561 - The Best Case for Not Fearing AI, Help with Email and Creative Diet with Cal Newport

Summary

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Creative Pep Talk – Episode 561

"The Best Case for Not Fearing AI, Help with Email and Creative Diet with Cal Newport"
Date: June 24, 2026
Host: Andy J. Pizza
Guest: Cal Newport

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Episode Overview

The episode centers on reclaiming humanity amidst modern digital overwhelm, especially for creative people. Andy J. Pizza interviews Cal Newport—bestselling author, theoretical computer scientist, and productivity expert—about three major topics:

• The real story behind AI and how not to fear it.
• Approachable, human-based productivity for creatives.
• The need for a healthier “creative diet” in media consumption.

Andy and Cal bring both practical and philosophical insights, aiming to help listeners not just survive, but thrive creatively in a noisy digital world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Cal Newport’s “Secret Sauce” for Clarity in Writing

[07:26]

• Cal attributes his clear, implementable writing style to his background in theoretical computer science:

  "My secret sauce... my brain was trained to do proofs and mathematics, which is all about all the pieces have to fit and when they do, you have the choir of angels." – Cal Newport ([07:26])

• He believes “dense but vague” books fail readers, preferring work where each piece is harmonious and logical, similar to a math proof.

2. Storytelling Tightness: Fiction, Screenwriting & Michael Crichton

[09:06 – 14:28]

• Andy and Cal nerd out over how tight plots (e.g., Back to the Future, Jurassic Park) create satisfaction.
• Cal relates the evolution of Crichton’s Jurassic Park and the discipline of starting over creatively.
• Andy notes that creative work (like illustration and book publishing) requires an un-precious, process-over-product mindset.

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3. AI Mania—A Grounded Perspective

Hype vs. Reality

[16:48 – 41:53]

• Cal describes two simultaneous forces:

  1. Genuine technological progress in “generative AI.”
  2. Rampant hype, driven by media, corporate PR, and economic interests.

  “There’s these preposterous layers of hype… I’m trying to reality check it.” – Cal Newport ([16:48])

• Terms like “vibe reporting” refer to journalistic narratives that loosely connect AI to real-world events (like layoffs), even without real causation.

  “There’ll be a general vibe that feels correct... even if I know this isn’t true because it’s directionally correct with my feelings about what we should care about.” – Cal Newport ([19:21])

• The “fear” generated (intentionally or not) works for both media engagement and AI company investment narratives.

• Much of what is reported as AI apocalypse is, Cal says, not supported by real evidence.

The Actual State of AI

• Cal describes the three phases of LLM (Large Language Model) development:

  1. Scaling: Bigger models got better until ~2024.
  2. Post-training/tuning: Focus on incremental gains for specific tasks.
  3. Application layering: Improvements now come from smarter tools that use LLMs, not smarter models themselves.

• Key insight:

  "What really happened... there was no AI breakthrough, there was no machine learning breakthrough... The underlying language models really have stopped getting smarter a couple of years ago and we're just doing the long tail of product market fit." – Cal Newport ([22:05], [37:12])

• Tech CEOs hype “superintelligence” for business reasons, not because it’s imminent.

• Much of Silicon Valley’s existential AI panic comes from a subculture that treats it like a new religion.

On Creativity and AI

[43:12 – 47:22]

• Creative work is fundamentally “an act of mind reading”—a deeply human-to-human communication.

  “The point of writing is it’s a deeply human endeavor… a human communicating their brain state to another human.” – Cal Newport ([44:20])

• AI-generated art/writing misses that essential spark.
• Andy relates our preference for human art over “monstrous” or robotic sources.

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4. Human-Based Productivity – Especially for Neurodivergent Creatives

[47:26 – 57:32]

Email Overwhelm – Why It’s So Draining

• Email isn’t hard because of quantity alone; it’s the “context switching” between unrelated threads that’s cognitively exhausting.

• Cal explains:

  "When you go message to message... that's really, really hard for the brain to do... It takes a long time for us to switch these sort of non physical, you know, abstract context." – Cal Newport ([49:02])

• Typical advice about batching or willpower misses the point; the issue is we’re using email for real-time, frictionless collaboration, creating endless message chains.

Timestamps & Hacks:

• [51:58] Cal defines “context switching.”
• Andy shares a multi-pass inbox processing method ([53:49]), and Cal offers a tweak: process one project/context at a time, not by task type, to reduce cognitive fatigue ([55:09]).

Managing Tasks and Project Flow

• Move collaboration out of the inbox (e.g., set up office hours, structured tools).
• Trello cards and time-blocking approaches can further help segment contexts.

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5. A “Creative Diet” and the Coming Cognitive Fitness Revolution

[58:54 – 71:48]

• Cal draws on his new NYT op-ed: We need a “cognitive fitness revolution” — paralleling 20th-century physical health enlightenment.

• Analogy: Ultra-processed food (Oreos, Doritos) = ultra-processed content (algorithmic short-form videos).

  “What is short form video content if not ultra-processed, right?" – Cal Newport ([60:22])

• We should value “artisanal” media—books, movies, music made by humans, for humans.

• Andy notes how youth already push back against “AI slop” and celebrate authenticity.

• Both see hope in cultural movements akin to punk or indie scenes, as society “detoxes” from digital junk food.

  “We are more resilient than you think.” – Cal Newport ([68:36])

• Andy wants to help foster this movement through creative consumption communities (book/movie clubs), and encourages listeners to rethink how and why they engage with art.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “If it’s a deeply human communication, don’t let AI write for you.” – Cal Newport ([44:59])
• “You're not supposed to stay on top of everything, but get to the bottom of things.” – Andy J. Pizza ([72:11])
• “If I'm a grown up, I'm not pounding Oreos every day. Maybe I need to stop consuming ultra-processed content.” – Cal Newport ([60:22])
• “I like the tightness. Maybe we go through an era where everything’s loose… but yeah, I miss that tightness of a plot.” – Andy J. Pizza ([11:45])
• “Sometimes it’s just getting the right vector… Like with the Truth campaign for teen smoking: the right vector for this awareness was to emphasize the fact that these tobacco companies are run by these old men in suits who are laughing about how they're manipulating you.” – Cal Newport ([66:25])

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Cal's writing craft and clarity: [07:26 – 09:48]
• Story structure, Back to the Future & Jurassic Park: [09:48 – 14:28]
• AI reality check & vibe reporting: [16:48 – 26:30]
• Silicon Valley’s AI “religion”: [27:48 – 32:47]
• LLM development 3-stage timeline: [37:12 – 41:53]
• Creativity is “mind reading”: [43:12 – 47:22]
• Email, context switching & productivity: [48:53 – 57:32]
• Cognitive diet manifesto & short-form video: [58:54 – 63:12]
• Hope for creative culture, resilience against “AI slop”: [64:38 – 69:11]

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Action Steps & Creative Call to Adventure (“One2Three Z”)

Andy wraps the episode with three practices for listeners:

1. Get more sober, reality-based AI information:
   – Listen to Cal’s “Reality Check” episodes on his podcast, Deep Questions.
2. Try “slow productivity”:
   – Read Cal’s latest book or listen to his productivity episodes. – Focus on getting to “the bottom of things,” not all the things.
3. Engage with deep, human creativity:
   – Spend time with a challenging book, film, or album. – Seek out “artisanal” rather than algorithmic content.

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Tone & Language

• Andy is energetic, self-deprecating, always channeling the creative’s inner voice, asking practical questions and sharing candid struggles.
• Cal is lucid, analytical, a clarifying influence, balancing the high-minded and concrete.

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For Listeners Who Haven’t Heard the Episode

This discussion is an antidote to digital overwhelm—dispelling AI panic, advocating human-scale productivity, and inviting a more intentional creative life. Cal Newport’s expertise brings needed calm and clarity, and Andy’s perspective ensures it’s always rooted in the lived reality of creative people today.

Key Takeaway:
You don’t have to fear AI or feel overwhelmed by digital chaos. Reclaim your time, your inbox, and your attention. Choose a “creative diet” that feeds your humanity and fosters deep, satisfying work.

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Transcript

[Andy J. Pizza]

This is not an ad, it's a gift. I'm going to be at the Icon Illustration Conference this year in July doing a handful of different things and I asked them if they could give me a discount for the listeners of the show because I would love to see you there and hang out at the after parties and whatnot. And they let me have a hundred dollar discount to share with you, which is just so generous and so awesome. If you're an illustrator, I highly recommend going to Icon. It's been a magical experience the times that I've gone. Even the first time in 2014 that I went, it was a very scary leap, but so worth it. Go to icon icon.creativepeptalk.com to learn more. The discount is automatically applied to that link. Icon.creativepeptalk.com Hope to see you there. Are you feeling like a robot? Are you feeling like everything is not quite real? Like it's a simulation? Like you're. There's a distance between you and, you know, reality. The grass, the trees, the sky. Well, there is a distance unless your face is right up in it. But besides that, for me things, I just don't feel as human as I used to feel. It's easy for me to feel like I've lost my sense of humanity because of the onslaught of what we are just being consumed with as we're consuming it through our phones and devices. How to be more human. That's what this episode is about. With someone who his whole job is about being human. Cal Newport is back on the show. If you know me, if you listen to the show, you know I'm a mega Cal Newport fan. So I was thrilled that he agreed to come back and have a long chat with me. We talk about three things that he talks about on his podcast and his books that have had a huge impact on me reconnecting with my own humanity. We talk about AI. He has the most hopeful anti AI apocalypse perspective and this guy is a computer scientist. This isn't just wishful thinking. It's not predicting the future with optimism. It is the reality of why things are not what they seem to be based on what the AI companies and tech companies are selling you. And that's really good news. And we get into that. We also talk about productivity. The only productivities I've ever put into practice and stayed in practice with have come from this guy. And so we're going to talk about that and how you can have a more human productivity slant. And the third thing we talk about is consuming creative work in a more human way. And that has just been a huge deal to me recently as well. So think you're going to love this episode. I'll be back at the end for our creative call to adventure. Something you can do with this episode. Not just feel good, but do something that has an impact on your creative journey. Today CTA is called One2Three Z and I bet you want to know what that means, but you have to wait till the end to figure that out. It's going to be something that you can do to get some more of that humanness back in your life and in your creative practice today. But for now, let's go to Cal Newport. Let's talk a little bit about AI without going doomsday, but quite the opposite. On the creative journey, it's easy to get lost, but don't worry, you'll lift off. Sometimes you just need a creative pep talk. Last summer me and the fam went on a once in a lifetime trip to Italy. It was amazing but very hot and I had to learn how to dress for that kind of heat. You want looser, breathable fabrics which I hadn't really ever thought about. And I started carrying that learning and look back to my wardrobe here in the States for the summer. Like my new stripy short sleeve European linen button down shirt from Quint. Sophie just got a new pair of European linen pants from Quint that look swishy and flowy and cool and light and look in my heart of hearts. We know we will never be as cool as the effortless Italians that we saw in Florence. But with these summer looks from Quint's we can look the part and feel literally cool. Like temperature wise at least Quint's European linen pants and shirts are the perfect warm weather upgrade to add to your rotation. Starting at just $34, they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. Quint's goes beyond clothing. Custom upholstered sofas, ceramic cookware, premium bedding. It's the kind of brand you end up recommending to everyone for everything. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quints.com Pep Talk for free shipping on and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com Pep Talk for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com Pep Talk man, I can't tell you how badly I wish I had been able to find a great therapist that accepted my insurance. Back in my mid-20s, I was figuring out I was ADHD. I was struggling in my career and struggling to support a new family. And finding a good therapist that I could afford would have been a total game changer. I'm almost 40 now and I've been in therapy in some capacity for the past few years and it has made such a massive impact on my mental health. I truly wish that everybody could do it. And that is why I'm thrilled to tell you about Rula. Rula is an online healthcare company that allows you to quickly and easily find therapists that accept your insurance. Literally. The first thing you do on their site is put your zip code in and your insurance into the search bar. And Rula asks you a few simple questions about the care that you're looking for. And boom. Delivers lots of options of therapists that take your insurance. Rule of patients typically pay $15 per session when they use their insurance. And I love how this is making therapy accessible to more people. Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high quality therapy that's actually covered by Insurance. Visit rula.compep talk to get started. That's R U L A.compep talk. You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget. Honestly, probably the number one thing that I say when I recommend your books is how much of a clear writer you are. That clear thinker, I think that that is pretty unique. Like I think especially in books, like so much. So many books in this world are the title and then just an exploration of that in 10 different directions. Whereas I feel like your stuff is always just super, super clear. Like sometimes even the stuff that's really great but denser. I can think of some authors that I won't name just because it's not a flattering thing, but dense stuff. But you walk away thinking, I have no idea how to implement that. Like I would have to study this book for years for it to like take an effect. And I feel like with your work it I can point to and I'm going to do this later. Very specific areas that I know, like this came from Cal's work and it stuck. And I think that the clarity is a big piece there.

[Cal Newport]

Yeah, I mean I appreciate that my secret sauce in that is the fact that I'm a theoretical computer scientist. So it's like my brain was trained to do proofs and mathematics, which is all about all the pieces have to fit and when they do, you have the choir of angels. And when they Don't. It's incredibly uncomfortable and irritating. Right. So when you're doing mathematics, oh man, I need all these pieces to fit together. And if they do, you have a proof. And if you don't, you don't. It turns out those same circuits apply when you're writing. And so, like, I will. I will be viscerally uncomfortable if I know I introduced an idea over here that didn't pay off. Or this is not symmetric with the other case here exactly. Or there's a little bit of ambiguity between does this mean this? Or this? And I'm just incredibly uncomfortable with my writing. And until the pieces click together like a math proof. And because of that, it does, it creates that effect where it. I think the human mind, when it reads, we underestimate this. If there's pieces that don't quite fit, you get a discomfort. Even if you don't immediately flag like, oh, I'm so mad because that doesn't match this thing. Three paragraphs later, you come away instead with just this sort of. Something doesn't quite feel right. And when all the ideas in writing click because our brain is using other parts, you know, of our neural circuitry that we're evolved well before writing, when all the parts click into place, I think we get a sort of satisfaction that we then interpret as. Something about this writing really resonates with me. So I'm like a mathematician trying to write nonfiction journalism. And I actually think if you can also learn how to control language is like a really good combination that we don't see enough of.

[Andy J. Pizza]

That makes tons of sense. Have you ever thought about writing fiction? I know you're a big consumer of fiction. That all kind of filters into fiction writing as well. Like, I think about. We've been watching like classics with my kids. Classics. Classic 90s 80s stuff, I guess. And things like Back to the Future and Jurassic Park. These are two where just feel like every single thing they do, the story circle where everything that shows up in Act 1 pays off in Act 3. And you can draw a line to it and it feels like, okay, complete and you're satisfied. Like, I know you consume a lot of fiction. Do you ever toy with the idea of moving that energy that way?

[Cal Newport]

It's funny. When I was last in New York and had dinner with my agent and my editor and my publicist.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah.

[Cal Newport]

My agent said outright, my worst fear is that one day you are going to come to me and say you have a fiction project or should actually, Andy, I should say our agent.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah, our agent now yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Cal Newport]

Lori. It was funny. She brought up unprompted. I think you're right, though. Like, this has always been my thing about screenwriting. What tricks people into thinking that screenwriting is easy is that when they look at a particular scene, like, oh, I know how to. I talk. Like, I can. I could write people talking like, this isn't so hard. It doesn't have all, like, the dense musicality and description you would need in a novel. And I can come up with good ideas for, like, I go back in time in a time machine.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Like, a lot of people think it's the premise. Yeah.

[Cal Newport]

And what they don't realize is that if every piece in a screenplay doesn't click together. Exactly. It makes people uncomfortable. It creates a sense of. Of. Of literary ick. They're like, this is not good. And that's incredibly hard to do. Like, the Back to the Future script, you know this. That's Zemeckis and Robert Gale.

[Podcast Promo Voice 1]

Right.

[Cal Newport]

That wrote that. And that went through a lot of variations. The earliest versions was, it wasn't a DeLorean. It was a refrigerator. And the mechanism of time travel. It needed to harness a nuclear blast. So he had to. It was at Los Alamos for a nuclear test. And the nuclear blast in the refrigerator. And if you read about it. I've read a couple books about it. They sort of refined over time. They found the, like, the heart of it was like. No, no, no. The heart of it is, what if you could go back in time and hang out with your parents? Would they think you're cool? Would they be cool? And they're like, we got to bring it back to that heart and then just have the mousetrap all click together. Exactly right. I think that's exactly right. Jurassic Park. I don't know who wrote. I know Crichton took a swing at that, but it was.

[Andy J. Pizza]

It was like, who wrote the screenplay?

[Cal Newport]

Yeah. I don't know if it was like. I don't know either David Kep or someone like that. I don't know.

[Andy J. Pizza]

But it just has this thing. And it's also gets at maybe a little bit why they were shorter. It feels like they were shorter and sweeter and everything kind of had a place and then. And I'm a big believer in sort of the opposite of a profound truth. Might be another profound truth, especially in Creative World, where I love the tightness. And then maybe we go through an era where everything's loose. And I think about, like, Judd Apatow going hard on improv and exploring Things and blowing up comedies to three hour movies and stuff. I think that there's good things that happen there. But yeah, I miss that tightness of a plot.

[Cal Newport]

Did you know the original version of the Jurassic park novel? So not the screenplay, but Crichton's original version. So like, Crichton, like I'm a bit of a Crichton obsessive.

[Andy J. Pizza]

So I know too much about this.

[Cal Newport]

Yeah, you know this. So he was in a depression at the time, right. Because he had gotten divorced and things were sort of slowing down in his career. People forget he had this. His career started so early. Like he wrote the Andronima Strain before we landed on the moon. And this is the same person who did Jurassic park in the 90s, right. So if you read the Andronima Strain, they're speculating about what's going to happen when humans get into space for an extended amount of time. We hadn't done it yet. And so he got really heavily involved in Hollywood. He really wanted to be a director and screenwriter and do all this stuff. And it kind of was not going as well as he thought. And then Jurassic park is what got him back to it. So he got excited about this idea, pulled him out of his depression. But his first draft of that book was from the kid's point of view and it was terrible. So it was like Ovitz, his agent at the time, was like, yes, this is the idea. Obviously this is the best idea. Let's go. And he wrote the whole thing from the perspective of the boy. And it was, you know, just not working. They're like. They're like, this is the best idea I've heard in a decade. You got to rewrite this thing from scratch. And so he came back as like, all right, I can do shifting perspective from the adults. And really the star of this is the. Is the premise and the technology and then obviously the book cook. But I always thought that was funny, that like his first. His first swing was just the worst possible. The joke is. It reminds me of the joke. There was a Simpsons joke at some point in the first in the golden age where principal Skinner is like fired. He's like telling Apu, I have this idea. Idea for a book about using like high tech technology to bring dinosaurs back to life in an amusement park.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah.

[Cal Newport]

And he's like. And I call it Billy and the Clone of Saurus. And then it just cuts to hours of Apu just berating him of like, this. Jurassic park is like such a well known whatever. But anyways, it reminded me of that. It's like you got this great idea that it's Billy and the clone of Source. That's literally what happened, basically.

[Andy J. Pizza]

I think it's a good. There's something good about that. I think also, just once you get into, like, when I was in the client world with illustration, like, exclusively, I did that for a long time where I was just working with brands and doing advertising, illustration, and that kind of thing, you get really kind of comfortable with. This is what the agent agreed on in terms of rounds of revisions like this. I'm going to give you a sketch, you're going to approve it, and if it does, if it goes past these four rounds, the budget increases, all that kind of thing. And I think that makes sense in that space. But once I started making picture books and got more in the publishing world and realizing, like, oh, when it comes to, like, a more pure creative pursuit, you have to have a lot less preciousness about it. You have to realize, like, you might create the whole book and then have to recreate it. It might just all be the process to getting to where you need to go. I think that's totally true. Okay, I have three topics that I want to talk to you about. All right.

[Cal Newport]

All right.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Let's see if we can get through these. I'm going to give you the bullet points, and then we'll jump in. The first one's going to be about AI mania. I'm excited to talk to you about that. You have been a voice of sanity in these times for me in your podcast. And the second one is productivity, but with a neurodivergent lens. I'm adhd and I'm excited to kind of talk through a couple. A few different things that have made a huge difference to me in my productivity. And then the third one is a balanced creative diet. So I want to get into. I think this is a huge topic that I. I don't see a ton of people talking about it, but I feel like it's bubbling up and it's about discipline around what you're consuming, you know, So I want to talk about those three things. All right. The first one is the AI Mania. I want to see if you can help us get a reality check. I know that's your new, like, segment on AI, and it's been. I find myself kind of pointing people to your podcast often because the world has just lost it with AI. The first question is, maybe we could just start by you talking about what is vibe reporting.

[Cal Newport]

Yeah, well, and I'll just premise this whole like, why am I talking about. I'll premise the whole conversation is that there's two things happening at the same time which makes this a very confusing moment, right? There's this actual real technological story. There's breakthroughs in a particular type of AI called generative AI that were like very impressive and are continuing to unfold at various types of trajectories that are important, have had some impacts and will continue to have impacts. It's an important technology story, it's important consumer story. It's also an important business economic story because these are actual companies that are taking on massive debt and are having, they have an actual real impact on the stock market, right? So this is like something worth covering here. On top of it are these preposterous layers of hype. It reminds me of the COVID years, except for like back then there was something driving that hype. Like it really was this like unprecedented change the world. There's a similar tone to it. It's, it swings on a dime. If you're following this from a journalistic perspective, you will see every three month period has an obsession that like all of the media will go after all, YouTube will go after all the tech CEOs will lean into. And then like three months later it's completely shifted to something else. And now this is the biggest story. So there's these like preposterous levels of like hyped up, overinflated, unsupported types of commentary, critique and predictions on top of this real tech story. And every time the real tech story does something interesting because it's a real tech story, this is a real interesting technology. People will say, well this now justifies all of the preposterous hype that's been on top of it. And so I'm really trying to pull those two things apart and say this is, it's a important technology, but it is a normal technology and we can cover it like other normal technologies. We do not need all of the sort of preposterous hype on top of it because it's stressing people the hell out and it's leading to like actual real consequences in the economic sphere and the way that like bosses are behaving, we don't need it. So like I'm trying to reality check it. I'm not the only one doing this. It's basically an interesting war within computer science. I call it like the east coast versus west coast war. So like the east coast computer scientists do not have a foot in the door of Silicon Valley and don't drink Silicon Valley Kool Aid and the. So you know, we're all looking at this like, well, we understand the underlying technology. This is cool. That's not. And what the hell are you talking about? That like, our jobs are disappearing in three months. There's no basis for this. And then the west coast is a whole different world where, I don't know, for whatever reason everyone thinks that they're going to be a VC someday. They drink their own Kool Aid out there.

[Podcast Promo Voice 2]

So.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Okay, yeah, that makes sense.

[Cal Newport]

The vibe reporting back to your question. So one of the things that's happening on the hype layer on top of the real technology layer is this idea of there'll be a general vibe that feels correct. Like directionally it feels correct that this AI technology is going to have an impact on jobs. It might not be happening now, but I'm going to report a story in a way that makes it seem like it's happening now, even if I kind of know this isn't true because it's directionally correct with my feelings about what we should care about. I'll still do the reporting. And so you'll get an article, for example, that will, it'll say something like, people in the video game development industry are really stressed out about AI and there's all these prognostications of AI replacing jobs. Next paragraph. Microsoft's gaming division just laid off 3,000 people. You put these next to each other and the reader comes away with the sense of Microsoft's gaming division just laid off 3,000 people because AI came in and automated those jobs. Whereas the reality is, oh no, they laid off the gaming division because they overhired in the pandemic and they're trying to bring their earnings numbers back. Unrelated, there's these concerns about AI impact on jobs that haven't come to happen yet. But the vibe you get from the article is that's happening now. I'm seeing this has been rampant, especially in like the last six months where there will be a pre existing vibe and then you just put together in an article a lot of different stuff that's all accurate in isolation, but when it's together it makes an implication that's not, not accurate. So typically a lot of vibe reporting recently really has been about trying to attribute economic things happening right now to AI. That's actually just really not true. It's not supported by the facts.

[Podcast Promo Voice 2]

Yeah.

[Andy J. Pizza]

And it kind of brings up the computer scientist side of you. This if then thing they're really creating these if then statements that don't have any correlation or the correlation is loose and a lot of people are writing it that way. Maybe not on purpose. Maybe on purpose. To me, it's kind of like my sense of why this has hit such extreme levels is this kind of Venn diagram of fear working in media. So that's a thing that news knows. So if we can say, this is doomsday, this is Armageddon, your job's going to be lost. All that, that's going to get tons of attention. And it's in this Venn diagram with the PR that the AI companies need to have to keep the investment going. And it also aligns with the economy, wanting the economy to grow. And so much of our economy is being based on this growth. And it feels like it's these three overlapping things means that we're just getting inundated with this stuff all the time. Does that feel right?

[Cal Newport]

And the fear is very effective. I mean, I. It hits me psychologically as someone who knows a lot about this because I have to read so much of this coverage. Yeah, it's like PTSD again. It reminds me a lot of like the early Covid coverage where there was this sense of impending doom that was accurate. Right. And so it's like ptsd. You're like, oh, this reminds me of when I was hearing about Italy or what was going on in like, Wuhan or something like that. And knowing that, you know, this thing was coming and it's giving me those same type of feelings, except for here. There isn't. The thing isn't actually there yet. Right. It's not that what we're actually reporting on. So I think that is what's going on for whatever reason. Here's what I don't get about it. Here's what's confusing to me. I understand why the. The CEOs of these big frontier AI companies will just say anything. I mean, they'll just say anything. Right. And they change every four months. Super intelligence is coming and I'm afraid of it. All the jobs are going to go away and there's nothing we can do about it. These things might be conscious. I don't know. Like, they just. Whatever, they'll say anything. There's one point where Altman was talking about needing to build a Dyson sphere around the sun if we're going to fully power our sort of singularity AI future. Like, they'll say whatever. I get it. Because they're in an economically perilous situation. The LLM technology, which is what the companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are all in on is like, this is going to be the AI solution that's probably a dead end, right? We actually haven't had significant increases in the capability of the actual models since about 2024. All of the effort since then has been about getting more value out of the models we already had. And so at first that had to do with things like adding reasoning to the model or post training. And now the focus has really turned to building smarter applications to prompt the model on your behalf. And so if you look at something like the Claude code explosion, what really happened? There was, there was no AI breakthrough, there was no machine learning breakthrough. There's no model somewhere that's smarter than it used to be. That was the result of a multi year process of trying to build the program that prompts the AI on behalf of the programmer to better respond to the realities of enterprise programming. And what changed in the fall was these programs, they finally added enough features that you could use them if you're an enterprise programmer and not just vibe coding like a web app for your own personal use. And so now a lot of professional programmers like oh, now I can finally try to use AI. But there were no breakthroughs on the underlying language model, right? So we're at a stage now where the underlying language models really have stopped getting smarter a couple of years ago and we're just doing the long tail of product market fit of trying to figure out and build applications on top of it. And so we put a lot of years in the programming making some progress there. Other places it's been slower. This is not a technological trajectory towards, we're going to automate the economy and then we're going to have sentient AIs take over the world. We're building painstakingly bespoke products on top of a sort of locked in static LLM technology. But if you're the CEOs of this company, that's a terrifying reality, right? I mean, look at Anthropic. To date they've taken on something like $60 billion in investment in debt, they've spent at least $10 billion just on compute costs. And they had to report in their court filings earlier this month for their lawsuit against the government that to date their entire existence of the company, they've only brought in $5 billion worth of revenue. So they need to make a lot more money. And it's unclear if you're going to be able to where are you going to get these extra 20, 30 billion dollars a year revenue out of these kind of LLMs.

[Podcast Promo Voice 2]

Right.

[Cal Newport]

So it's a problem. We've invested like 5 to 600 billion dollars into infrastructure for these LLM based AI companies in this country. Where are we going to get that type of revenue? Cloud code? I mean, are we going to have $600 billion worth of computer programmers querying it? So anyways, I understand why they're doing it. What I don't understand is why the media, which in recent years has taken to really dislike these tech CEOs. Yeah, they don't like, they, they do not like Elon Musk, they do not like Sam Altman, they do not like Dario Amade. They're taking them super seriously. And they'll say, quote unquote, these guys know more about this technology than anyone else. So like if they're saying it, we should be worried. Why else would they say it? That's of course they'll say it. It's completely in their economic interest.

[Andy J. Pizza]

That's what I'm getting at with. I'm wondering if it's because of. It is such a scary topic that you're just. It's good for the news because it's, it catches on like wildfire and it's good for the companies and there's, they're not, they don't have same goals but it works for both of them. And the other piece that I take away from this that was really helpful from your commentary on all this was I don't know if it's always been like this. I don't know if this is like a, if this started with like Steve Jobs in the way that he handled Apple and he had this very public facing like famous. He was famous to everybody as the leader of this tech company. And now we entered this space where we think we're listening to technology people and we're actually listening to sales people and we don't hear the difference. And so the, the real huge takeaway for me is every time one of these people say something just realizing that they have this economic incentive primarily that's like what's driving them is making sure that their investors continue to think that they're, this is going to be worth this much money that they've poured into it. And I feel like that shift alone has helped me like weed out a little bit of the fear mongering of just like, oh, every time they say something they have a really good reason to say that.

[Cal Newport]

I think, I think it's really useful to keep in mind. I mean if they came out and they were honest and they're like, if I'm Sam Altman, I'm like, okay guys, like here's, here's what's going on is we, we have this sort of like improved version of Google in ChatGPT, which is like useful. It's, it's, it's not really profitable because it's also kind of expensive to do the queries and we're doing coding agents and like this is about how much revenue this is making. We've brought in like a couple hundred billion dollars worth of like capex spend or this or that. Investors are like, oh my God, well I'm not giving you a dime. Like how are you going to make back, how are you going to make back that money? How are you. I mean OpenAI at this point needs to become the fastest growing company in like the history of companies in order to just service their existing, you know, debt and make their investors at least happy. Right? And so I feel like, yeah, you know, we're helping coders produce code and we have a better Google. And you're like, oh wait, but is Google, isn't Google also going to just, just add this directly to Google and probably like, yeah, they are doing it and obviously they're going to master that because they're the masters of doing lower cost infrastructure. That's a scary investment picture. So if you're Sam Altman, you have to be like, we are going to be running the entire economy. So what we really need to talk about is like, how do we make sure there's enough wood for the trash can fires that all the fire knowledge workers are going to use to cook their pets. Like that is a much better place for him to be talking about because they're now the most important company in the history of, of the history of the world. But there's another thing going on which I'd throw into your Venn diagram, which there was a weird thing and I think this confused a lot of reporters. There is a weird thing that happened in Silicon Valley writ large. So even beyond just like the specific AI companies where the idea of like AI either apocalypse or utopian scenarios became almost like a religion for a large number of people over there, right? There was, there's sort of a meaningless crisis in Silicon Valley. You know, it's, it's religion's not rational, we're super optimal and you kind of, you have a bit of a meaning crisis out there. And a lot of people latched onto this, right? So this, these ideas were percolating pre OpenAI and chat GPT, it came out of, like really briefly. It came out of. We had this thing, the Rationalist community, right? So we had this community that was very popular in Silicon Valley where you try to bring hyper rationality to understanding the world and your life. And it's a very Silicon Valley type of thing. And there was a subculture in the rationalist community that focused on existential risks. And they cared a lot about like, let's think a lot about the rare things that might have a huge impact. So we should think about asteroid hits, we should think about pandemics, we should think about super intelligent AI. Not that any of these are very probable, but their cost is so big. If we're being super rational, the expected value we have to like, it's worth spending money and attention to reduce this rare risk because the cost would be so big. And AI was on the list with asteroid strikes and like killer pandemics or whatever. So this whole community was studying this, right. And they cared about this a lot. The Rationalists, they're, they're online, they're on blogs, they had meetings. There was the, the Singularity Institution Institute out there, had a lot of overlap with the, the Rationalist. And then when OpenAI came along and released ChatGPT, this little switch flipped in their heads. We're like, hey, what if one of these things we're worried about and talking about, what if it was true, that would make us the prophets. Like we're now, we're, we're Ezra now, right? We're Micah now. Like we were the ones that were seeing what's going to happen and we're the ones who can save the world. My life now just has meaning. And it became the church of existential risk. And this was a big deal in Silicon Valley. So in like 2021, 2022, 2023, if you're out there at like a dinner party in Silicon Valley, you're meeting these people whose entire structure of meaning comes from the belief that AI is an existential risk. Yeah. And they just were. But they're very clear spoken and super confident about this. And it really spooked a lot of reporters, Right. I think it really set the tone. And some of these people were in the companies like OpenAI and they, they left the companies and were like very vocal about like, this stuff is going to destroy the world. And I've never been more confident. And for a lot of reporters who are like literature majors, they're like, these guys are engineers, they're worried, they're the people who know the best. So that was a big role was the church of existential risk among engineers made it seem like the people who knew. So it was very reminiscent of like the infectious disease doctors in February 2020. Being like, you need to be more worried about this than you think. It hit those vibes for a lot of reporters, but in this case they weren't infectious disease doctors. They were it was the church of existential risk. They were sort of in some sort of weird sort of geek religion world. So that also played a really big role here.

[Andy J. Pizza]

I'm always trying to up my game creatively. Recently it's been comedy writing for my books and talks and there's only really one place I know of where the literal best in the biz share all their tips and tricks. And it's Masterclass. The class with writer, director, producer Judd Apatow is especially great. I've been listening to it on audio mode while driving and doing chores. One thing that he said that I instantly started to apply was prioritizing facetime with the people working in creative roles that you wish you had. It erases your limiting beliefs when you see that they are human just like you. This was true for me meeting working illustrators when I was in college, but now I'm like, how can I interview people on this podcast that are where I want to go next? I know a lot of listeners to this show are interested in upping their storytelling game, so maybe the class learn how to tell a story with Big Short and Moneyball author Michael Lewis could be a good starting point for you. I love that three out of four Masterclass members say they feel inspired every time they watch, 83% say they have applied ideas from the classes to their real life and every new membership comes with a 30 day money back guarantee. Masterclass keeps adding new classes so there's never been a better time to get in. Right now, as a listener of this show, you get at least 15% off the annual [e-mail] Pep Talk. That's 15% off masterclass.com Pep Talk. Head to masterclass.com Pep Talk to see the latest offer. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. I freaking love having Squarespace as a sponsor because it's easy to sell it when you love something this much. I'm a big fan. Squarespace is an all in one website platform designed to help you succeed online. Here's what I love about Squarespace. They're intuitive and super versatile. Drag and drop tools mean you can make a custom website without knowledge of code that makes people say, whoa, who made that for you? Looks like you built that from scratch. People have really said stuff like that to me about my site and I built it myself quite easily with Squarespace. You can check it [e-mail] if you want to check that out. What I did with it, it doesn't look templatey and it screams my creative brand. I also love that I have all of my domains through Squarespace now, which makes it seamless and easy to manage. I know the first thing, as creative folks do when we get an idea is to grab that URL. Now you can keep track of all your websites and your domains in one place. That's super intuitive and easy to manage. Head to squarespace.com pep talk for a free trial and when you're ready to launch, use promo code, pep talk, all one word to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. I can't even put my finger on exactly why this helped ease my existential dread around AI. Exactly. But it's something about the training of these models initially went better than expected. I'm putting it in a nutshell. They thought we're going to keep feeding it this data and then it's going to hit this ceiling. And then it didn't hit this ceiling. It actually surpassed all the expectations. And then we lived in this brief moment where everyone's freaking out that when, when we hit AGI is going to happen just like in no time. And then in that little brief moment, everyone's freaking out. Everyone thinks this is going to change the world. And then that they hit a real ceiling. It was just a bit higher than they thought it was going to be. And then since then, there's a correlation between the technology is not growing like they thought it was going to, and now we, now all of the people in charge of these companies have has to create more buzz, even though there isn't much of a story. Does that sound right? I don't. I kind of want to just bring it up because it's something that I've heard you speak that I never hear anyone speak about this other than some of the, you know, technocritic people like you. But it's not a major story. Like that's not a thing that I think most people are even aware of that happening.

[Cal Newport]

I've been trying. Yeah, that's more or less right. I have been trying. So like I wrote a big New Yorker article about this last August and then that led to. So I went on All Things Considered and did a bunch of hits on it or whatever. And then if the listeners want the long version of this, the day we're recording this, there's a podcast episode of mine that came out that's AI reality check. Are LLMs a dead end? And I do a long gloss on it, but what you're saying is more

[Andy J. Pizza]

or less right for people.

[Cal Newport]

The kind of like the two minute version of this is that LLM technology went through three stages. We're in the third stage right now. The first stage is what you were talking about. This was pre training scaling stage where they kept making the models bigger and the amount of time they trained them longer. It came out of a paper that was written by some OpenAI engineers in 2020 where they said, actually, we have reason to believe by experimenting with GPT2, that if we keep making these things bigger, they're going to keep getting better. Which was like a big idea, because typically in machine learning, if you make things too big, they overfit and get worse. And the whole idea of this paper was that might not happen with LLMs. Like actually they might just get better. And it did happen. It happened until 2024. So they scaled up GPT2 by a major factor to get GPT3. It got much better. Then they scaled that up a lot to get GPT4 in early 2023, which was much better than GPT3. And, and in a way that was just demonstrable to any user. Like they were just discovering, oh my God, like, this is good at this now, it's good at this now. Like, it was really amazing. And so the idea was then, by the time we get to the summer of 2023, after GPT4 has come out, they said, if we just, just do this a few more times, just make these bigger, train them longer, this model is going to get as good as humans or better on almost everything. And we're going to have AGI and we could just replace basically any type of economic role with this. It's going to change the world. It's like this moment of huge utopian fervor. And you see it in Sam Altman's writing at this time. It's when he starts writing about needing universal basic income so people still have a way of having money. And it's going to be like just the AI is going to run everything and then that's stage one. Then it stopped working. So like OpenAI immediately after GPT4 was like, of course we're going to play this back and they built an even bigger model, they trained it even longer. They called it Project Orion. They trained this thing up and they're all excited about it and it wasn't much better. And Meta had the same problem with Project Behemoth which they had the shell because it wasn't much better. Xai had this problem with, with GRO3, which they just, they trained it on a hundred thousand cutting edge GPUs in their colossus data center and it wasn't much better in the way that they thought it was going to be. So that entered stage two, which was like, oh God, these aren't just getting smarter by making them larger. How do we still show improvement? And stage two, which really picked up in 2024, was the age of post training. So they would take something like, basically it was like GPT4, GPT4 5, which is what we got out of Orion, a pre trained model that was like not much better than we were in 2023. And like how can we make this pre trained model do better on specific type of tasks for which we have a lot of really good data that we can use to kind of like tune it to be better at those tasks, right? And so that's when we got the Alphabet soup models. Instead of GPT5, we got GPT O, GPT01, GPT023, Mini Nano. And these were all just the same pre trained model that they were tweaking and prodding to try to make them better at individual tasks. That's when benchmarks became the major thing they focused on. GPT4 was just better. When you used it, you're like, this is better. These other models, they would have to tell you, look at this benchmark for this reasoning challenge. The chart, it's going up on the chart. And then we entered and that kind of hit its final point in GPT 5, which was the late summer 2025. And people were like, like, what's better about this? Right? So then they shifted in that fall to the new strategy, which is now, this is the stage we're in now. All right, let's turn our attention to the applications that are prompting the LLM, right? The applications that sit between the user and the LLM. Let's try to make those a better product market fit. And that's where we get like cursor and cloud code and codex getting good enough that they become commercially viable. And that's the stage we're in now. So really that stage of this thing's going to keep growing till it's AGI the tech CEOs knew we had left that stage by like the end of 2023. But we're still have that mindset of like there's rapid advances, there's not rapid advances. Ask yourself what really is qualitatively, impressively, significantly better about LLM based tools like now than a year ago? And like most of what people can say is the programming tools fit better now into enterprise code based workflows. Yeah, that's it really. I mean what else has. Because we haven't been making the brain smarter, we're just building better tools on it. So that does help me feel better as well is that particular AI trajectory is rich, this mature stage and we're going to build a lot of cool applications on it, but the underlying capability is not on some sort of scary trajectory upwards.

[Andy J. Pizza]

And to me my kind of understanding of that is like the scary growth of the tech is maybe reached a peak and then now we're going to see it applied in a way that actually is meaningful in some areas. But it's, yeah, it's not going to be, it's not going to keep going on that trajectory. Okay, last question on AI. I feel like you're an interesting person to answer this because you're a computer scientist, but you're also a writer. So you're a creative person and a science person. You can, can see it from both angles. What do you think? The. I have this feeling that the corporations that, that are kind of in control of mass media and entertainment and all of these things really don't understand something fundamental about creativity and why people consume creative stuff and what their relationship is with creative stuff and artists. I haven't really heard you speak about that or the creative side of AI, but you're a writer and you, you are a content creator and you do all these things in that field. What do you think? Do you have any gut feelings around what's missing in this conversation or just, I don't know, interesting perspective on this.

[Cal Newport]

I mean I have been thinking about it. I, I recently had a big riff on this and this is paywalled, so it's not worth paying for. But in the Chronicle of Higher Education I did a big feature interview about academic creativity, academic thought and AI. And like one of the big ideas in that interview is that creative endeavors, like the reason why creative endeavors are useful and important and appealing is that they're fundamentally an act of mind reading. I have a cognitive state within my own brain that I want to then transfer into your brain. It's a person communicating a complicated, deeply human cognitive state to another human. And the way I'm going to do that is through whatever art form I'm doing. If I'm writing, then I want to use the structure of language to try to recreate in your head this feeling. If I'm doing the visual arts that I want through, like, the application of whatever it is, pigment, the page, canvas, to try to create a certain state within you. So it's an incredibly human to human thing. Right. It's very. When you take the human out of. Defeats the purpose.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Right, right.

[Cal Newport]

It defeats the purpose. Like a sex robot. It just defeats the purpose. You know what I mean? And I think that's what a lot of people are missing when they're like, oh, the AI can write for me. Writing's hard. The AI can write for me. But the whole point of writing is it's a deeply human endeavor of I have an idea and a certain way it makes me feel and it's interesting and it's in my mind and I want to put it in yours. It's a human communicating their brain state to another human. So I've been, you know, I've been coming at the. This from a deeply humanistic point of view where I've been arguing, don't let AI write for you.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah, right.

[Cal Newport]

If the writing is important, that's a deeply human endeavor. And if it's not, and AI could just do it, then writing is the wrong medium for whatever that communication is. And you should build some. There should be some sort of just, like, protocol or something like that. Right. That don't use the human English or whatever language, like a human communication language. It should either be humans communicating with humans. And if it's not. If it's like, no, I'm just trying to get this information to this other person, then, like, don't use prose. Like, have a different way to. You have a spreadsheet with things ticked off about, like, what information is in here or put it in whatever. Right. Like the English language is written language, and glyphs are not the right way to communicate this. So that's. I've been deeply, like, humanistic about this.

[Andy J. Pizza]

That makes tons of sense, and it aligns with some of the things I've been thinking about on it. One of this one's kind of imperfect. I don't even know exactly what I'm trying to say, but I'm thinking about it, like, comparing us and gorillas. Like, gorillas are interested in other gorillas for mates and connection and it's not like they look at us and think they're so much better looking or their communication so much better. We just, we're obsessed with humans now. Like, it just doesn't seem like it happens that way. And then the other piece that I think about a lot is I get my fears kind of satisfied a little bit from thinking about how the conversation around cancel culture and this idea of do we want to consume from people that we think are monsters? And then I think monster. Now, people still do. They're, they're, they're less proud of it. An artist that is a known monster is going to have a much harder time building a career or sustaining a career. Like, a lot of people don't want to wear T shirts of people that they know are, you know, just terrible people. And I think monsters and robots are in a similar category. Right. Like, if we don't want to consume from monsters, we're not going to be that jazzed about consuming from robots. You know what I mean? So it's kind of in a sim. I think it's a similar headspace is what you're talking about.

[Cal Newport]

I think that's right. I like that idea too. The same type of idea of it matters because it's mind reading, right? It matters to me. This is communication. So it matters to me where this is from and if it's from someone who's a monster. Like, I, I don't want to mind meld with a monster. And if it's from a robot, you're like, I don't want to mind meld with a robot. Right. Like, I don't want to be, you know, Joaquin Phoenix and her. Like, that's not appealing. Like, why that's not appealing.

[Andy J. Pizza]

The movie is how disturbing it is. Really?

[Cal Newport]

Yeah.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Okay, I want to get to another piece. I want to talk about productivity. I was dubbing this section Neurodiver, Neurodivergent Productivity. Because I haven't had almost any success adopting productivity tips from other people. And I would say three categories from you have made a huge impact. And in a way that stuck with me. I wanted to see if I could just tell you those three categories. You could say, like, here's what I think. The number one misconception or the number one problem that people have with dealing with this. And we could kind of go from there. So the three categories are going to be email, project management, and time blocking. These. You know, the only time that I've ever had an inbox under control has been about in the past year. And it came back from you talking about it in an episode of your podcast, going deep kind of on your process with email. So like email just, I could never wrap my head around it. And now I use a lot of the tools that you talk about and I have, I get to inbox zero most weeks, which is, is just kind of unbelievable. What do you think is the number one thing that people get wrong about email?

[Cal Newport]

Well, like what? Email is a disaster for everybody.

[Podcast Promo Voice 2]

Right?

[Cal Newport]

Right. So that's you grappling with email is not exceptional.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Right.

[Cal Newport]

And one of the reasons why it's a disaster for everyone is that it's incredibly exhausting from like a brain standpoint to do that context switching. Like, we really underestimate how terrible it is from a brain standpoint to go through an inbox in sequential order. Because you're going from this message is, in this context, the next message is completely unrelated and then the next message is related to something completely different. That is really, really hard for the brain to do. Right. It takes a long time for us to switch these sort of non physical, you know, abstract context. And so when you go message to message to message, it's incredibly draining. So that's why cleaning inboxes, even though on paper, like what's the problem? Just go one message at a time and none of them take that long to deal with. Why is this so hard? It's the cognitive context switching cost. And everyone deals with that. The other thing people get wrong is they don't understand what is the source of all these emails, what is the reason why I keep checking it. Right. So they have the wrong answer for both of those. There's actually unified answer. So they think there's too many emails because people are doing something wrong. Oh, you just don't know, you know when to write an email. And people are bad at writing emails. And we could just, if we could just sort of fix that or people I have too many mailing lists I subscribe to think that's the problem. And they think the issue with checking the email too much is because of willpower. I just, it's a discipline thing, like I should just batch and do it twice a day. That's wrong. Actually both of those problems come from the same source, which is the way we're using email is as a low friction tool for on demand collaboration. So we're going sort of unscheduled messaging back and forth to figure things out like with clients or family or team members or whatever. That's why we have so many messages. It's also why we have to check so often. Because if we're figuring something out by bouncing messages back and forth, I can't wait till 3 o' clock to check my inbox again because I have to see this message and respond. So you can respond and I can respond and you can respond. Then we can figure this out before the end of the day. So the constant checking of email, that sense of like it's, there's always messages in there, I'm always, I'm always checking, is downstream from the collaboration strategy. It's downstream from the idea of let's use ad hoc back and forth messaging to collaborate. It's not a willpower and it's not a norm issue. So those are the two things that are happening. The collaboration strategy makes constant inbox checking unavoidable. And when we're in an inbox, the context switching cost is cognitively devastating. And we don't realize that. And we just are like, I guess I'm just tired. And I think that one is a particular issue for, for neurodivergence. Because context switching, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That's hard for everyone. But that's particularly hard, I think, especially, you know, I work with a lot of people with some degree of adhd. Like, that's a really hard one.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Killer for me. Yeah, that right there, that's the thing I thought you would say, because that was the game changer for me. Could you just explain what context switching is so that everyone's clear on it?

[Cal Newport]

It's just changing your target of attention, right? So I'm changing my target of attention from an email about a client contract to an email about trying to organize a trip. Like, my brother's coming in from out of town. Mentally, your brain actually has to do a lot of work. Like if it wants to answer a question about the client, it actually has to inhibit so certain networks and excite other networks and basically get the brain ready to think and deal with and come up with a good answer there. Then when you switch to the, the brother coming to town, it has to inhibit these networks related to the client and has to bring up the networks about like, what's going on with my schedule and what matters here or this or that. That can take like 10 or 15 minutes to really switch into something. I mean, artists know this right? From if you're working on something creative, it takes 10 or 15 minutes before you, you, you hit your stride. It's how long it took for your brain to sort of refocus on this thing. So the human brain can refocus really quickly on physical environment changes. Like, that's what it's evolved to do fast. The tiger growl. We could be like, boom. All of my attention is over there and not on like the fire I was trying to make. But when we're doing abstract thinking and planning, right, It's a logistics for a visit. It's trying to take in feedback from a client and give them the right feedback. Our brains aren't evolved for that. And it takes a long time for it to do those switches. So when you try to force those switches, you know, immediately switch to another thing. Immediately switch to another thing. You're trying to do the work without the context fully loaded. And that's, you know, you're dragging the dog sled on dry land, right? Like, it's just incredible amounts of friction. And it's. You experience as a feel, which we all know of this sort of deep seated cognitive fatigue that is the feel of trying to rapidly move between contexts without giving your brain time to actually catch up.

[Andy J. Pizza]

I don't know if this is an analogy that you came up with and I heard it from you, but the thing that comes to mind is that TV trope where the character agreed to be in two places at once. And so, I don't know, it's like the Flintstones Boy Meets World has one of these. And at one point you're at the dinner party, then you're at home at the baseball game or, you know, whatever, and you're going back and forth and back and forth. And it's just like your brain cannot do that in an inbox. For me, the way that I've approached it, kind of adapted all your recommendations around email. The way that I will move through my inbox and think, I'm going to do one pass where I'm deleting stuff, then I'm going to do one pass for quick replies where it's like, I can just do it. This is just something I just need to answer a question. And then I'm going to do a pass where this is stuff that requires a task and I'm going to add that task to my to do list. My Google tasks and copy this is something you've talked about too. That's really helpful. Copy the subject line of that email into the description of the task and then archive that email and then know that when I do that task, that's when I can email them back. And so it's not exactly you have other steps and other parts to the way that you approach it. But yeah, I have a model how I approach it.

[Cal Newport]

I have a modification to suggest.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah, please.

[Cal Newport]

Okay. All right, so after you do that first pass of deleting, which is fine, like just deleting stuff, you don't need consider doing those second two steps in a subject specific manner. So. Right. So do you use Gmail? Is that your primary?

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah.

[Cal Newport]

Okay, so like I'm going to create a, a label called like Holding Tank or Focus or something like that. Now I'm going to go through and find all the emails that are related to the same thing. So if it's like I'm working on whatever logistics for whatever, and there's a bunch of, I'm going to get all those messages and move them, archive and put them in this label.

[Andy J. Pizza]

These are podcast emails. These are class illustration email. These are my book projects.

[Cal Newport]

Yeah. So grab one of those topics and move every email related to that into like this, this new label and then just load up those emails, then do those second two steps.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah.

[Cal Newport]

So now you're entirely within the same cognitive context. And so you're going to find as you get going, like, okay, once I've loaded up this context, I can deal with each. It's not so bad. Like I could deal with this. Now you're making sharp decisions, you're moving stuff around. Like, you make good progress. Then you go back to your inbox and you grab a whole other collection and move it in there. So you keep it. You work within individual cognitive context. It seems like on paper, like, how is it faster? I'm looking at the same messages. Right. In both cases, in the end it's the same 50 messages. It will feel 5x less fatiguing because you're not context switching. So that would be my only concern with your original way of doing it is when you go through to do the quick replies, even a quick reply

[Andy J. Pizza]

going to these different contexts, you got

[Cal Newport]

to go to different contexts and then that makes it a lot less onerous. And then the big picture thing I always suggest to people is longer term. Look at what these emails are and say, are any of these part of like an ongoing or regular collaboration that I could move out of an inbox permanently? Right. Is this something that we could have a better process for? Can I have office hours every day? That half of these things I can just say, you know, three to five, my phone is on every weekday. Just give me a call next time you can and we'll work this out. Right. And then so, so how can I move More collaboration. That's the big picture goal. How do I move more collaboration out of just they shot off a message. I shoot one back. They shoot one back. Like start to see that as like productivity poison and you want to try to detoxify your cognitive life as much as possible. Yeah, I absolutely love that.

[Andy J. Pizza]

So I had other things to talk about in this category, but I'm going to switch gears. Maybe next time we could talk a bit. Little, little bit about. I've really successfully implemented Trello for managing the podcast. So each podcast episode has a card. Nobody that doesn't use Trello knows what I'm talking about. But maybe we could talk about that next time. Also time blocking. I have a really simple version of that. But let's move to. We'll go. Maybe if we get to talk again we can talk about some of those things. They've been really helpful. Or I'll touch on them in a solo episode and send them back to you. So let's talk about creative diet. This is something I'm thinking about all the time because I think that we are potentially at the start of like a punk movement or an indie movement and it's at the heart of it is going to be like a techno criticism thing where we're going to think really critically of how we've been trained to consume creative content. You did an episode all about movies recently which is kind of in this vein. I don't know if you. Where you want to start with this, but I'm curious if you're feeling that same thing. And maybe you could just talk about how you think a short form video is kind of like junk food just as like a starting point.

[Cal Newport]

Well, I mean the timing is good because the, the, the morning after we're recording this so it'll be out when this comes out. Is I have this in theory, like knock on wood, you know, breaking news could happen. It's in the CMS system now, so it should coming out. But I have this major New York Times sort of like op lead Sunday op ed, you know, cover of the opinion section. Multi thousand word manifesto about we need a cognitive fitness revolution that, that echoes the physical health revolution we had in the 20th century. And it uses the analogy of consumption and exercise. Right. So I'm this, this will be in the world by the, by the time this comes out. There's two things that make this metaphor useful. One, if you look back at the history of the physical health revolution, which I mean just like the idea we take for granted now that what you Eat matters and exercise matters. Right. That actually entered a cultural consciousness sort of of in a 10 year period in the mid 20th century. There's like actual like events that happened that sort of changed everything. It was Dwight Eisenhower's heart attack in 1955 when everyone started learning about like, oh, what you eat affects heart health. And then we had Dr. Kenneth Cooper, wrote aerobics and he's like, hey, look, I'm a military doctor. I've been doing exercise research for NASA. I think we need to be doing cardiovascular exercise not to get better at a sport or because we're in the army and need strength, but because like we'll live longer. Right. And because.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Sorry, I just wanted to say one little bit. It's because they, this is where, I don't know if you hit this. Where the, the work shifted to be in an office and everybody was, was suburbs and.

[Cal Newport]

Yeah, yeah. Like it wasn't relevant before. Like the one thing that a farmer in 1920 wasn't lacking was cardiovascular exercise.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Right.

[Cal Newport]

Yeah. But anyways, it sparked a huge revolution. Obviously we have a long way to go within health, but you can look at the statistics, statistics, and it's been like a massive, massive improvement increase in like cardiovascular health and stuff that's happened like since that period. And I'm arguing we're in a similar point right now with our cognitive health. Right? And I used a metaphor of, of diet and exercise. So like, it, I think it ties into this really well. And I said to your question there, I said we've, we've learned in like the food world, you shouldn't be eating that much ultra processed food like Oreos and Doritos, like it's a Franken food, it's this weird reconstitute. It's not a recipe real food. And it's really terrible for us, right? And like, maybe you occasionally have an Oreo at like a kid's birthday party. But like you shouldn't be pounding these things. And I'm like, what is short form video content if not ultra processed, right? It's this, it's not real, like artisan, actual creative content. It's these vast databases of content that algorithms sift and sort through and break down and reconstitute and they, they come back together with a digital Oreo. That's like weird food, but it's like irresistible or whatever, right? And just as we're like, if I'm a grow up, I'm not pounding Oreos, you know, every day. Maybe I need to stop consuming ultra processed content. Like, should I really be consuming a lot of short form video, like, what's going on here? Just because it, like, feels good. And so we need to think about that way now on the exercise front. Like, you get 10,000 steps a day. Like, you should be thinking, I should be reading this many pages of a physical book a day. I should be spending like this much time alone with my thoughts, trying to hold a thought steady, you know, even as, like, distraction encroaches. So I think cognitive fitness will be the big thing. And I think in the creative fields, just like with. When it came to our physical health, once we started to care about food, that really fractured into, like, you had people that really begin to care a lot and value cuisines and authentic and interesting food and trying to get to like traditional cuisines and Michael Pollan type of stuff. Right. I think you're absolutely right. We're going to see that with creative content consumption as well, where you're going to have big movements that are like, I really, really. I really prioritize and care about very specific types of creative production that I think, like, are authentic and have ties back to tradition and are interesting and meaningful and eccentric and. And, you know, this will become the equivalent today of people who are like, I get my. This at Whole Foods because it's whatever. It's like healthier and I really, you know, whatever. I go to my farmer's market or something. So I think you're. I think this has happened, happening. That's why I wrote this thing when I did.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah.

[Cal Newport]

Because I think it's a movement that's happening where we're like, enough is enough. We can't just let all of these companies and weird habits we have just colonize our brains. Like the. I asked this question in the, in the piece. I'm like. And the what end? Like, why are we willing to completely give up our ability to do the most human. The most human thing we do, which is thought.

[Podcast Promo Voice 1]

Thought.

[Cal Newport]

The ability to actually hold thought on abstract concepts and not just like immediately what's happening in front of us. It is the most human thing. Like, this is Aristotle. You know, early on we realized, like, this is the most human. This is. This is the Bible, right. This is. This is Genesis. This is like the metaphor of Adam went and named all the animals. What is that? That's like the metaphor for. We got the ability to have language which gave us the idea of abstraction and thought. The tree of good and evil is like, like a metaphor for the evolution of the brain, right? Yeah. Why are we giving this up so that Mark Zuckerberg can buy the other half of Kawaii so that like Sam Altman won't be embarrassed about like how much money he raised and it didn't like, lead somewhere. Like, what, what are we giving this up for? Because it's like, it feels convenient in the moment to be on slack all day. Like, there's no real good reason why we're giving up our heritage. Heritage as a species. Right? Yeah. So I don't know. I'm real fired up about this now, but I think you're absolutely right. I think that's like the, that's a really useful analogy for people is think about health and food.

[Andy J. Pizza]

I think the, the thing that gives me hope that I don't see, you know, the general vibe online is we're cooked in all these ways. And I think they're really zoomed in to their own personal life, knowing I don't really want to consume this much short form video. But I am doing that. I can't control it. These giant corporations with billions of dollars have spent all of their time attacking me with their technology so that I can't even defend myself. And I think that I get what feels hopeless about that in the micro. But if you zoom out, you can see how smoking was like this, food was like this, fitness was like this. We've had these times where. And then punk comes along and indie comes along. Even if you think about. I've thought a lot about how similar short form video is to bad TV when back in the day when it was normal, where everyone was watching TV while they ate and just consuming TV all the time. Like it's all. It's funny. Like short form video is televangelism, infomercials, and then America's funniest videos. Like, that's, that's what it is. And I just think we don't give ourselves credit enough to like, when it becomes culturally gross to do something. We do change. We do make changes. And we're not prisoners to this just because it feels good. We will have. And even my kids give me a lot of hope with this because they really hate AI Slop. They really don't. Like, you know, they're constantly picking on each other, their friends for being phonies. People that are just all on their phone looking at their phone and I just think, think we are just unaware of how resilient we are when it comes to this kind of thing.

[Cal Newport]

Look at Sora.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Right? Exactly.

[Cal Newport]

It comes out and people are like, okay, a let's carry new stats. Like, this is the end of creativity. Like there'll be no reason for there to be filmmakers or anything anymore. Everyone just create their own thing. OpenAI is like, hey, people like short form videos that are distracting, so why not make a whole social network around it? This is great. This is going to make all this money. And people's universities, universal reaction was like, no way, are you kidding me? I don't want this. No, like you're in, like that's a, that's a bridge too far, right? So it does give me hope and it also gives me hope that we forget. And I write about this in the piece. It's not just the change of awareness that happened. That came first and then that was followed by decades of actual action building up of infrastructure and scaffolding and information. And so like if you, if you talk to someone in like 1955 and they were in a suburb for the first time and they're getting out of shape and you're like, you need to be, be, you need to be like healthier and like in better shape. They'd be like, I don't know how to do that. Like, what do I do now? Compare that to today. We're like, oh, we know so much about exercise and fitness. Well, I can join a gym, there's one that's right down the street and I can have a trainer. And there's like 10 different methodologies and they're saying, use this methodology and here's what you should do that. You know, we didn't have the scaffolding yet, right. So sometimes it's not just the awareness and sometimes it's just making the awareness in the right vector. This is what happened with kids smoking, right? Is in the coming in the 90s we had all this money from the, the settlement with the tobacco companies that we were going to spend to try to reduce you smoking. What ended up working pretty well was the ad council's truth campaigns because they realized like, oh, the right vector. These were big in the 90s. The right vector for this awareness for kids is to emphasize the fact that these tobacco companies are run by these old men in suits who are laughing about how they're manipulating you and making money off of you. And the kids were like, in the 90s. No way, man. That was the whole like, we were influenced by Gen X and like, be authentic and don't be a sellout. And we're like, I'm not a sellout. And, and all it was a lot of like faux hidden Footage. I don't know if you remember these ads. I do faux hidden footage, hidden camera footage of, like, tobacco executives kind of laughing about how they're trapping all these kids or whatever. That was pretty effective. So sometimes it's just getting the right vector, which is where we are with kids in social media now. Like, they.

[Podcast Promo Voice 2]

They.

[Cal Newport]

They're no fan of Mark Zuckerberg.

[Podcast Promo Voice 2]

Right.

[Cal Newport]

They're no fan of Elon Musk. Right? Like, they're not, like, I can't wait to be on their services. And so I'm with you. I think we are more resilient than you think.

[Andy J. Pizza]

The way that I'm taking kind of conceptualizing action around this is potentially with my podcast community starting some kind of book club and movie club. I feel like those things are going to become more frequent as we. Because I know so many people are like, I can't even watch a movie anymore. And you did a whole episode about film students struggling to watch movies. And I think, yeah, I hope we see a lot more of that.

[Cal Newport]

I have this idea for a podcast. I don't have time to do it, but someone should do this. Well, in this vein, you could do a really great show that's called why Is this Good? And you take some sort of, like, artisan, like, creative endeavor. It's beautiful music, a great movie or whatever that you've been told time and again, like, this is the best whatever, right? But you're like, why, why. Why is, like, the White Album so great? Like, why is Beethoven good? Why do people love Taxi? Taxi Driver? Right? And then you, like, break it down this. Let's talk about what was going on in this and how this was different than what other people were doing. And look at this here and this tech. And this is why people really love that. Like, the. The hear about connoisseurship, I think, is something that people have almost forgotten what that's like. It's like when I just mentioned movies casually in my podcast, I'm like, oh, I saw this move, and here's why I liked it, which is, like, casual chatter at the end. People really love it because it's like, even just this idea of appreciating some type of piece of, like, creative. How do you do that?

[Podcast Promo Voice 1]

Right?

[Cal Newport]

I think it's very appealing, and I think that's what people want. And I think they want. They want to understand how to watch movies again. They want to understand, like, how to appreciate a book. They want to, like, love music. And, like, this is why I love this band, because they're Doing this. And I'm really into it. Yeah, that'll be the new indie movement, I guess, of the. The 2000 and 20s, I think so.

[Andy J. Pizza]

And it makes me think of. This has been on my mind a ton. I've actually thought about how maybe I'll shift my podcast a little bit to be not just about creating things, but consuming creative things differently. Because I'm really. I get. Because creativity is almost like. Like a religious practice to me. I think of it that way, both in the creating and the consuming of it. I love what Simon Critchley, who is this British philosopher, did a book called On Mysticism. And one of the things he gets at is how the loss of religion has changed our relationship to creative things because it was disciplined to sing together and look at paintings and read scripture and just all that kind of thing, which is a type of literature. And I think we're at this moment where we have religion. Is this seen as this medicine? And then entertainment is seen as sugar. And they're not. They're not connected whatsoever. And that's why I'm so interested in. I love a conversation around. You love that show. And it's even a mainstream thing like Stranger Things. What you loved about it, what it made you feel. Well, what, you know, all these different angles. Like, yeah, that. That's been on my mind a ton. So that's a good. Yeah.

[Cal Newport]

Yeah. Things that are lighting you up. Right. Like getting into it, having people on who also like, really know and appreciate it or just talking about why this is great. Like, I think that'd be great.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Yeah. Thanks for spending so much time with me. I had a bunch of other questions, but we'll have to get them. Get to them another time. And good luck with the rest the of. Of the book project and all the other stuff that's on your plate.

[Cal Newport]

Yeah, anytime. Always happy to come back. We'll chat again soon.

[Andy J. Pizza]

Thanks.

[Cal Newport]

Calm.

[Andy J. Pizza]

I'm back with our creative call to adventure. It's called One2Three Z. It's as easy peasy as One2, Three Z to get some of that humanity back. And you got three options from this episode. Number one is if you liked a taste of this AI talk with Cal Newport. He does whole episodes of his show now that are like the AI Report reality check to like, check in with what's actually happening instead of just. Just, you know, intravenously injecting the PR that the AI companies are just sending out to us in every form because their whole fricking companies are at stake with you believing this is the end all, be all of humanity and our story as a species. Go check out. The first option is if you need more of that, go check out his Reality Check episodes when you go to his podcast Deep Questions with Cal Newport, and I'll put a link in the show notes. There are episodes that have episode art with blue backgrounds. Those are the Reality Check, the AI episodes. It's also. It'll give you clues in the title, but I highly recommend it. He knows his stuff, he talks to experts. He's been following it very closely, and he has such a sober attitude about this stuff. And I think as creatives, we need this. That's why I wanted to give him a platform here to say some of that, but then also direct you to it. The second one, so we've got 1, 2, 3 Z2 is if you need a more human approach to your productivity. Highly recommend Cal's book Slow Productivity, and I recommend his podcast for the same reason. But he talks. He has so many practical, pragmatic approaches to productivity to get you out of the pseudo productivity that is modern life. It's not about how many emails you could send, it's about how to send emails well, so you don't have to send that many. And so that you can do what creatives do, which is not stay on top of everything, but get to the bottom of things. That's an idea that came from a mathematician who. I can't remember his name, but if you know the quote, put it in the comments or send me a message so I can put it in the show notes. But I like this idea. Like, Creatives, your job is not to stay on top of everything with email and all that pseudo productivity, but to get to the bottom of stuff, of our humanity. So highly recommend Slow Productivity. And number three, if you just feel like, man, I just need to remember, I need to feel what it feels like to be a human. I recommend going and getting some time with a book, time with a movie, time with something that even maybe challenges you because there's nothing more human than suffering. But yeah, so that. Or, you know, I really like to challenge myself with music, like listen to something that, you know, has some critical acclaim or a friend told me about and maybe it's not a genre that I'm familiar with or a fan of yet and just put that on a few times until something about it kind of clicks. Yeah, that. That's my challenge to you. All right, thanks, Cal Newport, for coming on the show and just fighting the good fight out there for humanness and deep stuff. I'm all about it. Hope to chat with you again soon. Massive thanks to Sophie Miller for being an editor and producer on the show. Thanks to Connor Jones. Huge thanks to Connor Jones of pinning Beautiful for audio edits, video edits, animation and sound design. Thank you to Yoni Wolf and the band. Why for our theme music and soundtrack. Until we speak again, stay pepped up y'.

[Podcast Promo Voice 1]

All.

[Podcast Promo Voice 2]

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[Cal Newport]

Foreign.

[Podcast Promo Voice 1]

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