The Cal Newport Show

Everything is hard for ordinary people these days. Keeping a job. Being laid off from a job. Finding a job. Paying for food. Paying for health care. Losing health care. Everything is too damn hard. Hearing a billionaire one hit wonder tell ME to do hard things isn’t going to work and might lead to an unfollow. Read the room Cal. Should I make Bee Movie?? A movie about cereal? Vanity project flops. Seinfeld should stay in the 90s and stick to driving around in fancy cars.

“Do Hard Things”? Of all people to celebrate as an inspiration, Jerry Seinfeld? His success owes an enormous debt to Larry David and a brilliant ensemble cast, yet we’re treated to another celebration of the self-made genius. Worse is the astonishing lack of editorial judgment in elevating someone who publicly declared “I don’t care about Palestine” and compared the Free Palestine movement to the KKK. Perhaps the genuinely hard thing would have been to challenge the celebrity worship rather than perpetuate it. Read the room.

Tired of pod’s consistent attacks on effective altruism and rationalists. These ppl are trying their best to keep AI safe, but Cal never misses an opportunity to paint the collective as its most extreme fringes (eg Yud). Please let a non extreme member represent the groups actual beliefs, not the straw man version

Cal wrote one great book, Deep Work, and has basically been confidently wrong about everything else ever since. I enjoy Cal because it’s good productivity theater. When he’s not spouting ultra right wing talking points and posting white nationalists memes, he remixes Deep Work every single week so you can listen to a novel version of Deep Work for every podcast. While his political takes are infantile, Deep Work was really a great book and I love him remixing it every single week.