Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 353: Summer Schedules

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

Summer is here. It’s time to slow down. In this episode, Cal discusses his radically simplified summer schedule and then suggests you similarly inject some “seasonality” into your life, offering tips for finding a slower gear without tanking your job. He then answers listener questions and reacts to the most important AI article that you likely missed last week. Find out more about Done Daily at DoneDaily.com!Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaDeep Dive: Summer Schedules [5:25]- How should I structure my summer vacation with a significant injury? [27:40]- How do I learn the secrets to publication if the faculty doesn’t know I exist? [32:10]- Should I even attempt long-term content or is it too hard? [33:31]- How can I develop a deliberate practice for crafting narratives for technical documents? [44:33]- Is there an alternative to formal education to improve quantitative skills? [45:13]CASE STUDY: A father balances his different roles [47:40]CALL #1: Finding a side hustle [51:16]CALL #2: College student wondering the tips to focus better [56:02]CAL REACTS: Is the AI boom slowing? [1:07:01]Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-is-delaying-the-rollout-of-its-flagship-ai-model-f4b105f7Thanks to our Sponsors:grammarly.com/podcastvanta.com/deepquestionsshopify.com/deepcozyearth.com/deepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the slow productivity 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.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world. I'm here on my deep work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Maybe really our first summer day we've recorded in the sense that it's 80 something degrees. Is it that hot? It's going up to like 87 or something like this. I'm getting a new air conditioner installed in our downstairs this weekend. Yeah, because I remember you did it in the upstairs. Yeah.

And this new one, I believe if I'm understanding the marketing copy properly from Carrier is self-aware. That's how advanced the technology now is in air conditioners. Like the one we had is from like roughly 1976. The one downstairs. Yeah. I mean, I think there's this, there's just like a relatively small guy in there with an ice cube and a fan that he would just sort of wave it over it. Then this new one is Skynet, as far as I can tell. It's like computers and controls and it's kind of.

connected to the internet for God knows what reason. I don't know what's going on with this thing. How's the one upstairs doing? It's doing pretty well. So same, you bind it from the same provider? Yeah, but I'll just say this. If you find me dead in my house frozen and my bank account's emptied, blamed the air conditioner. I don't trust it.

These things are too smart. We've been getting, speaking of complaints, we've been hearing from people about the absence of my newsletter, my email newsletter. So brief update on that. I made the decision a while ago to take the newsletter to the next level, make it more serious. I was like, look, this needs to be, it really should be a weekly newsletter, well-formatted and branded and branded with the right content and edited properly, et cetera, et cetera. So I was like, I'm going to hire someone to work on this with me. And this is going to become a truly properly professional weekly newsletter, which is what it should be. And that's what it's going to be.

But basically, as I was going through that process of getting all of my ducks in a row to move the newsletter to the next level, I just stopped doing it. Because it's like, yeah, we're going to have this nicer version coming. And so let me wait for that. So that's why there's been a delay. But these changes are now upon us. I believe the day this episode comes out, there'll be a newsletter post, which is, God willing, the last newsletter post that I'm doing all on my own. And then there should be a three to four a month rhythm continuing from there. with the help of my new newsletter guru, so you'll sort of see in the weeks ahead, we're going to get a better looking newsletter.

There's going to be some more content in the newsletter in addition to my main essay. So I'm looking forward to that. Yeah. Here's the big deal, though. We're naming it. So remember from the very, the early days, my newsletter slash blog was called study hacks back when I gave student advice. And then at some point we moved away from student advice. We didn't really emphasize study hacks.

It didn't really make sense. and it was just sort of like Cal Newport's thing. It needs a name. And so I've decided I'm going to steal the name I was using for Thursday podcast interview episodes. I'm going to steal that name for the newsletter. The newsletter is going to be called in-depth with Cal Newport. So what are you going to call the interviews? I don't know.

There's other ideas for that. Yeah, I have other ideas for that. I think I'm going to call it. You're good at creating names. Yeah. Well, what I figured, I did some research on it. And I found both Oprah. and Joe Rogan are very popular

interviewers. So I'm going to just name it. Oprah and Joe Rogan presents and then whatever interview I'm doing. And I figure like it'll be more popular then because people will be like, I like those people. And then we'll get more listeners.

Mad Dog is a good interviewer too. Mad Dog Oprah and Joe Rogan presents a conversation with Michael Easter. I like it. I can do the voices. And then we'll try. That would go over really well. Anyway, so I'm excited about it.

I mean, I, first and foremost, I am a writer. And I want the newsletter to be, I want to be able to put my thoughts down. Yeah, I'd have to respond to people because they were like, am I not on the list? Am I on the list? I've checked. I've reached it, arrived. I know.

It's coming. But actually, I am very interested in feedback once it gets going once a week again. I really do want feedback. You can send to Jesse at jessey at calnewport.com. He's more likely to see it than me about like, oh, I like these topics, not these topics, because we cover a lot. There'll be overlap with the podcast. I typically sometimes not.

I go deeper on things in the newsletter. I can be a little bit more nerdy on it. So anyways, if you're not subscribed to that, just go to Calnewport.com and subscribe because the weekly email has begun. All right, Jesse, we got a good episode today. We got a summer themed, slow productivity inspired deep dive. We got some good questions, calls, case studies, and then a reaction. I'm going to react to a, the most important article.

about AI that you did not read but tells us a lot about what's happening now and should also bring your blood pressure down a little bit if you are worried that we're weeks away from AI conquering the world. All right. So let's get started with our deep dive. For me, today is in some sense the first day of summer. I'm a college professor and my final grades were submitted last week. I hosted the lunch for the graduating seniors. Commencement was on Saturday. The campus has just shut down for the summer season. Unlike most professors at most research universities, however, I don't take summer salary. As soon as the spring semester ends, I am officially off the clock until the fall comes.

I've received no paycheck from the university. I receive no paycheck from the grant agencies during the summer. There is no expectations from anyone else. My time is my own. Here is the schedule that I more or less try to run during these summers of no external obligations. I try, if possible, to have no professional appointments, meetings, or calls on Mondays or Fridays. I want to begin and in my week with quiet and depth.

So the transition into the weekend and from the weekend back into the week is one that is much more gradual and subtle and cognitively rewarding. You're not going from a quiet Sunday to a crazy Monday. I try when possible to make one of those days, Monday or Friday, an adventure thinking day, where I'll spend at least three or four hours, usually. somewhere outside of nature being way too hot because I do live in Washington, D.C., but maybe going to like the Pectoxic Wildlife Refuge right outside of the Beltway or to Wheaton Regional Park or to the, I like the Rachel Carson Greenway, to a trail, go for a hike,

spend a couple hours outside, go to Rock Creek Park, bring my notebooks and try to really work through ideas. For Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, those days start with deep work. I don't look at an email or a computer until midday. Then in the afternoon, I have an admin block. What I try to do is have 30 minutes on my calendar, midday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, where like a furious task completing machine, I go through small logistical things that have piled up and try to make as much progress as possible.

In the afternoons on those three days is when I'll have calls, I'll have interviews, I'll have professional-related appointments, and I try to end those days by four. That is my summer schedule, and I love it, and I can get away with it because I have these really slow summers. is a vital part of my success. It is a step away from the frantic demands of the school year. I get my best thinking done during the summer. I produce my best ride in the summer. It's when I recharge for the year ahead. So I want to talk to you today about this general strategy of seasonality. I'm going to argue that it's important for basically everyone, especially if you have some sort of knowledge or office work job.

You might not be able to push your summer schedule to the same extreme as mine, but I think it should be different. I'll argue why. And then I'll give you some ideas about how you can do that, even if you have less flexibility than myself. All right, let's start with the case for the seasonality, taking one season to be different and less intense than other seasons when it comes to your work. I'm going to read something from my book here, the Bible for the show, slow productivity.

I wrote about this idea. I did some good research on this, so I'm going to take a second to take advantage of the research I already did. All right. I'm going to read here. The side-by-side comparison underscores the degree to which our experience of work has transformed during the recent past of our species. Our shifts from hunting and gathering to agriculture, the Neolithic Revolution,

only really picked up speed somewhere around 12,000 years ago. By the time of the Roman Empire, foraging had almost completely disappeared from the human story. This reorientation towards agriculture through most of humanity into a state similar to that of the rice farming agta, grappling with something new, the continuous monotony of unvarying work all day long, day after day. All right. So I'm arguing here. So I do a, before this, I went through a treatment of what the foraging and hunting and gathering life was like in which we spent most of our species existence, drawing on some more recent research from the Agen to people in the Philippines where you had this. same people that divided half of the group went to rice farming and the other half stayed with foraging. There's interesting research from the 2000s where they compared the lifestyle between

these two groups that were otherwise very much controlled to be the same people in the same type of geographical region and they found that, oh, the hunting and gathering foraging group has way more variation in their days. Busy periods, non-busy periods, busy seasons, non-busy periods. So what I'm arguing here is that change with agriculture. Our days when we were working became uniformly hard days. However, and I'm going back to reading here, the one saving grace in this scenario is that agriculture didn't demand this homogenized effort the entire year as the busy sowing and gathering a crops is offset by the quiet of winter.

So we went from hunting and gathering and foraging where even within a given day, there's huge variation in intensity. This hour is really locked in because we're in the middle of a hunt, but the next two hours were taking a nap during the midday sun. Then we get agriculture. It said, no, no, when you work, we have this new idea of, like, working sunrise to sun set of equal intensity. Our Paleolithic forebearers did not have such uniform intensity, but at a bigger scale, you had busy seasons and less busy seasons. The fall was very busy.

The winter was not. Moving forward in the human story, and I'm reading again here, the Industrial Revolution stripped away those last vestiges of variation in our work efforts. The powered mill, followed by the factory, made every... day a harvest day. Continuous, monotonous labor that never alters. Gone with a seasonal changes and since making rituals, marks for all his flaws and overreach hit on something deep with his theory of entrafundung. I said that perfectly, Jesse, by the way. Estrangement, which argued that the industrial order alienated us from our business, our basic human nature. The workers eventually inevitably fought back against this grim situation. They pushed for

reform legislation like the Fair Labor Standards Act passed by the U.S. Congress in 1938, which fixed 40 hours as a standard work week limiting the fraction of the day that could be snared a monotonous effort without extra pay. They also form labor unions as a counterbalance to the more dehumanizing aspects of industrialization. All right. So what happens next is the factory in the mill is a brand new thing where we said not only you're going to work all day long at equal intensity, there are no seasons anymore. The textile mill doesn't care if it's January versus Jews. Now all year round there's not going to be a change.

What I'm arguing here in the book is that this was deranging for people. This was like really difficult. It's not what our species evolved to do to hard work all day long without change all year round. It's very unnatural. And so we had to at least to make it bearable

get things like reform legislation and labor unions to at least try to have like some pushback there. Finally, we get the knowledge. which brings us to what us as our audience, you know, to our world. So let me read here briefly. Then knowledge work entered the scene as a major economic sector. The managerial class didn't know how to handle the autonomy and variety of jobs of this new sector.

Their stopgack response was pseudo-productivity, which used visible activity as a proxy for usefulness. Under this new configuration, we took another step backward. As in the industrial sector, we continued to work all day every day without seasonal changes, as any such variation would now be received as non-productiveness, but also. Unlike in the industrial sector, in this invisible factory we'd constructed for ourselves, we didn't have reform legislation or unions to identify the most draining aspects of this setup and fight for limits. Knowledge work was free to totalize our existence, colonizing as much of our time from evenings to weekends to vacations as we could bear and leaving little recourse beyond burnout or demotion or quitting when it became too much.

Our estrangement from the rhythms of work that dominated the first 280,000 years of our species' existence was now complete. So the argument I'm making there is that we've sort of invented when it comes to knowledge work the most unnatural possible way of approaching work. It is as far as we have ever been as a species away from how we spent most of our time as a species.

Kind of had this steady march away from the way we were wired to exist for the Paleolithic. Agriculture made it a little farther from that. The Industrial Revolution was even farther from that and we had to bring in protection so that at least it didn't overwhelm us and at least we recognize, hey, this is really unnatural so you better pay us well and extra pay and we're going to push back. And then knowledge work got rid of all that and just left with the really unnatural pace and everyone now pretended like this was good though. And this was somehow like what it meant to be productive. So seasonality

pushes back against that. It goes back towards our agricultural roots and even farther back to our forager roots where it says we have busier periods and less busier periods, a busy time of year and a less busy time of year. When you better match the natural rhythms for which we're wired, your life becomes more tolerable and sustainable. And over time, you produce better quality work because when you're in this unnatural edifice of continuous invisible factory labor, you just burn out. And then it just becomes activity for the sake of activity.

And yeah, you're working all day long, but what does that work? Well, a lot of it's going to be moving emails back and forth, taking on. those unnecessary meetings because at least it's something that's not too taxing and looks like you have activity. It's not a good way of producing results and it's a great way of burning out the human psyche. So I am a big believer in having variation. I will say as an aside, by the way, Jesse, that whole, I won't name names, but that whole sequence in this book, which came out of a New Yorker piece that came out before the book,

starting with the hunting and gatherers, moving through agriculture into the industrial revolution, how we got alienated from our rhythms, quoting Marx and Marx's theory of estrangement to talk about like what happened when we finally separated so much from what we were wired for. A book that came out not too recently had that exact same arc with the same examples, citing some of the same studies, ending up with Marx in the theory of estrangement or whatever. I don't think the author like was stealing it. I think his research assistant.

just like came across my New Yorker piece at some point. Or like, great, here's some ideas. They went into their system. And this is kind of the problem of the modern way that a lot of these nonfiction writers write where they just have a research assistant, gather a bunch of stuff on a bunch of topics. And then the writer has a bunch of examples to pull from to make their points. I think they just, he just digested my New Yorker piece,

broke it into its pieces. And then the author is like, oh, these are good research parts and reconstructed my, my exact arc, basically, in his book. Did you read the book? Yeah. Have you reviewed it on your monthly book? You're trying to get me to identify who this is. I will not identify who this is.

But yes, it was the baseball book of why. It was a weird tangent that author went on. I don't know what Marxist Three of Estrangement had to do with baseball trivia, but, you know, damn him. I'm on, I'm on to him. All right. Seasonality. So how do we do this?

Well, what I do with my summer schedule is one example, but that's pretty specific to be. I mean, it's like why I became a professor and writer was exactly to be able to do. that. Flexibility and schedule and a job like the writing that could sort of support me to take time off like that and give me like an activity to do. There's a lot of ideas you can do that are smaller that'll give you a taste of seasonality. I have a few to suggest here as you think about the summer ahead. One, consider having one day each week, maybe a Monday or Friday, where for the most part

you don't schedule appointments. Don't make a big deal about this. Don't announce it. Don't tell people when they ask you when you're available that you're not available on Mondays have plenty of options to suggest like yeah I have this day this day how about here here here just don't happen to suggest days on this day that you have secretly marked for yourself as a no meeting day each week it won't always work but many weeks it will and to have one day a week or two days a week where especially connected to a weekend where you can get into your work and get

caught up and see what's going on at a more of a leisurely entry pace and not have to jump into a thousand meetings really makes a big difference, makes the season seem slower. If possible, try to make one of those days into more of an adventure day. Get out of your normal workspace if you can, especially if you were able to work remote, go into nature, go to a museum, go to the mall in D.C. It's what I used to do. Make it feel different. Now, still, you'll work, work on your notebook, bring your laptop with you, you know, still

get things done, but in a completely different location, it just makes the pace of work seem different. I would also suggest, oh, I lost a page here. Where did I put? Oh, I see what I did here, Jesse. I put my ads in the wrong place. Okay. So no meeting days, yes.

All right. Another thing you should think about doing is pushing new project start times. Again, you don't need to make a big deal about this, but you can wind down your projects as the summer starts. And as you take on new projects, be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's, I'm finishing up some things now. But like late August, I'll get that ramped up. that's close enough in the future that people are like, yeah, fine, that's reasonable. But what you've done is created a bit of a lacuna in your schedule here. There's going to be this period where you're not really starting or in the middle of any big projects.

Now, you can't do this all the time because eventually projects have to get done. So you can't keep pushing them into the future. But once a year, you can start saying for a little while when new projects are coming to you, like, yeah, I'm finishing up a bunch of stuff now, but what if like in mid-August I'll take this on? And the reality is you're not really finishing up that much stuff, but it does buy you some space. Put your hand down more. And what I mean by that is when it comes to volunteer activities within your work, especially what researchers call non-promotable activities,

like organizing the internal office birthday parties or this or that. Maybe you're that reliable go-to person that likes to help out and people like that about you. That's great, but put your hand down for a couple months. Just don't volunteer or say, I don't know, I'm a little busy right now. again, if you do this all the time, then people might be like, oh, man, he or she likes never useful. It's kind of annoying. You do it for a month or so for six weeks. No one notices then because, like, you're mainly volunteering a lot.

They won't notice, but it makes these periods feel different. You just have less of this extra work on your plate. This is a strategy I talked about in my slow productivity book. The idea of like a highly autonomous blocker project. You take on a project for the summer that you can keep referring to, to try to push away other type of work. Like, well, yeah, yeah, I can do that, but I'm working on the McGuire report, right?

And, like, that's where my head's down on this. But after I finished the McGuire report, like, I can work on these other types of things. Choose that proverbial Maguire report to be something that's highly autonomous that you can, in reality, do like an hour every day and stay on top of it. It is a extremely effective strategy.

People don't know how long work takes. Most people are, like, pretty inefficient. You take something where you have a lot of flexibility. It doesn't generate a lot of meetings. It doesn't make you have to be on other people's schedule. Be efficient and effective. And then use that thing to push everything else off your plate for a little while. You can only get away with that so long.

But really, we're just looking for a month or two of respite. Start your day slowly. Apologize only if people notice. Like start your day in the coffee shop. Like a little breakfast and coffee. Work there for a while. Just change the rhythm of the day. So it just feels slower.

It's not as frantic as other times of years. Like this is psychological, but these type of psychological differences really can add up. Finally, this idea that people keep getting upset about this. I'm not sure why. Just, you know, every other week, go do something midday, some day that you don't normally do during the weekday. You go see a movie or something. It's two and a half hours. It's not some big deal.

People go to doctor's appointments and stuff all the time. But it's going to give you a completely different feel for your week. When you're in a movie theater at 2 o'clock and you're in a movie theater at 2 o'clock and, you're, you know it's a weekday. It makes you feel like you're not just in like the normal invisible factory clock and clock out. This is what I do every day. It just gives you a sense of autonomy and slowness and control. And in the summer, do this more often.

Go see some dumb movies. Right? Especially if you're in a situation where you don't have to account for every minute of your time. Again, if you go to movies every day, if you stop work at two every day all the time, people will notice. But if once or twice a month, you're gone in the afternoon, you're back a little bit late. No one knows. No one notices. So you can use these smaller tips.

if you don't have a huge amount of autonomy, to introduce some seasonality. Summer is a great time for seasonality. So hopefully a lot of you in the audience are going to join me in slowing down for the months ahead. Do you ever need more than 30 minutes to do admin work? Probably, yeah. Sometimes it extends more. But like I try to just have this mindset of when I get in there, especially for like Georgetown stuff, which is not much in the summer.

but queries come up and a dean needs this or that. Just try to be like really focused and work through. The opposite problem is what I'm trying to solve more often than not, which is there's not a lot of stuff in my inbox right now, but try to do 30 full minutes of useful admin work, even if there's not just messages to answer, like fill in the rest of the time to get ahead of things or to organize things or to preemptively step out or prod things along.

So it goes both ways. try not to work beyond that 30 minutes too far, but also make sure you use the full 30 minutes. This is not going to work for most jobs. It wouldn't work for my job in September. But in July, because it's an academic institution that's technically shut down and I'm not on salary, it's much more plausible.

I also have to deal with writer admin as well. But there, I'm just really good at all the various teams in my life sort of know in the summer. Like, yeah, Cal's not, that's not his super accessible time. I guess I thought you were also handling your personal. and Ladman like budgets and stuff like that takes it yeah that's different okay that's different yeah but that's fine that's summertime yeah mo you have to like mow your yard and work on your budgets i got do my taxes the next week i'm doing my budget today yeah but that stuff's fine that's like you're at home

and i don't mind that as much and that does take a while all right well we got a bunch of good list or questions coming up uh but first hear a quick word from some of our sponsors I want to talk about my friends at Cozy Earth. I love Cozy Earth. This is one of these products or companies where I use a lot of their products. I absolutely swear by them. In particular, their sheets are a must have in our family. We have multiple pairs of these sheets so that when one is being washed, we can switch them into the bed.

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That's CozyEarth.com code deep. And if you get a post-purchase survey, tell them you heard about CozyEarth from Deep. questions with Cal Newport. Sanctuary awaits at Cozy Earth. Also want to talk about our friends at Shopify. If you run a small business, you know there's nothing small about it. As a business owner, I get it. My business takes up a lot of my time and attention, and I am always looking for places to avoid having to waste time dealing with extra products or things that don't work well. This is where Shopify enters the scene. if you're going to be selling things, you 100% need to be using Shopify.

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and reflecting. Because of a knee injury, I can't do my usually trip this year and don't enjoy too much unstructured time at home. How would you suggest I structure my eight weeks summer break and daily schedule to get similar benefits without being able to leave home or walk all day? I'm thinking maybe take up drinking. Good old fashioned Texas moonshine or whiskey, like an old fashion Texas cowboy. That'll get you through the eight weeks pretty well. Okay, so you can't walk all day, but I want to push on this a little more. You say you can't leave home. I don't think he means he can't literally leave his house.

He means just like on longer trips, I guess, right? Yeah. Yeah. Because I was going to say, you know, a few things I was going to say. But my overarching advice here is have a schedule, have a plan. Right. Don't go into your day saying like, whatever. The day is kind of awful to see how it unfolds.

There's not much I can do because of my knee. It's that type of slow through the mud. Like I'm just sort of wasting time. I'm on my phone for three hours this morning. I don't even know where that wind. I'm going to watch some TV and see what's going on. Like that type of stuck in the mud, mired in time mentality can really be relaxing for a day. But over eight weeks, I think is really going to be a bummer.

So you want to have some notion of a scheduler plan, whatever those details are. This is what I'm doing this summer. This should probably involve some sort of project or projects you're working on. And these might be more intellectual, cognitive than physical, preferably things you can work on outside of your house. I mean, you say you can't leave your house, but you can leave your house. Like go different places. Start your morning with the paper at the coffee shop, and you're going to the woodshed because you're working on mastering some sort of new woodworking tool, you know. Yeah, your knee is hurt, so you can't walk all day, but it's not going to be something where you can't walk on it.

I mean, even people with knee replacements, they want you up and around. So I want you up and around working on some sort of projects that is not just in your house. It could be cognitive. It could be physical. Some mix of the two have some initiatives you're going on. I'm going to read all these books. I'm going to watch every movie that, you know, every Ford movie between this 10-year period and like read books about it or whatever it is. But have things to do that feels like they're rewarding.

That's what the long hikes worse. You want something that's similarly ambitious, but just not something that makes such a big demand on your knee. and there needs to be a plan here. I think we tell ourselves, this was kind of my pushback against the sort of Ginny O'Dell hypothesis about doing nothing. We tell ourselves that's some sort of Rousseauian platonic ideal, that doing things is an internalization of capitalist narratives and doing nothing is a brave resistance,

and that's where we're going to rediscover ourselves. But there's only so much of literally doing nothing that we can put up with before we get antsy. And then what happens is we have all these highly polished attention economy tools that are very much happy to solve our problem for us. Like you're antsy about doing nothing.

Look at this screen. Your eyeballs bleed. We can give you something to do. And then time just disappears. And you come out of it feeling depressed. I was just looking at a study that was featured on an NPR clip a couple months ago that was showing these connections

between looking at algorithmic content and your mood. And as they, in an experiment, took people off of their phone. essentially, they found this steady increase in their actual psychological well-being. So, you know, doing nothing, it's not, we think it is very appealing, but really what we don't like is being overloaded, burnt out, overworked. But we're not looking for the opposite of that.

Or if we are, the opposite of overworked is not doing nothing. It's a reasonable amount of work. The opposite of grueling efforts that feel meaningless and pointless is efforts that are meaningful and have a point. Right. So the opposite of these things that wear us out is not sitting there on your phone doing nothing all day. It's doing less things and doing those things better and more meaningful things. So just keep that in mind quiz and then keep active. Get that knee healed.

Maybe PT is a big part of the something you're doing this summer and then get back to those hikes as soon as you can. All right. Who do we have next? Next is from Martin. In episode 352, you answer the question, am I working hard enough to get tenure? I'm a postdoc myself in computer science, but not at an R1 university. A few faculty members here are at the top of the respective fields,

but we do not learn the same toolbox to publish consistently as the top venues. How do I discover these secrets if the faculty don't even know my name? I mean, honestly, Martin, like if that's what you want to do, right, you want to publish at the top of your field and gun for top academic positions, you need to work for those people. So if there's a few of those people at your school, like you want to find a way to actually collaborate with them. Now, you might not be able to change your postdoc advisor this far into game, but if you can

find a way to collaborate with them, hey, I'm making your life useful. I'm writing a paper with you and doing a lot of the work. That's what you have to do. I mean, it's an apprenticeship system. High in academia is an apprenticeship system. You have to find an apprenticeship. It is very hard otherwise to make your way into this sort of metaphorical guild. So see if there's a way you can write a paper with these top-to-line faculties.

I mean, good for you for noticing, based on last week's answer. That's who you need to be allied, Lewis, if you have this very narrow goal of publishing the top places and getting access to these type of jobs. You've got to find a way to actually work with them. It's very difficult to learn these things from afar. All right. Who do we got next? Next question is from Will. even if the short-form content topics are still relatively deep,

do you still caution against short-form content creation and encourage long-form writing as a way to sustainingly build an audience? Or do you think today's attention economy is too focused on social media to the point where the barrier to entry is too high for a new successful blog or sub-stack? So I was questioning a little bit his use of the word short and long. Maybe you have a better sense here, Jesse. When he's saying short-form versus long-form, is long-form books? No, long forms is a blogger or substack, and short form is like a YouTube short or something like that.

Oh, I see. So he's saying, is it too hard to the long form stuff that I talked about before, is it too hard now to start with that? Yeah, like to start your website and stuff like that. Okay, so it's always been hard. Here's what I think has happened. And I don't know. This is maybe a crumudgeonly way of looking at the media landscape. But if you look back 30 years ago where what's dominating in the printed word media

landscape is going to be, you know, books and the big glossy Condi Nost magazines that you find on the newsstand. There wasn't a lot of people who are like, hey, I kind of want to be in that game, right? Like, you didn't have just sort of like the average person being like, yeah, I want to be one of the authors on the shelf there at Barnes & Noble or in the van, you know, with my articles in Vanity Fair. You had like a relatively narrow group of people who wanted to be professional writers and that was a vocation. It was kind of competitive but sort of cool if you could get there. But the average person was content to be like, yeah, I read that stuff.

I think a lot of this changed with Web 2 and then particularly after Web 2 gave way to social media where a big part of the pitch of Phase 1 social media and I'll tell you what Phase 1 means in a second was you can try on, you can cosplay. producing content for an audience. I'm convinced that this was the original sales pitch of phase one social media, was that Facebook, which was the first big player, they emerge in 2004 and they're generally public in 06. You have to remember, at this point, Web 2, which had been around since like the early 2000s, which was blogs, basically, was pretty brutal.

This technology came along and said, hey, anyone now can publish something. You don't have to, there's not a gatekeeper at a magazine or a newspaper or like a web developer you need to sort of put content. You can set up an account and publish something and it's on the web and anyone can read it. And what happened is a lot of people tried it and no one cared because it's really hard to write things as it always has been that people care about. And so a lot of people were disillusioned by blogs. It was it was embarrassing. It was it was whatever was demotivating. I wrote and no one came.

Then Facebook came along and said, okay, here's our deal. You write on here, people will come. Here's the social contact. You're going to go through the contract. You're going to go through and you're going to indicate all these other Facebook users who know you. And we're going to tell them about stuff when you publish it. And yeah, the stuff doesn't matter, but there's going to be a social contract that they'll come over and they'll click like and poke and write comments and you'll do the same for them. And we can all sort of feel what it's like to be producing, you know,

ideas and commentary and have an audience that cares about it. So we all can kind of cosplay in a lightweight way what it would feel like to actually be Michael Lewis writing these pieces for Vanity Fair, right? Or Malcolm Gladwell producing these books that are getting all, you know, these readers. And that was a big appeal of phase one social media. Now that changed. We got the phase two. TikTok brought us into the phase two where we said, you know, forget publishing your own stuff.

What really matters is just like put into my blint, put it right into my veins, algorithmic distraction. And we kind of gave up caring about posting stuff and what people thought about us and was just like put it right right in my veins until my eyes bleed. That's phase two where we are now. I think that was the original pitch of phase one social media. And so it really traded on this idea that like, yeah, not only is the ability to publish words accessible to a lot of people now. But like it's really like kind of right there. You get a couple right breaks and some stuff goes viral and it just feels like you're right there.

you're posting stuff and people, you have this built-in audience that'll look at it a little bit and anything could go viral at any time and you hear stories about it. And suddenly now this became something that it was like running triathlons or something that like a lot of people could do. And I think it changed our approach to things like professional content production to like, hey, maybe I should do this. Which again, you don't hear a lot of people in 1985, just casually be like walk by and see someone reading, you know, the New Yorker and be like, hey, I should write for that. That might be fun. Like, I can start doing that. Because there's just like less venues and they're really hard.

So this has been crumudgeonly, but I'm coming back to this and saying, well, what content are you producing? Like, do you want to be a professional writer? Then, like, you should go down the path of becoming a professional writer. Don't be seduced into this idea that there's some sort of shortcut into that that requires a lot less effort and a lot less hard hoops to make it through where I'm posting short-term content and something takes off. And, you know, next thing you know, I'm a writer.

or an SNL or whatever. Like, yeah, that happens, but really not that often. So is the media attention economy too focused for things like a successful blog or or substack or a podcast or books? No, I think it's like it's always been. It's very hard. It's no easier, no harder than it's always been. If you want people to read your articles or books or listen to your podcast, which is kind

of like an audio version of like long articles, it's like like it was 30 years ago. It's hard. You have to have like an extra expertise and a voice and and like, find. your audience and what you offer and have a couple swings that finally connect and then build on those is the same thing that professional writers have been doing all the time. I don't think it's any harder any easier than it's been before. We just have this other thing over here, which is the the cosplay that you get in attention economy, social media, where everyone feels like they're pretty good and they're

one lucky breakaway from being the next Kim Kardashian. That, I think, has warped how we think about content creation. but I'm a big believer in writing professionally. I just put these reality checks on it that it's like very hard. Right? Digital technology did not make this something that is easier for like a huge number of more people to succeed at. It changed the forms in which you can do it. It changed the economic for the people who are good at it.

Now you have more control over how you reach and get to your audience, but it doesn't actually give you a big audience. That is still earned, I think, the ways that it always was. So I don't know. I feel like I'm going on a rant here, Jesse, but it's something I've been thinking about recently is that, again, 30, 40 years ago, it would be more rare that someone just be like, I want to be publishing stuff that people read. It was like the people who really want to be a writer. And now I think it feels more accessible in a way, in part because social media, like, plays on this idea of like people are listening to you and like you're, you're like one or two good quips away from like a retweet storm that's going to make you famous. And so I guess my answer is like The entry level is not too high It's as high as it's always been Which is pretty high

It's hard I was having this conversation with someone recently Like well how do you succeed with a podcast? It's like it's hard Like typically you have to have something else going That's already big All these things It's like substack

It really helps if you're already well known You're already a journalist Who's well known Then like you could maybe build a successful substack Do you read a lot of people's substacks? Some Do you get the email Notifications?

I just look at my inbox. Yeah. Yeah, I don't use the app. Or sometimes it takes me over to the app. But I just look for my email inbox. I like that form. I mean, email newsletters, I think is a great form. Podcast is a great form.

I like these forms because they're independent. And you're not beholden. You're not beholden to like super large companies that are using your content. I mean, some steck does a little bit of this. But like email newsletters and podcasts, I think it's like a golden age of content production. But the people succeeding in these, it's the same people that were succeeding in like the magazine industry in the 1990s. It's like kind of the same number of people

and some of the actual very same people, you know, like Gladwell and Lewis's podcast. So the forms are different, but I don't think, this is like the misnomer about media revolutions is they don't make it easier to be successful. They just sort of change the terms of success.

That's kind of my growing theory. Now that we'll have our new weekly, our newsletter every week. It's going to be good. It's going to have a logo. It's going to have some good links. We have some good links in it. We're going to have links every week.

I might eventually bring in from an archive piece at the end. We're just sort of pull out some classic stuff from the decade or so. I've been writing about this stuff. It'll be good. Got to hone in on my topics, though. Oh, the video for the podcast? There is going to be, like, featuring the that week's podcast episode will be right there. So, like, people who are email subscribing will always hear like, oh, here's what

is going on in the podcast this week. Should be good. Yeah. And then on the podcast, what I'm going to do is in a mom. monotone read the entire newsletter word to word every week. Just all the way through, page break. I'll read the punctuation as well. Because, yeah, how else is they going to know?

Semi-colon space. Just be like that. And that's really what the podcast is going to become. Instead of me, I'm going to have a 1980s-era Macintosh. Remember how they could talk with that robot voice? Just reading out my newsletter. I think it'll be just as successful. With an occasional throwing of your French accent with the pipe.

Yeah, and then I'll come in and do a bad French accent. Yeah, I think we've got this all clued in. I think we are about to explode. This world is so hard, by the way. It's so hard to grow podcasts and newsletters speaking to which. I mean, that would grow it, but what a hard world. All right, what else do we have here? We have Mark. Mark. I'm an actuary with a job that leads to adversial interactions with regulators who are often challenging our assumptions in rejecting proposals. Since filings are infrequent and mistakes are highly visible, it's tough to design a deliberate practice. to reduce pushback. Well, Mark, you're actually in a situation that's really right for deliberate practice because you're getting super clear feedback. We are really mad because of X. That's great feedback on like, okay, how do I never do X again? So you probably are in a cycle of deliberate practice here that is making you better.

It's not fast in the sense of you're doing 20 reps a day, but like each year you're getting probably a dozen or two great pushback. So great teaching signals about what's working and what's not working. And the rate at which you are improving at writing these types of reports that you're filing is probably impressive if you're looking at the right time scale. I will throw in, however, if this job is stressing you out, and it sounds like it might be, I mean, it was stressing me out. Like you're just constantly being yelled at by people who are mad by default are mad about what you're going to send them. You might think about getting another job. The key, however, is if doing so, take your career capital with you.

Don't quit this job to become a yoga instructor, quit this job to become an actuary somewhere else, but in a non-adversarial environment, right? So if there's something that's emotionally draining about a position, see if you can pick up your skills and take them somewhere else that removes that thing that is emotionally draining. Because I'm suspecting that might actually be the real problem here, you know, the sparring. I wouldn't like that either. All right, who do we got next? Next up is Kayla. As someone who excelled in humanities and liberal arts, I appreciated your suggestions to read books with opposing views to grapple

with different theories and perspectives. However, I'm curious if you have any recommendations for how to improve quantitative and technical skills as a way to get smarter in a dumb world. I would focus on specific projects that require you to master a new technical or quantitative skill to make progress. The two types of projects that you'll actually return to is either one that has a professional salient So you volunteered to do this thing and your organization's like, yeah, that's good, do this thing. And now they're waiting for an answer and to get them an answer. You have to pick up the new skills.

That'll focus your mind. Or something's really fun. I think they'll be really fun to build this thing that's going to require me to learn circuit design or going to have to learn computer programming. Maybe I'm doing it with my kids. But have a project that you either are interested in for professional financial reasons or for fun, sort of like family connection reasons. and let that drive you to have to pick up new quantitative skills. Don't just sit with a textbook and say, all right, guys, just come on a Torx day and just sit there and try to memorize theorems.

Like, that's not going to be very fun, but having a project is going to make that easier. I like, by the way, that you brought up my suggestion from before because I always like to underscore that. Read two books that have, that are very smart and have the opposite view on something. Even independent of the content, the dialectical clash of two opposing opinions on something adds just a new layer of nuance to your mind. It just makes you smarter. It makes you see the world in more interesting shades of gray and not black and white.

It's a really interesting experience. Even if you don't care about the topic, seeing that clash, just adds like a more sophisticated layer to your brain. And if it's a topic you really care about, then you extra sure want to read the opposing view as well because that's where you're really going to figure out why you care about it. It's going to strengthen your conviction. It's going to make you a better advocate for that. Do not try to avoid stuff that you think is.

going to be contradicting stuff that you care about because that's not a belief, right? If it's, I'm avoiding contradictory information, that's not a belief acquired in good faith. It's an idol that you're worshipping. It's you like the idea of being a part of that cult. So it's great the challenge ideas. It's going to make them stronger. It's also great just to make you a smarter thinker to see what it looks like when you read two very opposing views. All right.

Ooh, we got a case study this week for people send in their accounts. of applying the type of things we talk about on this show in their own life. If you have a case study, you can send it to Jesse at calnewport.com. Do we have a name for this week? I guess not. We'll just call this Peter. Yeah. Peter said, at the end of 2022, my life reached a turning point.

I had just become a father for the first time, released my own music after years supporting other artists, and was deeply involved in serving my local Baha'i community. On paper, I had achieved, this name is probably not Peter. On paper, I achieved many of my life goals, but something still felt off. I realized, after talking with my wife, that I was constantly distracted thinking about music and work while at home and feeling guilty for not being fully present with my family or in my community service. Social media, I suspected, was a big part of the problem. It'd be funny here if the case study said, so I got rid of my family and now have much more time for my social media and I've never looked back. His name is Cyril.

Surreal. Surreal. Social media expected was a big part of the problem. Discovering your TED Talk and then dive into your books, especially deep work, was a revelation. It helped me see that my habits needed the change if I wanted to be truly present and effective in all areas of my life. Over the past two years, I've worked hard to put your ideas in the practice. I've become much more intentional about how I organize my days, treating my music career like a knowledge, work job with clear boundaries. Deep work sessions are now a priority, allowing me to focus on improving my core musical skills,

which are composing, producing, singing, and playing instruments. I'm also more disciplined with my time. I keep social media off my phone, stick to fixed work hours, and reserve evenings and weekends for my family. This structure has actually made me more flexible, letting me step away from work when needed for family or community projects. I've also picked up new habits like boxing and reading more books,

which have brought a steady sense of well-being. All right, what I really like about this case study is this sometimes paradoxical sounding idea that having some more structured intentionality and control of your time makes your life slower and more full and more meaningful. There is sometimes this idea that's out there that once you begin to think more intentionally about your time, that necessarily means what you're doing is internalizing capitalist narratives and you're building your life into like a stressful scramble of trying to produce, produce, produce.

But that's not always what's going on. An unstructured life can be busy and exhausting. A structured life can be intentional and more relaxed. And I think that's what we see in Surreal Story here. I'm going to go back and show you a couple things that I think are important here. His job was flexible, right? He's in music production. He's not at an office working for a boss.

Adding clear boundaries made it much better. Here's when I work and here's when I'm done. Without that, it just bled over into the rest of his life and it was causing real distress and problems. He makes deep work a priority. There's lots of stuff he could be doing. That's probably more fun. And maybe I should be working on the social media pages of the bands that I'm repping and try to make sure that they're getting attention, but he says, no, on a regular basis, I want a deep

work on getting better at music. Long term is probably making a much more successful. Short term is giving him a lot more psychological satisfaction out of his job because it continually connects him back to the core artistic element of what he's doing and why he values it. He keeps social media off his phone and weekends and evenings are just for family. That really helps. I'm not working. I'm not on my phone. You're going to connect to your family much more. So these seem like simple ideas, but these little rules and structures made a really big difference in Surreal's life. And so I think it is a fantastic case study. All right. Let's do a call. Yep. Hey, Al, Alex Sorto here. I'm a commercial

real estate appraiser, and my question has to do with the topic of side hustles. So, you know, there's a lot of random and conflicting advice on the internet about side hustles. And Maybe some of it is unrealistic and some of it is not, but I would love it if I could create and develop a side hustle this year to keep me up float during downtimes. And it could be something that I actually particularly enjoy like fashion or something along that line where it could be a passion as well. So I just wanted to see what were some of your ideas or best practices for creating a side hustle and implementing it into your. a regular schedule. Seems to me like Alex referred to me as Al. Yeah, but I think he knows your name's Cal.

You think it's because his name, he was queued up to say Alex. Yeah. And then, yeah. He definitely knows your name is Cal. Yeah. All right. I was going to say, Alex.

I'll see you in hell, buddy. But I'm going to assume that was a runtime error. I was somewhere where I was recently, where I was continually introduced as Kyle. So would you rather be interested? by Al as Al. Well, the weird thing is my wife who was misintroducing me. I think she just forgot.

No, I made that up. Side hustles. All right. Three things to keep in mind. One, I typically would say be wary of a side hustle where ultimately what you'll be doing is trading your hours for time. So basically wage labor side hustles. They don't scale well.

You're typically getting less money for your time than you could get just putting those hours into your primary job. And it's not what you're really looking for with a side hustle, which is like a flexible and stable and potentially scalable source of side income. So it's tempting because they're easier to get into. It's easier to get people right off the bat to pay you for your time. But if you're effectively just, if I spend five hours versus 10, I'm going to get half as much money is not where you want to be in a side hustle.

That's not a good side hustle. Two, I would say, care about your existing career capital. The more that you're leveraging rare and valuable skills that you've earned, the more value you can get and the more likely it is you can have like a really effective side hustle. So if you like something but you don't have demonstrably rare and valuable skills in that area, the possibility that you are going to get sort of scalable, time independent income from that direction is very low. that type of low-hanging fruit just gets washed out in efficient markets. If there's some, like, relatively easy way that you can make, like, a lot of money on some topic you're interested in don't know much about,

anyone who doesn't know much about it could make money on that topic, and they would start trying it, and then that would drive down the price, and that market would go away. So the inefficiencies that produce good side hustles usually take advantage of skill. The more rare and valuable skill that you're deploying, the better chance you have of finding a real inefficiency and getting a really actually attractive side hustle. So don't ignore your career capital. You mentioned fashion. Like, you would really need some sort of queer capital in fashion before you think that's going to necessarily be a good side hustle. Finally, it's an idea from Derek Sivers that I featured in my book So Good They Can't Ignore You.

When evaluating your current side hustle and whether you want, if it's successful or not successful, or whether you want it to become more of a full-time thing, I'm quoting them here, use money as a neutral indicator of value. All right. Are people paying me for this? people will tell you your idea is good. People will tell your idea is interesting. People will for free like, yeah, I would love for you to give me a tarot card reading or whatever. But they don't like to give away their money.

And people only give away their money if they feel like they're actually getting a proportional amount of value for that money. So Derek Sivers had this idea with the side hustles that he transformed in the full-time roles on multiple occasions throughout his interesting career, is that he would use money as a neutral indicator of value. If this is generating money, it's valuable. not, it's not. Should I make this my full-time job? Well, here's a question. Is it generating enough money to be my full-time job? That seems like it's really simple, but people often ignore that. They want to sort of assign other sources of value to their idea. Like, well, it's really cool. I know someone else who did really well with this. My friends tell me it's awesome.

It's not really a reliable indicator of value. Get people to give you money. If they're not, the idea is not that successful. The hustle's not going to be that successful. all right calix i hope you enjoyed that advice you did there jesse i sort of reverse it back on him there added a c to his name all right do we have another call yeah we do all right hi cow i enjoyed your recent podcast looking at how to become a straight-a student as i am a college student and that was my initial introduction to you my question is you talked for a second that if you were going to rewrite that that you would have a section on focus. And I know that you said that you'd probably never rewrite it,

but I was curious what principles you would go over in a section like that. That's something that I really struggle with and I'm trying to figure out how to implement that as a college student. Thank you. So my basic framework about focus is in the book and when it change. There's a core idea in that book, how to become a straight-a-student from 2006. it's an equation that says work accomplished equals total hours spent times intensity of focus. And my point there, like why I made that argument was one of the easiest ways or most effective ways to get more work done is to not just increase the hours piece of that equation, but to increase the focused piece of that equation.

They're multiplied by each other. Double your focus, you can double your output in the same number of hours. And back then I was saying what I saw was too many people would study in a low intensity of focus. So sort of at the library with their friends and reading instead of doing more difficult, like passive consumption instead of active recall. And they would just try to increase the hours component to get the amount of work that need to be accomplished done. But that's a hard game. Like you've got to spend long amounts of time doing that work. And I would say, no, no, increase that intensity of focus.

Come at this thing with laser-like focus. And you can drastically reduce the hours needed to get the work done. And that's actually more sustainable in the long run because you're not spending all your time studying. That central equation still stands. What's different is the obstacles to intensity of focus today versus 20 years ago. You have way worse obstacles, in particular, in your hand, in that phone that's next to you while you study. That is a much bigger obstacle than we had the deal with in 2006. I was worried about conversations with people at the same table.

I was worried about you just using low intensity techniques, so using study techniques that weren't very mentally taxing. Therefore, they didn't require much focus, but required a lot more time. And like walking over to public email terminals to like check your messages. Like that's the type of stuff I worried about. So you have obstacles to boosting that intensity focus now that are way more accessible and appealing and disastrous

than what we were facing back in 2026. But I would have one rule, one extra rule that I think translates most of the value of that equation to today. Never have your phone with you when you study. That would be the rule I would add. And don't look at this like this is crazy. You're not an ER surgical attending. You're not the Pope.

People will be okay if they can't get in touch with you for 90 minutes. It's okay. You're not that important. Don't bring your phone with when you study. Go to a library to study. go to a non-popular library to study, don't have your phone with you. Now you just don't have access to those distractions, right?

That's going to make, now you can just apply the advice as written in my 2006 book. Now still you have to use high-intensity study tactics. They're going to get you to focus more, use active recall instead of passive recall, you know, go to places where you don't have a lot of distractions. There's like all the stuff I talk about now applies equally as well in 2026 as it was in 2006, as long as you don't have that phone with you.

So it would be like my number one advice. You would want to put a giant sign over every library or public study space that says, abandon all ye phones, ye who enter here. A little Dante reference right there. And that puts you back on a level playing field. And then you actually have a chance of succeeding with focused high-intensity studying. Let me tell you the effect of this. it will feel like a superpower.

You will, and I'm not exaggerating, study a third of the time of the other people in your class and you'll get good grades. If you study without your phone and you use smart study techniques like a type I talked about in my book that actually work, they're hard but actually work and not what's easier, and you boost up that intensity, you focus part of the equation, and you do the time management stuff we talked about a couple weeks ago on the podcast that's in that book, you're going to get really good grades, you're not going to work late in the night. you're not going to do all-nighters. You're going to have a lot of free time. So that's it. That would be the number one thing I would add. You just don't have screen time rules. Don't get queued about it.

It is just not allowed to come with me when I go to study. That'll make all the difference. For the newer students in the audience, can you, in a couple sentences, explain to them what active recall is? The only way to learn new information that actually works with any sort of effectiveness is trying to produce the information out loud from your own brain as if lecturing a class without looking at notes. that's how you learn things.

The opposite of that is passive recall, which is where you read your highlighted notes. That is an incredibly inefficient way of learning stuff. I'm going to give you an analogy. Let's make the analogy trying to get like muscles larger. Passive recall is I'm going to hold a shake weight. Have you seen a shake weight, Jesse? They used to sell these in infomercials.

It's like a dumbbell where the two ends go, and they shake back and forth, like power. by batteries or whatever. Like it's shaking your muscles and like it's going to kind of make it stronger. I guess you're like kind of holding it up or something. Active recall is like I'm doing curls with heavy weights and it's kind of sucks because it's like it's burning, but I'm doing them, you know, on a really good schedule. Like your muscle's actually going to get easier.

It's harder, but your muscle is going to get bigger. You can stand around with the shake weight as much as you want, but maybe get a little bit stronger. So there you go. Active recall is the only thing that matters. It sucks in the sense that it's really hard. But you have to think of that hardness as like the, it's not literally this, but like the feeling of your neurons reforming. You're forcing your brain into a new configuration where that information is accessible.

Lecturing out loud as if lecture in a class. I preach just to my students like five or six times a semester. I even wrote, like I'm teaching discrete math. I was teaching discrete math to 100 kids this semester. Is that where all those exams are? That's what the, yeah. You see those? I looked at the first question.

Yeah, not so bad. Yeah, I don't know. Screet probability. So I have a, this feels like a FERPA violation, but I was grading this weekend. And so I have all my exams in the HQ, because I was grading in the HQ the other day. But I always told them, I wrote an article about this when I was in grad school because I did well, I got the highest grade. I've talked about before, but like, that's why I realized I might have some math ability when I took this large discrete math classes on the ground and got the highest grade in the class. And so I wrote an article about here's how I studied in that discrete math class.

I'm always telling my students, I wrote an art, do this, do this. Maybe they do. That's a pretty good grades. That wasn't a hard exam, I don't think. It was a very reasonable exam. So there you go.

Active recall. All right, let's, what we got here? We got a final segment coming up. I'm going to react to something on the internet you should know about. But first, let's briefly hear from another sponsor. One of the longest sponsors of this show, and for good reason, is our friends. at Gramerly.

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All right, Jesse, let's do our final segment. I want to talk briefly about an article that's important, and you might not realize how important it is. I'll bring this on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening. It's from the Wall Street Journal. It came out on May 15th. Here's the title. Meta is delaying the rollout of its flagship AI model. The companies struggle to improve the capabilities of latest AI model mirrors issues at some top AI companies. So what's going on here is that Lama 4, which they're nicknamed in Beameth,

had been a long-awaited next big large language model from Meta. They were greatly increasing the amount of compute and data. But when they finished, they realized this thing wasn't that much better. It wasn't better enough versus their last model to justify yet releasing it. Now, there's an important quote in here. I'm looking through the article now where other companies have been having similar problems. Sorry, let me read from the article. Meta's recent challenges mere stumbles or delays at other top AI companies that are trying to release their next big state-of-the-art models.

Some researchers see the pattern as evidence that future advances in AI models could come at a far slower pace than in the past and at tremendous cost. Right now, the progress is quite small across all labs, all the model, said Ravid Schwartz-Ziv, an assistant professor and faculty fellow at New York University Center for Data Science. GPT-5, one of OpenAI's next big technological leaps forwards, was initially expected around. mid-20204, the Wall Street Journal previously reported. In December, the journal reported that development of the model was running behind schedule. All right, and they give some more examples. All right, we can take this off the screen now, Jesse. This is pointing towards a very, very important trend in AI, but the details are a little

burky, and I think most people don't know it, and I want to make it as clear as possible. Here's the best way I can explain this. there was in the aftermath of open AIs starting to make their moves with their GPT family of models. So in particular, GPT 2 and 3. There was this idea, they're called the scaling laws. There is this idea that as you continue to increase the amount of computation and the amount of data that you use to train these language models, their skills would keep massively jumping forward. And in fact, the chart that showed this relationship between resources and ability was exponential. And for a while, it was fitting that.

GPT3 was like this huge improvement over GPT2. GPT4 was a huge improvement over GPT3. It was better at like everything. It was doing it better. The visions you heard about a year or more ago about like artificial general intelligence, for example, about all work. being essentially automated was people looking forward on this curve

and saying this was so much better than that model and this model so much better than this model as we continue to build out the compute and get more and more data

eventually these models will just become so capable that we can just build software agents around them to actually execute the stuff they say we could just say like hey here's a job tell me how you're going to do it

and have a software agent actually execute it and basically we can can automate everything. It will just be able to understand so much about the world that we can just ask it, describe how you do this or that. It'll be a general intelligence that can basically do anything that a human can do. This is going to completely change the world. This was the scaling vision was the vision for what was going to happen. The reality, however, is that the benefits of scaling are starting to give massively diminished returns. It turns out that like this exponential doesn't keep going. Hundreds of billions have been invested in building out compute and in building out the biggest possible data sets to train these things. But after roughly that GPT4 point, the improvements begin to become diminishing. That's why GPT5 hasn't come out yet. It's not good enough.

It's not that much better. It's why Lama 4BMeth Project, they haven't released it yet. It's not that much better. And in the cases where they have put this in, you look at like GROC, I guess it's three now versus GROC 2, massively more compute. It's a little bit better. So the scaling laws are kind of trailing off. So we're not going to,

this dream of like if we keep building bigger and bigger data centers, we don't have to do anything else but get bigger and we're going to have like AGI. That's not happening. I don't think everyone's caught up to that yet. There's still so many of these sort of non-technical articles about like,

hey, what are we going to do in a future we're going to have no jobs? Is they're still looking up this curve? Well, look at how much better this model was than that model. Well, if we just do that five more times, it's the danger of exponentials, the seduction of exponentials.

We do that type of doubling inability five more times and all work will be done this way. But that's starting to level out. So where is all the energy shifted because they still need to make improvements, right? You've noticed OpenAI has now released all these models that have weird names. It's GPT40 and GT.403 and all these different types of weird names.

Well, they're having to put their energy into much more narrow development. So a lot of what's happening now is they'll take with a call a foundational model, which will just be an existing model like GPT4. And then what they're going to do is they get a particular data set about a particular type of task they care about where they can have a lot of examples of questions and write answers.

So computer programming is a fantastic example of this is because you can have a question saying, write a computer program that does this, and then you can compile the answer and test it and see if it actually does it. Math is another area where they could do this, because you can write math problems and have the right answer, right? And so they take an already trained foundational model like GPT4,

and they do a tuning step with these type of synthetic data sets with right answers, where they ask it these questions, and if they give the wrong answer, they use reinforcement learning to kind of move its weights away from that. And if it gives a right answer, then they use reinforcement learning to make its weights more solidified towards that. And they can tune the base language model to be better at these specific tasks for which they have big synthetic data sets with examples of right answers.

That's what they've been doing since the scaling's not working as well. So they're like, look, this model is good at computer programming. Why? They built a huge synthetic data set of computer programming examples. Over here, we have a program that's getting really good at math. Why? Well, because we're hiring a bunch of math PhDs and paying them $100 an hour to write all these problems, where here's a problem, here's the answer.

We're using that the tune foundational language model. The reasoning, quote-unquote advances that came recently was they were, worked through, built out these big synthetic data sets of questions that require reasoning and then step-by-step answers and then they could use that with reinforcement learning to train certain models to be better at like doing

something that look like that type of step-by-step reasoning. So that's what's really going on now. We're not just getting this like massive general increases and overall capability by just scaling compute and data. So instead, the companies are saying we're looking for these like specific applications where we can have

these really good synthetic data sets and then we'll build bespoke models that are better at that particular thing. And maybe they get worse at other things. Like the latest reasoning tune engine of OpenAI better match this site at step-by-step reasoning. They trained it with reinforcement learning,

but it hallucinates a lot more. Whoops. Because in trying to actually match that, it helps to make things up more because you can better get a logical seeming chain of answer. So the wrong thing to do now is that this is not now a general, extrapolation. You can't say like,

now it's good at math and now it's good at reasoning and now it's good at computer programming. So tomorrow it's going to be good at X. It's like, no, no, no, these aren't additive or aggregate. GPT4 is kind of like their state-of-the-art base model if you're looking at OpenAI. And they're looking for specific applications where you can get good data sets for reinforcement learning on

particular tasks. Now, this is producing and will produce cool bespoke tools. It's going to be a long product development cycle. You've got to figure out places where you can build these type of tuned models and then build good software agents around them and integrate them into the workflows where people use them. But it's a far cry from the vision that people had two years ago of like, no, no, just GPT6 will be anything you ask it.

It'll do at a human level. In fact, it can write its own code to make agents around it and we won't even have to, like, work anymore. That is not the trajectory we're on at the moment anymore. Without the scaling laws, we have to sort of hand-build bespoke models that can do specific task where we happen to have data for it. There's many things that we do in our lives. where there's not going to be good data sets for, but where there are,

I think they're going to eventually have really cool tools. This is a cool technology, but it is not on one of these. I have to write an article about the end of business type of trajectories. So anyways, this is like a really important thing that's going on. This is being discussed a lot among like the high executives

in these companies, the death of the scaling laws, trying to build out these bespoke skills. I mean, so I'll just say real briefly. So why then did we have like the AI 2027? report come out last month saying, no, by 2027, these AIs are going to be in charge of everything, and by 2030, humanity might be dead. Well, I look closer at what was really going on there because they know the scaling laws

aren't working, right? So what's their tech story for how AI is going to kill humanity in the next like three years, right? If you look closer, it all comes down to a single assumption, which I think is specious. the tuning we're doing for producing computer programs is getting better, which is true. Like that, we have good data sets for that, and computer programs are text, and we can produce a reasonable size good computer code. The foundational assumption of AI 2027 is, well, we're better at computer programming

with models now than we were before. So maybe if we keep getting better at that in the next year or so, the models will just be able to build their own. They'll solve the problem of how to build a more technically advanced AI. Yeah, we can't just scale language models. We don't know the text story for what type of models would be super powerful or super intelligent. But maybe if we just make them better at programming, they'll figure it out in the year 2026 and then we'll be in trouble. That's a crazy assumption.

Anyone who's actually working with the tuning of language models to produce computer code to think like, yeah, that's going to lead to giant breakthroughs and architectures for artificial intelligence. It's a crazy claim. It's like saying the Wright brothers being like we've, we just found the new type of propeller and now we can we can get powered flight now. It used to just be for a little bit on Kitty Hawk Beach. Now we can actually go up and circle the field and come down and do like 10 minute flights. So like I don't think we're that far away from interstellar travel. It's like different. I mean, they're both flying, but it was like completely different levels of complexity and challenges.

So anyways, this is an important story. You know, I'm increasingly believing there's this. It's like weird temperature raising on AI that is becoming more disassociated from the tech story. And so not to talk about AI too much, but this, I think, is an important story. Understanding that the scaling laws seem to be faltering for language models puts us into a much more traditional business innovation cycle landscape for AI tools right now. All right, there we go. I'm writing a mass. Actually, it might be out by the time this comes out on my newsletter.

I'm writing a big AI and work article where I'm just dumping a lot of this stuff. I've learned in the one article that I can point people towards. So check that out at Calnewport.com. It should be live when you hear this podcast episode. Nice. I've just been deep on this in a while. I don't want to keep talking about all the time. Let me just put down like,

hey, here's what I think is going on. And it's an article, at least in the draft that it is now. Here's the places where, like, AI is really affecting the world of work. Here's the places where I think it will soon. It hasn't been developed yet, but will soon. Here's some places where it's like a little more hazy,

like how exactly is it's going to play out, but there could be some cool stuff. And here's the stuff that's crazy town. And I try to side of it. a lot of things and make the text story a little bit clearer. So, what's the article? Cowdennewport.com. It should be up. All right. Speaking of which, I should probably go work some more on that.

So let's call this episode to a close. Thank you all for listening. Back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, Jay 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 Cal Newport.com. 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 70,000 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've got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week. Thank you.