Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 241: The Virality Trap

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

Why does Twitter maintain such a strong grip on those who produce things with their minds for a living? Is it really so critical that we all spend so many hours spreading our output on this particular platform? In today’s episode, we explore this question, seeking new, more sustainable and humane ways to be an online creative professional.Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today’s episode:  youtube.com/calnewportmediaToday’s Deep Question: Given all the advantages of controlling your own digital press, why do so many content producers rely on Twitter? [5:39]- Does Twitter’s new view count feature make the service even worse? [27:10]- Why do so many important business/thought leaders spend so much time on Twitter? [35:14]- Does this professor need Twitter? [43:00]- Does Mastadon stand a chance against Twitter? [53:26]SOMETHING INTERESTING:Started From the Bottom podcast [1:01:04]pushkin.fm/podcasts/started-from-the-bottomAustralian senators backing 4-day work week [1:03:12]theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/mar/09/australia-four-day-work-week-labor-greens-senators-supportThanks to our Sponsors:hensonshaving.com/calzocdoc.com/deepmintmobile.com/deepcozyearth.com (Promo code: Deep)Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, and Mark Miles for mastering. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about living and working deeply in an increasingly distracted world. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined, as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, I found a way to, against all the promises I've made to our listeners to work baseball back into the show. Opening day next week. Opening day next week, we will be podcasting live from that spark. No, we're not. We should, though. We could pause podcast live from the bullpen.

It's still my, yeah, that's right. You have the connection there. It's still my dream that Mike Rizzo at some point is going to get connected to this general manager of the nationals to this podcast and say what we need is like Cal to come talk to our front office. And I just come in there, talk about World Without Email, talk about Deep Work. Next season, World Series. And there they are. The trophy's being handed out. And I'm kind of on the field, you know, but I'm not up there on the dais.

And Rizzo just gives me the finger point. and I just give them like the thumbs up and it's like a real emotional. He's sort of acknowledging that the front offices embrace of deep work and non-context switching collaboration processes was really kind of at the foundation of the next World Series run. I think it's a reasonable dream. But anyways, what I wanted to show you, I'm working baseball in here subtly. I want to show you something that the Washington Post did in their coverage of a spring training game, national spring training

spring training game from earlier this last week actually so this is airing on Monday it was early last week the nationals were playing the Yankees with actually most of the Yankees line up

minus Aaron Judge and well Kinsey Gore pitch six innings two hits pretty good but here's what I wanted to talk about so I have this up on the screen now so for those who are watching at YouTube.com slash Kalinaport Media this is episode

241 you can also find this at the deeplife.com so here's the Washington Post is up on the screen. What they did was they switched to a live blog format to cover the game. Now, what they would

normally do up until this point, this is considered an experiment. Up until this point, coverage of the games as they unfolded happened on Twitter. So the two beat reporters, Jesse Doherty and Andrew Golden, would just tweet throughout the game

to give their updates about what's going on or what they've heard. And they were experimenting this time with, well, why don't we live blog it? That's what's on the screen now. So you can see Jesse, Jesse Doherty, not producer Jesse, having various length updates on this page at the Washington Post about what's happening, some of them longer than others. So they were considering this to be an experiment. So here's the thing. It makes so much sense to cover your games this way as compared to on Twitter.

Here are the advantages. It's a nicer format. Tweets are short and you have to do tweet threads with these one out of N where you have multiple different threads that go together. It's cumbersome, unrelated tweets interspersed between the tweets you're doing about the game. It's not a great visual or reading format on a live blog. They can spend as much time as they want. So I have up here one post. It's a few paragraphs too long for a particular tweet.

all of the live blog updates just appear all in the same page, one after another, formatted nicely, no distraction. Doing it this way also creates new permanent content for your site. So this now is an article, right, with a strong start for McKinsey Gore, National's Top Yankees at Spring Training, where you have some summary at the top and all the live blog below. So this actually becomes a permanent piece of content that actually has quite a bit of information in it. So you get new content for your site. You also control the eyeballs, right?

When Jesse Dorety is tweeting about the game on Twitter, the Washington Post does not control the eyeballs of people who are keeping up with these game updates. Twitter controls the eyeballs. Twitter can show them its own ads. Twitter can push them towards other tweet threads. When you're on the Washington Post, now we can show you other content related to the nationals. Now we can show you our own ads. Now we have the ability to funnel you towards subscription or towards email newsletter products.

I mean, it just makes so much more sense for a company that produces content for a living to have full control over the eyeballs that's reading their content. And perhaps most importantly, for the reporters like Jesse Doherty to be able to do this work on your own site and not on Twitter, saves you from the anxiety distraction machine that is Twitter. Because when you are on there, and I'm posted on Twitter, you're getting the reactions, you're getting the weirdness, you're feeling the pressure to comment on other things that are going on. You get obsessed with, well, is this thing spreading? How many people are reading this? I see a lot of baseball reporters in particular. This is a microcosm of the broader issue that Twitter creates for journalists getting obsessed about being first on various types of scoops. And can I get John Heyman to quote tweet me and say I was first on it?

And there's all these weird incentives in it. And none of this work is actually directly helping your home publication build up an audience or build up eyeballs. So I'm using this very narrow example about baseball to lead to a broader point about the Internet. So the deep question I want to tackle today that will uncover this point is given all of the advantages of controlling your own digital press, why does so many creatives rely on Twitter to communicate with their audience? audience. Now I want to dive deep into this question today because I think in answering this question, we're going to find out that the incentives that are drawing us to these platform monopolies like Twitter are actually not as strong as we think so we can get an intimation of a more healthy relationship with the digital world. After we do that deep dive on this question, I have a collection of questions from you, my listeners, that all orbit around this general issue of grappling with social media and its role in you being a creative professional. and how important it actually is. And then we will switch gears at the end to do something interesting. All right, so that's our goal.

So let's dive deeper on this question. Why are people, especially creatives, using Twitter? The obvious answer is going to be virality. There's this idea that Twitter has this virality engine because of their retweet mechanism. It is possible for things you write if it catches the attention property. of the cybernetic curation organism, which is the combination of individual people making retweet decisions, plus the fact that the follower graph has power law expansion. The cybernetic curation algorithm has the capability of spreading your tweet to a massive audience all at once,

perhaps even unexpectedly. So there's senses I want to harness this potential virality to very quickly grow a large audience. This large audience is then something I can monetize or will give me a lot of influence. That's the promise of Twitter. its virality can build you an audience much faster than any other method. But is this supposed benefit of Twitter worth giving up all of the other advantages of controlling your own platform, the type of advantages we talked about with the Washington Post examples? I want to give four reasons why I think the answer to that question is no.

Four reasons why I think the supposed benefits of Twitter virality are not as strong as many creative professionals who rely on that platform actually believe. So here's my first reason. Most people don't end up building a Twitter audience of any notable size. The average creative professional who is tweeting never builds up a big follower account, but you do not need a big follower account to reap the full negative impact of being on Twitter. So you reap that full negativity of the distraction and the anxiety of even without a lot of followers. If you say the wrong thing, that could spread. You have negative virality. That hangs

over your head. Then there's also the addictive distraction of what's catching on, what's not. Am I getting retweets? When we had the comedian Jamie Kielstein on the show, he really talked about that from the perspective of a comedian, this experience of your obsessively checking after you tweet to see if someone famous retweeted it. So you have all of those negatives, even if your audience is small, and most people have small audiences. So this idea that Twitter is going to spread your genius to the world and build you this audience, it's actually very rare. The second reason why I think this virality explanation is not so strong is that Twitter followers are much less valuable than an organically acquired follower.

So let's compare a Twitter follower to, let's say, someone who is interacting with you on your own site or through your own podcast who, let's say, subscribes to your podcast or signs up for your email newsletter because they have over time come to really trust you or appreciate you in your point of view. That organic follower is significantly more valuable than each digit that clicks up on your Twitter follower account. Twitter followers are not that powerful. Writers have known this for a long time. Twitter followers do not convert well, for example, to book sales. And I think this is a great natural experiment because how else is better to test the loyalty of a follower than actually asking them to invest $15 on your behalf.

Book authors know this. Email newsletter subscribers, they will buy books. You can get up to a 10% even plus conversion rate on number of subscribers in your email list because those are organically acquired followers who over time grew to trust you. Twitter followers convert at a miniscule rate. You can have hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. And when you start tweeting about your new book coming out, it might generate minuscule relatively speaking sales, whereas a 10,000 person mailing list can actually make a dent in

getting your book noted. So even if you can build up this large Twitter follower count, it doesn't actually mean that you have a powerful audience. A 30,000 person mailing list, I would argue, is as useful as a high six figure, maybe even million Twitter follower count on Twitter. So even if you do get the file. followers due to virality, it's not necessarily that valuable. The third objection I want to bring up here is that when you look at specific examples of people who have grown large Twitter followings, typically the forces that drove that audience growth were not internal to Twitter.

External exposure, external fame is what actually brought them to the attention of a lot of people and people came to follow them on Twitter because that's where they happened to be producing. So it's not that Twitter virality is for a lot of people how they got discovered. It's that Twitter is where the people who discovered them elsewhere came to follow them because that's where they happened to be. Let me make this more concrete with a specific example. I think Conan O'Brien is a great example here. So after Conan O'Brien fired from the tonight show sort of was in the wilderness,

one of the things he started doing was tweeting. And he did one tweet every day. And it's a document. There's a good documentary about this called Conan O'Brien Can't Stop. And for a while, the conventional wisdom was this is what got Conan relevant again. He was interacting with people directly without TV and doing these funny tweets and people were retweeting and following them. And it kept him on everyone's mind and it kept him relevant. Right.

So sort of a case study of Twitter being this great creative platform. But here's the thing. Conan realized what was valuable here was his pre-existing fame, his pre-existing talent as a comedy writer and on-screen comedic presence, and his massive national exposure that he's had on TV and on radio and he's on Stern all the time and going on other people's shows. He's an incredibly well-exposed person. So yes, when he went and said, I'm going to put my attention into tweeting every day,

people went over there and said, we'll follow your tweets. But it wasn't that Twitter built him his audience. He had a big audience. He just said, this one going to hang out, so they came over there. Now, speaking of our last point that Twitter followers are not that valuable, Conan eventually figured out having my audience follow me to Twitter is not useful to me. I can't do much with Twitter followers. So he stopped the tweeting every day and instead put his energy into making his

own home online, a home he owned, which was his podcast. And now, again, his preexisting fame and talent and massive exposure, which is what's generating all this attention, that could now aim this attention to a home he owned, which was his podcast. Now, what's the difference and value between these two things? Well, tweeting every day on Twitter got him a couple million followers, and maybe it helped some ticket sales when he was touring or maybe not. bringing that attention to his podcast, they signed a, I don't know the whole magnitude of it, but it was tens of millions of dollars deal for his production company.

So taking this preexisting fame and aiming it towards a platform he owned, forget about the raw number. Like how many people download your podcast versus how many Twitter followers you have. No, he turned his preexisting attention to a platform he owned. That was worth tens of millions of dollars. When he put that attention instead towards someone else's platforms, Twitter, or maybe he got 20% higher ticket sales when he did live shows. So the reality of many large Twitter audiences

is those audiences are there not because Twitter went out and found them, but because the person was already famous and that's where they're hanging out. Barack Obama doesn't have a large Twitter account because he's good at Twitter. Because he's Barack Obama. All right, the final objection I want to bring up here

to the idea that Twitter virality is so critical to any creative professional is that Twitter virality is best harnessed on your behalf as opposed to on your bequest. So there's really two broad categories of information going viral on Twitter. One type is that you actually tweeted something yourself that was smart or funny or outrageous and it caught the attention of the cybernet curation algorithm and spread really far. That's actually not that valuable.

I mean, it can help attract more people to want to follow you, but that does not actually directly translate necessarily to you being more successful at what it is you do. The second type of virality on Twitter is where something is really good. Something has been constructed or done that is very good. A book is excellent. An article is excellent. A movie is excellent. A video game is excellent.

And Twitter is spreading the word. This thing is great. You got to see this thing. You've got to read this thing. Let's debate about this thing. That type of virality is incredibly valuable for a creative professional because it's not just raw attention. It is attention on you and your skill and what you can produce. It's the type of virality that will allow you to actually great.

and cultivate new, loyal, organic audience members. Now, here's the thing. That virality does not require you to be on Twitter. In fact, that virality is actually impeded if you were the person trying to tell people, look at my article, look at my movie I made. That's a really bad way to kick off that isn't this great virality. That type of virality is much more effective when it's third party. Look at this article Cal wrote is going to do much better than me saying,

look at this article I wrote. And you see this with creative professionals on Twitter. They have this huge elaborate dance of self-deprecation to try to kick off the second category of virality. And they'll say, you know, I'm so blessed to have such great editors and just to be noticed like this and to have this article out. So they're trying to find a way to make it palatable that they're the ones talking about it. But in the end, actually, the best type of virality is people talking about you. So you being on Twitter and having to pay

those prices of anxiety and addiction and distraction at the same time losing out on all the advantages of owning your own platform controlling the eyeballs, building up your own organic audience, having that nicer format, all of these advantages to give all of that up that try to create this much

weaker form of virality when Twitter can do this on your behalf if you're producing something good. The tradeoff really doesn't make a lot of sense. All right, so what I'm trying to say here is there's a lot of advantages to releasing content on your own platform. The main reason people do this instead on Twitter is virality, but as those four virality myths I just talked about emphasize, that reason really is not that attractive anymore. So what is the alternative if you're a creative professional who wants to embrace the online world?

Create the absolute best stuff you can released on your own platform, be this a web-based text platform or an audio-based podcast. Build a fiercely loyal audience slowly but steadily. When you get a new member of your audience is because they've heard your stuff enough. They love it. They really want to read it. It's not just a Twitter follower.

When your work occasionally goes viral on your behalf, which it will if it's good, enjoy the fact that you're now going to capture some more listeners or readers or audience members in your own ecosystem and then get back to producing work too good to be ignored. That, I think, is the right way to approach content production on the internet, not to get lured by the siren sound of these platform monopolies that basically just chew you up, chew up your attention, chew up your vanity, and make you

into grist for their attention economy, money-making mill. I think this type of discussion is important for a broader reason as well. Let's move beyond just Twitter and content producers. I think it's really easy when we think about the downsides or the excesses of the internet. to get stuck in a hopeless feeling. They get stuck in this hopeless place where you say, well, of course I have to use these platforms,

but I'm not liking what they're doing and the way they make me feel. So if we can only just have the right laws passed, maybe we can fix this. Or if we can only have the right person by the platform, and then they can fix it and make it better. And these type of discussion

show there's another alternative. You don't have to be that involved with these platforms in the first place. You can be cutting edge online, growing your audience in 21st century ways, without having to worry about what's happening with Twitter, what's happening on Instagram, is TikTok is going to be banned or not.

I just hope we're moving past this age where we feel like platform monopolies are somehow a critical piece of being a creative professional. And if you somehow avoid those, you're in trouble. You're not. Those advantages are overblown. It's okay to move on. So there you go.

I didn't know that Conan and Brian had such a big audience. Yeah. So that's what, I mean, the tweeting every day was supposedly how he sort of re-engaged, you know, re-found relevance and regained his audience. But my argument is like, actually, that didn't lead to much. What was important is when he started the podcast. Right. Because then he had an actual thing he was creating that was very high quality and the audience he attracted there was actually valuable.

I don't know what the size, maybe you could look it up. Look up Team Coco, C-O-C-C-O podcast deal. So he has a couple other podcast it produces, but Conan O'Brien needs a friend, just a main podcast. And I know they just bought a big building in Los Angeles. So there was some deal. One of the networks says like a... The headline says $150 million deal. So this is the...

On the verge. Yeah. So Conan O'Brien's fame aimed at something he owns generated $150 million. His fame instead aimed at Twitter generated a lot of likes and maybe, you know, slightly more. attention when he was trying to sell tickets. I think Sirius X-M bought it. And I think we can just- So explains why he's on Stern.

But he's all, but that's true, but he's been, he went on Stern a lot. Okay. Like in that period, right after he left at the tonight show, he was on, he goes on Stern a lot. So I think he's done that for a long time. But you can just scale that down. Okay, so most people are not as famous as Conan O'Brien. So he can scale it down. But the key thing is there's this, that difference.

So like, let's say your notoriety is a tenth of Conan O'Brien. But like, whatever, you're still out there. You're known. You're on like some big podcast a lot. You had some big books or something. You could just scale down those numbers. So like Twitter will give you, you know, an extra 100 people showing up at a show. Putting that attention towards a thing you own, scale it down by a factor 10 is maybe worth, you know, $1.5 million a year in revenue.

It's aiming, audiences come from, you earn audiences by doing things notably. Twitter, this idea that, I mean, there are some viral influencers, but it's a dark, fausty and world. You don't want to be a, your whole world is just being viral on Twitter. No one really wants that. These audiences are coming from other things you're doing. So why take all that juice and basically give it the Twitter in exchange for peanuts? All right.

So I want to do some questions that all roughly orbit this topic. Before we do, first let me mention one of the sponsors that makes this show possible. And that is our friends at Cozy Earth. Cozy Earth bedding is made using only the finest premium viscozy, V-I-S-C-O. OSE from highly sustainable bamboo. Top designers choose Cozy Earth. It's been named to Oprah's favorite things five years in a row. But I want to give you my individual pitch for this.

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Yeah, I was like, when are we going to get a cozy cozy earth read? This is true. I asked Jesse, like, when are we doing a cozy earth read because we're obsessed with these things? And you need to order more. Oh, yeah, I said, I had Jesse look up the discount code. They're great sheets. They're great sheets.

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Zoc Doc. Zoc Doc is the only free app that lets you find and book doctors who are patient reviewed, take your insurance, and are available when you need them to treat almost any condition under the sun. Jesse, I want you to, I'm taking out my phone here. I want you to be the arbiter for our audience. You've got to confirm this. I'm showing Jesse now a text message on my phone from,

11 a.m. today, so from 30 minutes ago. So what do you see on this text message here from my dentist? What is the URL? Zoc Doc, baby. There we go. Nice. Just 30 minutes ago, I have an encounter with Zock Doc. My dentist uses Zock Doc. My primary care doctor uses Zock doc doc. And I love it. So it's an app you can use, first of all, to find doctors who are near your area, take your insurance, see reviews from real people. Once you sign up for a doctor, if they, use Zoc Doc, they handle your paperwork through there. You can do the paperwork in advance. They do reminders about your appointment. You can confirm what's going on. You don't have to sit there with the clipboard and fill out all the same information every time. It just makes a lot of sense. Why just randomly look up a local doctor on Google or ask your friend using Zoc Doc makes it more consistent. The other thing we like about Zocdoc is we like saying the name, Zocdoch.com. So sometimes Jesse and I joke about other products that could have an even longer sequence of those rhymes.

Well, I want to briefly read a submission along these lines from Elliott. So here is Elliot doing his attempt to get an even better URL than Zocdoch.com. All right. So here's Elliot's ad. World War II generals are unanimous. Keep your feet dry. Our product protects your most important piece of clothing from all forms of damp and it secures it with a unique code known only to you.

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slash deep, Zocdoc.com slash deep. All of our ads today, Jesse, or it feels like people that are deeply, products that are deeply integrated in my life at the moment. That's good. Yeah. What we need is a Poland spring sponsorship.

Jesse keeps me my Seltzer water addiction well served with our Poland spring. Let's hear some questions. What do we got? All right. Sounds good. First questions from Will, a 55-year-old economist. What do you think about Twitter's decision to put the number of views on tweets? I hate this change.

It adds an extra layer of stress before you can get that dopamine hit or like or reply. Well, Will, I wrote something about this dynamic in my book, Digital Minimalism, where I was talking about Facebook. And this is a very important technological moment that explains a lot about our current relationship. to social media, especially the more compulsive use. And the way the story unfolds with Facebook is that engineers at Facebook last decade wanted to put the like button into the Facebook product for a very pragmatic sort of nerd optimization reason. They were seeing that under a lot of Facebook posts, many of the comments were very similar

and low information. There's a lot of great exclamation points, good, congratulations. and you had to scroll through all of these low information single word exclamatory comments to get to the interesting comments where people are actually adding information. So the engineer said, let's just add a like button. This way, if all you want to do is like, yeah, great, I love it, you can just click that. It'll be a count of how many people liked it, and then we won't have comments clogging it up. So the actual comments on the post would be more informative. It's an engineering thing.

They saw an inefficiency they wanted to fix it. it turned out however as an unintentional side effect of adding that like button to the Facebook platform engagement time went up and what was going on is that this like button though this was not its original intent this like button was adding in an intermittently reinforcing indicator of attention you could now after you posted something on Facebook go back and check are there likes how many likes and then you can come back and an hour later, has it jumped up or is it really, as it really plateaued? And different posts would generate different likes. There is a slot machine aspect to it that maybe something about this

post would break out to a wider spread and you might have a massive jump of likes on the post. And this was very exciting. And you never knew if that was going to happen. We are wired to love that type of reinforcement. We are going to pull that virtual slot machine lever again and again and again. So once Facebook stumbled into this innovation, other platforms did the same thing. So Instagram, which at the time had not yet been bought by Facebook, they came next, and this became integrated into many other platforms. It was an accidental mechanism of moderate behavioral addiction. These type of stories, by the way, they fall into the wayside because I think a lot of the media narrative on social media right now is from journalists who are

obsessed with social media. They just want it to be more focused on what they like and fixing it. They want to fix it, but they don't want to fix the issue of using all the time. They don't want to fix the issue of being addicted to it. They just want to make sure there's not bad things on it. Or if you're on the right, you want to make sure that people aren't being kicked off. But we've lost track of this original thread, but just not wanting to be on these things so much in the first place. And these type of addictive intermittent reinforcement mechanisms is a big driver of that engagement. So back to your question, Will, by adding a view count to Twitter, you're adding a more highly dynamic, highly salient intermittent reinforcement indicator.

Replies are a little bit slower on Twitter. Retweets happen, but again, not that often for most posts. So this is an engagement issue for Twitter. Most people, most tweets, they don't have a big audience, get no replies and very few retweets. By putting in the views, though, you have a finer grain number that can rack up higher, even for relatively small accounts. have a more salient feedback mechanism, you're going to get people who are minor Twitter users and producers to come back and check more often to see what's going on. There's other reasons

that I've been given for why the view feature was added, but I think this is one of the key implicit reasons why you want to add these type of feedback into it. One of the reasons why TikTok is so successful, by the way, is they just go straight for the jugular on these mechanisms. right so the the likes on Facebook the favorites on Instagram the views on Twitter is still driven by actual humans and actual human interest it gives you intermittent reinforcement because some stuff you post is better than others TikTok doesn't really trust people I mean we already see this with their recommendation algorithm they say I don't need someone to favorite something I don't need someone to spread something I don't even need someone to tell me who their friends are our algorithm will just tell you what you should look at will they do the same thing with views? So TikTok will artificially make your view counts go up and down, specifically to create the slot machine effect of you never know which your TikToks might take off. And because everything is just algorithmically recommended, there's no human in the loop.

TikTok can do this with incredible precision. Their algorithm can basically say, you know, Jesse hasn't had a TikTok get a lot of attention in a while. we're worried that, you know, people are going to stop watching Jesse's TikToks. So let's just take one of his TikToks and we can just show it to 10,000 people. And now his view count on that jumps to 10,000. Now, Jesse is like, you know, I was going to quit TikTok, but this last thing I did got 10,000 views. Like, maybe I'm on the cusp of emerging as a TikTok influencer. And so they just cynically and cynically directly manipulate your attention with the exact same precision as someone putting in

win rate tables to a Las Vegas style slot machine. That's part of the reason why they're so popular. If you don't believe this, talk to any young person who uses TikTok. I overhear these conversations on a regular basis. They will talk about their one big hit or their two big hits. That's all you need. That's all you need to use it all the time. You know, I had this one thing and it got 100,000 views.

You know, I bet if I just tweak things a little bit, you know, Jesse's thinking like if my dance moves were a little bit sharper, I'm going to get that more regularly. And so they're just cynical about it. So anyways, it's a good question. No, I don't like any of those features. But again, the answer to all this stuff is, guys, get off these platforms. Get off these platforms.

Do whatever your equivalent is of the Washington Post live blogging instead of live tweeting baseball games. I heard a conversation at Bevco, Jesse, the other day. Or it's like, I think it was a date. young people first date you're in line or you're sitting at a table sitting at a table okay it's trying to write um and it was two young people and they're on a date and he was getting he was seriously getting points by talking about his one viral tic-tok he's like yeah it was uh you know like it was a complicated hat on and all the young person stuff he's like yeah you got it you got like a million views on that and she was impressed like he was definitely sort of peacocking

his TikTok numbers. But you know how effective that is? Like that guy is going to TikTok now constantly. I mean, think about this feedback. He's like, man, sometimes things go big and it's like impressing the ladies. And like, I don't know why that guy over there sighing so loudly all the time. I wonder what's wrong with them. But I don't know how to be like depressed or intrigued or, I mean, my main issue was I was

trying to write and they were right next to me. And when you're on a date, you're talking all the time. And I was kind of frustrated by that. but that's really funny that's what they were talking about he was getting mad credit and also oh man so the dynamic of this conversation

she opened it by being like you know one of my TikToks got I forgot the number was but 5,000 views and you could see he was dusting off his glove like ready to throw his fast while I was like well you know I had one that got a million views it's so good

yeah so TikTok knows what it's doing all right let's do what we got next year all right next question from Adam, a 43-year-old furniture maker. I find it sad that along with tweens, teens, and average adults, some of our world's thought and business leaders are similarly more concerned with playing in the attention economy than focusing on a deep life. I mean, I agree with you, Adam.

There is a sort of vanity run amok thing going on here, crossed with a insiduous addictiveness. Multiple people I've talked to, for example, who personally know Elon Musk are baffled, by the way that Twitter just took over his life. It makes no sense. For him and what he's working on in his companies and his goals in life, for him to spend so much time on Twitter is some weird combination of addiction-fueled vanity. I think there's a key point to make here that distinguishes Twitter from other platforms.

So most of these platforms do play in part. One of the many things they play on to win in the attention economy game. One of the many things they play on is personal vanity. Twitter does it in a different way than the other platforms. So in Deep Work, again, I looked at Facebook. I said Facebook in circa 2014 and 15 when I was writing Deep Work had a collectivist attention model. So back then, Facebook was still pretty heavenly driven by friends. You know, I post things on my friends' walls.

They will check me. They'll post things on my walls. And I argued that, look, Facebook was in part a response to the hostile attention landscape of the web. So early Web 2.0 allowed almost anyone to post information online. You could have a blog where you could just post whatever you wanted to post. But it was a hostile attention regime because, let's be honest, most things that most people have to say is boring. And it was rough. You would start a blog.

You put things on there and no one would read it because it was just your random stuff and no one cared. I had my very first blog. I started in college. It was called Inspiring Moniker. Zero readers. Because why would people care? So that was a very hostile attention environment and people said, why am I just going to keep putting stuff out there? And that's actually like a completely reasonable reaction.

It's like, yeah, like most people actually shouldn't just be putting stuff out there. But people who really have, you know, something to say. It's like a young Ezra Klein doing his political blog or he was posting nine times a day in 2004. Like there's people who emerged. They took advantage. They had something to say. They were skilled. They did the work.

And it was a great. But for most people, it's like, yeah, you know, you don't have anything interesting to say. Facebook said, no, no, I have something for you. Attention collectivism. You will have these friends. These will be people you know. You will be friend them digitally. They will be friend you digitally.

And the agreement will be, I will pay attention to whatever junk you put up there if you pay attention to whatever junk I put up here. I'll put up some random photo. You'll say, oh, so cute. And you'll post some thought about something. I'll come over and say, ah, you got it, right? And we'll just give each other attention. It's nice to get attention.

Most people don't get attention in most parts of their life. People aren't paying positive attention to them. So it monetized in some sense this desire to have people pay attention to us. It reacted to the hostile attention landscape of just the bare bones web 2.0 and said, no, no, we'll just all agree to talk to people we know and pat each other on the back. And I thought this was a little bit shallow, but whatever, it worked pretty well. Twitter is doing something different here. It's offering sort of a similar dynamic, but for actual what I would think of as higher tier thinkers and leaders, right?

So it actually is, its model is not focused on anyone will post something and other people will come and comment on it. It's actually brutal like that. It's brutal like Web 2.0 for the average user. If I tweet something, nothing happens. People don't come and like it because they know you. That's just not the dynamics of how Twitter works. It spreads virality. It doesn't connect people to their friends anymore.

But if you have some sort of actual expertise, if you're a journalist, if you're a creative of some type, if you're a politician of some type, Twitter is offering you much more access to attention than you could get before through traditional media channels because they were just way more narrow and way less numerous. And so Twitter is plain on the attention vanity, not of the average user, but of the above average user. And that's their whole business model. So if you're a professor with some expertise, you're drawn, you're saying, man, I could wait

until I get citations on a paper, or I could go on Twitter. And I have something to say here. If I had anything to say, no one cares. My tweets will just go and disappear. but I actually have something to say. If I make the right takes, I could get on a day-to-day basis this retweet and share and like and reply attention. Every once in a while, someone really famous might retweet my thing, and I feel like I'm a part of this. And so Twitter says, we're going to play on the attention vanity of above-average users.

And by doing that, they attracted a lot of above-average users, people who actually were unusually creative or had specific expertise as to share. That is the whole core of what makes Twitter a compelling place for everyone else just to sit and read what's going on, because you have interesting people spending all their time writing on there. And so we talked about before earlier in the episode is one of the things that attracts content producers is, I want to build an audience, virality. This is the other thing that attracts, especially these sort of notable personalities. They're attracted, it's attention and vanity. And it's really good at that.

And I think it was a really smart move by Twitter to say, forget making the average user feel like people care about them. what we need to get is the unusually clever comedian. We need to get, when there's a pandemic, a bunch of credentialed virologist. What we need to get is, you know, contrarian political thinkers who have a funny streak. Like, we need these type of people who actually have some talent. Do not focus that talent into articles and books and occasional TV appearances and lectures, put it into our platform. So by focusing on the attention vanity of above average users, they created a constantly refreshed pool of above average quality information that then the cybernet curation algorithm could play with.

And now as the average user, you're seeing all these things going by that is very engaging and very compelling. It's why Twitter clones have not done nearly as well, even though the algorithmic and digital architecture is the same, but then in the same pool of people. So Twitter did very well there. So anyways, Adam, I think that's what's going on, is Twitter very consciously said, we need to make above average users feel like they're getting more attention than they could otherwise get. And then we're going to get a lot of above average content pushed into our system.

And that's different than almost any other platform. Most other platforms, they play more on your own personal attention vanity, people you know, paying attention to what you do. I mean, that's not completely true. Instagram has some Twitter vibes to it, but it also has some Facebook vibes to it. TikTok really doesn't lean heavily into we need above average users. It's just we need a giant pool of content

and we'll use algorithms to figure out what's going to just press your reptilian brain buttons and make you keep looking. Twitter is doing this almost uniquely. It's a part of what makes it so sticky. All right. This is great. A lot of Twitter bashing and discussion.

Yeah. That wasn't Twitter bashing. I'm just, that's just actually explaining. Yeah, this is why Twitter is effective. Yeah, I'm not just, you know, put it on my Twitter as bad hat. I mean, there's a reason why this is an effective platform. All right, what do we got next? All right. Next question is from Bo, a 38-year-old teacher. I'm not big on social media, but as an independent researcher in the humanities, I use academia.edu and research gate mainly to get access to papers. I also have a Twitter and a LinkedIn account, mainly to share my blog posts and see if I can find an audience. Is this the right balance?

Right. There's a good case study of our discussion from the deep dive earlier in the show. So not knowing too much about specifically what type of research you do or your career, let's just give some random recommendations here. Paying for access to academic articles is a no-brainer. If you are an academic who's not associated with an institution that gives you that access, so of course. Twitter, I don't think you need to be there. We just talked about this.

Twitter gives you this illusion that it's going to grant you a virality that will grow your audience bigger than if you hadn't had Twitter. I would say, forget it. Just produce really good work. Twitter may work on your behalf. People may share your work on there, and you need to have a platform you own to capture that attention. But putting your attention in the content production on Twitter is going to open you up to all

these negatives and dilute the positives you get from your own platform. LinkedIn, I guess it just depends what you're doing on it. So for LinkedIn to be effective, A, you have to ignore the sort of increasing social features slash streaming distraction features and just focus on the core original ability to use it to look at tertiary network connections. I mean, the value of LinkedIn, the unique value proposition of LinkedIn is I can look at people who are in the network of people I know. It's not secondary but tertiary connections.

That's really useful, right? So you say, okay, I need a connection to the movie industry. I don't know anyone in the movie industry. but I probably know someone who knows someone in the movie industry. That person can make a recommendation on my behalf. And so it opens up contacts. And because you have an intermediary who knows both ends of this link, that's actually a high quality contact. If you go out one more layer, it doesn't work anymore.

So if it's I know someone who knows someone who knows someone in the movie industry, that connection doesn't work because there's no person in common between you and the ultimate person you want to talk to. So I remember my long-time friend Ben Kastnoka, who used to be Reed Hoffman's chief of staff, I remember him at the time when LinkedIn was really taking off explaining this network theory to me. It's all about the sweet spot of your friend's friends is the sweet spot of opening yourself up to a huge amount of potential connections while still having the ability to make those connections strong. So if your work is such that as an independent researcher, you need contracts or engagements with clients and various type of industries and you need connections to people in those industries, that aspect of LinkedIn could be very valuable. So I would summarize this, I guess, as saying yes, to paying money to gain access to articles, no to Twitter, maybe yes to LinkedIn if you really need it. Now, there's a bigger point here that I made in a New York Times op-ed that came out.

in 2016, and it actually generated a lot of fewer at the time. But I wrote this New York Times op-ed where I said, we overestimate the value of social media presence in getting noticed and succeeding in your career. And I say, we are forgetting the fact that these platforms are very new. And most industries have been around for a very long time. Twitter was not used at a high rate until 2012 or 2014. So when I was writing that op-out, it's like, this is a few years ago. Before that, all these industries still existed.

People still got noticed, got hired, grew reputations, grew really big careers, and they did this all without Twitter followers. And they did this all without being an influencer on Instagram. So presumably, these bespoke methods by which your work is noticed and rewarded still exist in most fields that have been around for more than just a handful of years. So don't ignore those. if you ignore those and say, I'm going to invent my own way to get noticed and succeed in my field based on social media, you're taking a huge risk. You need to pay less attention to your Twitter followers and say, in my particular field, I'm this independent researcher and humanities who makes my money this way.

How do people traditionally get noticed and succeed? Almost all those channels are still there. Social media's rise, which is only still just a decade old at this point, of any sort of widespread adoption, has not gotten rid of existing channels of getting. noticed and succeeding. And so I keep coming back to that with people. How do people traditionally get noticed and succeed in your field? And usually it involves producing really good stuff and it's really hard. It has nothing to do with virality or having large follower accounts. And it's almost always that's going to be the answer. And so until you have a really good answer to that question, forget about like new tools are going to somehow give you a shortcut.

Now when I wrote that op-ed in 2016, that caused a lot of problems. This was right before the mainstream had turned against social media. So the political right in America had turned against social media at this point because they were worried about being censored. But the political center and left in America was still very laudatory towards social media at this point when that came out. And so me standing up and saying social media is not as important as you think for your career, you should maybe ignore that and focus on the fundamentals. it was considered a heretical, almost certifiable thing to say. It really upset people.

It was, whoa, no, no, no. Social media is the key. It's how you get noticed. It's how you circumvent all of these gatekeepers. It's how you build up movements. I mean, there was so much pushback. Really surprised me. And I've talked about this on the show before, but the New York Times commissioned the next week a response op-ed.

They got the social media manager of Monster.com. Patrick someone, Patrick Gilroy, to write a response op-ed to mine and say, this is crazy, don't listen to this. A lot of articles were written in response to mine. This is crazy. Don't listen to this. I had hostile radio interviews. We're like, how can you believe this?

Now I understand this mechanism because we see it all the time in 2022, 2023. We see this all the time. Where is the fiercest pushback generated, this sort of, when you get these type of big pylons generated? It's not when someone comes from left. feel from the completely other team and throw some rocks. You're used to that. It's when someone who you feel like is in or close to your tribe pushes a little bit to the edge. Then it's seen a little bit more like heresy and that has to be policed. So if, you know, in 2016, Jaron Lanier stands up and says social media is nonsense. People like, yeah, that's Jaron Lanier. I mean,

he's like kind of crazy and brilliant. And this is what he's been saying for a long time. And we know It's not a big deal. But if a computer scientist comes out and says that, someone who is in sort of mainstream thought, someone who has some influence with an audience, someone who's sort of a part of that sort of mainstream centrist or leftist center tribe, comes out and says, I don't think that's that's that important. You have to fiercely, at the time you have to fiercely police that to prevent the Overton window from shifting away from the direction you wanted to shift.

So it was an interesting example of what became much more prevalent in the years that followed, this sort of policing of views. And this became increasingly political after a while, so the left and the right would do this on political hot topics. But this was less political, but it was just more, there's this mainstream intellectual thought that social media was this powerful force that toppled dictators and helped Barack Obama get elected. And it was very meaningful, important. And so if you're involved in this sort of mainstream intellectual life, they did not like someone starting to veer off the reservation. Now, everyone's like a course.

Yeah. Everyone agrees with it now. But it was interesting. So it was like an early mild pylon, but it showed a general internet dynamic that I think has really strengthened ever since then. So you wrote that before the like button got introduced, right? Now the like button actually got introduced earlier.

Oh, okay. Yeah. So the like button got introduced like 2007 or eight or something like that. Oh, right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The interesting thing was when I wrote that, it was right,

so the turning point in the main. mainstream intellectual thought on social media was Donald Trump getting elected. And that's ultimately what turned it is the shift from Facebook helping Barack Obama to Facebook helping Trump shifted, I think, the reception of social media. And it opened up like a lot more skepticism and hostility towards a platform from the center and left. The hostility from the right was already there. I started hearing that like 2015. So that was already there. But from the center and the left, that was after the Trump election. But it wasn't immediate because that op-ed, that op-ed came out in the Sunday in the New York Times in the week in review the Sunday after

Donald Trump was elected. So it wasn't an immediate response. I mean, it was a week in review section that was that and like a bunch of political stuff. And then the next week they had the follow-up, right? So in the first, the last months of 2016, early months of 2017, there still was a general positive consensus on social media. It wasn't really told the Cambridge Analytica and the Russian disinformation stories. When those really took off, which was more after Trump was in office in 2017, that's when you began to see the shift. So I know it's an interesting time point. So really the shift towards universal negativity towards social media was probably first or second quarter of 2017. If not all the way around it. You had to get all the way to like 2008. really before people on board. But then by the time I was promoting digital minimalism in 2019, the pushback I was getting from reporters is like, why aren't you pushing for even harder, you know,

regulations and shutting down these companies? So, man, that thing flipped. Nothing flipped hard. All right. Let's have time. Let's do one more question here. All right. Next question is from Alta,

a 22-year-old software engineer. Do federated social media networks such as Bastodon stand a chance against centralized ones such as Twitter? We don't need Mastodon. I mean, I'm fine for Mastodon to exist, but part of the premise of Mastodon is we want Twitter, but just without stuff we don't like. I mean, it's the same interface as Twitter. It's the same paradigm of Twitter, these short tweets that go to people who follow you.

And my bigger argument is this Twitter format is not that fundamental. I mean, we have websites. We have blogs. We have WordPress. We have podcast. We have the ability to independently produce and post video and host it and have it be washed on all these devices. We have all these other means of producing content independently without it having to live in a massive ecosystem where we don't control it anymore.

So we don't actually need a Twitter clone. That's fine if there is a Twitter clone if Mastodon takes off, but we don't need it to. I think we became so myopic in recent. years because we got so used to the dominance of these platform monopolies that our vision of what the internet means means means, means, Instagram, and it means Twitter. The internet was a lot more than that. So getting away from these platform monopolies, it's not just, let's just have Twitter, but not have it be owned by one person. It's we don't need a Twitter clone at all. We are already developing independent alternatives to this that are way more successful than the Massadon.

That's why I mentioned podcasting. That's why I mentioned individual WordPress. I think email newsletters. All of these are examples of independently produced media, content being produced where you control much more of the eyeballs you control your audience. And this is all working a lot better. Macedon's not working that well because, you know, Twitter turns out that, why does that format work? It works if you have a massive retweet network that can be very good at virally spreading information in the cybernet curation paradigm that we've been talking about. and you have a really huge amount of above average users constantly pumping information to be evaluated by the Cybernet curation algorithm. That's what makes Twitter interesting.

Not that you can post short things and see it on a timeline. And so this is why a Mastodon federated server doesn't really do so well. It's because you don't have that massive network that does a really effective curation. You don't have all the best comedians and thinkers and politicians and outrageous people. All these people putting all this attention into it to generate really good content. So you end up with 70 guys on a Mastodon server saying, things and then they get bored and just ban each other. So we have alternatives to the platform monopolies, but they don't look like the platforms.

And I think that's actually good. All right. Well, what I want to do is move on now to our something interesting segment. Before I get there, however, let me briefly mention another sponsor that makes this podcast possible, another product that I use every single day. and that is our friends at Hinson shaving. So I've talked about this product before. Hinson produces a beautifully constructed precision engineered aluminum razor.

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That's 100 free blades when you head to H-E-N-S-O-N-S-H-A-V-I-N-G.com slash Cal and use that code Cal. I also want to talk about our friends at MintMobile. If saving more and spending less is one of your top goals for 2023, why are you still paying insane amounts of money every month for your phone bill? Switching to MittMobile is the easiest way to save this year. As the first company to sell premium wireless service online only, MintMobile lets you order from home and save a ton with phone plan starting at just $15 a month.

I actually was talking about Mint Mobile. I put it in a talk I was invited to give at my kids' schools about smartphones and kids. And one of the things that comes up in this conversation is how do we give our kids the ability to text message us without having to give them a fully featured smartphone? Mitt Mobile is actually one of the things I talk about in this lecture I'm giving because it makes it really easy. You can go on the Amazon buy a feature phone, so a flip phone. They can still do text messages, but not the internet. You buy it for whatever, $70. And then just get one of these $15 a month fully featured wireless plans for Mint Mobile.

You do it online. They send you a SIM card. You stick it in your phone. And now for a very small price, your kids have the ability to text you to pick you up from practice or to say they got on the bus safely or whatever. This is what I like about this. It makes it cheap and easy to get texting, to get calls, to get data. So you have a lot more flexibility. You can have multiple plans.

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What should I do with my kids and smartphones? And I've gone deep into this research and have a lot of thoughts on it. I know some of these researchers who are involved in it. And I have this sort of big slide that goes, all these slides to go through it all. So if that's of interest, let us know. I think I might at some point record a version of that talk and just put it out there in the world for anyone to see. Yeah, that would be cool. It's an interesting topic.

All right. So let's switch to something interesting. This is where we take interesting things that people sent to my interesting at Calnewport.com address. We like to just look at these to end the show on something cool. So I actually have two things I want to mention today. The first thing is a new podcast that just launched. It's a Pushkin Industries podcast that's hosted by podcaster extraordinaire, Justin Richmond. Justin Richmond is one of these super pros in the industry.

he came up through the NPR system, working on some of their major shows and NPR podcast and came over to Pushkin where he's a producer. He also co-hosted a music podcast on Pushkin with Malcolm Gladwell and Rick Rubin. Anyways, he has a new podcast out called Started From the Bottom.

And I thought it was a really cool idea. So I just wanted to mention it here. So what he does on this show, Justin interviews people with humble origins who managed to scale the summit of success. People who are outsiders, people not part of the old boys network, people who grew up in a world where almost nobody went to college. And he asked, how did they beat the odds,

allowed you to hear their stories in their own words? I'm fascinated, as you know, about this topic, about how people succeed in various endeavors. And I think by focusing on people who had very few advantages, you're distilling, in some sense, some of the necessary core drives that goes behind success. So it's a really cool show. Some of the early episodes feature people such as Charlemagne the God, Susie Orman,

and the MFA champion, Francis Ingano. You know, I've actually crossed paths with Charlemagne a couple times. I've been on his radio show, The Breakfast Club, where I think I still hold the record for the widest, geekiest person to ever be on that show. But Charlemagne worries a lot about the impact of social media on young people. So there's a cool interview. I also went on his Comedy Central show. He had a TV show.

I've been a guest on that show as before. Very thoughtful, really interesting guys. Francis and Gano, I don't know, but I just know he's terrifying. A terrifying MFA fighter. Hi, it's Cal here. One more thing before you go. If you like the Deep Questions podcast, you will love my email newsletter, which you can sign up for at calnewport.com.

Each week, I send out a new essay about the theory or practice of living deeply. I've been writing this newsletter since 2007, and over 70,000 subscribers get it sent to their inboxes each week. So if you are serious about resisting the forces of distraction and shallowness that afflict our world, you've got to sign up for my newsletter at calnewport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week. So what's happening here is you have Australian senators beginning to back legislation that would make a four-day work week at full pay something like a standard.

This topic is coming up a lot in a lot of different places. All throughout Europe, for example, similar discussions are happening. And I just think the four-day work week in general is something to keep an eye on. And it's interesting, I think, that Australia is starting to get more serious about this. something to keep an eye on. My feelings about it are mixed. They're mixed. I just did an interview with a reporter on the four-day work week,

and I was relatively actually negative because I was the mood I was in when I did that interview. But I think mixed is the right way to describe how I'm thinking about it. So pros and cons. On the cons side, I think it is stepping aside because you don't want to deal with complexity, the real issues. And the real issues is not that people think that there's too many days during the week in which they're going to work, it's the nature

of their work itself. And for knowledge workers in particular, it is overload. Overload is creating all these problems. There's a lot of psychic damage that's done by having too much work on your plate. And just saying Friday is no longer officially a work day, doesn't get rid of that overload, doesn't get rid of that psychic damage. You end up still working that day anyways. You still are paying that tax of all the overhead of all these different tasks on your

plate. It means you can spend less time on the actual work itself and it piles up more and all these negative things, don't go away by just turning the knob on the number of days in the week that you work. This is different, of course, than the industrial sector, where the main knob you had was the number amount of time you work. If I am putting steering wheels on a car in a Ford plant, the only variable that is going to now affect that experience is just how many hours am I doing that? And so in the early 20th century, when we get something like the Fair Labor Standards Act from the 1930s

that put in place to five-day work week, it made a lot of sense. This is the knob we need to turn. What is the reasonable amount of days? In the knowledge sector

in the 21st century, it's not the issue. The issue is not so much how many hours is your work day, it's how much work is on your plate. So that's my, that's my trepidation around the four-day work week

is it's kicking the can to the side. It's not actually tackling with what matters. On the other hand, we have an interesting data point that comes from the company

base camp who switches to a four-day work week for part of the year every year. And it's an interesting data point. And what they found is reducing the total number of days, at least temporarily, creates a scarcity mindset that does actually reduce time wasting. It reduces long meetings. People are less likely to call a meeting. People get a little bit more focused on what's important because it creates a sense of scarcity. We don't have as much time.

So you know what? Let's not do this. Let's remain more focus. So actually, it created a better working environment. There was a lot of negative feedback when Basecamp first did this experiment. And I document this in, I think this is maybe in deep work I talk about this or potentially a world without email. There was pushback at first.

It said, oh, you're just going to make people take five days of work and squeeze it into four. And the co-founder, CEO, Jason Freed responded, that's not what's happening. People are actually reducing their work when there's less days. So it's possible that the four-day work week will indirectly improve things. It will be an indirect side effect because of a sense of scarcity. People will actually pull back what they think is a reasonable amount of work to assign. There's also some other obvious benefits such as if Friday is not a work day, even though you still might be answering emails all day and feeling like you have too much to do, it'll become socially acceptable not to have meetings. That's another day without meetings.

That's useful. There's a flexibility benefit. of course. Any day you have off in an official sense is a day where you're more flexible to do things like go to the doctor, take your car to the shop, go to your kid's school. So there are these sort of smaller direct benefits and perhaps a larger indirect benefit on work.

But I still think the conversation we have to have is about the details of the nature of knowledge work. What makes knowledge work hard? What's burning out knowledge workers today is not as simple as a question as it was 100 years ago, where you had two things to make sure the conditions were safe and the hours were reasonable.

Knowledge work is different, and we have to introduce more knobs to turn, but it's really hard, and we don't want to do it, so we focus on the simple things. So I'm just mixed on this. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. There might be some benefits. There might be some drawbacks, but it's not getting at the heart of what I think is actually causing problems in the knowledge sector today. But it's interesting, so I wanted to show you that article.

These links, of course, are in the show notes. You can also find a summary of all the questions and everything else in there. But let's wrap it up. So thank you, everyone who sent in your questions. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode of the podcast. Until then, as always, stay deep. Hi, it's Cal here.

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