Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 295: Artists Revolt Against Social Media

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

In this episode Cal takes a closer look at a growing trend of artists quitting social media and instead reverting to old-fashioned websites. Are these acts of principled sacrifice or a sustainable way to be creative online? Cal argues for the latter, showing how the internet without social media curation algorithms can be a place of rich discovery and audience building. He then takes questions on similar topics and ends by playing a few rounds of “deep or crazy” during the final segment.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/calnewportmediaDeep Dive: A Quiet Revolt Against Social Media [7:37]- Is my deep living too extreme? [45:06]- LinkedIn is getting toxic. Should I quit that too? [47:39]- Where do online articles fit into the life of a digital minimalist? [51:09]- Did Cal design the specifications for the hardcover copy of “Slow Productivity”? [54:04]- How do I not feel overwhelmed by online content after a Digital Declutter? [58:07]- CALL: Obsessing over quality [1:01:08]CASE STUDY: Applying lessons from “Digital Minimalism” [1:06:37]CAL REACTS: Deep or Crazy? [1:13:54]Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowpeoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/ twitter.com/HumanitiesGU/status/1772436799727472942youtube.com/watch?v=W3h9gV_z8OMyoutube.com/watch?v=tV6BbPTN5PQyoutube.com/watch?v=r0RqucKwIcwThanks to our Sponsors: mybodytutor.comshopify.com/deepdrinklmnt.com/deepmauinuivenison.com/deepquestionsThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for slow productivity 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 cultivating a deep life in a high-tech world. I'm here in my Deep Work HQ, joined as always by my producer, Jesse. Jesse, we actually won't be in the Deep Work HQ for next week's episode because we are recording a, I'm putting live in quotation marks, but we are recording live to tape this podcast. On Thursday. So on the Thursday that this podcast comes out, that's April 11th, we're recording our podcast at People's Book in Tacoma Park, independent bookstore around the corner from our normal podcast studio, open to the public at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 11th at 6 p.m.

There's a link in the show description about how you can RSVP is free, but they want you to RSVP. Also, if you're listening to this podcast on Monday, the day it comes out, you. out the eighth. I'm speaking at Georgetown University talking about the book, slow productivity, and I'm going to take a lot of questions from the audience. That's the main campus of Georgetown in the Fisher Colloquium space. That's in the Harari Business School Building. I put some information for this in the description. Also at caldnewport.com under essays, I posted some information. So it'd be great to see people. So what are we going to talk about today?

Well, I keep trying to categorize what are the main categories of things we talk about on this show. I'm altering that list a little bit. We have digital knowledge work. So trying to survive and thrive in digital knowledge work. We have the promise and perils of new technologies. As well as, here's my slight change. Really, category three I'm thinking about as engineering a more meaningful life, the applying of engineering and computer science metaphors to how do you make your

life deeper. Today, we're going to talk about something that come straight out of that second category, The Promise and Perils the new technology. I'm going to talk about a rising revolt. Online, there's been a rising revolt against social media being led by artists. A lot of you, my listeners, have been sending me videos and articles about this, so we'll get into it. We're going to look into whether or not a revolt like this can succeed and whether or not, if

you're not an artist, you should be paying attention or their ideas there we can all look at. then we'll do some questions. The questions will be pretty heavy on technology and its relation to work and promotion and success and depth, but we'll also have a slow productivity corner in there. And then for the final segment, we're going to return to a game we haven't played in a while.

Is this decision deep or crazy? That should be fun. I have a couple of those built up. So we got a good episode. By popular demand, we will have the slow productivity corner back because people love to hear the music. quick update on that book, by the way, going well. So, for example, the latest update is the New York Times has a business bestseller list, but it's only monthly.

Each month, what were the bestselling business books of that month? They just released the bestseller list for March and slow productivity was number four. So the number four bestselling business book of March, even though the book didn't come out until the end of the first week of March. So I think that's a great sign. We've just about, we're just crossing the 50,000 unit mark across. the three formats. So I really appreciate all of the success. I mean,

all the support, I should say that you've been given the book. If you want to hear some more about it, I think last week there was a nice interview with Chris Williamson on Modern Wisdom, the Modern Wisdom podcast. So if you're looking to hear more about me, talk about the book, maybe check out that interview.

That was a good one. And as always, Calnewport.com slash Slow, if you want to find out more, if you want an excerpt, if you want to listen to me reading an excerpt from the audio book, you can find out everything at calnewport.com slash slow. All right, I think that's all we got here for house cleaning.

Oh, let me mention also there's some visuals in today's deep dive. So if you're listening and you want to watch it, go to the deep dive, the deep life.com slash listen. This is episode 295. We'll post the video right on the show page there. All right. I think that's it, Jesse. You think we're ready to go?

Yeah, I just have one question. Have you started writing, have you started the plan for writing the next book? I'm still working on the next book. So contractually, what I'm supposed to be writing next is something with the title, The Deep Life. Now, what exactly that looks like? I'm not sure. One of the things I've been thinking about recently is I realize when we talk about the deep life specifically on this show, I'm often leveraging engineering computer science type metaphors.

We have stacks. We have algorithms or whatever. So one of the approaches I'm thinking about is actually like really leaning into that, like really making it, I'm completely using computer science metaphors for understanding the challenge of trying to engineer a better life. And because as I've been thinking about this, really thinking through hardware versus algorithms and objective functions and analysis, these metaphors about theoretical computer science, which you really push them are pretty subtle and pretty nuanced and give you a really interesting way of thinking about the systematic injection of intention. So one of the directions I'm thinking about is something that might be, you know, the deep life, like a technologist perspective. Like we lean into like this is, you know, we're going to tackle this from through the perspective of computer science and get to our sort of style of systematic advice. I have completely other ways I'm thinking about this book as well. Like, for example, one of the other ways I've been thinking about is really leaning into the technology aspect of this from the standpoint of how you can use the internet.

the created deep life. Like right now, the internet has been a, for a lot of people, a source of negativity, something we're trying to get away from. Like I talked about in digital minimalism,

but there's these big underlying decisions that were made along the way that made the internet into more of the source of negativity that it is. And these decisions can be reversed. So there's also a way of thinking

about this of looking at people who are reclaiming the internet, reclaiming it in a way that makes it a source of remarkability and not a source of sort of distraction and upsetness. And so I have a lot of different ways I'm thinking about it. But no, I have not locked in yet. I'm still focused on slow productivity.

So I'm in that fun stage where I can just think about ideas. I mean, I do like a slim book that, you know, it's talking about Turing and computability theory and algorithms and the definition of correctness and also is just giving like wise advice for systematically iteratively making your life. life more meaningful and intentional. And just like unapologetically, like a slim book, it's like direct metaphors from computer science and just advice.

I don't know. I think that could be cool. Yeah. It'd be kind of like one off, right? I mean, as I'm more and more writing about technology and its impact, it's sort of just like this little handbook, it sort of captures this idea we talk about on this show. I think it could be cool. But anyways, I'm not there yet.

Feel free to send ideas, by the way. I'm always happy to hear feedback. Jesse at calnewport.com, they'll get to me. All right, let's do a deep dive. So today I want to talk about a quiet revolt against social media that seems to be circulating mainly among artists. It's being documented and broadcast on YouTube. What I'm going to do is I'll get into the theory behind this revolt.

I'm going to argue why it might be more sustainable than you might at first imagine and then help you understand if you should be joining this revolt as well, even if you're not specifically an artist. But let's start by trying to understand what's going on. I want to look at some videos. I'm going to load these on the screen. I'll turn off the audio and have the closed captioning on. But I'll load some videos that are emblematic of this ongoing revolt. So I'm putting a video on here now. This is from Damon Dominique, which is really like a travel video channel. But this video seems to be one of the sparks for the the current revolt.

I do got to say first, by the way, Damien has beautiful aesthetics on his video. I don't know if you see this, Jesse, but it's a... I can see it. It's a very expensive camera, and he has a, I would say, like a vintage vogue, sort of visual aesthetic happening with his,

the light, the color balance or whatever. Anyway, it's a very nice looking channel. Let me put on his close captioning, because what he's talking about, what this video was called is, why do I not, why am I not posting anymore? And basically he is arguing he is tired of having to post on social media.

He's tired of trying to get his content viral on social media. I appreciate the giant glass of wine he's pouring right now. This is a gag where he's kind of emphasizing his frustration with what's going on in social media. And he catalogs it's an hour-long video. He catalogs all these frustrations with the interaction of his content, which is very artistic, as you can tell by how it looks. and the demands of social media. This seemed to inspire a lot of other people, more specifically artists,

to post their own videos. Let me post another one here. All right, here's one that one of the listeners sent me. This is high dot, um, MDED I-D underscore art channel. This is a smaller channel. It's an artist who does really cool artwork. And this video is called deleting social media

and making a website. And the artist here, who does videos of her art, which is I really appreciate, is basically saying in this video, I'm done with social media. I'm creating a website. And I can put my art on my website

and I'm going to control it and I don't want to post things anymore and have to see how many likes they get or what have you. I'm done. Right. So let's see. I'll read a little bit of what she's saying here.

It's a good presentation worth listening to. Let's see. All right. I don't know. how to fast forward. I got to go out of full screen here. I want to read a little bit of what she's saying here. She has some interesting things.

She says. Here we go. All right. You can expand that. Man, you can tell I use a lot of social media, Jesse. I don't even know how to use videos. You notice when people unfollow, people unsubscribe, and you see that, like it's so noticeable and it hurts.

It does hurt. But at the same time, I'm like, I would rather you know if I'm not for you, I'm not for you. So if you choose to unsubscribe or unfollow, it's like, well, I'm sad to see you go. Maybe I'll catch you on the flip side. Feeling like you can never keep up. And an addictive quality, of course, that is just social media in general. So she's going on about you just get really caught up and like how many followers

and you really notice when like numbers go up and down, et cetera. A very good sort of honest video. Here's another one I want to load up. This is another artist. This is LR in Julie, one word. That's the name of the channel. This website is I deleted all social media and made a website. All right.

So in this video, this artist is explaining why. So she left social media. She has these outlines. She also was tired of the demands of social media and she built a website. And that's where she's putting her art now. All right. There's a lot more videos like this happening on the internet right now of people declaring, especially artists, I'm leaving social media.

and I'm just going to put stuff on a website that I control. So what are their reasons? Well, I mean, I actually went through and watched these videos so I could summarize like the main reasons given by these artists. And let me give you the three main categories. Number one, they're leaving because social media is controlling and reducing the possibilities and quality of their art. They talk about the limited format.

Oh, if I'm posting on Instagram, then my art. Art now has to somehow fit into the physical format that's appropriate for Instagram. They talk about the algorithm that you are posting for rewards sameness and not uniqueness. This is a big point that Damon in particular has is that social media used to reward people for doing something different. Now it really forces conformity. Otherwise, the algorithm will ignore you. It focuses on what's already working. Another big reason is people are there.

These artists are saying social media is making. give them unhappy. They have to use it all the time. They don't like being addicted. They also don't like feeling as if they're trying to get other people addicted as well, that they're playing this game of trying to make their stuff as compelling as possible so people can't look away. The third reason they give is it seems to deny the reasons why they became artists in the

first place. So I think in particular the LR and Julie video had a really good, take on this, where she was saying, look, we didn't get into art for social validation. That's not why artists become artists is to have social validation. They do it to create something new to take raw materials and produce, on the other hand, something that's beautiful or engaging. Art, the production of art is what they got into art for, but having to integrate their art in social media meant that their focus became more on social validation, trying to build

or appease crowds of people. all right so that's why they're that's why they're leaving social media so here's the key question I want to ask about this revolt is it narrow is what these artists doing essentially self-sacrifice they're going to destroy their career because they're not on social media but they're doing so to make a broader point and maybe that's important or is this different engagement with the internet to be a creative and to be engaging in the internet without social media is this actually sustainable? In fact, could this actually be better?

Those are the questions I want to explore here. Not surprisingly, I'm going to make an argument for the second, but to do that, let's get a little bit theoretical. All right, so what do we have when we think about the Internet? At the base, all we have is a standard set of protocols and a standard scheme for addressing. This was the big innovation of the Internet. Whatever computer network you have and whatever computers you have,

on it. If you use these same protocols and you use the standard way of referring to yourself, the standard addressing scheme, you can plug into the internet and anyone can talk to you and you can talk to anyone else. So anyone could connect to this network of networks and any two machines connected to this network of networks could talk back and forth with each other because we all agree to speak a common language, a common protocol. We all agree to refer to ourselves with a common naming scheme. So the fundamental problem of the internet from the very beginning is how do people find

other people or things to talk to? How do you find what machine to talk to? How do you find what information you want to get? When you have this growing collection of networks and networks, anyone can connect to it, how do you figure out what to do? It is a hard problem. My younger audience probably doesn't remember this,

but I remember this in the 90s when the web, which is a part of the internet, but when the web became a big thing, they would publish internet yellow pages. Do you remember these, Jesse? Kind of. Actual yellow pages, a paper book that look like the yellow pages, and you would like flip through to a topic,

and there would be like list of URLs. Like here's a website, there's a website. That's actually early Yahoo. Yahoo used to be when it started in the 90s, just a hierarchical list of websites by topic. Well, business, entertainment business under this, movie companies. and then here's a list of websites and movie companies. Google really solved the problem of finding specific information.

It said, okay, we have a better way of actually, if I want to find out about this thing, it does a really good job of finding where on the internet are there authoritative sources on this particular thing you're interested in. So that kind of solved that original problem. But we still had the problem of what we could call serendipitous discovery and serendipitous exposure. There's this ability to say, I'm not looking for something in particular. I'm not looking for the way. website for Warner Brothers. I want to find something that I didn't know I was looking for. I want new ideas, new art, interesting people, new perspectives. This is the bigger promise

of the internet. It's not just that it's a more convenient way for companies to be accessible online, but that you can have this serendipitous discovery. And the flip side, how do you service the creatives so they can produce stuff? And even if people don't know them directly, people can find them. So as creatives can find audiences and audiences can find creative input, that became the second fundamental challenge of the internet, especially once we had the Web 2.0 revolution. This was happening roughly like 2004, 2005 is when this picked up, where it became really easy to put stuff on the internet. Like the 1990s, if you wanted to put something on the internet, you had to get a server, you had to hand code a website in HTML. It was kind of difficult by a

2004, 2005, there was web-based software, like blog software, for example, that made it easy the post information. You could have an easy interface and like type and drag in photos, and it would, and the software would automatically produce a nice looking web page for you. That was the Web 2O Revolution. So now really, like anyone could post stuff. It was much easier. The barrier to entry was lower. And we had this question of serendipitous creative discovery. How is that going to happen? All right. The model that came to dominate is what we can call the algorithmic model.

I'll draw this on the screen here. I'm putting a lot of dots on the screen. These are people creating stuff, their own individual stuff. So in the algorithm model, we have a single platform. So I'll draw a big gray box here. And inside this platform

is going to be algorithms. So I'll put a bunch of little binary symbols here. Right. They have algorithms. Everyone is going to aim the stuff they're creating at the central platform.

So we're all aiming what we're creating at the central platform that's running lots of algorithms. Then on this other side, we'll have a single this will be us. This will represent us. I can put a dot for someone

who's just trying to consume some information. Put that over here. And the platform is going to decide like, oh, okay, here's what, here's something cool for you to see.

I'll make a stream of things for you to see. All right, so this is the algorithmic model I've drawn. Lots of creators. Everything goes into a box. That box then looks at it and decides for you

yeah, here's stuff you might like and choose the stuff that you might like. All right. That's basically what it is today. If you're using TikTok or using Instagram or you're using Twitter slash X, this is how your content, how you're finding serendipitously,

so content you didn't know existed, how you're finding stuff, you didn't know existed, that might be interesting to you. And if you're a creative, so you're over here on the other side, you're just throwing your stuff in here, hoping that your stuff is assigned to people.

Right. And this is what's creating the problems that the artist are talking about is now your art becomes about satisfying this gray box, try and do whatever you can do to get it to select yours to show to other people. And this, of course, has a real constricting effect. There are advantages to this model, though. The reason why this model is so popular is there's real advantages. First of all, is it simplicity. If I'm a consumer, it's really easy.

I have a stream on an app of my phone that's being populated by an algorithm. if I want to serendipitously encounter information, I press an icon on my phone and there we go. And it's just, I'm just being shown stuff that's been selected for me that might be interesting. For the creators who are feeding this algorithm, there's a sort of lottery ticket excitement to it.

You never know. Your thing, right? And I'll highlight something over here. Your thing might be really favored. And you have a way if you could reach thousands of people all at once. Like there's that lottery ticket. of virality, if you just never know. You could be like one right choice of topic and look and timing away from being seen

by an amount of people that would have in a traditional world required like a whole career of building up your success. There's also a huge aspect of attention manipulation here that affects creators. We don't talk about that that much anymore, but I talk about it in my 2016 book, Deep Work. one of the ways that when these algorithmic platforms took off, one of the ways that they convinced people to move their creative activities over to these platforms is they collectivized attention.

And what I mean by that is that in a pre-alorithmic platform Web 2.0 world, one of the big problems if you were creating content is that it was very hard to get people to find the look at what you produced, right? It's hard. and so you would write a blog or post some photos on your Flickr account or on your Tumblr. And like no one would show up. Right? And this is, you know, this is hard.

You're like, I want people to show up. What these original platforms like Facebook offered is we'll make it seem like people are showing up. It collectivizes attention. These platforms make it easy for you to have something like a couple thousand of putting in air quotes here followers. Now, in reality, these are castles made in sand. this is not a couple thousand people who are waiting for what you're going to produce next. I mean, most of them are not seen, really aren't seeing what you're producing anyways.

The follow was a button they clicked at some point and forgot about it and the algorithm's not even serving your content to them. But for you, the creator, you get this simulacrum of like, I'm in an arena. There's a few thousand people. They really care what I'm doing. That feels really good. And that was really powerful for content creators, this idea of we're going to give you a sense that you have an audience and not like a dozen people, but like hundreds or

a couple thousand people. And this was very powerful. So it was playing on the psychological needs. Again, it's not really a couple thousand people who are watching what you're doing, but they could give you that sense. And that really attracted a lot of people, not even creative, just everyday people who messed around with a GeoCities website or a Tumblr. They all moved over to Facebook because Facebook had this model where you will comment

on what your friends are doing, they'll comment on what you are doing, whether or not it's good are interesting, this is going to happen, and you get the sense of, like, people care about what I'm doing, which is incredibly, incredibly powerful. So the algorithm model has some real attractions. So what happens when you quit this? Well, we get to what we can call the distributed trust model. So now what I'm drawing is a bunch of these blue creator dots again. But now there's no gray box that everyone is connecting into. What you get in the distributed trust model, model where now where are people producing and let me let me just label this like they're producing these are ugly dots by the way jesse um so now we could think of like email newsletters

podcast websites all independent content stuff that's not going into a centralized platform that everyone's on but everyone's kind of posting their own things and it's all universally accessible over the internet but it's not being curated by outside algorithms. And what we get in this world is these individual links of trust. Right. And a lot of times we see these little cliques of people that all know each other. And they all talk to each other. So think about these orange lines. I'm drawing these orange lines are, think of these as like connections, like people that know each other. It's an actual human trust relationship. I'm a person, you're a person, we have some sort of connection, we communicate with each other.

And you get this web of these connections. And as you can see on here, if you're watching this online, there's clusters, like a bunch of people that know each other. Over here is a bunch of people that know each other. And so, like, they all know each other. And then you have these, like, longer distance links connecting them. It's like standard human social networking happening on the internet. So how does information move through here?

It moves over these links. It moves over these links. So I'm going to, let's trace a particular piece of information. You know, maybe someone over here produces something and they send it to like their nearby people. They have like interest. They like it. So it sort of spreads to this local group.

Now it's going to maybe make us way out of here because this person has some connection to that person. It kind of makes this way out of there and maybe makes its way into infecting another clique. and the information begins the spread. Now, it's not all epidemic viral spread. Some of the stuff just goes, you know, a little distance, like over here. It kind of spreads in here, makes this way out and stops, and some stuff goes farther. And some stuff has a more sort of serendipitous path where it just kind of makes its way, you know, off random links and gets to a pretty far distance in the graph.

But the information is being spread on individual trust-based links between people that have some sort of established relation, be it digital or physical. This turns out to be an actually very good way of curating serendipitously interesting information. In fact, the curation decisions that end up being made here implicitly tend to be much more interesting and higher quality than what you would get with a centralized algorithm. Because now the main incentive is, if I'm going to send you something, I really care about what I'm sending you. I'm not going to send you nonsense.

I'm not going to send you something that's not interesting. I'm not going to send you something where the person is clearly unhinged or it's really hateful, most likely, you know, unless one of these clusters is like a cluster of Nazis or something like that. It works out to be really good curation. And so when something makes its way through this network and me as a receiver receives it, it's interesting stuff I'm receiving. It's carefully curated stuff. Like a really original idea that looks like nothing else, but has a spark of something interesting. It's going to spread probably pretty well. And I'm not going to get all these things, but I'm going to get an interesting mix of these things.

And maybe I'm primarily getting things that are local in this graph from places that aren't too far away. But that's okay. I'm getting an interesting mix of things. And occasionally long-distance things make it into this region of the network graph. And then that spreads to me as well. From the point of view of any individual receiver here, you're going to end up getting a really interesting serendipitous mix of information that's going to be much more original and diverse and I would say creative than what you're going to get when we trust. TikTok's algorithms or Instagram's algorithm to decide for us. It's also we're going to have community standards can implicitly be enforced.

So instead of trying to figure out, for example, what are the rules for this billion person social network about what's acceptable and what's not acceptable? What you get in a distributed trust model is like, well, over here we have shared standards implicitly because we know each other and we have similar interests. So when stuff comes in here that we don't like, we don't like that tone. we think that is, you know, over the top or conspiratorial, whatever it is, it's just not going to spread in our group. And so you're getting implicitly these regionalized community standard type spread.

Anyways, it's a really interesting way to have serendipitous information spread. It's a really interesting way, if you're a creator, to have your information spread. Now, there's one more twist here. So if you're a creator, your information is spreading somewhat serendipitously through these networks because of individual trust connections. But what happens is, as your information, let's look at this orange, if you're watching, this like orange path here,

as this creator's information sort of begins to spread, you begin to attract new direct connections. So now more and more of these people might say, oh, well, I kind of want to connect with you. I like this too. I want to connect with you as well. I like this too. I want to connect with this as well.

and you begin to build around you this cluster of this clique, this cluster of shared connections of people that you can more directly communicate your information to. This is really the standard of the original vision for the internet. It's a vision of these distributed connections. We're all speaking the same language. The curation decisions are human. Do I want me to send you? We're to people something. Did I like this thing that came to me?

I did. I'm now going to connect directly to this person. I'm going to subscribe to their letter or listen to their podcast or their RSS feed or go to their website. And you can, as a receiver of information, receive a lot of interesting stuff. And as a producer of information, begin to grow as your content and art warrants it, a sort of larger sort of clique. It's a really good system. And it solves a lot of the problems that we get when we instead use this system of like let the gray box handle everything. Everyone will talk to the gray box and we'll just sort of have a thousand,

people in northern California to sit there tweaking it and try to make everyone happy. So when these artists are leaving social media to create their own websites, they're leaving the algorithm model of information spread and discovery to go to the distributed trust model of information spread and discovery. And I think that's not a bad model. The biggest problem with it is it's slow, right? I mean, you can build your true fans as a creator. But you got to produce good stuff.

It has to make its way on a regular basis through this network and attract people one at a time. It's slow. There's no attention manipulation. So if you're not really producing something original or interesting that people really like, there is no pretending like there's a thousand people who care what you're doing, like TikTok can do for you. You just won't succeed.

So there's this sort of threshold for success. So it could be frustrating. Like I want people to think I'm interesting, but what I'm doing is not. not and you do have to deal with that. And even as a consumer of information, it's more work. You kind of have to like follow things and keep up with things and check out different websites and you have email newsletters that come in that you read and sometimes you don't. There's different podcasts and you have to discover a podcast and then you have to go try

it and listen to some episodes. I mean, it's a lot more work than just having a continuous stream that you just hit a button and there's stuff there that's really interesting. This way of consuming content's not good for in the moment distraction. you're trying to hide from something difficult in your life. TikTok is there to hold your hand. We can right away distract you whenever you need it. This distributed trust model, no, it's harder.

Like you have to wait for the email newsletter, the new podcast to come out, or for someone to update their website. It doesn't offer you a solution to the problem of numb me right now. But I think you get better information. I think it's more interesting. I think it's more human. I think it solves a lot of problems of the algorithmic model.

And if you're an artist, I think it's just more true to art. So should other people do this? as well, I think it's completely on the table. All it takes is stop using social media, but lean into the internet as a really cool place. And lean into it by independently produce things. Newsletters, we'll talk about other newsletters, check those out. Podcasts, we'll talk about other podcast, check out those other podcasts.

Websites, this sounds old fashion, have a folder of bookmarks. I like this artist website. Like one of the things I do like I used to do in 2006 is like go check out what these artists are up to. Have an RSS reader if they're syndicating their content. Embrace the friction. Embrace the quirky weirdness of I'm not just getting these really polished streams. I think it's a cool version of the internet. But the key thing is for these artists, it is a version of the internet that is compatible with being a working artist.

I would even wager that you have a better chance of making a. full-time middle-class creative living as an artist in the distributed trust model than you do in the algorithmic model. The algorithmic model gives you more hope. But again, these are castles in the sand. All these followers that you're trying to pursue aren't really doing much for you other than making you feel better, whereas the carefully built distributed trust model true fans, they'll join the subscription, they'll buy the artwork, they'll come to see you in person.

You only need so many of those to actually make a living. So I'm a big believer in the distributed trust model, and I think these artists who are revolting against social media aren't just making a sacrifice to prove a point. They're discovering a better way to be a creative in an online world. I like the castles in the sand metaphor. Yeah, we don't, it's interesting. That was, when I first started talking about social media, that attention manipulation was the number one point. Because they weren't really, they had not yet fully invested in the engagement strategy. Right. So like early Facebook, when I first started writing about this, they were just trying to get as many users as possible. They did not care about active user minutes, like trying to make it addictive. They wanted to make it something that you wanted to join. And they didn't really care how much you used it after you joined it. So the really the big push of Facebook in 2004, 2005, 2006 was people are paying attention to you. It was entirely attention manipulation. Then once they went to their mobile strategy in 2010s, then the game changed. And it was, okay, we also need people.

to look at this all the time. And so the focus became on how do we keep you on the app once you're on the app. And it became a little bit less for the average user, became a little bit less about I want to be seen and more about I want to be numbed. And that's what we talk about most now. When we critique social media, we talk most about the engineered addiction. But we shouldn't forget, especially when thinking about creatives, that this like original attraction was no one's coming to your blogger.com blog. But if you come over to Facebook, people will comment on your wall. And that was really, really compelling.

And I think that's how they got people to leave the quirky, interesting old school distributed trust web and come into these walled gardens. That's how they got them to do it. That was what they were dangling. And I think that points often forgotten. But artists know it well because, man, it feels good. If you create things for a living to make it seem like there's a lot of people who are caring about what you create. And it's just weird collectivized attention and algorithmic manipulation.

And they're subscribed. What do that mean? Who are these followers? Do they ever actually see what you're doing? Like, who knows why they hit that button at some point? And they haven't thought about you since. It's a weird game that's being played on there. Interesting as well because these creatives probably have some sort of validation

through their friend group on Facebook that they're like, hey, I saw you do XYZ yesterday on Facebook. Yeah. So then they're like, oh, people must be honest. so I must have those 1,000 fans or whatever. Yeah, yeah, you get the signals that keep you hooked. Hey, I really, comments do the same thing. Hey, this is great.

I really love that. Yeah, but I love the way they're talking about it. And this is a Jaron Laner point, but I'm glad it's being picked up now by these artists. The impact on your art of the medium, that was another really cool point about this. It's like when you're designing for Instagram, part of this is just a format of Instagram really constrains what your art is. and then you have that second order effect of you're trying to create art that Instagram will like.

You're trying to please the algorithm. Art can't survive in that world. It would be the equivalent if I guess we kind of did have this in the early Renaissance. Think about like there was a small number of great patrons. And the artist, if you wanted to succeed,

if you're in Florence in the 1500s, you needed one of these great patrons to support you. So those patrons, all you were doing was trying to design what they were going to like. I mean, like the Medici's taste completely shaped high Renaissance art. They were funding Michelangelo.

They were put, they were, and you were creating this art, you know, for them, right? And then think about what happens. You go to like the first half of the 20th century where you have the New York City modernism scene. And what you got instead was these networks of independent galleries. And people began to produce really experimental, interesting things. They were, weren't serving like a small number of patrons. are like, okay, we need to paint whatever the epic art is of the day. And this is where you start to get out the interesting things.

It's where you get the pollocks and the decoonings. And you begin to get the abstract expressionism reaches its full flourishing. When you get this, things are more distributed. And small groups of people producing for an independent production, like small galleries, and people are hearing about stuff through other people. And that's where all the excitement happens. That's when the innovation happens. happens. So we'll see. I saw recently that Jonathan Haidt was on Rogan as well. I have to check that

out. Yeah. Yeah. John do I know one up to our number two debut on New York Times bestseller. You got number one. What's his book? The Anxious Generation. Oh, he's probably on the book on his book. Yeah, yeah. So he has his new book out. Yeah. So I mean, we talk about John all the time on the show, but his book that lays out what he's been talking about for the last six years, the research on teenagers and social media and phones, his book with all that research just came out. And it's cool. It's like really crushing it because it's one of those things where everyone's like, yeah, we're there. Just give us the numbers.

So I think that's he's killing it and good for him. There's a cool, man, also being attacked. I mean, it's hard to be number one and anything. There's like a really interesting, if you want to hear an interesting. Christine Heid interview. He went on Tyler Cowan's podcast. Okay. Right.

Marginal Revolution. And Tyler, who I've met, and I really like Tyler as well, brilliant guy, economist at George Mason. He's very pro-technology, also very pro, there's different ways of thinking about technology. My philosophy is different than his. His is very much, like, we will adapt to new technologies. It could be disruptive when they emerge, but we adapt to them.

And ultimately, over time, we can't. deny that like technological innovation pushes forward the human story in like really positive ways. So you have to just deal with the, the tumult in the small scale. And so he had hide-on and it's really contentious interview. It's interesting. Now, after the fact, here's what I love about it. After the fact, both Tyler and John were like, yeah, this got kind of contentious, but that's great. Like, we respect each other and it was like a heated discussion. It's not gotcha. It's not like someone hating the other person. This is what heated debate should be like. So that was kind of cool. I haven't listened to it yet, but like they, I guess Cowan's much more of like a libertarian

on these issues and really pushing Hyde and and there's like, anyways, I've heard it's really interesting and contentious and a, but a model of what like a contentious conversation should be like when it's done in good faith and with respect for each other. Yeah, so we should check that out. I would say we should have John on, but he's just like in the stratosphere right now. He doesn't need to be coming on our show. He's, uh, he's on like every major show, which I love because God, his message is needed. All right. We got questions coming up.

Let's first hear from a sponsor. So I want to talk about our friends at Maui-Nui-Vinneson. That's Maui, M-A-U-I, N-U-I. It's a mission-based food company that's bringing the healthiest red meat on the planet directly to your door. I love this meat. We had the jerky and we had the steaks, which we grilled, both were fantastic. My kids loved the stakes, which they don't always do, so that's a good sign. But here's the thing about this company. What is this meat? Where's it come from? Here's their big idea.

There's an invasive deer species in Maui, the island of Maui in Hawaii that's eating all the vegetation. So they have to call these herds. And Maui Nui's whole idea was instead of just wasting all these deer, just culling them off, we should harvest the meat. Because it's incredibly nutritious because they're eating a Hawaiian salad bar all day. Very nutritious meat. And so they figured out how they could harvest the meat from the invasive species they have to coal anyways and make it available as super nutritious meat for consumers to actually eat. So it's 100% wild harvested red meat. The only U.S. company that has wild harvested red meat. You can wild harvest fish.

It's the only company that's wild harvesting red meat. So this is their invasive access to your population. It tastes fantastic. It's very nutritious. And it's ecologically sound. It's a species they have to cut back on anyways. And so Maui-Nui-Vinnessin is definitely a favorite now in the Newport household. So the good news is you can get 20% off your first order if you go to Maui-Nui-Vinnessin.com

slash deep questions. so that's M-A-U-I-N-U-I-V-N-U-I-Vinnessin.com slash deep questions or use a discount code deep questions at checkout. That's Maui-N-E-Vinneson, the healthiest red meat on the planet, delivered directly to your door. Also want to talk about our friends at Element, L-M-N-T. So this is a, what do you call it, a drink mix, like a powder you add to water that adds to the water. The electrolytes, including sodium, that you need, especially if you've been sweating a lot or otherwise, have been exerting yourself. It's created by the former research biochemist Rob Wolfe and Keto Gaines founder Louis Villasynor.

It has enough sodium, potassium, and magnesium to move the needle that gets you feeling to perform in your best. But what I like about it is zero sugar, zero artificial colors, no dodgy ingredients. I use it after I exercise. If I've been sweating a lot, I'll put a little bit of LL. into my water to get back some of the electrolytes and not just the water. If I've been lecturing all day or giving talks all day, I also lose a lot of liquids. I'll put a little element in my water. I like having that hit of salt and other things in it. And I like that there's nothing bad. There's no sugar. It's not the sweet. I can just throw it in there. It tastes great. I know I'm

not drinking. No, I'm not drinking stuff that's not good for me. You have a lot of different flavors, like citrus salt, which I really like, or raspberry sauce. salt. They also have spicy flavors like mango chili or chocolate salt, which here's a key. If you had a late night, mix that into your coffee the next morning. That actually goes really well with the coffee. So, anyways, I am a big fan of Element. So I'm going to say, suggest you go to drink element.com slash deep. So that's drink. LMNT.com slash deep to get a sample pack with any purchase. Jesse, let's do some questions.

Sounds good. Before I read the first question, I think you've got to tell the audience about how you're wearing a new shirt. I'm trying a different shirt. Yeah, it's similar to my old shirt, but not quite the same. I don't even recognize who you are anymore. I don't know if it's going to perform as well. But I'm sampling different options I have for shirts. I mean, it does feel weird.

It's like driving your car left-handed or something. We'll see. I mean, I'm sure it's been distracting everyone who's watching it. Yeah. Yeah. You're like, that's a different shade of blue. All right. Our first question is from mate Uts.

I'm a student and devoted myself to deep work in digital minimalism. Thanks to this, I've become more aware and I'm doing much better in school. However, yesterday I was sick and it absolutely interrupted my core of a deep life. I was on my screen all day. Reflection made me think that my life was simply a routine loop of habits related to the same goals every day. For example, learn to constantly develop, read a book to become smarter and wiser. Is this extreme routine? Good. Look, it's not only fine, but it is good to have regular routines or rituals that

emphasize the stuff that you find important because that signals to yourself that I find these things important. So, of course, we've talked about that. They're like reading on a regular basis. It signals to your mind that you take the slow consumption of big ideas seriously, right? So routines to emphasize what's important is important. However, I think what you're seeing here is that you probably have these turned up. The dial of their intensity and frequency is probably turned up too much. This is easy to do,

especially if you have a lot of discretionary time, like you're a student and you really have a lot of autonomy in your time. It is easy for you to begin to really just fill your day almost entirely with these highly structured activities. Then it becomes counterproductive. So you want regular,

we call them daily discipline sometimes on the show. Those are fine. But they shouldn't be all-consuming of your day. Something you do on a semi-regular basis to signal something is important to you, but your day should not become a sort of monastic ritual of this service, followed by this discipline, followed by that service. That I think not only is non-sustainable, but sort of misses the point of life in the

first place. Your day should be varied and exciting, suffused with gratitude and adventure. And they won't be that after all routine. Also, you should have more of these sick days. a lot of air quotes today, Jesse, but I'm doing air quotes again. You should have more of these sick days, even when you're not sick, days where you're not doing a normal routine. I'm going on a long hike, and then I'm watching a movie, and then I'm, like, hanging out

with friends, right? So you want the daily disciplines routines to be regular and important to you, but not everything you're doing, and you can walk away with them for a while and be fine and then come back to them, and you can take days off, and you want that sort of variety. So it's not like you're doing something bad here. I think you just, again, have that dial of intensity and frequency on these daily disciplines probably just turned up a little bit. So turn it down a little bit and go throw a little bit more variety into your life. I think you'll be fine. Okay, who'd we got next? Next questions from Ed.

In your books, you talk a lot about quitting social media. I don't have Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, but I do use LinkedIn. However, this platform has become very toxic and I find the whole promotion aspect untasty. I'm considering quitting LinkedIn, but I'm unsure of its implications. My work does not really rely on it. What should I do? You can go ahead and quit it. You know, this is classic digital minimalism. Tools have to earn their way into your limited time and attention. They use Thoreau terms, because Thoreau is a real inspiration for digital minimalism. Before you're willing to allocate some of your limited life force to a particular activity, it has to earn it. So it sounds like LinkedIn is not earning it for you. Now, if it is, like, oh, there's something that happens on LinkedIn that I find

to be really important. Then you can reconsider, is there a way to isolate that and get rid of the other aspects of this, or is it worth taking that hit? Or is there another way to get a similar value? You can go down that whole process of figuring out, like, what value am I getting here? But if you don't have obvious value, it's not your job to figure out how these tools can be useful to you. It's the tool's job to convince you that they're unmissable, right?

And it's something I used to write a lot more about because there's a period, especially during the height of tech exuberance, when the attitude of the tech companies was this could be important. You don't want to miss on something important. So please go use this and figure out how this might be important. And so people will just sign up for these things and use these things because it's like, I don't know, it could be important as if like it was their job to figure out why LinkedIn was important. It was their job to buy the first Apple Watch and figure out what am I going to do with this. You don't need to be a beta tester. If you don't have definitive value from LinkedIn, just walk away. Hey, if it's a problem, if you discover something you're missing, it will become apparent,

and then you can make another decision. But I say it's completely fine to walk away from something that's not obviously earning its key. I don't really know what happens on LinkedIn these days. I never go on LinkedIn. I mean, when I first started talking about social media, LinkedIn was very much just business networks. Yeah. Like it's, you would just kind of declare, I know this person. And here's my job title.

And like the main use of LinkedIn when it first started, Reed Hoffman actually blurb so good they can't ignore you back in 2012. Back then, the main use of LinkedIn was a two degree of connection contacts. So like I want to talk to someone who works at Google because I'm thinking about trying to work at Google. I don't know anyone who works at Google. But if I look at the people that the people I know know, probably someone in that much larger group works at Google, and that's a connection that could make sense because the person that works at Google is hearing from someone they know, and I know that person as well, and so that's a connection that actually makes sense. It's, you know, there's trust,

it's a full train of trust. That was the main use of LinkedIn. Nowadays, I think you post a lot of stuff. I know they have a big ad network as well, because I hear their ads on Ferris. Yeah, so they advertise job listings, help you find people to hire. For the individuals, I think you more promote yourself. It's not just I want to be on here. If I got to post things, like sort of a blog medium type setup, I think. I got to post things and people share it. And so I think there's more sort of social networking going on as well.

All right. Who do we got next? Next question is from Julius. I've been able to wean off social media and replace those old habits with reading books, listening in audio books, and watching films. Where do I fit in online articles? You always mention your articles published in a New Yorker. I want to save those to my pocket app, but that would just add to my growing 2B red list.

So with articles, I mean, I typically recommend you have some times when you read articles. And it could be just regular. You know, Sunday morning, I go to a coffee shop, a Friday, happy hour after the week, a lunch hour on Wednesday. Or it could be more, if your schedule is more flexible, a little more serendipid. It's like, what do I want to do today? I want to have an article reading block. But have a ritual around it. I go to this place to like read articles.

I like to go to the park and sit there and read articles, right? Have some rituals around like when you do article reading. Have a place you gather articles. So some people use things like the pocket app, the grab articles they see throughout the week and they can read it in a nice interface like on a tablet. Other people like to print things, you know, okay, I want to bring them with me somewhere. I don't care how you do it. During your regular article reading period, it's just like read the ones that seem interesting. You know, and that's it.

And like, yeah, you're not going to read all the articles. that are interesting, you'll read some interesting articles, and that's the goal. And maybe it's just I do it once a week and I read three articles, or maybe I really, you know, I do this three or four times a week and I get through a lot of articles. It doesn't really matter. The activity of value here is just encountering interesting ideas from interesting people. And doing that is interesting. Do not have a completest mindset about this.

I have to read every interesting article. There's no price you get for reading every interesting article. And by the way, you're not. You think you are, but there's 100 other publications and cool things. So your goal is not to somehow win at every interesting article I read. It was the experience of communing with a mind that has thought a lot about something and given an interesting thought. That's going to be good for me. It's like eating a good meal or doing exercise.

I want to do that on a regular basis, but I don't have to eat all the good meals and I don't have to do all the exercises. So I would just lower that. I mean, the only caveat I would give there is my articles you absolutely have to read. That is just a given Bad things will befall you if you don't But beyond my articles, just reading some interesting stuff each week is a win What I do with like New Yorker hard copy

Is if it gets too stacked I just recycle and then to start fresh I always try to read one article Right away when the hard copy New Yorker comes Yeah And then if I have more time I'll read more Yeah All right

But it's weird for me It's weird when you actually write for these same mediums. Reading becomes different. It's like I have a hard time reading nonfiction books that are similar to my nonfiction books because it's sort of close to home.

And so like we have sort of weirder habit sometimes. Like if you're a magazine writer, you might not read a lot of other magazine articles. It's kind of interesting. All right. Who do we got next? We got our slow productivity.

Ooh, slow productivity corner. Let's get some theme music, Jesse. All right. So as long time listeners know, we try to have one question per week that is inspired by a relationship. to my new book, Slow Productivity. If you have not yet read Slow Productivity,

but you do listen to this podcast, that's a problem. It's like the handbook for the digital knowledge work category that we tackle so much on here. So check that out, Slow Productivity. Find out more at Kelnewport.com slash Slow. All right, what's our question, Jesse? This question is from Matt. He actually emailed me over the weekend,

so I had to include this because I was curious myself. I just sat down in my garden on Eastern Saturday weekend to read Slow Productivity and Hardback. I noticed the following. The size. Perfect size for a hard back, not so big that it's hard to hold up. The weight, again, glorious. The paper choice, such a nice weight in color.

The font, love it. I'm not a humbershire what it is, but I'm going to try to work it out. The page size, by this I mean the margins on the page. Again, I like it a lot. Where all these factors deliberate. Well, Matt, little known fact. I hand bind every copy of slow productivity. I sit outside under a tree and I sit and I knit whatever you do.

I bind with thread every page. Now, it's not quite true. So a lot of that is deliberate, Matt. So I will say the thing that I really went back and forth a lot with the publisher was the interior design, the font and how the interior design looks. Because I had a very specific idea there. This whole book has a lot of very specific aesthetic choices. I think the first design they put together was what I would call the standard sort of business space idea book design.

Similar maybe to like a world without email. And it was much more of a sans seraph adjacent font, a more modern look, a more sleek kind of digital type look. There's kind of like a standard look that a lot of these types of books went. And I said, no, no, no, this has to be old fashion. We're tapping into like this timeless attraction to slow production of things that matter. or drawing from the stories of traditional knowledge workers. I want this book to be more old-fashioned. And we iterated and found that font, which you can find the name for.

It's in either the front or back of the book. You'll find the name of the font in there. I fought for that font and the looks, this more old-fashioned look. And they were really, once they realized what I was going for, I sent them a bunch of existing books. Like see what they did with their font and layout. This is what I'm looking for. And then they got it right away. And I really loved the way that design looked.

In terms of like the size and the weight, I also, you know, specifically made this book a certain length that lends itself to a little bit of a smaller trim size, a little bit of more portability. I didn't want, sometimes I write tombs, you know, big thick books, not super thick books, but like a world without email, like I cover a lot of ground. That's a pretty thick book. I wanted this to be more talisminsic. Is that a word? That's not how you say that. How do you say that, Jesse? I have no idea.

Your vehicle is so robust. Talism, like, say talisman and then adding like a talisman, talismanzic, I'm going to say. Like a talisman. Like this, like this object is capturing this new philosophy that I want to return to and like rethink what I mean by productivity. And so the size also mattered. I was the one who really pushed the cover. I said this cover needs to be rich and artistic. It needs to capture a mood more than it needs to capture specific information.

about the book because there's a big psychological element of slow productivity. So I'm glad you appreciated it, Matt, because all aspects of the aesthetics of this book, I really cared a lot about. And I took some big swings on. You know, I did some things that were different than the sort of standard book in the space from my prior book. So I'm glad you appreciated that. Tell us Mnzik.

There is a real word there. I'm just not getting it right. All right. What else have we got? All right. Next question is from John. When I come back from a declutter, I can't find a good solution to my reading inbox. even after the most careful filters I employ,

I still get over 50 high quality think pieces push to me every week. Right. So again, so this is great. So now we can go back and reapply our advice from before. Collect everything interesting in a place that's easy to get to. Have regular rituals and time set aside for reading think pieces. Fit what you can in there.

Be happy with that. Unless like your job is to stay on top of the cultural zeitgeist about a particular issue. You just want the, the benefit is from the interaction and grappling with the smart article, not from the collection of specific types of information. So just like to reiterate that advice. I mean, I love the idea. Let's elaborate this.

I love the idea of reading rituals. Certain place, certain days, certain times you go to read. Like I used to tell college students who are like seniors over 21 that my whole like Heffawizen, Heidegger with Heffawizen philosophy is like you need a, you need like a friendly pub-style bar that you can bring your Heidegger, like the stuff that's sort of ambitious that you're reading. And you can sit there and read and it doesn't feel like work.

Or this could be a spot in the woods as well. It could be like you want interesting places you go to read and think and encounter really big ideas. I used to do a lot of reading when I was at MIT during the summer and the spring on the banks of the Charles. I would like to read on the running path or on one of the docks that was out there in the river, especially when like the first sunlight of the

spring season would come. I have a lot of good memories of that. Like location, location really matters. And so like reading wrapped around location, wrapped around with non-instrumentality, meaning you're reading just for the sake of encountering ideas, not because you're trying, you need it for your work or it's research for something else. It's really there's few human pleasures that are greater. So like, have a reading ritual regularly spend time with contemporary articles, variety of them. But the goal is going to be to fulfill that. ritual, not to somehow capture everything.

And again, the big exception here is my articles. You have to read and share those. At the tombs in Georgia. At the tombs. That would be a great place because cell phones. So the tombs is a bar near Georgetown University. It's a basement bar, college bar. Cell phones don't work down there, or at least some providers don't work down there.

So you go down to the tombs, bring your book and like you're not going to be distracted. You can't even look at your phone. I like the tombs. I was this there last week. Yeah? Yeah. I haven't been in a while. We had a game at Georgetown University, so we all went there afterwards, and we won in overtime, so it was exciting.

This was lacrosse. Yeah. Yeah. Someone, a reader reached out. Someone reached out. Oh, no, someone else. It wasn't a reader, but I was talking to someone recently who's friends with the new coach over there. Oh, okay. Yeah, so he said to say hi.

The coach. Yeah, the tombs is cool. It has a rowing theme. Yeah. Oh, that place. There's a Dartmouth ore down there. Yeah, the tombs is cool. All right.

Do we have a call? We do. All right. Let's see what we got. Hi, Carl, I am Giacomo, a product designer from Italy. Thank you for slow productivity and for the positive change that it has brought to my personal and professional life. I have a question for you, and it's related to the principle obsessing over quality. So the way I implement slow productivity is truly through the lens of quality, because as you say,

obsessing over quality is the glue that brings all the different parts of this framework together. Now, the question is, do you see that this is the best way or maybe there are other ways that we can find the object that we should focus on, obsess over its quality, is enough to ask yourself what it is that only I bring to this organization and then obsess over its quality? quality. Thank you so much for your work, and I'm really glad that you mentioned slow food in your book. I really hope that, who knows, maybe they're going to reach out to you. As an Italian, I must say that I'm proud that you include it. Thank you so much again, and have a great one. Thank you for that question. Coincidentally, I should say, I was just right before we recorded

was talking with my Italian publisher. So we're going to have an Italian version of slow productivity is coming out in June. So look out for that. He was actually telling me my books do well over there. Deep work does well over there. Digital minimalism does well in Italy. They more recently published so good they can't ignore you.

And they were a little bit worried because I wrote that 12 years ago. And that's doing well over there as well. So I guess I'm connecting with the Italians, Jesse. That's good. Yeah. So June, I think 11th or something like that. an Italian version, an Italian translated version, a slow productivity will come out. All right, so it's a good question.

I might actually draw a little bit in answering this question for people who are watching instead of just listening. So what Jekmo was asking about is how do I figure out what I'm going, what craft I'm pursuing in my job, right? Because again, it's this key idea in slow productivity is that when you turn your attention from activity and towards quality, producing something really well, all the other ideas become much more natural. So you want to care about your craft. He was suggesting, should I just say, what can I do that no one else can do? I don't actually think that's necessarily going to be the most accurate way to do this. So let me draw a picture here. The Venn diagram, I'm going to draw two circles with an overlap.

So we're going to do a Venn diagram here. All right. And we are going to look at this intersection in the middle here. So how would I label these two circles that we're looking at the intersection in the middle of? All right, here's how I'm going to label them. I'm going to label what I can do. What I can do is going to be the first circle. Notice I'm leaving off that no one else can't.

And over here produces clear value. So for your organization or for your company, whatever you do, this red circle are the things that clearly produce value. So it's like these are what ultimately get us new business. It's what the products that are paid for. It's the strategy that we bring to clients. This intersection is what you should care about. the things you can do

where it intersects with the things that produce clear value and there might be multiple things in here and there might be multiple people that correspond

to any of the things in here. That's fine. And what you do is you find something in this intersection. All right, here's something

I know how to do, preferably something that requires some sort of specialized training. Let me get a big dot. This is messy. Here I'll put blue

around the two. Jesse, I'm getting abstract here. All right, whatever. here's something I can do. It's skilled.

It produces value. There might have many options. Choose one of those. And then you run with it. I'm going to get better and better and better at this thing. So the choice of what the... It's not trivial to choose what you're going to get good at. It's not trivial, but it's also not impossibly hard.

It shouldn't be too fraught. It's like there's some things I do that actually are non-trivial. And some of these things also like I can tell matter and what I do for a living. Let me choose one of those and really focus on getting. better and better at that. So that's how you figure that out, Jocamo. And just to walk through, just to walk through the logic here, again, once you start really focusing on craft, busyness becomes more and more unnatural to you. And it motivates you to go through the other principles of slow productivity to commit to those more strongly. I want to be working on fewer

things. I want to have more of a natural pace. I want to take longer on the stuff that matters because you're trying to get better at what you're doing. All that becomes natural. And then as you get better at what you're doing, you gain more control and leverage over your job, and then you're able to make even bigger demands about how many things you work on or the pace that you work on, and it becomes a flywheel, a flywheel of slowness and quality. So don't look for this perfect thing only you can do, but just find something you can do that's valuable. Even if other people can do it, your goal is to do it better than them. I'm going to get better at it than they are. I'm going to focus on craft. So that's a good question. That was a Jekimo, a good chance

to qualify that. All right. I think we have a case study here as well. So let's see. We got a case study that's where people send in their stories of putting some of the ideas we talk about here into action. This case study, actually we don't have a name on this one. So we'll just call it anonymous. I read digital minimalism and started applying its lessons. Since then, I have drastically increased how much I read, drastically increased how much I exercise, incrementally increased how much I sleep, significantly increased the amount of movies

and video games I have actively and consciously consumed, in contrast to passive or regretful consumption. My case study is one of very slow and steady progress. Here are some stats I compiled with my nerd spreadsheets comparing 2022 to 2023. I doubled the amount of hours I read books, paper or ebook, while listening to the same amount of audiobooks. I did 2.5 times the amount of strength training exercises and three times the amount of cardio workouts. I increased the average sleep per night by about 20 to 30 minutes. I increased the amount of video game hours put in by 30% and hours of shows and movies watched by 80%.

There are also some fuzzy or subjective improvements, but still worth noticing. Subjective improvement in mood, maybe 10 to 25%, increased attention span as measured by being able to read for more than an hour in a single sitting, which was unheard of for me two years ago. Now I can do that. Increased attention to kids due to lack of. phone usage when spending time with them. I used the phone FOIA method and mood and attention span improvements. Screen time seems

to be reduced. Vaguely remember four to five hours daily previously. That's down to one to two hours and that's mainly maps, podcast, reading time trackers and leaving my screen on after making a caller text. I forget to charge my phone overnight and is never a problem. I have saved a few hundred

dollars because I no longer feel any need to replace the phone I've had for three plus years. I like the quantitative There are most people don't like to track things so closely. I think that's fine. That's a personality decision. But I appreciate us being able to benefit from seeing the quantitative benefits of getting more intentional about your relationship with technology. There's a lot of cool things in here. Let me highlight a couple things. The phone usage. Phone for your method is massive. I put my phone in the same place in my house when I'm home. If I need my phone, I go to that place

to look something up or to make a call or to receive or send text messages. And then I leave the phone there and go back to what I'm doing. That makes a big difference. Your phone is no longer a constant companion. It becomes instead an Oracle, something you consult usefully as needed, not something that's always with you. I also like this idea of attention span returning. Like when you start to read on a regular basis, you get more comfortable reading.

And reading is a good proxy for basically any sustained concentration demanding activity. The anonymous writer here says two years ago or more. the idea that he could read for a single hour, just do nothing but read for an hour, was unheard of, and now he does it regularly. The time, more time spent with kids,

big deal, more time spent exercising, right? I mean, when you get more intentional about your time and your technology, it really opens up a lot of things. So we hear about all this things this person was doing that they weren't doing before.

And probably if we talked to this person before, they would just say, how would I ever have time to read? How would I ever have time to exercise? And it turns out like, you had more time than you thought, but the technology was stealing and monetizing it. So these moments that you could have spent making your life and your family's life better was instead being spent implicitly toiling in the salt mines of these attention economy companies,

looking at their content to make them more money. So you sort of regained that. So anyway, that's a cool case study. He says this is digital minimalism in action. Yeah, just digital minimalism, but it's like the whole program here in action. So that was cool to see. All right, so we have a final segment coming up, but first, Jesse, let's hear from another sponsor. I want to talk about our friends at Shopify, right? Shopify is the global commerce platform

that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the launcher online shop stage to the first real-life store stage all the way to the, did we just hit a million order stage? Shopify is here to help you grow. They have an all-in-one e-commerce platform. You can be selling things in a store. They have the point-of-sales systems that make that easy. You can be selling things online. Best e-commerce setup makes it easy for you to sell things online. Gives the users this fantastic checkout shopping cart experience.

If you're selling things, Shopify is who you should be using. It is definitely what Justin and I will use, when we, and I'll say if, I say when we launch our long-rumored deep questions store with confusing t-shirt slogans, Shopify is absolutely what we're going to use to rack up our, and I want to be conservative here, Jesse, but I'm talking like tens of orders that we'll probably get. But here's the thing, as we go from tens of orders to a million orders, Shopify can be there for you. Whether you're selling a little or a lot, Shopify helps you do. your thing, however you,

cha-ching. So sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash deep. Just be sure you type that all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash deep now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in at Shopify.com

slash deep. I also want to talk about our friends at My Body Tudor. I've known Adam Gilbert, my Body Tudor's founder for many years. He used to be the fitness advice guy for my study hacks blog and I've kept in touch with them ever since. My Body Tutor is a brilliant company because it solves a real problem in a smart way.

It's a 100% online coaching program that solves the biggest problem in health and fitness, which is consistency. It's not too hard to figure out what you should be doing with your diet and exercise. It's hard to keep doing it. It's hard to adapt that when the situation temporarily changes, like you're traveling or it's the holidays. My Body Tutor solves this by giving you an online coach. A coach that's dedicated to you, they help you make your plan for nutrition.

They help you make your plan for fitness and you check in every day. Here's how it went. If you have a question, they give you feedback. If you need encouragement, they need to modify your plan for whatever business travel. They help you do that exactly for you. So you get all the power of having, you know, a trainer that's working straight with you without the expense of having to have someone come to your actual house.

Because it's done online, it becomes a lot more affordable. So if you're serious about getting fit, Adam is giving deep questions listeners $50 off their first month. All you have to do is mention the Deep Questions podcast when you join. So go to My Body Tudor. That's T-U-T-O-R.com and mention deep questions when you sign up and you'll get $50 off your first month. All right, let's do our final segment.

There's a thing we used to do, long-time listeners know it, called Deep or Crazy, where I would talk about some sort of scheme I had, some sort of dubious thing I've invested money in. And Jesse would be our arbiter to determine, was this decision a bid for living a deeper life or is it crazy? Do you remember this game, Jesse? We've been doing this one for a little while. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. I have three things that get maybe increasingly outlandish, recent, either decisions I've made or I'm thinking about making. Yep. All right. Number one, I have tricked out the. studio here at the Deepark HQ with like a really nice teleprompter system.

So like I'm actually looking right now into a teleprompter. I can see my own face reflected up on the screen. So I'm looking at my own eyes, but actually I'm staring down the barrel of the camera. When I'm doing interviews, remote interviews, I can have the interviewer's face like right in front of me so I could be making direct eye contact, but staring down the barrel. This is an Elgado teleprompter. I just set it up. So I thought this would be good.

because I spend a lot of time in here. This is where maybe it gets a little bit more outlandish, Jesse. I also was thinking, hey, when I just do normal Zoom calls, like for work, you know, with my publishing team, with, you know, faculty meetings at Georgetown. Like, it's a waste not to use this nice studio I have. And so I also bought a pretty good road condenser shotgun microphone that I can put off camera aimed at me. So now I can do a Zoom meeting. I can be looking down the barrel of Zoom,

but really be looking into my pretty nice Sony A6400 and have no mics because when you're on a Zoom meeting for work, you don't want to have a broadcast mic and headphones on. So I'll completely mic-free, but well lit with three-point lighting, looking down the barrel, really good audio, but with like an off-camera microphone. All right. So the question, this upgrade of the lab of the studio, Jesse,

deep or crazy. Definitely deep. All right. The only thing you have to figure out is, you know, the shirt you're going to wear for these new things. I'm thinking, uh, no shirt. It's that you put a pull-up bar, like get a pump going and then just like do every meeting and like, uh, like they do in the Marvel movies where like they're holding a or the new roadhouse with Connor McGreyer.

Yeah. And they're always like holding like a flex because they want to look good. That's going to be my flex is in a very sort of unsublished. settling way just sort of be shirtless in Zoom meetings. All right. Second thing. I'm upgrading the MakerSpace part. So the Deepwork HQ has a studio, it has a maker space slash production office, and then

has like a conference room. And so I'm upgrading the maker space because I have a lot of making I want to do and I want to clean it up and get stuff stored better. And me and my sons are working on various things. I want to make the maker space more usable. I'm going to put up a pegboard and get a lot of stuff off the desk and get organized. Get organized because I'm learning CAD design because I want to be able to build sort of custom 3D print components and cases for the microelectronics on building, et cetera. So I'm excited about that.

I felt compelled as part of doing this to really upgrade the computer system in there. And all this stuff arrived, by the way, Jesse. I haven't brought it over here. but we have a nice external monitor in there. I bought another one. And I got the dual Jarvis Herman Miller sort of monitor, free-floating dual monitor stands. You'll be able to position those two monitors,

like however you want them. And then I invested in like a pretty good mid-range Mac computer, a Mac Studio, which is like a step above an IMac or a Mac Mini, but a step below the Mac Pro. It's a pretty powerful computer. It's got a good amount of RAM. It's got a big multi-core GPU in there.

You know, it's something you would do for like pretty serious 3D design or video editing. So I'm telling myself, well, Jesse, you do some video editing in there. So this, you're going to have dual screens and like a beast of a computer for video processing that can like really, it can do 4K, even 8K, like whatever you need to do. And I do 3D design and my son does 3D design. And so we're like, yeah, we can do rendering and we can do slices for a 3D printer and everything is going to be really fast. it's probably like 5x more powerful than it needs to be. But I just like the idea of my maker lab of just, this was like my gift to myself for the book launch of just having like a beastly computer system set up in there.

100% deep. Because also you got to consider back in the day when you remember you had the noise that was bothering you and you were thinking about moving studios to maybe potentially more expensive studio. Yeah. But now I mean, we stayed and you're probably, you know, I got a decent deal. So you're saving, you know, funds on that. We could have been spending a lot more money.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how we got rid of that hump. Oh, I fixed it eventually by just like changing certain, turning down certain gains and turning up other gains. I solved that problem with the time old honored of like turnoffs. You're definitely allowed to like beef up the maker computer room now because of that. Yeah, I want to like writing my program with doing like my CAD designs and like the big monitor and like dragging things over and put into the 3D printer and I have my desk where I'm doing whatever. And, okay.

I like big computers too. Hang some of those pictures up there. Going to hang some pictures. I'm buying a cool, I have a cool piece of artwork. I'm buying for in there as well. That's awesome. Yeah. So everything is going to be covered in there.

There's going to be a cool space. All right. So I've got two deeps. The final thing is in the Maker Lab. And this, I mean, I think this one is just like from a professional perspective, probably very necessary. I want to move the fridge. We'll move that somewhere else.

We'll have plenty of room for the fridge. And I want to replace that with a street fighter video game camera. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Uh-oh. That one might be crazy. I might do that, though. I like the idea. I mean, I was looking at these video game cabinets. And I didn't want a game that is of the style of like you try to play as long as you can, like a standard video game. I wanted something like if I was here, I'm here with like my sons. Like you're like, okay, we got to like clear our head for five minutes or two minutes. You can like jump on and play one fight and then like that's done. And then you can get back to whatever else you're doing. And I remember street fighter very well for my childhood. So I'm eye. a street fighter video game cabinet. Not vintage. That's so good.

Yeah. I went down the track of vintage. Vintage is hard. They break. They're big. They're going to be hard to get up here. Are you talking like an arcade thing? Yeah.

Yeah. Like you stand at it with the like, yeah, the controllers. So I looked into vintage. What I really wanted was pre-microcessor electronics, like the original Pong and breakout. That's like impossible to find.

I did find a really good company in the D.C. area that could refurbish like an actual like vintage cabinet. But I worry about them being too big to get up here. And it might take up like more space than we think. Because the stairs and narrow and it's for the audience. It's a mini fridge. Yeah. So it's yeah.

It's not like we're moving a huge fridge. Yeah. We're replacing like it's not a big space. We're putting this in. So I worried about that and they break easily and then you have to have like the team come out or whatever. So there's a compromise as there. There are a couple of companies that just they build these things new. and they come in pieces and you reconstruct them.

It's not vintage electronics. It's actually like a nice new screen and just running off of an emulator. But it's a smaller footprint. It would fit in there without taking it. And it would still solve the problem. It would still solve the problem of like I like the idea in there just like having something like for my childhood that you could go over there for five minutes and like clear your head and then get back to like whatever you're working on. So I'm writing at my major monitors like working on a project. or whatever.

You can just like roll over there and like do a couple fights. Yeah. And then like get back to what you're doing. That's so good. All right. So we got two deeps and a crazy. I'm going to do all three of them, I think. Yeah.

Great. All right. All right. Well, we haven't done that in a while, but I'm glad to have a chance to do it. I guess it's all the time we have. So we'll be back next week. The episode, again, if all goes well, we'll be releasing the episode that we're going to tape on Thursday at People's Book.

Maybe we'll delay when we release that. I kind of want to release that. as the next week's episode so it's timely so we can talk about stuff that's actually happening. So that'll be fun. So we'll have a lot of like in-person questions. So stay tuned. You'll like that episode next week. And whether we see you then or you encounter us at our next episode, stay deep.

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. Thank you.