Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 382: Is the Internet Becoming Television?

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

Last month, Derek Thompson published an intriguing essay that made waves in technology criticism circles. It was titled: “Everything is Television.” In today’s episode, Cal takes a closer look at this essay, unpacking and expanding Thompson’s arguments, and ultimately concluding with a series of predictions about what to expect next from the internet. He then answers listener questions and discusses the five books he read in November 2025.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: Is the Internet Becoming Television [00:03]Can AI reduce distractions for developers? [38:32]How do I time block in a job with heavy interruptions? [44:03]How should I manage what I read, watch and listen to for books, magazines, shows, and podcasts? [47:31]How should I cope with family and friends always scrolling TikTok during the holiday season? [52:50]Does endless scrolling make people less motivated to be physically active? [54:48]CASE STUDY: Developing a Deep Life after selling a company [56:15]CALL: Eliminating Instagram in graduate school [1:04:19]NOVEMBER BOOKS: The 5 Books Cal Read in November 2025 [1:09:08]Realityland (David Koening)Becoming Mary Poppins (Todd James Pierce)Tradition in an Untraditional Age (Rabbi Jonathan Sacks)What is the Bible? (Rob Bell)Notes on Being a Man (Scott Galloway)Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal’s “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newport/Cal’s monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?flowingdata.com/2025/10/03/passed-peak-social-media-maybe/derekthompson.org/p/why-everything-became-televisionyoutube.com/watch?v=QaiecWzeHFMcsmonitor.com/1985/0610/z2vid1.htmlThanks to our Sponsors: cozyearth.com/DEEP (for up to 40% off)auraframes.com (Use code “DEEPQUESTIONS” to get $35 off)indeed.com/deepgrammarly.com/podcastThanks 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.

Back in October, the journalist Derek Thompson published an intriguing essay on his substack that was titled, Everything is Television. Now, it created a bit of a stir among those who study technology in the internet for a living. Here's Derek actually his own words summarizing the thesis of this article. A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television. So what did Derek mean by this? This is the question we're going to answer today. I'm going to both unpack and expand on Thompson's arguments and then add my own conclusions,

including three predictions about what I think is going to happen next. Hopefully by the end of our discussion, you'll have a brand new way of understanding the sort of vaguely distressing but difficult to define changes that seem to have been happening in Internet culture in recent years and have some ideas about what to expect and what to do to best react to the future. So let's get into it. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions. Today's episode, is the internet becoming television, and what does this mean for you? All right, so I want to start by really diving into the big points from Derek Thompson's articles to see if we can make sense of what he's saying here. Fortunately, on a recent episode of Thompson's podcast, playing English, which is really good

and you should listen to it, especially the episodes where I've been a guest, Thompson read his piece out loud. So we can actually hear passages from his article read in his own voice. All right. So I want to go back and I want to replay that initial clip because this is where Thompson started his article. So Jesse, let's hear that original clip again. A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television.

He then goes on in the article to immediately give three exams. of what he meant by that claim. All right, example number one, the death of social media. Thompson references a brief that was filed last August by META as part of the antitrust trial that the FTC brought against it. In the brief that is publicly available now, META made what Thompson described as a startling claim, which was the fact that their social networks, namely Facebook and Instagram, really aren't that social anymore. Let me give you a couple of statistics from that brief. More than 80% of time spent on Facebook, they revealed, and more than 90% of time spent on Instagram is now dedicated to watching videos, most of them being videos created by people who the users do not directly know.

So he's noting social media is now less about socializing and more about watching content from people you don't know like you would do on television. Over at the Financial Times, John Byrne Murdoch, as he does so well, has some nice data visualizations that capture this shift from social media to video. Let me put one of these graphs up here on the screen. This is for people who are watching instead of listening. You can see it and I'll describe it for everyone else. This is a graph from the Financial Times. The title is Time on Social Media Peaked in 2022 with young people cutting back first. And what we see here on the far left is average numbers of hours spent on social media per day.

seemed to peak in 2022 around two and a half hours and it's been going down ever since then. The biggest drop when you break it out by ages is young people. Older people are kind of stuck at that peak because I don't know. I think they're still updating their friendster profiles. I think the older people aren't necessarily up with it. All right. So it is true. There's data to back this up.

There's another chart I can show here from the Financial Times. This is one that Derek had in his essay as well. This is labeled social media has become. less social. And what we're seeing is change and share of people reporting each reason for using social media. So the reasons to meet new people to keep up with friends and to share my opinion have drastically fallen since 2014 to 2024, while the reasons to follow celebrities and to fill spare time have both increased somewhat notably since 2014.

So yeah, Derek is right about that as he supports with that type of data. social media has become more about watching videos from strangers. All right, his second example he gave to back up his claim is that podcast are moving towards video. Thompson notes that podcasts used to be the radio for the internet, but now he quotes an analyst who says the consumption of video podcast is growing twice as fast as audio only. He talked about his own pressure to film his own podcast, which was just on audio. So it's another example of a technology that made sense as not a visual thing, just becoming more visual. his third example was AI videos Thompson references the Riza Open AI SORA and Meta vibes

which are these AI tools that are organized around watching endless videos generated by artificial intelligence as Thompson concludes even AI wants to be television for those of you who haven't seen what this sort of AI what this actually looks like this AI video revolution Let me just put a clip up here on the screen. I won't play audio, but you can just watch it. All right, these are examples of SORA videos. So now we see someone having Bob Ross was painting one of his paintings on his face.

Here is the person, this is just like the person who generated the video is now on stage, giving an Oscar acceptance speech. Here is an ASMR podcast with characters from famous European paintings from the Renaissance interacting and drinking tea. here's a bespectacled normal guy who's put themselves into the brave heart

scene so yeah this is there's a cat skateboarding there we go this isn't exactly the future

that we're promised by Star Trek but that's what's going on even AI is now just producing video content all right so that's what he

that's what Thompson is arguing that's what he means his examples of things becoming television but what does he mean by

television right I mean how is watching a cat skateboarding on SORA the same as like in 1997 watching an episode of American Gladiators on your TV? Well, to help make this connection clear, Thompson draws from an interesting book. It was written by Raymond Williams in 1974, which is called Television, Technology, and Cultural Form. It's actually a really good book. If you're someone who's studying the academic study of technology studies, it has a really good upfront explanation of the difference between technological determinist.

explorations of technology versus social construction-based consumption perspectives. He's much more on the social construction side. Anyways, Thompson draws from Williams' book to make a couple key points. He notes that William says in that book,

before TV entertainment was discrete like books or play, something that had a beginning and an end that when it was done, you could discuss that specific thing you just saw. Television by contrast became defined by the fact that it was continuous and streaming in multimedia. Williams called this flow. It's not like a discrete thing.

It's just sort of something that flows by. Let me read you. I pulled some passages from William's book here. Here's William talking about this concept. Here's William's words. In all developed broadcasting systems, the characteristic organization, and therefore the characteristic experience is one of sequence or flow.

This phenomenon of planned flow is then perhaps the defining characteristic of broadcasting simultaneously as technology and as a cultural form. In a later quote, he emphasizes the non-specific nature of, television versus something like a book or a play as being critical to its operations. So I'm going to read a quote here. Yet for all the familiarity of this model, the normal experience of broadcasting, which when we really consider it, is different.

And indeed, this is recognized in the ways we speak of watching television, listening to radio, picking on the general rather than the specific experience. This has been true of all broadcasting, but some significant internal developments have greatly reinforced it. All right. So Williams had this model of like the right way to think about why television is unique is that it gives you this flow of sort of non-specific multimedia visual content. You watch television more than you come to the television to engage with a particular

discrete element of whatever you would call it, entertainment or content. And that's really pretty similar to what we're seeing with like TikTok or these SORA videos. It's just stuff that's flowing by that's like it's on. It's interesting. You watch TikTok. You don't talk about going to TikTok to consume a very specific piece of content. content. All right, so let me go back to Thompson here. Here's Thompson summarizing the move towards this definition of television. I say everything is turning into television. What I mean

is that everything is turning into the continuous flow of episodic video. All right. So where does this leave us? I want to go back to Thompson here and he's going to elaborate his summary of this entire state of affairs. Whether the starting point is a student directory, like Facebook, radio, or an AI image generator, the endpoint seems to be the same, a river of short form video. In mathematics, the term a tractor describes a state toward which a dynamic system tends to evolve. So to take a classic example, drop a marble into a bowl and it will trace several loops around the bowl's curves before settling the rest at the bottom. In the same way, water draining in a sink will ultimately form a spiral pattern around the drain.

Complex systems often settle into occurring forms if you give them enough time. Television seems to be the attractor of all media. Right. So here's Thompson's overall summary of what he's arguing is that media in general is just inexorably heading back towards this Williams notion of television as a continuously non-specific stream of video content. This is some sort of a tractor state for media, and this is where the internet itself is heading. The past might be methane circuitous, but it's something that attracts it in.

Now, I have to do a little bit. I can't help myself, Jesse. I did a little bit of nitpicking on the use of dynamical system theory here. I've done a little bit of publishing on dynamical systems. This is kind of the right use of the word attractor, but maybe not quite exactly accurate. So in dynamical systems, you're often thinking of attractors would be like things. like strange attractors, which comes out of chaos theory. A key thing about strange attractors, though, is in the most visible variable, they're not

the recurrence or the collapse onto like a steady recurrent state. It's not visible. It's only when you create a more complex state space that includes multiple other sort of related variables that you actually find the structure going on. So it's like a structure that's hiding behind the visible chaos. So that's why I think the marble moving around the toilet bowl, that's probably not a great example of like a strange attractor. That's actually like a physical system that's just what you see, just like the position of that marble, is very predictable because it's obeying laws of physics in a really clear way.

A classic dynamical, like chaotic system might be like a Lorene system, which measures sort of fluctuations and temperature and sort of climate systems. And there famously, if you look at the main variable that people care about, which is the temperature variation itself, that seems chaotic. Like, I can't predict this. It's all over the place, and it's very sensitive to initial conditions. You make a little change to the initial conditions. This thing goes off somewhere else. But if you take that one variable of temperature variation, you combine it with two other carefully selected related variables.

And I don't know them exactly, but one is like temperature variations vertically through strata and one's about like a horizontal temperature distance. And you plot that as a three-dimensional point in three-dimensional space. Now suddenly you see a structure that's like spiraling around something and there has structure. So not the nitpick, but in dynamical systems, often attractors are not visible to the naked eye, there's something that exists in the mathematical substructure that is only visible when you plot points

that are outside of just like the main information. I thought that was important, Jesse. I thought that was great. Yeah, I think it's an important clarification. This is why my articles aren't as popular because I have the two-page thing about dynamical system theory.

But anyways, it's a good. The idea is good. It's a clear idea. Media is pulled back to the state. So it's inevitable that the internet would be pulled back to the state of the William style definition of television, this continuous non-specific flow of visual

media. Is this a problem? Like, do we care about it? It's a natural follow-up question. Thompson gets into this. Let me play a quick clip of him setting up this discussion. My beef is not with the entire medium of moving images. My concern is what happens when the grammar

of television suddenly conquers the entire media landscape. Right. So it's not bad that we have really interesting YouTube videos like this one or that, you know, maybe there's some interesting stuff happening on TikTok. But the idea that all media is going towards this form, he's worried about, he points to two particular consequences.

One, that we get worse at thinking as we, quote, move from a culture of literacy to a culture of orality. That's a Walter-Arm type of idea. A lot of data backs that up. Yeah, as we use, especially short form video in particular, people have a harder time concentrating in thinking. so we do lose something as if that's what everything becomes, we lose mental abilities that are important.

His second issue is we know that classical television made people lonely. As he points out, this was at the core of Robert Putnam's famous book, sociologist from Harvard's famous book, Bowling Alone, that traditional television made people more isolated. And as we have television now being delivered through our phones, as the internet becomes television, we get even more isolated. We see this in the data as well. So it's not that video content.

itself is bad. But if everything becomes short form distracting video content, Thompson's pointing out, there's real consequences of that. All right. Well, overall, I think Thompson has a really smart idea and a smart take. Like any good article, it gets you thinking and helps explain something you'd understand before and gives you new things to think about or argue about. I want to get into my reaction.

So I agree with most of this, but there's some places where I would want to complicate or caveat his explanation. I also want to make some predictions. I have three predictions about what is going to be. going to happen next in the world of media based on these trends that maybe will give you some ideas about what you should do to prepare for that. Before we get to my take and predictions, however, I have to take a quick break so we can hear from some of the sponsors that make this show possible.

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Let me add on a few additional thoughts. All right, here's thought number one. Not everything became television. There's actually a lot of media that did not become television. Now, I'll explain in a moment why I think this is important, but let me just justify this point first. A Corey D. in Thompson's piece is that the sort of television style flow of undifferentiated video is an attractor state that eventually draws in all media. That was his words. But that doesn't seem quite right because of the existing legacy media types that have basically stayed the same from the time before television existed to today and are actually doing fine as industries.

They don't seem to be in states of collapse. Consider, for example, the global book market. In 2025, that market reached $151 billion, and that market's been growing steadily, so it's not showing signs of collapse. That's a big market. It's roughly, it's a little smaller than the combined market of meta and TikTok, but it's kind of in the same ballpark.

So books are still books, and they're doing fine. They continue to grow. Movies are still around as well. the total domestic box office in 2024 was $8.7 billion. So we're at a lower order of magnitude in things like books and social media, but that's non-trivial. In 1974, when Raymond Williams wrote his book, Television, the total domestic box office was $1.14 billion.

If you adjust that for inflation, today's dollars, it's about $7.5 billion. So, you know, it's like we can think of the global box office since like the rise of television as we know it today, I mean, the domestic box office. And today it's like kind of the same or it's grown modestly. So like movies are still around. And of course, to be fair, in the 90s, movies got way bigger than that. It's kind of shrunk back down again. But they're not below adjusted for inflation where they were back when television began taking its move.

But these are media that exist in the same form as they did before television, and they're doing more than holding their own. So it's not really the case that all media becomes television. I think the real way to state this headline would be Internet-based media. is becoming television. Okay, but this is still really interesting. So why is this particular type of media so attracted to the television form? This brings me to my second thought.

To understand why the Internet in particular is becoming television, we have to remember the relationship that we used to have with television. A lot of people, I think, like the younger members of my audience, when they think of television, they're probably thinking about growing up in the brief golden age where there was appointment viewing and on Sunday night, you would watch the Sobranos on HBO. But back in the 70s and the 80s and the early 90s, when television became this like sort of massive market, the time when Raymond Williams was writing his book, Television, our relationship with screens was different than a lot of people actually remember.

I want to load up an article here. I'll put on the screen for those who are watching instead of just listening. This comes from the Christian Science Monitor. It was published in June of 19. And it's looking at television back in the 80s. So let me just reach you from the beginning here. The figures are staggering. In 1984, 84.9 million American households, 98% of them had television sets.

They kept them in use seven hours and eight minutes a day, making television watching far in a way the most popular leisure time activity ever. Even if those households had only one person watching for those seven plus hours, which is a very conservative estimate. The American public would have invested 217 billion hours before it sets last year. That's more than double the number of hours spent by the American armed forces fighting in World War II for a full year. All right. So this is what television was in the 80s, in the 90s, in the 70s.

It was just on all the time. Everyone had television on average. That television was on in your household over seven hours a day. I think we forget how staggering those numbers are. Now, here's what's interesting. If you dig deeper, so this article is really cool because what it does is they say, where did that number come from? How do we know that the average American household has a TV on 7.8 hours a day? It actually came from the Nielsen company using a tool called an audiometer.

So it was actually like a tool with a microphone that they would put in a random sampling of houses. So it could listen to hear if the television was on or not because people lie when you ask them to write it down. And the audiometers were the ones who were measuring this average of 7.8 hours a day, a television, at least one television was on in these houses. Now, they make a key point in this article. That doesn't mean that for seven hours and eight minutes a day, there was someone sitting in front of that television watching intently. The audiometer doesn't know who's there or not, just whether or not the television is on.

And what they're capturing is a truth we forget about how television was used. You would put it on in the background in your house while you did other things. and sometimes you'd be sitting there watching a show all the way through if it was one of your favorites, but also you would just have it on if you were doing other things like housework, and during like boring moments, you would just kind of, hey, what's going on over here? Or if like Oprah had on a particularly good guess, you might stop for a little bit to watch that interview. So if you think about it, the way we were using television in the 1980s was exactly the way we used something like TikTok today.

It was a tool we used to banish or eliminate any moments of downtime or bored. them at least in the household context. So I could just have it on. And when I didn't have something interesting in front of me that I was dealing with, like I was on the phone or like trying to figure out something difficult, I could just immediately turn my attention to whatever it was showing. Because it was in that flow that Williams talked about. It just had it on.

You weren't watching a particular show. It was just there to fill in the moments. That turned out to be, that's a very lucrative business model. I want to try to look up these numbers. The global television video market today, remember books with $150 billion, meta plus TikTok is a little shy of $200 billion. The global television video market is over $730 billion in 2025.

This is a massive, highly lucrative market, right? So what I think happened, here's my argument, is that as the internet infrastructure grew out in the 90s to include broadband, and then the smartphone infrastructure built out in the late 2000s, early 2010s, this made possible the creation of an upgraded version of exactly what people were doing in televisions within 1980s and 90s. It made upgraded television possible. Upgraded in three ways, it was now more portable.

So you had access to it not just in your house or wherever you went, because it was on a smartphone, upgraded because it had algorithmic curation. So now its ability to satisfy your distraction needs was better. Because before you, it just go through a few channels. And now, of course, we have algorithmically curated content. So it's just like a, it's a more pure distraction environment. And because the ads are now targeted much better than you could get on a broadcast medium like television,

so they've become, you know, much more lucrative. So I think what happens is we had this massive market that was built on. It was the TikTok of the 1980s. We had this massive market that was built on. You don't have to be alone with your own thoughts or bored. There'll be something to kind of take the edge off of the ennui of just like I'm here sweeping and it's kind of boring. And it was this massive market. And once we built this infrastructure for other purposes, right, that we built the internet infrastructure thinking about the web and expression and connection and being able to get information from anyone around the world, all just like distributed.

You know, that was our vision for building that information. structure. We built smartphones because Steve Jobs said we shouldn't have to carry a separate iPod and a separate razor, Motorola razor phone. Let's put them in the same device so that you can make your calls and listen to music on the same device, right? That was the point of smartphones. But these two things came along and other entrepreneurs were like, well, the money's in TV, let's do that. So in this particular technology, it was possible to build upgraded television. and when you see the size of the television market and how dominant that was, of course you're going to pursue that,

that has become the biggest economic engine, the biggest economic activity opportunity in the Internet age, has been building a better version of television. So let me refine my take even further here. I would say the existing, this is my headline, instead of everything is becoming television. The existing television industry is so large and lucrative that it's not surprising that when a new technology,

came along that enabled the creation of an upgraded television experience, a lot of investment energy went towards these goals. So to me, this is not a tale of technological determinism, which is a tale of like all technology is going to come back to this form, but instead a tale of economic determinism. There is a lucrative market over here, and this particular technology made it possible to compete, so of course people would use it to compete. So it's not an argument about all media is going to become television so much as it is the internet plus smartphone infrastructure revolutions have been co-opted. by media entrepreneurs that said now we can take a run at competing with television.

So it's sort of specific to these particular technologies. Those are just the details. Thompson's big point still stands, which is a lot of internet-based media is converging towards this other model. That's kind of the interesting observation, regardless of why that's happening. So our question is, what is that going to do to us in the future? So what I would end with here is three predictions for the future of internet-based media as it continues this convergence towards a television model.

All right, prediction number one, if you participate in internet-based media, then you have to be aware of this shift because it's going to be consequential. Major podcasts are going to have to have video to be a serious player. I think even other types of internet media that we don't think about as being multimedia at all, like newsletters are going to eventually need to have some sort of video content

if they want to be a part of the full, like, entertainment, entertainment ecosystem. To be a little bit more specific, here's a couple things. Here's something I think you're going to see. The move of podcast on the streaming video services is going to be a big thing in 2026. This is already starting to happen. The ringer just did a deal, I believe, with Netflix, where they're going to have more of their podcasts show up on there. We're going to see a lot more of this. The economics just makes sense.

Podcasts have loyal audiences. And if you can just raise the production values a little bit, which is not that big of an investment. I mean, we're talking tens of thousands of dollars per episode, which is not. nothing if you are producing television for something like Netflix. They have loyal audiences and they produce a lot of content. So if I'm a big fan of a, you know, you're a big fan of my show and it's on twice a week on Netflix with good production values, not that the HQ is not good production, but even better production values than the HQ.

And you're going back and forth between YouTube and other sorts of things to your TV anyways. Like that might be a reason that you stay subscribed to Netflix. That's incredibly valuable to them. and it's much cheaper to build like an upgraded version of the HQ and, you know, pay me some whatever fee. That's still going to be much cheaper than doing eight episodes of nobody wants this, which is only going to give you eight episodes of content. And, you know, you're going to have to spend $20 million in that or $10 million.

I don't know what it costs. But, yeah, it costs a lot of money to get Kristen Bell. She doesn't get out of bed for less than $4 million in a cut of the merchandising. That's what I hear. The same with Jesse. He makes those same demands. Yeah. Every day he comes in and says,

I'm not going to get out of bed for less than $4 million and I cut of merchandising. So that's my prediction. You know, note, I made this prediction, not to pat myself on the back, but back in 2020, Jesse, you'll remember this when you first started working for me.

I insisted on video for the podcast. I said, I can't tell you exactly why. It's not like I have a plan for in 2021. Like, why our YouTube channel is going to be important. I just said video is going to be the future of internet media because of the power of we've seen that video has.

over people and the way that television just ate to launch a radio and didn't even look back, video is going to be. So I made that prediction. That's why we've been on YouTube since the beginning. It's like we just, I was like, we have to be conversant in that, that idiom. All right, prediction number two. I think this convergence of internet media towards television is bad news for the existing social media giants.

Now, this is an argument that I made in that 2022 article in the New Yorker that I talk about all the time, TikTok and the fall of social media giants. I reference it all the time because I think it's like the most important article. written that no one's read, but it actually was getting at some really core idea, so I keep coming back at it to push. The big point there is that the competitive advantage that the social media giants had, that the Facebooks and the metas and the Twitters of the world had, was their social graphs. The fact that people painstakingly as first adopters put in the effort to click on people

they wanted to follow or they knew. And as long as those services were built around using those social graphs to produce interesting content, they had a moat that other competitors couldn't cross. Once the early Facebook excitement was gone, the early Twitter excitement was gone, no one was going to bother to go through all that work of following people and building their friends on another platform. When internet media moves towards television, you got to throw out those social graphs. It's not really that relevant anymore.

And this is exactly what we see Instagram doing. It's exactly what we see, you know, Twitter trying to move towards. They want to be like TikTok. What was the numbers we had before? it was something like only 7% of time spent on Instagram is looking at content produced by a friend or keep it up with a friend. Everything else is just watching videos created by other people. Yes, that moves you more towards television, which is very lucrative. But now you're a television network without a competitive advantage that other people can't replicate.

You're competing now with all other sources of short-form video content, all the podcasts that are producing short-term video content, all the streamers, like actual television, that are putting hundreds of millions in the short form video content. Upstarts, like TikTok was an upstart because they didn't need a social graph. They had a peer experience in a better algorithm. We have Sora now. We have meta vibes that's trying to compete with Sora. Like it is an incredibly competitive world. It's a world where you don't have competitive advantages anymore when you move away from your social graph.

But you have to in the television world. So legacy giant monopoly social platforms, their time is cooked in a world where the Internet media moves more towards television. is going to be a much more aggressive sort of competitive landscape with winners and losers shifting much more tumultuously. Third prediction is I think there's a silver lining here for us as individuals. I believe that abstention from a lot of this becomes a lot easier as the internet-based media moves towards television. Why? Because this is what happened with television. Like, we know what television is. And it became very culturally normal.

Yeah, it's maybe on average, people have your TV on 7 hours a day. But like, if you were talking to, you know, Noam Chomsky, he'd be like, yeah, I don't watch a lot of TV. We're like, yeah, of course you don't. Like, that's, that's, you have other things you're doing that are more like intellectually demanding and you read more books or whatever. It was very normal to be like, I don't watch a lot of TV. No one questioned it. And in fact, by the generation of like our kids, things had shifted and parents think a lot about screen time and like, I don't want you to watch too much TV. Like, that's not good for you.

We're very used to this idea that like, it's not the TV is poison, but like you probably don't want to do a ton of it. And it's completely normative to be like, I self-defined by not watching a lot of TV. For a while, internet-based media had grabbed this sort of cultural high ground where they would basically argue this is necessary. to function in civic society. Somehow these services, these social media services, what you were doing on your phone was just part of being an informed citizen. It's how politicians were elected and news was spread. It's the new digital town square.

It's where people are being expressed where people could find other groups, which where activism happened. There's this moment where it was like you have to use all these services, right? Or it's somehow weird or disengaged or eccentric not to. But as the internet-based media moves more towards TV, it'll be so much easier not to use it or use less of it. No one is like, what do you mean? you don't listen to Bravo.

Like no one would say that in 1996. Like you don't watch surreal housewives. What's wrong with you? No one would say that. Whereas today they're like, oh, you don't use TikTok. It still seems a little bit weird. I think that will change.

Once things to TV, we know how to deal with TV. We know it is not vital. And we're completely okay with the idea of not being big TV watchers. So for people who listen and watch this show, this is good news. It's going to make it easier for you to live a deeper life. Because what you're moving away from is going to be more clearly coded as

just distraction it's it's uh mori povich it's i'm trying to remember all those shows the fight shows the talk shows yeah very springer yeah mori povich is a deep dive jerry springer phil donahute you're like yeah it's it's light and actually good for you for not watching it

all right so there we go jesse no separate takeaways this week because i think my whole thing was a takeaway but yeah um that's it i think it was a cool article and that's how i would but that's how i would evolve it Do you watch any podcast personally on video? No. I'm trying to think about this.

Yeah. But I don't. I would never consider it. I mean, I know it's important, but personally I would never do it. I mean, I'm just thinking it through.

I've seen clips, like clips of podcast. I'll watch the video. If it's like an interesting clip, I'll watch the video. Like you put it on when you're working out or something? Well, no,

more if like I'm researching something. Or like I'm at my computer and I'm, you know, writing about whatever. Like if there was an interview, like a clip from a podcast interview about the thing I'm researching, I would prefer to watch it than, like, if I had the choice, I'd prefer to watch it, then listen. I don't watch a lot of TV in general, but I think part of the thing that's happening is that people that, like, actually, which a lot of people do, spend more time in, like, front of a TV, like, normal people, more of what they're doing is, like, they're loading up the YouTube app and watching,

like, I'm going to watch a podcast episode instead of, like, a show on Netflix. Yeah. So I think that's one way that's being consumed. I do think the video podcast numbers are somewhat inflated because of generationally, Gen Z will often use YouTube as their podcast player. So in theory, in their pocket, the video is playing, just like it does on Spotify, but they're not watching it. Like they're listening while they do other things. But it is, I mean, I've looked at our numbers.

The watched on TV numbers is growing because they can tell what device the podcast is download to. it's not as high as I've seen for other people I've talked to but like we're on our way yeah it's like number three it's like computer phones and TV and TV is like in the mix so I think I don't but I don't watch me the main things I watch is movies to be honest yeah yeah it's got a new TV actually a lot of you did Black Friday last week yeah well ours got broken and by got broken I mean one of my son's friends broke it but it was an excuse to get the latest old LED technology And plus the new TVs aren't that that expensive, right?

Yeah, I mean. Unless you go. If you want like a really good movie, if you start to care about filmmaker, if you used to the term filmmaker intent and are looking at the color correction options, it starts to get more, not crazy, but expensive. More 2x than it needs to be, I would say. It's probably like 2X than what. But it's worth it.

We've got a nice Blu-ray player. So I can really get the highest, you know, good HCR 10, perfect, contrast, color resolution, like just what the filmmaker wanted. Happy about that. All right. So anyways, let's move on some questions. Sounds good. All right, who we got first?

First question is from JS. As a software engineer, I have a web browser open constantly. This distracts me a lot. I started using clod. Dot app instead of my browser. This has basically eliminated my distractions. What do you think about this? All right.

So I have a specific answer for you and then a larger, more general answer for people thinking about their work in general. My specific answer is like, look, I think that's great, right? If you had your browser open, because I'm assuming you had it open because you were looking up, just to give some context for non-computer developers, to look up things that were relevant to the coding you were doing. This used to be the standard rhythm of doing computer coding is that you would often have a site like Stack Overflow open. And you would search for what's the function call here, how do I do this? And so now you had a browser open. you could look at other things.

If you're using clod. App, you could do things like tab complete, et cetera, where it will give you these answers like directly in the thing we were writing the code.

You don't have to go over to a web browser and look things up. Ironically, it was language models tuned in part on these humor interactions that kind of just sucked it all in and replicating it to some degree.

So I think that's good. If you start using code agents, you're going to have a separate problem. So not to just to like quickly differentiate this. There's kind of two ways that AI is intersecting development. One is what I think of as like the auto complete tab complete type of tools, which is where you're writing computer code and you can say like, hey, finish this function for me or can you fill in this function header and it like press tab and it like does it for you. Behind the scenes, that's all implemented by a single call to a language model.

So the thing you're typing in like makes a prompt to a language model, hey, here's the existing code. can you finish this with a function that does whatever. Language models are good at that. You get the answer back and then the editing environment puts that right in there. Agents, on the other hand, coding agents are going to do many steps on your behalf. So this is where you say, like, I need to build like this sort of prototype, a simple application to do something internally is going to be useful. And you're going to actually have a program that goes in a loop and it's going to ask the language model like, okay, give me a plan, like a multi-step plan for doing this. and then the program takes that plan.

And it's like, great, we're now going to do step one. And so then I'll tell the language model, okay, here's the first step we want to do. Give me the, maybe it's produced code for whatever. Give me the code for doing that. And language model sends it back. And then it, and you go in this loop where you continually prompt the language model step by step. What do you want to do next? What do you want to do next until it thinks it's done.

So coding agents allow you to sort of have AI automate longer, more complicated steps than you can get with just asking it one time to do something. I've heard from a lot of developers who use those for producing prototypes or more complicated code is that there's downtime. It takes a while. There's a lot of back and forth with the language model and your language models aren't fast in returning their answers. And so they have downtime while they're waiting for their agents to finish things. So you need a good deep distraction for those downtimes if you use a coding agent, something that's not going to be emotionally arousing, and something whose context is very different than your work. That's usually my advice about deep distraction. Don't look at your email is that context is very similar to the work you're doing.

That's going to confuse your brain. MLB trade rumors is probably fine because it's like a completely different context. It's not going to have as much interference. But here's the bigger point. And this applies to everybody. Why were you so distracted by having your web browser open? Like why not just be, say, I don't look at other things on my web browser when I'm working on this? And the reason is because you're not time blocking.

So the bigger point I want to make here is if you're time blocking, so you're like, this is what I'm working on and these are the minutes I'm working on it during. Like from 1 to 2.30, I'm working on code. When you time block, when you have a particular, you know what you're doing for how long, it's much easier to say, here is my rule about time blocks. If it's like a deep work time block, I don't look at other things other than the work I'm doing. the only commitment you have to make now is do I follow my time block rule my single rule and so if you go off and you go to email or go to YouTube or something like that it's very clear you're violating the rule then you have to kind of live with that mentally like I guess I'm not able to you know obey my own simple rules if you don't time block

you be like let me just kind of like work on stuff the problem is that it's very reasonable that at some points you need to take breaks at some points you need to check email at some point it makes sense. You might want to go look at some YouTube. You can't just work like a robot all day long. But if you don't have a structure for your time, you have to figure out when those breaks or context switch happens on the fly. And now your brain is going to have a continuous argument with yourself.

What about now? What about now? What about now? Like any minute is a possible minute you could be taking a break and that's not that unreasonable. And so now you're going to lose that argument like every six or seven minutes and you get a much more distracted flow because there's no simple rule you're violating. Your brain's like, we're going to take a break. we have to check our email at some point and we checked it now.

Like what did we do that was wrong? But if you time block, you say, no, I have an email checking block at 230. And I'm in a deep work block and I don't check email during deep work block. It is clear as day if you go and check your email anyways that you're violating the rule that you set up to make your own working experience better. So if you have that problem more generally, whether you're a computer programmer or not, time block. That's one of the hidden advantages of time blocking is it makes it much easier to stay on task. All right. Who do we got next?

Next up is Bert. I work as an automation engineer at a major technology company. I split my time between hands-on mechanical work and debuditing code. In my world, something like a single broken bolt could add hours to a task and urgent breakdowns regularly interrupt any planned time block scheduled work. How do I adjust? Well, first of all, I want to make clear that in your position as you describe it, this idea of like you deal with unpredictable but urgent interruptions and then do your best to get other stuff done in between. that's your job. Like, that's what they expect you to do.

It's not as it feels like for a lot of knowledge workers that their job is X. But this other thing, which is like really not that important, keeps coming in and interrupting them from doing their job. And that's really frustrating because you're like, I'm measured on producing X, but you keep throwing like Zoom invites at me for nonsense. And I can't do X. But you're never going to know it's your fault. You know, you're just like, why aren't you doing more X? Where in your job is like, no, this is like, Bert's job. handle physical breakdowns, and there's these other things he works on as he can.

So, like, there's nothing to be frustrated about here. This is, like, what you signed up for. So your goal is not to eliminate the disruptions because that's part of your job. Your goal is not to resent the interruptions because it's part of your job. It is to do the best you can with the time you happen to have in between interruptions, which some days could be very little and some weeks could be like a ton. And the key there is intention. All right.

I build a time block plan at the beginning of the day. so I have intention for my time that I can control. Then a bolt breaks and I have to go spend three hours fixing it. When I'm done, I come back and say, what's the best plan I can make for the time that remains? It'll look very different than your initial plan, but you have intention for what you're going to do with the time that remains in the day. That's the name of the game here.

Intention, not completion. Your goal is not to create a plan you're able to stick with. It's that you keep coming back to saying, what can I do with the time I have that's going to be most useful. useful. Now, if you multiply that over many weeks and many months, what you get is someone who's handling the urgent stuff and is doing as well as anyone could possibly do, making the most of the time that they have outside of it. So you want to return to intention, but don't have any qualms about I have to fix my time block schedule three times a day because I'm constantly

being interrupted by this other part of my job. The only exception would be if your bosses expect you to be doing more with that other time than is possible, like you're being very intentional. Like, why didn't you do these other optional projects? Well, now you have a record. Like, oh, I time block. I keep track of my time. Let me show you what's going on here. On average, I'm getting like two interruptions on the scale of like three to four hours per day, which is leaving about like this many hours that is fractured between a few different stretches. I'm very organized with my time. I time block my time after every interruption. This is about how much progress I'm able. I'm able to put about like 10 hours per week on one of these projects. These projects really take about. 30, this is like a three-week project.

Like, oh, okay, well, you have the receipts. We get it. We get what you're saying. So if that's the case, bring the receipts. But probably people are just, if you're doing this, your time blocking the time you have left, you're doing much better than everyone else there, who's in a similar automation engineering position.

And they're probably already very impressed. So again, your goal is to keep having intention. How do I make the most out of my time? Not to satisfy some sort of plan that you created earlier when you had a different understanding of what your day was going to be. All right. Let's do another question here. Next up is Scott.

How should I develop and manage my lists of what to read, listen, and watch? I get overwhelmed and don't have a good system for execution and review. I mean, you really should only be reading my books and articles and watching this podcast. Let's be honest. And I don't want to be hyperbolic. But if you don't, if you watch and read other things, there's like a 14 to 15% increased chance that you die this month. My new marketing technique, Jesse. written people with death if they don't watch our podcast.

I'll tell you what, Scott, those type of lists stress me out. Some people love them. They stress me out. The way I see it is like, look, do I always have something interesting to read? Yes. Do I have no shortage of like interesting things to watch when the time comes around? Yes. Do I have no shortage of podcasts to listen to when I have downtime?

Yes. Then I'm happy. Because the problem is I make list of all this stuff. Then I feel lost for not doing the stuff on my list that I haven't gotten to. but the list are technically speaking could be unending. I mean, there's no shortage of books you could be reading. There's no shortage of visual content you could be watching. So why create loss, right?

I'm just like, what am I excited about? Let me do that now. With my books, I definitely do this. It's like, what am I in the mood for right now as I get to this new book or movies? Like, okay, I have some time. Like, what am I excited about now? Because as long as I'm filling those things with stuff I'm happy with and is interesting, I don't want to feel bad about missing out on stuff on a list.

So if it's stressful you out, Scott, just get rid of the list. You know, or you can write down ideas, but don't stress about, like, crossing them all off. It's just like having, as long as you're not just sitting there, like, if I had, I don't know what to do. If only I had a list, but I don't, so now I'm just going to sit here and stare at the wall. Like, if you're not in that situation, I would just not sweat it. All right, we have some more good questions coming up. We also have a case study. We're going to talk.

Someone's going to talk about their experience with a deep life pitfall. Now we're going to learn a lesson from that. We also have, speaking of books and lists, I will talk about the five books I read last month because of our first podcast of December. But first, we need to take another quick break to hear from our sponsors. Right, Jesse, we have to talk about cozy earth. As listeners know, I'm a huge fan of their bamboo sheets. I absolutely love them. We own three sets.

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That's Indeed.com slash deep terms and conditions apply. Hiring. Do it the right way with Indeed. All right, Jesse. Let's get back to some questions. Next question is from Buttersket. As I become more aware of the attentioning economy and more intentional with how I spend my time, it's hard to see family and friends scrolling on TikTok as their main hobby and not feel judgment towards them.

It's especially hard during the holiday season when I spend lots of time with them, which I do. Usually my recommendation, and do this as many times as you can, is when you see that, like a young relative or something that's on their phone kind of stuck in TikTok, come up quietly, knocked the phone out of their hand, yell deep work, and then sprint out of the room. And just do that again. It'll be kind of like a fun thing you'll be beloved for it.

It's a lot of like knocking the phone out of people's hands, yelling deep work, and running out of the room. That's what I do. I'm not invited to a lot of parties in you. That's what I do. No, look, it is hard because you care about these people and you're like, this is not great.

Like I have this feeling when I see like my students or whatever or friends of my son just like looking into this phone all the time. Like, this is just not great for you. Like, you're missing out on the world. Like, this is just abusing your brain. It's like, I don't know, like, you see a baby smoking a cigarette. It's funny.

Don't get me wrong. I've given my share of baby's cigarettes for the fun. But, you know, like long term, this is probably not good for you. That's the way I feel about it. However, like with substance abuse or whatever, you can't force someone to change and lecturing them is not going to work. Demonstrate life without it so they see it going on and you have gratitude. for all that you are able to enjoy

because you're not on your phone all the time. And then in like another occasion, so not in response to seeing them using their phone. You can mention like one of my books or send them one of my podcast episodes and kind of get them exposed to the world of deep living in a distracted world, but not as a luxury sort of haranguing like,

hey, you're on your phone right now. You know, listen to Cal Newport. Like that doesn't work well. But you can bring it up with them later. But again, it's hard to make people change. So be the change you want to see in the world. All right, who else do we got? Next up is Josh.

Have you come across anything saying that endless scrolling makes people less motivated to be physically active as well as adversely affecting their attention span? Yeah, there's data for both. We've talked about both on the show, mainly the attention span one. There's some good John Murdoch data in the Financial Times. We did some podcast about this earlier in the fall where as we get to the smartphone era, you see trouble with concentrating, trouble with attention just goes up. There's some new research out in September, a big meta study. looking at short form video in particular, like you get on TikTok or Instagram Reels, and they found a definite impact on attention.

So your attention goes down, the more that you use these, those particular types of content. So we know that's out there. John Haidt talks about the connection between more phone usage and spending more time indoors. So we spend less time outdoors as we spend more time on our phone. Scott Galloway in his new book, Notes on Being a Man, talks about this idea that the phone offers for, like, digital simulations of other types of stuff we would normally do, including stuff outside. That's often where you get things like peace and challenge. It's relaxing, but also I'm building something. I'm racing. I'm running. I'm working on, you know, a project or whatever.

Men, I'll just simulate this by like, I got to the next level of my video game. So definitely there's a connection between the screens being more attractive, keeping us away from activities like being outside. So that's one of many reasons why a life spent increasingly on screens really isn't a good one. All right. We also have a case study this week. This is where people ride in to talk about their own personal experience. We're happening with the type of ideas and advice we discuss on this show. It's also our excuse to play the case study theme music. Jesse, I think I cut the name off of this case study.

Do you remember who this was? Let me check. It was Jeff. Jeff. All right. So Jeff wrote in to talk about his struggles with trying to create a deep life. All right, here we go. Jeff says, five years ago, I sold part of my company when I was just 27 and effectively

achieved financial freedom. However, unsure what to do with my life, I kept vaguely, I kept vaguely striving for more, and by doing so, I fell into one of the pitfalls that Cal talks about. After a year-long break, I knew I wanted to do something ambitious. Applying the grand goal strategy, I pondered working in biotech or producing movies, and eventually got a prestigious job in finance. I just wanted something big and was convinced an impressive enough job would make my life all around better. Over the following year, it became clear that this wasn't the case. While the role was prestigious, I didn't care for the work. During this time, the company I still owned spun off a brand new brand in the rock climbing industry.

I was a passionate rock climber, so I thought that's what my real calling was. And I should walk away from prestige and instead work on something I was passionate about. The first months were exhilarating, but then reality quickly set in and my day-to-day life consisted of the same company-related admin. I had successfully gotten out of years prior. I then stepped out of that business last year and took the question what to do with my life seriously. I was able to focus on what my day to day should look like. First, I got disciplined and organized. I was able to tackle a bunch of home admin stuff that was bothering me.

Now I'm studying philosophy and literature basically full time. Sitting in cafes, reading or attending lectures and meeting with my study groups. I host short story dinners. I run every morning and play tennis several times a week. I'm spending more quality time with my kids. I only check my email on Wednesdays and Fridays. I leave my phone in the car after five. PM and I'm only reachable via backup phone.

I've also reduced my total travel time. Overall, I'm calm and without haste most of the time. All right, this is a great example of lifestyle-centric planning. So what we see in Jeff is actually two different philosophies. He ends up with lifestyle-centric planning, but he begins with what he called the grand goal strategy. In my new book, I think of this sometimes as the phase-shift model, the deep life. This idea of, like, one big radical change will make your life all the way better. Oh, I'm now in a very prestigious job.

That will fix everything. We often think the radicalness of the change correlates to the radicalness of the improvement it will give. The problem is your life is built up of many different parts. And what matters to how you feel is your daily subjective experience with these different parts of your life. So making a single radical change or chasing a single radical goal, it might take one area of your life and make it better

or maybe temporarily make it better, but it might make a lot of other areas of your life worse. Like we see this classically with like very prestigious jobs. This idea of like I have respect for what I do or what I do has like big financial impact. That goes up and that's good. But it might step on every other part of your life. Your time with your kids, your physical health, you know, your ability to like enjoy the world, other types of interest you have.

All of those are made worse. And so you add these things up negative, negative, negative, negative, this one positive and you end up net negative. like the single change fixing everything doesn't really make sense. Life sales syndic planning says, why don't I just actually survey my entire life and say, what do I want my daily experience to be like? So think about all these different buckets.

What types of things do I want on a regular basis? Great. How do I engineer my life to have those things? And that's what Jeff ended up doing finally. The details don't matter. What matters is he was thinking about, I want to be intellectually engaged. I want to spend time with my kids.

I want to be on top of things. I want to, you know, exercise. He like has this vision for a life. And he was like, oh, I could make that happen because of my current financial resources or this or that. And that is making it much happier than pursuing like a single thing that was very prestigious. So lifestyle-sendic planning can lead you to all sorts of different places. There is no template for what a deep life looks like.

But there is a template for how to get there, which is imagining the reality of your daily lifestyle across many different areas of your life and engineering towards what you want that daily lifestyle to be like. Making progress in the book, by the way, Jesse. I'm in the most epic chapter of the book, which is you've figured out what resonates or what doesn't resonate. You've translated this into an ideal lifestyle vision. You've formatted. You know now what your plan, how to format your plan, like the different elements your plan for moving close to that vision should include.

You've figured out how to connect your plan into your life. Like, okay, how am I going to keep checking in with this plan and making sure to execute it? Now you've got to fill in the details of what that plan is. is. And I'm in the middle of this epic 15,000 word chapter where it's just idea after idea based on all sorts of different stories and examples and science about different tools and techniques or building plans that work or moving closer to your ideal vision. It's like we're all, it's like where all the fun stuff happens. So like where's your last book? There was three rules per se.

Yeah. This one there's. It's linear. The book is linear. It's like, do this. Now we're going to do this. Now we're going to do this, and now we're going to do this. And then at the end, like, okay, and here's a couple things.

Not some complications, but really it's like, okay, let me explain to you by lifestyle strength planes better than phase shift model. How do you figure out what you care about? Great. That's what we're doing in this chapter. We're going to get these journals. We're going to walk around. We're going to keep these notes. We're going to process them.

All right. How do we translate that into a vision of your lifestyle? Because, again, we want to work towards a vision of your complete lifestyle, not just pursue a single goal. Well, let's get into it. That's what we're doing next. Here's how you format it. Here's how you do it. Here's a bunch of examples.

Here's a bunch of like lists there's in. Okay, now you're, you have, you filled your notebook. Now you have the plan. I mean, not the plan, the vision. All right. Well, how do we now move closer to that vision? Well, first let's work through just like how we format the plan. Here's what's going to be in it.

Here's literally where you write it. It's going to be written right under your vision. How do we connect us to your life? Okay, well, you're going to start doing these sort of daily metric tracking grids and these weekly check-ins to put stuff onto your calendar. Great. Now, how do we figure out what actually goes in here? Ah, huge chapter of like now we're lots of ideas for how to actually fill that stuff in there.

All right. How do we now like execute this and not get overwhelmed? Okay, let's break it down. Let's go area by area. So it's really like moving through linearly. Do this, do this, do this, do that. And then a few things at the end where it's like this might not apply to everyone or like a lot of the what we would have thought of is like the lower layers of the deep life stack. I have coming towards the end.

But what if after all, now you have the step by step. what if you don't feel at all capable? Like I can't do anything. It's like my life's a mess. I'm not disciplined. Like I'm never going to be able to execute these steps. All right, let's do a crash course becoming more capable.

Like that's sort of at the end now. Like, like let's just get the idea. Like what is lifestyle planning? How does it work? Let's walk you through it. And now you're fired up. That's the right time I realized to be like,

oh, and if you're feeling like your life's a mess, but you really want to do this. All right. Now we'll talk about, you know, becoming more capable, getting your disciplined up, managing your time,

stuff like that. Have you contemplated writing a book on AI ever? Yeah, I have an idea for my next book that would be in reaction to AI. It wouldn't be like this is just about AI or a theory of AI, but it would be in reaction to AI. Yeah, I got that idea. I actually, I can't give any details about anything, but there's a potentially major article I'm writing in the new year that would, for a big publication, that would kind of introduce a lot of those ideas. I want to tackle in that next book. So we'll see how that goes.

Always something, Jesse. Always writing. All right. Do we have a call this week? We do. All right, let's hear this. Hey, Kyle. My name is Jennifer.

I'm probably one of your younger, long-time listeners and readers. I graduated college last spring, and this fall I moved across the country to D.C. to start grad school. Go nuts. My grad program is very demanding, and I find myself engaged in a lot more deep work or focus time than I did in undergrad. Because of this, I decided to ditch Instagram. which was my only form of social media. I have been much more time-efficient and focused since removing it from my life. This brings me to my question.

Since my friends are still very active on Instagram and post pictures wherever we go, I often wind up in photos. But now I don't have a way to see, comment on, or moderate the photos of me that are shared online. I'm wondering if you have any advice on how to deal with this. Thanks a bunch. Well, welcome to DC. Hopefully you're joining Nat fandom on an upswing. We could do a whole episode on the youth movement over at the Nats, but we won't for now.

A couple points. Good for you for leaving Instagram as a grad student. Your job is to use your brain. That gets in the way of using your brain. It's smoking to a professional athlete. The grant program who brought you on is expecting you to use your brain. Don't do things to make you worse at doing that. So I think it's a really good idea for anyone in one.

one of these sort of time-limited elite intellectual types of positions like being a grad student to be like, I really don't get near any type of algorithmically curated short-form content. Like that's cigarettes to an athlete and I'm trying to make the major league squad. I can't deal with that. So good decision. I'm not surprised that you're seeing advantages. All right.

So what do you do about your concerns of not being able to comment on or curate photos of you online? That's all fine. Don't comment on or curate photos you online. Your friends will quickly learn, oh, she's not on Instagram right now because She stopped using it while she's at grad school. And they move on. That's it.

Part of the issue that, I would say part of what makes social media clever, is maybe the better way of saying it. Part of what makes it clever was it sort of sold us on this idea that I don't want to sound dismissive, but that we're more important than we are. And what I mean by that is it creates a sense of that you have an audience. And even whether it's people you know even, right? not necessarily like a broad audience, but that like you're part of this,

is part of what made it so compelling early on. You have, you have this audience. You're part of this great conversation. They want to see what you're posting and they're commenting on and you're commenting on other people's stuff. And it's like you're part of this great conversation

and you'll be missed if you leave. But that's never really been the case. It's why in my 2016 book Deep Work, I had a chapter that said quit social media. And what it really meant, if you read the chapter, it said leave it for 30 days without telling anyone and see if anyone notices.

Because what happened is people in their mind they imagine all these like friends and people who are commenting are essentially in like the seats of a theater like really eagerly waiting for you to come out on stage and be like look around really solemnly and then say photo of my dinner and they're all like yeah there it is we've been we've been waiting for that and they're all like high-fiving each other and like you know whatever but that's not really what happens is actually a collectivist attention model where the Facebook was the one to innovate back in 2004-2005 is like it's just like I will comment on things you comment if you comment on things I comment on that's just the game and then we all all feel like people are comedy. And when people would do this experiment from deep work, like, oh, God, no one noticed I was gone. I wasn't at the center of this, like, grand conversation. I wasn't this, this, uh, this, uh, producer on stage everyone was waiting for. It was all just sort of a game of like showing fake attention to each other. No one cared. Great. I'm not going to go back. And I think you'll have a similar experience, right? Um, it make these, these services want to make you feel like you're, it's very important what you're doing. But for the most part, it really isn't.

You will be fine. The few friends that notice will learn. pretty quickly, like, oh, you don't use Instagram anymore, good for you. And that'll be that. So stay with the course. That type of stuff is not as important as it wants you to think. These are all the things that are going to hurt these companies as they move towards becoming television to go back to our deep dive. Because as you move towards television, because as you move towards television, you get higher minutes used per day. Because honestly, algorithmically curated short form video is more interesting than your friend's photos. But you're You don't get that deep social hook. Like the thing that you're worried about, like my God, my friends are going to wonder where I am. That goes away with a service like TikTok. No one knows you're on there or cares. And they lose their hooks. That's why I think it's going to become such an ungrounded competitive marketplace.

It's hard to dominate internet-based television in a way you could dominate friend-based Instagram. So I think it's a good case-studying that dynamic that I'm worried about. All right, let's go on now to our final segment. All right. The first podcast of every month I like to talk about the books I read the previous month, I usually aimed to read five books per month. I've grouped them this month, Jesse, by topic. Kind of like two major topics here, just kind of randomly, but that's the way I grouped

them. All right. My first two, these are both Disney-related, because I guess that's how I deal with my stress these days. That's my hard drinking is Disney-related topics. I read David Cohen's book, Reality Land. It's a book about just the business. history of the Florida resort as opposed to the California result because I read that other book

about Disneyland because we went to Disneyland and so this was a book about Disney World and it was about like how they got the land and how they acquired it and the growth strategy and like that stuff is my it's so different than anything I do in life is very non-stressful it was very good it was a very well researched book I guess it's one of the big ones then I read the other Disney Disney ish book it was really about the Sherman brothers but it was called becoming Mary Poppins new book just came out Todd James Peer it's about the making of that movie in the early 1960s, but it's also a lot about the songwriting duo,

the Sherman Brothers, who really helped innovate the cinema form of the family musical as a thing that became big again in the 1960s. And so it's interesting hearing about what the world of professional songwriting was like in mid-century or prior to mid-century. Their dad was like an early 20th century songwriter. That was really interesting. some of the Disney stuff was interesting too

they really were kind of betting the farm on this movie succeeding it was interesting to hear also how the Disney live action film studio was very small compared to the big major studio they couldn't they couldn't really do these epics

on the scale that like a paramount or universal could do and so like that stuff was interesting then I moved on to a pair of religious books one it was like they couldn't be more opposite one is very very very, very popular audience. The other is an academic audience. So the popular audience, one I read was Rob Bell's book, What is the Bible?

So I've been reading these books about, like, how to understand and interpret the Bible. Like, what, who wrote it? How do they wrote it? Like, what about it is, you know, what about the writing is so interesting or profound? Because if you just kind of read it through a modern context, like these are weird stories, you don't get a great experience. I read that book a couple months ago. I like popular book. Rob Bell wrote a book on it.

Bell's an interesting guy. I think he's a Christian pastor. I don't know if he's evangelical or not or with one of the main mainline Protestant denominations. He's super well educated, right? Like I think he speaks Greek.

He speaks Hebrew. He's really studied this stuff. But he writes definitely for a super mass audience. I mean, it's like incredibly conversational with a lot of single line paragraphs and bolding. And it's like really really like simplified style. but some really good points captured in it.

So it was a quick read, but I found it kind of interesting. Then I went and read Jonathan Sacks' books, Tradition in an Untraditional Age. So, you know, I'm a big fan of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, his public-facing books that connect religion with other schools of thought in the broader world, like science and religion, morality, culture. These are fantastic books.

He's a fantastic, fantastic writer. I wanted to get more acquainted with his more academic style writing. So God helped me, Jesse. I went back and found this book, which is a collection of more like academic essays he wrote. Really, these essays were dealing with like orthodoxy and its collision with modernity and grappling with a bunch of sort of like big thinkers in that field. 450 page beast of a book. But even his academic writing, I was like, this is I learned a lot. It was really interesting to learn about.

I learned about this like the collision of modernity with other types of traditional. thought worlds. Itself, I felt like, was really useful even for, like, the techno-criticism I do. So it's a more academic book. You know, you're going to hear about, like, these, like, very specific thinkers. And so if you're not used to academic writing, I don't know, it's not like a fun read, like Rob Bells. But I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot.

The final book I read was Scott Galloway's new book, Notes on Being a Man. I like Scott. I, you know, I've been on his podcast. I think he's a great broadcaster, interesting character. the book captures like the stuff he talks about in book form is exactly what you would want. It's like he writes in the style that he talks. If you like his podcast, you're going to like the book.

It's not a super bogged down in numbers. So he has statistics. And it's not bogged down in stories of other people. It's really like him talking a lot about his own life and his own thoughts and kind of riffing, which is probably the right format for Scott. I also think the book has been killing it because he's everywhere. His podcasts are super popular, but he's very good on TV. So he does like every remaining legacy TV show with an audience.

An author can go on. He did all of them. The morning shows, the view, Bill Maher, the Morning Joe, because he's very good on TV. So there you go. There's all of them. So that was good. There you go.

So that's what I read. Thriller December is underway. I was going to start with the Dan Brown book you got me, but I got intimidated. It's 600 something pages. And I was like, I need to get more momentum going in the thrift. I can't start. thriller December on a book that I need to get a few under my belt quick.

So I went back and I'm starting with Michael Crichton's 1990 something classic airframe. Is that a reread? Yeah, they're all rereads, but it's been a while since I've read that one. So I'm excited about that. Michael Cretton's your favorite author, right? Just for thrillers. Oh, okay. Yeah, for thrillers.

Yeah. The 90 stuff began to get kind of weird and reactionary. But like, right in 90s, I liked, pray time. line and airframe but like next and the the climate change one like this disclosure I don't know rising sun is like

some of those are little like you'd recognize it today as like someone red pilled back before that was a thing so which is fine is the matrix yeah but it means like you get exposed to like conservative ideas and realize like wait I think all the media is like

has a left one leaning tilt and so like I am going to I'm going to like I've been revealed that we've been like kind of had and so he kind of got which is fine but it's not what I wanted in a thriller. So it kind of petered out a little bit. But yeah, I've read I'm a completist, a cretan completist. I've read all of his posthumist ones. And of course you know what the masterpiece is from his canon. The book is maybe one of the finest books of the last century.

Eruption. Co-authored with James Patterson at the volcano. know. One of the worst books I've ever read. I should be nice, though, because the Crichton Family Foundation sent me a nice note after I wrote an article about him last year. So I should, outside of that, I do like a lot of Crichton stuff. So I'm going to do Airframe.

I have a couple of the books I'm going to read. I'm reading, I got a used version of the Raymond Williams book television we talked about. I want to really read that carefully, so I'm going to read that. I'm probably going to read Geraldine Brooks's book about the aftermath of her husband dying. So I have some non-thrillery stuff in there. Oh, she wrote that book, Horse, right? Yeah. That was good.

Yes, I'm reading her book after that. Yeah. So I have some non-th thriller stuff in there, but I am going to read the Dan Brown. A couple other thrillers in mind will be good. I like thriller, but airframe is like perfect. That's like my suez. So from the 90s, I read it as a kid.

It's like he brings you into like a world of like air traffic control and incident reporting after plane crashes. And all this technical stuff is happening and there's a mystery and great. But like the stakes are low. I like it. I think there's a dinosaur in there or is that a different one? I don't know. I mix it up. Twist ending.

A little known fact. After 1994, almost every Michael Crichton book involved at some point and usually like very incongruous ways dinosaurs. Rising Sun is like a lot about like financial tensions with Japan and like the cover up of a murder. But also it's a trinosaur that does to murder. So like he did a lot of that.

Disclosure was about gender power dynamics with sexual harassment. and also she was a velociraptor. So like, you know, he was really kind of pulling on what worked. You got to play the hits. All right. That's enough nonsense for now. We'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, 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 Cal Newport.com. 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 calduport.com and get some deep wisdom delivered to your inbox each week.