On The Lost Art of Watching Movies | Cal Newport

Late last month, The Atlantic ran an article titled, The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films. I want to read you an excerpt from early in the article. This excerpt starts with a quote from a film professor. I used to think, if homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever, Craig Epperling, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madsen told me, but students will not do it. I heard similar observations from 20 film studies professors around the country. They told me that over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films. All right, so yeah, that's not great. But here's the thing. I think there's both bad news and good news here. The bad news is, as I'll argue, this phenomenon reveals the impact of digital technology on our basic human ability to pay attention and think is perhaps worse than we originally imagined. But the good news is that in this problem, we can find its own solution. So as I'm going to go on to argue, getting better at watching movies might just be the right first step toward reclaiming your brain. So here's the plan. I'm going to elaborate on those two arguments, right, that our struggles to watch movie is a side effect of digital technology and that practicing watching movies can help us reverse that damage. And then, assuming that you buy those arguments, I'm going to get practical. I'm going to give you specific advice for how to become a better movie watcher, including a list of classic movies that you should start with. Jesse, I think it'll come as no surprise that my main recommendation is going to be conducting an extensive scene-by-scene analysis of the 2002 Britney Spears movie, Crossroads. No? I like it. Too soon? All right. Then we'll move on to my news and notes segment where, by popular demand, I'm going to take a close look at last week's viral essay sensation. This is Matt Schumer's essay, Something Big is Happening. It's one of these AIs about to change everything for real this time type essay. So we'll get into that. We have a reader email about the Olympics. And we'll talk about my new books. We have a lot to get to. As always, I'm Cal Newport, and this is Deep Questions, the show about the fight for depth in an increasingly distracted world. and we'll get started right after the music. All right, so to start our investigation here, let's look a little bit closer at this problem of people having a hard time watching entire movies. It's not just film students, and it's not just the people that The Atlantic talk about. If you start poking around on the internet, you can find a lot of evidence of people having the same issue. I was looking on the rmovies subreddit, and I found a bunch of people on there who are giving similar complaints. Let me read you a quote here. This comes from a Reddit post. This might just be me, but for a while now, I'm struggling to decide which movie is worthy of watching, then actually sitting and watching it. I can watch it in the movie theater, but for some reason, I just can't watch it at home. I end up watching Seinfeld reruns on TV. I don't know what's wrong with me. All right, here's another quote from another post from the movie subreddit. When movies are over an hour and a half, I struggle to continue whether the film is really interesting or not. I just get bored easily and have to watch them in two parts or even three, and I even avoid watching films if I see they are too long. All right, we have more evidence that this is a problem. We've been getting reports that the major streaming services have started changing the way that they make original movies to better match their audience's reduced ability to pay attention to them. In a recent podcast interview, Matt Damon, who has a new movie out with Ben Affleck on Netflix that's called The Rip, said that streamers are now pushing filmmakers to avoid the classic three-act structure and to instead, and I'm quoting him here, reiterate the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they're watching. In another part of this interview, Damon says another change is the streamers now say you have to have a major action set piece in the first five minutes. Otherwise, people will get bored and flip away. This is very different to the way that we used to make movies where you save the big action sequence for act three. People aren't going to last that long anymore. I couldn't help when I was thinking about that idea that you have to have the major thing happen in the first five minutes. I couldn't help thinking about the making of The Godfather. I'm reading another book that talks about this recently. An interesting tidbit about the making of that movie is that nothing major happens with Al Pacino's character of Michael Corleone until about an hour and 15 minutes into the movie where he shoots Captain McCluskey. And so Pacino, rightly looking at the full duration of this three-hour movie, said, I need to play Corleone very sort of quiet and meek. and then that's like a key character transition point. Well, when Coppola began filming this movie and the first dailies were coming back, the head of Paramount, Robert Evans, was like, Pacino's got to go. They're looking at the sequences from the wedding scene up front. Like, this guy's barely talking. Like, he's barely moving. Like, this is the wrong person. We got to fire them. So Coppola had to actually move up the filming of the restaurant shooting scene way early into the schedule just so they could show those dailies to Robert Evans at which point he's like, oh, I see what's going to happen later. No, no, Pacino's got to stay. But it just caught my attention. We used to be okay with an hour and 15 minutes going by before the main character talks above like a quiet whisper. Not the case anymore. All right, enough movie geekdom. Let's get back on track here. The next follow-up question is, why are we having a hard time paying attention to movies? Well, if we return to the Atlantic article. There's a lot of quotes in there that point towards digital technology and particularly smartphones as being the culprit. The first piece of evidence is the quote from earlier in this episode. Notice that that professor said this issue got really bad after the pandemic. What happened in the pandemic? Young people began to obsessively use their devices because they were stuck at home at a level they haven't seen before. So there's a lot of device-related issues that got really bad after the pandemic. So that is a big piece of correlative evidence right there. There's also some quotes from the article that make this clear. I'm going to read you one. All right, this is from the article. Mizuta Lippit, a cinema and media studies professor at the University of Southern California, home to perhaps the top film program in the country, said that his students remind him of nicotine addicts going through withdrawal during screenings. The longer they go without checking their phone. The more they fidget, eventually they give in. All right. So why is this going on? Here's another quote from the article that I think helps unwind what's happening in these students' brains. Students arriving in college today have no memory of a world before the infinite scroll. As teenagers, they spent nearly five hours a day on social media, with much of that time used for flicking from one short-form video to the next. An analysis of people's attention while working on a computer found that they now switch between tabs or apps every 47 seconds, down from once every two and a half minutes in 2004. I can imagine that if your body and or your psychology are not trained for the duration of a feature-length film, it will just feel excruciatingly long, USC's Lippitt said. All right, so, I mean, not a surprise, but these film professors point their finger at the obvious culprit. Phones have made it hard for people to focus on movies. Now, I want to get a little bit more technical here. there's actually a term of art for the capability that phones are degrading. The term is cognitive patience. Now, this was coined by the reading researcher, Marianne Wolfe. Here's a formal definition of this term, which is reading specific, but we're going to generalize it to movies as well. Here's the formal definition of cognitive patience. the ability to read with focused and sustained attention and delay gratification while refraining from multitasking or skimming over parts of the text. So we can adapt this idea of cognitive patience. I can sustain attention on something for a long period of time without switching context or multitasking. We can really apply that to multiple other activities, including consuming films. Our cognitive patient seems to have been degraded by using our phones. All right, well, if we're going to solve this problem, let's try to understand again in more detail why is cognitive patients degraded by looking at our phones all the time. There's two things going on here that have to do with the reward systems in our brain. The first has to do with our short-term reward system. So there is a bundle of neurons in your short-term reward system that is associated with the stimuli of picking up and looking at your phone. And because you get this consistent, strong source of reward that has high expected value when you pick up your phone because of the algorithmic curation of the apps that are on there, those bundles have learned we will probably get a good reward if we do that. So what happens, and I'm simplifying things here, is that bundle of neurons effectively votes for picking up your phone as your next action if it sees it nearby. You experience that vote subjectively as an urge to pick up that phone, a distracting urge to pick up that phone. There's a dopamine cascade that happens through your neuronal motor neurons. There's a whole thing here. We're going to get into this more, by the way. I'm having Anna Olympeka is going to come on the show, teach us more about dopamine. But it feels like an urge to pick up the phone. So if you have a phone with you and you're trying to watch a movie, there's all of these votes happening. Those neurons are like reward, reward, reward, let's go, let's go, let's go. And you are feeling this like jittery as that one professor said, nicotine addict style withdrawal symptoms, because your brain is like, this is here, this is reward. It's the same thing like if you're hungry and you have the big bowl of popcorn in the movies. I don't know if you have this problem, Jesse, but I often tell myself not until the previews are over. It's really hard because there's a bundle of neurons. It's like, that's going to be good when we eat that popcorn. Boom, boom, boom, vote, vote, vote. And you're like sort of sitting there shaking because it's right there and it's hard to overcome your short-term reward system. So our constant use of the phones builds up a very strong vote from that neuronal bundle, which makes it difficult to do anything else when the phone is there. But the second thing that happens is that because of that, we lose our exposure to the deep, delayed gratification rewards of actually making it through a good movie. Now, why is that important? Well, there's a different reward system in our brain, the long-term reward system, that can override the short-term reward system. And it deals with not immediate guesses of if we do this thing, what's reward, it predicts the future. If we do this thing now, it actually might not in the moment be the best feeling thing, but in the future, that's going to give us a good reward. Not a cheap reward like the Sadie that comes from eating popcorn, but like maybe a deep psychological or philosophical type of reward. That long-term reward system could overwhelm the short term, but it has to be trained. And the way you train that long-term reward system is that time and again, you delay gratification, you get the deep reward in the end, the deep satisfactions, it strengthens its case in the future for like, it's worth sticking with this activity. So we have this anti-virtuous cycle where the phone makes it harder and harder to watch things when it's there. So you get less exposure actually making it through good movies. So your long-term reward system loses its standing. And now when you're in a situation where even your phone's not there, you're just like, I don't, I'm bored. Like, I don't want to make it through here because there's no motivation left for you to actually make it through the film. So those two things work together. And in the end, you can't watch the film. Now, should we care about it? What if you don't like movies? Well, I say yes, because it's a canary in the coal mine. Movies are just one example from a broader category of activities that are moving and meaningful and can change the way we understand the world and ourselves. And we're getting pushed away from that because of what's happening on these devices. So whether or not you like movies, there's some equivalent of that in your life that you are probably being pushed away from because of the dominance of your short-term reward system and how that leads to the long-term reward system with these other activities to degrade. So this is like a bigger trend that's being picked up by this specific issue, this bigger trend that activities that give us deep satisfactions almost always require delayed gratifications and cognitive patience, right? And the more time we spend on our phones, the worse we get at actually sticking with those activities. How many things like watching movies are leaving our lives that we don't even know? So I think it is something worth dealing with. Like the first step towards reclaiming our brain is beginning to rebuild cognitive patients, especially around activities that can give us deeper satisfactions. And I think movie watching is a great first tool that we can use. So here's my physical analogy, right? I mean, I think about the ability to make it through a good movie, we should think about that like if you're new to running, your ability to actually like complete a 5K race. It's like that first milestone you want to get to that says, I am now starting to reclaim my brain. I am now starting to actually build up some cognitive fitness. It's not where you end, but it should be your first step. So this is my pitch to you today. Let's make this our exercise, relearning how to build up the cognitive patients to make it through a good movie. And we're doing this not just because movies are cool, which they are, but because again, we want what I call attentional autonomy, the ability to actually have more control over what we do with our brain and not just what's going to give us the most immediate rewards. Let's take a quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. Look, it's easy to work on your health in January when you're still motivated by the new year to get up and go to the gym or make all those kale smoothies. But now that we're in February, that motivation is starting to dissipate. The practices that are going to stick are those that you're able to make into a habit. And when it comes to your health, here's one habit I recommend using AG1. 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You have to get the stimuli that is going to trigger the short-term reward system out of the room. Do not have your phone with you. But you're just setting yourself up for failure, the nicotine addict shaky withdrawal, if the phone is right there, because it's going to fire those votes again and again and again. And why combat that? Why combat that? Put the phone far enough away that it's not triggering your short-term reward center. So that's going to help. And if you're in a movie theater, for God's sakes, I hate seeing this. Jesse, I don't know if you see this now, but because of that reward signal, people are looking at their phones. They can't help themselves. So it's almost easier to practice this at home because you can put your phone very far away. In the movie theater, people are just like, you know what? I'm just going to look at it because, you know, I don't know. They can't help themselves. All right. Number two, that helps the short-term reward system to greatest influence. Number two, we have to rebuild your association of long-term rewards. So keep the movies good, that is movies with enough sort of art or artifice that you're going to end them with a deep satisfaction. I was exposed to something new. It was a moving experience. It was an inspiring experience. The craft was really inspiring. The story was really inspiring. Because again, the more exposure you get to a moving experience at the end of a movie, the more standing you're giving to your long-term reward system and the easier it will be to do this in the future. So how do you now make it all the way through a good movie if you're not used to watching movies that aren't every six minutes, there's some sort of alien that's attacking. How do you make it through these movies? Here is my technique that I use. I'm going to give it to you now for the first time. I've never talked about it before. I call it the 30-minute rule. You never go more than 30 minutes without stopping to read something about the movie. So before you start, you read a review or analysis of the movie. And if it's a good movie, there's going to be a lot written about it. So, oh, I kind of understand. Why do people like this? What should I be looking for? Great. You watch 30 minutes. Stop. Give your brain a little bit of a break. Read another review or analysis. Start it up again. Go another 30 minutes. Stop. Read another review or analysis. You're always repriming your brain with ideas about why this movie is good, what you should be looking out for, why people liked it, and just increases its attractiveness or salience to your brain. It makes it easier to pay attention, and it amplifies the rewards you get out of it. I am not a big fan of this movement of exposure to art. Just go to the museum and then you'll learn to love art. It doesn't work that way. You got to know what you're looking at and why. Or just say, watch this movie. It's great. It can work. Some great movies will get the people, but a lot of classics, people are like, I'm bored. So you need to know what makes it great and it amplifies the rewards you get from the experience, which gives your long-term reward system or standing. And now you can, your cognitive patience expands. Now here's my extra secret tip. This is, this is one I like because I like both the art of movies, but also the craft of movies. If I'm watching a classic, I always search to see if there's an article written about it for American cinematography magazine, a magazine for cinematographers, right? A lot of movies will have these articles where the cinematographer, I guess now they often call director of photography as well, write a long essay about how they shot the movie, what they were thinking about, the techniques they introduced and why they introduced them. You learn about different lighting choices they make and different lensing choices they make. I always come away from those articles with this. I see the movie through a different light. I'm like, oh my God, look what they did in this scene. This is great. All this amplifies reward. All right. So that's what I'm going to recommend. What should you watch this? Okay. You know this, Jesse, I can't do top 10 list. I'm like, there's a word for this. Like I can't rank things. I can't see what my favorite things are. So I can't tell you like, these are the 20 best movies or the 10 best movies or whatever. Um, but I just went through and I listed, I was thinking through, like if I was, someone was like wanting to get into watching good movies, what are some movies I would recommend that I just threw a bunch down that these are all movies that are meaningful to me. And I think they have like really clear sources of value. If you do my 30 minute rule and read about them or why they're important. So I have these in rough chronological order here on the older side, consider watching M the German Fritz Lang movie about actually it's not a very cheery topic, Jesse. It's about a, I guess like a child's abducting serial killer, but it's from the 30s um so atmospheric it's kind of touches on german expressionism so many like innovations and it's actually a really good movie watch citizen kane citizen kane kind of fell out of uh i'm obsessed with this movie it kind of fell out of favor because what happened is a lot of people watch they were like what's so great about this what you have to do to understand that is watch another movie made that same year you're like oh this is great because he invented wells invented all of these techniques that now we're used to from sophisticated movies. They weren't in the movies before it. I mean, he has non-linear narratives. He has the types of cuts, these type of tracking shots, his use of long focus, even little things like, I'm going to build a ceiling on this set because I want to be able to shoot low. And they actually had the floor of the set up on a platform so a cameraman could be down in a pit. But to shoot up, you have to have a ceiling, and so they built a fake ceiling on the set. He just innovated the cinematography in this, the darkness, the shadows, like this 20-whatever-something, maybe like 27 or something, comes in from radio and just innovates, innovates, innovates, innovates. The most innovations in a single movie, technical innovation since probably Birth of a Nation, but with 100% less Klu Klux Klan members. So, like, that's good. So I'm a big Citizen Kane fan. If you can watch it with the audio commentary, that's worth it. You've got to watch John Ford. You've got to watch The Searchers. You've got to watch Vertigo by Hitchcock. You've got to watch The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I think that's my favorite. Clint Eastwood from that period. You've got to watch Bonnie and Clyde. Read about Bonnie and Clyde before you watch it. This introduced new Hollywood. Read Pauline Kael on it. Read Ebert on it. I think Bonnie and Clyde, there's a famous review. I don't know if it's Morgenstern who it is who didn't understand it because bonnie and clyde you know this is warren beaty hackman's in it uh it was bringing like a european style personal filmmaking to hollywood just as the studio system was collapsing right like this was we went from the sound of music to bonnie and clyde it's it's a european style film in the sense it's more personal it's more nihilistic it's it's playing on like emotional realism or whatever and there's a famous review of it that's like this is garbage and then they had to go back and write a new review like i was wrong actually this is a classic so you got to watch that you got to watch jaws arguably like the platonically perfect movie of the 20th century um then you got to watch some of the new hollywood 70s some other naturalist movie naturalism rich movies i would suggest uh dog day afternoon is good um city lumet you got to watch nashville i think is very good you listen to the robert altman working with these multi-track recorders that have overlapping naturalistic dialogue. I also like McCabe and Mrs. Miller, speaking of Beatty, which is like another Altman movie of that era. It's like a realist naturalist reinterpretation of a Western. Watch that after The Searchers. Now that's a cool double feature you're going to get right there. Taxi Driver. I mean, it's an unsettling movie, but man, the camera work in there, the confidence of that movie. Let's go modern, like 21st century. Dunkirk, I think, is a masterpiece of writing and filmmaking. I think I've been pushing Zone of Interest. Not a very cheery movie. Takes place right outside the gates of Auschwitz. So I guess you could double feature this with Fritz Lang movie. I think it's a masterpiece. There's a lot about that movie. It's so original, the way that it was crafted and constructed. I saw it in the theater. I think it's fantastic. If you want something that's in the theaters now, the best thing I've seen recently is Marty Supreme. It's one of the Softee brothers. uh fantastic kind of again you got to read about it right it's it's commentary on the american experience on capitalism on the tension between ambition and family and where we come from and is beautifully shot and acted and the energy is just like a really well done thing all right so i don't know i'm leaving out all good movies but that's a place to get started what am i missing jesse i mean crossroads should be most of your time i saw that in the theater i saw that in the theater and got yelled at by the people behind me what happened i was making fun of it so much that at the end of the movie they were like you ruined this for us because you wanted to shut up and i like it was so bad like you should have been on your phone so you were distracted by me yeah that's the problem nowadays they wouldn't have noticed it would have been on their phones oh man what am i missing well robert duvall just passed away yeah okay we got to do some like so i was listening to a lot of commentary on him yeah you got to watch apocalypse now there's there's such great beautiful remasterings of that of that movie it's visually beautiful that's a fantastic movie colonel kilgore that's classic duval godfather it's one and two it's like out of favor to say that's good it's a great movie and he's great in that he wasn't in three because they weren't going to pay him enough yeah and three wasn't very good yeah three was horrible um the great santini he's very good and i think robert duvall's i mean he was a network too he His network is a great movie. His most challenging role, and hopefully the role that he's remembered for and the one that you should watch, I think is his appearance as the father of the Vince Vaughn character in Four Christmases. That's an underrated movie. My wife and I love the, it's like a 2006 movie, Four Christmases. It's Reese Witherspoon and Vince Vaughn. At the end of that era where you would just put Vince Vaughn in a movie and he would talk fast and it was kind of funny. and robert duvall played his like functional alcoholic divorced father mad dog had a critic on talking all about him and he said that he was offered the jaws leading role but he didn't want to be a main guy yeah i know a lot about i was just reading about again everyone was offered those roles and you know how schneider got it spielberg was like at a thing socially with schneider and was uh just telling about the movie and he's like why don't you put me in the lead and you're like, you know what? Yeah, that makes sense. And that was that. And that's how he ended up in the, and they put him in the lead. Roy Schneider. All right, we're going to take another quick break to hear from some of our sponsors. Well, listeners of this show know that in the world of business, I'm a fan of systems that can help organize the efforts of teams. Without systems, work devolves into random emails and Slack messages that distract everyone and lead to missed opportunities. This is why I love PipeDrive, a fantastic sales CRM system for small and medium-sized businesses. PipeDrive is easy to set up and use. Within minutes, you can have your whole team operating from one centralized platform where you can see all of your deals in a visual sales pipeline. You can also connect to over 500 apps from the PipeDrive marketplace so that it connects right into your existing workflow. A new year calls for a new CRM. If you're starting a business or working in sales, I highly recommend you check out Pipedrive. Because over 100,000 companies are already using Pipedrive to grow their businesses, you know that it works. Right now, if you use my link, pipedrive.com slash deep, you'll get a 30-day free trial, no credit card or payment needed. I also want to talk about our friends at Grammarly. Succeeding in knowledge work requires more than deep thinking. It also requires the ability to communicate your ideas clearly. Rushed, sloppy, or generic-sounding text just doesn't cut it. This is why you need Grammarly, one of the show's longest-running sponsors. Now, here's the thing. Grammarly doesn't just help fix mistakes in your text. It integrates AI technology seamlessly to help you write better. One of these features I especially appreciate is the tool's ability to detect the tone of your message and help you automatically adjust it. So if you, maybe you're writing something that's too formal, it'll tell you that and it can help you make it sound more natural. Or maybe you're writing an official email and it's too conversational, it can go the other way and help you make that text sound more professional. And that's just one feature among many that Grammarly offers to help your writing get better. Not surprisingly, 93% of users report Grammarly helps them get more work done. And here's the great thing. You can use Grammarly in all the places where you already write. It now works across 500,000 sites and apps. In a world of generic AI, don't sound like everyone else. With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at grammarly.com. That's grammarly.com. All right, let's get back to the show. All right, so that's what we got. Watch more movies. All right, we're going to move on now with our news and notes. All right, so I got to react to something that I've been sent a lot of times. I think a lot of people have been sent this a lot of times. It's an essay that's been going around on X that went viral. It's written by an AI startup entrepreneur named Matt Schumer, And the essay is called Something Big is Happening, and it is a right down the middle, AI is about to change everything, for real this time, let's all be worried type of essay. I got sent this so many times. For whatever reason, this crossed over in the normie culture and out of tech culture and tech journalism culture. Everyone seems to be reading this. So by popular demand, I'm going to go through this a little bit. I picked out three or four sections I think are important for understanding the message and approach of this essay. And then I'm going to respond to it and we'll try to get down to the ground truth here. So I'll have this on the screen here for people who are watching instead of just listening. All right. I'm going to read something here. I'll start with something from the introduction to the piece. All right. So here's Matt Schuber. I've spent six years building an AI startup and investing in the space. I live in this world, and I'm writing this for the people in my life who don't, my family, my friends, the people I care about who keep asking me, so what's the deal with AI, and getting an answer that doesn't do justice to what's actually happening. I keep giving them the polite version, the cocktail party version, because the honest version sounds like I've lost my mind. And for a while, I told myself that this was a good enough reason to keep what's truly happening to myself. But the gap between what I've been saying and what's actually happening has gotten far too big. The people I care about deserve to hear what is coming, even if it sounds crazy. All right. That's quite the setup there. There's some sort of classic AI reporting traps that are happening here. There's no actual information in it. It's pure emotional manipulation, trying to give you a sense of the digital ick, make you feel uneasy. It sets you up for this. The emotional state it puts you in, if you're not someone who's following AI closely is like, yeah, your worst suspicions are true. It's crazy what's going on out there. And you know what? All right. I'm going to let you in what's going on. That is a classic. Before we get to the content of this essay, that is a classic move. Like I'm going to reveal to you what's happening and it's worse than you think. I mean, that's like the classic move for everything. Conspiratorial thinking for radical health trends. It's a very compelling way to set up whatever you're going to say. All right, let's get into the content itself. I'm going to skip ahead a little bit now. Here's the first, I think, substantive thing that's said here. For years, AI had been improving steadily, big jumps here and there, but each big jump was spaced out enough that you could absorb them as they came. Then in 2025, new techniques for building these models unlocked a much faster pace of progress, and then it got even faster and then faster again. Each new model wasn't just better than the last, it was better by a wider margin, and the time between new model releases was shorter. I was using AI more and more, going back and forth with it less and less, watching it handle things I used to think required my expertise. All right, I'm going to stop right there. This is our first piece of evidence that, oh, this writer is willing to essentially make things up if they fit the vibe that he's trying to portray. The way he describes this is actually, in some sense, the opposite of reality. As someone who has been covering the generative AI revolution very closely for the New Yorker and here for this show, this is not how things happen. It's opposite. Things were moving really fast when pre-training scaling was working. The jump from two to three and three to four were these impressive leaps. This is where you're in the steep part of the lost power law curve from the Kaplan scaling paper. The period he's talking about as we arrived into 2025 is actually when progress slowed down. It became a problem for the AI companies. The general overall capability boost that happened from pre-training scaling stopped happening. And they had to shift instead to a backup plan, which was, we're going to do this sort of post-training work on very specific tasks. And we're going to do things like post-inference time compute, and we're going to turn our focus is from like general ability improvements that are clearly impressive to any user to instead chasing down these arcane named benchmarks that we can sort of teach the model to specifically do well on. And there was this whole period where this was a real, for users were like, I don't really, the main thing I'm noticing is like the personality of the chatbots changing. And you're getting incremental improvements on specific activities where they could specifically try to post train for that activity. It was actually a bad period for growth, not a good period. So this idea that changes were speeding up, most, I would say, close watchers are saying, no, no, this actually slowed down. And they had to try to find specific areas where some sort of notable improvement could make. They found video generation was one that ended up being a bit of a bust. And then the other place was in computer programming tools. So I think he's extrapolating continued progress on the computer programming tools, which I'll get into in a second was not exponential, but hard one with like the models in general, we're getting faster at some sort of bigger pace. It's simply not true. I know it fits the vibe of people talk about cloud code more, but it's simply not true. All right. So let's read the rest of this quote here. Then on February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day, GPT-53 codex from OpenAI and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic and something clicked, not like a light switch, more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest. Again, these were just continued incremental improvements on these coding-related agents, which I've been reporting on for a while. They've been impressive for a while. They've been making progress in these somewhat frequent but relatively small steps that are built on fine-tuning and other types of post-training that they're doing specifically around programming tasks, there is something like an inflection point where these latest models on certain sorts of code autogeneration, agentic autogeneration tasks, it got just to a level where more and more people were like, I think I can start using this more in my day-to-day. But these are kind of technical shifts, and they're very focused on what's specifically happening in programming. So the idea that there's these models in general are exponentially speeding up. This is the opposite of exponential. incremental steady progress on a small number of narrow applications where other applications that they thought the models would be much better at so far they failed to be making progress on all right let's jump into the details of the programming itself Matt writes I am no longer needed for the actual technical work on my job I describe what I want built in plain English and it just appears not a rough draft I need to fix to finish thing I tell the AI what I want walk away from my computer for four hours and come back to find a work done Done well, done better than I would have done it myself with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just described the outcome and leave. All right, I'll skip the final details here. So he's saying in the narrow world of computer programming, this is the inflection point advanced, that you can now, as a computer programmer, just tell the AI this is what I want and come back four hours and you have that app built. He goes on to talk about that it not only builds the app, it tests the app, it fixes it, you don't have to do anything anymore. All right. So is this how people are now using this technology, the latest models that were released earlier this month? Well, who can tell? I can tell because I'm in the middle of a reporting project that I started just last week. So with the exact models he's talking about, where I have so far received detailed notes on how they use AI from active computer programmers. I have over 250 such case studies. I've made my way through about half of them so far. So I'm still kind of early in this progress, but here's what I can tell you. No one is saying, make me an app and walking away and coming back four hours later. And it's like, there I have it. Let's release this. That is not how programmers are using these very latest tools that only works for very specific types of apps. They have to be in one of a small number of like very common style of applications that are much more, and it's like special languages, sort of interface focused, not too big, and you don't need to be particularly stable. So you can, as like a hobbyist, kind of vibe code, hey, can you make me a Tetris game with, you know, Dungeons and Dragons characters or something? And we'll like do that, you can come back, you'll have something. But the 250 serious programmers I'm talking to, that's not the way they're using the auto code generation. It's much more narrow and specified. Those who are doing this, and a of them aren't. Those who are doing this talk a lot about how you have to use these super clear specs. This is exactly what I want you to do. And then they let the model build that code for this piece. And then they have to extensively test it because again, the models make mistakes 20% of the time, right? And then they run a bunch of unit testing on it. Okay, I think this is working. Let's integrate that in. Okay, now here's the next thing I need you to do. And like one out of five of these attempts are like, okay, the AI just doesn't get it. I'll just do it myself. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening here with AI, but what he's describing so confidently is what a minuscule fraction of this broad sample of real active professional computer programs I talk to, a minuscule fraction is using the tools in this way. It's cool what's happening, but it's not, hey, go make me go do this. I'll come back four hours later. It's just done, and I'm moving on in my life. These are heavily supervised right now. All right. Let's keep rolling here. Here's the next quote from the piece I want to highlight. The AI labs made a deliberate choice. They focused on making AI great at writing code first because building AI requires a lot of code. If AI can write that code, it can help build the next version of itself, a smarter version, which writes better code, which builds an even smarter version. Making AI great at coding was a strategy that unlocks everything else. This is grade A nonsense. It's just vibing nonsense. instance. These AI agents do not let us make better AI models. That's not how that works. That's not what's happening. They're very useful, especially if you talk to these programmers like I've been doing. The reason why they're saving time is that there's a lot of very tedious tasks that happen when you build various software stacks or applications, like building out the interface and connecting all the interface elements to, you know, like the right functions or integrating multiple different data sources into, you know, a common framework so that you can pull data from any of them. This is tedious type of coding, especially if you're not an expert at exactly like you haven't built 100 of those type of apps before. And it takes people a long time because they have to look up. Oh, God, what's the library call for the button? What's the what do I how do I access this sort of data source here for this? What's the call I got? What do I have to import. And this type of stuff, these models can do automatically. They know it already. You're like, God, that's saving me so much time. It's so tedious. I don't have to do the tedious thing. What they cannot do is invent a new model of intelligence, improve the fundamental mathematics of machine learning, build us a better model for AI than we've ever seen before. That's not how this works. None of the innovations in generative AI are programming-related innovations. They're all conceptual mathematical innovations, where someone who is an expert in machine learning realizes like, oh, reinforcement learning could be applied to a language model if we work through the different renormalizations of the vectors properly, and then someone goes off and programs it. So this idea that tedious code or code that requires you to look up a lot of information can be automatically coded, and that saves you a lot of time, you cannot jump from there to say, oh, AI can write itself now, and now we're going to have this self-reinforcing loop. That idea has been in the zeitgeist all the way back to the 1960s when JL Goode wrote the first paper on ultra-intelligence and introduced the idea of recursive self-improvement. It is not, not, not what these tools are meant to do. They cannot do that. That's not what's going on. This notion that the AI companies chose to build coding agents first so that they could build better models that could then do everything else is wrong. The reason why we're hearing more about coding agents is because it's one of the only narrow tranches of applications where they could find a market. There's a lot of other things that the AI companies promised products in. I wrote an article back in January for the New Yorker about this, where in early 2025, they said, this is the year that we're going to have these general use agents for all sorts of jobs. We're there. It's going to happen. It didn't happen because it turns out that's much harder than coding agents. They put a lot of effort in the video generation and like that did pretty well, but there was no market there because people didn't want to pay $200 a month to make TikTok videos. They want there to be other markets. The technology is not good enough. It's not interesting enough. It's not helpful enough. We're not seeing it move the needle in other positions as much. So we're hearing about coding because it's like the only place right now where there's real progress being made. And it is a good market. And this technology could be really useful for programmers. Again, I'm doing these surveys and I'm going to do a much bigger thing about this soon. But this is like a narrow thing that's happening right now. One of the places where these models have always been good, all the way back to the Instruct model, the InstructGPT model that was helped to make the GPT-3.5 that ChatGPT was made on. From the very beginning, the last half decade, we've known the one thing these models are good at is structured code, because it's very structured language with lots of good training examples. And they've been making steady improvements on it using post-training techniques, and they've been passing various milestones as they do these. And this is a good story for the computer industry, and it's an interesting story. We might lose jobs, we might gain jobs, and we don't know, and we should cover it well. But the idea that the AI companies chose to do that first so that that they could then make their own model smarter, and then there's going to be this takeoff and AI takeover. Straight up vibe nonsense. That's not what's actually happening. So, okay, I'm going to leave it here, Jesse, because this essay makes me a little bit upset. But let me be clear. Summarize. There's struggles with the AI industry post-GPT4, the failure of Project Orion, the failure of the behemoth model, the failure of the Grok 3 failure where they moved to 100,000 GPUs for training and didn't get big improvements, the shift towards post-training, more incremental improvements and benchmark chasing. I've written about this. Look at my article last August for The New Yorker for more about this. This is the portrait of an industry that's not like it's failing, but it's also not going gangbusters. This is why right now the investment community is a little bit nervous about the stocks for the big AI companies. We need to see where your big revenue is going to come from, and we're not seeing it yet. It's just a mixed story. It's a cool technology. They're trying to find markets. They're finding some niche markets, customer service, video production. That's a pretty small market, but there's good stuff there. And in programming, they're pretty good at programming, and they've been making steady incremental progress. And the tools are now good enough now that it's beginning to affect the actual workflow rhythms of non-trivial percentages of programmers. And that's a cool, interesting story. This essay is about a science fiction dream. This is not an inflection point for most people if you're not a computer programmer. This is not from here, we get some rapid takeoff. From here, everything changes. And I've seen article after article after this essay came back, including one, if you read my newsletter today and get at calnewport.com, I dissect an Atlantic article that does so much vibes on exactly this. I just don't think that's an accurate way to think about this, all right? interesting stuff is happening to computer programming. This is not an inflection point that AI is about to rise over our heads and change everything. Again, it's a task for which these models are supremely well-suited, and all this progress has been incremental but steady to continue to refine and update because it's the only place where they're getting non-trivial monthly subscription fees right now is honestly in that space. So i don't want to say nothing's happening but also i think this essay is um it's alarmist and i think it it he gets the technology wrong and he mixes truth with fiction and makes statements confidently that just aren't right there's a lot of good reporting out there about ai this is not it you could ignore this one you can ignore this one so i don't know there you go jesse did you see that essay everyone sent me that essay i did not see it until i saw it in the script i mean he wrote it in part with ai and you can tell i don't know i the bigger thing and not the bigger thing the other story here is these essays on x going viral is like definitely i think a thing of the winter of 2026 and obviously that opportunity is going to get saturated and go away but remember that dan co and say we did that was also one of these x essays that went viral so i think we're in this moment where like you can go viral on x doing these long-form essays and i bet it's not going going to last past March. It's going to get saturated. And then that opportunity is going to go away. But man, how many YouTube videos do you think are being made right now about how to go viral with your XSAs? There's probably so much content about this. I don't know. I don't like to think of myself as an AI skeptic, but I see myself as an AI realist. I really want to ground everything I do and what's actually happening. I don't like this vibe approach. Well, I love the fact how you referenced on an earlier show as well, that you're doing all the reading with your students from the past and you see all the recurring themes yeah i'm the doctoral seminar i'm teaching on super intelligence with ai doctoral students yeah these themes are very powerful and they've come up again and again and again it's it's i mean people doesn't mean they're true right now all right let's hear from a listener here news and notes let's get a note here um we got an interesting email that was related to the olympics which are just sort of ending as we record this episode we got an email from katie i want to read and then i'll react to it. Katie says, I've been following your work for years and has helped me immensely in both my personal and professional life. So thank you. I thought of digital minimalism as I was reading Ilya Malin's Instagram post after his heartbreaking solo performance in the Free Skate a few days ago. He cites, quote, vile online hatred, end quote, as an impetus for his literal downfall. I don't know if you saw that, Jesse, but I guess the quad god is from Vienna. He's around here. fell during the solo. They said, man, it was so hard. They said there's no athlete who's more favored in his sport than he was in his sport. But the two times I watched him, he did not win a gold medal. They got on the team, though. All right, back to Katie's email. I was struck by this, especially in the aftermath of Simone Biles' well-publicized experience in which she cited similar demons. I would have thought that elite athletes would have taken note and began to see social media and really any media coverage of themselves is far more of a liability than an asset. No doubt an online present helps with sponsorships and other business deals, but is it worth it if it prevents someone from truly achieving the highest status in their sport? If elite athletes will meticulously attend to their food consumption, why do they seem hesitant to limit their media consumption? It seems to me that as sports grows and becomes more competitive, the edge might be less and less in workout plans and diet regimes, but in the still counter-cultural practice of social media abstinence. All right, Katie, I think that's a really good note. it is going to happen. It is kind of happening in elite athletics. The coaches in the front offices are realizing this. I've had conversations with multiple GMs from the NBA. I talked with the head of an internationally ranked rugby team. Athletes are beginning to, at least the teams are beginning to realize, oh, this is a huge edge in a sports setting where small edges really matter. The problem is the players are young and they're addicted because they've been on these things all the time and their whole life has often been about just training for sports and it's an anxiety producing type of life. They don't have a lot else going on because they have to focus so diligently on the sports. And so they use the phone as like, here's my escape, here's my way to numb, here's my way to self-medicate. And it's better than actual drugs right? Or alcohol because I need to keep my body performing. And they end up addicted and it's really hard for them. It's why, for example, from what I hear talking to sports executives, the biggest issues are in the NBA. Why? Youngest players. You have the smallest gap from high school. You can go right from high school into playing for an NBA team. Compare this to something like Major League Baseball where, man, it's a long road. Usually like Eli Willits and you get recruited at 17. You're going to go through all of these minor league teams. Also, the games are played, they're long, and you don't have technology with you. So NBA has this worse. But anyways, I think eventually people are going to put their foot down from a coaching perspective and realize this is getting you. You're going to be better if you don't use this at all. I think it'll be a non-trivial advantage. And once elite athletes are doing it, this often, that's why I like this trend, often accelerates trends into the general public. Just like there's certain types of exercise and diet and recovery routines that elite athletes do that make their way down to how the general public does it, this could have a big impact. To hear really top athletes say, I don't even touch that stuff and it helps means more people who aren't elite athletes might be like, okay, that's not so eccentric anymore. One person who does do this is Alex Honnold, the climber. He's talked about this a lot because for him, it's not just if I lose a 5% edge, I'm going to have a bad performance in a basketball game. It's like if I lose that edge, i could fall and die so he goes on like a very long period in the lead up to his free solo climbs where he doesn't look at a phone no social media nothing so that his head can just get clear and he can get into this like mind space where he can concentrate more more athletes have got to follow this i mean especially like these olympians these young olympians it just gets in their head like especially if you're like uh if you're going to wear what you have to wear as a figure skater you want to be on social media if if you look like you're in blades of glory like you do look like the character from blades like you don't want to be on social media just do your quad jumps you know so i think katie is right i think we are going to see that trend and i think that's good did you watch any of the alex documentary and climbing the skyscraper i watched it live watched it live um and then i watched it kind of was a bummer i watched a video of a professional rock climber talking about it and he was like i can't emphasize how easy this was he's like this is not this is this is uh not a challenging climb for alex honnold that kind of goes with your theme of you know watching 30 minutes of a movie and then reading a review it did change my experience yeah yeah it was interesting but yeah but basically they put it on the rating and it was like a relatively low rated climb he was like the only he said you could do this like if you repeated this a thousand times maybe he falls once but probably zero times like for alex it's like for us if someone's like i want you to climb this step ladder you're like yeah i can climb the ladder like i'm not going to fall or whatever it's like they said the main thing is just um making sure that you had the right uh make sure that you're trained up enough you don't get arm fatigue it was like 70 minutes long i basically fast forwarded so it only took me like 20 minutes yeah i got the gist i was chilling with some friends and then we just had it on yeah yeah Yeah, I was at a friend's house for his birthday. We kind of had it on the iPad, just like, hey, does he fall? No. All right. The scariest part was really the end. You see the end? Yeah. He's standing on that little thing with those winds up there. I mean. But then he went on his phone, right? I wonder if he went on social media. He's like, oh, I finally got here. Let me get on TikTok. He was like, oh my God. And then he fell. Would that be bad for him? It'd be good for us though, right? Metaphorically. Alex Honnold publicly on live TV falling to a gruesome death while his wife was there be good for reviews we could do well kind of a bummer that didn't happen cow's kidding it's kind of a bummer um all right let me do another note quick update on my book right so as long time watchers and listeners know my next book which i actually it's taking me much longer than i thought is i'm writing a book about the deep life because i have this idea that uh like when it came to distractions digital distractions in the office what actually worked is when I wrote a book called Deep Worked, it said, yeah, distractions are bad, but what I want to give you is a bigger, better offer. So books that were just about email being bad don't sell as well as the book that was, here's what you should do instead. I realized I needed something similar for our digital lives outside of work. It's hard to tell someone to get off their phone when the life outside of the phone is sort of unsettling or uneasy or anxiety producing or just boring. So you need a bigger, better offer. We don't need to hear more about why the phone is bad. We need to create lives that the phone is not that interesting. So that's what the deep life is. I talk about it a lot on this show. Anyways, the update, Jesse, is I handed in my manuscript. So I finally finished a draft of the entire book. It's in the hands of my US and UK editors right now. There's still a lot of work to be done after that. Significant rewriting happens during the editing phases, but still symbolically to get a complete manuscript. Then it's like, all right, I got my arms around it. So I'm pretty psyched about it. can we talk about the conclusion in your strategy with that or is that yeah top secret you mean my conclusion that i haven't written yet yeah yeah i feel like the audience would love that i so you're right i didn't submit the full manuscript i submitted the manuscript minus the conclusion but i've done this before because the point is this is just like a book writing thing but that's the last thing you write and typically when you finish a whole manuscript and i was like i wanted to get it done before i went on a trip the conclusion is kind of rushed and they're bad because of that. And I find it's much better to finish a whole book, step away from it for a few weeks, clear your mind, maybe even get edits back, and then say, I'm going to write the conclusion. And if the conclusion is the only thing you're writing and you've cleared your brain and you're no longer exhausted, then you'll write a really good conclusion. But if it's the last thing you're writing at the very end of a really hard push, conclusions end up bad. So I handed a whole manuscript except the conclusion. And I said, look, I'm going to take a couple of weeks and then i'll attack the conclusion on the end so that's my story i also have the introduction towards that was the last thing i wrote before i submitted it was the introduction um over the summer when you were abroad for the month or not abroad but just away you had written a part and then had to throw it away i threw away a lot of that book did that happen multiple other times like i've thrown away a lot a lot is that typical with books or it just depends for me this one uh this one i have thrown out as many words as i've written like as i just submitted i've thrown out at least that many words and there's a lot of that the first approach to the book wasn't right um so i threw that out the second approach was the right approach but the the way i was writing it wasn't right so i threw out a bunch of that um some of that stuff i salvaged and could use in other places but so brandon sanderson has a good good quote about this by the way uh you might know brandon sanderson as the author of name of the wind actually you know my son my middle son is reading a lot of sanderson oh nice he's he just finished the third book in the misborn i told him about the storm something i don't know i don't know what sanderson's well the storm something way of kings i don't know but his other like major like epic one he's like oh i gotta read that uh but i was listening to ferris's interview with Henderson again, which is like a great interview. And he said, this is the big divide between amateur and professional writers. Amateur writers don't like to throw out chapters. Professional writers do it all the time. It's like, I guess I'm a professional because I threw out a hell of a lot of chapters. It's like, this is good writing, but it's not the right writing. And then you got to throw it out. But I think this book's going to be good. It's a handbook. I mean, I really wrote it like a handbook. I mean, it's practical. It's linear. This builds this builds on this builds on this um it's really meant to be let's talk about cultivating a deep life so your phone's less interesting as like a engineering challenge like let's be like very systematic about it so slow productivity came out in 2024 i think in spring yeah when do you think this one will eventually come out a year from now so spring of 2027 yeah okay yeah and then you'll you'll do like a book tour and everything yeah similar to those last time yeah i will be i will be out and about book touring it up and doing all of our doing all of our things we did a podcast here that was we did a live podcast here in tacoma park that was fun uh we did pollux and prose around here did you come to that one yeah yeah that was fun yeah we got a big crowd um went to la went to austin do the stuff we'll do the stuff all right uh finally what am i reading I finished two books on vacation and I'm doing the count, Jesse. This gets me up to four for February because I know you don't trust me anymore and I'm almost done with my fifth. So we're recording this. What's the date? Like the 18th? Yeah. I'll finish my fifth probably tomorrow. I believed you. I just wanted to keep in one of the audience. You don't trust me at all. You think I'm trying to pull a fast one. All right. So I finished a book I had started before. So we went to the Florida Keys for a long weekend. I finished a book, a new book called Atensify, like ATT, like a mix of attention intensify. It's like a splashy new like manifesto. It's a collective of academics who are thinking and writing about attention and the attack on attention from digital devices. And this is their big new bold book. It's smart, actually. It's smart writing. Yeah. Actually, there's a couple ideas in there I'll probably talk about, maybe make a future deep dive about. But that was a smart book, definitely some good ideas. and then the thriller i needed a thriller to read when i was in the keys and i needed to be related to that part of the country so i found a lincoln um uh preston and child's getting cruise thriller called the lost island which takes place in the caribbean it's a little nuts it's a little nuts uh the it was good set pieces the structure was not great like it was very disjointed um interesting i don't want to spoil it jesse but they're cyclopses and i didn't think i and i wasn't it's not a fantasy book it's just a it's a cyclops i have two quick questions yeah would you ever want to be an editor or you just don't have any time right that would be just rather write we'd rather write yeah yeah yeah but you talk to editors all the time yeah god bless them i don't want the job because they read all the time right yeah which seems like it's fun but i the frustration would be is like you get here's here's the problem if you're an editor you develop fantastic taste because you all you're doing all day long is reading you know what's successful you know what's not like you you know you're just so good at assessing like what's good or bad and like 80 of what you read you're like this is not great you know that's the problem like you occasionally get a book where like this is great but you you know too well why the stuff that's not great is not great and i think that's got to be but you but what can you it's not your book yeah so you're like i'll help the author but like i would have written this book completely differently i think that's got to be frustrating yeah um also they put too much work on editor's plates right now so it's like i think i wrote about this in a world without email uh digital technology like email changed the structure of the job of being editor in the sense that it and personal computers they added like seven or eight more parts of the book publishing process onto the plate of the editor like now like you're involved much more and more constantly in marketing and sales and book shipping and fulfillment and the cover design and all the you're in the mix on everything and because of this it's becoming much more like admin overhead heavy like logistical nightmare of a job whereas you know a hundred years ago it's like you had your manuscripts you took them to your house in the hamptons like without the digital technology there was less you had to have your hands in beyond like working on the books and editors don't publish more book per editor now than they did pre-email but they're just they're just more busy right so it's one of these things where on paper they're like each of these new things email lets editors do makes them more productive on paper because it's how could it be wrong to have more information or more say on things but in reality it doesn't produce more good books so So it was like one of these classic case studies of you think in the narrow, this technology will make people more productive, but then you zoom out on the metric that matters and it didn't. So I think it's a hard job. But the cool thing I work with editors, they read so many books is their feedback is on it. You know, like you give it to a friend or someone or like, they're like, oh, I like this. Or what about this? And like, sometimes it's useful. Sometimes it's not the editor. Like they see straight to your soul. They're like this. Nope. Yes. No. What were you doing here? you're forcing that like because they're just so good at it so i love working with editors i don't think i could do the job i wouldn't be any good at it and then last question did you read the rogan article on the new yorker rimnicks yeah yeah did you read it yeah i read it yeah i got that that issue kind of late so i only read it more recently um yeah it's pretty good i i just we're talking about off fair a little bit i the idea of rimnik listening to like these rogan episodes where all fall you know the moon landing is fake and like some of the more extreme rogan episodes like oh man that's that's funny but rogan's a compelling broadcaster so it's not like the hardest job i thought it was a pretty good profile the main thing here's what i've noticed i think the the sort of elite writer world that i'm a part of like the in the academic elite world like the biggest problem they have with rogan is that our frame it's like our frame for seeing the world is very much a like rationalist intellectual frame. Everything is about ideas and knowledge and argument. And so like Malcolm Gladwell did a big thing about this. Remnick was really upset about this. It's like why your job, you know, Joe Rogan is to be looking for wrong information and pushing back on wrong information and building correct structures of epistemology and knowledge or whatever. It's actually not the way that most people approach the world. Most people approach the world like Joe through like social relations, like connection with people, like these type of things, emotional reactions, what's interesting, what's not interesting. This makes me upset. This makes me happy. This is, you know, makes me feel good. I want to like be a leader and a friend. It's like all these things that are, you know, pre-writing, rationalist, post-enlightenment type of thinking that all of our elite people do. And so they just see it very differently. Rogan's like, oh, someone's here. I want to connect with them and see if I can generate interesting emotions or I want something that's going to catch my attention. But if it's like Remnick or Gladwell or me, our instinct is like the reality is shaped by structure of information and you cannot deform that structure of information in incorrect ways. And if someone is saying something incorrect, you have to push back on it. Then there's also blind spots in it too because it's it becomes more if the people are saying something incorrect on the things i really care about you better push back on it but if it's like something where it's like okay yeah this is incorrect information but like it's thematically i get what you're getting at i'm with you on that like that's fine right so it becomes a little bit i'm just critiquing my own circle here it gets a little bit selective where you know it might it might be like oh thematically we're not going to get mad at something that maybe is like making a strong progressive point, but in doing so as being loose with facts and reality. And a lot of commentators from like the elite circles will be like, yeah, but like thematically that point is right. So that's fine. But if you are on like some health topic or something, like you're getting at thematically this point of whatever, we should, we trust big medicine too much, but your facts are wrong. It's like, how can you not stop that person? So we all have blinders on as well. Um, but it was a good profile and Wolverine, he's a good writer as a Pulitzer. All right. I think that's all the time we have for today. Thank you for listening and watching. We'll be back next week with another episode. And until then, as always, stay deep. Hey, if you liked today's discussion about how to pay attention throughout an entire film, I think you might also like episode 390, which looks at what happens when real people stepped away from their smartphones. Check it out. I think you'll like it. But here's an idea that I've long to believe. It's not enough to just list the harms. The problem is that phones also have legitimate uses.

Cal Newport explains if movies can save us from our phones in episode 393 of the Deep Questions podcast.

Buy Cal Newport's latest book, “Slow Productivity” at www.calnewport.com/slow 

Last month, the Atlantic reported that film students are now struggling to sit through entire films. In this episode, Cal argues that this is both an issue and an opportunity. The fact we can’t watch full movies indicates the impact of digital tools on our brains is worse than we assumed. But in this problem we also find a solution: maybe teaching ourselves to become better movie watchers can be the first step to reclaiming our own minds. Cal then dissects a viral AI essay that seems to have everyone worried (spoiler: Cal’s not impressed), reads a reader note about social media and the Olympics and gives an update on his next book project.

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February Books:

Attensify
The Lost Island (Eilis Dillon)

Links:
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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/college-students-movies-attention-span/685812/ 
https://fortune.com/2026/02/11/something-big-is-happening-ai-february-2020-moment-matt-shumer/

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0:00 Can Movies Save Us From Our Phones?
31:23 Something Big is Happening
49:33 Digital Minimalism and the Olympics 
56:04 Cal gives his weekly reading update 

Connect with Cal Newport:

🔴Visit Cal's BLOG and website:             https://calnewport.com/blog/
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About Cal Newport:
Cal Newport is a computer science professor at Georgetown University. In addition to his academic research, he writes about the intersection of digital technology and culture. Cal's particularly interested in our struggle to deploy these tools in ways that support instead of subvert the things we care about in both our personal and professional lives.

Cal is a New York Times bestselling author of seven books, including, most recently, A World Without Email, Digital Minimalism, and Deep Work. He's also the creator of The Time-Block Planner.

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