Welcome to The Lost Debata Show for Political Ecclectics. I'm Robbie Gupta. And today we talk to somebody I have been a huge fan of for a long time, Cald Newport, who is the author of the huge, colossal, successful Deep Work book. He's also the author of Slow Productivity. both books about how do you have a deeper life,

both professionally and personally, an age of digital distractions. And I can think of no better

person to talk to about the question of artificial intelligence. We start the interview by

talking about more like the personal side of things, like how this technology is changing

your life now, how to cope with it, from the perspective of somebody like Cal who has written

a lot about how to maintain and cultivate a life where you can concentrate for larger periods

of times and avoid, you know, being on the sort of digital distraction treadmill.

So that's the beginning of the interview. And then we get into Cal's bare case for AI.

One of the reasons why I asked Cal on was, I keep getting sent these pieces,

usually white papers or sometimes there'll be an errant quote from a tech CEO saying,

like, AI is going to take all of our jobs.

We're going to need universal basic income. It could lead to revolutions and all this. And they could

be right. But what was interesting is that Cal wrote a piece in the New Yorker recently that takes

the other side of this argument that essentially says that actually there's a lot of hype here.

And that although the artificial intelligence technology is important, it's not going to be this revolution that people are

claiming is going to be at least in the near term. And so that's what we spent the bulk of

the interview talking about. But before we get there, a few housekeeping items or just updates,

one is that I have moved to Italy for most of the next year. I'm in Italy

right now and I am learning to cook and I write about this in a new substack that I launched.

And you can go in the show notes. It's real ravigupta.substack.com and I write there about

why I chose to go to Italy, what I'm hoping to get out of this

year plus here. I also write a bunch of other pieces about things like parenting your parents

...