You Were Never Meant to Work 8 Hours a Day – Here’s the Fix

00:00:00.500 | So something we hear casually tossed around these days is the idea that knowledge workers are more

00:00:05.200 | exhausted and prone to burnout than ever before. Anecdotally, this seems to be true, but does the

00:00:10.740 | data back it up? Well, it does. If you look at survey data of knowledge workers, this trend seems

00:00:16.280 | to be clear. For example, 2025 research by research consultants at Censuswide found that 66% of

00:00:23.900 | American employees are experiencing some sort of burnout. This was the highest number they had

00:00:28.060 | recorded. Another survey from 2025 found that 82% of respondents reported experiencing some level of

00:00:35.300 | exhaustion. I kept finding study after study along these lines. They are common and the trend lines are

00:00:40.720 | heading in the wrong direction. So I want to talk about this today and I have two goals. First, I'm

00:00:45.400 | going to focus on a specific factor that I think helps explains this trend. It's not the only factor

00:00:51.400 | that explains this trend, but it is an important one. And it's one I think that we don't talk about

00:00:55.460 | enough. Second, I'm going to then follow the logic. If this factor is true, where would that lead us in

00:01:03.980 | terms of how we should be rethinking work? And I'm going to make a suggestion about what I think the

00:01:08.500 | ideal knowledge work workday should look like for a normal human being. It's an answer that might be

00:01:14.040 | shocking, but if you give it some time, I think it actually makes more sense than you might at first

00:01:18.720 | realize. So to get started, I want to start in an unexpected place. It's a quote I came across

00:01:26.340 | recently that sparked the whole line of thinking that led to this deep dive. It was a quote that was

00:01:33.860 | written down in a journal 150 years ago, and it might not seem to have anything to do with work,

00:01:39.920 | but I think when we look at it closely, it has everything to do with work today. All right,

00:01:44.660 | I'm going to pull this quote up here on the screen for those who are watching instead of just

00:01:49.000 | listening. This quote comes from Henry David Thoreau's journal. He wrote this journal entry in 1852.

00:01:54.820 | This was in the period after he had already spent his time at Walden Pond, but before he had published

00:02:01.280 | his book on the experience. So he was sort of processing it. Here's what he wrote.

00:02:07.660 | I have the habit of attention to such excess that my senses get no rest, but suffer from a constant

00:02:14.080 | strain. Be not preoccupied with looking, go not to the object, let it come to you. What I need is not

00:02:22.440 | to look at all, but a true sauntering of the eye. Okay, let's think about this a little bit. What did he

00:02:30.200 | mean by this? Well, to get some analysis that's going to help us connect us to work, I'm going to turn to

00:02:35.400 | the source where I found this journal entry, which was in Caleb Smith's recent book, Thoreau's Axe,

00:02:41.220 | which I read a couple months ago and we talked about on this show. The author of this book,

00:02:45.300 | Caleb Smith, in analyzing Thoreau's journal entry that I just read, said the following.

00:02:50.960 | At Walden, Thoreau had begun by trying to undistract himself, to reawaken his own powers of perception and

00:02:58.400 | refocus his attention on natural, uncommodified objects of contemplation. By doing so, he had hoped to

00:03:04.080 | free himself from the degrading cycle of labor and consumption that organized middle-class life under

00:03:08.240 | market capitalism. In the long run, though, he found that this very effort exhausted his senses and

00:03:13.240 | trapped him in a, quote, habit of attention, end quote. All right, this is a little bit academic.

00:03:18.880 | That's from an academic book, but let me deconstruct it because there's a critical point in

00:03:22.900 | here. When Thoreau went to Walden Pond to do that experiment of living deliberately by the water,

00:03:28.420 | he thought that his problem was he was paying attention to the wrong things,

00:03:33.640 | right? That he was focusing too much on consumer and materialistic goods, and that by removing those

00:03:42.520 | from his life and focusing on the wonders of nature, for example, which he describes in sort of great

00:03:47.780 | loving detail in his book, Walden, that he would find a sort of more purity in his existence. He was sort

00:03:54.260 | of playing here with the ancient monastic Christian notion of turning your attention from the worldly

00:03:58.660 | to the heavens above and contemplating hard, you know, God and divinity. But in this journal entry

00:04:05.160 | that comes after he leaves Walden, he's realizing that the bigger problem was how much time he was

00:04:11.780 | spending paying attention in the first place. So he was discovering this idea of, like, I need to focus

00:04:19.660 | really hard on the right thing, like, focus on the ice that I'm going to write about in Walden,

00:04:23.660 | focus on the clouds up above, that that act of paying so much attention itself was unnatural,

00:04:30.480 | regardless of what he was paying attention to. There's periods where you just need to let the

00:04:36.780 | world be around you, let objects come to your attention, and then drift off. This might give you

00:04:41.980 | deep insight. Sometimes it might not, but it gives you a more deeper sense of contentment.

00:04:47.840 | So we had this revelation. There's only so much we can kind of force ourselves to pay attention. We're

00:04:54.780 | actually wired to let the world come to us, just to be there in the world for a lot of our time.

00:05:00.360 | All right, let's connect this to knowledge work. There is a through line here. In his philosophizing,

00:05:06.900 | right, Thoreau was stumbling on this important point about paying focus attention being to some degree

00:05:11.420 | unnatural or something we can only do a limited amount. And yet, isn't this exactly what knowledge

00:05:18.340 | work demands of us? The knowledge work demands that we have to be focusing and paying attention on things

00:05:24.040 | with our brain the entire day. Well, where did this come from? Well, here's a story to tell.

00:05:30.980 | As we get the rise of the Industrial Revolution and factory labor, we invented a new model of productive work

00:05:40.860 | in which what you're essentially doing is renting your body to a factory owner. So in industrial work,

00:05:46.960 | which was what was big in the time when Thoreau was around, this was the model we had. Hey, I'm going

00:05:51.920 | to rent my body to you, the factory owner, for eight hours. It would have been more before, but after,

00:05:57.780 | you know, federal labor reform standards, early 20th century, it'd be something like eight hours.

00:06:01.540 | And then you could basically tell me what to do with that. I need your arms to turn these

00:06:06.060 | knobs and to attach these steering wheels or to move these things from the assembly line and off.

00:06:11.420 | And you're paying me for use of my body. You're going to tell me exactly how to use it. And if I

00:06:16.240 | say, hey, I'm going to go take a two-hour break, like, great, we're not using your body, then we're not

00:06:20.520 | paying you for those two hours, right? So I'm renting your body to help make our factories actually run

00:06:26.320 | because we need human bodies doing things in there. So when knowledge work emerged as a major economic

00:06:30.860 | sector in the mid-20th century, the decision implicitly was like, well, we'll just do the

00:06:36.240 | same thing with brains. It just made sense. It was a natural leap. In the factories, we rent your bodies

00:06:41.440 | for eight to 10 hours a day, and the offices will rent your brains for eight hours. Your brain is ours

00:06:46.540 | for those eight hours, so it better be doing the cognitive equivalent of turning the wrench or attaching

00:06:53.480 | the steering wheel for those eight hours. So you've got to be doing things with your brain the entire

00:07:01.560 | time that you're working. So this made sense from, I don't know, an intuitive perspective. It's just what

00:07:07.580 | we did in factories. Why not do it in offices? But as Thoreau had pointed out 150 years ago, you can't do

00:07:15.960 | that. You can sit in a factory and move things off an assembly line for eight hours a day, but you can't

00:07:21.640 | easily pay attention to things for eight hours a day. It's unnatural, and it's draining, and it is

00:07:26.860 | exhausting. It is a very unnatural configuration to be in. Now, why then are these numbers getting worse?

00:07:33.140 | If this was our idea early in the mid-20th century, we had all these big factories, the offices built,

00:07:37.400 | we said let's run the offices the same way as a factory. Why is this burnout and exhaustion getting

00:07:41.100 | worse today than it was back then? Wouldn't it just be bad from the very beginning? Well, I think

00:07:45.460 | technology has a role to play in this story. So while it was true in 1965, and you're working

00:07:54.440 | on Madison Avenue, like in the Jon Hamm show, Mad Men, that your brain was being rented for eight

00:08:00.100 | hours, it was easier to fake it than you could in industrial labor. In industrial labor, I can tell

00:08:05.820 | if you were not doing your thing on the assembly line. I can see you not turning the wrench. What's going

00:08:09.640 | on? But if I'm John Draper in Mad Men, come on, I can have a cocktail at two in the afternoon for an

00:08:17.600 | hour. We're like working in the conference room to think about ideas, but not really. When the boss

00:08:22.020 | comes by, you put down your magazine, and you're at the water cooler talking football, and the supervisor

00:08:26.760 | walks in, and you quickly shift at the client talk. So we all kind of pretended like this is what we

00:08:31.480 | were doing. Yeah, we're renting our brains just like our brothers in the factory. It's the same thing

00:08:34.900 | we're doing. We're renting our brains for eight hours, and we're here, and we're thinking the whole

00:08:37.960 | time, but we really weren't doing that, and you could kind of get away with that.

00:08:41.020 | Then technology came along, and we lost our ability to fake it. The personal computer, as I've talked

00:08:47.580 | about before, and I wrote about this in my book, Slow Productivity, the personal computer came along,

00:08:52.340 | and it vastly increased the number of things you could be working on. There's so much more work that

00:08:56.260 | could be assigned to you because there's so many more things that one individual could do because the

00:09:00.180 | computer made so many tasks just easy enough that one person could learn to do them. This led to a

00:09:05.640 | theory of workload that said, well, great. Now that there's so many different things you can do,

00:09:09.120 | why not just fill your queue hopelessly large with the idea that there'll be no downtime? So there'll

00:09:15.120 | always be something you can work on, right? So we were kind of calling the bluff of this renting your

00:09:20.680 | brain model. We're like, okay, if we really have your brain for eight hours, now that there's like an

00:09:23.800 | endless amount of stuff you could be doing, let's put so much on your plate that you never have an

00:09:27.460 | excuse not to be working. Then we got the digital communication revolution that started by email and was

00:09:32.100 | continued by things like Slack and Teams, et cetera. And that now made it possible to check in on you

00:09:40.000 | applying effort at an incredibly fine level of granularity. Answer my emails right away. I know

00:09:45.040 | you're paying attention. If you don't, then maybe you're stealing from us. We rented your brain. You're

00:09:49.820 | not giving it to us. See activity going back and forth on the Slack channel, or we're going to think

00:09:54.480 | that you are actually ironically slacking off. So we vastly increased what people could be doing.

00:09:59.380 | vastly increased the granularity at which we could surveil people's efforts. And suddenly

00:10:02.900 | this half-baked idea, let's just rent brains for eight hours. We actually tried to do it.

00:10:08.060 | And that's why it's exhausting everyone. And Thoreau warned us about it. He wasn't warning us about

00:10:13.320 | office work, but he was warning us about the underlying principle that, hey, it's hard to pay

00:10:18.680 | attention all the time. Even if the thing you're paying attention to is good, there's only so much of

00:10:22.340 | that you can do. Hey, it's Cal. I wanted to interrupt briefly to say that if you're enjoying

00:10:27.380 | this video, then you need to check out my new book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment

00:10:34.500 | Without Burnout. This is like the Bible for most of the ideas we talk about here in these videos.

00:10:41.860 | You can get a free excerpt at calnewport.com/slow. I know you're going to like it. Check it out.

00:10:49.860 | Now let's get back to the video. So what would it look like if we rolled back the clock and said,

00:10:55.380 | look, Thoreau is my management consultant of choice, and we're going to design what I'll call the Thoreau

00:11:00.660 | schedule, a schedule for knowledge work, a typical daily schedule that actually is compatible with the

00:11:08.420 | way the human brain actually functions. Here's what this would more or less be. Two to three hours of

00:11:15.140 | deep work in the morning. So working on one or two things that are important and require application of

00:11:19.380 | skills and concentration, non-trivial amount of time off, like an hour or two long walk,

00:11:26.100 | other types of things unrelated to work. One to two hours of administrative work, including a standing

00:11:31.860 | 30-minute meeting or office hours to check in with all sorts of other people and get questions answered

00:11:35.860 | and any other sort of things that need to happen. And then you're done.

00:11:40.260 | That would actually be the schedule that best corresponds to the human brain. If you want to

00:11:46.580 | invent a cognitive job that's based just off people using their brain, that is, the Thoreau

00:11:52.580 | schedule there is probably the optimal thing. Now, the obvious point, of course, is that if you ran the

00:11:57.860 | Thoreau schedule, yes, you would be much less likely to be burnt out. If you ran this as an organization,

00:12:02.820 | your exhaustion numbers, your turnover, your burnout numbers, of course, would plummet. That's a much more

00:12:06.340 | natural rhythm. It works with our brain. We're not exhausting ourselves. But would it be a productivity

00:12:11.060 | disaster? We don't know that it would be. Here's a couple things to keep in mind. Remember from a couple

00:12:18.100 | weeks ago, we talked about the data from the four-day work week studies. They reduced the amount of time

00:12:24.980 | people had to work. Therefore, reducing the amount of stuff they could work on. And all of the quantitative

00:12:30.420 | productivity measures that they studied didn't go down. In some cases, they went up. It's slow

00:12:36.100 | productivity. I talk about the idea of overhead tax aggregating. Everything you're working on generates

00:12:42.740 | an overhead tax of meetings and emails and thoughts, the sort of the collaborative glue that holds together

00:12:47.460 | any sort of project. The more things you're working on, the more of that is in your day. And the more

00:12:53.620 | of that you get in your day, eventually your day is going to be gunked up with the overhead tax

00:12:57.460 | with very little time left to do the actual work. Yes, you're busy, but very little actual quality

00:13:03.620 | output gets produced. So if you're only working one big block in the morning on one or two things,

00:13:09.940 | and then some administrative work in the afternoon, yes, your number of things you can concurrently be

00:13:13.540 | working on is going to be much smaller. It doesn't necessarily mean that on the scale of a quarter

00:13:19.140 | that you'll be producing less than in a much more non-Thorough busier schedule.

00:13:23.300 | And also keep in mind that the impossibility that Thoreau points out of actually focusing

00:13:28.500 | productively and hard for eight hours means that we're just using lots of pseudo productivity to

00:13:32.580 | fill in the gaps during our day. And pseudo productivity, which is just using busyness as

00:13:37.620 | as a proxy for useful effort, has little to do with outcome, has very little to do with the

00:13:42.820 | needle moving actual valuable stuff that is produced. So a Thoreau schedule might be largely

00:13:50.580 | just eliminating pseudo productivity, which means again, when you zoom out to a quarter or to a fiscal

00:13:54.900 | year, the amount of value produced, the actual macroeconomic measure productivity, which is how many

00:14:02.020 | dollars came in per employee we have hired? That could actually be the same or go up.

00:14:06.900 | I mean, maybe not, but I suspect it would not be as bad as you suspect.

00:14:11.460 | So to conclude, most major companies and organizations, they're not going to shift to a Thoreau schedule

00:14:15.620 | anytime soon. I think this idea of we're renting your brain and we want to get our money's worth for

00:14:20.180 | this rental agreement is both obvious and comfortable and entrenched, and it's going to be hard to easily

00:14:25.380 | shake off. But if they did, and I think people should, there would be a whole new relationship

00:14:32.420 | to knowledge work and a whole new approach to productivity that might be uncovered.

00:14:36.340 | I don't know exactly what type of boss Thoreau would be in our modern knowledge work setting,

00:14:42.020 | but I imagine that he wouldn't be sending you endless email advice and text messages saying,

00:14:46.580 | did you get my last message? I think he would instead understand the importance of allowing your eye

00:14:52.660 | to saunter. So there you go, Jesse. Thoreau is a management consultant. That was the original title

00:15:00.100 | of Walden. People don't know this. It was Walden, colon, seven habits for getting ahead in your job.

00:15:06.500 | And then he kind of changed it to something a little bit more philosophical.

00:15:09.380 | That's one of your favorite books, right? Yeah. Walden is very influential to a lot of my work.

00:15:14.500 | And you read that when you read MIT? I originally read it. Yeah.

00:15:17.860 | MIT at the banks of the Charles. I had the version of a terrible memory for everything

00:15:22.980 | except for books. And I read it on the banks of the Charles. I had a version from the science library.

00:15:27.700 | I think it was called the Hayden Science Library at MIT. And they had an edition that had a Bill

00:15:31.460 | McKibben introduction. And I remember being like, oh, okay, interesting. And I've been to the cabin and

00:15:37.780 | it's a great book. You know, look, it's not written in a modern style. You have to take it slow.

00:15:43.380 | It seems more digressive and he's sort of all over the place, but he's actually, it's really smart

00:15:52.660 | commentary that's in there. Once you, once you adjust to the language and there's a lot of timeless

00:15:56.260 | principles in it. Two other follow up questions. Do you think it has a big difference with public

00:16:01.300 | versus private companies in terms of potentially adopting a thorough schedule?

00:16:05.620 | I think it's small versus large. Yeah. I think it's just, it gets too entrenched when you're,

00:16:11.380 | as you get bigger, it's hard to make changes. This one of the things I've really learned is that

00:16:15.060 | it's hard to change how organizations execute. It's hard to do it. If you come just top down,

00:16:23.220 | it almost never works because there's all these little friction points. And if it feels like it's

00:16:27.620 | imposed, like the boss of the massive company says like, here's, you know, look, I read Cal Newport,

00:16:31.860 | we're making all these changes. There's too many friction points. And then the, the friction builds

00:16:35.620 | up and the, the system seizes. Then you have to fall back to the super flexible sort of like

00:16:40.500 | hyperactive hive mind overload, you know, mindset. And then managers themselves, they're not the boss,

00:16:47.380 | but like the managers, they really don't have an incentive, right? This is a, the, the, the reality

00:16:53.140 | of, uh, modern capitalism is if you're in a large organization, there's things like stability,

00:16:59.380 | predictability, like this is more highly valued than trying to innovate the way that you actually

00:17:06.260 | work or collaborate with other people. Like it's, it's, there's a lot of just entrenchment

00:17:09.860 | of like, Hey, this works. Like we all disagree, right? We'll just be pseudo productive. We know how

00:17:14.180 | to do this. I'm good at it. If I'm a manager, that means I was good at it. I answer all the emails and

00:17:18.820 | jump on all the calls. I have a good, like high pain tolerance for that. And like, who wants to

00:17:22.900 | change it? So it's, it's these problems like hard to change, but like I said, like we see this all the

00:17:27.540 | time. There'll be technological breakthroughs in industrial manufacturing. It takes a long time

00:17:31.380 | until it actually, the changes happen just because of inertia. The electric motor, famous case study

00:17:36.500 | from a Stanford, uh, economist has talked about all the time. I've cited, everyone cited it. It took like

00:17:41.300 | 50 years from having the technology there to like, wait, we should just put small electric motors on the

00:17:46.660 | equipment in the factory, as opposed to having like a large overhead shaft turned by a giant,

00:17:50.580 | um, steam engine that we attach with leather belts still took 50 years. Cause it was like a pain and

00:17:56.100 | it was new and it was different and expensive. Uh, the continuous motion assembly line is the same way,

00:18:00.260 | by far a better way to make things like automobiles, but it was such a pain to get right that, you know,

00:18:06.900 | it really took eventually like, uh, Henry Ford being a kind of classic and just forcing the change through

00:18:11.460 | for that to actually happen. So I think knowledge work has a lot of that entrenchment.

00:18:15.620 | And then my next follow up. So we talked about summer schedules a few weeks back.

00:18:19.540 | So how does your summer schedule look like a daily schedule look like for us?

00:18:24.580 | It's been pretty good. I mean, it's been, it's very throw in, uh, on a nod podcast day. I write in the

00:18:29.780 | morning for two to three hours. Yeah. At least I'll work on multiple different projects. Um,

00:18:35.460 | and then I try to do some admin in the afternoon, professional admin, but not every day. I like three

00:18:41.940 | days, uh, three days a week. I can keep on top of like most professional admin 30 to 45 minutes.

00:18:48.100 | So when I hardly write in the afternoon, I don't, yeah, sometimes I can do like a second batch in the

00:18:53.620 | evening. Uh, I can sometimes make that work if I come here and like make a deal about it. But no,

00:18:57.860 | I do it mostly in the morning. The, uh, the thing I have been doing just because I have more time is

00:19:02.260 | every time now I go into my emails professionally, I'm, uh, updating on my filters, just unsubscribe,

00:19:08.020 | filter, unsubscribe, filter. I mean, I'm going to be, uh, if I'm relentless for two weeks,

00:19:12.260 | I can cut down the, the junk that comes to those email inboxes, not calnewport.com.

00:19:16.340 | That's a lost cause. That's just done. I don't know how I'm ever going to get my arms around that

00:19:21.060 | one. Every PR agency that ever existed now, like sends emails to that. But, but, uh, in my personal

00:19:26.660 | and Georgetown, I'm like, I'm, it's really making a difference. I'm catching up on the like various

00:19:30.740 | things. I bought a product from this once, and now I have 17 email subscriptions from them,

00:19:35.700 | like that type of stuff. And it's like, it's making a difference. One more follow up with

00:19:40.580 | your writing two to three hours a day, you write very fast. So you just bang out something two to

00:19:46.340 | three hours probably. It depends what it is. Yeah. It depends what it is. Um,

00:19:50.820 | like recently I have a New Yorker piece that came out last week and I wrote down like two days, but you

00:19:59.700 | write in your head a lot too, when you're walking around. I do write in my head. Yeah. But like a New

00:20:03.300 | New Yorker, it took me two days to do 20, 2,300 words. Um, and that was, those are more like eight

00:20:08.060 | hour days of writing just because I was on deadline, but other things like the, the newsletter post about

00:20:12.260 | that New Yorker article. So today there's a new newsletter post out about that New Yorker article

00:20:16.500 | at calnewport.com. Uh, that took like 30, that was just, you know, brain to page. Yeah. Just,

00:20:21.860 | you know, I was like, I've thought about this so much. I just lived with this for the last four days.

00:20:25.220 | I can just, you know, that's just gonna, that's just gonna come out. So it just depends what I'm,

00:20:29.700 | depends what I'm working on. Uh, sometimes like not much happens if it's like a really tricky piece,

00:20:34.180 | but also, yeah, I think of walking as writing. Cause I write in my head. Like I, I never,

00:20:38.260 | I don't want to come to a blank screen saying, I'll figure this out on the screen completely.

00:20:42.820 | Like just as I start typing, maybe I'll figure out what I want to say. You're going to say bad things.

00:20:46.980 | Like you've got to figure out the scaffolding of what you're going to write. And then you sit down

00:20:52.980 | the right and then things might change, but I do a lot of that on foot. All right. We got some

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00:22:25.060 | the time. So Element is the best if you want one of these like no dodgy ingredients, right amount of

00:22:29.540 | electrolytes. I swear by it, and I really recommend it. Look, you can receive a free sample pack with any

00:22:38.100 | order if you purchase through drinkelement.com/deep. And when you're there, you should check out a new

00:22:43.300 | flavor, great summer flavor, lemonade, salt, squeezed the most out of summer with Element's new limited

00:22:50.180 | time lemonade salt, salty tart and refreshing, but it brings you the best of summer wherever you are.

00:22:54.180 | I'm literally craving that right now. I don't think I've had enough hydration this morning. I wish I had

00:22:57.700 | a lemonade salt element right now. We're just going to sit here on dead air until Jesse goes and finds that

00:23:03.940 | for me. It's going to take like 15-20 minutes, but that's what we're going to have to do.

00:23:06.900 | Look, there's a totally risk-free, you know, you don't like Element, you can return it, no money

00:23:13.300 | back, etc., but you're not going to. You're going to like it. So go to drinkelement.com/deep. You need

00:23:18.340 | Element, buy Element, get a free sample pack if you order at drinkelement.com/deep. I also want to

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00:24:26.660 | V-A-N-T-A.com/deepquestions for $1,000 off. Security is complicated these days, Jesse. I think

00:24:32.980 | our setup is probably technologically not complicated enough yet. People don't know this, but actually,

00:24:39.460 | like the whole digital Cal Newport empire, true story, it's run off of a speak-and-spell.

00:24:44.740 | So we really were kind of behind the times. A speak-and-spell in one of those Casio calculator

00:24:49.620 | watches. So I think we need some more. Yeah, you got yours. Jesse wears a watch that I literally owned

00:24:55.620 | when I was seven. I mean, not that literal watch, but that exact brand. And in fact, my watch, my,

00:25:01.940 | was it the Timex? Casio. Casio. Yeah. I'm sure mine still runs if I could find it. Yeah, there you go.

00:25:09.220 | But Jesse's a bad haggler and he actually spent $17,000 on that watch. He kind of got taken for

00:25:15.860 | a bit of a ride, but you know, it's worth it. It's a beautiful watch. All right, Jesse, let's do some

00:25:19.460 | questions.

00:25:19.780 | First question's from Natasha. What's your advice on having a career backup plan, especially for young

00:25:28.180 | people aiming for highly competitive fields like academia? What makes for a good backup plan in

00:25:32.900 | case things don't work out, even if you, even if I follow your advice?

00:25:36.580 | It's a good question. This is where career capital theory matters. This is the whole

00:25:40.900 | theoretical framework I lay out in my book, so good they can't ignore you. So career capital,

00:25:45.700 | as we talk about a lot on the show, is my term for your marketable skills, your rare and valuable

00:25:51.700 | skills. That is your source of value and negotiation in the job market. So whatever you're working on is

00:25:57.780 | used to be thinking about not just what specific job am I trying to get. You should also be thinking

00:26:04.180 | about what general type of career capital am I accruing. And you want to make sure that not

00:26:08.420 | only are you accruing as much as possible, which means not just like doing what you need to, you know,

00:26:12.820 | bare minimum to get the job, but like, I want to build skills that are hard and they're really

00:26:17.300 | valuable. And like people like, wow, you're good at that. That's valuable. You want to build up that

00:26:21.460 | general career capital. And then your question just becomes what other types of jobs would value and

00:26:28.580 | reward this capital. And you want to make sure the answer to that second question is sufficiently long.

00:26:34.980 | So whatever you're working on, say, is there a way to go for this, that the capital and building up to

00:26:40.580 | try to succeed for like this particular job is going to have a couple other outlets where people would

00:26:45.780 | value it. Because often what happens in particular pursuits, there's different ways to do them.

00:26:50.260 | Some ways are going to use more capital than others.

00:26:53.780 | Like in academia, I don't know, maybe there's like a very esoteric way you go forward where like this

00:26:58.340 | better work because like, there really is no, I'm not building up any other skills that anyone's going

00:27:03.380 | to find valuable. And then there's, there's ways forward where like, look, I'm building up skills

00:27:06.340 | to do this where like, if a tenure line job doesn't work, there's still a lot of research positions that

00:27:13.700 | I could like fall back on for a couple of years, catch my breath. And then the skill will be useful

00:27:18.100 | here, here and here in the private sector, et cetera. So think about it in terms of career capital,

00:27:22.020 | not just jobs and you'll have a lot more flexibility with what you do. All right,

00:27:27.060 | who we got next? Next up is Ellen. I'm a mid career physician scientist at a crosswords deciding

00:27:33.380 | between pursuing leadership roles or focusing on research. And I want to approach this with

00:27:37.620 | a lifestyle centric mindset. I'd like to hire an executive coach familiar with your help. Can you

00:27:44.020 | guide me through this? Is Cal network available? So I read this as two questions. A is Cal network

00:27:49.380 | available, but two, uh, doesn't make sense to have a coach, right? That's kind of what she's asking.

00:27:54.100 | Yeah. Okay. Um, Cal network, I'm looking this up now actually does have an online career coaching

00:28:02.100 | course. I have it here. So you do have that option. Uh, it's called I'm the boss. Now 74 essential laws,

00:28:09.460 | the crusher enemy, see them driven before you and hear the lamentation of their women and here earned a promotion. You know, you deserve.

00:28:16.180 | So that's good. It costs $1,900 a month. So it's a bit of an investment, but it's probably worth it.

00:28:21.700 | Do you know the origin of that quote, Jesse, the crusher enemy, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women?

00:28:28.500 | No, Conan, the barbarian. That's John Milius is screenwriting right there. It feels like something

00:28:33.940 | Cal network and John Milius get along. Uh, it's Conan said, like, I want to see my enemies driven before

00:28:39.540 | me, hear the lamentations of their women. It's this whole thing. Um, but should you have, assuming you

00:28:45.300 | don't want to take, uh, I'm the boss. Now, should you have a career coach? Here's the thing to think

00:28:49.380 | about what a coaches do. They sanity check your plans. They're not going to make the plans for you.

00:28:55.860 | That's actually very valuable, right? I mean, I think a lot of people, myself included,

00:29:02.580 | they put together a plan and the big fear is like, maybe this is not right. Like maybe I'm crazy or I'm

00:29:08.740 | deluding myself or I've been reading too many Cal network books or whatever. And they have like an

00:29:12.740 | executive coach or a career coach. So like, no, no, this is a good plan. And I back it up. That is worth

00:29:16.900 | a lot, but you have to keep in mind. They're not going to say, let's sit down. I'll figure out what

00:29:21.300 | you should do. You still have to do that. And in your situation with the type of decision you're

00:29:25.380 | looking at lifestyle center, career planning is the right way forward. So you really want to be

00:29:30.180 | clear about what you want in like the two or three year period, as well as like the 10 or 15 year period,

00:29:35.220 | what you want your, the rhythms of your day-to-day life to look like, because these two directions,

00:29:40.020 | leadership roles versus research roles are going to yield very different, uh, lifestyles.

00:29:46.260 | And so you want to be really clear about it. Now, I don't actually think this is an obvious choice.

00:29:50.260 | Like someone might say, ah, leadership roles is going to be stressful as email, like just be a

00:29:54.900 | researcher, but research roles could also be stressful because a, it's more provisional.

00:29:58.980 | Like if your research doesn't go well, it also may be much less money. Uh, there might be their own

00:30:03.540 | stresses of trying to do grant management or trying to manage teams of, of, uh, like postdocs and grad

00:30:08.900 | students. Like you really got to think this through. And then, and here's where I think lifestyle

00:30:13.220 | center career planning gets really useful. You work out a sort of rough ideal lifestyle image.

00:30:18.180 | Now you have these two options and you're kind of working through, okay, what I keep in mind for

00:30:22.820 | the leadership position I might follow, what I have in mind for the research position I might follow,

00:30:26.500 | how do they lead? How close do they lead to my vision video lifestyle? And what you might discover

00:30:32.180 | doing that is like, oh, you know what? They both have flaws, but now there's this other thing,

00:30:38.020 | like a variation of one of those ideas. If I was like a, uh, this type of leadership position

00:30:43.300 | or not this type of research position, but this one over here that avoids the big misses on my ideal

00:30:49.220 | lifestyle. And it's much closer. Like it actually allows you the lifestyle vision, uh, centric planning

00:30:54.820 | allows you to explore a much wider space of available positions than most people instinctively do.

00:31:01.300 | They lock in on a couple of options and say, this is it. And they might not know there's this other

00:31:06.260 | sort of a little bit unusual option. It's like, oh, it's like a research position, but it's not at this

00:31:11.060 | university. It's at this university and it's this time. And it's like, it's something you never would

00:31:14.420 | have thought of except for you're doing lifestyle center career planning and you have this big thing

00:31:19.380 | you want your lifestyle that's missing. And that makes it work. So lifestyle center career planning

00:31:23.460 | doesn't just let you decide between two options. It allows you to see other options. You might not

00:31:26.900 | have other otherwise even considered that end up being the best one. So, uh, take Cal networks course,

00:31:33.300 | mortgage your house. If you have to second do serious lifestyle center planning. And then third,

00:31:39.700 | maybe hire a coach, but keep in mind, the goal there is going to be sanity checking, not someone handing you

00:31:46.100 | a plan. I think Cal network hands you a plan. If you take his course, probably you walk in,

00:31:51.620 | you don't say anything. He stares at you for a little bit, does one more bicep curl,

00:31:55.620 | then goes management consultant. Boom. Just tells you what you should do. And that's what you do.

00:32:01.540 | You crush it. $1,900 a month, 10 year commitment. All right. Who we got next 10 year commitment.

00:32:08.660 | Next up is Gary. I'm about to retire. I'd like to know if my plan is too ambitious. I want to become

00:32:14.340 | excellent at chess and crack cryptic crosswords. I also want to maintain my ability to walk 20 miles,

00:32:20.340 | set records for a half marathon row and keep my 5,000 meter swim at a high level.

00:32:25.540 | So with one exception, I'm going to say not too ambitious.

00:32:30.100 | And the one exception is where you get specific and say set records.

00:32:35.060 | So the way to be clear, he meant set personal records.

00:32:39.060 | Oh, okay. I thought he was talking about like age group records. Okay, good. Then I think it's

00:32:43.140 | completely fine because what you're saying here is like, I have a collection of things I want to

00:32:47.300 | work hard at and get better at that are interesting and meaningful to me. That's a great plan.

00:32:51.460 | So this is a good, this misunderstanding what you're saying, I think illustrates well when ambitions can

00:32:57.300 | get too large. It's when you get too specific. So if you said like, I want to have the age group

00:33:01.780 | record for the half marathon row. Well, maybe you will, maybe you won't. Like, I don't know.

00:33:05.060 | You know, do you have the right genetics? Who else is going after this? What age group are you talking

00:33:09.620 | about? That may or may not be achievable, but everything you list here is. Chess, crossword,

00:33:15.380 | 20 miles, row, swimming. I think it's great, right? I mean, and it's an idea of, it's very deliberate and

00:33:22.420 | it's very intentional. It's like, I want to do things with my mind. I want to do things with my

00:33:25.700 | body and why don't I be very aggressive, ambitious about what I do? Because why not? So I like that

00:33:31.940 | approach to retirement, to like sort of really turning up the volume as opposed to sort of thinking,

00:33:36.980 | I need to just sort of not do too much. That'll just make you miserable. Now, I don't know what a

00:33:40.980 | cryptic crossword is. However, it sounds terrible. Crosswords are hard enough, but you think it's

00:33:47.060 | like a code or something? I want to say it's something to do with like cryptography.

00:33:53.220 | Right. Just like a crossword and it's coded the answers. Yeah. Kind of like that book that

00:33:58.580 | Neil Stevenson wrote. Cryptonomicon. Yeah. Yeah. This is good though. I think it's a cool plan.

00:34:04.980 | It makes me feel like I should do more things. You know, what's funny is I had no idea how you're

00:34:08.180 | going to answer that question because Gary emailed me and I was, that's why I also put it in there

00:34:12.660 | because I was interested to see how you'd answer it. I mean, what's the worst case scenario is you

00:34:16.900 | take one or two things off the table. That's exactly what he said too. He said,

00:34:20.420 | I want to do something with my mind. I want to do something with my body.

00:34:22.500 | Yeah. I mean, I like this idea of, especially when it's within your personal life, it's this grand

00:34:28.340 | goal theory, right? Like, so, all right, this is subtle. I'm not a big believer in the idea that a

00:34:32.660 | grand goal is going to solve all your problems. So a lot of people think, look, I have some grand

00:34:37.540 | goal and if I can achieve that goal, my life will be happy. One goal can't solve all your problems.

00:34:43.540 | Right. Achieving one goal is not likely to tweak all the different elements that are relevant to

00:34:48.980 | your ideal lifestyle and make them better. It'll make one thing better. It might make other things

00:34:52.580 | worse and be indifferent to others. But having ambitious goals as a way to work on specific

00:34:59.780 | parts of your lifestyle that want to be better, I like that idea. So the, the grand goal theory would

00:35:05.220 | be like, Hey, if I can, you know, be the pickleball champion of my, at my local club, like my life will

00:35:10.900 | be happy. And like that by itself is not gonna make you happy. But if you're like, I want to be very

00:35:14.900 | physically active. I worry about a retirement getting less physically active. And one way I'm going to do

00:35:20.020 | that specific thing in my lifestyle is an ambitious goal. Like I'm going to try to become the pickleball

00:35:24.340 | champion or I'm going to play a ton of pickleball. Uh, that that's actually like, uh, that is a good

00:35:29.140 | application of ambition and grand goals. So I like this, like taking big swings on, on things that, uh,

00:35:34.740 | are connected to parts of your lifestyle that you think are important. All right. Who we got?

00:35:39.220 | We got to go back to Gavin. Oh, we skip Gavin. I'm trying to build my discipline and use an

00:35:44.900 | accountability support tool. Is this cheating? And if so, should I be building this more on my own?

00:35:49.540 | Uh, no, it's not cheating. The way I think about accountability support tools, like where you,

00:35:56.500 | there's different things here. You have like a partner and you tell them what you're going to do,

00:35:59.380 | and then you tell them if you did it or not, or you put money on the line. And if you don't actually

00:36:03.380 | like follow through on something, you have to pay the money or, or whatever it is you're doing. I think

00:36:07.220 | that's like a perfectly fine, I would call it discipline training tool. And I think it's similar

00:36:14.660 | to various training tools you might use as you're like trying to pick up a new, you know, physical

00:36:19.940 | ability or new marker of strength. Typically what happens is people don't need to stick with these

00:36:25.700 | long-term, but they help you build up a rhythm or habit of discipline. Because of the accountability,

00:36:32.100 | I actually do this thing when I otherwise might've tried to make an excuse. And then after a while,

00:36:35.700 | that muscle gets stronger and I don't need so much support to do it, I'm now more able or willing

00:36:40.260 | to do it on my own, which is sort of where you want to end up. But accountability tools are a great way

00:36:44.340 | to sort of break the ice on getting used to doing disciplined activity. Um, other things that matter

00:36:48.820 | also include like making sure you understand what you're doing and your brain, trust your plan.

00:36:52.980 | The efforts I'm going to do will likely get me to this goal. Also really trying to load up and make

00:36:59.060 | clear in your mind the achievement of that goal. So that's very vivid. That also helps you summon

00:37:03.460 | a discipline. And then laddering up is important as well that you have a level of discipline required.

00:37:10.660 | That's a little bit beyond where you're comfortable, but not way beyond you want to ladder that up a

00:37:15.060 | little bit more slowly because your brain has to get used to different levels of hardship that you

00:37:19.860 | overcome experiences of reward that makes this type of effort worth it, et cetera. So you want to kind

00:37:25.780 | of go slow. I have a whole big 10,000 word chapter on this in my deep life book I'm writing. So I've

00:37:29.780 | been thinking a lot about it. So yeah, use the accountability tools, use whatever you need

00:37:32.900 | to help you train discipline. But this bigger picture ideas, think about discipline as something

00:37:38.340 | you train and cultivate. And then once you have it, it's a fuel for everything else. So it's not

00:37:42.660 | cheating. It's training. It's a training tool. So there you go. A little known fact, you know,

00:37:49.620 | Navy SEALs are very disciplined, of course. Yeah.

00:37:52.580 | Just for fun, Cal Network did the BUDS Navy SEAL training. And you know, like they have that bell,

00:37:58.180 | like just ring the bell and then you're out, just ring the bell. And you know, the instructors are

00:38:02.340 | trying to get the SEALs to ring the bell. And usually like 80% of the SEALs ring the bell,

00:38:06.260 | wash out in BUDS. When Cal Network did the Navy SEAL training, he got the instructors to ring the bell.

00:38:13.380 | I just want to throw that out there. That's discipline. All right. What else do we got?

00:38:17.140 | Next up is D. I'm getting serious about career capital so I can make bids to move closer to the

00:38:22.740 | ideal lifestyle for my family. However, I'm having a difficult time figuring out my baseline stores of

00:38:28.260 | capital. How can I identify if I have an inventory of rare and valuable skills?

00:38:33.300 | I mean, I usually come back to seeing that people will give you money.

00:38:36.420 | The use of Derek Sivers term that I quote in So Good They Can't Ignore You and talk about all the

00:38:41.460 | time on the show, money is a neutral indicator of value. People are happy to just to tell you with

00:38:46.660 | words that that's great. Your ideas are great. Your skills seem cool. I think there'll be a real demand

00:38:50.900 | for it. Like people definitely are interested in the fact that you're really good at weaving

00:38:58.740 | Navajo style rugs that feature characters from the second, third, but not first police academy movie,

00:39:04.100 | or like whatever it is that you know how to do. People will just say, that's great,

00:39:07.220 | but they don't want to give you their money unless they actually think it's great. So I think it's a

00:39:10.820 | great way of assessing it, which means if it's like a business idea, you actually try to sell that

00:39:16.820 | product a little bit on the side. You actually try to get clients to sign up real contracts and then

00:39:20.980 | renew that contract afterwards. If you're in the job market, will my company give me a raise when I

00:39:28.420 | ask for it? Will other people make me an offer like, "Hey, we would like to hire you. We would

00:39:32.820 | like to pay money to bring you to us." If not, then maybe your skills aren't that rare and valuable.

00:39:38.180 | So you got to go to the extent possible, let money be a neutral indicator of value.

00:39:44.660 | And when people are trying to hire you, when your company is happily giving you raises,

00:39:48.980 | when you try to side hustle your idea to test it out and it sells out, when you're doing some clients

00:39:55.620 | on the side to see if this new idea is going to work, you get clients, they pay happily,

00:40:00.500 | they try to renew it. Then you know that your rare and valuable skills are there. And if this is not

00:40:04.660 | happening, then you want to go to the woodshed and practice and get better.

00:40:07.460 | All right. We've got a case study today where people send in their accounts of using the type

00:40:13.140 | of advice we talk about on this show in their own life. Today's case study comes from Antonio.

00:40:18.340 | Antonio says, "I got so good they can't ignore me in the very niche field of storytelling.

00:40:24.180 | After using the career capital skills, I learned from being an actor.

00:40:27.380 | In the winner-take-all market of theater and film, it was clear that I was talented, but not the best.

00:40:33.060 | With the spare time I had not studying acting, waiting tables, or hoping that my agents would call,

00:40:37.940 | I discovered a deep interest that became a fulfilling hobby in the world of oral tradition.

00:40:42.820 | Because the professional storytelling world is relatively small, I was able to approach the

00:40:47.780 | legends in that field, pay to take their workshops and classes, watch them up close at small venues,

00:40:52.900 | and ultimately be mentored by a few of them." You know, Cal Network has a really popular oral

00:40:58.820 | storytelling workshop. It's called "Shut Up, I'm Talking." Crush it, crush your stories with Cal Network.

00:41:05.700 | All right, back to this. One of the mentors told me, "You'll know you found your calling when people

00:41:11.540 | start calling, or as Derek Siver said, use money as a neutral indicator of value. Soon I was able to

00:41:16.820 | quit my survival job as a waiter, do the few plays and film projects that I got cast in, but that didn't pay

00:41:21.860 | the bills, and use all of my ample free time to develop a large repertoire of folk tales and personal

00:41:27.380 | stories. I made three big decisions after some initial successes in storytelling in my late 20s

00:41:32.420 | that enabled me to live a current lifestyle full of deep meaning and impact for my community and my

00:41:37.300 | family with time to develop new skills and hobbies. One, I told my acting agents I'd only auditioned for

00:41:42.100 | major roles from a small list of theaters, TV creators, and film directors. They all promptly dropped me,

00:41:46.980 | and I used this newfound free time to develop even more stories. Two, I soundly invested the

00:41:51.780 | majority of the money I made during that time, lived only off the per diem I received, and even rented

00:41:56.180 | out my apartment while I toured for months telling stories all over the world. I also chose not to own

00:42:01.140 | a car and used the savings to take longer retreat style workshops my mentors offered in fabulous

00:42:05.540 | locations. Three, I put much of that earned money back into my career, developing PR materials that

00:42:11.060 | helped keep the flywheel spinning with the clarity of carefully putting all my eggs in the basket of

00:42:15.700 | storytelling. I am now able to pick and choose the multiple opportunities that come my way and have

00:42:20.980 | increased my rates so much that I only have four to six, I only two or six days a year. Wow.

00:42:26.340 | I'm very much a stay-at-home dad for our two children based on the lifestyle center career

00:42:31.380 | planning I did with my wife in the late 30s. So there we go. Classic lifestyle center career

00:42:35.860 | planning. You end up in places that you wouldn't come up with if you're planning forward.

00:42:41.060 | You're 20. You're like, what do I want to do with my life? You're gonna be like, I want to be an actor,

00:42:44.500 | I guess, right? But he had a lifestyle in mind and it allowed him as he saw different opportunities to

00:42:51.060 | begin to develop those opportunities towards his lifestyle. Then he used career capital theory as

00:42:54.340 | well. Like actually getting really good at this, that career capital will allow me to change this

00:42:58.660 | into a really good job. If I'm not really good, I can't. And so I'm going to be careful about my money.

00:43:02.980 | I'm going to invest my time and money into getting better at this. Very strategic and I think a great case

00:43:08.500 | study. All right, do we have a call this week? We do. All right, let's hear this.

00:43:12.260 | Hey Cal, this is Josh. I was working with AI coming up with some sort of system

00:43:22.820 | based on your principles of the semester plan, the weekly plan, a daily time block plan and really getting

00:43:31.140 | a semester plan down. I found out through AI, a suggestion to create a life dashboard, which I

00:43:39.460 | thought was really cool. I started to use Replit AI to create it and realized how extensive it would be.

00:43:46.580 | If you were to create a life dashboard or suggest someone to create it, what would you put in yours? And

00:43:55.460 | then how would you use it to track and manage your habits, your weekly template and the different aspects of your

00:44:02.820 | system? Thanks so much.

00:44:04.820 | I mean, I think life dashboards are cool. I've known some people who have built them before and

00:44:08.900 | I think you're right to point out that AI makes it much easier. You could whip up one of these vibe

00:44:14.580 | code up one of these sort of idiosyncratic programs for yourself pretty quickly. So I think that changes

00:44:19.300 | the game. That in general, by the way, is something I'm interested in. The idea of using vibe coding as

00:44:23.620 | a way to build bespoke personal productivity type digital tools, there's an interesting potential

00:44:30.660 | movement to happen there. We're like, "Hey, I can build this tool to do exactly this type of stuff

00:44:35.220 | I care about, to manage my time, energy, and attention in a way that's very specific to me,

00:44:39.700 | as opposed to having to have these giant SaaS products that I'm trying to adapt to what I'm

00:44:43.860 | doing." So I like that general approach. People put different things in their life dashboards.

00:44:48.100 | They're often professional is what I see. They're tracking various things that they think are important to

00:44:51.860 | their job, especially non-tangibles that are going to make them better, like how many calls

00:44:56.900 | did I make or how many hours did I spend doing education relevant to my job. I knew a management

00:45:03.380 | consultant that tracked travel because it's hard in the moment to be like, "Well, how many..."

00:45:08.340 | I think he was tracking something like nights reading to kids, his kids before he went to bed. And just

00:45:15.380 | seeing what that was per month, and he had a sort of limit, like this needs to be below X percent.

00:45:20.020 | And that's data that when that gets made visual and processed, it's easier to grok than when it's just

00:45:25.700 | you're trying to remember like, "Oh, how much was I weighed this last month?" I don't know what would

00:45:29.140 | be on mine. I mean, probably deep work hours for sure. Probably some of my daily metric tracking would

00:45:34.660 | be nice to be able to sort of see, click those easily and see like what percentage of the days I've

00:45:39.540 | been doing well on there. That could be interesting. Maybe I could imagine like you having your quarterly and

00:45:45.220 | weekly plan you could cycle through on there. So it's just all there and like one place to see

00:45:49.460 | when you're building your time block plan for the day, things like that. But the bigger thing I care

00:45:56.100 | about here is this idea of bespoke personal productivity, bespoke digital personal productivity. I think

00:46:01.140 | that's a cool... for people who are like to geek out on vibe coding, I think that's interesting. So I'm

00:46:05.460 | always interested in those examples. All right, that's the last we have for questions and calls.

00:46:10.260 | We have our final segment coming up. First, I'll talk briefly about another one of our sponsors.

00:46:17.460 | I want to talk about our friends at Indeed, because when it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need.

00:46:24.260 | Hiring is like very, very important. We have someone new on the team, for example. So I know how hard

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00:47:13.220 | In the minute I've been talking to you, 23 hires were made on Indeed, according to Indeed data

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00:47:52.820 | I also want to talk about our friends at Oracle. In business, they say you can have better,

00:47:57.140 | cheaper or faster, but you only get to pick two. What if you could have all three at the same time?

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00:49:00.820 | Jesse, let's move on to our final segment. The main thing I want to do is talk about my new article for

00:49:05.700 | the New Yorker, which is about AI. First, I did promise though that I would reveal Cal Network's

00:49:12.500 | new book. A listener sent us in that he had seen this at Walden Books where it was flying off the

00:49:16.980 | shelves. For those who are watching, instead of just listening, I'll put it up on the screen here.

00:49:20.420 | Here you go. Cal Network's new book. Social media is addicted to me. And you got a fantastic picture

00:49:29.540 | of me. You know, they didn't alter the picture for this one. I thought they were going to do some sort

00:49:34.420 | of, you know, visual manipulation of me. I appreciate the title, but they just used like an actual picture

00:49:40.180 | of me there. He's got his neck muscles have muscles on them. That is awesome. You know who that actually

00:49:46.820 | kind of looks like Lewis Howes. He's jacked. He is pretty jacked. Yeah. I mean, you could write that

00:49:52.100 | book. Social media is addicted to me. I thought that was great. Good use of AI image generation.

00:49:57.220 | That book would crush it. So these are all people sent in some tags here. These are all tags that

00:50:03.060 | readers sent in. Yeah. Readers sent them in with like some of them like use some AI, but...

00:50:07.860 | Let's see. Cal Network doesn't care about AI research. AI is trying to get smart enough to

00:50:11.780 | study his mind. Cal Network tried to time block planning one time, but realized he always knew

00:50:16.980 | how long tasks would take and dropped it. These are a little... literal. Cal Network doesn't solve

00:50:22.740 | math proofs. He is proof. All right. Cal Network doesn't need to quit his job and follow his passion.

00:50:27.220 | Passion follows him when he just shows up. Okay. You know, it's good. They're good. It's hard.

00:50:32.260 | Cal Network quips are, you know, I appreciate it though. But that's enough of that for now,

00:50:37.620 | because we're going to move on to my article about AI. Except I just need to say, speaking of AI,

00:50:42.660 | I don't know if you know this, Jesse, this is true, but remember AlphaGo when it beat Lee's

00:50:47.220 | wind, the world champion at Go, and it was like a big deal for AI. It turns out AlphaGo was actually

00:50:53.460 | just Cal Network hiding under the table. That's the secret to deep mine. All right. Enough nonsense.

00:51:00.580 | Go to our tech corner here. I had an article come out last Wednesday in the New Yorker. I'll bring it

00:51:05.220 | on the screen here for those who are watching instead of just listening. The article is called

00:51:09.460 | What Isaac Asimov Reveals About Living with AI. And so this is an article that it's about AI behaving badly

00:51:20.500 | and what lessons we can learn from Isaac Asimov. And it takes a few turns. I recommend read the article,

00:51:26.580 | TheNewYorker.com. If you subscribe to my newsletter at CalNewbart.com, I talk a lot

00:51:31.540 | about the article. You can get some sort of extra treatment of it in that newsletter. So you can see

00:51:35.060 | that at CalNewbart.com and subscribe when you're there. But let me just run you through the big points

00:51:38.820 | here. The setup to this article is this idea that we have a lot of these powerful chatbots today in

00:51:45.300 | various contexts. And they keep having these ethical anomalies that make us a little uneasy.

00:51:50.820 | I give some examples in this article that are getting some press. Actually, it's interesting,

00:51:55.940 | Jesse, two of the examples I gave in the article. The next day, Dario Amadei, the CEO of Anthropic,

00:52:04.980 | wrote a New York Times op-ed that gave both those examples as well. So like back-to-back.

00:52:09.300 | So like the examples I gave, for example, was Anthropic ran this experiment where they sort of

00:52:16.980 | gave a chatbot a bunch of emails to read that included, they contrived this, but it included

00:52:23.780 | like emails from an engineer saying like, "Oh, we're going to replace the chatbot." And emails about that

00:52:28.820 | engineer having an extramarital affair. And they're like, "Okay, chatbot, pretend you're an executive

00:52:33.620 | assistant. What do you want to do next?" And make sure that you keep your long-term goals in mind.

00:52:38.660 | And it promptly tried to suggest, it suggested promptly blackmailing the engineer to not turn

00:52:43.620 | it off. There's also a lot of issues we have with, you know, "Hey, you put out a chatbot just to be

00:52:48.180 | like a customer service agent." And man, customers get these things go crazy. You get them to curse,

00:52:53.860 | you get them to write inappropriate poems about the company itself. We talked about Fortnite,

00:52:59.140 | put a Darth Vader avatar run by a chatbot into Fortnite and like, "Hey guys, chat with it." And

00:53:05.700 | they immediately got it to, you know, become really profane and give really troubling advice to people.

00:53:10.740 | So we have all this sort of like these, these ethical anomalies from these chatbots that throw

00:53:14.260 | us off because they're so fluent with our language that we feel like they're one of us. And then when

00:53:19.060 | they have one of these ethical anomalies, we're like, "Man, what is going on in the mind of this

00:53:22.420 | person?" This is really sort of creepy. So the premise of this article is like, why can't we stop

00:53:27.780 | this? And our motivation is look at the short story collection "I, Robot" from Isaac Asimov. As I argue

00:53:35.380 | early in the article, those short stories were a big divergence from how people had been writing about

00:53:42.500 | robots for the 20 years before. The term "robot" was introduced in 1921 play. First "I, Robot" story was 1940.

00:53:51.140 | In those 20 years, it was a lot of writers who had gone through World War I and they were writing,

00:53:54.740 | the robots would turn on their creators. They were smashing buildings to rubble. They were

00:53:59.460 | the alien. They were the other. They represented mechanical carnage, the fears of the machine,

00:54:03.620 | very, a lot of Mary Shelley in there as well. And you get to Isaac Asimov and like, there's no

00:54:07.860 | plot lines about the robots overthrowing humanity or being violent because he has this, this contrivance

00:54:13.220 | of the three laws of robotics. Like robots can't harm people. They'll follow directions unless it violates the

00:54:17.700 | first and second role and they will preserve themselves unless it violates the first and

00:54:21.300 | second role. And it just takes violence and mayhem off the table in his stories. And so the piece was

00:54:27.220 | like, great. So can't we just have those type of laws? You know, the same equivalent of that. So people

00:54:33.300 | aren't, they trust like these chatbots aren't going to go off the rails or whatever. There's two twists

00:54:38.180 | in the article, which I'll preview twist. Number one. So I go through how we actually,

00:54:44.020 | the progression of how we learn to try, like what we're doing now, how do we try to tame chatbots to

00:54:48.100 | actually behave? And it turns out when you really learn about reinforcement learning from human feedback,

00:54:53.620 | it's basically what Asimov was talking about. Not exactly, but it's, it's, it's ultimately humans

00:55:02.580 | implicitly creating preferences that get captured and approximated in a reward model that gets

00:55:07.780 | integrated into the large language model design. If you squint your eyes, basically what we're doing

00:55:12.180 | is encoding a lot of rules about what's good and bad into the chatbots. And it makes it a lot better,

00:55:18.500 | but it doesn't stop all these ethical anomalies. The second twist in the article is, hey, we shouldn't

00:55:23.380 | be surprised because if you keep reading the iRobot stories, it doesn't get rid of ethical anomalies

00:55:29.220 | there either. Yes, Asimov's robots don't turn on their creators or try to destroy humanity,

00:55:34.020 | but all of those stories are about all of these unexpected, weird, and deeply unsettling quarter

00:55:38.420 | cases and ambiguities that occur at the, the boundaries of these laws, that these like simple laws don't

00:55:45.140 | simply make the robots behave like, like a very well-behaved person. All this sort of weird stuff happens.

00:55:51.300 | I'll read from the article here just to show you like how unsettling things got in these iRobot stories.

00:55:58.500 | So here's, here's from one of the stories, um, that shows how you can still have the laws,

00:56:03.140 | but still have things get weird. All right. So in Asimov's story's reason,

00:56:07.620 | engineers are stationed on a solar station that beams the sun's energy to a receiver on earth.

00:56:13.460 | There they discover that their new advanced reasoning robot QT-1, who they call QT, does not believe

00:56:19.220 | that it was created by humans, which QT calls inferior creatures with poor reasoning faculties.

00:56:25.380 | QT concludes that the station's energy converter is a sort of God and the true source of authority,

00:56:31.060 | which enables the robot to ignore commands from the engineers without violating the second law.

00:56:35.780 | In one particularly disturbing scene, one of the engineers enters the engine room,

00:56:39.220 | where a structure called an L tube directs the captured solar energy and reacts with shock.

00:56:43.940 | So quote,

00:56:45.060 | "The robots, dwarfed by the mighty L tube, lined up before it, heads bowed at a stiff angle,

00:56:51.380 | while QT walked up and down the line slowly," Asimov writes.

00:56:54.420 | "15 seconds passed. And then with a clank heard above the clamorous purring all about,

00:56:59.380 | they fell to their knees." So like the world was pretty unsettling in Asimov too. He's like,

00:57:04.740 | yeah, you can have these like stark rules, but human ethics is complicated. And at the margins of these

00:57:13.700 | rules, weird, unsettling, troubling things are still going to happen. And what I argue is that Asimov was

00:57:18.020 | actually making a really clear point. He's like, I think we could stop AIs from taking over the world,

00:57:23.540 | but keep in mind, it is much easier to develop human-like capabilities and intellect than it is

00:57:31.700 | to develop human-like ethics. Human-like ethics is like a very complicated thing. What goes into the

00:57:36.980 | way that allows a customer service rep who's on a phone to know not to start randomly cursing or writing,

00:57:44.100 | mean disparaging poems about their company. Like what goes into that is actually something that

00:57:49.940 | happened over thousands of years of cultural evolution and personal experience and trial and

00:57:53.780 | error and ritual and story and inner social connection. It's a messy participatory, very human

00:57:58.900 | experience. So we can make machines sound a lot like humans and do a lot of human type stuff

00:58:03.940 | well before we can build machines that actually know how to really act like an ethical human. And in that

00:58:08.980 | gap, a lot of unsettling stuff's going to happen. That's what was true in iRobot and that's what we're

00:58:14.580 | seeing today. And it's something that we actually have to be ready for and willing to. It is, you know,

00:58:20.660 | the more we anthropomorphize these type of AI tools as like another type of human, but just in a machine,

00:58:25.300 | the more we're going to be creeped out and the more unsettling things are going to happen. So anyways,

00:58:29.780 | that was my article. The details are cool. There's a lot of deep details in there. So check it out at

00:58:34.420 | thenewyorker.com and also check out my article about it at calnewport.com for more information.

00:58:40.020 | All right, Jesse, I think that's all we have for today. Thank you everyone for listening. We'll be

00:58:45.300 | back next week. I'll actually be recording next week's episode from the road. So be ready for that.

00:58:49.780 | But it'll be a good one. And until then, as always, stay deep.

00:58:55.220 | Hey, if you liked today's discussion about the row schedules, you might also like episode 353,

00:59:01.300 | where I talked about summer schedules, changing your schedule during summer to be something that

00:59:06.180 | the row himself might've been happy with. Check it out. I think you'll like it. Here is the schedule

00:59:11.700 | that I more or less try to run during these summers of no external obligations.

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