Ep. 354: The Workload Fairytale

Deep Questions with Cal Newport

Cal Newport

Technology, Self-improvement, Education

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 26 May 2025

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A few years ago, in a spirit of post-pandemic experimentation, multiple countries ran formal trials to test a radical idea: shortening the workweek. In this episode, Cal returns to the results of these trials to identify an astounding finding that has critical implications about how we work in the 21st century and how this could be made much better. He then answers listener questions and concludes with a tech corner that addresses a simple question: when will AI begin to automate most of my work?

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions,
0:15.2	The show about cultivating a deep life in a distracted world.
0:22.8	Here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse.
0:27.6	Jesse, we're doing something different.
0:29.2	Usually the video version of this podcast, we start with the deep dive.
0:33.4	Our audio listeners get to hear a little chatter ahead of time.
0:35.8	Well, we're putting this opening chatter on video as well on YouTube,
0:41.8	episode 354 because there was something I came across that I felt like I just had to share
0:47.2	with the viewers and listeners because it's making me so happy.
0:50.9	So I don't know if you know about this trend, Jesse,
0:53.2	but there's this big trend
0:54.1	where people sell fake books.
0:55.9	Yeah.
0:57.1	Sometimes they'll use AI to write like a 20 page whatever.
1:00.8	And sometimes they don't even bother, right?
1:02.5	They just put up fake titles.
1:04.0	There's a lot of books that are like similar to deep work that are out there,
1:06.5	this or that.
1:07.6	Well, I came across one of these that was so fantastic and it's made me so happy.
1:13.4	I wanted to share it with the audience. It's the biography of Cal Newport. This is a fake book.
1:18.0	It's disappeared now off Amazon, but I grabbed the screenshot of the cover. I want to bring up the cover right now.
1:24.9	Oh, I love this so much, Jesse. So here we go. A picture of me, smiling me.
	...

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