Cal Newport

speaker

23,606 appearances 41 recordings 5 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 6d ago

Cal Newport’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 41 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 9.

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Deep Questions with Cal Newport · The AI Resistance is Forming. (Should You Join?) · 14 Sep 2026 podcast

We have this issue in knowledge work where it's hard to measure quality. podcast-host

It's hard to measure true productivity. podcast-host

I can't really point to a pile of widgets and say, this is what I produced, right? podcast-host

It's much more ambiguous and overlapping and unclear workloads or what have you. podcast-host

And so we have this sort of heuristic in knowledge work of pseudo productivity. podcast-host

Visible efforts are proxy for useful activity. podcast-host

The more visible effort, the busier you are, the more useful I'll assume you be. podcast-host

It's just like this rough heuristic that managers have. podcast-host

The problem is if that's the heuristic managers have and then AI comes along, podcast-host

They're going to say, oh, everyone should use AI because these sort of performative kabuki theater type of I'm doing stuff like emails are moving back and forth. podcast-host

And here's a PowerPoint that's summarized from a Zoom, which you can then send to an email, which will then summarize. podcast-host

And then you can send over to me and I will summarize it, ignore it. podcast-host

Like all this sort of like visible activity that none of it is directly connected to a value producing outcome. podcast-host

AI allows you to essentially accelerate that. podcast-host

And so now, I've been hearing from more and more people, they're like, my job is miserable. podcast-host

My workload has never been higher. podcast-host

They've doubled, I hear this often, they've doubled the amount of projects they expect me to work on. podcast-host

And work on these projects just means slinging AI slop back and forth to be consumed by other AIs that are going to turn it into other slop or whatever. podcast-host

And so I think it is, even if you're not doing creative work, podcast-host

This demand we have in knowledge work to use more AI right now is actually just taking the already absurd aspects of knowledge work that we were all struggling with and I've been writing about and just turning them up to 11 on the spinal tap amplifier dial. podcast-host

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