Deep Questions with Cal Newport - Ep. 390: What Happens When You Ditch Your Smartphone? + Assessing the Internet’s Latest Self-Help Sensation

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

Everyone knows that excessive smartphone use can be harmful. But the question we don’t ask enough is what the advantages are of not using these devices. In the ideas segment, Cal examines the testimonials of four subjects who spent significant time without phones, to learn what they actually experience. Then, in the practices segment, he dissects the latest viral online self-help sensation to see if it holds up or is just fluff. Finally, in the Q&A segment, he tackles a surprising (and distressing) way in which technology plays a role in the violent ICE raids happening in Minnesota.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/calnewportmediaIDEAS SEGMENT: What (Really) Happens When You Ditch Your Smartphone? [3:07]PRACTICES SEGMENT: Assessing the Internet’s Latest Self-Help Sensation [31:53]QUESTIONS:What do the ICE raids in Minnesota teach us about technology and its impacts on our society? [53:17]WHAT CAL’S READING: Cal gives his weekly reading update [1:08:17]The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (Michael Barrier)Links:Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at [calnewport.com/slow](https://www.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?youtube.com/watch?v=kzXOyW8Zumgyoutube.com/watch?v=gh5CYvi5E40youtube.com/watch?v=C-Iewo7zUFoyoutube.com/watch?v=5FI1gP_K5K0youtube.com/watch?v=FshYuO6Opwkx.com/thedankoe/status/2010751592346030461prospect.org/2026/01/27/ice-greg-bovino-minneapolis-one-battle-after-another-sean-penn/youtube.com/watch?v=elF0YmsCHvQThanks to our Sponsors: This episode is sponsored by Better Help:betterhelp.com/deepquestionrag-bone.com (Use code “DEEP”)calderalab.com/deepshopify.com/deepThanks 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.

Those of us in the technology criticism space talk a lot about the harms created by smartphones. And we all know what these are because we live with them. I'm talking about constant distraction or a distorted view of the world or the dumbing down of our brains or the social isolation or the gambling, the porn, the videos of random people, fist fighting. None of this is good. We all agree about that. But here's an idea that I've longed believe. it's not enough to just list the harms. The problem is that phones also have legitimate uses,

and the harms when considered in isolation, don't really seem so bad in the moment. Your mind might very reasonably ask, is anything really all that terrible going to happen if I look at TikTok for a little bit during my bus commute home? So it becomes hard to convince your brain to put in the effort required for sustained behavioral changes, and this is why we tend to fall back into our old phone habit.

So what would work better? I think we need to also explore the benefits of a life without all this digital noise. We're wired to find motivation and positive images that seem very desirable. This can inspire much more regular action over time than simply listing harms that you want to avoid. What we need in this phone conversation, therefore, is a better understanding of what goes right when you're away. from that device. So that's what we're going to explore today in our idea segment. We're going to hear from real people who actually ditch their smartphones describing

what their life actually feels like. All right. Then in our practices segment, we're going to dissect a viral essay that has been read online an absolutely absurd amount of times over the past few weeks. I think something like 170 million times on X alone. The article is titled, How to Fix Your Entire. life in one day. And it's written by the popular YouTuber Dan Co.

So last week on the show, we debated whether or not the internet was helping our ambition or hijacking it. So this is a great case study of that discussion. So we'll look closer at this essay. We'll pull out the big ideas. And then we'll try to assess at the end, is this something that's going to make our life better? Or is it just clickbait bro nonsense?

Then finally, during the Q&A segment, I'm going to touch on a hot button issue, the ICE immigration crackdown raids in Minnesota. And as I'll explain in more detail, I don't normally talk about issues that don't have a strong connection in technology criticism. But in this case, I think there is a strong connection to technology.

And so buckle up. We're going to get into that topic as well. So clearly we have a lot to cover today. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about the fight for depth in a distracted world. And we'll get started right after.

the music. All right. So the goal of our idea segment is to figure out what it's really like to live without constant access to a smartphone. Now, to accomplish this goal, we had to find people who ditch their smartphones and who reported what it actually felt like. Where can we find such subjects? YouTube. Our crack research team here at the Deep Questions Podcasts tracked down four different people who reported on YouTube what it was like to live for various durations without out their phone. So here's the plan. We've pulled some clips from these testimonials. And we're going to go through these clips one by one. And we're going to pull out the benefits that these subjects seem to be describing. Right. If you're listing instead of just watching,

you'll actually be able to see these videos on the screen. And if you're, you might want to jump over to the YouTube version because, you know, some of them are actually in kind of scenic location. So it's sort of fun to watch. But you'll be able to hear it all as well if you're just a listener. And then what we're going to do is we're going to make a table as we go along of the benefits. And when we're done, we're going to analyze what have we learned about the benefits of phone-free living? And we might even do some thinking about can we get closer to that even if we still can't get rid of our phone altogether. All right. So we've got a lot to do here.

Let's start with our first subject. Our first subject of phone-free living is a young man named David Boland. As far as I can tell, he's a 30-something YouTuber who last year went on a week-long trip without a smartphone. then immediately recorded a video to describe what it felt like. This is the least extreme of all the phone freedom experiments that we're going to encounter in today's idea segment. So I thought it was a good place to start. One week is not that long, but it's still long enough to get a sense of, hey, what changes when you don't have a phone? For those who are watching instead of listening, you'll notice he's sitting in a chair in a middle of a field while he talks, which, I don't know, seems somehow appropriate for this clip.

There's also good background music as well. All right, so I got three clips I want to play from David Bowlin. Jesse, let's start with the first one. That, that, that, that, that. I was recently away in the woods for five days with no technology, no phone, no internet, just lovely campfires and lovely conversations with lovely people. We used the wood from the forest. We had to dig holes in order to use the toilet.

There were no toilets as we know it. And it was an incredible time. And I didn't feel any anxiety. I mean, any crazy amounts of anxiety. All right. So there we go. The first clip we hear him talking about anxiety is reducing and him having to dig a hole for a toilet. He really emphasized that, Jesse.

I guess that's a key part of that experience. All right. He elaborates then on what he meant by anxiety going down. So let's hear this second clip. But the most profound thing was that while I was away, while I was off the phone, I just wasn't thinking about people that weren't in front of me for the most part. Maybe I had a fond thought about somebody or some memory or whatever, but fundamentally I was dealing with what was in front of me.

And the moment I went back online, I saw all of these messages about things that were kind of trivial or like not relevant. All right. So interesting here, right? So when he talked about his anxiety being reduced, specifically he was saying when he has his phone, he's often thinking about other people who aren't there and what they might be thinking and what they might be thinking about him or what they're not thinking about him. it gives you enough of a sense of sort of fake connection to lots of people that it's hard to shake your social simulation circuits in your brain and it makes him anxious. And when he was away from his phone, those thoughts about what are other people thinking really reduced because he was just caring about the people who were actually right there. And when you're just dealing with people who are actually right there, things can be a lot less stressful. Jesse, I know we had a third clip. I'm actually going to skip that third clip because I think we got to what we need from David Bowlin. I'm going to load up on the screen now our table of benefits of phone free living and we'll add to it reduced anxiety.

I'm going to say that is the main, that's sort of the main lesson from David Bulland is that he was no longer so worried about what other people were thinking and what other people were doing. He could be more present and when you're more present, you are less anxious. All right. So that was our first subject. We've already learned something. Our second subject, I don't know his actual name, but his YouTube handle is Weezy Waiter. He's in his 40s, so he's more like Jesse and I's age. Now, he did an experiment that was more extreme.

He quit his smartphone for a year. So he really wanted to see what an extended period of life was like without his smartphone. And what's useful to us is he did a video log along the way. Hey, here's what I'm feeling this day. So he was doing a real-time logging. The clip I want to play for you now, actually, it's from very early in this experiment. I think this is day three of his experiment. and he's already having very significant observation.

So, Jesse, let's play that clip. Missing anything. So far? Not really that hard at all. And enjoyable. I've been reading more. I've texted back and forth with people. It's a little bit more clunky with this thing.

I haven't really been leaving the house, so it hasn't been that much of a challenge. But I'm using social media way less. The thing that's constantly happening is I want to look something up. Someone will mention a celebrity and be like, what was that person in? Or I'll get an idea for a video and I'll want to Google what's already out there. Uh-oh.

Now you know my research secrets. I use Google. I have prevented probably like 50 rabbit holes I could have gone down. And what I did instead have my own thoughts. And those thoughts are less chaotic and stressful. My mind is able to focus on the ongoing conversations I'm having with people in my life, rather than the ongoing conversations I'm having with everything happening in the world. All right.

So I think there's some really good new observations there. So he was emphasizing that when he had his phone, it made his brain more chaotic, right? Because you had the sort of feedback loop where as soon as you had a thought. thought, you could actually follow that thought by Googling it or going down some sort of digital rabbit hole. And then you jump back to what you're doing and back to another rabbit hole. And he didn't realize the chaos of that cognitive space until he actually stepped away from his phone.

And what did he find when that chaos had been dissipated, that he could focus on whatever was happening around him? He talked about conversations where he could be fully present in the conversation, not thinking about what else do I need to look up or what thoughts. is this conversation spurring that I need the chase. He could just be there in the world. He felt less frenetic. I think this is just explaining a less busy mind that then allowed him to be there for everything else in a way that he hadn't experienced in a long time.

So after only three days, he was spending much more time doing things that were meaningful to him. So, Jesse, I'm going to add this. If we bring up our table again, I'll add this as our second benefit to phone free living, more time in. engaged in meaningful activities. All right. So we're making progress here. We're going to move on now to our third subject. His name is Nate O'Brien.

I think he's the youngest of the people we're going to hear from. He was in his mid-20s when he recorded this video, which was about a year ago. He was a popular personal finance-oriented YouTuber. He actually left the medium a year ago. And I think he just announced that he's moving into a cabin in the woods that's off the grid, which is interesting. But when he talked about why he's doing that, one of the big things he cited actually was his phone.

And so I think this experiment he did with phone-free living actually had a real impact on him. Anyways, his experiment was 30 days without his phone. And I'm going to play a clip here where he talks about an interesting benefit of that experiment.

I'm interested myself that like, if I don't have any downtime, if I don't have any boredom, and there's no moments for me to have like this creative kind of like mind wandering thinking about stuff i don't really feel good when i don't allow myself to do that and so this is the biggest thing that i've learned from not having my phone on me is that it allowed myself to be bored it allowed myself to have that downtime and then also to to recognize things that maybe i wasn't aware of before like like so this is really interesting

i hadn't thought about this benefit before but it was kind of profound to hear it from someone especially someone who probably, because he's young, has probably never had any substantial quiet time alone with his brain since he was, you know, eight or nine years old because his whole life has been defined by the digital. And when he didn't have his phone, he had downtime and boredom, right, where it's just my mind wandering. And he said, wow, I really felt myself once I let my mind actually just be bored and wander.

Like when his mind was constantly having to be engaged, it was almost like you could imagine there's a scrim between you and your internal definition of yourself. It's probably because when your mind wanders, that's where you reflect, that's where you integrate information and make sense of it. That's where you update your understanding of yourself and the world around you. Without these regular occasions for contemplation, you basically become an MPC. That's just bouncing one viral content capsule after another off of yourself and throwing it towards other people. So letting his mind actually wander and think and make sense of things on its under its own steam allowed Nate to really feel like himself.

So let's add this Jesse to our table here. This will be our third element, more mind wandering, which helps you feel like yourself. That's going to be our third benefit of phone free living. All right, let's move on now to our fourth subject here. I love this name. His name, Jesse, is Bjorn Andreas Bull Hansen. He is the subject that will probably remind most of you the most of me. I would probably, you're like, oh, that's like a cow type character in the sense that he's a bearded Scandinavian who hasn't owned a phone in years and spends much of his time surviving in the wilderness.

This guy's awesome, Jesse. He makes great videos. It's like him in the woods making a fire to like kill the cook the reindeer he killed with his bare hands. Anyway, this guy is a fascinating character. His videos are always shot in beautiful location. So certainly you might want to jump to the YouTube version of the podcast to see this. clip. Unlike the other subjects who ran temporary experiments, Bjorn just straight up doesn't own a smartphone. He just doesn't see the point.

He has like a dumb phone that he's sometimes, you'll hear about it that he sometimes brings with him. All right. So in this clip, let me set the scene for people who are listening. He's in a shelter that he built in the woods out of logs with like a fire going. And in another clip, he's standing by like a river near his shelter. And he's just reflecting on life without his phone. All right, so let's hear this clip from Bjorn. Life much better. It's beautiful here.

And one of the big advantages of not having a smartphone is that you get to take it all in without distractions. And many times I don't even bring my phone. I have a what I call a dumb phone, old-fashioned phone. But I don't always bring it. All right. what Bjorn's talking about, which I think is important. The world can be really interesting and beautiful and a real source of gratitude and peace if you can notice it.

And he says, look, if I had a phone with me, I'm not going to notice this beauty around me. And it really is shot in a beautiful location, the Scandinavian forest or wherever he has, I think Sweden, or is really beautiful. And he's like, I couldn't appreciate that if I was there. Interestingly, Jesse, because I watched a whole video with him. Later, one of the things he talks about is a little bit of like inside baseball on YouTube. He says there's a lot of these outdoor YouTube channels where people are outdoor doing like survival stuff or camping stuff or Bushcraft or whatever. And he says a lot of these outdoor YouTubers, they have their phones with them.

And as soon as the camera turns off, they're on their phone. Checking their like YouTube, whatever, on social media. And he says it's such a waste. It's so fake. The whole point of being out there in nature is to get the psychic benefits of being alone and a Washington piece and all this greenery. And if you're instead on the phone, you don't get those benefits. Now, you don't have to have the name Bjorn and live in Scandinavia to get those benefits. You don't have to be in the middle of nowhere in the forest.

I mean, walking through a city, walking through a quiet suburb, walking like after the snowstorm we just had here, while everything is covered and iced and it's quiet and there's no cars on the road and you can just hear things so clearly because of the crisp cold air without much moisture in it. These are all moments you can get lost in and have a lot of gratitude and find a lot of peace. but not if you have your phone with you. So, Jesse, let's add this as our fourth element to our list of benefits of phone-free living. It allows you to notice beauty and find peace in the moment. All right. So there's our full table.

I'm going to read all four of them here. Here's the benefits we encountered from people who really did this. Reduced anxiety, more time engaged in meaningful activities, more mind wandering, which helps you feel like yourself. And you can notice beauty and find peace in the moment. So hopefully, just me listing those benefits, will motivate you to consider more sustained action about your digital life. Hopefully this is more inspiring than me just simply listing the harms of actually using a phone too much. But there's an elephant in the room here.

The reality is that for most people, going completely smartphone free just isn't practical. I mean, think about the examples we just gave there. Only one of those four subjects remain smartphone free to this day. The other ones did it temporarily and then went back to at least partially how they were living before. to make this difficulty even more clear, I'm going to play a clip that I actually find quite distressing. This is the acclaimed director of Werner Herzog who has long been famous for not using a smartphone, right? He's always been too busy creating his movies and documentaries to have a smartphone. This is a clip from just three months ago where he goes on Conan O'Brien's podcast.

It starts with Conan praising Herzog for not owning a smartphone, and then Herzog drops a very distressing bomb. So let's play this clip real quick, Jesse. Well, I don't know how you survive without a cell phone in the modern era. Easily. Easily, I enjoy it. I do read. But in fact, I had to get myself a cell phone. Technically, I have one now.

Because what happened in Dublin, I was filming at the train station, parked my car at the adjacent train station building. And I couldn't get out of it because it. would open only with a application on a cell phone. I love Herzog's voice. You know what I want to see? Here's the content I want to see.

Bjorn Bull Hansen and Werner Herzog trying to figure out how to make their iPhone 13 work. He's like, they're trying to get like the AirPods to work out in the woods somewhere. Herzog would be like, I think you need to go to the Bluetooth settings. and Bjorn would be like, nature doesn't need Bluetooth.

Nature controls all. And then Hurtzog would say, maybe we need pairing mode. And then Bjorn would come by, run past in the background, you see him jump onto a reindeer and break its neck. That would be good content. Warner Hurtzog and Bjorn Hansen,

Bull Hansen figuring out an iPhone. All right. So even Warner Hurtzog, one of the canonical examples of people who never owned a smartphone had to get one because the reality of modern life is there's just too many things that requires it. I mean, this is true for me as well. I can't even log into the course website for my courses at Georgetown anymore without

having a smartphone because I have to have two-factor security, which requires an app. It's like very difficult to go completely smartphone free. But I want to find a bright side in here because what we just did is we pulled out specific benefits of going phone free. So if we can know what we're going for, there might be a way, like if we want to think about our smartphone habits, instead of just saying smartphones are bad, try to use it less, we can say how can we design our interaction with a smartphone such that those four benefits that we just listed, we can get the bulk of those in our life still.

If we aim at trying to move closer to benefits and instead of just trying to, in general, reduce usage, we might be able to get like 80% of the way towards those benefits we heard from those people who are living without smartphones. So I think this is possible. I thought a lot about this. And what I tried to do is come up with what would be the advice I could offer about how your relationship with your phone that would most move you towards those four benefits. And I came up with three ideas.

So I'm going to write these on the screen here. For those who are listening, what's up on my chalkboard here? It says advice to become practically phone free. And I can kind of put practically in quotation marks, I guess, because it means both it's practical advice. And you're not really phone free, but it's almost like you are. That's why I call it practically phone free. All right, I got three things to suggest to get us close to those benefits. Well, you could still own a smartphone.

All right. So the first thing that I'm going to suggest, and I'm going to, I'm going to draw these, Jesse. Oh, God. This is always a gamble when I try to draw things. All right. So I'm going to draw, I think I'm already proud of myself. Can you tell that's the old Twitter logo? Yeah.

Kind of. All right. So I drew the old Twitter logo and I put a cross through it, like the circle and a cross around it. All right. So what's the advice here that that represents? Don't put any social media apps on your phone. If you have them on there, take them off. In general, avoid on your smartphone any app or someone

makes more money the more you use it. If you need to use social media like for work or something like this, access it on your laptop or it's boring and it's not with you at all times. It's something you have to go do and load up a web page and type in URL and it's not really that fun. It's not default distraction. It's more I'm specifically going to get information. The goal here is to make your phone more instrumental and less entertaining to make it more of the type of thing that, sure, I have it so that I can open the parking gate of Dublin, but it's not that interesting outside of that because there's nothing on it that really gets my attention. All right, so you still are doing practical things with your smartphone, but now it's less

of a brain-warping constant companion. All right, I have a second piece of advice here. I'm going to expertly draw something. Let's see if Jesse can figure out what I'm drawing here. Okay, let's see here. Oh, uh-oh. What do you think this is, Jesse? Like an island in a kitchen.

Yeah, all right, there we go. Yeah, it's like a kitchen. And I'm drawing, so I drew like a kitchen counter. And then on top of that kitchen counter, I am drawing an expertly rendered smartphone. And we can imagine that it's like plugged into, I'm just going to go nuts with my drawing here. Plug into the wall.

Perfect. All right. So the rule here, this is the kitchen dock method. When you're at home, you leave your phone plugged in in the kitchen. All right. If you need to listen to like an audio book, my podcast or something like that where you're doing chores, yeah, use AirPods, like something wireless. And okay, fine. If you're like a part of the house where the AirPods, don't reach, plug your phone in a little bit closer to where you are.

So you can still, if you need to listen to AirPods. But otherwise, the phone lives there when you're at home. So if you need to look something up, you go to the kitchen where it's plugged. and you look it up there. If you know you're waiting for a call or you're participating in a text message thread, you have to go there and stand in the kitchen to do it. It's not with you. Now what this gives you is a significant stretch in your day every day,

assuming you're going to be home like at night and in the morning at the very least. It gives you a significant stretch during the day where your phone is not a constant companion where you're doing lots of things. You're eating meals with your family. You're watching TV. You're reading. You're doing lots of things where the phone is not enhanced reach. And it begins to change that relationship you have where this is a constant companion that you experience your day with and through.

That when you're reading every four or five minutes, you check in on like baseball trade rumors. Or when you're watching something, you're also looking at social media and going down rabbit holes about the characters that you see in the show. It breaks you of that habit, which again is going to transform the phone back to be instrumental. You still have it. You can go have the logistical text conversation. You can still open up the gate when you're in Dublin, whatever Warner Herzog was doing. but it's less of a constant companion that's warping your end distorting your view of the world. So you're going to begin to get a lot more of those benefits.

All right. And I got one more piece of advice to offer here. So what we're going to start with here is a rendition of expert rendition of someone walking. He's a really long torso. And then he is holding. That's not really well drawn. So this is supposed to be, if I put lines around it, flip phone. Mm-hmm.

Or a pipe. Or really, he looks like he's armed, to be honest. I drew a picture of someone walking with a dumb phone. I suggest that you buy and own a dumb phone like these people had during their experiments. It's not that hard to do anymore. There's a lot of websites that can help you find them and get wireless plans for them. You can do this whole thing for $15 a month or less, and it's worth it. Why do you need a dumb phone?

I want you to identify more and more situations in your life where you're leaving your house to do something constrained. Like you're going for a walk, you're going for a hike, you're going for errands. where you might need a phone for emergency contact, right? Like if your kids might call from school or your wife needs you or you're telling your business partner, like, hey, if we hear back from so-and-so call me because it's very timely. So you have a way for someone to contact you in case of emergency. But there's nothing else interesting you can do on that. And again, you're going to now have more experiences where you can be fully present in interesting situations.

So when you're walking the dog or you're out in the woods, because you don't have a phone that's interesting, like Bjorn, you can get completely lost in that situation. You no longer have the excuse of I need to be in touch. It's too dangerous not to have my phone because you do have a phone with you. It's just not a very interesting one. And you still have your smartphone for other cases. Like again, when you go to Dublin, need to get out of the parking garage. You're not getting rid of the smartphone.

But it's not with you now when you don't need it on excursions where being really present might be better. Going out with friends is another great example. I meet my friends for dinner. I don't have a smartphone to look at. You know what happens? You get itchy for a while. that passes and then you're fully present with those people here. And when they get up and go to the bathroom,

you're just like, I'm just going to sit here and just like see the restaurant. I'm not going to immediately start looking at things. All right. So let's pull this back up. We've got three pieces of advice here. Nothing interesting on your phone. Keep your phone plugged into the kitchen when you're home. Own a dumb phone that you use when you're going somewhere where you don't absolutely need a smartphone.

I think that will actually inject into your life a lot. lot of the phone-free benefits that we talked about. You're going to be more present in a lot of situations. You're going to feel a lot less distracted because you don't have your deep programming the constant companion. You're going to find much more time to do other things because this plan has you spending a lot more time without your phone there. And yet you still own a smartphone for the apps, the music apps, the audible apps, that's still on there. When you need the text group text messages, which is really useful on a phone, it might be plugged in the kitchen, but you can still do it. Or when you're on, you're meeting someone you're trying to arrange to meet them,

you can still have your phone and do that. Or you're on a road trip. You need the map. You still have it. So you're still keeping those benefits of having a phone while also getting the bulk of the benefits that those subjects we talked about before experienced by not having a phone. All right. So anyways, this specific advice might not fit for you. But I think it's a good way to think about your relationship with your phone. It's not just I want to use this less because again, that's just going to dissipate intensity over time until you're back to where you started. It's figuring out the benefits of phone free living you want

and figuring out what rules or constraints can I place that move me closer to those benefits. Those are much more likely to stick. Rules and constraints that move you closer to a positive vision are just much more likely to stick than rules and constraints that are trying to reduce something that you think is like generally kind of negative. So it's a different way of thinking about what to do with your phone,

but I think we learned a lot from those case studies. And I think that led us to some interesting insights. I think, Jesse, we got to play that David Borland music like all the time. It was like, yeah, the music in the background of those videos are pretty great. Isn't that great? Like, especially that stuff. I mean, we could be doing an ad read for a colon cleanse powder. But with that background music, people will, you know, wipe away a tear from their eye.

Like, yeah, my colon could use a regular scrub. equivalent of 17 grams of fiber. Wow. It's the music's playing. I'm talking really slowly. That guy has got it figured out. All right. So there we go.

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Here's what I want to do today is I'm going to take a very piece of practical. internet advice and we're going to dissect it. Let me load this on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening. It's from the YouTuber Dan Co. It's an article he posted as an essay on Twitter called How to Fix Your Entire Life in One Day. And let me zoom in on that. 173 million reads so far.

That's pretty crazy, Jesse. That's like almost as many copies as I've sold of how to become a high school superstar. I was just going to say that way. Not quite. How to Become a High School superstar level. Man, that guy is getting close. It's getting close to that level. I don't even know you can post essays on Twitter.

I guess that's a thing. I'll tell you who's going to be doing it now, everybody, because this one article got 173 million views. Anyways, how to fix your entire life in one day, viral, internet advice. Why are we going to look at that in the practices segment? Well, it's practical advice, and we're going to break it apart, and we're going to go through the seven suggestions he has. But I'm thinking about this exercise in the light of last week's episode.

We had Brad Stolberg on, and he was talking about his new book, The Way of Excellence, and we were talking about in general what is the impact of the internet on our natural instinct for ambition? And we said, look, it could be one of two things. Sometimes it actually can help guide us and help us fulfill our ambitions. And sometimes it can hijack our ambitions, but sort of like nonsense content that in the moment feels really good, but it's actually distracting us from things that really matter. This seems like a great case study to apply this type of thinking. Is Dan Co. Superviral article is something that's hijacking our ambition or supporting it?

So we're going to go through it real quick. And I'll get Jesse's opinion. I'll tell you my opinion. I actually talked to Brad about this last night. So I'll tell you what he said. So we're going to kind of have a little court of inquiry at the end. All right. So we're going to go through this really quickly.

I'm going to start by reading from his intro, his words, just to set up how he describes this, and then we'll go through a seven piece of advice. So here's what Dan says. If you're anything like me, you think New Year's resolutions are stupid because most people go about changing their lives in the completely wrong way. They create these resolutions because everyone else does.

We create a superficial meaning out of status games, but they don't meet the requirements for true change, which goes a lot deeper than convincing yourself you're going to be a more disciplined or more productive this year. I'm alighting a little bit. However, as much as I think New Year's resolution are stupid, it's always wise to reflect on the life you hate so you can launch yourself towards

something that's much better, as we will discuss. So whether you want to start the business or transform your body or take their risk toward a more meaningful life without quitting after two weeks, I want to share seven ideas you probably haven't heard before on behavior change, psychology, and productivity, so you can do just that in 2026. All right, so that's a pretty lofty goal, Jesse. he has seven pieces of advice. Let's go through these one by one.

I'll give you a quick summary. All right. So here's a piece of advice one. I'll show it briefly on the screen. You aren't where you want to be because you aren't a person who would be there. That kind of makes sense. That's a little bit. We're going to have to untangle a little bit of things here.

I read that more carefully. Here's how I summarized it in my own notes here. Lifestyle trumps discipline. Instead of setting a surface level goal in hyping yourself to remain discipline for a few weeks, consider creating a lifestyle that makes the outcome you desire much easier or even unavoidable. So I think that's what when I read this closely, I think that's what he says is lifestyle is better than discipline.

All right. He doesn't tell you to do that yet. That's what the rest of the advice is about. All right, here's idea two. Pull this up here. The way he, his title here is you aren't where you want to be because you don't want to be there. You can't do this to the English language. Jesse, there's a lot of negatives and negative negatives.

And, okay, it's a little circular. But I read this carefully. Here's my summary of idea too. Your behaviors follow your desires. Our behavior isn't goal-oriented. I'm using his words here. It's teleological, meaning we do things because we want certain outcomes. For example, we procrastinate not because we lack discipline, but because we want to, quote,

protect ourselves from the judgment that comes from finishing and sharing our work, in quote, you stay in the dead end job because you want the security and predictability, et cetera, et cetera. So what he's saying there, Jesse, is that we are doing things because for certain outcomes, we tell ourselves we do things to accomplish certain goals, but actually our behaviors are often not just us being undisciplined or not having a goal. The behaviors we don't like often do have a goal that's desirable to us. that for like a lot of people,

it's desirable not to work on these bigger projects because we don't want to be in a position to actually be assessed and be rejected. Or we actually like the security of this bad job. That's why we're not interested. So we're saying behaviors follow desires. You have to think about what you actually desire in your life is more important than like what goals you have.

You should have let me help write this. I feel like I'm a clear. The whole time I was thinking, is this the stuff you were teaching those Dartmouth kids we did that summer program. I thought those kids out of right. All right. Number three, here's Dan's words.

You aren't where you want to be because you're afraid to be there. You aren't where you want to be because you're afraid to be there. Okay. Here's how I summarize that in my own notes. We protect the status quo for the sake of psychological consistency. So here's, this is literally in my notes, Jesse. I don't fully understand this one. I tried to understand this one.

It got a little bit complicated, but my best read is you build an identity as you grow up, and then you will go through a lot to protect it for the sake of psychological consistency, even if that identity is harmful. So you sort of build up an understanding of yourself, which is not necessarily a positive one, but we want to whatever our self-understanding is, we want to protect it. And we might protect it by sabotaging goals that on paper might be like, hey, that's really good and ambitious and something you should do, but it might challenge this identity we have about ourselves. Like, I'm no good at that. I'm not smart.

People don't respect me. And you don't want to lose that identity so you don't pursue goals. So it's like a psychology there that's important. All right. Idea four. Co-summerized it this way. The life you want lies within a specific level of mind. All right.

So again, here's my notes here, Jesse. I wrote, I got fully lost in this one. I'm going to read to you verbatim from a paragraph, just so you get a sense of what I was dealing with here, trying to summarize this one. This is me quoting. I've talked about these many times and synthesized them into my own human 3.0 model and various AI prompts

to uncover your level of development and a path forward. Perens, open a tab to read after if you like in Perens, but here's the 80, 20 of the nine stages of ego development as a refresher because repetition helps reveal things you didn't notice before, and there are new people reading these letters. He then presents this take. table, which will make it all clear to you, Jesse. This is a real thing.

My God. If you're listening instead of just watching, I have never seen a more complicated. This is a chart. It's colors. It's words. It's quadrants. It looks like a little bit like you threw up fruit loops, I guess, onto like the printer test page.

I can't pull this apart. I'll just read various words on here. States of consciousness, lines of development, types, interactive vision logic, integrative vision logic, personalistic, relativistic, individualistic, pluralistic, four out of five, radical relativism, rules, single system view. I don't know. I don't know if this is something that Dan put together or something that someone else did that he's referencing. I didn't really understand this one. So let's move on. All right.

Idea 5. Here's Dan summary. intelligence is the ability to get what you want out of life. All right, that's very clear. I appreciate that. He goes on to talk about cybernetics. Cybernetics is, you know, this is Norbert Weiner in the 1940s and 1950s, is talking about the merging of electronic mechanical machines and humans.

So you kind of like have feedback loops between like humans and machines and allows you to do something that a human by itself couldn't do or a machine by itself couldn't do. He was inspired by working on during the war, like things for helping to aim anti-aircraft guns that fighter jets, or not fighter jets, bombers and stuff like that. So he references cybernetics to illustrate a model like goal pursuit, where you keep making adjustments to your path longed away to keep going back towards the right way forward. This is a useful photo. This is like a classic cybernetic thing.

You constantly make adjustments. So you kind of leave the right course, but then you adjust and then that you go off the other way, you adjust again. If you keep making adjustments, you make progress work towards you're trying to get. here's his summary of the steps for a cybernetic approach to trying to get somewhere you want to get, have a goal, act towards that goal, sense where you are, compare it to that goal and act again based on that feedback. So he's saying, and I think this is very pragmatic, you need to constantly assess where you are and adjust. That's how you make progress towards something.

You're not just going to have the perfect plan and just follow it and then two years later you're there. You have to constantly be like, where am I? I've made some progress, but I veered off the goal. So what adjustments do I make for going forward? You keep doing that and you'll be moving. in the general right direction. All right, idea piece of six. Here's Dan Summary.

How to launch into a completely new life in one day. So now he's going to pull together a lot of these ideas. I went through this and I summarized there's three parts. Now he's trying to summarize how do you put all these things into action your life. And there's three parts. One for what you do in the morning. One for what you do throughout the day and one for what you do at the end of the day for trying to put all these ideas in the practice.

So what he recommends briefly is during the morning, you do a vision and anti-vision exercise where you spend 15 to 20 minutes reflecting on both what you like and don't like about the path that you're on. Like what do I want out of my life? What do I want my life to be? What would my life be like if I don't do those things? This is like classic psychological possible future comparisons. Very powerful actually. All right. So you spend 15, 20 minutes. He gives you some questions to answer. Then part two, during the day, he says you should interrupt autopilot to regularly ask yourself questions. Like what am I avoiding right now by doing what? what I'm doing. And he says, actually, he has a list of these questions. Put them in the calendar events so that they can pop up with notifications and just remind you, like, stop whatever you're doing and ask this question. So he wants to break the idea of autopilot and keep you much more conscious

about how you're spending your time. Part three, at the end of the day and the evening, he wants you to synthesize any insight. So integrate any insights you had during the day into your understanding your identity. There's some time here for self-reflection. For example, he says, write a single sentence that captures what you're building towards knowing it will evolve. This is your vision MVP. Then he goes on and says you should have multi-scale goals, which of course I'm a fan of. You have a daily, goal, monthly goal, and one-year scale goals that you can be keeping track of. Finally, Idea 7, pull it up here. This is, look how much I have to scroll. So it's a long article. All right. Idea 7, turn your life into a video game. So here he's saying you can gamify some of this

advice. I'm going to quote from him directly here. because I didn't quite understand this, but maybe this will make sense to you, Jesse. Your vision is how you win, at least until the game evolves. Your anti-vision is what's at stake. What happens if you lose or give up? Your one-year goal is the mission. This is your sole priority in life.

Your one-month project is the boss fight. How you gain XP and acquire loot. Your daily levers are the quest, the daily process that unlocks new opportunities. Your constraints are the rules, the limitations that encourage creativity. Okay, I get this. Like you have constraints in your life about things,

you do or don't do. Each day you have certain things you do to make that day better. On the factor of the month, you're moving towards these one-month goals, which move you closer to your one-year mission, and you have a vision and anti-vision to help you know this is what I want and this is what I want to avoid. And you talk about you can kind of think of it like a video game. All right, so there you go. I want to start by asking a question, why did this get so popular? Why did this rack up 173 million views and counting? Here's my assessment. And just you can tell me if this makes sense to you. In self-help literature, there's two different camps, two different types of self-help literature, the practical and the psychological.

So the practical, it's usually about like here is like really specific advice for achieving specific goals. Like in the world of books, you might think about like James Clears atomic habits. It's like really specific advice for how you make progress on habits or maybe online. You would think of like classic Ali Abdal. You know, he really talk about specific setups or configurations of your technology. to make progress on certain goals. The other genre is psychological, which is much more about the psychology

behind your motivations and your action. So it's about change your brain and you're not going to get in the way of things that you want to do. So in the book world, you might think about like Mark Manson's book, The Settle Art, or Mel Robbins' new book,

The Let Them Theory. These are psychological self-help books. Brne Brown, I think, would fall in here as well. Less about step by step and more about changing your mind. so the psychology doesn't get in the way of action. So these are both two genres that both have major bestsellers. I mean, right now, if you look at the bestseller list,

James Clear and Mel Robbins are right there. All right. I think what this essay did is it combined practical and psychological self-help. He has like practical ideas. You want to do this, put these events on your calendar, gamify it this way, have goals at these levels. But he also talked a lot about the psychology, the psychology that's getting in your way,

that's preventing you from making progress, why, what's going on in your brain. He talked about both and he put them together. And then he layered on top of that references and terminology that's relevant to Gen Z. I think that was a pretty powerful mix. Now, as you could tell by me going through it, I mean, look, I'm in my, you know, 40s. I've been a professional writer my whole life. I write for the New Yorker. I'm a writing snob.

The writing's a little hard to follow sometimes. Okay. Like it's, it's, it's, there's, there's, there's, some of them are really are and some of them, I, the, you can't do that to the English language. This is referencing this, this, this and this. But you put that aside. And this is Dan Co's project. Let's talk about psychology and practical, put them together in a lingo that makes sense to a generation on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube idioms of speech and that type of movement, right? That kind of like you keep moving and say lots of things, not, not like our generation of carefully crafted writing.

When I look at it that way, I say, this does not hijack ambition. I think, especially for a younger person, this would be useful. You start thinking about your mindset. You start thinking about practical advice. I mean, I think the system in here is pretty complicated. I think that rainbow de fruit loops vomit chart is going to not help be that helpful. I don't know what the hell is going on there. But in general, like, oh, I need to think about my psychology.

That's important. The practical advice seems pretty reasonable to me. Vision and anti-vision planning is actually incredibly effective. effective. Make really clear what will happen if you don't change and make really clear where you could get if you do. That's very powerful and motivating change. This idea that you need to change your understanding of yourself before you can make progress on certain goals, I think that's interesting. The idea that people who do really important things, often they've set up their lives in such a way that making progress is something that of course they do. It's not a fight. It's not a willpower discipline fight. So you've got to change your life, not just change your goals. I think that's important. tracking things, having goals at multiple levels. I think that's useful as well. So I don't know. I'm going to, if we have to choose hijack support,

I think this leans for the support side. It's not my cup of tea, but it wasn't written for me. And hopefully, I don't know, I think that could be pretty useful advice. All right, let's take another quick break to hear from our sponsors. Starting a new business is hard. I remember what it was like starting up the media company

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So if you can sign up now and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash deep questions. That's better, h-elp.com slash deep questions. All right, let's get back to the show. What's your take, Jesse? I'm still flabbergasted about the 175 million views. Yeah, that's a lot of people.

I mean, maybe they get, they get seen a lot of times. I don't really know how that works. And I keep on thinking about this with your episode earlier a couple weeks ago about substack too. Yeah. And the fact that he did. And then you mentioned the essay thing. And he did this on Twitter, which is interesting, as opposed to like on substack or

something like that. I wonder if he has a substack. I don't know, man. This generation's not big on substacks. There's 8,000 replies. I was reading through some of them. And they were just like people like, yeah, it's interesting. You know, sometimes you just catch the virality genie in the bottle.

Partially what's happening with this essay is what we're doing here writ large. Everybody is doing segments on the essay itself. So it's getting like huge like after after market. Yeah. To put in perspective, like the Super Bowl in a couple of weeks will probably get 110 million. But that's people watching for four hours as opposed to a Twitter view. So I don't know how to translate that to real people. Maybe it is, though, because international, right?

Like, this is all around the world. People could look at it. Anyways, I think it's amazing how many people seen it. And I'm not upset that this thing is viral. Again, not my completely my cup of tea, but there's good ideas in there. And the reason why it's successful is not because of some weirdness or griftiness. I think that's an interesting merge, you know, psychological, practical, and Jin Z into a certain potent stew. It's a good time to announce my new book aimed at Gen Z, or I will also call it how to make

what did my what do my son say today i completely misunderstood it he said like oh my my magic the gathering deck is now busted and i i was like um oh sorry so you're gonna have to like get better cards or whatever he's like no that means good so i don't know so i'm gonna call it how to make your life busted escape mid and get to from basic to busted and fix your entire life in 17 minutes. See what I'm doing there? More extreme. And I don't know any other references. So that's it.

That's what's going to be. Lessons from Mr. Beast. I don't know. I don't know. All right. So there we go. That's our practice of this segment. We're going to move on now to questions and questions.

comments. So we're just doing one question today because I think it's worthy of a long answer. Jesse, what's our one question for today? As a technology and culture critic, what are your thoughts about what's going on in Minnesota with ice raids and clashes with protesters? All right. So I'm going to talk about this in our Q&A segment today. The back up a little bit.

I want to be clear that in general, when it comes to big news, or political issues. I follow the Chicago model, so out of the 1967 Klavenor report from the University of Chicago, which calls for higher education institutions should have institutional neutrality, right? So the Chicago model for higher education institutions was you really shouldn't comment on the news of the day unless it is very specifically applies to higher education. And there's a lot of reasons for this. One of the reasons for this was there could be a sort of chilling, effect on scholars and free speech because maybe the institution stance on something

conflicts with some of the scholars of the institution. But there's also a practical implication. The issue is once you start commenting on some things, you're commenting on everything whether you want to or not. Like now even your silence on something becomes a comment. Once you've opened up the business of I'm going to assess things in the public sphere is good or bad, you're in the business of assessing all things in the public sphere is good or or bad.

A lot of colleges discovered this in the 2020s, but they begin commenting on a lot of things they were obviously bad, but they're like, oh, wait a second. Now there's a lot of other things, too, and our silence is just as a big of a deal with, and a lot of institutions actually more recently said we're going back to the Chicago model. So that's what I generally do. This is a technology criticism podcast. I only want to talk about things connected to technology criticism. However, sometimes big political or otherwise world events overlap at the world of technology.

So we talk about him here. It's like after Charlie Kirk was killed, we did a podcast because I saw a connection between that. and what it told us about the role of social media in our lives. So we did a podcast on that. So this brings us back to Minnesota. I think there is a strong connection between what's happening there and some themes about technology criticism that are important writ large. And so I'm going to talk about it today because I do think it connects to the topics we cover on this show. So we've got to start by setting the stage here.

What is going on in Minnesota? It's complicated because things are changing very rapidly. but let me just bring you up to speed on my understanding, and then I'm going to tell you how this connects to technology. Right. So for those who aren't following this closely, back in December, the Trump administration announced that they were surging a large new group of ICE and border agents,

probably around 2,000 to 3,000, though they won't give specific numbers, to the Minneapolis area for an intense immigration crackdown. They called this Operation Metro Surge. Now, the result has been a series of high-profile detentions, featuring swarms of mass agents that's happening, not just at homes, but like during morning commute, and outside schools and churches and at workplaces.

There's also been significant reports of opportunistic stops of individuals merely because of how they look, as opposed to actual targeted enforcement efforts. The Minneapolis Police Chiefs had a press conference recently where he said multiple non-white officers from the Minneapolis police force have been hassled by agents off duty, just because clearly these were not people who were being targeted because they aren't immigrants, and they have no criminal pass and they're on the police force. But out of their uniform, they've had multiple police officers have been hassled with agents, like, who are you, et cetera, et cetera.

So we know this type of thing is going on. This has resulted in significant citizen pushback and protest to date. Immigration officials in Minneapolis have shot and killed two protesters, one for trying to drive away, which seems to have annoyed one of the agents. And another one who was filming an arrest, he had a pistol on him. The agents took away the pistol, and then after they took his pistol away, shot him in the back. So as of the day, we're recording this, which is Tuesday, the Tuesday before. So we're recording this almost a week before you're hearing this.

It looks like some changes might be happening. So a lot of this might have changed a lot by the time you hear this. The president has withdrawn the controversial border control chief Gregory Bovino and is replacing them with the borders are. Greg Bovino, who's basically the Colonel Lockjaw character from one battle after another. In fact, actually, I think we have this picture. right? Let's put it up here, Jesse. I mean, it's Colonel Lockjaw. He's a border agent who really aren't trained or have a lot of experience with doing internal enforcement. These are two completely different things. He has a bad history of his enforcement activity. So they're pulling him out of there.

There was some talk about reducing the number of agents. So it's possible things are changing in the time between when I'm recording this and when you hear it. But that's just what I know about what's going on so far. All right. So that's kind of the ground truth. What does this have to do with technology? Well, we have to ask a key question. What did the Trump administration send all of these troops under the head of this Border Patrol leader with little experienced internal enforcement? Why did they do this search? What was the motivation for Operation Metro Search? Now, if you talk to spokespeople from the administration, they will say it's all just about crime, right? So let me quote Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Trisha McLaughlin, who said the following early in Operation Metro Search.

She says DHS has surged law enforcement and has already made more than 1,000 arrests of murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and gang members. All right. So the official explanation is there's undocumented immigrants who are criminals and we're trying to get them out of the streets. But this stated goal doesn't fully explain the chaos we're seeing. So what I want to do here, I want to really set the stage of what's happening so I can make my technology point as clearly as possible. And I want to play you a clip here. It's a little long. It's 90 seconds long, but I want you to stick with it because it's really important.

It comes from someone who, unlike me or the other people you see talking about this on Twitter, actually knows what she's talking about. This is an Atlantic reporter named Caitlin Dickerson who covers immigration. She actually won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of immigration policy in 2020. She knows all of the people. She has sources all throughout all these agencies. And here she is in this clip. What she's going to explain is two things. She's going to start by explaining the way that ICE has traditionally gone about trying to find and or detain, especially undocumented immigrants with criminal histories.

And what is happening right now in Minneapolis and what the differences are. So this is a key technical discussion from an expert. So I'm going to play this question here. ICE has always done lots of arrests, hundreds of thousands, some years. years and consistently gone after these people with serious criminal records. But central to their approach was to make arrests happen in a way that was meant to be as safe as possible and as seamless as possible. Not that this is going to sound great to people, but to describe it for you, what ICE agents did historically is that they would identify someone they wanted to arrest, do lots of work at a desk

on a computer before they ever pursued this person, to confirm their identity, to confirm they had no claim to legal status in the United States. Once that work was done, they would often go to the person's house at five or six in the morning, knock on the door, and try to take them into custody often while other relatives are still sleeping and before they leave for work for the day. So, you know, I point out that this isn't going to sound great because, of course, what I'm talking about is a situation where you'd have kids wake up in the morning and find out that their mom or dad was gone. But that approach was to minimize the kinds of chaos that we're seeing ICE really invite now. So I've talked to so many current and former ICE officials who are watching

this happen and they're really bewildered because it's as if ICE is now going against all of its former training to make arrests as dramatic as possible, to do them in the streets in front of the general public, kind of inviting conflicts that then lead to protesting and to escalations. And they're also filming a lot of these violent clashes, making it them as dramatic. as possible. All right. So clearly, right, we know how to do surges of arrest. What Dickerson talked about is maybe not during the Biden administration. There were some issues there with how they rained in ice, but during the Obama administration, other administrations, we had these surges where hundreds of thousands of people a year would get brought in and deported. And we knew how to do it in a way that you don't make mistakes and it's minimal impact. And you minimize the opportunity for violence and spectacle. and you get the job done. We could, of course, just done that or scale that up, but it's not what we did. Clearly, the Trump administration is trying to create a spectacle in the streets.

They want protests. They want confrontation with protesters. They want a big show of mass agents pulling people out of cars while blue-haired progresses whale. But why? This is where we get to the technology connection. Here's what I'm convinced is a big part of what's going on here. They're doing this because they want the content. I want to tell you something important about the time.

about what's happening in Minnesota. In December, a young YouTuber named Nick Shirley posted a video about alleged government fraud from within Minneapolis's Somali immigrant community. This was fraud that centered on creating fake daycare and other service centers that didn't really exist so that you could get government checks. Now, Shirley didn't uncover this. This was actually something that had been investigated for a while. So sort of known this was going on.

But what happened is that the Tim Walts or the governor's office and, you know, the governor's office and they had sort of turned a pressure off this investigation because it was politically inconvenient. So really what was happening with the Shirley video is that he was saying, we caught you, right? Like, this is, I went to these places. This was a big deal, right? So this was like an actual scandal. This YouTuber helped point it out.

Okay. That video went super viral because it pressed a lot of buttons, you know, right wing, righteousness, and it put left wing people in sort of a hard situation. And so it went super viral. It was like a week or two after that that the president said, oh, we're going to send, you know, Colonel Lockjaw and a bunch of our troops with mask on to that same city. I think he saw that content and said that played really well with the only people I care about, which are the people who voted for me. And they voted for me largely because they don't like the other side. I want to get in on that type of virality.

We can create even bigger spectacles that are going to press the buttons of our base and going to make the left-wing progressives bad. We can do that even bigger than this. And this is what we're going to do. We're going to create the type of content that would do well online. And so it was right after the Shirley video, they said, oh, this is where we need to go. And of all the, you know, Minneapolis is not a, does not have a massive undocumented immigrant population.

They do have a large Somali immigrant population. But 87% of that population are nationalized citizens. Half of them are born here in the U.S. There's way more California, Texas, Florida, Arizona. There's places that have way bigger populations of undocumented immigrants and gang activities and criminals. But we go there because the Shirley video did well online. The algorithm treated it well. It pressed the buttons in my base.

I want to create a similar type of spectacle. This is an example of what I call algorithmic politics. Put simply, when politicians like our current president become heavy users of social media, they start to think about all of their actions through the lens of what will produce the type of optics that a social media algorithm would reward. You begin to do things in the real world

that match the properties that the social media algorithms that you have internalized, you know, reward. This typically means things like pushing things towards the extremes, because if you're too nuanced or in the middle, you're not going to catch the viral juice online,

it typically means pump up confrontation with an outgroup. That's a very successful strategy that was learned in the social media space. Put out the table on the campus and say prove I'm wrong. The confrontation with an outgroup. This was at the core of Charlie Kirk's online success. And stomp on taboos. This is another thing that has done really well virally online.

Take a taboo, especially if it's taboo that's set from a team you don't like and then step on it, that transgression has a thrill. That does really well online, especially in the looser regulated spaces online. Taboo and transgression taboo. taboo stomping and transgression engagement. That's what works in that world of social media. And now we have actual political action that's just like a real live tweet that's trying to match those same properties. What's going to spread well among the people that I care about seeing this?

It's as if you now have the administration to be like, hey, we killed a lesbian mom and a male ICU nurse on camera. Then we doubled down and said they were terrorist assassins. Let's go check our likes. So this is something new in politics, and it was something that was shaped by specific technologies. People often treat Marshall McLuhan's claim that the medium is the message as some sort of metaphor, like an oversimplification of a more complicated reality, but sometimes it's just directly true. Reorganizing civic and political life around algorithmic attention economy platforms like Twitter and Facebook and TikTok wasn't costless. It reshaped how we engaged in the world, and it did so in a terrible way. Technology critics used to reassure themselves by saying Twitter is not real life, but now it is.

And it's even more depraved than we could have imagined. So that's what I think's going on here, Jesse, is I think a big part of this is we have a government or a leader of a government that often thinks about the real world in terms of social media. Like what would actually, what type of things would play well on social media? that's where my power came from. Let's follow that, even if it leads to cruelty and death or whatever comes down to. So I think that's a big part of it.

If that technology did not exist, it doesn't mean that political leaders wouldn't still do horrible things, but they would have a different form. I think social media has shaped our civic and political life in a way that I think we all look at and say this is much worse than it was before.

And you and Brad were kind of talking about that last week, too, in your interview when you kind of talked about that Elon clip. Yeah, yeah, same idea. It was, yeah, with the chainsaw. And the whole thing was, like, set up to be a spectacle, like, to the extreme, you're annoying and out group and being transgressive. Like, those things do really well on social media, so they became a political strategy. I don't think that's great. So, you know, there we go.

All right. So let's change gears completely. We're going to wrap up here. I like to end each show by talking about what I've been reading. I just finished a book, a big one, 400-pageer that I've been. And reading off and on since last year, I finished Michael Barrier's biography of Walt Disney called The Animated Man, which was the second major biography of Walt Disney I've read. The first was Neil Gabor's biography, which is like a classic in the genre. It's 900 pages long.

It won all the awards, and it's a fantastic biography, especially if you care about the psychology of the person. The barrier biography, which I picked up after we visited Disneyland for the first time last year, what it's known for is that he did a lot of research on the technical innovations of the actual films being produced, especially in the early period of Disney's career. So that book supposedly does a really good job of how the sound synchronization worked, et cetera. And that part was really interesting. And then it goes much faster for the other stuff. I consumed a lot of Disney content this month is what it comes down to.

I just was a hard month, man. I don't know. We had a lot going on all December. It was a stressful month. We had a lot of things happening in January. I was just done. Coming in the January, I've been done. I've like cleared all major events off of my calendar.

I'm saying no to everything. I just had a really hard fall. And so it's been great, actually. I don't have anything major looming on my schedule at all. And that's been like great. And where have I been going? It's like I just want to read Disney stuff. That's like my romance novel, I guess.

know. I mean, I have some, you know, I'm also reading like a great biblical criticism book. I have a great technology criticism book I miss. Like I'm, I'm now slowly back into sort of more like grown up reading, but I don't know, man. I needed a month of reading too many books about Walt Disney. All right. That's all the time we have for today. Thank you for listening, putting up with my rants and everything else. We'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep.