hear from you next, the answer, your name has shifted. And now you call yourself once a consultant. Our next question is from Scott.

Scott asks, how can I lead from a middle management position, an organization away from email. Well, Scott, it's a good question. Obviously, the glib answer is to get a copy of a world without email into the hands of as many people in the organization as possible as that lays out the whole vision. But assuming that that does not work, I have a few quick pointers to offer you here. First of all, don't talk about email. I mean, I think this idea of let's do less email, let's move away from email scares people, because email has a dichotomous relationship.

I talk about this in the book, where we love and hate email at the same time. We love it for the reason why it first spread in the early 1990s is because we need to do asynchronous communication in most modern office context, and email is a great tool for asynchronous communication. It replaced the fax machine, voicemail, and inner office memos, and it's better, more flexible, faster,

and has more features. So we love it because we don't want to send faxes. We hate it because it brought with it the hyperactive hive mind approach to collaboration in which everything now gets worked out with ad hoc back and forth unstructured messages that require just constant tending to these inboxes so that we can keep up with all these ongoing back and forth conversations. Is that hyperactive hive mind and the constant context shifting that it engenders that makes us hate email? So you're not leading your organization away from email. you're leading them away from the hyperactive hive mind and towards ways of organizing and collaborating and working together

that does not have all that context shifting. So to do that, it's just a two-step process. Number one, preach the dangers of context shifting. This is productivity poison. We're making ourselves dumber. We're burning out. We're getting very little good work done. It's a huge competitive disadvantage.

And then two, say, the way you get away from context shifting is put in place specific process for our work that does not require messages that arrive without schedule that need to be replied to. Ad hoc messages that require reply are really the thing we want to get away from here. So a lot of it's about

vocabulary and specificity. Context shifting is bad. We contact shift a lot because of the unstructured nature of the hive mind. The solution has come up with more structured solutions to how we coordinate. All right. Once everyone's on board with that general agenda, then I would say start with some

low-hanging fruit. When I give talks on my book, I give a couple broad categories of the different ways that we can begin to optimize processes away from the hive mine. And the first of those categories is defer. How can we defer an interaction that was going to happen with back and forth ad hoc messages? So start using async, not asynchronous, automated meeting scheduling tools. Yes, we're going to meet, pick a time. One email instead of 10, the set of meeting time seems like a small. thing, but it saves a ton of inbox checking. That's low-hanging fruit. Office hours. You have

some quick back-and-forth we need to do. A question you want to clarify, let's defer it to my office hours. Every other day, this set time, my door is open, my phone is on, Zoom is running, swing by with anything small. So in that first example, we're deferring a conversation about when to meet to a tool. And the second example, we're deferring a short back-and-forth conversation to an office hours. Those two low-hanging fruits alone From this category of deferral strategy optimizations, Those two pieces of low-hanging fruit alone Are going to save a ton of ad hoc back-and-forth messages

And give people a flavor of, oh, I see When you put in place an alternative For a particular type of work we do together, The amount of messages in my inbox goes down, The amount I have to keep checking it goes down. Once they're comfortable with that, So they know the problem, they have the vocabulary, they've done the low-hanging fruit, then you can get advanced.

And say, let's choose another process, let's choose another. Now you can start using task boards. Now you can start using automation systems. I get into all of that in the book. Read the book carefully to get those details. But that is what I recommend to people. Forget email. Context shifting is the problem.

It is amplified by the hive mind. The solution is replacing the hive mind with specific processes wherever you can that reduce those messages. Start with the low-hanging fruit so people understand what you're talking about. Then you're ready to get serious. All right, let's fit in one more work question here. This one comes from Gabe. Gabe says, how can you analyze career capital in order to pick a specialization in a very broad field of work?

He elaborates that he's an active duty service member in the Navy and is working as a cloud administrator in Microsoft Azure. He says he will be transitioning back to the private sector at the end of 2022 when his current enlistment ends and he wants to take the time. between now and then to expand upon his current career capital to become so good he can't be ignored. He says, my issue is that my career capital as an IT person in the Navy varies across a wide array of specialties. I know I want to stay in cloud administration, but even that is still a very broad field. So Gabe, what this underscores is a reality that is often overlooked. So we're underscoring something that is overlooked.

See what I'm doing there? contrasting symmetry. Writing. So we're, now I forgot I was saying, underscoring so it was overlooked. Well, that just takes all the coolness

out of my turn of phrase. Thanks, Gabe. What I'm trying to say is we often overlook the difficulty of deconstructing the fields in which we work. This was definitely one of the big messages

that Scott Young and I learned with our top performer course that we've done for five years. and over 5,000 students is that it's often really hard to figure out what to get good at. And it's not something that we should take lightly. In your case, honestly, Gabe, I would say you probably want to wait until you get that first public sector, the first private sector job, rather, to pick a hardcore focus of specialization. And here's why I'm saying that. One, it's going to be very difficult from your current position to understand what skill is important because that skill is going to

very dramatically depending on the particular type of industry and administrator job you get. It would be very difficult to figure out what that is from afar. And it could vary depending on what job it is. You don't really know what job you're going to end up in. Two, you know, all due respect to the Navy and I've had a lot of relatives be in the Navy and go through the Navy, you don't have a ton of flexibility there. So you might be seeing yourself up the frustration that even if you do figure out, oh, this is what, this is the skill to pick up.

you may have no opportunity to pick up that skill in the Navy, no way of actually expressing or growing it, and that's going to be a source of frustration. So I might actually recommend, you know you're coming to the public sector in 2022. There is a huge or private sector, but it's public sector because it could be a government job. If it's a government job, for example,

there is a huge push right now in advantage to being a vet when trying to get these jobs. It's going to open a lot of doors to you. So you can choose a job. I would really recommend lifestyle-centric career, planning and doing so, the location, the hours, the type of work where you'll be, where you could live, really be all of the factors of your lifestyle in mind when you choose this job. Then once you have the job right away, you know, I want to be dependable, I want to be reliable,

I want to deliver, but let me figure out what's going on now that I'm in this sector, I'm in this industry. Then you start figuring out what are my opportunities to pick up a new skill, what's the skill I could go for and master here that's really going to get me ahead. That's when I would do it because, again, I think it's going to just be too hard where you are now to figure out what to get good at and have the flexibility of doing it. So enjoy this last year. To the degree possible, you know, maybe you've earned some flexibility, your short duty type position, you're running out the clock, lean into that,

pick up some hobbies, get in good shape, take a breather, get a good job, and then say, let's put back on a running shoes and start picking up the pace. All right, speaking of picking up the pace, I think we need to switch now to some questions about the deep life. All right, let's start with an easy one from Allie. Do you use your smartphone for things like driving directions, taking photos, jotting down notes of things you don't want to forget, or do you go analog for these kind of tasks? Allie, I do use my phone for driving directions. I don't take a ton of photos, but I do use my phone for taking photos. I don't use it for notes.

I don't like typing on my phone. So I have various notebooks for various purposes. Typically, I'll have my time block planner with me for capturing to-do type reminder type tasks. I have my research notebooks and I'm working on a proof and I usually have my moleskin idea notebook for bigger reflections that get integrated into my bigger plans that are part of my strategic plan. So I do go analog for notes. Bigger picture point here is that I'm a big smartphone fan. you know, go back and read my New York Times op-ed about using our phones the way Steve Jobs intended. Steve Jobs had this great vision for the smartphone, pre-app store, pre-social media.

He had this vision of this beautiful device that can play music and do phone calls with a great interface and have these other useful features like text messaging with a good interface, directions that you can stretch and grab, and that it was like a very useful device to help you do the things you already do in your life better and more elegantly. Before smartphones came along, we used maps, we made phone calls, we listened to music. We had calculators for doing tips. And the iPhone that Steve Jobs created took these things we already did and made the experience more beautiful, more seamless easier. I think that's fantastic.

Great tool deployment. Where I get suspicious about smartphones is where it introduces behaviors that we never used to do before. behaviors metastasize until they're taking over almost all aspects of your life. If I'm staring at my smartphone constantly checking it one to 300 times a day because there's these algorithmically served up social media tidbits pressing buttons in my deep brainstem, then I'm worried because that's not something I used to do before a smartphone came along and I don't want to start doing it now because there's a lot of other things in my life I'd rather concentrate on. But even before smartphones, I listened to music and had to look up directions and it's nicer to

swipe through the album list on the phone and nicer to pinch and expand the Google map than it is to have to put a tape in a Walkman or print out map quest or open an Atlas. So that's the way I love to use smartphones to take the things that I would be doing anyways and just do them more conveniently and do them better. I stay away from smartphone uses that introduce behaviors that I never used to do and predominantly just get in the way of things that I like doing. That's where I get suspicious. John asks, How do I choose my minor? I'm starting an arts degree in the fall with a major in urban planning. I don't know what to do with the rest of my timetable.

I realize that minor doesn't matter much career rise, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts about making the most of my degree. Well, John, I mean, first things first, you don't need a minor. You know, if you have what feels like more than enough time for your classes, that is good. I call that back in my days of giving advice to stressed out students underscheduling. Underscheduling is good. Your focus should be not on how many different things I study, but instead, how well can I do on the things that I am studying? If you have more than enough time for your classes, because you're doing just one major and you're very careful in your electives so you don't overwhelm yourself, now you have more than enough time to really, really do well in the classes you are taking, to be a star.

in your urban planning department because you're able to start things early and sit with the reading and come back to it fresh and just do excellent work. That is by far the most important thing you can do to distinguish yourself and open up options is do the work you do exceptionally well. So if that is our main goal, then be very wary of adding anything extra on your plate that could get in the way of it, having a minor or another major or a bunch of club commitments. the advantage of that to your options pales compared to the advantage of doing your one major really well. That being said, if what you're saying is, look, I have to take these other classes anyways, you know, just to get my credit count.

So I might as well take classes that add up to a minor because why not? I get that. I minored in art history. Why not? It was at Dartmouth. It felt like a movie set version of a New England Ivy League campus. Look, I came from a central New Jersey public school, so I figured I think I should take a class where we're in an old building. Shout out to Carpenter Hall.

In an old auditorium with the room dark and there are slides being projected. We're hearing a lecture from a world's expert on Michelangelo. That just felt like what you were supposed to do at a Ivy League college. in New England. At least that was my New Jersey, my central New Jersey teenage idea of what you're supposed to do. So I was like, why not? Might as well organize the other courses I'm taking outside of my major into a minor.

And I enjoyed it. So I get that. If you're doing that, I'm just going to point towards an article I wrote years ago. Years ago on my blog, I wrote an article that basically said, when in doubt, minor in math or computer science. Why? Because it looks awesome. it's not nearly as hard as actually taking the full major

because the minor allows you to sidestep a lot of the more difficult courses. It's kind of a cool looking thing when you are doing almost anything, especially with an arts degree. When you have a mathematics minor or a computer science minor, people are like, whoa, this is a really interesting cross-discipline thinker.

This person must be really smart. There's a really hard subject. So all things being equal, throw a math or computer science minor into your arts major and you will turn some heads. But again, don't really, don't really overthink this. The biggest thing I can say is do the main thing you're doing as well as possible. That is your baseline.

Everything else comes secondary. Our next question is from Zach. Zach says, what is something you've changed your opinion about in the past few years? Well, there have been many things, Zach. One in particular, I suppose, is podcasting. I started a podcast in the last few years. They had been around for a while before then. I have been a frequent guest on podcast since 2014.

So I knew the medium well. And for a long time, I thought the idea that all these people are rushing out to get podcast is just limming behavior. You're doing it because you think you have to, but there's no, you have no real benefit for actually doing it. You can't really understand why you want to do it. And at some point, I had a change of heart, whereas I look deeper into it. I realize, wait a second. actually a profound engagement channel. It's not a fad. It's actually a major new mode of media for people to actually reach an audience directly without the intermediation of a giant media

company or a social media platform. It's allowing new and interesting types of interaction and building up a really close relationship between host and their audiences. And that as someone who produces content, especially in the world of ideas, it was something that was really difficult to ignore that existing just in the world of books maybe is not an option. You need a way of being in your reader's lives outside of just the books. And I'd been doing that with my newsletter, but a lot of the energy was shifting over towards these higher bandwidth forms and media interaction. So I changed my mind of that. I was anti-podcast now.

I'm hugely pro-podcast beyond just my own engagement with this medium. I think it actually represents a really important shift in the media land. So there he goes, Zach. That's one of many examples of things I have changed my mind on. All right, let's try to fit in two more quick, deep life questions. This one comes from KJ. KJ says she's looking for advice on nonfiction book writing. She says, I have started working on a book and I think it meets your three criteria. It's on a topic that a substantial number of people will care about. I am well qualified to write the book and I am a good writer. However, I've been struggling a bit because of two major concerns. So I'll just paraphrase her.

Her first concern is novelty as a topic that's been written about a lot, and she would have to overlap a lot of what other people have already said. So she's worried about that. And her second concern is audience. She doesn't use social media. She doesn't blog. She says if a podcast, is that going to be a problem she wonders if she doesn't have a way of directly reaching an audience. All right, KJ, I love giving nonfiction.

book writing advice for your first concern is your approach to this sufficiently novel sufficiently novel to actually support a successful book launch you know what a great way to get that answer is try to sell the book as you know of course

a nonfiction writing especially of the advice genre you're talking about you sell the book before you write it first you sign with an agent the agent helps you write a proposal the agent pitches at the editors the editor buys it you get in advance and then you start writing. That's a fantastic way to get a definitive and trusted answer to that question.

If you can't sign an agent for the idea or if that agent can't sell the book once you have signed with an agent, then that tells you that, yeah, there's not enough novelty there. Or you messed up one of the other three criteria. Like maybe not enough people really care about it. Or you're not as qualified as you think or, you know, maybe your writing is not as good as you think. But it's a great way of getting an honest answer. Should this be a book is, could I sell it? So honestly, go try to sign an agent.

Just rock and roll. How do you do that? Find similar books that you like and writers you like. Go to the acknowledgement sections of those books. Look up who the agent is. They will thank the agent in the acknowledgments. Looked at agent up online. That agent will give what is known as querying instructions.

Here is how to query me if you want me to potentially sign you as a client. Then boom, go do it. Find three agents and do that this month, KJ. Just go for it. All right. Second issue. You don't have social media. You don't have a podcast, you don't have a blog.

Is that going to be a problem? Yes, but we can mitigate it. We can largely mitigate it. Now, you say, should I try to start a blog or newsletter before I pitched a book and you're worried about your available time? It's unlikely you're going to build that blog or newsletter in a reasonable period of time to anything worthy of catching a publisher's attention. If anything, it's going to be a counter signaling issue. If you try to start a blog on this topic out of nowhere, six months from now, those readership numbers will be so small that it's worse than not having a blog at all. Or if you start a newsletter or, God forbid, you know, a social media feed that has a very small number of followers, it's actually worse than being like, I don't do that.

I mean, whatever, I'm a Cal Newport type. Drop my name, by the way. I always tell people, drop my name. You know, we have sold a lot of books and I've never had social media. So you can try to drop my name. Sometimes it backfires. But, you know, give that a try. So what should you do to mitigate this factor?

Have a really clear plan for how you were going to engage with people through these various channels. Not on your own podcast, but here are the 15 core podcast. These are the core podcasts that reach this audience. I understand this audience. These podcasts, these new deuce letters, this is the whole ballgame. My entire marketing strategy is about getting to these people, getting on these shows. I'm going to start with these shows and then use those interviews to get to these shows and show that you have really thought through how you were going to reach people where they are using these new media channels, not the ones you own, but how you're going to get on the channels that people who already have an audience own, that you've thought a lot about it and you have a plan for it. You know, I think that's really good.

That you're going to put money into the website before the book comes out, and that book is going to talk a lot about how that website that you're going to give. this URL. And in fact, honestly, here's a hint, KJ, buy the URL first. You say, I already own it. Actually, wait, I take that back because you want the URL to match the title and you don't want to commit to a title. The editor is going to have a say for that. So ignore that. But say I'm going to, I have this whole plan. I'm going to work with this. And I don't care if this is where my advance is going to go, we're going to build this really great website that I'm going to be able to give this URL, whatever it is on every interview I do. And it's going to be this great landing page where, you know, get the first two chapters or the 15 tips.

free and we're going to build up this audience. And by showing you have your act together, that you see how you're going to get to this audience and then start collecting the people as you talk about this book into your own audience that's going to grow and you're going to control going forward, that'll middle gate the concern. They'll say KJ knows this world. She's going to take advantage of this world. She's going to grow her stature in this world starting with this book. That's good enough because honestly, yeah, it's great if you say I have 50,000 people on my email newsletter, but you don't and you won't. because you don't have a book out yet. So as long as they see that you're going to get on the newsletters with 50,000,

and then you will have yours after not too long, I think you'll be okay. So I know what's KJ, I'm saying go for it. Like right away, let's just go for that agent. Queries are one page long. If you're going to do it, let's do it and get that ball rolling. All right, let's do one more question here. This is from Arthur. Archer says, do you ever regret becoming a public intellectual rather than

than staying, staying all in on computer science. This is a fair question. Though I might disagree a little bit with the premise that I wasn't all in on computer science. So if we actually go back and look at the timeline, I published so good they can't ignore you in 2012. It came out really early during my time at Georgetown. But I wrote that book as a postdoc at MIT. It just takes a while for books to come out. So when I started at Georgetown, I was not writing a book.

And I wasn't a big time writer back then either. So that book coming out at Georgetown, no one knew, no one cared. I did some radio shows and some podcast and wrote a couple articles. I did a New York Times thing. But it came and went. Deep work came out in 2016. That's when I got tenure. So in the entire pre-tenure period as an assistant professor at Georgetown, and I did go out for tenure early, so it wasn't a very long period.

I wrote one book. That was it. One book over a four-year period. That's about all I did, right? I mean, starting 2014, that's when podcast became a thing. So I would occasionally do podcast interviews. And I very diligently, like I do today, would write my weekly essay, but I would do that at night in my chair with a drink and Thursday nights. And it was a really nice ritual and I put a record on the record player.

And that was more like a hobby than a real time sink. And so there'd be periods where I'd be writing and years would go by where I was like, having kids not writing it at all. So really, I was pretty much all in on computer science as an assistant professor. So, I mean, in some sense, I was exploring what's my ceiling as a computer scientist, I suppose. And I think it was a reasonably high ceiling. I mean, I did get tenure early. I did get a distinguished professorship after tenure.

My H index is now at 30 and climbing for my peer-reviewed computer science publications, which is pretty good. I have something like 60 to 70 peer-reviewed computer science publications that have gathered three to four thousand citations. You know, I have a bunch of best paper awards. So in other words, like I had a good, very focused computer science, theoretical computer science academic career. And so, you know, yeah, maybe I wasn't completely obsessively focused on that because I did

have my book some of my other things. But it really was a major source of my focus. I mean, the thing that took my time away from computer science more than anything else by far during that period was kids. Not writing deep work. It was, I had, you know, two babies during that period. But I think it went well. So there it was. I got tenure.

I got tenure early. Got the stimulus professorship. All right. Now I see this is where I am. I'm an established computer science. I can do this. It wasn't really until a couple years after deep worked that probably the public intellectual aspect of my work began to grow large enough that it actually had a footprint that mattered.

Once deep work started selling, once I then signed the big deal for digital minimalism and a world without email, then it became something that was probably more intention. I mean, I really still remember right before digital minimalism came out, a professor in my department who was, you know, yelling at me for saying I couldn't take a service obligation

because, you know, I had a worldwide publicity tour was going to happen for digital minimalism. I remember him saying, and I've talked about this before on the podcast, I know you write those productivity books for students. So up until that point, even up until that point, right before digital minimalism came out, I don't, you know, most people probably in my field didn't even really know. Maybe they'd heard a deep work, but like, look,

there's someone in my department that vaguely had some sense that I, you know, was the guy who wrote how to become a straight A student. That was right before, by the way, a massive book launch. It was featured in media all around the world, and I was on all the morning shows and all the radio shows, and started writing for the New Yorker, and, you know, whatever.

But so to me, that was a turning point where it was still kind of a minor thing. And then it became much more of a major thing because the ideas clicked, the books clicked, my writing clicked. I became a much bigger public. figure. And so what you see today, there seems to be, okay, much more of attention that I do think really exist today. I mean, I have a media company, and I'm on TV and radio and podcast all the time, and I do a lot

of writing and I'm a regular contributor for this magazine and that. And, you know, okay, it wasn't like that when I was really making a go of being a full-time academic. I did not like that tension, and I'm already resolving it because, you know, hey, I'm now four or five years post-tenure, coming up on full professorship application, and this is a stage in a lot of academics' lives where their academic work might actually turn more public serving. And so I'm shifting my academic interest more towards digital ethics, the impact of technology on culture, my public intellectual work has been more and more about that. These are coming together in a way that's very natural. So there was this moment of tension where for a few years, I was really well known for bookwriting and media that seemed very different than the distributed algorithm publication I'm doing.

And now those worlds are coming back together in a very natural way. So my advice, Arthur, because you elaborate that you're also thinking about pushing some big ideas. I would say, make sure that you have established yourself and hit your ceiling as an academic in the area that you've spent years and years training before you allow. public-facing work to become a major part of your life. You can nurture it right now. Work on a book. Work on articles. That's great.

Like, nurture it. You don't have to have it go away. But I would keep it contained until maybe post-tenure where you really get a sense of where you are as a scholar and where your opportunities lie. And there you might say, look, my scholarly work, I'm on a role here. And there's a whole field I'm trying to create in this public-facing work who cares about it. I'm about to innovate what I'm doing.

Or you may say, yeah, I've kind of hit a ceiling. I've done some interesting work. but I don't know, just doing this type of work for the next 30 years seems kind of boring. I'm going big on this public-facing idea. You'll be in a good place to make that decision. But the decision I'm going to make right now is to wrap this up. First episode in a while that we went over an hour. So I guess congratulations.

Anyways, I'll be back on Thursday with some listener calls. And until then, as always, stay deep.