Cal Newport

I mean, I think part of what I noticed was the present was crazy to me and no one else recognized it.

So it was less even predicting the future.

I feel like there was a time...

God, it's like 10 years ago now where I was looking around and yeah, saying two things.

One, social media doesn't make sense.

Why are we all pretending like this is at the center of democracy and civic life and all business?

We all have to be on here all the time.

And two, email doesn't make sense.

not what was going to happen in the future.

I'm just like looking at the way we're working today with email and Slack and Teams was coming.

Like this completely does not make sense.

You're switching your context once every two or three minutes.

This is a terrible way to actually use your brain.

So I never thought of myself as predicting the future as much as just telling people what was going on then, then it makes sense.

And everyone thought I was crazy.

And 10 years later, it just kind of jumped from I was crazy to it's common sense.

So it's not even that interesting that I'm saying it anymore.

So I kind of skipped the part where it sounded prescient.

I think certainly on a couple issues.

The social media issue was a big one because I used to get a lot of flack for that.