Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Why You Should Quit Social Media in 2026 | Cal Newport

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

If you’re trying to be productive, what if the answer isn’t to do more… but to do less, better?On today’s episode, we welcome back Cal Newport — Georgetown computer science professor, bestselling author of Deep Work and Slow Productivity, and one of the most influential voices on focus, sustainable achievement, and the hidden costs of our digital lives. Cal and Dr. Mike pick up where their first conversation left off — exploring why the human brain can’t do its best work while juggling five active tasks, how context switching quietly crushes output, and what leaders can do to build cultures that protect focus without adding headcount. On the human side, Cal dives into digital fatigue, rethinking our relationship with phones, and how parents can create healthier tech norms at home. Finally, he looks ahead to AI — not with fear, but with clarity about how it can remove friction and restore our ability to think deeply.In this episode, you’ll learn:Why doing fewer things at once leads to faster, better resultsHow to reduce context switching and build deep work into team cultureThe difference between true productivity and “pseudo-productivity”How to counter digital fatigue at work and at home — with different strategies for eachWhat parents should know about phones, social media, and attentionHow AI can actually protect deep work when used wiselyThe heart of this conversation: mastery in the modern world isn’t about speed or volume — it’s about depth, clarity, and choosing what truly deserves your attention._________________________________________________________________________Links & ResourcesSubscribe to our Youtube Channel for more conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and wellbeing: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine: findingmastery.com/morningmindset Follow on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and XSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We could be doing 10 things today instead of five if we were just willing to do it. So the real question is, how do I get the most productive output out of this brain today? And there, the answer is rarely, let's give it as many things as possible to work on. That actually reduces the amount of useful output that brain can produce. I hear it all the time. So many of us feel overwhelmed and scattered and behind. But what if it's not because you're doing too little, but because you're actually doing too much all at once? If I have five tasks that I'm actively working on, I have to contend with the overhead of five tasks.

And that is going to jam up the whole cognitive apparatus. If I instead work on one thing and then when I'm done, take on a next and take on a next, I'll get those five things done much quicker overall. The quality is going to go up. We are excited to be back for a fresh start in 2026. So as ever, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast, where we dive into the minds of the world's greatest thinkers and doers. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Jervay. by trade and trading a high-performance psychologist.

And the idea behind these conversations is simple. It's to sit with the extraordinarily to learn, to really learn how they work from the inside out. Today's conversation is with Cal Newport, computer science professor at Georgetown University, best-selling author, and one of the most influential voices on focus, productivity, and deep costs of our digital lives.

TikTok wants you to use it as much as possible. They make more money, the more you use it. You have to completely change your relationship with devices. You have to be in control. not letting like four or five large companies that run these attention to companies, run your attention in your life. We unpack digital fatigue in both work and life, the dangerous tradeoffs being made with smartphones and social media, and how parents can make clearer decisions about technology in the home. I think the evidence here is really clear. Don't have a smartphone until high school. And even

then it's a lockdown smartphone, like that's really like 16 plus or post-puberty. And then even after the kid has the phone, my argument is like as long as you live in this house, when you're at home, the phone is plugged in in the kitchen. You don't get it while we watch TV, and you certainly don't get to bring it up to your room and stay up until 3 a.m. And we look ahead to the future of AI, not with fear, but with clarity about what it should and should not replace. I have a vision of AI that I think is much more gentle and controllable and productive. It's not scary, but there's a lot of things in our lives that are easier, just like the web made a lot of things in our lives easier. Like, I don't have to look up this company in the yellow pages and call them to see when

their hours are. I can go to their website. So I think there could be big booms from AI that aren't sonic booth. So as you listen, I want you to consider how might your work, your family life, and your sense of peace shift if your attention became something you fiercely protected. With that, let's jump into this week's conversation with Cal Newport. Cal, it's been a long time since we've been able to connect. And what a great excuse to have a podcast to be able to do this. So it's great to have you back on the show, and it's a treat to have a conversation with you. So thanks for coming back on. Well, I think all podcasters secretly know this is why we do it. It's an excuse to talk to interesting people that the other people in our lives will put up with. Like, no, no, I got to go work.

I got to go get on my podcast. It's work. Actually, it's just, it's like it is intellectual heart-filled candy, you know, that we get to noodle on. So, okay, let's start this way. I hear this a lot, and I've been wanting to ask you this question. So what I hear often is, I'm doing nine to 12 things reasonably well. I want to do three things exceptionally well. Can you open up, you know, how you go about thinking about that dilemma? I mean, I think this is one of the key dilemmas of our current moment, especially in knowledge work, is this tension between busyness and impact.

And so I think the higher performance you get, and I'm sure you see this, you could probably graph this with your clients that are higher up the ranks they go or the higher performance they get, the more you realize what really matters is the thing you do best. This is what moves the needle. This is what I'm known for. This is the thing for which I have the most sort of market leverage or impact leverage is the thing I do really well. And the more things you're working on at once, the worse your best thing gets. So in other words, if I'm really crowded with lots of things, why is that a problem?

It's a problem because that prevents me from doing my best thing better. and I don't know. I think this is sort of one of the central tensions of our current moment is, is it quantity of things you do or is it quality of your best thing? And once you make that turn in your thinking, it seems to completely transform how you think about almost everything. But I'm going to turn this to you because I'm curious about what you saw. I wanted to ask you about this. When you shift your focus from high performance sports to the world of business, in sports, this is of course known, right? This is the whole. thing. Like, you're training to do this particular skill as well as possible, and you're very, very wary, I assume, of almost anything that gets in the way of doing your core thing better. And business is super high performance, but no one thinks that way. So I don't know. I mean, was that, I imagine that was a one of the culture shocks you had as you moved between these two worlds. Yeah, cool framing, because best practices in sport or expressing potential to kind of keep it really broad are miles apart from best practice.

in business. So in sport, you have people that observe you and give you timely, meaning nearly immediate, hard to sometimes receive feedback and information about how you're doing what you're doing. And so think about practice. You've got two or three coaches that are watching, let's call it, nine to 12 athletes. And they are saying, hey, listen, move your foot just a little bit this way. Hey, make sure that you're moving your hip this way. Where are you looking? Are you looking here? are you looking there? And they are down into the subtle details of becoming masterful or becoming exceptionally potent at their ability to do the thing that they want to do. In business, my emails are not examined. The phone calls I have are not scrutinized. The way that I walk down the hallway

and greet people or don't greet people is not coached. And so we lack the structure of support than challenge. And we are in business. We're afraid of the challenge because the support is not honest. And so in sport, we spend a lot of time learning each other. So we want to be a great team. You need to be great teammates, which means we got to spend time to know each other so that when times are tough, you'll have somebody's back and somebody will have your back. And that is how you get freed up to really take a risk. In business, those mechanics are not there. Yet, I think they're coming because there's this rotation to invest in relationships over productivity. But that's not happening at this moment. There's a swing that's starting to happen, but it's certainly not

happening in this moment right now. But even your use of the word productivity there, I think, is important, right? Because it sort of implies to the average person of, oh, we know how to measure this. And yeah, this is the way the frame, I think a lot of high performers have this incorrect. They think, we know how to measure productivity. This way we're working makes us more productive, but maybe it's not sustainable. Or maybe what's going to happen is like long term, I'm going to burn out. But, like, clearly what I'm doing, let's say I'm super busy. I'm jumping in out of inboxes. I have 100 meetings a day. Clearly, this is making me more productive. It's just a matter of, like, whether or not that's sustainable. Or it's actually not the case.

Like, this is what's interesting about it is, we're not more productive because we're more busy. It's just harder to measure. So you said mechanics. So I think about baseball pitchers. If I'm a baseball pitcher and I start flagging, my velo drops in like the fifth inning, immediately those pitching coaches are like, how, what is your routine? Clearly, you have some fatigue. I think we're like overdoing it in the bullpen sessions in between. Like, we can see immediately there's a problem and we're going to adjust it. But we don't have that equivalent for the executive. We don't have whatever the business equivalent of is your, your velocity has fallen. Maybe you have too many things going on. That frame shift I have found to be very useful

is I disrupt the assumption that the stuff we don't like has a, it may be cruel to obtain, but objective benefit. Like, yeah, this way we work stinks. But you know, what, it gets the job done, but is it sustainable or should we care about other things more? And I say, I don't think we have that reality. I mean, I think we're pitching worse and it's an unforced error. It's not a trade-off between what's hard and what's productive. I think we're working a way that's hard that often makes us less productive, which is a situation where you definitely should think about changes. Yeah, we pushed off dock in the world of business. We pushed off the dock at, let's call it 20 degrees. Where our boat is taking us is not

the destination that we're trying to get to. Like, we made a fundamental error pushing off dock in the way that we structure business. So if you could wave a magic wand, like, how do you solve this? Okay, so what level are we talking about? So I think it's different if we're talking about a high-level executive versus talking about, you know, I'm just an employee in a knowledge work firm with like three layers and bosses. Like, which of these, where do we want to start? I want to talk to leaders that can change and make decisions on how culture runs.

Okay. Right, right. So if I'm talking to leaders, so it's both about what they're doing in their own practice and what they can do for culture to make everyone else's practice better. Three things I'd always talk about. One, I would talk about the value of concentration slash the poison of context, switching. These go together. So I would say, look, you've got to understand if you're in a knowledge work organization,

the key activity that adds value to information is the human mind focusing on things that are difficult and producing new value. this works better when people have unbroken focus. And the more people have to switch their context to be distracted, the worst they are at doing the thing that actually makes money for your company. So let's think about things like deep work. As a tier one skill, we should measure and protect. The second thing I would say is workload matters.

This cannot and should not just be left to everyone the sort of in an obfuscated way figure out on their own. How many things you're working on, how you juggle these things? Workload really matters. How many things do you want someone in a given position to be working on at the same time. And how do we measure how many they're doing to make sure they don't go beyond that? Like workload management matters. And then finally, communication protocols matter. How are you collaborating? The solution here cannot be around what is going to be easiest in the

moment for me? What's the lowest friction thing I can do right now to try to grab someone's attention? It's what method of communicating is going to get the collaboration we need done while minimizing the distractions while minimizing the context shifts. Like if you care about those three things, your employees are going to produce a lot more. It's going to be a lot more sustainable. They're you get much better results, you're going to have a lot less burnout. I would say most leaders, they don't think about any of these things, right? It's a little bit too complicated. It's often just let's have OKRs to measure like some big benchmarks and then just like go for it. Let's email at Slack and let's just rock and roll. Can you take one of those and maybe provide what you would

say would be a good solution set or a way for a leader to think about actually making happen because there's always some tensions in these scenarios. And one of the tensions is, yeah, if I had 12 more humans or if I had a bigger budget or if I had a better AI stack or, you know, like I could solve those, but I don't. And we're kind of building the plane as we're flying the plane and I don't have that luxury. So just create some tension around the envelope is stuffed and we don't have more resources and we've got a downward pressure to meet deadlines. I would centralize tasks. Here's one specific recommendation. So for a team, you know, the team of people in your company, they work on the same thing. Where do the tasks go? When something comes up that we need this team to do, where does it go? The default behavior is it lands on individuals' plates. So like maybe you email me and that I email it to someone else. Just everyone, sort of everything is owned by some person. So the tasks are distributed among the people who are out there and they're transferred via communication like Slack and email. I say do something different. When a task is identified that a team needs to do, don't give it to a person, put in a central list. All right. So here is our list of things that grows. Here are the things.

this team needs to do. And then in a very coherent, structured way, you pull things off of that list to give the individuals to do. And you should every morning, 15 minutes, stand up meeting the team is like, all right, who's doing what, who's done, who needs help, who needs something new. Okay, you just finished this thing. Let's decide as a group, what's the best next thing for you to do. How long is that going to take you? It's going to take you midday? Great. We'll check back in after midday and pull something else onto your plate, right? So now each individual is working on a very small number of things at a time. And you might say, like, well, wait a second. I want to get more done.

Here's the topsy-turvy logic of this. Zoom out a month. Zoom out to the scale of a quarter. The number of things finished on those timescales will be much larger than the traditional way of just spreading this workout among people. You're actually going to get more done. And the reason why you're going to get more done is that there is a big difference between a task that is waiting on a centralized list to be assigned and a task that has been emailed to you and now you have it on your plate. Once you have been actively assigned a task, it brings with it overhead that you have to pay. I mean, people want to check in on it.

There's going to be emails. There's going to be meetings. It's going to take up cognitive space. You have to just sort of think about it. And so if I have five tasks that I'm actively working on, I have to contend with the overhead of five tasks. And that is going to jam up the whole cognitive apparatus. It's going to fragment my attention.

I'm going to have the page in and out. And the quality and speed at which I get things done will plummet. If I instead work on one thing and then when I'm done, take on a next, then take on a next. I'll get those five things done much quicker overall. and the quality is going to go up. So centralizing tasks that we can keep individual workloads of active tasks smaller increases the throughput at which things are produced. We know this in manufacturing. This is a well-known sort of pull theory technique or resource allocation.

It's a better way to use resources in general, including cognitive resources, but it's a little bit more complicated than just, hey, my boss just said, do this. And I'm like, Mike, you handle this. Email, done. It's off my plate. So, like, that would be one thing I would do. It's an example of by being more structured and being more aware of how the brain works, you actually get things get better. You get more done, and you do so without less burnout.

I mean, I don't know if you buy that or not, but doesn't require more resources. You mentioned the pull-through, so I think that that's worth opening up and the pull-through method. But also, like, let me add one more constraint here, which is the way that I hear that, from a cognitive science perspective, I go, yep, that's right. And then I go meet the realities of, let's say, the pressures of producing, you know, the pressures of creating or making or introducing to the marketplace, what your promise to them is. I hear a waterfall approach, like I'm going to do project one and then project two. But the reality oftentimes is, let's say, I've got a month to get the five done, cool.

But usually it's like, and then you would want to waterfall those. however it feels like in that month time it's going to take a month to do project one and it's going to take a full month to do project two and then there's this bouncing back and forth between the two to try to get 10 pounds of stuff into a five pound bag so it's like these unrealistic demands to finish something pushes people to do the parallel path as opposed to the waterfall path so am i wrong in like the the constraints that people are wrestling with i think the issue here is The discreetness you're thinking in as projects, where I'm thinking about tasks.

Okay. So it's not, do that. Yeah. I'm not going to work on, I'm not going to work on project A till it's done. And then we're going to work on project B. It's like, I'm going to work on this task today. Or this is what I'm doing this morning.

Okay, now what's the next thing for me to do this afternoon? Should we do the next task on this project? Or no, no, no, there's this client really needs an update. So what we need to do is, this is what you should do this afternoon is why don't you work on this task so we can give them an update, right? So I'm at the granularity of tasks, not a project. And then once you're there, here's the thing. Here's the thing.

The constraint that matters is your processing power as an individual, right? There are so many hours a day that your brain can be processing things, right? So the number I care about is during that day, what is the ratio of these processing hours, whatever I want to call it? What is the ratio of me actually working on producing the thing and to the ratio of time I'm spent doing overhead related to projects, emails, meetings, and stuff that's talking about the work before it's done? If you're working on five tasks simultaneously, like what's going to have are five projects and you just have them all on your plate without any sort of active or passive differentiation, what's going to happen is that ratio of actual work to overhead is going to plummet.

And once you get to a point where, which is where a lot of people are, half my day or more is talking about the things that need to be done. And then the rest happens in fragments between those discussions where I actually try to do work. You're just working with like a diminished piece of equipment. And the amount of cycles being spent on actual work per day is smaller. And the time it takes for you to get through those five things will be longer. That's what I always come back to with this idea is like here's, we talk about five projects. We've broken up in task. What ultimately do you care about?

When are all five projects done? And if you're using centralized task lists and keeping active workload smaller, those five projects will finish faster. Like they just will be done. But we have, we're so wired. We have this thinking that our processing power is infinite. And all that matters is to what degree are we, like, willing to hustle or to take on more things? And we could be doing 10 things today instead of five if we were just willing to do it. If we just had the can-do productive spirit.

But no, our brain is like a computer. There's only so much it can do. So the real question is, how do I get the most productive output out of this brain today? And there, the answer is rarely, let's give it as many things as possible to work on. That actually reduces the amount of useful output that brain can produce. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. We tend to think about creatine as something for athletes, for power, for muscle, for strength. But what often gets missed here is that our brains rely on creatine, just like our body does.

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intellectually, I know deep work based on your research earlier in the day, and I'm not organized right. So one of the things that is a problem for uniquely to my organization is that we have an international employee base. So finding mastery, we've got teammates all over the globe. And so to meet with teammates that are, we've got in Europe and Africa, those meetings happen in the morning. And so now here I am doing meetings, which is kind of task. checking, if you will, or project checking and alignment and communications, all the stuff that's required to get a team to move forward on something that is remote in this case. That overhead and drag is happening in my morning hours when I am at my highest volitional kind of potency I have.

I'm spending on drag behavior. So I don't know how to solve that, and I'm not asking you to solve that because I have an idea. Okay, I would like an idea. Yeah, that's good. I wrote about this last year in the Atlantic, I wrote this piece about hybrid attention models. And I said, okay, look, we were talking about hybrid work and these semi-common now schedule of some days of remote days and some days were days in the office. And I said, okay, here's my suggestion. Like, let's say you have a hybrid schedule. I'm not going to tie it back to international time zones. I said, if you have a hybrid schedule, fine. But here's what I really care about. If you really want to increase the amount that is produced in your company, don't just have

hybrid work locations. These days are in office. These days are in office. These days. aren't, have hybrid attention model. All right, these days, the at home days, let's say, there are no meetings. There are no meetings. There is no expectation of communication. You are working deeply on things that move the needle for our company. The other days, when we're in the office, like, that's when the meetings are scheduled. It doesn't reduce the number of meetings. It kind of consolidates them more in other days. But actually, you're going to get a lot more high value stuff done. So you could think about something similar in a highly international organization. It's like, well, these are the meeting days. It's two days a week. We're my

mornings are spent catching up with people in lots of different time zones. And then these other three days, I'm not, okay, for this to work, now we have to think more about how those meetings operate and what we do in between meetings. But there's changes to make now. Like, okay, if I'm only going to be able to check in with you twice a week, now we start thinking about what should happen during those check-ins. There's a lot of cool theory about what to do with meetings. And how should we structure collaboration and tracking work and workloads outside of those meetings so that you'll be okay if we have to go this many days before, like, we can actually like check in again. So I think there are solutions here. Once we're willing to get, open up the toolbox and try some things that

seem non-standard. Would you make a case for having more managers than people that are frontline producing? Or would you want to thin the manager layer down to be more efficient? Like, how do you think about that? And then add the complication of AI in the mix on it. Yeah, I mean, I put AI aside for now because I don't think that's ready to change everything yet. I care more about structure than managers. So I think in part, the less structure you have, here's how we think about communication and workload and how we think about how work unfolds. Like the less structure you have there, the more haphazard it is, which is how most knowledge work really unfolds. It's like it's autonomy. You work, how you work is none of my business. I'm just going to give you

an OKR that you have to try to satisfy, but it's objective-based management. The more that there's actually structured there, the less you need in terms of management, right? So like if we think about software developing teams that like run a good like sort of agile methodology, You don't need, like, a lot of layers of management. We kind of know what we're doing and, like, how we come together. So maybe I'd lean towards that, but I don't know. It depends what you do? So, like, what's your concern?

So when you're thinking, like, your organization or the organizations you talk about, what happens or what's to fear if you strip back to management layers too far? Is there going to be people unsupervised go off to reservations, or what's the real concern? Yeah, I think that that's probably it, which is, like, managers help to manage projects, you know, to completion. effectively and much more, you know, there's a cultural component that they're also responsible for. But it's like you hear about the frozen middle and kind of that middle layer of management having a real hard time themselves in organizations. And it's like there's a tax in it of itself of managing the managers, if you will. So I don't know. It's just something I hear

a bunch. And it's, you know, at Finding Mastery, we've, I'm not sure if I have the right mix or not of managers to people that are executing on a front line but I'm not sure. Have you heard about the theories of managerial capitalism? No, I don't know that. This was interesting.

I've been reading this more recently. This is Alfred Sloan. Had a couple really good books. Like the visible hand was one of them. And it's a theory of what happens to capitalist theory when you're talking about the rise of organizations

that have hierarchies, right? Management. You have different layers of management, which we're used to now, but it was like, this is relatively new. This is 20th century. stuff, right? I mean, if you think about the typical knowledge work organization in like 1870,

it's going to be Charles Dick and stuff, right? It's going to be, you're all in the same room, and here's the boss, and there's four people, and, you know, it's at a small scale. And there's this interesting study, this book won the National Book War back in the 70s. What happens when organizations get really big and you have to have layers in management? So he calls it managerial capitalism. And he said, one of the big things that happens is that you begin to get a disconnect between day-to-day activity and the bottom line, right? And especially because now, like, who sort of supervises the activity is sort of managers in the middle.

But they don't get a direct feedback from, hey, if we're having more meetings or making people be more responsive to the emails that, like, right away, I see, like, where this project got done later and my money goes down that came in this month. There's kind of a disconnect between the bottom line and what they're doing. So what are they going to optimize for? And the Sloan's argument was the managers are going to optimize mainly for like stability. You know, I don't want surprises. I want things to be predictable. I want like my position to be like okay. Like I don't want to take risks because I'm not getting a direct market

signal. And the argument is in that setting, you can have operational practices drift increasingly farther away from like what actually is most productive in the sense of producing the most value per employee. So it like kind of helps explain on the knowledge sector. Technology changed and work change. We could begin to get, I always hypothesized and we've seen actually a pretty big division between the best ways to use brains that produce value and like what we're actually doing in organizations. And partially it's like this theory of managerial capitalism is when you're really not feeling immediately the effect of your decisions about how you run things is there's too many layers of obfuscation behind it, you're going to start optimizing for other things like

convenience and stability. And, you know, I fear like I, I'd rather just you, everyone answer my emails right away because I kind of fear that something bad will happen and that gets rid of that fear that like at least I know you haven't like disappeared for the day or you're not being lazy or you know so it really changes the incentives and so I think there's a big gap right now between the best way to run organizations and knowledge work and like what what we're actually doing yeah and so is your most recent book and I know it didn't just release but in your most recent book slow productivity how do you address that you know I'm trying to argue let's have alternative definitions of productivity so like this the starting of that book says

says, here's the biggest problem with knowledge work, like how we get in this situation I've talked about. Part of the way we get there is we use terms like productivity, but we have no idea what they mean? So we'll be like, I want to be more productive. But what does that mean? It's often sort of code for other sorts of things. So I look closer. It's like, what do we really mean when in knowledge work someone says, like, oh, I want to be more productive or I care about productivity. Well, it's not what we meant by productivity in industrial manufacturing. It's not what we meant by productivity in agriculture, whereas a ratio of outputs to inputs. That's not usually what we're referring to in knowledge work, because

because it's hard to measure outputs on the individual level, right? So I can't actually measure very easily. How many widgets are you producing per, you know, eight hours of effort or whatever? So typically what we're doing in knowledge work, when we say productivity, we really mean pseudo-productivity, which means visible effort. And we just use it as like a rough proxy for useful effort. If I see you doing stuff, that's good. And the more stuff I see you doing, the better.

And that's basically been how we've managed in knowledge work. Now, this was okay in like the 1970s. Like, okay, whatever, we're going to come to the building because we're using the factory model. We're here for eight hours. I'll put the magazine down when the boss walks fire. You know, it's like a little game we played. But in the age of network communications and mobile communications is really driven people to burnout. Because now you can be demonstrating visible activity at like any moment of the day at fine granularity.

Because it's like responding to individual Slack messages, responding to email messages. So the granularity at which you can demonstrate that you are doing stuff, become super small, so that's exhausting, and because a mobile computing can follow you anywhere. So now, like every moment, whether you're at work or not, you have to have a debate with yourself. I could get on my phone right now and demonstrate some visible activity, which will be in my favor. And so now I have to constantly be trying to balance other things in my life that are important versus what's going on in my job. And so that's even extra exhausting, right? So that type of pseudo productivity we implicitly use, like this is not working. So I say,

let's have a different definition of productivity, a different way of thinking about it. So that's what that book was about. And like the number one, the first of the three principles is what we were just talking about before. It was, okay, number one, you should be looking to have people do fewer things at once. Like, let's say that's better. The fewer things you work on at once is going to increase the number of things you complete over time. And then I say we need to be much more realistic about timeframes. How long do things take? How long can I maintain intensity? How much variation do I need? And then we have to like make quality. That's the third principle. We need to make quality a tier one principle. Well, how good is the thing you're producing? You should be

driving to get better at the thing you do best. I care much more about that than, like, on average, how fast you respond to Slack messages. So I'm trying to give an alternative, alternative measures of productivity that I think are more compatible with the human brain and knowledge work. Yeah, so the three principles are do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and then obsessive quality. So I think I'm hearing one in three in there, obsessive equality. I've got a teammate here at Finding Mastery. He's exceptionally talented, very creative. I love collaborating in the ideation phase. And then he's able to drill things down in a very concrete way to make sense of best practices in sport to crosswalk them in a business. He's a great teammate for me and with me.

However, he wants to do everything. He wants to be part of every part of the organization. So it's like, Kevin, how you doing? I'm sure he's listening right now. Is he a just in your microphone right now because he wants to be a part of that? No, it's not that saturated. But like, wants to be in part of every meeting, which then, of course, because he loves everything. And it's like, oh, I want to hear this. And that's great. But then that moves timetables back in ways that compromise our promise to our customers, if you

will, which is what the business really runs on. So how do you address that? Somebody has got a big motor that is exceptional at what they do and has a huge appetite. to be part of everything. And so how do you work with somebody like that, which is a great problem to have? Yeah, and it's a good problem to have. It's a common problem in sport as well.

I'm in Washington, D.C., so I was just thinking about there's a current debate about Debo Samuels about, like, well, you know, can't he also be on special teams? Like, he'd be good at that too, and he'd be good at this or that. And there's this argument of like, well, look, there's only so many hits you can take,

and it's better to find a thing you do best and really lean into that. So I think the answer here comes out of that quality, mindset. Like, no, here's what we care about. We care about is what you do best, doing that at the highest possible level. Like, we don't care about quantity so much. Business doesn't mean anything to us. The fact that you're here in like 15 different things, like, good for you. But what we care about is what can you do that you can do at a super high level that very few other people can do? Like, pick your moments and get great at it. Like, pick your spots. Yeah. And do it really,

do it really well because ultimately doing something great has this is like personal advice I often get people but doing something great has huge returns versus doing like lots of things kind of good it's not this linear thing like well if I do five things pretty good that adds up to more than doing one thing great no no it's not how that curve works it's exponential like the value for yourself in the marketplace of doing something great just because the competition falls away the other people who can do it, you become more valuable in the marketplace, that shoots up exponentially. So it doesn't just straight add. And I think it's often a mistake high-powered, high-talented individuals make as they think it add. Like, they do math in their head. Like, okay, it's a scale of one to five

of like how good I am. And if I do five things at level two, that's 10 points. And so that's better than doing one thing at level five, right? It's twice as good. But no, the reality is if you can do something at the highest level, that's better than doing 50 things at a lower level. It's just way more valuable to the marketplace. So you've got to lean into what you do best. Like the superstar mindset is like the mindset I would take to someone like that. I wrote about this years ago, man, old, 2012. It's like 13 years ago. I wrote this book so good they can't ignore you. And it's about individuals, right? So it's not aimed at management, but like individuals and how you build a career that's like really successful. This was a core concept. And I got into Superstar Economics. So,

you know, Rosen's theories of superstar economics and how the value of what you do increases as the number of people who can do it falls. And when you look at superstar economics, it makes all these predictions like, oh, we see this every day, you know, in everyday life. Like I talked about Pavarotti, the opera singer. And I was like, look, if you're one of the top ten opera singers, I'm a really, really good opera singer, it's a world of difference than being Pavarotti. Like he's like this $100 million made from all these sort of deals. And if you're just like a really good opera singer in Lincoln, Nebraska, who's not that much worse than him, it's, you know, a middle class job and you're struggling. So like it really, the rewards jump as the number of people who can do what you do fall.

And so that's superstar economics. Finding Master is brought to you by Defender. In the conversations I have with world class performers, there's this theme that keeps coming up again and again. how we choose to move through the world shapes the quality of our lives. That's about mindset, the environments that we seek out, the way that we use our tools,

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That's LinkedIn.com slash finding mastery to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Do the thing you can do best best if you're a star. It's really refreshing. You know, to just be reminded of that idea. And I think it's also difficult at some level to, for an individual to know what they do best. So I'll put you on the spot, Cal, like, what are you a superstar at? What is the thing that is your crown jewel? And you might say there's one or two or there's a hybrid somewhere in there. But like what is your crown jewel? It's ideas, right? Like the thing that I'm very good at is sorting through ideas and finding an idea. Like this idea is just it resonates with me. this idea is right. I think this gets at the core, what's going on. This kind of summarizes down. This is all, and then I built up a lot of craft skills around that so that I can use it, right? In my role as a professor, I was a theoretical computer scientist. Most of what I do now is more about just technology and impact. But, you know, I came up and earned tenure on the back of being a theorist, doing sort of math theory. The core of that is I'm very good at ideas, like finding problems, this is the right

problem, this is what's interesting. I had to learn a lot of math so that I could apply that general skill there. Writing was another area. You know, I've been professionally writing since I was 20 years old. The ideas are core there. I can come up with like,

this is a really good idea. Like deep work is a really good idea. But I had to learn the craft of writing so that I could, you know, deliver that talent in that place. So I feel like my empire is built us on an empire of ideas. Like I have a very good ability

to survey a bunch of information and be like, this is at the crux of it. And then I built up a bunch of tool kits to take advantage of that. Let's do the toolkit thing for a minute because obviously you can speak eloquently and clearly. And you can do the same with writing. I would imagine,

I would imagine, it's a guess, that you speak better than you write. Writing takes a little bit more time to define mastery in that space or even on the path of mastery. Why did you choose to build that compliment or that muscle as opposed to offload that to somebody? You speak to them and then they write, they put the commas in the right place and stitch the sentences and ideas in a way that is eloquent. Why did you decide to go down that path and support your idea expression in something that maybe wasn't as natural or as skilled as somebody that you could hire or partner with? Well, so when I was thinking about how do I want to apply, like how do I want to build on this skill? And I was thinking about, okay, I want to be, now I made this plan in college that I was

going to do an academic path and write. And it went together. I was like, look, if I do an academic path, if I'm like a grad student for the next six years, it will be much easier to also write. Right. So it's going to be conciliatory. So I had this plan. This is what I was going to do. And when I thought about applying the skill to write, I was like, what type of things do I want to write? And I, you know, I had this vision for like what I wanted my writing to be like. As part of that vision, I need to get better at writing than anyone I could hire to write for me. Because my vision was I really respected really serious nonfiction writers. And the vision very early on is like, I want hardcover books at the front of the bookstore. It's smart books with like smart ideas. To do that well and the writers I admired who could do that well, you have to become. a really good writer and I was like I have to become a better writer than someone who's making themselves available that like the hired a ghost writer this or that is like I want to become this was my goal which I eventually succeeded is like I want to become a New Yorker caliber writer and yet still have advice in my books like that was the whole vision like what if I could become a great writer but also keep plugged in to I mean I'm so compelled by this idea of being

able to transmit an idea to someone else's head and it physiologically changes the way they feel and like their possibilities in life. So the smart self-help genre that I sort of helped invent, that was my plan. I was like, oh, I got to become great at writing for this to work.

And that took a long time, by the way. That took a decade to get good and, you know, almost two decades to get like notably good. Takes a long time. Very cool. That's a cool answer.

And what I hear underneath that is like, I really wanted to do that. I wanted that as part of the art of my expression. So awesome. A slightly hard pivot, but we've already hinted at this before,

is, can you just open up and talk about digital fatigue? Who's suffering from it most? What can we do about it? What are some of the tell-tale signs for somebody that might be struggling with it? What helps here, what I think is often missed, is that we have to differentiate between two domains of digital that both are creating fatigue, but they're from different causes and have different solutions, right? So there's the professional digital fatigue.

I'm talking about Zoom overload, email overload, Slack overload. Huge problem, right? Like exhaust us. Then we have non-professional digital fatigue. and I think here's smartphones, I think social media, I think scrolling. I think it's this sort of I'm lost in the world of digital and not fully ever present in the world of physical, right? They're similar sounding.

They have two different causes. They have two different solutions. So like very briefly, in the digital world, the cause of digital fatigue tends to be over communication, over collaboration. And there's two reasons why we have this. One is we do too many things at the same time. So we already talked about this. But if I have no control over my workload, so I just pile as many things. as possible, the overhead of all those things is going to take up my schedule to the point where

all I'm doing is answering emails and going to meetings because I have to actively upkeep so many active things. So overload leads to digital fatigue in the professional space and then collaboration style. So with the advent of email, and I wrote a whole book about this back in 2021, but with the advent of email, we evolved a way of collaboration where we just work things out with unscheduled back and forth messaging. So it's like very low friction in the moment, just like, hey, Mike, what about this? Sin. And they're like, oh, I, I don't know. Do you think about this? Send. And I'm like, oh, yeah, okay, should we meet? Send.

You're like, yeah, that sounds good. Are you free next week? So we let things sort of unfold with unscheduled back and forth messaging. The problem with that approach is that if I have multiple ongoing conversations that are unfolding with unscheduled messaging, in order to actually bring all of these conversations to a conclusion in a reasonable amount of time, I have to check channels constantly because I don't know when the next message is going to come back, but I got to see it pretty soon after it does because I need the volley it back to. so you can volley it back to me. And so that led to like constant context shifting.

That's super exhausting in the world of work. In our personal life, it's more the fault, I think, of the people creating the services that are distracting us. So it's not, Google doesn't need you to use Gmail more. They just need you to need Gmail so you pay for it by the month. TikTok wants you to use it as much as possible.

Like it actually, they make more money the more you use it, right? So like in that world, what we're dealing with, I think is just like highly engaging algorithmically optimized information that over time rewiles our short-term reward circuit so that like nothing else seems as appealing. And the reward circuits are like, the thing is right here, pick it up and we're going to get like a jolt of something.

Dopamine splash because there's a reward that we can get right now. And that overwhelms almost anything else you want to do. And like, I'm just lost in my phone. I can't be present. So two different problems. To fix the work overload, you got to fix work. All the types of stuff we're talking about. To fix the out of work overload, well, you got to change your relationship to devices.

And that's where I become more, people think I'm more puritanical. But I was like, you don't need to be on social media. You don't need to have your phone with you at all time. You have to completely change your relationship with devices. You have to be in control, not letting like four or five large companies that run these attention to companies run your attention in your life. Do you have any best practices for folks other than kind of providing the mandate? Or the suggested mandate.

Yeah. So for outside of work, you got three things you can think about. So if you have troubles with your phone outside of like email and, medians, which we talked about. But your troubles with, like, social media and distraction. There's three things you can do. One, take off your phone any application where someone makes more money, the more you use it. And if you have some argument, like, but I need to be on X because, you know, three times a week, my nephew uploads pictures of like whatever that I want to see. Great, you can access that on your laptop. And you can have a time and you can go on three times

and go on the web interface to Instagram or whatever if you look it up. But take off your phone anything where someone makes money every time you look at it because they're really good at that game. They really care about money. And they're going to win at that game. They're going to beat you at it. Two, phone foyer method. When you're at home, the phone's plugged in. It's a really simple rule that makes like a huge difference. My phone is in the kitchen. My phone is in the foyer. If I need to look something up, I go to the phone and look it up. If I need to check in on a text conversation, I go to my phone and check in. If I need to listen to a podcast, I use earbuds, right? So like, I don't have to have the phone with me. So when I'm at dinner, when I'm

watching TV with my family, when I'm working on something else, I just don't have the ability to pull that thing out and look at it. This completely rewires your relationship. Your short-term motivational circuits change. It rewires your relationship with the device. And the third thing is you could think about using something like brick technology where in order to use the phone, even when you have it on you, you have to get the other fob and you have to do some friction and there's some steps you have to go through. That just, again, helps break this short-term reward loop. But I become so much more aggressive about this recently. I mean, there was a stage early on where I was like, look, I don't use social media. I don't think this stuff is too valuable. And the world was like,

You know, you don't care about democracy. Like, this is, everything used to happen on social media. They used to really get mad at me. I'd be like, oh, well, we can look. We can moderate this and this and that. And nowadays, I've just think, I don't know, I've seen enough of Mark Zuckerberg. Like, how much more land do we need to help him buy in Hawaii? Like, let's move on with our lives.

Like, we don't, that's okay. We don't need to be, but this is getting kind of arbitrary now, like, TikTok, Instagram reels. I was like, I think at some point we have to just, like, move on and do cool things in our lives. I'm laughing because, like, I catch myself often feeling like the old man on the porch. You know, get off my lawn, kids. Stop having fun. Like, am I outdated or am I more anchored to first principles?

And when I hear you saying that, I can absolutely hear the rash. People would develop around your idea. But I think it's a first principle, you know, which is the outside a little bit more. Stay away from, you know, products that are designed to suck your attention in if you want to quote unquote, more organically designed life. But if parents knew what you knew, what would you hope the one, two, or three things that they would know and accordingly do to be a better parent to raise a, quote, unquote, better child.

Oh, my middle schooler hates this because I just gave this talk in my kid's school. I'm the parent that is all of his friends are like, your dad is why we don't have phones. So he really hates it. But I think the evidence here is, you know, really clear, right? Like, what's the general best practice? I mean, it would be, don't have a smartphone until high school. And even then it's a lockdown smartphone. Like, no, you don't have TikTok on there, right?

Unlock smartphone, like, you can have social media and sort of use it. Like, that's really like 16 plus or post-puberty. So, like, you already have developed a social identity and social group and activities and interest before you bring in these sort of tools, which could otherwise have a big impact on the developing social brain. And then even after the kid has the fun, my argument is, like, as long as you live in this house, when you're at home, the phone is plugged in in the kitchen. It's not, you don't have a right. This is not like your personal property that you have a right to have it with you everywhere you go. Kids become like Burke and Conservatives

as soon as you start talking about things like phones, like the right of private property and civilization is built on my ability to have my property. It's like, no, I'm paying for the phone. When you're at home, it's plugged in here. You can check in on your friends and your text messages here, but you don't get it at the dinner table. You don't get it while we watch TV. And you certainly don't get to bring it up to your room and stay up until three. am. Those are the three things. And then when you get to college, do what you want. But by that point, you'll have fully developed yourself and your identity and your habits and your brain. And it's not going to be as tempting. That's where I think we are. Some of those are more extreme than people are recommending. But some of them, like phones tell high school, this is like starting to become. I think we're like a couple of years away from that becoming like a cultural norm. Yeah. Hearing you, I'm like, oh, I missed a couple of tricks. But, you know, the only app that my sonny 17 has on his phone is Snapchat. And, And I felt pretty good about that, you know, and he didn't get any of that stuff until he was in ninth grade until high school. So I feel pretty good about that.

It does. And I also like this idea of like when you're in the home plug it in, I can hear the pullback. Like what? You know, like, it's not that I'm afraid of confrontation of it, but I'm like, is the juice worth the squeeze here to create that type of relationship with his technology? It's a good one for me to consider. It's a new principle that I haven't thought about before. So I thank you for that. Well, here's the hard part.

Like, for it to work, if you didn't start with it, is probably you have to do it too. That's the way it works. That's exactly what I was thinking. That's the problem. It's not, hey, I'm telling you is like my son, you have to do this new thing now. It's our family has a new thing. Just as if like our family moved or our family now goes to, you know, religious services and we didn't before. It's like the family is now doing this thing.

But I hear you, I had a conversation with a parent the other day. And she was near tears. She was just like, 17-year-old daughter. He's like, I, I just, I don't have, I don't have the fight in me. You know, it's really, and it's the problem. It's like not our fault. It's super bad luck to have raising adolescents in the last five or six years because it's like just as we, this technology was new. We're just learning.

It's the people who have five year olds right now as their oldest kids, they've got it made. Like by the time those kids are in middle school, like, we'll have figured this all out. But this is like the rough. We're at the end of the roughest period in terms of kids and phones. because we're just figuring this all out. And typically what we do with new technologies, which makes sense, is when they're new, we're like, let's just rock and roll and see what happens. Because, you know, what else are you going to do?

You know, you don't know. And then there's usually a period of observation, then a period of reaction. And then there's a new restabilization. And like, the new restabilization is coming. But yeah, it's tough right now. Like, well, wait a second. I already have a 17-year-old. Yeah.

Yeah. Just last night, I was talking to an NFL coach on my phone. We were texting back and forth. And it was timely and urgent. and I was also kind of trying to listen to my wife at the same time. And I just, what a stupid thing I did. She goes, what are you doing? And I was like, ah.

And so I tried to explain it. And she's right. Like, why didn't I just say, hey, hold on a minute, babe. You know, let me finish this. And I want to hear what you have to say. And it was just so sloppy. And so that type of tension and pain that I feel about being sucked into the immediacy of the thing that I was trying to solve and not have.

the wherewithal to draw the right boundary either direction. Yeah, I mean, you're pointing at things that I think all of us are feeling. Finding Master is brought to you by David Protein. One of the lessons I've learned working with some of the best in the world is that consistency matters. And one of the ways to help drive consistency is to find ways to remove blockers in your day. Like get ahead of it. You know, those blockers, those moments of indecision or delay that can really derail building great habits. So for me, nutrition is one of those areas where if I don't plan ahead, I can easily slip into whatever is available to me. And then oftentimes I will be disciplined enough to not make that fast, easy choice. And then what ends up happening is I just don't eat.

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world's top performers across sport, business, and the arts are using. The best part, it only takes about 90 seconds to do. So just head over to finding mastery.com slash morning to download the audio guide for free. Again, head to Finding mastery.com slash morning to get your morning mindset routine. You're really good at seeing around corners. And just as a last couple questions here, when you look at AI, and if you could see around a couple corners here, what are you concerned about and what are you excited about? There's a couple of places I'm concerned.

I'm not concerned about the grandiose tales of artificial general intelligence that automates all the jobs. I'm not worried about massive economic disruption in the next few years. years. I'm not worried about, you know, Project 2027 style fears that we're going to have takeoff and the human race is going to be extinguished by super intelligent AI. Like, from a computer science perspective, none of that's imminent. I'm not worried about that. I am worried about more prosaic or pragmatic impacts. And one, I think, is paradoxical reduced productivity. So I'm actually like working on an episode about this today, actually. I'm recording it later tonight where there's this. this issue, when it comes to things that require deep work, the required focus concentration, right? You have to be very careful about how you bring in other tools to help you. And what a lot of people are starting to do now, computer programmers are doing this, writers are doing this, is what they're trying to do is have a collaboration with AI where, okay, I'm going to pass off

some of the cognitive load to you. Like, you do this, I'll work on this, I'll edit what you do. And we have a mounting amount of evidence that that's a more pleasant work experience, but it's sufficiently less effective. You never actually get your mind up to where it needs to be to do good work and things take longer and the quality is lower. So I'm worried about an accidental productivity fall. There's a good article about this not too long ago in the Atlantic that Rosalie Karma wrote. I'm quoting at the end of that article, but that gets into that well. I'm worried about that. I'm also worried about kids. And the thing I'm worried about kids is AI, gender of AI, is to writing what a calculator was for, you know, arithmetic, right?

That it can produce writing for you. The issue is if you're a kid, if you're a student, why are you writing? It's not like, oh, this is just some sort of thing you have to get out of the way to get to some other sort of goal. It's how you actually practice. You take circuits in your brain that are forged through learning and reading and you practice actually using them. Writing is cognitive push-ups. It's cognitive pull-ups. It's a big part of how you actually train a brain to exist in a sort of symbolic, world of symbolic information like sort of modern society is. And if you outsource all the writing during the period we're trying to train your brain, I just think it's, the equivalent of like, hey, I've got this great new hack that if I bring a hydraulic lift to the gym, I don't have to put as much effort to do the leg press. It'll do it for me. You know, fair enough, but what you really want to was strong legs. And so in the world of grown-ups and work, I'm worried that, like, if you don't use this right, it's going to make your work easier and worse. That's not where we need to be. And for kids, it's going to make you dumber. Those are both scary, you know. I mean, they're not terrifying, right? Like, I'm not

terror. I think social media and smart phones had an equally big bad impact, especially I see it as terrible. I mean, what is our greatest asset as a human? It is our ability to process information. It's our ability to connect it with feelings. It's our ability to have a consciousness about the experience that's taking place. And to strip away one of those three stools to the uniqueness of the human experience, like, that's a bummer. You know, like to be able to process well. And I like how you thought about like when you're offloading some of the cognitive tasks, like you downshift in your ability to have like real cognitive strain to get better. That's what's going on. That's what's going on. I wrote an article last year where I

looked over the shoulder of university students writing papers using chat GPT. I came into that article thinking here's what they're going to be doing. They're going to be trying to have shortcuts. They're trying to save time, you know, get the paper done earlier. It's not what happened. These students were taking longer to get these papers done. It was not speeding things up. So what were they doing? They were running away from strain. And it turns out if you make your paper writing into this back and forth conversation, this parisocial, they would name the GPT bod and like have conversations, it prevented the peak strains from being as high. But it also made everything take much longer. And the result wasn't as good. I mean, it's like athletes know

this. You learn super early on in your process of like athletic journey, the physical discomfort of training. And, like, one of the first things you learn if you're going to be an athlete is, like, that's a good discomfort because that's at, like, the core of how we're going to get better. Let's go. You know, if you take that out of cognitive life, how do we, like, take the rough edges off of strain? But the problem is, is of the stools that matter. We've knocked out a lot of the legs already. I think, like, smartphones and algorithmic entertainment knocked out the stool where you read and encounter complicated information and try to input, you know, complicated information. It knocked out the stool of self-reflection because it's portable.

So now I just miss all these moments when I could be alone with my own thoughts trying to make sense of my world and my life. I wrote about this on my book, Digital Minimalism, the inner life of Abraham Lincoln and how important this was, like just him walking and thinking. I went to the sort of the house in the hills outside of D.C. where he would go to think, right? And how important he was just reflecting. We don't do that anymore because we have constant distraction. Now we're taking out this other stool, which is the production of new knowledge and practicing doing that with writing. It, to me, we're a cognitive society. we're allowing a small number of technology companies to make us worse at being thinkers. And to me, that would be like if we were in ancient Sparta and it was a martial culture where everything was built on our ability to wage war, if there was like a couple organizations in ancient Sparta that was making everyone like out of shape and worse at combat, it would be a really huge step. We're like, we're going to lose to Peloponnesian wars. Like this is a problem.

The same thing is happening now, but you know, we just, we don't think about the brain the same way. Very cool analogy. Last question. Put on your optimistic lens. when you think about humans in the next three to seven years. So like a Horizon 2 viewpoint, what do you see? Well, if I'm going to be optimistic, I think there's a couple things to... If I'm going to be optimistic, that's great.

There's a couple possibilities at the technology interface would make I'd be optimistic about. All right, so one, I think we're poised to move on from this like temporary state of the internet where we said what the internet means is four companies that have. have like highly engaging products delivered through mobile apps. That's not what the internet was prior to 2010. It's not what the internet needs to be going into the future. And I could imagine, you know, it could be a zeit-kai shift that happens like this. We're like, you know what, I don't want to be on TikTok. I don't think Instagram's that important anymore. And so we could go back to like what I've long argued for is a much more distributed and diverse and idiosyncratic web

where you have small groups of people that you get together with online because you share an interest and you sort of can self-regulate and police each other and not trying to have a billion people all on the same social conversation platform, which is just doesn't fit with our human wiring and just causes problems. The internet could get better if we say enough of this experiment with consolidating the internet and the wild garden of six services, right? There's nothing inevitable about our current setups. That would make me optimistic. Another thing would make me optimistic is the future of AI, right? And this is like a very long discussion, but like my very short piece to it is you know, I've been writing a lot about this recently.

This idea that we're going to keep scaling up a small number of massive language models, these frontier models, and that like one of them is going to become brilliant and can do all work, that's probably not going to happen. There's technical reasons why not. But there's another vision of a future of AI where what we do is we're going to see a fragmenting, the development of many, many, many different systems that use things like language models, but other types of models as well, all connected. And each of these systems is bespoke to a particular thing.

you know here is a system that is like really good for doing like this type of thing that happens in my job and here's a system that's really good for doing this type of thing we're good at building these bespoke systems we have a system that can beat professional poker players we have a different system that is a very highly rated chess player we have another system that can play the game diplomacy very well and they're all different from each other right i call this the gentle takeoff the a GI but i have this this vision of the future in which there's all of these companies and all these areas that all have their own sort of custom system that are all product market fitted to do very specific things, and it's going to make a lot of our lives easier, right? So instead of it's like we're all talking to chat GPT, it's like this type of scheduling I don't have to do anymore, I don't have to wrangle my inbox as much because these 10 things are being handled by this thing over here, and that it might take some of the overhead cost of work, all this overhead and context switching. It might actually make knowledge work better, not because it does our deep work for us, but it helps us get around these things to get in the way of deep work. So I have a vision of AI that I think is much more gentle and controllable and productive.

It's not big right now because it's not going to be two companies. It's not something that the venture capitalists can make a fortune on because they put their money in early. But I think it's better for the economy. It's better for us. I think we could have an AI future. We're like, oh, like it's not scary. But there's a lot of things in our lives that are easier. Just like the web made a lot of things in our lives easier.

Like, I don't have to look up this company in the yellow pages and call them to see when their hours are. I can go to their website. So I think there could be big, big booms from AI that, aren't sonic booms, if that makes sense. Cal, thank you for sharing your intellectual prowess and your clarity of ideas with us. It's always fun to connect with you. I really appreciate it. And I'm wishing you the best, and I hope people go reintroduce themselves or for the first time

go check out slow productivity, your latest book. And we're looking forward to your next one as well. Thank you. Oh, thank you. I enjoyed it. Always have fun. Ditto. Next time on Finding Mastery, we're joined by Dan Harris, bestselling author of 10%

happier and one of the most honest voices on anxiety, mindfulness and the messy work of being human. In this conversation, Dan and Mike talk openly about panic attacks, self-talk and what it really takes to meet stress without being overtaken by it. Not perfectly, but skillfully. If you want to continue into the new year with more steadiness, clearer perspective and practical tools for working with your own mind, join us Wednesday, January 14 at 9 a.m. Pacific. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community.

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