Ep. 369: Why Are We Getting Dumber? A Debate.  ## Metadata - Author: [[Deep Questions with Cal Newport]] - Full Title: Ep. 369: Why Are We Getting Dumber? A Debate. - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/76a0f996-b1c3-491a-8d11-b4ab8199ed88 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **IQ Gains Have Recently Reversed** - Multiple studies show the Flynn effect reversed around the 2010s, with measured IQs declining since then. - The decline appears across education levels and sexes, with 3D rotation as a rare exception. Transcript: Cal Newport I recently stumbled across a fascinating 2024 essay written by a Norwegian psychology professor. In this essay, he talks about how he was asked to teach a course about intelligence, and he was excited about this because he used to teach that class a lot, but hadn't recently. So he thought what he would do is he would open this class the way he always had before by talking about the so-called Flynn effect, which is this observation originally made by James Flynn that IQs worldwide have been rising since roughly the post-World War II period. So here's what the professor wrote in his essay. The Flynn effect has been rising steadily for so long that I thought I'd bring an updated graph. I'd update a graph to 2024 numbers because it's always fun to tell students that their generation is the smartest people who had ever lived. But then he added those new numbers to his old chart of rising IQs and was floored by what he discovered. IQs weren't going up anymore. And not only had IQ increases slowed down, in recent years, IQ scores had begun to decrease. His students were not the smartest generation to have ever lived. They were getting dumber. Today, I want to talk about this so-called reverse Flynn effect. ([Time 0:00:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0bf1e916-1920-4d43-a1e1-619b1d82ae16)) - **Less Reading Changes How We Reason** - The 'post-literacy' hypothesis links reduced reading to weaker analytical thinking and lower IQ test performance. - Historical critics (Postman, Ong) argued that media forms reshape public reasoning and epistemology. Transcript: Cal Newport There's one argument in particular that is common. It's well known. It's been articulated by many different people in many different contexts, and it is pretty convincing. Here is the short version of this most common argument for the reverse Flynn effect. We stopped reading. So the idea that reading rates are down drastically, this is well covered. This is known. We did an episode, I don't know when that was, Jesse, but probably like in the spring where we went over a lot of like the more recent data about how much people are reading, how much people Are reading for pleasure and how these have had a steady decline. So this is just this is well known. Now, many have argued that this shift away from books and towards other types of media, such as television at first, now more recently, also the Internet and smartphones, can explain, At least in part, why we are getting dumber. So how does this work? Well, I want to play you a clip here. This is James Marriott. He's a critic and columnist for the Times of London. This is a podcast appearance from a couple of weeks ago where James tries to summarize this sort of general argument that the now well-accepted fact that we're reading less is impacting Our overall intelligence and helps explain the reverse Flynn effect. It's kind of a long clip, but I think it's worth hearing in its entirety because James sort of lays out clearly how this chain of argument goes. So, Jesse, let's hear this clip. Speaker 2 When you look at the way that information is structured in a book compared to the way that information is structured in a phone, it makes a lot of sense. Books are exceptionally dense with information. They're exceptionally dense with argument. Print requires us to make a logical case for a subject. A really significant feature of books is that if you make a case in print, you have to make it logically add up. You can't just assert things in the way you can on TikTok or on or on a podcast or in conversation and print privileges, a whole way of thinking and a whole way of processing the world that Is logical, that is more rational, that is more dense information, that is more intellectually challenging. And if you lose these things in our culture, which I think we really are in the process of losing them, it's not surprising that people are getting stupider and their reasoning skills Are declining and that, yeah, seem to find the IQ is declining. Right. Cal Newport So that's a really interesting argument. If you spend more time consuming media through things like television or James is focusing in particular on smartphones, you are missing a dish, like essentially a sort of intellectual Cross training that you get by reading books that force you to do a sort of more logical type of analytical thinking, which gives you a brain that can do really well on IQ test. Now, this is not a new idea. So Marriott here is not making a new idea. It's something that really big thinkers, a sort of like big minds of techno criticisms and media studies from decades past have been grappling with. I want to play another short clip from Marriott where he talks about the sort of esteemed history of people thinking about these type of issues. Exactly. Speaker 2 There's been a lot of interesting research and writing on this done in the 60s and 70s when TV and radio had really begun to find mass adoption in Western households. And people like Walter Ong and another guy, Eric Havelock, a classicist, compared the information environments of oral societies with literate societies. Cal Newport And they made a series of really brilliant cases that literate culture enables things like analytic thought. Right. So in other words, this idea, even before smartphones, as soon as TV came up, there was this big thinker started saying, wait a second. Literate society, so society based on information consumption primarily through the written word, their brains just operate differently. And one of the most influential thinkers to try to tackle this concept, this connection between reading and IQ, was the late NYU communications professor Neil Postman, who's been A major influence on my own thinking and writing as a technology critic. In 1985, he published a classic book, which we've talked about on the show several times, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Now, this book was all about how the shift in our culture from a, he called the lexographic culture, but a culture in which newspapers and books were the main way through which we gained Information to a world of television. It changed the way literally that we thought, our definitions of truth, the processes by which we tried to make sense of the world. I'm going to read you a key quote here from chapter two of that book. Postman writes, Under the governance of the printing press, discourse in America was different than it is now, generally coherent, serious, and rational. Under the governance of television, it has become shriveled and absurd. Postman writes, Now here's another quote from that chapter where he sort of elaborates how these changes happens. Here's Neil. My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse. It does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content in a phrase by creating New forms of truth-telling. I will say once again that I am no relativist in this matter and that I believe the epistemology created by television not only is inferior to a print-based epistemology but is dangerous And absurdist. So what he argues in this book is that literally we think differently. We think differently in a culture that is broadcast-based versus lexographic-based, where we consume information created to us visually or in audio form versus reading it for ourselves. And it leads to a worse country. He's like, I'm not a relativist. It's not, well, things change and some things are better than others. He said, no, the lexographic governance, when we read, that was better. That was better suited for a democratic country and democratic life and just for intellectual life in general. That was actually a really good match for what we needed from the human brain. So there we go. As we moved away from reading, from television to smartphones, our brains thought in a different way and the way we thought, to put it crudely, the way we think now, it's just a dumber. When you use a 35-item ICAR intelligence test, you measure like, yes, we are starting to do worse on these measures because our brains just don't get the same cross-training they got Before. And we're not exposed to the same sort of sophisticated analytical discourses and epistemological definitions of truth-telling that we used to have before. I want to be clear. It's not like this is a consensus claim that the decline of reading is making us dumber. Those are big thinkers with big ideas. In our current world, I mean, there are a lot of researchers who will say the typical thing a lot of researchers will say, which is like, well, it's complicated. And it is probably complicated. The post-literacy hypothesis for explaining the reverse Flynn effect is by, it's solid, but by no means a complete explanation. ([Time 0:04:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f26f20be-7569-4324-85f8-ccec3d02486d)) - **Smartphones Add An Attention Layer** - Smartphones add an attention problem distinct from reduced reading: they erode sustained concentration via hyperpalatable content. - Combining reduced reading (capability) with reduced attention (use) magnifies IQ declines. Transcript: Cal Newport Now, I should qualify this here by saying I actually think the post-literacy hypothesis is right. I think that explains a lot of what we see. But there is another factor that's sometimes mentioned that I think gets overlooked. It is also playing a large role, especially in the recent decreases in IQ. Now, given my interest as a technocritic and the fact that this podcast focuses on technology's impact on our ability to live deep lives, you might not be surprised by what I'm going To say, but I think the missing factor here is the smartphone's impact on our attention. So this is different. Let's think about this. The post-literacy hypothesis is saying when we stop reading, the way our brain processes information changes and it becomes less analytical and dumber. So our capabilities, like what our brain can do, goes down. All right, fair enough. But the rise of smartphones and in particular hyperpalatable algorithmic content delivered through smartphones has an additional impact of reducing our ability to sustain concentration. Now, this is not about the way our brain processes information. It's not about our epistemology, as Neil Postman would say. It's about the fact that we are constantly overwhelming our short-term motivation circuits with this hyperpalatable content to the point where our brain begins to suffer when we Ask it to put sustained concentration on one target. So it's like the post-literacy hypothesis explains the capability of our brain is going down, and the attention hypothesis claims our ability to make use of whatever processing ability We have is also being reduced. You put these two things together and you get a much more heightened effect. And I think this is a major effect in the Flynn effect. And I think we have two pieces of evidence that I want to point to here that shows that the attention hypothesis is playing a big role here. One, reading began to decline, of course, well before the advent of ubiquitous smartphones. I mean, we talked about, you know, Walter Ong was writing in the 1960s about the death of literate society with the rise of television. Neil Postman was writing in the 1980s. We've seen declines in the statistics and reading. This has started going down in the 80s and the 90s. So none of this is new. It continues to get worse, but none of this is new. And yet, if you look closer at the reverse Flynn effect studies, they all point to an inflection point. Increases slow down, but the point where it turns and IQ scores start going down, on average, lands somewhere around 2010. What happens around 2010? Not some major shift in our reading habits, but the ubiquitous introduction of smartphones. So smartphones entering the picture, we already were reading less. We already were watching some crazy amount of television a day. But then our attention began to get worse. And so now this slow reduction of our brain's ability to process had this other factor added to it. We can't even get that the full capacity that our brain has reduced as it might be. Here's another piece of evidence. If we return to that Northwestern study, they also broke out these IQ declines by age group. And guess what age group has had the sharpest decline in IQs in this sort of period starting in 2010, 18 to 22-year So what do we know about 18 and 22-year Two things. They are the heaviest users of smartphones, and they are the first generation to not have that formative experience of going through childhood education, primary education, and Post-primary education without smartphones, which used to be this sort of neurological crucible where you practice concentration, you come out of the schooling system and your Ability to focus on abstract things has really been elevated. That was one of the main skills. Today's 18, 22-year from the last decade has studied in that paper. They had the smartphone aspect throughout all of that. So they had a notable impoverishment in attention ability that was probably more heightened than what we saw in other sort of demographics, and they had their things go down the worse. They had their IQ scars fall the fastest. So we put all these pieces together. There's a lot of things that might come together to explain the reverse Flynn effect, and the post-literacy hypothesis has to be a part of it, right? I mean, if we were still in a largely lexographic area, I mean, society, we would be smarter. And moving on from that has and continues to make a difference. But smartphones have added their own extra special dumbness spice on top of this Sunday of badness, which is we also struggle to concentrate and use the skills we already have. We're in a post-literacy society, but also a post-concentration society. ([Time 0:14:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c56e5ee5-70d3-46a6-8f1c-a3c0eae3f765)) - **2010 Inflection Points To Phones** - The IQ decline inflection around 2010 aligns with smartphone ubiquity rather than the earlier decline in reading. - Young adults (18–22) show the sharpest drops and are the heaviest, earliest smartphone cohort. Transcript: Cal Newport One, reading began to decline, of course, well before the advent of ubiquitous smartphones. I mean, we talked about, you know, Walter Ong was writing in the 1960s about the death of literate society with the rise of television. Neil Postman was writing in the 1980s. We've seen declines in the statistics and reading. This has started going down in the 80s and the 90s. So none of this is new. It continues to get worse, but none of this is new. And yet, if you look closer at the reverse Flynn effect studies, they all point to an inflection point. Increases slow down, but the point where it turns and IQ scores start going down, on average, lands somewhere around 2010. What happens around 2010? Not some major shift in our reading habits, but the ubiquitous introduction of smartphones. So smartphones entering the picture, we already were reading less. We already were watching some crazy amount of television a day. But then our attention began to get worse. And so now this slow reduction of our brain's ability to process had this other factor added to it. We can't even get that the full capacity that our brain has reduced as it might be. Here's another piece of evidence. If we return to that Northwestern study, they also broke out these IQ declines by age group. And guess what age group has had the sharpest decline in IQs in this sort of period starting in 2010, 18 to 22-year So what do we know about 18 and 22-year Two things. They are the heaviest users of smartphones, and they are the first generation to not have that formative experience of going through childhood education, primary education, and Post-primary education without smartphones, which used to be this sort of neurological crucible where you practice concentration, you come out of the schooling system and your Ability to focus on abstract things has really been elevated. That was one of the main skills. Today's 18, 22-year from the last decade has studied in that paper. They had the smartphone aspect throughout all of that. So they had a notable impoverishment in attention ability that was probably more heightened than what we saw in other sort of demographics, and they had their things go down the worse. They had their IQ scars fall the fastest. ([Time 0:16:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/06e5bd26-14b7-4b30-ae11-6901d11fdb07)) - **Concrete Steps To Protect Attention** - Quit attention-extracting apps and join attention resistance for required apps by removing addictive features. - Keep phones plugged in a fixed home location and train attention with timed concentration and device-free walks. Transcript: Cal Newport So I'm going to get really specific here. I've got four things to tell you. Number one, to the extent possible, I want you to quit apps on your phone or your computer where the company who makes the app makes more money the more you use it. Right? TikTok. Instagram. Any of those games that have like a bunch of coins that fall out when you press a button and you never paid for it. It's just there on your phone and you start playing it on the flight to Chicago. And then you look up and you're in Chicago and you haven't moved from your seat and your leg is asleep. Anything where your attention is what is valuable, get those off your phone, right? That's just, to degrade your short-term motivational system, the concentrate on something. Hyperpalatable is going to take that over. Two, for things that maybe fit that profile but you can't quit or delete because they have some uses you need to preserve, join the attention resistance. This is an idea from my 2019 book, Digital Minimalism, which says basically find a way through using new rules and technologies to make these technologies that have specific use cases You need to make them no longer hyperpalatable, make them not a source of distraction in your life. So for example if you say i need to use youtube occasionally for looking things up right like this is a a good reference library when i need to figure out how to change the oil on my minivan Great get a browser plugin only access it on the browser and on app and get a browser plugin there's many that exist like this that hide the recommendations now youtube is just a cool library You search for oil change you see the results They're all oil change videos. You click on one. You're doing an oil change. And you don't see over on the right-hand side, you know, how oil changes are part of the secret MAGA agenda to put microchips in Epstein's vaccines, right? You don't see those recommendations on the side. You're just getting the oil change video. That's joining the attention resistance. You have to use Instagram for your business for like whatever reason. We've got to post because we have to post what's going on at our local bookstore or something like this. So people get news. Fine. Have a Google doc where you put the information. One of your employees once a day at five o'clock takes that, puts it into a post and puts it up. You never even see Instagram, right? So, Hey, I'm getting used out of you instagram without you being on my phone and me having again to you know go on this short chain from like hey my bookstore is open at five like is five too Late for my bookstore to be open oh my god is the oil change on my car part of a mega conspiracy to put microchips and jeffrey epstein's vaccines right like you don't have to play that game Anymore. It's like I'm getting some advantage out of Instagram without having to deal with that. All right. Concrete takeaway number three. This is a huge one. I've been really pushing this one. It's a hard one. I want you to hear me out on this. When you're home, keep your phone in your kitchen, plug it in. And that's where it is when you're home. If you need to look something up, you go to your kitchen, look it up. If you need to check, there's a text conversation going on. You're making plans with your friends. You got to go over there in the kitchen and see what's going on with the text conversation and sort of make your plans there and then go back to what you're doing. If you want to listen to a podcast or whatever, AirPods. And if you're in a mansion, then I guess you can have your butler move it to another part of your house to plug it in. I know Jesse has this issue. So, Jesse, your butler can move the iPod from your kitchen to the catering kitchen if you're in your basement fitness center. And then they can move it to the conservatory greenhouse when you're in your West Wing library. But the point is, is it's plugged in in a location and not on your person. This changes everything. It's not a companion when you're at your house. It's not no matter what I'm doing, I'm checking this. I'm eating at dinner. My family, I'm checking it. I'm watching TV. I'm checking it. I'm watching sports. I'm checking it. I'm doing chores. I'm checking it. I'm working out in between sets. I'm checking it. When it's plugged in somewhere, you can't do that. And once you've gone just three or four days without doing that, you still have all the advantages of it. I can look stuff up or whatever, listen to podcasts when I'm doing my dishes. But when it's not there to check when you're bored, your brain adapts so quickly and says, okay, that's not what happens when we're bored anymore. That impulse goes away. Your concentration ability, it jumps up. That's a hard one, but it's a critical one. By the way, it's what I've been recommending. I've been giving, writing a bunch of talks because it's back to school talks about kids and phones, right? What's the right thing to do with kids with phones? And, you know, I have my standard rules. A restricted smartphone should be when you get to high school. Unrestricted smartphone that might have social media or other apps should be when you're 16. But until you leave the house to go to college, your phone's in the kitchen when you're home. It's not your property. I'm loaning you a phone the family's paying for. You can use it when you need to coordinate with your friends or whatever. You don't bring it up to your room. You don't get to sit there and look at it while we're watching TV as a family. You don't get to have it at the table. This is not your property. I checked a declaration of independence. There is no mention of WhatsApp access in there. I'm sorry it sits here at home when you're here. The greatest gift you could give to a teenager at home because they are stepping out of the post-attention society. And what's the effect? You just gave them IQ pills. This is as effective as hiring an expensive tutor in terms of like the overall impact on like their academic performance in high school and college and beyond. It's like the greatest gift you can give. So keep your phone in the kitchen. Keep your kid's phone in the kitchen. And if your kid is not in high school, take the phone back because they really shouldn't have it yet. Number four, train your attention. Do this daily. There's two main techniques I talk about for actually trying to improve your attention. Both of these come out of my book, Deep Work, from 2016. So yes, I've been beating on this drum for a while now. Number one is these Roosevelt dashes named for Teddy Roosevelt who used to have this habit, especially even as a college kid and beyond as well, where he would do work in short but ultra Intense bursts where he would give it his absolute complete attention. The amount of work he could get done doing this was monumental. He would read a book a day. It was crazy Go look at Teddy Roosevelt and concentration is crazy. But those Roosevelt dashes are actually a great training mechanism. And you should do it with a timer and you should start with 10 minutes and you take something hard that you want to do. It could be doing a crossword puzzle or trying to figure out a new complicated concept for work or school. You set the timer and you start it and you just, you focus as hard as you can for that short amount of time. And you really try to bear in like really hard. Your brain wanders, like bring it right back. And you do that and it's really hard, but you do that hard thing until it's not hard. And then you add five more minutes. So it's just like doing interval training with running. And the amount of distance you can sprint gets longer and longer as you keep pushing yourself this way. The other way I've been talking about for a decade now to train your attention is you go for walks without anything in your ear and nothing ... ([Time 0:21:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/88999b6d-6cd3-4f86-9aa5-f8be6b432d4d)) - **Train Focus With Intervals And Walks** - Use short, timed 'Roosevelt dashes' to build focused work stamina and gradually extend them. - Practice device-free walks and 'productive meditation' to rehearse sustained attention and working memory. Transcript: Cal Newport Both of these come out of my book, Deep Work, from 2016. So yes, I've been beating on this drum for a while now. Number one is these Roosevelt dashes named for Teddy Roosevelt who used to have this habit, especially even as a college kid and beyond as well, where he would do work in short but ultra Intense bursts where he would give it his absolute complete attention. The amount of work he could get done doing this was monumental. He would read a book a day. It was crazy Go look at Teddy Roosevelt and concentration is crazy. But those Roosevelt dashes are actually a great training mechanism. And you should do it with a timer and you should start with 10 minutes and you take something hard that you want to do. It could be doing a crossword puzzle or trying to figure out a new complicated concept for work or school. You set the timer and you start it and you just, you focus as hard as you can for that short amount of time. And you really try to bear in like really hard. Your brain wanders, like bring it right back. And you do that and it's really hard, but you do that hard thing until it's not hard. And then you add five more minutes. So it's just like doing interval training with running. And the amount of distance you can sprint gets longer and longer as you keep pushing yourself this way. The other way I've been talking about for a decade now to train your attention is you go for walks without anything in your ear and nothing in your pocket. It's just you, your thoughts, and the world around you. You just practice being out there in the world with nothing but yourself to keep you company. You get used to your own mind. Now, the bonus you add to this is you can maybe give yourself a particular problem you want to try to work on in your mind while you walk. I call this productive meditation. And now you're really starting to play with things like working memory and the ability to sustain stable state things in working memory. I have to put this thing here while I think about this and then bring this back again into the problem. This is calisthenics for your ability to pay attention to your mind's eye, to aim your mind's eye in a way that is focused and to do so with sustained attention. So you can train your attention. ([Time 0:26:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/62e0de6a-b0d0-4a31-9876-64f1cc5bf242)) - **Schedule Deep Work Like Meetings** - Block your own calendar with meetings labeled for deep work so others schedule around them. - If mornings are taken by East Coast meetings, create afternoon rituals and locations to make deep work possible. Transcript: Speaker 2 Do you have any advice on how I can incorporate more deep work hours? Cal Newport Yeah, it's a tough issue because if you're on the West Coast and you have East Coast colleagues, even if they're trying to wait till they're mid-morning or midday to schedule meetings, Those are still going to fall at the beginning of your day. And most people don't do that. They're just used to scheduling meetings whenever. I'm going to have one at nine, right? That's now a 6 a.m. Meeting on the West Coast, right? So it is a big problem that West Coast people who work with East Coasters have. I have two things to recommend here. One, start adding some of your own meetings to your calendar, meetings with your esteemed colleague, Dr. Deep, PhD. What I mean by that is just meetings for you to do deep work. Not every day. You can't, you're not going to get away with saying, hey, I can't ever meet until like noon East Coast time. But just throw some meetings on your calendar for working on particular projects without disruption. Then when it comes time to schedule meetings with your East Coast colleagues, use whatever standard meeting scheduling tool that your office or organization uses and just have those Meetings with Dr. Deep PhD show up on there like any other meetings. It's like, yeah, let's meet. Here's my calendar. Choose a spot. And some spots are already taken up. They don't know that that's a meeting for you to do deep work versus just a meeting with like another client. And then so they, they find meetings that work in the space that remains. If your company doesn't use a meeting scheduler, you should be like, yeah, yeah, go ahead. Here you go. Here's my calendar. Here's a schedule once link, just like grab any time that works for you. Let's make this easy. And these meetings with Dr. Deep just sort of show up as time that you're not available. So just make, just put the time aside and see what happens. It turns out like, hey, everything else will work itself out. You've gone through other periods of your career where you've had projects going on that take up certain times in the morning. You've had those schedule around them. So schedule time for yourself. The other thing that a lot of West Coast workers have to do that have East Coast headquarters is they have to learn how to do afternoon depth. That's hard because often your energy is lower in the afternoon. But the advantage of your afternoon is that the East Coast is logged off. ([Time 0:37:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f88801df-d49b-42f5-a594-ab7f283e84d4)) - **Close Projects So You Can Reopen Them** - When pausing a deep project, tie up loose ends and leave a clear narrative and the next concrete step for your future self. - Prepare key resources so resuming the project needs minimal context-rebuilding. Transcript: Cal Newport Some days there's not a lot of tickets to answer. So she has time to work on personal projects. And then other days there's a lot of tickets to answer and it might be, you know, okay, I've had a couple of busy days. It can be hard for her to return to her project. So there's a bigger point here, which is when you have a project that requires focus, how do you sort of shut down that project in such a way that when you need to open it up again later, you Can do so with minimum effort or overhead? And it really does matter how you shut down a project, especially one that requires deep work. It matters how you shut it down when it comes to how easy it is to pick it up again a couple days later. If you just stop in the middle of something, like a lot of loose ends, and then you come back a few days later, you're going to feel a lot of resistance to loading that project back up because Your mind is going to have to recreate a complicated cognitive context before you can really make progress on it. And that takes a lot of effort. You have to, it has to sit there and like try to remember everything that was going on, recreate where you were this whole time. It has to try to resist other distractions or try to stop that cognitive context or pollute it from loading in a pure way. In your mind, like that seems like a lot of effort. And if this isn't really urgent, I don't want to do it. So what you want to do is shut down the product in such a way that it's easier to load up. So it's worth always taking some time to tie up loose ends, even if you have to come back and stay a little late that day to tie up the loose ends, like maybe some tickets came in and you got Interrupted, come back and tie up the loose ends. You want to tie up the loose ends. You want to have, if possible, like a narrative that you're leaving for your future self. All right, here's where we are and here's what needs to happen next. It's useful if you can identify the very next thing that needs to be done and maybe have some of the pieces already in place so that you can hit the ground running. There's a lot of stories of famous writers who would do things like this with their manuscripts. They would sort of finish what they're working on and sort of start the next paragraph so you can kind of hit the ground running, like read through that paragraph and then just keep writing. And by reading up to the point where you stopped, you would get your attention going. So do something similar. Like, okay, this is where we're picking it up is answering this question. And here are the three websites that are relevant to it. And we have to figure out like, this is where I was stuck. Now, when you load that project up a couple of days later, you're like, okay, that's exactly where I am. I'm trying to answer this question. This was the information I'm using and where I was stuck. Okay, I can get back into that quicker. It's easier to pick back up. So tie up loose ends and set yourself up with a narrative about where you are and clarity about exactly what you need to do next. ([Time 0:48:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cc616ad0-db5b-42e7-ac75-bafc48de4dd5)) - **Use Evidence Before Getting An MBA** - Seek evidence from industry insiders about why your applications fail before pursuing costly degrees. - Only pursue graduate degrees when you have specific, verifiable hiring evidence they change outcomes. Transcript: Cal Newport Bart. One, the word hope. Like, hey, should I just hope this will work? I don't want you hoping. Let's find out. I'm going to tell you how to do that in a second. Second, so should I just go get a graduate Because I don't know what else to do. Jesse knows I hate that. Graduate degrees are not a default behavior because you don't want to spend like a little bit more time figuring out like what really matters in your field. It's a lot of time and a lot of money. You have to have a specific reason to get them. I think what you're missing here, Bart, is an evidence-based plan. So you're saying, I don't know, I feel stuck. Should I just hope that I'll maybe do better if I keep working on this stuff? Find out why your applications are failing. Get the truth, the unvarnished truth from someone in this industry that you know. Why would someone like me not get hired? Why are people not looking at my application? What type of applications would you look at and why? Get the real answer. Don't invent an answer or have a theory. Get the real answer. Now, here's the thing. You might love what you hear like, oh, I'm just missing this one thing. I could go figure that out in two months and then I'm going to be super attractive. I didn't realize that this one thing was messing me up and you could love the answer or you could hate the answer. It could be like, oh God, I see. Like I'm never going to get these rules. They're hiring only out of like MIT for these like digital consulting jobs with like core six CS majors who had all A's and they're not even like sneezing in the direction of my applications. There's no way I can fix that. Okay, this is not a good idea. I'm going to have to have another plan. But at least you know you should always be acting from evidence. So get the answer to the question of why you're not getting these jobs, the real answer. And then we'll use that to make our plan. Then and only then, if what you find out is like, yeah, we would hire someone like you if you had an MBA from a school of this caliber or higher. In fact, here's three people recently from a similar background who had an MBA from a school of this caliber or higher, and we hired them. So if you got an MBA from a school of this caliber or higher, we would hire you. Then, okay, then you could think about, is it worth the expense and time? And if it is, like, then you know why you're getting that MBA. That's when you would do that. So we call this evidence-based planning. ([Time 0:53:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/78dd90bf-8394-485d-baa1-7c74f15df2ab)) - **Design Academic Work With Quotas And Protocols** - In academia, time-block teaching prep and autopilot recurring tasks, and set quotas for committee and review work. - Use communication protocols and separate addresses to reduce ad-hoc interruptions. Transcript: Speaker 2 How should I treat this blank stite? Cal Newport So here was the one confusion i had and i don't know if it was clear in the longer question jesse law school professorships are they're weird to me like sometimes it's what you all you're Doing is being a law school professor but sometimes these law school professors also practice law he was getting or she's getting out of law okay so she's leaving. She's transitioning from the what she called the the constant fire drills. I think she said at some point that she faces as a lawyer. She's leaving that to go in the tenure track academia. Okay, Karen, you're going to find it in a lot of ways easier and some ways harder. So the ways you're going to find it easier is you don't have to, you won't be on for nine, 10, 11, 12 hours a day, billing in seven and a half minute increments. Like you don't have to be locking in your brain and just squeezing out activity without break. When you're a professor, if you leave for an hour to go see a friend, no one yells at you. Like no one comes in and is like, these are billable minutes. Like what's going on here? No one cares. No one cares. I disappear for months at a time. No one notices. I put a mannequin. It's a true story. What I do is I put a mannequin in my office and I have a, an old wiper motor so that it like kind of moves back and forth. And for like a couple of weeks, my department chair will just walk by and be like, oh, Cal must be in there. I see someone moving behind the door and I'll be gone for months. No, it's not true. I'm not gone for months at a time. But the point is it's your time. No one's billing you. It's up to you. Write cool papers, teach good classes. However However you want to do that, get it done. So if you're a lawyer, what I would suggest doing is like, here's what I would keep from your lawyer life. The ability to, okay, I'm during this time, I have to do this thing. And this is my time to work on this client. It needs to get done. I'm going to lock in and get it done. Time block and keep that sort of intensity to get the class prep done. And to make sure you're making progress, like whatever research you're doing. If you're doing that, I don't know, you need four hours a day outside of like the classroom time. And so my other advice is don't feel guilty about that. And right. I would spend the first semester, just like work on your classes. Don't do any research. Just like walk around the campus, enjoy the students, write cool lectures, you know, and then you can kind of add some research in. In terms of specific systems that do time block planning, that matters in academia because the work will fill the space. But if you have a time block plan, you realize you don't need as much work as you thought, as much time as you thought. You definitely need quotas. So the thing about academia is that there are certain things that you need to do that will be offered to you that you need to say yes to at least sometimes because it's just part of being A good academic citizen. But you might have so many of these requests coming in that you can't say yes to all of them. Like you need to do some reviews of papers. But you can't say yes to every request to review a paper. You need to sit on committees. But you can't say yes to every offer to sit on a committee. So have quotas. Is there any papers review? How many recommendation letters I write? How many committees I sit on? How many program committees I'll be on? How many students I supervise? Set quotas of the stuff that's important. So you're doing the stuff that's important, but you have a limit on how much of it you do. And when you get past that limit, you say, look, I love this activity. I do a lot of it, but I've hit my quota. So I can't help you out this semester. So have quotas. A big difference. Definitely in academia, use autopilot scheduling for all the autopilot stuff. So in particular, in teaching, there's a lot of stuff that happens regularly. Like I have to prepare lectures. I have to do this type of grading. I have to like stuff that happens week in, week out, when, where, and what you do. Just have it auto-scheduled on your calendar. Don't even think about it. Like, yeah, like after lunch, I go to this library and that's when I do my grading. I do that on Thursdays because they handed their essays on Wednesdays. Like autopilot it. It makes your life easier. And it also means like when other things fall into your schedule, it's not going to steal the time you need to get the basic repeated stuff done that you need to get done. ([Time 0:56:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8cbe44f6-5aaa-4aa2-a7aa-1258849f8e71)) - **One Hour A Day Produced A Breakthrough Album** - Rebecca worked one hour each morning on one song and solved its lyric puzzle after 2.5 months of disciplined focus. - That approach produced multiple strong songs and led to an acclaimed album and better career traction. Transcript: Cal Newport It's written by Rebecca who writes to say, I've always had trouble committing to one thing. I went to art school, worked at galleries, did freelance reporting, design jewelry, and more. Meanwhile, I'd been writing songs since high school and releasing an album every eight years. My songs are lyric focused, but I found lyrics excruciating to write so i took forever to finish them at any time i was working on at least three ambitious unrelated projects this reminds Me we should find i have it somewhere the cd that my high school band cut i should play that on the air i have it somewhere i don't know we're gonna find a cd player Let's give you the harder Part. I was thinking the exact same thing. Yeah. We wrote the theme song for our senior prom. Very proud of that. It was a song we wrote and recorded. All right. Anyways, it's called get off your damn phone. All right. Anyways, back to Rebecca's story. At any given time, I was working on at least three ambitious, unrelated projects. I tended to either jump ship before going fully deep with one discipline or wait until right before a deadline to finish a project with no time to bring it to its full potential. True to form, I pivoted the web development a few years ago. Then I read your books, Digital Minimalism, Deep Work, and Slow Productivity in Succession. While reading Deep Work, I took a lyrical seed I had jotted down a year earlier and started working on it every morning for one hour, first thing after dropping my kid at school. Some days I free wrote on the song's theme, other days I labored over one line. Even if I disliked everything I wrote that day, it felt productive to just be ruling things out. By working on one song consistently, I found I was always it over in the back of my mind. After two and a half months of doing this almost every morning, I solved the puzzle of the song. The final verse came around in a pleasing way I could never have predicted. Even though I spent more hours on these lyrics than on most songs, the overall timeline was shorter. I decided this is the way for me to work going forward and finished another lyrically ambitious song soon after, one that would later strike a prominent music journalist when he saw Me open for a bigger act and which would eventually lead to an album review. After reading Slow Productivity, I realized I needed to solely focus on finishing the album. I've been obscure for two decades, but since this album came out, people seem to be connecting with my music on a new level. So here's some examples. Uncut Magazine called the album a triumph of dramatic storytelling. Rolling Stone called it fantastic and described the second song I wrote during the one-hour blocks as one of the wittiest and warmest parenthood songs you'll hear this year aquarium Drunkard wrote before the future is that rare thing an album that feels as satisfying and complete as a great short story collection i attribute this all to both a higher level of songwriting Than before and my new willingness to focus on one project and see it through to the end including the packaging and promotion phase most importantly i no longer dread working on lyrics. I have faith that if I kept at it, I will eventually solve the song and I feel hopeful that I can release my next album in two to three years instead of eight. That's a great case study because what this tells us, it's like what we talked about last week on the podcast when we talked about work-life balance and what it takes to not be mediocre And the reality of that. Is what really matters? Relentless disciplined work over a long period of time on a thing that you're trying to do really well. That is what almost always is going to be the secret to people doing the types of things where you say, wow. So if we look at this Rebecca story here, Rebecca, of course, is a pseudonym for Taylor Swift. I assume. I assume. We look at Rebecca story here. What she's saying is like, OK, I worked on the hard thing lyrics. I worked on the hard thing every day, even if I didn't want to. I worked on the hard thing every day. If it meant all I got done was writing one line or just ruling out things that didn't work. Nothing worked today, but I'll still call that progress because I now know new things that don't work. And I do the hard work and I do it every day whether I want to or not. That led to a rave review in Rolling Stone. The stuff she has struggled for years and years to make progress on. Now she was making progress on it. That's hard work. That's relentless discipline. That's diligence. But you know what? It's not hard to do in the sense of long grinding days, hard to do in the sense of, I have to sacrifice almost everything else in my life to make this happen. Hard to do in the sense of, I don't sleep anymore, or like I have to cut off all ties to anything that I value. No, it's two hours a day. The magic of relentless deep work is not in what you do in any one day. It's how much you did over the last year. And when that's your game, I want to aggregate a large amount of actual deep work on hard stuff that matters over a year or two years. What you do in a particular doesn't really matter. It doesn't have to be exhausting. It doesn't have to be busy. It doesn't have to be performative. In fact, if you do that, you're going to burn out and the amount of work you get done is going to be much less. So never underestimate the power of like in this case, an inspired mom and songwriter who's getting one to two hours a day in on the absolute hardest, most important stuff she could be Doing creatively. And eventually that worked. So I think that's a great example. ([Time 1:07:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fb0410b6-12d3-4953-a3c9-e4b4e197174a)) - **Reset By Simplifying Then Rebuilding** - For major life or work chaos, revert to a one-page productivity system to stay afloat, then rebuild systems gradually. - For broader life resets, fix one to two small routines per domain (health, relationships, work) month by month. Transcript: Cal Newport Kelso, I appreciate the question. Just that's actually the second Kelso I've met. It's an unusual name, but that's the second Kelso that I've met. Kind of ironic that we're also talking about Kelsey. I was worried at first that there's like, yeah, this is Kelsey. Why don't you know my fiance's songs? A. B. Do i hear this live because you're recording the tape i just do taylor has that technology c i'm coming to fight you which would be a highly rated episode um all right this is a good question There's two different types of resets here that matter there's's like a purely professional reset, which is just, you know, you're making progress at various, you're all locked in Your, you have time blocking and multi-scale planning and working on different initiatives and keeping on control of stuff. And then you go through like a super chaotic work period because there's like a crisis or something and all that flies out the window. It's just like our hair's on fire. We're trying to make this done. And how do you turn back on your time management systems? We've talked about it on the show before about how you um recover i i would point towards if that was the issue there was an issue uh a podcast we did over the summer and maybe you remember This more jesse but we did a podcast over the summer where i talked about like going to a uh one page productivity system like a highly reduced productivity system. And if you're looking for it, it's called one-page productivity. And this would have been like six episodes ago. Speaker 2 Episode 60, 360. Cal Newport Episode 360, so nine episodes ago. So if that's the issue, like, look, we have a fire drill at work, and so all my systems are out the door. Just go in the summer mode and fall back on like a one-page productivity system that just sort of keeps your head above water, prevents major things from being missed, and makes you have Some sort of peace of mind. And then once you have a little bit of breathing room after the crisis dies down, then you can sort of one-by turn your systems on. If it's a life overload, so it's not just work, it's all sorts of stuff going on. Maybe it was like a health issue with you or someone in your family or there was like a major disruption or a natural disaster. There's all sorts of stuff that can happen that throws your whole life in the chaos. And like, I don't even know what I'm, you know, doing anymore. I'm just sort of running from one crisis to another. Maybe I've fallen into like some unhappy, it's like unhealthy substance habits. And I'm, you know, just things aren't going well, but now the acute emergency has died down and I want to get out of it. This is more of a reset where I would look at something like, you know, I'm thinking about my deep life book where part two is about what's this crash course in becoming a more capable human. And it's something I say, you could do this a lot of times in life. Like when things go chaotic, how do you get things back? So without going into too much detail, because I haven't finished this part of the book yet, the basics of this sort of like I want to reset my whole life is you take four areas and you do One to two things per area one month at a time. That's like the framework you want to think about. I think I talk about this. We re-released a podcast episode like this in August where it was like four months to something, something. So I've talked about – you might find a sample system like that if you go back a few episodes. 366. 366. But mainly what you want to do if you're trying to reset your life is like, okay, it's going to like health. It's going to be relationship. If you're religious, it's going to be God fixing that, you know, relationship. And then, you know, it's going to be social and then maybe work. It's like four or five things. And then you just like, you go one by one. Like, I got to just throw a daily habit into each and just get that back. Something that doesn't take that long, but just like a small exercise habit, a small like connecting with people habit, a small like spiritual habit, right? And you go through like two to four weeks for each one thing, maybe go through again at a second thing. You're not trying to jump into like my ideally configured life where I'm making the maximum progress in my ideal lifestyle. It's like I am back in control in the sense of I'm not where I want to be right now, but I'm taking action that's optional on things that are important. And that resets you. And it's going to take six months, take four months, whatever it is. And then you can say, all right, great. Now, now I'm back in it. Where do I need to start making major changes? I got to get this whole thing, this whole problem out of here. ([Time 1:15:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0633ffe9-7b65-4eb7-a68f-4a5c2bdfcab6)) - **Parents, Not Academics, Now Lead Resistance** - School smartphone bans have bipartisan momentum and teacher-union support, shifting resistance to anxious parents. - Parental need for constant contact conflicts with collective educational quality and attention restoration. Transcript: Cal Newport So it's back to school season. I am scheduled to give no fewer than three talks in the near future about kids and phones, which I'm happy to do because I feel super strongly about this topic. So I've been sort of clued in with like, how is this back to school season going? So I'm going to pull up an article here from the New York Times. This was from earlier. This actually came out in the spring, but it was looking ahead to this current back to school season. The title of this article was who's against banning cell phones in schools. So inspired by the governor of New York, Kathy Hochul's push to have a New York be one of the latest states to have a statewide ban on cell phones in schools. This reporter was checking in who's for this and who is against it now. This has been a long evolving issue with alliances coming and going. Mainly the groups of people who have been in favor of these bans have been growing while those against have been declining. So this is an interesting question. Who is still against smartphone bans in schools? This, by the way, is an article by Gina Belafonte. All right. So just a couple of quotes I want to read here. Let's talk about the context for this article. Governor Kathy Hochul's recent campaign is to ban cell phones in schools across New York. At least eight other states, including Florida and Louisiana, have institute restrictions of varying kinds. In September, Governor Gavin Newsom signed a phone-free act requiring every school district in California to devise a policy limiting the use of smartphones by July 2026. So these statewide smartphone bans in schools are spreading. It's blue states and red states. There used to be a talking point. I think Killer Rins was really pushing this, that somehow this was like a Republican thing. Blue states, red states, New York, California, but also Florida, also Louisiana. Let's look at what's going on with New York's proposed ban. In a rare instance of agreement between labor and government, it is supported by the United Federation of Teachers, the union representing New York City school teachers. As Michael Mulgrew, the president of the UFT, put it, it is simple and everyone knows what the expectation is, right? So who is in favor of the cell phone bans? The state of New York and the teachers unions. And it's hard to get them to agree on almost anything. So I think that's pretty impressive. So who is left to be against these right now outside of like high school students who just like to have their phones? This is the interesting point of this article. So the reporter looks into this. The constituents most opposed to all-day phone bans are the mothers and fathers who seem to be addicted to constant filial contact. Twist. This is a twist for those of us who have been following this issue. For so many years, the debate was between the data-driven academics and the theory academics. So the data-driven academics were the social psychologists and the childhood psychologists, the demographers and the economists who were looking at data, and they care about data Methodology. This is people like John Hyatt. This is people like Gene Twenge who are like, look, I have no dog in this fight, but we're looking at this data. This stuff is bad for kids. We should get this out of schools. Almost certainly it's going to make things better. Academia who writes about technology so like media studies professors or like critical um media critical technology uh theorists who are less about data and more about particular Theoretical frameworks here here's the framework that's dominant in our field right now and sort of my job is to sort of keep protecting this framework um and those type of academics They really would they cared about things like techno determinism they didn't like the idea of just like a technology by itself could be good or bad. They were much more interested in their frameworks, which were more person-focused and about, you know, conflicting hierarchies of power, et cetera, et cetera. These sort of like complicated postmodernism-inspired theories. And so for a long time, they just kept throwing up roadblocks for their other professors. And at first, the roadblocks were uh when gene twenge came out in 2017 and said by the way like there's a lot of these trends i'm seeing that are kind of bad and i think it's because of phones At first like no it's because of other things but then they look closer and said actually these trends start just when phones start not when these other things started so they kind of Moved on from that and then you have the social psychologists come in and say i don't know we're looking at this data and there seems to be these retrospective giant social uh surveys There's these correlations between heavy social media use and bad mental health outcomes and then the against the idea there's like no our real complaint was not about the timing our Real complaint was these correlations are small and there's other correlations you can come up with and and it just matters how you look at the data. No one really knows what's going on here. And then we got better at analyzing the data and they stuck around. And then we got a lot of other types of study designs like prospective studies and randomized control trials and self-reports and natural experiments. And they all were pointing towards the same thing. Oh yeah, these are bad for teenagers. So then the same people like that was, that's not really our complaint. I think their complaint now is like, well, maybe cell phones are bad, but you can't ban them because we're going to invent hypotheticals where there is, you know, a particular kid in A particular situation where it'll be bad for that particular kid. And the kid is marginalized and we get points because we came up, we should get virtue points because we realized that could be a problem when you didn't. So like there's been, this has been the battle. These professors fighting these professors, these professors are like the data keeps showing this and these other professors keep throwing up different roadblocks. Like, well, what about this? What about that? So this is the twist. Who's really against these bans now is anxious parents. And that's something that those of us who are in the academic argument maybe weren't paying attention to. Let me read a little bit more of a quote here. Governor Hochul has spoken to aggrieved first grade teachers who told her that they are overseeing classrooms full of children wearing smartwatches. Mommy and daddy were checking in all day long saying, I miss you and can't wait to see you, the governor told me. That's a parental need, she said, not a student need. The continuation of these patterns, she worried, was bound to keep children from emerging as fully functioning adults. I've heard the same thing in some of the talks that I give, that part of the solution to getting kids off phones, especially in schools, is therapy for the parents. And I get it. If you're prone to anxiety, I'm a parent of three. If you're prone to anxiety, this is a really good vector for anxiety. I know about anxiety. A great vector for anxiety is my kid and my kids like safety. And you can ruminate on that six ways to Sunday. And once you start ruminating on that, you start telling yourself all these stories of all these disasters are going to happen. And that the only way to give yourself some peace is to be able to sort of be in touch with your kid and see this is not a problem. Unfortunately, from a social utilitarian perspective, dooming an entire demographic to have to have these sort of highly distracted, low quality educational experiences so that A smaller group of parents can feel better. It's just not the right tradeoff, right? ([Time 1:23:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4c4d3bcc-6adb-47c7-80f1-905f2d1afc98))