Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 398: How Do I Find Purpose in a Distracted World? (W/ Arthur Brooks)

Episode Date: March 30, 2026

Here’s a key question: Did technology like smartphones make us miserable, or were we already miserable and smartphones made it worse? To help figure out this answer, I talked to Arthur Brooks, the #1 New York Times bestselling author, Atlantic columnist, and Harvard professor, about this new book: The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. In our conversation, Brooks argues that our current Age of Emptiness began in the 1990s, but technology like smartphones and social media made it worse. We then discuss smart strategies for finding purpose in our current moment. Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Send an email to [e-mail].  Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia INTERVIEW: How Do I Find Purpose in a Distracted World? (W/ Arthur Brooks) [1:44]   INBOX:  Tech employees being evaluated through LLM tokens [1:01:49] Can Cal comment on reading digital books? [1:07:35] WHAT CAL IS UP TO: What Cal is reading [1:13:00] Deep Work HQ update [1:14:37] Books: Mistborn (Brandon Sanderson) Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slow Get a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?gizmodo.com/tech-employees-are-reportedly-being-evaluated-by-how-fast-they-burn-through-llm-tokens-2000736627 Thanks to our Sponsors:  monarch.com (Use code “DEEP”)butcherbox.com/deepdrinklmnt.com/deepmeetfabric.com/deep Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Nate Mechler for research and newsletter, 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.

So here's a conundrum about technology and happiness in our current moment. Did smartphones make us miserable? Or were we already miserable and then turned to smartphones to cope? And this ended up making things worse. Now, this answer matters. If the second option is right, then creating a deep life in a distracted world is not just about reforming our use of technology. It involves fixing a more fundamental problem. And this is what I want to talk about today.

To help me, I'll be joined by Arthur Brooks, who is a number one New York Times bestselling author, calmness for the Atlantic, a professor who teaches leadership and happiness at Harvard. Brooks has a new book out that's called The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. In it, he argues that we entered into this age of emptiness, starting in the 1990s, and then in the the last decade, new technologies like smartphones and social media served to make things worse. In our discussion, we get into the details of the shift, and just importantly, we explore Brooks's advice for rediscovering the purpose that we've lost. So if you're at all interested in seeking depth in our current moment, you need to listen to this episode. As always, I'm Cal Newport,

and this is Deep Questions. The show for people seeking depth, in a distracted world. And we'll get started right after the music. All right, Arthur Brooks. It's great to have you back on the show. To talk about a book I'm really excited about because I think there's a lot of ideas in here, especially when it comes to the complicated bi-directional relationship between things like meaning and technology, that we are in a really good dialogue and we're kind of coming from the same place.

So this is a conversation. I've been looking forward to, but I want to start it where you started the book, which is sort of setting up the problem that we're going to address and how you encountered it. So I wanted to start it with you returning to academia after a 10-year hiatus running a think tank here in Washington, D.C., you returned to academia. I think it was Harvard was your position after that. Tell me about what it was. This is interesting to me. What it was that you noticed seemed different than than it had been 10 years ago.

Yeah. So you and I are longtime academics. I'm a third generation academic. And the truth is, I love academia. I always did love academia because it was a happier place than the rest of society, generally speaking. People, when they're in college, they made friends, they fell in love, they were encountering interesting and new ideas. They weren't in the milieu of, you know, ordinary life. And that was a good thing, as a matter of fact.

And I left academia in 2008 to become the president of this think tank in D.C. And that was completely consuming position. So I wasn't paying attention to what was going on in my old, happy, and. academic home. Well, I came back 11 years later, and it's like a plague had gone through my village when I got back because it wasn't happier than the rest of society. On the contrary, people weren't falling in love more. They weren't in a better mood. They weren't paying attention to new and scary ideas with an open heart and mind. On the contrary, it's exactly the opposite of all that. There are higher rates of depression than in the rest of society, as a matter of fact.

Depression rates had increased by about a factor of three. Anxiety generalized anxiety, which is, you know, a diagnosis such had gone up, had doubled. People are lonelier on college campuses than they were outside of colleges. And it turns out that that was just sort of the tip of the iceberg, because as a behavioral scientist, of course, this really, really gets my attention. And I started looking at what's going on. And this is raging through society for people under 30. Something happened after 2008 that massively spiked the amount of misery. There's a psychogenic epidemic, which is just what we, behavioral scientist, we get tenure by making up fancy ways of saying simple things. That's misery that doesn't have a biological origin.

And so, boy, oh, boy, was I interested in figuring out what this is. But more importantly, I needed to figure out what we could do. What's the problem? What, and, you know, what, what do we, where do we go to find a solution? And then how do we need to live differently to solve it? Now, you're the OG on this man, because your stuff has been about this for a long time. I got there a little bit later, but this book really elucidated to me the biggest problem in our society today. So I like the idea that you went through your thought process for eliminating options. And the first option you pointed to that you ultimately eliminated as the primary explanation for what was going on is something we hear a lot today, which never really rang true for me. So I was glad to hear you also say this doesn't really explain what's going on.

But it's this idea that things somehow are harder for the young generation than they've ever been before. That somehow the boomers have taken everything. And this is like there's a sort of new hardship. There's no jobs. I'll never buy houses. Like I hear this all the time. It's become a standard mantra. And this was an explanation we hear a lot for why people were upset, why they're depressed, why they're anxious.

I have my reasons why I didn't buy that. But why didn't you buy that? Because the data just don't support it. The idea that life is uniquely hard. I mean, there's two bidirectional explanations for why everything is so tough. People my age, and so I'm 40 years older than undergraduates. You're 20 years older than undergraduates. And people who are in the early 20s today, people my age will say, it's because they're weak.

It's because they're weak people. We've made them weak or society's made them weak or wealth has made them weak. And they say, no, it's because you ruin them. the world. And so it's like this intergenerational blame game that's how it's actually happening. And the truth of the matter is they're not weaker than generations past and life isn't harder than generations past. Both of those don't actually hold water when you look factually. And at the book, I look factually at those explanations. I want to rule those particularly things out. When I talk to young people and they say, well, houses are more expensive than they used to be.

And income inequality is worse than it used to be. And the environment is worse than they used to be. You know, one by one by one, I'll talk about how the world is actually not perfect and in some ways gotten harder, but in most ways it's actually gotten better. And then I'll explain to people my age how people actually aren't weaker now and they aren't more feeble than they've been in the past because I have data on what people my age looked like at that age. And it wasn't that great either. We hear it every generation, I'm sure. I mean, my dad's a baby boomer. My mom's a baby boomer. And, you know, I often think about their stories.

And I'm like, well, that sounds harder than my life. I mean, the defining feature of my dad's college and grad student years was like, oh, sorry, I have to put this on hold to go into basic training for the army down in like Louisiana and Texas and do that for a few years and then come back or to hear my mom talk about. Look, my parents, her parents were clear. Like, you're going off the college. You're not coming home. And there wasn't that many job opportunities necessarily for, you know, a woman. coming out of a small college. You had to become a flight attendant, teach yourself how to computer program. They lived in a small East St. Louis apart. I was like, that sounds hard.

Yeah. It didn't sound like this was, you know, this was uniquely easy, but I'm sure their parents said the same thing, which was, I had to go through the Great Depression. My parents were older than yours. Yeah. My parents were called the silent generation, and they were named that by the greatest generation, which was my grandparents' generation. And the greatest generation was named that by the greatest generation, by the way. And they call the silent generation of that because they were a bunch of slackers. In other words, every generation actually does this. So that's not the reason that we have this unbelievable explosion of mood disorders and misery that's happened since 2008.

It's not because there's something uniquely wrong or something new about society. That's not it. Yeah. Okay. So what do you think is going on? So when I'm doing a data analysis as a behavioral social scientist, I look at a bunch of survey data. I start to find patterns, but then I do what old school scholars used to do. Like, you know, Adam Smith, when he was writing of both the nations, he went out and walked around factories and talked to workers.

I mean, that is like the, and just ask him. What do you do as a social scientist? You listen to the words that people say, and you say and you listen to the words that keep popping up again and again and again until the penny drops. And in doing that, I actually found that people, young people in particular, they said, yeah, you know, my life is good. It's good, but it feels fake. It feels like a simulation. It feels meaningless. They kept saying this word meaning over and over again.

I don't know what I'm meant to do. I'm just doing everything I'm doing, but I don't know what I'm meant to do. And I don't know what the meaning of what I'm doing. And most importantly, and this is actually in the data very clearly, the number one predictor of mood disorders like just depression and anxiety, is the answer to the question, does your life feel meaningless? And people saying yes. A yes answer to the meaninglessness of life question. That's what best predicts the misery that we see today. It's a meaning problem, Cal.

Interesting. Well, so let me read you a quote from the book that I think gets at this well. And this is quoting, I believe, a young person you talked to. Life felt unreal, full of false rewards, empty accomplishments, therapeutic talk, and fake experiences all curated the past the time as painlessly as possible. So that's explaining what life without meaning, those are the things that define. That's right. I mean, we're basically just like, we're not happy.

We're not satisfied. It doesn't feel real. And so therefore, we've got more therapy to kind of deal with this creeping sense of emptiness. And I'm just kind of waiting around. A lot of young people say that they're kind of just scrolling their phones like they're in an airport lounge waiting for a flight to take off. And you don't even know even the status of the flight. you don't even know if it's going to get canceled and just sit there kind of I don't want to do this but you know I'm waiting for something they're they all say they're like they're waiting for something and they don't

even know what it is that's the sense of emptiness well I so I want to get now I'm drilling on this technology connection now because now we're getting obviously into a neck of the woods that I'm interested no real reason right let's get where you know I want to be this is okay so let me I think this aligns with the way you're thinking about it I'll just run by like one of the things that emerge from my thinking and writing post-pandemic that confuse people, but I don't think it should be confusing, is when I started talking about this concept of the deep life, which is a life of meaning and intention. So in line with like what you're talking about here. And people would say, why are you talking about that? You're the technology distractions, you know, deep work digital minimalism guy.

Why are you talking about trying to build a life and meaning and what have you? And I said, well, let me tell you the lesson I learned from my book, Deep Work is just talking to people about your distractions at work are bad, then it get too far. But if you have this bigger, better offer, deep work is great. This is more meaningful. Then it's much easier to move away

from all the distractions because you have a bigger, better offer. And when it came to people being on their phones all the time and social media all the time and being caught up into these sort of webs of distractions, I realize you can't just talk about that directly. You have to talk about what's the bigger, better offer. But that's somewhere you fall

if you don't have anywhere else to go. you're lacking meaning, you're anxious, you want to numb, you want to escape, or you're just bored, then you'll fall back to the phone. So just telling someone, don't be on TikTok so much. Yeah, it doesn't solve the problem

because they're going there for a reason. So I ended up having to talk about, this is why I love having you on the show, is because actually what you're talking about, the meaningful life, right, is something that you have to figure out if you want to figure out how do I not stare at like a video game?

camera or phone all day. Are we aligned on this? Yeah, this is not a book about, I mean, it wouldn't be original if it was about the fact that phones are addictive and that technology is a problem. And there's plenty in this book about that fact. What this is a book about is what you deeply want and that you can't get and then you need to go and get. This is about the bigger, better offer. That's really what it comes down to, exactly what we're talking about, which, by the way, is the same thing in any addictive process. You know, if you come to me and say, hey, Arthur, man, I'm just drinking all the time. You know, I'm drinking my breakfast.

I'm drinking my lunch. And I would say, Cal, I got, I got some incredibly new and, you know, bold piece of advice for you. Stop drinking. You know, no, that's not what I'm going to do. That's obviously true. But I'm going to find out why you're drinking so much. What is it that you're actually seeking?

Is it a feeling? Is it a relief from your anxiety? Is it because you're really bored? Is it because you're having trouble at home? Let's talk about what their actual problem is. generally speaking, people who just start drinking, it's because they're trying to cut the connection between their amygdala and their prefrontal cortex because they're suffering from a lot of anxiety and it's very effective for doing so. Or they're bored and lonely. Or all of those things. And so I want to

know what those things are and I want to fill those holes in their life. Otherwise, they're not going to stay off the sauce. And the same thing is true for this. So the beginning of this book is, okay, what is the meaning of life? And then why is it such a problem? Because, because we're all getting so addicted to this stuff. And then what is it that you really want and how do you have to live differently? And that's the biggest part of the book. Let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. God help us, but it's tax season again.

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That's right. Your choice of organic ground beef, chicken breast or shrimp in every box for an entire year, plus $20 off your first box and free shipping always. That's butcherbox.com slash deep. Don't forget to use our link so they know we sent you. All right. Let's get back to my conversation with Arthur Brooks. So why did, stick it a little bit longer with the motivation, what happened with, you know, in 2000, what this window, 2008 to 2019?

Why did this generation begin to have more of these meaning problems, which we will then perfectly solve in the next one to be. But what's going on here? So it predates the iPhone. And I know what people are thinking right now. 2007, the first iPhone was delivered, 2008. it became ubiquitous by 2009. It was in everybody's pocket. By 2010, everybody had apps on the iPhones, and we proceed a pace. That's actually not the exact explanation. The iPhone was produced as part of a broader culture of hustle and technology. It was part of the broader culture that said all of these

deep complex needs in your life for love and beauty and suffering and calling and transcendence. We can solve it with these complicated things, we can actually bring genius to bear in engineering that can solve these problems, which has been the mantra of the age, man. And there's nothing really new about that, but that really, really started exploding in the new century before the iPhone. The iPhone was produced to solve problems that it can't solve. All these tech things do. I mean, think about it. When Facebook was invented at my university, I mean, the promise was it was going to wipe out loneliness. Loneliness is a complex human problem. The, you know, that the Facebook is a complicated engineered algorithm and complicated algorithms can't solve complex human needs. They can't.

The result is, if you try to do that, you're going to get lonelier, not less lonely. If you're trying to wipe out your loneliness with social media, you're going to wind up lonelier. And I got the data to show it. I've got the studies that actually show that. And that's the same thing with everything else. So the problem is in the iPhone. The problem is how we use it, because this is the way the culture has been pushing us in the first place. This was like Silicon Valley. What was the change of the culture? It was the shift of the economy towards more of like a tech IP, post.com bus. You have the new dot com boom. So there's different elements, I guess. It was shifting us towards this more technical or technocratic way of thinking

about human emotion. What are the forces that are coming together here? So this is what we might call the post-industrial revolution. The industrial revolution. The Industrial Revolution, everybody understands actually how it worked and, you know, when it, it created the middle class, but it also destroyed a lot of indigenous ways of living. A lot of normal ways of, you know, families being together led to a lot of urbanization and family fragmentation, et cetera, et cetera. The post-industrial revolution is very similar in its way. And what it basically says is that we're going to move toward an algorithmic approach to the things that, to the basic human needs that we actually all care about. So as, For example, when the Industrial Revolution, what it did is it made physically weak people strong by adding machines to the way that we work. The post-industrial revolution, it makes people smarter. It actually is an enhancement of cognitive skill. But the important thing to keep in mind is that it doesn't enhance all of your cognitive skills. You have two kinds of cognitive skills.

You've got the left brain complicated stuff and you have the right brain complex stuff. And the right brain is all the why questions of love and mystery and meaning. That's real life. On the left brain, you have all the algorithms that you're actually trying to solve. And we have these things every day and they're important. How do I get my food? How do I get to work? How do I find my destination?

How do I turn on my computer? All of these are left brain problems. The engineered approach to life, the post-industrial revolution, gives us this massive left brain, but it lies to us. It says that we can actually, with that massive left brain, solve our right brain needs for mystery, meaning, love, and happiness, and it can't be done. Now, is this explain, or is this a data point supporting that claim? The idea that you talk about in your book, that you saw the suffering was worse among young people that were in the most sort

of elite striving. Right. Like at Harvard, this was like a really big problem. Right. That would sort of track with, I think, the otherwise widely accepted, you know, understanding of in the post-industrial age, you see elite educational institutions separated themselves, from all of those things you just said. We don't really want to be in the business of the Numinous. We don't want to be in the business of the transcendent. We don't want to be talking about value and love and moral courage. We want to be talking about theory.

We want to be talking about science. We want to be talking about a very sort of highly educated way of seeing the world. And in fact, we're going to separate the world in between people that can sort of approach it through complex applications of expertise. And then those who don't, who don't really know what's going on. STEM, baby. STEM. It's like, forget the humanities. He says, it's all STEM.

Forget the good life. If you're not actually studying something that will, I mean, learn to code, which people used to say before coding became completely overtaken by events. And, you know, back in these things. And it's interesting because I had this kind of natural experiment. You know, I've got three kids, but my two older kids are sons, and they're only two years apart. And one of them went to Princeton to study, you know, math and economics.

And the other one didn't go to college. He worked on a farm and didn't join the Marine Corps as a sniper in the Marine Corps. Okay, now my kids are fine and they're doing really, really well, but I'm really interested in their communities. What I've found was my older son was surrounded by people with this on wee and the sense of emptiness and looking for meaning and okay, I guess I'll get into the hustle and grind culture and then all day long on the phone. And my younger son, he wasn't spending time on his phone at all. On the contrary, he's goofing around with his friends. None of his friends went to college because they were enlisted U.S. Marines and they were having a great time and they were super happy. what's up with that?

My younger son was living the old way and my older son was living the new way and that is exactly what actually helped me to crack the case here. It was just looking at my own kids. Oh, that's fascinating. It's almost like in my own siblingdom, right, where my brother went to the Naval Academy

and the Navy and was on subs and I went to Dartmouth and MIT and did like math and computer science. Yeah, he lives life. Oh, man, he lives life. He's like, this is great. He lives in California. He's always out there, mountain biking and surfing.

going on, you know, he's like really into it. All right, so this is fast. By the way, you have escaped the matrix. You actually escape the matrix that many computer scientists are stuck in because you didn't fool yourself or you didn't let the world lie to you to tell you that you're training, which is the massive increase of your left hemispheric activity, could solve your right brain needs. You love your wife in real life.

You love your kids in real life. You're a man of faith in real life. And you're not mediating that. your phone is out in the foyer. I know that because I read your stuff. Well, it helps. I think what helped that was the fact that I ended up after grad school at Georgetown, which is a Jesuit university that is a liberal arts institution that cares about those things. And you'll still walk by, you know, a Jesuit priest will walk by.

There'll be a noviate going by. They care about, they care about humanistic values. They care about justice. They care about transcendence. And you're surrounded by it. And it sort of colors even the stem work. But, okay, so let me, there's a complicated thing that confused me, and I think there's an answer to this complicated scenario in your book, right? Because I agree with what you're saying.

You have a change in the culture in the 21st century that leads to this problem of meaninglessness among young people. But there is also these timing hooks into some of the negative effects we see to technology, right? Like especially the spread of the smartphone led in certain circumstances. You see these large bumps in the mental health issues. Certainly you'll see this on college campuses. Partially what I put me on what I write about was like getting the Georgetown and in like 2012 talking to the head of the mental health counseling to CAP program there and her just saying, we've like double or tripled anxiety, anxiety related disorders like in the last couple of years.

And I was like, what's the difference? She was like, it's the phones. the first kids who showed up with phones, it's getting worse. But tell me if I have this right, because I think there's an answer in your book, which is the way you talk about the doom loop, which is this idea of it's not that we were fine, and then we got the phones, and then we got bad.

It was no, we were in this new perilous situation. I'm throwing this out here. You tell me if this is right. We were in this new perilous cultural situation in which we're getting disconnected from these traditional right brain sources of meaning. In that situation, when iPhones came along, We had smartphones.

That allowed us to basically amplify or supercharge the disconnection from meaning that we were already having by falling into what you call the doom loop. Is that correctly resolving this sort of tension? Yeah, that's exactly right. And doom loops are characteristic of any addictive cycle. And the brain chemistry is very same, is very much the same across all of these different cycles. And so you'll find, for example, if you're bored and anxious, then you drink some alcohol. and what that does is it makes you feel better for a minute, and then you're more bored and anxious,

and so you drink some more alcohol, and then you escalate and down and down and down it goes. And the same thing is more or less true with the way that we're in a society that has a lack of inherent meaning that we actually will, because we're anxious and we're bored, so that we use the technology to distract ourselves. We use the technology to pass the time, and that makes us more bored and anxious.

And that's the doom loop that we can't quite get out of. The other way we can think about it is the simulation, because that's what a lot of young people told me in this. It's kind of like you remember in 1999. Sorry to shock you, but that's 27 years ago now at this point. So even a young guy like you is going to feel really old. But that's when the Matrix was actually when it came out. And the plot of that movie was that in the years 2199, science fiction flick.

But they think it's 1999 in the movie because they're living in pods being fed a simulation of real life because in artificial intelligence, a super engineered machine intelligence is sucking the energy out of humans in terms of their energy, in terms of their attention. And you have to pacify them by keeping them in the simulation. Cal, we're in the matrix. We're stuck in the matrix. That's the doom loop is we don't know how to get out of the matrix. And so that's a lot about, that's another way to think of the same problem. Do we, is it, is it useful or is this crass to try to find useful analogies to the fentanyl crisis in the sense of you start with the same ground, which is a disconnection from traditional sources of meaning? So the problem is already there, in this case is for various economic drivers. Then you introduce into the picture a vehicle of escape that has lots of negative externalities, in this case at least to lots of deaths of despair and overdose deaths. Whereas in the social media world, you throw social media into a ground where we're disconnected from meeting and we tend to get great amplifications of anxiety, anxiety-related disorders. But in both cases, there's an underlying problem and then you throw into the mix a sort of escape that becomes addictive and causes its own, amplifies problems or causes its own problems.

Is that a reasonable analogy? Well, we can, but we don't want to push it too far. And part of the reason is because for many, many millions of people, social media is not a net bad. it isn't a net bad. It's not heroin. I mean, by the way, there are a lot of analgesic painkillers that are not a net bad if you actually need them for that matter. But for many people, especially older people that remember them four times, social media is a phenomenal way to stay abreast of your friends and to connect with your grandchildren and to get a good chuckle from time to time because they can actually use it in a moderate way. The problem is people who use it to treat an underlying problem of misery and dislocation and loneliness, when they use it for that and distract themselves and solve the problem of boredom, my goodness, you know, boredom is really important. And yet it's really uncomfortable because it's boring, but Mother Nature, of course, doesn't care. And we've never been able to do it. But when we solve the problem of boredom, we invite all kinds of maladies. I mean, I'll tell you

something that my great-grandfather, Leroy Brooks, I guarantee you he never said to Mary Ellen, my great-grandmother. He never came home and said, honey, I had a panic attack behind the mule today. And the reason is because it wasn't a thing, because his brain wasn't malfunctioning because he was bored a lot. And here's the great irony

of the doom loop that we're actually in today. His life was very boring moment to moment behind that mule, but I guarantee you his life wasn't boring. People today are never bored moment to moment, but their life is grindingly boring. What's going on with that?

eradicate moment to moment boredom we've traded away an interesting life. That's what has come down to because our brains are working wrong and that's an encapsulation of the doom loop that we're stuck in. Interesting. Yeah. So to seek that stimulation in the moment, you prevent the bigger picture action. Well, so let's get into these equations then because you know I like equations. So I thought this, I'd never seen this before.

Your relation of happiness to meaning is you say, okay, happiness is an equation is this plus this plus this. One of those factors is meaning. There's other two factors we have. It's not a problem. But the meaning, if we don't have the meaning, we don't have the happiness. And then we can zoom in and say, okay, then what is meaning? Well, meaning is this plus this plus this.

So there's other two factors in happiness where enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. So you think enjoyment satisfaction, no problem. Actually, we're doing great with that. It's the meaning part. Yeah, so it's the meaning part we're missing. That's right. Okay. And then because we're getting enjoyment satisfaction just because we have stuff to do.

if you're a striver at Harvard, like you're doing lots of satisfying stuff. And we have enjoyment because we have access to like endless things that in the moment give us all sorts of pleasure. And we have friends. And people actually have friends. And they do things together a lot, not as much as they should to be sure. But enjoyment is pleasure plus people plus memory. That's how enjoyment actually works.

So it's not just pleasure. The secret of happiness is not the pursuit of pleasure. The pursuit of pleasure at least to rehab, not happiness. But when we actually do things, and young people do, they're really good at it. It's actually kind of extraordinary. Gen Z, they tend to be better in enjoyment than boomers, as a matter of fact. And, you know, this is an achievement-based society. There's satisfaction levels, which is the joy from an accomplishment after struggle.

They're really good at that. But meaning is in a cellar, meaning the bottom has absolutely dropped out. All right. So there's four big things you talk about in the book. I'm going to ask you about some of these out of order, just thinking, about my audience's interests. All right, I want to start with the one that overlaps my work calling. All right, this is what you're doing in your profession.

All right, I'm nervous about this one because I, you know, I wrote a book back, God, a long time ago. I was still a postdoc. But I wrote a book a long time ago that said we put too much emphasis in our job being a major source of like passion and meaning. Actually do something really well. You can craft it into something that's meaningful in your life. But don't don't be searching for like the perfect work. work, you say calling is important. All right. So help me understand what that means. I want to see if I can make it compatible with my feelings. Calling is this feeling that you're doing something that

you're meant to do, whether you enjoy it all the time or not. That's what it comes down to. Now, I, you know, I teach at the Harvard Business School. So I have a lot of people that are really going to go work hard, lots and lots and lots of hours. And one of the things that I tell them is don't worry about work-life balance. Worry about work-life integration because your work should be part of your life and it should make your life better and and and and your life outside work should make your work better is what it comes down to and so if your only strategy for finding satisfaction in life is working all the time you're doing it wrong and that's why in the chapter on calling i have as part of your calling doing leisure right now leisure is actually not chilling on a beach if you're chilling

on a beach in every vacation it means you're so exhausted that all you're trying to do is to get ready to work more and you're doing it wrong is what it comes down to leisure according to to Joseph Piper, you know, the great 20th century German philosopher, it really comes down to doing something with purpose that they don't pay you for, something generative that they don't pay you for, where you grow as a person. And he puts it into three kind of categories, spiritual development, relationship development, and intellectual development. In other words, go read the brothers Karamazov, if you're going to be on the beach for Pete's sake, and do it with the love of your life and then go pray or something like that. I mean, it's basically what it comes down to is developing

yourself. And that is so important that it actually is part of the calling per se, what you're meant to do as a person. But how do you find a calling? Yeah. So finding a calling really comes down to and, you know, there's a lot of stuff written on this, of course. There's a lot of philosophy written on this. It's looking for compensation that comes in two ways that you find. And this is, you know, I'm an old economist, so behavioral economist. So you go back to your computer science days. I go back to the equations of the board as an economist. And the two things that actually predict people feeling like their work is a meaningful calling

have nothing to do with money or position or prestige or title. There's two things. Number one is the belief that they're earning their success, which is to say, I feel like I'm creating value with my life and value in my work for me and for others. And the second is they feel that they're needed because they're serving other people. That's what it comes down to. And again, that doesn't mean that you're changing the world. You don't have to be Mother Teresa.

Maybe you feel like your coworkers need you. That, you know, it would matter if you didn't show up. But if you feel like you're acknowledged and rewarded for your hard work and personal responsibility, merit is everything, Cal. Merit-based systems are so important. You and I both know that tenure-based systems are not very motivating. We're both academics. Loyalty-based systems, like in government, are the worst, actually, for motivating people. But what everybody knows when they're there on the basis of merit, and that's what actually

helps. But more important is that they're serving their fellow women and men. That's what it comes down to. So it's earning your success and serving other people. Then you know you're in the zone of calling. Well, okay. So there's two things there that puts you so much on my wavelength that I'm excited about it to the point where my reader's like, oh, yeah, that's Cal, right?

Like the two things you said there that definitely caught my attention is, okay, the way you're talking about it is this is not about the. matching of the specific content of the job to some sort of narrow preexisting inclination, which is what my generation was taught. Fall your passion was 1990s into the early 2000s. We were taught what matters is the content of your job. You have to figure out through introspection that you're meant to be a beat reporter for a baseball team, and that's your passion.

And if you can match that to your job, you'll be happy. Otherwise, you won't. Nothing you said was about the content of the job. It was about the properties. so you don't have to figure out in advance what is the perfect job for me. And then two, those things you're talking about, feeling like you're valued and on a real merit basis and being able to really be serving people, that develops over time, right? That does go along with.

You might not feel that way as much in the first month of a job out of college than where you're going to be 20 years after you've built up real expertise and real skills that are important. You understand the industry. so it's something that you develop and gets richer over time. Those two notes are music to my ears. Oh, yeah. We're seeing this.

And I've learned that through long experience. You know, when I was in my 20s, when I thought that my passion, my everything, my all, was classical music. I was a professional French horn player. I was playing the Barcelona City Orchestra. I was going to be the world's greatest French horn player. So I thought, I thought that was the only thing I was actually made for. And if I didn't do that, I might as well die, Cal. and the reason is because I'd been taught to follow my passion.

And what I found was that I wasn't going to be the world's greatest French horn player. And I married a woman who said it doesn't really matter. And I went back to school. And I found I was interested in all these different things. And I was good at things I didn't actually know I was. And I went to a completely different direction. For Pete's sake, I became a behavioral scientist. And then later on I became a CEO of a big think tank in Washington, D.C.

And now I teach happiness at a business school. And the truth is, it's the best, man. Because what I'm doing is I'm cycling around is what that there's an old research by a social psychologist at USC named Michael Driver who talked about the kinds of careers based on psychological profiles. And a lot of really accomplished professionals are called spirals, meaning that they reinvent themselves every seven to 12 years, which you did. I mean, you're a very conventional computer scientist. and now you write how to people to be happy for Pete's sake. Thank God you teach at Georgetown because you know you can actually do stuff like that. Because you're a spiral every 7 to 12 years you reconceive of yourself thinking what can I do now based on where I am in my life and my relative skills and my crystallized intelligence and how I'm changing and how I see the world where I can earn my success and I can serve others.

Those are the two questions. I want to ask you about religion. I have a question for you about religion because I'm on I'm on board. with you listing the transcendent as one of the key factors for actually regaining this meaning. But I want to ask you a question about quote unquote kids these days and their relationship to religion because it's confusing to me or unknown to me. Right. So my generation, when we came of age, we came of age in that sort of George W. Bush era where there was this sort of interesting schism that happened. The left moved away from religion.

that became the rights sort of domain. We got there, this was like the intelligent design debates and there became this sort of cultural split. This is when new atheism arose post 9-11. There was all of these forces that made a real sort of antagonistic relationship to religion and often associated it with, I don't know, conservative politics and simplicity on the other side of science. And so my generation grew up with like John Stewart making fun of evangelicals, right? And so we had a complicated relationship with religion that now the millennials are sort of repairing. What's going on with Gen Z? Where are they?

Are they, what are you seeing? Are they pro-religion, anti-religion, indifferent to religion, dislike it, matters? Like what's going on with this new generation? So until about three or four years ago, the answer was they continued to walk away from religion. And you saw more and more people self-identifying as nuns, not like nuns with habits, Catholic nuns that you were at Georgetown. with, N-U-N-S, N-O-N-E-S, people who are identifying as having no spirituality or religious tradition. The year I was born in 1964, a nice long time ago, that was 1% of the population. Right now, it's 32% of the population, is what we find. And so it's massively increased,

and that was largely because of Gen X and millennials who were coming through exactly the bubble that we talked about here. But something has happened in this sort of age of emptiness. it's almost as if there's a bill of goods that they've been sold. Not that there's a particular religion that's suiting it, but what we've found in the past three years is that there's a tick up or a tick down, I should say, in the nuns. There's a tick up and the people who are actually starting to identify as spiritual or religious, starting with young men.

And that's usually how it goes, by the way. You know, the whole idea where every time religion is waning, people are like, yeah, no, man, that's it, that's it, that's it. And then it starts to wax again. Right. And it's gone through this. I mean, we go back to the time of the American Revolution, for example. People are about as irreligious as they are today. And then we go to after the Civil War, this massive boom in religious experience. I mean, that's when all of the, yeah, that's when all of the reformed Jewish temples in America were coming across between the Civil War and the First World War. Boom, man. That's when the Mormons were there. The Methodists and the Baptists were just doing these tent revivals, the temperance movement, the self-improvement movements, which are quasi-religious movements. And then, you know, in the 50s, it was more traditional religion. And then, you know, through the hippie revolution, it changed.

And then there was a cult. There was all the cults that actually came through and the moonies and all this kind of stuff. And this is just American life. And so what's happening right now is when people feel this enwee, this acute sense of emptiness, religion is going to be, is not going to be very far behind. And sure enough, that's actually the beginning of what we're starting to see today. But help me resolve this tension, right? So we're in this new moment that started sort of early 21st century.

which is much more algorithmic and technocratic way of thinking about treating life, it seems like it's causing two counter forces, right? So force number one is that creates a non-wee or meaninglessness, which will drive people back to I need something like religion to act as like the operating system for the new minors in my life. But at the same time, the culture itself has a defense mechanism against religion. It makes you uncomfortable about religion if you're steeped in this much more technical, scientific algorithmic culture, because you say,

I have lost the ability to comfortably deal with something that doesn't exist in the matrix of empiricism. That doesn't exist in terms of like this is a, we're making observations of putting them on tables and we're verifying if this is true or false and we're thinking about fact checking. And, you know, it's a, the whole cultural milieu that you're talking about is one in which if you're in that world, religion doesn't make sense. So it's driving us towards religion, but it's also a culture that's going to make us uncomfortable with religion. I guess what that creates like we saw coming out of. Silicon Valley in the 2010's, a lot of people that were talking about, there's a period where every friend I had was saying they were spiritual but not religious, which to me would be an exact personification of exactly those tensions. But what's going to win here? Because we have

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states, prices subject to underwriting and health questions. All right, Jesse. Let's get back to the show. So I think that what's going to win is the desire to be happier. That's what's going to win. Because, you know, who's going to choose misery forever on purpose is the whole point. So it's actually a deeper problem than what you're talking about. You know the work of the M. McGilchrist, the great neuroscientist and philosopher at Oxford, now emeritus. He did the work on hemispheric collateralization that I talked about before, where the left brain does the complicated engineering stuff and the tech that you're dealing with every day.

And the right brain is the why questions that don't have answers about love and mystery and meaning and happiness. And so what happens is that when you're only on the left brain, you're on the tech all day long and they're in the hustle and grind culture. It's not that you can't deal with religion. It's just that you don't even, it doesn't even occur to you to deal with religion because you're literally in the wrong part of your brain all day long to deal with religious questions. Now, that means that when people become miserable enough, they'll say what is actually missing. And that's when you get a whole rash of books by cats like you and me that say, let's take a little look at what you've been missing. And when they do, you, you're

you get a cultural revolution. I don't mean in the Chinese sense. I mean in the sense of when we actually get these religious waves in our society. And when people start to rebel against it, and that's actually what I see for the first time. I'm in Silicon Valley all the time. Look, I'm super into tech. I actually believe that AI is going to wind up at the end of the day,

mostly making us happier. Because a lot of people are going to figure out that all the left brain stuff that it does actually frees us up to have a lot more time. The Industrial Revolution initially made people work more, but then it created the weekend. And on the weekend, they actually hung out with their kids. And what AI is ultimately going to do is do a lot of left brain nonsense. And in the free time that we ultimately will have, we will have like do crazy old-fashioned stuff, like falling in love and having babies and praying and meditating. And I actually figure that that's the direction that we're going to go because that's the humans, what humans ultimately,

always do in the end that they choose happiness. So, well, I don't know if I share your optimism. Unfortunately on AI, just because I've studied too many workplace technologies, and the possibility is always there, we always mess it up. We always mess it up. We always end up making our lives more frantic because we're... Yeah, but each one of us can make that decision now, by the way. I agree.

Which is why you write your books. Yeah. And I've been telling people, yeah, think about AI. How can I automate something that's annoying? if you're using it to avoid strain in your brain, there be dragons. Like actually, no, no, no, you want to keep that piece, that sort of humanistic. I'm trying to create new value with my brain. Keep that.

But if this means you have to not format a PowerPoint slide, oh, fantastic. There's no reason for you to be doing that. All right. Unless you like formatting PowerPoint slides, unless that's your actual thing is what it comes down to. And by the way, don't use it as a substitute for your relationships. Yes. That's the biggest mistake that people make is making it your getting the girlfriend experience from AI or making it your buddy or God forbid your therapist, that actually is a substitute and your

brain will know the difference. It will never pass the touring test of the right hemisphere of your brain. And even though you say, wow, that's really good advice, that will make you feel empty, depressed and anxious because your right brain is craving a true human experience. Yeah, and it knows the difference. Well, let's talk about that because that was another one of your, the things you mentioned as sources of meaning is fall in love, have relationships. I know this is, being said it's a struggle, especially for younger people. Why and what should they do to overcome that struggle? To begin with, it's been, we've made it a lot worse with the technical mediation of relationships themselves. You know, the truth is that the best possible way to find a mate is to go

someplace where those people actually are and to deal with them over an interest that you have in common. That's actually how you meet people, which is why traditionally people would meet their mate in college or in the workplace, right? Another great way to do it is that somebody, another human being who knows you sets you up, which is why matchmakers and families are so really good and actually finding people, because they're dealing with a complexity of the human person themselves. When you inter-intermediate that with dating apps, what you're doing is you're reducing people to a two-dimensional facsimile of themselves, and that is inherently, unsatisfying. That's one of the reasons

of people who date a lot in the apps, they get way more dates than they used to, and they find less attraction than they used to, and when it turns into a long-term relationship, it's less stable and satisfying than it used to be. So marriage is, by the way, 62% of long-term relationships are starting

in the apps today. They are fundamentally and notably, significantly, less stable and have less attraction than relationships that don't start on the apps, because they're starting literally in the wrong side of the brain. Oh, interesting. So the right brain appreciation of sort of humanity. This is a separate, this is a person, this is a soul. This is like another human being, you know, blessed by God to be sort of like infinitely valuable. And we are like interacting in space. Your brain is literally encoding a different understanding. That's right. It's like, this was option five I swept right on or something like that. It's not like an algorithmic learning thing.

You're actually not encountering the people that your right brain needs. Why? Because your left brain is ascertaining who the greatest match is going to be, and your left brain is going to get it wrong. Your left brain gets it wrong. And your right brain knows. You remember when you met your wife, which is probably, how old? Were you in college when you met your wife?

We were in college. Yeah. And you met her, what? What were you doing? You were like having dinner or something and somebody introduced you? She was on my floor in my freshman dorm. Right. No, man.

Good stuff. And you met her. What's that? But I'll say this about it is, is we used to do things like in high school. We would do things like go to parties. And it was social boot camp because it was weird and awkward. You had to navigate incredibly complicated real world situations, like trying to figure out, is my popularity sufficient to be in this room with these particular people and how do I navigate this?

And it was very difficult and stressful. And you would drive around with your friends and you got good at it. And I always think about by the time I got to college, then I could function competently in the new social circumstances and like fraternities and dorms and this or that, which allowed me to attract a mate who's now been, you know, my wife for 20 years. So there's like something about. That's a highly complex human experience. And if you're on the apps, God forbid, you'd know, if she, is she look hot in a picture? Does she like to eat saracha? Does she want to live in, in Austin?

And does she vote for Democrats? or something like that. And you say, okay, I guess I go on a date with her, right? And she'll be like, is he over six foot three? Does he have a good, lustrous head of hair? In your case, boy, is that ever true. And the truth is that, you know, this stuff is incidental. When I first met my wife, she didn't speak a word of English.

And I didn't speak a word of Spanish. And I was talking to her, and I could smell her. And I thought to myself, I don't know why, but she smells like a cantaloupe in August. I really, really like that. Now, what's happening is the right side of my brain. in concert with the olfactory bulb in my brain was saying something about her major histocompatibility complex, which is telling me something about the dissimilarity of our immune systems.

And that was telling me something like attraction, attraction, attraction, because if you have babies, they're going to have really good immune systems because you're really different than each other. Thank God for all that, man. But you're not going to get that on hinge. I can't wait. I would love to hear what your wedding bells were like. Let me talk about the immune system. still mismatch.

I love it. All right. So we're basically out of time here. So let's just try to bring it down to, all right. So I want to be concrete. It's impossible to be too concrete. But there's a listener of mine. They're agreeing with all of this.

So like I want to add the meaning to the equation. This is what I'm missing. This brings a lot of pieces together. But I want to get concrete. Like what am I doing in the next few weeks or in the next few months just to sort of start moving in the right direction towards meaning while I'm waiting for my copy of Arthur's book. Yeah.

book the show up. Yeah, got it. That's great. Thank you. Number one, get clean. Number one is actually start to do some things to rebel against the machine that's actually putting you into the doom loop. Number one is people should be really angry that they're actually stuck in this thing.

And I talk about the fact that in all addictive processes, the number one instigator of actually recovery is getting just pissed off. You know, that's what it comes down to. You don't talk to anybody who's a former, you know, really best. bad alcoholic. They'll say, it's like, I got so mad about what I was doing to myself and what I was doing to the family and what I just like, no, I'm not going to do this anymore. You read Dostoevsky's the gambler, which he wrote, by the way, because he was so out of money that he was that he actually had to wager everything he had to get a novel written in one month so that he had enough money

to pay off his gambling debts. And he wrote it about a gambler. And the whole thing is just like, he's like basically, you know, to hell with it all is what. what he said at the end of the day. The second thing is you basically have to understand how your brain is getting hooked onto these machines and actually how it works. And again, I'm not anti-tech. I'm not anti-phone. I'm not anti-social media. I've got all of it. And so do you. You have to understand how you need to learn to manage your devices so they don't manage you. And I've got a bunch of protocols in this book to actually do that. But it starts with your methods for device free times and you're cited in this book. And that's like first hour of the day,

during meals, last hour of the day. The gold standards are your phone foyer method, by the way. When you're home, you're actually doing this. Then the last part is actually working to get bored on purpose. And so I recommend that people actually work out without headphones, that people go for walks for an hour in the morning called the Brahmahurta in Vedic wisdom without devices that they drive in silence, a whole bunch of actual interventions to do that.

So that's number one, is getting clean. Number two, before the book shows up, because by the time the book shows up, there's a whole bunch of cool stuff to actually do, but everybody can do this, is actually getting into what the Greeks called the state of Aporea, which is the state of puzzlement by actually thinking about big questions that don't have answers and talking about it with other people. Here's two. Why am I alive? Here's another. For what would I give my life? You know, that's when you were in college. That's what you were talking about at 1130 p.m. after the party when you met your wife.

Now, what are people doing at 11.30 p.m. after the party? Zit, zit, zit, zit, zit, sending themselves right over to the left side of the brain. This is what every major religious tradition has in common. If you're trying to become a Zen Buddhist monk, you're going to learn Coens. What's the sound of one hand clapping? The big questions, the deep questions, the questions, the questions that matter most in life. That is pure therapy for the right hemisphere of the brain. You're not going to find the answers to the questions, and that's not the point. What you're going to find is that you put your yourself into a position where meaning starts to find you. All right. Well, this, I'm on board with all this, Arthur. I think like the right brain versus left brain, the equations, why meaning is lacking. Like, all this stuff resonates with me. A lot of insights in this book that I hadn't had before, but helped explain things I'd noticed, which to me is usually the mark of a good theoretical framework.

So to my audience, the book is called The Meaning of Your Life. Yeah, you need to go order it. It's going to definitely help you with all the things we talk about here on this show. and Arthur, it's always a pleasure to have you on the show. We'll have to have you back on again soon. But thanks for joining us to know. I love it. Thank you, Cal.

Thank you for your work. It's really helped my life a lot and a lot of other, millions of other people, too. I appreciate it. Right on. All right. So there we go. Jesse, that was my discussion with Arthur Brooks. It's interesting how ideas seem to travel in packs.

So for the years I was working on my new book about, the Deep Life, which is coming out next year, it really felt like it was sort of out of left field, and I was the only one thinking about this. And now all at once, there's lots of books about the same general idea. Arthur Brooks is one of these books. Jim Collins, they just sent me a new copy of his book that's coming out. That's also about trying to find more meaning in your life. So I think it's just in the air right now that we're in a mode where people are ready to say, let's stop just talking about the problems and start also talking about the solutions. Now, all of our books do something different, so they'll all complement each other. But I'm

kind of happy to see that we're entering a moment in this year of questioning how do we cultivate a life of purpose as opposed to being so unique like focus very myopically on just individual issues that we might want to solve I guess we call this like the meaning renaissance I don't know yeah did you end up writing your conclusion yet no what I'm doing uh I haven't run the conclusion yet because I want to see I'm in the first round of edits for my book the deep life and what I've been struggling on all week, honestly, is more of my personal story and introduction, my editor wants, and I'm pretty uncomfortable writing about myself. But there are some pretty deep motivations from like my 20s where I developed a lot of the ideas like lifestyle-centric planning that

then play a big role in my theory of the deep life involving some stuff I went through back then. So I'm trying to write about it. God is going slow. I could write a 3,000-word New Yorker essay easier than I could write this sort of 1,500 words about, like, my own story. But it was also, like, completely unanticipated, right? Like, you didn't expect it? I don't do that when an editor came back with those comments?

No, I mean, I know she was right. I was just hoping she wouldn't notice. Oh, okay. Yeah. I was like, do I really have to talk about it? She's right. Like, when you're talking about something like cultivating a deep life, it is as personal as it is technical. So it is right. But, man, it's really slowing me down. But I'm almost there. I'm going to try to finish it this afternoon, actually.

after we record. And then move on to like more normal editing that I'm comfortable with, which is about shortening stories, adding stories, clarifying things, cutting things you don't need to be there. There's my happy zone. I love cutting and simplifying. But man, it doesn't help that I'm lying a lot. So like in my story, it's a lot of me in war zones.

I basically just like took a lot from a mix of like Sebastian Junger's books about being embedded in Afghanistan and the Navy SEAL Richard Marcink. goes autobiography of starting SEAL Team 6. So I kind of mix a lot of that in there. I guess it may be it, maybe readers will notice. There's a lot of, a lot of me doing halo jumps, high altitude, low opening parachute jumps into terrorist camps. But, you know, I want to keep it. Keep it real.

Keep it real. That's what I say. That's what we do here. All right. Speaking of keeping it real, you've heard from me and Arthur. And now it's time to hear what you have to say. Jesse, it's time to open our inbox. Just as a reminder, if you want to ask a question or share a case story or maybe just attempt to prod me into a ranch, send a note to podcast at calnewport.com.

I think we now have three different people who read that inbox. So it's your best chance of actually getting your information in front of me and on the show. All right, Jesse, what's the first message we're going to cover today? All right. First message, Adam recommended an article for you to read. All right. So what do we got here? This is from Adam Scott.

You think this is the actor, Adam Scott, from Severance and Parks and Recreational? Yes. Let's just assume yes. Look, this is his words, not mine. Emmy nominated actor Adam Scott essentially sees me as like one of his biggest inspiration. I think we can just assume that's true. All right, what did Adam Scott have to say? He said, here's an article that will be quote right up Cal's Alley. All right, so let's load up this article.

I'll put up here on the screen that Adam Scott sent me. It's from Gizmodo. Here's the title. tech employees are reportedly being evaluated by how fast they burn through LLM tokens. Is that terminology known, do you think, Jesse? Like, if you hear me say LLM tokens, you know what that means? I'm not sure if my audience does. Can you define it?

So this is what you actually, how you're actually charged for using something like a language model. So when you use a large language model, you give it text as input. And the output is a single token, which is either a word or a part of a word. right so what the language model thinks it's doing is it thinks the input is from a real piece of text that already exist and that it is trying to correctly guess what word or part of the word comes next so how do you get a whole long response out of it will you have a computer program like a chatbot for example would have a computer program that continually calls the lLM again and again so you give it a prompt it gives it as input to the LLM it gets out one token it adds that token to the end of your prompt now you have a slightly longer input It feeds that into the LLM, gets another prompt token, adds that to the end of your input, feeds that back in. So you're growing out a response, one word or part of a word at a time. This is called auto regression, where you keep feeding back your output back into the input to try to grow the final output. And at some point, the LLM will output a special token that says that's the end of my answer, at which point then you return that to the user if you're in like a chatbot scenario.

So every time you produce a token, your input has to go through all of the layers of the LLM and all of the hundreds of billions of parameters have to be involved in multiplications. So that's the measure of how much computation is necessary for a particular response is how many tokens had to be generated. So it's the same thing as saying how many times do we have to call the LLM. All right. So when it says tech employers are being evaluated by how fast they burn through LM tokens, it means how much they're using language models. So let me read from this article. This article is actually, it's quoting a Kevin Ruse column from the New York Times. So really we should be reading Kevin's.

But this is what they sent me. So I'll read what's actually in the Gizmoto article. All right. So it says, and I'm quoting here, according to a column by the New York Times, Kevin Ruse, employees that companies, including meta and open AI, compete on, quote, internal leaderboards that show how many tokens each worker consumes, in quote. At meta in particular and also Shopify, Ruth says, volume of AI used has become a metric that goes into people's evaluations with managers, quote, rewarding workers who make heavy use of AI tools and chastening those who do not.

The resulting numbers in terms of both tokens and money are absolutely staggering. One open-eye engineer, according to Roos, burned through 210 billion tokens, which Roos equates to 33 Wikipedias. A Swedish software engineer claims to Roos that his company spends more than his salary on Claude Cod Code tokens. alone and then because I guess we have to gen Z everything, he calls this token maxi. So there we go. What do I feel about this? Well, I think this is just pseudo-productivity laid bare. It's a big idea we talked about in last week's episode, which is why Emmy nominated actor Adam Scott sent me this article this week, is this idea that in knowledge work in general, we tend to use visible activity as a proxy for useful effort.

the busier you are, the more stuff you're doing, the more productive we think you are. This is why we send tons of emails and jump in tons of meetings, even if that's not actually producing more of whatever it is that makes money for our institution. Well, this is that made even more quantitative. I don't care what you're doing. I don't care if it's producing better software. I don't care if it's shipping more things than matter faster. I just want to see that you're making lots of hits on the LLM because that means you're doing

lots of things. So it's pseudo productivity laid bare. but pseudo productivity is often a trap. Because there's lots of stuff you can do faster or more phonetically that doesn't move the bottom line. So what was my suggestion last week? My suggestion last week is have a better scoreboard. Measure the things that directly produce value.

That's what you should care about. How many meaningful features were shipped to our software clients, for example? Maybe that's what we care about. Now, if that requires a lot of LLM use or not, if you use a lot of tokens or maybe use few tokens because you have very, very careful, well-constrained prompts, and that actually makes you more effective than the guy that's just shooting left and right, prompts left and right, and getting clogged in all sorts of weird loops, right? Focus on the scoreboard that matters, not whatever is more proximate and whatever is easier.

So I think this is a great example of the digital productivity tool traps we fall into. Be very wary of looking at zoomed-in speed of things. and be much more interested in the big picture actual production of value because what leads there is not always, doesn't always seem as busy or frenetic or fast-paced as you might assume. So I do appreciate that article. All right, Jesse, what other message do we have? All right. Next matchup, we have a note from an anonymous student who has a question about digital books. Let's see if we can find this.

All right, here we go. All right. So here's the note. It reads, I'm a 22-year-old software engineering student. I've recently been trying to apply your ideas on digital minimalism, but I have a question about reading digital books. Recently, I started quote-unquote reading PDFs using a combination of visual reading and text-to-speech, which I listen to while following the text. This helps me stay focused and feel like I absorb more. Here's my question.

For developing deep focus, cognitive improvements, and strong critical thinking, is this combined method as effective as traditional reading, or does it reduce to long-term cognitive benefits of reading? All right. So I think in this context, yes, it is reducing the long-term cognitive benefits of reading. What I think is happening here is that you are trying to reduce the cognitive strain involved in consuming the written word. So by having your audio system going, you're taking the strain off of just my mind has to just purely decode these symbols and create meaningful representations in my brain. you're sort of short-circuiting that. The audio allows you to sort of take your foot off the cognitive gas pedal and just listen for a while and then read for a while, then listen for a while. It is a lot less cognitively demanding way to consume words.

But if you're interested in using books to help develop your brain, your ability to contemplate, which I define to mean your ability to actually control and aim your mind's eye at particular targets towards useful outcomes, if that is your goal, then you want the strain. What you're doing would be the physical analogy of saying, hey, good, good news. My Navy SEAL training was really hard. I hate the pull-ups that make us do, but I figured out how to use a pulley system.

And if I put some counterweights on the pulley system, these pull-ups are much easier for me to do. I just feel like I can do them easier. Well, it defeats the purpose of the pull-ups. You want to strain your muscle so they get stronger so that when you're in deployment, you can actually carry that rucksack for, you know, the long hike or whatever the analogy here is.

So, no, you want to confront the actual symbols printed on a piece of paper. And I want you to change your mindset, that strain you feel. Think about it like Arnold Schwarzenegger and pumping iron, loving the strain he feels in his bice up when he's lifted. He's like, yeah, that means I'm getting stronger. So I would much rather you do shorter reading sessions at full intensity than longer reading sessions where you're trying to reduce the intensity because you're not actually getting the cognitive benefits of increased contemplation ability, which it sounds like

you're actually trying to get. So that would be my recommendation. There is a magic to decoding printed symbols with no other types of input that creates deep reading processes, strengthens those deep reading processes, builds cognitive patience with focus, and allows you to then reverse those circuits when the time comes when you're thinking or writing to produce much more original thoughts on your own. So stick with the real books. Read less, but keep the reading you do at a higher level of intensity. He also asked about audiobooks. I think audiobooks are a fine way to absorb information, right? I think it's, you know, hey, I listen to this book on audio, especially like a nonfiction

book where either it's just entertainment or you want to get some ideas out of it. But if what you're looking to do is increase your cognitive capacity, you really want to read physical books for that purpose, right? So audiobooks are fine, but don't think of audiobooks as your primary way of building the strongest possible cognitive results. It's just less strain is involved. So I'm all four audiobooks. Like half my book sales now are audiobooks,

but it shouldn't be the only thing you're doing if you're trying to train your brain. Half your book sales are audiobooks. Isn't that crazy? Wow. I don't know that. When I first got in the game, it was like none.

And then when like Audible became a thing and Amazon made it easier, it was like a quarter. I think I went back and looked this up for digital minimalism, which came out in 2019. If you're looking at those first year sales, it's like a quarter of the sales.

Now, if you look at like slow productivity, is 50%. Wow. That's incredible. So partially that's a shift in book consumption habits. And partially it's a reality of the fact that we have a podcast and I do a lot of podcast. And a lot of people encounter me through an audio format.

So that also bumps it up. Like I've noticed, like if you look for sales spikes based on particular publicity related events, if it's a podcast related event, you get a audiobook spike. and if it's a print related event, it's more hard covers, it's like more evenly balanced. So like when I went on like Andrew Huberman's podcast on launch day for slow productivity, that was an audiobook spike, right?

In fact, my slow productivity was on the Amazon charts for multiple weeks, the top 20 most read or most bought books of the week. But it was the audio version because like really I was on a lot of big podcasts. But if I get something like a big article in the New York Times or something, then you're going to get many more hardcover. So it kind of depends on the audience. But a lot of our audience now finds me through this podcast. So they do a lot more audiobooks.

The bad news is that means I have to record my own audiobooks. And it's a terrible process. It's terrible. You explained it on a prior podcast. I know. I'm not looking forward to it with the new book. But say Levy. All right.

We're going a little shorter today since we had a very long interview. But I like to end each show by briefly checking in. with what I've been up to recently. Let's start with reading. I'm working on my fifth book of March. We're recording this on March 24th. So I read the first four books. My fifth book is mentioned

as this Brandon Sanderson book, misborn, my middle son has insisted that I read. Jesse, I'm about 400 pages into this book, which for a Brandon Satterson title means like I'm basically finishing up the prologue. Like,

I'm just getting started. These are long books. I'm enjoying it. it though. You know, I hadn't read him before. I'd read I don't read a ton of fantasy. I read some Game of Thrones. I read some Patrick Rufus. I hadn't read this before.

I had read a snarky profile in Wire. There's this like famous mean profile of Brandon Sanderson from Wired magazine. And I had read that and it was like really down on his writing. It was like, oh, it's like super expositional and he is explaining redundantly how

characters were feeling and I was like, oh, maybe this is going to be clunky writing. Like he just writes these things But I don't think so at all. I think it's a very well-paced adventure-style book against the backdrop of a complicated world-building magic system. I was like, this is like very well-executed. I mean, it's not Ursula McGuin, but it's also not like I was expecting after that wired article. I read a lot of thrillers. I read a lot of adventure writing.

Like this is like well-crafted, especially for a six-seventh-page book that keep the momentum going, great world building. So I am impressed. I was more impressed by Brendan Sanderson than that snarky article. led me to believe. Let's check it on the HQ. I got a bunch of stuff, Jesse, I'm about to bring over here. Our foyer is full. We got a video game cabinet in there.

We got my $500 light is in there. We got a new, a giant rug. So we're going to rug the whole floor in there. So it's going to be not so live and echoey or whatever. I got a lot of stuff. I got the vintage video game maintenance manual from 1980 for the Galaxian arcade cabinet

because I'm taking out some of the circuit diagrams to frame to put up in there. So I need this done by May because that's when my semester ends and my sabbatical begins. And how long does your sabbatical go for? It'll be the whole next academic year.

So I need, because I'm going to be spending a lot of time in there working. And so I need that to all get done by May. Here's the, the open question I have and I'll get the advice of the listeners

is I'm putting picture ledges staggered on the wall in front of where the computers are, where I write and Jesse does video editing. I want to put books on them that are going to be like a source of inspiration. But I will take suggestions about what type of books to put there. My current thought has long been, but let me test this with the audience. I want to put first edition techno thrillers up on that wall because A, I associate that with my childhood reading in the 1990s, which was like a lot of creative energy and inspiration, the start of like my intellectual life.

And two, I think of techno thrillers. I think of this idea that writing and thinking about technology can be, it can be interesting or fun or emotive or like really be something that that catches people attention. And I like that's, you know, I don't want to put just like books in the mainstream of what I write about like tech criticism up there or something like that. I want it to be a little bit more oblique.

So that's my current idea, Jesse. But I'm open. I'm open to other suggestions that people have it. But I want a sort of inspiring wall of books with the spotlight for my $500 light shining right on them when I'm sitting there writing. So that's my current thought. How many books do you think? 10, 5? Yeah, I think 10 maybe.

Yeah, I think 10. I'm not doing first printings, but that's too expensive. But first editions. That's what I'm thinking. First edition hard covers. We'll get them up there. They're red acrylic picture ledges. All this stuff can be.

such a pain to hang, but I'm having someone come to do it. Just hang everything all at once because it's all. I hate doing that type of thing. All right. Well, send your advice to podcast at Cal Newport.com or if you're the Michael Crichton estate, I will lovingly put up your first editions you send me. They will be well displayed. We will, they will find a good home.

All right. That's all the time we have for today. On Thursday, we have an AI reality check episode coming up and then next Monday will have another main episode. So until then, as always, stay deep.