Listen to the chapter here!
Cal Newport:
There's no YouTube video that can have as long and lasting an impact as a book, because when we read, we begin simulating the mind of the other characters that we're encountering. And through that mind meld, you can reconstitute, restructure your brain. And you can come out of a book thinking about your life completely differently, which is just the most powerful thing we can do, is that the right book at the right time can transform the way you understand the world.
Cal:
And I kind of joke sometimes, my whole career is built on giving two-word terms to things that everyone already thinks and knows. When is it appropriate for someone to get unrestricted internet access? The safe answer is 16.
Neil Pasricha:
Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha and welcome or welcome back to chapter 135, 35, 35 of 3 Books. Yes, you have joined our 22 year long pilgrimage to uncover and discuss the 1000 most formative books in the world. Today we have a wonderful long form conversation with the one and only Cal Newport, a guide, a visionary, a role model to me and millions of other people on living an intentional life and a productive life.
Amidst our noisy, scatterbrained, tech-drenched world. Cal is an MIT-trained computer science professor at Georgetown University, and he's the author of 10 books, which have collectively sold over two million copies, including ‘Deep Work’, Digital Minimalism, and his latest bestseller, ‘Slow Productivity’. Cal says in our conversation, I sometimes joke that my entire career is built on giving two-word terms to things everyone knows and thinks.
He's being humble when he says that because the truth is he's doing a lot more than that. Just take ‘Slow Productivity’ for example. He's boiled this new phrase down to three principles. Do fewer things, number one. Two, work at a natural pace and number three, obsess over quality. Maybe sounds simple, maybe even trite. You're like, I could, doesn't that sound obvious? But that's when you kind of pull your head up and realize that the whole world is conspiring against you doing any of those things. I mean, doesn't our world today reward doing
More things, working at an unnatural pace and obsessing over quantity. I mean, that's kind of the design of the world today. How many posts can you get out on your feet? How many how many cold calls can you make? I mean, we're always kind of going after things the wrong way. There's a reason Cal has no social media apps on his phone. Actually, it doesn't just have no social media apps on his phone. He has no social media. He's never been on social media ever with his books and his wonderful podcast called "‘Deep Questions’", which I highly recommend you check out.
Cal is focused on helping us navigate and find our way through the ever-changing technology and work patterns that increasingly feel at odds with our shared quest of living intentional lives. So, what are we gonna talk about today? Well, he's got a giant mind, Cal does, and it was on full display as we discuss how Cal measures success. We've got an opening conversation about, the new book just came out, like, how does he think about success?
The neuroscience of reading, Denis Villeneuve, the relationship between rest and work, the ideal age for unrestricted internet access, the Washington Nationals, Leet speak and productivity pr0n the role of books today and their future, Andrew Huberman, positive reinforcement theory, Jonathan Haidt and the ancient generation, technology boundaries for children and much, much more. Let's jump into Chapter 135 now.
Neil:
Hey, Cal.
Cal:
Hey, Neil.
Neil:
It's so, so nice to finally meet.
Cal:
I know.
Neil:
I mean, it was an email eight years ago.
Cal:
Eight years? Oh my God, I'm so old.
Neil:
That I have from Monday, February 29th, 2016 from Brian Johnson. Guys, I've told you both about the other. You are now connected. Have fun.
And I wrote this hilariously nerdy, like geeky, stupid reply. Calvin, I wrote Calvin. Does anyone call you Calvin?
Cal:
My foreign academic collaborators, because I might. Well, yes, because they don't know me, because I don't see them normally. They're different. When I see them at conferences, I publish academic papers under the name Calvin.
So they still call me Calvin. But and you, I always say yes, my foreign collaborators and Neil. There that's also why I had written this note. And then you had written back a very kind note. And it was like, it's great to hear from you. And I love that you spell 'hear', H-E-R-E. That like made me feel like you were human, you know, because I do that. I spelled there, their and they're wrong. Yeah, almost one in three times I spell any of those words. I'm excited to see your book. And my happiness is below.
You probably won't believe this, but years ago I was thinking about positive psychology and I thought someone should write a book with the exact name, The Happiness Equation. I'm glad someone did.
Cal:
Yes, I remember that. Yeah, I remember thinking about that at some point. Like, oh, if we made this mathematical, I had a whole thing on it. I think I probably still have the copy that like you or your publisher sent me. It's somewhere. I saw it recently. I think I still have it from back then.
And you seem like a title obsessed kind of guy too, because like I loved on '‘Deep Questions’', your wonderful podcast that everybody should listen to. It's really, really good. And it's powerful how you do it. It's really like high signal, you know. You said you were talking about the title of ‘Slow Productivity’ and the resonance you were getting kind of even before it came out. And I thought...
Wow, this is a guy that thinks a lot about titles. Like you had said that you had the same sort of pre-publication resonance with, I think, '‘Deep Work’' and maybe one other of your books. So I was wondering, what is this, what is this pre-publication resonance that comes from a guy that's been publishing books since he was in undergrad? You know, like what, what is this thing that you figured out here?
Cal:
What I figured out is if you have a term that people aggressively agree with and then begin riffing on, hearing nothing but the term, you're probably hitting on something, right? And then, you know, you're on that, you know, you're capturing and I kind of joke sometimes my whole career is built on giving two-word terms to things that everyone already thinks and knows, right? But you know you're tapping something that is really out there, right?
So '‘Deep Work’' was like this, you know, people just have a term that people are aggressively agreeing with and riffing on.
Two-word terms to things that everyone already thinks and knows, right? But you know you're tapping something that is really out there, right? So like the term '‘Deep Work’', people are just like, yes, I mean, I don't even know exactly what you mean, Cal, but like this seems important. 'Digital Minimalism' was similar. Just as people were beginning to get wary about their phones, like I need to be a 'Digital Minimalist'. '‘Slow Productivity’' had a similar thing. Like yes, that's what I want.
Neil:
You famously tested it, I think, on the Tim Ferriss show in, I think, 2021?
Cal:
I did. I tested it on Tim's show. I tested it first. I tried to go back and pull this timeline. I tested it within some newsletter articles. I tested it on Tim's show, and I think that was right around the same time I tested it in the New Yorker as well. So I was sort of putting out trial balloons. And if you look at all those discussions, by the way, those early discussions, it's capturing maybe a third of the big ideas from the book. So it was still an early point, but I was seeing if the term resonated. And I saw it pop up a bunch of places after that. People like, yeah, we believe in ‘Slow Productivity’. Here's what we're doing to try to implement slow product. People started using the term even though I hadn't really defined it yet. It's all like, okay, there's something there.
Neil:
And it's funny that you're also testing things like Tim's show gets more downloads than either of us sells books, you know what I mean? Like he's got like 800 million, 900 million, and maybe a billion even now downloads. I know they're more ephemeral, but you're, you're also testing your book titles, like books, like to be in, you were number two on the New York times bestseller list in your first week. And collectively you and I both got to throw some bottles through James Clear's window. I think after this conversation, cause the 'Atomic Habits' for the 232nd week!
I wasn't necessarily number one all 232 weeks, but for 200, come on James, could you give Cal a break on like the first week of his book?
Cal:
I know he was number one. Here's the crazy thing about James, by the way, was when my last book, when my last book went on the New York times bestseller list, uh, I got a note from James. It was like, Hey, this is great. We're both on the New York times bestseller list. This is another book later. He's still on the New York times bestseller list.
Neil:
Did he give you a note this time at least?
Cal:
I don't know. I think this time it's not as novel. I think back then this was really close. I guess my last book was closer to when 'Atomic Habits' came out. I think he was still checking the list back then. I think now like why bother he could just assume like I'm sure my book is on it. So it was when he was still excited that he was still on the list. That's crazy. A whole book went by and he still hasn't left that list.
Neil:
Yeah, exactly. 232 weeks is nothing to sniff at. That is almost five years. You know in total.
Do you see the list says anything anymore? Like how do you measure success?
Cal:
I mean, honestly, the thing I care about is the two year total sale all format number.
Neil:
Ooh. Right? Great.
Cal:
That's what matters to me. Like the list is a lot about pre-orders. The list is a lot about turn converting your existing audience to buy a book sooner rather than later, which is nice. I think it's like a win. You know, it's a win for the team. There there's probably a long term effect to have the medallion on the book cover that says New York Times bestseller because that's going to maybe increase your conversion rate of someone encountering the book by, you know, 5%. But that could add up, right? Right.
Neil:
The conversion rate might be also the book, the indie bookstore that decides to sell it or, you know, the conversion rate might not also be sales, but curation,
Cal:
It could it used to be able to convert into more media, not so much anymore not necessarily coming off the advice how to list because the which is by the way the harder of the list by far
Neil:
You're competing against cookbooks!
Cal:
Which by the way the next week the number one book was a was a cookbook. Yeah, so, so that's nice. That's nice. But the thing that I care about is the two years list. And the reason why I care about the two year number is like...
Neil:
Can you tell people what that is? So people, so I mean, I really just mean two year total sales, all formats, how many books got sold in the first two years? You didn't say one year. You didn't say three years. You said two years. You said all formats.
Cal:
Yeah. If for me, if a book's going to be successful, it takes, you know, you have to add up these sales over multiple years, not what's happening in the launch window, but what happens over two years. And the reason why I care about that is my sort of entrance as a successful writer all happened on a very slow trajectory. So the book, I'll tell you the story. So here's the backstory, right? My first three books were, I wrote them when I was young.
Neil:
Tell us the titles and tell us the years.
Cal:
So the first book was '‘How to Win at College’', 2005. I wrote that during my senior year of college. And then I followed that right up in 2006 with a book called 'How to Become a Straight A Student’'. And then a couple of years later, a book called 'How to Become a High School Superstar'. Those are the only types of books you could get Random House to give a book deal to a 21 year old for. Right. Because I wanted to write, but a 21 year old, I can't show up and say, I want to write about work and distraction. I really great, you know, become 20 years older. But what I did pitch them on was I'm a student. I understand students. I'm going to write a book for students that students will resonate.
Neil:
I won at college. I'll show you how.
Cal:
Yeah, and I interviewed other people, but basically that was the idea. And then my first big hardcover idea book came out when I turned 30. This was so good. They can't ignore you. And then the book after that was '‘Deep Work’'.
Neil:
When you were 30, meaning that when it was like 2012, your first big book came out in 2012, ‘Deep Work’. Sorry, sorry, sorry. '‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’'.
Cal:
Now, here's the thing. That book, at least for me, there was a there was an auction for it and for me, as a post-doc at the time, I was like, this is a lot of money. It was my first sort of major book that there was actually some money behind. It disappointed out of the gate.
Neil:
Right. So that was not to the advance.
Cal:
Relative to the advance and relative to just, you know, it just didn't do much out of the gate. It was at this interesting tipping point where podcasts, that whole ecosystem wasn't here yet. And there's still a traditional ecosystem. And, and so when I pitched '‘Deep Work’', they said, well, we're going to lower your advance from what you got for '‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’' because it's not really doing that well. So then when '‘Deep Work’' comes out, I remember being disappointed right off the bat because it was low, the advance had been lowered. Um, yeah, the book was just put out there. Not a lot was happening at first. And I remember really getting upset because a good friend of mine, his parents went to Barnes and Noble to pick up a copy and like they didn't even have it in stock. This was like the first week. And I remember completely my age. Like why? Like this is such a great idea for a book. Like why, why can't I get, you know, support for this. Why is it not everywhere? It's great, I know it's a great idea for a book. And she gave me this really hard advice, which is like numbers are what matters. They just look at numbers. Like your last one didn't sell that much. This is what a launch looks like for, you know, an author whose last book sold that much. But here's the thing about '‘Deep Work’'. It started to catch on and it had this, this slow build. This is why I care about, to go back to the original point, these big windows, but also why I care about not just the launch is that ‘Deep Work’ has never been on a bestseller list, maybe like on the aggregated business, Wall Street Journal list briefly, but never was a New York Times bestseller, never on a bestseller list, never on an Amazon chart, maybe has rarely been under a thousand in any one day on sales rank. The book has sold almost 2 million copies.
Neil:
Wow, that one book? That one book. Wow.
Cal:
And it was just people talked about it and I did, I started doing, I was doing podcasts. I would just say, I would just say yes to any podcast and it just, that thing just got a life of its own. And so and then what happened to ‘So Good, They Can't Ignore You’. That's now like a three, 400,000 copy seller. It followed behind. And so my whole mindset is now geared towards, if a book's going to hit, it takes a while. Yeah. I don't know how to do the James Clear thing.
I don't know how to just get on the bestseller list and be there for five years.
Neil:
You have to have a million person email list. I mean, a lot of it starts with what Sahil Bloom is doing today or what Dan Go is doing today and the tremendous amount of investment. I don't mean just time. I mean just like...
There's a financial investment, there's a time investment, there's a Sahil’s list went from 100k to 700k in a year, Dan's list went from 500k to 200k in a year. So these guys are post book deal, but pre book publication. And so the conversion after giving some, and I felt this with ‘The Book of Awesome’ too in 2010, like when I was able to say on my blog, hey, I got a new book, everyone was like, I've been reading this guy's blog for free for years. But when I'm like, hey, I got a fifth book, people are like, oh yeah, like I already bought your first three books.
We're used to it.
Cal:
Yeah, that's true. First books with big lists, you get big conversion, but it takes time. So that's how, I mean, it's hard to sell a very large amount. When you're talking like numbers, healthily in the six figures or beyond, it just takes time to sell that many books. I mean, you can't get that many people to buy a book in a single week. You can look at the very best selling nonfiction books. And you go in the Book Scan and look at these numbers, like the very best selling, like here's my debut and it's a fantastic debut. You're not going to see more than 30,000 books sold in a week or whatever. And that's just one week. That's for the launch week though.
Neil:
Right.
Cal:
So yeah, that's, that's the reality of the book world is only so many people are buying a book on any given week. And like, even if you have a healthy percentage of those people buying your book, you cannot, you can't sell a million copies of a book in a month, you know, maybe Harry Potter.
But otherwise you can't do it takes time. So that's the time scale. I look at it because I think of my launch windows, like for, you know, I have an audience, they like me. They're interested. They'll buy my serious audience will probably buy what I do in the first week. Like to me, like the third week matters a lot more than the first because that tells me if there's legs.
Neil:
Oh, interesting. Yeah. It matters a lot more than the first.
Cal:
So the first week, no one's heard about it. I mean, no one's read it yet. So it's just like, I know Cal Newport, I saw them on, you know.
I saw him on Ferris and Huberman and, you know, Adam Grant and Rich Roll and Ryan's and like all these other guys podcasts, right? Like, yeah, like, let's give this a try. I know Cal, but like week three, most of that stuff has come out. And so hopefully they're, they're still hearing about it. So that's a weird world, man. It's a weird world.
Neil:
Well, and that's why it kind of begs the bigger, you're kind of a visionary, right? Like you are able to see around corners more than most people are. I think that's where your long form New Yorker pieces have really, you're almost like, I've always thought the New Yorker is like kind of saying how things really are, but you're almost saying how things really are becoming. And so I'm curious about your macro level view. Forget Neil, forget Cal, forget your books, forget my books. What is your macro level view on books? Period.
Cal:
Yeah. I think the format's durable.
I think it's, I mean, it's the best, it's the best bargain sort of in the human intellectual experience because you're, you're spending.
Neil:
Oooh. Books are the best bargain in the human intellectual experience.
Cal:
Yes, because you're spending $20 to get what a, a mind that has specialized on an idea for years and has spent years trying to crystallize that knowledge into like the optimal structure. You get to transfer all that cognitive effort from that brain into your brain for like 20 bucks. And that's such a powerful thing. It's the only mind reading of any sort of great bandwidth that we have right now, is a book that I can take years of thinking and transport that to your brain by giving you this artifact of information captured with characters that I'm handing off to you. And so I think this is why books have been durable. They've been durable throughout so many different media revolutions. It's hard to replicate what you get out of that.
You know what I really like, for example, about pragmatic nonfiction. So I, in my books, there's usually a real pragmatic portion to it is you can induce physiological states in your reader, right? That this is what I grew up with being around these books is that feeling of an advice book, that feeling of suddenly your internal scheme of understanding the world shifts in a way where new opportunities for you that are very exciting emerge. That just feels so good.
You know, like, oh my God, I could do this. And this opens up this opportunity and it's gonna change my life for the better. And it's such a high and you can induce that with paper. You know, it's such an awesome, interesting thing. I mean, books are really personal.
Neil:
And I agree with you, I always call books the greatest form of compressed wisdom that we have. I mean, there's a reason when people go to TEDtalks.com, they read the transcript. I mean, like, so the speech is 18 minutes long, but I can read the thing in three minutes. There's a reason why like Apple podcasts just released the transcription thing and hasn't it? Hasn't it already? Have you noticed like people open and they're like skimming reading the thing because the podcasts are so long.
So maybe you're reading this right now as opposed to listening to it and I get that so I've always been trying to say well books are the greatest form of compressor, but at the same time, Cal, 57% of Americans read zero books last year. American Time News study from our mutual friend, Johann Hari, from his book, Stolen Focus. Highest number it's ever been throughout history. From what I understand, from I think some things you've looked at, but also people like, you know, Prof Galloway and so on are showing that like, you know, below a certain age, below 25 this, below 20 that, below 15 this, and maybe you've seen this with your own kids, their consumption of reading is smaller than it has been for previous generations and TikTok is eating everything type of like…I do worry about books, even though I'm bullish on them. I'm like, do you not see this happening at the same, like, isn't everything kind of going YouTube-y? Maybe, but you know, the period where books lost their supremacy as the only game in town and the most appealing game in town for distraction was really radio and most definitely TV, right? So that ship has already sailed.
So the interesting counterpoint numbers to those numbers is book sales are stable or growing, right? Especially hardcover book sales, ebooks are sort of staggered, people are sort of moving away from ebooks and moving towards, if you're going to do that, you'd rather listen to a book and so audio is going up, ebooks are going down, but book sales are not falling. So when you hear these numbers, like this is the lowest the read zero books has ever been, what's happening there is what you're shifting is maybe someone who read one book going to zero.
So yeah, that number can get the zero book number can jump.
Neil:
Non-readers are growing.
Cal:
Yeah. Or margins. Yeah, you're getting like the marginal, like I if I get really excited, like I hear about, you know, Dave Goggins on Rogan and maybe I'll read his book, like sort of the marginal readers. Maybe we're losing…You lose them. That number can really jump up. But without really affecting necessarily how many books are being sold in a given year. That being said, I want that number of reading zero books to be much smaller, because what you're saying is like it's the best compressed, not the best compressed knowledge. What else do we have that can change your life so thoroughly? There's no other medium that I know of. There's no YouTube video that can have as long and lasting an impact as a book because when we read and I don't know the full neuroscience of this I think Marilyn Wolf would be good on this – I don't know the full neuroscience on this, but we begin simulating the mind of the other characters that we're encountering. It really is a mind meld.
You get this in movies as well. It's really a mind meld. And through that mind meld, you can reconstitute, restructure your brain and you can come out of a book thinking about your life completely differently, which is just the most powerful thing we can do is that the right book at the right time can transform the way you understand the world.
Neil:
Oh my gosh, you said it so well. And there is something about that first person narrative. I also always say like, look, if you read Dune, you're the director, you picture the characters, you picture the sets, you picture those things underground in the sand. I don't remember what there called. You picture all that. You picture the music. You picture the lighting. You picture the costumes. When you watch the Denis Villeneuve vehicle, as I'm going to do later today, he picks the he picks the characters. He picks the costumes. He picks the music. He picks the lights. And like just the percentage of stuff you got to do is this much smaller.
Cal:
Yeah. Yeah, it's cool. I saw it in the theater down and when I was down there in Austin, you shake in the seats as they're riding the sand worms. That's cool. But you're exactly right. It's not engaging your brain in the same way as doing all of those things in your head. There's something special about it, right? We're not evolved to read, but it's this co-evolutionary thing. Like it's hard. We have to hijack parts of our brain that were evolved to do other things. We have to hijack them and basically force them to do this very unnatural thing. But once we do, it works so synergistically with us. Like it's one of these accidents, cultural discovery accidents that this thing, which is very unnatural and humans aren't evolved to do. We have to really train for years.
Neil:
Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is not natural and humans aren't evolved to do?
Cal:
We're not evolved to read. Reading, we have to hijack portions of the brain that are used and evolved to do other things and through painstaking training, essentially rewire them to convert written letters into semantic meaning, right? I mean, the written word, and this is so recent, we're talking 10,000 years or less and humans have been around for 300,000 years in roughly their modern genetic state, right?
Neil:
Right.
Cal:
So it is really arbitrary. Whereas even something like speaking in language which is more like 50 to 80,000 years old, writing's pretty new, but it works really well. It's like one of these cultural discoveries that has stuck because it's not just useful. Our brain takes to it in a really interesting way. The way that like we imagine the scenes and the impact we get out of it and its ability to change our cognitive states.
It's like discovering, you know, they talk about how like the cavemen discovered beer by accident. I felt like this is awesome. That's sort of what reading has been like for our species.
Neil:
Wow, that's amazing. And plus the 10,000 years ago was the advent, but really, you know, Gutenberg's printing presses, maybe 500 years ago when it was actually able to be mass distributed. There are stories. I have a book called, ‘The Book’, and there are stories of like, I think it's Marcus Aurelius. Like the first time he read in his mind and people were watching him, like he wasn't like talking the words. He was just reading it in his, people were like, what's he doing? Like, you know, what's, why does he just stand there? What's he just looking at? Like they, no one knew what that even was as an idea that you could just sit there and look at something and read.
Cal:
Yeah. I have an interior monologue. Like what is going on here? Yeah. I think Augustine, about him as well.
Neil:
Yeah. Maybe that's who it was. I mean, this is, so that is giving us some great fuel for ‘3 Books’, the podcast, because here I have thought that it is like a, you know, we're in the books category, when the literature category, when they're like tiny infinitesimally small substantive society, Jonathan friends and guests on the show, you know, it says I'm part of a declining species of the literary community. You know, he kind of jokes like that. But meanwhile, you're giving us some contemporary like freshness here. Like there is, is a new thing that you know how to read. It is a new thing that you can do this great thing. You are rewiring your brain to transplant yourself into three different places every single time we have our conversation. So with that wonderful, a beautiful set of appetizers that you've given us with Cal, I really appreciate that. Why don't we dive into now your three most formative books.
For each one, I'm going to hold it up to the camera for those watching YouTube. And for those not watching YouTube, I will describe it as if you're holding it in the store. That's my goal. I'll give like a 30 to 60 second overview of the book and I'll ask you, Cal, to tell us about your relationship with each book. And then I have a few follow-up questions for each one.
Cal:
Yeah, sounds good.
Neil:
Let's kick it off with ‘‘Getting Things Done’’ by David Allen, that's A-L-L-E-N published by Penguin Books in 2001. The cover has got a picture of David Allen who looks kind of like Niles Crane from Frasier, if you know that character, It's got a white background, blue border across the top of the check mark next to the word ‘done’ depending on cover. Mine has it by the word ‘getting’ and so David Allen, born in 1945. He's an American author and productivity consultant who created the time management method ‘‘Getting Things Done’’ after graduate school. Interestingly, I wanted to just mention this. Alan began using heroin and was briefly institutionalized. He claims to have had 35 professions before age 35. In ‘Getting Things Done’, Alan shares the breakthrough methods for stress free performance with the simple premise of our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. He shows us how to bullet point list, apply the do it delegate, defer it, drop it rule to get your inbox empty, reassess goals to stay focused in changing situations, plan projects as well as get them unstuck, overcome feelings of confusion, anxiety, and feeling overwhelmed and feel fine about what you are not doing.
Dewey Decimalheads, you can file this book under 646.7. Interesting subcategory, it's technology/ home and family management/sewing, clothing, management of personal life/management of personal life. Cal/Calvin, tell us about your relationship with ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen.
Cal:
Well, first of all, for the audience that's listening, Neil, don't you miss that period where they did covers like that? So it's David Allen with his arms kind of crossed and the contemplative hand on the chin. Wearing a three piece suit. This was like the 1980s and 90s, you used to get these book covers where you would just say a full size picture of the author standing like a full body shot in like a dramatic kind of like, Hey, pose. Miss those eras.
Neil:
There's like one finger on the cheek, three curled around on the chin.
Cal:
Oh, such classic. And I'll say, by the way, he's a fascinating guy. So I profiled, I kind of profiled him, but really like profiled the book in the New Yorker in 2021, I wrote this article called, ‘The Rise and Fall of ‘Getting Things Done’.’ And so I really kind of went deep then, he's a weird, interesting guy. Which, which is important, actually, because when I think about that book's influence on me, there's two waves of it, right? So there's going to be the influence that had when I first encountered it in college when it came out. And there's the influence.
Neil:
2001.
Cal:
Yes. And I so I read it, I listened to it on tape. And back then, I probably downloaded it. This was pre-audible, so I probably paid 30 bucks and downloaded it onto my iPod. Then there's a new resonance that we can get into more recently, where the cultural reaction and misunderstanding of ‘‘Getting Things Done’’ and what that book was really about has a new resonance that I think is also very important. But in 2000-
Neil:
I want the full relationship.
Cal:
Oh yeah, I have a long relationship with Alan and everything. I've spent an unhealthy amount of time probably thinking and writing about David Allen. So when I get to this book, when I first encountered this book, I'm in college, 2001, 2002, I would have read it. And so I would have been like a sophomore or junior. The thing that jumped out at me about it was this idea of being systematic about how you're organizing stuff in your own life, which was an idea that sort of appealed to me. Like I had read Stephen Covey, you know, and Stephen Covey had the quads and trying to work backwards from your roles to figure out like what you should prioritize. There was the sort of a late eighties time.
Neil:
Time vs. Urgency Eisenhower Matrix.
Cal:
This is all Covey. So he was, he was doing that. There were some characters around like Brian Tracy that was sort of more, uh, aphorism based, but like eat the frog, sort of a Maxim based time management, like do the hard thing first. And, uh, Alan came along and was very systematic. He's like, you have a flow chart. You make a decision here, and here. This goes on this list. You execute from that. It kicked off this movement in the 2000s that became known in LeetSpeak and sort of online parlance as ‘productivity pr0n’, P-R-ZERO-N, which was this belief. And by the way, my New Yorker editor at the time was so pleased that we got the word productivity pr0n, which is this like, ultimate geek term into the pages of the New Yorker and back what I wrote about David Allen…
Neil:
Being a play on the word ‘porn’.
Cal:
A play on the word porn and you write in a way that it's not going to be, it has to do with like it won't be filtered by the early like content filters. But what it was like productivity porn they call it pr0n. There's this big movement this big optimistic movement into 2000s that with the right system supported by software work could become effortless. Like that this was going to liberate work from being the sort of like relatively like confusing hard thing of like, what am I working on? That you would have the right software running the right systems. And like a lot of the organization of work would be automated algorithmically be outsourcing the sort of energy dispersal required to make decisions into systems and work would become this much more effortless thing. You get the right system and your work was going to be better.
And I interviewed some of the creators of one of the big tools that built on ‘Getting Things Done’. This was super appealing to me when I was 20, 21 years old, right? It felt new, it felt fresh. And you see this influence for sure in ‘How to Become a Straight A Student’’, my second book, where I'm really walking students through like, you need to be systematic about how you're approaching your schoolwork. Like, how are you doing it? You need to write down like, what's your GTD? Like, you need to write down this is how I'm taking notes, this is how I'm studying papers. Systems mattered, right? And so that idea that systems matter is very important. I went on a student systems quest starting my sophomore year, right around the time I encountered this, where I had gone through my freshman year and had gotten pretty good, but not great grades. Inspired in part by ‘Getting Things Done’. If I have this timeline right in my mind, I began aggressively experimenting on myself with how I was doing student work, like the systems I was using. I treated it like David Allen treated knowledge work time management. How am I taking notes? How am I sitting for a test? And it was transformative. Like what happened is my grades maxed out. 4.0, 4.0, 4.0. Every quarter starting my sophomore fall, suddenly I was getting to 4.0 until my senior spring where I got one A minus. It was like a three-year span with one A minus. Like everything else was an A.
Neil:
So the systems work.
Cal:
And I evolved them, you know, and let me try this. So this is stupid. That's a waste of time. Let me try this. And so, man, I was a believer in systems by the time I left college and it infuses my early books for sure. Infuses the stuff I do now. David Allen was the person who really introduced this idea of you can have a system. You can have a system for how you do things and that system can make things better and you can, you can let the system take on a lot of the work of, hey, what should I do next? Or how should I do this? A system could make your life easier. Like I never pulled an all-nighter in college once I got systematic about my studies. Like it could make your life easier. I had to study less time than other people. I was more relaxed, you know? I could do-
Neil:
I wanna go deep into your systems because they are pretty powerful and I've heard you talk about them before, but for those that are earmarking this part of the conversation, what is the best place for them to go if they wanna go into this part of your work? Is it how to be a straight A student?
Cal:
Well, you know, it's every stage.
Neil:
So they listen to your conversation with, I think, Andrew Huberman, where you talk about this a lot.
Cal:
It's every stage. Yeah. So if you look at ‘How to Become a Straight A Student’’, you'll see my student systems. If you look at ‘‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’’, you'll see systems for transforming your like, choosing a job and making your career something that you're successful at. It's locked in on systems in general.
Neil:
Those that want more can look at your early books or more recently, I think your conversation with Andrew was you went pretty deep on this there.
Cal:
Yeah. Or my podcast.
Neil:
He's kind of a consummate learner.
Cal:
Yeah, that was a systems, that was a systems conversation for sure. Well, what's his term protocols? I guess yes. What's the protocols? Yeah. So he keyed in on it's funny how different people key in on different things like doing Ferris's show. Like we usually key in when we talk on like the state of technology and its impact on society. Huberman is like, what's the protocols? Like, let's, let's get that. That really wants to know about your childhood. Rich is like, how do we like, what's this all about Cal? Like, you know, you're like, he got into my interview with him. He's like, I think I'm doing too much. You know, like this is, I'm kind of stressed out and like, it's funny.
Neil:
Everyone has their angle. And it's all self oriented too, in some sense.
Cal:
That's the secret to all media.
Neil:
So, so David Allen, Cal Newport part one in 2001, when you're a sophomore or a junior is to ingrain into your brain, this idea that this is how the world, this is one way of looking at the world. And when I apply this to my life, it seems to be working.
Cal:
Yeah. Now there's going to be…This is why the article I eventually wrote about this was called the rise and fall of ‘Getting Things Done’. Because ultimately I realized and had to evolve like a lot of people who got into this, oh, systems can't do everything. So that then became another important step as I moved on to graduate school and professional writing. And these were the two things I decided in college I wanted to do was computer science and writing. And this is what I was doing. I was at MIT, studying computer science at the highest level and writing books, you know, and trying to become a better writer or whatever.
Neil:
Yeah.
Cal:
This is when I began to realize, um, oh, systems can't get you all the way to impact, systems can't get you to the meaningful life. Systems can help save energy systems.
Neil:
So why'd you think that? Why did you just, why, why'd you stop believing in the systems?
Cal:
Well, and not only did I stop believing, I began becoming a target for David Allen fans for my heresy. Because at the core of Allen's idea was this idea that all work gets reduced to widgets and categorized. And then you don't have to worry about anything. Work becomes this sort of Zen activity of just what context am I in, take an action off a list that's been reduced to something you can do in a couple minutes and execute that, then what's next. And I realized when it came to producing really meaningful things,
That's not what that work feels like. That work is grappling with the muse. That work is like grappling day after day, hour after hour, trying to create something useful or beautiful. When I was solving a theorem or trying to write a book chapter, it's not next actions. And a system couldn't make the hard work easy. And I began to then think about like, oh, these systems are maybe more about getting stuff out of the way.
Yeah. So that you could grapple with the creative beast, which is like this hard, much more messier, beautiful type of thing. And so I had this interesting evolution during grad school.
Neil:
Wow. That is…that is really interesting. And it kind of makes me think a little bit of I, it's weird that I have this, but it makes me think a little bit of this little two by two that I drew for myself, which is time versus importance. I think low time, low importance decisions, you gotta automate them, okay. Systemize them perhaps. High time, low importance decision like email, you gotta regulate it into like…start, maybe do an hour a day or whatever into one regular for me and Leslie. It's like, um, we have a little piece of paper on the inside of one of our kitchen cupboards. And so whenever something… a door is squeaky, a patio stone is wobbly, a light bulb. We just put on that list and then like one half day a month – I've invited her to an invite the last Saturday morning of the month – and we do all the house stuff. Do you know what I mean? So it's just regulated, right? Cause it takes a lot of time, but it's not that important. Effectually just means get it done cause I wanted a rhyming word that is like high importance, low time stuff, like saying hi to your team and you get to work or like picking your kids up from daycare and that all free space to grapple with the muse slash debate, which is the only word I could think of.
That means the high time, high import decision. Well, how interesting is that? It almost feels like you mentioned Tim Ferris a couple times. Like, isn't that interesting? Like I almost see that slow evolution because he's been a very systems guy, you know, for our work week. It almost, you can almost see that evolution with lots of people of our lots of our contemporaries. I throw myself happily in this mix. Like you get to the point where like. I just want to read poetry.
Cal:
Yeah, well, here's the interesting thing about Tim. So I wrote a profile, like a mini profile of him for the New Yorker, where I was I was talking about how like he got maybe he got misunderstood or maybe he evolved. And I interviewed him about this, so like I could kind of get his take on it. But the thing with Tim is I was saying, look, he wrote this book, The Four Hour Workweek, which should be like the handbook for 2020, 2021, right? I mean, it was like he was ahead of the time of like thinking about work in 2007.
And it was like perfectly fit for that time of how do you, how do you, how do you integrate and reduce the footprint of work and do these other sorts of things that are bootstrap remote work. So you could, how do you design your life? Right. And everyone was thinking about this and yet the book was getting no play. And I wrote this New Yorker piece, like, why are we not all talking about this book? And I talked to Tim about it and it was weird. Everyone honed in, in that book on the, the automation and the systems then and now he was like, well, this was all about, it was about me being in Argentina and learning the tango and going and enjoying the wine. It was about me traveling. It was about freeing you up to do the stuff you would normally wait to do when you were retired. He's like, so I wasn't, he was like the hacks almost don't matter in that book. It was like, the thing is you have, you should, if you're clever, you can free up a lot of time for what he called mini retirements. And it was completely misunderstood or people cued in on Ferris is all about, ‘How do you do things’, like ‘what are the shortcuts and how do you do things?’
Neil:
Yeah, because the left brain scratching parts of this book were so scratchy for the, for those left brain people, but that bigger holistic living thing was that we were all young alpha males, a lot of people targeted in that book were like young alpha males looking to like make a million bucks or whatever, right?
Cal:
So yep But then and then he told me and then he got captured by a little bit. He wrote a couple books like great. Well, then I’ll just talk about the hack stuff like what works for your body what works, you know with learning with the Four hours half and then you're like, okay enough of this and he is like podcasting is more interesting, you know. So it was interesting, uh, but that's another microcosm of the systems are very appealing – but like the systems by themselves. And that's how the whole productivity pr0n movement collapsed. Is eventually people discovered the systems help, but they don't give me meaning in my work. They don't, they're not important. They're not getting me fired up. Having a Kinkless GTD set up built on top of OmniFocus, optimized to the hilt is not making me happier. You know, I mean, I like twiddling with it, but it's not making me happier. It's a – this interesting evolution a lot of people go through from systems as the theology of work to sort of systems as one of the things you deploy to get to what matters.
Neil:
That's fascinating.
Cal:
Teleology. I said that wrong.
Neil:
What was the word? I said theology, but I think I meant teleology. How do you spell it?
Cal:
T-E-L-E-O-L-O-G-Y. The intrinsic purpose of…
Neil:
That might be the word of the chapter. Keep going. I want to get this teleology.
Cal: Teleology? Now you have me nervous that I'm saying it wrong. This is an Aristotelian-
Neil:
The explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than the cause by which they arise.
Cal:
Yeah, it's like an Aristotelian idea.
Neil:
Teleology. Does that sound right to you?
Cal:
That could be right.
Neil:
Okay. Because at the end of every chapter of the show, from way back into chapter one, we have a word of the chapter with chapter 18 and David Sedaris, the word was Lilliputian. Typically, the word is a word that I have never heard before.
Cal:
Lilliputian referring to Gulliver's travels and the little people?
Neil:
You got it. Yeah, because I asked him about his height because over his New York Times profiles over the years, it was like he kept getting taller. Like it was like, oh, interesting. He realized you could lie. Like, it doesn't really matter. Well, and the reporters maybe these were diminutive or tiny, a tiny man. And then as he got more famous, it was like, his height disappeared from his profiles. It was interesting.
Cal:
Oh, interesting, interesting.
Neil:
So he laughed and said, I was once called Lilliputian. So here's what's good about that term then. And by the way, this is a common thing about people who read a lot and writers is we say words wrong because we just see these words in our head all the time. You know, we're not talking to people, we're thinking about things. Even now, I will get common things wrong. And my wife will be like, that's not how you pronounce that word. And I'm like, I've been a professional writer my whole life. I'm in my head. You know? Yeah. That's why one of the best pieces of advice to ever give anybody who's written a book is read the whole book out loud.
Cal:
Oh yeah.
Neil:
Read your whole book out loud.
Cal:
Which I did for the book on tape for the first time for ‘Slow Productivity’. And man, that's a process.
Neil:
Oh, for the first time? First time? First time, why first time?
Cal:
Because it's a pain. I don't know.
Neil:
You said no to doing audio for ‘Deep Work’ and for ‘Digital Minimalism’ and for ‘A World Without Email.’ And this is two years ago, four years ago. These are recent big audio world. You said no, thanks?
Cal:
Yeah. Now, ‘World Without Email,’ it was easier to say no because it was in the pandemic. And so they were like, eh, it's hard. The studios aren't really open. But yeah, I'd always said no. It sounded like too hard. But then when ‘‘Slow Productivity’’ came out, they’re like, you have a podcast. People know what your voice sounds like now. Sorry, you have to do it.
Neil:
Oh, wow, you were still saying no.
Cal:
It's a pain. I really don't like it. But it was really useful and interesting. But by the way, I don't know if you've had this experience. You come away being like, this writing is trash.
When you're forced to read it slowly, you're like, I'm a terrible writer. That's how you come away. You want to edit it the whole time you're reading.
Neil: That's exactly why it's so good to read your own book out loud. James Frey, who is the author of ‘A Million Little Pieces’ and was our guest back in chapter…I got to get this right…is it 18? James, James Frey. Sure. James Frey is chapters third…I'm getting it wrong. He said he talks while he writes. He reads every sentence as he writes it. He talked like he can't write in a room at a coffee shop because he's talking as he writes. He's…he's saying the sentence. Of course, he might with fiction be writing a little bit more…
Cal: Adjusted the song a little bit, but yeah.
Neil:
Yeah, but still it's an interesting point. So I get your relationship with David Allen's…year of college. And I get that there was a kind of when you got to the exposure that grappling with the amuse was kind of a bigger thing. So is that, did we get to what your relationship is with it today?
Cal:
No, there's been another chapter. There's another chapter. All right. So then there's this other chapter, which is what the book tells us about our culture and our understanding of productivity. And this is a little bit more recent. So like one of the interesting things about that book is it comes up in pop culture. Like for example, there's an episode of The Office where Darryl holds it up as like reading, ‘‘Getting Things Done’’, right. And it's referenced a lot as well. It's often referenced.
Neil:
Everyone knows this book. Or they know it in the business book world. This is maybe one of the top five most well-known books with ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’, ‘Seven Habits’, ‘Highly Effective People.’ This book and one of each of ours.
Cal:
Yeah. I mean, hey, it was the my biggest one of my biggest triumphs, at least for like that version of myself is the point when finally ‘Deep Work’ consistently started topping ‘Getting Things Done’ on the time management list, you know, and that was like my biggest, that's just been the last two or three years. That's been my biggest accomplishment. But so, but it's used in culture. It's also used in a lot of critiques of productivity, a lot of critiques of work, a lot of critiques of capitalism. This book is often referenced because the people, the title indicates, they don't know about the book, but the title indicates that this book is about doing more things. Because you see that title, right? And so it's become a stand-in for how a lot of people understand productivity culture. It's like the goal, there's all these people like David Allen saying, how do you do more things? How do you optimize to get more things done? That's exactly how Darryl on The Office referenced it. He's like, I'm trying to be more efficient about how we run The Office because I'm reading, ‘Getting Things Done’. The interesting thing about this book is that's not what it's about. The book, David Allen has no interest in...getting more things done in the sense of like increasing the rate at which you accomplish things, being more impressive, trying to get ahead. The book is instead, here's my take on the book. Now it represents a huge discontinuity in the business productivity literature. That's very important for understanding how the world of business shifted right around that time period. If you go back to like Stephen Covey, ‘First Things First’, ‘Seven Habits’, it's like late eighties, early nineties. You have like a very optimistic approach to productivity. It's all about self-actualization. It believes that you can figure out like the optimal things to do to achieve all your goals and all the roles in your life. It's like very positive. David Allen is not. It's actually, and I didn't notice this when I was 20, but I noticed it today very glaringly, a very nihilistic book. Like in this book, David Allen is basically saying we're drowning. And what is our goal here? What is the goal of this book is to try to find cognitive peace amid unstoppable onslaught of things to do. That is his goal. That's why it's the art of stress-free productivity, not the art of doing really good things, not the art of getting ahead, not the art of accomplishing your goals or getting promoted, stress-free productivity. All he wants is cognitive peace. And the whole system is about how do you get stuff out of your head where it's making you stressed out and get it like in the paper where you trust it.
And it's nihilistic. He wants work to be this almost dystopian, like cranking widgets thing. So at least you don't have to be stressed by all the stuff you have to do. You can just sort of in a mechanical way zone out and just do this, do that, do this, and like let your brain get some breathing room. It's like a nihilistic book almost. And I think this is very important because what happens between Stephen Covey and David Allen, it's the front office IT revolution.
It's computers, it's networks, it's emails, it's mobile computing. That's what's different between 1994 and 2001. And what Alan is reacting to, he's like right there at the very beginning of this wave, is how once we all got connected to digital devices in the office, the amount of work on our plate and the speed and velocity at which this came at us and we had to talk about it just exploded. And he is like, he's there at D-Day, seeing the troops come on the beach, riding from the front lines.
That is what I realized today ‘Getting Things Done’ is. It is an observation, you know, dispatches from the catastrophe. He was right there at the moment that knowledge work changed.
Neil:
So now you see it as a nihilistic book.
Cal:
A milestone that marks the sharp discontinuity in the world of work. And by the way, look at every major business bestseller productivity related book after that, like in the 2010s, they're all about fighting overload and finding focus. It's, it's essentialism. It's one thing. It's my book, ‘Deep Work’. All of these books.
Neil:
Even ‘Atomic Habits’ could be labeled that way. Yeah. During the pandemic, when the book came out, everyone was looking in their wildly messy, Netflix-addled, endlessly screened lives. How do I fricking? Stop drinking coke. How do I maybe that habits book will help me?
Cal:
Hey, that'll maybe get me there.
Neil:
How do I stop scrolling TikTok?
Cal:
but the bigger point here is when you when you hear almost anyone any modern writer, especially in like the elite media world where I also play when they're writing about productivity, cultural work, they set up this straw man. That's just not true. They set up the straw man of like everyone is saying that you should hustle and like get more done and optimize your day. We haven't seen a book like that in like 25 years.
Neil:
Oh, that's interesting.
Cal:
Everything since David Allen on has been fighting back against the onslaught, the distraction, the overload. How do you just find a thing that's important and do that? How do you avoid getting dragged into too many commitments? How do you make sure in the midst of…that's the theme of all these books?
Neil:
So then what's pushing us the other way? Capitalism?
Cal:
It's not capital because we've had capitalism for a long time. We had capitalism in 1970 and knowledge workers weren't worried about this. We had capitalism in 1989 when Covey was writing and we weren't worried about being overloaded.
Neil:
Accessibility?
Cal:
Here's what I think it is. So we had a knowledge work in particular. And this comes from the ‘Slow Productivity’ book. But the rough heuristic we were using for thinking about productivity was what I call pseudo-productivity, which is like, hey, visible activity is going to just be our, our proxy for useful effort. Like if I see you doing something that's good, if you wanna be more productive, stay later at the office. Because we were going from the industrial revolution where you could put a screw and a tire on the Ford line and that was our proxy as knowledge work kind of came into being.
Neil:
Yeah, exactly.
Cal:
So in that assembly line, we could be very precise. We could measure cars produced per labor hour. We could have numbers and charts. And all that fell apart in knowledge work because it's messy or more ambiguous. So we're just like, we'll just use, visible…we'll gather in a building and like make sure that we see each other working. I argue, this has been my big contention because most of my thinking of the last 10 years of writing has really been about the story of different places that technology disrupts things than how we react to that. Because I'm a computer scientist, I care about that. I think it was the combination of pseudo-productivity, which had been in place since the late 1950s, the combination of that with the front office IT revolution that sparked the spiraling burnout crisis that we saw the first signs of in David Allen and by the pandemic had basically reached a point of epidemic proportions, not to reuse that term, but it got really bad. It's technology, these new technologies, plus this old idea of using pseudo productivity to measure your usefulness in the office. Those two things did not play nice to each other. The whole first part of ‘Slow Productivity’ is arguing that created this spiral of increasing overload and frustration and it made knowledge work increasingly unbearable.
Neil:
You’re a dad.
Cal:
Yes
Neil:
You've got kids, three, I believe.
Cal:
Three boys. Yes. All boys.
Neil:
Yeah, I'm also a father of all boys. And your age range is…
Cal:
We have five about to turn six on the young side and 11 at the old side.
Neil:
Mm hmm. And you are at the forefront of a lot of things. Podcasting world, the writing world, the, I think the digital kind of future gazing kind of world. And we are also experiencing a cultural tipping point at the same time as this is happening with Jonathan Heights’ book, ‘The Anxious Generation’, which is just out and killing it and there are movements around the world.
My wife and I have been working on a book proposal with my agent right now, like a manifesto on smartphone free childhoods, like a mother talking to a child. Like what are your internal family Newport principles, rules, ideas on screens and cell phones and smartphones with your five to 11 year old six, five to 11 year old kids?
Cal:
Yeah, well, they're all exactly aligned with John's work because I've known John for a long time And i've written about him and he's kept me up to speed on the research. He's been looking at and so…
Neil:
You’re a paid a member of ‘After Babel Substack.’
Cal:
I am a paid member of ‘After Babel Substack.’ That's absolutely true I actually have given a couple talks at my uh, my kid's school about kids and phones that's all me just basically summarizing John's research, right?
Neil:
So he's a friend of the show as well and we do a nice chat over his wife's Korean food in his kitchen.
Cal:
So he's right. I think he is right that unrestricted internet access, when is it appropriate for someone to get unrestricted internet access? The safe answer is 16. And the culture is not there yet, but I think we're like a year or two away from that being a very common thing. Just like we're like, yeah, probably a 17 year old shouldn't drink alcohol like when we kind of made that decision in the 70s or kids shouldn't…we should really care about kids smoking, you know, we made that decision. We got serious about that in the 80s and 90s, I think we're going there culturally with smartphones, unrestricted smartphone access to kids. 16 is where the research is pointing.
Neil:
Really? Not, not 21?
Cal:
Well, maybe be better but the key thing about 16 like John would point out is that you're through puberty. And like that's critical. So you've gone through that very malleable developmental period. You have a more stable sense of self and identity at that point. Like you don't want, while you're trying to establish a sense of yourself and identity, to also be exposed to algorithms. Like that leads to weird places. Also, your social setup, your social structures are all relatively strongly in place. By the time you're that age, you're like, here's who I am, here's who my friends are, here's what I'm involved in. I have a pretty stable sense of self. My emotional regulation is not quite as dynamic as it was when I was 12 or 13.
Neil:
I must have been a late bloomer. I gotta say. Yeah, well. I didn't hit this till at least five more years, if not more.
Cal:
Well, but at least it's better, right?
Neil:
Yeah, certainly better than 10, yeah, for sure.
Cal:
So that's why John's been pushing 16, right? And I think that makes sense. The surgeon general has also pushed that age.
Neil:
Yep, it's a big birthday, yep.
Cal:
Yeah, Murphy's been pushing that age. It's sort of emerging some of the new legislation state and there's national state legislation all over right now. Think about these issues, but we're seeing more like the bill that was just passed in Florida basically says no social media 13 or younger, which all the way was the law already, but an unenforced federal law. But what the Florida act added was under 16, but above 13, there has to be parental consent. So like, you know, someone has to say you’re allowed to use this.
So I think 16 is becoming a de facto threshold when thinking about these services.
Neil:
What about you? What about your family? When are you going to get your kids phones? It's kind of what I'm asking.
Cal:
Yeah, well, there's two different.
Neil:
What's your screen time policy at home? What's your video game rules?
Cal:
Yeah. So there's multiple different things going on here. To me, phone is a misnomer. It's unrestricted Internet access. That's the danger. Right. So we have to be we have to be really clear. So unrestricted Internet access, 16. So that would mean, for example, having a smartphone that you can just use. That's got to be 16. Having a phone as a communication device, let's say a phone that doesn't have a smartphone screen, but you can do text messages on it, or a watch, you can do text messages. The policy there is if there's a demonstrated logistical need, then you can get one of those. If it is, okay, you're doing all these sports, and it'd be very convenient if you could let us know what time practice is going to be over, then we can get you a device that does that. We don't have to let that need, that narrow need, lead us to say, okay, here's your iPhone, go, you know, get after it.
Neil:
Do your kids have devices now?
Cal:
Well, they don't have any telephonic or internet connected devices on video games. I'm very worried about any video game looking at the research, especially with boys, anything that's connected to the internet. I'm very worried about anything. You didn't have to pay $50 for the game. I'm very worried about because they're getting their money. And if you didn't pay for the game, where are they getting their money? Through making you addicted to it so they can help upsell you on things. So for our kids, for the video games, they have Nintendo switches.
Neil:
That's what we have too.
Cal:
And I think that's absolutely fine.
Neil:
We only have one.
Cal:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, they fight otherwise. So I think that Nintendo is fine. So it's interesting how this has shifted. And this is part of the confusion in this field.
Neil:
You're pro Mario Kart.
Cal:
I'm pro-Mario Kart. I'm pro-Zelda. Air Conflicts. I'm trying to think what they play. It was about time.
Neil:
Do you have the time restrictions?
Cal:
Of course. There's only certain times they get to use it. And it's not for…they could use it on like Saturday morning and there's they can win a half hour if they do like enough chores. They don't get very much time.
Neil:
They can win a half an hour if they do enough chores.
Cal:
Point systems. Yeah.
Neil:
And what's the what's the chores? Oh, so number of time you do on the chore?
Cal:
There's, you get various points for doing various things. Yeah.
Neil:
So you have different things you can catch. It's gold.
Cal:
Yeah. That's positive reinforcement theory, right, that when you can positively reinforce good behavior, actually that's like very compelling to kids and points are a good way of doing it.
Neil:
So you start with like two hours, you got screens, which is like largely video games, maybe they watch TV with the parents, that's not counting, but the solo screen time thing for six to 11 year olds in the new per health, but I'll happily share my mind as well. I've got boys three to nine, four boys, three, five, seven and nine. And we have a currently under negotiation screen time contract, which says everybody gets 20 tickets per week. The tickets are worth half an hour each. Uh, that's actually sorry for just for 10 and up. So they had looked forward to that. Then it's like 16 tickets at this age for 12 tickets at this age 10 tickets. I think the baby is like still under our purview and the tickets can only be used Wednesday's music practice day. So you gotta have your four music practices in if your music practices are in by the Tuesday, you can start using your screen time on Tuesday. There is a screen time window per day. It's three to six pm, that's like the after-school time before the like bedtime and it's kind of sounding similar. I mean, and by the way, my kids wrote this up like it's like in their writing on a piece of paper with scratches on it. So we're negotiating it now. It's like a live in process work. Yeah, I hesitate on how kind of like it sounds totally insane, you know, but I’m happy to hear that you do something too, like similar.
Cal:
I mean, for us, basically, there's very little you're not going to play a video game during the week except for some special occasions. So it's like weekend mornings and long car trips. Yeah, and like some special occasions. I mean what I like about Nintendo games too is they're not super addictive. They're hard and they're fun, but you also kind of get bored after a while. We, you know for a while, we didn't realize this at first, but we had put we for we were going on a flight somewhere. So we put some games on an iPad. Yeah, like the iPad arcade and our youngest when he was like playing these iPad arcade games was very different than Nintendo. It was like he couldn't control himself.
And so you, and he's like, I have to get this back.
Neil:
Candy Crush Saga-esque.
Cal:
Yeah. With the Nintendo, we're like, okay, you're like, you're done playing Nintendo. It's like when we played Nintendo as kids, like, oh, it's too bad. It's like watching a TV show you like, but you don't get that reaction. You get when the kids is on the sort of networked game. That's made to be addictive where they're like yelling at you. And like, I, you know, this is my digital crack. You know, that makes me nervous. So we're very careful about what games.
And then we don't worry as much about TV. We watch TV as a family. I'm a cinephile. We watch a lot of movies together. They don't get a lot of time just watching TV on their own, but it's interesting how this changed. Like when we first had our first kid back in 2012, the concern was still the APA talking about screen time. They meant TV, right? They meant like watching or content. Passively watching content like that was the big concern all of the young millennial parents had was like how much TV time should my kid watch. And by 2017, that shifted, like forget TV, it’s nothing. What you care about is interactive screen and internet. That's where the damage is being caused. It's interesting how these things shift where without anything else to worry about we used to worry like what if our three-year-old sees too much Sesame Street. That's not the concern now. Now the concern is the 13 year old with the iPad in their room and you know, it's like put it into my veins. God knows what they're doing. And if you try to take it away, they're going to have an aneurysm.
Neil:
Amen. And two things to add in. One is a physiological one is this an aha, the aha or the underscore point. It's just look at what Cal is doing. He's evaluating the business model of the platform. So if it's a online, you know, free game that is badge oriented versus a $50 you buy the Legend of Zelda in a box, which we just did. Um, that's a fast, that's a really sharp and astute way to evaluate, uh, what you allow you to, cause I thought that's amazing. And then physiologically, I just wanted to say, I took my kids to the eye doctor recently and she's like, how much screen time did they get? And I was like, I don't know, three hours a week. And she's like, uh, three hours a day or three hours a week. I was like, well, I don't know, maybe four hours a week, but it's a week, you know? And she's like, and what's the screen time? I was like a one hour on TV. She's like, that doesn't count. What do you mean it doesn't count? Like, from an ophthalmological perspective, the TV does not count as any screen time. It's the shrunken, tiny, close to your face stuff.
Cal:
That's the problem. Yep.
Neil:
You knew this. I did not. So we're getting the big screen TV. Daddy was against it. We were all sitting on the couch watching laptops. Turns out I was making the mistake.
Cal:
No, you need the big screen. And let me tell you what else you need to do. Right?
Get the big screen TV, get the Sonos Arc as your front speaker, and get the Sonos Sub subwoofer. Those two things alone can give you as close to cinematic sound experience.
Neil:
Wow. Sonos Arc, Sonos Sub, okay.
Cal:
Oh yeah, and you got to get the sub. And you can add two more Sonos small speakers if you want the full five points around. You don't really need it. The Arc is very good, but the Arc plus the Sub with a nice, crisp big screen TV.
You can get a really close to cinematic experience in your house. Let's be honest. That's the whole key for all this is that so you and I can enjoy movies better.
Neil:
That's funny. Yeah, that's funny. Speaking of movies, speaking of this one last question, ‘Getting Things Done’, we're going to go to your second book after this. I know the first one we're taking a little bit longer. Here's the thing. I got to ask you about your relationship with your face, your face, your relationship with your face. And the reason I'm asking about this is because Seth Godin told us in chapter three of the show that his book, ‘Permission Marketing’, which came out in 2000, he says was the very first business book in this category that featured a business author's face on the cover. Now I know you mentioned like the front suit kind of, you know, that look. Well, David Allen in this 2001 book, he's featured on the cover. Your face isn't on the cover of anything. So Cal Newport books do not have a Cal Newport face on them. Okay.
And we also, both you and I operate in a world of like podcasts, for example. I have gone one way. I had my face on the three books logo. I took it off. I don't like being recognized. I don't like the “Surprise, I know you and I want to talk to you!” I don't like that feeling. Um, I happened to me a lot when my first book and I just kind of, I have this disorienting effect when I feel like I'm being…cause that person knows who I am and they're looking at me and they want, I just don't like that. Ryan Holiday did not have his face on the Daily Stoic podcast, now he's added it. You know what I'm saying? So there's like, it seems like everybody's constantly exploring their relationship with their face. A lot of people, like again, mutual friends, let's mention Sahil Bloom, Shane Parrish, Ramit Sethi, they go to like the same photographer for like their, you know, their profile pic, which is then the same kind of perfect profile pic across all your social media handles and across all your...podcast slogans, across all your email newsletters and all this. And I'm like, what's going on? Like I need your crystal ball again. Like what's going on with your relationship with your face, my relationship, our relationship with our faces in general? What, what is happening here? Like I'm disoriented in this world.
Cal:
Yeah, I mean, look, I'm uncomfortable with this world, too. I preferred the model where like Cal Newport is almost like an abstraction, you know, it's like this. We know these ideas in this book and there's this entity Cal Newport, like I don't know if it's a real person or not. I just sort of associate this abstraction with these particular type of ideas. And that really has changed recently in the sense that visual branding seems to be just part of the new media landscape, that when people hear you and see you I guess they have a different relationship with you, that sort of parasocial relationship that I guess is positive for selling books. But I'm not, this is all new to me. I'm like you, I don't want people to recognize me. I don't want people to really know much about me. I don't want that really, but it seems to be the way the whole media world shifted. When I got started, it was like blogging and newsletters was new media. And that was pretty, that could be pretty impersonal, right? It was the ideas. It was the columnist model. It was like, I don't know anything about David Brooks other than his ideas. He's a guy for the New Yorker, Tom Friedman. I think he has a mustache. That's all I know. And he might have grown a beard after that. So the picture may just have been for that. I've always thought, like, if I had to get a picture for the paper, I would make it different than the real, you know, than the real me.
Cal:
Yeah. To your point, I like how you're uncomfortable with it. I like how you're sort of sitting here with me. And I want to just insert a couple more data points for us both. OK. Andrew Wilkinson said on Twitter: “You want to be Coen Brothers famous; the absolute top of your craft, but nobody has a clue what you look like.” This is years ago. James Clear responded. He doesn't really respond much. He responded, “Agree.” I want a brand that is known by name, not by face. Examples, Calvin Klein, Kate Spade. Most people know the name. 99% of them couldn't recognize the face. Now let's insert into your, the Instagram, Instagramification. Like if you've ever talked to anybody who like wants to grow your Instagram profile, I don't know, you don't, I know you're not on social media and I respect you and I love you and I hate social media and I desperately shouldn't be on it, right, I don't do anything with it and I don't have the apps and blah, but I have to post the new podcast is out. Come check. So I'm still doing that kind of stuff. But if you talk to them, what they always tell me is they don't know you. You aren't sharing your four AM ice baths and you're like nine AM putting your kids to bed and your kids. We don't know what your kids look like, Neil, and we don't know what your wife looks like. And I'm like, I know. And they're like, well, that's what you're going to have to do if you want to get bigger. And I'm like, what the fuck? Like, so there's Andrew Wilkinson and James Clear on one side, Coen Brothers famous. Calvin Klein, right? Mary Kay. Right. James Clear, arguably, is a face people don't know. But it's not his face is not all over his stuff. And then there's what I've heard you say. It seems to be the culture now. And that is, I think, where most of us live in. And so we just got to live with it. Can we rail against this? Should we take our faces off of everything? What's up? What's going on like? I'm still trying to figure this out.
Cal:
I think it is a good question. Like the argument, the new media argument is, if people have more of a personalized relationship with you, I suppose, um, they're more, they're more interested in what you're doing. Right. And they'll, they'll be more loyal. They'll buy the books or there's that. I don't know if that's true or not.
Neil:
Humans are rare, scarce. Yeah. So face on the front of Amex.
Cal: That's true. Yeah. There's no face. So, so I don't know. Um, I don't know how this is going to shake out. Like, I'm more visual now than I used to be because I do, it's really the podcast that had to make me more available because in the podcast you're in someone's ear and then once you're doing a podcast you do want a visual component to it because people just, if you're going to do it people consume these in different ways so now you're visually out there. The thing that first got me occasionally recognized was just book tours because all of these other podcasters who I used to just call into from my home built these studios and I had to like fly around and go to these places. It was after ‘Digital Minimalism.’ That was really the first time.
Neil:
Do you pay for that or do they pay for you?
Cal:
It's a mix. Usually it's those tours, it's the publishers paying for the tour.
Neil:
Okay, okay. I was just curious when you start creating a podcast, because I heard your rant on like the $6,000 like Rich Roll Studio versus the like $250,000 CBS Studio. I thought that was a great point that you made. Yeah, yeah. You didn't say Rich Roll, you said, “Malibu,” but I kind of figured it was Rich.
Cal:
That might have been Rich. Yeah. So anyways, I don't know It's weird. I mean I've talked to Rich about this too, he said it got weird once he was on YouTube, like people recognize him now. I don't know how it's gonna shake out. I mean, here's the thing is I think There is the reason why people are more visible I don't know about the sharing personal details piece that I think is a social media artifact and I think that is maybe not as important as people say I don't, I mean, I don't talk, I mean, I'll talk about some of my systems. Uh, you know, I'll mention like my, what we do with my kids and screen time, but like, for example, my wife is not a character.
Neil:
I purposely didn't ask you their names.
Cal:
I don't say their names. I have an agreement with my wife that she didn't opt into this world. So I don't talk about her. I don't give her name. I don't, she doesn't want to be discussed. You know, she didn't opt into this world. Um, and, and I don't talk a lot about non-professional things other than like interest, like movies. Uh, so I don't know if that's true. I don't think you have to be, let me let you into the details. That's a very modern thing. This idea, it's very YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok thing, of we're going to form a connection by me being vulnerable and sort of like being honest and expressing like what I'm worried about. And that I think might be more faddish. I do think a visual connection with people, this is why TV dominated radio, you know, like people like the newscaster. I don't know anything about Dan Rather, but I like that I can see them. There's all these points of visual information.
Neil:
JFK over Richard Nixon.
Cal:
And yeah, so, so I do think, uh, at least if you're doing new media that by new media, I mean not books, but you know, something digital, you're online. It's inevitably going to have a sort of video. You're a personality point to it. But what I'm trying to do is still keep myself as a professional presence online and try to keep the rest of my life separate.
Neil:
This is great. My current thinking on this, by the way, is if you work for it, you can find it, but if you don't work for it, you can't. So I've taken my face off my books, even my most recent book. I purposely don't have my face on. I've taken my face off my podcast. I've taken my face off my social media, like my Twitter thing is like not my face. And yeah, I'm doing live speeches here. I'm on a video podcast. So that's what I'm saying. It's like, if you want to like find out what I look like, and I'm not going to hide it from you, but I'm not going to push my face out at you so that I can do what Jonathan Franzen told us, which is I want to be able to ride the subway un-molested.
Cal:
Jonathan Franzen famous. That's how we should describe it. Right. Yeah. People really don’t know what he looks like, but he's incredibly well respected. Chris Nolan. That's the other example. Yeah. He's the king of the king of his medium right now. Most people don't know what Chris Nolan looks like. He could walk into a restaurant and no one's gonna be like, ‘Oh my God, it’s Chris.’ I mean, in LA they would, but like out here in DC, he could walk into a restaurant. I think everybody knows what Tarantino looks like, Tarantino and James Cameron and Spielberg. They messed that up. They got too…they're too visual. We know what they, we know what they look like, but they're kind of like, directors have it easy. Authors used to be this way like a lot Michael Crichton. I bet a lot of people don't know what Michael Crichton looks like. John Grisham is yeah, he's a tall guy, 6’5”. John Grisham I don't know if a lot of people know what John Grisham, Stephen King maybe you would know what he looks like, but you didn't know what writers look like. I bet a lot of people didn't know what Malcolm Gladwell looked like. I mean, maybe he's kind of distinctive.
Neil:
Mmmm. Big frizzy hair. Yeah.
Cal:
When he did all the speaking, I don't know. I mean, talk about narrow problems. Neil.
Neil:
No, I think it is broadly applicable though, because I think that if you're young and you're being told that you need to get out there and you need to bootstrap, you need to hustle and you need to freelance, there is this somehow algorithmically derived expectation that you need to front yourself. And we see it in negative ways, obviously, with like teens and sexting and so on and all that stuff. But I just wanted to get your pull back and I got it and I love it and I appreciate it because I felt like a lone wolf on this thing.
Cal:
Now I got to pile on for the young people. Also, all of what we're talking about, even like where you should be visual or not, all of that is given the prior of you have some craft that you're mastering doing really well. It's just a matter of how, how are you going to be in the public after doing that? Right. And so if you're young, forget all of that. All that matters is I need to build up the skill to do something really, really good. That's really valuable. Then you can worry about, okay, now that like I've done, I'm doing great things. Um, do I want to be…have my face on the book I wrote? Like, that's the right question because I think young people are, have been given this idea, this comes out of the social media companies themselves, that you can just directly alchemize yourself, just being vulnerable and visible and open, that'll just alchemize somehow into being really valuable. That's actually the thing that makes you valuable and well-known. And it's not the way it works. You still need craft. You still need to do something.
Neil:
Oh my gosh, that's a great phrase. Just being vulnerable and open and visual somehow alchemizes into valuable and it doesn't.
Cal:
That's the whole TikTok scam, right? It's like, how do they get people to post stuff to TikTok? Because they need a certain percentage of people posting stuff to TikTok? Well, because TikTok directly controls every video fed to every person. They just do this game. If you're a new creator on TikTok or like on your third or fourth video, they throw like ten thousand views at you and they give you this sense of just something about me is like really appealing and I'm like right on the border of being like a superstar influencer. They feed your vanity and now it's the cocaine pellet in the rat cage. You're like, I'm going to keep posting things on here and then they'll give you another hit. Yeah. Then like here's 10 posts later, 7,000 views. You're like, Oh my God, I'm so close. So it's a lottery mentality, right? This idea. It's like all the, all the boys, my son's oldest son's age have this idea of like, if I'm just playing Minecraft on YouTube, it might just like happen for me.
And then because I know how to play Minecraft, I know how to talk about like I'm playing. And so it's something anyone can do and it could just lottery. And then you're like Captain Sparkles or whoever. I don't know who people listen to now. You're like this personality.
Neil:
I, I'm yeah, I, I have a lot. I want to pile onto your pile on and I'm going to hold myself back, but I think people get the general takeaway of what we're saying. I'll tell you guys things though most people don't know is Henry David Thoreau, the author of ‘‘Walden’’, originally published in 1854 by Tickner and Fields in Boston. Everyone's cover of this book is different. I happen to have a version that has the introduction and annotations by Bill McKibben. So it's just like a bunch of kind of black and white sparse trees in the forest. I don't know what version you have. It just says ‘‘Walden’’ in the top in all caps and a highly kerned, heavily spaced, serifed kind of Times New Roman type of font.
Across the top, it says ‘Bill McKibben gives us Thoreau's ‘Walden’ as the gospel of the present moment by Robert Richardson.’ From the back, Filed in Nature/Literature, first published in 1854, Henry David Thoreau's groundbreaking ‘Walden’ has influenced generations of readers and continues to inspire and inform anyone with an open mind and a love of nature. With Bill McKibben providing a newly revised introduction and helpful annotations that place Thoreau firmly in his role as cultural critic and spiritual seer, this beautiful edition of ‘Walden’ for the new millennium is more accessible and relevant than ever. Obviously, that's just my version. Now, Thoreau lived from 1817 to 1862. So how he died like the age we are like I'm 44. You're ish the same.
Cal:
Forty one.
Neil:
You're 41?
Cal:
Yeah.
Neil:
Well, you finished college the same year I did, but you were three years younger than me. Holy cow.
Cal:
No, I finished college in 2004. I started college in 2000.
Neil:
Okay, so when you said you're a sophomore or junior you were a sophomore that is a little bit better in college. I thought, wow, you skipped three grades? Thoreau lived from 1817 conqueror, Massachusetts and he died 1862 in Concord, Massachusetts. American naturalist, essayist, poet, philosopher, lifelong abolitionist and delivered lectures that attacked the fugitive slave law. Thoreau’s philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of many notable figures, including Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. Sometimes he's referred to even as an anarchist. File this one 818.303 for literature/English North America/middle 19th century.
Cal, please tell us about your relationship with ‘Walden’ by Henry David Thoreau.
Cal:
Interestingly, it was the hardcover version of that edition you have right there that I first read it. Taken out of the science library at MIT that edition with the Bill McKibben introduction.
Neil:
2004. Yeah.
Cal:
And so it was it was on the new release table, and which I would go there and I would take books off of the library. We put, oh, here's our new releases in science writing. And that's how—
Neil:
Where were you, you were at Dartmouth?
Cal:
This would be now at MIT. So I graduated in this.
Neil:
Which bookstore? The Coop?
Cal:
No, in the library.
Neil:
Oh, the library. The library. Not Harvard bookstore or anything.
Cal:
Yeah, I mean, I would go to the Harvard Coop and I would go to the MIT one as well. But I would go to the science library. I had no money back then. I used to go to the Harvard Coop as I lived near Harvard Square, even though I was at MIT. And I didn't have any money. So I would just go.
Neil:
Where did you live? I lived there too.
Cal:
I was living originally off Chauncey Street.
Neil:
Don't say 1558 Mass Ave.
Cal:
Not on Mass Ave. I was a little bit north of the Cambridge Commons at first, living in a building where they had a plaque outside that said Nabokov. You mentioned him earlier. Wrote Lolita staying in this apartment building. So we lived there for a while. Yeah, it was really cool. And then we moved towards Huron.
Neil:
And I know the crisscross fries of Cambridge Common well.
Cal:
Yes, exactly. But I used to go actually the Harvard bookstore and I would just get a pile of books and go to that cafe on the second story and get coffee or tea and I would just read the books because I couldn't really afford them. So I would just sit there and read them. Anyway, so I read that edition. Here's why. So I read it in grad school. So we can set the scene. I probably got it in 2005 or something. I read it by the banks of the Charles. So it was a sort of nature-y scene. It was incredibly influential because...
I think people misunderstand ‘Walden’, especially people who haven't really encountered it in depth and they think of it as a nature book because he has this beautiful nature writing in it and he's a very good nature writer. It's not a nature book. It's not primarily a nature book. I mean, look at the first chapter. The biggest chapter in the book is called economy, right? And if you look through it, it has data tables in it, right? There's not, Hey, let me just talk about the beauty of nature. So what ‘Walden’ really was, was an incredibly erudite self-help book. And what he was doing is saying, I have a question, a key question about how to design your life, how to live your life. And he had this very key question that was at the core of the first half of the book, which is he was looking at the trappings of modern life and all the things you buy and how much you have to work to get these things. And he was thinking, I think we have this trade-off wrong. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go back to the...the bare needs of existence. So I'll go out to this cabin by Walden Pond and I'm going to figure out what's the minimum amount of money I need to survive. Beans to plant, food to eat, I'm going to build this on someone else's land. What's the actual amount of money I need to not be in deprivation? He's like, okay, so this is our baseline. And his whole experiment was what's really worth adding on top of this?
Like, how happy am I when I'm doing this? And is it worth to do like all this more labor so I can afford this nicer thing, but that nicer thing is gonna require all this labor? And he came up with this really interesting equation of you have to consider the moments of your life and the time and energy that you have to work in order to generate the money to pay for the thing. Is that thing really worth that much of your life? And so he was grappling with these like fundamental questions about how to design your life built around a combination of his own experiment. Let me live at the base amount. And he calculated how much, that's why he has data tables. Here's exactly how many dollars and cents it costs for me to be alive and not deprived. And then he calculated, okay, how much work if I was just working as an hourly laborer on my neighbor's farms, how much work would I have to do to generate this much money? And it was like a half a day a week or something.
And he was like asking this question of like, how do we get from that? Like 50 hours a week and all the stress and these mortgages. And so he was really questioning assumptions about life and the good life and what it required to live. And why did he do all that beautiful nature writing that try to indicate? Like there's all this value he was getting that didn't require him to work 50 hours a week. He's like the copper pot is nice, but also watching the ice is nice. But the copper pot required me to mortgage my farm.
Yeah, so it was an erudite self-experiment based self-help book.
Neil:
So the copper pot required me to mortgage my farm. Therefore it costs, you know, in the broadest sense of the word more.
Cal:
These were the quiet desperation, right? So, you know, famously men living lives of quiet desperation is this key line from ‘Walden’. What was he referring to? What was the desperation he was referring to? He was referring to Concord farmers who had these mortgages on their farm so that they could buy nice stuff. He talks about copper pots, he talks about Venetian blinds, and their desperation was that they were under this crushing loan debt, and they had to just work and work to try to keep up with this debt, and they were sort of desperate because they were trapped. And was this state of desperation worth the Venetian blinds and copper pot when...watching the ice on the, because he’d write about so eloquently, watching the ice change on the pond and looking at the snake and for an hour just watching this, he's like, this is just as diverting as the copper pot, but I only have to work a half day a week. So it was like a really radical self-experimental based rethinking of what's required to live a good life. I think that's such a cool genre of writing. And that really inspired me to consider radical ideas as like the foundation of writing to like the question, big assumptions, the excitement in that. And so I think it's like one of the best self-help books of all time. Even though we see it as literature and nature writing and people who love it would say, I hate self-help and self-help is so low. And why would you ever, but ‘Walden’ is a fantastic self-help book.
Neil:
Wow. There’s a lot there. There you used a couple sentences ago. You said just as diverting like he talks about walking on the pond and the winter and how the view of it looks like totally different than when he's on there in a canoe in the summer. And you said just as diverting as the copper pot and the Venetian blind. So what do you mean divert? How are you using the word diverting? What do you mean? Like just as what?
Cal:
Like capable of capturing and keeping your attention.
Neil:
Ah, just as capable of capturing your attention, meaning that is some elevated goal.
Cal:
Yeah, like this is interesting and ennobling and value producing. Just nature itself is so exciting. I mean these all became the ideas of course that the counterculture movements of the 50s, 60s, and 70s in the US were all building on these ideas, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, the ‘Voluntary Simplicity Movement’, ‘The Back to Lands Movement’, all of these movements, ‘The Commune Movements’, slow, they were the original slow movement. They all are sort of pulling from some of these same radical ideas. This is a very radical book that Thoreau was throwing bombs. And like the modern reader is like, oh, he's, that book was such a nice description of nature's beauty. You know, it's like he was throwing bombs like…
Neil:
And when you say throwing bombs, you even said, I love this genre. How would you label and define the…what else is on the shelf of this genre? What is this genre you're talking about?
Cal:
Yeah, I mean, these are any books where they try to destabilize like some idea or assumption you have in a way that then like completely changes how you think about things.
Neil:
That's what you've been. That's what you asked. We talked about the very beginning of the conversation in terms of what the value of reading and books is in general. So it seems like this is your thing. This is what you aspire your books to do and you are doing with your work in the New Yorker and with your email list and with your ‘Deep Questions’ podcast and with you. It's throwing bombs.
Cal:
You can see it directly. That's why this book is so influential to me. My first two books written before I read ‘Walden’. ‘How to Become a Straight A Student’’, ‘How to Win at College’. The premise is I talked to really successful students and here's what they do. First book I write after ‘Walden’, How to Become a High School Superstar. This is a deeply contrarian book. It's one of my favorite books that no one has read, but it's like a, it's a crazy book. It's like a college admission book written like a Malcolm Gladwell book. There's a whole backstory to it, but the whole premise of this book is that all of this like stressful striving that kids are doing to get into college, they have it wrong. And I went and spent time with these kids I called relaxed superstars, including by the way, Ramit Sethi's brother, Manish, which is interesting. Cause I knew Ramit, I've known him for a long time. And so it's his brother. Yeah, his brother Manish.
Neil:
How did you come to pass with him?
Cal:
Well, I knew Ramit just because we were the same age. He graduated Stanford right around the time I graduated from Dartmouth and we had a friend in common. And it was actually Ramit who told me early on. I have this friend, Tim Ferriss, you got to read this book. He's he's writing. So it's all a small world.
Neil:
You call them you call them relaxed superstars, relaxed superstars.
Cal:
And it was kids who got into good colleges and they were just like relaxed, interesting kids.
Neil:
I totally know those kids. I hated those kids!
Cal:
Yes. I wrote a whole book about them.
Neil:
And it was like they'd show up to the exam with like I got like all these black bags in my eyes from study all night. I got all these they like have like three words written on their hand as like just a way to recall a million things. I was like.
Who are they're skateboarding at night?
Cal:
Yeah, and they were these kids and they would get interested in things. They were like truly interesting. They didn't do a lot of things, but the things they do are interesting. Like Manish wrote a book when he was in high school, which like really made a big difference. It was like a guide to computer programming, but it really made a difference. Anyways, so I wrote that in the next book after that. ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You’. It argues that follow your passions, bad advice. And that was like the central piece of career advice when that book came out was follow your passion, Steve Jobs said, follow your dreams. Like this is what you should do.
That's a ‘Walden’ inspired book. It was, this is no, that's wrong. Let's rethink from the ground up, very ‘Walden’-esque. Let's rethink from the ground up, how do you build a career you love? Like ‘High School Superstar’, let's rethink from the ground up, what makes someone impressive? You know, so that bomb throwing, a ‘Deep Work’ had a sort of a similar-
Neil:
Counterintuitive.
Cal:
Yeah, ‘Deep Work’ was like stop using social media, all this stuff you're doing online, all this email and stuff. Like this isn't gonna make you, this is getting in the way.
You should focus on what really matters and be the person who's like disconnected. You're going to be more successful. So it's, you know, that, there's a lot of ‘Walden’ influence in that because I love that feeling of, of destabilizing something you took for granted. And when you destabilize it opens up all these new alternatives and new opportunities for you.
Neil”
Yeah. Yeah, totally. I, um, that's really mesmerizing the story itself and the way you've painted it through the through line of your books. I mean, what a great thing to be able to have written books that you can point to past cells. I mean, you don't got to go on a Facebook timeline to see it. You can just check out my bibliography, which is awesome. And congratulations and well deserved. And now I really want to buy my kids ‘How to be a High School Superstar’ so they can learn to be like this. And a couple of things come up for me. One is, you called him the self-help guru. I mean, or you called him, Thoreau, like a, like a self, like a pre self-help, you know, self-help guy. Um, and there's a question I have been trying to formulate for like a week. And I don't, I still don't have it congealed, but you're so gifted. I'm going to, you're going to, I'm going to give you like the half, the embryonic question and see if you can take it from me.
I'm listening to you to prepare for this with Andrew Huberman, Rich Roll, Tim Ferris, Adam Grant, Chris Williams. It goes on and on. You were pretty much in every big podcast. Maybe just not Joe Rogan, but pretty much every big podcast you were on. I know a lot of these guys. I know we're one degree of separation from a lot of these guys.
They're all rich, like rich, like financially rich. And they're all. And I include myself in all this stuff, by the way, I'm not saying they are. I'm saying they're weird. Like they're weird. Like there's, there's like a, there's like a, and I don't, there's a great quote. I think it was Paul Graham said recently, these days, “The algorithm is so homogenizing that if you're doing anything remotely interesting, you are by definition weird.”
So I love weird, weird is great. So weird not to be weird, John Lennon, I'm with you on weird. But I'm just like, when you go up close to these guys, like some of them I have been, they're like way off. They're not two separations from the main, they're like eight. They're like so rich, so hot, like attractiveness. Like I saw a picture of Andrew Huberman with his shirt off on the internet this morning. Someone was sending me a tweet and I was like.
Oh my god, like that guy could be on the cover of like muscle mag.
Cal:
He's very fit. I can confirm he is very fit.
Neil:
See what I'm saying? And like, but on every level and I'm like, is it just me or are we taking our advice? Like, is it that we're taking our, is it that their stuff works so well that like this is the manifestation of it? Because I will also say, and I mean, no judgment by any of this, the whole question is non-judgmental, but there's also a lot of like,
When you go up close, there's that old Neville Ravikant phrase. It's like, what, I want to trade lives with the person. And often the answer is, again, no judgment, but like family has often not been a priority for a lot of the people or the kids are not. And that's fine. Everyone's got their own thing. Everyone does their own life. It's great. But I'm just looking at the self-help industry as a thing. And is it weird that the self-help echelon, let's call it whatever 10, 20 names anyone listening wants to put in there. Well, you go up close, you're like, this isn't really it for almost anybody. Yeah. And I don't think it's even achievable or desirable for most people. Like I'm stymied a bit by this wrestling I'm having with the industry. I know that we're both in.
Cal:
Yeah. Well, OK, here's what I think they would say. I don't think any of the people you mentioned would think of themselves as self-help gurus, I think they all think of themselves as being in the Johnny Carson role. Like their job is to bring the interesting people onto their shows and, and bring you there's one exception because Huberman does the deep dives on. So he would see like what he mainly does is actually doing research deep dives on a single topic. And you know, he'll spend 50 hours reading about melatonin and whatever. So that's a little bit different, but all these other characters they don't see themselves as like, I'm not giving advice from my own life. I bring on interesting people. I bring in interesting people. That's how they would describe themselves. And most of them, I think if you ask them, they would say, yeah, you don't want my life. Don't switch with me. Like there's a, there's a lot of stress. Like they all will tell you. And now I'll tell people the same thing about me. There's a lot of stress that comes with, um, being more public, for example, you do have wire. They don't seem like normal people. You're right about that. They're all very interesting. That's kind of a necessity, I think, to be a media figure. You have to be interesting. You’re commanding attention. It's like if you want to be on TV, you have to be.
Neil:
The classic Jay Leno versus David Letterman. They both looked really strange. They looked really strange. And they were followed by Conan, who looked even stranger.
Cal:
Movie stars are the same way. They're strikingly beautiful. They're strikingly beautiful in a distinctive way. Like, you know, if you walk past Emma Stone on the street, it would just like catch your attention.
Neil:
Or Timothy Chalamet. I'm like, oh my God, this guy is so specifically lanky and big. He's an unusual.
Cal:
Or Brad Pitt. You just have to be like, that's the most attractive human being I've ever seen. I mean, this is like I can't think about anything else in this party now. You know, and so the podcast, the visual podcast world, it's maybe not to be like the most attractive. It's everyone's distinctive. Like I'm good friends, for example, with I don't know if you know, ‘The Minimalist’, they have the show.
Neil:
Yeah, yeah, I know them.
Cal:
Yeah. But I was just out there doing it. But like Joshua, like wears his hair…It's kind of like a joke. He wears it like super bouffant high, right? Because it's interesting visually. So yeah, I agree. But I think that's, they're not really, I mean, maybe they all see themselves, I think, as channeling other interesting people.
Neil:
Is that not post-success view of yourself though? I mean, like, this is probably why I'm so attracted to like first books in general. Like the pre, like when I wrote ‘The Book of Awesome’ in 2008-2012. My wife had just left me and my best friend took his life. I'm writing an awesome thing a day. This congeals into a book. That book still has a unique energy and I don't think any of my books have equal because of what I was in my in my life like a unique like a harried up all night frenzied, anxious just weird energy in that book. Yeah I get a lot of people saying I was going through my divorce and I lost my best friend I read your book nowhere in ‘The Book of Awesome’ does it say that that's what I was doing. Yeah but yeah that it translated through you know what I'm saying.
Cal:
Like that David Goggins book it just has this like hungry weird interesting energy in it that like just from this guy and what he was going through and he's just like laying that out in a book and it just hit people who are in similar situations. It just was like, okay, this is, this is a first book. This is raw. Like this is like a, you know, it just hit people in a way. It wasn't calculated.
Neil:
I guess what I'm trying to also rail against or at least bring up in a discussion point with you, and I appreciate you going there with me is like similarly with like the ads on podcasts, like it's like the ads on pockets are, it's a ludicrously priced industry with massive thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars per read per show with full of this thing. And it's like, does that not, does that not do something with the message itself? Like, like.
Cal:
Yeah, maybe.
Neil:
Like I know I'm stuck in my own stupid no ads thing that I'm stuck on from like 1983 I don't know why I'm on this world of no ads.
Cal:
I don't know. I think it's too new I think people are trying to figure it out like or is it just you know the your favorite show on TV, then you have the Colgate commercial. It's like, yeah, the commercials are what pay for the show. And it's always the person on the show saying, that's what's different about it.
Neil:
I like it. I think you should buy it. Go to my name. Go to this.
Cal:
Yeah. So it's weird. I think it's weird how that's working. And like, should it just all be programmatic ads? But then programmatic ads are a third of the CPM. And so it's hard to support the show. I think that's all being figured out. It's a weird world, but I actually think we should have more public intellectuals giving advice. Like, I think giving advice. We have…We have this real concern about it, right? It's like in our current, especially like elite culture is like, don't give advice because someone might say who are you to give that advice? Or they'll critique you for like, well, you gave that advice but you're missing X, Y, and Z. But I actually think it's like a healthy cultural thing to have more people like Thoreau was doing. He's like, well, look, I thought about this. I'm idiosyncratic. I'm giving a take on things. Because I've always had this belief, which is really not shared right now by a lot of people who sort of write about books, but I've always had this belief that the audience is very smart. The audience is very smart. They understand their situation and context, and they're very good at, you know, I can go back and read Thoreau. A lot of what he's talking about is not directly relevant to me. I'm not a farmer in Concord in 1850, but there's like some ideas in there. I probably can adapt to me. So I was like, I want him throwing bombs and then I'll sort of see what resonates and what still is like timeless in there. And I can do that sort of filtering, but there's a, there's a culture now that says, no, the author has to do all that in advance, right? Like you can't.
Neil:
Can you give an example of this, cause I have not heard of this, ‘not giving advice’ dictum. Oh, well, I don't, I don't disagree with you. I'm like, what do you mean exactly?
Cal:
Well, first of all, like you see this with almost any journalist that goes into nonfiction writing. If they're coming out traditional journalism, they don't put advice in the book. Even if all people want it from it is advice.
Neil:
It's a meditation. It's an exploration. It's an investigation. It's a gotcha.
Cal:
It's Malcolm Gladwell coming out of the Washington Post in New Yorker. His books are, these are advice books, but he would never put a piece of advice in it. Whereas I always used to talk about West Coast, East Coast pragmatic nonfiction, all the East Coast writers came out of East Coast journalism and you can't put advice in the book. The West Coast writers are coming up entrepreneurship, like Ramit and others, and they'll put advice like, yeah, here's, people want information. Try this, try that. Like it's all full of advice. Tim Ferriss, it's different. Right. It's a different field.
Neil:
Go to this website, go to this virtual assistant category, look up this.
Cal:
Yeah, because it's a different way. So I'm a big believer. It's like, I like books that take big swings and then like people will filter it. But there's this, the two fears are the, who are you fear? Like people are very afraid. They'll say, who are you to give advice? And the point is like, everyone is their own person. We can understand the context of a person pretty easily. Give us your best swing. And we'll see which of your balls come to our part of the field. Don't be afraid to take the swing. And then there's this weird caveat concern, right? Where it's like everyone, everyone has a particular thing that they really care about. There's like a hundred things out there you could care about. And they'll get really upset if you don't specifically like address their thing or at least acknowledge their thing, but they don't care about the other 99 things. They're just going to be like, I'm really upset at you because, you know, you're not thinking about…You didn't specifically talk about childcare or something, because I really care about childcare and childcare and work.
Neil:
That's also coming up with the whole DEI stuff has gotten a little out of hand where it's almost like you're afraid to not…I just gave a speech recently and the person before me was laying out the sort of mandatory diversity and inclusion module that everyone's…and you could just feel in the room. I'm like, no one likes this. No one agrees with this. No one understands this. Everyone's afraid of this. No one wants to say the wrong thing.
No one's putting up their hand for questions. It's like, whoa, we've gotten to like an..ice shattery place with some of this stuff.
Cal:
Well, so you get it like outside of that context, like in nonfiction writing, right? I see it a lot. It's not DEI so much as there's also the audience completeness issue. Is so anything that started with that's nice for you, but what about dot, dot, dot. And so what you can do is like with anything that's prescriptive is you can just look for an audience to us. The advice doesn't apply. And then somehow this has become like a standard critique where of course all advice is for a particular audiences. So it's sort of like you write a book about running. You're going to have someone say, well, that's nice for you, but what about people whose foot is broken? Like they can't run. Right. And so it's like, okay, so should I say clearly this advice, you know, for some people though, their feet is broken. So let's talk about like how they can exercise. There's a lot of that, you know, I used to get a lot of that with ‘Deep Work’. Like I write books about knowledge workers and I'll get a lot of like, yeah, but what if you're not a knowledge worker and what if you're this, this and this? I was like, well, I didn't write a…I didn't write a book about that.
Neil:
Well, that's what you're saying now. Thank goodness because you've got the awareness through the feedback. It's like, I got the same thing on ‘The Happiness Equation’. It's like, this is good if you're privileged enough to do that. And I'm like…Well, I know, I guess that's my view.
Cal:
But yeah, but I bring it all up to say this is dissuading more people. I'm used to this, but this is dissuading new voices from giving advice. And what I would love would actually. So here's my I'm going to make my DEI pitch is: I love advice and people taking swings. I want people from all sorts of jobs and backgrounds and cultural backgrounds. Whatever it is, I want the biggest possible variety of people just taking ‘Walden’-esque big swings at like, don't caveat it and protect it. We'll do that as the audience. Just give it your best swing. Like we should destroy phones in a fire. Like give it the big swing, you know what I mean? Or like we should, jobs should only be 10 hours a week. Like take the principle and push it to an extreme and purify it and clarify it. That I think is so exciting. And then of course I'm a reasonable consumer of information. I'll….I'm not just going to go do those things and I'll get to the real point of what you mean and I'll reject some and accept some. But I wish there was a world where more people were taking more big swings with advice. But I think there's a lot of fear of like, what if people say, who are you? Or that might be nice for you, but what about? And that became scarier now because in social media, you hear more of it. And I think maybe it feels like it's everyone saying it. And so I think it's like scarier. And because of that, I think we have a lot less people than we could, like, taking swings at like interesting ideas, pragmatic ideas. And I think we need more of those ideas, not less.
Neil:
Oh man. I know you're not on Instagram, but that was an Instagram Reel, Chapter 82 with Quentin Tarantino, our question our final questions always give us one hard-fought piece of wisdom and his last piece of advice was ‘Do not censor yourself.’ Yeah, which I thought was a really good point. Do not censor yourself. Um, there's a lot there. Uh, become a digital Minimalist be slowly productive while you're doing your ‘Deep Work’ so that you can eventually be so good. We can't ignore you. There we go. Um, and I like that I’m just gonna say repeat for people I thought about this. Points you said that Thoreau said, other people say we're going to your next book is I thought about this I'm idiosyncratic I'll give you my take. I like that thanks are great about this I'm idiosyncratic I'll give you my take that being the caveat in the middle I'm idiosyncratic like you said that I thought about this I'll give you my take but in the middle you're saying I'm just, you know, that's kind of like the, the preclusion. I'm, I'm idiosyncratic.
Cal:
Let me give you a quick example. Another quick example. I recently, I liked this book. So I bought a first edition recently of Thomas Merton, ‘Seven Story Mountain’. This is a very idiosyncratic book. It's about, uh, is a NYU professor in the fifties who becomes a monk and goes to a monastery and it's, it's about this experience. It's very, it's very Catholic book. Um, but very psychological and theologically astute. There's like profound ideas in this book.
Even though, of course, it's like a very weird, idiosyncratic thing this person is doing. Like most of us have no interest in becoming a Trappist monk, but like it has profound ideas. Wendell Berry is the same way. He's a weird, idiosyncratic guy. He's still, I mean, he's like 89 now, but he uses horses on his farm still. You know, he's a weird guy. He also left NYU, went back to Kentucky to farm and write about farms and natures, but his books are, his ideas are electric and they're inspiring and interesting. Even though like, of course, like a lot of the stuff he's writing about is like, I'm not going to farm with horses and this is like really narrow. Yeah, that's narrow, but the ideas have like really deep resonances. So we like, I'd like the weird, the idiosyncratic, that people in different situations, just like taking swings and writing essays and giving proposals and giving advice. Like I wish more people were less afraid.
Neil:
But I love that. Totally agree on the same horse. Pun intended. But you also said, I also tell people, ‘Don't change lives with me.’ And you said with all of these up close weirdos and I clue myself in this like wholeheartedly, by the way, like I'm not saying I'm not looking at these guys outside of a lens. I'm looking at us in the petri dish here. I, you know, there's, and you said too much stress that I heard you say that cause there's too much stress. Is that what you said?
Cal:
Yeah. Being a, I mean, you see this, right? You have this in your own life. Like the more public, like the more exposed you are, that's just, straight-up linear function stress and like the more like exposed or public you are like careful what you wish for if you're like a young person who's like I want to be famous online. No, you don't you want to be Coen brothers famous. Make an awesome movie. Don't let people know that you look like that. That's better. Yeah, it's just trust like the more public.
Neil:
Like Jonathan Franzen famous.
Cal:
But also, they also I guess not just being visible now that I think about it just the more…like Jonathan Franzen has to care about. He's a lot more critiques of him now because he's famous or his books are more well known. He's going to get the backlashes now. It's like the more prominent you get, it rises in proportion. The better selling my book is the more like critique I get, the more the more it's like interesting to be anti-Cal Newport. It's not interesting to be anti-Cal Newport when no one knows who Cal Newport is.
Neil:
It's kind of like the more reviews you get, the more one star reviews you get.
Cal:
A hundred percent. Yeah. Like a book that's all five star reviews, it’s like a first book or it's like a quirky book, it's not a famous person's fifth book.
Neil:
Oh, nice. Okay. Speaking of a famous person's first book, let's now go and close the conversation off with your third most formative book. And I'm, I love, I really appreciate this. You're really, you're, you're we got like fifth gear cow here and I'm loving it. And, uh, I can feel your energy. It's really dynamic and palpable. Thank you. But let's now jump into. Your off days perhaps with ‘‘The Sabbath’’ by Abraham Joshua Heschel. That’s H E S C H E L originally published in 1951 by Farrar Strauss and Giroux the most…the most unpronounceable publisher of all time. It's a golden brown cover with stylized wood carving. I know it's a wood carving because the whole book is full of wood carvings of the Menorah, but as a twisted artistic series of almost not yet bloomed roses with Hebrew letters set on each flower slash candle. Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in 1907 in Warsaw, Poland, died 1972, age 65 in New York.
He was a Polish-American rabbi, one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century, he got to the US in 1940. You can kind of picture war-ish times.
Cal:
Barely got here.
Neil:
Yeah, okay, you know more than me. And then learned English and then wrote this book 11 years later, which you can file, by the way, under 296 for Religion/Other Religions/Judaism. Cal, tell us about your relationship with ‘The Sabbath’ by Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Cal:
Yes, I like a lot of his books. I think somehow when you come to a language late, it can lead to a much more interesting style. Much more like considered style, you're kind of learning it from scratch. He's a beautiful writer because he mixes in all of his books, the poetic with also like the highly structured, almost academic rationale. And he goes, he moves back and forth between those forms, like in the same chapter. So it'll be, it'll, he'll be like beautifully poetic, but also be laying out some sort of argumentative structure that's like well-structured and balanced. And so it's a, he's a really cool writer. He, it can be tough. This is like one of his more accessible books for sure. But yeah, I really admire him.
Neil:
Still tough, but it's still tough. I found it still tough for me.
Cal:
Yeah, this one's tough. Yeah, this one. This one is it's a little tough, little interesting. I mean, if you read more of him, it's interesting.
Neil:
I mean, I liked reading it, I made a ton of notes.
Cal:
Yeah, it's a cool. It's a cool book. I like reading…religious thinkers can write really cool books because they're so contemplative Jewish religious thinkers write really cool books because like all they do is sit around and think and grapple with things and it comes up with like really cool books. So I'm a fan of his, I'm a fan of the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Okay, so ‘The Sabbath’, why do I like this book? So it does a lot of things. It's a theological discussion of Shabbat, ‘The Sabbath’, the day of rest from the very sheet, from the Genesis.
Neil:
So those that don't know this, just give me three more sentences on the Sabbath, what it is.
Cal:
Right. So in that tradition, and so like the Judeo-Christian tradition. There's one day, so when you look at the seven-day story of God's creation of earth, on the seventh day he rested. So that's the Sabbath, and so you're commanded then to do that yourself. And so Christians place the Sabbath’ on Sundays, and Jews place the Sabbath on Saturdays. Comes from the same, obviously the same book of what we'd call the English Genesis.
Neil:
Right. they just started on a different day.
Cal:
They’re different calendars. Yeah, sorry. Different day. But whatever it is both the last day by however they count. So this book is trying to like understand this tradition and there's some theological arguments in it like his main theological argument is that Judaism versus like the religious cults that came before and different than Eastern religions…is sanctifies time and not space. So it's a religion that exists in history, in real time. It's not an abstraction. We're not looking back to abstractions, and it's not as much about sanctified places as it is like this time is important. But he has another argument in there that has a very secular resonance. And so he's explaining like God working to build, create Earth and God resting.
And he's putting this out as a sort of ideal template for the human experience, which I think is like really relevant. I came to this book much more recently. So I think it's really relevant for this pandemic, post-pandemic moment of work and work angst and anti-work movement and ‘Slow Productivity’ and all the stuff that's going on right now. This book really resonated with me when I read it because he's arguing, well, the work is important.
I mean, God was creating the earth, and this was important. This was important stuff, and it was good. And they used the Hebrew word for good, right? These acts of creation are good. But then God rested for the last day. And not only is that good, they didn't use the word good there. This was the one day where they described it as ‘holy’, Kedushah, ‘holy’, the Hebrew word for ‘holy.’ So like the day of rest is holy as well.
And Heschel makes this argument, like it's holy not in some instrumental sense, not in some sense of it's your reward for the work, not in some sense of it's going to recharge you so you can do more work. But because it allows you to appreciate like the other wonders of life, like they would, the tradition they would talk about is supposed to give you a taste of, like a utopian post redemption afterlife. It's like your taste of the world to come. And that's what you're celebrating. But you can see it as you're appreciating all the other stuff, that's ‘holy, that's not work. And so like the work was good, but also like the other stuff is holy as well. And so there was something really critical about that, that seemed to me to unlock, like how to think about work, how to think about anti-work, how to think about productivity, how to think about anti-productivity. That like, we had this figured out as humans back in this late Bronze Age, when these first, the things that coalesced into this book were first being told in surviving cultural evolution, was like the work can be good and important.
And also the non-work is good and important and holy even. And both of this stuff is important. And somehow we have to figure out how to keep both. So we can't just come at our current moment and be like, work or the urge to work is just an epiphenomenon of capitalist exploitation. But we also can't come at it and be like, okay, what matters is work. We need to rest just so we can get better at work. Like sleep is about maximizing work. Like all that matters is like the work. We had this figured out, you know, in 800 BC that both are important. So anyways, I found a real secular resonance from this otherwise theological book.
Neil:
Yeah, absolutely. I...National Geographic said in January, I think 2022 that, you know, the world is tilting towards the secular majority. The US, I think maybe have crossed 50% people no longer ascribed to a particular faith. I know Canada is over that threshold, Finland, the UK, France, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand and like the world is kind of, you know, the fastest growing religion in the world is none. You know, you've maybe heard that to the point where I wrote an article for Harvard Business Review in 2019 or something called, “Why You Need an Untouchable Day Every Week and How To Get One’, they titled it, it was a good title and then the comments I'm reading the comments and someone's like this dude is just saying the Sabbath! I didn't even…
Cal:
You invented Genesis.
Neil:
Exactly! 2800 years later, whatever, so. First of all just for context, when did you read it? How did it come to you? I get how it's been formative. So, you read this most recently of the three. So were you like, where were you in your life here? How did you get this book?
Cal:
This is like after the pandemic started, like sometime like late pandemic. Relatively recent. Relatively recently. I'd read a lot of Heschel and I hadn't read this one.
NeiL:
So you read it in the pandemic. You're like, it's like pandemic time. You're reading this book. How do you practice it in your life? You're the guy that wrote the book, ‘Deep Work’. I know I've heard Mark Manson and many other people saying self-help authors are talking to themselves. You know what I mean? Like, this is a common trope in the self-help industry that we're talking to ourselves. I, whenever I complain or whine over texts or emails, someone's like, yeah, I got a real good book for you, buddy. It's called ‘The Happiness Equation’! Have you not read your own book? Like, so I'm asking just in general, you come across this book. It strikes a nerve with you is if I understand correctly, a religious based kind of treatise, that's the right word, that has broad societal and personal implications. You have also written a lot on this topic in general with books like ‘Deep Work’, ‘Digital Minimalism’, and most recently ‘Slow Productivity’. What's the Cal Newport manifestation of this today?
Cal:
Well, I mean, first of all, you'll see those fingerprints throughout ‘Slow Productivity’. I mean, this idea of take longer, you're producing the good thing over time, it's not about the hustle in every moment, it's the what did you produce over the last five years, not what did you produce today. That notion of stretching out your definition of productivity, there's a real sort of a Heschel-ian Sabbath type of idea in there. I follow, I try to actually follow something like that practice of a Sabbath or Shabbat every weekend.
Neil:
So tell me what that looks like.
Cal:
Well, I try to match it.
Neil:
The intro of the book is like, my parents are running. She's running by his daughter. My parents are roaming around like Friday night, like getting the steamer going on the cattle and this. And then like literally the clock, I think it's the sun goes down and then like they just stop. If something's going on the stove, they don't finish cooking it. Like it's like a lights out kind of thing.
Cal:
Yeah. Well, no, I'm not Shomer Shabbat, as they would say. That's the sort of like the, an Orthodox Jew like the Heschel's would you have all these things you don't do but I like the Jewish timing versus the Christian timing, because Saturday versus Sunday.
Neil:
Wait what’s the difference, sorry?
Cal:
Saturday versus Sunday. And it doesn't, it’s Friday night, it's Friday night at sundown to Saturday at sundown. But, but it's you know predominantly on Saturday versus like the Christian timing of Sunday because Sundays it's right before the week starts again Saturday that seems like the right day to try to the step away and appreciate the holy is because, your week is ended at Friday, starting Friday night. How perfect is that? Like, what do you do?
Neil:
So what do you do in your Friday, sundown and Saturday sundown? What do you do? What don't you do?
Cal:
What do you email? So no work, no email, no, uh, so no work, no email, no, um, I think no news, it's a little bit more nuanced than that. It's, it's, uh, content that is, um, created to create a reaction. So don't…nothing viral like I can see it like a newspaper or something, but no like I'm going to mess around on my phone or something like that.
Neil:
But you're allowed to use your phone.
Cal:
Yeah, but I don't know if I would use it much.
Neil:
I mean I would use it if I could. And I know your phone is kind of like my phone. No game apps, no social media, black and white. Exactly. Your phone's pretty locked down to begin with.
Cal:
I use it to like text a few people, most of them are related to me and to stream baseball games. So yeah. Shut down.
Neil:
I like the Nationals.
Cal:
And today's only day, by the way.
Neil:
My team, by the way. I mean, this is the Expos, let's be honest here.
Cal:
Okay. I get you. We will take that. We'll make that connection. We're brothers now. I'm just saying, in 1993, or ‘94, sorry, the Jays had won the ‘92 and ‘93 World Series. Shout out to Roberto Alomar and Joe Carter and Devon White. And in 1994, the Expos, the Expos, managed by Felipe Alou, I believe, had, at the time of the baseball strike, the best record of all time in baseball by that time of the season.
Cal:
That strike.
Neil:
And they never played another game in Montreal again. Yeah. Like it was like you couldn't have ended that story on a worse note in Montreal. Yeah. The first baseball team outside of the US. And then like they never won the Toronto team with a new rich city. They took over in population and skyscrapers. Now they get the World Series and then they had the best season in baseball history. And then they never played in game of Montreal again.
Cal:
Well, but we appreciate, we appreciate it down here in D.C. because we've been having a great time with the team. So it went to a good cause, Neil. I mean, we're happy. We're happy to have the team. Just pr0nise me you'll wear a Montreal Expos hat to a baseball game. I will. They're around. I was just there the other day for the Futures game. But anyways, all right. My practice. Friday after I'm done with work until Sunday.
Try not to do any work, any email, any like looking at content meant to like get you excited and just it's family time, it's reading time, it's you know, go on adventures time. My wife and I try to, when we can have like a standing date on Saturday night, we see a lot of movies and stuff like that. That's, it's huge for me, especially when I'm in these periods of high stress, like book launches, et cetera, that just know you can fully move out of that mindset.
And I'm not going to check something because I don't check something till Sunday. Like having the rules be really clear makes a difference. So that's a great.
Neil:
You're inspiring me. I'm not nearly as fastidious, although I love the differentiation between. I don't read like online news as much. I do read it. I don't read it as like when I turn stuff off, I turn that off for sure. I don't have any cancel on my news push. But I'll still like if I buy a paper Saturday or Sunday near top like that is a different part of my brain somehow.
Cal:
Yeah, you're not, it's not being curated by algorithms. You're just sort of like encountering what's there.
Neil:
I want to see the full page what Yoko Ono's got to say this week.
Cal:
Yeah, they made their money when you bought it so they don't need to now like get you to compulsively.
Neil:
The business model investigation piece again, this is you're good at peeking under the hood.
Cal:
It's also the they make it's the New Yorker model. Yeah, we got these subscribers. We have a million subscribers and they pay a lot of money. It's an expensive magazine.
Neil:
Very. It’s like $700 a year or something!
Cal:
It's cheaper than that.
Neil:
I’m in Canada.
Cal:
But yeah, well, that's different. It should be cheaper. But they've got that's it. So don't worry about ads. They don't worry about. They just like we can just like write really try to write really great stuff. Get good writers like write great stuff because we're not playing the game of like viral online spread. So we can have a writer like I work on articles for there. They're like. Go work on this. We'll help you. Let us know what help you need. And you just sort of work on it till you're done.
Neil:
You know, how many edits are you doing? How many rounds of editing with them? I've heard, David Sedaris told us people don't realize I do 17 rounds of editing before I send it to them and 11 rounds after.
Cal:
It's a lot of editing. Yeah. And then like it's, well, it depends on the article. Like if you, if you nail it, it's, you know, it takes for, I mean, it's a lot of.
Neil:
Who’s your editor there?
Cal:
I work with a couple people. I just started working with a new editor named Marella I was working with Josh Rothman as well before that.
Neil:
I'm not gonna get to my millions of New Yorker questions so I don't have to park that but I got lots to say about the New Yorker is a…It's a…I just did a massive deep dive interview with Susan Orlean, you know, the New Yorker since 1992.
Cal:
She's great writer for sure It's my favorite thing I do. it's the most fun thing I do.
Neil:
It's the favorite thing I do?
Cal:
It’s so fun. It's so fun.
Neil:
We're going to close off the fast money round questions now, Cal! You're ready? All right. Hardcover, paperback, audio or E.
Cal:
Uh, all depending on the circumstance, whatever's quick. Like if I really want to start reading the book, I'll get the e-book because I don't want to wait a day or two to get it. Uh, if I really like a book, I will go back and buy usually like a first edition or early edition hardcover. So I'll have multiple copies of it. Uh, I try to read books on audio, but I have a much worse success rate except for very specific types of books. So I'm on all the formats.
Neil:
Except paperback.
Cal:
No. So if a books and paperback, that's what I'll buy if I can wait a day or so to get it. If I love it, I'll go and buy a vintage hardcover copy of it for my library.
Neil:
Yeah, this begs the next question, which is how do you organize your books on your bookshelf?
Cal:
It's by subject. I mean I have multiple libraries, but I have a library at home with all built-in bookcases and library lights that like shine down on it. I love my library. It's all organized by topic, all types of books, like here is all of my like technology criticism books. These shelves are all fiction. This is like my business books. Here's my like vintage productivity books. I did a New Yorker article earlier this year where I walked through my collection of vintage productivity books, starting with the fifties and like, how do they change from each decade? So I'm a by topic organizer.
Neil:
Sounds like the ‘Newport Decimal System.’
Cal:
Yes. I know where every book is.
Neil:
Here I am using Dewey in my house. Wow. And what are library lights?
Cal:
So like at the top of the bookshelves, they come out and they shine down on the books in the shelf.
Neil:
How do I not know this? I don't know this.
Cal:
They're great. They come out, they’re brass.
Neil:
The thing I've heard of that I don't have in my house, but I wish I had when I built my bookshelf, is the bottom shelf kind of on a 20 degree angle. Have you seen that?
Cal:
Ooh. So you can see that.
Neil:
Every bookshelf...This is a Billy bookcase, but every one upstairs we actually did build in our walls and we did do the corner being a front facing corner unit, you know, it's like I could get my thematic. But I've seen in bookstores that the very bottom shelf tilts out at like a 10 to 20 degree angle. And it's awesome. You don't kick the books or whatever, but it's such a good way to look at the bottom shelf. Otherwise, you'd like squat to see it. Yeah. Anyway, what is your book lending policy?
Cal:
Oh, I give books out left and right. The only problem is my books are marked up six ways to Sunday. So I'm happy to lend it to you. I love people to read books that I like, but they're going to be marked up.
Neil:
How do you mark up books? What are your markup, what are your one or two key markups?
Cal:
I do corner marking. So I put a slash to one corner if I'm marking that page. And then I do brackets and check marks. And that's it. And I do that as I read real time, minimal fiction. I can go back through and follow those marks and recoup the main ideas of a book. It takes about five minutes. If you've corner marked a book, you just you go to the pages, mark, you read the things, you remember it. So all my books are corner marked. Wow. Um, do you have a ‘white whale book’ or a book you have been chasing the longest?
Cal:
You mean in terms of, uh, getting a good version of it or reading it?
Neil:
Purposefully left it vague, but I guess I meant reading.
Cal:
Oh, that's it. Yeah. Yeah, I do have I have a few books that…
Neil:
Or a genre that you're like I've never read anything by this! Me it's like the Russians, you know, I mean I've read like one of the Russian books.
Cal:
I do, like I have like, one of my New Yorker editors who's like a literature PhD was like you need to read Anna Karenina and I bought it and I have it but I haven't read it yet.
Neil:
We'll put that we'll put that as your white whale book for now. Do you have a favorite bookstore living or dead?
Cal:
A bookstore! Well, here in my hometown, an independent bookstore finally opened called People’s Book. I love that. I'm in that place all the time.
Neil:
What town? I thought Politics and Prose was your...
Cal:
I like Politics and Prose too.
Neil:
So I know you did that event there with David Epstein, but what's...
Cal:
I did. Yeah. So I’ll give you the geography. So I live in Washington, DC, but I live in a small town right at the border of DC called Taoma Park.
Neil:
Okay, got it.
Cal:
And in that small town at Takoma Park. So like I could...you know, 50 feet from sitting right now in my studio is an independent bookstore. That's right. It’s where I do all my signed copies through, you could order them through this bookstore. And we sold, you know, four or five hundred copies. People's Book. No apostrophe. It’s like People's. Like People's plural, book singular. And then Politics and Prose is like the big independent store in D.C. I've loved them as well. I've done five or six events there and I did a book launch. I did my book launch there recently. So that's an awesome store as well.
Neil:
The conversation with you and David was great in his newsletter, by the way. I thought that was really well done.
Cal:
David's the greatest. But I can walk to be able to walk to a bookstore and like know the owners and like know the staff. It's my dream. So I've been happy about that.
Neil:
Oh, I love that. Yeah, I live in downtown Toronto. When I first moved here, people said, my cousins were like, there's houses in downtown Toronto. Like, isn't it just people walking around like puking and rats and stuff. And I was like, do you know how many books there's like a walk to from my house that are open till midnight? Like that was my big, like.
Cal:
That was your pitch. Yeah.
Neil:
Um, what, and we've had a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate your time, your generosity again, especially this is post-launch for you. This is an evergreen show. I only have guests on once it's 333 inspiring conversations for a thousand formative books total. That's…the show's done on April 26th, 2040. We know that end date. So it's curated. Um, and thanks for being part of our curation. So what is your final piece of hard fought advice or wisdom for all the book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians listening to this chat?
Cal:
Well, I guess I'll focus on book writers since like among that list, that's, uh, that's what I am.
Uh, look, if you're writing, if you're writing a book, uh, in the end, the thing, there's all this other stuff we do. And we talk to, we talk to people and do interviews and have podcasts or this or that. But like in the end, the thing that matters is writing the book that delights you. That's like your best chance of, of changing minds and making an impact. Like the book that delights you that you're, and it'll do what it'll do. Um, but that's what makes this like an interesting field. It’s what makes this a rewarding career. And it's how the very best, biggest performing books are often written. It's weird and idiosyncratic and brilliant. It's like ‘Walden’ was at the time. So you gotta write what delights you. And then the other stuff, let that work out.
Cal Newport, ‘Write what delights you.’ Thank you so much! This has been absolutely inspiring. So I'm like gonna be reeling and processing this for days after there's so much nutritional, intellectual density in this conversation. I am so grateful. Thank you so much for coming on 3 Books.
Cal:
Thanks, Neil. It was great. I enjoyed it.
OUTRO, Just Neil:
Hey everybody, it's just me, just Neil again, hanging out in my basement, listening to the wise and wonderful Cal Newport. Ah, he takes us so many different places in this chapter of 3 Books. Did any quotes jump out for you? I got a pile in front of me to just kind of give you some of my highlights. How about this one? Um…
Actually, I want to start with books. ‘I think books are the best bargain in the human intellectual experience. I just wanted to pause, underline, bold, highlight that one. I think books are the best bargain in the human intellectual experience. He expanded, because you're spending $20 to get what a mind has been specialized on, an idea that has been specialized on for years, and spent years trying to crystallize that knowledge into the optimal structure, and you get to transfer all that cognitive effort from that brain to your brain, for like 20 bucks.’ A wonderful way to put it, obviously, you know, our next chapter, or it could be the next chapter, one after that, is with Jonathan Franzen, and he talks a lot about working and reworking and reworking pieces of writing so that they become totally polished. And again, Cal Newport’s bringing us back to the value of books, the value of three books, and the value of all this stuff that we're all focused on here. Only pockets in the world buy, and for book lovers, writers, makers, sellers, and librarians. And most of us are book lovers first and foremost. That's why we're here, that's why we're hanging out.
So it's nice to hear Cal give us, you know, solidify our purpose for being here together now. I like this one. ‘I think young people have been given this idea, which comes from the social media companies themselves, that you can just directly alchemize yourself by being vulnerable and visible and open. And that will somehow alchemize into being really valuable. That that's actually the thing that makes you valuable and well-known. And that's not the way it works. You still need craft. You still need to do something.’
This is a really nice reminder to me because I can tend to get obsessed and worried about like what's going on online and how many, you know, we're putting these things on YouTube like we're over, and now I'm recording videos, now we're editing the video version of it, you know. It's a lot of extra work, and that's like how many views do we get, how many followers do we get, how many subscribers? It's like, just focus on the craft, just take the advice and ‘Slow Productivity’ to obsess over quality focus down, not up and around right, and try to just get better and better at what you're doing.
How about this one, last one. ‘When is it appropriate for someone to get unrestricted internet access? The safe answer is 16. And the culture's not there yet, but I think we're a year or two away from that being a very common thing.’ If you think about unrestricted internet access, I mean, I had it younger than 18 because I was coming of age when the internet access kind of came up with bulletin board services and things like that.
But now with the publication of ‘The Anxious Generation’ by Jonathan Haidt, our past guest on three books, HAIDT, you know, we are shifting the classic 15 year time period. We're more aware now than ever before about the risks and damage that can be done if you just give kids the whole internet in their pocket, right? Jonathan Haidt is saying that we have been kind of overprotective of our kids physically and underprotective of them digitally and so we're kind of riding that ship now. Cal Newport, thank you so much for coming on the show and giving us three more books to add to our top 1000. We're getting close to the 500s now people. Cal has given us number 606, ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen. Number 605, ‘Walden’ by Henry David Thoreau. And number 604, ‘The Sabbath’ by Abraham Joshua Heschel. It's H-E-S-C-H-E-L. Thank you to Cal.
Thank you to all of you. Thank you so much for being here.
END OF THE PODCAST CLUB:
All right, did you make it past the three second pause? If so, I'd love to welcome you back to the End of the Podcast Club. You made it, you're at the very end. Now it's time for our after party. It's one of three clubs that we have for three books listeners, including the Cover2Cover Club. Just drop us a line, let us know if you are listening to every single chapter of three books. We're gonna add your name to the FAQ, put your name in lights. Okay, we started doing that, so we're getting the names coming in now. And the...secret club. I can't say more about this, but you can call our phone number for clues and please do call our number. It is one eight three read a lot. That is a real number. 1-833-READ-A-LOT. And let's start off the End of the Podcast Club as we always do by going to the phones. Here we go.
Leah:
Hi Neil. This is Leah calling from Huntsville. Alabama. I'm about five years late to your podcast. I found out about it…Sorry about the background noise. I'm walking on my lunch break? But I found out about 3 Books when you were on Rich Rolls' podcast. And since then, I have been voraciously listening to every episode. I think that was about 2 months ago, and I'm on Chapter 59 now. I just wanted to call and tell you how much I am enjoying the podcast, and let you know how much it has just broadened my reading. I love to read, but I just finished ‘Enlightenment Now’ by Steven Pinker. And I don't believe that's a book I would have read without hearing about it on your podcast. I'm currently reading ‘Quiet’. But there are so many things I love. I am planning to write you a letter to let you know because it's too long to discuss in this voicemail. But I just wanted to let you know, listen to Chapter 58 with David Mitchell. Really could not believe that you played music afterwards. I was in my car listening to that episode and thought that Apple Music had picked up and then realized it was the podcast. So I truly appreciate everything you're doing and look forward to actually catching up to episodes that you're probably currently on because right now we're still in 2020. I have no doubt that I'll pick up and then be on your moon schedule. So take care and again, just love everything you're doing. Goodbye!
Neil:
Thank you so much to Leah, from Huntsville, Alabama! For calling our number, 1-833-READ-A-LOT. First of all, I love that you’re walking on your lunch break. Everybody should walk on their lunch break. Get outside! Breathe in the phytoncides, the chemical that trees naturally release in order to reduce your cortisol and yeah, your stress hormones, great, get outside. Thank you for calling! Call me from outside! If you're outside right now, and you're wondering, just tell me one formative book in your life, one guest you dream of, one thing that you liked or didn't like from the show. Give me a call, 1-833-READ-A-LOT. Also, Leah, a couple references here to other chapters. You said you're on chapter 59 now, which is chapter, which is with Jeff Speck, author of ‘Walkable City’, which I found out about from Ann Bogle.
Okay, wonderful books, podcaster. She picked, ‘Walkable City’ when I met up with her in New York just before the pandemic. You mentioned the music at the end of chapter 58 with David Mitchell. That is the ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet’. I actually paid for the rights of the composer, but if you're on Spotify or something, you wanna find that, I recommend just putting that music on loop. I sometimes write to it. ‘Cloud Atlas Sextet,’ S-E-X-T-E-T.
And then you also mentioned ‘Enlightenment Now’, book by Steven Pinker. I had to go back and just double check, but that book was given to us in chapter 12 by Chris Anderson, head of TED. And you also mentioned Susan Cain's book, ‘Quiet’, ‘Bittersweet’, ‘Two Big Gems.’ Susan was our first ever live podcast guest back in Chapter 102 down at the 92nd Street Y. You know, just honestly going through those numbers of those chapters, I'm kind of realizing like, okay, yeah, it's been six years already.
I was 38 when I started, I'm now 44. You know, part of the value of pegging a show to the full moon and the lunar calendar, it's just that it gives us a bit of a pace-fulness. I feel like, sometimes I feel like I haven't done anything all day, you know, I have this self-critical feeling and something like, oh my gosh, I'm wasting my day. Like, oh my gosh, it's lunch, I haven't done anything yet. I have this feeling and then, you know, this is the benefit of having these thousand-point kind of calendar things, is oh yeah, we did have that conversation five years ago.
Little bits, bit by bit by bit. That's the way to do it. All right, now it is time for the letter of the chapter. And for this chapter's letter, we are gonna go to Neeti. We are gonna go to Neeti! Neeti has written us a letter. I wanna just read it out loud now.
Okay, here we go. Ah, let's zoom in on the letter here.
‘Dear Neil, I have been a devoted listener of your podcast for more than three years now, and only today have I dared to request a guest for your show. Why today? You may ask. Well, there are a handful of reasons. First, I really want to earn the right to recommend a guest, which after being a loyal listener, I would want to believe I have.’
You absolutely have.
‘Second, I came across the perfect context when listening to episode Chapter 134 with Susan Orlean. In the chapter, you ask Susan to recommend Indian writers and books. As an Indian listener, who would love to have Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni on the show, I thought this would be the perfect time. From the day I first decided to request Chitra on the show, I've been thinking of the right choice of words to describe the impact her books have had on my life. This is the third reason for waiting so long. I am convinced that my limited vocabulary and flimsy writing abilities will never be able to describe the profound impact of her writing.
Today I am banking more on the serendipity that unfolded in the last chapter than on my written expression. It would be great if you could reach out to Chitra. I'm sure many of the listeners will enjoy your conversation with her. I would be thrilled.’
From Neeta B. over in India, recommending Chitra. I want to get the last name right here, but I'm probably not going to be able to. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni on the show. Okay, who else knows Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni?
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, an Indian American author and poet. And she's currently the professor of writing at University of Houston. Oh, interesting. She got a short story collection called ‘Arranged Marriage’, which won an American Book Award in 1996.
Let's reach out to her!
We need to have more Indian…I wanna have more global guests in general, right? I wanna have, I mean, part of the advantage of recording virtually like this, you know, cause the show started just in person only, in person only. And...I love doing in-person interviews. That is obviously the dream, right? You get a connection that I don't think can be replicated virtually. But if we're going to be doing virtual conversations, which we started in the pandemic, then, you know, how do we talk to more people from India, from Africa, from Southeast Asia, from, you know, places that it's harder for me to get to?
And so I'm adding Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni to our pitch list. We have a big giant pitch list. I will add her to that. We'll look up her email address, we'll reach out to her. Really, I should probably pick up that book, ‘Arranged Marriage’, kind of get familiar with the writing myself a little bit first. It's a pressure I put on myself, you know, get familiar with the writing first. And other international guests, I will also say, you know, Neeti, you've given us the, you've given me the like kind of purpose to reach out to everybody.
If you have a guest that's...far away from North America, that you think we should have with their interesting background, their interesting experience, their interesting voices. Maybe it's connected to books, maybe it's not. Maybe they're an author, maybe they're not. Maybe they run the largest publishing house in Namibia. I don't know. Then reach out to us, give me a call, give me an email. It's 1-833-READ-ALOT if you wanna phone me. And our contact information if you wanna drop me an email is over at 3books.ca as well. Okay. And now, as always, let's go…
Now it's time for the word of the chapter. And for the word of the chapter, let's head over to Mr. Cal Newport. Over to you Cal. Teleology. Yes indeed, it is teleology. Teleology, can we hear it from the dictionary lady? Teleology. Teleology, T-E-L-E-O-L-O-G-Y. The basic meaning is the study of ends or purposes. A teleologist attempts to understand the purpose of something by looking at the results. Complicated word, big word, you know, Cal uses a lot of interesting words, productivity pr0n, schema, synergy, nihilistic, erudite, ennobling, linear function, we maybe could have done a sound cloud here, but let's focus on this word that neither of us really knew what he meant when he said it, but that's what the whole point of the word of the chapter is. On Wikipedia, teleology is: ‘finality, a branch of causality giving the reason or an explanation for something as a function of its end, its purpose or its goal, as opposed to a function of its cause. Hmm, a purpose that is imposed by human use, such as the purpose of a fork to hold food, is called extrinsic. Natural teleology, common in classical philosophy, though controversial today, contends that natural entities also have intrinsic purposes, regardless of human use or opinion.’
For example, Aristotle claimed an acorn's intrinsic telos is to become a fully grown oak tree. Right, okay. What is the telos of this show? What is the telos of you and this conversation? Something to think about as we get ready for the full moon in May, Chapter 136. Guys, 3 Bookers, thank you so much for being here. This has been a long conversation, a deep conversation, a profound conversation.
If you haven't already done so check out Cal's new book, ‘Slow Productivity. Check out his podcast, ‘Deep Questions’. Thank you so much to Cal Newport for being on here and thank you to all of you for listening. And remember until next time that you are what you eat and you are what you read. Keep turning that page everybody. And I'll talk to you soon. Take care!